Marcel Winatschek

What If...?

Sometimes I lie awake at night, and one almost essential question spins endlessly in my head: What if...? While others quietly masturbate late at night or are kindly taken to the seventh heaven by their partners, drifting off with a faint smile before waking refreshed to expand their successful résumés, I spend the night thinking. What if I’d made tea instead of coffee? What if I’d been nicer to the woman at the train kiosk yesterday? What if I had chosen Spotify over Apple Music? Moved to Hamburg instead of Berlin? Confessed my love to the cute girl next door? Read more books? Not cheated on ex-girlfriends? Not been lazy? Not been an asshole? What if I hadn’t spent so much time pondering what might have been?

Goodbye Kumamoto

My time here in Kumamoto is now coming to an end. For a full year I have been an exchange student at the Faculty of Design of Japan’s Sojo University, exploring new ideas in both artistic and technical fields. Day after day, I wandered the two campuses that rise above the city, learning about typography, painting, and graphic design in lecture halls, tinkering with Arduinos and Raspberry Pis in the computer club, and studying Japanese in the library with friends. I’ve met so many wonderful people, traveled across half the country with them, and through them gained deep insights into a different kind of society – glimpses that remain forever closed to most travelers. It’s hard to express how grateful I am to have lived through these colorful adventures.

The Queen of J-Pop

What Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, or Mariah Carey might be in Western realms, that is what women named Hikaru Utada, Namie Amuro, and Seiko Matsuda are in Japan. Grand shows, powerful voices, and an abundance of feminine energy – this is how the Far Eastern audience knows and loves its female superstars. They dazzle with charisma, glamour, and emotional performances that blend strength with elegance. These artists are more than singers, they are icons who have shaped the image of Japanese pop culture for decades, inspiring countless fans across generations. Their concerts fill arenas, their songs dominate the charts, and their influence stretches far beyond Japan’s borders, defining what it means to be a pop legend in Asia’s ever-evolving music scene.

I Love Tomboys

When I was twelve and scratched the naked, hairy ass of my first so-called girlfriend in our homemade hideout, somewhere under cardboard boxes, rat poison, and industrial pallets, I knew what the rest of my life would look like. She wasn’t one of those normal girls who plastered their faces with makeup, ran to pedicures, and shaved their legs, but my best buddy – for years. We jumped like Power Rangers over sacks of earth, beat each other senseless in the woods, and late at night watched the first soft-core porn on some shabby TV channel, together with her little brothers, to laugh at her own flesh and blood and shove them whooping down the stairs. I admired Mara through and through. She was my first tomboy.

Dystopian Decadence

A misaligned photograph of the future, born in the fever of Japan’s growth in the sixties and seventies. Traditions, quiet and fine, threaded through with wabi-sabi as an inner pulse, keep time beneath the noise. Buildings that refuse to shed their rust, that keep a film of dull gray on the fingers, stand as patient witnesses. A floating consolation, and a smell of open country, move down the lanes and linger in the alleys. The story of Millennium Parade unfolds in a forked-off Tokyo, grown out of this zone – our shared room of side-by-side living. The city has laid aside its earlier addiction to polish and noiseless urbanity. Instead, it sets out toward a strange, beautiful, absurdly ideal future metropolis, nourished by disorder and yet leaning toward transcendence.

The End of the World

By now I had long since resigned myself to the fact that for months I could neither really laugh nor cry. I had degenerated into a feelingless phantom in this endlessly same world, drifting from party to party, from person to person, and yet no longer truly taking part. In life. Everything had decayed into the same everyday mush. No matter how hard I searched. And then I sit there and, in a single instant, everything changes. I do not see it. No explosion, no scream, no ending. Nothing. Only me and my head and some switch inside it that flipped. Suddenly. And that forces me to burst out of the ruined normality. Out into the night air, out of the loop that had me on repeat.

Don’t Stop Shooting!

I finally watched Shinichiro Ueda’s 2017 film One Cut of the Dead the other day. And what can I say? It is, as anyone who has seen it can attest, absolutely fantastic. The big problem is that I really shouldn’t reveal anything about it, not even the genre, because otherwise I strip away all the fun. Only this much: One Cut of the Dead opens in a run-down, abandoned warehouse where a small film crew is in the middle of shooting a zombie picture... But of course it’s not an ordinary warehouse. Rumor has it that military experiments were carried out here... on human beings! Then, as if from nowhere, real zombies suddenly appear and terrorize the crew. A bloody struggle for survival begins...

One Year in Japan

For exactly one year now I have been living in Japan. I have a Japanese phone number, a Japanese bank account, a Japanese social security number. As a student at the art faculty of a Japanese university, I have met many local creatives as well as wonderful people from all over the world who, like me, are trying to find their place in this demanding society. When I’m not sitting in lecture halls, studios, and cafeterias having my broken Japanese put to the test, my life plays out by day between cinemas, galleries, and museums, and by night between izakaya, karaoke bars, and supermarkets that stay open twenty-four hours a day, on nearly every corner of the city, bright and humming.

Songs of Rebellion and Loneliness

I recently watched the documentary Our Lies and Truths about the rise and downfall of the Japanese girl group Keyakizaka46. After all, in recent years Techi and her comrades have been the idols I listened to most. Songs like Silent Majority, Ambivalent, and especially 黒い羊 still play on endless loop for me today, and the accompanying music videos are performative masterworks. Yasushi Akimoto, who has been responsible for acts such as AKB48, Onyanko Club, and Iz*One and also created Keyakizaka46, is not for nothing Japan’s most gifted and at the same time most hated producer. Some people say Yasushi Akimoto destroyed the Japanese music industry, and I agree, noted Agency for Cultural Affairs Commissioner Shunichi Tokura in cutting words.

Small Talk Is Hitler

We’re in a hotel lobby at the counter, staring holes into the air. The girl is Irina, buxom. The guy is Erik, important. I’m Marcel and want to go home. But that’s impossible. Business appointments are essential. Instead of telling Irina that tonight around nine I’d like to take her anally in her single room, and stapling my bank details to Erik’s forehead so he can wire me his inheritance, we must perform society’s dance of dances. I hate small talk. I hate the your-life-is-irrelevant-to-me, nice-weather smile with dull looks trained to keep us from yawning and pouncing. I hate most people. So why this? Dogs sniff rears, humans edge closer through gab. Less fun. Imagine the hours we’d save by going straight to the point.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

On a warm summer evening, when the cicadas were diligently chirping away and the moon was slowly pushing itself onto the stage of the sky, a friend and I were on our way home from an exhibition when, not far off, we first heard music and shortly after cheerful laughter. Because we were curious and still had a bit of energy left, we decided to see what was going on there. So we picked our way through the neighborhood’s ever-narrowing streets and walked past streams, houses, and playgrounds until, a short time later, we stood at the edge of a small park where a neighborhood festival was underway. And it took less than a minute before friendly, perhaps slightly tipsy, people invited us to join the little festivity.