Skin Whitening Cream?

This one made me a bit uneasy. I found my girlfriend using this cream and idly read the spiel on the back seeing it was in English. I was shocked to find that it claimed to be skin whitening cream. Does my girl so hate her own ethnicity that she wants to change her skin colour? I decided to study the cream more thoroughly. The description on the tube is remarkable for these two assertions:

"lightens skin tone by healing visible wrinkles" and

"prevents skin aging through effective whitening"

The claims are conspicuous for their implausability and incompatibility.
Paler skin is the result in the first case while in the second it has become the cause. Curious. Good trick if you can manage it.

My lover on the other hand claims total innocence. She got the cream, she said, because it is cheap and effective. It contains both foundation and ...something in Japanese that girls put on top of the foundation. Furthermore, she didn't know it claims to be lightening cream and didn't buy it as such. Being unable to read English, she was bothered not at all by the description on the tube.

So there.

My thoughts on wedding customs

When thinking of the wedding ceremony, I have always been dismissive of traditional customs. I have no respect for a ritual designed to glorify the superficial aspects of relationship over the substantial (why is there no emphasis of the wedding night, for example? No photos, videos, public toasts or speeches?)

I have no desire to sacrifice one of the most important days of my one and only life to empty ritual, lining the pockets of every hypocritical money-hungry parasite living off the vanity and earnestness of innocents in the process. Thousands of dollars for wedding photos? Those people should be shot. I want nothing to do with matching china, bridal veil styles and table centrepieces. In fact, not only would I eschew traditional wedding customs, I would like to demonstrate my contempt for mainstream culture by avoiding human practices of all kinds, even those which serve to separate the human species from our closest primate relatives.

"I would like to get married naked", I told my girlfriend suddenly.

"Why?", she asked, looking puzzled.

Hakone Checkpoint

Last weekend I went with my girl to Hakone, the hot-spring resort town about two hours from Tokyo. It was only mildly disappointing, with the onsens a pale overpriced imitation of those in Kagoshima, but the food and the service in the ryokan was very good.

But the most interesting thing to see was a little side trip on the last day, when we went to Hakone sekishyo, the reconstructed checkpoint that guarded the entrance to Tokyo during the shogunate, when Tokyo was known as Edo. There were guardrooms, inspection chambers, administration offices, barracks for troops, even a small jail. I was interested to learn, however, that Hakone checkpoint, known for its strictness, was, according to the brochure,

"primarily responsible for keeping women from escaping from Edo."

That's all the English-language brochure said about the subject, leaving me wondering just what that was about. In the inspection chambers were teams of female officials who inspected women from Edo. Why were these women (known as deonna) trying to get out? Were Tokyo women being systematically abused? Where did they want to go? Was there some other women-friendly place in Japan 200 years ago, some kind of medieval harassment-free safe house?
Was Tokyo really that bad ?

Eventually I worked it out, dictionary in hand, through Chizuru and the helpful staff. The checkpoint officials were on the lookout for escaping hostages, women from the families of rival daimyos to the shogun who were being held to guarantee the good behaviour of feudal lords in distant parts of Japan.

There. Just the normal cruel politics of humanity. Nothing sinister.

Hakone Checkpoint: Hard on the chicks

Time Out

I went running today and blanked out, lost track of time. This is the first time this has happened since I started running again two months ago. It wasn't for very long- just 5 or 10 minutes, but it was real and it was good. One second I had reached the midway of my run, where I turn back home, and the next I was halfway back to the mouth of the forest, running towards the fork in the path that led to the meadow...I lost all track of who and where I was, forgot the nagging ache in my knee, the problems at work, the evolving relationship with my partner.

This happened often in Kagoshima; I would lose myself for half an hour or more. I would come to and realise that I couldn't remember that hill, or couldn't remember that slope. On a few occasions I lost the entire run, fininished it without any memory of it at all. Once I was jolted out of my reverie by the sight of a large monkey, a big male, as it scooted across the path in front of me. I remember that, remember being nowhere and then being suddenly on the road again, feeling my body and watching that bloody monkey.

I was always most restful and most content when I came out of these trances, happy about my body and about my mind, but it is a little creepy. What is my mind doing at this time? Surely it is doing something: the brain produces thoughts like the liver produces bile. What is it thinking about when it is not me?

Getting caught in the chicks' train carriage

No penises allowed



It was about 9 o'clock at Shibuya station, one of the busiest. I was tired, happy to find a seat, and mildly surprised that there seemed to be so many women in the carriage.Then a Japanese woman, swift and oddly confident, comes up to me and says something rapidly in Japanese. Not catching it, I reply 'Sumimasen?'. She switches instantly to English and tells me that I am in a women-only carriage. I stare around, thinking that accounts for why everything is pink. I thank her and get off the carriage.

I felt sheepish but also grateful to the woman, not only for telling me (50 other women had ignored me) but because she had tried Japanese first; she gave me the courtesy of not assuming I couldn't understand her.

Part of me wanted to object to being thrown out of my seat; but I don't have the right; the Japanese have made the decision to have women-only train carriages and a public objection by me would make the issue a Japanese versus gaijin issue, when it isn't; it is a gender issue.

But I do think it is a bad idea. It has been put into place to combat the problem of endemic sexual harrassement on the trains; or, to be more specific, the problem of chikan, the train groper. These guys take advantage of packed trains by groping girls when the trains are completely packed, to the point where nobody can move. There are even cases of high school girls turning up to school with cum stains on their skirts. Distasteful, I know.

I myself saw an incident (or saw the resulting fracas) with a chikan. I was coming into Shinjuku, rush hour, one of the busiest stations in the world, when suddenly I heard a tremendous shouting from the other end of the carriage. One guy was yelling for all he was worth. Another man's voice, repeating over and over again: sumimasen, gomenasai, sumimasen, gomenasai. Then the train pulled up to the platform, people flooded out of the carriage, and I saw what was happening. The apologising man, head bent in shame, was trying to get away, pulling hard, while his arm was being held by the other man, a young man, who would not let him go. A young woman was standing nearby, presumably the young man's girlfriend. The man holding the guy's arm stood in the doorway of the train, which meant that the doors couldn't close, which meant the train couldn't leave, which meant that within 30 seconds the platform was swarming with staff. When about a dozen station staff had turned up, the guilty guy had appeared to accept his fate and stood silently, head bowed, on the platform, while the young man talked rapidly to a station officer. All the while the girl stood by, expressionless, saying nothing. She was a pretty girl, short skirt and all that, and I would have been tempted to put my hand on her arse myself... if she had been my girlfriend or we were dating or soemething weird like that...

I often wondered what happened to the chikan guy. Did he go to jail, get fined, or what?

But what stuck with me most about the incident is what the girl did. Nothing. Zilch. I knew that if her boyfriend had not happened to be there, she would have just put up with being felt up on the train, as they usually do. While that chikan was caught, the whole incident was hardly empowering for women.

Which is part of the problem of women-only carriages. It perpetuates the perception that women are helpless and cannot deal with their own problems, or that they are incapable of protecting themselves, or, just as bad, that they should not be expected to make an effort to protect themselves.

It's a defeatist attitude, and one that seems to me to be an admission of failure. Why should women need to be segregated in order to feel safe? It is like dealing with the Arab-Israeli problem by building a concrete security wall to separate the two communities. Walls are not the answer. Shouldn't they be targeting the gropers? Or shouldn't women be putting up more of a fight?

Would Western women?

I also find it insulting to me as a man. It tells me that I cannot be trusted. That women need protection from me. It reminds of the unease I felt, as a young and earnest university student, when during a safety-on-campus meeting I was told that at nighttime, if I see a woman walking towards me on my side of the street, then I should cross over to the other side of the street. I had gone to the meeting wanting to help, only to find that I was part of the problem. I felt strongly then, and still do, that perpetuating victimhood does not help.

Fear is not the answer.

Face masks: Just how creepy are they?

The Japanese love face masks. In the street, at work, and especially on trains, you can see them everywhere. Seems a bit weird for newcomers, you come to a strange country with an unusual culture, only to find that Ebola seems to have broken out, and the locals refuse to breathe the air, oblivious to the alien, inhuman feeling they create among freaked-out foreigners.


Well, the Japanse have reasonable-sounding explanation for wearing face masks. It is claimed the masks prevent infection, especially from influenza, and more importantly, stop your flu being transmitted to others. It is thus considered polite to wear the mask, as a courtesy to others. They are also worn in the Spring to prevent breathing in the pollen that commonly causes hayfever. A reasonable explanation, I suppose.


However, I prefer to believe that these Japanese are members of a satanic death cult, and they wear face masks because they are preparing for Armageddon, as only face masks will protect them from the hideous viruses soon to be released by the government and foreign multinationals. Soon the charismatic leader of the cult will unleash his word and the mask-wearers will attack, killing and eating, zombie-like, all the unbelievers who refuse to conform...


But that's just me.

But seriously, what is it with these people? Don't they know how they look? Extras from some B-grade sci-fi plague movie? Basically, the truth is that the Japanese are basically afraid of everything; somebody in the same city with a case of the flu gives them an excuse to put another barrier between them and the scary world. Japan: paradise for paranoia. Lowest crime levels in the world, yet locals patrol the streets at night looking for 'troublemakers'. Safest country in the world for kids, yet the poor little buggers are forced to wear personal alarms, just because a few years ago, one child, out of a population of 125 million, was kidnapped and murdered...

Anyway, for an account of my favourite example of Japanese paranoia see http://panawave.easter.ne.jp/pw-1/syasin030512.htm for some nice pictures of the Pana Wave cult, whose penchant for white masks, white everything has some interesting parallels with the face mask movement. Call me cynical, but it has occured to me that the Pana Wave people are just at the extreme end of the face mask continuum.

Anyway bye for now. I gotta lie down. Think I've got the flu coming on...

Maid face-mask soft porn: why didn't I think of that?

Trainspotting

Saw a trainspotter today. My walk to work takes me past a multi-track segment of the railway, several lines going past, a perfect trainspotting site.
So this guy was standing there at the link fence, a huge-zoomed camera hanging around his neck, checking a printed schedule and looking at his watch anxiously, stamping his feet against the cold. He looked rather pitable, but then, who am I to judge? His hobby takes him into the fresh air, gives him something to do, costs little, and satisfies his need to...look at trains. I can understand it in a way. It's the same urge I had as a boy to collect toy cars, categorise them, line them up, look at them. If this man's hobby seems a bit ridiculous, even laughable , it's important to remember that most men his age in Japan play pachinko.

The only other trainspotter I've met in Japan was a regular conversation school student I had years ago in Tokyo. Middle-aged man, desperate comb-over, missing teeth.

"Trainspotting?", I said in mild surprise.

"Not like the movie!" he said adamantly.

The intensity with which he made this statement, coupled with the almost aggressive countenance he assumed, made him seem for a moment actually not dissimiliar to Begbie as he was stabbling that innocent guy in the pub. I briefly wondered whether the lifestyles of trainspotting and heroin addiction in the Glasgow underworld did in fact overlap in some ways, and that the irony of the otherwise well-chosen movie title was perhaps misplaced.

Then I looked once again at my middle-aged student, who had once claimed that he had never used a washing machine in his life, leaving domestic duties first to his mother and now his wife, and I thought...

No.

Going to the Immigration Office

Try to avoid this if at all possible.

However, when eventually you are forced go, put it off another couple of days.

If you have to go the office in Yokohama, don't try to find a map on the internet...because there isn't one. Actually there is, but it will lead you to a doll museum next to Yamashita park. The only way to find the real immigration office at Yokohama is the ask the station staff, and he will direct you to a large concrete block variously signposted as
'Dr Hepburn's former residence', 'Yokohama municipal prefectural office', or 'Private-Keep Out'

Finally you will notice the inexpressibly minute English letter writing on the postbox, and only when you enter the building will you notice the streams of desperate foreigners crowding the elevators. The first four floors are occupied entirely by stacks of immigration forms, piled to the ceiling, so the dirty gaijin crowd into the tiny lifts. Disliking the smell of people in general, let alone desperate people, I took the stairs. Inside, it was like the refugee scenes from Children of Men. No, I'm exaggerating. A bit. But happy camping it is not. Take a degrading, dehumanising number and wait your turn with an officious pointy-faced moron who will expetct you to read and write kanji and will look at you like a piece of used toilet paper when she discovers you lack a simple form nobody told you that you had to get from another officious cow in another grey concrete troll house in another part of this rotten souless city.

Just as well we would never treat foreigners like that back home, huh?????



Yokohama Immigration Office: Helpfully signposted

My guesthouse is owned by a cult

...called The Kofuku-no-Kagaku. Which in English means "The Institute for Research in Human Happiness". Pretty catchy, huh?

They're pretty low-key in my guesthouse. The guesthouse is run as a business, not a cult-centre. Nobody gets hassled to join, though I understand that nine years ago, the first time I came to Tokyo, Japanese staying here were asked if they wanted to go to...meetings. Now they just give you a book when you move in. The little library here, dotted with backpacker pulp novels and ancient German-Japanese dictionaries, bulges with abandoned copies of these cult books. They have names like "The Laws of the Sun" and "Guideposts to Happiness". They read like they were written by James Redfield on valium. Most of it is pretty harmless, mildly obvious fluff: "Having been given human life in this world, if we can live in a way that is uniquely individual we will feel all the more joy", "Be intensely sincere" etc etc.

However it is not difficult to find the craziness, the spoon-bending feng-shui Mists of Avalon what's your starsign I remember the womb-state I was a princess-of-Egypt-in-a-former-life frootloop looniness. How about this:

"The Garna Civilization flourished for approximately 25,000 years until the continent was destroyed...the men of that time still had their third eye: a round, emerald-green eye in the centre of their forehead about 2 centimetres above the eyebrows....The Garna civilization came to a violent end...approximately 735,000 years ago."

Nice.

"The airships of Atlantis would have seemed a very strange shape to us."

No doubt.

"In June 1986 Jesus Christ, Ame-no-minakanushi-no-kami and other spirits came down to me one after another and declared that now was the time to stand forth and announce my presence publicly."

I read a paragraph every now again, just as a reminder never to underestimate human stupidity.

Kofuku-no-Kagaku claim to have 10 million followers world-wide.

Bullet trains are a load of bollocks

Took the Japanese bullet train last week, the legendary shinkansen. The shink has a great reputation: luxurious, swift, silent; wonders of modern technology.

Well, like so many things in Japan, I can report that the reality is sadly different.

I was told that riding the shinkansen was likely flying in an airplane. Maybe, if you are flying Aeroflot in the 1970s. The shink from Osaka to Tokyo was old. It was extraordinarily shabby. Stained seats and faded curtains. Scratched windows. A food trolley whose legs were held together by bits of tape. The haggard crone pushing it was flogging cup noodles and slimy sandwiches made of white bread with the crusts cut off. Decades of tobacco smoke had made the cabin smell like death. The seats were cramped, dingy and lumpy. This was not modern technology. It looked like a film clip from the 50s.

Yes it is swift, but far from silent. The noise comes not from the train itself but from the annoying intrusive announcement before and after station stops. It was a lot worse on the much newer tsubame, the shink that goes from Fukuoka to Kagoshima. That train has so many announcements that, far from being rested, you will have cut your wrists an hour before arrival.

Take my advice: catch the bus. It is comfortable, relaxing and half the cost.