report from the front lines: Operation Japan Trade proceeds apace

To: Directorate, Operation Japan Trade
From: False Data
Re: Report from Front Line Operations

As I compose this message on a Toshiba computer while reading about Toyota Motor Corporation's successes in automobile sales and the increasing United States trade deficit, a cursory inspection would seem to show a retreating trade position. However, I am pleased to report significant advances in the Grand Plan of Operation Japan Trade.

The integration of Starbucks into the Japanese economy is nearly complete, and integration into the nation's culture is making significant strides.

Furthermore, Eddie Bauer now has a strong presence.

However, the Directorate will be justly proud to learn of the success of its most audacious move: please note the popularity of the recently-introduced Krispy Kreme:

With strides such as this, it is only a matter of time before the Directorate can declare Operation Japan Trade a resounding success.

Please Enjoy Japanese Public Toilet

The meaning of the word "enjoy" gets stretched a bit by tour guides. "Thanks to hydroelectric power, we enjoy electricity in our homes." "Please enjoy this promotional video." However, the architecture of some of the public restrooms is surprisingly enjoyable.

Here's one in Tokyo shaped like a fountain:

I think I may have posted it earlier, but it's the one that got us looking at others, and started a running joke of "collecting" them. Also in Tokyo:


In the mountains, somewhere around Nikko:

and Kegon Waterfall:


In Takayama:


Finally, this one's only semi-public. It's actually an outhouse attached to the farmhouse I wrote about earlier:


Except for the outhouse, which has a plank and a hole, inside a public toilet you'll find a commode that's either the more familiar western-style sit-upon variety or the Japanese style which is set in the ground and you squat over it. Sorry, I don't have a picture of the commode itself.

Soap for hand washing is fairly rare as are hand drying facilities which, when present, are inevitably electric hand driers rather than paper towels. (They have a high pressure hand drier here which is considerably more effective than the "press button, wipe hands under warm air" variety common in the U.S.)

Kyoto

Ah, Kyoto, my other favorite city in Japan. A thousand years of history in one glorious jumble. It's a shame we had only a day to tour the city--it's like trying to tour Rome in a day. I would much rather have had two weeks and a small library of Japanese history books to properly appreciate the city.

Only an hour to visit Nijo Castle! They don't allow photos (or sketching) inside, but I could get pictures of parts of the outside of the castle.

And of the surrounding garden:


The castle features the famous "nightingale floors," floors purposely made to chirp as you walk over them to deter assassins and spies. For the mechanically inclined, here's a close-up of the mechanism that does the chirping when there's pressure on the floorboard above:


Then it was off to the shrine and temple grab bag. Kitano Tenmangu:


Kinkakuji, the Golden Pavilion:

(Yes, that's gold leaf.)

Heianjingu:


and the garden around it:


Sanjusangen-do, filled with a thousand and one golden statues of the Buddhist deity Juichimen-senjusengen Kanzeon:

too bad they don't allow pictures inside.

And finally Kiyomizudera Temple:


where we stopped for a much-needed shaved ice.

parking in Japan

Travel in Japan has given me a whole new appreciation for parking. In this country, you may not purchase an automobile unless you can present a certificate showing you have a place to park it, so you see some pretty amazing parking jobs, and some rather tiny cars. (A Toyota Prius is a large car here.)

For instance, consider this parallel parking job. That's a foot deep trench between the rear wheels.

This structure is a vertical parking lot.

It holds one or two cars per floor. There's a turntable at the bottom to rotate the car to the proper position and an elevator to lift it to the floor with the parking place.

They typically rent out spaces by the month, about 2,000 yen per month (around $200) in Kanazawa. More in Tokyo.

Or how about this arrangement to let you put four cars in two spaces?

As I mentioned, the cars are also smaller. Some of them extremely small. There are two classes of general passenger cars, the normal-sized ones and the "lightweight cars" which have an engine smaller than 1000 cubic centimeters. You can recognize the lightweight ones by their yellow license plate. A Honda Fit, which is one of the smaller cars available in the U.S., is too big for the "lightweight" class. Here's a lightweight van next to a tour bus for comparison:

This is what one looks like close-up: very small wheelbase and tall seating position (so you can see over the other traffic).

They're not much bigger than a motorcycle.

unexpected interdependences, or why a mobile phone makes a poor alarm clock

When I travel, I often don't carry a travel alarm. Instead, I generally rely on my mobile phone's built-in alarm clock feature. During this trip, I discovered that's not such a good idea because of unexpected interdependences in technology.

You see, my phone sets its current time from the cellular network, which is handy because it means the phone's clock is usually very accurate. But the phone is not an international model. So when I turn on the phone here in Japan, it gets stuck looking for a cellular network, which it's never going to find because the network is on a different set of frequencies. So there's no way to get to the alarm clock function because the phone's stalled on the network search. And there's no way to manually set the time. Rather than degrading gracefully to let me use the other functionality, the phone's basically a very sophisticated electronic paperweight.

My old Palm Pilot has an alarm clock feature as well, but I've been hesitant to use it because, to make sure I wake up at the right time, I'd need to change its clock to local time. But Japan's on the other side of the international date line from the U.S. I have no idea what happens if I advance the clock, make an entry, and then upon returning to the U.S. reset the clock to what the Palm Pilot will believe is the previous day.

So far, we've been using wake-up calls at the hotels, which are an automated system at the places where we've been staying. They've been working out pretty well, but that's a heck of a lot of technology to rely upon, and the tour guides are sticklers for punctuality.

Maybe next time I'll just bring an old fasioned mechanical wind-up alarm clock.

Kanazawa

Kanazawa was interesting but not the knockout that Takayama City was. We visited Kenroku Garden, one of the most famous Japanese-style gardens in Japan.

Notice how this island is shaped like a turtle (with a heron perched on the turtle's head . . .):

Originally, this garden was the private garden of the shogun who controlled this area. It costs about five million dollars a year to maintain it.

Next was the a pottery studio that has been making kutani pottery for five generations.

We visited a former geisha house, now a museum, and wound up the tour with a shop and manufacturing facility that makes and uses gold leaf.

. . . where they treated us to tea with (real) gold flakes in it.

This place is known for, among other things, having a million dollar bathroom: the ladies' side is picked out in gold leaf, while the mens' is in platinum leaf.

damp day, but cool stuff

Note to self #1: when traveling, remember to waterproof your leather shoes. Or at least put water-friendly sandals in the little bag they let you take with you on the tour bus.

Note to self #2: the night after taking over 130 pictures, remember to recharge the camera's battery. We had just enough juice for another thirty pictures or so.

The next day in Takayama City dawned with another rainstorm and a rather damp trip to the farmer's market.
The next stop was a traditional gassho-style house, the Toyama family's farmhouse.
No hardware is used in the construction of the house. Instead, they join all the beams and other parts using carefully cut joints and wooden wedges and use rope in certain other areas. The steeply-sloped roof handles the two meters (six feet) of snow the area sometimes receives. The house has a straw-thatched roof that must be replaced every forty years or so.

After touring this large farmhouse, we went to Shirakawa village, a historically-preserved village full of this style of house.

The next stop was Gokayama, the heart of the paper-making industry, where they've been making mulberry-bark paper for three hundred years or so. We got a chance to try our hands at making paper (just the easy part of turning pulp into paper, not the hard part of preparing the bark and making the pulp.) Unfortunately, that's about the time the camera ran out of juice. They mentioned that paper-making is a dying art and they're trying to find new uses for washi paper, which has me thinking about structural applications. (Hey, if they can make paper sculptures, wallets, and purses, it may also be strong enough for some very interesting structural uses.)

Takayama City is now on my list of favorite cities in Japan

We traveled to Takayama City first by Shinkansen, the bullet train.

I'm having some problems posting videos from the train. I'll try to get them up in a few days.

Later, we changed to a local train that wound its way through mountains and valleys for two hours to get to the city.

The city itself is small, but they've preserved the old town beautifully.

Twice each year, they have a festival parade that's apparently quite famous, with over a hundred thousand people coming to attend (and hotel space for about a tenth of that.) It's sort of the exact opposite of the Rose Bowl. For the Rose Bowl parade, they make the floats the day before out of flower petals, so they're the most ephemeral things you could imagine. In contrast, many of the parade floats for the Takayama festival are three hundred years old or more. We saw a few of them in a museum, where they rotate several of the floats through:

That night, we had a fantastic dinner of mountain vegetables and a bit of meat cooked at a gas burner at the table using locally made miso. One nabe dish:

and one sukiyaki:

Mt. Fuji, Hakone, and culture shock

Today's trip was to Mount Fuji and Hakone. Mount Fuji is a volcano that hasn't erupted in 300 years, which is roughly a blink in geological times. It's usually cloudy, but we got a glimpse of the north slope.

At altitude, though, we were in the clouds:

which later turned into a rainstorm preventing a planned cable car trip.


By the end of the day, we landed in a hot spring resort in Hakone. This evening, culture shock started settling in, or at least that's what I'm calling it. No one particular thing precipitated it, it's just that feeling that you get when you realize you're on a boat and far enough out to sea that you have no hope of swimming to land if the thing sinks. It's one of those adjustment processes I'll have to get through.

Tokyo, at least, and much of the rest of Japan seems very western on the surface, but there are some profound cultural differences. I used to think the breakdown was along the lines of convenience versus presentation, where the U.S. is more focused on convenience while Japanese culture values presentation more. Now I'm beginning to change my mind. I think the real difference is that U.S. culture places a strong value on flexibility, while Japanese culture more strongly values order. For example, trying to find a coin laundry in Japan has proven exceptionally difficult, unless you want one associated with a hotel, in which case it's most likely available only to hotel guests. Similarly, getting a doggie bag from a restaurant here is pretty much unheard of (and if you ask for one you're likely to get an excuse along the lines of it being a hot day, and they don't want to endanger you with possible food spoilage--translation: you're bucking the trend and they have no idea how to deal appropriately with the request.) As long as you go with the flow, things flow beautifully, but if you (say) would rather not pay 60,000 yen (around $60 U.S.) for the hotel buffet, and would rather make your own arrangements for dinner, or you simply didn't have dinner reservations, you may have a lengthy search for available food that goes beyond Cup Noodles.