The Bigger They Are

My old friend David, he who supplied the title for my last post, reminded me that I hadn't mentioned the parking issue that contributed to my moving vicissitudes. It would obviously have been easier to rent a big truck and do the  whole move at once instead of making multiple trips with my car. If the civilian parking wardens weren't such persistent pests, that's exactly what I would have done. However, since curbside parking would quickly get me a ticket, the only safe and reliable place to park during the move is shown in the photo of my bike from my May '08 post. There's less than twice the length shown in the picture available, so only a fairly small vehicle would work.

Although I haven't reconnoitered thoroughly yet, my initial scouting of the new office's immediate environs hasn't turned up any place to park a bike, much less a car. Maybe I can make a deal with the gas station next door.

Unfortunately, I'm not going to have to worry about that for a while, because I probably won't be able to ride the bike for at least another week or so. I've got a sprained left wrist and/or thumb, the palms and fingers of both hands are scraped, swollen and bruised, and my left elbow and knee have got some "road rash", too.

That's not the result--as it probably sounds--of a bike wreck; I merely tripped and fell on the street the other morning, and (mostly) broke my fall with my hands.  I was immediately reminded of Dr. Jack Horner, the paleontologist whose controversial opinion that T. Rex was a scavenger rather than a predator is partly based on a theory that it was so big and had such relatively weak arms that a fall at fast running speed would likely have been fatal.  "The bigger they are, the harder they fall"...luckily, although I'm pretty big I'm not that big, and I have quite strong arms and hands with which to break my fall.

So, I wasn't injured that seriously, but it's going to take a while before I'm able to grip the bike's clutch lever strongly enough to change gears. In fact, I've had to type this post using only my right hand.

Unpacking all of those boxes is going to have to wait a week or so, too.

A Moving Experience*

I've been working out of the same office in Shiba, near Tamachi in Tokyo's Minato Ward, for well over a decade, maybe closer to two. The company recently decided to move out of the building and into another one in  the Shibaura area. The "ura" means "back" or "behind", and indeed Shibaura is on the other side, the Tokyo Bay side, of the train tracks. It's a somewhat less prestigious address, but presumably the rent is less, and these are financially difficult times.

The move--as of the end of March, and the end of the Japanese fiscal year--coincided, coincidentally, with my birthday, my retirement as a full-time, permanent employee and the start of the next phase of my career as a contractor/consultant.

For the last three weeks or so of March, though, I was rather less concerned with changes in addresses and statuses than I was with the logistics, and the manual labor, of moving.

Everything had to be removed from the old building by the end of the month. To make things more interesting, I'd been working in a more-or-less private office with three desks, two large bookcase/cabinets, and three file cabinets...all of them filled with books, texts, files, and miscellaneous equipment, mostly stuff I'd collected and/or produced over the years, but some acquired by the company (a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, for example, and dozens of translating dictionaries) or left behind by colleagues who had long ago moved on to other jobs. In the new office, I've got one desk in a typical Japanese open-plan office.

Much of the stuff could be, and was, thrown out or sold to recyclers, but a lot of it had to be moved. This meant a great deal of sorting, packing, carrying boxes, and making several 150 kilometer round trips from home to office in my car, a smallish SUV. I could have used a couple of professional movers and a 2-ton truck, but you make do with what you have.

I ought to mention, for the benefit of my readers who aren't familiar with traffic conditions in the Kanto Plains area, that the trip from the wilds of the Saitama/Gunma border country to southeastern Tokyo takes a lot longer than someone from--for example--northern California might expect. The 75 or so kilometers can be driven almost entirely on expressways with a nominal speed limit of 80 kph, but unless it's three or four in the morning, it will probably take three or even four hours.  Most of that time is likely to be spent fuming in the  exhaust from cars moving at glacial speeds on the Tokyo Metropolitan Expressway, the last 10 or 12 kilometers of the journey.

Having learned that the hard way many years ago, and being unwilling to add insult to injury by actually paying the 700 yen toll to participate in a world-class chronic traffic jam, I opted for a "lesser evil" solution. I took the Kanetsu Expressway (which is usually pretty fast, as long as it's not ski season) to the outskirts of Tokyo, and then ordinary roads to the office. That's a better strategy than using the Metropolitan "Expressway" (an extraordinarily inapt name), but is still somewhat tactically deficient if you're doing it at the end of the fiscal year. That's when the infamous "let's do all sorts of road and other public works construction now so that our budget isn't reduced for next year" activity kicks in. The predictable result was around 45 minutes for the first 65 kilometers getting to Tokyo, and two hours or so for the next 10 within it. It worked the same way in reverse, except for one day when I left Tokyo before dawn.

There is, of course, the option of not using expressways at all. If you don't mind dealing with an astonishing number of signals, roads that expand and contract from two lanes to six and back, and hundreds of sleep-deprived truck drivers, you can save the 1400 yen for the Kanetsu, the 500 yen for the Gaikan connecting ring road, and the 700 yen for the Metropolitan Expressway...but it'll probably take over four hours and the stress--even if you're like me and really like to drive--will probably take a month off your life expectancy. I can only recommend that option for masochists.

In any case, I did manage--just barely--to get a ton or so of stuff packed and moved by the deadline.

I don't want to think, just yet, about unpacking and finding storage space for it all.

*Thanks are due to my old friend David for the title.

This is Becoming a Habit (and I'm Glad)

On this day last year I wrote about how surprised and pleased I was to hear from a long-lost and very dear friend. She sent me an utterly unexpected e-mail message and really made my birthday a happy one.

Come to think of it, I guess I can't call her "long-lost" because she has certainly not been lost; if anything I guess I have. But I know where I've been...pretty much. It's really contact that was lost.

Today, in any case, she managed to astound me again, by calling me on the phone!

I hadn't been having a particularly good morning, as I proceeded with the now weeks-long task of packing up the accumulated stuff in my erstwhile office. Tomorrow's the last day for removing what remains of my possessions in the office I've occupied for many years. The company has moved to a new office, and they're vacating this building. I have a single desk there instead of multiple desks, bookshelves, and file drawers, and I've been sorting and packing and transporting stuff for longer than I would have believed possible (or necessary). There's just one carload left, though, or at least I hope so. In any case it has been tiring and rather depressing.

Hearing my old friend's voice wishing me a happy birthday and talking about old--and new--times immensely improved my outlook, and once again, with even greater intensity, made my day!

A Glimpse of the Future

Many, even most, of you know that I've been writing a weekly column for my employer for a few years now. Called Glimpses of Japan, it started as a column in a company internal news magazine and was intended to introduce or explain Japanese customs, trends, pastimes and the like to non-Japanese employees both here and abroad. Some time after that magazine was phased out, I was asked to revive the column--but this time aimed at English-reading Japanese--as a tool to attract repeat visitors to the company website. Before long it was moved from the company website to a "mail magazine", so people could subscribe to it and have it sent to their PCs or cell phones.

The idea was for me to write a fairly brief piece about whatever I--as a long-term foreign resident--considered worth commenting about regarding Japan, whether observations or opinions. I was billed, with some justice, as being "karakuchi"; when used about wine or sake, that means "dry", but about comments I guess it is best translated as "acerbic" or "caustic". I'm often enough cynical, and I suppose I've been caustic enough to deserve the label.

The column, a blog of sorts, seems to have been fairly popular, and it produced some thoughtful and thought-provoking comments from readers. Now, out of a desire either to economize or to reduce my workload, or both, the column has been discontinued. The last installment is here while it lasts; I'm not sure at the moment whether the archived back numbers will continue to be available.

Except for a few holidays, I had to submit Glimpses by every Friday afternoon to a colleague for formatting and uploading; sometimes work schedules moved the deadline to Thursdays.  Once I started this private Balefire blog as an experiment, I had to be concerned about avoiding duplication, but since my posts here are erratic and rather infrequent, that wasn't really much of an issue. Meeting a weekly deadline, often when other work deadlines were also yapping at my heels, was an issue, and sometimes quite a tricky one. There were times when I just didn't have anything to say offhand by Wednesday night or thereabouts, so I watched a lot of late-night news programs in ambush mode, waiting for something that would provoke a sarcastic comment from me...and a topic for the next column.

I'm not going to miss some of the stress associated with six years' worth of weekly deadlines. On the other hand, I'm something of an excitement junkie so I probably will miss some of the end-of-week pressure and adrenaline. I've also already been told by a few readers that they're going to miss Glimpses, so--tentatively for now, since my work situation is going to be in a state of flux for  awhile--I intend to increase the frequency, and probably the average length, of my posts here. Although I'm not going to be writing specifically for  non-native readers of English, a lot of the posts are likely to be on the sorts of topics I chose for that column, and I'll probably include some expressions and figures of speech chosen with that audience in mind. Rather than explaining what might be obscure to that group, though, I'll solicit questions as comments, and answer any questions there.

At least, that's the plan for now, if one can justify calling  a glimpse into a possible future a plan.

Rum, Reggae, and...Curry

When I was very young, reading some of my grandmother's collection of old Reader's Digest magazines, one of the ubiquitous little filler items--sometimes jokes, sometimes household tips, sometimes witty observations--caught my attention and tickled my imagination. This one merely reported that there was a pink log cabin with a sign saying "Frenchy's Chinese Oasis" in someplace like Minnesota, but I have remembered it for half a century.

The memory of that incongruous and eclectic restaurant image was stirred when, 10 years or so ago, I first saw a flyer advertising Arun's. "Reggae Shot Bar", it said, and "Bangladesh Food". I find odd combinations like that fascinating, almost irresistible, and I visited Arun's that very evening. I wasn't disappointed, either.Their selection of rums was better than usual for Tokyo, the reggae music was well chosen, the food was uninspired but definitely tasty , and the prices were reasonable. As for the interior decoration, I think that the next time somebody asks me to explain what "funky" means, I'll send them to observe the decor at Arun's as a learning experience.It's pleasantly bizarre and comfortably shabby, and I quite like it.

This is a very recent picture, showing the relatively new awning and (mostly) repainted exterior.  There's a more artistic one here (be sure to click the "image info" button in the upper right) that seems to be from 2008 and shows details of the old awning, and a customer-written review here from late 2006 with some shots of the interior and a couple of the dishes on the menu.

Arun's is only about a few minutes' walk from Oimachi Station, and it's worth a visit even if only to bask in the mildly surreal atmosphere for the time it takes to drink a little rum and maybe eat a samosa.  

Caution is the Quay

All day Sunday every channel on TV had a blinking, color-coded tsunami warning map of Japan overlaying about 20% of the screen, much/most regular programming was replaced with tsunami news, and coastal areas were constantly subjected to a barrage of PA system and emergency services vehicle announcements warning people near the water to evacuate and to stay away from the seashore.

The waves from the Chile earthquake arrived in due course, with less force than had been feared, but with some pretty dramatic scenes of quays submerged until nothing but the tops of bollards could be seen, and waves rushing upstream in rivers.

Earthquake-prone Japan is no stranger to tsunamis; almost 200 have been recorded. In 1498 one even washed away the building that once housed the Great Buddha in Kamakura, a considerable distance from the nearest beach. More recently, the 1993 Okushiri tsunami killed nearly 200 people with a wave over 30 meters high. The memory of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami is still pretty fresh, and there have been many documentaries and news stories since then about the potential danger of tsunamis. One originating as far away as Chile is not lightly dismissed here: it is often mentioned that the one caused by the 1960 Chile earthquake killed 199 people in Japan. So the government, quite rightly, was not inclined to take this newest tsunami threat lightly.

There are always some people who fail to exercise sufficient caution (I hesitate to say "common sense", because it so demonstrably often isn't that common). Quite a few surfers rushed right out to the Pacific beach at Kujukuri, Chiba, intending to surf the tsunami, and had to be warned back by the local police. I predicted this scenario...I've known a lot of surfers.

Perhaps less understandably--but equally predictably--one of the remote camera video feeds on the news showed a couple of people who went down to a harbor edge, in one of the areas with the highest warning level, at the height of the first tsunami wave. They were apparently undaunted by the fact that the quay was inundated by a wave almost sufficient to cover the tires of vehicles parked on it, and deep and strong enough to force the guys to climb atop a block wall. What motivated them to head for the sea when 70,000* people around the nation's coasts were heading away from it to shelters, and after several hours of persistent warning announcements, is a mystery to me.

*This was the figure that seemed most reliable at the time I wrote this post, a little after midnight Monday morning; later in the day other numbers were published, including the probably pretty reliable ones from Japantoday.com quoting a Kyodo News estimate of 520,000 nationwide ordered to evcuate, of whom 320,000 were in Aomori, Iwate, and Miyagi. They say "About 30,000 people actually moved to public evacuation centers, according to the Kyodo News estimate", but it's not clear to me whether that's a nationwide total or referring to the people in those three prefectures only.

Hallelujah

Watching the opening ceremony of the Vancouver Winter Olympics, I was somewhat surprised to see Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah being performed.

He's a Canadian, and he's a great poet, lyricist, and singer. I've liked him and his work for a long time, and I've liked the song since the first time I heard it...which was only a year or so ago; I was surprised at the time that I hadn't come across it earlier, and disappointed that I'd somehow missed it until then. There are several versions that one can watch/listen to, although the one I first saw was on YouTube.

I would have liked for Mr. Cohen himself to have performed the song at the ceremony, but k.d. lang's rendition was one of the better covers I've seen, brilliantly performed, and she's a Canadian singer/songwriter, too, so that's fine, I suppose.

If you didn't catch it, it's well worth searching for when it makes its way to reruns, video, YouTube or wherever. Meanwhile, there's a version here that she did at the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame induction of Leonard Cohen in 2006. Somewhat different, but also good.

I was, however, wondering about the choice of song. I was listening to a simultaneous (well, almost) interpretation in Japanese, which I always find distracting: the English and the Japanese each vie for my attention, and I never feel as if I'm getting as much information as I would if I were listening only to one language or the other. I believe that I heard somebody describe the song as a "song of peace", which is nice Olympian sentiment but isn't the way that I'd describe the lyrics.

And I don't really see how, for example, "love is not a victory march" or "I did my best, it wasn't much" fit into the whole Olympic Games picture.

Nevertheless, it is an excellent song, and the performance was a suitably impressive part of a very impressive opening ceremony.

So...ah...hallelujah, I guess.