A Sense of Scale

With each week that passes, the end creeps closer. A few weeks ago I could barely detect it, now I can smell it in both nostrils. No doubt in a couple of weeks it will be a deafening roar in my ears. This is the last of our days living in Osaka. This is the beginning of the end.

On the weekend of the 6th through to the 12th of May we had our first return visitors! Our first visitors Dave and Kerry, came back for a second time. We all got into the food and drink when they were in Osaka and then we all jumped on the shinkansen and went down to Hiroshima. Great company, but unfortunately for us, shit weather. It sleeted for the entire two days we were there, which meant that we couldn't make it to Miyajima. Poo. However, we ate a lot of delicious okonomiyaki - in both Osaka and Hiroshima - ate oysters, we sang karaoke, we did photobooth, Kerry and I went to the public bathhouse and enjoyed some Japan style retail therapy. It was all extremely pleasant, until poor Dave was struck down with some kind of mysterious stomach bug. It caught Kerry the day after they left our house. Whether it was food-poisoning or a 24 hour virus I don't know, but he went down like a sack of potatoes on the Tuesday night, but had been resurrected in true Easter style by Thursday morning, back on to the shinkansen for Tokyo and skiing with Luke.

Genbaku, the A-bomb Dome was a stirring sight. I know it is truly impossible to know the absolute decimation that must have ensued after the atomic explosion, but this building is an eerie and evocative monument to an event that truly opened Pandora's Box. The accompanying museum also has a sensitive, even-handed exhibit that outlines the human side and the administrative story of this horrific event. I defy anyone who goes there with an open heart and an open mind to remain dry-eyed.
However, there were a few people amongst the visitors, let us say from a certain country that finds this event particularly difficult to interpret in a favourable light for their own purposes, who were being quite disrespectful about the museum. I heard one middle-aged man say "I get the gist, let's get out of here." I mean, why did you come here? Did you think this was going to be a "U.S.A! All the way!" experience? This event happened, and it was the United States Army that decided how this was going to go down. The funniest part was that this certain specimen of historical denial was only in the first room, in the first few exhibits. He hadn't even gotten to the far more moving exhibits about the hibakusha (a-bomb survivors) upstairs. The pain, the poisoning, the instant deaths, the prolonged suffering, the lurking cancers - some skin and flesh was vaporised, others skin and flesh harboured the poisons that would ultimately kill the victim years later - the potential lives of hundreds of thousands of individuals, wiped out.
Parts of exhibit made me quite angry, particularly the written evidence that the existence of this new, more deadly weapon was hidden from the Japanese and the target city was chosen because of its high civilian population. It was a scientific curiosity for decades after. There is something very cold and calculated about such a decision being made in the name of science, as well as military merit of the bombing, as the penultimate event in the series of reversals against the Japanese army that ultimately resulted in the decision to surrender.
Genbaku (A-bomb Dome) and Hiroshima A-bomb Museum
The atomic bomb museum seems like a very poignant place to commence "The Beginning of the End."

V.V.V. by Thrall
It's the beginning of the end, and it's the beginning of the start as well. Next adventure, here we come. Thrall has done the last Osaka show (thanks to Elsa for the above video footage). As usual, we got offered another show off the back of that show, but it was on after we are gone, so we had to decline. We had lots of people turn up to show support, which is seriously sweet of them, as I know that many of them are not the kind of people who usually (a) go to shows, or (b) listen to misanthropic antipodean black metal. We soundchecked for a good 10 minutes. God, it made all the difference. That, and that Tom bought a line splitter so he could play through two amps at once (which really helped thicken out the sound). We played hard and fast, we roared through all the lyrics, and the crowd stood around and nodded their heads approvingly. It was a good little reception for our last Osaka show. Next we have the Kyoto show, and then it's Sayonara!
So, we've been busy, busy, busy, and to round out our busy time in the last few weeks we went to a very interesting festival, which I shall enter into this blog at a later time...
I recently went back to Nagoya, the town where I spent my first solo year in Japan. And it was tiny! Living in Osaka, the second biggest city in Japan, Osaka is just so much bigger than little Nagoya is. Nagoya just falls asleep at about midnight, the venues close, the bars lock you out, and there's no street culture compared to the vibe of Osaka. I remember when I first arrived in Japan, Nagoya just seemed so enormous, and now it just feels so tiny. My sense of scale has been completely skewed by living here. I really wonder how we will fare when we return to Australia... will it just feel too small for us to fit there anymore?

Music, sweet music...

Well, it's been a busy little week. Very, very busy.

We had our first night on the grog on Wednesday for this year. Reminded me why I've not been on the grog. A powerful and bombastic hangover ensued. I strained a muscle in my shoulder whilst being silly and drunk, and have yet to feel it fully heal.

Ah! She'll be right.

I say that because I have been reminded by Tom's recent trip to the doctors (with what was presenting as either tonsillitis or a cold) being quite traumatic. He was bombarded with questions that he couldn't understand, given treatments that he didn't understand either, and was told to come back the next day. He decided that it would be better for his health if he just had a lie in instead. Doctors that don't speak your language = stressful!

All health problems are being put off until we get back to Australia. I've had it with Japanese doctors. Japanese dentists are awesome, Japanese doctors are stressful.

So, anyway, the Wednesday drink was brought on by a gig. Leila was doing her first show, her solo performance called The Patty Hearst Noise Opera. I watched and took photos for Leila's Artists CV. There were some points that I thought were quite moving, hypnotic, interesting, and there were other bits where I was just wondering "what am I meant to be thinking about here?" I'm a bit simple when it comes to performance art. I don't really get it. But I think it might have been good.

Either way, with the entry to the venue, you get a free drink ticket. And that was my undoing. I spent the drink ticket on beer, and had a few more, and was suddenly on Father Jack's Rollercoaster of "drink! drink! drink!" After the gig I had the excellent idea of going to Bar Konton for a few extra drinks, and well, got completely hammered. It was at Bar Konton that I received the shoulder injury. I didn't really feel untoward until the next day when I felt like I'd been hit by a truck.

But I was having a happy hangover, so I went off and tried to make the most of the day. Only much later did I start to realise that I wasn't bouncing back from this.

On Friday I had one weird event lesson type thing, on Saturday they gave me three kids model lessons (!) and one event lesson (!!) - a move that I was kind of annoyed with because I was on that shift with someone who is a more than competent Kids teacher, that the branch have decided to go cold on, so instead of talking to him about it, they just loaded me with all the model lessons. Pretty pissed about that. Will be having firm words with said school this week.

The shoulder strain was a bit of bad timing, that's for sure. We had to play a gig on Sunday evening, and this gig was with bigger and better bands than we've played with since we left Australia, so we were really hoping to put on a good show. I rushed all the way from Kuzuha to Amemura carrying my stupid, heavy, piece of shit kick pedal with me to get there on time, and then realised that this venue doesn't do on-time, and I could have actually saved myself the hassle. Unfortunately, the stars were crossed unfavourably. The amp that was supplied at the venue was a Marshall JCM900 that shat itself every time Tom tried to apply the "big muff" to the sound. So when the music should have sounded louder, it ended up sounding quieter! What a pain! I couldn't get the drum kit to sit together in an ergonomically sensible lay out, and the snare skin looked older than Byōdō-in. No one seemed to be mixing us. Tom's vocals were too quiet, my snare wasn't cutting through. It took us two songs to really lock in, and by the end of the 5th song, I was quite tired from struggling against my injury and my less than ideal set up.

Lesson to be learned from this: soundcheck. YOU MUST SOUNDCHECK. It doesn't matter if everyone has to wait for a few minutes. It's better for all concerned if you soundcheck.

I'm not too disappointed because I think we still did a fairly intense and fierce looking performance, and those three songs in the middle had enough smack down in them to make up for the three that sandwiched them, but I would have liked to have done better.

That said, after the gig, the venue owner asked us to do another show in March. So, we went from "Last show" to "not last show" again! And then we got a call from a dude we met at the gig on Wednesday night asking us to do another show in Kyoto in April. People seem to like us even when we're not firing on all cylinders. How strange.

But I suppose that's it. Music is a powerful force. Surprising. Thought changing. Strong. Emotional. Physical. That's kind of what Thrall is about. Creating something Thrall inducing. To put yourself into a sort of trance and let the music overwhelm you, and your audience. When it works, it is truly gob-smacking. When it doesn't work, it's just another band.

I'm off to another Zeni Geva show tonight. I'm really excited about seeing them again. The last show was so good, and this show is at a much vibier venue, so hopefully they'll be laying the smack down in quantities that won't be able to be resisted by the audience. It's my turn to lay down my will to someone else's sound and feel the power of their 'thrall.'

Reverse Nostalgia

I was just thinking, gee, my blog has been a bit business like recently. No great musings on the nature of place and happiness, no great stories, surprising anecdotes... just a brief run down of where we are and how we got there. Well, I should probably change tack.

Now that we're winding down our Japan adventures a bit, I've been finding myself feeling this strange sense of reverse nostalgia. For those of you who may not have experienced it, it's the feeling that you are leaving a place, probably for good, and that you will miss many elements of the place.

Here are some of the things that I will miss about my neighbourhood:

1. Riding my "mama-chari" (grandma bike) without a helmet on the footpath. I am the terror of Nipponbashi. No where is safe from my cycling! And blessedly, I don't have to contend with "helmet hair" afterwards.

2. The flashing lights of Den-Den town. The mad bustle. The silly "Maid Cafés." The scary "Obaasan Porn" arcade.

3. Mr Howly, the giant dog that lives across the road. He gives the neighbourhood a certain "je ne sais quoi."

4. Doguyasugi - the kitchen supplies alley about 4 blocks away from my house. It's wild! Knives, platters, takoyaki grills, maneki neko, plastic food, and all manner of stuff you need and patently do not need for your kitchen.

5. Cheap food, Osaka style. 7 takoyaki ¥300. Huge okonomiyaki with egg and negi (spring onions) ¥450. You can't get a meal that good for that price at home.

6. Subrock studios. Our home away from home. I spend between 3 and 6 hours here a week, beating the stuffing through the cheap, relatively well-maintained rehearsal drum kits for the princely sum of ¥300 an hour.

7. Ame-mura. Gigs are early, they're nearby, there's heaps of good d-beat around, and I love getting out and seeing what Osaka has to offer.

8. Spaworld. Mad stucco and nudity. What a marvellous combination!

9. Combini. Pay your bills at 4 in the morning whilst picking up some beer, collagen syrup, oden (weird stew), nikuman (steamed meat buns), and garbage bags. One every two blocks around here. Brilliant!

10. La La Indian Restaurant. One of the dudes fully looks like Groucho Marx. Best naan bread - EVER. The curry... whatever... the naan... to DIE FOR.

I'm already missing things and I haven't even left yet. It's a weird feeling.

Shuffle the deck...

Money, money, money, must be funny, in the rich man's world... Three overtime shifts coming up, and we're looking to recoup some of the losses of the past year. Got to get the cash together to get the move happening. We've not planned much of an end of year celebration. I'm becoming quite the fan of the austere Christmas/New Year, so I'm off to the local temple to hear the bell rung 108 times (for the 108 desires that cause human misery, according to the Buddhist canon). To break up the work-on-work cycle, we're having a couple of days in the Hokrikyu region of Japan. Driving in the snow, so I'll be very careful. Let's just hope everyone else on the road is equally careful! Pictures and stories to follow.

News from the last month has mostly been of a musical nature. Tom has finalised the artwork, done the printing, cutting, folding, etc... for the promo mail out of the "Away from the Haunts of Men" album. We're about one or two songs off having finished the next album's song writing, and so we'll be ready to hit the studio again when we get back to Tassie. Exciting times!

CD photos

We saw 21 bands at Socio for ¥2000. Worth every penny. A lot of awesome music, some surprises, some disappointments, by the end of it I was well yoporai, and quite jolly. Made friends with some punks from Australia, Debbie and Jane, who had been sleeping in parks and going to live-houses in Japan for the last 3 weeks. Nuts. Lovely girls.

Massatsu Osaka 2009

On the sightseeing front, we saw a few nice leaves at Tenryu-ji and Tofuku-ji.

Tofuku-ji, Fushimi-ku

Tenryu-ji, Arashiyama

Tenryu-ji, Arashiyama 2

We saw Corrupted play at Unagi Dani Sunsui on the 13th of December. Chew was a little "horoyoi" for you guys in the know, and we had a good old chat, which was really nice. Rosie was there (the Masters student studying grindcore in Osaka and Melbourne) so we got to introduce her to Chew, which was kinda funny ("can I interview you for my thesis?" "no" x 3). The show was good, I got some good photos which I am totally not publishing (due to Corrupted's policy on photos and press), but if you would like to ask me to show them to you in person some time, I'd be more than happy to.

We also played our first live show as a two-piece. It was a successful experiment. I don't think the venue liked it so much, but the audience were pretty happy. We were asked for an encore! I think the venue owner liked talking with Rob, that's my guess. The sound engineer seemed to like us as a two-piece. So yeah, anyway, if we don't play again until we get back to Australia, I won't mind, but if we get a show with Riverge (another band that rocks hard over here) I'd be more than happy to do one more.

Just let the cards fall where they may.

No point in trying to make things happen if you can't really MAKE them happen, if you get my drift. Lovely to hear from those of you who have managed to put pen to paper (all three of you!) and the rest of you, you're a bunch of slackers! We will be giving you a good teasing in person when we return.