In the City Reactions Blog

Reading the different episodes in this reading – tough-sounding American guys summing up their lives in a few pages or less – I can’t help but wonder how much of this was edited before it got put on paper. They really do all talk like a character in a novel, like that tough guy sitting alone in the bar who’ll tell you all of life’s secrets after two drinks. It’s a lot of fun to read that way, and I think if you put an oral history (especially these particular kinds of oral histories) onto paper you’ve got to make it at least somewhat like this. It’s a lot more gripping and intriguing to have one flowing, charismatic monologues about everything life has taught a guy than to read a transcription of all the questions and pondering that most likely led to them saying the good stuff.

But all that said, this is a collection of very moving oral histories. Each one has its own distinct message which fits in with the whole. You’ll have the ex-cons and the cops both telling their side of the same story – in general, the non-existence of the American Dream – and find out that the different sides aren’t so different after all. And in all of them you’re hearing from the little guy, the guy behind the scenes, the guy who gets stuck with the dirty work. But for the most part they’re not talking about what it’s like to drive a cab or work in a steel mill, but rather the lessons that their various life experiences have taught them.

I think that even though what a lot of the interviewees seem to be saying is that the American Dream has either gone the way of the dinosaurs or else was false from the get-go, I think the overall message of the In the City is that these people ARE the American Dream, or at least were the American Dream at that time. What I mean is that, as is hopefully plainly obvious by now, the “American Dream” that one usually hears of going from dirt to riches, from the ghetto to a palace, is about as “American” as winning the lottery (a one in a million chance, at best). The American Dream that In the City shows is going from nobody to somebody, not the way 50 Cent went from the hood to mainstream record deals, but rather that they have made a full life out of what they started with. Where they were before and where they are now doesn’t matter so much as the things they did and the way they’ve affected other people’s lives and the things they’ve learned about humanity. Things like the ex-con-ex-junkie Robin Hood who spent a fortune’s worth of stolen money on paying for people to ride The Comet at Coney Island, or the photographer who stood up to a hypocritical politicians only to get arrested. Even if what they did only affected people for a few minutes, and even if only their own daughter can still remember them doing it, that’s enough impact. If the majority of the world had the kind of wisdom and experience these people have, it would be a much more pleasant place.

I want to go back to what I was talking about in the first paragraph though, about the way it all reads like each person is a character rather than an actual person. This has convinced me that for an oral history like this, and like we will be doing for our projects, the media has to be some sort of recording, whether video or audio. Text works great for making things clearly understandable and laid out, and is of course easy to edit, but you lose so much of what an oral history is – specifically, the “oral” part. Without hearing the different voices, different accents, different intonations of these people, they all read like they were just different fabricated personalities in a story. And for all I know, that’s what they are. Obviously you can fabricate someone’s personality by piecing together audio or video as well, but the media as a whole are much more immediate and therefore believable.

I feel that for the audience to really get into the person being interviewed and understand the sort of person they are and the actual experiences they’ve had, there needs to be the voice. Some visual would certainly be preferred as well, whether video or just a photo or an artistic interpretation (like that example website we looked at…I forget the guy’s name at the time). There are times when medium specificity is kind of silly, but I think there are definitely certain situations are not fully satisfied with certain media. If you’re interviewing someone for more than just a few sound bytes, it seems like it’s always worth it to present the actual recording and let their character and their message speak for itself (pun intended).

3 Day Exercise Blog

I did my 3 Day Exercise in a park in Shinjuku. It’s a pretty big park (for inner Tokyo) with a few different parts, but the one I concentrated on was an open flat area where you can go pretty much any day and find people playing soccer. It’s right next to the “Shinjuku Sports Center”, but as far as I could tell it wasn’t part of the Sports Center itself.

I did my first two days last weekend, and then had successive attempts at interviews thwarted by rain. Weather seems to be the only thing that stops them from playing soccer at this park….

Anyways, here are the notes I took last Sunday. They’re mostly about the way the guys were playing soccer – that was really the main interesting thing going on, but I also used to play soccer so I’m kind of interested in how people play recreationally here in Tokyo.

• The guys here are actually playing soccer now – yesterday they just stood around, maybe kicking the ball around a little bit, while I was here.
• One group discerns between teams with neon yellow jerseys – the other group seems to rely on people recognizing their team’s faces.
• There’s also three guys on the side practicing juggling, and doing some conditioning training from the looks of it
• Two older guys watch from the benches, where I am; they may be homeless and just enjoying the show, but there are no obvious signs of that
• Both soccer groups have cones set up as goals
• The group closer to me seems to be fairly young guys, maybe about my age, maybe a little older; the far group seems both older and more experienced at soccer
• This area has clearly been self-designated as the place where adult guys can play soccer – even my host mom knew there would be soccer here
• Yesterday there were also a couple of guys practicing juggling – I assume the park is one of the few places one can find any real open space
• Despite the fact that this open area is spotted with trees, it seems to work well for this kind of mini-soccer (seems like 5 per side)
• Guys have dropped their bags under a tree between the two fields, and the guys not playing at the time are sitting there.
• Neither group seems especially competitive – each is probably one group of friends meeting to play friendly soccer, rather than some sort of organized match between groups

And then this Sunday, I interviewed two of the guys sitting on the sidelines. (I didn’t want to try and pull someone out of the game for this, of course). I was definitely incredibly nervous, and on the recordings you can hear my excellent use of the Japanese language (that was sarcasm). But the guys I interviewed were very congenial, and chatted with me for a while in between the two interviews – really kind of returning the interview and asking me about why I’m studying abroad, why I’m interested in Japan, etc.

These interviews that felt like 4 or 5 minute long conversations at the time turned out to be one or two minute ones, so that’s definitely one thing I’ve learned.

The questions I asked were basically about soccer, the park, and…well…playing soccer in the park. I didn’t get any stunning revelations or anything (I don’t think there could be any about playing soccer in a park), but it was still interesting to hear how long these guys had been playing in the park, why they come, etc.

I’m not sure if I we were supposed to do a full transcription/translation or not, but for now I’ll just summarize in English.

Click To Play

This first guy, 24 years old, said he’d been coming to the park since he started college, so about 6 years ago. He says the park is good because it’s free, and you can play with lots of different people. He comes once a week, on either Saturday or Sunday. At the end he mentions that it was very hot at the time (which it was), and that it gets really cold in the winter, but they still always play there, so it’s a “special place” for them.

Click To Play

The second guy, 23, said he’d also been coming to the park since entering college, so about 5 years. He said he came because his senpai (upperclassmen, perhaps one of which was the first guy I interviewed) played there. He also mentioned the ability to play soccer for free as being a good thing about the park, as well as the fact that there are always people there to play with and that you can play with the same group each week. Like the other guy, he only comes once a week, on either day of the weekend. His closing comment was “ゴールがほしいです”(I want a goal).

Looking back on it, I wish I’d made my questions a little more specific, especially about the park. It seemed like there were always homeless people watching – about 20 meters away from the soccer area is a big collection of tents and tarps set up in the park – so I had kind of wanted to know what the soccer players thought about that situation. And also, for guys who’ve been coming about once a week for 5 or 6 years, how that situation may have changed. But I also didn’t want to ask that directly…I guess that’s another interview skill I’ll need to work on.

Donald Richie Blog

Reading Richie’s thoughts on Tokyo while reacquainting myself with the city was very interesting. I thought it was especially intriguing to see how many of the things he wrote about more than a decade ago are still very true, but also to think about a few of the things that have severely changed the Tokyo climate that he was writing about. When I say severely changed, I don’t mean that they made them wrong, but rather that the situations are quite different but the observations Richie made still hold true, just in different ways.

For instance, the advent of cell phones in Tokyo during the late ‘90’s would certainly have changed a lot of things around the city, both physically and culturally. Now, with virtually every Tokyo citizen being permanently accessible by email via mobile phone, the metropolis is not only a collection of villages, but an online network as well. Speedier communication only shortens the virtual distances between people, making information travel more quickly but also lowering the necessity for actual physical contact. The father who stays out to drink every night need not stray one step from his nightly prowl to contact the home and announce that he will not be there for dinner – he can do that on the subway.

In a city where a family or a group of friends may spread out to entirely different parts of town during the day, communication among these networks is still instant because of the cell phone, and especially because of cell phone email. One need not turn off their music player, step off the train, or even stop talking to someone face-to-face in order to send a quick message on the phone. Thus it has been made possible to spread out all over the Tokyo area while still keeping the tight social networking of a village. Physical space between people may be widening, but the virtual and social space is, if anything, closing down. America is too spread out for this to be the case – because of cell phones and email the virtual space between my parents in Ohio and my grandmother in Arizona is next to nothing, but it’s not like we can send an email saying “meet at Hachiko in 3 hours” and expect the receiver not only to receive that message instantly, but also to be within easy access to whatever the meeting place is.

Are Richie’s comments about Tokyo being a village, or rather a collection of villages, becoming outdated? I would say no – really, if anything, they are being strengthened. From my time in Tokyo last year, and the extra exploring I have done this year as well, I can say with confidence that any station within the Yamanote Line – and most likely any station for a ways outside of it as well – will have Pachinko, karaoke, a 100 Yen shop, and a collection of convenience stores and izakayas, at the least. It is also interesting to think, though, how each of these villages-within-the-metropolis could be thought of as its own gigantic store, or really mall; Akihabara is the electronics mall, Harajuku the clothing mall, Kabuki-cho the sex mall. Most of the Tokyo neighborhood-villages don’t necessarily have this kind of association, but it still gives an impression of the whole metropolis being one big village, where there’s one particular place to go for anything you might need. Everyone still seems to have their favorite bar, their favorite pachinko parlor, which they probably go to almost exclusively, but it doesn’t seem to necessarily have to be in one’s own neighborhood-village. For simple shopping people can probably find what they need in the appropriate shop in their own neighborhood, but if they are seriously shopping for something they might take a step up and shop not at their neighborhood-village’s appropriate store, but rather at the appropriate spot of the mega-village that is the whole of Tokyo.

This weekend I had a chance to experience a little of what I, as a Westerner (a Mid-Westerner, at that) would consider to be “nature”. I went to Futako-tamagawa to play Ultimate Frisbee with a group of Americans and a few Japanese – the field we played at was at the very back of a gigantic park on the bank of a river. I say a little of what I consider to be nature, but really only because there was an abundance of green, which in inner Tokyo seems to be an extreme rarity. At the park in Shinjuku where I am doing my 3 day exercise there are planters and trees, but everything does indeed seem to be planned, or at least carefully contained. A “park” in my hometown of Cincinnati would probably consist of a playground in or near a patch of woods. And by woods I mean actual woods, not just a few scattered trees – and it would probably only be managed as far as having a few trails through it would require. Futako-tamagawa was certainly less urban than Shinjuku, but this park was still entirely planned – all of this flat green space was entirely plotted for baseball or soccer, and the river bank even seemed manufactured both for a bridge for the trains and for easy fishing. This kind of park exists in American suburbs as well, but most likely accompanied by a backdrop of actual woods; here the backdrop was the usual forest of concrete that one associates with Tokyo. Even in Chiba, when I visited it last summer, the park I went to was entirely planned; concrete trails and gardens and mowed lawns. No freely growing brush, no dirt paths. It seems that, for the most part, the Japanese prefer something to look as good as possible, whether or not it is manufactured. In America there is a sense for “authenticity” that requires we have large plots of “nature” preserved from human interference. Whether this is an issue of difference in space or culture, or just a combination of the two, I’m not really sure. Although I suppose the space difference itself has an effect on the separate cultures as well.