digi*ana*logue

I follow quite a few photoblogs, but this is the only one that I know of that’s definitely foreign, so here we go. I mentioned earlier that music was universal, but I believe that art, being a wider category than music, is the same way as well. While the settings are unfamiliar to me, I think the photos can still evoke the same emotions in both a Japanese person and someone, say me, from another country browsing the photos on the Internet. These pictures in particular are generally really calming to me, but I especially love the one I posted above. I think some of the best photographs are ones that suggest there’s a deeper meaning below the simple beauty of the photo. The girl is obviously the main character of the picture, but she is also dwarfed by the sheer size of the buildings around her, as well as the number of people walking on the sidewalks. But why is she standing in the middle of the street? What is she looking at?

Experts Weigh Importance of English Education

http://classified.japantimes.com/ads/pdfs/20110329-jtforum.pdf

This article from March of this year covers the current debate in Japan over whether English should be taught even earlier to students in Elementary school. While the article itself doesn’t really present any extreme viewpoints, I think it’s interesting that other countries are even considering starting foreign language education so early. I read earlier in some other article that despite the English classes offered at the middle and high school levels, the average “skill” of many non-native English speakers in Japan is still very poor (I think the article said only slightly better than North Koreans), which could possibly be another factor in this decision to introduce English to Elementary schoolers. I think it’s a very significant reminder of how widespread and powerful Western culture and influence is on the rest of the world. Not that this is a negative thing, but it’s definitely something that I take for granted sometimes when traveling to other countries, assuming that at some point I’ll be able to find someone who speaks English to help me out if I ever need it.

Random Life Experiences!

I was in the middle of fifth grade, and one day, my friend asked me to go to church with him the upcoming weekend, I didn't really know what to expect. I had heard the stereotypes about going to church at lunch; "church was boring", "I accidentally fell asleep last week", "I hate going to Sunday School", and so on, either from watching TV or hearing snippets of conversations at lunch.

"I have a duet I need to play, so I need you to help me with it. It's not gonna be too hard."

"Sure, I guess."

A few days later, I arrived together with my friend, slightly uncomfortable in my button up shirt and pants. I follwed him nervously to the pews and sat down. Were there assigned seats? I glanced nervously at my friend, and then back at the projector screen. I thought to myself, "Oh no, I don't know any of these hymns."

After the ceremonies were over, we gathered on a lower level and the adults began to unpack various dishes they had brought for the lunch potluck as my friend and I took out our violins and music. A simple tune from an old TV show, but everyone crowded around us anyway, congratulating us on our "skill," and then hustling us to the tables of food. "Eat, eat," they said, "there's plenty of food. Don't be shy."

The closeness of all of the families was what really struck me back then. It seemed more like a large family gathering instead of the somber and formal procession that I had imagined. I was amazed at how much fun and how well everyone knew each other. I thought to myself, "They get together like this every week?"

Though I have not gotten another chance to attend church since then, I think that one day helped me get a taste of a different way of life, and really demonstrated to me the value of belonging to a tight-knit community.

NAGISA COSMETIC - Life Balance

I don't even know what to write here. Ridiculous bouncy electropop with horns and ridiculously bouncy vocals and ridiculously bouncy piano and jazzy influences and ridiculously upbeat melody. It's got that "cool because it's so over the top and ridiculous" feel? Seems like a characteristic of the genre though. Anyway, "Shibuya-kei (渋谷系) is a sub-genre of Japanese pop music which originated in the Shibuya district of Tokyo. It is best described as a mix between jazz, pop, and electropop." Yup. Oh and also according to Wikipedia the genre was influenced by French Yé-yé music, a style of pop music that emerged from France, Québec and Spain in the early 1960s. It’s amazing how in this age influences can come from everywhere in the world. While I’d hate to see the world’s music all move in the same universal direction, it’s still cool to see fusions of genres from all over, and the product is almost always at least unique and interesting, if not great. In this case it’s just unique and weird, your mileage may vary on whether it’s great or not.

Tokyo Jihen - Adult

One of my favorite albums from last year. An interesting mix of specifically Japanese “pop” sensibilities with Western rock and jazz influences.

スポーツ (Sports) is the newest album released by 東京事変 (Tokyo Jihen). Formed in 2004 after 椎名林檎 (Shiina Ringo) decided to end her solo career (though she has since resumed it with her 2009 album 三文ゴシップ, which is also great). All of her albums, both solo and with the band have been at least great, and most of them are amazing.

As far as stand out tracks go on this album... pretty much all of them. This tends to be the case with all of her albums, and each individual track would probably be a standout single on any other album. None of that hits + filler nonsense. That being said, there are still tracks that stand out within the album. The second track, Denpa Tsuushin opens with a hectic bass line, while combining elements of electropop and her signature jazzy style into a ridiculously catchy and energetic song. Raise the dead on your turntable, she sings on 能動的三分間 (Noudouteki Sanpunkan, Active Three Minutes), the lead single. An exactly three minute long (get it?) song, played at 120BPM, with hands down one of the catchiest choruses I've ever heard. A fusion of her amazing pop sensibilities and the rest of the band's instrumentation. This song is the shining example of her ability to fuse modern rock and pop with the feel of high energy jazz performances in a tightly knit song, stripped away of any superfluous elements and without a single wasted second. Finally, スイートスポット (Sweet Spot), is another one of my favorites and one of the slower songs on the album. In the form of a modern jazz ballad, overflowing with emotion, amazing vocal delivery, etc etc.

Die Antwoord - Enter the Ninja

Die Antwoord was a “rap-rave” group that originated in Cape Town, South Africa. I’m personally not a fan of their gimmick, but the critical reaction for their unique glorification of the South African “Zef” culture was extremely positive, so much so that they became very popular in music magazines and online publications. Their rapid rise to popularity among “hipster” music circles was very interesting in that their music is very “trashy” and a celebration of this foreign culture that usually gets little to no attention in the West. Enter the Ninja was released in 2009 and very quickly became a sensation, with people all over praising their unique music and culture. An interesting note is that it was revealed earlier this year that Die Antwoord was actually a group of art students who were putting up an “act,” and they were parodying the extremes and excesses of the culture, although not in a negative way.

Sidenote: Leon Botha, the sufferer of progeria featured in the Enter the Ninja video died a few days ago, which reminded me of this group and I figured they were actually pretty relevant to this blog.

Music and Language

I’ve had some people ask me why I listened to music in a foreign language if I couldn’t even understand the lyrics. It had never actually crossed my mind before that unintelligible lyrics would somehow be a barrier to listening to music. To me, the actual musical aspects – melody, rhythm, etc – were always the most important, and lyrics were secondary. Perhaps it’s because I started playing violin before I really got into popular music, but to me vocals have always been “another instrument” in a sense. I have a friend who, aside from this would consider to have good taste, refuse to listen to anything that isn’t in English because it “makes no sense” to him. I always hear the saying that “music is the universal language” (although math has been thrown around too occasionally), and so his logic makes no sense to me. To me, as long as it “sounds good,” I can listen to anything. The most interesting part to me is the stylistic difference in music from different cultures. It’s really interesting to hear the slightly different takes on various genres, such as when you hear traditional ethnic instruments in modern pop music recordings from Asia or Africa. 

All About Lily Chou-Chou

I watched this a few weeks before we watched Departures in class, and while they are completely unrelated thematically, they are both Japanese films that I really enjoyed. Without spoiling too much, All About Lily Chou-Chou is about the lives of Japanese youth as they go through life and deal with social pressure, stress, bullying and other issues that plague teenagers in modern day society. The titular Lily Chou-Chou is a singer who is idolized by her fans, and although she does not actually make an appearance in the movie, she is integral to the plot, as she is the connecting thread that ties much of the movie together. While the movie is obviously dramatized, it was a very raw and real look into the social problems of Japanese teenagers.

It also has a great soundtrack with lots of Debussy. I love Debussy. 

Animation

One interesting fact that I discovered a few days ago is that in Japan, anime films now account for 60% of Japan’s entire film production. I find it really interesting that animation reached such popularity in Japan, such that the medium is now so big that it has become one of the main forms of entertainment. This is in direct contrast to American cartoons, which are still viewed only as a form of entertainment for children, and there are very few animators and cartoonists who work to cater to a more mature audience. Despite the fact that there have been gritty American comic books geared toward older readers for a long time now, western animation just cannot seem to shake the label of children’s cartoons. Even CGI movies from Pixar and Dreamworks Studios, the most popular form of mainstream animation, while having elements that can appeal to adults (The Incredibles, Up), are still mainly seen as entertainment for children and marketed that way as well, with vibrant colors and a relatively “straightforwardly happy” plot (I don’t mean cliché, but there are very few, if any, examples of tragedy or horror in western animation, for instance). Although Japanese animation was inspired by early Disney movies and western children’s cartoons, it somehow developed into a more diverse storytelling medium that is used alongside more traditional live action movies. I think since animation was a newer medium in terms of development in Japan, more people were willing to experiment, whereas in the West, the tradition of children’s cartoons had become so normal that animators don’t often even consider the idea of trying to use the medium. I think it’d be interesting, although I’m not sure how plausible it is in our society, if western animation began to broaden its range of genres as a result of Japanese animation, which was in turn initially inspired by western filmmakers in France, Germany, US and Russia. 

Foreign Films

Foreign films. I’ve always loved watching them because they generally offer a different perspective or feature some interesting perspective on life or society that isn’t often present in Hollywood and other mainstream Western movies. While I’m most familiar with Asian cinema, just based on random anecdotal evidence of the other foreign movies I’ve seen, they really do offer something that feels unique and refreshing compared to the average blockbuster. I personally think this is generally a combination of (generally) a smaller budget, and therefore filmmakers need to make do with limited resources and come up with other creative ways that do not involve some of the high cost CGI and special effects that Hollywood movies often have. Again this may be observational bias, but most of the foreign films that I’ve seen are noticeably lower budget – not in a way that detracts from the experience, but they are often much less flashy than the movies that are shown in large theaters. I see this often in American independent films as well, where filmmakers often try to craft an intricate or compelling plot, or try to push social boundaries in some way instead of trying to make a film to appeal to a wide audience and make a profit. In some ways, I think it’s the fact that these films feel like they are more of an honest effort to tell a story for the sake of telling a good story, rather than for making a large amount of money for the studies that funded them. Obviously this isn’t true across the board – there is plenty of “mindless entertainment” in developed countries with a significant film industry as well (Hong Kong, India, Japan, etc.), but I’ve noticed many of the foreign movies that I’ve watched tend to fit this pattern. 

Shanghai Pt. 2

Like I’ve said before, my first trip back was just incredibly disorienting, since everything was so new and different to me. Aside from the language issue which I touched on in the last post, my surroundings in China were also very very different from what I was used to in the United States. The streets were a lot dirtier, and it was pretty obvious that not littering and taking care of them was not a priority at all. The living conditions for most of the family friends that we visited ranged from relatively nice apartments to some chairs and furniture in single concrete room. In some of the dirtier alleys and “living areas,” people often urinated in the streets and just let it run wherever. This was because, back when I was five, some places didn’t have plumbing or outhouses, and so many people resorted to using pots or going in the street. These small back alleys often smelled due to how often people used them, and it seemed that no area was off limits as long as it wasn’t in public view. The interesting thing is, the last time I returned to visit Shanghai four years ago, I noticed that it had been cleaned up a lot, and that it reminded me a lot more of a large American city and not the dirty alleys that I remembered from ten years before. I had heard that China was industrializing and modernizing incredibly quickly, especially in large economic centers such as Shanghai, but it was amazing to see the huge difference with my own eyes.

Shanghai Pt. 1

I want to start this blog with probably my first “memorable” intercultural communications experience. When I was around four or five, my parents took me to Shanghai for the first time that I remember. While my parents also took me to Thailand and (I think) Vietnam before then, I didn’t remember much from those times, and I didn’t need to interact with anyone either. In China, I had to talk to strangers in a completely different language for the first time, instead of hiding behind my parents. When in China, all my relatives assumed that I knew how to speak Shanghainese (my memory is very fuzzy and I may be completely wrong, but I had never actually spoken it before, though I could understand it), while I was too shy to reply during the first week. Once, in a department store, I remember I was too shy to ask where the bathroom was, even though I’m pretty sure I knew how to speak Shanghainese well enough, and ended up gesturing to people until someone figured out what I meant. I was there for I think a little longer than a month, so in that time I basically spent all my time with my family. My parents lived in a hotel, but my grandma and I lived with my aunt and cousin, so I got to know them pretty well. By the middle of the vacation I got comfortable enough to start speaking Chinese in front of my family, but I was still too shy to really say anything in public. The most surprising thing for me about this trip is that I’d never thought of myself as a shy kid before, but going to China was just so different to me that I felt totally overwhelmed for a while.