Identification

When I was growing up, my small town had a friendly rivalry with a neighboring small town, particularly when it came to competitions between local sports teams. This was at its peak when I was in elementary school and we called the people from the other elementary school "Rimers-burgers" in a juvenile attempt to make the denizens of Rimersburg seem stupid. Of course, we were the ones who were being stupid but such is the behavior of the under 12 set when they are trying their best to undermine their rivals.

By the time we all hit 7th grade though, we had to abandon this rivalry and our identity with our small town (Sligo) since we were all integrated into the same combined junior and senior high school. We outgrew our small town rivalry and grew into a rivalry which was based largely on the football teams our school's team played against. By the time most people started dating though, even this sense of strong identification with our home towns and schools dissipated as one discovered there were attractive and kind people everywhere who one would like to associate with.

The funny thing about a lot of people in America though is they don't tend to outgrow this need for identification with places, things, and people that don't matter at all. This was brought home to me on more than one occasion when a casual disparaging comment about something or other elicited a hostile defensive response from a party who felt emotionally connected to the object of my low opinion. In one instance, I used Barry Manilow as an example of a type of music to which I was not attracted, not knowing that the party I was speaking to was a particular fan of the man. Her reaction was highly defensive and she reacted as if I'd insulted her personally by my rejection of Mr. Manilow's music. She then proceeded to personally insult me as an act of retaliation.

As I believe I've mentioned in other posts, this sort of casual identification with content and items we consume is rampant in the U.S. from colas (the Pepsi vs. Coke crowd) to music (Goths, gangstas, metalheads, and beyond) to sports teams. People appear to ally themselves rather intensely and often. It's something I don't actually encounter as much in Japan from the Japanese. I'm not sure if they simply do not make the same emotional connection or if they don't react when you disparage the items they love. Mind you, I'm not saying they don't love items but that love seems tied more to status than to emotional integration.

Since no one has gotten mad at me for disagreeing with what they have staked their identity on for quite some time, the curious intensity of the angry response you can get when someone feels their beloved is attacked hadn't been on my mind until today. I received an extremely foul-mouthed and hostile response from a Mac user who clearly doesn't read my blog on a regular basis but came across my "Apple Frustration" post and decided he was going to call me a 4-letter-word starting with "c" and try to bully me off the Internet. (I'm staying.)

The interesting thing is that a lot of people who have such responses will profess views of tolerance, enlightenment and open-mindedness when it comes to things like culture, religion, or politics yet they will have disproportionately aggressive reactions to trivial matters such as someone finding fault in the computer platform they choose. They may deride others as close-minded or bigoted but then have responses which show that, when someone finds that one thing they've staked their identity on, they can be just as irrationally hostile and defensive as a religious zealot or political extremist.

Things in T.V. and Movies That I Could Do Without

There are many times when I'm watching something and the thought occurs to me that I've just seen or heard something that I'd really rather not encounter again. I don't know what is wrong with the people who make entertainment but it seems as though they lack imagination and feel we do as well.

Indications of this to me are as follows:

1. In the past, when someone tossed their cookies, we heard a coughing sound and the person dived down out of camera range to spare us the ugly spewing process. Now, we need to see the liquid pouring from people's mouths. This isn't just in movies but in prime time television shows. I think we all know what it looks like to barf and don't need a vivid reminder. I shudder to think what sort of normally-hidden-bathroom-behavior we're going to have to watch next.
   
2. "If he dies, you die." If there is a doctor and a person with a gun, it's irresistible for writers not to use that line. The idea is that the gunman is always irrational and feels it necessary to state this despite the fact that anyone with two brain cells to rub together knows a doctor who is trying to save any sort of adversary or enemy in such a situation will do his or her best. Besides the fact that this line is greatly over-used, the person who fails to save the friend doesn't die when the patient dies so it's all rather pointless.
   
3. I don't know if these sorts of commercials air in the United States but some time back advertisers in Japan decided that any drink commercial has to show someone downing the showcased beverage accompanied by a disgusting, loud, overly-exaggerated gulping noise. I neither associate this horrible sound effect with enjoyment nor require an audio sample of what it sounds like to swallow amplified by the equivalent of a digital blowhorn.
4. Breasts and beverages. Breasts and cars. Breasts and tools. Breasts and whatever item are being marketed at males. In this day and age, how many pathetic loser men believe that buying the socket wrenches will also bring delivery of the babe standing next to them? Are men really that easily manipulated and gullible or do advertisers just like to continue to think they are rather than design imaginative ad campaigns?
   
5. The fantasy doctor who spends extra time with his or her patients doing the jobs that only nurses do in real life like blotting their feverish brows. Isn't it fantasy enough that doctors in entertainment series (with the exception of House) care about their patients and actually talk to them about their lives and show interest in them as people? I've rarely met a doctor in real life who has regarded me as anything more than a piece of meat in need of curing.
6. Children who undergo accelerated growth. Back when I was in university, I spent some of my summer doing what a lot of people my age did during the afternoon. I watched soap operas. One thing you learned quickly is that kids grew up fast on soap operas. A pregnancy may gestate for over a year as the storyline around it unfolded at a leisurely pace but a kid generally grew to pre-teen in about 3 years and fully-grown early adulthood in no more than 6 years. Their parents, of course, aged normally. This little hack-writing chestnut lives today in science fiction as a way of getting around the nuisance of having to write about people who have kids in any credible way. This also allows them to trot out some oedipal weirdnesses in the storylines. The rather bad and short-lived "V" T.V. series played both these cards when they had the star-child off-spring of a reptilian visitor and a human hibernate in a cocoon and come out all pretty and grown up. She then competed with her mommy for the affection of the shows young beef-cake character (young accelerated growth child is always attractive and always gets the love interest). I saw a repeat of this situation in "Angel" when his infant son was kidnapped and spirited away to another dimension where time passed more quickly. He came back a whiny 17-year-old who banged his father's love interest and impregnated her with his demon love baby. Said baby also skipped the growth process by springing from the womb a full-grown woman. Most recently, I've seen this sort of rapid growth occur with baby Isabel (I'm a few seasons behind, folks) on "The 4400". During the entire time I was watching the second season, I was saying to myself, 'please don't succumb to the accelerated growth storyline,' but the writers couldn't resist. Pregnancy apparently makes for a great story but kids are just a pain to deal with once they're out of the womb. They either magically fade into background accessories (like on "Friends" and "Murphy Brown") or they grow up freakishly fast. I wish writers would simply not have people get pregnant if they can't credibly write storylines once the babies are born.
7. Computer nerds who dress in a stylishly dorky way and wear variations on horn-rim glasses and/or hot, slightly wacky-looking geek girls with mad skills at the computer. Real dorks and dorkettes don't look like this and even when they do, they don't transform into very attractive people once the glasses come off and the hairstyle and clothing style change. It's almost like they doubt our intelligence as viewers sufficiently that they have to push these stereotypes in front of us as a way of flashing a "geek character" sign in front of us. I do, however, have to give credit to "24" which avoided this stereotype and showed the computer literate types as normal people.
8. Pocahontas syndrome. I name this syndrome not for the real situation with Pocahontas but the one white people like to imagine. In what I'm sure is a historically inaccurate situation, Pocahontas is young, beautiful, desirable and speaks English perfectly and wants nothing more than to show all the palefaces safe passage through Indian territories. In television and movies, every time the hero finds himself in a strange culture where he can't speak the language, an attractive woman steps out and announces she can speak his language and serves as his guide. In many cases, the woman ends up the love interest. I think any writer who falls back on this hackneyed means of getting a character through an alien place should be dropped into the middle of rural China and see how many beautiful, helpful, perfect-English speaking women step up to make his life easy.
   
9. People who pine for each other but avoid hooking up for artificially constructed reasons. I'd blame the X-Files for this but they were hardly the first to indulge in this sort of long-term tease. It gets old very fast, particularly when the reason is unbelievable or absurd.

I'm sure there are a good many of these sorts of things I'm leaving out but these are the ones that have been bugging me as of late. If I compile another list, you can look forward to part 2. ;-)

100 Yen a Bag

This evening one of my students told me about some policies in the handling of trash in her neighborhood which do not bode well for the future of trash collection if such notions infect other local cities. My student lives in a seaside area a little less than two hours by train from central Tokyo and she said her area was having issues with inappropriate trash disposal such as people putting out too many shopping-bag-size bags which take too long to collect and possibly issues with illegal dumping though she wasn't clear on this point.

The city government decided that they would try to deal with the problems they've been having by requiring two things and encouraging a third. The first thing is that people will have to buy a sticker for 100 yen to put on each and every bag of trash they put out for collection. The second is that they will have to put their trash in individual spots rather than in a centralized location so that each person's responsibility for their trash is clearer. In her case, she has to leave her trash in her parking space to make it clear that it is hers.

If you think these moves have anything to do with global warming and decreasing the amount of waste so that less trash is incinerated, think again. The reason for these changes in policy are completely financial. The local government is too poor to continue trash collection service so they want to lower the volume they have to handle and increase their revenue. To this end, they are encouraging people in the city to buy personal incinerators and to burn the trash themselves. My student told me the devices they are recommending cost 50,000 yen ($435) each and are about the size of a washing machine.

Given the small size of Japanese homes (both apartments and houses), you might guess that people are not keen on this option. My student said that she is also worried about any burning trash odor that the device may emit within her apartment and I'm sure this is a concern others have as well. The solution that she and her neighbors are considering is a truly scary one. One of her neighbors works in construction and they routinely burn trash on the work site in a big metal drum. He's volunteered to transport the drum to the neighborhood every Sunday to allow everyone to burn their trash in it so they don't have to buy incinerators and so they don't have to pay as much for bags of garbage to be removed.

This solution may save the residents money but it's bad in several ways. First of all, the risk of a fire from burning trash is not a small one when you get a bunch of regular folks tossing crap into a big drum, particularly one that is smoking and stinking for a long period of time which no one is going to want to stand around and watch. The other problem is that the fumes coming from such a thing are likely to be somewhat toxic and will definitely be worse than controlled emissions from a government-ran incinerator which is obliged to adhere to guidelines to which residents will not be subject. Finally, given the very high cost of tossing out each bag of trash, people will be inclined to burn anything and everything possible and may be attempting to burn things which really ought not be burned because of their toxicity.

This sort of situation is so incredibly Japanese in the way it has unfolded. It's the sort of thing I was exposed to time and again at my former job. Short-sighted decisions are made for very small, concrete benefits and likely but hypothetical long-term problems are dismissed, left un-discussed, or ignored. The general way of handling any problem is to propose a solution to the immediate problem and then to cross the other bridges when they collapse under the ill-advised weight of the short-term solution. It's a classic result of holding meetings in which dissent is discouraged and consensus is valued over the broadest possible long-term solution to the problem.

There have been many times when I have been the happy beneficiary of the way in which Japanese people think about the harmony of the group and times when I think it's the ultimate exercise in consideration and sublimating one's wishes and opinions in order to accommodate what is best for everyone but this sort of situation which solves one problem and very likely will create many more (potentially worse ones) is the negative flip-side of that sort of thinking.

Silly English/Japanese

If you spend a brief amount of time in Japan, you see people walking around in shirts with funny English on them. If you spend a brief amount of time looking at blogs written by people living in Japan, you see pictures of these sorts of shirts.


Foreign people aren't sure who thinks up the English for these shirts. Sometimes, they are random words and some seem to be long strings of ideas which don't quite come together. One thing is for sure, the Japanese don't care about what these things say in English. They know it's wrong but the lettering itself just looks cool to them.


One of my students wore such a shirt to a lesson last week which made me think that not all the designs are blithely tossed out there or random. Her shirt is not pictured because it would have been rather inappropriate (and rude) for me to ask her to let me snap a picture of her torso for my blog. The shirt she was wearing had the word "sagacious" written down along it in black dots about 8 times with the letters "TNFLTP" written in red about 6 times in front of the repeated"sagacious". If I had seen this as a random shirt on the street, I would have wondered what on earth it was on about and then forgotten it but the student asked me what it meant. I knew "sagacious" meant "shrewd" or "intelligent" but had no idea about TNFLTP.

I looked it up using Google and discovered these letters are part of a genetic sequence. Since I'm not an expert in genetics, I don't know if these letters were coincidentally part of a genetic sequence or if the entire shirt was a sly "in joke" about "intelligent" (sagacious) genes. Following my research a bit further, the sequence seemed to have been related to the DNA of Japanese rice but I'm afraid I was well in over my head at that stage in terms of understanding things. It did make me wonder though if there is hidden meaning or humor in a lot of the funny English shirts we see.


When my student and I discussed this issue, she mentioned that the Japanese don't think clothing with Japanese words is "cool" and they find it pretty unappealing by and large. She said that she noticed when she was in Hawaii that there were people with Japanese/Chinese characters as tattoos as well as on their clothes and that they were often as funny to her as English on shirts is to us.


She said that one of the funniest she saw was a man with a tattoo on his back of a character which meant "sheep". She found it particularly amusing because this was a pretty well-built, masculine fellow walking around with this absurd tattoo, possibly thinking it was really cool.

Impolite Pressure

About a month ago, the referral agency I use for getting private students called and asked me to accept a new student at 9:30 am on Saturday morning. The schedule I provided them with back when I initially signed on with them states that I don't accept lessons before 10:00 am on the weekend so they already knew this was too early before making the request.

The woman who spoke with me pleaded with me to accept this particular student for just two lessons either in August or September. At the time of this initial call, she said the student had contracted to do only 4 lessons and needed to finish off the last two of them. I told her that I would do it if it were only 2 lessons though I'd prefer it was in September because the two dates she gave me were August 18 and 25 and the latter is my birthday. With audible relief, she told me she'd contact the student about the dates and get back to me. Of course, the student wanted to come in August despite September being offered as an option to me.

After the first lesson, I realized that part of the reason she may only be taking a handful of lessons was that she required relatively specialized lesson planning and was dissatisfied with the type of generic lesson she'd received before. The teacher with whom she'd taken a lesson (or two) before was an older man who had her doing relatively low-level grammatical pattern practice from an antique book (which she purchased but then didn't want to use). She found this sort of lesson not only boring but rather tedious and pointless. She's 55 years old and interested in serious topics like feminism. She doesn't want to spend her time speaking like a child. It was her desire to express her opinions and ideas on topics she was interested in. She just had a lot of trouble doing so.

While it may not be what she technically needs, I concluded that she could have what she wanted if she was willing to put the work into it and if her future teacher was willing to be patient. As a courtesy to the referral agency, I wrote them a letter recommending that any future teacher find articles on issues related to the student's interests (particularly women's issues) and have the student read it and think it over before each lesson. The student would be able to consider the topic and vocabulary well beforehand and then they could discuss it with the teacher working on her grammar issues as part of the discussion.

The result of my voluntary good deed was that I got a phone call from the agency thanking me for the letter but also attempting to pressure me into teaching her in the future. I should mention that I not only made it clear during the initial phone exchange that I could not teacher her regularly at this time but I also mentioned it in the letter about her lesson planning. When I said that I could teach her if she could come later in the afternoon, the response was, "oh, you don't want to get up early." This struck me as incredibly rude and presumptuous. It was all I could do not to be angry on the phone but I explained that it had nothing to do with when I got up as I'm usually up early every morning but it's related to when my husband leaves for work.

The truth is that it's very inconvenient for me to have students arrive right on the heels of my husband's departure for work. We sit in the room in which I conduct the lessons and the folding table I use in the lesson can't be set up in it when we are both in it so I have to rush and set it up after he goes or leave it crammed into the space available such that he can't get in and out of the room easily because of the way it blocks the exit to the kitchen. I also have to rush and get any breakfast dishes done while he's still here and try to tidy up for the student. Additionally, it's not uncommon for my husband to start 20-40 minutes later than his usual schedule because of a late cancellation. In such cases, my husband has to hide out in the bedroom while I conduct a lesson and he waits to leave.

There's also a serious possibility that a student who is supposed to start at 9:30 am on Saturday will show up early enough that my husband will still be in the process of gathering his things and preparing to leave. In fact, the first week this 9:30 student showed up within two minutes of my husband's departure because she was 6 minutes early. Scheduling a student in the way they want would require my husband to regularly leave early to ensure there was no conflict in this regard and one more student is simply not worth rushing around, putting my husband out, and being stressed every week.

At any rate, I didn't go into this level of explanation with the agency, I simply said that my starting and finishing times were linked to my husband's work schedule and I couldn't accept students who wanted to start before he left or after he came home. One thing I can say for sure though is that this is the last time I'll consent to do them a favor which conflicts with my scheduling wishes. I don't need people foisting their conclusions about my lifestyle on me in order to pressure me into doing what they want me to do.

Birthdays

A fan one of my students dressed up as a birthday card for me. :-)

There's an episode of "Roseanne" in which her mother is celebrating her 62nd birthday and Roseanne asks her mother how old she feels. Her mother replies, "sixty-two, I'm sixty-two years old." Roseanne responds by asking her how she feels inside and her mother repeats her previous response. With a clear amount of exasperation, Roseanne tries to get her mother to admit that she must feel younger than her chronological age inside and later says that she (Roseanne) feels like she's 'stuck' at 16.

Birthday cards from my family.

Recently, I also read a blog post by one of my favorite web cartoonists (Paul Southworth at Ugly Hill) and he expressed a similar sentiment on his 27th birthday. I often feel that my husband retains the ability to see things in the best light and has the unconditional love of an innocent child while still being as responsible in every way that matters for a man of his age. I sometimes think my husband is stuck at 12 in the most positive ways and in none of the negative ways.

Today is my 43rd birthday and I feel every year of it and more. This is actually the way I have felt since I was 17 years old. In fact, the awesome weight of my responsibilities since that time have always left me feeling about 72. Fortunately, associating with my young-at-heart-in-all-the-very-best-ways husband and having someone who has helped lift some of the weight of life from me has brought that number down to about 65. I'm pretty sure I felt older at 17 than I do now at 43. I figure that, one of these days, I'm going to celebrate a birthday and actually feel the same on the outside as I do on the inside. If I had to guess right now, I'm betting that will happen around 55 or so unless life gets a lot harder between now and then. I do wish, rather wistfully, that I would have had the chance to feel like an 18-year-old for awhile and I rather envy those who feel stuck in their teens. Their hearts must be freer than mine and their minds considerably lighter.

In something which may appear coincidental but is not, this blog is two days shy of its first birthday. The reason is that I waited to start it until after I had a digital camera and I got it last year as a birthday gift (originally planned as a gift to myself but my generous in-laws paid for it for me). I'm not really counting the time under my belt and I'm certainly not tracking the number of posts I do but it's rather hard not to remember its anniversaries when they come so close on the heels of the anniversary of my unceremonious entrance into this reality.

Popeyes

You meet a wide variety of people as you journey through life. Some of them are pretty self-aware and genuine. Some of them are self-centered and myopic. Some are neurotic and constantly worry about what others think or are always trying to please those around them. Others are angry, sarcastic and lashing out in any way they can find. There are very few people who are psychologically perfect and even those who appear pretty well-balanced initially may eventually show cracks as time goes by and you get to know them better.

Since none of us are perfect, I don't really expect the people I encounter to fail to get on my nerves (nor do I expect that I won't eventually get on theirs). Among the flawed people I meet, I think the ones who frustrate me the most though are the ones I have christened "Popeyes". These are the people who are fully aware of how their particular issues cause stress and difficulty to others but their response is "I yam what I yam".

These aren't people who have tried to curb their more inappropriate responses or habits but people who feel no need to try. They may be aggressive, hostile, impatient, childish, or rude but they excuse themselves by simply saying that it's just the way they are. They feel that the people around them should accommodate their personality problems rather than attempt to modify their behavior such that it manifests itself less destructively. These people either believe they were born a certain way and have no power to change or are so narcissistic that they believe the whole world should shape itself to their personalities.

A good example of this sort of behavior is the boss who snarls at his subordinates over little "mistakes" (which may actually be a failure to adhere to idiosyncratic wishes on the part of the boss) because he had a fight with his wife before work and is irritable. He won't try to cut back on lashing out at others but simply conclude he was born temperamental and will always be this way so the people around him should get used to it. Most people like this not only won't try to change but they also won't apologize. The best they will offer is to say, "this is the way I am, don't take it personally."

Men are far more likely to be Popeyes than women. That is not to say that women can't be this way but women are conditioned socially in every culture to be aware of the feelings of others and to attempt to make them comfortable. Men also view any sort of personality change in order to accommodate the feelings of others, even significant others like their wives, as a challenge to their power in the relationship. For some people, the minute the topic of filing off the personality's rough edges comes up, they go into defensive mode and gear up to hold their ground in the emotional tug of war they anticipate will follow. These are typically, but certainly not always by a long shot, the kind of men who delight in calling a man who alters his behavior to accommodate his wife "whipped".

Some "Popeyes" would say that anyone who worries about the way their behavior affects others is neurotically obsessed with trying to please others and lacking in confidence but that's just a way of placating the voice inside them that knows they're unable to face their flaws in a meaningful way. Such people often seem to feel that admitting a personality flaw gives them a free pass to exercise it at will. It's a little like telling people you'll be setting off a stink bomb at their desk on random occasions but you've warned them so they should attempt to be sanguine about it when it occurs.

I often wonder if such people have tried to improve and failed and that failure was sufficiently discouraging that they talked themselves into a frame of mind which says it's okay not to try to be a better person or if they're so selfish and self-centered that it never even would occur to them to try.

Ikebukuro - Part 2

Note: this is a continuation of a post I started here.


Another thing I associate rather strongly with Ikebukuro which is by no means unique to it is long rows of vending machines. There are places in Shinjuku with similarly impressive strings of these eyesores but I think it's burned into my memory as a part of Ikebukuro because this is where I first saw them and I saw them so often. Such copious amounts of these over-lit refrigerators don't tend to appear in the more residential areas (such as the place in which we live) as the foot traffic isn't heavy enough to justify so many in one place. I do wonder how much energy could be saved if the number of these things was forcibly cut in half all over Japan.


I haven't actually been to Ikebukuro for a very long time but my husband recently went there to see a movie with his brother (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) at a movie theater which specialized in both bowling and movies (two great tastes that don't necessarily go great together). His ticket, which I'm too lazy to scan in and is too crumpled to take a digital photo of, shows a drawing of an old-fashion movie projector next to a bowling ball hitting pins. Classy!

He took the pictures in this post during his visit there and I recognized some of the shops and areas (such as the venerable Jean's Mate shop pictured above) but other places were built since I was last there. Like all of Tokyo, Ikebukuro is in a constant state of being torn down and being built back up again. Many of the places my husband took pictures of are the type with "funny English" on them so I'm pretty sure I'd remember them if they had been there before. Of course, it's also possible that they simply weren't places I came across in my then daily explorations.


The English school above is either ran by a fellow named "Sirius" or is named with a misspelled name. I'd bet on the latter. It sort of takes the wind out of the sails that this is a "serious" place to study if that is the case. The faded sign (under the "GA") of the letters "A", "B", and "C" with an apple, ball and a car don't do much to enhance the reputation of the school. It looks rather sad, slapped together and run-down, but these types of little schools can be better places for foreigners to work because they don't carry the corporate mentality of the large chain schools. Of course, they can also be worse because they are often strapped for cash and having difficulty competing and are therefore understaffed and overwork their teachers.


While a "chat club" carries overtones of a place where people get together and, well, chat, the sign below this says this is a karaoke pub. Why waste time actually talking with your friends when you can get up and sing some cheesy songs? The blue part of the sign says "all time" which I'm guessing means that the price for drunkenly crooning out a tune doesn't change during peak hours. The price is 2000 yen ($17.50) for a half hour or a bargain 3800 yen ($33) for an hour.


My husband got a big kick out of this custom sports clothing business's slogan. The slogan is supposed to indicate originality but manages to convey the notion that everyone gets the same one. Personally, I like the "sweat wear" option and the odd use of "etc." at the end. Even though the logo seems to say "1/80", the business is actually called "Eighties" and was named for the year of its creation rather than a way that represents the contents of its business.


This is a picture of the shop itself where you can order as few as 5 custom-designed bits of sports apparel for your team or gaggle of school girls. It's individualized conformity. You can look like everyone else in your group but not like anyone in any other group.

Outside the shop, there is a bin of Disney T-shirts complete with a hand-drawn Mickey Mouse on the sign. I wouldn't be surprised if the shirts were illegal knock-offs. Perhaps these school girls are shopping for matching "sweat wear" or possibly even those slouchy socks that were all the rage among the uniformed set some time ago.


Some shops are unforgettable even if they don't have funny names or slogans. There's something about a black and lime-green undies shop that you don't forget. Shops with names like this sound incredibly narcissistic but the truth is that such shops are really all about what men want rather than about what the women who shop in them desire deep down. Underwear is, after all, under your clothing, and the only one who sees it are those who are intimate with you (and yourself when you do laundry and spend all of a minute getting dressed). Why would anyone pay more for itchy, tacky undergarments just for themselves? And if you don't think what you see in the window qualifies as "tacky", check out the web site. A lot of it is porn star fantasy crap. I guess men have to have something interesting to steal off of clothes lines and stash under their pillows at night or to sell to those "used underwear" shops in Japan.


If you click and look at the larger picture, you'll see the sign says "Cool! Bowling and, many amusements are here" in addition to "Exitment (sic) batting". There's also "infomation" under the "Cool" sign. It's a veritable cornucopia of misspelling but the Japanese don't care. They just think English on signs looks cooler than Japanese.


Looking over the pictures my husband took and thinking back on my time working in Ikebukuro, I found myself wondering why I never go there anymore. It clearly has everything you could want in terms of shops, restaurants, and entertainment but it's not the sort of place people tend to go unless it's where they work, live, or have to go for some reason or another. For instance, I've never heard a student say they're headed for Ikebukuro this weekend. They always go to Shinjuku, Roppongi, Ginza or one of the other big name shopping and entertainment districts.

I guess part of the reason I don't go there is that one doesn't need to go to Ikebukuro if one lives closer to one of the other areas because there's little there which you can't get elsewhere. While it is a one-stop for nearly anything you might desire, it's not what my husband would call a "happening place." It's a nice place to live (or work) but you wouldn't want to visit there.

Ikebukuro - Part 1

A segment of Ikebukuro station can be seen in the distance at the end of the street. As always, bigger versions of these pictures can be seen by clicking on them.

The first time I came to Japan was in 1988 for a one-month vacation. I met my husband for the first time at Narita airport and then spent 4 glorious weeks living with him in his small apartment in Kita-senju (Adachi-ku). At that time, I had him as a guide to help me find my way around the train stations as well as to navigate the streets and shops. He'd been in Japan for about 9 months at around that time so he knew the ropes relatively well.

Ikebukuro was my first Tokyo "stomping grounds" where I had to explore and cope without the aid of my husband as that was where my first job (with Nova) was located. Kita-senju was pretty small potatoes compared to Ikebukuro and my initial week or so was very intimidating, particularly in regards to dealing with the station which is vast, huge, and had very little English on the signs at that time.

Initially, the station was a very overwhelming and incomprehensible place to be and I remember getting frantic at least once because I thought I was hopelessly lost. If you've never been in one of these town-size stations, you can't know the fear you feel when you are new to Japan and go out the wrong exit and find yourself some place you've never seen before. I believe the time this happened to me, I walked around the entire station in a sweaty panic.

The present location of the Nova Ikebukuro branch (just in front of the station).

Back when I worked there, the Nova Ikebukuro branch was quite a bit further from the station than it is now. It's been located relatively near one of the exits for quite some time but I used to have to take a 6-8 minute walk to reach the former location. During my first year in Japan (and in Ikebukuro where I worked for around a year and a third), it was a pretty interesting place to explore during lunch hours because there were so many places to shop and some decent restaurants. However, I took baby steps at first for fear of finding myself wandering around and unable to return to the school in time for my next lesson.


There are certain things about Ikebukuro which I remember well because they stand out as part of the character of the area. One was the great volume of "love hotels" (pay by the hour places for trysts). Ikebukuro always felt more "industrial" to me than places like Shibuya and Shinjuku. I think part of the reason for that was most of the buildings were big face-less boxes. It's not that there aren't a lot of these types of buildings in the more "glamorous" parts of Tokyo but rather that those areas tend to punctuate the landscape more frequently or vibrantly with buildings with more stunning architecture or features comparatively-speaking.


Another thing I recall very well was the somewhat grubby look of many of the back streets around the areas my coworkers and I frequented relative to some other districts in Tokyo. Again, a lot of parts of Tokyo look rather dirty and run-down but the side-streets of Ikebukuro seemed to have more of it, particularly the little off-shoots of the area around Sunshine City and the heavily-trafficked shopping street leading up to it. I'm guessing part of the reason it looked a bit nasty at times was that there were so many people around and the foot traffic wore down improvements and people left trash around because there are no garbage cans on Tokyo streets.


One thing I do recall favorably is that, unlike Shibuya, the crosswalks and streets were wider or at least felt it because they weren't usually chock-a-block with people. For some reason, I also vividly recall crosswalks under raised highways like the one pictured above. I guess part of the reason must be I used to walk under one all the time when I worked in Ikebukuro and the other part would be a memory of how relatively long the hike across the street was relative to similar crossings in other parts of Tokyo.

To be continued in Part 2...

In My Shoes

As I've mentioned before, one of my students is attending a U.S. college on a military base. In one of her recent lessons with me, she told me that she feels very isolated from others now despite the fact that she is encountering more new people than ever before. It's not that people aren't friendly with her on the base per se but rather that she finds herself in circumstances she wouldn't have anticipated.

On the one hand, she has Japanese friends who she feels she has less and less in common with. When they communicate with her (usually via e-mail), she doesn't have much to share with them because her experiences as a 44-year-old college student at a U.S. school are so different from theirs as Japanese housewives and mothers. When they invite her to go do things with her, she feels torn between wanting to do things with them and feeling that the fatigue and possible awkwardness in communication now that they've grown apart will not be worth whatever pleasure she gets from the experience.

Her family is also no comfort because her husband constantly criticizes her for failing to live up to his expectations of a Japanese wife. He tells her that she can't do anything right and they frequently quarrel. To me, this is ironic because she has taken 3 classes so far and gotten an "A" in each of them. Her husband once had me correct his English for an abstract for a medical paper he'd written and I daresay he could not cope nearly as well as her with the all-English instruction, essay-writing, and environment. All of this makes her feel as if she's drifting away from the other Japanese people in her life and can no longer relate to them as their values are increasingly different from hers. Unfortunately, she completely embraces her husband's assessment of her and gets depressed and feels like a failure.

When she's on the military base, she feels like a visitor in a foreign land which operates very differently from her expectations. She often complains to me about how the teachers don't answer her question in a timely fashion or how they fail to assist her when she needs help. Her expectation is that the teachers will behave like Japanese teachers, who are often expected to ensure their students pass and to spend their free time dealing with student problems. She also feels a lot of stress because she can't understand the way in which many of the military personnel she takes classes with speak because many of them are from the south and/or African American and she finds their cadences and accents difficult to follow since most of her exposure to English is to slower-speaking teachers (myself included) and those with measured voices that contain little accent on T.V. and in instructional materials.

My student is in a situation which is oddly similar to mine. She has a lot of her social activity centered in a "foreign land" and she feels disconnected from people in her own culture. For me, this is rather expected because I am far from my home but, for her, it's a bit of a hard experience to understand because she still lives in her home country. In fact, in many ways, she is worse off than I despite having the "support" of her family literally at her back-door (her parents live in the other half of a divided house with she and her husband) and her long-time friends a phone call away. Not only do I have an incredibly supportive husband where hers is always tearing her down but I expect my difficulties and actively work to understand and address them because I know they're a part of being in a foreign country.

I've tried to comfort her and boost her confidence but I don't think she understands where I'm coming from when I tell her things like she doesn't have to live according to her husband's expectations and that a lot of people discover their lifestyles and their friends' lifestyles are diverging as time goes by. In the end, I don't think she can break free from thinking that conformity to the expectations of those around her is more important than an objective analysis of her accomplishments (which would be a very positive one) or finding her self-worth within herself alone.

Recurring Dreams

During most of my adult life, I have had recurring dreams. I'm not talking about having a dream a few times but about the same dream occurring for a decade or more. Many people don't remember their dreams but I often do. I've also been capable of lucid dreaming in the past and often used to wake myself from nightmares by realizing that I was in a dream and the terrible things I experienced couldn't happen in real life so I must be dreaming. I don't have many actual nightmares anymore and my ability to lucid dream may be related to that or it could simply be that fear is a very different animal when you're older than when you're younger and doesn't tend to manifest itself so obviously or elaborately as you mature.

In the past decade, two recurring dreams have stood out. In the first one, I'm looking for a best friend from high school. Often, I have his phone number and I fail repeatedly in my attempts to dial the phone to contact him. It's as if I lack the dexterity to dial the number properly and therefore constantly push the buttons in the incorrect order repeatedly. This experience in the dream is immensely frustrating. Sometimes, I can't find the number at all. On occasion, I find him and he is cold and indifferent to me or too busy to talk to me. The other dream is one in which my husband has done something which makes me so furious that I am apoplectic with frustration at his response. In this dream, he is either utterly indifferent to my reaction or cold and cruel.

Lately, I've been having a third recurring dream in which I either plan or want to go back to my former company. Sometimes they ignore me and sometimes they make it clear that they don't need me or require my services. This topic is at the forefront of my mind because I had this particular dream last night.

All of these dreams have a few things in common and that's that I'm either out and out rejected or seen as unimportant, or that I can't get what I want or need. Depending on how you view dreams and if you embrace the notion of dream interpretation, this is either very significant or utterly useless information. However, given where I live and some of my life experiences, the notion that I'd feel deep down that I was being constantly rejected or useless isn't such a stretch. After all, I will never fit in in Japan and am reminded of that on a daily basis.

Depending on who you speak with, dreams serve different purposes. Psychologists usually tie them to suppressed feelings or issues. Sleep researchers tie them to a need to have the brain in a certain type of sleep in order to maintain health and mental stability. Some people feel dreams are messages from other selves, realities or entities. The truth is that no one really knows why we dream. Oh, researchers can tell you what happens if we don't dream and psychologists can theorize a relationship between the conscious and "unconscious" mind as a rationale but no one really knows what compels us to dream or what they mean.

When I was studying psychology in university, I wrote a paper on dream interpretation which gave an overview of the various theories and methods for analyzing them but the bottom line is that dreams are such a personalized experience that the only one who can really interpret them is the person who is having them. Personally, I think that not all dreams serve the same purpose. Some of them are psychological messages from your inner self to your outer self. Some of them are messages. For me, some of them have also been moments of absolutely mundane precognition of little experiences or events.

For awhile, I took the time to write down my dreams but I found that it took too long to do so. My little dream notebook would contain dreams with a level of detail requiring 6-8 pages of writing. I simply remember them too well and feel it's pointless to write out brief summaries when I can remember them anyway. However, I do feel that writing them down can be very useful, particularly if you have troubling dreams or quickly forget your dreams. They have the potential to tell you at least as much about yourself as your waking thought processes do.

As a final note, I'll also mention that I have had recurring dreams where I smoke and I love it. The sensation of smoking and the pleasure I derive from it is extremely real in the dream. It's not some abstract experience where I stand aside and witness myself smoking and think I'm having fun. I am in a body putting the cigarette in my mouth, inhaling and exhaling smoke and holding the cigarette in my hand and my nervous system and mental needs are very satisfied. When I have this dream, I find it the most natural experience in the world and do not feel any sort of guilt or need to censor the pleasure I receive from smoking. In real life, I hate smoking and haven't smoked since one clandestine cigarette offered to me by my cousins at the age of 10 which sent me into a painful coughing fit. I thoroughly detested that experience and hate second-hand smoke. Of all the recurring dreams I have, this one puzzles me the most. Though I'm sure there are wags out there who will attach something Freudian to the dream, I'm just as sure sex has nothing to do with it.

How My Unconditional Love for the Macintosh Died

You often hear that couples fall out of love not over one big thing but over a collection of little things that add up to disillusionment and disappointment. My unconditional love for all things Apple and the Mac died in such a fashion. I still like Macs but I no longer have blind faith or unwavering loyalty. They became something I used rather than something I enjoyed due to a series of disappointments.

1. Around the time of the Performa series (which ended in 1997), Apple stopped using cheaper lower-quality components in an attempt to better compete price-wise with PCs. Unfortunately, these components suffered more premature deaths. The series of Macs I purchased after my LC III began to suffer from regular hard disk and CD ROM drive failures. In fact, every desktop Mac I've bought since my LC III has had its hard disk and CD ROM drive replaced except the Mini (which has only had its hard disk fail after 2 years). This killed the illusion that Macs were superior in terms of their hardware or the idea that the higher price tag on them was justified.

A screenshot of a kernel panic identical to the ones I had in my early Mac OS X usage (lifted from Apple's page on kernel panics).

2. The earliest incarnation of OS X ran horribly on the Mac I was using at the time, a G3 DT/266, despite the fact that I had copious amounts of RAM and was told that it was a compatible machine. It not only had frequent kernel panics which subjected me to the Mac equivalent of a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death on PCs) for the first time but also had an awkward forced multiple user installation set-up which went a long way toward confusing people who wanted the same type of single user situation as they had under OS 9. When this early version of OS X crashed and burned, the screen turned white and cryptic geek-speak fed across the screen. It was clear Apple lied or mislead users about which machines could run OS X in order to increase early adoption rates. Web forums were flooded at the time with complaints by users who had purchased computers with "OS X-ready" stickers on them shortly before OS X was released only to find the OS ran like an lady with a walker who frequently fell down when they upgraded from OS 9 to X (an upgrade they paid for, no less). It was clear early versions of OS X were more of a beta that you had the pleasure of forking over $120 for rather than the advertised fully-fledged "rock solid UNIX-based OS".

3. Apple told all of its users that it would offer a "free forever" e-mail hosting service with a 'prestigious' Apple-based e-mail address (mac.com) which they then swapped over to a subscription-based service which one had to pay $100 a year for. At the time of this little bit of bait and switch, you only got the e-mail service and a modicum of storage space which you could use to automatically back up your hard drive onto Apple's servers via OS X. It was not only not worth it from a money for value point of view but it made it clear that Apple would say whatever it took to lure people in then change the conditions of the arrangement. It didn't help that the Mac devotees worked overtime to justify the way in which this was done.

On the left, pure evil (the command prompt). On the right (Mac OS X Terminal), wondrous heaven. It might be a black/white thing but they're both loathsome ways of entering arcane commands in my opinion.

4. The Mac user community changed its tune about what made an operating system great. In an indication of how baldly hypocritical Mac users can be if it suits their need to tout the advantages of the Mac at any cost, they started expressing their unending admiration for the use of the terminal function when mending Mac OS X's shortcomings and bugs while they had spent nearly two decades before derisively regarding the use of the command prompt in Windows. Pre-OS X, all users could talk about was how easy Macs were to maintain and how we didn't have to remember a bunch of arcane DOS commands to control the deeper functionality of our computers. Post-OS X, all users could talk about was how much power and control you had by using arcane UNIX commands in the Terminal application.

Additionally, users became hostile toward anyone who wasn't happy with the way they had to type in commands in terminal in order to convince OS X's permissions to let them empty their trash. Early on, it seemed that many of us somehow didn't qualify by default to perform such an earth-shaking OS-altering function as emptying the trash in OS X. Before OS X, people were helpful because they were a part of the happiest computer user community on earth and they wanted us all to be one happy family. When some of those family members were disgruntled at the turn of events, things got ugly. The blind faithful were like overprotective parents who told you how stupid and incompetent you were any time you criticized Mac OS X's early teething cries.

The division between the faithful and the confused early users of OS X was probably one of the biggest factors in allowing the scales to fall from my eyes. I wondered if I was that blind and hostile any time someone attacked my "baby". This was a turning point for my attitude and my Mac changed from something I identified with as a user and became just a machine I used like my oven or television.

Place item in trash. Basket is full. Empty trash. Basket is still full. Repair permissions. Empty trash. Basket remains full. Run MacJanitor. Empty trash. Basket is still full. This happened today, folks, not early on in Mac OS X's evolution.

By the way, I still can't empty my trash on occasion. In fact, two problems gave me the incentive to write this post and that was one of them.

5. Every incarnation of OS X was idiosyncratically altered to fit Windows user conventions. It wasn't that there was anything wrong with the way the Mac worked in certain ways but rather that Apple was more interested in making switchers (from PCs to Macs) more comfortable than sticking with a way of doing things that the faithful were accustomed to. Here are a few cases in point:

• Shift-clicking used to allow for both contiguous and non-contiguous selection of files. This made it possible for one method to be used for selecting multiple files in either situation. In OS X, this was changed so that non-contiguous selection now required a Command-click. Why was this introduced? It's because this is the way file selection works in Windows.
• In previous versions of the Mac OS, the OS would not attempt to force you to structure your file system in any particular fashion. Applications didn't have to be kept in an "Applications" folder and the OS didn't become confused or issue warnings if you didn't put them there. With OS X, a Windows-style organization system was incorporated which strongly encouraged users to keep applications in the applications folder just as Windows keeps "Programs" in the "Programs" folder.
  

There are a myriad of other rip-offs and knock-offs that are clearly there to emulate a good feature of Windows (the Dock copying the task bar, for instance) or simply a feature to which people are indifferent (the web-style "back" and "forward" buttons on windows) . The bottom line is that the difference between using Windows and using Mac OS X is getting smaller and smaller. It's harder to tout how uniquely superior the Mac is when it's so similar. I guess since Steve Jobs was in love with his IBM ThinkPad before he returned to Apple, he wanted to Mac to work the way he was used to rather than the way we were used to.

6. Some things don't work as they should and some things should work but don't.


See that key combination on the right (in the picture above)? There's a key on my keyboard which says "delete" and has that little drawing with an "X" on it. If I press "Command+delete" and use that key, the file does not move into the trash. It will work if I use "Command + delete" and use the delete key which is next to the "=/+" key but not with the one under the "help" key. I'm using an Apple keyboard and the logical thing is to use the key which looks like the one in the menu but it doesn't work.

If you drag the cursor from the right in (along the lines of the red box in the picture), you cannot select the files in list view.

One thing that should work but doesn't (and used to work in Mac OS 9 and works in Windows XP) is selecting a list of files by dragging the mouse from bottom of a list in a window while you're in list view. It works in other views but not in list. Why? I guess it's just an oversight but it is rather annoying to have to change views or drag the cursor up to the top of the window. It also means pixel hunting if you don't want to select just the top file and drag it down.

7. DRM and spyware. With Windows, the spyware is pretty well-known and you can find ways to track it down and zap it. With the Mac, it's more insidious and less-publicized so you've got to be more in the know to find it and get around it. If you use Mac the Ripper to rip DVDs, a hidden file is left keeping a record of every DVD you've ripped. You have to know this is happening and know enough to download another application to put the kibosh on this invisible spying. My guess is this is part of a deal to allow Mac the Ripper's distribution while still fitting in with Apple's brown-nosing to DRM advocates in order to advance iTunes sales and selection. Additionally, the latest version of iTunes eliminated the ability to make MP3 files. This was presumably to placate the RIAA in some fashion but iTunes without MP3 conversion is ridiculous. These things in no way make the user's life easier and the former situation with Mac the Ripper (an application I don't use, as it is inferior to the Windows application "DVD Shrink", but was warned about by my former boss) seems mainly geared toward gathering data for copyright infringement prosecution.

Before the Mac zealots start arguing that none of this makes Windows better than a Mac, I'll clarify that that is not what I'm talking about in this post (read the "title" for a reminder of what this is about). I don't believe Windows is better than the Mac. What I'm saying is that these are the factors which contributed to my coming to taking Macs and Apple off a pedestal and seeing them for what they are, tools and a business, instead of being a Mac zealot. The Mac still has the edge on OS usability, better design, and an overall better feel than a PC but it's no longer something I can advocate people use without reservation or with enthusiasm. I can't say that Windows or Microsoft have let me down because my expectations have always been incredibly low due to the common (mis)perceptions about using Windows that are prevalent among Mac users.

An Equation

This morning, I decided I'd better go out and pump up my low tires before heading off to the market. The front tire seemed okay after about 25 pumps but the back tire refused to stay up even about 50 sweaty pushes in the blazing sun. It was clear that the tire needed repair rather than air. The first part of the equation at hand today is: a flat tire.

My husband usually deals with taking the bikes to the local repair fellow when there's a problem but he has more than enough on his plate on the weekends and far too much on the days when he's working with his 48 hour work week. I decided I'd just bite the bullet and walk the bike to the shop myself because I wanted to spare my husband the time and effort on his day off, particularly since he's already going to have to deal with some dai gomi (large trash) scheduling and sticker purchasing to get rid of our old oven and a huge shelf we're abandoning after 18 years of use.

When I set off on my little walk to the shop, I noticed that some other places along Ome Kaido had their metal shutters down and were closed. I considered for a moment that Thursday might be the day the shop just happened to be closed but thought that was unlikely as Wednesday and Monday are the big weekdays for places to close up. It didn't occur to me that this week is the first week of the O-bon summer holiday season in Japan and that the shop may be closed for that reason. In fact, the bike shop was closed as were a great many other shops on the local shopping streets. Part two of the equation was: the summer holiday season.

The problem at this point was that I've got a bike with a flat tire and a desperate need to get some shopping for food done. I also need to pay some bills that are due today or risk having my gas, electric, and water access cut-off. While it's unlikely they'd shut me down for being a little late (today is the actual due date), one doesn't want to take chances when people are dropping dead or being hospitalized all over Japan as the temperatures hover near or over 100 degrees.

Since I was somewhat closer to a few of the places I needed to shop at than I'd be if I just went back home, I decided to just push the dead bike along and walk to the shops. I knew that it'd take some time (in the end, from pumping the tires in the sun to getting home, it took about an hour and a half) but the bike isn't going to get fixed any time soon so I felt it was better to do it while I was already close than to walk home and think about how to deal with things later.

The local carpet and draperies shop.

As I was walking to the first market, I passed by the local carpet and draperies place where we bought our new living room carpet. I need a carpet square to put under a metal shelf I plan to move into the kitchen so that it's spiky supports don't tunnel through the newish kitchen flooring and (eventually) through the floorboards. The finished carpet bits (which I guess are throw rugs) are in the picture above just behind the hanging "500 yen" sign. As I was pawing through them and checking out their sizes (my shelf is 40 cm x 60 cm and I wanted one that wasn't too big or small), the fellow who works there and delivered our carpet popped out and started helpfully educating me about the sizes of the bits I was looking at by saying things like, "that one is long." In the end, I found an acceptable one which was 45 cm x 65 cm (which he helpfully told me was "smaller" than the "long" one) and purchased it.

The man who works in the shop is really quite nice and well-meaning. I really don't know how he stays in business though since I rarely see anyone buying things there when I pass by (and I go by two or three times a week) and we shop there only once every 8 years or so. These shops that mysteriously linger on despite seeming to sell nearly nothing are all over Tokyo. Roy at Q-taro once made a post about such a place and I speculated that they're intentional failures as tax dodges for high value property but I really don't know how they manage.

As I was walking from the carpet shop to the market, my back started to bother me a bit so I took advantage of the useless bike I was pushing around and leaned a bit on it. By the time I got home, this "leaning" and the friction it caused on my thumb and palm actually resulted in a sizable blister. I didn't even notice what was going on until I scraped something against my thumb while putting away groceries and ripped off the thin skin cover the blister to expose the raw skin underneath. I can't tell you how much fun this was to clean off with rubbing alcohol but lets just say it was a new adventure in pain.

The cheapest local market, Utakaraya, with its fine selection of what I'm sure are semi-aged vegetables out in front.

Getting back to my little journey though... By the time I reached the market, the heat was starting to really bother me. I'm the type of person who has never known a suntan because I'm so fair-skinned that I make the journey from ghostly white to freckle to lobster in a very short time. There is no pit stop at "tan" between. I'm also exceptionally sensitive to heat and I don't mean that I'm one of those whiny people who says I can't tolerate heat because I get sweaty and uncomfortable. I mean that I get faint, nauseous, and feel like I'm going to pass out when I'm in the sun and heat for too long.

I was thinking at about this time that it'd be a good idea to get the shopping done and try to get home as quickly as possible but I'm hindered by old women who linger in front of the piles of carrots poking at and inspecting every package to make sure they get the very one which is absolutely the best for their 100 yen. I get tired of this and snatch my carrots from around the old bat who seems to be the official carrot inspector (I'm surprised she didn't whip out a magnifying glass and inspect them for blemishes) and make my way inside the store, grab a few avocados and the greenest bananas on the top of the pile (this time reaching around a middle-aged woman who needed to lift every single one of the bunches on top to see if any "better" ones were lurking underneath). I glanced at the wilted lettuce and moved on to the meat section. Six diet Cokes and a 4-pack of cream cheese and ham "panini" later, I'm fighting through check-out where a mother bemuses herself by allowing her 2 sons to each hold onto multi-packs of tiny blueberry yogurt containers separately so the check-out woman can't finish the job of ringing up the woman's purchase and so I can't get out of there.

It wasn't that getting out of there was such a great deal. At least Utakaraya is air conditioned to around 80 degrees whereas it's closing in on 100 outside. All I've got to look forward to is a walk in the heat while pushing my bike with the flat tire and now also carrying a heavy back-pack. The cheap housewife bikes most of us use for dealing with daily running around aren't all that heavy when you have inertia and you're riding them but they can be a chore to push around for a long time, especially when it's sweltering and when you have to push them up hills.

I decided to take the back way home because it's shorter but I overlooked the fact that it also has no shade. Ome Kaido has trees all over it but the back street is almost all cement walls and pavement being cooked in the sun. The sun is beating down on me and I literally feel like I'm stewing like a sausage in its skin. The third part of the equation is: 97 degree-heat and no shade.

By the time I was approaching home, my heart was really pounding even though I was not greatly exerting myself. I figured it'd be prudent to walk home slowly given how badly I'm reacting to the baking I'm taking but this just leaves me out in these horrible conditions longer. I'm starting to fear that the sum of the equation is going to me lying on the road suffering from heat stroke but I talked myself down from such notions and made my way back.

In the end, I was okay after a bit of a woozy spell while I slowly sipped water and let the air conditioner do its thing. The valuable lesson I've taken from this is that I need to live with my limits rather than try and tough it out, and that I should only shop after dark and allow my husband to fix the bike from now on.

Flat Tire + holiday season + baking heat with no shade = stay at home!

They Scream for Ice Cream

It's been in the mid to high 90's for the past week or so in Tokyo. I guess this is par for the course in August but it never ceases to be an uncomfortable and frustrating experience, particularly when it never cools down at night but remains hot around the clock. This is the sort of weather which causes problems the likes of which I never experienced back home in the summer because things worked differently.

For one thing, water comes out of the tap warm. In fact, it is so warm that washing lettuce in it for salad produces a warm, limp salad unless you toss the leaves back into the fridge to get them cold again. It also causes showers to be almost unbearably hot at the lowest heat setting because the water is entering the heating unit at a warm temperature. Unfortunately, the water isn't quite warm enough to comfortably shower without heating so your options are a painfully cold or a painfully hot shower. Usually I need to sit under the air conditioner at the lowest setting for about 20 minutes to cool down when I take the time to wash my hair as that much exposure to such hot water warms me so much.

This is the sort of weather in which people flock to ice cream shops. In our area, there's only one, Baskin Robbins (known in Japan as "31"). My husband and I go there about once a month in the summer and once every several months during other seasons. The ice cream is very good compared to other offerings in Japan but quite pricey. Most Japanese ice cream tends to be "ice milk" and made with relatively cheap ingredients. Some of it can be pretty good (Morinaga makes a mean vanilla ice cream sandwich but it's hard to find) but, in general, it's rather disappointing though I can't honestly claim to be a Japanese ice cream connoisseur.


A few days ago, my husband was in the mood to take a little sojourn to Baskin Robbins so we hopped on our bikes and braved the sweltering heat. The counter at Baskin Robbins had a parade of little snowmen with surfboards pasted all over it as part of a new promotion for "King plus Kids" scoops. This is a large scoop sold with a much smaller scoop on top of it. I don't believe the point of this is to gobble down copious amounts of ice cream but rather to allow one to enjoy their favorite ice cream in a large scoop size and to sample another flavor in a much smaller size.

If you look at the flavors on the brochure I've scanned in (click to see a legible large size), you can see a lot of the usual flavors from the U.S. have made the transition to Japan but there are some odd ones that you probably won't find back home like matcha (green tea), "musk melon" (cantaloupe) and dainagon azuki (chock full of sweetened red beans). I also would be surprised to find things like "31 love" (lime-colored mint ice cream with lemon marshmallows) and "sweet mariage" (sic) (Chardonnay ice cream with apricot and cherry). I also wonder if the "mango coconapple" is a temporary addition meant to pander to the current mango consumption fad making the rounds in Japan.

Anyway, we picked up a pint each of "chopped chocolate" and caramel ribbon but it was a less than pleasant experience because Baskin Robbins is a magnet for screaming children. It was sufficiently unpleasant that we preferred the 95 degree heat outside to the cool cacophony on the inside while we waited for them to prepare our pints. If you haven't been to Baskin Robbins, they laboriously pack the cartons and weigh them meticulously and that can take a bit of time. I had to wonder if the children carried on so much because of ice cream induced excitement or because high volume clamoring is associated with getting what they want from reluctant parents.

New Oven

I recently read that the difference between people who shop so much that they end up living beyond their means or at least who shop for recreation is that they don't feel any guilt when they spend money on things. If you're the sort of person who feels guilty for spending money, you're far less likely to be a shopaholic or to spend money you don't have on meaningless crap.

I used to be guilt-free in regards to buying things then at some point that changed and now I find it hard to buy things that I arguably need without feeling guilty. I think it has something to do with not working full-time anymore though I'll admit it started at least 3 years before I quit. Perhaps it's age and the feeling that "stuff" isn't really making me happy anymore.

Anyway, I've been limping by with my old oven (which must be at least 13 years old by now) since I posted about problems with the timer knob in April. In an attempt to use it until it was truly dead, I was baking or roasting in a step by step process in order to accommodate the knob that would not set a proper time until the oven got really, really hot. The process went something like this:

1. Painstakingly attempt to dial up one minute of time at the pre-set temperature and push the start button to initiate the pre-heat sequence.
   
2. Wait 15 minutes for pre-heat sequence to complete then place food in the oven where it ran for one minute. Look at the clock to keep track of cooking time since the timer wasn't going to do the trick.
3. Repeat step one.
4. Repeat step one.
5. Repeat step one.
   
6. Painstakingly attempt to dial up more than one minute (4 minutes was a lucky day) to continue cooking.
7. Repeat step 6.
8. Depending on how hot a day it is and my luck, I may be able to finally coax the oven to run dial up the remaining cooking time (calculated by the clock on the wall, of course) or repeat step 6 again.

You can see how this might be a problem. What was worse was that the timer was even more useless when using the microwave function because the oven didn't heat up and the timer didn't get easier to set. The only way I could use it was by using the auto-cook function whereby you open the door to activate the microwave, close the door and push "start" and the microwave was supposed to auto-detect when it reached whatever random temperature it felt was correct for that food. Sometimes the food was only lukewarm. Sometimes it overcooked. When I heated water or milk in there, it more often than not boiled over if I didn't keep an eye on it.

My old oven. It worked as good as it looked.

I even soldiered on after the lower left bezel cracked and the front glass plate slipped down some. I just taped it up and kept on going. After months and months now (possibly well over a year) of fighting with it and it getting harder and harder to set the timer on even on hot days (initially, it worked pretty well in the summer but poorly in the winter), I found that I was starting to hate it so much that I didn't want to cook with it at all. When the notion to bake or roast something popped into my head, the laborious process of dealing with the oven chased it right out again. It was at this point that I decided it was time to bite the bullet and get a new oven.

The two main criteria for the new oven were a relatively modest price and that it's internal cavity be large enough to cook a whole chicken. After considerable research, I found a Mitsubishi for about ¥32,000 ($271) which accommodates two 32 cm (12.6 inch) square ceramic trays. Since my old oven uses two 32 cm square metal trays, I figured the size should be sufficient and the price well within what might be expected for such an oven. The old Toshiba we bought was ¥80,000 ($678) but part of that high price was a reflection of the fact that such ovens were not as commonly purchased in those days. Based on my pre-purchase research, I believe a comparable one today would be ¥60,000 ($508) or so.

The shiny new oven. It works better than its tacky color scheme makes it look.

The new oven is just as wide and deep as the old one but not quite as high. I'm pretty sure it can still roast a whole chicken but it may be rather close to the top of the oven. The new one is one of those fancy convection things which swirls the air around the food for even cooking. Our old oven twirled the food around on a circular plate in the center and left the air alone. I often had to turn food around at the mid-baking point because the front was hotter than the back and it wouldn't cook evenly otherwise. The new one also has more custom temperature settings including the ability to heat food to precise temperatures and it allows you to cook with steam though I'm not sure how useful that function is going to be for me. Except for the steam cooking, I'm pretty sure most of these functions are old hat for people who aren't using antiquated equipment.

I used the microwave function several times last night and this morning to re-heat food and make tea and it was a delight having knobs turn and actually set the time as I wanted. The target temperature function was also pretty nifty though I can't say I know what temperature is best for certain foods yet. I tested out the oven today by making a banana bread recipe which is tried and true. Since I know how it usually turns out, a comparison between the old and new for this particular item was easy.

Here is where I ran across the differences between a cheap and an expensive oven. For one thing, the oven can't be set at 5 degree temperature variations. It's either 170 degrees (338 degrees) or 180 degrees (356 degrees) and not 175 (which is often the preferred baking temperature as 176.6 is 350 degrees - the near universal setting for baked goods). Also, I noticed that the door has an overzealous spring on its hinge and slams shut rapidly and loudly unless you ease it up by hand.

The oven also appears to have a separate preheat cycle and a separate timed cycle but I could be misunderstanding how to use it. Today, I preheated it to 180 degrees and it beeped when it reached that temperature but I couldn't figure out how to set the timer for 45 minutes. I had to stop the oven then switch to one of the other 3 oven modes and then set the time and temperature again. One good point though is that the pre-heat time is easily 1/3 the length of time that the old oven took, possibly it's even faster than that. This is certainly saving on energy consumption.


Since I had to choose too high or too low for the temperature, I settled on too high because I was afraid too low would impede the rising of the banana bread. This made it darken very rapidly compared to baking in the old oven. I also noticed it didn't rise as much in the center but rose more evenly overall (because of the convection). About 2/3 of the way through the baking, I reduced the temperature to 170 degrees. Next time, I'll have to split the time or try the lower temperature first.

Though it is a bit darker, it turned out very well. The texture seems softer and better than ever. I'm not sure if this was a random preparation factor (though I doubt it as this is my standard no fuss banana bread recipe made largely in the food processor so there's little variation in method) or the convection oven's influence.

The irony is that last night after I received the new oven and had set it up, I started to feel guilty for not having endured dealing with the old one until it conked out for good. Somewhere along the line I went from the type of person who blithely bought a new Macintosh every year and a half to the type who feels bad about replacing a dying piece of necessary equipment. I've got to work on finding the happy medium between those two, especially since I also ordered a new toaster oven. ;-)

The Blogger Experience

I'm coming up on my one-year anniversary with this blog at the end of this month and have been using Blogger to post for that entire time. Since I started posting, Blogger has changed for the better in certain ways.

• Labels were added so posts could be sorted or searched for by topic.
• Auto-saving was added so that posts wouldn't be lost as easily.
• The need to re-publish the entire blog (which only required clicking a link but could be quite slow) to update with a new post was eliminated.
• Google e-mail addresses became user names and your gmail password became the password by default so using Blogger required a gmail account.
• Improved customization of the design was added including easily allowing your banner to contain a custom picture (though I have not yet done this, I really should).
• Default language settings which were hard to find and tend to re-set themselves based on the origin of your I.P. address now are right up front where you can easily find them. This is a blessing when you get swapped over to Japanese and can't work out how to get back to English.
  

There are a lot of advantages to using Blogger if you're not a control freak or interested in making a living from your blog (though you can make money with any blog by enabling Google's adsense function, I'm guessing you can make more from a site better designed to showcase ads of various types). You don't have to pay for bandwidth if you have a high traffic site. You don't have to do any web site coding or design if you don't want to but you can make alterations to the pre-set schemes colors, designs and fonts if you so choose. You have various levels of control over comment moderation and notification. It's a pretty easy and straightforward way to run a blog.

This is the cramped space we have for moving around pictures.

Some things, however, have continued to be troublesome or tedious. The biggest one, and this is on my mind because I've done a lot of picture intensive posts as of late, is that you can't add pictures into specific points in a post. Every new picture gets loaded at the top of the post and has to be dragged around in a relatively smallish preview window for rearranging. What is worse though is that if you add pictures after having entered text, dragging them down to where you want to locate them often results in random text dragging with it and you have to go back and piece together the post.

My number one wish for Blogger would be for pictures to load at the insertion point or to be dragged and dropped precisely into place. As it is now, any post with more than a handful of pictures has to be carefully organized such that I load them all first in backwards order. Only after all of the pictures have been uploaded do I proceed to type up the post. This isn't always possible since I don't always know for certain what order is best.

Other than that, I really don't have any complaints and would recommend that people who are as unambitious about web design as me and who want to blog give Blogger a try.

Asagaya Tanabata Festival - Part 6

The festival at night is quite different than the day time. For one thing, there are many more people. My students who come in the evening and had the bad fortune to walk through the crowd had so much trouble getting through that they were actually a little late in some cases. It must be rather difficult to need to get through a wall of people and still be polite.


Beyond the great crowds though is the absolute din. Not only do you have the roar of the crowd as people try to talk over the noise but you also have a lot of vendors standing outside shouting constantly about their wares.


In the end, it must seem an incredibly over-stimulating experience aurally, visually, and tactilely. I'm guessing after a bit of this, there are some people who just want to sit down and get away from it but seating is really difficult to find. In fact, this is a rare situation where you sometimes see Japanese people sitting on the ground along the side streets because it's the only way to momentarily escape the overload.


In the evening, there are more games and activities running than in the daytime. Some of them are rather similar to the types of things you'd find at similar occasions in the U.S. This game, which involved hitting a spinning wheel with a velcro dart, wouldn't be out of place at a carnival back home.


Some things, however, are distinctly Japanese. A few tables were set up along the sides in front of closed businesses and players waited for shogi (Japanese chess) partners to come along and play. A little ramune and a dog help pass the time between partners.


There was also a live performance by a fellow (dressed like a dork, it seems) doing tricks with a yo-yo and doing some sort of verbal interaction with the crowd.


It wasn't clear what he was saying to them but people were playing along and his performance was pretty popular, particularly with the kids.


The Boy Scouts of Japan were also hanging around for some reason. I guess they were recruiting or asking for donations (or both). I didn't even realize there were Boy Scouts in Japan until I saw this picture. I guess they hung around in the evening because the crowds were so much bigger but I can't think of anything less pleasant than standing around in 90 degree heat holding a donation box and wearing long pants.


Another difference is that there are patrols of people in official-looking get-ups who are there to take care of any problems should the merry-making get out of hand. You'll notice that security in Japan carries a rather different look when compared to that in the States. Skinny old men and friendly middle-aged women are going to keep the riff-raff under control.


The thing about my husband's festival pictures that I liked the most and this was especially so at night when people are too preoccupied to be paying attention to picture-taking or too inebriated to care, is that the pictures are so much more real than what you usually get from Japanese people. When my students show me pictures of their posed vacation shots, it is a sea of continuous hands up making "peace" signs and embarrassed or posed smiles (as above).


Candid shots of real smiling faces or people doing what they might naturally do are a very rare thing and can be quite a joy to behold.

You also get to see and show others that Japan is not awash in a sea of perfect model-like women with perfect bodies, skin, and hair staring into a camera with lips slightly parted and vacant eyes or cutesy girls in cosplay clothes. In essence, it isn't the male fantasy paradise most people who have never been to Japan believe it is.


Even the ones who seem to be striving for the fantasy don't seem to be quite pulling it off and end up resembling women of a certain profession more so than sexy anime characters.


Sometimes you can also see the contradiction between the happy face that people are forced to put on for public presentation and the bizarre, overly-cute, hyper-energized pop culture and the real faces of people who are tired and maybe a little fed up reflected in just one picture.

The Heat

Today has been the hottest day of the year so far in Tokyo and I had a chat about the weather with "little old man" (LOM) before he launched into a long talk about how he spent a sweaty but "exciting" time on the golf driving range. LOM loves his golf. He once spent three lessons getting through telling me about one game in minute detail.

Getting back to the weather though, LOM told me that one of the effects of all this heat is that he doesn't sleep very well. He said he has an air conditioner but he doesn't like to use it all night so he puts it on a 30-minute timer just before bed and when the heat inevitably wakes him up again and again, he runs it each time on a 30-minute timer because he thinks running it all night is going to cause him to freeze to death or get very sick.

After telling me about this drawback of the heat, he wanted to tell me about some other ill effect so he pulled out his electronic dictionary and started poking at the keys. He slowly said that the heat makes him "im-po-tience". I was pretty sure he didn't mean what it sounded like so I just smiled and said, "impo... what?" He repeated "impotience" and I asked to see his dictionary at which point I realized he meant, "impatient".

Sometimes I wonder what the students would think if they could read my mind when such little errors occur. Generally speaking, I'm rather glad they can't.

Asagaya Tanabata Festival - Part 5

One can't do justice to the Asagaya tanabata festival without posting a gallery of the wire-frame characters suspended in front of the shops. It would be unfair not to showcase them after the shops spend so much time, effort, and (likely) money on making them. I'm not sure why they do them but I have the sense that they're like the floats in a parade but they hang in the air so as not to take up precious pedestrian space on the ground.


I also sometimes wonder how the people who work at these shops decide what figures to create. Sometimes, the character chosen fits the type of business and sometimes it seems relatively random or based solely on what is hot this year. I also wonder if the people who spend a lot of after hours time constructing these wire-frame doppelgangers in the heat of summer get paid for their time. I'm guessing they don't.


I mentioned in a previous part of this series that I used to try to guess at what the figures will be as they go through their stages of construction. The guessing game doesn't actually end there as I sometimes don't recognize the characters when they are fully completed. This is particularly the case when the characters are Japanese anime (cartoon) characters or from some part of popular culture which is reserved for the pre-pubescent set. I have no idea what the first three characters pictured in this post are, for instance.


I do, however, know this cat very well and why it was chosen for the establishment it hangs in front of. There is a UPS-like delivery service in Japan called Yamato which is also called "kuro neko" (black cat). Their logo of a mother cat carrying a baby cat can be seen just under the grinning kitty with the big eyes. This company has done a lot of business with my former company and I as they handle packages between us when I do freelance work. Their delivery people are always friendly so I have a bit of a warm feeling toward them. Also, who can dislike a company which so embraces cats? (I love cats.)


There is almost always one American superhero character suspended in front of the shops each year. Usually, the hero is the one who has been featured in a popular movie most recently. In our early days in Japan, it was Batman and later it was Superman. This Spidey looks like he's having some sort of hip problem. I'm just kidding, by the way. I believe that one of the reasons animated characters are more popular is that it's immensely difficult to shape realistically-shaped bodies when making these things.


At first, I thought this was a pirate Snoopy because of the eye patch but the accouterments are Japanese-looking so I'm not sure who or what they're dressed up as.


Some characters endure and are represented in several incarnations. This pretty much proves that the shops don't consult one another when deciding what to do. Above, there is a montage of three versions of the venerable Anpan Man. The one in the upper right with the super bulgy cheeks looks like he has 3 noses.


Shrek also got three variations as well as a pretty impressive-looking mural. Each of them are suitably manic-looking and bare their teeth.


This is Remy from the movie Ratataouille. The Japanese in the oval says "Remy's delicious restaurant". You'd think this would have hung in front of a restaurant but it did not.


I'm not sure but I think these are Power Puff girls. They're from the era of poorly-drawn cartoons with even more obscenely huge eyes than a cartoon character requires to be expressive which holds no interest for me.


Though I'm pretty out of it when it comes to animation, even I recognize Pikachu but I have to admit that I had to look up Pokemon on Wikipedia to determine that the guy next to him is a human character from the series. There were at least 3 of the sort of figure that looks like a golf ball with a smiley face on it (like the one on the right). One of them can be seen in the Shrek montage above and another is in the picture below this one. I don't know what the deal is with them but I'm guessing they were easy to make.


The bib says "I (heart) Suginami" because Asagaya is in Suginami ward. The thing about this picture though is that seeing Hello Kitty in a bikini is oddly creepy.


Not every shop takes the time to make a unique figure. This is a collection of boxes for some sort of make-up or hair stuff with what appears to be some kind of drink promotional item hanging under it...it may not be a drink though. I can't say I recognize it.


I guess some things are even creepier than Hello Kitty in a bikini. I'm sure that this fellow with the bad hairstyle carrying a huge eyeball is well-known to people who watch Japanese animation but I'm just as happy not to know.


I think Homer Simpsons would try to take this fellow down and eat him.






Among those remaining items, the only one I can understand the presence of is this final one of Spiderpig...er, a boar that represents the year of the boar.

There's one more installment of pictures for the festival then it'll be back to business as usual.

Asagaya Tanabata Festival - Part 4

When I was a kid, the closest we came to a festival were the local carnivals that traveled to all the little towns and milked the poor and unsophisticated of their hard-worn dough in rigged games of chance and skill. There were three points about them which I really looked forward to as a kid. One was the rides, another was the games, and the last was the food. At the Asagaya tanabata festival, the food seems to be at least 50% of the fun if you go by the number of vendors and offerings.


The second most popular item by far is the Japanese equivalent of a snow cone which is called kakigori. There were at least 6 vendors along the street offering up this cold treat. Given how hot it was during the festival, this is no surprise. Almost all of the vendors sold exactly the same flavors - strawberry, lemon, melon, and "Blue Hawaii". I tried a "Blue Hawaii" one ages ago but can't remember what it tasted like. I think it may have been some sort of fruit punch. The stand shown above also sold "yogurt" as a flavor.

The main difference between a snow cone back home and one in Japan (besides the flavors) is that they are prepared by using a hand crank that produces finer ice. They are also sometimes served with sweet beans or condensed milk but I didn't see any of this sort of thing for sale at the festival. I'm guessing those are more sophisticated versions of kakigori and aren't often sold at tables set up temporarily for festivals.


The most popular item was "franks" in various incarnations. From convenience store dogs to weenies on a stick to the dogs on bones above, a lot of shops seemed to feel that everyone wanted to have a hot dog. Japanese hot dogs aren't like those in the U.S. They have an odd taste which reminds me of bologna crossed with a sausage and are not as soft as your average Ball Park frank. You can't buy American-style dogs in Japan which is fine with me since I don't care for them anyway. The Japanese ones are no picnic either. They aren't better, just different.


There are a good many foods that I wouldn't touch and the item pictured above is one of them. These are konnyaku balls. I've mentioned konnyaku before when talking about the sumo stew chanko nabe. It's a gelatin-type substance which is used in a variety of Japanese foods. Blocks of it are added to stew. My students tell me they are also used to make sweet konnyaku jellied candies which are a bit like a werid Sunkist Fruit Gem.

Every time you mention konnyaku to a Japanese person, they tell you it's "healthy". I'm not sure if it really lives up to all the claims associated with it or if the agency for the advancement of tasteless jellied foods just wants us to think that.


On the flip-side of konnyaku is pure spun sugar. There is always one cotton candy vendor at tanabata. This is the only time I ever see it in Japan and it seems that the people who make it think that quantity is what people want. The bundles are always really dense and the floss is stuck together. I don't know if this is because it's spun too tightly or because it's made beforehand but, back home, really great cotton candy was like whispery clouds of gossamer. If it was a lumpen glob, there was no point in having it so we don't partake.


There's a rather old, run-down and somewhat grubby meat and miscellaneous fresh foods shop that has been on the shopping street since forever. It looked old and unsanitary even when we first arrived 18 years ago. This shop, along with several other places, was offering grilled chicken on a stick (yakitori). This goes hand in hand with the multitude of beer vendors. When my students ask me what Japanese food I like best and I reply with "yakitori", they assume that I'm a booze-hound since they always associate its consumption with drinking alcohol.


This takoyaki (octopus balls, not octopus's balls) stand was set up by a supermarket named Daimaru Peacock. This market is one of a great many in the chain in Tokyo and their vendors have a more professional air about them. I guess those shops who have a big corporation behind them can afford professional signs and shiny clean preparation facilities. It actually seems less appealing in the festival atmosphere because of it's slicker look. It seems like the sort of thing you could buy any time anywhere.


The liquor shop that I mentioned in my New Year's post, showed their international nature again with a French fellow preparing a variety of mini-quiches (on the left) and crepes. Though the crepes were freshly prepared, they were served with the same type of fillings you get from the trendy crepe shops in Tokyo (whipped cream, chocolate, and banana being the most common). I admire the way the French fellow can smile as he stands over a griddle in 90 degree heat.


I'm not certain but the things on the left with sticks protruding from either end may be yet another variation on the weenie on a stick. On the right is tsukune which is a sort of Japanese meatloaf on a stick. In Japan, there's nothing you can't serve on a stick so it can be conveniently held in one hand while you carry your beer in the other.


In fact, it doesn't matter how disgusting something looks, it can be put on a stick and grilled. I'm no seafood fan and the sign I can read in Japanese says "seafood" so I'm not sure what this stuff is. If it's got tentacles though, it's off my edible list. However, if you're put off by eating the appendages of bottom feeders, you can have some wieners since this place was selling them for half the price of the tentacle sticks.


Notice the nice green apples on the paper in front of this stand? There aren't any apples for sale here or, in fact, anything with apples so I don't know what these guys were thinking but it wasn't truth in advertising. On the left, they're making okonomiyaki. Okonomiyaki sort of defies explanation since it's a bit like a pancake/omelet hybrid that you can slop nearly anything else into. The pans in the center are likely okonomiyaki fixings. On the right are chocolate-covered bananas. You can't miss them as they're next to the omnipresent weenies on the grill.


There were two stands selling caramel corn but I decided to use this one instead of the one of the bored and forlorn-looking woman standing all alone in front of her brown-goo-covered corn. This one was more interesting because it really looks like these two are flirting with each other behind their corn aquarium.


One of the things I noticed after looking at these pictures is that two food groups are over-represented at the festival - parts of former living creatures on sticks and things involving sugar. There aren't many items from the carbohydrate or fruit and vegetable groups comparatively. I'm guessing this is because meat/seafood on a stick goes with booze (and there were a lot of beer sellers there who I haven't bothered to show pictures of as they're all pretty boring) and sugar appeals to the kids and young women. The picture above shows a rare offering of grilled corn and rice balls (onigiri). I love yaki-onigiri but don't often have occasion to eat it since I'm too lazy to make it on my own and I have to go to restaurants or bars to order it. Grilled onigiri has a crispy outside which has a lovely grilled flavor and is tender and soft inside.


The items above are dango. These are chewy balls of sticky rice-flour goop that don't have much flavor themselves but are served with different sauces. They're sometimes sweet and sometimes savory. They remind me of eating an unhappy marriage of licorice and taffy but every Japanese person I know loves them. My main issue with them is with the texture though it could also be that the first variety I ever tasted was coated with a massively sweet bean paste and the second was done with soy sauce. I have a rather stand-offish relationship with soy sauce and only like it as a condiment rather than a side dish so it was all a bit overwhelming for me.


Given how much the Japanese love the combination of cucumbers and summer, I'd have expected to see more of them for sale but this was the only one. One of my former coworkers said he was hiking around Japan at one point and a farmer offered him a cucumber on a stick which was wearing a thick coat of salt. He said it looked like it would be disgustingly salty but it was quite refreshing in the heat of summer. In some of my husband's other pictures, there are girls eating these during their night-time partying.


The sign in front of this display says "viking sushi". Usually, "viking" is used to talk about "all you can eat" style buffets but in this case it appears to be used to denote large, cheap rolls of sushi. I'm not so sure that I'd trust huge rolls of sushi for a little under a buck. They could be filled with the stuff pictured below.


These look like animal bladders but I believe they are squid minus the tentacles. The sign on the left does say "squid" but I don't know if that sign is for this display of weirdness or for some other. I guess they cut off the tentacles so they could grill them and sell them on sticks.

There are a ton more pictures but most of them are people who are selling only weenies or kakigori. I'm not sure why there was such a hot dog explosion this year but it did seem to be the food du jour this time around. I'm sure that someone out there will conclude that it's all America's fault since any food that isn't squiggly, wiggly, raw, or made with rice and isn't healthy for you is being forcibly jammed down Japanese gullets by big, bad Americans. However, if I had to guess what brought on the serving of all these sausages, I'd say someone hit the giant celestial boar (this being the year of the boar) and someone made the most of it. ;-)

Postcards

Postcards are probably the last type of snail mail that people continue to send to one another on a semi-regular basis as part of social discourse. This is likely due to the fact that they are short, sent only from vacation spots at irregular intervals and have pictures which give one a feeling for what a locale is like. Substantial snail mail correspondence via snail mail has been largely supplanted by e-mail, chatting, and text messaging but postcards from exotic locales can't be replaced by e-cards (and everybody seems to hate them anyway).

The postcard above was sent to my husband from one of his regular students from Hawaii where she's on vacation for a little over a week. This particular student has been my husband's regular student for about a year and a half and shares an interest in Weird Al Yankovic with him. In fact, she mentions buying Twinkies in the U.S. to make a "Twinkie wiener sandwich" because it is part of the movie, UHF.

This student sent my husband this card because she likes him as a teacher but back when I was working at my former office, the president of the company used to ask the teachers to solicit postcards from students when they went on vacation. This was a rather awkward situation because the teachers were teaching six five-minute telephone lessons and never saw the students face-to-face. It is difficult to develop a rapport under those conditions and asking for postcards to be sent to you when you are little more than a disembodied voice speaking briefly with the student seems like an imposition.

The teachers, including myself, asked for these postcards anyway because the ability to generate large quantities of them was an indication of the teacher's popularity and tickled the president no end. He wasn't necessarily concerned with how well-liked the teacher was but rather he wanted the cards to stuff into an album which the salespeople would take around to potential clients to show how great an experience speaking with the teacher was. Since we solicited most of the cards, the cards were rarely a reflection of the affection a student held for a particular teacher but the president placed a lot of stock in this sort of phony PR.

Some students did send cards to their teachers spontaneously but it was relatively rare. Sometimes, even in a brief call, you would develop a rapport that was fairly strongly despite the brevity of contact but it often had more to do with the student's gregarious character than with the teacher. This part of the teaching experience in Japan was all part of the vast education you get in just how much of what you do is about sales and not about helping the students advance their capabilities.

Asagaya Tanabata Festival - Part 3

Godzilla: "Roar!"

For a lot of Americans, Godzilla and Japan go hand in hand. Those cheesy weekend movies dubbed in English with guys in rubber suits are fuel for a great many gags in comedy programs. They're so much a part of American pop culture that we all have come to associate Japanese movies with mouths moving out of sync with sounds.


One of the anecdotes I heard in conjunction with the original Godzilla movie was that it was hard to come up with English sounds that come close to the Japanese insult "bakayaro" (idiot) so the English that was used was "banana oil". I probably heard this from George Takei in an interview since he was a voice actor in the original dubbed version of the movie. This story has nothing to do with the tanabata festival, mind you, but it does have something to do with Godzilla who was actually at the festival in one of his incarnations. Incidentally, students usually find this attempt to find a phonetic replacement for bakayaro pretty funny so it's not a bad idea to bring it up if the topic is already at hand.

The adults take pictures while a little girl looks awed by the mechanical mutant.

At the tanabata festival, a mechanical Godzilla was set up in front of the Sony Avic shop. "Avic" is a chain store that sells consumer electronics and various consumable items like batteries, DVDs, etc. These shops used to be called "Sony Sun Life" but were changed to "Avic" awhile back. I'm not sure why the name changed but I'm guessing it has something to do with the words "audio", "video" and possibly "camera".


The mechanical Godzilla is the one most hardcore Godzilla fans hated in the movie with Matthew Broderick. I'm not sure how the Japanese feel about it but the people at the festival were pretty impressed. Many people whipped out their cells phones to take shots of it and kids were especially drawn to it because it wasn't a statue. It moved back and forth and side to side and would open it's mouth and roar. If you compare the various shots in this post, you can see that the position and mouth have changed.

The action didn't do much for the adults but the younger children were sometimes a bit freaked out by it. When he lurched and roared, some of them would squeal and jump back. They didn't do this once but every time the cycle repeated as if they'd forgotten that it'd happened a short while ago in exactly the same fashion.


I'm not sure why Avic in particular was offering this display other than it was kind of cool for everyone to see it and fun for the kids to be scared by. There was a bit of Godzilla kit set out off to the side for sale but that's not a part of the usual Avic product line. I guess it really had nothing to do with Avic except that Sony was behind the much disliked American remake and they were getting some more mileage out of their investment.

Apple Frustration

Apple announced new iMacs today and they look great. The problem is that they're really not a huge improvement over what has already been released. More than ever before, I feel as though Apple is trying to woo (and wow) me with design. It's bigger in all the right places (the display) and smaller in all the right places (thickness), shinier, a little faster, a little cheaper ($300), and has a new keyboard design. I get the feeling Steve Jobs is waving the new computer in front of the Mac faithful and saying, 'look, pretty!'

Unfortunately, the beauty of the thin, elegant iMac also brings some drawbacks for the user which make me avoid buying a new Mac (again, I was pondering one awhile back). One has to realize that Mac Mini and iMac models are essentially laptop computer components re-oriented in a different box. In the case of the Mini, it's a headless laptop. In the case of the iMac, all the guts or the computer are stuck behind and under the display rather than under a built-in keyboard. This makes for a nice small footprint but creates some usability issues.

The biggest problem I have on a regular basis is that the low power innards of these types of models will cause your USB ports to act wonky on occasion, and not in a way which is uncommon or inconsistent in normal (read: NOT POWER USER) use. Since they are notebook components, they are designed to reduce power consumption while on battery power so shutting off ports that are drawing too much juice works to the user's advantage on a MacBook model. On a desktop model which is always plugged in, it's utterly maddening. I can't tell you how many times I've had one of my two USB ports shut down because I attached my camera, printer (which is externally powered itself!), Palm, or even mouse and had a "low power/port disabled" message pop up from my Mini. Once the port is disabled, it won't re-enable in most cases unless I restart.

The other problem for me personally with these models is that I want my next Macintosh to cover for both a Mac and a PC so I can live la vida dual platform without two machines. The main problem here is that the Mini and iMac models come with irreplaceable and relatively crappy video cards for gaming and that's what I mainly use a PC for. What I need and Apple refuses to give me is a mid-range Mac model, preferably a tower with a lot of expansion capability so I can upgrade the video. A Macintosh Pro model is not only more computer than I need but more cash than I'm willing to pay.

There are, of course, other issues with these consumer models (the Mini and iMac). They often have slow hard drives, limited RAM expansion capability, and no ability to add functionality with cards like a tower or box model do. That would all be just fine if there were a less compact (display-less) model which looked less gorgeous which you could opt for at around the $800-$1200 range but Stevie-boy isn't interested in these models because he's afraid it'll eat away at the more lucrative pro model line-up's sales. He knows the Mac faithful fear the boogey-man that is Windows (or these days, a bit of PC hardware) and those who really want a better Mac are far more likely to frequently buy completely new consumer models or opt for more machine than they require rather than dance with the Windows devil. Well, Steve, I'm not afraid.

Given the choice of waiting to buy a new computer, buying a new Mac which isn't what I want or buying a PC, I'm going to opt for waiting it out. However, when the time comes, I'll be looking more favorably at a PC if Apple doesn't come up with something that reflects my needs more than their marketing priorities.

Asagaya Tanabata Festival - Part 2

The opposite end of the shopping street (which lets out onto Ome Kaido avenue) during festival time.

There are actually three ends to the shopping street that the festival runs along. There's the end that opens from JR Asagaya station (pictured at the top the "Part 1" post I made previously) and two ends that branch out like the top of a Y that let out onto Ome KaidoAvenue, a major street in Tokyo. The JR end is the area which is prime real estate and I'm sure rental of space near it costs an astronomical amount. The other end (pictured above) lets out into an area which is mainly traveled by local residents and is far less lucrative for real estate agents. If you compare the two pictures, you can clearly see how one is elaborately decorated and heavily trafficked while the other looks a little forlorn, empty, and modestly decorated. The other Ome Kaido outlet is similarly unassuming.

Shops and pedestrians along the less-trafficked end of the shopping street during the festival.

The modest end has a very different character than the side closer to JR (which I will cover in more detail in subsequent posts). The shops at this end are small "Mom and Pop" places that tend to look a bit run-down. Beyond the car rental place at the entrance, you find a miniscule meat shop that sells breaded deep-fried cutlets out front, an over-priced green grocer, a tiny market selling mundane food items, a small bakery, and a butcher shop (among others). The JR end has McDonald's, Starbucks, Choco-cro cafe, and a huge Pachinko parlor. It's pretty clear which end speaks to the daily needs of locals and which end is for the crowd that's just passing through.

If you pay attention, you can see the fact that the Ome Kaido street end is more in touch with the community reflected in the decor. The decorations on this end are less professional and more homey.


Drawings of faces made by kids attending the nursery school on the street are pasted onto the decorative "box" hanging off the lamp post above the school. I'm guessing the drawings are actually self-portraits of the kids who did them but I have no way of knowing. This is in contrast to very professional-looking decorations artfully arranged near JR Asasgaya station.


Decorations made out of old 1.5 PET bottles carry tags with drawings by kids on them as well.


There are many things in the festival for kids to enjoy but it's not designed specifically for kids. The collection of children above probably are from the aforementioned nursery school since they're all together and wearing the same hats.


At a couple of points along the street, you can see little wading pools full of water and colorful bits of plastic. These games often offer goldfish or other cheap tropical fish as prizes.


The game aspect is skipped entirely in some cases and kids just scoop their fish out of tubs. Not having been a kid for quite some time, I'm not really sure of the appeal of this sort of thing but I guess it has to do with the joy of choosing your own pet. I seem to vaguely recall feeling I was choosing the "best" fish from a tank full of them when I was a child. I guess at that age, you antrhopomorphize enough to feel the various fish have personality or at least that some are prettier than others.


My students tell me that the goldfish that are won in such festival games tend to die very soon after they're acquired. I'm not sure if they only stock the oldest goldfish knowing it's not worth their while to give away fish that are going to possibly suffocate in plastic bags as their new owners enjoy the fruits of the festival or if they don't expect kids to take proper care of them but it is expected these will be very temporary pets. My students have also told me that these fish were often their first and only pets when they were growing up.


Some parents dress their kids up in lightweight kimono. I'm guessing they do this to get into the festive spirits of it all since there are no performances done by children as a part of the festival to my knowledge. While the kids may look cuter, I'm not sure it enhances their experience much. I think they're more uncomfortable. The kids in this picture certainly don't look all that happy.


A better and, at least to me, equally festive idea is to do as the mother in this picture has done and put your kids in a yukata. For those who can't tell the difference, a kimono has a wide belt (obi) which ties atthe back in relatively sophisticated ways. A yukata is tied with a string and is worn casually, is more lightweight, and tied with a string-style tie. A lot of yukata are white and blue with simple, repetitive designs and are more or less just a robe-style garment. Kimono are in a greater variety of colors and have a more lavish style.

The pictures I've used in this post are somewhat misleading as most people at the festival aren't dressed in either yukata or kimono and are in western-style garb. My husband took all these wonderful pictures and tended to focus on the more unique-looking aspects and I've also been selective about the pictures I've chosen to make the points I've wanted to make. When we get to the next area of the street, you'll see more adults and you'll notice they aren't wearing either yukata or kimono by and large. It seems the adults enjoy dolling up the kids in ways they themselves don't want to bother dressing.

Asagaya Tanabata Festival - Part 1

Asagaya JR station during the tanabata festival. As always, click on the smaller image here for a bigger one in which you can see better detail.

If you follow any other Japan blogs, you'll see that summer is the time for festivals of all flavors and types. It's the time when all the little sub-sections of all the little sub-cities that make up Tokyo concoct their own unique take on festivals in order to drum up business for local merchants. That's not meant to sound cynical. It's simply meant to be a realistic assessment of why any "town" would run a week-long "festival" which consists mainly of merchants lining the front of their shops with seasonal food and goods.

In our local neighborhood, Asagaya, the big annual event is "tanabata". Tanabata is a strange (non-National) holiday in Japan because it seems to have no localized time frame. Any area can celebrate any time it wants between July and September. In Asagaya, this is always August and generally starts from the first weekend. The "festival" runs for an entire week.

The story behind Tanabata is well-told in the Wikipedia entry I linked to in the previous paragraph but the short version is that it's a story of star-crossed lovers. Every culture seems to embrace their own flavor of these types of stories. The details are different but the overall story is the same. Two people fall in love but their families for one reason or another forbid their love and their story ends in sadness or tragedy. The end of the story in Japan is that the lovers get to meet once a year when two stars meet in the sky. The star aspect is just about the only element of the story behind Tanabata which actually gets incorporated into the festivals. It's relatively common to see stars used as decorative elements. Other than that, you rarely encounter anything related to the lore during the festival.


Kids (and sometimes adults) write wishes on scraps of paper and attach them to bamboo branches as part of the holiday. You see these branches everywhere at this time of year and they aren't always incorporated into a festival. I used to see them at Nishi-Shinjuku station when my office was located there. Most of the time, the wishes are just on slips of paper but the ones around Asagaya station are written on colorful star-shaped papers.


The funny thing to me is that the idea of wishing upon a star, like the star-crossed lover story, is something that occurs across cultures. It really does make you wonder if Jung's theory of the collective unconscious was right or if we all have underlying mental mechanisms which lead us all down similar mental pathways, but that's a post for another time.


The Asagaya festival is held along an absolutely huge (and impressive) shopping street. The map I scanned in above (which definitely is better if you look at it in full size by clicking on the small version above) shows the names of the shops along the street. The street is so jam-packed with stores that the map had to be cut in half to fit on the flyer. The top and bottom have to be placed end-to-end in order to truly see how many shops are along this stretch. I can say without hesitation that I believe this is one of the best local shopping streets in Tokyo because of the variety and convenience.

I'm not that well-versed in Japanese anime and mascot characters so I don't know what that white bird is but I think the little fellow on the yellow blob in the center may be a Dragon Ball Z cartoon character.

Local merchants spend weeks preparing for the festival by making large wire-frame, papier mache figures which they suspend in front of their shops. If you come home from work in the evening from JR Asagaya station and travel along the street to get home pre-festival, you often see these figures lying on the ground being worked on after the shops have closed. Back when I was still taking JR (and working full-time), I used to look at the progress of these bits of artwork and try and figure out as early as possible what they were going to be in the end. It was like a game where you started with the barest hint as a clue and got better clues as time went by.

The festival is huge and allows one a chance to see Japanese summer merrymaking in a way which is enlightening about the culture and endearing. It's an interesting reflection of traditional and modern tastes and behaviors that you cannot look at and start pointing fingers at the oppressive influence of western culture upon Japan. Most of the foods and items that are sold are chosen by average people running little local shops who are hoping to profit by appealing to the appetites of their average customers, not monolithic chains like McDonald's or Starbucks cramming western tastes into Japanese souls. In essence, this is a slice of the "real" modern Japan.

Luxury Shopping

Generally speaking, I don't wish for my husband and I to have more money than we do. It's not that we're rich, but rather that we're not poor and with some frugality, we manage to do just fine. We have no debts. We pay our bills on time, buy occasional, (usually) moderate indulgences, and save a bit for the future. When there's been an emergency (like the refrigerator going belly up or a computer dying), we've had enough on hand to manage it. I consider us very fortunate despite the fact that we can't go around buying every new yuppie toy that comes down the pike.

Sometimes though, I wish that money were no object and I could live every day of my life buying wherever I like. Note that I didn't say "whatever" but "wherever". When I was quite a bit younger, I used to have the hunger for new things and itch to buy them but at some point that (thankfully) vanished. Now, on occasion, I yearn more for a better quality of experience while shopping rather than any given item. Today, I had one of those more enjoyable experiences.

Last night my husband slept very poorly and got less than 4 hours of sleep. When this happens, I like to do what I can to comfort him, particularly when he has to go to work with so little sleep under his belt. Usually, this involves attempting to fulfill any whims he has when he gets home. Sometimes, it involves preparing him any homemade dish he desires though I also didn't get much sleep because his difficulties woke me up and I couldn't go back to sleep between 4:00 and 7:00 am (I feel sorrier for him though!) so he probably won't ask me to overtax myself in this regard. On rarer occasions, I'll head off to the local "luxury" supermarket and pick up some treats for him in case he's in the mood to overindulge during his miserable evening following his miserable day.

The best market in my area is Queen's Isetan and the shopping experience is so much better there than at the cheap place (Utakarya) I usually frequent that I sometimes wish I didn't have to live like a normal person and could shop there full-time. The compare and contrast is as follows:

Parking:

Queen's Isetan has the Tokyo equivalent of "valet parking". There are not one but two bicycle rent-a-cops who make sure everyone who parks by the store, which is right next to a subway exit, is going into the shop so there is almost always ample parking. If there is no ample parking, they park your bike for you so you don't have to struggle to squeeze it in. When you exit the store, they remember which bike was yours and pull it out of the line-up for you. They even ask you which direction you are riding so they can point the front wheel in the right direction!

At Utakaraya, there's one rent-a-cop but he patrols the front of the store watching for shop-lifters who might pick up the produce stacked in front and make a run for it. While this may seem overly paranoid, I once saw a fellow walk off with some vegetables there. Not only is this fellow not involved in bike parking but most of the area near the shop is roped off so that people can't park in front of the vending machines lining the side of the shop. You've got to walk a fair way down the street to cram your bike into a space in front of an a rusting playground. More often than not, you'll come back to find someone has either shoe-horned their bike into a space next to yours in such a way that you have to unlock their hand brake lever from your handle bar to extricate your bike or your bike has been knocked over onto the ground.

Shopping Comfort:

Many stores in Japan only have enough space for two people to barely squeeze by the aisles so that they can cram more stock into a smaller space. At Utakaraya, that's more like 1.5 people. The entire shop is about 1/6 the size of Queen's Isetan so they have to make the most of it. It also doesn't help that Utakaraya is always full of what appear to be confused old people who block what little space there is. There's one door in and one out and food is stacked on either side of each door such that people stop in the doorways as they enter and exit and gawk at the items on display. This makes it really hard to get in and out. Utakaraya is also perpetually grubby. I'm sure they clean it every day but everything is worn and carries the patina of heavy and long-term use (not unlike certain parts of my apartment, ahem). The tables for packing your bags are worn, thin plywood with chipped edges. One of them is badly warped. The baskets sometimes have fallen bits of vegetable or fruit stems and leaves in them from the people who used them before you. There are also about 4 carts total (and at least 1 of them has a malfunctioning wheel) for placing your basket in and pushing around on days when you buy a lot of heavy items. Also, the air conditioning can sometimes be sub-par in the summer, particularly since the automatic doors seem to stick open at times and there are so many people in such a small space.

At Queen's Isetan, everything is gleaming and clean as if little elves with toothbrushes are not only scrubbing every nook and cranny but magically replacing portions of any mildly worn surface. Pristine baskets are stacked high at the entrance which is wide enough for 5 old ladies to stand in and gawk and still let you get inside and there are two long rows of carts which never have wheel problems. Of course, all the food is inside the shop so people don't linger at the entrance and old people are scarce because the prices are too high for those on a limited income. The air conditioning is generally adequate though it can be a little hot near the front because they tend not to air condition as heavily near the registers. I guess they feel the shopping area should be cool and comfortable but the clerks can sweat it out.


Food Selection:

There are a wide variety of imports at Queen's Isetan (including the wafers pictured above). There is also a lot more ethnic food and many exotic ingredients to prepare a great variety of non-Japanese dishes. The fresh fruit and produce look great. All of it is actually fresh, firm and has good color. It also has its own bakery with a wide variety of bread and pastries. There are always bagels and (well-made) scones. These two items are relatively hard to find in the average baked goods section in most supermarkets.


Even the weird Japanese baked concoctions are good. The items pictured above from left (clockwise) are a mini "hard" melon pan, a slice of chili pizza (with actual meat chili and plenty of cheese) and a tea-flavored scone. The chili pizza was my lunch and it was damn tasty.


Queen's Isetan also has a wide variety of store-brand products which are incredibly good quality. One of my husband's favorites is the "Extra Vanilla" pound cake. It's a tiny little cake that is no bigger than a large muffin in the U.S. but it's very moist and flavorful. The areas near the check-out counters are full of a huge number of these green-labeled food items neatly displayed in racks.

At Utakaraya, the produce is sufficiently bruised such that it looks as though some of it fell off the back of a truck and some of it is wilted or aged-looking. I'm pretty sure that one of the reasons some of their fresh food is so cheap is that it's the type of stuff that places like Queen's Isetan ship off because it's approaching a point where quality is slipping. I'm also pretty sure most of the meat at Utakaraya is frozen and re-thawed before put on display. There are no imported treats and the baked goods section is a small area near the registers which carries a limited selection sometimes surrounded by crates full of day-old buns and an-pan for cheap.

Price:

Obviously, Utakaraya is about as cheap as it gets in Japan. A head of lettuce which is 300 yen at Queen's Isetan is likely no more than 160 yen at Utakaraya and is as low as 100 yen on occasion. Peaches can be had for 100 yen verses 250 yen at Queen's Isetan. One of the reasons I never do "regular" shopping there and reserve my rare visits there for their high quality expensive treats is that I can't afford to spend so much on a weekly basis for the basics. Still, the shopping experience is so much more comfortable that I sometimes wish I could.

Going to Utakaraya makes me feel like I'm at one of those sales T.V. shows like to show where people are climbing all over each other trying to get to bargains for irregular sweaters and slightly-damaged shoes. Going to Queen's Isetan makes me feel like a regular human being buying groceries.

Pretty Boy Memorabilia

Back when my husband and I were spending every weekend shopping for used records and interesting Japanese memorabilia, we used to come across tiny, little shops that specialized in selling various items related to teen idols. These places are a bit like a walk-in issue of Tiger Beat magazine where young girls can buy pictures of sexually-ambiguous, non-threatening boys.

The shop in the picture above has two things going for it. First of all, it has one of those completely nonsense English names that compels foreigners to take pictures of it so that we can chuckle at how clueless the person who named it was. It's okay to do this because every time a Japanese person hears an American say "carry-okee" for "karaoke", they chuckle at us (or maybe loudly guffaw, or belly laugh, or pee their pants as they're doubled over in laughter as it sounds really, really stupid to them).

The second thing that the shop has going for it is that it has an LCD display hanging inside its front door so that the girls can get up to the minute information on which idols have changed from androgynous pretty boys into middle-aged goofs who have to pad their careers by going on variety shows and making asses of themselves. Seriously though, I don't know what the display is for but it does appear to be a place for messages they'd like customers to read. I must say that I admire their ingenuity in expanding the area of the shop by opening the door and using it as a signboard.


Inside the shop, one can buy pictures, stickers, CDs, and (supposedly) autographed cards on the same sort of card stock you often see sumo hand prints (tegata) made on. The shops don't appear to stock much but they have catalogs from which one can make orders for other idol-related goods in the event of an urgent pretty boy memorabilia shortage.

My husband and I never made a purchase from a tiny little kiosk such as this one but there used to be one of these types of places in Shinjuku which was about twice the size of this little closet of a shop. That one carried a little bit of western movie memorabilia as well as items for the easily-infatuated set. At that time (many moons ago), "Indiana Jones" and "Back to the Future" were very popular so you could get glossy pictures of Harrison Ford or Michael J. Fox. Back in those days, my husband and I ran a little mail order business selling second-hand Japanese KISS items so we scoped out the shop for potential stock. It was during one such search that we learned they keep home-made catalogs you can order a wider variety of items from. I believe that you see those books to the right of the shop girl. We never did locate any KISS memorabilia but we picked up a couple of Star Trek movie stills at one point. They weren't incredibly expensive because an American science fiction show full of old farts wasn't competing well with the dewy-eyed boy toys with fashionably long hair hanging in their eyes.

Team Minus 6%

Back when I was still mad about sumo, I watched a program about the wrestlers' personal lives which included Wakanohana (a grand champion from a family of grand champions - his brother, father and uncle were all famous sumo champions as well), I noticed that the Japanese love to give cute little names in katakana English to certain trends or commercial campaigns. At that time, it was pretty popular to say "my (whatever)". In the program I was watching, Wakanohana was bowling and used his own equipment so I'd hear things like "mai baggu" (my bag) and "mai boru" (my ball). I believe that marketers use Japanized English as catch phrases because they feel they will be more memorable. I was reminded of these sorts of naming conventions and how they're used to promote certain campaigns after a recent experience at a grocery shop.

Yesterday I went to the local market (Inageya) to pick up various and sundry items and chose to allow them to give me a bag because I needed a few for trash. As I posted previously, I'm very careful only to take bags when I need them as trash bin liners. At any given time, we've got 4-5 of them at most on hand, usually fewer. Instead of putting a plastic bag in my basket, the clerk put the packet pictured above in it.


Inside, there's a reusable, waterproof synthetic bag ("mai baggu") which is the same size and shape as a conventional plastic shopping bag. The market and others who are participating in the Team Minus 6% program are distributing these in the hopes of getting consumers to use them instead of taking plastic bags each time. I'm not sure how well this will work but it's a very good idea.

The distribution of these items is an attempt to help reduce greenhouse gas by 6% by 2012 in accord with the Kyoto protocol. Reduction of excessive packaging is one component of the plan. The others are water consumption reduction, using ecologically friendly products, setting air conditioner temperatures such that they consume less power, reducing gasoline consumption from idling vehicles, and reducing electricity consumption. In typical Japanese marketing fashion, a trite name in English, "Team Minus 6%" (チームマイナス６％), has been applied to the campaign to make it feel more personalized and memorable.

The main problem with these campaigns is that, even in a country like Japan where awareness of others is much higher than in the west and notions of personal sacrifice are lauded, people still tend to act based on personal comfort rather than on higher principles. The housewives who I see asking for extra bags and practically emptying the spools of extra-thin, free plastic bags for wrapping wet (vegetables and fruit) or drippy food items (meat in trays) aren't going to start going for re-usable bags any time soon because it'll cramp their lifestyle. I'm pretty sure that the only thing which is going to motivate them will be charging for the plastic bags distributed at check-out. It could be that these bags are being distributed in anticipation of starting to ask customers to pay for bags so that they will be less disgruntled when the time comes.

Getting this reusable bag has made me re-consider getting shopping bags as trash can liners. I'm guessing that shopping bags are thicker than required and the handles are unnecessary meaning they're using more material and are more wasteful as liners. It'd probably be better to buy specially-designed liners just for trash and cease getting shopping bags altogether. So, if nothing else, they've accomplished their goal with me.

Update: I went to Inageya again today and indeed they have stopped giving out shopping bags for free. Now, you have to grab one at the end of the aisle and pay 5 yen for it if you want one. I think it'd be better if they charged 10 yen each as I think people would take it more seriously but at least this removes the mindless element from getting a bag.

8 Reasons Why "The Simpsons" Is No Longer Funny

Image pinched from the Wikipedia entry on an especially weak episode of the Simpsons.

It's no secret that the Simpsons has been on a slow decline for quite some time. Despite being a great Simpsons fan, I hadn't been watching since Season 15 and was unaware that the slide had ceased and that they were now bottom feeding on a regular basis.

Many people who have visited this topic far earlier and far more often than I have talked about where they believe the show has gone wrong. A lot of the decline can be laid at the feet of the writers and Ian Maxtone-Graham whose involvement in the show seems to have signaled the show's decline. However, the Simpsons was rarely conventionally funny and in fact they often made things funny in the same way that Monty Python does; that is, through well-timed repetition, great line delivery and funny juxtaposition of various normally conventional lines.

The main problems I've noticed are as follows:

1. The voice actors aren't working together and it shows.

In the commentary on the DVDs that have been already released, the show's creators and writers have mentioned on more than one occasion that the voice actors no longer do "table reads". A table read is where all of the actors sit around a table together and read through the script. This not only allowed them the equivalent of a live actor's rehearsal so they could fine tune their timing and line delivery but it also allowed jokes to be refined and comical ad libs to be included.

These days, all of the actors can record their lines remotely and then the pieces can be edited together. As of late, this is crystal clear in the way the lines are delivered. In particular, I've noticed that energy levels and emotional infusion between lines delivered by different actors are not matching. It seems especially noticeable with Julie Kavner's lines for Marge Simpson. This messes with the "punch" of the lines. I believe it's also partially responsible for unfunny jokes running on far too long because the pacing isn't obvious from what is written on the page nor from the pieces being cobbled together in editing.

I'm not sure how long it has been since table reads were regularly done. It's possible they stopped a long time ago and there's been a slow decay in the rhythm of line delivery through time. I believe this is likely the single biggest factor in the show's decline and it's unlikely to ever change as the voice actors all have other work they are doing and probably find it impractical to work together physically now.

2. Too many meta-references.

In the past, the meta references the Simpsons made tended to be appropriate within the context of the show and less obviously self-referential. Mainly, such jokes included references to Fox as a network. Such jokes occurred several times a season but it seems these days they can occur as often as several times per episode and some are lame repetitions of meta jokes that have already been overdone. In particular, there are references to the Simpsons fame or merchandising, animation or animators, and the show's inconsistency with things like Homer and Marge's jobs.

Meta-references can be considered a wink and a nod to the audience but it looses its impact if it occurs too often. If you worked with a co-worker who was constantly making the same comment and winking at you, how long would it take before it'd cease to be amusing?

3. Too narrowly-known parody references.

In early Simpsons episodes, classic movies or well-known cultural references were parodied such as Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" or Orson Welles's "Citizen Kane." Recent references included a White Stripes video that was re-created with Bart. It made no sense and wasn't the least bit funny. These sorts of references are done to showcase the guest voices (who increasingly appear to be there because of the personal interests of the writers or show runners and not because the audience may find their appearance of interest) rather than to add humor to the show. This is a case of the tail wagging the dog.

Narrow references only work when you explain them to the audience so they know what's going on. In the past, the Simpsons went out of its way to explain certain references (particularly music-based ones), such as the Homerpalooza episode. Now, they're too lazy or indifferent to frame the references for those who aren't experienced with their source. Parody only works when most of your audience knows the reference and when it's done well. The Simpsons has been failing more frequently on both of these fronts.

4. Interchangeable characters.

The Simpsons is a cartoon and you can expect some flexibility in how the characters are portrayed. Initially, Homer was used as the all-purpose character who was smart or stupid, a great or terrible father, hopelessly out of shape or athletic, etc. This back and forth for Homer was bad enough but acceptable for one character to give the show some flexibility in story lines but this sort of inconsistency bled over into Bart who has been both untalented and talented musically, obedient and disobedient, famous and unknown, and both a child and a man (doing adult jobs).

The next in line to be afflicted with serious character issues was Marge who started off as a wonderfully diligent and caring mother who was capable and moral and now sees more than her share of neglectful behavior toward her kids and immoral behavior. The last character to be corrupted is Lisa who has become increasingly shallow and morally labile when the story calls for it though her character has remained largely intact relative to the others.

The problem with this lack of character integrity is that the viewer loses all ability to relate to the characters in even the most minimal fashion and it guts the emotional impact which in turn undermines the humor. If, for instance, Ralph Wiggum is passive and dumb most of the time but on rare occasions says something oddly aggressive or smart, it's funny. If he says such things too often, the impact is lost and the comments are no longer funny.

One of the reasons humor is difficult to convey cross-culturally is that viewers from one culture can't relate to those from another. It is essential that the viewer identify with and empathize with characters for the comedy to work. When the characters become interchangeable, they cease to have a concrete personality you can find a foothold with emotionally.

5. Too gross, scatological, juvenile and tasteless.

In general, it seems that the Simpsons are siphoning their content from the same wells of death, desperation, violence, and childishness. These wells are obvious, deep and broad but uninteresting. The best stories of the past were dug up from personal experiences that the writers had in real life which they adapted for use in the Simpsons. Now, it seems anything goes. Perhaps this means they need new writers with fresh experiences to draw from after so many years or that the show runners are content to allow the quality to lapse because they're profitable even with a half-assed show.

In a show I recently saw, Michelle Kwan uses her skates to cut up a judge's chest when he scores her badly. This was supposedly a "hotdogging" maneuver. In another episode, two gangsters have an exchange where one asks the other if he's still married to his sister and he says he's not because she's been dead for two years. Ned Flanders makes an incredibly violent biblical movie which is not only gross but also out of character for Ned. Mr. Burns is in a car crash and his lungs are his airbag which he sucks back in. In an episode which visits 8 years in the future, professor Frink's skeleton is seen hanging in his home to indicate that he committed suicide and his body was left here. All of this is just a little too black outside of a Halloween episode.

In general, it seems the Simpsons is starting to confuse itself with South Park. This sort of nonsense only works about 1/5 of the time on South Park and it works almost not at all on the Simpsons.

6. Repeated story-lines from earlier episodes of the Simpsons and Futurama.

Homer's antics allowed him to dance and show off as a baseball mascot in a very early episode. In season 16, Homer's antics allow him to become a teacher of showboating behavior for various sports figures. Bart traps homer on April Fool's with a beer. Bart traps Barney with a beer to get him hit in the face with a watermelon. Too many of the more recent episodes are vaguely familiar.

7. Heavy-handed social and political commentary.

The aforementioned biblical movie made by Ned Flanders was an obvious reference to Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ. Homer joins the army and we're treated to a great amount of Iraq war commentary. Springfield glacier melts and the guide tells us that the official stance is that global warming doesn't exist as Lisa points out that the glacier is now sludge. While I almost always agree with the Simpsons writers' politics, I don't find it amusing when these sentiments are waved in front of my face like a screaming banner. Such things are far funnier and more effective when they are subtle and represent rushed, lazy or hack writing.

8. Too many jokes at the characters' expense which are sad instead of funny.

Fat jokes on a show like the Simpsons are an easy way to try and get a laugh since so many characters are rotund. When Homer is gearing up to take a shot at Flanders's pool table and says, "they don't call me Springfield Fats just because I'm morbidly obese," it's a funny fat joke. When police chief Wiggum, in reference to how he's not a good cop, says his badge is covered because his fat grew over it, it's just sad. When a character as oblivious to his faults as Homer makes a comment about his shortcomings (odor, weight, hair), it's funny because he's speaking with misplaced confidence. When Wiggum does it because he's feeling bad about himself, it's pathetic.

I believe this sort of "humor" started with Gil and has been expanded to other characters. The writers need to understand that it's not funny to kick someone when they're down on themselves or others are making fun of them unless the character has the confidence not to care or the zeal to fight back. I guess children who are 10 or younger who have parents that never taught them that mocking others is cruel may find it amusing.

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A reasonable question to ask is why I continue to watch (even belatedly) if I don't think the show is funny (or even enjoyable) anymore. The answer is that I want to believe it can be funny again and am not quite ready to give up on it yet.

Poor Teaching

About a month or so ago, the referral agency that provides me with students sent along a new potential student. This was a 61-year-old man who had been having lessons with another teacher for several years but she was leaving Japan and he needed a new teacher. The agency had sent him to another (male) teacher but he had corrected his pronunciation "too strictly" and the student had rejected that teacher.

One of the plethora of things you learn early on while teaching Japanese students is that they won't like you unless you use a soft touch when correcting them. It's okay to correct frequently (if the student desires it) but not okay to do so sternly. I'm not sure if the teacher who preceded me was inexperienced or oblivious to this fact but he alienated my student pretty thoroughly and instilled in him a nagging insecurity about his ability to be understood.

One of the things the teacher made this fellow do was repeatedly count ("1, 2, 3, 4...") to practice pronunciation. Boring, pointless types of practice are generally the hallmark of a poor teacher who has a limited bag of tricks that he or she trots out in order to pass the time in the lesson without actually addressing the short-comings of the student. In this case, if someone has a pronunciation problem, it's in enunciating certain sounds, not in numbers or colors or types of animals. This new fellow's biggest issue is pronouncing "see" and "she" properly. How is counting off again and again going to help him except when he hits the "6" and "7" words? It was a particularly poor choice of pronunciation exercise for a 61-year-old man capable of discussing politics and social issues to be reduced to elementary school recitation exercises. I'm sure he was humiliated.

Unfortunately, the fact that most people come to Japan and stay for a short time and the fact that teaching English is seen as a crappy job which is regarded with disdain by those who have moved on to other work keeps Japan populated with people in the English language business who don't know what they're doing. The former simply never get enough experience to be good at it and the latter think it isn't the sort of thing you need to be good at (or even can be good at).

You find that the vast majority of teachers are spending their lessons teaching what is easy for them rather than what is useful for the students. When I was at Nova (15 years ago), we were mainly teaching 40 units of American Streamline per level. The teachers weren't trained in how to teach the grammar point of each lesson nor were they given sufficient time before each lesson to review the teacher's text (when they had one to work from). The student information sheets had a list of numbers, 1-40, and you marked off the lesson you did so another teacher wouldn't repeat it with the same student. When you got one of these sheets for a student who was stuck at a certain level and couldn't advance to the next, you'd find that the student had repeatedly done the same lessons with a lot of reading content again and again and had never done the ones with very little text to read. The reason for this was that inexperienced teachers would waste class time having students read aloud rather than practice the lesson points in a meaningful way. This meant less work for the teacher both in terms of preparation and imagination. Since Japanese students grow up in a school system which emphasizes rote memorization and often repetition to that end, they don't even realize how crummy the lesson they're getting is in terms of helping advance their English skills.

Teaching well is very challenging and generally unrewarding in terms of how you are regarded by fellow foreigners (who love nothing more than to climb on their high horses and look down on the English teaching rabble they've scrambled away from to their Japanese office jobs) or by the Japanese students and employers who believe what you do is a doddle because you speak English already. While a student may benefit from your skill, she tends not to realize that it is extraordinary in nature. Most students generally can't tell the difference between the gaijin monkey who fills the lesson time with pointless games or prattling about himself and the teacher who is working to improve the student's weak points while still making the lesson interesting.

All that being said, a few of my students have left teachers and language schools specifically because they felt they were getting nowhere. One of them recently told me she'd started doing a conversation exchange with a British friend and that she realized from trying to deal with his Japanese that it was extremely tiring. She wasn't even teaching him but just focusing on his mistakes and correcting them was exhausting for her. After this experience, she told me she really respected what I did. I must say that that was an immensely gratifying thing to hear as it is all too rare for anyone to spend time in my shoes.