Love Hotels

On the outskirts of every business district near every train station in every city in Japan, in the heart of every red-light district, clustered in alleyways, lining dirty riverwalks, you can find love hotels. They are, at their most basic, places that young Japanese people go to have sex with each other.
It works like this- young Japanese people don't traditionally leave the family home until they get married. And though this number is steadily plummeting, a solid percentage of adults between the ages 21-35 still live at home: lets say 20%-35%. On top of that, Japanese people are much more willing to commit to a grueling commute, sometimes upwards of three hours, in order to keep a steady job while living at home. (If you wonder why they don't just get apartments, I know at least two family men in my town whose work pays them to commute, but refuses to spring for room and board, though the prices are comparable.)
As if this weren't enough, several quirks of Japanese culture regularly meet to encourage, of all things, cheating, from both sexes. First of all, though the Japanese consider themselves overwhelmingly Buddhist (over 90% in surveys, when asked to choose a religion), a similarly overwhelming percentage- about 80%- consider themselves agnostic. The long and short of it is that religion is for feastdays. Its a cultural celebration, not a personal one. This means that young Japanese grow up by and large without a strong aversion to premarital sex, and without a firm sense of monogamy's benefits. Another quirk is the continued disenfranchisement of Japanese women. Young wives are under real pressure to stay home, cook, clean, and raise the children. Domestic abuse often gets a blind eye, even from the police. This means that men, often alpha males, are free to cheat on their wives, who fear repercussion. You can imagine that this type of abuse encourages a lot of loveless marriages, a remnant of the old 'arranged marriage' system.
I once read a testimony by a Japanese author that to become a widow was 'the happiest time of a woman's life'. She no longer had to take care of a family or wait on a helpess man. Having 'performed her duty', she was vindicated from social pressure, and had access to her dead husband's money to use as she would. More often than not in the last few decades, that inheritance has translated to a big deal- most men would stay on the clock at the office, working double, triple shifts rather than come home to their families. A social policy which, of course, encouraged the use of love hotels. You meet your lover at the hotel after work, far from the prying eyes of home, then write it off to a long day at the office, or a drinking party afterwards. Its rough to read, but its the truth in thousands of cases.
Having gone through this brief psychological history, you might think that love hotels are seedy places where gangsters turn dirty cash and the occasional body floats up. Some of them are. But in typical Japanese fashion, the love hotel has basked in 'fad' status for a long time. Some are palaces- Indian palaces, Chinese palaces, European castles. Some are done after cozy American-style log cabins. Still others show a myriad of themes- there are 'dungeon' hotels, 'heaven' hotels, 'video game' and 'cosplay' hotels. There's even a 'Hello Kitty'-themed love hotel somewhere deep in the heart of Tokyo. On the inside, however, your typical hotel has a similar layout- an eyehole-sized box where you rent a room from the well-protected (and well-hidden ) proprietor, an elevator, and what might be the world's most expensive vending machine, featuring Louis Vitton handbags, designer perfumes, and gift cards to top-class boutiques: as a 'gift to your companion'. She will, unswervingly, return the gift to her pimp, who gives her a small percentage, and feeds the rest up to his bosses, through the vending machine.
So by and large, your typical love hotel visitor is accompanied by there lover, or a lady of the night, and they've come for a specific purpose. But as a foreigner traveling on the fly, I've learned that a love hotel, in an emergency is a useful alternative to a regular hotel- its always clean, spacious, comfortable. I'd recommend it to anyone dangerously short of lodging while on a Japanese tour. One word of warning is the price- about twice as much as a typical business hotel. This is a yakuza (Japanese gangster) enterprise, for the most part, and they know how to value their services (more on them later).
So the love hotel ranges from the extremely cute to the extremely sleazy (don't worry, its very easy to tell which is which). There are as many different types of hotel as there are subcultures in Japan: and there are plenty. But we can be sure of two things- one, that they are completely pervasive. Every city, large town, red-light district, waterfront walk, and business fringe is coated in love hotels. And the next is that, though the may not have (as Wittgenstein thought) 'meaning in themselves', they are being visited.
Man, its tough to end an article like this! Hope you all enjoyed my return. Let me know what you thought in the comments below. Not enough information? Too much? Not vivid or interesting enough? Too much of both?

All my best,
Alex

Trees

Winter got its foot in the door sometime after lunch yesterday, without my seeing. I've had my eye open for snow for a few weeks now, and its just like the season to sneak in just when you put your guard down. My students have been able to talk about little else since the big event, while the teachers haven't been able to do much but grumble about the cold. I began to get the feeling that the flurry was getting blown out of proportion, or even that perhaps a cluster of white confetti had blown by overhead, and a student or two had confused it for the real stuff.
So I set off on my own to discover the truth behind the rumors. I went up the mountain after school, along the wide forestry road that leads the way past the old castle ruins (Jinsekikogen was once the county seat, 600 years ago) and up to the observation deck at the summit. I passed through the natural forest cover- made up mostly of spruce and birch, maple, cherry, dogwood, and a thousand broad-leaf varieties that I cannot name, tangled with hydrangea. The leaves had come off every tree but the cedar, which hold tenaciously on to their thick, technicolor beards long after the color fades. No snow under these sticks.
When I did find the evidence itself, it was in the thick dark of the sugi farms- vast tracts of Japanese cedar. Now, cedar here has pretty much the same characteristics as the cedar I spent my childhood uprooting (woe is me) with my grandfather, at his ranch in the hill country. It grows like a weed, its so tough that cows can't eat it, so dense that it chokes out its shade-that's how I found the snow- and its roots are so shallow that it lives nearly everywhere.
And it does, here. But the last official tally, cedar farms (i would imagine must to my grandfather's dismay, rest his soul) had replaced 43% of Japan's natural broadleaf tree cover. The result on every hillside in, say, autumn, is a motley patchwork of lovely autumn cedar display and the dull, dark green vastness of the sugi. In spring, its cherry and sugi. In summer, its hydrangea and sugi. In some town, especially in the dance, semirural farmland around Tokyo and Osaka, the eager weekend packer is likely to be disappointed- 80% of the surrounding forest has been cut to make way for neverending regiments of cedar.
And just because the trees are subsidized doesn't mean they aren't a nuisance. Thirty years ago, the Japanese almost never visited doctors for pollen allergies. Now, 10% of the population suffers. On any given workday in any season, one or two employees in every office will clock in wearing a mask, and while some are trying to prevent contracting or spreading a cold, its just as likely that their allergies have flared up. There is a even a growing cottage industry here for the design of fashionable hospital masks, for people with colds and allergy sufferers.
Its gets worse. Since the rise of prefab, fiberglass housing, and since Southeast Asian market opened up, lumber prices have been falling steadily, every year for thirty years. Timber now accounts for less than 1% of the total Japanese GNP. The Forestry Department is 3.5 trillion yen in debt (that's about 35 billion US), and its reduced its workforce from 89,000 in the mid sixties to 7,000 at the turn of the millenium. The government expected the local mountain dwellers to trim and cut the local trees, for their own profit. Now, no one wants to do the tough work required to maintain and harvest the farms.
So instead of passing resolution to diversify the forest cover, or emphasize conservation, or redirect the cash flow, the government has spent billions of yen on propaganda campaigns to increase sugi awareness, holding seminars and planting signs in every small town in the country about the maintenance of the local trees. It hasn't worked. Stands of unkempt sugi crowd my town at every border, and new trees are growing up in the cracks.
Part of the problem is that Japan now imports 80% of all its lumber. And while Japan has deforested less than half on its own forest cover- and diligently reforests with cedar- countries like Malaysia have hacked down a whopping 90% of their natural forests for export, replacing only slowly. And for timber sales, Japan is at the top of everyone's list. The lion's share of this precious lumber goes to the creation of a single commodity- disposable chopsticks.
The list goes on and on. Massive forestry roads drink funds and lead nowhere. Shallow sugi roots dry up the soil, causing landslides and 'cedar drought'. Japanese moviemakers have such a difficult time finding virgin scenery in their home country that they are forced to export production to Asia or Canada, where foreigners reap the profit, or else they shoot in bluescreen studios, editing background in later- a cheesy backdrop, to say the least. Tourism to formerly beautiful towns disappeared overnight decades ago, and the undermined villages collapse into poverty.
So does this mean that they Japanese countryside is doomed to live out a slow, deep-green postapocalypse? Not quite yet. A series of recent studies have shown that several towns with significant natural treecover have fought off poverty with the forest's help- by hunting rabbit, deer, and boar, harvesting rare and expensive mushrooms (like matsutake, the mushroom king, which can fetch a hundred dollars for a single cap), encouraging tourism, and collecting wild fruits and herbs. A few enterprising yokels have even made unlikely fortunes off their mountains- a pair of grandmothers made a post-retirement million by harvesting, packaging, and distributing decorative maples and bamboo leaves to high-class restaurants. Several artists, including one old man down the street from me, make a steady living as artists in raw hardwood.
While the government has yet to act on this evidence, in 2004 it passed a New National Forestry Plan, which recognizes the importance of broadleaf for Japanese physical, social, and economic health. It has designated 44 farms and special 'testing areas' for broadleaf multiculture to be planted and harvested over the next 30 years. So it will take at least that long to tell know if the program heralds Japan's return to naturalism, or if it is simply meant to pacify the skeptics, buying more time for the Ministry of Finance to get its dead horse up and running again. Until then, the sugi farms will continue to darken my town mountain's soil, and I'll still be able to find snow under its boughs. But I will say this. Even after I returned from my hike, I could easily distinguish my hiking path up the mountainside- its thin line of cherry, maple, and birch was the only color standing out against the monochrome green of Gongen-yama's cedar plantation.

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Christmas

Thanksgiving is behind us. This year, my girlfriend and I decided to host a dinner for a few of our closest friends. This soon got out of hand. At the end, we had sixteen people over for a meatless international potluck thanksgiving extravaganza. It went over very well.

Amid the rush, however, we were not at all sure how well it would go over. We tried to find a venue, and settled for her cramped flat- which proved spacious enough. We tried to find a turkey, and got a huddle of cold shoulders. We bought pots and pans, silverware, dinnerware, and tupperware, picnic blankets, and all the fixings for those extras that could survive our kitchen's meatless revolution. I found all of these things at the local mall, Sanyo Diamond City, Fuchu-cho, which has in its folds a foreign foods store, a sweeping 100-yen plaza, a kitchen outfitter, a bakery, and an easily visible 25 meter high smokestack, where at last we gathered a gaggle of our hopelessly lost friends.

So needless to say, I made several dozen rounds that weekend. Each time I walked through the automic glass doors, I met the Diamond City Christmas diorama, a three-story monstrosity replete with giant banners, an enormous, fully decked christmas tree half as large as the smokestack outside, and hundreds of tiny, cute, inflatable Santas. They slid down the banners. They burst burst from the tree's boughs. The rollicked among the presents at its foot. The santas had even taken hold of the Information Booth, and seemed frozen in the act of devouring it, like two dozen cheerful termites.
If I went down the street to the next shopping center, I would have found the same thing. Take the train into the city, and there'll be a giant wreath on the department store across the street. And so on until you hit Sapporo- every shopping mall, every government building, every covered parade is decked out for Christmas. The Japanese have a flair for construction, too, thanks to heavy government subsidies and weighty bribes thrown at the beurocracy to make sure the concrete river flows. So every city is packed with subdivisions of subdivisions of government offices, mega-malls, and department stores all taking part in the holiday spirit. This is a mixed blessing, because even though they can be garish to the extreme, department stores tend to be the only modern Japanese buildings with any flair at all. The rest is a jumbled, zoneless mess of spilled blocks and shapeless townhouses. Here they call them 'mansions.'

So all these department stores tend to draw the evening crowds. Shopping is a bit of a national past-time, so if you've got your money on 'unbridled capitalism' as the culprit for the Christmas craze, you've made a safe bet. Even though we're 5 1/2 centuries past Japan's first Christmas (1552, Yamaguchi-ken, by those darned Jesuits) we can safely rule out religious observance as the cause- shortly after that first mass, Christianity was outlawed by the government, and Christians were met with mortal persecution to the tune of three centuries, until the broad-minded Emperor Meiji unstiffed his collar. And of course foreign religious observances, especially American ones, tightened up again during the war (that's WWII), when Shinto became the national religion.

It wasn't until the 1960's that Japan took Santa in their arms, with an encouraging shove from some American TV dramas getting broadcast at the time. The economy was booming, and appliances, trendy clothes, kids toys, and other pricey consumables were flying off the shelves nationwide. Then a big store in Tokyo- the Japanese version of Macy's- decided to take a cue from their counterpart in New York and turn Christmas into a honking, romping cash cow. 'But how,' they asked themselves, 'will we do that in a nation full of Buddhists?' Simple. They turned Christmas into a holiday for lovers. The Santa seeds- raging Americaphilia and a hearty penchant for mass mobbing- were already in the soil. They just needed a bit of watering. So the big department stores in Tokyo got together and launched a secular holiday lights display, advertised a romantic stroll, and gifts guaranteed to get your sweetheart swooning. From then on, it was Christmas magic.

The 'Christmas is for lovers' campaign isn't without it consequences. Thanks to a penchant for all this cute and plastic, Japan is responsible for some of the tackiest Christmas displays on the planet. The Santa horde I encountered is just one example. I've seen rock gardens in Kyoto mangled with holiday lights, their meticulous curves sacriligiously etched with slapdash tracery. In Northern Fukuyama, the roof of a hospital is adorned, year round, with a sickly green Santa sliding down a fake chimney. You can see it from the highway, half a mile away. Worse still is the Summer Santa Club, a clothing outfitter dedicated exclusively to Santa-themed paraphernalia (I have a suspicion against its Australian origins; regardless, on these shores its fame is unbound).

There is a tenuous hope and a secret fear in the back of every teacher's mind that someday his pupil might outstrip him, and Macy's greatest may have come into its own this year. In an act of incredible hubris and moderate sacrilegion, Hiroshima City's Pacela Department Store has revealed its latest holiday advertising campaign: St. Pacela, replete with a wispy faerie of a mascot posturing as a member of Christianity's most holy committee. This genuinely angered me, a sure sign that all those years of Catholic schooling left their mark. Take that, St. Nick.

And much to the retailers' delight, each holiday season works better than the last. Every salty marketer knows that a whining child has inside him-or-herself the greatest purchasing power in the universe. It was only a matter of time before the kids got in on the Christmas cheer. What more, for the two years I've been here, my elementary school teachers have pressured me into teaching Christmas classes for as much of December as possible. I'm only too happy to oblige, with compromise- two classes only, to make cards, exchange gifts, learn a carol or two, and eat some cookies.

So the commercial holiday in its purest form has taken a foothold in the land of the rising sun. Its toothless, religion-free, and massive in scale- a marketing firm's dream home. Considering the national haste to get the season started, and the fervor with which it practices, you might think the holiday goes on well into January. But its not even a public holiday. On the 27th, all the tinsel comes off the trees, the Santas are all packed away (with the exception of the one on the hospital roof, I think its bolted down), and not a vestige of Christmas is left.

On the same afternoon, a whole new brand of decoration goes up, to celebrate Japan's real National Holiday, New Years Day, OShogatsu. For the most popular holiday in the country, its a subdued affair. Every house in every city meets for an elaborate family meal, then places an odd decoration , called kodamatsu, on its doorstep for the coming week. The kodamatsu is a tradition of uniquely Japanese origin. It began several hundred years ago, during the strange days of Japanese isolation. 'Kodamatsu' translated literally as "The Gate Pine", and every year the family cooperates in its creation- a festive arrangement of bamboo and pine boughs, decked from top to trunk with flashing lights, colorful ornaments, and tinsel.

The Revival

Dear Everyone,
Sometime last Spring I traded in the hassles and complications of blogging for simpler media- a personal journal. I found I had more time to write in a more soothing fashion that I did here. In short, I found I could keep the journal in my free time at work. The blog quickly became moot.
There was, for several months afterwards, polite protest from those few most interested in my time here. My apologies; I'll have to disappoint you again. The journal is still standing, so a personal account would feel redundant on my end, an uninspiring chore to say the least.
Instead, I have decided to keep here a series of open letters, the topics of which amount to examinations of Japanese culture as my feeble eyes see it. The plan is to release a new letter each Wednesday, every week until I depart.
I'd like to avoid the danger here of thinking that, for every day I've stayed in this country, my perspective on it has become truer. The fact is that every gem of knowledge I get from this place and its people goes in a stockpile invested in my own jade, my defensive bias. When asked by a visitor how long one must stay in Rome to know it well, Pope Paul VI said 'two days, very good. Two weeks, even better. Two years, still not enough.'
More important still will be remembering my audience's own knowledge as I talk about a world more foreign for every glance taken. So I'll end in the grand American style, by making a disclaimer- if I leave out anything you need, just ask. If you want to hear more about some charming detail, clamor for it. And if I overstep my bounds, don't hesitate to call me a fool.
I miss you all dearly, and hope all is well.

Love
Alex

What Have I Been Doing?

Find out here!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6b-TVYocRU0

There was a film festival tonight. Third place out of twenty movies! I've decided to remove 'The Kancho Kid', our third place winner, for lewd content. Sorry folks!

Alex

And that's what I get for trying to post for the first time in six weeks after a full day at the Board of Education with nothing to do but study, for six hours. I'll work on getting a real post up here, as soon as I have something nice to say.

Im Typing with One Hand

We'll see how well that works out for me. See, I broke my arm. And its slowed me down. In the most inconvenient ways. This is where my mom would chime in with her bit about 'learning my lessons, and moving on.' Great advice, to be sure.
For now, I go to the hospital for two hours every morning, during work, for rehabilitation. When I finish, my boss has to drive me to work, or I call a cab, which costs a fortune.
'If you don't have anything nice to say...'

On the other hand, I'm healing quickly.

Long Enough to Lose Some Readers

My apologies. I'd say I've been busy, but no more than usual- I've just had my head in too many places, and I forgot about the blog.
Let me give you a quick summary, lest you be left forever in the dark: China was a great adventure that lasted far too long. The temples and palaces got diluted in bulk and lost their flavor in that last week, and we were all too tired- Amy, Roo, and I- to get really creative with our time. But I had a stupendous time, I appreciated the challenge, made a few new friends and deepened bonds with the old ones. If you have any burning questions, you can always email me- alex_henri@yahoo.com, which I check more often than I do post here.
So more sporadic updates, and a penchant for procrastination. I'll keep it as steady as I can. Stay tuned!

More Business Trips!

Hi all,
I just got back from the JET Mid-year conference in Hiroshima- two days of thinly veiled socializing pocked with slideshow presentations. It was great! Before I caught my bus I visited the Museum of Modern Art, where I watched a grotesque Russian parody of the fabled affair between John F. Kennedy and Marylin Monroe. It was crap.
As for the China trip, I'm dragging far behind. Another day goes up today, then starting tomorrow I'll speed up the pace and spare everyone the novella. Read on!