Funeral Parade of Roses

Watched Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) directed by Toshio Matsumoto for Monday's LGBTQ+ film group. I found a great discussion in this episode of The Magic Lantern podcast.

Mentioned in the podcast: 

-the film's first title card is a quote from Baudelaire;

-Kubrick cited this film as an influence on Clockwork Orange;

-Peter, the actor who plays Eddie, played the role of the Fool in Kurosawa's Ran;

-roses appear throughout. Bara means rose, but is also an epithet for a gay man that has been reclaimed, and is now a shorthand term for a type of gay manga.

-the eyelashes!

-the interviewees resist collapsing identity into the interviewer's narrow terms. We all wish there were more to the interviews;

-"gay bars have changed"  

-drugs, performance art, protests, riots, art, film-making, all in Shinjuku;

-street scenes, shot from rooftops and street-level, including some performance pieces, and Eddie and friends presenting as women and encountering harassment and fights with girl gangsters;

-a long flashback within a long flashback, the narrative circles back on itself a couple of times;

-Oedipus inverted;

-"All definitions of cinema are erased. All the doors are now open."

-gentle caricature of the group of artsy kids;

-Eddie putting on her make-up, such a great scene! but echoes the scene when she put on lipstick and was kissing the mirror, and was attacked by her mother;

-"dangerous deviant" or gay kid as killer is subsumed by the Oedipus plot--or is it?;

-Oedipus's crime was pride. What is Eddie's? Yes, she killed, but is she being punished for being gay?

-Leda's suicide, laying herself out as a bride;

-Gonda discovers the photo and kills himself;

-absurd cut to movie critic: "Sayonara, sayonara, sayonara!"

-it's a full-body film!

 

 

Shinjuku Boys and Dream Girls

Following up on last night's discussion of Queer Japan, I watched the documentary Shinjuku Boys (1995, Kim Longinotto and Jano Williams) which presents the lives of  three FTM transgender people who work at a onabe host club in Shinjuku. It's a lovely film whose subjects speak candidly about their lives and work. Longinotto also directed Dream Girls, a documentary on the Takarazuka Revue School, an all-female musical theater company where women play both male and female roles.

Queer Japan

For another Meet-Up film discussion group, I watched the documentary film Queer Japan (dir. Graham Kolbeins 2019).

It gives very broad and rich survey of today's LGBTQ world in Japan, featuring interviews with at least three dozen people, representing a variety of experiences and identities.  It is somewhat less satisfying in terms of contextualizing the particularities of same-sex relations in Japan, or connecting today's queer practices to existing cross-dressing dramatic traditions like kabuki or takarazuka, or to the history of same-sex practices among samurai and monks, but I really enjoyed it and learned a lot.

Here's an interview with the director Kolbeins and producer Anne Isshi:

The Japanese language itself organizes gender through speech practices in a highly complex fashion, that is both dynamic and evolving. Negotiating the many subject pronouns and how they indicate nuances of gendered speech is a challenge to Japanese language-learners.  Gendered speech patterns exist on a spectrum from feminine extreme patterns to a masculine extreme, in  pronoun use, vocabulary, intonation, and sentence endings. These are not rigid rules for how all men and women should speak; instead they can be understood as situations and ideas about how men and women can speak, and be positioned in relation to ideas about gender (as well as age, degree of familiarity, formality, relative social status, etc).

Our group wrestled with the fact that the film is made from a Western perspective for a primarily non-Japanese audience, and most of us have relatively little experience with Japanese language and culture, so it is difficult to recognize how much we are missing. Since the film interviewed people about how they name their experiences and identities, we saw how some terms are adaptations of English terms, but when Japanese terms were used, we couldn't see from the subtitles what we were missing in translations. This article gives a thorough overview of Japanese gender and sexuality terms, and gives an idea of how they do and don't map onto foreign ideas.

Anthony Bourdain goes to Sapporo, in northern Japan, to eat miso ramen (from his show No Reservations).


Another NHK video on ramen, this time a serious ramen shop tasting tour:

All about ramen (ラーメン) Journeys in Japan documentary

All you want to know about Japanese ramen in this documentary by NHK World.

Sagamihara

When I was five, our family left El Paso, Texas, on the first stage of our journey to Japan, where my father was to be stationed. We drove to California. I don't remember the drive, but I do remember that we stopped at the San Diego Zoo and Disneyland on our way to San Francisco. What must it have been like to have three kids under six in the back seat of the car? 

From San Francisco, we took ship to Japan, a two-week trip with a stop in Hawaii. The ship was  the USNS Gen. Hugh J. Gaffey, one of many ships in the Military Sea Transport Service (MSTS). This essay by Tom Barry on the JapanBrats blog includes the memories of many kids who made the trip with their families during those years. I also remember the spartan conditions, the boredom, the cramped cabins (I think we were all sick at one point), but also crossing the International Dateline, seeing flying fish, and arriving at Yokohama, welcomed by a band.

 When we arrived, housing wasn't ready for us yet, so we lived for a few months in temporary housing at the Sagami Depot. I remember the rows of tanks and half-tracks parked on the other side of the fence. We slept in a bunk bed, which was exciting, but at least one of us fell out. I had my sixth birthday there. 

We then moved to Sagamihara Dependent Housing Area, which was part of the military complex supporting Camp Zama, where my father was working in the hospital as a surgeon.  Here we see the base as an island of green in a highly urbanized area, but I remember farmland.


According to my father, in the first two years we were there, it was like working in a small town, but with the escalation of the war in Viet Nam, the number of wounded being transported was such that the 100 beds were increased to 500, and three other hospitals were built, to receive the thousands of casualties that were to arrive in the next few years. 

Of course, I knew almost nothing of this. What I remember is my first grade teacher, Miss Bell, whom I adored.  The Snack Bar had a jukebox and hamburgers. We loved an excuse to eat there.
 

 Teachers from the Elementary School. We lived next door to Mrs. Allen.There were three kids: Sharon, who was twelve, was like a goddess to me. Debbie Cynthia, who was my age, beat me up. Billy, who was younger, was, according to my mother, a brat.

 I learned to swim in this pool, where we spent hours and hours in the summer.

 

"Wamono" by HIFANA

Thanks to insomnia, I caught this tweet by Roger Ebert to a set of Japanese hip hop videos. That led me to a video by a duo that calls itself HIFANA. "Wamono" can translated as "traditional Japanese things" so the visuals here play on a variety of images and practices that would be seen a Japanese and non-Western. They blend them with their hip-hop virtual personae and contemporary Japanese visual vocabulary, in a little story of a fishing trip that turns into something else:

HIFANA's "Wamono"

traces of Japanese sixties pop culture

From about 1963-1968, my family lived in Japan where my father, then a doctor in the U.S. Army, was stationed at Camp Zama.
Some sounds and melodies are imprinted from those years.
"Sakura sakura" (played with many variations on the koto by Yoshie Sakai) is a tune everyone knows.


We lived in a house in the Sagamihara Housing Area. There were lots of trees, and the post was small enough that we could walk the few blocks to school. I went to first-fifth grades there.
Although we were in Japan, we lived in the Army. Think "Leave it to Beaver," airlifted and dropped into the Japanese countryside. Sagamihara was a small town then; now it has been absorbed into greater Tokyo. Officers (doctors were automatically officers) had bigger and nicer houses than the enlisted men. We kids and wives were "dependents" and our entire social life was contained by the post. Those families who chose not to live in Army housing were said to be living "on the economy." I thought "the economy" was the land outside the fence around our housing area.

There was a commissary where we did our shopping, a pool where we spent most of the summer, a library, a movie theater, a "snack bar" with a juke box and hamburgers, an Officer's Club where we could eat steak. Even though we had relatively little contact with Japanese people or culture, we did watched Japanese TV in black and white: samurai movies, army movies, monster movies, variety shows, cartoons, sumo wrestling. Since it was all in Japanese, we made up the stories to go with the images. For a while, we had a confused idea that any dueling samurai was "a victor."

One program I that I loved was a cartoon called "Obake no Q" about a ghost named Q-Taro who was afraid of dogs. The theme song has been stuck in my head for decades (there were later versions, but this is the original). I can't believe I managed to find it on YouTube!


This song ("Ue o Muite Aruko"), sung by Kyu Sakamoto, was a huge cross-over hit (meaning Americans actually heard of it). We had the record.

I also remember seeing some of the early Group Sounds bands on TV shows. I was especially impressed by The Spiders.

BROKEN WEAR!

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

LOLOLOLOL!

Eight images that amaze you

Three years ago, a blogger tagged me with a meme, asking for eight images that amazed me, or was it eight amazing images? I made a post that included this image of a reader, one I used to have on a postcard, and which now serves as my avatar for Disqus comments.

I should do that exercise again, but with eight different images. Any one else up for it?

Nine centuries of Japanese Art at the MIA.

Today is the last day of the exhibit of John C Weber collection of Japanese art at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Because I had such a great experience with the San Francisco Asian Art museum exhibit in March, I've been meaning to see it. The MIA's holdings in Asian art are quite rich, and there is now more exhibit space for Japanese art, with six galleries added since the building was expanded in 2006.

There are so many other great exhibits ongoing at the MIA, including the natural history paintings from Suriname of Maria Sybilla Merian, but we are just going to see this one because we have to do some shopping for pants. Someone has grown three inches in the last year, and it wasn't me. I am now one of those moms who is shorter than her lanky daughter. We wear the same shoe size, but she doesn't like any of my shoes, for which I am thankful.

Two shows of Japanese art

Some years ago, the building that used to be San Francisco's Main Library was transformed into the Asian Art Museum, to house the collection that had been so cramped at the old De Young. We went to see an exhibit called "Drama and Desire"--two rooms of Japanese paintings from the 18th and 19th century "Floating World," the pleasure quarters of the Shogun's city Edo (Tokyo) where courtesans, geishas, and kabuki theater performers.


Apparently, in the 1880s, a rich doctor from Boston went to Japan where he bought a boatload of paintings. They went straight to the basement of the Fine Arts Museum, which didn't start to catalogue them until fifteen years ago. The colors are so vivid. This is my favorite: the energy of the musicians is palpable.

In one room, there was a parental advisory up because of the display of rolls with paintings of sexual cavorting, somewhat euphemistically called "suggestive pictures." In fact, they are casually explicit. Many of the subjects are kabuki performers, scenes from plays, images of people at the theater. When I get back home, I'll have to see the show at the MIA, the Weber collection of Japanese art.

Dr. John C. Weber, an avid New York collector, is lending more than 100 masterworks acquired during the last decade, when many important and rare objects entered the marketplace. The Weber collection premiered in 2006 at the Museum of East Asian Art, National Museums in Berlin, and was subsequently shown at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. As the exhibition’s final venue, the MIA offers museum-goers one final opportunity to savor these stunning works of art.


With a dazzling display of hanging scrolls, folding screens, sculpture, lacquers, textiles, and ceramics, Arts of Japan encompasses more than 900 years of technical and artistic innovation by Japanese artists. From opulent to quietly sublime, each object is distinguished by its exceptional artistry and breathtaking design.

luna lunera, cascabelera

The Moon passed in front of the sun today. This partial solar eclipse was photographed from South America. It wasn't a total eclipse; because the moon was far enough away from the earth that it could not completely block the sun, it looks as if the sun makes a ring around the moon, so it's called an annular eclipse. NASA's "Astronomy Picture of the Day" site has a wonderful photo of a similar event from last year. It's easy to search their archive.

Looking for images of moon goddesses, I came across this post on Moleskinerie with an image of Ixchel, Maya goddess of the moon. The post was actually about a fun site called the Godchecker! ("your guide to the gods"). You can search for gods or goddesses by topic or by pantheon.
Moleskinerie is a treasure trove; it also had a post that led me to the The New York Public Library's Digital Gallery . What a gorgeous collection of hundreds of thousands of images from their holdings, Here are some from a Japanese book called "100 Aspects of the Moon", woodblock prints by the artist Yoshitoshi. .