British people using Japan as a backdrop for self-discovery. How very selfish of them! What a very interesting topic!
First here’s David Sylvian making Preparations for a Journey, telling us he feels “about ready to commit myself to certain philosophies that may see me through my entire life”. This film, which appeared on a laser disk entitled Steel Cathedrals, “was shot in two days of November 1984 in, and around the outskirts of, Tokyo, Japan.” Sylvian was in Japan to show his Polaroids. To me the “coffee-table spiritual quest” theme feels a bit wishy-washy, although Part 2 gets a bit more interesting as we see David taking Polaroids of Kyoto rock gardens.
Talking of coffee tables, here are some glimpses of a glossy new book by Japanese photographer Masayoshi Sukita. Speed of Life (a snip at £360) shows Sylvian’s direct forebear and antecedent David Bowie posing in Kyoto during a holiday there in 1979 – the time he was hanging out with Sinologist David Kidd.
Bowie, after hinting that Japan was to be his new home, left for New York, explaining that Japan would make him “too Zen”, which would cause him to stop writing.
I remember being excited by these staged-yet-casual, exotic-yet-everyday images of Bowie on the subway when they first appeared in The Face magazine in 1980; Bowie seemed to have discovered a land where everyone had his high cheekbones, thin lips and determined gravitas. But perhaps the oddest and most interesting of Sukita’s images, revealed for the first time in the new book, are the studio shots where he portrays Bowie as a salaryman on his way to work, attempting to beat the clock:
To go to Japan to discover your inner salaryman seems to me the height of perversity, but this was the dawn of the neoliberal era and I guess business really did seem, for a while, like the new glam.
Finally here’s Off The Page, a BBC Radio 4 programme in which a panel of British people discuss stereotypes of life in Japan and conclude that British expats in Japan – expected to be somewhat obnoxious but not expected to conform or even learn the language – have a much nicer experience than the Japanese themselves.
First here’s David Sylvian making Preparations for a Journey, telling us he feels “about ready to commit myself to certain philosophies that may see me through my entire life”. This film, which appeared on a laser disk entitled Steel Cathedrals, “was shot in two days of November 1984 in, and around the outskirts of, Tokyo, Japan.” Sylvian was in Japan to show his Polaroids. To me the “coffee-table spiritual quest” theme feels a bit wishy-washy, although Part 2 gets a bit more interesting as we see David taking Polaroids of Kyoto rock gardens.
Talking of coffee tables, here are some glimpses of a glossy new book by Japanese photographer Masayoshi Sukita. Speed of Life (a snip at £360) shows Sylvian’s direct forebear and antecedent David Bowie posing in Kyoto during a holiday there in 1979 – the time he was hanging out with Sinologist David Kidd.
Bowie, after hinting that Japan was to be his new home, left for New York, explaining that Japan would make him “too Zen”, which would cause him to stop writing.
I remember being excited by these staged-yet-casual, exotic-yet-everyday images of Bowie on the subway when they first appeared in The Face magazine in 1980; Bowie seemed to have discovered a land where everyone had his high cheekbones, thin lips and determined gravitas. But perhaps the oddest and most interesting of Sukita’s images, revealed for the first time in the new book, are the studio shots where he portrays Bowie as a salaryman on his way to work, attempting to beat the clock:
To go to Japan to discover your inner salaryman seems to me the height of perversity, but this was the dawn of the neoliberal era and I guess business really did seem, for a while, like the new glam.
Finally here’s Off The Page, a BBC Radio 4 programme in which a panel of British people discuss stereotypes of life in Japan and conclude that British expats in Japan – expected to be somewhat obnoxious but not expected to conform or even learn the language – have a much nicer experience than the Japanese themselves.
