Aiyakki's Window

Adjusting

2010-05-14T17:37:00.004+09:00

The other day I was watching the news and they reported that a woman's body had been found in one of the canals. It was wrapped in plastic and it had been in there for over a week because whoever dumped it had done so just at the beginning of the Golden Week holiday.

They were interviewing one of the old guys who had been responsible for fishing the the corpse out. He kept commenting on the fact that the body had been dumped at the beginning of the holiday. I guess people don't look for corpses over the holiday, so by the time the found it, it was difficult to identify whose it was. He said that they put it in there at the beginning of the holiday, so we are only getting it out now. They put in in there just as the Golden Week holiday was starting, so you can see how that caused a bit of a problem. This guy pulled a rotting corpse wrapped in a huge plastic bag out of canal with something that looks like an oversized meat hook and all he can talk about is the timing of when the corpse was dumped into the canal with respect to his holiday.

I guess if you spend a lot of time fishing corpses out of canals you sort of get attuned to the little details and you begin to notice that some corpses really are more inconvenient than others and some murderers just don't have much in the way of decorum when it comes to timing and such.

Budapest

2009-08-25T13:43:00.039+09:00

At the beginning of the summer vacation, I went to the meeting of the International Commission of the History of Science and Technology, which was in Budapest this year. I stayed in a small hotel across the Danube from the meeting. The venue was a technical university that faced the river from the Buda side. You can see the university in the picture below.

The conference was the biggest international meeting for historians of science. There were a fair number of talks that I wanted to hear but, because they were running ten or so multiple sessions, I wasn't able to see all of them. It was good to see some of my old teachers and colleagues who I haven't seen for a while and to meet, for the first time, colleagues whose scholarship I've been reading for years

In between sessions, and during a few dead periods, I was able to get out and explore the city. Budapest is both splendid and squalled at the same time. Here you see the parliament building, which is on the Pest side, from the turrets of an old fortress on the Buda side.

Budapest was once the two cities of Buda and Pest, separated by the massive Danube and from time to time making war on one another.

It's hard to get a sense from these pictures of just how huge the Danube is. In Budapest, the river is spanned by numerous bridges.

One of the most prevalent features of central part of the city are the 19th century apartment buildings.

Here's one that looks like it's from the early 20th century.

Years of communist rule, however, have taken their toll and many neighbourhoods are impoverished and the buildings in a state of disrepair.

With the new influx of borrowed money, there is construction going on at slow pace everywhere throughout the city. Here's a typical street that they've ripped up and don't seem to be in any hurry to refinish.

The Hungarians are famous for being a mathematical nation. I took this button panel in the elevator of my hotel as evidence of the mathematical disposition of even the average Hungarian.

Summer Vacation

2009-08-13T02:26:00.012+09:00

I survived my first semester at Waseda. There have been many strange things to get used to but I has been going by so fast that I hardly have time to take them all in. Maybe a few examples will help.

When I first started I was asked to go to the clinic associated with the university for a check up. I was given a thorough examination and a few days later received a ten page report in the mail. The final conclusion was that I had a hearing loss and should go to an ear doctor and that I had high blood cholesterol (I had to look that Japanese term up) and should go back to talk to the examining doctor about the situation. A weeks days later I received a very polite email from someone in the human resources department saying that she had seen the report and would I please eat lots of intense vegetables (濃い野菜, the adjective usually means strong in the sense of taste or color) and do things like walking and then take another test in the summer holiday. I found it endearing that they would take such concern, but on the other hand I was relieved that I didn't have anything embarrassing that they could have found out about.

Our library is generally in a fairly deplorable state for what I'm teaching. I was going to set an assignment on eugenics, so I searched in the library catalogs to see what they had. In this case I was pleasantly surprised to see that they had many books in both Japanese and Western languages on the various eugenics movements. What was a bit peculiar, however, was that in addition to some ten or twenty books of modern scholarship there were also some hindered or so books on race, race purification and straightforward racism, mostly written in the interwar period. Given the situation, however, this is understandable. If I were Japanese in the 1920s and I was aware that someone had written books with titles like The Mongol in Our Midst : A Study of Man and His Three Faces or Our Testing Time : Will the White Race Win Through?, I would want to know what they were about as well.

I have also had to come to grips with teaching undergraduates in their first and second years many of whom come from very different backgrounds from anything I previously imagined. I repeated realized that I was taking too much for granted. In one of the most extreme situations a student told me a week before the paper was due that she had not had time to read my long and detailed instructions on how to write a paper, but that she had decided to write her (five page) paper on the relationship between the role of determinism in the collapse of civilizations and the extinction of species and for her sources she had two textbooks, one on ancient civilizations and one on biological speciation and extinction. I told her that this sounded a bit grandiose and that moreover she should try to find some sources that dealt with her topic directly and which were not textbooks. Next, a week before her paper was due, she sent me an email explaining that she had changed her mind, that she would now write on The History of Astronomy and that her paper would have the following form: 1. Before Christ, 2. After Christ, 3. Modern Astronomy, 4. Technology in Astronomy and 5. The Future of Astronomy. I replied that this sounded like a bit much and, moreover, that I wasn't sure where she had derived this periodization but that it wasn't particularly sound. Luckily, in the end she turned in a reasonably good paper on the history of astronomy in ancient Greece.

And finally, for some pictures and general weirdness. Here's the sign to the men's sink in a department store in Akihabara (秋葉原). The Japanese just means "face-washing" and is probably just an abrivation for the word for sink (洗面台).

In Ueno (上野) there's a shop called Powwow, run by some Japanese people that sell American Indian stuff. It has all manner of products of dubious taste...

... and a ridiculous sign. I got into an argument with my friend Nathan, who's half Maori, about whether or not this sign is racist. He maintained that in order for something to be racist the people involved had to have some clue about the racial conflict, the social context. He pointed out that the people running this shop obviously had no idea about anything to do with Native Americans, other than some fantasy they had concocted based on media and such, and they were totally obliviousto the meanings behind these things. I can kind of see his point, but whatever you want to call it, it's pretty creepy.

Finally, the curiously named Spo-Vege, short for "sport vegetables," which promises the power of vegetables for a body doing sports (スポーツするカラダに、野菜のチカラを).

New Apartment

2009-07-28T00:55:00.004+09:00

I finally moved into a new apartment at the end of last month. It is a large place for Tokyo, but it was reasonably priced because it's in an old building and about ten to fifteen minutes walk from a decent train station (and about two minutes from a crappy one). But it's really near the university, so it's fine for me.

A sign of the state of my Japanese is that I was able to do the transaction and set everything up entirely in Japanese. This included getting optical fiber pulled to the apartment and a number of calls to the internet company in which I managed to be an annoying prick on the phone while still maintaining all the superficial forms of politeness - a distinguishing characteristic of my phone manner with customer service representatives. (In the interest of the full truth, I should point out that this phone manner is not particularly effective, but somehow I find it too satisfying to change.)

This is the room that I was going to use as my bedroom, but it is just above a large road with a train track down the middle and is INSANELY LOUD. I have found that I can get some work done in it, however, so I'm going to turn it into a study with a couch and screen for watching movies.

The only green that you can see from the place is actually an old school Japanese style garden with landscaped lakes, little bridges, benches and the whole bit. It belongs to a shrine but it's open to the public and has a park for kids at one of the entrances.

Here's the little side street behind the place, which the main door of the building opens out onto.

Here's the Google Map location.

View Larger Map

Dormitory life

2009-05-03T16:54:00.003+09:00

It's hard to believe I've been in Tokyo for almost two months. Classes are moving at a brisk pace, and what with with prep, writing and trying to keep up with my Japanese, I haven't had much time to get out and see the city.

I moved into my more permanent temporary apartment at the end of April. It's tiny and although it has a bathroom and a small kitchenette, it's basically a dorm room. I don't even have enough space to unpack all my stuff, and my clothes are in stacks all over the place. But I just don't have the time, or the inclination, to move somewhere else at the moment.

I've got a fairly good routine down for now. Since I only have to teach classes three days a week, I am able to get in about two full days of work a week. This means that I've been able to get more done than I thought I would.

The library - shown above - is fairly good but still a far cry from great for the stuff I need. On the other hand, I can get whatever I want through interlibrary loan pretty quickly because there are a fair number of large libraries in Tokyo.

Waseda itself feels very much like a large private university. There is far more in the way of school spirit type stuff than what you get at most Canadian universities and it has all the quirks of a private school - such as ideosyncratic systems that are only marginally functional and which are justified by vague appeals to the "Waseda way of doing things."

Getting out

2009-03-18T21:04:00.007+09:00

Deborah was in town over the weekend, so I took the excuse to take some time off and see a bit more of Tokyo.

On Sunday we went out to Odaiba island (お台場), which was once the fort protecting Tokyo's harbor and is now a huge man-made island devoted entirely to entertainment and shopping.

It's basically just one massive mall after another with rides, movie theaters and museums scattered in here and there. We went to Miraikan, the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation (日本科学未来館) - which had some exhibits on robots and nanotechnology that were pretty cool.

There was also a quintessentially Japanese activity going on at the southern end of the island. There was some kind of organized event for the fans of idol girls to take photo shoots of their favorite girls. There were packs of older men, all in their 50s to 60s, with expensive cameras taking photos of different girls. The men all had little yellow ribbons that marked them as participants in the event and the girls were doing various pin-up like poses for them. There were also organizers walking around with yellow arm bands that marked them variously as organizers, security and such.

On the way back, we saw this man-hole cover in front of the JR Shinbashi Station (新橋). The caption literally says fire extinguisher plug, or cap. I guess it means fire hydrant.

I've finally got my office all set up. I needed a set of file drawers, a little table for my printer and a white board. I talked to various people about this but we ran into a bit of a problem with funding regulations and it was unclear, who, if anyone was responsible for paying for it, and such purchases were clearly ruled out by the stipulations of my research grant.

So me and the general office manager did what one would do in such a circumstance at any university. We went over to the building that the department had just moved out of, talked to the janitorial staff (who, in Japanese, have a much more elevated title), and together rummaged the place for abandoned furniture. The head janitor took us around to various places where he thought he remembered that stuff like that was, but he was pretty old and I guess his memory isn't what it used to be. Eventually, we did find most of what we were looking for and the janitor assured us he would let us know when he found the other stuff. Sure enough, the next day, the moving company brought everything to my office.

In the background of this photo, you can see building 11, which houses our department and the School of Commerce. The faculty offices are on the top floor.

New Office

2009-03-07T22:19:00.009+09:00

The moving company arrived this morning at nine o'clock, exactly as they said they would. After I witnessed the unsealing of the seal, they very quickly put everything in the front room, as I had told them, handed me an official receipt made out to the University and left.

I then made my way back over to the department. When I got there, I saw that the boxes of loaner slippers had disappeared. There were still a lot of slippers lying around, however, so I asked the guys at the front if I could go in with my shoes on. They said that I could either use the slippers or my shoes, as I pleased. I wore my shoes.

At the main office of the department, I introduced myself in rather formal Japanese, saying "Hello, I am S, who has been entrusted into the care of this department" (こんにちは、こちらにお世話になることになりましたSですが). This may sound a bit extreme, but it was regarded as the appropriate sort of thing to say at this juncture by the woman at the desk, who gave a little bow. I then asked if my contact person was in, but he had seen me come in, or something, and was already on his way over.

He welcomed me and took me to a conference room in the back, to sign the contract. While he was getting the contract papers, I took this picture of the main quad of the campus. The statue is of Okuma Shigenobu, the samurai scholar who founded the university in 1882. Somehow, signing the contract in my own shoes felt more dignified to me.

After signing the contract, I was given the key to my new office, which is on the top floor of the building with the other faculty offices. In Japanese, a professor's office is called a research room (研究室), and that is certainly what mine looks like.

I borrowed a moving dolly from the logistics company, and spent the afternoon bringing my research books into my new research room. My teaching books will arrive from Canada in the next few days.

By the time I decided to call it quits, I had everything divided into subject piles, but nothing really put away. I also had a list of things the office needed.

I'm not sure about the logistics, but hopefully I can get back in on Sunday.

Osaka to Tokyo

2009-03-06T22:29:00.014+09:00

Well, I moved - and none too soon, because after spending about six months excavating the lot across from my balcony and apparently finding nothing, they decided to put up a new wing of the national hospital. Now, instead of the Naniwa-no-miya park, this is all you can see out of my old window.

I wont miss the sound of the construction, but I will miss the sound of the kids playing after school. Look at how tiny those kids are. I don't really understand how they can make as much noise as a construction site, but they do.

I don't know if there is anyone reading this blog who doesn't already know, but I accepted a tenure track professorship at Waseda University (早稲田大学). So, I'm posting this from a faculty apartment near the Waseda campus in Tokyo's Shinjuku-ku. Actually, this apartment is just a temporary place for a few weeks, before they move me to another faculty apartment that is right in the middle of campus. (If you click on the "view larger map" link below, you can go to street view and see my apartment building. It's the off-white building besides the parking lot and across the street from the construction sight.)

View Larger Map

Needless to say, it has been a busy couple of weeks. I was going to my Japanese classes right up until my last day in Osaka. My teachers wanted me to make a speech in Japanese. I tried to get out of this in various ways, including telling them that I had no time outside of class to prepare the speech - which was true. They were undeterred by this, however, and simply cleared up class time for me to work on it. I wanted to do something kind of original, as opposed to a self-introduction or a trivial cross-cultural comparison, which is the standard fare for such speeches. I ended up doing a simplified version of the story of Fred Marshall's pumpkin harvest. After a few rounds of revisions, my teachers decided the speech was ready, and then told me they were going to make a video of it and play it at the graduation party, which I would, happily, miss.

After a fairly humiliating morning of repeatedly recording the fifteen minute story until my teachers were satisfied that I had made no major pronunciation slips and had expressed what they regarded as fitting sentiment at the appropriate moments, I rushed home to finish packing in time for the moving company, who came that afternoon. The movers themselves were as organized as one can imagine. I had a bunch of extra boxes from a different moving company, and when I was asking my movers if they wanted them, they told me they would take the extra boxes for free, but that they could also take my full garbage bags for ¥300 a bag. Since my trash wasn't properly separated, this seemed like a better idea than facing the wrath of the old lady who was in charge of berating me about constantly failing to follow the many rules of the apartment building - most of which were unwritten, but were somehow understood by her as obvious.

The movers put all my stuff in a my own gated cage inside the moving tuck and then closed the gate and sealed it with a paper seal. They asked me to come down to the truck and witness the sealing of the cage. After I affirmed that I had, indeed, seen the cage so sealed, they told me that could witness the opening of the seal in Tokyo. I told them that I was much obliged, and there was some minor bowing and a number of thanks were said.

I spent the night at Chie's and then returned to the apartment in the morning to clean. The guy who had checked the place for damage a week before had told me just to clean it lightly, since they would clean it anyway after I left, so that's what I did. Then Chie and I had lunch together, she walked me to the station, and I took the bullet train to Tokyo. It rained all day.

The rain was heavy when I arrived in Tokyo. I didn't really know what to do, so I just walked to the address of my new place. It was just an apartment building and there was no one around. I called one of the numbers posted for the management and told them I had a reservation for that day. Then I told them I had just arrived so I had no key. Then they understood that I was a new tenant who had no idea what he was doing and they directed me to a main building where I signed a contract an was given a key.

After I dropped off my bags, I went to the new offices of my department, the School for International Liberal Studies (国際教養学部). Our department has just been moved into a huge, brand new building. Actually, the move is still in progress, so there are protective covers all over the floors and the walls to protect the building from furniture damage. (This is a standard practice in any move in Japan.)

Moreover, for reasons that I do not entirely understand the moving company had provided boxes of slippers, one for public use and one reserved for moving company employees, at the front entrance of the building. Near the boxes many people had left their own shoes. I could read the signs and see all the shoes, but somehow I couldn't really believe it. As I was standing there wondering what to do, however, a woman came out of the building wearing bright blue loaner slippers and carrying her own shoes.

So I took off my shoes, put on a pair of general-use loaner slippers and shuffled in, to see if I could get the key to my new office. Our main office, however, was already closed. I thought they would be, but since Japanese work late anyways, I had decided I would go in and see. Actually, I could see people still working through the curtains but they had posted a sign stating that they were closed and to please come back tomorrow. Anyway, it had been a long day, and now I was wearing bright green loaner slippers, so I decided to just call it a night.

The National Hospital

2009-02-10T23:07:00.008+09:00

There's a National Hospital right across the street from me. I see it every day but I few weeks ago I got the influenza, so I walked over for a check-up. Apparently, the influenza that I had was the real deal, because I was so out of it that I couldn't leave my place for days on end. I kept thinking that I should go out and get some food and maybe go to the hospital, but then I would think that maybe I should just rest for a little bit first and proceed to wake up like six hours later.

At one point, I emailed a friend and asked her to bring me some food. She bought a huge bag of food and left it in front of my door, but unfortunately there was altogether too much in the way of fish and seaweed to really satisfy my idea of comfort food, so I couldn't eat much of it.

The next day, I decided to email an American friend. I told him I wanted American style comfort food, but something light. He brought me rice that was topped with a breaded and deep-fried pork cutlet all smothered in beef gravy. Somehow, it was only when I saw the food that I remembered he was a Texan.

When I woke up in the mid-morning of the following day, I hadn't eaten for quite a while and my fever still hadn't broken so I decided that I really had to go to the hospital. I didn't know the procedure, so I just took my heath card and wandered over. I went up to the information desk and told them that I had come to the hospital suddenly with some kind of sickness. It was kind of an oblique way of putting it, so the lady asked me if I wanted a medical examination. She used the technical term, which in theory I should have known. It's not a term I hear much or ever really use, however, and, being American, it didn't occur to me that you could just walk into a hospital and request a medical examination, so I just sort of stared at her blankly. Then she asked me if I had come to visit someone at the hospital or for a medical examination. I told her that I hadn't come to visit anyone so I guess I had come for a medical examination. This time, I used the technical term.

Then she led me to another desk, where they gave me a sign in sheet. There were boxes where you could just choose what department you needed. You could just go right ahead and make a check for surgery or the cardiovascular clinic, or whatever. I knew the Kanji for most of these words because there was a section in one of my textbooks on hospitals and their departments. Nevertheless, I wasn't really sure what box was best for me, so I told the guy at the desk that I had a fever and a headache and he told me that I should probably go to internal medicine.

If there were an award for the Most Adorable Doctor In the World, my internal medicine Doctor could surely be a contender. She was tiny and seemed much, much too young to be a doctor - maybe like a 12 or 13 year old girl who was playing dress up. There was team of nurses who took all my statistics and laid me out on one of the gurneys. The Doctor, who seemed far and away to be the youngest person in the room, would come talk to me for a while and then go and type furiously at a computer on the other side of the room. Sometimes I had the feeling she was only humoring me. At one point she told me that if I wanted she could give me an intravenous transfusion. I didn't know the term for an intravenous transfusion so I asked about that. She made some gestures and gave a fairly graphic description, and I asked if she really thought that would be necessary. She said that she didn't.

About an hour later, they sent me home with a medication for the fever and another for the flue. Taking those medications, I started to recover by the evening.

I'm back in Japanese school again, for two hours every day. This time it's a completely different experience. Now, I can actually understand everything the teachers say, and I can articulate my questions about whatever I don't know. We're moving too fast for me to retain everything again, but I can put the new constructions into use right away and I understand fairly well what they mean. Still, I have the constant feeling that even though I am slowly climbing, I'm at the base of a huge, and still largely unseen, mountain.

Here are a couple pictures of some otaku bikes at a local bike show.

Check out Little Busters. Bike geeks, anime style.

Washington D.C.

2009-01-19T03:51:00.006+09:00

In the second week of January, I went to the US capital to give a talk in the history session of the Joint Mathematics Meeting of the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematics Association of America. This is sort of an ideal setting for a historian of mathematics. The meeting itself is huge with over 2000 talks, and the history session has one of the larger rooms, seating some 250 people. Since many mathematicians are interested in the history of their discipline, the room is usually close to full.

I was mostly busy with the conference, but my colleague Toke and I did get out to see some of the monuments and a few of the museums in the Smithsonian Institution. Actually, the only patriotic thing I did was visit the Lincoln memorial.

It was a dreary day and as we were walking back towards the museums it started to rain. I didn't even bother to go look at the White House. After all, I've seen it a million times in photos and movies, and I wasn't planning on going inside.

The Smithsonian Institution was really amazing. There must be around 20 museums, all of which are free and really well presented. One could spend days wandering around them and still not see everything. We only saw a fraction of the holdings of the few that we had time to visit. As well as having the money to put up first class exhibits, the Institution also possesses a fair number of original items from all over the world.

Below you see the Hope Diamond.

In the Air and Space Museum, there are spaceships and planes from all over the world hanging from the ceilings, including the original Wright Brothers 1903 flyer and one of the joint Soviet and US space stations.

Here's a picture of one of the top of the high end bikes made by the Wright Brothers in the bicycle shop where they built the first plane.

Beijing

2008-12-31T18:43:00.008+09:00

On the way back to Osaka, I stayed in Beijing. It was my first time in China, but luckily my friend Carlos's friend Joy was able to show me around a bit.

I was only there for a bit and everything took longer than I had expected so I wasn't able to see that much. But we tripped around here and there and had some great food.

The best meal we had was probably the hot pot at this Muslim restaurant. The water was heated by that big cone filled with burning coals.

It was basically like Japanese nabe except the stuff you put in the pot was a bit different and, obviously, there was no pork.

Beijing was a strange experience in the winter. It was freezing and I could see that all the standing water was frozen as we flew in, but there was no sign of any snow. The city is basically flat and in the middle of an endless flat plane, sectioned into rectangular fields and cut through with wide irrigation canals. When you come in from the air, you can see at once that Beijing was constructed as an imperial city, laid out around a central palace. In the winter, however, everything was just brown and gray and cold.

Most of the streets are wide and the buildings massive, clearly designed to impress. Throughout the city, there are mammoth structures of every age, including those just finished this year for the 2008 Olympic Games. There is a vast sense of history, but somehow I found the feeling of history in Beijing unnerving. It seemed as though it little matters what I say or what I think ... as though there are great, ineluctable forces at work ... that they will sweep over me and swallow my whole life up.

I don't know. Maybe I'm just going through a strange period.

Bandidas

2008-12-31T00:29:00.008+09:00

This Christmas I took the opposite of a vacation. From relatively warm Osaka, where I had been riding my new bike everyday and wrapping up my projects for this year, I went to Vancouver, where it snowed nearly every day, riding for pleasure was of the question and I spent a week doing manual labor.

Aiyana and Jackie are opening up a restaurant on the drive called Bandidas. They got the place sometime in December and hope to open in early January. I guess when we got there they had already been working on the place nonstop for weeks, but it still seemed like an impossible job.

Somehow, the magnitude of the project and the fact that we were all there, just feed into our family's mania for work. We pulled most of the standard moves - working all day without eating, working into the wee hours of the morning and thinking that it was still like 11 or 12, working for seven hours when we meant to just drop by for an hour or two.

I didn't think it was possible when I first got there, but now it actually looks like they might get it done in time. Most amazing is that fact that, with the exception of some electrical work, it will all be done by family and friends for no more than free food and booze.

So, for another year in a row, I worked on Christmas. But this time, it really felt like Christmas. The whole world was blanketed in snow and there were Christmas carols playing everywhere, not just at Starbucks.

But hey, there's nothing like painting, cleaning and stripping glue off of tables with toxic goo while wearing cold, wet shoes day after day to make you really happy to get back to the quiet warmth of your Osaka apartment.

Maiden Ride

2008-12-19T00:38:00.006+09:00

I finished building up the Miyuki the about a week ago, and since I know of no other, she will now be called, simply, Miyuki-chan. Most of the parts, I had around - except the hubs and the toe-straps, which I obviously bought to suit the frame.

Above is a picture taken in front of a Pachinko parlor on her maiden ride. I put a drilled fork on it so I can put a break on the front, which I probably will do. But right now, the ride is just so fun I might not get around to it for a while.

Nara and such

2008-12-09T21:34:00.015+09:00

John was in town for a bit, so we did some touristy stuff. Probably the most impressive thing I saw was this gigantic Buddha in Nara (奈良). We spent all morning in a museum full of Buddhas and I was pretty sure I had seen enough Buddhas to last me for quite a while, so the impression of this one was really something. I can only imagine how I would have felt if I came at it fresh, so to speak.

It's difficult to appreciate in the pictures how big it really is, or even when you're there in person. In fact, to help you get a grip on the size of the thing, the monks have cut a hole in one of the pillars of the building that's the same size as one of the Buddha's nostrils. The whole is big enough for school children to craw through; and so they do. While I was there, I watched a 10 year old kid go through with no problem.

The Buddha is guarded by various fierce looking figures. This one is a scholar. You can see his brush and his scroll.

Probably the best way to get a sense for the size of the Buddha is to see the building that houses it surrounded by tiny people. The Buddha's seat reaches all the way up to the roof of that building.

On a different day, we went for a bit of a hike in a town called Mino (箕面), north of Osaka. At the end of November, the leaves were turning here, so it's the best season to see the red leaves.

The area where we went was actually packed with people, but you could get off the busy paths pretty easily and have a quiet hike.

And, just so you don't think these days it's all about Buddhas and autumn leaves, here are some other random shots.

It's the x-mas season here now, so these sample girls, at one of the big stations in Umeda, are dressed up to match the season, as - Oh, I don't know - sexy, black Santas. They're handing out free samples of luxury, high-end cat food. You know, 'cause nothing says Christmas like giving your cat gourmet food that you got from a sample girl dressed in a sexy French maid costume that's really a Santa costume.

And then, out by the docks near the international convention halls, we have an ominous building somewhat vaguely called "Service Center" - where everything is yellow.

A few weeks back, I took another friend out to Nagasawa's shop and on the way out we walked by a sort of suburban stripmall. Below, you see the shelves in the parking lot where a liquor store keeps all it's bulk beer. There was no one around and no sign of any security, but there it was, just sitting there, right by the road - cases upon cases of booze. In the plastic cartons to the right, there are individual bottles of beer - again, let me reiterate, within easy reach of anyone who happened by.

Finally, a picture of a host, before going out on Saturday night, saying a quick prayer at a local shrine. After he threw his money into the container, he tucked his white Louis Vuitton bag between his legs, bent his head, pressed his hands together and said whatever it is one says under such circumstances.

Election 2008

2008-11-06T23:16:00.016+09:00

I've been out of the States for the last three elections. In 2000 I was in Toronto. I was a bit let down by the result, but I kind of expected it. Also, I had no idea that Bush was going to be such a disaster. After all, in his first campaign, he ran as a moderate conservative.

The 2004 election was pretty heartbreaking. All day, while I was working in the basement of Massey College, Toronto, the exit polls were showing a Kerry win, but when I went out at night to a bar to watch the coverage, the reality began to become clear. Then Ohio and Florida fell and it was all over. I remember feeling like the floor was falling out from under me. I was surrounded by Canadians, who cared but didn't care nearly enough, who had not voted and were already showing signs of retreating to their precious moral high-ground from which they could smugly claim that such things would never happen in the safer, saner Northern America.

Japan was a great time zone to watch from but it was a bit strange culturally. Ken was aware of the historical significance of the election, but a lot of my Japanese friends just didn't understand why it was so important - why I was so excited. The East Coast polls started to close about midday through my workday on the 5th. By the time I was done with work, it was clear that Barack Obama would be declared the president elect of the United States.

When I got off work, I went to an international bar to meet some friends and celebrate with other Americans. Everyone was excited and it was the first time in years that I felt really proud to be an American.

While I watched Obama giving his speech, I cried. I also heard a line that made me realize why I felt so proud - that reminded me what it is that I do believe in about America. Obama said,

The true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth but from the enduring power of our ideals - democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope.

In fact, for regular people who aren't American citizens, maybe even for a lot of regular American citizens, these are the only things that can really be regarded as America's strength. When we move so far away from these ideals, appearing to turn our backs on them - as has happened often in our history - we become a hollow mockery of ourselves.

For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
- W. Shakespeare

Waseda Interview

2008-11-01T22:37:00.005+09:00

This weekend I went up to Tokyo to interview for a professorship in the history of science at Waseda University.

Now I have interviewed at wealthy private schools in both the US and Japan, and the experiences were very different. At Caltech, everything was paid for by the school, at Waseda, I paid my own travel expenses. At Caltech, the interviewing process lasted from eight in the morning until eight in the evening, at Waseda, it was over in an hour and forty five minutes. At Waseda, I was never told any one's names, at Caltech, I learned the names of over fifteen people and struggled to try to remember them. At Waseda, I wore a tie, at Caltech, I did not.

This picture below kind of sums up my feeling about the whole thing. I went into the front office and bumbled through a conversation in Japanese in which they used various words that I didn't understand, but eventually we got everything straightened out.

Then they took me to a lecture room so that I could set up my laptop for overhead projection. After everything was set up they took me to another classroom to wait by myself while the selection committee went into the first room. They told me it would be about half an hour, but since I forgot my watch in the other room, it felt like an eternity. It was, in fact, as I found out when I was shown back into the original room, exactly half an hour.

Everyone was seated when I went in. I was asked to introduce myself, which I did. Then I gave a 30 minute mock lecture that I had practiced every evening for the preceding week, and which, consequently, went well. This was followed by a fifteen minute question and answer period. There were a few simple questions in Japanese, that I answered in Japanese and one more complicated question in Japanese that I answered in English, but thankfully most of the questions were in English. But the fifteen minutes went by in a blur and then it was over. Everyone filed out. On the way out, one British professor (who had been sure to point out that Eton is spelled Eton, not Eaton), asked me if I was going back to Osaka that night. I said I was, and that was that.

In the main Tokyo station I noticed these annoying benches. They reminded me of some benches that Mike Davis talks about in his social history of Las Angeles, City of Quartz (1990). Apparently, the city of LA was trying to discourage homeless people from sleeping on the benches in certain parts of the city so they designed them with curved seats, so that you could sit on them but you couldn't lay down on them for any length of time.

Well, the Tokyo transportation system has taken it to a new level. Here you see some benches that you can lean on but they're specially designed so that you can't actually sit on them. Tokyoites, however, can sleep standing up on a crowded train so they should actually have no trouble sleeping on these leaner benches.

A shoemaker

2008-10-29T23:15:00.005+09:00

The other evening a friend and I were looking for a restaurant in my neighborhood and we ran across this place that seemed to be selling a pair and a half of shoes.

I could see some leather rolls in the back, however, so I pointed out that it was probably a shoemaker's and, of course, we proceeded to get into an argument about the place of hand-made shoes in the modern world.

Eventually, the shoemaker saw us out there carrying on this discussion and invited us in to see his shop.

He seemed to me to be pretty young for a shoemaker. He was definitely younger than me, although, speaking frankly, this can no longer be regarded as much of a criterion for youth.

Apparently, he was trained in various famous shoemaking shops in Italy and England and he seemed to care as much about shoes as anybody who has taken the time necessary to develop real skill in something cares about that thing for which they have given so many of their hours.

He was able to talk endlessly about the various leathers - where they come from and what they are best suited for - the machines - all of which came from Germany - and that each pair of shoes is entirely custom made based on a cast of the client's foot. His shoes start at around 100,000円.

My friend asked him what was the most difficult thing about being a shoemaker and he said that all ladies want an elegant shoe - something that is slim and graceful - but the ladies who could afford a 100,000円 pair of shoes tend to be both fat and ugly, and it is only with great skill and diligence that a shoe that looks slim and graceful can be made to bear such a lady.

Tokyo Trip

2008-10-23T20:50:00.005+09:00

I went up to Tokyo last weekend to give a talk at a small conference on history of mathematics at Tsuda College (津田塾大学), a girl's school famous for its superior mathematics program. I stayed at a friends house that night and the next day, before I went home, I did some shopping and took a walk around the campus of the Waseda University (早稲田大学).

Here are some shots of the interior of Blue Lug, a specialty bike shop in Tokyo kind of near Shibuya Station that has the endearing motto It's only bicycle, but we like it.

Here's a apartment building near Waseda. The front has a some shops, including this hair salon.

The entry to another store goes over this wicked tiled demon with a big, long tongue.

The demon looks like it has some kind of piercing with an ornament in its tongue. Or maybe that's just a bug.

A Miyuki Frame

2008-10-09T22:06:00.006+09:00

I bought this Miyuki frame in a little shop under Shinimamiya Station (新今宮駅), down near Kamagasaki. The shop used to specialize in BMXes, but lately they've been getting a lot of old track stuff in. I picked up this Miyuki for a number of reasons. I've been meaning to get another frame for a commuter and this one was pretty suitable. It's a handmade steal frame and it was a reasonable price (20,000円).

I had never heard of a Miyuki frame before and that was one of the reasons I decided to buy this one. From what I have found out, Miyuki was a small factory in Tokyo that has since closed down. Apparently one of the frame builders went on to work at 3Rensho. This frame is marked 130 on the BB and is probably the 130th frame they built. It is made of Ishiwata Croston 019 double butted cromo tubes.

Aside from having a cute Japanese girl's name, or rather a name that you could imagine belonging to a cute Japanese girl, there are a number of other endearing features to this frame. The logo, for instance, is somehow strangely incongruous with the name and appears to be a snooty rooster starring off into the middle distance.

There are also a number of platitudes stated on the frame in various places. For example under the striped Miyuki label on the seat tube, in Italian, it reads, Campione del Mondo.

In a number of places, and shown here on the top tube, we find the English phrase GAZING AT THE IMPOSSIBLE, which appears to be a sort of motto. One wonders, then, if the rooster is perhaps not so much a snob as somehow transfixed by this act of constant gazing over such vast distances. Or perhaps, long hours of such gazing has lead to a certain frustration, and in turn a sort of anger at the pain and absurdity of it all.

Finally, we have a personalized adaptation of a John Lennon lyric, You may say we are dreamers, someday you will join us, which is signed by the frame builders or the owners of the shop. I don't really know what a statement like this means in the context of being stuck on a non-drive side chain stay. I guess it's more to do with the impossible and the kinds of responses they had been getting for staring at it all the time.

I don't really know what to make of it all, but I couldn't say no to riding a bike called Miyuki rocking an angry rooster.

If anyone has any real information on Miyuki, drop me a comment.

Some pictures from Kyoto

2008-09-09T13:37:00.011+09:00

One of the malls attached to Kyoto JR Station.

The grounds of Ryoan-ji (龍安寺), widely regarded as one of Japan's most beautiful temples.

The rock garden inside Ryoan-ji, made up of fifteen rocks and white gravel. This garden is considered to be a masterpiece. You can buy a booklet about it in Japanese that has over a page devoted to each rock.

Some pictures of Ninna-ji (仁和寺), which was at one time an imperial palace and is now the headquarters of one of the Buddhist sects.

Another temple complex called Myoshin-ji (妙心寺).

Here's a guy playing golf in park. It was pretty small park, so I'm not sure how he was really able to play.

A night scene in Yasakajinja (八坂神社).

The main gates of Yasakajinja.

Looking out from the gates onto the Kawaramachi area (河原町).

This creepy looking thing below, was actually pretty creepy.

I don't know what its called, but it's to help people put an end to bad relationships. You write about your relationship on a slip of paper from the lighted desk, paste it onto the blob, with all the other descriptions of bad relationships, and then craw through that dark hole.

I tried to read some of the slips. Most of them seemed to be about people, but there were also discussions of smokes, booze, gambling and such. I was then told that it was in bad form to be reading the slips.

New Computer

2008-09-07T22:09:00.004+09:00

I basically use my computer all day everyday so I seem to burn through them pretty quickly. Over the last few months my silver G4 Powerbook started to whine and eventually the CD drive died. Actually, it somehow simultaneously lost the ability to read CDs and to eject them at the same time. The only way to get the CDs out was with a credit card. Credit card insertion, however, seemed to have no effect on the machine's ability to read the disks.

For awhile I toyed with the idea of getting a Japanese Mac. I went down to the Apple Store a few times and tired them out. Everything was fine except one or two keys were in different places and I couldn't for the life of me find the open quote mark. (Maybe this explains why Japanese people so often enclose their quotes in English with two closing marks.) Eventually, however, I decided to special order a Mac with a US keyboard. This time, contrary to my usual practice, I didn't buy the top of the line model. My old Mac already did everything I needed and the current mid-range models blows it away.

It was a typical Japanese affair. They delivered the computer to the front door of my apartment a few days later and I handed them a huge wad of cash.

The transition between computers was painless. There's a special function for updating from your old Mac and I used this. It imported my home directory and all my applications, preferences, everything. In less than an hour I had my work environment exactly as I wanted it and everything now worked twice as fast and looked a bit better. This was the fastest computer upgrade of my life.

Below is new style of vending machines that are popping up at some of the bigger stations. The label in blue reads "Natural Disaster Response Style Vending Machine" (saigai-taiougata-jidouhanbaiki, 災害対応型自動販売機). The red line above this informs you that in the event of a natural disaster the contents will be free. It does so in a sort of cryptic style of Kanji abbreviation which is perfectly intelligible when you look at it, but if you just said it to someone they would have no idea what you meant.

Strange Signs

2008-08-22T01:20:00.008+09:00

When I first moved to Japan, I was collecting passages of strange English, but this was too large a project and it quickly got boring. Now, I'm just taking pictures of weird signs I see around town.

You see these ominous signs on a lot of the public ashtrays around town in front of the convenience stores and whatnot. Notice how the smoke has morphed into a "stalker." The English is neither a literal nor literary translation but it gets the point across.

The other day I was in a ramen shop and they had these large vessels full of ice water on each table. The vessel itself was called a "Double cock keeper." On the side of each of the Double cock keepers was a device called a "Peacock." As the label says, the Peacock can be folded out as a stand for paper cups. In this shop, however, as usual everyone got their own cup, so we could serve ourselves all the ice water we wanted straight from the Double cock keeper with no need for the Peacock.

In Osaka, by law one has to separate one's recycling and bring out the right stuff on the right day. Since, most apartments are fairly small, you can buy all kinds of bins to help make this easier. Here's one that they sell at the Loft, which can apparently be put to other uses as well. What do you put?

This bed linen is also found at Loft, a great chain with huge store fronts at every major train station.. Loft clearly loves English, but somehow can't find room in it's budget to hire any of the poor English teachers to take a quick look over its ad copy. Nevertheless, for all my mocking, this is now my bed linen brand of choice. For one thing, I like the simplicity of the branding, and for another, I don't want there to be any more confusion of about the type of space I prefer to be sleeping in.

A friend of mine recently moved into Juso (十三), a notoriously sleazy neighborhood full of love hotels, pink shops, hostess bars, and Chinese massage girls working nearly every street corner. Here's the awning of a nearby love hotel. I'm not really sure what to make of it and I welcome any comments. The business about condoms is fairly straight forward, but what is A.A.A. in this context? As for injunction to get into a train, there was no locomotive theme to the hotel, so I don't know if it's some prison lingo or just totally off the hook.

This final sign is a common notice in the train stations around town. It tells you, in case you were in doubt about such things, that it is, indeed, a crime to molest people on the train. Actually, the first line is in Osaka-ben and then the rest is in standard Japanese. The word chikan (痴漢) can mean a molester in general, but in the context of a train station it means a groper. The sign reads something like "Molestation, No Way!" (chican akan!, チカン/アカン) "Molestation is a crime!" (chican wa hanzai desu, 痴漢は犯罪です！).

My Birthday

2008-08-19T03:11:00.004+09:00

The cake that Mom and Pop sent me arrived on Friday, and I ate it with some friends on Saturday afternoon, in a heat that was so intense the pieces melted as we were holding them. As usual, somehow I was grumpy all day on my Birthday.

In the evening, I went to a restaurant in Umeda that's famous for its view. You can see why from this picture. The food was delicious and we ate it as the sun went down and the city began to light up. I finally began to cheer up as we ate.

Here you can see the top of the JR Osaka station, Yodobashi Camera (a gigantic electronics store), the Umeda Sky Building, and various industrial plants and skyscrapers. In the background, you see the Yodagawa and Juso.

Taishou Ward

2008-07-11T23:18:00.005+09:00

Taishou Ward (大正区) is kind of like an industrial wasteland down near the ports except that there are actually a lot of residences there as well. I guess because the factories and dock yards are so ugly, you see a lot more people growing flowers on their verandas and on the sidewalks in front of their houses than in other areas of town.

Here's a big crane that separates piles of metal based on a set of criteria that is not always evident to the untrained eye. This is kind of representative of Taishou Ward, but the thing to remember is that Osaka is actually a huge industrial city and the bright lights and bling of the downtown areas are supplied by these outer Wards. The bentos that millions of people eat every day for lunch are prepared every morning in suburbs like Taishou.

The Ward is actually a collection of islands and peninsulas and there are free pedestrian ferries that you can use to cross the channels. Over the weekend, some friends and I wend on a ride around the Ward basing our route on the ferry terminals.

A few of the ferry routs are longer, but most of them just cut across a narrow channel.

In order to build the freeway bridges over the channels high enough for the big ships, they have these crazy circular ramps so the vehicles can ascend at a gradual slope.

This one near the ferry terminal has a baseball field in the middle of it. There was no game when I took the picture, but at other times I have seen little league games here, with the kids playing, the dads yelling and the cars driving around in circles. (The sign asks you to please refrain from crossing through the middle of the grounds.)

There are these nets to protect pedestrians from getting hit by fly balls that are tipped back over the home plate, but nothing at all to protect the cars from fly balls or home runs. Actually, it's kind satisfying to think of hitting a home run as knocking a ball into a freeway.

Osaka was one of the first ports opened for trade with foreign countries and the ports and loading docks of south Osaka are still a major thoroughfare for imports. This green bridge like thing is apparently a storm gate that can be lowered in case of a hurricane to prevent the high waters from sending waves deep into the city.

Another Riot in Kamagasaki

2008-06-21T23:09:00.005+09:00

Officially, Kamagasaki (釜ヶ崎) doesn't exist anymore and you wont find the name on a current map of Osaka, but that's what the locals still call the large slum in the northeast corner of Nishinari-ku (西成区).

Kamagasaki has traditionally been a day labor's neighborhood and the local hotels have average nightly rates of 1,500円, but the population is aging and even at this price many of them can't afford a room and sleep in the streets. The area is famous in Japan as the largest slum in the country, with high homelessness rates and a long history of intermittent rioting.

A couple weeks ago, a day laborer was picked up by police detectives in one of the local shoutengai, taken to the police station, beaten in the face and hung upside down from ropes. When he was released the next day with no charges, he went and told his friends what had happened. In response, about 300 workers surrounded the police station and demanded that the police chief apologize and that the defectives be fired.

This lead to four or five days of rioting. The other night, a friend and I decided to ride down and check it out. It was raining pretty hard that night, and the riots had quieted down.

I took these shots while I was riding, so they're pretty shaky. A few of the pictures that I thought would be the best didn't come out, because I wasn't actually looking at the view finder while I rode.

After we rode through Kamgasaki we headed back to Shinsekai, where Biliken, the god of things-as-they-ought-to-be, is always watching with his malevolent grin.

Not too sweet...

2008-06-04T00:05:00.005+09:00

Here's some Japanese junk food that I picked up at the local convenience store. The stock in the convenience stores here is seasonal and for some reason dark chocolate is not as well stocked in the spring as in the winter. I was looking for dark chocolate so a was reading all the packages to see what they had.

These chocolate almonds aren't dark but they were still pretty good. I bought them because they have a great tag line. It's ad-speak so it's a bit tricky to translate but it basically says, "Not too sweet is too awesome" (ama-suginakute uma-sugiru, 甘すぎなくてうますぎる). Can you imagine trying to move candy with that line in North America?

May Critical Mass

2008-06-03T23:50:00.003+09:00

It's hard for people in Osaka to understand what Critical Mass is, or why we do it, or that it's even a thing. Jon had the idea to make a flag and this helped a bit.

He brought a flag and some supplies and before the ride they drew something up with a bike rider and I put an old school crest on it and we gave it to one of the messengers to carry.

Probably everyone still had no idea what the Mass was or why we do it, but we had the flag so they knew it was a thing. Even the cabbies kept their distance a bit and didn't lay on the horn as much. They were probably thinking, "Woa... Those guys have a flag, I guess something must be going on."

Actually, I really have no idea what the cabbies were thinking but it was the funnest Mass yet, so the flag is doing something right.

Worldout Meets Trackheads

2008-05-19T22:00:00.008+09:00

Over the weekend Chris and I went to an "event" called Worldout Meets Trackheads. (The word is ebento, エベント, in Japanese as well. Somehow, they didn't have a sufficiently vague and meaningless word to use for a bunch of people getting together to do random things, so they borrowed ours.) I didn't really know what it was going to be because my friend in his email just said it would be an "event" and there would be a lot of people there. We met at Namba Hatch to join the group ride, which gave us a discount on entry to the venue.

From Namba, we rode about 20 minutes down by the port, south of Taisho-ku (大正区). It was a huge warehouse with multiple floors and it turned out there were about three main spaces, with totally different scenes in each one.

The bike scene was on the top floor and it was basically the national street track completion with goal sprints and trick comps. There were people in from all over the country but a huge contingent from the capital. This meant the Tokyo vs. Osaka rivalry was in full swing and the two main crews even stacked their bikes up in different parts of the room.

The goal sprints were done virtually, in true Japanese fashion. Three bikes were set up on rollers with speedometers on their rear wheels synced to a bank of computers. The computers then projected three different views of a virtual Keirin-jo (競輪場), one screen for each rider. It was basically, a video game of a track race where the way you play is to actually pedal a track bike with real ground friction as fast as you possibly can.

So they had a full street-track tournament in the third floor of a warehouse near Osaka's port. Above you can see one of the bikes set up in its station. Below, you see the guys at the bank of computers that control the game.

Here's one of the races in progress. At the beginning of the race, there are crew members crouched down behind the bikes, holding the wheels so you can't jump the gun. Just like a real Keirin race.

After the goal sprints came the trick competition, proceeded briefly and chaotically by one or two games of foot down.

These were the best guys in the country, so the tricks were pretty outrageous. It was hard to get much on my camera, but this guy has his front wheel stopped with his foot on the tire and now he's kicking the back around. After he flips it around 360º, he's gonna drop back down onto the seat.

There were competitions for both BMX and track bikes, but actually the guy who came in first on BMX also came in second on track.

This is him, below. There was a major rivalry between the Osaka guys and the Tokyo guys and the main guy from Tokyo was being a bit of a wanker. At one point he got so mad about screwing up a trick that he jumped on his rear wheel and trashed it. So, I guess the BMX champ, decided to finish him. It was an elimination tournament, so he borrowed a friends track bike and just owned the place. Here he his going backwards by kneeling on the bars and propelling the bike by kicking the front wheel. He treated the track bike like a BMX and he did thing on it that I didn't think were possible.

Actually, all in all the Osaka crew owned everything and one of the guys from the Tuesday night ride came in first.

But this guy, below, was my favorite. He came out into the arena with that huge black bag on his back, a pair of thick chains around his neck, and a can of beer in one hand. Each rider had one minute to do as many tricks as possible and as the announcer was doing the count down, this dude was egging on the crowd, telling the Tokyo guys that now they were gonna see how things were done in Osaka.

First, he spent about 10 seconds just setting down his beer and grabbing his crotch to adjust those massive shorts he was wearing. Then, he turned the bars of his bike all the way to one side and lifted it up in one hand. Then he balanced it like that in one hand for the full minute, occasionally shouting out to the crowd. As the announce r began the countdown for his time he started bellowing like a caged animal and on one he just threw the bike into the air, knocking out one of the lights.

The main competition ended around 3:30 am and we wandered down into one of the other areas to get some food. It was basically like a normal club down there, with no trace of the track madness. Beside Chris and myself, I only saw two other foreigners there the whole night.

Tripping around

2008-05-18T23:34:00.004+09:00

Chris was visiting Japan for the last couple of weeks so we had a few days to ride around together and check out Osaka. This was the first time I've had a chance to show anyone around the Osaka I know, and by seeing the city through her eyes, I got to trip out again on a lot of things that I've somehow gotten used to.

We rode all around the one day. Down in Shinsekai (新世界) we saw this game called The Marine Catcher. All over Osaka there are these game shops that are full of all manner of games - video games, gambling games, and tons of these so-called catcher games. This, however, is the weirdest one I've seen yet. You use two buttons to position the catcher device for a single grab at the live shrimp in the basin. The prize you get for winning the game is the live shrimp that you caught. I guess you could take it to a nearby shop and ask the chef to make it into sushi. The sign with the sexy girl says ebi, which as anyone who's ever eaten sushi knows, means shrimp.

Later that day we went up to Nipponbashi (日本橋), which is were the otaku hang out in Osaka. It was a Sunday, so it was pretty crowded. Chris was looking for an anime figurine for a friend of hers, but I convinced her to come with me into a manga shop that only carries manga for girls. I forget the name of the shop but the subtitle was in English and read, "For the Ladies."

I had heard about a new trend in girl's manga featuring boy-on-boy love, but this in no way prepared me for what we saw in the store. Although there was other stuff, the place was basically packed with gay loves stories. In a strange twist on the gay love story scene, I was the only guy in the crowded shop and from the looks I was getting from the customers, I clearly did not belong. Below, you see some of the staff picks.

Eventually, we found a figurine shop for anime fans, but since the prices started at around 5,000, Chris decided not to get one for her friend after all.

That evening, I took this shot of my bike on one of the bike bridges in the northing part of the city.

Learning Japanese

2008-05-06T23:41:00.005+09:00

In the month of April, I noticed the biggest change in learning Japanese in the whole time I've been at it. In February and March I spent a lot time just memorizing vocabulary and reading grammars and in April it all started to sink in and for the first time I could really have simple conversations in Japanese. In April, I met and made friends who speak no English. Everyday, I read and write email in Japanese.

I guess the strangest thing is the way the grammar starts to slowly make sense through repeated exposure. Japanese grammar divides the conceptual space differently than any other grammar I've ever studied. Not only is the range of meanings of individual words different and often unexpected, but fundamental concepts are different. For example, the distinction between object and subject is sometimes different, the line between transitive and intransitive actions is in a different place and the structural relationship between individual objects and their context has a different composition. There's not really a whole lot you can do to try to sort all this out other than to just get used to it.

Like in any language, some of the rules are simply rules - they don't make any necessary sense - most, however, make good sense, it just takes a long time for someone who doesn't think in those rules to see the sense that they make.

The result of all this is that my life in Japan is starting to open up a fair bit. I don't feel as much apprehension just doing simple things as I used to, because I know I can talk to who ever I run into. I still cant' read Japanese prose, but I can at least get the gist of the signs and I can read basic conversational email.

Hair Dye

2008-04-28T02:22:00.007+09:00

I'm thinking of maybe dying my hair again, so I decided to check out the selection of products at one of the big shopping centers. Most of the stuff was aimed at various fashion niches that I don't fully understand, but the two most curious where the following.

If you're a girl, maybe you might want to look like a little doll with large round eyes and a huge head. Well, if that's your situation, here's the product for you. This package is the lightest of the light. The color is called mega-mega bleach (メガメガブリーチ) . You know, 'cause it's like mega.

If you're a dude and you're into the doll look, you're out of luck. On the other hand, maybe you want to look like some guy from a manga. Check out these, yahoos. Those shades of brown were more or less as difficult to distinguish between in the store as they are in the photo.

A 3Rensho mountain bike

2008-04-16T13:15:00.006+09:00

Check it out! A San Renshou mountain bike (three straight victories, 三連勝). Maybe you're thinking, "Ah, that frame was probably made for a road bike and then somehow outfitted with those MB components."

But take a look at the clearance and the pegs for caliper breaks. It was definitely made as a mountain bike frame.

The Osaka History Museum (大阪歴史博物館)

2008-04-16T01:45:00.006+09:00

The other day I met a guy named KSK riding a purple Vivalo on the quad of the Osaka History Museum near my place. KSK keeps a blog on some aspects of the bike scene in Osaka. Both liking purple bikes, we naturally hit it off and he told me to come by on Tuesday, when a bunch of guys hang out on the quad and practice tricks.

Actually, I'd seen them before, but the few times I had tried going by was no one there. Also, since I didn't know anyone, and my Japanese is such shit, I felt a bit weird about just showing up. But I had gotten by fine meeting KSK in Japanese, he invited me and then my other friend Ryouzou wrote me that he was also going.

It turned out to be cool. Everyone was chill, my Japanese was good enough to talk about bikes and make conversation about basic stuff, and I did my first weelie. Out of about 50 times getting the bike fully riding on one wheel, I was only stay up for about 10 feet at best. On the bright side, I also didn't fall down. Not that night.

Springtime in Japan

2008-04-12T20:25:00.011+09:00

The thing to do in the spring in Japan is to go drink in a park somewhere and enjoy the return of the warm weather. This is called flower viewing (hanami, 花見), because the cherry trees (sakura, 桜) are in full blossom, and probably because this sounds more sophisticated than just coming straight out and saying that you're going to go sit in a park and get drunk.

Everyone has parties and sits on ubiquitous blue tarps and drinks all afternoon. On the weekends, they drink on the tarps all day. The company hanami parties start in the afternoon, so in order to get a good spot for viewing the sakura they send out a junior guy to sit on a tarp all day and wait for everyone else to show up. From what I could see, these guys don't do much drinking on their own.

Some friends and I went to Arashi-yama (嵐山), where I went in the fall to see the leaves change colors in the outskirts of Kyoto. Again it was absurdly busy, but we hiked in a short distance and suddenly it was very quite and absurdly beautiful. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.

This next one looks like something out of a movie, but when we were walking back, this dude just sitting there fishing in the early twilight. You can see where the old Japanese painters got their ideas.

When we got back to Osaka, it was just as loud and dirty as ever. When we were hanging out in Ame-mura (アメ村), I got a picture of this thing. I have no idea what it's called, but you can see it's like a cross between a transformer and a lowrider.

Critical Mass 3

2008-03-29T17:50:00.006+09:00

When I got home after eighteen hours of traveling, just as I was getting my mail out of my mail out of my mailbox, Maisie called to ask if I was coming to the mass.

I was long passed exhaustion but since they were riding by my place, I figured I would join the ride for a bit. It was a small group again with a few different riders.

After I joined them, we rode around Osaka Castle. It was good to see everyone and kind of jarring to be thrown back into Japanese with so little sleep. Since neither of us had eaten, Shoko and I dropped out to grab a bite. After dinner, Shoko went to rejoin them but I was too beat, so I went home and slept until 3:oo AM, when I mysteriously woke up and couldn't fall back asleep.

When I was out walking today, I got a different kind of welcome back to Japan. On Midosuji, there was a long procession of right-wing nationalists broadcasting hate speech on megaphones. There were cops lining the streets, watching them.

I said to my friend Yuka, who was getting lunch with me, "hey, it's those guys who don't like foreigners." She seemed to be totally oblivious to the situation, so I told her to listen to what they were saying. She listened for a bit, and then said, "Oh, that's really weird... I'm sorry."

Landing

2008-03-16T04:30:00.004+09:00

So, I'm back in Vancouver for two weeks, to see friends and family, take care of some business and to obtain my official status as a Permanent Resident.

This is apparently called a Landing and, as you can imagine, the Immigration people take it pretty seriously, but they're also kind of excited about it. The girl who processed me at the first counter was originally from Pakistan and told me she still remembered her landing when she was a little girl. When she saw my immigrant visa, she said, "Oh wow, you're landing today. That's Awesome!"

In the back offices, there was were some complications because, of course, I had forgotten one of my forms. But, they guy who was dealing with it was pretty chill and he took care of everything. He was a young, cheerful Ismaili guy who kind of reminded me of Amyn, except his favorite line was, "Fair enough," which was his responce to everything. The conversation went something like this.

"That's a protected document. It's like really important for this whole process."

"I meant to bring it, and I had various lists and stacks of papers, but I just got back to Japan from Europe and I was really tired. I don't know what happened."

"Fair enough. But without that I'm not sure what I can do."

"Well, I don't know... somehow I forgot it. I'm not really sure what else I can do at this point."

"Fair enough. Do you have any idea where it is? Is there anyway you can get it?"

"I live alone in Japan, so... no there isn't."

"Fair enough. Well, I'll go talk to the guys in the back and we'll see what we can do."

It took a bit of time, but he got it all sorted out. Sitting around the back immigration room in Vancouver really brought out the difference between Canada and Japan, when it comes to foreigners. The room was full of people who were immigrating and since I didn't see anyone who was clearly Native, all of the Immigration Officers were immigrants or the decedents of immigrants. There was one guy who was pretty clearly Sikh, I knew my guy was Ismaili because we were talking about it, although she spoke Canadian English with no accent, the girl at the front counter was originally from Pakistan, and there were two Asian officers who still spoke with non-Canadian accents. Canada is a country of immigrants.

Japan, on the other hand, has a statistically negligible number of immigrants. In Japan, I have to have to carry my Foreigner Registration Card (gaikokujin-touroku-shoumeisho, 外国人登録証明書) with me at all times. This is just an identification card, but it clearly marks me as a foreigner. When I was a foreigner in Canada, on the other hand, I just carried my Canadian driver's licence. But it's a bit different, because, for one thing, you can use it to drive, and for another, it doesn't other you as a non-Canadian.

I have a friend in Japan who's of Korean decent. She was born in Japan and speaks no Korean, but only has a Korean passport, because Japan doesn't automatically grant citizenship under these circumstances. There are actually 600,000 ethnic Koreans, born and raised in Japan and excluded from the rights of citizenship. They are called the Zainichi Kankokujin (在日韓国人). In Japan, less than 1 percent of the population is made up of immigrants, and these are almost all people of Chinese and Korean decent who's families have been in Japan for generations. I asked my friend why she doesn't apply for citizenship and she said she just never really felt welcome. I guess I can see her point.

Briefly back in Osaka

2008-03-13T20:58:00.005+09:00

I'm back in Osaka for one day before I fly to Vancouver.

The trip back was a typical airline fiasco. At the Charles de Gaulle Airport, I was told that I could not be issued a boarding pass for my connecting flight for some reason. As the Amsterdam Schiphol Airport is huge, and I had a fairly short layover, I realized this might be a problem and protested. The Air France attendant told me that it would be impossible to issue a connecting boarding pass at this time. I was assured with the utmost confidence that everything would be fine, that I would be met by an airline employee with my boarding pass when I got off the plane in Amsterdam. Of course, this didn't happen. Instead, in Amsterdam I was told that I would have to go to a transfer center to get my new boarding pass. As our plane was 15 minutes late, and many other plans had also been delayed, there was huge line. I took a number from the box and discovered that there were over 50 people in front of me. I went to talk to an employee, who told me to go directly to the gate. As the gate was on the opposite side of the airport I asked for a lift but was told this was impossible.

At this point I ran to the gate, and made it with 5 minutes to spare before take off. There was a security check, however, and the lady at the check told me that I was too late and it would not be possible for me to board the plane as I didn't have a boarding pass. I explained the situation, of which she was apparently already aware, and was told again that it was impossible to board the plane. I pointed out that that was absurd as the plane was right there at the end of the gate, that I could probably hit it with my bag. Then we had a discussion about the nature of impossibility.

I've noticed that the French and the Italians use the expression "it's impossible" with a range of meanings such as "it's not going to happen," "it's unlikely," "it's inconvenient for me," "bah (with a dismissive wave of the hand)," and maybe occasionally, "it's actually impossible." I don't know how the Dutch use the phrase, but none of them seem to understand that in English the expression "'it's impossible" is understood rather literally. Whatever the case, it was no use arguing with an airline attendant about such matters. I went back to the transfer station and took my place in the massive line.

Besides me was a Japanese girl, named Shiho, who had missed the same flight as me and had somehow been traveling around Europe although she could speak no language besides Japanese. I took the opportunity to brush up on my Japanese. When she was called up she asked me to help translate a bit and she was promptly issued two boarding passes for the next flight to Osaka, by way of Seoul.

When I was called up a bit later by a different attendant, I was told I would have to spend the night in Amsterdam. Normally, I would have gone for it, but I have to make my flight to Canada. I pointed out that they had just issued Shiho a ticket by way of Seoul. The attendant told me that this was because she was going to attend the death of a family member. I knew for a fact, however, that she had just quit her job and had taken the opportunity to come see her sister in Germany and travel around a bit.

I told the attendant so and asked her if the airline told them to lie to the customers. She stormed off in a huff and returned fifteen minutes later with one boarding pass and a piece of paper on which was written the information for a flight leaving Seoul after a four hour stopover on some no-name airline, for which, of course, she could not issue me a boarding pass. Again, I pointed out that there was a better option, and again she threw a small fit and eventually returned with the boarding pass. (I wonder what they pay these employees to take their jobs so personally.)

The most absurd thing is that when I eventually took those two earlier flights, there were a fair number of empty seats on each of them.

The Eastern Manuscripts

2008-03-10T18:47:00.001+09:00

The eastern collection is housed in a fairly small, third story room accessed from a different part of the quad. The whole experience is much more pleasant than Western Manuscripts. Because the collection is smaller and fewer people work on the material, the procedures are more relaxed.

They only assign one plate, in one color, a deep, blood red. They will bring you a stack of microfilms at a time that are organized by collection number with about five MSS per reel. The walls are lined with the essential reference works, which one can pile up on one's desk. Throughout the course of a workday one can come and go as need be by simply telling the librarian at the front desk that you're stepping out for a bit, without putting everything away.

I'll be in this room for the next few days.

Bibliothèque Nationale

2008-03-09T19:15:00.012+09:00

Paris has been a major contrast with Holland. I'm staying in a scuzzy little hotel near Châtelet les Halles on Rue Saint Denis, a narrow, cobbled, pedestrian street full of panini vendors, sex shops and crowds of young guys doing street pick-up. The only advantages to my hotel is that it's cheap, so I save a substantial chunk of my per diem, and it's located in the middle of the city, walking distance from the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Louvre and the museum of modern art.

The city is loud, busy and dirty. So far, I've spent all day in the library and only wandered around a bit at night. I've been pretty tired, so I haven't gotten to see to much.

The situation at the BnF is a classic example of French bureaucracy. My library card was issued fairly painlessly, and I went first to the Western Manuscripts. They are housed in an inner sanctuary, a large beautiful room with high ceilings and books lining every wall. Behind the front door, you give your card to an attendant who scans it an gives you a key. You then stow your all but your essential belongings in the box in the outer hall that your assigned key opens. You then return the attendant who confirms that your remaining belongings are permitted in the manuscript room and assigns you a work station designated by green plastic plate about 4x6 inches. No photos are allowed.

Once you're set up at your work station you can begin requesting manuscripts. The policy is that, if a microfilm exists - and they generally do - you first have to examine the microfilm at one of the microfilm stations. After you've looked at the microfilm, you can request to view the original document. If you request a microfilm, your green plate is exchanged for a bright orange one of the same size and number. About 30 minutes later, when the manuscript arrives you exchange your orange plate for the manuscript itself. The whole system is so involved that if you don't understand it well, it's easy to make a mistake. At one point the lady in charge of the microfilms assigned me an orange plate somewhat arbitrarily of a different number, which cause quite a stir later on when the confusion was realized and of course I was scolded for not realizing that something was amiss, despite the fact that I had never even seen this incorrect plate.

Although it was intense to see the room and the microfilms, the text that I was looking at are all ones that I have read many times and are very well known, so in that sense it was a little boring. For the rest of my time here, I'll be in Eastern Manuscripts, looking at Arabic texts, were there's more opportunity to make original discoveries.

But today the library is closed, so I'll go to the modern art museum and wander around the city.

Leiden University Library

2008-03-08T00:59:00.008+09:00

I've spent the last few days looking at manuscripts in Leiden University Library. This is my first time in Holland and it's been good. I flew into Amsterdam and I'm staying with Diana in The Hague. A lot of the Netherlands still has the feeling of the early modern period, when so much of the country was developed.

Getting around so easily, getting access to the manuscripts with so little hassle, drinking coffee with real pastries, having good bread with my breakfast, everything about being here makes it obvious that I'm not in Japan anymore.

I've never been to Holland before, but I feel much more at home here than I ever do in Japan - this may not be my country, but it is still my culture. I don't know the language, but I can still read all the signs and I can guess what half of them mean.

Strangely, some of my favorite food has been the most comforting thing about being back in the West - Fresh squeezed orange juice, real bread made out of real grain, fresh fruit with breakfast, good cheese everywhere.

For the last three days, I've gotten up early, taken the train to Leiden and walked down the brick streets by the canals to the library. I spent all day in the library examining medieval manuscripts a few of which I knew from microfilms but most of which I had never seen before.

It a bit unreal. I would just hand them a piece of paper with my request and a few minutes later the librarian would bring the document to my station in the reading room. Some of the texts I looked at were as old as the 13th century. I looked at 15 to 20 a day. (Below is a detail of the oldest Arabic translation of Ptolemy's Almagest. It's the part where he uses iteration to approximate the relative size of the orbit of Mars.)

I also had a chance to go into Amsterdam a bit and wander around, but I've been pretty tired from jet lag, so I haven't had too much time for much besides work.

Critical Mass 2

2008-03-02T19:00:00.002+09:00

Well, so far Critical Mass here has been unlike anywhere I've ever been before. This month we had about the same number of people, although mostly different people, which should give us hope for the future. Maybe they'll all come next time.

We just rode around for about an hour stopping at bike shops and whatnot.

Adventures in the bike trade

2008-02-26T23:42:00.007+09:00

got a new job with a substantial pay raise, so he decided to buy a Nagasawa frame. Actually, last time I had been out there, Nagasawa-sensei said he had a frame kicking around that would fit . He said he would finish it and sell it for 100,000. So, , Maisei and I went out there to see if we could order the frame. set up the appointment with Nagasawa-sensei, so I don't know what they talked about, but it confirmed my opinion that there's no point in just talking on the phone with him. When we got out to the shop, he took one look at the paper had with him detailing the frame we had discussed and told us he had already sold it. It turned into an epic evening.

At first Nagasawa-sensei insisted that he would have to make an entirely new frame and that, in itself, was a bit more than wanted to spend, and wasn't what we had talked about. Moreover, he was reluctant to let anyone else build up the bike, pointing out that since it would have his name on it, ultimately, he would be responsible. A brand new Nagasawa frame, after all, could only be build up with the best parts.

tried to talk his way out of this, but since he wasn't exactly sure what he wanted, there was no way he could convince Nagasawa-sensei. I wasn't really willing to help him out here, because he really didn't know exactly what he wanted. At one point Nagasawa-sensei pointed out that since he was the bigger bike geek, the matter should be left in his hands. (The Japanese word he used was jitensha-baka, 自転車馬鹿, "bike fool.") I basically agreed with this sentiment and kept my mouth shut. Anyway, the Japanese was flying so fast, I couldn't follow everything.

So we were at an impasse. Nagasawa-sensei wasn't going to sell a frame by itself, and didn't want to pay the full price for a brand new bike, fully build up. Nagasawa-sensei spoke his mind, folded his arms over his chest and sat back looking at , who shifted around uncomfortably. Eventually, Nagasawa-sensei suggested that we go down to the workshop.

In the lower shop, we just puttered around, looking at the machines, discussing frame building and looking at some of the projects on the go. Eventually, in this row of fames, I noticed some large unfinished frames wrapped in plastic. I asked Nagasawa-sensei about these and he pulled them down. The first had some rust, but the second was a clean, unfinished frame from the 80s in 's size. Nagasawa-sensei said he'd finish the frame and build up the bike for 160,000 and I told he wasn't going to get a much better deal than that.

We spent about fifteen minutes discussing the paint job and then went back up to the main office, so they could discuss the components. Again, the fact that didn't know exactly what he wanted complicated the entire process.

Eventually, Nagasawa-sensei's daughter came out and she and Maisei and I talked while the the other two hashed out the details of the bike. At one point I asked her when our last train was and she told us that we had missed it over an hour ago, but that she would drive us back to town. Maisei and I were a bit taken aback.

After they finished discussing the bike, Nagasawa-sensei broke out the Nihonshu and passed out drinks while he told us his story. It was now past 1:00 am and the Japanese was too involved for me to really follow.

At one point asked Nagasawa-sensei if he ever drank in the shop and he said he only drank after the work was over, but when we finally said good by, around 1:45, he said he was going back to work and headed back to the lower workshop.

I got home around 2:30.

Onsen in the mountains

2008-02-19T19:08:00.005+09:00

Over the weekend, some friends and I went to an onsen way out in the mountains surrounding Kobe. This was my first time at an onsen, and since they're such a big deal in Japan, I thought there was going to be more to it, but it's basically just gender-divided hot tubbing.

We went to a hotel that had two different bathing rooms, one on the ground floor and one on the ninth floor. They issued us bathing clothes that kind of looked like something a samurai might wear but which I'm sure were actually much simpler and cruder than anything a samurai would ever be caught dead in. Once we changed into these clothes, we spent the rest of the time in this get up, shuffling around the hotel in slippers. (My slippers kept flying off my feet, occasionally hitting other pedestrians shuffling by, proving once again that everything in Japan takes some getting used to.)

We would spend a few hours in the baths and then recuperate with some food or sleep and then back to the baths. It seemed a bit indulgent to me, but this was actually the plan.

The bathing rooms are divided by gender. The baths themselves are in a sort of inner sanctuary, made holy by the gradual removal of shoes and clothes. The foyer of the baths is a no-shoes zone, the dressing room for the baths a no-slipper zone. Here, we undressed and put our samurai clothes into wooden lockers. The bathing room was a no-towel zone, except for a tiny washcloth that everyone carried (actually, lots of the older guys kept their the washcloth on their head when the were in the bath). First we sat down at washing stalls that looked kind of like dressing tables for a theater, except you sit on a low wooden stool and wash yourself, and instead of make-up and hair spray they are supplied with soap and shampoo. (The brand of the soap was called "horse oil," 馬油. I'm not sure exactly how it's pronounced or if it comes off as wrong in Japanese as it does in English.) The rule is you have to wash yourself completely before getting in the bath. There were six different baths in the men's section. There were various temperatures, mineral contents, bubbles, and so forth. Two of them were outside, and since it was snowing, this was somehow the most exciting area. We just sat around in the baths for hours, wandering from one to another.

The baths were open from 5:00 in the morning until 2:00 at night. Since we all had to work on Monday morning, it was decided that we would wake up early and hit the baths for an hour from 5:00 to 6:00 and then head back to Osaka. This seemed crazy to me, but it apparently made perfect sense to everyone else.

Randomly, this is the tile work at the Tsurumiryokuchi Station (鶴見緑地駅) on the subway's Nagahorietsurumiryoku Line (長堀江鶴見緑地線), the only line in the city whose name I still consistently forget.

Car Trouble

2008-02-16T15:53:00.003+09:00

Last night I had my first real accident in Japan. I was riding with Eph, who just moved here from Vancouver, and I got broadsided by a car. Luckily, we were both going fairly slow, so although the car didn't make the slightest effort to avoid me, there was no real harm done. I was knocked head over heels but amazingly there was no damage to my bike at all and my legs were only slightly banged up. (Strangely, my bike was more damaged in two previous collisions with other bikes than last night.)

I got knocked down in the middle on the intersection, so the first thing I did was get back on the bike and ride to the sidewalk. The driver just took off and while I was trying to shake it off a lady came up and started asking me, in thick Kansai-ben, if I was OK. I told her that I thought I might be and then she told us that if something happened, we should call the police. She was mostly talking to Eph, because he looks like he could be Japanese, and because I was a bit to shaken to pay much attention. At one point, she was telling him that we should tell the police the car's licence number and that it was 55768, or 55678, or maybe 55687.

After I got my breath back, we went to a nearby shop and had my rear wheel trued while I waited for the adrenaline to subside so I could determine if there was any long term damage to my legs. The stinging was pretty intense but I decided my legs were actually fine and to try to ride it off.

We ended up riding for about two hours, out east near Kyobashi (京橋) and around Osaka Castle. Here's a cute little Christmas love hotel that we saw along the way. In Japan, every night can be like Christmas, as long as you have someone to spend an hour or two with.

Pruning Trees

2008-02-12T22:30:00.000+09:00

A lot of the construction workers here have wild outfits, but I haven' t really gotten up the nerve to just go right up and take pictures, because, like anywhere, they're tough dudes who look like they don't give much of a shit. But you have to hand it to them. Osaka wasn't built in a day.

The two guys in these photos are wearing fairly characteristic ninja shoes with a split between the big toe and the others. Some of the guys wear really wide pirate looking pants that tuck into these shoes, but I haven't been able to get a good photo yet.

HEP5

2008-02-11T11:17:00.002+09:00

That red demonic looking thing reaching up into the sky is actually the Ferris Wheel (kanran-sha, 観覧車) on top of HEP5, seen behind one of the many entrances to the Hankyu Railway station. Ferris Wheels are somehow a typical feature of the skyline in many entertainment districts in Japan. This one is visible from almost anywhere in Umeda.

The sign is quite boring. It reads Hankyu (阪急), the name of the railway, Umeda Eki (梅田駅), the station name, San Ban-gai (三番街) and Juu-nana Ban-gai (17番街), that is number 3 and number 17 shopping mall. These bangai go up as far as number 32, spreading out in a mysterious labyrinthine structure around the station. They belong to the rail company and are a vital part of the company's overall business strategy. They must have been numbered chronologically, in typical Japanese fashion, because there seems to be no connection between their numbers and their physical distribution. Indeed, it seems likely that some of them were torn down and replaced with others at the next chronological number. I'm sure I haven't seen close to 32 of then but I have been in the 32nd bangai.

First Snow

2008-02-10T13:14:00.000+09:00

Somehow, this weekend we got our first snowfall of the year. It came down for hours yesterday, but today the sun came back out and melted it all off. Now it's sunny and warm again.

Critical Mass 1

2008-01-27T01:40:00.000+09:00

Last night we did the first critical mass in Osaka in a few years. There were only about 20 riders in the beginning and it quickly dropped off to about 10.

We had a route planned and mostly stuck to it, despite some protests that we should ride on the major roads.

Here's most of the group in the beginning. We never did the northern part of the route because it was really cold and by the that time there were only six of us left. So we pulled off at a bar between Shinsaibashi (心斎橋) and Hommachi (本町).

Osaka January 25, 2008

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Yakuza

2008-01-25T14:06:00.000+09:00

Today, I had my first definite Yakuza sighting. Their girlfriends are a lot easier to identify. They wear almost nothing at all and teeter around on super high-heels, covered in tatoos - they're the only hot girls on the street that the nampa guys don't say a word to. The guys, however, are usually a bit more discrete. Actually, this guy was probably pretty low down in the chain, because he was dressed like a thug.

When I was doing my shopping in an old shoutengai, I saw this tough looking dude in his 40 wearing a track suit and a huge down jacket. Then, I noticed he was missing the ends of two of the fingers on his right hand. The damage was new, because his hand was still bandaged, but it was clear that the fingers had been chopped. I guess I was a bit obvious, because when he saw me looking at his hand, he shoved it into the pocket of his jacket. He was reading the adds for rental places posted outside of one of the ubiquitous rental agencies, and after shooting me a glare he went back to reading.

Imagine trying to rent a place in Japan with two fingers missing.

Critical Mass, Osaka

2008-01-23T17:11:00.000+09:00

Because there's no critical mass in Osaka, my friend Maisie and I are trying to start one. Apparently, they used to have one here and there's still an old website for it, but it died out some years ago.

Maisie made up some fliers and we've been handing them out and trying to generate some interest for this Friday's ride. Somehow, independently, we both got into contact with a guy named Takuya, who used to organize the rides in Kyoto and Osaka. Takuya told me on the phone that doing a critical mass in Japan is way different than anywhere else and then he sent me a long email full of advice. There's some great stuff in it, so I'll quote some excerpts:

Here's some advice from a bitter old man...

Make a strong outline. Once somebody said, "We should ride on the sidewalk." We took a majority vote and she won....

Someone else said, "We should make a single line. Let's not ride side by side." We took a vote and he won...

"Let's not take over a whole lane... Let's not play music while we ride... let's be courteous to drivers..." Things like that appeal to many people here.

"Let's ride in a park so we don't bother driver's" didn't win, but many people thought it was a good idea.

Help them understand what C.M. is and what it's not.

Recruit beginners. They are not committed but they have good vibration. Most newbies have good ideas about bikes, and they use commonsense. But they will follow like ducklings... teach them how to ride safe before you go into the street... You ride through a yellow light and they will ride through a red light without looking.

Watch out for bike geeks. Some bike geeks will put people off by trying to pick up girls by talking about the newest bike parts... Or by trying to make everyone ride the same kind of bikes as them... Bike geeks are welcome at C.M. but don't let them overrun it.

Watch out for bike shops. They will bring people to C.M. but really they're there for selling bikes. They will make C.M. into something that it is not.

(Well actually, I'm a bike geek and a bike shop owner and I like picking up girls, but for C.M. forget all that.)

There's a lot more detailed advice and then at the end he says, "Sounds hopeless? That's exactly why we need a Critical Mass."

We decided that we're gonna have to do things differently here, at least at the beginning, and so we planned a route. There are two reasons for this, one cultural and one logistical. Japan is not a place were people get together to do random unplanned events, so having some structure will reassure everyone that we know what we're doing, and Osaka is not a city where you can just ride on any street you want. Some streets are major auto thoroughfares and others are mobbed with pedestrians. In order to navigate a group of bikers through the city, you kind of have to think ahead so that you don't end up stuck on a street that wont work. The simplest way to do this is just to plan the route.

Tomorrow me and Maisie are going to do a test run of the route.

In other bike news, since Jackie sent me the Campy seat post off her Veloche, I finished building the Nagasawa. I want a different seat, but for now I had a yellow one sitting around that will do.

Here it is leaning up against one of the outer walls of Osaka Castle on it's debut ride.

The Elephant in Japan

2008-01-12T01:43:00.001+09:00

Every week I meet with Takanori and we read Arabic together in his office. Takanori reminds me of some of my best teachers. We read slowly and carefully and at the end of every session we have raised more questions than we have answered.

He has this poster on the wall above his desk. I don't think the colors came through well, but it's printed on a deep yellow. It was made by a geriatrics association in Rhode Island for some campaign to encourage the elderly to continue reading. But that's not just some random old man studiously scribbling in a notebook. That's Otto Neugebauer.

My doktorvater has an original print of that same photo in his office above his desk. Actually, although Takanori is older, he and Alex were students together at Brown when Negebauer was still there. Even here in Japan I feel the presence of his tradition.

Mathematicians love these traditions that have to do with intellectual lineage - the transmission of knowledge and methods from one generation to the next, the development and preservation of schools of thought and styles of scholarship. They are much more interested in this intellectual transmission than in bloodlines. Once Deborah and I were talking about the Mathematics Genealogy project with a colleague who works in the history of biology and had never heard of it before. He started half joking that the mathematicians were going to mix this project up in with some kind of eugenics and try to breed a race of super mathematicians. When we realized he was half serious, we looked at each other, a little surprised that he had no idea how completely banal mathematicians would find this idea. I recently noticed that my doktorvater is included in the Genealogy project, and so is Takanori.

Over the holidays I made a few changes in the way I'm studying Japanese and by applying them consistently for the last three weeks, I'm starting to have a real break through. I've got a basic grasp of Japanese grammar now, and can read stuff that's not too Kanji heavy, but my biggest difficulty is in understanding natural Japanese and speaking at a normal pace. The sounds are just too unfamiliar and the vocalizations too foreign.

I realized that the only way out of this is exposure and drill. I've begun to do what's called shadowing, which is speaking what you are hearing at the same time that you hear it and trying to imitate the sounds exactly. I have some text and sound files on my computer and everyday I do a half hour or so. This is just blind repetition, over and over until I can say each sentence in the same way and at the same speed as the speaker. Meaning and understanding is secondary. On top of this I'm also drilling vocab with a program I downloaded that analyzes what words you know well and what you need to be drilled in and paces the ordering of the vocab based on this analysis. Then, almost every evening I go out and talk Japanese - use the words I just studied and phrases I repeated over and over again.

Even a few of my English speaking friends have agreed to do some Japanese only time. has agreed to teach me Japanese in Japanese and when we're hanging out together, the people around us are totally mystified. Japanese people don't expect foreigners to know any Japanese, much less for one of them to be correcting another's mistakes followed by various example sentences of good usage.

The other night we went down this festival for Ebassan, a god of prosperity in business. I didn't get all the details but we were funneled into a big temple structure where people piled these bouquet like things in a huge pile and then threw money at one of the temple buildings and got a bamboo branch. I through my money clean over the roof of the building, at which said, "ma ma."

In the crowd, there was much carousing and drunkenness. We gave the temple people some money and drew our fortunes from a big urn. I got the number one fortune. I couldn't read it but when I asked a nearby girl she said that if I worked hard good things would happen. She couldn't read much of it ether, but she said that was the main drift.

Working on Xmas

2007-12-26T03:04:00.001+09:00

Christmas here really is Xmas. Christmas eve is apparently for couples - they have dinner out, eat a Japanese style Christmas cake and probably stop by a love hotel. But the day itself is just another day.

Strangely, the city has been lit up with lights for the last month, so I was expecting something more. But as you can see from the stars of David in these lights, there's actually nothing Christian about Japanese Christmas. It's just another excuse to light up the city.

Today, in keeping with the Japanese spirit, I worked. Nevertheless, midway through the morning my door bell rang, announcing the postman with a package. Christmas had arrived, and I was delighted to find cookies from Aiyana and a seat post from Jackie.

What with nuts and things from Tim and Deborah as well, I'll be stocked with hippie food for some time and I can finally ride the Nagasawa that has been sitting around, absurdly, unfinished for over a month.

In the afternoon I met with Ken to read some Greek and took care of University paperwork. (Actually, every time we meet we spend at least fifteen minutes taking care of paperwork - sometimes half an hour.)

In the evening, I met with down near his place under the Tsuutenkaku. We commiserated about having to work on Xmas, ate some green curry and talked over some plans for studying together.

Election

2007-12-24T16:05:00.001+09:00

There's some kind of local election going on. No one I know cares about it in the slightest and a fair number of people don't even know what governmental seats are being selected. Nevertheless, it's annoying because there are election vans roaming the streets making broadcasts over giant loud-speakers. A few times an hour now, while I work, some van or another drives by my window promoting their candidate.

This van was just parked on the side of the road when I was getting my groceries today. All I know about the candidate is what you can see in this photo - his name is Umeda (梅田), and his color is green. All the candidates have colors. I guess if your electorate couldn't care less about politics, you can at least hope to capitalize on their love of a particular color. That's Umeda himself in that ridiculous green jacket. The guy in black is making a speech on his behalf. This division of labor seems to be standard. You can see for yourself that Umeda is a typical politician. There was no one around, certainly no one listening, but every 30 seconds or so he would wave and, when he wasn't waiving, he would look down on us in utter disdain.

Actually, speaker-vans are common on the roads in Japan. They're usually advertising something you don't want and don't need at high volumes. Once, when I was in Kyoto, there was some kind of Christian proselytizing organization that was running a van up and down one of the mains streets for over an hour with a broadcast on loop. I couldn't understand all of it but I got the basics. It said, "Everyone is bad ... Jesus Christ is your savior ... Jesus Christ is the only god," and other gems along these lines.

Now, when I ride by a speaker-van in the street, if the window is open, I've taken to shouting "Urusai!" (五月蝿い！) at the driver. This is basically the Japanese way of saying "shut up!" but it's much more expressive, because it literally means you're annoyingly loud. I picked up that trick from a guy named Nori, who I ride with sometimes.

Various places in Osaka

2007-12-22T23:39:00.000+09:00

Today it rained all day, so I stayed inside and worked. I've finally started real work on a new paper and it feels good to be back at it. It's odd that in this strange world, separated from everything and everyone I know and love, I can still sink back into the familiar comfort of my work. There's something to be said for Mendeleyev's admonition that we must "look for peace and calm in work."

Here are a few pictures I have of various spots in Osaka.

This is an intersection at northern edge of Umeda (梅田), an upscale shopping and entertainment district. In the background, you can see the train tracks cutting through the middle of everything, as they invariably do.

Here you have a shot of Tennoji park (天王寺公園) in the south. This park was actually recently "privatized" so that now only a pathway is available to the public, while the rest of the park is behind tall steel fences, which in many places have some kind of razors at the top. It's hard to imagine how the cost of erecting these long, steel razor-fences was justified, since the land they enclose is literally just a park.

This is the local headquarters of one of the major broadcasting corporations, near Ogimachi Park (扇町公園).

These are some private houses built right up against the shore of a little lake in one of the parks south of Tennoji, near Hirano.

The next two shots are of commercial spaces which have a variety of different descriptive names.

This is a shoutengai, 商店街, or shopping arcade. They're actually just narrow streets between the shop buildings, but they're covered. They're ubiquitious in Osaka, but relatively less frequent in Kyoto and Tokyo. They come in all price brackets, but this one of the rundown ones in the south.

Here's an intersection in an underground mall (chikagai, 地下街, literally "underground passageway"). This fountain is directly below a major intersection. Below the fountain is the subway and above the intersection is the freeway.

Kyu-san's finale

2007-12-21T18:24:00.000+09:00

For the last day of class we had a ridiculous party, with tea and much strained conversation in Japanese with our teachers.

Once again Kyu-san delivered. When it was his turn to take the podium, he told us all about his job as a fruit vendor. After a short, robotic introduction, almost his entire speech was based on this material. He told us all about the different things they sold, dwelling especially on the tangerines. He never once mentioned any of the many other jobs he has told us about over the last three months.

Editing in Kyoto

2007-12-18T22:31:00.000+09:00

Yesterday Ken and I went up to Kyoto for editorial work and I got a chance to experience the cooperative work spirit of which the Japanese are so proud. Ken is the executive editor of a journal in our field that comes out once a year, and we went up to meet with the editor, Michio, and go over the page proofs for this year's book.

Michio's university is located in the foothills to the north of Kyoto in a beautiful countryside area that's charming but difficult to reach. We first met in his personal office (appropriately called a research room in Japanese, kennkyuu-shitsu, 研究室), which was actually a small library with a desk in the middle surrounded but the internal, free-standing bookshelves.

Since Michio is the head of his department, we then went to his other office (gakka-chou-shitsu, 学科長室), which was just a big empty room with one desk and a conference table. Myself, two professors, another postdoc, and a graduate student sat around the conference table proofreading, while Michio sat at the desk, working on his computer and talking to everyone. We read for hours and then took a long lunch. For some reason, it was decided that I wasn't needed for another hour, so I went into Kyoto to go to a bike shop Simon had told about.

Apparently, the guy who owns the shop was up in Tokyo at the time and it was closed, but I still got to wander around for a bit. Kyoto really does feel like old Japan, and it's full of universities, so everywhere you go, you see people studying. It seems like in every cafe people are reading journal articles.

When I got back to campus, there was of course more work to be done, and we stayed in that room, working around the table until about 7.

Conveyor belts

2007-12-12T18:00:00.000+09:00

Now the true purpose of the conveyor belts is clear.

As they dig, they sift through the dirt in various parts of the site and drop the excess onto the belts. It is then brought, by this system of belts to the hole, which they apparently dug for this purpose. I wonder how much time they spent calculating how big the hole should be.

A Sunday ride

2007-12-11T22:58:00.001+09:00

I finally got the paper that Len and I wrote on the Planisphere corrected and sent into the editor, which meant that for the first time in a month, I got to take some time for myself on the weekend. On Sunday, and I went for a long ride down into Southern Osaka. We took a winding route through parts neither of us had seen before with a vague destination of a bike shop I had been told about in Hirano (平野). I was told it was a good shop, but nothing prepared me for what we found.

This was far and away the coolest bike shop I've ever seen, and there's a real possibility that it is the coolest one I'll ever see.

It's fastidiously organized, and every cubic meter full of bikes and bike parts. The parts range from cheap and nearly worthless, to rare and sometimes priceless - but they are all sorted by type, color and value. Some of the bikes themselves have no price, just a hand-written description. There are bikes covering the whole floor but a narrow path, bikes hanging from the walls and ceiling, and between the bikes, in every available space, there are bike parts.

All of the bikes were made by the owner of the shop who's name I never learned, but who is very old and very tiny. He told us that the tall bike in the background stands at 2.6 m and that the only person who ever rode it without support was some crazy gaijin from Canada.

The pink bike in this photo is possibly the greatest tandem ever made. The front rider sits on the pink seat, the rear rider on the white one. The rear rider reaches over the shoulders of the front rider to grip the higher bars, while the front rider grips the lower bars and leans back into the lap of the rear rider. The bike was clearly made for lovers.

He told us that he has made over 400 different kinds of bikes but that he has never built a track bike, because he only makes bikes that can be ridden until you are 70 to 80 years old.

I would pay good money to see an 80 year old riding around on this little clown bike. (In related news, when I was on my way to Osaka University of Economics (大阪経済大学) the other day, I saw an old woman on an electric scooter that looked pretty much like this bike. By the time I had gotten out my camera, however, she had actually scooted away a block and a half and I didn't want to scare her by chasing her down.)

As well as all these freak bikes, he had a few perfect gems of European racing bikes, including a beautiful old Italian bike with wooden rims.

This freak bike has wobbly wheels that seem to be built onto hubs specially made for this purpose. Actually, those hubs were the rims from the wheels on some kid's novelty bike. He refitted the axles, drilled the the rims for spokes and laced them to another set of real rims.

Kyu-san

2007-12-06T19:19:00.000+09:00

There's a Chinese guy in my Japanese class named Kyu. He doesn't speak any English and his Japanese is really weird because he has been living here for two years but he hasn't taken any classes yet. He knows a lot of words, but he often can't make himself understood.

He seems to work whenever he's not in class, and one time, when I got to class early, I found him sleeping on a collection of chairs that he had gathered together into a humanoid shaped oblong in the middle of the room. He always has stories about his job, but it's impossible to get a straight answer from him about what exactly it is he does.

My friend, Ben, has taken to asking him every few days what he does for work and every time Kyu has a different story. One time he worked in a restaurant cooking rice, one time he worked in a convenience store, one time he worked at the train station. Moreover, he does all this with a straight face. If you try to ask him if it's anything to do with what he was previously telling you, he just looks at you like you're crazy, like it's a complete mystery where you're getting these ideas.

For awhile, I decided that maybe he was hooked into the Chinese mob, because he does kind of seem like the type. Then he told me this long story about shopping in Namba with his younger sister. I really don't know what to make of him.

Today in class the teacher was asking if we had part-time jobs and if so what they were. Kyu was in his element. Here spent like seven minutes telling all of us about some job he has. At first no one had any idea what he was talking about but eventually it became clear that it was all to do with washing pillows. Actually, I was able to determine what he was on about before the teacher, because he was using the wrong verb for washing pillows. For me, unlike for a native speaker, one verb for washing is much like another. At this point, having studied the language for less than six months, I already know six verbs for various types of washing and cleaning, but I obviously don't understand the differences well.

Excavation

2007-12-02T00:33:00.000+09:00

It's now clear that what I thought was a construction site outside my window is actually some kind of archaeological excavation. As you can see from this photo, they are working slowly and following the peculiar patterns of some former structure. This makes sense, because my area was the administrative center of the city during the Naniwa period.

The standard setup for construction workers here is for a crew to consists of some old guys who watch and some young guys who work. The crew outside my window is no exception. Here's a classic example of these two dudes watching a backhoe fill in a big hole it dug the week before. It's not that clear in the photo but the lower guy is just sitting on the top of the stairs below him.

Actually, since I spend a fair my time watching them while I try to think of sentences, I've gotten pretty familiar with their workday. They do stint of work for an hour or so, and then they take a half an hour break. When it was time to take a break from watching that backhoe, the guy in the white helmet went and took a power nap on top of that that thing that looks an I-beam at the bottom of the scaffolding. (They're actually conveyor belts for moving dirt around. I have no idea why they need to use conveyor belts, but I guess it has to to with the excavations. Last week the belts were set up to drop the dirt from a height into the hole that the backhoe is now filling.)

Here's a foreman at a construction site down by one of the big temples to the south of me in Shintennoji. He's got a special helmet and outfit that distinguishes him from the common riffraff. He seemed pretty stoked about his job and literally just stood there watching and smoking cigarettes while I worked in a cafe across the street. Sometimes pedestrians going by, usually old women, would stop and talk to him about the work. He would point things out to them, take off his helmet and gesture with it and then put it back on.

Autumn Leaves

2007-11-26T23:59:00.000+09:00

The last few weeks have been pretty hard. I have been working all the time and I can feel a deepening sense of isolation. The weather has finally begun to get cold, although it is still quite nice by Canadian standards.

Last weekend, myself and a few friends decided to go to Kyoto to see the autumn leaves. This is a traditional thing to do in the autumn and there's a special term for it in Japanese (kooyoo-mi, 紅葉見, something like 'viewing the crimson leaves').

The leaves were indeed beautiful, but despite the impression of these pictures the place was mobbed with people and it was actually pretty annoying at times.

There was one incident as we were passing through this bamboo grove that to my mind was particularly odd. There was a train crossing about halfway along the path through this grove and, because of the number of people, we had to wait for multiple trains to go by before we could get through the crossing.

Somehow, the passing of these trains was source of great amusement - people lined up along the railway to take pictures, everyone around me was talking about the trains. And this in a country that's virtually plagued with trains. These people ride trains every single day of their lives, everywhere they look they see train tracks and stations, but on that day, in that place, for reasons that I could not understand, it was like they were seeing trains for the very first time.

That evening we wandered around the old neighborhoods of Kyoto, which are really quite pretty, especially at night. While we were walking, we happened to see a geisha, or maiko, being delivered by her driver to an appointment. This was regarded as an extremely propitious event by my Japanese friends, because of the rarity of sighting a geisha at work.

Apparently, a geisha sighting is not only fortunate in and of itself but also bestows luck on those who have made the sighting for some unspecified period of time.

Nagasawa's Frame

2007-11-16T23:26:00.001+09:00

Nagasawa promised me that when he emailed about the status of the frame he would use as little Kanji as possible. Nevertheless, when the mail came, it was written in standard Japanese and, hence, full of Kanji. I got basic message, which was, "I'm finishing the frame tonight, come by and pick it up on Sat or Sun, but let me know before you come." But there was some stuff in the middle that I didn't understand, even though it included Kanji that I had just learned. It said something like, "If you want a rearrangement, bring the bike, there's no charge for the rearrangement." I talked to some Japanese friends about it and they didn't really get it either. Finally, I realized that since I told him I already had the other parts, he must have assumed I had them on another bike and he was saying that he would swap them all over for free.

I wrote him back, saying that there was no need for an exchange, that I was coming out alone and reminding him that my Japanese sucked. I didn't hear back from him, but when I shot him an email en route he responded that he would be there when I arrived.

When I got there the frame was wrapped in protective cardboard sleeves that he took off in pieces to show me various things, such as the fact that he had put my name on the top tube. The frame was sweet and I could see immediately that the color was gonna be sick with my hubs. I actually never unwrapped it entirely and I'm gonna wait until the bike is all built up.

Nagasawa, his daughter and I chatted as much as was possible given my Japanese, and the fact that they only know individual works of English. His daughter asked me about what I do for a living, despite the fact that she had already talked to Ken and about this. When I told her that I did research on the history of mathematics, she exclaimed with great excitement, "The history of mathematics?!?! Cool!!!" Which sounds as absurd in Japanese as it does in English (suugaku-shi?!? kakkoii!!! 数学史！？かっこいい！！).

Since I didn't need any labor for the parts, Nagasawa asked me if I needed anything else while his daughter filled out the forms. He ended up finding me some chain tensioners, a pair of MKS Unique Custom pedals, clips, and Fujita straps. He gave them to me tada, as he said -- which is the expression young people use for free. (Actually, in distinction from most people his age, he uses a fair amount of young people's lingo and words borrowed from European languages.)

The receipt they gave me is so cool I had to scan a copy of it. It's printed on some kind of anti-counterfeit paper that looks like a bond note. It has a special 200円 stamp on it that also appears on one of the forms for one of my bank accounts. (I'll have to ask someone about this.) It is then stamped twice. There is the small circular stamp with a name in Kanji that all Japanese people carry with them, and then the abstracted square one that was engraved on a large piece of stone. The stamping of the receipt was and serious affair and since there was excess ink, it had to be hung up to dry.

Like most Japanese people, they preferred my middle name, and as you can see they made the receipt out to Camillo. (I smugged out my last name in the image.) Somehow, however, Nagasawa determined that my first name would me more appropriate for the frame itself.

Here's a picture of the frame, still in wraps, surrounded by some of the parts that will be on the finished bike.

Wheel building

2007-11-11T22:45:00.000+09:00

This week was really busy. I received the referee reports for the last paper Len and I wrote and was told I had about three weeks to get all the corrections done. Since the paper is over 100 pages and the corrections mostly involve suggested changes to the edited text, everything has to be double checked against the manuscripts. Also, there are a number of suggested changes that need to be done globally and with care that every instance has been changed. Moreover, since I will do all the changes and then send the text to Len for a final once over, I really only have a couple weeks.

In order to take some breaks throughout the day from these kinds of academic details, I started to build the wheels that will go on the frame Nagasawa is making. This will be the fifth or sixth pair of wheels that I've built but the first with such well made parts.

Tonight, I finished truing the front wheel. It's has radial lacing and spins forever. I think that purple will really look sweet with the light blue frame.

Nagasawa

2007-11-06T17:25:00.001+09:00

and I went out to Nagasawa's shop to officially put in an order for a frame. He was as cheerful as the first time I met him, and despite initially pretending like he had no memory of ever having met me, made references to the last time I was there and remembered a number of trivial details about me.

After looking over all the measurements, making numerous suggestions and reminding me that I was crazy to ride a pista on the rode, he asked me if I wanted a brand new frame or a refurbished one that was my size. He pulled out a damaged frame that he had made in the beginning of the 80s from Columbus steel and said that for 85,000 he would replace the damaged tubes, repaint it and put in a new headset and bottom bracket. Since his lugs were beautiful in the 70s and 80s and you can't get a new frame made from Columbus steel, I decided to go for it. He got out his old files and looked over all the original specs on this bike. There were a number of details he wanted to go over with me, such as the fact that the stay ends are spaced at 123mm to allow for a 1.5mm chain tensioner on each side. He wanted to make sure he doesn't see me riding this frame around without tensioners.

After we had covered the technical details of the order, we went upstairs and had some tea while he put my contact info into his keitai. This took him a good 15 minutes while and I watched, sure that he forgotten about us. Finally, he sent me his contact info from his phone and told me that the frame would be ready in about a week. He required no deposit but assured me that he would make it well and from good parts. After a round of thank yous and bows, his daughter drove us to the JR station in the pouring rain.

When we finally got back to Osaka, we had some duck udon in Shinsekai (New world, 新世界), one of the poor neighborhoods in southern Osaka and the home of Biliken, the god of things-as-ought-to-be.

Commies in Osaka

2007-11-04T19:49:00.001+09:00

My friend Jon works as a translator and does a lot of freelance interpretation for people doing various political projects in Japan. Today he invited me to a meeting where he was going to be doing the interpreting. It was a strange deal.

The presentation was by two old school communists from Europe whose organization had helped in the recent strikes in France against the CPE - an anti-labor bill meant to undermine job security and facilitate labor outsourcing. I went because I wanted to hear more about the anti-CPE strikes. In fact, the Europeans were mostly interested in having a discussion about Marx's view that capitalism as inevitably doomed, and the Japanese weren't really interested in discussing anything. The presenters were fairly theoretical and didn't really have much in the way of practical suggestions. It was a small meeting, but I got to learn more about the history of the left in Japan. Actually, I've been hearing a fair bit about this, because Ken's father - who was quite traditional and only ever owned one or two western things - after becoming disillusioned with the socialists, consistently voted for the communist party.

In other news, now that I can understand a bit more Japanese, I realized that if the postman brings me a special delivery, he will actually take it right to the door of my apartment. A guy came to my 10th floor apartment on a Sunday evening at 8:30.

More Canals

2007-11-02T23:21:00.001+09:00

Here are two more shots of some of the many canals in Osaka. The first is taken in one of the poor southern neighborhoods, which now has a large Korean population.

Back in the day, before the introduction of trains, when Osaka was Japan's most important mercantile city, canals were used to ship goods to all the major markets in the city.

The second shot is of one of the two canals that run to the north and south of the major government buildings in the northern part of town.

Hearing aids

2007-11-01T16:06:00.000+09:00

My Japanese class begins everyday by listening to a dialogue over and over again until we can all repeat it. Because of my hearing loss, this is almost impossible for me to do. In desperation, two days ago, I finally started wearing my hearing aids, but it's still quite difficult. I think my brain is just not used to processing sounds in this way. I constantly get syllables mixed up and mispronounce things in ways that produce entirely different meanings than what I intend. The weirdest part of this phenomena is that my mouth often makes different sounds than the ones my brain and my ears think it's making, as I find out when I am constantly corrected.

Pink, the perfect temperature for chocolate

2007-10-29T21:00:00.000+09:00

According to the labels on these bars, the people at Dars have decided that the ideal temperature for enjoying their bitter chocolate is 22º C. In case you aren't carrying a thermometer but you also don't want the disappointment of eating some chocolate that's off temperature, they've thoughtfully equipped each box with a gauge that changes color as a function of the average kinetic energy of the molecules in that circular dot in the upper right-hand corner. The device isn't all that precise but purple is too cold, white is too hot and pink is just right.

These packs are actually both too cold because, being a philistine in such matters, I kept them in fridge. I got the white one to warm up by covering it with my hand.

Halloween

2007-10-28T19:17:00.000+09:00

This was probably the most surreal night in Japan so far. There are no second-hand places here to buy a costume, so I went with a friend to two department stores that have Western goods and holiday sections. The selection was pretty bad, but I managed to find a costume that I now regard as my best Halloween costume ever.

The main piece was a strange thing described on the package as "full-body tights" (zenshin-taitsu, 全身タイツ). I bought it mainly for the picture on the packaging, since you couldn't actually see the costume itself.

I thought the little bulges on the dancing men were just a whimsy of the artist, but these are actually a selling point. The text in the blue bubble reads "tight-fitting, bulge" (picchiri, mokkori, ピッチリ、モッコリ). I also picked up a green wig.

There is supposed to be a tradition in Osaka of Gaijin getting decked out in costumes on Halloween and riding the JR loop line. The JR company, however, has decided that this is a public nuisance and had taken measures to stop it. The rumor is that they sent letters to the executives at a number of the language schools and asked them to forbid their employees to ride in costume. They said they would be taking photographs of anyone who did so.

I don't know if this is true, but I do know that there were a huge number of private security guards and a bunch of JR employees in gray suits with ear pieces and walkie-talkies trying to keep order. But there really wasn't anything going on. Hardly anyone in costume showed up, and most of those who did left without riding the train. Myself and a hand-full of others decided to ride the train and see what all the fuss was about.

These guards may look unconcerned by my presence, but it turned out they were assigned to follow us the whole night and they spent most of that time trying to pretend like they weren't standing right next to a guy in a ridiculous pair of red full-body tights.

When we got down to the platform, there were about ten JR employees around us talking into walkie-talkies and fidgeting with ear pieces. One guy kept coming up to us and asking where we were going and would we please move along. Then he would hold a piece of paper over his mouth while he talked into his phone.

As I was walking around, one girl had to adjust her ear-piece as I was approaching her. Somehow, she believed that I didn't know what was going on, panicked that I might find out and actually tried to hide from me behind an old guy who was standing on the platform, waiting for his train. When I peeked around his shoulder and said konbanwa, she was mortified but managed to smile and say hello in reply.

On the train, not only our security guards, but very nearly everyone else as well just tried to pretend like it wasn't happening. We got off at a few other stations on the loop line and they were all full of security guards and plain-clothes company employees. At one point, when we transfered trains, we were trailed by seven guards. We never saw anyone else in costume.

After the train got boring, we went down to Amemura, where there were a fair number of people in costume.

Back in Osaka

2007-10-27T17:44:00.000+09:00

I'm now back in Osaka and the pace of life here makes the respite of Denman Island seem like a dream. My days are again a blur of reading and studying. I didn't get out much this week, but last night I joined some friends for drinks at a German pub in Tennoji (天王寺).

We stayed at the pub until last call and then went to karaoke. The trains stop running at about 12:30, at which time almost everyone is stuck wherever they are. I think this must be part of the huge success of karaoke here. The place we went to was seven stories about 20 rooms per story and packed at 2:30 AM. This is because staying in a karaoke room all night is cheaper than staying in a hotel. Moreover, you can order cheap food and drinks to your room. I only stayed for a couple of songs before heading out to my bike, grateful I wasn't stuck there all night.

Today, I went to the Osaka History Museum (Osaka-rekishi-hakubutsukan, 大阪歴史博物館). The holdings were a bit disappointing but the displays gave a good sense of the different periods of the city. For one thing, I learned that the historic site that's visible from my window, is the remains of the Naniwa Palace (Naniwa no mia, 難波宮), which was the Imperial seat for a while before 655. During this time, Osaka was the political as well as financial center of Japan. Although, the Imperial seat never returned and the Shogunate was only briefly centered in Osaka, the city remained the center of commerce until the rise of Tokyo in the 19th century.

Denman Island

2007-10-22T06:30:00.000+09:00

In a strange turn of events, I'm writing this post from Denman Island, BC. On what was my Thursday afternoon, I received an email from my mother saying that my grandmother Estelle was being released from the hospital the next day, so that she could die at home sometime in the next few days, and that if I wanted to say goodbye, I should come as soon as possible.

The next morning, I rode through the pouring rain to the the immigration office near my house to apply for a reentry permit. After 45 minutes of navigating the bureaucracy of this office, I had the permit. I returned home and began calling travel agents and airlines. Eventually, a travel agent in Umeda found me a convoluted trip leaving that day. Since he did not take American Express, he asked me to bring cash to his office.

I went to the nearest conbini, withdrew 200,000 in cash and took the subway to Umeda. After I paid for the flight, my travel agent walked me to the bus I would have to take to the airport. The bus left a few minutes after I boarded. I went first to Itami Domestic Airport in the north of Osaka and from here to Haneda Domestic Airport in Tokyo. From Haneda, I took a one-hour bus to Narita International Airport in the outskirts of Tokyo. From Narita I flew to Vancouver and then to Comox on Vancouver Island.

I had left some messages and sent some emails about my arrival time, but I had not actually talked to anyone, so I was happy to be picked up at the airport by Don and my mom. We got some groceries and took the next ferry out to Denman.

When I got Estelle's house, the first thing she did was make some wry comments about how I shouldn't have come so far. I held her hand and we talked for about 15 minutes. When I left to go get Jackie from the ferry, Estelle said goodbye. I told her I would be back later. She squeezed my hand and said it again.

Spending grant money

2007-10-18T23:15:00.000+09:00

Because of the terms of my grant, I have a fare bit of money to spend on things that I will use for research. If any individual item costs more than 100,000円, the university will keep it when I go, and I have to spend half of the total funds before the end of the fiscal year in March. Last weekend I bought this multi-function printer, scanner, copy machine. It's all in Japanese, but I was able to download the English drivers and manual and it all works fine with my computer.

For the the last three days I was in Tokyo for an orientation organized by the agency that brought me over. Since it's by far the largest science funding body in Japan, bringing international researchers into Japan is only a small part of their general purpose. Most of the talks were about overall science funding policy in Japan and their role in it. Naturally, they have a substantial budget and they put us up at a nice hotel.

There were also talks on working in Japanese labs and learning Japanese that were pretty interesting. The hotel was located fairly near the Imperial Palace, so we did some tourist excursions to the palace and other nearby places.

My experience of Tokyo was a lot different this time. I can read enough Kanji now that I just bought a normal Japanese mapbook and was able to use that to navigate the two train systems and get everywhere I wanted to go with no real problem.

Languages ... again

2007-10-12T23:31:00.000+09:00

My Japanese classes have started and this means the language situation has reached new levels of absurdity. The class is only two hours long, but at a much higher level and faster pace than the class I took over the summer. Everything is done entirely in Japanese, so that I only understand about half of the answer to any question I ask. The class is small: three Koreans, two Chinese an Austrian and myself.

The Austrian is a guy named Ben. He is fluent in German and English, I'm sure his French is serviceable and he seems to have done quite well learning Japanese on his own before arriving here. I hate people like that, so I decided to enlist him as a study partner for an hour or two after class. Once, I'm wiped out on Japanese, I go home, eat lunch and then read some theorems of the Spherics, first in Greek and then in Arabic. In the evening, if I'm not going out, I work on Japanese vocabulary.

Here's another shot of Osaka-jo. Apparently, the stones in this outer wall are original. The construction of each part of the wall was entrusted to a different samurai family. The structure is held together simply by the weight and the shape of the stones.

Under the Tsutenkaku

2007-10-09T00:26:00.000+09:00

Southern Osaka is considered to be a bit rough. Here you find everything you aren't supposed to think of as Japanese: homeless people sleeping in the streets and parks, used clothing vendors hawking their wares on the sidewalks, low-level Yakuza - or Yakuza wannabes - shuffling around in tacky track suits covered with embroidered dragons, tyranny streetwalkers strutting the arcades and red-light districts where the girls look out on the streets from doorways lit by the unforgiving glare of florescence. Most of my Japanese friends wont go there and, having never been to say South Chicago or Cuidad Juárez, they consider it unsafe. Naturally, I find it fascinating.

I've finally met some expats who speak fluent Japanese, and this means I'm meeting more interesting Japanese people. Today a friend of mine named Shoko told me she was going down to her favorite bar to see if they would be willing to show a documentary she made, and she asked me if I wanted to come. She said I couldn't miss the spot because the bar was located right under the Tsutenkaku (通天閣, the tower passing to heaven).

The Tsutenkaku is a huge broadcasting tower that advertises Hitachi in many changing neon lights. Once you get into the general area of Tennoji (天王寺), you can't miss it. (I'll let you be the judge of how well you think the name suits the structure.) Shoko met me under the tower and led me into this tiny bar, upstairs in one of the buildings on the square surrounding the tower. I had some very good, very hot Thai green curry served with brown rice and a fried egg.

The place is owned by a couple and, since we were the only customers, we sat at the bar and chatted with them. Since only Shoko spoke more than individual words of English they mostly just chatted in Japanese and I tried to follow.

The owners were really into Thai food and spent a lot of time trying to tell me where I could go to get good Thai food in Osaka. This involved me taking out my map, to shuts of sugoi, and them pointing out various spots where they were pretty sure there were Thai restaurants. I have yet to meet anyone here who can give more than the vaguest directions anywhere.

The girl I bought my furniture from was the worst by far. She gave me a hand drawn map for a store she was telling me about that consisted of the circled name of a steak house that was then unknown to me and three lines near it that were supposed to be parallel streets. There was then an arrow that pointed up between two of the streets. She told me the shop was somewhere around there between those streets. I tried to save that drawing because it was easily a contender for the most worthless map of all times, but I seem to have lost it.

At one point, I actually saw that steak house and rode around for a bit in what may have been the general direction of the arrow she drew; but this was in Umeda, so of course there were many streets, many of them more or less parallel.

Reconnected

2007-10-08T01:32:00.001+09:00

My internet service has finally been turned on. The process was fairly complicated and, of course, there were many forms. This time, the situation with the forms became truly absurd. I had been calling the company on a regular basis, so I knew when the modem was set to arrive and when they were scheduled to come over and actually make the connection. Nevertheless, two days before they came, I received four forms in the mail. I can now make out enough Kanji that I could tell more or less what most of them where about. One was to set the appointment for them to come check the connection, which I rightly assumed we had already covered over the phone. Another was to set up automatic deductions from my bank account and a third - which requires my name and address not once, not twice, but three times - was to combine the bills for my keitai and my internet service. The fourth was mysterious to me.

Despite the fact that I could basically tell what they were about, on each of the forms there were check boxes that appeared to be important and which I did not understand. I called the company to discuss these matters, but the English speaking staff told me they did not have access to such details and they would have to transfer me to the appropriate department. I was then connected to an interpreter with an Indian accent to whom I described the situation in terms such as, "Well there's a yellow form and it's about payment methods and there's a section for personal information, one for bank information, credit card information and so forth. I understand all this but below there are a number of boxes and a large red arrow that points at them so they seem to be important. I can't read the Kanji but for example near one there's the Kanji for to enter and some that I don't know and then the one for to come and so on." The interpreter would then talk to someone in Japanese who sounded like a woman to me but whom he always referred to as "The Man in Charge."

The Man in Charge would then ask various questions about the color of the form, the boxes and such and would then look to see if he had the same form. This went on endlessly as he checked various forms. Twice The Man in Charge put us on hold while the translator and I tried to have a conversation over the obnoxiously loud musac. I asked him if he could turn it off, but he said it was out of his control. During the second musac session, he kindly offered to call me back once they thought they had the right form. About ten minutes later they called back. I imagined that for the duration The Man in Charge had been shuffling through great stacks of forms - all different but all equally intricate - which they were preparing to send out to their customers. Eventually, they decided that the didn't have the same forms that I had received and that the thing to do would be to send me the new forms, which they did have. That way, if I called back with more questions, they could help me.

Here are some of the view from my new apartment. My balcony faces east and a small street runs between my building and a construction site. To the south of the construction site is a small school. In the photo to the left you can see the school and, south of that, the part of Osaka called Uehommachi (上本町).

In the photo below, you see the view to the east of my apartment. The large building on the left is one of the major hospitals, which is in the process of expanding into the lot directly below my balcony. In the backgroundm you can see a forested area, which is some sort of sacred ground. Ken assured me that it's protected and that I wont have to worry about any construction on that land during my stay in Japan. If the new hospital building is sufficiently large, however, I won't be able to see it anyway.

Deliveries

2007-10-03T12:31:00.000+09:00

Apparently my shipment from Canada will be delivered today. This means I will soon have my books, bike tools, cooking implements, towels, shoes, clothes and other things useful for living.

Because of the local respect for punctuality, deliveries here are quite convenient. Yamato simply called me up and asked me when I wanted the stuff dropped off.

Yesterday, I received some granola bars from Deborah - which is great because it's almost impossible to find anything remotely granola in Japan. I wasn't home on Monday when the postman first tried to deliver the package, and I found a note in my box when I got back.

I went down to my local post office, expecting the package would be there, but they told me that it wasn't and to call a central number. At first, I thought this very inconvenient, but I gave them a call. Eventually, I was able to get on the line with someone who spoke a bit of English, and we arranged for a drop-off the next day.

Somehow, I didn't hear my intercom when the postman first arrived, but that evening I found another note. I called and when I asked for someone who spoke some English, I was put on the line with the same woman who I had spoken to the day before. At length, I was able to explain to her that I had been at home at the time written on my second notice, but that I had not been notified that the postman was there. She was profusely apologetic and asked me if I was home at the moment. When I told her I was cooking dinner and would be home for some time, she told me the post man would come back at 9 pm. Moreover, she assured me that if he could not ring me on the intercom, she would call my cell and to this end took down my number. Sure enough, at 9, just after I had finished dinner, the postman returned with my granola bars.

Quick update

2007-10-01T11:07:00.000+09:00

I'm still posting from internet cafes, so I'll keep this brief. I now have a couple of regular conversation partners for practicing Japanese. They both have very limited English and this is a great help. Most of the people I met for conversation in the first month were so much better in English than I was in Japanese, that we just stayed in English the whole time. If my conversation partner has very limited English, I am forced to try to make myself understood in Japanese. This means that I often have to try to say the same thing many different ways.

As some of you know, I love overpasses and fly-aways, which is weird now that I rarely drive on them. Nevertheless, Osaka has some spectacular ones. This picture is a bit of a patchwork, but it gives a good sense of the shear scale of the thing. Here, you see an intersection near my house where two large city streets meet underneath the merging ramps of two major highways.

Check out the way this freeway dives between the two buildings. The photo was taken from a low bridge over one of the northern canals.

Osaka Castle

2007-09-26T18:08:00.000+09:00

There's a beautiful ride right near my place around the grounds of Osaka Castle. The Castle is situated on a peak and the surrounding park is large, so I had seen it in the distance a number of times as I made excursions near my place.

Last night, I went for a ride around it with a guy named Vince, who I met when I first got here. At night, there are relatively few people around and you can ride fast through the corridors of the massive walls, over the moats, and eventually into the inner sanctuary. The castle itself is lit up like a massive beacon. As we charged in, I imagined a samurai army swarming the grounds, scaling the walls over the fallen bodies of their underlings.

As is the case with many Japanese Castles, however, the main tower of Osaka-jo (大阪城) is a reconstruction. The modern structure was opened to the public in 1997 and replaced an earlier reconstruction that was destroyed by Allied bombs during the Second World War. What remained of the original tower was destroyed during the Meji Restoration, when the grounds were turned into an army barracks. The current reconstruction is conveniently outfitted with an elevator, which you see in the foreground of this picture.

Today, Ken and I went up to the northern part of town to meet with Takanori, a specialist in Indian mathematics who was a Ph.D. student in the States with Alex. Takanori and I will meet once a week to read some texts, so we had a preliminary discussion of how to proceed. Since the Kansai region has one of the biggest concentrations of specialists in the history of Indian mathematics in the world, Ken was adamant that I should study Sanskrit with Takanori and begin to read Indian texts as soon as possible. At length, however, it was agreed that Takanori and I would read Arabic on Monday, and Ken and I would read Greek on Wednesday. We then all read a few theorems of the Spherics.

Settling in...

2007-09-24T14:35:00.000+09:00

My map book has already been a huge success. Yesterday, I was able to flawlessly pull off a full day of excursions on the JR rail system, and today I immediately found a nearby Seattle's Best from a list I had saved on my computer. The fact that there is almost no Romaji also forces me to stay in the Kanji head space, which is good.

Ken and I have started reading Theodosius's Spherics. Since I have neither books nor internet in my place, I am not able to fully prepare my reading of the text before I go to our weekly meeting. In fact, the first few times, I was simply reading the Greek on the spot when we met. Since the text begins with simple mathematics and the Greek throughout is in the standard mathematical idiom, this has so far presented no problem. Nevertheless, this evening I'll prepare a bit for tomorrow's meeting.

Navigation

2007-09-22T14:47:00.000+09:00

Without internet access at home, just doing basic navigation to places I need to get to, but don't yet know, has risen to a new level of difficulty. For those who do not know, a Japanese address is based on an entirely different system than a western address. Whereas a western city is known by neighborhoods, streets and intersections a Japanese city is divided into large wards (ku, 区), smaller townships (usually machi or chou, 町), numbered sections (chome, 丁目), numbered zones (literally cardinal number, ban, 番) and finally buildings.

In a North American city, a street is a street by virtue of the fact that you can drive a car on it. In a Japanese city, there are many different kinds of streets. Some streets are strictly for walking, some for walking and riding, some for driving and possibly riding, and some freeways that are only for cars. (There are also other venues for walking and riding that are not technically streets at all.) In Osaka, a good half of the streets were never meant for automobiles. The only thing that unifies all of these different transportation spaces is the fact that they are not buildings. (In fact, however, there are some streets, roadways and train tracks on top of, or underneath, buildings.) Only the larger thoroughfares and freeways even have names. Many of the the streets are so small only two or three people could walk abreast.

A Japanese address scopes in from the more general to the more particular, instead of beginning with a specific place and then stating where that is. So, it states the prefecture, the city, the ward, the township, the numbered section and zone and finally the building. The arrangement of the numbered sections and zones is not perfectly predictable, so that even people who live or work in a specific chome will not necessarily know where another block-sized zone is within the same chome. Because of the syntax of a Japanese question, whenever I ask for help with directions at a convenience store or post office, they always know what I want before I even finish the question. They take out a map and study it for a few moments before turning it around showing me the location of the ban or building I'm looking for.

I have a bilingual map of the Kansai region with pretty good coverage of Osaka, but it's not nearly detailed enough to find anything in a reasonable amount of time. Today, I bought a Japanese map with full detail but all in Kanji. Fortunately, the pronunciation of place names is also difficult for Japanese people, so there is furigana above many of the Kanji. I plan to put this map to much use.

Isolation

2007-09-20T16:07:00.000+09:00

My furniture arrived this morning and I'm starting to get settled, but my lack of internet access is hugely frustrating. I found a long list of supposedly free wi-fi sites in Osaka, but almost all of them are either defunct or actually unavailable.

At this point, the only place that I am sure has free wi-fi is Seattle's Best and there are relatively few of them in the city. Today, I spent almost an hour looking for one that was supposedly near me before giving up and going to one that I knew in my old neighborhood.

The amount of memorization I'm doing, along with the stress of two moves in a month and trying to get a bit of writing done each day has caused my brain to go into overdrive. I feel a constant pressure in my head, such as I usually feel only after a long day of productive work. My thoughts are hyperactive at night in a way that I have not experienced in years. I've become absent-minded - getting off the elevator on the wrong floor, taking the subway one stop too far.

At least, however, I now have a desk in my apartment, so that I no longer need to type with my laptop actually in my lap.

New place

2007-09-19T17:36:00.001+09:00

I finally moved into a normal apartment. It's much bigger than the old place and cheaper, but was empty, so I had to fully furnish it. The heat is back in full force, so the last two days have been pretty intense.

I spent all day yesterday carting stuff back and forth on the subway, dealing with the gas, electricity and water companies, registering with the local ward office, and dealing with various other logistical technicalities. Of course, there was much paperwork, and two parking stickers for my bikes.

Some things are very simple, but others are needlessly complicated. For my electricity, I simply turned on the meter outside my apartment, filled in a pre-paid postcard with my address and bank info and put it in a nearby post box. The'll just take the money out of my account each month. My internet, however, is going to take two to three weeks to get going - once I have all the forms properly submitted, which I have not yet been able to do. And this despite the fact that my place is already set up for optical fiber.

The expenses involved in my move have also been strangely lopsided. I was able to buy all the big items I needed from two girls who are moving back to the States for so cheap that it cost me nearly as much to have them moved to my new place as it cost me to buy them. For my mattress, I decided to go Japanese style and get one that can be folded up and put away, but I insisted on getting a double (140 cm wide). This is very nearly the largest mattress that can be purchased here and buying it meant paying more for my mattress than for my refrigerator, washing machine and sofa combined.

The two movers who picked up the furniture were quite efficient and I never had the slightest inkling that they might break anything. They had these huge, padded sleeves that they pulled over everything. They then packed it into parceled sections in a large truck. I paid for two parcels.

The new neighborhood I'm in is more central, but also more working class. The level of racism is also a bit more intense. Everywhere I go, shopkeepers at the smaller places will follow me around. At first, I thought they were just trying to be helpful, but the way they follow my every move makes it clear they think I'm likely to try to steal something at the slightest opportunity. Today when I was looking for some things for my new place, three proprietors made sure I knew I wasn't welcome by trying to block my entry and asking me what I was looking for. Nevertheless, they were too polite to actually kick me out or to prevent me from entering when I walked directly toward them. At first, I thought it might be amusing to walk around and ask them how much things were, but that got old pretty fast.

View Larger Map

Here's a map of my new place. The large site just to the east of me is Osaka Castle. I haven't had a chance to check it out, but I've heard there's some good rides around it. I'm now in "Central Ward" (Chuo-ku , 中央区).

Language

2007-09-17T20:58:00.000+09:00

This will probably be the first of many posts on this topic. In a beginners class for Japanese they start by teaching you the standard polite forms of verbs, which is fine if you want to say something polite to someone, but doesn't always help if you need to know what people are saying to you. In fact, the only people who use this polite language with me are some women and people working in shops and restaurants. In some cases, service workers will use even more obsequious forms that I do not fully understand.

Today, I was looking for a nearby post office (yuubinkyoku, 郵便局) and decided to just ride around and ask people and see where that got me. I asked all kinds of different people. At first, it was almost impossible for me to tell what the old men were saying to me. Eventually, I realized this was because they were using the plain verb forms, which I still do not know very well. According to my textbooks, the direct use of this form is reserved for friends, family and one's social inferiors - such as children. In fact, however, this form is in fairly common use. Most of the men seemed annoyed at my presence and two simply dismissed me with a waive of their hand and the exclamation that they did not know or care. The younger people and women, on the other hand, were generally polite and helpful. Or at least, I thought they were. Nevertheless, I was not able to find a post office in this way.

On three different occasions, I was sure I was told to go forward three lights and take a left. But there were always further instructions, such as go down, or up or around. I spent almost 45 minutes doing this before I decided to just go to a post office that was not that near, but was at least known to me.

The vast majority of mobile communication here is done via email sent to and from one's cell. I've taking to writing bits of these in Japanese. This is actually much simpler than it sounds because the phone has all kinds of auto-complete features built into it. So for example, if I can only remember the first few syllables of a verb form, the phone will offer me a list in which I can easily see the form I want. It also has Kanji conversion, so again it's usually enough just remember the first few syllables, or to just hunt around for a bit until I see the right character. The only draw back to this is that people will generally respond to Japanese in Japanese. On the one hand, they always correct my Japanese, which is helpful, but this and the rest of their response is usually full of a bunch of Kanji that I don't know.

Nicotine

2007-09-16T20:15:00.000+09:00

A few weeks ago, I met a guy named Kazuya in a cafe who told me about some drop-in Japanese classes that he teaches as a volunteer in a suburb up north. So today, I gave him a call and got directions to the class. I was feeling a little drowsy when I was on my way to the train, so I decided to stop for an energy drink.

In every convenience store, there's a large rack of energy drinks and jellies. I thought I'd try one of the brightly colored jellies that comes in a foil pack. I scanned the ingredients a bit quickly, but I saw that there was some caffeine and a bunch of vitamins in one of the orange ones, so I figured I give it a try. On the short train ride up, I started to feel a bit funny, so I took another look at the ingredients. Somehow, I had failed to notice that there was a big whack of nikachin (ニカチン) in the drink. As I haven't had a cigarette, or presumably any other nicotine, in over seven years, you can only imagine the effect. Luck ally, it wore off pretty quick.

The class was in the Bible Gospel Church. There were actually a bunch of different classes for people learning both Japanese and English. I was in the beginners group, which was taught by a woman named Yoshimura, who had studied English at UBC for 8 months. One of the two other students had done his undergrad at SFU. The class was all in Japanese and on some grammar I hadn't seen before, but I still learned a lot.

It's still hot enough in Osaka for a daily ice cream, but most of the stuff here is the soft kind. The best I've found is all imported. These are the biggest Häagen-Dazs containers they sell at my local supermarket.

Mini bike mania

2007-09-16T00:13:00.001+09:00

Check these minis...

All the cool kids in Osaka have one.

Food

2007-09-14T22:39:00.000+09:00

A lot of the food here is great, but I miss some of the foods from home. I finished the cookies Aiyana gave me a few days ago and I have the feeling that's going to be the last really good hippy food I have for a while. I haven't eaten a real green salad since I got here.

On the other hand, I've had some really good stuff that I probably never would have tried otherwise. For example, at dinner the other night, we finished with a simple bowl of white rice served with a plate of various pickled vegetables. All of the really good food that I've had has been prepared for me, or recommended to me. My policy of trying some new unknown thing each time I go to the grocery store, however, has yet to pay off. This is, I suppose, not terribly surprising. The one thing I will say is that the convenience stores here actually have some edible food in them - along with socks, underwear, pantyhose and colored shirts.

Today, I found a little taco place on one of the side streets near my apartment run by a hipster named Taku.

I ordered a taco made of minced pork and beef, because those were the only two Kanji that I knew for sure - and I was suspicious of the shrimp taco.

It was pretty good and reminded me of home. There was a lot of other delicious looking things on the menu, so I'm sure I'll be back. Now, I'm going to head to check out a hipster bar I noticed in the same area.

New shoes

2007-09-13T20:13:00.000+09:00

After work I rode down to Amemura (short for American Village, アメリカ村), because this is where a lot of hipsters hang out and I figured I could pick up some Vans. For some reason, I had my heart set on Vans, but it turns out I should have bought them back in Vancouver, because they're an exotic import here and fairly expensive.

Amemura is a crazy scene on the weekends but it was tame when I was there this time. There were some people shopping and kids practicing rope dance. Some of the guys were throwing down break moves inside the ropes, but I didn't catch any of those.

There are shoe shops everywhere but they're segregated according to dress or casual, black or white culture (which is odd, considering that there are no black or white people here), by age, by gender, and by a number of other fashion points that were too subtle for me to discern. Since I was looking for Vans, I was only in the casual shops, which were basically unisex - although heavily slanted towards men, since most Japanese women wear high-heels.

Here are some shots from a few of the shops.

I guess they have more or less the same shoes here as they have in North America, the difference is that colors and styles that would be considered outrageous in North America are perfectly standard here.

This goes for other things as well. In the Adidas store, a dude was rocking a bright, shining purple hoodie with baby blue and lime green stripes. I decided on the spot that I wanted one but it was 15,000円 - and this was probably a deal. The other day I saw a zip-up that I wanted with a fly little bird on the zipper pull and criss-crossing dark blue and green stripes. It was 22,300円. My budget for clothes is definitely going to have to be scaled up here.

This shot is taken from a shop that only carries shoes for kids. I know I would have been stoked with some of those when I was that size.

In the end, I wasn't able to find the Vans I wanted in Amemura. Luckily, I found some in a little boutique on one of the side tiny streets up near where I live. That's right, I bought my Vans in a boutique - and I paid boutique prices for them.

Here I am demonstrating questionable taste by wearing them inside.

Lunch in Kyoto

2007-09-11T23:15:00.000+09:00

In the morning I finished one of the reviews that I set aside to write in this period before my books come. I will reread it a couple more times before sending it off to the editor. For lunch Ken and I went up to Kyoto to see a former student of his who recently had a new baby.

We then proceeded to eat a leisurely lunch followed by an extravagant chocolate cake that Ken had brought with him. The food was quite good and there were again some specialty dishes, including tofu that had been frozen and then reheated. This gives the tofu a soggy texture that allows it to hold liquid. It was served in a thin sauce that dripped out of it every time I picked it up with my chopsticks.

In the evening, I went down to a bookstore in Hommachi (本町) that has a good selection of books for people studying Japanese as second language. The bookstore is called Bonjin-sha (凡人社), which caused a chuckle when it was being discussed, because although bonjin means "common people" it apparently has the connotation of "mediocre people." I picked up a kanji workbook and a systematic grammar that had been suggested to me.

Another long monday

2007-09-10T22:24:00.001+09:00

I began the day with an ice coffee, toast and boiled egg at my local kissaten (喫茶店, a traditional coffee shop that usually serves some free food with the 400 円 coffee in the morning). Then I met Ken at Nakazaki-chou Station (中崎町駅) and we set off on another grueling day of errands and bureaucratic bullshit. It was still all so new to me that I was able to be amused by most of it. Ken on the other hand, could hardly contain himself on a number of occasions.

The first order of business was to look at an apartment that we had decided would be the best bet. Ken was determined that I should avoid many of the unnecessary expenses involved in renting through an agent, a private owner or a Gaijin rental service. This was a real sticking point for him. He had humored me by letting me look at some of these places, and then taking me through detailed calculations of the costs, proving that these places were much more expensive once these added expenses were divided by 12 or even 24 months. My agreement with his general position was solidified by the fact that they were all basically dumps.

By renting directly from a corporation that owns many apartment complexes throughout the city, I would save on agency fees and other customary expenses. The only drawback would be that I would have to fully furnish the place, including a refrigerator, gas range, washing machine and other items that are typically included in a North American rental. Again, Ken rightly pointed out that all these expenses would be absorbed in a 12 month period.

We looked at the place and, to Ken's obvious satisfaction, it was far better than anything else I had seen. Thus began the process of actually drawing up the contract.

We went to the main office where they proceeded to ask us for far more documentation than I had brought, and this despite the fact that I had tried to anticipate such an eventuality. Since we had to go out to the university anyway, we decided to see if we couldn't get, or fabricate, the necessary documents when we were out there and return to the office again at the end of the day.

At the university, we were again involved in a endless stream of paperwork, only some of which had to to with my arrival. We went from one office to the next, while Ken filled out forms and repeatedly entered his stamp (inkan, 印鑑) into various ledgers. At one point, as he was for the third time that day, filling out a form in duplicate, he wryly pointed out that, given the circumstances, it was a wonder Japanese scholars got any work done at all at this time of year.

The one good thing about our trip to the University was that I was able to pick up an electronic dictionary (denshi-jishou, 電子辞書), paid for by my research grant. I had originally believed that if I bought items over 10,000 円 they would be retained by the university after I left, but it turns out I had misread the conditions and I am allowed to keep any items up to 100,000 円. Now this is much more agreeable, so I purchased a hi-end Japanese-English denshi-jishou for 34,000 円. It contains the full text of 35(!) dictionaries, including things that would come in handy anywhere, like the Advanced Learner's OED, and strange ones like the Oxford Guide to British and American Culture, which has slang in it that I've never heard and which I frankly doubt anyone ever really used (for example, "go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut"). The user's manual is all in Japanese, of course, so I imagine it will be some time before I've even scratched the surface of this thing.

Finally, we returned to the office of the rental apartment and managed to satisfy them regarding the documents. We completed the contract in short order and I settled out the amount owing in cash, of course.

Here, however, we ran into another snag that caused Ken to nearly lose his composure. My rent is to be paid electronically by automatic deduction from my bank account, however, my bank is not included in the long list of banks from which the rental corporation accepts electronic funds transfer. When we were outside, Ken informed me that this is probably because Shinsei Bank was rescued from bankruptcy by a buy-out of foreign capital and is consequently, in the eyes of many, not really a Japanese bank anymore. What makes this situation even more absurd is that for the second month's rent, they will send me a form that I can take to Shinsei Bank and pay electronically, but they claim to be unable to continue to do this for subsequent months. Ken decided that the best way to deal with this would be to open a second bank account at a second bank. I couldn't really believe that this was the simplest solution, but Ken was adamant. For now, I think it's best to take his advice in such matters.

Many of the transactions throughout the day generated what I regard as a staggering amount of paperwork. The purchase of my denshi-jishou produced six full-sized sheets of paper - two were signed and stamped by both Ken and the clerk, one of which was retained and the other of which was our copy. The other four copies seemed excessive to me, but when I asked Ken about it, he didn't think anything was amiss and supposed that they might come in handy. What is more, apparently these are only temporary receipts, when my grant arrives, sometime in the next month, six more forms will be made out, this time in my name.

Below, you see the paperwork I received from the rental office. (It may be hard to see from the photo, but three of these forms have other, smaller forms stapled to them) Half of the documents are informational brochures and so forth, but the other half are my originals of various contracts and agreements, not all of which I fully understand, but which I, nevertheless, filled in and signed. Naturally, the rental office retains duplicates of these, which I also filled in and signed.

Canals

2007-09-09T21:06:00.000+09:00

Today the sun came out but the humidity didn't subside much, so it was unbelievably hot and muggy. It was too hot to ride, so I spent most of the day doing housework, writing and studying Japanese.

When I went out to a nearby stationary store in the middle of the day, the heat immediately forced me back inside. I picked up some pens and the paper that school children use to practice their Kanji. The pens come in many sizes but they go down to very fine tips so that one can fit the Kanji into normal lined paper. That's still a bit too advanced for me.

Since I didn't do much of interest, I'll just post some pictures of two of the Canals near my place. Osaka is built on a delta, so there are canals and rivers throughout the city.

Nationalists

2007-09-09T01:36:00.001+09:00

I spent most of the day riding around the city, to get a better sense of the overall layout. When I was downtown, I saw some right-wing Japanese nationalists demonstrating in front of the US Consulate.

They were surrounded by police - presumably to make sure they remained peaceful, as there were only a few other people watching them out of curiosity. There were about seven guys and a woman, all wearing black military dress.

One guy was making a speech on a big hand-held loudspeaker. I couldn't understand much of it, but I could hear lots of mentions of "American," the "United States," and "English." Whatever, he was saying, he was definitely saying it about me. Nevertheless, everyone was quite civil as I wandered around taking pictures. And this wasn't just because the police far outnumbered the demonstrators - you can see how polite they were by the fact that they stood outside the little chain drawn across the steps of the Consulate.

Although such extremism is, naturally, in the minority in Japan, nationalism is often, as in the States, an important component of a successful political career.

It is worth noting that, in comparison with Nuremburg, there were relatively few convictions in the Tokyo trials. There were only two executions, and a number of those convicted were subsequently released and went back to their political careers. Moreover, the supreme ruler of the Japanese state, whose official stamp appears on all the battle orders in what was called the Great War of East Asia, was never even brought to trial. Despite having steered his country into the worst disaster of its history, Hirohito was not only able to maintain the imperial institution, but also remained himself in the imperial seat. For obvious reasons, it has never been a crime in Japan to deny the war crimes perpetuated during his reign.

Banking

2007-09-07T22:37:00.000+09:00

My bank card arrived yesterday, by registered mail, and it is, indeed, quite dreamy. I took a picture of it, but the color just doesn't come through. Today, my security card came, so I could log into my account and activate the purple card.

The security for my online account is much greater than that at any of the banks I have used in North America. In the first place, you enter any information through key-buttons in the browser, as opposed to the keyboard. I suppose the mapping between these key-buttons and the information is then randomized or encrypted, so as to prevent people from simply sniffing the keystrokes.

Secondly, you are issued a security card that comes in a separate delivery by registered mail. The security card must itself be activated by keying in the requisite numbers through the browser. Then, every time you log into the account you are asked to enter random values found on the card.

As you can see from the picture, each of three slots is selected from an array of 50 cells, each of which can be either an letter of the Roman alphabet or a digit of the Hindu-Arabic number system. There are repeats on my card, so that gives 36^3 = 46,656 possibilities. But you effectively only have one shot at guessing the right one of these, since a different three cells are required each time. A cryptologist would probably try to determine the algorithm used to generate the array, but clearly the weakest link in the chain is the human owner of the cards.

Once I had everything set up, I now had an account that showed a balance of 0円, so I took some of my cash with me down to a local machine to deposit it. Despite the fact that Japan is obscenely safe - and I've taken to free-locking my bike everywhere and for long periods of time - I still didn't feel comfortable carrying all that cash on me.

The machines for my bank, Shinsei Ginkou (新生銀行), are bi-lingual, so it was all fairly trivial. I just put the cash in the slot and the machine counted it up. If you don't like the count you can just tell the machine to give you the money back. After I had deposited the cash I had brought, I tested the machine by putting in 23,000円, alternating 10,000 notes (万円) and 1,000 notes (千円). Naturally, the machine tallied it up with no problem, but I asked for the cash back anyways.

At around 7:30, I went over to Ken's place to help him move some furniture. He didn't mention anything about dinner when he asked me to come, so I had eaten already. It was a bad idea, however, because after we rearranged his office, we sat down for a five course meal. I tried not to eat that much but it was so delicious, I could barely move by the time I was ready to ride home. Luckily, Osaka - despite its name - is flat.

Kobe's Chinatown

2007-09-06T22:20:00.000+09:00

After finishing what I regarded as a sufficient amount of work to be on schedule for some up-coming deadlines, I decided to try to find the Chinatown in Kobe. I had heard this was the only real Chinatown around, although there are Chinese shops scattered here and there.

When I was in Vancouver, I had had a prescription for a Chinese herbal remedy filled at one of the many herbalists shops in the Chinatown near my place. The script had about 15 different components, the most conspicuous of which was large dried insects. A single dose required a paper lunch bag full of ingredients, took over an hour to prepare and tasted vile. Nevertheless, it quickly cured the eczema that I had had for years and which no dermatologist had been able to do anything about. Since I moved here, the eczema has started to come back - presumably, because it's a stress related condition - so I decided it was time to drink some more bug juice.

This would be my first time by myself on a train system other than the subway. There is a cluster of four or five train stations, run by various companies, in the Umeda area near me, and one of them, the Hanshin Umeda Station (阪神梅田駅), runs a train that stops right near the Kobe Chinatown. The largest three of these stations are actually on different corners of a giant intersection, but it's not simply a matter of walking across the street from one to another. They are connected by a maze of pedestrian overpasses and underground malls. Once I found the right station, getting the right train was easy. The train to Kobe was about 35 min and cost 310 円.

I was able to find the Chinatown by asking some girls for directions. They seemed to be immensely amused that I was looking for it.

When I got there, it was a bit of a disappointment. I was hoping for something like the Chinatown in Vancouver, Toronto, or New York, with groceries, bakeries, meat shops and full herbalists. Instead, it's very commercialized and much closer to the Chinatown in San Fransisco. Mostly just tourists shops with trinkets, some tea-shops, booze shops, a few markets and a single herbalist.

When I handed her the brown wax paper on which the characters of the recipe had been scrawled, the pharmacist immediately started shaking her head. She put little circles by five of the ingredients and I managed to understand that she didn't have these ones. I asked where I could get them and she told me no where nearby. She asked to see my hand, tongue and if I had the eczema anywhere other than on my hand. She then went and got a box of prepared medication and explained that it had a large number of the ingredients in my script as well as a few others. I wonder if it has the bugs. I bought 7 days worth of the medication from her as she suggested, but she also insisted that I have one day's worth on the spot, free of charge. She also made me a photocopy of a page from a book in Japanese that discussed the medication I bought. It remains to be seen whether it will be as potent as the bug juice.

The whole transaction in the herbalist's was so time consuming and confusing that I managed to leave with neither my pen nor cellphone. When I came back, she was out on the street and started waiving them at me as soon as I came into view.

In the lower left of this picture you can see a small stand that serves Turkish ice cream. The ice cream has a thick, stringy texture and the guy who runs the shop constantly churns it with long steel poles that have little shovel-like ends. He makes a show of lifting up long ropes of the ice cream with the poles.

After I retrieved my cellphone, I decided to get some ice cream. The proprietor is a big white dude and he has a trick he likes to play with his customers. He puts about half a scoop of ice cream on the cone with the pole so that the cone sticks to the pole. Then he makes some funny noises and reaches the pole down to the customer, as though offering the cone. When the customer reaches up, he exclaims "Ah, ha!" and twirls the pole so that the cone flips away and the customer grabs at the air. He does this a few times with each customer.

I stood in front of the shop and watched him do this with two customers in a row, so when it was my turn and he stuck the pole out at me, I just chucked weakly and didn't bother to take my hands out of my pockets. Despite the fact that he saw me standing there in front of him the whole time, he was incredulous and tried to get me to grab at the cone three or four times. Eventually, he filled the cone and handed it to me, still clearly annoyed.

The ice cream was quite good - not at all too sweet and with a slight taste of yogurt.

Cold milk

2007-09-05T23:09:00.000+09:00

When I specified that wanted my milk cold, it was served on ice. I was dubious at first, but it was so good, I immediately ordered another. The green-tea muffin, by comparison, was only so-so.

Back up to pressure...

2007-09-04T21:32:00.000+09:00

I finally found some decent bike shops. Getting directions here is nearly impossible given the language barrier and my unfamiliarity with the address system. Over the past days, I had chased down a few guys I saw on track bikes, but was never able to get any useful information by this means. Although, as I mentioned, one of them did draw some frustratingly large circles on my map, I didn't find anything when I rode around in the circles.

Luckily, however, I ran across this website that has the locations of a bunch of shops, two of which turned out to be right around the corner from me.

Neither of them specializes in track bikes but they both have lots of stuff that would have to be special ordered in North America. Via Cycles Village has a whole wall of colorful tires and some beautiful steel-lugged Italian frames in the 30,000円 range.

Gyro is a small, crowded shop with a glass case of rare parts and a jar on the counter full of bags of spoke nipples in about 12 different colors.

At Via Cycles, I bought a floor pump, so that don't have keep riding on the squishy 60 psi I was getting with the hand pump I carry in my bag.

I spent most of the day working in cafes, because there isn't desk in my apartment and typing at the coffee table is annoying. Finding a place with wi-fi was actually non-trivial.

Ken had told me that Seattle's Best has free wi-fi, so I went to their Japanese website and found one near me. I did this by plugging the addresses into Google Maps, which helped me determine the one nearest to me (大阪市北区芝田１丁目８−１) but gave me only a vague idea of where the shop actually was. (Go ahead, give it a try.)

Once I got to the general area, I started asking around but this was useless, because - as I found out when I finally found the place and read the sign (シアトルズベストコーヒー) - "Seattle's" is pronounced Shiatoruzu, and the chain is such a new arrival that no one has heard of it anyway. In desperation, I finally took out my laptop, got some dude's attention, pointed at the address and asked, "where is this?" Since this is one of the few things I am able to say perfectly, he just glanced at the screen, pointed to a nearby building and said "over there," which, luckily, is one of the few things I can also understand perfectly. Sure enough, it was in a sort of mall complex under that building.

Paperwork

2007-09-03T19:47:00.000+09:00

Today was brutal. It was already hot when I met Ken at the nearest subway station at 8:30 and the heat and humidity seemed to get continuously worse as we ran errands all day. We dealt with the bank and the cell phone company in cool, air-conditioned offices, but most of the day was spent crisscrossing the campus of the University, filling out detailed forms and talking endlessly with scrupulous bureaucrats to find out what forms we had to use, how many copies they wanted and if they had English copies of the forms I actually had to sign. At the university, only individual work spaces were air-conditioned and the heat was oppressive as we went from office to office.

As an example of the elevated state of the bureaucracy, in order to get a library card I have to be accepted by the University as a "Visiting Research Scholar." As I understand it this is a mere formality, nevertheless, a recommendation must be must be made by the Dean to a full meeting of the faculty which will next convene in half a month's time. In order to receive the Dean's recommendation, we submitted a 10 page application, including a pledge by myself to uphold the confidentiality of certain unspecified materials that was written in a peculiar Legalese and must have been translated from Japanese Legalese. (Although, in due respect to good English prose, I will mention that it made better sense than some English Legalese I have read that was written by English speaking lawyers trained in English speaking schools of law.)

There were only two moments of excitement throughout the day. One was when I was choosing a new cell phone. All of the top-of-the-line models had features that I either didn't want or couldn't use, such as an over-sized screen for watching TV, a 5.5 megapixel camera, or a 10 gig hard drive for music that, unfortunately, only syncs with PCs. I picked out a terminal that - although modest by local standards - is pretty fly with a charcoal gray exterior and bright, metallic salmon inside the clamshell.

The other great thing was picking out the color of my bank card. They seemed to have anticipated how enjoyable this would be, because they had a large binder with 32 brightly colored cards all with amusing names - just in case you couldn't get a proper appreciation of the hue and saturation from the pictures in the brochure. Even the computer screen where you filled in the details of your account had a special drop-down menu specifically for choosing the color of the card. The choice was not easy as there were 4 or 5 colors that were really outrageous. Nevertheless, I settled on one called "Dreamy Purple." I'll admit the name also played a role in my deliberations.

Apparently, all banking is done by way of the card so that I can't even make an initial deposit before my card arrives in a week's time. So for now, I will have to keep my "settling-in" allowance - less my first month's rent, and other start-up costs - in cash in my apartment.

My first apartment

2007-09-02T20:35:00.000+09:00

Today was fairly uneventful - just some work and errands - so I'll say a bit about my apartment. If you cut and past my address (大阪市北区中崎１−２−６) into Google Maps, you can see my building (エスリード東梅田, Esuriido Hagashi-Umeda) by scaling to the second bar from the top. If you set the map to the "hybrid" setting by clicking the button in the upper right, the building will be conspicuous, because it's large for the area. (At the time of writing, Sep. 2 2007, the satellite image on Google Maps is out of date. The vacant lots to the left of my apartment building have now been "developed" into a strange roadway that I'll write about at somepoint.)

It's impossible from these photos to appreciate how tiny the apartment really is, because I can't ever get far enough away to take in the whole scene.

There are two "rooms" separated by a door that breaks up the space. The first room is really a hallway, along which all of the utilities are clustered.

The front door opens into a lowered area for leaving one's shoes, on the right of which is a washing machine behind a sliding door while on the left is a cupboard that serves as my pantry.

Once the raised flooring begins, there are four more stations that face each other in pairs across the hall. A little burner and sink faces the toilet closet, while the washroom sink faces a shower room.

The shower room has a bath in it, but the floor is water-proof and has a drain in the middle of it. Moreover, the door to the room is really a shower door, so you can just walk in there naked and get water all over the place. It's brilliant. (That little screen is a TV. I was hoping it was a screen for the intercom - you know, just in case I wanted to see who was at the front door while I was taking a bath.)

At the end of the hall there is a little step down into the other room that serves as a living and bedroom. (That screen on the phone is the actual intercom screen.)

Although the place is small, it's also very efficient. Notice how the lowest shelf for the dishes doubles as a drying rack.

Also, even though the suite has a washer, there is no dryer, since the clothes can be dried by hanging.

The door between the two rooms means that I can keep the room I'm writing in cool, but when I go into the kitchen to refill my glass of cold barley tea (mugi cha, 麦茶), I step into a stifling heat.

The appliances are generally useful and they motivate me to learn some household Kanji, but it's slow going. Take this rice cooker. The top button reads 予約, yoyaku, which mean "reservation." I have no idea what it means in this context. It just causes numbers to cycle from 1 through 14. The red light can show up in three settings. The first of which is 白米 (hakumai, "white rice"). I knew what that one meant because I knew each of the Kanji individually, but I had to look up the reading. (Theoretically, it might also have meant "white America," or "white American" since 米国, beikoku, means the US and 米人, beijin, is a somewhat old fashioned word for "American" - but I suppose we can rule these out based on context.)