Osaka to Tokyo

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.