Nothing But Words
Michael Toppa's Personal Blog
I blog about several totally unrelated topics, so it’s fun when there is the occasional random connection between them. From behind the Nikkei subscription wall:
A small city on the Sea of Japan coast, seemingly far removed from the intense U.S. presidential race across the Pacific, is enthusiastically rooting for Democratic Party candidate Barack Obama.
Its motive is not political. Residents here simply want a U.S. president who happens to share a name with their hometown, and in turn to see their city become internationally known — and perhaps get a boost to its tourism.
The city of Obama suddenly came under the spotlight after a Japanese blog mentioned that there is a Fukui Prefecture city bearing the name of the candidate.
Hoping to boost their city’s profile, a group of residents from Obama, Fukui Prefecture, have launched an “I Love Obama” campaign in support of U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama.
Obama means “little beach town” in Japanese. Reuters had this to say:
“So far we have been unilaterally giving him ‘love calls’ as we have a close affinity with him, although we have not met him,” said Hideki Ikegami, a city official in charge of promoting tourism. “Perhaps Mr Obama has yet to know and feel the real festive mood prevailing here.”
And this from The Guardian:
As the race for the nomination heated up, the town’s tourism office received a stream of calls from locals wishing Obama well. On Super Tuesday, supporters nervously clutched photos of Obama as they watched the results come in at their makeshift headquarters in a hotel, whose lobby is currently home to a large portrait of the candidate.
Obama’s most ardent fans, who include a hotel executive and a couple of farmers, believe their campaign, like that of their hero, is gathering momentum. With his name recognition at an all-time high, they plan to produce hachimaki “victory” headbands - a common campaign accoutrement in Japan - themed lacquerware chopsticks, and manju sweet buns bearing his name and face.
This is the first of several occasional posts I plan to write about my time in Japan last year. Although I blogged a lot about my time in Japan as it was happening, I didn’t have time to blog about everything.
Ikea in Funabashi, Japan
Ikea in Funabashi, Japan
About a week after we arrived in Japan last New Year’s Eve, I was finding it impossible to work comfortably on our rickety dining room table. We were going to be in Japan for only 6 months, so a cheap desk was in order. Where to go for one? I first tried some sayonara sales (expats headed home and selling their stuff) and some used furniture stores (called “recycle shops” in Japan), but didn’t have any luck. The next option is the same one you might think of in the US - Ikea. There are two Ikeas near Tokyo (both built within the last few years), one in Funabashi and one in Kohoku. We decided to head to the one in Funabashi since it’s very close to Tokyo Disneyland. We figured we might catch a glimpse of it as we went by on the 30 minute ride on the Keiyo Line. Eidan munched on Pocky the whole way and got chocolate all over his face, which got a pair of high school girls smiling and giggling at him for quite a while.
Ikea Funabashi is located on the grounds where the LaLaport Skidome (SSAWS) once stood (the massive indoor Skidome represented one of the last gasps of the 1980s Japanese real estate boom, and the dome proved to be financially unsustainable). All I know about Funabashi is what I could see from the train, but it struck me as quite different from other Japanese cities I’ve seen, in that it sprawled - lots of relatively low rise construction spread over a large area. Next to the Ikea is the grim Wakamatsu residential complex, which I believe is public housing. When I say grim, I mean by Japanese standards - the buildings are old and unattractive, but everything is tidy and clean. Across from the Ikea is the massive LaLaport 3 mall, which we didn’t visit, but it’s probably similar to LaLaport 2 in Toyosu (the only mall I’ve ever been to that I actually enjoyed).
What made visiting this Ikea very strange was that it was absolutely identical to the Ikeas I’ve visited in the US. It felt comforting and unnerving at the same time - comforting to be in a familiar environment, but unnerving because it felt really out of place. Visiting a Starbuck’s or a McDonald’s in Japan is just different enough that you don’t get a sensation of deja vu, but not so at this Ikea - it was exactly the same down to the tiniest details, other than the signs being in Katakana.
After an unnervingly, comfortingly familiar meal of Swedish meatballs at the Ikea cafeteria, we quickly found their cheapest desk and desk chair, but since we were so far out from Tokyo the delivery was way too expensive (more than the price of what we were buying). So we put Kai in charge of Eidan’s stroller, Maria handled the chair, and I lugged the desk all the way back on the train. The hardest part was switching lines at Tokyo station, as it’s quite a long walk through the station to the Yamanote Line. It was quite a workout, but that desk and chair served me well for the rest of our time in Tokyo.
Shinjuku Gyoen National Park in April 2007
Shinjuku Gyoen National Park in April 2007
I noticed that it’s been so long since I wrote about Japan that I no longer have any Japan posts on my front page, and we can’t have that (I’m not counting the Japaridelphia post). With temperatures well below freezing tonight in Philadelphia, a look back at some nice spring weather in Tokyo is in order. Undoubtedly one of the most beautiful spots in Tokyo, Shinjuku Gyoen is one of just a few places I took the time to visit more than once during our 5 month stay.
The gardens which are 58.3 hectares in size, and with a circumference of 3.5 km, blend three distinct styles: French Formal, English Landscape and Japanese traditional. The gardens have more than 20,000 trees, including approximately 1,500 cherry trees which bloom from late March (Shidare or Weeping Cherry), to early April (Somei or Tokyo Cherry), and on to late April (Kanzan Cherry). Other trees found here include the majestic Himalayan cedars, which soar above the rest of the trees in the park, tulip trees, cypresses, and plane trees, which were first planted in Japan in the Imperial Gardens… The gardens are a favourite hanami (cherry-blossom viewing) spot, and large crowds can be found in the park during cherry blossom season… The greenhouse… has a stock of over 1,700 tropical and subtropical plant species on permanent display.
Unfortunately I went too early in the season to see the French and English gardens in their glory, but the rest of the park is spectacular in the early spring. It’s acre upon acre of well manicured, immaculate, perfectionist-fetish Japanese landscaping at its finest. Each time I went I had just a couple of hours for my visit, but the park is huge and you could easily spend a very pleasant, relaxing day exploring it.
It’s one of the few public parks in Tokyo that charges an admission fee (200 yen - about $2). They don’t allow people to use frisbees, balls, etc. and no pets are allowed (most parks are referring to as koen, but this one is a gyoen - an Imperial garden). But you can bring a picnic, there’s a restaurant, two tea houses, and at least one snack bar.
If you’d like to visit, check out the Shinjuku Gyoen official web site (English version). For some reason the site doesn’t come up when you do a Google search, which is unfortunate, because it has by far the best map and access guide. To get there, the easiest route for most tourists will be to take the Yamanote line to Shinjuku station and go out the South exit. This is the world’s busiest train station and the the world’s second largest, but don’t be intimidated - just follow the prominent English signs. Turn downhill when you come out of the station. You won’t see the Gyoen entrance at first, but just a minute after you cross the intersection with Meiji-Dori Ave, you’ll see the Shinjuku Gate entrance ahead of you.
Why a volcano for Japan?
Why a volcano for Japan?
I’m sure you’ve seen AT&T’s place name mash-up ads. This one greeted me at my neighborhood trolley stop early in the morning today. If you’re wondering what that lump is where Japan should be, I’m fairly certain it’s not a tumor or a wart - I’m pretty sure it’s a volcano. I guess they’re trying for Mt. Fuji, which actually is a dormant volcano, but I don’t think most people in the US know that (it last erupted 300 years ago). So it struck me as a cryptic choice - when I think “Japan,” “volcano” is not an image that comes to mind. It’s a shame because they could have had a lot of fun with other possibilities: Hello Kitty, Shinto shrine gates, sumo wrestlers, sushi, samurai, bullet trains, Astro Boy, cherry blossoms, geishas, and so on. The real problem is that the ad designers boxed themselves in with their choice of bland gray icons, as so much that is iconic about Japan is wonderfully colorful. What makes Mt. Fuji so recognizable is its white capped peak, but that aspect is lost in the ad’s bland grayness.
Doraemon subbing for Stanford’s copy of The Thinker statue when it was temporarily removed in 2001.
If he were more widely known outside Asia, I would have picked Doraemon for the ad. Here’s a picture I took of him on the Stanford campus about 6 years ago. When the University’s copy of The Thinker was temporarily removed for minor repairs, some enterprising students put Doraemon in his place.
 Our room in the Yakushima Youth Hostel |
 The communal room in the Yakushima Youth Hostel |
A traditional Japanese dinner, served in our room at the Nakamuraya Ryokan - http://www.japaneseguesthouses.com/db/sapporo/nakamuraya.htm
If you travel in Japan, there are a number of different types of places you can stay. In our travels around Japan so far, we’ve tried most of them:
- Ryokan: a traditional Japanese inn - Wikipedia has a good page on ryokans. You’ll sleep on futons on a tatami mat floor, and have a traditional Japanese dinner served in your room. They tend to be pricey but you can sometimes find affordable ones. When we visited Sapporo we stayed at the reasonably priced and very pleasant Nakamuraya Ryokan (pictured on the right). In Kagoshima City we stayed at the Nakazono Ryokan, which was a nice place to stay, but was actually much more like a minshuku…
- Minshuku: in my experience these are similar to youth hostels in the US. Bathroom and shower facilities are usually shared. Meals are not served in your room. What you’ll get for food may vary: some may offer breakfast in a communal room, others may simply offer a communal kitchen where you bring your own food, and some may not have a kitchen at all. During our 2004 trip we stayed at the Kimi Ryokan, but it really should have called itself a minshuku: all the facilities were communal, no meals were provided, and the guests were primarily noisy foreigners. In Tanegashima we stayed at the Tanegashima Miharusou, which was a relatively quiet, slightly rundown, but well run minshuku that catered to the many surfers that visit Tanegashima.
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The Oirase Keiryu Grand Hotel. This is where the conference took place, and it’s where we stayed. The grounds of the hotel, and it’s hot spring baths, were great
Hotels: western style hotels are common everywhere in Japan nowadays, except in the most rural areas. The only major differences from western hotels are that the rooms are typically smaller, and pricing is usually per person, not per room. They’re especially popular with business travelers who want a western style bed, and may not have the time for, or interest in, the amenities of a ryokan. When we visited Aomori in 2004, we stayed at the fabulous Oirase Keiryu Grand Hotel. Normally it’s not the kind of place that would be an option for us financially, but we were fortunate to have the room paid for by the folks sponsoring Maria’s conference.
- Capsule Hotels: these are unique to Japan - it’s kind of like sleeping in a cadaver drawer at a morgue, except there’s a small TV in your capsule instead of a freezer. It’s not the kind of accommodation one is likely to seek when on vacation (unless you missed the last train on a night of drunken revelry, and you don’t have enough yen to take a taxi or stay anywhere else). I’ve never had the experience of staying in one, but Wikipedia has an excellent page, with pictures.
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A room in the Miyanoura Portside Youth Hostel in Kagoshima, Japan
Youth Hostels: I’ve saved these for last, because they’re the best. The Japan Guide site says Japanese youth hostels “…do not differ much from European or American youth hostels.” This could not be further from the truth. American youth hostels are more akin to Japanese minshukus: not always clean and not always quiet. We’ve stayed in 3 youth hostels in Japan (when we visited Nikko in 2004, and two in Yakushima this spring), and they were all immaculate and quiet, with attentive staff. All have at least a communal fridge and microwave, and some provide a communal dinner. They have communal bathrooms and showers, but in my experience they were always very clean. All have doors locked and lights out policies, usually around 10pm, so they’re not good options for nightcrawlers (but traveling with children, we thought it was great). They also offer common areas for the guests, so they’re great places to meet other travelers. In Yakushima, I enjoyed a long conversation (after the family was in bed) with a man from Yokohama who was planning to hike clear across the island. He gave me some good hiking tips and we shared opinions on various Miyazaki films. The youth hostels on Yakushima island are especially worthy of praise. The southern one is very nicely designed (pictured at the top of this post), has nightly communal dinners, the staff organize and lead hiking trips for their guests, and they offer car rentals on the premises. The northern one is more utilitarian (pictured on the right), but is very well run, and offers western style beds.
[tags]Japan, hotel, ryokan, minshuku, capsule hotel, youth hostel, Aomori, Nikko, Yakushima, Tanegashima, Sapporo, Tokyo[/tags]
Tomorrow’s Christian Science Monitor has a fun article on a topic I’ve been meaning to write about, but they got to it first: the difference between men’s Japanese and women’s Japanese. It’s a personal story written by an American journalist working in Japan:
Wherever you go, men and women tend to speak differently. But in Japan, those differences are more pronounced than in many places. Among the multilayered rules of grammar and usage governing spoken Japanese, there also exist underlying concepts of “men’s Japanese” and “women’s Japanese.” By the end of my 2-1/2-year stay there, I had unwittingly become conversant in the latter form.
Like many Western men who spend more than a year in Japan, I learned most of my intonation, expressions, and slang – the things not taught in the classroom – by mimicking a Japanese girlfriend.
I thought my Japanese was fine, while in reality the effeminate, almost childish twang I had been learning made me sound very much like a 20-something, pink miniskirted Japanese woman.
My Japanese isn’t good enough for me to share a specific example of this, but I’ve been immersed in the language long enough to have an ear for the difference in how Japanese men and women speak. It really is a striking contrast. The men typically sound quite gruff and blunt, and the women often speak in an artificially high pitched or even nasally tone.
I’ve been fortunate enough to have spent a good amount of time around both Japanese men and women. But like many male foreigners working in Japan, the article author was in an English speaking office, and was mostly around Japanese women when not at work:
The solution, of course, was to hang out with more Japanese guys. But for me, a freelance journalist with a part-time job and daily Japanese classes to attend, I had little time for new friends.
Besides, Japanese men, unlike their friendly female counterparts, are often inaccessible. They generally work 12 hours at a stretch and afterward go out in tight-knit, impenetrable groups. My girlfriend once tried to recruit a few male coworkers to teach me better Japanese but had little success. They were either too busy or just too exhausted.
My friend Fred, who’s an American living in Tokyo, married to a Japanese woman, went through the same experience as the author. He told me about one night during his first year in Japan, he passed a policeman on the street and offered him a high, lilting “konban wa” (good evening). He said the officer halted him, quickly surmised the situation, and corrected him with a low, gravelly “konban wa!” My friend Chris, who is half Japanese, told me of a female friend who had the opposite problem many years ago: she was in Japan learning Japanese from a bunch of male friends (surly teenage guys to boot), and later had to unlearn a number of Japanese language habits that were very inappropriate for a woman.
So, if you’re learning Japanese, once you get past the basics, definitely make an effort to spend some time learning from someone of the same gender.
[tags]Japanese, learning Japanese[/tags]
This is my fourth (and long overdue) post profiling the places we visited during Golden Week. The first was Yakushima, the second was Tanegashima, and the third was the Fukiage Beach Sand Festival. We also had a couple of misadventures on the trip which I wrote about here and here.
The plaque for this statue reads, in part: “Satsuma, now Kagoshima, produced brilliant, far-sighted men during the Meiji Restoration (1868). In 1865, defying the Tokugawa Isolation Law, 17 courageous young students from Satsuma were smuggled to Europe a
Kagoshima City, with a population of approximately 600,000, is the fourth largest city in Kyushu, the largest southern island of Japan. “It has been nicknamed the ‘Naples of the Eastern world’, for its bay location (Aira Caldera), hot climate and impressive stratovolcano, Sakurajima.” The city is best known for its history in the period surrounding the start of the Meiji Restoration. In violation of the isolation laws preceding the Restoration, 17 students were secretly sent from Kagoshima (known at the time as Satsuma) to study Western technology in Europe and the US (the students are commemorated in the statue above). As a result, many of Japan’s early industrialization efforts were centered in Satsuma. It is also known as the home of the samurai Saigo Takamori, a legendary figure in Japanese history, who led the Satsuma rebellion against the Meiji government. He’s roughly analogous to General Lee in US history, minus the animus of slavery. His last stand was depicted - with great hyperbole - in the movie The Last Samurai.
The city is now known for its shopping districts, local cuisine, tourist attractions, and, of course, the simmering, occasionally ash spewing volcano that dominates the eastern skyline. The outdoor Tenmonkan shopping district has a series of long, translucent roofs, which are there so shoppers can go about their business without worrying about ash getting in their clothes and hair. For the rest of the city, there are ash collection points every few blocks, where residents and shopowners are expected to deposit the ash they sweep up and bag.
The footbath at Dolphin Port mall. It’s a real hot spring with sulpher water that’s good for your skin but very stinky
The central area of the city is dominated by a modern aquarium, the Tenmonkan, the Dolphin Port outdoor mall, and a number of museums, ancient ruins, temples, and statues celebrating the area’s history. The Dolphin Port mall sports a hot spring-fed footbath, which Kai and Maria thoroughly enjoyed. Unfortunately, you don’t see things like this in the US - only in Japan is there complete, mutual trust that everyone will clean their feet properly before using the footbath.
All the food we ate in Kagoshima City was delicious. I remember the night we had sushi especially well, because it was the freshest sushi I’ve ever eaten, and because just a few hours later, I threw out my back.
For our last night in Kagoshima City, I took Kai to see Spider Man 3 at the enormous, modern Amu Plaza, which is probably the only place within a 100 miles where you can really immerse yourself in Japan’s consumer culture (which, believe it or not, surpasses the US’). We were staying across town from the plaza, so we rode on the trams. They aren’t too hard to figure out once you get to know the main roads, even if you don’t speak Japanese. Fortunately, in Japan they show most American movies in English, with Japanese subtitles. Unfortunately, Kai got scared towards the end of the movie when Venom was on the loose, so we had to leave before the movie was over - I still don’t know how it ends 
.
The only part of our visit that didn’t work out was our last half day. It was raining so we decided to cancel our plan to take the ferry over to see the historical sites surrounding the volcano. Instead, Maria and I cobbled together the last of our yen coins so I could take the boys into the aquarium while she tried to figure out where to get some more cash. It was a holiday, and the post office ATMs were unexpectedly closed (I wrote about how all that turned out in this post).
I should re-iterate from my previous post that we enjoyed staying at the Nakazono Ryokan. It’s inexpensive, it has a central location (it’s within walking distance of the Yamakataya bus terminal and the main port), and the man who runs it is very attentive. He even helped us buy our ferry tickets and gave us a ride to the port after I hurt my back. And he speaks English 
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On the trip home Maria and I had idle conversation about someday retiring somewhere on Kyushu. It’s a place of stunning natural beauty, but with a few cities big enough that you can enjoy what civilization has to offer too.
[tags]Japan, Kyushu, Kagoshima City, Sakurajima, Satsuma, Saigo Takamori, The Last Samurai, Meiji, volcanoes[/tags]
Eidan pretending to crash into posts, at the park adjacent to World City Towers in Shinagawa
Eidan pretending to crash into posts, at the park adjacent to World City Towers in Shinagawa
I shot this video of Eidan at the park adjacent to the gargantuan World City Towers residential complex in Shinagawa. From Kai he learned the trick of pretending to bump into a pole and exclaiming “unh!,” as if he’d hurt himself. And here he’s doing it repeatedly. This park was a short walk from our apartment, and during the spring it was a daily destination for Eidan and I in the mornings. We’d play in the park after Maria left for work and Kai left for school, then I’d do our daily shopping at the wonderful Maruetsu grocery store. We’d go home for lunch, Eidan would nap for two hours while I worked, Kai would finish school, the three of us would go somewhere for a few hours, and then be home in time for dinner with Maria.
I enjoy doing write-ups of the parks we visited in Tokyo, but this one isn’t worth much commentary - it’s main attraction was that it was nearby. It’s a new park, and is quite large, but with only a few play structures, and an enormous, smooth gravel area in the middle. Every morning a workman came by to empty the trashcans, and sweep the entire gravel area with nothing more than an old fashioned Japanese broom. The one astonishing thing is that the grassy sections are strewn with rubble. It’s peppered with small pieces of broken concrete and tile, from the recently completed World City Towers. It’s just another idiosyncrasy of the otherwise fastidious Japanese: in so many ways they have the most exacting standards, but when it comes to parks, they’ll just throw grass seed down on top of the rubble and call it a day.
[tags]Tokyo, Japan, Shinagawa, World City Towers, parks[/tags]
I’ve uploaded a minute and a half clip from a show that was on our local cable channel in Tokyo about Kai’s school. Kai makes a brief appearance towards the end of the clip (if the video looks big and blurry when you play it, look for the small arrow in the bottom right corner and adjust the display to “original size”). It’s in Japanese of course, but even if you can’t follow along, you can still get a good sense from the visuals of what the school is like. Sitting next to Kai in the video is his friend Hiroki. Hiroki lived with his parents in Albany, New York for a while, and he went to school there, so his English is quite good. Kai had another friend at the school named Kaito, who also speaks English. Both of them helped Kai out a lot, since he spoke very little Japanese.
In the video, the woman greeting the kids as they arrive is the principal. That wasn’t staged for the video - she’s out there every morning, rain or shine, to hold the gate open and say good morning to everyone as they come in. While the other teachers spoke at least a little English, she didn’t speak any, so my (attempts at) conversations with her were always the most challenging for me.
It was a really great school for Kai, and I’ve written many times before about how much he enjoyed it. The teachers and his classmates were very supportive and understanding, given that he didn’t speak any Japanese at first. But he did learn quickly. One thing that was fun for me was watching him with the kids in the playground after school, and hearing him try to transpose English words into Japanese. There’s actually quite a bit of English that’s been borrowed in Japanese. Once Kai figured out how to transform English words into their “correct” Japanese pronunciation (e.g. “hot dog” becomes “hotto doghu”, apple juice becomes “apploo juicoo”), and once he mastered a few key Japanese phrases, it was amazing how much he could communicate. One of his first Japanese words was “dameh!” which means “stop it!” - a vital playground survival phrase.
The show about the school was on the Minato City channel, as part of a regular series on the local schools. Each year they make their way through all the local kindergartens and elementary schools. It struck me as a really nice way for residents to get a broader sense of their community, and see how their neighborhood school compares to others in the area.
It’s been a long time since I’ve written a pho review. I have a backlog of a few I’ve been meaning to write (two more in Philly and one in San Mateo), and hopefully I’ll get to those soon. But for now I’ll weave my talk of pho with my ongoing talk of Tokyo. Pho is not easy to find in Japan. While the Vietnamese diaspora in Tokyo is big enough to sustain at least a few Vietnamese restaurants, you usually need to go to a specialty shop to get good pho. Thanks to the dazzling pho-king site, I was aware of at least one pho restaurant in Tokyo. Unfortunately, I never made it there - it would have been an excursion to get there from where we lived, and it just never made it to the top of the list. But I did stumble across the Com Pho stand in the basement of the Marunouchi Oazo shopping center, located across the street from Tokyo station. Com Pho is a chain with four locations in Tokyo, but I haven’t been to the others.
I was visiting the shopping center with the family, but couldn’t persuade them to join me for pho. So I sat with them while they ate Chinese food next door, and then I got pho take out afterwards. Like many inexpensive restaurants in Japan, you order at Com Pho by putting your money in a vending machine and pushing the button for the food you want, and then the machine gives you a ticket that you take to the counter. It saves the restaurant staff from spending time behind a cash register. If you want a drink, they have free water, or you can get your own drink from one of the ubiquitous soda machines that are on every block in Tokyo.
When I go to a pho restaurant, I have certain expectations. One of them is that they serve pho. I found myself baffled by the Com Pho menu: it had four choices, and none of them resembled any kind of pho I was familiar with. The staff was not Vietnamese, none of the broths appeared similar to traditional pho broth, and the soups were filled with vegetables like asparagus and broccoli. So, it turned out to be a typical Japanese bastardization of foreign food. Another example is pizza: if you’ve ever had pizza in Japan, you know that they typically put things like mayonnaise, corn, nori (dried seaweed), and Tabasco sauce on it.
I decided to go for the green curry pho. It was actually much more like a Thai soup, with a coconut milk-based broth, ground meat, and lots of basil. For that reason I’m not giving it a rating, since it simply was not pho. But that didn’t stop me from enjoying it. It was quite tasty, and I hadn’t had any Vietnamese or Thai food in the 5 months we had lived in Tokyo, so it was a nice change of pace.
Location: The Marunouchi Oazo shopping center site’s access page has a couple PDFs that show you how to find the shopping center. Com Pho is on the basement floor. The phone number is 03-3216-0564, but be ready to speak Japanese!
