A harmony of shared cultures, religions
www.chinaview.cn 2005-06-09 14:02:58

BEIJING, June 9 -- Bingzhongluo, the largest tableland in the Nujiang Canyon, is located at the boundary of Yunnan Province and Tibet Autonomous Region. The isolated, special environment and rainy, humid climate of Bingzhongluo makes it a good grain-producing area, as well as a place where various ethnic groups and religions live with and influence each other.

To this day, the old trade caravans are easily seen in Bingzhongluo, often referred to as the "land of peach blossom" the symbolism of this name conveys much more than the words, and speaks of a place which is beautiful, peaceful and unsullied by the outside world.

Covering an area of some 800 square kilometers, Bingzhongluo is a township of the Gongshan Dulong and Nu Autonomous County. Here, in harmony, dwell the ethnic groups of the Nu, Dulong, Lisu, Tibetan, Naxi, Bai and Han, while Tibetan Buddhism, Catholicism, other Christian denominations and primitive religions have long co-existed.

Bingzhongluo was originally named Bingzhong, which in Tibetan means "Tibetan village beside the bamboo grove." In the past Tibetans ruled the area, but it is the Nu people who have lived there the longest and make up the largest population. The Lisu, Tibetan and Dulong people all migrated to the area after the Nu.

Because of the special geological structures and landforms, the Nujiang River is obstructed a number of times in the area, resulting in it making two successive great turns.

Although it is on the periphery of Yunnan Province, Bingzhongluo is the best-known place in Nujiang Canyon. Historically, it was an important caravan route between Yunnan and Tibet. And even today, a continuous flow of caravans trek between Gongshan and Zayu in Tibet, albeit a trickle of those which passed in bygone days.

Earliest settlers

The Nu people were the earliest settlers of Nujiang Canyon, according to historical records, arriving here more than 1,000 years ago. They call themselves the "Anu," and officially became the "Nu" ethnic group after the founding of New China.

In Bingzhongluo, along both sides of the Nujiang river, crops grow in profusion while the houses of the families who farm them stand nearby in the shade. As we drove uphill, the form of Bingzhongluo, that of a lotus, became apparent.

Structures were comparatively concentrated around the township government building, while other houses and villages were composed in trapezoids on both sides of the river. Together with the golden fields, they constituted a serene and idyllic vista.

My companion told me that this is the homeland of the Nu people. Decades ago, Nujiang Canyon was a dream destination for adventurers and travelers, because of its unique landform and almost primitive human living conditions. Now, it is one of the most charming places in the area.

We drove to a village called Chongding, built on a sloping hillside facing the river. Wooden houses nestle among luxuriant trees and beside limpid brooks. The beautiful scenery and fresh air of this quiet village do indeed make it "a land of peach blossom."

Today it is a designated tourist destination. In the households near the entrance of the village, groups of tourists were either sightseeing or drinking tea.

Villagers' houses are open to visitors and we went into one, the home of the Liu Ji'an family. Typically it was a multi-ethnic household.

The head of the family is an 81-year-old Nu, his wife a Tibetan. Their son and our host Liu Ji'an, 61, is married to a woman of similar ethnic mix. Of their three sons and two daughters, two are married to Lisu and Han nationalities, while a third, their eldest daughter's husband, is a Nu.

Broken down, this four-generation household of 17 people comes from four ethnic groups who speak Nu, Tibetan, Lisu, Dulong and Han.

In Chongding, households made up of people from two ethnic groups are the norm, but such a large family made up of people from four ethnic groups is rare not only in the area, but in the whole country.

The younger women in the family wore ethnic dress and made buttered tea for us, while Liu's wife cooked lunch the locally enjoyed buckwheat cake on a stove which had replaced the traditional cooking pit.

Upstairs, hanging from the eaves I noticed scores potted orchids. A good orchid is worth hundreds of yuan, and one of the highest quality can be sold for tens of thousands of yuan. Growing orchids has long been popular in the northwest of Yunnan and has gradually become a vibrant industry, which is helping to boost local economic development.

Before lunch, I took a look around the village of 40 households and 200-plus inhabitants. From the construction of houses, arrangement of courtyards, water supplies for the people and livestock, and guestrooms under construction and decoration, one could tell that most of the people today enjoyed a certain level of affluence.

In fact, I was later to discover, the village, which had developed through tourism, boasted a higher standard of living than that of the township.

The next day, in Shuangla village on the opposite bank of the river, Li Wenming invited fellow villagers to drink and dance in his home to celebrate the building of his new house. This was the opportunity that I had dreamt of for my interview, so I bought some wine and food and joined the party.

The arrival of people from outside the village added to the festive atmosphere. Everyone was dressed in their ethnic costumes, and all the people, regardless of gender, formed a circle to dance and drink, with hands on each other's shoulders. The beat was slow, but clear and dynamic.

Though the new house was not yet complete, the concrete ground and wood structure indicated that it was not going to be of traditional design.

Li, the father of a two-year-old, owns six mu (0.4 hectare) of dry land and half a mu (0.03 hectare) of paddy field, and raises cows and chickens at home. He spends 10 months of a year working outside, with a daily income of some 30 yuan (US$3.6). His Lisu wife and child are looked after by his parents, while he is away working.

Tourism and working outside are today no longer rare occurrences in this isolated canyon. And remote as it is, it is no longer an inaccessible place. The doors of the mountains have been opened, and that on the inside and outside is today inextricably connected.

A peaceful Buddhist village

As multiple ethnic groups have settled and thrived in the area, they have also come to learn to respect the different beliefs and religions.

Lama village, a multi-ethnic village located in the central area of the tableland, was so named because of its lamasery, the "Puhua Temple."

Compared to Chongding village, not far away, houses in Lama village were more concentrated, but a little simple and crude. Living standards in this village are not very high, and the environment rather isolated.

Looking around the village, we saw very few villagers and were told most were either working outside or in the fields.

As we wandered around we spotted a man returning from collecting firewood, sweat oozing from his dark, strong arms. His name was Wang Jiangmin, a Tibetan. I gave him a cigarette and lit it for him, which drew a smile of thanks. Beside his house, a Nu woman grinding corn, told us about the village.

I noticed a girl sitting on the wooden steps of a house, looking at us and when I raised my camera towards her, she sat motionlessly for me to take a picture, a sharp contrast to the reaction of other camera shy locals. I later learnt her name was Nu Weixiang, of the Dulong nationality.

Although small, Lama village is home to a variety of ethnic groups. Nowadays, however, it is very difficult to distinguish the ethnicity of villagers in Bingzhongluo from their appearance and customs.

Puhua Temple is located on a tableland called Changputong and its white enclosure and gate have been newly renovated. Its abbot, 72-year-old Ganma Yuanzhai, said the temple belongs to the karma bka' brgyud pa sect, and dates back over 200 years.

The abbot is a Nu and joined the temple as a boy aged 12. The abbot said the temple gets very crowded during the Tibetan New Year, according to the Tibetan lunar calendar, and on the Fairy Festival of the Nu people which falls on the 15th of the third lunar month.

The lamasery, explained the old abbot, was not only influential in the area, but was the only lamasery in the whole prefecture. That was why among the 5,700 population of the township, about 2,000 were followers of Tibetan Buddhism.

(Source: China Daily)

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2005-06/09/content_3063277.htm

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IHT, FRIDAY, JUNE 10, 2005
The master of mystery in Japanese animation
By A.O. Scott, The New York Times

NEW YORK When we think of feature-length animation, our thoughts turn to "Shrek" and Pixar (or less fondly to "Robots" and "Madagascar"). The animated world is round - created in three dimensions by teams of computer wizards and enlivened by noisy, knowing references to American pop culture, past and present.

It may seem somewhat paradoxical, then, that the world's greatest living animated-filmmaker - a designation that his fans at Disney and Pixar would be unlikely to challenge - is Hayao Miyazaki, a Japanese writer and director whose world is flat, handmade and often surpassingly quiet.

Not that Miyazaki, 64, is indifferent to technological advances. Starting with his 1997 epic, "Princess Mononoke," he has used computer-generated imagery in his movies, though he has instituted a rule that CGI should account for no more than 10 percent of the images in any of his pictures.

In an interview last week about his latest movie, "Howl's Moving Castle," he spoke about the new technology with a mixture of resignation and resistance. "I've told the people on my CGI staff" - at Studio Ghibli, the company he created with Isao Takahata and Toshio Suzuki in 1985 - "not to be accurate, not to be true. We're making a mystery here, so make it mysterious."

That mystery is the core of Miyazaki's art. Spend enough time in his world - something you can do at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, which is presenting a sumptuous retrospective of his and Takahata's work - and you may find your perception of your own world refreshed, as it might be by a similarly intensive immersion in the work of Ansel Adams, J.M.W. Turner or Monet. After a while, certain vistas - a rolling meadow dappled with flowers and shadowed by high cumulus clouds, a range of rocky foothills rising toward snow-capped peaks, the fading light at the edge of a forest - deserve to be called Miyazakian.

So do certain stories, especially those involving a resourceful, serious girl contending with the machinations of wise old women and the sufferings of enigmatic young men. So do certain themes: the catastrophic irrationality of war and other violence; the folly of disrespecting nature; the moral complications that arise from ordinary acts of selfishness, vanity and even kindness.

As a visual artist, Miyazaki is an extravagant fantasist and an exacting naturalist; as a storyteller, he is an inventor of fables that seem at once utterly new and almost unspeakably ancient. Their strangeness comes from the freshness and novelty he brings to the crowded marketplace of juvenile fantasy and from an unnerving, uncanny sense of familiarity, as if he were resurrecting legends buried deep in the collective unconscious.

Miyazaki's world is full of fantastical creatures - cute and fuzzy, icky and creepy, handsome and noble. There are lovable forest sprites, skittering dust balls and ravenous blobs of black viscous goo, as well as talking cats, pigs and frogs. "Howl's Moving Castle," adapted from a novel by Diana Wynne Jones, features a garrulous flame; "Spirited Away," from 2001, had its melancholy, wordless no-face monster; "Nausicäa of the Valley of the Wind" (1984), the director's first masterpiece, was nearly overrun by enormous trilobite-shaped insects called Om.

In the interview, Miyazaki was asked where he thought his work fitted within the expanding universe of children's pop culture. "The truth is I have watched almost none of it," he said. "The only images I watch regularly come from the weather report."

The director, whose demeanor combines gravity with impishness, was not being flip. It is hard to think of another filmmaker who is so passionately interested in weather. Violent storms, gentle breezes and sun-filled skies are vital, active elements, bearers of mood, emotion and meaning. His monsters and animals, who share the screen with more conventionally human-looking animated figures - adolescent girls with wind-tossed hair, short skirts and saucer eyes, mustachioed soldiers and wrinkled crones - are an integral part of Miyazaki's landscape, but the most striking feature of his films may be the landscapes themselves.

The action in his movies - he has written and directed seven features since "Nausicäa" - takes place far from the cramped cities of modern Japan, and also from the futuristic metropolises that provide the dystopian backdrop of so much anime. His characters tend to live in hillside villages or in tidy, old-world towns where half-timbered houses huddle along cobblestone streets. As much as they can, in gliders, on broomsticks and under their own magical powers, these characters take to the sky; the evocation of flying, for metaphorical purposes and for the sheer visual fun of it, is one of Miyazaki's favorite motifs. But one reason he ventures aloft may be to offer a better view of earth and water, which he renders with cinematic precision and painterly virtuosity.

Even though his frames evoke the careful brushwork and delicate emotions of Japanese landscape painting, Miyazaki is very much a product of postwar Japan, and he sits at the artistic and commercial pinnacle of his country's churning, eclectic visual culture. Though he has, in the past 20 years, concentrated almost entirely on film, his earlier career includes television cartoons and manga (comic books). Animation, which arrived in Japan with the American occupying force, has since the war become at once the embodiment of the country's antic modernity and also, in the hands of artists like Miyazaki and Takahata, a vehicle for reimagining and preserving its history.

Miyazaki's approach to the past is mystical and elegiac. "When I talk about traditions, I'm not talking about temples, which we got from China anyway," he said. "There is an indigenous Japan," he added, "and elements of that are what I'm trying to capture in my work." The clearest expression of this impulse may be in those carefully drawn landscapes, many of which are overseen by local spirits and all of which vibrate with the feeling that nature is an active presence rather than a backdrop. It makes sense that the world's greatest animator is, at heart, something of an animist.

In the Miyazakian cosmos, wizards turn into birds of prey; young girls are transformed overnight into 90-year-old women; greedy parents are changed into pigs; shooting stars mutate into fire demons. You can call this magic - a word reviewers of Miyazaki's films seem helpless to avoid - or you can call it art. But it may just be that he reveals, in his quiet, moving, haunted pictures, the hidden senses of the word "animation," which after all means not only to set things in motion, but also, more profoundly, to bring them to life.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/06/09/features/scott.php

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Shanghai Daily news, 7/6/2005
Chinese massage for `Hamlet'

The Prince of Denmark has been given a new name and received a Chinese makeover. Xu Wei reports that a Peking Opera version of Shakespeare's classic play is heading for Denmark but not before Shanghai audiences have a chance to see it. Theatergoers may think they are already too familiar with William Shakespeare's ``Hamlet'' but the Peking Opera version of the play is definitely a unique theatrical experience. The Hamlet in the new production has a Chinese name and he dresses in traditional Chinese costume but whether to speak in English or Chinese, that was the question.
The answer is one of the selling points of the Shanghai Peking Opera House's adaptation of ``Hamlet'' (now entitled ``The Revenge of the Prince'') -- it's in Chinese but with English subtitles. ``It will be the first Peking Opera version of `Hamlet' to be seen on the Chinese mainland,'' according to Shan Yuejin, vice president of the local Peking Opera house who says it has previously been staged in Taiwan. ``Undoubtedly much had to be done to merge this Western classic with a traditional Chinese art form,'' Shan says. The Shanghai Peking Opera House was invited by Hamlet Sommer, a Danish organization which sponsors cultural events, to stage the play in Kronborg Castle in Helsingor, Denmark from August 1 to 5. It will be directed by Shi Yukun, a well-known Peking Opera director noted for his modern play ``Camel Xiangzi.'' The Peking Opera version retains the tragic soul of the original Shakespeare play although the scene of the action has been moved to ancient China and the main characters all have Chinese names -- Hamlet is Zi Dan, the queen is Jiang Rong and Claudius is Yong Shu. The classic plot stays the same. When the young prince learns his beloved father has been murdered by his uncle he moves slowly to avenge the death. However, his efforts to bring the murderous Claudius to justice lead to the deaths of many others and the destruction of those he loved. ``But Peking Opera has its own language with which to tell this foreign story,'' says director Shi. The script keeps most of the famous lines in the play -- including the soliloquy ``To be or not to be'' -- but shortens long stretches of dialogue. This allows the actors more time for singing, dancing, acrobatics and martial arts so that the essence of Peking Opera is conveyed to a Western audience. The role of the Chinese Hamlet has been taken by Fu Xiru, a 25-year-old actor. Fu says that the big challenge he had to overcome was how to handle the delicate emotional changes demanded by the role so he would be able to portray the character's contrasting multi personalities -- a challenge every actor playing Hamlet encounters. ``The prince has always been seen as a moody, anxious and indecisive fellow although in appearance he is a hero,'' Fu says. ``After a series of shocks, he doubts the world he is living in. The long monologues cannot conceal his overwhelming anxiety and heartfelt fragility.'' Theatergoers everywhere know the story of the play. In Denmark -- Hamlet's home country, it has been performed in various versions, says Vibeke Normann, an official with Hamlet Sommer. But, the Peking Opera version has to be different because the Chinese troupe believes it is important to let a Danish audience see and understand the beauty of a revered Oriental art form. Known as China's national opera, Peking Opera originated in the late 18th century as a synthesis of music, dance, martial arts and acrobatics. It can be divided into ``civil'' pieces (``wen xi''), which are characterized by singing, and ``martial'' ones (``wu xi''), which feature acrobatics and stunts. Elaborate facial make-up is also an important part of Peking Opera where it distinguishes different roles and reveals their dispositions, social positions and moral qualities through artistic exaggeration and symbolism. ``For example, our version's Claudius (Yong Shu) puts on a clown mask, which reveals his identity as a villain in Peking Opera drama,'' says director Shi. ``For us, the question is whether the Danish people will be able to fully appreciate our version of the play. We hope that the spectacular costumes, acrobatics and stage decorations of Peking Opera won't make foreigners feel estranged from the play.'' Shi and the cast have reason to be concerned about the reactions of a Danish audience -- even some Chinese do not appreciate traditional Peking Opera -- but at least one Danish critic already has been won over. After a recent rehearsal, Bettina Heltberg, a Danish newspaper journalist, was enthusiastic about the Chinese production. ``The play is wonderful,'' Heltberg called out when the rehearsal finished. ``With the help of English subtitles and that familiar story line, I can easily understand what the characters are saying. I love it so much not because it is a work of Shakespeare but for its brilliant Oriental charm.'' It would help a foreign audience to better understand the performance if they knew some Chinese because it would help them not to miss some of the tricks on stage. For instance, ``the Chinese name -- Zi Dan -- literally means `The son of Denmark,' meaning this is definitely a Hamlet story,'' says Shi with a grin. So as to make Hamlet not feel too far from home or a Danish audience not feel the play is too unfamiliar, the band has been moved to the front instead of sitting behind the curtain -- the normal practice in Peking Opera. And ``Hamlet'' won't be the last adaptation by the local Peking Opera house. ``It is a good opportunity for us to raise the status of age-old Peking Opera all over the world,'' says Sun Chongliang, president of the Shanghai Peking Opera House. ``In the future, we will present more shows based on Western masterpieces to pump new vitality into the traditional Chinese art form and to attract more foreign audiences.'' The troupe hopes to attract more local young Chinese to Peking Opera by performing the play in Shanghai before the cast and crew leave for Denmark. They will stage the new version with English subtitles in July. Maybe then a local audience will be able to decide whether they like this Danish Hamlet with his distinctive Chinese personality.

http://english.eastday.com/eastday/englishedition/features/userobject1ai1160828.html

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IHT/Asahi: June 4, 2005
A world of his own: Create, erase, redraw
06/04/2005
By SAYAKA YAKUSHIJI Contributing Writer
[image] Toru Honda during a trip through Tokyo's Akihabara district

Toru Honda boasts he is the archetypical otaku. A single guy, he lives alone in Nakano Ward, Tokyo. Fashion bores him. He buys his clothes exclusively from Uniqlo. His shoes cost 1,000 yen.

Honda splits his time between the Nakano Broadway shopping mall and Tokyo's Akihabara district. The nearby locale features shops selling video game figurines; the latter is the premier otaku oasis.

A 35-year-old freelance writer, Honda spends almost all his money on his otaku hobbies. He has eight DVD recorders. He can record up to 30 hours worth of animation a day. He bought a 45-inch LCD TV for 900,000 yen to watch his fantasy friends in delicious detail.

Honda has no girlfriend. He says he can't remember the last time he talked to a woman, excluding the 80-year-old owner of his apartment building.

He would be satisfied with his peaceful existence but for the public's tendency to turn up its collective nose at otaku. He says otaku are almost considered ``untouchables'' in a society that defines love as the most noble of human emotions.

Not so, he says. Love is dead. What remains is moe-the intense affection players develop toward their favorite animated characters.

Moe is the saving grace of the otaku. It never flirts; it never calculates-it offers perfect uncalculated love. Moe is, above all else, self-sacrificing; it asks nothing in return.

Based on this near-religious belief, Honda began to defend the otaku lifestyle on his homepage < http://ya.sakura.ne.jp/otsukimi/ > in the spring of 2004.

His book ``Denpa Otoko'' (Radio wave guy) was published in March, making him a hero to his otaku comrades. For 405 pages, Honda makes the case that the otaku life is superior to the run-of-the-mill existence. Moe, he says, is essential for peace in the world.

Now in its fourth printing, ``Denpa Otoko'' had sold 33,000 copies by the end of May.

In addition to picking up royalty checks, he's received a slew of e-mails from guys like him. Most say his book gave them courage and validated their way of life.

``I stopped counting the e-mails after they topped 100,'' he said during an interview in Akihabara earlier this month.

The interview with Honda came the day after a 24-year-old man from Sapporo was arrested for allegedly confining and assaulting a teenage girl. His apartment was crammed with games and animation videos. He allegedly insisted his victims call him ``master.''

This appellation is used by waitresses-clad in black skirts and white aprons-when addressing patrons at some extreme ``maid cafes.''

Sipping cafe au lait at one of the longest-operating maid cafes in Akihabara, Honda distanced himself and his brethren from the suspect.

``Real otaku know the difference between the two-dimensional world and the real world. Otaku are tame as sheep.''

The title of his book, ``Denpa Otoko,'' resembles that of another book ``Densha Otoko.'' The latter originated on popular Internet bulletin board 2 Channel. Once turned into book form, it soon became a best-seller and the movie version will open today.

According to the story, an otaku wants to get to know a woman he encountered on the train. He solicits romantic advice from bulletin board participants and keeps them apprised of his progress. The story has a happy ending, of course. The geek gets the girl and reaps the congratulations of his online advisers.

The predictable story irritates Honda. He says the heart-warming ending is not an otaku victory, but rather a failure.

``(Densha Otoko) is an otaku's surrender to `love capitalism.' What the main character should've done is turn the girl into another otaku and bring her to Akihabara,'' he says.

Honda's editor, Shun Saito, agrees, ``The supporters of `Densha Otoko' cheered as their hero stopped being an otaku. But is being otaku such a bad thing? Aren't we supposed to be proud of otaku? That's the message `Denpa Otoko' offers.''

``Since the 1980s, love has become a consumption item,'' Honda writes in his book. ``Men spend money on women. Women buy things with the money they get from men.

``So the guys like me who are not good looking and not willing to spend money are considered losers.''

Around the same time as love became ``a consumption item,'' according to Honda, games like ``Tokimeki Memorial'' or ``To Heart'' were released that allow players to fall in love with the characters.

Those games brought salvation for otaku. Unpopular with girls, they let them live out a goodly portion of their lives in the moe world-taking their favorite animation or video game characters to heart.

Honda employs the terms ``three-dimensional'' and ``two-dimensional'' love. The former is the real thing, the latter the otaku-game character relationship.

Honda might be said to be avoiding relationships with women, but he is even harder on himself. In self-deprecating moments masked in sarcasm, he says his ugliness and otakuness leave him ``handicapped'' in the love hierarchy of the real world.

With Honda it is difficult to tell where reality ends and fantasy begins. In the book, he says his need for moe-pure love-is the result of a traumatic childhood in Kobe.

He writes that his mother, as the first daughter of the family, was forced to marry a man who agreed to be adopted into her family.

However, the husband-Honda's father-turned out be a wife-beater who eventually abandoned his family for another woman. Later, Honda learned that his father had also been abandoned by his father, thus acting out learned behavior as an adult.

How deeply Honda's fantasy world is ingrained is hard to tell. At any rate, he writes that his mother ran a cabaret to support her aged parents and her two children. Due to the tough times, she developed cancer before she turned 40.

Bedridden and in agony, she told her son that she had been forced to marry someone she did not love. Her life had been huge failure, she said.

Honda says he listened horrified-hearing a tale that seemed to deny his very existence.

Worse, he states in the book, his man-hating mother raised him as a girl and always objected when he made friends with girls.

When he turned 16, Honda realized that his family environment was far from the norm. Ostracized at school, he tried to commit suicide, but his mother got in the way again.

Finally, Honda withdrew into his tiny room, endlessly watching TV animation programs. Attractive girls were characters in many of the stories. The standard plot put them in a difficult situation from which the babes eventually emerged triumphant.

``I began to create an imaginary world; a world of two dimensions where only I and animation characters existed.''

Honda dropped out of high school and shut himself up in his room with his imaginary companions.

After his mother died, he used her life insurance money and entered cram school. He picked up a certificate that allowed him to enter university.

He was admitted to prestigious Waseda University and moved to Tokyo in 1988.

He says he thought he could start a new life in a new environment, but soon came to the arguable conclusion that women only go for guys who are either handsome, have money or a nice car.

After graduation, he worked at a publishing house for nine months and then quit. He returned to Kobe. His luck remained the same-the Great Hanshin Earthquake in 1995 left his house in rubble.

Scarred by the catastrophe, Honda thought death might be a relief. But his animated games and his pixelated girlfriends helped him through the ordeal.

``Again, those moe characters saved my life, whether I wanted it or not.''

Many newspaper articles and books like ``Makeinu no Toboe'' (Underdog howls) discuss the difficulty Japanese women have in finding boyfriends now that so many men are holed up in their rooms seemingly content with their animated fantasies.

The theory angers Honda. In his book, he says, in effect, that he had no choice in the matter. ``I never hit women. But I know I might have a penchant for violence in my blog. If I were to have a peaceful life not hurting anyone, I had to stay home and live my life in my imaginary world. But women are saying that this lifestyle is unforgivable.''

He says his indignation at this mischaracterization of otaku prodded him to write his book. He felt otaku needed someone to tell their side of the story-of harmless individuals seeking love in an imaginary world only to be labeled misfits by society.

Badly disappointed with the ``three-dimensional world,'' Honda has created his own fantasy family. One of his younger sisters is a chimera of his own making. The rest-a wife, two other younger sisters and a maid-were all borrowed from animation games.

It may sound like a solitary life. But Honda, while admitting he is not a social creature, says he is not lonely.

He doesn't recommend every otaku follow his path, because ``you lose a lot of things.'' The warmth of another human being?

``No, money,'' he says, referring to the financial burden incurred in supporting his virtual family.

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NYT, June 2, 2005
The Lady Is a Villain and the Trappings Are Chinese
By JAMES R. OESTREICH

CHARLESTON, S.C., June 2 - Verdi's "Macbeth" was never like this. Here, too, the story is Shakespeare's, more or less, but the trappings are vintage Chinese.
[image] Yang Wen-Chin/Spoleto Festival U.S.A.; Wei Hai-Ming, left, and Wu Hsing-Kuo in "The Kingdom of Desire," a Chinese adaptation of "Macbeth," at Spoleto.

"The Kingdom of Desire," which opened at the Spoleto Festival U.S.A. on Thursday evening, is an adaptation of "Macbeth" in the style of Beijing opera by the Contemporary Legend Theater of Taiwan. It is one of four distinctly nonstandard opera presentations at the festival this season, along with Mozart's "Don Giovanni" in a radical staging; Respighi's fairy tale opera "La Bella Dormente nel Bosco," staged with puppets; and a rare revival of "Die Vögel" by Walter Braunfels, whose music was banned by the Nazis.

Beijing opera, which has long been the most popular theatrical form in China, is a catchall of drama, music, stylized movement or dance, costume design, acrobatics and martial arts. In short, it is spectacle, and "The Kingdom of Desire" - the first opera presented by the Contemporary Legend Theater, in 1986 - indulges lustily.

The lead actors - Wu Hsing-Kuo, the company's artistic director, as General Au-Shu Cheng, and Wei Hai-Ming as Lady Au-Shu - are both versatile masters, as each showed several years ago in other contexts at the late, lamented Taipei Theater in New York. Ms. Wei, in particular, has proved the most refined and elegant of heroines in more traditional style, whether in serious drama or comedy. (Her delightful "Tipsy Concubine" lives vividly in memory.)

All the more remarkable, then, her descent into bald villainy here. In an assertive and devious role utterly foreign to her usual genteel specialty, she cannily let stylization melt into subtle shades of naturalism.

Mr. Wu, playing less against type, caught the hero's wavering balance between resolution and doubt. His strenuous physical exertions built to a stunning conclusion, when, mortally wounded by an arrow, he teetered backward to the edge of a high wall and finally dismounted in a back flip - wearing, it was said, some 40 pounds of costume. (His subsequent lingering death may be as close as any of this came to a Verdi opera.)

The script, by Lee Huei-Ming, sets the drama in the later Chou dynasty (around the third century B.C.) and compresses it considerably to make room for the added elements. An extended scene at the beginning of the third act, "Subduing the Horses," has no text at all, just mime and acrobatics.

The music is based on traditional tunes from Beijing opera, as arranged by Ma Chin-Liang. Liu Sung-Huei added an overture and periodic background music. The harmonies were tinged with western chromaticism and modernistic dissonance, and the score occasionally took on a cinematic quality that complemented the staging: elaborate by Beijing opera standards, with hangings, scrim, smoke and lighting effects.

The producer and choreographer was Lin Hsiu-Wei, Mr. Wu's wife, who also danced. Lin Ching-Ru designed the lavish costumes.

Remarkably, given all the disparate elements, the production made a unified and compelling whole and was loudly applauded. So when can we see the Contemporary Legend Theater's version of "The Tempest"? Or "King Lear," in which Mr. Wu virtuosically plays all the roles, male and female? (Though you might ask why, with a star of Ms. Wei's magnitude in the wings.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/02/arts/music/02kingdom-extra.html

 

__________________

with kind regards,

Matthias Arnold
(Art-Eastasia list)

http://www.chinaresource.org
http://www.fluktor.de

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