A small tour of Japan, The Japan UK Poetry Exchange - 2024

Returning to Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka to collaborate and perform, following an extraordinary experience in Japan in 2023 www.stevenjfowler.com/japan This was a return to the hospitality of my Japanese poet friends, a chance to deepen relationships, try new performance techniques, and absorb the playful eccentric and expansive culture of Japanese poetry. Co-authored with the brilliant Colin Herd, alongside help from Fukudapero, Kyoko Yoshida, Corey Wakeling and more, here can be found more information about the wider project, entitled JUPE https://www.theenemiesproject.com/jupe which was supported by The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation and Glasgow University.

After a few days in Tokyo, and with the weather going rainstorm to boiling heat, we put on our first event at the Hazuki Hall house in Suginami, west Tokyo, co-curating with Sawaka Osaki and Corey Wakeling.

The venue is right on a park, and it was a hot sunday, full of people, in cherry blossom season, and this defined the aesthetic - the event was playful but charming, relaxed and communal. The audience were seated at two ends of this piano bar basement and we performed in the middle. Some brilliant new collaborative works, and the final three pairs were especially brilliant, Corey and Satomi Tanaka, Colin Herd and the co-originator of this whole project, Kyoko Yoshida, and then a sextet of poets musicians dancers.

The whole event can be seen here https://www.theenemiesproject.com/tokyo
And a blog by the venue on it’s happening. https://hazukihh.exblog.jp/30886834/

For my own part I got to work a pure improv trio with Miya and Yoshi Hogyaku, whom I’d worked with on my last trip, thanks to our mutual friend Benedict Taylor. Miya is a Flautist and Yoshi a poet. We fused these easily. I left via a window into the park, we named the animals in the room, I went under a piano and stole a coat, and in both languages, in the corners of the space, we made something I was privileged to be a part of, viewable below.

Japan 2024 #2 - Noh Theatre and Noboru Sano April 12, 2024

A profound experience, thanks to remarkable generosity of Miya, she kindly invited me to attend a private Noh Theatre lesson she had recently begun taking at the national Noh Theatre in Tokyo. She was undertaking this lessons under the venerable Noboru Sano, to learn the chanting, singing elements of Noh.

The environment was everything one would expect from a theatre associated with such tradition. We entered a private room, adorned in the Noh style, and waited while other students finished what appeared to be stoic, strict instruction. I had the privilege of watching Miya’s lesson and the atmosphere felt reverent, but hypnotic and completely memorable. My expectation conjured a picture of Noboru Sano as a great sensei, and someone austere in that, which was perhaps reflected in the environs. However, with me dressed all in pink, and Miya telling him about my work, his humility, hospitality and humour were remarkable. We joked, he gave me gifts, and then adapted the lesson to tell me all about Noh, show me dances, songs, movements, and we shared so much in common in terms of approach to our work, which was surprising and not, given the sense of play he seemed to feel came from the rigour and discipline of his 50 years acting and performing. In time he suggested we even collaborate in the future, melding a talking performance with a Noh dance / movement performance, even playing with improvisation. What an amazing man, and in our conversations, translated through Miya, I learned a great deal, about paradox, instinct, intention, repetition, discipline, immediacy, presence.

An article on him https://timelesstokyo.com/experttips/noh.html

So good to be back in Kyoto. On the first day I tried to do everything, and it was boiling. Up in the middle of the night with the reverse body clock, drinking holy temple water and into the red gate hills, up the top of Mount Inari, sweating through my legs and then the Golden Temple, which isn’t golden but covered in gold leaf, and then I found a charity shop, which was amazing.

The Kyoto Camarade itself, on a friday night in the Uradera Gokurakuji Buddhist temple, right in the middle of the centre of the city, in the Nishiki market, was atmospheric to the max. Disco music in a low lit temple, people giggling and eating, and hosted by the father on Monk dynamic duo of Uzai and Yoshiki Ikumi. Such good laughs. Amazing people. And lovely to be around Fukudapero and Kyoko Yoshida too, who co curated the last Japanese tour Colin and I did and are proper friends now.

The event was proper memorable - shouting, potatos, card games and kimonos, improv music, sword fights, live webcams. Not typical temple fare, but very good camarade style. The highlight was Pero’s academic paper as performance, and the huge finish by the lead monk Ukai Izumi with Decalco Marie. They fought and painted and smashed screens and it was a piece of theatre. More on the event https://www.theenemiesproject.com/kyoto

For my own part I worked with the amazing double bassist Naoki Nakajima, who is out of a novel. Absolutely chill, up for anything, throwing his double bass around. I wore a mask I found in a bin and made some talking.

Our first time in Osaka for the Japanese UK Poetry Exchange, and the city has a reputation for experimentation, in music certainly, so we partnered up with the brilliant venue Environment 0g. This event was always designed to be more of a salon than a camarade, with a much smaller number of poets, and a kind of playful exchange of performance and ideas. Our host, Junja, shared with us his collection of Seiichi Nikuni’s concrete poetry before we began, and played us Nikuni’s sound poetry too (which I didn’t know existed and have been teaching Nikuni for years) before playing his unique DJ set using vinyl’s of poet’s readings, especially Anne Waldman and John Giorno. Then we had readings from Rina Kikuchi and John Newton Webb before Colin Herd and I did a collaborative one hour conversation poem, as an experiment. It was all heightened by the venue, underground, near the busy strip of Osaka, but hidden away, with just a small group. It was really productive and intimate and we talked for long after, precisely because it was so different to the size and energy of the Kyoto and Tokyo events. https://www.theenemiesproject.com/osaka

Japan 2024 #6 - Japan and JUPE project April 24, 2024

For 2024, the Japanese tour over, and over two weeks of collaborating, travelling, exploring comes to a close. Such an extraordinary time, memorable for my whole life, and built on the sincere and remarkable hospitality of so many people in Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka. Colin and I felt really looked after, with people going out of their way to invite us into experiences we couldn’t have imagined. I felt a responsibility to the rarity of the opportunity, especially repeating itself, to push myself out into the places, staying in five different areas of Tokyo, walking over 100 miles all told, and taking any opportunities I could to talk, eat, work with people living there. I discovered so much, spent so much time learning not only about poetry, but calligraphy and other artforms, as well as about how people think, spending lots of time reading and talking about Buddhism and Shinto. I felt welcomed in, every day. Moreover, Colin and I had real fun. Travelling across the earth is never easy, even when in great fortune, and this trip felt like a reward.

All the event videos and pictures are also up now on our project site too https://www.theenemiesproject.com/jupe/