And So It Goes

Tokyo Orchid Show, YouTube version

Orchids at the Japan Grand Prix International Orchid Festival in Tokyo on Saturday and Sunday at (of all places) the Tokyo Dome. Which is an indoor baseball stadium. Low-def YouTube version.

Tokyo Orchid Show, Vimeo version

Some of the orchids seen at the Japan Grand Prix International Orchid Festival in Tokyo. High-definition video, I hope.
Tokyo Orchid Show from Calton Bolick on Vimeo.

Snowy Light Show at Tokyo Midtown, YouTube version

The low-def, YouTube version of the light show video:

Snowy Light Show at Tokyo Midtown, Vimeo version

A big snowfall hit Tokyo on Sunday, and I took my video camera to see the effect of snow on the landscape. What I got was an eerily beautiful lightshow at the park behind the Tokyo Midtown development in Roppongi... This is the letterboxed, Quicktime version, supposedly in HD. We'll see.

Snowy Evening at Tokyo Midtown - QT version from Calton Bolick on Vimeo.

More Songs Posts About Buildings and Food

Another late start, as is usual for me on Saturdays. First, I stopped by my old company’s offices in Tamachi to drop off some paperwork – technically, I’m still a part-time employee there, even if it’s one (1) hour a week – passing by a group of Japanese Christmas carolers inside Akabanebashi Station. Not completely fluent – no surprise – and while I have no proof, I suspect this wasn’t a Christian thing, but a hobbyist thing, kind of like people in the U.S. who sing Latin Masses for fun even if they’re not churchgoers.

Paperwork dropped off, I went on to the GA Gallery in Yoyogi to see another architectural show. The GA Gallery is the bookstore/exhibition space for a publisher of big glossy books and monographs on modernist architecture – in a small modernist building, of course – and they regularly put on exhibitions displaying models, conceptual drawings, and presentation posters for contemporary projects and proposals. A few months ago, for example, they had one on the latest work of French architect Jean Nouvel, highlighting his designs for the huge new Quai Branly Museum in Paris and the new Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. Today, it was a catch-all covering recent proposals/projects by modernist Japanese architects. This included a competition entry proposal by architect Arata Isozaki for a massive mixed-use development project in Ho Chi Minh City (aka Saigon), Vietnam. The project, called the Diamond Island New Urban Quarter Development, I quite liked the look of, including the look of how some of the residential units were stacked on top of it each in oddly overlapping ways.¹

I headed back to Yoyogi Station and did my biweekly browsing of the magazine rack at the big Kinokuniya Books nearby (bought three) and browsed the travel guides for Italy – I’m considering a Spring vacation there – and by the time I was ready to leave it was dinnertime and I was hungry. I crossed the pedestrian bridge to check out the new Krispy Kreme doughnut shop on the other side, maybe to buy a snack or a box to bring to the office on Monday but it was still jampacked with an incredibly long line.  Still, the sign on the door said they open at 7 AM, so if I really wanted a doughnut, I should come back early Monday morning as a long detour on the way to work.

So, wanting dinner and not wanting to wait until I got home, I headed back in the direction of the GA Gallery, to check out a place I’d passed earlier, a French bistro calling itself Bistro d’Artemis. It’s small stand-alone building – rare enough in this densely built urban center – tucked on an odd-sized lot under a highway not far from Yoyogi Station. Maybe 20 seats total, informal-looking, open kitchen, windows and walls covered with an assortment of authentic-looking bistro signs, menu in French. Seeing this had given me a bit of a craving to try cassoulet², so, stymied in my attempt to buy a doughnut, I went back for that. You might ask, “A choice between some sugar-laden American fat bombs and what is probably authentic (this being Japan, probably disturbingly so) French bistro food? You had to think about this?” Yeah yeah, I know.

Inside the Bistro d’Artemis, it was very Gallic – though I don’t know if the average Paris bistro has a four-meter (15-foot) tall glass-enclosed wine rack with attached ladder built into one wall. In any case, I ordered what I believe was some variant of Navy Bean Soup (as I say, the menu was in French) steak tartar, and cassoulet, along with a small carafe of red house wine. I’d never had steak tartar (it was good) and the cassoulet was pretty much how I’d remembered it. Of course, I’ll need to run further experiments to be sure, or maybe I can try some of their other specialties, like boudin noir (blood sausage, if I recollect, but my French is more than a little suspect). I'll have to bring my friend Sonja, who is very much into French food, being, you know, French.³  I'm sure she'll love it.

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Notes:
¹I looked it up when I got home, and sadly, it looks like the developers rejected Isozaki's proposal in favor of a much blander proposal by a German architect named Albert Speer. No, not THAT German architect named Albert Speer: this one is his son. Speer the Younger’s much duller proposal for the project, in my opinion, looks like it would fit in, say, Berlin – East Berlin, that is, before the Berlin Wall. Blah.

²A cassoulet is ”a rich, slow-cooked bean stew or casserole originating in the southwest of France, containing meat (typically pork sausages, pork, goose, duck, and sometimes mutton), pork skin (couennes) and white haricot beans” says Wikipedia.  The first and only time I had ever tried this was during my vacation in Paris, and I was still unsure about how authentic it was. If that sounds strange (“How could you be worried about whether you got authentic French food in FRANCE?!?”), it’s because the cassoulet I had was frozen.

Really. Short version: while in Paris, I was listening with my iPod to an episode of the radio show This American Life (previously recorded, of course) featuring an American expatriate named David Sedaris who’d moved to Paris to be with his lover, not because of any inherent love of the place. In fact, he bragged that he’d never been to any of the obvious landmarks such as the Louvre (“Why go to the only place in Paris that won’t let you smoke?”) – which struck me as a really annoying reverse snobbery, but neverthemind. In the course of the show, Sedaris mentioned the Pantheon. Nope, never had been inside, but he knew about it because it was across the street from a frozen-food store he frequented.

Now, it so happened that a few years ago I had heard a radio news story about a relatively new chain of stores in Paris that sold frozen foods – but high-quality frozen versions of classic French dishes, or so the report had it. I filed it away mentally, but had no recollection of the name of the store or where to find one – now, with Sedaris’ mention, I now had a landmark and knew exactly where to find one: across the street from the Pantheon, just down the road from my rented apartment in the 5th. So late one afternoon during one of my rambles I aimed myself in that direction.

The Pantheon, it turned out, was fairly large, so “across the street” covered a LOT of territory, meaning that I had to almost completely circle the Pantheon to find it. But there it was: Picard, a modern and spacious store with wide aisles and nothing but frozen-food cases. I went in and browsed, but since the store also had one entrance and one exit (through the cashier stands), I felt somewhat impelled to actually buy something rather than run the risk of having to explain to a cashier I had to pass that no, I wasn’t actually shopping, I was merely playing tourist in a frozen-food store. So I picked up a frozen duck-sausage cassoulet, frozen broccoli florets, and raspberry sherbet for that evening’s dinner. And you know what? It was good.

³Okay, technically she's American, but her parents are French and she spoke French at home in rural northern California where she was raised. so it's pretty close.

It's Your Fault!

Today was a public holiday (Health and Sports Day), so I wandered off to check out an architectural show called the 9tubohouse Exhibition. Essentially, it was showcasing a simple house design -- almost a cube -- constructed of joined timbers. The house is two stories high and 9 tsubo in area (hence the name), each tsubo being two standard tatami (or about 36 square feet), tsubo (坪) being an old and still widely used measurement for land and houses in Japan.

All the stuff I like in house design: aesthetically simple, compact, and airy.

What was intriguing for me was the setting for the exhibition: an old school building (in the Akihabara district, away from the all the electronics stores) being used as a temporary exhibition space for a variety of art shows. The 9tubohouse Exhibition fit into one of its ground-floor classrooms. And it was not a particularly attractive school building, being one of those Stalinesque stained-concrete hulks that seem to make up the main school design aesthetic here. The fact that the weather was rainy and gloomly overcast certainly didn't help the overall atmosphere matters.

There were actually a couple of shows going on in the building, tucked away in different classrooms, making it look like a REALLY ambitious Parent's Night at North Berkeley Middle School. I checked out one called "Small & Beautiful: Swiss Design Today", which, as the title suggests, was about the work of Swiss designers. This one took up about four classrooms, with little signs pointing you down the appropriate gloomy corridors to reach the various temporary galleries. This exhibit (which is moving on to Sagamihara in December), displayed Swiss Army knives (ooh, a exploded display of a knife) and Swatch watches, of course, but also toys, fashion, graphic design, etc.

The most distinctive gallery was the one set aside for a company called Freitag, which makes heavy vinyl backpacks and courier bags. What makes the bags distinctive is that the bags are made from used truck tarpaulins, making each colorful and unique -- and in the gallery at this show, you could buy a custom-made bag by cutting the pattern yourself, using their templates, a boxcutter, and heavy-duty workgloves. Naturally, you had to sign waivers that absolved the company if you mishandled the boxcutters and noted that once you start cutting, you can't change your mind. You slice it, it's yours, I guess. Once you cut up the pieces, the Freitag company will assemble them into your finished bag and deliver it to you in a few weeks.

What I found amusing was their slogan for this little do-it-yourself promotion, which probably lost something in the translation: "It's Your Fault!"

Museum Days

A slow Saturday, and a tad warmer and more humid than I normally like, but I roused myself enough to head out to a nearby museum in the neighboring suburb of Fuchu city. It's your basic modern but unremarkable museum space you can find in mid-sized and suburban civic centers worldwide, and in this case the place -- the Fuchu Art Museum -- was hosting a traveling exhibition from the U.S. that was closing the next day.4

The exhibition, called "Picturing America: Selections from the Whitney Museum of American Art", displayed 46 examples of modern American art from some the heavy hitters of the last 100 years, including Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Thomas Hart Benton, Jackson Pollock, and (what got my attention in the first place, since an example is reproduced on the exhibition poster) Edward Hopper. Apparently this is one stop on a multi-city Japanese tour organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art). If you're in Japan and want to see it, it's traveling up to Kanazawa next week, and then onto Kitakyushu and Fukushima.

I'm not a fine-arts connoisseur by any means (shoot me, I generally like my art representational), it seemed obvious that I should check it out: living in Tokyo, it would be a waste not to take advantage of all the world-class art exhibitions that come through town or are available to residents. And, thanks to the Tokyo Art Beat website, I can keep track of art events (broadly defined: I do love looking at architecture and photography) that are in the area or will be soon.  I missed going to the Whitney when I was in New York City a few months ago, so if they come to my backyard who am I to say no? And in such a small and uncrowded space (unlike the madhouse of the traveling MoMA show a few years ago, which came through Tokyo with some of MoMA's Greatest Hits while their building was being rebuilt), it was a very relaxing and low-key way of looking at some art.

One thing I've discovered about looking at art in museums is that it gives you the opportunity to examine a quality completely missing from posters: namely, texture. Standing a few feet away, you can see the brush strokes and the thickness / thinness of the paint, and see how the artists achieve their effects. That's not something you can ever get from a computer monitor, and as long as I live in a global city like Tokyo that gives me the chance to see these sorts of things I'd be a fool not to take advantage of it.

Otaku

In English, an '''otaku''' (plural usually ''otaku'', though ''otakus'' is not unknown) is a variety of geek (or an overly obsessed fanboy / fangirl) specializing in anime and manga. The word is a loanword from the Japanese language, in which it is derived from an honorific term for another's house or family (お宅, ''otaku'') that is also used as an honorific second-person pronoun. The modern slang form, which is distinguished from the older usage by being written only in hiragana (おたく) or katakana (オタク), appeared in the 1980s; it appears to have been coined by the humorist and essayist Akio Nakamori (中森明夫, Nakamori Akio) in the 1983 series "An Investigation of Otaku" (おたくの研究, ''otaku no kenkyū''), who observed that this form of address was unusually common among geeks and nerds.
   -from the Wikipedia entry for Otaku

Today was the closing day for a museum exhibition called "OTAKU: persona=space=city", at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. Despite the venue, it wasn't a photography show, more of a slightly arty introduction to the phenomenon of the otaku, a scaled-down version of an exhibit at the 9th International Architectural Exhibition Biennale of Venice.

I'm not particularly qualified to report on this exhibition: perhaps I have certain otaku tendencies, but to me it's still an alien subculture, both here in Japan and in the United States. The exhibition, certainly, tries to make it out as a valid subculture all its own, and tries to take a look at some of its outward features.

The entrance to the exhibition began with photographs of Expo '70 in Osaka, part of their attempt to trace the beginning of the otaku culture, along with a progression of small toys evolving from the simple to the futuristic. And other part of the exhibition was an installation, a mockup of a typical Japanese apartment made entirely of styrofoam package inserts. Clearly, the attempt was to recreate an old-fashioned, cramped Tokyo apartment, complete with the hanging florescent ceiling light typically found in old apartments.  Inside were mounted photographs of similar rooms occupied by otaku, cramped apartments typically stacked floor to ceiling with the objects of the otaku's desire: the spacecraft and robot models, the superhero or manga action figures, or -- in the case of one room, a life-size mannequin of a school girl in school uniform, along with a rack full of girls dresses, presumably to go on the mannequin. This room was identified as belonging to a man in his '30's or 20's, as I recall. Weird.

In any case, directly across the very cramped room from the photographs were very tiny mockups, models, of the rooms depicted in the photographs. What this represents, I don't know, but I suspect I'm not the target market for this art. The largest part of the exhibition was several rows of clear acrylic display cases, stacked like transparent milkcrates, each case containing objects of the otaku's obsession.  Action figures, comic books, models, the whole 9 yards. Lord, I didn't realize how many different toys a person could collect. Another part of the exhibition featured a tabletop model of the Akihabara district, which is basically Otaku Central here in Tokyo, several blocks of big-box electronics stores, gadgets shops, holes in the wall selling all manner of electronic goods gadgets and toys -- I even once stumbled over two shops that sold nothing but old radio tubes, if you can believe that.

Themost  fascinating part, though, was the exhibition of and published comic books.  The most fascinating part, though, was the exhibition of the fan-published manga comic books, as well as small signs explaining common otaku words (uch as "doujinshi", the Japanese term for these books). It turns out, there's an enormous fan base for fan-published manga, essentially parodies and pastiches of existing manga characters. There's even an annual comic market for this stuff, where all these little fan publishers and readers gather to swap, sell, and trade their various comics: it started off in 1975 with a 32 circles and 700 attendees, but as of last year they had to rent the Tokyo Big Site Convention Center  to hold 35,000 circles and 500,000 attendees: all this basically to trade home-brewed comic books.

It turns out (who knew?) that there is a Japanese word for "slash" -- "Yaoi", an acronym made up of three words, yamanishi, ochinashi, and iminashi; meaning, respectively, no climax, no punchline, no meaning. And if you don't know what slash means, I am not going to tell you.

Muji Dreams

Sorry about the delays. I keep meaning to take my notes of my China trip in December out from my Moleskine notebook, but I never seem to have the energy. I'll do it soon, I swear, but it looks like I'll have to set up a separate section to do it, instead of in the main blog. Watch for it soon.

Meantime, life goes on, and I saw something last weekend in Yurakucho that has me salivating.

Some of you reading this probably know how how much I like products from Muji, the No-Brand Store (those who don't might recognize it from references in William Gibson's Pattern Recognition.) I've often said that I'd love an entire apartment furnished in Muji -- and I'm slowly closing in on that goal, as I'm beginning to get rid of the crappy old furniture that came with my place and replaing it with new stuff from Muji -- but it looks like I can do better than that.

I dropped by the big Muji store by Yurakucho station last weekend to pick up some items -- the aforementioned furniture replacement project -- when I came across something new in the big open area at the front of store: a model home. Muji, it seems, is now selling their own houses -- the entire basic 2-story building, placed on whatever lot you have. Naturally, I had to check it out and sneak a few snapshots, and just today I returned with my co-worker Sonja (she and her husband -- well, only her, really -- are in the market for a mansion or house).

As fellow expats from the San Francisco Bay Area, we both recognized the basic structure as essentially a loft (not a new concept in the US, maybe, but new here) designed to fit Japanese-sized house lots and Muji shelving/furniture dimensions. It has an open atrium with the second level wrapped around it with floor-to-ceiling windows lighting up the main room. This model home had a kitchen centered around a stainless-steel island with an induction-heating range and ceiling hood: positively gigantic by Japanese standards and continent-sized in comparison to the pathetic kitchen arrangement inside my place. The upstairs had no interior walls, so you'd need curtains or shelving units to maintain some privacy, but nevertheless I was hooked.

The cost is certainly reasonable: the base price is about ¥16 million (about $152,000 US), and with fixtures about ¥19 million (about $185,000 US).  Of course, I'd need the land to put it on, but I kind of wonder if I couldn't buy the whole enchilada, pack it into a shipping container, and send it back to the US to be assembled there. And fill it with Muji furniture! And Muji appliances!.

Sorry, I'll calm down. Sonja (who doesn't share my love for All Things Muji) was intrigued but not excited, and may drag her husband down to look at the thing. I myself still have no long-term plans to stay in Japan, but damn, this is so tempting. I wonder if I could talk my landlord into tearing down my old building if I'll finance its replacement with a Muji house?

For pictures of what the house looks like when photographed by a professional, check out http://www.muji.net/infill/se/index.html (Japanese only, I'm afraid, but you could always run it through Babelfish or some other translation website).

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