Hokkaido, Japan, November 2010.
What a changed country. Wow. I’ve been in Sapporo a week now. It still has the warmth, the womb-like gentleness, the socially engrained nervousness, the wonderful but never-spicy food, the clean streets that have no garbage cans, the employees of almost any business hustling around in a way that would make you look like a brown-noser in the US. All that’s still here. But the money is gone.
I was at a coin laundry today and checked out a store nearby, selling used household goods. Used! I don’t remember anything like this when I was in Japan 12 years ago, especially for clothing. But there they were, racks of winter coats for $5, yukatas for $4, even shoes. Old stereos, broken down acoustic guitars, plates, kitchen storage units, gloves, it was all there for sale, cheap. Some traditions of Japan remained as it all seemed far cleaner that you’d find in a Salvation Army or other second-hand shops in the US.
I talked with a guy at the laundry about how shocked I was to see this and he said that “recycle shops” started coming into Sapporo about 3 years ago. Nothing new in the US, where we’ve always bought and sold stuff that was used. But in Japan? When people bought new stuff, the old went out on the street. Many of my contemporaries in the 1990s furnished their abodes with VCRs, TVs, video cameras, rice cookers, heaters, etc from the street. Me, too. Perfectly good stuff that no one has enough space to store in Japan so on the street it goes. There was an enterprising foreigner who drove a truck around on garbage days and picked up perfectly good used stuff and sold it from a store, mostly to foreigners I think. No one else was doing it and he had no competition as far as I remember. It just didn’t exist in Japan 12 years ago.
There was an antique-oriented outdoor flea market in Tokyo. Among 100-year-old scrolls and carvings and such, it sold used kimonos and yukatas, again, mostly to foreigners I think. They were as low as $10, and the kind that often cost $1000-$5000 new but were of no use after the special occasion they were made for was over. Why so cheap? The spirit of the person who wore them was still in the clothes, is what I was told. But now? They even have shoe stores selling used shoes. A lot of them. The guy I was talking to said that there were many, many stores selling used items now. The economy has gotten so bad over here that even cultural taboos about wearing someone else’s clothing are disappearing? Wow.
Speaking of disappearing, I stopped by the Sapporo museum of modern art today and saw an incredible exhibit by a Hokkaido artist named Norihiro Nakae. It was called “Beyond Time” and consisted of just 3 main installations that really hit me with their depth. Apparently he felt that the “spirit” of Hokkaido has pretty much disappeared, and gone up to the stars somewhere. And that we need to listen to the spirits of people who have come before us, that they have something to say. Remember what a plaster cast looks like of your teeth? He used about 3,500 of them, given to him by a dentist friend, all of them painted black. So personal, so undeniably individual and human, every single set of teeth different from the one beside it. And an implied sense of death, as natural. There were also huge 30-foot-high square-ish wooden spikes, also painted black, reaching toward the sky. Toward the stars. A few fake mummies in muted but colorful wrappings lay scattered about. The lights would come up about every 20 seconds or so, and then dim back down. It felt so tangible, like something in this world is changing, truly, and that maybe a certain kind of spirit is dying. With a new sense of the world coming into being?
The lights coming up and down really felt like the light of each person’s life, so temporary, so brief, on this planet. And at a time when structures of what we have come to accept as normal in our era, are failing left and right big time. Things we take for granted in terms of money and government and employment are hardly stable, and maybe about to become dramatically more unstable. Truly disappearing before our eyes to make room for something unknowable, something truly new.
I was talking with an old friend on the phone about the recent currency wars, with China using its clout to make the yen too strong for Japanese goods to compete with Chinese goods, and the dollar too weak to remain the world currency much longer. You feel it every time you buy something over here. The prices are generally cheaper than they were 12 years ago (unlike prices in the US!), but the exchange rate to the dollar into yen is awful, the worst in 20 years. The deflation balances most of this out, so it’s still reasonable to eat a meal or stay at a hot spring resort. But the lower sticker price is weird to see. And kind of unsettling, actually.
In case you didn’t know, I’m in Japan for 5 weeks with a show from NYC. I’m mostly doing sound, mixing 6 singers and a piano for an Irving Berlin song and dance revue. It’s excellent, by the way. Great singers, dancers, and actors, every one of them, the archetypical Broadway “triple threat.” One friend said maybe that’s what people over here need right now, something happy. Like people needed Fred Astaire movies about the ultra rich in the 1930s?
Talk about investing in gold seems to have spread to many circles, including actors. Maybe a sense of doubt in any currency at all is gaining steam. If this accelerates to panic level and currencies lose their value worldwide the way the deutschmark did before WWII, our current systems of trade break down. As would civilized behavior in obtaining the goods needed for survival on a day-to-day basis. Buying a gun isn’t a solution because you can’t defend against hordes of desperate people who also have guns. Joining an army for shared protection from others, almost like warring tribes in the era of cave men, seems the inevitable conclusion for survival if society truly does break down.
Actually, all this doom and gloom talk seems like just another way of speaking about an old world falling away, and a new world emerging. Which does seem inevitable to me, as well as the current structures fighting to keep their status quo alive for as long as possible. Nakae’s sculpture installations seemed to speak to this in some strange way and it’s still rattling through my brain. There was something very deep he tapped into, and I think I tapped in when I saw it. And if this is just the paranoid ramblings of a lost person who is just not plugged into his own life enough in November 2010, I will be very happy. But it does not feel that way right now. Time to buy gold?
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