Money, Monks, and Good Luck hr677

 

Although I don’t regard myself as a believer in Buddhism, I visit a nearby temple once a year as a custom with lots of wishes for the new year when snow melts away at the end of a long harsh winter. I toss a one-yen coin into an offertory box, ring a bell that is dangled under the eaves, and pray for a few minutes.

Kyoto, where I was born and raised, is renowned as a historical city that had been the capital of Japan for over one thousand years. Historic landmarks are everywhere, most of which are temples and shrines. In that kind of city, especially a rural town like the one that I’m from has a strong relationship with a local Buddhist temple in the hamlet. The temple that my family served as one of its main parishioners was one block away from home and I used to have quite a few occasions to go there when I was little. The temple had a cemetery of the family’s ancestors in the hamlet on its premises and managed it. Inside the temple, a variety of gatherings were held, such as a meeting of main parishioners, a lecture meeting for elderly men and women separately, and sometimes a wedding or a funeral. The chief priest of the temple lived at the site, who preached the teachings of Buddha at the meetings and read the sutras at a funeral or a memorial service that was held for the deceased in a family every several years. The sutras are intoned monotonously, of which contents and meanings I can’t make nothing, and are supposed to purify people’s minds and give repose to the deceased’s soul. Although listening to them should be a boon, all I felt physically would be pain in my legs as we usually didn’t sit in a chair but had to sit our legs bent beneath us on the tatami floor, and mentally would be a wish for the sutras to end soon.

When I was a child, the folks in my hamlet respected the old chief priest of the local temple because his preaching convinced them that he had learned the Buddhist scriptures well and disciplined himself accordingly. However, the new young priest who took over his predecessor’s duties had fallen into disfavor. He preached irrelevantly and incorrectly, buttered up main parishioners with tacky flatteries, and urged unnecessary memorial services on which decline he threatened the family to be cursed. While I understood he must have had financial difficulties, he looked like a salesman rather than a priest. Other than the one in my hamlet, monks were spotted easily around the city as there were many temples in Kyoto. When I was in my late teens and worked part-time at a steak restaurant, I often saw a skinhead man wearing a monk’s stole, who I hoped wasn’t a real monk but just cosplayed which was sadly unlikely, have an expensive steak and beer in the middle of the day and leave by driving a luxury car. Ascetic monks in the Buddha era fasted at the risk of their life or buried themselves in the ground to seek the truth of spiritual enlightenment. Compared to those who tried to hear the voice of God abstinently, it seemed that monks in modern times cherished money over God. It’s not fair to blame only monks, though. We may have lapsed into the same state as them.

I create my songs by squeezing everything I got and taking years per song, in order to dedicate them to the Higher Power of the Universe that I call it. I don’t know exactly what it is but I feel its existence from my experiences in which something must have watched over and helped me by making unexpected things happen and giving me hope with that. Since it looks on me and gives me benefit, I should show gratitude and repay it with what I could possibly do. Then, that calls forth good luck, I suppose. Because I don’t think money brings happiness, I would be happy if I were being a blessed person.

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. 

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.

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.