By the way, here's what the boys look like now. Tony is 14 and Andy is turning 12 soon.

I wasn't making backups of Herro Flom Japan or Japlish Podcast and I lost a year's worth of HFJ posts and the entire Japlish site.

I found this interesting fact in my Twitter stream yesterday morning. My first reaction was, “I call bullshit.” I’ve lived here for over 19 years and not once have I ever heard of condoms being sold door-to-door. In fact, I can’t see why they would be sold that way seeing as how every convenience store I’ve ever bothered to check stocks multiple brands.

But this rumor had to have come from somewhere. At some level it has to be true.

First thing I did was ask one of my coworkers.

“This is probably a stupid question, but there’s really no such thing as  コンドームの訪問販売 in Japan, is there?”

“Actually,” she said, “I think I’ve heard of it.”

Shocked. Utterly shocked. How could I have lived here for so long and not known about it?

So I did some Googling. Turns out that 25-30 years ago, roughly half of condoms sales in Japan came from pharmacies, the other half from door-to-door sales. “Skin ladies,” as the saleswomen were called, named after the leading brand “Skinless,” sold them to young married couples by the gross. At that time condom makers weren’t allowed to advertise in print or on TV, and convenience stores weren’t as prevalent, so it starts making sense. This article has the lowdown on the history of the condom in Japan.

On a bit of a tangent note, if sex in Japan is relevant to your interests, check out Jake Adelstein’s Japan Subculture Research Center. I came across it the first time yesterday:

Japan Subculture Research Center was founded in 2007 to expose the hidden side of Japan – its underground economy, its sex trade, and all the other intriguing and seedy aspects that keep the country running.

Posted via web from richpav's posterous

Update: Schadenfreude.

On the bright side, with nothing left to have fun with and no money to buy replacements, maybe our kids will start reading books.

I predict that next week schools and universities in and around Tokyo will start closing. What's ironic about that is kids who would normally be confined to school all day instead will be out and about town, eating in restaurants, singing in karaoke boxes and increasing their chances of spreading infection.

Here are my plans: If I catch the flu, I'll get tamiflu from our family doctor, stay locked in my room and in bed a few days reading and sleeping, then get on with my life. Then again, if I die from it, I'll be pissed off because I really want to find out what happens on LOST.

I wonder, if you catch the flu early, will you build up an immunity to it so that if it mutates later you won't get as sick?

One more thing. For about a week now, I've been amusing myself on the way home from work by coughing and sniffing loudly while I'm in crowds. So far it hasn't gotten me a seat on a jam-packed train, but it does cut down significantly on how long I have to wait in line for the turnstiles after arriving at Koga station. I'm thinking I should try again, only next time while wearing a Mexican sombrero and poncho.

• 1. Go out & buy n-95 masks or equivalent. $ 20.00 for box of 20 at Lowe’s & Home Depot.
• 2. Buy surgical gloves.
• 3. Get anti-bacterial soaps, & bleach.
• 4. Get a preventative doctors prescription for Tamiflu or Relenza, about $ 50.00 to $ 70.00 per multiple dose pack or bottle.
• 5. Quarantine yourself & go no where if possible. No guests, in or out.
• 6. If that’s not possible, wear the mask & gloves, everytime you go out. When done, come home take off the gloves throw away in bio-hazard container. Take off mask, put on shelf for use again. Wash hands with soap & water, rinse, then rinse again in mild form of “bleachwater.” Then blow, or allow to air dry. Or use seperate 2nd towel ( white ) to dry them.
• 7. You cannot go out to eat, go to the movies, or eat any prepared foods. They will not be safe. The only safe foods will be sealed in “glass jars, metal, tin, or frozen, long before the “PANDEMIC,” hit. No fresh breads, salads, open foods, fast food restaurants, nothing like it.
• 8. Do not trust or believe the mainstream news media ! I cannot stress that enough. Get your “TRUTHFUL,” news from the internet.
• 9. Do not take any shots or vaccinations what so ever ! I do not trust them !
• 10. Watch for more deaths, clusters, & such.
• 11. Once people get scared & panic, it’s gonna be nuts. And you won’t be able to get food, medical, supplies, water, or anything.
• 12. Please run out now, & buy what you need, right away. You should be stocked up already as you’ve been told for all other types of “end of the world scenarios.”
• 13. The CDC & other sites have good information on how to protect yourself.
• 14. Do not seal up your home airtight ! You’ll run out of fresh air qucikly & die of lack of oxygen.
• 15. Of course keep your doors & windows shut.
• 16. PRAY !

I would like to add my own advice:

• Scream while flailing your arms and running around in circles.
• To assure yourself an empty seat on a crowded train, wear a sombrero, cough and sneeze loudly while muttering to yourself in Spanish.
• Stock up on water-based lubrication. The indiscriminate, all-out, end-of-the-world sex is going to awesome for those of us lucky to survive a few days longer than everyone else.

1. It's been so long since I've recorded one that I have no idea where I put my microphones. If you saw what my bedroom looks like, you'd understand. The last time I did a podcast, I was 39 years old. I'm 41 now.

2. My parents listen, so the topics I can cover are severely limited. During the train ride home tonight I was listening to Adam Carolla talk for half an hour about a carbuncle he had on his anus and how he had to pop with a pin while bent over naked in front of a mirror while shining a flashlight up his ass. I don't have that kind of freedom.

My next podcast will be about marijuana in Japan and why you should avoid it as if it were the most dangerous drug known to man while you're in this country. I'm still doing research. Being the upstanding citizen I am, I don't have any connections to the indigenous cannabis culture, so I need to venture out a bit before I can speak on the topic with any degree of expertise.

Last week he showed me a catalog of games to tell me about the next game he was all excited to buy: Grand Theft Auto Liberty City Stories. One of his 11 year old friends has it and he totally fell in love with it. An 11 year old kid. His parents let him buy a game rated "Z" for 18 and over because it's wall-to-wall foul language and adult themes such as murder, mayhem, carjacking, brain-splattering headshots, cop killing, prostitution, BSDM, kinky sex, double-ended dildos, tittie bars, drugs…

That is, so far. For all I know, it gets worse. I'm still only on the 5th or 6th mission. Tony, on the other hand, is on well his way to unlocking the second island.

Last week, when Tony first showed me the game, our conversation when a bit like this:

Tony (in Japanese): Daddy, I want to get this awesome game!
Me (in English): What's it rated?
Tony: Z.
Me: How old do you have to buy a game that's rated Z?
Tony: 18.
Me: How old are you now?
Tony: 11.
Me: What's 18-11?
Tony: 7.
Me: That's how many years you have to wait to buy the game.

End of conversation. Flash forward to this week.

Tony: Daddy, look what I got!
Sony PSP: "You cock-sucking mother-fucking son of a goddamn whore! I'll rip off your head and shit down your neck!" (explosions) (police sirens) (sexual innuendo-filled radio dialog)
Me: Wonderful.

So here's the thing. And maybe I'm just rationalizing my horrible parenting skills and my guilt for not confiscating the game on sight.

Neither Tony nor Andy understand much English aside from the conversations I have with them, so all the swearing in the game goes over their heads. It was only a few weeks ago that Tony finally learned the word "shit" when I dented the running board of our family car trying to back out of a ridiculously narrow dead end. I'm not too worried about either of them acquiring a new and exceedingly foul English vocabulary from the game.

They don't understand the adult themes in the game. Or, maybe they do, and if so, they already acquired such worldly knowledge elsewhere.

That leaves the violence. When I was a kid, we played cops and robbers and smashed Matchbox cars together all the time. And I didn't grow up to be a sociopath.

Yesterday was a holiday so the three of us played the game together. I taught Andy how to read a map and to give and understand directions in English. I found a website of cheat codes and taught Tony some new vocabulary by explaining to him what they all did. The boys got practice sharing their toys, which involved patience and conflict resolution. Tony got to show me all the secret locations, mini games and tricks he discovered by himself. (I skipped over minor details such as what prostitutes and pimps do for a living.) We shared opinions about strategies. But most of all, the three of us spent hours of quality time together, which we don't do often enough lately.

But still, I'm conflicted as to whether or not I'm being a horrible parent by letting them play such an adult-oriented game.

If Obama wins, you'll read about me in the papers for exuberantly and singlehandedly overturning cars in Tokyo and setting them on fire.

On the other hand, if McCain wins, you'll read about me in the papers for angrily and singlehandedly overturning cars in Tokyo and setting them on fire.

You've probably already seen this video clip many times over of Gayle Quinnel telling McCain that she doesn't trust Obama because "he's an Arab," then McCain refuting her by explaining that, essentially, he can't be an Arab because he's actually "a decent family man citizen." As if the two were opposites.

What you probably haven't seen yet is the follow-up interview conducted by TheUpdate.org in which she says she got her information about Obama from the library and a pamphlet given to her by a McCain volunteer. She goes on to explain how she too is a McCain volunteer–working from of the Burnsville, Minnesota office–and she has made hundreds copies of letters and sent them to people randomly picked out of the phone book. In addition, as a volunteer she has spoken to a lot of people who have the same opinion of Obama.

This got me to thinking there's a much bigger story here than just some frazzled and confused old lady who's deathly afraid of a black Arab Muslim terrorist running for president. Namely, are McCain's campaign offices simply complacent when it comes to false rumors about Obama, or are they complicit in spreading them? As a volunteer for the McCain campaign, not only has she not been corrected by anyone who knows the rumors are false, but she's also spreading the rumors on behalf on the campaign!

Honestly, I don't understand why the mainstream media hasn't taken a closer look at what kind of rumors are being spread by McCain's volunteers. I feel uncomfortable saying this in seriousness, but frankly, I'm shocked.

Whoever threatened martial law isn't bluffing. As you may know, on October 1 the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team was redeployed to a 12 month tour to Northern Command, "a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities." When their tour is over, another brigade will take their place, to carry on with the mission "to help with civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack."

The America of today is very different from the one I left 18 years ago. Frankly, I don't want to go back.

I think it's odd that I can't find any mention of this threat to Representatives in the mainstream media.

This morning as I was passing through Shinjuku Station, I saw a woman take a dive down a short flight of slippery stairs and lie crumpled on the wet ground with a quickly expanding pool of blood under her head. (That freaked me out.) I've lived here long enough to know that you can't assume someone else is going to help so I rushed down her, tore off my headphones (and my glasses–oops), grabbed a towel from someone who pulled one out, knelt down and held the towel to her head while resting her neck on my thigh. She was talking, which was a relief. She was saying, "Don't worry about me, if you need to get to work, please go because I don't want to make you late." I told her to just relax and asked her if she was hurt anywhere else. She said she hurt her leg a little, but it didn't look broken, although I wasn't about to let my hand off her head to check. Man, she was really gushing blood. It looked like someone had slaughtered a dog on the sidewalk.

I got blood all over my jeans. Not a good pair, but these days none of my jeans are a "good pair." I can't buy my size in Japan, so I only have a few old pairs left that are still wearable. In other words, I trashed about 20% of my wardrobe right there.

Someone else called an ambulance on their mobile phone. It was nice that so many people stopped to ask if someone had called one. I like to see people care about total strangers, but day to day I don't see it often enough. Either people don't want to get involved or they just stand there dumbfounded.

There was another women there who vaguely knew her because they work at the same company, so she stayed with her to wait for the ambulance and I left to get washed up. She kept saying that she didn't want to make anyone late, and by that time she was sitting up and not bleeding as much so I figured it was OK to leave. But it's never easy to know if it's really OK to leave in a situation like that. She wanted me to, so I left.

And now I have to spend the rest of today wearing blood-stained jeans. I don't mind, really. It doesn't look like I've been through a massacre, but the stain is definitely noticeable so I'm a bit self-conscious.

Update: When I got home tonight my wife gave me a ziplock baggie full of some magical blue powder to put on the stain. The jeans just came out of the washer and much to my surprise the blood washed off completely without a trace. I told the story to both of my kids. Tony (the older one) wanted to know every last detail of the ordeal. Andy wanted to know why the heck would I volunteer to help a complete stranger.

In a way, it's comforting to know that when all these otherwise intelligent (but conservative) people you hear extolling Palin for her love of moose meat and what not, they really aren't stupid, they're just lying.

What I'm wondering is, since this happened on MSNBC, how will Keith Olbermann and Rachael Maddow cover it? They have to mention it because other media outlets are already picking up the story, as will the Obama campaign, but all three people in the video work daily with Keith and Rachael. It's going to be awkward…

Not so seriously, here's a funny YouTube video. I think I'll watch it again and have some more whiskey.

It's Friday, I'm starting on my way home and I was hungry for a snack so I bought a bag of tempura fried squid. They look like potato chips or some other salted carbohydrate snack. Apparently, if you're not eating them, they don't smell so nice. I was eating them out of the bag when I got on the train and instantly all the women around me covered their faces with their handkerchiefs. One woman moved to another part of the train. I took the hint and twisted the bag shut until I got off at my stop then ate the rest in the open air.

Next time, I'll wait to get home to eat them. Tony likes stinky food so we'll eat them together.

• I start with Iran by remembering the phrase, "She is from Iran." Iran is Shi'ite.
• I recall the mistake McCain made saying that Iran was training al Qaeda. That is incorrect because al Qaeda is the opposite, Sunni.
• Osama Bin Laden is from Saudi Arabia, which makes the country Sunni.
• Most in the world are Muslims are the same as Saudi Arabia, Sunni.
• Iraq is between Iran and Saudi Arabia, so they're approximately half Shi'ite and half Sunni, but they're politically closer to Iran, so a slight majority of Iraqis are Shi'ite.

How does that work for you?

Next, onto Obama, McCain and the surge. I'll assume you know nothing about why there's far less violence in Iraq now as compared to 2006-2007. Here are the facts, and please correct me if I get anything wrong.

• There are two sects of Muslims, Sunni and Shi'ite (pronounced "SHE-ite" not "shitty"). Iran and the Iraq governments are Shiite, as are a slight majority of Iraqis. Al Qaeda, Saudi Arabia and 90% of all Muslims in the world are Sunni. For centuries they've been killing each other over an argument about who has the right to rule over the religion, kind of like who gets to call himself the "pope," but it's a bit more complicated than that. At this point, I expect most people to give up reading. But congratulations, you already know more than McCain. All you need to do now is get shot down over enemy territory and spend a few years being tortured as a POW and you'd be more qualified than him to run for president.
• Bloody ethnic cleansing has taken place throughout Iraq. We're talking wholesale torture and slaughter with victims in the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, and both sides are guilty. Towns and neighborhoods have become segregated, and the cleansing is pretty much over. Note: This is one of the reasons why there is less violence now. Towns and neighborhoods are now segregated.
• Second, some of the Sunni groups that used to be on al Qaeda's side fighting against the coalition troops decided to switch their alliance over to the occupational forces. Why? For security reasons, and because we're paying them. Note, they're Sunni, and the Iraqi government is Shi'ite. They're not fighting the government or the coalition troops for now. We're arming, training and paying them, and in return they're keeping the peace in their neighborhoods particularly by keeping al Qaeda out, but that doesn't mean they have given up fighting forever, only for now. Right now the occupation is probably the only thing keeping them from turning on the Iraqi government, and the government is very worried about them becoming a third power in Iraq. Nobody knows what will happen when we either stop paying them and/or leave. Note: These Sunni groups decided to give up their support for al Qaeda and side with the occupation before the surge. These switches of alliance are called Awakening Movements.
• Third and last, we have The Surge of 2007. Note: The surge happened after most of the ethnic cleansing and awakening movements had already taken place. But this is not what the Bush Administration wants to admit, and even worse, just the other day McCain got it backwards! McCain got it backwards. You really need to understand why this is such a big deal. McCain says that not only did the surge cause a decrease in violence but it actually caused the Anbar awakening! NO!! WRONG!!

So if you're still with me and haven't scurried off to YouTube to watch videos of adorable kittens or people riding bicycles and skateboards into brick walls, we'll get to Obama's take on the matter, but first you have know that Obama opposed the surge. The other day, CBS News asked Obama if he knew then what he knows now, would he have approved the surge. Here was his answer:

If we have shifted away from the central front of terrorism as a consequence of enormous and continuing investments in Iraq, then that's a poor strategic choice.

Huh? But Senator Obama, don't you give any credit to the surge for the decrease in violence in Iraq?

No, no of course I have. There is no doubt that the extraordinary work of our U.S. forces has contributed to a lessening of the violence, just as making sure that the Sadr militia stood down or the fact that the Sunni tribes decided to flip and work with us instead of with al-Qaeda — something that we hadn't anticipated happening. All those things have contributed to a reduction in violence.

So on one hand you have McCain who doesn't understand what's going on in Iraq, and on the other hand Obama who understands that the surge is only one factor in the decrease in violence. As for me, I know which of the two I'd rather have as president.

P.S.In order to keep things simple, I didn't mention that the Mahdi Army, a Shi'ite militia possibly supported by Iran, is currently under a very tenuous cease fire agreement which is set to expire, and hopefully be renewed, in August 2008. When it's all put together, it becomes evident that violence in Iraq could flair up again if either the Mahdi Army or the participants in the Awakening Movements decide they're no longer satisfied with the way things are, or if any of the segregated towns or neighborhoods decide to expand their territory.

It's a good thing too. By the last day they were all looking pretty bored. I started to see them congregated into groups talking to each other instead of standing watch over commuter/terrorists.

Seriously, I really want to know where the hell they all went.

P.S. I'm posting this using ScribeFire.

For years and years, the English language website for Mainichi News had a section called WaiWai. It translated salacious and bizarre articles from the dregs of Japanese tabloids into English. As far as I know, the authors of WaiWai never made anything up–they left that to the authors of the original articles about such nonsense like a restaurant where you could have sex with a pig then have it cooked for you.

A Japanese person could read the original articles in their original context and considering the source and content easily see through the bullshit, similar to how an American could tell that an article from the National Inquirer or Weekly World News about scientists planning to blow up the moon is most likely not true. But foreigners have a propensity to believe absolutely anything they read about Japan, up to and including the thousands upon thousands of used panty vending machines on every street corner here that don't f**king exist.

Apparently it was the "You screw it we cook it" restaurant story that caught the attention of Japanese bloggers and 2channers back in May. They got fired up about WaiWai sullying the reputation of their beloved country overseas, and from there the mass media caught wind and ran with it.

As reported in Japan Probe, the Mainichi acted all shocked and stunned, as if they had no idea WaiWai even existed, closed down the site, apologized in Japanese and English, and even went so far as to punish the employees responsible for the column. The chief editor, an Australian named Ryann Connell, has become the outraged public's whipping boy and is currently suspended for three months from his job and sequestered in his home with police protection after receiving a number of death threats, as reported in the Australian media.

Here's my take on the whole situation. WaiWai should have been shut down years ago. Republishing tabloid articles under the Mainichi name lent credibility to the articles that were most likely complete fabrications. I used to visit the site a few times a year simply because the articles were painful to read, which is kind of fun in an intellectually masochistic kind of way. They painted a picture of Japan very different from the Japan I know from living here. A news outlet like the Mainichi shouldn't be in the business of publishing stories in a column where a small percentage of them are true and the rest are tabloid trash without any kind of disclaimer attached to the unsourced articles. In the end, the company got what it deserved–a whole lot of bad publicity and a mass exodus of their advertising sponsors.

Twitter friends were right, the extra security is due to the G8 Summit in Hokkaido. It says so on these out-of-order garbage cans. Mystery solved.

Want to know what scenario worries me the most? Some nutjob mixing together a batch of hydrogen sulfide on a crowded train or subway.

Update: Twitter friends say the extra security could be related to the G8 summits. That would explain the cop outside the Canadian Embassy.

Update #2: The illegally parked scooters got ticketed. He looked pretty bored wandering the neighborhood all day. I guess he needed something to do to pass the time.

Weeks went by and I slacked off from reading news articles in Japanese, because frankly, it's a time consuming pain in the ass, and keeping up with election news from the US in English requires far less effort in comparison. But eventually I did go back to it. (It's what I do when I can't sleep at night.) That's when I discovered that suicide by hydrogen sulfide had become a fad. Between the beginning of this year and the end of May, there have been 517 deaths nationwide, compared to only 29 in all of last year. In at least one incident, the elderly parent of a suicide victim was found dead just outside the bathroom where the 39 year old man took his own life. In far more cases, entire neighborhoods have had to be evacuated until the air was deemed safe to breathe.

People who are suicidally depressed often feel like they just want to disappear; to go to sleep and never wake up. On various online bulletin boards (such as 2chan), blogs and websites, death by hydrogen sulfide has been toted as a way to take one's own life quickly, easily, and painlessly. In fact, when you search Google for the term "hydrogen sulfide" in Japanese, the second highest ranking result after the Wikipedia article is a web page giving a step-by-step instructions on what chemicals to use, how to buy them, how much to mix together given the size of the room, and even a PDF sign to print out and tape to a door warning others to stay away and call authorities. Two links at the very bottom of the page take you to the sites for two suicide prevention organizations. I don't know what the author's point is, given the contents of the rest of the page.

But here's what really blows me away: Even though for the past 10 years in Japan over 30,000 people have committed suicide annually, the government is doing very little to combat the problem. That statistic is four times the number of people who die in traffic accidents every year. On year's total is roughly equal to the number of soldiers killed and wounded since the beginning of the Gulf War.

Nearly 20% of suicides are attributed to depression, the rest mostly to physical ailments or unsurmountable debts. It's the ones caused by depression that are the most disturbing to me. If 6,060 people had died in 2007 from any other cause–homicide, SARS, AIDS, paper cuts–the news media would be in hysterics over the epidemic and the government would throw billions of yen at the problem. As it stands, the only concrete action I've been able to dig up on the part of the government is their declaration to cut the suicide rate by 20% by 2016. Maybe I just haven't hit Google paydirt yet on what's actually being done; the relevant section of the National Institute of Public Health's website has a pretty picture of some flowers to show their concern, but the page hasn't been updated since 2003.

I don't know what my point is, other than 30,000 people out of a total population of 127 million is a hell of a lot of people, and the thought blows my mind. That, and I'd like to see psychotherapy cognitive behavioral therapy covered by national health insurance. Taking antidepressants without therapy is like taking anti-cholesterol medication but still eating at McDonald's three times a day.

We took him to a pet shop on Saturday to look at the dogs, and he really liked a yappy little brown chihuahua that was going for only 50,000 yen. Every time I commented on how much cheaper that one was compared to all the others, my wife turned to me and told me to STFU under her breath. Personally, I'm a fan of much larger dogs, preferably one that could eat a chihuahua for breakfast.

My wife told him (and me) that she'll think more about getting a dog when Andy's in the fifth grade, which is a euphemism for "when hell freezes over," but to Andy that just means he has plenty of time to save up enough money. I've suggested a few alternative animals for pets: a penguin, a snake, a poo-flinging monkey, a chicken or a hamster that'll make his room stink like rodent piss. But for him it's chihuahua or bust. Mommy's vote is for the latter.

Tony has been spending every waking moment playing Monster Hunter on his PSP, and he'd even play it in his sleep if we let him. It bothers me to see him wasting his formative years slaying imaginary monsters, so last Monday I very lovingly confiscated his PSP's battery and told him I'd give it back after he read a book of his choice in English. He chose The Cat in the Hat Beginner Book Dictionary, which he chased me around with every day until we finally finished it together on Saturday afternoon. Immediately he went back to putting his young life on hold to spend hours and hours slashing more monsters and collecting bigger and more deadly weapons, so last night I asked him for the battery again, and he gave it up with barely a whimper. After all, there's still Smash Brothers on the Wii and Animal Crossing on the Nintendo DS which he can use to waste his life.

This morning I sent a text message in English to his mobile phone: Your PSP battery is in the top drawer of your desk, inside the blue Oreo chocolate candy box. It he can decode the message, he can have the battery back. The messages will get progressively harder from now on, and eventually he'll have to start answering questions. By the time he reaches junior high school, he'll be decades ahead of his classmates in English ability, and he'll thank me for being such a prick.

I came upon this article by accident. (I hope you don't mean that literally. -ed.)
Don't you realize that although you did your civic duty, you also stopped the practiced skills of an art form. Chikan can indeed be considered an art form. Where else can one find throughout history that an entire culture has tolerated and encouraged the groping of its female population. Video and film industries have sprung from the art of Chikan. Techniques that have been passed down from generations of men to their sons on the groping of females so that the act becomes one of pleasure for both the male and female. Although many women will not admit it, I truly believe that they love the attention of being touched and fondled, not to cause injury but to make women feel loved. For many of these women the anonymous touch of a man's hand rubbing her buttocks with his hands or erect clothed penis is an act of appreciating her beauty. There are millions of Asian females who know that their breasts are small in size, appreciate that Asian males touch and fondle them in respect of their beauty. When a woman's undergarments are lowered as in panties or raised as in a bra, the material is never damaged or torn. That is a rarity. Also very rare is for a female to have her clothes cut off with scissors.

With this new all female trains thing in Japan and new laws, the beauty and spiritual joy of the art of Chikan will soon disappear forever.

Frotterism is not an art form. It's a sex crime, like rape. Nampa, otherwise known as "picking up women," on the the other hand is not illegal and requires some finesse. It also empowers the woman by giving her the choice of shooting you down, but gropers are too cowardly to accept those terms.

Every woman who's accosted on a crowded train is someone's daughter, sister, girlfriend, wife or mother. It makes me happy to give them a safe zone, knowing that I'm doing it from them and for the people who care about them but aren't there. I don't do it because I'm all high and mighty, I do it because I've found that it makes me feel good. The same goes for giving up my seat to someone who needs it. I guess I'm just lucky that being kind to others what does it for me.

Me, I scanned more photos (Tony's birth, B&W photos from my time at Penn State), drank beer and reminisced about my college days. Out of the hundreds of people I knew back then, I can probably name about 15 now.

I can't believe I used to go out in public wearing those enormous Harry Potterish glasses. No wonder I never got laid much back then.

Sunday I was determined to get the kids out of the house to do something fun. As a parent I'm supposed to do that. My wife is a lot better at it though. It was easy to convince Tony to go to Navel Park with me, but try as we might we couldn't convince Andy to come along. He wanted to stay home and play with his friends, who are a bit nutty but good kids. They think it's funny to talk to me all the time in a fake American accent. It kind of makes me want to whack them over the head, but I just go with the flow instead.

Tony and I had fun together at the park. We played catch until his arm gave out, roamed around the tunnels below the roller slide, swung on the skyrope, and climbed the rope and log jungle gym. Afterwards we bought lunch at a food stall, checked out the outdoor tsuri bori lake then went home to make sure Andy was still alive. My wife would be really angry if I left him home alone and he got hit by a car or something. But Grandpa was home and so was his friend's mother so I wasn't too worried.

Yesterday (Saturday) I finally hooked up the flatbed/negative/slide scanner (CanoScan 8400F) that I bought second hand for 8000 yen months and months ago but has been sitting in a corner of my room still in the box. I stayed up till the wee hours of the morning looking through my slides from my year as an exchange student in Ecuador and my black and white negatives from college, and found the negative of the best photo I've ever taken:

Here are some of the photos I took while I was in Ecuador in 1985-86. Unfortunately most of my negatives are still at my parents' house in the US. And really, they don't seem so special anymore now that it's possible to search for the most interesting photos on Flickr tagged "Ecuador" and find hundreds of images better than the ones I took.

While I was upstairs in my habitat home office reminiscing and playing with my scanner, Andy was outside playing MTV Jackass with his neighborhood friends:

I'm well aware that there can't possibly be anyone besides my wife and me who gives a rat's ass, but here's the story anyway.

About 6 or 7 years ago we were in the market for a new washer and dryer. Back then I had a better paying job and money to burn, so I let my wife choose any model she wanted. (Plus, it was her birthday present. How romantic.) With the monthly salary I was receiving back then, it was easy to be generous. She had her heart set on a combination washer/dryer that went for 80,000 yen, so I bought it for her with nary a whimper. It was an exceedingly kind and selfless act on my part. I wanted a separate washer and dryer, and the man in me wanted to put up a fight about it, since if one of them broke we'd still be able to use the other instead of having to replace a single, very expensive dual purpose unit.

Flash forward 2-3 years and the dryer stopped working. Since then we've been air drying all our laundry. I never complained, and the words "I told you so" never crossed my mouth.

Last week, the washer kicked the bucket. Somehow my wife found out–maybe on the Internet?– that Sanyo was admitting a defect in our model and was offering to repair it for free. The repair guy came to our house, did something, left, but it broke again immediately. The second time he visited he told us the motor was shot and we'd be receiving a replacement completely free of charge.

Let me emphasize that last point. Without any hassle at all they offered to replace our old and broken 80,000 yen washer/dryer that had only a one year warranty with a brand spankin' new 110,000 yen model chocked with the latest technology for holy frikkin' completely free, AND they hauled away the old one free of charge. Keep in mind that there's no way I could have afforded to buy a new one, let alone pay to get the old one fixed, and as luck would have it, it turns out we're given a better model than the original on Sanyo's dime. Right now, I could not be happier. Normally I hate doing laundry, but I've already gone through two loads tonight. If I didn't have to work tomorrow I'd stay up all night tossing load after load of my entire wardrobe into the machine.

I must say, the next time I buy a home appliance, I will definitely give whatever the Sanyo version is of said appliance some very serious consideration. I owe them a big one.

Yesterday was a beautiful day and Tony, Andy and I were home. There was no way I was going to let the kids stay inside playing video games (Tony: Monster Hunter for the PSP; Andy: Animal Crossing, Super Mario Brothers, Yoshi's Island, and Bimoji Training on the DS), so I dragged them kicking and screaming to the local park to play catch and wade barefoot in the little man made stream.

There's nothing like the smile on Tony's face when we play catch. I need to put more effort into playing outside with him. It sure beats the zombie-like expression he has on his face when he's under the hypnotic spell of his PSP, and the guilt I feel for letting him zone out like that for far too long. Andy, like me when I was his age, can't catch a ball to save his life so he either watches from the sidelines or goes off to do his own thing. It doesn't bother me in the least that Andy isn't athletic. He likes to make up his own games and enjoys playing with other kids, as long as whatever they're doing doesn't involve ball catching.

While they played together, I foraged through the park for things to take pictures of with my new camera. There aren't too many flowers in the park this time of year, but I did find a few bushes with bees buzzing about. Up a path through the wooded hills in the middle of the park there's a restored 17th century house called the "Old Nakayama Family Residence," designated as a cultural treasure by the Ibaraki Prefectural government. I won't go into details about its history. Basically, it's a big, old house that people come to see and there's some old stuff inside it from that era. I waited with my camera on a tripod for about half an hour for a chance to take an HDR shot with nobody getting in the way.

Before heading home, we stopped off at the little restaurant on the park grounds for some overpriced eats. $1200 yen for two soft ice cream cones and three bottled drinks. My fault for not being able to deny my kids their right to ice cream on a spring day. What a racket they've got going there.

We went home and I made the boys a late lunch of their favorite spaghetti (Prego sauce out of an industrial sized jar bought at Costco). Tony, when you put food in front of him, has to be reminded a hundred times to shut up and eat. Man, that kid is skinny. Afterwards I fell asleep until 11pm, then stayed up till 3am messing around with Photoshop and uploading photos to Flickr. The end.

In other news, our washer/dryer is broken and laundry is piling up, but the good thing is Sanyo recently announced a defect in that model so we're getting it fixed replaced for free. As a homeowner, it feels a bit like winning the lotto.

Tutorials, etc:

• Fake-LOMO Adobe Photoshop Script
• Faking the "Lomo Effect"
• 4 Easy Photoshop Techniques to Make Your Pictures Pop!
• How To Make Digital Photos Look Like Lomo Photography

On Sunday Tony and Andy's elementary school held classes and invited parents to come and watch the last class of the day being conducted. I brought the camera, figuring ya'll might like to see what a schoolroom looks like.

An excerpt from his blog:

Even though I'm a ukulele player I don't own a Hawaiian shirt. It's not like anybody made a rule that if you play the ukulele you have to wear one. I never wanted one so I've never bought one.
But this year I think I'll buy one because I started to want one.

Here's the information I've collected so far:

• Best lenses: Sigma 8mm or Penleg 8mm if I can find it in Japan. Another low-budget choice is the Fisheye MC Zenitar-M 16mm f/2.8 Lens made in Russia.
• Panorama tripod mount: I already ordered a Panosarus. It's the least expensive model I could find that lets you do multi-row panoramic shots, meaning you tilt the camera up to take one series of shots all the way around, then tilt it down to take another, then stitch them all together into a single full 360 degree spherical scene.
• Panorama stitching software: For free there's Panorama Tools, then PTAssembler for $40, or what's considered the best out there, PTGui, which is $130 for the regular version or $245 for the pro version. The latter two are GUIs built on top of Panorama Tools. Another way to go is the combination of Hugin and Emblend, both open source.
• Viewers: There are a number of ways to go: Java, Quicktime, Shockwave, proprietary browser plugin or Flash. Obviously, these days Flash is the best choice, and the most popular Flash viewer is the Flash Panorama Player, which costs $70 for a site license, but there are many interesting free or open source plugins available for it. Another group has developed an open source version recently, and I might look into that one instead.

Flickr user Simon S. has a set of equirectangular photos from Japan with a link to the interactive viewer under each photo.

The reason why I want to get into panoramic photography is because it's getting harder for me to bare my soul in public through podcasts and videos. If I were independently wealthy, I could talk about whatever I want and not worry about what people think, but I'm not and I can't. But still, I want to act as peoples' window into the real Japan, and show you places you might not see even if you were to take a trip here. I'm also hoping I'll be able to use the technology at work to show off schools' facilities on the new version of the Global Daigaku website. Our current site is really showing its age.

Here are the first pics from the new camera. (Click thumbnails to enlarge.) This is how my family spends every night at home before bedtime.

Every store in Shinjuku & Akihabara is sold out of Bimoji Training.

Penmanship means a lot to Japanese. From kindergarten through high school, children spend countless hours in class learning and practicing how to write properly, and even as adults people still take courses in penmanship and calligraphy. Although I'm not Japanese and never will be, I still compare myself to those around me, and everyone–including my kids–have better handwriting than I do, and it bugs me. Every time I have to put pen to paper, I'm ashamed of my chicken scratch that looks like that of a four year old stroke victim with cerebral palsy.

Here's how it works. The program shows you a character on one of the DS's two screens and prompts you to trace it on the other screen in the correct stroke order. When you're done it gives you grades for balance, detail and stroke width along with praise or advice on how to improve, just like a calligraphy instructor. It covers 3,119 characters including kanji, hiragana and katakana and up to six people can keep track of their progress on one DS.

For 3,800 yen it seems well worth the price and I'm going to stop off and buy it on the way home tonight.

The only good thing that comes to mind about living a spartan life limited to home, commuting and work is that it doesn't take much at all to make me happy.

I asked him, "Do you know any bad words in English?" He thought for a second and exclaimed, "Dingleberry!" He likes that word a lot, but I told him it's not that bad. So I asked if he knew any words that would get him smacked if he said them in front of Baba (my mother.) The best he could muster was "Fat girl."

It makes me proud of myself to realize that for the past 10 years I have been so patient and careful of a father that I've never cursed in front of or at my kids. I've never lost my temper when they leave on every goddamn light in the house, I've never threated to kick their asses for goofing off when they're supposed to be getting ready for bed, and I watch my language when I'm playing video games with them. But once they hit their teens and start really screwing up, I wonder how long I'll be able to keep their ears safe.

It smells like a bonfire made from burning tires on a New Jersey beach at low tide on a hot summer day.
Guess which family resturant. Easy question for anyone who's lived in Japan.

When I was growing up, all we ever did was make crank calls and tape record them. It never made headlines, but we laughed ourselves silly listening to them over and over for months.

Link

Here's the original heart-wrenching message:

>>私の知人の三歳の子が急性リンパ性白血病になってしまって、昭和医大に入院してるそうです！
ＲＨマイナスＢ型の血液不足にて手術受けれない状態で、誰かＲＨマイナスＢ型の方いませんか！？
是非協力おねがいします！
１人の幼い子の命がかかっていて、とても危険な状態だそうです！
最寄りの献血センターで献血できるようなので、是非是非協力おねがいします！
分からないことあればいつでも連絡ください！
よろしくおねがいします！！
私の携帯
090-××××-××××
友達にまわしまくってもらって結構です。
是非そうしてください！
なかなかない血液みたいで、私だけの人脈だと間に合わないのでおねがいします！
〇〇　〇〇子!

What I don't get is why a message like this serves as a call to arms to hundreds of people willing to help, but if you stand a 80 year old woman on crowded train, everyone who's sitting down ignores her.

Doors opened to the public at 10 a.m., and for the first hour security officers scanned each person who came in and checked their belongings in a process that kept movement of the long lines at a crawl. Then, about 11 a.m., an order came down to allow the people in without being checked.

Several Dallas police officers said it worried them that the arena was packed with people who got in without even a cursory inspection.

They spoke on condition of anonymity because, they said, the order was made by federal officials who were in charge of security at the event.

Link 

Details are sketchy, but a Philippine woman living in Okinawa claims that she was attacked by two US marines in a hotel on the night of the 17th. Police are investigating, and the two marines have been identified and detained.

Meanwhile, since February 20th military personnel and their family members (over 55,000 people in total) stationed in Okinawa and at Iwakuni near Hiroshima have been forbidden to leave their bases until further notice. I feel no sympathy for them whatsoever, and I completely understand the indignation felt by the citizens of Okinawa. The military either needs make a very, very serious effort to get its act together or leave Okinawa entirely, preferably the latter. At this point, it seems like the entire country is against them being there.

Link

Update: Looks like Asahi got some of the facts wrong. Today it's being reported that the local police are seeking an arrest warrant for only one person in the US Army, and it's being investigated as a rape instead of an attack.

And we all know that the US military isn't going to pull up stakes and leave, no matter how many crimes are committed by its members. The common perception among citizens and politicians from Okinawa is that every time someone in the military commits a crime, US officials offer a token response but nothing ever really changes.

Link

This BBC article has a more level-headed report on the latest incident and how the Japanese media is focusing a disproportionate amount of attention lately on crimes committed in Okinawa by members of the US military. For example, here's something I haven't read on any Japanese news site:

Last year just 46 US military personnel were arrested on Okinawa in connection with criminal cases, a tiny proportion of those stationed there, and that figure was less than half the number five years ago.

• 教育漢字(kyouiku kanji): The 1oo6 characters students must learn by grade 6. Essentially, knowing these characters is a good start, but you're far from finished.
• 当用漢字(touyou kanji): A list of 1850 characters published first in 1946 approved for use in public documents and the media. Many characters that were in use until then were simplified; for example, 學 became 学.
• 常用漢字(jouyou kanji): Last updated in 1981 and the successor of touyou kanji, 1945 characters that basically you ought to know as a literate adult. Used in legal and public documents, newspapers, magazines and broadcast media.
• 新聞漢字表(shimbun kanji hyou): A standard agreed upon among newspapers based on jouyou kanji, but removing some characters and adding others. The link is to a Japanese Wikipedia article, but the explanation and outline that appears there is possibly under copyright and could be deleted from the site in the future.
• 人名用漢字(jin meiyou kanji): Characters approved for use in people's names. As of 2004, when the government had a heck of a time trying to update the list, there are 983 extra characters than can be used in addition to what's already in the jouyou kanji list, or that are variants of jouyou characters, and most of them are really, really hard to read. The only way I'll ever learn them is if I get a chip implanted in my brain someday.

Incidentally, mainland China also simplified their characters sometime after WWII but for obvious reasons they didn't give a rat's ass about how Japan went about doing the same thing, so in many cases the two countries simplified the same characters but in different ways.

Summing up, if you're pretty smart, my guess is that you know around 3,000 characters or more. Multiply that number by a few factors to approximate how many readings you'd need to know for all those characters.

As for me, when reading a novel in Japanese I have to look up an average of five characters per page, and I can get through around 15 pages in 2-3 hours when I'm reading to learn. It's tedious, frustrating, labor intensive, tiring, and makes me feel learning disabled, which is why I avoided serious studying for far too many years.

Black Stripe Theater, a team of independent artists, performers and technicians based in Tokyo, will be performing David Mamet's Pulitzer Prize and Tony-winning play Glengarry Glen Ross (in English) from Friday Feb. 22 through Sunday Feb. 24 at Theatre Iwato in Shinjuku. Tickets are ￥3,000 for adults, ￥2,500 for students or seniors, or you can contact TPR for a pair of free tickets if you act fast.

P.S. Over the weekend another marine was arrested for drunk driving. Okinawans are really getting sick of this crap, to say the least.

Maybe I should change the name of this blog to "Dumbass people in Japanese news."

Link

On the first of this month a 23 year old vagrant used his cell phone to post a message on 2ch saying that he was going to kill an elementary schoolgirl in Chiba Prefecture on Feb 15 at 3pm. As a result, over 15,000 community volunteers and parents in Chiba were mobilized to ensure the safety of children going to and from the nearly 1,300 schools in the prefecture. When the police tracked down the person who posted the threats, he said he wrote the messages because he thought the replies were funny. The authorities disagreed.

Link

Another link, so you can see what a typical 2ch thread looks like.

If you want to see how far and wide his threats reverberated through the net, Google this:  千葉の女子小学生を２月１５日１５時に殺しちゃいます

Link

Link 

So this week, and maybe from now on, I'm going to paraphrase news articles I read in Japanese and provide a link to the original for anyone who wants to read along. I'm not going to make any attempt whatsoever to use high-falootin' words or accurately translate articles.

Anyway, here's the video the boys have been watching over and over lately. They found it on this site, which Tony can navigate through like you wouldn't believe.

I don't understand what democrats see in Hillary. I see someone who will say and do anything to get elected. I don't see her as trustworthy candidate who can win the primary election, or as a president who will unite the country.

And while we're on the topic of not understanding America, when exactly did celebrity meltdowns cross over from the tabloids into daily mainstream news? Chris Crocker was right. Leave her alone already. Every time I see Britney's name in the headlines, I feel like screaming/crying enough to make my mascara run too. What's the attraction? She's mentally ill and needs help, preferably on some remote island in the Pacific. End of story. Whatever hole Michael Jackson crawled into, I hope there's room in there for one more person.

In other news, it snowed all yesterday and it was cold enough to stick on the ground. Very rare. This morning school openings were delayed and I rode my bicycle to the station though treacherous frozen slush. It's days like this I wish my carbon footprint wasn't so small.

The other news is that Tony is one of the lucky few who was able to snag a copy of Smash Brothers Brawl for the Wii and played it almost nonstop all weekend. I played it too but found it to be rather monotonous and unchalleging. Other than the hodgepodge of characters available, it's not offering much new or groundbreaking. It's just another sidescroller; Mario Brothers et. al. revamped and repackaged. I'd rather see Tony reading manga than wasting his youth on that game, but unfortunately bashing bad guys gives little boys a much stronger dopamine rush than learning new kanji. On the bright side, at least he's not shooting heroin.

Every time I see a woman doing her makeup on the train, I wish I could pull a battery-operated shaver out of my pocket and do my face. That's an old joke, isn't it. But today I really did forget to shave.

It got laughs.

I wonder if anyone has ever been seriously injured while doing their makeup on a train. Seems  like there's a strong possibility of poking out an eye with a mascara brush or choking to death on lipstick. Wouldn't that be fun to watch. How much do you want to bet that nobody would help.

"The money simply hasn't come in at the rate that we expected," says the aide. "Florida is a $7 million commitment that we can't meet, and if we did, that leaves us exposed for Super Tuesday, where we have a lot of states and a lot media buys. We had to make tough decisions."

Anybody who advocates federally sanctioned discrimination against homosexuals, the continuation of the war in Iraq, a ban on embryonic stem cell research, and a federal sales tax, and on top of all that believes the world was created in six days despite any scientific evidence to the contrary, seems to me wouldn't make a too good of a president.

Nice guy though. I'd gladly invite him to dinner any day of the week.

Update: This blog's SEO is unbelievable. It's been only 3-4 hours since I wrote this post and I'm #2 in Google for "Huckabee is broke." That just blows my mind.

Dolphin Play Bubble Rings

You have been warned.

Every time I pass this sign, I can't help wondering what exactly a "fetish bar" is and what people do there. Can you order a Tom Collins with a stiletto-heeled kick in the nuts chaser? If you ask for a bottle of beer does the waitress ram it up your ass? Alas, I will never find out. My only fetish is for brainy geek chicks who wear wire rim glasses and can code in languages I've barely heard of.

I don't feel 40. I don't think I look it either. People my age don't look young anymore. They're covered with wrinkles and cellulite and have specks of gray in their thinning hair. But at least they tend to have their stuff together. My stuff is lying in piles around the house. Am I allowed to have a middle aged crisis now? Because I think I've already starting having one. A very quiet one. Mostly. Until right now.

Changing the subject to the subject of this post, a bunch of bloggers who live in and around Tokyo meet at The Dubliners' Irish Pub in Shibuya on the third Wednesday of every month at 7 pm. That's tomorrow. I will be there, and I will drink (but not smoke) and probably moan a little about turning 40 because it stinks, although it's not as bad as the alternative, which is dying.

And if anyone makes fun of me for getting old, I will beat them senseless with my stainless steel walker.

So right after I post this message, I, for the first time in almost a year, will make the two-hour journey home without smoking the three ritual cigarettes I normally do. Nonsmokers won't understand why this is such a big deal, but current and ex-smokers will. The cigarettes you associate with certain places and activities are the the most difficult ones to quit.

If I didn't announce this publicly, I could easily picture myself buying a pack on the way home.

I wish I had something interesting or witty to say, but all I do these days is work, go home, tag base, then go to work again.

Ali Shafeya Al-Moussawi, a special correspondent for the Alive In Bagdad video podcast, was killed on December 14th, 2007, two days shy of his 23rd birthday. Read the full story here , and donating a few dollars to his family won't end all the suffering in Iraq, but it might help out one grieving mother a little. For her, I'll brew myself the next few cups of coffee and send her what I save by not visiting Starbucks.