Other writing

I wrote a story for CNN International on the buzz in Tokyo about the US presidential election. Nevermind that there isn't much. I felt like there would be more to say about it when the actual election gets closer. I learned a lot about Japanese elections while I was writing it. Most of it didn't belong in the story, but I felt like I had to understand how the Japanese see their own elections before I could understand how they see ours. (Maybe that wasn't totally necessary? It felt like it was.) I had thought I'd live out my days without knowing anything about how it all worked, so it was fun to dive into. When you've got some time, check out how Japan divvies up votes when the handwriting (!) isn't clear. They could never have the equivalent of a hanging chad problem. The editor suggested I work in karaoke somehow to give it more of a Japanese flavor. This insulted my journalistic integrity, so I put in something about pop hydra AKB48 instead. Oh, well.

The only reasonable size

I'm doing fewer posts at Japan Pulse now. One recent one was about Japanese versions of American fast foods. Make no mistake, you can get as fat as you want to in Japan. I also put up something about the remarkable unpublished "teenage wasteland" photos that LIFE magazine has released from its archives from a shoot in Japan in 1964. A lot of the pictures are of Japanese kids losing their minds to The Tokyo Beatles. Their music sounds like it wants to be a direct copy of the actual Beatles -- a copy in the same way that looking in the mirror and drawing with your left hand would give you a copy of a painting. But the band looks wilder. Backstage photos show them with shirts off and magic marker writing on their bodies. Check out the music on the post.

I don't know why posting here is so much less frequent. Probably because the time goes to Twitter, sliced up into tiny chunks like fine sushi (there's some Japan flavor!!). [Commenter: I went to a sushi shop in Kyoto once and the pieces of sushi were very large. You shouldn't say that fine sushi is small.] Anyway, the truth is that writing, anything, feels harder and harder. I don't know why. Maybe the relevant brain cells have curled up and died. I'm hoping they're just sleeping.