Sapporo Cafes: Sarou Houmura

I half-expected Sarou Houmura, a wonderful cafe and gallery in North-East Sapporo, to be in some secluded little glade outside the city. In fact it's about ten minutes from Kanjodori Higashi subway station, in a perfectly normal suburban neighbourhood. The smart architecture of the place though is such that inside you completely forget about the mundane surroundings. Even walking up to the place from the direction of the station it looks just like a pair of anonymous warehouses, and you have to be right on top of the place before you realise what it is.

It's those windows that are the genius point. By setting them all around the cafe part of the building the designer has let plenty of natural light shine in so you don't feel completely cut off from the outside world. At the same time, all you can see is the garden immediately surrounding Houmura, not the more bland buildings of the neighbourhood. It creates the fascinating illusion that you are somewhere far more remote than, in reality, you are. The entrance adds to this feeling as well, that long, winding, high-walled ramp cuts you off from the outside world even before you enter the cafe.

And once you're inside, the cafe part of Sarou Houmura is just the kind of perfect, super-stylish cafe that you can absolutely lose yourself in.

I loved the tables here. I have an unhealthy love of broad, heavy wooden tables, and the ones in Houmura felt like solid, immovable slabs - there for the duration. The chairs too were, I'm pretty confident, the heaviest damn chairs I've ever dealt with in a cafe situation. Holy crap, thank God they were so comfy, because once you were ensconced in one, you couldn't really shuffle it to a more comfortable position. You can probably tell that the whole place was perfectly designed on every level. The toilet was one of those hybrid lavatory/zen retreat deals. Incredible.

All of which is down to the place being owned and run by an artist, Mrs. Houmura, who we recognised from photos as we were browsing around the place after we ate. Connected to the cafe is a gallery space which was showing a range of art by different artists from a local studio when we went. Art is clearly at the heart of Houmura, and there's another building - Shinajina Houmura - just around the corner. That place may be closed for now though, since it looked a little deserted when we walked past. It looks just as cool as the one we went to though, but in a completely different way (there are lots of great photos on the site I linked to, so check it out).

We got a lunch set, ginger pork and lots of great Japanese dishes for 1200 yen including coffee afterwards.

Everything was great, those pickled beansprouts at the top especially, and it was very, very healthy. They do just coffee and drinks too of course, and a 900yen cake set that we saw a bunch of people order, and which seemed to be served on a tile. Painfully cool, which is all the better since the place is run by a little old lady.

I'll mark the place on my map, of course. Like I said it's close to Kanjodori Higashi station on the Toho line, and there's a clear map on the website too.


茶廊法邑（さろうほうむら）

札幌市東区本町1条1丁目8-27

It's open from 10am to 6pm and closed on Tuesdays.

If cool cafes are your thing it's definitely worth a trip, and it's always nice to find interesting things on the Toho line because, I'll be honest, I don't know many. Perhaps I should challenge myself to find some more.

Art! Turner! Wright!

Well, I wrote about going to the Turner Prize 2009 exhibition before, and they just announced the winner:


Richard Wright, whose exhibition mainly consisted of the amazing Gold Leaf wall piece above, and whose work is always painted over once the exhibition has finished. He was my second favourite after Roger Hiorns, but I think he was the deserved winner.


It really was a beautiful piece, and the temporary nature of it, and the way the space inspired it (taking cues from the Tate Britain itself) was really interesting.

Isn't this the most awesome thing ever?

Tomoyasu Murata is an animator that my dad (I swear, some how my sister now knows more than I do about Japanese pop, and my dad knows more than I do about Japanese art, they're lapping me here) introduced me to, and this is awesome:

His website is here, and his youtube channel is worth keeping an eye on here. He's one of those people who, one day, I want to make a music video for me (though I think he already got pretty famous by making a music video for Mister Children).

She ends up with the doctor.

From Falling In Love #43, 1961:

And so she fled to the kingdom of the Mole Man. Actually, reading through this random scan of an old romance comic that I found reminded me 1) that I love cheesy old romance comics, and 2) of Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein. That's a really interesting site, and while I'm not sure if it actually devalues Lichtenstein's art (it was always obvious that he was just replicating comic book panels), it certainly shows that the original illustrations are much better than his blow ups. Poses seem more natural, people seem more balanced. Perhaps I do have a little less respect for Lichtenstein now, and a lot more for the original comics' artists.

Englanding #15 : London again - Turner Prize Atomization

So basically on the Friday: Tate Modern and down to Brighton. On the Monday: back to London and Tate Britain for the Turner Prize exhibition. I've always wanted to go to the actual Turner Prize show since, as I said on Friday: modern art makes me want to rock out. Your mileage may vary, but I really liked this years shortlist. In reverse order of which I liked best (oh, photos thanks to the Guardian!):


Lucy Skaer had some nice pieces, but nothing struck a chord with me at all. I did not want to rock out, thus I did not really rate it.


Enrico David's work I kinda liked. Actually his actual, physical work I was on the fence about. He had some great pieces and some that I found really lacklustre (they were all wonderfully displayed though on a kind of black art-stage.) What I really dug about his work were the themes he dealt in: not just the difficulty of human communication but almost the impossibility of it. It ran through all of his work in the curious clumsy shapes of the figures, and even the placement of each work as they occasionally obstructed or supported one another.


The last two were really difficult for me to pick between, they both seem to be geniuses. Richard Wright paints directly onto the walls, and is inspired by the space in which he works. In this case that brought the intricate gold leaf work above, and a smaller more unobtrusive piece. After each exhibition the walls are repainted and his works are destroyed, which is... dizzying.


So the best for me was Roger Hiorns. That pile of dust right there? An atomized passenger jet engine. Atomized. I have no idea how you even go about doing that. He also made several wall pieces that included brain matter and famously filled an entire flat with blue copper sulphate crystals so that they covered every surface. I would have loved to see that, but as it is - atomized passenger jet engine? I'm officially rocking out over that.

Englanding #12 : London Town

London! The man who is tired of London is tired of paying too much for a chocolate bar and being treated like scum while he's paying for it!

I kid, I kid, but in this case not because I love. Without ever having lived in London I've been there so many times that I wasn't expecting my trip there to be much of an eye opener. But while I still put London in the same bracket as Tokyo (awesome to visit, wouldn't want to live there) it impressed me a lot more than I thought it would. For some reason living in Japan made the architecture and the buildings of London seem really beautiful and interesting this time out. I felt the same in Birmingham, but then Birmingham really is very familiar to me whereas going past St. Pauls and seeing business like this:


...was really fun. I let myself be more of a tourist than I ever have before down there and wandered around with my backpack on taking photos of tube trains and stuff like that.

Still, worth mentioning that when I first came back to the UK people said, "well, everyone's gonna seem really rude aren't they?" They didn't until I went to London and Brighton! Down in London almost (not quite) everyone in the shops and cafes was magnitudes ruder than the other places I visited. In London though, you've kinda gotta be, and the customers they were serving were a damn sight nastier than those people deal with in Birmingham I'd reckon.

So on my first day in London I met up with young Ben Green, who's doing very well, in the leafy borough of Hackney. After I'd taken my leave of him I went to probably my favourite place in the capital - Tate Modern:


The first time I went to the Tate Modern, a power station converted into a massive modern art gallery, I think it took me two days to go around the whole thing. Seriously. Two days. As Eddie Argos sez: modern art makes me want to rock out. The turbine hall installation at the moment is this enormous terrifying void:


How It Is by Miroslaw Balka is a giant metal box facing a blank wall so that no direct light can get in. In fact, once you're up that ominous looking ramp and inside it feels like no light at all can get in, you're just stumbling around in a huge pitch black box bumping into people and worrying that any minute the floor is going to drop away. There's no sense that you're progressing, or even getting closer to the back, until you finally reach it. The walls are covered in felt too. Awesome.

More modern art on Monday!

Kiyoshi Awazu 1929 - 2009

Last year I went to see an exhibition by the artist and designer Kiyoshi Awazu at Miyanomori Art Museum. I wrote about it here too, with some images of Awazu's work. Sadly I just read (here) that Awazu passed away last month.

I really loved his work, he made me want to paint everything with the most vibrant colours I could find. More so than usual I mean. I found a publicity photo of the exhibition that I saw that should give you an idea of how great his work was.


And here's another example of his vivid palette and flair for montage.


It's a sad loss, but I'm sure he'll continue to inspire me and many others for a long time to come.

More drawing less writing

Little bits of Geijutsu no Mori in the snow.

Taken with Yuki's new camera that dishes out a resolution so large you could probably carpet your lounge with the originals of these images.

Neoteny Japan at Museum of Contemporary Art, Sapporo

There are two biggish modern art galleries in Sapporo: Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sapporo. The former is located near the city centre, about ten or fifteen minutes walk from the central shopping area and has a small collection space and a big space for touring exhibitions... most of which aren't all that interesting (and some of which aren't even modern art). It's ok but I've been mostly underwhelmed when I've gone there. I much prefer the Museum of Contemporary Art, but to get there you have to slog all the way out to the wilderness way south of Sapporo. It's in Geijutsu no Mori, the Art Park that you have to get a train, then a bus to reach and it takes bloody ages. Of course they have much more interesting exhibitions and while you're there you can check out the sculpture park which I posted about a while ago.

I'm glad Yuki and me decided to trek out there today though for the Neoteny Japan exhibition before it closed this month. I love modern art and this was post 1990 Japanese work taken from the Takahashi Collection. I don't know anything about this Takahashi fella other than he's a psychiatrist, but I like to imagine him as the Japanese Charles Saatchi, and his collection looks to be hella well stocked. Neoteny by the way refers to creatures keeping childish traits into adulthood, or (more creepily) animals becoming sexually mature while still in the larval or pre-pubescent stage. In fact a lot of this exhibition was creepy, but not in a bad way, and it certainly wasn't very primitive or childish either. I'm pretty sure the Neoteny referred to the Artists themselves reaching adulthood while something inside still retained a childish trait.

Of course there were works from Yoshitomo Nara and Takashi Murakami, but their work is so globally famous now I'm pretty sure I don't need to drop images in to give you an idea (they were heavily represented in the gift shop too, there was like a Nara, Murakami table that I'm not ashamed to say I shopped from). There was tons of other great art too, from some famous Japanese artists that were still only buzzing around the edges of my memory until today.


Tomoko Konoike had a big, gorgeously presented room exhibiting three of her works, a floor displayed video, a huge wall canvas and a giant, six-legged mirrorball wolf. She seems to work heavily with symbols - young girls, swords, bees, six-legged wolves - and those things get rolled together in all sorts of ways and across all sorts of mediums. It was great.


Makoto Aida, I'd already been reading about recently, and I wasn't surprised to see his big creepy salamander thing and naked pre-pubescent girls here. He's a kinda ADD modern art genius it seems, working with shocking violence and disturbing imagery and in a million different styles.


Motohiko Odani is someone else I'd come into contact with before, and his room here was a pretty impressive display of versatility. The picture above is taken from Rompers, which seems to be a universally acclaimed short video piece of his where a cute, creepy piece of music soundtracks a gharish, grotesque, technicolour paradise scene where puss/honey oozes from a hole in a tree and pink frogs with ears on their backs jump around a lurid green pool and everything moves in time to the music and it's more than a little disquieting. I was thinking that it would be nice to find the actual video to post here since it's only about two minutes long, but no dice. I'm always curious about modern video art and the way it's displayed in art galleries, if it's just a screen on a wall in a well lit room then it can't be being displayed for maximum effect... I just feel like some artists are embracing modern mass production to let people interact more with their art or actually own something, while others are avoiding what might be a logical step for them. However I'm sure as hell not going to criticise anyone for how their art is made available to the public, for all I care an artist could make a 5 million dollar movie and show it only to one person then burn the only print in existence. That would, in itself, be pretty amazing.

There was more, like Akira Yamaguchi's incredible fusions of old Japanese style painting with modern contents and some really fantastic paintings by someone who's name I can't read because it's on this paper in Kanji, but believe me she was really good. It was, as always, worth travelling a ludicrous way just to see one exhibition, and the Art Park looked beautiful in the snow too.

Hokkaido No. 5

Double posting today, as in both here and on Loom, because I'm pleased with how this came out:

I used a neat little hack to make youtube stream in a slightly better quality, I hope it worked.

Also, I guess this is another opportunity to shout out for Loom, which is the... what do you call it? Artblog? Create-o-sphere? that I post on every week, along with people called Ben, Paul, Renee and Juan. Music, videos, drawings, whatever - I create something and upload it every Thursday, so have a look.

Andy's Continuing Adventures in the Distant North

So hey Andy, since we went to the zoo you've experienced even more of the dazzling, glittering life that awaits all denizens of Hokkaido when they step out of their front doors. Today we ate Jingiskan (aka: Genghis Khan, a kind of mutton yaki-niku that's famous in Sapporo) how was that?

It was good. We ate a lot of meat, but it was delicious, and we also had some Hokkaido potatoes. They were very tasty. And lots of onion. I think I can still taste onion in my mouth.

Yeah, it was very satisfying I thought. Remember that was Hokkaido lamb too. You might as well have been eating Hokkaido SOIL Andy, that's how authentic it was. As real as the dirt beneath your Grandfather's fingernails. Also you walked the whole length of Odori park, how was that?

It was pretty good. Like you said, every section had something of interest, and I think there were 12 sections to it, if I remember correctly. there were some fountains, some statues, and a slide which I slid down. We saw the TV Tower and we could see Sapporo Battle Tower. I liked the trees, and seeing the colours of the autumn leaves on a crisp, sunny day.

That's pretty much it you know, after you see the Sapporo Beer Museum tomorrow you can probably just turn up and ask for your official Sapporo resident's permit. Then you can get free Sapporo beer and potatoes everywhere you go. FACT. Also yesterday we went out to Geijutsu no Mori, Sapporo Art Park, way south of the city and had a good look around the sculpture park. I really liked it, especially the Antony Gormley hidden away at the top of the hill. How about you?


I liked that one too. I also liked the big shiny steel poles with loops of wire between them. I could imagine lying underneath and looking up at the clouds through the loops. Looking at the picture will help you understand:


Then there was the secret hidden garden, including the seven water fountains, the cone in which our voices echoed wonderfully, and the stream which seemed to work by magic, because it took a long time to figure out where the water was coming from.


Do you remember this one Alex? It was called 'Woman with Cock'.


Yes. Yes, I do remember that one Andy. If I remember rightly the description in the guide referred to her as "mannish" or "manly" which put the fox amongst the chickens even more as it were.

Alex Loves Zazen Boys: crayon fun edition

Recently I had to teach some very young kids, which necessitated the use of wax crayons. Now, it's been many, many years since I used wax crayons, and the moment I touched them to the paper the sheer joy of making those big streaks of colour was wonderful.

Also, today I looked at my last.fm page for the first time in months, and was surprised to see that my recent all-out adoration of Mukai Shutoku and Zazen Boys has rocketed them to the top of my favourite artists list.

How could I possibly combine these two apparently chalk-and-cheese concepts? Easy, I went to town and bought some wax crayons and drew a picture of Yoshikane Sou a.k.a. Casio Man, the lead guitarist of Zazen Boys.


I kinda went a little overboard on the colours there. Then again I do have twenty different colours to choose from, how could I be expected to stick to just black for his clothes and pink for his ridiculous sun glasses?

Kiyoshi Awazu

On Sunday I went to a great exhibition of the works of Kiyoshi Awazu, at a tiny gallery in a huge building in Miyanosawa, Sapporo.

Seriously, the gallery is like, three rooms and some wall-space in the hall, and the building is enormous. The reason is, it looks like the rest of the complex is given over to holding wedding ceremonies and receptions. I think I mentioned it before, but they have their own wedding chapel, and this time I arrived when one was actually going on. The entrance was crowded by young people in suits and spectacular dresses, and inside elderly relatives chaperoned howling child-beasts to the toilet and back. The staff are always immaculately turned out, of course, so it was pretty much me and the two other women in the gallery who were wearing anything the slightest bit casual. I mean, being a six foot five caucasian I'm pretty used to standing out, but this was a whole new level of sore-thumbness. As you're walking between the gallery's two sections you go past a huge panoramic window looking out onto the wedding chapel garden, and looking up at the rest of the building I could see backs of the bride and groom as someone made a speech next to them. It was kinda fun really.

The gallery is small, but it's really good. They use their space really well, and they have a weird hobbit-sized door that connects two of the bits together. I have no idea why they would use a doorway that even Japanese people have to stoop to get through, but it works really well for making you take a good long look at the room you're stepping into, since for all you know there's a gallery attendant lurking out of sight ready to bash you on your head as you emerge.

Bash you on the head and sell your body. To ART.

Anyhow, Awazu (who has a spectacularly comprehensive website here) seems to have become famous through his poster work, which allowed him the freedom to make a bewildering amount of other art. Paintings, sculptures, installations, books on design theory... it's a pretty darn impressive body of work. His posters were for everything from films to plays to political rallies (he seems to have worked often with anti-war organizations) and they comprised the majority of the exhibition. They were really awesome, and showed off a fantastic sense of design:






I love that one for The Friends, the flag-faced guy really reminds me of some of DoseOne's work for his band Subtle. And since Subtle are one of my favourite bands... it'd be nice to think I'm clocking their influences.

Like I said, his website is stocked, in English, and most of you can't really make it out to this tiny exhibition in the middle of nowhere, so check it out.

Leonard Foujita

Man, I love it when I got into a coffee shop, order a coffee, and while I'm sitting drinking that coffee, they bring me more coffee for free. That's the kinda thing that'll make you love a place, and they've done that three times now when I've been in the Japanese coffee chain Tully's in Odori. On one level Tully's is just another chain coffee store, but their coffee is better than Starbucks, and I find it much less objectionable going there when I'm in one of the big shopping areas. Plus, y'know, free coffee.

This weekend I went to see the Leonard Foujita retrospective at Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art. I love modern art, and I love art galleries, but with the best will in the world Sapporo is not well served for them. Oh well, I guess the general awesomeness makes up for it.


Foujita seems to have been a prolific and interesting artist. He moved from Japan to France in the 20s and hung out with Modigliani (I would say, with my professional art-critic's gaze, that the examples of his early work here did look like Modigliani) and became an established and respected figure in the European art community. He later travelled all over the world, married several times, and at some point changed his name to Leonard and converted to Christianity.

From a quick browse on the web it looks like Foujita painted many, many pictures, and moved through quite a few phases in his career which made the retrospective very interesting, even if at times I plain didn't like his paintings. The exhibition's centrepiece was a massive piece recently discovered and restored from his... I guess middle period. It's a fun story, it was considered lost for many years but found in a Paris warehouse and restored. However that period, and earlier in what seems to have been the period when he made his name... really not to my tastes:


I am unmoved by the pearlescent luminosity of their skin. There was one mural that I felt was really pretty terrible. However the earlier pictures when he was finding his way were interesting, and he seems to have painted the only interesting pictures of cats I've ever seen. Paintings of cats are usually a pet hate of mine, but these were great. And later in his career I would say he was a hell of a painter no matter what your tastes, his faces became deliberately stylised in a really interesting way, and he started using these eerie children that look both fully-formed and painted from memory at the same time. His paintings started exploding with colour and he really started pursuing his Christian faith through painting, decorating a chapel and making paintings of the adoration, the apocalypse, the descent from the cross and so on.

It's great to see an artist's career like this, and considering I couldn't read any of the information boards (which were helpfully in Japanese and French) it all came across pretty clearly. I didn't know anything about him before, but I'd recommend the exhibition if you can make it to Sapporo Japan before it finishes on... um... Thursday.

Iconic Obama

Over on the Guardian they have a great three minute video of their political cartoonist Steve Bell visiting Manifest Hope, an exhibition of pictures of Obama by contemporary artists. Ah the Guardian, doing so much for the internet and yet I still can't embed your videos? For shame:

Link!

Morgan Spurlock's in there too, and I was quite surprised at how Shepard Fairey, who's responsible for the ultra-iconic Obama image below, comes across as quite a cock. Still I was most excited to see what Steve Bell looks like since I've been loving his cartoons for years. Bearded!

Happy Olympics Everyone!

Well the Olympics has started in Beijing, China. There was a spectacular opening ceremony that I didn't see, and now there will be some sports that I'll probably watch a little of. I'm kinda worried about the air pollution in Beijing and its affect on the athletes, and I'm certainly not impressed by the seemingly dickish attitude of the Chinese government the whole time - but I'm not well enough informed to pass any kind of judgement, so I don't mean this picture as some super-damning criticism. It is a great piece though, by the chinese photo artist Wan Quingsong:

The Glory of Hope , 240x180cm, Photograph, Wang Qingsong, 2007

I read about Wang Quingsong in an art magazine in a fancy, fancy shopping mall in Fukuoka, while I was visiting Andy this year. I don't know much about him, but I'd love to see his work in the Flesh, since his photos are so damn big! Check out those dimensions, they must be staggering!

I'm sorry if this post is a bit crazy, today I cycled far too far and played football in the sun, and ate terrible food, so my brain is somewhat broked. However we did end up inviting a guy to play who was standing around watching us, and he was a nice guy, and of course very good at football. I thought those kind of things never really happened, but apparently they do.

Loom

God knows what's gotten into me recently, but I started contributing to a creative-collective blog a couple of weeks ago. We were inspired by this post by Warren Ellis, that observes astutely that there are quite enough link blogs, aggregators and indexes out there, it's about time people started creating their own interesting things. There are five of us in total, so we can keep it rolling and updating every weekday, and we've been going for two weeks now so there's a good amount of stuff there already. The curtain was officially raised today, or possibly yesterday, depending on what time zone you're operating in:

Loom

I'll be contributing every Thursday and so far I posted a couple of songs that you can listen to and download. Our remit is completely unspecified, but this week is acting like a kind of introduction, so you can see who is creating this stuff. My more-than-able co-conspirators have been posting paintings, photos, comics, carpentry, prose and much more. It's pretty exciting really.

Renee's painting.

Ben's loom.

Art / Crows / Rocking in the Street

Originally posted on facebook on 12th August:

One of my colleagues has a phobia of crows. I thought, well sure, crows are a little creepy, but to be really afraid of them? Oh no, I was assured, crows in Japan are bigger than you think. Yeah, whatever...

So, of course, turns out crows in Japan are bigger than I thought. Some of them are the size of cats, they congregate in packs in all the parks, they tear up bins, they CROW to each other from all around you. They're hunched and wicked looking, and their beaks are like KNIVES of PURE EVIL. Have they been known to attack anyone? No one thinks they have, but no one would put it past them.

A quick mention for Don. Kihote (i.e. Don Quixote, but I use the phonetic spelling from the Katakana here just incase it makes a difference). Some of my training guys went to a Don. Kihote in Omiya, Tokyo a few times, but I never did, now I wish I had so I could see if it was like the one in Sapporo. The one in Sapporo is maybe six floors high, and has been organised by a lunatic. Or perhaps someone with a severe head injury. There is a lot of stuff. There is TOO MUCH stuff, and while for the most part products are grouped together (cosmetics & lingerie, food, CDs & DVD) there are plenty of crossovers and logical disconnects along single rows of shelving. The camping gear runs straight into the stupid black-light things, novelty items with breasts are all over the place, and stuffed Disney and anime characters are just EVERYWHERE. Everything is packed floor to ceiling, and there is enough room between the shelves to fit one person. Not even a very fat person at that. Whatever you need, they probably have it, but I doubt I could find it for you.

Today I went all over the place! It was hot, but there were blue skies and there was very little humidity. I was wilting certainly, but it was a good heat, not that evil heat that Primal Scream warned us all about. Not the evil heat we've been enduring since last weekend.

I went to two art galleries, the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art was really great. It was packed with people going to see the featured Dali installation that I wasn't all that interested in, but the collection galleries were very quiet. There wasn't a great deal of it, but it was very, very good. After a quiet opener (Art Nouveau glass works hmmm...) came one of the best displays of glassworks, porcelain and so on that I've ever seen! That sounds so geeky! Like I've EVER seen any glasswork or porcelain exhibitions that I found even the slightest bit interesting. Kinda like saying "It was the best Pauly Shore movie that I've ever seen!". But this? Wow! Colours and incredibly intricate shapes and all sorts of strange, beautiful craziness. Upstairs is a great "introduction to art" gallery for kids. Very accessible, colourful and fun. In the lobby they had set up a sort of touring rock-band merch table for the Dali exhibition. Made slightly more surreal by having a Chuppa Chups (the spelling AND pronunciation are up for grabs on that one) machine on the end.

But my real find was that on the way there I stumbled across a small silent, almost deserted gallery devoted to the Sapporo born artist Migishi Kotaro. He died at the age of 31, after a short productive career, full of experimentation and absorbing influences at a hell of a rate. I really, really like his work, particularly the ground it covers, and the atmosphere that almost all his works create. They're sort of creepy, in a good way.

And that was not my only find! Walking down past Odori they had closed off a huge stretch of one of the main roads (haven't been here long enough to know what it's called), for the purpose of ROCKING! That's right, I passed at least two different areas where a PA had been rigged up in the street for bands to play. No stage, no flooring at all, literally playing on the asphalt. It looked really cool, and as you would expect most people seemed utterly nonplussed. It also looked incredibly hot for the first band I saw, who were pinned in a beam of sunshine in the middle of a huge junction while everyone else hid in the shade.



Then I went to Maruyama park, because people had been mentioning it to me, and I'd hit the tourist information place this morning for maps and details. Still on my list: Mount Moiwa (involves a cable car ride, points!), The Sapporo Beer Factory (may just be a shopping mal), some other cool looking park in the north-east of the city (nearish where I live). Anyway it was a very cool place to go because Maruyama Park turns into a hike up a mountain (or at least a big hill) so you really get to see Sapporo run out and turn into forest. One particular view really got me, but I couldn't get a good picture, of the huge, wooded hillside towering at the end of a big urban road. Rurality! Also in Maruyama is the Hokkaido Shrine. Sapporo is not overly blessed with historical shrines,and temples, having been built in the latter part of the 19th century, with the help of savage, heathen Americans, but this was great. It was, like Meiji Jingu in Tokyo, incredibly quiet and peaceful and there was a ceremony going on so while I sat outside, cowering from the sun and from the crows, I could hear drums and flutes. And clapping. For some reason I really like that about Shintoism, that it involves clapping.


My vague aim to learn the Shamisen while I'm here came a step closer on Friday night when I met a guy who thinks that he works with a guy, whose brother may be learning the Shamisen. He's going to look into it, hey, it's something!

Also I may be developing something of a musical infatuation. I've been doing lots of research into J-pop already, trying out artists to find ones that I genuinely like, asking students and colleagues and so on... I'll let you know how this one pans out, but separate to that I was very excited to find out that the bassist from J-pop mainstays Dreams Come True wrote the music for Sonic The Hedgehog and Sonic The Hedgehog 2. That's a hell of a pedigree as far as I'm concerned, although I do like the Sonic 3 music EVEN MORE.