July 2006 Archives

In the past few days I've had a couple of convenience store experiences that I think typify an important aspect of Japanese culture. Two years ago, or even one, I'm not sure that I would have picked up on them.

So I went into the convenient store the other day to buy a soda and/or a bentou or something. My pockets were bulging with change, so I figured, "Why not unload some on it on this poor cashier?" As I was fidgeting about in my pockets for the correct combination of 1, 5, 10, 20, 50, and 100-yen coins - a process that was taking me a considerable amount of time - I noticed that the teenage cashier was opening the bag slowly and putting my purchased items into the bag methodically and deliberately. More so than usual, even. He was timing his tasks so that their completion would coincide exactly with my fishing out the right amount of money. Though his deliberation was completely artificial, I neither felt like I was waiting on the cashier, nor was I made to feel that I was making him or anyone else wait. It was an extremely considerate gesture. Everything had gone according to script, and for a brief moment, I felt Japanese.

Another trip to the convenient store. Same store, different cashier. This was a lady who always seems to be happy when I come in. She always seems cheerful and bright. The lady rang up my yogurt drink, gyuudon dinner and a lemon water. It came up some odd amount, like 837 yen. I decided, this time, to dispense with unloading my coins and instead hastily handed the lady a 1000 yen bill. With both hands, since it's more polite, and certainly not with just the left hand, since that's the hand with which one... well, I've been accused of putting too many gross details in my blog, so I'll leave it at that.

"I receive 1000 yen," the cashier merrily intoned. She rang me up; the register drawer opened. Suddenly a dark cloud crept over her face. "Oh, I'm so sorry, there are no 1 yen coins in this drawer. I'll have to get some from the other register..." she said.

"It's OK," I assured her as she ran to the other register. I looked behind me; around me. Nobody else was standing in line.

About five seconds later - an eterniny - she returned with a roll of one yen coins. She opened them and gave me my change. "I'm sorry to have made you wait," she said with a flustered look on her face.

"Not at all," I said, and I smiled.

Her expression did not change, and she looked down and then away, looking hurt. "Thank you for coming. Please come again."

I had been detained for all of an extra twelve seconds or so. I made no difference to me at all! But the episode had somehow humiliated the cashier. Things had most certainly not gone according to script, and that caused the poor woman considerable distress.

No Logo, by Naomi Klein, is an important book. I've had it for a couple of years now, but I just started (and finished) it recently. I'm glad I did.

There are myriad themes of the book - some are better than others - but among the most fascinating deal with corporate images and the extent to which they have become thoroughly infused in our lives. I'm not going to say much about the book myself - I'll leave it to the excerpts. I will say that, though there is definitely an agenda here - and an anti-capitalist and anti-corporate one at that - it is the most important book I have read in a very long time. Very interesting history and meticulously-researched data and analysis are contained within.

Inevitably, the lifestyle brands begin to ask why they need to attach themselves to someone else's media project in the first place. Why, even after proving they can integrate into the most stylish and trendiest of magazines, should they be kept at arm's length or, worse, branded with the word "Advertisement," like the health warnings on packs of cigarettes? So, with lifestyle magazines looking more and more like catalogs for designers, designer catalogs have begun to look more and more like magazines: Abercrombie & Fitch, J. Crew, Harry Rosen and Diesel have all shifted to a storybook format, where characters frolic along sketchily drawn plotlines.

The merger between media and catalog reached a new high with the launch of the teen TV drama Dawson's Creek in January of 1998. Not only did the characters all wear J. Crew clothes, not only did the windswept, nautical set make them look as if they had stepped off the pages of a J. Crew catalog, and not only did the characters spout dialog like "He looks like he stepped out of a J. Crew catalog," but the cast was also featured on the cover of the January J. Crew catalog. Inside the new "freestyle magalog," the young actors are pictured in rowboats and on docks - looking as if they just stepped off the set of a Dawson's Creek episode.

Total branding experience.

Do you remember the Molson/Miller Blind Date concert series? Here's the story behind that.

The emerging dynamic is clearest in the branded festivals being developed by the large beer companies. Instead of merely playing in beer ads, as they likely would have in the eighties, acts like Hole, Soundgarden, David Bowie and the Chemical Brothers now play beer-company gigs. ... For the first decade or so, this was a fine arrangement, but by the mid-nineties, Molson was tired of being upstaged. Rock stars had an annoying tendency to hog the spotlight and, worse, sometimes they even insulted their sponsors from the stage.

Clearly fed up, in 1996 Molson held its first Blind Date Concert. The concept, which has since been exported to the U.S. by sister company Miller Beer, is simple: hold a contest in which winners get to attend an exclusive concert staged by Molson and Miller in a small club - much smaller than the venues where one would otherwise see these megastars. And here's the clincher: keep the name of the band secret until it steps on stage. ...[T]he name on everyone's lips isn't David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, Soundgarden, INXS or any of the other bands that have played the Dates, it's Molson and Miller. No one, after all, knows who is going to play, but they know who is putting on the show. ... "In a funny way," says Universal Concerts' Steve Harman, "the beer is bigger than the band."

Here's an interesting passage about branded people. In this case, Michael Jordon.

Other highlighs of what Falk terms "Michael Jordon's Corporate Partnership Program" include a WorldCom commercial in which the actors are decked out in Oakley sunglasses and Wlson sports gear, both Jordon-endorsed products. And, of course, the movie Space Jam - in which the basketball player starred and which Falk executive-produced - was Jordan's coming out party as his own brand. The movie incorporated plugs for each of Jordon's sponsors (choice dialogue includes "Michael, it's show time. Get your Hanes on, lace up your Nikes, grab your Wheaties and Gatorade and we'll pick up a Big Mac on the way!"), and McDonald's promoted the event with Space Jam toys and Happy Meals.

Here's an interesting tidbit about the scheduling policies of Starbucks:

Starbucks has been the most innovative in the modern art of supple scheduling. The company has created a software program called Star Labor that allows head office maximum control over the schedules of its clerks down to the minute. With Star Labor, gone is anything as blunt and imprecise as a day or evening shift. The software measures exactly when each latte is sold and by whom, then tailor-makes shifts - often only a few hours long - to maximize coffee-selling efficiency. As Laurie Bonang explains, "They give you an arbitrary skill number from one to nine and they plug in when you're available, how long you've been there, when customers come in and when we need more staff, and the computer spits out your schedule based on that."

Cool. Possibly evil, maybe approaching 1984, but still cool.

There's a lot of cool stuff in the book. I've barely even scratched the surface. Highly recommended.

As an added bonus, I noticed that the ampersand - & - in this book is rendered like a stylized e followed by a stylized t. Et - the French word for and - and they do kind of look alike, don't they? Just checked the Wikipedia and my suspicions were confirmed - although, of course, Latin is the root language. Fascinating.

I want to write again today about the idea of collective media experiences, a subject about which I rambled on and on last entry.

So, Heather and I decided a while ago to start watching the HBO show Sex and the City, because a lot of our friends and acquaintances - people we respected - were watching it, and we felt somehow that we had become culturally illiterate. Or culturally dated, at least. Watching a couple of episodes of Sex and the City, we reasoned, would expand our cultural lexicon sufficiently that we could better interact with our peers and friends. "You're such a Charlotte," we would be able to opine. Or so our pretext went.

Well, six seasons later (that's all of the seasons, mind you), I seriously wonder if we have accomplished our goal.

I asked Heather whether she thought anyone else watched shows simply so as to have something to talk about with others. She looked at me skepically and said, "of course they do!" But I had never really considered this idea before; that is, improved interaction throw media absorption. Immediately, I thought "how stupid it is, that people watch these shows and listen to these songs on the radio, simply to be better able to communicate," but now I'm thinking that I'm the one who has been stupid. I'm the one who has allowed himself to get bogged down with rivialities such as plot, theme, and characterization, while some of my peers were busy acquiring cultural currency. Busy building their social lexicons. DOH!

Another topic, but related. As for media serendipity, I've been thinking about it in relation to newspapers. As it turns out, there's also an interview on the Diane Rehm show about the future of newspapers, and although it was phrased differently, the topic of serendipity was touched upon. Newspapers are having a tough time of it lately; more and more people are getting their news not from paper newspapers but from Internet media outlets - good for the environment but bad for serendipity. It occurs to me that if serendipity is a major selling point for paper newspapers, those papers should be pursuing strategies that focus on serendipity. Are they? It doesn't seem to make sense to pursue strategies of personalization (although, on second thought, who knows? Probably the technology already exists to print personalized newspapers for all members of a circulation cheaply. Why aren't newspapers doing this? Or are any?)

Serendipity on the Internet continues to be a problem, I think. When we search for something on Google, we are more likely than not inundated with material that supports our viewpoint. What I want is an anti-search engine. I want a website in which I enter in terms in which I have an interest, and the sites that pop up have nothing to do with my interests - or, if possible, the opposite of my interests. I think it's technologically feasible.

Finally, I found this clip on YouTube the other day, from Japanese TV. Jesus. I've had nightmares like this - no kidding.

Recently, I've been aggressively working my way through the Diane Rehm show archives, and the other day I found this absolute gem of an interview, The Future of TV (second one down). It's a little bit old - it was first published in January of this year - but it is extraordinarily insightful.

Lee Rainie: '...[F]rom a social researcher perspective, one of the most interesting and dominant questions of the age is, "What does this do to us as citizens of a sovereign entity? Do we retreat to our own information bubbles where we only encounter the people that we agree with, or the material that supports our worldview?" We have less and less in common with our neighbors, we have fewer and fewer media experiences that we can call collective media experiences. So far, there isn't much evidence that it's having a deleterious impact on our culture, but it's certainly an enormous worry in the research community.'

Diane Rehm: 'I must say I can certainly remember when everybody watched Ed Sullivan or everybody watched Milton Berle or Louis and Martin, and, you know, all those wonderful programs in the '50s [and] early '60s, and now everybody's watching their own thing, and certainly network news is one of those programs that's suffering. We're seeing a downtrend in that.'

I've often thought about this very thing, but I've never heard it articulated so perfectly. Collective media experiences. That's great.

Later in the broadcast:

Diane Rehm: What's the downside here, Lee?

Lee Rainie: That our culture becomes more balkanized, that we retreat into our own little information warrens and have less chance to encounter - serendipitously - information that we can all share together and will help us define who we are as a society, and maybe even create policy....

More on serendipity:

Walter Mossberg: If you work in, I don't know, the chemical industry, let's say - it's possible online to look at the contents of the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times and say "only show me articles about this," - the chemical industry or whatever else you're interested in. Opening the paper newspaper, you do have serendipity. Your eye may fall on an article about something you would never think in advance to look for, which could change your life, or it could make you rich, or it could allow you to help someone that needs help - whatever. And eventually, maybe the Internet will evolve to where that's likelier, but right now, it's a big disadvantage.

Diane Rehm: So you are agreeing with the balkanization theory?

Walter Mossberg: Yeah, I do agree with the balkanization theory, although I have to say there is a flip side. It's possible to roam across the Internet and look at things that are not in your daily newspaper that might be just wild from your point of view - but you've got to take the time to do it.

The balkanization of our media outlets. What a great turn of phrase.

I've been worrying a lot about the balkanization of our media outlets - as well as the not-unrelated issue of lack of media serendipity - and the effects on their respective consumers, for the very reasons that Mossberg and Rainie articulated. Later in the broadcast, however, something an emailer wrote in helped, somewhat, to alleviate my concern.

Lee Rainie: Can I just address the balkanization point? We talked about the problems connected with it. Our own research suggests that the heaviest Internet users ... are actually availing themselves of more information, particularly information that disputes their point of view. Those who are the heaviest Internet users - the broadband users - during the political season last year were more likely than lighter users or non-users to be aware of arguments that conflicted with their worldview. So, while the concern is out there ... the fact of the matter is that Internet users tend to ... know about and connect to a wider amount of information, even information that doesn't fit the view that they have of the world.

Walter Mossberg: And I also would say that this is not a new worry. You mentioned, Diane, the Ed Sullivan show, in the days when we all watched, as a country, things together. We've been moving away from that for a long time, even within the confines of the old media. The highest-rated shows on television have many fewer viewers as a percent of the market than they used to twenty-five years ago. And we all know folks who only listen to radio talk shows of one political persuasion or another.... [T]he kind that reinforce your prejudices[.]"

OK, so the heaviest Internet users are responsibly rounding out their viewpoints. But what about the lighter Internet users? What is the topology of their web site visitation? Does the visitation profile of User A of a certain ideological persuasion significantly overlap with User B of the same ideological persuasion? Boy, this is an interesting question, and it troubles me deeply.

These collective media experiences, I think, must have been very important in shaping American culture thusfar. How is our future culture going to be affected by these developments? Perhaps our will in defining ourselves as distinct cultural entities will fragment, bit by bit. Maybe these developments are the harbingers of the erosion of our cultural identity - but, so as to forge a new one? Maybe that's not such a bad thing?

Japan, as always, is an interesting case. Contemporary media outlets are few and narrowly controlled by an elite - at least compared to the modern U.S. I think the values of Japan are in part a reflection of this narrowness. I have heard many foreigners living in Japan draw the comparison of modern Japanese values with those of the United States in the late 40s and 50s. In that time in the U.S., presumably there were far fewer media outlets, so perhaps the elite could better manage the flow of the public's values - and control them. From the books I've read and the footage I've seen of that era, there were strong undercurrents of signals towards nationalism, isolationism, narrow-mindedness and - I daresay - cultural insecurity. I think Japan is going through these these things today, and though I don't think the media is the cause, it's certainly an enabler. The U.S. of today, I hasten to add, certainly has its share of cultural insecurity, narrow-mindedness, etc., but it's of a different timbre altogether. It's a more sophisticated narrow-mindedness. We delude ourselves with greater zest.

Anyway, another positive email comment during the interview, from "Ronny," this time about the positive changes that contemporary media outlets are effecting upon societies:

I view the democratization of history as one of the greatest benefits of modern media. For thousands of years, history was written in the voice of the powerful, and the voices of common people were stilled. Today they have a voice in one or more of the many methods of mass communications: weblogs, e-zines, personal web pages and so forth.

There's also a very concise definition of the concept of network neutrality by Mossberg, and why it's important. Give it a listen.

Finally, the interviewees talk about Al Gore's interactive cable television network - current.tv - in which end-users can both watch and create content. I hadn't heard of this service before the interview. Has anyone seen shows from current.tv? What do you think?

Just got back from doing my laundry. Someone stole the rest of my dryer sheets. Why on earth would a person steal dryer sheets? There weren't even that many left. I mean, they're American dryer sheets, but other than that I don't think that there's that much to distinguish them.

The most baffling element of the whole episode is that the thief left the empty box, lid pried way open, as if to mock me. "No, you aren't losing your mind. No, you didn't forget the sheets back in the apartment. Yes, somebody took the sheets and left the box as a message to you," the box seemed to tell me.

My uncle sent me this email the other day:

John: Your discussion of language and how we perceive "realities" reminds me of Benjamin Whorf. Look him up. You may find his ideas quite interesting. I studied Whorf a bit when I was in college in the early 1960s.

I did look him up, and he is interesting! Benjamin Whorf was one of the originators of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Briefly, Sapir and Whorf were two of the biggest modern exponents of the idea that language affected thought. Here's a comic that succinctly and amusingly explains Sapir-Whorf (source: Wikipedia).

I had heard about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis before, but only in name. I hadn't really known anything about it. When I scrolled to the bottom of the Wikipedia article, however, I spotted this:

Sapir-Whorf and programming languages

Aha! That's probably why I had heard of it. Check out this sweet excerpt from that article:

One way of stating the Church–Turing thesis is that any language that can simulate a Turing machine can be used to implement any effective algorithm — in this sense, it is irrelevant what language is used to implement a particular algorithm, as that exact algorithm can also be implemented in every other language. However, when designing an algorithm to solve a particular problem, programmers are sometimes heavily influenced by the language constructs available. Though a large part of this is undoubtedly the way of least resistance (implement whatever is easiest to implement), there is also an element of "appropriateness" or "naturalness" that seems to compel the programmer to a design that "befits" the language.

The bit about the Pirahã language is also really interesting - in particular how there are only three number words in their language. I read an article somewhere (I can't find it now) about a study conducted where they tried to teach the tribe members to count past three, but with very little success. I wish I could find that article...

As an added bonus, read about how Pirahã is one of the few languages of the world that can be whistled.

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words. --Philip K. Dick

Given Dick's interpretation of reality, it seems to me one could rephrase this as follows:

Language (and by language I mean all symbols, utterances, literatures, etc.) is the filter by which we perceive the world. If we can change our language, we can change - and expand - the way we interpret the universe.

Alan Watts knew this very well. The English language - and perhaps all Germanic and Italic languages - is absolutely riddled with agency, and this has reinforced modern notions about God as the creator, and the more contemporary Newtonian myth of the universe as one gigantic machine set into motion by an originator. Creator. Originator. These are agents, and we have a hard time expressing things in English without agency.

To contrast, Japanese is a language in which agency is not as ubiquitous. Consider the sentence 寂しいです (sabishii desu). Depending on context, it might mean I am lonely, he/she is lonely, you are lonely, it is lonely. It might also denote this situation is characterized by a feeling of loneliness. Prepending an I am or a you are would, in most situations, be generally regarded as highly unnecessary and perhaps even clumsy. As a non-native speaker of Japanese, though, I am always fighting myself to not prepend an I am or a you are. I can never fully divest myself of this way of thinking; my neural pathways have already been paved. Agents, I am subconciously and incorrectly convinced, run the universe.

Here's another example. It's raining right now. (It really is, by the way... the rainy season is in full swing) Do you notice anything peculiar about that sentence? What exactly is raining? It. Well, what's it? The rain. Is this an artifact of our belief that someone or something - significantly, other than the rain - put the raining into motion? Or is it just my perception?

Interesting, the normal Japanese rendition of this sentence is 雨が降っています、(ame ga futteimasu) or rain is falling. Much less agent-neutral, wouldn't you say? Or sometimes it's rendered as 雨です. There is rain. No agents, only processes (and copulars).

This agency idea is also expressly made manifest in the founding document of the United States - the Declaration of Independence.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

Here's a double treat. We have both agency - creation needs an agent to put it into effect - as well as the identification of that agent as a Judeo-Christian entity - the Creator. Note the capitalization. I find this stuff fascinating.

Finally, one more observation and I'll end this post. When I was in middle and high school in the United States, I and my peers were constantly encouraged to use the active voice rather than the passive. That is to say, rather than the passive The boy was bitten by the dog, the sentence The dog bit the boy is preferable. Passive is somehow confusing. That's how the Online Writing Lab at Purdue characterizes it, anyway:

In most nonscientific writing situations, active voice is preferable to passive for the majority of your sentences. Even in scientific writing, overuse of passive voice or use of passive voice in long and complicated sentences can cause readers to lose interest or to become confused. Sentences in active voice are generally--though not always-- clearer and more direct than those in passive voice.

I think the reason we are encouraged to use active sentences comes down to agency. We are continually being reminded - and reinforcing - the idea of God as the creator. These ideas also resonate with ideas about hierarchical leadership roles (monarchy, presidency) even today.

In sentences written in passive voice, the subject receives the action expressed in the verb; the subject is acted upon. The agent performing the action may appear in a "by the . . ." phrase or may be omitted.

So passive sentences allow you to omit agents - The boy was bitten - by what? many of us might instinctively ask - and maybe that represents a challenge to the status quo.

Today I lugged a great big box full of Heather's clothes to the post office. As soon as I lifted it - actually, well before, given its size - I knew that it wasn't going to be much fun. Soon after I got out the door, I cursed Heather for burdening me with it. It was heavy, and I started wondering if the post office might not accept it based on its weight.

I should be fair to Heather to mention that she asked me to arrange the post office to drive out and pick up the box, but out of laziness I had neglected to do so. Today I paid the price.

It took me a full minute just to go down the stairs with the package. It was so big and so bulky, I couldn't get be arms around it comfortably, so I ended up doing what I normally do in these situations - I balanced it on the back of my neck.

I walked about ten meters, balancing the box. From my downward-facing vantage point, it had become clear that I had once again forgotten a necessary component of proper dress. I had forgotten to zip up the fly on my shorts, and it was gaping open. On top of that, I hadn't put on my good underwear this morning.

"No problem," I thought. I balanced the box with my left arm and tried to zip up with my right hand. I had to bend over a little bit to properly zip up. The strain my stomach caused on the button caused it to open with a snap, and my shorts promptly fell. My cat-like reflexes salvaged my dignity, however - I quickly opened my thighs as far as possible to prevent further sliding and waddled to the curb. I put the box down, pulled up my shorts, snapped the button and zipped up. I pointedly didn't look around to see if anyone had seen, and threw the box on top of my head. My pace towards the post office could be described as very brisk, given the circumstances.

When I got to the post office, I was pretty shocked at how much it did indeed weigh. 23 kilograms - more than 50 pounds. No problems when I got there, though - they accepted it. If the post office workers didn't know what to make of the round, wet indentation on the side of the box - that is, where I had balanced it for about a quarter of a mile, and where my head-sweat had seeped into the cardboard - they certainly hadn't shown it.

ForeignPolicy.com and The Center For American Progress have recently completed the first installment of The Terrorism Index, a survey of the top 100 terrorism experts on how the status of the "global war on terror."

These pessimistic public perceptions could easily be attributed to the high cost, in both treasure and lives, of counterterrorism efforts. After all, Americans are constantly being told by their elected leaders that their pessimism is wrong, that the war is being won. But they’re also told that another attack is inevitable. Which is it? To find out, FOREIGN POLICY and the Center for American Progress teamed up to survey more than 100 of America’s top foreign-policy experts—Republicans and Democrats alike. The FOREIGN POLICY/Center for American Progress Terrorism Index is the first comprehensive effort to mine the highest echelons of America’s foreign-policy establishment for their assessment of how the United States is fighting the Global War on Terror....

Despite today’s highly politicized national security environment, the index results show striking consensus across political party lines. A bipartisan majority (84 percent) of the index’s experts say the United States is not winning the war on terror. Eighty-six percent of the index’s experts see a world today that is growing more dangerous for Americans. Overall, they agree that the U.S. government is falling short in its homeland security efforts. More than 8 in 10 expect an attack on the scale of 9/11 within a decade.

Bummer.

On the other hand, as Freaknomics authors Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner have pointed out (still reading, but almost done), far more people die in the U.S. due to heart disease than to terrorism. And yet our allocation of funds to the eradication of heart disease is puny compared to the money going towards our efforts to stop terrorism. Of course, one might argue that the possibility of a terrorist detonating a nuclear weapon in the U.S. justifies the increased spending, and I'm inclined to agree, but only to a point. Diminishing returns and all that.

Anyway, the Terrorism Index is to be conducted every six months. It will be interesting to see how the values shift - and it will also be interesting to see which experts' opinions, in which fields, correlate most closely with what actually pans out.

I just today discovered that the authors of Freakonomics have a blog. Good reading!

It's been a really long time since my last entry. It's been a rough couple of weeks for me, though. First, just as Heather and I were really getting used to my Mom being in Japan, she returned home. If that wasn't enough of a bummer, Heather also permanently returned to America four days ago. So I was a little bit bummed out. On top of that, my boss still hasn't given me a clear answer as to the last day that he wants me, even though I've asked him repeatedly for about two weeks. Well, I decided for him today. I guess if he wants me to work later, he'll get a free lesson in internationalization (and maybe I'll get one in being fired - not that that matters too much at this point). I'm hoping that the days coincide. I think they might.

There was so much that I wanted to write, but I think I overshot my window of reflection. I can't wait too long to write about something, or else I forgot too many of the details. On the other hand, I can't write too soon about something, because I feel I don't have enough perspective to write anything coherent. I'm on the far side of that window, I'm afraid.

This post is essentially content-less. Sorry about that. I do wish to call attention to something that disappointed me with my last entry, however. In one of the pictures, my mom and I are standing in front of the lake, the woods, and the skyscrapers in the garden at Hamarikyu. Only a couple of people noticed that I doctored the photo to put Godzilla in the background. That picture was even published in the family newsletter, but I don't think anyone noticed it (although it was pretty small).