Dontaku!
Dontaku was a good time, and it definitely lived up to the hype of it being really crowded. The Hakata Dontaku festival is a particularly famous one in Japan, so the streets were full of out of towners, floating cartoon characters and marching bands. The problem was I had this festival confused with the Hakata Gion Yamakasa thing, where the guys in traditional diaper-gear race through the city at full speed, carrying these enormous, i dunno, things.. you should google it, but anyway that’s not until July. I was kind of let down, but still, the parade was fun. I was also really tired on this particular day, stemming from a particularly rough all-nighter in Tenjin that culminated in inadvertently spending my last 300 yen on a crappy breakfast in Yoshinoya and taking a nap outside the convenience store at 8 in the morning, waiting for the ATM to open. If you want to hear the rest of that story, send me an e-mail; it’s pretty rad.
You gotta hand it to the SOBs marhing band, they did a killer version of Peter Gunn
I wish that all American companies had the presence of mind to have a really cute spokes-creature. I can think of the Geico gecko, and he’s pretty cool, but companies here have taken it to the next level. Anyway, the internet has been kind of slow lately, so it’s kind of a hassle to upload photos. I apologize for this, but I’m thinking it’s only temporary; I have a suspicion that the other guys who share my IP thing are downloading thousands of anime shows every day, but their hard drives are bound to fill up soon. Don’t worry folks. Even still, I’ve been kind of lazy about documentation recently, mostly because I’ve been really taken with all the music that’s playing everywhere more so than the visual stimuli. There really is music playing everywhere, all the time, anywhere you go. There’s two little ditties that play whenever the Walk sign lights up on the street corners. One is cheerful, and inevitably finds its way into my dreams from time to time, and the other one is really menacing for some reason. I haven’t been able to figure out what determines the change in mood, but the latter one sounds a lot like a gameboy song, like Castlevania, or the dungeon-level in Mario. I’m working on a DJ edit of it. Not really.
The best music, however, is the indoor stuff. Basically anywhere you go regularly, subways, malls, supermarkets and so on. It’s so innocuous I can only envision some demographic-research section of the bureaucracy devoted to testing the most agreeable yet instantly forgettable melodies in the modern world. Then, I imagine a big recording studio in Tokyo where they bring in professional musicians and, providing them a midi loop, instruct them to solo on a 2-octave casio keyboard for five or six hours. It doesn’t have to be a keyboard though. Sometimes in the subway there’s saxophone music that sounds kind of like Grover Washington being backed by an army of Totoros on midi synths, or really bad-period Wayne Shorter. But yeah, basically you hear what sounds like some underpaid freelancer playing a really long, diddling solo over some loop sampled from Mario Kart. I can’t think of too many more ways to describe it. On rare occasions, it sounds like an entire orchestra is soloing aimlessly but in unison, because there’s never any hook or chorus you can hang your hat on. It’s just an indefinite phrase that stretches on for as long as you’re wandering around the grocery store looking for cheese.
There’s a great quote by Merzbow that I like to paraphrase which basically sums up the Japanoise ethos. He says something like there’s so much insidious background noise in Japan, be it street-crossing jingles or offensively banal promenade music, you ultimately just want pure silence. But not the kind of silence where you just flip the off-switch, because that’s too merciful. Merzbow says he wants to create silence through his noise, which makes a whole lot of sense to me now. It’s not like Fukuoka is a deafeningly loud place in the same way that New York is a loud place. In New York, it’s like you’re surrounded by a marching band of car horns and industry and confusion; here it’s like you’re constantly being followed by little kids who keep pulling the string on their musical stuffed animals. It gets inside you somehow, and one way of flushing the system is by a whitewash of static. It really works! But shit, this post is getting kind of dark, and that’s not my intention. For sure, there have been a few times where I’ve walked into a big mall and the cutesy music is actually kind of nice. Kind of like a dream. Anyhoo, another way of flushing it all out is by, of course, zen meditation, and I got to try a little bit of that on for size this week, zazen-style, at Bairinji temple in Kurume. I was very diligent in my posture and everything, so I didn’t get hit with the discipline stick. Bummer. I guess I sort of chickened out. I did, however, get kind of sore in the legs during the tea ceremony.
Bairinji is a pretty high-up training temple in the Rinzai sect in Japan, which is cool, cause most of the famous Rinzai spots are in Kyoto
My bad, here's part of the actual temple. That other building was like a toolshed or something. HAR
OK We've warped out of the temple, now we're getting snacks near Fukuoka Tower
Sorry by the way, not that I should be sorry, but this post is kind of the random photo-roundup.
Nakasu ramen yatai, the place to go if you want to eat ramen and get stared at by shady dudes making the ramen. million dollar views though
Park took all the style from Korea and brought it to Japan. UPS
Somewhere in the past couple weeks, I went on a bike ride and got lost in a bamboo forest. Go figure!
At some point, all the people near Mimochi beach went home.
It actually got a little easier to upload photos at the end there. So, I’m off to Kagoshima this weekend and I’ll report back about that. Also, something nice to end with: music that sounds good in Japan. Tonight it’s Michael Hurley. Light Green Fellow is a good nighttime song in any country, but who would’ve guessed it would hit the spot in Japan? I should e-mail him to tell him that. Also, Moondog and Karl Blau are putting in good work these days. OK! I finished my homework while that last photo was uploading. The end
