Up in Smoke

For the first time in quite a long time--like several years--I attended a meeting of the Tokyo PC Users Group, a group in which I used to be quite active. I've been the president of the group, and the VP, and I was the editor of the newsletter for seven years, too. Back in the old days, I had a lot of fun and learned a lot as a member of the group, and it was pleasant to show up again at their meeting held in the basement hall of of the Tokyo Union Church and speak with some of the old friends with whom I've not had much chance to interact for quite a long time.

The inducement to attend was a presentation by Hugh Ashton on independent publishing. It was a very informative and potentially useful presentation, especially interesting because I've read both of his books that he used as examples: Beneath Gray Skies and At the Sharpe End.

It's a long-standing post-meeting tradition to walk down Omotesando  to Shakey's Pizza and continue conversations begun at the meeting over pizzas and pitchers of beer, and in the old days the more valiant--or foolhardy--would, after being ejected from Shakey's at closing time, walk back behind the building to a complex of bar/restaurants that included a branch of the Tex-Max Zest chain where one could investigate a variety of tequilas or just eat nachos and guzzle margaritas.  Once upon a time, we'd go to to an old favorite of mine in the complex, Zenon, where they kept a half dozen bottles of Freixenet Cordon Negro just for me, with which to chase the Myers's rum they also kept on hand for me and my friends. Zenon vanished with the bubble, pretty much, but Zest lasted a long while, as did Oh, God!, an odd little billiards bar that showed movies every night, and a so-so Cajun restaurant/bar upstairs called--unaccountably--La Haina. It wasn't uncommon for the hardiest of the crew to drink and talk until it got light outside...and since the TPC meetings are usually on the first Thursday of the month, that meant an interesting Friday work day.  But we were all somewhat younger then.

I arrived in Omotesando much too early for the meeting, and was dismayed to find that Zest--and indeed the entire restaurant complex--had disappeared and been replaced by an amazingly ugly glass and steel building housing, as nearly as I can tell, a place selling something called "Gorilla Perfume".

Even Ozymandias's legs had been done away with; no trace of the former character-soaked building remained. I had really been looking forward to a tequila or two, while trying to recover from my first actual viewing of the absolutely execrable "Omotesando Hills"...they replaced historic, interesting old apartments with a huge complex of shops which look from the outside like the world's largest construction site prefab workers' quarters. At night, lit up, they go from terminally bland to remorselessly garish, and I sincerely hope that they--and the architect who inflicted them on Tokyo--are relentlessly haunted by baleful, unforgiving ghosts forever moaning and mourning for the days when some vestiges of good taste still remained in the area.

After the meeting, I was looking forward to at least the hour or two of beer, pizza, and conversation, just like old times...until I found that Shakey's has, for the month of December, and for the sake of those customers who enter the place to gaze at the illuminated ginkgo trees lining the street outside, made the entire restaurant into a no-smoking zone. This means, to me, that they don't want my patronage, so I declined to enter. I won't be going back when they change their policy back, either. In fact, since I don't care for the attitude behind the policy, you won't find me in a Shakey's anywhere, ever again.

The remainder of the evening was salvaged (somewhat) by Michael Wright, who suggested we hike a bit further and visit a local branch of a taproom selling craft beers. The place started in Numazu, and I'd heard of their branch in Naka-Meguro. I confess that their excellent ales seduced me to stay for more than one even though they, too, turned out to have a no smoking policy. They at least have an ashtray outside the door...if not for that, I wouldn't even have mentioned the place (nor stayed for more than one beer, maybe not even one). I see no need to provide a link for them if they won't provide a smoking space for me, though, other than outside in the rain, so if you're interested, you can search for them yourself.

It seems that Omotesando has been added to my list of places to which I can never return, because they have become something too different from what I remember.

Video Ahoy!

A lot of TV airtime has been spent recently on the Senkaku Islands collision video released to YouTube last week. It was a sensation at first because the Japanese government had refused to release it except for a very brief version shown--rather reluctantly it seems, and certainly quite late--to a small group of legislators. This stance was somewhat understandable at the very beginning of the incident, since the captain of the Chinese vessel accused of purposely ramming a Japan Coast Guard ship had been apprehended but not yet tried: the video footage would have been evidence in a trial.

But then the captain was released and repatriated, ostensibly by the local prosecutors' office without pressure from national government politicians. If you believe that, in the face of China's heavy-handed response to the captain's arrest--reducing rare earth exports and arresting Japanese contractors for photographing supposedly secret military areas (a set-up if I've ever seen one)--then you're a lot more gullible than I am.

The captain returned to a hero's welcome in China. Japan was accused of  "caving in" to Chinese pressure or lauded for calm diplomacy in contrast to China's thuggish approach, depending on who was talking/writing. Attempting to capitalize on their "victory", with the typical tiresome so-called "spontaneous" anti-Japanese demonstrations here and there across the country as a background, the Chinese government tried to further their claim to the islands, conveniently ignoring the fact that China had regarded--and even recognized in writing--the islands as Japanese (or at least Ryukyu Kingdom) territory for ages...until it became known that the area is likely to be rich in resources. Suddenly it became Chinese territory.

All of this has become business as usual when dealing with China, and if anything the rare earth export reduction is arguably counter-productive, since it highlights the risk of over-reliance for critical resources on a single source, especially if the source is prone to economic gunboat diplomacy at the same time that it's increasingly running real warships through sensitive waters.

Other Asian nations can hardly have been surprised, given the long-standing Spratly Islands issue, by the way, but that's a story for another time, perhaps.

For that matter, the problem with over-reliance for resources on possibly hostile providers must have had some deja vu notes for any Japanese who have studied--or are old enough to remember from personal experience--the run-up to World War II.

In any case, the collision video, which had been described from the beginning as clearly showing the Chinese boat ramming the Japanese patrol boat, remained unseen by the general public. Once there was no longer a possibility of its being used as evidence in a trial, the only rationale for keeping it under wraps seems to have been an attempt to avoid offending China. This approach didn't impress either the opposition parties or many (most?) of the general public.

Apparently it didn't sit well with at least one member of the Coast Guard, either.

A 43-year-old man who has been described as an "officer" in the Coast Guard has--after a week or so of media frenzy about who leaked the video--reportedly admitted to uploading it from an Internet cafe in Kobe near his ship's berth. Since details of his name and rank haven't been made public as of this writing, it's not clear whether he's a commissioned or warrant officer or a petty officer. It's also not entirely clear how he obtained a copy of the video, although it seems to have been pretty freely available to many Coast Guard members through their computer network. This is important both because of what it may reveal about weaknesses in the organization's data control systems and because of the degree of secrecy that was afforded to the data; the latter may make a big difference in what the Coast Guardsman is charged with, depending on whether it can be regarded as having been secret information when he released it.

Many Japanese government organizations, both local and national, have had problems with the security of their data in recent years. Some of the leaks have been accidental, including those due to careless use of file-sharing software applications. Others have been more sinister, with data illegally sold to unauthorized parties.

This leak, however, judging from a TV journalist's interview with the man himself prior to his public revelation, is different. It appears that he uploaded the video because he felt that the public had a right to see it, and by implication at least felt that the government was wrong in continuing to suppress it.

Public response so far, at least to the extent that one can trust the mainstream media to report it objectively, seems to be leaning in favor of the man being a hero who should not be punished. Others apparently feel that regardless of his personal feelings/beliefs, he violated a trust in a manner inappropriate for a public servant. There certainly is a case to be made for either opinion; which you prefer is up to you.

Either way, I think it's pretty likely that his career in the Coast Guard is finished. The opposition party is--predictably--even calling for the resignation of the Coast Guard commandant to take responsibility for the leak. It's difficult to imagine a mere patrol craft crewman continuing his career under those circumstances. The future wouldn't be a bright one for him or his family even if he weren't old enough to make new career opportunities extremely difficult to find.

Personally, if the truth is as it appears to be, I wish that I were a wealthy owner of a steamship line, so that I could offer him the job that he's almost certainly going to need.

Cheers, Mike

I just received an e-mail notification that an old friend, Mike Marklew,  has passed away.

I first met Mike when he was managing the now-defunct Tokyo British Club in Ebisu. I was a member for the last year of its existence, and spent a lot of time talking and drinking with Mike both in the members' bar upstairs and in the public bar, the Barley Mow, on the ground floor. It was he who gave me my "Big Mike" nickname, because there were so many other Mikes among the regulars there; it could get complicated to figure out which of us was being discussed  in some of the ale-fueled conversations.  Toward the end of the club's existence, when money for wages was tight, I did some pro bono bar tending in the Barley Mow to help provide some time off for the depleted staff. Mike was always quick with a clever quip or a well-poured pint, whichever side of his bar I was on.

Shortly after  the British Club closed its doors for the last time, Mike oversaw the construction and opening of The Black Lion Pub in Meguro. I was a regular visitor there even when the pub was still a construction site in what had been a parking lot and small office, before they had their operating license, when--since they weren't yet legally allowed to sell drinks--the "bar" was an ice chest filled with bottled beer, and there was a bucket for "building fund donations" in lieu of a cash register, and I've been a regular there since. Mike ran the place for a few years before moving to other places, and eventually moving to the UK to care for his elderly mother.

We've kept in touch by e-mail since then, with much of the volume of our correspondence being a constant flow of jokes and amusing pictures or videos from him to me and a huge collection of his friends, interspersed with a few more serious messages and updates on what he was up to. Once in a while he'd ask for help or advice on some computer problem, which I was always happy to give if possible. More often he'd pass along information about mutual acquaintances in various parts of the world--and even in Japan after he left--with whom he kept in touch far more diligently than I have.

I'll miss Mike's loyalty to his friends, and his witty observations on just about anyone and anything. I'll miss his inexhaustible stock of anecdotes, many from his extensive travels and numerous jobs throughout his life. I'll miss seeing his name in my e-mail inbox and wondering what odd bit of humor, wit, or clever observation I could look forward to seeing. I'll miss the feeling that, even though he's far away, an old friend is--or soon will be--enjoying a pint and observing, with an amused twinkle in his eye, the human condition.

I'm pretty sure that Mike had a firmer belief in an afterlife than I do. I hope he was right, because I'd like to think that he's sitting at the corner of some celestial pub's bar, where the pints are always perfectly poured, and it's always Happy Hour.

Cheers, Mike.

Happy Birthday, Colonel!

Harland David Sanders, "Colonel Sanders", the founder of the Kentucky Fried Chicken chain, and arguably the inventor of the modern restaurant franchise system, was born on September 9, 1890.

Although the first KFC store I visited was in Japan (the same is true for McDonald's, Wendy's, and Burger King, none of which were particularly prominent in San Francisco before I left in '70), I've made up for it over the years with considerable consumption. I still remember how excited my Navy buddies were when  the KFC shop opened in Enoshima, and the chicken-buying expedition that we mounted from our home in Akiya/Tateishi. If memory serves, this was the first shop opened after the initial introduction at Expo '70 in Osaka.
 
I remember a lot of parties and a lot of late-night pit stops on the way home from wild revelry in which the Colonel's chicken took a starring role as the only solid sustenance.
 
So, Happy Birthday, Colonel, and thanks for the memories!


Edited to fix the Akiya link

Over 35 but After the First

Although there's a tentative but welcome breeze blowing through the Tokyo area today (apparently brought by a typhoon approaching slowly from the south and west), the heat wave persists and is expected to do so for at least another week or so. Several records have been broken around the country, and the unusually fierce and long summer heat  has been a constant news item for many weeks. In fact, it has become even more newsworthy now that it's September, and we should theoretically be experiencing the beginning of autumn weather. Except for that breeze, no such luck: the nights continue to stay above 25 degrees Celsius, and the daytime highs are above 35--and sometimes close to 40--all across the country.

Thus, I was somewhat surprised to see, in a TV  news story last weekend, that the still numerous visitors to Shonan beaches were complaining about the umi no ie (literally "ocean house(s)" or "house(s) at the sea") having stopped operation and indeed being dismantled. These temporary but sturdy structures house restaurants/bars and often offer showers, changing rooms, and a place to rest, along with rentals of beach chairs, umbrellas, inflatable boats, and the like.

When the weather is good, these places do a lot of business, particularly--but not only--on weekends and public holidays. They're often the only practical place for beach-goers to get a cold drink, a bowl of flavored shaved ice, or something to eat. Unless you bring your own umbrella, they can be the only place to get a little shade, too. They set up each year at the landward edge of the beach, quite a few of them on any reasonably large and popular beach, and operate throughout the summer season.

The tricky term is "summer season". The report I saw, with thirsty bikini-clad girls complaining in the foreground and umi no ie being rapidly dismantled in the background, was filmed on the fourth or fifth of September. The temperature was 37 or 38 officially in the area, which means probably at least three degrees higher at the beach in the sun. But it was after the first of September, so the summer season was over.

I don't know just what sort of financial arrangements these establishments make with the local government (and probably the local yakuza as well) for permission to set up shop on the beach. Their existence is beneficial in providing a service to the visitors and in doing a lot to prevent heat stroke cases, and the local government gains financially as well.

It's not unreasonable to imagine that someone would have thought to arrange for a couple of weeks' extension, since the sun, the heat, and the beach goers are still very much around.

Someday maybe I'll look into just what sorts of permissions and charges are involved in operating an umi no ie, but for now I'll just remain bemused that they are being taken down even though the only indication of the end of summer is gradually shortening days and the numbers on a calendar.

I am bemused, but I can't honestly say that I'm surprised. I spent several years early in my stay in Japan living near the beach. In those days, I found it odd that virtually nobody--except for a few surfers, anglers, and die-hard sailboaters--went to the beach until the first of July, and they all disappeared at the end of August. The local Shinto priests would have a beach opening ceremony (they do such rites on popular mountains and hiking trails, too), and the next day the beach would be covered with glistening, reddening people. Come September, the crowds would melt away. This was pretty much regardless of the weather, although in then-typical years it used to start to become noticeably brisk toward the beginning of September, especially in the morning and evening. Typhoons would start to proliferate around then, too.

Recently, however, both the weather and people's leisure patterns have changed considerably. It's hot--very hot--earlier in the year, and it stays that way later in the year. People tend to do things in smaller groups and travel a lot more by car than by train. And, for various socio-economic reasons, many people--especially young ones--have more spare time on their hands whether on weekdays or weekends.

It no longer makes much sense to close down your beach-side business at the beginning of September, particularly when there are still hordes of potential customers watching you do it.

Survival Unaffordable

Recently a 76-year-old man was found dead in his home in Saitama, having perished from heat stroke. In the continuing heat wave, such news has become all too common. Indeed, with 31,579 people having been rushed to hospitals with heat stroke between June 1st and August 15th this year, individual heat stroke cases rarely make the news these days unless there is something unusual about them.

Nearly an entire school baseball team having to be hospitalized for heat stroke after practice games that began around seven in the morning was, for example, sufficiently bizarre--or at least unexpected--to merit special media attention. Ordinarily, starting in the cool early hours should have been enough to avoid such severe dehydration, but lately the early hours haven't been that cool: temperatures as high as 35 degrees by 10:30 in the morning have been registered, because nights don't cool off as much as they used to. In the Tokyo area, for instance, there have been 36 excessively muggy nights this summer so far, when the average had been 16 for the same period.
 
The heat stroke deaths of four people in their 20s last month also got media attention, because except for people engaged in strenuous activity heat stroke is thought of as being particularly likely to strike the elderly.

In the central Tokyo area (i.e., the 23 wards), there were 104 deaths from heat stroke in the last month as of yesterday.  Over 90% of those Tokyo deaths were people aged 65 or over. Somewhat surprisingly, over 95% of those people died at home, rather than out in the sun as one might expect. Indeed, 40% of them died at night.

Various reasons have been advanced for this, including older people not noticing the heat as much, or not drinking enough perhaps because they don't feel as thirsty as younger people might. Reduced overall stamina may be a cause, too. Reluctance to leave air conditioners on all night also seems to contribute: assuming that it will become cooler late at night, and setting the air conditioner to turn off after a couple of hours can be deadly if the temperature stays high.

The poor fellow in Saitama was a grimmer case. Investigation showed that he had lived for the last 10 years without electricity or gas; he couldn't afford to pay the bills, and used a flashlight at night when he used light at all. His son (the Japanese reports call him "the oldest son", but it's not clear whether there are any other children) is injured and unable to work, and it appears that the father either couldn't or wouldn't apply for government assistance, most likely the latter.

Although the Kanto Plains area doesn't get as cold as it does in, say, Hokkaido or Niigata, the Saitama winters over the last decade must still have been terribly harsh for an elderly man with no electricity or gas. I suppose that he survived the cold with many layers of clothes or blankets. The recent heat wave, with no air conditioning, no fan, little or no breeze, and relatively little relief from the heat even in the middle of the night, seems to have been just too much for him.

While I have plenty of sympathy for people who collapse from heat stroke while working in their fields or gardens, or while walking over the heat-softened asphalt on sales visits to their customers, I feel particularly sad when I think about this poor senior citizen who stuck it out for 10 years without basic utilities, before finally succumbing to the heat, because he couldn't afford the means to survive.

Respected or Forgotten?

Recently the  mummified corpse of a man who, were he still alive, would be 111 years old and Tokyo's oldest man, was discovered. His immediate family had apparently followed his orders to leave him alone in his room so that he could "become a living Buddha"...in the style of legendary monks, apparently by starving to death or dying of dehydration, and he's thought to have died 30-odd years ago. Until he was finally found, the ward officials had believed him to be their oldest living resident.

This was followed shortly by the realization that a woman who is--or would be--113, and Tokyo's oldest resident,  can not be located.  Her daughter, with whom she is registered as living,  apparently thought she was living with a younger brother in another city. The daughter has had no contact with either relative for years, and a check of the brother's address has shown it to be a vacant lot on its way to becoming part of a new road. The last news I heard about this case was that the police had finally located the brother, who informed them that his mother had died years ago. The news story I heard implied that further investigation was proceeding.

These two cases caught so much media attention that not only investigative reporters but even the various ward and city offices involved have begun to try to determine the whereabouts of the elderly...at least those 100 or over. As I write this, the total nationwide whose location (or even current existence) cannot be verified has risen to 56. Tokyo had 5 so far, Osaka 18, Hokkaido and a couple of other prefectures 4 each, and several other prefectures one each, the last time I saw a breakdown.

I imagine that the number will rise, across the nation, as people are belatedly checked on more aggressively. There are (probably) over 40,000 centenarians in Japan, after all. If the confirmation parameters were expanded to include those over, say, 80, the total would no doubt be surprisingly high. If all those over 65, the basic starting age for pensioners, were investigated, the total of citizens for whose location or current condition (i.e., whether they are still alive) cannot be confirmed would probably be astounding.

In some countries, this wouldn't be too surprising. Not all countries, or cultures, are highly focused on actively keeping track of their citizens' whereabouts and health conditions. At the risk of sounding cynical, I'd say that this is particularly true of those citizens who are old enough not to be taxpayers any more. To be fair, many societies are not willing to put up with too much government checking into their lives. Not a few people resent even regular census efforts as an invasion of privacy and an unacceptable level of meddling in their lives. Many countries lack the resources even if they have the desire.

Japan, however, requires every resident to register with his or her local government office, and to update the records when they move. Citizens need a current copy of the juminhyo (residence registration) for all sorts of things, such as buying or selling or renting property, acquiring a driver's license, making credit or other contracts, applying for jobs, buying a vehicle, and pretty much anything else that requires more than very simple proof of identity.

For foreign residents, some of them centenarians who are also "missing", this essential document's purpose is served by the infamous  gaikokujin toroku shomeisho (proof of foreigner's registration), which we are all required to carry at all times. A document verifying the registration can be acquired from one's local government office and used in place of the juminhyo.

Note that the juminhyo, or its foreigner equivalent, can only be procured from the local government office in which one is registered. If you move to another administrative area (generally speaking, to another ward or city), you are obligated to transfer your residence registration to the new locale.

So, theoretically, the government has a record of where each of its residents resides. There are further records (family registers) by household and/or family, with a smaller version for individuals, wherein births, deaths, and marriages are recorded along with information about who the head of the household is, and who has left the household/family. Copies of these rather more detailed records are also sometimes required by, for example, prospective employers, or for registering a marriage or the paternity of a child.

In addition, many if not most local police forces have traditionally made rather concerted efforts to canvass neighborhoods to determine who lives where. Pretty much every time I've moved in Japan (about a dozen times), a local cop appeared at my door within a week or so, politely inquiring about who I am and whom I'm living with. The downside of this is that the police may know more about you than some people might be comfortable with, the upside is that visitors who get lost trying to find your house in Japan's semi-chaotic house numbering system can ask at the local police box with a strong chance of getting precise directions, sometimes even a police escort. If a catastrophe befalls one's house--say a fire, earthquake, or meteor strike--the police have a pretty good idea of at least who might have been expected to be there when the disaster struck.

With all this interest in and record-keeping for residents' locations, it has become a (belated, in my opinion) source of surprise that the government can't locate so many of its senior citizens...or even confirm whether they're alive or dead. It has also become a source of embarrassment for the local governments who are supposed to be keeping track of their residents (not least because there are sometimes issues with where pension payments have been going, and who might have been spending them).

Of course, if you don't do anything that requires a copy of your residence documents, you're pretty much "off the radar".

The reasons I've seen given so far by government officials for why they've lost track of their citizens have centered on right-to-privacy issues. This may lead to a change in the law governing protection of personal information. In at least some cases, government workers who have inquired about the elderly in their areas have been turned away by relatives, or been unwilling to go beyond pressing ineffectually at unanswered doorbells. In more urban areas, the decades-long trend of people not really knowing much if anything about their neighbors has contributed to the difficulty of getting information about unresponsive residents.

Nobody has mentioned it yet, at least in the national media that I've seen, but there may also be a problem with a lack of coordination between government departments:  most people's deaths are reported to the local government office, either by relatives or by the police, and I suspect that the reports haven't been circulated to everyone who ought to know, so that one department may know that someone has passed away, while another department in the same office may still have them on their resident rolls. Of course, this may not be the case, and as I say I haven't heard it mentioned, but it wouldn't surprise me much.

I imagine that at least some of the people may have quietly disappeared--with or without the knowledge of and/or reports from any relatives--and become homeless, or wandered off into the woods, either way perhaps eventually to have become unidentified corpses. If there's no landlord worrying about unpaid rent, and no concerned relatives or friends, that's not at all inconceivable. There are even more disappearances--95,989 in 2004, for example--than suicides in Japan every year (about 30,000), and I don't think that anyone is systematically correlating disappearances, found missing people, and unidentified corpses. As far as I can determine, there doesn't even seem to be any systematic correlation between disappearances and suicides, at least at a national level.

I doubt that anything that looks like a natural death of someone not immediately identifiable inspires much  effort from the police to determine who they might have been, unless there's a local missing person report, and probably one that's pretty recent. I suppose that there is, unfortunately, not much reason for the police to spend limited resources on them if nobody else seems to be concerned.

When the annual national holiday, Respect for the Aged Day, comes around, there are always plenty of human interest stories in the news about people who have managed to live to 100 or beyond.  Reporters interview them, local government people visit them and present them with small gifts, and so on. Some of them may even become media celebrities, for a while at least.

In Japan, as in most of Asia, in principle the elderly have traditionally been respected, even revered, for their experience and presumed wisdom.

It's a pity that nobody seems to know where so many of them are, or indeed even whether they're alive.