Changing impressions of Japan

As the semester is about to enter its final week, the time has come to look back and consider how my impressions of Japan might have changed during these past few months.

There are a lot of things actually, but the first thing that leaps to mind is the people. As my language skills have improved (they're still bad) I have become more confident about talking to Japanese that I meet on my walks, and the response has surpassed my expectations. People are overwhelmingly kind, generous and tolerant of my mistake-ridden sentences, and they do their best to answer my often strange questions.

When I came to Japan for the first time some years ago, I thought that Japanese people were supposed to be reserved, but that hasn't been my actual experience at all. This openness might be a Kansai thing, as a lot of Japanese have told me, but I feel like I've been treated the same way in Sapporo, Tokyo and Fukuoka.



Another revelation has been how messy Japan can sometimes be. The rock garden at Ryoan-ji is very stylistically pure and peaceful, but it's not terribly representative of a lot of the Japan that I see around me. The Japan that is cluttered with signs, wires, rusting steel and scruffy-looking apartment buildings.






Before I came here I also expected that Japan would be very new and high-tech. I had read for example, that in big Japanese cities the average lifespan of a building is only around 25 years; that everything is quickly replaced with something newer. In many areas I'm sure that's true, but there are also many examples of the opposite phenomenon - old buildings and stores hanging on. And these places hardly seem to change at all, at least on the outside. They carry the same sign they put up in 1982 or whenever, even if it's worn, faded and totally out of fashion.

I like that. In my home country, the owners would be nervously concerned about what signals they would be sending out if their signs weren't new and pretty. There's an apparent lack of caring about appearances that you often come across outside the major shopping areas that I find refreshing.




This goes for information signs too. I don't know how many rusted or weather-bleached signs I've seen on the streets here. In Sweden they would have been thrown away ages ago, but here they still serve their function. One unit of sign is still one unit of sign, even after wear and tear has made it barely legible anymore, it seems.




I could go on and on, but I need to wrap this up. However, I can't finish without a quick mention of food. When I came to Japan my favorite Japanese food was sushi, but then I really couldn't get much else back in Sweden. Then it was katsudon for a while, but since my time in Sapporo there's one type of food that always fills me with a warm ball of happiness, and this passion has only increased during my semester in Kansai. I am talking of course about ...

PET versus pet

PET bottles. Made of plastic derived from oil, they have some fantastic properties. They can contain fluids with no leakage, they are light, transparent, sturdy and extremely durable. Old ones can be turned into fleece sweaters and with some creative thinking they can be metamorphosed into all manner of other practical things.

They may also be magical.

Something I'm sure many people have noticed and wondered over here in Japan is the sudden appearance on a side street somewhere of a cluster of large, water-filled water bottles secured to the base of a lamp or utility post, or perhaps a group of them stretching single-file along the sidewalk. I've even seen a children's sandbox entirely surrounded by what must have been at least eighty of them once.



Naturally, I've wondered about their purpose. One early theory was a sort of futile-looking, heavily localized fire prevention scheme. Take out those little flames before they spread! Because of their frequent cohabitation with garden plants watering also came up, but was equally quickly dismissed as an explanation.

When I asked around I did get wind of an animal connection.


(Culprit in action. Note broken-down countermeasure in foreground.)

For a long time I let the matter rest, but the other day I finally decided that enough is enough, I must settle this issue. So I went out on a few fact-finding missions in Hirakata and Kyoto. This is what I found.




"They are there to protect the pots from wild cats, there are many of them in Japan," a 60-something woman tells me. "The cats leave their うんち (unchi - shit, feces) in the pots," she explains with a giggle and puts her hand to her mouth. Apparently, the rumors I had heard were correct, the pet bottles are supposed to keep the cats away. How exactly this is supposed to work she doesn't know, and neither does another woman passing by that she enlists for further assistance. "But it's definitely against cats," woman number two agrees.

I can see how that fits with the gardens, but what about the lampposts and installations like the one below?



"They are meant to keep away cats and dogs," explains a 50ish woman that I stop on the street by the above PET altar. She doesn't know exactly how it's supposed to work either, but she does have an interesting theory. Perhaps the bottles' ability to reflect sunlight can scare pets off, cats mostly. Similar to shiny things you hang in trees to keep ravens and other birds away, she suggests.

I can relate to that, since you can now and then see old CD:s dangling from trees in Sweden in an attempt to save some cherries for pie-making. Still seems a little bit like magic though.

She also adds that this is something mainly older people believe in. "Even though PET bottles are new things, the tradition goes a long way back I think."



The heavily protected lampposts now make sense, because what are posts like that to dogs? Message boards for writing on. Fluently.

But does a dog really care all that much about where it does it's posting, I wonder?

Also, I presume that wild dogs are not a major feature of the Japanese urban fauna, but pet dogs on leashes certainly are. So, in order to keep dogs from chatting all over the utility post outside your door, it might be necessary to ward off not the dog itself, but it's controlling owner.

To keep people away however, it seems that you need to combine PET magic with something even more powerful.



This wonderful lamppost I photographed in Kyoto's Demachiyanagi area. Those white symbols look like shrine gates, don't they? In fact, that's just what they are, according to a helpful late 30s woman. "It used to be quite common that people would urinate in public in Japan in the old days," she explained to me in English. "When Japan became more modern, people started feeling that this was not very nice, so they started working to get rid of the habit." Marking previously urination-friendly places with shrine symbols was one creative device used. Who would want to call down damnation on himself for peeing on something holy?

It would seem that someone in Kyoto is still using the method, now adapted to keep dogs and their owners walking right on by.



So, there seems to be a consensus among people I have talked to that PET bottles are deployed to ward off cats and dogs. I have searched for a scientific answer to how this is achieved, but so far this search has been unsuccessful. If anyone else has further knowledge to share, I would love to see it.

Of course, dogs urinating on lampposts is not a laughing matter, as the City of York Council can attest. According to an online article in The Press, a York newspaper, this British town is having to replace 80 street lights per year because of corrosion to their bases, and dog urine is one of the causes. Apparently, neither steel nor concrete can resist its awesome power. Leicester City Council reports the same pressing problem.

But fear not. There may be a solution, and I am proud to announce that it comes from my native Sweden. If PET bottles should prove to be effective only in Japan, some d-level celebrity has taken to promoting Swedish inventor Lennart Järlebro's rubber dog urinals, or so the celebrity press is eagerly reporting anyway. These urinals can, when attached to lampposts, prolong said lampposts' lifespan by up to fifteen years, the inventor claims. Go Sweden!

No pictures of this rubber contraption can be found anywhere, perchance because the product hasn't received a patent yet, but this story from Sweden seems to confirm its existence. Those in great need should keep track of this page, which may or may not be the company page of the celebrity press world famous Swedish inventor.

Abandoned vending machines

I have long had a fascination with abandoned places. Old factories, hospitals, hotels, waste plants, private houses, even entire neighborhoods or towns are sometimes abandoned to the elements, left to slowly decay as nature takes it's toll on them. Here in Japan there is plenty to be seen, as evidenced by this site that a friend directed me to. While I haven't been able to go on any expeditions to abandoned sites in Japan so far, I have discovered a new (for me) sub-genre for the hobby - abandoned vending machines.

While walking near Makino a while back, I came upon a cool little cubic building that looked like an abandoned snack bar (snack bars being a Japanese phenomena worthy of its own entry at some point). I stopped to take some pictures.



Around the corner from the entrance though, I found something that intrigued me even more - an old vending machine for hot and cold drinks. Now, vending machines are of course legion in Japan - there's 1 for every 23 people according to an article at www.japan-guide.com. But this one was clearly from another era and it had been a long, long time since anybody received any liquid satisfaction from it.



Exactly when it was abandoned is naturally hard to say, but we can get pretty close by looking at the sample cans left inside.






Asahi began selling "Nova" coffee (top picture, left) in September 1986 and the name was changed to "J.O." in February 1990. I have to rely on Wikipedia's entry for Asahi soft drinks for this information unfortunately, but I was able to confirm that the famous football player Diego Maradona did in fact do advertising for Nova coffee in the 1980s, as Wikipedia states. "Nova is here!"


(Pictured borrowed from www.advertisingarchives.co.uk)

So, this vending machine was probably abandoned by its owner somewhere during the last years of the 1980s. It has been standing there for at least twenty years. This is one of many things that I find fascinating about Japan - old things are sometimes left around, not always swept away in the latest redesign or renovation as they are in Sweden.

In fact, this machine is like a mini-museum to Japanese vending machine history. It kind of makes me wish someone would take care of it. Most of these drinks probably don't even exist anymore - well, except for Pepsi. And apparently Bireley's may still be available in Japan.



Since that time, I have begun finding more abandoned vending machines on my walks. Perhaps I have some selective perception going on. Anyway, here are a couple of other examples. I'm especially curious about what the game vending machine had to offer.





By the way, I cannot let this post end without mentioning Ikeda san, a Japanese man who has been taking pictures of the same vending machine in Hokkaido for the last five years ... every day. He documents the changes in advertising and drinks offered very carefully. On days when he is away on business trips or just can't go for any reason, his wife takes pictures for him. That's a good wife for you. You can read about him in English here and check out his blog (all Japanese) here.

Adventure Hotel Chapel Coconuts

I spent most of the 1990s in Uppsala, an old university town and power center in Sweden. Uppsala is situated in the middle of a big plain of flat farmland, almost devoid of distinguishing landmarks. Putting some distance between yourself and the town only two features stand out, rising above the low city skyline - the Royal Castle and the Cathedral. Representing worldly and heavenly power, their creators new what they were doing, finding the only hill in the area to build upon. Those two buildings dominate the city, they project their influence over it. They tell us something about what kind of place Uppsala is - or at least what it used to be.

Having spent a lot of time walking around Hirakata, I have come across a building that has the same dominating grip on the surrounding skyline. Easily visible, day or night, it sits atop its hill in resplendent majesty.



At night it is lit up like a beacon. On a sunny day its walls glow bright pink. I am of course talking about the eclectically named Adventure Hotel Chapel Coconuts.



With its palm tree-lined entrances, lively color scheme and exotic bird theme, not to mention its telling price list and room pictures, the Chapel Coconuts is not just any ordinary hotel. Rather, it's a prime example of something many Westerners find fascinatingly curious - the Japanese love hotel.

Before I came to Japan for the first time in 2006, I read a couple of the standard travel guides and checked a lot of web pages. Love hotels often came up in the "only in Japan!" category of must-sees. But I got the feeling from my readings that love hotels were mostly a thing that belonged in the past, a sort of service establishment that was in decline.



How wrong I was. As far as I can see, they are very much alive. Having spent some time walking around Tokyo, Sapporo and Osaka, I have come across gaudy love hotel districts in all three cities, seemingly doing brisk business. According to a January article on The Japan Times Online web site, love hotels are considered such a good investment that there are even special love hotel funds available to investors. As one such investor is quoted as saying, "It's related to one of the three biggest basic human desires, so it's recession-resistant." The article also mentions that some 37 000 of these places are estimated to exist in Japan.

Short-stay hotels are not something that only exists in Japan of course. I have come across them in other places, like Mexico and the U.S. Those were in pretty seedy areas though, and seemed to my untrained eye to be very much geared towards prostitution. That doesn't seem to be the case to the same degree with the Japanese version.



Granted, there were one or two unaccompanied women standing around in a Kyobashi love hotel area when I walked through there a couple of weeks ago, and I have navigated through a tiny, labyrinthine block of love hotels in Iriya, Tokyo, with neon-colored houses and a middle-aged woman waiting around every corner. But a recent Saturday night visit to Namba yielded none of that, only several young couples walking hand-in-hand through the well-delineated block of hotels, checking out the different menus before disappearing into their establishment of choice.

Personally, I've only concerned myself with the outsides of love hotels so far, enjoying their often outrageous design. If Japanzine's very information-packed article (as re-printed on the Quirky Japan Homepage) on love hotels is to be believed though, the insides of these places are changing, away from the garish and crazy towards the more discretely stylish. Giant mirrors, revolving beds, vibrating chairs and weird theme rooms may soon be a thing of the past in most places.



So perhaps it's time to go before these hotels all get gentrified. For the curious, Japanzine has plenty of recommendations and the Osaka area seems especially fruitful. Beware that some of the specific hotel information appears outdated. A quick search showed that JZ favorites such as Gang Snowman and Belles des Belles have already been re-modeled. You can also check out this love hotel listing, "IN ENGLISH!", that looks to be up-to-date.

In the meantime, Adventure Hotel Chapel Coconuts does not seem to have given up on offering the fantastic rather than the sophisticated. The website proudly proclaims that it re-opened in March after a period of renovation, still boasting brightly colored rooms and a sort of theme park ground floor with a giant snake's head and a grotto feel. And the exotic birds and dolphins are all still there.



For a Canadian honeymooning couple's report on their stay in a love hotel, see this news article from The Globe and Mail: "There's nothing like standing in a hotel devoted exclusively to sex and staring at a black-lit mural of humpback whales to give you the sensation that you are in a different country."

The latest Japanzine Magazine, with articles in English about what's going on in Japan, can be downloaded for free here.

Aiming to Impress

So, this week's assignment is to compare and contrast two photographers that at first glance may seem to have very little in common - Annie Leibovitz and James Nachtwey.

Annie Leibovitz is considered by some the most famous celebrity photographer in America, perhaps the world, and it is difficult to argue with that when she was the one chosen to shoot the Obama family portrait last fall, as well as the Queen of Britain in 2007, not to mention every celebrity known to (Western) man and woman. As we could see in the PBS documentary about her, Annie Liebovitz: Life through a Lens, she is well-known for her work for Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair and foremost for her many "iconic" - that word appears all the time when you read about her - portraits of various celebrities. She often uses elaborate sets or clothes or ploy ideas for her arranged pieces, although those are not the only types of pictures she takes, and I am in no way doing justice to her here. She is considered to be a great portrait photographer and there's no denying that her photos have had a huge impact on popular culture in the Western world. She's been designated a living legend by the Library of Congress, for chrissake!


(Nicole Kidman. Picture borrowed from www.pbs.org, 2010-03-15)


(Martina Navratilova. Picture borrowed from www.pbs.org, 2010-03-23)

James Nachtwey takes photographs of a radically different kind. He is by some considered the greatest war photographer around, moving from one crisis to another with his camera. He has won a number of awards for his work, including Magazine Photographer of the Year in the US a number of times. The documentary we watched about him, War Photographer, begins with a quote by legendary war photographer Robert Capa that clearly is meant to sum up Nachtwey's attitude: "If you're pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough."


(West Bank 2000, Palestinians fighting the Israeli Army. Picture borrowed from www.jamesnachtwey.com, 2010-03-15)

Yet, after viewing many of Nachtwey's pictures, it appears to me that there is a strong aesthetic side to them as well. In many cases, they are beautiful pictures in themselves, even though the subject matter is painful and violent. Just look at the colors in the West Bank picture above - the scarf and the flames against the smoky blue sky, the dirt and the white wall, the shadows stretching long and the young man's matching clothes. Leibovitz could not have posed it more strikingly however hard she tried, with her set designers and camera loaders.

Or see the picture below and compare it to the picture of Nicole Kidman. Isn't there a certain kinship between them, a shared eye perhaps?


(Afghanistan, 1996. Mourning a brother killed by a Taliban rocket. Picture borrowed from www.jamesnachtwey.com, 2010-03-15)

Perhaps, as a photographer, you can't help watching the world in picture frames? Perhaps you cannot stop looking for the beautiful shot even if, like James Nachtwey, you are working in the midst of chaos and misery?

This, for me, doesn't lessen the effect of Nachtwey's pictures, I much prefer them to Liebovitz', probably because there to me is something real behind them. I think Annie Leibovitz sums it up very well herself in Life through a Lens, when talking about her short stint as a war photographer in Sarajevo:

"After that, what side Barbra Streisand needed to be photographed from didn't seem so important."

A Pleasant Encounter in Kyobashi

One of many things that I can't seem to stop taking pictures of here in Japan is old signs. Preferably rusty, and preferably still in use. On a recent walk through the seedier parts of Kyobashi, a neighbourhood not very far from Osaka Castle in Osaka (see map [pdf]), I came upon a nice one and started taking pictures.



I soon noticed a man who seemed to be interested in what I was doing - slowing down, passing by, looking back, eventually turning around at the next crossing to head back my way. When I was done taking pictures, he came up and asked "Are you German?", in an accented but understandable version of the language of Goethe. My German isn't very good, so I explained in Japanese that I'm not but that I come from a neighbouring country, and we started talking.

It turns out that Okada-san has been to Germany five times and even spent an extended period there as a foreign student a long time ago. His major was Philosophy of Law (or jurisprudence) and according to him, if that's your specialization, then Germany is the place to be. I take it that going there must have been a dream come true for him as a young student, visiting places like Heidelberg or Thübingen, famous old university towns that he mentioned with a smile.

When he came back to Japan, Okada-san got a job at a big insurance company teaching law to doctors, and from what I gather, he remained there until he retired. He indicated that he is well over seventy years old by now, but he was very 元気 ("genki", vigorous) for his age. It seems that these days he too likes to walk around with his camera, and he first noticed me because I was taking pictures of weird stuff, like dirty pipes and worn-down signs. So I told him about my passion for unintentional patterns and rusty old things and he laughed and called me 変な男 ("hen na otoko", strange man). We had a great time.

Okada-san's passion is photographing people, so he asked if he could take a picture of me. He lined me up so that the deep shadows under the raised railway tracks and the sunlit side of a building formed a black-and-white background, two separate halves joining neatly behind my head. The picture turned out pretty nice. I should have asked for a copy.

Naturally, I jumped at the chance to get the portrait assignment done, and asked Okada-san to move over to a wall nearby with some interesting pipes. Well, interesting to me anyway. I figured that the uniform colour of the background would lessen the chaotic effect of the pattern.





I quickly took three pictures and would have liked to take more, but I didn't want to impose. Still, I think they turned out okay. I feel like Okada-san's personality shines through in his gestures, his face, the tinted glasses, the pointy beard and the brightly-coloured headphones.

All in all, this little meeting was probably the highlight of the day, even though that part of Kyobashi has many interesting features to point your camera at, not least if you're into signs and debauchery. The usual cheap restaurants and pachinko halls are interspersed with suggestive-looking places with names like Crazy Horse and Honey Dipp's, places that advertise themselves with light signs telling you that 30 minutes of some unspecified activity will set you back 3 000 to 7 000 yen. Walk under the tracks, turn right onto an angled smaller street and there are several rather flashy but seemingly cheap love hotels too.

The place is well worth its own post when I get the time. For now, for more on Kyobashi, here's a nice photostream by jam343 at flickr.

Oh, and for an example of a rusty sign that I would definitely have gone gaga over, see kotoi's post on tips for foreigners, and this well-worn 銭湯 sign ("sento", public bath). Still in use too, it seems.

Growing Your Own in Hirakata

Matoba-san and Omura-san are relaxing in a vegetable garden near a busy Hirakata intersection, no further from a gaudy Pachinko complex than you can easily throw a small steel ball, as I introduce myself and blurt out a few polite phrases in broken Japanese. They kindly take the time to answer my questions, although they ask me not to take any close-ups of their faces.

Both men have lived in Hirakata all their lives and they say the town has changed a lot over the years. There are many new roads, many new houses. "Before, this whole neighbourhood was just fields," explains Matoba-san, a friendly- and robust-looking man in his early sixties.

They have been growing vegetables here for about ten years now and come down to the plot pretty much every day. The vegetables – cabbage, onions, beans, broccoli - are for their own households only.

"It’s just a hobby," says Matoba-san and looks over at his friend. “Something to kill time with at least,” he continues and they both laugh. When I passed by earlier, thinking of questions and working up the courage to approach them, they were also sitting down like they are now, each on his own blue stool, chatting and smoking, letting the garden take care of itself for a while. I get the feeling that clearing weeds is probably only one af many reasons for going there each day.

I want to know what their favourite vegetables are, but they just look at each other and chuckle. "Anything is fine!" declares Omura-san with a wave of his hand. His hair is less gray and he appears to defer a little to his friend. Perhaps this is actually Matoba-san's plot and Omura-san has the one next to it, it never occured to me to ask.

"Is it fun to work in the garden?" I throw out there while trying to think of something better. "Yes," answers Matoba-san, definitely the more talkative of the two. He stops to think. "People can betray you," he continues with a little smile. "But vegetables never do that."

They tell me that in Hirakata you can grow things in the garden more or less all-year round, which to me, coming from a cold Northern country, feels quite remarkable. My parents, eager gardeners themselves who can only work their garden from around April to October, would be very envious indeed.

Before I leave, Matoba-san picks a handful of lemons from the little tree they are sitting under and gives them to me as a parting-gift. When I look back before turning the corner, they are having a smoke again.