Alas, Shizuoka...

Or, the other title I came up with, "If you're ever in Hamamatsu..." just get back on the train and return to wherever it is you came from.

The Hamamatsu of my youth, which is to say a couple of years ago, is an idyllic place, full of long walks on the beach, while enormous kites fight it out overhead. I had extrapolated somewhere in my noodle that if Hamamatsu can have such a kick ass festival then it must be an altogether groovy place. With this in mind, Colleen and I set out on her birthday to explore this mystic wonderland just across the border in Shizuoka.

The station, a combo train station/shopping mall as most are here, was abuzz with people scurrying about scooping up everything from designer handbags to pickled vegetables. It bode well for our journey; it seemed that Hams was really the kind of place our imaginations had whipped it up to be, full of life and fantastically weird shit.

But,

The moment you step outside the station you realize two things: 1) Hams is full of gigantic fuck off buildings and 2) these buildings are largely empty. Empty? Yes, hollow shells of day to day commerce. Aside from the post office and yet another shopping mall attached to yet another train station, Hams beyond the eki is largely devoid of what one would call urban life. It was rather creepy walking thru the immaculate desert that is Act City, a monument to cultural pointlessness, whose vast confines were uninhabited by the kinds of shops I suppose the city government wanted to attract. On paper, the place is quite nice: a concert hall, an exhibition hall, an art gallery, a musical instrument museum, a small park situated above the concert hall, an observatory atop the main tower from which on a good day one can see Mt. Fuji, and so forth. The one thing this place didn't have - something these reports never seem to take into account - is people. A pristine paradise ostensibly for no one.

So what is Hamamatsu full of (besides shit)? Foreigners. Shizuoka has the largest population of foreigners (by percentage) of any prefecture in the country, even including Osaka and Tokyo, due in large part to its massive shipping industry. Everywhere you go are signs in Portugeuse, Korean, Tagalog, and Chinese, though not, interestingly, in English. If Hamamatsu is anything, it's representative of what the foreign population truly is here: not white, not well-to-do, not English speaking. I suppose that's why the Japanese are nowhere to be found.

The Horror of Being Read

So, our mutual savage has requested I actually give a little taste of that which I always hint at, namely that pop music figures prominently in my academic work on lyric. Normally, I try to refrain from dealing too openly with the artist below (as I'm a huge fan and it's quite embarassing), but for Liansu I'll make an exception.



This song, "Superstar," performed above by Shiina Ringo and her band Tokyo Jihen (cuz when you write and sing all the songs it really is your band), was written, according to an episode of Bokura no Ongaku [I know most of you don't speak the J-go, but it's worth a watch], with the baseball player Suzuki Ichiro in mind. On that same episode, Ichiro confessed something about this song, a confession that left Ringo nearly speechless. But first, a few lines.

"mirai wa shirankao sa, jibun de tsukutte iku"
tabun anata wa sou iu to wakatte iru no ni
honno chotto zawameita asa ni koe o nakusu no

"the future is indifferent... it makes itself"
even though I know that's probably what you say
I lose your voice in the light hum of the morning

atashi wa anata no tsuyoku hikaru manako omoidasu keredo
moshimo aeta toshite yorokobenai yo
kayowai kyou no watashi de wa, kore de wa mada... iya da

I remember how brightly your eyes shine
but even if I've seen you I can't get excited;
today I'm fragile, here I'm still... no good

The switch from atashi (the more feminine "I") to watashi (more gender neutral) in the second verse is a bit perplexing. It may not mean anything, but it seems that atashi is allowed to get caught up in the (submissive) act of adoration where as watashi is subject to a harsh critical gaze. In this way, the subjectivity is doubled, or rather subject and object are drawn from the same source in a way that is difficult to get across in English. Is atashi judging watashi? or is the gender neutral pronoun more indicative of breaking out of that position of submission that should be pleasurable and yet cannot be.

The song begins somberly, from a place of melancholy. There's more than a touch of anguish in Ringo's voice when she sings "tabun anata wa sou iu to," but as the song progresses, it becomes more manic, to the point where Ringo is practically screaming the words.

ashita ha anata o moyoasu honoo ni mukiau kokoro ga hoshii yo
moshimo aeta toki wa hororeru you ni
terebi no naka no anata
watashi no superstar

tomorrow, I want the heart to face the flame that burns in you
so that when I've seen you I can boast
that you, on the T.V.,
are my superstar

Of course, for the sake of parallelism and brevity, I've skipped the middle verses that make this song genuinely perplexing (and perhaps more about the I's relationship to itself than to an other). Ringo interviewed Ichiro on that episode of Bokura no Ongaku, and he confessed that he hates the word "superstar" so much that when he listens to the album it's on (Otona - Adult, the title of this album is an issue in itself), no matter what he's doing he always skips that track. For emphasis, he repeats he hates it 3 times (like Peter, I imagine), making Ringo's already awkward demeanor (practically the opposite of her stage persona) even more so. The strange advantage the poet enjoys in the absence of her apostrophic other is not only a masturbatory space in which she might say as she pleases but also a reprieve from the horror of knowing that the other can just as easily have opinions of her.

As Ichiro says, it's embarrassing to be fawned over in that way, to know that, even though the song may be more generally applicable (more "you" than "thou"), someone - especially when the poet is that someone - would easily substitute your name for "you."