Media Mix, Jan. 5, 2014

Posted on January 5, 2014 by philipbrasor

imagesHere’s this week’s Media Mix about the influence of money on issues related to Abe’s Yasukuni visit and the announcement by Okinawa governor Hirokazu Nakaima that he will approve the application to start the proposed air base in Nago. There’s one more money connection that I didn’t mention, which has to do with the so-called bereaved families who urge Japanese politicians to go to Yasukuni and pray for the souls of their loved ones who died in the war. Not all people who lost relatives in the war support the Yasukuni visits, but those who do formed the Japan War-Bereaved Families Association, which is a de facto lobby, and besides advocating for support for Yasukuni the association also has made sure that survivors of soldiers who died during the war receive pensions. “Survivors” means not only the wives and children of dead soldiers, but their siblings if the soldiers were not married. In some cases, it’s not a lot of money—maybe ¥40,000 a year for the purpose of tending the deceased’s grave—but the government continues to pay it out regardless of how old the survivors are, so we can assume that the association will continue to stump for state recognition of their loss until they die. What happens after that? Though a recent Kyodo News Service survey about political attitudes found that younger voters were less likely to view the Liberal Democratic Party as “right-wing,” it seems to be mainly a function of historical ignorance. Does that mean young people are more likely to become right-wing in the future? Of those who said that Japan’s stance during the war was “not aggressive,” the largest age group was 20-30 year olds, but this age group was also the smallest of those who thought that patriotism should be taught in public schools. More significantly, only 13 percent of 20-30 year olds said they would be willing to fight in a war for Japan. So while they may have conservative tendencies, young people don’t necessarily translate those feelings into justifications for a stronger military.

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Best albums 2013

Posted on December 31, 2013 by philipbrasor

grateful_dead230582_8-01This post coincides with the final closure of Expert Witness, Robert Christgau’s wonderful blog, which, during its brief existence, garnered a following as dedicated and lively and acerbic as any you’ll find in cyberspace. Though I’ve only been a (semi-) working music critic since the mid-90s, I’ve read Christgau’s reviews since the early 70s, when he wrote for my hometown newspaper, and my tastes were duly affected by his opinions. Fortunately, the many people who congregated at his site in the comments section will continue on as a conversational collective in other forums, and I’m happy to say they’ve invited me to join them, though I’ve never contributed as much as I should. As far as my listening habits went this year, I feel slightly mortified to say that I may have finally succumbed to nostalgia, a trap I never thought I’d fall into. I bought CDs of albums I hadn’t heard in 40 years just for the sake of hearing them again, got back into the Grateful Dead after decades of holding a grudge against them for being liked by certain people who burned me, and, as the following list shows, even tried to recapture the magic of the 90s, a period when I rediscovered my pop music-loving mojo in early middle age and which now seems like a lifetime ago. If these things work in cycles then the 2010s could very well be another personal watershed period, so I  bought a new stereo…just in case. Continue reading →

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Best movies 2013

Posted on December 28, 2013 by philipbrasor

UnknownHere are my best movies for 2013. All were released in Japan during the previous 12 months, which means the best film I saw all year isn’t on here. That would be The Past, Asghar Farhadi’s gripping and heartbreaking film about cross-cultural divorce and the soul-crushing effort necessary to keep secrets from loved ones. I saw it in Busan and it will be released here in April, so it will surely be on my list for next year, maybe even at the top. Actually, it’s difficult to gauge the worth of such a movie, whose emotional contours are so carefully molded as to make you suspicious of the director’s purposes, but in any case I can’t think of a movie I’ve seen since Poetry that affected me so directly as I was watching it and stayed with me for so long afterwards. None of the films on this list came close, and, for sure, many of them don’t endeavor to produce that sort of reaction, even the Haneke film, which is probably his most sentimental—if such an adjective can be applied to a Haneke film. Of course, purely emotional responses to movies are something everyone understands, though you can usually tell how “honest” a movie is by the way you feel the next day. I’ve seen enough movies in my life to know that the occasional tear I shed during a particular scene is likely reflexive rather than empathetic, more a reaction to the confluence of structural elements than anything else. And I gladly give myself over to those feelings because being in the moment is what it’s all about. But like some sort of terrible joke you tell during a drunken moment, you think better about it the next day, so just because I welled up during the more dramatic passages of Hope Springs doesn’t mean I bought the premise, only the goods they were selling. And let’s just say I probably would have returned them for a refund once I came to my senses. Continue reading →

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January 2014 albums

Posted on December 26, 2013 by philipbrasor

Here are the album reviews I wrote for the January issue of EL Magazine, which was distributed in Tokyo on Wednesday.

NekoCase6thJK13billiejoe&norahThe Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You
-Neko Case (Anti-/Sony)
Foreverly
-Billie Joe + Norah (Reprise/Warner)
Though she has slowly moved away from the alt-country sound that first defined her as indie’s most distinctive vocalist, Neko Case still scans as Americana in the better sense of the term. She is steeped in a tradition she has outgrown, and while the melodies and arrangements on her latest, most confessional album defy categorization, they fit snugly into a continuum that leads back to her days with her country band the Boyfriends. She’s also lost her jokey feistiness, but her sense of humor is in tact, now tempered by bitter experience. “You never held me at the right angle,” she croons in “Wild Creatures,” an indirect way of saying something Dylan used to say quite often and with more bile. There’s a swooning quality to the music, as if the effort of trying to address her mortality and the way it impacts her romantic life keeps her constantly off-balance. The songs never rock the way her country songs did, but they do swing, and when the horns make their entrance on the closer “Ragtime” you swoon, too, because there’s something abrupt and final about them. Case understands that a guitar means parties and a horn section funerals, even when they’re blasting away. It’s a New Orleans thing, and New Orleans is the homeland of Americana, the place where music was born, and where it goes to die. Case is only 42, but she can see the horizon and means to sing as much as she can before it gets too close. That sort of fatalistic melancholy is all over the Everly Brothers tribute album, Foreverly, a one-off collaboration between Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day and Norah Jones. The Everlys were the first pop vocal ensemble to suggest that teenagers had complicated inner lives. Their place in the Americana canon is as secure as Johnny Cash’s or Willie Nelson’s, and because of their innocence their songs are more emotionally affecting than either of those two men’s material, despite the demons they so famously battled. What’s interesting about Armstong and Jones’ tribute is that it focuses on one specific album, the Everlys’ Songs Our Daddy Taught Us, which was released less than a year after their debut. The Everlys didn’t write their own material, but this collection was even more removed since it consisted of traditional folk and country songs. It was, in effect, a roots album released at a time when the concept didn’t exist. Armstrong and Jones approach this material the same way the Everlys did, as formative texts, and though they are looser with the rhythms and less reverent of the classic arrangements, they faithfully recreate the supple harmonies, which is what the Everlys were all about in the first place. The revelation is Armstrong, who hasn’t been this emotionally invested in singing since his indie punk days. The album is slight overall, but as an introduction to the darker side of country music it will do fine. Continue reading →

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January 2014 movies

Posted on December 24, 2013 by philipbrasor

Here are the movie reviews I wrote for the January issue of EL Magazine, which was distributed in Tokyo on Christmas Day.

beforemidnightBefore Midnight
One of the great experiments in the history of film, Richard Linklater’s collaboration with Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke derives its irresistible appeal from its unpredictable nature. In the first installment, Before Sunrise, twenty-somethings American Jesse and French Celine met cute on a train bound for Vienna and then spent the day and night in each other’s company, discussing all matters personal and political while falling in love in front of our eyes. Everything was a suprise, because that’s what falling in love is about. In Before Sunset, set in Paris, where Jesse has journeyed to promote a novel based on the Vienna adventure, he reunites with Celine, and though a lot of water has passed under the bridge in the intervening 9 years, the romantic tension is still taut and the surprises even more plentiful. The ending left their mutual fate in the air, though common sense told us where it was going, and that premonition is confirmed in Before Midnight, which takes place in Greece while Jesse and Celine, together now for eight years and the parents of twin girls, are on vacation. The 9-year lucanae is filled partly by the appearance of Jesse’s adolescent son with the wife he left for Celine. We see Jesse being the good dad as he sees his son off at the airport, giving him advice and attempting to draw a show of affection. The kid resists and tells the old man not to try so hard. This encounter casts a cloud over the rest of the film, which follows the structural precedent of its predecessors as a peripatetic two-way dialogue, but the stakes have changed. There is no longer the “will-they-or-won’t-they” uncertainty factor. Jesse remains a modestly successful writer (though he also teaches at the American school in Paris, where the pair make their home) and an American kid in temperament, while Celine frets about her own job prospects in the non-profit sustainable energy field and bears the usual burdens of encroaching middle age. So when Jesse indirectly suggests that he wants to be near his son back in the U.S. during these “very important years,” Celine feels both threatened and betrayed, but the force of her feelings don’t emerge until the couple is ensconced in a luxury hotel room for the night, a gift from one of their Greek hosts that was granted for the purpose of some much-needed solitary sexual comfort. But those feelings can’t be denied. As in the first two movies, the dialogue is delightfully circuitous, following the contours of real conversation without losing narrative cohesion. Jesse and Celine are, if anything, more compelling characters in their settled ripeness if for no other reason than that they have much more to lose now. (photo: Talagane LLC) Continue reading →

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Media Mix, Dec. 22, 2013

Posted on December 22, 2013 by philipbrasor

fd20131222pba-870x579Here’s this week’s Media Mix, which is about the media’s fascination with the burgeoning ranks of the senile. Aside from the obvious economic ramifications, which the column goes into, there is an underlying question of whether or not dementia is more prevalent from an organic standpoint. The basic assumption is that it will become a problem due to sheer numbers, that the very size of the boomer cohort is what it’s all about. But a sidelight of senility coverage over the years is what people can do to put off cognitive dysfunction. Usually, the answer is unoriginal: keep yourself healthy by eating right and exercising. Secondarily, one should remain mentally active and stimulated–take up a foreign language or keep a diary; make your hands busy by knitting or gardening. Japanese TV shows revel in the centenarian who is still cognitively sharp and gets around. In many cases these people are women who still work in the fields every day. It’s a convincing portrait of vitality and feels like common sense: If you have a reason to live, a reason to look forward to getting up every morning (as opposed to simply a reason to get up), then your body and mind will accommodate that desire by staying well longer.

These considerations have mostly been ignored in the recent coverage, and, of course, they are integral to the discussion. But there is another assumption at work that perhaps goes without saying. All the individual cases covered in these articles and broadcasts were of people living in urban environments. It’s another truism that feels tired, but as Johnny said so memorably in Mike Leigh’s Naked, after somebody says that a cliche always has some truth in it: “That’s a cliche, too.” As developed societies, and not just Japan’s, have moved from the country to the city, people become more isolated, which sounds counterintuitive but really isn’t. Rural life, with its closer proximity to the elements and uncertainty, requires greater community cohesion for people to survive, whereas in cities the infrastructure keeps uncertainty at bay. The circumstance that almost all of the senile people portrayed in the media have in common is isolation–even when they’re married and their partner is taking care of them. Without a community that nurtures real emotional responses–and that includes anger, fear, and any other negative feeling you can think of–the mind becomes less important and basically falls out of use. In the NHK Special I mention is a woman who gets righteously angry whenever social workers come by to get her to take her medicine or try and talk her into moving into a group home. She values her independence and rails against their meddling purposes, but it’s easy to conclude that these occasional interactions are the only stimulation she has, that her anger is a kind of compensating function for all the time she spends in her dark, cluttered room in the heart of Tokyo doing nothing except mooning nostalgically over a past that probably didn’t exist in the way she imagines it did. As one person in the program says offhandedly, by the time a person turns 95, chances are he or she will be senile. This is meant to sound shocking but when you think about it it isn’t. 95? Fifty years ago it would have been considered a miracle to reach that age. Now that it’s more easily achievable, the fact that people tend to lose part of their minds when they do achieve it shouldn’t be surprising. It’s like cancer. The older you are, the more likely it is that you’ll contract cancer. It has nothing to do with lifestyle and everything to do with normal biology, and if you had to think about it all the time as you grow old, you’ll lose your mind, too.

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December 2013 albums

Posted on November 26, 2013 by philipbrasor

Here are the album reviews I wrote for the December issue of EL Magazine, which was distributed in Tokyo yesterday.

ladygaga13avril13Artpop
-Lady Gaga (Interscope/Universal)
Avril Lavigne
(Epic/Sony)
The title implies that the biggest pop star on the planet wants her cake and eat it, too. It’s not enough that everything she’s ever done has an effect on the way popular music is produced and heard, Gaga wants to be acknowledged as an artist, an old argument that has never held much water. Art is where you find it and what you make of it, and there are people who always assumed her stuff is art. Gaga’s problem is that they may not be the “right” people, but if there’s any discernible difference between Artpop and her first two albums it’s mostly a matter of attitude. Artists, she seems to think, are people who are confident about the creative process, which sounds more like a description of a pop star; and while she’s been assertive in the past, it’s usually been in service to an inclusive philosophy, the cultivation of her “little monsters.” Here, she comments on the same themes but with an agency bordering on arrogance. Most of the songs are about sex, but there isn’t a lot of joy, especially when she tells R. Kelly, of all people, to “do what you want.” She plays the top in “G.U.Y.” as if it were payback. And while she’s always been good for a laugh when trolling fashionistas, here she’s just mean. I have no special affection of Donatella Versace, but could any target be easier? Throughout, Gaga’s sonic attack is brittle and bombastic, its pleasures visceral without being exhilirating, which is too bad because her singing remains her most underappreciated facet. Unlike all the other female pop stars her age she uses her lungs and understands that emotions get through when they’re projected with all the oxygen at your disposal. I just wish the emotions were worth it. Avril Lavigne may not seem like one of those pop stars, since her entrance into the pantheon was mainly through the back door (punk), but her new self-titled album definitely feels more zeitgeisty than her past work. The influence isn’t Gaga so much as Ke$ha, whose head tones are easier to pull off anyway, but it’s those exaggerated diphtongs that give the game away. Avril isn’t the only singer who’s appropriated Ke$ha’s style, so it’s no surprise in and of itself, but it is in light of the fact that her new husband, Chad Kroeger of Nickelback, is all over this album, and he’s the last person I would think might countenance the kind of party animal persona Ke$ha represents. Then again, Kroeger co-wrote the creepiest song on the album, “Bad Girl,” in which Avril gives birth to Marilyn Manson’s baby, so he’s obviously more magnanimous than his own power-play rock would indicate. If Avril herself sounds scrappier, more invested in the classic rock hooks than she has since her debut, credit it to the afterglow of the honeymoon. There are worse reasons for making a record. Continue reading →

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December 2013 movies

Posted on November 25, 2013 by philipbrasor

Here are the movie reviews I wrote for the December issue of EL Magazine, which was distributed in Tokyo today.

aiweiweiAi Weiwei: Never Sorry
The Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei is the perfect public figure for the social media era, not so much because he interacts through his Twitter feed, but because he makes of his life a social situation that begs to be recorded. Alison Klayman started hanging around Ai in 2008, but her documentary almost seems redundant since it seems everything Ai does is already being recorded by himself or an acquaintance. It’s this aspect of his celebrity that bugs the authorities the most, that and his rare ability to speak truth to arrogance. After he’s beaten up by cops who object to his memorial project for victims of the Sichuan earthquake, he makes a point of filing as many lawsuits as possible, because, as he says, you can’t rightly protest without at least trying to work through the system. Klayman’s film does a good job of explaining Ai’s conceptual art, but it does a better job of conveying his singular outlook about social justice, which may have been formulated during his decade in New York but is nonetheless born of a sense of patriotism. In Mandarin and English. (photo: Never Sorry LLC ) Continue reading →

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Media Mix, Nov. 24, 2013

Posted on November 24, 2013 by philipbrasor

51QEJpcg8EL._SS400_Here’s this week’s Media Mix about the bestseller “Genpatsu Whiteout,” whose pseudonymous author has been the object of much speculation since, as he admits in the Tokyo Shimbun interview cited, he is a career bureaucrat. As a sidelight to the interview, the newspaper sought comments from other public figures who tend to get under the skin of the authorities. Lawmaker Taro Kono, the most prominent anti-nuke politician in the Liberal Democratic Party, said that he “hears” METI is “looking for the author” because what he wrote is way too close to the truth, and essentially “makes a bad situation even worse” for the ministry. Using his own experience as an illustration of what Wakasugi wrote about, Kono told Tokyo Shimbun, “I understand that power companies said to MPs who support nuclear energy, ‘If you shut Kono’s mouth we’ll buy tickets to your fund-raising parties.'” Shigeaki Koga, a former high-level official in METI who wrote his own book exposing the underside of the bureaucracy, confirmed Wakasugi’s description of officials spiking bills with terms like the ubiquitous sonota (“and others”) so that the authorities can interpret the law at their own discretion. “That’s part of bureaucratic DNA,” he said. “They always make sure there are loopholes in regulations and operations so they can do whatever they want based on circumstances.” And as for Wakasugi’s “monster system” of high-level collusion between government and industry, Koga says that Tepco is well-known for its lavish “entertainment” spending on politicians and bureaucrats that somehow is passed off as being legal. “Bureaucrats on a career track, like Wakasugi, only think about being promoted, so they can’t speak out.” He called Wakasugi “courageous,” adding that he has to keep his identity a secret “so that he can continue collecting information” and, presumably, leaking it to the public. Wakasugi himself says that if the confidentiality bill is passed, and it seems certain it will, bureaucrats may become more tight-lipped, which means it will be more difficult for him to overhear what is really going on. “I won’t be able to write another novel like this,” he says. That is obviously the purpose of the law. Continue reading →

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Media Mix, Nov. 10, 2013

Posted on November 10, 2013 by philipbrasor
Joji Nishida

Joji Nishida

Here’s this week’s Media Mix, which is about how media coverage of people considered outside the mainstream may contribute to their continuing social marginalization. The headline in the JT says “minorities,” which is technically correct in the context of the column but may be misleading for the average person, who will be reminded of racial or ethnic minorities. I’m mainly talking about people whose status in society is determined by socioeconomic factors—on the one hand, children born out of wedlock, who are the subject of institutional discrimination because of civil registration laws, as well as couples who may not get married because they want to keep their names; and on the other hand people who are receiving or trying to receive public assistance. There is overlap among these different groups, and some may belong to ethnic minorities, but it isn’t the point I’m trying to make. The point is that discrimination is intensified for any group when the media treats the people in that group as being “special” because of the way their minority status impacts their daily lives. For those on welfare, this is probably true as far as it goes because if you’re poor it affects every aspect of your life. If you’re “illegitimate” or cohabiting with a partner for whatever reason, those factors probably play a smaller part in your daily life, so there is that distinction, but in the media scheme of things it all comes under the same heading of “being different.”

As mentioned in the first part of the column, some members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party want to maintain these social differences for the purpose of encouraging people to form traditional families, which they’ve never bothered to define but we can assume it means a married couple and offspring that are connected to both spouses biologically. Their logic is of the negative suggestion kind: make illegitimacy and “living in sin” unacceptable phenomena so as to discourage their proliferation, a type of social engineering that ignores not only people’s choices but also the way real life is lived. After the Supreme Court in September ruled unconstitutional the Civil Code stipulation that illegitimate offspring receive half the inheritance of a legitimate heir, this group of lawmakers said they would study the matter, presumably to make a case against the government changing the law accordingly. This is mostly just posing, since there’s enough support to change the law among the remaining LDP Diet members. Moreover, there’s something arcane about the law in the first place: it has no effect on the majority of citizens, who couldn’t care less about illegitimacy. Besides, there is still a legal designation of illegitimacy attached to the birth certificate and the family register, so it’s not as if the stigma will be gone over night.

Still, it was a bit of a shock when I heard that the LDP’s deputy secretary general, Joji Nishida, referred to the “making” of “proper children” (chanto shita kodomo) as being essential to increasing national strength. By “proper children” he was referring explicitly to legitimate children, since, according to journalist Satetsu Takeda in the Huffington Post, he made the remark on the Fuji TV show “Hodo 2001” during a discussion of the Supreme Court decision, which he opposed. Of course, it doesn’t take a big leap of imagination to assume that since legitimate children are “proper,” illegitimate children are “improper.” Many people have a problem with the term “illegitimate” in the first place, which is understandable since it has a negative meaning, but it’s become a more or less standard legal term for children born out of wedlock. There’s no mistaking the purposefully negative cast of “improper,” so there’s also no mistaking Nishida’s position. He clearly believes children born out of wedlock are not full citizens. Maybe he even thinks they’re not full human beings. It’s difficult to tell because the media didn’t pick up on the remark at all. No major newspaper or TV network or even weekly magazine commented on a phrase that would have certainly occasioned outrage if it had been uttered by a politician in the U.S. or Europe. Maybe it’s because “Hodo 2001” is on BS Fuji and no one watches news shows on satellite TV? Or, more likely, maybe the media cares even less they let on.

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