Mindful Shopping

Two good things bring me home, back to Japan. The first is a review by Gary Mawyer of Spike Japan, a blog started by Richard Hendy. As you’ll see from reading Gary’s review, SJ creates a thinking-man’s (and woman’s) clime. The second is a new take on one of Mindful Shopping’s oldest friends: Unique Japan. Owner Pablo Kuntz recently revised the site and infused more of his personal philosophy.

Spike Japan
A Review by Gary Mawyer

As a big fan of Japanese travel writing, a genre that sprang into exuberant existence by the 1870s, I’ve enjoyed reading great masses of some of the most self-evidently imperceptive, impertinent, self-centered, namby-pamby, fraudulent, half-witted and/or insulting essays and books ever penned. The tradition goes on and examples of “travel books that aren’t” describing impossible or nonexistent Japans still proliferate. I believe it’s been claimed somewhere that Japan has been the subject of more authentically bad travel writing than maybe anywhere else on earth. Across this wasteland blows the fresh cold wind and gemlike northern light of Spike Japan.

There are some important western travel books on Japan. Alan Booth wrote two mild-seeming Bruce-Chatwinish travelogues before his extremely untimely death, The Roads to Sata: A 2000-Mile Walk Through Japan, his account of walking the length of the Japanese archipelago from northernmost cape to southernmost cape, and Looking for the Lost: Journeys Through a Vanishing Japan, an account of rambling about in the most rural areas of Japan. These masqueraded as hiker books. Since so many Japanese live in Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto, the rest of Japan is much more rural than the outer world may realize, and getting more so every year as rural outmigration continues and the birth rate drops. Booth now has almost prophet-status as a Japanophile and it has gradually become self-evident that his two books were literary masterpieces. And valuable ones: books from people who walk remind us that the whole world looks dramatically different on foot. Another very fine book in the Booth tradition, recently re-released in a fresh edition as Hitching Rides with Buddha, is Hokkaido Blues by Will Ferguson. Ferguson did a “reverse Booth,” hitchhiking instead of walking from the southernmost to the northernmost cape. It’s pretty good.

Which brings us to Richard Hendy’s Spike Japan–referenced in this article, where I discovered it: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/mar/19/spike-japan-decay-architecture.

In many ways Spike Japan is at least every bit as interesting as Roads to Sata or Hokkaido Blues. Booth (like Chatwin) was writing as much about himself as anything else, and Ferguson was if anything even more delightfully self-conscious, but Spike Japan is foremost not a self-discovery but an other-discovery. Real self-discovery is kind of uncommon, but real other-discovery is so vanishingly rare that it calls for celebration. Secondly, Spike Japan includes a wealth of absolutely first rate photography. And finally, though this may just be personal to me, Hendy loves rust. That makes at least two of us—rust is nature’s finest editorial comment on the works of man.

The Spike Japan essays just seem to get better and better, although they were awfully good to start with. Spike Japan ought to have particular interest for Americans because the “years after the crash” post-bubble phenomena Spike Japan describes are probably foretastes of the “years after the crash” post-bubble phenoms we will get to see in the U.S. Systemically ill sectors of the Japanese economy have taken many years to completely mortify and the true results were not really all that obvious even to professional students of these events (whom Hendy brilliantly skewers in many of his essays). So it will be with us. Effects of the U.S. “Great Crash of ’08” will be weirder, more lingering, less predictable than our politicians, business freaks and public mouthpieces know. As J.K. Galbraith pointed out in his classic The Great Crash, 1929, bubble crashes seem dramatic but their deeper effects occur in slow motion, creeping rather than flitting from one economic sector to the next over a period of years.

Unique Japan

Its “About” page says that UJ “helps to make the finest Japanese crafts, tradition and culture more accessible for the whole world to enjoy. All products exude a deep and respectful significance; each one has a story to tell, a special message to convey.” Then it goes on to say something unexpected:

Our collection is, in a sense, a step back in time. It’s a step back to the fundamental joy of creativity. A step towards a more personable community. And a step towards the love of focusing all of one’s energy to the task at hand.

To live life with dignity, pride and purpose.

This is the Japan through which I discovered the world.