Tokyo Nightclub Hostess expat's story

I haven't read Bar Flower, My Decadently Destructive Days and Nights as a Tokyo Nightclub Hostess, by Lea Jacobson. (St. Martin's Press, 2008), but I have read a review of it by Mio Yamada at the Japan Times . I don't know how good the book is but I love this review. It's a perceptive and very well done and I have to believe it gives a sense of this journey of self awareness. The books is now on order. An excerpt:


This makes "Bar Flower" an odd piece of confessional work as Jacobson slips into her former inebriated self only to then step back and make astute societal observations in moments of sobriety. It's a difficult balance to keep, and on the rare occasion she loses it. But between the vodkas, her wit and insights make any uncomfortable moment more than worthwhile.

Another good review by A Girl Walks into a Bookstore, who writes: Jacobson’s knowledge and analysis of Japanese culture is spot-on. She details her drug addiction without feeling sorry for herself, and I found myself becoming emotionally invested in her heartbreaking story.

Crazy for Japan and other notes

I live in DC and a great source of information on Japanese cultural activities is the Japan Information and Cultural Center.

 This activity arrived via its mailing list:

The George Washington University's Sigur Center for Asian Studies Presents: Crazy for Japan: Art and Political Agendas at the International Expositions in the Gilded Age

Wednesday, Oct. 29 from 12:30 - 1:45pm at the Lindner Family Commons, The Elliott School of International Affairs, 6th Floor, 1957 E Street  NW with speaker Hannah Sigur, adjunct professor, University of California-Davis & San Francisco State University.


Hannah Sigur is an art historian, writer, and editor with seven years' residence and study in East and Southeast Asia. As an adjunct professor, she teaches a wide range of courses at San Francisco State University, University of California-Davis, and elsewhere, and has lectured at major museums and antiques fairs across the country from New York to California. She co-authored A Master Guide to the Art of Floral Design, listed by The Christian Science Monitor in "The Best Books of 2002."

Please RSVP with your name, organization/GW affiliation, and e-mail to gsigur@gwu.edu by Monday, October 27, 2008.

The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore also has a show, Autum Colors . It continues through Nov. 30 and is described: Through this selection of paintings from the collection of Betsy and Robert Feinberg, visitors will explore the imaging and meaning of the autumn season as it resonated with the various Japanese schools of painting during the 18th and 19th centuries.  Works by nanga, rimpa, ukiyo-e, and Maruyama-Shijo painters all explore sites and subjects that have long been synonymous with autumn in Japan, including the red leaves of Takao and the crimson momiji, or Japanese maple.

Murakami's characters are global citizens

You need a subscription to the New York Review of Books to see nearly all of their archives. But occasionally I have come across reviews that are accessible, such as this one, Gods of the Mall, by Christian Caryl, that looks at Haruki Murakami’s Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman.

Toward the end, Caryl steps back from the topic and wonders why other Japanese writers, with the exception of Muakama and Yukio Mishima, are not attracting international audiences. One reason is Muakama’s characters are globalized, dealing with dream-like conditions that seem universal but nonetheless rooted in the forces arising from the modernization of Japan.

Caryl writes: His characters are global citizens, inhabiting a world of ghostly presences and vague disquiet even as they indulge in the benefits of their membership in a thoroughly Westernized world.

Japan goes bananas

Is Japan more suspectible to diet fads than other nations? I doubt it. 

The latest trend is called the Morning Banana Diet which involves  a banana for breakfast and anything you want for the rest of the day. 

The beauty of the banana diet is that it doesn't cost anything. You won't need to buy books, join a support group, or follow a complicated schedule. 

From the Telegraph in the UK

The banana craze started in March this year with the publication of Morning Banana Diet, which claimed that consuming only bananas and room temperature water for breakfast fuelled weight loss, regardless of what was eaten during the rest of the day.

The trend for eating bananas recently gathered pace following a string of television programmes proclaiming the success of the banana diet.

As a result, sales of bananas at Life Corp, a major supermarket chain, reportedly increased 70 per cent last week while a department store in central Osaka also reported August sales up 50 per cent from last year and regularly selling out by early afternoon.