Pacific Rimjob

I recently received the happy news that I will be moving to Los Angeles, a city I have long admired from afar, this fall to begin a doctoral program. With that in mind, I thought I'd set out on a free-associative sprawl through a culture I'll be somewhat nearer to starting this September: Japan!

What was my first impression of Japanese culture? My parents started feeding me sushi when I was fairly young...


(Note: Not a picture of me)

Around the time I was ten, my mom became aware of Hayao Miyazaki's 1988 masterpiece My Neighbor Totoro. She sent away for a VHS copy, which my sister and I watched with glee.



For years we searched high and low for Totoro merchandise, not easy to find in mid-1990s suburban Chicago. When I visited the Sawtelle neighborhood of LA with my boyfriend many years later, I was blissed out of my mind to find a stuffed Catbus at the Giant Robot store.



On a childhood vacation to Disney World, I discovered Yukito Kushiro's Battle Angel Alita, a manga about a lonely cyborg girl with a mysterious past. I never fell fully into real manga or anime fandom, although I enjoyed plenty of both media.



I also remember being taken to a Japanese restaurant in Chicago called Suntory at some point in my childhood. It served what I would later come to recognize as shabu-shabu cuisine. The waitresses wore full kimono. I very clearly recall that the restaurant displayed photographs of its locations all over the world - including outposts in Sydney and Johannesburg - and yet I strangely cannot find any evidence of its existence on the internet.

At the beginning of adolescence, I became, like most teenage girls who like Hot Topic, enthralled by FRUITS, the bombastic collection of photographs of Tokyo street fashion available in book and postcard form:



During high school I discovered the work of Haruki Murakami, America's favorite Japanese surrealist. Norwegian Wood was my first Murakami book.




I tried, and failed, to custom-order a white kimono to wear to my high school graduation. In college I read Edward Said's Orientalism, which made me feel a little bad about my love of Japanese weirdness. But I also experienced the work of great Japanese filmmakers in depth. I took a course at Facets Cinematheque on the work of genius / idiot savant provacateur Takashi Miike, director perhaps most famously of Audition:




I've also long nurtured a frustrated desire to learn more about the Ainu, Japan's aboriginal people. Two years ago I was lucky to see Tomu Uchida's film about Ainu culture, The Outsiders at BAM. I've still got my fingers crossed for a Criterion release.



I decided to make this post because my roommate and I were discussing ZZ Packer's short story "Geese," a masterful treatment of the outsider experience of Japanese culture. The juxtaposition of the African-American and Japanese cultural experiences reminded me of my new favorite thing about Japan: Jero!



Jero is the stage name of Jerome Charles White, a Pittsburg native who is now a star in Japan. Jero's maternal grandmother is Japanese, and he grew up listening to enka music with her. Enka is a tradition of very heavily sentimental love songs which has recently gone out of style in Japan. For an English equivalent, think of the work of Perry Como, the "Velvet Fog." (With Japanese subtitles for thematic consistency!)



I'll leave you with this CNN interview with Jero. Sayonara!