Travel. Write. Drink Plenty of Fluids.

A Case For Cheap Souvenirs

2012-02-20T23:33:00.000-05:00

I’ve never been much for the kinds of souvenirs so manypeople buy. Hard Rock café t-shirts. Eiffel Tower snow globes. Mexican orMoroccan or Vietnamese hats that people think are funny when they wear themonto the plane for the flight home, but then realize before first beverageservice that not only are they not funny, but that their five bucks would havebeen much better spent on an in-flight beer, which tastes infinitely better andwill not end up under a heap of other crap in the back of their closet.

I’ve always preferred to take home more personally creativeitems. To wit: I’ve got a Bacardi bottle filled with Puerto Rican sand and aCruzan Rum bottle with sand from St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands. Totallycool mementos, and way cheap as the local booze on any Caribbean island can behad for a fraction of what you’d pay at home. Plus of course I got to personallyempty the bottles on the beach before copping sand that probably shouldn’t havemade it through customs.

I had these souvenirs displayed on a shelf for a while. Atthe moment they are in a closet somewhere.

Maps Are No Fun

2012-02-03T17:56:00.002-05:00

I’m not big on planning ahead. Or planning at all for thatmatter. Some might call me disorganized. I say I’m advennnnturous. It helpsthat I have the concentration span of a five-year-old at Disneyland after abreakfast of strawberry compote and whipped cream, but even if I know whichcountry I’m in, traveling on the fly is a way to see things I’d otherwiselikely never see – a forested temple, for example. A way-out-of-the-wayvillage. An interrogation room.

I’d made it fine so far on my2007 trip around Indochina, biking through Thailand and across Cambodia withouta map. (I might have gone a few miles out of the way on occasion, missing aturn here or taking a wrong turn there, but if everything goes smoothly yourstories in the end aren’t very good, are they?) Tomas, on the other hand, had amap – several of them actually, that he rotated through the handy-dandy clear plasticpocket on top of his handlebar bag. (This was back before the prevalence of iPhoneGPS apps made it easy for your typical backpacker to not come back with anygood stories.) Tomas and I had been traveling together since Trat, near where theThai coast runs into Cambodia; we’d gotten split up twice in the Khmer Kingdom,once on our way out of Sihanoukville’s Wat Leu (I ended up going thirty milesout of the way that day) and again on our way out of the rarely-recommended coastaltown of Kep, where we managed to lose each other somewhere along thefifty-meter gravel driveway of our guesthouse (he went one way around the barnin the middle of the path, I went around the other side and poof!). Stephan had been on the road well over a yearand had ridden thousands of miles with dozens of other fellow cycling travelers. He said he’dnever lost anyone until he met me.

House Sitting for the Irresponsible Budget Traveler

2012-01-29T09:00:00.000-05:00

When you are on the road few things are better than having aplace to crash for a night or three. Whether they be relatives (as was my goodfortune last weekend), friends (like this past week) or former co-workers fromeight years and fourteen time zones away (like tonight), having people who willwelcome you into their homes is pure bliss for the traveler – particularly ifyour gracious hosts have young kids and/or toys to keep your own road-wearymunchkins emotionally stable for another day.

If the gods of the itinerary are really smiling on you, yourgracious hosts will, after providing you with free range of things, leave town.

But before that kid-in-the-candy-store giddiness gets out ofhand, you’d be wise, fellow freeloader, to keep a few things in mind. Afterall, you might pass back through on your way home and want to crash again.

'I'm not watching TV, I'm working.'

2012-01-15T22:04:00.001-05:00

Being a writer is great. Here’s why.

‘Honey, can you help? I’m trying to make dinner and the kids are screaming at each other again.’ ‘Well I just got this incredible subplot idea I need to develop; I need to think, I’m going out for a bike ride.’

‘Maxim? What kind of magazine is that?’ ‘Oh, it’s a kind of resource for creating a new character for my book.’

‘You don’t usually drink Kahlua. You know, that much at one time.’ ‘Yeah, well it helps my imagination.’

‘Are you coming to bed soon?’ ‘In a while, I’m going to watch some TV first, get some fodder for a new blog post.’ ‘You mean for the blog that makes you no money?’ ‘These things take time, honey.’ ‘Fine. Good night. You’re on breakfast duty tomorrow, I have to go to the mall.’ ‘Why, what do you need?’ ‘Nothing, but all the walking around is good exercise.’

I can’t complain. She spends about as much as I make as a writer.

In Case You Stuck with the NFL on NBC...

2012-01-07T23:26:00.010-05:00

Two minutes ago I was staring at the all-important Lions-Saints matchup down on the Bayou, an evening of passive adrenalin infusion ahead of me when I remembered the other game being televised tonight. Thanks to someone in my neighborhood providing unsecured Wi-Fi I am now at the dining room table, ready to hunker down with the six most highly-funded of our eminently-talented GOP nomination pool.

It is 8:58pm and I am so fired up for this debate; I’ve got an oversized cup o’ joe in my belly and my blood is suddenly supercharged thanks to the sparks flying at me from the socket where I was hastily plugging in the old Hewlett-Packard. Add to this my uncanny political judgment, unclouded by any trace of actual knowledge, and I am ready for two uninterrupted hours of Yahoo-powered policy and bickering.

All right so I just missed the opening question because I had to go let out my coffee. Mitt Romney is talking about…ah yes, it’s nice that our economy has been creating lots of new jobs but of course Obama is not to be credited. He hasn’t yada yada, his policies yada yada… Great start Mitt, you’re debating someone who is not even in the room.

Getting From Point A to Point B in Viet Nam

2011-11-24T00:51:00.001-05:00

Transportation in

Vietnam

is like a box of chocolates...

After two days traveling further into the Vietnamese highlands on the rear of a motorbike, all I wanted was to chill and get to Hoi An. My butt needed a break, those bikes on those roads make for one good long vibration.

Back in Da Lat I took a leisurely last stroll around town after reserving a ticket on the 6pm bus to Da Nang – a reservation which means nothing if the bus driver decides to leave 45 minutes early. 'No problem, I put you on another bus' says the girl at the desk. She makes a couple of phone calls. I so wish I understood Vietnamese. Finally her eyes brighten and she hangs up. 'Okay, no problem. Only driver, you and one more person,' she tells me. ‘To Da Nang, you get off at Hoi An.’ Sweet I figure. Plenty of room to stretch out for the overnight trip.

What Comes of Domestic Malaise

2011-11-20T09:00:00.003-05:00

I was rather taken aback the other day to find out it’s been over two months since my last post – not that anyone else noticed but I still feel better making up excuses for these things. You’d think without a pesky job to have to bugger off to every day I’d have more free time than Bernie Madoff and would be able to tap into my bottomless reservoir of creativity and crank something out; stuff that, while perhaps not always worth the time investment on the reader’s part, will most likely never land me in jail (now that I’ve got that little copyright infringement thing straight). But my four year old son’s YouTube kick is now entering its fifth week, and every time I pry open the old laptop these days, no matter how quietly, he hears it over his eighteen month old brother’s shrieking (due to big brother also being on this rip-every-toy-out-of-little-brother’s-hands kick) and he comes running at me full-speed, launching himself across the room and landing stomach-first on my lap, simultaneously smacking the keyboard with both hands and screaming ‘Come on, damn computer!’ (no idea where he picked that up) even though he knows damn well ‘sesame street pinball’ doesn’t start with 'slafjhlenjflab'.

Air Travel III - Thin Atmosphere Reading

2011-09-02T05:45:00.001-04:00

People will sometimes ask me how long it takes to fly between Tokyo and New Jersey. My answer usually elicits a contorted expression and a syllable or two of pained commiseration, reactions I personally would reserve for someone in truly insufferable straits – a diehard Glee fan, for example. Or someone with a full-time job.

I don’t know why people consider thirteen hours in the air something akin to torture. First of all, in my case, I’m flying because I want to, unlike the poor saps up in the front of the plane who have no choice but to fly off to another meeting somewhere. Second, what’s so bad about being able to sit around and watch movies while people bring you food? If you’re flying with an Asian airline there’s the added bonus of free beer and wine. Plus the flight attendants are still selected in step with the time-honored tradition of chauvinistic arousal. Are you kidding me? If demurely beautiful women in flattering silky garb are bringing me free beer I’ll fly for weeks on end.
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Air travel II - (sk)In-Flight

2011-08-26T01:20:00.002-04:00

I like airports, actually. They offer such good post fodder.

I step through the door and come face to face with a half-naked middle-aged man. Well not face to face; he’s turned toward the wall so all I see is his pasty, mealy back. On the shelf in front of him is his open carry-on. He’s slathering on his deodorant. I feel like I’m at the YMCA.

The door to my stall bangs shut as I step around the corner – to see another shirtless fifty-something man bent over one of the row of sinks. His gut rests on the countertop as he washes his face. This guy didn’t make it far in the Gladiator audition process either. I take one of the sinks on the opposite wall…and there’s the guy, his back and his front, reflected infinitely in our opposing mirrored walls.

Really, this is nothing compared to a Japanese onsen in terms of proximity to naked strangers and their degree of nakedness. Still, I can’t wait to get on my flight to Tokyo.
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Air Travel - Wonder & Woe

2011-08-23T08:13:00.004-04:00

Last week I flew from Newark, New Jersey to Tokyo’s Narita Airport. (If this were a facebook status update I’d simply say ‘EWR-NRT’, assuming such snark has not yet become passé.) It had been a while since I’d flown –six weeks almost – so it took no time for the incongruous wonders of air travel, like the burn of a jalapeno, to rip into my senses once again.

Of course, the physics alone are mind-boggling. I’m sure Orville and Wilbur never imagined an eight-million-pound plane, loaded with another eight million pounds of people, luggage and processed dinner omelets, could make it over a sand dune let alone the Pacific Ocean. Legalized extortion (commonly known as the fuel surcharge) notwithstanding, that we can in twenty-four hours get from any semi-major city in the world to any other semi-major city not currently steeped in rioting and/or armed conflict is nothing less than an everyday miracle (until we figure out those wormhole things). Yet people will still complain about the dinner omelets.
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Go Find Your Own Top Ten

2011-08-06T10:33:00.002-04:00

Every time I turn to my twitter feed there's somebody, or several somebodies, or one hyperactive somebody, tweeting relentlessly trying to outdo all the other somebodies, linking to an article or a blog post centered around a numbered list: Top Ten Mistakes New Tweeters Make. Seven Kinds of Shoes You Should Never Wear to a Job Interview. Thirteen (13? Really?) Words You Need Right Now To Get You More Traffic!

I hate these lists, partly because I read them knowing full well they are written because research shows most people gravitate toward numbered lists when they want information, advice or more traffic. And I hate being most people. Sounds snobbish I know, but Yogi Berra wasn't like most people and look, people still remember and repeat his advice. I doubt anyone is going to remember WebBizMan for all those great numbered lists he tweeted to his 152,804 followers (149,934 of whom he himself follows, very closely no doubt). Given the choice, I'd much rather be Yogi Berra than WebBizMan.

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Living As We Can - A Year in Fukushima #11

2011-06-27T08:37:00.007-04:00

The narrow passageway inside the front door showed a familiar scene. On the table, a miniature camel from Morocco and my son’s last paper and crayon pre-school project. On the opposite wall, pictures from Vietnam in the Spring and Christmas in New Jersey. The recycling still sat in plastic bags over in the corner under the stairs. That dirty soccer ball was still there too.

Only the staleness of the air was new. That and the fact that this was now where we used to live.

Exactly three months had passed since we locked up and left. It was cloudier then, drops of rain poetic in foretelling the heavier storms to come. Today the sky bore bright patches of blue, with nary a rain cloud in sight. Yet it seemed a blanket now lay draped over the town, a dank invisible veil that fell over the streets and houses and floated right through the walls, not settling on our material world so much as invading our learned concept of existence.
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Adversity

2011-06-22T22:51:00.000-04:00

A buddy of mine was relating to me recently the story of his friend, a girl born in Southeast Asia. ‘Thirty-something years ago her family had to take off,’ he said. ‘There was all sorts of fighting going on, people being killed, and they had to sneak through the woods for days to get away, basically with nothing to their name.’ Eventually they made it all the way to America and managed, in circumstances I couldn’t imagine, to create a new life for themselves. ‘She was really young at the time, I don’t know how well she even remembers it all. But I’ll tell you what, she is one tough girl. We go running, biking, whatever, and she refuses to not keep up with me. And she’s only like this big.’ He stuck his hand sideways against my arm, just below my shoulder. ‘Dude, she’s amazing.’

I told my friend that I envied her in a way. It wasn’t that I wished I’d had her childhood instead of mine. And yet, part of me wished I did. ‘We grow up in a nice, safe place, all comfortable and fortunate,’ I said. My friend listened, staring back at me, eyes brimming with his own brand of intensity. ‘And we have no concept of what it means to be tough, you know? That idea, that understanding of what it is to have to survive…literally.’
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Home No More - A Year in Fukushima #10

2011-06-15T21:56:00.005-04:00

Last October I decided to document some of the facets of a year of life in my adopted home of Fukushima. Three months ago that life as it was ended, replaced by something I am only beginning to come to grips with.

My mother in law was there waiting for us last night, hazards blinking, fuel-efficient car parked neatly along the curb of the mostly empty street. Fukushima City seemed unusually dark and desolate for 8:30 on a Monday night. As our bus lurched to a stop I wondered if maybe it had always looked this way.

There were nine people on our bus, four of them me and my family. Three had gotten off at Koriyama. The Tokyo-Fukushima Highway Line, I was sure, had never been this empty. The recorded messages – We are now arriving in Fukushima, Thank you for riding with us, Please make sure you don’t leave anything behind – were the same as always, which somehow made them sound odd.
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Moving, Still Moving...

2011-05-17T09:56:00.001-04:00

It started back in mid-March. Many of you know the story. My family and I left our apartment, then our hometown, and soon our country – my wife’s own, my adopted. We landed in New Jersey and tried to relax.

For a while it seemed to work.

I was home – yet I wasn’t. As with every other place I’d occupied for the last twenty years, this wasn’t where I lived, it was only where I was staying. For my wife…a place she felt eminently welcome. A place she could feel her kids were safe and loved, a place they could thrive…for a while, until it was time to move again.

We visited people. Family, friends. We stayed over, told to make ourselves at home. We were blessed, for this was a time to take time and relish our good fortune in having so many people, in so many places, who cared enough to invite us in and see, though we already knew, that we were loved. And we stayed for a time, watching, remembering what it was like to go about the business of being a family living at home.

Good bye, for now - tohoku earthquake part eight

2011-05-04T03:38:00.001-04:00

On Tuesday morning all I cared about was getting my family out of Fukushima, far away from the radioactive mess that was percolating down along the coast. We didn’t know where we might end up when we jumped into Jun’s car. Maybe we’d go to Akita, I thought, or Yamagata – put some more miles and mountains between us and the reactors. If we really thought it necessary we could probably get to Osaka, or even Kyushu, where people had gas in their cars and the supermarket shelves were stocked and kids could play in the park without their parents worrying about what might be falling out of the sky. No place could be too far, really. We just needed to find a corner of Japan, a place we could go to be safe, where we could breathe the air and let our kids run around outside, and wait until things settled down. Then we could return home and get on with living our lives.

The long ride to Morioka – the stretches of quiet thinking time along a road through a country that seemed much more dead than alive – those four hours in Jun’s car changed all that.
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Hope & Reliance - tohoku earthquake part seven

2011-04-25T10:28:00.001-04:00

The ramen shop was flooded with light and familiar smells. My wife and I, our boys between us, sat across the low table from Jun, his brother Yu and his friend (girlfriend?) Miki. We ate as we would on any night, though the cooks couldn’t make a couple of dishes for lack of certain ingredients. We talked as we would over any meal – hometowns and high school memories, jobs and friends and the soft-boiled eggs Yu had this thing about. Yamato slurped his noodles, splattering his soup. Seiji fussed and laughed and ate and refused in turns. The radiation we had run from seemed far, far away.

Yet the reason we were there wouldn’t fade from my head. Not completely. Not for a moment.

Back at Yu’s apartment we would share snack food and drink a random assortment of beer in cans. Yamato was given his first taste of video games and Harry Potter. Seiji entertained before he started tiring; my wife would skip his bath tonight and try to get him down. We talked more, about all manner of things, though somehow – as it seems to happen in Japan – we never scratched too deep below the surface. This because maybe the Japanese are inclined on all levels to remain one of the group; tipping the conversational scales in any one person’s direction, particularly their own, is not the overriding inclination.
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You are getting sleeeee-py.....and irrrr-itable....Your throat is swelling shuuuut....

2011-04-18T09:11:00.000-04:00

In a previous post I documented an hour of channel-surfing Japanese TV. Admittedly I devoted the lion’s share of my attention to the commercials because they are short and I could squeeze more material out of my self-allotted hour. I didn’t mean any disrespect to the actual programs, which by and large are always just as silly as the adverts.

Though I considered trying, it would be borderline impossible to write an equally bone-splittingly hilarious post about the programming here. Not because TV in the US is any less ridiculous than in Japan, but all four of my devoted readers live in the States so anything I say would be either redundant or offensive, and faster than you could say American I Dull down the drain goes my hard-earned fan base.

Fortunately two weeks ago my mom left the TV on in the den after the recent NCAA championship game.
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North - tohoku earthquake part six

2011-04-12T23:16:00.000-04:00

I recognized the woman at the door immediately, despite the mask that covered her nose and mouth. I knew her daughter too, as one of my son’s many pre-school friends. ‘Konnichi-wa,’ I said, trying in vain to recall either of their names. The woman offered a slight bow, awkward enough with her daughter on her hip, forget about the underlying circumstances. ‘Kevin-san, domo.’ She handed me a small, heavy plastic bag.

My wife had said she’d be dropping by, with milk formula for our little boy. In the intervening moments I’d forgotten her name, but I remembered very clearly one thing my wife said: she was going to be driving to Sendai.

‘I’m leaving tomorrow,’ she said in response to my casual query. I glanced over at her boxy car, already half-stuffed with blankets and bags. ‘Are there any buses running out of Sendai, do you know?’ I asked. She shook her head. ‘Maybe, but I don’t know.’ With this we both understood: I was looking for a way out of town, and while she really would like to help…
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Things, We Didn't Know - tohoku earthquake part five

2011-04-08T02:26:00.000-04:00

The subject of the text message was simple: 'Run!'

With this one word all the thoughts I'd fallen asleep to came crashing back into my head. My friend had spent the night thirty miles up the road in Yonezawa. 'We'll go further today, if we can,' he said.

If we can?...

In my head it sounded right out of a movie, too dramatic to be real. And he wasn't the only person I knew who was already heading west, away from the nuclear reactors leaking God-knows-what-if-anything into the air. A co-worker of mine, one of the sharpest and most level-headed guys I've ever met, had also hit the road. He too was with his family, making his way toward the Sea of Japan, unsure of their destination, living out of their car. 'Just to be on the safe side,' he said.
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NCAA Men's Hoops Title Game Review

2011-04-06T05:56:00.000-04:00

Already three and a half minutes into the culmination of the greatest sporting event of the year (don't argue with me, it has been scientifically proven) and I am just now tuning in. The kids have a knack of keeping me from life's most important moments with their needy little habits - bedtime stories, clean diapers, rehydration - but they are finally all tucked in. Now my mom and her husband are in a silent power struggle over control of the TV. What about my needs?

So I'm watching the game on some Internet channel or another, no idea if I'm paying for it. Check that - no idea if mom is paying for it. Got this document window open to about the size of a playing card so I can see the entire screen. And a few key stats along the sidebar. (Quick question: How do you pronounce 'Oriakhi'?)

So UConn's Kemba Walker just got the smack down by Andrew Smith after traveling down the lane after getting hip-checked by aforementioned Andrew. Looks like we're in for some fun tonight.
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Who Cares Who Matters?

2011-04-04T14:14:00.000-04:00

The front page of this Saturday's Newark (NJ) Star-Ledger almost made me toss my oatmeal. Top and center, with a bold headline and a big photo added for extra intellectual value, was an article (two actually) involving someone I was until this Saturday morning completely, utterly and in hindsight blissfully unaware of.

It seems certain people at Rutgers University recently decided it would be a good idea to pay someone $32,000 to come talk to the students for two hours.
My first thought: 'I probably would have done it for half that.' But of course what could I possibly have to say that could rival the wisdom, the priceless inspiration, the sage life-altering advice of...a reality television mouth? With a self-given nickname that rhymes with a snack food?
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Home, Neighbors, Cake & What's Coming - tohoku earthquake part four

2011-04-02T01:19:00.000-04:00

After faking his own death Huckleberry Finn hides in a tree outside a church window, looking in on all the townfolk crying at his funeral. 'I never had any idea so many people cared about old Huck Finn,' he says as the tears well in his own eyes.

Of all the scenes of all the movies, all the passages in all the books I've ever read, this was the one that came to mind as I stared at the screen of my laptop soon after returning home on Sunday.

The population of the shelter was about half what it had been the first night. In the morning air I felt a mix of restlessness and lethargy; the aftershocks had all but ceased, and though they'd probably keep the gym open for anyone wanting to stay, I knew it was time for us to go home - utilities or no.
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The Morning After - tohoku earthquake part three

2011-03-29T10:21:00.000-04:00

Morning arrived in the form of the generator's low hum; a murmur of voices; the footsteps, discernible somehow, of people at task. I crawled out of my futon (everyone I'd offered it to - elderly women, infant-coddling mothers, even the girl who literally fell asleep on her knees on the bare hardwood - had declined in favor of their own measly blankets) and looked around at a gymnasium filled with sunlight. People were up and about, moving not so much with purpose as with a desire for purpose. A few still reclined where they had slept, or not slept. Many stood in a line that stretched halfway around the room and ran right past the edges of my comforter. In shorts and a t-shirt I folded everything into a less obtrusive pile. The people at whose feet I'd just been sleeping pretended not to notice or care.

At the long tables against the far wall men and women handed out rice balls and tea. My wife was already on line, both our boys hanging onto her. I caught her eye and she motioned for me to join her; food was being carefully rationed out and they might not have given her any extra rice for a husband she'd claim was still asleep in that oversized lump of bedding over there. Although with our own leftover rice from home, along with some crackers and bread and peanut butter and juice, we weren't living on the edge of survival. Not yet.

Overnight the sheltered masses had sat nervously, clutching their blankets and murmuring louder with each successive aftershock.
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Calm Amid Calamity -- tohoku earthquake part two

2011-03-24T18:32:00.001-04:00

I walked into the dark front hall of the Shimizu Learning Center. A man in a blue windbreaker approached, moving with an efficiency that told me he was at work though in what capacity I had no idea. What was the situation here, or anywhere else? What had really happened, and what needed to be done? I hadn't seen any damage. A distant siren bled through the hum of a single generator; outside the glass doors a circle of men dressed in shadows watched over a huge pot of water, slowly warming over a propane flame.

I suppose I expected to be received in some way, for someone in a dark blue windbreaker to ask me my name, if I was all right and did I come with any family. I waited for direction but the man kept walking, by my shoulder and out into the wind and the returning snow. More figures appeared, out of the black corridors ahead and the blustery darkness behind. A couple of them held flashlights. They traded scant words as they passed each other. No one spoke to me. No lines, no people with clipboards. Barely a sound besides that generator. The siren in the distance faded and died. Something was going on here - but what? I wondered if we had come to the wrong place.

Yet the parking lot outside was full; my wife was waiting out there with our two boys, along with enough food and blankets, we hoped, to get us through the night. There had to be others. I walked down the left corridor, drawn to a softly-illuminated doorway and a murmur of voices. At the bottom of a single step a dozen pairs of shoes lie in semi-disarray. I kicked off my battered sneakers and stepped inside.
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Where Fear Lies -- tohoku earthquake part one

2011-03-22T03:42:00.001-04:00

With a cheap driver I worked the tiny screw on the back of my son's toy microwave oven. He likes to play restaurant every now and then, making me fish pizza and croissant soup or whatever strikes his blossoming imagination. Then he tells me to 'sit here and eat'. I couldn't remember those words coming from him lately though so maybe the batteries in there still had some juice.

The sky outside was growing dim.

I am so not prepared for this.

----------------------

Quarter to three in the afternoon; my son is sitting at a kid-sized table with his friends at the Shinryo pre-school, chomping on cookies and drinking cold tea. The other kids are there with their moms. Both teachers in the room are women. I'm the only adult male, and though they all say it's great that my son could be there today with his 'O-to-san' I'm feeling a bit out of place. I stir my paper cup of coffee and watch my son interact with the other kids in effortless Japanese.

All along the coast, from Fukushima up through Miyagi and into Iwate, fishermen in slickers and rubber boots and weathered skin tie off their nets and head to bed. Their wives sit on the floor on straw mats pouring tea, alone or with friends, glancing outside at the slowly warming March weather. Young children play and shriek and eat cookies at schools just like Shinryo. All along the coast.
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Bathrobes and Beer: The Japanese Ryokan Experience - A Year in Fukushima #9

2011-03-03T11:07:00.001-05:00

Japan boasts a considerable array of accommodation options – to put it in cheesy tourist pamphlet terms. Capsule hotels, business hotels, love hotels; the Hilton and the Hyatt and the Japanese versions of such; you have your youth hostels (thirty dollars with membership) and your campgrounds (thirty dollars without); and on the traditional side, you’ve got your minshuku, with tatami floors, futons and green tea to make yourself comfy as you watch your coin-operated 13-inch television, and then you have your more upscale ryokan, with tatami floors, futons and green tea to make yourself extra comfy as you relax and watch your wide screen high-definition plasma television.

In the course of my travels around Japan, when not camping (illegally) or sleeping on a beach or a gazebo in a park (maybe legally), I’ve rucked up to many a minshuku. They give you those robes to hang out in, and dinner and breakfast are included so why not? I’m not much of a TV guy however so I never sprang for the more expensive ryokan. And if my wife hadn’t finagled a sweet deal at Azuma-So up the road in Iizaka last weekend I might very well have ended up leaving Japan – or dying – without ever experiencing a wide plasma screen while hanging out on the floor drinking tea in someone else’s bath robe.
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Going By The (Immensely Popular and Profoundly Flawed) Book

2011-02-26T12:34:00.002-05:00

We were making unbelievable time; seriously, I thought we had entered some kind of worm hole. The trip from our hostel (way overpriced – and no breakfast) back to Bratislava Station went much faster than the initial walk across town to the Linoleum Sheraton now that we knew which way was hore. We hopped a train to Trenčin, a small city with a quaint old town and phenomenal ice cream, then traveled on to Ružomberok via a silky smooth connection in Žilina. (Switzerland, I thought at this point, had nothing on Slovakia’s rail system – except maybe in the sanitation department…and in overall comfort…and on a baseline decibel level.)

Right outside Ružomberok Station we jumped on a bus (after a stuttering, embarrassing back-and-forth with the driver). The seats and aisle crammed full of students (wonderfully forgiving of our bulky bags), we stood for the ten kilometers down the road to Vlkolinec, an idyllic one-dirt-road village whose residents’ lives have been turned upside down since its appointment to Unesco’s World Cultural Heritage list. After a prying look around we would take another creaky bus back to Ružomberok for our last train ride of the day; if things continued to proceed as they had since our fortuitous encounter with that blessed street vendor in Bratislava we would make it to Liptovsky-Mikulaš in plenty of time to find a place, fire up some dinner and relax as the sky turned dark over Jasná and the peaks of Chopok Sever. We started walking, me pushing a suitcase, a loaded pack on my back, my wife pushing our son in his stroller right behind. According to the map in our guidebook, Vlkolinec was right there along the main road…
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An Hour in TV Land - A Year in Fukushima #8

2011-02-20T13:04:00.002-05:00

The following account of my Saturday evening is completely true and totally uncensored.

The clock on the wall was ticking toward 10:30. I had just finished hanging the laundry in the living room. (Just go with it, this is Japan remember.) A familiar snoring reverberated from the bedroom, an unintentional but unmistakable message from the wife that I could go ahead and play Lone Ranger again tonight. Twenty-four hours ago I had sketchy plans to meet up with a buddy for that ever-elusive beer; unfortunately on this day, like most recent days, I had been deep into my work and the fascination of how slow my microchips move, and I forgot to get back to him. So there I stood, all alone, between two racks of wet clothes and my sleeping family. It was 10:25 on a Saturday night.

This, by the way, is not the bad part.

The bad part is, I decided to turn on the TV.

I stepped on train tracks and tripped over dinosaurs as I scrounged around for the remote. Then I fell onto the couch and clicked that baby, hoping for…well, anything. After a moment staring at a blank screen I got up and walked over to our TV with built-in VCR, which you have to turn on manually if that’s how your son turned it off. Then I plopped back down as the picture warmed up.

First thing I saw were three walking, singing pollen spores getting their lights punched out by a psychotic football player spray-painted the color of aluminum foil. After a pleasant jingle someone breathed easier, and the scene switched to a computer-generated garden. A woman in red smiled as she walked along, seemingly unfazed by the line of grinning red birds following her. They had a conversation and sang a song before another woman came on, marching down the street in front of a row of levitating tubes of some kind of crème.

At this I went downstairs and dug desperately for the last two cans of beer in the house. As I settled back onto the couch again I swore to never forget to call another friend.
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Love Rules In Japan

2011-02-13T22:00:00.005-05:00

It's the start of another English class; I'm pretending to jot something in my notebook when I toss the question out. ‘What day is it, guys?’

My students enjoy the easy back-and-forth, to get their minds and mouths into English mode. For me, it’s nice they play along since I usually don’t know what day it is. As far as I’m concerned, that we’ve shown up on the same day at the same time at all is cause enough to celebrate, by cancelling class and going out for ramen and beer I always say - to no avail as I’ve yet to be blessed with a student who doesn’t see this as a breach of some vague rule system.

This morning too I asked, then found myself squinting at the calendar across the room trying to figure it out before my student did. ‘Oh!’ she says, in an authentic show of surprise; this starts me thinking that maybe she forgot about a hair appointment and is going to cancel class on the spot, or at least step out into the hall for ten minutes to apologize profusely into her cell phone, which will allow me time to hang out and down an extra cup of coffee while I figure out what day it is.

But instead she turned to me, wide-eyed. And then it hit me too. And a wave of guilt washed through me, knowing what was going through my now equally guilt-ridden student.

In Japan, where passion ranks on the common social agenda just below understanding football, there is only one possible explanation for why Valentine’s Day is met with such enthusiasm: it is because a thorough set of guidelines has been established so everyone knows exactly how they are supposed to express their unbridled love.
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Between Two Pictures

2011-02-08T03:37:00.000-05:00

The day after we moved into this apartment two years ago I set up a bookcase in the living room. My family and I were fresh off an extended European vacation, and most of our kitchenware and clothes were still in the stacks of mismatched boxes at my wife’s parents’ house thirty minutes away. We had no table to eat on. We had one bath towel to share. My son wanted his CDs. And with the chill of winter hanging in the March air the kerosene heater would come in handy.

Naturally, all this would be addressed in due time.

‘We need more blankets,’ my wife yelled from the top of our new staircase as I was grabbing the car keys.

Blankets and books, I said to myself.

I imagined the warm sun coming in through our sliding glass doors as I flipped through picture books of Iceland and Hokkaido and a dozen US National Parks. I had a couple of kids’ adventure books from Germany. I had a series of books on learning Mandarin, along with a variety of books on Japan – the language, the culture and a smattering of literature in the Japanese original. My wife kept handy a stock of travel magazines; I would add a few tomes on the world’s major religions. Together, these rows of printed and bound treasures would serve as the catalyst of my aspirations.
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Luck & Sardines - A Year in Fukushima #7

2011-02-04T12:00:00.002-05:00

I am in big trouble.

Something bad is staring me right in the face, and this time it has nothing to do with my son, my short attention span or personal injury (or, most recently, all three). It has nothing to do with anything I’ve done, actually. In fact, it has absolutely nothing to do with anything that has even happened yet. But I am on a collision course with destiny, and there is no getting around it. That is why tomorrow I am going to jump on the horn and set a date with my local exorcist.

To most outsiders Japan is a safe, peaceful place, decorated with cherry blossoms and veiled in a kimono of serenity. Not true, my friends. This country is a dangerous, devilish place.

Take my friend Eriko. She’s a pleasant mix of gregarious, intelligent and modest. She works at a bank, travels abroad on her own and goes to the gym regularly. She’s confident yet self-effacing, and has probably never crossed the street against the light. Yet recently she did something to warrant a trip up the road to Fudohsan Shrine for the ominous yakubarai ritual.

Recently, Eriko turned the dreaded thirty-three.
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Part of the Battle - Guest Post by John Regan

2011-01-31T23:15:00.002-05:00

Today we take a blessed break from the pointless ramblings of the guy who usually posts here to enjoy a few words from John Regan, an aspiring writer and incurable Red Sox fan.
I became acquainted with John only recently, and it didn’t take long to take a liking to his work. Anyone who writes for a living – John works as an editor for a telecommunications company in Washington State – and then goes home to craft a short story or work on a book or post to a nostalgia-rich blog has got to have passion for the art. In John’s case, this passion translates into subject matter that, well, matters. Take a look at an excerpt from the book he is working on, about former collegiate wrestler and current motivational speaker Rich Jensen, or pick an entry from one of his two blogs and dive in. You’ll see what I mean.

For his guest post here John offers a few words on his love of language and writing while touching on their concomitant labors. I deeply appreciate John’s stopping by, and look forward to seeing his name on book covers and bookshelves as he works to conquer the beasts that, in writing as in any endeavor, roam the forests between aspiration and success. Take it away Mr. Regan…
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'Hey I got a schedule to keep here!...' - A Year in Fukushima #6

2011-01-29T11:31:00.000-05:00

Last month I stumbled across a job opportunity in Florida that seemed right up my alley. This was pretty exciting for me as jobs and my alley don’t normally hang out in the same neighborhood. The position, involving fingerprint analysis and expensive-looking machines, would jibe perfectly with my advanced (mostly in age) education. What tipped my stubborn work/life scales though was the prospect of living year-round within a short bike ride of the sand and surf. This was a place I could almost imagine being gainfully employed. So immediately (meaning within a week) I got to work on the application process.

As with any application to a law enforcement agency, the paperwork involved a lot of swearing: I swear I don’t have any objectionable tattoos (or a forked tongue, a condition actually spelled out in the ‘no bodily mutilation’ section); I swear I don’t smoke (drinking, by its non-mention, is fine); I swear I have no history of repeated marijuana use beyond ‘experimental’ (Bill Clinton clause); I swear I have no recent DUI convictions. No problem, I’ll swear to all this and lots more, just hook me up to that polygraph. Oh and by the way I’ve got that ‘high school diploma or GED’ thing covered.
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Time Management 2011 ('Hey where are my keys?')

2011-01-23T22:23:00.003-05:00

Barely three weeks into 2011 and I can already hear the shatter and crash of people everywhere tossing their new year’s resolutions out the nearest window. Normally I wouldn’t notice it over the sound of the toilet as I flush my own promises away, right along with the back end of the year’s first Tuesday afternoon beer. But this January there’s a new kind of noise around the Kato household. Yes, that sound you are hearing is the smooth, even drone of methodical, almost superhuman planning.

I’ve thrown a few resolutions on the table this year. Not casually tossed under the kotatsu, or mindlessly slipped onto my desk, under a pile of what may be last year’s city tax forms and trail of related notices and summonses. No sir, I’ve been cultivating my powers of concentration in preparation for what is shaping up to be a landmark year for me. This year, no more minutes and hours will be wasted, lost forever in the vortex of inefficiency. This year, things are going to get done, frequently and fast, with none of my valuable ‘Run & Gun Time’ wasted on YouTube or dental floss or barely-bleeding kids.
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Flights of Fancy

2011-01-19T08:49:00.001-05:00

My wife’s wallet is fat with stamp cards. Card for the gas station, card for the camera store, card for a curry shop I don’t think she’s ever even been to. She doesn’t even like curry. I myself don’t have the organizational skills to keep track of a stack of store cards, even if I did possess the inclination to hold onto them or the capacity to remember to use them. My wife hands me a supermarket card as I am heading out the door of the apartment, and by the time I’m walking through the automatic doors two minutes later (assuming I hit or ignored all the traffic lights on the way) I’ve completely forgotten about it.

Really, it’s hard to exist in Japan without amassing at least a modest collection of these insidious little gimmicks. I have a mess of them in a drawer from the haircut place up the street; I never bother or remember to bring the last one I got but I feel culturally insensitive if I don’t let them make me a new one. And every time I promise to bring my others to combine them and see what sort of discount I can get on my next cut. I may have enough to take over the place. Then once I do I am going to get rid of the stamp card system.
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Ringing in the New Year in Japan - A Year in Fukushima #5

2011-01-06T10:44:00.001-05:00

That I rang in the new year five days and fifteen minutes ago means a few things. One, the synapses should be firing like jiffy-pop up there, making my aluminum foil head explode with ideas for resolutions so outlandishly ambitious I won’t feel bad about breaking them; two, my mother-in-law’s mochi cakes – all fourteen varieties, including the one with the dried bits of squid entrails mixed in – should have mercifully, magically disappeared by now, from both the fridge and the walls of most of my major arteries; and three, I should have written my first post of the year four days and fifteen minutes ago and gone to bed.

I have excuses none of this is happening. Their names are Yamato and Seiji.

My older boy won’t stop making me play trains with him, or take him to the park. I wish he’d get creative and say something like ‘Daddy, just get out of my face if you can’t turn me into a dinosaur.’ Then I can get down to some serious resolution-making – after I fiddle with the settings on my blog page a little more. The younger kid thinks he’s off the mochi hook because he only has four teeth, and cries like a baby until I give in and fix him some pulverized peas instead. This of course means it’s another plate of cooled-off, brick-of-chalk mochi for papa. Then all day they tag-team mom with screaming poopie pants and glue-eating competitions, and in an apartment this size I can’t fake not noticing that the god of hellfire is shooting out the wife’s mouth again, and suddenly I’m back on daddy duty and another day of writing is shot. So here goes another late-night typing session – evidently I didn’t place the prolific writing resolution bar high enough to justify crying a quiet ‘impossible’ to myself and just crawling into my futon.
But really, I’m glad I’m feeling motivated, because I can’t wait any longer to say that my New Year’s Eve was, in a word with countless connotations, amazing.
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Prelude to a Japanese New Year's - A year in Fukushima #4

2010-12-31T02:20:00.004-05:00

With only a very limited time to write this post I found it decidedly fortuitous that there were no decent CDs in my wife’s car. Thus the drive from the Internet-less peach farm to a screaming child-less apartment would be a quiet one, as there is a law in the universe that makes it impossible for anything good to be on Japanese radio, and I would have the opportunity to think of an intelligent and snarky opening for today’s blither. But just to make sure the universe was behaving I flipped on the stereo and pushed a couple of preset buttons.

Depending on your opinion of jazz, universal law may indeed be holding constant. But I ended up in mental la-la land for most of the drive listening to a drawn-out jam session called, for no reason I could discern, Autumn Leaves. Another universal law seems to be that jazz titles shouldn’t bear any comprehensible connection to the music.

I came to Japan in September of 2001. This is the first New Year’s Eve I will be spending in Fukushima, where I have officially been living for all but two of the past nine New Year’s Eves. I drove up to the peach farm with the wife and kids two days ago, and while on the surface things appear as they always have (see this previous post), this time around the air in Arai feels different somehow.

‘How long are you staying?’ my mother-in-law asked as I dumped more bags of crap onto the front hallway floor. Yamato pushed his box of new train tracks into the living room while my wife immediately began worrying about whether Seiji needed more milk or a clean diaper or some time with his new walker-wagon as he is now spending a lot of time on his feet and my wife doesn’t want him to lose his developmental momentum. I just mumbled my Japanese greetings and lugged everything into the refrigerator tatami room where we would be sleeping for the next six nights.

Interview with Christopher Carr Of The Inductive - Part V

2010-12-26T10:37:00.001-05:00

Fifth and Final Installment. It has been a fantastic pleasure working with Christopher Carr on this, and I look forward to 2011 when I will begin contributing regularly to The Inductive. Thanks for stopping by, and best of luck in all your endeavors in the coming year.

Christopher Carr: As for connecting with a local person, I recommend couch surfing. Other than that, I've heard Akita is a special place. It's the only area of Tohoku I've never been, and I'm planning a big trip up there next summer, so we'll see how that goes. Here is my final question for you: what do you think lies in the future for Japan and your own relationship to it?

Kevin Kato: Couch surfing, of course! How could I forget that one? I’ve actually surfed all over the place, and I’ve hosted some great people here which has actually helped deepen my own appreciation for Japan and Fukushima. Yes, definitely glad you brought that up. I must be getting tired.

Now, you want my take on the future of Japan? I’ll be honest, for as long as I’ve been here I know precious little of the machinations behind this country’s political and economic behavior, I’ll leave that to the pundits and bloggers who know what they are talking about. As far as my place in Japan, I really do feel at home here, bewildering though it can still be at times. On a personal level I’ve met and been befriended by countless wonderful people who would give me the shirt off their back if I needed it. I’ve eaten dinner with many a welcoming family and slept in their homes. I’ve been invited to partake in festivals and weddings. I’ve been forgiven by policemen and treated like royalty by strangers on the street. I wandered into the restricted area at the Hakodate fish market and found myself being given a guest pass and a complimentary sashimi breakfast. And none of it took more than a smile or a friendly word. To anyone who says Japanese people aren’t friendly, I say you aren’t doing your part.
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Interview with Christopher Carr of The Inductive - Part IV

2010-12-25T19:18:00.002-05:00

For previous installments of this interview go to The Inductive or simply keep scrolling down.

Christopher Carr: In terms of traveling Japan, I imagine going by bike is one of the best possible ways. I've always preferred using the cheapest public transportation imaginable mixed with a small amount of hitchhiking. Getting back to your point about avoiding the touristy areas, which specifically would you avoid, and which do you think are must-see? Also, could you paint in broad strokes, how someone with no experiential knowledge of Japan might go about acquiring that knowledge as efficiently (yet enjoyably) as possible.

Kevin Kato: Which touristy areas to avoid? That’s actually a tough one to answer. I mean, by and large I’ve enjoyed what these heavily-touristed places have to offer, it’s just that conundrum of a place losing its aura because of all the people who wish to go see it. It’s just the nature of the beast. If you were out in the backwoods of Oita or Aomori and you stumbled on a Kiyomizudera that no one but the locals knew about…well, I’d certainly consider that an immensely more magical experience than visiting the ‘real’ Kiyomizudera in Kyoto. But Japan doesn’t tend to hide her treasures – I mean the ones that fit into the mainstream tourist’s interests. Okay, so what to avoid? One place that comes to mind is a theme park in Nikko called Edo-mura, which you can imagine is a recreation of an Edo-period village. Well, a very poorly-presented recreation. Really, it was terrible. Not the replicated village so much as the troupes of pseudo-bandoliers parading around like they were in some samurai movie set and hadn’t read the script. But Nikko itself was fantastic, from Toshogu Shrine to Lake Chuzenji to the gorge downriver from Kegon Falls, I can’t remember the name actually. But let’s see, a place to avoid… Maybe not so much to avoid but a place that in my opinion did not live up to my expectations was Amanohashidate. It was nice, but one of the three most beautiful sights in Japan? Great place, no debate; maybe what got to me, and if you’ve been there then maybe you can relate, was everyone up on that lookout spot standing up on that rock bent over and looking between their legs, which is supposed to make that strip of land look like it is rising up into heaven. For the few minutes I was up there waiting my turn, no one seemed to see anything more than I did, which was an upside down strip of land. But then afterward I went down and took a stroll across that strip of pine-covered sand and thought it was remarkable. Sat on the beach, went for a swim, it was great. So again, it was the human-added factor that put a check in the con column for me.
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Now I Know Why My Son Calls Me Krampus

2010-12-24T12:07:00.001-05:00

This past week I was once again rattling my ping-pong ball brain around in my skull, trying to knock loose from my miserly sub-conscience another of his multitude of ultra-creative, neuron-growth-stimulating ideas for my Tuesday evening English class. Last month I decided to broaden my students’ vocabulary as well as their intercultural awareness by showing them photos of my recent trip to California. This worked well for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being that it gave my students a way to feel they were fully participating in class without having to say anything more than ooh and ahh.

With the Christmas season upon us, and with Japanese society in general not having the slightest clue how to properly celebrate, I wanted to incorporate a Christmas theme into our ninety-minute lesson that usually ends up lasting no more than an hour because someone, like the teacher, is always late. Singing Christmas songs seems an obvious option, but after teaching that Beatles class earlier in the year I knew no one would be able to hang with a tempo any quicker than ‘Silver Bells’ and personally I know my sanity wouldn’t survive the class because they don’t allow spiked eggnog in the building. Last year I asked them to translate a children’s Christmas book; my preparation for this consisted entirely of plowing through all the Santa and Snowman and cartoon ‘Zheesusu’ stories my wife had borrowed from the library and picking out the shortest one. Two hours later my students were bleeding through their foreheads trying to translate the sounds Maisy the mouse, Tallulah the chicken-like thing, Charley the alligator and Eddie the elephant made as they walked through the snow. No disrespect to Lucy Cousins but I will not be trying that again.

This year I am arguably older and wiser, and I thought it would be interesting for my students and quite easy on my ping-pong ball if I put together a list of little-known facts related to Christmas. But when I sat down to a piece of white paper, pen in hand (my printer is broken, has been for two years and isn’t getting better), it occurred to me I know pretty much jack about Christmas beyond church and Charlie Brown (not to downplay the significance of either of these). So I turned on the laptop, made a cup of hot chocolate and folded an entire load of laundry waiting for it (the laptop) to warm up, then googled and scribbled down the most easily-explainable bits of Christmas history and trivia I could find before my son came in to demand I let him use the pc to watch Barney, one of the dozens of DVDs we have from the US that won’t play on our Japanese DVD player.
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Interview with Christopher Carr of The Inductive - Part III

2010-12-23T21:36:00.001-05:00

This is Part III of a five-part interview. For Part I as posted on The Inductive, click here. For Part II, click here. Or scroll down, or click the link on the right.

Christopher Carr: Tell me about your travels since you came here. Japan is not all that popular with tourists these days, although it's leading the world in English teachers who come and live here I think. Most of my friends, if they make it to Asia at all, skip the neon of Tokyo and the temples of Kyoto for more adventurous tours in Laos or Thailand. Can Japan compete? I've heard a lot of seasoned travelers say that touring Japan for the most part is an academic experience, and you'll get much more out of if you speak Japanese and really do your homework before going somewhere, or else you'll have just no idea what it is you're seeing. Would you agree with this assessment? And how would you characterize your travels around the archipelago?

Kevin Kato: It’s funny, when I first got to Japan I was on the street in Tokyo, maybe Shibuya, and my overriding impression was that it looked a lot like certain parts of Manhattan; big buildings, lots of traffic and people and, what was by far the most astonishing thing, if that isn’t too strong a word, was that almost everything was in English. Store signs, restaurant menus, everything on everyone’s t-shirts, it was all in English. Not always correct English, but English. It was disappointing, really. I was expecting to walk into a world that didn’t make any sense to me. That’s how I wanted it to be. Probably the most exotic experience I’ve had here is using the toilet in someone’s old farmhouse – where they still lived – and finding a floor made of loose boards sitting above a big hole in the ground. In Laos or Cambodia or Malaysia or Peru, outside of the major cities and tourist areas this is almost what you can expect. Japan is extremely developed, so I think you’d be hard-pressed to find that permeating primitive, exotic experience though I’ve never been to the Okinawa island chain.

I tell people my first “real” experience as a traveler came after I’d been in Japan a year and a half already and went to Cambodia. My first day there I found myself in the middle of Phnom Penh with no money, not a word of the language in my head, no idea where to go and no sign of anyone who could help me even if they wanted to – which, to be totally honest, they didn’t. I never felt so utterly lost and hopeless in my life – yet I have to say I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. I’ve never felt even remotely lost like that in Japan.
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Interview with Christopher Carr of The Inductive - Part II

2010-12-22T09:50:00.001-05:00

This is Part II of a five-part interview. For Part I, click here.

Christopher Carr: My experience coming here was kind of the same. I actually never really chose to come to Japan, so that's always a tough question for me to answer when the students ask. From the time I graduated college to the time I had kids I just kind of floated through life. Would you say you had a similar experience? If so, do you believe that there was a kind of force of Fate or Destiny guiding you to Fukushima, or was saying "sure" a conscious decision?

Kevin Kato: Well, I certainly made the decision on my own to come here to Japan. Coming to Fukushima was part of the job offer, something I just accepted without much consideration. “Fukushima, Shimafuka, whatever, I’m going to go live in Japan!” was pretty much my take on the whole deal. Even if I knew I could have requested another location – which I could have – I don’t think I would have because I hadn’t done a whole lot of homework on Fukushima or anywhere else. So at the moment one place would have sounded just as good as the next – as long as it wasn’t Tokyo. ‘Fukushima? Never heard of it, sign me up.’ So in a sense, yeah, I can be a bit of a floater, taking the road that happens to roll out in front of me.

But really, in my years after getting my grad degree – in forensic science...you know, CSI Miami type stuff – I wasn’t floating; I was naively determined to wait until I got exactly the job offer I wanted, which from the outside can seem the same thing. I knew I wanted to work for the FBI as a profiler, and I was ready to accept nothing but the shortest route to that end. Fresh out of grad school I was rejected by the Bureau, so I said okay, I’ll work on the state level for a while first, or I’d go local but only in a place I thought would be cool. I applied for jobs in San Fran, Tampa Bay and Portland, Oregon, passing on jobs in Tulsa and Detroit and such. And I think I pretty much shot myself in the foot being so choosy – I ended up working further and further outside my degree until I found myself an operations manager at a storage and moving company in Colorado. ‘And you have a Master’s in forensics?’ No one could quite get their head around that one, and so a lot of people probably nailed me as a floater, even if that wasn’t the term they had in their head, you know?
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Interview with Christopher Carr of The Inductive - Part I

2010-12-21T10:37:00.000-05:00

Christopher Carr writes on a broad range of subjects on The Inductive and has guest posted on several other blogs, including here (see 'On Teaching a Foreign Language'). Recently he gave me the opportunity to share my thoughts and views as an expat in Japan, something I normally reserve for long bicycle rides when there is no one else listening. Below is the first of five installments, necessary due to my long-winded answers Christopher has promised not to edit too heavily.

It has been a great pleasure working with Kevin Kato for the past several months. Kevin and I have worked together at the same English school in Japan, and we have both done various work for NOK, Fujitsu, and the Japanese government. Kevin has written a guest post for The Inductive comparing and contrasting his trips to Angkor Wat and Yosemite National Park; and he has been kind enough to allow me to post on his blog: Travel. Write. Drink Plenty of Fluids. Kevin is the author of one book, The Tunge Pit, a collection of interconnected short stories which I described before in this blog as a pungent mixture of the American Gothic, ensemble tale, horror nouveau, and pulp suspense genres.
In addition to publishing the Tunge Pit last year, Kevin has recently translated from the Slovenian Damjan Koncnik's Greenland - The End of the World, an account of an adventure to that massive island in the far north.

I was originally planning on reviewing either or both books for this site; but now I believe such reviews might be a superfluous conflict of interest, since Kevin has agreed to write for the Inductive on a regular basis from 2011. Without further ado, I present part I of an interview conducted via email with Kevin Kato over the last month or so, with parts II through V to follow later this week:

Christopher Carr: Please tell me about the changes in your life, outlook, view of Japan, and view of the U.S. since coming here.

Kevin Kato: Wow, you’re going to hit me with all that right off the bat? Can’t we start with something simple like, “Hey are you on Facebook?” Well, for starters, as far as the obvious goes, I came here with three bags of clothes, a bicycle and a camera that used film; now I’ve got a digital camera, two bicycles and three other people in my home – this being my wife and two little boys. I still have three bags of clothes, but now they’re mostly buried under toy trains and picture books.

But regarding my outlook on things, I’d say straight off that I’ve gone from one who lives for today to one who works for tomorrow. This I blame completely on the family I’ve acquired. For the first half of my life here in Japan I put in my classroom time and that was it; everything else was socializing, cycling and sumo on television. Now as a freelance teacher, writer, publisher, husband and father the concept of free time does not exist, unless you count sleeping. When I am not on the floor playing with cars or clay, or at the park with the kids, I am at my computer hoping I turn out to be the one monkey out of the infinite number of monkeys typing away on an infinite number of computers who happens to bang out Shakespeare. I don’t even know when the next sumo tournament is until I happen to catch a glimpse of the broadcast before my boy switches to some show with a dancing chair or a magic peach-headed thing.

Regarding my view on Japan, I think whenever we travel we tend to have this romanticized view of our destination – if we are not scared shitless of course. Our imagination makes either fantasy or nightmare of the horizon, and it rarely turns out to be either of these. Coming to Japan I was on the fantasy side of the coin – I soaked up everything I could about this totally alien environment and – I think at least to a certain degree – I spun it in my mind into the best possible perception. Of course my opinion on some things has not changed since those first days and weeks: I love the atmosphere imbued in traditional Japanese architecture, and sushi and beer is still tough to beat on a summer evening. But other things have lost their magic. I can say with fair authority that not every schoolboy and schoolgirl here is an intellectual prodigy, as seemed to be the ongoing, permeating perception growing up back home. And always sitting on the floor can get old really, really fast.

As far as my perception of home, the U.S., I should note that I came to Japan ten days before 9/11 – thus the world in general was a very different place when I was still in the States versus what it was from almost the moment I got here. Add to this my sudden personal interest in politics and world events beginning on the morning of September 12th and yes, my views have changed appreciably since I arrived in Japan. Perhaps the most telling experience I can relate has been the change in my attitude – that’s not really the right word, though…maybe my inner response is a better term – regarding how I’ve felt when someone asks me where I’m from. In the first few days it was a veritable ego trip. The Japanese, at least the recent generations, love anything relating to the U.S., and when I’d tell someone I’m from America they’d invariably react with something bordering on awe if not mere admiration. It was really kind of silly. Then in those weeks after 9/11, I would answer the same question with a twinge of…oh crap, I need the right word again…Living here so long I’ve begun to lose my English, it’s crazy but it really happens, I swear. I don’t think I used to be this stupid. Anyway, when I told people I was from America they’d have this sudden sadness in their expression, their voice, you know, ‘Oh I’m so sorry what happened’ or whatever. And I mean it was sincere. Turned out I didn’t know anyone personally who died on that day but it was a national tragedy and at least in this part of the world people were mourning with us.
But then G.W. rolled in with his ten-gallon agenda – all right, this has been hashed out a million times, I don’t need to go into it. But as time went on I began feeling embarrassed when I told people, whether in Japan or Malaysia or Chile, that I was from the States. Not because I suddenly thought my country was bad but hey, that fiasco was all the news anyone was getting practically, so for a while, that was the tipping point as far as the world’s view of the U.S.. And it wasn’t entirely unfounded. I would be immensely proud of my son if he stood up to the schoolyard bully to keep another kid from being pounded for his lunch money; I wouldn’t be a proud or a happy dad if he started lying to me about why he was throwing rocks at people. Beyond this, though, I’ve had so many people tell me they loved the U.S. when they visited, or would die for a chance to travel to the States, and this makes me immensely proud.

Also, having done a fair amount of traveling in these nine years, from Asia to South America to Europe and Morocco and Australia, my view of the U.S. has not been shaped merely by whatever my students think and what I can get off the web. To see how so much of the rest of the world lives - and I mean seeing it firsthand, which is worlds apart from watching the same thing on 60 Minutes, or checking out some magazine article on what Brad Pitt and Angelina Voight are doing – actually being in these places, living them, I see how very very lucky we are in the U.S., from our standard of living to our freedoms to just how cheap we get everything. And since the only exposure so many people are getting to the outside world is through TV - where nothing is real, really - so few people can appreciate the extent to which we are blessed. I go home and overhear people complaining about this or that and I want to club them over the head.

Carrying a Tune

2010-12-13T09:37:00.000-05:00

Last week, among the many mentions of and references to John Lennon on the 30th anniversary of his death, I spotted an interesting thread on facebook. Okay, using 'interesting' and 'facebook' in the same sentence shows a lack of qualitative judiciousness, so let me say instead that it was simply amusing. Of course, the thread became instantaneously more amusing once I jumped in. (I believe, by believing this, that this puts me in the self-aggrandizing facebooking majority.)

So in this thread on or around John Lennon's tragic anniversary someone mentioned the song 'You Won't See Me,' which was written by Paul. I don't recall the reason or significance of the song with regards to the original conversation, I only remember how the mention of the song was meaningful to me. (This because I am in the self-absorbed facebooking majority.)

My brain, like God and Google, works in mysterious ways. The connections that form up there in my spongy gray matter fall well within the cross-over realm of miracles and algorithms – or, in non-believer math hater terms, coincidental, self-deluding hooey. Usually these associations arise in the context of riding my bicycle, when my mind is clear of needy kids and writer's block and basic traffic safety rules. And, usually, it involves a song I haven't heard in years.

Biking through the Mekong Delta in southern Vietnam, fresh off a spectacular wipeout involving a preoccupation with my rear tire and an old man with astonishing powers of spontaneous materialization, I was beginning to worry. Back on Koh Chang Island in Thailand I found out that my derailleur was sorely misaligned. Trying to shift onto my Frisbee (the largest chain ring on the front half of the chain drive) my chain refused to catch on any of those forty-eight teeth and wedged itself quite impressively down in between said Frisbee and the middle chain ring. Thirty minutes and a dozen bloody knuckles later I finally pried him free. Less than an hour later I'd forgotten it all – Koh Chang is quite nice – and ended up leaving more blood and shreds of skin in the sand on the side of the road. Small miracle and a fortunate turn of physics that I didn't then snap my newly-gouged chain pushing my loaded tandem up over mountain roads that make Lombard Street in San Francisco look like a wheelchair ramp. I had a chain tool, so mechanically I was ready; thing was, I had no idea how to use it. Nor did I have the slightest idea how to correctly replace a broken spoke (or ten) if I happened to get another close-up of an old man doing his Star Trek thing. By the time I busted the cable on my drum brake in the Vietnamese highlands I was already hearing the first notes of a melody that would remain with me for the next two months.

Quick, name a song by the SOS Band. Here, I'll give you a hint: 'Just be good to me, in the morning. Just be good to me, in the afternoon...' The song came out in 1983 and I might not have heard it since, but there it was in my head, the chorus going round and around and around. 'I'll be good to you, you'll be good to me, we will be together, be together...' The cool part is, all the begging and pleading worked. My bike carried me through the rest of Indochina with only a flat tire in Vientienne and a sticky brake cable, the plastic casing having partially melted somewhere among the sado-masochistic road system in northern Thailand.

On a scorching afternoon in Cambodia, on the same trip, I was pushing down an endless dirt road searching for a place I could get some water – preferably the bottled, non-malarial variety. I didn't want a coke; I didn't want to stop for a coke-sized water that I would completely sweat out just getting my loaded tandem moving on down the road again. I wanted the until-then ubiquitous liter size. And, evidently, my brain thought singing about it would help me deal. This time, not only did I get a song, I got two verses worth of original lyrics to go with my burgeoning dehydration.

The next time you have Bonnie Tyler's 'Holding Out For A Hero' stuck in your head, try these alternate lyrics:

I need a liter!
I'm holding out for a liter till my throat runs dry.
It's got to be fresh and it's got to be cool
And it's got to attach to my bike.
I need a li-TER!!
I'm holding out for a liter if the price is right.
I'll give you the cash put your fingers up fast
But it better not have parasites...

Okay, I'll concede it's not as poetic as the original but this was not something I worked on. You (I) can't come up with stuff like this with a parched throat, angry legs and a sore butt surrounded by nothing but the Cambodian countryside. Hooey on the surface maybe, but miraculous somehow underneath.

Every time I bike through a fishing village in Japan, or anywhere else for that matter, one particular Japanese song gently, merrily explodes in my head. Translation: 'Fish, fish, fish, when you eat fish, head head head, head gets smarter.' I usually head for the mountains when I get on my bike now.

In Nagano Prefecture there's a scenic mountain road called the Venus Line. Guess what song I had in my head for all 32 kilometers of it? Heading out of Malacca, Malaysia I passed a street vendor selling bread and rolls and such, which got me hooked on 'Do You Know The Muffin Man?' That was a fun four hours.

Despite my general innocent disregard for safety I rarely forget to bring my headlamp with me when I am heading out on the bike at night. I do, however, sometimes forget to recharge the batteries. And there are days when I leave with plenty of daylight left but still end up not making it home until after dark. Of course, having a (working) headlamp helps me see all the cracks and potholes and curbs in the road before I hit them, but for the most part it is much more important in its function of letting other people know I am about to slam into their fender. (The same goes for the headlights on your car; if you don't believe me try it sometime.) Thus when my headlamp is less than fully operable (or fully present) I have to keep in mind that while I can see that car pulling out of that side street five yards up ahead, that person can't see me. And my brain, ever on the lookout for opportunities to drown me in songs I would otherwise never hear, in or out of my head, starts in with that Beatles song again. But only the one line, repeated over and over and over and over because it is the only line I know. Of course, it is the only line I need. If my wife suddenly starts ignoring me then maybe the rest of the song will come to me. Though more likely the words to 'I'm Free' by the Rolling Stones would fill my head. 'Yes I'm free, to do what I want, any old time...'

Winding up yet another blog post reminds me of one other example of a song in my brain melding seamlessly with circumstance. This one too involves a Beatles song – specifically, the only line in 'Eleanor Rigby' written by Ringo.

'Father McKenzie, writing the words to a sermon that no one will hear...'

Because I suspect I am alone in the Kevin Kato-absorbed facebooking minority.

Luxury: The New Spirituality

2010-11-29T09:19:00.002-05:00

A number of years ago – 7 2/3 to be exact – I visited Cambodia’s venerated Angkor Wat. This was to be my first trip to a country without any semblance of a sanitation department so naturally I was pretty excited. I met up with a couple of friends in Phnom Penh and we headed for Angkor on the tandem bicycles they were riding. We rode 100 kilometers or so that first day, along undulating dirt roads cutting across tree-studded plains, only an occasional village to keep us on the more pleasurable side of dehydration. ‘What’s that?’ I asked Jamie as he poured a small packet of something into his bottle of purified water. ‘Electrolytes,’ he said, and nothing more. These guys, Jamie and Garryck, were biking around the world and, I figured, needed lots of electrolytes. I was okay with just water. Lying in a hammock at our guest house for five hours that evening, unable to keep down so much as a leaf of Cambodian lettuce, I learned firsthand the wonders of cellular osmosis – and, for future reference, how to ask for electrolytes in common Cambodia-speak.

Next morning we elbowed our way around a crowded and litter-strewn riverbank looking for someone we could trust to tell us where to go to catch the boat up the Tonle Sap to Siem Reap, the de facto base town for Angkor day-trippers. The boat ride was magnificent; the inside of our barge-esque vessel was stuffed with food and other such necessities for the locals all over the countryside which meant we tourists were offered by default an unobstructed rooftop view of the surrounding fields of wild grass and water buffalo for the four-hour trip that is equally fascinating whether you put on sunscreen or not. (The consequences don’t surface until later.) Once in Siem Reap Garryck followed his nose to a guesthouse where we could drop our stuff and take a meandering look around the town, which I found surprisingly and pleasantly serene. Where were all the day-trippers and other assorted backpackers? Left to explore the dirt roads and side streets in solitude I was not going to complain. Until my sunburn began screaming.

Next morning we were up at three for the ride to Angkor to watch the sun rise. We settled down on a spot of grass facing Angkor Wat, by far the most famous icon in all of Cambodia, and watched as the first glints of dawn lifted the black blanket of night, revealing the outlines of tufted palms rising up at the feet of lotus-shaped turrets. The lilies on the ponds fronting the temple took on a slightly different color than the water. Slowly the grandeur of this immense 12th century wonder showed its details to the world. Ten feet away a trio of college-age mouths carried on a loud conversation replete with self-importance and laughing inanity. I wanted to shoot them.

With the sun shining bright we stepped through the stone entrance to the grounds of the Wat and made our slow way toward the temple – or funerary palace, as some scholars contend. The crowds were light; my system had returned to a state of semi-equanimity. Walking several hundred yards over huge cut stone transported by boat and by hand over many miles we found ourselves standing at the base of a steep, steep staircase, one of several equally-steep paths to the interior of Angkor Wat.

‘Why are the steps so steep?’ The question can be asked two ways: in a sarcasm typical of a guy from New Jersey who has just gotten over his lesson in cellular osmosis or in the manner of honest inquiry. I did both in rapid succession.

The answer, as I overheard a guide explain, was grounded in the idea that this was a sacred site, a place of reverence, dedicated to the pursuit of spiritual reflection. Simply entering through a doorway, or even a staircase of normal proportions, would not require any thought on the entering person’s part; thus the mind could remain occupied with other matters and the meaning, the significance, and thus the experience of this place would be lessened by one’s diminished perception of it. Climbing these stone steps demanded attention from anyone not wishing to fall off them, stripping away the clutter of the outside world from a person’s consciousness, drawing one to a fuller, deeper, more intimate experience. I figured with my electrolyte lesson and my upcoming skin grafts added to the mix I was in for one deeply spiritual day.

‘Without effort, the experience is meaningless,’ I heard the guide say.

The US Park Service would do well to put this concept into practice.

Back in the Fall of 1995, upon completion of grad school and passing the almost sadly unchallenging final exam, a friend and I drove cross-country to explore the richness of the US’s many national parks and microbreweries. Among our stops was Yosemite National Park, and while I don’t recall all the fine details of the state of the park at the time, I do know that there were few options for transport, camping and eating there in the valley. Most of the visitors we encountered seemed to be experiencing the park much like we were: maneuvering through the traffic along the looping road and jostling for parking spaces and unimpeded views of the beauty rising up all around us while wondering how long to stick around before barreling off to snag a camp site somewhere before dark.

I returned to Yosemite this past September and found a much different place. The loop through the valley is now largely one-way, with shorter two-way spurs in a couple places to ease access to trailheads and certain popular sights. And while private vehicles are still allowed everywhere, most people opt to park in one of the sprawling parking lots and get around the valley using the free and efficient bus system. If the NPS had stopped the development there I would be heartily applauding their efforts.

About a week prior to our trip I tried to reserve a site in one of the campgrounds in Yosemite Valley proper. The summer season was officially over but, I was warned, spaces still went fast. As it turned out, there was nothing available and we ended up having to opt for Crane Flats, a campground 10 miles west of the valley. I was mildly disappointed – until I saw what had happened to Yosemite.

It all centers around a mini-city called Curry Village, which refers not to the obscene amounts of food now available out there in the wilderness but to David and Jenny Curry who opened up a tent camp in Yosemite in 1899. I wonder what they’d think of how their $2/night operation has changed. Today in Curry Village you can get a cabin with a private bath, a motel room or, if you are feeling adventurous, a tent cabin with, and I quote the website here, ‘custom insulating panels.’ To make this ‘unique and magnificent place to stay’ truly complete, there are no campfires allowed, but there are plenty of ‘dining options near all of our Yosemite cabins.’

I am not at all opposed to being comfortable. I have a problem with catering to people who are unable to appreciate beautiful places without being obscenely pampered. This may sound snobbish or overly critical, but a little time spent in this village in the wilderness confirms what the Khmer rulers and builders apparently understood.

Skies were impeccable, I couldn’t wait to get out on a trail hike. But Seiji, at five months, hadn’t yet learned to time his feedings to my schedule and needed his milk. So off I ran to find hot water – or just water we could heat up on the propane stove. Among the cluster of buildings with log cabin facades and plasma TVs mounted on the walls inside for viewing Yosemite’s best while your ass stays firmly planted, I spotted a restaurant and café and pizza place combination food palace. Inside people were standing around chatting and sipping from large paper cups with heavy plastic lids while others waited on a long line for their coffee or cappuccino or espresso. The only thing missing was the Starbucks logo. Back outside a man and a woman were walking along a paved path, holding their oversized cups and talking about nothing related to Yosemite or even outside. Then the guy suddenly asks the woman: ‘Hey, is that Half-Dome?’ Yes, I wanted to answer, that is half-Dome, the single most recognizable landmark in the valley and the symbol on every piece of official Yosemite literature out there, how long did you have to wait for your coffee?’ Instead I kept quiet.

‘Yes…I think so,’ replied the woman.

Official Yosemite Pamphlet featuring Half-Dome

Later, after the 3-mile hike up to Vernal Falls and back, countless people along the way ignoring the surrounding beauty in favor of commenting to each other what a tough walk it was and who do you think will win American Idol, we got on a shuttle bus and plopped down, my wife and I happy to enjoy a bit of the park without carrying our kids. At the next stop a group of no less than fifteen high schoolers piled on, carrying on with each other, oblivious to the world around them like any group of high schoolers would be, in any environment. A couple of them carried cardboard pizza boxes. Others fooled with their iPods. None of them looked outside until one of them shouted to the rest that their stop was coming up. They all peered out the windows like they’d never seen the place before. Whatever though, teenagers don’t have to be dedicated naturalists. But if my kid ever goes on a field trip to a place like Yosemite he’s leaving the iPod at home.

On the drive to Crane Flats that evening we caught a glimpse of a bear darting into the woods, having apparently just crossed the otherwise desolate road. The only wild animals I saw anywhere in the Valley in three days were a group of three drunk women speaking what sounded like slurred Russian as they pushed past my wife, baby in her arms, to get on the shuttle and take the closest empty seats. Crane Flats Campground itself was perfect; no lights, no heaters and no cabins with insulated panels. People built campfires and sat on folding chairs, carrying flashlights to fetch water and go use the bathroom. There were no stores, no vending machines, no food except what people brought with them – and stored in heavy metal boxes provided to keep the bears from ripping open their car windows and camper doors because the bears in the area can and will do just that. In the morning the drive back to the Valley was magnificent – the sun was rising over the immense peaks and rock walls carved by glaciers long ago. Down in Curry Village people busied themselves with coffee and café breakfasts and the morning paper. The newspaper! Yes, there are newspaper boxes here and there so anyone who came out here to get away from it all could keep up on the news, then maybe go look around a bit of the park if there was time before lunch at the Cabin.

In the afternoon my wife wanted to get a couple of postcards for my older son to send to a couple of his teachers back home. A nice gesture, and a learning experience for Yamato. Meanwhile I waited in the expansive market and souvenir shop, watching over the cameras I was secretly and probably illegally recharging. (Okay, my vicious reliance on modernization surfaces.) It was killing me, trapped inside with the revolving hordes looking at sweatshirts and shot glasses and a thousand other forms of kitsch. So I decided to play a little game. I picked up a postcard with a panoramic scene of the famed valley entrance, one of the most photographed views of the vastness of Yosemite, and began asking people working in the store the name of the waterfall in the picture. Now, this was not a trick question; it wasn’t a shot of just some water tumbling down some rocks, nor was it a barely-visible thin white hint of a waterfall among an expanse of trees and nothing else. There in full color was the most recognizable view of the entire valley, and I am proud to say on just my third day in Yosemite I could confidently name that waterfall. Which, as I half-suspected, was more than some of the people working and living in Yosemite Valley were able to do.

‘Excuse me,’ I said, approaching a man with a fantastic bushy white moustache and a green staff shirt and name tag. ‘Could you tell me the name of this waterfall?’ I showed him the postcard. He stared for a moment, eyes vacant, then came out with what I guessed were the first two names to pop into his head. ‘Oh, that’s Yosemite Falls, or maybe Nevada Falls.’ I thanked him and let him go. Next I went up to a kid stocking shelves of canned food. ‘Hey man, quick question?’ He answered Yosemite Falls too, but then his buddy took a look and corrected him. ‘Nope, that’s Bridalveil Fall.’ I thanked him and left him to chide his can-stacking pal. ‘Figures you wouldn’t, you’re from Boston,’ I heard him say as I turned the corner. Next young girl guessed Yosemite Falls, by now the established default answer. Three out of four people living and working in Yosemite had now answered incorrectly. Next girl, twenty-something with a sharply-defined nose, shot me an impatient ‘Bridalveil’ as if I were the most stupidest person on the planet for asking. The next guy knew too, evening the score at three and partially restoring my faith in humanity. The last test was the floor manager, a girl with a figure like a light bulb and a look of quiet panic in her eyes as she hurried back and forth between a service counter and the door to a back room. ‘Excuse me,’ I said when I had finally timed my slow, unsuspicious circle right and cornered her near a display of cheesy picture frames. ‘Can I ask a quick question?’ And she saved the day with a correct answer and a desperate look over my shoulder.

The board next to the patio of the pizza place advertised a happy hour special of some sort; the main lodge offered a humongous all-you-can-eat buffet for fifteen bucks which, after ten days in a van with two little kids, was admittedly hard to resist. (Strike two against me.) The food wasn’t bad, the selection adequate, and the atmosphere surreal. Nowhere in the entire valley were people’s eyes so full of excitement and wonder as when they were hauling their overloaded plates to their tables, not noticing when clumps of macaroni and chunks of turkey fell off onto the floor as they hurried along. This, I had to sadly consider, was the evolution of the intimate experience: eat until you burst, stay nice and warm in your insulated tent cabin and start the day right with an extra-large gourmet coffee in the high-quality disposable cup and ergonomically-shaped lid. And don’t worry if you can’t recognize Half-Dome; if anyone asks how it was you can just point at the logo on your sweatshirt.

Just today I happened across an advertisement for Wildflower Hall, a luxury hotel located in the Himalayas. ‘Discover solitude in the lap of the Himalayas’ it says under a picture of this massive former royal residence. This solitude includes wireless Internet access everywhere including the urinals, 24-hour business center, room service and personal butler service, and of course ‘extensive safety and security arrangements.’ Yes, this is the very essence of solitude. ‘For centuries, the Himalayas have inspired awe and awakened spirituality in the souls of all mortals who encounter their greatness,’ the site goes on to say. Yes, and for centuries people have discovered that spirituality through views of the Himalayas from restaurants, the Jacuzzi and the outdoor heated swimming pool. To access this special retreat of solitude and spirituality get on the daily flight from Dehli to Shimla, the closest airport – or if you prefer you may charter a private jet. From Shimla Airport it is 90 minutes by limo service, available also from Shimla’s train stations. Once you’ve recovered with a visit to the full service spa there are activities ‘for the adventurous...white river rafting, mountain biking, trekking, billiards...’ Billiards? Absolutely! Adventure truly knows no boundaries at the Wildflower.

Now, if someone offered me an all-expenses-paid trip to this place I’d say yes and have my bags half packed faster than the person could say teak wood floors. But if this is the definition of spirituality then obviously I’ve missed something somewhere.

When I visited Angkor in 2003 the site was on UNESCO’s Danger List for reasons stated here. The following year it was taken off, as the threat of destruction both intentional and otherwise had declined along with other factors. If Angkor has a similar problem in the future I think I’ll tell them to build a Curry Village; this way the majority of visitors will be so distracted by the coffee and newspapers and general atmosphere of gluttony they might forget about the temples altogether. ''Specially in that heat, gawsh!' In the meantime I’m going to petition the National Park Service to raze Curry Village and make a long, steep staircase out of the rubble.

Guest Blogger Christopher Carr of The Inductive on Teaching a Foreign Language

2010-11-09T22:43:00.000-05:00

Brilliant! Have a guest blogger post on my page and my output goes up with barely a diaper-change worth of effort. Why didn’t I think of this before?
Okay, actually I didn't think of it; this was Christopher's brainchild. The guy's got ideas coming out of his pores – check out his blog, The Inductive, and you’ll see what I mean. He is nothing if not proficient...and well-read...and insightful...
This doesn't necessarily mean I agree with him.
I can't stand teaching kids. This is has nothing to do with their ability to learn so much as it does my inability to maintain any sort of control over them without looking like the Shinto equivalent of the anti-Christ. Trust me, boss, you might want to just cancel class today...
The silver lining here is that, as Chris and I teach out of the same place, there is no discussion necessary when a kids class and an adults class happen to overlap. He reaches for the playing cards and I get the coffee ready.
In all seriousness, I feel fortunate to have crossed paths with Christopher. I first read his following post a few days ago, and since then I've found opportunity to try to teach my own son the concept of self-control, with amazing results. In vying for attention at home, he is beginning to see alternatives to stepping on his little brother's fingers.

Okay, on to Christopher Carr and today's topic: Teaching a Foreign Language
(For those of you accustomed to reading my normal posts, I apologize for the big words.)

As a teacher of English as a foreign language, I prefer teaching kids to teaching adults. There are several reasons for this. The first is that our civilization has wildly misunderstood the nature of language learning, and teaching kids doesn't require any unschooling. Adults don't learn second languages easily. There is usually a lot of unfounded, reductionist neurotechnobabble behind this assertion, but in practice it's because adults are often unwilling to look foolish. Adults learn facts about languages instead of languages. Kids on the other hand are seldom embarrased when they make mistakes. The trial-and-error style of learning required to learn a new language comes naturally to them. If adults are to succeed at language learning, they must either be shameless sociopaths or fluent in the metacognition behind language learning. (Check out this article in The New Yorker.) Apropos, language learning is something that suits the learning style of just jumping right in preferred by kids over the taxonomic style of learning preferred by besuited economic automata.

The second reason I prefer teaching kids to adults is related to the first: kids don't ask stupid questions. (It's often said that there are no stupid questions, only stupid answers, but, if your question produces a stupid answer, is it wise to ask it in the first place?) Usually kids don't need to be discouraged from asking questions uniquely tailored to their particular abilities, the answers to which confer vital subjective knowledge. Kids are usually far more perceptive of inference and intuitive knowledge than adults. There are some kids that struggle with language learning, and in my experience it seems they often have a lot of heavy-handed adults in their lives.

"Japan" could change its name to "heavy-handed adult place" and not miss a beat. I can't tell you how many times I hear the words "dame!" and "abunai!" from adults lazy and lethargic from chain-smoking shouting at their kids from across the play area. In short, the Culture of No makes everyone stupider (taxonomic knowledge is excluded) as a function of age. I had an elderly student tell me last week that she had no idea how to have fun. She then asked stupid vocabulary and grammar questions for twenty minutes; I answered all with variations of "whatever". This is typical of most adult ESL classes.

The third reason I prefer teaching kids is that the one problem associated with teaching kids is entirely solvable: kids are crazy and out-of-control ids. In that respect, it's helpful to think of them like convicts. I had a friend go to jail a few years ago, and he told me that his first day, he sought out the biggest, meanest-looking guy in the place and sucker-punched him right in his big fat stupid meathead face while he was eating lunch. My friend got pummeled before the guards came to his assistance, but what he also got was respect from enterprising, social-climbing bitches, snitches, and perverts. Not only did the other prisoners not try to make my friend take their pockets, but they actually aspired to get in his good graces by bestowing upon him solemn offerings of toilet wine and hair dolls.

Likewise with kids, on my first day I pick up and punt whoever is the reigning shitbrat, and his betas make me their leader. No, that was a joke. What I do do though essentially relies on the same principle: if there is a kid who's fond of jamma-ing the heiwa, I usually make him submit by shunning him, kicking him out of the classroom, or subjecting him to repeated public ridicule. Once the alpha submits, so do the rest. All I have to do is outcrazy the craziest kid and the hearts and minds of the students are mine to direct towards whatever evil purpose I may in my darkest of dark hearts imagine, like learning English.

It Was a Beautiful Day in Sydney

2010-11-04T11:56:00.000-04:00

It was a beautiful day when my friend got on the train in Sydney three days ago. He was heading west to the Blue Mountains, a tranquil place touched by God. He was alone. He was feeling okay. Better than he had in a while. The world passed by outside his window. I wonder if it looked any different to him.

I went down under to see him in September, 2009. It had been a while, and it was a great excuse to travel. We climbed aboard that same train, along with my wife and my wonderful son. My friend had just returned to school. Both our lives had changed dramatically since our days teaching English in adjoining classrooms, where we could listen to each other conduct class and then roll with laughter on the walk home as we criticized each other mercilessly. In the seven years since our roads had narrowed. Yet our horizons remained wide, despite the haze floating over them from time to time.

My friend got off at Katoomba Station, where people still take your tickets and trade friendly words. The crowds were light, this being a Monday; there were plenty of empty seats in the coffee shops and cafes along Katoomba Street. My friend could have stopped somewhere, to rest his legs and treat himself, to ponder the beauty of the day. But like all people with places to go, he didn’t. He walked on, with an ease in his step that had been missing for far too long. A lightness that would disappear if he decided to just go home.

There are shuttle buses that run from the station down to the visitor center at Echo Point. It would have saved us time. But time, as much as the Blue Mountains themselves, was why we were there with our friend. So we walked Katoomba Street together. My wife and I took turns with the stroller, our friend ambled along behind us, visibly amused by our indifference to, or ignorance of, the length of the walk we were undertaking. ‘I would have pulled up stumps at the first sign of a beer,’ he’d later joke to his family. But if he did at the time think the walk might be too much he never gave any indication. Or maybe I’m not too good at picking up signals. And I wish to God I were.

Katoomba Street runs straight as an arrow, down a long hill and right back up another. There Katoomba Falls Road forks off to the right, leading past Maple Grove Park to Cliff Drive, Prince Henry Cliff Walk and a hundred places to stand and look out over the canyon below and the miles and miles of Blue Mountains running off into forever. Continuing on Katoomba Road brings you to Panorama Drive and Echo Point Road, which terminates at Echo Park and more breath-taking views from the cliffs that rise hundreds of feet straight up from the canyon floor. Behind the visitor center a path through a grove of gum trees leads to the Giant Stairway, a treacherous descent for anyone let alone a guy carrying his two-year-old son in his arms. I don’t know if my friend walked out to Echo Point three days ago; if he did perhaps he would have recalled our hike down those steps.

Our days teaching together had come to an end, but my friend and I kept in touch. While he maintained an appreciable collection of video games he felt not the slightest compulsion to get a cell phone. This, upon closer scrutiny, can actually appear quite congruent. He claimed to be a strong introvert, though no one who knew my friend would ever be inclined to agree. At work, at parties and on the street, he was never one to temper his boisterous urges. Which seemed to work in his favor until he said the wrong thing to the wrong person in a nightclub in Tokyo. He came to the next afternoon, no recollection of the last 24 hours. He’d suffered damage to his brain. He’d need immediate surgery. They scoured the surveillance tapes but the culprit would never be known.

No matter where my friend stood along those cliffs, he would be able to see Federal Pass Track, the trail that took us along the floor of the canyon. The ground was too rocky and rutted for the stroller; my wife and I shared kid-carrying duty while my friend folded up the stroller and carried it by his side in one big hand. Up ahead a cable car waited, for anyone not too keen on hoofing it back up to the top of the cliffs. My friend looked at us. We looked at him. He couldn’t believe we were actually going to pass on the cable car, but he smiled and followed us up another comically long and winding staircase. We’d end up walking back along Katoomba Street, all the way to the blessed benches on the platform at the station. ‘You guys are gamers,’ he said, collapsing in his seat. ‘I’d have never done that myself.’ Then after a moment he added, ‘Thanks.’

If I could choose one thing I would want going through my friend’s head as he looked down onto Federal Pass Track, this would be it.

As we made our way toward Echo Point I listened to my friend explain how he hoped to regain the Japanese he had learned over six years and then lost in a second. He was also studying German as well as economics and was looking forward to finishing his degree and getting a steady job teaching, at a high school or maybe a university. ‘Uni,’ he called it, in the common Aussie vernacular. But the headaches just wouldn’t go away, and he couldn’t concentrate no matter how hard he tried. He had a girlfriend, though she lived clear across the far side of Sydney and he only saw her so much. Over the years his old friends had all drifted away. ‘No worries, I need to put all my energy into my studies anyway.’

And he tried.

My friend stood out on those cliffs, somewhere. And maybe he did for one moment think about our time together there. Maybe he even smiled. But the weight of the life he was trying so hard to fend off became too much to bear. And the vastness of the Blue Mountains looked so peaceful.

It was a beautiful day in Sydney.

God be with you, my friend.

One of the Crowd - 'A Year in Fukushima' Post #2

2010-10-14T10:43:00.000-04:00

Pop Quiz: Which of these things is not like the others? Christmas, your birthday, Happy Hour, Income Tax Day. Think hard before you decide, because your first guess will be wrong.

I can already hear the smartypants answers.

'I got it! It's your birthday because it's the only one not capitalized!' Wrong, grammar police, everyone's birthday is capitalized. 'Okay wise guy, then it's Christmas because it's the only one that's religious!' Great, here comes the ACLU. 'Tax Day, of course,' the level-headed majority will confidently assert. 'Because it's not fun.' All right, sure, the lead-up isn't a party but come on, who doesn't get a kick out of sticking it to the IRS once a year? Come on Uncle Sam, fork it over. It's even better when a guy like Dubya starts tossing everyone an extra $300 to offset the ugly budget surplus he inherits.

'Then the answer must be Happy Hour, because, well...it's the only alliterative event, ha ha!' Not for Joe Blow born on February 4th or Sue Blew born on November 9th.

The answer is in fact Happy Hour. Because it is the only one that happens more than once a year. Until you have kids that is. And then it becomes a once-a-year occasion, and like all the others a very special event indeed.

IRS audits notwithstanding.

As birthdays and Christmas and Happy Hours are celebrated with as much fervor here in Japan as Labor Day is in the States, and I honestly have no idea when Japan's Tax Day is, I have been forced to find other yearly occasions to look forward to. My favorites are springtime cherry blossom parties, sumo tournaments and October. Why do I like October? Used to be because of my birthday, until I turned 40. Now it is because October is when Fukushima holds its annual Aki Matsuri, their Fall Festival.

I had only been in Japan six weeks the first time I witnessed the barrage of drums, flutes and people in split-toed booties shouting and pulling huge wooden carts draped with red lanterns through the streets. At this point even a trip to the 7-11 was still a relative voyage into the unknown, if only for those unidentifiable chunks of food floating in square metal tubs filled with murky brown liquid next to the register. At my first festival, standing in the middle of a swarm of people shouting words found in no existing Japanese dictionary and taking pictures of the backs of each others' heads with their cell phones, I felt I was in another world. And indeed I was. This, I thought, was why I had come to Japan.

Fast forward to the following Spring. A student of mine asks me if I want to go out for yakitori after class. 'Have you ever been to a yakitori bar?' she says in the exact same tone people use when they ask me, nine years after moving here, if I am able to use chopsticks. 'No, I haven't,' I answer truthfully and thus without a hint of sarcasm. An hour later we were walking into Hanawa-san's yakitori joint.

I mainly listened and filled my face as my friend (she was very nice but this was not a date as far as I was concerned) and Hanawa-san spoke in a language I still struggle with to this day. What did they talk about? To this day I don't have a clue. It was only once we'd left that my friend explained that Hanawa-san wanted me to join their neighborhood group for the festival that Fall. I stormed back inside to tell him 'Hell yeah.' Then I had to wait for my friend to come in and translate.

That Fall I walked into what was to that point the greatest day of my life in Japan. Everyone swarmed around me, smiling and shaking hands (it's funny, I could just tell they weren't used to shaking hands, with anyone). They asked me my name and my age and my blood type. Someone handed me a beer. Someone else slipped a happi (festival jacket) over my arms and onto my shoulders. The older women hid their huge smiles with their hands; the younger girls giggled and snapped pictures with their cell phones. Little kids plucked at my arm hair. And all I had done was show up, with a bag of fruit from the supermarket and a bottle of mid-range sake which Hanawa-san hurriedly placed next to the mountain of food and the forest of sake bottles already on the table.

Before we set out for the streets I was ushered up the ladder to the top of the dashi (the wooden wagon with the red lanterns all over) so Watanabe-san could take a few souvenir photos for me. Later on I was told to climb aboard again, this time to sit at the O-daiko, the huge drum, and pose for a couple more memory shots, this time with Hanawa-san. Aside from this – and the ambitious flow of beer and sake still being poured my way – I was left to mix in as just another member of the Ban-se-cho crowd.

Kind of prophetic.

This past weekend I participated in the Fall Festival once again, the seventh time I would don the dark blue Ban-se-cho happi – though I'd have to pull it on myself. Everyone still knows my name, except for the young kids who weren't even born the first time I joined the party. Sadly, there are still some people whose names I don't know, which is a bit inconvenient not to mention potentially embarrassing when I have to ask one of them from the back of the dashi for another beer. Yeah, this is my seventh year...yeah, nice to see you again...Um, what's your name again? That's right, of course, hey anymore asahi in that box?... Most everyone says hi to me when I show up now, but they no longer swarm. The girls can't be bothered taking my picture, they've all got text messages to send. I even have to get my own sake half the time. No one offers anymore to take a picture of me on the dashi, or even just let me pound on the taiko a little. 'Just get back there and start pushing,' they say. The only time I go up on top now is to help clean up after the girls have had all the fun riding around town singing and laughing and eating and drinking and not having to push. I am invited to climb the ladder at the end of the last night of the festival every year though only to help haul down the impossibly heavy generator that has been powering all the light bulbs in all those red lanterns.

With two sons now I've become even more invisible.

But I think I rather like it this way. The rock star treatment was fun the first time around – and as I continue traveling Japan it still happens occasionally. After seven festivals, though, it would be pretty odd to be regarded as anyone special. And in Japan, where the common lament among foreigners is that making them feel like foreigners is what the Japanese do best, I feel pretty good about being regarded as just one of the Ban-se-cho crowd.

Though I'd still like another crack at that taiko.

Odds and ends:
That first year I decided not to spring for the $100 for my own Ban-se-cho happi, thinking I might not be around the next year. For seven festivals I've asked to borrow someone's extra happi, giving the same excuse every time. Meanwhile my mom has one in a closet in New Jersey, an impromptu gift from a tipsy Hanawa-san at a party after my wedding. I could steal it next time I'm home, but then I think nah, I probably won't be in Japan much longer...

On the third and final day of the festival everyone gathers in the morning to carry the Mikoshi, the miniature shrine, around town on their shoulders. This mikoshi is wrapped in white and purple cloth, has a tinny, rattly rooster frozen in a permanent squawk on top, and weighs about the same as a Volkswagen. This shrine is mounted on four long 6x6 pieces of black-painted wood, which rest (bounce, really, or slam down) on the shoulders of as many people as can squeeze under it. As I am taller than most Japanese people, mine is the first shoulder the Volkswagen slams down onto with each collective step we take, and by the end of the day my spine resembles a piece of macaroni. I also have a permanent scar on one shoulder. (This year I passed on the mikoshi.)

When a family member passes away, it is customary in Japan to refrain from taking part in any sort of festival for the year. Sadly, Hanawa-san was conspicuously absent this past weekend.

The day after my first Aki Matsuri I spotted myself in the feature picture on the front page of the Minpo, Fukushima's newspaper; I was talking to my then-girlfriend Mayumi. This past Monday a very small me was in the front page picture again, along with the rest of Ban-se-cho and a few thousand other people. This time I was carrying my son.

As with every other year, I'm now sitting at home, wondering if I've joined my friends for the last time.

Marking Time - 'A Year in Fukushima' Post #1

2010-10-09T07:35:00.000-04:00

The running joke (no longer funny if it ever was in the first place) is that my life in Japan amounts to an extended working vacation. Really, the only funny thing in this (funny ironic, not funny chuckle-snort) is that the term working vacation makes no sense to me. Either (a) you are on vacation but you are so busy or wound up or both that you bring your work with you (‘Come on Dad, let's go in the water!’‘Hold on Jimmy, just gotta clean up this report and fudge I mean balance the quarterlies.’) or (b) you are extremely unproductive and/or the people in the surrounding cubicles have threatened to stage a walk-out if you don't stop resting your nose on the top ledge and saying in your Mr. Magoo voice I see you've been playing Farmville again and your boss as a last resort before canning your butt has sent you off to see how you perform in what he calls an 'alternate environment.'

Or (c) you have landed a job in a foreign country, which feels like a vacation but the reality is you go to work and then you spend your free time in novel ways until you have been abroad so long the novel has become routine. And you decide you need a vacation.

Personally I prefer vacationing in places I've never been. My wife has taken such a liking to family though I find myself heading back stateside more and more. Having babies she wants to show off only intensifies her strange affinity for New Jersey. This past month, however, we spent in California, taking advantage of an invitation to a friend's wedding and the generous hospitality of my sister in San Bernadino. I've always thought if I ever move back to the US it would be somewhere out in the wide open west, despite the underlying cultural epidemic grounded in over-sized pickups, reality TV and tattoo magazines. Bottom line though, I'd much rather be a couple hours from Yosemite than a couple minutes from Wal-Mart.

When I was in college in Washington, DC I would go home for Thanksgiving and Christmas break. Getting off the highway, driving down Route 10 and Ridgedale Avenue and Cambridge Road and into my driveway, I would look around at everything that hadn't changed and marvel at how different it all seemed. At night I'd lay down in the same bed I'd slept in my entire life, and even with my eyes closed and the room dark it all felt different somehow. Even with that same sag in the middle of the mattress. Going from Japan back to the States gives the same sort of effect, only on a magnified scale. Why are the people at the airport so surly? The New York subway has gotten so grimy and dirty. Hey when did the girls at the bars all get so chubby? To be fair, the same sort of thing happens when I return to Japan. The muzak at the supermarket has never been as annoying as it was this morning.

But this is all prelude. Being away from a place we are to any degree familiar with, and then returning to that place, the way we see and perceive things – and, if we care to, the way we think about our surroundings, from the material to the intangible – it all tends to change. Two weeks ago the apples in the Safeway in San Mateo resembled all the apples I'd ever seen before, yet now they were ridiculously shiny, which made me notice how perfect the entire produce section looked, which stirred in me a momentary sense of gratitude for having been born in a land of such plenty, though I then began to wonder how natural all this natural food really was. And it has probably looked like this since before I was born, I just never thought about it until I spent some time perusing the markets of southeast Asia. Two days ago, back in Japan after a month in America, I looked at a rice field and saw something I'd never seen before.

The rice looked the same as it always does in the Fall – tall and golden and top-heavy. Bending down, pointing out to my son how the color meant the rice was ready to be harvested so we can eat it, something else entirely occurred to me.

This is how I have come to mark time.

When I was a kid the constructs of weeks and months were defined by artificial means: Summer is over because school is starting; sales on candy, Halloween's on the way; songs on the radio mean that soon it will be Christmas. Super Bowl, Opening Day, Fourth of July fireworks. We go to the beach every August. These are the things that ushered in the seasons. As an adult the signals are less spirited: TGIF and long Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends; mowing the lawn and shoveling the driveway; sarcastic birthday cards. The seasonal weather of course can not be ignored – unless you live in a place that has none – but even these can seem to defy our ability to clearly perceive the passing of time: Summer's over already? God, will the cold ever let up? Where the heck did Spring go? And the weeks and months and years march on, right under our noses.

Japan has established her own markers: company bonuses in April and December; six sumo tournaments a year; work-related gatherings called Bo-nen-kai, which translates into 'forget about the year parties' and amounts to eating and drinking with your co-workers in the spirit of collectively accepting the fact that everyone has basically sacrificed their lives for the well-being of the city water system or the department store or the oil seal manufacturing industry.

Yet in Japan there are also more sublime reminders of the passing of time and the eternal essence of existence (if I may wax esoteric). There is the springtime tradition of O-hanami, well-known even outside of Japan as the eagerly-anticipated custom of getting together with family friends and colleagues to eat, drink, talk, sing karaoke and otherwise enjoy and appreciate the beauty of the flowering cherry blossoms. Some people may even pause to appreciate the short-lived blossom season as an allusion to the fleeting nature of life on Earth for all living things, though most people seem to be more interested in simply having a good time and letting off steam and forgetting that they have sacrificed their lives for the good of the city water system.

Another Japanese remembrance of time tied to nature is that the vernal and autumnal equinoxes are official national holidays. And they do not move them around to allow for three-day weekends either. June 21st is on a Tuesday this year? Okay, work and school on Monday then a day off to enjoy the sun as it hangs over the equator. That is, if Dad isn't going in to work to check on the water flow valves just to be safe, and little Hiroyuki isn't going off to cram school for a special eight-hour pre-calc tutorial to make sure he's ready for the middle school entrance exam next March.

As I am neither preparing for any sort of entrance exams nor have I sacrificed my adult life for any utility whatsoever, thus nullifying my chances to truly appreciate meteorological days off, to receive bonuses or go to Bo-nen-kai, I see my time passing in rice and peaches.

The phenomenon is certainly not unique to me or to Japan; people who work closely with the land or the sea, who watch and depend on the heavens as a matter of health and survival, will probably measure time's passing similarly. Only it is something I never experienced until I came to Japan. And it never really occurred to me until I walked past that rice field two days ago.

My wife's parents live on a peach farm, and are able to grow a tremendous amount of vegetables for themselves. What I suppose I knew but never appreciated until I started hanging around the farm is how certain things grow at certain times of the year. In the cold of winter people are outside hanging persimmon to dry and taking in the hakusai, a lettuce-like leafy pale green vegetable that goes into so much winter-time cooking around here. It's fresh, it's organic, and my mother-in-law can do wonders with it. But it only grows for so many weeks; when there's no more hakusai to be had, I know that Spring is on the way. Which means strawberries will for a while be plentiful and cheap. As the peach trees begin to bud in April it is time to start working on them. It takes a couple of weeks to pare down the number of peach buds on each branch of each tree; fewer peaches on the branches mean larger peaches, not to mention much less work in June when the peaches need to be individually covered in bags made of old newspaper (there's a company who makes them and sells them by the hundreds of thousands, and that's all they do) to keep the sunlight off them so they don't turn red and lose their sweetness. For forty years my wife's parents tended to over two hundred peach trees – about a hundred thousand peaches. Every year they put those little bags on the peaches. One at a time, by hand. When my father-in-law got sick two summers ago we all pitched in to save the family's harvest and income. I now have a monumental respect for farmers.

After a relative respite in July the peaches are ready for picking in August. No problem, I figured. I was all thumbs getting those stupid little bags on those stupid little pre-peaches but I can certainly pick them and put them in crates. Or so I thought until I saw that peaches don't grow at all the same speed. On every tree and every branch, peaches grow at varying rates. This is still a mystery to me; I wanted to ask but my mother-in-law just told me to get picking. So we made our rounds, checking all the peaches on all two hundred trees, picking only the big ones. The small ones we would get on subsequent rounds when they were bigger, heavier, and thus worth more as they sell by weight. But wait too long to pick them and they grow soft and are therefore unsellable as they won't make it through the transportation process without getting brown and mushy and nasty. When the picking is finally done that means Fall is just around the corner. This means that the nashi, the Japanese pears, are just about in season. Then the weather turns colder and the apples begin to ripen.

Through all this, the rice fields turn from swaths of brown to massive squares of irrigated water, to pools with neat lines of green sprouts sticking up through the surface. Soon the fields are thick with rows of growing shoots, which turn a beautiful green before becoming heavenly golden sheaves. Which are in due time cut and gathered, leaving bare fields of earth once again. And another season has passed.

This weekend Fukushima holds its annual Inari Shrine Fall Festival. We will go downtown and meet with friends to drink, talk, laugh and dress up in our traditional festival garb. We will yell and sing to celebrate another year's blessings, pulling through the streets these huge wooden floats, dripping with red lanterns on all sides. The sound of drums and flutes will fill the air. Age-old Japan will be visible everywhere, mixed in with the hum of electric generators for the lanterns and cases and cases of Asahi beer. It's Fall in Fukushima. Winter is on the way.

I biked past that same rice field this morning, on the way to the supermarket. There's nothing there now but two huge squares of mud, lined with the brown remains of the rice plants that have been harvested once again.

How I'm spending my 10th year in Japan.

2010-10-07T17:36:00.000-04:00

I read somewhere that Dan Brown spent nine years researching and writing The DaVinci Code. Nine years! For all the research and writing. Dan, you shameless slacker. I've devoted an entire nine years just to the researching of the various shades of mystery comprising the cultural anomaly known to most outsiders as Japan. (Those of us who live here tend to use the more accurate term ‘This F+++ing Place.’) Only now do I feel the time is right to nail down and expose in words the secrets imbued in this silly society.

It's true I've paused now and again to offer my sometimes witty and always superficial insights into my adopted home – an underdeveloped habit which by all evidence has kept both people who have been reading my stuff irascibly satiated if not outwardly hostile. But beyond my early, impetuous mass emails to the folks back home and my recent and impossibly ungraceful back flip into the blogosphere (and, if my memory is correct, a sake-induced letter-writing frenzy somewhere in the middle there) I've managed to keep my trite perceptions to a blessed minimum. Today, however, I decided this had to change. I'm not sure who would want to follow me through a year of unraveling life in small-town Japan, but why let that stop me? I've traveled alone before.

I've been meaning to do this since those first few days and weeks here in Zipang, when everything was fresh, new and exciting – like the sight of a pair of a drunken salarymen on stolen bicycles, clattering wire baskets and aluminum fenders, rumbling over the bumpy yellow blind people strips in the sidewalk, flying at me like two human knuckleballs (this all makes sense once you've experienced it, trust me). But just like assigning my students homework and filing my income taxes, week after week and year after year writing it all down was something I just never quite got around to.

True to rational form, I get to it in the midst of a wild bout of jet-lag.

They say by and large people are driven to act not by the potential for gain but by the fear of loss. And it is the prospect of leaving Japan, the ever more tangible sense that my time here is running short, that spurs me on to this year-long endeavor. (It was also the idea of maybe moving back stateside that put me back in touch with Uncle Sam after seven years.) (I'm still leaning toward Europe though.) I've got no schedule set. I don't have the vaguest idea when I might find myself packing up the family and heading for the horizon. But returning to Japan yesterday, more than any other time I've returned from a place that made infinitely more sense to me, I felt the need to take a good look around me, to see and understand this f+++ing place better than I have for the last nine years.

Ironically, starting now, this may be the most uninteresting of my years here in Japan. This is not to say life will be boring with two little boys in the house, one of them just beginning to crawl and the other preparing to stomp on his fingers if he goes near his toys. But this sort of thing is the same anywhere, just with slightly different toys and health care systems. In previous years I biked over mountains and alongside oceans; taught doctors, businessmen and professors during the week and chatted with farmers and fishermen on the weekend; lived and worked in a dozen cities and partied in many more; witnessed centuries-old traditions and slept in temples twice as aged; dated a truck driver. And while much of this makes for good stories to tell (and better stories to keep secret) they comprise a disjointed tale of what it means to live in this ridiculous, amazing land.

Just what I need, another writing project to add to the pile.

If either of you is beginning to worry (or thank the Lord) that I am changing my tune here, let me add that I fully internd to continue tossing out half-witted, entirely superficial bits from time to time, about whatever I feel the world needs to know at that specific moment. But starting today – or okay, whenever the jet-lag eases – I'm going on a year-long literary walk around Japan, in search of the things I've missed these past nine years.

I hope you'll come along.

Both of you.

To Sharpen or Recharge?

2010-08-08T09:10:00.001-04:00

This post is Part II of what began as a single post. But it was getting too long so I decided to split the story into two parts. Until I began drooling on the keyboard writing this part into the wee hours. Part III (and possibly IV) are forthcoming. Probably.

Part I, in case you missed it, ended with me sitting on a bucket between two dripping wet naked men. This should be all the update you need. Proceed.

I am a pencil and paper guy in an iPhone world. Blackberry? Piece of fruit as far as I’m concerned. I’ve never seen a Kindle outside of Amazon’s homepage. I’ve met a couple of iPhones in person but I don’t think I’ve actually shaken hands with one. I didn’t even have the slightest compulsion to get any sort or species of cell phone until I moved to Tokyo in 2003, and only then because I was falling under threat of deportation for what the local authorities were calling my ‘suspicious resistance to conform.’ (This of course based not solely on my failure to carry a ‘keitai’ at all times; I didn’t wear a black suit and matching black tie to work every day, I offered my seat on the train to old women instead of pretending to be asleep, and I showed no interest in Japanese comic books, soft porn or otherwise. All troubling tendencies for a population clinging to the psychological comfort and safety of not being expected to manifest an original thought.)

On my desk (my wife’s desk from her high school years to be specific), sitting next to my laptop (which I bought used four years ago when my previous secondhand laptop crapped out on me) is my trusty black address book. Do they even make these things anymore? I don’t know, probably. I haven’t shopped for one in a while. The plastic-ish, vinyl-ish cover on this one fell off several years ago, but I taped it back on and so far it has held. On the back page I have names and numbers of people on my Denver league soccer team. I haven’t even seen Denver in 9 years. Other numbers are of friends from when I lived in Arlington, Virginia, when George Bush – the first one – was still in office. I don’t even remember who half of these people were. And the time zone and area code map on the front page doesn’t show a single area code that doesn’t have a 0 or 1 in the middle. This thing doesn’t have a print date, it has a carbon date.

So why is it on my desk? Because my son has recently become intrigued with the concept of calling people – anyone – using our combination telephone/fax machine with the receiver with the cord. I give him my address book and let him dial any number he wants because none of them are good anymore. Except for my sisters and a few college buddies, but if he calls one of them I can jump on and say hi and save myself an overseas postage stamp.

Anyway, so I have this cell phone. It even takes pictures. It also has this memo pad function as well as a voice recorder doo-dad, but I still carry a pen and a few old store receipts around at all times in case I need to write something down – like someone’s phone number. And I could sign up for Internet service right through that little inch-thick wonder but really, I don’t need live updates on the Yankees, I don’t care that Paris Hyatt is now trending, no one on facebook needs to know that I am hot and my train is crowded, and until very recently I have never needed to check my email now. The only reason I even keep that thing with me (when I don’t forget I actually own a cell phone and leave it on the yellowing notebook I am using to outline my next novel) is in case my wife needs me to pick up some onions on my bike-ride home.

This changed, if only slightly, on my recent trip to Tokyo.

I had never felt so good after ten minutes sitting on a bucket between two dripping wet naked men. A day on your feet in Tokyo in July is not conducive to staying fresh and dry, no matter how much time you spend wandering lost through the labyrinthine and partially air-conditioned Ikebukuro underground. And though nightfall brought some degree of relief, thirty minutes combing the humid, neon-laced streets of Omiya in search of an inexpensive hotel without hourly rates and rotating beds is going to leave you feeling slimy. Enough so that you’re willing to bathe in a communal shower and hot spring (until someone starts talking to you about hourly rates and rotating beds).

Omiya, interestingly enough, was my very first destination when I arrived in Japan on September 1, 2001. The company training center was there in town, and all the newbies would spend a week there learning how to drill scraps of English into our students’ heads in such a way that they would think they were having a good time. After that initial week I’d been invited back several times to show the folks at headquarters how much I wasn’t improving as a teacher, and every time I’d paid a visit to Manboh. This was where I was headed as I stepped out into the cool midnight air and made my way back toward Omiya Station.

Nothing seemed to have changed; they still had the blue-tinted glass door in front, and inside they still had the same black light atmosphere, in all likelihood to shadow the fact that the kids working there would rather be anywhere but there, asking you if you wanted to go with the special four-hour marathon session they were promoting. Again the girl asked, impressively hiding her malaise with the kind of smile I am convinced only Japanese girls can turn, and again I said no, I only wanted a half hour to check my email and take obscene advantage of the free drink bar. She then used approximately forty-five Japanese words to tell me to use computer Number 9 and handed me a receipt on a tiny plastic clipboard that showed me when my time to raid the vending machines was up.

Armed with three paper cups of coffee and one hot cocoa for variety I wound my way through the dark rows of blue-tinted private booths until I found Number 9. Then, with my hands full and my coffee more or less burning my fingers through the paper cups I sat on the door handle and entered my rented world butt-first. And stepped right into the side of my chair, the physics of the next half-second allowing my coffee to bypass the paper cups and start burning my skin directly. But now was not the time for pain; I had twenty-eight minutes to go through my emails and then jump on facebook to let people I otherwise never speak to know where I was.

Before leaving Fukushima I had emailed a few people in Tokyo, explicitly asking them to get back to me (if they were going to) on my cell phone. I gave them my number. I typed out my phone mail address. I was even nice, and didn’t use any of those efficient terms like ‘tmrw’ or ‘if ur l8’ because I didn’t want to give the impression I was trying to be quick and efficient, which in my mind translates to ‘Hi I haven’t seen you in forever but no time to talk now can I crash on your floor?’ Yet here they were, all responding with incomplete sentences and a click of the Reply button – because of course that is the quickest and most efficient way to communicate. So I have to guess they assumed I could check my email from my iPhone. Or would at least be smart enough to stop in an Internet café before committing to the forty-minute train ride from Tokyo to Omiya.

As it turned out, one of my friends had in fact emailed me back earlier in the day, offering in not so many words to let me crash that night if I needed to. My first impulse was to chide him for not getting back to me on my cell phone, but this would do no good. My fault, I need to anticipate when people are going to inconvenience me like this and chide them beforehand. Then of course I’d probably be on my way to Omiya five minutes after being hung up on so the whole process is an unavoidable wash. But if I had stayed at my friend’s place I would have missed out on more free coffee than any human being of any size should be drinking at midnight. In this I was ahead of the game.

Also waiting in my inbox was a response from a woman who had time to meet up that afternoon – a woman with three zillion potential connections for me. But setting aside an hour for her might have denied me the experience that day of putting on a shirt and tie in the midday heat so I could walk into Sanseido Bookstore and get shot down faster than a Mexican driving into Arizona. And I hate missing out on those character-building moments.

After one final drink bar run – I had to try something called the Expressa au Lait – I found myself out of time and unable to let the facebook world know I was tired and ready for bed. I handed my clipboard to the girl with the smile and took out three hundred yen as she launched into a glib and very polite minute-long speech about how I owed her three hundred yen. I could have extended my time for a buck per fifteen minutes I suppose, but I was so caffeinated by now I’d end up spending the next two hours scrolling past innumerable farm game and mafia battle updates to see how my friends felt about the final episode of Lost. Personally I’d rather sit on a bucket between two dripping wet naked men.

Which is where I was once again twenty minutes later.

I’m still a pencil and paper guy at heart. But in today’s world, pencil and paper guys miss out on timely messages from friends and chances to meet up with people with three zillion potential connections.

Next time I find myself in Omiya, I may not need to make a stop in Manboh. Not to check email anyway. But even if I do decide to spring for the extra yen and hook my 5-year-old cell phone up to the web, I think I’ll continue to keep a pen and a couple store receipts on me, just in case. Because paper doesn’t go dead. And address books, no matter how old, never crash and are exceptionally immune to hackers.

In the meantime, I’ve made a pact with myself to at least up my technological agility and communicative availability on my next trip to Tokyo by ducking into a Net café every few hours. The downside is, I won’t be able to take a picture of my lunch and post it on my facebook profile.

As a pencil and paper guy, I’m okay with that.

A Moment of Normal

2010-08-05T13:15:00.000-04:00

So I’m dripping wet, sitting on a tiny plastic bucket in between two other naked men, and all I can think is ‘Man, life is weird.’ Now, you may not think there’s a whole lot of debate in considering sitting naked on a plastic bucket dripping wet between two other dripping wet naked men weird. Yet this was one of the few moments of my day that was entirely unfettered by any form or degree of parasympathetic fight or flight impulses. In other words, this was the normal part of today.

Since 6am when my alarm roused me – it was now around 11 at night – the only other measurable stretch of time my system wasn’t redlining was during the nap I caught on the morning bus to Tokyo. Falling asleep itself was more a matter of system overload and subsequent operating failure than my usual lack of sleep.

I knew I was making this trip too soon. Sure, I had a couple of appointments with the people who hadn’t flat out refused to meet me over the phone. But I had absolutely no idea what I was going to say to their faces once I introduced myself and handed over my homemade business card. ‘Japan is a tough nut to crack’ says any gaijin who has ever tried to make any sort of business deal here outside of renting a karaoke room by the hour. ‘Japan is its own bird,’ ‘They’re very polite while they would actually rather be sticking bamboo shoots under their fingernails than be talking to you,’ and on and on. I’d heard it all a hundred times. This was going to go nowhere – I should have packed my swimsuit instead of a shirt and tie and just gone to the beach. Yet here I was on a bus on Tuesday morning, heading for the biggest city in the world as if someone was going to listen to me. What was I thinking?

The logical answer, of course, is nothing. I wasn’t thinking. I was doing. And now I had my foot in someone’s door, had a chance to sell myself and convince men in charge of the largest bookstores in Tokyo to let me use their time and space for a self-serving book-signing event. This was an opportunity – to take another step closer to my dreams; to throw myself onto a stage and hope people show up; to make a ridiculous fool of myself trying to do all this in Japanese. In another two hours I’d be getting off the bus, and I wondered if I should just take the first bus back to Fukushima. I felt the same way my first time on a ski lift.

My wife had actually made the initial phone calls for me. She didn’t know what she was doing any more than I did, but she had the advantage of being clueless in her own language and I handed her the receiver. The people from Kinokuniya threw out every possible expression for ‘no’ except the actual word no. The person from the first Maruzen gave a defensive ‘We can’t do book-signings at our store,’ in other words ‘Oh God this wasn’t in the manual and I wasn’t told I would have to have an original thought on this job or in my life for that matter so please let me get back to answering questions I’ve been given the answers to.’ The person at the other Maruzen had yet to give a definitive ‘yes we can talk to you’ or ‘no and don’t call back until you’re a famous writer so we can guarantee ourselves a non-failure event.’ He was supposed to call back around 9am. At around 9:15 my phone started blinking. This would be a message from my wife with the good news. I flipped my phone open – and saw an email with an attachment. Great. Downloading pictures. This I didn’t need. My phone was fully charged when I left the house at 7:00; on any normal day – heck in any given four-day stretch considering my social life – I’d have no worries about my phone going dead on me. But I tend to find things to worry about when I am already stressing, and I didn’t need my phone running out of juice in the middle of an extended call with the president of a nationwide chain of bookstores who just couldn’t get enough of me. But good husband I am I fetched the file from the digital ether – and found myself looking back at my two sons, a love in their eyes they didn’t even understand, and I still can’t quite comprehend. Suddenly I was the guy lifting the car off his child pinned underneath. I was all-powerful, invincible. I was Daddy.

I was heading for the biggest city in the world. And someone was going to listen to me.

Ten minutes later my wife emails me again; the guy from Maruzen said no thanks. In a roundabout way.

Sitting on a wooden chair on the 7th floor of Junkudo Ikebukuro, sweating through my necktie as I sat waiting for my meeting with Kimura-san, it was safe to say I was a wreck. Even my watch, my only watch, the one that hadn’t seen the light of day in many many months, had stopped. Maybe yesterday. Maybe last Christmas. I couldn’t know. My electronic Japanese-English dictionary was working, though I had left it on my desk back in Fukushima and now for the life of me I couldn’t think of a decent translation of ‘to promote.’ My business Japanese ability, after nine years here, is as deep as my knowledge of book-signings. My shirt and tie felt like a ski jacket. I didn’t want to move, for anything. But I reached into my bag and slid my phone out and took another look at my older boy’s beaming face (my younger son just had this expression that said ‘Why are my pants wet again?’). And I remembered why I was really there.

An hour later I was laughing and chatting with a trio of Japanese men among the foreign novel stacks, the broad strokes of my first book-signing now splashed across the canvas of my future. ‘I just have to get the okay from the boss,’ said Takahashi-san as we were shaking hands in parting.

Note to self: Future not indelible.

And my euphoria takes a nose-dive, the worst of possibilities storming my head.

Well I didn’t know it at the time but Mr. Takahashi didn’t even work at that store. Not exactly. He worked in every store. In the country. As the guy in charge of the foreign book division for the entire nationwide chain of stores. He just happened to show up in the Ikebukuro store as I was struggling to give Kimura-san a reason not to say no to me just yet (though it was obvious that was all he wanted to do, for no other reason than to save himself from me and my stubborn refusal to walk away before he was forced to give me an actual answer). I’d say all three of us were thrilled that Takahashi-san was taking over the conversation, and before I knew it we were scouting out possible places to set up a table.

Alternate universe: The guy from the second Maruzen shoots me down during our initial phone call instead of the next morning when I am already headed to Tokyo. With that prospect gone I only have two appointments, which I decide to do back to back on Wednesday and thus don’t go to Tokyo until Tuesday evening. I meet with two Junkudo bookstore managers; Mr. Takahashi is not around to save either of them from me or me from either of them. I throw every idea I have at these poor managers, neither of them ever having done a book-signing before let alone for a gaijin. My Japanese is going downhill fast as I get more and more desperate underneath my ski jacket. They both do what any other Japanese person in their position would do: punt. I end up on a bus back to Fukushima with nothing to tell my wife who was probably still de-stressing from making those initial calls for me. My sons, thankfully, wouldn’t know any better.

In reality, there I was, three hours into my time in Tokyo and a book-signing already in the works. Add to this Takahashi-san offering to meet me the next day in the Shinjuku store to meet with the manager there and, perhaps, change my future to a degree I can not even perceive yet. This I could only take as a good omen. Even if he had to check with the boss first.

Before the midday heat had a chance to melt my tie and my spirits I ducked into the underground world of Sanchome Station. These below-ground networks of passageways (there are dozens of them all over Tokyo) are nothing short of amazing, a seemingly endless maze of shops and restaurants and remarkably clean floors and, in some zones, air-conditioning. My first order of business was to find a restroom and change out of my shirt and tie, just as I used to do as a teenager as soon as Christmas Mass was over.

I strolled comfortably, lazily among the hordes of working people, dressed more or less identically and hustling in every direction for God-knows-what reward. For a wandering while I breathed easy through the faint smile on my lips, relishing my triumph in Ikebukuro. But I couldn’t ignore the voice telling me I could rest on my budding laurels. I just have to run it by the boss…

For no reason I could figure, I’d always taken the train to get around Tokyo. I guess that was how I first learned to navigate the polite, sprawling monster. But today, trying to fend off the 36-degree heat, it occurred to me that the subway would be cooler. Plus there were those underground walkways; one more block in the shade was one less block in the sun as I figured it.

For a year I lived and worked in Osaka, and took the subway trains there quite regularly. And in Umeda, the biggest station on the north side of the loop around the city center, there is a labyrinthine underground ‘shotengai,’ which doesn’t exactly translate into ‘massive and dense vortex of restaurants and shops’ but might as well. Why I didn’t expect to encounter the same in Tokyo is a testament to my acute powers of perception.

In Tokyo, even moreso than in Osaka, the subway system constitutes an intricate web of criss-crossing train lines that manage to actually intersect at very few stations. To compensate, adjacent stations are connected by these underground sub-cities boasting signs that read, to give but one example, ‘Marunouchi Line 370 meters ahead,’ with an arrow to get you going in the right direction so you don’t spend the next half-hour walking the wrong way. And believe me, it is possible to walk the wrong way for a full thirty minutes in Tokyo’s underground.

So I’ve got a subterranean half-mile to go before I reach my station, and I’m strolling along at my own non-sweat-eliciting pace, I’m feeling triumphant and giddy and completely freaked out. I’d gotten what I wanted. Now I had to figure out how to not blow it. This, I was just now realizing, would be even tougher than landing the gig in the first place. Takahashi-san could have told me to come back and see him once I was a famous writer. But he decided, for whatever reason, to give me a chance. To use his store and his time and try to make it worthwhile for everyone. I was now allowed to show up. The obvious next question was, who else will? This idea sank further in, and suddenly I felt the urge to go play on the swings.

The subway brought me to Jimbocho, the so-called ‘Bookstore Heaven’ of Tokyo, faster than I would have liked. Aboveground I would find more bookstores than I could possibly visit in a day; disregard all those with little or no selection of foreign books and I’d be down to exactly one store: Sanseido, who I hadn’t called and would drop in on unexpectedly. In the underground of Jimbocho Station I found a restroom.

It took me longer to change clothes than it took for the people at Sanseido to tell me no.

And with that I decided to call it a day.

The sun fell; the air cooled; my legs and feet grew vaguely achy. And I couldn’t put off looking for a room for the night any longer. I knew a good number of people in town. Not counting facebook I only knew how to get in touch with three of them. With the sky growing dark one of them texted me back.

‘You’re in Tokyo? Cool, I’m in O-daiba, I’ll be free around 10:30, let’s have a beer! By the way, where are you staying?’ This I took as a prelude to an offer of a little floor space. My female friend, however, was apparently just making conversation. While not taking my obvious hints. So I stopped hinting. I’ll bring the beer! This, however, does not make a single Japanese woman feel better about inviting you over, no matter how long you’ve known each other.

Certainly there were inexpensive places to stay in Tokyo. But none of the Tokyo guide books in the Yaesu Book Center listed any (feeding my suspicion that guidebooks, even if they do not begin as such, evolve into a listing of favored (read:paying) establishments, and cheap hotels aren’t going to go that route.) Inside Tokyo Station, glancing over the train line map above the ticket machines, I decided on Omiya and hopped on the ever-jam-packed Keihin-Tohoku Line for a forty-minute ride north into Saitama Prefecture, which seems to exist as a sort of controlled run-off pool of humanity since there is no more room for anyone in Tokyo and they have to spill out somewhere.

Omiya is the biggest city in Saitama; for no other reason I was betting I’d find a decent variety of accommodation to choose from. After thirty minutes walking on progressively irate legs I’d found a business hotel for 90 bucks a night (the guy at the front desk was very polite as he told me there was nothing cheaper in town anywhere, liar) and a number of neon-lit, fancifully-colored and decorated joints charging by the hour until 10 or 11pm when I could then check in for an overnight stay. I walked on, not having brought my own sheets.

At this point my lady friend emails me to tell me where I can find a cheap and decent place to stay in Tokyo.

I thought the sign was a bad joke; I walked up and down the dark side street three times and still couldn’t find the place, supposedly 20 meters around the corner from the sign (which was, inexplicably, hanging right above - no space between the door frame and the sign - the door to a red velvet karaoke bar). I studied the red arrow and the ‘you are here’ and the sketchy map of corners and half-streets. And I found myself wishing ill on everyone who had anything to do with this sign and this hotel and this town and this entire country. I emailed my friend and thanked her for the information.

I knew of the capsule hotel concept. I knew they existed (unlike the vending machines offering certain used women’s clothing items that every gaijin swears they’ve seen – or swears they know someone who has sworn they’ve seen.) And I had always been curious (about the capsule hotel concept).

After the day I had, this was as good as any night to find out what it was like to sleep in a plastic coffin with a TV.

Twenty minutes after checking in I was pushing through the door into the communal bathroom where, for those not familiar with the Japanese idea of a hot spring bath, I would sit on a tiny bucket and wash and rinse off before sinking slowly into the big hot bath to let the day soak out of my system.

I stared at the dripping wet gaijin in the mirror in front of me. He had run himself through the gamut of emotion today, jumping into something he wasn’t ready for, doggie paddling like crazy just to stay mentally afloat, looking at a picture of his children and feeling superhuman, losing it in a foreign language, then conquering Tokyo (at least for the moment) before being brought back to his tired, sweaty existence as a dot in the concrete jungle.

Be careful what you ask for.

The guy in charge of the entire foreign book department for a nationwide chain of bookstores wants to see what I can do. This is scaring the rice balls right out of me. I want off the ski lift. My boys won’t know the difference, will they?

But I would. And so would my wife. She has more faith in me than I deserve. She knows even less about this book business than I do. She’s tried, but she can’t really read my book, not to any meaningful degree. But that doesn’t seem to matter. She made my phone calls for me, believing I needed her. Which I did.

She didn’t know what she was doing, but she did it anyway, believing I could turn this into some kind of success. Which, God, I hope I can.

Yes, it is an extraordinary day when the only moment of complete normality is sitting on a plastic bucket between two naked men.

World Cup Blogging in Surreal Time

2010-07-07T16:50:00.003-04:00

The evils of the Internet, not to mention the social media, have gotten their claws into me. Ten years ago I could watch any major sporting event on tape delay without having to worry in the meantime that Yahoo or MSN.com or half the facebook world would ruin it for me. Now here I am, awake and on my undersized couch at 3:30am for the Germany-Spain match.

I didn't drink coffee ten years ago either.

I am actually pretty fired up that I decided to set my alarm. That tinny electronic version of Canon broke in half the worst dream I can remember having, ever. It involved a conversation - a conversation! - about global warming. Who has dreams like that?

Well the match is underway, so let's get to it.

I predict a win for Germany because they don't have anyone with long hair. This is my infallible barometer for predicting success on the football (soccer) pitch (field). Sound crazy? Look at Holland. Half their team doesn't even have hair. What other explanation can there be for a country of ten million people living in constant danger of being flooded into oblivion making it to the World Cup finals? It helped that they were up against Uruguay in the semi-final; Uruguay, a country of three million people and, apparently, no barbers.

This hair formula works for individuals too: all-time leading scorer in World Cup play? Ronaldo, with only that wedge of hair on his otherwise clean-shaven head. Germany's Klose and Mueller are right behind him. Klose's hair has gotten shorter with each successive goal he has scored, check the replays from 2006 if you don't believe me. Mueller's put the ball in the net three times in the last two matches, but then he didn't shave and thus yellow-carded himself right out of today's match (game) against Spain, who does have the neatly-trimmed David Villa on their side as well as the tamed golden mane of Fernando Torres, but if a couple of those guys don't visit the team stylist at halftime Spain is done for. It's as simple as that.

Maybe they've already made their appointments, because early on Spain seems to have the time-of-possession edge, despite being interrupted in Germany's territory by some nut job who decided to run onto the field less than four minutes into the match. I'll never understand some people. He should have at least made some kind of deal and run out in front of three billion people waving a Budweiser banner for some cash.

We're already thirty minutes in and while both teams have had their chances there have been no serious scoring threats. Okay, Puyol from Spain was given a great opportunity on a perfect cross from the right side but he had long hair and his header went flying way over the crossbar.

Since the match started I've been feeling a bit off. Normally a 3:15am alarm will do this to me - if a 3:15am alarm were normal. But I just realized what it is. I'm not hearing those kazoos. The TV is turned way down, sure, but I can hear the Japanese announcers just fine. Two weeks of World Cup play and my brain has tuned out the noise. It took me almost a full month before I was sleeping through my baby's nighttime screaming sessions. Lucky for me my wife doesn't care about the World Cup and hasn't had the selective hearing training that I've had.

I love watching sports on Japanese TV; all the relative terms the commentators use are actually the English words, spoken in the Japanese syllabary. 'Deh-viddo Bee-ra ga ref-to sigh-do ni, ku-rossu boh-ru, headin-gu shoo-TOH!' (Please email me directly for the official translation, as well as the incidental distinction of being the first person in history to officially comment on my blog.)

It's already halftime. What happened? No yellow cards? These guys better try harder in the second half.

It's 4:15am now, and despite the thick rainy-season cloud cover it's getting light out. This doesn't bode well for me in terms of getting any sleep once this match is over. My son still isn't old enough to understand that wake-up time is based on how late daddy was up the night before, not on some silly solar event.

Okay, second half is starting, I've got another cup of coffee by my side and...wait a minute! Fernando Torres is still on the bench! What is Spain's coach thinking? Fernando just recently got his hair cut! There are plenty of crossbar-clearing hippies still running around out there. I think we are beginnning to see why Spain has not been living up to its Number One ranking lately.

For those of you who still doubt my reasoning, ask yourself: Did Pele ever need a hairband?

One of Germany's players is named Schweinsteiger. Now, I was a mere German language and literature minor in college, meaning I could get by if I was able to discuss in German the relative pros and cons of German beer. (This of course made easier by the fact there are no cons.) But if I recall correctly, Schwein means pig while Steiger means someone who climbs or mounts. Check the math yourself, but personally I would not be out there in front of half the TV-owning world with the name 'Pig-mounter' on my back.

While we are on the subject of names, what is up with David Villa having his full name across the back of his jersey? Anyone who actually cares who is who out there will probably be astute enough to understand that big Number 7 under the Villa means it's David. On the other hand, there's also a guy named 'Xrvi' on the Spanish side. He should have his full name on his shirt just for the fan interest factor.

Twenty minutes into the second half, Spain is getting some solid chances but Neuer the German goalie keeps turning them away. I can deal with 0-0 matches if guys are getting dirty out there.

SCORE!! Spain goes ahead with a borderline insurmountable 1-0 lead on a header off a corner kick. Strange thing is, Puyol put it in. This is the same muppet who headed it over the crossbar in the first half. He must have gotten a trim during the break.

I'm rooting for Germany by the way. It often happens that I don't know who I want to win until the match has started and I find myself pulling for one side or the other. Today was no exception to that, and I just now realized why. The German and Dutch languages are similar enough that opposing players can hold a decent argument with each of them speaking their own language. With two completely different languages at work - say, English and Japanese - it is much more difficult for two people (soccer players, husband and wife, etc.) to get a good jawing going. If Uruguay had beaten Holland I would be rooting for Spain now. And yes, I would be able to hear the players yelling at each other now that I've tuned out the chorus of kazoos.

Ah, the Spanish coach is coming to his senses - he's putting Fernando Torres and his neatly-trimmed coif into the game. But hold on...he's taking out David Villa? He's got shorter hair than the new and improved Fernando! And that tiny trianglular goatee Villa is sporting can't be the problem, that thing is barely long enough to merit a dab of mousse, even in Spain (but would get one in Italy).

Germany's got three minutes left to put the ball in the net. Spain took out both Portugal and Paraguay with 1-0 efforts; I didn't think that would be enough against the impeccably-clipped German scoring machine.

Now Spain is making a substitution with less than a minute of extra time remaining. This is what used to happen in town league basketball games. What, did someone's mother complain that her son wasn't getting any playing time? And there's the final whistle, and he's still on the sideline, jumping up and down as if to ward off the barrage of pulled muscles his 8 seconds of playing time would bring.

Great, so now I'm looking at a World Cup final consisting of inarticulate arguments and a probable 1-0 score as Spain doesn't seem to know how to do anything else. Unless of course their coach takes my call and sends Puyol to the Cape Town Barber Shop before the weekend. Or Holland continues to put their receding hairlines to work. Who hasn't noticed how many of their goals have come off of headers? (Except for their first goal against Brazil, which was a gift as a long-haired defender got in the goalie's way allowing Sneijder's pass - that was in no way a shot - to end up in the net.)

So it's coming up on 5:30am, it's light out, the clouds are even clearing and the family is still all asleep. I suppose I could try to get a little more shut-eye but recently my son has gotten into this early-to-bed-early-to-rise cycle and has been waking me up at 6:00 by sticking his face into mine and saying 'Daddy let's eat breakfast!' Not even a gentle shake or a nice easy good morning or even a kazoo which would be fine since I can't hear those anymore. Just a blunt, grinning 'Welcome back to the new world order, dad. I want cereal.' And another day will be lost in the vortex that is parenthood.

So maybe it's good that I have to wake up in the middle of the night to watch these games. This is my time. The next Olympics are in London, which means a lot of the best stuff will be on in the wee hours here in Japan. If I'm really lucky I won't be working at all by then. Of course my second son will be pulling the same wake-up call routine that his older brother is throwing me now.

But that's cool; at the end of the day I love being a dad.

I'm going to need more coffee though.

Daddy the Hypocrite

2010-07-03T09:58:00.000-04:00

There goes my dad, off to the supermarket on his bicycle. What a liar. Three hours ago he told me it was closed so he wouldn't have to go buy me ice cream. 'Maybe tomorrow,' he said in that high voice, trying to give me hope for the moment. He thinks I'll forget by morning. Does he think I was born yesterday?

Then later he whispers to mom (like I can't hear him over the sound of my trains smashing into the walls) that he's going to get some soy milk. I know that's a dish of poo too because a little while ago I found some in the fridge. I only wanted a sip – fair trade for the neg on the Breyer's I’d say – but nooo he says, tossing me some line about my week-old cough. He has a cough too but he still shovels in the meuslix every morning while he tries to make me eat that hot water and rice stuff. 'And don't drink out of the carton,' he tells me though he does it every day. Then I barely get the milk back in the fridge before he starts in on the Save Energy routine. 'Close the door, all the cold air is getting out!' Right, Mr. Eco-Life, leaving your laptop on while you slip out the door.

Mom's busy with the baby again. I got out of diapers a year ago, she doesn't think I can figure out daddy's password?

Last time I said I wanted ice cream we were at the supermarket. Come on, Pops, it's summertime. If you're not gonna crank up the a/c then at least get me a rocket cone. 'Oh, those are kind of expensive, and I don't think I have enough money today, buddy.'

Maybe if you'd work more than an hour every other day...

I can't wait to hear what lame excuses he comes up with once I learn how to count money and tell time. 'It's only seven and mom gave me 500 yen. What do you say to a couple rocket cones, sucker?'

For a while I was too young to understand my dad. But since I learned how to imitate him I see how twisted he can be. 'What's this?' he would always ask me when I first started talking. 'What color is that? What animal is that?' Questions, questions, give it a rest, I'm trying to eat the wheels off my matchbox cars over here. And I'm not supposed to talk with my mouth full. Some questions were kind of tough, but I learned as fast as I could so he'd stop. But then his questions got harder. 'Where's Shimajiro going?' he'd ask whenever we watched DVDs together. 'What's Mickey going to do?' Like I haven't made him watch these with me a thousand times already. We both know what's going to happen, just keep folding the laundry over there big man.

When I started asking him back, that's when the hypocrite in him came shining through. 'What's this Daddy? What color is this Daddy? What animal is this Daddy?' Man, he got bent out of shape. 'You know what color that is, Yamato, why do you keep asking me?' And his face would get all red and scrunched up. Same with my DVDs. 'Who's that? What's he gonna do? What's gonna happen?'

Red scrunchy face again as his clean t-shirt falls off the clothesline and onto the wet dirty balcony. 'We've seen this a thousand times, Yamato, you know what's gonna happen, okay?...'

Oh, so you can ask but I can't. Gotcha, old man.

He really went crazy when I started using the same words he used whenever I tossed my dinner on the floor. He didn't even care that I was using them correctly.

When the new kid showed up it got even better.

'Don't hit your little brother!' And he'd smack me on the hand or the arm.

When he's in a good mood he's always squeezing my cheeks and messing up my hair and turning me upside down, and he laughs his head off. I give Seiji one little purple nurple and dad blows up like when I tried to use his razor.

'Okay Yamato, help mommy take care of Seiji,' he tells me on the rare occasion he leaves to go to work. This from a guy who can't wake up for Seiji's night feedings and poop sessions because he was up till two pecking away at his computer again.

'Don't eat in the living room. Don't pee in the shower. Don't go outside in your pajamas.' There's no end to his stupid little game. Stupid, that's another word I learned from him. It's what he calls all the TV shows I wanna watch. 'Look, the funny dancing cactus is on!' He lets out a phony giggle while my fingers are now all red from him ripping the remote from my hand. 'This is much better, isn't it buddy?' he says in that condescending voice of his. Then I get settled in and he comes back from the kitchen with milk around his mouth and says I'm watching too much TV and let's do something else. So I grab my trains and start smashing them into the walls and it's back to the cactus.

Oops, he's back already. He makes me ride my tricycle on the side of the road and freaks out when I don't look both ways twice before crossing over to go to the park. Now look at him flying around the corner on his bike at night with no light. I used to wait for him at the top of the stairs and ask him what he got at the store, but he always told me the same thing. 'Just some stuff for mommy.' Then he'd go into the kitchen and start ripping open the chips and beer. I ask him for some beer – ‘Oh no, (gulp) this is no good for you (gulp).' – and he pours me some milk. Which is all I really wanted in the first place.

If I ever figure out what he's saying to mommy in the next room when he thinks I'm finally asleep it's really gonna be interesting.

Right & Wrong - World Cup Round-Up

2010-06-27T13:47:00.000-04:00

My first son is some kind of perceptual wizard. After sleeping through his little brother’s all-night a capella performance last night, not only did he have the wherewithal to wake me up at 5am to play cars, but had the previous evening strategically machine-gunned his toys all over the living room floor so I could catch the end of the US-Ghana match as I lined up Thomas the Tank Engine for another head-on collision with a green convertible driven by Ronald McDonald. A rather long and confusing explanation, you say? Welcome to my recent life.

I’ve got the England-Germany game on; Wayne Rooney is flopping around like a Gulf coast pelican.

It’s already taking me forever to write this. Number 8 on Germany looks like a cartoon character and I can’t figure out which one.

I played soccer for years growing up. Or should I say I was allowed to play soccer. My personal brand of it which, while not pretty, was basically harmless to the other players, on both teams. But nothing I pulled – inadvertently – compares with the circus known as this year’s group stage.

Forget those big kazoos, I’ve tuned them out by now, more or less. Still, South Africa better not hold their breath if they’re hoping to host the Olympic Games someday. Or wait, maybe that’s exactly what they should do.

I really have no business trying to give a rundown of events up to this point; between trying to keep my older son from feeding his little brother his pillow during the 8:30pm matches and digging around in a darkened kitchen for toothpicks to pry my eyelids open for the 3:30am games I miss a lot. Regardless, with the usual theme of decent soccer painfully absent from the group stage I am relegated to tossing out a completely and unabashedly disconnected review of the curious debacle happening in Africa, where people in the stands can be seen wearing winter coats.

Five minutes into the first match, South Africa – Uruguay, my only thought was of the hairstyles of the players on the field. I thought I was looking at a Black Music Stars of the 80’s convention: Milli Vanilli and Terence Trent Darby everywhere.

Algeria gets my vote for dirtiest team of the tournament; Ghezzal with his two yellows in ten minutes was only the icing on that ugly cake they baked up against Slovenia. On the flip side, Cameroon wins for fielding the coolest if not the most effective bunch of footballers. The Netherlands gets my nod for the best player names, Van Der Vaart and Klaas Jan Huntelaar among them. Gotta love the double a.

Fashion has been a rather hot topic around Boerland these days. Four years ago Italy seemed to stand out with their skin-tight jerseys. (Of course Italy, what would you expect?) Now it’s on ongoing international display of ‘look-at-my-pecs.’ Some will argue that the tight shirts are tougher for the opposition to grab and pull on; I also read a comment about them decreasing wind resistance – presumably so these guys can hit the ground even harder before writhing around in the agony of their fake injuries. But it’s obviously all a marketing ploy. I’ve never seen so many women in the stands before.

Speaking of women in the stands, what was up with all those Dutch women in their bright orange mini skirts being arrested? Banning bare legs while touting their ability to continue blowing their kazoos fifteen minutes after the game has ended; never mind the Olympics, South Africa isn’t going to get Pat Sajak on location if they keep it up. That sideline slogan – STAY ALIVE – SOUTH AFRICA – might not be helping either.

Everyone (okay, all eleven people in the US who cared) was up in arms about the goal that referee from Mali took away for offsides in the US-Slovenia match. Much worse though was Kaka from Brazil getting sent off when an opposing player next to him pulled a Wayne Rooney, throwing himself at the turf after Kaka’s elbow brushed against his non-wind-resistant jersey. But even this is understandable – it’s a fast game, the refs are bound to miss stuff like that. What I found absolutely unforgivable was the German coach and his assistant not being carded for their matching navy blue cardigan sweaters in the match against Serbia. They weren’t moving that fast, I don’t know how the refs missed it. Then tonight they switched to matching blue v-necks and were yet again able to get away with it. Now that they’ve disposed of England I can only speculate as to how they are going to flaunt their apparent disregard for decency when Germany takes on Argentina, who will undoubtedly beat Mexico as Maradona will manage to punch the ball into Mexico’s net without being called for it.

Everyone here is fired up for Japan’s match against Paraguay, and rightly so. Yet in Japan, as in baseball arbitration, it’s not what’s expected to happen so much as what has already happened that seems to matter. In the lead-up to the World cup Japan was giving about as much attention to Team Okada as they were to their own country’s ongoing practice of killing over 400 whales annually for ‘research purposes.’ Then they eke out a 1-0 win over eventual 3-game loser Cameroon and the entire population is rushing out to buy Honda jerseys. The guy wasn’t even on the ‘Kirin Lager – Support the Japan’ cardboard beer display racks for crying out loud. (And maybe it’s just me, but I’m not sure he was even speaking Japanese in his post-game interview.) Suddenly he’s an icon, center of the 10-HOUR (I swear) pre-game show right before Japan got their collective attention smacked by Holland and everyone went back to meekly predicting a 1-0 win over Denmark. So perhaps now it’s a bit surprising that, having taken the Danes 3-1, Japan isn’t already building an airport to commemorate their 2010 World Cup championship.

Great, now it’s 2am and I’m wide awake because (a) I still can’t figure out who that Number 8 on Germany looks like, and (b) I’ve been eating cocoa puffs out of the box. I can probably stay awake for the 3:30 game even though we’re out of toothpicks but I know that in a few hours my son, having woken up at 5, gone the whole day without a nap and crashed at 8, is going to be replaying his early bird performance. And now his toys, strewn like the aftermath of any bar in England right now, are in a room where there’s no TV.

And he’s not going to let me get away with faking an injury.

The Psychology of Doing the Dishes

2010-05-27T08:36:00.000-04:00

Silence throughout the house at 7:45pm. If I close my eyes I can almost recall my peaceful previous life. A life of unfettered choice. Of a lone wolf, walking the wilds of this world, hunting his prey as he sees fit and sleeping where he chooses.
As I open my eyes again, to floors strewn with a miscellany of toys and a fish tank that has somehow fallen into my pit of responsibility, I have to remind myself that I chose this.
Not so long ago I was content to drift along on the currents of circumstance - which is easy to do when you are constantly landing on new and inviting shores. But even the most exciting of prospects will eventually lose their luster if their shine resembles all others that have come before. I am reminded of a kid I met in a guest house in Malaysia; he'd given up a life of criss-crossing the Pacific as a deckhand on the boats of the super-rich to spend days at a time hiking the rain forest in Tamana Negara, his boots filling with leeches along the way. 'Another day, another deserted white-sand tropical paradise,' he said, wiping at the smears of blood on his feet. 'It gets boring.'
Akita and Matsumoto don't qualify as tropical paradises, but eventually I came to understand what he was saying. So I left my peripatetic, epicurean life with the English conversation school and threw myself into the unknowns of marriage and my nascent dreams of living off the written word.
Life has since become the greatest paradox I could ever imagine.
Free from all responsibility save the ones I choose to assume, I find myself a full-time prisoner. I thought I'd hit the jackpot when my wife told me she didn't mind how much or little I was working, so long as we had food on the table. What I failed to consider was the improbability of getting a shred of thoughtful writing in with a milk-swilling, diaper-dirtying, ear-grating newborn boy around. He took naps, of course, but they never seemed to last very long. Especially to a guy who types with two fingers and has the concentration span of a coke addict.
Fast-forward to now, that little boy is running around speaking two languages - though all he ever seems to say in either of them is 'Let's play cars together.' The kid is tenacious, I'll give him that. And that newborn has been replaced with a carbon copy, save for a less easily-satiable appetite and a stronger set of pipes. The only control I have over my daily life now is choosing which chores to do and when. 'I can't hold Seiji, I'm busy filling the laundry machine with the used bath water.' 'Sorry Yamato, I can't play cars, I'm washing the dishes so we can use them again tomorrow.' And for a few more moments, my life still belongs to me.
The teaching jobs I pick up now serve as a coffee break amid the chaos of working (or not) from home. (I keep mentioning to my wife how expensive rice has become recently.)
As for the ongoing pursuit of traveling the world with pencil and paper, I take my own baby steps when everyone else has finally fallen asleep. This evening was an absolute anomaly. And, ultimately, short-lived. But they'll all fall back asleep before long, and I'll fire up another cup of 10pm joe and continue down this road of freedom I've chosen.
Once I've finished the dishes.

A Night at the Peach Farm

2010-04-08T19:47:00.000-04:00

Last week my wife suggested we go spend the night at her parents’ place. She does this every so often, usually buttressing the idea with a practical reason: she has to dig some clothes out of storage; her mother wants to discuss maternal instincts; we need vegetables. And as long as I don’t have anything in particular planned for the evening (and what are the chances of that anymore?) I nod and grunt in monosyllabic agreement and get back to the laptop. At present I am researching the correct spelling of Greenlandic towns, for a travel book I am going to be quite happy to finish. Who has never been to Aappilattoq yet knows how to spell it? Such is the turn my life has taken.
The thought of a night at the in-laws’ place tends to start my mind swirling. Not like a kid on Christmas Eve, mind you. More like an adult figuring out how to fudge a refund out of his federal income tax. Coming up on five years since I married into the peach farm, I see my returns becoming increasingly muddled.

The most recent sleepover was, as my wife put it, ‘practice’ for when she’s in the hospital and my son and I are staying with Grandma (the ostensible advantage being a week of free babysitting though I think this is my wife’s way of making sure our kid eats more than toasted cheese and hot cocoa for twenty consecutive meals). This particular night would be no different from any other night out among the orchards of Arai, so I don’t know where the practice bit came in. But I guess it made my wife feel better. Involves that maternal instinct stuff probably.

We really do score a lot of vegetables whenever we make the trip. They live on a farm after all. Yet this past Saturday, mere hours before we set out on the thirty-minute ride up winding Route 369 and into all that fertile land, my wife went to the local garden center and bought two 12-liter bags of dirt. This from a woman who persists in peeling off and reusing the twenty-yen discount stickers the supermarket passes out every Saturday. Tending to the potted plants out on our balcony did seem to take her mind off the hormone imbalance her pregnancy is tossing her so I’ll concede there was some value in that dirt there, for both of us.

The peach farm lies west of town, a couple hundred feet or so higher above sea level which makes for a rather surprising difference in air temperature. The unbending Japanese tradition of building houses with insulating properties approaching theoretical zero adds to the fun. ‘Konban-wa,’ I say to my mother-in-law as I kick my shoes off, my breath turning the air between us a milky white. She’s been in the kitchen cutting daikon and stir-frying gobo; I’ve long since stopped wondering why she has the hands of an Alaskan fisherman. They reappear as my breath swirls and rises and dissipates. ‘It’s warm in the living room,’ she says. I’m already stepping over my son to get in there.

The TV is on, and undoubtedly has been for a couple hours. A small group of currently-popular television personalities has been entertaining the empty room with the hilarity of saying ‘This fried eel and rice bowl is delicious’ in a hundred different nasally voices. The kerosene heater over there is doing its thing, and rather well thank God. I stand there on the straw mats, looking around as my son gets busy spilling his toys all over the floor. The room wears that proverbial Japanese mix of old and new, though not in the expected manner. The dusty VCR on the shelf under the TV stopped working sometime before I ever set foot in this house; the tapes my niece and nephew watched as little kids ten years ago are still there too. The books on the low shelf along the wide east-facing window are in the same disordered arrangement as the last umpteen times I’ve been here. Same with the forest of finery and knick-knacks in the huge glass and cherry hutch sitting in its custom-measured place on the north wall. The souvenirs we bring from Germany and Morocco and VietNam go directly onto a crowded shelf and are summarily disregarded or so it stands to reason. Even the garbage in the garbage can looks the same. Only the day’s newspaper on the low table and the fresh offerings of fruit and bean paste cake on the Buddhist shrine in the corner tell me anyone has been in here recently. That and the humming heater, bless his little coils. The TV, I am sure, turns itself on.

On the other side of the north wall the familiar kitchen sounds resume, and as my wife settles onto the floor in the midst of my son’s entropic pursuits I slip through the sliding door to ask my mother-in-law if she needs help with anything. I already know what will happen: my breath will turn white again, the kitchen as frigid as the front hall, and my mother-in-law won’t look up from her knife as she says she doesn’t need help but the hot pot is filled and waiting if I want to make some tea. Knowing this is the way of things, I wonder why I even bother. Maybe we both find small consolation in being able to understand each other, even if the conversation never changes. Hesitation creeps in though when it occurs to me to ask about the bath water.

For three years I watched my father-in-law slide out the back door after dinner, thinking he was sneaking into the yard for a quick smoke. It was only after a healthy yakiniku meal one night, washed down with an equally healthy amount of Kirin Lager, that I decided to step outside with him to continue our halting discussion of the respective talents of Hideki Matsui and Ichiro. And it was then I learned what he was really doing back there. ‘If it’s too windy we don’t heat the water; it creates a fire hazard…’ But on every other evening of the year he’d go out into the shed with the water tank, build and stoke a fire and heat up the bath water for the family. ‘It’s more economical than burning oil,’ he explained.

Last February I watched him as he split and stacked wood. ‘This is about four years’ worth,’ he said, motioning to the neat rows and stacks under the tin roof behind him. Four months later he went down with an aneurism.

‘We have hot water for tonight,’ my mother-in-law will usually say. Once in a while I find myself hoping she’ll ask me to go out back and check the temperature gauge, her subtle way of telling me she’d appreciate it if I could build and light a fire for her. Much like heading to the gym or going for a run, once I step outside and get moving I’m all right. It’s nice to feel productive once in a while. Having to remember to push a button when I want a hot shower at home seems not such an inconvenience either after this.

My father-in-law used to put a few bottles of beer in the fridge whenever I was coming over. They’d be chilled and ready by dinnertime and we’d tip a glass together. A simple act on the surface, though underneath I think he was celebrating finally having a son he could have a beer with. I suppose I enjoyed having a dad again too – even if it was hell trying to understand his Japanese, cryptic enough when he’s stone cold sober. In the colder months we could just keep the crate of beer in the corner of the kitchen; it’d keep just fine. Now it’s in the small shed where they used to store konyaku potatoes, a crop that a few years ago ceased to be profitable. Today that musty shed is a halfway house between their home and the trash heap. Except for the beer, which has become all mine by default.

We stayed at the peach farm for a month after our son was born – common practice in Japan, and a big help to first-time parents like us. My mother-in-law cooked and cleaned and otherwise coddled tirelessly. I did whatever I could to help out in return; this consisted mainly of doing the breakfast and dinner dishes. Do something once, it’s a favor; do it twice it’s your job. So goes the saying. It is now a sort of family custom that when we go over and eat, I do the dishes afterward. I suppose this is another reason I tend to ask if there is hot water in the tank out back. On the peach farm I’ve learned to take nothing for granted. Except, of course, the cold.

In winter all meals are eaten in the living room, on the floor. The typical low Japanese table, called a kotatsu, has a sort of blanket that spreads out beneath the tabletop and hangs down like a skirt. Everyone keeps their legs covered and warm this way; it’s effective, and really quite nice. There’s even a heater built into the floor down there. The lifesaver for me though is the fact that the floor under the table is sunk two feet, so even though we are hunkered down on the tatami mats it is just like sitting on a bench – with no back but I take what I can get. Even after eight years I have yet to develop the flexibility to sit cross-legged for an extended period of time. Like five minutes. I hate tea ceremony for this very reason.

With my father-in-law still hospitalized, I am given his seat at the table. My mother-in-law is at the head of the table, back to a world of neglected art. My wife and child sit across from me – in those rare moments the boy is seated. Dinner is inherently communal; we share from the various dishes arranged in the middle of the table. There is always plenty to go around. I fear I am getting used to the idea.

My wife puts our boy to bed at nine o’clock or whenever he’ll let her. Half the time she falls asleep with him. My mother-in-law goes to bed rather early too, leaving the warm living room and its air of stagnation all to me. If I plan ahead I’ll have the laptop with me; I’ll never get to all the writing projects I have in mind, even if I learn someday to type with more than two fingers. There’s no Internet connection in the house, which I deem a blessing. Without that distraction I have a chance of getting something done. The TV does not count as a distraction either; even if the aerial antenna is getting any reception the chances of something interesting being on (more unfunny ways to say ‘This fried shrimp is so goooood’ not qualifying) is only slightly better than there being any ice cream in the freezer.

Sometime between midnight and two is when my eyes and my brain have had enough. The more wiped out I am the better; dulled senses make stripping down to my boxers in a six-degree room slightly more bearable. But if the chill doesn’t rouse my senses the half ton of blankets and futon covers certainly gets my attention. Staying warm is important in a room that could keep a gallon of milk fresh, but all those thick layers start crushing the living breath from my lungs. I swear it feels like that X-ray chest thing they drape over you at the dentist.

I don’t have an alarm clock. I have my son. He stopped taking naps many months ago, so he tends to sleep well at night. But when he wakes up, he is up. And so is everyone else in the place. Same as with any other kid I’m sure. Small consolation though when he starts yanking your covers off, immune himself to the cold. I pull my clothes on as fast as possible, cursing myself once again that I left them out on the floor exposed to the cold night instead of keeping them warm under my X-ray blanket. ‘Let’s go play cars!’ he says, pulling on whatever part of me is closest. For just a brief moment I think I’d rather have the living breath crushed from my lungs.

Outside I see pine-covered hills and new daffodils, and the stumps of the peach trees that provided my wife’s parents with their hard-earned livelihood for forty years. They aren’t sure what they are going to do from here.

My mother-in-law is in the kitchen. The heater in the living room is humming once again. Breakfast will be rice, vegetables and miso soup. I am trying not to think about doing the dishes once we’ve all eaten.

Watching my son from my father-in-law’s seat, I ponder my fear of getting used to this.

The Mind of a 2-year-Old...and the father he's raising.

2010-03-25T12:26:00.000-04:00

'Higher, Daddy!'
My boy smiled up at me, oblivious to the truculent March weather.
'I wanna go higher!'
No matter that he hadn't gone anywhere yet.
Once upon a time I too used to laugh in the biting wind. Whatever happened to that guy? I wondered as I slid my hands out of my pockets and grabbed the ropes on the big yellow swing.
It was Friday the 12th. I know this because of a conversation I had with my son as he swung toward me and away, toward me and away, brown eyes bright as two brown eyes could be. His mother's birthday was in two days. True to form I hadn't even thought about what to get her. We don't even bother with presents for each other half the time, through mutual understanding perhaps but more likely due to my forgetfulness and her Japan-bred interest in keeping things even between us (though customarily this applies to gift-giving, not gift-omitting).
I do my best to fill my boy's ears with English whenever we are together. Sometimes I am inspired with great new ideas and things to talk about (Lord only knows where these come from); in other moments I am about as loquacious as yesterday's spring rolls and end up asking him if he wants to count to twenty again. On this day, with my brain lobbing wisecracks at me ('Whatsa matter, Cupcake, chilly? Wanna borrow your boy's scarf?...'), I spit out the only other thing on my mind.
'What should we get Mommy for her birthday, Yamato?'
I didn't expect much out of him, to be honest. And where did this pessimism come from?
He stared over toward the big blue bouncy caterpillar thing. His eyes had a sparkle that could melt ice.
He looked at me as he swung toward me again, smile like the sunrise.
'Chocolates!'
I always loved sunrises.
'Wow! That's a great idea!' I didn't even realize it at the time but I think this is when the cold started feeling really not all that cold. 'Okay, let's get Mommy some chocolate!'
My boy gazed across the empty playground again, palatable, innocent satisfaction on his face.
I kept pushing him, swinging my arms and rolling back on my heels as he swung away, maintaining a sort of metronomic rhythm as if that meant I had any real control over things. But I knew who was mastering the moment. All I could do was try to fan the fire.
'Do you want to get anything else?'
If he were a little older he might have perceived a lack of imagination in the guy who was supposed to be his father. God, I really wanted this moment to last forever.
He turned that smile to me. Children are so beautiful.
'A towel!'
I knew right away what he was thinking, and what had never occurred to me until that moment.
In Japan, tradition often dies hard. This can be a good thing; there is a certain intimacy in sitting on the floor around a table too small for all the food and family members gathered. The country's steadfast refusal to accept the idea of central heating is another story. As for my wife, she is quite accustomed to getting out of the bathtub and drying herself off with a towel the size of a large lasagna noodle. I did contribute two normal sized bath towels to our existence when we got married, though I'd bought them in Colorado six years previous so that might have had something to do with her leaving them both for me and reaching for her flat cotton noodle instead. Regardless, I had never questioned it. Never even considered it. She had her towels.
She needs a big one! I could hear my boy saying as he looked at me, so eager to give Mommy his own idea of love.
Now I too was smiling in the chilly gray afternoon.
'Yamato, that is such a good idea! What color should we get?'
More gazing. More thinking. More sunrise.
He almost jumped out of his swing.
'Yellow!'
Thirty minutes later he was picking out a yellow Winnie the Pooh bath towel to give to his Mommy.
He uses it every day now.
And Mommy continues on with her customary collection of cloth noodles.

My Life is So Perfect Right Now.

2010-02-07T11:38:00.000-05:00

Seriously, I mean it. Right now, things just couldn’t be better for me. Consider everything I’ve got going for me, right at this moment, and you’ll find you simply have to agree. Just please don’t get angry or jealous; I’ve worked hard to get where I am.

It’s late in the evening here in Japan; I’m sitting at my kitchen table in sweats, sipping tea and chewing on semi-dried persimmon. The wife and kid are asleep – I can hear my wife snoring – so I’ve got the whole rest of the night all to myself. Not bad, huh? As long as I keep quiet as I tap away on my keyboard; noise can really carry in a 500 square foot apartment.
     Right now most people on the east coast over in the US are sitting at the breakfast table, whacking down huge plates of eggs and bacon and pancakes and French toast. Good stuff, for sure. And yeah, I suppose I crave such a morning feast every now and again. But with my wife reheating last night’s sautéed vegetables on the right burner that only leaves the left one for me, meaning I can only make one thing – which of course saves me from the time-consuming task of firing up a proper Sunday brunch, and then having to wash all those dishes afterwards. Plus with the six inches of available counter space the sheer logistics of whipping up a batch of pancakes makes me give up and reach for the muesli, saving me even more time, on both ends. Which works out great. I’m a busy guy, after all. No time for Mrs. Butterworth when the book I’ve been working on for three years is so close to being done again.
     Well it’s Super Bowl weekend in the US; seems like just yesterday I was home for Christmas, stretched out on my mom’s couch watching the regular season winding down. Which was great, of course, don’t get me wrong, but I’d be doing it all over again this weekend if I were back stateside. My entire weekend would be taken up by a football game that means absolutely zero to me, along with all the friends and beer and cholesterol-packed food that would come with it. Lucky for me I am here in northern Japan, our love seat perfect for keeping me from lazing around and taking naps in front of TV shows about fried shrimp over rice. No wasted weekend for me, firmly planted comfortably for an 18-hour pre-game show, beer and chips all over the place. I’ve got familial duties to tend to, I’ve got to be ready to take the reins and keep my son from falling down the stairs whenever my pregnant wife goes down in an emotional firestorm and has to disappear for an hour or two. Plus my son, at two-and-a-half, has perfected the art of standing up for himself, clinging like box tape to his silly little childish beliefs. So even if we got the pre-game hype here my son would let me know that doing the crow family’s bread shop puzzle for the four hundredth time would be infinitely more interesting than watching four former linemen in neckties grunt and roar and high-five each other over twenty-two hulking millionaires in tight pants. Strong-willed family I’ve got; keeps me razor-sharp and on my toes.
     Now the time difference between Japan and the east coast is such that the Super Bowl would come on here at about 8:30am on Monday. This means catching the first half while the wife tries to get our boy dressed and fed and re-dressed in clean clothes again and out the door in time for pre-school at 10:00 would be tougher than getting through a bowl of muesli without my boy demanding half because he doesn’t want to eat sautéed vegetables for breakfast. Fortunately the game isn’t being broadcast here, not on regular TV anyway. It will be on cable, but we don’t subscribe since we can’t fit a full-size couch in our living room. Plus we just don’t have the time. We’ve got old baby clothes to dig out of our closets, we can’t spend precious minutes catching glimpses of quality movies and major sporting events. Besides, if I do end up with a bit of time tomorrow morning I think there’s one of those samurai shows on. Who needs Peyton Manning?
     My work situation is perfect too. Freelancing means freedom, so I don’t have to accept any jobs that would require the use of my wife’s car. All my assignments are within biking distance, except for the one over in Hobara but my boss gives me a ride back and forth every week so that’s a sweet deal. And since I do get around on two wheels my boss cuts me some slack and doesn’t make me dress up in a shirt and tie when I teach. I can haul ass through the streets and show up as I am, most of the time either sweaty or sneezing or both but hey, no dry-cleaning bills for this English teacher! Rain or snow can make things pretty interesting too but hey, variety is the spice of life, right? Who wants to show up to work every day the same old fresh and dry person? My students get a good deal of enjoyment out of it all too, though they’re generally too shy to say much.
     Speaking of snow, we’ve been getting quite a bit here in Fukushima. This week has been the chilliest of the season too, so there’s even more variety piled onto my already spicy plate. Stretched out on a real couch in the States, whole huge house heated to the rafters, I might be tempted to stay put and miss out on really experiencing the wildest winter in recent memory. Not here, though. The one wall-mounted heater/AC unit in the living room is perfect for that little area of space, once it finally gets cranking. But if we slide open the doors leading out into the kitchen (and the odd adjacent area we can’t really use for anything but is perfect for scattering eight hundred toy trains around) the Little Heater That Couldn’t starts burning more energy than Rush Limbaugh on any day any Democrat says anything and our utility bills go through the roof. So instead we clear a space among the on-going train wreck and fire up our kerosene heater, which is a much more cost-efficient way to minimize the white puffs of steam billowing out of our mouths when we’re talking at the kitchen table. Plus – and this is the real genius of it all – when we light the heater, and again when we turn it off, massive amounts of noxious fumes start filling the apartment and we have to open up all the windows and the sliding glass veranda doors so we don’t succumb. So you see, I can’t help but enjoy the swirling snow and driving winds. And I don’t even have to go outside. Talk about efficient.
      When the weather warms up it’s time to air out the tent and tune up the mountain bike – or so it used to be, once upon a time. I’m so lucky not to be bothered with those things now, what with the wife expecting our second child in April. I mean, I want to be the best father I can be, around at all times to help out when the wife gets hit with another of her hormone episodes. All-day bike rides through the glorious mountains, weekends camping with a few buddies and a couple cases of beer, even the occasional Happy Hour, or even the occasional friend, is a distraction I just can’t be bothered with right now. It’s pretty amazing how fortunate I am in this regard.
     Still, temptation lurks out there. Just yesterday I got not one but two emails, one from a friend in Virginia wanting to know if I was going to be able to meet up with him in Italy in March, the other from a friend living in Sumava National Park in the Czech Republic inviting me to spend the summer with them helping build a house and whacking down some of the best beer in the world. Of course, I’ve married the perfect woman – she’s managed to effectively hide my passport from me in only 500 square feet of space, destroying for me any chance and therefore any distracting ideas of taking off for a while. Which really is exactly how it needs to be, considering how much we’ve traveled recently and how perfectly uninfested by money our lives are right now. The added specter of a second child makes the realization that I need to work perfectly clear now, so off I go on two wheels, mind focused perfectly on the jobs at hand, no possibility of veering off the laser-straight path before me.
     I heard a rumor the Super Bowl might be shown here on regular TV sometime around Wednesday. If our Internet hookup stays on the fritz then I won’t inadvertently hear or see who won, and I can watch the game in all its intensity, just as if I were back home. Minus the couch, of course. And the friends. Of course I can run out and get me some beer; the taxes on alcohol are astronomical here, a six-pack of cans of regular old Kirin goes for ten bucks easy. Which is perfect, of course. Can’t be drinking when you’re sharing 500 square feet with a two-year-old boy and a pregnant wife.

Dumb Luck

2010-01-27T11:54:00.000-05:00

This evening during English class with a group of relatively excitable Japanese 'shakaijin' (company employees) I gleaned yet another sliver of insight - if not a slice of actual understanding - into this place I've come to call home.

Despite the depressing trend here toward westernizing anything that can be westernized (read: culturally decimated) it is still not only possible but rather easy to find a calendar in Japan with daily notations for the traditional six-day cycle of good luck and bad luck and...whatever you call what lies in between. The luckiest days are called 大安 (dai-an), when every wedding hall and fake church in the country can get away with doubling the going rate for a eye-stabbingly boring reception or a fake Christian ceremony (complete with gospel readings that no one involved has the slightest clue about - and that includes the person reading) because everyone getting married wants to do so on this, the luckiest of days. (It just occurred to me I should check into the divorce rate in Japan.) The unluckiest days in Japan are known as 仏滅 (butsu-metsu). On these days the wedding halls stand deserted as the immigration information counter at City Hall while the fake Christian priests go hit golf balls into a massive green net hung between the dental clinic and someone's home because that was the last remaining two-meter-wide swath of unused space in the entire city, and the priests needed something to do on butsu-metsu.

These things, though, are common knowledge for even the most disinterested of the 5,000 overpaid, underworked 22-year-old brat JET English teachers here on the archipelago. Tonight, however, thanks to my students, growing more confident each week in their ability to maim the English language in new and uncharted ways, I now possess perhaps one more salmon egg's worth of knowledge about the intricacies of Japan which, ironically, just serves to confound me even further. To wit:

Another of the six days of the cycle is 赤口 (shakkoh) which, translating the characters literally, means 'red mouth.' (This may or may not be good for a few interesting visuals.) Ever eager to firm up my mental grip on my adopted home, I went ahead and asked Toshiyuki: 'So what is a shakkoh day?'

What I gathered listening to his stuttering, syntactically-disastrous explanation was that shakkoh is a lucky day - but only at noon. At first, by 'noon' Toshiyuki seemed to mean that almost immeasurable sliver of time when it is exactly noon, according to the Emperor's personal atomic clock. But I pressed him on it and he backpedaled a bit, conceding that the good luck of shakkoh could conceivably extend an hour on either side of noon. But the rest of the day was most assuredly bad luck. The rest of the class chimed in with a chorus of sounds which, in any language, could only mean one thing: 'We actually have no flippin idea what we are talking about but please accept this as our answer so we can move on without embarrassing ourselves any further with our gross lack of understanding of our own traditions.' You'd hear the same sound in the States if you asked any random group of people the functioning purpose of the Electoral College. As of now, I can only say that in Japan on shakkoh days you probably want to eat your sushi lunch on time - and eat it quick.

Then Mihoko piped up and told us all about how her grandparents would never leave the house on butsu-metsu days.

I love Japan, for all its quirks and incomprehendability. It wouldn't be Japan otherwise.

Still, I'm glad some traditions are falling by the wayside.

Sarah the Brave

2010-01-19T21:06:00.002-05:00

I liken my mind to a tornado: swirling like the dickens and indiscriminate in direction, followed by an eerie silence and scattered debris. It was two weeks ago I came across the fodder for this post – an in-flight magazine article by fellow writer (fellow meaning she writes for magazines and I would like to write for magazines) Sarah Twain (not her real surname). Since then my head has been spinning with images I've been itching to get down on paper before they lose whatever small measure of their original incisive hilarity. My ideas, unlike wine and easy listening radio, don't get better with age.

     I'd have gotten to this sooner if not for the more pressing priorities I've recently imposed upon myself, like getting my novel ready for printing, making sure my son doesn't swallow any more of Thomas the Tank Engine's buddies, and getting to 200 friends on facebook. There just isn't enough time in the day. If I ever get a job this blog will really be done for.
     To be completely forthright, the novel still isn't quite ready, but there I'm in a bit of a holding pattern as my patient friend Ron sorts through a few niggling formatting details for me so I won't have to. A fine attitude for a guy starting his own publishing company, I know, but I've lost track of the number of little plastic train pieces there are supposed to still be around here. Plus the tornado of inspiration of two weeks ago is down to a wispy breeze of erstwhile wit; this post will simply die if I wait longer. As will, I'm sure, both of the people who know I'm keeping this blog.

In a previous post I mentioned my unabashed affinity for airline magazines – particularly ones with the sudoku not already having been utterly maimed and destroyed. So I can get my nose into the pages before drink service starts I've developed the insidious but effective habit of handing my son the emergency instruction pamphlet and telling him to start pointing to each of the ninety-eight pictures and graphics in turn and asking my wife ‘What is this?’ Thus I can begin panning the pages of Hemispheres or Horizons or Turbulence for the travel articles I can always count on to make a four hundred dollar fuel surcharge on a plane ticket I can't afford in the first place seem like a non-issue. Flying back to Japan two weeks ago, however, the pendulum had swung the other way. Far enough, in fact, for the sad incredulity of what I was reading to become a pleasure – kind of like the first time I saw Obama speak without a teleprompter.
     A photo of a misty beach spread over both pages, wild golden grass creeping toward the sand and the flat surf. ‘Three Perfect Days in Sonoma’ proclaimed the author, further teasing me with the promise of ‘rugged valleys that are just now tame enough to conquer.’ This Sarah seems like my kind of girl I mumbled to myself as my son moved his finger over to the image of a cell phone with a red X over it and asked my wife ‘What is this?’ In the bottom corner of the page the bullet points for the first two days consisted of (1) sipping pinot and (2) eating oysters. Day three included seal-spotting. I guessed Sarah just wanted to start us off slow; we'd get to the conquering-the-rugged-bits soon enough.

The next page was entirely dedicated to a photo of the pool at Sarah's hotel. Then I read the first line of the article – ‘Wander the streets of affluent Healdsburg’ – and I knew that Sarah the Rugged must be one slick writer, fooling me into thinking my three days would be all glazed shopping strips and poolside nips of chardonnay before tossing me into the water at Big Sur. The original settlers of the Sonoma valley, she explained, were lumbermen and farmers who made wine on the side, more as family tradition than as a commercial endeavor. Okay, so maybe we'll be chopping wood and operating heavy farm machinery I tried to assure myself despite the photograph of one of Healdsburg's streets, cleaner than Disneyland and every bit as precise as a Williams & Sonoma mail-order catalog layout.
     But then our tour with Sarah began.
    ‘Step out onto your balcony at the understatedly chic room at the Hotel Healdsburg,’ wrote Sarah the Intrepid. Farm trucks 'purr' along the street, she adds, though we wouldn't be doing anything quite so rash as touching something that so recently had dirt on it. Instead we'd be heading down to the hotel lobby for some fresh granola (fresh from the box I'm gathering) and sliced fruit laid out like a mosaic in the Basilica di San Pietro. Outside we'd spot a small group of ‘spandex-clad athletes’ (a phrase which probably gives the correct visual) getting ready for a day of biking the wine country. Cool, I say to myself. Biking. ‘What is this?’ my son says to my wife. But then Sarah the Wise advises I take a walk around Beverly Healdsburg (her words) before I ‘embark on anything quite so ambitious.’ I could only squirm in my seat and keep reading.
     The rest of our first day would include visiting a bookstore (beautiful Sonoma, Sarah the Learned counsels, also has brains), running our hands 'lovingly' over some copper cookware, stopping by the organic Love Farms market to see a display of ‘heirloom tomatoes’ (big deal, I've got half a casserole that's been in the family since Grandma), driving a Mercedes SLK55 convertible (automatic transmission to save your strength) to go pick up a Brie and olive sandwich for lunch (drive-thru if possible), having a 'picnic' on one of the teak tables on the patio at a vineyard, taking a guided tour at a second vineyard, then scurrying back to the hotel to relax in the hot tub or ‘indulge in a quick nap on your crisp Frette linens’. Sarah the Circumspect understands I might not be up to her level of ruggedness at this stage of our odyssey, I figure. I need to ease into our wine country crusade. The remains of Day One are best spent tackling the formidable five-course meal waiting in the hotel restaurant.
     I try to tell myself that is just Sonoma-speak – or Sarah-speak – for a high-carb pre-workout scarf-fest.

Next up is a full-page shot of a path disappearing into a thick forest. The first word that comes to mind when I see a trail through the woods is ‘run’ – as in take off running down the trail and don't stop until you feel yourself reaching that moment that only other people who have run until reaching that moment can understand. The first word Sarah the Supercilious thinks of when she sees a wooded trail, I imagine, is bug spray.

Day Two begins with some 'serious' coffee and a croissant. We've checked out of our understatedly chic hotel, but I don't see any camping gear for our trip into the rugged valley – as if there were any room in our little ragtop coupe what with the guide, the masseuse and the guy in the turtleneck who speaks fluent wine taking up the back seat. We'll be checking into a 'luxurious' (I already checked, this is not a synonym for rugged) room at the Farmhouse Inn, the perfect name of course for a ‘stylish Russian River idyll’ complete with a concierge (thank God we don't have to go find anything on our own out on one of the three roads out there). But before this, we will push ourselves to the limit with a stop at yet another winery to pick up some zinfandel mustard, then go for Drakes Bay oysters on the half shell at a place Sarah the Embellisher tries to pass off as 'urbane yet rustic.' I don't know if I've ever had Drakes Bay oysters – I don't even know what that means – but I get the sense they and the word rustic don't quite belong in the same area code. One more winery (remember, you're driving) for a breezy chat with the resident winemakers about traditional barrel-making and wine-stomping (Sarah the Uncalloused is thoroughly experienced in the art of chatting about traditional arts). Then back to the Farmhouse Hilton for a dip in the pool. Finally, a stop at reception to get set up with a complimentary salt scrub and milk bath because (I swear I am not making this up, these are Sarah the Lionhearted's exact words), ‘you've earned it.’ You've earned it! God be praised you hale and hearty adventurer, alive and well after a most intrepid expedition to the remotest, wildest realms known to man! After a dinner including fig pizza, something called Black Pig Salumi and, of course, some pinot noir, kick back on the lanai and breathe in the scents of the herb garden.
     I don't think I can take any more, but on Day Three Sarah the Relentless presses on. Go for a drive along River Road, she commands, and ‘note the various trapped-in-time motels tucked into the shadows of enormous redwoods and feel happily relieved you've arranged fancier digs.’
     Next to the word rugged in Sarah the Deluded's dictionary is a picture of someone having to press the elevator button themselves.
     But wait! At Armstrong Redwoods State Reserve Sarah the Conqueror is getting out of the car! God be praised! She's going for a walk! ‘Here in the dim woods,’ she says, referring apparently to the bright green forest in the photo on the opposite page, ‘you're eerily alone.’ On a fence-lined woodchip path that makes a meticulously-raked Japanese temple rock garden look like downtown Port-au-Prince. But then, ‘feeling ready for human contact (since no one has handed us a slice of Gouda in nearly twenty minutes), hop back in the Mercedes.’ Lunch is a West County burger with fried leeks on a roadside picnic table overlooking the coast (too little too late Sarah) followed by a drive along the ‘perilous, cliff-hugging Highway 1’ (Hey Sarah the Carsick, talk to me after you try taking a night bus out of La Paz). ‘Stay on the lookout for stray cows’ warns Sarah the Crocodile Hunter as she brings me toward Salt Point State Park's Stump Beach, where there is a sign that reads ‘Strong Backwash. Sleeper Waves. Rip Currents.’
     If Sarah decides to go swimming then all is forgiven.
    ‘Watch the surf and the occasional seal.’ Did she forget to mention the ‘from the cedar deck while sipping a merlot in your leather patio chair’ or is this something we should just assume by now? ‘The air is a bit cooler here than in Healdsburg, so head back to the Mercedes and put up the top.’ Aw, is Sawah the Wugged getting a widdle chiwwy? We get on Skaggs Spring Road, ‘a byway so remote that signs warn you in advance to make sure you're gassed up.’ From there Sarah the Ultimate Survivor arrives back at the Farmhouse Inn to (I absolutely swear these are her words) ‘freshen up before dinner’ – a real backwoods-style meal of Gruyere potato gratin and beef tenderloin. Served, of course, with wine. Poured by someone else.

And with that, rugged traveler, the unforgiving road comes to a merciful end.

Don't get me wrong, I am not at all against a relaxing few days in wine country. Sounds pretty darn good, actually. But when someone like Sarah the Manure Spreader tries to make a high-dollar weekend of wine, food and salt baths sound like a Jules Verne novel I have to call her on it.

Of course, this is all just to hide my envy. Sarah the Writer is getting her stuff in airline magazines while I'm trying to explain the concept of a life raft to a two-year-old, the wife having fled to the bathroom.

'Daddy, what is this?'...

The True Meaning of 'Home For Christmas'.

2010-01-03T22:29:00.000-05:00

Twelve minutes before midnight, January 1, and I am draining my second massive Kahlua and coffee of the evening. This is not typical, mind you. At least it wasn't up until three weeks ago. Come to think of it, there's not much typical about a lot of things I have been doing since I arrived back stateside for the holidays. Until I actually got here, that is; then the atypical quickly assumed a veil of normalcy. Confused? Bear with me, I'm heating up another pot of water.
Twenty-hour journey and subsequent jet lag notwithstanding, I always look forward to coming home for the holidays. The predictable inveiglements apply, of course: Mom's cooking and Dad's SUV, occasionally half-decent radio and the opportunity to catch up with friends face-to-face. And the experience of having twenty-three family members simultaneously under one roof is an occasion that really shouldn't be missed, regardless of how you feel about them. As long as there's Kahlua, I mean. But these things are more or less superficial adornments to a subtler, more gratifying and much more sinister dynamic of substituting a normally sane lifestyle with the damn-the-cholesterol-torpedoes approach to anotheer Christmas season at home.
I got off to a responsible start, actually. My two-year-old son didn't take to the time warp too readily (he was gracious about it, even if he didn't understand why the hell everyone was eating dinner at 8am), but this meant he would drag my wife out of bed and down to the basement in the middle of the night to play with Grandma's impressive collection of third-generation Fisher-Price toys. This in turn led to long afternoon naps and early bedtimes which translated into time for me to work on a couple of writing projects. On top of this, I am nlessed with superhuman powers of concentration and I have been able to tune out Mom and Dad in the background watching CSI: Toledo.
But then came the road trip. Christmas was coming fast and my window of opportunity was closing. So I tossed my family into the car and head south to DC to drop in on my sister...then headed further south into the Shenandoah Valley and the seething teeth of a snowstorm to see a couple of friends who had a couple of kids while I wasn't looking. Headed home via the Jersey shore, another sister and a poorly-plowed I-295 and voila! I was back home again, itching to get back to Google's amusing Slovenian-to-English translation efforts. My mom was even clearing out for me, taking off for Pennsylvania and her husband's side of the family for a few days. But then my wife and boy made a horribly miraculous recovery from their jet lag, and before you could say 'No Yamato you can't have ice cream for breakfast don't touch that hey GET DOWN FROM THERE' my quiet time had disappeared, leaving me with these nagging notions of responsibility, of bearing the mantle, however thin, of the caring, infested-with-holiday-cheer father and husband. This is when I first cracked the Kahlua.
With a near-empty house, Christmas Eve was indeed a mighty calm affair. On Christmas Day we attended mass, the majority of the congregation showing up fashionably late then hauling ass out the door like the crowd at the Giants' last home game this season. I think I was the only one in the entire place wearing a tie. Best dressed in the church I was, with the possible exception of the priest. In the afternoon we accepted an invitation to celebrate Christmas with my oldest sister's husband's extended family, consisting mostly of gregarious Italians whose names I successfully forget with each new meeting. I draw fair consolation that most of them forget my name too. The day after Christmas mom and her husband returned, my sister from California was flying in the day after that, and my Japanese wife was full-on into the post-Christmas half-price-on-all-Christmas-merchandise fray at Target and Kohl's. Monday was taken up by a trip into New York City, and thereafter the rest of the family came pouring into mom's quiet home, making all sorts of noise and taking away any hope of getting any writing done, even if the computer wasn't overheating with the constant stream of facebook hounds. Long before mom began slicing up the cheese and lining up the crackers for our family New Year's Eve I had accepted the probability that I was not going to get any more writing done for a while. Thus my spiral into my present condition.
My alternate life, temporary but oh so thick.
I've watched more TV in the last week than in the previous six months, thanks to the generous helpings of criminal investigation dramas available, not to mention the return of my body to a couch that takes itself seriously (while simultaneously magnifying one of the glaring voids in my life overseas). I haven't touched a bicycle since December 9th. Last weekend my legs were aching, quite literally, from inactivity - and probably still would be if not for an afternoon of walking Times Square with thirteen pounds of little boy hanging on my arms and neck. The only running I've done lately was a sprint across the street to the Dunkin' Donuts two days ago.
I am hardly repentant.
Because this is what it means to come home. I'll be back in Japan soon enough, my life once again devoid of decent TV dramas and big couches and bottles of stuff to mix with coffee. I'll get back to my writing then.
At least until my son's jet lag goes away.
The kettle is whistling again. And my mom says she really doesn't care much for Kahlua.

Julia Childs and the Curvature of the Earth

2009-12-23T00:10:00.000-05:00

'How are you doing?' was the first thing my mom said last week as I emerged from the Immigration & Customs Chamber of Secrets at Newark International Airport.
My first thought: Is my shirt still on inside out?
The trip from home in Fukushima to home in New Jersey takes 20 hours give or take, barring any minor setbacks - like missing my plane. This almost happened in 2003 when I decided to save 20 bucks and take the local lines from Shinjuku to Narita-in-the-Sticks instead of jumping the airport express in Ueno. An hour later I was squeezing the blood out of my fingers gripping the door handle as my unusually aggressive taxi driver hit the hyperspace button and somehow got me from the train I abandoned in a panic to Narita's Terminal One a full 20 minutes before departure time. Well worth the $120 cab fare. The good people with the plastic silver wings pinned to their crisp blue uniforms then whisked me through to my gate, virtually bypassing any sort of security screening procedure. If I ever turn terrorist, I thought, just get to the airport late.
This week was the first time I wasn't flying direct from Tokyo to Newark. Our two-hour layover in DC would, thanks to air traffic, become four and a half. After twenty-five hours on the move I bet even Superman might not have his cape on straight.
But I like flying. Even long flights. Especially long flights as it means I am spanning oceans and continents. And getting two full meals plus a mid-flight snack, most likely consisting of a mix of pulverized food and chemical glues and lacquers I wouldn't eat on the ground if I had a gun against my temple but I readily devour at 550mph and 30,000 feet. Plus flying, for me, constitutes a sort of mental rejuvenation process; a shift in environment that tosses my awareness into a sort of parallel bars routine where half my thoughts spin and twirl along the esoteric while the other half of me grips desperately to hard, uncolored reality - like how amazing is it that a plane this big and heavy can soar so high...and how equally amazing that if we were to suddenly find ourselves doing a screaming nosedive we are supposed to think that tucking our heads between our knees might help.
High above clouds, land and sea I find myself doing things I never do when my feet are on the ground (where human feet really belong if you think about it): I watch sit-coms, at least for as long as I can stomach the stupidity; I look for video games to play; I order ginger ale. These things, though, take a back seat to the magazine in the seat pocket in front of me.
Airline magazines are a breed apart - an ambitious mix of travel and artistic creativity, the two things I am constantly trying not only to incorporate into my life but assimilate into my very being. Like religion, for some people. Or facebook. The articles themselves run the gamut in both subject matter and delivery, and in the course of reading one of these magazines my belief in my own creative capacity is confirmed then destroyed then resurrected again, on occasion more often than the person in front of me with the eye shade thing and the self-serving inability to speak English will ease his seat back forward then slam it back into my knees.
Literary picking on this most recent flight included an overtly self-deprecating, subtly haughty bit from a guy who claimed to have flown over 100,000 miles by age two and thirty years later wasn't showing signs of slowing, as well as a fascinating article (fascinating in that the writer seemed to take both himself and his subject seriously) about an artist whose most recent accomplishment (according to members of certain twisted circles) consisted of an empty room with a clear plastic yogurt cap affixed to each of the room's four walls. Immediately upon finishing this second article I asked the flight attendant for four packs of peanuts.
Mind awash in conflicting visions of my own future, I ripped open the hermetically sealed plastic bag next to my thigh and plugged in my headphones. On every other flight between the US and Japan the plane had been equipped with personal TV screens for every passenger; today the whole lot of us would be subjected to the whims of the troll working the VCR down in the plane's bowels. I was neither overjoyed nor particularly despon to find the upcoming movie would be a more or less true story about a directionless young woman who, in a rash moment of direction-seeking, started a blog about her quest to cook up 547 new recipes in 365 days a la Julia Childs. In the course of her culinary pursuits she developed a following, wrote a book and, obviously, ended up with a movie.
Staring out at the crescent moon hanging in the deep blue of space, the fuzzy orange glow of the sun still hiding behind the gently curving line of the Earth, I thought about foreign lands and finished books. I pondered brilliance and banality. I connected imaginary dots between life in the present and life's incredible potential.
And I wondered what really, truly mattered to people.

There's only one thing worse than being talked about...

2009-12-03T09:41:00.000-05:00

And that is not being talked about.
I might never know whether being a psychology major was the beginning of my search for meaning in everything around me or if it simply exacerbated my condition. Either way, I think the ill effects are in remission.
Some things came easy to me when I was growing up: spelling and running 10K races and biting my fingernails until they turned red and stingy underneath. Other things didn't come too readily - like knowing how to tell people to piss off. I hated disagreement; I feared confrontation. At school and on the playground and in my own backyard I began to keep to myself the words and ideas and thoughts and feelings that could possibly turn someone against me.
By the age of ten I had learned to survive by hiding myself away.
Only in moments of complete self-assurance could I open up. Then I would spill all over and give people real reason to tell me to stick it.
At age forty I think I am finally excising the last remnants of these devils from my soul. Easy to say, perhaps, when 90 percent of my social life is played out on a computer. (Such is the existence of an expat in a small town of socially-inhibited people but that's a story for another day.)
Twenty-six years ago I was working at the George Washington University Hospital as a doorman. The job was part of a sort of experiment they were running - an attempt I suppose at making an inherently unnerving place a little more comforting and user-friendly. To me it was a corridor to a free grad school degree. One sweaty summer day there on 23rd Street between Washington Circle and I Street this guy struck up a conversation with me, overtly enchanted by my role there at the hospital. 'You should write a book about your work here,' he said with a big white toothy smile. 'Call it The Entrance.' Six years later I started writing that book.
For hours at home, or on my computer at work at the Boulder Municipal Courthouse before I finally bought my first PC, I typed and thought and typed and thought and deleted and typed some more. I started staying home on Friday nights because I wanted to write this book - which became for me a sort of cathartic autobiography. I spent two years I think, slowly cranking out this introverted Jerry Maguire manifesto. And the week before I moved to Japan I took my pile of paper to Kinko's to have it bound so I could send it to my mother - which I might never had done if I hadn't blurted out to her during a rare phone conversation many months prior that I had actually decided to try to write a book.
Though at times I entertained the possibility of turning this into something, I didn't write this convoluted explanation of my psyche in an attempt to have it published. The idea of being a writer per se hadn't ever even entered my head. I wrote for myself, to clear my head and clarify my ideas and maybe see what kind of person I was able to admit to myself I really was. I wasn't even sure I wanted anyone else to see it. But in that impetuous, unthinking moment I told my mom I was trying to accomplish something - and from that moment on I felt I had something to live up to. And though I didn't realize it at the time, this would prove a driving force behind my dreams.
Since slogging out that long-winded piece that I did in fact title The Entrance, I found that I love to write as much as anything I've ever done. Writing is creating; writing is exercise for both the head and the soul; writing, for me, is a source and a product of self-expression. It is enjoyment on a different plane than riding my bike or traveling overseas or swilling beers and tripping over my Japanese, but it is fulfilling nonetheless.
Now to make it my livelihood.
I was hesitant at the outset to tell people I was trying to write a novel. Then I tossed around the disclaimer that I was not trying to get published, I just wanted to see if I could write a book - though I more or less already had. The real question was: Can I write a good book? If I couldn't I felt better having the I-wasn't-really-trying bit in my back pocket. And failure would become a much less harrowing proposition.
Today I tossed out on facebook for all to see that I am starting my own publishing company. Reactions, I expect, whether I hear them or not, will run the gamut. And now, I know, that is good. Now my family and friends and six potential degrees of separation all know I am striving for something. Something called a dream.
Still, just like that first book, I'm not doing it for anyone but me.
But everyone will know it if I give up.
Somehow, that drives me.

Getting a Life in Japan

2009-11-12T21:51:00.000-05:00

It is commonly known that the Japanese concept of harmony, often depicted by the character ‘Wa’, is a prevalent aspect of society and culture here. The idea appears in the uniforms worn not only by junior high and high school students but by the women working in banks and on tour buses. The businessmen all wear the same color suit – a blue so dark it’s black – with a necktie to match. Some of them get a little crazy and wear dress shirts with pinstripes but this is not a practice for the meek. Punctuality is a kind of religion here; it is not uncommon to hear a very polite and formal announcement at the station that a train is running two minutes late. I don’t know how many times I’ve been on my way to meet a friend somewhere and gotten an email on my cell phone at the very stroke of our agreed meeting time: ‘Where are you?’ Back in my early days here I made the mistake of strolling into a lunch party fifteen minutes late. Everyone was seated quietly around the table, hands in their laps, staring at their food.

Japanese people are perhaps even better known for being interminably polite. No matter how fervently I try to explain to them how stupid their rules are, they will just keep smiling and bowing and telling me nicely that since the letter I am mailing is smaller than the standard size envelope I have to pay double postage. True story, and fully representative of the ‘rules, not reality’ approach to life here.

After eight years you’d think I should have seen it all, at least the broad strokes if not the infinite number of ways this Japanese manner of thinking can apply. Last night reminded me how much I still have to learn.

The topic for our English class was ‘Drinking with your co-workers.’ Yes, there are some common faces of life in Japan I can live very well with. For an hour my students fought and struggled to explain their opinions about whether Mark, a Canadian software engineer working in Tokyo, should make it a point to go out and socialize with the other people in his office after hours. (Personally I couldn’t comprehend Mark’s dilemma.) The idea behind this practice is that it facilitates understanding among co-workers which translates into a more productive and - why not use the word here? – harmonious work environment. (Mark, apparently, would rather go off and curl up with a pile of manga in a private booth in an Internet and comics café somewhere.)

As the class wound down, we came to the general concensus (of course) that Mark should at least go out with his colleagues once or twice a month. Okay, fair enough.

The revealing moment, however, came in the last few minutes of class as one of the students got on the subject of how Japanese people love to work, which in and of itself is not a bad thing but often results in Japanese people having scant free time to go out and – to use the expression they’d just learned – get a life. A life apart from not only work but co-workers as well. (Ah, so maybe Mark had a point after all...) He went on to say that he believed a lot of Japanese people felt this way, but no one has the mental fortitude (not the term he used) to rock the boat (not this one either) and put himself before his work on occasion. ‘Well, Hiroyuki,’ I said, looking into his eyes. ‘What’s the solution?’ He looked around the room. Everyone was watching, waiting for him to say what they were probably all thinking themselves. He looked back at me and opened his mouth. ‘There should be a law...’ He went on to explain that it just wouldn’t work if some people went out and got a life while others were still working – or drinking with their co-workers. He suggested the government should put a limit on time one needs to devote to his working life. That way everyone will have an equal amount of free time to enjoy as they pleased.

The Japanese Wa strikes again.

We ended class by deciding on the date for our ‘Bo-nen-kai’, the traditional year-end party all Japanese partake in - with their co-workers. We worked backwards from December, to find a Friday that everyone had free.

Our Bonenkai is next Friday, barely past the midpoint of November.

But that’s okay. Because then everyone will be able to make it.

Running Naked Once More in Motomiya

2009-10-26T03:40:00.000-04:00

First off, let me say that the Motomiya Naked Festival has little to do with anyone being totally naked. It does, however, have a lot to do with everyone being a little naked. Confused? Well so was I the first time, seven years ago, standing there in a strange woman’s house, stripped to my boxers, hands raised high above my head as she proceeded to wrap ten meters of white cloth around my mid-section. This is what an adventurous spirit in a foreign land will get you.
‘Ugokanaide ne, shibaraku.’
How could I say no?

A couple weeks before I’d found myself an active participant in a Japanese festival for the first time. The Fukushima Inari Jinja Matsuri too involved the carrying of a mikoshi, a miniature replica of a Shinto shrine that somehow weighs as much as the real thing. A hundred or so intrepid Japanese had gathered on a Monday morning, towels tucked under their festival jackets to pad their shoulders against the weight of God, to carry out the raucous yet subtly spiritual act of hauling around town this lead-heavy lego set with the trembling gold-plated rooster on top.
As my spine contracted under the sheer weight of the thing, the washcloth I’d brought doing nothing to keep my collarbone from being crushed, I thought this must be what it feels like to pledge a fraternity.
Little did I know Animal House was waiting further south.

To be honest, I can’t recall much of that first experience in Motomiya with any particular clarity – and not just because of all the sake. Japan was still a novelty for me, every day a potential typhoon of sensory input. A trip to the supermarket could still make me feel like I’d eaten some bad mushrooms. Letting myself be thrown into the fray of this small town’s annual plunge into cultural insanity would be like any given rugby match in college, though with the excessive drinking done before the game, not after.
So rather than try to piece together my fragmented memories of that fateful day in the Fall of 2002, allow me to relive, in much greater detail, the events of this past weekend.

I was still in the car when the vague feelings of dread began. This would be my seventh time joining the circus, and every time I’d felt the same (except for that first time when I had no idea what was coming and thus the dread was not at all vague). Today, though, I also had a sore ankle to ponder. Would it turn the coming melee into a pure nightmare? What if I turned it or got stepped on? Why the heck had it been bothering me for the past week anyway? As we pulled off Route 4 and dipped down into town I decided to stop thinking about it.
Every other year I’d gone to Numa-san’s home for the unceremonious ceremony of getting dressed for the party. Numa-san, however, had been promoted to Deputy Grand Poobah for the day and would be prancing around in a suit and tie, carrying only a small paper lantern, a bottomless cup of sake and envelopes of money the townsfolk would be tossing him for good luck. I felt a dull ache in my ankle as I walked toward Takeda-san’s home. I wanted to be a Deputy Grand Poobah too.
I pointed out the wooden name plate on the porch wall next to the door. ‘Is this it?’ No, wrong first name my wife said, continuing down the short, narrow, cement-lined street, our two-year-old son in tow. I shrugged and kept walking. The sound of a metal storm door opening spun us both around.

A slender woman in a white sweater and long brown hair stepped out and waved to us. ‘Konnichi-wa! Takeda desu! Do-o-mo! Haitte kudasai!’ How did she know it was us?

Takeda-san is a fireman for the Motomiya FD and hadn’t been able to participate in recent years due to his work schedule. (Somehow I got the feeling he was still way ahead of me in line for Deputy Grand Poobah.) This year, in Numa-san’s absence, he’d be leading the Date-machi neighborhood group. He’d asked me to be at his house at 3pm to get ready. It was now 3:05. Punctuality rates high on the Japanese scale of priorities.
Takeda-san was sitting in his kitchen wearing white boxer shorts and a white t-shirt.
On any other day this would have been weird.
An old man was sitting on the raised tatami floor of the living room, glancing back and forth between the TV and me. A woman who looked too young to be his wife but too old to be Takeda-san’s entered the room with big smiles and hands eager to do something. The woman in the white sweater was padding around in circles between the kitchen and the living room, straightening up the clutter that is so common in Japanese homes I’ve come to believe there’s a law of some sort. So the name on the plate next to the front door must be the father’s, I reasoned, with the four of them living together. Not at all unusual in Japan. And there were four chairs around the kitchen table. How quaint.
Then suddenly another old man appeared through the sliding glass doors leading in from the tiny backyard. I looked at the framed pictures of Takeda-san’s four children and got back to thinking about my ankle.
‘Please, change your clothes here,’ Mrs.Takeda said, motioning to the living room and reaching for the sliding partition doors. Then she paused. ‘No, please, this way.’ And she stepped toward a door leading, I think, to a hallway. ‘Or no...’
Mr.Takeda sat at the table bent over, clipping his fingernails. The old man kept looking at me. Mao Asada, Japan’s figure skating darling, was doing a short program on TV.
The old guy in the sliding glass doors had disappeared. The older woman was still smiling, ready to help – with what I had no idea.
I looked at Mr.Takeda. I thought about what we were going to be wearing while parading ourselves through the streets for the next six hours. And I proceeded to strip down to my boxers, right there in front of Mao.

So I’m standing in my underwear in the Takedas’ living room. Mr.Takeda stands up and walks over. ‘Get down on your hands and knees.’
You don’t say no to a Japanese fireman. Especially one who may be your Grand Poobah someday.
The doorbell rings and two more guys about my age show up. They walk into the living room to see Mr.Takeda standing over me, my hips pinned between his thick calves as he grunts and yanks on the ten-meter swath of white cloth he’s wrapping around my body. They say their konnichi-was and proceed to strip down to their boxers.
The old man is torn between us and Mao.
It’s getting a little chilly standing in the kitchen watching Takeda-san wrestle with the other two guys. I can’t really help my wife dress our son up in the festival outfit she brought for him. I can’t really move, actually. Takeda-san wraps a tight cloth. The cold is making me have to pee.
Christ...
I duck into the dark hallway. I feel like Indiana Jones, staring at a bunch of closed doors, having to choose the correct one. I go for the one tucked in under the staircase.
I crack the door open. There’s a toilet inside – and nobody on it, thank God. I throw the door open to duck in – and a whirring sound comes at me as the lid to the toilet seat rises like the door to a haunted tomb opening up. Then a green light appears, reflecting off the water. Straight out of a bad horror movie. Indiana Jones and the Secret of the Emerald Crapper.

Back out in the living room the older woman was preparing four cups of hot tea. The mysterious old man from the backyard was now in the kitchen. ‘Forget tea, here you go.’ And he cracked open a huge paper carton of sake. Four guys in boxers and white cloth squeezing our internal organs into a fine pate gathered in a circle, glasses out, ready to warm ourselves against the impending idiocy with an introductory layer of insobriety.

We tossed back two full glasses each and stepped out into the street.
My wife took a couple pictures of me and Yamato, also decked out in white boxers and white cloth around his protruding belly. Mayumi had been up until 2am the night before making the tiny shorts just for this occasion; to see him standing there was worth every ounce of effort.
The other guys chuckled and pointed and cheered in between long sucking drags on their cigarettes. From the end of the street Ishikawa-san came hobbling along, pack of smokes tucked into the cloth across his chest, ready, more or less, for the evening.

A group picture and we were off.

Around the corner was the neighborhood shrine, a temporary set-up just for the festival, with a plethora of bottles the neighbors had placed in front as a sort of offering – to God or each other or themselves I’m not sure. The elders had begun gathering, eager to give us a warm, sake-soaked send-off. How many years of festivals had they survived, I wondered as I accepted their gifts of rice wine and beer.

More rock heads in underwear appeared, shaking out their shoulders and rubbing their hands and commenting on the chill. Yamato was jumping around, half naked and oblivious. Talking and laughter. The glug-glug of alcohol.
Slowly the sound of drums floated up through the air.
Down the street the white pickup truck appeared, grumbling under the weight of a half dozen shrine priests and their collection of festival worship accoutrements: tree branches, wood carvings and a big huge drum. The truck stopped in front of Date-machi’s humble sake-laden shrine. One robed man stood facing the altar and waved a stick with white paper tied to it back and forth in deliberate rhythm. Other old men in different colored robes played an assortment of flutes, obscenely high-pitched and quite out of tune. One guy stayed on the truck to pound on the drum.
Then a quick word of encouragement from the guy with the stick and they were on their way to the next neighborhood.
We gathered in front of the shrine for our own quick prayer. The time was upon us, I knew. We bowed and clapped and bowed again, a guy with a suit and a ribbon pinned to his lapel that obviously signified his importance offered a short speech – something about gratitude and the weather and not dying today – and the elders and the women began clapping and shouting as we jogged off down the road, chanting the traditional words: ‘Washoi! Washoi! Washoi!’

Then Ishikawa-san’s lighter fell out and everyone stopped to make sure someone picked it up.

Today, in Motomiya, Japan, the sight of ten men dressed as we were jogging up the street yelling washoi washoi would not turn any surprised heads. People notice and watch, for sure, but the sight is not an odd one. For this is the order of the day. Seeing the same group of men walking quietly along the sidewalk, though, is cause for concern.
That was how it felt to this gaijin anyway.
It was only a few hundred meters up the road and around the corner to the next meeting point. And everyone was already walking. Where had the spirit of things gone?
Before turning the corner and coming into view of the folks waiting for us we resumed the jogging and chanting. They received us with cheers and clapping and more food and drink. What a crock, I thought to myself as I reached for a cup of sake and threw a handful of dried, salted fish – heads included – into my mouth.
Another couple of neighborhood groups came tumbling around the corner, and suddenly we were fifty or sixty strong. The collective energy was building. The air was cool but stable. Closer to the center of town, the milling crowds of onlookers had increased. We had a bit more sake in our blood. Voices and laughter rose up, ever louder. Perhaps the spirit was just taking its time getting started today.
Then on some unintelligible signal the guys carrying the lanterns on long bamboo poles lined up in front of the crowd and headed off up the street. ‘Washoi!” Washoi!’ I jumped in with the few following close behind. ‘Washoi! Washoi!’ The drone of voices dissipated behind me. I looked back. Forty guys were still back there, standing around and talking and finishing their sake and cigarettes. A few had begun walking.
What the evening would eventually bring I couldn’t even guess.

As the gray afternoon gave way to the dark of the early October night I did feel the soul of previous festivals return. The group got into a rhythm, working our way through the streets and the crowds. Every time we started throwing the mikoshi up and down, a spirited display if not completely rock-headed, I felt the adrenalin that can come only from extreme experience. At each successive resting point, once we got the mikoshi settled back down on those life-saving wooden horses, kind Japanese would approach me in the crowd and offer me more sake and rice cakes and beer. My ankle was all right. My shoulders were killing me. Nothing in the world, I believed in that moment, could ever compare to this.
A few less palatable aspects of previous festivals were similarly prevalent. The same guys who were overly drunk and stupid two and three years ago were drunk and stupid again tonight. The same scrawny guy whose job was to act like he had any control over a hundred guys shouting and stumbling around with a Volkswagen on their backs was at it once again, all five-foot-nothing of him scampering around like a monkey with a lantern and a Napoleonic attitude. No one can help being short, but the guys who were in there with nothing but a relaxed hand dangling from the wood high above their shoulders were making it tough for those of us actually supporting the thing to walk without tripping over their useless little feet.
But these things are part of the deal. And the wonder and magic of being a part of such tremendous pleasure and pain will always outweigh the niggling annoyances.

Yet this year something was indeed different. The faces I remembered from past years looked older. The newer faces bore the odd excitement of inexperience. The final push to carry the mikoshi through the gate at the base of the stone steps leading up to the Adatara Shrine was a struggle as dire as any I remember, thanks to the guys pushing us backward, back out into the street and into the crowds of onlookers, time and time again. They could have kept us out there all night if they wanted to. Or until we all collapsed in an exhausted heap, crushed to death at last under two thousand pounds of Shinto deity.
But they gave in finally, and with twenty-five meters of rope added to help pull the mikoshi up the long crooked staircase we hauled ourselves up to the shrine. And there, with more prayers and shouting and a few spirited ‘Banzai!’ the evening ended.

Our Date-machi gang regrouped for the run home. Or it used to be a run anyway. This time, after making our gingerly way back down the stone steps to the street, everyone began simply walking. No final bursts of energy. No more ‘Washoi! Washoi!’ Until right before turning the final corner back up our street where all the old folk were waiting to congratulate us on a job well done. At least the guys had it in them to put on one last show for them.

And as they did I met up with Mayumi and Yamato, warm-up jacket over his skimpy festival garb. I peeled it off him and held him in my arms as we bounced up the road toward the Date-machi shrine, chanting ‘Washoi! Washoi!’ far behind the other guys running the last few meters.

This, I would soon come to realize, would be the most memorable moment in a hectic evening of memories.

I skidded to an awkward halt

2009-10-15T12:33:00.000-04:00

near the lift and began cleaning the excess snow off my jeans. An intermediate skier (at best) taking on the expert slopes of Copper Mountain, Colorado, I’d been coloring my day with a series of spectacular falls. Only way to get better I kept telling myself, refusing to dwell on the possibility that I had no health insurance whatsoever.

I’d driven up from Boulder alone, hoping I’d somehow run into a couple of the people I knew would also be up there that day. When I spotted Beth gliding along, heading for the space between me and the end of the lift line, I took off – and immediately crossed the tips of my skis and dropped like a rock.

I didn’t know if I wanted her to see me or not.

‘Hey, what’s up?’ I said as I caught up to her, nobody having gotten on line behind her. She turned her head, her stocking cap whacking me in the nose.

'Oh, hi...'

Silent pauses sometimes speak louder than words. In this case, it was pretty clear she’d forgotten my name.

Things like this stopped bothering me years ago.

I was single at the time, which made Beth look a bit more attractive than she might have otherwise. Plus I have this thing for healthy women in jeans, sweaters and knit stocking caps. But her allure lay more in the fact that she’d done a bit of traveling. ‘Thailand and New Zealand,’ she’d said with palatable satisfaction the first time we met. I’d tooled around Europe with a couple friends after college, and then after grad school went on a cross-country odyssey with a good friend and fellow adventure addict, but these had only served to whet my appetite. There was a whole wide world out there to see. And this girl had gone off to see part of it – on her own no less.

She was more than happy to talk about it all the way up the mountain.

At the top I looked out over the surrounding peaks and hills, down the slopes and at the little toy ski resort far below. As Beth picked out her line I envisioned two possible futures. Both of them scared the hell out of me.

‘That is so cool Beth, what you’ve done.’ I chewed the chunks of snow off my gloves and waited for her to look at me. ‘But I’m thirty.’

She raised her eyebrows. ‘So?’

Thirty and three months, actually, with a Master’s degree, a string of half-ass jobs behind me and not a glint of a career in sight. And I didn’t want to be asking myself at forty what the hell I’ve been doing with my life.

‘Yeah, but you know what?’ She adjusted her cap and looked straight into my eyes. ‘When everyone else is forty they’re going to be sitting in an office wondering the same thing.’

A year and a half later, unsuccessful in my attempts to put my education to use in Florida, California and Oregon, I found a job teaching English and moved to Fukushima, Japan. If I couldn’t land a career, I reasoned, opting for this cushy working holiday seemed like a healthy alternative. Life in a world as foreign as this would be a daily adventure. Weekends and vacation time would be devoted to exploration – across fields and over mountains, from Hokkaido to Shikoku and a hundred places in between.

After eighteen months I managed to wriggle into an even better gig, taking on short-term teaching assignments in schools from Akita to Osaka. Always meeting new people; always seeing new places. And making more money than I was spending on plane tickets to places further overseas. At times I had two apartments at once. On occasion I had two girlfriends at once. Emailing accounts of my new life to my family and friends made my adventures seem even bigger than they were. I couldn’t imagine holding down a real job let alone throwing myself into the confines of a career.

Beth, it seemed, was right on the mark.

And here I am now, back in Fukushima, two days away from forty. I’m married with a little boy and a second child on the way. I’m freelancing as an English teacher, which in this economy in this small town doesn’t translate into mounds of income. Yet I’m traveling as much as ever.

Maybe too much?

Convention would have it that I’ll soon be mired in some kind of mid-life crisis. Fortunately I have a reactionary aversion to such ideas. Besides, the very term is dangerously misleading, as it is based on the assumption that we are going to live 82.4 years. Enjoy yourself, warns the Chinese proverb. It’s later than you think.

If I am faced with any sort of dilemma regarding the rest of my existence it is balancing my enjoyment of the present with my irrepressible desire to chase my dreams. It has nothing to do with job, since by the common definition I don’t want one. It has nothing to do with retirement, which is a spiritually illusory concept as far as I am concerned. It doesn’t even necessarily involve money – though I suppose I’d go ahead and accept the wealth if it was part of the package deal of realizing my dreams.

My dilemma – the perfect mid-life crisis, perhaps – has everything to do with love. Love of adventure, of traveling to faraway lands. Love of eating breakfast, lunch and dinner with my family. Love of day-long bicycle rides. Love of late-night ten-mile runs and mornings with no alarm clock. Love of envisioning the future I want for me and my family, and then giving everything I have to the long, difficult, beautiful chase. Love in the knowledge that I can have all these things.

Yet I only have so much time.

So how much to devote to each? It was such a beautiful day today – so beautiful it hurt to have to choose between a bike ride along the Abukuma River and taking a few more steps toward the completion of my novel and giving birth to the dreams in my heart. Tomorrow I’ll have to decide whether to go to Japanese class, do more writing or go on a nursery school picnic with my wife and son. Of course I can not forget the necessary evil of making money, so in the coming weeks I’ll need to choose whether to commit to a year of teaching part-time at a nearby university – if I’m lucky enough to be given the option – or continue down this uncertain road of freelancing freedom. As my son approaches elementary school age my wife and I will have to decide together what kind of education we want for him.

The devil on my shoulder keeps whispering things like equity and security and 401(k). I keep telling him to go stick his fork in someone else.

This Saturday I’ll blow out a few candles and listen to my little boy sing and have ice-cream and cake with the family I love. Maybe I’ll open a small present or two. And at some point I’ll probably think of Beth.

She’s probably got the same problems as me.

Somewhere outside of Brisbane, Australia

2009-10-07T22:31:00.000-04:00

lies the expansive Browns Plains Plaza mall. And somewhere inside this cavern of noise and heavy people getting heavier sits a self-important licorice shop. Or so said the leather-faced woman stacking shelves in the supermarket. Judging from the state of what teeth she had left, I figured she’d been there before.

I’d never even met the guy for whom I was buying this particular brand of licorice; Graham had let us crash in his suburban Tokyo apartment earlier this year on our way back from Europe, and had invited us back for another one-night stay. In return, all he wanted was licorice. ‘Darrel Lea or Kookaburra,’ he’d requested. I’d gotten a few strange looks when I asked for the latter. Perhaps Graham had a sick sense of humor. Regardless, two flavors of Darrel Lea it would be.

I plowed through the throngs, a bag of groceries in each hand, winding my way through the apses and corridors of this temple of consumerism. A hundred stores packed in among the two (!) full-size supermarkets, a Target AND a K-Mart, and no sign of Darrel anywhere.

I stuffed my manly pride deep in my gut and asked the information woman.

‘Right next to the K-Mart.’

Of course it is.

Plastic bags 700 grams of licorice heavier now, I shouldered through the mobs in the food court and headed out into the warm evening, my laser sights set on the bus stop. True to form, I had no idea when the last bus back to my friend’s house was.

The timetable showed 6:10; apparently no one living in Heritage Park stays out too late. I asked a guy with grimy clothes what time it was. ‘Ten past,’ he said, odd irritation bleeding from his lips. I hadn’t seen the 543 anywhere; it was either running late or had left early – assuming this guy’s watch wasn’t broken.

I waited.

Several buses came leaning around the bend. None of them was the 543.

‘Do you have the time?’ I asked a nervous-looking woman. Before she could respond the kid next to her dug his cell phone out of his pocket. ‘6:15,’ he said. Relief and embarrassment on the woman’s face.

Waiting for a bus that wasn’t coming, I weighed my options. Take a taxi? Nah, too easy. Plus I didn’t have much money on me anyway. And Australia is oddly expensive. Call my friends and ask them to come get me? I’d feel like a ten-year-old who missed the school bus. The walk home, as best I could figure, would take an hour and a bit.

There was only one real option.

I adjusted the bags in my fingers and started running.

Five kilometers and twenty-five minutes later I was standing in my friend’s kitchen, smiling through the sweat covering my face. Gloria took the bags from my hands.

‘Why didn’t you call?’

I wiped my forehead with my shirt. ‘I didn’t have your number on me.’ A more intelligent excuse than the truth.

‘We’re in the phone book.’

She had me. There wasn’t much else to say.

‘Well, Gloria,’ I conceded. ‘Guys have this thing…’

She let out a humph. ‘Yeah, I know.’

That was the end of the conversation.

Frankly, I don’t know what ‘this thing’ is, or whether all guys have it.

I, for one, am afflicted.

Years ago, living in Longmont, Colorado, I would ride my clunky orange mountain bike to work at the Boulder Police Department at 6am – every morning, right through the winter, instead of driving my clunky but warm 4Runner. A couple years and a couple of jobs later I carried a half-keg of beer on my shoulders for the quarter-mile between the liquor store and my apartment; driving such a short distance was silly, my logic told me.

I would run to the supermarket every Sunday – then fight gravity all the way home under the weight of a week’s worth of food. I carried dressers and sofas and a console TV up the stairs into my second-floor apartment by myself; I couldn’t ask my neighbors for help because I didn’t speak Spanish, I reasoned with myself.

Transplanted to Japan, bitten by the fangs of the travel bug, my condition progressed.

I knew the hilltop hostel in Passau, Germany was full, but I had to push our loaded tandem up the half-kilometer-long hill anyway, just to ask and make sure. My wife walked along behind me, on the surface supportive and patient.

I won’t hesitate to bike across Cambodia, but I can’t be bothered with the time-consuming effort of searching for a guidebook with a reliable map. So what if a 100-mile ride turns into 130? Disassembling my bike and taking a tour bus over the mountains in Laos would have bordered on lunacy after hearing what an amazing ride it was. I’d deal with the rifle-toting anti-government rebels when I got to them.

That was hands down the greatest single day of riding in my life. And I only encountered one armed insurgent the entire way.

Last year my wife and I could have figured out the bus schedule in Vaduz, Liechtenstein, but instead we walked to the youth hostel – in the next town – my wife pushing our 11-month-old son in his stroller, me with a rucksack and a suitcase with three wobbly wheels, like the kind that make your shopping cart go haywire. (The fourth wheel was cracked and worn and wouldn’t turn at all.) We could have gotten around Morocco in air-conditioned comfort but we opted for the slightly slower, slightly more odorous local buses. Why travel all that way only to keep everything at arm’s length? We would have done the same in

Peru

even if we had a choice – which we didn’t.

In 2007 we could have taken a taxi from the airport into downtown HaNoi for ten bucks, but we went for the dusty, creaky 30-cent bus trip. Forget that my wife was four months pregnant. Just last week our friend in Taipei called us ‘resourceful’ for catching a bus from the airport to the subway, then walking to his place instead of having a taxi whisk us from the terminal directly to his door, avoiding the hassle and the rain. Neither of us saw anything extraordinary in it. We rather like it that way.

Even with those moments of ‘No I don’t know how the god damn ticket machines work! I’ve never frickin been here before!’

Whatever this ‘thing’ is, my wife seems to have it too. If she didn’t, we’d have a tough time traveling together. Fortunately my son is still too young to know any different. Or should I say better. At two years and two months he is a fully-seasoned traveler, having crawled and walked upon five different continents. One day, as he strikes out on his own, I’ll watch him go, hoping he too has this ‘thing.’

The worst (depending on your perspective) typhoon in years is passing right through Fukushima today. They’re predicting a foot of rain by the time all is said and done. And I have to go teach this evening, at a printer/copier manufacturing company eight miles or so from my home. We’re resuming class tonight after a month hiatus, with three new students joining the group.

My wife has a car. I don’t. Because I don’t want one. I always ride my bike, to work and the supermarket and the barber shop and everywhere else I need to go, no matter what the weather. And today, like on so many other days, I’ll be wrapping my books and extra clothes in plastic before sticking them in my knapsack and throwing myself and my bicycle out at the world.

I don’t know why I do it. I just have this thing…

Our boat lurched and slowed,

2009-10-07T02:18:00.000-04:00

engines still roaring against the weight of the ocean. Ahead of us, a pontoon weighing as much as twenty-two elephants floated silently, waiting for another day’s adventurers. It may have been a kilometer away, maybe three. Distances are tough to judge out on the pelagic – for a land-lubber like me anyway.

The sapphire blue water slowly gave way, revealing an amoebic sprawl of emerald greens and hints of white. Meandering conversations faded as men with tank tops and girls with bikinis and men and women and children crowded the white railing keeping us safe three stories above the South Pacific. The air sat hazy, clouding the horizon as if intent on adding to the dreamy quality of the moment. Many of us had traveled hundreds, perhaps thousands of miles to see this. Most of us would never see it again. Yet somehow, even with my senses under siege by the grandeur of the Great Barrier Reef, my heart racing with the anticipation of diving into these waters, dreams propelled and sharpened by mask and snorkel and fins and unnamable emotions, my mind turned to home.

The phenomenon is nothing new to me. Travel - in a perverse way - creates in me a certain longing for constancy. Predictability. A semblance of routine. Clean clothes. My bathroom and shower and my own refrigerator. My pillow. Things that, for me, comprise ‘home.’

But the feeling is fleeting. By the time I’ve got my mask spit-shined and my feet are dangling in the water, these thoughts have long dissipated and gone. Fish and coral and God manifest await beneath my goofy rubber fins. Home is the last place I’d want to be right now.

Road signs and thin-walled houses and fields flat as lake water filling the canyons among the surrounding hills, the Japan passing by outside my bus window breathes with such familiarity now. As many times as I’ve left and returned, this adopted country of mine has always greeted me with the subtle sense that she still harbors secrets. That I’ve still got much to learn. Much to discover. That I’ve been accepted, but not yet fully initiated.

This time, though, something is different.

Our deepest thoughts are often difficult to put into words, and now is no exception. The best I can say is that it seems the novelty of Japan – and any remaining intrigue, allure, inspiration and whatever other intangibles had previously tickled my senses – has finally, after 8 years, 1 month and 5 days, worn off.

Walking across the Abukumakogen rest area parking lot to go use the men’s room – could there be a more mundane moment? – it occurrs to me that perhaps this ongoing journey I call my life in Japan had ceased to be such. ‘A working vacation’ I always liked to say, referring to my life abroad. But the blurred line has slowly been sharpening, and the vacation part has all but disappeared, leaving me with...a home? Yet for all the familiarity, this place I occupy does not feel like home – not as much as I’d like it to.

As I wash my hands and shake them dry (in Japan, paper towels are so rare as to constitute an anomaly) I acknowledge the ideas that have been building inside me for some time.

It’s true, I don’t want to live in Japan forever. It also seems fairly evident I won’t be leaving anytime too soon. There lies before me a period of life – months, a year, maybe several – that separates me from my next great adventure. It is this intervening time that is begging for my attention.

‘Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans,’ it has been said. Now more than ever, I understand what this means.

I may pack up and move to Europe next year. I may return to the great wide American west. I might grow old right here in Fukushima. Life happens. Life surprises. I’ve been on vacation too long. And traveling overseas is not going to change what ‘home’ is or is not.

As I give up on the cool October air and wipe my damp hands on my shorts I decide I need to become more involved in the life going on around me. Make some new friends. Spend more time with the ones I have. Pick up a few more English lessons without wondering when I am going to have to tell my students I'm leaving. Put up a few more pictures on my walls without thinking about the day I’ll just have to take them all down.

Back on the bus barreling northward through the rain, I listen to my son talking about nursery school and singing songs in Japanese. My wife reaches over and holds out a half-empty tray of natto-maki, something I could not even fathom eating a mere two months ago. I pinch one between my fingers and pop it in my mouth, and resume reading the book in my hands, about a guy who runs a hundred, a hundred and fifty, two hundred miles at a stretch while living an otherwise normal family existence.

And I think that home is not so much a place, but what I do in the place I am in.

I looked up at the clock

2009-09-13T11:52:00.000-04:00

above the windshield of the bus. It was seventeen minutes past noon. We sped past wet houses and top-heavy rice fields, heading for Sendai and the Johzenji Street Jazz Festival. Back home in New Jersey, across the Hudson from Manhattan, it was still September 11th. This moment eight years ago, smoke was still billowing. People remained on the streets, giving of themselves, for no other reason than other people needed them. Confusion still reigned. The dust, it seemed, would never completely settle.

My students and co-workers approached me with genuine sorrow in the following days. ‘I’m sorry about what happened in your country,’ they said to me in their best English. I’d arrived in Japan on September 1st. I was as far away from home as I’d ever been. But I looked into the eyes of people who knew only that I was from ‘there’; I read in the Japan Times of the condolences, the grief and the resolve so many shared with us; I watched on the news as our global friends and neighbors offered their hands, and I sensed an intimacy with the rest of the world I could never have imagined possible.

Watching those hands being withdrawn, one by one, was like a slow-motion sock in the gut.

It is not quite right to say 9/11 was tragic. Tragic events occur suddenly, randomly. Isolated from human intention. Devoid of foundation or prelude. Brutus didn’t trip over his shoelace and accidentally fall kitchen knife first into Caesar. Juliet wasn’t reaching for a Sprite. Human perception, volition and action give rise to a series of events culminating in tragedy.

To mistakenly call the events of 9/11 tragic may only be a matter of semantics. Ignoring the complexities of the preceding acts and actors, however, is a much more dangerous proposition. ‘Because they hate us’ may help anaesthetize the wounds, but will leave us with deeper, uglier scars.

A friend of mine was stranded in Europe in the days following the attacks, unable to get a flight back to the US. His reaction, conveyed in an email: ‘Considering the big picture, this is nothing.’

I wasn’t sure what he meant at the time. Did he believe that more horrific days were on the way? Was he saying that our collective and personal pain amounted to little more than a blip on the Richter scale of human suffering? Whatever the implication, I know he was not out to diminish the scope or significance of anyone’s sorrow, rage or despair. But that we alone understand what it means to suffer is by no means a claim we can make.

The world did mourn with us. I saw a small slice of it firsthand. Yet that intimacy, that global sense of brotherhood, would quickly dry up if we decided we above all others are entitled to the wounds we lick. Yes, we have our horror stories. But our country is blessed. And it hits us not when we raise our gloves to beat down the rest of the world, but when we look toward the millions of human beings who are suffering in ways we can scarcely comprehend, in places that by the grace of God we will never have to see. On September 11th, this is the sock in the gut we need to open ourselves to.

'And can you get some rice?...'

2009-09-10T13:02:00.000-04:00

I'm not sure if that's quite how she put it, pregnant with our second child and her hormones popping like Jiffy-Pop. But I got the basic idea. 'And get 100% Hitomebore or Koshihikari, not the blended kind.' God forbid.
I stood in the aisle at Hashi Drug, staring down at the selection: mostly home-grown Fukushima, in five or ten kilogram bags. I've traveled fairly extensively throughout Japan in my eight years here, but for all the vast, sweeping fields, not to mention the Japanese penchant for using every square centimeter of flat land they can find to eke out a few more grains to contribute to the national haul, it is still difficult for me to comprehend feeding 120 million people this way. Then again, considering the girth of some of the school children waddling around, McDonald's and Pringles seem to have a hand in the equation.
I'll spare myself and all of you the underlying psychological dynamics, but I have a hardened habit of considering the cost per unit among different brands when buying my meusli or spaghetti sauce or coconut wafers. Money and I have never gotten along, and I need to get the most out of the few friends I have.
Today, five kilos of rice (pure Hitomebore) was going for 1680 yen. (I used to try to convert kilos to pounds and yen to dollars simultaneously to compare Japanese and US prices but the stores always closed before I could come to any conclusions.) Next to this, a ten kilo bag sold for 3480 yen. I scratched my head.
Simple math.
Vintage Japanese logic.
Before I came to Japan I read a book (didn't buy it, just read it in the bookstore over several visits) entitled Culture Shock: Japan, the words sprawled across the black cover in a devious, blood-sucking font for maximum effect. Among the many pages of information I didn't find at all shocking ('Japanese people often give fruit as gifts when they visit someone's home, beware!') was the admonition that if one doesn't understand something, one needn't bother asking why. Just accept it. Like the locals do.
I asked anyway.
For the first few weeks.
Why policemen in Japan sometimes cruise around with their lights flashing for no readily apparent reason remains a mystery to me - and perhaps to the police as well. I recall once seeing a cruiser stopped at an intersection, lights on fire and waiting to turn, and nobody coming the other way slowing or stopping to let him through. 'Not very polite for Japanese people,' I thought, followed by the question 'So what do they do when there's an emergency?' Answer, for police and ambulances and fire trucks: blast a recording over the on-board PA system asking everyone very politely to get the hell out of the way please if you don't mind and please be careful. I speak Japanese, I am sure of this.
Why do the radio stations here refuse to play an entire song? On the odd occasion they even decide to begin to play one? I never used to mind if someone switched off 99 Luftballons.
Why is the Ministry of Education so steadfastly adamant about making sure 20 million schoolchildren all learn to say 'ice', 'note' and 'maybe' for the English 'ice cream', 'notebook' and 'I have no f-ing clue.'
But just as you can't force democracy on an Islamic state (damn, I swore I'd stay away from politics here) you can't expect another culture to conform to your own ideas, no matter how right you may be. A quote from George Orwell's Burmese Days comes to mind: 'Most people can be at ease in a foreign country only when they are disparaging the inhabitants.' And it is true for me at times - when I find out an undersized letter costs more to mail than the standard size does; when my mailing address changes and I haven't even moved; when I'm told I can't ride my bike according to automobile traffic laws, I clench my teeth and shake my head and curse the entire populace under my breath.
But I am also fascinated, awed and humbled by the Japanese Way. The unending politeness. The generosity. The white-gloved cab drivers. Another eight years and maybe this sarcastic, cynical, opinionated rockhead from New Jersey might learn a thing or two.
Though I don't expect to ever understand why a case of beer has to cost forty bucks.
If anyone can explain that one I'll buy them two five-kilo bags of rice.

Biking home from work last night...

2009-09-08T18:37:00.000-04:00

...I let the full moon guide my way. Not that I'm in supernatural tune with the universe though I like to think I am. It's just that I'd forgotten my headlamp. Again. And in here in Fukushima, Japan, streetlights are about as common as a decent cheeseburger.

Now the morning sun plays hide and seek with the clouds, falling in threads through the only east window in my second-floor apartment. 700 square feet of superficial luxury: my friends gawk at all the space we have. My friends back home chuckle with undertones of bewilderment - why, exactly, Kevin...do you want to live there?...

I'm sitting on the floor, tapping away as lightly as my early morning motor skills will allow. Wife and son are waking on the other side of the bedroom door in front of me. I call it a bedroom because that's where we sleep. But once we fold the futons and hide them in the closet for another day our 10' x 12' tatami room turns into a playroom, dressing room and temporary dumping ground for when a surprise guest drops by. Behind me lies my office, so dubbed to make it sound legitimate to my wife. In reality it is my cave, my haven, 10 feet by 10 feet of psychological asylum. The guys out there know what I'm talking about.

Today brings with it, as all days do, chores to be done and responsibilities to assume. Fun to be had and dreams to pursue. Opportunities glaring and hidden, and, as we may lament, not nearly enough time. This is the unforgiving, unrelenting, beautiful quagmire of life. How to cash in our minutes and hours and days? Some people offer wisdom pursuant to such questions - a boon to those of us in search of gurus. This, above all, is why I am here.

I've been telling my son, ever since he had ears, what numbers one and two are. No, not that one and two. He's already got those down. The number one and number two I want to instill in his mind - and in his being - are the things I believe form the foundation of a life well-spent.

Number One is happy. Explore this world and find what makes you happy. What lights your fire. What makes your soul explode. Then strip away the excess and pursue these things with everything you've got.

Number Two: healthy. Healthy in mind to understand what happy really means. Healthy in body so you can climb mountains, cross oceans and cycle around the world, forever chasing down and grabbing hold of your own unique Number One.

The moon last night was beautiful. The breeze tumbled in warm and cool cycles. I wanted to keep riding; hold onto the moment forever. Though there will be another moon tonight, I know. The morning I now bask in borders on perfection. This Friday I will be meeting new friends from a country I have never been to. Life is good.

Life passes.

These things I tell my son as he is still learning to pedal his tricycle.

These things I tell myself, as I have only so much time.