Pic 15: 高円寺 - Koenji, Tokyo

Pic 14: 代々木 - Yoyogi, Tokyo

Haiku pair

Not deserving

this metal fence

a dandelion

Not deserving

this field of poppies

a metal fence

Pic 13: 青山 - Aoyama, Tokyo

The Kizunas (part 4)

       A mixture of the faddish and the genuine, but whose fault was it? The name Kizuna was known all over the nation and their music was making people feel good. But when the side that takes over as fashion tips the scales, then the momentum slows down and things are taken for granted or forgotten; or worse still, become fossilized platitudes. And there was always the possibility that this could happen to The Kizunas.

       As if a harbinger of what was to come, or indeed what was actually happening, a trivial incident occurred at a performance in the capital. Just as they had finished their last song, a sequin from Ms. Kizuna’s right sleeve broke its thread and flickered down to the floor of the stage. It happened in an instant and only the people in the very first row could have noticed it, if at all. But to the Kizunas it was like a cast iron plate thudding into the wooden boards beneath their feet. And as they came off, they realized that the loud applause that always accompanied their exit to the wings was a subdued patter. They could hear their footsteps padding off into the dressing room; they had never before heard the rustle of their clothes as they were going off.

       Is this what Zeami meant by opprobrium from the masses? Were these the first stages of losing the Flower? The Kizunas flopped down into their chairs. They were in decline; people didn’t care about them that much any more. What had changed? Why were they not considered to be as necessary as before? Was it inevitable that a good thing cannot last forever? Yes, the climate of the times had changed; people had changed; feelings, emotions, and lifestyles had been re-prioritized to suit values recognized and reinforced, even coerced, by society as it now was. The Kizunas were slowly being forgotten, their fame and meaning tapering to a hardly discernible footnote in the back of people’s minds.

Pic 12: 原宿 - Harajuku, Tokyo

Person not people

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Pic 11: 芝浦 - Shibaura, Tokyo

The Kizunas (part 3)

       Their name appeared everywhere. In the neon signs announcing their next appearance, on the helmets of baseball players, as tattoos on the arms of young men and the ankles of young women. The whole nation felt good. It was as if some magic dust had been sprinkled over the land by the songs of The Kizunas – a coating of grace and enlightenment. People began to reassess their lives, heeding the songs’ messages, which reminded them of the important things in life, as well as its brevity and impermanence. Family members who had not met up for years began to make efforts to renew contacts with their kin; there was forgiveness for the absentees and the runaways, the divorcees and the lost contacts. Nobody could quite explain how such a feeling, such a mentality, had suddenly gripped the nation. That the Kizunas had triggered such emotions with their music was in no doubt, but how it had happened at this precise time and to this extent was still under debate. A flash in the pan? A short-lived fad? Or a permanent change in the mindset? A famous psychologist explained as follows:

This is a good example of what is known in our field as the Schilstrom-Richtblufter Effect. There is what we call an intra-psychosertive desire within people to manifest a behaviour, feeling, or habit, which needs an extra-psychoadsertive contrareflexive stimulus to release a series of emotions acting as pre-parietal hippocampial reflex agents. In other words, if a behaviour is suggested to you as being desirable, it will be readily embraced and even enhanced further if the initial desire, no matter how deeply buried or concealed, is present. The Kizunas are spreading a message that a lot of people have found that they need. It’s nothing new; it was always there.It just needed an exogenous impetus to generate an endogenous reaction. And it’s a common phenomenon, with many examples existing in every culture. One famous equivalent could be the Flower Power movement at the end of the 1960s, and it is likely that the impact of The Kizunas will last for about the same length of time. It does not necessarily mean that the pervasive feeling or trend will disappear, but there is always a thinning out, a decline, or a transformation to mask the original phenomenon, even though it could actually continue for a long time, albeit in a less conspicuous form.

Meanwhile, The Kizunas were still flying high.

Pic 10: 代々木公園 - Yoyogi Park, Tokyo