Turn off your phone, fancy man

This Tokyo Metro Manners poster has a lot going on. Background: there are signs and announcements on many trains asking that cell phones be turned off near the priority seats, ostensibly to protect people with pacemakers. Don't get me started on that one. Though, if I had a pacemaker and there were any chance, however minimal, that having a few square feet in the city where there was a slightly reduced amount of electromagnetic radiation trying to scramble my heartbeat, I guess I'd want people to turn off their phones there. I suppose. But I've digressed.

So, here, we have the usual put-upon poster lady sitting in a priority seat with her child. (And what's happened to her usual partner in moroseness, now that she's had the kid? Has he abandoned her? Is that why she looks so glassy and vacant?) Lurking above her is a golden-haired man (foreigner? host?) in a flashy white coat. He whips his phone out and holds it aloft. Is this some kind of a threat? Is he going to throw it? Make an inconsiderate phone call? Zap all the pacemakers in range? No! This prince of a man is simply shutting off his phone. He is surrounded by a sparkly aura of good manners. Mother and child are agape.
I would be, too, if I ever saw this happen. Shutting off phones near the priority seats is the most flagrantly flouted of all the manners.

Crowdsourcing earthquakes

 

What are you doing now? Shaking.

Well, not now now. Yesterday. "What are you doing now?" is Twitter's ice-breaker question. Everybody knows you don't have to answer it literally, and usually people don't. But they do when there's an earthquake. 

I haven't noticed too many recently, then I felt two good long jolts yesterday. One early in the morning, and one after work. I happened to be sitting at home looking at Twitter during the evening one, and apparently, so was everyone else I know. Those screen captures from my phone are just a small segment of all the quake messages. And those are just from the people I follow.

In the ensuing chat about how ha, ha, everyone tweeted the same thing at the same time, I mentioned that I thought I'd read or heard on the radio that the US Geological Survey used Twitter as one way of tracking quake activity. Talk about monitoring -- I got a  message from @USGS about a minute later that said "You heard right," and included a link to this story about how the USGS uses Twitter to track and map earthquake experiences around the world. The agency is doing all kinds of interesting things with social and interactive media. It will be fascinating to see what they can develop with it, and how similar work can be used in disaster and public health scenarios. They mention filtering for "earthquake" in a few other languages. Hope they've got 地震 (jishin) on their list.           

Wish upon a pudding

Cute ad for a convenience store dessert, a "layered dolce" with four kinds of melt-in-your-mouth.
"Here's hoping there's no one cuter than me at the blind-date party," it reads.
Whatever. You're eating a yummy marscapone and chocolate dessert the day before a date party, which says you don't have insane dieting tendencies. And you're wishing on that dessert, which means you're kind of quirky. Quirky and pleasure-loving beat dull and skinny any day. Hit the goukon with confidence, and don't trust anyone who doesn't order dessert.

Lost and found, after a quick lap around Tokyo

 

We were trying to go to Costco. We had a backpack with a cooler pouch inside to bring a few of the groceries home. Jim put his Japanese text book in the bag, too, to maybe study on the ride back. On the Yamanote train, he put the bag up on the rack over the seats and said to remind him to take it on the way out. I said sure. A few minutes later, we got off the train at Shinagawa, went upstairs and through the wickets to our next train, and realized we'd left the bag behind.

The stolid man in the platform office made a few calls to see if someone at another station could pop aboard and look for it. We had retraced our steps and were able to tell him which car, which door and which side we'd left it on. But the train was running seven minutes behind schedule, so they wouldn't be able to do any checking until the train stopped for the night in Ikebukuro. He said it would just loop around and around for the next five hours. He said we could wait until the same train came back through the station, in forty or forty-five minutes. Or, we could wait until the next day then call the number on the card he gave us and see where in the train system, if anywhere, the bag had turned up. With that, he looked down, started shuffling paperwork and was done with us.

We went back on the platform to where we'd gotten off before and watched as lime green train after train pulled up, each stopping at exactly the same spot, each papered with the same combination of iced tea ads in the same frames around the priority seats, all with empty overhead racks. 

It was an outdoor track on a pleasant evening, and the ridiculousness of the situation overshadowed the annoyance of it. Right around the 42-minute mark, almost exactly an hour since we'd abandoned the bag, a train pulled up with the backpack sitting where we left it, untouched.  Jim grabbed it, and we hopped into the train on the other side of the platform and went back home.

I really didn't want to go to Costco, anyway.

Hey, no ditching!

Everyone's saying the same thing about this subway manners poster - it's not the kids who cut in line, it's the old ladies. It's true, if anyone will elbow past you to get on a bus or train, it will be someone who looks like she might blow away in the gust of wind from the oncoming subway, but turns out tone anchored to the platform and to have elbows made of steel. And she's not afraid to use them.

When this happens, I always think, reflexively, "Ah well, go ahead, you'll be dead a long time before me. You've probably been through a lot. Grab a seat." Is that horrible? I get pretty weird looks when I admit this. I don't mean it to be. It's a sympathetic thought.
That said, getting elbowed is still annoying.

Is that an umbrella in your waistband?

Why yes, yes it is.
----
Despite specific reminder announcements on the train, lots of people leave their umbrellas behind. I see one orphan on the floor by the door now, and I took an empty seat next to one hooked over a handrail this morning.

Quite a few guys use this foolproof, if slightly unelegant, method: the belt hook.

I use a variant when I'm carrying too many things, hooking the umbrella onto my bag. I often forget it's there when I do this, though, sending it clattering to the floor as I get off the train. Talk about not elegant. I'm tempted to try to pull off the belt-hook manoeuvre, but even though another youngish guy in a nice suit was doing it on the train tonight as well as our rumpled friend above, it still reeks a little too much of absent-minded old man.

Deer in a bubble

I went to an art opening this weekend at SCAI the Bathhouse. I used to go to quite a few in New York as a press-pass-carrying party crasher. This was the first time in Tokyo. Quite similar - white walls, vehement opinions and clear plastic cups of white wine. The venue was different, though. The gallery is a beautiful old sento, or, you guessed it, bathhouse. The outside is intact and the inside is completely renovated as a gallery, though high original windows are retained.
I liked Kohei Nawa's exhibit. The centerpiece is two deer coated in clear balls. I wonder if Lady GaGa or her bubble dress designer has seen it?
SCAI the Bathhouse is between Nippori and Nezu stations. It has a nice website with lots of pictures and info in English. This show is up until October 30. Check it out.

We're closed: a word of encouragement for language learners everywhere

I walked into a local restaurant yesterday evening for about the dozenth time. The lights were off in the open kitchen. One guy was at the register counting money. The other was sitting at a table, doing something on a laptop. Chairs were stacked on top of most of the tables around him, and the front door was propped open awkwardly. I needed to talk to them about something, so I paused in the threshold for a moment, nodded, and walked in. They both sort of recognized me and and smiled, but then the money-counting guy frowned and said in Japanese, "Sorry, we're closed." I smiled, "Yes, I see that. But I'd like to talk to you about something." The money counter walked toward me and, looking stressed, said, "Sorry, but we're clooooosed."
I was pretty sure I'd used the right, rather simple, words and sulked internally that my pronunciation was so bad that they hadn't been able to understand me. As I was trying to find another way to say it, the guy at the computer said, "She knows that. She said she wants to talk to you about something." He had a heavy trace of "What're you, thick?" in his voice that was most gratifying.

And then we all chatted for a few minutes. But I'm going to end the conversation there, because that's where my point is for you, language learner. Sometimes people can't understand you because your pronunciation is bad and your word choice is way off. But sometimes, people can't understand you because they just can't. For whatever reason. Maybe they're not paying much attention. Maybe they don't hear so well. Maybe they don't expect that someone who looks like you would be able to speak their language. Those particular people, they probably wouldn't understand you even if you were both native speakers of the same language. (People with a common native language have trouble understanding each other all the time. This bears repeating when you feel like you're hopeless at learning a new language. Notice one day how many times you say "What?") On the other hand, some people will probably get you, more or less, no matter how badly you mangle the words.
 You won't always be lucky enough to have that second guy-who-gets-you sitting right there.  But for every person who gives you a blank, slightly panicked look when you start talking, remember that there's someone else out there who not only would have understood you, but who wouldn't even have known why anyone else would have trouble understanding you. Don't be discouraged. Keep talking, and you'll find those people.

Whirling Dervishes

There was music and entertainment in Sultanahmet Square every night for Ramazan. We stopped to watch some traditional musicians on stage for a few minutes at the small amphitheater. We were picking our way carefully over bulky cobblestones to head back to the hotel when I saw the next act standing to the side of the stage - three men in tall hats and floor-length white skirts. Dervishes! Lots of the restaurants in the area advertised evenings of fixed menus and performances. This seemed so much cooler, since we just stumbled upon it. The audience seemed like locals. There was a low-key street fair vibe, with families moving in and out of the long bench seats, kids getting restless, men talking on phones. The woman in front of me recorded video on her cellphone.
The whirlers were like nothing else. All they did was spin, slowly and then more quickly, raising their hands overhead. What was most fascinating was that even though they were doing the same thing, each had a distinct style. After a few minutes, I felt like I knew their personalities. The guy on the left was an artist. The one in the middle gets into really intense discussions. And on the far right, a hippie poet for sure. Maybe.

Last things first

While I was waiting at the gate for our flight home to board, wallet empty, I found a final five-lira note ($3.30) folded up in my pocket. I traded it with this machine for a bar of pistachio chocolate. (A can of Coke cost even more.)
A delicious last taste of Turkey.