Monthly Archives: February 2008

The Invisible Neighbor

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I’ve used quite a few different textbooks to study Japanese and what’s worked best for me has been the popular Japanese for Busy People. The revised third edition is a huge improvement over the previous edition. It’s easy for self-teaching, clearly written, and builds the language, grounded in every day use. It’s well illustrated and well-designed. I use the kana version which has the exercises written in Japanese. Because of how much I like using the book, I was taken aback by something that I realized: this book is nationalistic propaganda. And I’ll tell you why.

The first chapter helps you introduce yourself and lists several countries and nationalities. I found it odd that Korea and Koreans weren’t listed. I thought that perhaps they were just focusing on English speakers. But they also list German, Chinese and Thai. Perhaps the glossary and supplemental tables in the back would list it, but no. Although, Egyptian and Indonesian are added to this list. At this point I realized this was just a straight up snub. How could Japan’s nearest neighbors not be included in the list of nationalities, nor their country listed? Out of curiosity, I checked other Japanese language textbooks at a bookstore and they all list Korea and Koreans in their chapters on self-introduction. This is a clear case of politics trumping education and common sense.

There is also a map of Japan in the front inside jacket and I found it bizarre that on the map was “Take Is.” Take Island, or Takeshima, is the Japanese name of contested islets called Dokto in Korea.

takeshima?

The dispute is of course more than about this set of rocks, it’s the economic zone of rich fishing and possibly oil and gas around the islets. In any case, South Korea has controlled them since the republic was formed in 1945. And a Korean state probably had claims to them since the Yi Dynasty.

It’s odd to see it on a map of Japanese territories because none of the other islands that Japan has disputes with are on the map. Not the 56 Kuril Islands that Russia controls, nor the uninhabited Senkaku Islands that Japan controls but both China and Taiwan claim. Dokto’s area, at 0.186 km2, is tiny in comparison to these substantially larger archipelagos, and would hardly constitute a pin prick on the map above. What’s more odd is that actual Japanese islands that are much larger and, well, significant, are also not named on the map. We see just their silhouettes. The only conclusion is that the writers of AJALT, the book’s “non-profit” writers just want to send a big middle finger to its western neighbor and make it disappear, except for Dokto. I find it terribly pathetic and petty. And worst of all, it’s academically dishonest.

Museums Around the Palace

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late for the ball

Continuing my museums of Tokyo tour, I decided to venture near the Imperial Palace, at the very center of Tokyo. I visited the Science Museum and MOMAT (The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo), and made a short detour into the Imperial Palace Gardens.

Trotting Around the Palace Gardens

I ventured into the Palace Gardens with a little apprehension. It’s intimidating to approach it. There’s the busy road, the moat, the stone bridge, the imposing wall, the guards, barriers, and no signs of welcome, and no sign of people entering or exiting.

moatwater

Yet I decided to walk up to the gate house, and when no one stopped me I walked past the guards and finally saw a sign that said I was allowed to enter. There was no entrance fee but I was required to carry a thick plastic guest pass that I had to return upon exiting.

Inside were a scattering of foreigners wandering about, an opera house that a former emperor had built for his empress, vast lawns, more imposing stone walls, and gardens. But most surprising were the horse-drawn carriages and cavalry trotting around in Meiji Era uniforms. I think they were exercising the horses. There was a pick-up truck that tailed them in case the horses left behind their business. I’m assuming the carriages were for the royal family if they want to go from one palace to the next, or maybe from their tennis courts to the imperial outhouse.

A History of Bicycles

Before being transported in time to the Meiji Era, I stopped by the Science Museum and was transported to other time periods.

equine bicycle

There were a million little kids running around but they seemed to be concentrated in just a few of the galleries. The most popular were the robot exhibit and the mechanics exhibit. The exhibits were wildly uneven, ranging from high tech displays sponsored by big name corporations to shabby halls of interactive science experiments that looked like high school science fairs. What’s worse is that these exhibits were difficult to understand. Sure my Japanese is far from literate, but I heard lots of kids muttering, “nani kore?” “What is this?”

The highlight of the museum was the Plaza of Bicycles. It was a fantastic collection of bicycles from its early forms as wooden riding toys to the sleek whisps of space-age metal and rubber of today. I loved this exhibit. Click on the picture above for more bikes.

Self/Other

Just down the street from the Science Museum is the The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, or MOMAT. I didn’t get to check out the permanent exhibit. I only had time to look at the Self/Other special exhibit. This was a brilliantly themed collection, drawing in mostly Japanese artists and some Korean artists as well, to explore how the self is expressed in relation to the other. The museum passed out a collection of essays in English about each of the eight subthemes. Every museum should do this. It starts out slow, with nominally interesting pieces, but ends with some inspired videos. There are three highlights.

cont_546_4.jpgMultiple Personalities
The first is a photomontage by Tomoko Sawada called “ID400”. It consists of three panels of ID photos taken not in a studio but in the photo ID booth at her local train station. The public bathroom was her changing room.

For each of the 400 different IDs she made costume, hair and make-up changes, as well as tweaks in her facial expressions, resulting in identities ranging from vacuous teenager to prim office worker to sullen barfly.

In a medium (a photo booth) meant to capture an official identity, Sawada questions what that identity is, and shows how arbitrarily it can be displayed.

Claymation and Voyeurism
takamine_godblessamerica.jpg“God Bless America” is a time-lapse video filming the artist, Takamine Tadasu, and his assistant, while they eat, watch TV, sleep and copulate. In the center of their red living room is a huge mound of clay that they pound and carve into various creatures and characters, making it sing an old recording of “God Bless America” over and over again. I’m not sure what the political implications of this is, other than that the U.S. is a large presence in the every day life of a couple. Regardless of whatever message Tadasu was trying to convey, it was highly entertaining, mixing claymation and voyeurism to elicit a lot of laughter from the viewers around me.

Global Gazes
Kimsooja’s “Needle Woman” is an installation of four videos, one on each wall of a black room. She faces away from the camera while people walk past her on busy streets in four cities around the world: Cairo, Mexico City, Lagos, and London.cont_554_1.jpg

We never get to see the artist’s face. We only get to observe the gaze of the “other” reacting to her. The passers-by of each city had different reactions. On the one extreme were Londoners, who simply ignored her. They briskly walked past without a glance. In Mexico City, the pace was slower and the pedestrians similarly ignored her, but their gaze was downward or away, as if they were trying to not be involved in whatever this woman was doing. In Cairo, she attracted the attention of mostly young men who looked at her directly, talking or laughing, at her or amongst themselves, as they walked by. They were the most aggressive of the four city dwellers. In Lagos, the people also interacted with her but not aggressively. There was a large group of open, smiling children gathered in front of her. Women looked on in curiosity and sometimes stopped to observe her, probably with the same expression that Kimsooja gazed back at them.

I was fascinated to see how different cities gazed upon and interacted with someone doing nothing at all. She was, in fact, just standing and looking at them, making herself the faceless other.

H2
H2 Cafe We can’t close this museum review without a comment on the café. MOMAT’s café, H2, is a posh white affair with a wall of glass facing the Imperial Palace wall and moat. It looked like one of those places where shady art dealers meet. Snobby waiters, 500yen coffee, water served from green bottles, pretentious art photographs suspended on wire hovering above glass bowls of tropical fruit. In short, I loved it. Stop in and make sure not to tip the waiter.

Photo credits. All photos not credited to an artist in the text are by Wind.

iBook iSurgery

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gutting fish 1

Over a year ago, T’s iBook gasped its last breaths. The hard disc drive had died. I guess it happens every few years to every computer. It had never happened to either of us. But it was all good since she just went out and bought a beautiful Macbook. The dead iBook had served us well, functioning as our DVD player, stereo system, as well as the usual computer functions, during our time in England. We had worked it pretty hard for three years.

Last week I dug it out of its grave and gave it a brain transplant. A much bigger brain than it had before. I was surprised at how big and cheap memory has become. It had 40 gigabytes of memory before. Now it’s got 120 gigs, twice as much as my own iBook. Even 120 gigs is now modest. New computers now come in tetrabyes. But I don’t think it will get much bigger. The trend seems to be to have all of your music, photos and documents, as well as the applications to use them, in cyberspace. For instance, you can have all your photos on flickr, and then edit them online. Apple’s newest laptop, the Macbook Air, doesn’t even have a dvd drive, anticipating this trend. Soon computers will just get you online, and all your files and applications will be accessible from any terminal.

So I’ve never done iSurgery before. I hunted down some good instructions on the internet, lured my inner-geek out of hiding, and bought the hard disc drive and some tools that seemed to be designed for dismantling bombs. I got all the supplies from Akihabara, which is the area of Tokyo packed with tech stores. It’s probably the only area of Tokyo that is completely devoid of beautiful stylish women. In fact, I only saw three women there that afternoon. If you’re more comfortable around wires, switches and motherboards than you are around women, Akihabara is where you want to go.

I love tools and electronics. But like Las Vegas it’s good up to a point and then it’s too much; you have to go back to reality. And it’s only like Vegas, except that there’s no gambling, alcohol, and the aforementioned women.

So my science project resulted in:

  • 3 kinds of screwdrivers
  • 1 egg carton
  • 1 iBook
  • 1 hard disc drive
  • 3.5 hours
  • 45 screws
  • temporary loss of sight

Most of it was pretty easy, if you’re ultra careful and organized, except for two steps. Removing the outer case was like prying a glass of cognac from Kim Jong Il’s hand. And unplugging the audio thingy from the motherboard socket was like doing a spleen transplant on a hummingbird.

But it’s done and I saved one computer from the landfill and made one friend very happy to be upgrading from her 10 year old Windows NT, converting one more person to the beautiful happy world of Macs.

The Unlocked Bicycle

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the postman's bike

Japanese postal bike at the Philatelic Museum, Tokyo

If you visit Japan you’ll be surprised to find that people seldom lock their bicycles. And if they do lock it, it usually won’t be locked to anything in particular. The chain might be snaked through the wheel. But that’s it. And that bicycle can be there, usually near a busy train or subway station, for months, and no one will steal it. Really.

But I come from a place where an unlocked bike is as good as gone, and a bike not chained to anything solid just means that the thief will break the lock when he gets home. So even here in Tokyo, out of habit, I lock my bike to a sturdy railing.

While growing up in Southern California, I had two bikes taken out of my backyard, and one bike stolen in the few minutes that I left it outside a store while I ran in to do a quick errand. In Oregon, I had, at various times, a seat, a bike light, and a front wheel stripped from my mountain bike, before it was finally stolen out of the back of my friend’s locked pick-up truck. In those days, it was common to quick release the seat and take it with you, after putting the bike chain through the frame and front wheel.

So, great, you say. Japan, bike heaven. Well, not quite.

A few days ago, after work I went to where I had parked my bike and found that it wasn’t there. I knew it wasn’t stolen. I knew the bike cops took it. Because this is one of the most annoying things about Tokyo: there’s no legal public place to park your bicycle. Some large stations have bike parking lots that are expensive and almost always full. Beyond that, it’s pretty much illegal to park your bike anywhere near a station, or along a busy road, or in the case of my last apartment, right in front of the apartment building.

For a country that does a great job of trying to make everything convenient, the bike parking situation is just maddening. Of course, people park everywhere anyway. And we get periodic little warnings attached to our bikes. But every now and then, someone comes through, cuts all the locks if they’re locked and take all the bicycles to a huge municipal impound lot. That’s what happened to my bike.

I was lucky that I locked my bike in Meguro Ward because the fee to get your bike back is 3,000 yen or about $27. Other wards charge 5,000 yen, which easily surpasses the worth of most bikes.

I went to the impound lot and found a vast multi-storied parking lot filled with thousands of unclaimed bicycles. I explained to the old man working there that my bike was stolen, I mean taken, that day. He lead me to the most recent round-up. I produced my bike lock key to prove that it was my bike. I was directed to the front to fill out paperwork and pay the fine. I had to insert money into a vending machine that produced a receipt. I handed the receipt to another old man who handed it to the clerk.

Finally after much bowing and apologizing and thanking, I had my bike. I went there irate and ready to give them my best outraged attitude. But the old guys were very nice. They apologized for the inconvenience, offered to dispose of my dismembered bike chain, and wished me luck to not get my bike seized again. What could I do? I repeatedly bowed and thanked them for each kindness they showed me, paid up and hoped I never had to go there again.

Clinton or Obama: Wind Makes a Decision

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061216_ClintonObama_xtrawid.jpg

Yes We Can

I’ve been thinking about the world. As usual. Maybe too much. These days I’ve been immersed in the pros and cons, contingencies, cost-benefit analyses, and worst-case scenarios. And I’ve been thinking about the elections in particular. Weighing and breaking down each candidate’s positions, voting record, speeches, electability, media savvy, funding sources, demographic appeal.

And I was going to put the candidates side by side and score them like they were figure skaters. I had already disqualified the Republicans, a bland collection of the same old same old constantly tripping over themselves on their way to a triple turn.

Them

There was Romney, the cookie cutter candidate who was built for media exposure but was exposed as the classic mega-rich Senator who said whatever it took to get elected and tried to spend himself into the Presidency. The Presidency should never be for sale.

There was Guiliani, the archetypal opportunist who was always there at the right time at the right place, but in the end shot himself in the foot, on each toe in fact.

Still standing is Huckabee, an aw-shucks minister from Arkansas, a kinder Christian Fundamentalist, the anti-Bill.

Leading the way is the wounded soldier, McCain, who sold his soul to the devil by aligning himself with Bush even though George and his men mercilessly slandered him eight years ago. How can you trust a man who willingly becomes the pet of his bully?

And most intriguing is Ron Paul, a firebrand, libertarian constitutionalist that even Democrats can love, were it not for the fact that he’s anti-abortion. I love the way he’s been shaking up the right, raising more money than anyone thought possible, attaining folk hero status. I hope he gets a cabinet appointment in the next administration.

Us

Then there are the Democrats, one of the most exciting fields since I can remember. It’s down to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. And it’s close. I liked John Edwards and was sad to see him drop out but wasn’t surprised he didn’t win any states since he’s been out of political office since 2004. I love Dennis Kucinich, the 2003 winner of the Gandhi Award, who wants to create a Department of Peace. Though he’ll probably never win, I hope he keeps running for the Presidency in future elections. His is a voice I’ll never tire of. The rest were the usual candidates you see every four years.

So between Barack and Hillary, who do you choose? Either way, it’s historic. Both are strong charismatic leaders. Both appear to want to do the right thing. Their positions really aren’t that far apart. One touts her experience, the other emphasizes his fresh perspective. Each has had criticisms directed at them. Yet, I don’t think Hillary is that divisive and I don’t think Barack is that inexperienced. I see two great candidates, each with some flaws. They’re both rich, that’s true. It disappoints me that all the major candidates are millionaires, that our government is a rich person’s game. Hillary’s got up to $50 million. Barack has a net worth of up to $5 million. They have skeletons in their closets, made bad voting decisions, said silly things, have questionable friends and allies. Still, you really can’t go terribly wrong with either.

Yes We Can

Until yesterday I was still undecided. I’d been thinking about the world. As usual. Maybe too much.

There was a time when I was a headstrong idealist. I thought a lot back then too, but it was thinking from the gut, from a feeling of following what’s good, what’s right. I didn’t analyze so much as seek the truth. Seeking justice and joy. And inspiration.

I don’t want to calculate anymore. I want to be inspired again. And I want a leader who’s capable of inspiring, stirring people to wake up, stand up, sing out. So I made my decision. And this video made by Will.i.am from the Black-Eyed Peas captures what I feel. Enjoy it.

Credits. Photo by Evan Vucci / AP, Video by Will.i.am