A one-man screw factory

Asai Seisakusho (Nejiya) Ltd. is a small factory, ran by one man, in Japan. It produces 400,000 screws per day. The work it takes to maintain the machines, manage orders, perform quality control, order the supplies he needs, and do the books is amazing to consider. When done with his workday he says he goes home and drinks beer. That sounds well deserved to me.

 

Thirty-Six Views of the Eiffel Tower

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Henri Rivière (1864-1951) was French artist. When Japan opened up in the 1850s a wave of goods had entered Europe, including woodprints which considerably influenced European artists. They were to influence Rivière as well. 

In 1888 the construction of the Eiffel tower began. Inspired by Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji Rivière decided to do a similar portfolio featuring the tower. He started by trying to replicate the Japanese printing process, although he actually didn't know how it was done. His experimentation led to two prints, but it was a costly and time-consuming process, so he abandoned it for lithography for the rest of the series.

These images are from the Public Domain Review' post Henri Rivière’s Thirty-Six Views of the Eiffel Tower (1888–1902). There are more images at that post, as well as a discussion of his series. 

Henri Rivière

Chushingura (The Story of the Loyal Retainers)

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Chushingura, or the 47 Rōnin, is a popular Japanese story. It has been told and retold, in various media and with various interpretations. It is about the samurai honor, duty, and revenge.

It is based on a true incident in 18th century Japan. In the Shogun's court two functionaries, Kira and Asano, got into a dispute and one of them, Asano, attacked the other. Because drawing a weapon was forbidden in the Shogun's palace, justice was swift. The fight was in the morning, and by the afternoon the offender was condemned and sentenced to commit seppuku (ritual suicide). 

At Asano's death his followers became Ronin, which were unaffiliated samurai. Living in poverty, they plotted for two years and eventually invaded Kira's mansion to avenge their lord. Kira was killed, but the 47 Ronin also sealed their fates with the attack. The Shogun had outlawed their revenge, and so when the raid was over, they turned themselves in and, by imperial edict, had to commit seppuku themselves.

Shortly after the raid plays were written about it. In these plays the Ronin were portrayed as honorable men who had upheld their honor by avenging their leader's death. As the linked article states:

The reason why the tale of the 47 Ronin created such a fuss at that time and became so valued and important in modern Japan is because, according to Benedict, the Japanese have a great appetite for stories of relentless heroes who settle debts by choosing death as the solution. In the West, this type of narrative would be considered resignation to a cruel fate. 

In Japan, however, they are chronicles of initiative and unyielding determination in which the heroes exert all their efforts to fulfill an obligation that is incumbent upon them and, in doing so, they redeem themselves from another. The sympathy for the selfless hero comes from the fact that he fulfilled his duty at all costs without anything – helplessness, illness, pain or death – diverting him from his path.

Spending a night in a Japanese flophouse

Ok, my post title is a bit click-baity, but the video creator calls the Osaka Airin District, the area he stays in, a slum and the hotel he stays in is dirt cheap so, flophouse it is. That said, from reading the comments it is probably more accurate to call it a poor working-class neighborhood than a slum.

The room is small, but clean. There are communal bathrooms, showers, laundry machines, and a cooking station. All of the areas are clean and well kept. The streets are a bit litter strewn, and there is graffiti all about which is never a good sign. 

There are also a lot of vending machines. In an American slum those would have been smashed to bits in a matter of minutes, but they seem to be left alone. I suppose the crime in the area is of a different nature. 

Japanese pirates

Japanese pirates were call Wakō. While originally entirely Japanese, later they included Chinese, Philipino and other southeast Asians. The video is a good history that covers the growth, spread and the ebb and flow of the Wakō's fortunes (as well as a fight over a slave girl mentioned in passing, a seeming constant of history when it comes to warriors).   

 

Riding to heaven on the backs of turtles

 (Note: this was first posted on November 17, 2009. I'm reposting it today for the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing)

A few years ago I happened to visited Hiroshima on August 7th, one day after the 63rd anniversary of the atomic bombing of the city.

When you get off the streetcar from the train station the first thing you see is the ruin of the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall. The atomic bomb detonated almost directly overhead of the building. With its few still standing walls, and its dome stripped and leaving only its framework, it is the iconic ruin of Hiroshima.

When you stand at that building, if you turn in a circle you realize your standing in a bowl surrounded by hills. Most of the rest of the buildings in that bowl were reduced to rubble by the bomb blast and resulting fires.

When they cleared the rubble they set aside several blocks of the old city as the Peace Memorial Park. You walk south along the river to get to the entrance to the monuments. At the entrance card tables are set up where there are petitions for peace that can be signed. You can buy peace t-shirts and listen to folk musicians strumming guitars and singing about peace. It is a fitting sentiment for this place.

The most visited monument is the Children's Monument for Peace. A young girl named Sadako Sasaki contracted leukemia after the bombing. As she sickened in the hospital she remembered an old Japanese saying that if one folds a thousand paper cranes one is granted a wish. She spent the rest of her short life folding paper cranes, but died before she reached one thousand. The Children's Monument for Peace was built in her memory, and in memory of all the children who died from the bombing. It is covered with paper cranes that school children have folded and sent to the park.

As touching as he Children's monument was, I most wanted to see a different monument. The monument pictured with this post. The Monument in Memory of the Korean Victims of the A-bomb.

There were tens of thousands of Koreans in the city when it was bombed. Most were forced laborers who had been brought to the city, housed in barracks and worked in the munitions plants of Hiroshima. Some 40,000 were killed, and a another 30,000 injured in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Most of the Koreans in Hiroshima were from Hapcheon, South Korea, and so sadly two cities ended up bearing the brunt of the attack (Atomic bomb survivors in South Korea still feel the wounds).

The Korean Monument was built in 1970 by South Koreans living in Japan and sited across the river and outside of the Peace Park. The Japanese authorities would not allow it to be placed in the Peace Park. It took until 1999 for permission to be granted to move it onto the Park's grounds.

As I stood in front of that Monument I could not help but reflect that all the paper cranes in the world would not have helped the dead honored by this memorial. That the peace petitions, while a fine sentiment, were no more substantial than Chamberlain's umbrella.

The Germans dressed prisoners up in Polish uniforms and shot them to justify their invasion that started the wider war in Europe. The Japanese used bayonets to stage their low-tech version of Hiroshima in Shangai as they spread ever deeper into China. The allies pounded cities with high explosives and incendiaries from the air. All across the globe men died in combat and civilians died behind the fronts. 

A few days after Hiroshima's destruction Nagasaki was bombed. Hirohito then taped his surrender speech. That night a cadre of Japanese officers ransacked the palace seeking to destroy the recording and postpone Japan's surrender. How do paper cranes and petitions solve that sort of madness?

In the end, to me at least, this small place in the Park was less about the bomb and more about Korean farmers taken from their villages and used as forced labor. A life spent at the whim of masters. Another tragedy of the war. 

My family and I were the only people at the monument when we visited it. The insciption on it reads, "Souls of the dead ride to heaven on the backs of turtles." At its base are small stones with Korean characters painted on them (pictured). The guidebook said you should leave a gift for the slain worker's ghosts. All I had were a couple of cigarettes. I supposed the ghosts might like to relax with a smoke and so I left them. It was all that I could do.
 

 

Carl Randall

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Carl Randall is a contemporary English figurative painter. He lived in Japan for 10 years where his first main body of work, Japan Portraits, was created. Later he was to return to London, England where he continued where he created his London Portraits series.

The images are taken from his website Carl Randall where there are many more examples of his work. You can also buy signed, limited editions of his works at that site.

Carl Randall

A restaurant that's been around for 162 years

This is a video of a Tokyo restaurant that has been in operation for 162 years. For dinner they only serve food from the Edo period. The tables have an area, which is covered for lunch. During dinner it is opened, and charcoal is placed in it so dinners can grill their own skewers. It's a pleasant looking place.

For a Westerner it would be confusing as all hell to order food in the place, but Japanese food is quite tasty. You would just have to expect mildly aghast looks as you committed one dinning gaffe after another as you ate.   

 

Christmas TGIF

Just before Christmas I have a different TGIF music video post. I figure we've all heard the usual Christmas songs about a gazillion times, so I post Japanese Christmas songs for a change.

While strictly speaking, not a holiday, Christmas is popular in Japan. However, since Japan is Shinto and Buddhist it is does not have religious trappings. The Christian elements have been stripped out and only the secular remain: Santa Claus, decorations, presents, snowmen, jingle bells and so forth.

Christmas day will feature a family dinner, often times and oddly enough a bucket of KFC fried chicken. However, Christmas Eve has morphed into a couples' holiday akin to Valentines Day. That is why a lot of their Christmas music ends up being sappy love songs like the one above (and what sort of a dope proposes with an empty ring box?).  

The video below shows the travails of dateless salary men on Christmas Eve. Of course, Japan being Japan, nobody does ridiculous quite as well as Japanese girl bands, and so we follow with a few of those, ending with my favorite which starts frantically and only gets more insane. 

Sanzo Wada's Sketches of Occupations in the Showa Era

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Sanzo Wada was a 20th century Japanese artist. He was a painter (I previously featured his painting South Wind as the second image in the series of Sailor paintings), worked on color theory, and was an educator. After the war he eventually also did set and costume design, winning an Academy Award for his work on the film Gates of Hell.

He is best known for his Showa Shokugyo E-zukushi (Sketches of Occupations in the Showa Era), a series of wood block prints which show both modern and traditional occupations. These images are from that series.

Sanzo Wada

Small garage restaurant

This is a small restaurant in Japan that is ran by a single woman. Apparently, they have a lot of small shops like this. It reminded me of my youth; I grew up in an Eastern European immigrant neighborhood and there were a lot of these sort of places. However, instead of using the garage, it would be the first-floor front room of a two-story house. I have fond memories of them.

  

Prints by Suzuki Harunobu

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Suzuki Harunobu was an 18th century Japanese print maker. He is the first printmaker in Japan to produce full color prints (prior to him printers used 2 to 3 colors), as such he was extremely influential in the development of Japanese prints. He was from a samurai family and was well connected and popular in his day. He is best known for his idealized images of pretty young women. 

The image at the top of this post is one such print. She is Ôsen, a waitress at a teahouse in Edo. We tend to think that being a 'celebrity for the sake of celebrity' is a modern thing, but of course it isn't. She was renowned for being a beauty, with the teahouse having towels with her image on them, as well as selling prints, picture books, and even dolls of Ôsen. Today, instead of being a teahouse waitress, she might be an influencer of some small fame. Who knows?

See how when spring begins to fail
each opening flower fades;
So too there is a time of age
and death for beautiful maids;
And when the fleeting spring is gone,
and days of beauty over,
Flowers fall, and lovely maidens die,
and both are known no more.

(Burial of the Flowers - Cao Xueqin) 

Christmas TGIF

This TGIF music post will be a bit different. By this time of the year we've heard all the Christmas songs about a million times. So, for a change I bring some Japanese Christmas music. 

The Japanese do celebrate Christmas, but because they are a Buddhist and Shinto, they do it differently. The Christian elements are largely absent while secular elements remain: Santa Claus, Christmas trees, lights, decorations, snowmen, and so forth. The Japanese have also added a few of their own touches: A bucket of KFC chicken for the Christmas meal and Christmas cake being the most notable.

While Christmas is celebrated over several weeks and is a time to spend with your family and friends, Christmas Eve has morphed into a couple's holiday, more akin to Valentines Day than anything. Hence the above Japanese Christmas song, where they've changed 'jingle bells' into 'singles hell' as they bewail their dateless quandary. 

A lot of their Christmas songs are sappy and sentimental, but of course, Japan being Japan, some of it is quite frantic and insane. Immediately below is my favorite. It starts out rather energetically and gets more ridiculous as it proceeds. Following that we have a boy band doing a schmaltzy Christmas love song, but at least the video is nicely done. Then we have a girl group singing about a Funky Glitter Christmas, whatever that is. 

The final video is A Winter Fairy is Melting a Snowman. I have no idea why the fairy is doing that, but it is, However, be forewarned -- the song has an ear worm that, if it burrows its way into your noggin, may cause some temporary brain damage. 

Anyway -- Merry Christmas to all my regulars, visitors and faithful spam bots.

Tsuchiya Koitsu's woodblock prints

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Tsuchiya Koitsu was a 20th century Japanese artist who worked in woodblock prints. He was a member of the Shin Hanga school, which married western influences with a revival of traditional Japanese woodblock techniques. We've visited work from that school previously in the post The artwork of Hiroshi Yoshida. 

What is striking about Tsuchiya Koitsu is his palette. It is much richer and darker than usually seen in Japanese prints. That is particularly evident in his night scenes.

It should also be noted that while works from Shin Hanga school were primarily sold to Western collectors, that the movement itself -- which was steeped in traditional Japanese methods, themes and scenery -- was also very much a part of the pre-WWII Japanese imperial sensibility.  

Tsuchiya Koitsu

The Bridge on the River Kwai

The Bridge On The River Kwai is an entertaining movie, but there was always something that seemed very off about it. Lt. Colonel Nicholson, the British officer who decides to build a great bridge to show the Japanese the superiority of the English, is a ridiculous character that is hard to take seriously. Above is a video that discusses the actual building of that bridge and Lt. Colonel Philip Toosey DSO, the British officer who commanded the POWs, and who was far from the blithering nitwit shown in the movie.  

  

The artwork of Hiroshi Yoshida

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Hiroshi Yoshida was a 20th century Japanese painter and print maker. He was trained in the Western style of oil painting, but eventually moved on to Shin-hanga, which was a return to more a traditional, collaborative woodblock process. However, it still retained a lot of Western influences, particularly in the use of light and color. Shin-hanga prints were primarily aimed for sale to Western audiences.

Hiroshi Yoshida travelled extensively. He visited America, Europe, India and Southeast Asia. Much of his work is landscapes and scenes from the places he visited. It is interesting to see them through the lens of Japanese stylism. 

Hiroshi Yoshida

Space food

As demonstrated by Homer Simpson in the above clip, eating in zero gravity is a problem. You don't want food particles floating about creating a mess, so since the start of manned flight ways have been created to provide food and drink to spacefarers in a controlled manner.

In the video below we go to the NASA's Space Food Systems Laboratory where they expain the development, and some of the issues of space food packaging. That's followed by a video of a rather chipper young lady taste testing old-timey Soviet space food. The final video is about Japanese space food. It ends with a segment about some Japanese high schoolers making canned mackerel in soy sauce which they eventually send to the ISS. The jokes about American teenagers TikTokking themselves into terminal stupidity write themselves, so I'll just leave it at that.

A Sumo wrestler's morning

This video shows a morning of the Sumo Club at Kinki University. Most of it involves a couple of underclassman cooking breakfast for the club. We are also shown some of the morning training activities.  

 

A Tokyo middle-class neighborhood

In this Walking in Cities video we tour a nice-looking neighborhood in Tokyo. Most of the walk is through side streets, where only pedestrians, scooters and bicycles are about. There are a lot of store front businesses lining the streets. It looks like a pleasant neighborhood. 

 

Stop-motion ninja puppet battle

Above is a video of an animated battle featuring Hidari Jingorō, who was a famous Japanese sculptor from the Edo period. He may, or may not, have been an actual person. There are many stories surrounding him. Apparently, he was missing his right hand and one of the stories is that rival sculptors, jealous of his skills, hacked it off. I think that's what this stop-motion film memorializes.

Video via Spoon and Tamago.