August 2015 albums

Posted on August 3, 2015 by philipbrasor

Here are the album reviews I wrote for the August issue of EL Magazine, which was distributed in Tokyo last week.

Ezra Furman ／ Perpetual Motion People (jake-sya)(HSE-38014)drewfordPerpetual Motion People
-Ezra Furman (Bella Union/Hostess)
The Life and Times of Drewford Alabama
-Drewford Alabama (P-Vine)
Few millennial purveyors of pure rock’n roll go about their mission with as much purpose and instinctual passion as Ezra Furman, a Jewish gender-bender from Chicago. The fact that he plays harmonica along with his guitar is mostly gravy, but it aligns appropriately with his street-level sociopolitical outlook, which he doesn’t indulge as forthrightly here as he has on previous albums. Though his themes mostly revolve around his struggles with mental illness and suicide, he isn’t so inner-directed that he can’t disassociate his feelings from his thoughts and relate them to the larger world, and he often steps out of the persona he assumes for a particular song and comments on the moment, as when he professes to being “sick of this record already.” If fear of ennui qualifies as a psychological disorder, than Furman is ready for serious therapy, but rock therapy is obviously just what the doctor ordered in Furman’s case, and the rest of us benefit as well, since the energy level rarely flags. Per the title, the kinetic power of Furman’s music feels pre-ordained, organic, a natural phenomenon. And while the R&B and folk forms get worked on relentlessly, there’s nothing reverent about the way Furman wields them. In other words, he has no use for the 60s—or the 90s, for that matter. He’s the busker with nothing to lose, the guy on the audition tape who doesn’t give a damn who’s listening but hopes whoever it is can keep up with him. Jamie Morrison used to be in a band, the Noisettes, that was famous for its own peculiar brand of energy, and as a drummer Morrison even moonlighted with the Stereophonics. Neither band qualifies as Americana, but Morrison’s new project, Drewford Alabama, does in a sort of piss-takey way. Still, don’t expect Father John Misty. Reportedly, several years ago Morrison found a notebook filled with hundreds of lyrics written in the middle of the last century by a guy named Drewford Alabama. He claims to have seen the light, but since he fields the singing chores out to friends and acquaintances, the project has an ad hoc vibe to it, as if the spirit of Drewford Alabama were simply hovering above. The songs have a pleasingly dusty ambience but they don’t deliver the piquant wierdness that great folk music does when it’s being made by a true original. Since Morrison says he was inspired by Alabama’s lyrics (he even taught himself the guitar just so that he could sing them), the listener wants to be inspired as well, but there’s often so much going on in the song that whatever it was about the words that drew Morrison to them is buried under a lot of disparate business. And that’s the difference between a force of nature like Furman and a man who “plays” music like Morrison. One doesn’t need inspiration because the music is already there. All others have to search it out. Continue reading →

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August 2015 movies

Posted on August 1, 2015 by philipbrasor

Here are the movie reviews I wrote for the August issue of EL Magazine, which was distributed in Tokyo last week.

confessionConfession
Lee Do-yun’s feature debut is like a primer in mass-appeal Korean cinema of the moment. It’s got a bit of criminal mischief, some class-conscious social observation, and a lot of betrayal-induced guilt among characters who think of themselves as friends. This latter theme is central to the story, since it involves three men who have been close since a near-fatal adolescent jaunt bonded them for life. Of the three, Hyun-tae (Ji Seong) has ended up the most grounded, married and working as a paramedic. In-cheol (Joo Ji-hoon) is an insurance agent living beyond his means who sometimes resorts to scams to make extra money. And Min-soo (Lee Gwang-soo) is the requisite full-time loser, a lonely drunk living on the margins. After In-cheol talks Min-soo into helping him torch a building for insurance money at the bequest of Hyun-tae’s estranged, debt-ridden mother and the scheme goes south, the friendships unravel, though probably not as fast as they would if such an unlikely incident actually happened. Lee knows how to stage all the cliches but he can’t make them anything other than cliches. In Korean. (photo: Opus Pictures) Continue reading →

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Media Mix, July 19, 2015

Posted on July 19, 2015 by philipbrasor
NHK reporting on identifying minors in criminal cases

NHK reporting on identifying minors in criminal cases

Here’s this week’s Media Mix about the government’s proposal to lower the age for criminal trials from 20 to 18, presumably as a sop to the public and the media, which think that brutality among youth is on the increase and should be addressed in a serious manner. In the column I referred to a radio discussion with TV announcer and right wing pundit Jiro Shinbo, who wants tougher sentences for juvenile offenders and thinks the media should be allowed to cover such crimes openly. He somehow believes that Japan is the only country in the world where reporters are banned from identifying minor suspects, which isn’t true but nevertheless brings up the question of why some countries, like the United States, which supposedly forced this rule on Japan during the postwar occupation, allows the media to identify youth offenders and Japan still doesn’t. The reasons seem to have less to do with legal limitations than with popular demand. According to Amnesty International, the U.S. is the only country where minors can be sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. For the record, America doesn’t sentence children to death, but that’s only because the Supreme Court abolished the death penalty for minors in 2005. In that decision, one justice wrote that juveniles are “categorically less culpable” than adults when it comes to committing crimes, but somehow life imprisonment is still a possibility for them. Consequently, there doesn’t seem to be much reason to prevent the media from reporting openly on youth crime and attendant trials since rehabilitation is obviously not the main purpose, punishment is.

What’s different about the Japanese situation isn’t the sensibility at play—like Americans, Japanese people think the punishment should fit the crime regardless of age. The difference is in the legal framework. The American system doesn’t distinguish between minors and adults when it comes to serious crimes, whereas the Japanese system does. That’s why the government wants to lower the age of majority. Instead of changing the Juvenile Act, which limits reporting, it simply wants to increase the number of people who can be tried as adults. This gambit will probably only satisfy the tabloid media for a little while. Whenever there is a serious crime committed by a person younger than 18, they will feel shut out of the process. They obviously look with envy at the American system, where crime is reported pretty much openly and suspects can be named and, potentially, vilified even before their guilt is established. Call me a “liberal” (Shinbo would), but I think the Japanese system is better. Youth offenders should be given a second chance, even those who have committed murder. However, I also believe that American society, despite a frank outlook that often drifts into rabid Manichaeism when it comes to crime, is better prepared to debate the usefulness of prosecuting minors and perhaps fairer in its treatment of them. In other words, while juveniles aren’t protected from adult-level punishment and exposure, America’s penchant for contentiousness makes it possible for them to receive more equitable judgment overall, at least in the public realm. It isn’t the same in Japan, mainly because the media itself isn’t as mature or self-conscious enough about its responsibility. Here the Juvenile Act is necessary. Otherwise, youthful offenders would just get buried.

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July 2015 albums

Posted on July 3, 2015 by philipbrasor

Here are the album reviews I wrote for the July issue of EL Magazine, which was distributed in Tokyo last week.

Jamie xx ／ In Colour (jake-sya)(BGJ-10235)yjyIn Colour
-Jamie xx (Young Turks/Hostess)
Animation
-Young Juvenile Youth (Beat)
Though Jamie xx’s solo album has been anticipated for almost five years now—ever since he remixed Gil-Scott Heron’s last album We’re New Here into something quite different from the original—the record is still startling, if only because of how dissimilar it is to the work of his group The xx. In some ways this is a good thing. The xx’s second album was much less interesting than its debut, and it’s easy to surmise that Jamie, the producer, was already outgrowing the song-based predilections of his mates by the time Coexist was recorded. Removing the need to write original tunes with conventional meaning—no matter how abstract they tried to make it—obviously freed Jamie to explore what he could only do on his own, i.e., sample sounds and music that meant more to him than any personal verbal expression. Significantly, the casting off of normal structure has made his work more musical. The songs on In Colour still have that melancholy cast that made The xx’s tunes so indelible, but at the service of a wider range of fundamental emotions, which is probably what the album title is all about. Jamie is not going to tell his audience how to feel, but he will insist that there’s more than one feeling to feel here. His use of old doo-wop and ragga rhythms never seems gratuitous, and he’s careful to loop beats and melody snippets for maximum tension-and-release. You can almost hear the intent coming at you. Since this is unabashedly club music, made to be played (and danced to) in the presence of many people, it’s by definition more limiting in style than whatever it was The xx was trying to accomplish, but within those parameters it takes advantage of more resources than The xx ever did. It’s the most democratic dance music imaginable. Producer Jemapur (Toshiaki Ooi) has less pressing concerns in his new project with pop vocalist Yuki Matsuda. He surrounds her breathy, languorous vocals, in both English and Japanese, with the kind of spare beats that highlight those vocals rather than compete with or even complement them. His pop mission statement is more forthright than Jamie xx’s, but Jamie’s songs are closer in effect to what we enjoy about pop—its immediacy, its lack of guile. In interviews, Matsuda implies that there is no longer an “underground” market, and thus her vision of pop music cuts across all lines of taste and style. She obviously sees Young Juvenile Youth’s music as being more of a challenge to local consumers, which is probably why she sings mostly in English. Apparently, it was she who went to Jemapur and not the other way around, and she seems to control the message. That may explain why YJY sounds less like an organic partnership than two people struggling to find common ground, which is fine. Struggle can be entertaining, too. Continue reading →

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Media Mix, June 28, 2015

Posted on June 28, 2015 by philipbrasor
Richard Armitage

Richard Armitage

Here’s this week’s Media Mix about the mainstream press reaction to Okinawan Governor Takeshi Onaga’s trip to the United States to explain his opposition to the U.S. Marine base at Henoko. In the piece, I mention that former State Department official Richard Armitage gets a lot of traction in the Japanese press and is often the go-to person on the American side for a quote about the base issue, even if those quotes tend to be selective. Apparently, his quotes are used selectively for other security related issues. During the same discussion on DemocraTV where lawyer Sayo Saruta explained how Washington works, other journalists talked about the security bills that the Liberal Democratic Party are now trying to ram through the Diet. The LDP’s reasoning for passing the bills, which would allow Japan’s Self-defense Forces to participate in collective defense even though the Constitution limits such actions, is that interpretation of the Constitution should adapt to changing times. The only scenario that the LDP side has put forth as an illustration of how the SDF could participate in collective defense is a possible blockade of the Hormuz Straits by Iran. Such a blockade would “threaten Japan” because much of the country’s oil comes through the straits, so Japan should help its allies, presumably the U.S., in preventing such a blockade, probably through mine-sweeping activities. The journalists found this reasoning laughable, since Iran is desperate to sell oil right now and would never blockade the Hormuz Straits, but Prime Minister Shinzo Abe can’t come up with another example of how Japan could lend a hand because almost every other scenario would sound like war. And the LDP got this scenario from Armitage, who suggested some years ago that Japan could help by carrying out mindsweeping activities in the Hormuz Straits, but he made that statement at the height of the Iranian oil embargo. In other words, Abe’s illustration confounds the reasoning behind the constitutionality of the bills: Times have changed, and there’s little chance of a blockade of the Hormuz Straits. But he can’t find another illustration to justify the bills, which is why the opposition is accusing him of being vague as to what collective defense really means.

But more significantly, the journalists blasted the LDP for conflating the protection of Japan’s economic interests—securing oil—with safeguarding “Japanese lives,” which is the only reason put forth by the new bills for engaging in collective self-defense. As one reporter pointed out, if you accept that reasoning then the government should be condemned for cutting social security and funding for education—two economic decisions that affect citizens negatively—in order to pay for weapon systems demanded by the new security arrangement, at least according to the U.S., which still seems to be calling the tune because they’re the ones who want to sell Japan those weapon systems.

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July 2015 movies

Posted on June 27, 2015 by philipbrasor

Here are the movie reviews I wrote for the June issue of EL Magazine, which was distributed in Tokyo last Thursday.

Avengers2Avengers: Age of Ultron
Just as the huge box office success of this second installment in the Marvel superhero collective franchise seems the result of the multiplier effect of having so much star power on the screen at one time, the movie’s over-stuffed plot and almost incomprehensible dialogue structure feels like an attempt to give each iconic character his or her due, as if the producers were contractually mandated to treat everyone equally. In the end, Avengers: Age of Ultron proves to be a sufficiently entertaining film while you are watching it and totally forgettable once you aren’t. Should theaters be obligated to hand out plot precis to make sure people get it all? Or is that something only critics care about? As a director, Joss Whedon has earned a reputation for making action set pieces coherent and exciting at the same time, and since he alone is responsible for the script, he has obviously gone to great pains to make the story compelling on its own merits. But some things are just unachievable. At the center is Ultron, a robot overloard voiced by James Spader that is the result of an AI program designed by Tony Stark aka Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) and Bruce Banner aka The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo). Ultron is supposed to one day replace the Avengers as the planet’s last defense against extra-terrestrial evil, and of course the program becomes full of itself and decides it would rather destroy the Avengers just to see if it can. That’s as good a premise as you’re going to get in a superhero movie, but each character has to have a personal dramatic arc, and if those arcs intersect, so much the better. So Banner and Natasha Romanoff aka Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) are given a romantic subplot that never reaches its natural conclusion, while Stark, Steve Rogers aka Captain America (Chris Evans), and Thor aka Thor (Chris Hemsworth) engage in macho pissing contests presumably underwritten by Ultron and his familiars. On the margins is Clint Barton aka Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), whose superhero particulars have never been sufficiently explained, and the only principal character with a family to speak of. In fact, the movie takes a rather leisurely detour to visit that family in all its model American normalness, as if Whedon were afraid we’d forget these people are really human (well, except Thor). But with all the self-deprecating jokes, wielded mainly by Downey (he calls one particularly trying day “Eugene O’Neill long”), and furrowed brows, the heroes’ humanity is never at issue, only their relevance as characters. The set pieces are thus a relief, since they provide the viewer with a break from making sense of the plot, which becomes even more convoluted with the late entrance of Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and the constant reappearance of twin beings (Elizabeth Olson, Aaron Taylor-Johnson) whose super powers are practically X-Men level in their arbitrariness. When your budget is limitless, you can hire anyone for any reason. (photo: Marvel) Continue reading →

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Media Mix, June 21, 2015

Posted on June 21, 2015 by philipbrasor
Backpackers in Sanya

Backpackers in Sanya

Here’s this week’s Media Mix, which is about the fires in Kawasaki in May that killed 10 people living in a kanishuku hakujo. Though I mentioned it only in passing, the day lodgings in Sanya tend to be made of concrete, which means they’re safer than the wooden ones that burned in Kawasaki. I don’t know if this has to do with stricter enforcement of fire codes in Tokyo, but it should be noted that kanishuku hokujo in Sanya are now patronized by more than just day laborers. As I pointed out, some now house incapacitated seniors, many of whom used to be day laborers but are unable to work any more. I saw a documentary on NHK last year that described how some of these lodgings are used as hospices: men on welfare who are in the terminal stages of illness being supported by NPOs who try to make them as comfortable as possible in their last days.

But another demographic that uses these lodgings is foreign tourists, specifically backpackers. When I lived in the area and Minami Senju was the closest train station to my home I often encountered young travelers from Europe and Asia who would ask me for directions to this or that facility, and all were in the kanishuku hokujo style, meaning small rooms with communal toilets and baths. Some had even upgraded and started serving breakfast just to attract more foreign tourists. The appeal was multifold. Mainly, the places were really cheap, so backpackers could stay in Tokyo for a long time and use it as a base. But they also liked the rough demeanor of the accommodations and the neighborhood, which to them represented Japan in a more genuine way. The Japanese media have reported on this phenomenon in depth and at length, since it shows an appeal for foreigners that most Japanese people would not expect. Few of the reports I’ve seen, however, mention the core clientele of these lodgings, the day laborers, and maybe they’re being priced out. I moved out of the area in 2011 and haven’t been back since.

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Media Mix, June 14, 2015

Posted on June 14, 2015 by philipbrasor

Japanese-Brazilians protesting official employment and education policies in Ginza

Here’s this week’s Media Mix, about Japan’s very qualified response to the idea of allowing more immigrant workers into Japan to alleviate the labor shortage. Of course, the last time the government tried to import laborers without actually giving them work visas was in the early 90s, when it approved a special residency permit for South Americans of Japanese ancestry. Encouraged by the thought that they could make a lot of money, they flocked to Japan, and by 2007 there were 320,000 Brazilians alone living in Japan. Then the Lehman Brothers-led recession hit the economy, and many of these immigrants lost their jobs. The government, desperate to get rid of them since they were seen as a burden on the welfare system, bribed them into returning to Brazil, offering them cash to leave with the condition they wouldn’t come back to Japan for a certain number of years. Over the next three years, more than 100,000 did, taking the skills they acquired in Japan with them. By the end of 2014, 180,000 remained.

The Brazilian experiment is the perfect example of the government’s safety valve approach to labor shortages. The Brazilians were not given work visas, they were given residency permits that allowed them to look for work. That way the government could say they weren’t importing laborers, though that, in fact, is what they were doing. It’s the same thing with the trainee program described in the column. These people are not here to make a living. They’re here to learn skills, though in most cases they do repetitive work.

The distinction has become moot as Japanese industries now require more workers. The government tries to cover its ass by extending the “training period” for foreign trainees, but its the Brazilian experiment that really shows the failure of this policy. According to Asahi Shimbun brokers and “temporary employment agencies” in Brazil are receiving many requests from Japanese companies for Brazilians of Japanese ancestry, since the special residency permit is still available. One agent says he gets requests for about 200 workers a month. In the early 90s, when Brazil’s economy was very bad and Japan was thought of as a very desirable place to live and work, it would have been very easy for him to find those workers, but not any more. At most he can find about 30 people a month. The Japanese companies’ desperation is apparent in the lack of conditions they impose. In the 90s, they would insist the workers speak at least some Japanese. Now, they say they will take anyone, “even people with tattoos,” says the broker. And it’s not as if there aren’t Japanese-Brazilians looking for work. It’s just that they have a “wait and see” attitude now. They were burned once before, encouraged to immigrate to Japan, even bring their families, and then treated as second-class members of society and “cheap labor.” They’d rather take their chances in Brazil, which is, after all, home.

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June 2015 albums

Posted on June 4, 2015 by philipbrasor

Here are the album reviews I wrote for the June issue of EL Magazine, which was distributed in Tokyo last week.

blur15palmaThe Magic Whip
-Blur (Parlophone/Warner)
Danger in the Club
-Palma Violets (Rough Trade/Hostess)
You have to hand it to Damon Albarn. For all his fuss-budget musical machinations, he rarely is unserious about the work he does, and I don’t mean that as a backhanded compliment. Beneath—and often on top of—his catchy melodies and deliberate arrangements are ideas that bear close scrutiny, and not just about amorphous generalizations like love and life; but about class struggle and the quest for individuality in a world increasingly flattened by technology. The Magic Whip is the first collection of new Blur material since 2003, and none of the many interesting things that Albarn has done since seems half as consequential as the songs here, and it’s not just because the band that knows him best is on board again. Reportedly, the songs were created and developed during a short spell of downtime two years ago when the band found themselves stuck in Hong Kong. The album isn’t so much Asian as it is cosmopolitan the way a seasoned traveler is cosmopolitan. Some critics have noticed that this record was put together at about the same time as Albarn’s bona fide solo debut, Everyday Robots, and if you take that tack it’s a clear corrective in comparison: broad where Robots was restricted, extroverted where the former was contemplative. “Ong Ong” and the emboldening “Lonesome Street” reconsiders the rock song afresh, as if Albarn and co. hadn’t played any rock for years and suddenly felt the urge to revisit the old school. And while I still consider Albarn’s Brit inflectives an acquired taste I haven’t acquired, his jaunty Weltschmertz fits this material well. And ironically it sounds fresher than the new album by the Palma Violets who are some twenty years younger than Albarn. One of the myriad indie rock bands to be labeled the next big thing by the Brit music press, PV have preempted any potential backlash by downplaying their skills and native appeal in interviews. Tongue in cheek by design, the band has fallen back on what it calls “pre-punk” rock, meaning the kind of R&B that Dr. Feelgood reheated for pub-goers in the 70s, and it’s as unstimulating as it sounds; the energy that pub rock was supposed to deliver undercut by sour attitudes and willful sloppiness. Some will say this sort of contempt for proper form is in a grand tradition. Look at what it did for the Replacements, or, closer to home, the Libertines. The difference is that Pete Doherty was at least inspired by his screw-ups, whereas PV is only inspired by the need to keep moving forward. Their topics are personal without being insightful—girls are always disappointing, it seems, a worthy theme for someone willing to doubt his qualities as a lover but not for someone who couldn’t care less in the first place. Yes, it’s better to burn out than it is to fade away, but this isn’t burning. It’s fizzling. Continue reading →

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June 2015 movies

Posted on June 2, 2015 by philipbrasor

Here are the movie reviews I wrote for the June issue of EL Magazine, which was distributed in Tokyo last week.

congress_mainThe Congress
Ari Folman was obviously hard put to follow up his stunning 2008 tour de force, Waltz With Bashir, and this adaptation of a Stanislav Lem story reeks of ambition, but while Folman takes his live-action-to-animation style further, he can’t deliver his concept. Robin Wright plays herself, an actress in middle age whose most indelible role, The Princess Bride, is way behind her. A “studio” wants to preserve that image and offers her a huge payday to “sell” them the exclusive rights to it. This means that Wright becomes a virtual star who has nothing to do with the movies that use this image. The first half of The Congress involves much ethical gnashing of teeth, and Wright wrestles with the concept as she frets over her emotionally troubled son. The second half takes place at the titular congress, a meeting of individuals who have taken the next step and become virtual beings. The Matrix-like conceit is so politically charged that it loses its power as an emotional device, even if the animation is often stunning. (photo: Bridgit Folman Film Gang, Pandora Film, Entre Chien et Loup, Paul Thiltges Distributions, Opus Film, ARP) Continue reading →

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