Nothing But Words

In my previous post, I experimented with putting my photos on Picasa. I’ve been posting my photos to my own site until now, but it’s a real chore. Also, I severely hacked my Coppermine installation to make it do some things I wanted, which has made it hard enough for me to upgrade that I haven’t done so. For a long time I was thinking about writing my own photo management application, but never had the time. Picasa’s come along and it does about 80% of the things I’ve been wanting, so I want to start putting my photos there. The trick is getting it to integrate with WordPress.

I looked for a plugin, and found folks discussing the mPicasaIntegration plugin. It’s a plugin that reads the Picasa RSS feed and stores data from it in custom tables, and then caches images as it needs them from Picasa. The only problem is that the plugin’s author and his website vanished from the web a few months ago, and I couldn’t find the code. So I was emailing people who I found were using it, and a kind person sent me a copy. He also informed me that it no longer worked. Google had significantly changed the Picasa RSS feed, which broke the plugin.

The time I normally set aside for blogging has been consumed the past few days by trying to fix it. I have it reading the RSS feed correctly again, but unfortunately some of the data the plugin relied on is no longer in the feed, so some of its features will need to be re-thought. In a few days I should have it working well enough so that at least some of the key features are working. Then I’ll post the code, as I know there are others who have been trying to track down this plugin as well (the author released it under a GNU license, so I don’t think he’ll mind).

View at Picasa The lower level of the Ramen Museum. It re-creates the feel of Tokyo in the 1950s, and is filled with ramen shops.17-Feb-2007 23:30, Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 2.8, 5.40625mm, 0.125 sec	View at Picasa The lower level of the Ramen Museum. The white and red sign for the bakery shop reads “hoomuran beekarii” (homerun bakery).17-Feb-2007 23:32, Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 2.8, 5.40625mm, 0.125 sec	View at Picasa Re-creation of alleys filled with shops in the Ramen Museum.18-Feb-2007 00:19, Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 2.8, 5.40625mm, 0.125 sec
View at Picasa Maria and Eidan – at a ramen shop in Shin Yokohama.18-Feb-2007 01:14, Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 2.8, 5.40625mm, 0.017 sec	View at Picasa Mike enjoys some shoyu ramen with lots of chili oil. If you look closely you can see the sweat.18-Feb-2007 01:32, Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 2.8, 5.40625mm, 0.017 sec

Last Sunday was a rainy day, so we made a trip we’d been saving for a bad weather day: the Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum. The museum section on the first floor is actually much less than what you’d expect based on the description at the page I just linked to. It consisted of a few modest displays, and then a shop selling every kind of ramen related merchandise you can think of.

The lower level is more interesting: it’s a one block, two story re-creation of what Tokyo was like in the 1950s (or, perhaps, a rose-tinted version of what it was like). It has 8 ramen shops, a candy shop, and a game shop. Kai loaded up on 50s-era candies and particularly enjoyed the pop gun game. Unfortunately, it seems that everyone else in Tokyo and Yokohama had the same idea we did on this rainy day, as the place was absolutely mobbed. All the ramen shops had a wait of at least an hour – a wait that we couldn’t ask the boys to endure.

So we left feeling a bit defeated, having visited the Ramen Museum and not eaten any ramen! But on the way back to the train station we stopped at a ramen shop that had no wait, and was really fantastic. I’ve never been a big fan of ramen, but this bowl was delicious. It was shoyo ramen (which means the broth was soy sauce based) with a lot of chili sauce. It made me sweat profusely, causing me to turn into an ice cube when we ventured back out into the cold, wet weather. For me it was a lesson in why spicy food recipes all come from countries with warm climates.

Mike with the Takanawa kindergarten moms. The other guy in the picture doesn’t count – he was the sound engineer. View at Picasa Mike with the Takanawa kindergarten moms. The other guy in the picture doesn’t count – he was the sound engineer.22-Jan-2007 01:00, Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 2.8, 5.40625mm, 0.017 sec

I like to think I’m an easy going guy, and that I like to have new experiences, and that I try to be helpful when I can.

But there are some things I just can’t do.

At Kai’s school, I’m an “isle of man” in a sea of moms. Bringing the kids to school and picking them up is the exclusive realm of moms in Takanawa (we actually live in Kounan, which is the neighboring ward, but the Kounan school was full by the time we arrived, so Kai is at the Takanawa school). The moms are also very involved with school activities. There are at least a few activities at the school each month. Last month the kids recorded a song for the school (see the video below), and so did the moms. Despite my limited Japanese, and my being male and gaijin (foreigner), they have been very nice to me and they do their best to make sure I don’t miss out on/escape from any of the activities. For the recording of their song, they wanted me to sing too. I thought I’d give it a try, and while I can read Hiragana, I couldn’t make out the lyrics on the n-th generation photocopy they gave me. So I didn’t participate in that recording.

But last week they were at it again. This time they were practicing a song they wrote for a party next month, thanking the teacher for her work over the past year (the school year ends in March here). And they weren’t going to let me out of it this time. One of them took the time to transcribe the song in Romaji, so I could easily read the lyrics. I’m not much of a singer, but it was a simple tune, so I was doing alright for the first couple of run-throughs. But then they decided to throw in some dance moves, such as some Rockette-style leg kicks. My Japanese is very limited, but fortunately I knew “dekimasen, dekimasen!” (I can’t, I can’t). They were willing to let me off the hook. I didn’t fully understand the conversation that followed, but I think I ended up agreeing to wear a yellow wig and throw confetti instead.

It reminds me of when I was little and my older sisters would try to see what kinds of crazy things they could make me do before I would snap.

I may or may not post photos from the party next month

Kai and his Takanawa kindergarten classmates singing the school song. View at Picasa Kai and his Takanawa kindergarten classmates singing the school song.22-Jan-2007 00:34, Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 2.8, 5.40625mm, 0.017 sec

Video – Kai and his Takanawa kindergarten classmates singing the school song. View at Picasa Video – Kai and his Takanawa kindergarten classmates singing the school song.22-Jan-2007 00:34

Spam Omusubi, spotted near Ebisu station. It’s my understanding this concoction comes from Hawaii. View at Picasa Spam Omusubi, spotted near Ebisu station. It’s my understanding this concoction comes from Hawaii.17-Feb-2007 02:27, Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 2.8, 5.40625mm, 0.02 sec

This post is dedicated to John S, a regular reader and commenter on this blog. John has a peculiar fascination with Spam (but I don’t mean to imply that he actually likes it). Before I left for Japan, he and I joked about Spam sushi. I told him I doubted anyone would ever create such a heinous thing, but that I would let him knew if I ever saw any. Well, I didn’t come across Spam sushi, but as you can see in the photo, I did come across Spam omusubi (spam inside a rice ball). I didn’t actually dare to try it, but I figured the photo of this banner provided sufficient evidence of its existence (this was outside a convenience store, about a 10 minute walk from the Ebisu Yamanote line station). It’s my understanding that this vile concoction comes from Hawaii. If you’d like to make your own Spam omusubi (or perhaps some omusubi with a more traditional filling), here are some nicely illustrated instructions.

Update: After writing this post I came across retired General William Odom’s recent op-ed in the Washington Post, and the transcript of his recent interview on the Hugh Hewitt show. I highly recommend both. Hewitt is a strong supporter of Bush’s handling of Iraq, and it’s quite amazing to see how efficiently and convincingly Odom demolished Hewitt’s arguments.

This will be my first post since we arrived in Japan that’s not about Japan. Thanks to the “series of tubes” that make up the internet I’ve been keeping up with US politics from here. I’d like to share some thoughts on a few foreign policy matters.

• First, since it’s Presidents’ Day in the US, here are some wise words from Abraham Lincoln that I came across recently. Even though Congress is in no mood to authorize military action against Iran, there are strong indications the Bush administration is nonetheless seriously considering some kind of military strike, so these are words worth keeping in mind:
  

  Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose, and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after having given him so much as you propose. If to-day he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, — ‘I see no probability of the British invading us;’ but he will say to you, ‘Be silent: I see it, if you don’t.’

  The provision of the Constitution giving the war making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood.

  - Abraham Lincoln, letter to William H. Herndon, Feb. 15, 1848 (Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner, had written him arguing that the president as commander-in-chief possessed the right to initiate a war against Mexico without specific Congressional authorization)

• Both Republicans and Democrats in the Senate have behaved shamefully in the current Iraq debate (with a few exceptions: namely Feingold, for recognizing the pointlessness of the anti-surge resolution, Biden, for actually offering a plan of his own, and Hagel and Snowe, for trying to keep the Senate in session until a vote was taken). After years of hammering the Democrats for “up or down” votes in the Senate (where the minority party can block votes), the Republicans have blocked a vote on the Democrats anti-surge resolution. By blocking the vote, the Republicans avoid having to go on record one way or the other as to whether they support the President.

  At the same time, this non-binding anti-surge resolution is at most a side-show. In the latest AP poll, 63% of Americans favor “setting a time-table for withdrawing all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of next year,” yet we are not anywhere near having our Congress debate this question. Instead, the Senate has been debating whether to have a debate on a non-binding resolution saying they don’t very much like the President’s plan to send more troops.

  Despite the Democrats’ decisive victory in November, which was largely based on the public’s frustration with the Iraq war, they are still driven by fear more than principle. Fear of being hit with the “endangering the troops” line if they write a withdrawal timetable into law (i.e. defunding Bush’s open-ended commitment), and fear of having to take responsibility for the outcome, good or bad, if they force the President’s hand. Bush has made it abundantly clear that he will never willingly take our troops out of Iraq, so if the Democrats want to do something meaningful, they have to go after the money. That doesn’t mean pulling the rug out from under troops in the field, but it does mean developing and taking responsibility for an alternate plan.

  The Democrats fears are illustrated by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham’s recent comment that they don’t want to debate funding the war because “If you did have this vote, the radical left would eat every Democratic hopeful for president alive.” Graham and other Republicans are hoping that the Democrats won’t notice that it’s not just the “radical left” that wants the US involvement in Iraq to end in the foreseeable future, it’s a clear majority of Americans. The Democrats have yet to figure this one out. They also haven’t figured out the absurd “defunding the war means endangering the troops” canard, which has become a common Republican talking point and is quickly becoming conventional wisdom. As Glenn Greenwald states:

  This unbelievably irrational, even stupid, concept has arisen and has now taken root — that to cut off funds for the war means that, one day, our troops are going to be in the middle of a vicious fire-fight and suddenly they will run out of bullets — or run out of gas or armor — because Nancy Pelosi refused to pay for the things they need to protect themselves, and so they are going to find themselves in the middle of the Iraq war with no supplies and no money to pay for what they need. That is just one of those grossly distorting, idiotic myths the media allows to become immovably lodged in our political discourse and which infects our political analysis and prevents any sort of rational examination of our options.

  That is why virtually all political figures run away as fast and desperately as possible from the idea of de-funding a war — it’s as though they have to strongly repudiate de-funding options because de-funding has become tantamount to “endangering our troops” (notwithstanding the fact that Congress has de-funded wars in the past and it is obviously done in coordination with the military and over a scheduled time frame so as to avoid “endangering the troops”).

• Steven Clemons at the Washington Note has been closely following the unfolding story of the 2003 overture from Iran on reaching a “grand bargain” with the US, which the US completely ignored. It appears to have been a very serious offer, and it “[put] on the table such issues as an end to Iran’s support for anti-Israeli militants, action against terrorist groups on Iranian soil and acceptance of Israel’s right to exist.” Exactly how the offer was buried is turning out to be a somewhat bizarre story.

  It looks like Powell shelved it because he was deep in working on the North Korea issue, which was the only policy area he had much control over, as his influence in the Bush administration was on the wane at this point. Since his more traditional diplomatic approach did not square with the ascendant neocon vision of Cheney and Rumsfeld, he concluded that if he tried to push for diplomacy with North Korea and Iran at the same time, he would end up shut out of both completely. So he sacrificed possible progress on Iran in favor of hoping to make progress with North Korea.

  And what of Condi Rice? She claims she knew nothing about it, but a former member of her National Security Council says that she must have known about it. And it’s recently been confirmed that Karl Rove and congressman Bob Ney knew about it. Either way this is very bad for Condi Rice: she’s either being dishonest, or – despite being the National Security Advisor at the time – she was considered such a weak or irrelevant player that others were able to keep her out of the loop.

  The larger point here is this is more evidence of Bush’s failed “CEO Model” of the Presidency. The CEO model only works when the President is strong enough to keep his cabinet in line, working toward common goals. Instead, each member of his cabinet has pursued his or her own agenda, often in conflict with others, and the national interest has been lost in the shuffle.

• I will leave you with another Presidential quote. This one is from Teddy Roosevelt, writing during another war:
  

  [The President] should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole.

  Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile.

  To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.

  - President Theodore Roosevelt, 1918, in his essay “Lincoln and Free Speech”

In our neighborhood in Tokyo, the gyoza man is like the ice cream man in the US: he comes down the street in a cute van playing a tune, but he’s got hot gyoza instead of cold ice cream. We ran out to get some the first time we heard him, and his gyoza was fresh and tasty,. The gyoza truck is a variation on the more common and more traditional yaki-imo (baked yam) truck. You can use the audio controls below to hear our neighborhood gyoza truck. (Sorry for the sounds of wind and rain in the recording. He only comes down our street when the weather is bad. My guess is that he thinks folks won’t want to hike to the restaurants that are about a 10 minute walk from here when the weather is bad, but that they will come down to the street corner for some fresh gyoza).

If for any reason the player doesn’t work for you, the MP3 file is here.

For more about yaki-imo trucks, and a (much clearer) recording of what they sound like, see this post at the Japan Visitor site.

This post is mainly for my Japanese 1 classmates from last semester (I hear almost everyone has continued with Japanese 2 this semester – that’s great!). As I mentioned in my post a couple days ago, I’m getting plenty of Hiragana and Katakana practice simply by looking at all the signs I pass by. Just over half the signs I see are mostly Kanji, so I can’t read them, but the rest are mostly Katakana and Hiragana, which I can read. So the pictures in this post are some real life examples of how helpful it is to be able to read these two writing systems. I have additional comments in the photo captions. For the Katakana signs, see if you can figure out the English words they’re based on before reading the captions.

I forgot to mention earlier that this past Monday was National Foundation Day in Japan. The Japan Visitor Blog has an excellent post on this holiday, as well as a video of Japanese Nationalists haranguing everybody passing through Shinjuku station. My impression of this holiday is that, aside from the Nationalists, it doesn’t inspire particularly strong feelings for most Japanese (sort of like Labor Day in the US, which inspires more Americans to make one last trek to the beach than to think deeply about the history and contributions of the American labor movement). In regard to the flags used by the Nationalists in the video, I should point out that swastikas in Japan aren’t strongly associated with Nazism like they are in the US and Europe. I’m not certain about this, but in this context I think the association is with Shintoism and purity, which the Nationalists use to make political implications for things like racial purity (so the connotations may not be all that much better).

Japan’s criminal justice system is getting some attention these days. A new film called “I Just Didn’t Do It” has been released here. I mentioned in a recent post that the conviction rate here is 99%. It turns out I was a bit low with that number: (economist.com article – subscription required)

Now a new film about wrongful arrest by one of Japan’s most respected directors, Masayuki Suo, has just opened to critical acclaim. The movie, entitled “I Just Didn’t Do It”, is based on a true story about a young man who was accused of molesting a schoolgirl on a crowded train—and refused adamantly to sign a confession. Thanks to support from friends and family, the real-life victim finally won a retrial after two years of protesting his innocence, and is today a free man.

The film, which was premièred in America and Britain before opening in Japan, depicts how suspects, whether guilty or innocent, are brutalised by the Japanese police, and how the judges side with the prosecutors. Mr Suo argues that suspects are presumed guilty until proven innocent, and that the odds are stacked massively against them being so proven.

The statistics would seem to bear him out. Japan is unique among democratic countries in that confessions are obtained from 95% of all people arrested, and that its courts convict 99.9% of all the suspects brought before them. Prosecutors are ashamed of being involved in an acquittal and fear that losing a case will destroy their careers. Judges get promotion for the speed with which they process their case-loads. And juries do not exist…

If you want a sense of what it’s like to go through an arrest in Japan, Stippy.com has a three part story by an American who was arrested in Japan and kept a detailed journal of his multi-week lock-up and rounds of interrogation for an offense that would probably not have involved him being locked up at all in the US. Part 3, which I linked to, is the most interesting so I recommend starting there.

If you were to pick a person at random in Japan and compare his life to a random person in the US, the Japanese person has much better odds of having decent housing, decent medical care, and a decent education. It’s interesting that you’d be much more likely to get a fair shake from the US justice system though, even with the many problems the US has in this area.

When I visited Japan in 2004, I met up with a friend of mine who had been working in Tokyo for a year or so. He told me living in Japan was the worst thing for the Japanese language skills he had acquired taking classes in the US. He put in a lot of hours at his job in an English-speaking office, and his circle of friends were Americans. He ended up speaking Japanese mainly just to order food and give directions to cab drivers. At the time I found this hard to believe, but now I find myself having the same experience.

The logical solution would be to try to make some Japanese friends, but taking care of the boys severely limits time for that. My natural social group here is the moms at Kai’s school. They all hang around when school gets out, while the kids play in the school’s playground for a while. I get to practice my Japanese with them a bit here and there, but I spend most of my time chasing Eidan, to keep him out of trouble (Japanese playgrounds are a lot of fun, but – by American lawsuit-happy standards – are really dangerous for toddlers. I’ll probably write more about this later).

Having said all that, I am making advances. I wouldn’t say I’m covering a lot of new ground, but I’m becoming more adept at using the skills I already have. People talk much faster than what I was used to in the classroom, and at first it all sounded like a blur. But now I’m getting better at being able to at least parse out the words I know when I hear people talk. With my own speaking, I can produce some simple sentences naturally, in that I can say them without having to think about the fact that I’m speaking Japanese: asking where something is, ordering food, exchanging greetings, etc. I can put together more complex sentences, but once you start adding adjectives, indirect objects, etc., I have to think about what I want to say before I can say it.

One stumbling block has been dealing with old ladies. Young people generally have no problem understanding my Japanese, but older women I deal with (typically at cash registers) seem to not comprehend even my simple “ie, kekkoo desu” (no thanks) as I try to turn down their offer for yet another pair of chopsticks to bring home with the food I’m buying, as they look puzzled and then stuff them in the bag anyway. I imagine I’d have the same problem with old men, but I don’t encounter them much (you don’t see them in service jobs as often, and, from what I can tell, there aren’t as many of them, as they don’t live as long).

I’m doing a few things to at least maintain my Japanese skills:

• I’m taking a Japanese class that meets once a week. It’s offered by the Minato International Association and cost only 5000 yen for 10 classes (that’s about $40). It’s their “Step II” class – about half of it is familiar from my class at Penn and the other half is new. The teaching style is also quite different: the students in the class are from all over the place, and many don’t speak English, so there is no common “fallback” language for the students. The instruction is almost entirely in Japanese, and the teacher compensates for the lack of a common language by using a lot of visual aids. Just about every new word we learn is accompanied by a picture.
• I’ve finally worked out a good, efficient daily routine, so I’m now starting to squeeze in half an hour a day to study.
• I’m listening to JapanesePod101 podcasts on my iPod while I stroll Eidan back and forth to Kai’s school. I’ve tried out several different podcasts, and JapanesePod101 is by far the best. The lessons are usually fictional stories play-acted in Japanese, and they are often very funny. After listening to the scene they then break down the key lines to analyze the grammar and vocabulary. Highly recommended! You can download the podcasts for free through iTunes.
• I’m keeping up my Katakana and Hiragana by trying to read all the signs I walk by. This is actually a lot of fun – it’s kind of like doing crossword puzzles on the go. The Katakana signs are especially enjoyable, as they’re almost always transliterated English words, but they’re usually changed just enough that it takes some thinking to figure out what the original English word was. I’ve taken a lot of pictures of signs like these and will post some of the best ones soon.