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....