Shake Your Groove Thing, Nihon Style

Ah, yes.

So long posts have been eluding me since The Brain is just refusing to focus on anything for very long.

Here are a few tidbits from yesterday anyway:

I did go to the shamisen concert in Tsukuba yesterday and it was strange and beautiful--and four hours long. And I went to the second performance of the day, which means that some of the people played for about eight hours that day. Never let anyone tell you that shamisen players don't have some kind of endurance. Under those kimonos and robes, those are some hearty, hearty folks.

It was a very Japanese day, really. Maybe it was the earthquake that shook the building before the concert or maybe it was the concert itself or maybe it was the trainride to Tsukuba, a forty-minute long ride through the countryside that surrounds Tokyo, which disappeared into a dreamlike mist that had slowly enveloped the afternoon. Maybe it was my friend, the woman who invited me, running up to meet me in the rain. And this is Japan after all, so she was in a scarlet and gold kimono, all dimples and hugs and tiny little steps in her geta.

You might think of Japan as a refined and quiet place, and it is that so often. It is that as the beautiuflly dressed players silently take their places onstage and ready their instruments. Japan is a quiet and refined place, is what you're thinking, right? But some of that thinking goes out the window when you hear the cue to start the music, which is, as often as not, a loud yell, like you'd hear at a karate competition. And the yelling continues through the songs, which themselves are very rousing. It's very fun after all, this refined art of shamisen.

The concert was given in honor of Tsukuba University's graduating shamisen club members and it was a mix of traditional and modern and fun. At the beginning, the women were all wearing kimono, and the men were in their somber formal dress, wide-legged black and white striped pants and black short robes. The program began with very traditional Japanese folk songs. By the end, they were playing original arrangements: The taiko drummer did a 1940's big band beat and the man who had played the traditional flute came out with a tenor sax. All the kids who were just moments before in kimono and robes ran out onstage in black suits and did a dance number. There were skits and drummers and singers and, at the end, the previous graduating class members joined the newbies on stage. There was a mix of all ages, probably from 16 to 70+.

That's Japan right there.

This is, I mean, sometimes a surprising place.

One young man earned everyone's respect by playing with a broken string. He just modified the song and went on playing beautifully, and ended his solo to thunderous applause.

There was a talented young man with a shaved head and pierced, stretched earlobes and a young woman, radiant in a kimono printed with lime green and dreamsicle-orange hexagons and a lipstick red obi, her hair cut into a modified mohawk. And she caught my eye several times, not only bcause she had the face of an angel and was a talented drummer and shamisen player, but, at the end, as everyone was giving their farewell speeches, she stood at the back of the stage and sang to herself the words to "Let It Be" (an instrumental version was being played as background music to the speeches).

The students shed tears and thanked their families and it was sad and wonderful to think of these talented young people going on to lives that may or may not include shamisen. I understood about 2% of the language--and 100% of the feeling.

And, as always, I'm glad I went.

(There are a few pictures at flickr if you want to have a look.)

Women Only

The other interesting thing was that I finally ran into one of the infamous women-only cars on Japan Railways--on the Tsukuba Express. The cars are marked with pink signs on the windows and on the train platform gates, and the are women-only on weekdays from first train until 9:00 p.m. I agree with women-only cars after hearing the stories about chikan on trains (chikan are men who take advantage of the crowded trains to molest women). Japan is still a country dominated by men after all. Anyway, it's never happened to me, but it did happen to Ellaine, the teacher I replaced. She went two years without a single chikan sighting, but then in the month before she left, she had TWO men grope her on the train.

So, yeah, that's Japan, too.