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Tag Archives: YELLOW FRIED CHICKENz

Lessons in the School of Rock

17 Monday Feb 2014

Posted by scalesoflibra in Concerts & Theater, Post JET, Stuff That Just Happens

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Bujingai, Bujingai: The Forsaken City, GACKT, Rock and Read, Translation, YELLOW FRIED CHICKENz

There’s an Oasis song that says “don’t put your life in the hands / of a rock and roll band.” Seems like sound advice, but I wonder if taking it means you’re still putting your life in a band’s hands.

In December of 2012, when I was struggling to decide whether to stay on JET or not, one of the things that crossed my mind was “if I leave, I might not be able to go to another GACKT concert.” Seriously. If, in that cold and lonely December, I had hit for premium tickets (first 5 rows) in the fan club lottery for the 2013 Best of the Best tour, there’s a chance that I would have found the strength to grit my teeth through everything that was annoying me. Instead, a couple days before leaving to spend winter break in the States, I called the fan club line and got a nice recorded message telling me in keigo that I had struck out. For the first time in my 3 years in the club. After being in the seventh row at the Osaka Gakuensai! I couldn’t believe it and called the automated line again, hoping I’d misunderstood. But I hadn’t. And I thought, “On top of everything that’s gone wrong this past year I can’t even see GACKT?!” Then I cried in my kotatsu.

I remembered Oasis’ song, and felt like no matter what I chose, I was putting my life in the hands of a rock band. If I stayed it would be to continue going to GACKT shows, even if I ended up all the way in the back of the hall. If I left it would be to listen to Oasis’ advice. Granted, I don’t think this is what Noel Gallagher had in mind when he penned the lyrics to “Don’t Look Back in Anger.”

Actually reading these...that's my homework now. Woo-hoo!

My small collection of 2009-2013 Fool’s Mate, Arena 37℃, Out of Music, and the official fan club magazine, GACKT Globals. For the most part, I haven’t actually read these. Yet.

Okay, so that’s a bit of an exaggeration; GACKT was only a part of my decision making process, but he has played a huge role in my life for the past 12 years. I don’t think I would have studied Japanese as enthusiastically and naturally if I hadn’t fallen in love with his music, then with him overall. On top of being a singer-songwriter multi-instrumentalist, I think he’s pretty smart. When I saw this interview that came included in 2004’s PlayStation 2 game Bujingai: The Forsaken City (whose main character was modeled after and voiced by GACKT) I knew I wanted to listen to more of what this man had to say.

G in Bujingai Interview

Right after this, he says something that the English subtitles leave out. If I heard him correctly, he says, “Hm, well, I’ve always thought of myself as being slow on the uptake.”

My body used to be really weak, and I was sick of using that as an excuse in my life, so I started practicing to conquer my own weaknesses. I guess a lot of mothers don’t want their kids fighting with each other, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. If you fight someone physically, your injuries will heal eventually. But a lot of kids don’t do that these days. They get into fights with their hearts, you know? They hurt each other emotionally, and those wounds are a lot harder to heal. That’s how bullying works, and I think the reason why suicide rates are going up is because people are hurting others, and people are letting people hurt them emotionally.

You can see this interview from the beginning here, but what I quoted comes at the beginning of part 2. Interestingly, the subtitles also leave out that GACKT says specifically that martial arts can be used to overcome Asians’ disadvantage of having small bodies relative to white people and black people. (Something I didn’t catch when I first saw this interview 10 years ago.)

Now, I don’t agree with GACKT on everything. I sort of put him on a pedestal so when he does or says annoying things, he really ticks me off and I have the sort of one-sided lovers’ spat that only a truly devoted fan can have. Punning on 男尊女卑 (“dansonjohi,” literally meaning something like “respect men, revile women”) to come up with 男尊女秘 (pronounced the same way, but meaning something like “respect men, keep [this show] a secret from women,” maybe) for a men’s-only concert? Really? I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having a men’s-only concert, but it seems like a strange name to pick for the show, especially when the overwhelming majority of your fanbase consists of women. But, for the most part, I’ve found a lot of what GACKT says to be very logical and useful.

As I complete my self-assigned homework of studying Japanese for 4 hours a day (2 hours with textbooks and 2 hours with anything else) I’m coming across a lot of GACKT’s words, wise and otherwise. Today I read the interview from Rock and Read #44 (November 2012). I plan on translating all of the interview for practice, but there was one part in particular that really stuck out to me, so I’d like to share it here, along with a related anecdote. [UPDATE: You can now read the whole interview translation here.]

At this point in the interview, GACKT has been talking about bullying. The interviewer, Ayano NISHIMURA, then asks what makes him feel alive and he answers seeing and feeling people’s happiness. The interview continues:

So, turning other people’s happiness into your own strength. Through your music, movies, and plays, you call for people to stop fighting with each other, and to hold friends dear. Why did that become a theme in your work?
Hm, probably because when I took a look back at myself, I realized that I hadn’t produced anything.

You hadn’t produced anything?
Through fighting. It resulted in nothing. The fights I myself started, the fights I was involved in, they accomplished nothing. I really think so. When I was a student, the discrimination against zainichi* children was awful. I was in that group, too. I’m not zainichi, but I got along really well with the zainichi children. So, I stood right between the Japanese and the zainichi. You could say I understood where both sides were coming from. Neither side was wrong in what they were saying; they’d get so heated that you couldn’t even tell who had started it, and I was caught between the two, being on good terms with both. So, sometimes there would be these really huge arguments, and I’d be the only one who didn’t get called out to join. Because I couldn’t join either side. They wouldn’t let me know what was going on because they knew that I’d end up mediating. I wondered, why does such a meaningless thing have to happen, why does it happen over and over again? It was a huge dilemma. I thought, if Japanese and Korean people sat down to talk to each other one-on-one, they’d both realize what a great person the other is. But they never understood each other. I thought, what’s up with that?

It’s about the pride between countries, right? Recently, I interviewed a certain zainichi actor. He’s 33 years old now. He said that from the time he was very little, he was always taught that he couldn’t lose to Japanese people. When he started to wonder why that was, he asked his parents, “Is it okay if I lose to Korean people?” They couldn’t answer him, so his viewpoint changed to “what a stupid way of thinking.” But I think it’s about how you take it. In that case, it could go either way. I think that to treasure one’s country and to want to protect its culture and way of thinking, are very precious things. But it’s sad when people hurt each other.

___________
Note
*”Zainichi” literally means “being in Japan” but it’s most often used to refer to people of Korean descent residing in Japan.

The story the interviewer shared about the Korean actor and what his parents told him reminded me of something that happened at one of YELLOW FRIED CHICKENz’s concerts. YFC was a band that GACKT formed, active 2010-2012. Its first live shows were men’s-only, with women gradually allowed to participate. But the rough nature of having started as a men’s-only show remained. GACKT would address the audience in really rough Japanese, included a call and response bit that consisted entirely of the word “F***,” and the audience was constantly instructed to “go wild.” I was more than happy to oblige, and I would scream out the band members’ names between songs louder and for longer than anyone else. But at the beginning of one concert, this happened, and I was so annoyed by it I felt compelled to write about it in my journal in the fan club community:

DEARS Diary 2011.10.11The English sounds really simple because I would write it translating from what I'd written in Japanese.

The English sounds really simple because I would write it translating from what I’d written in Japanese.

Well, I was gentle in the translation. The word the woman used, 「気持ち悪い」, doesn’t mean just “bad,” but literally, something that makes you feel bad, e.g. something disgusting. So there I was, enjoying the show and showing the band some love, feeling like I was one with all the fellow fans, when this woman goes and ruins the moment by turning it into a competition. Implying that somehow I shouldn’t be enjoying the show as much as a Japanese person. I, who had been walking the path of GACKT fandom for 9 years at that point, who was a card-carrying member of the official fan club, was screaming so loud it somehow challenged this woman’s Japanese-ness. What?

The comment seemed even sillier considering that in their 2011 incarnation YFC had two vocalists, GACKT and Jon Underdown, an American musician active in Japan. It reminded me of the first time I went to the Catholic church in my neighborhood, and a parishioner said, “Oh, a foreigner.” There was no ill-will in the observation, so paired with the location I was just thoroughly amused. Had I known more Japanese at the time, and had the guts to make saucy comments in church, I might have given voice to my internal reaction: “Who, me, or the man on the cross?”

Well, to take another lesson from Oasis, I’ll end on a positive note. Because I don’t want to always be looking back in anger. The reason I didn’t get in touch with friends in Detroit in my first few months back was that I didn’t want to talk about Japan, and I figured they would ask. I was too mad at it, but I knew that I needed time and space to let the good things about the country and my JET experience resurface in my mind.

This comment from another fan club member (one whom I knew in person from the same club-within-the-club) made me feel better that day.

oninkl

“I was glad to meet you for the first time in a while! ♪ Nationality doesn’t matter!! That is to say, there’s no reason why it would. What’s important is KiAi ♡”

気愛 KiAi = 気合い Kiai + 愛 ai. Putting love into your fighting spirit. Or fighting on because you love something. I think writing the word this way isn’t common outside the GACKT community, but I really like it.

気愛!! ^o^

People who don't follow GACKT often don't know that Screencapped from the greatest concert DVD ever, Requiem et Reminiscene II Final. ♡

People who don’t follow GACKT often don’t know that underneath the stoicism and visual kei garb, there’s this guy who is just so gosh-darned adorkable you could die. ♡ Screencapped from the greatest concert DVD ever, Requiem et Reminiscence II Final.

Really Quick Update

20 Tuesday Mar 2012

Posted by scalesoflibra in Living in Fukuoka, Me Being Random

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Spain, YELLOW FRIED CHICKENz

I’m still here yo. Ahahaha…

Well, just what happened? I had meant to add photos of my ehoumaki and the corner I faced as I ate it, but never got around to it. There was just so much going on, and now that classes are over (for me, not for the students), I just wanna relax. I’ve been bumpin’ YELLOW FRIED CHICKENz’s first album, playing Star Ocean: The Last Hope, and buying omiyage.

I’m going to Spain next week. @_@

That came outta nowhere, huh? Ahahaha…it’s actually been in the works since…mmm…maybe last June or July? I’d been scheming with my mother’s Spanish penpal of 30 years until I could see my mother in person in December. Once we decided on dates within my spring break (since now my mother’s retired and so is her penpal), it was just a matter of buying the tickets. I bought my tickets shortly after returning to Japan.

And now I have less than a week before I fly over Asia and Europe. I’m going to have pretty long layovers in Seoul and Paris. I hope I can remember something of my 7 years of French! J’ai oublié tout!

Watch, I’m going to accidentally speak in Japanese or some weird chimera of Japanese and French in Paris! It might even come out in Spain too, since I don’t even hear Spanish very often over here, much less speak it. >o<;

Ahem, anyway, I’ve bought most of the omiyage I want to take from Japan, and figure I’ll round these gifts out with some sweets from Korea and/or France.

A pretty different school will greet me upon my return. One of the teachers from my old school will transfer to my current school! @_@ I was so surprised. That, and the whole new English curriculum requirements…it might be a wild year.

Well, I’ll have GACKT and his YELLOW FRIED CHICKENz to get me through. ^o^ Enjoy a song from them. It starts off a little bit…uh…well, let’s just say that when he mentions an accelerator, brake, and shaft, he’s probably not talking about car parts. ^o^;;;  The song is 「恋愛Driver~Fooさんの歌」(“Ren’ai Driver ~Foo-san no Uta~” which would mean something like “Romance Driver ~Mr. Foo’s Song~”). I don’t know who Foo-san is, and apparently, neither does anyone else. I Googled 「Fooさんは誰」(“who is Foo-san”) and found that no one seems to know just who he is. *Shrugs*

Oh well. HEADBANG!!! >_<\m/

Two Nights with YELLOW FRIED CHICKENz

03 Saturday Jul 2010

Posted by scalesoflibra in Concerts & Theater, Rolling 'round Kyuushuu

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

GACKT, YELLOW FRIED CHICKENz, YFC

It’s to be expected that a post about a rock show would have obscenities and explicit content, but in the interest of keeping this blog relatively clean, I’ve edited the post I wrote for my personal blog to post it here as well.  After all, it’s thanks to being on JET that I can finally see GACKT live.  So, here we go!

Thursday and Friday I went to see GACKT and his band, YELLOW FRIED CHICKENz, at Zepp Fukuoka.  Both shows were great, but Friday’s was noticeably better.  There’s too many sights, sounds, and feelings to try to do a chronological telling, so I’ll write in vignettes.

Thursday Night (July 1st)

As expected, there weren’t as many people on Thursday.  Judging by the signs with the ticket numbers, there were only some 1600 people in the standing room plus how many ever there were up on the second floor seats.  My friend and I had tickets numbered in the 1330s, but when we went in many people weren’t trying to get up as far forward as they could, so we ended up pretty close to the stage; I estimate some 25 feet (8 meters) away.  We were close enough to be able to see GACKT’s face clearly and could see the sweat flying from his hair when he would head bang.

Around 6:45 someone (it wasn’t GACKT) came on the mic from backstage to lead the crowd in “kiai practice.” Kiai are cheers or fighting yells.  There was lots of OSU! and ANIKI! and slurred, rolled-R manly Japanese.  Don’t know if I understood it correctly, but after the first “ANIKI!” it sounded like the guy said, “What the hell was that?!  It’s not “anikki” it’s “aniki”!  Can’t you even pronounce right bakayaro?!”

The concert proper started on time.  GACKT walked in carrying his sword and started “ZAN.”  I couldn’t hear his voice very well and he seemed tired.  He was staggering, but I couldn’t tell if he was stagger-dancing or just plain fatigued-staggering.  (After seeing him Friday, I think it was from fatigue.)  It wasn’t until the fourth or firth song, “LU:NA” that I could clearly hear his voice.

His little strip-teasing during “Dybbuk” and finally the ripping off of his shirt during the bridge of “LU:NA” were wonderful. ^_^

I think it was after this that GACKT led the crowd in random shouting, first calling on the men, then the women, then finally just yelling “YFC! YFC! YFC!” over guitar feedback.

Then there was…GACKT shimmying during “EVER.”  Oh. My. Savior.  It was so cute, so adorable, yet utterly ridiculous.  I was simultaneously thinking of the Chiquita Banana lady and Belscard, the antagonist GACKT voices in the MMORPG Dragon Nest for which “EVER” is the theme.

There were several times during “Flower” and “Uncontrol” that GACKT put the mic down, I assume so that the audience would sing, but unfortunately, it was only during the first verse of “Flower” that the crowd actually did, or at least, that’s all I heard.  I felt bad for GACKT.

In general, I would say that the crowd wasn’t very frenetic.  It was strange to see the older people (40s, maybe even 50s) just standing, watching without swaying or otherwise giving any sign that they were listening to music and enjoying it.  Especially given that the “Rules for Private School Students,” which are the “rules” for participating in the live that among other things dictate that “students” (the audience) show their enthusiasm by yelling “osu” and “aniki”, etc, say that “the front is dangerous, if you can’t handle it, fall back!” and “only you can protect your body!” (translating loosely).  I was expecting to see a mosh pit, but alas, there was no moshing.  The fist/hand pumping was as violent as it got.  The girl in front of me nearly hit me and my friend in the face a couple of times, and I stepped on someone’s toes when I jumped up and down without thinking.

Thankfully, the weather was relatively cool, so it wasn’t hot in the hall. I could feel the air conditioning above my head, and even surrounded by all those people, it wasn’t unbearable.  I was dressed lightly, but I don’t know how the girl in the maid outfit could stand it.  Most people were dressed normally though, a plain shirt and capris, skirt, or shorts.

After the second to last song, when GACKT and the band went offstage, people started clapping and chanting “YFC.”  It seemed rather staid to me.  I thought, “Is this supposed to be the audience calling the band out for an encore?” As I had observed during my school’s bunkasai, I have the impression that Japanese think encores are mandatory, so they don’t shout with all their might to make the band come out.  Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s the idea I have.  I wanted them to yell louder!  In my mind I was screaming, “Come on Fukuoka!  Don’t embarrass yourself! It’s bad enough only the Friday show sold out, so at least SCREAM!!!” ^o^;

My friend  told me that the Japanese people around us had a look on their faces like “OMG are these people really screaming?”  I did notice that the people in our section, with the exception of the boy to our right, really weren’t saying anything (even if their fist pumping was violent).  The people closer to the front were better though.

During the last song, “Uncontrol -Kyouki Ranbu edition-” the crowd once again left GACKT hanging when he wanted them to sing.  Maybe a few people way up front sang for him, but I couldn’t hear them.

At the end there was another screaming session of “YFC!” and what sounded like it was supposed to be a big cat’s “raow.”  During the call outs for men and women, GACKT said 「やっぱり九州の男は強い!」(“As expected, Kyuushuu men are strong!”).  I didn’t understand what he said about Kyuushuu women, but my friend and I woo’ed fiercely even though we’re not Kyuushuu women.  LOL  Then he asked the men if they would join him for another men’s-only live at the Budoukan, and asked the women if they would join him at Tokyo Dome.

Once the band went off and the lights came back up, GACKT came on the mic from backstage and did a cutesified yet rough「忘れ物のないように」(“Careful not to forget any of your things” and said a bunch of other stuff I didn’t understand, and finally, said “Buy all the goods you fools!  If there’s anything left, we’ll have to commit seppuku!”

Thus commanded by GACKT, my friend and I went to get some goods.  I got a face towel, a Gakucchi, and the YFC Box. Very few people were buying goods, and even before the concert, there were sometimes only one or two people at the goods tables.  I felt a bit bad for GACKT some more.  ^_^;

My hauls!

The assembled box with photocards inside.

When we sat down to put our hauls into our bags, a Japanese fan approached us in English to try to sell some tickets for Friday’s show, but unfortunately all the people we called were either unavailable or couldn’t spare the money for not even the discounted tickets.  Oh well, we tried.

We saw YFC!

Friday Night (July 2nd)

Friday I had arranged to meet some friends at the hall.  I was waiting for them outside when it started to rain, so I texted them to let them know I would go on ahead.  This time, my tickets were for the second floor, as standing room sold out either before tickets went on sale to the general public, or in the 10 minutes before I got to the Loppi to buy my tickets the day they went on sale.

Once again, no one was at the goods tables.  But I hoped that with more people, the crowd would show more enthusiasm.  They did!  Whenever something was thrown out into the crowd, there was a visible fight for it.  People were louder with their kiai, and always sang when GACKT gave the chance (but he only gave two chances this time).  There was a cute moment when GACKT did a very calm, not terribly forceful fist-bump with someone in the front row who had their fist up.  ^o^; (I also found GACKT’s half-done head of cornrows amusing in a similar manner.)

This time GACKT was ON from the very beginning.  I could hear him clearly and he didn’t look tired at all, there was no staggering of any kind.  I didn’t know whether to be relieved (i.e. “Yay!  GACKT got some sleep and possibly ate something!”) or even more worried (i.e. “No! GACKT drank 10 espressos and took a fistful of diazepam!”).

Since we were in the seated area this time, I had much more freedom to move.  I head banged and jumped around relatively freely, though I did apologize to the girl behind me the one time my hand smacked hers.  The older lady next to me would yell out “GAKUTOO!” and something else I didn’t understand every now and then, but my friend and I were still the loudest in the section.  Or more accurately, I was the loudest in the section.  ^o^  I had been worried that I wouldn’t be able to yell since I’d woken up with a sore throat from the previous show, but, やっぱり、being that much further back motivated me to reach new decibel levels.  Both friends I went to the concerts with later said (in what I think might have been as much complaint as it was compliment) that I had “some lungs on [me]” and “really showed how excited” I was.” ^O^

Now, Thursday night I’d had the urge to yell “KFC!” instead of “YFC!” but didn’t, but this time my friend said to me, “I really wanna yell ‘KFC’.”  We tried to do it together, but it proved too funny and only got two out before it turned into “k–LOLOL kK F ahahaahahaa!”  I also let lose and yelled 「福岡もっと叫びましょう!!!」(“Fukuoka let’s scream more!!!”) because it was really starting to bug me that the audience wasn’t trying very hard to get the band to come back out after the second to last song.  I also did a yell that’s sort of like a Hispanic equivalent of a kiai; you hold a rolling-R at high pitch and let it turn into a laugh.

Everything else was pretty much the same.  At the end GACKT said something about how he was also a man of Kyuushuu (Okinawa is sometimes considered a part of Kyuushuu) and that Kyuushuu was the best.  The message from backstage was similar, though I didn’t hear the threat of seppuku if the goods didn’t sell out.

This time we actually had to wait in line to buy goods after the show, but no more than 10 minutes.  I had meant to buy another face towel, since my bracelet caught on the one I had and pulled some threads out, but I forgot.  I did pick up 5 bags of YELLOW FRIED CHIPz.

My friends and I then went to Hard Rock Café (it’s right next to Zepp) to have dinner, but were so busy talking about the show that we didn’t even open the menu till the waitress came over to ask what we would like to drink.  Whoops.

After that we hopped on the subway, then went our separate ways.

It was a great two nights!

This afternoon, I woke up with everything sore.  My neck from head banging, abs from clenching to scream louder, arms from pumping, legs from jumping, and throat from screaming.  But I could be in more pain, so by GACKT’s apparent logic, I wasn’t serious enough!

This was my lunch today:

YELLOW FRIED CHIPz: Part of a balanced diet.

^o^

Now it’s time to start saving up for Premium or SS seat tickets for when the Nemuri Kyoushirou play comes to Fukuoka in December. ^o^

Notice

As my time on JET has ended and I've said all I wanted to say about it, I will not be adding any new content to this blog. I leave it up for reference. However please keep in mind that the usefulness of this reference may drop as the years go by, because sometimes things change. Anyway, thanks for dropping by! ~September 2014

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