Sons of Loki

“Yell”, by ballad-y group Ikimono-gakari (a name Wikipedia explains as “[the] group of children who are responsible for looking after plants and animals in a Japanese elementary school”) came out last September and went to #2 in the charts. It’s shamelessly sentimental (the video is all about kids in high school, and I hear it’s a popular choice at graduation) and I’d hate it if it was a cheesy English ballad but shucks, there’s something about the brave eyes of naive schoolchildren staring into the camera combined with Kiyoe Yoshioka’s soaring vocals that tears me up inside.

「”わたし”は今どこに在るの」と
“So what of “I”, now?”
(This is a doozy. “わたし” (‘I’) comes in quotes, and the verb 在る (meaning “to exist” for inanimate objects) is used where you’d usually use 居る (meaning “to exist” for animate things like people). Literally it’s “Where am I now?” but if I had to guess, I’d say the gist of the line is “What now for (the concept of) ‘I’?”, or “What’s to become of me?” or “Where am I now?” in a spiritual rather than material sense.)
踏みしめた足跡を何度も見つめ返す
I go back to stare at trodden footprints again and again
枯葉を抱き 秋めく窓辺に
I embrace dead leaves, and by the autumnal window
かじかんだ指先で夢を描いた
I traced dreams with numb fingertips

翼はあるのに飛べずにいるんだ
Though I have wings, I can’t fly
ひとりになるのが恐くてつらくて
At being alone, I’m scared, heartbroken
優しいひだまりに 肩寄せる日々を
The days of sweet sunshine with your arm around me
越えて僕ら孤独な夢へと歩く
We pass through, we walk towards lonely dreams

Chorus
サヨナラは悲しい言葉じゃない
“Sayonara” is not a sad word
それぞれの夢へと僕らを繋ぐＹＥＬＬ
When we head towards our many dreams, a “yell” will connect us
ともに過ごした日々を胸に抱いて
I hold those days we spent together close to my chest
(“胸”, literally “chest” but more figuratively “heart” just as in English, is probably one of the most used words in J-pop)
飛び立つよ独りで未来（つぎ）の空へ
Fly, alone, into your future sky
(The kanji read みらい (future) but are sung as つぎ (next). I mean, if you just listened to the song without reading the lyrics you’d have no idea, but I guess this is a songwriting trick)

僕らはなぜ答えを焦って
We’re impatient for answers to “Why?”
宛ての無い裏切りに自己（じぶん）を探すのだろう
I guess it betrays no one to search for ourselves
誰かをただ思う涙も
Both tears just when I think of someone
真っ直ぐな笑顔もここに在るのに
And smiling, straight-ahead, there’s both here

本当の自分を誰かの言葉で
Our real selves, through someone else’s words,
繕うに逃れて迷って
We run from fixing, we go astray
ありのままの弱さと向き合う強さを
The truth is, the power to face our weaknesses –
掴み僕ら始めて明日へと掻ける
Only when we grasp that can we succeed tomorrow

Chorus
サヨナラを誰かに告げる度に
Every time we say goodbye to someone
僕らまた変われる強くなれるかな
Can we change, can we get used to it?
たとえ違う空へ飛び立とうとも
Even if we take off into different skies
途絶えはしない思いよ今も胸に
We’ll never stop, I hold that in my heart even now

Bridge
永遠など無いと (気づいたときから)
When there was no such thing as eternity (From the time we realised that)
笑い合ったあの日も (唄い合ったあの日も)
That day we laughed together (That day we sang together)
強く (深く) 胸に刻まれていく
Strongly (deeply) those days dig into my heart
だからこそあなたは (だからこそ僕らは)
Because of this, you … (because of this, we …)
他の誰でもない(誰にも負けない)
Without anyone else (no one will fail)
声を(挙げて)”わたし”を生きていくよと
Our voice (as one), “I” will go on
約束したんだひとり(ひとり)ひとつ(ひとつ)道を選んだ
I promised. Alone, I chose a single path

Chorus
サヨナラは悲しい言葉じゃない
“Sayonara” is not a sad word
それぞれの夢へと僕らを繋ぐＹＥＬＬ
When we head towards our many dreams, a “yell” will connect us
いつかまためぐり逢うそのときまで
Until the time comes for us to meet again
This sentence, more literally, is “Until someday, some day, again, again, when we meet again.” Japanese can be wonderfully redundant.
忘れはしない誇りよ友よ空へ
Say you won’t forget – into the sky, my friend

僕らが分かち合う言葉がある
There’s a word we all share
こころからこころへ声を繋ぐＹＥＬＬ
From my heart to yours, a “yell” connects our voices
ともに過ごした日々を胸に抱いて
I hold those days we spent together close to my chest
飛び立つよ独りで未来（つぎ）の空へ
Fly, alone, into your future sky

Happy End (はっぴいえんど, Happii endo) are one of my favourite little Japanese gems, a folk-rock band from the 70s whose song “Kaze wo atsumete” (風を集めて, “Gathering the Winds”) made an appearance in Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (the only Japanese song on the whole soundtrack – but that’s for another day, perhaps). Lead singer Haruomi Hosono would go on to start a little electropop band called Yellow Magic Orchestra, invent techno in 1978, and the rest is history.

“Natsu nan desu” (夏なんです, “Well, it’s summer”) is a sweet, laidback track from their second album, which perfectly captures the essence of lazy summer days. It’s a very Happy End-ish track – old tea houses, empty streets, aimless wandering.
Linguistically, this is an interesting song because of it’s heavy use of Japan’s double-onomatopoeia words, which usually tend to denote things with quite a nebulous context. For example, くるくる kuru-kuru, which means “spin-spin”, or ぎらぎら gira-gira, “glitter-glitter”.

田舎の白い畦道で
On a white country road
埃っぽい風が立ち止る
The dusty breeze stands still.
地べたにペタンとしゃがみこみ
I drop down to the floor with a bump,
奴らがビー玉はじいてる
as some kids play marbles.
ギンギンギラギラの
Shine-shine, glitter-glitter
太陽なんです
Well, it’s the sun
ギンギンギラギラの
Shine-shine, glitter-glitter
夏なんです
Well, it’s the summer

鎮守の森は ふかみどり
The deep green of the shrine grove
舞い降りてきた 静けさが
A solemn silence has fallen.
古い茶屋の 店先に
An old tearoom
誰かさんとぶらさがる
Someone swings from the store front
ホーシーツクツクの
Chirp-chirp
蝉の声です
It’s the voice of the cicadas
ホーシーツクツクの
Chirp-chirp
夏なんです
Well, it’s the summer

日傘くるくる ぼくはたいくつ
Parasol spin-spin, and I’m bored
日傘くるくる ぼくはたいくつ
Parasol spin-spin, and I’m bored
ルルル…

空模様の縫い目を辿って
Chasing stitches in the sky,
石畳を駆け抜けると
And when I cross some paving stones
夏は通り雨と一緒に
A summer shower
連れ立って行ってしまうのです
Comes along with it.
モンモンモコモコの
Worry-worry, fluffy-fluffy
入道雲です
Big summer rainclouds
モンモンモコモコの
Worry-worry, fluffy-fluffy
夏なんです
Well, it’s summer…

日傘くるくる ぼくはたいくつ
Parasol spin-spin, and I’m bored
日傘くるくる ぼくはたいくつ
Parasol spin-spin, and I’m bored
ルルル…

I’m finally getting the hang of this Japanese thing! (How many times have I said that?) I’ve pretty much decided that I’m never gonna be an accomplished conversationalist in either Japanese or English, but that if I honestly do have a knack for the skills of reading, I might as well concentrate on that. I’ve started reading the news (almost) daily in Japanese, and it feels rather remarkable to be taking in a Japanese newspaper, getting most of the kanji to some extent, even if the overall meaning of each sentence remains murky and uncertain. Fiction, too – I finished the first story in Read Real Japanese and I ought to make a good start on the next.

You know, learning Japanese – it’s all about scrambling up the mountain using every means at your disposal. People will tell you “It’s better to do it with one hand behind your back,” or “You ought to use hiking boots”. Some advice you should listen to. Some of it you should ignore. The one true way to climb the mountain of Japanese is to do it whatever way works. For me, that’s making up stupid mnemonics and reading newspaper articles about minor party officials in funding scandals. I guess I’ll be alright.

I need to stop counting down my days left in Japan… though it be 72 days right now. Yeah, after a tense phone call with the JAL office in Tokyo (why do I find phone calls with strangers such an unmitigated terror?) I went ahead and changed my return date to the 2nd of August, so I’ll be with everybody else coming back on the 3rd of August at 4:35pm. (It’s cost me 15,000 yen to change, but then I would have had to pay 17,000 yen rent to stay here until the 10th (plus food and stuff) so it’s worked out fine.)

This is day 235, or thereabouts. It feels like a marathon, and part of me is glad that I didn’t go back at Christmas because the longer I stick it out here, the more insane it will be when I get home. Yeah, it will be insane.   I remember when I came back last time, after a paltry ten weeks, being blown away by the ticket machine on the London Underground. When I get back on the 3rd, it will be a whopping 308 days since I left. I’ll be a stranger in my own country.

Been listening to a couple of new good albums recently: Here Lies Love, David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s unlikely musical/song cycle collaboration on the even unlikelier topic of Philippines dictator’s wife Imelda Marcos, has an all-star cast of female singers (including Florence “+ The Machine” Welch, Cyndi Lauper, and …er, Steve Earle) and some surprisingly catchy tunes on the subject of Imelda’s rags to riches to unparalleled embezzler and shoe collector story, some of the best being the title track, “How Are You”, “Please Don’t”, and “Never So Big”. Also, LCD Soundsystem’s new album This Is Happening, with a stompingly awesome first track “Dance Yrself Clean”. James Murphy has this really interesting half-spoken, half-singing style on tracks like “Pow Pow” that puts me in mind of the old Jonathan Richman. A good album for the summer, methinks.

Finally, interesting thing of the day: The Strange Case of the Electronic Lover, a insightful look into one of the very first internet chat communities with a male psychiatrist undercover as a woman.

Just ran some errands; posted some letters, signed for JASSO, paid some bills. Doesn’t that sound like fun? Well, not really, but there’s a strange sense of satisfaction in getting small things done.

I was talking to my friend Emily about this. She wants to stay in education, do a Masters. Me, I kind of just want to get out there in the real world. Like Rob Fleming or Jesse (Hawke?) I don’t feel like a real person, living in a single room and eating combini food and scripting visual novels no one will ever play. I want a job – something interesting, mind – and a proper apartment or a real house with more than one room and beanbags and big giclée prints (bizarre fact: the development of giclée printing was spearheaded by none other than Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills and Nash) on the walls and a cat called Noboru Wataya.

Obviously, when I’m working my 9 to 5 in Sainsburys and living in a quiet backstreet in Leeds I’ll miss the student life, so basically the lesson here is never try to do anything, ever. (I’ve become a nihilist, lately. Does it show?)

Last week was a bit of a fugue, a blur of hanami and hikikomorish tendencies. Yesterday, after a sake-induced hangover I kind of snapped out of it and went for a walk in Yuutenji, which Emily told me was a pretty nice area. And it was. I had a proper coffee in a proper coffee shop, visited the temple (awash with sakura, obviously) and wandered through the city of Meguro, which reminded me awfully of some area of Leeds.

I love cities. It’s interesting, though, that all cities are kind of similar… all built from offcuts of each other. Parts of Higashi-Shinjuku are identical to New York (round about the corner of 47th and 6th, near the NHL store). I stumbled across Chicago in Niigata, found Norwich in Harajuku, and this bit of Meguro really nailed that “concrete Holiday Inns and big roundabouts with hundreds of road signs and a dozen pedestrian crossings” bit that cities like Leeds do. You know what I mean – designed for cars, not people.

Down by a weird riverside bit (it had the feeling of a riverside area with cafes and bars, but it was built on a five story embankment above a feeble drainage ditch) there was loads of sakura and a big matsuri (festival), with food stalls and huge throngs of Meguro residents and a fat lady (who did indeed sing, to a large audience) and a wonderful, rejuvenating sense of life.

Of course, it couldn’t stay sunny for long, and now Tokyo is overcast and rainy again.

Stay inside and drink tea, as the Bryce 2 materials browser would commonly recommend. In conclusion, I have one goal in life now, which is to play “Black Out Fall Out” on electric guitar in front of a billion fans and then spontaneously combust, because nothing can top how awesome this song is.

音がない (No sound)
泣き止まないずっと (Don’t cry your heart out)
もうCRY OUT (Keep crying out!)
I know I know la la la la
もう止まらない！ (Don’t stop!)

(oh cool, previously unheard original 2002 version, though I wager the version on 2005’s Polysics or Die!!!! is better)

What came first, the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?
People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands – literally thousands – of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don’t know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they’ve been listening to the sad songs longer than they’ve been living the unhappy lives.

–Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

Bah! Who needs love? Here’s the top five anti-love songs (that I could find on YouTube. Depressingly, the fantastic “I’m Not In Love” by Talking Heads (entirely different to the 10cc song of the same name) couldn’t be found.)

Richard Ashcroft – A Song for the Lovers
I love Ashcroft’s counterpoint baritone mumble in the video as he sings along to his own song. Diegetic cleverness, there. This song beat out “Love is Noise” in the running, but both depict love as a kind of unpleasant anxiety, which is far more preferable to sentimental pap.

Pulp – F.E.E.L.I.N.G. C.A.L.L.E.D. L.O.V.E.
Different Class is just all over a great album, and this is a fantastic love song that basically sums up the incomprehensible gut-punch of love.

Belle and Sebastian – Funny Little Frog
This is probably my all-time most listened song, but I just can’t get over it. I think I first heard of it as the only B&S song at OK Karaoke in Leeds, but back then I hadn’t heard their album The Life Pursuit, so I just thought it was a song about, uh, a funny little frog, so I never sang it.
At first listen, it’s just about loving someone. Then you realise it’s about loving someone you can’t have. Then you begin to suspect it’s all about loving some ideal girl, some soulmate you have yet to meet and who may not even exist. (I read an interesting theory that it’s actually about the Virgin Mary, which puts a new spin on the lyrics, but I prefer the secular interpretation.)

Absentee – We Should Never Have Children
A title like that says it all, right? “Some people never should have met,” intones the gravelly-voiced Dan Michaelson.

Buzzcocks – Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t've?)
To which we can all answer, “Yes.”

Depressing!

So what’s been going down? Not much, I don’t think. Due to my poor long-term memory, I generally have to reconstruct my life from photos I took and mails I received, Memento-style. This will probably be quite rambling.

Last week I seem to have watched Brother, by Takeshi Kitano (currently appearing in ads for some English teaching school), which was a bit pants, to be honest. It’s like Kitano has no idea how to direct Americans, so he asks them to wave their arms around and speak in expository dialogue at all times (it’s painful to watch the talented Omar Epps (of House fame) churn out such stilted dialogue). Nevertheless, the clash of Yakuza with LA is pretty fun to watch, even if it completely loses the plot in the last act.

Then I recorded a commercial for my speech class, where I played an influenza suffer who is cured by the magic of Japanese natto. I haven’t had natto in two years. It hasn’t got any better. I mean, it’s less of a vomit-inducing unpalatableness than I remember, but it’s just … unpleasant to eat.

I went to Shinjuku, where a chugger asked me for some money for charity. Now, don’t get me wrong, I give to charity and I think it’s the duty of everyone to make at least some kind of regular contribution. It’s just that I don’t give to charities I’ve never heard of. This guy, as most Japanese street collectors are, was collecting for places hit by heavy snow in Japan and while I certainly wouldn’t wish natural disasters on anyone, the fact is that I’d rather give my money to third-world nations rather than a first-world country with the second biggest economy in the world.

They obviously only pick on foreigners, because he called out to me in English. I feigned lack of comprehension, so he asked if I was Portuguese. I waved my hands and then gave up and popped a handful of change into his box.

Speaking of charities; you may wish to consider a donation to whistleblowing site Wikileaks, who have found themselves in a spot of financial bother. These guys are fighting for free speech, and not just in an abstract way; this site has brought about a lot of exposure on everything from Guantanamo Bay doctrine to the recent Carter-Ruck super-injuction.

The weekend was fun. Went for karaoke in Kichijoji with Kanako, Katy, Miles and Rob, sang the usual; bit of 80s Japanese punk, 90s Britpop, 00s rap.


Saturday wandered about Shinjuku with Katy and (eventually) went for ramen. I believe Chris wanted to see what people wear in Tokyo, so here we go:



(and isn’t Flickr so much nicer than FB’s ultra-JPEG?)

In the evening, headed to Musashi-Sakai to meet Rob and Miles where we feasted upon Subway sandwiches and bought dairy products from a local combini and ate them on a bench outside a hairdressers for reasons I can no longer remember.

And now it’s today! It snowed last night, so I went to ICU today and we had a little bit of a snowball fight. Then I got the Specials album off iTunes (it makes it so easy to whittle away all your money in tiny chunks, doesn’t it) and am thoroughly enjoying all the tracks I have sort of picked up from cultural osmosis.

I got into the Teriyaki Boyz recently, this Japanese rap supergroup comprised of Nigo (founder of A Bathing Ape), a dude called Wise, Verbal from M-Flo, and Ilmari and Ryo-Z from j-rap superstars RIP SLYME. I thought I’d expand my burgeoning interest in J-hip-hop by checking out Rip Slyme, who I was vaguely aware of before. So, first of all, listen to this. Listen to that synth bassline when it kicks in at 0:30. Isn’t that just the best thing you ever heard? Don’t you want it injected into your blood to harness the supreme sunny glory of that synth? Don’t you want it to be played from all the rooftops of all the houses across the land?

Saturday I was thinking about heading down to Shibuya to check out the BAPE store (as a child of 00s hip-hop rather than 90s rap I have been subtly brainwashed to buy designer clothes rather than shoot cops) but I ended up doing the complete opposite and shopping Akiba for DVI cables and cheap monitors (you can pick up a second-hand TFT one for 2.5k (£15), which is nuts). After that I met up with the guys in Shinjuku for nomikai, literally “drink-meet”. We found a izakaya which we thought was deliciously cheap. However, we had been burned. The izakaya was not offering cheap nomihoudai, as represented. It was some kind of gypsy grifter establishment … sorry, I’m channelling Philip K Dick here. Anyway, we ended up with a lot of food we didn’t want and a bill for 3,500 yen each and some dangerously watered-down cocktails. I wanted to use my gaijin smash to escape, but in the end decided to save it for another day.

Luckily, the club we went to was free.

We decided – well, the girls decided – to take Miles to his first ever gay club. And the place for gay clubs in Tokyo is Nichome in Shinjuku, so that’s where we went.

Man, it was gay. Nary a woman in sight. Bars with hilarious names. Men holding hands. Sunkus (truly the gayest combini chain). It was kind of exciting, in a gay way, like I imagine San Francisco to be. We met a Australian girl with her male friend (gay, no doubt) who was trying to find the same gay club as us (“Arty Farty”, which sounds pretty gay). Eventually we found it, went inside, and bought our mandatory gay drink (mine was a gay Vanilla Mule). Unsurprisingly, the place was packed with men. From what I hear, Arty Farty is the only place to attract a sizable gaijin (or should I say “gay-jin”? no, perhaps not) crowd, so there were quite a few foreigners about. And so we drank our drinks and entered the gay dancefloor, fittingly as “I Will Survive” came on.

And you know what? It wasn’t bad. No, actually, I had a really good time. There was just a different vibe to other clubs; everyone was there to have a good time, not to get pissed or start a fight or hook up with girls. (Uh, you know what I mean.) The music wasn’t too bad, and it was a whole lot cheaper than other places in Tokyo – and you got access to their other branch for free, which means basically two clubs for the price of none.

Today I went to the Tachikawa immigration bureau to get a student work permit. It was my first interaction with the machine of Japanese government bureaucracy by myself, so I’m surprised it went as smoothly as it did. I brought my documents and the form from TUFS authorising me to work, waited patiently for my number to come up, went up, was told by a scary man to fill out a form, filled out the form, waited for my next number to come up, went back up and – yes! – hadn’t done anything wrong. Japanese efficiency applying to everything but government, I should receive my permit in three weeks.

It was quite interesting, the ethnic mix in the waiting room. I know it’s not so, but always I tend to assume that the majority of gaijin in Japan are Americans, followed by Europeans, but that’s a colossal mistake. Of the zainichi (from zainichi gaikokujin, lit. “living in Japan foreigners”) the vast majority are ethnic Koreans and Chinese, who have quite an interesting place in Japanese society – they were born in Japan, have lived in Japan their entire lives, speak only Japanese and are to all intents and purposes Japanese, and yet just … aren’t. It’s an interesting subject.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Orbital lately. Obviously when their sweet brand of English techno was all the rage I was six or seven, so give me a break, okay? When I was that age I knew I liked indie and I liked britpop, and all this dance music seemed the complete antithesis to that. It took Laurent Garnier to open my mind a little, about two years ago. (I can remember downloading and listening to “The Man With The Red Face” in some nameless hotel in some city in western Japan (Hiroshima?) and thinking “hey, now this is interesting…”)

But I guess it must be weird for the people who grew up in that scene, who are now in their thirties, for me to be getting into the music of their formative years. It’s like in ten years time, in 2020, kids born in the late 90s will be discovering The Strokes and Franz Ferdinand and The White Stripes, and I will be terrified.

Home is where I want to be
But I guess I’m already there
I come home, she lifted up her wings
I guess that this must be the place

Some songs have a few good lyrics in. Some songs are simply perfect from start to finish. (And this from the greatest concert movie ever made.)

I was looking forward to writing about the newly-spiced up battle for Christmas no. 1 when a few days ago this woman basically said it all for me much better:

We live our lives amongst popular culture. The Christmas number 1, for the past decade, has nearly always been a novelty record, but the group isn’t protesting at that. What they’re angry about is that nearly everything is now a novelty record, that the charts are now full of talentless jingle singers with sob stories instead of genuinely exciting musicians, and that thanks to all that, children now assume that becoming famous needs no discernible talent or effort.

Now I wasn’t too bothered when the idea of “Killing in the Name” came up as a rock-the-vote candidate for Christmas number one, because there were a few songs floating around and none of them seemed to have any chance of defeating Cowell’s dreary inevitability. But then … something very magical happened. Imagine that, a miracle at Christmas! The Facebook group grew, and grew to the point where it might actually happen. A proper grassroots campaign might achieve it.

Everyone got it wrong, of course. It wasn’t to spite Joe Whatshisface – the truth is I didn’t even know his name until last week, and I have no idea what his song is like, and I’m sure he’s a lovely lad, but he is a celebrity now, and has become a pop singer through a shamelessly commercialised route, and must come to terms with the fact that the public may not like him. It’s not really about Cowell, who is actually a guilty pleasure to watch at times (but mostly a dick). It’s not juvenile rebellion, even if there is an irony in a band of people coming together to say “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!” and then sheepishly all buying the same record because one guy told them to. (As Rebecca Winson notes, “Lying down and letting a Miley Cyrus cover, for crying out loud, with all of its connotations – take us into the next decade… well, now that’s sheepish behaviour.”)

It’s about all the people in Britain who are fed up of being pandered to by crappy reality shows and mindless tabloids (who predictably lashed out at the campaign, suggesting that they lived in some bizarre fantasy world where Simon Cowell owned Sony and got a direct cut of RATM’s royalties, which is patently untrue). All the people who didn’t want another bloody cover from another bloody here-today-gone-tomorrow artist with the right voice and the right looks to appeal to a very particular market did indeed cry out, “fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me.” This can only be a good thing, right?

And it’s more than that. You know where I spent my formative years? By the radio, listening to the Sunday chart show with my sister. Every week, like an unrepentant gambler, I would have my own choice for number one, something made with real talent and sweat. Every week I would hope against all odds for Marion or Kenickie or The Bluetones to get to the top spot, and every week it would be the same commercialised, soulless pap. You know what that does to a small child? Disillusionment. I was taught from a very young age that real talent and hard work will get you nowhere thanks to Simon and his cronies.
As I wrote this last night, the results were yet to be in.

I wake up today to see that Rage won.

Good times. It is only a small thing, but I hear my childhood self cheering.