DOES THE SUN STILL SHINE IN THE EAST? Hello Kitty vibrators, love hotels, earth tremors, onsens, 50s Rockers, morbid fashion and morbid freaks, video games, wayward buildings, explicit teen comics, hostess clubs, game shows, erotica, sumo, sushi and much, much more, this is just a small part of what makes up Japan. Sure the sun is still rising in the East and it is getting stranger to look at every day. This is why you have got to love the Japanese in more ways than one.
The persistently eccentric cultures that appear from nowhere seem to pave a way to weirdness that has become almost humble. The Japanese have a simple love for complex things you have to admire. It is productivity in numbers; like millions of tiny organisms acting as one with a creative intellect that almost any westerner finds hard to understand.
IT’S ALL ABOUT COORDINATIONTake the 2002 Fuji Rock festival as an example of the Japanese people coming together. Headline bands from all over the world - tens upon thousands of people streaming through the gates all peaceful, all happy.
The location: Mt Naeba - A valley green, with craggy peaks above and crystal streams below, with open grass fields, woodlands and temperate forest to get totally lost in. The setting, the music and the people all fit into place with ease, creating comfort and enjoyment to all the senses. The beauty is they do it without a glitch, without major catastrophe at all.
THE INSIDE STORYOn the last night of the 3 day festival a cool mist soothingly fell on the 100,000 plus crowd, all brimming with a smile, all comfortably numb and all satisfied, soaking in the last big name performance of the festival. It was the first spot of rain for 3 days and it could not have come at a better time as Anthony and his band of Chili Peppers seduced a crowd with a cheering encore of ‘Under the Bridge’. It was a stunning performance and the perfect finale to a great show and a superb festival.
Sure there were the cheap, belly-bloating noodles and the foot long beef sticks, the clouds of dust, the toilet lines, the lack of meat pies by Sunday and the chaos created when trying to see two of your favourite bands at the same time on different stages. All in all, pros and cons put aside it could be rounded off as humanity at its best, a congregation of lost and found, all coming together as one, at one of the worlds biggest and most well organized musical events.
THE TOKYO BIG SMOKETokyo city, like Fuji Rock is also very well organised, but on a much larger scale of course. Sprawled for miles upon miles, it is a giant Lego Land playground, full of narrow alley s, a shit load of bicycles and even more people, 25 million during the day. Tokyo is one big building, one top of the other, the buildings, the people compact together as the human ant colony of a new millennium, each having their own responsibility, each person falling into place. A way of living the rest of the world is only starting to understanding.
Being built to adapt and live in ‘very small’ spaces is the key to life in Tokyo. Your typical, one room only, apartment in Shibuya (A suburb in Tokyo with the busiest crossing in the world) will size between 10 to 15 sq meters and cost you anywhere from $1500 to $3000 AUD a month. This would include your kitchen, TV, bathroom and your couch, which doubles as a bed all in one.
EVERY BIG CITY HAS THE FREAKSZen has taught the minimalist approach to space and living in Japan, however this tradition whispers a distant past that the younger more commercially minded people don’t understand. The youth now look for something beyond radical even freakish to the unsurpassed morbid. A trip to Yoyogi Park on a Sunday, in Tokyo’s central Minato-ku district, will splash an unforgotten memory on just about any conforming soul. It is where the wannabe freaks come out to share their freakish costume and makeup for the world to see… It is all just an act, a way to stand out and be unforgotten. Tokyo is an endless stream of eye candy. Eccentric people with eccentric little toys.
Japan now lives with a futuristic film placed loosely over a traditional past with over 150 years of constant change, moulding, blending and building. Like the fashion in Tokyo, it is a mix match of past and present, bits of cottage bits of plastic, all hanging out smoking cigarettes, all on a mobile phone sending I-mode messages to their friends.