Friday, March 22, 2024

A Super Drummer Appears! hr676

 

There used to be numerous kinds of music magazines at book stores in the mid-80’s when my partner and I moved to Tokyo to become professional musicians. Those magazines had classified ads on the last few pages to recruit band members. Among them, a magazine called ‘Player’ spared almost more than half the entire contents for the classified ads. In fact, my partner and I ran across each other through one of the ads in that magazine when I still lived in Kyoto.

One of the reasons why we came to Tokyo was that we had thought many good musicians would be found in Tokyo, which would enable us to form a band with professional quality in no time. Finding a good player had been extremely difficult when we played around the kyoto area. We recruited one after another who had never met our standard. In the end, we used a rhythm machine and sequencers in place of human members. It was the time when those gadgets had been just put on the market so that the technology was lamentably primitive. Machine troubles had been our norm in the gigs and we had bitterly learned the limitations of machine members.

Once we moved to Tokyo, we put as many classified ads as possible in the music magazines and met so many musicians. While we repeated test sessions with each candidate in the studio, we couldn’t find good enough members who matched our quest for the ones with high skill and a strong motivation to become professional. We gradually began to think that we had overestimated Tokyo.

On one of those days, we found Mr. Maejima. He was a highly motivated drummer of a bag of bones, who was refined and courteous, a dropout of college from passion for music as I was. In the studio session, he played accurately and delicately, who was the best drummer we had ever come across. He joined us as a band member instantly. We got along so well. We shared not only eagerness for success in music but also even hobbies, which made us closer. He invited us to his home where he lived with his parents. He gave me his old, first drum set that he had gotten by working part time so strenuously when he was a student, and came to my apartment with it to set it up for me. He also gave me a lot of gaming software that he had finished playing. The legendary film ‘Back to the Future’ was first known to us as his best picture. Together we ate out and even went to that famous theme park of the mouse, where I introduced him to the mouse as my band’s drummer. We were on good terms, that was quite rare for my partner and I who had no friends.

As for other members however, we continuously had no luck. We couldn’t find a bassist and a guitarist, and had to compromise with the temporary members to play for gigs and auditions. Those members played awfully in the studio for rehearsal and in the actual gigs. What irritated us most was they would make a big mistake at the important contest of all things and ruin our chance. On top of that, we were caught in a fight with the promoter of the gig who turned out to be a fraud. We were besieged with bad luck and our band had been in hot water for months.

Then at last, Mr. Maejima told us that he wanted to quit the band. My partner and I understood his feeling since a long predicament of the band added to our part time jobs for living had exhausted us as well. We were too dispirited to persuade him to stay. Nevertheless, it was so hard to see an unfailing partner leaving. A leaden heart by his leaving drove us to switch to recording our songs with synthesizers from playing them in a gig. In hindsight, it was a good decision that would work for us well.

A few years later, I received a letter from Mr. Maejima unexpectedly. It said that he had joined a new religious group and worked as a drummer of the group’s band. He suggested that I join it. While I should have felt happy for him, I felt sad instead. The fact that the mainstream of the music scene had no place for such a talented, motivated musician like Mr. Maejima. The reality that a would-be artist with good looks and no talent sold well and was adored. I knew that the world was unfair, but his letter made me realize it anew.

Decades have passed since then, and I have moved around several times. Still, I have a drum set that Mr. Maejima gave me. It’s on active service, only disassembled to components. They are used as containers in my apartment, holding my stuff including passion. 

Wednesday, February 14, 2024

Ramen Restaurants in Japan hr675

 

Japanese people love ramen so much. Ramen is Chinese-style soup noodles which is obscenely popular in Japan. I hear that there are about 20,000 ramen restaurants all over the country. The degree of its popularity is easily imagined by the fact that a McDonald’s closed and reopened as a ramen restaurant in my town. Chains are rampant while the majority are small restaurants run privately by individual owner-managers. In front of a popular restaurant, a long queue is formed before it opens until it closes for the day and the place is packed with customers all day long. Millions of websites, magazines, TV programs and YouTube videos feature and introduce ramen restaurants of any kind, in any area.

I like ramen but don’t eat it at the restaurant. I loathe a waiting line to begin with. And the atmosphere is a big problem. Those restaurants are clean but almost all of them are shabby. Customers sit at the counter elbow to elbow in a cramped space where they suck in noodles by slurping. Above all, the price is high. A bowl of ramen in an atrocious atmosphere costs more than a dish at a modern family restaurant. The reason why people choose ramen restaurants despite all of that is the quality of deliciousness, I suppose.

An owner-manager in any ramen restaurant is particular about his or her special recipe that is attained by a continuous process of trial and error over years, in which they have selected and contrived a mixture of ingredients for the soup, such as pork, chicken, fish, soy sauce or miso. They use carefully-selected noodles in their elaborate soup for which they begin to prepare the night before. Because they spend enormous time and effort to make ramen, profit is little in spite of the high price setting. I think that is why their restaurants are small and tacky. To me, it’s always a mystery why they wouldn’t spare just a tiny bit of their passion for the taste, to their place’s interior. But there’s one bigger question. If they can’t be rich no matter how popular their place becomes by their time, effort and elaboration, why do they run that kind of business?

Come to think of it, I take years to complete my song with persistent, rather obsessive elaboration although it doesn’t sell at all. I know I can earn money if I make many songs like recent hit ones that are catchy and arranged with loops efficiently done by copying and pasting on music software. Yet, I wouldn’t do that. Since we have limited time from birth to death, I want to spend mine for what I can enjoy as much as possible. From my experiences with my wealthy parents and my rich friends’ parents at the private school I went to, I learned that living in luxury gives more enjoyment is an illusion. I would rather have time for doing what makes me feel deeply satisfied and truly happy than for greed and a shallow delight given by looking down on others. After all, I feel happy by elaborating my music into perfection itself, which is more appealing to me than money.

I suspect that owner-managers of ramen restaurants may feel the same way I do. Even if that’s the case, I won’t enter their unrefined restaurants. I would definitely get in if there were a delicious, low-priced ramen place with a sophisticated atmosphere and no queue. However, the possibility that I come across that restaurant is as low as I become a successful musician. I would never say never though.

Friday, January 12, 2024

A Life Foretelling Poem hr674

 

My Japanese language teacher gave particular homework when I was a junior high school student in Kyoto. She assigned a Japanese poem to each student in the class and told us to interpret its meaning. The subject poem was from a Japanese classic anthology called Ogura Hyakunin Issyu which is composed of one hundred poems by one hundred poets. That set of one hundred poems was compiled in the 13th century in Kyoto, which was the capital of Japan then, and written by one hundred different representative poets of the era, who were  sort of celebrities at that time. All poems are written in a specific style called ‘tanka’ that is a long version of haiku. The anthology has been popular all along for some reason so that it became a Japanese classic card game at one point. Even now, a national tournament of the card game takes place annually, which is a fixture of the New Year in Japan.

One of those poems was assigned to me for homework. A number had been given to each student according to the student register listed by names in alphabetical order. My number was eight. The poems also had a number for each and the teacher assigned the corresponding one to the student number. Mine was the poem number eight written by Kisen Hoshi who was a Buddhist priest. Not only the style but also the words and the place names used in the poem were too old for me to understand. It wasn’t appealing and I didn’t appreciate it. Besides, I was a thirteen-year-old who had any interest in neither in tanka nor haiku. Just to finish my homework, I was looking into and trying to interpret it. But the further I went, the fonder I grew of the poem. Rather I sympathized with it. To sum up, the meaning of the poem is “I am living a secluded life in my hermitage that stands away from a capital city. People call me a recluse.” Back then, I had just entered a privileged private school where I had been struggling to fit in. As a daughter of rural farmers, I couldn’t get along with other students from rich families. I usually felt like an outcast at school and the poem generated deep empathy.

The homework stimulated my interest in the anthology and I fell for it before I knew it. I read and interpreted all one hundred poems and in the end, I won the school’s card game tournament by remembering all the poems completely. I don’t say that poem changed my life, but it surely influenced the course of my life. As an unknown singer-songwriter, I often feel that I’m not part of this society. And I suspect that the poem is one of the reasons why I quite easily accept that feeling. It told me that I was not alone. It also showed me the strong power of what someone creates fueled by empathy. My belief that a song can change somebody’s life for the better may have stemmed partly from this encounter with the poem.

I’m still able to recite some of those one hundred poems. Among them, the number eight that was given to me as my homework often comes up in my mind. After decades have passed since I came across that poem, I feel empathy more than ever. I had left my family and friends and moved into a remote town closed in by mountains to make music. When I see the snow-covered mountains from the window of my small apartment, I recite the number eight poem unknowingly, and find myself living just as it is written.

Friday, December 15, 2023

A Picture of the World After Death hr673

 

There was a local temple one block away from my home in my hometown. The temple wasn't a grand splendid kind that often appeared in sightseeing brochures, but a small somber one that seemed more like a meeting place of a hamlet. People in my hamlet regularly used it for various kinds of assembly, such as a parishioners' meeting, a sutra reading practice of elders, and funeral prayers. It had the cemetery in the yard where stone statues of a guardian deity of children lined up. My mother used to take my sister and me there to pray at the statues. In the old days, those local temples in Japan served as family history keepers for the residents of the area. People would use a temple to examine the other family when their daughters or sons were getting married. For so many purposes, the local temple was deeply integrated with the residents' daily lives when I was a child.

During those days, an assembly for children living in the hamlet was held annually in the temple every summer. Grandmothers would take their grandchildren to the temple where the monk preached and handed a bag of candies and snacks. A hall of the temple had a large wall picture that depicted the world after death with an ancient eerie fearful touch. The dead cross a river that separates this world and the next. They meet one by one a humongous fiend with a horrifying face who judges them according to their deeds in their lifetime. A dead person who lies to the fiend is to get their tongue pulled out. Some of the dead climb above clouds where heaven is, and some are kicked off down to a pit where hell is. In hell, the dead are boiled in a caldron or burned by lurid fire. Grown-ups told the children that they would end up there if they did evil. I suppose the picture would be regarded as inappropriate for children if it were now, for the reason of giving them a traumatic memory.

There is a proverb in Japan that is 'Hell and heaven exists in this life.' As it says, innocent people get killed every day and less fortunate people endure scarce suffering days that make them feel as if they are being boiled in a caldron. Looking back, I also had some experiences in which I felt as if I had been in hell. Especially when my parents deceived me and destroyed my music business, I writhed in agony with anger and grief. I duly agree from my own experiences that hell exists in this life, but then, where in this life does heaven exist?

I have some possible instances that I can think of. When I completed one of my songs after almost ten years with my aimed quality and no compromise, I burst into laughter with tears rolling down on my cheeks, feeling like I was floating toward the sky with extreme happiness. Also, whenever I acknowledge someone purchased, downloaded and read my book somewhere, my heart gets warm and is shined with a sense of happiness even though it pays me a dollar or so. I think people can be in heaven in this life when what they are engrossed in by doing their best is rewarded somewhat, even a little, after they go through many kinds of hardships.

We don't have to wait for the end of this life since we can be either in heaven or hell today. At least we can decide which place to walk toward today. Even if hope and despair always coexist and fall on us as a set whenever we strive for what we want, I would rather keep trying and head for heaven. An image of hell that was shown in the picture of the temple remains in my brain and still scares me. I just don't want to be in a place like that. 

Thursday, November 16, 2023

Welcome to the Real World hr672

 

In the mid-80’s, flashy, rhythmic songs were dominant throughout the Japanese pop music scene. It may have had to do with the Japanese bubble economy which sent the nation frivolous and on a spree. The kind of songs that influenced me by touching and reaching my heart had been no longer the mainstream.

My partner and I moved to Tokyo to be professional singer-songwriters just in those days. While we continued to search for the band members, we were aggressively sending out our demo tapes to the major record companies. In addition, my partner was visiting the companies in person to hand out the demos. Since we didn’t have any connections or acquaintances there, my partner would sneak through the reception, get into the elevator to the production department floor by mingling with other employees, circle around the desks of the staff with saying, “Please listen to my demo tape.” Most office workers made a face and refused, but there was rarely someone among them who showed him a person he had better turn to, or actually listened to the tape. My partner had routinely visited the production department in all the major record companies in Tokyo in that way and consequently acquired some connections with producers.

One day, a producer introduced to him the in-house competition for a debut song of the company’s contracted idol singer. He allowed my partner to join other contracted songwriters and enter the competition with a song written for the singer. We would get a contract if the song was selected. Until then, we had written songs exclusively for ourselves and had never even imagined writing for other singers. While I had no interest in it at all, my partner gave it a try to use this opportunity as a footing for our possible record deal. He wrote quite a few songs for the idol singer and submitted the best one to the competition. Several weeks later, the producer called him for a meeting where he was told that his song wasn’t selected. The producer let him listen to the selected one. He couldn’t accept the result because the selected song was a disaster. When he asked the producer to point out at least one thing that was superior to his own song, he couldn’t answer.

That was a too familiar instance of what we had experienced about our songs. Whenever we got some advice or opinions from music producers, they sounded irrelevant and off-base. They made us fail the audition or told us our songs were not good, and gave us unconvincing reasons that were out of the point. To sum up, so-called ‘music producers’ of the major Japanese record companies were simply office workers who graduated from the renowned university and happened to like music as a hobby. We, on the other hand, had bet our life on music, had thought about nothing other than music all day and had striven to create better music every day for almost a decade. It was natural we didn’t click with each other as the depth of passion for music was too far different. The more I got involved with the Japanese music business, the more I learned how important aspects of looks, impact, and trends were, much more than quality and creativity.

In fact, it happened so many times that when we got a call from a producer who listened to our songs and liked them, he instantly lost interest the moment he saw our looks at the first meeting. We often brought our own marketing ideas about how we should be produced and promoted, which also made them turn us away. It seemed that they wanted musicians to be beautiful puppets with no brains.

I was naive enough to believe that making better songs would open the door to a contract with a record company. However, that wasn’t true to reality. In reality, the Japanese music industry had become trashy and petty. The question was, if I would give up being a professional singer-songwriter then. Since singing and writing songs was the only thing that I was good at, I couldn’t afford to quit trying. Besides, I still believed that there must have been people who wanted to listen to the songs that could save them by touching their hearts and changing their life, just as those songs did to me once. Now that the Japanese music scene had deteriorated in the real world, sending out that kind of songs was necessary all the more. Although I knew there must have been a way to do so, I couldn’t figure out how to find it. And so it went, the struggle stuck, clutched, and pursued my partner and me all along in those early days of my career.

Friday, October 20, 2023

The Unhappy at the Happiest Place hr671

 

Looking back, the bottom of my life was several years in the mid-80’s when I left my hometown and came to live in Tokyo where I was struggling for success as a musician. While I was working part-time for a living, I was making songs, looking for band members, doing gigs and selling our demos to the record companies. Those days were so energy-consuming without any luck that my mind and body had been both tuckered out. I began to drink and smoke.

It happened at the theme park in the Tokyo area which host was the mouse. I had been working part-time as an attraction cast member at the park that was newly opened only a few years back. Because it was in the midst of the Japanese holiday week, the park was quite crowded. The attraction where I worked had a full house all day and a long waiting line continued. When I was introducing the attraction over the PA system at the holding area inside, I saw a group of three peevishly-looking men in their late twenties eating popcorn. After I put down the microphone, I approached them and gently with a smile asked not to eat inside, which was strictly instructed as a working procedure. Then I noticed they were sitting on a swung chain in front of the mural painting. I went to them and again asked not to because the chain was easily detached from the poles thus dangerous, which was also what the cast member was strictly told to do. The whole thing originated with these two trivial incidents.

Next to the holding area was the preshow area where the short movie was shown. In the middle of the movie, I saw some people open the door and enter the next theater, which was prohibited. I followed them into the theater where the main attraction was. They were the same men who had infringed the attraction rules at the holding area. I politely asked them to return to the preshow or go out as they weren’t allowed to skip the process. One of them said to me angrily, “You have kept telling me not to do this and that all the way! Stop that already!” They refused what I asked and tried to stay in the main theater. I explained the preshow would end merely in about a few minutes and asked them to go back. Then he yelled at me, “Shut up, ugly!”

The word ‘ugly’ had been a cue for me since I was a child. I battered a boy who uttered the word to me at elementary school. Even in my adult life, I once tried to strangle a middle-aged hoodlum and push him over the bridge-rail down to the river. In that case, I was carrying all the musical instruments and walking slowly when the man yelled at me from behind, “Walk fast!” I turned around and explained why I couldn’t do so with a heavy burden, and he said, “Don’t bar the way, ugly!” Probably because of my complex, I easily lost control whenever somebody told me ‘ugly’.

The man’s cue at the theme park made me thrust him with my both hands. He fired up as well and shouted, “Violence! Violence here!” Next moment, I found myself punching him. He looked surprised and terrified, then repeated like a child, “Violence! I was hit by an employee!” Other cast members came running toward us. Without a word, I left the attraction for the break area where I smoked a Camel.

Nobody came to me and I returned to work after I pulled myself together half an hour or so later. Neither the supervisor nor my colleagues mentioned the incident. They acted perfectly as if nothing had happened. They behaved similarly the next day, too, except for a distant attitude. Since it was in those times when companies’ awareness of compliance was low and social media where people upload their video clips was yet to come, the incident didn’t raise a fuss. Even so, I didn’t feel relieved not to be fired. I just felt sorry for the mouse who was the host of the park, that I did violence at my favorite place. I noticed how low I had gotten as a person. The sense I needed to clean up my act and change led me to quit the job soon after the incident.

I am so ashamed of my past self. I couldn’t, and still can’t, forgive my behavior. Just because I was unhappy, I shouldn’t have taken it out to others. I realized I was a foolish punk myself, and bitterly hated myself for that. The decision to quit the job was the new cue to try to become a better person. What I didn’t see was that the cue consequently turned my life for the better. I thought I was completely cornered and resigned to live at the bottom, not knowing I had gotten out of the worst already.

Friday, September 22, 2023

A Long Way to Freedom hr670

 

I have started a video Podcast.

A complex about looks resides in me always, all my life. When I was a child, my mother used to say, “If only you don’t have a nose like that,” by shading my nose with her hand. She daily instructed me that the only way for me to make it through in this society was to be affable to anyone since I wasn’t pretty. Adding to the piggy nose, I was fat, and given a constant notion from my mother that I was ugly. Although I had a dream to be a singer, the complex about being ugly led me to switch my dream to be a radio personality that could hide looks. Then, while I had been suffering many more bitter experiences of my looks mainly at school as a teenager that relentlessly implied my ugliness, there came a big music trend in Japan, in which singer-songwriters who didn’t have good looks and abstained from TV appearances made big hits. I saw a new path appear in front of me. My dream to be a singer was back on and with my own songs this time.

Sadly, that music trend didn’t last long. By the time I got down to pursue my music career in earnest, the trend had died out and good looks had been required for singer-songwriters as well. Although many record companies and music producers contacted me when they listened to my songs that I sent to them, they turned down the offer as soon as they saw me at the first meeting. I had tried to hide my looks as much as possible in the course of my career as a musician because they would work adversely. My complex had deepened further.

I am vain by nature. I grew up hearing my mother say that the most important thing is how we look to others. It seems I’m unable to break her spell. While my life has been a long journey to fix my flaws and complexes, the biggest obstacle is my vanity. I thought it was about time to face off. Now that I’m no longer young, my vanity has been forced to be compromised drastically. Aging has made my looks even worse, my moves clumsier, my careless mistakes more frequent. I’m too old to care about good looks that are way out of my reach now. To get rid of the complex by beating my vanity once and for all, I decided to take on a video Podcast that would reveal my bad looks to the public.

I connected my microphone into my computer and set a photo shoot light that I newly bought. The light got broken quickly and the microphone didn’t work properly on the computer. I ended up shooting with my smartphone. Although I had recorded several Podcasts without a picture for some time, doing on video is a whole different business. Sitting in front of a smartphone with makeup and good clothes feels as if I were in front of others. Because I’m not social, I easily get extremely tense and can’t talk as I usually do. On every recording, I sweat all over from tension. Sometimes my head goes blank and I just stare into space while opening and closing my mouth that utters nothing. I begin to get nervous a couple of days before the recording and feel like running away by the time I start shooting.

However, I feel surprisingly refreshed when I finish, and I want to do more. Since it appears to work as therapy for my social phobia and stage fright too, I think I had better continue. Above all, it helps me to be free from my mother’s spell though it took so long. I should be content to show myself as I am even if nobody watches or I look hideous or I can’t speak as I intend to. And I hope that recording becomes enjoyable for me someday. That would be the day when I have overcome my complex and have won this battle. 


~Talking and Reading from Japan by Hidemi Woods~

video Podcast: [ Youtube ] [ spotify ]

Podcast: [ Amazon Music ] [Apple Podcast] [Castbox]