Xmas in Japan

A very tortured Christmas tree!

        Well, the prospect of spending Christmas Eve & Day alone here in Penang looked pretty bad, so I hustled off to Japan to spend it with Hubby in the little country town where he's now working as a "business bachelor."  The Xmas season is always tough for me because of all the tortured Christmas trees.  Take this one, which had a lot of potential and could have been "saved."  In fact, I made a secret attempt to fluff it up and make it actually look like a tree, but I couldn't.   Someone had tied up its little branches with white string so the branches couldn't drop down even an inch.  Now why did they do that? Was it to streamline the tree to make it take up less space? Had they tied it up to store it away and forgotten to cut away the strings when it was time to set it up? I'll never know, but if I'm living in Ogawa-machi next year at Xmastime (and I might well be), I'm going to beg them to let me help them with their tree.

Cabbages that look like bouquets of roses

       On the other hand, the Japanese do wondrous things with cabbages.  Not the edible kind, but the decorative ones that are used in outside planters because they can withstand the cold.  I've never seen ones as good as those I saw on this trip!  In fact, I loved them so much, I'm going to put two pictures of them here.  And let me remind you loyal readers that these are ALL ornamental cabbages, no matter what other flowers they might look like.  There are ones that look like roses, others like begonias, and some . . .  well, they look like living lace.  I love those things!
                  

And more ornamental cabbages for winter planting

          No matter what the season, you can count on the Japanese to have some seriously confusing English on their garments.  This jacket had a whole story going on, complete with a little word play.  For those who can't read the jacket in the picture, I'll try to reproduce its whimsical message here:  "Hurray ("Hooray") for 40th Anniversary!!!   We continue running from 1968 & we pedal a bisycle now.  We gathered in Ogawamachi to get into the boat of the name to call the. . . .  'FRIENDSHIP'  ha-ha-ha!!!" 

Put your personal history on your back

          You can almost understand it, but not quite. I think the idea is that these fellows have all been running together since 1968, although, with aging, painful knees, they've switched to cycling nowadays.  And they've gathered in Ogawa Town for a reunion, though I can't imagine why they chose that place.  I hope they had a nice ride in the boat called 'Friendship" and enjoyed some "nomunication," which is a combination of the Japanese word for "drink" and the English word "communication."

       Sadly, I had to leave Japan on Christmas morning mainly because Hubby had to work both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.  So, he trudged off to work and I headed for the airport for a long, long trip back to Penang.  The flight itself isn't so bad, but getting to the airport by bus and train and then sitting around the airport takes forever.  Getting back home even after landing in KL took hours and hours, too.  (I had to stop off in KL to pick up my new passport, adding extra hassle to the mix.)

Haneda Airport in Japan at Christmas time    

         I flew in and out of Haneda Airport this time, rather than Narita, and it was such a pretty sight at night! They'd taken masses of very tall bamboo, wrapped them with white lights and erected them in "groves" that you could walk under.  So beautiful!

     

Luggage "parked" outside a shop in Japan

      Going back to Malaysia after Japan always requires a mental adjustment for me about security of personal items.  In Japan people don't steal your stuff because they have their own and it's probably better than what you've got anyway.  (And honesty is inculcated in kids from a very early age and throughout their educational years.)  So you're sort of expected to leave your luggage outside the crowded little airport shops while you're inside buying your souvenirs.  (Mine is the black one in front here.)  And when you come out, it's still going to be there.  That wouldn't happen in most countries you might visit, that's for sure!   So, when I leave Japan, I always have to remember to be more careful about my stuff wherever I'm going.  

          That would be a good New Year's resolution in fact: "Be careful with personal possessions always."  

        

Malaysian Butoh

NOT Malaysian butoh, but Japanese (Sankaijuku)

I'm a huge fan of Japanese butoh, especially that performed by "Sankaijuku."  It's hard to explain, and I'm no authority on it by any means.  But it generally involves shaven-headed men covered in white paint from head to toe doing really slow, somewhat provocative movements, often to  sounds rather than music.  But is it really dance?  For lack of a better term, I'll call it that.  One thing is for sure -- to me it's completely arresting, captivating and memorable.  The images stick with me long after I've gone home.  It's rarely happy stuff; the dancers often appear to be tortured or in quiet agony, but that's part of what makes it so fascinating.

Again, Sankaijuku (photo stolen from the Web)

       I guess there are those who would call it grotesque, but fans of butoh might characterize it as thought-provoking and mind-boggling -- at least I do.

          By the way, I hear that the word "butoh" has a  totally different meaning in Bahasa Melayu, something to do with men's private parts.  So I hope I won't get anybody reading this post by accident, expecting something  else.   Please don't anybody censor this blog post!  This is art and culture we're talking about here.  Culture with a capital "C," I might add. . . .

Malaysian butoh (at a2 Gallery)

     Anyway, recently I was invited to "a2 Gallery," a gem of an art space right here in "downtown" Pulau Tikus, just beyond our traffic light where the non-stop traffic jam happens.  The gallery is in a restored Chinese house located in Lorong Bangkok, so named because the Thai Buddhist temple with a reclining Buddha is nearby.  (You could google that, too, if you wanted.)  Anyway, they had a performance of Malaysian butoh that was small-scale compared to Sankaijuku doing their thing in Tokyo, but it was fascinating and very well done, in my uneducated opinion. 

My deep apologies for not having his name!

   

With the mask or without it, he's still very cool!

     The main performers were a young gal who looked a little like an angry bird, and a  fellow who --   Well. . . . .  YOU tell ME what you think he looked like!  I'm still puzzling over it. ( See what I mean by "thought-provoking"?)  I must say that I think his real face was just as interesting as his masked persona, but in a different way.  And let me apologize here and now for not having the names of these two terrific performers.  It's really unfair for me not to have gotten them and put them right here, but I didn't.  

     But I do know the name of this gentleman-- well, now I do!  He's Lee Swee Keong, the founder of Nyoba Kan, Malaysia's only Butoh dance company.  I saw him by accident out at Straits Quay, where he was getting ready to perform at PenangPac, (Penang Performing Arts Center).  And, like a stupid idiot, I marched right up to him and gushed and asked him if he knew about Sankaijuku and forced him to look at my silly cell phone photos of the performance I'd seen.  Honestly, I had no idea who I was speaking to!  I can only hope that he found my naivete charming and fresh, not ignorant and bothersome, as he probably did.  He was pretty nice to me, though, so I guess he forgave me for not being star-struck, as I surely would have been, had I known who I was talking to.  
                                     Live and learn, I guess!

       If you ever have the opportunity to see butoh performed wherever you are, don't miss the chance.  It's a really special kind of  performance art of the body.