My Last Week in Japan

My trip does not start with a train ride Saturday, June 6^th. It starts about 36 hours prior. It starts with the stomach flu.

 

Mollie, how did you get stomach flu? You didn’t use your dry-heaving sister’s toothbrush right before finals did you? Again?

 

I’m going to guess I accidentally swapped drinks with a friend recovering from stomach flu. I also may have jinxed fate by telling my professor earlier in the week that I had an “iron gut.”

 

When I got back from the izakaya on Thursday night, I thought I had overdone it on the drinking. I got back at midnight and it wasn’t long before I realized what was hitting my system. I won’t get too graphic, but I was vomiting until 6 am. The kind where you need to plug your nose or unspeakable things will happen.

 

I spent the next 12 hours horizontal, wondering how I could traverse4 through Japan in a stretcher. I missed the final program banquet and missed many goodbyes. I was managing a slow re-entry into humanity by Friday evening, and met up with Veronica and Emily at their hotel’s onsen. It was a calm, enjoyable send off to Kyoto.

 

Waking up the next morning was a bit lonely. All my friends departed for the US that morning, and I had very little knowledge of where exactly I was going. I found my train okay and soon realized how successful my haphazard travel planning had been.

 

Now I should say, this past year I’ve had the fortune to spend over 80 hours on trains. Traveling through France, Italy, Hungary, South Korea. This is not a regular occurrence in my life, traveling through these breathtaking countries. Before last year I had never crossed oceans to visit anywhere. 

 

This is to say that though 80 hours sounds like a lot, the novelty hasn’t worn off yet. There’s just too much beautiful countryside, looking out a traincar window is like watching a movie.

 

So let me tell you this: when I say my trip to Matsumoto was one of the most spectacular train rides I’ve taken, you know I’m not fucking around. I became so entranced that I actually started filming the trip on my Android. It was the kind of ride where you consider just getting off at a stop with no plan, because it was too beautiful to pass by. A lot of Nagano is like that, including Matsumoto, where I stayed.

 

When I got into Matsumoto I knew two things: my hostel was far from town, and the hostel owner was coming to get me in an hour. With no phone, in a fairly large train station, I saw how my wonderful afternoon could unravel. After twenty minutes of standing outside the East exit, I also realized that if any old man approached me and told me to follow him into his car, I would do so.

Luckily the hostel owner found me okay, and drove me a short distance to where I’d be staying.

 

For all the complaining I saw online about the hostel's distance from town, it was surprisingly close, while still being positioned in between the mountains of Matsumoto near the creek bordering town.

I spent my week biking through Matsumoto, designing my photobook, and listening to plentiful podcasts. My nights were punctuated with kind visits from the hostel owner. We spoke a couple of times over shochu, talking our ways around language barriers.

 

One of my favorite days was a day trip I took to a farmers' market in the mountains. After biking uphill for what felt like forever, I stumbled upon the red-roofed market. I came across it from the wrong side, leading to me traipsing through the vineyard, creaky bike in tow. I spent a few hours looking around at the local foods, sipping coffee from the cafe overlooking everything.

 

 
However lovely my time was in Matsumoto, I did find that I was having more trouble sleeping. The night before my last day in Japan I couldn't fall asleep until the sun came up (around 7am). Even so,
I managed to rally and make a trip to a neighboring park, Kamikochi. The mountains reminded me a bit of the Grand Tetons in the US. Even though it was summer, you can tell from my video, the water was quite icy. I spent the afternoon walking around the park, listening to more podcasts, and eating cherry blossom ice cream. It was the perfect end to my adventures in Japan.

 
The trip back to Minnesota was not as eventful or beautiful as the previous six days, but it was safe. Despite having a rather solitary end to my trip, I found it to be exactly what I needed.

First Photobook

This spring I created a photobook with all of my best work from my time in Japan. This book can be found on Blurb and is quite pricey to buy in its physical form. However, you can purchase the PDF for $10.

The below image is on the cover of my book and was taken in a suburb of Tokyo.

What Does Liberation Look Like? Yanagi Miwa's Elevator Girls and Cross-Cultural Feminist Iconography

Among Japanese photographers today, one of the most well-known and controversial artists is Yanagi Miwa. Regarded as a feminist photographer, Yanagi’s work provokes questions around the status of women in Japan. Her work is recognized domestically and internationally, with her first photo series, Elevator Girls, receiving critical acclaim.

A crucial dynamic to note in the series’ international popularity is that of Orientalism and Western looking. The basic tenets of Orientalism define Eastern cultures broadly, in ways that are aligned with colonial power paradigms, placing the Eastern other in a position of cultural inferiority to the West. The art world is not divorced from Orientalist perspectives, just the opposite. The international art world is criticized for seeking out Japanese art that reinforces Western preconceived notions of Japanese aesthetic (leaving little room for modern Japanese artists to thrive). Miwa Yanagi’s global popularity, therefore, must also be considered critically, for it is very often that Asian artists find international accolades only through supporting Western expectations of Eastern art.

In her art and design thesis, Rachel Chamberlain notes that Elevator Girls is criticized by some for being self-orientalizing.[1] Here the concerns around Western looking are two-fold; first, there is the concern around Western art critics disproportionately valuing Asian artwork that criticizes an Asian society, artwork that reinforces the perceived cultural and sociopolitical inferiority of the Orient. This concern applies to readings of the Elevator Girls as a critique of gender roles in Japanese society. The second concern is around the iconography of Yanagi’s landscapes in Elevator Girls. She creates futuristic landscapes with bright lights and a strong sense of technological development. An example is one of Yanagi’s photographs in which elevator girls are in a glass display case under bright lights. 

 

Techno-orientalism fetishizes technological development in the East, continuing Western objectification of Eastern cultures. Iconography that resonates with bubbling, (often) subconscious techno-orientalist readings become more apparent in some critics referring to the elevator girls as appearing "robotic", looking more "cyborg" than human.

I will not belabor this point any further, but do wish to contextualize Yanagi’s work in an art world and global audience that remains entangled in Eastern othering. With so many interpreting Yanagi’s work as being laced with sociopolitical critique, we must observe these interpretations as not existing in a vacuum. Yanagi’s artistic aesthetic, and international audiences’ responses to her work, are never entirely divorced from the Western Gaze.

Feminist Iconography

Interrogating what creates images of female disempowerment or liberation is central to reading Elevator Girls. Western readings often find the photo subjects’ homogeneity as a negative illustration, one that proves they are unable to exercise agency through expressing themselves individually. This argument comes into conflict with the common idea in feminist theory, that narrow expectations and expressions of femininity are inherently oppressive. Conforming to societal standards of femininity is, often in the United States, viewed as a symptom of societal pressure that reduces control over self-representation. In this way we must recognize that if you subscribe to such views of femininity, you are predisposed to view Yanagi’s depiction of femininity as a critique of societal pressure. Whether we should regard subscription to narrow standards of femininity as devoid of agency is a complicated question. Although there is not time enough to explore this question deeper, we must recognize that in reading Yanagi’s images we quickly approach a fork in the road. One in which we are asked to read the elevator girls as exercising or being denied agency, in the context of conventional expressions of femininity.

If we broaden our understanding of female agency some of the feminist readings of Elevator Girls weakens. Another complication is the historical background on the elevator girl position in Japan, one of the first jobs that offered single University graduates the opportunity to support themselves. Although the elevator girl profession demanded that young women showcase their beauty and “guide” shoppers at different places in department stores, it also inadvertently exhibited young Japanese women supporting themselves in a developing Japanese economy. A job that demanded women subject themselves to, and profit from the gaze, became a visible mode by which young women gained socioeconomic independence (Chamberlain 2010).

 

And yet, even with this broader understanding of female agency, there are those images within Yanagi’s series that, I would argue, are palpably negative. The most obvious example of this being the image of four women on the ground, shot from the ceiling. The images show a progression of the elevator girls, wearing red, dissolving into a pool of blood. The elevator girls in Yanagi’s series are frequently captured lying on the ground, appearing lifeless.

Discerning those instances where we assume a woman has no agency, versus discovering it through visual cues, is challenging. While Yanagi’s series certainly finds its footing in some degree of sociopolitical critique, its most interesting offering may not speak to gender dynamics in Japan, so much as cross-cultural formations of feminist thought. Through looking at the Elevator Girls, viewers are encouraged to reflect on the parameters of feminist images and depictions of female liberation. The questions introduced in a bell hooks panel on representations of women may best summarize the questions Yanagi provokes:  “… who actually has ownership? Who is making the decisions and is it more powerful for us to make those decisions and put our body on display, or not? Was it more powerful for us to be shamed into thinking our bodies shouldn’t be displayed, or not? Are we free because we are displaying? Are we free because of who we are displaying for? What liberates us in the process” (New School panel 2014)?

 

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[1] Definitions of self-orientalism are often coupled with rising concerns around techno-orientalism. “Those perceived cultural traits are turned into cultural assets, and merchandised as such. What the techno-orientalist deformative lens perceives as robotic, gregarious, and self-emasculated way of life is presented as a considerate, balanced and reliable behavior. Paradoxically, the culture, tourism and entertainment insures from Japan have been exporting products that undergo symbolic negotiation in Western markets and, all too often, become techno-orientalist avatars” (Lozano-Mendez 186, 2010).

Listen to For Colored Nerds Now

I have a question for my fellow white folk reading this mag: how does it feel to engage with media that is almost exclusively created for you? TV shows, movies, music, so much of it emphasizes whiteness and fails to represent people equitably. Since I was a child, I’ve been inundated with white voices. In the media, in the coursework I am assigned, who I hear on the radio. And irony of ironies, I stumbled across this podcast after listening and loving Serial, a show that follows a white woman decoding how a likely innocent Muslim boy was sentenced to life in prison for murder.
 

 

The title of this podcast references Nitozake Shange’s work, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide, but also highlights who the podcast is for. For Colored Nerds is not made for me or any white person really. And that is what drew me to the podcast to begin with. Because it’s just as important to listen to what wasn’t made for you as listening to the stuff that was.

 

It also must be said, FCN is not intended to decenter whiteness, that’s more of an added benefit. Listening the podcast you’ll soon see…it’s just a fun podcast. Brittany and Eric deliver a new episode every other week, tackling whatever entertainment topic is trending at the time. And if you get around to listening to them, you’ll probably enjoy the way they communicate, the world they’re sharing. If This American Life is a couple of journalists sitting stiffly in a studio, gravelly voice and forced formality, FCN is two of your closest and smartest friends, sitting on a couch, bantering and back-talking (with no small amount of academic metal-wielding). 

 

Favorite Episodes

Blacker the Violence

The Price of Black Ambition

The Smudging Part I

Bike Trip to Asuka (Day 2)

Sunday morning at 7am we were up and packing. Breakfast was a traditional, savory Japanese meal with fish, rice, vinegar and egg. After breakfast we had established a pattern of Tetsuya neatly and quietly finishing his meal long before the rest of the group. Even with my haphazard approach to fine dining, we were done and out of the hotel at 8:30 am. To illustrate a regular morning in Asuka, here are pictures from our hotel:

For the next couple hours we toured around Asuka. We visited a stone tomb, a museum, and Japan's oldest Buddhist temple.

By the time we visited the temple I was wishing for more time to take in my surroundings. I toured around the temple briefly, then snuck outside where there were beautiful views and a little convenience store. This is how I came to eating vanilla ice cream outside Japan's oldest temple at 10:30 am.

Outside the tomb

Once we finished at the temple we left for Nara. The morning in Asuka was cloudy in a way we all appreciated. Heading for Nara, the sun came out, but temperatures stayed at a safe 75 with wind and occasional clouds. To all of our surprise we were moving much faster than the day before, a probably of result of the dramatic change in weather conditions.

For lunch we stopped into a grocery store. It was small with wood floors, natural lighting, and almost exclusively local, fresh produce. We had found the birkenstock, clove-smoking, hipster vegetarian's paradise. It was all affordable and we ended up buying a cake to share.

Lunch was the final installment of Tetsuya finishing before I'd even started. The sushi was delicious, as was the cake, which Koji managed to cut into pieces WITH CHOPSTICKS.

Koji aka Cake Tsar/Lord of the Roads

The rest of our trip back was smooth and comfortable. At the end of the day we stopped for some bubble tea and shaved ice. Bodies sore and slightly sunburned, we biked 55 miles in two days. The trips was one of, if not the, best moments while abroad in Japan. I'm so grateful to Koji, Tetsuya, Anne, Emily, and Veronica, for making it so special.

Bike Trip to Asuka (Day 1)

I'm sitting in a hotel bathroom in the mountains of Asuka, in Nara, Japan. The bike trip I've taken this weekend is one of the most fulfilling, surprising things I've done while abroad. Knowing that much time has passed, that blog writing was more infrequent this trip, I've decided to retell the story of my day to you first, before my bike trip has even concluded.

I left early this morning with Emily and Veronica. These two ladies were the same phenomenal people who went with me to the homeland (aka Hogwarts) a couple weeks ago.
 

Veronica on the left, Emily in the middle, the homeland directly behind us

We took a train from Kyoto to Nara. I found myself successfully asleep right as we arrived at our destination. It was in the station that we met up with the three other people on the trip, Anne, Koji, and Tetsuya. They all are members of the International Outdoors Club (IOC) in Japan, a group that organizes hikes and camping among English speakers. We all became acquainted (having met for the first time this morning) on our way to the bike rental shop in downtown Nara. At this time I learned Tetsuya works in a pharmaceutical company. With this realization I began to ask him a number of prying questions about how sensitive information is handled and limitations on what can be shared with the public. Standard small talk u kno.

It was soon that we found the place and selected our candy colored bicycles. Mine is bright red, with a lot of style.

By the time we departed by bike it was a hot, humid, cloudless 85°. I was beginning to doubt my decision to skip sunscreen. I shrugged it off, plugged in my earbuds, and listened to Kendrick's "To Pimp a Butterfly."

On the outskirts of downtown Nara. Image courtesy of Koji.

Even moving out of downtown Nara was scenic. With wide fields, a number of lakes, and mountains surrounding us wherever we went. After about two hours of biking we stopped for lunch. I finished my nalgene, two sandwiches, and was sweating from every pore. The food tasted like anything I've ever eaten, in part because I was ravenous by the time we ate. I also discovered my bike gears, realizing I had pedaled up a few very intense hills on the most difficult gear. 

The next two hours put me on a spiritual journey. I found myself asking many questions, such as: what are the symptoms of heat stroke? What constitutes a "beginners bike trip"? And, can I avoid vomiting for the next couple hours? Thankfully I wasn't the only tired, tomato-faced biker. On a break Koji took one look at our faces and politely suggested we stop at a cafe for some "iced coffee and cake." We pedaled off-trail to a town, finding a cafe beside the local grocery store. This cafe was where I encountered the ultra deluxe, raspberry pacman ghost cake. It was three dollars.

We went the next hour rehydrating and eating. It was a fucking utopia, where I was able to recover from queasiness and replenish all the water I was still sweating out of my body. At this point in the day my water intake was at two nalgenes, one bottle of water, and one sports drink.

After our extended break in the cafe we reembarked on a slightly cooler, slightly cloudier afternoon trip. Although this chunk was more manageable, I still wondered if the next morning they'd find me dead, like the first man to ever run a marathon. Not unlike him, I had woefully under-trained for the trip. Even though I was holding my own and in love with my surroundings, I wondered about my prospects of seeing tomorrow.

On our way to Asuka

At this point in the afternoon, we were fairly comfortable with navigating roads in Japan, though I will say this: our leader, Koji, has a very loose interpretation of a walk signal. And Japanese roads often have little to no bike path. This was more relevant in the beginning and end of our day trips, where we biked through cities. I kept thinking back to that moment in One Day (spoiler if you haven't read/seen it) where the female lead gets randomly, and violently hit by a car at the end of the story. I wasn't really afraid, so much as bemusing the thought. Even in the heat, dehydration, and longer bike stints, the landscape was consistently beautiful. Every once in a while I would glide, my hair blowing back, listening to music, looking at mountains, and feel an undiluted bliss. 

Starting with me on the left, Koji, Anne, Tetsuya, Emily, and Veronica

After biking a couple more hours we arrived in Asuka, an area that is all trees, mountains, and farmland. It reminded me of a national park, minus all the giddy camera-clad tourists. We biked for a bit before I sheepishly asked Koji to stop so I could take a picture. He smiled and agreed. While I took some pictures he told me that "everywhere in Asuka is this beautiful."

We got to our hotel shortly after, walking our bikes up this one last, very steep hill. Eager to shower, we washed off, turned on the AC, drank water, and met up for dinner an hour later. Our dinner was a traditional Japanese meal, complete with a full fish! I attempted to pick it apart with my chopsticks, but did a poor job in comparison to Anne, Tetsuya, and well pretty much everyone.

By the end of the meal, most of us were exhausted, but Koji was determined to party. Remember, the three of us are college students. Anne was 30, Koji maybe 45, and Tetsuya around 60. We agreed to walk around looking for fireflies, then drink wine on the deck afterwards. We didn't stray too far from the hotel, but did spot a few fireflies nearby. I climbed up a stony hill and sat on a ledge looking at the hills and fields. Soon after we headed back to the patio, where we drank and talked for a little less than an hour. It was very relaxed, which was nice in the context of a more challenging bike trip.

Everyone went to bed at 10pm, but I'm up writing in the bathroom. It's going on 11, we're set to wake up at 7:30 for breakfast and a morning bike around Asuka. I will post pictures and write a bit more about day 2 after it's happened.