Japan: 18 months in 18 pictures – September 07

Part 1 and explanation of the series here. Read entire series via tags, here.

September in Japan heralded the end of the summer heat and oppression and a return to ‘normality’ with work and the daily grind following the extended Obon holidays. It’s also around September time that I started to really consider the possibility of leaving teaching and looking for something else, a prospect that was fairly daunting considering how difficult it can be for a foreigner to find non-teaching work with basic or non-existent Japanese skills. More on that next month though.

I continued to explore Tokyo and its surroundings with a few day trips around town. On one of these I decided to go and check out the Imperial Palace, being the tourist attraction that it is. Dissapointing would be the nice way to put it, with the Palace not open to the public, apart from two days a year, and the surrounding gardens and estate fairly dull. However the day wasn’t wasted as I found a procession of goths, lolitas, maids and others making their way to a concert near the palace. I ended up spending an hour or so just sitting by the side of the road taking pictures and watching the ‘show’ as it were. This reminded me that often it’s the people that are a lot more interesting than the places or buildings, and this is I think especially true in Tokyo. And I’m not just talking about people watching in obvious places like Shibuya, Akihabara or Harajuku, but also in the suburbs and smaller town centers where I always found that the people were as fascinating to watch as the surroundings and culture.

It was also around that time that I started to give some more thought to advertising in Japan and its place within the country’s culture. Advertising in Japan can be such an alien experience, especially for Westerners, that it’s easy to try and avoid dealing with it. Personally, I found it to be one of the most interesting aspects of modern Japanese culture and life. In a country where harmony, respect and order are still strong values, both traditionally and on a daily basis, advertising comes across as fairly chaotic, invasive and at times overbearing. Shops compete for customers attention by essentially shouting at them in the busy streets of downtown Tokyo, while visual and audio advertising finds its way in every hooks and cranny it can possibly fill, from the side of plastic holders on the train to the back of tissue packs handed in the streets (but only to the relevant demographic). Ultimately due to the language barrier a lot of the advertising can still easily be filtered out, but in the case of shopping it does change the experience quite drastically. The sensory overload that comes with entering a big shopping center or shop in Tokyo is enough to put most people off, what’s interesting though is how the Japanese just don’t seem to register it anywhere near as much as the foreigners. To them it’s normal, part of the whole deal and it’s not impossible to end up thinking like them, you just have to let go of certain preconceptions about Japanese culture and a certain Western understanding of what is acceptable when it comes to advertising and invasion of your private space.

My feelings of illiteracy and linguistic allienation were starting to fade by September, and that’s when I decided to actually try and learn Kanji properly. It’s funny looking back on this, as nearly 1 year and a half on my attempt to learn and master a decent, basic amount of Kanji turned out to take a lot longer than I’d hoped and has been a lot more complex. I continued to try and learn Kanji until early 2008 when life got in the way and I sort of gave up. A year and a half on I’m still learning and while I use to think of Kanji as frustrating and antiquated when I was living in Tokyo, it’s now become a lot more appealing, like some sort of logic and memory game, a feeling that is no doubt mainly due to the fact that I left and I am trying to go back and therefore I am romanticising certain elements of Japanese life. I wonder how I’ll feel about it if I do go back. It was around September, following discussions with various people, that I also realised that the majority of the Japanese population is technically not fully literate as most people only know about half or less of the 5,000 or so Kanji recognised as needed by the government for full literacy, a fact that still amazes me, especially when you consider just how important literacy can be in the West. Granted, comparing Kanji, a logographic system, to our latin alphabet is a bit misleading and unfair but that doesn’t make Japanese people’s technical illiteracy less of a fascinating fact.

September is also Tokyo Game Show (TGS) time, where geeks from around Japan, and the world, congregate in the Chiba prefecture for four days of video game related mentalism. The gaming equivalent of a big comic convention, with just as much nerdiness and plenty of scantily dressed women being eyeballed and photographed by weird, pervy looking men. The photograph above is taken from TGS and shows the Capcom ladies wishing the visitors farewell at the end of the day, a tradition of the show and one that takes various elements of Japanese culture and nerdy life and combines them into one such as girls dressed in maid-like outfits, bowing and overbearing politeness. Walking to and from the show was also quite insightful, as I’d never really got the chance to check out Chiba up until then. What was most fascinating about it was just how uncannily non-Japanese the area felt. Not that it represents the rest of Chiba, as I never really got a chance to explore the rest of the prefecture, but the part of Chiba that holds the exhibition hall, as well as Disneyland, is scarily like a small-scale version of anytown America, complete with giant shopping malls, hotels, diners, burger joints and supermarkets, and very little else. No temples, shrines or other obvious, identifiable Japanese elements. Walking around these parts of Chiba is a totally surreal experience, and while I’m pretty sure it’s not representative of the rest of the prefecture, it was nonetheless a reminder of just how much like America Japan can sometimes be, or try to be. That’s another thing I was starting to really understand as the year passed.

September bonus shot:

I also returned to Fuji in September, taking advantage of a short work holiday. Going back for a second time allowed me to spend more time discovering Kawaguchiko and the surrounding areas, including Saiko one of the smaller five lakes surrounding Fuji. Once more the time spent outside of Tokyo allowed for more insights into Japanese life outside of the big city, and in this case I also got an insight into the more traditional rural lifestyle when we visited a village near Saiko that had been destroyed by a mud slide and reconstructed as it was in the 19th century. Past the touristy element, the village gave a pretty good idea of what life might have been like for rural Japanese in the last century, a life that was a lot slower and simpler. Japan’s jump from an old-fashioned, and somewhat outdated, society in the 19th century to one of the world’s leading countries and technological pioneers in the 20th and 21st centuries is well documented, but to see it for yourself, to an extent, puts it in a new light. And while Japan is now known more for its technological and industrial prowess, it still holds a lot of the old charm and quaintness from its not-too distant past blended in with modernity and futuristic elements. The area around Fuji to me is a perfect example of this.

Runner up pics:
Link and friends take a break at the TGS, riding brooms could be the next big thing in video games, Kawaguchiko from above, and an everyday sight on the streets of Tokyo.

Flickr set(s):
Tokyo Game Show
Kawaguchiko, Saiko and Mt Fuji
Imperial Palace