Sep-03 The Hip Hop Guys At My Station

For some reason, every night a group of young Japanese men (usually but occasionally girls) gather at the train station near where I work (and live) and do this half-assed hip style dance. I say half-assed because mostly they just bob their heads, high five one another, attempt some circa 1982 break dance move which ends up with the person on the floor. Or, they get bobbing along and then just quit, putting their heads down, hands on their hips, silently mulling over where it all went wrong.
The strange part is that they aren`t asking for money, as far as I can tell. Nor are they part of some street performance art, or a guerilla music video. The station isn`t a major one as this area is mostly suburban. So, what are they hoping to accomplish? Some local level of fame, their names passed around in a junior high school math class? Perhaps it`s for chicks, though the kind of girls who would be attracted to break dancers who bust a move in a suburban train station are probably the kind you want to stay away from, for fear of serious mental defect or for getting in trouble for keeping them out past their bed time.
To add the general confusion of the station a few BMX riders attempted tricks in the station as well. The wickets open up to a wide hallway, that connects one side of the station to the other, and also has a string of stores, mostly the kind you find yourself in after coming home from work beat tired. Once again no monetary gain is apparent in their lame attempts to perform stunts such as bunny hops and wheelies, and more often than not they end up on the floor, the tire wheels spinning. There doesn`t seem to be any animosity between the two groups, but they tend to eye each other wearily. I can see the start of an urban epic comic series - Hip hoppers vs. BMXers, maybe jazz it up by giving them special powers.
There are also a few guitar players who sit at the other end of the station and belt out their heartfelt, if not exactly tuneful, songs. On Sundays, in the city, in a park called Central Park (which is mostly just concrete and patches of grass over top of a underground shopping complex) groups of people belonging to various sub-cultures gather round and share in their obsession. Notably a group of greasers, complete with leather jackets and pompadours, a distorted Asian verison of Sha-na-na, play 50`s rock and dance as if Dick Clark were presiding over the entire proceedings. People flock and stare, flash photos, laugh and talk about it, but the greasers seem unfaze. They continue on, twisting and shimmying. They must have jobs, perhaps regular ones where they wet their hair down and put on a tie, dreaming about next weekend, when they can cut loose. A Fight Club for men who can`t let Elvis go.

27/08/2003 Japanese TV

I was back in Canada for nine days, for something I will get into later. Going back home is always such as whirlwind - you lose a day traveling back, so you end up leaving on Thursday at 1:00 PM, fly for 12 hours, and arrive on Thursday at 12:00. That alone would do your head in, but add to that the noise and bustle of an airport, plus all of sudden the volume has been turned way up, it leaves you more than disoriented.
I was rather busy on this trip, so I didn’t get much of a chance to watch TV. I caught a few shows here and there, but for the last few years I only watch a few channels, such as CNN and CTV Newsnet, and of course Simpson and Seinfeld reruns, the Daily Show, and a few other randomn tidbits. One of the mainstays of North American culture is the rerun - you could be lost in the jungles of the Amazon for two years, drinking tree sap and licking poisonous frogs, but as soon as you were rescued you could find the Star Trek episode where Spock has a beard in a matter of minutes.
I do miss TV though, at least English speaking TV. I have the basic cable package in Japan, which means I get about 12 channels, and 2 of them are shopping networks. There’s about 8 hours of English TV a week, some of which is Sex and the City reruns at three in the morning. Lots of cheap and bad movies that the Japanese networks buy - Raw Deal, Strategic Command, Cliffhanger, the kind of movies that have biggish stars in them, but the ones that don’t get mentioned in their filmography. I’ve gotten into ER and CSI, two weekly shows that Japanese TV airs. What happens though is that once they show all the programs in a season, they pull the show off and wait for the next season to arrive, usually a few months to a year or so later, but then don’t show it at the same time.
So, I watch Japanese TV. Attitudes to Japanese TV mirrors the attitude to living in Japan in general - it’s exciting and confusing at first, then it become common place, then it degenerates into boring and annoying, something you do because you have no other choice. There is a highly-developed star system in Japan, and it seems most of the time there are only a handful of actors in Japan. I’ve had the surreal experience of watching a Japanese TV show with one actor on it (often called ‘tarento’ in Japanese English), a commericial comes on with the same actor, change the channel and there he is again, on a different show.
Last night I watched a program where a two comedians went to a soba restaurant to see soba being prepared. (Cooking shows are big in Japan, often having a multitude of stars going to restaurants and tasting the food, all of which is described, with crystal meth enthusiasm, as being delicious.) The two stars watched this chef explain how to make his special brand of soba. But here is where it got weird - in the corner they had to the two stars, superimposed over the screen, watching themselves watch the chef make soba, giving comments of not only themselves, but also on the chef. But most of the comments were the same as the comments they made when they first watched the chef make the soba (what can one really say about making soba, anyway?). It was more than surreal, it was at some goofy Disney on acid level beyond surreal.
This is entertainment?