P.S.

Here's something fun about the Japanese language:

To understand 80% of an English language newspaper, you need a vocabulary of around 1000 words. To understand 90%, you need 3000 words.

For French, that's 1000 and 4000 words, respectively. For Russian, Korean, or Chinese papers, that rises to about 2000 and 5000 words.

To read and understand 80% of a Japanese newspaper, you need to know 5,000 words, and to understand 90%, you need a vocabulary of 10,000 words.

The reason for this huge vocab requirement is simple: Japanese is a language with many levels, not only of politeness and respect, but also of what one could call "sophistication." For simple day-to-day speech, people tend to use a certain limited vocabulary. For a professional publication like a newspaper, they bring out the mother of all mental thesauruses, and write in a much more sophisticated-sounding, largely Chinese-derived language. For any particular English word, there might be five acceptable translations in Japanese, each with a subtle difference in meaning and register, and you might sound like an idiot or a prude if you don't pick the right one based on the circumstances.
This is comparable to the stiff-sounding, Latin-derived language of the medicinal or scientific disciplines. The difference here is that everyone is expected to know it, and these words really are used in daily life, if usually in writing. Hence, even if someone is fluent in spoken Japanese, they could very well be baffled by a simple newspaper article. And let's not even talk about the nightmarish kanji-kana-latin mishmash that is the Japanese writing system.

So it sort of irritates me when people learn a romance language or two on the side, while studying something "useful" like engineering or materials science. Unless you're a gifted linguist, and I sure as hell am not, Japanese takes a lot of time and focus to study. But in the end, one language is pretty much "equal" to another, in that two people who speak the same language can communicate fluidly. The only thing that sets Japanese apart is the relative scarcity of non-Japanese who can speak it.

Oh well. I enjoy the study and I'm living a worthwhile life, so I'm not complaining. But when people get smug about knowing four languages as opposed to two (yes, I'm talking about you, Europeans), it gets my hackles up a bit.

An Ode to Okonomiyaki / Stargazing

The sign in the window says "okonomiyaki."
Ginko trees, a few weeks ago on campus.
I really like this advert for high-speed rail. They did a good job of fitting the bullet train into what could otherwise be a classical Japanese woodblock print. The text at the bottom reads "head back to your hometown by train for the new year."
Another hair-raising parking job by a Tokyo cabbie.
See the blue LED fixture near the top of the frame?
The thought is that the color blue will help calm people down and stop them from hurling themselves in front of the trains. I've been late to class three times this year because of people committing suicide that way. They've installed these at every station on the Yamanote line.
My bike. I'm not sure the quality is good enough to really show the flaking, dying brake cables or the evil, serrated edges of the rusty baskets.
I like what they've done with the creek here; criss-crossing it with walkways and building tables and benches. The creek eventually flows into the Yagami river.
A sign near some railroad tracks, put up by the police department. It reads "Let Us Beware / of Sweet Words and Dark Paths."
I rode to school in the front car of the train the other day ^ ^ Notice the old-fashioned pocketwatch near the conductor's hand, set into the console?


Wow. I just realized that these 300 gram bags of peanuts that I've been snacking continually off of for the past two weeks pack almost 2000 kcals each. I caught myself thinking: "Man, I've been doing a ton of snacking on these peanuts. But they're just so irrepressibly delicious." I finally decided to check the nutrition label : ( It's back to bananas and dark chocolate for me...

Anyway, Christmas is approaching and I shall soon head back to America for the holidays! Yay! I apologize for not writing recently, but the school work has cropped up rather thick in this last week before Winter Break. I think I have passed through the thick of it.

So I would like to take this opportunity to sing the praises of okonomiyaki- a dish consisting of nothing more than egg, cabbage, and flour, mixed with whatever you like and topped with katsuo-bushi, mayo and sweet sauce. The translation of "okonomiyaki," in fact, is "whatever you like, grilled." Due to a dangerous surplus of cabbage, my recent meals have been dominated by this unassuming and delicious pancake. I have taken my artisanal preparations of it to new levels: tuna and corn okonomiyaki, salmon and spinach okonomiyaki, even cheeseburger and egg okonomiyaki. Never before have I spent so little time and money to prepare such filling and delicious meals. I am getting sick of it, but I only have enough giant cabbage left for one more meal. So, thank you okonomiyaki.

In fact, it was thanks to the power of okonomiyaki that I achieved last night (and this morning) one of the greatest feats of my reckless young life: Staying out all night with friends- dancing, drinking, and attempting to flirt with beautiful girls in a fashionable club in Shibuya- after pulling an all-nighter to complete a translating project and catch up on my homework. I think that after I finish this post, I'm going to sleep so well that I'll end up dying.

Apropos of absolutely nothing, I have two things to share with my loyal readers.

First:

"My eyes have expressed it,
My tongue has pronounced it,
My quill has declared it;
For you my heart capsizes,
My mind raves,
And my hand writes."

-- George Farquhar

Next, amusing Australians make fun of the British.

I guess that's about all I wanted to write about. Except! Last Monday night I took a trip by train to Mt. Takao, about an hour west of where I live, with Maya and three of her friends from school (Benedict Lloyd Terrell, Jared Bird, and Evon Too). Our goal: to catch a glimpse of the Geminid meteor shower, away from the city lights.

The first hour after we arrived at the station nearest the mountain could be described as "misadventure." After misreading the large, friendly map in front of the station, we wandered off into the dark along a highway, passing construction for a controversial new elevated roadway and numerous flashy love hotels and restaurants. Finally, we started wandering up a random wintry mountain, following the misleading advice of Ben's iPhone. Toward the close of that first hour, we encountered a totally unexpected sight: a large, torch-lit parking lot for a sprawling, classy, castle-like restaurant that was set into the mountainside. A valet saw us standing dumbfounded at the entrance to the parking lot (which was fairly full of high-end cars), and came over to us with an uncertain look in his eyes. When he realized just how lost we were, he arranged for us to take the restaurant's private shuttle bus back to the station. Yes, private shuttle bus.

So there we were, right back where we started, with final trains and curfews mere hours away.
The driver of the shuttle bus was kind enough to point us in the right direction, and so we quickly found the correct path and started climbing. It felt good to do some real hiking (although some stretches of the path were concrete, unfortunately). Bird gets credit for remembering to bring flashlights! The air was crisp and clear, perfect for stargazing. We also enjoyed some spectacular, glittering panoramas of Tokyo from viewing areas on the mountain. We didn't make it all the way up, on account of the aforementioned time restrictions, but we did find a really good spot to lie down and just stare up at the sky. I could feel my body heat seeping into the ground through my all-too-thin cardigan, as we alternated between contented silence and jokes about Carl Sagan. Every few minutes, we would catch a meteor as it streaked through the atmosphere and vanished.

That's all for now. On Tuesday I'm going to see Tokyo Disney Land for the first time, but I might not have time to write about it until I'm back in the States. See you all soon!

I Found a Bike!

The side of a river is a great place to look for things. Earlier tonight, I found a repairable unicycle in the reeds while I was out jogging. From time to time, I see discarded bikes, umbrellas, pieces of furniture. Most of that gets snatched up by one of the two hobos who live under a particular bridge- each lives in his own pile of junk; they face each-other across the river.

I had decided to acquire a bike at any cost (in effort, not dollars :), and started my search along the river. I ended up finding my bike- powder blue, beat up, rusting, flat back tire- in the garbage area of an apartment complex while I was on my way back along the river. It was unrideable, so I walked it home.

On closer inspection, I found a tack in the back tire. And the rear brake cable is almost rusted through. Damn. There's a little bike shop- I think it's called "Kojima Bicycles"- on the road to the station.

My local bike shop is an old lady's parlor. It has a thick oriental rug and some chairs, with some little nick-nacks set on shelves and pictures on the walls. The only difference is that there are two bicycles for sale in the window, and a bicycle stand with attached tool tray in the middle of the room. The owner of the shop is a hard-talking no-nonsense woman, about 65 years old although it's always hard to tell. I asked her about the brake cable, and she said, after giving the lever a squeeze, "well, it hasn't snapped yet. It's fine." When I asked her about the cracked back tire, she told me "ride it until it really starts falling off."

Within minutes, she had the back tire off and was checking the inner tube for leaks by submerging it in a bowl of water. We made small-talk as she readied the replacement inner-tube. It turns out that three of her sons studied abroad in America- one in California, one in the midwest, and one in Maryland. She worked with efficiency, despite not having any other customers, and after about ten minutes I had a bike in rideable condition!

Aside from the banshee screech of the moribund brakes, it's actually a pretty nice bike. There are large baskets on the front and back for groceries or whatever else. And now I can save 400 yen each time I go to the climbing gym by riding my bike instead of taking the bus. And I can get to the station in about six minutes by bike (although it's 100 yen for parking... cheap bastards), if I'm pressed for time in the morning. I feel that the scope of my "neighborhood" has just greatly increased.

On another note, I received a random call on Skype, around midnight a few days ago. Maya was over at my place, and we had been watching "Mishima, a Life in Four Chapters" after a sushi dinner. I found the movie and its subject to be fascinating. But yes, the call, most unexpected. It was from someone named Salman, born and raised in Dubai but studying medicine in Poland. Totally random. He had only been studying English for about five months (or so he said), but we were able to have a strange, meandering, slightly baffled conversation about women, life, and Polish medicine. Apparently, he called me because he wanted to speak to someone in Japan (and it seems I am publicly listed on Skype as residing in Japan). It's nice when something totally unexpected happens, especially if you wind up making a new friend on the other side of the Eurasian Continent as a result.

Oh, look below for some of my favorite pictures from Hong Kong. Many more (most worth seeing!) on my Facebook album.

Hong Kong (Part II- Saturday, Sunday, Monday)

They're everywhere!
A relatively new temple. I've forgotten the name, but the grounds were beautiful.
Same temple.
Planning.
This sort of adorable graffiti was everywhere! A serial artist was on the loose. For the full set, see my Facebook album : )
Eerie, shrouded high-rises.
Temple roof, with apartments behind.
A scale model of the Kowloon Walled City. 33,000 people lived in this .01 sq. miles of sunless ladder-laced claustrophobic elevated rubble, before it was demolished by the government in 1993. It was virtually ungoverned, and controlled in large part by an organized crime syndicate. Some of the alleys were lit by florescent lights, even during the day, because so little sunlight reached the lower levels. Today, a public park stands in its place.
Roasted chestnuts.
St. Paul's Church, in Macau.
Daniel and Maya, with the Grand Lisboa visible through an arch of St. Paul's Church.
I had no part in this. I'm just the photographer. The Portuguese would have cause to be furious. If they still owned the fortress LOL.

Offerings.
Our guide for the hike.
My favorite picture from the trip, I think.
Notice a... discrepancy? In their heights? Screw you China, for trying to make Obama look like Hu Jintao's pet imp.
Shipping cranes.


Saturday morning. We decided to visit China's other Special Administrative Region: Macau.

We left around 10am, which was later than we had meant to. This was due in part to the grey, insubstantial quality the light that struggled through the inadequate window. We arrived at the ferry dock and bought our tickets- about $350 HK each, if I remember correctly. With 90 minutes to kill before departure, we wandered aimlessly around Central Station, at one point wandering into a Toys R Us (the only difference from the American branches being that instead of G.I. Joe, they had People's Liberation Army action figures).

We lost track of time while eating lunch in the ferry terminal, and realized with a shock that we had five minutes to get on board! Our tickets were pretty clear that we needed fifteen minutes to go through customs safely. We were, thankfully, still allowed through, despite being late.

The area of Macau where the Wynn Hotel shuttle bus dropped us off was a gambler's paradise. The skyline was made up largely of casinos, brilliantly lit at night. In contrast, the sights that most drew our attention hearkened back hundreds of years to the Portuguese settlement on Macau: the Ruins of St. Paul's church, with its ghostly facade etched on a hilltop against the sky; a stonework fortress; an old lighthouse (which still functions, albeit with an electric light), at the top of a tall, steep climb.

The sun was already setting by the time we found ourselves at the ruins of St. Paul's, so it was completely dark by the time we had climbed up to the lighthouse, and quite late by the time we started searching about for dinner. We found one lovely looking Portuguese restaurant, with wood-and-plaster walls and a cozy, lively feel, but we were told that it was booked straight until 9:30pm (our return ferry was scheduled for 10:30). A man sitting by the door told me with a satisfied smile that it was worth the wait. However, we didn't feel like waiting for over an hour to get into a restaurant, so we reluctantly began searching elsewhere.
About ten minutes later, on a whim, I ran back to the restaurant and asked again if there wasn't any way they could fit us in before 9:30. This time, the owner told me "Well, it's tight. Very tight. But we have a seat for three. It's very tight." I told him I didn't mind! We got in! Woo! It was my first and last really good meal this month, I think. I had steak and potatoes with seafood soup. Ahhh!
On our way back, we took a taxi to Macau Tower, but tickets to the observation deck were far too costly, so we ended up wandering across the street, into a huge culinary fair. What! And right after dinner! Maya and I got some icecream, at least, and perused the stalls for a little while before getting on a shuttlebus to the ferry dock.
However, it was the wrong ferry dock! When we realized this, we ran for a taxi, hailed it, and after a fifteen minute drive, arrived just in time to board our return ferry. Wow, the stress never ends.

The next day was our date with Buddha. Kamakura was nice and all, but I wanted some real Buddha, and I wasn't going to be satisfied with anything short of spectacular. Enter the Great Buddha of Lantau island: Serene on its mountain-top, 110 ft. in height and 280 tons in bulk.
The surrounding hillside is peppered with gift shops and a 7-Eleven, selling everything from fortunes to chopsticks and overpriced replicas of the buddha.
I had had this nagging feeling ever since we had to decide between the expensive cablecar and the bus in order to get to the buddha, but then it hit me: This is a tourist trap. A soulless, capitalistic tourist trap. The hiking trails are paved over in cement, there's a high-priced food court next to the temple, and the temple is all but screaming for donations from tourists.

The Buddha itself was spectacular, but more as a feat of engineering than one of spiritual devotion, or so it seemed to me. Climbing the 268 steps to the buddha's mountaintop platform, Maya happened to spy a pair of discarded panties on the staircase. The world is full of mysteries.

We hiked down off the mountain, but my shoes were hot. Daniel and I ended up going barefoot. A scruffy old dog lead us through the first twenty minutes of our hike, pausing at first every once in a while to check on us, and finally leaving us behind. The whole path was covered in concrete and uncomfortable on the knees, especially going down hill. At one point we spied a wild banana (or plantain? not sure) tree, growing in the forest, and Daniel and I managed to snatch a handful of large bittersweet bananas to eat as we walked.

We passed through the vegetable garden of a little Buddhist monastery on the way down. Finally we hit a bus stop, which carried us to downtown Lantau.
We took a train straight from there to the University of Hong Kong, to meet up with Leila (Daniel's old friend from his days in Italy). My feet were killing me- scuffed, mosquito-bit (it's still summer in Hong Kong!), and worst of all I had lost my socks at some point on the trail, so my shoes were unbearably stifling.
Imagine my relief when, within ten minutes of arriving at the University, Leila guides us to a student shop where I can buy cheap socks. Never have I felt such satisfaction from slipping on a pair of socks, and never again will I.
The University is beautiful, hugging a stretch of coast, with many dorms getting a clear view of the ocean. We spent our last night in Hong Kong drinking cheap beer by the seaside.

The next morning we were on our way back to Japan. Daniel and I had another good game of chess during the flight. In Narita Airport, there are signs in Japanese (without translations in other languages) which read "Welcome Home." For the first time, I really felt like I was returning home when I arrived in Japan.

The feeling was almost one of relief. It is difficult to articulate, but there is a sense of public order, decency, and mutual respect in Japan which I really missed in Hong Kong. It's good to be back.

Check my album on Facebook for many, many more pictures!

I'm back from Hong Kong (part I- Thursday, Friday)

Apologies for not updating, but my time in Hong Kong was far too insane, and the lady in the manager's office (the only place where I could find even a trickle of internet leaking through the walls) seemed not to like me. I think I scared her dog.

We got a thorough tour of the block, searching for our hostel after arriving in Kowloon, Hong Kong. We finally found it hidden on the fifth and seventh floors of a high-rise which also contained a cramped shopping center. The smell of the heavy oil used in the food stands outside hung like a curtain in the dilapidated stairwells. Our room was small. The floor was white tile, and there was a bunk-bed set against the far wall. A yellowed air-conditioner pumped cold air into the room. Below the air-conditioner was a small window which offered a grimy view of a narrow, blackened alleyway, which was so criss-crossed by trash-laden pipes and cables that it was impossible to see more than twenty feet down. The bathroom saved on space by having no separate shower area at all. Instead, the nozzle sprayed directly down onto the toilet, the sink, and the showerer.

Within the first three or four hours of our arrival, Leila (Daniel's contact in Hong Kong) had managed to track us down. We had returned about an hour earlier from a large outdoor market ("The Ladies' Market"), where I had managed to pick up a great canvass messenger bag (I think I managed to avoid the dreaded "manpurse" look). Unfortunately, I had not yet really learned how to haggle in terms of Hong Kong dollars, so I feel like I got gypped into paying more than I had to. It still wouldn't have been expensive (meaning over $20 US), if I hadn't seen a far more awesome bag after buying the first one. I ended up bartering! I traded the bag I had just bought to another stand, and threw in $50 hk (about $8 US), to get the bag I currently have. And I love it. So bah.

Right. Time for me to confess to some stupidity. So, remember how earlier I couldn't get into the Shibuya nightclub because of my damned sandals? Well, the first order of business after Leila found us was, of course, clubbing. And, of course, the only footwear I had brought to Hong Kong was...

So, my desire to save money, my desire to go clubbing, and my hope that either dress code would permit sandals or I would be overlooked, vied in my head. The compromise I came to was to attempt to get into the nightclub, and, should I be rejected, to find some shoes in the area.

In the end, of course, I did not go clubbing that night. All the stores were closed by the time we arrived, and despite the valiant efforts of a strange New Zealander named Rhys (who at one point, a little drunk, gave me his shoes), I was unable to enter the club. I tried my best to persuade Daniel, Maya, and Rhys to go in without me, but in the end we wandered, drinking and eating casually, through a classy district full of clothing shops, night clubs, and sleek bars.

At one point, Maya and I pushed Daniel (who was in a box) down a hill, and then all three of us climbed onto a crane trunk that was parked nearby.

The next day, however, shoes became a priority, and I found some. I was able to bargain down to $140 HK for them (about $18 US). So, not bad. The day before that was spent touring various gardens and temples around Hong Kong, but I'll let the photographs speak for that when I buy that blasted USB cable I need and upload them off my camera.

So, Friday night, cheap new shoes on my feet and a spring in my step, I went clubbing with Maya at the very same club I had been rejected from the night before. Daniel stayed home to recuperate from the day's exertions.

I have to say, the evening began inauspiciously. After entering the nearly deserted club (ten or eleven guys sitting around the bar drinking, no girls, no one dancing), and having a couple of drinks, the music suddenly stopped. The lights came up, and the club was filled with police. Roaming in teams of two or three, they began checking everyone's ID. Apparently, they were looking for underage drinkers. After scrutinizing my passport and scribbling something on a piece of paper, the last officer finally departed and the music resumed.

Two cranberry vodkas and a rumcoke later (did I mention it was an open-bar night?), things began looking up. Maya and I started dancing, because that is what we came there to do, and we were determined to succeed. Eventually, we were joined by two others, one of whom had been relentlessly hitting on Maya all night, in the crudest possible fashion. About an hour later, girls showed up. Yes!

The night got fun fast as more people started dancing and the DJ woke up and the alcohol kept flowing. Around 3am, the open bar ended, and we decided to take a taxi back home to get at least a little sleep before...