Roland Kelts's Blog, page 37

On tour in California, Oct. 2014

I'll be touring California with the Monkey Business team next month, Oct. 11 - 25. Six cities -- San Diego, Los Angeles, Palo Alto, Oakland, San Francisco and Berkeley -- w/Tomoka Shibasaki, Hideo Furukawa, Steve Erickson, Hiromi Ito, Peter Orner, Dean Rader, Motoyuki Shibata, Ted Gooossen and more. Readings, signings, conversation, fine wines & spirits.

[Sayaka Toyama, graphic]
Specs after the jump.
13: San Diego: UC San Diego, 4-6 p.m.
14: Los Angeles: The Last Bookstore, LA, 7:30 p.m.
15: Los Angeles: USC, Translation Panel, 4 p.m.
      Los Angeles: Monkey Reading & Discussion, 7 p.m.
16: Los Angeles: UCLA Japan/America Writers’ Dialogue, 6 p.m.
20: Palo Alto: Stanford University, 6:30 p.m.
21: Oakland: Diesel Bookstore, 7 p.m.
22: San Francisco: USF, 5-7 p.m.
23: Berkeley: UC Berkeley, 2 p.m.
EVENT DETAILS:
*13: San Diego: UC San Diego, 4-6 p.m.
New Japanese Writing: Monkey Business Writers Speak
Monday, October 13, 2014
4:00-6:00pm
University of San Diego
5998 Alcala Park, San Diego, California 92110
Literature Building Room 155 (de Certeau)
Speakers: Hideo Furukawa (novelist, Mishima Award), Hiromi Itoh (poet, novelist, essayist, Takami Jun Award), and Tomoka Shibasaki (novelist, Akutagawa Award)
Moderators: Roland Kelts and Motoyuki Shibata (Monkey Business editors)
*14: Los Angeles: The Last Bookstore, LA, 7:30 p.m.
Tuesday, October 14,2014
7:30pm
The Last Bookstore
453 S Spring St – Ground Floor
Los Angeles, CA 90013
*15: Los Angeles: USC, Translation Panel, 4 p.m.
      Los Angeles: Monkey Reading & Discussion, 7 p.m.
Baiting the Hook: The Tricky Art of Translating Japanese Literature
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
7 pm
USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture
825 Bloom Walk, Ahmanson Center 130D
Los Angeles, CA 90089-1481
Room 450, Tutor Campus Center (TCC)
University of Southern California
Speakers: Michael Emmerich (UCLA), Andrew Leong (Northwestern University)
Moderators: Roland Kelts and Motoyuki Shibata (Monkey Business editors)
Monkey Biz: The Latest Words from Today’s Japan
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
7 pm
USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture
825 Bloom Walk, Ahmanson Center 130D
Los Angeles, CA 90089-1481
Room 450, Tutor Campus Center (TCC)
University of Southern California
Speakers: Hideo Furukawa (novelist, Mishima Award), Hiromi Itoh (poet, novelist, essayist, Takami Jun Award), and Tomoka Shibasaki (novelist, Akutagawa Award)
Moderators: Roland Kelts and Motoyuki Shibata (Monkey Business editors)
*16: Los Angeles: UCLA Japan/America Writers’ Dialogue, 6 - 8p.m.
Thursday, October 16, 2014
6pm
UCLA Japan
11282 Bunche Hall, University of California at Los Angeles
Los Angeles, California 90095
*20: Palo Alto: Stanford University, 6:30 p.m.
Monday, October 20, 2014
6:30pm
Stanford University
450 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA 94305
(650) 723-2300
Speakers: Hiromi Itoh (poet, novelist, essayist, Takami Jun Award) and Tomoka Shibasaki (novelist, Akutagawa Award)
Moderators: Roland Kelts and Ted Goossen (Monkey Business editors)
*21: Oakland: Diesel Bookstore, 7 p.m.
Oakland- A literary evening with ZYZZYVA and Monkey Business
Tuesday, October 21, 2014
7pm
DIESEL, A Bookstore
5433 College Ave
Oakland, California
94618-1502
Speakers: Hiromi Itoh (poet, novelist, essayist, Takami Jun Award) and Tomoka Shibasaki (novelist, Akutagawa Award)
Moderators: Roland Kelts and Ted Goossen (Monkey Business editors)
*22: San Francisco: USF, 5-7 p.m.
Monkey Business: Contemporary Fiction and Poetry from Japan and the US
Wednesday, October 22, 2014
5:00 PM - 7:00 PM
University of San Francisco
2130 Fulton St.
San Francisco, California 94117
Fromm Hall 120 - Xavier Auditorium
Speakers: Hiromi Itoh (poet, novelist, essayist, Takami Jun Award) and Tomoka Shibasaki (novelist, Akutagawa Award)
Moderators: Roland Kelts and Ted Goossen (Monkey Business editors)
*23: Berkeley: UC Berkeley, 2 p.m.
Monkey Business: Contemporary Fiction and Poetry from Japan and the US
Thursday, October 23, 2014
2pm
UC Berkeley
80 Doe Library
Berkeley, California 94720
Colloquium: Center for Japanese Studies
Speakers: Hiromi Itoh (poet, novelist, essayist, Takami Jun Award) and Tomoka Shibasaki (novelist, Akutagawa Award)
Moderators: Roland Kelts and Ted Goossen (Monkey Business editors)
For any inquiries, please email monkeybiz@apublicspace.org

On Ottawa, Toronto and Ontario for Paper Sky magazine

Reflections on a trek through Canada for my latest travel column in Japan's Paper Sky .

On the real Haruki Murakami -- my interview with Penguin Random House Canada

Here.

Sold-out in Ottawa

My thanks to the Embassy of Japan, Canada; the Ottawa International Animation Festival; Prof. Tom Keirstead, and a sell-out audience in Canada's capital city.

On Fukuoka for Paper Sky magazine

My travel column for Paper Sky magazine on Fukuoka, Japan.

My 10 quick tips for tourists in Tokyo

Hometown recs for Departures magazine.

Reading in San Diego, Oct. 13

Appearing @ Ottawa International Animation Festival 2014, Sept. 17-21

I will be a guest speaker at the 2014 Ottawa International Animation Festival in Ottawa, Canada, Sept. 17-21, at the behest of the Embassy of Japan.

COOL JAPAN: New monthly column for the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan

COOL JAPAN | BEGINNINGS (ACCJ Journal)


Cultures Intertwined

American influence on Japan’s soft-power push

By Roland Kelts

In 2002, American journalist Douglas McGray published an article in Foreign Policy magazine called “Japan’s Gross National Cool.”

After spending a few months traveling around the country, McGray concluded that Japan was transitioning from being a manufacturing exporter to a cultural exporter.

What he called “the whiff of American cool” that dominated most of the 20th century was being supplanted globally by “the whiff of Japanese cool,” in the form of cultural products such as manga, anime, fashion, and cuisine.

McGray cited the phrase coined by Harvard professor Joseph S. Nye (who was, incidentally, President Barack Obama’s first choice for ambassador to Japan in 2008): Soft Power.

Nye contrasted the phrase with hard power—the more conventional means by which nation states seek to coerce others into agreeable behavior via military or economic bullying.

Soft power might persuade others to do your bidding through the appeal of cultural products. In the case of the United States, that would mean Hollywood movies; jazz, pop, and rock music; fast food and blue jeans.

A conversation with Japanese baby boomers does much to bolster Nye’s claim.

Novelist Haruki Murakami, for example, is quick to highlight the attractiveness of American culture in postwar Japan, especially in the 1950s and ’60s.

“It was everywhere,” Murakami told me, “and everything was so shiny and bright. When I first heard the [US] Modern Jazz Quartet [band], it changed my life. And when the first McDonald’s opened in Tokyo, my friend and I held hands as we approached. We were so excited and nervous to find out what this thing called a ‘hamburger’ really was.”
But while most Americans have grown used to, and even cynical about, the global appeal of fast food, Levis, and other cultural icons of the homeland, most Japanese are stunned, even skeptical, when they are told their culture has an international audience.

Being in the spotlight can be jolting.

When McGray’s article was translated into Japanese, it sent shockwaves through the intelligentsia and government. Bureaucrats were scrambling to find ways to capitalize on what the American journalist had uncovered—a new identity and purpose for a nation mired in economic stagnation and perceived irrelevance.

McGray was invited back to Japan to deliver a speech on his findings to government officials. The American had unveiled a cool new Japan, and Japanese officialdom liked what they saw.

The birth of Japanamerica

A couple of years after McGray’s article was published, I was invited to lunch in Manhattan by an editor at Palgrave Macmillan.

The editor, Toby Wahl, had liked some of the stories I’d written about Japan, and wanted to commission me to write a book on Japanese popular culture, specifically anime, and how it was making inroads into US life.

I politely declined. While I had a Japanese mother, had attended kindergarten in Japan, and had discovered manga, anime, and Japanese tokusatsu (special effects monster TV dramas) as a kid, I was no otaku (geek with obsessive interests).


But Wahl and his colleagues were patient and persistent, finally convincing me that what they were seeking was a book for a general audience—something that could help my American father understand why a bright yellow Pikachu float appeared in a parade celebrating the most American of holidays, Thanksgiving.

So I dove into the project, renting several anime DVDs, reading manga as well as books on anime and manga, and arranging interviews. Among working titles for the book was "Animation Nation: Japan’s New Cultural Export."

I talked to American fans, academics, producers, and distributors. I even chatted to a couple of tolerant teenage girls at a manga display in a Barnes & Noble.

Soon after, I flew to Tokyo and began my research in Japan. But the nation that kept popping up in interviews and during my hours studying at the University of Tokyo library was … the United States.

Japanese pop culture, it turned out, had American DNA embedded in it.

The seven-year occupation (1945–52) and postwar bilateral alliance flooded Japan with American cultural artifacts—icons of soft power like Disney films and the TV series "Father Knows Best."

The father of modern manga and anime, Osamu Tezuka, lionized Walt Disney. He met the storied American at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York, and claimed to have watched the movie "Bambi" 81 times.

And so the book I wrote was no longer about one animation nation, but about two cultures densely intertwined.

Today, at Pixar’s studios in northern California, the most talented animators in America revere the greatest living animation artist and director—Japan's Hayao Miyazaki.

As we were vetting the final manuscript, my editor in New York sent an email to me in Tokyo: “We’ve discussed this at a meeting with the marketing team. The title we like is 'Japanamerica.'”

What is “Cool Japan”?

As I was conducting research and racing to finish the book in time for publication in 2006, Mika Takagi, then a recent graduate of Stanford University’s School of Business who had studied Silicon Valley, was appointed to head a Japanese government committee called “Cool Japan.”


The phrase was lifted from British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s “Cool Britannia” campaign of the late 1990s.

While it drew and continues to draw plenty of detractors (who calls themselves “cool” anyway?), it survives to this day, and is now the name of a 20-year, $375 million government fund to promote Japanese culture worldwide.

The road has been long, rocky, potholed, and might lead nowhere.

The Cool Japan Fund was rubber-stamped last summer. It may be renamed, but for now, it is the brand of a mission to share and spread Japan’s cultural soft power.

And as the 2020 Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games approach, it is the only apt title for this freshly minted column. •

*Roland Kelts is a half-Japanese American writer, editor, and lecturer who divides his time between Tokyo and New York. He is the author of the acclaimed bestseller Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the US and the forthcoming novel Access. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Time, Psychology Today, Playboy, and The Wall Street Journal. Kelts authors a monthly column for The Japan Times, and is also a frequent contributor to CNN and NPR.

Haruki Cool for The Japan Times

Haruki Murakami’s Cool Japan
BY ROLAND KELTS


I was in New York last week to host a launch event for the English translation of Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.” My good friend and Murakami translator Ted Goossen, professor at York University in Toronto, joined me, as did pianist Eunbi Kim, whose multi-media project, “Murakami Music,” I saw performed at Symphony Space in Manhattan last year.

With all the talk of the Cool Japan campaign, it’s worth remembering that author Haruki Murakami reigns as the nation’s most potent global cultural export.

I wasn’t surprised to find the venue packed when I arrived. Kinokuniya bookstore’s New York branch in midtown comprises two floors and a basement. Events and readings are staged in the center of the ground floor. Audience members filled the seats and spilled into adjacent aisles, many of them peering over bookshelves.

I first met Murakami 15 years ago on a kind of bet. I was living in Osaka, where a group of editors from a now-defunct English-language magazine had commissioned me to contribute stories. They had invited me to one of their monthly meetings at a tachinomiya (standing bar) on a dark corner near the city’s business district. One of the editors had read my review of Murakami’s “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” a year earlier in an American newspaper.

“Think you could get an interview with him?” he asked, grinning and swaying a bit on his heels.

“I could try.”

“He’s a total recluse, you know. Won’t talk to anyone. If you get the interview, dinner’s on us.”

I realized the other editors were grinning, too, and one of them raised a glass to me.
I didn’t know much about Murakami then, but I admired his stories, which I’d read in The New Yorker as a college student. And like many others, I found “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” intensely charged and mystifying. There was something about his storytelling that seduced you even as it frustrated your rational and critical faculties. Some of his sentences and descriptions were awkward, occasionally excessive. But the seduction of his stories, his narrative dreams, usually won you over. You had to keep reading, as if under a spell.

One of the editors gave me the postal address of Murakami’s Tokyo office. I put together a folder of samples — short stories, articles, and my review of his novel — and slid it into a manila envelope with a cover letter explaining who I was. I don’t remember much of the cover letter, except its description of my dual heritage as the son of a Japanese mother and American father. I mailed it to Tokyo and thought: well, that’s the end of that.

A couple of weeks later, I received a fax (this was Japan, 1999). It was handwritten by Murakami’s assistant and had a hand-drawn map of the walking route from the nearest subway station to his Aoyama office. It read: “Haruki looks forward to meeting you for one hour next month,” and proposed a series of dates.

I didn’t tell anyone. Somehow I thought the meeting probably wouldn’t happen and I didn’t want to look like an idiot. Instead, I sent a fax back to Murakami’s office with a date and time that would work for me. One of my mother’s friends had an empty one-bedroom apartment in Shibuya that she offered to me as a crash-pad. At the time, I didn’t have an expense account.

I met Murakami on a hot day. I wore a suit and sweated a lot. Murakami greeted me in his air-conditioned second-floor room, wearing a pair of running shorts and a T-shirt. The first thing he did was show me his collection of LPs, which filled an entire wall and were meticulously cataloged. We talked for more than three hours.

Since then, I have met Murakami in five cities — Boston, Berkeley, New York, San Francisco and Tokyo. In Berkeley, we engaged in a taidan (public dialogue and reading) before 3,000-plus audience members at the University of California. I was fitfully nervous; Murakami was as cool as the day I met him. “The more people in the audience, the less you have to worry about them,” he told me backstage. “We’ll talk as we always do. Don’t worry.”

In the years since our meeting in 1999, Murakami has become a global phenomenon. He is a bestseller in Japan, of course, but also in neighboring Asian countries such as South Korea, China and Singapore, where the memory of Japan’s World War II military colonization campaign still stings. In the United States and Europe, he is a beloved literary author, a modern oxymoron. “Harry Potter” books and Stephen King horrors are genre-driven; Murakami’s world may persist, but each work is different, oddly challenging, piercing.

Each year, Murakami is an odds-on favorite for the Nobel Prize in Literature (he now tops British bookmaker Ladbroke’s list in 2014, favored 6 to 1). After our first meeting in sweat-soaked Tokyo, I became something of a Murakami flag-waver overseas — not that he needs one.

I don’t mind. Sharing the wonders and worries attendant upon Japan and its rich culture is at the core of this column and much of what I write. But I do think Murakami’s extraordinary global presence, and the respect he commands, is unparalleled in contemporary Japanese culture, pop or otherwise. He told me a few years ago that he traveled to Prague, Jerusalem and Barcelona to accept literary prizes because he had become a “cultural ambassador” for Japan. “It’s a real privilege,” he said, “and a responsibility. Most people around the world see no face of Japan. If I can be that face, that’s good.”

Cool Japan? Murakami may be as cool as it’s gonna get.

Roland Kelts is the author of “Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture has Invaded the U.S.” He is a visiting scholar at Keio University in Tokyo.