Japan Times journo and her biker-girl past

[Mulboyne]

Kaori Shoji
Japan Times: Confessions of a biker girl -- those were the days!
Despite my current overworked, wage-slave status, I still remember when I was able to wield some power. I actually had underlings bow as I strode along the corridors in high school, and a lot of the teachers were just too scared to talk to me. I could quell a guy twice my size with one good gan (stare) aimed from the upper-left corner of my eye, and the weaker of the female students used to cross the street when they saw me coming. One of them dissolved into tears just because we happened to be alone in the girls' bathroom, with me blowing smoke rings at the mirror. Yes, I was what is known as a zoku (member of a motorcycle tribe), and to put it quite frankly, me and my mabudachi (best girlfriends) could have made Marlon Brando of "The Wild One" hitch up those cute black jeans and run for cover...more...

[Taro Toporific]

Japan Times: BILINGUAL
Confessions of a biker girl -- those were the days!
By KAORI SHOJI

This language column "BILINGUAL" by Kaori-chan sure has its free-associative moments of madness. Her column seems to release completely repressed and off-limits ideas bouncing around in her head. Then again, the inside my ain't exactly tiddy either.

[Mike]

"Look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me."

[dingosatemybaby]

Dingo's advice to Kaori "Panhead" Shoji:

Stop living in the past, babe, and start opening that Kanto-area chapter of Dykes on Bikes.

[Marvin Feltcher]

You guys leave her alone...she is such a brilliant writer! I'd give my eye-teeth to be able to write like Kaori Shoji. She is truly wonderful.

[jingai]

This is a great article, and she's got guts to tell people what she did as a kid.

"suka-jyan"? Anybody play Shenmue? Same jackets- "Yokosuka-John" and same era, except she's not made by Sega.

[Andocrates]

[Socratesabroad]

You guys leave her alone...she is such a brilliant writer! I'd give my eye-teeth to be able to write like Kaori Shoji. She is truly wonderful.

I'm hoping, nay I'm praying to the god of everything that is holy and sacrosanct with respect to the English language - the language of Shakespeare, Orwell, Mark Twain, and PJ O'Rourke - that your statements are dripping with sarcasm as I take them to be...

[Andocrates]

Shakespeare was a poser. :P

[Mulboyne]

I don't know if I'd go as far as Marvin's love-in but I think Ms. Shoji has written more interesting articles for the English language press than most journos (Marvin and Captain Japan being major exceptions).
I guess as a writer, you are hamstrung by what your editors/buyers want from you. KS gets appearances in the IHT but I don't see her ever pandering to the newbie market for which she gets credit from me.
In Tokyo, a world made for kids
Knocking 'em out on Killer Street
The Japanese woman's perpetual quest for perfect skin
Japan's invisible revolution
Thinking Local in Japan
A budding taste for kitchens
I've never really seen them as FG material but maybe they should have been before.
She's not always right by any means. She wrote back in 2001

[Foreign] brands, however, may be in for a shock. Tokyo's fashion slaves have awakened to the fact that there is more than one master out there and first choice may not necessarily be French or Italian.

As a prediction on the fall of foreign brands, this hasn't panned out to date but I'd rather read her view than another welcoming mat to what has gone before.

I was amused at the JT biker article since she most often puts on a "Bridget Jones" persona in her Bilingual column and film reviews.

[Marvin Feltcher]

Sorry!

[mercutio]

Along with the original WaiWai writers Mark Schreiber and Michael Hoffman, she's my favorite Japan-based newspaper writer.

Ah! that explains everything

[Marvin Feltcher]

[dingosatemybaby]

The IHT describes Kaori-chan as a "freelance journalist based in Tokyo," but in her biker-gal article she refers to her "wage-slave status."

Sooo...which is it?

She certainly is one of the better writers to be featured in that irrelevant propaganda organ known as the Japan Times. Galactically better than that odd uyoko critter named Hiroaki Sato who peridiocally files hysterical little neo-fascist screeds from New York (New York! One of the cultural capitals of the decadent West! What the hell is he doing there?).

[Captain Japan]

Galactically better than that odd uyoko critter named Hiroaki Sato who peridiocally files hysterical little neo-fascist screeds from New York (New York! One of the cultural capitals of the decadent West! What the hell is he doing there?).

Dingo, you are spot on. Sato is out of his mind. I think he is a translator. Here's some of his stuff:

Still, the Times reporting, as news, some Japanese rewriting of what Japan did in Manchuria caught me off guard. I had assumed that it was old news. Well, rewrite is not the right word] Though French took care not to mention "Manchukuo," probably to avoid eliciting Chinese ire, [b]what Japan was trying to do in Manchuria -- this word itself doesn't exist in Chinese nomenclature, I gather -- was to create a nation in a foreign land, and doing that had to have some element of idealism. It was also a large-scale undertaking. It meant transplanting tens of thousands of Japanese across the ocean.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?eo20041025hs.htm

[Socratesabroad]

No, I'm absolutely serious. OK, perhaps I don't show as much respect for English as it's used by its greatest proponents and I can understand that she's not everybody's cup of tea, but Kaori Shoji is unfailingly entertaining...

Fair enough - she is a decent writer. She towers above the likes of Amy 'having a bad hair day as a gaijin in some obscure Japanese village" Chavez and Hiroaki "I'm the one who translates uyoku posters into English" Sato. And even I'll admit to having saved a couple of her articles - the one about women getting a raw deal kanji-wise was both funny and true.

I just consider her to be a decent entertainment/lifestyle cloumnist rather than a serious writer. Not that the Japan Times has many serious writers anyway...

[Taro Toporific]

She towers above the likes of Amy 'having a bad hair day as a gaijin in some obscure Japanese village" Chavez and Hiroaki "I'm the one who translates uyoku posters into English" Sato..

Even Amy Banal-to-tears Chavez has nothing over Herr Doktor Professor Marshall Childs, the "The Practical Linguist" for the turn of the century (19th). I'm in awe everytime I read Childs in the The Daily Gomiuri. Scroll down to the middle of the ELT News and read Krashen vs Childs.

[Marvin Feltcher]

Sorry!

[dingosatemybaby]

Well, they did have a pretty flavorful writer a few years back who wrote an intermittent column called something like "Tokyo Beat."
While the putative raison d'etre for Tokyo Beat was to cover the "R and B music scene" in Tokyo, the column mostly consisted of descriptions of the writer's attempts at getting laid with chix he met at clubs - "Damn, them bitches was fine!"

[AssKissinger]

The only thing I ever thought was worth a shit in there was "FUZZY LOGIC / Simon Bartz"

[dingosatemybaby]

The only thing I ever thought was worth a shit in there was "FUZZY LOGIC / Simon Bartz"

Yeah, I sat across the aisle from Simon Bartz about 5 years ago on a flight from London to Narita. Mofo voraciously read about 20 newspages; when he was done with one, he'd throw it on the floor. Whole goddamn area around his seat looked like the bottom of a muthafuckin' birdcage.

But I didn't give a shit. I washed down some Halcion with with bloody mary and slept like a lamb. A quasi-comatose lamb.

[AssKissinger]

I washed down some Halcion with with bloody mary and slept like a lamb.

That's the only to fly!