Month: October 2008

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Clean Rice

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Last Thursday night, just outside the town of Tsukuba in Ibaraki Prefecture. We were walking along a semi-rural road just after sunset, and, not reading Japanese, I had no idea what this little kiosk was. My son Eamon said, “Well, what would a farming community like this need?” Well, there were rice fields all around us, scattered with single-family homes and small apartment buildings. But I still had no clue what I was looking at.

The large characters on the canopy say, “Kubota Clean.” What I was looking at was a personal rice mill (built by the Kubota company). People bring their winnowed household rice here, dump it in the hopper, put in some money, and this unit hulls and polishes the rice to the finely finished white grain most in Japan prefer. Not sure what the U.S. equivalent would be. A neighborhood flour mill to grind people’s wheat into flour?

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So, *That* Happened

Item 1: We returned from Japan today. In fact, I’m on my second Sunday evening (we took off from Narita airport, outside Tokyo, at about 7:15 Sunday night; and here it is getting close to 7:15 Sunday night after landing in San Francisco before noon. I understand the why and how of it, but it’s still strange.

Item 2: Before we left, I mentioned to someone that gee, the Cubs might be out of the playoffs by the time I get back home. Just indulging a moment of pre-emptively rueful Cubsy-ness. When we got home early this afternoon I picked up the San Francisco Chronicle, whose Sunday sports section featured not one but two misspelled names in other headlines, and saw the news that the Chicago nine had been swept. You can say wait till next year, or you can just admit you’re not waiting anymore. Go Pale Hose–spoil that beautiful Tampa Bay Rays story for us.

Item 3: Sometime I’ll relate my greatest adventure of September 2008, which was not flying to Japan but running out of gas on the very busy San Francisco Bay Bridge. I believe I’m an unindicted co-conspirator in the event, which involved a faulty fuel gauge.

Item 4: Not to leave the subject of The Trip too quickly: We flew Japan Air Lines both ways to Tokyo. Oddly (or probably not), about two-thirds of the seating space is devoted to first and business class. We were jammed in the back with the other groundlings. One of the entertainments offered on the screens-at-every-seat was a map of our flight’s progress. This morning, I saw that we were nearing the Northern California coast and started looking for Mount Shasta. The mountain is our Fuji, 14,000-some feet, a good hundred miles in from the coast. At the point I started looking, probably near Point Arena, we were about 200 miles from the mountain. But there, way off, rising above the clouds, was that beautiful snowy (not Sno-) cone.

It’s interesting to be back, even after just a week away.

(And where did the post title come from? Watch the clip below. You gotta stay with it to the end.)

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Mokuyobi

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Our last day in Tokyo on this trip. It’s a city reputed to have a daytime population of 30 million as people come in on the network of trains and subways to work. The packing you’ve heard about on Tokyo commuter trains is one effect of the rush into the city. In the evening, the crowd ebbs a bit more slowly. Lots of people stay in the city late, dining and drinking with workmates or friends. The next morning, the tide flows in again. That’s old news, but it’s still captivating to see firsthand.

The trains, whether you’re talking about the superfast long-distance lines like the Shinkansen or the most humble local, are stunning for their speed, efficiency, convenience and cleanliness. I’ve never seen anything that comes close in the United States–though that’s entirely for lack of trying. What the Japanese do with railroads requires a lot of money and a sort of infrastructure context–because the highway network is relatively undeveloped, you wouldn’t want to try a casual 200-mile drive anywhere unless you have a lot of time to burn. Back home, we spend more and more grudgingly on public works projects, but you can be sure that the money that’s out there will go to highways first and to every other mode of moving people second.

Again, old news. I’ll leave the Tokyo chapter with this advice: If you can, go with one of your kids–preferably after they’ve studied Japanese, married a local, lived in the city for a couple of years and have become fluent in the language. That way, you don’t have to worry about details like navigating on your own. In all seriousness, Eamon and Sakura have been the best guides we could have had. In fact, I feel like I missed out on the obligatory foreign-visitor anxiety.

Tonight, we’re in Tsukuba, a small city (by Japanese standards) about 50 miles north of Tokyo and at the end of a brand-new commuter rail line. Tomorrow we head up into the mountains north of here to the hot springs resort of Nikko. And then somewhere in the next two or three days, I guess we get back on a plane and fly to San Francisco. Not sure how much I’ll get to post between now and then. I’ll catch up on one side of the ocean or the other.

[Pictures (click for larger versions): Above: Up to JR platform at Kanda Station, downtown Tokyo. Below: Notice designating train car as “women only” during the morning commute–a measure taken to give female passengers a way of avoiding groping male riders. Bottom: As seen from Hijiri Bridge, trains cross the Kanda River at Ochanomizu Station.]

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Suiyobi: Today’s Top Commercial (and Other) Concepts

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I have a feeling you could spend all day, every day for a long time in Tokyo harvesting signs like these for the consideration and amusement of native English speakers. And when you were done with Tokyo, you’d have the rest of Japan to cover.

We talked a little bit today about English language words and names terms and why they’re popular here. In a lot of cases, it seems they’re employed merely as decoration–no one reads them for a literal meaning; their presence alone lends some sort of smart, cool quality. And somehow that leads to “Junky Style,” “Nudy Boy,” and all the rest.

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