Harajuku Sunday

by S. Michael Choi

  “Your plan has a one-in-a-million chance of success. And anyway, you’ve read me totally wrong. My father is a carpenter, my mother a housewife. We grow up dirt-poor. Being an artist is a choice about how to live life itself. And the murder itself is important, because you know it’s about the chance of youth itself. It’s about promise and hope, and the loss of that hope. I guess a conniver and manipulator like yourself can’t see what ordinary people think about; but then you were always good at profiting from every social situation, weren’t you Ritchie.”

  “I’m a realist, and I’ve paid my dues as they needed to be paid. Many thousands benefited from what I did, and everyone living in Tokyo today has no idea that I built up everything they go to be hand. Where are the thanks for scavenger night?”

  “Take your head out of your own backside for a minute and look at the situation for ordinary folk. We were transformed by the murder. None of us had the same life afterwards, and the truth has to come out.”

  Julian, the perpetual film student, now in his eighth year on private Fellowship, top most circle of the Fulbrighters, the JET programmers, and then the next levels afterwards of private gigs, backpackers on three month contracts, thirty-three years old. He lectures me about the practice of life, and then goes off to film with a cynical group of reluctant part-time actors. The film is eighty percent complete. He is engaged in film practice for incidentals as well; the drama with pretty actresses; the play with younger people. I smoke a cigarette and don’t care as he leaves; I lay in plans for the main chance.

  Melanie, failure in the art world. Already showing signs of becoming middle-aged, her accent changing, the Taos godmother who shepherds young artists but does nothing original of her own. Also tragically collapsing into irrelevance. But yes Julian is right. There is authenticity in the earlier story. Maybe I should look at Blair, Jim. I suppose they were pathetic in their own way, but right next to the edge of genuine hand-to-mouth, wow, strange, artistic personalities as well! There must be intensity in just the way the sun looks after three months of basic training at Parris Island. Those jarheads, grunts, less than normal civilians on one hand, more on another; who will record their stories? Who to record their feelings? But that impenetrable world resists an outsider’s touch as well; one has to live; only the insider knows how one’s hand looks after a firefight, the mere thrill of continued life, a gift.

  Days and ways. I am a weaponsmaster. My weapon is a 5’3” Japanese girl, top name of her club, top personality of Shinjuku, Japan. Our earnings are 130,000 USD a year and we live in Ginza. Managing her defective personality is a full-time job, and I will direct this perfect girl-weapon right into the heart of the US-Japanese Establishment. A prime minister’s career will be ruined, and that is the desirable outcome. But aside from this, there is indeed the simple beauty of days and ways. Walking around for six months in the lead up, there is a deadly swagger to my gait. People stop and look at me on the street, even in ego-centric Ginza. The world itself is bending to my twenty-something will. And I, too, record that which is recorded.

  Beauty. A quality existing side-by-side with certain forms of quantity. Beauty. A Mercedes S600 piloted through dark Japanese streets, one’s girl driven to exclusive mountainside resorts. Beauty. A quality of certain deadliness blown out of one’s core through aesthetic practice, through a desire to kill. “Utsukushii”—the collective voice of Japan staring back at me, the only American they bother talking to. I don’t have a MP7 locked and loaded in the boot of the car, but it’s as if I did, it’s as if everyone knows that I am practicing and practicing and practicing, years now as the Gallery keeps getting delayed delayed delayed for that one-in-a-million shot, the kill-team swooping in on the political faction, an actual ordinary person about to play politics with the lives of millions. It’s absurdity is all; I couldn’t have planned it better had I actually planned. But bridges are crossed, highway miles are left behind, and silent girlfriend remains silent, our relationship deepening to perfect individuation, the representation of forces behind us, left behind, but never forgotten unforgiving night.

  “All I wanted was ever to get out of this place!”

  Julian wants to film about Jim, the Marine whose killing of his hostess girlfriend (an American) sets into motion all other events. I point out that there is some process of self-consumption going on here; the program is now starting to write about itself since the Fellowship extended a grant to Jim, and so instead of breaching new art, it’s all self-contrained Matroshka dolls, it’s all art about artists themselves, Julian thirty-three, thirty-five, thirty-seven? But he is convinced that thousands must be invested, dozens of lives must be dedicated to producing this film, and his research is the last argument.

  “The whole point of filming Jim/Alissa is that people like that don’t have a voice. Jim was an orphan; he was adopted by a Marine officer and brought up to be a Marine. Alissa was a girl at his same military academy; after an act of political corruption by the superintendent and the town mayor, she took off for California, but the love affair brought them back together. Japan is the perfect setting because the decadence of Shinjuku life is the precise foil to Alleghany innocence. Everything is for sale, and extinction is the only possible outcome.”

  “But in the end he’s just a killer who couldn’t cut it as an artist; he could have walked off somewhere and left everyone alone; instead he has to take Alissa with him.”

  “Maybe Alissa wanted to die.”

  “Maybe all victims secretly wish to be victimized by their assailants.”

  “The media just needs a quick story.”

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  Twenty black-clad assistants, a 16mm camera on rails, the admiring glances of the passerbys. This is coolness, of a sorts, an admiration public and expressed; the youthful foreigners being the epitome of cool. I admit I like the attention; I feel a part of the group. It’s just I don’t believe in the story. Film-making, film-making, film-making, finally Julian’s second film is complete.

  “The blue of the sky; a plane flying across; the dream of air cadets; the blue of Alissa’s eye.”

  “How tired you are after basic; a Marine in Japan, lost.”

  “The world five minutes from now; an alternate Japan, VWs and 60s neo-retro.”

  “Aesthetic as concept itself, the film the makes itself without intervening filmer.”

  There are certain people, I think, who understand what is going on, or at least preserve enough inner cynicism to realize that nobody—Julian, myself, Melanie, the other Aoyama Fellows—will ever make it big. In the end there is another possibility—the retreat into craft or folk rather than urban and hip—and in the ensuing months some go down this route. Even Melanie starts with some comic/cute style Shibuya drawings but at the Comiket her work is passed over and doesn’t sell. I’m not sure exactly why; it is good; it may just be simply a matter of too much supply of such, not enough demand.

  As the months pass, the opportunity only grows more fantastically perfect. Baseball is huge in Japan; I have a direct relative of the country’s current Koshien MVP under subordination. One shot on the broker, the power-structure node whose fall will bring down LeFauve, decide the politics of Japan for twenty years.

  XI.

  In the weeks leading up to the Aoyama Gala, the atmosphere is one of festive excitement. Since it is the twentieth anniversary; since the permanent gallery opening represents an investment of a rumored eighty million U.S. equivalent, the decision is made to bring up the arrival date of the new cycle’s Fellows and extend the contract of the currents’, bringing together nearly two hundred of the program participants, along with a not inconsiderable number of donors, benefactors, alumni, staff, associated interested parties, native artists, special guests and so on; this will be the social event of Tokyo philanthropy that year—representatives from minor branches of the Imperial Family itself are rumored to be considering attendance.

  It seems every week brought another planeload of arriva
ls, fresh-faced early twenty-somethings from every corner of the world, bright-eyed, goggle-eyed with wonder, filled with the enthusiasm and vigor of new arrivals in Japan. Aoyama Studio itself is transformed: the Galleria next door is still covered in blue construction tarp, its crystal and metal architecture carefully hidden from site, but in the studio, every last nook and corner was packed with luggage and boxes. The dorms are at capacity; portfolios and installation art had to be stored in hallways and corridors, brown wrapping paper torn open as works were processed; the smell of turpentine, sawdust, oil paint everywhere.

  “All right! Everyone get a move on! Let’s get the show on the road!”

  At the center of all this tumult is Gustav from Sweden. His presence is obvious, the young blonde carrying around a megaphone and issuing mock orders, the merry ‘Prangstgrup’ with which he surrounds himself the source of constant rumors and story-making. In contrast to the extended film tradition in which Julian works, Gustav is famous for his ‘Three Minute Samurai” clips, mock Japanese sword-and-ninja videos, one of which has reached two hundred thousand views on YouTube. The two, of course, hate each other.

  So much goes on, so many flagrant “artistic temperaments” meet that drama, I suppose, is inevitable, but I feel distant from it; I feel a distinct sense of remove. I am not a Fellow myself, of course, and actually I am not all that much older than the average (twenty-four or twenty-five? but some as old as sixty…), but it all feels so familiar now; it all seems like just the same thing over and over. In the weeks leading up to the Gala launch itself, the artists hold ‘events,’ spontaneous artistic gatherings like taking over a pedestrian tunnel, putting up paintings, drinking wine, and then disappearing within the space of two hours. VIPs and dignitaries are escorted through the studio proper; with plain, unassuming manners but elegant refinement, they anonymously pass through the building, leaving behind a wave of curiosity and wonder.

  “I’m a professional actress! I don’t need this! I can go modeling and CM work here in Tokyo!”

  Julian loses his primary actress about three months before the gala, a high-strung half-Asian girl Anna from New York City, and everyone says this is when his real decline begins, this is when he has to cut corners, make compromises, and produce something out of existing footage because there’s simply not enough time to re-do things. Sympathies do exist for this particular problem; not everyone is on the actress’s side.

  “Yet the point can still be made that she’s still an interesting person in her own right. It takes courage to invest six months of life into an art film…”

  “I heard she’s really rich; that her parents tried to get her into respectable professions but she kept having fiascos. Sexual harassment suit at the law-firm and then she was considering marriage to two different men, one had a HBS MBA and the other “

  Anna isn’t so important, I suppose. Neither are, I guess, the rumors of Julian’s decline—the alleged bottles of urine stacking up in his dorm room as he scrambles to edit his work; the hours he may have spent in the G-CANS storm system. Maybe he really does go a little nutty; maybe it’s just the wire speaking, adolescent drama springing into existence and washing away in the next rain. Gustav’s group has energy; numbers; but the output, three minute films, isn’t exportable to a gallery launch. Julian has invested years of his life in the group; but he may think he owns it; he may be a little too obsessed with his commitment to things.

  “So we're just sitting there in the car minding our own business...”

  (A flurry of giggles informs me this is not the whole truth.)

  “Can we trust him?”

  “Yeah, Ritchie's cool...”

  “But maybe Julian wants...”

  “It's common knowledge...”

  “Guys, you can just tell me. What's up? I was like, gone for two weeks, and it's like everything's fallen to pieces.”

  “OK OK. So we were filming a bit all weekend and on Sunday afternoon we decide to take a break.”

  Now Gustav speaks up, in his slightly breathless, edge-of-laughter sort of way. “Well I light up a joint to share with everyone.”

  The kids all laugh.

  “We're sitting there hiding a spliff in the car taking a break in some quiet little neighborhood.”

  “Well it's because Gustav decides to take a photograph of people...”

  “No, no it's because we're just hanging out there, a bunch of foreign kids in a white Japanese car...”

  “It's because what? What's because what? Guys, you're telling me the story all out of order.”

  “Well basically, a bunch of cops starts walking and biking past us. Not like literally right past us, but in the T of the T-intersection we're facing.”

  “So Gustav gets all paranoid.”

  “Oh shut up, I saved us all.”

  “No, Gustav starts yelling that we have to get our asses out of there 'cuz we're going to get busted.”

  “And we can't lose our visas, you know...”

  “My mother would kill me...”

  “Fortunately, I'm a good driver.”

  “Yeah! We almost hit a bicyclist!”

  “Almost. And then Gustav is panicking, and a cop sees us, 'cuz we're right in front of the neighborhood post, one of those koban things, you know? We like drive right to it and almost run over a cyclist.”

  “Please... we just had to brake hard is all.”

  “And the cop tells us to pull over.”

  “Gustav is like, 'hit the accelerator!' 'hit the accelerator!' but there's, like, seven cars in front of us. So I can't hit the accelerator. He's being a nutjob! Actually what happens is that I save the day, 'cuz I pretend like I'm pulling over, but I'm just slowing down until the light changes...”

  What's clear what happened is that he and his film crew are almost arrested by the police, with their license plate almost certainly noted, and everything apparently can be hushed up, except, of course, this is art school, so actually everybody internal knows before the sun has set twice. Even, apparently, Julian finally gets wind of it, and, being the law-and-order type that he is within his own organization, he pushes for Gustav to be let go.

  “Julian marches into the administrative office at Aoyama Studios, and if it had been any other person, any other employee there except the new girl, Shiori-”

  “She's such a sweetie.”

  “Any other girl than Shiori, probably he could have gotten what he wanted completed. Instead, Shiori, being new to Aoyama, decides to actually look up the rules on how to handle this sort of situation and she discovers--”

  The crowd excitedly presses closer.

  “That Julian is not actually a member of Aoyama!”

  At this news, I am shocked. “Wha--?”

  “No, exactly. He was on the Fellowship twelve years ago, but technically, he shouldn't even be addressing any formal meetings of any kind.”

  “But I thought he basically ran the thing?”

  “Yeah, he does, but it's all informal. Totally based on his relationship with Roshi-sensei. And Roshi-sensei's daughter has actually started handling more of the administration lately, so she's going to start enforcing rules a bit more strictly.”

  I clear my throat. “You know, I'm not without some bitterness about this development.”

  “Why not?” The crowd is generally surprised.

  “Well a few years ago, before you guys arrived, Julian basically turned this entire organization against me, and I thought that he actually had some right to because he was the senior person here. But now it seems that he shouldn't even be part of the organization at all.”

  Gustav makes a contemptuous expression and nods. “See this is exactly what I'm saying about Julian. He just does all this rude stuff to people and they accept it because they think he's the genius or the boss. We just have to say no whenever he orders anything.”

  Other stories come out, apparently some karaoke fiasco where somebody is trying to input in their song, and Julian forcibly stops them. Sentim
ent against the overly-controlling director is quite evident.

  “Ritchie,” says Gustav, “why are you even hanging out with him? He lost his actress, he lost his film, I heard Melanie is leaving him. There's no point in hanging out with this loser.”

  “Well...”

  “You can hang out with my crew. We have a lot of fun.”

  The kids nod in agreement.

  “Well, it sounds very tempting….”

  Ladies and gentlemen, patrons of art, generous benefactors, assembled guests. Twenty years ago today Murayama Roshi-sensei had a vision. In a Japan that had just recently “learned to say no,” Roshi-sensei realized that the relationship between the re-emerged world power and the outside world could go in one of two directions. Either Japan would continue to develop its independent identity and emerge as an alternative to the Soviet-U.S. dialectic of the time, or it could engage the world that it was inextricably a part of and enrich and enliven the culture, expression, and knowledge of that world, not as a political power, but as a cultural entity, a treasure-chest and aesthetic partner to all the varied family of the world. He wanted the latter and founded the Aoyama Fellowship, Japan’s answer to the UK’s Rhodes Scholarship, the U.S.'s Fulbright program, Comintern's International Youth Congress and so on, but the first--and only--program that sought art as a means of international communication and a building block for peace.