Saturday in the Japanese way
–
shimonedenburg.blogspot.com
I
On that Saturday, eating vegetables at the restaurant Hana Bishi at Balmes 55 St, in Barcelona, the preparation of the vegetables, sashimi, Maki and other wonders of the Japanese minimalist cuisine, which I love for the accuracy of its treatment, didn`t remind me at all its counterpart in South America, either the content or the shape.
Watching a steak bleeding under the weight of the Argentinian facón sharpened in any estancia , in the outskirts of Buenos Aires isn´t analogical, in spite of the fact that they are similar products and utensils.
In places of my childhood, unlike Barcelona, we used to sharpen our knives with the man having his bike placed upside down and the background sound of the metallic flute- which, by the way, was a Spanish costume and not precisely a habit from Mataderos, like I used to believe-.
The memories about the street vendors so common during those years always focus on a kind of “hanging casino” with its wheels and barquillos hold by the seller, who was sweating for the effort.
We used to turn the wheel and when it stopped, you got 1, 2 or 3 little crunchy barquillos. From there to the Baden Baden casino, there were just a few centimetres…Only that in Baden Baden, gambling stopped with a “Nicht mer” coming from a man with a sickening nazi odour but the one from the barquillo didn´t say even mu and just smelled like a sweating peddler, which was a luxury at those times.
While I had these memories, the little samurai from Hana Bishi cut the row fish using the “a cote” technique, probably to save meat, which he introduced in the sashimi with skill, or just because this is the way he learnt in the Japanese cookery school in Tokyo.
A good sashimi cutter is considered an artist, he knows how to cut up huge tuna fish following an almost architectonic plan. This artist was from Tokyo, spelled with “y”. Japanese language overuses the “y” and probably it relates to their influence from Greece —an old power in the past times, today not so popular, although the Japanese still steep themselves into Greek philosophers like Platón, Esquilo, Paraménides, Aristóteles in the same way as we do, or they probably base themselves more on Buddha , despite the fact that in Japan there are a lot of different religious trends and beliefs.
There is no doubt that this cutter of raw fish feels that he belongs to a tangential legacy for the samurais who are always trying to be in a self-improvement act.
It isn’t about overcoming others but overcoming oneself. Being better today, yesterday and tomorrow even more. The true samurais devote all their lives to the perfection of themselves.
The training is an endless process.
The female samurai equivalent would be the geisha as an icon.
These pleasure maids with skills in the art of seduction are in charge of charming the man since distant times and sometimes they are able to stop a man with a single look.
Very cultured women in the art of conversation, they master through seduction and produce attraction in the male huddles.
Men live with that hidden and worshipped feminism which produces a sublime attraction, nowadays in decline, although there are women keeping the male tension on those beings from Mars who are said to be the men.
Japanese people don’t go very often to the temple and their relationship with Buda is mainly personal and at home: that place of bright architecture which they are able to build and produces a deep-rooted envy to me.
On the contrary, as Judeo-Christians, we tend to gather in special places and sometimes of inhuman sizes considering the height of the buildings, similar to the banks today, like in a social act and we ask God to punish us, or we take communion after the sins or other several rituals.
I dare to say that each community moves closer to a God that gives services to an outrageous fear prevailing on earth, and maybe, in contrast, to the loneliness that each group carries on their backs; I guess that the Japanese aren`t punished so much and they just offer their God food, candles and flowers, especially as a reminder of their deceased people.
The time of dessert was coming; the Japanese almost offer it to you as if you didn`t need to feed your bowels -that at my sixty and something started to ask for moderate but pauseless care-.
In the meantime Lady C. arrived; she and her daughter were coming from a shoe shop where they didn’t buy a pair of boots because they didn´t agree about the colour, the height of the heels and the quality of the boyfriends they shared. And as usual, they ended up putting off their business- which by the way, I believe that her daughter would afford with her one thousand euros and something salary coming from her job as a night keeper in a hotel of the area-.
Thus, I developed a unique friendship in BCN with a woman in spite of the fact that she was a militant feminist. This made her immediately into a “state enemy” of the manhood class which I belonged to, but deep inside I liked flirting with tomboy girls. I recognize that Lady C. went beyond all my limits.
The feminism that she preached made me think a lot in those years when you start questioning the need of belonging to a church, in a globalized individualized world, where everyone could “cross dress” their sex in the real and the virtual world, in a phase of social development in which women had reached their adult social age.
Personally, I saw them as “superior” beings able to carry life in their bodies and they are not so fragile according to the experiences I had with them.
That “myself”, “the only one” who at that moment understood the idea of “the feminine” and “the male”. In the psychoanalyst area it was almost “legal”, and we were able to assume those parts of a whole which we take with us without knowing it.
This doesn´t mean that there weren´t male aberrations like men who battering women. I didn´t belong to that group and that´s why I stopped understanding that simplified feminism movement.
I don’t remember what we did after leaving the restaurant; actually it mustn’t have been important because my memory tends to fade.
II
The Japanese speak so little with western people at the restaurants they run, that when you ask them about anything, they are very effusive and even they exaggerate the details as if it was the only feasible relationship between them and us.
I think they are very influenced by the Buddhism since the XIII century, and they act only in the correct way, with the correct manners, the correct actions, and this leads them to do only the things that they consider appropriate and it produces harmony, which approaches them to the minimalist movement, in almost all their expressions.
This makes them get closer to architecture and minimal art, which is so hard for us westerners to understand and recycle.
Actually, the Japanese are of a single gesture, a single colour, a single movement and in this way they feel structurally complete; that is to say:
I think that for them western complexity is not necessary since the action itself, the word or the thought are part of the subject because they carry inside the content / form in their totality, as a consequence of the concentration produced by the thought free from cruelty, free from bad will and free from contradiction, although this seems “ideal”.
This concept is fundamental to understand why the Japanese talk just when they should; they don’t argue but they specify their thought and they express it suddenly at once. This happens despite the fact that the official religion in Japan is Sintoism , which has a great syncretised capacity to adopt other beliefs like Buddhism.
I don’t doubt that the Japanese culture and architecture have had a considerable influence on me, especially their synthetic capacity of their “habitats”, gardens and movements adapted to the human size.
The delicacy of details, their handicraft use of the wood, their closeness to the land and stones, their way of moving in the space, place the Japanese architecture as the closest one to the human habitability.
The clear and sheer gesture, the moderate design and the poverty of accessories make this “almost Japanese method” into “my pilgrimage place” when I think about architecture and sculpture.
Definitely, the Japanese, their minimalism and their ability to synthesize have an important influence on my life, my job, my way of speaking and my movements with the passing of time.
…And the Japanese from Hana Bishi will probably keep on cutting sashimi at a good rhythm when future western visitors to the restaurant keep associating sexually and freely just like it happened to me that time. This happening as long as there is a real world?, because if everything had been a simulation, the Japanese could play Jim Carrey`s role as an office worker in the film “The Truman show”, in those stairs next to that painted skyline and could open a door which makes him realize that he hadn´t been in a real world. And then, we wouldn´t know if the one that tells this story is me or that Roland Barthes that I wish I had inside. And it would be about a “Barthesian” setting with a portion of the reality added to interlaced memories in this scene coming out of my early artistic-sculptural lucubration.
Anyway, let´s leave this here because I left the restaurant without sense of direction around Barcelona to live with the real loneliness and this doesn`t admit any lucubration.
Shimon Edenburg
Saturday in the Japanese way
–
shimonedenburg.blogspot.com
I
On that Saturday, eating vegetables at the restaurant Hana Bishi at Balmes 55 St, in Barcelona, the preparation of the vegetables, sashimi, Maki and other wonders of the Japanese minimalist cuisine, which I love for the accuracy of its treatment, didn`t remind me at all its counterpart in South America, either the content or the shape.
Watching a steak bleeding under the weight of the Argentinian facón sharpened in any estancia , in the outskirts of Buenos Aires isn´t analogical, in spite of the fact that they are similar products and utensils.
In places of my childhood, unlike Barcelona, we used to sharpen our knives with the man having his bike placed upside down and the background sound of the metallic flute- which, by the way, was a Spanish costume and not precisely a habit from Mataderos, like I used to believe-.
The memories about the street vendors so common during those years always focus on a kind of “hanging casino” with its wheels and barquillos hold by the seller, who was sweating for the effort.
We used to turn the wheel and when it stopped, you got 1, 2 or 3 little crunchy barquillos. From there to the Baden Baden casino, there were just a few centimetres…Only that in Baden Baden, gambling stopped with a “Nicht mer” coming from a man with a sickening nazi odour but the one from the barquillo didn´t say even mu and just smelled like a sweating peddler, which was a luxury at those times.
While I had these memories, the little samurai from Hana Bishi cut the row fish using the “a cote” technique, probably to save meat, which he introduced in the sashimi with skill, or just because this is the way he learnt in the Japanese cookery school in Tokyo.
A good sashimi cutter is considered an artist, he knows how to cut up huge tuna fish following an almost architectonic plan. This artist was from Tokyo, spelled with “y”. Japanese language overuses the “y” and probably it relates to their influence from Greece —an old power in the past times, today not so popular, although the Japanese still steep themselves into Greek philosophers like Platón, Esquilo, Paraménides, Aristóteles in the same way as we do, or they probably base themselves more on Buddha , despite the fact that in Japan there are a lot of different religious trends and beliefs.
There is no doubt that this cutter of raw fish feels that he belongs to a tangential legacy for the samurais who are always trying to be in a self-improvement act.
It isn’t about overcoming others but overcoming oneself. Being better today, yesterday and tomorrow even more. The true samurais devote all their lives to the perfection of themselves.
The training is an endless process.
The female samurai equivalent would be the geisha as an icon.
These pleasure maids with skills in the art of seduction are in charge of charming the man since distant times and sometimes they are able to stop a man with a single look.
Very cultured women in the art of conversation, they master through seduction and produce attraction in the male huddles.
Men live with that hidden and worshipped feminism which produces a sublime attraction, nowadays in decline, although there are women keeping the male tension on those beings from Mars who are said to be the men.
Japanese people don’t go very often to the temple and their relationship with Buda is mainly personal and at home: that place of bright architecture which they are able to build and produces a deep-rooted envy to me.
On the contrary, as Judeo-Christians, we tend to gather in special places and sometimes of inhuman sizes considering the height of the buildings, similar to the banks today, like in a social act and we ask God to punish us, or we take communion after the sins or other several rituals.
I dare to say that each community moves closer to a God that gives services to an outrageous fear prevailing on earth, and maybe, in contrast, to the loneliness that each group carries on their backs; I guess that the Japanese aren`t punished so much and they just offer their God food, candles and flowers, especially as a reminder of their deceased people.
The time of dessert was coming; the Japanese almost offer it to you as if you didn`t need to feed your bowels -that at my sixty and something started to ask for moderate but pauseless care-.
In the meantime Lady C. arrived; she and her daughter were coming from a shoe shop where they didn’t buy a pair of boots because they didn´t agree about the colour, the height of the heels and the quality of the boyfriends they shared. And as usual, they ended up putting off their business- which by the way, I believe that her daughter would afford with her one thousand euros and something salary coming from her job as a night keeper in a hotel of the area-.
Thus, I developed a unique friendship in BCN with a woman in spite of the fact that she was a militant feminist. This made her immediately into a “state enemy” of the manhood class which I belonged to, but deep inside I liked flirting with tomboy girls. I recognize that Lady C. went beyond all my limits.
The feminism that she preached made me think a lot in those years when you start questioning the need of belonging to a church, in a globalized individualized world, where everyone could “cross dress” their sex in the real and the virtual world, in a phase of social development in which women had reached their adult social age.
Personally, I saw them as “superior” beings able to carry life in their bodies and they are not so fragile according to the experiences I had with them.
That “myself”, “the only one” who at that moment understood the idea of “the feminine” and “the male”. In the psychoanalyst area it was almost “legal”, and we were able to assume those parts of a whole which we take with us without knowing it.
This doesn´t mean that there weren´t male aberrations like men who battering women. I didn´t belong to that group and that´s why I stopped understanding that simplified feminism movement.
I don’t remember what we did after leaving the restaurant; actually it mustn’t have been important because my memory tends to fade.
II
The Japanese speak so little with western people at the restaurants they run, that when you ask them about anything, they are very effusive and even they exaggerate the details as if it was the only feasible relationship between them and us.
I think they are very influenced by the Buddhism since the XIII century, and they act only in the correct way, with the correct manners, the correct actions, and this leads them to do only the things that they consider appropriate and it produces harmony, which approaches them to the minimalist movement, in almost all their expressions.
This makes them get closer to architecture and minimal art, which is so hard for us westerners to understand and recycle.
Actually, the Japanese are of a single gesture, a single colour, a single movement and in this way they feel structurally complete; that is to say:
I think that for them western complexity is not necessary since the action itself, the word or the thought are part of the subject because they carry inside the content / form in their totality, as a consequence of the concentration produced by the thought free from cruelty, free from bad will and free from contradiction, although this seems “ideal”.
This concept is fundamental to understand why the Japanese talk just when they should; they don’t argue but they specify their thought and they express it suddenly at once. This happens despite the fact that the official religion in Japan is Sintoism , which has a great syncretised capacity to adopt other beliefs like Buddhism.
I don’t doubt that the Japanese culture and architecture have had a considerable influence on me, especially their synthetic capacity of their “habitats”, gardens and movements adapted to the human size.
The delicacy of details, their handicraft use of the wood, their closeness to the land and stones, their way of moving in the space, place the Japanese architecture as the closest one to the human habitability.
The clear and sheer gesture, the moderate design and the poverty of accessories make this “almost Japanese method” into “my pilgrimage place” when I think about architecture and sculpture.
Definitely, the Japanese, their minimalism and their ability to synthesize have an important influence on my life, my job, my way of speaking and my movements with the passing of time.
…And the Japanese from Hana Bishi will probably keep on cutting sashimi at a good rhythm when future western visitors to the restaurant keep associating sexually and freely just like it happened to me that time. This happening as long as there is a real world?, because if everything had been a simulation, the Japanese could play Jim Carrey`s role as an office worker in the film “The Truman show”, in those stairs next to that painted skyline and could open a door which makes him realize that he hadn´t been in a real world. And then, we wouldn´t know if the one that tells this story is me or that Roland Barthes that I wish I had inside. And it would be about a “Barthesian” setting with a portion of the reality added to interlaced memories in this scene coming out of my early artistic-sculptural lucubration.
Anyway, let´s leave this here because I left the restaurant without sense of direction around Barcelona to live with the real loneliness and this doesn`t admit any lucubration.