K-City, May 2009

I've just got back from K-City...

No kachi-gumi American hold-outs to be seen, but lots of other fine shit...

... the first Japanese beggars I've seen for 10 years - fluent in English and with outstretched baseball caps full of American dimes and nickels...

... Korean War-era bars still promising exciting shows and dollar lady drinks - the blood stains coagulating yet on their front steps at eleven in the morning... 

... traditional turtle-back tombs nestled between the bars. The tombs are bigger than most Yokohama apartments and the whitewash almost (but not quite) manages to cover over the graffiti on their walls...

... pawn shops and loan shops and counselling centres for those who've worried they've borrowed too much (check out the wikipedia entry for Okinawa City and in the photo there are no less than three sarakin billboards in less than two hundred yards)...

... run-down brand-new business centres that - in the time between my 2005 Japanese guidebook and today - have gone from hosting Okinawa's finest IT ventures to 100 yen stores and Hello Work outposts...

I wish I could have stayed there to witness the carnage as 5000 US Marines enjoy a Friday night on the town, but I've got an early flight back to Yokohama tomorrow...

Okinawa, May 2009

This week, I'm in Okinawa on a fact-finding trip for K-City Blues...

It's the quietest time of the year for the island because of the rainy season which was supposed to have started in the middle of the month (it still hasn't fully arrived yet and today it only drizzled a very little). This year, a lot of people also cancelled trips due to pig flu...

I decided to take advantage of the low prices to put in some much-needed research - information that I couldn't find on the net. This includes the smell of banyan trees, the taste of black sugar candy, the colour of the soil and the girth of sugar cane. 

I managed to answer most of my questions, and tomorrow I'm going to head up north towards the American base towns where rumour has it - hidden deep in isolated pockets - there are aging GI's who think the war's still on...

Will let you know,

JM

 

Okinawan Blues

Last week, I met up with a potential publisher for K-City Blues... 

We went to an Okinawan festival in Kawasaki and watched a concert by Noborikawa Seijin - the Jimmy Hendrix of island music. Seigwa's in his late seventies - he learnt the blues from American GI's stationed on the islands in the 1950s, and he blended them with traditional Okinawan tunes. He put on a sixty minute set of blistering banjo-sanshin interspersed with anecdotes in thick dialect which had the Okinawan expats rolling with laughter and the bemused mainlanders straining their ears to make sense of what he was saying.

After the concert, the publisher took me to an Okinawan bar, and he asked me why a Welshman like me was writing about a string of tropical islands four thousand miles away. I topped off his glass of awamori and started telling him about the suppression of local language, the love-hate relationship with tourism and the search for self-identity in a place that exists in a nationality grey zone. 

"Yes," he agreed, "we have many problems in Okinawa. But you haven't answered my question. What's the connection with your home country?"

"But I was talking about Wales," I told him. 

I showed him pictures of Welsh nots and the way they worked to turn students into informants in the same way as hougen fuda were employed in Okinawan schools. I told him about the closeness of the '97 Welsh referendum and the numbers of English who buy up second homes in Wales making it difficult for locals to buy themselves a first.  I told him it's tough to define yourself as British when the dominant culture sees your country as a backwater better suited for watersports and raising sheep... or in Okinawa's case goats.

The publisher nodded and seemed satisfied that I knew (partly) where I was coming from. I promised to get him a brushed-up chapter when it was ready. And he, in turn, told me he'd show me the sights when I head down there in the summer...

JM 

                                                                                               the welsh not...

 

                                                                    ... and it's Okinawan equivalent.

The Green Grounds goes home

Just a quick update from here in Yokohama...

This morning I received some good news from Swansea. 

The Green Grounds has been nominated for the 2009 Dylan Thomas Screenplay Award. The nomination means a lot to me - coming as it does from my own hometown and the city that the story is set.

I'm not going to be able to make it back to the awards ceremony in June, so they've asked me to knock together an acceptance speech and send it by DVD.

I'm just about to head out now to find a tux, director and some eye-candy to hang on my arm...

Will keep you updated...

JM

Spring

The cherry blossoms are out in full force here in Yokohama and - North Korean missile scares aside - the city has a beautiful relaxed feel to it. The parks are full of office parties and the streets are run wild with little kids dressed in their new school uniforms.

I've managed to join in the festivities, too, this year. I finished the first draft of K-City Blues last week which is reason in itself to celebrate. It came in at a hefty 410 pages and come the summer, it will need a good whittling down. But for now I can forget about work for a while and enjoy the warm weather. Yesterday I went hiking with a friend into the foothills of Tokyo. And after writing this, I'm going to head up to the local temple to give thanks for the safe completion of my first draft, plus enjoy a couple of cold beers beneath the white blossoms....

JM 

Fear of Fiction

I’ve always been attracted to the security of structure. The 5-7-5 of haiku. The one thousand word limit of a magazine story. The 114 pages of a screenplay.  Choices, options, the infinite freedoms of other fictions scare me. Novels, in particular, fill me full of dread. Their variety of tenses, first, second or third person, internal dialogues, streams of consciousness, similes - they all, quite frankly, leave me in a cold sweat.

But last year, I came up with a story...

It started off innocently enough as a feature script. A coming of age tale. A love triangle. A bittersweet first act, with a fiery rite of passage.

The more I worked on it, the more it grew. As the characters took on their own voices and the tale wove its natural course, though, I was struck with the frightening realization that here was a story that I wouldn’t be able to shoehorn into even the most tightly-margined screenplay. The characters had stepped out of the bounds of speech and tense, and the plot surpassed any page breaks Final Draft would allow.

So early last month, I started writing a novel called K-City Blues… I’ve been putting in 7-hour days, and now I’m 65,000 words in and I’ve vowed to finish a first draft by the middle of April. It’s been a scary ride so far. I’ve lost my way too many times to say, and every night I close down my computer so burnt-out and thirsty that I wonder whether my characters will abandon me in the night…

But then the next morning, they start yammering away at me again - refreshed, insisting there’s nothing to be afraid of - and I wonder whether they might just be right. Whether we just might make it to the finish line in one piece.

Tamagawa Onsen

This week, I finished off the first draft of Rocks – a short story I’m planning to enter into this year’s Zoetrope All-Story Contest.

The tale’s loosely based upon a hotspring resort in northern Japan called Tamagawa Onsen (玉川温泉). I’d first driven through the area with a friend a few years ago, but I hadn’t really understood what was going on there. I’d been to hotsprings before – you soak outside in a tub and try not to get drawn into measuring contests -  but I’d never been to one without water – which was what I found at Tamagawa.

Some people were sitting in tents they’d set up on the stony ground, while others just lay on picnic sheets with rocks balanced at strategic points of their torsos. I asked my friend what was going on and she coyly explained that it was supposed to be good for your health. In my ignorance, I figured it was some type of Fu Shui Oriental thing.

I didn’t think any more of it until a nurse I met last year mentioned that one of her patients had booked himself a week’s trip there. “What’s with those stones?” I asked, and that’s when she mentioned the Big C, or to give it the Japanese equivalent, the Big G (for がん).The stones in the area are high in radium, so people who can’t afford chemotherapy go there hoping to treat themselves.

She told me there’s a grey market in stones taken from Tamagawa and she recommended running a search on Yahoo Auctions – Japan’s equivalent to E-Bay. 

 

The results were heart-breaking. This particular 284 gram specimen was going for 4000 dollars, while others were being sold for twice that amount.

All of the stones come with testimonies from people who have been helped by them, and also small-print disclaimers that they are not sold for medicinal purposes.

I asked my friend why people didn’t just go to Tamagawa for themselves and she answered that the waiting lists were long for the inns in the area – up to six months at some times. And this was just too long for many people who only had weeks to live.