Section 61 Entry 0001. Date: 2003 August 12 Tuesday.
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According to a free giveaway paper which circulates here in the Yokohama area (a paper simply called "Yokohama" - it's in Japanese, of course) a new subway line running between Yokohama Station and Chinatown is scheduled to open on 2004 February 1st.
The stops will be:-
1. Yokohama Station.
2. Shin Takashima Station.
3. Minato Mirai Station.
4. Bashamichi Station.
5. Nihon Ōdori Station.
6. Chūkagai Staion.
(The "Chūkagai" is apparently Japanese for Chinatown.)
The subway line will be called the "Minato Mirai Sen," i.e. the "Minato Mirai Line."
Section 61 Entry 0002. Date: 2003 August 17 Sunday.
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Here in Japan it's been cold and wet. I took Friday off and had a very quiet three days up in Gunma Prefecture. Gunma is pretty remote from civilization, but at least they have a reliable supply of electricity, which is more than can be said for New York.
This trip gave me a lot of time for writing, starting with all the hours spent on the stop-at-every-station train. I made a lot of progress on the Bamboo Horses novel, which should get finished this year.
I also added some stuff to the website:-
Added a couple more sections of the travel book that I wrote back in 1992, originally called TRAVELS IN JAPAN. The new sections are A TOURIST'S JAPANESE, JAPAN: FIRST IMPRESSIONS and JAPANESE PICTURE WRITING. Also added the science fiction robot dog story GOLGO MOLGO and the alien invasion flash fiction PERFECTLY ADJUSTED. Also added a rifle range poem called A MANTRA.
Section 61 Entry 0003. Date: 2003 August 18 Monday.
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Two or three times a week, I try to find out what's new in the world of depleted uranium, a frustratingly difficult subject to research. In a nutshell, the United States military throw this stuff around with reckless abandon, claiming that it's safe, but it's rumored to cause both cancers and genetic defects.
Today, something surfaced on a site run by The Japan Times - an article about some doctors who are visiting Japan from Iraq.
Today the relevant article is at:-
The article reports that doctors from the southern area of Iraq are saying that cancer cases are up following the use of depleted uranium munitions by the United States in the first Gulf War in 1991. Cancers and birth deformities. The following figures appear to relate to the Basra area and are attributed to Janan Ghalib Hassan, who apparently is a doctor:-
Hassan, 47, said that in 2001, 611 babies were born with no limbs, no eyes or other birth defects, compared with 37 such cases in 1990.
The significance of these claims of DU damage, to my mind, is that doctors from Iraq are still saying that DU is dangerous even though Saddam Hussein has fallen. Similar statements were coming from Iraq before Saddam's fall, and the changed political situation has not altered the tune that Iraqi doctors have been singing. This suggests that what Iraqi doctors have been saying about the dangers of DU is medical opinion rather than regime propaganda.
Section 61 Entry 0004. Date: 2003 August 19 Tuesday.
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Here in Japan, the weather continues to be cold and wet. Today, in Tokyo, it has been a gray, overcast day, nothing at all like summer. I find myself a little sad and depressed. Where is the summer we were promised?
It's not that I like summer. If you asked me, I'd say that I hated the hot, sweaty Japanese summer, when perspiration pours off me in rivulets and my overheating computer has to be cooled down with external fans or an icepack or both.
Even so, I find myself missing the summer we're not having.
Back before the cold spell set in, there was a day when I was sitting at home, working in the heat of the day, no airconditioning on, sweating like a big, two fans both focused on the computer so that I was awash with warm air, and I felt just great. Energized.
But, with the moody, listless weather, everything's been feeling a bit ... empty. Decayed. I've found myself noticing things ... signs of abandonment and decay ... like an abandoned bicycle slowly collapsing into a hedge ... and up at Gunma, on the weekend, the graveyard was kind of sad ... black stone ... gray skies ....
No cicadas to speak of ... we're not at cicada zero, but cicadas are few and far between ... occasionally I see one on its back in a puddle of water, kicking feebly ... I kind of think the bad weather has slaughtered this summer's cicadas ....
From conversations with other people, I've found that I'm not the only one who's feeling a bit flat ....
On yesterday's TV news, one of the themes was
reika
("cold summer")
The TV news program showed shots of beaches unnaturally empty.
Although one doesn't think of Japan as being a beach culture country, nobody's far from the sea and a lot of people do in fact end up at the beach.
A great many Japanese beaches are highly commercialized. You can go to the beach for free, but up above the high tide mark there will very often be concession stands (often actually reasonably substantial buildings with concrete floors and permanent kitchens) selling noodles, sweet corn, soft drinks, beer and all the rest of it.
Then, of course, there are the restaurants near the beachfront, and the places which hire out beach umbrellas and so on and so forth, and if we add all that together then we must be talking about quite a considerable beach life economy.
However, what's really taking the punches right now is the rice crop. There's an article about this in today's English-language edition of The Asahi Shimbun (bundled here in Japan with the International Herald Tribune).
The article, on page 20, is headlined "One of the worst rice harvests looms," which says that "To many, fall has arrived without a summer to speak of."
The article starts like this:-
The cool summer is fraying the tempers of rice farmers who worry about a repeat of 1993, said to be the worst harvest since the end of World War II.
Back in former ages, the failure of the rice harvest used to mean mass starvation in Japan ... no such drama nowadays, of course.