Friday, Dec. 10, 2010

Fukuoka harbors hotbed of new talent

Despite dwindling audiences, city's live-house culture still going strong

By IAN MARTIN

Special to The Japan Times

Despite its far westerly location (being closer to Seoul than it is to Tokyo), the Kyushu city of Fukuoka has for a long time been one of the musical powerhouses of Japan.

Freak scene: MacManaman (above) and Nontroppo perform at Yakuin Utero, a club in Fukuoka's Yakuin district. NOBUKAZU YAMAMOTO PHOTOS

Fukuoka in the 1970s brought the nation "mentai-rock," a brand of high energy, proto-punk rock 'n' roll exemplified by Sonhouse and Sheena & The Rokkets, while in the '80s it gave us chart-straddling megastars such as Seiko Matsuda, Chage & Aska, and the recently scandal-hit Noriko Sakai. The late '90s Generation X Fukuoka punk scene created Mo'some Tonebender and Number Girl, not to mention incubating the teenage musical ambitions of Shiina Ringo.

Recently, however, the rest of Japan hasn't heard too much out of this traditionally noisy city. On a recent trip to Fukuoka, I met up with several of the city's musical movers and shakers to investigate the current state of affairs.

"There aren't so many record labels based in Fukuoka," says Seiji Harajiri, in charge of booking at Fukuoka's newest live venue, Yakuin Utero, "and audiences aren't as big as they used to be. Underground music doesn't seem to be so popular lately."

Not just that, but the town's indie record shops, such as Chameleon Records and Plastica, have found themselves downsized and then closed. Also, most shockingly, was the death from cancer this autumn of one of the Fukuoka music scene's most influential and best-loved figures, Yoshie Fujii of the band Garorinz. She was 38 years old.

"4-Dimension Music Therapy," a Garorinz tribute album released in September as a fundraiser, drew on contributions from the likes of Eastern Youth, Melt-Banana, Afrirampo and numerous others from across Japan's underground music scene, while on Dec. 19, more than 20 bands from across the country will gather for a tribute event at Tokyo's Shibuya O-Nest.

The long-term impact of Fujii's death is harder to gauge, but looking around Fukuoka now, her legacy is everywhere. The venues with which she was associated — Decadent Deluxe, Cafe & Bar Gigi, and most particularly Yojigen Public Space — are still going strong, while Time Market, the magazine and live event that she created, remains a cornerstone of the city's music scene, with its operation now falling to her former Garorinz bandmates.

There's a Time Market event being held on the evening I arrive in town, so Drum Legend, another new venue, in Fukuoka's busy Tenjin shopping district, is my first port of call. Winding my way up the staircase, threading between seated audience members taking a break from the main hall, I emerge into a long, narrow room drenched in seedy, red-tinged lighting, the kind of place where you might expect Fredo Corleone to sidle up to you at any moment and order a banana daiquiri.

Any air of louche, elegant decadence is dissipated almost immediately with the arrival onstage of Fake Girl Nott, a bouncy, cheerful, blonde-wigged female electropop duo. Then Kyoto/Tokyo art- punks Ni-Hao! drag the audience kicking and screaming in another direction entirely, before local jam-band supergroup Barcelona take the stage, and, it has to be said, much of the dance floor. Featuring two drummers, six guitarists and a trumpet player, Barcelona are deeply infused with the scent of another of the Fukuoka music scene's prime movers, Shuichi Inoue.

Best known as the guitarist and singer of the blues-influenced lo-fi band Folk Enough, as well as running the Electronics Guitar event and label, Inoue is one of the Fukuoka scene's liveliest and most charismatic figures. A passionate sports fan, he always performs with the Italian national football team's crest sewn to his guitar strap. He idolizes Juventus forward Alessandro Del Piero, wouldn't play gigs while the World Cup was on, and steadfastly refuses to recognize local baseball team the Softbank Hawks.

"The Hawks aren't a Fukuoka team," he explains. "They used to be based in Osaka and they only came to Fukuoka when Daiei bought the franchise. The (now Saitama Seibu) Lions are the real, original Fukuoka baseball team."

Inoue believes that one of the strong points of the Fukuoka music scene is the way its smaller size and more limited number of venues means that bands of different kinds are more used to playing together, away from the comfort zone of single-genre events into which Tokyo bands can often get sucked.

"Sometimes in Tokyo it's a bit like that," muses Inoue. "You'll be at a show and all the bands are the same BPM, just one after the other. That kind of atmosphere really doesn't work for me. I like there to be more variation."

By midnight, Drum Legend is closing up, but a few minutes away at Yakuin Utero, the party is still in full swing. As he works the still-busy bar, the club's bookings boss Harajiri explains the need to balance the Fukuoka scene's inherent variety with the problem of creating a musical identity.

"At Utero I usually try to book events that have a coherent style," he states, "so here it's usually alternative or underground. (Venue) Kieth Flack is mostly hardcore, Yojigen has recently had more rock 'n' roll bands, and Graf tends to be the place for young bands who want to get famous."

Nevertheless, looking around Utero, it's clear that a more relaxed atmosphere pervades the place than in Tokyo venues, with their strict closing times and often officious managements. A small crowd of people are drinking around a couple of tables, one guy is trying to teach Miwako from garage-punk band Masadayomasa how to play guitar, and, every once in a while, a gaggle of musicians stumble onto the stage and form an impromptu jam band.

The following evening, the previous night's laid-back atmosphere has been transformed into a scene of unparalleled intensity. The warning signs are there from the moment the bands start to arrive for their soundchecks. Jitta Setoguchi from instrumental postrock quartet MacManaman finished the previous night at 6 a.m., drinking convenience-store beer in the shower of a visiting Tokyo musicians's hotel room, but he seems none the worse for his experience.

His Tokyo-based drinking partner is obviously less used to such debauchery and immediately falls face-down on some seats to sleep. None of the local musicians notice, however, because Utero's bar has already opened. By the time the music starts, four hours later, the venue is buzzing.

The DJ is going round the audience handing out free slugs of tequila, Inoue from Folk Enough twice invades the stage and starts jamming on guitar, one audience member strips and starts dancing in his underwear during MacManaman's performance, and by the time we arrive at tropical progressive art-pop Renaissance men Nontroppo's climactic set, DJ Dragon is dancing on the bar, still clutching the tequila bottle.

"It's not usually like this," warns Harajiri afterward, "It's just when you get people like MacManaman and Inoue in the same room together. They drink a lot."

According to Harajiri, there is a bit of a generation gap in the current Fukuoka indie scene. "It's the thirty-somethings who go really wild," he explains, "New, young bands and their fans just stand around and listen. They don't drink or smoke, and for a lot of them, they might as well just watch music at home on YouTube."

Nevertheless, it's clear that there are plenty of imaginative, energetic people in Fukuoka working to engineer a revival in the city's music scene. "People like Inoue, like Bogey from Nontroppo, they're trying to bring underground bands together with more major bands," says Harajiri. "And here at Utero we're trying, too.

"Whether they get famous or not," he concludes, "Fukuoka has always had really cool musicians, so it'll be OK."

Friday, Dec. 10, 2010

Murakami's tale of crazy love falters on the big screen

By MARK SCHILLING

"Love hurts" is a staple message of popular culture everywhere, from blues songs about cheating lovers to tear-jerking Japanese melodramas about teenage couples eternally separated by terminal disease. But "Love can drive you crazy" is one uncomfortable truth mainstream movies, from Hollywood and Japan alike, shy from, for good box office reasons. Their target female audience, who enjoy a good cry over romance gone wrong, is less willing to vicariously dwell in the hell of clinical depression.

Norwegian Wood (Noruwei no Mori) Rating: (2.5 out of 5)      Tainted love: Naoko (Rinko Kikuchi) and Watanabe (Kenichi Matsuyama) suffer the fallout of mental affliction in "Norwegian Wood." ©2010 "NORWEGIAN WOOD" HARUKI MURAKAMI / ASMIK ACE ENTERTAINMENT INC., FUJI TELEVISION INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Director: Anh Hung Tran Running time: 133 minutes Language: Japanese Opens Dec. 11, 2010 [See Japan Times movie listing]

That, however, is what "Norwegian Wood (Noruwei no Mori)," Anh Hung Tran's adaptation of the eponymous Haruki Murakami novel, asks them to do.

Watching the film after it screened in this year's Venice Film Festival competition — and left with mixed reviews and not a single prize — I understood why it had taken more than two decades to bring the novel to the screen, despite the 4 million copies sold since its 1987 publication.

First, the young hero, Toru Watanabe (Kenichi Matsuyama), is immature, introverted and vacillating — hardly a leading-man type — while his ventures into romance are more about intimate talk and interior musings than crowd-pleasing action, in the bedroom or out.

The film's emotional center, however, is the sensitive, fragile Naoko, Watanabe's high-school friend turned lover whose breakdown and long, difficult struggle with mental illness are portrayed with unflinching commitment by Rinko Kikuchi. In contrast to typical heroines in Japanese romantic dramas, however, Naoko is neither reassuringly normal nor upliftingly selfless and pure.

Vietnamese-French Tran ("The Scent of Green Papaya," "The Vertical Ray of the Sun"), who both scripted and directed, has teamed with Taiwanese cinematographer Pin Bing Lee to make dramatically stylish visuals that fully capture the beauty of Japan's seasons and landscapes: Winter has seldom looked as desolatingly wintry and storm waves on a rocky coast as theatrically stormy.

At the same time, the drama of the characters' intertwined and tangled lives feels curiously inert, punctuated by vivid, stark moments of emotional revelation or upheaval. And though the set design and costumes are meticulously of the period, the characters and their problems are not specifically of the 1960s or even Japan: I could easily imagine a French version of the story set in the 1980s — or any modern era you could name.

This impression is strengthened by the music, supervised by Radiohead member Jonny Greenwood, which includes relatively few tunes from the era, in favor of strings and contemporary pop sounds. The title song, however, is the real Beatles deal, instead of the usual Fab Four covers heard in Japanese movies.

As the film begins, Naoko, Watanabe and the soft-spoken, charismatic Kizuki (Kengo Kora), who is Naoko's boyfriend and Watanabe's best pal, are 1960s-era high-school students. But when Kizuki suddenly and inexplicably commits suicide, their little world is shattered. Watanabe goes to college in Tokyo, arriving at the height of the period's student unrest, but takes no interest in radical politics or the local version of the counterculture.

A chance meeting with Naoko leads to a resumption of their friendship — and intensifies their common mourning for Kizuki, particularly Naoko's. This leads, on their private celebration of Naoko's 20th birthday, to a flood of emotion — and awkward passion.

But Watanabe cannot heal Naoko's damaged psyche, and she goes off to the countryside for treatment at a sanitarium. Watanabe exchanges letters with her, but is soon distracted by Midori (Kiko Mizuhara), a perky, talkative, sexually confident girl who is the withdrawn Naoko's polar opposite.

Telling himself that he is only obeying male instinct, Watanabe succumbs to the aggressive Midori's advances. His rattish behavior is encouraged by Nagasawa (Tetsuji Tamayama), a smooth-talking, worldly senior classmate, but Watanabe can't help feeling guilty, especially after he visits Naoko in the sanitarium in the dead of winter and realizes he still has feelings for her.

He also meets Reiko (Reika Kirishima), another patient and Naoko's close friend — who one night sings and plays for them "Norwegian Wood," the Beatles tune that is Naoko's favorite song. But this cozy idyll cannot last.

Matsuyama, best known abroad as the reclusive, sweets-addicted detective L in the "Death Note" films, was the producers' first choice for the introspective Watanabe. He tries to fit the naive, pure-hearted mold of the usual seishun eiga(youth drama) hero, while tamping down the on-screen strangeness that has made him Japan's own version of Johnny Depp. He may be trying to broaden his range, but his performance is on the limited and listless side.

Kikuchi, Oscar-nominated for her performance as a deaf school girl in "Babel," rather amazingly had to audition for the role of Naoko — possibly since she is, at 29, a bit old to be playing yet another troubled young woman. But she also gives the film's strongest performance, convincingly crossing the line from ordinary grief to full-blown depression, which sex cannot heal and tears cannot ease.

One pleasant surprise is Eriko Hatsune as Nagasawa's much-abused girlfriend, who gives Watanabe and Nagasawa a dressing down for their piggishness that is perfectly chilled in its anger and deadly accurate in its thrust. For a moment I thought I was not in Tran's visually sumptuous, amorphous exercise in style, but a film by Stanley Kubrick. Who would have probably told the producers of "Norwegian Wood" that the novel was unfilmable.

Cancún

Un poco de diplomacia....

Seguiremos siendo amigos....

John B. Fenn, Nobel Winner Who Studied Large Molecules, Dies at 93

By KENNETH CHANG

Published: December 12, 2010

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John B. Fenn, who shared the 2002 Nobel Prize for chemistry for developing a technique that sped up the development of new drugs and the study of the molecules of life, died Friday in Richmond, Va. He was 93.

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Virginia Commonwealth University

John B. Fenn in his lab at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2002.

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A spokeswoman for Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, where Dr. Fenn was a professor of chemistry, confirmed Dr. Fenn’s death but did not provide information about its cause or his survivors.

Dr. Fenn was in his 70s when he published the research that won the Nobel Prize, focusing on a new way to identify and map proteins, carbohydrates, DNA and other large biological molecules. He shared the prize with Koichi Tanaka, an engineer in Kyoto, Japan, and Kurt Wüthrich, a professor of biophysics in Zurich, who worked independently on related protein research.

Dr. Fenn improved a technique known as mass spectrometry, which identifies molecules like proteins by how quickly they are accelerated in an electric field. Using his approach, biologists can now identify molecules in a matter of seconds rather than weeks, speeding up research on new drugs.

The techniques have helped create a new field of biology, proteomics, in which scientists are trying to catalog the interplay of hundreds of thousands of proteins in human cells.

“The possibility of analyzing proteins in detail has led to increased understanding of the processes of life,” the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences said in its citation for the 2002 prize.

The problem that had stymied biologists in using mass spectrometry on larger proteins is that such proteins clump together, and thus the scientists would end up measuring the clumps rather than individual proteins.

Dr. Fenn’s breakthrough was to turn a solution containing the proteins into vapor.

In this technique, called electrospray ionization, a strong electric field dispersed charged droplets. As a droplet evaporates, it explodes into smaller droplets; the smaller droplets explode into yet smaller ones until they each contain a singled charged protein hovering in the vapor.

With the proteins separated, scientists could then employ the usual technique of mass spectrometry, applying an electric field to accelerate the molecules and measure their mass.

“We learned to make elephants fly,” Dr. Fenn said in an interview after the announcement of the Nobel. “There’s an awful lot of luck in this,” he added. “In fact, there’s a lot of luck in science.”

Dr. Fenn and Yale battled over the patent rights to electrospray ionization after — contrary to the university’s policy — Dr. Fenn personally patented it and then licensed the patent to a company he had co-founded. A federal judge ruled in 2005 that Dr. Fenn was guilty of “civil theft,” assigned the patent to Yale and ordered Dr. Fenn to pay Yale more than $1 million. He appealed the ruling but lost.

Born June 15, 1917, in New York City, John Bennett Fenn received his undergraduate degree from Berea College in Kentucky in 1937 and his doctorate from Yale in 1940.

He worked at the Monsanto Chemical Company in Anniston, Ala., and Sharples Chemical in Michigan and spent seven years with a small Richmond company, Experiment Inc., that worked on combustion engines.

In 1959, he was named director of Project Squid, a United States Navy research program in jet propulsion, which was administered by Princeton. Dr. Fenn became a professor of aerospace and mechanical sciences at the university.

He moved to Yale in 1967, retiring in 1987 as an emeritus professor. Dr. Fenn moved to Virginia Commonwealth in 1994.

He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

FINDINGS

Real Evidence for Diets That Are Just Imaginary

By JOHN TIERNEY

Published: December 13, 2010

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Call it the Imagine Diet. You wouldn’t have to count calories, track food points or memorize rules. If, say, some alleged friend left a box of chocolate truffles in your home this holiday season, you would neither throw them away nor inhale them all. Instead, you would start eating imaginary chocolates.

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Viktor Koen

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You would give yourself a few seconds to imagine tasting and chewing one truffle. (If there’s a picture on the box, you could focus on it.) Then you would imagine eating another, and then another and another...until at last you could open the box of real chocolates without making a total pig of yourself. And then you could start on fantasies of other vices you wanted to eliminate.

So far, the Imagine Diet exists only in my imagination, as does any evidence of its efficacy. But there is some real evidence for the benefits of imaginary eating from experiments at Carnegie Mellon University reported in the current issue of Science. When people imagined themselves eating M & M’s or pieces of cheese, they became less likely to gorge themselves on the real thing.

This form of mental dieting — I think, therefore I’m full — sounds bizarrely counterintuitive, because we’re all familiar with the opposite phenomenon: thoughts of food that make us more eager to eat it.

Indeed, there’s a well-established phenomenon called sensitization, or sometimes the whetting effect: if you picture yourself eating chocolate, your desire for it increases, and such thoughts can cause you to literally salivate.

Similarly, imagining the sight or the smell of a cigarette will increase a smoker’s craving to light up. And when you actually smell or get a taste of something, that initial sensation can also increase your desire for it.

But eventually that effect is counterbalanced by another well-established phenomenon called habituation. Just as you adjust to bright lights and stop being bothered by bad smells, you get habituated to a food as you eat it.

“After you eat the first little cheeseburger at White Castle, your craving is probably greater than it was before you started your meal,” says Carey Morewedge, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon and the lead author of the Science article. “But your craving is probably going to be lower by the time you start your eighth.”

At that point, you may stop ordering sliders and think you’ve lost your appetite for any food. But habituation is quite specific to the food you’re eating, as has been repeatedly demonstrated both by researchers and by pastry chefs. Restaurant patrons may feel they can’t eat another bite after going through the entree, but they suddenly feel peckish when the dessert cart arrives.

The experiments at Carnegie Mellon are the first to show that habituation to food can occur simply by thinking about eating, according to Dr. Morewedge and his colleagues Young Eun Huh and Joachim Vosgerau.

The habituation occurred as people imagined eating 30 M & M’s or 30 cubes of Kraft Cheddar, one at a time. They were shown photos of each M & M for three seconds, and each cube of cheese for five seconds.

The habituation effect didn’t occur when people imagined eating just three M & M’s or cubes of cheese. Nor did it occur when people imagined moving M & M’s one at a time into a bowl or doing other mental tasks, like feeding quarters into a laundry machine.

The effect required lots of mental eating, and it was specific to each food: the people who imagined eating chocolate didn’t lose their desire for cheese.

The imaginary eating didn’t make people feel any fuller, and it didn’t change their overall opinion of M & M’s or Kraft cheese cubes. They just didn’t feel like eating as much of it at that moment.

“Our desire for food has two components: liking and wanting,” Dr. Morewedge says. “We may very much like ice cream but not want to eat it for breakfast. Imagined consumption didn’t affect how much people in our experiments liked M & M’s, but did reduce how many they wanted to eat. Habituation is generally considered to be a motivational process.”

The importance of mind over stomach was demonstrated in 1998 in a striking experiment with two men whose mental functions were normal except for a severe form of amnesia. They were unable to remember an event for more than a minute. Their eating habits were studied on several days by researchers, led by Paul Rozin at the University of Pennsylvania, who created a rather extended lunch period.

After each man ate his lunch, the food was cleared. In a few minutes, a researcher appeared with an identical meal and announced, “Here’s lunch.” The men always ate up without any complaint about feeling full. Then, after the food was cleared and another few minutes passed, a third lunch was served, and the men always dug into it, too.

In fact, one of them stood up after his third lunch of the day and announced that he would “go for a walk and get a good meal.” Asked what he planned to eat, he replied, “Veal parmigiana” — the same food he had just had for lunch.

When the researchers tried the same experiment on a control group with normal memories, the people all refused a second lunch. They, unlike the men with amnesia, consistently felt less hungry after eating, but the sensation apparently wasn’t just coming from their stomachs, as the researchers concluded.

“Nonphysiological factors seem to be of major importance in the onset and cessation of normal eating,” Dr. Rozin and his colleagues wrote in Psychological Science. “The results suggest that one of the principal nonphysiological factors is memory for what has recently been eaten.”

Now it look as if even memories of imaginary foods can affect people’s desire to eat. Dr. Rozin says he is impressed with the new Carnegie Mellon study, and so is Leonard Epstein, an expert on habituation to food. Dr. Epstein, a psychologist at the State University at Buffalo, says the results raise intriguing questions for further research.

“Can you reproduce the effects over time, or do they only work once or twice?” Dr. Epstein said. “Obviously for this to be useful clinically, it is necessary to work repeatedly. Does it work for everyone, including obese people? Does it work for all foods, or just snack foods?”

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Dr. Morewedge agrees that it’s too early to know how long-lived or useful this effect will be, or whether it will work at all with addictive substances like tobacco.

He hopes to study what happens when people imagine smoking cigarettes. But the results so far, he says, offer some hope of eventually diverting people to healthier diets.

For instance, if you had a bag of carrots and a bag of potato chips in your home, you might try mentally consuming the chips so that you’d be more inclined to reach for a real carrot. And then, assuming that worked, perhaps you could try habituating to other vices.

If you wanted to curb your lust for someone, would it help to envision an erotic encounter in exquisite detail? (In which case pornographers could call themselves providers of therapeutic materials.)

To cut your credit card bills, could you embark on imaginary shopping expeditions? Would fantasizing about goofing off help you stop procrastinating? If you imagined watching “Jersey Shore,” could you avoid the real show?

Dr. Morewedge doesn’t yet have answers, although he does allow that “habituation processes seems to be similar across a variety of modalities and stimuli.” Habituation is inhibited by variety, he says, so for it occur with activities other than eating, you’d presumably have to keep imagining the same act being performed in precisely the same way. And to habituate to a food, you’d have to do more than have vague thoughts about it.

“Our results suggest that you have to engage in the mental activity simulating actual consumption,” Dr. Morewedge says. “You can’t just imagine a whole steak or a whole bar of candy — you have to imagine eating a piece at a time.”

That was easy enough to do in the Carnegie Mellon experiments, which showed people pictures of each piece of food for a few seconds. But what if you want to try this at home? Clearly, there’s a need for an Imagine Diet smartphone app, or at least a book filled with lush illustrations of the planet’s most fattening foods.

No one has any plans for the Imagine Diet Book — not yet, anyway — but Dr. Morewedge and his colleagues have been joking about introducing a new format to the diet genre.

“It would be all pictures,” he says. “The first diet flip book.”