I must tell you, Rupert.
I had to become an artist for my self-liberation, at any cost - it is my whole life. Because for me the world of these corrupt people is too bad, the worst to live in.
There is an art to liberate us from this bad world.
Of course, you are one of those who make the world too bad for sense.
You don't have empathy for other human cultures because you don't have good taste potential or you can't feel the good sense well. You should never write about the culture of the fine arts again in your career.
Let you get out of the whole world for works of art. You must always radically respect all artists. If you can't understand the meaning of other people's art, let them live the artistic life happily in their own civilisation. Or if not only you should go back to before humanities.
Ken Mogi is your friend, but a bad friend. Because he too cannot feel the importance of great music in Japan. It is as if he cannot know why we live. Goodbye, British ethnocentrism.
In Japan, people generally believe in "Shinto imperial family cinocentrism" (meaning metropolitan centrism), so they hate living in the countryside. Please check the population concentration by country.
It is well known that Tokyo is the most populous city in the world, at least since the Edo period (I learned so).
Even the 'Kojiki' (Records of Ancient Matters) - not only Japan's first writing, but also the Shinto scriptures of 712 - taught that the rural people were inferior to the imperial family of cosmopolitans who had invaded Japan from abroad.
But of course this is just a political scheme, and today we cannot agree with the violation of the rights of indigenous peoples.
In Britain, at least since the time of the Norman Conquest, the composition of unfair discrimination has usually been the opposite, more or less.
For example, I recently reread a collection of Wordsworth's poems which gave me a kind of insight into why Britain loves the country.
Today, the mass media in Tokyo have capital and they use it to seduce people into commerce - as if you can have a more sophisticated life if you come to the metropolis.
Nor is it the same as England. For example, I have read 'The Vision of Britain' by His Majesty the King of England, or I have seen HM's great expression in painting. In thought of HM, HM loves the traditional life of the countryside more than the commercial life of a metropolis like modern Tokyo.
By the way about 'Light of the Beginning'. That was made for IbakiraTV, a local web broadcasting studio in Ibaraki Prefecture.
If you can watch this video on YouTube, you can easily imagine what life is like in the Japanese countryside.
The artists composed and played on very traditional instruments, unique Japanese classical "koto", "syakuhachi" - but Yuko Suzuhana studied European classical music at college, like composer Toru Takemitsu (well known from 'November Steps'). She mixed another cultural essences in her masterpiece.
First of all, she used the grammar of pop music, because that was everyone's theme song. But she used original poetry to make it special unique.
If you can read Japanese, you will notice that her lyrics explain what life is like in Mito City - where's one of Japan's traditional hometowns. She was born and lived there, so the song's lovely beauty and admirable sense of reality were composed with a wonderful poetic spirit.
♪
Sakura River where we walked together.
In the murmuring stream, hand in hand.
The wind enveloped all the tears you showed only once.
I yelled my dream to drown out the sound of the passing train.
Do you remember the rest of the dream?
The scenery is togethering us to tomorrow.
I can imagine what life is like for their teenagers around Mito City as if I was living on their side again. This is the work of a genius of the imagination.
Of course she used landscape expression to abstract from her experience, but we can also understand the harmony of life in the countryside with nature and the city - flowers, trees, stream and people - through her singing.
Just like a foreign, unfamiliar language, but you may not understand the poetic feeling itself. It depends on the sensory potential of the feeling.
It's like if someone has a different sense of humour, you can't touch their comfort level very well.
Next, she used the term "Kira-kira", which is an onomatope of Japanese. If you can use a Japanese dictionary, you must see this. The word has a sense of a certain kind of beauty. For example, キラキラした宝石 means 'sparkling jewels' in English, but it is not the same thing: the word kirakira has a delicate quoria of the word, not the simple meaning of sparkling.
She rhymes kirakira several times in the poem because she uses the delicate quoria to express some kinds of presious and amirable scenes.
If I was to use an analogy, it would be as if the light wafting from the sky, diffusely reflected in a rainbow after the rain has cleared and hitting the Seven-Colour Tower (a metaphor for the Mito Art Tower), gradually brightened as it poured into the city - and reached the surface of the lake, brighter and brighter, the animals resting by the lake, the fish under the lake, and the birds resting in the eaves of the city buildings, as if people's lives came back to beautiful life as it should be with a smile. At the same time, as if the glittering jewels of the Goddess' love were united in it, it strengthens our heartfelt life like the relief of the Gospel; because it was composed while people were being crushed in a place that belongs to the first category of cities severely damaged by the Great East Japan Earthquake.
It was this feeling that the word Kirakira simply abstracted. It is truly a miracle of words, probably unique in the Japanese language.
If you could read these things, you would realise that there is another culture in the world. Maybe you have never known almost all in your all life. And Mr. Rupert said on the BBC that J-pop in general was "awful".
And I've to say again, Mister Rupert said on the British Broadcasting Corporation that J-pop in general was "awful". I checked three times to make sure it wasn't "kirakira" really. If it's kirakira, it's political - at least educated speech for a multicultural society. Definitely.
This "awful", of course, has a double meaning. We can read it as an admiration for understandable childishness of localism. You have a bias towards your cultural meme, which assumes that cynicism is a "sign of culturally refined intelligence".
In Japan, around Kyoto, the cult is similar. Because the old town had fought with the court for more upper-class status, not only they but also the lower classes, who more or less imitated them, couldn't use the word straight. Let snobbery be your guide: the painted and lavishly decorated lift at Kyoto City Hall is a financial disaster, and not just in Geisya.
In the U.S. it might be the opposite. People like to use simple & straightforward logic - the old colony didn't have to fight the class system with its democracy. Yet Obama invited the VIP of Russian not the French cuisine to his favourite hamburger shop.
I like their frankness more than the commercial of the opium trade.
But not all cultures are the same. Japan is complex. There are many cultures in it, and of course you cannot understand all aspects in one day.
I respect your country very much, we learn that in English.
So I hope to understand why we love our Japan - it's imperfect, but we humans do it to learn what love is for all beings, every day for the most beautiful civilisation in the world, like a samurai.
You know well 'Bushido' by Inazo Nitobe, because it's a book written in English, he wrote to teach what is the aristocratic moral of another kind, what is the respectable life of the Far East, for the European cult confused under the faith of Jesus or capitalism.
Or, but it would be just awful if this term "cult" were also just a meme of Richard Dawkins's Eurocentrism in this context. And a miserable story for what the should be United Nations today!
This is a critical review of the violation of the human right to freedom of art expression, the dignity of the individual and the original culture of any humanity in a BBC article 'Japan was the future, but it's stuck in the past' by Rupert Wingfield-Hayes.
In the first sentence of the review I used dishonourable language, I am one of the poets, so I wanted it to sound like I was very angry when Picasso created his 'Guernica' about the violation of our people's human rights, on the rhetoric.
But if you felt rude, I would like to apologise to you, Mr. Rupert and Dr. Mogi, for using an emotive word.
