There and Back Again: Video Tours

My favorite videos on Youtube these days are the walking tours, in which someone carries a camera through a cityscape or landscape.  They range in length from half an hour to two hours and more.  I usually watch them on my TV through the Youtube app, which gives them extra vividness; I've caught myself thinking about buying a larger TV, but I don't have a good place to put one and 42 inches is really big enough.  They usually have no narration or musical soundtrack, so it's easy to get lost in the experience, but as often as not I just start one up and let it run as I do other things.

I first stumbled on some from Japan, starting with this one taken at night during a thunderstorm in Tokyo. The rainy soundtrack can be restful all by itself.  Youtube algorithms directed me to others.  Snowy landscapes or cityscapes are also pleasant, especially since you don't have to cope with the snow yourself.  (Here's one I found later, of snowfall in Manhattan.)  I also enjoyed these videos of Halloween in Japan.

When the quarantine started, I began sharing some of them on Facebook.  It occurred to me that these videos might alleviate feelings of confinement -- they do for me -- and when people began posting suggestions for home-schooling activities, I began looking for walking tours of other countries, in Europe or South America or the United States.  I passed along this tour of the inside of the Statue of Liberty.

Finally I found some walking tours of places in Korea.  This one, of Seoul by night, is taken from the air and is breathtaking.  I was interested in areas familiar to me, and Seoul Walker provides plenty.  Some of these videos were shot before the epidemic, but Seoul Walker has kept busy, and there are several from the past month or two.  I used to spend a lot of time in COEX Mall before it was renovated several years ago, and I don't much like the new version but it's nice to see what it looks like now.  Itaewon is not my favorite district of Seoul, but I recognized the streets and even the stores.  Here's a Saturday afternoon in Gangnam, of "Gangnam Style" fame.  Here's a student district that I visited, I believe, on my last visit to Korea in 2018.  There are a couple of videos featuring Insadong, an artsy / touristy district not far from City Hall.  I know it well partly because friends took me there on my first few visits, but it's also a good place to buy gifts for friends and family when I return to the US.  It's also adjacent to Jongro (pronounced Jongno), where I spent much of my free time on my last several visits to Korea.  Finally, here's a tour along the ocean in Yeosu, a seaside city in South Cheolla province where I visited a friend on my most recent trip in 2018.  We walked along this very route.

I find this video rather chillling: it's a residential district of private houses, probably owned by moderately (though not extremely) rich people, with no stores or street vendors; it has the same kind of emptiness as upscale housing developments in the US.  I've never been there nor am I likely to go even if I am able to return to Korea.  On the other hand, here is Nami Island, a popular tourist attraction; I have a vague memory of going there or to an island like it in 2003 or so, but in any case it reminds me of parks I've walked around since then.  And here's a video of a train ride to Seoul from Gyeongju, a southeastern city that was formerly the capital of one of the ancient Korean kingdoms.  I've been there twice, and took this ride myself a couple of years ago.

It might seem odd that I prefer the videos set in cities, where the camera passes among crowds.  For me that's a (paradoxical?) pleasure of being in a city: to be surrounded by a river of people, while still being anonymous.  (As anonymous as an old white man can be in an Asian city.)  Or look at this one, of Provence Village, a tourist attraction northwest of Seoul: I don't feel left out and isolated among these people, I feel included, contained, safe.  Once in a great while someone will single me out to talk on the street or in a subway station, which is fine.  As I've written before, subways - at least in Korea - are social places, where a lot of interaction happens between people, offering their seats to others or just striking up conversation.  At the end of the day I'm glad to go back to the friends I'm staying with for dinner and more talk, or watching TV together.  But the city is one of the great human achievements, and I always feel satisfaction being in one, especially when it's as well-run as Korean cities tend to be.  Not perfectly run, of course, no human construction will be perfect, but well-run.

I have mixed feelings about these Korean videos.  On one hand, they bring back good memories; on the other, they remind me of places I may never be able to see again.  I'm nearly 70, and who knows when it will be possible to travel to Korea again as a tourist? But for now, I'm grateful to be able to see these places again.

First We Take Tahiti

I just reread Jack Douglas's The Adventures of Huckleberry Hashimoto (Dutton, 1964), for the first time in at least forty years.  Douglas (1908-1989) was a radio and TV comedy writer, a buddy of Jack Parr (who makes a cameo appearance in this book), and the author of numerous books that permanently warped my sense of humor when I was in middle school: such classics as My Brother Was an Only Child (1959), Never Trust a Naked Bus Driver (1960), and A Funny Thing Happened to Me on My Way to the Grave (1962).  All of which were in my small-town public library; they weren't obscure under-the-counter samizdat, they were published by a respectable house and went into mass-market paperback.

I don't remember at this remove in what order I read them.  It's possible I read Huckleberry Hashimoto first and then found the earlier books.  The first two were basically comedy routines that couldn't have been performed on TV; Huckleberry Hashimoto was an account of Douglas's 1963 trip to Japan with his (third) wife, Reiko and their rambunctious sixteen-month-old son Bobby.  They went by way of Tahiti and Hawaii, largely by ocean liner.  Bobby was, Douglas informs us,

sixteen months old when we started out.  Reiko was twenty-seven and I was forty-eight.  When we got back home he was nineteen months, Reiko was still twenty-seven, and I was a hundred and three [9-10].

In fact, Douglas seems to have told a little white lie here.  According to his Wikipedia entry, he was born in 1908, which would mean he was 55 in 1963.  (According to her obituary in the New York Times, Reiko was born in 1936, so she was 27 when they went on that fateful trip.)  But the marriage seems to have been successful -- they remained together for the rest of Douglas's life.

I enjoyed the book this time around, and was surprised by how many of the situations and gags had stayed with me.  What I noticed on this reading was the number of references to homosexuals.  It's been a frequent complaint of many homophobes that although we are a small minority, we still insist on talking about ourselves all the time - you know, the "the love that dared not speak its name" routine.  There is some truth about this, though we're not any more obsessed with our sex lives than heterosexuals are about theirs.  But what I find interesting is how obsessed with homosexuals many heterosexuals are.  Douglas is not terribly bad, really -- he doesn't fuss and fume hysterically, he sticks to the neutral term "homosexual" for the most part -- but he does keep mentioning us, more than our minuscule numbers would seem to justify.

For example, early in the voyage Douglas catalogues some of the characters he saw on board:

... I saw Miss Ethel Murdock and Mr. Peter Corbin enjoying a glass of beer (their eighteenth) under a rear table in the Outrigger Bar.  (Miss Murdock is a forty-five-year-old third-grade teacher, with more than just a suggestion of a moustache, in search of "new experiences."  Mr. Corbin is a homosexual who didn't realize that Miss Murdock wasn't Pancho Villa.) [27].

Then, on the way to Tahiti:

This particular deck steward also told me that if I was going to write anything about Tahiti in my new book, to check up on the stories concerning a certain movie actor, who had made a picture there.  The stories all pertained to the fact that he was a homosexual.  I told him that that's what they said about everybody in show business, that they were either homosexuals or communists.

He said, "Jesus -- I didn't know he was a communist, too!"

I said, "I didn't say that -- besides, what proof has anyone got that this actor is a homo?"

He said, because all the Tahitians called him a "mahu" which is Tahitian for "faggot" and also this actor in making this movie (which was about Tahiti) insisted that all of his "boys" be in it, and when he didn't get his way he stamped his sandaled foot and swished off the set into his thatched hut where he sat around in his muu-muu and sulked and pouted and moued for three days.  Something had to give, so finally the producer agreed that his "boys" could appear in the trailer for the film, if not in the film itself.  This seemed to satisfy the movie star and he emerged from his hut, his lip still a little Jackie Cooperish, but more or less ready to continue making the movie.  In all fairness to this movie actor, I did check up on him when I got to Tahiti and the consensus was unanimous -- he's a fag [47-48].

It's hard to sort out Douglas's commentary from the steward's in this story, so I'm not going to try.  I think Douglas was a bit more sophisticated than he let on, for once he got to Tahiti he reported

the penchant the Tahitians have for sensational gossip, one facet being that according to everybody on the island everybody else is queer.  Also, everybody that comes to the island is either queer or double-gaited -- or both.  (For those of you who are not familiar with the term "double-gaited," it means a homosexual who is happily married and the father of six children, but who is madly in love with the boy next door.)  [90]

I found this pretty funny, actually.  It reminded me of the stories Mark Padilla told in his book on male hustlers in the Dominican Republic, who would mention "to me that one or another of their peers was known to 'dar el culo' (give their ass) on occasion, which often produced much hilarity on the part of the storyteller."  Padilla didn't draw the connection himself, but he also reported that some of the same young men who told him that other guys would steal from their clients, turned out to be thieves themselves.  I suspect, then, that at least some of the Tahitians who gossiped -- no doubt with "much hilarity" -- about the predilections of their fellows and of tourists were sounding him out to see if he might be available and interested.  (The same might have been true of the steward.)  Douglas may even have realized it; who knows?

There were a couple of passing references to homosexuals later in the book (see page 122 if you ever read it), but you get the idea.  Douglas wasn't complaining about homosexuals everywhere, trying to take over, which puts him ahead of many his more highbrow peers in those days; he was just showing how worldly he was.  And to give him credit, he was also genuinely interested in Japan, got along with Reiko's family, and picked up more Japanese than most gaijin who married Japanese women seem to have troubled to do.  His account of staying with Reiko's family -- her father was a Buddhist priest, by the way -- in Hiroshima is pretty sensitive for the era.  He gets comedy out of their stay in Japan, but no more than he does of everything else, and I liked him overall.  There were other books by other writers that I read in those days that disturbed and frightened me by their handling of homosexuality; but Douglas' treatment made no impression on me, and I went on reading his books happily for years afterward.

So let me conclude with a story that I found rather charming:

The last thing I remembered as I drifted off that first night was the incident of the dignified little old Japanese gentleman and the electric-eye door at the hotel in Kyoto.  Every time he left the hotel or entered it, the electric eye would fling open the door for him.  And every time he would stop and bow to it [166].

Come Over and Help Us

RWA1's first response on Facebook to the disaster in Japan was to link to a post by the notorious right-wing economist Amity Shlaes, titled "Four Ways the U.S. Can Help Japan, Also Itself." "A free market look at help," RWA1 calls it. Well, no.

Her first recommendation is for the US to "stop being a prissy multilateralist" with regard to trade.

Now is the time to forget about fairness and just say, “Come on in, guys,” with or without trade concessions.

Hahahahaha. And she follows that up, two sentences later, with this knee-slapper:

If the Japanese are behind in learning the value of free trade, let them learn by watching the U.S. example.

Hahahahaha again. Shlaes is a bit vague about what her one-liners actually mean, though. She quotes a former Bush II official "and now vice chairman at Citigroup" who says "It’s time for Japan to have a free-trade agreement with the U.S. and to be in the Transpacific Partnership." I guess she wants the US (and presumably the other countries in the Transpacific Partnership) to drop its trade barriers against Japan without demanding reciprocal concessions. Nice, I guess, but she's just grinding her free-trade ax, secure in the faith that free trade is the remedy for all economic ills.

Second, she ties herself up in knots.

The second thing the U.S. can do is stop kidding everyone about infrastructure as stimulus. The natural response of the U.S. now -- the most likely expression of our good will -- is to write a multibillion-dollar foreign aid bill so Japan can rebuild its cities, secure the coastline and clean up its nuclear power mess.

So, should we or shouldn't we? I'm guessing we should:

So sure, Japan will need new infrastructure now. But that infrastructure should be recognized for what it is: brick, wire, mortar. Remember, though, that growth comes from competitiveness, not government spending

Except for government spending that builds infrastructure that is necessary for "competitiveness," a null concept. I hadn't read anything by Shlaes before, but I see already why she's so popular with the wacko right and so easy for everybody else to sneer at. I'm sure the Obama administration is taking her very seriously, given Obama's own obeisance to Free Trade.

Her other recommendations? Number three,

ease immigration rules so that more Japanese can study or work here. Japanese already have a presence in American universities. Make that presence larger. Then they will be less likely to stick to their old ways of protectionism and cronyism.

... and pick up our ways of protectionism and cronyism. Finally,

The fourth move for the U.S. would be to pass laws that strengthen our own growth. That means lowering our tax rates, including corporate taxes, so that Americans make more and buy more. This isn’t selfish. It’s actually generous, because it gives Japan a strong western ally to offset expansive China. Militarily, economically and politically, a strong U.S. ally gives Japan more leeway to set its own path.

Given the US' own ties to the Middle Kingdom, I'm not sure we constitute an offset to expansive China. And Japan has been following its own path -- that's the trouble with them -- which is why Shlaes is rubbing her hands over the prospect of a coup for Disaster Capitalism.

Here’s where that unprecedented good will, that urgent desire to help a stricken country represents opportunity. If we are ever going to widen our markets, this is the moment. The same holds for Japan. An open U.S., a flexible friend, is the kind of help Japan can use most.

You'd think that Japan had been shut off behind a bamboo curtain for the past sixty-odd years instead of being a primary US ally and trading partner in Asia. But their collaboration wasn't submissive, abject enough. Now we have our chance. The vultures are circling!

We'll Meet Again, Don't Know Where, Don't Know When

Roy Edroso at alicublog has a post about right-wing reactions to the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, with a focus on Japanese nuclear power plants.

These lunatics are saying that the Japanese reactors got through the tsunami "without a dent," which proves that we should get nuclear plants up and running now. Among the choice quotes: "Regulations don't make ya safe, safety makes ya safe!" Also they claim wind power is more dangerous than nuclear because a hawk flew into a turbine.

I've tried for years to figure out what motivates them, but I'm leaning toward the explanation that they were sent by aliens to destroy the human race.

But he forgets this wingnut, who just a year ago was calling for a threefold increase in public financing for the construction of nuclear power plants, while nixing funds for storage of nuclear waste.

"It's ironic, but Obama could end up being the biggest pro-nuclear power president since Dwight Eisenhower," says Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, a nuclear deterrence expert who served as deputy for nonproliferation policy in the Department of Defense from 1989-1993 under President George H.W. Bush.

Maybe the President will change his mind in the light of current events, but probably only until the next news cycle.

Meanwhile, a reporter at Obama's latest press conference actually dared to question him (via) about the brutal and degrading treatment of Pfc. Bradley Manning at Quantico brig. (For which he, as Commander-in-Chief, is ultimately responsible.) The Saint replied:

With respect to Private Manning, I have actually asked the Pentagon whether or not the procedures that have been taken in terms of his confinement are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards. They assure me that they are. I can't go into details about some of their concerns, but some of this has to do with Private Manning's safety as well.

My point here is that a good many liberals prefer to look at the dementia of the far right, while doing their best to ignore the dementia of their own near-right heroes. While I enjoy Edroso's surveillance of the fringes, most of the time he forgets how deranged and evil the mainstream is.

Never the Twain Shall Meet Redux

I'm reading Mark J. McLelland's Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan: Cultural Myths and Social Realities (Curzon, 2000), and I'm struck by how often his descriptions of Japanese culture sound just like American culture. For example, "although there are now well-publicized Japanese gay activists, who have adopted a western agenda of gay identity and gay rights, many ordinary Japanese gay men remain sceptical about the usefulness of this discourse in a Japanese context" (19). You could substitute "American" for "Japanese" in that sentence, and it would be just as true; especially in the early 1970s when the American gay movement was first starting to make waves, but I heard similar reservations expressed by American gay men well into the 1980s, and (not always coherently) right down to the present. I think McLelland (who's Australian, I believe) knows this, since he mentions correcting the misperceptions Japanese had about gay life in the West, so I'm not quite sure what his point was here, unless it was to let non-Japanese readers know that gay Japanese don't unanimously endorse gay activism either.

Then there was this on page 86, on the absence of women in the comic books or manga, very popular among Japanese women, which depict sexual love between beautiful, androgynous boys.

This [i.e., the absence of women] is not unusual in postwar Japanese popular culture however, as Susan Napier has pointed out. In her book on The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature (1990) she includes a chapter entitled 'Woman lost: the dead, damaged, or absent female in postwar fantasy' where she charts a paradigm shift in the treatment of women in Japanese literature which took place after the war where 'women are no longer caretakers but objects of prey, only acceptable as victims upon which to enact male rage' (1990: 53). The male ego, rendered so fragile now that women have encroached upon all the areas of life that were once the sole domain of men: the realm of education, the workplace and even the sexual market-place, sees itself as under attack. Napier comments that in literary portrayals, 'male characters are shown damaged and angry' (1990: 57) and women 'are frequently seen as agents of entrapment or humiliation' (1990: 56), resulting in a situation where 'women seem to have become increasingly Other, unreachable, even demonic' (1990: 57).

Again, my first thought was Wow, that sounds like postwar American fiction too: Norman Mailer, William Burroughs, Philip Wylie, and many others. Not to mention film noir, with its femmes fatales trying to feed on men's precious bodily fluids, and its boring homemakers trying to sap their men's lives of all excitement, which drives them into the clutches of the femmes fatales. There's often a tendency to blame such crises in masculinity on the loss of a war -- WWII for the Japanese, Vietnam for the Americans -- or on colonialism. But the US won World War II! What did our guys have to whine about? I don't want to oversimplify, because I think that many, maybe most American veterans wanted nothing more than to live quietly and safely with their wives and children; but there was a countermovement, partly among male youth who thought they'd missed something by not having gone into combat and having their legs blown off. (You can see this in the Western Shane, in which the annoying little boy character wants Shane to be the hero and defeat the bad guys, and his father droops a little because he's not an expert in violence. Send the little brat to boot camp, I says.) The theme of the demonic female is of course much older and widespread than just the post-WWII period in Japan and the US, so this is something I'll have to look into some more.

Let me stress, by the way, that I'm not saying there are no differences between Japanese and American cultures, only that the similarities are so very interesting.