Good-by, My Dear Friends hr685

 Our furniture and appliances have finished being moved into our new apartment. My partner and I were gazing at an array of our musical instruments spread all over the floor in the living room of our empty apartment.
Five synthesizers, two electric guitars, an 88-key MIDI board, two rhythm machines, three sequencers, three sound source modules, many effectors, an 8-track open reel recorder, an 8-track mixer, a 16-track mixer, a drum set and accessories. Those instruments have occupied a large space of our tiny apartment although they haven't been used for over twenty years since a computer became a dominant tool for me to make my music. Today, a person from the used instrument purchase company was coming to our apartment to make an assessment and collect them. The instruments that spent so many years with me were on standby for their last work with a  somewhat tense look.
We shared a lot of memories. It was my custom in my old days to carry several heavy instruments on foot and by train into the studio every time my band practiced and rehearsed. I input data of the arrangement I made for my song on the sequencer by staying up all night and the entire data was all gone in a flash when I tripped on the power cord toward morning that got pulled out of the outlet. Technical difficulties were rampant on the live stage since I used so many kinds of electric instruments connected to each other in place of human band members, such as no sound came out of the sequencer or unexpected sound was produced from the synthesizer, which needless to say horrified me and gave me a cold sweat each time. The instruments felt much heavier on my way home whenever I lost a contest or an audition. We had trodden together on a long, endless road of disappointment and cravings. Though I had already stopped using most of them by the time I moved into this apartment, I brought them anyway by paying costly moving expenses because I was too attached to them to let them go.
For this move, however, I decided not to bring them to my new apartment. I was no longer my past self who had desperately coveted success as a band or had focused too much on writing songs and recording them without sleep until I harmed my health. As I grew older and accumulated more experiences, I came to understand things and be mature. That helped me sort out my feelings. I felt it was time to take the next step of my life, thus time to leave my instruments.
Looking back, not all the memories we shared were bitter. There were fond memories as well. An extremely hopeful feeling that I had when I got a new instrument with all the money I saved by working for months on my part-time job. An indescribable satisfaction I obtained when I got the best take after redid recording hundreds of times. Heavenly bliss I felt when I listened to my completed song after a long period of time of making. After all those years, I finally realized how happy I had been and how valuable my experiences were.
The person who came to our apartment from the used instrument purchase company was a young man who undoubtedly wasn't born yet when I bought these instruments. He carefully looked into each of them to decide the price. When he was done, he asked, "Why are you selling them?" My partner replied, "We make music with a computer now and don't use them anymore." Then he said to my partner and me, "It's so wonderful that you have been making music all the way together."
The price he offered was far higher than we had expected. While we didn't have much income from our music no matter how hard we strove with those instruments, they earned a good sum of money for us at the very end. We helped him load the sold instruments onto his van and saw them off. I was a little sad, but somehow refreshed and cleared at the same time. And that made me feel like our new life had just begun.

 

Shifting Seasons, Renewed Mind hr684

 

The local bus I got on was crowded. While I barely found a seat to sit on, my partner was standing with heavy bags on his shoulders and hands. A woman behind him got up and said to him, “Would you like to sit here?” and he declined saying, “No thank you, I’m fine.” He told me later that he was shocked when he was treated as an elderly by being offered someone’s seat for the first time in his life. He may have looked older than his age since his hair was grey and wearing sunglasses and a mask.

I have taken this local bus before and it is usually near empty. But early November causes a sudden change every year. The section deep into my rural town is a popular tourist destination for skiing and autumn leaves. Many tourists from the metropolitan area visit to see the colorful landscape in autumn. The skiing slopes operate ski lifts for a midair trip by gondolas that run above trees and between valleys of colorful autumn leaves, which has been a major attraction of my town in recent years.

On the local bus, I heard a woman who was sitting next to me and traveling as a group exclaiming to her friends, “Look, look, how beautiful the colors are! Look at the gorgeous view! How wonderful!” The route of this bus was on a narrow winding road that threaded into mountains. It climbed steep slopes with numerous curves and through long tunnels. After each tunnel, the leaves along the road grew more colorful and the mountainous view got more and more breathtaking with trees that changed their clothes into red and yellow. Although this view was an autumn norm for me and what I had gotten used to seeing, it must have been worth taking hours to come to see as a weekend trip for people from the city.

The reason why both my partner and I were carrying so much baggage was because we were in the middle of moving. We had decided to move from an apartment in a remote town to a different one further deep in the mountain inside the same town. Since we’ve got too much stuff, we have spent several months packing and have sent our furniture and packed boxes in parts repeatedly by a small moving company because we don’t have a driver’s license. Before moving into this town for the first time, we used to live in the urban area. Once we settled in the rural small town surrounded by mountains, we found that living in nature suited our liking. Our fondness for nature had grown in the course of our country life, which led to our decision of moving much deeper into mountains. No human lives beyond our new apartment. Only nature and wild animals reside there.

Since I left an urban life, I have less and less compared myself to others and have hardly cared what people make a fuss about. A sense of happiness has increased as I have been able to concentrate on my work. I chose to move into more isolated mountains probably because I would like to be freed even more from a secular society.

By the time the local bus arrived at the bus stop close to our new apartment, all the tourists had gotten off near the ski lift and my partner and I were the only passengers. When I entered our apartment, heaps of cardboard boxes holding our stuff welcomed me. Out of the window was a range of colorful mountains filled with red, yellow and green trees. As words in a song say, we can get truly wonderful things without money, such as love and appreciating beautiful nature. It seems to make no sense to use up a lifetime by spending a large sum of money for worthless things and working like stink to afford them. Observing my parents’ life in which they unwillingly married without love for money and the family name and lost everything in the end, I have nurtured that kind of thought.

While we were eating dinner, the sun set, and a sky full of stars began to shine out of the new window.

 

 

The Gap between the Music Industry and Me hr683

 I used to go to music school and present my songs on the live stage there in the early ’90s. The presentation event was held once a month where the students sang their own songs in front of the renowned music producers and the top artists of the time, who gave their suggestions or impressions of the songs. I tried to seize the opportunity for a break and made a new song every month for the event by writing, arranging and recording the accompaniment until dawn with cutting down on my sleep. Though I was picked as the best of the class and the producers and the artists were impressed at my song on every stage, nothing further ever happened. I had imagined that people in the music business were looking for songs of good quality so that I could sign a contract only if I provided them, which wasn’t how it worked as it turned out.
In those days, my partner with whom I created music together worked part-time as an attraction cast at the theme park which host is the famous mouse. Since our music career hadn’t been going as we had expected, he constantly brooded over his future as a musician. He couldn’t get rid of anxiety out of his mind and felt at a deadlock. One day, too much distress caused him a panic attack during work at the theme park and he suddenly pushed the stop switch without thinking. His operational error made the entire attraction aborted and the guests had to leave the attraction. Fortunately the matter was settled by submitting a letter of apology and he was spared from being fired. Nevertheless, he thought he couldn’t go on with such a mental state of his and quit voluntarily. To recuperate mentally, he was walking for a couple of hours every day and rented a movie at a rental video shop that existed at the time to watch one film per day. Now that he had gotten time to spare, he looked up music producers of Japanese record companies, copied my songs that I presented at the music school on cassette tapes, and sent them out to the producers.
While he had been sending to thirty or forty producers each time I completed a song, some of them contacted us and we had a meeting. In those cases, we were nervous but extremely excited at the same time to picture that this could be a break. We visited the high-rise shining building where the major record company resided and met quite a few producers there. The best meeting for me was with the one who worked for the very band whose songs had been the decisive reason why I became a musician. He told me that the artist of the band of whom I was an avid fan had actually listened to my song and admired it. In another case, a producer even promised to prepare a studio for us to rehearse the recording. After that meeting, my partner and I opened a bottle of champagne at home. The thing was, they would stop contacting us after the meeting without exception. Although all the meetings seemingly went so well, everything stopped right there and no further progress occurred. They never called us again. No matter how excited the producer sounded when we received a call from him, his passion dispersed once we met face to face. It seemed that their sweet offers were only to avoid conflict and end the meeting peacefully. When we called them day after day persistently to ask how things they had promised were going, they were always out. They apparently dodged us. Then I finally learned that it was our looks and uncompromising music business model. What they were looking for was good-looking musicians who would give in to any demand from the producer. On the contrary, we had determined what our working style as musicians should be and expressed we had no intention to change that, while my partner wasn’t handsome and I wasn’t pretty. No matter how good our music was, they regarded us as useless the minute they saw we weren’t beautiful puppets whom they needed. I was circling in a tormenting loop where I completed the best song in my life, sent it to producers, had meetings with them, and lost contact.
During those unrewarded years, I had searched for a way to fill the gap between what the music industry wanted and what I wanted. Although I couldn’t find the way, it was a shame to give up because I was confident of my songs’ quality. An unbreakable heavy wall appeared in front of me who had simply thought that making good music would lead to a contract with a major record company. Back then, I was a young musician who had believed making a big hit meant success. Sadly and foolishly, it was decades later that I finally understood the notion like that was all wrong and what success truly meant.

 

Cheap Japan hr682

 

In recent years, many foreign travelers have come to my small town that is a rural tourist resort. When I first moved to this remote town, it was rather a desolate place except for the skiing season. But soon, more and more people overseas were coming for skiing and now they flow in throughout the year as well as Japanese travelers.

I assume that Japan owes increased foreign tourists to its low prices and safety. Everything is sold at about half or one third of the price in the U.S. while the quality is good and the service is superb although there is no custom of tipping. The majority of travelers are from Asian countries and so many of them visit my town regularly as well. I’ve seen an Asian tourist shopping for a basketful of cosmetics at a drug store near the train station, which is one of recent trends nationwide. Instead, Japanese people have had a hard time for a trip abroad since prices in foreign countries are too high.

Why Japanese prices are so low is because of the weak currency. The Japanese Yen has decreased to almost half the value of the time when I often traveled overseas. That means the country’s economy has sharply declined. In addition to persistent gender discrimination, slow digitalization made Japan left behind in a rapid tidal stream of the world. It seems as if time moved slowly here in Japan. For instance, women are still forbidden to step in a ring of sumo wrestling for the reason that women are unclean and sumo is a sacred Shinto ritual offered to God. For the same reason, I was forced to carry a small paper parcel of salt when I visited a shrine back in my hometown. If a voice that says it’s awfully atrocious is raised, it will be silenced by a theory that is so called Japanese culture. People get meek when it comes to culture, thus it remains unchanged.

Quite a lot of those undesirable cultures exist in Japan. As a native who was born and grew up in Japan, I tend to overlook their oddity that is regarded as norm. Since I was an elementary student, teachers and students alike had tried to ignore me whenever I expressed my opinion that the Emperor system in Japan had to be abolished because only a man could be an emperor was a discrimination against women. Their attitude toward my strongly attached view had taught me how much taboo it was. People make a face at someone like me who constantly points out discrimination against women. Their expression says “Here it comes, somebody hysterical who complains about everything is bubbling something to disturb harmony.” They believe that Japanese should live in unity without complaining or being distinguished. That’s why people have been working in silence overtime at a low salary. As a result, a low-priced, safe Japan has been developed.

In the course of nature, I couldn’t find my place here in Japan as a constant complainer. I was expelled from Japanese society and became a singer-songwriter isolating myself in a remote rural town secluded by mountains, which I have willingly accepted because I believe I’ve been doing the right thing. As a crazy person claims their sanity, I’m not sure what other people think of me. Furthermore, I don’t care how I look to others now that I live only according to my conscience, not this nonsensical world. Even if I disrupt a well-ordered harmony, I choose to be myself, that is more important to me.

The Umbrella hr681

 I was about to leave the beauty salon for the supermarket across from it when there suddenly came a downpour. It rained heavily enough to whiteout everything around. Some people were dashing toward the supermarket soaking wet instantly. I pulled out a folding umbrella from my bag. In my school days, my grandmother would never forget to say, “Have you got an umbrella?” whenever I was leaving the house, rain or shine. That has made it my habit to carry a folding umbrella wherever I go regardless of the weather forecast to this day.

When I was a high school student, I went to school by local bus. I needed to transfer the bus on the way because the school I went to was far from my home. One day, while I was transferring and waiting for the bus at the bus stop, a heavy rain started to fall. The bus stop was on the street and had no roof. I stuck my hand into my school bag for a folding umbrella, then remembered that morning at home. Since it shined brightly and I felt it bothersome to go get my folding umbrella, I lied to my grandmother’s daily confirmation for once and said yes though I didn’t have it in my bag. As it sometimes happens, it never rains but it pours. I wasn’t carrying an umbrella on that particular day. Learning how right my grandmother had been, I was bracing myself to get drenched. Then, it stopped raining all of a sudden. To see what happened, I looked up. There was an umbrella above my head. And I saw a girl who was about my age and wearing a uniform of a different school standing close to me. I hadn’t noticed she was also waiting for the bus and stepped closer to me to let me share her umbrella when it started raining. It was her umbrella that covered me.

I had been a bad person under the influence of my mother. She was all vanity and cared only how she looked to others. She made me go to the most privileged school in the area based on her values. She believed which school they went to decided people’s rank. After I actually enrolled in that private school, I found out that other students thought in the same way as my mother did. As I was too weak to defy it, I went with the flow and soon adapted that kind of ranking myself. Each school had its own uniform by which the school a student went to could be identified. I was sporting my uniform of the elite school to show that I belonged to the upper class. Most Japanese students use public transportation to school. The students of my school including me were snobbish and overtly despised other schools’ students when we were riding the local bus together on our way to and back from school. We cold-shouldered and ignored the students of the lower rank schools as if they had been invisible. Accordingly, other schools’ students apparently hated us because of our attitudes. As a result, an inamicable, tense atmosphere was created whenever we shared public transportation. The girl who held out her umbrella for me was wearing a uniform of one of those schools that we had been looking down on.

My mother’s mantra had been that everything people do was nothing but for gain, which had inevitably inhabited my mind for a long time since my childhood. But here she was, a stranger who was getting drenched half of her body by giving up half of the cover for me. Even though she had recognized from my uniform that I was one of those pretentious students of the privileged school, she didn’t gloat over my misery. Her expression wasn’t patronizing at all, but rather apologetic as if she expected that I would consider help from a lower rank school’s student as an insult and reject it with anger. I was flurried by an umbrella offered without gain. It proved my mother’s mantra was wrong, my friends’ attitudes were wrong, and I was wrong. I thanked her and we waited for the bus together silently under one umbrella. And we separated into each other’s friends as usual when the bus arrived. Only, now that I broke an evil spell of my mother and my friends, my attitude had changed since then. I learned the school’s rank wasn’t proportionate to the students’ humanity, or rather, was inversely proportional. I greeted that girl every time I saw her and sometimes had a chat with her on or off the bus. When my friends saw me doing that, they would sneer at me saying, “Is she your friend or something?” to which I replied yes. What I didn’t explain to them was that she was my benefactor who rescued me from the evil world with her umbrella.

When I was opening my folding umbrella under the eaves of the beauty salon, I noticed a woman came out of the building, looking discouraged by the pouring rain. I thought of sharing my umbrella with her momentarily, and stopped. I’m extremely careful about helping people. Whenever an occasion arises, I muse deliberately and discreetly whether I should offer help or not because I don’t want to offend someone with my help. I imagine some people may regard it as an unwelcome favor and would rather do it by themselves. I also fear that someone takes my kindness as being looked down on. From those worries, I always try not to meddle with someone. In this case, however, I wavered because an umbrella was involved. While the encounter with the girl in my high school days popped up in my mind, I chose to stick to my way and stepped out in the downpour alone. A few steps later, the woman dashed past me in the rain. The moment I saw it, I shouted to her, “Would you get in my umbrella!?” totally unconsciously as a reflex action. She looked back in surprise and I covered her with my umbrella before she replied while I was surprised at my action myself as much as she was. We ran to the entrance of the supermarket together under one umbrella. She thanked me gratefully and disappeared into the store gleefully. Half of my body got drenched which was exactly what I had prevented by carrying a folding umbrella all those years. Although it  felt stupid to get wet by breaking my principle not to meddle with others, I felt extremely good at the same time because I looked like the girl of the umbrella, half of whose body had been drenched as I was now. I realized how deeply her deed had resided in me and how much I longed to become a person like her. 

Pride or Survival hr680

When I lived in Tokyo in my early twenties, I desperately tried to succeed as a musician while working at a part-time job. Although I had clearly envisioned a plan for success, reality was much more cruel than I had expected and ate into me both physically and mentally. I consumed a large amount of alcohol every night to get rid of stress and exhaustion. I knew it didn’t help as I found in the packed train car one morning on my way to my part-time job that I had left home wearing an unmatched pair of shoes inadvertently.

I abandoned a presupposed secure life for me in which I would take a husband into my family by an arranged marriage, have a child as a next successor to me and live in the family house as the successor until I die when I left home for Tokyo to be a musician. That was the reason why I wasn’t willing to ask for financial help from my grandfather who had been the master of the family that used to be wealthy. I thought I should be on my own if I wanted to live my life. Japanese people’s consensus in those days was that doing what one wanted to do for life was a childish idea since the possibility of financial sustainability in that kind of life was one in a million. Most of them believed that adults should lead a responsible life by standing on their own feet. Doing what they didn’t want to do was the norm for financial independence, and to have a family eventually. That notion had prevailed so deeply that not only my friends but also a stranger who had a chat with me and happened to know I was trying to become a professional musician scolded me and told me to live seriously.

In those unrewarding, exhausting days of my life, I heard about a music school that a renowned Japanese musician newly opened. As a conceited young musician, I thought there was nothing to learn there for me, but I saw it as ties to the Japanese music business because the owner was the best selling, top artist in Japan. Also thinking that it was an opportunity to change my stifling situation, I decided to enroll. Needless to say, I had neither time nor money for the school. To make time, I quit my part-time job. For money, I resorted to my grandfather’s fortune. Although it wasn’t a solution of my liking, or of Japanese society’s common sense for that matter, I no longer had leeway for how I looked to others. My career as a musician had been stuck and nothing went according to my plan. I had been less motivated and drinking more instead. I had been cornered to the point that my choice was either to get financial support for my dream or to die.

The music school where I started to go was like no other ordinary school. It was more like a small salon. It didn’t have classes. Students came to school to present their music. A teacher gave them some advice and an impression. It held a presentation event once a month where students sang their songs on stage in front of the owner famous musician or other top Japanese music producers. In the first presentation I participated in, I was picked as the best. Until then, I had felt other students were my enemies to beat and they had kept me at a distance probably because they sensed how I looked at them. But after that event, their attitude changed. I seemed to have earned their respect and they came to talk to me. I learned they were struggling musicians like myself and we had a lot in common. My attitude toward them softened as well. We even hung out at the family restaurant after school. They were fellow challengers and rivals among whom I tried to be the best in every presentation. As it was held monthly, I completed my song every month, which was an amazing rapid pace for me. It was as if something inside me had woken up. I drank less and less, and lost weight for the monthly stage.

The school brought a drastic change to my life. Driven by a competitive spirit, I was motivated and focused to make music more than ever. I noticed I was breathing. My stifling days were over and I found myself out of darkness.

Manners for All You Can Eat hr679

 

The Japanese Government rolled out a travel benefit to help the travel industry that had suffered after the big earthquake. Hotel plans in the applied areas were all half off by using the benefit. As I found an extremely saving plan that included a gorgeous all-you-can-eat dinner, I stayed at that hotel with my partner to shake off my everyday stress.

In order to make the most of it by eating as much as I could, I stepped in the restaurant at the opening time with my excruciatingly empty stomach. Although I had learned on the website that its all-you-can-eat buffet would be the most lavish one I had ever seen, the real one easily exceeded the information. Added to the buffet, a main dish was served at the table where a small individual rice-cooking pot was set on a solid fuel cube, which meant I was able to eat Japanese beef steak along with freshly boiled brand-name rice. Incidentally, both Japanese beef and brand-name rice cost three times more compared to imported ones.

Already dazzled by luxury, I walked into the spacious buffet area. There were three long counters that offered over thirty kinds of expensive delicacies. I was seeing beef stew, carpaccio of a variety of fresh fish, lasagna, smoked salmon, sushi, and tempura that a chef fried right in front of my eyes, not to mention salads and elaborate desserts. The thought that I could eat them as much as possible almost made me faint with excitement. With my pounding heart, I rushed to take them on a plate though I knew I didn’t have to hurry, and took desserts as well for fear of stock-out though I knew it was unlikely to happen. Three large plates with mountains of luxurious foods and one with Japanese beef spread over my table. I felt ashamed a little because it seemed to accurately represent the degree of my greed.

Though I hardly have beef because of the high price, I was able to tell that this Japanese beef was completely different from the beef I know. It had a thick, deep taste and was tender enough to disappear quickly in my mouth. Shrimp tempura also had a clear difference from the one I usually get at the supermarket so that it felt like I was eating some novel dish not tempura. I had always had negative views for brand-name rice that its name made the price high, not its quality. I had been skeptical about the effect of freshly boiling it at the table, too. But it turned out to be a special treat by itself, which was not rice I had been familiar with at all.

While I was devouring, a conversation of a young couple at the next table came into my ears. “I saw a man taking every kind from the buffet. Can you believe it?,” a woman asked. “I can’t believe there’s a person like that.” a man replied, and they laughed. It surprised me. I had thought it was a norm to take every kind at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Of course I did so there, but was it bad manners or something embarrassing? That sort of thought had never crossed my mind. If not, I had believed that I should or must take every single kind on the buffet, which was a concept of ‘all you can eat’. I glanced at their table that held few plates with a small amount of food. They stayed for only about ninety minutes and left saying “I have had enough.” My partner and I were panting, suffering from fullness, but kept eating until the restaurant closed. The time like a dream came to an end and I left feeling myself pulled by the hair from behind. I earnestly wished for one more stomach.

The next day, I had a pricking pain in my stomach, which aggravated into a piercing pain by the day after next. Eating and drinking provoked more pain. Tossing and turning did the same so that I couldn’t sleep. In the morning, I even had a slight fever. I looked up on the internet that suggested sinister possibilities such as appendicitis, or cancer. I was utterly dreadful. Is this any kind of serious disease? Should I go to see the doctor, that I loathe to do and haven’t done for decades? Do I need to go through an operation? How can I pay for that since I don’t have my savings? Will I borrow money from somewhere and be in debt? Besides, is this curable? Am I dying?? Fear inflicted sleepless nights on me more than pain. I bitterly regretted and blamed myself for having eaten so much to the point of risking my life at the buffet restaurant. A horrifying week later however, pain subsided and was almost completely gone in the following two weeks to my great relief.

My body may be intolerant of high-class foods. Or excessive overeating simply caused the ailment. It’s extremely difficult for me to control my greed, which is always the case.