How Japan saw Europe (or at least how one artist did)

 Japanese pictorial map of Europe from the year 1932.

"Constructed Views: Stone Cut"

A captivating short documentary on Etsuro Sotoo, the Japanese immigrant stone cutter who ended up being a chief supervisor at the Sagrada Familia cathedral (still under construction) in Barcelona.

https://www.nowness.com/series/constructed-views/stone-cut-la-sagrada-familia

The "reading" of minds (Disturbing? Wonderful? AI is certainly significant...)

On Twitter, the explanation from Siqi Chen@blader:

·
Mar 3

"okay so AI can literally read our minds now. a team from osaka was able to reconstruct visual images from mri scan data using stable diffusion. first row is the image presented to the test subject, second row is the reconstructed image from mri data. wild. "

"Damned noise" -- an opinion from the 2nd most noisy country in the world: Spain.

  

‘In this country, clamour is as inevitable as the air one breathes. It follows you, wherever you go, whatever you do.

Motorcycles, construction sites, shouting, music, mobile phones, bells, firecrackers, barking, horns, alarms, barrel organs, shouting, radios, hammers, garbage trucks, heels, drills, TVs and slot machines…

We live in the acceptance that silence is no longer possible; we have given up, we endorse with total naturalness that we do not have access to the balm of tranquillity...’

Read more (in Spanish) here.

[Article first found at Business over Tapas:

"Only Japan (with its paper walls) is noisier than Spain."]

"In a small world" -- My latest article for Catalonia Today magazine

Barcelona isn’t well-known for flamenco but Kayoko Nakata, thinks it should be. 

As a Japanese flamenco dancer with a Catalan husband and two year-old son, she lives near the city’s Sant Pau hospital. When she can, she goes back to her place of origin in the rural Iwate region where she’s a lifetime cultural ambassador.


Kayoko told me, “At the Barcelona Ciutat Flamenco Festival at the end of October, my work, “Hermandad” was selected from a lot of applications and I was able to perform at the Auditori Sant Marti. “That was just before the last three concerts in the festival were cancelled due to Covid restrictions.”


“Flamenco is a small world,” said. “Here and in Seville where I studied it, the attitude is very often that [Romani] Gypsies do this and Japanese people could never dance flamenco. Tourists don’t want to see Japanese or Chinese or Africans dancing flamenco. It's a closed world too. I struggled a lot and eventually doors opened for me and I danced in “tablaos” (or daily organised performances on stage) a lot.”


“The title of my latest show means bonding but also brotherhood. In that way, it describes what I’ve done with two types of music. I fuse flamenco with traditional musical elements from Japan. 

For example, in the song that opens the show I dance dressed in a “kimono” (traditional and formal Japanese garment) and I use hand movements from the ancient “Nihon buyo”  dance from my region. 

There are people in Barcelona who really like being surprised by that mixture. I’m someone who wants to create music and movement without borders. I don’t feel Japanese or Catalan or Spanish. I’m a human, a person.” Summing up herself on her website, she uses the phrase “I DON'T KNOW WHERE I COME FROM OR WHERE I'M GOING.”


I asked Kayoko about the meaning to her of “duende,” that core spirit of the art that is said to take over flamenco dancers when they are in full flight. She compared it to the Japanese idea of “mu:'' nothingness or being without, "unasking." She said in that state, thought was absent, like when she meditates.


Other things are also absent in her life, however. Currently because of the theatres being closed and face to face sessions prohibited, Kayoko teaches flamenco online from her apartment, though she’s only doing a small number of classes. Her students are both in Japan and those living in Barcelona, where she believes the  flamenco scene is based on many thousands of residents who have an Andalusian family background.


Like so many other teachers though, she’s had to try to adapt this year. As have the people around her. “I think the neighbours in my building are angry at me because of all my stamping on the floor but luckily none of them have said anything,'' she laughs. “I want to restart classes in my studio because that’s more enjoyable.”


As a foreigner or “gaijin” as they are called there, I was lucky enough to live in Japan for three years. Similar to Kayoko Nakata, I also had a partner and young child with me. Also like her, I discovered something of a small world.


I learned that the world was not as big as I’d thought because Japanese people basically wanted many of the same things as me. This, despite the fact that they have a hugely different culture and history from where I’d grown up in Australia.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, December 2020.]

"Natsukashi" -- My latest column for Catalonia Today magazine

This morning, with the dying of this summer and noticing the shortening of the hours of light in the evening, I remembered that exactly two decades ago I went with my new wife to live in the city of Kyoto, in Japan.

It became possibly the single most influential experience in and on my life. 

To look at a period of what became three years and see it as one complete experience (or a collection of thousands of experiences wrapped into one) is obviously unusual. But Japan is exactly that: unusual. 

In fact, it’s unique. Living there, I found myself sometimes saying to myself or whoever was near me, “Everything here is different. Everything!”

Of course not literally everything is, in fact, different there but that was how Japan and its people struck you, especially at first sight. 

Essentially, Japanese people want the very same things as you and I, and the rest of the inhabitants of the planet. We all basically want love, food, shelter, respect and satisfaction. But it often seemed that how they thought they would get these wants was a polar opposite to me, a 30-year-old male from Australia, so geographically close to Japan.

The Japanese language is unique, too, like every language, I suppose. There’s a word in Japanese - “natsukashi” - for which the closest translation in English is “nostalgia”. This translation, though, does not do justice to such a complex, nuanced word that is actually a highly emotional one.

In Japan you would find even primary school children saying this word, not just adults. I think this is because from a very young age in Japan you are taught (or at least influenced) by parents, schools, and wider society to reflect back on your actions, your experiences, and even individual moments. This is a mentality not currently in vogue in much of the Western world, partly because Japan is a very formal society.

There is a structure, a ritual, an accepted composed method and set order (and a set order of words in a phrase) for virtually every daily action the Japanese do; whether it is eating, leaving home, getting to or leaving school or work, or even how you conduct relationships with people. 

To my wife and I and our non-Japanese friends, for at least a year or two, this was mystifying, confusing, frustrating but eventually somehow comprehensible. Although it was quite simple to understand and learn the basics of daily routine, having relationships with Japanese people was another matter, despite the fact that almost everyone was extremely kind to us.

The multiple layers of meaning that everything has in Japan can be seen in my current nostalgic yearning feeling towards Japan through the word ‘natsukashi’.

It turns out that my understanding of this word was not quite on the mark though. After researching it, I find that this feeling is better expressed by the longer word ‘mukashiwonatsukashimu’. ‘Natsukashi is apparently a more simple term for someone or something that is dear, desired or missed.

Next month, I plan to write a follow-up article on some specific examples that illustrate the points I’ve made above about Japan, this most unique of unique places. Until then, I’ll finish with a ‘haiku’ I wrote in Japan. ‘Haiku” is the traditional 5-7-5 syllable simplified form of poetry that’s designed to recall a single moment:

Portuguese song voice

Sweet, controlled, but free and light

Heard in a night street.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, October 2019.]

"The Wind-Water Sickness" - My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

[Japanese "onni" (devil) mask]

How do you get sick in Japan?

According to one Japanese teacher that I once talked to, a Mr Shiroi, he caught a cold because the school that we both used to teach at was in an “unfavourable” north-east position, when compared to his house. He had been working at this school for four years, he informed me, and had got sicker much more often than at his previous school, which was in a northwest direction. This was a ‘good’ location relative to where he lives, so he rarely found himself in less than perfect health.

 

Mr Shiroi told me that this extraordinary superstition was called fu-sui (wind-water) and has its roots in Chinese Confucian times, having a fairly committed belief amongst about 1 in 20 people in Japan, Mr Shiroi estimates. In China, he thinks it is over 10 per cent still.

Naturally, in our conversation I offered the opinion that it is actually germs that cause diseases, but this is only the ‘direct’ cause, he maintained. From this ancient nonsense, it seems that you can predict where the harmful things are, but they will only take effect on you if you have arrived at your destination from certain directions.

I contended to him that if somebody catches AIDS for example, it is because they shared a needle or bodily fluids with an infected person. In Mr Shiroi’s view it is also because they were ignorant of the warnings that, with special insider-knowledge, can be found.

Mr Shiroi then went on to inform me that all the important variables in fact changed on the night before ‘Setsubun,’ (which was only two nights before our discussion.) You see, the turning point for which directions are favourable is midnight on this ‘real’ New Year. Setsubun (literally "sectional separation") is a timed-honoured Japenese custom that marks the beginning of spring and is based on the solar calendar, not the lunar calendar used by the western world. A man puts on an onni (demon) mask and is chased out of his own house by the rest of the family who throw beans at him yelling the Japanese equivalent of bad luck out, good luck in! It is still practised in most Japanese households, he told me.

More interesting to me though were this otherwise well-educated man’s theories about predictability of natural phenomenon. I asked him if it was not only people’s houses and workplaces that came under the influence of this “cosmic compass.” Did it affect relationships? For example, if someone who was born in the town of Uji, south of Kyoto, and they married someone from say, Kameoka to their north-west, did this mean that their bond would be a successful one?

He believed it did, explaining to me that it is actually even better to marry a partner further along the same axis line. This struck me as another absurdity, particularly when taken to its logical extension. I argued that, according to his theory here, it would have been better for him to have married a woman from the very tip of Chile in South America rather than his current wife. “Oh, but you have to balance the idea with practical concerns,” he squibbed. I asked him what his wife thought about this. He said “Well, I got married before I learnt about these ways.”

I knew that just last year he had traveled to Morocco. He had previously told me that he liked it very much but that his wife never wanted to go back there again. Now, he filled me in, that particular tip of Africa had been the ‘second best’ possible place to travel to. It had been at times very difficult to find somewhere to go outside of Japan that was relatively “safe.”

Following these principles was limiting to his options, it seemed. I told him that former U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s wife Nancy had experienced similar problems with a different brand of superstition.

[This article was first published under the title "How do you get sick in Japan?" in Catalonia Today magazine, March 2016,]

What British educators can learn from Spain (and other countries)

Below is an edited version of the text of a short piece that I wrote recently for an article in the Guardian on-line’s education section...

“If I could point to one idea that I would bring back to the UK from overseas it would be that that awful corporate-speak word 'innovation' - though I would call it creative teaching, rather than anything else.

In Spain, it's uplifting to see how older kids treat and care for younger ones, and this is done naturally and informally, not with prefects or head boys or head girls. The quality of school food is generally good there, and Britain can learn from the health benefits of this.

In Australia, where I was blooded as a teacher during my first four years, educators were encouraged to take risks with their teaching methods, whether this was bringing in sometimes slightly unpredictable guest speakers into the classroom or just simply reading poetry outside in the sunshine. Also, one or two states in Australia have not relied so heavily on exams and testing to assess students' knowledge and abilities. This has given teachers more choice and lets students produce work not purely for regurgitation in an exam.

It's easy to say that we should take personal and collective responsibility for our schools, but in Japan you will see teachers and students every afternoon, side by side, mopping and sweeping the corridors, classrooms and toilets. Admittedly, the low level of attention often paid to this ritual meant that the school was more spiritually clean than physically clean but there is a lot to be said for 'doing the dirty work' together.”

The other contributors to the piece, teaching in Bhutan, New Zealand, China, New York and Qatar are also worth a read and (as usual) some of the comments underneath the article are  interesting as well.

Japan in Barcelona

The Japan Photo Project is launching its new book, simply titled “Japan” at an exhibition at the Private Space tomorrow night (Thursday, the 10th of November) at 7.30.

(Excellent follow-up reports here and here.)

How the world of work has invaded the private sphere

“One example is the way many companies give their employees free mobile phones and computers, purportedly to help them work. In reality, it is so they can take their work with them.

That is the starting point for the conflict between the individual who gives orders and the body that obeys […] If the body is pushed too hard, it breaks like a machine that’s been asked to do too much.”*

It’s uplifting to read someone else in the media who shares your own opinions, especially about a problem that has hardly been publicly recognised as a problem.

Over a decade ago I first noticed this new feature of work life creeping quietly into outside work time on trains in Japan, a country where use and misuse of technology is often quick to happen. It was startling to me in the late 1990’s to see phones and computers so obviously being used to “extend worker productivity.”

(*Sidi Mohamed Barkat, an Algerian-born philosopher, professor and researcher at the Department of Ergonomics and Human Ecology at the Sorbonne, in France, quoted from a recent speech at CCCB, the Barcelona Centre for Contemporary Culture, entitled “The Future of Labour.” [From an article by J.M. Martí Font in El País.])