{"id":1331,"date":"2013-02-13T15:00:10","date_gmt":"2013-02-13T23:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=1331"},"modified":"2013-03-27T17:48:48","modified_gmt":"2013-03-28T00:48:48","slug":"notebook-on-cities-and-culture-s3e10-trouble-sparks-creativity-with-christopher-stephens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=1331","title":{"rendered":"Notebook on Cities and Culture S3E10: Trouble Sparks Creativity with Christopher Stephens"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Colin Marshall sits down in Nishinomiya, Japan with translator, writer, and former\u00a0Kansai Time Out<\/em>\u00a0editor Christopher Stephens. They discuss whether higher Japanese skills get a foreigner more suspicion; the nearby presence and touristic effects of novelist Haruki Murakami’s elementary school; the older writers, like Yasunari Kawabata, Junichiro Tanizaki, and Yukio Mishima, who stoked his interest in Japan; the experimental music to be found in Japan, such as the work of Keiji Haino and the Boredoms, and specifically in the Kansai noise scene; the Osaka duality between money-making hard workers and underground weirdness; the local pride taken in relative roughness and unrefinement, and the stereotype of\u00a0the bad Osakan<\/a>; what actually distinguishes the Osaka dialect, and how entirely different words might see use in one city but not its neighbor; Japan’s visual culture, and the problematic emphasis on beauty that can ensue; his youth in Fresno, California, whose finest quality was the way it pushed him out; the time he took Wilco to an Osaka psychedelic sixties rock bar; how, when the Japanese open a psychedelic sixties rock bar, they\u00a0really<\/em>\u00a0open a psychedelic sixties rock bar; his early struggles with regional backwardness in the eighties, and what happens when Japanese friends still ask him to hold their babies; Osaka’s high crime rate for Japan and Fresno’s high crime rate for California; whether\u00a0Paris syndrome<\/a>\u00a0actually afflicts the Japanese; the West’s eagerness to believe everything they hear about Japan; photographer Kyoichi Tsuzuki’s purchase of the entire collection of Toba’s science-fiction erotic museum; the cannaboid substance known as “herb” that recently made the rounds in Japan; the persistence of visual art in Japan which goes well beyond Takashi Murakami, and his own specialty, the Gutai group of painters; why no Japanese person has yet appeared on this show, and what linguistic reasons might explain it; the corrections Japanese people make to his English; his work editing\u00a0Kansai Time Out<\/em>\u00a0during the heyday of its breed of publication; Japan’s relatively robust print culture, at least by contrast to America’s; how little time translation leaves to learn new words or savor the language; and, despite the world’s having lost confidence in Japan, his theory that darkness always brings light, and that trouble sparks creativity.<\/p>\n

Download the interview from\u00a0Notebook on Cities and Culture<\/em>\u2019s feed<\/a>\u00a0or on\u00a0iTunes<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Colin Marshall sits down in Nishinomiya, Japan with translator, writer, and former\u00a0Kansai Time Out\u00a0editor Christopher Stephens. They discuss whether higher Japanese skills get a foreigner more suspicion; the nearby presence and touristic effects of novelist Haruki Murakami’s elementary school; the older writers, like Yasunari Kawabata, Junichiro Tanizaki, and Yukio Mishima, who stoked his interest in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-japan","category-notebook-on-cities-and-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1331"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1331\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1437,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1331\/revisions\/1437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}