I arrived at 19:07. The lobby was empty and there was no sound coming from the quilted velvet doors. Smugly assuming I was early I almost crossed the road to grab a bite to eat. Lucky I didn't, that would have been cocky! The concert had started, of course, at seven on the tit and I was not the first but literally the last to arrive. As I slipped through the padded doors I was confronted with the hundreds of backs and arses of a crowd already two songs in dammit! I couldn't believe I was stuck at the back of another concert! I wanted to let my elbows guide me to the front but alas Japan has made me too polite! Still, no biggie. The venue was tiny so even at the back you could see the writing on their Tshirts. The lead singer WhatisFucknosenberg or whatever is really really sexy in that way that ugly people manage to be only because they are really arrogant - which he was! I fell for him instantly. He is ugly because he is pale and scrawny and stooped. He also has the worst hair I have ever seen. Of course, its supposed to look that way and it says much about his innate deep sexiness that he still looks good under a long curly mullet with middle parting curtains to boot. Absolutely disgusting. And as he sweated bucketloads his mullet got longer and longer sticking to his neck and down his back.
The others were just hairy - not sexy at all. They looked like cave men or engineering students. The keyboard player, it seems had made some effort to look like...something, by wearing tacky plastic sunglasses. All in all their appearance was not overwhelming - they looked like a fun but kak South African band playing at Sunningdale hotel.
They played the whole of Oracular Spectacular - Kids being the highlight of course. Really fucking cool! Everyone went mad. Then 8pm had arrived and they had played the whole album and that was that. Lights up, roadies up to walk the guitars off. I went to the bar to get my one free drink and everyone else who had had their one free drink before curtain-up flocked out to buy the ugly tour thsirts. Three variants competed to be the ugliest tshirt design available, not just in the venue, but I suspect, on the whole island. As I stood in line amongst Osaka's horn rimmed uber-hip, clutching my free drink, I realised (as did the horn-rimmeds too I think, on some level) hang on, I dont want one of these ugly starchy t shirts in plastic packets from under a tressle table - I want the shirt the singer was wearing! Old and sweat drenched - it might have been blue or really old black - anyone's guess. I want that one! hmph. I bought one from the cardboard box under the tressle table. Design A. The black one with wizard purple bubble writing "mgmt" across the boobs, and a cutesy lion with purple paws. Sounds sif? It is. Better than T shirt B though, a clip-art hot dog drinking a beer or T shirt C which was lime green - I dont care if it had the best font, lime green is a crime. Like the hair, the shirts are dead ironic you see and I want to be as ironic at Whatis Fucknosenburg. I will sweat prodigiously into my new tshirt and make it old.
I had forgotten how heavy handed Japanese bar ladies can be with the hard tack - by the time I had downed it, bought my t shirt and been spat out into the street I was proper pissed. In the middle of Osaka. Where would I find a bed in the megalopolis? I was lucky that it was night time and I couldn't see quite how mega this lopolis really was, otherwise I might have cried.
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
capsule hotel - driected by Luc Besson
The area of Namba lies in the middle of The Osaka JR loop line. You would think this would make it very easy to get to but alas the opposite was true and it took ages to get there. On and off trains for hours whilst time ticked toward midnight. Finally I found the right stop and climbed the grubby station stairs into the hubbub of Namba. Namba is loveland. Love hotels everywhere. At night they light up and look the furthest thing from seedy, they look like magical castles or shining churches. Some have neon sign cherry blossoms floating up their ten storey exterior, some have massive inflatable creatures outside. My favourite one, a mint green chapel shaped thing had millions of fake flowers bursting out of every window and the door. I don't think Japan knows from kitsch or, at least, doesn't think of it as something bad and to be avoided. I have learned to stop worrying and love the kitsch.
Tonight I was not going to on of these temples of excess which only make economic and moral sense to couples, I was going to the soberly titled Namba Capsule hotel - an unusual capsule hotel in that it allows women (on certain floors). I found it squeezed between all the pink and florescence on a tiny side street. Inside and out it was the opposite of love land. It was all mustard carpeting and peeling wall paper. The concierge was a gruff and shabby old man with a shiny head fringed with bristly tufts. He eyed me sceptically. Had I been to one of these before he asked? No, I admitted I hadn't. Hmmm. Was I a foreigner? Yes, I said, thinking that much was obvious. Hmmmmmm....I could see him debating whether to let me stay. I wasn't sure if he thought I would be prissy and report him to some guide book authority or be a tourist and destroy the reclusive anonymity the guests desired by running amok down the corridors, drinking and taking photos. I tried to pull a face that suggested I would do neither of these things (what face is that exactly, i wonder now). It worked and he handed me a grubby key that opened one locker downstairs for my shoes and one upstairs for the rest of my stuffu. The capsule itself didnt have a lock. This would have worried me if I had been in any other country in the world.
In the lift I could barely contain my excitement. A capsule hotel! My own capsule! I couldn't wait to see it. Stepping out of the lift I was confronted first with a bank of blue metal lockers and behind them a dimly lit corridor. The capsule mouths opened straight onto the corridor - some were unoccupied and open, others had their brown blinds down, their inhabitants already asleep or doing whatever else one does in a capsule. Read? Shoot up? Mine - number 317 was on the bottom row right at the end of the passage. I clambered in and pulled down the blind. Feeling around the moulded plastic walls i found the light and flicked it on. Wow! It was my own sci-fi cell. The plastic was off white as was the bedding. It was old but clean and starchy. The dimensions were less like a coffin and more like the interior of an economy car - small indeed but not claustrophobic and to further assuage any fear of suffocation there was a small fan silently circulating the air. Along the one wall the plastic bubbled out to form a narrow shelf. At the foot of the bed the plastic bulged down housing a small tv whose remote was dangling below on a rubbery chord. There was also a tiny mirror and a digital alarm clock set into the wall. All this luxury for 200 Zed a Rands. I was so happy! Lying in my pod sipping water. I watched tv quietly for a bit, there was some space anime movie showing which complemented the situation perfectly. I could hear people in other capsules turning over, coughing and fiddling with their phones. It was comforting to hear them but never see them. It all felt extremely futurist and dystopian - storyboarded in the seventies or with the seventies in mind. Before going to sleep I nipped out to shower in the bathroom at the end of the corridor. There, as in the pod there was everything you would get in a regular hotel, just utilitarian and small . A shower box, a basket of sterilized hairbrushes, a box of single service toothbrushes in packets, a hair dryer, shampoo and soap. Little basins to spit your little toothpaste into and little stools to sit on while drying your hair.
In the morning it was still pitch black in the capsule. I turned on the yellow light, got dressed and fixed my face in the tiny mirror. I then went down to the lobby where the no-frills complementary breakfast of boiled eggs toast and coffee was being enjoyed by the guests - all of them skinny and middle aged, all of them smoking, burping and farting. I sat and ate with them. We ignored each other together. By daylight the love hotels admitted their seediness. The glamour gone, I headed back into the station.
Tonight I was not going to on of these temples of excess which only make economic and moral sense to couples, I was going to the soberly titled Namba Capsule hotel - an unusual capsule hotel in that it allows women (on certain floors). I found it squeezed between all the pink and florescence on a tiny side street. Inside and out it was the opposite of love land. It was all mustard carpeting and peeling wall paper. The concierge was a gruff and shabby old man with a shiny head fringed with bristly tufts. He eyed me sceptically. Had I been to one of these before he asked? No, I admitted I hadn't. Hmmm. Was I a foreigner? Yes, I said, thinking that much was obvious. Hmmmmmm....I could see him debating whether to let me stay. I wasn't sure if he thought I would be prissy and report him to some guide book authority or be a tourist and destroy the reclusive anonymity the guests desired by running amok down the corridors, drinking and taking photos. I tried to pull a face that suggested I would do neither of these things (what face is that exactly, i wonder now). It worked and he handed me a grubby key that opened one locker downstairs for my shoes and one upstairs for the rest of my stuffu. The capsule itself didnt have a lock. This would have worried me if I had been in any other country in the world.
In the lift I could barely contain my excitement. A capsule hotel! My own capsule! I couldn't wait to see it. Stepping out of the lift I was confronted first with a bank of blue metal lockers and behind them a dimly lit corridor. The capsule mouths opened straight onto the corridor - some were unoccupied and open, others had their brown blinds down, their inhabitants already asleep or doing whatever else one does in a capsule. Read? Shoot up? Mine - number 317 was on the bottom row right at the end of the passage. I clambered in and pulled down the blind. Feeling around the moulded plastic walls i found the light and flicked it on. Wow! It was my own sci-fi cell. The plastic was off white as was the bedding. It was old but clean and starchy. The dimensions were less like a coffin and more like the interior of an economy car - small indeed but not claustrophobic and to further assuage any fear of suffocation there was a small fan silently circulating the air. Along the one wall the plastic bubbled out to form a narrow shelf. At the foot of the bed the plastic bulged down housing a small tv whose remote was dangling below on a rubbery chord. There was also a tiny mirror and a digital alarm clock set into the wall. All this luxury for 200 Zed a Rands. I was so happy! Lying in my pod sipping water. I watched tv quietly for a bit, there was some space anime movie showing which complemented the situation perfectly. I could hear people in other capsules turning over, coughing and fiddling with their phones. It was comforting to hear them but never see them. It all felt extremely futurist and dystopian - storyboarded in the seventies or with the seventies in mind. Before going to sleep I nipped out to shower in the bathroom at the end of the corridor. There, as in the pod there was everything you would get in a regular hotel, just utilitarian and small . A shower box, a basket of sterilized hairbrushes, a box of single service toothbrushes in packets, a hair dryer, shampoo and soap. Little basins to spit your little toothpaste into and little stools to sit on while drying your hair.
In the morning it was still pitch black in the capsule. I turned on the yellow light, got dressed and fixed my face in the tiny mirror. I then went down to the lobby where the no-frills complementary breakfast of boiled eggs toast and coffee was being enjoyed by the guests - all of them skinny and middle aged, all of them smoking, burping and farting. I sat and ate with them. We ignored each other together. By daylight the love hotels admitted their seediness. The glamour gone, I headed back into the station.
Homelessness and Liberty
The night at Capsule Hotel Namba had made me feel very out-of-this world. Everyone I have spoken to about Osaka finds it to be a big city. I found this too. They do not however, think of it as alien. Which I did. I felt so foreign and disassociated the next morning, as I headed back into the train intestines, I might as well have been in space.
I got off at a station that, according to my Lonely Planet, was stone's throw from Liberty Osaka Human Rights Museum. When you are in a train you could be anywhere in the country (squint a bit and you could be anywhere in the world). Outside this particular station though, I felt nowhere in Japan. Not anywhere I had been or seen before. It was dirty. The chicken wire flanking the tracks was hung with debris and a powdery brown with years of pollution and neglect. The museum, which should have been looming in front of me was nowhere to be seen so I decided to penetrate the area for a few blocks and see what was what. Everywhere on the street were little shabby stalls made of blue plastic sheeting. Some of the stalls had plastic on the ground in front of them too on which were assorted items which, I guessed, were for sale. Old video tapes, broken shoes, small grubby plastic purses. Stall after stall of worthless tsatkes. It looked like a street-long garage sale that was selling stuff that came from a home too poor to have a garage. Ten minutes walk into the area and I found street after street to be the same. Concrete buildings that wept black goo from their cornices and in front of them the blue stalls. For miles and miles in every direction. There were also more dogs than I had yet seen in this country and they were not the precious, groomed little handbag dogs that belong to fancy women in sunglasses. They were big and baleful township braks. Some were roaming slowly through the clutter of stalls and some were shut up in chicken wire cages between the buildings. Some sat at the feet of men who wore overalls of pistachio green I recognised as construction wear. The men, like the dogs were baleful, slow, innumerable and indiscernible from one another. They sat and smoked or crossed the streets without apparent purpose. This was not the first time I had seen this many people on the streets of a Japanese city but it was certainly the first time I had seen so many people without a destination. They were clearly not going anywhere. They were nowhere.
I have become used to being stared at here. It is impossible to slip under the radar because I cannot 'be Japanese' in appearance, however much I try to be in behaviour. In this derelict neighbourhood I was more conspicuous than I have ever been; wearing my white coat (which is inexplicably still bright white - it must be magic) and I literally shone , reflecting light and otherness against the grot. I found a way out of the maze of shacks - I had given up pretending they were commerce ventures of sorts and accepted them as what they were - the first informal housing I had found in the country and these sad, sad men my first homeless in Japan. Toothless, dirty. Smelly. A taxi found me on a main street lined with petrol stations and whisked me off to Liberty Osaka; which wasn't that far away distance wise, but that it had trees and playgrounds and public amenities like post offices around it, made it a world away. In the taxi I tried to work out why I had felt so threatened. I was from South Africa man. I can do homeless, I can do poverty. I'm not a naive first-world baby who cries when she sees a dog...or a man...foraging through garbage. Has four months in Japan made me soft? Yeah, so the men had stared at me. But by now, I should be used to that - everyone here stares. No one had approached me or tried to mug me or anything. They had done nothing but stare, so why was I so freaked?
The Museum is manned by volunteers - little old men and littler ladies in nylon waistcoats. They were very kind to me. They gave me a walk about headset that provided English commentary and they tag-teamed me so that I was never alone in the otherwise deserted rooms. The exhibits are divided into twelve sections. Twelve sectors of Japanese society that have had their rights infringed upon and, in some cases, that continue to be marginalised. The Ainu, Okinawan first peoples, Koreans in Japan, Gays and Lesbians, people with AIDS, women, the disabled, victims of pollution and Minamata disease, Hansen's disease survivors, Buraku and the homeless. In past posts I have written effusively about Japan's advanced-ness, the nation's progressive practices with regards to the aged and the sick. I have seen the monuments to war and peace in Hiroshima. I suppose that any country and its policies turn out to be putrid if you scratch the surface. Seeing these twelve exhibits completely shattered my idea of Japan as a land of boundless compassion. I found out about Eugenics, extreme racism and modern high-tech discrimination based on ancient feudal kak. I learned about people crippled by hazardous chemical fuck-outs or wars who the government then ignore or worse, ship off to die somewhere with no infrastructure where no one will see or smell them.
The lowlight of the whole experience was the section on homelessness in Japan, Osaka in particular. The area in which I had got lost an hour or so before, it turns out, is called Kamagasaki. It has for generations been the place where day labourers gather and get work. Working a day in construction or on the docks gets you a stamp in a little passport type book. That stamp is then presented at a government office and you get a small wage. With these wages men would be able to pay a day's rent in a hostel - all those grubby grey buildings that weep muck from the windows. Problem is, with Japan's ageing populous, thousands of day labourers are now too old to labour. If they don't work they don't get money and if they don't get money they cant pay a night's rent. So instead of living in the buildings they now live outside them, in the blue plastic shacks. The scores of men I saw doing nothing were waiting for work that day or maybe, at ten a.m they were already waiting till the next day. Apparently there are 30,000 day labourers in Kamagasaki nearly all men and nearly all over 50. What I had seen now made such horrible sense. I thought again about why I had been so frightened there. Maybe it was fear mixed with embarrassment - it's bad enough being a tourist anywhere but to be so obvious a tourist around people who maybe didn't want to be looked at?
I got off at a station that, according to my Lonely Planet, was stone's throw from Liberty Osaka Human Rights Museum. When you are in a train you could be anywhere in the country (squint a bit and you could be anywhere in the world). Outside this particular station though, I felt nowhere in Japan. Not anywhere I had been or seen before. It was dirty. The chicken wire flanking the tracks was hung with debris and a powdery brown with years of pollution and neglect. The museum, which should have been looming in front of me was nowhere to be seen so I decided to penetrate the area for a few blocks and see what was what. Everywhere on the street were little shabby stalls made of blue plastic sheeting. Some of the stalls had plastic on the ground in front of them too on which were assorted items which, I guessed, were for sale. Old video tapes, broken shoes, small grubby plastic purses. Stall after stall of worthless tsatkes. It looked like a street-long garage sale that was selling stuff that came from a home too poor to have a garage. Ten minutes walk into the area and I found street after street to be the same. Concrete buildings that wept black goo from their cornices and in front of them the blue stalls. For miles and miles in every direction. There were also more dogs than I had yet seen in this country and they were not the precious, groomed little handbag dogs that belong to fancy women in sunglasses. They were big and baleful township braks. Some were roaming slowly through the clutter of stalls and some were shut up in chicken wire cages between the buildings. Some sat at the feet of men who wore overalls of pistachio green I recognised as construction wear. The men, like the dogs were baleful, slow, innumerable and indiscernible from one another. They sat and smoked or crossed the streets without apparent purpose. This was not the first time I had seen this many people on the streets of a Japanese city but it was certainly the first time I had seen so many people without a destination. They were clearly not going anywhere. They were nowhere.
I have become used to being stared at here. It is impossible to slip under the radar because I cannot 'be Japanese' in appearance, however much I try to be in behaviour. In this derelict neighbourhood I was more conspicuous than I have ever been; wearing my white coat (which is inexplicably still bright white - it must be magic) and I literally shone , reflecting light and otherness against the grot. I found a way out of the maze of shacks - I had given up pretending they were commerce ventures of sorts and accepted them as what they were - the first informal housing I had found in the country and these sad, sad men my first homeless in Japan. Toothless, dirty. Smelly. A taxi found me on a main street lined with petrol stations and whisked me off to Liberty Osaka; which wasn't that far away distance wise, but that it had trees and playgrounds and public amenities like post offices around it, made it a world away. In the taxi I tried to work out why I had felt so threatened. I was from South Africa man. I can do homeless, I can do poverty. I'm not a naive first-world baby who cries when she sees a dog...or a man...foraging through garbage. Has four months in Japan made me soft? Yeah, so the men had stared at me. But by now, I should be used to that - everyone here stares. No one had approached me or tried to mug me or anything. They had done nothing but stare, so why was I so freaked?
The Museum is manned by volunteers - little old men and littler ladies in nylon waistcoats. They were very kind to me. They gave me a walk about headset that provided English commentary and they tag-teamed me so that I was never alone in the otherwise deserted rooms. The exhibits are divided into twelve sections. Twelve sectors of Japanese society that have had their rights infringed upon and, in some cases, that continue to be marginalised. The Ainu, Okinawan first peoples, Koreans in Japan, Gays and Lesbians, people with AIDS, women, the disabled, victims of pollution and Minamata disease, Hansen's disease survivors, Buraku and the homeless. In past posts I have written effusively about Japan's advanced-ness, the nation's progressive practices with regards to the aged and the sick. I have seen the monuments to war and peace in Hiroshima. I suppose that any country and its policies turn out to be putrid if you scratch the surface. Seeing these twelve exhibits completely shattered my idea of Japan as a land of boundless compassion. I found out about Eugenics, extreme racism and modern high-tech discrimination based on ancient feudal kak. I learned about people crippled by hazardous chemical fuck-outs or wars who the government then ignore or worse, ship off to die somewhere with no infrastructure where no one will see or smell them.
The lowlight of the whole experience was the section on homelessness in Japan, Osaka in particular. The area in which I had got lost an hour or so before, it turns out, is called Kamagasaki. It has for generations been the place where day labourers gather and get work. Working a day in construction or on the docks gets you a stamp in a little passport type book. That stamp is then presented at a government office and you get a small wage. With these wages men would be able to pay a day's rent in a hostel - all those grubby grey buildings that weep muck from the windows. Problem is, with Japan's ageing populous, thousands of day labourers are now too old to labour. If they don't work they don't get money and if they don't get money they cant pay a night's rent. So instead of living in the buildings they now live outside them, in the blue plastic shacks. The scores of men I saw doing nothing were waiting for work that day or maybe, at ten a.m they were already waiting till the next day. Apparently there are 30,000 day labourers in Kamagasaki nearly all men and nearly all over 50. What I had seen now made such horrible sense. I thought again about why I had been so frightened there. Maybe it was fear mixed with embarrassment - it's bad enough being a tourist anywhere but to be so obvious a tourist around people who maybe didn't want to be looked at?
just a trailer
Hi guys! Just got back from a 24-hour mini-adventure in Osaka. I have so much to write about! Look forward to blogs on the following: mgmt, capsule hotels, love hotels, IKEA, homeless people in japan, salarymen and Christmas & Japanese conspicuous consumption.
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