Tag: japan

Suicide, Abortion and The Donald

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

One thing with writing in here each day is that it makes you take notice of interesting stories or news you discover online. Usually that evolves into an entire piece but sometimes two stories can become one. Sometimes I just want to make a short comment on something without having to turn it into a whole piece. When I do I risk dragging it out or am forced to spend time researching something enough to write a decent article. That isn’t always the case because if it’s politics or football I’m straight in there. Suicides in Japan though, what the hell do I know about that. But this being the internet, I’ll make a comment…

I was going to make some kind of statement about suicide being part of Japanese culture. Or at least that we’re looking at a situation in Japan through western lenses. However Japan only has the thirtieth highest rate of suicides in the world, above it are half of Africa it would seem and other countries like Belgium, Uruguay, India, and Russia. Importantly though South Korea comes in tenth and while the two countries culture and history are different I will make a potentially ignorant statement and suggest Korean culture is the closest to what is an incredibly unique one in Japan. Again, as per previous pieces, national and cultural stereotypes are stupid and a waste of time but we make them anyway for the sake of understanding. Perhaps it’s the link to Samurai killing themselves which makes us think it’s so high or the stories of Japanese overworking. Saying that Koreans are even guiltier of that apparently which may explain the higher rate. Anyway, this whole suicidal ramble was in response to a series of seemingly high profile suicides in Japan recently.

And then Trump, fuck the man’s pushing everyone even closer to a second civil war. I mentioned this fear previously and when I asked an American friend about it it was dismissed as something just going one in certain parts of the country. But still, a new Judge on the Supreme Court that will tilt it even further on a conservative slant. The likely affect on abortion rights, or Roe Vs Wade. It is happening everywhere seemingly but America is becoming even more divisive with every big moment. This election coming up is potentially going to be like a bomb going off. It’s not too crazy to envisage a civil war. They do have a history of such things. It is still remarkable that religion plays any part in the slightest in politics or how a country exists. I guess it affects cultural behaviours and then political ones too. The accusations thrown at the Middle-East, Islam and Sharia Law seem infinitely hypocritical.

Staying on Trump, the news that he only paid $750 over two years in taxes. Sounds like he needs a better accountant. That and him making losses all these years. I won’t feign surprise, that’s how these things work. It will have little bearing on an already entrenched vote. He has incriminated Ivanka though, her being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in consultancy fees while also being on the board is an entirely illegal act. That should be interesting although they don’t take down their own, not properly anyway. And ‘they’ are not divided by Democrat and Republic leanings. That’s just the game for us to play.

Haruki Murakami

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

I finally got over my readers block and finished what feels like my first book in months. I feel very pleased with myself. With enforced isolation around the corner maybe we’ll all get a chance to have a little read soon. The book was ‘Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World’ by Haruki Murakami. I’m sure there’s a proper word for it but it is two stories running parallel to each other, which you find out as the story evolves are interconnected. One was a cyber punk detective story about a man who ‘shuffles’ information for a quasi-governmental organisation call The System and who finds himself being chased down by first The System’s shady rivals and then some underground sub-human aquatic monsters called Inklings. The story was written in 1985 so imagine all of your favourite dark grimy 80s punk sci-fi films and picture how that could look and unfold. The other is a dreamy story about a man who arrives in a walled town which he cannot leave, he has his shadow taken from him and he works as a dreamreader. The town also has unicorns. It is obvious in any book which is two stories together that they interconnect so it is probably okay to say that without giving too much away.

It seems every Murakami novel, I say every but this is only my third, the men are solitary lonely lovers of jazz and alcohol. It mustn’t be coincidental that prior to becoming an author Murakami ran a jazz bar in Tokyo. The women in his story are never like any women I’ve ever met, they seem both simple and deep and are usually quite promiscuous. I have heard criticism of his female characters as being unreal but I mentioned this to a woman once who suggested the women were merely described from the perspective of the narrator and that this was either how the narrator experienced them or how he viewed women. They couldn’t in that case be unreal and I quite like that description, it seems like an insight worth repeating when I am attempting to sound smart.

Murakami described this as his favourite novel he had written and while it is not his most successful or well renowned it does seem to have won a variety of awards over the years. I enjoyed it but I felt it lacked on to ‘South of the Border, West of the Sun’ and his collection of short stories ‘Men Without Women’ which was the first Murakami I read and didn’t just enjoy because I was feeling like a man without a woman at the time. He has a pained empty loneliness in his work, apparently in this style it is a very Japanese thing, but it feels like something you can connect with in a positive way despite those not appearing to be positive attributes at first. We enjoy authors because of story or language but quite often because we can connect to them. There is a depth to his work that is approachable and relatable, and as I finish his books I am always excited to read the next. If you haven’t read your first yet I think you know what you need to do. You may just have a little time on your hands soon anyway.

Poison

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

It is a shame that having done so well and in a way turned the corner with my piece the day after Tomorrow – you see what I did there – as that was supposed to be the one which was the beginning of a new era in mini blog piece writing. Yesterday the mind was dying of death, an alcohol related death. Being thirty four years of age, the hangovers are different to just five years ago. It is remarkable though because when younger, those both hungover and older than I, sometimes commented on how easy it was for me regarding hangovers and how much worse they get as you age. While I didn’t disbelieve them it is easy to admit to not being fully appreciative of what they were saying. If anyone reading this over the age of thirty I am sure I have your understanding sympathy and for those below thirty ignore me at your peril. For now and for a few years my hangovers don’t just last one day, there is at least two full days of not feeling quite right after a good drinking session. After a three day stag party it is a week of actual genuine illness. The body has been poisoned, and we’ve done it to ourselves.

I was listening to a podcast today, the guest being someone whose name I have forgotten but he directed the documentary The Cove about the Japanese murder of thousands of dolphins each year. It is a famous documentary but if you haven’t watched it I suggest strongly you do. He was saying in the podcast about how the Japanese eat dolphin meat, even putting it in school menus and recommending it to pregnant women. Ignoring the fact that we just shouldn’t kill let alone eat such beautiful and intelligent creatures, dolphin meat also contain dangerously high levels of mercury. Ultimately the Japanese people are being poisoned and poisoning themselves. We have poisoned the seas, we eat cows full of steroids and hormones, soya from burnt deforested rainforest and puss filled milk which three-quarter of the worlds population don’t even contain the right enzymes to break down. Lets be honest, hit thirty and hangover may last two days but if it takes about three months to flush mercury out of your system I suspect those hops are the least of our worries. It’s times like these that I make numerous vows and very rarely follow them through. What is it again about being human, being human and self-destructive. Our daily mission to poison ourselves and those around us.