this post was originally drafted on december 12, 2010, just under two weeks after i returned from a month in japan. i'm picking up the thread of that initial effort somewhere around the end of paragraph four...
a.(drian) a.(nthony) gill is no stranger to criticism: he writes his own for the sunday times in the united kingdom -- and is readily and frequently criticized for his acerbic takes on culture and its makers. over the summer, a bbc presenter went so far as to file a complaint with the press complaints commission (the independent article where i read that implied that it's a huge deal) over comments gill made about her sexuality. so he should have been easy to pillory for his exceedingly reproachful take on japan and the japanese, thoughts that he put down in an essay called "mad in japan," which is headed "tokyo, september 2001" and appears in a collection of gill's travel writing entitled a. a. gill is away.
japan, in the entirety of its hidden and self-esteemed convolution, is too much for me to take up in a single post, which i don't say to recommend that it can't -- or shouldn't -- be done, but rather to pre-iterate a theme: that i can only take japan in meted doses. gill gave all of what he'd experienced of the country a dozen pages, probably the same number of days that he spent traveling in hiroshima, kyoto and tokyo (the same principle three that i showed my parents when they visited me for two weeks in february 2003 during my winter break.) my memories of hiroshima are occluded by distance, and i had my say on kyoto more than once while i was there. so this time we're dosing on straight tokyo, which i'm about to tell you is not an easy trip. (i haven't seen "enter the void," but the apartment i took in the city was in the area where that was set.)
to be honest, i'd planned a post on tokyo from well before arriving there. that city was the bright lights mecca of my early adulthood, and although i'd let the scales fall (you'll permit me that hackneyed idiom for knowing that they use a verbatim translation of it in japan) as far as my perspective on most things since i'd last lived there, i had reserved an exclusion for tokyo, the formative big city of my youth. gill's essay seemed like an easy foil. of course a non-initiate would be so immediately reproachful. gill derides: "but then, silly me, of course i don't understand. i'm constantly being patronized for my coarse sensibilities and told that naturally i couldn't comprehend the subtlety, the aesthetic bat-squeak of japanese culture." on the other hand, my own experienced understanding should be subtle and nuanced (i.e. sycophantically trained, subtlety and nuance being two of the most important tools for appreciating, and being appreciated by, the japanese).
having gotten to this point, though, i wonder if maybe that's just the impenetrability of the place, maybe the japanese have always had me in the dark and i've never had any claim on that city whatsoever; because despite all the starry-eyed planning -- and then the strange dismissive resignation -- i find myself with absolutely no way in, and everything i thought i had to say stops dead up against a wall of babble just as incongruously convoluted as my subject would like to seem. what was once, however, a mysterious magic now just seems drearily enervating. the harder i try to write around the inevitable in my lead up, the more i just succeed in drawing the outline of a place that has, for me, lost everything but a clichéd curiosity.
"if freud had lived in tokyo," gill writes, "we'd never have got analysis. he wouldn't have known where to start." it's tough to say whether the sexuality of the city is more confusing or confused, but there's no doubt that the bright lights and hyper-modern kitsch of tokyo's sex industry, which makes no attempt of hiding itself from view, are as representative of japan in the west as sushi or giant robots. the japanese are as eager to glom onto a fetish as admirers of japan in the west are to exoticize and fetishize all of its cultural quirks.
those damn scales, though, they drop easy. maybe it's just my frustration at having worked so long and hard to perfect a fluid and graceful posture within a such an opaque and rigid system of social strictures only to find myself still denied the benefits of being on the inside, but the cultural quirk of japan seems to be just a game of self-distraction played by the japanese to keep them from facing up to the paucity of their contemporary social ethos. i'll defer one last time to gill, quoting words of his that i felt so much righteous defiance towards when i first read them: "japan has taken the worst of the west and discarded the best. so it has a democracy without individualism...it makes without creating. and, saddest and most telling, it has emotion without love." but we loved each other once, didn't we, tokyo?
so this essay is ultimately about nothing, because, in the end, saying what i've said amounts to nothing more than crying over a breakup to friends at the bar, friends that couldn't be expected to know anything of the real tumult of the emotions on either side of the story but who listen (as you're reading) because it's the nice thing to do. sadly, in the terrible end it's also impossible to sound convincing when you say that things were once absolutely lovely. i drew the veil because i didn't want it drawn aside, and so when i planned this post on tokyo before arriving there in november, i saw myself walking the streets of that old flame to the soundtrack of "your silent face" by new order and "theme for great cities" by simple minds.
tokyo, you are a great city. the great city of my youth, the powerful eighties, and although i didn't know you until the end of the next decade, you still had that air of glory when we met. neither of us, however, can deny that all that's gone. i still listened to my soundtrack, and it still made sense, but only for the way we were (don't worry, i won't let streisand sully our memory). even if i didn't see you the same way, i took solace in individuals, our mutual friends. they didn't take sides. having given myself some time alone to think, i don't feel nearly so adamant about airing my grievances, but this post isn't finishing itself much differently than it started. that says something, right? no hard feelings, tokyo, but i think we're breaking up. we can be civil. there's no need to make our friends take sides now. and we'll always have, well...yeah. but you should have told me that you cheated on me with a.a. gill.
update, 2/8, 10:21 a.m.: i've got an email in my inbox from ameba, a japanese web magazine and social network of sorts that hosts a friend's blog. the subject line is, "women with clean toilets do well with men. a group of models and ame-blog readers share their manuals for becoming a more polished woman." i don't take back a thing. i meant it all.
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