I hope that young people in places who think "it won't work not to Tokyo" will slightly revise their views on the land beneath their feet.
Editor's note: Tokusatsu is a maverick freelance editor who breaks the mold and only does what he's interested in, such as visiting hundreds of ordinary people in Tokyo's cramped apartments to shoot "Japanese Style", photographing the "Lover's Inn" that Japanese people often go to but is not ignored by the design community, exploring the eccentric and rare attractions in Japan, the United States and around the world, collecting poems written by death row inmates before their death sentences, and reporting on local Japanese hip-hop artists...
"Outside the Circle Editor" is a question-and-answer work published by Tokusuke in 2015, which can be regarded as a review of the author's editorial career, full of free, real and painful life feelings. "Wasted editorial meetings", "Don't drink with your peers", "Web search is a drug", "Clicks are the devil"... Behind his poisonous and impactful writing is his observation of the cold and warm of the human world, and his intransigence to the system and mainstream values.
The following is an excerpt from the "Why Roadside" section of The Editor Outside the Circle, the Chinese edition of the book was recently launched by the Republic of Guangxi Normal University Press.
Wander to get people to catch you
After the publication of Tokyo Style, my next step was to set my sights on roadside in the non-metropolitan area. One day I was with the then Weekly SPA! The editor-in-chief of Fuso Society had a drink together and talked about "there are big frog statues and other strange things in the Japanese countryside, right?", and the atmosphere immediately became very warm, so we thought that it might be interesting to collect such things. It was really at such a rash pace that it became the series "Rare Japan Kiyuki" launched in 1993.
At that time, there was no internet, and there were no guidebooks for such a route on the market, so we couldn't even imagine how many exotic attractions there were in remote areas at first, so we were originally scheduled for a short-term series. "Well, maybe three months or so." As a result, as soon as we embarked on the road to visit... Amazing, much more.
I was at POPEYE, at BRUTUS, and in terms of job assignment, I only knew famous tourist spots or ski resorts like Kyoto, so going around a rural place that I had no information about and had never visited felt like going to a "foreign country where Japanese is common", which was really exciting. It wasn't a mockery of the country place, but a description of how shocked I was. I didn't know about the existence of the Secret Treasure Museum before, and I hadn't seen a car "substitute drive" service in Tokyo.
I interviewed to the point of oblivion, and before I knew it, five years had passed. Roadside JAPAN – A Collection of Documentary Notes on Rare Japan has become a large collection of photographs. After the series ended, I worked tirelessly to continue the interview, and in 2000 I launched two sets of supplementary and revised library editions, which should have more than 1,000 additional introduction locations.
When you do "Tokyo Style", you can also use mopeds to move around Tokyo, but it will not work if you go to non-metropolitan places. So I asked a friend to introduce the used car dealership to me and made a request: "In short, give me the cheapest domestic car in a solid domestic car." "The other party sold me a Mazda or something for 120,000 yen." Later, the aunt of the car dealership said that when she drove out of the parking lot, she bumped slightly, and counted you as 100,000. (Laughs) I changed many cars in the future, and I still miss it the most. Although there was a stereo in the car (only tapes could be played), the horn cone was broken, and Jimmy Hendricks's music was great to put away!
At that time, the car navigation system had just been listed, and the price was too high to be handed down. I had to tuck the road map between the steering wheel and my stomach, whether it was to the northeast or Kyushu, and I couldn't take it all right. Roughly, you will decide on a good area, such as "Go to the Ishikawa area this month", then take the highway to get there, and when you arrive, you will only take the ordinary road. If not, nothing will be found.
In this year, just take the Shinkansen or plane and rent a car locally. But at that time, even renting a car was not cheap, and more importantly, at that time, the negative machine was still widely used, and I would stuff all the equipment I had such as 4×5 large cameras to monocular cameras into the trunk, buy a lot of negatives and put them in the refrigerator, and drive to the end of the world by myself. If you move long distances, you will take a nap at the rest stop on the highway.
Even then, this type of interview was a special case among the general weekly magazines. Deadlines come quickly, so editors, photographers, and writers are usually teamed up to plan a lot in advance. However, I was going to do a topic that no one had done beforehand, I couldn't make a plan in advance (at that time, the rural area travel guide was only RuRuBu), and the date could not be scheduled first, so I could not hire a professional photographer. However, if a person embarks on a journey, a person drives, takes pictures, and writes articles, he will always be born with something. For purely economic reasons, I used to take pictures and write articles myself, and later my work was generally in this form.
I'm often asked, "Did you insist on coming all by yourself?" "It's not like that at all. I have no formal training, and now when I take pictures, I still doubt whether I have done it, so I am worried (the negative era is even more serious), to be honest, I would like to leave the business trip schedule or photography to others, concentrate on interviews, and do pre-investigation of the next place. But I don't have the budget to form a team to do things. If a person does it, it can only be done. Fortunately, I didn't doze off while driving and crashed into the road, I really.
Travel shows on TV will have local restaurant owners, hotel waitresses, people on the same stops (laughs) tell you, "So-and-so is so-and-so." "I started out too... I didn't believe it (laughs), but I managed to stay in a historic ryokan instead of a business hotel, thinking I could ask for all kinds of information.
At that time, the hotel had a strong tendency to hate solo travelers, but I still coordinated through the local tourist guide center and had to live in it. Then talk to the waitress who brought the food.
"Is there anything interesting about this neighborhood?"
"Nasty, you're so horny!"
"No, it's not like that!"
"So what kind of place do you want to go?"
"Let's say... Secret Treasure Hall and the like. ”
"Just say it!"
Dialogue will always develop like this, completely hitting a wall. Think about it, if the third building in your hometown was the Secret Treasure Museum, and your mother kept telling you for 20 years, "Don't go to that kind of place," you would just turn a blind eye to it, and it would be as if it didn't exist to you. As a result, locals don't necessarily know best where he lives. People from all over Tokyo gathered and asked them where their hometown was fun, but they still didn't know. Because they thought their hometown was boring, they went to Great Lengths to run to Tokyo.
I vividly remember when I first went to the Toba Treasure Museum in Mie Prefecture. I didn't know the location, so I went to the sightseeing center in front of the station and asked, "Where is the Secret Treasure Museum?" As a result, the other party replied: "Well..." I couldn't ask a question at all. It's weird, I thought to myself, as soon as I walked out of the tour center, I found that the Secret Treasure Hall was next to it! It can be seen that he is pretending to be stupid, because it is not a well-known attraction that they are proud of.
So, I started interviewing and quickly gave up the idea of relying on the locals. Try not to live in a ryokan, but live in a business hotel, eat outside food, and dig with your own hands. I will also collect the leaflets of sightseeing spots next to the front desk of the hotel.
Can't go back if you can't find a place to report. I often encounter crises when I have to go back to Tokyo tomorrow and can't find the subject matter at all. Desperate to keep driving on the national highway, until a billboard appeared at the last moment: five kilometers ahead, pure gold Buddha!
At first I thought I was pretty good at finding that type of attraction, but unexpected encounters happened again and again, and one day I suddenly realized: it wasn't that I found the other person, but that I was found by the other party. I didn't find anything, just was "called" past. It may sound strange, but I've come to believe that's the way things are.
Take, for example, a temple with a pure gold Buddha, where of course there are no guests. Standing in the empty temple with a camera on my back, as if someone had slapped me on the back, he said in an unspeakable voice, "I'm trying too, so you have to go forward." ”
Just staying where you are, you won't encounter anything new. In the evening, when I was tired of driving on the winding mountain road, I could hold on to the bone of the hot spring street for a good rest in 30 minutes, and suddenly found a handwritten vertical billboard tied to a roadside telephone pole: "Local genius painters are unfolding and putting, free entry!" ”
Glancing obliquely, I began to think about eating and taking a bath under the pretext of "I can't bet on it anyway" or "there is no place to turn around on the mountain road". But after five minutes or so, I still didn't care, so I turned around and looked back. Of course, in this case, 99% will hope to be disappointed, but sometimes 1% happiness will be encountered. This opportunity always comes at a wonderful time when I least want to go around to other places, and the key to winning or losing at this time is whether I am willing to turn around and go back while thinking that "80% of my hopes will be disappointed" and lamenting.
I'm often asked what the trick is to discover interesting locations, but I only have one trick to "keep running". If I had a knack, I'd like someone else to tell me.
There is a life that is extremely ordinary, and may not be desirable in the eyes of the media, but it just exists intact and does not disgrace anyone. I discovered this kind of life indoors in the city of Tokyo and made "Tokyo Style", and expanded the scope to japan's non-metropolitan areas, and the appearance of this kind of life that I explored outdoors was included in ROADSIDE JAPAN.
The title of the book also has the words "Rare Japan Chronicle", so some people think that it is a pioneer in the collection of rare attractions. But for me ROADSIDE JAPAN presents a vast landscape, and the roadside attractions that make up it are all kinds of "places" that allow us to live a life of nature on the outside of the values that the media or high-level intellectuals have forced over... Or a life that is in keeping with nature that only we know. The rarity of introducing each attraction is secondary.
Through "Tokyo Style", I wanted to dispel the feeling of dwarfism in the hearts of narrow apartment dwellers, and in the same way, when I did ROADSIDE JAPAN, I had a strong idea that young people in places who thought that "not going to Tokyo is not feasible, but they don't have the ability to do it" can slightly revise their views on the land under their feet after reading the book.
"Pure Gold Kaiyun World" Daikann-ji Temple, Yukihara Onsen, Mie Prefecture, from "ROADSIDE JAPAN - Rare Japan Chronicle"
The Fantasy Style Inn, taken at the Dancing Lovers Inn in Osaka City, is from the STREET DESIGN FILE series of Tokuchi Shoichi
I must run all 50 states in the United States
After roadside JAPAN came to an end, the editor of Literature and Art Spring and Autumn approached me. In the past, I used to have a column in marco polo (yes, it was also discontinued) in the magazine "The Kingdom of Learning Tongue Creators". The editors of Literature and Art Spring and Autumn said that they had a new magazine to start, and asked me to help them write something. "What kind of magazine?" I asked. The other person replied: "A cultural magazine like BRUTUS." (Later ITLe.) So I asked him to let me do the American chapter of the "Rare World Chronicle" that I had always wanted to achieve.
There is a series of guidebooks called "Walking the Earth", which introduces a lot of european manuals, which are divided into basic sections according to the country, and there are also themes such as "small village tour". But the United States only has new york, Boston, west coast, Florida and "south" and other big classifications, so it is gone, now there are probably more books. However, those famous metropolises in the United States of America are exceptional, and the huge "United States" is still completely unknown to us, they are the overwhelming masses. Just as Tokyo is not typical of Japan, New York is not the representative of the United States.
Whether it's music or movies, almost all of my nourishment comes from American culture, but I don't know much about the real America. Not only that, but the more elites look down on the United States. Obviously, the United States as a country or government is fundamentally different from an American. Therefore, I secretly harbor an ambition, that is, no matter how many years it takes, it does not matter, I must run all 50 states in the United States, and as a result, the literary and artistic spring and autumn came to talk to me at this time, but it was a coincidence! [Laughs]
So I said, "Okay, let's do it!" "The magazine had just started, and the budget was sufficient, so at the beginning I set aside a state every month, flew over to visit, but physically could not hold on, about the second year onwards changed to three or four times a year, three weeks to a month, and then visit several states.
I still went on the road alone, rented a car when I arrived at the airport, and in the evening I looked for a motel along the road for the night, and so on. Later, from 2000 onwards, the company probably found that they had spent too much money on the four-page report, and the editor-in-chief would pat me on the shoulder and say" every time he changed, but I clenched my teeth: "I promised to run through 50 states, right?" "It took seven years to get through the whole process. Then, TITLe was discontinued in 2008, the year after my series ended... I hope it wasn't me who did it. [Laughs]
At that time, the Internet was widespread, and a certain degree of pre-investigation could be done, and just a moment before I went on the road to interview, the United States published a book called ROADSIDE AMERICA, which was like the American version of "Rare Japanese Chronicle", which I referred to a lot of materials. However, there are still many things that you will not know if you do not go to the local area. When I arrived in a town, the first thing I did was go to the bookstore to buy maps and local travel guides. Also, young people like Starbucks tend to put free publications, which helps me a lot. However, it is also the same as when circumnavigating Japan, and the most useful thing is the leaflet of local sightseeing spots placed next to the front desk of the motel. The Internet can't cover all of that kind of regional information, and there are many exotic attractions that are not available on the website.
However, there is a big difference between the countryside in the United States and the countryside in Japan. A considerable number of local residents of Japan think that living in the countryside is a dwarf, and they do not love the land under their feet very much, and they have the idea that "Tokyo is better..." But the Americans are the complete opposite.
What will we Japanese do once we become rich? Most people want to build a palace as close to the center of Tokyo as possible. But Americans will want to buy property as far away from the crowds as possible, and the bigger the house, the better, and the more rooms the better. "Neighbors (in) miles" is the best show off. So most of the rich sit in Montana or Wyoming with huge pastures and commute to work in private jets.
Based on this mentality, Americans do not think that the sparse population of the towns in which they live is a shameful thing, but are proud of it. Driving on the road, you will find that most of the entrances to the town will be signed "POP 1538". At first I didn't know what it was, but it was the population of the town. New York is probably too big, so there is no such brand. Best of all, the "POP1" brand really exists. Resident one person... Too few! During the trip, I gradually understood that living in that kind of place in my own way is a manifestation of the American psyche.
Left, Chicago's suburban shopping mall, which has been art-eraized; right, the shipwrecked ship that continues to sink in the concrete waves, Massachusetts, both from ROADSIDE USA : A Chronicle of the Rare World (USA)
The "chain of contempt" goes on and on
When the evening came, I would look for a motel to stay in and go around to a big supermarket like Walmart to buy dinner side dishes.
At first, I would look for "road cafes" like Baghdad cafes, but that kind of restaurant is actually on the verge of extinction in the United States, and the only options for eating out are McDonald's, Tacobell, Pizza Hut and so on. I find that eating these every day is really bad for the body... So I bought a small portable rice cooker on the way, and brought leave-in rice and miso with broth from Tokyo.
It's hard to find a good restaurant in the country, but the ingredients are abundant, so I will buy fish, vegetables, and meat at will, cook rice after returning to the motel room, cook it in other containers, then blanch the meat and vegetables, and then dissolve the miso into the hot soup... In order to carry out this kind of "motel cooking", I kept running supermarkets and gradually gained a personal understanding of what Americans would buy and eat. Just look at the teenagers gathered in the parking lot of the mall, you will know that young Americans now only listen to hip-hop, and there is no difference between white, black, and Hispanic.
Mobility, of course, is all about renting a car. There were so many cars to rent, and I began to find it interesting on the way, taking pictures of each car. The motel rooms were also photographed and all look the same, but still interesting.
When traveling in the United States, you probably only have to drive in New York, Boston, San Francisco, or New Orleans. Other places, ninety percent of the U.S. soil, have to drive around to see why.
So I drive for eight or nine hours from morning to night, and interview for one hour. No matter how much people like to drive, they will get tired. (Laughs) Americans don't seem to get tired, for some reason. That really made me feel incredible. What the average American hates most is not being forced to drive for long periods of time, but sitting in the passenger seat for long periods of time. They say it's much happier to hold the steering wheel than to sit there. Alas, I got tired of holding the steering wheel for a long time, and I didn't have a travel companion. The biggest help at this time is the radio station.
When I traveled to Japan, I deeply felt that the boredom of the local FM radio station was desperate, although Tokyo was not much different. Obviously playing music should be the original purpose, but the host continues to spit out the so-called nonsense, introduce the reader whose pen name is very humiliating, and finally play the main song of the record company, and the main song chorus is sung once and then cut off and finished. Something like this.
I was hanging out all over Japan for a while to do The Rare Japanese Chronicle, and my painter friend Nobuhiro Otake also wrote a column in the literary magazine Haiyan (a magazine owned by Berakusen, which was also discontinued in 1996), with paintings from non-metropolitan areas, so we traveled together for a while. I can't stand the boredom of Japanese rural radio, and before I leave for a certain place, Otake will make several tape compilations, which is very interesting. But even listening to it for a week will still be boring. The broken car Bought for 100,000 yen did not have a CD player, and when we passed the low-cost electrical appliance store, it occurred to us that if we bought a battery-type CD recorder, we would not be able to get it! How could I not have thought of it before? Even I was dumbfounded. We bought the cheapest CD recorder, bought various CDs such as songs at the highway rest station, and drove while broadcasting, and as a result, the road surface would jump off as long as there was a little undulating music, and it was not used at all. Neither of us knew until then that that the car CD player was different from the usual one. [Laughs]
Back to the topic of the United States. No matter how small the town, there are several local FM radio stations. No matter where you go, there are dozens of radio stations for you to pick and choose your favorite listening. There are only two or three in the Japanese countryside.
Some say that one in four Americans listens to country music while driving, so the most common is the radio station that plays country music. There are also a variety of radio stations, but the unexpectedly popular is Classic Rock, a radio station dedicated to rock music from the 60s to the 80s. Not just one program, but the whole radio station plays nostalgic rock 'n' roll 24 hours a day.
It's all the music of my generation, so listening to it often has moments of falling into unusual nostalgia. Japan's FM radio station can't broadcast Zeppelin, right? I wanted to listen to the music of that time more and more, so I ran to the record counter in a supermarket or shopping mall to look for CDs.
The record store in the country mall was full of young people listening to hip-hop, and I took George Harrison's "Everything Will Disappear" to the counter to check out, and the clerk with long hair and looking like a hippie and waste wood uncle said to me: "That's great, right?" ”
I think there should be hundreds of similar classic rock radio stations in the U.S., but the most popular and unshakable song so far is from Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.
I think listening to the same music for twenty or thirty years and continuing to like it is the best act. Although it is not on the "fashionable" side, it is much more noble in my eyes than the winner of life who "said that I had to listen to rock and roll when I was young, said that adults should listen to jazz soon, and finally sang with my big sister in high-end karaoke", and listened to Pink Floyd until death and was extremely satisfied. I've seen a lot of these people in the American countryside.
There are so many memories of one "American rare spot" after another that I can't say enough, so I won't mention it here. I would say that before the planning began, I talked to friends in New York or Los Angeles about it. As a result, everyone said don't do that, and some people said, "People in the American South have guns, and they have racist ideas, which is dangerous," and added that "and those places can't be interesting."
However, I actually ran through 50 states in the seven years of my actual journey, and I really didn't have the experience of being scared once, and the horrors of fatigued driving dozing and worrying about running out of gasoline on mountain roads were tasted several times. The southerners, who speak ill of each other, are very friendly and cordial.
At the end of the day, like Japan, Asia, and Europe, the United States has big cities that look down on the countryside. This is everywhere: New Yorkers look down on Los Angelesians, Los Angelesians look down on Las Vegas people, Las Vegas people look down on them... People always look down on beings weaker than themselves.
As mentioned earlier, the person you are reporting feels your intentions. If you plan to report from a negative point of view, the other party will of course be angry, and approaching with respect will naturally be welcomed. Besides, I went from Tokyo to Alabama and something like that. I don't rely on language, and I certainly don't rely on money. Saying "sincerity" may be a bit old-fashioned, but you are not interested in the people, things, and things you are interviewing, and the other party can definitely feel it.
The magazine's column was serialized under the headline "Chronicle of the Curious World: A Visit to the Alleys of America", but shortly after the end of the series, the book collected was renamed ROADSIDE USA – The Chronicle of the Curious World (USA), which is another large collection of photographs. The cost of seven years spent on interviews should be quite staggering, but the one-line book department of Literature and Art Spring and Autumn said, "We don't produce this book." I was mentally prepared for self-funded publishing, but things changed again, and finally the photo album was published by Aspect.
I thought there would never be a magazine that would let me run that kind of interview trip in the future, so I started making my own email magazine. But if I have a chance next, I would really like to do "ROADSIDE CHINA". China, like the United States, is the object of constant slander in the Japanese media, saying that nouveau riche and love to plagiarize, let people buy a lot of things and then laugh at them for "bursting". You know, my own Chinese friends are very gentlemanly, gentle and kind. A man wants to hate whatever he wants, and what place he hates is happy with him, but I think he must have seen it in person to be hated.
I went to China to interview several times when "Rare Japanese Chronicles" was still serialized. Nowadays, you can go almost everywhere you want, and the Chinese with a certain amount of wealth has increased.
People have a certain degree of wealth, which is actually very important for rare attractions. After touring a variety of places, I mastered the elements that nurture (laugh) exotic spots:
(1) First of all, a community must have acceptance... Or ignore the spatial and spiritual surplus of the weirdo; (2) there must be a spacious enough place to do weird things; (3) the community must have a monetary surplus, so that the makers can easily get the waste, that is, the materials for making weird things; and the guests who are willing to pay the entrance fee will exist.
These are the three points. Therefore, if any waste in a country is taken and reused by someone (Mr. Fujiwara Shinya told me that there is very little garbage in India), then there is no room for strange things to create rare spots. Poor countries that do not have the surplus to allow fools to make strange devices will find it difficult to breed rare attractions.
"Outside the Circle Editor", Du Zhuxiangyi, Republic of Guangxi Normal University Press, Translator: Huang Hongyan, 2021-3, ISBN: 9787559834799
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Captions and in-text images are provided by the publisher.