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.

Relativity

Ooops! I forgot to post in the blog last month. Well, probably not that much of a concern for you all, as last month was pretty cold, and I had an infection (doctors still have not managed to explain how I got it, but it's gone now, thanks to the marvel of anti-biotics), so we didn't get out much. But there is enough to report to make this more interesting than many people's lives, I'm sure. It's all relative. It's all relatively relative, anyway.

So, last post we were just about to go away to Kanazawa for our holiday.

Kanazawa is in Ishikawa Prefecture in the Hokrikyu region of Japan. It is famous for it's pleasant Japan Sea influenced summers, and harsh Siberian blizard influenced winters. We were hoping to see some snow, preferably in Kenroku-en, a famous Japanese garden, rated as one of the top three gardens in Japan.

We left on the 28th in a hire car. It was very nice. I enjoyed the drive. Made one wrong turn and almost ended up in Nagoya for a moment there. But I managed to find an exit and turn around, and all was well. We stopped in Hikone on the way to check out Hikone castle. The sun was being all shiny, and the photos look rather pretty, I think. Hikone castle is the last of the 4 National treasure castles I was hoping to see, so that's that. I have collected the set.

Hikone-jo

After hitting the highway again, the weather turned cold and rainy, and occasionally snowy as we wound our way through Fukui Prefecture. Fukui was cold and snowy, there were lots of tunnels that went for about 2km through mountains as we got closer to the Japan Sea coast. Just amazing scenery. I found it really exciting just to be there.

We arrived in Kanazawa, checked into our hotel, and I almost instantaneously started getting cold symptoms! Eee, gads, bad timing! I shuffled off to the chemist and got some cold and flu tablets and struggled on, almost uneffected. On the 29th we went to Kenroku-en. Unfortunately for us, there was no snow. Our students had been admonishing us for the entire month of December: "Kanazawa is very cold, be sure to wear lots of warm clothes." We get to Kanazawa and the top temperature in Kanazawa that day was higher than the temperature in Osaka! Talk about don't believe the hype!

Anyway, the garden itself is very pretty, and I'm sure it would be even prettier had it been snowy. But alas, it was not to be.

Kenroku-en and Kanazawa-jo

Whilst we were in Kanazawa I bought myself an umbrella for a souvenir. There is a local saying in Kanazawa that states: "Bento o wasurete mo, kasa o wasureru na!" (forget your lunch, but don't forget your umbrella). This is due to the mad weather that Kanazawa often experiences. On our last day in Ishikawa prefecture, the weather turned bad, windy, rainy, snowy, simultaneously, fantastically bad... just what I had been hoping for! But alas, it did so only in time to make my drive home a bit more perilous. We passed about 4 or 5 car accidents on our way, but being the Grandma slow-coach that I am, I didn't manage to be in any of those accidents.

So, in early January, that's when I started getting these mysterious abdominal pains. After 3 weeks, I decided that they were of sufficient quality to warrant a trip to the doctor, who took some blood from me and found some kind of bacteria having a party in my abdomen. Currently got the bacteria whacking stick out to give those unwelcome visitors a good seeing to, and will be back to normal by the end of the week. Don't know what those nasty bacterias were up to, but I'm going to have a full medical when I get back to Australia to see how it is that I managed to get sick like that. Anyway, nothing to concern you all, it's just why we haven't done anything much.

However, after three or so weekends of being indoors, I went a bit stir crazy and this weekend I demanded that we go somewhere to get some sightseeing in. So we went off to Uji city in Southern Kyoto Prefecture to get some sights in. The main attraction there is Byōdō-in. This temple is co-owned by the Jodo-shinshu (Pure Land) Buddhist sect and the Tendai sect. The image of The Pheonix Hall at Byōdō-in is featured on the back of the ¥10 coin. The hall houses an Amida-Buddha statue made from cedar and lacquered in gold of quite exceptional beauty. The roof is carved in a most spectacular style, and there are paintings on the walls of Amida-Buddha and his gang of Bodhisattvas cruising around on clouds, being awesome and stuff. Because Byōdō-in is so old (it was built in the 11th century), the original paintings now just look like some brown stains on the walls, but there are some replicas in the fantastic, modern, architect designed museum next door that give you an idea of what it must have looked like when it was new. The Jodo-shiki (perfection) garden is also extremely beautiful, but my photos look quite poor in comparison to how it looked in real life.

Byōdō-in

Last but not least, I trialed Picasa as a photo uploader for this post, and I think the official verdict is: it sucks. It's compressed my photos so hard, they look like faded prints. I swear, the exposure rate on my camera is set to auto, it shouldn't look that underexposed! So, the next post will be back on the cursed facebook. Facebook sucks, but at least it doesn't render my photos like muck!

Alright, off to work now. We're continuing to try and scrape all our belongings and whatnot together to send home, and get our travel plans in order. We've decided to abandon the original plan to do Kyuushu and Okinawa - it was just too expensive and the cost was stressing me out. So now we're going to just hang out in Osaka, do some hanami time in Kyoto, and make a quick trip back to Tokyo, the city I always wanted to call home in Japan, for one last Sayonara party.

In February we're seeing some bands, playing some shows, and in early March we're going to Hiroshima with Dave and Kerry (who're making it back for a second visit!) so there will be photos to show and stories to tell. Don't hesitate to let us know you exist. We get lonely over here sometimes...

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.

Infamous Butcher

Ah, if true contentment can be wrapped in a morning, it might as well be this one. Woke today feeling rested before the jackhammers started, popped on some Slayer, and felt mighty inspired to go off and work on drumming (Dave Lombardo - one of my many drum heroes). Tom made me coffee in bed, next I'll have some toast. All to the sounds of:

"Infamous!

Butcher!

ANGEL OF DEAAATTTHHH!"

It's never too early for thrash metal.

What's been happening? Well, quite a lot. Not stuff that is fun to read about or take photos of, but stuff, indeed has been happening.

Let's start with the band. Thrall (Tom plays guitar and 'sings', I play drums, and Rob is/was our live bass player) has been really busy. First, we decided to get the album that has been "being finished" for over two years mastered. Once it's mastered it can not be "finished" any more. It is completed! Ready to send to labels and see if anyone will pick it up. Thank goodness, because I was really starting to get sick to the teeth of that album constantly hanging over us. It's not just being mastered, mind you. It's being mastered at one of the best mastering studios in Australia, Turtle Rock Studios, and it's costing us a truck load of money (even though we got a discount, it's a lot for a bunch of independent musicians to come at) and so Tom's finances have taken a major blow on that front.

A friend of ours from college, Jansen Herr, has been working on a bit of a film clip for us in his spare time. He's quite the film maker these days and is based in Sweden. So, when we send out our little package to labels with our mastered album, we might also be able to include a little DVD of Jansen's wonderful film clip. He's a real artist, that Jansen, and he's made something really haunting and amazing to accompany the song.

We also decided that after over two years of playing that our band needed some kind of merchandise. The last merch we had was some little button badges that said "Thy Plagues" back in 2006-2007! So we bit the bullet and forked out for some t-shirts to be printed in the hope that someone (nay, anyone) might buy one at the live shows that we had been doing. We've not sold enough to cover the cost of printing them yet. We know, we have to be patient, but being patient requires patience, and sometimes supplies of patience run low. You could help by ordering one... :)

Now, you might have noticed from my interesting verb tenses above that we've decided to stop playing live shows. Thrall played the gig on the 21st of October at Socio. And it was abysmal. Socio kept giving us gigs after that first one, and we were quite pleased to be invited back so quickly, until we realised what was happening. Socio was using us as spac-filler on amateur nights. First gigs - all your friends turn up to show support - because they're your friends. It was a Sunday night, everyone could make it. Then we are given a bunch of Wednesday night gigs. No one turns up for us except my mate Glenn. We play to hostile crowds for two gigs that look like they wish we would just die. So we decided that the experiment of playing live with me on drums was a success, that it would work if we did it back in Hob's, and so, there was no point in continuing live shows on amateur night bills. Time to go back to songwriting for the second album.

The deal that we had made with Rob (wherein I play in his pop band, and he plays in my black metal band) had begun to run us both ragged (particularly me, as I was finding it really hard to play soft, poncy drums in one band, and BM, power-striking drums in the other). I try to practice drums at least 3 times a week to keep my double kick training in check, and ultimately, I'd like to play BM drums every day. The feel of one band was polluting the other band, and the time commitments were meaning I was spending even less time with Tom (and I wasn't enjoying that!), so Rob and I have come to an agreement that we will finish up playing in each other's bands at the end of this year. Thrall will do one more live show with Rob on the 15th of December, I will do some session work on Sister Ray's recording, and then we will amicably part ways. It's a great relief for me, because I was feeling really stretched and thin, and as one polluted the other, I had Thrall demanding me to play louder and harder, and Sister Ray demanding I play quieter and more poppily. You try to please all the people, you end up pleasing no-one.

Now I can return to my single focus: to be the most slamming, thrashy, speed-blasting, evil, kvlt, BM drummer I can be. Dave Lombardo, Philthy Animal Taylor, Horgh, Frost, and Daniel from Craft will be back on high rotation as I return to black metal mania!

So, that's all the news about the band. Hopefully soon I will be able to let you all know about which label has picked us up. Wouldn't that be nice?

Either way, in other news, the weather has started to go cold. I'm keen to get out and take as many photos as possible of the changing seasons. Last weekend I caught up with Leila, who I know from Hobart, in Kyoto, and we took a couple of photos of the start of the autumnal leaves. They'll just get redder and more intense over the next couple of weeks, and by the start of December they'll have disappeared. Just like the cherry blossom, so beautiful when you can see them, so transitory, so ephemeral. Haiku like burblings spring to mind.

Tadasu no Mori and Shinagamo Jinja

Kodaiji Temple

My teeth decided to stop working the other day, so I'm currently having some quite extensive dental work done. Finally this extortionate hell-th insurance is coming in handy. The excess for my last dental visit was ¥1490 (about $15 AU). I'm jogging and swimming occasionally at the moment, and my fitness level is still pretty good, even considering that I've not been able to do much exercise in the Japanese summer. So health wise, pretty good. Tom's well too.

Work, we had our Halloween lessons last week, which meant we were obliged to dress up. We both managed to spend less than ¥2000 on our costumes. Teaching is somewhere between fun and a drag. Work. What can I say? It's always depressingly work-esque.

For Christmas holidays we're coming up with a list of things we want to do that can be done as daytrips from Osaka. Tottori, Hikone, Nagoya, Ise, and Wakayama seem to be the front runners for our 5 days of Seishun Ju Hachi Kippu fun. Maybe we'll do one or two overnights, but nothing too drastic. Financially we're hoping to keep the spend quite low. Send back some cash for a car when we get back, and save some yen for our grand finale. Yakushima looks like a definite, Kyuushu, definitely, Okinawa, maaaybe... I'm really keen to get to the Japan Sea for a bit of a look at the Hokurikyu region, and to get back to Tokyo for one last, and very fond visit to that city. I will always wonder how different our lives would have been had we been able to station ourselves in Tokyo. It's just so much bigger. So different to Osaka. I feel like I'm visiting a different country whenever I am there. Who knows... maybe Tokyo would have chewed us up and spat us out far sooner, but maybe, maybe we wouldn't be heading home if we had been able to take the Tokyo route.

Well, we'll never know now.

Hoping you're all well, feel free to let us know how you've been and the like. 24th of April we'll be flying out, so it's not long now and we'll be back in Australia. Then the next question is where will we settle? I'm hoping the employment situation in Tassie will have loosened up a little by the time I get back, but if not, it's Melbourne or Sydney. Any of the above will be fine. We were also looking at the possibility of emigrating from Australia permanently, but that's another music in a different kitchen. More on that later.

Change of plan

We thought about it, and thought about it, and looked at websites, checked the prices. Shirakawa is just going to be too expensive to do in December, so we`re going to focus on doing some local travel. Grab a seishun-juu-hachi kippu and do the local sights. Only 6 months of having a job left before we come back, so we`re focusing on getting as much stuff and cash home as is humanly possible for now.

This doesn`t mean we won`t have any marvellous adventures to share, or pictures to post. It just means they won`t be from Shirakawa-go.

In other news, we`re going to go to the Kobe Biennale with Rob and Jo tomorrow. Sister Ray has a FREE gig on the 11th of October at Socio, Amemura. Thrall is playing on the 21st of October, same venue. Taking the day off on the 22nd of November if all goes well, to try and capitalise on a big metal/punk fest.

Looking after myself better now in the light of my recent cold, and have gotten back on the wagon for a while. I don`t mind being sober almost as much as I don`t mind being drunk..!

Alright, signing off. Much love to you all. Don`t be shy about getting in touch, eh?

Chirpy

I love late summer, early autumn. There's a lot of false starts with the Japanese autumn. Is it going to finally be comfortable yet? Cool breeze one day, back to hot annoying bluster the next. One of the signs of late summer is the change in the sounds of the insects. Suzumushi has moved into my drain on my balcony. Who is suzumushi? Well, it's the Japanese Bell Cricket. He makes a beautiful noise in the evening. "Ping, ping" goes his call, "ping, ping." He's really very soothing compared to the racket of cicadas ("semi" in Japanese) from early summer, and he doesn't wake me at dawn, unlike the cicadas! I've named him "Mr Chirpy" and I hope that he'll be calling in my drain for a few more days before the warm weather and his beautiful calls go away.

Zeni Geva! Oh, my goodness, what a gig. They were just outstanding. They played just as well as they did on their recordings. Just an amazing band. I'm hoping that next year I might be able to collaborate with the Brisbane Hotel to get KK Null down to Tassie for a show, as he's already going to be in Melbourne doing the Liquid Architecture festival in June. KK Null was very nice and said hi to Tom and I outside the gig. We told him we had seen his Tassie gigs, and he got rather excited about the proposition that we might be able to get him down for a third visit.

Tom and Rob and I all got to play our first show as Thrall. It was grand, and many people turned out to show their support. Mel, James, Glenn, Jo, Marcus, Leila, Jeremy, Jai, amongst others all came out of the woodwork and came to what was probably the most powerful and exciting show I've played yet. Thrall will be doing a few more gigs before we go now, because this gig went so well. We got offered another gig on the 26th of September and again on the 21st of October because the venue owner really liked us.

Hooray for music!

My mum was here from Monday the 14th to Thursday the 24th of September. It was so lovely to see her. I tried my best to show her around, but she was struck down by a cold half way through her stay, and was forced to spend 3 valuable days in bed. Now, it's my turn. Same cold, got me sitting in bed blogging, rather than out and about, doing my usual mad busy weekend flap.

My mum arrived the day before my birthday, and on the first night I took her and Ross for a quick bite at The Royal Road Izakaya (also known as the ¥290 Bar). Showed them around Minami Osaka a bit. I could see that it was quite exciting for them to see a city of this scale. The next day we went to Hong Kong Chong Long in Namba Parks for a bit of yum-cha lunch, and unfortunately I could not attend the aquarium in the afternoon with them, due to my bike being nabbed for being parked in a no bike zone so I had to go to Bentencho to go and retrieve it (well, it's a fair cop, I did park it in the no bikes zone, but it was bad timing considering it was my birthday!). The next day I went to Kyoto with mum and Ross, we went to Kiyomizu Dera, looked for some bits and bobs in the tourist stores in the surrounding area. Wandering around the cobble-stoned back streets of Higashiyama area was most pleasant. The next day we returned to Kyoto, to Heian Jingu and Nanzen-ji. We ate dinner at Luxious European buffet. I had to work the next couple of days, but then my Mum got sick, and we couldn't really get out of Osaka again during her visit. I had hoped to get them into Nara and over to Himeji, but alas, cruel fate, had other plans. We got to go to Ryokuchi-Koen to see the Osaka Open Air Museum of Traditional Farm Houses, and it was fantastic. We had a couple of nice spicy lunches in Nan-nan town, courtesy of the Vietnamese and Thai restaurants down there, a fantastic dinner on the 36th floor of the swissôtel, and finished it all up with a visit to Torikizoku. A perfect Osakan holiday - involving a lot of eating, and enjoying the crazy metropolis feeling. It was really lovely to see them both, and I think they had a lot of fun.

They left on the Thursday that Discharge, GBH and The Exploited played at King Cobra. Great gig, great fun. Only two members of the original line up of each band remained, but you could tell which ones were the ring ins and which ones have been at it since the early 1980's. Great powerful music. There's something quite community building about screaming your lungs out and getting sweaty all over with a bunch of other punk rockers. There's always a couple of boofy agro boys who bounce off everyone and try to beat people up, but mostly it's just a great surge of energy, toward the stage, in a musically inspired show of mutual passion. The nature of music and community building has been on my mind a fair bit recently, as most of the Japanese friends we have made over here have been music fans. We've been invited into the inner sanctum of the Osakan extreme-metal/d-beat scene, and made to feel very at home, despite our limited Japanese language ability. It's quite humbling, and I feel lucky that I have the ability to share in this amazing little microcosm.

So, we played our second Thrall gig on Saturday the 26th. I started to feel a bit off colour during the day, and by the time that we played, I was feeling downright sick. But we played well enough, and I got home promptly afterwards. I made it through a rocky shift on Sunday, but couldn't go on Monday. Just too sick. Hoping it lifts from the chest pretty quickly by itself without anti-biotics. I'm guessing I'll be OK for work on Thursday. I'm about to book our end of year travel in Shirakawa, based on the beautiful Gassho house at the Osaka Open Air Museum of Traditional Farmhouses.

I'm ready for the next part of our Japan adventure, the end of our Japan adventure, to begin. Here we go!

Suzumushi is chiming for me... chime me in, little friend.

Excited

My Mum's coming to visit. Ten more sleeps! I'm so thrilled. I might not have always seen eye to eye with my Mum (but then again, are there any mothers and daughters who do?), but I definitely love the heck out of her. She did an incredible job as a single parent for a few years there before finding her current (and lovely) husband, gave me a good education, straight teeth, a lot of support in my debating, basketball and athletics activities... really, looking back (in light of considering starting a family of my own at some point), I boggle at how awesome a job she did. She's about to come over and visit me as her first overseas vacation, and I'm just tickled pink.

I've been trying to come up with some excellent Mum friendly activities (no trips to Bar Konton, methinks), but I just have to remind myself that the competent, well-organised bones in my body are most likely inherited from my Mum, I can probably rest assured that she could look after herself pretty damn well if it comes to it.

Tom got tonsillitis not but last week, which was accompanied with a roaring fever that I though might have been H1N1. Went to the hospital, was masked, isolated, tested, and negative. Tonsils were the size of golfballs, mind you. However, he's shrugged it off pretty well this time and is back at work, and singing with his dulcet tones. It's had him pretty down, the continuous sickness, and I feel like I've run out of ideas as to what to do. My bedside manner has pretty much been reduced to an incredulous "again?" Which is just terrible. Anyway, we've resolved to shove vitamins down his neck each morning, keep away from mad partying, rest, eat well, exercise, that kind of malarky... if that doesn't help, I don't know what will.

Also in the next couple of weeks I have a date with destiny: Zeni Geva are playing in Kyoto and I have reserved tickets. Very pumped!

Lastly but not leastly, our gig is on the 13th of September (the day before my Mum arrives) so we're training like mad up to our deadline... which brings me to what I'm gonna do now: drum practice waits for no woman! And double kicks require daily maintenance or they slip away.

Love to you all, thank you to Colin for the comment about the TB. I had heard similar stuff from my students about the Shin-Sekai area. I don't know exactly what kind of proximity to homeless dudes is required to be put at risk, but there's no denying there's a few of them about. About those emails, cards, postcards and letters that you all haven't sent - the phone calls you haven't made: we'd love to hear from you. No really.