New York City’s Japan Society is currently hosting a two-month series on Okinawa, the country’s southernmost prefecture, home to a culture that skews far from the rigid intensity of the rest of the archipelago. Held on Tuesday the 3rd, the ‘Explore Okinawa’ event seemed like the most general of these, a broad primer on the island’s culture, history and cuisine. Okinawa is actually the largest island in the Ryukyu chain, which existed as an independent kingdom / Chinese affiliate state until being brought under Japanese control in the 17th century, persisting as largely autonomous entity for centuries afterward. Absorbing influences from all over the Western Pacific, the island culture has produced distinctive exports like bingata, a painstaking, multi-step textile form, and karate, Japan’s best-known martial art.
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Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice takes place during a period of great, decidedly un-groovy change, set in a sun-dappled 1970 in which the dreamy hippie lifestyle is gradually being consumed by, and absorbed into, the formerly square mainstream, pulled by undercurrents of corporate greed and communal adaptation. It’s a process that’s neatly summed up by the toxic relationship of barefoot PI protagonist Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) and his authoritarian tormentor/establishment foil Christian F. “Bigfoot” Bjornsen (Josh Brolin). Here, in a fitting moment for a character defined by several instances of massive consumption, the flat-topped detective wolfs down two helpings of American pancakes prepared in Japanese eatery. “They're not as good as my mother's” Bigfoot notes, “but what I really go for here is the respect.” From a tinny radio in the background comes another signifier of this process, by which American culture absorbs foreign items, then pressures or transforms them to conform to its own narrow sense of the exotic: Kyu Sakamoto’s 1961 hit Sukiyaki, which underwent a similar progression in its American renaming. As reflected by its Japanese title (“I Look Up As I Walk”), it’s an aching song about lost love / the failures of the anti-US protest movement, and has nothing to do with the traditional hot pot dish; the title is merely a slapped-on word that sounded catchy and Japanese. Look down as you scroll for a weird promotional video for this otherwise fantastic song:
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The coded language of snacks, sandwiches and seasonings, in NYC and beyond.
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