Growing up... still.

Despite another lengthy hiatus away from the keyboard, my mind and heart are constantly flooded with various blog-worthy thoughts and feelings. Tonight is no different, as as I spend another night in a lonely business hotel (on yet another business trip), I finally manage to put pen to paper, so to speak.

Unfortunately, my mind has been such a jumble that, for a while I fear, putting together a decent post for this blog will be difficult. In fact, I too often feel like rambling on about arbitrary subjects rather than trying to be coherent. Such is the way when you begin to feel like life is running you over….

This past year brought several detours to my life. I got married and my wife and I celebrated the birth of our first child. Truth be told, she’ll be our last child as well. As cold as it may sound, we both value our freedom too much to be bogged down with more than one kid to take care of.

The first couple months of being a parent are as hard as I imagined. I remember watching television shows and movies about new parents, "mr. moms" (my hero, Michael Keaton. It all went downhill from there.), talking babies, and reluctant parents. And now, I am one of them, and at times, all of them. Sleeping in 2 or 3 hour intervals, changing diapers, sanitizing everything, and taking care of my wife whose status in the household has been downgraded to milk machine.

If I had thought that being a single working guy in Japan was busy, I could never imagine that becoming a married working dad in Japan to be so much harder. It is though, much more so. The baby demands constant attention; we both breath a sigh of relief when she can sleep more than a few hours without waking up or requiring to be fed. Those moments of relaxation are few and far in between. We aren’t surprised though; it’s the life and behavior of the newborn, after all. I feel very sorry for my wife, as she seems to have absolutely no time for anything, as she is constantly feeding or changing diapers or preparing baths or burping. This weekend she is looking forward to her first haircut and spa treatment in over a year. It will be my first challenge as a dad as well, as I will have the baby to myself for a few hours.

On a side note, this past year has somehow opened my eyes to several masters of literature. Hemingway, Maugham, Dos Passos, Graham Greene, Dumas… to name a few. My usual assortment of train reading doesn’t vary much beyond travel essays and non-fiction but for some reason, I’ve bitten by this bug to catch up on all the classics that I didn’t take the time to appreciate in high school and college. One of the pieces of advice from my father that I will never forget is to “read wildly.”

NOTE: Actually, because of his accent, I never did figure out if he told me to read “widely” or “wildly.” But anyway, his point was just that I should read everything I can get my hands on.

There are two EXCELLENT used bookstores in Tokyo that sell only books in English. They are my two favorite simply because they are the only two that I am aware of at the moment. One is in a rather high-class part of Tokyo and thus caters to snobby expats with swollen pocketbooks. As such, the people that work there have rather long noses themselves, with which they enjoy peering down from. The other is staffed by much more down-to-earth booklovers, so to speak, although the books are not catalogued so it takes a lot more looking to find what I want. The former is heavily stocked; the latter heavy in the value-for-the-money department. Both manage to throw my budgetary cautions to the wind every time I visit them.

In my few years of living abroad, I have managed to find an endless supply of blogs about Westerners living in Asia. Due to the overwhelming quantity, I rarely have the time or fortitude to read all of them on a regular basis, so what happens quite often is that I visit a blog after some time only to find that the author, since my last visit, had moved back to his or her home country. Some of the blogs are simply abandoned, with the last post sometimes dated a year or more ago. Other times, the authors simply say that they’ve gone home, and so-and-so’s blog about trekking around in xyz country in Asia has lost its main selling point. So many of them wonder if and how they can keep the blog going; some of them do, in fact, and continue to blog about life back in Bristol, Toronto, Melbourne, etc, etc.

I am saddened when I think about the same destination for both me and my blog. Going home, the adventure’s over, back to life and reality. Were I to shed a tear, it wouldn’t be for the end of the blog, of course, but rather the return. As one who constantly reveres and lives in the past, it’s hard for me to accept that having a family has resigned me to returning back to the US. Ethnocentricity not withstanding, I don’t think either Hong Kong nor Japan can provide the life that I would want for me and my family that could come quite easily in the US.

A part of me, secretly and shamefully, longs to go back to the days when I was living a carefree life in Hong Kong, making very little money but with time on my hands for so much fun, exploring, and making friends. Hong Kong was the perfect place too, for the wanderer, the foodie, the curious expat, and dabbler in cross-cultural discoveries and disasters.

There is much to say about my life in Japan, but I’ll save it for another time. Working in a traditional Japanese company, being married to a Japanese wife, and just generally being out and about in and around Tokyo (and not to mention all the business trips that have taken me from one end of Japan to the other) provides me with more blog fodder than I can keep track of. A lot of it bad, much of it good, and all of it to be treasured memories when I say my final goodbyes to Asia.

Let me leave this post, then, on this note. For all the doubts and regrets that I have in these past few years, for all the tugging and pulling back and forth of my desires about where to be me and how to be me… there is a happiness that comes to me when I hold my daughter in my arms. Whether it’s the feeling of being a father, of having a family, of a continuation of self and identity, or simply carrying on the genes: I have no idea. It’s something that I am trying hard to put my finger on. My life, as I know it now, seems too convoluted and my sense of judgment too immature and contrived yet to truly know peace but I am hoping it will come.

Research in Japanese means "Sushi"

In November of last year, the Japanese government embarked on a whale research study, which would entail capturing nearly 1000 whales.

Read the BBC perspective here.

A 2004 estimate by the International Whaling Committee put the Minke whale population to be on the order of 184,000, according to Wikipedia (thus needs to be taken with a grain of salt.)

In 2005, the IWC estimated the population to be around 760,000. This I also got from Wikipedia.

The Minke whale is categorized by the The World Conservation Network (aka, the IUCN) as "nearly threatened". I've borrowed this from their website:
"NEAR THREATENED (NT)
A taxon is Near Threatened when it has been evaluated against the criteria but does not qualify for Critically Endangered, Endangered or Vulnerable now, but is close to qualifying for or is likely to qualify for a threatened category in the near future."

Doesn't say much, actually, except that an orange is an orange because it isn't (yet) an apple nor is it a banana (although a change is possible). However, if a network of scientists from around the world tell me that an animal species is dwindling at an even subtly alarming rate, I would tend to want to pay attention to what they say.

Now that we've gotten through all this background, we should probably wonder whether capturing (and thus probably killing) nearly 1000 whales is necessary for research. A handful wouldn't do? Since I am merely an arm-chair cetacean biologist (in the same vein that I call myself an arm-chair oncologist, arm-chair Ku Klux Klansman, and arm-chair Peruvian), I can't really be one to judge.

Probably neither can this guy....

What's really cool is that last month, the Japanese government decided to drop plans for humpback whale slaughtering for commercial purposes... er, research.

"The U.S. asked Japan to freeze planned humpback hunts" for one to two years to support its efforts as chair of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura said."

Read about it here.

My favorite part of the article, in which the Japanese government comments on Australia's opposition to the whaling issue:

"This seems to be a problem of differences in national sentiment between Japanese and Australian culture," Komura told reporters. "It's not a matter that can be solved by appealing to one another through logic."

Let's consider this again... Japan wants to hunt whales in the name of science but... international opposition to the whaling can simply be chalked up to cultural differences and national sentiment. This matter of SCIENCE can't be solved through LOGIC.

Oh, now I understand....

Better late than never

Except for purposes of faithfully serving my company, it's been hard to free up some time at the keyboard. As such, there is some catching up I'd like to do.

This summer, it was discovered that street vendors in Beijing were substituting softened cardboard for minced meat filling for meat buns. For the uninitiated, Chinese meat buns are the East's answer to Italian calzones or English Cornish Pasties except that they are generally steamed rather than baked.

Beijing meat buns.

However, I guess it was all a scam. So says the Chinese government. Apparently, it was also newsworthy enough for the AP to enlighten us with as we sipped our morning cups of coffee and reviewed what was going on in the world. And, so enamored were we with the honesty and integrity of the Chinese government, especially in regards to food and consumer product safety, that I suppose no respectable journalist has second-guessed it. Luckily, I'm neither a journalist nor respectable.

What a boatload of feces. Why would a journalist fabricate a story like this? In order to make the Chinese people look bad in the eyes of the rest of the world? Because of the fact that street vendors lie, cheat, and steal in order to make a profit, even at the risk of the health of fellow Chinese, of women and children? Did he make this up to embarrass the government (at all levels) by highlighting the fact that food safety and health inspections are either fabricated or non-existent in China? Or was he just trying to prove the already overly-demonstrated point that China is developing/trying to develop (translation: people are getting rich/trying to get rich) at a rate faster than the Chinese culture, society, government, and environment can handle?

Gee, we've plenty of valid and proven examples and incidents that do all the above already; no need to make anything up! So, back to the question of "why would some John Doe journalist fabricate a story like this"?

Answer: He wouldn't.

The report claims that this journalist thought up the idea himself of using caustic acid to soften up cardboard, chop it up, add it to fatty minced meat, fill some buns, and get it all on hidden camera. Right. If I had to decide who would be most likely to think up a way to dilute minced meat with readily available garbage, I would most definitely choose some insurgent freelance reporter with a bone to pick and no clear motivation rather than a meat bun hawking street vendor looking to save a few thousand RMB in overhead so he can stock up on coal to heat his shanty and pay his rent.

I would be willing to bet one month's worth of my measly salary that there is some kind of cover-up involved and that journalist is probably already in a gulag or dea... oh, hold on a minute. Be right back. Doorbell just rang... must be the Beijing Public Security Bureau and/or Secret Police.

In other old news....

Some background.

The meat of the story... no pun intended: China Officials deny flood rats on the menu.

Seems fairly simple to draw this out:

Vast amounts of flooding = vast amounts of homeless rats (2 billion, according to Chinese media! And these are just the ones they... um... "caught"... and... um... "counted.") = vast amounts of rat meat made readily available to a culture famous for eating any living creature whose back faces the sun.

Approached from a completely new and arbitrary direction:

People desperate to get rid of rats/surplus of rat meat + street vendors looking for things other than pork to fill their buns.

Chinese authorities denied that evidence of rat meat for sale in markets in southern China. Maybe they should have checked a bit further north.

I am currently on a business trip in Kagoshima, which is on the island of Kyushu and is the southernmost prefecture in Japan. This is the farthest south I have been in Japan; so far, the only noticeable differences between Kagoshima and the rest of Japan is that it is much warmer here (i.e., it’s now nearly the end of autumn and I was sweating just after a 20 minute walk) and the foliage is more reminiscent of the tropics (i.e. I see palm trees, which I don’t see where I live in Kanagawa).

Apparently, this area is famous for pork and thus prompting me to eat a pork dinner. Although I pirated this photo off the internet, this is exactly what I had:

This is called Satsuma Black Pork Tonkatsu. Tonkatsu is a meat fillet that is breaded and deep-fried. It can be any meat, but is traditionally pork. I’m not sure why exactly it’s called Black Pork; the meat is actually white as one would expect. It was delicious although the taste is pretty much the same as regular Pork Tonkatsu.

Satsuma, incidentally, is the historical name for this southern region which includes Kagoshima. Being the furthest south and thus most distant from Edo (Tokyo), Satsuma is known for the Satsuma Rebellion (in addition to black pork) and the ultra-nationalist samurai that populated and ruled the area. These samurai, angered over an edict passed during the Meiji Restoration, which declared the end of their social class, staged a rebellion that was a tactical failure but successfully landed the event in most Japanese history books. Essentially, the samurai were pissed off because the edict also declared the wearing of samurai swords to be illegal. In my reading, both in books and online, there is no mention of the samurais eating black pork; still, people insist that it’s a local delicacy.

On a more cheerful note, here is a photo that I took of a vending machine in Tokyo:

Anyone who isn't a complete stranger to Japan will not be surprised to see beer and alcoholic beverages that are available in vending machines. However, what struck me as different (read: odd) was that one could also buy a meal in a can. The ones in the middle left row are oden, a kind of Japanese snack of stewed root vegetables, tofu, etc. The bottom left row of cans is Japanese ramen noodles, in two flavors.

Ultimately, what's cool about Japanese vending machines is that you can buy hot beverages, which is nice during the winter. I suppose hot Japanese stewed root vegetables or ramen might be just as nice on a blustery winter day.

One thing that I have failed to find (not that I am interested or anything) are vending machines that sell used underwear. Before I came to Tokyo, I had heard that these existed. Sadly enough, the popularity of this product seems to have run its course. Again, ramen might be a suitable substitute in this case.

Lastly, since I am on the subject of vending machines, a parting shot from my hotel:

The only thing missing? A vending machine that sells frankfurters on a bun... with a side of used underwear.

Belly button lint, culturally speaking

I present some other random and not-so-random observations about Japanese people and culture. Warning about keeping your expectations realistic. Will the following be a stimulating investigation with a heavy academic bent? Hmm, doubt it. Strange perspectives and tongue-in-cheek humor (translation: bad writing) that may kill some grey matter and make you laugh to the point where you snort milk out of your nose? Hopefully. You've been warned.

Collected over several months of... ahem... rigorous field analysis.

About bodily contact:

In Japanese culture, physical contact among casual acquaintances or strangers is not really allowed. It can be rather strange and uncomfortable for the touchee.

BUT… the rules are broken when boarding trains. With regards to getting a seat or just getting onto the train, it's every every man, woman, child for him/herself. Pushing, elbowing, and grabbing the side of the door or the top of the door frame to leverage body into the car is the norm.

One cool trick: turning your back to the doorway of the train to “back into” the car – as if it is less intrusive than just walking directly into the car face first.

For women, the rules are back in force once they sit down. Woman shy away when men sit down next to them; seemingly afraid of incidental and even unpreventable contact. Something as minor as brushing your arm or elbow against theirs seems out of bounds for Japanese women. I usually have to sit with my hands on my lap (not resting on my crotch... that might offend their sensibilities), resting on top of my backpack, or out in front near my knees so women don’t think I am trying to feel them up or grab them by pretending to cross my arms in front of my chest (a technique used by Japanese guys). Considering how perverted lots of Japanese guys are, I guess they have good reason to be paranoid but it leaves me feeling just a bit dirty.

About being subservient:

The Japanese need to display subservience at any given moment and at various levels.
Lower managers modify their voices (kind of like what we in the West consider as baby talk) with upper managers. This is accompanied with constant bowing and the shuffling of feet.

Office ladies (a.k.a. secretaries and often, glorified secretaries) with otherwise normal (and oftentimes amazingly husky) voices speak with a timbre reminiscent of the 3rd grade or perhaps Shirley Temple. Again, imagine baby talk, but in an office environment. Office ladies, or OLs, also usually wear black shoes (no heels) and black stockings that cover their calves. My guess is that they are not allowed to look sexy in any way whatsoever as this would be a distraction for the male occupants of the office, and that my friends, would be an indication of the sway of sexual power that women have over men. Generally though, I wouldn't think it makes a big difference to the guys, as they are usually fantasizing about digitally-created bimbos, school girls, and tentacle sex.

Note to reader: the Japanese have an odd fascination with sexual intercourse involving a human and a tentacled partner, preferably a giant octopus or squid. This has been portrayed in Japanese wood block prints from the 18th and early 19th centuries, so I am not making this up.

The word “to arrive" or "to come” – mairimasu vs kimasu – both carry the same denotation, but the former is used by the subordinate to lower his/her position in regards to the other person. For example, if I were to tell my boss that I am coming to his office, I would use mairimasu. If he were to tell me the same, he would use kimasu. Mairimasu is also used in the train station announcements to say that the train is arriving. To whom the train is subordinate to, I couldn't tell you.

Things that are not strange, just different:

I once was in a 7-11 at around 10 o'clock at night. A beverage delivery man walked in with the next day's shipment of drinks and says ohayougozaimasu – "good morning" - to the store clerk. Mind you, it's still nearly 2 hours until midnight, what we could officially but not normally consider as morning. It's my understanding that people that work night shifts always say "good morning", regardless of the actual time.

Japanese people like to say otsukaresamadesu - this is a short phrase to express acknowledgement that what you just had to endure was tiring and perhaps troublesome. This is spoken between friends and/or colleagues after drinking parties or group dinners or a night out singing karaoke, said to the passenger by the taxi driver after arriving at your destination, and between colleagues after work when leaving the office. It is also necessary to say this to colleagues when answering phone calls from them, or vice versa.

Once I saw an old woman using her shoe to push a piece of garbage into a rain water gutter running along a flight of stairs. The strange thing was, the gutter was, at the most, 1 inch deep and a couple inches wide, so shoving the garbage (it was a plastic wrapper) into the gutter didn’t hide it at all. The pragmatist in me says that she was moving it out of the way of other pedestrians so they wouldn't slip on it and fracture a tibia. The cynicist in me says that she cared so much about the appearance of the stairs that it didn't register in her mind that she could have better preserved the purity of this public through way if she had just picked the garbage up and thrown it away in a rubbish bin.

Note to reader: The reason that Japan is so clean is because there are practically no trash cans or rubbish bins in public areas like sidewalks and train stations. No trash cans = no trash. Where does all the trash go then? That, my friend, is the million yen question. Answer? On the sidewalk! And no, Japan is NOT as clean as the rest of the world thinks. The trash is just more well hidden!

From a pep talk given to me and another colleague by our Japanese manager (and I paraphrase) – "It doesn’t matter how much you really know or what your skills are – all that matters is that if asked to do something… anything… your reply every time should be: 'Yes, I can do it.' "

The person at KFC forgot to add the side dish to a set menu that I ordered for take out. After calling them to let them know about it, a person from KFC came to my apartment to deliver the food and apologize. All I can say is... wow.

One night I decided to order sushi from a sushi restaurant that delivers. After taking my order on the phone, I innocently asked the sushi restaurant worker how long it would take. She replied that the delivery would take over 2 hours. What kills me is not the fact that there was a 2 hour hold up on sushi delivery on that particular night but rather that she would not have told me if I had not asked. Again... wow.

Life is tough... here.

Today I feel like writing about random things so pardon my meandering. If you get bored, just enter another URL into your browser bar and I will disappear!

I have lived in Japan now for a total of 24 months. The first stint for 10 months, and now on my second attempt, which is going on its 14th month. I will be seeing my 3rd winter in Japan... and I DO love winter.

In my short time here, it's questionable whether I have really learned anything about Japan and its culture that I did not learn in academic study or via my own reading. Granted, my language skills are getting better... slowly... and thus I am able to pick up more and more cultural nuances through the language. But still... in general, I think my brain hasn't gained much since the day I first arrived in Japan over 3 years ago. In fact, I might be getting dumber.

One thing I HAVE perfected is how to EMULATE being Japanese. Not actually becoming Japanese, but just pretending to do so. For example:

- I sometimes bow when I talk to someone over the phone, especially my managers.

- I have the vexing habit of saying "maybe" a LOT more than I used to. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, for example, when I look up at a gray sky and say "Maybe it will rain today". But it does get kind of annoying when people ask me, for example:

1. if my mother is a woman or
2. if the ocean contains salt water or
3. if 2 plus 2 equals 4

... and I reply with "Maybe".

- I say "Sorry" instead of "Thank You" when people do things for me. Or the opposite case where I expect a "Sorry" to come when "Thank You" is the only appropriate reply. This happened just recently on a flight back from the US. After I helped a woman lift her suitcase into the overhead compartment, she said "Thanks". I said "No, no, it's really okay". See? I thought she was going to apologize, so I was already telling her not to.

If perhaps after another couple years living in Japan that scenario plays itself out again, I would probably whip out a sushi knife and chip off my pinky so as to apologize for helping her.

I am coming to the sad realization that I am one of those foreigners that can never quite get comfortable with Japanese culture. Despite my cognitive abilities to rationalize the "whys" and "hows" of the culture, my heart (and admittedly, lack of patience) is screaming "That is completely, utterly, [insert colorful metaphor here] wrong and idiotic! That doesn't make ANY sense at all! Why, in MY country, we do things this way....."

When, of course, I am NOT in my country, but theirs.

Which begs the question, especially in an office environment and business context... being ethnocentric isn't necessarily wrong, is it? So many East Asian (indeed, Asian, in general) companies have already or are adapting a Western style of doing business. So why can't I speak up as an employee in my company and demand (heck, even just recommend) that we do things the Western way? One thing is for certain: the fact that I work for an ultra-conservative, ultra-traditional Japanese company contributes 95% to my misery in the land of the rising sun.

No more excuses

I have decided to stop making excuses for not blogging regularly. Of course, the fact that I work in a Japanese company and spend a considerable amount of time on trains suffering the odor of drunken old Japanese businessmen may have something to do with my absence from the blogging world. But anyway....

From now on, I will only post a blog once a year. The date and content will be unannounced. The tale, whether fact or fiction, elegantly written in my classic style. Those of you either lucky or bored enough to stumble onto my little niche in this world wide web at precisely the right moment will be bestowed a gift beyond gratitude.

Disclaimer: I may feel motivated now and then and post several blogs a year. Whoo.

Oh, and another thing. I won't hide it. This blog is all about ME. Not anyone else. Not about Japanese or East Asian culture. Not about travel and adventure. Just me. Let's drop the facade, people; we wouldn't be here right now if we didn't enjoy talking about ourselves and having the rest of you read about us. This is, after all, the "Me" generation... us with our own little "niches in this world wide web". Who are we fooling anyway? The internet has no boundaries. It's ethereal. Neither physical nor temporal. Can we really carve niches out of nothing? Nothing save a bunch of 1's and 0's, at least.

With all that said and done, stay tuned for the next series of 1's and 0's about me and my life and the things that only I care about.

Cheers.