Archive for May, 2007

Last Weekend in Tokyo

Well, this is it. Yesterday Kai and I had a farewell ramen lunch with Fred and his kids. Then we met up with Maria and Eidan for one last hurrah in Akihabara (we bought gifts for friends in the states, and a pair of web cams, so the boys can see Maria while we’re apart) and Ueno Park. Today we’re re-arranging the furniture in the apartment, back to it’s original configuration. Then we’re headed to Kawasaki for the afternoon - I want to see if can get myself a pair of those glittery gold tabi that you can see in my last post!

On Friday we sent the luggage ahead to the airport, via takkyubin, so I don’t have to wrestle with both bags and boys while on the way to the airport. Then tomorrow, Maria is off the Vietnam, and the boys and are I off to Philadelphia! It’s 14 hours to Chicago, then 2 hours to Philly.

Right now I can’t fully describe how I’m feeling about all this. For now I’ll say that it’s been an exhausting, wonderful, fascinating, sleep-deprived, frustrating, sometimes depressing, really amazing roller coaster ride. Essentially, it’s been five months of life in overdrive, in a foreign language, with a lot of cool things to see and do, and in a tiny apartment with a small boy who never took to sleeping through the night.

I have a big backlog of things to write about. So my blog will still have a Japan focus for another month or two.

I’ll try to write a short post after we arrive in Philly, to let you know whether or not I survived the trip

In My Next Life, I Want to Be A Japanese Construction Worker

Why? Why else - check out the clothes. You can wear puffy pants and glittery gold shoes like a rock star every day for work:

Like many other parts of Tokyo, our neighborhood near Shinagawa station is having a construction boom, so we see tobi (construction) workers all the time. Of course, their clothes aren’t quite as spiffy as those in the catalog photos above, but they’re not too far off. In the winter, when I was walking Kai to kindergarten at the same time every morning, we’d pass this burly guy on his way to work, and he always wore a hot pink tobi outfit.

My favorite part of the outfits are the tabi (toe-shoes). Looking like slippers, they are a far cry from American-style construction shoes. With their relatively thin soles, they also tell you something about Japanese construction sites - they’re tidy enough that you don’t have to worry about something like a stray nail poking your foot.

The tobi clothes are actually much more practical than they might seem at first:

On their wrists they wear a broad and firm wristband called Tekou. This is used not only to wipe off sweat, but also to protect your wrist’s vulnerable arteries when cutting things and to prevent the sleeves from getting into your way when moving around. On their feet they wear Tabi, the Japanese “toe-shoes”. There are all kind of different Tabi-shoes! Unlike the ones you wear with Kimonos, these Tabi-shoes have a rubber sole. Wearing Tabi makes it easy to sense the ground condition for construction workers. In addition to this, they dry easily and are very light. These days, there are even safety Tabi-shoes: with steel toe caps!

Now let’s get to the Tobi trousers: this shape is just amazing! (In fact many Japanese people identify Tobi workers by these special trousers.)

There are various theories why the lower part under the knee is pumped up like a balloon. The main reason, however, seems to be a simple one: the baggy pants make it easy to move, easy to bend, stretch and stride…

Right below the pumped up part, the trousers become narrow again in order to tighten up your calves. Why? Pressing the calves encourages blood circulation and helps you to work longer and to stand for hours without your feet swelling up.

[tags]Japan, construction, clothes, fashion[/tags]

Minami-Satsuma’s 20th Annual Fukiage Beach Sand Festival

This is my third post profiling the places we visited during Golden Week. The first was Yakushima, and the second was Tanegashima.

ふきあげ はま すな の さいてん

After taking the ferry back to Kyushu from Tanegashima, we finished our Golden Week vacation with two days in Kagoshima City. This post is about our half-day trip from Kagoshima to Minami-Satsuma for their 20th annual Sand Festival (that link is for the official site, which is in Japanese, but if you click around you can see some more pictures, including some cool nighttime shots). After the wonderful time we had at the Sapporo Snow Festival in February, this seemed like the perfect contrast.

It was an hour long ride on a packed bus from Kagoshima, which made Kai miserable (Eidan surprisingly handled it just fine). The bus turned out to be the best option though, as there was a huge traffic back-up as we approached the site of the festival, and the driver was savvy enough to take us down some dusty farm roads to get around all the cars. What surprised me however, was that we didn’t end up at Fukiage beach, or any beach at all. The festival instead was in a big lot surrounded by farmland, with no coast in sight. They must have hauled in many truckloads of sand. We asked one of the staff and he said the beach was about a kilometer and a half away. Adjacent to the lot was a large building with a stage, concession stands, etc. I imagine they held it there instead of the beach to take advantage of the amenities. Personally though, I think it would’ve been more fun to have a sand festival on the beach!

The sculptures were amazing. The theme this year was exploration, and the sculptures were grouped by continent: Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America. See the photos and captions above. Fortunately, Kai perked up once we got some lunch in him, and Eidan napped in his stroller (which was preferable to having to spend all our time trying to keep him from stomping on the sculptures). There were two stages with live bands, and a flower show as well, so there was plenty to see for a few hours.

[tags]Japan, Kagoshima, sand sculptures[/tags]

Tire Park

Wednesdays are short days for Kai at school, so I usually try to plan an outing for the boys on Wednesday afternoons. Last week I took them to Tire Park:

This playground, covered completely with sand, is filled with big tires in every combination: dinosaurs reaching to the sky, tire “monsters,” regular and tire swings, bridges, slides, climbing equipment, and loose tires lying everywhere for free play.

The moment we arrived, Kai was off like a shot. He went straight for the giant cement slide, where the kids grab loose tires from the pile at the bottom, go up the stairs on the side, and then slide down on their chosen tires. Eidan was a bit more hesitant, as the multitude of kids running all around was probably a bit overwhelming for him at first. He eventually relaxed and enjoyed himself, but was much more interested in playing in the sand than with the tires.

What makes parks like this in Japan such fun is that they’re so dangerous. You can look at each play area and climbing structure and imagine a dozen different ways bones could be broken. You don’t see places like this in the US (not for the past few decades anyway). But take away America’s lawsuit happy culture, and add in parents who take responsibility for their kids, and then parks like this become plausible. My feet managed to find toeholds on the stacked tires that made up the park’s giant dinosaur, and I climbed about 20ft off the ground; Kai ventured about half as high.

After about 90 minutes of running around like a monkey and climbing on everything, Kai suddenly stopped and coolly declared, “I’m bored, let’s go home.” By then I was also finding it increasingly difficult to keep Eidan away from other kids’ sand toys, so we went to McDonald’s for dinner (the boys’ favorite). Then I took them home to start getting them cleaned up and ready for bed. Mission accomplished.

Note: the Tokyo Families article I quoted above has excellent directions to the park, but I have one additional suggestion: take a cab from the station to the park. Even if you don’t speak Japanese, all you have to say to the driver is “Tiya koen kudasai” (tire park please). It’s easy to find taxis at the station, but you’re not likely to find one to take you back from the park. That way the kids only have to walk one way.

[tags]Tokyo, Kamata, playground, park, tires[/tags]

Some Random Thoughts on Gun Violence

For the past few days this story has dominated the news here in Tokyo:

Japanese police have nabbed a former gangster, ending a more than 24-hour standoff during which the man shot a policeman dead after wounding his own son, daughter and another police officer and holing up in his suburban house.

This would be a big story anywhere, but is even more so here, where gun-related violence is rare. All day yesterday most of the TV stations here placed a box on the top corner of the screen, showing a live feed of the standoff. Over the past several weeks, sensationalistic gun violence in Japan seems to be up:

The stand-off comes a month after a gangster shot a fellow mobster in a Tokyo suburb and hid in an apartment before shooting himself, and another gangster shot dead the mayor of Nagasaki, shocking a country where gun control is tough and shootings rare.

I think what really matters is the point mentioned in the last paragraph of the article:

Gun-related crimes are rare in Japan and on the decline. The number of shootings fell to a record-low 53 last year, with most involving members of organized crime. Of those, 36 were thought to have involved gangsters. Only two resulted in deaths.

The population of the US is about 2.3 times the population of Japan. As a starting point for comparing the two countries, let’s adjust Japan’s number of shootings by population: 53 times 2.3 is about 122. Take a a guess at the actual annual number of shootings in the US? Don’t Google it - take a guess: 10,000? 30,000? Not even close. I couldn’t find numbers for last year, but looking at 2004 and 2005 numbers, it’s about 83,000 annual shootings (not counting suicides, but including accidental shootings - I couldn’t find a breakdown excluding those), with about 12,000 of those being homicides (compared to 2 in Japan last year).

Looking at this table comparing 25 industrialized countries, Japan is at the lowest end of the spectrum for gun violence, and the US is at the highest. Looking at just gun-related homicides, the country coming closest to the US is Northern Island, but the US rate is almost twice as high. The next closest is Italy, and the US rate is over 5 times higher.

I’m not going to hold forth on some simple (or even complex!) explanation for all this. It’s not something I’ve done a lot of research on. But here’s some food for thought:

• Guns are virtually prohibited in Japan. But, if that table I mentioned is correct, Finland has no restrictions on gun ownership, has an even higher rate of gun ownership than the US, but a homicide rate that’s about one-seventh of the US’. So what’s going on is more complex than just whether or not guns are readily available. (I’m not saying the US’ lax gun laws are ok; I’m saying you would have to look at more than just gun laws to fully understand what drives overall gun-related crime).
• For a shooting to count as a homicide, the victim has to die. I heard an interview a while back with a doctor at the U Penn Hospital who had developed innovative surgical techniques for dealing with gunshot wounds that were eventually adopted by the US military. He said what sent the murder rate off the charts, at least in Philadelphia, was semi-automatic pistols, which hit the streets in the 80s. Instead of people coming into his emergency room with one bullet in them, they started coming in with three or more bullets in them, making it exceedingly difficult to save their lives.
• In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, law professor Jack Balkin wrote a thoughtful post on the Second Amendment. He doesn’t formulate any specific form of regulation, but he does make an even-handed, thought-provoking comparison between the legal limits placed on the First Amendment’s freedom of speech guarantees (restrictions often sought by the Right and disliked by the Left) and restrictions on the Second Amendment (usually advocated by the Left and resisted by the Right).
• In the 1980s and 1990s, I recall the gun control debate was often in the public spotlight. But in the age of terrorism, it’s moved way down on the agenda. Death by firearms, at the hands of fellow Americans, is one of the leading causes of death in the US (the only other major cause that’s not a disease is car accidents). Unfortunately, that simple fact cannot penetrate the political minefield that engulfs the gun control debate in the US. Look at how quickly the public policy debate on gun violence receded after the Virginia Tech shootings. Our political process is utterly paralyzed on an issue that should actually concentrate minds like almost nothing else.

Coming Back Early

Our original plan was to return to Philadelphia on June 26, but Maria and I have decided that I should come back early with the boys. So I’ll be flying back with Kai and Eidan on May 28. The main reason is that Maria will be away for most of June on business trips (she’s being sent to the Philippines and Vietnam to evaluate a couple of JBIC projects), and it’ll be easier for me to handle the boys on my own in Philadelphia than Tokyo. Kai will re-join his old class for a few weeks, and he’ll graduate from kindergarten…again! (He graduated from kindergarten in Tokyo in March). Eidan is also old enough now to start in the daycare program at the same school. So I’ll still be working part-time in June, but I’ll be able to go into the office for part of the day.

Also, after having a wonderful time in kindergarten here, Kai is having a miserable time in 1st grade. Kindergarten was mostly playtime and arts and crafts, so it didn’t matter much that he couldn’t speak Japanese. Also, there were a couple boys in his class who spoke Japanese and English, and they helped him out. But now he sits at a desk all day and doesn’t understand most of what’s going on, and none of his classmates speak English. He was supposed to get Japanese lessons, but the school has yet to find a teacher, so nothing has come of that so far (there are some other foreign kids in the class, but they don’t speak English, so they’ve been trying to find a teacher who speaks 3 or 4 languages). If we were going to stay for a year or more, then it would be worth it for him to tough it out, as he’s at the right age where he can learn through immersion. But we’re not here long enough for him to really benefit from the experience. He’s eagerly looking forward to re-joining his old class and seeing his old friends.

What I’m fearing is the 14 hour flight to Chicago, plus the 2 hour flight to Philly, with Eidan, AKA Baby Godzilla. I keep getting flashes in my head of a panicked John Lithgow from the Twilight Zone movie: “There’s a man on the wing of this plane!” But it’ll be Eidan out there, maniacally and gleefully tearing the engines apart with his bare hands. Wish me luck.

New Home For mPicasaIntegration

mPicasaIntegration is no longer available for download on my site. Björn Teichmann now has it, and you can download it from his site. Björn started with my fixed version, and has added some new features. He plans to continue working on it. As I mentioned before, I made some fixes to it after its original author stopped working on it. I decided not to do any further work on it though, as its design is not something I want to stick with (It downloads the images from Picasa and stores them on your server. I’d rather just point to the images on Picasa, which lets me scale the images arbitrarily, and then I don’t have to worry about going over my disk quota either.) Since then I’ve started working on my own plugin, but I probably won’t finish it until sometime after I return to the US (i.e. sometime this summer).

[tags]WordPress, WordPress plugin, Picasa[/tags]

Tanegashima

This is my second post profiling the places we visited during Golden Week. The first was Yakushima.

According to the taxi driver who picked us up after we stepped off the ferry to Tanegashima, it’s an island rarely visited by foreign tourists. I got confirmation of this quickly, as I felt long stares from everyone as I walked down the street. Another clue was the complete lack of any tourist guides written in English (in contrast, they weren’t too hard to find at Yakushima). The local accent was also noticeably different from “Tokyo Japanese.” For example, instead of hearing “kakoī na” directed at the boys by schoolgirls (aren’t they handsome), it was “kakēi na.”

Tanegashima has three towns. We stayed in the largest, Nishinoomote, which is home to the island’s main port. It’s population is about 18,000. In the middle of the island is Nakatane, and then in the south is Minamitane, where guns were first introduced to Japan by the Portuguese. Near Minamitane is the Tanegashima Space Center, which is Japan’s primary satellite launching facility.

While Yakushima’s economy appeared to be a roughly equal mix of tourism and agriculture, Tanegashima seemed to be more dependent on agriculture (and probably the space center). The island’s visitors are mostly Japanese surfers, as there are a number of good breaks all around the island. In fact, we stayed at the Tanegashima Miharusou, which is a surfer’s minshuku (you can think of a minshuku as a ryokan without the meals and attentive service). It had surfing stickers all over the front door, and surfboards lined up along the walls of the lobby.

We arrived in mid-afternoon, so our exploration that day was limited to a short taxi ride down the west coast of the island, to Yokino beach, so the boys could play after a morning of traveling. We were thrilled to have this nice long stretch of coastline all to ourselves. We ended up having the same experience at all 3 of the beaches we visited on Tanegashima. Kumano beach was surrounded by amazing rock formations, and there wasn’t a person in sight. The nearby Chikura caverns had great sea caves to explore. The “animal rock” beach, at the Iwasaki hotel was also great. Although it wasn’t the peak summer season, it was Golden Week (the busiest vacation time in Japan), so I couldn’t get over these great beaches being empty. My only explanation is that Tanegashima is not the easiest place to get to, so people looking for nice beaches probably go to popular destinations in Okinawa, Guam, or Kyushu. It was a real treat to have such wonderful surroundings all to ourselves.

We learned from our experience on Yakushima not to mess around with buses and bicycles, so we went ahead and rented a car for our second and third days on Tanegashima. The second day was all about beaches, and the third day was mostly for the Space Center. Maria particularly enjoyed the Chikura caverns, but for the three little boys in our family (I count myself as the third) the space center was the thing. It’s tagline is “the most beautiful rocket-launch complex in the world.” As you can see in the pictures, there’s probably no arguing with that, as the facility’s buildings nestle in nicely among the hills and beaches along the coast. They had a small but very well done museum, with a focus on rocket engines and how they work (most of the displays were in Japanese, but some also had English, and one of the short movies was available in English). Most importantly for Kai, of course, was the gift shop. Kai has a small collection of various toy American and European rockets, so he was thrilled to get his hands on a toy Japanese H-IIA rocket. I don’t think it came out of his hands for at least the next 3 days.

Good resources on Tanegashima:

• The JNTO web page on Tanegashima.
• The Tanegashima Space Center web site.
• Eddie Does Japan, Tanegashima category: gives a window into life in this far corner of Japan. Written with a great sense of humor.
• Also see the other links in the body of this post.

[tags]Japan, Tanegashima, space center[/tags]

In Search Of… The Kanda Matsuri

[mpiphoto=265,leftclear,scale,640]
On Saturday we wasted a couple of hours trying to find the Kanda Matsuri:

Also known as “tenka matsuri (Shogun’s festival),” Kanda Matsuri is a major festival at Kandamyoujin (Kanda Jinja) Shrine and is one of three major festivals that have been held since the Edo period. As it falls on a year of the biannual main festival this year, the festival presents parades that are more gorgeous than last year. On the day of Shinkosai festival (May 12), a festive parade that features three horen mikoshi, kanko dashi floats, shishi-gashira dashi floats and others walks through 108 local parishes (including Kanda, Nihonbashi, Akihabara and Ote Marunouchi), followed by a cavalcade of samurai warriors, more dashi floats and a samba team.

[mpiphoto=264,left,scale,200]As you can see in the picture above and the video to your left, we did come across one mikoshi (portable shrine), but that was it. We had planned well: we found the Japanese web site with information on the festival, and printed out their detailed route map for the festival. This being a Japanese event, exact times were provided for various locations along the route. We got a late start and would have missed the start by an hour at Kanda shrine, so instead we headed to Akihabara, where we would arrive in time to see everything there.

But when we arrived, traffic was flowing normally on the streets, and there was no sign of the festival, other than a bunch of other people like us, walking around looking confused with maps in our hands, trying to find it. It turns out the Japanese trait of punctuality was being overridden by another penchant of the Japanese: drinking heavily during a festival. Maria participated in carrying a mikoshi once, and she said it was quite painful as the heavy mikoshi slams down on your shoulders as it’s shaken (it’s believed that shaking the mikoshi will bring good luck to the neighborhood). Most get through it by being drunk. And when you’re drunk, you’re usually not too worried about being on time.

We hung around for an hour and one mikoshi came by, and then that was it. We scouted around the corner to see down the road, but nothing else was coming. No more mikoshi, no floats, no one dressed up as samurai - nothing. By then my back was acting up and Eidan was tired, so I took him home for his afternoon nap. Maria, Kai and Maria’s friend Andrea gave up on the festival and headed to Asakusa for the day, as Andrea hadn’t seen that neighborhood yet.

Footnote: In the interests of journalistic integrity, I should point out that I don’t really know if drunkenness had anything to do with the festival not coming through Akihabara on time (or anywhere close to on time) - it’s entirely conjecture on my part.

[tags]Japan, Tokyo, Kanda, Matsuri[/tags]

Used Machine

A shop selling used industrial and medical hardware in Minami Azubu, Tokyo

A shop selling used industrial and medical hardware in Minami Azubu, Tokyo

I came across this shop on the way to Maria’s lecture last night at Temple University’s Japan campus, in Minami Azubu, Tokyo. The place was filled with big, old industrial machines and electronic equipment. I’m a sucker for clunky machines.

Maria’s lecture was great - all about how Japan manages its foreign aid programs, and the changes that are coming next year when JBIC is split apart and reorganized under two different ministries (that’s the Japan Bank for International Cooperation, where Maria is working during our time here).