Saturday, November 04, 2006

A brief cultural moment


Yamatonokuni takes a break from the normal fare of toilet humor to bring you this cultural moment.
It was a gorgeous fall day, so I was at the river bank instructing my daughter on the finer points of playing your GameBoy while shutting out the intrusive sounds of nature. Suddenly this elderly guy cruised in on his bicycle. He pulled out an actual Mongolian horse-head fiddle (see detail) and started playing it. After awhile he began to do some honest-to-god Mongolian throat singing. It was interesting...I believe one of my college roommates explained to me that in throat-singing the performer actually sings entire chords, albeit with a limited range (somewhere between dirge and funeral march). Very cool stuff to hear live.

The gentleman in question is from Mongolia and is studying here in Japan. He's been studying Japanese for only a few years, but speaks more fluently than I do after 10.
It's funny...panhandling...er...sorry..."busquing" is not really practiced here. While in the US, this guy would probably have been buried under a hail of nickels and quarters, here he gets only the odd question. Fortunately he seems to be actually doing it for practice, not money. Playing outside is probably his only option (many apartments here ban the use of any kind of instrument inside).

Anyway, just thought it was a share-worthy scene. The drone of the fiddle and throat singing drifting across the river in the hazy autumn air, happy kids playing in the grass, and a creepy middle-aged guy wandering around clutching and talking to his cat. It was a random collision of cultures, age groups, and weirdoes that kind of nicely sums up urban Japan. Equal parts tranquility, tradition (both native and imported) and strange lonely people who may or may not be psychopaths.