J-Pap? Maybe Not!

We've been trying for almost a year now to 'get into' Japanese music. Well, that's a lie actually. We very quickly scaled down our aspirations and have been trying to find any kind of indigenous music that is tolerable. Watching MTV Japan is a bit like watching a succession of Eurovision Song Contest auditions, but with much better videos. A quick roll-call of J-Pop gives you a clue - Rip Slyme, Mr Children, Bump Of Chicken...

Yes. I'm afraid that really IS Bump of Chicken...

It's not that they are lousy musicians - quite the contrary in fact. The precocity of youth here is quite frightening. No hanging around on street corners menacing the elderly for them, they're all indoors polishing their fretwork. It's just that the music is so utterly derivative and well, dull. Unlike manufacturing, music isn't just about build quality.

And they've got no excuses - the Japanese music industry is the second largest in the world, so there's no shortage of cash. Million-selling records in Japan are not as frequent as they used to be, but they still exist (unlike the UK, where it seems you can just email your mates these days to get to Number One). The highest-selling single in Japan was in the 70s, when some dodgy nursery rhyme sold over 4 million copies. This pales into insignificance compared with the biggest-selling single of all time - Elton John's horrible Candle In The Wind - which has amassed an astonishing 26 million sales worldwide. But then credit where credit's due - Japan's sales are achieved solely in Japan. After all, no-one else is going to buy this stuff.

The Yoshida Brothers are pretty interesting on the face of it. 'Their axes are old school, their music is new school' proclaim their marketeers. Their 'axes' are three-stringed shamisen, and you have to hand it to them for even having the idea of covering Brian Eno's By This River from Before and After Science (Yoshida Brothers III). Respect indeed. Unfortunately the whole twangy-plink deal that is the charm of the shamisen doesn't have legs - in fact it really starts to get on your thrupennies after about 15 minutes.

But recently we have happened upon a band that we think aren't half bad at all. Oreskaband are a six-piece girl band from Osaka who are smart enough to mine a genre that is quintessentially derivative from the outset - ska. Maybe it's because I'm from Coventry, the (second) home of ska, or maybe it's because I'm just over the hill, but there's a hint of Specials, Dexys and Roland from Grange Hill's sister about this bunch. What a treat they are. Check out their website. And remember where you heard it first...

The Lesser Spotted Geisha Bird

The ultimate hostess with the mostest, the geisha is a Japanese icon. The two most famous hanamichi (geisha quarters) can be found in the current and former capital cities, Tokyo and Kyoto. So as part of the itinerary for my parents' recent visit, a trip to the latter for some geisha-spotting was a must.

Arthur Golden's 1998 novel Memoirs of a Geisha - set in the Gion district of Kyoto - revived interest in an aspect of Japan that is as romantic as it is ambiguous. The film it spawned was a little too Mills and Boon for my liking, and wasn't so well received in Japan, mainly because it rather insensitively cast two Chinese actresses in the the lead roles. A bit like casting Brigitte Bardot as Mary Poppins. Well, maybe not.

The word geisha literally translates to "arts person" or "one trained in arts" (gei = art, sha = person). They are a dab-hand at dancing, music, poetry, flower arrangement, calligraphy, serving tea (quite an extravaganza in Japan) and not looking bored in the company of men.

An estimated 10,000 geisha (geiko in Kyoto dialect) still ply their trade in Japan, although you are much more likely to see maiko (apprentice geisha) or even elaborately made-up tourist faux-geisha (for about £150 you too can be geisha'd up). To become a true geisha takes approximately six years training, costs an estimated £150,000, and will set you back £300 a month in dry-cleaning alone. So it's perhaps no wonder that the true geisha leave the shuffling around the streets of Kyoto in their high-heeled wooden geta to the rookies.

I've no idea whether the girls we saw on the steps of the Kiyomizu-dera temple were maiko, gaiko or just plain fako, but they looked pretty impressive. Next time we'll ask them to play us a tune. Or show us their laundry receipts.

Flower Power

Apologies for the fact that this blog seems to turn into an online botany class from time to time, but there are certainly petals a-plenty in these parts. It's fueled by the fact that I've got myself into an ongoing photography competition with the guy who runs networks and IT. As you do...

The first challenge was photographing the Luminarie last December, but to be honest, every photo I've ever seen of the Luminarie looks pretty much the same, and unless you're using a pinhole camera, or painting it with poster paint using your feet, you're going to be there or thereabouts. I think I was hard done by though, losing out in a very close office poll. Foolishly I chose to play the art card, rather than the tried and tested method of a grinning daughter under an arch, which would have definitely sealed the female vote.

Then I was absolutely slammed by some pretty impressive blossom pictures by the indefatiguable Inamura-san, who travelled the length and breadth of the island to capture almost every strain of sakura known to man (for which he also bought himself a new lens, I later learnt. Grrrr..).

So, it's May, and azaleas - or tsutsuji - are my weapon of choice. Sorakuen Garden has a stack of them, it's just round the corner, and it's only 300 yen entrance fee.

There is still some dispute over the this, but I reckon I won the Battle of Tsutsuji, for the simple reason that my picture has a bee in it. And that's something that independently moves about, and is stingy and mildly threatening - ergo, it's a much more challenging composition. Inamura-san won't have any of it though, and has challenged me to a June duel - hydrangeas at dawn! Watch this space...

Slap Happy at the Festival

If you've been following this blog you may recall that on New Year's Day we saw a band of taiko drummers at the local shrine. I took quite a lot of photos of them that day and showed them to my Japanese sensei, Yuka. By coincidence, Yuka knew those very same drummers and effected an introduction that would culminate in Jessica and myself, bedecked in happi and hachimaki, slapping cowhide in a somewhat wayward fashion on a float in the 37th Kobe Matsuri less than five months later.

I've always been quite partial to a spot of taiko - I've seen the Kodo drummers three times, as recently as last year in Belfast. So when I found out that Yuka knew the people who ran the local drumming club I was initially quite excited about 'having a go' myself. I was brought down to earth rapidly by the bloke who ran it, who rather brusquely replied that my intended two years sabbatical in Japan was nowhere near long enough to learn taiko. In hindsight, what he actually meant was that I was middle-aged, unfit and having a laugh, but this was tempered by the suggestion that maybe Jessica could give it a whirl and I could watch.

So, since January, Sarah and myself have taking turns to take Jessica to Kobe Daiko every Saturday, and the three of us have tried to deduce what on earth is going on, as the lessons are delivered in Japanese and the rhythms annotated in hiragana. To her credit, Jessica has progressed very quickly from scratching her bum and pulling faces to giving it a real go.

When it comes to festivals, the Japanese certainly don't hold back, and the Kobe Matsuri is the biggest in the region. It is particularly renowned for its samba dancers, seemingly on the grounds that they apply the same approach to clothing as to the infamous waxing technique.

Jessica was willing enough to perform on the stage, but was not so impressed with the idea of appearing on the float, which was the exact opposite of how I felt about things, except I was none too keen on the float either. We struck a deal that Jessica would consider doing the float if I was prepared to make a fool of myself. I reasoned that I would at least be a moving fool, only fleetingly bearing my incompetence to the Kobe masses.

The taiko kids range in age from about four to nine, and they are superb. The mums are better than I could ever hope to be, and they all profess to be only making up the numbers. The morning stage performance went without a hitch. Jessica looked nervous, but acquitted herself well, and we then had a three-hour wait for our slot in the five-hour procession - we were number 91 in the queue. Although the festival route took 30 minutes to navigate, it was over in a flash. The exhilaration of the occasional sequences of drum-pounding that I could actually do, brought into sharp relief by Jessica's rolling eyes at the more frequent bits that I couldn't. At the end of it I was completely knackered, but the sense of achievement - and relief - was palpable.

The above photo will be submitted to Kansai Time Out's Chinatown Section 'How Many Chins?' competition.

Nuclear Family Outing

My parents are making their first ever visit to Japan, so it's back on the Shinkansen again as we make the trip west to Hiroshima, just an hour away on the sleek 500 series. A largely non-descript industrial city prior to August 6th 1945, Hiroshima was incinerated, and instantly redefined, when it became the recipient of the world's first atomic bomb. The 'city of water' - so called because it straddles the frond-like delta of the Oota River - in an instant became one of the most powerful images of the twentieth century.

I'd read John Hersey's 'Hiroshima' at school. Commissioned by The New Yorker in 1946, Hersey interviewed six survivors of the blast to relate a tragically human dimension to the effects of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima; in stark contrast, at the time, to the mostly statistical, political and questionably moralistic reporting of the event. It's both a fascinating and chilling read, so it was an eerie experience stepping off a tram at Genbaku Dome-mae to find the remnants of what used to be the Prefectural Commercial Exhibition building, and which is now simply known as 'The A-Bomb Dome'.

The Peace Memorial Park covers a sizable area - previously the Nakajima district of the city. Opened in 1955, the Peace Memorial Museum tells the story of Hiroshima before the bombing and of the aftermath. Despite the grim subject matter, it is not overtly grisly, although it maybe dwells a little too much on the statistics of nuclear fission - all of them very, very big, by the way - towards the end of the tour, turning it into a bit of a fourth-grade physics lesson in the process. But the message is crystal clear - nuclear weapons are very, very bad - and not surprisingly it's a lot more compelling coming from the memoirs of the hibakusha (survivors of the blast, of whom there are still an estimated 80,000 living in Hiroshima today) than the massed ranks of the Birkenstock-shod middle classes.

But life goes on. The fear that nothing organic could survive the aftermath of the nuclear bombing for many generations has proved to be unfounded, and Hiroshima is a thriving metropolis looking ahead to the future that cannot, and maybe should not, forget the legacy of its past. As evidenced by the entry in the local listings magazine for the Hiroshima Youth Hostel: "A-bomb survivors share their experiences the first Saturday of each month from 19:00. Followed by origami project. All welcome."