I love you, Fukushima

 

   A love song for Fukushima: I love you and I need you, Fukushima by Inawashi Rokos. All profits from the sale of this single will be donated to help the prefecture of Fukushima deal with its nuclear accident.

   Inawashi Rokos (猪苗代湖ズ) is a collaborative effort of four musicians from different rock groups, yet all of whom hail from the stricken prefecture: Shinji Matsuda, drummer (The Black Horn); Masashi Yamada, vocalist (Sanbo Master); Toshimi Watanabe, guitar & vocals (Tokyo No.1 Soul Set); and, Michihiko Yanai, guitarist & producer (Kaze to Rock).

   The song can be purchased at Ototoy for ¥420.

HKT48

 

   If you've been living in Japan for the past few years and still haven't heard of AKB48, why then I commend your ability to completely shut out Japanese pop culture. May nirvana soon come to your quiet mountain retreat.

   AKB48 is an all-female Japanese theater/idol group based in Tôkyô's Akihabara district and comprised originally of 48 members (hence the name AKB48). Since their debut in 2005, the group has taken the country by storm, much in the way that Morning Museme did in the late 90s, so much so that it is now impossible to get through a day without hearing one of their songs or seeing their promotion videos, many of which border tantalizingly on lolita porn. Don't believe me? Have a look:

   With almost sixty members today, AKB48 seems to have hit a high water mark. It's no surprise, then, that Yasuhi Akimoto, the successful producer of this and other idol groups, has decided to expand the franchise to other cities, including Fukuoka where the group will be called HKT48. That's HKT as in HaKaTa. Other franchises include SKE48 (Sakae, Nagoya) and NMB48 (Namba, Osaka).

   The first stage of auditions for HKT48 finished on May 31. (Apologies for not announcing this earlier.) Those lucky girls deemed to have the right stuff will be notified by phone. Stage three which involves the first in-person interview with candidates will begin at the end of June, and the final cut will be announced later this year.

  Until then, enjoy another one of AKB48's popular songs, Ponytail and Sush:

The Hunt

 

   One of the things that impressed me when I first got to know some of my students at the women's junior college where I teach was how many of them had already started their job search back in the second semester of their freshman year. When I was their age, the only thing I was seriously looking for was a steady girlfriend and a cheap place to drink beer.

   And now, only two months into their second (and final) year, a number of my students have already received job offers. This is a testament that even in today’s severe job market, a person can still find the job she wants if she has a clear goal and is doggedly persistent in pursuing it. So, stick with it!

   Those in my second year writing classes will have already heard this, but the nature of job-hunting in the United States differs greatly from that in Japan.

   In Japan, there is a ritual of sorts. Armies of students, their hair dyed black and wearing black “recruit” suits, attend lectures conducted by company representatives who talk about their company’s merits and explain the application procedures. Interested students then submit a hand-written application, take a test of “general” or “common” knowledge which can ironically delve into the arcane, and, in the event they clear this hurdle, participate in a series of group discussions and interviews designed to whittle down the number of applicants to a dozen or so candidates. The whole process can take several months, but once hired the student is able to kick back and enjoy her remaining days in school.

   In America and I would venture Canada, as well, the situation is quite different. At better universities, company scouts sometimes recruit students right on campus, but most students are left to their own devices. They must contact companies on their own, send out resumes and set up interviews with employers who, unlike Japanese companies, are generally not interested in hiring new graduates because they lack experience. This is where the popular phrase “It’s not what you know, but who you know” comes to mind.

   Connections are important when looking for a job. They can help you, both figuratively and literally, get a foot into the door. Because of this, your more aggressive student will take part in internships during his long summer vacation. A former student of mine who has just finished up his first year at Yale (I taught him everything he knows) is currently in Tôkyô doing an internship with the Japanese advertising giant Dentsu. The internship not only provides a student with valuable experience, but also enables him to widen his “network” of people who might be able to help him when he starts looking for work.

  And speaking of starting one’s job-hunt, another striking difference between our countries is that while most Japanese students will start looking a year and a half prior to graduating, there is no such uniformity in the west. Most students are far too busy studying in their final years at college to even think about their future career options. Many won’t begin seriously looking for work until after graduating from college.

   I lucked out personally when I was a student. I had a number of part-time (and not-so part-time) jobs when I was young, one of which was as a lab assistant at Oregon Health Sciences University, home of the medical college I was thinking of attending for graduate school. The head of the laboratory took a liking to me and offered me a full-time position once I graduated. I accepted and worked there until shortly before coming to Japan. 

Karatsu Bank 2

They really don't make them like they used to. 

Karatsu Bank

   In a previous posting, I wrote about the Meiji era architect Kingo Tatsuno (辰野金吾) and promised that I would add some photos of his other buildings if I ever had the chance to see them. Well, the opportunity arose in early April while I was on a business trip to the city of Karatsu, Saga prefecture, hometown of the architect.

   I was in luck: the Former Karatsu Bank (旧唐津銀行) building had recently been refurbished and it's doors once again opened to the public only a few weeks before my visit.

   Built in the 45th year of Meiji (1912), it was one of the last buildings Tatsuno would see completed before he died in 1919 of the Spanish flu.

   Unfortunately, that is all I know of this iconic structure. The historical section of the former bank's homepage is, ironically, still under construction.

Exterior shot of the bank

Power cables, arrgh!

I was happy they had the good sense to maintain the integrity of the lighting and mail boxes around the bank. Now, if only they would bury the goddamn power lines so people can take photos of the building without having to photoshop them out.

Shall we go inside?

Shita Amé

   The other night my wife used a word I hadn't heard before: shita amé (下雨). I tried looking it up but couldn't find it in any of my dictionaries. I did, however, learn that the two characters in reverse order (雨下) was pronounced uka and meant "rain" or "raining". I'd guessed that much: there had been a downpour outside at the time.

   Now, I'd never heard uka before, either, but, taking a second look at 下雨 (shita amé) with fresh eyes I remembered that it was the same as the Chinese word for "raining", namely xià yǔ.

   It's been years since I last studied Mandarin. Nevertheless, the word was still tucked away in that cluttered pantry in my head, waiting for me to take it out and dust it off. Almost makes me want to study the language again. Almost.

   So, shita amé meant "rain". Or so I thought. When I asked my wife about it a few days later, she gave a quizzical look and said she had no idea what I was talking about.

   "Maybe you misheard."

   "I did not mishear," I insisted. "You said, shita amé."

   After a moment's thought, she had a sudden inspiration: "Ashita amé!"

   "Ugh!"

   I had indeed misheard, or more precisely had not heard the first syllable "a" of her sentence. She hadn't said, shita amé, but rather ashita amé. She was telling me it was going to rain tomorrow. 

   Anyways, now that the rainy season is just around the corner I am reminded of a passage from my second novel A Woman's Nails:

Listen:

   In Japanese, Jimé jimé is that unpleasant, sticky feeling during the rainy season when humidity's got its clammy hands all over you; mushi mushi when it damn near smothers you.

   To the Japanese ear, potan is the sound of a drop of water plopping into, say, a bucket; pota pota, the tune a leaky faucet sings; and jah jah, water gushing out of a pipe.

   The Japanese will hear potsu potsu as raindrops start falling upon dry ground; shito shito, when it drizzles; and zah zah when it pours.

   Strong winds howl with a byoo byoo making the windows of your apartment rattle, gata gata. And, thunder, when woken by the pika pika of lightning, will grumble loudly with a goro goro.

   While nuru nuru describes the slimy feel every surface has when it’s been balmy for days on end, beta beta is how your sweaty skin feels on uncomfortably jimé jimé days.

   You're dripping with sweat if you're dara dara; drenched to the skin if you're bisho bisho.

   And, while niwaka amé, you may recall, means a sudden shower, a doshaburi is a downpour; and oh-amé, a torrential rain. Konuka amé means a light mist; and kiri samé, a drizzle.

   Confused already? This is not even a potan in the baketsu. There are 1190 rain related words and phrases in the Japanese language.

   One more! Though Yûdachi, which literally means evening stand, refers to a late afternoon summer shower, you shouldn't assume that asadachi, or morning stand, means an early morning shower. Far from it, an asadachi, my friend, is sure as shootin’ the Morning Woodie.

Excerpt from A Woman's Nails. To read more here.

 © Aonghas Crowe, 2010. All rights reserved. No unauthorized duplication of any kind.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A Woman's Nails is now available at Amazon.

Kiri

   And while I'm on the topic of things being shrouded, most of northern Kyûshû was blanketed in a thick fog a week ago Sunday. It started to roll in just after one in the afternoon and by evening most of the city was enveloped in it.

   In spite of Fukuoka's proximity to the sea and being surrounded on all sides by reasonably high mountains, fog is a rare occurrence. I'm no meteorologist, so I won't venture any guesses as to why this is so. I will, however, offer this up as an another example of how oddly the weather has been acting lately.

   We had an unusually chilly, dry April. But just as people started to worry about the level of water in the local dams, the weather changed lickety-split. Within a matter of days, we were soon experiencing weather more typical of the late rainy season in mid July: it was unbearably hot and humid, and, as a friend put it, wetter than an otter's pocket.

   I heard that the Kanmon Straits which separates the island of Kyûshû from Honshû, was closed to shipping as the thickness of the fog made it impossible to navigate the waters safely. Would like to have gotten some shots of it.  

Kôsa

 

   When composing a haiku, a poet must not only write three lines consisting of five, seven, and five on (syllables), but include a seasonal reference, known as kigo. Typical kigo for spring include, of course, the cherry blossoms for which Japan is famous, frogs, the Japanese bush-warbler, and so on. Haiku poets when stumped for a suitable kigo for their poems often consult a saijiki (歳時記), which offers an extensive list of word that give the reader a true sense of the season. 

   Permit me to offer up a new kigo for the times we live in: kôsa (literally, yellow sand).

   Also known as Asian dust, the yellow sands are kicked up by dust storms occurring in Mongolia and northern China and carried by the prevailing winds as far away as Japan where they can turn the sun into an angry white dot in the gray sky and cover everything with a fine yellow dust resembling pollen.

   In recent years, these sand storms have grown both more frequent and more intense. A little over a week ago, visibility was cut to less than five-hundred yards. The mountains outside my office window shrouded behind a thick veil of dust.

   It's believed that desertification in China and Russia as well as an increase in industrial pollutants in China are to blame for the worsening storms which, in addition to bringing dust also carry sulfur, industrial heavy metals, carcinogens, viruses, bacteria, fungi, pesticides, asbestos, and a host of other nasty particles to our shores. Not very encouraging news when you're raising children. 

I've Been Shot!

   In your typical war movies, a soldier is shot in the gut without realizing it. He carries on, fighting along side his buddies, only to notice something strange: a warm feeling growing across his abdomen. He looks down and sees the blood stain. Looking up at his comrades, he says incredulously, "I've been shot."

   The same thing happened to me yesterday when I took my son from the bath, bundled him in a towel and held him close to me. "You're awfully warm this evening, boy," I said.

   Looking down, I noticed the stain. It was growing across my abdomen.

   "I've been shot."

Cobwebs

You'd think that a country as technologically advanced as Japan would have buried it's power lines and cables decades ago . . .

   Think again.

Death and Taxes

Thought for the day: 

   Back in October of 2008 when Wall Street bankers were projected to receive some seventy billions dollars in bonuses despite having caused the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, we were told that the bonuses were not only deserved, but also necessary to retain top talent.

   If we accept that these fat cats are truly as talented as they claim to be (and thereby deserving of their ludicrously high compensation) then surely they've got the talent to successfully conduct business with stricter regulations and higher taxes.

   And while I'm on the subject of taxes, you'd think that in these times when we're fighting two wars started by a Republican president paying higher taxes would be considered patriotic. But no. Death and taxes are not always certain. You won't find the sons of millionaires dying on the battlefield or many billionaires paying their "fair share".

Fukushima

Yesterday the incident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant was raised to a level seven - the maximum - on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES), putting the accident on a par with Chernobyl. Earlier in the day, the government expanded the evacuation area around the crippled nukes and created a two-kilometer zone that is off-limits to all but those engaged in disaster relief. All grim news, indeed, but how serious is it? While the Fukushima accident is now rated at the same level as the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, in which 64 people were confirmed to have died, in terms of casualties and effects on the environment, this accident is far less significant. So far. The Economist posted the following of nuclear incidents.

A week and a half ago, the AFP and Air Photo Service released a dozen photos, bird's eye shots of the crippled Fukushima power plants, taken by an unmanned drone that show the extent of the damage to the nuclear reactors.

 

 Photos by AFP/Air Photo Service

Don't Tweet This

   A rumor has been going round that due to the dramatic upsurge in use of the micro-blogging service Twitter following the Tôhoku earthquake, the social networking site would be indefinitely restricting tweets in Japan to 17 characters in order to prevent overloading the telephone lines.

   The blogosphere went wild over this. People tweeted, "17 characters? WT . . ." One blogger suggested that an efficient use of the newly truncated tweets could be the following message of encouragement: "がんばれ日本！いつも応援してるぞ." (trans. Hang in there Japan! We're always rooting for you!)

   This was of course nothing more than a prank beautifully executed by Japan's answer to the satrical news organization The Onion, The Kyokô Shimbun. 

   With everything from toilet paper and batteries to instant ramen and mineral water in short supply these days, it was only natural the gullible public felt that the precious babble of tweets would eventually be rationed as well.

Light Out, Tokyo

   I had an interesting conversation the other day about electricity, of all things, with a man who used to work for Kyûshu Electric (Kyûden), our local power company.

   The scheduled electrical power stoppages in the Kantô area had been in the news that day. The power outages, which were a result of damage to nuclear reactors in Fukushima after last week's horrendous tsunami had begun earlier in the week and were causing great disruption to people's lives. For one, it wasn't always clear when and where the black outs would occur, and just because TEPCO had announced that a particular area was going to go dark from, say, five o'clock that evening didn't necessarily mean that every portion of that area would have its electricity cut off at precisely that time. Thanks to this confusion, there were 122 cases of people getting trapped in elevators. One elderly woman who was stuck for three hours in her apartment building's elevator told a reporter that she nearly went mad. "It felt as if the compartment were getting smaller and smaller and smaller." (I think I could deal with the claustrophobia, not being able to pee for three hours . . . )

   As is only natural, the black outs had unforeseen consequences, one of which was that power cut off from, for instance, Group A ended up affecting the water supply in Group B. A businessman whose office is in Group C couldn't contact a client in Group D, and so on. Train schedules were also thrown into disarray.

   So, I asked the former Kyûden engineer, "Instead of these silly, seemingly random 3-hour-long blackouts wouldn't it make much more sense to turn everyone's energy off from 12pm - 3pm? That way everyone would know when the power would be out and could manage their lives around the outage."

   Sounded reasonable to me. But then again, what the fuck do I know about electricity?

   "Electricity can't be stored," he answered. "Either you have it or you don't."

   He went on to explain that the area supplied by TEPCO, a sprawling regions that produces 40% of Japan's economic output, had a peak energy demand of some 45 million kilowatts. With the Fukushima nuclear reactors out of commission, TEPCO's energy capacity had dropped some 25% to 38.5 million kilowatts. By comparison, Kyûden, which supplies the island of Kyûshû with power, has a capacity of about 14 million kilowatts. There was no way to boost energy production in a major way, so all that was left to do was reducing demand. Hence, the black outs.

   "What about Kyûden? Can't regional power companies like Kyûshû Denryôku step in?"

   "Yes, it can," he replied, "but only to an extent."

   When the electric grid was first being laid in Japan, the Tôkyô Electric Lamp Company purchased an alternator made by the German company, Siemens, and another electric company located in Ôsaka bought one from GE. Thanks to those two purchases, Japanese power plant frequency would forever be divided--60Hz in the west and 50Hz east of the Fuji River in Shizuoka Prefecture.

   In order for Kyûden to supply the Kantô area with electricity, the company must first sent power to Chûgoku Denryoku which will then pass it on to Kansai Denryoku, and from there to Chûbu Denryoku, where, I believe, it will be converted, and finally provided to TEPCO. All that work for an extra million kilowatts of power, which brings us back to the knotty issue of the scheduled power stoppages. 

   In recent days, however, an appeal by the government for the public to curb their consumption of electricity has had the effect of lowering demand to about 30 million kilowatts, just shy of TEPCO's present capacity. If citizens can continue to be convinced to conserve energy--if not out of a desire to avoid causing trouble for others (meiwaku) then by higher fees for electricity--further black outs might be unnecessary. 

Deflation Tied to Palin

   Sarah Palin blamed President Obama in a Facebook post, accusing the administration of deliberately advancing an energy agenda designed to drive up the price of gas.

   "His war on domestic oil and gas exploration and production has caused us pain at the pump, endangered our already sluggish economic recovery, and threatened our national security," the former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska (pop. 10,256) wrote. "Hitting the American people with higher gas prices like this is essentially a hidden tax and a transfer of wealth to foreign regimes who are providing us the energy we refuse to provide for ourselves."

  While the star of a cancelled reality show and "author" of a best-selling ghost written memoir acknowledges that increasing global demand and tensions in the Middle East led to a significant rise in the price of oil, she writes that "the White House stood idly by watching the prices go up and allowing America to remain increasingly dependent on imports from foreign regimes in dangerously unstable parts of the world."

   Palin concludes, "Energy is connected to everything in our economy. Access to affordable and secure energy is key to economic growth, which in turn is key to job growth. Energy is the building block of our economy." In short, the US should, "Drill, baby! Drill!"

   What horseshit!

   Proven oil reserves in America stand at 21 billion barrels, which when weighed against annual consumption of 7.5 billion barrels a year would provide less than three years of increasingly expensive, increasingly difficult to extract oil. True energy security lies not in demagoguery, but in pursuing sound policies that promote conservation, alternative forms of energy, and increased energy efficiency. 

   In related news, Horse Apples Emporium, wholesaler of quality manure since 1968, blamed Palin Thursday for the dramatic drop in the price of crap, claiming the former half-term governor of Alaska had inundated the market with bullshit since her unsuccessful vice presidential run. A spokesman for Horse Apples said, "It hasn't been this bad since the build up to the Iraq War. Gets any worse and we'll have to abandon this shitty business altogether."

   When asked to comment, Palin tweeted, "Thanks, but no thanks."