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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.

It’s the cherry blossom season here in Tokyo. Japan’s cherry blossom time is famous, and justly so. There would appear to be a number of reasons for this.

• The cherry trees produce incredible amounts of bloosm. Not only do the twigs and minor branches produce blossom, but the major branches produce it in places as well. The incredible profusion covers the trees with pink and white flowers.
• The cherry trees produce their blossom before producing any leaves, unlike many trees which produce leaves first. This again provides a spectacular sight of just the blossom with no leaves to get in the way of viewing.
• It’s a very short lived affair. As soon as the blossoms start appearing, petals start dropping off, and within a couple of weeks they main bloom is over.

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While writing the post on the Butler cafe, I wanted to say something like “oodles of useless google search results”. This obviously leads to the new term:

Goodles: a large number of hits on a Google search, where the term you are searching for, if present anywhere, has been overridden by one of the following:

1. a semantic difference: e.g. searching for Bob Baker and finding bread and confectionery makers called Bob;
2. mis-spellings of a different word overwhelming it: e.g. searching for “femininist” brings up goodles of hits for “feminist” spelled wrong;
3. googlewashing;
4. googlebombing.

Spotted today in Mainichi Daily News (Mainichi means “every day”). Following the success of their “Maid cafe” Pinafoa (“Pinafore” in Engrish) where the waitresses dress up in traditional maid outfits, a company has opened a “Butler cafe” where the waitresses dress up in pseudo-traditional butler outfits. The quote from one of the senior waiting staff was:

“There’s a wide range of butlers here — moe (passionate interest) types, good-looking types and tsundere (aloof/lovestruck) types — so both men and women can enjoy it. We’re aiming to be the world’s No. 1 butler cafe.”

Easy to be the best when you’re the only one, I would have thought.

Just daily life weirdness in Japan.

I’m often reminded of an SF story which included the idea of “femininists” (note: that’s the correct spelling). In the story they’re a cover for a terrorist organisation, but the idea itself is a lot of fun: in reaction to the imitation of masculine traits exhibited by many feminists, the femininists emphasise “traditional” feminine virtues while retaining control over their own lives. This seems to be quite in keeping with where Japanese women are coming from. They strive for equality of opportunity in many things while not losing the things they like about being “feminine” in clothes, appearance and power over the sex-dominated brains of men.

Unfortunately I can’t remember which story that was in and a web search on femininists simply brings up huge numbers of pages where they’ve spelled “feminist” incorrectly.

Pointed at by Piled Higher and Deeper (Cecilia’s Blog) is this Nature report, where scientists managed to (apparently) “delete” a pavlovian response in rats by providing the stimulus while they had been given a memory consolidator-suppressing chemical.

Congratulations to Charlie Stross on getting another novel Hugo nominated. Eventually, maybe he’ll win “the big one”. Still, it is, as they say, an honour to be nominated.

I’ve just spoken to BBC Online researcher Joe Campbell about the effectiveness of CCTV systems in crime prevention and detection. This was as background for material regarding the Woolmer case, where the hotel had CCTV cameras trained on nearby corridors but, as is often the case, the analogue tapes used to record the images had been so heavily used that they were “fragile”.

Despite the rush to deploy CCTV cameras all over the UK in the late 80s and 90s, there was almost no significant research into their effectiveness. Indeed, Norris and Armstrong (The Maximum Surveillance Society: The Rise of CCTV) suggest that politicians did not want to know whether it was effective or not.Since finding the money centrally to promote jointly funded local schemes to deploy CCTV was relatively simple and the public believed that they helped to reduce crime, politicians would rather spend the money and be seen to be doing something rather than find out if what they were doing was effective (and exactly what is effective out of the various options) and be held properly to account for their efforts in tackling crime. In particular, no cost/benefit evaluations were done which considered the use of the money spent in other ways to reduce crime, either by providing other law enforcement measures or simply providing better street-lighting, or more facilities for young people (since much of the crime that CCTV has targetted is public order and low-value thefts).

Only recently have some studies suggested that CCTV has been effective:

Crime Prevention and Community Safety: An International Journal (2004) 6, 21–33: Evidence-based Crime Prevention: The Effectiveness of CCTV by Brandon C Welsh and David P Farrington.

It is ironic to note that many of the religious types currently arguing against the new anti-discrimination laws in the UK, banning discrimination on the grounds of sexuality in the provision of goods and services to the public, are the same groups who were so vocal in support of laws banning discrimination on the grounds of religion in the last couple of years. Today I heard a Christian on Radio 4 claiming that discrimination against homosexuals in the provision of adoption services or hotel provision was a matter of religious conscience. The debate about the partially state-funded Catholic adoption agencies is a classic “separate but equal” argument last used by the racists in the Southern US states during segregation. (more…)

Ah, these things abound, but thanks to Sparks, I had to try this one out. What a surprise (not):

What kind of soul do you have?
Dark Soul