Evil earrings

This came out blurry. One-handed iPhone photos are almost impossible to focus. This Harajuku shop, Before the Boom, has ten thousand pairs of sparkly pretty earrings and then this guy, lurking around on a knee-high rack. Don't tell him your secrets!
----
 "I have your secret. Can I give it away? HA HA HA"

I wrote a novel (more or less)

I wrote a novel for National Novel Writing Month.
The main tools I used on my computer were Scrivener, LeechBlock and SimplyNoise. The main things that helped offline were coffee*, a daily word-count requirement, and a few real and virtual writing buddies. The main things I avoided were how-to-write articles and editing as I went. The main thing I learned was that writing fiction, at least the first draft, can be a lot of fun. Also, people seem to be inordinately impressed that a person with nothing but time on her hands can string together 51,000 words in a month. I'm super impressed at anyone who did it while holding down a full-time job and/or feeding and cleaning up after other people. But me? I've got room.

I don't know if I'll do anything with the thing. It's about some foreigners in Japan, which -- hey, come back! The villain is a naturalized Japanese citizen of Canadian descent, and the heroine is a headstrong woman from the US who doesn't know (or care) a thing about Japan before she comes over in pursuit of a vague job. The company she and her fellow recruits work for turns out to be quite sinister. There's a friendly ex-yak and an unlicensed accupuncturist.

Anyway, it was fun. A lot of people I talked to said they'd been thinking of trying NaNoWriMo sometime. I had heard of it a long time ago and thought, There's something I'll never do! But then the day before it started this year I thought I'd give it a try, and the next day I thought I'd keep going for another day or so and here we are. I figured out the plot, such as it is, in the third week. It might want some revision.

*Everyone always says "Coffee! Ha ha!" and I felt compelled to include it, too, but more because I did a lot of writing in coffee shops than because I was staying up all hours alternating between pounding caffeine shots and tearing out my hair. I think we novelists** like to project the latter image, but, unusually for me, I did most of the work*** during daylight hours.

**Oh, please.

***It also feels silly to call it work in this case.

Merry Christmas from Tokyo!

You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling

Is it weird to have a favorite piece of trash? Because now I do. This thing made my day.

I love this place: Tenzan

The library. Shhhh!

Today, we made it to Hakone and my favorite onsen, Tenzan. It's a hotspring complex nestled along a river about ten minutes from Hakone Yumoto station.
We did the Hakone conveyor-belt–like scenic course of train-cablecar-gondola-gondola-gondola-boat-bus. (The Odakyu Hakone Free Pass is a great value if you do this. It saves 20 bucks or so if you do the whole circuit.) We had lunch near the lake before taking the bus back to Hakone-Yumoto station. From there, we took a 100-yen shuttle bus to the onsen.
It was my third time at Tenzan. All the baths are outdoors. One of them goes into a cave, and a sign near it suggests you meditate inside and "absorb some of the power of the mountain." I like that they are all different temperatures. The mildest one is milky with microbubbles and covered with shady, trellised vines. Everyone who gets in says "ah! nurui!" How often do you hear people smile and say "Oh, it's tepid!" in everyday life? The cedar bath is so hot it makes your hands and feet feel almost numb. The cold plunge bath is so cold that it does make everything numb. Then there are two long, stone-lined baths that are comfortably hot. There's a stand of tall bamboo trees behind the wooden sauna hut and pine trees on the mountainside that slopes toward the baths.
As relaxing as the baths are the resting rooms. There are several. Inside the women-only area, there's a tatami room with bean bags and massage chairs overlooking the baths. (There's a sign that says in Japanese, "Although you may be able to see into the men's baths from here, the reverse is not true.") There is a spacious patio and at least three other rooms in the general area. One is open tatami and has low tables where people snack and play go. Another is tatami with rows of mats, pillows and blankets facing the river. (The only disturbance is the occasional clunk of the beer vending machine in the back.) The smallest public room is separated by a glass door. The button to open it is at eye level -- a subtle enforcement of the no-kids policy. This is called the library and it's my favorite, though you should bring your own reading. Their collection is pretty motley. There are only a handful of lounge chairs and leather recliners in here, and the front wall opens completely to the river. The woman next to me was inking cartoons that looked startlingly professional. Others were reading magazines and books.
There are a few restaurants, too, with traditional Japanese food, not cheap but not too expensive. We took the Romance Car home, which I can't recommend strongly enough. Not because it's romantic -- it's just a normal train with reserved seats, but it's a "special express" and very efficient. I've taken a combination of local trains home before, and every train change chips away a little bit of the day's relaxation.
Tenzan is big, but it doesn't have the pack 'em in commercial feel of LaQua or other spas in the city. Everything is simple, elegant and understated. I can't think of a more relaxing way to spend 1,200 yen.

Back to the Future: 10 am movie madness!

We celebrated Culture Day by going to see Back to the Future in the theater this morning. That's culture, right? And did you kind of feel like no part of that sentence made sense? We had, um, a sudden change of plans this morning (cough-missedourtrain-cough) and were looking, at 8:30, for something to do. One of the theaters near us plays interesting old (mostly) American movies at 10 am. We've never made it to one, because we always see the listing in the mid-afternoon when we're looking for something to watch in the evening. Not today! I checked the schedule on my phone and saw that it was Back to the Future. Right on! Just the right amount of time to get over there, have another coffee and buy tickets. Which were only 1000 yen, about half the regular price. Bonus.

What time was the train?

I was surprised that the huge theater was packed, and almost the entire crowd was Japanese. (Someone told me later that this movie and Michael J. Fox are hugely popular in Japan.) Nobody budged during the credits, and there was applause when the lights came up. Everyone was disappointingly silent during the movie itself, though. I didn't get the buzzy sense of camaraderie you get from watching a movie with a ton of other fans. I loved seeing it on the big screen anyway.

But it gets better. I checked to see (finally) what this ten o'clock movie thing was about. Turns out, it's part of a nationwide campaign called the "Ten am movie festival" of "50 movies that are great no matter how many times you watch them." How great is that? This has been going on all year. Better to find out late than never, I guess. You can find your local theater in the previous link; this is the list of movies and dates at Roppongi Hills. Each one plays at 10 am every day from Saturday through the following Friday. The list is in Japanese. It's good katakana practice; Next week is Amerikan Gurafiti. When the titles get translated instead of transliterated, it's fun to guess what the original was. The week after next is a good one: Ganbare! beaazu! 

Fruit burger

Hamburger topped with half a mango, to be exact. Meeting a demand expressed by nobody, now, at a Freshness Burger near you.

See the Yokohama Triennale, but not on the weekend

Have I mentioned I don't like crowds much? I don't, and I'm sure I have. So I took advantage of my easy-living lifestyle to see the Yokohama Triennale in its final days on a weekday, the way god intended. The show is in four venues spread out over a fairly wide area. I followed my friend's advice and went through the main venue first, at the Yokohama Museum of Art, and then I took the free shuttle bus to the NYK Waterfront Warehouse. Then I walked to Sakuragicho Station, which is not the fastest way to get back to Tokyo, but it is the best way to get a slice of delicious apple pie.

I guess a lot of the art I didn't 'get.' Like, the audio guide said that this piece below "looks like a wall covered in pure gold, but it's actually 60,000 individual thumbtacks." As if therein lies the amazement. But it looked like a lot of thumbtacks to me. I mean, it looks neat. The foreground is, I believe, 28,000,000 Fake Diamonds and One Real Diamond, which is intriguing and fun to look at. The museum guard leaned over the pile to straighten the Do Not Touch sign or to shoo some wayward gems back into place and her pen fell into the pile. I wondered how much of a breach that was. It's her job to keep people from chucking stuff into the art and there she goes dropping her pen in.

28000000 fake diamonds... and no people

I liked a few pieces. Damien Hirst's stained glass windows made of butterfly wings were gorgeous and, up close, macabre. Far and away the most amazing thing there for me was Christian Marclay's 24-hour-long film The Clock. Here's 00:04 - 00:07. (For best results, watch it at that time.) I went back a second time on a weekend to see it and it was still worth seeing another thirty minutes of it, even after waiting 20 minutes in line to get in. (Seriously. Don't go places on the weekend.)
The show is only on through November 6. If you won't make it, Tokyo Art Beat has a great photo report of many of the highlights. MTokyoblog has a nice overview of the Triennale and great pictures of the critters outside the museum.

Adventures in Japanese cough medicine

Tablets, capsules or powders. Cough syrup doesn't seem to exist.

It's my fault I was playing trial and error all through a nasty and persistent case of acute bronchitis. I went to the doctor as soon as my temperature hit 104. After a glance down my throat and a second of listening to my breathing, he said, "If it's the flu, you'll have to stay home. Otherwise, you can take medicine and go to work tomorrow." He ruled out the flu by sticking a cotton swab so far up my nose it hit my brain. The nurse came to where I was slouching in the waiting room and said, "You're negative for flu. You can go downstairs and get your medicine and pay."
"If it's not the flu, what is it?" I croaked.
"It's not the flu. You can go downstairs and get your medicine."
"I have a temperature of 104 and you can hear how this cough sounds. I'd like to know more than 'not the flu' if possible," I said Americanly.
"You want to talk to the doctor again? Fine." She was annoyed.
I waited another hazy block of time in the theater-row seating of the waiting room til the doctor called me back in.
"It's not the flu," he said.
"I'm sorry to bother you again," I said Japanesely, "But my family seems to get pneumonia rather easily and I've never had a cough and fever like this before. I just wanted to ask what you think I might have."
"It's bronchitis," he said. "I'm prescribing a fever reducer, cough suppressant and antibiotics."
I blame the fever. And past experience of leaving the doctor with a bag full of medicine that didn't help much and cost a fortune. I panicked: I had drawers full of Advil, Tylenol and Nyquil at home. I told him I had stuff I knew worked, so I'd just take the antibiotics, please. He shrugged and unticked the boxes and said take care.
I'd always considered Nyquil the nuclear option in cold fighting. That night, I took a full dose (half usually knocks me out cold) - and woke up coughing every 45 minutes. The next night I took the full dose and then, a mere few hours later, took another full dose, afraid it would put me into a cold-med coma. It didn't, unfortunately.
The next day I shuffled to the nearest pharmacy and asked for their strongest cough medicine. The pharmacist grabbed a box of Nobikku powder and said it was the best. It tasted like burnt cinnamon and left me coughing all night.
I went to a different pharmacy the next day and again asked for their strongest stuff. They'd never heard of Nobikku, but gave me the capsules in the gold box above, Nuspol. It had the same ingredients in slightly higher amounts. (One key ingredient in all of them is Noscapine, also known, awesomely, as Narcotine. A mild hallucinogen.) I went on it full time, and made sure to stay away from heavy machinery and social media.
When I ran out, I hit a third pharmacy where they'd never heard of either of the other two medicines. Even though they aren't branded with the pharmacies' names, the drugs seem to be proprietary to each place. This third guy brought out a pile of boxes and finally recommended Cool One, apologizing that it was tablets instead of capsules. Down the hatch four at a time.
I wish I had a more helpful report, but ultimately, whatever and however much I took, I ended up waking up constantly. I coughed so hard one night that I injured a rib or two, adding a stabbing pain to every cough from then on.
I also went through a whole bottle of honey and a pile of lemons.
The take-home lesson here is this: at least try the prescription medicine. 
Better yet, don't get bronchitis.

Meiji Jingu Doll Appreciation Festival

Meiji Jingu Doll Appreciation Festival, a set on Flickr.

In Japan, a person's doll is thought to be animated with a spirit, so when it's time to get rid of the dolls, you can't just throw them in the trash. You take them to the shrine on Doll Appreciation Day to be blessed or exorcised. A donation of 3000 yen or more is required. Judging by the people we watched handing over department store bags full of dolls and stuffed animals, it seems like this amount might cover as many as you like. A guide who was walking around with an info sheet in four languages said that they expected about 40,000 dolls to have been brought in on the one day. Even if a few people squeezed in an attic-ful of dolls in one go, that's a lot of money for the shrine.
They were separated by type to some extent: a row of tall southern belles with cartoon eyes here, some kewpie dolls there, an assembly of seated porcelain emperor and empress dolls spread out at the front. The variety was astonishing. There was a patch of Winnie the Poos (including one huge fellow with stuffing puffing out of where his right arm had been) from different eras clustered like a multi-year class reunion. There were traditional wooden kokeshi and the square Ainu figures that resemble totem poles. A few brand new Pokemon, as bright yellow as the day they were won (surely) in a street fair or amusement park. One or two old toddler-sized hard plastic dolls with eyes that slide open when they sit up, like we used to have in our own attic. In fact, I felt like I recognized at least a dozen as dolls that I'd had or seen growing up.
At four pm, a priest in white robes and tall black lacquered clogs sanctified the dolls by waving a bundle of young bamboo branches over them. Immediately, a team of older people with participant armbands began unpacking shopping bags and cardboard boxes to take them away. I asked the guide where they would be burned. "Someplace else," she said, and closed the conversation.
There were two dolls so caked in dirt that I couldn't help wondering if they'd drowned in the tsunami. I went back to take a picture of them and noticed they were gone before the collection started.

Please don't eat the hell flowers

Hell flower

I left the house early this morning, looking for a flower. I thought the nearest likely place would be the grassy park behind Meiji Jingu, so I grabbed a cup of coffee and walked, happily shabby, against the tide of pressed and polished commuters. I read about the "flower of the dead" on my Twitter friend Uchijin's site yesterday. I've never noticed these bright red flowers before. I hadn't realized there was any flower that signaled the end of summer. Like the yin to the sakura's yang. Or vice versa? I can never keep them straight.
Anyway, I was enjoying the park and the half dozen people dotting it: one guy on the grass reading a newspaper, a woman doing NHK-approved morning stretches under a tree, an angry-looking old lady hobbling fast with a cane, and someone wearing head-to-toe denim fast asleep on a small tarp. I'd forgotten what I was there for when a spray of red under a tree caught my eye. That was it! I felt like I'd conjured the plant. I hadn't really expected to find one. Up close, it was beautiful and covered with black ants.
Do check out Adrian's post and the ones linked within it for lore on this flower and some incredible pro photos.

Child's play in Ishinomaki

The bus was crowded before anyone got on.

A bunch of us piled into a small rainbow-painted bus in a Tokyo suburb in the middle of the night. I was joining a group of parents from Abiko on their third relief run up to Ishinomaki City on the tsunami-scrubbed coast of Miyagi prefecture. The first two trips, they'd taken up truckloads of the necessities people were doing without as they lived in shelters or crowded into upper stories of half-gutted houses. This time, they were taking a children's fair. A midnight caravan to set up a one-day festival? There's something a little bit Something Wicked This Way Comes about it, except that the kids were already in a nightmarish situation and we were going just to bring a little cheer. The rented bus was crammed from the storage space underneath to the ceiling with donated snacks, games, toys, dolls, bicycles, generators, balloons, bingo cards, two sturdy trampolines, a cotton candy machine, and gear and ingredients to make 60 jars of homemade ice cream.

Fifteen of us wedged ourselves into the spaces that were left and drove from midnight til about 7:30 in the morning, stopping frequently. (Some strange goings on at the rest stops, but that's for another post.) As we drove through central Ishinomaki, organizer Yoshie said it was unbelievable how much better it was. At first, it looked like Main Street in any pre-dawn small city in Japan, with awnings running over the sidewalks on both sides of the street and neat shutters pulled down over each shop. A few places were boarded up like they were awaiting a hurricane. But then, some looked like they'd been kicked apart in a rage from the inside.

We set up in a grassy park near a temple at the top of a high, steep hill overlooking the water. The high ground saved a lot of lives during the tsunami. We had to carry all the boxes and bundles about 200 meters from the parking lot to the field. Happily, Jamie, Manish and a few other local volunteers from It's Not Just Mud met us at the site in the morning with hot coffee and plenty of enthusiasm.

We had a low table in the shade for kids to make name cards and a spot under a trellis where one crafty mother led the kids in making little animals and charms out of branches and pine cones. Some local volunteers made giant soap bubbles using bamboo sticks and string. The first kids to arrive batted around an oversized badminton set, and then ran around swatting volunteers with the rackets while we were setting up. The hardest part was setting up the steel-pipe trampolines donated by a school in Ireland via a Quakebook contributor. (Actually, taking them apart was even harder, as one little girl started crying and yelling at us to stop, clinging to the one she was on while we pried, pulled and kicked apart the other.) One of the most popular activities on a hot day was making icecream. An ingenious combination of two-liter bottles, ice, salt, jam jars and fifteen minutes of shaking -- plus a little cream, vanilla and sugar -- yielded a solidly frozen treat that one of the test-tasters said "tastes like the expensive icecream."

Icecream making was a big winner

Throughout the day, more than 200 people came through. Most of the kids seemed like they were about seven or younger. We hadn't known what to expect - fliers had been put up in elementary schools and public places where kids might be in Ishinomaki, but we had no idea how many or what age kids would come. At the end, when kids were lining up to get the overstuffed goodie bags that corresponded to the numbers they'd found in a balloon scavenger hunt, we were pleased to see that the rations fit the numbers quite well.

Yoshie said that while most people she talked to during the weeks of preparation loved the idea and many people pitched in with all kinds of help and donations, some told her it was a bad project, because the children don't need games, they need x. Or because you shouldn't help like that, you should help like y. Their ideas about what the children needed were simply their ideas; they weren't privy to any better information than anyone else. This is a painful thing that happens around volunteering or donating. Did you do enough? Did you do the right thing? The fact is, you can never do enough and there isn't one right thing. So if you have something you can do that will make some kids smile for a few hours, why wouldn't you do it? Back in Tokyo 24 hours after we left, we were all glad we did.
Yoshie put up a Freetohoku blog post in English and Japanese with lots of great pictures and details, including the off-hand comment that broke our hearts.
The photographer who went along with us posted some great photos from the day here.

Funny weather icons don't lie

The typhoon went right over Tokyo yesterday evening, right at rush hour. Many companies sent people home at three pm or so. From what I hear, trains were crowded then, but running normally. People who waited until the usual time to leave had a lot of trouble. Trains stopped, traffic was blocked by downed trees, and train and bus stations were packed solid. Because it was the middle of a typhoon. Why didn't companies let (or better, make) people leave earlier? The storm track was pretty clear early in the day. There was heavy flooding elsewhere, but Tokyo was, again, mostly okay.
The good thing about the storm is that it was moving fast, so the rain had stopped where we are by 7 pm or so, and the worst of the wind seemed to have died down within an hour after that. The group to suffer the greatest number of casualties was, as predicted by the morning news, umbrellas.
例のマークシティ下の傘の山 on Twitpic

Typhoon Roke: A hard rain

Japan is battening down the hatches (does Japan have hatches?) for Typhoon Number 15, or Roke. Look at this thing. Amateur linguists, please note that Roke does not mean "15." I don't know what it means or why there's a name and a number. Presumably these things are knowable, but you're not gonna find 'em out hanging out around here. Instead, I have amusing icons and some free association for you. First, the most sadly apt weather icon since the angry sun. If it's that windy, probably best to leave the umbrella at home and go with a raincoat. Or leave yourself at home and don't go out at all.

Second, they're trying to evacuate over a million people from the Nagoya area. Rivers are rising and streets were already flooding all over this morning before the storm had fully hit. Tokyo will get rain and wind, and there will surely be train and traffic trouble. We're not expecting severe flooding, though, I don't think. (We're up on a hill anyway. So if it gets bad, come over.)

The free association part: Almost exactly six years ago, I was flying into Houston to wait for Hurricane Rita as the city was evacuating some three million people - still the largest evacuation in US history. The storm was heading for the Gulf Coast just three weeks after Katrina, so the Tokyo Shinbun sent my boss and me there to see how badly it would go the second time around. There were only a few people on the plane. On the ground, fewer people were taking chances with being left behind post-Katrina, and the view from the sky of cars packing one side of the highway as far as we could see was incredible. Our hotel was attached to the shut-down airport. A few dozen airport employee families were sheltering for the night around the baggage carousels. I talked to some of them and then spent the evening wandering around, riding the little Disney train alone through the empty terminals. I'm not sure why I was able to do that, now that I think about it.
Rita didn't do much damage in Houston, so we drove east until we found flooding. Here's a set of photos from that night and the drive the next day. Some of the captions aren't bad.

Disappointingness in a bottle

Everyone's been making fun of this new tea called Pungency, for obvious reasons - it's a terrible name for a drink. It has bad connotations, and it isn't a normal part of speech for a brand name. But I have to admit, I was hoping it was right on. Bottled 'royal milk tea' is always too sweet and mild. In the last few years, there have been drinks that claimed to be stronger - double tea leaves, espresso brewed - but it all tastes mostly like milk and sugar. They were all missing a certain... pungency.
Alas, this tastes the same as always. No bracing bitterness to balance the sugar. They should have called it Regularness. Or Normalcy. Maybe next year's attempt will be called Same-as-before-ish.
Also, "pungency" is not a well known English word around here. The entire Pungency ad campaign revolves around answering what the word means. Is that really where you want to start?

Earth Celebration on the internet!

It's not the same as being there, but world-famous taiko group Kodo put HD video of last weekend's Earth Celebration concerts online. It's streaming on-demand for free, but only until August 31. Check it out while you can! They really are incredible. Watch here on Ustream.
Being there was great. It was another world from Tokyo. The fauna was  prehistoric - I found a six-inch long poisonous centipede. In the bath. A moth that looked like a fat bird. A lizard that was fat and shiny. The coast was jagged and the greenery jungle lush.
There was plenty of great food, like Brazilian pastels, Italian sausage, and Turkish kebabs. A lovely coffee roaster guy was grinding his beans to order and brewing individual cups of coffee that were worth waiting 20 minutes in line for.
The social media coverage thing went pretty well. Turns out that people who come out to camp and chill out on the beach with an acoustic guitar aren't necessarily  into tweeting every second of their day. Weird, right? But there were people watching our reports from Hong Kong, England and the US.
As much as I thoroughly enjoyed the experience, I didn't fall under the spell of the festival like all of my friends who get that faraway look in their eyes when they talk about EC. I think that level of intoxication probably demands late-night beach parties, intense and doomed three-day love affairs and, well, intoxication. As staff, we stayed in a beautiful tatami-matted building that was near all the action - it had a kitchen, nearby onsen and kept us snug despite the rain, but there were no bonfires or parties. 
My phone shut down on the last day. Kaput. I lost all the photos I had taken that I hadn't posted online. Luckily, Jim brought his camera along and got some nice shots.

Earth Celebration on Sado Island!

Taking the midnight bus tonight to an island all the way on the other side of Japan. We've been hearing about how amazing Earth Celebration on Sado Island is since we got here, and now we're finally going to check it out. And taking you along! This is a music festival that's always welcomed the world by hosting international guests and acts - this year the festival is reaching out, too, via streaming video and social media stuff. The festival has Twitter, Facebook and -- if it goes as I hope -- Storify pages. It would be so great if you would follow, like and check out those pages for the next four days. You might say there's a little bit of Japandra in all of them. If I can get my phone battery to last for more than an hour at a stretch...

So, please! Get a little taste of all the music, dancing, art and good good vibes. Maybe if we all celebrate the Earth real nice, she'll go easy on us for a while.
Follow Sado_EC on Twitter
Like Earth Celebration on Facebook
Share the link for Storify.

And please check out the streaming video on Ustream. We'll announce on Twitter when video is going up.

Palace of Fine Arts

This Palace of Fine Arts is beautiful and makes no sense as an outdoor structure. It's not much of a garden, it has no facilities and isn't really big enough for a city-scale public event. So what is it? Turns out it had a fascinating role in revitalizing San Francisco and the surrounding area after the devastating 1906 earthquake. The building that's there now is just a small, fully reconstructed part of the sprawling 1915 Panama-Pacific Expo.
It also had a role in The Rock, and I looked everywhere but did not see Sean Connery.

Give me back my finger

Speaking of posting old stuff... this has been sitting for a year. A year since we sat at a restaurant that no longer exists with friends who are no longer in Tokyo.
Talking about a guy who no longer has a pinkie.
Our friends Alex and Alwyn had wandered into the festivities at Yasukuni Shrine right on August 15 -- a big rallying day for nationalists. Going to see the right wing protests there had become sort of a tradition for the two of them, ever since they had ended up there during their first week in Japan five years earlier. This time, as they were getting ready to move out of the country, they found the ultimate souvenir on the ground behind the crowd of young and old in WWII costumes: a prosthetic pinkie with dirty gauze still stuffed inside. We all handed the finger around the dinner table with equal revulsion and merriment. Yes, that is terrible on many levels.
I miss them.

The blogging equivalent of jetlag

Well. We've been back from vacation for almost two weeks now. There are still pictures and little non-stories from the trip I'd like to post. (There's still stuff from Turkey from a year ago I'd like to post, but that's another story.) Meantime, there's life going on here. (Nothing too exciting, just, you know, life.) But I feel like going back and forth with stuff from Japan and the trip is like flying too often across time zones. Like when you wake up trying to figure out why all your furniture is in the wrong place. What's that behemoth Korean taco truck doing in Tokyo? What's that Japanese pop group doing at a train station in Seattle? They're wearing sweaters, they're complaining about the muggy heat, she's eating an icecream sandwich bigger than her head and yet sorting trash into burnable and non. And why are there suddenly tall buildings outside? I secretly look forward to that moment of utter confusion between sleeping and waking when I open my eyes in a strange place at an off hour. If you kind of like that too, stick around.

Catastrophic molting

On the second day of the drive, after an afternoon at Hearst Castle, we pulled off the road in San Simeon to see the elephant seals. There's a beach that they come to throughout the year to do what elephant seals do -- mate and shed. In July, they're shedding. Signs explained that they weren't sick, they were undergoing a "catastrophic molt" in which all their skin comes off at once. This does not leave the elephant seal-shaped rugs lying on the beach that the description suggests. The skin just rubs off in patches. While they wait for their skin to fall off, they mostly lie around in groups packed tight against the chilly wind, rearing up once in a while for a quick skirmish, then flopping back down with mighty thuds. (They say they can be up to 5,000 pounds.)  The viewing platform is maybe 100 yards from where the seals are. Through binoculars, they had the funniest faces. The lighter ones look like they have pretty eyeliner -- and hideous floppy, whiskered nose flaps.

We were planning to drive to a beach another hour north or so to catch the sunset and then keep going til we found a place to stay. Maybe it was the jetlag, but watching these slothful heavy beasts, I realized there was nothing I'd rather do than thud down and just lie around. So we decided to stop nearby for the night.

World Spice Merchants, Seattle

A trip to World Spice Merchants has become a mainstay of our visits to Seattle. (I always remember it as Spice World. Isn't it amazing how much cheesier it sounds that way?) It's a wonderful little shop a street level down from Pike Place market. We go mostly to get a ton of chili powder, one ingredient that eludes us in Tokyo. I was extra excited to go this time, though, because somehow my brother had never been in almost a decade in Seattle. He's a fantastic cook and I had a feeling he'd find a lot to love at the spice shop. He went straight to the rows of jars with Chinese spices and showed Emily one that he hasn't found since he lived in Tang Shan. Success! Jim was opening and sniffing the variety of chili powders, and I checked out the loose tea downstairs. (And the veggies and spice dips they'd laid out. I was hungry.) By the time we left, we had a brown paper bag packed solid with vacuum-sealed pouches of seasoned salts, spice blends and chili mixes. How did that dense parcel get waved through airport security while my travel-size Listerine got a full interrogation?

Ostrich Land

We made an unscheduled stop to visit Ostrich Land in Solvang on the first day. There were so many signs with warnings all over the farm that by the time I got my dustpan of pellets to feed the ostriches, I won't lie -- I was pretty wary of them.
We made a lot of unscheduled stops like this. That's why it took four days to drive from LA to San Francisco. That's also why our trip was great.

Check out more of Jim's ostrich photos.

Mad Homes Seattle

 

We only found out about this on the day we were leaving Seattle because we got up to have coffee with Andy and Emily before they left for work. The local news did a little segment on these houses in Capital Hill that were given over to an artists' group for a last hurrah before getting torn down. We found the intersection they mentioned and drove over. Just a residential street with four weird houses in the middle of the block. The houses were really cool. The scale was impressive. One had been completely wrapped in shipping plastic and another had been cast in latex and then the sheets of latex were hand stitched into a skin of the house. Inside, there were some pretty amazing optical illusions. There were just a handful of other people wandering through. Mad Homes is up through August 7 and is free. If you live in or near Seattle or know someone who does, it's definitely worth checking out.

Check out how mind-blowingly nifty this is in the photo set. 

Of all things, a Hostess cupcake?

And an orange one, at that? With all the delicious food - the fresh cherries, home-grilled carne asada, the whole dungeoness crab - we're starting the trip recollections with the cupcake?
----
Yup. I eat one every few years. Like maybe this time it will be as delicious as I remember. It never is, but I sort of enjoy that, too.

Back again again

Flying into Haneda is a breeze. Touched down at 4:55 am, waited a bit for our bags and still made the 5:27 monorail. It's a neat ride, especially at sunrise.
The west coast trip was great. I'll try to post a few pictures and things in the next few days. Thanks lots for all the suggestions of things to do. We hit most of them and then some.

Cool, dude

I'm in LA! But before I left, I put together a round-up for Japan Pulse of products made to keep you cool. If you look back through the last few posts there, you'll find cool clothes, cool foods, how people feel about cool clothes, and official national policy on what to wear to beat the heat. Are we unfairly painting Tokyo as a city obsessed with the temperature? From this sunny, breezy back yard, I say no. The first thing I noticed when I woke up today is that it wasn't hot. My suitcase looks like it was packed for a trip to a desert. Even though I'd checked the weather forecast, from Tokyo, I couldn't imagine it not being oppressively hot and humid. With occasional bursts of chill. Getting into an airconditioning blast when it's that sticky out feels like going underwater with a tank of oxygen. Even though you can breathe, you don't forget that you're wrapped up in a temporary reprieve from an inhospitable environment.

Anyway, my favorite find of the warehouse of wraps, fans, creams, shades, sprays, gel cushions, bath salts and hair gels was this thing, Neck Fresh, a mentholated sticker that goes across your neck to cool down at least that patch of your neck for up to eight hours. Nothing too new about that, but the packages are great. The 70's-guy cartoons are the "new guy," the "sexy section head" and the "dandy president." They wear fresh citrus, sexy musk and dandy green. And you know my suitcase is full of them.

Aloe sashimi and the quiet city

That's all. I just wanted to show you this. It's at Kotatsu in Azabu Juban, and aloe sashimi is what it's called on the menu. The sauce is a spicy mustard miso. The aloe has an unusual texture, firm then a little slimy and then gone, like it was never in your mouth in the first place.
The restaurant was conspicuously empty for a Saturday night. They usually have enough traffic to have lines out the door and menu items that they only serve after 1 am, but when we got the check at 1:30, we were the only people in there. The barman was nodding off on his feet. A friend out in another part of town said both places she went were also empty. Did we miss a memo?

Green curtain revolution

Companies have been told to cut power use or face fines and people at home are valiantly reducing their AC to avoid losing power altogether. Is the power situation really as bad as they say? Worse? Does anyone actually know at all? In a bid to provide some free shade and make people feel like they have some control over the totally confusing situation, some local governments have been giving out "green curtain" kits -- a flower pot, netting and a few bitter gourd seeds. My local plant store has a whole "green curtain corner" of viney plants like cucumber, Goya and what I can only guess from the florist's pantomime is some kind of loofah.
I got some Goya and a cucumber plant, hoping to grow a little shade on the balcony. They're climbing, but they're so wispy that they not only aren't shady, they're almost unphotographable when back-lit, which is always.
Instead, here's a building that may have gone a little overboard with the green curtain thing. Wasn't there a Stephen King story about this?

UPDATE 2013/4/2: This building has been torn down. I guess its camouflage wasn't good enough.

Izu overnight

A quick getaway, just one night. Beach time, a good dinner, up for sunrise, and a dip at a famous hot spring. The last time we were there, it was so crowded that the "thousand-person bath" felt like it was living up to its name. This time, almost noone was there. Much better.
Beach season doesn't really start until rainy season ends, so prices are good and crowds are thin for at least another week or two. By August, all bets are off.

Fire and ice, in a can

I don't love canned coffee anymore. I still think it looks cool and it's neat that it exists, but I can't say I love drinking it. So I usually don't. But it's hot out. An icy "not too sweet" iced au lait might be just the thing...

Ice, ice Oreo

What does ice flavor taste like? In Oreos, lemon.
There's sort of an asterisk at the bottom (one of these guys: ※) explaining that "a cool-feeling creme is used in this product." As if to quiet the people complaining, "Hey, these Ice Flavor Oreos don't taste like ice!"

The other Tokyo subway manners posters

There are two separately administered subway lines in Tokyo. (I'm on one right now, so I can't look up the details.) As the manners posters on Tokyo Metro get cuter and cuter, the ones on the Toei line are getting punchier. Look at this. Kapow!

How many yen per meter?

Another thing I've failed to get excited about is the Sky Tree. It's a big TV tower. The tallest tower in the world and the second tallest structure, after the Burj Khalifa. And, if I'm reading Wikipedia right, it's also the tallest structure on an island? Couldn't they just stop at "tallest tower in the world"? Anyway, yesterday they announced the price to go to the observation decks: 2000 yen to go to the lower deck at 350 meters and 3000 yen to the upper deck at 450 meters. That's almost 40 bucks, with the yen as strong as it is. On Twitter yesterday, Nikkei Trendy set off a wave of price comparisons for tall buildings around Japan when they calculated a trip up Tokyo Tower at 5.68 yen/meter and Sky Tree at about 6.67. One reader pointed out that the Shin Umeda Sky Building in Osaka was a bargain at just 4 yen/meter, but my pal Durf won the day with some back-of-the-envelope math.

You've seen someone like this

A single bound!

When we came back to Tokyo in the beginning of April, the first foreboding change I noticed was a big fat cat lounging around in the subway station. On the wall. The clever yellow “Do it at home” and “Do it again” posters had apparently been replaced by the lowest form of art: a cute cat photo. At the risk of alienating you: I hate cute cat photos. Was every month going to be a different cat? The new slogan is “We’ve seen people like this,” or, “You’ve seen this type of person.” The message of the fluffy fat cat was that you shouldn't take up too many seats on the train. Would they have soft-focus cats illustrating all the bad subway behavior? Shoving adorably to get on first, endearingly grooming themselves on board, slurping ramen with their widdle paws? The horror. The obvious answer to this concern was, of course, “Hang in there!” Luckily, May brought a sort of funny flying dog, (why are dogs okay and cats annoying? I don’t know. They just are.) and now June’s poster is totally appropriate and more cringey than cute: this wet dog shaking himself off, warning people about not splattering each other with their umbrellas. A timely message, since rainy season officially started here on May 27, a little earlier than usual.
The new manners posters are collected on the Tokyo Metro site.

Here’s a bonus page of umbrella-handling etiquette for those who read Japanese. I never thought about how to open and close and umbrella before - handy. People follow many of these already. Most folks almost always wrap their umbrellas neatly before getting on the train, and most adults are more likely to tap the points on the ground to shake off water than to pinwheeel them around. The worst offense I spot is people holding their umbrellas pointed almost horizontally out behind them, like swords they’re about to draw with a flourish. Not to give anyone any ideas.