Man and Ultraman

If there’s anyone out there who’s worried about the possibility that the Japanese recycling and garbage pickup system is not complicated enough, not diabolically impenetrable enough, not incomprehensible or Byzantine enough, then allow me to refer you to the following. Behold the monthly trash/recycling schedule posted in my kitchen. And lay your concerns to rest. (Did I mention there’s no curbside pickup?)

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5443669538228827844&hl=en]

Probably best to turn the volume down on this one. It’s just me providing unnecessary & trivial commentary, and you can’t hear me over the wind anyway. See all the photos here. Fancy a look in Google Maps?

One of the most satisfying parts of being on the other side of the world has been unplugging from the 24-hour information machine that saturates every waking moment of daily existence in the U.S. It’s not that Japan is fundamentally any different from the U.S. in this respect, only that my personal circumstances have changed. There are probably just as many superfluous ones and zeroes pumped through the air of every public space here as in the States, maybe even more. Even in out-of-the-way Fukui, you still see huge building-sized plasma displays competing for attention at every major downtown intersection, and vast banks of television screens flicker like the square faces of ghosts at shoppers in the lobbies of grocery stores and supermarkets. But of course they’re all in Japanese. It’s just blinking lights and barking mouths to me. (Incidentally, don’t get me started on the Japanese pop music that liquifies the brain of anyone who steps into a shopping center or supermarket here. Sometimes it’s even playing from speakers along city streets. This is the stuff of nightmares, the sort of result you’d expect if you could somehow combine corn syrup, kittens, vanilla ice cream, rainbows, pop rocks, air raid sirens, Mariah Carey, David Hasselhoff and a dictionary of clichés – or are those last two redundant? Look, you went and got me started anyway, didn’t you?)

Also, I’m no media hating Kill-Your-Televisionist. I’ve worked in the news and entertainment media industry for almost ten years – this is a card-carrying, American-conditioned media consumer here. These days, though, my daily contact with the English-speaking world is limited to my laptop, a wireless broadband signal, and my iPod. It doesn’t make for the most up-to-date skinny on what’s happening back home with Britney, Brangelina, Hillary, Halo III and the cast of Lost, but somehow I’m confident the world is chugging along just fine without me.

This weekend, though, it was pretty much impossible for me to avoid hearing about the Big Local News Story, because it came to me not from a TV set or a celebrity gossip blog but from the people living it. Nova Japan, the biggest private English-teaching company in the country, collapsed on Friday and filed for bankruptcy, putting roughly 7,000 people here out of work, most of them young Americans. Continue Reading »

Saturday night was Halloween Party Blowout night in Japan, just as it surely was in the United States. Apropos of my post last week, Reuters News Service today runs a story about the Japanese obsession with American holidays like Halloween.

“Japanese people like festivals very much, you see. We even celebrate Christmas, but we don’t celebrate Christ, we just enjoy,” says Yoshiaki Ei, an affable entrepreneur wearing jeans and a blue long-sleeve T-shirt. Mainstream clubs advertise “Fetish Halloween” and “Erotica Halloween” parties. Fashion retailers decorate their windows with slogans such as “Play! Party! With cute trick!” Japan’s passion for Halloween extends a long tradition of festivals that liberate ordinary Japanese from the extreme control they face in everyday life, according to Patrick William Galbraith, a researcher at Sophia University’s Japanese Studies faculty.

There was no shortage of said liberating going on among the raucous crowd of Japanese and Westerners aboard the Fukui International Club’s Halloween Party Train Saturday night. We all climbed onto a local train the club had tricked out with a sound system and party decorations – even a disco ball – and spent two and a half hours riding the local railways to throbbing dance music, chugging sake and Asahi beer, and communicating in the international language of costume-wearing intoxicated people everywhere. Lessons learned during the evening: 1) it’s basically impossible to take a picture with no flash in a rocking train filled with jostling, dancing revelers, 2) in the future, stay far, far away from Japanese tequila.

So you think Christmas comes earlier every year in the U.S.? At least retailers there have the decency – if that’s the right word – to wait until the Halloween orgy is out of the way to start beating us over the head with Holiday shtick. Yesterday I walked into a home supplies store in Sabai and what do you think I got? A face full of Merry Christmas, that’s what, complete with Santa Claus, fake trees, and blinking yard reindeer. Yesterday, I should mention, was October 25.

Meanwhile, the word on everybody’s lips in Fukui is about Halloween this weekend. The place is awash in standard décor – fake cobwebs, rubber skeletons, jack-o-lantern cut-outs, black cats, and the rest – and there’s an outbreak of Halloween parties planned Saturday night, all with the obligatory cover charge and costume contest. The kids are all in danger of wetting themselves with excitement over next week’s trick-or-treating revenues.

I arrived in Japan in the middle of a week-long national holiday called Obon, during which everyone returns to their family homes to honor the souls of their ancestors. Obon involves a lot of Buddhist-style ceremonial stuff, and everyone has to spend a bunch of time hanging out in graveyards. And that’s actually a high point on the official Japanese holiday calendar, which includes such other red-letter dates as Respect for the Aged Day, Constitution Day, Culture Day, and Ōmisoka on December 31, when everyone in the country undertakes a vigorous house cleaning in preparation for the new year.

So you can hardly blame the Japanese for adopting a foreign holiday or two, especially if they’re retail-friendly and involve a lot of parties. National Foundation Day is great and all, but I imagine it’s severely underrepresented in the young-girls-dressed-up-as-sexy-nurses department.