Some Remain, Others Disappear hr582

Once a year in autumn, a road race of classic cars is held in Japan. The race starts in Tokyo, runs through five prefectures in four days and finishes back in Tokyo. It stops for the night at a certain checkpoint during the long journey and one of the checkpoints is a hotel in a small town where I live. On its way there, it passes through the desolate main street of my town. I look forward to this event and go out to see it every year. More than one hundred beautiful classic cars like Fiat, Bugatti and Alfa Romeo, some of which are about ninety years old, run past right in front of my eyes one after another on a narrow street almost within my reach. I can also get to spot a few Japanese former Formula One drivers and celebrities who participate in as proud owners of the cars. The promoter hands out small flags for this event to spectators along the street. They wave the flags to the cars and the drivers wave back. This year, I left my apartment a little early for the race to stroll around the main section of my town where I hardly visit. When I shop or eat, I usually travel to the city far from my town that is too small and forlorn to hang out. I walked around the center of the town for the first time in a year and found it more desolate. A small grocery store I have shopped for several times had been out of business. A bookstore in front of the train station was closed along with a restaurant across it. There was no sign of any new tenant at those locations. More and more stores are gone, as a small population of my town is getting even smaller every year. I sat on a bench at the best spot to see the race along the main street that also had more shuttered shops than before. I was waiting for the cars to come while looking through a race brochure with a flag in my hand, both of which I’d gotten at the town’s empty tourist information office. As it was about the time the cars were scheduled to pass, I was prepared with my smartphone camera. But not a single car appeared. I waited more and there were still no cars. And I noticed there were no spectators either. I made sure the date and the time in the brochure again, and they were correct. Since an unpredictable incident can happen in the race and a delay sometimes occurs, I waited patiently. No cars and no people showed up. It was getting dark and cold. I went back to the info office and asked about the race. The clerk said, “Hasn’t it come yet? It should be here, I think.” Because she sounded she knew nothing about the race, I assured that her info was false, which meant, the race shouldn’t be here. I must have gotten the right time, but the wrong place. I left the main street and hurried toward the checkpoint where the cars would eventually arrive. On the way, I started smelling a strong odor of exhaust that came from nothing but classic cars in these days. The race must have been near. I hurried on, and finally saw a classic car turning the intersection with an explosive engine noise at the bottom of a steep slope toward the checkpoint. The race did come to my town but used a different route. It had dropped down the main street as its route this year and the info office didn’t know that. With only few spectators even along the main street every year, the new route was outside the town center and there were literally no spectators. I managed to see the last one-third cars in the dark while I missed the most part of the race, especially fast cars. Like this, my town is gradually declining with fewer people, fewer shops and less information. I will watch the whole race next year near the checkpoint not along the main street. Unless the race excludes my town from the route altogether, that is…

Huge Absence hr581

I went to the Tulip concert the other day. Tulip is my lifelong favorite band and the reason why I became a musician. They are making a national tour commemorating their 45th anniversary. Since I was a teenager, I’ve been to several concerts every time they were on tour. They used to tour every six months, which made the number of my attendance soar. Most part of my monthly allowance was spent on the ticket. Among the five members, I was an avid fan of the lead guitarist of the band, Toshiyuki Abe. I was always enchanted tremendously by the sensuous sound from his red guitar in my youth. After I grew up and the band broke up, they reunite every five years to make an anniversary tour. I had been to several venues each time by spending costly transportation fees and staying at a hotel when the venue was too far to be in time for the last train back home. That had been my usual pattern concerning Tulip until their 40th anniversary tour was wrapped up. Although I had waited anxiously for their 45th, the wait ended abruptly two years ago even before the tour started. Mr. Abe, who I believe is the best guitarist in the world, suddenly passed away. Tulip’s 45th anniversary tour turned out to be a memorial to him, which I’d never, ever pictured happening. I wasn’t going to go to their concert this time. I didn’t want to see the band without him who had been my idol for such a long time. It would be too sad. Whenever something related to Mr. Abe popped into my mind in my daily life, my eyes easily swim with tears automatically. I couldn’t imagine how sad it would be that I actually saw Mr. Abe missing in the band and realized again he was gone. On the one hand, I thought I’d better not go, but on the other hand I was curious how the band would play without him. They announced Tulip would become a four-man band without having a new guitarist. Who would play the guitar part then? Would they change the arrangement and have the keyboard cover the part? Or, would one of the members switch to a lead guitarist? Or, would a robot stand with a guitar? I had thought of possible alternatives every day and couldn’t stop thinking about it eventually. To solve mounting questions, I decided to face the sadness and go to the concert. After I got the ticket, though, I still felt hesitant to go. I couldn’t believe I was holding a ticket of Tulip in which Mr. Abe didn’t exist. I had asked to myself what I was doing for three months. But about ten days before the concert, I began to feel excited and my heart leapt up. I was headed for the concert hall on that day with odd rapture. The minute the concert started, all my questions were answered in an unexpected yet totally reasonable way. In the back of Tulip, there were three supporting players. A supporting guitarist was understandable, but there were a drummer and a keyboardist that made up the band of twin-drums and twin-keyboards. The sound was different accordingly and for some reason, wasn’t good as it used to be. They also lost edge on vocals with no reason. The loss of Mr. Abe has had effect on the band much greater than I thought. It reduced the quality of Tulip. It didn’t sound or look like Tulip. I was disappointed and felt so sad. I witnessed the band suffered a massive vacuum. Mr. Abe’s trademark red guitar that I’d watched and listened since I was a teenager was placed on the stage and made me cry instead of exult this time. His song was played while his pictures were shown and I bitterly missed him. As the concert went on, I realized how hard the members was trying to fill in the big hole that they knew couldn’t possibly be filled in. With their desperate attempts, they tried to carry on at all costs. Their strong intention to sustain the loss and to survive as Tulip was conveyed from the stage. I was deeply moved by their effort to continue. Before I knew, I was jumping and sang myself hoarse along to their songs with other audience as I had always done at their concert. Looking back, I became a singer-song writer to be like Tulip. Now I will do anything I can to keep on until I die like Tulip is doing. Just one thing I will not follow them is to accept that the quality of my music gets poor. I wouldn’t, I hope…

A Korean Friend hr580

The neighborhood I grew up in wasn’t so good and low-income families were everywhere. While a small hamlet that my house stood consisted of well-off families of farmers, it was surrounded by poor areas where many Korean-Japanese lived. The income difference produced chronic tension. Naturally, the tension was conveyed to school and the students were divided. When I was in sixth grade, more than half my classmates were Korean-Japanese. There was an undeniable rift between Korean-Japanese students and Japanese students including me and we didn’t mingle well. It was funny because Korean-Japanese kids were born in Japan, converted their names to the Japanese ones, spoke Japanese and looked exactly the same as Japanese, except that they were mostly shabby and sour. As a custom at school in Japan, the sixth grade takes an overnight trip. Our destination was Toba in Mie prefecture, a two-and-a-half-hour ride on an express train from Kyoto. The train had four-people booth seats and each of the students was assigned to the reserved seat according to the school roll. In my booth, I had my closest friend next to me, but sitting in the seats opposite to us were two Korean-Japanese classmates. Those two girls lived in a particularly poor area of all other Korean-Japanese areas, and I had never even passed it by or gotten close to it although it was within my neighborhood. Since I had barely talked with them at school, I felt nervous and thought the trip was already ruined by this seating. But as soon as the train departed Kyoto, what I had expected was reversed. One of the two girls sitting face to face with me began to talk about her intention of becoming an idol singer. Her name was Yukiko Kimura and she declared a plan to enter and win an audition of the idol-searching show on TV when she became fourteen. Because I also wanted to be a singer, I was drawn to her talk and we were lost in chattering. Yukiko Kimura was the youngest of seven girls in her family. Her parents had so many girls in the house that they often neglected her and called her by her other sister’s name by mistake. She said if she won the audition, she would debut by her real name to have everyone remember her name. We talked on and on and had a lot in common. We mocked our homeroom teacher and laughed heartily. Contrary to my initial expectation, we got along so well and had such a good time together on the train. When the trip was over and the school days were back, our friendship was also back to where it was. We returned to each group we belonged to and barely spoke. However, every time I reacted against our teacher and went on strike, or received punishment for that and had to stand in the hallway for a long time, Yukiko Kimura was the first one who joined me and was beside me. Years have passed and I still haven’t heard of an idol named Yukiko Kimura. But I do remember her name to this day…

Phone-Phobia hr579

When I was a teenager, a smartphone era was still years away to come. I came from a large family that had one phone in the house, which meant a scramble for a phone call. It was usually a three-way battle: between my grandfather, my mother and me. My grandfather used to be the chairman of a local senior citizen club and make and receive lots of calls. Once his phone time began, it lasted forever. He would pull a chair from the dining table, set it in front of the phone, sit in, spread some kind of papers and start dialing. The stand where the phone sat turned into his makeshift office desk while my parents, my sister and I were eating dinner right beside it. The background music of our dinnertime was usually his telephone conversation that sounded totally unimportant and ridiculous. The minute my grandfather finished his phone time, the phone rang that would be from my grandmother on my mother’s side. She would call my mother almost every day to report her day. It would always consist in complaining about her son-in-low. After my mother finished listening to her endless nagging, it would be finally my turn. I used to chat with my friends over the phone for hours as a habit of a teenager. Although I did that so often, I have a confession to make. I hated it. I was really loath to talk over the telephone, to be honest. But as everyone knows, the phone call is a must among teenagers. If I had confessed I didn’t like the phone and asked my friends not to call me, I would have been instantly branded as a nerd. To be popular, I kept it secret and talked with my friends by acting happy but weeping inside. I forced myself to be funny and a class clown at school although my true self didn’t want to. At least when I was at home, I wanted to return to be myself who liked to be silent and alone. But the phone call would intrude into my home and destroy my peace. I cultivated my dislike for the phone during my teenage years like this. After I graduated and left home, my condition got much worse. The phone attack from my parents began when I started living alone in a small apartment in Tokyo as a musician. Since they opposed strongly about my career choice, they denied me, insulted me and cursed me over the phone. The ring became the most distasteful sound in the world to me. I couldn’t take it any more one day and turned off the ring. I stopped answering phone calls altogether by setting the answering machine. Then playing messages on it gradually got painful and even seeing the message lamp blinking made me sick. My dislike for the telephone had evolved into phobia by then. Besides the nasty phone calls from my parents, I sometimes got prank calls. More and more, the telephone looked an entrance to hell. To this day, I jump to the phone ring and talk into the receiver feeling ultimately tense with my hands sweating and my throat drying. Every time I see someone talking casually over the cell phone on the aisle of a supermarket, I think I’m seeing someone from other planet. The other day, I was shopping online at Amazon. When I was paying with my credit card, an error message appeared on the screen that said, “The payment was failed. Please contact your credit company”. I called the company while I was twitched with fear, my fingers were trembling and even my eyesight became blur and white. It turned out that my card had been suspended because the balance in my bank account was short. My distaste for the telephone has grown deeper…

Defection from A Negative Empire hr578

I’m a singer-songwriter living in Japan. Yet, I’m totally unfamiliar with Japanese recent entertainment. As I haven’t caught up with Japanese pop music, TV dramas and movies for decades, I don’t know any tunes, any titles and any names and faces of a band, a singer or an actor. I have lost interest in Japanese entertainment as a whole except for comedians for a long time. The reason is simple: there’s nothing worth listening or watching at all. Every single thing I encounter is rubbish and I have stopped trying to find something good. It seems that as a nation falls into decay, its entertainment perishes accordingly. The most common sales pitch for movies in Japan is ‘You can cry hardest.’ The tears in the pitch don’t mean what we shed when we are moved or touched or happy. They mean specifically the ones when we are sad. The sadder a story is, the bigger hit a movie scores. As a result, movies that center only on death of one’s beloved are overrun in Japan. That kind of movie is what I want to watch least. I prefer foreign movies which themes exist, touch me, and consequently make me cry. But Western films are not sad enough for Japanese people and every year the number of foreign movies that come into theaters shrinks. Even the Japanese comedy TV shows are aired less and less although they are the only domestic entertainment I can enjoy. I used to be an avid frequent visitor of a Disney theme park in Tokyo where I could feel like I’m visiting America. Sadly, Japanese taste has been greatly increased there and changed its atmosphere so much that I’ve long since stopped going. While less Western culture flows into Japan, more and more Japanese games and animations are going abroad. I’m afraid that the Japanese negative spirit might brainwash teens and children in U.S. through them. Thanks to cable TV I recently subscribed, I enjoy TV shows and movies from U.S. every day. Unlike domestic counterparts, good ones are abundant throughout the channels and I can easily find myself absorbed in. Zombies, devils, serial killers and the FBI come at me every night and I fight against them. That gives me food for thought, and makes my brain active and me feel positive. I’m duly aware of a lot of problems, but I can see hope exist in U.S. I suspect that’s the very reason why Japanese people are inclined more for domestic culture. They have lost hope and want to share denial of hope with others. They see themselves die with characters in the Japanese movies. I will stay away such a negative and would rather wander around cable TV channels from U.S. I intend to devour good entertainment as much as possible for my own survival. And I believe that will lead me to create good works of myself and help them be part of good entertainment. It’s not a matter of fame and money any more. It’s a matter of life or death. Well, of course it’s even better to stay alive with fame and money, I admit…

Ordinariness vs. Contrariness hr577

I have signed up for a few online survey websites and answer some questionnaire or other every day to earn small change. Other than money, there’s a byproduct in answering them. Each questionnaire has a set of answers to choose from that a survey writer thinks participants’ answers are supposed to be. I can see a trend and an opinion of a majority of Japanese people through the choices. To be honest, even though I’m Japanese myself, it’s a complete mystery to me what Japanese people think and how they live. I can understand the American way of thinking, for instance. It’s reasonable and logical, right or wrong. But for Japanese people, I often have no clue why they act or think as they do. The answer choices for a questionnaire are helpful leads to knowing them better. I take a glimpse of popular things or thoughts among Japanese people through a set of likely answers. There’s another interesting byproduct in surveys. Unveiling my true self. To save time, I answer them as quickly as possible. Choosing an answer instantly without deep thinking reveals what my unconscious mind really tells. I’m sometimes startled at my own answer, which means I still don’t know myself either. While I’m answering them, I encounter a problem quite frequently. My answer isn’t included among the suggested choices and I can’t select any of them. It’s so rare that I find the answer that refers to me or to my opinion in the long list of choices. In most cases, my answer is ‘Not applicable’ or ‘Other’. I simply don’t agree or apply to the suggested answers anyway. The choices are laid out in order of probability and none of them represent my answer. I even don’t know the items or the people on the choices that are considered to be popular in Japan. There’s no way for me to choose from what I’ve never heard of. My opinion is always in the minority. Whatever I do or think is usually shared by merely two to ten percent of all. Unfortunately, consensus is valued above character in Japan. Being different falls into disfavor. What I think and how I behave is mostly ignored or meets a scornful laugh. As a result, I feel I’m totally an outsider of this world. Maybe I’ve become a contrary person who believes most people except a few wouldn’t understand me ever. The other day, a motion to expand a parking space in my apartment complex was made. The complex I live in was initially built as a vacation home for people in the city. But recently, more and more people have been moving in to actually live here like myself. That has caused a shortage of a parking space. Some proposals for the solution were brought up, such as, to expand the parking lot by acquiring the neighboring land, to reduce parked cars by collecting fees or limiting to one car per household. Although I opposed strongly, other residents voted solidly for a motion to get land to expand the parking lot with a huge amount of money. The cost would be paid by reserves that the residents, including me, pay every month as a maintenance fee. It’s outrageous to me because I have neither a car nor a driver’s license, and don’t use a parking space to begin with. No one ever imagines a resident without a car exists in an apartment complex that is located in an absolute rural area enclosed by the mountains. My opinion that living here without a car is duly possible and thus expanding the parking lot is unnecessary was completely ignored and sneered at as usual. I wasn’t disappointed, though. I knew how things would go and this outcome is exactly what I expected. I’m used to being outside the majority…

The Influence of Global Warming hr576

I live in an apartment that is enclosed by the mountains and a five-minute walk to the ski slopes. It was built about 30 years ago, when this area was cool enough to be lived without an air conditioner in high summer. As an air conditioner was assumed unnecessary, my apartment has the structure that an air conditioner can’t be set up. But in recent years, the temperature here reaches above 91 degrees in the summer time. While I’m not sure global warming plays a part in this, my apartment is now evidently too hot to live a normal life without an air conditioner in the summer. Every day I fill up a plastic bottle with water, freeze it and use it as a portable cooler inside my apartment. It’s possible to set up an electrical cooler on the window, but it would cool only one room while it would occupy a large part of the widow blocking the view and making my apartment dark. Besides, since my apartment was designed without a possible use of an air conditioner, the allocation of the maximum electricity for each apartment is low and I would worry about a circuit breaker all the time not to have a blackout. Even so, when an unbearably hot summer ended last year, I decided to place a cooler on the window for the next summer. And as the way of the world, I forgot the heat I had suffered when autumn came. By spring, I couldn’t remember why I needed a cooler altogether. Then, summer arrived again with stronger heat. There is a communal spa in the building for the residents of this apartment complex and a cold bath is operated there every day in the high season. I used it a lot this summer. The small tub is filled with extremely cold water because the tap water is from the mountains. The water cools off my body instantly and I’m hooked with its sensation. Being submerged up to my neck in it, with my heart pumping and my teeth chattering in ten seconds, I can no longer tell whether I’m fierily hot or freezing cold. I get a scare every time that my heart might stop in this cold water. Especially in the hot summer like this year though, it was so easy for me to push away my fear of a heart attack and I plunged in it three times one evening, making it my new record. Next day, I had a sore throat and began to cough. Then I was running a fever and had stayed in bed for a week. I caught a cold by three plunges into a cold bath. I hated my poor immune system and felt wretched about myself. After I got rid of a fever and got out of bed, persistent coughing has continued to make me miserable over ten days. While I was scuffling with my cold, summer is coming to an end. I didn’t get a cooler this summer either again…