Time goes by…in Kyoto

Today March the 3rd, the Hina Matsuri or Japanese Girls Festival was celebrated at Shimogamo Jinja, a temple in Kyoto from the 7th century, where a few hundreds of visitors –mainly housewives and retired people because it’s Wednesday- gathered at the UNESCO World Heritage Site Shinto temple to attend the old ritual of throwing dolls to the river. They are supposed to contain bad spirits and, letting them sail the Kamo River, they get them expelled from the young girls forever. Not only that, but the tradition also explains that if the Heian-era dolls are kept by the girls for too long, they won’t get married in their adulthood. Well, only two short comments about this colourful festival so close in time –only one month- to the coming and so much expected Hanami or Cherry Blossom Festival that many times is not properly taken into account.
First, it’s unavoidable to find certain similarities with other cultures’ rituals, as for the giving the dolls supernatural powers, like in the Afro-Caribbean voodoo –in the Japanese case, it would be a purification more than a mortification-; or for the expressing thanks for the liberation of bad spirits or diseases, like in the case of the Catholic ex-votos, which represent miraculous cures by Christian God.
Second (and sorry for the sarcasm), as for the absolute necessity of throwing away dolls to start becoming young women –it’s a symbol, of course- and be able to marry, I think that nowadays, many Japanese women have forgotten about all this and want to be little girls for ever and ever; sure, that must be why this festival has been sent into oblivion. Examples: the kawaii thing, the huge dolls attached to their cell-phones, their Lolita outfits and their teenage ways no matter how many decades ago they have finished high school, their high-pitched tone…and so on. Or maybe I’m wrong, and that’s exactly the only way they can get married, throwing away the shadow of a scary obasanness and showing men how innocent and pure they are. In that case, we should ask the Japanese men about it, don’t you think so?
Coming back to the festival topic, in March’s issue of Hiragana Times, some Japanese people complain about the lack of interest in the Hina Matsuri and the Heian dolls platforms by today’s little girls, and they propose to mix the tradition with Barbie and Rika Chan. Well, Kyoto authorities have done something in that direction, because they have included the Kyoto Tower-人形 character in the ceremony! Impossible to mix more tradition and modernity, a little bit 似合わないけどね。
Anyway, two videos to enjoy this interesting Japanese tradition:
Video 1 and Video 2

Hace unos días una chica japonesa me habló de una extraño evento que tiene lugar en Osaka y que excita a partes iguales su curiosidad y su repugnancia. Me remitió a este vídeo de U-tube para estudiar mi reacción. No tengo especial fobia a las cucarachas -sobre todo después de haber vivido un año en la bonita y colonial pero infestada de cucarachas voladoras Savannah, en el americano estado de Georgia- pero he de reconocer que al ver corretear tal número de repugnantes insectos por entre los pixels de la pantalla, pude entender los sentimientos encontrados de mi musa nipona.
Aunque lo realmente interesante del asunto no son esos hemimetábolos blatodeos de cuerpo aplanado, sino el happening que envuelve a la caza y captura de los mismos. Un grupo de más de 100 jóvenes japoneses se dan cita en la estación de Kyobashi de forma periódica para preparar ese sórdido y macabro genocidio de cucarachas. Se han conocido a través de las redes sociales de Internet -tal vez Mixi- y parecen tener un corpúsculo de líderes pensadores y promotores de la idea; y muchos seguidores, teniendo en cuenta el número de visitas de dichos vídeos, incluyéndome a mí.
Sin duda, la creatividad de los japoneses en un mundo plagado de reglas -y cucarachas?- no deja de sorprenderme.　¿Será que son 引きこもりs u おたくs empedernidos, o simplemente chavales con ganas de juerga y de llamar la atención?
La reacción de la policía también es modélica: simplemente les piden que limpien el desaguisado que han montado y den un entierro digno y aséptico a las pobres blatodeas.
Un amigo profesor mexicano me explicó a mi llegada a Osaka hace algunos años que esta ciudad japonesa era diferente al resto de Japón, que según su opinión era como el Tercer Mundo japonés pero super interesante y muy divertida. Bueno, yo no creo que sea precisamente el Tercer Mundo pero sí que Osaka is different. 分からへん　　笑

When Terenci Moix – a Spanish writer obsessed with Egypt’s Pharaohs and mythology, and who died a few years ago- used to live in London as a youngster in the 60’s, he lost quite a few jobs because of attending movie festivals. He just neglected his pecuniary duties to attend those orgies of culture in the capital of European pop culture and rain.
It’s not that I am going to lose my job to an International Student Film Festival, although after going to the movies 4 days in a row, my social life and some grading duties were put a little bit aside.
Last week, young directors from Japan, Germany, Austria, Korea, China, etc. got together at Kyoto Cinema, in downtown Kyoto, to show mostly their graduation work in the form of short and not so short films. In spite of the high quality of the films and the cheap fare of the ticket –hardly 500 yen per movie o 2000 for the one-week festival- the movie theatre was almost empty most of the days, which is a shame, taking into account that Kyoto has a student population of 200.000 souls.
Here are the movies I saw:
The grandfather: my favourite one, and old man full of knowledge and life experiences transmitting his hallucinogenic ideas to a devoted grandson. The grandfather we all wish we had had.
Evil in daily life (日常の悪魔): the suggesting bildungs roman story of a teenager who finds out how she can make use of her body to achieve her objectives (towards her homeroom teacher!). Her last words in the 29 minute-short movie are “今世界は私のものです” (“Now, the world is mine”). Scary (for home-room teachers).
Martina and the moon: The only Spanish movie, an incest story, told in a fairy-tale fashion.
Etude: Passion and obsession for piano music and dance. The story of two neighbours that only meet by exchanges of sheet music but decline to meet in person for not to deceive their own ideal images of one another. Very Japanese.
Schautag: playing with time, characters who happen to be ghosts, and the concept of guilt for a childhood fatal sin: the closest to a horror movie in the festival, quite good.
Which one is your last memory (ラストメモリー): a very reliable depiction of Japanese college students and their childish talks and dull lives, but which turns into an unforeseeable SF ending.
Baby complex: when a Japanese woman decides to have a baby, there is no obstacle big enough for her, even if she has to convert her husband into one. The main actress’ performance is praiseworthy: I had a nightmare two days afterwards with her “Yuuuuuuuchan” screams and her psychotic behaviour.
Pal: a technically-failed but original story of a young tranvestite, a dull but kawaii girl, and her obsessive-compulsive and mentally-ill panties-eater stalker.

From Kyoto, good luck to Nikias and Christoph, the German and Austrian young directors I met in the festival, now in their respective countries working in their new projects.

El fin de semana pasado se celebró en la Universidad Provincial de Shizuoka el Congreso de Hispanistas de este año http://wwwsoc.nii.ac.jp/ajh/indexsp.htm y allí nos reunimos profesores de universidades de todo Japón. Hubo ponencias sobre lingüística, enseñanza del español, literatura, cultura y pensamiento. Me gustaron especialmente la ponencia sobre Emilia Pardo Bazán del siempre lleno de energía y ameno profesor Ogusu, y el análisis del surrealismo en el poeta mexicano Xavier Villaurrutia, a cargo de la doctoranda de la Universidad de Tokio Eiko Minami. Pero la estrella del Congreso fue una obra de teatro a la que todos asistimos en el Teatro Artístico de Shizuoka y tras la que hubo una interesantísima charla con el director de la misma, el colombiano Omar Porras www.malandro.ch . Se trata de una versión libre del mito de Don Juan http://www.spac.or.jp/09_autumn/donjuan , que recoge elementos de diversos donjuanes más la cadencia de voces del teatro japonés del kabuki. Los movimientos y gestos españolizados de los impecables actores y el juego con los tonos japoneses de sus voces, especialmente en los momentos de seducción de Don Juan –私はあなたに約束を守ります- creaban un contraste atractivo que encajaba con las máscaras, el teatro grotesco de marionetas y el intento de pérdida de ilusión teatral buscado por el autor. Muchos símbolos estaban visibles en la obra -después lo explicaría el director-, como por ejemplo el vestido de bailarina de doña Ana, y surgieron de una improvisación en los ensayos por parte de los actores, a los cuáles Omar supo sacar la creatividad que todo artista lleva dentro. Tras la obra y el coloquio, actores, actrices y director se unieron a nuestro banquete y pudimos conocer en persona al Don Juan japonés sin máscara y tomarnos una copa de vino con él.

I’d be lying if I said that I am disappointed because of the once-again failure of Madrid at becoming host to the Olympics. Yes, it’s the city where I was born and where I lived most of my life, but there is a saying which claims that “you belong to where your heart is”. And my heart belongs to Brazil since the first time I went there in 1998. I’ve been to Rio many times since then and it was always great experiences. It’s true that only out of your country you can be yourself, but I’ve lived out of my country many times and it was there in Brazil where I felt more myself.
Let’s analyze the other candidates: Tokyo -already had them in 1964-, a very modern city, but it lacks personality not to mention “Olympic” passion. I think it’s a too mechanized city and short of humanity, with robot-like salary man flooding the subway and trains. However, if Tokyo had won, it would have made real the exotic dreams (manga, kawaii girls, zen temples, etc) of half the world waiting for an excuse to visit the Rising Sun Empire –or what remains of it-.
Chicago, the windy city, is kind of cosmopolitan and cultural but without enough charisma; too developed, too first world, too Western World. And the presence of the president of the U.S. in Copenhagen only made things worse.
Madrid needed an injection of tourism and investment to recover from the brick-bubble crash, and it has the charm of an old but face-washed city and the comfort of a major touristy city. I understand her reaching the final.
But Rio de Janeiro has everything: an amazing physical background with the beautiful beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema, the most charismatic people in the world with a healthy and integrating nationalism, samba and bossanova culture, a still young population, culture everywhere in terms of literature, cinema, music, art, theatre, passion for sports and for life; like many in the country it’s a city that needs to lessen the gap between the middle classes and the poor, and an investment like this would help a lot; and it’s also a decision that recognizes the importance of Brazil and South America in the new configuration of the World (the South now weighs more).

日本残念ですね、take it easy Chicago, otra vez será Madrid, PARABENS RIO DE JANEIRO

This past weekend the Latin Beat festival came to Osaka (from Tokyo, where many more people attended the movies, including two parties with invited directors and actors).
Me, in spite of my 風邪 (cold but not influenza), saw two of them: the Spanish “Camino” and the Chilean “La Buena vida”. Both of them had things in common in their obvious differences of style and tone. Both have a dark side with deaths of young people but at the same time a light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel hope.
Javier Fesser’s “Camino” is a sharp critic of the Spanish and Catholic institution of the Opus Day and their out-of-the-real-world ways but their insistence in power and money. His plot, based on the real story of a 12 year-old girl with terminal cancer in 1985, now dead and in process of beatification, shows the manipulation of the Institution and its priests, involved with the family at different levels. Fesser very successfully mixes reality and fantasy, things that happen outside and inside the main character’s mind, represented by Nerea Camacho, who in justice was awarded with the Goya to the best new actress.
Chilean “La Buena Vida” is darker if possible because of the constant pessimistic tone of the movie, maybe in relation with an economic crisis and the lack of hope for the future of the youth in that country -on the other side, one of the best in Latin America, economically speaking-. Different stories intermix in a kind of a chaotic destiny: a clarinet young musician desperate to get a position at the Philharmonic, a divorced social assistant with a pregnant 15 year-old daughter, a hair-dresser at 40 with financial problems and still living with his mother, a young drug-addict with a baby. All but one of them happened to have, if not a happy ending, a possible future one, with the characters assuming their problems and miseries and even laughing ant themselves –so Chilean, that-.
I wish many more festivals like this would come to Kansai.
http://www.hispanicbeatfilmfestival.com/

Por muy civilizados que estemos, siempre nos acaba saliendo una vena violenta en determinadas circunstancias. Es como si el cuerpo nos recordara nuestros orígenes homínidos de caza y lucha, especialmente al género masculino, macho, varón, seductor y peleón.

De hecho, la sociedad parece haber evolucionado más rápidamente que nuestros cuerpos, y de ahí los problemas de estrés por esa imposibilidad de desahogar el exceso de tensión mediante la lucha, el movimiento, etc. Sin embargo, yo he encontrado la receta perfecta, el thai boxing: siempre y cuando seas tú el único que golpea, claro.

This year the World Exhibition takes place in Zaragoza, a small city in Northeast Spain. The exhibition’s theme is Water in Earth, and most countries show their own politics related to the saving or the getting of drinking water’s reserves.

Since I was in Barcelona, I decided to stop by for one day and check it out. Apart from a few original but useless buildings, most of the exhibitors were mere souvenir shops or etnhic restaurants and the staff most times was either non-native or non-talkative. Any of the yearly FITUR in Madrid is more fun.

One of the few interesting things was an only-women salsa band, which played Cuban rythms. After the concert in the huge but empty Latin American pavillion, they explained to me that they were on a tour around Europe from Santiago de Cuba.

Cabo Verde and Vietnam also had good venues. And the queue to enter Japan’s exhibitor was so long -in distance and time, maybe 2 hours- that either they give kimonos as a present or Spaniards are really in love with this country.

この間東京の国立新美術館に行って印象的な緑ような建物に入って日本の現代の画家の絵画を見た。色々なスタイルと西洋の影響見えるけどその絵画は特に何か日本らしいあります。強い感情ではなかったけど鮮やかな内の人生に富んでいます。一番好きなのは花になったスイカでした。昔の夢のような遊んでいる人のも私を満足させました。

Apart from this rich exhibition –in quality and number of works-, the main attraction these days at the museum is Modigliani, the Italian painter and sculptor turned into a Parisian bohemian, who died in 1920 at the young age of 35, after a life of excesses. His work is marked with an obsession for long-faced portraits with geometrical noses and non-human eyes and in general with a different approach to the concept of beauty. He was influenced initially by African and Cambodian art –his Cariatides show the evolution of his art- and later by Cubism. Although it was his bohemian and eccentric life along with characters like Picasso, Brancussi, Rivera and others, and his abuse of absinthe and hashish what finally provoked his death and his becoming a myth.

Y como no todo en la vida es el placer intelectual, y hay que darle al cuerpo lo que es del cuerpo, un fin de semana en Tokyo no está completo si no se visitan sus templos de la salsa en Roppongi. Generalmente, ese reducto gaijin no supone una experiencia muy japonesa, pero cuando se trata de salsa, ese es el lugar. Los viernes, sábados y fiestas de guardar son el momento adecuado para visitar Salsa Sudada, donde la falta de espacio y la alta temperatura se compensan con un buen ambiente festivo y bellos cuerpos femeninos cuyas caderas se mueven con sensualidad al ritmo de la clave cubana. Cambiar de canción y de pareja de baile es automático, y muchos pares de ojos se cruzan buscando improvisados contactos corporales y rítmicos que durarán apenas unos minutos, casi lo que dura una vida.

鎌倉時代は１１８５年から１３３３年までです。あの時は日本の首都は京都から鎌倉に変わって源家族次北條家族はほとんどの日本を支配しました。将軍と侍の時間でした。Zen Budhismも中国から日本で確立された。

So close to Tokyo and Yokohama -hardly one hour- and in Matsuri celebration, no matter how hard it might rain, Kamakura was a compulsory date last Sunday. A parade with many people, included children, dressed in Samurai’s costumes, followed by portable heavy danjiris, reached the main Shinto shrine, Tsurugaoka Hachimangu, through the noticeable orange huge gates. There, some cherry trees could still be admired next to the paraders, many of them retired, now with tourists in the pictures, movie stars for one day. After a compulsive taking of pictures, a Kamakura-typical pink ice-cream and a big round, salty and crispy cookie, the Daibutsu or Big Buda, an interesting Bronze statue built in 1252 that has survived all kind of meteorological disasters.

Cerca del Gran Buda hay un templo rodeado de jardines y flores en distintas alturas que vale la pena ver. Se llama Hase-Dera, y algo que llama la atención es la ingente cantidad de pequeñas figuritas de cerámica representando a un monje budista. Se trata de Jizo, algo así como el santo de los viajeros pero sobre todo de los Mizuko (水子) o niños de agua, esos niños que no llegan a nacer. Las madres que sufren abortos van al templo y compran una estatuita que colocan en ciertos altares al aire libre. Es como un simbólico mini-cementerio para niños non natos que les ayuda a cruzar el río hacia la otra vida; y libera un poco la ansiedad de esas frustradas madres.