Triin and I arrived in Nagoya by train and hooked up with our www.couchsurfing.com hostess Changmi - she is super - she took us to a Halloween party where we played and then jammed with the band - amazing guitarist and a saxophonist to make Kevin buster blush - almost. The waiter there suggested we went to another bar called Jajaa - where we did rinse out. The owner started playing guitar and then the bar-lady started playing ukulele and a big guy turned up and started banging the drum. After a few surupticious phone calls a few more members of the band turned up. One took down the tambourine and proceeded to rinse, another sang like a frog, a really cute little girl who looked 13 years old came in smoking a cigarette and wearing a motorcycle helmet and the BIG drum-banger picked up an accordion and put it on her - pining her slight body onto a chair under the weight of the giant accordion. By the end pretty much everyone in the bar was rinsing on a bizarre collection of ancient instruments of music: bass drums, conta-bass, wash-board and whistle! They made some fantastic music!
We set up a gig there for the next Sunday. The musical exchange died down and they all faded into the night, we followed them around 5am.
maybe check their website:
www.jaaja.jp
Jaaja is the name of the band leader`s cat who died, he wrote a song about the funeral and called the bar after the dead cat and there is a cat sculpture above the door. Japanese are so delicate. I was so impressed! They touch things with such care and respect - I would not say love but that is perhaps an unavoidable human emotion that comes anyhow. They obvious love what they do and when you do anything with such tenderness you enter a state of meditation where you have deeper feeling and sensitivity for your actions and the results. I am very impressed. It is like the science of the soul revealed. Very quiet and calm. Our hostess` mum has a cafe and we went to see her and she gave us sake cups that whistle when you drink them and parchment from a Korean almanac from 150 years ago - printed in the old fasioned way - she just tore out pictures - she uses the paper to paper the inside of antique Japanese furnature for her antique shop. She was so kind!
I was thinking about dreams - I thought that opening a bar like the jajaa bar would be a project I would like to take on but you know all my life projects have been too big to be possible really so I did not know how to start them. That is why I am just floating around the world!! He He!
What are your dreams out there guys? Anyone wants to publish a book by a hobo who has bummer around Asia and Europe and painted pictures all the way?
* * * *
We were invited to a performance of Indian classical music in a temple. The owner of the temple - the caretaker monk - sadly died last year and his son who had been educated in Shri Lanka and England came back from his life abroad and reentered the world of Japanese formalities, duties, responsibilites and the life of a monk. In Japan monks and politicians and other jobs that you thought would take some ideological motivation are all heireditory - the present prime minister is the son of a former prime minister - everything is very clique and closed to outsiders it seems, old duties to other families, loyalty lasting decades of years are all the major virtues - not so much good policies. Anyhow, this poor boy has been handed the golden begging bowl and is a very reluctant monk but since he is in charge of the grounds he opened the doors of a beautiful empty nunnery on the site of the temple for travellers. He was accommodating a group of Indian musicians. In fact they were Japanese kids who work in factories in Japan for six months then spend all their money studying sitar and tablas in India for as long as they can until their money runs out. They were really great musicians but I have started to spot the weak point in Japanese cultural armour - they are often too polite, they work together like one man but they are always aware of the people around them - this sometimes means that in those moments when you have "divine inspiration", when your soul tells you to do something quite exceptional they will not act, staying this side of living Nirvana because they cant seem to take their friends with them. Those moments don`t happen so often and it is very good of them to come back to us - Good or bad, I think it means they strive less for personal enlightenment than Social Acceptance. On paper that is less selfish but somehow less effective for the good of the world and more importantly Japan. That is all just uninformed supposition of course. We had to wait till very late before we left the temple, our hostess had taken out her violin and the hippy kids had started to teach themselves how to play it and she could not ask for it back saying she had to work at 8am - I could see she was smiling at the girl and thinking - oh I need that violin back, but did not say anything. So as she eventually drove home I chatted to her from the back seat keeping my eye on her eyelid and breaking the silence whenever it looked like it was sinking! The hippy Japanese family had played songs that lasted 20 or 30 minutes with the same refrain over and over. It was impressive, pathetic and very tiresome so I read American Gods in the beautiful bathroom with the preheated toilet seat cover and the recording sloshing sounds so you cant hear your own farts and exhaust sounds effects. Very cosy, and then I worked on a new theatre show for next weekend.
lots of love
jimbino vegan
We set up a gig there for the next Sunday. The musical exchange died down and they all faded into the night, we followed them around 5am.
maybe check their website:
www.jaaja.jp
Jaaja is the name of the band leader`s cat who died, he wrote a song about the funeral and called the bar after the dead cat and there is a cat sculpture above the door. Japanese are so delicate. I was so impressed! They touch things with such care and respect - I would not say love but that is perhaps an unavoidable human emotion that comes anyhow. They obvious love what they do and when you do anything with such tenderness you enter a state of meditation where you have deeper feeling and sensitivity for your actions and the results. I am very impressed. It is like the science of the soul revealed. Very quiet and calm. Our hostess` mum has a cafe and we went to see her and she gave us sake cups that whistle when you drink them and parchment from a Korean almanac from 150 years ago - printed in the old fasioned way - she just tore out pictures - she uses the paper to paper the inside of antique Japanese furnature for her antique shop. She was so kind!
I was thinking about dreams - I thought that opening a bar like the jajaa bar would be a project I would like to take on but you know all my life projects have been too big to be possible really so I did not know how to start them. That is why I am just floating around the world!! He He!
What are your dreams out there guys? Anyone wants to publish a book by a hobo who has bummer around Asia and Europe and painted pictures all the way?
* * * *
We were invited to a performance of Indian classical music in a temple. The owner of the temple - the caretaker monk - sadly died last year and his son who had been educated in Shri Lanka and England came back from his life abroad and reentered the world of Japanese formalities, duties, responsibilites and the life of a monk. In Japan monks and politicians and other jobs that you thought would take some ideological motivation are all heireditory - the present prime minister is the son of a former prime minister - everything is very clique and closed to outsiders it seems, old duties to other families, loyalty lasting decades of years are all the major virtues - not so much good policies. Anyhow, this poor boy has been handed the golden begging bowl and is a very reluctant monk but since he is in charge of the grounds he opened the doors of a beautiful empty nunnery on the site of the temple for travellers. He was accommodating a group of Indian musicians. In fact they were Japanese kids who work in factories in Japan for six months then spend all their money studying sitar and tablas in India for as long as they can until their money runs out. They were really great musicians but I have started to spot the weak point in Japanese cultural armour - they are often too polite, they work together like one man but they are always aware of the people around them - this sometimes means that in those moments when you have "divine inspiration", when your soul tells you to do something quite exceptional they will not act, staying this side of living Nirvana because they cant seem to take their friends with them. Those moments don`t happen so often and it is very good of them to come back to us - Good or bad, I think it means they strive less for personal enlightenment than Social Acceptance. On paper that is less selfish but somehow less effective for the good of the world and more importantly Japan. That is all just uninformed supposition of course. We had to wait till very late before we left the temple, our hostess had taken out her violin and the hippy kids had started to teach themselves how to play it and she could not ask for it back saying she had to work at 8am - I could see she was smiling at the girl and thinking - oh I need that violin back, but did not say anything. So as she eventually drove home I chatted to her from the back seat keeping my eye on her eyelid and breaking the silence whenever it looked like it was sinking! The hippy Japanese family had played songs that lasted 20 or 30 minutes with the same refrain over and over. It was impressive, pathetic and very tiresome so I read American Gods in the beautiful bathroom with the preheated toilet seat cover and the recording sloshing sounds so you cant hear your own farts and exhaust sounds effects. Very cosy, and then I worked on a new theatre show for next weekend.
lots of love
jimbino vegan
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