Interesting Japan articles cropping up....

[xxx 2]

Check this out:

 

Thanks to the Times http://www.timesonline.co.uk

 

==========================

 

A survivor's guide to Japan

by Joe Joseph

You may think that you know Japan but, this is a land of paradox - as well as baffling poetry, obese sportsmen and the smelliest breakfasts around

 

 

 

Geisha? Sumo? An obsession with cherry blossom? Raw fish for breakfast? Grown women who dress in Hello Kitty outfits? Yes, the Japanese have a reputation for being inscrutable. But they’re actually pretty easy to figure out. That’s providing you’ve ingested one of those hallucinogens that delude you into thinking that you have searing insights into the universe. For the rest of us, it can still be very tricky.

Most people in the West know as much about Japan as they know about photosynthesis. Can you even name ten Japanese people (“Of course I can. Let’s see now, there’s Emperor Hirohito, Mishima, Kurosawa, Yoko Ono, Issey Miyake, um . . .”)? So why is it so hard to fathom what makes the Japanese tick? Japan’s startling paradoxes, for one. Take the attitude to cash handouts: tipping a waiter or a cab-driver is thought peculiar. Yet politicians always have their palm open. And those taxi drivers whose cabs are always gleaming, and who wear white gloves at the wheel? They also think it unremarkable to stop on a street corner to have a pee.

 

What does Tokyo look like? Willow trees and willowy women shuffling under lacquered umbrellas? Actually, it’s an intensively urban landscape, jangling with noise and neon, where overhead expressways thunder through the s****iest parts of the city, and where town-planners seem to have taken their inspiration from a tipped-over pile of Lego bricks. Yet these same people, who seem not to mind living in houses that remind you of Portakabins, will take enormous pains to drape a sliver of raw tuna over a cherry blossom twig so as to make it as appetising to your eyes as possible, and will spend as much time ornately wrapping a present as they spent choosing it.

 

The Japanese can be prudish. On the other hand, Japan’s “sports dailies” — with their frank reviews of the latest massage parlours — make the Sunday Sport look like an Amish newsletter. The live sex shows in Tokyo’s Shinjuku quarter would make even Hugh Hefner blush.

 

Getting the hang of the place yet?

 

Geisha

 

Tell the average, liberal-minded Western male that there’s still a major capitalist country that openly and shamelessly maintains geisha, whose key purpose in life is to subordinate themselves to a man’s happiness, and he’ll just shake his head in astonishment and disbelief and he’ll ask, a little angrily : “Why the hell don’t we have them, too?” (Obviously, only if his wife isn’t within earshot).

 

So the question is: do they or don’t they? Well, many do, but it’s not like you think. It’s true that a geisha’s pronounced red lips confect a state of sexual arousal. But geisha aren’t the high-class prostitutes that many Westerners assume them to be (some do have “sponsors” who “look after them”), even if they do live on the kindness of strangers. Their role in life is to pamper a man — whether through pouring saké, singing, dancing, or playing roles that his wife no longer does.

 

Of course, there are women all over the world who perform much the same service, without the historical baggage. But what is striking in Japan is that mothers don’t make their children look away when a geisha passes in the street. A geisha isn’t embarrassed to walk around Kyoto in full kit, wig and face paint. Here’s another possible surprise: some of the most prized geisha are older than your granny.

 

Sumo

 

What would you call a pastime in which two men force-feed themselves to a point where a) they need Playtex trainer bras, and only a container lorry can knock them off their balance, after which they enter a small ring and try to shove each other out of the circle?

 

The Japanese call it sumo. Sumo wrestlers may look like tubs of lard who get their kimonos run up by the local tentmaker, but they are actually quite athletic and graceful (don’t consider saying anything other than this, to their face at any rate). Sumo bouts can be hypnotic. Ringside seats are as sought after as a geisha’s virginity. Wrestlers do occasionally diet: for instance, before a long plane flight, so as to lessen the chances of their needing to use the plane’s lavatory cubicle, which can roughly accommodate a sumo wrestler’s thigh.

 

Life in a sumo stable is a feudal existence, especially for the apprentices who have to fag for the star wrestlers: their duties include swabbing a senior wrestler’s backside after he’s visited the loo, because apparently they can’t reach themselves. On the brighter side, sumo wrestlers are clearly sexy: they attract pretty popstars and actresses as girlfriends, most of them smaller than a sumo wrestler’s lunch.

 

Business cards

 

A crucial part of Japanese life is sizing up other people’s position in the social hierarchy by means of coded signs; how deeply they bow, where they sit in a meeting, who speaks first in a group. Much Japanese etiquette relies on knowing one another’s place in the tribal pecking order. Usually the first step in this waltz is the orchestrated exchange of business cards, or meishi.

 

You’re as likely to walk into a business meeting without a wad of meishi in your wallet as to walk in wearing only your boxer shorts. Even Yakuza gangsters hand them out, detailing their rank in the organisation. Reckon on collecting a tree’s worth of meishi per annum.

 

The key piece of information on the card is not your name, but your employer’s name. Then your rank in the organization. Then your name. In Japan, you are who you work for. However, even if the recipient of your meishi decides that — in the great scheme of things — you rank only slightly above pigeon poop, he will nevertheless study your card with reverence — marvelling at each line; asking pertinent questions; nodding thoughtfully — as if the card is an extension of you. It is. Don’t ever write on a Japanese person’s meishi.

 

Haiku

 

A haiku poem traditionally consists of 17 syllables, usually divided into three lines of five, seven and five syllables, and generally bearing some reference to nature or the seasons. This is technically accurate. But it’s like saying Marilyn Monroe was two-thirds water, with the balance made up of various chemicals and minerals. It doesn’t quite convey the venerated position of haiku in Japan’s cultural consciousness.

 

Yet those unfamiliar with this elliptical verse form might struggle to guess why it sends the Japanese into such raptures. Here’s a haiku:

 

Carefully looking,

Blooming shepherd’s purse,

Under the hedge.

 

This was composed by the haiku master Basho, a Zen Buddhist monk, in the 17th century. Here’s another of his:

 

How still it is!

Stinging into the stones the locust’s trill.

 

There are related Japanese verse forms, such as senryu: here’s an 18th century example:

 

A horse farts,

Four or five suffer

On the ferry boat.

 

It’s the way they tell them.

 

 

Pachinko parlours

 

Little in Japanese life progresses at a more sedate pace than a Noh drama (even a Zimmer frame moves faster than a Noh drama). Except maybe pachinko, Japan’s bewilderingly addictive version of pinball arcades.

 

Pachinko looks as though it’s a helter-skelter kind of activity, because of all the bangs and bells as the balls ricochet around the machines. The din inside a pachinko parlour is like a campanologists’ convention being held inside a printworks.

 

But this is how it works. You buy a tubful of shiny steel balls, feed them into a tray at the bottom of a vertical bagatelle machine, and you watch them shoot upwards to the top of the board and then jiggle their way back down. In the old days you used to have to actually use your own fingers to propel the balls upwards, but now most machines do this automatically. This leaves your hands free to smoke, do the crossword, read the newspaper, watch TV, knit or just enjoy the deafening military music that blares from loudspeakers all day. If you know semaphore, you could converse with your neighbour above the racket. It’s hard to think of a more inactive pastime.

 

In his book Empire of Signs, Roland Barthes, the French semiologist, saw pachinko parlours as “a hive or a factory — the players seem to be working on an assembly line”. That’s fun, Japanese-style.

 

 

High-tech lavatories

 

The Japanese have a knack for freighting even the simplest actions with opportunities for extreme humiliation. Take going to the loo.

 

First you must change out of your house slippers into the special “toilet slippers” parked outside the bathroom. If you rejoin your host still shod in toilet slippers (you being an idiot foreigner: a Japanese would no more forget to change back than he would forget to breathe), the blood drains from your host’s face. As you exit hastily to correct your footwear, your host calls a hygiene contractor to fumigate his house.

 

Then the Japanese invented the computerised superloo.

 

Previously, toilet technology ran to a button inside the cubicle that simulated the sound of a cistern flushing: prim women pressed this to camouflage the tinkling sound of their ablutions. But the superloo dispenses with loo paper in favour of a spray attachment and a hot-air blaster; it’s the equivalent of taking your bottom for a wash and blow-dry. Button-infested consoles adjust the angle of the nozzle, heat the seat, direct hot air, emit puffs of deodorant, and so on.

 

Manga

 

Japan has a near 100 per cent literacy rate, but a foreigner glancing around a subway carriage in Tokyo any morning might wonder if his fellow passengers have the IQ of navel fluff. This is because most of them are reading comics. No, not the children. The adults. These comic books, called manga, are the size of paving slabs. Hot titles sell millions per week.

 

Manga started out as children’s books, but their influence has seeped into Japanese culture like red wine across a tablecloth. Those stylised images of humans with soup-plate-sized eyes have invaded everything from history books to government pamphlets: the circular that comes through your door alerting you to, say, your next neighbourhood earthquake drill, will usually be in the form of a strip cartoon.

 

Archaeologists unearthing copies of today’s manga in centuries to come time might conclude a) that, among Japanese, eyes typically accounted for roughly 20 per cent of the body mass; and that the Japanese had a peculiar taste for sadism. The storylines in many manga focus on violent rapes of tethered schoolgirls and weeping women who, it turns out, usually discover that they actually enjoy a little degradation. Yet crime in Japan remains low, and the streets are remarkably safe for women.

 

Giving gifts

 

The exchanging of gifts closely follows Newton’s Third Law of Motion, about every action having an equal and opposite reaction. Gifts are Japan’s currency of obligation. Everybody has debts that they incur and must repay. These are not financial debts, but social ones.

 

Where gift-giving is concerned, it’s never the thought that counts. Actions speak louder than words; the actions being wrapped, ideally, in the paper of a top department store. Partly this is to signal the giver’s generosity, and partly so that the receiver can accurately pinpoint the gift’s value, and thereby avoid the humiliation of reciprocating with too cheap a gift (or embarrassing the giver by trumping the value of his original present). Mastering the etiquette of gift-giving takes only slightly longer than solving Fermat’s Last Theorem.

 

There are, additionally, two annual jamborees of gift-swapping — at mid-year, and at the year’s end — when everybody gives everyone presents and Tokyo becomes a blur of deliverymen. Reciprocation is the key.

 

Wedding presents, for example, tend to be cash; lots of it. But in return for the cash, wedding guests leave the reception with a car-bootful of cakes, cut-glass bowls, maybe even a toaster. That’s why Japanese tourists are always shopping. They’re buying gifts for friends and relatives: it’s a hangover from the days when travellers repaid those who had given them spending money for their journey by bringing them a souvenir in return.

 

 

And finally . . .

 

Phrases you won’t need to find Japanese translations for (because you’ll never need to say them):

 

“Everywhere in Tokyo is so easy to find” There are few street names in Tokyo. Unless someone sends you a detailed map, you can be standing within 20 yards of their house and still be two hours away from ringing the correct doorbell. Kindly hosts meet their guests at the nearest landmark.

“I don’t know why other countries don’t also eat natto for breakfast” Natto is fermented soybeans with a whiff pongier than the elephant enclosure in London Zoo after the animals have been struck by diarrhoea.

“I only wish I could buy a top-shelf magazine full of pictures of schoolgirls in their sailor-style school dresses, with classified columns offering for sale soiled underwear” You can! You can!

“Let’s travel out of the rush hour” In Tokyo it’s always rush hour. Subway trains are always so packed that you can commit a sexual assault just by getting into a carriage. Japanese would be baffled by the phrase “it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive”.

“No!” The Japanese basically find it tricky to say no outright. Instead listen out for such phrases as: “I see”, “Is that right?”, “That could be difficult”, “Interesting” and “I’ll certainly look into that”. All of these essentially mean “No” — ranging in emphasis from “No way!” to “Are all Westerners quite as fat-headed as you, Mr Sawdust-brain?”

[Ocean11 0]

Money for old rope...

[brit-gob 9]

And that means, Ocean11?

[Ocean11 0]

It means that the author has been paid, or not, for recycling a bunch of stereotypes, minutiae, and the blinding obvious in a facetious but largely unfunny style, for the edification of those who don't or can't know any better. Why, what do think of it?

[xxx 2]

Nothing special, I just like reading stuff about Japan - the things that are right and the things that are very wrong.

 

Maybe I should be more critical.

 

Peace

[Ocean11 0]

Hey, it's not all bad. Just I've seen a lot of it before, that's all.

[IM 0]

You can babble the same thing on other countries or people. I don't belieave Japan is so special that requires special explanation. I think most foreigners live here knows it.

[LiquidX 0]

I don'tt think xxx was saying anything special, just pointing out an article about Japan.

 

 

What's ya problem IM?

[cal 6]

I think this one must win the "absurd article" award. From the Mirror in the UK. Go figure.

 

---------

 

Football: FIFA WORLD CUP 2002: Des Kelly In Japan: Now I realise why Godzilla was so angry

 

Des Kelly

 

 

THE only time Tokyo was on television when I was a child, Godzilla was busy flattening skyscrapers with his tail.

 

After a couple of days in this place I can quite understand why your average, 100-foot high mutated lizard would be driven to acts of angry mass destruction.

 

It took nearly 12 hours to fly from London to Tokyo, a distance of around 6,000 miles.

 

It took me another four hours to cover the 43 miles from the airport to my hotel.

 

This happened for one simple reason - I was stupid enough to try using a car.

 

It is impossible to drive in this city.

 

For a start, the place is huge and I suspect I saw every inch as I took wrong turn after wrong turn.

 

Unless you have taken the trouble to learn Japanese, the signs are utterly incomprehensible.

 

My attempt to conquer this complex language involved reading a travel guide on the flight over.

 

This, as I soon discovered, was not the recommended way to learn Japanese.

 

The recommended way to learn Japanese is to be born in Japan, have Japanese parents and then live in Japan for your entire life.

 

At least this would give you an even chance of understanding what is going on.

 

When I passed near Tokyo's little Godzilla statue on something street near whotsit road for the umpteenth time there was even a moment when I thought I would give up, pull over and live in the rented Toyota. Only there was nowhere to park.

 

So I was left with no choice but to blunder on like a five-year-old lost in the world's biggest shopping mall, hoping to stumble across the destination by chance.

 

In Germany, Italy or France it is always possible to bluff your way around.

 

Most words share a common root. So if a sign above a door in Munich says 'hereisthetoiletten', you can have a reasonable amount of confidence that you are not going to burst through the door and undo your flies only to find you are standing in a nunnery. But in Japan every sign says - and I quote here - 'squiggle'.

 

It looks like a drunken pigeon has landed in an ink pad and tried to dance the Bossanova.

 

There are four - yes, four - different alphabets including thousands upon thousands of symbols called kanji, each representing an entire word.

 

Sometimes you read horizontally from right to left, sometimes vertically from left to right.

 

Or us it the other way round?

 

To help the unwary visitor yet further, Japanese addresses are equally simple.

 

The whole system is based on numbers rather than street names. Central Tokyo is divided into 23 sections known as 'ku'. Within each ku there are smaller districts known as 'cho', which are subdivided into 'chome', then into blocks and finally to individual buildings.

 

See? Easy.

 

For instance, take the location of a traditional Japanese watering hole like 'The Dubliners'.

 

It is listed as Maranuka Bldg, 2F, 3-28-9, Shinjuku, Shinjuku-ku.

 

This apparently means it is on the second floor of the Maranuka Building, which is third building of the 28th block of the ninth area of Shinjuku in the Shinjuku ward.

 

This also means it will never be found again.

 

The streets were actually designed to confuse invaders and many don't even have a name.

 

Added to this, the numbers are not necessarily consecutive, as they were often allocated to buildings in the order they were built.

 

It must be a postman's nightmare when the street goes 1, 2, 351, 11, 49, 6...

 

But once you get used to it, you quickly come to understand. You quickly come to understand even the people who live here must be lost.

 

Although I have spent time in many foreign places, such as Yorkshire and Scotland, Japan is really very foreign indeed. It's magnificent too, now that I've found the hotel and dumped the car.

 

(That's Des Kelly in Japanese)

[danz 0]

very funny....

can we say "Frustration"

 

but are there really 4 alphabets?? I am only aware of 2...maybe that's why i'm still so ?!#$%^ illiterate...

 

danz

[miteyak 0]

Nearly all travel supplements, articles, books these days seem to be someone trying to suggest they've stumbled across new ideas, places, people, whether it be 'discovering the silk road' or, 'three sherpas carried me up Everest'. Easy bucks? look for things people did and wrote about thirty years ago, and re-write it for the growing market of armchair travellers.

[Guest]

yeah 4 alphas...

 

kanji

hiragana

katakana

roman chars

 

so what alphabet do you use to transcribe all the weird noises they make?

[NoFakie 45]

Isn't there a saying that goes something like "If you've been in Japan two weeks you can write a book. If you've been here one month, you can write a magazine article. If you've been here a year, you can't write anything."

[scouser 4]

Football related

 

---

 

Fledgling football nation Japan no novice at "kemari" football

TOKYO, May 31 (AFP)

For a World Cup host, football or "sakka" (soccer) as it is known here, has a remarkably short history in Japan, but priests and samurai warriors were kicking a ball around in another version of the game around 1,400 years ago.

Just a few kilometers (miles) away from the clash between England and Sweden in Saitama on Sunday, a handful of colorfully dressed Japanese "footballers" will demonstrate "kemari", a much older version of the game.

There is no winner or loser in kemari, just about eight or ten people standing in a circle dressed in puffy kimonos and duck-billed shoes trying to kick a "mari" or ball -- traditionally made of deer hide and barley -- to keep it in the air continuously.

"You don't bend your waist or your back, and you have to kick the ball with just a slight lifting of your foot," said Tokihiro Yamashina, the 77-year-old chairman of the kemari preservation society based in the ancient capital Kyoto.

"You have to kick the ball elegantly, and when you do so continuously with this determined form, it is a delight to the fans and really satisfying for the players."

Nineteenth century English trader James Mollison wrote in his memoirs that British sailors brought football to Yokohama even before 1873 when the navy was known to have introduced the sport at its academy in Japan, according to a brochure published by the city's government.

Japan only joined football's world governing body FIFA in 1929, and the professional J-League was not established until 1993.

Kemari, on the other hand, is thought to have come from China along with Buddhism 1,400 years ago, and while it enjoyed wide popularity from the eighth to early 14th centuries, it never really had the potential to take off as a major sport.

Compared to the 140,000 high school footballers in Japan, Yamashina estimates there are fewer than 100 kemari players across the country. The average age of his Kyoto group, with some 30 members, is about 60 years old.

The group usually plays on pitches measuring 10x10 meters (30x30 feet) in Kyoto temples, which traditionally had a willow, cherry, pine and maple trees for corner posts.

But the kemari kickers have been asked by the Saitama prefectural government, some 50 kilometers (30 miles) northwest of Tokyo, to show off their skills.

"I think there will still be a few people who come and watch," Yamashina said of the Sunday morning event at the Saitama Super Arena, despite the competing attraction of World Cup action at the nearby Saitama Stadium 2002.

He admitted kemari shared little with soccer despite its football moniker. "The only thing that's the same is you kick the ball with your foot."

[HoTRoD 2]

I've noticed a lot of rubbish articles that have had loads of mistakes in them, concerning Japan. 'S'pose it's to be expected.