Let’s Remember the Real Innovators

Childhood’s End

I’ll always remember where I was on April 12, 1981. At my grandmother’s house in Clinton Township, Michigan, sitting on the floor of her living room, watching the TV as the first space shuttle lifted off. I remember it so clearly that even now I can recall the fuzziness of the picture (ah, the days before HD everything), the rug burns I got on my hands from running them to and fro in pure excitement, even the texture of the corduroy pants I wore. It’s like it was yesterday.

I was nine years old. I was very much into space, and at the time I wanted to be an astronaut (I would soon grow too tall and clumsy and have awful eyesight, all of which kind of put a crimp in those plans.) Young and Crippen, the two men test-flying the shuttle that day, were my heroes. It was the beginning of a new era, one that would open up cheap and easy spaceflight to all. And there I was, witnessing it. Anything was possible.

As I write this, I’m on the cusp of forty. I’m sitting in my apartment, in Kawanehoncho, Shizuoka prefecture, Japan, in my living room, on a futon on the floor. I’m watching the very last space shuttle launch ever, my wife at my side.

Thirty years gone by!

I finished elementary school, junior high, high school, college. I worked crappy jobs. I worked cool jobs. I went to Japan, worked, got married, came back to the States, watched the economy crash, went off to Japan again.

In those thirty years, I’ve seen a lot of wonderful things, and a lot of bad things. I saw the space program fall far short of expectations, saw the promise of cheap spaceflight go by the wayside as the system was still too delicate and balky and complex. I saw far greater advances made in computers than I could have imagined, as I sit here watching TV on my laptop, a device smaller than, and almost as light as, the three-ring binders I carried around as a nine year-old. Here I sit, blogging to the world, with all the information of our world at my fingertips. All of this, all those times, all that progress and heartache, bookended by a pair of fiery launches, a beautiful spacecraft rising in a familiar arc, taking to the sky.

It’s gone now, the pad empty, off into orbit and into history. And as I watched it rise for the last time, I reached back across those years, and shook the hand of my nine year-old self, and I shared a moment, and a dream, and the adult that I’ve become felt, if only for a moment, that anything was possible again.

Inadvertant Lessons

In English class I was teaching 9th graders the grammar form “Is A B-ing C now?”, as in “Is she playing the piano now?”. I devised a group game where each member of the group in turn picks up a card with a basic verb on it, like “sing”, and they have to blurt out a sentence in the target form as fast as they can, i.e. “Is he singing a song now?”, which the next person in the group would answer affirmatively or negatively, then that person takes a card, etc. I had the groups racing each other to see which could get the most sentences in two minutes.
So I’m wandering the room, acting as a floating referee, and I announce there’s thirty seconds left. The pace increased to a frenzy. Then I heard this exchange from one of the groups:

Sweet, Innocent 9th grade Japanese girl 1 (shouting at the top of her lungs): ARE YOU TOUCHING YOURSELF NOW?!
SI9GJG 2 (also shouting): YES, I AM!!!

At which point, I kind of lost it but managed to make the laughter into a big snort. The girls (who of course they had no idea of what they had actually just said), turned to me in shock and demanded to know what was wrong with their sentence. “Nothing.” I said, explaining that I’d just stifled a sneeze. Hay fever season, you know…

Corrupting Japan’s youth, one language-learning activity at a time…

A little trip

During spring break Masako and I decided we needed to get out of the house, so we tossed a couple of futons in the back of the microvan and hit the road for Kyoto.

I haven’t been to Kyoto since the beginning of my first stint in Japan (about ten years) and Masako hasn’t been back since she was a kid, although she used to go often (Kyoto is only about an hour or so by train from her family’s home). We took the expressway without much of a plan.

Along the way were reminders of the disasters that have befallen Japan. Electronic signs asking people to conserve gasoline, as it was needed by emergency vehicles (we were doing anything but conserving, but on the other hand our van has a 660cc engine and doesn’t use much). I filled up, just in case we ran into any real shortages, every time the needle hit the middle of the gauge. Every service station had a 20 liter limit (about 5.5 gallons), but since our van only has a 25-liter tank, this wasn’t a problem, either.

We spent some time walking around the vicinity of the Heiwa shrine, one of the largest and most famous Shinto monuments in Japan. I’m used to small shrines in our town; a couple hundred square feet of land, sanctuary, donation box, little tori gate and maybe a sacred tree or two. Heiwa covers something like a square mile and has beautiful buildings covered in red laquer, lovely gardens, and a sanctuary large enough to admit thousands. We could see into the inner sanctuary and there was a wedding going on… doubtless some very rich and well-connected families, everyone wearing beautiful traditional wedding gear. Masako just shook her head and proclaimed it torture to have to wear that stuff and sit stiffly for hours.

We then drove across town to Arashiyama, on the west end of the city. There’s a river, along with bridges, temples, and a lot of tourist-trappy shops. We had a good time wandering around some of the temple grounds. There’s also a bamboo forest with a path running through it- it’s very neat to hear the sound of wind rustling the bamboo, and the clack-clack of the stalks banging together. Like most things in Japan, though, the visual aesthetic was partly ruined by the presence of concrete power poles and power lines running along the path. Can’t put them somewhere else, huh? If you look in certain directions, or just close your eyes, though, the effect is magnificent.

We ate a good lunch at a tofu restaurant. Heading along some of the back streets, away from the tourist traps, we discovered a lot of little artisan studios and shops. We bought a noren (those curtains, split down the middle, that you see hanging in doorways) from one shop and a reading pillow (a cool and original wedge design that you can lay on forward or backward) from a pillow shop.

It was getting dark, so we headed to the middle of town, threading our way through tiny one-way streets, to Funaoka onsen. Up until about the 1960s, it was rare for Japanese apartments to have individual baths. City dwellers would bathe at their local onsen (hot spring) or sento (bath house). With the rise of individual private baths, most bath houses have closed, but a few, like Funaoka, survive. They’re a cool time capsule and a look back in time.

Here are some photos. I didn’t want to take my camera in, so these are taken from Google image search.  Thank you to JapanVisitor’s Flickr photostream, JapanInfoNet, and InsideJapanBlog for the images!  Check out the awesome tile work and all that old wood:

This Tengu decorates the ceiling:

Here’s the outside in daytime:

The lobby was cramped, the cashier wedged behind a counter loaded with shampoos, soaps, towels, razors, and other sundries. We paid out 410 yen (about $4.50) and headed in.

Funaoka was built in the 1920s and has gorgeous tile work and wood carvings. Most controversially, a major carving, added in the 1930s, celebrates the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and is still there for all to see. The problem for me was that said carving is located in the partition between the men’s and women’s changing areas. It’s an open-lattice carving, and being 6’6″ it’s very easy for me to look right through it and into the women’s side. So I stayed some distance away, checking it out while hopefully not looking like I was checking out the women on the other side.  Here’s a section of the carving in question (thanks to barry1959 on Flickr):

The baths were kind of small but the whole thing was laid out very well. You walk in through a tile corridor into the main bath where the washing stations and soaking baths are. They had a standard bath, medicine bath, electric shock bath, sauna, and a booth where a hard stream of water hits your shoulders. There was even a rotenburo (outdoor bath) in an inner courtyard, entirely made of cedar. I discovered that the tile corridor I walked through to get to the main bath was actually on a marble bridge, a pond with colorful carp swimming below it. The patrons were mostly older, but there were some young people from the various youth hostels as well. I heard a bunch of kids over on the women’s side as well. All in all, it seemed Funaoka was doing a good business and isn’t going anywhere.

We headed out of town, running into a snowstorm at Sekigahara, near Masako’s parents’ place, so we pulled off into a highway rest stop and bedded down in the back of the van. The cargo area is just the right size for a large futon, and with a bunch of blankets it makes for a cozy bed. We slept until dawn.

In the morning we climbed groggily out and found that we were surrounded by a flotilla of vehicles on their way north with loads of relief supplies and equipment- small earth movers, drills, diesel generators, household goods. They were all from Osaka; if their license plates hadn’t told me, their Kansai accents would have.

We got coffee and breakfast and headed for home. A short trip, but good to get out of the house.

Am I living in a PKD novel?

Philip K. Dick was one of the great geniuses of SF writing. I recently splurged on a six paperback collection of his short stories, so I could have everything together, stuff I’ve read and loved before plus a bunch of stuff that was new to me. PKD was known for his constant questioning of objective reality, his illumination of the inner experiences of the mind, his paranoid musings on government control, his (and his characters’) excessive use of drugs (which partly led to his eventual madness and death), and his generally bleak settings (I think 99.9% of his fiction is set post-WWIII or at least post-nuclear holocaust of some sort). Nowadays, he’s a favorite of Hollywood and his stories are often adapted into films (generally crapified, watered-down versions, of course).

So here I am in the mornings with my cup of coffee, checking my e-mail, checking the weather, and checking the radiation sensors in Shizuoka…

Radiation sensors? Yes, indeed. http://gebweb.net/japan-radiation-map/

Yes, I really am checking the radiation levels in the mornings before starting my day.

Although, contrary to popular belief, it is not the job of the SF writer to predict the future, PKD’s writings predicted things about our current day and age. I’ve often been disturbed by how accurate some of his stuff regarding government censorship and surveillance was, as well as impressed by how some of his musings on the nature of reality have been taken up by philosophers and scientists alike. I just never thought his nuke stuff (he was, after all, a product of the early cold war, before governments basically realized that any use of nuclear weapons would be suicidal) would find a way to come to fruition, kind of, as well.

Better News

Cooling systems re-started at 2 of the 6 reactors at Fukushima, hopefully more to follow tomorrow.

Cool map http://gebweb.net/japan-radiation-map/ with which to track radiation levels. We’re nearest the detectors in Shizuoka. Current readings between 67 and 73 nGy / hour, which is barely above normal background radiation levels. We spent a quiet day today. Took a walk along the riverside and collected some big rocks to start a rock garden with. Finished raking up the last of last fall’s leaves and twigs.

Beautiful full moon tonight.

More to come

Stress

Actual dialog after an evening of following news updates on the Fukushima plant situation:

Masako: I’m sick of watching the news! It’s stressing me out. I’m gonna watch The Simpsons (on DVD).
Me: Okay. So you’re going to relax by watching a show about an idiot who works at a nuclear plant?
Masako: …..

More to come…

Disaster Still Waiting

Graduation ceremonies for my JH schools were yesterday and today and I’m officially on spring break. All was normal- songs, speeches, and tears as another batch of kids move on to high school. Still gets me right here every time.
We went down to Shizuoka City last night to do some shopping. Places are sold out of water containers, so we got a 25 gallon plastic trash can with lid and filled it with water. Got some duct tape in case we need to seal the windows and doors, and we stocked up on non-perishable foods high in energy… peanuts, beans, pasta, canned fruits and fish, cookies, vitamin water, etc. Just in case. I’ve written before that we’re 300 miles from Fukushima, but now realize that’s inaccurate. 300 miles is road distance… straight line is a little over 200. Still well outside the hazard zone.
Beautiful spring days here, sunny and blue skies, though a bit cold.

More to come.

The Days After

This is a summary of the first three days of the quake and what has come after. 

The Day Of:  Where were you at 2:46 PM Japan time on March 11, 2011?  I’ll always remember that I was at the smaller of my two junior high schools, in an assembly.  The 7th and 8th graders were bidding farewell to the 9th graders (28 students), who are moving on to high school next week.  I was tired and suffering from hay fever.  I stood in the darkened assembly hall, leaning against the trophy case.

The windows began to rattle.  No biggie there.  The school is old and it was a windy day.  Suddenly I started to feel unsteady on my feet.  My first thought was the hay fever medicine was messing with my head again.  I braced myself against the wall, and felt the whole school shaking.  

Earthquake.  Well, that’s no big deal in Japan.  Except this one was different.  All of the earthquakes I’ve felt so far here are one or two seconds, a jolt or two or three, and that’s it.  This one kept going.  And going.  The students were looking around now, a bit apprehensive.  I exchanged glances with the other teachers.  It felt pretty much like standing up in a small boat on a lake.  Rolling, rocking, unpredictable.  I expected to hear cracking concrete.  Nope.  I watched the acoustical tiles on the ceiling to see if they were coming loose.  Fine there.  I waited for the principal to say something like “take cover”, in which case I’d help the students to get out of the room, but he didn’t.  About a minute later, it was over.  I and two other teachers dashed downstairs to the office and flipped on the TV.  The automated tsunami warnings were already out on the news, the map lighting up.  7.9 on the Richter scale, it said.  I was shocked to see how far away the epicenter was.  I called my wife to make sure all was well at our apartment, a 15-minute walk away.  She was teaching a private student, and they’d definitely felt it, but no problems.  My wife’s family lives in Ogaki, in Gifu prefecture, even further away from the epicenter; they’d felt it too, but no damage.  I hung up and went back upstairs, whispering the news to the other teachers.  

Then the first aftershock hit.  More rolling, only a few seconds this time.  The students were absorbed in their assembly, which concluded a half-hour later.  They filed out, and I helped to break down chairs and take down decorations.  I headed back to the office.

The first footage was coming in, live, of the tsunami hitting.  You’ve all seen the images a thousand times by now.  Cars jumbled together.  The wall of mud swallowing fallow rice fields.  A boat floating across the tarmac of Sendai airport.  The magnitude was revised upward to 8.4, then 8.9.  We all watched in shock.  This was big.    
I went home, a bit nervous about the long pedestrian bridge across the river, but everything seemed intact.  At home, my wife had dinner on the table (she’d wondered if it was okay to use the gas range; I’d told her sure, but turn it off if you think it’s leaking).  We don’t have a TV, so we plugged in my computer and tried to find some news.  

We ended up staying awake until 2 am, just watching, feeling stunned.  I called friends and family, waking them up so that they wouldn’t turn on the news and panic.  Amid fears of more aftershocks, or perhaps of another quake being triggered closer to us, we slept with all the doors wide open so we could escape easily if need be.

The Day After:  After a few hours of sleep I went back to making phone calls and watching the news.  Aftershocks constantly hitting, though we hadn’t felt any more.  Biggest quake to hit Japan in 1000 years.  I reflected that this was not the sort of history I wanted to be a part of.  Then I walked around outside a bit.

Our prefecture, Shizuoka, is the “cut-off line” for trouble in this crisis, it seems.  We were just far enough south and west to escape any damage.  In Chiba, maybe 150 miles in a straight line, was the burning oil refinery.  There were a few deaths in Kanazawa, the next prefecture over, from the tsunami.  300 miles away were the troubled nuclear reactors in Fukushima.  500 miles away were places where whole towns had disappeared, where there were people without food or water, possibly trapped under rubble, struggling to survive.  And here I was, listening to the birds chirp under a blue sky on what was quickly becoming a beautiful spring day.  I walked along the river.  The water was blue and clear as always.  In the park nearby, old people muttered and laughed as they played gateball.  Some kids, my students, played by the river.  I waved to them.  It all felt very, very strange.

Overhead, three big helicopters passed.  From the direction of travel, I figured out that they must have come from Hamamatsu, on the coast on the west end of the prefecture, and they were headed northeast, toward the trouble.  I wanted to hitch a ride.  I wanted to do something.  But what?  I suppose I could dig through rubble.  But how to get there, and would I just get in the way?  

So this is what it’s like to feel helpless.  

An announcement, over the town address system.  A town meeting, cancelled.  Whether due to the quake or not, I’m not sure.
We made breakfast.  We watched the news.  All of it terrible.  We took a nap.  We held each other.  We woke up and checked the news again and decided we needed to get out of the house.  We went to the local hot spring and had a soak.  Sitting my naked gaijin ass in lovely hot mineral water, trying to release the tension but failing.  Washing at the washing station, thinking about all the water I was using, while millions had none.  

We filled up the microvan, the local gas station guy polishing our windows.  They hadn’t raised prices or anything.  

We went to the convenience store and got some bread.  When we got home, I was happy to see one of the helicopters I’d seen that morning had actually made the news- “Hamamatsu” and Mt. Fuji painted on the side, assisting in a rescue.  On AJ we watched a bizarre performance by the Prime Minister as he shot out a speech full of strange platitudes while the poor interpreter struggled to keep up.  At one point she lapsed into confused silence as the PM actually said “This is actually good for Japan, because we can make a better tomorrow”.  Good for Japan?  The translator skipped that line and went on.  

We went to bed, worrying about the nuclear reactor.  

Day Three:  I couldn’t sleep well again.  More phone calls and e-mails.  Making coffee, washing dishes, doing a load of laundry.  Thinking about the water I was using, swirling down the drain.  More news.  Was the reactor melting down?  I posted a few comments on Kos.  I suggested we make the long journey into Shizuoka City to go shopping and just try to do something normal.  My wife was worried about the nuke plant.  I shared her fears but in the end, we decided it was worth the risk.  
We drove the tiny winding mountain road, up up up through cedars and grasses still dried from the winter.  At the apogee of the trip is a turn-off where you can see the peak of Mt. Fuji.  There it was.  Somewhere on the other side, all the trouble in the world.  On our side, business as usual.  

Now down the mountains, into the suburbs, then into the city.  What struck us immediately was how normal everything was.  People walking about.  Laughing.  Shopping.  The pay parking lots were full.  We found one a little way away and went to the mall.  We bought water filters and ate at our favorite Italian buffet, which was packed.  It was a strange and guilty meal.  How many people were without any food, while I sat here stuffing my face?  

We stopped in at the electronics department to find a TV to watch for any updates.  Same footage, only in HD, which just made it all worse.  The quake was now bumped up to a 9 on the Richter scale.  We watched the bureaucrat in charge of disseminating nuclear information hem and haw and not get to the point.  My wife clenching her fists in frustration, trying not to punch the TV.  At least the reactor hadn’t melted down.  A lot of people were watching with us, concern creasing their brows, but all around life was going on pretty much as before.  I watched a girl of eight or nine carefully count out coins to buy a pack of pencils.  At the next register, a woman was having a video game gift-wrapped for someone’s birthday.

We shopped at our favorite bookstores.  A street performer juggled in the intersection in front of the building.  People milled in and out of a Starbucks.  How normal life was here.  How carefree.  

Heading back to the parking lot, I couldn’t help but imagine all the cars I saw jumbled together, caked with mud, dented and destroyed and flipped over, hanging on poles and guard rails and wires.  I imagined fishing boats floating down the streets, houses ripped from their moorings.  Shizuoka is on the coast.  It could just as easily have happened here.

We drove home, back up into the mountains, listening to the radio.  A calm female voice, reading messages to any who could hear them.  Tanaka Kaori from Aomori prefecture, looking for Sato Kenichi from Sendai City.  Please call if you can.  Yamada Shinji from Chiba prefecture, looking for… on and on and on.

Back home again.  Officials say the number of dead will probably reach 10,000, which I knew was coming, but still was hard to take.  A police official saying the deaths in his prefecture alone could reach 10,000.

Me writing this diary.  My wife tucked into bed next to me, reading a novel.  Earphone in my ear, listening to BBC.  Still trouble at the reactors, but the news is getting better.  12,000 people rescued.  Red Cross on the ground.  Citizens clearing rubble.  U.S. aircraft carrier acting as a refueling station for rescue choppers.  Everyone pitching in.  

Why were we so lucky?  Why were others not?  What will it be like tomorrow, when I go back to work?  Did any of my co-workers have family or friends in harm’s way?  If so, are they safe and sound?

Graduation ceremonies, later this week.  Will they go on as normal, or will they be subdued?

What does the future hold?  

Keep Japan in your thoughts.  Donate if you can.  Peace to all.

Quake Aftermath

Quiet night last night. None of the aftershocks reached us, at least none large enough to wake us up. Spending another quiet day at home. Watching the situation with the nuke plant very carefully. Otherwise life is fairly normal here. Kids are playing by the river. We might try to go shopping later today, just to get out and think about something else for a change. I’m dreading Monday morning and desperately hoping that none of my co-workers or students have family and / or friends in the affected areas.