The Fukuoka Punk Rock Mafia

For Golden Week (one of Japan’s three nationally sanctioned block holidays) I headed down to Fukuoka on the southern island of Kyushu to catch up with my close acquaintance Andrew Bentley. Andy’s been living in Japan for around two and half years now, and the fact that I’ve been here for nine months without taking a trip to see him is to my shame. Still, I done gone put that right now.

I’ll go into the joys of Fukuoka some other time, but for now let’s talk about punk rock music. Andy plays drums in a punk band called 5 Minute Advantage, and to be honest both his drumming and his Japanese had improved a lot since the last time I saw him. Actually, that’s hardly surprising since he’s been both living in Japan and drumming in a punk band. I guess that’s what you get with the whole living thing. Better at things.

The rest of Andy’s band consists of Kuma and Crazy Non Maedirt. Kuma seemed to be a great guy, and asked me many questions in Japanese and English about music, the UK, lyrics and the English language that I was hard put to answer with my terrible Japanese. Bless the guy though, he was tenacious and we never ended a conversation with mutual incomprehension, which let me tell you, is always a danger.

Punk
Rock
Fuck
Fucking
Motherfucking
Love
Hate
Outlaw
Mafia
Miniskirt
Panties

This turned out to be a bit of an exaggeration as he later acted as something of a translator between me and another guy who was listing all the obscure European punk bands that he liked. However he did use the phrase “Fucking Punk Rock Mafia” more than most people do, and he did tell me that he found singing English lyrics difficult while I was there since he was so self-conscious. That kinda caught me by surprise because there was very little that was "self-conscious" about Non.

The first night I was in Fukuoka we headed down to a pretty fancy rehearsal studio, where we had a “mini-session” with a bunch of their friends. First of all Kuma’s other band The BJs played some songs. Yes, they’re really called The BJs, but I’m pretty sure they don’t mean… what it can sometimes mean… I didn’t have the nerve to ask for clarification. Anyway they ended on a 5 Minute Advantage song, which was a cool touch. Then 5 Minute Advantage tore through their harder, punk stuff, sounding really good! Then Non orchestrated a crazily ad hoc jamming session whereby he went around the room, distributing instruments and creating a variety of different bands and combos. He handed me his guitar first and, frankly my chops were not up to jamming with Shuji and Uela (I’m pretty sure that was his name, he spoke no English whatsoever but he had fantastic taste in music). I did manage to fuck my fingers up nicely though with some ferocious power-chording, and later acquitted myself pretty well with singing duties on Nirvana, Undertones and Ramones tracks. And, of course, I got everyone to play Louie Louie. Afterwards we went to a 24 hour diner and drank macha lattes and talked about music. It was a fantastic welcome to Fukuoka!

5 Minute Advantage have apparently played only one proper show, at which Non was so drunk that he fell over during the first song, knocking over the PA as he did so and scattering the crowd before him. I wish I’d been there.

For the Japanese take on the whole experience head on over to 5 Minute Advantage’s page, where Kuma wrote all about it: http://justyl.blog41.fc2.com/

Andy, Kuma, Me, Waki & Non

The Nexus of Awesome (aka The Wonderleague Shoppe)

So it's perfectly possible that there are some of you who are utterly unaware of the all encompassing joy of Wonderleague. My sister Bunny (being upfront about things) has been toiling away for quite sometime to bring you the best of all possible worlds. A world in which belief-defying vintage, kitsch and collectible goods from throughout history are all available NOW to be bought by YOU. And now her new online store is open.

Go here: http://www.wonderleague.bigcartel.com/




But be warned, don't you go near that L-size Ren & Stimpy T-shirt. I'm having paypal issues right now, but that shit is MINE as soon as I get them sorted. You can have the giant sized Lion-O badge though; or one of the astounding packs of trading cards (Terrorist Attack! For real!); or one of the hand made soft toy cake slices; or something else from her dizzying collection. I know this is only a slice of what she's actually been hoarding too, I would imagine there's a lot more to come.

Her actual website is he-ya: http://www.wonderleague.co.uk/

Her blog where she talks about wrestling far more than you would expect is here: http://www.bunnybissoux.blogspot.com/

Hey Bunny! Blog-five! Yeah!

Haircut One Million

Last night I was walking through my neighbourhood with a saucepan in one hand and a bottle of jasmine tea in the other. Oh, and there was a donut from a tofu factory in the saucepan. I was the world’s greatest vigilante. NO ONE was fucking with me.

But what the hell, where the hell have I been? I’ve been busy is what. I mean where. Whatever. Nunnayerbeeswax. Still if I don’t feed the internet content regularly then I get nightmares about being eaten by a freakishly strong laptop. With TEETH. So here we go:

Since I’ve been in Japan I’ve been sporting that slightly lame side parting: all business, very little pleasure. Actually to be honest, when it starts out I’m always pretty happy with it; it makes me feel both preppy and Teutonic, like I’m a member of Kraftwerk modelling in a J. Crew catalogue. But the longer it gets, the more I slip from the early eighties to the mid seventies, and some mornings it’s hard to tell where I end and Nigel Havers begins.

That big hair, for posterity

So I devolved recently into an old style: big and messy. It was fun, I got crazy double takes everywhere I went, the general consensus being it made me look younger and more Japanese, which is all well and good. But I’d left it too long before changing and after two beautiful weeks it was getting harder and harder to “keep it up” as it were, so – to the hair salon.

Now, until last week I was always getting my hair cut at American House in the same building I work in. American House was not palatial, but it was slightly yellow, always full of cigarette smoke, and they have vacuum cleaners attached to the chairs, which they use on your neck when they’re done. That’s all you need for a haircut right? Seriously, though, those hoover things were great. It was like the future. Or at least Blake’s 7.

But, but, I decided to bite the bullet and go to a salon where I might have to do more than just mumble something about keeping the style but making it shorter. So with the help of my boss I picked a fancyish looking salon near where I live that had a money off voucher in the local paper, and I turned up there too early on a Saturday morning clutching two shitty little scraps of paper with photos of hairstyles that I didn’t totally loathe.

The aesthetic of the modern, young man’s hairstyle in Japan is pretty different from that of the west. It’s generally longer and bigger, but mullet variations are also rife as is a quite inappropriate amount of volume. I have no problem with these styles on Japanese guys, it looks great because it’s the accepted style, but on western guys it makes you look like you’re trying to look like a Japanese guy. So I was in the convenience store at 2am the night before leafing through men’s fashion magazines (and in fact men’s hairstyle magazines) trying to find a style that wouldn’t make me look like a total gonk. By the way, when you’re in a convenience store at 2am leaving through magazines – everyone else is looking at porn.

The photos were necessary because just describing what I wanted done in Japanese would have been pretty tough, if not impossible. But then they weren’t necessary after all because the salon had even better hairstyle magazines, and it was actually pretty easy to find something sub-cuntish to point to. And after the less than tender caresses of the barber-shop vacuum cleaner at the last place; a salon visit that involved multiple hair washes, a head and neck massage and a lack of choking clouds of cigarette smoke was like a visit to the elysian fields. Not only that, I can’t remember ever being quite so satisfied with a haircut on the day.

So an actual, non accidental hairstyle that looks pretty good? New ups and downs at work? A fairly clean apartment? Snow slowly melting away? Other unspecified big changes? Pedal me faster Cyclops, it must be Spring!

3, 2, 1... MAGNUM!

More Monobright Exclusive Blog Content!

As in content for the blog that I'm not putting on facebook. It's probably ridiculous to go into this but I mostly just post on facebook and later put the stuff here. And putting stuff here is a bleedin' headache partly because of the different gmail/blogger accounts I have, and partly because blogger is such an ornery piece of software to use. What takes me two minutes to upload on facebook takes twenty minutes here. And it's not like anyone's reading this anyway...

Oh hey, look! I just used the Most Written Blog Sentence Ever! Now I feel like I've accomplished something today.

Anyway back to the band. When I was looking into bands with Chris at Christmas (the two of which are unrelated), we checked out a couple of Monobright songs. He wasn't too impressed, but I liked the intro to one of their songs, so I kept them in mind. So it turns out that for a Japanese indie band they have a pretty freakin' high rate of rock-to-suck, and they come from Hokkaido! Which, I don't know how I didn't know before. Anyway, they were one of the bands that I recommended to my Dad when he came to stay, he loves them and pointed out to me that they are actually playing at The Great Escape in Brighton... England! What a small, small world we live in.

A brief biography can be found here. It gives you some nice information and some lovely phrases, but I'd have to disagree with the "nothing that sets them apart" bit. They have some great chord sequences and off-key countermelodies that really make some of their songs crackle. I like them a lot, and they're a lot better than most Japanese indie, which I assume is why they're hitting The Great Escape. Also, I just checked, and like I thought the guy who wrote that likes L'Arc-en-Ciel who are a particularly wretched kind of awful.

So here's a live performance of a great song:



God, that guy just cannot keep his mouth closed can he? I'd hate to sit across from him at an all-you-can-eat buffet. And here's their latest video, which like an earlier video that I saw benefits from looking pretty cheap and shoddy. I just like the concept, all washing machines should be powered like this:

MaXtreme Snowboarding X

So yes, against my physical disposition, and against my God given instincts I went snowboarding for the first time on Sunday. And of course I was lucky that I went along because I had a great time in spite of my cold, and in spite of the terrible, torturous, muscle pain that has afflicted me ever since.

I’m laying it on a bit thick, but thanks to the use of muscles that my body has never required before, and then perhaps… possibly drinking too much at Chris’s Flatwarming party, I felt today like I had been hit – not only by a truck – but by a truck filled with booze.

Gah.


Seriously, about those muscles, I’m pretty concerned. It’s good to get fit, and work out parts of your body that don’t normally get exercise; but the human body didn’t evolve to staple its feet to a plank of wood and hurtle down a hill. I’m not saying that the activity itself is unnatural, I’m just wondering if we might be developing parts of our bodies that aren’t really required in any other activity. I keep thinking of Frank Zappa’s high school pal who found the guide to muscles of the body and set about developing all the unnecessary ones, until he was a total freak. Then again I guess the proliferation of hot snowboarders out there should pretty much set my mind at ease.

The muscles that take the most abuse, of course, are your arms because you’re having to push yourself up every time you fall over. And for me that was pretty much every time. I had the hang of keeping myself upright for the most part by the end of the day, and could descend in one way or another, but my moments of perfect execution were few and far between. After I had the hang of sort of shuffling from side to side, I tried angling myself a little more directly down the hill. The speed was amazing, but I could only stop by falling over. Which, y’know… works. Ow.

Picking things up wasn’t actually as grindingly frustrating as I’d thought. Thanks to my teachers (Olivia & Sara, take a bow) and a pretty steep learning curve, I found that actually staying on your feet in the snow, which at first seems impossible, actually came pretty quickly. Also I was told things were tricky for me because of my high centre of gravity, I really had to crouch down for control sometimes. Gravity: my closest friend, my most vicious enemy. And if only that was the first time I’d had to use that sentence.

The other thing about snowboarding, or skiing even, is that it's worth it for the view alone. Seriously, somebody put a lift into the side of that mountain so you can go all the way to the top and take a look. Now all you've got to do is get back down without killing yourself. Oh wait, we're going to stick your feet to this carbon fibre board too. Off you go.

Tips for first time snowboarders:

From Yoko – keep some chocolates in your pocket. This didn’t sound so useful at first, but man I wish I’d had something up there to keep my blood-sugar up, because I must’ve sugar-crashed half a dozen times.

Bend your legs. No, more. More.

You don’t get bonus points for taking out kids. In fact, apparently you don’t get any points for taking out anyone. I’m not sure where I got that idea from, but I was pretty disappointed. Back to throwing bricks at skateboarders I guess.

Let's have a look in Alex's cupboard!

So the good thing about living in Japan is how easy it is to eat healthily, and maintain a balanced and nutritious diet. What with all the rice, fish and vegetables, it's almost as easy to cover all the important food groups as it is to slip on the ice and fall on your ass here in Sapporo. Just take a look at what I found when I cleared out my one, tiny kitchen cupboard:


Chocolate covered coffee beans

Royce Creamy Milk Chocolate Bar

Sparx Magic Colour Changing Popping Candy

Bag of Watagashi (four individually bagged portions of candy floss)

Two small bags of Doctor Who marshmallows

Boiled Strawberry Lollipop

Gummy Hotdog

Peanuts Christmas Hot Chocolate Sachet

Mike Popcorn (actually the best bagged popcorn in the world)

Gummy Bears

Nesquik Magic Straws

Two bottles of Reese's Peanut Butter Ice Cream Topping

Mentoes

Glico hard toffees

...and an unusually detailed chocolate model of a chimpanzee.

...

What? There was some rice and some instant cup noodles in there too.

Snow Festival Prelude / My Part In Its Downfall

Sapporo’s internationally, globally, world famous Snow Festival kicked off this morning with an opening ceremony that featured “Miss ~ from all over Japan”. I haven’t been down to check it out yet, and I’ll have to live with the disappointment of missing that cavalcade of lovelies, but I can at least bring you news from the build up last weekend.

Sapporo Snow Festival apparently attracts over two million visitors a year. Sapporo is a city of around one point seven million people. Now I’ve expressed scepticism about this in the past, but here I’m going to go right out and call shenanigans here. Where the hell could we possibly fit all those people? Today someone said “Yes, but Sapporo does have a lot of hotels”, which is true, but does it have a hotel district BIGGER THAN THE REST OF THE CITY? Christ on a bike.

I was in town on Saturday and Sunday though, and the large number of tourists was pretty apparent. It’s not like I’m the only Caucasian in the city here, but certainly I don’t see all that many white folks in my average week. This weekend there were loads of them as soon as I got off the train. And while there’s a natural snobbishness (that I’m not going to deny) that you get about any city in which you live, it really didn’t bother me all that much. UNTIL that is, I was in a tiny, tiny vintage shop where the woman at the counter asked me in Japanese if I was in town for the Snow Festival. Putting aside the fact that if I were in town for the Snow Festival I probably wouldn’t have understood her, I replied “No… I live here” in a kind of crestfallen way. Oh well, it was an awesome shop, and the whole time I was in there she seemed to be giving a Ukulele lesson to another woman who was standing at the counter. Seriously.

On any other day that would’ve easily won the day’s medal for best shop, but I also managed to stumble upon a bookshop that sold both new and ancient, second hand children’s books, art and design books, fabulous stationery and a bunch of other things. The shop was on the third floor of some no-mark building off the beaten track, and I talked to the owner for ages, as he had excellent English from working in New York for two years as a butcher (!). His stock was endlessly fascinating, and I should probably write a whole piece sometime about the appetite for travel and assimilation of western culture that allows you to strike up long conversations with Japanese people in a way that foreign nationals never could in the UK or America. I also bought a phenomenally cool mechanical pencil from the Czech Republic. Sweet!

Wait… I was going to talk about the Snow Festival I think. So even more awesome than going shopping was the fact that I got to help out with Jesi’s Snow Sculpture, which was one of the small blocks of snow that they allocate to the citizens of Sapporo. There are 120 citizens sculptures altogether, and they are raffled off to people from a list of 600 entrants. Of course most teams consist of half a dozen members, and they all enter in order to secure a block. Jesi entered all on her own and scored spot number 112 of 120. I helped out for maybe three hours in total, and frankly I take little pride in it, as both times I only actually turned up to apologise in person for not helping out, only to actually end up helping out. Still, check out all the pictures; those wrists and the drumstick in his right hand… all me baby. It was fun, and we felt a little special as we got a lot of double takes from Japanese people who didn’t expect to see any foreign people making snow sculptures. The only other foreign non-pros that I saw were the US NAVY team. Our sculpture was better than theirs.

A massive number of citizen’s sculptures are cartoon characters and company mascots, which is really very sensible since those characters are mostly large blobs with other blobs attached. A pretty safe bet for snow sculpting. They have to open up some of the blocks of the park to allow the citizens to get access to their sculptures, so I probably saw most of the big statues last weekend and they’re all pretty cool. I’ll be going down again in the next couple of days to have a proper look, but as everyone says – it will be very cold, there will be too many people, and I will catch flu and die. My question for all of my students this week is “Are you going to the Snow Festival” to which the answer is 95% NO. For the people of Sapporo this whole thing is just a week long inconvenience.

Lets knock this on the head with my favourite Snow Festival trivia right now.

Firstly while the main Snow Festival site is in Odori Park, the park that runs for a dozen city blocks across the centre of the city, the big sculptures are actually placed carefully slightly to the west. This is because there’s an underground mall to the east of the park, and the massive weight of a large snow sculpture would crash through the ceiling and destroy the wonder that is Aurora Town.

Secondly the Snow Festival is actually smaller now than it was a few years ago, not just because they’ve had a run of years with poor snow, but because of Japan’s increased military presence on the global stage. Apparently the Hokkaido SDF base sent troops to Iraq a few years ago, and as the SDF has always been one of the main contributors to the Snow Festival there were suddenly less people to make the massive sculptures. Is it shallow to make a joke about that being yet another reason to hate the war in Iraq?

Yes, it is