Wide Island

"The old priest's eyes are bright."

2008-07-23T13:22:00.004+09:00

I've never posted a student assignment here before. There have been some good ones. Personal favorites include the girl who finished her report on "Pirates of the Caribbean" with the confession, "I like a jolly roger," and another student who had the Greek gods tell Narcissus, "When you awake, you will fall in love with the first parson you see." Another girl shared a special memory of how, after she had won an English Recitation contest, "all my friends were crapping for me."

Generally, though, I don't think teachers should put forward student work for laughs. But one of my favorite students, a real "beat of a different drummer" seventeen year old, just handed in a spectacular report on her recent homestay in Australia. Her classmates all wrote more or less the same essay about cuddly koalas and cute boys on the Gold Coast and how they "persevered every day to make a treasured memory," a phrase that appeared so often that I think the homeroom teacher must have written it out for them on the blackboard. Then I came to this. Even the title is a trip.

No Attention, Please

I saw a lot of nervous friends.
There are many flying insects for everyday experience.
In my house, many ants are walking every day.
And, there are cockroaches, geckoes, and many flying insects.
I made friends with geckoes.
People are not afraid of them. I could not believe it.
Every student has their own computer.
Pronunciation in Australia is different from the Queen’s and the Americans.
I don’t know why my lunch is a sandwich.
There are many products made in China.
They are very low priced, but, indeed...
The young priest is odd.
The old priest’s eyes are bright.
No one can escape from him.
Everyone often eats mashed potato.
Rulers are long.
Water is expensive. And also juice.
Everyone eats a lot of apples which are not cut.
Young girls with dyed black-color hair are really into punk fashion.
We don’t have an under five-cent coin.
The color in the sky is vivid. The sea is lovely.
Meat is dripping blood. (I bought it in a shop)
People often use wrong Japanese word.
Ninjas and sushi don’t connect.
Rice salad is incomprehensible for Japanese.
Some children have Japanese games.
(Almost Chinese)
Some women show their underwear.
-----But when we look from the universe,
we have no frontiers.
And we may be able to be friends.

All Phone Calls are Obscene

2008-07-08T16:58:00.007+09:00

Tomorrow the school smoking room will be converted to storage space, and there will be no more smoking anywhere on school grounds. Good news, it will make it easier to quit. But a lot went on in that room, and I'm reposting an entry from three years ago as a farewell:

The smoking room doesn’t offer much to a first glance, but it is a sanctuary for the weary and persecuted soldier of secondary education. There are no students, no teetering stacks of homework to be graded, not a trace of chalk in the still, poisoned air. Between each class half the men in the school stand shoulder to shoulder, silently handing round cigarettes. Lighters appear and are struck. 18 men inhale, nod appreciatively to one another, and release. The air instantly turns that perfect 20th century blue, the color only of television in strangers’ homes and dense tobacco smoke in narrow rooms.

The walls, last papered in the 80’s, are lustrous amber. A late history teacher’s still-life hangs near the door, a thick gloss of tar lending it the gravity of centuries. There is one machine for coffee and one for tea, both of which frequently work. There are two scruffy tables, across which two couches and six chairs face off. One couch is so soft that you are really, if we were to be absolutely honest, sitting on the floor. The other has boards beneath the thin cushions; sitting on it is like perching on a window ledge while the crowd below urges you on. The tables are set with four cut glass ashtrays, one smaller wooden affair with buxom native dancers carved around the rim, and one with beach sand and discolored seashells trapped in glass. The last two are souvenirs of K. Sensei’s Oahu wedding.

“My God, it sounds magnificent,” I hear you murmur among yourselves, and so it is but for one thing, a lone serpent fouling our Eden. The telephone.

It broods in the corner on a tall pedestal, its plastic-sheathed tail lashing menacingly, the sticky push-buttons and reeking mouthpiece making quiet threats. So long as that is all it does, we are content to overlook it, as we might ignore a fellow commuter fondling himself on a late-night streetcar.

But that is not all it does. It also rings. Or rather it bleats, it yawps, it sometimes quacks, in tones devised by some soulsick student of sonic warfare. At the sound, 18 men flinch, jitter a few inches across the scarred linoleum floor, and the game begins. The game, of course, is to decide who will answer the phone. In theory, the job belongs to whoever is nearest the thing when it commences its shrill gabbling. In practice, though, the room’s geometry allows several men to be equidistant from the phone, bringing a fascinating calculus into play. Who is junior? Who was the last call for, and how likely is it that this is a follow up to that call? Who is junior? Who last answered? Who is junior? Do we really think it’s for one of us? No one has called me on this phone, for instance, since November. Am I obliged to pick it up if I feel reasonably certain that the desired party is not present? What constitutes reasonable certainty? At any rate, isn’t someone here my junior? Eventually, often around the fourth ring, a determination is made and a trembling hand goes forth. The receiver is lifted, showering damp bits of bean cake from the last conversation.

“Yes, this is the smoking room. You want N. Sensei? He’s not here. No I don’t know where he is. That’s alright.”

Everyone relaxes. Everyone but the 24 year old PE teacher with the hunted look, who’s thinking, “Goddammit, I knew it wasn’t for me. Why the hell do I always have to answer the damn thing? What am I even doing in this room? I teach gym.” Worse, though, is when the recipient is present, but on the room’s far side. This requires a nimble hop over tables, a sliding step between chairs and around the corners of couches, a careful dance performed with 17 partners, each clutching a tiny, white-hot blowtorch in his hand. It’s an operation that demands rock-steady nerves and a relaxed outlook on the state of your necktie.

Our smoking room is also, during classes, a retreat for contemplation, for quiet downgrading of ambitions and spiritual certainties, and of course for deep, restful slumber. This is especially true for several older teachers.

I am thinking now of one man in particular, who is in his last year of teaching. He is old. He is peevish. He is tired, a special kind of fatigue reserved for slightly smelly, out-of-touch old guys who spend their days in girls’ schools. Don’t judge him too harshly. You’d be smelly too if you napped in our smoking room, or simply moved through it at a dead sprint. The consolations of teaching are lost to this man. He is waiting out the clock. His personal life is a disappointment too, perhaps. His only child, a daughter, lived under his roof until she was 36, when she very abruptly (it seemed to him) married a foreigner and moved to Sydney. Now he spends three minutes a week on the telephone with a five year old grandson who doesn’t speak Japanese. Lately he’s discovered his wife is stashing money away, in large sums, and he tries not to dwell on her possible plans for it. She’s stopped cooking his favorite meals, and no longer airs out the futons as often as he’d like. This time next year it will be just the two of them, together day and night, locked in a terminal staring contest across the tiny kitchen table.

I don’t anticipate much argument if I suggest that this guy needs the nap. And in fact it seems to do him a world of good. Not after he wakes up. He reverts to form more or less immediately upon waking. But if you were to watch his sleeping face, it would be clear he’s somewhere else entirely. In his father’s home, perhaps, in the mountainous north of the prefecture. It’s late autumn and he and his older brother, whom he loved very much, are sitting at the garden’s edge, shelling peas while they talk. A beautiful child runs out of the house, calling him grandfather in flawless Japanese. They play ball, the boy missing more than he catches but throwing well, very well. When the sun is down behind the pines, they enter the house, a newer house now, in the city, where his favorite dishes are laid on the broad table. Later he creeps into his own fresh, well beaten futon. His wife, young and bedwarm, stirs...

The phone rings. He reels up out of sleep with the kind of snort you mostly hear in zoos. He’s alone in the room, but it might be for him. Tottering around the tables to the pedestal where the thing lies mooing at him, he picks it up just as the other party disengages, and in the instant before the dial tone comes up he hears the chill whispering of a million kilometers of dead line.

The class bell. The tumbling entry of half the men in the school. The dance, as the saying goes, begins anew. Cigarettes out, the flare of lighters, the hiss of intake, the nod, the release. No one looks at the phone.

"Littlefoot, 32" made into a Wordle

2008-07-04T16:40:00.005+09:00

Charles Wright's poem, run through Wordle. Thanks to Paul over at the Get Hiroshima blog for pointing out the best timewaster I've seen in weeks. Click to see at full size. Pretty cool.

The Firefly Tribe

2008-07-02T23:47:00.003+09:00

In the evening the shadowed verandas of the large apartment block near my house are lit by the orange embers of cigarettes. They rise and fall, tracing wild arcs through the air to emphasize a thought, each inhalation marked by the flaring and dimming of the little glow. Sometimes there are ten or more at once, for the most part completely unaware of each other. It’s a common enough scene across the country that the Japanese have invented a wonderful word for it: hotaruzoku, the firefly tribe, smokers who choose or are exiled by families to the balconies. Sometimes the tribe has a voice as well, one hacking cough sounding in the darkness to be answered by another, slightly deeper. If it were blues or church singing it would be a beautiful call and response, but the effect is more like a flock of ill wading birds trying to find one another in the midst of a swamp fire.

I know all this because the hotaruzoku is one of the very few Japanese tribes I’ve gained full access to, and by far the easiest. It’s also the entirety of my interaction with those neighbors in the apartment block. There in the gloaming, I gaze thoughtfully through the intervening space at their indistinct outlines and they gaze thoughtfully back at me. Then we turn and go inside. And that is all. I’ll leave you now. Through the open window, my people are calling to me.

...and a time to cast away

2008-07-01T14:14:00.001+09:00

I think my long term relationship with National Public Radio is coasting to an end. It’s time. I think we hit a new low this morning when “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” used the Black Eyed Peas as a musical interlude, and the damned thing got stuck in my head. For obvious reasons, it’s ill-advised for a 140 kilo bald guy in his early forties to be strolling down the halls of an all-girls high school obliviously crooning, “My hump, my hump, my hump, ha! My lovely lady lumps. Check it out!” in a breathy falsetto, even if no one understands what he’s saying.

Unfortunately, that’s all I really took away from NPR this morning. That and the weather forecast for Minneapolis, nearly 9,000 kilometers away. I no longer care who gets Carl Kasell’s voice on his home answering machine. The Car Talk guys sound increasingly bizarre, though I freely concede that’s entirely my problem. The Driveway Moments are blending into one prolonged howl of bathos, and the promise of never hearing David Sedaris talk about his mother again fills me with a sense of hushed and happy exultation.

Why NPR, anyway? It’s just a sort of sonic security blanket. Listening over the internet, I could be listening to any English programming in the world. The BBC, or Australian Broadcasting, both of which are great by the way. Or why not go farther afield? Surely there’s something interesting coming out of South Africa, or New Zealand, or even Belize or Guyana. I always tell my students English is the key to a thousand doors, for which I suffer a great deal of eye-rolling, and here I am suckling at the teat of Liberal America. Well, no more! Goodbye, Peter, Karl and company. So long, Terry. Tom and Ray, old friends, I bid you adieu. And Sylvia Poggioli, you sorceress, how you inflame and unhinge me! But we can’t continue like this. We just can’t.

Japan Sings the Turkish National Anthem

2008-04-08T11:18:00.007+09:00

Not Japan but a group of Japanese singers. This is one of four similar films promoting the film project Pangea Day, which looks like it could be pretty interesting. From the website:

What is Pangea Day?
Pangea Day is a global event bringing the world together through film. On May 10, 2008, live events in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro will be linked by satellite to produce a program of powerful films, live music and visionary speakers. The program will be broadcast live to millions of people worldwide through the internet, television, and mobile phones.

Who started Pangea Day?
Pangea Day was created by award-winning documentary filmmaker Jehane Noujaim in collaboration with the TED Conference after she won the prestigious TED Prize, which granted her a wish to change the world. Together, Jehane, TED, and the Pangea Day team — led by Executive Director Delia Cohen — have created Pangea Day to harness the power of film to enhance empathy, compassion, and peace.

Of course, if that doesn't do it for you, we can always listen to Smoke on the Water again. I love the audience's reaction when they recognize the tune.

Wanted: One Fluff Suit, color unimportant

2008-04-04T22:57:00.010+09:00

I really hope one of you crafty Martha S. types can help me realize a vision. I went outside with my coffee this morning just in time to stand witness to a border skirmish between several sparrows. They raised their feathers when they attacked, looking like angry little globes of eiderdown with beaks sticking out. It was damned impressive.

Wishing to achieve the same effect, I have a simple request. Could one of you assemble a shirt, or perhaps a turtleneck bodysuit, with some sort of mechanism allowing me to instantly puff up threateningly whenever I’m feeling peeved? I’m not sure how you’d do it. Maybe a pull cord, or something that causes the “feathers” to rise when I lift my arms menacingly above my head. I’ll leave the engineering of the thing to you. I’m just an idea man.

One thing, though. Instead of real feathers, I’d like something stiff, something that will make a satisfyingly sinister noise. Bamboo, I think, or thin slats of polished bone, something to rattle as I jiggle grimly in my displeasure. Can any of you manage it? Let me know.

“No, I didn’t do my homework.”

Fwoomp! Clackety-clackety-clack-clackety

“Moushiwake arimasen! We're out of honey-glazed today.”

Fwoomp! Clackety-clackety-clack-clackety

“Daddy, this is my fiancé, Daisuke. He's a drummer!”

Fwoomp! Clackety-clackety-clack-clackety hissssssssssssssss

Scott Yano, an appreciation

2008-03-31T23:54:00.012+09:00

The name of Scott Yano will, of course, be familiar to most of my readers. To some of you, he is a dynamic and innovative instructor of English. To others, he may most readily come to mind as co-translator of that seminal volume of East Asian studies, “The Women of the Heian Night.” Still others among you will know him best as a frighteningly persuasive after-hours rhetorician, or as a dashing figure astride his skateboard, slaloming dauntlessly through the chill air of morning. For at least two of you, he is simply and forever Daddy. Orator, Canadian, sportsman and bard. Prettyboy, pundit, philatelist and fiend. Well, all right then, not a philatelist, not really. Yet if I were a postage stamp, I do not know the man I should avoid so soon as that spare Yano.

At any rate, the pressing question isn’t, “Who is Scott Yano?” No, friends, the question I put to you tonight is, “Who isn’t Scott Yano?” I’m not. And neither are you, unless you actually are Scott Yano, in which case I say to you Hi Scott, thanks for dropping by.

But did you know Scott Yano can rock and roll? Oh yes…

Scott is back in Hiroshima after an absence of several years, and on Saturday night he took the stage at Shelter 69 in front of his (locally) legendary combo AKA Toe Jam. Rendered all the more imposing by the addition of genuine leather cowboy boots, Yano raised high his mighty axe and battered the cowering night with impudent musical sass. Or something very like that. Bending to his lordly will such standards as Down By the River, Peace Love and Understanding, Brown Eyed Girl and that one song by the Doors, the merciless force of his performance sucked the wind from the lungs of hapless passers-by, leaving them gasping on their knees under the terrifying yet strangely agreeable rock ’n roll onslaught.

Yes. Good to see you back in town, Scott. Now get out before the swooning cows stop giving milk, you delirious six-string sorcerer. To those of you who missed the show, I offer this rare 1991 recording, in which Scott appears as the last voice, playing Pied Piper to a group of Canadian graduate students in a hard-driving restatement of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73.

Back from Brisbane

2008-03-28T17:46:00.006+09:00

Time slips by, doesn't it? I've been in Australia, and not able to keep up with this.

What I love most about Australia, aside from Coopers Sparkling Ale and sausage rolls, is the total lack of ceremony. It’s incredibly refreshing coming from Japan. My second morning I got into a cab to come to work and the guy behind the wheel had no idea where he was. Every two minutes he’d pull over to the curb, haul out a map and say things like, “Aw shit yeah, there’s the bugger. But how the Christ are we meant to get over there?” After four or five of these little stops, he just turned around and said, “Fuck, mate, I reckon we’d be better off getting out and walking. HAHAHAHAHA!!” I finally got to school about twenty minutes after my students had already gone into class.

Once again I stayed in the beautiful Garden City Motor Inn in Upper Mt. Gravatt, just south of Brisbane proper. If you look carefully you should just be able to see the rainbow coming gently to rest on the top of the sign. I go down every two years with a group of 35 to 40 of my high school girls. I’m not absolutely certain why I need to be there, since the girls are living with home-stay families and have two very competent English teachers during their school hours. But who’s complaining? Brisbane is a nice town. And Coopers Sparkling Ale is beautiful.

Last time I was down my little blog died. The girls attend a very nice school, the largest private school in Queensland I’m told, but the computer system blocks access to a lot of sites and getting wireless access outside of the school is a much bigger pain in the ass than it should be. After a month of not being able to write anything, I lost all momentum. I’m hoping to avoid that this time.

This was my motel room. It wasn't the nicest in the world, but it was clean, with a little kitchen and a complete set of phone books, and it was affordable for a month. The couple running the joint are very nice. And one of the maids, understandably, fell deeply in love with me and left extra Anzac biscuits whenever she cleaned the room. Excellent. One look at me and she thought, "Baked goods." Feminine intuition performs another quiet little miracle.

I really do love Australia. It's not an easy place to come back from. The people are friendly, the landscape is stunning, there are English language bookstores and yes, they even have Coopers Sparkling Ale. Anyone want to go start a commune with me?

Weekly Poetry 1

2008-02-19T16:26:00.009+09:00

Because what else is a guy supposed to do on a Tuesday?

Peg, Remembering

The old girl mostly waits now, passing
the mornings in a large chair by the stove.
In her lap her hands twist like cold mice,
the right hand’s fingers spelling secrets
in the palm of the left.

All day her one visitor the wind
will skylark down the sidewalk like
a restless crowd of boys, whistle up
the steps to fling yellow armloads
of leaves at the door, rattle the latch
and gad away west through the trees.

Above the little town, early snow
comes in a shy dance along the crest
of Fall Mountain. Now in the shadows
her eyes rise again and again to the
painting of Spain, in the place he hung it,
ruddy hills thronged like pilgrims pressing
forward to kiss the blue lace hem of the sea.
“The world,” she breathes, and all the wakened world
comes tumbling in, a wonder
blinking in its queer dress at her feet.

- Maethelwine

Mr. Ishihara, meet Mr. Freud

2008-02-18T12:43:00.004+09:00

Tokyo Mayor Shintaro Ishihara, Japan's most quotable politician, continues to delight crowds the world over.

Still downplaying his 2004 claim it's impossible to count in French, the 75-year old Mayor recently told the Agence France-Presse, "I love France. I once had a French girlfriend. She gave me a pistol as a souvenir but now it's too old to be of any use." Ahem.

To demonstrate, Ishihara tackled the young reporter, placed the pistol in question to her head, and pulled hard on the trigger three times. As promised, the Mayor's weapon failed to discharge. He then performed a marvelous series of handsprings into the studio audience and led them all in a buoyant rendition of "La Vie En Rose."

T'was in the Darkest Depths of Mordor...

2008-02-16T22:23:00.008+09:00

Too good to be true, but there it is, right on the online pages of the Pakistan News Service.

Waziristan is home to the Wazir tribes, a rugged, mountainous area along the Afghan-Pakistan border where the conservative tribesmen have lived, feuded, and resisted outside interference for centuries. More recently, Waziristan has become the favored fallback position for Taliban escaping Afghanistan. They've killed as many as 200 local leaders in ongoing efforts to consolidate their own fledgling power in the area. Not surprisingly, Waziristan is also widely regarded as the most likely hiding place for Osama bin Laden and other senior members of the Merry Men.

All of which led someone on the staff of the Paktribune website to make a little joke. A map of Waziristan accompanies a small story on recent military operations against "a large number of miscreants" gathering near Lahda Fort. But look closer at the map. I've ripped it and put it here, because I can't believe it will be allowed to stay up very long.

It's a small map, including all the prominent features of Waziristan. The mountains of Ered Lithui, the Plateau of Gorgoroth, Barad-dur and the Sea of Nurnen. And in the far northwest, the Dead Marshes, where Frodo and Sam gazed on the faces of the fallen Elves and Men of the Battle of Dagorlad. Waziristan looks a great deal like Mordor.

Wouldn't it be great to work at a news outlet where you could get away with this? Be sure to leave a comment at the bottom of the article. I doubt it will be online much longer.

Found this through registan.net, over on the sidebar, the best blog I know on Central Asia.

5 things to tell a child who's lost a tooth.

2008-02-14T23:12:00.012+09:00

Tooth loss offers a wonderful opportunity to lie to your child. Ema lost her first tooth last night. She's not thrilled to be the first kid in her kindergarten class to lose a tooth, despite the fact that the Tooth Mouse will be bringing her a gift. In fact, the lurid specter of the Tooth Mouse may only have worsened things. The best way to help children through these early traumas is to leave them so bewildered and uncertain that actual problems, like the shedding of milk teeth, recede into the background. I offer a few suggestions, with absolute faith in your ability to do better. Just close your eyes, and let the winds of deceit blow through you.

"I'll make you a new tooth, a better tooth, a wooden tooth."
"Uh oh, your left ear's gone a bit wobbly too."
"Sleep with your mouth shut so the Mouse gets the right one."
"Look, the new one's coming in already! What a great color!"
"With less weight, you should run faster. Go on. Run."

Setsubun

2008-02-04T11:41:00.000+09:00

I have a lot of writing to do over the next several days, so I may not put anything here until Thursday.

Busy weekend. Sunday, especially, with Ema's school festival in the morning, then the Setsubun demon-banishing at Sumiyoshi Shrine, dinner out with the whole family and finally Setsubun at home.

I wrote about Setsubun here two years ago, but I wasn't entirely fair. It can be a lot of fun, and so I was shocked last night to find that I've been fired from the job of demon. The father is really supposed to be the demon, but Ema said that I was "too scary" last year and consequently mommy would be wearing the mask this year. Fair? No, but on the upside I got to hurl beans at my wife, and I didn't hold anything back. Still, to be thoughtlessly dismissed at the last moment from a role you've really dug deep and prepared for, well no artist likes to be taken so lightly.

Friday night I went for curry with a group of friends and met a guy who's a pro-wrestler in his spare time. He tried to convince me that I ought to tag-team with another friend. We could style ourselves the Rumblejacks, and beat our opponents with axe handles. I'm not really interested, but maybe if I went for it and did well, Ema would let me have the demon mask back.

Maybe.

Two Photographers

2008-01-28T22:26:00.000+09:00

I like photography, but I’m a bad practitioner. I deal in lazy snapshots, never taking the time to really see what’s happening in the frame before I start shooting dozens of images on full-auto, hoping the law of averages will come to my aid. Fortunately, there are other people who take the images I wish I’d taken, and put them online. This is a quick post to share two Japan-based photographers whose work I like.

The first is a guy I’ve never met. His name is Jim O’Connell, and he lives in Tokyo. His website, wirefarm.com, has been listed on my sidebar since I started this blog. I found his site years ago, and it’s changed format several times, but the photography is what matters and it’s really good. He shoots almost exclusively in black and white, using an assortment of equipment that includes a fair number of cameras other people would write off as hopelessly obsolete. The current incarnation of wirefarm has a good collection of his work, and if you go to Flickr and type his name into search you’ll find a real treasure trove. I especially like some of his quieter portraits of those odd hours that are neither morning nor night, but pure bartime, like this one.

The second photographer works at the far opposite end of the aesthetic spectrum, excelling in full-color nature photography, especially close shots of animals and insects, though some of his landscapes are great too. His name is Michael Helbig, and he lives and works here in Hiroshima, though he’s recently married and will be moving back home to Perth soon. He shares and sells his photographs here, on smugmug.com. Living in a mid-size Japanese city, it’s good to be shown the small scenes of natural life that Mike shoots, like this image of rabbit tracks on a winter hillside.

Anyway, if you’ve got time to kill (and clearly you do), both of these guys offer a better return on that time than anything I’ll say this week. Begone.

BookCrossing in Japan

2008-01-27T23:09:00.000+09:00

BookCrossing has come to Japan! The picture may not look like much, but last night one of the first open parties was held to let people interested in BookCrossing in Japan meet one another and discuss next steps.

BookCrossing is one of those great, obvious ideas. Basically, it means leaving a book in a public place to be taken and read by another person, who then does the same thing.

At the moment, more than 600,000 people around the world are registered with BookCrossing.com, the website that got the idea rolling. You can join for free, register books online, print out and affix a sticker explaining how it works, and then “release” the book. As the book travels from one reader to the next, you can track it on the website. Until, of course, someone becomes too attached to the book to let it go again.

Originally, the idea was just to drop the book on a park bench or leave it on the train for the next person to find it. Increasingly, though, people have begun to use BookCrossing Zones, a bookshelf in a coffee shop or other place where people can go to pick up and drop off books. There’s a map of world BookCrossing Zones here, though many zones haven’t been put on the map yet. Zones allow book crossers a greater choice of books, and also do away with the awkwardness some people feel in picking up something that isn’t theirs, even if it has a large yellow sticker saying “Free Book.”

In Hiroshima, there are already eight BookCrossing Zones, and the goal is to expand to fifty. If you read Japanese and you’re interested, the BookCrossing Japan website is here. To do my bit, I’ll try to bring a few books into Mac and either leave them near the end of the bar or over on a shelf under the speakers.

I Wanna Feel You From the Inside...

2008-01-25T16:48:00.000+09:00

In any bar featured in Get Hiroshima’s tourist map or a major guidebook, you’ll sometimes knock bottles with a traveler who’s only recently lapped up half the booze in Cambodia or the wastes of inner China and finds that Japan “isn’t Asian enough.” I never know exactly what this means. Too little tuberculosis? Not enough poultry being butchered in the aisles of the shinkansen? Or maybe they’ve made the mistake of visiting a chain coffee shop.

It’s not like there’s no Japanese music. CD stores are stacked rafter-high with J-Pop, enka, noise rock, visual kei, Okinawan ballads and more. But step into almost any café belonging to a major chain and the music will be Western. The Carpenters are a huge favorite. I’d forgotten the Carpenters ever existed until I came to Japan, but that’s some ruthlessly catchy shit. It’s best to know that in advance, so you’ll be ready when it comes. You too shall one night lie in bed, gazing at the ceiling as “Rainy Days and Mondays” churns without mercy at the base of your skull, your big toes twitching in time. Hangin’ aroooouuuund, nothin’ to do but frooooowwn...

Sometimes the music is almost unbelievable, the worst gangsta rap hard on the heels of Simon and Garfunkel. One big chain, Kohikan, is a refuge for specimens of fading girlhood who’ve been cast out of hipper cafés with mismatched chairs and jazz on the turntable. The photo shows a typical Kohikan; a bright, sterile space in which everything you touch has been extruded in polished slabs from a café-making apparatus. I’d been in Japan about two months when I stopped in a Kohikan and sat next to a pair of women in their thirties, bent close over a mail-order furniture catalog. From a speaker overhead Trent Reznor sang “Closer,” urgently telling all of Kohikan’s valued customers, “I wanna fuck you like an animal.” No one else was grinning. It’s sad to be the only one who gets the joke, which raises the obvious question: why are all the songs in chain cafés in English? The sole exception that comes to mind is the rap I listened to in Café Excelsior one day, in French.

There are times when the music’s sheer oddity can blindside you. This morning I went to Hiroshima station to see off a group of students headed for Australia. When they’d left, I wandered downstairs and into Doutour, another major coffee chain. It was five a.m., there was time to kill. As I sat down, a beautiful piano arrangement of “Shendandoah” began to play. The music, combined with the time of morning, the train station mood and recent farewell, all settled over me and I was overtaken by the most ridiculous pathos. I’m sure I was humming along and looking very low, there in the little smoking section hidden away behind the main room. I caught a Japanese guy looking sideways at me, probably thinking I was a traveler succumbing to homesickness. I might have told him, “No, friend, I dwell in Hagoromocho, in a good house with seventeen windows and a deep bath.” But he was right. What’s more American than Shenandoah? We were rescued by the end of the song, which was replaced by an oboe playing the melody of “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” over a little piano backing. Strange, but really pretty good. The gentle oboe. Always a pal.

Andrew Returns

2008-01-20T20:49:00.000+09:00

I'm the only one of us who's lingered on, but at one time both of my younger brothers were here in Hiroshima. Over the winter holiday, my brother Andrew came for about a week and a half and brought along his wife.

It was good, especially the chance to get to know my sister-in-law a bit better, and for my daughter to spend some time with non-Japanese family.

Anyway, after a very long absence, I'm sticking my toe back in the water by posting a few photos from their visit. If you wander through, or you're still checking this blog from time to time, welcome and thanks for stopping by.

You can see from the photo at left that the weather wasn't always ideal for sightseeing, but with enough flannel and curry you can survive very nearly anything. Seriously, google it.

If you've been to Hiroshima, you've probably also visited Miyajima. That was an obvious choice for New Year's, so we actually went twice, once for the Fire Festival on New Year's Eve and again two days later to march around gaping at old wooden things. And if you've been to Miyajima, you've no doubt had your own run-in with the sacred deer.

Here's a shot down the souvenir alley toward the pagoda above Itsukushima Shrine.

And here are just a few more.

The obligatory shot of the torii gate, which I never seem to get right.

My daughter and her aunt all dressed up for a visit to Gokoku Shrine, near Hiroshima Castle.

My brother strikes a fairly ridiculous pose as he gazes out over the Seto Inland Sea from the top of Miyajima's Mt. Misen.

And that's all I have at the moment. Bye!

Five Anecdotes With Which To Arm Yourselves

2006-07-19T16:39:00.000+09:00

1. Not content with a merely ‘firm’ foundation, Samuel chose instead to build his dream house on a base of pure diamond. Unfortunately, he was a poor man, and could only afford a very small diamond. The house, while exquisite, was nearly microscopic, and in order to enter Samuel was forced to take a penknife and whittle away at himself until nothing remained but a single red corpuscle, which lay dejectedly on the parquetry floor of the miniscule living room, wishing that it had someone to talk to.

2. It is widely discounted but nevertheless true that the legal age of consent among certain groups of Australian aboriginals is sixty-four. It will be apparent to the attentive reader that survival under such circumstances demands a fairly high occurrence of felonious sexual contact. The shame that this carries may contribute to the dreary content of these people’s rock art, which consists mainly of images of frowning young men playing contact sports and taking long, cold showers together. Bummer.

3. Clayton had always wished to try his hand at ceramics, but was unable to locate a potter’s wheel in the hick town in which he was imprisoned by the Ice Giants. One morning, however, he found a rotisserie lying on the curb, and was able to contrive a sort of very slow, sideways pottery. For the most part the pots were crap. They were unglazed, poorly balanced and smelled of chicken loaf, but they fed young Clayton’s soul. Go Clayton, you luckless patsy of Ragnarok!

4. When Susan first had her plastic surgeon mount the enormous tin parachute on the back of her skull, all her friends complimented her on how pretty it made her look, gleaming in the sun and reflecting the scenery as she puttered about town on her miniature choo-choo. In time, however, the drag caused by the cranial tin canopy became another kind of drag altogether. Under certain wind conditions, Susan and her choo-choo made virtually no forward progress at all, and the strain to her neck was also something of a concern. All of her erstwhile friends began to make snide comments and snicker to one another as she chugged laboriously by, weeping softly. The moral of the story is, be happy with who you are. Also, another moral is that cosmetic surgery which hinders your natural streamlining may, for various reasons, be socially isolating.

5. Little Ninja Ned had a full set of Ninja clothes, but usually performed his terrible errands in a chador he had stolen from a Persian actress’s night table. It was a deep, marvelous black, and did a superb job of concealing his face, but it was also loose and, well, a bit billowing really. Often, as Little Ned was making his getaway after silencing some ne’er-do-well fat cat with a Ninja strike to the pancreas, the chador would catch on something or other. This caused all sorts of embarrassing problems. More and more it seemed that Little Ned spent most of his down time, which the other Little Ninjas used to pursue a variety of rewarding pastimes, simply mending the torn hem of his chador. Curse you, you dazzling, maddening, modestly attired Persian temptress!

Here I Am

2006-03-11T14:39:00.000+09:00

Of course, no one is actually checking this anymore, and who could blame them.

I am presently in Brisbane, Australia and won't return to Hiroshima until the 24th. I'm accompanying a pack of homestay students and eating sausage rolls. The school we're at has given me a severely restricted student-level access to the internet. Can't use hotmail or blogger. If you wander by, hi, and check back in a couple of weeks if the mood strikes.

As always, the floodwaters of my heart are rising around your ankles, bathing you in the liquid warmth of my love. When my love reaches your upper thighs, you may experience a strong need to urinate. I apologize for any difficulty this causes you.

Japanese Bluegrass

2006-02-10T17:10:00.000+09:00

Yesterday I posted a picture of my daughter playing with her mother’s sanshin, a banjo-like Okinawan instrument that is the direct ancestor of the Japanese shamisen. I thought I’d post today about the shamisen player Kunimoto Takeharu and his foray into bluegrass, a style of music I vastly prefer (and I realize I’m in the minority here) to pop, J or otherwise.

Kunimoto was born in Chiba Prefecture. Both parents were practitioners of a form of storytelling called roukyoku. Unlike the older and better-known art of rakugo comic storytelling, in traditional roukyoku narrative is combined with singing, and the storyteller performs standing, accompanied by a concealed shamisen player. There is an improvisational element as well, and the same piece may be dramatically different from one performance to the next. Roukyoku was widely popular at the height of radio, but like many older arts has lost a great deal of its audience in recent decades.

As a child, Kunimoto was completely uninterested in roukyoku. He was, however, drawn to American bluegrass after seeing Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys at the age of 15. He fooled around with the flat mandolin before taking up Tsugaru-jamisen, the percussive, improvisational northern style of shamisen that shares an undeniable energy with bluegrass. At nineteen, after flirting briefly with acting, he formally entered the world of roukyoku. He was the first person to do so in over a decade.

Over time, he has broken with tradition in several key ways. First, he sometimes dispenses with the concealed shamisen player to accompany himself during the sung sections of his performances. This was done, in part, because he wanted to introduce strains of rock and roll and bluegrass into the music, another innovation.

In 2003, he left Japan for a year to focus on bluegrass at East Tennessee State University, where he joined the Bluegrass Pride Band the day after arriving in the U.S. With members of the band, he later formed a new group called The Last Frontier and made an album called Appalachian Shamisen. If you have Quicktime, you can look here for a clip of his shamisen, backed up by banjo, mandolin, fiddle, bass and guitar. It sounds pretty damn good. His albums can be bought through this same website, though if you’re reading this from outside Japan your computer may not be able to display the Japanese script.

There’s an unusually good English-language website devoted to Kunimoto here. There is also a recent article in the Asahi Newspaper here. If you’re in the States, Kunimoto and the band will be performing in March at Austin’s South by Southwest Music Festival, one of the best music events in North America. If you’re in Japan, he’ll be performing roukyoku February 21-22 at Tokyo’s Parco Theater, and March 14 at Sogetsu Hall (03-3572-4311).

How to play the Sanshin

2006-02-09T17:48:00.002+09:00

Not like this.

My father took this picture back in October, and just recently sent us a copy. Note the frowning concentration, the positioning of the hands, and the perfect seiza posture. Luckily for you, you can't hear the actual sounds she makes on that old sanshin. Makes the snake glad he's dead.

How to Leave

2006-02-08T12:47:00.001+09:00

I know a few JETs visit once in a while. Some of you are coming to the end of your time in Japan. At a certain point, as you decide what to take and what to leave, a beguiling voice will begin to whisper, “Purge, purge! Out with the old, a clean slate, a fresh start, burn, baby, burn!”

Don’t listen.

In fact, if you’re smart you’ll do just the opposite. The chorus of an old John Prine song goes:

Memories, they can't be bought'n
They can't be won at carnivals for free
It took me years, to get those souvenirs
And I don't know how they slipped away from me
I know exactly how mine slipped away. When I left the States I loaded more than a ton of my possessions into a U-Haul van, drove down to the landfill in Brattleboro, Vermont, and chucked it all. There were boxes I hadn’t opened in years, and I don’t know what all I tossed out. It felt right, at the time, and when the last box flew out the back of that van I had my freedom. Two days later I woke up at 4:45 on a viciously cold morning, locked up my tiny apartment and dropped the key in the mailbox, slipped the keys to my old Buick Regal under the passenger side floormat as arranged with the National Kidney Foundation, and climbed into a hired ride for the drive to Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks, Connecticut. There was no one to see me off, so I can’t have been leaving much.

In the time since, I’ve regretted that little orgy at the landfill. There have been too many times over the last years when I’ve gone hunting for something, some book, a seashell my grandmother gave me, or an old letter only to find I don’t have it anymore. That scarcity of physical connection to the past can leave me feeling oddly insubstantial. No more than two suitcases full of what were deemed necessities survived the first 33 years of my life. I have a friend here who once talked about an old key ring he’d had for years, heavy with keys he didn’t even recognize anymore, and how wonderful it was to throw them all away. I get it, but I’m also uneasy at the idea of all those forgotten, locked away places.

Back to you folks who will shortly be leaving Japan. There’ll be time for purging later. Many of you won’t be coming back this way. You won’t know where half the people you love today are in fifteen years. Time is unkind, and memory fickle. So here’s what we’re going to do. First, go get a big box.

Now get two or three friends, enter your apartment, blindfold one another and wander around the place grabbing whatever your hands fall on and tossing it in the box. Check the box. If there’s anything good in there, something you were going to bring home anyway, take it out and start over.

Be greedy. Upend kitchen drawers into the box. Put that half-finished roll of toilet paper in the box. Any unopened cans of Boss coffee or Yebisu go in the box, next to the plum-flavored breath mints and cold tablets. Ask your friends for something to remember them by. If they won’t give it to you, steal it. Keep cuttings of each other’s hair. Pilfer your girlfriend’s purple socks. Scoop the seeds out of the last tomato in your refrigerator and bring them with you. You can plant them in the dirt you’ll take from the park, or the riverbank, or your neighbor’s window box. Go to your favorite places with a tape recorder and let it run for a while, then stick that in the box too.

It’s your life, why throw it all away? For your present purposes, nothing is garbage. Keep everything. One of my happiest moments in recent weeks was finding part of an old take-away menu from the Pizza King in Lawrence, Massachusetts stuck in a book. So catch up the floor lint from the four corners of your room, slip it in an envelope marked “floor lint,” and drop it in the box.

Floor lint?

Hell yes, floor lint! The whole point of this exercise is to acknowledge that you don’t know where you’re going, who you’ll be when you get there, or what you’ll want to see. It may be that on every day of your life but one the floor lint will just be filth, but we’re packing a box for that one day when you shake out that envelope and it raises a storm of memory. You don’t know what you’ll be remembering. It may be a specific time and place or it may be pure sense memory, attached to a hundred times and places at once. It may be that strange, analeptic recollection of things you’ve never known in this lifetime. Unidentifiable associations that tumble you down into regions where your eyes widen into the dark, places you’ll never find again. That’s why we’re stashing the floor lint. If this sounds stupid, trite, or overwrought that’s partly because I’m a raving blowhard. But honestly, it’s also because the day in question has not yet put in an appearance. And it will. Pack for heavy weather. Good luck!

Just Another Whiteboy Listening to Rap

2006-02-07T14:49:00.000+09:00

This horrifying image is from my youngest brother’s profile on his university website. Beneath the photo he announces, “I am researching the growth of semiconductor nanoparticles and their intercalation into block copolymers to form complex nanostructured materials.” I know for a fact that what he’s really doing is building obscene handpuppets in the cellar of a forgotten warehouse at the edge of campus. I’ve watched him play with them, pulling the little anatomically-exaggerated monstrosities over his grubby fist and squealing in a falsetto Scottish accent. It’s disgusting. Carrying on about nano-this and semi-that just keeps the government taps flowing so he and his “team members” Lewd Lizzie and Under-me MacKintosh can keep fleecing the American taxpayer.

No, that’s all a lie, or wishful thinking on my part. You see, with each nanoparticle intercalated, Andrew is more and more lost to us. For one year, he lived in Hiroshima. He was only about 23, and he liked to drink too much, terrorize the locals with his spellbinding dance moves, then call me on his mobile and narrate his trip home, which basically consisted of wild laughter and the word “Ouch” repeated each time he fell off his bicycle or rode into an oncoming taxi. His life wasn’t really going anywhere, so after some painful soul-searching, the family decided to donate him to science.

That’s why I was so happy to get this e-mail from him this morning, in which he reveals that he is still flailing about erratically, upsetting the furniture, and scaring the crap out of Asian women with his dancing. Here it is:

There are a few people in the lab with whom I get along quite well. And considering that I'm a particularly gregarious breed of primate, I often find myself getting embroiled in time-sucking, PhD-lengthening conversations that have a 13.33% chance of being directly applicable to anything I might be studying / working on / needing to do. This is something that I need to work on and one tactic that I find particularly helpful is the use of headphones. I find that setting the lab day to a soundtrack has the useful effect of distancing me from my companions and helping me focus on getting some work done in the lab. It also quiets down some of the easily distracted parts of the brain and so I end up spending much more time on point. Unfortunately, being mom's son, I have the tendency to "shake my booty" and even occasionally "drop it like it's Hot", though only if I'm feeling cavalier about the integrity of my knees. Often I stay just aware enough of my situation that I simply look like someone who is shaking his head to a beat. However today I crossed a line. I was absorbed in doing some soldering when the Fugee's "Fugee-la" came on to my headphones. I love this song. It's well written and sounds great. It's no "Ready or Not" and it certainly is no Sir Mixalot's "I Like Big Butts" but it's pretty good. I was starting to rock out and once I put the soldering iron down I sort of lost control and kicked the chair back and really threw down. This startled and then quickly baffled one of our new students, Xioayu, who had evaded my peripheral vision and started working at the bench behind me (and thereby in the path of the enthusiastically flung chair). Luckily this room is more or less chemical free so she wasn't startled in the middle of handling anything more dangerous than silicone (that's boobie-mix to all you classy gentlemen out there). When I spun about in the middle of one of my trademark moves I came chest to face with the picture of surprised, amused and slightly uncomfortable Chinese womanhood. The first and third of the aforementioned mix of emotions quickly yielded to the second as she pointed to my freshly shaved head and said, "When you blush your entire head becomes pink!" Sigh.
Beautiful. Just amazing. I mean, “Drop it like it’s Hot?” Wow. God is good. Doctor Disco, we salute you. Our extraordinarily small, needlessly complicated future rests in your capable hands.

Wide Island Gets Noticed!

2006-02-05T21:39:00.000+09:00

I’m very pleased to announce that this blog has been given a full page (in the reviews section) in the newest issue of Kyoto Journal. In a segment called KJ Blogology, you’ll find five excerpts from the first few months, and one of my favorite pictures of my daughter.

I’m pleased for a number of reasons. First, I admire Kyoto Journal very much, and have since I first spotted it on the racks at Maruzen six years ago. I think it’s one of the most consistently interesting English language publications in Asia. I’ve always liked its broadly eclectic (omnivorous?) blend of articles, interviews, essays, fiction and poetry, as well as the wonderful images that accompany them. The latest issue includes, among many other offerings, an article on writers in defense of the environment by the legendary poet Gary Snyder, an excellent profile of long-time Kyoto resident and artist Jack Madson, a look at the land and people of Syria by the Japanese photographer Miyagawa Yasuhiro, three works of fiction, poems, and a translation of the 9th century Confucianist Han Yu’s “Address to the Crocodiles.”

I’m also happy that someone besides my family and a small group of friends noticed the blog at all. I didn’t submit, I just got a note from the editor requesting permission to include the excerpts. I think I may have been recommended by Robert Brady at Pure Land Mountain, who is listed as Consulting Editor and Rambler-at-large. If I’m right, thanks Robert.

You can find Kyoto Journal at any bookstore carrying a decent selection of foreign language periodicals. Take a look.