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.