May 2007 Archives

Jen and Tak's wedding was the other day. It was awesome. Heather and I were very happy to be a part of it. We'll post some pictures here when we get them off of our camera.

Friday night I hung out with some people (R and J), and I got back to Heather's and my hotel kind of late. In fact, it was the last train of the evening. I think I arrived back in Ikebukuro at about 1:30 AM.

There was an episode that I thought was extraordinarily curious and amusing. The stairs leading up to the west gate consisted of conventional stairs - which were rather feebly chained off, and people were just flowing over them, coming down the stairs - and an inactive escalator, which people were clomping up. It was about three flights worth of stairs, more or less. I waited in line for the stationary escalator, and began my own ascent. When I reached the top, I, like the people before me, realized that the exit was closed. So I, like everyone else before me, began the descent back to the station, clumsily crawling over the chain cordoning off the entrance to the stairs.

And people in vain continued to climb up the stairs. There was a queue of about 150 people near the bottom, ever-growing, waiting to get upstairs. And I noticed that nobody coming down did anything sensible to stop the madness, like say, "Hey! It's closed off upstairs! We can't get out that way! It's a waste of time to come up!" On the other hand, I didn't say anything either. I felt like I would have blown the wa to do so. So there we were, like a chain of ants going up and back down, following the leader to the other exit further down, wasting potentially tens or even hundreds of man-hours.

We're in Tokyo now. Our plane schedule took us yesterday from Detroit first to Portland, and then on to Tokyo.

Getting on the plane in Detroit, we economy-classers (i.e. 3rd-classers) were paraded, as usual, through business class. I hate how they do that. Price discriminating techniques, I guess. As the other economy-classers were getting settled in their seats in front of us, we were stuck in line, standing. Feeling like spectacles, or at least I was. One man looked affectedly disinterested, glancing down and reading his Financial Times. A woman with lipstick that was too dark and too thickly applied deigned to grace us with a sour, contemptuous look. Or maybe it was directed strictly at me - I was wearing kind of pajama-like, purple fleece pants. Very unsophisticated. The line got moving again, and I farted as I passed her -- barely audible, but effective. That'll teach her, I childishly thought.

We had a good visit with Melanie in Portland - she's currently on the cleanse - before heading on to Tokyo. That was a long flight. We managed to have dinner with Valerie and Manabu at an izakaya near our hotel in Ikebukuro. The food was good, but I was too tired to really appreciate the food and atmosphere. We got back to the hotel at around 11:00, 11:30, and I fell promptly asleep.

I got up shortly after 6:00 this morning, and got some food from the Family Mart. Some onigiri and some Japanese-style curry, as well as yogurts, and some Lemon Water for Heather. We're scheduled to meet up with Jen and Tak this afternoon for some Homework's - a really good Tokyo burger joint.

The wedding that Heather and I are attending is for Jen and Tak, in Tokyo! Congratulations guys! They're really mirror images of each other:

That was taken at the the illusion museum near Takao station about a week or so before I left Japan. Ahh, good times. :( I lost my head a bit at that museum.

I'll stop now.

More photos here, courtesy of Heather's Picasa account.

It was a scorching day today. I had to drive to downtown Ann Arbor to submit my hours sheet for my summer job. I was also obliged to purchase some special shampoo, conditioner, and curling treatment - a hair care product whose function eludes me - for a friend in Tokyo. We're visiting Japan tomorrow, for a few days, and apparently these products are unavailable there.

Traffic was stop-and-go, stop-and-go... unusual for 2:00, 2:30 PM in Ann Arbor. At a traffic light in front of the medical school hospital, I saw a grey van with a wide, benign dent in the trunk door. The car sported a John Kerry - 2004 bumper sticker. It was faded and frayed around the edges - but whether from weathering, or from the owner's post-election dejection and embarrassment - and subsequent, thwarted attempts at peeling it away, it was unclear. One wonders what kind of emotions John Kerry experiences - driving around Washington, Boston, and other places - when he sees his faded, smiling face over a waving Red White and Blue. Kerry/Edwards 2004: A Stronger America.

I recently shaved my head again - with a razor - so when I went into the hair salon, in search of products, I think I surprised the proprietors.

"May I help you?"

"Yeah, uhh, I need a haircut..."

I was only able to buy conditioner at the The Campus Barber - the friendly woman informed me that Joico products are being gradually phased out - so I was able to recycle the joke - feeling vaguely dirty doing so - at four other Ann Arbor hair salons. I failed in my quest ultimately; I was only able to get a kind of, what was it? Curling treatment from the second-to-last salon. No shampoo though.

I finished up The Yamato Dynasty. It's chock full of interesting revelations, particularly immediately after the Meiji Restoration, but also with lots of interesting tidbits on Hirohito. Unfortunately, there is not very much information on modern-day Japanese politics and intrigue, but one can forgive this since a lot of the dirty secrets haven't yet been divulged, and probably won't be for thirty or forty years. Maybe my only other real criticism is that the authors take the metaphors a bit to the extreme. Other than that, it's a great volume.

There's one passage that I think is particularly noteworthy - not for its actual content, but because of a reader's reaction:

Many sources maintain that Roosevelt also had foreknowledge but avoided informing his commanders in Honolulu. According to this scenario, the "surprise" attack on the "day of infamy" was the only way Roosevelt could provoke the isolationist Congress into the war. Churchill wrote, "It was... a blessing that Japan attacked the United States and thus brought [her] into the war. Greater good fortune has rarely happened to the British Empire."

In the margins, one angry reader printed in hurried blue:

BULL! IF ROOSEVELT KNEW THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN LOADED GUNS + ALERT CREWS[.] A FAILED JAPEANESE ATTACK WOULD HAVE HAD SAME RESULT

I imagined that the person who penned the response was a WWII veteran who fought in the Pacific theatre.

Under normal circumstances, one might be irritated at the apparent defacing of a book. On the contrary, I thought it was actually pretty cool - the reader was adding value, almost like a blog commenter. He hadn't actually ruined anything - everything was still legible.

Here's another very interesting excerpt, one which I think is the central thesis of the book:

What is the truth? Many Japanese politicians, particularly in the LDP, still state flatly that Japan did not lose the war. Do they know a few things we do not? A Japanese scholar put it in the form of a zen koan: "If a robber steals $100 billion and successfully hides the money before he is captured and jailed, and then is released after seven years for 'good behavior,' did he fail or did he succeed?"

By this Oriental logic the Japanese military lost the battles, but Japan's financial elite ultimately won the war. If Hirohito refused to apologize to his own people for losing the war, could that be because he knew the war was not really lost?

Wow -- what an epiphany! The $100 billion to which the scholar refers in an allusion to Operation Golden Lily, where the Japanese pillaged much of Asia - including solid gold Buddhas, apparently still in Swiss bank vaults - and secreted the loot back to the Home Islands. Curiously, this incident has apparently not been recorded by the Wikipedia (or am I wrong? Anyone?). The only allusion to the incident appears to be in the entries for the Seagraves, the book's authors.

One more entry, then I'll let you go. This is in the notes of the book:

It may seem that the Japanese people are completely uninterested in their recent political and social history, particularly the 1930s and 1940s. However, the truth is that they are simply starved for information about their past. Because the elite control of the writing, research and teaching of Japanese history, it is not unusual for today's high-school students to ask, "Did we win the war?"

This might seem appalling - a scathing indictment of the Japanese educational system. But I recall that, in my High School days, we didn't even get past the American Civil War. Of course, at my school, world history wasn't even a required course (in contrast to American History - shows where our priorities lie). At Heather's school, they got a little bit further - the Second World War. But to not touch upon contemporary events like Korea, Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs, etc.... it boggles the mind. It almost seems as if active institutional "forgetfulness" of contemporary controversial and embarrassing geopolitical events has taken root in the good old USA, too.

I'd be very interested to hear what how far other people got in their studies of history in the course of their own education.

The Yamato Dynasty: The Secret History of Japan's Imperial Family is a book, on a recommendation from a friend, that I've been meaning to read for a long time. Well, I checked it out at the library a couple weeks ago, and I finally started in yesterday. If you have any interest in either modern Japanese history or true, compelling political intrigue, this book is well worth checking out. Otherwise, stay away.

I'm only about a hundred pages into it (out of about 300), but so far there are some very interesting revelations that help to inform the extent that recent events in Japan's history -- the Meiji "Restoration" of 1868, for example, and the narratives of the reigns of emperors Komei, Mutsuhito, Yoshihito, Hirohito, down to the current Emperor, Akihito - and the considerable political machinations behind the throne -- have been major shapers in contemporary Japanese attitudes and cultural tendencies.

The Meiji Restoration was a restoration in the sense that the emperor (on the surface) once again seized power, after centuries of Shogunate rule. This occurred shortly after American warships appeared in Tokyo Bay and demanded the opening of Japan - crucially, in matters of trade - to the West. Here's something I didn't know - and that perhaps a lot of Japanese don't know, or refuse to acknowledge - about the restoration:

It was easier for foreign nations to acknowledge the new monarch than it was for the Japanese. After eight centuries of military rule, most of them did not know there was still an emperor. They only had been conscious of rule by the shogun. Outside of Kyoto, people had long ago ceased to be aware that the imperial house existed, so it was necessary to reintroduce the emperor to the people, and make him an icon again. The strategists behind the regime launched a vigorous promotion campaign. If Japan's new strongmen were to remain invisible, the emperor had to be conspicuous. To become an effective figurehead, he had to be put on display. This involved a certain falsification. As Professor Carol Gluck put it, when he was taken out of the closet the emperor was deliberately "enveloped in an aura of symbolic meaning" that had not been practiced for over seven hundred years.

Venturing outside Kyoto for the first time in April 1868, Mutsuhito (the emperor), now 15, climbed into a palanquin and was borne off to nearby Osaka for his first glimpse of the blue water and lush green crags of the Inland Sea. He saw six new steamers belonging to wealthy domain lords, reviewed soldiers, and had a great day. The public was told the emperor had left Kyoto at the head of his army to put down a few die-hard rebels in the east, but that was only to inflate his image as a military leader. His next journey was a permanent move to the shogun's administrative capital at Edo (modern Tokyo). While Kyoto had been the imperial capital since 794, it was not suitable as a home for the new government because Japan's new strongmen wished to distance themselves from the intrigues of the old aristocracy, and to make certain that everyone saw the emperor taking the place of the shogun. The great castle of the Tokugawa shoguns at Edo was redecorated as a new home of the imperial family. This move was announced as an imperial decision, but Mutsuhito had nothing to say in the matter. The term "imperial decision" meant the emperor gave his nod to something already decided for him.

...

Although Mutsuhito remained hidden, he saw rice-farmers, porters, fishermen, shopkeepers, peasant women--a true cross-section of ordinary people and their way of life. This was the first time in 2,000 years that an emperor had crossed the mountains to eastern Japan. Though the trip was made to remove the emperor from the conspiratorial aristocracy in Kyoto, word was put out that he really wanted to be closer to the scene of rebel suppression.

Another passage:

Traditionally, Japanese strongmen and power-brokers take extraordinary pains to disguise themselves and their ambitions. It would be gauche and dangerous to do otherwise, for to have their ruthlessness revealed would defeat the whole purpose. After being excluded too long from decision-making, the coalition of conspirators who put Mutsuhito on the throne was ruthlessly aggressive. But they were extremely careful to maneuver in the background, while the emperor provided window-dressing. They did not restore power to the throne, but only went through the motions of doing so. To be more precise, they restored a certain kind of implicit power to the throne, but kept executive control for themselves. Mutsuhito became head of state, but not head of government. In itself, this was an historic change, for many centuries had passed since emperors were allowed even to be figureheads. During the Meiji coup, real power simply was transferred from one backstage clique to another, from the shogun's faction to a faceless group of new oligarchs. The Japanese people did not participate, nor did the emperor, except ceremonially. The throne was exploited to provide an aura of divine legitimacy, and to hide the fact that members of the new ruling coalition were continually cheating and trying to destroy one another. This clever deceit was so artfully contrived that most people were convinced it was real. Even within the State Council and among the power-brokers themselves, the deceit was maintained so effectively that in a few short years it became dogma, and the idea of Japan being ruled by the emperor became accepted as holy writ. It was suicidal to challenge this, or to point out that it was myth, and by the early decades of the twentieth century even the power-brokers and the emperor himself were addicted to its maintenance.

Wow. I'm tempted to draw a parallel between this and the contemporary tendency of our American administration to establish the mythical sanctity of our armed forces, so as to [attempt to] create a situation in which it becomes unpatriotic and unsupportive of them to criticize the motivations of the war.

Books could be written (and probably already have) about emperor Mutsuhito's two closest advisors (in his later years), Ito and Yamagata, and their interaction. Ito was an arrogant but jovial and carousing man, in stark contrast to Yamagata, who was secretive and austere, but with a network of secret police and informants blanketing the entirety of the nation:

Yamagata's police state was all-pervasive. Public meetings were permitted only if they met severe restrictions, so there was no forum of any kind for political discussion. State employees including teachers and bureaucrats were forbidden to take part in political meetings. Journalists were gagged by self-censorship. To blot up activists he encouraged all kinds of patriotic societies expressing intense loyalty to the throne or devout obedience to superiors. Although he backed a law prohibiting secret societies, Yamagata encouraged all manner of secret organizations, paramilitary forces and underworld gangs, so long as they were ultra-nationalist. Behind harmless groups like the Women's Patriotic Society was a paramilitary cult known as the the Genyosha (Black Ocean), founded by Toyama Mitsuru, a follower of General Saigo who transferred his loyalties to Yamagata after his release from prison for his role in Saigo's rebellion. Toyama became Japan's leading underworld middleman, feeding the egos of men who dreamed of conquest and looting on the Asian mainland and making available to Yamagata an endless supply of bullies and assassins. Yamagata's web also included the Yamaguchi Gumi (Yamaguchi Group), gangsters in Yamaguchi Prefecture, the new administrative name for Choshu. He used gangs to harass political organizers and labor demonstrators. Later he used them to soften up Korea and Manchuria in advance of invasion by the Imperial Army.

I emboldened Yamaguchi-gumi because anyone who has lived in Japan for a certain amount of time becomes familiar with them. The Yamaguchi-gumi, which contemporarily might be regarded as a large arm of the Yakuza, or at best a quasi-legal business organization, even have a prominent office building in downtown Tokyo. They're well-entrenched in business and politics, even today.

Both Ito and Yamagata were brilliant men, but they vied for power:

Japan emerged from the Russo-Japanese War with control of Korea and south Manchuria. Yamagata was triumphant. President Theodore Roosevelt offered to broker the peace in return for a secret accord. Japan could have Korea if the United States could have the Philippines.

Ito was sent to Korea as Japan's reluctant viceroy. He was bullied into it. When he initially resisted plans for seizing Korea and Manchuria, Black Ocean boss Toyama and three beefy thugs arrived at Ito's front door in Tokyo where Toyama shouted, "I don't know whether there is going to be a beating or not." According to the official history of the secret society, Toyama's conversation with Ito that day "determined the decision for war."

The great Ito's time had now passed and his days were numbered. Japan now belonged to Yamagata. Half a century earlier, Ito had been the right man in the right place at the right time. His Choshu masters had given him the job of stage-managing the emperor, of conjuring up the administrative organs of the new Japan and of making them look modern and democratic. He had done all this and more. Thanks to Ito's stagecraft, the new state looked dynamic, and the imperial family gained domestic adoration and international stature. But his showmanship also cloaked the intrigues of Yamagata and others who were only interested in personal power. They despised Ito's sophistication, his Western ideas, his endless talk, his grandly negotiated solutions. They perceived that Japan had no real friends in the world, only enemies. They wanted to turn the clock back. They arranged for Ito to be sent as proconsul to Korea, where he would be a very large target.

As an old man, Ito ad lost his elasticity and even his sense of humor. In his dealings with Korean officials he was overbearing. Yamagata arranged for the Black Dragon (another underworld secret society) boss, Uchida, to be on Ito's staff, accompanied by a large contingent of thugs. Secretly financed from army funds, Uchida's thugs murdered 18,000 Koreans during the next three years under the pretext of suppressing rebels. Disgusted by Yamagata's meddling, Ito resigned as proconsul in 1909. But as his enemy (Yamagata) intended all along, Ito was widely seen as Korea's oppressor.

On a trip to Manchuria that winter to ease tension with the Russians, Ito arrived in Harbin on a cold, blustery morning under snow clouds. Before descending from the train, he put on a great-coat, then stepped down to greet the Russian finance minister. Shots rang out behind him and Ito crumbled. Fifteen armed Koreans had been allowed on to the platform by Yamagata's security men. When Ito was told the identity of his young assassin, his last words were, "What a fool!"

In Japan, Ito's murder was used to rouse popular support for Korea's annexation. His body was taken back to Tokyo where he was given a state funeral.

These events happened comparatively recently, really - and are still going on today, in Japan. It makes me wonder what kind of -- no, I mean, the extent of -- political intrigue that occurs in modern-day Washington. I suspect more than we might possibly imagine.

My only complaints about the book so far are that I think it requires you to have some knowledge and appreciation about Japan to really get a lot out of it. Also, there are so many names to remember - it's almost like a Frank Herbert novel. But to the minority with even a passing interest in Japanese politics, intrigue, and the events leading up to and surrounding the Pacific War, the book is well worth the read.

I've gone back on the master cleanse, after about a year. Or the purge, as my family calls it. Today was day two, and the day's almost up. Oh, hey, now it's up. Day three. It seems like this time it's a bit easier, though I have been tormented by visions of burritos and jars of peanut butter, fragrances of spicy Indian and Korean cuisines, and phantom flavors of pizza and red delicious apples dancing across my tongue. Weird combinations of flavors are haunting me, as you can see. Still, my experience with the cleanse seems a bit better this time. Often, I don't even notice that I'm on it - in stark contrast to last time.

Tonight, I was cleaning out a dirty old bag that we have - one we brought back from Japan. One of the many things we still hadn't gotten around to organizing (until tonight). The bag was nearly empty, but something was rattling around in it. There was an envelope with a Japanese address on it, and a small box of Mintia - a sort of citrus mint breath freshener. The box lid was open, and I wondered how many dust particles and insect feces had managed to make their way into the box, but I absent-mindedly rattled two out and popped them into my mouth anyway. Of course, this is against the master cleanse "rules," and after about two minutes I realized it; I spat them out into the toilet. The taste was curiously strong, and distinctly, distastefully aspartamic. I still taste it now, hours later.

I went to the Toastmasters open house at the University of Michigan last night. Tuesday night, that is. I've been thinking about joining a club for a long time, so I thought, "what the hell?" It was a fairly diverse group, weighted somewhat to undergraduates and young graduates, but I didn't mind.

A young woman, looking to be of Indian descent, and holding a plastic basket full of various personal effects, got in front. Each of the new people was asked to choose an item at random and give an extemporaneous speech about it -- or at least use it as a launching point. I was asked to go about fourth, or maybe fifth; and the item I chose was an aerosol can of Colour Bright, spelled British-English style. Queen's English. I don't know if that was the actual brand name, but it was something like that. The can looked like it was designed for a teenager. Or else it was designed in 1983.

The can of hair color reminded me of an unfortunate incident that happened to me in Japan, when I went to Heather's hairdresser, at her prodding, to get a "cool" haircut. The haircut also included some selective bleaching - highlights, I guess Heather had envisioned. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to communicate my desired outcome to the stylist well enough, apparently. The result was being known for a time in our rural Japanese community as "leopard-head," at least among our impolite foreign friends. The Japanese people posessed a bit more tact, though I could occasionally glimpse more than a few of them looking at me, askance, with concealed horror. I shaved my head shortly after that.

But at the Toastmasters meeting, I wasn't quite as eloquent in telling the story as I am now. If you call this eloquence. I got a couple of laughs, but I was all over the place. But it wasn't bad.

The veterans definitely had a lot more poise and confidence in their speaking. Maybe a little too much confidence, some of us may have thought. Shame is there for a reason, and when you're addressing your Toastmasters book, cradling it in your arms pretending it's a baby, cooing and goo goo gah gah-ing to it in a high, childish voice - for ten or twenty seconds - with nobody audibly laughing - maybe it's time to reenact that shame. I can't say anything like, "the group embarrassment for the speaker was so palpable you could cut it with a knife" or some such cliche - because I don't know. I just know that I was embarrassed for the guy. But you know, that's just his style, and it's just not mine. Who the hell am I to tell him the way to comport himself?

Another suave, confident guy publicly evaludated one of the other speakers - as is the prescription for a normal Toastmasters meeting. He was a young guy -- an undergraduate -- but he had a lot of poise. He pronounced "anecdote" as "antidote," however. Three times. Poor bastard; somebody should tell the guy. I don't think that it'll be me.

The meeting ran about an hour longer than it was supposed to. I had fifteen minutes to return my books and CDs to the Ann Arbor library - before I had to pay the fine - so I scrambled out of there like an egg. "Catch ya later, leopard-head," I thought I heard as I rushed out the door.

I've acquired quite a few business cards lately. Here are some of my favorites.

The Garden Mill in Chelsea, MI, is a garden/outdoor improvement type of store. Not in the tradition of a Home Depot, but more with chimes and handmade birdbaths and the like. Not only is the card cool, but also the store itself is worth checking out.

I picked this one up at a karaoke place in Ann Arbor. First of all, I never expected there to be any karaoke studios in all of Michigan (turns out there are at least two). Another feature of this card is that Korean Hangul features prominently on the card - on an American card, which I think is interesting and cool.

Big pagoda is an art store in San Francisco. The store is cool -- though most of the art is way out of my price range. Still, it's a neat store, and definitely worth a look. The well-designed business card, however, was within my price range! I really think it makes a card look that much better when there are two printed sides to it.

Crunch is a fitness place, also in San Francisco. I don't know how I got this card, but it struck me. Not just for the sheer logo impact, but also for the text near the bottom: "no judgements." I thought I had really lucked out this time, too, because I thought "judgements" was spelled "judgments." It turns out that either spelling is acceptable, though the "e"-less version is less common in the US. So there's some appeal there.

OK, so this is a card that I've had in my collection for a few years now. This is for a coffee shop in Tokyo called "Yanaka." In fact, I have a whole set of about nine different cards, each with a different branch and a different map. It's really cool when you can find a card with a good-looking map on it.

Well, I finished The Undercover Economist the other day. Really good book. A couple of other excerpts I wanted to share with you. This first one is about free trade and globalization. The emboldened part is mine, because I think it's so interesting.

Even the most casual historian will be reminded of the Luddite rebellion in Britain. Luddism begain in 1811 in the English midlands, a desperate response by skilled textile workers to competition from the latest technology: stocking and shearing frames. The Luddites were well-organized, destroying mills and machines ("frame-breaking") and protesting against the new economic system. Contrary to the modern stereotype of an unimaginative thug, the Luddites were responding to a real threat to their livelihoods.

So did technological change hurt some people? Without a doubt. Did it impoverish Britain as a whole? A ridiculous notion. Without minimizing the genuine suffering to those who lost their livelihoods along the way, it's obvious that technological progress made us far better off.

Trade can be thought of as another form of technology. Economist David Friedman observes, for instance, that there are two ways for the United States to product automobiles: they can build them in Detroit, or they can grow them in Iowa. Growing them in Iowa makes use of a special technology that turns wheat into Toyotas: simply put the wheat onto ships and send them out into the Pacific ocean. The ships come back a short while later with Toyotas on them. The technology used to turn wheat into Toyotas out in the Pacific is called "Japan," but it could just as easily be a futuristic biofactory floating off the coast of Hawaii. Either way, auto workers in Detroit are in direct competition with farmers in Iowa. Import restrictions on Japanese cars will help the auto workers and hurt the farmers: they are the modern-day equivalent of "frame breaking."

The solution, in a civilized but progressive society, is not to ban new technology or to restrict trade. Neither is it to ignore the plight of those people put out of work by technology, trade, or indeed anything else. It is to allow progress to continue while helping support and retrain those who have been hurt as a result.

Perhaps that sounds callous. After all, even one person who wants a job and cannot find one is suffering a personal tragedy. Yet the interest groups who oppose free trade for their own profit have vastly overblown the effects of trade. Between 1993 and 2002, almost 310 million jobs were lost in the United States. Over the same period, more than 327 million jobs were created. Nearly 18 million more people had jobs in 2002 than in 1993. Each of the 310 million times somebody lost a job, that person was entitled to sympathy and to help, whether or not foreign competition had anything to do with it. Trade or no trade, a healthy economy loses jobs all the time, and creates them as well.

Here's another interesting excerpt about the spectrum auctioning fiasco of the US government:

Games within games: How to sell a $300,000 house for $3,000

The US government employed game theorists to help sell spectrum rights throughout the second half of the 1990s. This was not an easy task: a company bidding for a Los Angeles license and a San Diego license might want both of them, or neither, because it is cheaper to run adjacent networks. But how to bid sensibly on Los Angeles before knowing who will get San Diego? This is a complex problem represented by a complex piece of game theory. The theorists duly designed a complex set of parallel auctions.

The first sales were highly successful (and very lucrative for the government), but after a few auctions things went wrong. The theorists had got the complex things right but made some simple mistakes, like publishing the bids without rounding them to the nearest few thousand dollars. Firms took advantage by making bids which contained area codes. This allowed them to signal which licenses they'd prefer, and so carve up the US telecom market without having to bid aggressively against each other. This scheme didn't even require an (illegal) agreement, because the auction allowed such clear signals. It looked like cheating, but nobody could prove it. Three years after the first auctions, an auction in April 1997 raised less than 1 percent of the expected revenue because, claimed many commentators, firms had learned to cheat by avoiding competition with each other.

It's amazing to me how the actors were able to embed signals into their bids. As the author Tim Hartford points out, this is very much like a game of poker. In any case, this excerpt was not meant to heap opprobrium on game theory in general: the UK held a similar spectrum auction, but they got it right, and ended up raising much, much more than was anticipated, so much so that the "government's profit was almost enough to halve the basic rate of income tax for a year."

I just discovered that Tim Harford apparently does articles for Slate. Here's a pretty good recent one, if you're interested.

Wow, I just had a really good experience with Rapid Refill Ink. This is a company that refills used up printer ink and toner cartridges, instead of forcing consumers to buy brand new ones. I paid $7.00 each for three HP 92 ink cartridges. Compare that to new cartridges, which cost around $15.00 - $20.00 (for the 92s, at least).

Maybe Heather and I are the Johnny-come-latelies for this business, but if you go through a lot of ink, it can potentially save you a bundle. I asked if they stock, for example, high-grade photographic ink, and it turns out that they do; they in fact have partnerships with some of the commercial printing companies in town.

I just got back from the gym. There. as usual, ESPN was blaring on the mounted television. This time, though, there was a very interesting segment about a "sport" that's all the rage in Europe called Chessboxing.

It is what it sounds like. Specifically, from the Wikipedia:

A match between two opponents consists of up to eleven alternating rounds of boxing and chess sessions, starting with a four-minute chess round followed by two minutes of boxing and so on. Between rounds there is a 1 minute pause, during which competitors change their gear. The form of chess played is "blitz chess" in which competitors have a total of twelve minutes. Competitors may win by knockout, checkmate, a judge's decision or if their opponent's twelve minutes of chess time elapses.

Weird... but I'd consider going to a match, if one were nearby. The closest one in the US, though, is currently LA.

Maybe once the sport catches fire in the Midwest will I go.

One of the things that I knew I would really miss about Japan was the cherry blossoms. Fortunately, though, Heather and I have been lucky enough to choose a city and apartment complex that has many sakura trees all around. There's one even outside of our door, and it is truly mankai. I wonder how long it will last?

Yesterday Heather and I attended a birthday celebration for my friend C. He turned 27 yesterday. It was decided that we would meet at Conor O'neill's, a bar in downtown Ann Arbor. It was fairly warm last night - or at least it seemed to be when we left, which was around 9:00 PM or so. We drove for a while looking for a parking spot. Of course, it was Cinco de Mayo, and so the streets were congested with carousing fraternity men. It always seems that, in a college town like Ann Arbor, on a college street like State, all pedestrainship conventions are suspended. Young men and women dart across the street - some actually on the crosswalks, but most not - without bothering to look either direction. Last night was even worse. I was reminded of Japan again, and how you can actually do those things anywhere and reasonably expect not to be hit.

We finally found a parking lot. Luckily, we didn't need to walk too far; the parking spot was right next to the back door of Conor O'neill's. We went in and found our people. Corona - bottled - was the special, so I ordered one. I finished that in fairly short order, and then ordered a Hoegaarden on tap, which I had coveted since Heather ordered it. It was much more refreshing.

We sat around and talked for about an hour, hour and a half. Then somebody suggested shots of tequila, in honor of C's birthday, and for Cinco de Mayo. About four people left at this point, but seven of us were game. The shots came not in proper shot glasses - or at least what I would have regarded as proper shot glasses. Instead, the tequila came in half-sized cocktail glasses. It looked to be more than the usual amount - and I'm sure that that was the illusion the proprietors were going for.

There was a small swath of salt on the rim of the glass, and a small wedge of lemon. "I always forget the order of this thing," I complained. One of my friends offered a helpful mnemonic:

"Lick it, slam it, suck it," she said. I thanked her.

We toasted C's birthday, and, for whatever reason, we also toasted Cinco de Mayo, and downed the shots. It was good tequila - at least I thought so. Many of my peers apparently thought otherwise. But my taste is admittedly unrefined, so what do I know?

I stood up hastily after that and squeezed between the wall and the backs of the chairs of my friends, on tiptoe, and headed for the bathroom. I wondered, based on their expressions, if people thought I suddenly had a bout of nausea. Though I was a little woozy, I just needed to take a piss. I navigated the sea of frat men and easily-upset beers to the men's restroom. The door said "Men," and below, "Seomra na bhfear," or something like it, which means "men's restroom." Three guys had congregated in front. One guy, with designer sunglasses on his head and some obnoxiously sculpted facial hair, was, well, verbally abusing one of the other guys, who was unremarkable enough that I can't remember how to describe him here, except that he had a very round face. Anyway, it was a situation in which I thought, "are they in line, or have they just chosen to have their meeting directly in front of the restroom door? Is this one of those one-person bathrooms or something?" I waited for about a minute, or two maybe, feeling like an idiot, completely privy to facial hair's abuses to roundface, not able to make a judgment about when a good time was to ask, "are you guys in line?"

At last they dispersed and I was spared having to ask. I went in the seomra na bhfear and chose the urinal on the far side of the wall. I commenced urinating.

My eyes wandered up to the various graffiti on the wall. Not much interesting, until my eyes settled on an inscription a urinal-goer had carved, not written in ink like a normal person, about a foot above my head. It took a couple of seconds for me to understand, but when I did, it inexplicably irritated me. It read:

Jesus. 12-25-0

"Asshole," I thought. "Doesn't this jerk know that December 25th was arbitrarily chosen by the church because it happened to correspond with an already widely-celebrated pagan holiday? And wasn't Jesus born in 1, at least according to the common convention, and not 0?" I cursed the man who had written this, and his irresponsible fact-checking. That's about the time that I started feeling small, warm flecks of urine ricocheting out of the urinal and onto my bare legs. That's the problem with wearing shorts and pissing at urinals - not that you get piss on your legs, but the realization that every time you piss at a urinal, you're getting some on your legs - shorts or otherwise.

I returned to the table. The bar was much louder now, so about the most that we could accomplish was some very loud small talk. The music they played was pretty good, for the most part. Some of our party periodically opted to bob their heads and mouth the lyrics to their favorite songs playing on the speakers. It really pleased me to see people doing this.

And then something weird happened.

Shot through the heart and you're to blame
Darlin' you give love, a bad name

The song that came over the speakers was, of course, Bon Jovi's You Give Love a Bad Name. But this time, people in our party were not just mouthing the lyrics, but they were singing them - loudly. And dancing! Moreover, it seemed nearly everyone in the bar joined them, in unison! We had made a crazy, low-fidelity surround sound system. Playing a bad song. But everyone was into it, and I wondered, "what shared mass media experience is responsible for everyone - apparently spontaneously - singing and dancing when Bon Jovi came on? What did I miss?"

We left about an hour later. I went back into the bathroom, chose the same urinal, got angry again at the same graffiti, pissed, and left.

I borrowed this book from the library a couple of months ago -- but due to gross overestimation of my available time, I was unable to read it. Heather did read it, however -- and loved it. This week, I checked it out again. It's a difficult book to put down.

The book is The Undercover Economist. As Heather described it, if Freakonomics is the equivalent of a very interesting ECON 101 course, then surely The Undercover Economist must be ECON 201. In the interest of getting other people interested in the book, let me potentially commit a little bit of copyright infringement. Here's a piece about how Starbucks successfully identifies customers who are willing to part with their hard-earned cash more readily:

Take a Starbucks, any Starbucks. For the sake of argument, take the Starbucks on P Street and 14th in Washington DC. The price list looks like this:

Hot Chocolate: $2.20
Cappuccino: $2.55
Caffe Mocha: $2.75
White Chocolate Mocha: $3.20
20 oz Cappuccino: $3.40

Or, to translate:

Hot Chocolate--no frills: $2.20
Cappuccino--no frills: $2.55
Mix them together--I feel special: $2.75
Use different powder--I feel very special: $3.20
Make it huge--I feel greedy: $3.40

Starbucks isn't merely seeking to offer a variety of alternatives to customers. It's also trying to give the customer every opportunity to signal that they've not been looking at the price. It doesn't cost much more to make a larger cup, to use a flavored syrup, or to add chocolate powder or a squirt of whipped cream. Every single product on the menu costs Starbucks almost the same to produce, down to the odd nickel or two.

Does this mean that Starbucks is overcharging all of its customers? No. If so, a regular cappuccino or hot chocolate would cost $3.30, and you could have all the frills you wanted for a dime. Perhaps Starbucks would like to do that, but they can't force price-sensitive customers to pay those prices. By charging wildly different prices for products that have the same cost, Starbucks is able to smoke out customers who are less sensitive about the price. Starbucks doesn't have a way to identify lavish customers perfectly, so it invites them to hang themselves with a choice of luxurious ropes.

Here's another fascinating excerpt:

Now, however, companies are trying to automate the process of evaluating individual customers to reduce the time it takes. For instance, supermarkets accumulate evidence of what you're willing to pay by giving you "discount cards," which are needed to take advantage of sale prices. In return for getting a lower price on certain items, you allow the stores to keep records of what you buy, and then in turn offer you coupons for discounts on products. It doesn't work perfectly, because supermarkets can only send "money off" coupons, not "money on" coupons. "Money on" coupons have never been a success.

When technology allows, firms with scarcity power may use highly sophisticated methods to target customers. It's no secret anymore that Internet retailers such as Amazon can identify each customer by putting a tracing device called a "cookie" on her computer. Amazon used to tailor their prices based on their records of individual customers. The company really was able to offer "money on" vouchers: two readers buying exactly the same book would be offered a different price based on tendencies shown in previous purchases. Even though it would be more difficult that for on-line sales, supermarkets could, with the right technology do the same thing--each customer could have an identity tag, and price labels would change according to who was looking at them.

Of course, the "unique target" approach is unpopular. In Amazon's case, customers started to realize that if they deleted the cookies on their computers, they were offered different, often lower prices. And when they found out what the company was doing, there was an outcry. Like Costa, Amazon has promised not to do it anymore.

I remember that Amazon fiasco. What a disaster. The Costa to which the author, Tim Harford, refers is a UK-based coffee company. They offered cappuccino for 1.75 pounds, and "Fair Trade" cappuccino for ten pence extra. As it turns out, the farmers were only seeing less than one pence of that additional ten (which turned out to be a significant amount for them in the long term, I hasten to add). Nevertheless, about nine pence of the additional ten was apparently going to Costa's (and its subsidiaries) bottom line.