a-cubed.info

I wondered last week why there were a few bubbles in the liquid in my apricot jam jar. I found out today when I opened the jar again after not using any for about 5 days – it was fermenting in the jar!

Over on my gallery, I posted a picture of a “London Pub” in Tokyo. I didn’t venture inside that one, but on 28th April I went for dinner with Hirai Hirohide (Jack)-san and his wife Chizue-san. They’d had me over for dinner a while back and since my Guest House accommodation isn’t really set up for entertaining, I invited them out for dinner. We met up at the “Rose and Crown” a UK-style pub/restaurant right next to Akihabara station. Akihabara is “Electric Town” and used to be nothing but electric appliance stores, and later electronics stores of all sizes and types coming in. They’re redeveloping the area, though, and it’s gaining some entertainment areas, including a Starbucks, an Excelsior (a Japanese Starbucks clone) and a Vie de France coffee shop in the square that the Rose and Crown overlooks. It overlooks it because it’s a first floor (nikai or second floor for Japanese and USians) establishment. It’s quite common in Tokyo for restaurants to be in vertical blocks, with lifts (and stairs, though sometimes only emergency stairs) to the 6, 7 or more floors, on each of which is one or more restaurant. In this particular building, in a square at the back of Akihabara station (you can tell it’s the back because the station building is covered in ducting and pipework never meant to be seen) there are various types of restaurant including the “Rose and Crown” (that’s a link to their website). Jack thought it would be fun for me to try the Tokyo interpretation of British food.

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Teenage boys are the same everywhere. Stupid and convinced of their invulnerability. I was waiting at Mukougaokayuen station this morning, connecting between the stopping and express services to Shinjuku. I was listening to a Japanesepod101.com language lesson. An express train coming in the opposite direction (one which stops at Mukougaokayuen started blaring its horn. They usually do this because someone is standing too close to the edge of the platform. This one kept sounding, though and stopped only a third of the way into the station. As I looked down the platform to see what the problem was, I spotted a young lad (13, maybe) climbing off the tracks and onto the platform I was standing on. Train company staff started rushing around with mobiles or radios (difficult to tell the difference sometimes these days. There were a lot of similar age boys on the opposite platform, but I couldn’t tell from their attitude whether the boy had been pushed onto the tracks or jumped down on his own “initiative”. They stopped a long distance express (not stopping here) just outside the station on my side, and left the express in the other direction standing part way into the station for about three minutes. I don’t know if they found the boy, but things returned to normal.

Whether it was horseplay that got out of hand, a stunt, or a serious piece of bullying, I’m not sure. It didn’t look like a suicide attempt. Whichever it was, it would appear that there are some cultural universals, and one of those would appear to be silly actions by teenage boys.

The internet connection at the Guest House has been a bit flaky since I got here. It seems to have four states:

1. Working
2. Occasionally failures to resolve DNS queries or connect, defeated by reloading in a web browser and ignorable for most other net work. Oddly, once a connection is created it generally continues to run if it’s a dynamic keep-alive connection. Multiple connections sometimes lead to missing graphics or, worse, non-loading of CSS files for web pages.
3. Mostly down. If I try hard I can sometimes get a web page to load by trying 20 or so “reloads”. Mail comes in when an IMAP connection establishes for a little while. Outgoing mail is very awkward and often doesn’t get out for hours or until it comes back up.
4. Completely down.

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Yet again an ambulance just used their siren/voice alarm at 12:45am. I’ve mentioned this annoyance in Japan before. In the UK it’s illegal to use your car horn after 11pm and before 7am. I’m fairly sure it’s either illegal, or at least severely frowned upon, to use sirens after 11pm, and certainly after midnight they’re rare. In Japan, the ambulance drivers in particular seem to be all like Bill Cosby in Mother, Jugs and Speed. This one used their sirens and the recorded voice that (I assume – I can’t hear well enough even to try and translate) tells people to get out of the way, then it stopped. About thirty second later it started up again. Since I’m sitting at the computer I pulled up the blind and watched them drive off quite slowly and with absolutely no other vehicular traffic in sight. They then proceeded down the “road” along next to the canalised river bed. It’s fairly narrow but it’s got good visibility and very few vehicles, mostly pedestrians. I’m sure that the ordinary lights would be enough to get people out of the way, and if people were in the way THEN they could have switched the siren/voice on. But, no, if they’re moving and on a call they have the noise going.

At least now the elections are over the loudspeaker vans have gone. There’s still a delivery van that beeps everywhere it goes, though. Makes me long for the once a week (alternating garbage and recycling) collection vans at 7:30am at home.
Japan has a serious problem with noise spam (spaudium?) .

After a Nippon 2007 meeting today at the site in Yokohama, the staff attending split up into smaller groups and went to check out various restaurants. There are a lot of different restaurants in the Queens Square and Landmark Tower Malls near the Pacifico Yokohama conference centre. They’re not badly priced, either. Certainly I recommend the short walk across to the Queens Square (you go through that to get to the Landmark Tower Mall, about ten to fifteen minutes walk – longer for slowcoaches) rather than eating in the Intercontinental (small portions and extortionate prices).

So, along with Inoue Hiroaki-san, Inoue Tamie-san, Trevor Knudsen (what name for a Westerner living in Japan, try getting Japanese people to pronounce it from the written form), Rodrigo Juri and a couple of the other Japanese, we went in search of something that would fit me (picky beggar, mostly vegetarian) and Rodrigo (on a tight budget). Tamie-san suggested we try an okonomiyaki place (she remembered there was at least one in the Landmark Tower Mall).We went to the Yokohama Landmark Plaza Botejyu (okonomiyaki is food from the Osaka region and this is a chain that started in Osaka).

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The UK ID Card and Database

There are many objectionable aspects to the UK government’s ID Cards bill. Some of them are philosophical and fundamental, some are political and some are practical. Both the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties in the UK have policy commitments against the ID card policy and have stated that if they come to power after the next general election (due by mid-2009 at the latest) that they will repeal the act and scrap the cards and the underlying database. Here are some of the arguments against the UK ID card system and database:

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As many of you know, I’m mostly vegetarian. This is fairly hard to do in Japan. One of the delegates I met at the Ethicomp conference recently, who was just finishing a five month stint in Japan, had been a strict (moral) vegetarian when he arrived and had recently been told by his doctor that he had to start eating meat because his health had suffered so badly. Of course, he was eating out in traditional Japanese restaurants much of the time. The fare in these places is very very meat-heavy. Typically variants of yakitori (chicken kebabs mostly) and lots of other dishes with meat. The best you can do for non-meat dishes are green salads (very over-dressed for my taste) and a barbecue-it-yourself selection of vegetables. The barbecue-it-yourself selection gets very boring after a few tries, particularly if (like me) you don’t like the vinegar-based dressing that comes with the veggies. Luckily for me, I’m OK with chicken meat. I do specify chicken meat there, because it would appear that the Japanese eat every part of a chicken except the feathers: chicken skin (both on the meat and separately); chicken entrails; deep-fried chicken tendon; chicken feet (not many witches in Japan because the peasants eat up the feet); processed chicken bone (it’s processed in some way to soften it up). I’ve not seen it, but I’ve been told that some places even serve “chicken nose”.

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Well, my barber back in Reading did a particularly hard shearing on me before Christmas, but sooner or later I was always going to have to get my hair cut. I got around to it last week. It’s a little terrifying going for a hair cut when your grasp of the language is limited. You never know what you’re going to get. So, before my hair started getting in my eyes I decided it was time for a shearing again.

As you can see in my photos of Ikuta there are a number of barbers and male/unisex hairdressers in Ikuta. Actually, there are an awful lot of them. Having now experienced a Japanese haircut, I know why there are so many(more on that below).

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Someone asked me for a bit of physical context for where I’m living in Japan. I’m at a Guest House owned by Meiji University for visiting scholars. It’s near their Ikuta campus (not actually on it, but very close to the Ikuta railway station so handy for getting in to Tokyo).

The complex includes 7 single person rooms (self-contained like one of those US “medium term suite” motels). These are on the first floor (UK terminology; ni-kai or 2nd floor in Japanese/American counting). The ground floor includes four larger family flats which have two separate bedrooms, a living space and a (I assume bigger) kitchen as well as a bathroom. The place has a small courtyard and a “common room” which contains the pigeonholes and quite a lot of tables and chairs, a bit like a cafe. They’re hard chairs and high tables. Not really comfortable. The single rooms contain a bed, desk high shelf down one wall and an office chair along with a built-in wardrobe. It’s quite spacious for Japan, especially given the price.

Ikuta is a very developed suburb. I haven’t come across any parks in my wanderings around it. Very urban.
Anyway, Ikuta is basically in a valley (hence the canalised river that I posted a picture of when I arrived). There’s ridges to the south and north. The railway runs along the river course, crossing back and forth a lot. I’m just south of the railway and north of the river. The river runs east-west. I have taken a bunch of photos of Ikuta. I noticed on the way up to the barber that what I thought was a small wooded area on a raised piece of ground overlooking the main road up to the ridge at the south is actually a combination of trees and the kind of big bamboo you get in Chinese movies – House of Flying Daggers/Crouching Tiger etc.