Japandra minus Japan

Heading back to the US after almost six years in Tokyo. Our first stop when we arrived was an extended stay hotel where we spent the first 48 hours dead with food poisoning. We went out in style, though, with a comped stay at the Imperial Hotel after we handed over the apartment keys and 48 bonus hours to play tourist. We spent the last night singing at a time-warp snack bar with feisty old twin Mama-sans in sequined jackets. The place was full of thoughtful surprises and odd delights, with a befuddling mix of vintage holdovers and modern technology. It was also a little overwhelming and irritating at times. The bar, I mean. Of course.

Ome, oh my

Ome is one of my favorite little day trips out of Tokyo. While ten million people lined up to take pictures of the leaves at Takao this weekend, I had this place to myself.
Here are some more pictures.

Hi, gingko trees

I wrote a tiny bit about the gingko trees that haven't quite gone gold yet on Hi. It's kind of a neat site that maps moments. Check it out!

Japandra on Tokyo on CNN Travel

CNN Travel asked me to come up with a list of things to know before you go to Tokyo. The suggestion was that it fall somewhere between quirky and useful. That's me all over!
Enjoy. I tried to get in a few that don't make the usual lists.
PS They nixed my suggested headline for number 4, "One card to ride them all." What were they thinking?

No crying in bouldering!

Here's something I didn't mention in my SavvyTokyo story about rock climbing in Tokyo: I cried the last time I took a class. Considering the length of time I've been climbing, my progress is slow. Very slow. I'm still afraid of heights – I often come back down just because I'm uncomfortably far from the ground. The mechanics of climbing aren't obvious to me. So much of it is about shifting your center of mass a little bit or making subtle, coordinated adjustments. Sometimes I hit on the right combination and go "A-ha! That's it!" but I can rarely reproduce what it was that worked. I attended the free Ladies' Dojo at b-pump in Akihabara a few times with two friends. When I say we were the worst in the class, I am not being modest. Empirical evidence supports me on this. The teacher sets up a course by marking the rocks you're to use in the problem with holographic tape. Then, everyone takes a turn trying to go up the route. That day, nobody got it on the first go-round, but about half the people had reached the goal by the second turn. By the third, almost everyone had made it close to the top. Everyone except my friends and me. The wall kept pushing me off. Where other people seemed to be covered in velcro, I was climbing like the rocks were coated in oil. It was embarrassing. The teacher was supportive and gave me specific tips, but I couldn't get anywhere with it. I only felt worse when she chirped, "Okay, that's close! All you have to do is...." The final time I slipped off on an early move, I slunk back to my seat looking at the mat and felt my eyes stinging as much as the skin on my palms. I wiped at my eyes with the back of my hand to avoid smearing chalk dust in them. I hated that everyone else could do it and I couldn't. I hated that I'd been messing around with this sport off and on since college and had gained no appreciable skills. And of course I hated that I was upset about it. This was supposed to be fun!
Usually it is fun. That's why I keep going back. I went home after the class and ordered a climbing book on Amazon.

Gyoza: The only thing I'll line up for in Harajuku

This place has gyoza, with or without garlic in them, and not much else. It must be in every tourist guidebook from every country, because there's always a heavy international presence on line.
The gyoza are really good and cheap. The cucumber chunks are smothered in a super craveable sesame sauce and the bean sprouts have spicy ground meat (pork, probably?) on top. Draft beer and sake. Cheap and fast. A good counterpoint to all the pancake and popcorn places sprouting in the area like whipped cream smothered weeds.

Park Hyatt Spa

I think I've finally found my journalistic calling: the luxury spa beat. Why didn't I think of this sooner? I got a massage and afternoon tea package at the Park Hyatt right after we got back from LA the last time. I always find readjustment a little rocky on either side of the ocean, so this was good timing on a welcome assignment. My story about it is in Savvy Tokyo.
What's that? Not remotely journalism, you say? Labels, man. 
For what it's worth, when I'm on my own dime for a massage, I like Sonno. It's not nearly as fancy as a full-on spa, but it has private curtained rooms and good staff. They give you a cup of herbal tea when you're done, and there's almost always some kind of further 20% off offer you can find. You can choose how many minutes you want in 10-minute increments. The music is a little bit terrible. Trade-offs.

Do your best in Yatsugatake

Take a Theta spin through this evening

Another bike race in the mountains, the Yatsugatake Granfondo.  Not for me, of course. I'm just along for the ride. The non-ride parts of the ride. Fresh air, nice food, onsen time. I've only been to Nagano a few times, but it's always gorgeous. We stayed at a faux-Swiss chalet hotel called Hut Walden. There was a Japanese copy of Thoreau's Walden in each room.
It's near a touristy little village of knick knack shops and cafes called Moeginomura. Everyone there seems very excited about their local music box museum - the hotel guy urged us several times at check-in to make sure to use our free passes to go, then asked again at breakfast if we'd gone yet (and then when we were planning to go). I always think music box collections sound lame, but these did turn out to be impressive. 
The town of Kiyosato was apparently a booming mountain resort during the bubble years, but it's mostly shuttered now. There are portraits - photos, drawings and bronze busts - of a legendary figure named Paul Rusch all over town. Everywhere. Hanging in the entrance hallway of the musicbox museum. Towering over a garden. Taped to some kind of donation box next to the cash register at the ice cream counter. He taught the people to make cheese and ice cream, and this seems to be the only thing that's still flourishing.) His stilted motto is also plastered on everything - "Do your best - it must be first class." It's written in neon at a beer-brewing restaurant. It's weird. And great.

Eat your heart out on the Tokyo subway

I mentioned before that this year's "kokoro" manners ads were hard to translate elegantly. It goes deeper than the words, now. How would you caption this?

Sharknado: Japan

You have to feel a little sorry for the Okinawan sharks suddenly stuck on the sidewalk outside the Sony building in Ginza. Though if TV movies have taught me anything, it's that they'd barge into our homes and eat us all in a heartbeat given half a chance.

Sammy Davis Jr. and Suntory. You know, for kids!

We went to Zoetrope the other day, a Shinjuku bar known for the owner's tremendous selection of Japanese whiskeys and for the eclectic films he projects on the wall. Horigami-san stopped a Fatty Arbuckle silent reel and put in a DVD of old Suntory ads. When he saw us smiling at this Sammy Davis Jr. commercial, he said that it had been "the first – well, maybe or maybe not the first, but definitely one of the first "– in the long line of Japanese TV ads starring famous foreigners. (Hear that? No Sammy Davis Jr, no Lost in Translation.) He said the ad was popular when he was in elementary school and that all the boys loved to recreate it at recess. He claims that any Japanese man in his early fifties is guaranteed to have memories of pouring milk or juice into a cup in the schoolyard and doing his best Sammy Davis Jr. impression. His face lit up when he re-enacted his 10-year-old self doing the commercial. Wait!

Paper at Meguro Museum of Art

 

I loved the Paper show at Meguro Museum of Art. There is a whole wall of Naoki Terada's 1/100 architectural scale paper people mounted in tiny clear cubes (no photos allowed!). Each one is complete scenario stripped down to its most basic elements. The one called "Shibuya" was just a dog, sitting at attention. Some were grouped, like the couple that dates then breaks up after increasingly desperate apologies, and then there's the poor figure who gets sicker and sicker in works titled “Drank a lot,” “Are you okay?” “Seriously, are you okay?” and “Call an ambulance.” Others stood alone, like “Catching an escaped monkey,” and “A quick nap,” with an office worker dozing under a desk. To get so much humor and pathos into these tiny, featureless die-cut paper dolls was amazing. The other one I really loved was the butterflies alight on old books by Ryosuke Uehara and Yoshie Watanabe. There's mass-market stationery based on this work. How tawdry! Who would buy such a thing from the museum gift shop? Oh, uh, me. 

Lots of neat things from Yasuhiro Suzuki. I've run into his whimsical flipbook drawings and realistic paper sculptures twice in the past week. I also liked his video installation of waves projected onto open books, Books on the Edge. 

Those paper bowls by Torafu Architects have never done much for me, but people love them. There are are 400 of them hanging from the ceiling.

The show is on til September 8. The museum is about a 10-minute walk from Meguro Station or 15–20 from Nakameguro. I'd recommend bringing a bathing suit and hitting the municipal pool next door. 

View Larger Map

Storify: When's the last time you wore a watch?

I asked Twitter out of curiosity. I liked everyone's answers, especially Tokyo Telephone's gorgeous brand new watch. Here are some answers. How about you?

I love this place: Darwin Room

I've walked past Darwin Room in Shimokitazawa a dozen times and never noticed it. A friend who lives there has failed to notice it twice a day for the last three years. I'm not sure how we managed this: The outside is covered in hearty plants, and just inside the open front door is a glass case with a stuffed toucan, ostrich, and otter. The shop sells wonderful postcards and maps and notebooks, the walls are covered in used books, and there are comfy window seats. The woman who runs it has a kindly school librarian vibe. She shows anyone who pauses at the register the powerful little loupes for sale, offering samples of pressed flowers, fossils and preserved insects to look at under the lens. Basically, it's the perfect little shop.

Unless you're against stuffed zebras. While I was enjoying my coffee and walnut cookie, a blonde woman came in and dragged over first one and then both of the women working there to the taxidermy cabinet and started interrogating them in a mix of Japanese and English. She said it was very cruel that they were selling the animals and demanded to know where and under what circumstances they had bought them and why they were selling them and they should put up a sign in English about how the animals hadn't been plundered and had all died from natural causes. She also said the name/tagline of the shop, "Liberal Arts Lab," was incorrect and they shouldn't call it that since it wasn't liberal arts, not liberal arts at all.
Give it a miss if you agree. Otherwise, do check it out.

View Larger Map

Warrior Dash in Sagamiko Japan

Warrior Dash, a set on Flickr.

I politely declined my friend Dan's invitation to take part for free in Japan's first Warrior Dash. But I got signed up somehow anyway. I was dreading it. There was a typhoon scheduled for Saturday — phew, an out! But alas, it fizzled. Nobody on our team got injured during the week. No train wrecks on the way out there. No last-minute earthquakes when we arrived. No choice! We had to do the 5K obstacle course! This was my mindsest. So I am surprised to say this: It was a lot of fun!

We jogged maybe a third of it and walked the rest. That's fine. It's not too competitive. Everyone is chipped, but it's not obvious how you find out what your time was. Jim was tracking it independently, and put us all at about an hour and 20 minutes. (There were lines at a few of the obstacles.) His satellite watch also pegged the course at a little over 4K. I'm fine with calling it five! We weren't sure how much mud to expect. The muddiest part, where you crawl through a tank of dirty water, is optional. You had to make an effort to get really dirty. Some did: One shirtless guy belly flopped into a stinky mud patch in the festival area. Whooohooo!

The front end was well organized. There was a marked bus at Sagamiko train station to the venue. Sign in was easy, and they had a decent system for stashing your change of clothes. The start was casual. We missed our assigned time and just headed to the corral for the next block half an hour later.

The race itself was also very smooth. There seemed to be plenty of chipper staff at the obstacles and spread out along the trail. I'd love to have had another water station or two. We got an overcast day. More water would have been a must if it had been any hotter — especially considering what a pain it was to get a drink afterwards.

The back end felt like a disaster to me. The worst obstacle of all was getting to the food. There were way too few food trucks, and lines for a chicken leg or steak plate (no veg options) were an hour long. Unacceptable! Especially when bringing in your own food is prohibited. There was a complicated money system that felt like a rip-off. You have to stand in one line to exchange your cash for "warrior bucks" and only then get into the food lines. Unused warrior bucks could not be traded back for money. Hungry, tired people were standing in the food line for ages and then finding out the hard way that their cash was no good there. You also got one free drink. I saw someone try to exchange her free beer card at a food stand that was selling beer, but that stand was only taking scrip. The beer cards had to be exchanged at the drink trucks. Are you kidding me? For 80 bucks (the fee people paid to participate [!!]), I want them to hand me my beer and chicken leg at the finish line! More or less, you know. Just make it easy. There seemed to be plenty of shaded tables to sit at once food was finally procured. That was good.

And then getting out of there! There was a shuttle bus to the parking lot. The attendant said it would be an hour wait. (The buses back to the train station seemed better — but we were headed for an onsen where the shuttles were going to get cleaned up.) We walked the 40 minutes instead, in true warrior fashion.

Overall, the race was a lot of fun. There were a few obstacles that I thought I couldn't do (4-meter vertical rope wall!) but then did, and that was a rush, as promised. I would not want to pay what they're charging to do it. And I'd be furious at how hard it was to eat and get out of there if I'd paid full price and run it seriously. (Sounds crazy to put "seriously" in the same sentence as "Warrior Dash mud run," but there were some people definitely going for broke.)

Should you do the Warrior Dash? Sure! It's worth it if

• You like doing active stuff
• You like getting out of town and doing something different
• You're into fun runs, costumed or not
• You like mud (It had rained a lot recently. I'm not sure what Warrior Dash's plan B is if they're cursed with nice weather)
• You do real races (Jim) and would like to do a race-like event with your non-athletic friends (the rest of us)
• You dig drinking beer in the sun with loud DJ music. (I don't, so this isn't a value-add for me. People seem to like it, though — takes all kinds.)
• You are the kind of rule-breaker willing to smuggle in your own onigiri and Gatorade. (Don't tell them I told you that!)
  

May Trip to LA

LA 5/13, a set on Flickr.

Here are some pictures from our double birthday trip to LA. It was mostly gardening and hanging out with family people, with one day in the city to pack in some culture at LACMA and Cinefamily and eat some Thai food. I forgot how delicious Thai food can be. The Thai places we've been to in Tokyo seem to operate within a pretty narrow flavor band. We got a skin cancer screening, which isn't really done in Japan, according to my friend who is a nurse at a dermatology clinic. We were surprised the nurse practitioner, who introduced herself as Mimi, saw us both together, hence the his 'n hers paper robes. America is weird!
Also, I kind of mostly want to see how embedding a Flicker set works on Blogger.

Outsourced book review: 7 days 60 minutes Japanese

I got a request via email from the author to review this book. I've been studying Japanese off and on since 1996. More off than on, but I don't think I'm reliable at evaluating what's good for a blank-slate beginner. I had a friend who was in a much better position, as he had just come to Japan and had given himself his own crash course in studying Japanese in the weeks before his trip. I electronically loaned him the digital copy that the authors had sent me. (Yay, future!) This is his review. All asterisks are his own.
 

About a month before I came to visit you in Harajuku, I had the "Oh, sh*t, I don't know a word of Japanese!" moment. So I loaded up on learning aids--an iPod app with tons of survival-style convos (useful), a Lonely Planet phrasebook and mini-dictionary (also decent) and a kana app for my Google tablet (should have started with that a year ago). I studied desultorily. "Do you speak English?" and "I don't understand" were the Japanese phrases I ended up using most in Tokyo, with mixed results. And Sandra, once I got there, you taught me to say "fukuro ha ii desu" at the konbini, and that was by far my most effective communication. I've been saying "no bag" in English for twenty years, so it seemed only natural to learn to say it in other languages.

Anyway, my patchwork, piecemeal approach to Japanese language acquisition caused me to get pretty uptight once I was on the ground in Tokyo. Well, actually, I got very uptight at times. And I must say, beginning my katakana studies on the plane was the wrong approach.

But if one is a last-minute, learn-how-to-say-it-on-the-plane-over type, 7 days 60 minutes Japanese is probably a great place to start. In fact, probably the best use for this book is a crash course on the New York-Tokyo flight (no pun intended). I particularly love the way the authors roll out the Onegaishimasu/Arimasuka/Dekimasuka triumvirate in Chapter One. I wish one of my language resources had laid it all on the line up front like that. Those are some key terms that, combined with a little vocab here and there, will get you by big-time in Tokyo. I also liked the lessons on variations of no, expected responses, key kanji and numbers. The vocab was pretty thorough for travel situations, though it could have been presented in a more organized fashion here and there.

So, in terms of drawbacks...Sandra, one of the things I caught myself doing constantly on my visit was tugging on your sleeve and asking, "What does that mean? What did he say? What's that kana again?" The fact that you didn't throttle me is testimony to your infinite patience (or to that generic Ambien I was slipping you). [This explains a few things! —ed.]

The main drawback of this book is that I find myself with the urge to tug your sleeve again about certain things I simply don't understand.

7 Days 60 Minutes leaves particles out of the equation. The authors serve up "Sumimasen toire doko desu ka?" as an example. Sumimasen, but is that correct? Where's the wa? The ga's and wo's are mostly missing too. Basic particles aren't too difficult to understand for English speakers invested in at least saying a couple Japanese phrases on their trip, so it wouldn't have hurt to include some mention of them. But, Sandra. Tug, tug. Maybe I'm wrong and you don't need them? [They are often dropped in convo, but this bears explaining.]

I'm also not fond of the way the authors have romanized certain words. Why didn't standard romaji suffice? Oo and ee (for ō and ei respectively) make frequent appearances in the text, but it's not eego (pronounced like in English "ego"), it's eigo (pronounced like "a-okay"), right? Sandra? Tug, tug, tug.

Yet all told, 7 Days 60 Minutes Japanese delivers what it promises in the title, and with a few adjustments, could be perfect for an in-flight vocab brush up on my next flight to Tokyo. So, thanks for sharing, Sandra. Or as they might say in your neck of the woods, Arigatō, Miss Thing! [You see why I love this guy?? Follow Charles on Twitter, especially if you're studying Japanese now. Or if you just like brilliant people.]

TEDxTokyo in 140 characters

Don't bother us, we're tweeting

I helped out with the blogging and social media at TEDxTokyo this year. Highlights of the event included getting spritzed with a taste of chemically engineered "sudden anger," riding in an elevator much bigger than several apartments I've lived in and overhearing a few jaw-droppingly self-important conversations. I'm sorry. I get a kick out of that, though. Maybe I'll tell you who said what next time I see you.

For real, though, the most important part for me was working with the team I was part of. The people I worked with directly are a model for how small, dedicated groups of people can accomplish hairy tasks. I learned a lot from working with them, and I know (okay, I hope) I'll be better at future projects for seeing how they did what they do.

Live tweeting an event, as silly as it sounds (and I will always think it sounds silly) is harder than it looks. To do a good job, that is. I think we did a pretty good job. It felt like being back at the wire service, shooting quotes from the UN Security Council stakeout to the bureau. Except this time, the sound bites were about the endurance of Japanese lacquer-ware and the language of jazz instead of the latest North Korean hijinks. Because of the division of labor, I only saw about a quarter of the speeches live. I'm looking forward to watching the rest of the TEDxTokyo 2013 videos in English. Check them out! I'd be curious to know what you think.
These animated volunteer profiles, for better or for worse, were my innovation.

Some things we brought home from Kyushu

 

New towels, for going in a natural onsen we skipped due to all the naked old men already in it

Coffee beans (strong) from Stax, the first place near us on Yakushima to open in the morning and serve coffee but not for hours after we woke up

Organic Kagoshima ginger ale

Tankan juice, one of the many local citrus fruits

Jar of Takachiho butter, mmmm

Nanja kora daifuku (8, cold-packed), one of my favorite occasional treats in Miyazaki, mochi stuffed with red bean paste, a chestnut, a strawberry, and a cube of cream cheese

Yakusugi ring, to carry around a little of the power of the ancient forest
Yakusugi chopsticks (3 pairs), for gifts
Hard brown sugar lumps, tankan flavor: delicious, and it's not like you're just eating a piece of sugar; it has minerals in it so it's fine

Fluffy salt, hand made from coral-rich sea water

Saigo Takamori postcards, because I have a few friends who are crazy about this guy
Cinnamon balls for the road, more like root beer barrels (do you know them?) than American cinnamon candy
Used socks, from the friends I was staying with because I am a packing genius
New socks from Masamiya, one of the zillion gigantic deep discount shops that's opened since I left Miyazaki

Sneakers (Don Quijote), very cheap, because I also didn't bring any shoes fit for forest walking

Green tea, for gifts

Did you think there would be something cute at the end like "the newfound knowledge that my old pal from Miyazaki drives a Hummer now"? Nah. (But he does.)