It's been a while since I last blogged and in the meantime I've got a Wordpress account on a more private server, so for those of you who want to read about my Asian travels (beginning next Saturday) here's where:
http://www.morbidcornflakes.ch/thduggies_blog/
It'll probably be even less fancy in design, but give me some time. I'll get content there first and then decide if I want to spend time with interior design.
November 27, 2006
I'm back home. After taking the shuttle bus to the wrong terminal and watching three movies (Vitus, Memories of Tomorrow, Training Day - all well above average airplane fare) and dozing and buying Rivella after landing and opening all the mail I'm more than ready for bed.
November 26, 2006
I hadn't made up my mind whether to attend the new service at the old Oyumino chapel that I used to attend when living in Japan or the regular service at the Honda chapel, but it turned out I didn't need to. My plans all revolved around getting my luggage sent to the Tobu Narita Holiday Inn via takkyubin, but it turned out that because my destination lay outside of Tokyo it would take until tomorrow morning for my luggage to arrive, and that would not do. So I took a taxi to the Tokyo station, lugged my stuff to the Narita express, and took a taxi to the hotel, where I left my stuff and turned around to take a train back to Chiba and then from there to Honda. Instead of shortly after ten I arrived there shortly after twelve. Of course, I had missed the service; I had expected nothing else after the change of plans.
The reason I went to the Honda chapel anyway was the engagement ceremony of Tomoko Sugita and Ian Bibby. In Japanese Christian culture, this has apparently developed as an answer to a traditional but less formal secular type of engagement or betrothal. The vows exchanged at this ceremony concern purity until marriage and the intention of working towards a deeper knowledge and appreciation of one's fiancé(e). In Ian and Tomoko's case it also provided the Japanese church an opportunity to express their support and rejoicing and to throw a party for the two. The wedding is to take place in the USA, so the Japanese church will miss out on that opportunity to throw a party.
I got to do two things I enjoy: take pictures of people unawares and talk to old and new friends. Toward the end of the evening my voice began to wear out a bit from talking over the din, so I welcomed a more quiet discussion with Judith and Matt at the local Coco's family restaurant over a small dinner of onion soup and strawberry granite. Yes, granite - gu-ra-ni-te in katakana syllables, and although I can't find out the origin of the word I can find one or the other recipe, and they all involve frozen fruit and crushed ice. My version included a gelatinous flavorless mass at the bottom of the glass. The texture recalled gritty sherbet, much like frappucino except without the chunky agglomerates that stop up the straw.
Judith drove me all the way to the hotel, much appreciated in the pouring rain. I also enjoyed the conversation - Westerners in Japan rarely run out of topics.
I'm tired and not looking forward to re-packing my stuff tomorrow. All the omiyage is making it heavy and hard to close.
November 25, 2006
Yesterday we visited a customer in Tsukuba, where red, orange, and green trees line the roads at this time of year. The blue sky provided an additional hue in this sea of colors. On the way back we even saw Mount Fuji from afar silhouetted against the sunset.
Today I slept in and spent the morning shopping (all of ten minutes) and sitting in the park next to the shrine the name of which escapes me. At one point I wandered over to the shrine because of the drumming and chanting going on, and watched for a while. I left when little old ladies brought their purses to be passed through the fire and went back to watching kids playing and writing. On the way back I stumbled upon a cute little quarter of back roads full of izakaya (taverns). Too bad I won't get to try any.
I called my friend Hiromi and set out for Futtsu in the early afternoon. The train ride took nearly two hours - just because a town is on the Tokyo bay doesn't mean it's close to Tokyo. I got to see her whole family, though they were busy with the seaweed processing. Not a lot had changed in Futtsu - the Ito-Yokado supermarket in Kimitsu had shut its doors and there was construction going on in Aohori, but the place retains its quiet flavor. Here as on my Thursday travel and in Tsukuba the pampas grass stood tall as a grown man with its soft translucent tufts waving in the breeze - one of the typical autumn sights in Japan.
Back to Tokyo by bus to meet my associates for a dinner without business character at a typical Japanese restaurant, the Inshoutei. It's so typical I had to watch my head all the time. Most of the evening went towards learning rude Japanese like "urusai meshi kue" (shut up and eat) or "gaki" (brat). It speaks for the company and the food (does chicken sashimi count as unusual?) that it was much later than I thought when we left. We parted with plans for T-shirt designs in silly Japanese.
November 23, 2006
It's odd how a long day like yesterday can fit into a short paragraph. Up not long after six, Mister Donuts for breakfast, out of the hotel by eight, into the subway with all the uniformed Japanese kids. Brief training of our associates (with improvised opening and closing speeches expressing my desire for harmonious collaboration and increased sales), lunch at a French restaurant, customer visit, business meeting, ride back to Tokyo by shinkansen with another boxed dinner, this time accompanied with a beer and frozen tangerines and musings of what might happen if it were possible to launch those tangerines out of the train, taxi and check-in around eleven.
I reluctantly set the alarm for five, because today was a Japanese holiday that I wanted to use for a trip to a hot bath my friend Marc-Etienne had recommended. Getting there alone merits a few lines.
I took the metro to Tokyo station and the shinkansen to Atami from there. In Atami, a station on the seaside between two tunnels, I changed to the Ito line, which I took all the way to the terminal station, Izukyuu-Shimoda. By that time I could no longer fight the effects of acute lack of sleep and dozed from station to station. I woke briefly before Izu-Atagawa, a hot spring resort that announces its main draw with billows of steam from wooden superstructures above the springs. (On a side note, the 14th International Colloquium on Scanning Probe Microscopy will take place in Izu-Atagawa - I bet it'll be a particularly hot and steamy session.)
Had I known that Rendaiji would have offered a possibility of getting on the same bus as in Izukyuu-Shimoda, I might have been able to rouse myself and get out there, but instead I just barely missed the bus in Shimoda and got to wander around the sleepy station area for half an hour. The bus driver not only explained to me where to get off, but also was thoughtful enough to draw a map of how to get to the hot bath. I stayed awake through the whole drive, enjoying the patchwork autumn colors (the famed kouyou) of the Izu peninsula at 40 kilometers an hour, and occasionally reading. To my surprise, we passed a youth hostel on the way, the Sanyoso youth hostel - as the directions indicate, 50 minutes by bus from the nearest train station. If you want to see a quiet side of Japan, away from the big cities, this may be a good bet.
A few minutes later we arrived at my stop and a ten-minute walk took me to the Sawada-Koen Rotenburo. The attendant snapped to attention, asked for 500 yen entrance fee (getting there and back cost me around 12000 yen, not counting food), and in reply to my question informed me that up until then he'd had a total of five visitors. The parking lot allows for about twenty cars at most, but their passengers would never fit into the hot bath at once, nor would the one toilet stall per gender suffice. (The writing on the stall says Kitagawa Onsen is also berii guddo - I need to research that.)
I came upon an empty bath, and just as I stripped, I heard this female voice that sounded uncomfortably close. A few seconds later, a tour boat chugged into view, the audio-guide chirping her cheery announcements at a volume that must have nearly deafened the elderly tourists peering up at the steep cliffs atop of which stood yours truly in a changing room. Trusting they didn't carry binoculars, I carried on and lowered myself into the marvellously warm water. The overflow I caused gurgled down the drain, the only sound other than the gentle swish of waves below and some angry-sounding bird. At odds with the weather forecast, the sun even poked through the clouds and warmed the cliffs.
After a while, two guys from Saitama joined me and together we waved to the next tour boat. When a quartet of students from Yokohama with their carefully coiffed shoulder-length metro hairdos (ok, one had a buzz cut) arrived, the bath began to get cozy. I doubt it could fit ten people. The weather was warm enough to pleasantly air-dry (I'd forgotten my towel) with a warm breeze caressing me as I sat leaning against the wooden enclosure overlooking the cliffs and rugged islands. It felt like for once on this trip I'd stepped out of time, enjoying one of the best things creation has to offer (when you help it along with some piping and construction). Unfortunately, the other guys destroyed my notion that hot baths are conducive to a pure mindset of relaxation by trying to peep through what seemed to be holes in the partitioning between the female side.
The four Yokohama striplings left first, and the Saitama guys offered me a ride to the next town, Dougashima, where we explored the jutting peninsula with its overhanging cliffs and its network of cave passages with the central (natural) skylight. The sandy rock made me wonder how many accidents occur each year. The peninsula would make a great backdrop for a detective novel for teenagers.
We had an ice cream together, and then the Saitama guys went on their way, while I ate something a little more substantial and waited for the bus to Mishima. The bus wound its way along the rugged coastline past little villages crammed into tiny inlets and connected to the main road by access roads that would have demanded extreme driving skill had the bus wanted to have a hope of getting down there. Once again, an ideal spot for a retreat, and once again, a youth hostel stands in that area. After that I dozed off for the rest of the two-hour bus ride.
One thing I liked about the highway buses down there was that they indicated coming turns with a flashing sign above the main passageway.
At Mishima, I just missed a shinkansen back to Tokyo, but had I caught that train I would never have noticed that a hole in the clouds revealed a snowy Mount Fuji off in the distance. Today should have been rainy by mid-morning, but for some reason God chose to reward my stubbornness and inflexibility in wonderful ways. Every time I see Mount Fuji, I am reminded why this mountain is so special to the Japanese. In its near-perfect cone shape it towers above all surrounding mountains at almost twice their height, conveying a sense of majesty and authority and - it's odd to say about a mountain - self-confidence that eludes even the higher jagged peaks of the Alps. Even so, it wasn't Mount Fuji that brought tears to my eyes, it was the wasabi peas.
I'd intended to meet a friend this evening, but his mother had fallen sick and so he'd spent most of the day at the hospital. It seems she's already on the upswing. I bought bread and blue cheese at the bakery near the Nakano station where we were to meet, perhaps as a compensation for having discovered that my treasured Hiestand bakery in Harajuku had shut its doors and been replaced by a cell phone store. What is this world coming to? I also bought a bottle of the Beaujolais Nouveau that causes such commotion every year in Japan and can't quite figure out what the hubbub is about. And, obviously in a spending mood, I bought a few CDs, mostly just to get some song other than "Total Eclipse of the Heart" to run through my head all day. Now I can listen to Japanese ska, sung in an English I can only decode with the lyrics sheet.
November 21, 2006
Only in Japan will a taxi driver ask you if you plan to get married soon and provide some grandchildren for your parents. When you say you've got no immediate plans, he'll ask why, and laugh when you say a good woman is hard to find (or keep). He'll tell you he's got two grandchildren, both boys, "yanchabouzu," which means "Zwirbel," I think. "Yancha" means mischievous, "bouzu" refers to the buzz cut that little boys often have.
I didn't get to see Mount Fuji from the Shinkansen, because as so often clouds obscured the peak. In Nagoya we visited a customer, one of those visits I'd rather forget, an absurd moment of getting chewed out over being underprepared (true) because of not answering e-mails (untrue - mine went unanswered). But this is Japan: I can't insist I'm right. I learned another word here: "marunage" - passing the buck or passing the hot potato. Also, "giragira suru," to glare.
On the way back to the station I got treated to the sight of a random guy getting off his bike and relieving himself under a lamppost. I was relieved myself to learn that my Japanese associates also thought this was exceedingly odd.
In Osaka we went for Takoyaki, little bits of octopus heated in batter and basted with a sauce similar to that used for Okonomiyaki (which is still annoying to type). I followed it up with two scoops of ice cream: green tea and Belgian chocolate. Yum!
My feet hurt after a long day of travel. In Europe I'd be carrying even more, but in Japan I can count on a Yukata type robe in every hotel and a toothbrush along with all the standard toiletry. If I didn't object to using BIC razors, I wouldn't even have had to bring that. As it is, I brought only a hairbrush, a razor, and a deodorant for one night's stay.
Midnight - I'm out.
November 20, 2006
We visited a customer in Kurihama, and took a brief walk to the Kurihama ferry terminal afterwards, which allowed me to see in daylight what I'd only seen at night when back in 2001 my Nippon Steel research group took the ferry from Kanaya across the Tokyo bay to Kurihama, final destination Jogashima, an island off the coast of the Miura peninsula, where we ate that fabulous tuna head. I hadn't missed much in the way of scenery back then.
For lunch I had omraisu, omelet rice, which is a heap of rice swaddled in a thin egg omelet with a dab of ketchup on top.
I got my laundry back today. It made me laugh that the cleaner wouldn't accept my pyjama bottoms on account of them being underwear, but accepted the top on account of it being a T-shirt.
Dinner: Yakiniku, grilled meat, in a very Japanese ambiente that suffered only from the background music. There are some places where the taste police should intervene when some guy croons "be my girl" in an affected falsetto to a fidgety backdrop of effete cymbals. Come to think of it, R&B should be banned in most places.
November 19, 2006
One thing I wanted to mention back in Singapore I consistenly forgot, and the hotel here reminded me of it. After 29 years of living with modern contraptions, five of which as an engineer, I have finally discovered that a hair dryer serves wonderfully well as a means of getting the fogged-up mirror in the bathroom back to a useful state. I picked it up in Singapore because my hair's on the long side right now and I didn't want it wet when visiting customers, turned it on, and the thought struck me: "Windshield!" Sure enough, it worked beautifully, although I suspect that most everyone else is already using hair dryers like this and I just never caught on. It might make me look slow, but can't take away the magic of discovery.
For the first time in my life, buying a hair dryer has entered my mind. But I think I'll buzz-cut instead.
Honda station again awed me in its new shininess, a far cry from the sheet-metal contraption it used to be. My favorite: the spacious, functional toilets with toilet paper rolls (not a given in Japan!). Although - but I've already had my rant on toilet paper.
I got to reunite with many friends at Honda chapel, which perhaps explains why I go to the trouble of the 90-minute train ride when there are English services much closer by. I might not always catch the meanings of the hymns, though I can often guess because they're translated from English, I'll catch 20% of the sermon on a good day, and I'll embarrass myself because people will remember my name and I can't manage theirs. Still, I'll recognize faces, friendly faces, and soon be caught up in what's going on. I got a tour through the recently completed Keiyo Team Christian Education Building, where they're starting up a Japanese-language Christian school - very clean and neat but quite a contrast in size to the lavish facilities at YISS. (Shout it from your gut, primal scream style: YISS!)
For lunch Judith and Roberta and I went to the Dohtonbori okonomiyaki restaurant, where we had - you guessed it - okonomiyaki. The word okonomiyaki is a nuisance to type means "what-you-like-grilled," which explains the flexible nature of this dish, but batter, egg, and cabbage form its backbone. Throw it together, flip it on the hot plate, brush sauce on it and add seaweed and the bonito flakes with their sea monkey vigor, and you're ready for a taste of Japan. Judith asked at one point what I liked most about Japan and I had to think on that one. Beyond the pleasures of hot springs and friendship, I think it's the old familiar, the feel of home even if it takes an architectonic jumble to achieve that.
After lunch we drove to the enigmatically named Wel Sunpia, a sports center, for games of volleyball and basketball. I stayed away from the big ball and had a fun time with low-intensity volleyball. We sometimes switched to playing with a beach ball so the elementary school girls could join without fear of life and limb, and I found those games more amusing just because of how the girls were creating chaos and enjoying it. I forgot to take pictures, which now disappoints me, but sometimes looking at life through a lens can lessen the experience and the memories created by it.
I stopped in Chiba for Japanese curry rice (karee raisu), another nostalgic treat I won't likely get for a business dinner. On the train back I read for most the time, but at some point I noticed a small shop like all the other small shops - lit advertisement, crammed into the first floor of a tall but skinny building, lost on some alley - and sensed for a moment the vastness of Tokyo and its innumerable little shops full of Japanese working working working and never amounting to more than a brushstroke of a picture of Tokyo.
A vending machine told me: "Drink Hot Vitamin on a cold day, to make your body and soul WARM." So I did, but it only fulfilled one of its promises.
November 18, 2006
Yesterday was one of those days where I logged more than the usual amount of work hours, but spent most of them on the road. The downside is that I feel unproductive; the advantage, that I get to know my associates better.
We ate lunch at a traditional Japanese restaurant that charged us less for both our meals than mine alone was supposed to cost according to the menu. My associate pointed this out, but the owner insisted, using, of course, the humble form of the verb, that there was no mistake. So I got my fried black-skinned pork at a cut-rate price.
Our customer kept thinking of new measurements for us, when the second one had already proved the concept. The rest was just fiddling with an unrelated part of his experiment that involved us dangerously tilting a UV light source to illuminate the sample.
For dinner we had a smattering of traditional Japanese dishes. In my honor, my associates had chosen a restaurant that served raw ama-ebi (sweet shrimp) - the last time we'd eaten together I'd mentioned liking them. We also had several variations on squid and octopus (did you know that the counter for squid is the same as for a cup of coffee?) and cod roe mixed with hot peppers and baked. Then we enjoyed a horizontal tasting of different types of raw tuna: meji-maguro, hon-maguro, and chu-toro, the latter tasting best to me (not quite o-toro, smyp...), and two of us had some sake (the restaurant let us choose our own cups). My sake-loving associate chose his favorite, takashimizu, which does count as one of the best I've had.
Needless to say, it was a late night. I slept in today; I set the alarm to something past nine and just turned it off and slept on.
After a long process of waking and getting up, I made my way to the Oyumino church's Honda chapel. I once again noticed that in Japanese fashion the cuter the girl, the more incongruent her dress. It's winter, so almost all women are in knee-high cowboy-inspired boots, but they've swapped the skirts down to their quads for tubular shorts of the same length. A girl getting on the train with me typified this fashion for me: heavy-laden with several bags and apparently setting off on a longer trip, she nevertheless wore heels, loose enough that she lost a shoe off her foot on the way down the stairs. Out of her stuffed grey Jack Wolfskin backpack poked a white lace-embroidered umbrella. I wonder if the Japanese think I'm exceptionally happy or exceptionally rude with that smile I can't wipe off my face.
Once at the chapel I met Allen again, the Texan I'd met in February. We got our countries right, but I thought he was C.J. and he thought I was Matthew. Close enough. Actually, he wins: Matthew is a clearly male name.
Soon my friend Mrs. Sato and her daughter Yuka arrived and we entered for the harpsichord / flute / soprano concert. The three women treated us to a wide variety of works from Bach to (salty) Mozart to Japanese traditional songs. To me "Ave Maria" by Giulio Caccini and "Lascia ch'io pianga" by Händel stood out. Flute and soprano provided both gentle harmonies and rich counterpoint - I wouldn't necessarily have paired the two, but it worked well. It allowed for two voices that can suddenly soar in a swell of emotion and send shivers down the spine.
On my way back, I stopped in Chiba for shopping. I had a hard time choosing an appropriate T-shirt for my friend who'd asked for one, and nearly chose one that would have possibly gotten her hurt back in Covington. I'd picked the store where I'd found my Super Salariman toe socks in February 2005, and to my delight, they still carried the brand. On a roll, I decided to also buy underwear and take the lazy way out of my no-underwear laundry dilemma.
I had dinner at Yoshinoya, the trusty cheap standby. Beef on rice and as many cups of green tea as you want.
At another store, I found a shirt shop that had discovered German and French. Maybe I should submit some Swiss German designs. My favorite design said "Der Mond ist aufgegangen, die goldnen Sternlein prangen, am Himmel hell und klar" and underneath in giant letters "NORTHERN IRELAND."
I treated myself to green tea ice cream on my way home, a great way to end the day.
November 16, 2006
I left the hotel before noon and took the subway to the city center with all my luggage. My main objective: to meet a stranger and receive a certain object from this person. I can't reveal the object until next month, when everything has blown over.
Finding the rendezvous proved less of a challenge than schlepping my suitcase up the hill to get there. The rendezvous took place at the brand-spanking new Yongsan International School Seoul, which abbreviated looks like a fusion of two 80's bands: YISS! My contact there took me on a tour of the facilities, and the soccer field made me want to get at it with a ball. I got to peek into some classrooms and the kids seemed to be enjoying themselves, which always makes me vaguely suspicious of whether they're learning something at all. I was raised with the notion that study is serious business. Life is serious business. That's why you've got to eliminate the dross and spend your time doing something worthwhile, like writing a blog.
If you wonder why I'm secretive, blame Diana.
I took a cab to the Hyatt nearby, which showed me once again what ridiculously steep streets Seoul has in some neighborhoods. I wonder how residents manage in snowy conditions.
The KAL limousine bus took me to the airport, though it spent more time shuttling to other hotels in Seoul than driving out to Incheon. I tried to read a bit in Graham Greene's "The Quiet American" once we rolled along more smoothly, but didn't get very far.
I had only eaten an egg salad sandwich since breakfast, so instead of waiting for airplane food I ate a salted mackerel at the airport. I struggled valiantly with the metal chopsticks peculiar to Korea and the tough fish, but finally managed. After I had finished, to my unending amazement and puzzlement, the lady a table across said, "Hashi ga o-jouzu desu ne. O-sakana wa katasou." I still haven't figured out why this lady thought a white dude in a Korean airport would understand any Japanese, nor why a middle-aged Japanese lady would accost a total stranger.
The window seat afforded me a lovely view of Korea by night, albeit through a wispy cloud cover that in its thinner spots scattered the light from below as though it had been moonlight. I also noticed that Incheon airport from above looks like a giant backlit Miffy, or Sam from Sam & Max, depending on your mood. Or maybe a deflated bouncy ball, one of those for kids with two handles on top.
I need to apologize to Boeing. Not all 747-400s shake, rattle and roll after takeoff.
The taxi driver at the Ochanomizu station thought I was odd to hire his cab for a drive of three blocks. I should have let him unload my stuff, but they don't do that here.
The hotel I'm at has a laundry service that accepts no underwear. I'm glad I didn't wear a new change today, because that leaves me with two more - but I'm staying here for five nights, so I need to find some solution if I don't want my attire to become a bit risqué, not to mention chilly.
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