A mini-documentary about sexual assault on the Tokyo subway.

(If you have trouble viewing video in our lightbox player, please go directly to the video here.)

Directed by Ian Lynam
Research by Ariki Rie
Featuring Ito Aki
Music by Copy (courtesy of Audio Dregs)

If you want to stock up on cans of corned beef hash, I recommend a jaunt to Ishigaki-jima — one of the Yaeyama islands at the bottom of the Ryukyuan chain. Vegetarians may enjoy a brown sugar/brown rice drink called Miki, which is a meal in itself. For those with less discriminating and ethical tastes, a large mug of root beer and a bacon cheeseburger are always available at A&W’s fast food chain. (A&W has a fast-food chain?)

For years I have heard Japanese people obsess over the beauty and splendour [sic] of the “Southern Countries” (南国), but hailing from Florida, I had never been especially motivated to dedicate my few spare yen on a “semi-tropical” version of the country I already live in. 30,000 frequent flier miles later, however, costs for such an operation dropped to near zero, and I found myself on a Friday afternoon 747 (!) headed towards Naha.

As suggested above, the most obvious cultural delineations between Japan and its semi-colony are culinary. Even while waiting for our connecting flight at Naha airport, we quickly ran to the gift shops to indulge in Blue Seal ice cream bars and Shikuwasa juices. Although tempting at the time, we would not eat “authentic” “taco rice” until days later. The frequent use of goya bitter melon in dishes may be a natural choice from local agricultural conditions, but Okinawan cooking seems to have reached its defining moment the day American canned meats fell out of the sky in food drops. Like Hawaiians, the Okinawans love Spam. And oddly, even without U.S. military bases, Ishigaki still treats all these clearly-ration-derived cuisines as part of its local color.

On the way up to Kabira Bay at the north side of the island, where pelican-sized bats fly overhead at night in B-52 pattern formations, the taxi driver mumbled to us that he had once lived in Tokyo but found it “too cold.” Those are not usually the first adverb and adjective I use when describing my megalopolitan home, but temperature tolerance is relative. Mid-October in Ishigaki is perfect beach weather, so summer must be intolerable for us igloo dwellers of Edo.

Ishigaki’s beaches are nice and all, but the island’s buildings appear to have been built in a single coordinated effort, sometime deep in the 70s, by Mies van der Rohe’s third-worst student. Lots of geometric, semi-Modernist concrete structures that do not even begin to integrate into the otherwise “beachy” scenery. None of these houses and buildings have been touched since their initial construction, so the entire island feels a bit like the rotting remnants of the Dharma Initiative — without all the Casimir Effect mysteries.
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