random notes from Japan

Section 123 Entry 0001. Date: 2004 October 22 Friday.
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Last weekend, another typhoon hit Japan, in Japanese parlance Typhoon Number 23, the tenth typhoon this year to make a landfall on the Japanese mainland, which apparently is a record.

The typhoons seem to have been influenced by disaster movies, with each typhoon bigger than the next, and with a higher body count, and with better special effects. This typhoon killed a sobering number of people, seventeen according to one newspaper headline I saw, although it has to be admitted that some of these deaths do seem to be avoidable. One way to die during a typhoon, for example, is to get fall off your roof while attempting emergency repairs.

As of 2004 October 23 Saturday, Japan's NHK 1 TV news was reporting (at 12 noon) that ninety people were dead or missing in the aftermath of Typhoon Number Twenty-three.

Section 123 Entry 0002. Date: 2004 October 23 Saturday.
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Usually I do the grocery shopping on Saturdays and usually I'm trusted to do it without supervisory inputs, but today I got special instructions not to buy any leafy green vegetables. Why? Because of Typhoon Number Twenty-three.

bIn the aftermath of this typhoon, the price of leafy green vegetables has gone through the roof, with the price of a single lettuce hitting 1,050 yen in Yokohama. If we assume that 110 yen is an American dollar, which might or might not be the case, then that puts the price of a single lettuce at US $9.54 or therabouts.

Apparently supermarkets have been cutting lettuces in half or into quarters in order to produce a product with an affordable price.

To tell the truth, I'm not sure what a lettuce usually costs, but I think it would be somewhere between 150 and 250 yen.

Anyway, today, at the supermarket I didn't even look at the leafy green vegetables, but came home with a full backpack, the contents of which cost just over 5,000 yen (about US $45.45), but which did not include tomatoes. Black mark! No BLT sandwiches this Saturday!

If I'd bought the tomatoes there would have been BLT sandwiches because we do still have a quarter of a lettuce tucked away in the refrigerator. And on Tuesday we'll be getting a complete lettuce, at the usual pre-typhoon price, courtesy of the home delivery service of a supermarket chain called Coop, which presumably was able to sign a contract locking in prices before this year's bad weather disordered the market.

(Later ... I checked, and it seems we're paying 156 yen for a Coop lettuce.)
[Three days later: Damn! No lettuce!]

Section 123 Entry 0003. Date: 2004 October 24 Sunday.
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Yesterday evening, just before six o'clock, the house here in the city of Yokohama on the east coast of the island of Honshu (the largest of Japan's four main islands) began to shake with a prolonged earth tremor.

"It's an earthquake," I explained to my baby daughter, six months of age. "So now we're going to get under the table and keep away from windows."

Instead, I continued to sit blobbed out on the sofa, watching the TV, which very shortly began broadcasting news of a big earthquake (a little over six on the Japanese intensity scale) in Niigata Prefecture, across the island on the west coast of Honshu.

Later that evening, as I was working in the kitchen, something very strange happened inside my head, as if a wave of irresistible power was moving through the universe, unbalancing reality and revoking the certainties of gravity.

"If this is just happening to me then I'm in big trouble," I thought, or something along those lines.

And I looked around for confirmation of an external event and saw that the lightbulb hanging from a cord overhead seemed to be swaying very slightly. I went into the livingroom and took at look at baby Cornucopia's Woodstock and Snoopy mobile, and saw that all the Woodstocks were definitely swaying backwards and forwards.

That strange undulating earth tremor was our share of the second of the night's big earthquakes in Niigata.

By the time we were eating dinner, the TV news was saying that there had been three big earthquakes in Niigata, but here in Yokohama I only felt the first two.

This morning, at 0810, the news on NHK 1 was saying that there were fifteen people dead in Niigata and over seven hundred injured. By coincidence, we happened to have recently bought a third twenty-liter plastic water storage container to hold water for use in the aftermath of an earthquake. My first job of the day was to fill it.

Section 123 Entry 0004. Date: 2004 October 25 Monday.
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Random notes from a sleepless hour. A sharp jerk from the earth at about 05:30 this morning, not enough to have woken me up, had I been asleep. Presumably our share of one of the continuing series of earthquakes in Niigata.

I think I heard on the TV news yesterday that in Niigata there had been over 280 earthquakes powerful enough to be felt.

As of about 17:00 yesterday, NHK news here in Japan was reporting that there had been twenty-one deaths which could be attributed to the earthquakes (including some people said to have died of shock) and that hospitals had received an influx of 1,500 casualties. And in the news bulletin starting at 19:00, NHK was reporting that, in the aftermath of the earthquakes, there were 60,000 refugees.

Random note: JR rubbish bins. Earlier in the year, in an entry on terrorism precautions in Japan, I noted that trash cans had been sealed on the Tōyoko line, one of the train lines in the Tokyo-Yokohama area, and that, following the sealing of the cans, the authorities had started actually removing them.

The trash cans have been absent ever since, but, up until very recently, all the garbage receptacles on JR lines were open for business as usual.

Last week, however, I noticed that the trash cans had vanished from a couple of JR lines. I don't know whether this is a general phenomenon or whether it just relates to the couple of lines that I happened to use, and I don't know if it's temporary or semi-permanent, but my guess is that it represents a ratcheting up of security precuations.

And on another random note, last night our neighbors dropped by to introduce us to their new baby, now one month old. They brought us a present, a "tsumaranai mono" (a "boring thing") which turned out to be an exquisitely wrapped box of something, probably some kind of chocolate or confectionary (I don't know because we haven't opened it yet.)

On this visit, the neighbors only came as far as the genkan, the foyer, which is standard practice. People do not, as a rule, come into your house. Our neighbors have only twice entered our house, both times for a council of war on what was (at the time) our garbage crisis.

Here in Japan we're coming up to 07:00, and the NHK weather forecast has just reported that the outlook for Niigata is cloudy weather with rain developing later in the day. The news will be on in a moment (in Japanese, of course) and I'll try to catch the highlights.

NHK news ... on the NHK 1 TV channel, which I'm listening to by radio ... another intensity five earthquake this morning in Niigata Prefecture ... in Niigata there have now been 351 earthquakes strong enough to be felt ... fear of landslides ... people cold in the night as temperatures dropped ... and, if I remember correctly what I heard earlier, it seems there are shortages of food, water, blankets and baby goods ...

In fact, a reporter is just now saying that, in the location he's reporting from, there's a shortage of food ....

On the basis of its own research, NHK is now putting the number of deaths attributable to the earthquake at twenty-three (this is NHK's own figure, not an official death toll). That figure at about 07:15 this morning.

And another random note. We took baby Cornucopia out in the pram yesterday, visiting the local elementary school, where she saw her first rabbits. (Elementary schools here in Japan typically feature cages in which small animals are raised, the raising of animals being part of the process of civilizing small children.)

Reaction from Cornucopia: I thought, a little bit of anxiety. Her mother thought, a wrinkling of the nose at the bad smell.

She also saw a dog, probably her first dog (we think it was her first dog) and was invited to look at "wan-chan" (a term which could be translated as "doggy".) No perceptible reaction.

Section 123 Entry 0005. Date: 2004 October 26 Tuesday.
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Damn! No lettuce! Our much-awaited Coop lettuce, supposedly available at the price of 156 yen, was not delivered. Instead, we got an apology. But you can't make a BLT sandwich with an apology.

Section 123 Entry 0006. Date: 2004 October 26 Tuesday.
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Pretty busy these days, what with my job and my baby daughter. I don't have much time left for my website, and I have even less time left for answering the trickle of e-mail that comes my way. Which is a pity, because the people who do write tend to be long-standing fans of the CHRONICLES OF AN AGE OF DARKNESS series, people who have read and reread all ten books over the years, and who (by this time) undoubtedly know them much better than I do.

Usually I check my e-mail at night, just before going to bed, and answering e-mail cuts into my sleeping time, so my answers have a tendency to be brutally brief.

Anyway, I find myself with a couple of spare moments today, so I thought I'd address a couple of issues arising out of my e-mail.

Do I have time to read sample chapters of works in progress? Or of completed novels, for that matter? Regrettably, no. I'm overloaded, more than one hundred percent committed, and I can't take on anything more. I have any number of tasks being left undone because of time pressure, ranging from cleaning up my room to knuckling down to the study of Japanese.

What would I recommend to read? Based on what I've read in, say, the last ten years or so? To this I have to say that I've read a pitifully small amount in the last ten years and (doubtlessly as a result of the narrowness of my reading) I don't have any stunning new writers or books to recommend.

Steve asks "have you ever considered writing a novel that was strictly commercial? You mention that The Wordsmiths and the Warguild was written with this in mind, but I was thinking of something more along the lines of The Da Vinci Code or one of those pulpy bestselling thrillers you get from airports."

I think the answer is that if I could then I would. Actually, I always have high commercial ambitions for my books (however unrealistic those ambitions might be) but, because of the time and effort required to write a full-length novel, the text has to be something capable of sustaining my own interest for a prolonged period of time, and that always tilts the text in a literary direction.

Lastly, a note about a fan website designed by the abovementioned Steve, and designed, I think it's fair to say, with keen fans of the CHRONICLES in mind.

The link to the fan site is (or was, when I last looked):-

www.idlefellows.com/hughcook/

If you found your way to the zenvirus.com site because of an interest in the CHRONICLES, you might care to check out the link.

Section 123 Entry 0007. Date: 2004 October 30 Saturday.
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It's Saturday, and in my part of Japan it's a little cold and a little rainy. In keeping with my customary Saturday routine, I go on a shopping trip. My route takes me past a cafe which advertizes, in English-language signage, the availability of, amongst other things, club sand, hot sand, and cafe ratte.

On arriving at the supermarket, I discover another Japanese delight, one I've never noticed until now: a packet of mushrooms labelled Gourmet Mush. Apparently this wonderful name is a registered trademark, so don't go thinking you can use it to market your mushrooms.

In the supermarket, I get the stuff on my shopping list, which is yoghurt, natto (fermented soybeans), margarine, tomatoes, three kinds of mushrooms, chicken, pork, and a packet of sprouting soy beans (the long leafy tendrils of green growing from the beans are cut off and eaten as a salad vegetable.)

Then I buy some other stuff which is not on the shopping list, including raisins and prunes. But I don't buy lettuce. Lettuce has been typhooned out of our price bracket. There are, in fact, very few lettuces in the supermaket at all. Two of them are sitting on a shelf which could, when full, have held perhaps half a dozen lettuces at most. They are priced at 398 yen apiece.

I look at some steak labelled as being from Australia. If the label is true, then the steak will be BSE-free. However, I don't buy it. Even though it's from Australia, it's expensive. It's heavily marbelled with fat in the manner favored by Japanese gourmets, meaning that, if it really is from Australia, it's from a farm which is raising animals using some kind of fat-marbelling method specifically aimed at the Japanese market.

However, I do add a couple of other odds and ends to my shopping trolley (a standard Japanese shopping trolley, which is perhaps two thirds of the size of a Western shopping trolley) and head for the cash register. The total comes to 3,532 yen, so, following one of the conventions of shopping in Japan, I short out 532 yen in small change and hand over that plus a ten thousand yen bill, so the only change I get is in bills.

The convention (perhaps what I've just written isn't immediately clear) is that, if possible, you hand over payment in such a form that the cashier's need to make change is minimized. For example, if something happened to cost 9,002 yen, and if you had a 10,000 yen bill and a five yen coin, you would hand over both the bill and the coin, a total of 10,005 yen, so the cashier could give change in the form of a single thousand yen bill plus three one yen coins, which is easier than receiving a 10,000 yen bill in payment and having to come up with 998 yen in coins.

My basic arithmetic is shamefully bad, and, on top of that, I have a tendency to drop coins on the floor when fumbling them out of the little coin purse which lives inside our larger household shopping purse, so I don't really like this convention. Even so, I do my best to follow it.

Section 123 Entry 0008. Date: 2004 October 31 Sunday.
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Before going to the barber's today, I double-checked the Japanese for "parting." And just as well. The word I had in mind was wakame, but that, apparently, means "seaweed." The word I needed was wakeme.

The phrase Wakeme sono mama means "Leave the parting where it is." The phrase I had been intending to say, Wakame sono mama, means "Don't mess with the seaweed."

I always go to the same barbershop but my hair is always cut by a different person, even though there are never more than two or three barbers on duty (the place only has three barber chairs.)

Today's barber was a man I'd never seen before, who looked to be in his fourties, an overweight man who was smoking a cigarette when I sat in the chair. He seemed to be full of impatience, kept giving little effort grunts, and did violent things to my scalp and hair with his scissors and comb.

I was put in mind of an old story I once read, many years ago, a story written, I think, maybe a couple of hundred years ago, and written, perhaps, in Spanish. (I can remember neither the title nor the author, but I do know that it's a very famous story.)

The story goes something like this:-

There is a certain barber who is living in a town which has been occupied by the soldiers of a foreign power (possibly the French.) Being a patriot, he would, naturally, murder the leader of these soldiers, if he could. (In other words, in today's English the barber is a terrorist.)

Now, one day the terrorist barber is at work when who should come into his barber shop but the boss officer who commands the foreign soldiers who have occupied the town. And the barber immediately decides that, yes, he will murder this man.

The enemy officer sits down in the chair and the barber cuts the enemy officer's hair and then shaves the enemy officer with his cutthroat razor, all the time revolving in his mind thoughts of how he is going to kill this man. But, somehow, the barber never finds the moment for murder. His professional habits are too strong.

And, when all is done, and the enemy officer is ready to leave the barber shop, the enemy officer says to the barber, with total poise, something along the lines of, "You know, they told me that if I came in here then you would murder me."

Then smiles and leaves.

End of story.

My own barber finished off the haircut by shaving the skin under my ears and at the back of my neck with a cutthroat razor which felt uncommonly sharp, but I escaped the shop unmurdered, living to blog another day.

Note: on checking further, I find that wakeme apparently denotes one specific type of seaweed. For the generic term "seaweed" my English-Japanese dictionary supplies the words kaisou and nori.

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