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Ok, so first of all my New Year's Resolution this year is... to not write this blog daily!
Woo!
Yeah, so 568 posts in and over a year of daily posting (barring a couple of vacations) I think I've kind of proved... whatever it was I was trying to prove to myself. I'd rather use my brain for other, more creative things in 2010, so I'll just post here randomly, like any other sane blog and not fit one post every day like I have been doing. I promised Andy I'd do another post about Girls Aloud and I want to do one about the Kouhaku Utagassen, and I hope I can keep adding stuff to my Sapporo Map, so I'm certainly not done here completely. But output will be sporadic to say the least. If you've been reading while I spout off every single day then thanks a lot but it'd be better for me to spend some time writing more songs or maybe even finishing one of the many novels I've started.
Also, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest is a huge book, I really need some time to get cracking on that.
And I need to get a job.
Still, I'm very optimistic about this year. Why? Because of my omikuji.
That's me in the freezing wind and snow outside Hokkaido Shrine where I went on New Year's Day to draw omikuji - divination by lots (check out the wikipedia link there, it tells you all about it). You make a donation, take a piece of paper and it tells you how your future is going to be. For the last two years on New Year's Day I drew Shou-Kichi - small blessing, which is probably the most common one. Nothing too bad, nothing great this year. This year though - Dai-Kichi - Great Blessing! That's as good as it gets. It comes with a lot of reminders to give of myself, my wealth and my strength; to be aware when I am blessed - but it also has nothing but good messages about my future.
Using it even only as cognitive fuel I hope to have a great year, and I hope you will too.
Happy New Year!
On January 4th we went to Hokkaido Shrine to pray to the Shinto Gods for good luck and to find out what this year holds for us. Here is the queue to get up to the Shrine:
It was more than chilly, we lost feeling in our feet. There is a ritual of sorts to praying at a Shinto Shrine, one which I always forget but I'll try to go over it here. First of all you have to purify yourself at the water spring outside the shrine. You use a wooden ladle and I think you hold it in your right hand to wash your left hand, then left hand to wash right hand, then right hand to pour water into your left hand and sip it to clean your mouth. Finally let the water trickle down over the handle to clean the ladle for the next person. I may have that wrong.
When you reach the Shrine to pray you throw five or ten yen into the collection tray then it's two bows, two claps, one bow, pray and one bow again. Once more, that's probably wrong but I've done it a few times now and I can never keep it straight in my head.
We also got Omikuji, which is divination by lots. You make a 100 yen donation and pick a piece of paper on which is written your fortune for the year. Broadly you can get small, medium and big good luck or small, medium and big bad luck. Almost all of them are Shoukichi - small good luck - which is what I got. There are also some details under different headings like "business - you won't make a lot of money"; "something lost - it will be found, but you must look hard" "illness - it will be serious, go see a doctor". That kind of thing.
You can always see these too:
They're prayers written on pieces of wood which are displayed for a while before being burned so that the Gods can read them in the smoke and maybe help out. I took a photo of this one because it's a band asking for fame, fortune and a national tour in 2009.
Post New Year has been pretty hectic, so this Friday blog post is brought to you with the blessing of Sunday and the hindsight of two days. Let's begin:
Those are lucky bags - fukubukuro - that are sold on January 1st of every year from pretty much all the big stores and malls. The idea's pretty simple, you buy a bag filled with mystery contents (you can choose the size if it's clothes) worth a lot more than you pay. At the shit stores fukuburo stick around for days into the January sales, but at the popular places they go within minutes of the stores opening. In a couple of stores it was kinda like one of those speeded up shopping montages in a movie where hands a grabbing items off a table until the table is empty. Either that or there are security guard-enforced queues and massive crowds. We got into town just as the stores were opening (nine-fucking-thirty on New Years Day) and Yuki got four of those bags, I got the Adidas one on the far right, and when we opened them up...
Unsurprisingly the ones from the good stores, the busiest stores, were the best ones. One of them was almost a total write-off for Yuki, but one was almost all good and she was happy overall. I got two t-shirts and two hoodies in the Adidas bag, one of each of which is awesome, so I'm happy.
This, by the way, is not the actual January sale, that doesn't start until the 2nd and of course we were there for that too. The crowds were even bigger because some stores don't sell fukubukuro until the 2nd either. I thought it would be unbelievably awesome to get a Bape fukubukuro, but unfortunately so did about a hundred and fifty other people and they were more into waiting in the snow than I was:
They only had 30 fukubukuro which were being handed out in a lottery to some people out of the first hundred in line. After that people were just getting tickets to get in the store because the pre-release from the Spring/Summer 09 line dropped that day. Overall I guess I didn't buy too much which is probably a good thing, but I was fun just wandering around these stores while they verged on riots. My kinda fun.
So last night was pretty much an ideal New Years Eve for me: vastly over-eating and watching huge musical spectaculars on TV. First up was K1 fighting, which actually doesn't feature any singing surprisingly enough, but which does feature bleeding, which I guess can be used as a metaphor for singing. After that we jumped to NHK for Kohaku.
I want to translate Kohaku Uta Gassen (紅白歌合戦
for those of you who can display Japanese characters) as "Red & White Song Fight", because gassen is also in yukigassen which means snowball fight, and that sounds awesome. That's pushing it a bit though, it means Red and White Song Contest, and it is a big musical TV blow out every new year on Japanese TV (this year was the 59th) where the biggest pop and enka acts perform as part of a girls (red) vs. boys (white) contest. The winner is decided by judges and viewers votes, and this year it looked like the boys romped to victory. Go team!
I love it in the same way I love the Eurovision Song Contest, it goes on for hours (52 different songs this year) and features some baffling costumes and pretty spectacular performances. One of the hosts this year was Nakai from SMAP who deserves some kind of end of year retrospective of his very own to cover his insane sartorial stylings. Seriously, that shit is coming up in a blog post soon.
There's a lot of enka, which I don't mind really. It's old fashioned Japanese ballads, like the Japanese version of country music or the blues, that is popular now mostly with old people although there are a few young guns of enka that I'll mention later. Anyway the vocal power and control that enka requires, and the tortured emotion that enka singers are barely able to contain, always impress me a lot. I can even understand some enka lyrics, and they're always set at winter, in a rainstorm or a blizzard, with someone drinking heavily and lamenting their dead mother/departed girl or boy/dead girl or boy/father who was swallowed by the sea. Kobayashi Sachiko is fun too, she always performs in some kind of prog-kimono fantasy:
Wowza! There were plenty of other great performances, it was a lot better than the last couple of Brits that I watched. I pretty much hate Mr Children, and the simpering face their singer pulls when he performs puts him up there in the top three punchable Japanese celebrities for me, but their in-the-round performance in a separate studio was really great here. I'm still left cold by the endless parade of guy-guy duos like Kobukuro and WeT and Pornograffiti, but there was lots of good up-beat pop to go around like Hamasaki Ayumi and Perfume, who... yeah I guess I do like them:
Mostly in a similar way to Girls Aloud, their dances are really simple and easy (but really tightly executed I suppose) and I'm not sure they're great singers, but they're working with some great songwriters and producers. Polyrhythm is really good. Jero made his debut on Kohaku too, and, not to namedrop, but I did see him sing live in Tanuki Kouji to about thirty people early this year. He's a bilingual American, a quarter Japanese, whose grandmother taught him some enka songs... and now he's an upcoming enka star in Japan:
That's a picture of his gran on his shirt and she was in the crowd, just bawling with tears, it was really sweet. The night before he won best newcomer at Japan's pop music awards and almost couldn't sing he was crying so much himself. The other young face of enka was crying a lot too (turn down the volume quick, this video is hella loud and hella trebley):
That's Hikawa Kiyoshi who had the final performance of the night, quite an honour. I couldn't place that song for a few minutes, then I realised it's in the opening credits of Jonathan Ross's Japanorama, so there you go.
Oh, but the night wasn't finished there:
Yuki strong-armed me into watching Johnny's Countdown 2008-2009 with her to see in the new year. Johnny's Entertainment is the legendary boy-band stable responsible for a ludicrous number of Japan's pop hits and christ only knows how many celebrity careers. Although I wasn't that stoked to watch it, it was pretty fun and very impressive actually. The sheer momentum and scale was blistering. It featured about 6 or 7 different boybands in Tokyo Dome along with video crossovers with Kinki Kids in Osaka, and it was flawlessly executed. Every performance was a ten minute super-medley with one of the groups taking lead and running around a network of stages and bridges that covered the whole, massive arena, with members of the other groups seeming to appear out of thin air to guest on a verse or a chorus, and it just didn't let up. Tokio (the Johnny's who play their own instruments!) who performed on Kohaku came straight to Tokyo Dome and performed the same song again in the same get-up before changing into suits and appearing again later in the show. Another group V6 had a comedy skit where they'd forgotten they were meant to appear and they'd gone to a noodle bar to see in the New Year so they had to rush to the stadium to play! Oh no! I've seen this kinda thing in the UK, but this was a crazy, pepped up, hideously gaudy version and it was pretty fun.
Finally there was another show running after that, Countdown TV, with even more stars who'd already performed and appeared on Kohaku earlier in the evening. And that was going out live too. If you're a hit pop performer, you're really earning your fabulous wealth come New Year in Japan.
Year of the rat down, year of the cow's up next.
Yesterday I went snowboarding again, this time at the city community snow area Fu's. It was cheap as chips and this time I didn't fuck up my arm but I went down hard on my back, really clocking my head and knocking my hat and goggles off. It dazed me a little then, but today I've got some sweet whiplash pain across my neck. I also had a haircut today, and leaning my head back into the basin was not fun.
I don't have much more today. I'm emptying my mind to try and see the passing year and the coming year as clear as I can. Then I'm going to tackle the New Year sales with Yuki tomorrow and Friday.
Ah, duality.
Where are you going for New Year's Eve?
If you answered anything other than Cube Garden in Sapporo, who have decided to advertise their New Years Eve bash with a picture of Barack Obama as a cow, along with a witty pun - I'll have to assume you're lying.
Suggestions as to the origin of this concept gratefully accepted.
Also - eat that Shepard Fairey.
So that's it, Christmas wrapped up for another year. Back in the Old Country though it'll keep going until... what? The Epiphany? Is that right? There's a bunch more holiday anyway, but here in Japan Christmas is just this kinda silly fun thing where you can buy presents for people or eat fried chicken and cake and stuff. They do it with style, but their heart's not in it and of course the Christmas decorations are already being taken down on Christmas Day.
New Years is where it's at, next year's the year of the cow in case you're interested.
Last night's snowstorm was a real humdinger. We got about six inches and the sky was flickering with sheet lightning - in a snowstorm you know that means "business time". The temperature dropped savagely, and today it was a fierce day to be outside. We had howling winds and snow all day, it was positively arctic and someone mentioned something about highs of minus three.
Some choice presents from Santa this year included a seriously classy scarf, a boxing panda pen where the panda's eyes light up red when he punches (bad-ass), a map, a tourist guide from 1965 and chocolate.
Cadbury's chocolate that is, sourced in England, which reminded me that Cadbury's chocolate really is something to be proud of. You can pick it up here in Japan but it's all imported from Australia... and sorry but it's kinda lacking. I always heard that Cadbury's Australia have to add extra preservatives to keep the chocolate more stable in the heat, but that might be bull. I'm sure it ain't as good as the British stuff though.
Also Wovenhand - which put my mind at rest that David Eugene Edwards is still out there, using the bad side of the bible to warn us all. Also his new album sounds pretty much exactly like his old band 16 Horsepower, who were astonishingly good at their peak. He's got his badass French bassist back, which I think is probably a big part of it.
