Keisei Skyliner to Narita, Turkey

We're taking the new Keisei Skyliner to Narita. It's about 10 minutes shorter and 1000 yen less than the Narita express from Shinjuku for us. The transfer was easy. Five minutes was more than enough, even with a do-over needed after I explained to Jim that you put the ticket through first and then tap the Pasmo card - and then did the opposite. There was no line. Ideally, I'd leave probably 10 minutes or so to buy a ticket, just in case there's some dumb foreigner in front of you putting the tickets in wrong. The trains are brand new, with outlets at each seat. The seats are thin, dense foam over silver plastic shells. They look futuristic and chintzy at the same time, like the free digital alarm clock the bank gives you with a new account.
Anyway, we are going to Romania to birdwatch, meet a friend and drive "the best road in the world." And to Turkey to find out once and for all why Constantinople got the works.
I'll report back in about two weeks.

Wear it again

I think I'll just post this without comment and see if anyone who's known my family a long time has any observations to share.

Jello shots in a can

More of a bottle, I guess, a screw-top aluminum bottle. Of "decadent mango gelee alcohol for adults." It's meant to be shaken, then slurped.

Trouble Bagel

 

This "ethnical tuna" kind of encapsulates everything that makes going to Bagel and Bagel a dissonant experience. They put some tuna salad with Thai chili sauce on a bagel - that's fine, sort of. But what to call it? The Japanese has it as "ethnic," which is not wrong, just lazy. And then the English? "Hey, let's make the vague adjective a little adjectivier! Some English words have 'al' at the end, let's go with that."  Grr. 

In the same way, Bagel and Bagel itself looks like a familiar experience, but isn't. And that's what makes it tricky. Say I go eat ramen for breakfast. I know I'm having a Japanese experience and I expect it to be unfamiliar. But I see all these bagels, a list of cream cheese options, three sizes of coffee in paper cups - I feel like I'm on familiar ground. The little differences stack up and I realize, again, I'm not in Brooklyn anymore. 

I order the coffee and bagel set, with cream cheese. Oh, you'd like a cream cheese sandwich? Er, okay, sure. Well, that will be 75 yen more. If you want it as a set, you have to get the cream cheese and honey bagel sandwich. Alright then, cream cheese and honey sandwich, hold the honey. 

That's for here, right? Er. It's 8:46 on a week day and I'm getting a bagel for chrissakes, the very thought of a bagel "for here" is confusing to me. 

Also, could I please get milk in my coffee? Cream is over the trash can over there. Yes, but I'd love some real milk, please, not those thimbles of Creap (actual name). Even if I did dig petrochemical (guessing) whitener, I'd rather not fiddle with opening five of them and waiting for the viscous stuff to drain out. And, I don't want to have to deconstruct the careful to-go packaging to get the cup out. Oh, no, this requires a consultation with someone in the back of the kitchen. I feel a bit guilty, being a difficult customer with strange demands. Final verdict: I get the real milk. Yes! Thank you and sorry. 

I do walk out with a sesame bagel with cream cheese and a coffee. Yes, it is wonderful that this can happen in Tokyo. The end result is fantastic, if a little chewy. But I never feel further from home than in a place like this that feels almost, well, New Yorkial.

Keep cool, Bub

 

I've been seeing ads on the train for this Bub Shower cooling lotion. They say something like "leave behind your body that sweats" and have a cartoon that suggests a (watery) soul leaving the body.

My friend Kim tried it and said it left her shivering after a shower. Shivering beats wilting, melting and sweating, which is what we've all been doing lately. I found a lone bottle of the stuff in a drug store, stashed on a shelf next to the fizzy cooling bath tablets made by the same company. (On the way out, I saw there was a whole basket with all three strengths outside the front door.)

When you shake the bottle, per instruction, a heavy ball inside clacks like in a paint marker or quick-dry correction fluid. Residue on the outside of the bottle dries the same way, too.

You put it on in the shower, after washing, and then rinse it off. (You have to wonder what's staying on you.) It spreads on, white and slightly watery, with no noticeable effect. And then, sometime during the rinsing, the cooling starts. These days, stepping out of the shower feels a like stepping into a mild sauna. If you're not slathered in Bub.

If you are, it feels like every skin cell has made its own independent deal with the devil. How can you feel so chilly when even the porcelain of the sink is warm to the touch? Wrapped in a towel, still shivering, you start to think you may be about to pay the price, with an ironic, icy demise, for thinking you can outsmart the weather. And then slowly, the coolness fades and you are left feeling just pleasantly unsweaty, which is the real claim the stuff makes.

Cold patches stayed between my fingers for more than an hour, though--a reminder of what happens when we meddle.

Fish in a drunk, crowded barrel

I ended up on the last train tonight, the 00:25 out of Yurakucho. I was working and only remembered it just in time. I hit save, mailed my document to myself and went looking for the freight elevator to get out. The train was pretty empty when it rolled in. I could have gotten a seat if I'd walked up a few cars. But you know those collections of photos of salarymen sleeping amusingly on trains? I could have set up a whole website of them just from what I saw on the cars that rolled past. One guy was semi-fetal on a seat, feet near the ground and body curled behind a pole. Another was in a full crouch by a door, forehead resting on his knees. Various slumpers in all directions. The man I liked least was standing near me, eyes closed, swaying, briefcase banging my knees at each curve in the tracks.
Mercifully, there was an unusual amount of breathing room for a last train. I still feel constantly stressed out that someone is going to throw up at any moment, though. Always feels like a minor miracle when nobody does.

Tanabata wishing tree

 

Today is Tanabata in Japan, a traditional holiday based on a Chinese folklore tale of separated lovers only allowed to meet on the seventh day of the seventh month. It's celebrated by writing wishes on pieces of paper tying them to a bamboo branch. When I was teaching junior high school in Miyazaki, a lot of the classrooms made these. Seems like a good class activity, especially a good, painless English exercise. I think at the time the wish I wrote was that I'd become able to speak Japanese. The kids seemed to think that was an unbelievably uninteresting wish. I was partly trying to inspire them to want to learn English and I was partly really into studying at that time. 

I've been surprised to see quite a few of the branches around Tokyo. Two cops at Harajuku's huge new police station were dragging two leafy stalks of bamboo into the front door the other day, held sideways because they were much taller than the doorway. I saw this one at my train station the other day, a Tokyo Metro version. They left paper and pencils to write your own wish. I was passing through the station quickly and didn't stop to write anything or see what anyone had written. Good old Wikipedia says it was originally a day to wish for improvement of your skills, especially "better sewing and craftsmanship" for girls and handwriting for boys.
The woman who had the apartment before me in Miyazaki left, among a million other scraps and souvenirs, a big handkerchief that said Tanabata on it and had a colorful picture I can only compare to the seven dwarfs. It looked cheerful, and I tacked it to the spare room door (I had a spare room!). I would have sworn the holiday had something to do with seven spirits, maybe represented in a constellation, but that does not seem to be true. I think I'll wish for a better memory.
Got any wishes for improvement?

Two crazy ways to wake up

 

This is a new(ish?) green tea blend from Asahi. It's called Morning Blend. Know  what's so morning about it? It's zero caffeine. You know, just what you want in the morning. What?! I hope you've noticed that I don't like to be all "Whoa, Japan's k-k-krazy," but this defies explanation. What's the point?

Okay, I promised two crazy things, but this second is actually totally reasonable in comparison: breakfast ramen. I wrote about this "asa-ramen" for pulse. Tokyo Walker, a magazine that has a bit of a tendency to cry Trend! called it a trend. Actually, they called it a "boom."  I would want to see a line around every ramen shop on every corner to feel comfortable going with "boom," but there do seem to be more ramen shops open at dawn now than a few years ago, so I don't mind saying "an increasing number." (See how boring it is inside my head?)

Please check out the story. It has a photo of a big, greasy bowl of ramen at the top. If you're on the breakfast side of the world and that doesn't sound appetizing, you can come back at lunch time.

I've never had ramen for breakfast, but I would. I got used to savory breakfast (fish, rice, miso soup, pickles, leftover sushi) the first time I was here. No different than a slice of cold pizza for breakfast, really. And we all like that, don't we?

Two videos for you

These have both been making the rounds. Maybe slightly different rounds. I thought it would be fun to have them both in one place.

This one is a 10-minute silent film (with nifty intertitles like "Rice, the bread of the East...") My friend Roy posted it on Twitter.

The second is called Hayaku, and it's a beautiful stop-motion tour by Brad Kremer of some of the same places almost a century later.

Hayaku: A Time Lapse Journey Through Japan from Brad Kremer on Vimeo.

Take this ring and smash it

Writing for Pulse has been fun. But it got so much more fun with this story about divorce ceremonies in Japan that end with a cathartic smashing of rings. I found a short story about the phenomenon in a Japanese magazine and figured it had already been done to death in the English media - it sounds like that kind of story. It's gotten a ton of coverage in the Japanese (and Korean) media, but the only place it had been picked up in English was in an un-bylined story in the Mainichi, in translation from a Japanese story they'd done about it. Not even a photo.

I pieced together a story from a few Japanese reports online and the blog of the guy who runs the ceremonies, Hiroki Terai, but there were some discrepancies that didn't sit right with me. I made a quick call, expecting an endless runaround with some corporate PR department who would demand ID and faxes and the right to check the story before it went out. Instead, I reached a friendly older-sounding woman (imagine, at Friendly Travel), who answered my questions and gave me the cell number for the divorce guy himself. Terai picked up right away, and we chatted for 45 minutes. He was so interesting and sincere about what he's doing: providing a clear, dignified way to mark the end of a marriage and make a positive start to a new phase of life. If the photos make it all look a little goofy, that speaks more to his sense of humor than to a lack of seriousness.
Blogs are under no obligation to get quotes - they're often just an endless circle of links to each other, or to original content in other forms. Not necessarily bad, that's just generally where we fit into the information ecosystem. But since Terai was so accessible, it seemed like a waste not to just go ahead and rock some direct talk. It was so much more fun to write it that way.
I was a little afraid that my friends at Mutant Frog would give it the 2D Love treatment. (I'm not sure if I'm proud or disappointed that they didn't.) We did get some hostile, nutty comments on Pulse, but not the "You're sensationalizing!!1!" kind I was expecting. Something about writing about Japan makes people slap around broad, cliche-soaked brushes. I wouldn't be surprised if the next person who writes about the ring-smashing ceremony throws in some eye-popping sloppy numbers and overgeneralizations. That story will probably be more fun to read. But for now, check out mine.