Japan March-April 2004

The senior chef, a senior citizen - and, I think, the proprietor - was busy serving a customer who had been coming to the Tensan for something like forty or fifty years.

The Tensan, apparently, was founded by the proprietor's father 130 years ago. (At least, that's what I think I heard, though "proprietor's grandfather" seems, in retrospect, to supply a more reasonable chronology.)

And, eating there, I felt something which I don't often feel in Japan: a momentary sense of being immersed in a tradition, in a stable and unchanging world. (Not a standard emotion in a country which is definitely in flux, and where the future looks increasingly uncertain.)

I was also impressed, and not for the first time, by the endlessness of Japanese cuisine, the incredible variety of it.

I was impressed anew last night, at a sushi restaurant in Gunma. One of the items on the drinks menu was fuguhirezake, which I'd never heard of before, but which, apparently, is a popular drink in winter. It is sake which has been flavored with the dried fins ("hire") of the fish known as fugu.

At this particular restaurant in the backblocks of Gunma, we had plenty of time to study the menu because the food took forever to arrive. After we'd ordered our sushi (actually, I ordered sashimi) it was an incrediby forty minutes, by the clock, before the dishes made it to the table. There was just one sushi chef working, and he was working very slowly, and part of his efforts were devoted to fulfilling take-out orders.

"Kimono wa shibui desu ne," observed one member of our party, meaning "The kimono is simple but refined," the kimono in question being that of the sole waitress, who was getting around in wooden sandals.

"Kimono taberarenai," responded the impatient member of the party, who doesn't like to wait - this could be translated as "You can't eat the kimono."

Being kept waiting like this was really unusual. In Tokyo and Yokohama, the food tends to arrive on the table reasonably quickly. Nobody has the time to sit around for forty minutes waiting while nothing happens.

When the food finally did turn up, I found that my sashimi set meal included a little bit of shirako, cold and gray.

Incidentally, I neglected to take my digital camera to the restaurant, and really regretted it, because they had something quite fascinating, a bonsai watermelon plant growing up a circular trellis, complete with little itty-bitty watermelons the size of tennis balls.

Section 102 Entry 0003. Date: 2004 March 29 Monday.
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Tonight's TV news showed scenes of counter-terrorism training in the Tokyo Dome, including sniffer dogs searching for bombs, baggage being put through X-ray machines and people walking through metal detectors. Tomrrow, the New York Yankees are playing an exhibition game in the Tokyo Dome - a high-profile American target right here in Japan.

Section 102 Entry 0004. Date: 2004 April 13 Tuesday.
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I got an e-mail suggesting I might like to think about blogging about the Japanese hostage situation, and so I might, except that I'm going through one of those stages when life in Japan is like being run over by a truck - the excitement never ceases but you start to get the feeling that it's too much of a good thing.

Japanese hostage situation? What can I say? It's story number one, and the general situation in Iraq is story number two. Every time I glance at the TV set something seems to be exploding. The hostage situation is just huge here, really big headlines in respectable newspapers, relatives of the missing on TV ... this one will run and run.

In case you missed it, the situation is that three young Japanese people with innocent purposes went to Iraq and got kidnapped by terrorists who threatened to execute them in three days unless the Japanese military pulled out of Iraq (where it has a small presence.) An Iraqi religious leader condemned this move, and the terrorists then said they would release the hostages ... but, so far, the three missing Japanese people have not surfaced, and things don't really look good.

Later: "terrorists" is a sloppy word. Maybe "insurgents" better fits the bill.

Later still: 2004 April 19 Monday: at this writing, the three original Japanese hostages have by now been released and have left Iraq, and it seems from the news that two further Japanese hostages have also been released, and have also left Iraq.

Section 102 Entry 0005. Date:2004 April 19 Monday.
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Still rushed off my feet but had time to check a few favorite Internet sites, and so discovered that groklaw.net

groklaw.net

has started playing the idea of creating something called "Grokdoc" which would be (as a snippet on slashdot.org puts it) "a large-scale linux-usability study".)

There is a big problem with Linux documentation, as I discovered for myself when I started out using Linux. My first step was to go to the bookstores here in Japan to see what books I could find. The Red Hat distribution was the one supported by the most English-language titles here in Japan, so that was the one I ended up buying.

Just yesterday I was printing something out while the computer was running under Linux when the printer stopped working. Under Windows, this is a simple problem: if the printing process runs into trouble then a dialog pops up and you get asked if you want to cancel the job or try again. Under Linux, however, the job just stops.

The first time this ever happened to me, I went for a week wondering why my printer refused to print under Linux. Finally, hunting around in "Red Hat Linux 6 Unleashed" (David Pitts, Bill Ball, et al - over 1,250 pages of stuff you might just possibly need to know) I found the "kill print job" instructions on page 477.

(Once you've figured out that there might be a print queue that you might have to kill some print job which is sitting in the queue then it's easy to find the data. But it's hard to find something if you haven't even realized what you should be looking for.)

Killing a print job is a two-step job. First, open a terminal and type in "lpq" and hit "Enter" and you will see a list of print jobs. Each has a number, for example 301. If you see the job is "stalled" then you know that the job has run into trouble. To kill it, use the "lprm" command plus the print job number, e.g. for print job "301" the command "lprm 301".

(I don't know if you need root access for this. When I needed to kill a print job yesterday, after opening a terminal I automatically opted for root access, without thinking about it.)

I'm now up to Red Hat Linux 8 but I still get good mileage bout of my Red Hat 6 how-to book, even though is undoubtedly out of date.

To be ready for world conquest, Linux really has to be organized so this kind of problem is self-solving.

Random cultural note from Japan: Linux makes really free and easy use of the word "kill," and a Japanese national was really surprised to see the English word "kill" pop up on the screen when the computer was shutting down. (I forget what was being killed - if my computer kills some process, I don't bother to weep for the dead.)

Comfortable, in a spare half-hour in the evenings, to forget about the real world and escape into cyberspace.

Anyway, that's my contribution to the Linux documentation debate: go out and buy the big fat manuals.

Still, the Grokdoc initiative is one I'm going to be following with interest.

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