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Madplanet

Hesitant as one is to blow one's own horn, one should note that one has established a new blog, somewhat in the vein of the now dormant dottocomu but both ruthless in its brevity and broader in its scope, at http://madpla.net. Your patronage is appreciated.

Adieu, white iPod

I have not seen anyone mention this yet, perhaps because of its sheer obviousness or the brain-addling effects of Jobs' charisma field, but as of yesterday the white iPod is no more. In future years, will we consider the visuals of the first few 'Pod generations (and indeed, any other product that borrows the white-and-metal design vocab) as looking "really early-21st-century"? So iconic were they, I think we just might.

Things that occur to one in the midst of a typhoon

We are currently getting our untold million asses kicked by a large typhoon that is throwing rain and wind around kung-fu stylee with great sturm und drang.

Wife: What do we do if some large, sharp piece of stuff comes flying over and embeds itself in the (new, thus far almost pristine) house?

Me: Find its owners and sue the hell out of them for leaving large, sharp things lying around all over the place, of course.

No, I am not American, but in such circumstances what can one be but litigious? After all, we're talking about the wanton leaving-lying-around of big, sharp things here. There is a social purpose to litigating against the leaving-lying-arounders of such stuff.

Quechupped

This is distinctly old news, but I received an invite from a former colleague at Engadget a couple of days ago asking me to join Quechup.com and, like so many other fools before me, I signed up and let them peruse my gmail address book for matches.

Where Quechup appears to have learned its lesson is that it has, by the look of it, stopped sending invites to every non-Quechup member in your webmail address book without warning, after giving you the opportunity to search said address book for people who might already be members--which was, to put it mildly, the moral equivalent of fucking a dog in public and holding out a hat to ask for contributions. They haven't responded to a feedback mail I sent asking for confirmation that they've done so, but given the colossal backlash around the web it's an obvious step for them to have taken.

If I should prove to be mistaken and you receive a message from my gmail account inviting you to Quechup, please can it.

Great example of how easy it is to start up a web service, and how easy it is to kill it at the outset by treating your users as if their personal information is worth shit. Good job!

The Chick Magnet

A 15-year-old model rated the Chick Magnet last night as being "amazing". I feel that this vindication of my decision to buy it marks the appropriate point at which to introduce it to this blog.

The Chick Magnet is ironically named, need it be said, for it is the lowliest of a certain German supercar maker's line and relatively compactly built, unlike its owner. It can, however, race heavy-footed taxis and slackly ridden motorbikes with considerable success, though how it will fare against Leo's Skyline and Teal'c's Lambo (all right, it's not even in the running against the latter, though it cost about a sixth of the price) are unknown quantities.

Again, photos to follow, maybe.

Map to paradise

A million miles away

We got back from the Maldives last night. After spending a large part of the afternoon before our departure in an Ayurvedic trance brought on by having about a litre and a half of fragrant oil dribbled over my head in a beachside hut, and following it with fourteen hours of stop-and-start travel peppered with Malaysia Airlines' inappropriately-timed meals and constant overstated jingles about their and their country's greatness, I still feel as if part of my brain is paddling its way slowly northeast, enjoying the sun.

Photos to follow.

Voltage

An electrical storm's been hovering over the house for most of the last two days. It booms and sparks for hours at a time, like an irritable child with a noisy toy.

I have just realised...

...what my response should be next time a taxi driver tells me "hey, your Japanese is pretty good":

"Thanks. Hey, you know the roads pretty well, too."

(I realise the asymmetry here, in that while there's no necessity for a non-Japanese to be good at the language [though there's a strong practical incentive] there is for a taxi-driver to have some geographical savvy [at least in theory])

Not a Honda owner yet, then

The following appear in a Forbes slideshow on car buyer characteristics:

Honda Odyssey

Your biggest hobbies are domestic travel, family gatherings, church functions, conversations with friends and reading. Your biggest emotional desires are feeling secure, feeling safe, making smart choices, feeling in control of your life and feeling proud of your achievements.

Thom Yorke was sucking down a lot of this around the time of OK Computer, one senses.

Neurotheology

A friend suggests that Neurotheology sounds like a good William Gibson title. So (without having read the linked CNN article), we bring you:

NEUROTHEOLOGY, by (and with apologies to) William Gibson

1: The immanence of plugged-in deities

The sky over the bay was the color of a preacher's pate, the clouds combed-over strands of hair.

Case sat in his pod fingering a cyber-rosary. To his jacked-in eyes the beads were crammed with fractal images of religious iconography and art, a choking swirl of crucifixes and Inquisition scenes that extended in depthless zoom. With a diligence born of the surety that his deity was watching, he moved along the chain, revering idealised portraits of altar boys, Blakeian oils of demons, Dantean set-pieces of the evil in torment. His forehead ached as if the console headband had been set a notch too tight. It was going to be another batshit day.

Standard console jockey lore had it that God was in the matrix, somewhere. But the NeuroCatholics knew different. To them, God was the matrix and the matrix was God; and they were plugged into their deity 24-7.

(ntbc)

Writer's cramp

So, we finally worked up the courage to dip a toe in the property market.

The abiding impression of the process of buying a house here is, hell, what a lot of paper.

I spent two hours sitting at a bank in Shibuya today alternately writing my name and address on forms, and stamping them with my seal. They didn't provide either refreshment or hand massages, which I thought was pretty damn cheap given the colossal (to me, anyway) sum of money involved in the transaction we were consummating.

But anyway, the process of proving who you are and what you earn, of borrowing, transferring, registering, insuring and paying, is a godawful paper-hungry and repetitive one. Alien registration (both actual card and underlying data), proof of tax payment, end-of-year tax statement, salary slips, registered seal certificates, and goodness knows what else go into the hopper, mostly in triplicate, and out come contracts, powers of attorney, and all sorts of other stuff I have no idea about but which inevitably require signing and addressing in duplicate. It's the handwriting equivalent of being forced to do pushups until your arms fall off.

But we do get a decent place to live at the end of it. Provided we can find some movers in this city that don't want to screw us as much as the folks who came round to give a quote yesterday...

Amazon stocking racist book

The furore surrounding the stocking of an offensive magazine called 外人犯罪裏ファイル (Secret Files of Foreigners' Crimes) by Japanese convenience stores has been well covered by others, principally Japan Probe and Debito Arudou, as well as being picked up by The Times' Richard Lloyd Parry.

Attention thus far has focused mostly on the convenience stores and bookshops that are stocking the magazine, some of which are moving to withdraw it (though FamilyMart has set the deadline for doing so at a less-than-urgent week). However, Amazon continues to stock it and as far as I can tell is not taking any action. I also am unable to find an email address at which to contact them.

I would encourage Amazon to remove the magazine from its catalogue at once and dispose of any stock in the nearest landfill.

Product page: Amazon.co.jp： 驚愕の外人犯罪裏ファイル―外人犯罪白書2007: 本

[UPDATE: I found an address for Amazon's press office -- it's press@amazon.co.jp -- and emailed them to ask that they take the magazine down and dispose of their stock. Will update again if I get a response.]

No diplomacy, please

I was driving past the Chinese Embassy this evening when the word 外交 caught my eye on a sign outside an apartment block, perhaps because we were right next to the embassy. Then I read the whole phrase and saw that it said 物品販売外交お断り. For a half moment I toyed with the interpretation of 'no peddling or diplomacy'--you never know, with their proximity to the embassy perhaps the Chinese kept coming around trying to get them to act as a backchannel through which to sort the whole Yasukuni thing out, for example--but then I clicked back to reality and remembered that the mental topography of 外交 in Japanese extends to the particularly financial-industry sense of going marketing to outside clients; hence, the sign was saying 'no hawking (of things either tangible or intangible), please'. Neither clothespegs nor life insurance.

I hope this doesn't sound like showing off; it just seemed interesting to me in terms of the differently-shaped headspace that diplomacy and 外交 occupy.

The circles of hell

It's advisable to keep your involvement with the London tube network at the theoretical level. On no account be as reckless as to use it in the hope of getting somewhere soon. Every morning this week I have been drawn inexorably into Liverpool Street station and its Central Line, with its draughty platform's promise of swift and direct transport to Blackfriars. But each day, before 7.45am, something nobbles it. It is cursed. Specifically, the signals at Tower Hill appear to have been hexed by a powerful wizard who presumably has no interest in getting to anywhere around the Monument area in the near future.

Top current favourites about London versus Tokyo life:

-- Comedy that is funny.
-- Variety of draught beer available.
-- Ready access to houmous.
-- Top Gear.
-- Mini-supermarkets rather than convenience stores.
-- Ability to buy clothes and shoes in shops rather than crossing fingers and ordering via web.

Top dislikes:

--General expensiveness (particularly taxis).
-- Feeling like a foreigner in smalltalk due to lack of familiarity with pop culture.
-- Having ill-advisedly bought a pair of shoes without looking at the soles properly and later finding them to be made of suede with rubber inserts and therefore totally impractical. Very emphatically single-purpose driving shoes probably not best purchase for person who owns not car.

Holy balls, it's raining iPods

Gucci threw a colossal party this evening to launch their new Ginza store. Giving out impressive presents at these things is traditional (as is, recently, flying in foreign celebs to perform--tonight it was Mary J. Blige), but Gucci has outclassed the rest in sheer wastefulness by giving out a 30GB iPod and Gucci iPod case to every single attendee. Apparently the event set them back Y700 mn, most of which must have gone on audio players.

So, to cut a long story short, my dithering about whether to buy a new iPod because my (ripped) collection long ago exceeded the capacity of my nano has been rendered irrelevant by the arrival of a free iPod w, video. Welcome, Guccipod.

It came preloaded with a bunch of Gucci fashion-show videos and whatnot, but some ill-mannered lout had formatted it on a Windows machine, so I was forced to zap them and reformat it. Sorry, folks.

Incidentally, it sounds like Vuitton's party still marks the standard to beat for parties this year; it was pumping on through till 5am, where Gucci's had all but petered out by midnight.

Without toilets

Britain--its ineffectual indignance, its incompetent spin--radiates from every line of this article.

Around 1,450 passengers on a luxury cruise ship have been left without toilets for three days, according to people on board.

A series of blockages in the plumbing system is said to have led to "mayhem" on board Thomson's Destiny cruise ship.

Tour operator Thomson admitted that there have been problems with the vacuum system of the toilets, but said it was bringing in a team of "super-technicians" to fix the system overnight.

Peculiarly English usage to say "without toilets". It's not as if the bloody things dematerialised.

That and the hyperbole of "super-technicians". Again, it's not as if they are going to don capes, put on Y-fronts over their trousers and go winging through the pipes dislodging plugs of effluent with their laser vision.

1,500 cruise ship passengers without toilets for 'three days' | News | This is London

As William Gibson may or may not have realised...

Spook Country already exists, right here.

Flying for virtual real

I had friends who flew radio-controlled planes when I was at school and the ratio of tedious fiddling to cheap thrills always seemed to come out wrong. The endless process of building, the tweaking and tinkering and fueling in the middle of a field somewhere before you got the thing in the air, and the dubious pleasure of zipping a buzzing spec around overhead and hoping that the terminal failure of a crucial widget didn't abruptly slam the whole thing into the ground five minutes out.

The complexity of this French chap's setup suggests even more preflight fumbling, but with a much tastier reward in sight; he's taken the step of putting a camera in the cockpit that transmits images to a pair of video goggles, and pans and tilts in sync with his head movements for full-on flightsim fun. As many around the world are saying at just this moment, he should sell this setup commercially. If they could simplify the vehicle down to something that didn't require mindnumbing amounts of prep, even better.

Nooka update

I mentioned the other day that I'd picked up a Nooka Zen-V, and thanks to Nooka's amazingly swift service (I ordered from their online shop on a Friday evening and the goods arrived from New York the following Monday morning with expedited shipping) I've already had a week to break it in. Upshot is, it looks great, seems slickly put together and overall I'm pretty happy.

I'll get my sole quibble out of the way right now: If you have a largeish wrist, as I do, you're liable to find the strap a bit on the short side. As I found when subsequently looking around the site, Nooka themselves acknowledge that anyone whose wrist measurement comes in above 21 cm should request a strap extender when they order, though these apparently aren't available until sometime this autumn. I have a call into them on when the extenders will ship and whether they can be ordered separately, but no response yet.

The watch display is pretty easy to get used to, with the two leftmost columns showing the hours for 1-6 and 7-12, and the righthand column the minutes. I tend to adopt a countdown approach to the day, gauging my progress by how much I've got done in the morning, so the effect of the display gradually filling up as each twelve-hour period passes means you very quickly get visual confirmation of how much is left. It's also pretty easy after a while to pinpoint what time it is.

It's one of those watches that doesn't look much like anything else and attracts a fair bit of attention, so if you're into unusual watches, this one comes recommended.

Measure twice, cut once

Richard finds a Chinese shampoo whose makers should have done a little more research on its English name.

Nooka Zen-V

I've been taking one step forward and one step back from buying a Nooka watch for a while now, but I finally saw one in the flesh at the Archimedes Spiral shop in the Marunouchi Building and decided that they were, in fact, the shit. They didn't have the Zen-V, the model I wanted, so I ended up buying from their online shop yesterday (and they've already shipped from the US with an expected delivery time of Monday evening). You can also buy from Amazon in the US, which may reduce the delivery costs somewhat.

Decorative foreigners

According to part of a fluffy weekend TV programme I caught earlier, the market for lessons in which you learn to cook or box or do basketweaving in English, rather than going to an English conversation school, is gaining momentum. Given that English schools' lessons hardly represent serious education, I suppose one might as well pick up a recipe for dip at the same time.

This is a very bubbly phenomenon, though. For one, there's the implication that you can get a job teaching almost anything provided you speak English; for another, it places foreigners in that familiar category for Japan--decorative, monolingual, file under "hobby" or "novelty".

The saddest thing in the broadcast was watching Nicholas Petas, a guy who has spent years in Japan learning full-contact karate at Seido Kaikan and acquiring a fluent grasp of Japanese, teaching sparring in English at Gold's Gym. When interviewed by the show's fatuous reporters, he had obviously been told to bite his tongue and avoid speaking any Japanese. Great--the positive impression created by having another Japanese-fluent foreigner in the public eye is rolled back a notch. Petas has to make a living, sure, but it's a pity the market demands that he be a novelty.

It's a boy...what a surprise

So, to the surprise of no-one save any WWII soldiers still lost in the jungles of Asia, Princess Kiko has just given birth to the first boy to be gene-spliced cradle-swapped born into the Japanese royal family for 41 years, and her first child for 11 years.

What was wrong with an Empress?

[Via asahi.com]

Yokel unease through train advertising

Leapfrogging links from an obscure /.J story about battery-powered trams this morning, I found myself looking at the cost of advertising on an even more obscure Kyushu train line and thinking that, at the prices they're charging, one could quite easily justify putting up some batshit pseudo-ad with a link to a deranged website full of lies and nonsense, just to see what happened.

To quantify, you can put up a wall ad near the doors for about Y1,000 per week, or decorate an entire two-carriage train for Y120,000 per month. The latter is somewhat out of the price range I had in mind, but there's a kind of Hunter S. Thompson glee that bubbles up at the prospect of really scaring some yokels by redecorating their trains with sick, disorienting stuff.

Testing geotags

Alps Lab has announced a decent geotagging app that allows you to get a trackback URL from their map site and, by pinging the URL from a blog post, have a location for the post appear on a little map window in your blog sidebar (adding which involves pasting in a few lines of code). So, here goes nothing -- if this works then the map to the left should show an icon above Roppongi Hills, where this photo was taken.

Sorby webcam footage

Forgive a final post on theme of the week, the demolition of the hall of residence at Sheffield University where I spent a fun-packed six or eight months in the early 1990s.

After maligning the university for their webcam server getting fuxxored due to connection overload right before blasting time, I emailed the residences office to ask if they could put the file on the web and just got a nice email from them saying that they've done exactly that (it's here). It's pretty rockin' footage, too.

And in film news

A US distributor has decided that having a pretty girl in hot pants running around with a sword killing people is a universal theme that will go over well with the US public.

Hope they get the subtitles sorted out, though; everything is irredeemably straightfaced and stilted in the trailer. Not that the dialogue in the original is much to write home about. At least they didn't dub it.

[Apple - Trailers - Azumi]

YouTube to the rescue

While Sheffield University's crappy webcam may have karked on us all on Sunday, YouTube comes to the rescue with a handful of home vids and even a remixed tribute to Sorby Hall, complete with Beastie Boys soundtrack and tacky reversing effects.

[Watch: YouTube - Sorby Hall Boom!!!!]

The day they took old Sorby down

Today the University of Sheffield demolished the hall of residence where I spent the happy first two-thirds of my first year at university. Unfortunately their server seemed to freeze and stop accepting new connections entirely quite some time before the demolition occurred, but I was at least able to get a "before" screengrab for posterity. I'm assuming that there was far more interest than the UoS had expected and the tubes got clogged, though why 40 minutes past the scheduled blasting time it's still not letting me in I have no idea (aside from the nagging suspicion that the blast may have sent the webcam into low Earth orbit).

[UPDATE: Their server finally started working again. Here's the "after":

Power cut

I can't recall the last time we had a power outage for any other than typhoon-related reasons (come to think of it, the Yamanote Line was knocked out for a few hours on Saturday by lightning), but this morning a large part of the capital's subways are dead and the queues of people on the streets baying for wheeled transport in the soporific heat was something to behold. After a 20-minute roast in the sun, I only made it into work because I was lucky enough to have a taxi spit someone out right next to me.

Cause is as yet unknown, but heat seems possible. The forecast for today is a high of 28C, but in the direct sunlight it had to be more like 35. Would imagine a lot of people had their airconditioning on this morning.

[asahi.com article (Japanese)]

[UPDATE] Seems that some daft buggers trying to anchor a boat with a crane mounted on it prior to doing some work on a bridge were the cause. In order to knock in the anchor pin (no idea what the correct term is) they needed to extend the until-then folded crane to clear the hole that the pin slots into. They apparently didn't notice the power lines above. [Asahi.com article]

[UPDATE] Even dafter. They went trucking down the river unfurling the crane as they went, and just ripped straight into the power lines. Goes to show that operating heavy machinery while under the influence of being a moron is not a good idea.

So, it's a liquid

One hopes these restrictions on UK carry-on luggage don't (need to) last long.

It's evident from the restrictions that someone is very worried about a liquid or combination of liquids being used to blow things up, though, isn't it?

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Plot to blow up aircraft thwarted

Some day my Willcom will come

After much dithering, and having an unhealthy liking for gadgets, I bit the bullet and picked up one of Willcom's new Sharp W-Zero3 (es) smartphones. Keyboard's a bit small, but not enough to prevent me typing this without undue effort. More thoughts after I've had more of a chance to play...but for the moment it seems an agreeably fast machine.

Not give me rat poison

Thank goodness there are two prescription pharmaceuticals called Sofarin, and that the one I was given this morning was a painkiller and anti-inflammatory rather than the one that's a branded version of Warfarin. The thought that I had been slipped an anticoagulant (in particular, one that I associate solely with the words "rat poison") rather than pain killers almost reinforced all my inbuilt suspicions about the quality of Japanese medical institutions.

Incidentally, the place I went to this morning (to have a suspected--now confirmed--ear infection checked out) was the first example I've seen of a dispensing surgery--when I went to collect my health insurance card and pay up the receptionist handed over the pills there and then. Is it uncharitable of me to suspect that a lot of people are getting prescribed the same few things?

Incidentally, I haven't been to an ear doctor in about 20 years and the experience doesn't improve with ageing. Having metal probes stuck in a sore ear is worse than kicking an immovable object hard with just your little toe.

Satisfied like a house

I love machine translation. From a voucher for a local izakaya:

The lounge floor which has effect in a spice in an Asian taste. 11 single rooms of respectively rich individuality. Full-scale sum creation dishes are all 60 items, such as the Kobachi peak using the foods in season in plenty, and chest boiled rice adhering to rice and water. Please forget urban noise in "Nishi Azabu TOKA" which can enjoy a full-scale sum creation dish to 4:00 at midnight, and pass the time of important one until it is satisfied like a house.

To an extent I can read between the lines to the original Japanese, but "until it is satisfied like a house" baffles me utterly.

[UPDATE] Found the original on their website, which goes:

アジアンテイストをスパイスに趣のあるラウンジフロアー､それぞれ個性豊かな11の個室｡本格的和創作料理は､旬の食材をふんだんに使った小鉢盛りや自慢の豆腐料理､米と水にこだわったおひつご飯など全60アイテム｡深夜4:00まで本格的和創作料理を楽しめる「西麻布 燈花」で都会の喧騒を忘れ､自宅感覚で心ゆくまで大切なひとときをお過ごし下さい｡

Katakana will trip you up and laugh when you fall

Heard tonight in our kitchen:

"Are these new potatoes?"

"They're Maine Coons."

Pause.

"You mean May Queens, right?"

"Um."

The above was conducted in Japanese, needless to say.

Hamilton X01: Geekwatch in space!

I love gadgety watches and deal with a load of different timezones at work, and this tempts me severely: Hamilton's 40th anniversary 2001: A Space Odyssey watch. Kubrick apparently ordered the original direct from Hamilton, though some sources claim it never appeared in the film...but never mind.

I can only find a Japanese importer's page for this at the moment, possibly because it was only announced at this year's Basel fair and all of the world's watch blogs seem to have gone quiet recently.

Takaramonoya.com: X-01

Technorati Tags: gadgets

Elektron Monomachine in the garage

After obsessing over the Elektron Monomachine recently, a sizeable tax refund from last year came through and I took the plunge. It's not an easy thing to get hold of in Japan, and I ended up corresponding with the CEO (thanks, Daniel!) to try and figure out how to lay my hands on one and why it was taking so long. Turns out, for any prospective purchasers, that the importers need to fit a Japan-only adapter to handle the current--the US version won't work, so take care.

After half an hour or so of playing, I'm pretty pleased. The buttons are lighter and have a longer travel than I'm used to from this kind of kit and initially felt a bit flimsy, but in fact the light clickiness is reminiscent of a laptop keyboard, and allied with the incredibly well-thought-out layout makes it easy to touch-type when you're programming. The screen layout is just as good, dividing main parameters into two rows of four and matching them with eight knobs to the right of the screen.

Technorati Tags: gadgets, music

I've only scratched the surface of the synthesizers so far; particularly the vocal synth looks like it's going to take some getting used to, and (having only glanced at the manual a few times) there are some unfamiliar parameters in there. Particularly interesting is the filter, which seems to be infinitely variable between low/high/bandpass and possibly a few other things as well depending on how you tweak it; looks like it'll bear some investigating. One really great feature of the synths and sequencer is the parameter lock feature, though -- hold down the trigger key for the step you're programming and tweak whatever synth or effect settings you feel like, and they're locked in as part of that step. Makes adding variation to sounds very easy, and I sense I could well end up programming patterns on the Monomachine and pulling them into Ableton Live either as audio or MIDI later on.

The sounds themselves have a lot of oomph, and if you're pushing the phat button as you program the mix fills up very quickly. It encourages a stripped-down approach to arranging, given that the amount of sonic interest and richness you can pack into even a minimal set of parts is considerable.

In all, pretty impressed so far with my first Swedish-designed/Estonian-made synth.

Talking of po-faced...

...who would have thought that someone would invent a piece of software that not only detects when a cat is walking on your computer keyboard and blocks the input, but also plays nasty harmonica and hissing sounds at it to teach it the error of its ways?

Having your cat walk all over your stuff is half the fun of having a cat, for goodness' sake. It's what they do.

Available for Windows only (...must..avoid...snide...OS-discriminatory...comment).

Read: PawSense

Japan floats

This hits my sense of humour dead on the nose. July sees the release of a very po-faced-looking disaster film called 「日本沈没」 (Japan Sinks, based on a 1973 sci-fi novel by Komatsu Sakyo). (In related news, English-language school Nova are using this as a chance to advertise their classes, with slogans along the lines of "where ya gonna go when Japan sinks?")

This dull-looking fare, however, does not concern us. What does is the fact that some fun-loving folks are filming sci-fi enfant terrible Tsutsui Yasutaka's piss-take of it, 日本以外全部沈没 (Everywhere Else But Japan Sinks). There's no law saying that parody must be done swiftly and with a sharpened blade, but there is a certain delight in seeing this come so soon on the heels of the stodgy original.

[Via Slashdot Japan (Japanese)]

Album review: Pet Shop Boys - Fundamental

If by some chance this is the first review of this album you've read, I can set all fears to rest at the outset: Release did not mark the beginning of the end, a last few years peppered with side projects such as Battleship Potemkin and a subsequent fade out. Nope. Fundamental is great.

It throws you a worrying curve to start with, though. "Psychological" is mid-paced, low-key and lyrically abstract, though it offers a welcome hint of past triumphs in its "One More Chance"-like shift in and out of minimalism and washes of colour. It does reveal more complexity with repeated plays, but it still sounds more like a B-side than an album opener.

Real reassurance begins with "The Sodom and Gomorrah Show". A blustering intro that hints at a PSB returned to effortless form drops out into near-silence, into which Tennant begins: "I lived a quiet life, a stranger to champagne/I never dared to venture out to cities of the plain". And you realise how much you've missed this. You feel like phoning friends and telling them.

The people who claim critics of Release are down on the album because of its guitar-heavy, nontraditional PSB sound, and that the electropop stormers that see something of a renaissance on Fundamental are a crutch on which they lean in times of trouble are, I think, missing the point. The two indispensables in a good PSB song are Tennant's lyrics--which, aside from "Home and Dry" and "London" hit a terrible low on Release--and a sense of effortlessness, for want of a better word. Release sounded like it had sand in its gearbox.

Another thing to note is that the return to a faster, more bombastic tone has been overstated; five of the album's eleven songs are ballads, and "Twentieth Century" is so gentle in execution that it's hard to group it with the "up" tunes. But there's a tautness even in the ballads that was in scant evidence in Release's plodding lineup.

The two particular standouts on the ballad front, incidentally, are probably "I Made My Excuses and Left" and "Casanova in Hell"; both are vignettes, the former a sketch of a single scene of betrayal, the latter a short story of an ageing Casanova achieving revenge for his failing potency in the bedroom by airbrushing the history to leave his priapic image unblemished.

There's a full rundown of the background to the songs here and an excellent three part review at Trembleclef that discusses the album far more extensively. Also, read an interview in the recent Sunday Times here.

Yellow Submarine!

ウィー・オール・リブ・イン・ア・イエロー・サブマリン

イエロー・サブマリン

潜水艦！アソーレ！

Soyjoy

As an unexpected bonus for getting a taxi to work this morning, the driver handed me my breakfast along with my receipt: a Soyjoy bar, made of soybean powder and dried fruit. It turns out to be made by Otsuka Pharmaceuticals, who are relentlessly advertising it on TV as a meal for those without time to take regular meals. This has a grim timeliness about it, given the statistics being brandished around recently about economic upturns resulting in more deaths from overwork. As Japan booms, so the Soyjoy scenario goes, we all abandon hope of sitting down to lunch--or even, it appears, to a brief respite at our desks with a sandwich and the phone forwarded--in favour of one-handed nutrition that can be taken while continuing to add value to the enterprise.

The product itself eats like a smoother take on a cereal bar, as you'd expect since it's powdered matter encasing the fruit rather than seeds and suchlike. (Note the unconventional intransitive use of "eat", which I am trying on for size on a whim.) Still, there's something very wrong with the name of this product. The facile rhyme, for one; the associations "soy" still produces in my mind after exposure to primary-school dinners involving soy mince (a grey, dogfood-like substance that looked, shall we say, pre-hurled); and the suspicion that "joy" itself is out of place in the name of a product designed as fuel for those with no time to eat.

It's a novel marketing approach, though; presumably aligned with the whole concept of being busy, in that the manufacturer assumes that people getting taxis in the morning are doing so because they need to get somewhere fast, are running late, and therefore don't have time for breakfast. All of which, unfortunately, is true at least for me.

Apropos of nothing in particular

End of the world

You may need a fairly high vantage point to appreciate this (I'm 40+ floors up), but Tokyo at the moment looks like the end of the world is nigh. The photo (useless cameraphone) doesn't do it justice. We're enveloped in a greenish cloud that colleagues are blaming on yellow sand drifting in from China, and visibility has progressively closed down until the skyline of Shinjuku looks like the towers and funnels of a derelict battleship.

PSB Stupid video

Further to my frothing over the new Pet Shop Boys single yesterday, the video is now available online as well. Avoid the PSB site, which at the moment is letting through the audio stream but almost no video, and head over to Popjustice instead.

The PSBs tend to make entertaining videos, and this is among the best; David Walliams and Matt Lucas forcing the tied-up PSBs to watch their school-play-awful Pet Shop Boys act in a scratty hall. The inept rehash of the Very-era pointy hats and costumes in see-all-the-wires, low-rent fashion is classic. If I were to make a criticism, it would be only that the video is so good that it almost makes you forget the song.

Popjustice - Stupid video

The central Tokyo housebuyer's dilemma

Househunting again this weekend. We're starting to despair of ever finding somewhere of a reasonable size and age in central Tokyo; even the real estate agents are scratching their heads about how things of any age and size are flying off the shelves for increasingly ridiculous prices. Our contact at Sumitomo Real Estate Sales regaled me with a few stories about how commercial developers are buying plots of land and reselling at markups of Y1.5-Y2 mn per tsubo (the worst example he mentioned was of a plot just off Gaien-Nishi Dori in Shirogane, where the jump was from something like Y4 mn to Y6.3 mn). In the last six months, in short, everything has gone mad.

A couple of years ago, some friends of ours bought a 98-square-metre apartment in a 35-year-old building in Aoyama for about Y55 mn. Last week a 116-square-metre place on the floor above went on the market for Y69.8 mn, That means a rise of Y80,000 per square metre for a building that a year or so ago had escaped rebuilding only because a small minority of recent residents objected on financial grounds. Yesterday, we heard that even though the apartment isn't listed on any real estate websites as far as I can see, and has been on the market for only a week, someone has put in a bid.

We subsequently took a look at a unit in Takanawa Residence, a new 46-floor tower just up the road from us (which now fills the sky behind this fire station). 78 square metres for a somewhat staggering Y98 mn. That's more than the original sale price, incidentally. The hotel-like facilities of the place (second-floor lounge, spa, Japanese-style tea room on the 24th floor, in-house laundry service, etc.) would make up somewhat for the limited size of the apartment, but even so it was frankly claustrophobic to be spending a million dollars on.

Presumably any more serious signs of a property bubble will lead the government and Bank of Japan to put the brakes on, but the current trend in central Tokyo is an acute form of localised madness that shows no sign of abating. Perhaps we should move to Salt Lake, where a friend informs me that it's a buyer's market. That's the first time I've heard that phrase in relation to property in a long time.

Tonkatsu Boogie

Happened to find this site while trying to remind myself of what you'd call the koromo on tonkatsu in English. Some of the long-exposure photos of waterfalls and the cleverly-lighted water closeups are phenomenal.

Cool bit of Flash

I love the Flash banner for this site. No idea if it's an original piece of work.

Beware of the lemon

In need of some vitamin C, I decided to try this stuff out instead of the usual C1000 and all the other little bottles of lemon-based goodness out there. The upshot of this idiotic decision (as I could have forecast had I read the list of ingredients a bit more closely, or paused to ruminate on the fact that it's called Lemon's Lemon) was several minutes of being unable to do more than bang my head gently against my desk and moan occasionally.

A single bottle of this stuff could pucker the cheeks of a city the size of Tokyo. It contains 30% lemon juice, lemon vinegar, 1000mg of vitamin C and 2000mg of citric acid. They also claim it contains sugar, though I can't detect any trace of it. But thank goodness they opted to include it; this is one drink that doesn't need a sugar-free version.

NYT on Omotesando Hills

I hesitate to spend more time than absolutely necessary blasting away at the mainstream press when they fall down in their Japan reporting--you could keep several pedants employed full-time in the task--but having posted about Omotesando Hills the other day it behooves me to take the New York Times to task for their article about the place. It's not so much that they are wrong about the building itself, or that I disagree with their impressions about it. It's more the details in their picture of Japan as a whole that jar.

Omotesando Hills is a world away from urban Japan's bargain-hunting culture, where hundred-yen stores (the Japanese equivalent of the dollar store) seem to occupy every corner of the world's most expensive city. Most of the 93 shops, cafes and restaurants here reflect Japan's re-emerging interest in the high end as it perhaps starts to pull out of a decade-long economic slump.

First things first. 100-yen shops on every corner? Not as far as I can see. They're numerous and a growth business, but far from ubiquitous.

Japan a "bargain-hunting culture"? Curious statement. I'd be interested to see it backed up by more detail; in some senses Japan is very cost-focused, and the crush of department store sales leaves one in no doubt that, at least in that very localised sense, there is no aversion to a good bargain. But it's not a culture in which people shop around particularly, or seek discounts for buying in bulk, or haggle much.

"Japan's re-emerging interest in the high end"? The past tense is the correct one here. Japan's interest in the high-end is out in the open, frolicking gleefully and swinging its Louis Vuitton bag around its head. The major brands are making more Japanese money than a North Korean counterfeiting operation. The appetite for high-end watches, bags and clothing is voracious.

And why the "perhaps"? Is anyone in any doubt about this? Is the NYT's house opinion that Japan has yet to adequately demonstrate its entry into a recovery?

Contrary to Western stereotypes of incessantly bowing, starch-shirted Japanese businessmen, most shoppers and store employees here are cool and chic, urbane and brand-savvy.

The whole Harajuku-Aoyama-Omotesando-Azabu-Roppongi nexus is like that, for God's sake.

But some are less than enthralled by the new development. "My first impression was that it was just like Europe � meaning it has very few bathrooms," says Kayoko Sato, 60, with a laugh. "And there are a lot of expensive things that only hillzoku can afford," referring to people who live in Roppongi Hills, an apartment complex for the wealthy.

Describing Roppongi Hills as an apartment complex for the wealthy may make for a more concise sentence here, but it's not very accurate (and do we know that "hills zoku" here refers to Roppongi exclusively, and is not being extended to include the newest member of the Hills family? After all, Omotesando Hills apartments start at Y700,000 per month for a 40 square metre pad, somewhat more expensive than the Y400,000 or so a studio apartment in Roppongi Hills will set you back). Also, would it not have been worth mentioning that both Hills developments are the work of Mori Building, and contrasting the two? The story drifts in search of a hook to hang itself on without any background of this kind. Also -- fussy editorial point -- why is the description of Roppongi Hills appended to the second mention rather than the first?

[Read: Attention Avid Shoppers: A High-End Complex Opens Its Doors - New York Times]

Tokyo's popular wards: some obvious stats

I went hunting more or less randomly for population data for Tokyo and found that the metropolitan government obligingly gives out all manner of monthly numbers. After a bit of tweaking in Excel, the graphs below show the following for Tokyo's 23 wards in December 2005: (1) Change in population per ward for Japanese nationals; (2) the same for foreign nationals; (3) distribution of Japanese nationals among the wards; (4) the same for foreign nationals; and (5) the same for US/UK/French/Australian citizens. The latter is arbitrary and probably demonstrates nothing more than that there are a lot of financial-industry white people in the expensive parts of town. There are probably more meaningful things I could have done.

I've stripped births and deaths out of the data for Japanese citizens to more accurately reflect voluntary (well, nominally) movements as opposed to the forces of nature. That data isn't available for the foreign nationals.

One thing I would really like to do is automate the extraction of this data so that I could generate some standard charts every month. Would be interesting to graph stock market vs. population trends, for example.

I was set to make some sweeping generalisations about population shifting west and concentrating in the more upscale areas of town, but actually the Japanese data (this is only for one month, mind) show a mixed picture. There's certainly a pronounced shift into Minato-ku, where property prices are highest, but Meguro, arguably the next in line, loses a few people (maybe they moved to Minato-ku; hard to tell); also, Koto-ku is in the lead for population gain. I must get over to Koto-ku more and check out what the attraction is.

For foreigners, I have to be careful with definitions. There are a lot of people classed as Korean in the survey who are long-term residents and would likely have been given citizenship in another nation. I would imagine that aside from these long-term residents, most of the rise and fall in numbers indicates relatively short-term stayers who arrive, live at one address and then leave. So rather than being able to make all kinds of wild postulations as we can with the Japanese data about the population finding that declining land prices and increasing wealth have meant a sweet spot where they can move into better neighbourhoods, with the foreign data we perhaps should be concluding that industries that require high-end foreign workers are hiring?

I hope to do this again next month and start doing some more interesting stuff with the data. Any advice on how to pull data out of Excel sheets on websites and work with it with less pain than Excel involves would be welcome.

Omotesando Hills opening

Thanks to having a fashion journalist as a spouse, I ended up sliding in to the opening party for Omotesando Hills last night. Suspect the quality of the photographs I got is inversely proportional to the amount of free champagne I put away. (See Flickr photoset.)

From the outside the place doesn't give much impression of its size, but the inside feels far bigger -- unsurprising, perhaps, given the three underground floors, and the fact that the building's core is a ravine that extends throughout its height, in a similar way to the West Walk of Roppongi Hills.

The building shares a certain 2001ish airiness and sterility with RH; it has that same atmosphere of being built for window-shopping rather than anything as vulgar as consumption. That's reinforced by the shop lineup -- almost entirely fashion, much of it high-end, with only five restaurants and a few cafes, versus RH's (I sense) far greater emphasis on nosh.

I would rather have liked to see the opening ceremony -- again, attended by Koizumi, as was the Roppongi Hills opening. The party, which started after the official stuff was over, consisted of a large crowd of fashion-industry types, models, rich people, and for some reason a largeish German contingent, standing around drinking Mori Building's champagne and eating their canapes, both of which were rather good.

Give us back our Aibo, you finks

I think Sony lost me for good today. The existence of the iPod meant I could ignore their series of blunders with their beautiful audio players and their terrible software, their games division would spit out a cool machine once in a while, and I love their digital cameras; but the awful record company and its DRM are up my nose so far I can taste them in the back of my throat, and the electronics businesses have squandered much of their technological legacy, footled with backwaters like Qualia, and let themselves be overtaken by less bureaucratic, lower-drag operations like Samsung.

And now, they kill the robots. In a cull of dud businesses, they excise the primary symbol of hope and wonder for Sony the company. The QRIO, outdoing any CEO for charisma, conducting an orchestra or riding on trains; the Aibo, hacked and adored by pecunious geeks the world over. One place where Sony's self-image as an organization stuffed with more smart engineers than anyone else and the ability to produce products that shocked the world, which otherwise seemed hubristic or plain delusional, snapped into focus. The thing that made it interesting.

Sony may revive its corporate presence, the muscular dominance of its electronics, but a piece of its soul is lost forever.

[Via asahi.com (Japanese)]

Recent articles on the Japan Corporate News site

The Japan Corporate News Network has always leant somewhat toward the marginal and bizarre, but recently they seem to have firmed up their stance and embarked on a veritable campaign to celebrate corporate achievements that might otherwise have passed into history unrecorded: to bring us revelations of the Belgian R&D centre, the innovative cat ankle protector, the CFO's moustache (quiz: one of these is true).

Lion Survey Indicates That About 45% of Working Women Experience Sudden Diarrhea

Fujicco's Caspian Sea Yogurt Kit Shipments Reach 1,000,000 Mark

Kao Elucidates How Skin Flecks Appear

Sirius Cybernetics' lifts come closer

Fujitec America's latest lift installation sounds like the first step on the road to Douglas Adams' Sirius Cybernetics intelligent lifts. After entering your destination floor into a kiosk the AI groups you with other people heading the same way. It will supposedly get better as it learns usage patterns, too.

The office building I'm in has double-decker lifts that supposedly serve only odd or even-numbered floors, but their lack of ability to predict where someone is going often means that both decks stop in turn at the same floor. A system like Fujitec's would be nice to have.

Fujitec eases bottlenecks

[Via boingboing]

streetwork: latest chapter

Finally got around to posting the next installment of the novel I am, when time permits, blogging.

She throws the coat on the bed, then picks up a remote from a side table, dials in something and puts it down again. The lights turn a dimmer red, the windows fog up and the speakers start to throb.

--What's this?

--Squelch.

--Sounds like porno lounge music played by robots.

--That's what everyone says.

Some days, you think you've come out with a good line and the world turns up its nose like a guitar shop owner hearing the intro to Smoke on the Water for the fiftieth time that week.

Link

Pizza in solitude

To continue our occasional series of unusual or mismatched (rather than simply linguistically ill-conceived or wrong) shop names, there is a new clothes store in Roppongi Hills called Calzalone. Not knowing enough Italian to decipher a real meaning there if there is one, it suggests to me only one thing: a calzone that has been left all by itself, possibly in a house from which its parents have become absent, possibly assailed by buffoonish criminals and forced to use every cunning pizzaish trick in its repertoire to repel them. There will be a sequel called Macaroni Alone-i.

Meanwhile, media sources reported today that Kurt Russell is to reprise the role of Snake Plissken in the hotly-tipped new thriller "Escalope from New Jersey".

How much is a Quad G5? To answer that in one idiosyncratic way...

...Y2,547,470.

I tried loading up one of the quad-core G5s with every conceivable option in the online store (16GB of RAM, two 500GB drives, two 30-inch displays, etc.). And no, I didn't click the order button--fortunately for my bank balance.

The memory alone costs Y1.4 mn.

This is roughly the amount of money that one would pay for a brand-new Toyota Prius, for example. Colleagues offer the opinion that next year a $1,000 iMac will probably be just as powerful and come with a free iPod and, possibly, a free Toyota Prius.

In order to combat Apple's unstoppable advance Microsoft will next year begin inducing PC makers to give away a lifesize Steve Jobs robot with every Windows box. The robot will come to a halt every six weeks, say "just one more thing..." and pull a smaller version of itself from a trouser pocket, with the larger version spontaneously disintegrating as it does so. This will continue to happen until the robot reaches a size invisible to the human eye, upon which it will begin replicating until it forms a colossal black v-necked t-shirt that envelops your house and hermetically seals you in, to suffocate to death unless you pay for the next Windows service pack.

Thereby blackening Steve's reputation and boosting Microsoft's bottom line at the same time.

The Apple Store (Japan)

The whole US cried, and we don't care

I'm a sucker for reports on Japanese schoolkid slang, but my favourite in this Mainichi article isn't one of the puns or clever English/Japanese combinations, but a straight bit of jaded teenage irony. The phrase 全米が泣いた (zenbei ga naita), literally "it brought the whole of America to tears", is an empty bit of salestalk used liberally in movie advertising in Japan; the kids, having been promised weepiness and then left the theatre dry-eyed too many times, are now using it to mean "something of no importance".

MSN-Mainichi Daily News: WaiWai

Where to stop

Zhang Ziyi's TV adverts for Asience hair products are starting to look badly wrong. The theme of Asian hair supremacy has been overplayed to the point where, in the most recent iteration (Ziyi in red dress on stage in front of theatre audience in red silk dress, flouncing that *inner beauty* is the secret of her success) the jealousy the Western model-type girls in the stalls are showing has changed into something more like disgust at her sheer arrogance. It stuck in my head for weeks; I even worked it into the novel I'm blogging as background colour.

The next installment in the series is a teaser -- I assume they must be shifting units sufficient to justify a second-phase marketing assault -- which zooms in on Ziyi holding the signature red silk dress against herself, then throwing it at the camera, which continues to zoom as the dress falls, to the point where we only see the broadcastable parts of her supposedly-naked form. *What has happened to [the Asience logo]?* proclaims the caption. Sadly, the possibility of full-on porn is probably low. Still, what I wanted to say was this: saying to the world that you will throw your clothes at a TV camera for money is probably not an upward move, image-wise.

Soupglasses

Walking through Ebisu station earlier today, I came across a shop selling what were to be fair some pretty cool specs. The only problem I had with it was the name. Consomme.

In an ideal world where money and things of that nature were not of concern I would about now be opening a soup shop called Specs or Bifocals or Four Eyes.

I suppose there are probably those out there who would want to call it Shiru or Dashi or Warishita or something just to be assholes about the whole thing, but I'm not going to get into that one just now.

The Onion on Google

The Onion went through a phase of seeming rather tired, but today's lead piece on Google sees them back in top form. An obvious target, but the gags are spot-on and the timing is perfect.

Google Announces Plan To Destroy All Information It Can't Index

Beer weather

I find this weather page on Yahoo Japan marvellous and cynical in equal measure. It purports to tell you how good the weather is for drinking beer. Coincidentally, it's a good day for beer every day for the next week, and the beer cans used to express this bibulosity index are--whoda thought it--good old Super Dry.

It is, let there be no doubt about it, stinkingly hot. Like 29 degrees and 80% humidity by 8am.

Yahoo! Weather

Nerdcore: Gangsta rap for computer scientists

I'd heard of MC Frontalot, but wasn't aware that the genre of nerdcore had taken off to the extent that this Wired article would have you believe.

By chance I came across a couple of nerdcore tracks the day before I read the article. Probably the only time you'll hear someone rhyme "defrag" with "body bag".

Index of /product/Computer Nerd/audio/Untitled

Bali images

Have uploaded a ton of photos to Flickr.

Bali

Far too late, as always (our flight leaves in a few hours), but it turns out our hotel has WiFi. Don't think the habit of poolside blogging is likely to take off, however, both because I suspect it could have a deleterious effect on my marriage and because typing words like "deleterious" on a software keyboard with a touchpen is starting to give me cramp...

Mascot

The DJ spaceman that stands guard on the music side of my desk at the moment.

The sound of tears

I'm not the first with this observation, but Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler's new venture, The Tears, have made a debut that sounds exactly like that third Suede album we never got because Butler walked out during the making of the second. Of course, you also have to wonder how Dog Man Star would have turned out had Butler stuck around to the end, but Here Come the Tears is plenty for now.

I've seen Suede play some of the stuff that followed the breakup live, heard it on the radio, and liked it well enough; but they lost something critical when Butler left, and Trash and Film Star prophesied their shift into something that was harsh and slogany, plastic and empty. They'd always been partly about flash and trash, of course; but it was a coating on songs that you could feel were about something that made sense to you: yearning, loss, embarrassment, awkwardness, preening, ambition, escape.

This album resets things to the pre-decline era, though Brett's lyric writing is only just recovering from years of neglect and Butler needs to let go of his tendency to multitrack everything to hell. Still, there's a fluidity to the best stuff here -- the savagery of the riffs of Brave New Century, the swagger of Lovers -- that makes you unthinkingly forgive the flaws and rejoice in the fact that two strong writers have given up pissing away their talent and started bottling it again.

The one thing they have to work on is the codas, something which made many a Suede song complete, but which are only half-remembered here. Fallen Idol is one of several tracks that bow out on a repeated vocal phrase (in this case, whistling -- best avoided) with a wash of noodling guitars under it, creating a feeling of aimless churning that has you pining for the effortless shift of gear that took songs like Metal Mickey or New Generation flying into riffed endings like a sweet rush of blood to the head.

At its best, this album is effortless and inevitable in the manner of Anderson and Butler's best. Next task is to get past the euphoria of this reunion and work on the real masterpieces that, we can but hope, lie ahead.

Things not to write in your CV

A CV I read today credited the writer with the "ability to create instant credibility."

Someone should point out that so can a good con man, noted a colleague.

Technorati Tags: japan, summer, tokyo

Failure

Whatever idiot wired our entryphone into the phone line is destined for a serious karma downgrade in the next life. His first and only job from the age of three will be waving a lighted baton at roadworks. He will occasionally be hit by passing vehicles, and will frequently be sworn at.

Every time someone rings my home phone, the DSL goes into an entertaining five-seconds-on, thirty-seconds-off cycle that this time is in its third day and showing no signs of abating. Usually, getting it back on track by using something like a BitTorrent download to keep the data flowing works, but this time I'm stuck.

Technorati Tags: japan, night, nighttime, tokyo

Who would have thought

that a book involving a bunch of brothers whose names begin with successive letters of the alphabet and change at will, three of whom are a nested set of Russian dolls, one of whom is dead, and one of whom is an island, with a mountain and a washing machine for parents, could possibly work?

But it does.

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

Megumu

I love this little etymology of the word 恵む, which appeared of all places on Bloomberg a little while ago (prize to anyone who can remind me how to nail down who SNK are as a BB data source):

「妻子（めこ）見れば愛（かな）しくめぐし」と歌われた「めぐし」と同根の語。「めぐし」は目＋グシで、グシは「心ぐし」（「心苦しい」意）のそれ。「めぐし」が（見ていてはらはら気遣う）意なので、（かわいそうで放っておけず物や金をやる）意になる。

I'm not sure what it is exactly that tickles me; perhaps the fact that you mostly come across megumu -- or the more common passive form megumareru in reference to being blessed with or lucky to have intangible things like ability, opportunities, and so forth, so there's an amusing jolt from being told that the active verb originally meant "to feel so sorry for some poor guy that you can't just leave him to rot, and consequently give him money and stuff".

I've been a bit busy for the last month, as you may have gathered.

Wilderness touring

Of all the days to be heading off to Hakone for an offsite seminar. It continues to snow like a bastard, and with snow chains on the inside of the coach I'm on is vibrating and droning like some sifting machine designed to separate the underslept from the merely knackered.

Click on the link to the right for a short video of what it looks like outside about now (250k QT movie)...

Sometimes, katakana is just there to trip you up

When you're looking at a translation about a company that makes both aluminium foil and aluminium wheels, and both are arumi hoi-ru in Japanese, you have to conclude that someone is trying to impede the smooth progress of your day. Contextual cues can only get you so far before you start hallucinating and muttering about promising to tell them everything if they'll just leave you in peace.

Incidentally, I seem to have proved conclusively that mixing Japanese and English text in mo:blog causes nasty things to happen; putting the italicized text above in katakana and trying to post has just caused a fatal error, twice. Hmm.

Technology works for us in small ways

At our office there's a cart full of lunchboxes that turns up at about 11am each day to cater to all the poor souls who eat at their desks (i.e., most of us). I hadn't realised they were so, like, impressively equipped, though:

Woman with lunchbox cart (whipping out walkie-talkie in response to question about one of today's offerings): Moshi moshi. Do you know what the white fluffy stuff on top of the shrimp dumplings is? Over.

Walkie-talkies always struck me as something given to folks who needed to keep urgently in touch (say, the emergency services), but here everyone has them. Even the guys waving flags ineffectually at either end of roadworks have them, on occasion. "Blue Two calling Blue Leader. Going for tea break now, OK? Over." "Blue Two, roger teabreak. Out."

Testing video

Movie clip

I think this should play as is in Quicktime, but let's see.

Attempted taxiblog

Having the ability to post from anywhere (using the clie and mo:blog, with cellphone as Bluetooth modem) is turning me back on to the idea of moblogging. Hence, typing feverishly at the keys as we lurch through Shibuya, crammed in with a plant that takes up half the cabin space by itself.

Swan Lake in Shibuya

To Shibuya for the matinee of Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake. I'm not a great ballet aficionado, but this was spectacularly well done. No spoilers, but I cried at the end.

Only got a crappy shot of the curtain call as we were under the staff's beady gaze throughout.

Moblogging in style

Found today that a very helpful soul who owns the same combination of cellphone and PDA as me--a Fujitsu F900iT and Clie PEG-UX50--has kidly posted up a howto on getting them to talk to each other via Bluetooth. The main thing that's been impeding my use of the Clie for anything other than taking notes and syncing my work schedule (and sketching out songs using the excellent BhajisLoops) is the lack of enough WiFi around here. Looks like that problem is solved, as I am blogging this surreptitiously from an obscure corner of the office.

Yokohama

At the counter of a jazz bar in Motomachi.

It is, incidentally, bloody freezing.

Customs PR

So there are some things that get slapped with a ton of tax coming into Japan, and when you're thinking about buying one online you want to check whether you're going to get landed with a customs duty invoice when it arrives. So you go to the customs website. And pause.

Why do they have a download page with desktop wallpaper, even a screensaver? Is it so you can show your co-workers that compliance with customs regulations is a good thing, and that you'd never think of sneaking stuff into the country by throwing the boxes away and pretending you've had it for a while, wearing it, or some other devious means? Is it to instill into them the knowledge, the fear, that should they do the same you will be leading the pursuing posse of sandblasted customs motherfuckers hell-bent on doing, nay, collecting their duty? Or are they just insecure, aware of their unpopular place in the public imagination as a bunch of suits who contribute to the slow incremental erosion of our fun?

Whichever it was, the choice of a fat, stern-looking, mouthless dog as their mascot was a bad move.

A brief cross-cultural "Separated At Birth"

I doubt these are the photos that are going to have you gasping at the resemblance, but either Korean heart-throb Bae Yong-Jun has been doing some intensive study of James Spader's look in Stargate or my imagination is really starting to overheat. The hair, the glasses, the dreamy look; now, if only James could sort out some muscles and a scarf they'd be twins.

Japan's Golden Raspberries

In a welcome blip in Japan's mostly-cheerleading entertainment media, Shuukan Bunshun magazine is starting a Japanese version of the Golden Raspberries. The inaugural awards take aim at crap of both overseas and domestic varieties, with Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle coming in at a not-unexpected No. 3 ("the voice actors, the story, the visuals--all terrible"), pipped only by Casshern ("a promo video for Utada Hikaru's theme song") and Devilman, a live-action manga remake that I haven't seen, though the fact that K-1 bludgeoner Bob Sapp is playing a newscaster is a bad omen.

[Via Slashdot J]

Tony Takitani

The only Murakami Haruki work to make it to the screen thus far has been his debut novel, Hear the Wind Sing (Kaze no Uta wo Kike). It's easy to see why; in most of his novels the majority of the words on the page are first-person narration and, unless you go in for voiceovers or tedious devices like looking over the narrator's shoulder as he writes his journal, you're not left with much to work with. The SFX budget required to film something like Hard-Boiled Wonderland probably gives many more pause for thought, though with Kiriya Kazuaki allegedly having made Casshern on a bunch of G5 Macs purchased from Akihabara when the production budget came in, the word should be out that the bar for creating CG-driven epics is coming way down. Murakami's science fiction does have a certain 80s tilt to it, though, so it'd take a skilled hand to brush it up for the 00's.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying I'm not all that surprised that the next Murakami work to grace the screen will be an untypical piece. Tony Takitani is a longish short story from his collection Lexington no Yuurei (The Ghost of Lexington) that depicts the life of a Japanese jazz musician turned illustrator, beginning in Shanghai around the time of WW2. It does have the usual Murakami quirks, but it's odd to see him do a period piece except in the war flashbacks found in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

Whereas Hear the Wind Sing was by all accounts a fairly uninspired piece of disaffected-youth drama, Tony Takitani looks on paper to promise more. Ogata Issei and Miyazawa Rie star, Sakamoto Ryuichi provides the music, and the director is Ichikawa Jun. There's now a bilingual site up for the movie, from which I learn that it's already had a couple of film festival screenings and is lined up to show at Sundance in 2005. From the shots and commentary up at the site, I'm hooked enough to put this one down as a must-see for next year. Opens in spring in Japan.

The timely takyubin

Not a great day; have contracted the lurgy and, planning to finish up some work at home, then find that my newly-granted corporate ThinkPad is not on speaking terms with NTT's ADSL modems and that I will have to drop by tomorrow and pick up a router to put between the two. Which seems a touch excessive. Allegedly everything will at some point go wireless, which is nice given that the 'Pad already has it but you're locked out of using it.

Only bright spot in the day was the arrival of one of the iKub stands pictured. Basically a huge Kubrick figure that sits there holding your iPod for you. The holder doesn't block the dock connector, which is a nice touch, and it has a mirrored rear (slightly impractical, like the iPod itself). With the discovery that doing PowerPoint presentations using an iPod photo is possible, I've half a mind to order one and expense it just to see what happens.

Korea is nuts

According to the TV news, Korea is today starting its university entrance exams. Being a society that is even more fixated on academic performance (there's a perfect term for gakureki shugi in English, but I can't remember it) than Japan, if that were possible, they go extravagantly over the top to help out the leaders of tomorrow on exam day.

Company workers come into work an hour early to avoid the exam-takers being caught up in rush-hour trains. Pupils in junior years come to their seniors' classrooms to put on singing and skits to pep them up. Then camp outside overnight so they can welcome them and sing more songs and otherwise pump them up. The police are on the lookout for anyone liable to be late and will give them a lift to the exam centre. Parents pray and cry at the gates.

A colleague who worked in Seoul as a defence journalist once remarked that if any country in the world was likely to knock the Earth out of its orbit and crash it into the Sun, it would be Korea.

Pick of the month

This is the coolest thing ever to happen. Some of you may disagree with me, but you are, I am sorry to say, full of shit.

[Via Gizmodo]

A guide to NY's underworld

I've come across this page on the disused parts of New York's subway system before--it even prompted me to start sketching out a series of short stories about tunnel-dwellers--and this book has got my interest prickling again.

Publisher's blurb and some reviews on the Barnes and Noble site.

Wikipedia's fame in the Japanese countryside

One of last Sunday's stranger findings came at an autumn festival near Lake Kawaguchi. I didn't have a camera around at the time, but I swear on this copy of my year-end tax adjustment forms (the most official-looking bit of paper I have to hand) that I saw a woman in late middle age carrying a cheap-looking generic black nylon handbag with the word WIKIPEDIA printed on the side over some kind of world map. As manufacturers of generic black nylon bags are apt to randomly print all sorts of crap on them and, moreover, have yet to awaken to the potential of the Web as a marketing tool, I have thus far Googled in vain for another whiff of the beast's spoor.

NTT DoCoMo must take their share of the blame; were they not insistent on making their cellphones blurt out a pseudo-shutter noise every time you snap a photo I would have sidled closer and captured this one with my keitai.

Fourth decade

One of my companions on the recent weekend trip got in the first gag of my fourth decade; after falling asleep on a sofabed rather like this one (but with a more pronounced backward tilt to the seat), he awoke in the middle of the night from a nightmare involving being sucked in by a giant arse. Which, if you look at the photo, is entirely plausible. He then recounted being hit by a wave of nausea, "and then," he said, "I realised that it wasn't mine."

Unfortunately the wave of nausea belonged to the author, but the detoxification probably wasn't a bad thing.

The grand Japanese beer taste test

Out in Yamanashi to celebrate the beginning of my fourth decade (relax; I don't intend to [be in a state to] blog the rest of the festivities), and the first event of the evening is to assess objectively the deliciousness or otherwise of most popular Japanese brands of beer.

The following are the results of a taste-test panel conducted by seven experts (one non-drinker, one partial drinker, and several borderline alcoholics) on a scale of one to five urghs. The results posted are the combined number of urghs uttered by all respondents. Samples were obtained from the nearest FamilyMart.

Shiro Kirin -- 24
Ichiban Shibori -- 20
Classic Lager -- 16
Asahi Super Dry -- 17
Ebisu -- 23
Sapporo DraftOne -- 27
Kirin Komugi -- 9

A surprising result, then; Kirin's Komugi is a happoshu (low-malt beer), as is DraftOne, so a clear indication of just how execrable the genre can get on a bad day, and the heights it can reach at its best. First happoshu I've tried that has been generally decent.

Impressive...

...that blogs are now deemed important enough to move the equity markets:

Top News Article | Reuters.com

Typhoon

The drains were fountaining in our street during the big typhoon recently. I know I'm hopelessly out of date, but things have been crazy.

The Ginza-style French regional starvation diet

Had dinner a couple of nights ago at a certain new restaurant in Ginza that promises "French regional cuisine". I was all set to recommend it until partway through, but on the evidence of most of the food I think I'd be better recommending to the owner that she consider hiring a decent chef and spend less money on interior decoration.

The terrine I had to start was fine; appropriately coarse and country-style, though any self-respecting countrydwelling Frenchman would have come for you with a pitchfork had you offered him the unmanly sliver that I got. (Particularly had you hit him with a Y735 surcharge for choosing it over the other options, which were a soup thing or a fish thing.)

The trouble came, rather, during and after the main course. The problems during stemmed from the Basque-style sauce (aliens getting their first French lesson from this dish would have concluded that Basque means "like the tomato-puree-based salad dressing the author of this blog made at the weekend, but warm and fiercely oversalted") and the uninspiring chicken. Chicken is apt to get all sorts of crap from people who extol the virtues of red meat and deny that it has any flavour, but if you are one such person, believe me; there are inspiring and uninspiring versions, and the difference is vast.

The problems after came very shortly after, due to the once again minimal portion. I looked up partway through to note that my spouse had finished her even more minimal fish already; it wasn't a dish that could have lasted you more than a minute or so even had you paused to stare wistfully out of the window and compose a couple of haiku on the onset of autumn. Having dealt with my own morsel, I stared fixedly at the back of the nearby maitre d'.

"'He puts on a pleading expression'," commented my spouse.

"Not as such," I objected. "I was thinking of stuffing this lad into the oven in the next room and turning him into pot au feu."

We briefly attempted to forget about our gnawing hunger while drinking the decent coffee that came next and reflecting on the fact that its flavour had probably benefited from the chef's total lack of involvement.

The bill wasn't bad, mostly because my spouse had gone there at the restaurant's behest so they could sell her on its virtues as a dining venue and/or potential photo shoot location, and she was therefore eating for nothing.

"That means if we'd been paying for two it would have been about Y12,000," my spouse noted in a whisper.

"If we'd been paying for two one of these bastards would be dead by now," I responded equally sotto voce, casting a murderous glance at the waiting staff. "If they ask me how it was, am I allowed to suggest that unless they get a decent chef they'll be closed in six months?"

"No," my spouse admonished. "Tell them it was very nice."

So I did, while drawing some comfort from the fact that I had had the foresight to arrange the chicken bones from my main course into a complex rune that would later lead the chef to pull out all his hair and live under a tree by the Imperial Palace.

NY taxi sign

Still digging through the past month. Liked the Jenny Holtzer-ness of this taxi sign.

Taken with the Clie, hence the nasty quality.

New York

We're back to the beginning of September now (this was taken on the 11th, just off Brooklyn Bridge). The corporate world continues to strengthen its grip.

Skewed streets

The UK, and the glam that goes with it

I now have a new simile for length: as long as Schipol Airport. Damn that thing is long. You taxi for 15-20 minutes after landing, over major roads, a couple of canals, and miles of featureless tarmac. You half expect the pilot to give up halfway and just taxi out onto the motorway and head home. Did they build with spaceplanes in mind, or what? And the theme of long thinness is carried over diligently into the airport building itself; simply walking from a gate in the F's to another in the D's involves going through two border checks.

The ultimate goal of all this traipsing was to get to the Lake District and, well, chill. For all its intermittent tourist-pandering it wins out for greenery and general peace over competitors in Japan such as Ashinoko, which seems concreted to hell and anaemically forested by comparison. We were even moved to toy with the idea of opening a Japanese restaurant there and jacking in the Tokyo ratrace. I used to scoff at the advice given to those Japan-bound that one needs to get away once a year or so--I was made of tougher stuff. It now occurs to me that this is a universal need which affects Japanese people just as strongly. There they go, in their July hordes, cramming airport and station, bent on escape. It pays the 21st-century citydweller to go somewhere that hasn't had stuff built all over it and stare fondly at a hill here and a sheep there once in a while, just to get a bit of perspective.

Written while listening to Skyway from the album Skynet by Infiniti

Ten feet tall

Just to prove that us arts people are not a complete and total loss, I have just managed to program my first Perl script. All it does is convert Fahrenheit into Celsius, but still; I consider it my first step into a wider world, one which I suspect has more carpal tunnel in it.

Wonder how well speech recognition would work for coding? You'd have to establish a lot of verbal shortcuts that would be expanded into code, I guess.

Anyway, I've finally hit upon an idea for an application I want to build, hence the sudden burst of enthusiasm. Unfortunately it also requires reading a 50-page spec document from NTT DoCoMo, which is rather stodgy going despite the entertaining pictures of stick figures holding cellphones.

Talking of cellphones, just got my laughably primitive rental phone for our upcoming trip to the UK. It has a monochrome screen, for goodness' sake. But supposedly switching my FOMA USIM card into it will enable me to continue using my Japanese cellphone number, albeit paying international rates for calling and getting charged for receiving as well. I do hope this kind of thing is going to improve fairly soon.

Classic audio equipment casemods

All your casemods with neon and fishtanks are no match for the sheer class of these: old Bang and Olufsen stereos and other classic pieces of equipment that have been modded into multimedia PCs.

[Via Boing Boing]

[Read: Bootleg Objects]

New form of TrackBack abuse?

Logging into MovableType to do a bit of tweaking, I found I had a TrackBack ping entitled "iPod mini available in the UK" to an entry I wrote a while back about the 'mini. The link was to the pre-order page for the product at Amazon UK. A look at the URL suggests that someone with the ID robertscross-21 is looking for a bit of extra Amazon Associate business. If this is what it looks like, and someone's written up some code to send pings with a product ordering page to blog posts that reference the product, then it sounds like a quick route to getting your Amazon Associate ID cancelled.

You have to be kidding me

A colleague pointed out an article in the July issue of Japanzine that references Virgin English, a "mook" (half magazine, half book) of taste and style whose April edition is themed "Becoming Beautiful Through English".

I was joking about the taste and style, incidentally; the magazine gets its heels firmly stuck in the grating of cross-cultural sexual politics with such articles as "How to Woo and Win a Handsome Gaijin Guy" and "How to Get Rid of Gaijin Losers". It also includes a "map of gaijin habitats" (using the word seisokuchi, which as the article notes is only used formally to refer to wildlife). Essentially, it's a guide to places where foreign nationals abound, and where you're likely to get some free English practice and possibly pick up a trophy boyfriend who'll teach you the language for free. This attitude is prevalent enough in certain quarters without encouragement from textbook publishers.

This rather mars my impression of ALC, the publishers, who I had previously classified as the Good Guys because they host the open-source and eminently usable Eijiro dictionary on their site. Actually, it does more than mar my impression; it makes me want to shit on their head from high altitude.

ALC's contact information is here if you feel like sending them a few choice words, by the way; the other enquiries address seems to fit the bill for enquiries about why they are putting out unenlightened crap about the very cultures they're supposed to be educating people on.

[Via Japanzine]

Keitai impressionism

Love this shot, which came out of taking a photo through a window straight toward the sun and confusing the bejeezus out of the phone's camera.

Posted here because the moblog died in a recent crash, and I haven't had time to restore it yet.

Chaku-uta test

Just seeing if QuickTime 6.5 really will output music as something I can download to my phone as a song ringtone: here

[Update: Works fine on my new Fujitsu F900iT. Obviously you need to find a compromise between bit rate, length and so forth to get what you want--192Kbps @ 48.0kHz for about 10-15 seconds gives a file of about 268kb, which is only just under the limit these phones can handle, and I suspect given the size of the speakers it'd be possible to take the quality down quite a bit and still get acceptable results. More experimenting to be done...]

[Update: Apparently there are all sorts of settings needed. DoCoMo couldn't just make it easy...let's tryhere]

Now I'm a big boy I get to stay out late and stuff

Playing a little, after a week of 15-hour days

Kyodo News' cheap laugh headline of the day

3 medical workers arrested for poaching shrimp

The three were cautioned by police and instructed in future to stick to government-approved cooking methods--grilling, frying, boiling or steaming. "Poaching is something you do to eggs," said spokesman Hitoshi Makihara of the Hokkaido Police Agency's Culinary Standards Enforcement Unit. "The suggestion that shrimp are in some way liquid and akin to a raw egg is an abuse of linguistic, cultural and culinary standards."

Kyodo News manage to do this at least a couple of times a week, and they show no signs of slowing down.

Sorry if the sunsets are getting a bit much

Hi. It's Thursday. I'm back.

Japan beat India 7-0 in the football last night; one has to admire India's spirit for coming all this way just to get pasted.

PM Koizumi is a lying toad with big brass balls.

The men's volleyball team proved not to be as successful as the women's.

The rainy season started on Monday, and Jon "Your Name Will Live in Infamy" Kabila had the effrontery to start the day by playing "Rainy Days and Mondays" at 7.30am.

This is the best cheap laugh I've had in a while: a UK website that gives you a list of amusing place names near to a given postcode. My ancestral home returns:

Butty Moss
Nob End
Smallwood
Bottom Flash
Ramsbottom
Dick Slack
Shatton Moor
Upperthong
Dirty Gutter
Shavington Ho

That about brings me up to date. More soon.

Kids, you know what a "domain name" is, right?

Well, everyone, today we're going to talk about something a little bit more difficult, called "domain name renewal", and what happens if you forget to do it. OK?

Every year, or every few years, your domain name will need to be renewed. All you need to do is go to a website and type in your credit card number (just use Mummy's if you don't have one yet), and everything is fine.

If you forget, though, your website will disappear. You can send the people in charge of the domain names an email, but after that you'll have to use this big clanking thing called a fax machine to send them copies of your passport, utility bills, current address, contact email, and phone number, and a signed consent document that says you want them to apply to have the domain turned back on again. Sorry kids, did I confuse you there? Yeah, confused me too.

And God smiled on the metropolis

Loving up the skyline

Out-of-season cherry blossoms

What I have been doing while not updating this blog

2. That and a spot of work here and there.

That's where April and most of May went.

Photo is of a building near Omiya station. Must visit and see if I can get to the control room.

Historical beers for the tourists

Found in a supermarket in Shirogane earlier: Low-malt beers (argh!) with the likenesses of Kondo Isami and Sakamoto Ryoma, prominent figures in the run-up to the Meiji Restoration.

Not sure quite who these are aimed at, since the personages in question are a bit too obscure to be caught by a cursory skim of the guidebook. As for the beverage itself, it's better than most of the run-of-the-mill happoshu on the market, but nothing particularly special.

A gentler age

Somewhat refreshed

Small apocalypses

Overpass

Tower

Winding down

Off to Tohoku for a few days, where the sakura are still in bloom.

OK, then, we won't go

The United States now believes that it can detect terrorists using a half-minute interview prior to boarding.

To the US government, terrorism is doubtless a disease. But it seems intent on tackling only the symptoms, and with methods that are the equivalent of trepanning to relieve a headache.

One can but hope that a more enlightened successor to the present administration awaits us.

[Read: Guardian Unlimited Travel | Check-in times to US may hit five hours]

Thought for the day

I have had enough of the time it takes to rebuild Movable Type by hand each time the Berkeley database decides to choke on some character or other.

A move to SQL is in order as soon as I get the time.

City beads

Green and red light through rainy car windows.
To make instant art press miniaturise button.

My prejudices are showing

Have been meaning for a while to write some kind of diatribe against the Foreign Press Centre of Japan, whose email updates I subscribe to because they tend to arrive at that time of day when I'm thinking "I could really do with something to scoff at about now".

Came across the following in the FPCJ's sort-of-useful, sort-of-pointless "Japan: A Web Guide". (The Guide includes the telltale line that "Japan has four well-defined seasons", which should give those acquainted with bureaucratic, nihonjinron, stickinthemudreactionaryoldbastard writing chills.)

Five general-interest national dailies--Asahi Shimbun, Mainichi Shimbun, Yomiuri Shimbun, Sankei Shimbun, Nihon Keizai Shimbun--publish different editions across the country, which carry the same political, economic, and cultural reports but vary in their local news coverage and advertising.

No prizes for guessing how I misinterpreted the phrase "which carry the same political, economic, and cultural reports". That's remarkably honest of them, I thought.

I suppose I shouldn't be so harsh given that the whole thing is surprisingly up to date, though it does appear in places to have been written by a farmhand, translated by his horse, then copyedited by its arse at a time of day when the spellcheck wasn't working. The section on film lurches all over the place, regaling us at length with data about the Japanese horror films that have recently been optioned for remakes before noting, "Remakes of Akira Kurosawa's films have also been done in the past". Sure, one can only dwell on Kurosawa so long and it's healthy to move on, but the influence of the man's work deserves more than an aside in any overview. "Stanley Kubrick once made a space film too."

JAPAN: A Web Guide

From the outside looking in

Fairly scathing piece from Aljazeera on the treatment of immigrants, both legal and illegal, in Japan. It's a skim through some familiar issues, but does provide an update on the Ministry of Justice's awful and highly racist web page that encourages tip-offs about foreigners who the tipper thinks have done something illegal.

The ministry's Immigration Bureau introduced the section on 16 February and, according to spokesman Mamoru Fukudaki, received more than 780 tip-offs from the public in the first month.

[...]

"I don't think the ministry is even aware that this is discriminatory," said [Amnesty International's Sonoko] Kawakami. "They are under a lot of pressure from the public and the police and this just shows how racially discriminatory Japanese society has become in recent years."

And while it is true that many overstayers have violated the immigration laws, "the government must ask itself why", she added. "The reason is that Japanese don't want to do manual labour, which Japanese industry needs, so these people are contributing to Japanese society."

[Read: Keeping foreigners out of Japan]

Spam poetry

seven fires jelly quail inner liver kinky means winey modal speak pelts
crisp rough as pilot pools added surge simon query belts cream pagan knelt egypt angle
crash fatal heels oasis alive juicy a elbow crisp south crisp heard proof
jihad aboil entry store serve proof inner panda seven
crawl also vbweb dress while melon aphid seems cross pelts.
allot man oscar crime as tears

an grass under words hasty final keeps quail below title pinky rapid
knead shaky an kinds later clone a sunny ducks cream kneel was jihad never grill
going pulls skate older merry frogs flies local plane brace stuck cries dance
a wines whole salem quite polka alias blown named
popup racer alias happy yacht james robot kneel ovals xylem.
snail also black prism a lamps

quirk as issac as weeks pilot grand ulcer might was
miles aphid smoke group comes dance

wiser
snack given.

-- Fineness J. Astride, 2004

The above arrived in my mailbox today. One of these spam mails that are written in a very toned-down way, wary of filters, and have a mass of innocuous words inserted way down in the mail body to lower the dodginess ratio further. Given the option of HTML mail these are usually coloured to match the mail background; perhaps because I have a Mac, they showed up. I love the phrases like "allot man oscar crime as tears" where it almost starts to sound coherent.

The blossoms depart

Shidare-zakura at Happoen. In the hope of prolonging the blossoms a little. I've been looking down at Aoyama Cemetary's gradually thinning long cross of blooms, like an Anglican church, from the office window all week without being able to get down there to look at them. And now, damnit, they're pretty much scattered.

Guerilla artist out-guerilla'd

Hilarious article from the Guardian. Graffiti artist Banksy, celebrated or reviled depending on whether you're looking at his work or trying to wash it off the wall, has had his first sculpture kidnapped.

The message left on the telephone is slightly muffled. "Hi, Simon Hattenstone, I'm not going to give my name as yet. I've got a story you might be interested in. One of Bansky's works has been kidnapped. He's done a big piece called the Drinker and he's been moving it around London. It has been kidnapped. We've sent a demand ... well, we've sent a letter to his office to let it know it's been kidnapped. We've got full photos of the whole act going on." The caller says he'll leave a number, and then doesn't, but promises he will ring back.

I'm particularly tickled by Banksy's response to the ransom demand--an offer to buy the kidnappers £2 toward a can of petrol if they'll burn the statue and put film of it up on the web.

I often wonder how something like Banksy's stencils would go down in Japan. Police boxes would be my first target, I think--there are a world of possibilities for pisstaking. Another would be Roppongi Hills, which has all sorts of murals on the pavement anyway and deserves a stiff slap for the recent revolving door accident.

That reminds me--there's a Banksy print of a policeman with a raised middle finger in a tube at home that I must find a frame for...

Read: The Guardian

Well and truly burgered

The New York Times reports on Okinawa's growing obesity problem, which it puts down to aspiration toward things American and a consequent tendency to get the burgers in too often:

"Okinawa has the top number of hamburger restaurants in the country, 8.19 for every 100,000 residents.

Residents of Naha, Okinawa's capital, spend 46 percent more of their household budgets on hamburgers than in other prefectural capitals. They spend 60 percent more on bacon, three times more on processed meat and four and a half times more on canned foods.

They spent 49 percent less on salad and 71 percent less on sushi."

Spending relatively more on processed meat and canned foods sounds natural to me in such a hot climate, though that may be simplistic of me. I wonder about the sushi comparison, though; I sense the fish that can be had fresh enough to eat raw in Okinawa don't lend themselves that well to it. Tropical, colourful, and slightly funny has been my experience. A taxi driver in Naha last year warned us off it as being no good, too, so it may be a perception shared by the Okinawans.

The proliferation of A&W in Okinawa is certainly true, though; there's one in Naha airport and seemingly another every fifty metres in any direction (if it's not a McD or a KFC). There used to be two in Akasaka that were early casualties when the tide turned against fast food a couple of years ago. In the fast-food high-school yearbook they would doubtless have won "most likely to be nixed in a downturn", though; they were constantly running out of the little incidental, non-critical things like root beer, onion rings, and burgers, and the people who worked there would endlessly enter and clear the wrong code on the cash register rather than asking someone what they were doing wrong. Unfortunately I had invariably left my chakra torture kit at the office on such occasions.

A&W operates now only in Kyushu and Okinawa.

[Read: New York Times - Urasoe Journal: On U.S. Fast Food, More Okinawans Grow Super-Sized]

Plugging holes in a sunken ship

TV news reports that the police have turned up in force to search the offices of Mori Building and Sanwa Shutter on suspicion of causing death through professional negligence, after a six-year-old boy was crushed in a revolving door at Roppongi Hills last week. It turns out that there are no government safety standards for revolving doors, and that the sensors of the door in question had been set at a height that wouldn't have detected a young child. There had been 32 previous incidents involving the doors; 10 of those trapped were taken to hospital.

Government sanctions certainly seem too lenient when it comes to this sort of thing; someone resigns, public apologies are made, compensation is paid, and things carry on pretty much as normal. But what's going on within the individual companies? Is it just that the learned response to a problem situation is cover up and find the least disruptive solution rather than escalate?

Photos to the top right are police officers holding up a tarpaulin to conceal the entrance shortly after the accident last week, and the media scrum inside the lobby.

Chocoball blackballed

And while we're on the subject of sex:

Chocoball Mukai must be about the only male Japanese porn star known outside Japan, after his appearance in Karl Taro Greenfeld's Speed Tribes, thinly veiled by the pseudonym Choco Bon-Bon. Greenfeld's piece, "The Perfect Tuna", hints at something of the ups and downs of his career, and he's subsequently branched out into pro wrestling, presumably as a sideline to his main job in an industry ever more focused on the girls being serviced rather than the cocks-for-hire doing the servicing. It seems that even with a trademark pair of testicles that show up chocolate-brown on video to distinguish you, times are tough.

Live shows are apparently one way in which adult video stars supplement their income here, and it's one of these that has just got Chocoball arrested. The Asahi Shimbun reports that he was caught at a members-only "happening bar" in Roppongi 3-chome performing an obscene act with a 25-year-old actress. I'm not clear on exactly what a "happening bar" is.

One surprising thing in the article is the level of detail they give about Chocoball's address--not just the ku, but right down to the place name and the number of the cho he lives in. While they're not exactly giving out the GPS coordinates of his house, it would enable someone with ill intentions and time on their hands to track him down. I've seen the papers here do this before, but it seems rather questionable even with the tacit assumption common in Japan that anyone arrested is automatically guilty of something.

Granted, Chocoball has admitted his guilt. "It's my job," he apparently said in response to police questioning.

[Via asahi.com (Japanese)]

[Update: The indefatigable Mainichi Daily News, which seems to be entirely the work of a chap called Ryann Connell since the print edition was nixed, has this article on the incident that goes into what "happening bars" involve. Via jeansnow.net]

It ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it

I don't know whether Japan draws on the Kama Sutra for its sexual positions or whether they're part of an indigenous tradition (surely, beyond a certain point there must be an overlap based purely on the limitations of human anatomy), but there are certainly a lot. The spouse recently came home with a so-called fitness magazine that listed more than 60 in the interests of getting people to stretch their understretched bits.

An enterprising chap here has replicated 48 of the most popular positions for prosperity, using the miniature toy version of Sony's Aibo. Doubtless Nobuyuki Idei will have a good old chuckle over that one.

[Via Geisha Asobi]

Shrine guardian from Takanawa temple

I forget the name of the temple, though I got lost there once thinking it was somewhere else entirely. Had never noticed these catlike, fishlike beasts that guard the entrance, though.

Sakura wallpaper

On the offchance that anyone out there is need of some cherry blossom wallpaper, here's an image from Happoen this afternoon (warning; link is to a 2.3MB file).

Spring

This week's theme remains "grim"

Going for that Radiohead-cover-game-landscape sorta thing.

Ghostblogging

During busy spells I've often thought how nice it would be to be able to find an article that interested me and throw it at some lackey to write up in humorous and erudite prose. Now, it seems, there actually is a ghostblogging service. Starting this April, Japanese firm Writeup will install MovableType and create a blogged part of your site (for the princely sum of Y150,000), and then employ one of its network of 1200 writers to update it (for Y30,000 per month). Presumably one has to give said writer the info needed for updates in some form or another (press releases?), so it sounds like more of a repackaging or summarising service than writing per se.

Would be fun if they had carte blanche to Google the company and write up whatever they found, though.

March 24, 2004

On this day in 1982, then-Executive Vice President Ken Suzuki was arrested on suspicion of bribing a high-level government official in return for the award of a lucrative contract to supply several ministries with coffee-table-style Space Invaders machines. Suzuki cracked under subsequent police questioning and implicated several ministry bureacrats. Released on bail pending his trial, he was attacked by an unknown intruder at his home one night in early April and beaten to death with a rusty spanner. The murderer has never been found.

[Via Slashdot J (Japanese)]

Grim panorama of the day

JR East's skiing ostrich ads

Viewers in Japan will likely have JR East's ads to promote hopping on the shinkansen and heading for the pistes etched into their brains by now; for those who haven't seen them yet, both of the two-part series are streamable from the company's website.

The admirably nonsensical premise to the ads is that a diehard skiier is reincarnated as an ostrich whose sole desire is to get from Africa back to the slopes. This is an excuse for much slick and gleeful CG'd footage of the big bird busting moves all over the pistes.

Link to the 300k broadband version of the ad.

[Note: This isn't all that topical, I know; it's here because it occurred to me this morning that the ad might tickle the fancy of the folks at BoingBoing, and having submitted it there I thought I might as well write it up here too.]

Cameraphone-readable QR code generator

Came across a cool little CGI that generates the QR codes readable by many Japanese cameraphones. Encode a URL, for example, and when you snap a shot of it with your phone you'll get the option of connecting to the site. It's possible to encode up to 1,817 kanji or double-byte kana, or 4,296 alphanumeric characters. As the codes are equally readable via a monitor as from paper, could be an interesting thing to use on a website to scatter bits of keitai content about.

Time to upgrade to a cameraphone that reads QR codes.

[Via Michael Schubart's Weblog

Freedom from revealing the unsaid

From the New Scientist:

A computer program which can read words before they are spoken by analysing nerve signals in our mouths and throats, has been developed by NASA.

The first thing that came to mind reading this was William Burroughs' Cities of the Red Night trilogy, somewhere in which (IIRC) he talks about freeing the reader from the tyranny of subvocalising the words they are reading, of enabling them to read words as images. I can't particularly recall having thought Burroughs prescient before, but if we were to find ourselves in a world where words as yet unvocalised were able to be detected, we might thank him for the warning. One must note that the New Scientist seems to be going through a phase of leaping wide-eyed at the improbable recently, however.

Hide not thy shame, o operator of graffiti'd train

Graffiti is a comparitive rarity in Japan, except for certain parts of town where people have been corrupted by the evil appeal of hip-hop, America, wide trousers, and talking back to one's elders and betters. Appearances of such tykery in the provinces cause all sorts of alarm, as today; some enterprising chap with a can of paint and an itchy index finger redecorated the side of a train in Shiga prefecture with a 1m x 12m graffito (which we're told only consisted of silver roman letters). The train company's response? Pull the service, affecting 1,800 people.

Notwithstanding that the graffito may have revealed something sordid about the stationmaster's past, this seems a bit lily-livered. The idea of making the best of the situation--dressing all the train personnel in leisure wear and rebranding it with an appropriately illin' name, say--probably never occurred to them.

[Via asahi.com (Japanese)]

Turing, the guardian deity of children

Story from the New Scientist about an IT consultant from England who has created a sophisticated "nanniebot" that hangs out in IM chat rooms and attempts to detect paedophiles who are trying to groom children.

The NS notes that it was unable to substantiate the creator's claim that he has been successful. But read the transcript of a conversation quoted between a nanniebot and a human at the end of the article. Here's an extract:

A - heh yeah it is kinda quiet...you know why though don't you! B - no, why? A - national holiday in the uk! B - what, thursday? i don't know any national holiday on thursday! and besides wouldn't that mean there were more people not less? A - yeah youre right, i was confused with pancake day B - pancake day! i love pancakes...mmmm so tasty A - yeah me too, but i forget every damn year B - did you forget this year? A - yes! damn! B - well any day can be pancake day - just make pancakes A - its not the same! B - sure it is! hey, this one year I bought a box of 'pancake mix' for pancake day...guess what? A - go on? B - it was a box of flour! A - LOL thats bad news dude

Take a guess at which is the 'bot. Answer at the end of the article.

New Scientist article

The sins of the fathers

You don't want a doomsday cult leader as a parent anyway, but here's a specific way in which it can screw up your prospects:

A Tokyo university has revoked its acceptance of a 20-year-old woman after discovering she is the daughter of a former cult guru convicted of masterminding the 1995 gas attack on the Tokyo subway system that killed 12 people.

From the vague terms in which the university couches its explanation one suspects that they're just exercising their right to protect the wa rather than acting in accordance with a law that allows the offspring of cult leaders to be excluded from higher education.

Maybe the grandchildren will have more luck.

Yahoo! News - Japan Cult Guru Daughter's College Place Revoked

Define "tough job"

If you ever have cause to rue your current choice of employment, compare yourself for a moment with Matsumoto Rikyu. Charged with studying the effects of power plant construction on the environment at the Central Research Institute of the Electric Power Industry, Matsumoto's job currently involves collecting rabbit droppings and subjecting them to DNA analysis. This can involve, in the example cited by the Asahi.com article below, poking around in the Akita snow for nine hours at a stretch, looking at footprints and picking up pellets. The result, after analysing the DNA of each? There are 15 rabbits in the area.

"It's an unglamorous job, understanding ecosystems," he says.

[Via asahi.com (Japanese)]

Bubbly transport

12-hour day, knackered, train an unappealing prospect. Stick hand out and a Jaguar stops. Not a tricked-up Toyota; the driver lowers the window as he pulls up and I know he's about to say the door isn't automatic, so I open it before he has a chance.

It's an X-Type, so while there is leather and walnut there isn't the overpowering aura of its bigger brethren. Still, I am travelling in a dark green Jaguar with faintly smoked windows and a meter on the dashboard that says 660 yen...and counting. The driver's ID plate proclaims his company to be called Monkeys; whether it's just him or a fleet, an empire of Jags ruled by a fat chimpanzee in a green velvet smoking jacket, who's to say. It seems a question best left unasked; don't want to spoil the fantasy.

Is it the return of the bubble? Are we all to make our fortunes in stocks and land, be transported hither and thither through the city in expensive cars, wreathed in diamonds and furs?

I got the driver's card, just in case.

The kindness of Japanese music TV

Watching Hey! Hey! Hey! -- one of Japan's numerous chat-and-music shows -- we find the leader of twentysomething heart-throbs V6 with a stinking cold and barely able to speak while being interviewed. He is so out of it that he drops his drink in the middle of the chat segment. Neat segue into their song, during which he "sings" flawlessly.

And from somewhere out there, over the ether, a voice floats in, faintly: isn't he singing well through that cold?

Still find it curious that one would think to name a band V6 here despite the Japanese language not having a "v" or "s" sound. I suppose it is in our nature to be attracted to things outside the barriers our languages and circumstances happen to impose upon us.

Braintime

This has not been a week with much time to assimilate or reflect on things, to formulate opinions. It's perhaps an interesting comment on what it takes to be an educator; at work I have taken on a few extra responsibilities to fill in while someone's on vacation, which puts me in a position of having to tell people how to do thing properly and enforce and modify policies. The result is that this work stuff is very clear in my mind--in line with the adage that the best way to cement your own knowledge is to teach it to others--but it also eats into the capacity I have to process other information. It makes me blase, in a sense; the Madrid attacks came as part of a huge flow of information and I had to mark the news for later attention and let it go past.

It worries me that a job should take up so much of my time--specifically, the processing time available to my brain--that I should fail to react to something as dramatic and terrible as Madrid, that I should just be noting it and filing it. Our work/life balance in general continues to tip the wrong way, and around me I see an increasing number of people opting out of corporations in favour of arrangements that allow them to work more flexibly. One problem is that while there are many jobs that could be done remotely, enabling that just isn't on the corporate radar screen--even though in the long run it would probably mean cost savings and help retain employees who are pulling away because the number of hours they are having to spend in an office has crossed the threshold of acceptability. It seems almost taboo to talk of letting people go home earlier, even if they pick up some work later, partly because the culture rewards the show of persistence that staying at your desk represents, even if that's not the most efficient way and ultimately ends up driving people away because they happen to lack superhuman reserves of stamina.

I hope that in some small way I am able to change that. No-one can either lead or follow effectively without time to reflect, to broaden their perspective, to avoid getting locked into a loop where the information pipe they're plugged into comes only from one source, and the time unplugged is spent mutely recovering with the higher faculties shut down to recuperate.

Written while listening to Even Spring from the album Spokes by Plaid

10% of the population

Spotted in a discussion on Japan Today: foreign residents apparently make up 10% of the population of Minato-ku--16,000 vs. the 159,000 total (I am one of the 16,000, hence my interest). No wonder someone at the post office asked for my terehon nanbaa the other day when I called to ask them to redeliver something that had arrived when I was out. The concept of someone with a katakana name speaking Japanese must not be one that receives much reinforcement in their daily business (Minato-ku AND foreigner NOT monolingual = few hits), so it's fair enough that they assume the worst. Still, it is as ever faintly depressing each time I hear the other person's brain reboot into safe mode when I say my name.

I've used Japanese pseudonyms on the phone before to avoid the trouble (there is at least one restaurant that knows me as Edogawa-san), though that backfired once when I was apartment-hunting (tire-kicking, really) and unexpectedly ended up having to meet a particular estate agent. He asked how he would recognize me, at which I had to tell him that actually I was just using the Japanese surname for convenience, and that, as a 6'4" white person, he would probably have little trouble picking me out.

Japan Today - Local gov'ts worry how to evacuate foreigners in emergencies

Be careful and don't bugger about

Incompetent meddling with translations is a pet hate that's been with me since a stint working for a certain Japanese government ministry, at which it had been evolved into a form of highly-structured review process in which something good was systematically degraded to gibberish.

The following, from a Mainichi Daily News article, gave me flashbacks; I can just see someone saying "but if it's her 10th award, that's a plural, so it has to be 'awards'":

Also, the prize for best actress in a leading role went to Shinobu Terajima, which marked her 10th awards with the film "Akame 48 Waterfalls." This film is based on the Naoki literacy award-winning novel of the same title written by Chokitsu Kurumatani.

I love the surreal and unintentional putdown of calling the Naoki Prize a "literacy award", too; you can get it just for being able to read, let alone write.

Blue afternoons

Takanawa fire station (to be exact, the Nihon-enoki branch station of it), taken in mid-February. The building dates from 1933, at which time the exposed gallery at the top of the tower was used for the nightly firewatch.

The "Nihon-enoki" that remains in the station's name refers to the former place name of the area, Shiba-ku Nihon-enoki, which derives from the two large enoki trees (nettle trees or hackberries according to the dictionary) that used to stand nearby.

The blue tinge (it's a white tiled building) is partly the late February afternoon and partly the fact that the Sony DSC-V1 seems to like blue, and green, above all other colours.

Like everywhere else at the moment, the area around Takanawa, Shirogane and Meguro is seeing a cull of old apartment buildings and a rush to build cooler and more expensive things in their place. There's a pleasingly toylike quality to the orange of the cranes. Must be hell getting to work in the morning, climbing that ladder, but what a place to work. Probably cold up there, but rather that than a highrise.

Temples trapped between modern buildings are no rarity; this was one of two today we came across walking around Shinagawa. The other, which I didn't get a shot of as we were hurrying to feed, was set back up a sidestreet with steps up to a frontage that was more goldleafed and templelike than this one; but I like the way that this one fits in, placid and workmanlike, with its surroundings.

Testing ecto

Have finally been persuaded to move over from Kung-Log to ecto by the inclusion in the File Upload window of the ability to bring up a panel of thumbnails of whatever you slung into iPhoto most recently, and to resize as necessary before posting. Regrettably the iPhoto part doesn't appear to be working at the moment, but at least browsing for files once will take you back to the same location next time.

Looks great even compared to Kung-Log, though.

Photo is of the Mori Tower at Roppongi Hills. I have to expand my area of activities a bit. I suspect a plot of my movements in recent weeks would be a straight line between there and home.

A new bit of US English: Wagyu

Did a double take at hearing someone in the US talking in English about "wagyu" on the Japanese news the other night; now comes confirmation that US cow-fanciers are indeed raising Wagyu and then, following the lead of their Japanese brethren, taking the natural next step of turning them into monstrously expensive steaks. Apparently business is doing well thanks to the discovery of BSE in a less-pampered, non-Wagyu cow.

Japanese beef is "high in monounsaturated fats," says the article, which are apparently better for you than being beaten in the head with a spiked club.

Incidentally, a quick wagyu lesson courtesy of Japanese dictionary Kojien: wagyu is the collective name for the one wholly indigenous Tsukishima breed and the four others that result from breeding indigenous stock with European and other foreign varieties since the Meiji period.

Interesting that, as with so many things, the Japanese palate seems happiest with something that mixes foreign and indigenous to taste. Interesting too that while one asssumes the interbreeding stems from the recognition that being genetically various is a good thing, it's a case of four legs good, two legs bad: when it comes to humans, there is an abundance of old duffers ready to state as fact that the Japanese are a homogenous race (tan'itsu minzoku), and some will actually proclaim it as an ideal state. Pure and unsullied probably sounds like a good thing, but one is tempted to remind these folks that limiting one's gene pool too much tends to result in one's descendants growing tails and developing exotic ailments.

Read: Kansas.comarticle

Not being fired is bad for the health

More slightly dated news. Whether you have experienced being fired or not, gentle reader, you probably are like me in regarding dismissal as unlikely to do you much good*. It also transpires that those who remain happily unfired in the midst of the carnage do not escape unscathed. The New Scientist even makes the old mistake of suggesting that their risk of death is increased.

(Let's say it once more. Everyone has a 100% risk of death. At present it is not possible either to lower this risk one iota, nor (given that it is already 100%) to raise it.)

*Note: A former colleague who was planning to leave her job anyway had the happy experience of being fired and handed six months' salary as a payoff. That definitely increased stress levels in those remaining. All of us are still alive, though.

Read: New Scientist article

Biologist retrains as gas fitter

From among the things that have been piling up in my to-blog list.

BBC NEWS | Biologist retrains as gas fitter

Surreal news of the day

is that Watanabe Ken, having got a foot in Hollywood's door with The Last Samurai, is next to...

...portray a villain in an upcoming Batman movie, U.S. entertainment newspaper Variety reported Tuesday. Watanabe is slated to play immortal evil mastermind Ra's Al-Ghul (Arabic for "demon's head") in the fifth installment of the Batman movie franchise.

Christian Bale is Batman (a natural transition--or rather elision--after Bateman?), Michael Caine his butler, and Liam Neeson his mentor. Director is Christopher Nolan, of Memento fame. One senses something darker and more twisted even than Tim Burton's take could be on the cards.

Japan Today - Watanabe to play villain in new Batman movie

Keeping busy

Suffering another burst of overwork. For now, a snap.

Shop your neighbourhood foreigner

Japan's Ministry of Justice has set up a web form that allows posters to anonymously submit information on foreign nationals who they suspect of working in Japan without the appropriate visa.

The form offers a drop-down menu with a choice of reason for sending in information, which sounds very much like it was written by someone with a grudge. The options range from "neigbourhood nuisance" to "unease" and "the employer/company's actions are unforgivable", with the blip of "sympathy" (for whom?).

The best of the bunch are "I was made unemployed because of the criminal/violator (ihansha)", "I cannot get a job because of the criminal/violator", and "the criminal/violator's actions are unforgivable".

I see; obviously if one is the Ministry of Justice, it is acceptable for one to encourage people to refer to someone as in violation of the law before they are convicted.

One proposal for an addition to the list, in a lower emotional gear:

"I felt it was my civic duty to report a possible offence."

The MoJ has denied any intention to fan anti-foreign sentiment, something which Amnesty International accused it of in a complaint on the above issue. But even if we ascribe it the benefit of the doubt as an entity, the members of its staff who prepared the page in question could use a lesson or two in tact.

I am tempted to substitute something stronger for "members of its staff".

Japan urged to stop using Internet to inform on illegal aliens

Panawave: Alive and dangerous

Seems that the folks from Panawave are still with us. The white-clothed cult at one stage found itself caught full in the spotlight of a Japanese Media Hysteria Fest for shuffling uneasily around the country in a convoy of white vans, wrapping all around it in white cloths to shield its leader from various evil forms of electromagnetic radiation generated, if memory serves, by Communists.

The police have obviously been keeping up the pressure even though the media's has slackened; they've just arrested the cult's two leaders for having improperly registered vehicles. Attention to detail, one supposes, is what gets you there in the end; if you can't get them for the big stuff like human sacrifice or summoning evil spirits to sully public morals, nitpick them to death.

[Via the Sankei Shimbun]

Song lyric questions answered in agony column format

Q: Why do birds suddenly appear every time he is near?

A: Are these seabirds? If so, consider the possibility that your sweetheart is a fish.

(The bloody Carpenters are playing everywhere I go at the moment for some reason.)

Car games sell cars

Auto Insider article about Gran Turismo 4 and the power of racing games featuring production models as an advertising tool.

Gamers are changing the face of vehicle showrooms, automotive design studios, auto shows and commercials. They even are beginning to influence what ends up in American dealerships.

"Gamers are part of our company folklore," said Ian Beavis, head of marketing for Mitsubishi Motors Corp. in North America. "When the original version of Gran Turismo came out, they put pressure on us to bring the Lancer Evo to America. We finally brought it in and today we sell 500 of those a month to a very young audience. And they are all gamers."

I hadn't realised the sheer scale of Gran Turismo 4--500 production cars versus 50 in the original, "including historic vehicles like the Ford Model T, that will be accurate down to the names of the paint chips". That must be why it's taking so long to build the thing.

[Via TechDirt]

The Self-Defence Force in Iraq

Boston Globe article on the dispatch of the SDF to Samawah.

Despite the uniforms, weapons, and body armour, one gets the impression watching the troops depart from Japan that the government is making sure they play down the militariness of the exercise: troops arrive at the airbase in chartered tour buses; they fly on a government plane (not an SDF one); and their weapons and gear are flown on a civil cargo plane hired from Qatar (or somewhere nearby; I forget exactly).

While riding a high-tech lift the other morning a news item about the SDF came up on the TV monitor. One of my Japanese co-riders remarked that "if they didn't want a fight they should have dressed them in white uniforms with big red crosses on 'em."

I have no definitive information on the moustaches that some of the SDF officers are sporting, but I remember reading or hearing somewhere that they've been cultivating them with their destination in mind, facial hair being a status thing there.

Singaporean anti-smoking ad

Another stopgap post while I strive to find time to write up a couple of more substantial ideas. This ad from Singapore, spraypainted on the road, was sent in by a colleague there from his cameraphone:

Which rather puts Japan's mild warnings into perspective ("Please be careful of smoking too much, which can be harmful to your health" is the standard spiel on the packet).

Bad-boy yokozuna

Guardian article on Mongolian bad-boy yokozuna Asashoryu: A real handful.

Asashoryu was made for sumo. In less than four years, the 23-year old scion of a wrestling family has used his muscular, 140kg frame to twist, slap, trip, throw and bludgeon his way to the top of Japan's national sport.

But since rising to the rank of yokozuna, or grand champion, Asashoryu has made enemies, and not just among the fellow grapplers he has left nursing bruises on the clay floor of the sumo ring.

Homework is bad for you

The Guardian reports that homework is a Bad Thing (Homework fails to make the grade):

Children have long suspected it, and now research confirms it: homework is a waste of time. Anxiety, boredom, fatigue and emotional exhaustion are all side-effects of bringing schoolwork home, according to a review of 75 years of study into the issue.

I don't remember being "emotionally exhausted" (which means what?) by homework, at least. In fact I don't remember getting all that much, though different teachers varied in terms of quantity and viscosity. I sense that on the whole less homework reflected better teaching. The guy who could wrap up everything in the lesson, and hold your attention, set homework as a light memory exercise to make sure it had all gone in. The fluffbrained herbivore who spent the period grazing arbitrarily on factoids here and factoids there (here a factoid, there a factoid, everywhere a factoid) had to set ten-page essays to give you a shot at creating a context into which to fit them all.

Homework in the UK, though, is but a toe in the paddling pool where Japan puts its kids through the full cross-Atlantic swim with weights strapped to the extremities. One assumes that if there is a considerable body of research into homework in the UK, there must be great paper skyscrapers on the harm* done to Japanese children by the regime of rote-learning the school system here demands.

(*or "good," if one sees the goal of general education as equipping the populace for a life of mediocrity)

City photos

Cleaning up

Having finally beaten off a virus and a biblical plague of work, I was feeling stupid and full of beans once again and decided to tackle the momentous task of redesigning the style sheet of this site. It works in Safari 1.1, but may not in anything else; I was getting fever headache flashbacks from reading lists of each browser's rendering foibles and abandoned any attempt at total compliance. Another briezeblock on the tracks of my Beautiful Layout Express was that MovableType's standard templates appear to work fine with two columns, but to need rethinking for three. Not having the willpower to sit down and bughunt, or trash the template and build a new one, I have shelved that endeavour for next time.

Anyway, the new layout involves dispensing with the distracting background pattern, bringing everything more to the centre, and boxing things in a way that is hopefully easier on the eye, including a narrower content box to create shorter text lines. It also adds a friendly 8-bit game-style robot as a date marker. If he's not there, reload as necessary.

Overwork

February may lack a place in the popular imagination as a month of frenzied endeavour--"sleet" would be top of my word-association ranking for the month--but I have had a concussive couple of weeks that culminated in 36 hours in bed. In between such life-sustaining tasks as sucking chocolate ice-cream through a straw, I spent it working through an interesting fever dream in which in some sort of building site a series of diggers and dump trucks gradually grabbed and broke down blocks of undefined matter and returned them to the land. I assume this was my brain's attempt at reporting to me what was going on at the cellular level, since shortly after the last block was processed I woke up, at about three a.m., to find that my temperature was back to normal.

The following unposted bit from two days before the virus-infused building-site experience should have warned me to lift off and coast a bit:

"I work for what I might characterise as a media outfit. Recently I feel like I'm part of an anthill working ever more frenetically as it senses disaster nearing, though no-one thinks to point out that the anthill is clearly in the shadow of a tree that's about to fall on it. As the inflow of stimuli increases we churn out more and more stuff, which gets less interesting the more we churn out, as if we're trying to build a raft of paper on which to stay afloat.

"Recently started rereading the bunko-bon of Dance Dance Dance, and my part in the above process reminds me of what the copywriter protagonist describes as 'shovelling cultural snow'."

Photo is another attempt to keep my hands steady while taking long exposures of things at night.

Tripping the light fantastic

Nishi-Azabu at night. Meddling with colour saturation and so forth. Full-size images are about 150 KB.

Online "bookmark replacements"

Have been destruction-testing a few alternatives to browser bookmarks: del.icio.us, Furl, and dudecheckthisout. I can't remember when I stopped using bookmarks, because the main use I have for a link is wanting to look at or blog about something I come across in the news while reading at work, but need to reference and think about at home--which thus far has meant pasting endless links into emails that I send myself at home and end up not reading.

As Gen Kanai pointed out so saliently on dottocomu, dudecheckthisout is a dodgy proposition because, despite the fact that it provides an RSS feed for whatever you post, it ultimately drives traffic away from your site and towards the Dude (which may be the intention). Of Furl and del.icio.us, I favour the latter because it seems to bookmark pretty much anything where Furl.net will occasionally throw you an error and refuse to store something, which at that moment invalidates its usefulness.

The thing that Furl does stand out with, though, is the fact that it stores a copy of the pages you bookmark, which massively improves your chances of finding something again via its search function. This is great stuff, which addresses one of the key problems of browser bookmarks--namely, whether you were disciplined enough to give your bookmark a meaningful name when you stored it. Given that you can search the entire text of the page you bookmarked, you're in with a fighting chance of getting back to that interesting morsel of information that you've forgotten.

None of the above work all that well with Japanese, for some reason (Furl seems to mostly display correctly, but resets the page encoding to English every time you reload); this is something that dogs my work life as well, and I would point the developers, if they're reading, toward Joel Spolsky's piece on the subject of text encoding and Unicode. People need software to be multilingual these days--just look at the amount of Chinese links that del.icio.us gets, for example. Monolingual is not an option any more.

The corporation psychoanalysed

Jason Kottke posts about a film, The Corporation, that looks to be premised on an idea similar to one that I've been ruminating about for a bit: why is it that we demand from corporations, as entities, behaviour that would be unacceptable in an individual?

Considering the odd legal fiction that deems a corporation a "person" in the eyes of the law, the feature documentary employees a checklist, based on actual diagnostic criteria of the World Health Organization and DSM IV, the standard tool of psychiatrists and psychologists. What emerges is a disturbing diagnosis.

Self-interested, amoral, callous and deceitful, a corporation's operational principles make it anti-social. It breaches social and legal standards to get its way even while it mimics the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism. It suffers no guilt. Diagnosis: the institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism fully meets the diagnostic criteria of a psychopath.

I feel a little ambivalent about the above, since while it's probably fair to say that the larger and more successful of the planet's corporations have not got where they are by being models of goodness, that doesn't lead inexorably to the conclusion that all corporations are bad. And how does one define "guilt" at corporate level? The more cynical part of me also suspects that to a greater or lesser extent this "diagnosis" describes a set of prerequisites for individual success, if not survival, and that our knowledge of this at the individual level leads us to impose these survival characteristics on the corporations we create.

In any case, I want to see this, and the book on which the documentary is based looks like it may be worth a read.

Photographing the capital from on high

Testing out the new Sony DSC-V1 from the office window. Long zooms are a toy that I never seem to get tired of, and the V1 holds up pretty well even at the full 4X optical + 4X digital. You can almost see the interiors of rooms in buildings that must be 250-300 metres away. (Anyone with any serious knowledge of photography is probably labeling me a waffling simpleton about now.)

Anyway, not attempting Art from this vantage point because the reflection back off the windows is an incredible pain. Will have to dodge the romancing couples and go up to the fifty-whateverth floor outside balcony for a proper attempt (on second thoughts, probably best to take the spouse and go in romancing couple mode ourselves to avoid looking like some spiritual relative of the man in a raincoat hovering near the playground).

Into the tunnel of love

Brilliant little story in the Asahi Shimbun that unwittingly slides a few disparate morsels of Japanese cultural obsession onto the same skewer. I think I can sum the whole thing up in about four sentences; your attention, please.

A 21-year-old female student riding a women-only subway train in Kobe is subjected to an unspecified obscene act by a man aged between 20-30. She screams, driving him out of the train at the next station, where he leaps from the platform onto the tracks and heads into the tunnels. A group of ten policeman and rail staff search for him, but he has disappeared. Three thousand people are made slightly late.

Women-only carriages have become a firm fixture; are the stronger-willed among Japan's train perverts targeting them, now, as a form of revenge? (This isn't the first article I've seen about this kind of thing happening.) By no means do I offer praise to men who do this sort of thing; it's just that the superhero badguyness of being able to disappear into a tunnel sets me off imagining secret societies of mutant train perverts driven underground and living in the subway network.

Asahi Shimbun article

The latest scam to afflict the gullible

First we had the ore ore scam (ore being the male informal for "I" in Japanese), where an enterprising crim would ring up some unsuspecting pensioner and say, "Hi, it's me," at which said pensioner would assume that the speaker was whatever younger male relative they felt like and agree to help out financially with whatever spot of bother the speaker claimed to be in.

Now, we have another more topical variant on the theme: the "pay up or we're taking your son to North Korea" scam. Happened near where I used to live in Sumida-ku a couple of days ago. 65-year-old man gets phone call purporting to be from his eldest son, saying "Dad, I can't pay the money back and they're going to drag me off to North Korea," at which another man gets on the line and tells Dad that unless he pays up his son will be coshed and spirited away in a canvas sack. In a saner moment one might pause to consider whether it is actually possible to "sell" a Japanese adult male to the land of the Dear Leader for cold hard cash, but whatever; in times of stress these things take on an air of plausibility. The victim did, it must be said, think to call his son and check, but unfortunately he couldn't get hold of him until after he'd transferred Y3.6 mn yen to the heinous villain's bank account (from which it was promptly withdrawn).

(Apologies to any readers who have had relatives forcibly removed to NK for blowing off underworld loans.)

[Via the Asahi Shimbun]

Warp online music store opens

My fortune cookie this morning read "You deserve the very best that life can bring to you."

In very short order I found out that this was right on the mark: Warp's music download store, BLEEP, is open. The main differences from every other member of the species are that there's no copy protection of any kind, and that there is a very low wackness quotient indeed.

Can't listen to the previews at the moment, for some reason. Am looking forward to having a good explore tonight.

BLEEP

Comment spam reaches new lows

Have a look at this post from my moblog; a gentleman called Moma Massinga has left a Nigerian 4-1-9 spam as a comment to a photo of Roppongi Hills. One senses desperation.

New Thinkgeek favourite

Not sure how one can reasonably justify having one of these, but I have a longstanding soft spot for dot matrix signboards. Maker's site offers more variations.

You would look like a wanker walking around with one of these stuck to your jacket, wouldn't you?

Yeah, thought so.

Still going on my wishlist, though.

And the all-important camera

Having established where to buy and picked up and fiddled with the various candidates, I now face the difficult part; deciding what to buy. The Sony DSC-F828 is absolutely wonderful, save for the fact that it is the size of an industrial torch and weighs as much as a smallish revolver. The Minolta DiMAGE A1 and the Nikon Coolpix 5700 are smaller, but somehow left me rather cold.

Canon has also gone and derailed my careful deliberations by releasing a digital SLR, the EOS Kiss Digital, that I can almost afford. Having looked at the images you can take with it, I am convinced one couldn't do better for quality at the price. The noise levels at ISO 800 are less than of a prosumer camera at ISO 200, and even in long-exposure night shots the sky is absolutely free of graininess and blotches. It does weigh as much as the abovementioned Smith & Wesson, unfortunately.

Or should I just opt for a reasonable 4 megapixel compact I can carry all the time and stick to the film SLRs (a Minolta 7000 and a Canon A-1, for the record) when trying anything serious?

Ways in which I have benefited from learning the Japanese language

Number 1: Online shopping mall Rakuten.

Despite having two SLRs in the house I don't really have the patience to wait for things to be developed and find the process of taking film to the shop and picking it up unspeakably tedious. Besides, prints look crap. Hence, it being bonus season and all, have been shopping around for digital cameras. It rapidly becomes clear that the sole remaining reason for going to a major electronics retailer in Tokyo is to test the heft and balance of whatever item you will subsequently go home and purchase online, unless you are the product of an experiment to find and remove the human common sense gene.

The difference is literally Y20-30,000 in some cases. A Sony DSC-V1 will cost you about Y80,000 in the shops, but I found several Rakuten shops selling it for about Y63,000. A Minolta DiMAGE A1 will set you back about Y130,000; the cheapest one I can find on Rakuten is Y96,800. A Sony F828, Y130,000 versus Y108,000.

I don't know what bargains you might find trawling through the rustle of anoraks and the sigh of stalled libido that is Akihabara, but certainly avoid the major chains. Learn Japanese, and employ the Web to thy advantage.

Incidentally, a tip that will disappoint any monolingual readers who have hit on the cunning solution of using Amazon Japan's "view this page in English"; Amazon tends not to be all that cheap for electrical stuff, in my experience, so tread carefully. Rakuten is far better, or price comparison sites like kakaku.com (though I prefer the former since you have Rakuten watching over the individual retailers).

PS: If I get any comments to this post along the lines of "send me more information about where I can buy this camera" I will find the culprit's server and piss on it until it shorts. Call it a pet hate of mine.

Fowl play

TV news programs in Japan pixellate a variety of things, mostly to protect the accused, the innocent, or those too young to be held responsible. Depending on the station you may see the figure of an arrested suspect mosaic'd out, or just the handcuffs he's wearing--to avoid being sued should he subsequently be found innocent; you may see a softfocus blanket over the children in a school playground where a crime took place; you may see buildings around a killer's house blurred to avoid bringing the neighbourhood into disrepute.

Chickens, though, are a first for me. A first for the animal kingdom, in fact. There's a bird flu outbreak in Yamaguchi that has killed 2,399 chickens so far; to accompany this bit of news this afternoon we were treated to a shot of chickens inside a chicken-house somewhere, their figures carefully digitally degraded. Presumably since they were still alive it was necessary to avoid implying that they might be the next to succumb. Chicken buyers with sharp eyes might have spotted a familiar face at the next auction and refused to bid, too.

Bleeping is used in a similar way; comedians who happen to bad-mouth a particular politician, or even the police in general, can find the offending words neatly blanked. A recent comedy show bleeped a line in a song about Kanagawa prefecture that (it was evident even with the bleep) went something like "the only thing worse than the bosozoku in Kanagawa is the police in charge of controlling them."

Needless to say hard-hitting (especially political) satire is not a genre that has made it into the mass media in Japan, if it exists at all (I would be interested to know of any examples). Magazines have a comparitively free rein, but newspapers are extremely cautious about running anything that could blow up in their faces. One story I heard concerned a certain journalist who had a certain high-ranking prefectural politician bang to rights for using an emergency helicopter to visit his mistress, but was warned off by his editor (the politician in question has since been brought down by another scandal, I believe).

Most ill-advised domain name ever

An Italian company called Powergen made a grave mistake when registering a name for its website. Looks like they have changed it; probably just as well given that the majority of their visitors were likely in search of something other than battery chargers.

[Via No-Sword]

Roppongi Hills in the NYT

Very fluffy and rather sycophantic piece in the NY Times about Roppongi Hills: Tokyo Builds a Microcosm of Itself. Roku-roku*, as we aficionados call it, is undoubtedly a tour de force in many ways, but as the article notes it is labyrinthine. The maps are mostly appalling, too, either too close-up to show you how one area relates to the whole, or too zoomed-out to be of much use.

*(from the first character of "Roppongi" and the fact that it's situated in roku-chou-me [the 6th zone or block of the area])

One other thing that is proving a considerable annoyance around here is the biru-kaze; the slicing wind generated around tall buildings. Walking out of the Mori Tower and under the celebrated spider, recently I have to lean heavily sideways into the wind to avoid being blown over (I stand nearly two metres tall and am not lightly built). Given the apparent proliferation of software designed to predict at the design stage what sort of wind a building will generate, one wonders if they couldn't have refined the airflow a bit more.

Common sense on the iPod mini

A lot of moaning has been going on about how the iPod mini is priced too high, at only $50 under the 15GB iPod, considering its 11GB deficit in storage capacity. Via Hivelogic, this post takes the flaws in that reasoning apart.

Apple changing its spots?

Interesting: Apple has not been the most open of companies when it comes to sharing its technology or cooperating with other tech cos, but apparently it has inked a deal with Hewlett Packard to produce an HP-branded version of the iPod. HP will also be installing iTunes on all its PCs.

[Via Gizmodo]

NYT article on Tokyo's lost property office

New York Times: Never Lost, but Found Daily: Japanese Honesty

[Via BoingBoing]

Korea to suffer debilitating influx of low-grade Japanese pop music

With all the fuss over North Korea it's easy to forget that Japan's relations with the South are also less than rosy in some respects. For example, SK has just, from January 1, lifted its ban on the sale of music CDs with Japanese lyrics and the TV broadcast of Japanese songs. Sony Music is wasting no time, with its first offering from the inimitable Tube (who are not so much the tube as where you stick it) appearing yesterday, followed by some slightly better stuff today.

Restrictions on some Japanese TV programmes have also in theory been lifted, with broadcasters now able to show Japanese films that have been given a theatrical release in Korea, drama serials, and music programmes. However, national broadcaster KBS says that it will only broadcast dramas if they are joint Japan/Korea productions, and will only show music in the form of live broadcasts of concerts taking place in Korea.

Broadcasts of Japanese variety and comedy shows remain banned due to the fact that the public "still harbours strong feelings against Japanese popular culture," according to the government.

Animated features will be deregulated in January 2006, with the two year delay being to safeguard the domestic industry.

What Japan's new adults think

The 2004 iteration of Seiko's annual opinion poll canvassing new adults (19 and 20 year olds) is out. Interesting to see that the "men of the moment" features a bit of ethnic diversity in the form of Keanu Reeves in fourth place and David Beckham in sixth; last year's lineup was an all-Japanese affair headed up by Nobel Prize winner Tanaka Kouichi. The rest is not a great surprise, with the New York Giants' Matsui "Godzilla" Hideki remaining No. 2, Kimura Takuya of SMAP moving down to 5 from 4, and Hanshin Tigers manager Hoshino Sen'ichi popping in at 3. More surprising perhaps is PM Koizumi's rise from 3rd to 1st, but it turns out the reason given was that "he appears on TV a lot." Ouch.

The women of the year are mostly an obvious dredge through the narrow ranks of the young, beautiful and successful; seven of the ten are actresses or singers aged 17-30, and two are 18-year-old volleyball players (I assume I've missed some prominent competition in which they captured the imagination of their peers). The exception is Tanaka Makiko, daughter of Tanaka "Lockheed scandal" Kakuei and a colourful figure in the world of politics in her own right. Singer Hamasaki Ayumi holds on to the top spot.

The nation's new adults would apparently like Kitano "Beat" Takeshi to be PM (10% of the vote, vs. Hoshino's 5.0%). Carlos Ghosn of Nissan makes a showing in 7th place, tied with talkaholic comedian Akashiya Sanma. Forced to choose a politician, Koizumi comes out with 6.6%, versus Tokyo governor Ishihara Shintaro at 3.3% and opposition leader Kan Naoto with 1.7%.

As in 2003, nearly 25% of respondents would pay Y10,000 for 24 hours to use as they want. Most would spend it on hobbies (18%), sleeping (16.3%), relaxing (11.8%) or studying (11.6%). (What are they doing with their weekends at the moment?)

What word would they most like to say, given one second: "Thank you!" (arigatou!). To whom? Parents, mostly. 47.1% of boys and 67.8% of girls chose their mother, while 30.6% and 11.9% chose their father. Interesting that girls don't see their fathers as having helped out much.

Survey results in full on Seiko's homepage (Japanese).

Late Christmas present

If like me Christmas left you feeling hard done by, you might well be tempted to treat yourself to one of these. Yes, Apple's mini iPod (or more accurately the iPod mini) is real. 4GB of storage, $249, and the size of a business card. Unfortunately Apple's being its usual teethgrindingly US-centric self; won't be available internationally until April, even though it comes with support for most major languages (including Japanese) out of the box.

[Via Gizmodo]

An unwelcome shock

Any British citizens in Japan needing to renew their passports in the near future, brace yourselves: it's going to cost you. The price for renewing a 32-page passport for those over 16 is UKP56.50 or Y10,452 at the (somewhat outdated) exchange rate of 185 yen to the pound quoted at the British Embassy website. For reference, the price in the UK is a similarly gross UKP42.

Did we sodomise the ambassador's daughter? Did we fuck his wife? Is the fact that there are plenty of restaurants in London charging the same amount per head for dinner some kind of justification for this exorbitant fee?

Icons fallen

A reference to Donald Ritchie's recommendations for books on Japan (from On Gaien Higashi Dori) reminds me of a recent programme about Lafcadio Hearn on Japanese TV that I had been meaning to write about. Relying on memory here, but the summation was that LH's grasp of Japanese was rather basic. My image of him, particularly given his naturalization, had been that he would obviously have been a conquering god of the language, but apparently not; his wife wrote letters to him in the simplest of syntax, and Kwaidan was apparently based on her bedtime readings to him of children's ghost stories (or ghost stories phrased in terms that children would grasp). I suppose one is inevitably drawn to question his insights given his limited mastery of the language, though they do seem to have stood the test of time (but are those who revere him looking at contemporary Japanese sources as well, or just LH's view of things?).

Big news of the day

is that Tsuji Nozomi and Kago Ai, the babyfaced almost-twins who are the subject of many anoraked young men's mucky fantasies (to judge by the abundance of inventive Photoshopping on the web), are to leave Morning Musume. MM are rather reminiscent of Menudo with their ever-more-regular lineup changes, with the twist that not only are older or less popular members weeded out, but the more popular ones are spun off as solo artists. Not only that, but endless new "units" appear with various members of producer Tsunku's MM empire forming up in threes and fours. I believe Kago made it into the chouja banzuke, the list of Japan's highest tax-paying individuals, last year, at about Y50 mn (estimated earnings, or tax paid? I've never checked) so she is evidently a going concern outside the MM umbrella. Oh, to be young and beautiful.

What I did in the holidays

Directorial debut. Threw together a few video clips into a 20-second sequence, complete with original soundtrack; click the picture to the right [512k QuickTime movie]:

The video is stuff I shot with my cellphone while driving along a fairly featureless stretch of Akita road a few days ago. Soundtrack (brutally squashed by the compression) was 10 minutes' work in Reason.

I could almost have done the whole thing with QuickTime Pro, but annoyingly it doesn't seem to have the ability to do transitions between clips. Importing things into iMovie takes a huge amount of time and disk space, especially considering that the video is pretty low quality, but it does give more freedom.

[Update] This is what the music ought to sound like [435k mp3].

We had our suspicions

With the new year, Japaneze appears to have bowed out of the blogging world. Google's cache isn't recent enough to see whether Charlie left any parting shots, but I see the odd comment on other blogs suggesting that this was a blog as "art", which I take it means fiction. When Belle de Jour won a recent blogging award I recall the judges noting that there was no way to tell if it was "real" or not, and Japaneze was perhaps more so; there was too much having cake and eating it going on for one to be entirely certain that it was the whole truth.

I don't really care about the truth, just that the number of interesting blogs has gone down by one.

The unknown

Adapted from the Asahi Shimbun of December 31:

A year ago today a boy of perhaps ten to thirteen years of age was picked up by the police near the south exit of Shinjuku station. He was found wearing jeans, a shirt and a jacket, lightweight clothes for the time of year. They were clean enough to suggest that he hadn't come any distance. Neither did he appear tired or hungry. He was carrying no cash or identification.

He appears unable to speak a single word of any language, responding neither to Japanese, Chinese or Korean. There's no knowing his nationality, therefore. It is presumed that he has a serious learning disability; after a year, he is just starting to try and communicate through gestures.

Despite circulating his likeness and details around the country, hardly any information has come in. I presume he must be both unwanted wherever he came from, and unknown by anyone else.

A ninth empress?

The Guardian picks up a Sankei Shimbun article reporting that Japan is preparing to change the rules governing the Imperial family to allow a female to ascend the throne for the ninth time in history. This debate's been going on for a while, with it looking likely that an empress would be allowed (a high-ranking official indicated as much, off the record, to an acquaintance months ago, come to think of it). The main problem is practical; no male offspring have been born since 1965, and Princess Masako is now 40.

The Sankei article interviews Taro Nakayama, chairman of the committee debating constitutional issues, under whose remit the succession issue also falls. He notes that while the proposal to allow an empress met with majority approval when first brought up, elements from the LDP voiced concerns (wouldn't you know they'd be the ones to put the brakes on). Apparently the concern is over the "difficulty of selecting a suitable husband for the empress," whatever that's supposed to mean (my translation; can't see any other way to parse it). I can only assume that they mean it's going to be hard to find someone who passes general muster, is not a sponger, and doesn't feel too awkward about having subordinate status to his wife, but that's surely not much more difficult than finding wives for princes. The vetting process for wives may not be all that strict, though; rumour has it that at least one of the princes was bagged by a woman who was out to get into the royal family and got to him through a tennis club.

The thing that has always puzzled me about the succession problem is that it surely would have been easy enough to conjure up a male child using surrogates and what have you, a technique which allegedly was employed to bolster the previous emperor's progeny.

From warlord to skater in 17 generations

A minor footnote to history; the 17th male descendant of medieval warlord Oda Nobunaga is a figure-skater. 16-year-old Oda Nobunari (all the boys are given names beginning with Nobu) came second in this year's Japan junior championships and is apparently headed for the world championships next year.

Given young Nobunari's chosen career I somehow doubt the Nobunagas live in a council flat in Saitama; further proof I suspect that the nobility have continued to do fine in postwar Japan, whatever levelling effect reforms were supposed to have had.

Article with photo at asahi.com

Sex, blogs, and the end of another year

There is doubtless a lot of dreary writing about sex on the web, but Belle de Jour and Japaneze are required reading. Not for the sex so much as the insights; the glimpses at the hidden being the meat, rather than the tales of the meat itself. I like both because they're islands of engaging and intelligent writing in the vast continuum of everyday crap that forms the content of most blogs. (Having said which, forgive the humdrum tone of the following.)

Tonight is our first bounenkai of the season. Details of place and time are still vague, mostly because those involved (my spouse included) are linked in some way to the fashion or magazine world and work unpredictable hours, skewed toward the nocturnal. That leaves me chipping away at a story, with half an eye on a program dissecting North Korean TV broadcasts.

In comes the information. Off to Minami-Aoyama it is.

[Later] Back home, pleasantly sated on fugu and hire-zake. Pleased in a sense that I didn't manage to disgrace myself, but slightly unfulfilled in that the evening didn't get its afterburners lit to the point where I would have felt like drinking enough to be disgraceful. Will have to leave that for the party we're having at home on Sunday, when it is incumbent upon me to strap on the apron and concoct something like a Christmas dinner. Then it's off to the snowy north and my genetically teetotal relatives, for a week of not very much. Should get some work done if I can rise above the torpor engendered by end-of-year TV and being wrapped up in blankets next to a gas fire the whole time.

Returning from the half-life

Phew. MovableType's database died on me on Christmas Day; have just got everything back to (hopefully) the way it was on three blogs. I hope the rumours about Kung-Log causing problems are untrue.

Some notes on Apple and iTunes

Forgive my thinking aloud.

Have been thinking (and reading) more about Apple and the iTunes Music Store, specifically in reference to how it might work (or not) in Japan. Gen Kanai links to an article about Apple's failure commercially through what one might term its reckless pursuit of technological innovation, which the writer contrasts with Dell's focus on innovation in management and business models.

The former is an "artistic," elitist approach that focuses on Apple's reputation for quality and innovation as its key asset, and fears sullying that reputation through producing lower-end products or outlicensing technology. The Dell kind of approach, however, is needed to actually make a business work. While Apple has opened up many new markets, it lacks the openness--specifically, you're tempted to conclude, the will or skill to form alliances with other technology companies--that is required to benefit from their development.

The article characterises the iTunes Music Store as another dream that Apple has handed its competitors on a plate. While it has reached 25 million downloads, the margins are minimal and the wolves are closing in on all sides.

In Japan, one suspects the competition for any PC-based download service from cellphones is soon going to be pretty fearsome. Music downloads to cellphones already have a foot in the door in the form of mp3 ringtones; with 3G networks providing the necessary speed, fixed-price data tariffs appearing, and memory cards in phones supplying the requisite storage (and coin-sized hard disks coming very soon), the technology is all there in readiness for the real thing. Add to that the attraction for the content owners of being able to control where that content goes within the cellphone provider's walled garden, and it sounds like a hit to me. Consider also that mp3 ringtone downloads are a Sony trademark (chaku-uta). Sony has been at the forefront of attempts at music downloads in Japan, though it has had no conspicuous success, I suspect because of the pricing (Y300 per song!) and because the copyright protection and proprietary software were a pain in the ass to use (I certainly found them so). Now, however, its model's time may have come. You make the cellphone into a broadband Internet-enabled iPod.

As for pricing, I wonder if anything can be inferred from mp3 ringtone downloads. For the standard monthly content fee of Y300, you get to download 20-second chunks of songs (the number depends on the service). One example I looked at makes more than one chunk of the same song available, and you can download as many chunks of ten songs as you like each month.

Does that mean that in Japan you can charge money for what effectively is the same content as the previews in the iTunes Music Store just by feeding it down a particular distribution channel? Or could you say that selling the good bits of ten songs for Y300 per month implies that copyright owners are ready to agree to a fixed-charge download service for the full songs? Either would be a tenuous conclusion. One suspects that the record companies regard mp3 ringtones as unrelated to the business of shifting CDs, and will want to price each track for dowload at whatever the market will bear: (album price � 10) x 1.05 for each track, perhaps? Songs by foreign artists must represent a headache, though; how could you justify charging more for downloading the same content to Japan instead of to the US?

How much longer have record companies got, anyway?

Tedious legalities and online music

Now that the household is once again online, have been testing out the iTunes Music Store. Immediately hit a speed bump in the form of a message that comes up as soon as you click the "music store" category, saying that unless you have a US billing address you are unable to buy anything. I assume that selling me music in Japan falls outside whatever agreement currently exists between Apple and the various record companies, who are presumably unwilling to give up the premium they charge for CDs here. CDs by foreign artists in Japan include a translation of the lyrics into Japanese, and will usually have an essay on or interview with the artist by a Japanese music journalist, which seems to add about Y700 compared with the price charged for direct imports: Y2,200 vs. Y1,500.

Would love to see some figures for sales of imports versus domestically-manufactured CDs by foreign artists. I wonder if people really want or need the extra trimmings.

Incidentally, at an exchange rate of Y108 to the dollar, a CD that's selling for $7.92 on iTunes would cost you Y855. I can't recall having seen CDs on sale in a major retailer here for under Y1,000 plus tax. Not a huge difference, but if you wanted to eliminate some of the iffy tracks you'd be spending considerably less. There are a few earlier New Order albums from which I doubt I would want absolutely everything were I to buy them now, for example.

For now, a test link to the iTunes Music Store; some pisstaker called Richard Cheese who has a jazz-standards-style album full of covers of Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, Prodigy and so forth. Hopefully the rumours that the Store will hit Japan soon are true.

Live from the Temple of the Golden Pavilion

Kinkakuji and Ginkakuji have their own webcams. Via Alive in Kyoto.

Haven't read Mishima's book for ages, but I remember the overtones of awe and perversion that he gives Kinkakuji; it still is the only temple I can think of that I regard as having a character, as being an entity rather than an assemblage of buildings.

Rounding off the year

Why do samurai dramas from the seventies have music like a Lalo Schiffrin pastiche? For once I've managed to extricate myself from work before the bitter end of the year and am indulging in daytime TV; at the moment, that means jidaigeki, with its combination of funk and swordplay, and the preposterous acrobatic death agonies of those dispatched.

So, for once I have Christmas off, for all that signifies, and a week in which the world should more or less leave me alone. I have three short stories and six or so pieces of music in various stages of completion, all of which have their beaks open and are squalling to be fed, so I shall be keeping busy.

Brief mp3 sample of one of the works in progress.

The Christmas noise in Tokyo has risen a further notch this year. I approve of Christmas in Japan in that it provides a formal opportunity to buy the current girl of your dreams something nice and try and get her into bed. Of all the meanings with which one could choose to imbue this meaningless event, at least they chose something fun and straightforward. A hell of a sight better than enduring one's relatives and waiting for the pubs to open, certainly. This year there's further fuel for the fire with the appearance of Roppongi Hills, with its celebrity Christmas tree and hill lined with fiberoptic zelkovas under which a thousand couples huddle before their outstretched cameraphones. I have to confess that I work in the colossal tower at the centre of the whole shebang (as will be apparent from recent photos in the moblog), and getting home in the evening is like dodging through Disneyland.

Free wireless

Had a pleasant surprise when I popped open my iBook this evening to make some notes--someone nearby has an Apple wireless network. The etiquette of jumping in and using their bandwidth is of course questionable, but since I am stuck with an ISDN connection at the moment while waiting endlessly for fiber optics to be put into our building, I'm afraid I gave in to temptation. Result: I now have an updated version of Reason, and hopefully no-one noticed that they were losing a bit of speed...

Hopefully this nice person will leave their network on a lot, and unsecured. Oh I am evil.

Shadows hardwired into the brain

Via the New Scientist: "Our brains instinctively view our shadows as an extension of our bodies."

Can't help but recall the End of the World in Murakami Haruki's Hard-Boiled Wonderland...; Murakami taps casually into things that have deeper roots, and perhaps the shadows in his Town are another unwitting truth about the dark reaches of the mind.

Stock market superstitions

There are all sorts of seemingly irrelevant data that are supposed to be predictors of stock market activity in Japan; the price that the first tuna of the year goes for at auction is probably the most famous. Another that I vaguely knew about but hadn't investigated until now is the supposed relationship between the Chinese zodiac and stock-market performance.

The Kabuto-cho wisdom goes thus:

辰巳天井、午尻下がり、未辛抱、申酉騒ぐ、戌笑い、亥固まる、子は繁栄、丑つまずき、寅千里を走り、卯跳ねる

(tatsu hebi tenjou, uma shiri-sagari, hitsuji shinbou, saru tori sawagu, inu warau, inoshishi katamaru, nezumi ha han'ei, ushi tsumadzuki, tora senri wo hashiru, usagi haneru)

Roughly: The dragon and snake are the ceiling, the horse trails off at the end, the sheep is patient, the monkey and chicken whoop it up, the dog laughs, the boar digs in, the rat prospers, the cow stumbles, the tiger runs a thousand leagues, and the hare jumps.

What this refers to is the ranking of average market performance for each type of year in the zodiac. Averages for the last 6 occurrences of each year are shown below (figures from this Japanese page; not sure whether this refers to the Nikkei 225 or what):

Rat (nezumi) +54.9%
Hare (usagi) +19.4%
Monkey (saru) +19.1%
Boar (inoshishi) +17.7%
Dragon (tatsu) +16.0%
Chicken (tori) +5.3%
Sheep (hitsuji) +4.6%
Dog (inu) +2.9%
Tiger (tora) +2.9%
Snake (hebi) -0.4%
Cow (ushi) -1.0%
Horse (uma) -4.5%

Things may have changed a bit since the above bit of wisdom was originally coined (how 2.9% equates to "running a thousand leagues", or more precisely 1000 x 2.44 miles, is beyond me, for example). In any case, next year is a Monkey, followed by a Dog, so potentially good news if you believe in this sort of thing.

Fear of new things shortens your life

From the New Scientist:

Animals with an innate phobia of novelty have higher levels of stress hormones after a new experience and die significantly younger than their braver kin, new research has found. The work suggests that a lifetime of fearful stress can take an accumulated toll on health.

Departure lounge

Finally find a hotspot that is open at a useful time, in the form of the entire Heathrow departure lounge. Splendid. Watch men with faces bruised from fighting stalk the concourse in their Kevlar trousers, anonymous identikit figures that seem about to pixelate as if I am seeing them already in the security video playback on the news.

Thanks to all in the UK--three weeks went by in fast-forward, but they were fun. I hope next time it will be a little less sudden.

When once again the cogs of global capitalism need oiling, I shall return.

London notes - 2

[from 15.11.2003]

Odd to say, but this is the first real exposure to British writing and radio I've had in five years and it's a powerful shot in the arm (the TV is, unsurprisingly, largely shit). For example, reading Time Out record reviews today I find Busta Rhymes described as sounding like "a dog that's been taught to smoke fags and sing" and rediscover the glory of viciously wielding the language. So much of what I read in Japanese is frankly insipid: journalism, record reviews; every medium that should be lauding the great and carving up the wankers instead opts for an insipid middle ground that offers faint praise to both.

The radio is a similar shot in the arm. On the one hand I am understanding and loving the mutant Indian ragga throw the lot in the pot things that are happening to R&B; on the other I am reveling in whatever you call the stuff that sounds like the descendant of jungle and drum n' bass and 2-step on the other. Thanks to this exposure I am grinningly sitting here mashing together violins and distorted 140 bpm drums on my iBook and feeling the (possibly illusory) flush of catching up with the zeitgeist and being all cool and genre-bending. All this music leaves me with a feeling about Japan that I suspect many would share: of it being the bright but disappointing student in the class. Everything is slotted into genres; you have your trance, your techno, your garage, your popwank; but nothing that really blends influences in cool new ways. Or at least, nothing that seems able to pop its head above the turgid waters of the mainstream media, and nothing that gets onto my fairly widerangeing radar screen. That may be an overgeneralisation; but one thing that I am certain is a sign of chronic malaise is the well-known "big in Japan" phenomenon; in short, any fuckwit with a spinnable resume is lionised far beyond their talents or the quality of their back catalogue. There is a seemingly pathological need to create icons of cool from the slenderest of materials and grab onto their coattails, and it shuts down all critical faculties.

British TV, to its credit, has one conspicuous merit; the interviews. In the last week I have watched Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Downey Jr., Michael Stipe, and Michael Moore interviewed incisively and amusingly and without fear, with none of the inane, anodyne promo bandwagon routine questions asked in a hotel room that are all that Japanese TV can manage. I memorably once saw Anthony Hopkins interviewed by a Saturday morning fluff-fest where they made an awful lot of him being a difficult interview, even including a digest at the end of him answering questions with a monosyllabic "no" a hundred times. But the questions! "Do you think Hannibal is a crime movie, or a thriller, or what?" Hopkins: "Well, what do you think?" Interviewer: "Uh, I think it's a psycho blather blather blather ill-informed drivel movie." Hopkins: "Well, there's your answer."

Quote from Robert Downey Jr. interview:

RD: Have you ever stayed up all night on amphetamines searching through the garbage for a cigarette butt?

Interviewer: No, but I once got drunk and woke up in a mixture of my own urine and vomit

RD: You say that like it's a negative thing.

London notes

[from 5.11.2003; the author has been busy]

Marooned in the City of London for three weeks. After five years at Tokyo speed, the pace that everyone walks at leaves me wheezing. I feel like I'm breathing on a single lung while everyone else has three or four. Leaving the door of my fully-furnished shoebox on the delightfully-named Eastcheap at eight-thirty in the morning is like sidestepping onto a moving walkway. You too could live here, as long as you don't have a hankering for space and can stump up seven hundred pounds a week for the privilege. The extensive roadworks are a potential turnoff, however; for some unfathomable reason there is a tractor parked across the road at the moment. If they start ploughing, I'm leaving.

For all the talk of leverage and reach and global presence it is still taking a fuck of a long time to get a PC set up to work here. The thought that I may be doing this every time that quarterly earnings come around in Japan is dispiriting. Spending fifteen minutes here and ten minutes there waiting for data to come down a pipe from Tokyo means that I got nothing much done today. During one such wait I am sitting with a phone connected to the IT helpdesk cradled on my shoulder and hear the guy on the other end talking to someone about the speed of connections to other offices. Frankfurt and Johannesburg, he says, are "56". It would be easy to get "512", though. God forbid, are we talking about kilobytes per second here? Could I be wasting half my day waiting for megabytes of data to come trickling down a connection that's the same speed as the one I had at home ten years ago?

All else, though, is security and smartcards and corporate gloss. Swipe your pass over a sensor by the revolving doors and they rotate a neat quarter-turn to let you out. Leaving the office after a jetlagged two hours last night this was beyond my comprehension. There is an extensive restaurant, and a gym, GP and dentist in the basement. Compare this to Roppongi Hills' Mori Tower, the supposed cutting edge of Tokyo office buildings. Gym? Y500,000 to join, Y500,000 deposit, Y240,000 per year. Restaurants? Fight the tourists. There's a company branch of Starbucks, though. Splendid. Enough calories in a Mocha Frappecino to keep you nourished, provided you have confidence in the state of your arteries. Why is Tokyo so backward when it comes to this sort of thing?

Aeroplane thoughts

Business class definitely has its merits. An hour or so into the flight, I can express the difference in very concrete terms. Stuffed into an undersized seat in economy, this would be about the point where a mood of general despair begins to set in as I resign myself to twelve hours of squinting at films and troubled sleep. Instead, I am sipping my second glass of champagne in my little reclining cocoon on the upstairs deck, undisturbed by anyone around, and cheerfully programming a Reason sequence on my iBook. Only four seats to a row, and each pair is arranged in a loveseat formation, one facing forward and one back, with an extensible cloth shield like the crest behind the head of some desert lizard separating us.

Skimming the Nikkei on the plane I am rather alarmed at a piece that interviews one of McKinsey's *Senior Experts* in Japan on the question of immigration. She sets out to demonstrate the economic risks of encouraging immigration, which is something Keidanren has been suggesting to bolster the working population and, hence, the increasingly rickety pension system. The thing that tires me a little is that she does little more than trot out a series of generalisations, if not stereotypes--immigrants fall into the lowest wage bracket, they cause trouble by bringing their families over or suddenly upping and leaving, they stick together and try to maintain their language and culture, resulting in the need for education in that language, etc., etc. She also points out that Japanese society is ill-equipped to deal with immigrants psychologically; largely accurate, perhaps, but I suspect it's a generalisation that many would be unhappy with.

I will give the benefit of the doubt and note that she is talking as an economist and that she does note the option of going the US route in the long term, but I don't know; something about the tone of it comes off as too general, even condescending. In much the same way as the word "gaijin" is used as a meaningless generalisation for *foreigner* that when heard from official sources generally means *Chinese* or *Korean*, discussing the benefits or otherwise of immigrants is meaningless, except that here it's very clear that *immigrant* is intended to mean *unskilled Asia/Third World labour*.

Changing the subject, how long before there is WiFi on planes? Am finding Internet (=information) deprivation far more serious than any need to watch passable Hollywood movies the whole time. I'd rather be blogging. I think that's a t-shirt.

(posting date manually altered to, like, preserve the flow)

The iTunes revolution

I moved house recently and am stuck with the misery of an ISDN connection while I wait for the hallowed day when Usen finally clears their three-month installation backlog and plugs our building into their 100Mbps fiber optic network. As such, I've been following the rise of the iTunes Music Store from afar, affecting disinterest while secretly gnashing my teeth.

This week the wait for a decent connection is getting ever more frustrating, as the Windows version of iTunes gets off to a roaring start and the indications are all that something worldflippingly huge could be underway. What has me abuzz in particular is the allegedly soon-to-arrive iTunes Producer (alluded to on Hivelogic, though proving frustratingly hard to Google). Upload your own tunes to the Music Store. Could we again see the likes of the early, heady days of mp3.com before everything started to turn evil?

Also cool is the iTunes Link Maker, which I will no doubt be using very soon. Deep-link straight to iTunes Music Store songs.

Famous people look famous

(a short-lived exercise in amateur psychology)

Me: "Look at this." (proffers cellphone showing shot of spouse taken with Phillip Glass last Friday)

Colleague: "Wow! Who's that?"

What can we deduce from this exchange? Given that Phillip Glass does not have the kind of physique that makes people say "wow" (sorry), the conclusion clearly has to be that famous people have an aura apparent even in a photograph and unrelated to whether one knows who they are or not. We will for the purposes of this experiment discount the possibility that shoving a phone in someone's face and asking them to look at it is some kind of cue. [all assembled turn suddenly at a sound from behind them, in time to see the dishevelled corpse of man with the words "poorly-thought-out theory" tatooed on his forehead come sliding down the cliff-face toward them. COLLEAGUE: Wow!)

Some girl once asked me if I was famous while I was DJing in a cafe, but the glory of the experience is dimmed considerably by the context; I suspect she would have left me alone had I simply been sitting there drinking coffee. [the bitter old man's shoulders slump as he finishes his tale, and he raises his eyes to stare unfocusedly at the pattern of stains on the wallpaper. Fade out.]

Quotes of the day

Eminem judge raps out dismissal

"Mr Bailey complains that his rap is trash
so he's seeking compensation in the form of cash;

"Bailey thinks he's entitled to some monetary gain
because Eminem used his name in vain
The lyrics are stories no one would take as fact
they're an exaggeration of a childish act.

"It is therefore this court's ultimate position
that Eminem is entitled to summary disposition."

--Judge Deborah Servitto, giving the verdict in a defamation case brought against Eminem by the man who Eminem accused in a lyric of bullying him at school

Child's Play: A group of 11-13 year olds tear apart classic games of yesterday. "Kill ET! Glock ET!" they cry on being confronted with the film-tie-up stinker featuring the longnecked alien.

"But you can get this game on a cell phone. Why would you want to pay for it in an arcade?"

-- 11-year old John Burke, playing Space Invaders for the first time

Sunday news

Today's news:

Muneo Suzuki has announced he will not be running in the general election for "health reasons". Did he fall, or was he pushed?

Tonight's hypothetical dinner is chicken and broccoli with garlic and sudachi lime, miso soup with onion and botchan kabocha, tofu topped with pork mince and chives fried with shoyu and herb salt, and white rice.

Unfortunately I have a hell of a job working up the enthusiasm to cook for one and the spouse is in Chiang Mai on a fashion shoot while hopefully not being caught up in any attacks on world leaders at APEC. So the reality is bread, cheese, a carrot and an apple, which I suspect I could live on indefinitely.

The spouse's magazine tends to favour models who are pale and waiflike, which usually means Russian because there are so many of them in Tokyo; but the Thais apparently will not let Russians in the country because of the number of illegals. So they have taken Germans instead. The whole business of procuring foreign models here smells near to the sex trade to me; the catalogues with photographs and handlers who enthuse greasily about the virtues of their top performers. All very tedious.

David Beckham is appearing in another chocolate ad. "Like ripening strawberries," he intones in that blocked-nose twang, surrounded by children and chewing on a Pocky Stick. Twat.

I walked past the enormous faux-templelike thing owned by Koufuku no Kagaku (a religious cult) in Takanawa again this evening and realised quite how much it pisses me off that people are willing to contribute the sums needed to build these things. Land included, the thing must have cost at least five hundred million yen, probably far more. They are apparently all set to release their latest anime blockbuster this year, too, to follow 1997's "Hermes: Love Is Like the Wind". The cult's founder, who is a reincarnation of Hermes, wrote the screenplay based on his own experiences.

Spurious animal facts from Japanese TV tonight: showing an alligator a game of Space Invaders will make it start digging a hole. The sound of the spaceship's laser firing sounds exactly like the cry of a newly-hatched alligator, and since alligators bury their eggs underground, the first instinct is to dig.

Another one: Cats go absolutely apeshit over the roots of kiwi fruit. It's the same family as the silver vine, apparently, which is commonly recognized in Japan as sending cats into an erotic frenzy in much the same way as catnip is in the UK.

And another day passes peacefully.

Koyaanisqatsi

Saw Phillip Glass and his ensemble perform Koyaanisqatsi on Friday. It is clear that Mr. Glass's fans are cool people; fortunately I happened to be dressed entirely in shades of black and grey and so managed to blend in. As for the performance, it was the first time I had seen the images and I was mesmerised throughout. Interesting that they played with exactly the same sounds used for the original, though; I pity in a small way the guy who got landed with the cheesy synthesiser trumpet sound. I suppose this is Orchestral Music, though, and therefore not to be remixed.

I briefly met the man himself at the afterparty; he didn't look very happy and gave off an aura of not suffering fools gladly. I hate meeting people in circumstances like this; inevitably you're in a room where the majority of people want to tell the Star how great it was or otherwise love him up and you effectively have to come up with a chat-up line to make him not tune you out. I settled for shaking his hand and moving out of the way as two Industry People hit him in a pincer movement.

High-altitude takeaway

Looks like China's first astronaut has made it home safely. Was amused to see the inflight menu:

While in orbit, Yang Liwei is being fortified by specially produced packets of shredded pork with garlic, served with rice, and accompanied by cups of tea.

Profile: China's first spaceman

China hails space hero

A dry hump

Have been reading porn-star-turned-TV-personality Iijima Ai's supposedly scandalous memoir, Platonic Sex, in dribs and drabs. It's evident that she's had a fairly colourful time of it, but she's feeding her diaries and letters and memories through the filter of a tourist, not an artist, and it's very sketchy, underdescribed stuff. There's a certain vicarious thrill in some of it, but watching her descent through hostessing into pornography and sleeping with old men in pursuit of money is pretty dispiriting reading and the characters are less than sympathetic. Having the present-day Iijima hovering in the background sighing at her younger self doesn't help much, either. She also dims the scandal a good bit with her blase admission that she didn't do anything more than noisy fellatio in her porn films (the noise being, she says, her only concession to technique); the rest was all grinding and moaning plausibly and pixellated afterwards. I suppose this is perfectly pragmatic; if it won't be seen, don't do it. Overall, ho hum. Don't think I'll bother reading the rest.

I picked up a book of Murakami Haruki short stories for a trip the other week and finally wrested them off my spouse for our Okinawa jaunt. It was when I started in on them that I realised what a generally nasty aftertaste Iijima's low-level confessional had left; reading stuff by someone who knows how to write got rid of it. Assuming that Murakami floats your particular boat, you can happily let him spend five pages telling you about a house he used to live in on a triangular piece of land sandwiched between two train tracks, or how he falls asleep in his soup at weddings. He's sexier when he does sex than most Japanese authors, too, just because he keeps it straight and real. I find it hard to recall much sex in Japanese novels, actually, with the possible exception of Oe Kenzaburo, who is out to screw with your head from the outset and is not really in it for the screwing per se.

Anime is where you look for the true outlet of the unfettered Japanese sexual imagination, anyway; searching for it in literature is likely to take you into Mills and Boon with batteries territory. Anime really gets away with some interesting stuff; Seth Stevenson's Tokyo on One Cliche a Day is an amusing look at the genre. You find out what the "Japanese id" (or at least that of a sizeable male minority) involves by osmosis after spending a bit of time here, in the sense that you have to assume that what you see in all sorts of media is catering to an audience; but apparently anime DVDs and their alien-tentacled rape fantasies provide an instant masterclass.

Japan in the Pathe archives

The newly-launched online Pathe Archives have been Slashdotted and BoingBoinged and are probably being clogged by almost everyone else, too; and rightly so, since they look to be a goldmine of absolutely fascinating stuff (here's a BBC News story for background). A simple search for "Japan", for example, brings up clips including:

• Footage from before and after the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake
  
• The funeral of Emperor Yoshihito, from 1927, and the coronation of Hirohito the following year
  
• Japan beating Ireland in a 1933 mens doubles tennis match
  
• The war, of course; Pu Yi paying a visit to "his royal family in Tokyo"; fighting in Iwo Jima and Okinawa; kamikaze pilots training and in action; Hirohito touring bombed-out Yokohama in 1946 in suit and bowler hat; the war footage is not so much "embedded reporting" as a bloke with a camera standing on the bridge of a US warship as fighter planes scream past overhead
  
• Tokyo riots from 1952
  
• An item on Japanese London from 1968, including the only traditional restaurant there at the time
  

It is desperately slow at the moment, but hopefully the novelty for most will wear off soon enough and it'll be possible to download and view some of this.

Aeroplane thoughts

1. Being able to get to Okinawa in under three hours is indisputably a Good Thing.
2. Japanese domestic flights are so short that it is impossible to do much of anything but fidget.
3. All planes are designed in such a way that those over six feet tall will die in pain if person in front reclines seat all the way. Airline policy is to seat those over six feet tall behind people who recline seat all the way.
4. With the sound off it becomes ever more apparent that the people appearing in Japan Airlines' promotional videos about the plane's destination are only pretending to have fun.
4a. In particular, it is impossible to smile convincingly after drinking goya juice, suggesting that it tastes fairly unpleasant, whatever the health benefits.
5. A bumpy landing is enough to tip a can of drink off the table that the person in front of you was told to fold up and right into their lap, proving that there is karmic retribution for reclining all the way back while seated in front of a person over six feet tall.

Urban superhero, Angle-Grinder Man

I am slightly behind the blogosphere on this, and there's already an excellent article and discussion on Angle-Grinder Man and the phenomenon of "urban superheroes" in general on Making Light; it all stems from this New York Times article. Quote:

As a one-man vigilante force, Angle-Grinder Man, who takes his name from the boot-destroying circular saw he wields, has made only a modest impact: by his own estimates, he has freed about 20 cars so far (he does it only part time). But his campaign against the city's effort to immobilize cars for parking violations and other infractions has touched a nerve in a city of strict parking regulations, zealous traffic police officers, ubiquitous speed cameras and car owners increasingly aggrieved at what they believe is mean-spirited law enforcement.

I think the conclusion has to be "harmless nutter" very much in the British mould of ineffectual anarchists humoured until they fade out; the Making Light discussion above ranges more widely and globally over the phenomenon, however, and is recommended reading.

Where censorship and taste (sometimes) coincide?

Another from the Guardian on Norway rescinding its ban on almost 300 films. Norwegian Board of Film Classification (NBFC) director Tom L�land offers this priceless quote on its current policy on films with sexual content:

"The NBFC today makes a clear distinction between obvious pornography on one hand, and films with sexual or erotic elements on the other. Many believe that there is a statutory ban against 'genitals in motion'. There is not, and never was," says L�land.

A quick look at the list of hitherto banned films reveals an interesting pattern: Norway appears to have been using censorship as a means by which to keep crappy sequels out of its cinemas. Evil Dead II, Friday the 13th II, Gnaw Food of the Gods II (hah??), Halloween 2, Highlander 2, Predator 2, and Robocop 2 were all banned, though the originals were granted a certificate.

A few good films, such as the Coen brothers' Millers Crossing, did fall foul of the censors; but by and large, I would say they were right on the money, sifting out the gratuitous crap that offered violence for the sake of violence, genitals in motion for the sake of genitals in motion.

I would rather not have governments or public bodies making decisions that should be left to the individual's common sense, but the Norwegians seem to have managed to bring an admirable degree of sanity to the task. Now, of course, Virgin Bloodfest 7 will probably make it to the cinemas unchallenged.

Word of the day: Yuhangyuan

Guardian story on China's space program:

The target date for the moonwalk - something no country has managed, or bothered, to do for more than 30 years - is 2010. It would require considerable technological advances, but China's space programme has already come a long way.

Thirty-three years ago China launched its first satellite, the Mao 1, on a propaganda mission to broadcast the Communist party anthem, The East is Red, to the universe.

Now the country's scientists are preparing for the biggest leap forward since then, and once again the main aim of the mission is to deliver a political message.

That message being, to quote the government's website:

After four unmanned trial flights, China's first-ever piloted spacecraft, the Shenzhou V is set to soar. When it does, and if successful, China will be propelled into an exclusive country club status: the third nation capable of independently rocketing humans into Earth orbit.

Hardly a piece of prose that radiates confidence.

The vocabulary surrounding all this throws up a few points of interest: the Chinese word for astronaut is yuhangyuan, literally "space traveller"--so exactly the same meaning, then; Shenzhou, the name of the spacecraft, means "divine vessel", though this looks like an example of the "render each character's meaning literally to create something that sounds outlandish" school of translation; and, best of all, the booster that will put the whole affair into the heavens is called the Long March.

How much of you does your blog own?

Think twice about your choice of beverage

Via Boing Boing, Coca-Cola is to run a promotion where winners will be tracked using GPS widgets in Coke cans. Coke representatives will turn up at whatever address the winner has been tracked to and hand them a colossal SUV.

Given that everyone always drinks carbonated beverages at home and no-one crushes cans, this should work perfectly. Or perhaps Coke will be setting up lightning-fast response squads that can catch you in mid-gulp. Given that the best Coke-gluggers can get through a can in something like 8 seconds, and (assuming it hasn't been on all the time) a GPS receiver probably takes anything from 20 seconds to a minute to get a lock, it could be a close-run thing if one posits the combination of a thirsty bloke with a wide oesophagus who is in the habit of buying his cans from vending machines and crushing them immediately when emptied. I know lots of people like that.

GPS will pinpoint Coke prize winners

Tom Waits makes a mistake

I spent a miserable hour and a bit the other evening watching Woyzeck, the "opera" for which Tom Waits provided the music. Hold on a second while I take a bit of a run-up to get some speed for the dropkick this colossal pile of hubris and wasted endeavour deserves.

In a nutshell, it was poorly-paced, arbitrary, tedious, meaninglessly noisy, and portentous (oh, I could go on), and we made a run for it partway through, an honour with which I had previously graced only the Chemical Brothers. I should emphasise that I didn't do this lightly; the tickets were frighteningly expensive, though admittedly my journalist spouse did get hers free. Still, we left feeling as if we'd been incompetently mugged.

I had no grudge against Waits before this ordeal, I should emphasise. I may not own the man's entire back catalogue, but I have worn out a copy of Bone Machine and heard sufficient of his other albums that I was firmly convinced of his ability. A bit-part appearance in Richard E. Grant's tart filming diaries, With Nails, left the impression of him as a shy character on the set of Coppola's Dracula, playing the piano in breaks between filming and embarrassed if anyone paid too much attention or offered praise.

The music in Woyzeck, to be fair, was the only thing that kept me there as long as an hour. Played by an offbeat orchestra of strings, organ, double bass (the bass player had an impressive Father Christmas beard) and the hollowed-out percussion that is by now a Waits trademark, it sounded satisfyingly different. The songs had their moments too when the singers weren't hamming up the delivery, though by now the whole everyone-is-a-whore-from-an-incestuous-family-living-in-squalour-and-none-of-us-is-going-to-heaven riff is getting to the point where one wishes Waits would oil whatever switch has got stuck on the "black misery" setting and try something different.

Whatever the music's redeeming qualities, it soon became apparent that the playwright had had a close relative brutally murdered by Waits and had made it his mission with this cacophonous musical to extract a bloody and drawn-out revenge. Endless, meaninglessly stylised scenes (one that for better or worse sticks in the memory involved a man stroking a stick as if trying to generate static electricity) were punctuated with bursts of noise to emphasise an emotional climax whose meaning was utterly obtuse; songs repeatedly cut out mid-phrase for no discernable reason to dead silence, a trick which might have worked once--especially had the lighting and sound staff's walkie-talkie conversations not been audible in the ensuing hush--but not ten times.

The thing, however, which most made me want to take my dagger between my teeth and go leaping over seats to get at the playwright (he was sitting about three rows behind us, so I'd have had a fair chance) was the fact that a playwright, a whole theatre company, could precisely choreograph and earnestly rehearse the piece, then take it touring around various corners of the globe, without once realising that it was a useless piece of shit. Not just them but the critics who supposedly gave it rave reviews throughout Europe. One person, just one, should have stood up and said, "Look, lads, this is fucking terrible. Let Waits put it out as an album and let's call it a day".

This apparently is the third such "new opera" (the people making the old kind can't be pleased at that designation) that Waits has provided the music for, and come to think of it I remember one previous outing, The Black Rider, with libretto by William Burroughs, being slain in the press. Wish I'd remembered that earlier, preferably before seeing the latest one.

Tom Waits, if you're reading this; please, don't do another one.

Lost in Translation

Interview on Salon.com with Sophia Coppola about, amongst other things, her film Lost in Translation. I am halfway prepared to love the film already, having seen the trailer, since the images of urban Tokyo look gorgeous and it stars Bill Murray; and to ice the cake, for the soundtrack (hear here) Ms. Coppola has somehow managed to bring Kevin Shields, formerly of My Bloody Valentine, out of retirement.

The film unfortunately looks like it won't be released in Japan until 2004 (I don't know whether these monumental delays are to be ascribed to subtitling, but that seems unlikely given what a quick, dirty, and underpaid business it seems to be).

The Coppola clan's best director?

World's second cool displays

(The Apple ones being the first on the scene.) I'm not overly prone to object lust, but reading Gizmodo does bring one up against plenty of temptations. Most recent of which is Lieberman's Grand Canyon Displays.

At a minimum of $1,500 for the three-screen version I doubt one of these will be gracing the casino table-cum-computer island in the living room for a while, but the attraction is definitely there. Monitors are addictive: when you have one it's hard to conceive why you would need two, though if pushed you can probably think of some tasks that it might make easier; but once you get two, you're hooked before you know it and going back to one is intensely irritating; all that minimising windows is so primitive. Worse is the suspicion that gradually sets in after a year or so that actually three monitors would be even better.

Even the lack of an extra screen on my cellphone occasionally makes me grind my teeth these days, though I probably use it far too much. This is a useful sign of needing to calm down.