Tokyo Trip

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.