Day 25, Thursday, April 9 – Shinjuku "Nagashi"

I met Kudo in Shinjuku at 9pm and went over to Golden Gai, an area of back alleys lined with bars – tiny bars – bar after bar after bar! We hit about 15 places where I performed for 5 minutes on the Birdmachine and then left. About two hours in total. The responses varied, mostly enthusiastic, but I actually only hit my peak once. Wow, what a process... and what a deeply Japanese form of social, creative outreach. It's called Nagashi – "flow" – and used to be quite popular. Hijikata, the father of Butoh, got his start this way in the 50s, and so did Kudo in the 90s. At one place, a guy gave me 1000 yen! Of course, I politely protested... and then demurred. Sweet. I hadn't expected that. Unfortunately, I have no video of any of this, just photos of the locales and some people, but that's ok. It's a project, like all the other projects here, to be continued on the next jaunt.

Day 16, Wednesday, April 1 – The Dog House

Kudo and I were expected at Joni's place in Shibuya at 8:00. When we got to Tamachi station, I realized I'd lost another Suica subway pass. That was two in one day, my forty-dollar April Fool's joke on myself. Kudo noted that he'd seen such a pass on the sidewalk in front of the Butoh House, but hadn't connected it with me. We decided to hoof it back there, a fifteen minute walk, though neither of us really expected it to still be there. The foot traffic up that street was pretty intense, and anything even slightly out of place would be cleaned up. Sure enough, it wasn't there. 

Day 16, Wednesday, April 1 – The Butoh House

Keisuke Oka has been working on his concrete masterpiece for fifteen years. It's location between two condominium units near Tachi JR Station, is as unlikely as its haphazard eruption of forms, textures, and surface patterns. His plan from the start was to have no plan. He remains true to that dictum with stunning results. Kudo and I plan to do a performance here in the future.

Day 14, Monday, March 30 – Konno Hachimangu Photos

Here's part of my solo when Kudo left the stage for a costume and makeup change. Joni has the Tasmanian Ridgeback, a natural born lion killer, securely leashed in hand and I'm about to put my little Yamaha guitar amp into overdrive.

Joni emailed these photos of the Konno Hachimangu performance the other day. They're pretty good, and may have to do for now, since the video from Yuki's antiquated JVC needs to be reformatted to a codec iMovie can read. For now the sound coming out of that remarkable Yamaha amp slung around my shoulder shall remain mute in the face of Kudo's visual splendor. In the meantime, definitely need a hat, a haircut, and a shave... in no particular order! 

Day 13, Sunday, March 29 – Evening Cherry Blossoms

After lugging the Birdmachine around kingdom come yesterday, I took a breather today and rebuilt the instrument with an eye towards more portability and ease of assembly. What would have taken an hour in my shop at home, took all afternoon here. First of all, I needed rudimentary tools. That sent me to the hardware department of Tokyu Hands in Shinjuku. I bought wood, a Japanese razor saw, tubing, screws, pipe clamps, sliding clamps, micro c-clamps, and god knows what else. It wasn't difficult to spend a hundred dollars. On the way back, I encountered a Shiba Inu, the foxiest dog on the planet. Will definitely look into finding a breeder in New England. I also stopped at a flea market near Nakano-Sakaue Station and bought an old SONY cassette tape recorder (great for recording and slowing down bird song on the fly circa twenty years ago), and some 200 year old coins from the Edo period. 

Day 7, Sunday, March 22 – Konno Hachimangu Performance

I'm writing this the day after the performance at Konno Hachimangu. I'll add performance images and quicktime as I acquire them. Kudo was going to arrive at 5:00, and so I asked Yuki to arrive then as well. I, in the meantime, was pathetically lost trying to retrace my steps out of Shibuya Station from two days earlier and was forty minutes late. Somehow I went exactly the wrong way out of the station and up the wrong hill. I asked a couple of women for directions and they went to work on their global GPS cell phones. People in Tokyo are very cell phones savvy and love to help strangers in directional distress. They soon set me straight.

When I got to the shrine, Kudo and Yuki were already there. The three of us were led by the co-abbot, an Austrian man in his thirties, into a changing room in a brand new building on the shrine grounds. We spoke for a while in German about how he came to be here and what the shrine meant to the community, about how they stand on the side of religious flexibility and social innovation. Our butoh performance was a case in point.

Day 5 – Friday, March 20 – Hachiko

My mission today was to visit Konno Hachimangu, Shibuya's oldest Shinto shrine, and get a sense of where Kudo and I are performing on Sunday. I just heard that it's happening outdoors, so my other mission is to find a portable guitar amp for the flute. That may sound like an oxymoron, but the guitar effects, together with a Barcus Berry internal contact mic, is a thing of beauty: The Electric Flute! I'm going to try strapping a small amp to my body to give myself full mobility.

Day 4 – Thursday, March 19 – Art Fair Tokyo

The crows are a constant sonic companion. Once away from the traffic a bit, they are the loudest sound element in the city. What a strange counterpoint they provide the jet-lagged traveler vulnerable to macabre associations with other places and times. In the past few days, my being here has consisted mostly in fits and starts of sleeping and writing at odd hours, entirely in the confines of R’s house in Nakano. But yesterday afternoon, a different relationship to Tokyo unfolded. B, one of several great expatriate shakuhachi players in and around Tokyo, came up from Yokohama to retrieve a 1.8 尺八 that RS was returning to him via my formidable courier services. B, in turn, handed me another shakuhachi for RS to try out. This one got National Treasure, Goro Yamaguchi’s approval, before his unexpected death in 1999. B and I chatted for a while about shakuhachis. I demonstrated the Birdmachine, which I'd set up in my room earlier.