| Thursday, August 16, 2007 8:03PM | | | | Porn, Parties, and Takoyaki | Posted By: Tony Dsouza
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Japan has probably the best cultural marketing campaign of any country in the world. When you think of Japan--at least when I thought of Japan before I got here--I thought of haiku and geishas, samurais and tea ceremony. I thought of Yukio Mishima performing hara kiri in his despair and anger over the loss of tradition. I thought of torii gates and Shinto shrines and sumo and sushi. And of course I thought of Hiroshima. Certainly Japan is some of these things, and I’m sure that a tourist popping over for a week or two and hopping down to Kyoto and Nagasaki will have their expectations mostly fulfilled. But what about the ‘real’ Japan, the Japan that is neither a myth nor mythologized, the Japan that the masses live and work in: the Japan of rabbit hutch apartments stack upon stack, of cigarettes, of ubiquitous vending machines and bleakish urban landscapes that make green the most precious and fleeting of colors. The Japan of pap television and ‘cuteness’ (think Hello Kitty), of hobbies and expectations and pressure placed on kids and loneliness and alcoholism and suicide. And what is with the Japanese fascination with porn?
I’m in Sapporo again after two and a half months of small town life in Nemuro. My first pass through Sapporo left me running for the exit: a massive and crowded industrial city covered with advertisements for high end cosmetics and handbags hawked by four story high TV screens of famous white people like David Beckham and Jessica Simpson, once in a while by the Seattle Mariner’s Ichiro Suzuki, and almost never by actual average Japanese people. Japanese advertising is hard to distinguish from American advertising. Sex and sexy broads sell smokes, cokes, cars, booze, and food. Buying a certain toilet brush will make you happy, and, as the ad implies with the looming and smiling man in the doorway looking on, might make your husband take sexual interest in you again. Most any sort of knick-knack will help you love yourself. There is a Donald Ritchie quote that has stuck in my head awhile because I had trouble understanding what he meant…asked why he’s chosen to live in Japan for 50 years, he said something along the lines of, ’…everyday is interesting. Japan is a mirror.’ I know I’ve mangled the quote…what I remembered about it is Ritchie calling Japan a ’mirror’. Because Japan has certainly not felt like a mirror to me in far away Nemuro; in Nemuro, Japan has felt like the most foreign place I have ever lived, much more foreign than my village in Africa. Because Africa looks like Africa and definitely is Africa, while Nemuro looks like Kenosha, Wisconsin, where I went to college. But Nemuro is definitely is not Kenosha.
The quote makes more sense to me here in Sapporo, looking at the billboards and ads. Because I caught myself looking at a subway station ad of three barely clad girls knocking around a volleyball on a beach somewhere. The ad was shilling Coca-Cola, but all that I could see was the girls: the long legs, the buttocks, the breasts, the long hair, the smiles. But what made me look at the ad so long was that these weren’t white chicks, these were Japanese girls, tall slender, curvaceous Japanese girls with aquiline noses and wide, round eyes. And having lived now this time in cold and working class Nemuro, I found these girls in the ad overwhelming in a way. What Japan did they live in? Because they do not live in Nemuro. So here is how the Ritchie quote works for me: Americans aspire to unrealistic ideals of physical beauty: the Japanese also aspire to unrealistic ideals of physical beauty…using Japanese models. And these models are incredibly hot to look at. And they do not live in Nemuro. But looking at the extreme difference between these Japanese models and average Japanese people, that we do that same thing to ourselves in the States became suddenly ludicrous and clear. Like looking in a mirror.
So my first time through Sapporo, I just wanted to get out of it. Because Sapporo, (the name is an Ainu word meaning ’river on a plain’), confounded me in my search for Hokkaido as I wanted it to be: forested, natural, pristine. Instead Sapporo turned out to be what it was: more industrialized Japan. But coming back after ten weeks of relative isolation in BFE Nemuro, rolling into neon Sapporo on the bus after the nine hour trip left me feeling like Pinocchio at the carnival gates. Sapporo, after all, is home to the Susukino party zone, the largest party district north of Tokyo. There are snack bars and dance bars and food bars and bar bars and gaijin bars and Japanese only bars and bars where the girls will rub your body in soap bubbles and bars where the girls will play the samisen like the geishas of old. Everywhere are food stalls where the local specialty is ramen, where you can get anything else: Indian, Italian, Greek, Persian, soba, udon…I mean, Susukino is like the world’s largest food court on the street level, with girls and bars everywhere around you up to 20 stories in the air. After Nemuro, I suddenly understood the attraction of the ‘snack’ bar--the Japanese bar/institution where men pay exorbitant fees to have the girls inside--the hostesses--pretend that they are interested in what you have to say as they pour your drinks and light your cigarettes and generally act coquettish and that money isn’t involved. Loneliness will make you gladly pay for companionship, even when it’s wildly contrived.
So back to porn. Just like in the States, there are racks of porn mags for sale in the convenience stores, there is porn on the hotel TVs. Some of the porn fetishizes Japanese school girls, lots of the magazine covers feature girls in school uniform skirts. I guess we have the same thing at home with the cheerleader fetish. What seems weird to us in the Japanese we only have to look a little deeper to see in ourselves. I mean I do find it weird that men here look at porn in the convenience store, on the subway, openly in a way men at home would not. So you’d think the Japanese are more libertine, right? Well as I continued my research into Japanese porn, I discovered that the pay-per-view porn you buy in the privacy of your hotel room is censored. They digitally blur any scenes of penetration/copulation, so you’re left looking at a couple naked people moaning and panting with the very part you paid for blurred out. In the privacy of your hotel room no less! Definitely not libertine. And definitely not hot. Anyway, the existence of porn has always seemed to me a sign to me of sexual frustration. Am I right?
There are a few long term foreign residents of Japan who openly hate Japan and have web logs where they slam and take umbrage with seemingly every aspect of Japanese society on a daily basis.
This anti-Japan blog: www.whyjapansucks.blogspot.com is a well known one. The author is articulate and does voice a lot of the reasons why it is difficult to be a foreigner here. Obviously I was in a certain mood and googling certain words to have found such a blog. While I can’t say the author is wrong about a lot of the things he notices about Japan such as the xenophobia, which is what I’ll at this point take home with me more than anything else, he does also seemed to have reached the stage where nothing about Japan will ever satisfy him and he should probably go home. (Except he’s married to a Japanese). In any case, there are days when I see Japan with these eyes, and days when my eyes are more sympathetic. His continual harping on Japan’s denial of war atrocities, on the use of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for sympathy as though there was no historical lead up to those events, is justified I think. But I can also imagine a Japanese person living on the fringe of society in the States, growing more and more bitter in his loneliness and exclusion, focusing on American jingoism and patriotic displays, and finding a great and irreconcilable irony in the ‘Land of the free and home of the brave’s’ roots in slavery and genocide. Japan and the States both have ugly (and heroic) histories, behind every cherry blossom or amber wave of grain is a slaughtered Ainu or Cherokee. But what is also true is that part of the Ainu man’s formal dress was a Japanese sword which wasn’t just used for show, that the Cherokee owned slaves and fought against the Union in the Civil War. What to do, what to do?
One thing we can do, and have been doing for a very long time, is to get drunk. No better place to do that then Sapporo’s wild Susukino party zone. Like Pinocchio, I was a gentle babe in the dark woods of the Susukino, wide eyed, innocent, guileless, timid. Yeah right!
First I ate a big bowl of spicy ramen with wild mushrooms for strength. I’m at ease slurping up the noodles now in the Japanese way. In fact, I slurp the noodles even more loudly than most Japanese do just because I can. ’Hey, look at the gaijin eating noodles over there!’…SLURP! SLURP! SLURP!
Then I tied on my dancing shoes and went into my party mode; smile, smile, chat, chat, project ‘I am not an ax-murderer’, smile, smile, chat, chat. Knowing Japan as I now know it, I knew to look for a gaijin bar, not to meet other gaijin, but to meet Japanese people who go to gaijin bars hoping to meet gaijin, whether it is to practice their English, talk about the awful year they spent in Alabama on a student exchange, try to find someone to marry and take them to LA, or to fulfill a fetish. I tucked into a pint of Stella and pretty soon was chatting with ‘Mikki’ and ‘Nikki’, a couple of snack bar hostesses on their night off. They were much more the Coca-Cola model types than Hokkaido fishwives, it was definitely fun to have my cigarettes lighted as soon as I tucked them into my mouth, my beer poured for me, a couple of knock-outs clapping, actually clapping, when I spoke my Japanese. And when it was time for round two, I was sure all of this attention was going to cost me something dear. I didn’t mind. The girls ordered expensive Red Bull drinks, I scratched the bar for another hit of Stella, the drinks were set down and before I could toss down 5000 yen, Mikki and Nikki grabbed my hand and made me put my wallet away. In Japan, it seems, businessmen dump money on snack bar hostesses so that those hostesses can in turn lavish money on boys they actually like. Soon enough the night began to swim, we went here, we went there, we sang karaoke, we ate takoyaki, we laughed and laughed and laughed we drank and drank we danced. And of course the whole time there was a nasty war raging in the Middle East and people starving everywhere and my calorie intake reached 3500 by midnight and Mikki and Nikki lit my cigarettes even before I could tuck them in my mouth and the drunk businessmen shot angry looks at me, and one guy ran up to me and said, “What country? What country?” for his laughing businessman friends and it was fun, so much fun, to strut through the Susukino with Mikki and Nikki and the lights and the masses of milling drunken people because it was also the Sapporo Beer Festival. And a guy was puking into a plastic bag on the corner to keep from making a mess, so very Japanese, and Mikki and Nikki in their high high heels ate their takoyakis like lollipops as they strutted for the sheer novelty of walking and eating, which the Japanese do not do. And the girls would not let me pay, can you believe that, I wanted to pay but they would not let me pay and then when they finally asked if I had a gaijin girlfriend and I said yes, they clapped again, I don’t know why, maybe because I told the truth when I was far from home and didn’t have to. | | | |
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