Whistlin' Dixie (Well...Tootling it, at least!)

A number of years ago I was asked to sit in with a Dixieland combo. The leader, who played sousaphone (a type of tuba that is round so as to sit on the shoulders) was an American who was with the JET Program, the government project that was responsible for bringing me to the Land of the Rising Sun in the first place. The lead trumpet player, Mr. K, is a music teacher in my area and a musician I've worked with off and on for years. The clarinetist was the father of one of my students at Ye Olde Academy at the time. (There were a couple of other members, but they were people I hadn't met before.) I was asked to play tenor saxophone. After that first gig together, which was at an International Fellowship event in Kashima, I was invited to perform with them more regularly. My schedule made it hard for me to participate very often, but I did manage to appear with them in a number of gigs, usually at festival events. With a constantly-changing lineup, we played at a number of places including a few festival halls, the Ibaraki Prefecture government building, and a culture center down in Yokohama.

It was a lot of fun, and I really enjoyed it, but I have to admit there was a small degree of frustration on my part. The sousaphone player and Mr. K knew what they were doing, obviously, but among the various other members that came and went (usually based on who was available at the time) there was an awful lot of WAWD (What Are We Doing) syndrome, i.e. they were more or less lost. If we played a tune that had a full arrangement things went okay, but if we only had the melody and chord changes, which is what jazz is supposed to be about anyway, the performance had a bad habit of devolving into a chaotic mass of noise, no one paying any attention to what the others were doing (or what the chord changes were, for that matter). That's fine for a while, but I admit it often got a bit irritating, especially since the tenor sax plays more of a supporting role in a Dixieland combo. I continued to play with the combo as much as I could for a while, but eventually a combination of an increasingly complicated schedule and declining motivation on my part led to my participating less and less. Eventually the invitations to play stopped coming altogether.

Cut to a week ago. I suddenly got a phone call out of the blue inviting me to play with the combo again. It was to be at a beer garden event at Kashima Central Hotel, where I had stayed to help out with the Garfield High School orchestra only a couple of weeks before. It had been at least a couple of years since I'd played with the combo. Come to think of it, it had been quite a while since I'd done ANY kind of real jazz performance in front of an audience. There were some nagging doubts. I was happy with my performance with the Kashima Philharmonic at the Kashima Music Festival in June, but there's a big difference between "Bolero" and Dixieland Jazz. I was seriously worried about mold and rust, so I wasn't sure about it, but I went ahead and said yes anyway. Considering all the pressure in my life at the time, I figured it would be a welcome distraction.

The day of the performance came, and yet another surprising phone call came. I admit that, for a number of reasons (including fear of rust), I was starting to feel inclined to bow out of the gig, but it turned out they had a problem. The clarinetist who had been a regular member before had long since dropped out, and the "in training" replacement had suddenly phoned in to announce his absence. They asked me if I could play clarinet instead of sax. Considering the importance of clarinet in a Dixieland band, I didn't want to let them down, but I felt even more pressured even though clarinet is (theoretically at least) my #1 instrument. I went for it.

I'm glad I did, too, because that was probably the most fun I'd had on stage in YEARS! Yes, there was some rust in my fingers, but I managed to work the worst of it out. One of the characteristics of Dixieland is that the tunes are simple but fun, i.e. none of the really obtuse, rapid chord changes you find in modern jazz. I was able to relax and get into it. My horn was responding really well, and once I was fully in the groove I was able to cut loose and wail like there was no tomorrow. Unlike the tenor sax, the clarinet in a Dixieland band has more authority and therefore more right to do what he wants when he wants. I milked that for as much as it was worth while still trying not to step on too many toes. What was really fun was when Mr. K and I started trading twos and fours and finally jamming together (i.e. me improvising a countermelody to his improvised melody), something I was never allowed to do on tenor saxophone. The second trumpet player and I also had fun improvising backing rhythms behind other solos, something else I'd never been able to do with that group before. I also had some fun singing vocals on a few tunes. The leader of the group on his sousaphone eagerly drew the tunes out so we could keep the energy going, giving us the signal to go back to the melody when it was time to quit. All in all, it was a total blast, and I'm very glad I did it.

The audience in the beer garden, most of whom were there by reservation, gave us a warm (if comfortably inebriated) response. It also turned out that Mr. K and I knew some of them...and were known by several more...because they were people involved with Kashima's music and/or festival scene. We were also photographed for the local newspaper.

I guess there's nothing wrong with a little image-dropping, eh? Especially when it's SO MUCH FUN?

After the gig I was told that I'd be hearing from them soon. I hope so. I'd really like to do something like this again!

****
An (unpleasant) update

After coming home from the Dixieland gig with my feelings (and my ego) all nicely pumped up, I was given some very bad news. The doctors had had a look at my mother-in-law earlier that day. The prognosis was about as bad as it could possibly get. The doctor recommended that we have anyone wanting to see her one last time come within the next week. After that there are no guarantees. Ironically, she seemed more chipper when we went to visit her today, but the doctor says it won't last long. It appears that her fight is pretty much over.

Now I'm on the verge of learning about an area of Japanese culture that is both very important and full of very old traditions. It's also an area that I know almost nothing about. Frankly speaking, I'm not looking forward to the opportunity.

The Vanishing Culture of Japan? (pt. I)

Culture, like language (or disease), is constantly evolving. Unless it is totally bottled up in its own environment, it is a given that it will be influenced by other civilizations which come into contact with it. Even countries with the strongest sense of ethnic and/or national identity will find themselves adapting if not borrowing outright customs from beyond their borders, and this will lead to some native customs being abandoned in favor of foreign ideas which prove more popular. The result is a change in the host culture.

Darwin called this process "natural selection". Whether you believe in evolution, Intelligent Design or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, it is a very real and observable process, and the clash of civilizations is a very good example.

Culturally speaking, Japan has always been a very resilient country. In his novel "Silence", Japanese author Shusaku Endo describes his native Japan as a "swamp". He says that, no matter what ideas and customs may come in from abroad, they all wind up sinking into the swamp. Rarely is anything imported verbatim. Once a foreign custom or idea is brought in, it winds up becoming something Japanese in the end. Columnists and politicians here in the Land of the Rising Sun are fond of complaining of the Westernization of Japan and the corresponding demise of Japanese culture, but is this really the case? Well, let's look at some fading traditions and draw our own conclusions.

1. Chopsticks



This is a favorite of the local media. It seems that many if not most Japanese children nowadays can't use chopsticks properly. They hold them in all kinds of bizarre ways, often with messy results. Given a choice, most will choose Western-style forks and spoons. Now more and more convenience stores are giving out plastic forks with salads instead of the traditional waribashi (disposable chopsticks) unless specifically asked. Even maps and car navigation systems indicate a restaurant (even a traditional Japanese one) with a symbol of a knife and fork.

However - I actually ran into some trouble when I first came to Japan because the Japanese have their own system of manners regarding use of Western eating utensils. Once when I ate at an American-style restaurant in Kashima I followed the usual pattern of starting with the outermost utensils and working my way in. Apparently that was wrong, because, with a huff, the waitress replaced the knife I'd used with my first course, took away the next one in line on my table, banged it into the dirty dish tray, and said, "Baka ja nai?" ("What an idiot!") I've also noticed that it's the custom here to eat plain rice on the underside of the fork. Actually, though, I don't think chopsticks will disappear completely. They're still what you get if you eat at any traditional Japanese restaurant.

2. Kimono



Back in my high school days I remember watching a Japanese exchange student perform a traditional dance in a lovely kimono. After she was done, she grabbed the microphone and said, "You probably think I dress like this all the time. Wrong. I don't. This dress is really uncomfortable, and I don't like to wear it." Back then I couldn't help but be a bit surprised by her caustic attitude revelation. (Now, thinking about it in retrospect, I'm only surprised by her English ability!) I of course had always harbored an image of Japanese girls as being polite, graceful, and at least sometimes clad in kimonos. Boy, was I mistaken! Yes, kimonos are rather uncomfortable. (No, I've never tried wearing one myself, but I know how tight they pull those obi sashes...and I also know how well kimono don't fit the Westernizing Japanese female figure!) They are also very expensive. At the same time, Japanese women tend to be obsessed with European name-brand clothing anyway, so kimonos just don't enter the picture.

However - while modern Japanese women may not like to wear kimono often, they still take great pride in them. You can often see them parading around in them at festivals or important events like weddings. Also, young women go to a lot of expense and trouble to dress up in special kimono for their "Coming of Age" ceremony. Little girls are also dressed up in kimono for their Shichigosan (7-5-3) celebrations. While we're talking about female dress, I suppose it would also be appropriate to add that clothing fashions here do NOT exactly match those of the countries whose brand names they adore. In fact, when my wife and I visited Burberrys, Liberty, and Laura Ashley shops in London during our honeymoon she was shocked at how "boring" the selections were there compared with those of the same shops back in Japan!

3. "Squatty Potties"



Western-style toilets weren't always easy to find back in the 90s. Many if not most houses as well as the overwhelming majority of public restrooms had the traditional Asian "squatties". Even at Ye Olde Academy there were only three restrooms in the entire, sprawling campus that had sit-down types, and they were all intended for either guests or the principal. Actually, "squatties" aren't as bad as you probably think; many people, including a lot of ex-pats here, believe them to be a more effective way of emptying one's bowels. I also appreciated the fact that you didn't have to worry about pressing your naked cheeks against a freezing-cold seat in winter. However, it's impossible to relax when using them. Medical experts have even gone so far as to claim they present a possibly damaging strain on the legs. At any rate, public opinion seems to be turning against them, and they are rapidly disappearing. Now it seems like most restrooms either offer a choice (like most of them now do at Ye Olde Academy) or have only Western sit-down types.

However - As Western-style toilets have become prevalent, so have the heated toilet seat and the bidet. Now it is even harder to find a simple, unpowered toilet than it is to find a "squatty". Moreover, toilets of any sort in Japan have always been equipped with 2-speed flushing, i.e. "little" (for "number ones") and "big" (for "number twos"). Most Japanese would probably find a single-speed flush toilet hard to understand.

4. Keigo

お客様、こちらへ御覧に成ります。これから御説明致します。

The term "keigo" (敬語) directly translates as "honorific speech". In addition to separate plain and polite forms of the verb, the Japanese language includes a number of unique words, expressions, and even grammar patterns that are used to indicate either respect for someone else or polite self-degradation. Honorific speech can be quite complex. Indeed, it was one of the most difficult parts of my Japanese language study before I came to Japan...

...and discovered that few people actually use it. In fact, most adults here seem not to know it very well at all, and they often use it as a trivia game topic to quiz each other during parties. The overwhelming majority of teens have no concept of it whatsoever. It used to be simple, everyday, common sense etiquette, but now it is virtually a dead language.

However - even though the Japanese people tend not to use keigo very much anymore, their machines certainly do! Withdraw cash from any modern ATM machine, and a soft female voice will probably bathe your ears with some classic polite speech (usually while a doe-eyed cartoon woman bows demurely on the monitor screen). The same is true of a lot of vending machines. Keigo is also what tends to spew from those obnoxious speaker vans and planes that blast political campaign messages during election season. In other words, keigo has become something that is heard but not spoken, but that will help ensure its existence for some time.

5. Kanji

The Chinese written system, known locally as kanji (漢字), was brought into Japan as early as 47 AD(/CE) but didn't come into widespread use until around the 5th century. It has been a problem ever since. True, there are many advantages to using kanji; the fact that it is mainly read for its direct meaning rather than its phonetic pronunciation actually speeds up the reading process (though it makes writing more tedious) and makes misunderstanding less likely. However, the Chinese written system was obviously designed for use with the Chinese language, which is totally different from Japanese. Since compatibility was all but impossible, Japanese priests, scholars, scribes, and nobles adopted the habit of simply writing everything in Chinese but reading them in Japanese. That was more than a little inconvenient, obviously, (Imagine going through life with everything written in Greek but read in English!) , but the practice was maintained for around 500 years. To make things a bit easier, a system of markings was developed to add to the Chinese writing to at least help the reader understand the differing word order. That was still a pain in the butt, of course, so finally female aristocrats in the 10th century got fed up with it all and designed a pure phonetic alphabet which could be used to write Japanese directly. That script is now known as hiragana. It quickly caught on with everyone except the male nobles and Buddhist scholars, who stubbornly went on writing in Chinese (rather like IBM stubbornly sticking with "sophisticated" text-based operating systems even when Apple had proven people like GUI things better) and then invented their own, parallel phonetic script, which is now known as katakana. Eventually the three written systems settled into a sort of uneasy symbiosis, with kanji providing the meaningful components of most words, hiragana indicating the grammar constructions, and katakana spelling out all the foreign stuff.

Perhaps the biggest danger lie in the fact that hiragana was also used for children's writing. In other words, kids learned it first followed by katakana and kanji later. That meant that not only did people retain hiragana easier, but they tended to fall back on it whenever they couldn't remember how to write a particular kanji. Over time, it became more and more common for more difficult kanji to disappear from writing altogether, replaced instead with hiragana as the standard. Even now I'm occasionally told that kanji I learned in college are no longer considered part of everyday written discourse, and my using them makes me sound rather stuffy or bookish. Even worse is the fact that it seems to be an increasing fashion trend for young people , girls in particular, to write ONLY in hiragana...i.e. teens and twains writing like grade school students. They say they do it because it "looks cute", but it has also become a custom in SMS messaging an cell phone e-mails. Kanji has suddenly found itself being dragged closer and closer toward life as a museum exhibit.

However - the Japanese in general still seem to have a lot of pride in kanji, and they consider its knowledge a mark of good character. Even teens who rarely write anything but hiragana outside the classroom occasionally quiz each other on their kanji knowledge. Finding difficult kanji on a sign also arouses intense curiosity more often than not. Also, as I mentioned in a recent post, the Japanese still take great pride in the kanji they use in their names. Yes, kanji may likely fade from general use, but it will never disappear completely.

(To be continued...)