June 2007 Archives

There's a good talk given by James Howard Kunstler over at Ted Talks entitled The Tragedy of Suburbia [link goes to 20:00 video]. The speaker gives some compelling arguments as to how we are, in the design of our living spaces, creating places "not worth defending."

I also borrowed from the library a pretty good DVD from the PBS show Frontline, entitled The Persuaders [2004] (as a matter of fact, the video can now be viewed online in six self-contained segments here). If you have any interest in advertising, give it a watch. Topics include an insiders' perspectives to the application of focus group research, to data mining and consumer-product network creation, to political campaigns, to the [mis?] appropriation of language for advertising and message-promoting. Worth a look.

A while ago, while we were living in Japan, Heather and I read, or saw on TV, or heard through a friend, something incredibly sad and yet incredibly amusing. It turns out, according to the rumor, that when men were retiring from their jobs and starting to stay at home all the time, their wives were getting fed up with their being there, and would buy their husbands a kind of "containment chamber" into which they would coerce them to remain during the normal "workday." It seems that, over the past 30 or 40 years, the wives had become profoundly acclimatized to the routine that their husbands were gone for 12 or 14 hours a day - or sometimes more. I laughed off the rumor, not really believing it nor disbelieving it -- I had lived too long in Japan to commit to either.

On our recent visit to Japan, though, Heather, Momo and I had occasion to visit Tokyu Hands -- a kind of high-end, specialty department store -- and guess what we saw:

These images are scanned from a flier for the Avitecs Myroom. And look -- you can watch a screensaver while drinking whiskey and water; or you can surf the web; or you can read, sitting down on the floor, Japanese-style; or you can assemble model ships! At a base price of 418,000 yen, ranging up to 598,000 yen, the Myroom certainly doesn't come cheap... but I have to admit, it's pretty cool. Maybe I'll wait for a larger model, though:

To be fair, there are other use cases. Momo, who is an accomplished musician, mentioned something about using the room as a practice room for her singing and piano-playing -- after all, the Myroom is soundproof!

The whole my prefix in Japan has been present for quite a while, and it takes some getting used to. I remember, the very first year I lived in Japan (way back in 1999), a coworker asking me:

マイカーがありますか。

Which translates roughly to: "Is there a my car?" or, perhaps slightly more naturally, "Do you have a my car?" I was stumped for a while, but it turns out -- at least to the best of my understanding -- that the my in this context meant personal, or private, as in "Do you have a personal car?" or, "Do you own your own car?" I was confused about that for quite some time.

If you thought the Myroom was extreme, brace yourself for the m-ch -- that is, the micro compact home. Each unit is a cube of dimension 2.6 meters (for reference, my height, at around 6'1", is not quite 1.9 meters), and is a fully-functional house, with sleeping quarters (including two beds), kitchen, flat screen TV, toilet and shower cubicle, a dining table, and storage space. Several students and a professor have been living in the units for a couple of academic terms at a university in Munich -- initially they were supposed to stay in them for a single term, but the units proved to be extremely popular!

At E34,000, these don't come cheap either. But they're so cool. Unfortunately they're not yet offered in the U.S.

I wonder if they include a can of deodorant in the bundle?

When Heather and I visited Tokyo, I was sure to take her to Mt. Mitake (御岳山) in Okutama (奥多摩), about two hours' ride by train, on the Chuo line, and then the Ome line, from central Tokyo. The area is famous for a shrine that predates Christ, several waterfalls, a huge "hobgoblin" rock (which we climbed but did not photograph), a natural rock garden... and several other natural wonders.

The best though, I think, was the cedar forest. Beautiful sounds and colors. It smelled so green -- Heather and I enjoyed this the most.

But the waterfall:

and the rock garden:

were both very nice as well. The second waterfall was more spectacular, to be sure, but we had to climb up and down about fifty of these:

and that sucks. Especially when it suddenly starts to rain, and you hear the booming thunder rolling up behind you, and it's getting dark. We managed to get out of the forest way before it got pitch black, but we were sweating it a little bit.

So if you're in Tokyo, I recommend Mt. Mitake. Be sure to set off early in the morning, though.

On Saturday, Heather and I went to the Detroit Festival of the Arts. I think that the coolest think I saw were Sau'rus, a stilted performance group consisting of four members, three of whom wore these huge dinosaur costumes, and one of whom is their satanic-looking handler. I got a video of it. Listen for the screaming children:

The band Lelavision was pretty good too. These are also performance artists who create and perform on their own instruments, and blend it with modern dance.

One more video, maybe a little less exciting, but worth taking a look at nonetheless. Near the entrance to the festival, Advil had set up a promotional booth that contained a kind of carnival game in which you had three chances to get a foam ball into one of the five slots, located at different points of the body and annotated with text like "headache" and "toothache." The game handlers had the participants choose one of five cards at random, and that card specified the slot at which you were to aim. If you got the ball into a slot, you got an Advil foam stress ball. If not, you got an Advil chip clip.

I think that the promotion was pretty clever in the way in which it educated consumers about how Advil is more than just "headache medicine." I like the handler's "thanks a lot, thanks a lot." Here's the video:

There was actually a line to participate. Heather remarked how people loved to get free stuff. How true. Though, when we got home I promptly threw away the stress ball. Heather kept the chip clip, I think.

We've been back in the U.S. for about a week now. Almost exactly a week, actually... we got in I think around 4:00 PM last Sunday. We're still getting over our jet lag, believe it or not. We're pretty close to normal, now. Coming back to the U.S. was definitely much harder than going for me this time.

We had so much fun for the rest of our trip, and we were so busy that I didn't really have time to write any more blog entries. But that's a good thing, because it meant that Heather and I could spend more time with the people with whom we had become so close in the last few years. Oddly, the whole experience felt like a kind of homecoming.

Another homecoming we experienced was coming home to the unhealthily delicious taste of Coco Ichiban Curry. I remember Heather and I, when we lived in Joetsu, driving all the way to Itoigawa (I think it was about a 45 minute journey) maybe once a month to get our Japanese curry. Now, it had been over a year for both of us; we were pretty excited.

There are six standard levels of spiciness for Coco Ichiban Curry: 1-6, 1 being the mildest and getting progressively hotter from there. I remember several years ago reading in the menu the descriptions of what the various levels of spiciness would do to you (and I think that they have since changed). 1 read something like "a wave of heat will come over you." 3 said something like "you will turn red and sweat visibly," whereas 6 said something like "You will quickly feel faint. A doctor will be called."

I only ever had the guts to go up to level 4. Never again. Interestingly, the descriptions accompanying the spiciness levels accorded exactly with my actual experiences, so I don't doubt that a doctor would be called in the event of the consumption of level 6.

As we waited for my Chicken Cuts Curry and Heather's Croquette Curry at an Ikebukuro Coco Ichiban about a half-hour's walk from the station, we listened to the calypsotic sounds of Brazillian bossa nova music playing softly over the speakers.

"Remember how the Itoigawa Coco Ichiban played nothing but Beatles' music, over and over, no matter how many times we went?" I asked Heather.

"They're more sophisticated in Tokyo," she replied.

I glanced down at a trademark long curry spoon that read, in the store's standard typeface, "Coco." I remembered how I had always been tempted to swipe a spoon as a souvenir.

The curry came, and it did not disappoint.

We left, and I once again resisted stealing the spoon.

Saturday was the day before we left, and we were fortunate enough to see many people come to an izakaya, then karaoke, with us. It was a really good time. Hooray for nomihodai!