Geisha, Interrupted

They Grow Up So Fast...

The goddess of Japanese to English translation is really giving me the akanbe face* right now.  It's the only way to explain why some of the characters in my children's cartoon have started hanging out in bars.

Oh, and it gets better.  There are "bar girls" as well, and their main function it is to is to delicately stir the "super-delicious-ultra-great-special" leaf juice. (Translated from "chouderishasuurutoragureetosupeshyaru" happajuusu, in case you wondered).

The pink one with the blue eyelids is the one they call "Mama."

And that blond one at Mama's side, well, that's what I used to look like...

(*Akanbei: gesture of pulling down one eyelid and sticking one's tongue out, common in manga and anime)

Parody in Translation

I'm relieved to say that cute-character-X has really grown emotionally since I began translating his adventures some 12 episodes ago.  In the past episode, he developed a relationship with his darling grandmother.  Here she is now:

Yes, she is supposed to look that scary.  Actually, grandma is not very well-mannered, as far as grandmothers go.  Still, all the animals on the farm feel a curious need to line up and await her wise counsel.

Oh yeah, and I'm almost certain that she's a parody of the celebrated fortune teller, Kazuko Hosoki.

 

Although Hosoki is largely known for her conservative views and her mean-spirited 'advice', the Japanese woman has more fans than Jesus in this part of the world. 

And who is better to aid in the poocow's coming of age, than the cow-incarnation of Kazuko Hosoki??  I'll expect to see less poo-related humor in the episodes to come...but won't get my hopes up too high. 

The Return of PooCow...

Do you remember cute-cartoon-character-X, the excrement-obsessed calf who stole Christmas last year??  Well, he's back.  I've just received a fresh new pile of transcripts on my desk, to be translated by the end of the month.  Oh well.  Goodbye life, hello unchi...

Well, That's Different

Go ahead and invite him to your town, citizens, just make sure you hide all the TV sets...

Obama a hit in Japanese town 

By JUNJI KUROKAWA, Associated Press WriterThu Feb 14, 4:28 AM ET

Barack Obama has never been to this port town on Japan's snowy west coast, and residents only know him from news reports on his faraway campaign for the U.S. presidency.

No matter, Obama the town is nuts about Obama the man.

Obama's name graces posters hung in the main hotel. Headbands and T-shirts with drawings of the candidate's face will be available soon. Local confectioners are designing Japanese-style sweet bean cakes with Obama's portrait on them.

Policy doesn't seem to matter much either to this Obama, which is well-known in Japan for its lacquerware. Instead, the overriding issue is simple: Obama's name.

"Obama gives good speeches and has a good voice, so I want him to do well. And, of course, we share the same name," said Seiji Fujiwara, a hotel executive and leader of a local support group established earlier this month for the Illinois senator.

As fanciful as it may seem, leaders in Obama — which means "Little Beach" in Japanese — are serious about forging a relationship with the candidate.

The mayor, Toshio Murakami, sent Obama a letter a year ago with a gift of lacquerware chopsticks, a DVD introducing the city, and a guidebook, but no one knows if the package arrived because they never received a response.

The town 250 miles west of Tokyo is undaunted. Murakami plans to send Obama another care-package, this one with a fist-sized lacquerware good-luck "daruma" doll with the word "victory" written across the chest in Japanese calligraphy.

"We want to ask him to stop by Obama as president if he visits Japan," Sadakazu Tsubouchi, an official at city hall.

But like many towns in the far reaches of Japan's countryside that are desperate for tourism revenue, Obama is also eager for gimmicks to distinguish itself.

People in this town of 32,000 say that an Obama presidency could enhance the city's profile far beyond Japan's borders.

"It would boost our city's name recognition, and that can lead to a boost in tourism," said Murakami, the mayor. "We want a little more of an increase in foreign visitors."

Obama the candidate has already obliged in a small way, joking to broadcaster TBS in 2006 that he had listed the town as his birthplace while passing through customs on an earlier visit to Japan.

After eight consecutive primary wins, Obama has edged him past opponent Hillary Clinton by a slim margin of 55 delegates. Supporters of Obama here, like their counterparts in the U.S., are now looking forward to the March 4 Democratic primary contests in delegate-rich Texas and Ohio.

The 30-member support group plans to put on headbands and T-shirts with portraits of Obama to watch the results on television together, said Fujiwara. They plan to sell Obama sweets and chopsticks — once they get clearance from the candidate.

The U.S. election has drawn almost unprecedented interest from abroad. But the belief in Obama, Japan, that an Obama victory would bring immediate advantages to the town may be unique.

Sanae Doi, a 40-year-old housewife at the local mall on Thursday, said she'd never heard of Barack Obama until just two weeks before the Super Tuesday primary elections on Feb. 5.

"Since then, a lot of my friends and I have been talking about Obama, how his name is the same as the place we live," she said. "If he becomes popular, I'm hoping this whole region will get recognition."

___

Associated Press writer Chisaki Watanabe contributed to this report from Tokyo.

Sort of Like Christmas

"So Valentines Day in America," the mother of one of my students asks me after her lesson, "is it anything like Valentines day in Japan?"

"Not really," I replied honestly.

"So your tradition is not for women to give men chocolate?" she asked.

"Well you could give a man chocolate in America if you want to, but it is more of a day for couples to exchange presents and go out on romantic dates."

"Like Christmas!" she exclaimed.

"Yes, sort of like Christmas."

Rather than Valentines day, the big dating holiday in Japan is Christmas.  Valentines day is when Japanese women buy chocolates for the men in their lives (such as husbands, employers, colleagues, and English teachers). 

The term "giri-choco" gets thrown around a lot this time of year.  "Giri" means duty or obligation while "choco" is short for chocolate, so "giri-choco" is what women present to men on Valentines Day, largely because they are socially obligated to do so.

Then, in order to maximize consumerism, the Japanese have taken the liberty to designate March 14 as "White Day," an occasion when the men who received chocolates on Valentines day have to buy gifts for the women who bought them chocolate a month earlier.

While I am hardly the sentimental type, all the 'giri' involved in these two holidays feels incredibly unromantic to me.  But after all, romance is for Christmas.   

Goodnight Train: An Illustrated Bedtime Poem

Goodnight train

Goodnight mundane

 

Goodnight sumo, pondering pain.

Goodnight schoolboy

Goodnight schoolgirl

Goodnight poor platform, where all the drunks hurl.

Goodnight Mr. Slick

Goodnight nude chick

Goodnight dude who's wearing a mask cuz he's sick.

Goodnight beer can

Goodnight porno fan

Goodnight everybody

Goodnight Japan!

                       

Another Lame Gig

Oh, and while we are making fun of white men (or critiquing their representation in Japanese advertising, whichever you prefer) check out this ad that is posted inside many Tokyo subway cars:

It is for a plastic surgery clinic!!

Big(boned) In Japan

I recently snapped the below frames from a commercial that's getting pretty high rotation on Japanese Television lately.  It is a telling portrait of how Westerners are viewed in this society:

I've expressed my share of complaints here about being cast as a "scientist who doesn't care about how she looks," and a "person running away from a monstrous beast" on Japanese TV, but at the same time, at least I didn't get that guy's job...

Archetype and Octopus

The following is a passage from page 92 of After Dark, the latest Haruki Murakami novel in English translation. For some reason I found it so brilliant, and, so perfectly bizarre!

*           *           *

Takahashi: "As I sat in court, though, and listened to the testimonies of the witnesses and the speeches of the prosecuters and the arguments of the defense attorneys and the statements of the defendants, I became a lot less sure of myself. ...To my eyes, this system I was observing, this 'trial' thing itself, began to take on the appearance of some special, weird creature."

Mari: "Weird creature?"

Takahashi: "Like, say, an octopus.  A giant octopus living way down deep at the bottom of the ocean.  It has this tremendously powerful life force, a bunch of long, undulating legs, and  it's heading somewhere, moving through the darkness of the ocean.  I'm sitting there  listening to these trials, and all I can see in my head is this creature. It takes on all kinds of different shapes- sometimes it's 'the nation,' and sometimes it's 'the law,' and sometimes it takes on shapes that are more difficult and dangerous than that.  You can try cutting off its legs, but they just keep growing back.  Nobody can kill it.  It's too strong, and it lives too far down in the ocean.  Nobody knows where its heart is.  What I felt then was a deep terror.  And a kind of hopelessness, a feeling that I could never run away from this thing, no matter how far I went.  And this creature, this thing doesn't give a damn that I'm me or you're you.  In its presence, all human beings lose their names and faces.  We all turn into signs, into numbers....What I want to say is probably something like this: any single human being, no matter what kind of person he or she may be, is all caught up in the tentacles of this animal like a giant octopus, and getting sucked into the darkness.  You can put any kind of spin on it you like, but you end up with the same unbearable spectacle."

Conversations With Dude

I've mentioned this before, but I want to talk about it again.

I really really hate hair salons.  I hate everything about going to the hair salon.  This may be because my hair is curly, thick and prone to tangle, and the first thing any hairdresser does when I sit in that chair, is try to brush it out.  My hair does not enjoy getting the curls brushed out of it, and I usually end up looking like the Bride of Frankenstein when all the frizziness is unleashed.   Although the lighting is always terrible, I have no where to stare but directly at myself in the mirror.  I want to just electrocute myself and end the suffering.

The stylist, who somehow manages to look gorgeous even in the awful lighting, will usually try to chat with me.  But I have nothing to say to her.  Just looking at her makes me feel inadequate.  I deal with these insecurities by convincing myself that I'm above her shallow attempts at conversation, and that I am far too cultured and educated to be interested in the celebrity gossip magazines she offers me.

In Japan, my hair tends to stress out the stylists even more immensely.  Thick even for "foreign hair," my presence leaves many unassuming Japanese stylists struggling and squirming to remain On Schedule.  Still, no matter where I am in the world, I loathe trips to the hairdresser

Which is why it was so weird that last weekend, I had the most awesome experience getting my hair cut and highlighted here in Tokyo.

The shop was called DUDE.  Jade and I found it as we were walking along the narrower streets of Harajuku, where everyone and his mama owns a hair salon.  The name of the shop jumped out at us.

"Dude," she said.

"Yeah, Dude," I replied.

Soon, The Dude himself came out to talk with us in English.  He was very unique for a middle-aged Japanese man,  and his vibe was contagious.  It was likewise relaxing not to have to speak Japanese for once.

And so, my hair was to be done by the Dude.  It seemed the most obvious conclusion for someone like me, whose hair had become so damaged due to my avoidance of regular salons.

The Dude is a one man show.  He only takes one client at a time, so on the day I returned for my appointment, the shop was empty except The Dude, The Dude's assistant and myself.

"Here," he said handing me an imported copy of US weekly, "you can just relax and read about the crazy Hollywood people." 

Surprising myself, I took him up on the offer, and opened the magazine.  After flipping through it a while, I felt more relaxed.  Nothing, I realized, can make us forget about our own self-depreciating narcissism quite like reading about those "crazy Hollywood people" (most of whom I didn't recognize, but that's not the point).

He put on some relaxing, rather trippy music and concentrates on my hair, making no attempts at typical salon chatter.  The lighting, I noticed, was actually quite flattering.  All things considered.

After some time had passed, The Dude glanced down at the magazine article I was reading.  "That man..." he points to Tom Cruise, "he is...how do you say..."

I grinned, awaiting The Dude's wisdom.

"He is...the opposite of Dude."

"I agree with you," I laughed.

"Dude is like relax," he moved his arms and body in wavelike motions to demonstrate, "and chill out."

I smiled at him, catching his eyes in the mirror.

"But that man," he continued, "he is so uptight and stiff and crazy.  He is the anti-dude."

"Yes," I concurred, "Tom Cruise is the anti-dude."

After Dude had been blow-drying the back section of my hair for about 20 minutes, I mumbled something the likes of: "You don't have to finish drying it if it's too hard... I usually just let it air dry... It's sort of impossible to dry because it takes too long."

"It's not too hard," he contradicted me through the mirror, his eyes having widened a bit.  "I have a woman who comes here once a week with 10 times more hair than you, and it takes me 90 minutes to blow dry it."

"Really?" I asked, unable to hide my smile.

"Yes," he replied, "but I always enjoy taking the time to do my job slowly and properly.  For me, it is a kind of meditation."

"Cool!" said me.

"Of course," he went on, "I trained in a very busy salon so I can also cut and style hair very quickly, but I prefer not to rush, if you don't mind.  Rushing is not 'Dude'." 

"I suppose not."

"And my assistant is also a Dude. All my assistants have to be Dudes.  Dude is our philosophy."

"I like that philosophy," I said in earnest.

(find out more about "dude" at www.dude.jp)