Happiness

Jack Johnson - Sleep Through the Static (the song)

Today, a public holiday! *checks* The day of Showa (the previous emperor).

I just got home from Nagisa festival, where I went with Ikeyan and a work buddy of his from Kyuushuu, Nonchan and Reggae. What a day! Gorgeous weather, extremely colorful people, music spanning the spectrum from punk to techno, rock to jazz and even afrobeat, can you believe it!? 13 Japanese (including 3 percussionists) playing Fela Kuti covers as well as original material (which sounds identical!). Japan is a wonderful place. Good food, non-stop dancing and the festival atmosphere I hadn't seen for quite a while. Jodie told me he'd performed there once with Eric and the Tribe, so if he and I work on our two-person dance music fest, we might be able to perform there next October or next April. It seems the perfect venue for our kind of project, and I'd love to perform at this festival, so I'm all pumped to continue with it.

Skipping back to last night, I had dinner with Manchan (the flamenco guitarist that looks like an Italian pirate), after which I went to a house practice session in Fly dance studio and ended up crashing at Ikeyan's place, with 3 hours of sleep before waking up for the festival today. Some twelve hours of dancing in two days - exhausted but it feels great!

Coming home in a great mood, I also found out that U-T-A finally posted the next Jungle Lifestyle episode. Haha, I love these guys. To quickly recap the Jungle Mic activity of the past week and a half: a gig at Doushisha University south campus in the middle of nowhere on a beautiful sunny day; three days later, rainy, a gig at Big Cat, a very respectable live house concert hall in Osaka. That evening a certain lady from a certain company came to see our gig and have a chat with us, hinting at a very bright future for Jungle Mic !! So in order to make that happen, we're totally psyched for the recordings next month (three songs, 2 of which are uptempo and one a true ballad .. I'm sure you can find pieces of them scattered around the video blog). This time, I'll be adding lots of cool keyboard parts to fill the space, there will be percussion, raps by me and vocals by me and Yuuki, and even the sax player who I met on the riverside last Friday because I was attracted by his sound will probably make a presence in some or all of the songs (we jammed in the studio this week and it was good stuff)!! Wow, things really couldn't be more exciting.

Of course school is well under way as well, and it's not strange for me to be in the lab around 2 am lately, calculating propagators for the antifermions of quantum field theory. Tomorrow morning I have a presentation, and I'm kinda behind on my Anki reviews (and quite hungry besides), so I'll stop now.

A very happy day indeed.

P.S. Pics coming soon, I promise!!!

The Real Deal

Okay, so it's very annoying that I have to bend my neck every time I pass through a door, and that my bathroom mirror comes up to my chest if I stand normally. But honestly speaking, the practical inconveniences of Japan end right about there. In almost everything related to daily life, Japan is extremely convenient for anyone living here: public transport, public safety, supply of consumer goods (from apartments to second-hand clothes to electronics to books to 24/7 food), the cellphone system, etc.

Despite these luxuries, I am quite sure I won't live my whole life here. Of course my desire to see as many different corners of the world as possible is a major factor in that feeling. But there are other issues. And today, they seem quite heavy. So heavy, in fact, that it seems impossible to overcome them without sacrificing some things that lie quite close to the core of my being. On the other hand, I love a good challenge, and there will be goods and bads wherever you set foot in the world. Japan might not be that bad. For now, I'll leave things as they are and keep on living my life - a strategy which has proven itself often in times of philosophical impasse or other complicated situations. Personal conclusions and related important decisions are still a while away, and we will discuss the issues at hand many, many times before that, I'm sure.

So which issues, you ask? Here you go.

The above website gives a very good layout of what culture shock is like for most Western foreigners coming to Japan. In my first year in Japan (I had several parties this week to celebrate the one-year anniversary, by the way! You can look forward to the next blog entry), I've had to deal with many, but not all, of the issues the author describes, and it was a refreshing read for me; reminded me of where I'm standing right now. Though I doubt anyone can understand those issues without being in Japan for a long time, hopefully it'll help you to bring your (probably way-off) image of Japan a bit closer to reality. Hopefully it'll turn you on, rather than off, and stimulate your curiosity. Hopefully it'll motivate you to shake loose of the usual confinements of your world and stride into the wild universe out there.

To stimulate your curiosity even further, let me give you a teaser of what's to come on this blog. Just the other day, I mentioned I should start making a list of the small cultural differences between Japan and Holland so I can show it to people whenever they ask that dreaded question. Well, here it is! A beginning of the list of things that are strikingly different in Japan than in Holland (I keep using that country because I don't want to generalize to 'the Western world', though in many cases it might be just as appropriate...if I speak about languages the contrast is usually between Japanese and English, not Dutch). Compared to the being-'of-the-same-age'-if-you're-equally-old-on-April-1 quirk, the following things are kind of deep...but here goes!

• The meaning of love
• The rhythm and melody of language
• Music
• The concept of normality, or of absurdity
• The concept of quality
• Rationality
• Justice and its value
• Interpersonal relationships
  
• Sarcasm

Dear blog, dear readers: we have a lot to talk about.

Respect Your Elders My Ass

It's probably a universal feature of humans that (they think that) young people aren't showing enough respect for their elders. In Holland, I think it's quite true - living in Amsterdam, I honestly didn't have the idea that young people went out of their way to help elders, let alone respect them for no other reason than their age. Wow, I remember how my friend Loek could go on for hours about the uselessness of 'respect' - an extreme example of what I experienced to be the Dutch way of doing things.

In Japan, things are different. Historically, respect for the elders has been heavily ingrained in Japanese culture (perhaps it always has been more so here than in Europe). Of course, the usual keigo is applied when speaking to people who are older than you, and this I am gradually learning to accept (fortunately it's not so difficult to make people stop using it when talking to me). However, recently one source of frustration has been the excessive passiveness of younger people when in the company of older people. Overgeneralizing so you get the idea, older people are expected to make all the decisions and younger people don't talk unless talked to. Today I had a date with a girl from another band, it didn't go spectacularly, and I met up with U-ta and Yuuki afterwards. They forced me to accept, at least provisionally, the reason why many times conversation (and thus interaction, relationship, everything...verbal communication is essential to human interaction, am I wrong?) with Japanese doesn't flow well: I'm older than my conversation partners.

This is respect for your elders taken too far. I am obviously biased, coming from an unJapanese background; through these experiences, I realized that free conversation is one thing in this world I am extremely attached to and truly need in order to make my life meaningful. When anyone younger than you refuses to speak to you for no other reason than your age, and you are expected to do the same to your elders, there is no one left for you to have meaningful interaction (please give me alternative definitions for that term if you can) with than people of the same age. A dull world indeed, and again one piece of the Japanese puzzle falls into place, making it easier to see why many other Japanese quirks are as they are.

An example from personal experience: the people I'll be playing with tomorrow in Osaka. As the drummer (same age) and electric guitarist (2 years younger) were walking me back to the station yesterday, the drummer said the following:

"Wow, it's really a relief that we're the same age [he'd found out about half an hour before]! Makes the talking so much easier!"

...and I, in my head, was like "WTF are you talking about!? Who gives a shit?". I honestly feel bad knowing that if I were one year his superior, that would have a major, negative impact on our creative interaction in the studio as well as ordinary conversation. In fact, the tone of the vast majority of conversations with people you newly meet in Japan is instantly, conveniently, set by the answer to the question "How old are you?".

If it were up to me, 'experience' should be more of a respect-determinant than 'age', though I am dying to continue the old respect conversation with Loek and see if we can work out exactly how respect is ever useful (oh noes, did you just realize with me that that 'useful' is a completely relative concept? All my theorizing gone to waste...?). Of course, the two (age and experience) are linked, and in Japan they are very linked, which explains the situation. Maybe even more so than in the U.S. (from what I know), the percentage of Japanese lives that are completely stereotypical seems to be very high. School, uni, job, marriage, children, death, and all the extracurricular/'personal' activities along the way. Even a certain amount of 'craziness' is expected from anyone and included in the system of norms & values. I won't even try to compare Dutch and Japanese notions of 'craziness'; let's just say they're different, which somehow makes it so that when foreigners interact with Japanese, usually at least one party thinks the other is crazy. In a good way! It's why we are able to get along..it's interesting.

Wow, I can't help but feel I'm overrationalizing. What do you think? Anyway, let me conclude on a positive note (you know me by now). People who are older than you, if they're in the least cool, won't mind you (or me at least) dropping the keigo and speaking on the same level. I haven't been here for long enough yet to judge, but it seems that from there, good relationships follow naturally (as they would in Holland, where everyone thinks keigo is insane).

With it gradually becoming clearer that it will be very hard to 'integrate' psychologically into Japanese society, I am excited to see, within the next five years or so, how flexible my mind really is. Until now I've been proceeding smoothly, making good use of what I considered perhaps to be the one single thing I was really good at, but it seems I'm getting caught up in the rapids. Go with the flow - let's stretch to breaking point! Or beyond! Oooh, that sounds even more exciting .. another new world to explore .. I wonder what's hiding there...

P.S. A snippet of trivia: In Japan, almost everything begins in April (cherry blossoms, school, university, work, maybe even the fiscal year). It is not completely unexpected, then, that whether or not you're 'the same age' as someone else is determined by whether or not you're the same age on April 1, not on January 1 (aka same year of birth), as in every other country I've been to. Another one of those Japanese quirks that make Japanese culture completely different from Dutch. I should seriously start making a list of these subtleties to show to people whenever they ask me "so how is Japanese culture different from Dutch?", a question I invariably answer with "they are completely opposite" because it's so complicated I can't give a real answer.

P.P.S. If you have time, check out a movie called Ima, Ai Ni Yukimasu and tell me what you think. I have a very strong opinion about this film and just by talking about it to U-ta and Yuuki for ten minutes it seems we have stumbled upon another deep difference between Japanese and Dutch ways of thinking. But after reading some other people's opinions of the movie online, I realized that maybe it's not a Japanese-Dutch contradiction, but more one between a typical Japanese and me. I'm curious to find out the truth.

Sakura Blooming / Exciting Times with Jungle Mic - One Road

There are many roads to professional musicianship, and we just so happen to be on the one I think might be the most common: the one that winds through a bunch of local live houses, connections with local, then regional, then national bands and event hosts and club owners, and finally people who are willing to pay you adequately for your efforts...all the while learning, learning, learning from those who have come before you and "levelling up" as quickly as you can.

Last weekend was a Jungle Mic weekend. On Saturday, we organized a combined Fall In / Jungle Jamboree (Fall In is the name of the event a buddy band of ours, Es, organizes frequently - except they disbanded after this time because their guitarist is quitting...which I didn't realize until the next day because I usually don't listen to the serious stories in between songs) at Kyoto Muse, our usual place.

I had a lot to do in the afternoon/early evening (i.e. dance practice for the show at that same event, with Ikeyan and Yamaa, as well as meeting Misa for the second-last time before she moves to Shizuoka for her work, which I found out on Saturday and took a couple of days to process, because I thought she was going to stay in Kyoto...Shizuoka city is about 4 hours by normal train or one by Shinkansen), which is why I missed some of the earlier gigs, including one by the band of our recording/mixing engineer at Studio Rag. You can't have 'em all...

Anyway, after some confusion about who had to perform what when, Ikeyan, Yamaa and I all separately made it more or less in time for our dance show. A house show this time, and I'm glad to say it turned out quite interesting. Routines are always more difficult to perform smoothly than you think (no way you're going to be able to do them fluently with ~8 hours of practice), but there were plenty of solo/duet parts which were more improvised and probably more fun to watch. Overall, though we made many mistakes, the feeling wasn't bad, and since the audience was rather unfamiliar with this kind of dance, we probably managed to convey almost as much as we could have even if everything went perfectly. I liked the part where we were looking for the piano sound, I found it first, ate it with a satisfied face, went crazy, then they found it, went crazy, and we all had a blast.

More than the performance, though, last week's daytime practices were really fun, reminiscing about last summer with the sun out at 20 degrees. Beautiful! The sakura are beginning to bloom and I expect full bloom (i.e. riverside parties and gigs every day) in about a week! Ikeyan and Yamaa are both graduating, and though I'm happy to announce that Ikeyan is staying in Kyoto (and in fact moving closer to me), Yamaa (who has recently been added to the business team now consisting of her, me, Yokoo and Freddy) is moving to Tokyo. In other words, this was probably the last show for a long time, if not forever, performed by "Heartbeat Collective", the team that was first put together for Ego's Zero show last year - the first show I ever performed at. Wow, old times. The year is drawing to a close, and all kinds of interesting feelings are bubbling up ... but more about that another time.

Just before our dance show, there was the gig by Nubo, a band from Yokohama. It was the first time I really enjoyed another band's gig at a Jungle Mic event: they played something in between rock and ska and knew how to create a good party atmosphere. At the afterparty, I spent half of the time (i.e. 3 out of 6 hours) with Nubo's bassist, Kim (JM's bassist) and Masa (the aforementioned engineer), and have good hopes for performing together with Nubo again in the future. They're a touring band though, more suited for live performance than selling CD's, so they're on the road all the time and I don't know when we can match schedules. We'll see!

Our own gig went good and bad. We had a lot of new stuff going on compared to a month ago: three new songs, background vocals by Yuuki (guitar) and me, and more rapping by me. Somehow Yuuki messed up quite a lot, and it took quite a while for us to convince him, after the gig was over, that things were quite alright. Because on the side of the audience it actually turned out to be a great gig! Two of the three new songs are uptempo, funky and easy to feel, the other new song is a true slow ballad (Evans loved it, says he can't wait for the recording), U-ta (vocals) performed much better than last time, Satoshi (drums) and Kim were very tight, I did some MCing/call-and-responsing in between songs as well which was apparently a great success. During the encore, we had an acquaintance rapper and the singer from Es come on stage and join us in a mishmash of Resound (a JM song) and a funky improvised session (which I didn't know we were going to have). It was good fun, and though impromptu things like these are never flawless, we got positive feedback from the people in charge afterwards. Keeping the funk alive! In all, the atmosphere and the communication with the audience was very good this time.

As always, there was a feedback session with the manager and the owner of the live house before we left. This time, we got what I considered to be fabulous news: 1. U-ta, though he still needs a lot of practice, is noticeably advancing. 2. For the first time in over a year (which means since way before I joined them), it was possible to see what Jungle Mic is aiming for as a band, largely due to the successful integration of my keys. Whereas a year ago (half a year before I first heard them play at the riverside) it was apparently a total mess, now the way ahead has become clearly visible and the work that needs to be done can be put into words concretely: keep going with the uptempo songs and background vocals, keep working on the crowd interaction, increase variation in the ballad-type songs, have drum and bass play a bit more freely (since Jungle Mic decided, I guess about a year ago, that they wanted to create some more mass-appeal songs, the rhythm section has suffered from excessive holding back).... now that's stuff we can work with! Not like last time, where all we got was "keep it up .. you guys have the potential, but you need to work out for yourselves what you really want", which was not directly helpful.

So the gig was a success - also according to the couple of personal friends I had in the audience. The afterparty was an event in itself. About twenty people there, mostly band members but also some friends. All-you-can-eat-and-drink for 2500 yen - yes I ate and drank a LOTTTT (God I love Japan). As mentioned before, good conversation with Nubo's bassist, Kim and Masa, and with Evans and Mariko (a friend of ours). I also got to know a former member of Jungle Mic, who was kicked out because he sucked at guitar back in the day (they used to have two guitarists around 7 years ago, just after they started), and who has apparently always been the crazy drunk at the parties. This time too, he got wasted to the point of not being able to utter anything other than caveman language, being punched and kicked around by all his friends - outside ... naked. Riiiiight, don't forget we're in Japan!

The party ended around 6 am under a bridge in Sanjo, after which I crashed at U-ta's place and he was kind enough to wake me up with the smell of pizza around 11 am. We left around 12, to pick up some other members and head for Shiga, for the second gig of the weekend. Shiga is one of the prefectures bordering Kyoto; I have plenty of friends who are from there and a couple who live there right now. It's also where Lake Biwa lies (went there to see fireworks and dance in the streets sometime last year). Anyway, this particular live house, Huckleberry (Hakkurubeeri in Japanese) was kind of in the middle of a residential-looking area with nothing interesting around. It was a lot smaller than Muse, but then Muse is really quite big. The smallness made it very easy to get a good sound, though, so soundchecking was a breeze.

This night's event was hosted by a local band which, no offense, was very amateur compared to the other performing artists that night. Accordingly, they performed first - we were third or fourth out of seven (Yuuki, considering the artists after us, thought we deserved to be later). Despite (or because!) of the middle-of-nowhereness, the somewhat improvised organization and the audience consisting of 90% girls, most of which didn't seem too impressed by anything at all (which made me, bad boy that I am, stereotype them into music-illiterate friends-living-around-the-corner of band members), the overall atmosphere was quite good, and we had a fun gig. Playing in such a small space made it much easier to put down an good stage performance, which was nice for a change, though of course we're aiming to wow bigger crowds as well.

The afterparty, though, was where most of the fun was to be had. Contrary to Kyoto-style leaving the live house for another place, tables were set up inside the live house, and the food was prepared by the owner of the place himself. 2500 yen again, but this time all-you-can-drink and plenty of food with no time limit! The food wasn't so great, probably because the owner is an alcoholic and was drunk when he made it. That guy was truly something! As nowhere else in Japan, all band members used plain form (no formal language) with him, and he was cool about it. His idea of a live house is "a place where bands that become big get their baby experiences...no need for all kinds of formalities and strictnesses, just get people together and have fun". Though it's a good philosophy and I honestly think those places need to exist, it's almost hard to believe his business can remain standing, what with the small audiences and unlimited drink sessions every night. When we asked him what he thought of Jungle Mic, having seen us for the first time, all he could reply, time after time, was "I don't really like Kyoto bands...I just like Kyoto girls", and then the conversation would change into hilarious story exchanges between some of the musicians that were more familiar with him, who had been having their own, entirely unrelated conversations a couple of metres away until that moment.

Besides explaining the fine differences between Japanese and Dutch women to the club owner, I spent most of the time talking to the (female) singer and MC (male), both around 30, of Funky Rockers. They're both very cool and had some great ideas about us (Funky Rockers, Jungle Mic, our generation) having the responsibility to change the music scene: music should be about entertainment, going to a live house should be "hey, I hear there's a good party at club X tonight, let's go check it out" rather than planning a month ahead to go support your friend's band because he needs to sell 20 tickets to be able to play at all - let the motherfucking live houses get their own customers instead of making the bands do all the advertising! ..and more of that kind of stuff. We'd played with them once before, in Muse (on an evening where Muse booked all the bands separately), but that time we didn't have much chance to talk to them. This time, we got along really well and I have very high hopes for playing with them again, hopefully a lot in Osaka (because that's where they're based)! Between the two of our groups we have plenty of party fuel to make any event fun.

One thing I talked about with FR's MC was the difference between the live music experience in Japan and in other places. I agreed with him that the majority of Japanese concertgoers is too passive, to the point of making me think they're kind of missing the whole point of the gig. It's quite hard to get people to move (as an illustration of the seriousness of this issue, Yuuki wants one of the next JM songs to be written from the "easy to make the audience move" perspective .. you know, waving your arms from left to right or other stuff I'm sure you've seen Japanese audiences do in concert videos). Now of course it's fine if you don't want to go all out dancing and prefer to enjoy the music by watching from a distance, but it seems everyone is like that. I honestly think there are few Japanese people who would understand a Manu Chao concert video. Finishing this paragraph on a good note, though, Jungle Mic does have some fans that know how to physically enjoy the gigs, and it's always very motivating to see them in the front row. I hope we can make more people get up, get down, get funky, get loose, as Teddy Pendergrass put it in his funky song.

After the afterparty, we headed home around 3/4ish. In our car were U-ta, Kim and me, singing along to Dragonball, Pokemon, Ghibli and other assorted sing-along material loudly until we were back in Kyoto. Just before going to sleep that morning, I realized how lucky I had been to meet them and be accepted into the Jungle Mic family. With the gears moving (gigs planned, our CDs being passed around to record labels, continuing work on the new Jungle Mic image (clothes and all)) and positive feedback about all the changes so far, the future is looking bright. I love these guys.