SAT 27 MAY 00

Sake to Me, Big Udon!

The sky is drizzling in the gray monotony of this morning. Umbrellas are but large dots on the sidewalks twenty-four floors below me. They swirl and swarm past each other in a textbook case of colloidal motion.

Nope, no distant excursions for me this time. Besides, I have to be ready at 15:45 for a dinner engagement this evening. I decide to explore around my own backyard, so to speak. I know I haven’t stuck my nose into every corner beneath and about the Umeda area.

I’m in no rush, so I fish out the newspapers I haven’t read yet. There in the Tuesday, May 23 edition of the Mainichi Daily News is the following blurb:

Foot cult’s hometown looks to ax group

FUJI, Shizuoka – The municipal assembly here on Monday adopted a request to dissolve the Ho-no-Hana Sampogyo foot-reading cult.

The Fuji-based cult has been at the center of a conflict between local residents and cult members regarding the expansion of the group’s facilities.

The assembly’s request says the cult has broken the law, and this necessitates action by the Cultural Affairs Agency. The agency has the authority to order the dissolution of a religious body believed to be harming public welfare.

Friday’s edition further reports the arrest of the cult's leader and his second-in-command for extortion of millions of yen from women that joined the cult. After consulting the group and having their feet “read,” they were told that they would die of cancer unless they joined the cult and turn over their money.

It seemed strange to me that the Mainichi, an oft light-hearted paper, did not refer to the heads as the cult leader and his right ha… - I mean, foot. Or, at what point the victims realized that the whole deal stank. Or, that the women were cajoled into joining by telling them that it would save their soles.

This story has legs.

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Another news brief also catches my attention, because by origin (and by second citizenship) I’m Latvian.

Russians rank Japan as 4^th largest threat

MOSCOW (Kyodo) – While only 1 percent of Russians believe Japan is a threat to Russia, in terms of ranking, Japan comes out in a national survey as the fourth most feared country in Russia, the Interfax news agency reported Thursday.

Interfax, quoting results of a survey conducted by the Regional Policy Research pollster, said Russians rank the United States as the country posing the biggest threat to Russia, cited by 27 percent of the 1,600 respondents.

China ranked second, cited by 3 percent of the respondents, followed by Latvia, a former Soviet republic where there is constant friction with its sizable Russian population, with 2 percent of the respondents citing the country as a potential threat.

As I recall, there are some twenty countries that have confirmed nuclear weaponry. There are about twice that many that are suspected of having them or are in the process of developing them. Latvia is not among either one of these groups. The biggest threat Latvia poses to Russia is the closure of its beaches to Russian tourists.

I suspect that 25 percent of the respondents were so paranoid from brain damage that they were afraid of the US – which, by coinkydink, was the only country listed on the cover page of the questionnaire. The other 75 percent cast their votes randomly. They were too drunk to read the questions.

Vadda Kuntrree!

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Eventually, I roll on out of the hotel and into the labyrinth below. I had run across mention of a cultural center up in the Hanshin department store. In the process, I figure I might do a little shopping for home as well.

At the east end of the second floor is the Breeze CD & Video store. I try to find a purported video of Martha Arguerich, but come up empty. I take an elevator up to the ninth floor – home of arts, crafts and jewelry. I browse through the calligraphy supplies, take time to enjoy the select pieces of pottery on display, and note that there is a little nook where a man is repairing the unclothed innards of an SLR camera. If I have a chance, I’ll have to bring my Pentax there. I poke around the entire floor, but there is no cultural center here.

I go up a floor on the escalator. It’s approaching noon and this is the restaurant floor. There’s a promising Italian place as well as a bakery and grill called Alaska. I decide not to bog down with eating and continue on my quest.

I go back to the ninth floor, just in case I missed some turn or door. I still don’t find the center. I ride down another floor, where shouting and hawking is going on at one end and toys are at the other. I buy a little gold bug to add to the other VWs on my shelf back home. The hawkers are in a “bargain basement” sale area. I buy a calligraphy brush for a couple of dollars less than what the store sells it for one floor up.

A store directory indicates that something like a cultural center is on the third floor. I take another elevator there in the west end of the store. As it stops along the way down, I see out into one of the floors a sign for the “Beauty Saloon”. Nothing like a beer facial or a suds bath. I wonder if the owner’s significant other is a beast.

When I get to the third floor, it’s like I’ve wandered into the service corridors. As I weave through the dingy and deserted halls, I see through some partly open doors what may be administrative offices. I pass a couple of people, but they don’t question my presence. I go back to the elevator lobby, off of which is what looks like a cafeteria with place settings on the tables – but there is no food or servery in evidence.

Baffled, I leave. What I had expected was something like a gallery or museum with a collection of Japanese traditional arts and crafts. What there actually is, is a place for holding community and organization meetings. Stretching it, culture here is the process of interaction, not the product of individual initiative.

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I sink back down into the tunnels. As I head along the Whitey East Mall, there’s a fairly new fast food court right next to a Panda Express (“from California!” it exclaims) and a Haagen-Dazs. Among the usual (for Japan) offerings in the court, is Azteca Mexican Tacos and Ashoka Indian. My favorite Indian restaurant in town is Ashoka, so I have to try this.

After ordering I sit down facing the pedestrian tunnel at a counter with fixed footstools. With my nose almost forcibly pressed against the glass while I eat, a gazillion gazers and I stare each other down as they swim the currents of the human sea outside. Or so it seems.

I had ordered a vegetable curry with mango juice. ¥745 lighter, I have on my tray a paper plate with sticky rice mildly flavored with saffron, a 300 ml foam cup two thirds full with a lumpy light brown gravy, and another 300 ml cup – but clear – half full of ice with some juice poured on top. I also get a wrapped plastic spoon with tines on the end of it. I pour some of the curry out onto the rice. It’s edible, but nothing to write home about [So, why am I doing just that?]. Other than the occasional piece of a de-frozen vegetable medley of diced carrots, quarter-inch long pieces of green beans, and peas, this could almost be standard Japanese curry.

Pass.

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After tramping through Whitey North Mall 1 and Whitey North Mall 2 – where other future dining prospects present themselves – I go up into the Hep Navio. Like with the Hanshin, I had encountered some mention of a Navio Museum somewhere up in there.

I start with the seventh floor on top. There’s a multiplex cinema at the north end. Among the restaurants is what appears to be a very popular pasta place branched off from Tokyo. In the center is a café with a high two-story ceiling. The atmosphere is definitely contemporary cathedral. There are organ pipes at one end above a slightly raised platform. No doubt, this is intended as a backdrop for weddings. Despite the pipes, there doesn’t appear to be an organ. Ahh, those show designers and their scenery!

On the sixth floor, the central space is treated like a plaza courtyard with arched footbridges accessing it across running water. There are more restaurants – with most showing signs of bending to the onslaught of Italianate cuisine. An eye of mine is caught by an Indian restaurant.

As I pass by the window looking into the part of the kitchen with the tandoor oven, the two chefs inside grin broadly and bow. Hey, flattery with me may get you flattened, but if it comes with flatbread (like naan), then I’m a sucker. I vow to return in a couple of days.

It’s time to head back to the hotel. I stop off at the Hanshin and pick up a couple of pastries. I chow them down in my room in case the dinner later is too carnivorous for my taste.

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I get down to the lobby precisely at 15:45. SY and his wife are there. After a minute or two, JH, his wife, his daughter, and one of the vendors’ staff join us. We go south a block to the Kita-Shinchi station of the JR Tozai line. Heading east, it becomes the JR Gakken-Toshi Line. We take the express to Kawachi-Iwafune station in Katano City, which is about halfway to Kyoto. We exit the station, walk away from it a block and turn left. About a quarter of a mile up the road, our destination can be seen on the right hand (southeast) side of the road. It is an older two-story plastered building with large peeling painted kanji on the parapet. It is the only building that high in the area. It is part of a sake brewery.

There is no entry evident along this point. JH says it’s around the back. The map tacked to the wall confirms it. We go up an asphalt driveway that bears to the right of the road. It goes up and into the service courtyard of the brewery complex. An odd note is that as we head up, a certain distinctively cloying odor keeps getting stronger. I can place it, but don’t want to believe it until there is further information.

In the courtyard, a man tells us that we have come the wrong way – that we should go back down to the street, continue along it to the next street corner, and then make a sharp right. The pungent smell diminishes as we walk away.

We walk back down to the road. After the sharp right, we shortly come to the entrance of Mukume Tei. Tel: O72-891-0353.

A traditional courtyard gate building frames a view to the old, tiled wooden buildings about the garden within. A stone path leads us in to where we make a right turn and exchange our shoes for slippers before entering the brewery. I can get only four of my toes under the straps, and my size thirteen heels extend well beyond the soles of the slippers. Ouch!

We are welcomed into the lobby of the brewery. The 170+ year old structure is of wood stained almost black, with white plaster walls between the framing. The desk, the display shelves behind it, and a wooden screen are more recent in origin. The furnishings are long, low slabs of wood, sanded smooth but unplaned save for the tops. Their horizontality expands the room while their lowness creates the illusion of even greater spaciousness. Everything is simple and Spartan. The irregularities inherent in the materials used serve as the sole ornamentation

Just before the entrance to the dining hall is a waist-high volcanic stone. Water trickles down from a bamboo pipe into a bowl-shaped hollow ground into its top. Two slender wooden ladles, a floating lilac chrysanthemum blossom, and some well placed spotlighting form a composition of sights, sounds and textures that delight each of the senses. The fact that most of these things are available from your local gardening shop doesn’t diminish the impact.

The dining room is an equally old barn warehouse. Great crooked logs criss-cross the space some twelve feet off the tiled floor. Rugged rafters slope up into the darkness well above them. Descending between the girders are six crooked and angular cylinders of white rice paper that are a modern version of Japanese lanterns. The tables are logs that have been planed on the top and finished clear. Only the chairs bow to modern flexibility – and are folding metal ones.

The guests are here for a night of jazz. They are the vanishing knights of the fabled shogun – battling the evils of a cultural war for finger-poppin’ git-down-momma meaning - all in a world of surface.

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Just after being seated, orders are taken for either beer or sake – both of which they brew and bottle themselves. A pianist and a bassist launch into a couple of straight-up jazz standards. They’re joined for the rest of the set by a Japanese lady that belts out a few in a style akin to Anita O’Day. I bet she could do a mean Billie Holliday too. Everybody in the room is bobbing their heads in time, tapping their toes, and clapping feverishly after each number. It seems like a mostly fiftyish crowd of citizens – about forty altogether, filling in all of the available seats.

Meanwhile, the beer and sake arrive. The sake is served in what would resemble a small, personal-sized ceramic teakettle without a lid. It’s then decanted into simple modern glass tumblers about 40mm high and in diameter. Like a wine, it is served temperate. The volatility of the oils and other substances that give adult beverages their flavor, are destroyed and/or altered with heat. At the other extreme, substantive chilling numbs the taste buds.

So, if you want to get snockered real quick, toss your tequila in the barby, stick your head under the steamer lid and breathe in real deep. [Author’s PC warning: Careful, Do not try this unless you are professionally licensed - this could be the last time you breathe.] Or, if you want to give the appearance that you are still able to stand up, stick that Stoli in the freezer the night before. It’ll lock the synapses in your brain and keep you from moving altogether. So if you start out standing, you’ll still be standing. However, if you want to savor the flavor of a quality quaff, the owner of this place knows what he’s doing.

Dinner is more a matter of appetizers than of a repast. The first course has a few slices of cucumber with pickles, two 25mm cubes of beef, and a small pile of thinly sliced lotus root chips that beat their potato cousins hands down. The second course features a baby octopus tentacle, three slices of some slightly slimy root (Yucca? Taro?), and two somethings like small sushi rolls curled up within bright green leaves. This vegan chows down on the root-lets - slime and all – but passes on the “stuff that used to swim”. Someone speculates on whether the proper plural is octopusses or octopi. I say that I’m not sure, but if you put two or more of these tentacles together you have an octipital convergence.

The third course is what might be this country’s mon-de-nai football food: 20 dry roasted peanuts, three shoestring strips of provolone cheese, eight potato chips, two whole dried herrings, one slice of pepperoni, and 12 nori-wrapped rice snacklets. It’s been a really nice meal – but I’m oh so glad I snacked earlier. And nice not just because of the drinks – but everything: the food, the facility, the entertainment, the company, the atmosphere, and the memories.

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We sit and talk. I chide JH’s daughter about her avowed Feminism. I take things a step father than the Million-Man and Million-Mom marches in Washington DC. I suggest the more effective Million Mime March. Imagine a miles long line of mimes, moving towards Washington DC, while pressing against imaginary glass….Tell me that Leno and Letterman wouldn’t be out there doing “interviews.”

We sit and we talk some more - with the owner. It gets to be well past last call and the rest of his guests have left. He’s charming, intelligent, a man of taste, and fluent in English. Before we leave, he takes us to see the inside of a traditional house that is one of the buildings off the courtyard. It has two rooms of eight tatamis each and one of six – all of the rooms in linear sequence, divisible by sliding screens.

Everybody is looking at a gilded niche for ancestors in the Buddhist tradition that is built into the side of the middle room. I’m drawn to the room in the rear where a print hangs. It shows a bird perching on a reed. Like the entrance and dining hall of the brewery, it is minimalist. It is seemingly made with just a few strokes of black ink. The scroll is dominated by the white untouched spaces. Nothing is rendered in full. Only the least possible information is overtly there – the imagination is engaged to complete the picture.

But it is the subject matter that arrests me as well. Here the painting celebrates the bird’s singularity, isolation and individuality. Similarly, Ikebana (Japanese flower arranging) treasures the asymmetric, the dynamic, and the expressive. Again, in the same vein, the most treasured ceramics are irregular and enhanced with glazes that produce unpredictable effects during the firing process. All this in the supposed land of conformity.

Yet, in America, which purports to be the land of the extreme individual, the shared identity of commonly experiencing artworks is more important than the ideas expressed within the art. In this way, it is more important to have at home a poster for a David Hockney exhibit with the name “David Hockney” emblazoned boldly across the bottom than it is to have a Hockney itself. Your friends wouldn’t recognize one of his works, but they recognize the name, and, hey! – they now know you’ve got taste. You’ve got the right label, the right rallying flag to gather around.

It’s more important to have that designer label showing on your clothes than it is to select attire that expresses a style. News and talk about who’s doing who and what’s the buzz is more important than discussing the ideas (if any) presented in a film. The actors and actresses are labels that we can rally around and worship and adore, while the content of the films they appear in is irrelevant. Pop music is the same – the musicians are the message. Accessibility is desired more than refinement and intellectual engagement. And even at that, three to five minutes of incessantly repetitive rap thumping is the attention span limit. Who wants to sit through an entire symphony?

And that’s the paradox – despite the seemingly pervasive conformity, some of Japan’s arts extol individuality. In America, many people appear to act as self-styled individualists, but their culture revolves about conformity.

Every problem has its opportunities. When I get back to LA, I think I’ll try to effect a cure. I think I’ll found Conformists Anonymous – and encourage everyone to join my twelve step program in order to support each other in living one day at a time as individualists.

On the way back to the station, SY explains that the room we were in is used for brewing sake during the winter. In order to get additional revenue at other times of the year, it is available for dining – with reservations. Which might explain that distinctive cloying odor I smelled upon arrival – that of heat-drying cannabis.