Section 36 Entry 0001. 2003 March 31 Monday.
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Last night I cooked stingray for the first time. This was an interesting culinary adventure, but to be honest I cannot say that it was an unqualified success. In fact, it rather reminded me of the time when I tried to establish whether you can cook steak in a steamer. (Answer: yes, you can, but don't count on being able to eat the results.)

Some time ago - last year, I think - I ate stingray for the first time at a French restaurant in Iidabashi, in the heart of Tokyo. It was served very elegantly with capers and (if memory serves) with some kind of sauce, and it was reasonably palatable.

However, it seems that there is an art to correctly preparing stingray, because my own method - frying it with canola oil - did not really work.

For a start, when the packet was opened, the stingray proved to be rather smelly, which was rather off-putting. Then, as the stingray was cooked, it progressively disintegrated, so that by the time the frying was done a considerable portion of the stingray had collapsed into a gloopy white slush.

Fortunately, I had bought plenty of stingray, so I scraped the worst of the slush into the trash and served up the more promising bits. Unfortunately, the most promising of the promising bits proved to be lumps of stingray bone rather than stingray flesh. (I think that, technically, stingrays have cartilage rather than bone, but for the purposes of cookery they have bones.)

The part of the stingray which was not bone was edible, sort of. It was very soft and very white - cooked stingray, like raw stingray, has an ectoplasmic hue, a kind of mutant gray-white, not the most attractive of things to bite into.

Anticipating that there might be a color problem, I had boiled up some cheerful yellow sweetcorn to go with the stingray. But the stingray was still defiantly spectral, and eating it was like eating something soft and tasteless which has been extruded from someone's nose. After a very few bites, I gave up.

Fortunately, anticipating that the stingray might prove less than ideal, I had cooked up something more conventional to go with it - baby squid - and so we did not go hungry. Additionally, we had flying fish eggs, extremely small and intensely orange globules of nutrition, and sprinkling a healthy dollop of these things on top of your bowl of rice is a good way to cheer yourself up when the rest of the meal hasn't quite gone according to plan.

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Section 36 Entry 0002. Date: 2003 April 01 Tuesday.
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Cherry Blossom, April 2003

Fresh blossoms.
No thought of falling.
Behind closed eyelids,
Smoke.

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Section 36 Entry 0003. Date: 2003 April 01 Tuesday.
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Global plague SARS update - today I added to my SARS links page a link to the New Zealand Ministry of Health SARS page.

The reason is that I feel I can trust the New Zealand government to tell me the truth (at least on this issue). Additionally, my prejudices tell me that New Zealand is a country where people are good at taking practical steps to adapt to changing conditions. (Admittedly, I'm prejudiced. I'm here in Japan on a New Zealand passport.)

The SARS situation has the potential to change very, very quickly, and any information posted anywhere is likely to become out of date fairly fast. With that caveat, here is the New Zealand Ministry of Health's SARS's page's list of SARS symptoms, taken from the page today, 2003 April 01 Tuesday (Japan time):-

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The main symptoms and signs of this form of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome include:

  * high fever (more than 38 degrees Celsius)

    AND

  * one or more respiratory symptoms including cough, shortness of breath, difficulty breathing

    AND one or more of the following:

  * close contact with a person who has been diagnosed with SARS

  * recent history of travel to areas reporting cases of SARS

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Note that "AND," "AND," "AND". Regarding the temperature, note that the American CDC (Centers for Disease Control) states that the illness generally begins with a fever of greater than 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit.

Am I worried? Well, yes. A little. I find myself thinking things like "This disease has the potential to kill more people than George Bush," even though the disease would have to get pretty ambitious to do that.

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Section 36 Entry 0004. Date: 2003 April 01 Tuesday.
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There is an article on SARS in today's newspaper. It describes how 241 people are now quarantined in Hong Kong in an apartment building called the Amoy Gardens. The new strain of killer pneumonia has spread through this apartment block, and the interesting thing is that:-

The cases in the building first spread vertically, turning up in the same two units on multiple floors of Block E.

This pattern led investigators to suspect a common elevator, air supply or meeting place, but no route has been determined.

This is from the International Herald Tribune as published in Japan today, page 5, under a headline "Sars: quarantine on new Hong Kong cases".

Elsewhere, the paper records how Hong Kong stocks have been hit hard by the SARS outbreak.

Two thoughts are going through my mind, one a question and the other a statement. The question is "How long before SARS reaches Japan?" The statement is "The Japanese economy really doesn't need this."

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Section 36 Entry 0005. Date: 2003 April 01 Tuesday.
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SARS death rate: three point five percent of infected cases. Statistic from CNN, 2003 April 01 Tuesday at about 1553, Japan time.

Incubation period: about four days - "the average incubation period -- the time it takes from exposure to symptoms -- is about 4 days, ranging from 2 to 10." Source: New York Times article accessed online 2003 April 01 about 1858 Japan time, article title "Step by Step, Scientists Track Mystery Ailment" by Lawrence K. Altman, M.D.

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Section 36 Entry 0006. Date: 2003 April 3 Thursday.
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SARS update Japan:-

Today, as I traveled through the Tokyo-Yokohama area by train, I kept an eye out to see how many people were wearing surgical masks. I saw a few, but no more than usual. At any time, a certain number of Japanese people will be wearing face masks, usually because they have a cold and do not wish to spread it; additionally, at this time of year, a certain number of hayfever sufferers wear surgical masks as a protection against pollen.

The masks are worn, when they are worn, in the home, while traveling and at work. When I taught at junior high school, I would sometimes see teachers wearing them at school. In this season, the hayfever season, some people even wear these masks while sleeping.

As noted above, I saw only a few masks being worn in public today, and there was no indication that the number of facemasks being worn had increased. However, anxiety about SARS seems to be rising in Japan, at least on an official level, and today's edition of The Asahi Shimbun (the English-language version, bundled in Japan with the International Herald Tribune) has a big article on page 21 headlined "Red alert: Institutions brace for the possibility of the SARS epidemic reaching Japan."

Points made by the article include the following:-

• So far there are no official reports of SARS cases in Japan.

• Worldwide, as of April 01, about 1,800 people had been infected by SARS, of whom at least 62 had died. (Source of statistics: World Health Organization.)

From reading the article, it seems that the authorities here in Japan have not yet figured out how to handle any outbreak of SARS in this country. The article says many experts:-

suspect the disease is transmitted through contact with bodily secretions or exhaled droplets. That being the case, medical staff would be required to gargle and wash their hands after coming into possible contact with the disease.

But now, health experts believe the virus is airborne.

From reading the article, it is not clear to me which particular "health experts" are said to "believe the virus is airborne".

As far as "would be required to gargle" is concerned, this seems to be something that would hypothetically be done by Japanese medical staff here in Japan if they were faced with dealing with SARS-infected people in this country.

From my own knowledge, I have no idea whether gargling has any medical utility whatsoever. However, I can report that Japanese people seem to believe that gargling is a useful prophylactic procedure.

The newspaper quotes a Japanese expert as saying that "Those with low resistance, such as young children or the elderly, should avoid large crowds and refrain from traveling to areas where many cases have been reported."

It is not clear to me, from reading the article, whether the "avoid large crowds" advice is supposed to apply now, or whether this advice would be applicable if a SARS outbreak were to occur in Japan.

It is also unclear to me why this advice is intended for those "with low resistance." Of course, I'm just someone who reads the newspapers, and my own opinion has no weight. However, from what I've read so far, I'm not aware of any particular pattern of vulnerability having emerged. My subjective impression is that SARS looks pretty much like an equal opportunity killer.

Going by the article, then, it seems that SARS has not yet reached Japan, and that it is not clear what will happen if it does.

As mentioned above, in Japan the English-language version of The Asahi Shimbun comes bundled with the International Herald Tribune. (This, by the way, is the reason why the SARS article mentioned above is found on page 23 - today, that is where The Asahi Shimbun starts.)

In the IHT itself, there is more news about SARS, including a couple of articles about its negative economic effects on the Asian region. The epidemic is front-page news, and gets its own article (by Thomas Crampton) headlined "UN agency issues SARS travel alert" which starts like this:-

The World Health Organization on Wednesday issued a warning against travel to Hong Kong and the southern Chinese province of Guangdong because of the fast-growing outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome.

From the article we can learn the following:-

• SARS cases = over 2,200 worldwide; SARS deaths = over 75.

• Vaccines? None. Countervailing drugs? None.

• Center of the outbreak? Guangdong.

• Largest outbreak outside of Asia: in Canada. Probable cases = 129.

• "Commercial carriers are refusing to transport SARS patients under any circumstances, and even air ambulance services are now warning that they may not be able to move people with the illness."

... and now I'm sitting here trying to find something intelligent to say about the above, and find that I'm flat out of intelligent comments.

All in all, the world news is fairly depressing at the moment, with America's meat grinder war continuing to gnaw away at Iraq, and with the Asian economy starting to take some pretty hefty hammer blows from SARS.

The good news is that the cherry blossom is now in full flower here in the Tokyo-Yokohama area. I've been given instructions to look up and take notice of it, so I'm going to halt at this point and go outside (it's my lunchbreak) to walk under the cherry blossom.

.... later:

Number of surgical masks seen while walking through a reasonably well-populated train station while on the way home: one.

Number of surgical masks being worn in the train: three (out of an estimated one hundred or so visible people.)

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Section 36 Entry 0007. Date: Friday 04 April 2003.
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The war against Saddam Hussein may be almost over - it's certainly looking like it right at the moment - although properly pacifying the conquered country may take a little longer.

Right now, The Village Voice has an article which dissects the timeline of the George Bush war, the war that lies built. This article is by Sydney H. Schanberg and it's headlined "Bush's Ever Shifting Absolutes". This says, in part:-

this president humbugged and lulled the public into acceptance of war. He has dealt them a shameless series of half truths, erasures of history, allegations without tangible proof, allegations without any proof and just plain stable droppings, the last one being the whopper that the war would be a cakewalk.

The article is well worth reading, and the link to the article is here.

If the war against Saddam Hussein really is over, then the interesting question is "Who's next?" Iran? Syria? Syria and Iran at the same time? North Korea?

I punch "syria iran" into the search box of Google News and it throws up an article from the Washington Times, part of which says "Iran and Syria continue to scheme against US efforts to bring a democratic government to Iraq replacing Saddam Hussein's regime, according to US officials".

Is that an alibi being manufactured, or a pretext? An alibi: the peace in Iraq isn't working because of the bad guys in Syria and Iran. A pretext: we have to invade Syria and Iran to make the peace in Iraq work properly.

Logically, if you can make peace in Israel by invading Iraq then, once you've conquered Iraq, you should be able to make peace there by invading Syria and Iran. And, if that doesn't work, you can always blame the French, the Russians or the tooth fairy.

Maybe there's no plan to invade Syria and Iran ... yet ... but a whole bunch of people seem to be discussing the possibility.

As for North Korea ... I punch "north korea" into Google News, and the first page includes an item from the Iowa State Daily ... "Professor: War in North Korea may be the next step after Iraq".

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