Voyapon’s Editor in Chief, Paul McInnes, reflects on two decades spent in his adopted homeland of Japan in a long-form essay.
The late great American writer Joan Didion once stated that the reason why she wrote was to explore and find out what she wanted and feared. I’m sure there are other reasons for writing and creating but I like and respect Didion’s explanation. In terms of creation in fashion, a subject I’ve written about for years, there are a lot of designers who look as if they love the game and the sheer ostentation involved. Versace, Dolce & Gabbana, Dsquared — brands who have always emanated money and, for me, overt flamboyance. The Japanese word charai pretty much nails this aesthetic on the head.
Memories of Art and Artists
Other creators, however, design to feel. To show that they cry, fuck, howl and crumple. One of my favorite ever fashion designers, Alexander McQueen, had the line “love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,” from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, tattooed on his upper right arm that told you everything you needed to know about him. His, quite frankly, stunning career reflects and imbues a sense of sentimentality and ardor. A man who lived to love and loved to live until it all sadly became too much for him.
There are other artists, however, whose work also mirrors the times in which they live — using political, cultural and religious signifiers. There are also the “magpies” who take from disparate sources like Jean-Michel Basquiat and T.S. Eliot who, in The Waste Land, teased the reader with a list of references ranging from Dante, Shakespeare and Homer to Stoker, the Bible and the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad.
Then there are the unknowable. Designers or artists who create in a vacuum. Comme des Garçons designer Rei Kawakubo states that she never really uses the outside world or current events to illustrate meaning. For her, it’s an abstraction, a feeling, a wayward and muffled thought unconnected to the exterior. Kawakubo also lives an interior life. A life lived within the walls and confines of the mind.
There is something that Kawakubo does do, in her decades-spanning oeuvre, that reflects a belief. Something which energizes and pushes her forward and that is feminism and gender. She’s angry, and quite rightly so, and uses her position as one of the most respected fashion designers and artists in recent memory to point the mirror at the needless and oppressive patriarchy involved in fashion, Japan and society as a whole. In an interview with renowned fashion critic Takeji Hirakawa from 1990 she says:
“When I was young, it was unusual for a female university graduate to do the same job as a man. And of course women didn’t earn the same. I rebelled against that. And when my fashion business started running well, I was thought of as unprofessional because I was not a fashion school graduate. Then, when I went to Paris…I rebelled against that as well. I never lose my ability to rebel, I get angry and that anger becomes my energy for certain. I wouldn’t be able to create anything if I stop rebelling.”
From the early collections, it was evident that Kawakubo wasn’t interested in gender, not really. Sure, under the Comme des Garçons umbrella there are lines for men and women but when you see them, they are pretty much interchangeable. In her collection for Spring/Summer 1995 titled Transcending Gender she explored apparel that was blissfully free from being defined and compartmentalized. According to Vogue, Kawakubo said in a post-show interview that, “Spiritually, there are no more differences between men and women. What is important is being human.”
Tableaux Vivants
As a student of theater I was always fascinated with tableaux vivants or living tableaux. Tableaux vivants is defined as “a static scene containing one or more actors or models. They are stationary and silent, usually in costume, carefully posed.” This device is used in theater of course but also in fashion, film and various performing arts. In theater, Ariane Mnouchkine, Robert Wilson, Yukio Ninagawa (father of acclaimed contemporary Japanese photographer Mika Ninagawa) were all fond of tableaux while in experimental film the great English director Derek Jarman was a leader in terms of this kind of artistic movement. In fashion, probably the greatest example is to be found in Alexander McQueen’s tour de force Spring/Summer 2001 collection Voss which contains one of the greatest mise-en-scene in modern fashion performance. The nihilistic and knowing nod to the work of artist Francis Bacon, the denouement involves a cube/cage being slowly taken apart, mechanically, to expose a nude, obese model (a fantastically poised Michelle Olley) with a mask, breathing through a tube and overcome by a collection of moths which float carelessly throughout the mental asylum set design. Overtones of Bacon, McQueen’s beloved Leigh Bowery and Japanese photographer Masahisa Fukase’s work Ravens. Masochistic, sadistic and terrifying, the tableaux vivant and lasting image/s carries through time and is still being talked about today.
In Sally Potter’s Orlando, the English auteur also plays with tableaux vivants as each scene or sequence is staged with a great motionless flourish. Why is this artistic and creative device used so much throughout art? I’m not sure but I like to think that it mirrors our memories, like a film still, a snapshot from the past or from a dream or nightmare.
In fact the beautiful German language has a word for it, Augenblick — a glance or short period of time. My life and memories of my life are composed of such scenes, sitting on my grandfather’s lap, days before he dies watching the horse racing on television while he ate spring onions with HP Sauce, my first kiss with a beautiful girl named Sonia outside a school playground in a neighboring town, my graduation from university where I wore a navy blue three-button suit and tartan tie to reinforce my Scottishness amongst my many English peers, my father holding me tightly against a huge bonfire we were watching one November with dancing embers and the smell of peat which lingered for days. My wedding day standing on church steps in Yokohama wearing a kilt with my beautiful bride beside me or the day my daughter was born when the nurse passed a black marker pen to me and asked me to write a name on her leg and I wrote — Kotone. These are the tableaux vivants from my life. They remind me and define me. That is why they are so bewitching.
In 2007, probably one of my favorite ever television shows was first aired. Matthew Weiner’s epic Mad Men, a seven-season series about advertising men from 1960 to 1970 on Madison Avenue in New York. With the flawless Jon Hamm playing complex and deeply flawed protagonist Don Draper it had a monumental impact on television, modern culture and fashion. Mad Men, however, was never really about advertising. It detailed the nitty gritty intricacies involved in being human. And reflected the changes in politics, race relations, gender, family structures and fashion with such beauty and poise that it will always be regarded as one of the most groundbreaking television series of all time.
You can find tableaux vivants throughout Mad Men too. My favorite, but bleakest, is framed within the penultimate episode of Season Five and just precedes Englishman Lane Pryce committing suicide by hanging himself in his office. He sits on his swivel chair with the coldest New York snow outside the window, with skyscrapers looming opposite. But if you look closely there’s a small figurine of the Statue of Liberty placed on his left. The director frames it and the scene stops and what we have is a painting, a snapshot. A troubled man, cold and anxious, contemplating ending his life with an emblem of freedom in front. The noble and disturbing notion that suicide is freedom and that Pryce will be liberated from his troubles.
Beautiful, still and poignant this scene is something I think about and one which remains in me as much as an Alison Watt painting, or a song by The Smiths or the exquisite ballerina skirt with the Hinomaru design found in Kawakubo’s Spring/Summer 2007 Cubisme collection for Comme des Garçons. To be more precise and pedantic, the garment in question can be described as white triacetate/polyester tulle dress with black nylon applique and red rayon flock print with hinomaru (rising sun) motif. Interestingly, the designer says of the Hinomaru that, “To me, it’s the purest form of design in existence.” I tend to agree.
I was drawn to writing because I’m first and foremost a reader but also due to my stammer. I find it much easier and liberating to write than speak. I don’t remember much about those days (2007-2015) but I learned quickly at The Japan Times through a series of editors. Some old school, aggressive and direct and others softer and more supple, probing and suggesting. The systems in place need to be learned such as using fax machines and keigo (honorific language) when emailing and the use of kikakusho (project or article overview) and iraisho (a written request) when contacting subjects and institutions. Recording interviews on my old dictaphone, the weary and unenjoyable transcription process, the cringing at and realization that your own voice is horrible when heard on tape. The methods and rules that the Fourth Estate works by, which is slowly and surely being eroded as time passes.
I was also working at Waseda University at this time and was to be employed there for the next eight years. I was miserable most of the time, often aggressive and unhappy, often to be found looking at myself in the mirror with disgust and a longing to be removed.
I sometimes think of this time, especially 2006 and 2007. London had been bombed, buses blown apart and trains decimated. Terrorists also made a fundamental mistake in trying to bomb Glasgow Airport with baggage handler John Smeaton fighting terrorists with other airport staff and when asked what he experienced afterwards said, “Glasgow doesn’t accept this. This is Glasgow; we’ll set about ye.” I’ve rarely been this proud of my people than this moment.
The 2006 Football World Cup was held in Germany, my favorite Japanese indie band Tenniscoats’ Totemo Aimasho album and Julian Schnabel’s masterful The Diving Bell and the Butterfly were released. I wrote about fashion and theater and was eventually taking steps to become something else.
Indigenous Culture
I met renowned American writer Toni Morrison once. In May of 1998, my girlfriend Louise and I had just graduated from Glasgow University or were just about to graduate and attended a talk by Morrison at the university. She had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 and had just released Paradise and as young, eager students and fans of her work this was a once-in-a-lifetime event. A powerful and beautiful person with a commanding voice she must have read from Paradise but I’m not sure, to be honest. I do remember Louise speaking with her and Morrison signing her book. She also gave me such a beatific smile, one that I will never forget. Morrison is the kind of writer who inspires, rages through her work and raged until the very end, detailing African-American history, language, gender and discourse. She cared about fiction and knew, from her own experiences, how it can alter, inspire and change someone’s life. She inserted a seed inside me, along with other writers I had the pleasure of hearing read from their works over the years including Alasdair Gray, A.L. Kennedy, Janice Galloway, James Kelman, Junot Diaz, Geoff Dyer, and Mieko Kawakami.
Morrison, much like Woolf and Kawakubo, had a fiercely idiosyncratic voice. Blurring realities with imagination, with a balanced emotion and with a vision that is still stimulating readers and artists today.
I’ve always felt a very strong kinship with the Ainu people of Japan even though I haven’t met any Ainu or been to any Ainu facilities in Hokkaido. My colleagues Maria and Toshiko, however, are Catalan and proudly so. They have their own cultural identity, language, cuisine and so on, much like the Scottish and the Ainu. What Morrison was asserting through her fiction and perhaps Kawakubo, Issey Miyake and Yohji Yamamoto through the medium of fashion was a statement of national and cultural identity. Independent of imperialism, enslavement or fascism — repugnant philosophies we should always be rallying against especially in these times of Trump and the rise of the rightwing in Europe.
In his in defense of language — and by language he means any medium that is used to communicate, Glaswegian writer James Kelman always refused to accept the word “dialect” as it was, to him and many others (myself included), an inherently imperialist term to patronize working-class language. According to Kelman, there was and has never been, swearing, patois, dialect — only language. It’s the reason why, until this day, I use “aye” instead of “yes” and “wee” instead of “small, “pal” meaning “friend” amongst many other Scottish and Glaswegian terms. I’ve never been ashamed of who I am and where I’m from and neither should the Catalan, Uyghurs and Ainu people. In his Booker-Prize winning speech for the seminal novel How Late It Was, How Late, in 1994, Kelman proudly stated:
“There is a literary tradition to which I hope my own work belongs, I see it as part of a much wider process — or movement — toward decolonization and self-determination: it is a tradition that assumes two things: 1) The validity of indigenous culture; and 2) The right to defend in the face of attack. It is a tradition premised on a rejection of the cultural values of imperial or colonial authority, offering a defence against cultural assimilation, in particular imposed assimilation.
“Unfortunately, when people assert their right to cultural or linguistic freedom they are accused of being ungracious, parochial, insular, xenophobic, racist etc.
“As I see it, it’s an argument based solely on behalf of validity, that my culture and my language have the right to exist, and no one has the authority to dismiss that right, they may have power to dismiss that right, but the authority lies in the power and I demand the right to resist it.”
Indigenous culture, language, identity, fashion, fiction, food, art, architecture, and music, then, should always be considered sacrosanct and be welcomed and embraced as we defiantly fight for a future devoid of any hate, fear or discrimination.
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