It turns out swings are fun.

Stress stress not sleeping well frustration overcommitment whine whine go get Starbucks Houjicha Latte (tm) want sun go to shrine of guilt dojo only place in Shibuya with public benches want sun and wonder: how did dojo which I had looked forward to going to when in Japan become guilt dojo? I already have mastery of that and am more than satisfied with level of guilt, no need for additional training but it turns out next to the benches of guilt contemplation there is a swing.

It is in the sun.

I can sit on the swing in the sun and wrap my arm around the chain and sip my Starbucks Houjicha Latte Grande Size (tm) but the Starbucks Houjicha (this is roasted tea, the roasting makes it better than your average tea which makes sense because really everything is better roasted) Latte Grande Size, 460 yen please is too hot so the chain is nestled into the crook of my elbow and I rest my head against the chain, it's a friendly chain though not particularly stable or supportive and hold a paper cup full of Starbucks hot milk tea, two things previously anathema to me (1. Starbucks 2. milk and sugar in tea) but all things change, including the facts that I was a person who swung on swings and and then I was not for a long long time.

I carefully set my tea down off to one side.

It turns out swings are still fun.

Maybe I'll get back into iaido again next week. And if not? So be it. I can at least stop by and say a quick hi. It's really quite close by after all.

Eating the Sun (日食)

Love is a burning thing
And it makes a fiery ring
Bound by wild desire
I fell into a ring of fire

I fell into a burning ring of fire
I went down, down, down,
and the flames went higher
And it burns, burns, burns,
The ring of fire
The ring of fire

The taste of love is sweet
When hearts like ours meet
I fell for you like a child
Oh, but the fire went wild

I fell into a burning ring of fire
I went down, down, down and the flames went higher
And it burns, burns, burns, the ring of fire
The ring of fire

And it burns, burns, burns, the ring of fire
The ring of fire
The ring of fire
The ring of fire

Lyrics to "Ring of Fire" by Johnny Cash.

Photos by me.
Camera: Canon Powershot SD300, from circa 2004.

Update:

The last photo was published on the LA Times' home page for May 20th.

The Emperor says...

Go home and die.* "Happy new year."

For those unfamiliar with Imperial Custom, the Palace opens to the plebs on Dec. 23 (Emperor's birthday) and Jan. 2. Or you could avoid the crowds and take a free tour that you can sign up for online, though you don't get to see Their Imperialnesses.

I did not wave a flag because I was carrying a kid on my back. Not being Japanese, there's no particular reason for me to be patriotic. Nor am I particularly inclined towards patriotism - the idea of being a flag-waver in a crowd of flag-wavers makes me a little bit uncomfortable, so I was happy to have an excuse not to.

I don't think that this distance is evidence of cynicism or a lack of sincerity. I can respect the occasion and the Emperor's message of hope for 2012** without needing to conform.

Always a good time to be had in the Heart of the Empire.


*http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn5E6wYZWWM ~ 3:05

**Too bad the apocalypse is this year. Thanks a lot, Mayans.

2012

Totally gorged on new year food.

After the barrage of year-end parties, I just chilled out for the new year itself.

I'm largely satisfied with how things are going, productivity-wise. I should be releasing my first iPhone app pretty soon, really excited about that. I could write for here more often. I have 3 or 4 drafts sitting around that I should push out soon.

I think the one thing I want to work on this year - my new year's resolution, if I have to call it that - is to express what I feel and what I want more clearly. Or at all.

Seen on a hat

...worn by an elderly fellow reading a sports newspaper, dressed for light hiking:

Joe is aiming at

being a Professonal with

active and nice savor

Technically, it's off by a syllable, but I'm going to chalk that up to the difficulties of English pronunciation and call it a haiku anyway.

O, the evanescence of things.

Went to the drugstore a while back to buy some soap. (Which reminds me: I should pick up some shampoo soon.)

I always have trouble finding stuff at drugstores. Not just because I'm in Japan. One set of plastic bottles looks identical to another set of plastic bottles, despite them being wildly different products.

This particular time, I had wandered down several likely-seeming aisles - bath products; cleaning products - with no luck. Before mild frustration turned into nuclear rage, I flagged down a passing store dude (the appropriate word does not spring to mind) who was moving some merchandise around and asked where the soap was at.

He looked down at his laden arms,

I looked down at his laden arms.

His arms were laden with many packages of packages of soap.

"Great! I'll take one of those!"

"Really?" he asked, disbelieving. I do have some theories to explain this reaction, but none of them seem adequate. Ultimately, I remain puzzled.

Anyway, I replied, "Sure, why not?" carefully extracting, Jenga-like, a plastic-wrapped three-pack of of soap. Triumphant, I proudly carried my new trophy to the cashier, paid, and departed.

I frequently gaze upon my prize lovingly - and increasingly fretfully - as my the three-pack becomes two, and then dwindles to one. Will I find it again at the store? Or do I value it more highly because of the poignance of its potential to pass from my life forever, like a drifting cherry blossom?*

My prize:

They're quite serious about their branding.

On the off chance that it was not already abundantly clear to you what the picture was supposed to represent:

Is my memory just bad, or are personal hygiene products just not branded like this in the US?

And best of all, it was totally cheap.

*Blame for anything vaguely resembling philosophical musings in this post can probably be laid at the feet of two semesters of classical Japanese literature.

On the Evisceration and Subsequent Consumption of Cephalopods

So one day in the supermarket they had whole squid for sale, super cheap. And I had a hankering for some pasta con calamari.

So I took them home. They were so cute! How could I possibly resist?

I named the one on the left 'Lunch,' and the one on the right 'Tomorrow's Lunch.'

When I started washing one, some goop started coming out. I figured there would only be a little goop, so I kept trying to rinse it out. Several minutes of goopy futility later, it occurred to me that there was probably stuff inside my future calamari rings.

Even though I'm reasonably familiar with the processes of removing the inside bits of fish and chicken, it took a while to realize that squid is not all calamari rings and waggling tentacles. But what was in there? And how would I get it out?

Fortunately for the advancement of human knowledge, we have the Internet. So I thought I'd share with you - quite graphically - what I've learned.

What you do is this: you grasp the head, and you grasp the body. Then, gently but firmly, you twist and pull.

Got that? Twist and pull.

Which leaves you with your future calamari rings...

...and everything else.

In an ideal world, the connection between the viscera and the head is stronger than the connection between bits and body. This actually worked just fine for the first one, despite the fact that I had caused the goopy thing (liver equivalent?) to spring a leak in trying to wash out the squid. But for the second one, I had to tease it out, working my fingers in and gently separating it from the body. I probably could have just torn it out, since I wasn't planning on using that bit, but it would have been a good deal messier.

Next comes the removal of the head and beak, by hacking, and then by prodding and tugging, respectively.

Then slicing, then flash frying, then yum!

But all this reminded me of Ikacenter, a fantastic restaurant in Shinjuku that I went to last year.

It's a seafood restaurant, with a particular emphasis on squid. 'Ika' means squid, so that came as no surprise.

When you walk in, there are squids in huge tanks that run for about half the length of the restaurant. They jet around placidly, vividly reminding me of the Bloopers in Super Mario. Now, I don't think you can pick which one you want, but at any rate they scoop one out for you and hack off the tentacles, serving them still wriggling in a small bowl. Grab it (some skill with chopsticks is necessary) and dip it in ponzu sauce with grated ginger. Wriggleicious!
Despite my initial surprise, vigorous chewing subdued the thrashing in my mouth.

This is generally a good time to remember that your momma told you to chew 30 times first before swallowing.

Then they served a sashimi course, laid out in the artfully arranged corpse of a red snapper. This included a couple of types of fish I had never eaten sashimi of before, and it was delicious.

Alas, the only photographic evidence is of the sashimi course.

Next came the body of the squid, laid out flat and sliced finely. The dipping sauce was the goop-generator from inside the squid, which we ground into a paste. Again, totally freaky - but yum! I don't even know what to call it. Pâté de foie squid? Pâté de squid gras? French mystifies me.

Now, I figured that was it for Blooper-San. What more could he possibly have to give?

So we moved on to the next course, which was a fish called enzara. This is a fairly uncommon fish - I've only had it the once. It was simmered in a sweet, dark sauce, and, like everything else, obscenely delicious. And I mean it when I say obscene, because this is a fish that looked like it would have been totally at home bursting out of someone's stomach in a froth of blood and guts in Alien. Bulbous, pupil-less yellow eyes and dagger-like teeth make for a critter you don't really want to meet in an dark underwater cave. The pictures I've found of it on the internet don't really do justice to the horror.

Then, unexpectedly, came the squid's coup de grâce.

The head had been cut into four pieces and grilled (or maybe baked, I don't recall). Lightly salted, crunchy. Yum.

And that, finally, was that, for Mister Squid and dinner.

I didn't do anything exotic with mine - the parts that usually get thrown out were thrown out. I don't know if I would even try it if I bought them still-blooping from the fish market. But the unexotic, standard, flash-fried calamari still was pretty darn tasty.

The above + cheddar cheese = comfort food.

Still, you should try Ikacenter sometime. I'd be happy to go again.

Ancestor worship

Today I went to a vaguely church-ish event, which was about, from what I understood, honoring your ancestors.

I have great respect and fondness for my ancestors. Specifically, those from two generations back, all of who are gone, regardless of how much time I spent with them (but not enough, never enough, I know now, even as I repeat the same mistakes with those still here). Those who were born, lived, and died in a different world, a world which I shared briefly with them and already has the warm, misty feeling of "the good old days."

I only met one of my great-grandparents, and my only memories of her are memories of photographs, not of an actual person.

If you asked me, "What did she look like?"

"An old woman in a chair," is all I can tell you.

Of these people, three generations and more removed, I know only the barest of details, names and a two-sentence sketch of their lives.

I do not know them. They are ghosts. They were beloved by people I love. And yet to me, they do not exist.

What is there to venerate of these anonymous ghosts, these decaying black-and-white images of the past?

I can only bring myself to respect the ones I knew, the ones who I have, belatedly, reached some understanding of, if not from my personal experience, but from recognizing the ripples still spreading throughout the lives of those who remain.

Though I do not share the religion of either side of the family, a dream I had a couple of months ago really shook me.

I was at a table with my family and a close friend, R.

R mentioned that he had lit a menorah (the Hanukkah candelabra-like thing) at home, and I ridiculed him for it, since, well, he's not Jewish. And nor am I, and I have no recollection of my father participating in any sort of ritual of his own volition.

Caught up in ridiculing R, I finally realized that the table was lit by a plethora of tea candles, and my father was lighting one from the centerpiece, which was a menorah. (To get an idea of just how Jewish I am, in the dream it was the last day of Hanukkah, but instead of lighting a candle each day, they were snuffing out a candle each day. Oops.)

I gradually became aware of the others seated at the table. My father's parents, one of his aunts, and a good friend and neighbor of my grandparents. Not an exhaustive list, but a fair quantity of those from my father's family who I had grudgingly spent a lot of time with in my childhood. My cynical laughter snuffed out.

Berry murderous.

In the sudden silence, I began to cry. I picked up my own candle and shakily lit it, sobbing, and repeating the word, "sorry," whenever I could catch a breath. They never said a word, only looked at me all the while.

And then I woke up, feeling bereft and unsure of what I was apologizing for. I'm certain it wasn't for the Hanukkah gaffe, none of them were particularly attached to ceremony, that I recall. I think I was trying to apologize for only knowing them as a child, not as a person.

I'm afraid that if I have children, they'll relate to their grandparents in the same way.

Why learn Japanese?

Because when the police pick you up for intervening in a fight between your friend and some random asshole (hereafter known as "asshole"), being able to articulate...

"Asshole kept attacking us respectable folks even though I apologized (without knowing, admittedly, what the hell we were supposed to be apologizing for) and told him we were leaving," while presenting Exhibits

1. bloody mouth 
2. torn shirt 
3. broken glasses 

and sounding like a reasonable human being while asshole is screaming "fuck you, pigs!"

...is priceless.

Also: asshole hit like a pussy.

Circusing

Yesterday I went to the circus.

I am extremely fortunate in that a friend of mine performs in Cirque Du Soleil's Kooza show, and he invited me to come see the show and showed me around backstage afterwards. Backstage was excellent, but I must confess I was still reeling from the show itself.

I haven't been to the circus since I was a kid, unless you count the time I saw a Cirque Du Soleil show in Vegas. The title of that show was O, which could very well have stood for 'over my head.'

Contrary to all my previous circus-going experiences, the tent was quite cozy, with even the furthest row of seats commanding excellent views of the action. And of action there was plenty. A complete collection of circus acts - trapeze artists, tightrope walkers, contortionists, unicycles, you name it - melded with Cirque Du Soleil choreography and costumery.

The clown with a crown! His very existence is anathema
to native Japanese speakers.

But each of these acts are like pearls - beautiful individually, but with a string to hold them all together, exquisite. That string was the clowns, and my friend was their king. No, not metaphorically. He had a crown and everything.

The clowns were the comic relief, the easing of the tension, the breath taken after a death-defying act spiraled to its climax. They were the distraction as costumes, people, and sets were changed, props were set up. Who could possibly spare a moment to glance at people hoisting ropes when clowns are running amuck, hitting people with a nice ribeye steak?

(Upon reflection, the sheer thickness and size of the steak was wildly ambitious for Japan. If it were a real steak, it would probaly cost in the neighborhood of $50 here.)

Over beers afterwards, he told me that there were a number of jokes that they had to rework due to cultural differences. One example was a joke that in North America had been about female empowerment; nobody laughed at it here, so after frantic experimentation they hit upon a variation where avoidance of responsibility and blaming the innocent was the punchline* - then everyone got a kick out of it.

*The original joke was that they would take a female audience member and have her whack one of the clowns in the balls with the much-abused steak. The revised joke involved the king snatching the steak away, hitting the other clown in the balls, and handing it back to her - then, when the victim looked back in indignation, the king would finger the hapless audience member as the culprit. It's a classy show, as it should be.


Also, some of the lines that required audience comprehension were in Japanese. Whether the audience was laughing at them because their actions were funny, they used funny, exaggerated voices, or just because they were foreign clowns speaking in Japanese, was not really clear.

I should also mention briefly that the acts were very sensual, at times stunningly so.

You haven't been to the circus in years. They're not as popular as they used to be. Go check one out instead of just going to the movie theater. It's a great time. If you're in the SF Bay Area, I hear Teatro Zinzani is good. It's on Embarcadero and you've walked by it 100 times. (So have I.)

Also, quit being so down on clowns. Or I will hit you with a dead cow.

15 Minutes of Fame

When the earthquake happened, I was on the way home on the Chuo line. The train had just pulled into Akihabara station when the world went a little crazy.

In the midst of the rocking and rolling, an email arrived on my phone. I imagined friends or family having seen the news on tv and attempting to find out if I was all right. Upon seeing whom it was from - a friend of mine who is a journalist at a major news publication - this idea was reinforced.

I opened the email.

It said, "arr."

DAÑOS SEVEROS Y MUERTE!

I was flabbergasted. For all I knew, the train was about to tumble off the tracks and collapse through the three floors of the station (which I would survive thanks to action hero-like reflexes and brute strength) and all he had for me was a piratical greeting?

I emailed back a rant intended to scorch his soul and fill him with shame for making light of my dire predicament.

He replied, "tell me more."

The results of that were printed in the next day's LA Times. Then it was reprinted all over the place.

It also seemed like a good idea at the time to let my parents know I was not dead. The first thing my father does every morning is sit upon his mighty throne and read the news, so I figured he would be aware of the earthquake and deeply concerned. However, his unhurried reply was, "Yeah, I already read you were alive in the paper. Also," he told me, the Orlando Sun-Sentinel and ABC news wanted to interview me.

Reveling in my newfound popularity, I quickly agreed.

The ABC interview was recorded by parents via iPhone and stitched together by me with iMovie, which I provide here for your entertainment.

Lessons learned:

• I say "um" way too damned much.
• When TV stations tell you they're doing the interview via Skype, yes, it will be video. Shave. Put on a nice shirt.
• Look directly at the camera. Do not permit its medusa-like gaze to turn you to stone.
• Brasil represeeeent!
• It's all too easy to become a whore for attention after that first tantalizing taste.

Easy come, easy go.

Blogging on the go

Half Dome, Yosemite National Park

Usually I don't spend much time blogging - or writing in general - at home. Whether it's due to an abundance of distractions at home, or something psychological, I'm not sure, but regardless the reality of the situation is that I do nearly all of my writing and planning when I am out.

So here's the question: will having the capability to blog on the go result in me actually doing so?

My needs for blogging on the go

A summer festival at Yasukuni Shrine. No wi-fi here!

I have a US 3G iPad in Tokyo. I know of only two cafés in this benighted city that actually provide free wi-fi. So I need to be able to produce an entry without the Internet. Ideally, when I arrive at home and am enfolded in the warm embrace of teh intarwebz, I can practically just hit the publish button and be done with it.

Obviously, this will not always be feasible if I want to use media from the Internet or don't have my research duckies all lined up in a row, and that's ok. I can probably somehow manage to bring myself to do that last 5% at home. Sometimes.

Typing on the iPad

It's quite good. But there are a couple of features that would be really nice.

• A quick undo, similar to on a computer, that scratches the last batch of letters I typed. Backspacing is too slow relative to the amount of mistakes I make on this keyboard. While it can backspace a word at a time, it takes too long for that to kick in.
• A way to delete (as opposed to backspace). I need to replace the first letter of a word often enough that this would save a lot of pain trying to move the cursor to the precise position, or just selecting the word and typing it over again.

Fundamentally, I don't mind making lots of mistakes. But I have to be able to fix them quickly and easily, else it becomes a huge drag on typing speed. There might even be ways to do these things that I haven't figured out yet. I would have mentioned paragraph selection, for example, except I just figured out how to do it right now.

Blogsy

Blogsy is the app I've typed this up in. I haven't seen any other blogging apps for the iPad, excluding the various site-specific apps or doing it directly from their web interfaces. Currently I use blogger, and I don't think there's an app for that. Being able to pull media from your accounts or the Internet at large is brilliant. Switching between display and markup is smooth like butter. There are a few ragged edges, but I have high hopes that they'll be polished. I'm quite satisfied with it so far.

My one wish for the app is related to my lack of an Internet connection:

I want to be able to drag and drop photos and movies from Photos and Videos local to my iPad into the post. I don't know if the public APIs for the photo and video services would permit 3rd party apps to integrate uploading, but if it's technically possible, this app would go from being useful to being essential, in my eyes.

My verdict so far:

I've typed and formatted this post. I'd like to add a picture or two, so we'll see what happens when I get home. It took longer than I had expected, but I attribute some of that to the process of familiarizing myself with the app. Overall, I've got a good feeling about this.

The result after posting it to Blogger is not quite WYSIWYG, but... close. About 10 minutes of tweaking and adding captions (something Blogsy doesn't seem to be able to do yet).

Update: I had a look at the blog on the developer's website, and it seems like they're updating it to add local uploads shortly. I'm excited.