[Archive] July 2023
A summer of festivals and intense weather.
Welcome to NOTEBOOK, a cultural guide to art, design and architecture along with a resource of local news and information in English giving a realistic view of Tokyo and further afield.
Notebook took a well-earned rest during August, avoiding the worst of the hot weather to take stock as NOTEBOOK celebrated 200 episodes in early July.
Much of July (and most of this year) has been dominated by local scandals, domestic politics and the tensions of East Asia. But tensions seem to bypass Tokyo, at least at street level anyway,. In one sense they city is the very epicenter of this disinterest despite it being home to national government. Now parts of that government are packing up and moving elsewhere, to places like Kyoto for example, where the Bunkacho or Agency for Cultural Affairs recently relocated, the first time since the Meiji era (1868-1912) that a central government office has moved outside of the capital.
The ambivalent mood course through every vein. The song The City of Light (2018) by HASYMO, a truncated group featuring Harumi Hosono, Yukihiro Takahashi (1952-2023) and Ryuichi Sakamoto (1952-2023) who merged their latter name Human Audio Sponge (HAS) with their former self, Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO), perfectly sums up this ambivalence with the song’s refrain; “Look at people drifting … moving … floating.”
YMO (or HASMYO as they called themselves in later years) are distant cousins to British band WIRE which released Mind Hive in 2020, painting a less-than romantic picture of contemporary detachment, less landlocked and more global. Their song Off the beach might at first inspire images of refuges fleeing for British shores. But on more careful inspection, it pictures streets the world over patrolled by an army of selfie-sticks capturing images as much for an audience of one as an audience of one million. HASYMO with its image of citywide detachment and WIRE picturing the adversarial manipulation of social media, asking have you ever been swept off the beach … out of reach, are at opposite ends of the same visual spectrum that now describes each city.
Notebook has spent the past year cataloguing bits of Tokyo it thinks worth exploring. Hopefully these bits resonate enough for them to be explored more deeply. For now, though, Notebook serves to draw parallels between the daily occurrence of news in Tokyo and Japan and the culture that filters through a background of field recordings. Hopefully episodes inspire more than the casual ambivalence drifting through a HASYMO song, and picture somewhere that could be self-critical (if it chooses to) and acknowledge how interwoven history and culture can be.
Less dream-like and founded in the clear light of day.
Revisiting July
07/28
The International Red Cross is planning to use AI developed in Japan to speed up its recovery of landmines in parts of Ukraine while a team of Japanese scientists has said it has managed to build an original optical quantum computer. Japan moved to the knockout stage of the FIFA Women's World Cup by defeating Costa Rica 2-0. And the intense summer heat was set extend through August to October according to a new three-month forecast by the Japan Meteorological Agency. With temperatures said to reach their peak by late July, the back streets of Kagurazaka came alive during the Kagurazaka Matsuri, a summer festival east of Shinjuku from July 26th to 29th taking place while "Public Visuals" a multimedia exhibition extended its run at RootK Contemporary Gallery nearby.
07/26
Renowned Japanese author Seiichi Morimura, known for "Ningen no Shomei" (Proof of the Man) and his nonfiction work "Akuma no Hoshoku" (The Devil's Gluttony), died of pneumonia at a hospital in Tokyo aged 90. In a Sapporo hotel, the head of a man who had died at a hotel in the city earlier this month was recovered from the home of a doctor who was then arrested along with his daughter on suspicion of murder. And in the city of Tendo, Yamagata Prefecture north of Tokyo, a giant maze made from 50,000 sunflowers opened. Meanwhile, the 57th Katsushika Noryo hanabi taikai, or fireworks festival, returned to East Tokyo for the first time in four years. Notebook went and watched as people clung to lampposts clambering to catch sight of the sky as it lit up, filled with one deafening boom after another.
07/24
Recent research showed the Japanese consumer would see rising costs for over 30,000 food and drink by October as retailers seek to protect profits. Hyper Japan Festival 2023 showcased Japanese culture in London, attracting upward of 30,000 people. At the same time a government survey showed a marked increase in the number of working women in Japan with a record 30.35 million in 2022, compared with 1.22 million five years ago. In Osaka, news was less promising as delays in constructing foreign pavilions for the 2025 Osaka Kansai Expo site cast an unsettling shadow over the event with spiraling costs and controversial appointments casting an increasingly grim shadow across the world’s fair. [link] Amid soaring temperatures and unpredictable weather both here and abroad, local weather experts declared the country’s annual rainy season, from June and early July, has ended early. NOTEBOOK escaped the worst of the hot weather by taking refuge in "Nominoichi", a coffee shop (or coffee-tei) in Ikebukuro.
07/21
The Japanese government estimated visitors between January and June exceeded 10 million, 21-times the number from the year before. This rebound saw international travelers return to Haneda Airport's Terminal 2, following its three-year closure due to the pandemic. Meanwhile, Japan's prestigious Akutagawa Prize for Literature was awarded to a disabled author for the very first time with Saou Ichikawa picking up the top prize. Across town and one of the largest festivals of the year took place at Yasukuni Jinja (Shrine) opposite Kitanomaru Koen, a national park also home to many of the city’s museums. Both Yasukuni and park are a short walk from the Imperial Palace which descends into darkness as night falls while an exhibition by the New York based artist Tyler Cobern across town at Fig. in Otsuka centered on ideas of physical (and spiritual) darkness. Notebook visited Yasukuni late one afternoon and listened to the sound of summer with people soaking up the sun.
07/19
A parade of yamahoko floats passed through Kyoto during the city’s annual Gion Festival, held in all its glory for the first time in almost four years. Meanwhile, a man died after being run over by a dashi float at the Hakata Gion Yamakasa summer festival being held in Fukuoka, southwest Japan. Temperatures soared reaching almost 35 degrees Celsius in more than 150 different parts of the country, with temperatures in one city reaching almost 40. And Saturday marked the 40th anniversary of the iconic Family Computer or Famicom produced by Japanese video game maker Nintendo. With Gion matsuri in Kyoto, Matama matsuri at Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine and others the previous weekend widely acknowledged as marking the start of the Japanese summer, Notebook headed to see one bon odori dance while also catching the sound of Japanese fencing, otherwise known as kendo.
07/14
The current Chief Executive of Hong Kong said that it would ban the import of Japanese seafood should treated water from the disaster-crippled nuclear power plant in Fukushima be released into the ocean. In Japan, so-called ‘Search Funds’ were said to be helping entrepreneurs restart aging businesses and the legendary manga artist Kazuo Umezz was reunited with works he drew as a teenager and thought lost, years before making his manga-ka debut. With wind chimes dotted throughout Nihonbashi for the “Eco-Edo Nihonbashi” project running through September, art exhibitions like “Interconnection” at Mitsukoshi Contemporary Gallery, and 'joiner' photo prints by David Hockney at Nishimura Gallery, in celebration of the David Hockney retrospective at Tokyo's MOT Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, it is the iconic Nihonbashi Bridge which joins past with present from old Edo to present-day Tokyo.
07/12
The heavy rain which lashed northern Kyushu, south west Japan, caused the automaker Toyota to pause operations Monday at three of its factories. That same day, temperatures reached 36.2 degrees in Central Tokyo, the first time it has exceeded 35 degrees this year. The weather even caused one ceiling painting at Sensō-ji in Asakusa to peel away. Perhaps feeling the heat was one man who fell victim of a bar in Shimbashi that defrauded him of almost 700,000 JPY. That’s nearly 5,000 USD; one very expensive night out. In the midst of some serious heat, as Japan readied itself for the Bon holiday season, we revisited several interviews with key creative figures in the Capitol from the past few months — artists Joel Kirkham at Goya Curtain (March 10) and Toru Yoshikawa (March 17), Yoichiro Kurata, CEO of Shinwa Holdings in Ginza, discussing the Edo-verse project (March 24), the owner of Mejicafe at the Tsukiji Outside Market (May 17) and last month’s conversation with Hideaki Ogawa the new creative director of CCBT the Civic Creative Base Tokyo in Shibuya (June 30).
07/10
Concerns grew over a possible resurgence of coronavirus cases this summer in Japan. Suspicious objects were discovered by police as people observed a minute's silence for the former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe who was assassinated on July 8th 2022. A three-day festival of Japanese culture began in Sao Paulo, attracting cosplayers and members of Brazil's Japanese nikkei-jin community. Meanwhile, Access Tohoku in Singapore selling food and other items from Japan's Tohoku region readied itself to open on July 19th, Japan readied itself for the first of several O’bon festivals in the capital, including one in Kamiikebukuro, an area just north of Ikebukuro in Tokyo’s Toshima ward.
07/07
Notebook reached 200 episodes. The system logging traffic coming in and going out of the central Japanese Port of Nagoya was hit by a ransomware attack by a Russia-based hacker group known as LockBit. The International Atomic Energy Agency IAEA opened an office at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant to monitor the safe discharge of treated radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean. A river running through Ikoma in Nara prefecture turned bright green and police arrested a 35-year-old man for stealing 1,500 Pokemon trading cards worth 1.15 million JPY (8,000 USD) from a store in Akihabara. To celebrate Notebook turning 200 and the start of the summer’s Tanabata (or Star) Festival, we looked ahead to some upcoming art events — from Tokyo Gendai in Yokohama, to Tennozu Artweek at WHAT Museum, even Koji Nakano at XYZ Collective — and then visited Kishimojin temple in Zoshigaya for its summer festival.
07/05
Heavy rain pounded Japan's southwestern Kyushu region, causing a bridge to collapse, with some 360,000 evacuating Kumamoto city. The record rainfall left one dead and another person missing, with the Japan Meteorological Agency warning of further landslides. And as the rain front extended from western to northern Japan moving southward, a ceremony was held in the coastal town of Atami to remember 28 residents who died two years ago following a major landslide. In Fukuoka, a local artist unveiled his first painted billboard in twenty years to celebrate the release of the latest Indiana Jones film. And with storm clouds and wet weather enveloping the country, and Tanabata — the Star Festival — celebrated on Friday, July 7th, we visited the historic Zōjō-ji temple near Tokyo Tower, the day after the heavens opened over Tokyo the night before.
07/03
The Mayor of Hiroshima Kazumi Matsui and the U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel signed a sister park agreement between the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Park and the Pearl Harbor National Memorial in Hawaii. The Japanese government issued a power-saving request for areas served by TEPCO. The Nakagin Capsule Tower Building in Ginza was given a new lease of life with one of its modular capsules added to the permanent collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. And as the Enmusubi Wind Chime Festival opened yesterday in Kawagoe, Saitama, the southern port city of Uwajima made preparations for the annual Ushioni Festival set to arrive take place over three days later in July.
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