Character Design 2: Mariko Sato

I’m still iffy on Mariko’s last name, but for now “Sato” will do. My friend Makiko (also Sato) was nicknamed “Sugar” in highschool (Sato sounds like “satou,” meaning “sugar”), though it’s more flattering for her than for Mariko. Still, she puts on a good show – character stylesheet below.

Character Names as Character History: Seiji Kanezawa

Feeling a little under the weather today, but I am hoping to pull out a longer entry tomorrow. Here’s a little something to tide you over.

Seiji Kanezawa (in the Western order of given name and last name, formerly referred to as “Yukio” and “Yunho,” placeholder names until I put some thought into it) is Korean-Japanese or 在日韓国人 (Zainichi Kankokujin), a Japanese citizen of Korean ancestry. Seiji’s full Korean name is Soon-jung Kim. In kanji, Seiji’s Japanese name is written 金澤精二, the characters corresponding to “kane” “zawa” “sei” and “ji” respectively.

“Kanezawa” is taken from “Kim” (gold = kim, kin, or kane) plus “pond” (a water element). “Soon” is a generational name that corresponds to the water element, and anyone else of the same generation would have a given name beginning with “Soon.” (Generational names correspond to one of the five Chinese elements, and generally go from one element to the next with each generation; so one generation would have an iron-based generational name, the next a wood-based, etc). “Jung” can be read as “sei” in kanji and in Seiji’s case uses a kanji for purity. “Seiji” is an exclusively male name and uses the kanji for two, so it is the name for a second son (though Soon-jung is a unisex name).

So “Seiji Kanezawa” keeps the kanji from “Kim” and “Jung,” and the water element from “Soon.” Though he’s fourth generation, his grandfather having come to Japan as a forced laborer during WWII, Seiji might have chosen his own last name. His family would not necessarily pick a name with a water element that conveniently replaces the lost water element part of Seiji’s name. Seiji’s family name in Japanese could be: Kimura, Kanekuni, etc etc – anything starting with 金, read as “Kin” or “Kane.”

Though “Soon-jung” doesn’t indicate birth order, there is no reason to convert it to “Seiji” (instead of other options like “Seiichiro,” which uses the kanji for one and indicates a first-born son) if he wasn’t the second born.

Book Review: Geisha, A Life by Iwasaki Mineko

I’ve only read three books directly about geisha, but I am already sensing a certain trend of narcissism. Memoirs of a Geisha was a white guy’s shameless sexualization and misrepresentation of the stories women had trusted him with. Geisha by Lisa Dalby, while the most thorough and factual, is still full of self-aggrandizing and myth-making with this “American geisha” bullshit, and has a bit too much “scholarly foreigner states broad generalizations as fact instead of opinion” for my taste. That said, what are books if not the works of our egos, and memoirs doubly so – so Iwasaki Mineko’s Geisha, A Life, may be as much a look into the geisha day-to-day as Iwasaki’s own self-image and personal agenda, but she paints an interesting enough picture in the process that I can’t fault her for it. Especially with non-fiction, autiobiographies, and memoirs, there can’t help but be some delusion (or deception) involved. It’s just a matter of whether or not the delusion is an interesting and entertaining one, and Iwasaki manages it.

Confined to an English-language market where the most popular books on any subject will inevitably be by native speakers, Iwasaki’s memoir of her geisha training in 1960s Kyoto was a welcome relief. As one might gather from the above paragraph, I’m a little sick of hearing what white people think about The Exotic Orient ™, whether they think it’s full of sexy ladies or that they are so a part of it you can trust their interpretation as if they were Japanese, etc etc. The fact is, while not homogeneous, Japanese society is not something one can really absorb or be absorbed into unless that was what you were born into. So, as an authority by default, Iwasaki gets a fair amount of credit for providing probably the most accurate account of geisha life in general, even if her assessment of her own life is a little more suspect.

Iwasaki’s memoir begins in her toddler years and goes through her training, debut, and eventual retirement. While the story follows the arc of her life, she uses it to explain the course of geisha training and the practice of the profession as much as to recount what happened to her. It’s obvious she is a woman much offended by the gross misinformation about geisha, particularly in the Western world. As truthful as she intends to be about her own situation, however, her naivete and obliviousness to her own privilege – she was brought up to be the heir of her okiya (geisha house) and was one of the most famous and highest-billed geisha of her time – make it clear that the way she lives is not the way all, or even many, geisha live.

The only downside to hearing the little-told story of geisha life from a genuinely insider perspective is the cultural inclinations that go along with it. Iwasaki is already making a huge faux pas by talking about private matters, but rather than see that as a reason to just go all out, air all the dirty laundry, talk all the shit she ever wanted to talk, on some subjects she is clearly holding back. Maybe that, or she thought her specific grievances with the karyukai (probably best described as the big bureaucracy overseeing the geisha business) weren’t of interest to her memoir readership, even though these are clearly matters that defined her life and directly caused her retirement at age 29. Perhaps I just want too much organizational change and social justice in the world, so I irrationally demand its discussion in the books I read. But this is a matter that clearly bothers Iwasaki, and which is so obviously a flaw in the geisha training scheme that even I picked up on it on my visit to Kyoto: if girls start as maiko at 16, and train to be geisha and nothing but geisha, what happens when they’re too old, or are injured, or otherwise need to/want to/are forced to leave the profession? If they save up money they can open a restaurant, if they’re good enough they can become teachers, and maybe they’ll just get a husband. If a woman doesn’t fall into one of those niches, her geisha training has prepared her for absolutely nothing but what she can no longer do. Iwasaki petitioned for foreign language classes and other academic subjects to be incorporated into girls’ schooling to become geisha, and for the 10+ years she petitioned, from when she was just a girl to when she was wildly popular and filthy rich, she was patted on the head and told to not worry her little self. Given the unadultured anger she has towards her sister, a figure who appears briefly and seems to have done nothing more than be irresponsible and bitchy and disappoint their parents, I was expecting much more over the karyukai. In fact, I suspect there is much more. Iwasaki just isn’t sharing.

I read a handful of other reviews that complained about Iwasaki’s tone and her pervasive self-delusion. She is a woman who takes herself very seriously, and though quite capable of kindness and love is rarely able to see from any perspective but her own. However, I argue that, particularly in memoirs, that is a reader’s job, not an author’s. Iwasaki’s goal is to tell her story as she sees it. Mine is to take what she provides and turn them around to see the other side. It is to Iwasaki’s credit that her description of her experiences in Gion are so rich that there are many interpretations besides her own, without her planning to put them there. In addition, despite her inevitable bias – one we can hardly fault anything for, because anyone who doesn’t self-edit their life story is both boring and lacking any kind of self-awareness – it is clear, from any perspective, she is a woman who kicked ass and took names, who was successful as much from the advantages she was given as how hard she worked and how strong her own determination. She is the kind of woman the biased Western literature rarely has as a heroine, let alone a heroine with any kind of Asian ancestry, and I have to applaud her for not only sharing something with the world she never needed to but being a woman who defies stereotypes simply by being a real person.

Book Review: Tokyo Vice by Jake Adelstein

And we’re back!

I first heard about former Yumiuri Shinbun reporter Jake Adelstein on NPR’s Planet Money. The man interviews very well, and he knows what he’s talking about. In fifteen someodd minutes, he explains the yakuza’s business model shift from shakedowns to stock fraud and the Japanese anti-crime laws that brought it about. He also makes white collar crime completely fascinating, because he understands the story is not just about financial fraud but goes deeper into the yakuza’s role in Japanese politics and society.

Tokyo Vice is Jake Adelstein’s memoir of his ten years as a reporter on the crime beat for the Yomiuri Shinbun. He is probably one of very few foreigners with such authority on Japan’s organized crime and sex industry, and it is his position as an outsider on the inside that allows him to give the rest of us such a fascinating glimpse behind the usually impenetrable wall of Japan’s public image.

The book is organized into chronological and vaguely thematic sections, each chapter in each section focused on a different investigation. Adelstein tries to accomplish a lot with his book, and is more successful in some things than others. The stories are not really about him, though they follow the timeline of his life. The book doesn’t present itself as social commentary or activism, though it strains against its clear desire to be so especially toward the end. Some subjects and events are clearly of more interest to Adelstein – and therefore the reader – than others, but because of his effort to cover a very full ten years in a very reasonably sized book, the things that beg for more attention and detail are left roughly sketched and unfulfilled.

Tokyo Vice is a wonderful and entertaining overview of a part of Japan that few people even know about, let alone see. But behind the scenes I can see the strong arm of someone – an editor, a publisher, or Adelstein himself, who knows – dialing down the passion for the sake of breadth and wide appeal. I want to know more about the struggles of professional women in Japanese society and the attitude toward and portrayal of the mentally ill, issues that are integral to a story about one of Adelstein’s coworkers who committed suicide. This is clearly a woman who means a lot to him, both because of who she was and the level of despair she reached trying to do what she believed in. Yet very little of the story even touches on what she believed in, or the traditions and structures that made it so difficult for her to do anything but piss people off.

And I want to know more about human trafficking in Japan, something that hangs over much of the last third of the book and that clearly led Adelstein to the Polaris Project, where he works now. He gets into the cruel Catch 22 that is the Japanese legal system, with foreign women tricked into prostitution getting nothing better than deportation when they actually escape their kidnappers and report them to the police. He also gets into the sickening and sometimes fatal consequences of this revolving door of sex slaves. Though these points are not afterthoughts, he could dig deeper, teach us more, tell us everything he can for the sake of the women he met and so clearly cares for, and for the sake of change. Instead the book ends as it has to, with the big story, about a yakuza boss’s liver transplant in the US and the far-reaching consequences for Adelstein, his family, his friends, two national governments, and the hierarchy of Japanese organized crime. Because ultimately, Tokyo Vice is not the book for the economists, or the activists, the crime buffs or even the culture geeks, but for everyone, and in giving us all a little something it also has to take something away.

Tokyo Vice is the first layer peeled back, and now I’m hooked, scratching desperately to see more of the depth I only just learned was there.

Fail = Success?

Lifehacker had a good post a while ago on what it takes to succeed: namely, failing a ton. This coincided with an article in The Arizona Republic my mom sent me about local AZ author Jewell Parker Rhodes, whose daughter went to my highschool and who got me my tickets to my first two writers’ conferences ever. The article is pretty much the anecdote to the Lifehacker one-liner: she wrote a lot, and got rejected a lot, and wrote a lot more, and got better at writing, and then succeeded.

She also has a great line about the difference between people who say they are writers and, well, writers:

“There are more people in the world who say they want to be writers and will never, ever write because they just don’t sit down and do it.”

I will gladly take the story of her dogged perseverance, and the fear of becoming one of those people she’s talking about, and get to it.

Character Design

When I first start writing something, it’s important not to overthink it. If I have an idea of what kind of story I want to tell and the kind of people I’m going to use to tell it, it’s more productive to just jump in and write as it comes. It saves me from procrastinating with the dangerous infinity of “planning” that never becomes actual writing, and often helps me work out a lot of plot and character issues better than I would have if I just thought about them in the great black hole of my own head. Things sound so much cooler in my head than they do on paper, anyway. If I put a story down and if I put my characters in that story, I can see how everything works (or doesn’t) and how I need to fix it.

Planning is a little safer once the core of the story is out of my head. The details that might have been delusional time-wasters before are now a pretty important tool to scrub off the layers of crap around that core. So with Power’s main plotline written out, it was time to address one of the important issues I’d glossed over on the first go: What do my characters look like, anyway? No one else is going to understand these amorphous blobs of character concepts unless I give them more than a shape.

Enter Polyvore, plus a whole host of fashion and lookbook blogs. Putting clothes on my characters (not that they were running around naked, just in jeans and t’s) lets me better define not only their shapes but also their personalities.

Polyvore is an excellent tool for this kind of exercise, as it lets users browse clothes from all over and create digital style boards. Here are a few from Power:

I would have posted Mariko, too, but just Alice and Ryoko took way too long. Remember that thing about over-planning? Maybe I should write some more now…

Use the Time You Have

My goal this weekend is to put up research posts re: Tokyo and Kyoto. But 9:45am at work seems to be an opportune time to talk about writing using the time you have.

Despite my earlier posts about strict writing schedules, it’s been hard for me to stick to the plan. I get home and I’m tired, I don’t want to write, my brain isn’t working, I can’t think of what to write, blah, blah, blah. It was just way too easy to talk myself out of doing what I knew I needed to do and instead change into my PJs, eat something microwavable covered in pasta sauce, and watch TV.

One solution to the problem is willpower. Some people have it. I have it for certain things – I wouldn’t be able to roll my ass out of bed at 5am to work out if I didn’t. I wouldn’t be vegan if I didn’t. But right now, for this, I haven’t been able to do it. This doesn’t mean I will never be able to suck it up and write when I tell myself I’m going to, but for right now it’s clearly not a strategy that’s working.

Another solution, and the one I finally figured out, is to find another plan. My problem was that I didn’t want to use that time – in the afternoon, when I got back from work, when I was tired and hungry and burnt out – to write. So I had to find another time. I used to do mornings after I worked out, but that required waking up at 4am and was not super ideal. Between waking up, being at work, coming home, and going to sleep, what time did I have?

The train. Bam. I spend about an hour to an hour and a half every day commuting between my home in Arlington to my office in DC. Usually I spend this time reading books, which I enjoy, but still consider it “wasted time” – I always lament all extra stuff I could get done if I just worked at home, didn’t have to commute, didn’t have to bother being presentable, etc. Working at home really isn’t an option, but I can be more efficient with the time I spend on my commute. It’s quiet enough, I usually get a seat – so duh, why not write?

I gave it a shot this morning and it worked great. It’s a little hard writing in a notepad without the rest of my story in front of me, and I’ll have to type everything up when I get home, but this is a good hour of writing a day that I just wasn’t doing. I’m my own captive audience – there’s nowhere I can go, no kitten videos on Youtube that would be a more appealing way to spend my time, and definitely no email.

For first draft purposes, the train is a great environment to write. No distractions, no notes for me to check, no earlier writing to review. All I can do is shut my brain up and just write.

More to come as this experiment plays out.

Tokyo, Day 2

Pictures! Don’t say I never gave you nothin’. http://picasaweb.google.com/Jordan.Wyn/TokyoDay2#

TOKYO, 5am

In Tokyo. I would say it was crazy early but I always wake up at 5:30am so it’s not so bad. My friend Hazuki is kindly putting me up for the three weeks I’m here, so I’m chilling in her spare room on a futon. No official plans for today, other than meeting some people at noon and grocery shopping.

Notes:
Flying/Airports
- For its 11:20am DC > Narita flight, ANA serves lunch and… lunch. You eat right when you get on the plane (fish or curry beef, with the calorie count listed – handy!), and you eat when it’s about noon in Tokyo, which is 10pm DC time. Penne pasta, fruit, chicken salad. (Yeah, I didn’t find where to order a special meal early enough, it was a sad lunchx2 for me.)
- The flight attendants are all female, have nice makeup, little matching suit uniforms with ascots, and many of them looked like they were half. (The rest were full Japanese.) They were super sweet and were always wandering the aisles with green tea, English tea, orange juice and tomato juice.
- Business class was swank and EMPTY. So close, yet so far.
- Lots of passengers connecting through Tokyo to other countries. Predominantly heard Thai.
- Narita doesn’t let you use your cellphones until you are off the plane (unlike the US, where you just have to be taxiing usually).
- The public bathrooms are so. clean.
- Immigration was easy, the girl at the counter was all young and hip with a great bob haircut. Either English isn’t a requirement for immigration counter people to know or it was just easier for her to speak Japanese, because she asked me if that was ok.
- It is official, foreigners are fingerprinted (right and left index finger) and have their picture taken upon entering the country.
- Customs guys definitely do not care enough to search your bags if you’re me and you listed “pickles – Y300″ on your declarations form.
- The Narita Express on the JR is probably the more common mode of transportation for locals. Big luggage is okay, nobody will give you a look.
- You can buy a Suica card at a ticket counter right before the train gates.

Living
- Many apartment hallways seem to be outside (either with the stairs on the building exterior or with an atrium-style open air building with stairs on the outside)
- Toilets get their own room, separate from the tub/shower room and the bathroom sink. (Also, though it may not be the norm, Hazuki has one of those advanced toilets with the various buttons and warm seats. I’m not sure what the various buttons do…)
- Tamachi has a completely hodgepodge mix of office buildings, apartment buildings, and tiny shops/restaurants (noodle places, “fast food” etc). There is a really strong smell of grilled meat right after you get off the elevator.
- The sidewalks are sometimes lined with handrails? I would call them, that come up about hip-height and pretty much stop you from stepping into traffic or traffic stepping into you.

Style
- Lots of boys with the skater look, brown hair, tan skin.
- Lots of girls with these topknot hairdos and big square bangs. Also brown/blond-streaked hair, slightly tan but not super tan like some of the guys. Comfy sweaters, short skirts, tights and high motorcycle and cowboy type boots are in. Some serious heels, not a lot. I don’t think I saw any young girls in pants.
- Suits, suits, suits.

TO SLEEP.

To Tokyo!

Back in three weeks.