Our Man in Abiko's Blog, page 7

Fireworks over Abiko

So here’s Day Two’s sketch. It was so average I felt the need to turn it into a negative and make out that it’s symbolics or something. You know, night, and all. But the fact is I rushed it while waiting for the fireworks (those would be the scribble in the right-hand corner). Mind you, I was absolutely destroyed by my nine-year-old daughter who given the same time frame - about five minutes - came up with this masterpiece:

 
And the fireworks weren’t bad either.

Cheese Garden

Our Man’s latest wheeze is to learn to draw properly. He bought two books on the subject. One recommended using his eyes a lot and the other suggested sketching everyday and keeping a blog about it. So Our Man commandeered a 4B pencil, a 100-yen sketch pad and found something to draw for Day One. He’s already got a blog that isn’t doing much of anything at the moment. Don’t ask him how many days he can keep doing this. Or what exactly a cheese garden is. But he liked the packaging.

Collectors` editions

A real person actually emailed Our Man the other day.

Hard to believe, I know, but it happened. And he (for it was a he) asked if Our Man had a link to the  ebook of How to Write About Japan .

The short answer was "no."

The slightly longer answer was "Yes, if you give Our Man a couple of months to tidy the files up and release with a couple of other essays and do it all under his real name."

Our Man will never make it as a salesman, clearly.

Or a publisher.

But this chap might.

Shigeru Mizuki's art of war

My eldest is going through junior high school in Japan and I was happy to hear she was studying aspects of the Second World War. As far as I can tell from her textbook (and I could well be missing something) those aspects are the Nazis and the Holocaust, and that's about it.

To be fair, there was no room on the double page spread covering the war to refer to any part Japan had to play in it, I suppose talking about genocide in Germany is distressing enough for 12-year-olds without bringing up Japan's less than auspicious past in Nanking or its own mini-genocide inflicted on the Chinese by Unit 731. Much easier to start with the Nazis and Anne Frank and all that. The trouble is, I doubt it will develop into much more introspection, which would be fascinating, if not to my daughter, then at least to her old man.


So I don't look to Japan's schools to learn much about the war. That's what comic books are for.

I enjoyed the English translation of the first instalment of Shigeru Mizuki's Showa manga covering 1926-1939, which I reviewed here , so I just had to get the second (covering 1939-1944). You might quibble that a manga can only skirt the surface of such a momentous time, and yeah, it does at times feel like a school history textbook, jam-packed with just enough facts to tell the story of The Key Events of the war. The Bataan Death March receives little more than two frames (and an aside from Mizuki that as horrific as it was, it the death toll was as much to do with the heat and general Japanese unpreparedness to deal with POWs as anything particularly evil. And "Comfort Women" sexual slavery receives just a fleeting reference, one page I've taken the liberty of scanning in here:


But don't get me wrong, Mizuki is no revisionist. He's relaying the war through his experiences. He has thinly disguised contempt for the architects of war and has no time for jingoism. He's just trying to explain what happened, point to where it all went wrong, and get the hell out of the firing line.

Pulp the textbooks and replace them with Mizuki's manga. We might all learn something then.

Marching orders

Apologies if you came here looking for writing about the Prime Minister's latest attempts to revive the glorious Japan of the 1930s for us young 'uns to relive, there will no doubt be plenty of that to come from others, if not Our Man, over the coming weeks. Our Man just can't muster the interest in the daily ups and downs (mostly downs) of Japan politics just right now. Instead, he's made it his mission to get off the news cycle and read books instead. So here's a review of a good one that you might like, a book I'm enormously honoured to say was part inspired by one of my own, Reconstructing 3/11.



Deep Kyoto Walks (Ed. Michael Lambe and Ted Taylor)

How best to experience Kyoto? A great place to start is here, a collection of 17 essays mostly from resident ex-pats with a palpable love for the city. They were given the loosest of marching orders – to take the reader on foot through the Kyoto they know.

The result is a hotch-potch of illuminating experiences worthy of such an interesting city. We are treated to a walk along the banks of Kamo and Takano rivers, a hike up Mount Atago and all points in between, tours of inner-city neighbourhoods that are home to the writers.

You could strap your Kindle to your backpack and take off on any of the walks yourself (there are maps, pictures and Google Maps links included) but it's so much more than a traditional guidebook. At every step, we are treated to personal insights and opinions that you would miss if you didn't sit down and give the writers the contemplation their writing deserves. From my Abiko bunker I was able to witness journeys of all sorts – a middle-aged American retracing his youth through a changed Kyoto, a newbie watching a troupe of monkeys stealing veg from her garden, and barflies who would turn their heads every time the door opened expecting to see David Bowie (he did pop in once for a shochu or such, so it wasn't completely out of the realms of possibility).

There are enough temples and tea rooms to satisfy the tourist, but for Our Man's money it was the bar crawls, anti-nuclear demo and journeys back in time that grabbed his attention.

If you are interested in Kyoto, the ex-pat life in Japan, independent publishing, or just fancy a stroll along the streets of Japan's greatest cultural attraction, read this book. It takes you there, with or without your hiking boots on.

Saint George

Our Man was honoured to be invited to join in a birthday bash for a certain George Orwell, who would have been 111 today if he had been able to defy the laws of nature as well as his writing has defied time. Check out Our Man's favourite Orwell quote as well as more considered fare from knowledgeable Orwellians over at ten minutes hate.

Monarch of the Glenn

He fears for his liberty if he returns to the United States, but sets up a nationwide book tour. He mocks the internet tycoons as hypocrites for selling off other people's privacy while demanding their own, but then sets up a news organisation funded by the billionaire founder of Ebay. He badmouths the mainstream media as lapdogs of the Washington elite, but happily walks off with their Pulitzer Prize.

I can't quite figure Glenn Greenwald out, but maybe that doesn't really matter. What does is this is the guy who got the biggest leak in the NSA's history and put it right at the top of the world's in-box.

For that alone, I think I can give his No Place to Hide 5 stars, general.

The second chapter on his clandestine meetings with Snowden and the behind-the-scenes shenanigans to get the story published are worth the cover price. His mixture of righteous indignation, naiveté and ego somehow combine into a winning eloquence through tirades against the farcical Fourth Estate. That this book is not perfect (there's no index and if I have to see another page of shoddy photocopies of NSA powerpoint slides...) is beside the point. This is not about the messenger, it's the message:

Which is, that for a while at least, the surveillance state can be stopped in its tracks by an individual acting on his conscience.

Japanese history, the right way up

I'm completely the wrong person to review a manga.

My sum knowledge of the art form is from stolen glances on the Tozai Line at salarymen's copies that looked to me slightly less enticing than lugging around multi-coloured phonebooks through Tokyo's underground. But that was 15 years ago. The comics were impenetrable to me, being in Japanese. And upside down (I was invariably standing and the manga were on the laps of folk who had got on before me and so got seats.)

Well, that was until tonight.


Tonight, I finished reading Shigeru Mizuki's Showa, A History of Japan 1926-1939, An English translation of his history of the country, his life and his art. You probably know more about him than I do, so I'll just link to his Wikipedia page in case you don't and simply add that the guy is well placed to comment on the history of the Showa period, having lived through it all, much of it at the shitty end of the stick.

I've taken the liberty of scanning in three pages of the 500 in this manga just to give a flavour of the book. I thought at first it was just one damned thing after another (pre-war Japanese history as a series of Incidents and Puppet Governments, at least it was if all the history you know is to pass an  'O' Level. To a student, everything looks like a bullet point). But as time goes on and the pages fly by, you see, really see -- this is a manga remember -- how the Great Events of History impacted an imaginative but lazy kid having the good fortune to grow up in the wilds of Tottori, but the bad to have come of age at the time of dictatorship.


Read it. It's excellent. Unlike me, you haven't spent half your life deluded that comics are just for kids, have you? Because that would be a terrible mistake.

It is what it is

It is what it is.

That’s a favourite saying of my brother’s. It’s useful in that it encapsulates in one pithy expression a great deal about life and, well, not an awful lot at the same time. It’s the c’est la vie and shoganai of the football fan or the news junkie.

It’s meet-the-new-boss-same-as-the-old-boss acceptance of the status quo.

Meanwhile, the ice keeps melting.

It is what it is.

Hi

Keeping up with the news is a young 'uns game.

Maybe Our Man has ridden one too many news cycles, but when he saw Monica Lewinski was doing the rounds to "tell the truth" about what really happened on her and Bill's day that will live in infamy, Our Man was as nonplussed as usual. But he did have one thought:

Lewinski is 40.

40!

I remember being 40. Well, it was pretty much like 39 and 41 and 38 and 42, except Our Woman did arrange a surprise party and managed to round up pretty much everyone Our Man had known in Japan and fit them in one room. And it was quite a big room, I'm happy to say.

Anyway.

Our Man has a new computer and the same-old, same-old urge to spout nonsense whether or not the NSA is keeping track.

So just wanted to say "hi".