Final Post

This more or less ended before it began, but unfortunately, instead of being a pleasant pastime that I use to record my time in Japan this blog has fast become yet another unpleasant chore at the back of my mind.

Sorry for those of you who paid attention but I just don;t have the time that I thought I would have.

Karaoke, Ramen, Yukata and Sleepless nights...

Diary Post 1:

Keio Plaza Hotel

July 30th 

2:47am (Tokyo Standard Time)

I am wide awake in my hotel room running on what I can only imagine is a cocktail of caffeine, nicotine and alcohol tempered with a dash of endorphins and intermittent jolts of adrenaline. With our only "free" day in Tokyo finished and our official work duties starting tomorrow I get a distinct impression that I really this really is happening...

Image: Water Basin, Kumano Shrine, Shinjuku Central Park

Things I have checked off my list today:

✔Interact with a Japanese Toilet, ✔Visit a Shrine, ✔Eat Authentic Ramen, ✔Drink Beer in a Public Park, ✔Karaoke, ✔Buy a Basic Amenity from a "Conbini" Store

Beyond the Horizon

[Google Map]

Tottori... a small, unassuming coastal town located somewhere north-west of Kyoto and north-east of Hiroshima. Known for its anomalously large coastal sand dunes and its prefecturally famous Shan-Shan summer festival...it will be my home for the next two to five years.

Although I had known I would be moving to Japan for some months now, the whole experience still felt a little abstracted and unreal. As if I had woken up from reality and found myself in a dream. The knowledge on really hit home for me while I was researching the town I would be living in, wondering which house I would be renting, which mountains I would be hiking and which bars would be my favourite.

In a couple of months, I will be 14 000km away from my family, my friends and everyone I have ever known, and at the same time I will be home.

Kubrick and Carpenter: Learning to love the renegades

Stanley Kubrick and John Carpenter, these are names that, while uncommon in the modern sphere filmography, are in this bloggers opinion two cornerstones of cinema history on par with the likes of Tarantino and Spielberg.

Kubrick's' and Carpenter's films come from what I like to think of as the "Goldilocks Period" in cinematography. An era between the 1960's and 1980's, when films had just begun to start reaching wider audiences around the world but had yet to be carved down to the formulaic, money-making algorithm (I'm looking at you Marvel...). Many directors from this period, acclaimed or otherwise, drew inspiration from the outspoken atmosphere of the time to create timeless works of art equatable to the works of Da Vinci and Michelangelo.

The works of Stanley Kubrick and John Carpenter are a testament to this period and their films still have a major influence on modern Cult-Pop. Their combined works include legendary feature films such as; 2001: A Space Oddesy (1968), The Thing (1982) and Full Metal Jacket (1987)  as well as numerous cult classics such as Halloween (1978), They Live (1988), and A Clockwork Orange (1971). Elements of their films have been included in many modern movies, games and music as either educated nods, subtle cameos or full-on remakes. Some you may recognise are; Matt Groening's Futurama (1999-2013) *RIP*, Mel Gibson's Hacksaw Ridge, Visceral Gaming's Dead Space (2008) and Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.'s remake of The Thing (2011).

Kubrick and Carpenters films also carry a legacy of iconic scenes and one-liners as well as shots and filmmaking techniques which are still employed in modern cinematographic tradition today. Here are two that you may have heard, but didn't the origin of;

Bubblegum Scene - They Live (1988)

"I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass...

and I'm all out of bubblegum"

- A heavily armed Roddy Piper describing his intention upon entering a bank in Los Angeles.

"Me love you long time" - Full Metal Jacket (1978)

Prostitute: "Hey Baby, you got girlfriend Vietnam?"

Pvt. Joker: "Not just this minute..."

Prostitute: "Well baby, me so horny, me so horny...Me love you long time."

- Pvt. Joker and Raptor Man encountering a purveyor of worldly delights on the streets of Saigon.

The tone of macabre, slightly off-key humour against a backdrop of unsettling cynicism that is encapsulated in these scenes is what I would define as the hallmark of a Kubrick/Carpenter film. This similarity in directive vision is also the reason I have chosen to speak about these two legendary directors in unison rather than as separate entities (even though they never worked together).

If this blog-post has piqued your interest in these two directors in any way and you are interested in watching their films or learning more I have provided an IMDB link below.

Review: Norwegian Wood

I find Murakami's writing both hauntingly beautiful and terrifyingly real. His words seem to inexorably strip away the layers of bubble-wrap that we carefully place around our hearts, revealing the fragile lump of fears, emotions, memories, and dreams that have been patched together with spidersilk-like threads of hope.

Norwegian Wood is a novel that speaks to anyone who has ever experienced great tragedy, suffering or loss (i.e. all of us). It forces the reader to reflect on their own experiences without the comforting layer of frosted glass most of us are accustomed to. We see the world through the struggles of Toru Watanabe, the protagonist of the novel, which mirror the cycles of heart-rending love, passionate lust, crippling loss and deliberate repair that make up the very fabric of what it is to be human.

I interpreted the novels central theme as being this; "It's ok to be broken, we're all broken in one way another. If you can learn to recognize the scars and fractures in others for what they are, and then learn to love them, you might just be able to learn to love yourself.'

For my first post; a little touch of home...

The Union Buildings in Pretoria, South Africa are the official seat of the South African national government and house the office of the president of South Africa. Essentially the equivalent of the Whitehouse in Washington DC USA, they were built in 1910 shortly after the unification of the four colonial states which existed at the time. These were; the "Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek" (or ZAR) in the north, The Republic of the Orange Freestate in the West, the Cape Colony to the South and the Natal Colony to the East.

*Bonus Section*: The currency of South Africa is the Rand which is listed on the international market as the ZAR or Zuid Afrikaanse Rand.

To the left is an image of a special edition R5 coin (Aprox. ¥50) with a depiction of the Union buildings in the background. This edition was in minted 1994 to commemorate the inauguration of South Africa's first democratically elected president, Nelson Mandela.