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I started re-reading Rachel Caine’s Weather Warden urban fantasy series just before new year. I had the latest (and it turns out, probably last) in the series and I often though not always re-read the entire series with a new book. Since I can’t remember which ones I finished before the new year and which ones after I’m just going to give a qick description of the entire series. Particular now that Total Eclipse appears to be the last in the series, this seems appropriate. These nine books are a nice little urban fantasy series about people with elemental powers to control earth (includes healing), fire (may include electricity) and air/water (weather). The viewpoint character (Joane Baldwin) is an interesting mix of shallow fashionista with a somewhat incongruous love of and knowledge about fast cars. She’s very powerful and goes through a Jack Chalker’s Dancing Gods series of adventures periodically losing some or all of her powers (sometimes along with her memories) but gradually “powering up” to become one of the most powerful humans on the planet. Alongside these humans are the Djinn. Caine does a nice job of taking the arabic djinn myths (including the afrit variants) and building a rationale for the binding of very powerful entities into breakable bottles. Baldwin occasionally does stupid things in the furtherance of the plot and many of the NPCs (human as well as Djinn) are rather overly venal, but the action races along well enough that mostly this can be overlooked. It’s pretty well-written and has a very good sense of continuity given the fairly complex system Caine posits. There’s a romantic sub-thread running through all nine books, but it only descends into masturbatory sex scene descriptions twice or so. To me this series definitely falls into the “urban fantasy with a romance sideline” “rather than the “romance set in an urban fantasy world” genre. Well worth a look if you like light urban fantasy.

A Magnitude 4.7 quake off the coast of Honshu at 10:40am. This is the first time I’ve been in an earthquake (that I could feel) in my office. That wasn’t much of a shake here in Tokyo, though. A larger one (larger at my location) hit at 12:20pm, now showing on the earthquake monitors as around magnitude 5.7(USGS)-5.9(EMSC/GFZ). Anyway, no problems for me, though as this is off the coast up towards Senda, I suspect people up there are feeling more nervous again. The Japanese Met Agency haven’t issued a tsunami warning, which is good.

Things had quietened down in November and December from the afterschocks of last year’s big one in March. I wonder when a region like Japan is regarded as stopping having aftershocks and is back into normal mode where a new earthquake is regarded as its own event.

Since first coming to Japan in 2007 I have been researching Japanese government identity registration systems. Although providing some of the background to the papers I’ve co-authored on social and legal aspects of privacy in Japan I haven’t published any of this work yet. The trouble has been that it keeps getting bigger. Every time I think we’ve got a handle on the issue and just have to tie off a few loose ends, I find that the loose ends are actually spaghetti links to a new area that needs covering and which changes our view of the current situation. So far I’ve read material covering Japanese registration of residents back to the import of a Chinese family registration system in the 6th century up to the merging of the database for the current citizen and non-citizen registration systems. A recent book on Japanese immigration, focussing primarily but not solely on the Zainichi Korean question and its development from 1945 to the early 1980s (though including some relevant background from before the war and including a round-up of developments up to 2008) seemed a useful addition to my reading on this subject. I wasn’t disappointed. Borderline Japan (Foreigners and Frontier Controls in the Postwar Era) by Tessa Suzuki-Morris is an excellent examination of the status of the main group of foreigners in Japan. Extensively edited to create a single coherent volume from a number of previously published pieces, this also adds more depth to the constraints of material published as book chapters or journal articles elsewhere, and makes it available in one volume. The xenophobia, communist witch-hunting and duplicity of both the Japanese government and others (notably the US and the International Committee of the Red Cross as well as the governments of both North and South Korea) through over sixty years of dealing with the post-colonial issue of those of Korean descent in Japan are dealt with in good but not excruciating detail. I learned a lot about how others living in Japan have been, and indeed still are, treated by the Japanese government and understand a lot more about the dynamics of the political situation here with regards to foreigners rights. The origins of elements of my core research interest, that of government ID registration systems, were clearly visible here although that wasn’t the focus of this book.

Even without a research reason, I think this was a very useful book for anyone living in or considering living in Japan, whether Japanese or not.

I’m planning to try and blog a bit more in 2012. I wrote very little in 2011 due to various personal circumstances leaving me with little time for this kind of thing. One thing I’ve decided to do is to try and write a little something on each book that I finish reading, both fiction and non-fiction. The first non-fiction is coming up very soon.

A Cthulhu Knit Cap.