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The Hidden Energies of Kansai:
Tectonic Plates, Street Fashion and Festival Acrobats |
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10 years ago, just before dawn on January 17th the port town of Kobe was hit by one of the largest earthquakes of modern times. Hundreds of homes and buildings collapsed onto the sleeping inhabitants. Fires broke out as gas pipes ruptured, traditional wooden houses burned and whole areas of the city were burned to ash. Ancient temples, office buildings, flyovers and port cranes toppled like toys. |
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One local resident who struggled to escape his damaged home was a young Dutch educator, Kjeld Duits. Kjeld had already been in Kansai for 12 years managing a language school in Osaka. Recently he had decided to change direction and was designing a new technique to help people learn a second or third language. He tells the story himself. “I had spent several months designing the new language system and then the earthquake struck. Everything in my home that could possibly break, broke… the area around me was devastated. I helped to dig out a next door neighbor - she survived - but another neighbor didn’t. In all, seven people I personally knew died. That day, I saw a lot of terrible things. I thought, ‘I have to do something’, but I knew I could not dig into concrete buildings with my bare hands. One thing I realized I could do, that others could not, was report [to the world outside]. So I began sending reports to newspapers, magazines, radio and TV in Holland about the quake” |
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Despite many years in Japan building a successful business, Kjeld Duits suddenly found himself with no job and no income. “I had to start from scratch”, he says, but while not yet realizing it, he had already found his new line of work. “The earthquake launched me - at first literally - into a new career”. The ‘university-of-life’ crash course in journalism and news photography gave him a new set of skills and he even taught himself HTML (the arcane language behind the internet). What he needed next was a subject other than the earthquake. That was not such a difficult challenge for someone as intensely curious about the world as Kjeld Duits. He began to write about all kinds of subject related to Japan – history, politics, culture and social issues - and found an interest for his articles beyond his native Holland. This work continues today on his website at http://ikjeld.com (in English) and he prides himself on being the only foreign correspondent located in Western Japan. He feels uncomfortable that so much news out of Japan comes only from Tokyo and about the distortion such centralization brings to impressions of Japan overseas. |
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Ever since Kjeld Duits was a child, living in a small town near Amsterdam and reading adventure story books about distant lands, he had dreamed of exploration abroad. High schools in Holland were founded on the roots of the Trading Schools set up by the government in the late 19th century. These taught children the languages of neighboring countries and all the skills needed for commerce abroad. This was a tradition that appealed to young Kjeld. At age 19 he decided to follow his dream. He left Holland, first living in Germany, followed by Italy, Greece and Hawaii. It was usually chance encounters with people that influenced which country he would move to next. This was how he moved to Hawaii and then how he came to live in the Kansai area of Japan. Certainly the language and business skills served him well when he arrived. |
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For somebody who describes himself as “really curious about people and why they do what they do” the psychology at work in Japan was a greater challenge than the previous countries he had experienced. While delighted by the constant positive attitude of his new neighbors, he notes that it “nearly reaches to the point of naivety and is almost a unique characteristic.” It was other observations about the Japanese way of learning only about the rules of grammar, instead of actually learning to use grammar, that spurred his project to develop new teaching tools back in 1994.Among his large collection of books, many of them biographies, he keeps a section dedicated to human psychology, plus a Japan section. He recommends the book “Anatomy of Dependence” by Takao Doi as a good way to understand relationships between people in Japan. For example, when he first arrived he was especially surprised by the ‘group’ consciousness behind the fashion which stood in contrast to the emphasis on individuality of European countries. “When I was in high school I was interested in clothes and dressing in a unique fashion”. “In 1982 [in Japan] there was no originality, no creativity”. In fact, the fashion industry created the illusion that this season’s clothes radiated western style uniqueness by saturating promotions with images of blonde, non-Japanese models in posters and Caucasian-like chiseled mannequins. |
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A decade later things were different. The hidden energy below Kobe that had burst through as an earthquake almost stands as a metaphor for what was also happening to youth culture on the streets of larger cities around Kansai and Japan. Coinciding with the economic recession, and the prevalence of ‘freeter’ jobs among young people content to take on temporary, usually, menial work (in stark contrast to traditional aspirations towards a ‘salaryman’ job for life), some shopping streets were now being turned into “pedestrian heaven”. A whole new generation began to express themselves with clothes they had made themselves. Kjeld comments that “this was a very positive result of a negative situation.” As fast as the clothing manufacturers tried to mass produce the latest look, so the look kept changing. “Now we have a lot of trends happening simultaneously.” |
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In Kansai, this explosion of street fashion has been most apparent in Osaka, especially in the ‘Amerika Mura’ area near Shinsaibashi. Amerika Mura is an eclectic backstreet of counter-culture music stores, used-clothes boutiques, minority interest stores and coffee shops frequented by kids between 16 and 22. Until recently, this was the only area in Osaka where you might see graffiti (albeit respectfully kept within the confines of a designated length of wall and usually an expression of artistic pretension, not subversive rage or youthful angst). Amerika Mura is where another hidden energy of the Kansai has surfaced. (In Tokyo, the equivalent area is the more well-known Harajuku). As Kjeld explains about Amerika Mura, “The kids there may be buying second hand American clothes but the combinations they create are so Japanese. They have applied Japanese aesthetics to imported clothes and no European would come up with those color combinations. You can see how these combinations are influenced by kimono and yukata.” Kjeld has learned to spot the different “tribes” that the various styles signify. “The young people don’t dress this way to state a political or social idea but to identify with a particular group.” |
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Traditionally, fashion design and graphic arts skills have tended to gravitate towards Tokyo but a whole new pride has developed in Kansai exemplified by such initiatives as the fashion ‘happenings’ staged by the artist / designer group ‘Smile’ who promote young designers. “There’s a lot happening here in the Kansai but it is hidden away…a Kansai avant-garde” says Kjeld. Few people know that there are Kansai-only fashion magazines. Generally, people associate fashion in Kansai with Kobe (which has a fashion museum as if to stamp its mark on the claim) but the deluxe department stores and brand outlets are “really only for young women professionals and housewives”. |
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Another area where Kjeld often takes his camera is the ‘Greenwich Village of Osaka’ in Minami-Horie. This is home to the Digmeout café, a popular hang out for young Kansai artists (illustrators, graphic designers, painters etc). Started by local radio station FM802, Digmeout is a broadcast center for Kansai’s independent artists. In addition to holding art expositions locally, Digmeout promotes its artists worldwide, recently with a show in Oregon, USA, and exploits new initiatives to promote them. For example, Digmeout’s own magazine is issued with multiple covers so that several artists can claim front cover status! (More information about this “global young art connection from Osaka, Japan” can be found on line at http://www.digmeout.net.) Kjeld has many friends among this community and has examples of their work in his home. |
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With the foreign press around 2000 dedicating headlines to the explosion of Japanese youth culture Kjeld Duits knew he had found a new niche. On November 11th 2002 (deliberately chosen for it 11.11.22 rendering), together with a small group of equally enthused artist friends he launched a website called “JapaneseStreets” to provide the overseas fashion industry (both businesses and individuals) with a window on Japan’s hot new dynamic. As Chief Editor and Photographer, Kjeld provides much of the content himself.“I give pointers to the clothes and what to pay attention to…you can even conduct marketing research because we have data on spending habits.” |
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Kjeld talks about the new pride within a generation no longer encumbered with legacies of past wars. “Young people are at last wearing traditional yukata again, happy to be Japanese”. The confidence is apparent in many aspects of the new culture beyond fashion. “You can see it also in the animated films, in the manga comics, or in the street-art poetry”. As if to illustrate his point he shows off a set of unusual art objects shaped like traditional lucky ‘daruma’ dolls but decorated in psychedelic colors. Hence his website’s name is JapaneseStreets to allow it to embrace more than fashion. As such, it attracts more than 100,000 unique visitors monthly. The site's Member's Forum, only a small part of the site, has nearly 2,000 signed users, archives more than 4,000 photos uploaded by visitors, and boasts over 2.3 million views. He knows the site is having a real impact as the forum alone has attracted over 15,000 comments. JapaneseStreets was nominated for a prestigious ‘Webby’ award, (the Oscars of the Internet) in 2003. “It’s all done by word of mouth as I’ve done no advertising”. Also, importantly for someone who had to start from scratch, the work now needed to maintain the site’s momentum generates a real income. Asked what he does in his free time Kjeld replies with immense satisfaction “Journalism is my life, and I happen to get paid for it.” |
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Kjeld has also written books, some published, some still on the back burner. One of these is about Japanese festivals, or, ‘matsuri’. “Another reason I came to fall in love with Kansai was when I went to my first matsuri in 1995. First I went to the “Jidai Matsuri” (Festival of Ages) in Kyoto”, an event held each October featuring a historical parade with over 2000 costumed marchers. Kansai is perhaps home to more major matsuri than any other part of Japan including the Aoi-matsuri in Kyoto (May), Tenjin-matsuri in Osaka (July), Mantoro in Nara (August), Awa Odori in Tokushima (August), and Gujo Odori in Gifu (July~September). Kjeld himself has been to more than 100 such festivals. “I found them so interesting, so amazing, so full of energy.” He marveled at the raucous power of the parade of floats in the Kishiwada Danjiri (which is less a parade and more akin to the running of the bulls through the streets of Pamplona, Spain). “And if you go to Shiga or Gifu they have races with horses. The men perform all kinds of acrobatics that are better than a circus”. |
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Kjeld especially enjoys the smaller matsuri in the countryside, “the ones not so well known”. Here again he has discovered a hidden strength within Kansai. He feels the cities are overly-promoted to visiting tourists. “The roots have been taken out of the cities”. (“Uprooted Cities” being the title of an article he wrote about the issue). It is the older places that appeal to him. “When I went to the countryside I saw how beautiful Japan still is.” This extends to the older towns. “I love Sagano in Kyoto and Nara. Everybody goes to Arashiyama but Sagano is only 20 minutes away and hasa street with scenery that could be a length of the Edo Period ‘tokaido’. I can imagine how Japan looked 100 to 200 years ago.” For someone so committed to covering the ephemeral trends of modern city youth, he holds great respect for the past. “If you don’t know where you’ve been, you won’t know where you are going”. But as he said before, he can see how the young people are connecting with their past even if the connection usually only exists unconsciously. |
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Covering and uncovering the multiple hidden energies within Kansai perhaps explains why his next big adventure is far more subdued. “One day I intend to do the entire Henro walk.” (This is a pilgrimage route that connects 88 temples across the island of Shikoku located in the south western part of Kansai). “Just a few months ago I did a small Henro pilgrimage and came back so incredibly relaxed. We walked on mountain roads from temple to temple, saw no cars, only the real countryside... A lot of foreigners come for a whole month”. This is yet another positive feature of Kansai that seems well hidden away, (although less about energy and more about spirit). As Kjeld enthused further, “the Henro is so good it should be advertised more… but then again, no it shouldn’t !” |
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I wonder? For somebody so enthusiastic about covering all his experiences we can be sure Kjeld Duits will soon be uploading another website complete with an 88 temple photo gallery, this time a site called ‘Japanese Pathways’ that interviews ‘fashionable pilgrims’ and links to artists inspired by ancient temple seals. Fashion houses overseas watch this space! |
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