The White Peril 白禍

新年明けましておめでとうございます。今年も宜しくお願いします。

Which is to say, "Happy New Year! I ask your continued favor." Okay, that's one of those clunky-literal translations I generally try to avoid--but, see, the thing is, the Japanese have a different expression for "Happy New Year" now that it is the new year. I mean, the one above is the different expression from the anticipatory one you use in December. That's 良いお年をお迎え下さい (clunky-literal translation: "May you greet a good new year"). In the sentence at the top of this post, the 明けまして part is the verb meaning "has dawned" or "[morning] has broken." It's the same kanji as is used to mean "bright," though, so the New Year greeting has always had a sweet hint of "Good morning, sunshine!" to me.

And, in Tokyo, at least, the clouds have lifted, yesterday's snow/sleet/slush/yuck routine is over (for now), and it's gorgeous out. Perfect weather for the traditional New Year's cleaning--which explains why I decided to park myself in front of the computer and check the news and my messages and have now ended up composing a blog post. But never you fear. On this day of new beginnings, surfaces will be washed with hot bleach-water, items will be returned to their rightful drawers, electrical cords and lightbulbs will be checked, and bedding will be sun-fluffed. You know, starting in just a minute or so.

I was looking for a season-appropriate poem to post, but for a dilettante like me, there are problems. The new year according to which the poems of the classical canon were written is in February, so those that are actually appropriate to this point in time have a wistful, year-end feel. Those poems with the sense of a fresh start in the new year are full of references to the beginning of spring, which for obvious reasons feels a bit off.

However, since the Japanese spring in the Heian Period began before the vernal equinox, anyway, I'm going to take the liberty of repairing yet again to the Shinkokin-shu and enlisting the aid of the Princess Shokushi. Actually, I wish all dilemmas in life could be solved by enlisting the aid of the Princess Shokushi--it would make for a much more aesthetically pleasing existence--but we must content ourselves with capitalizing on such opportunities as present themselves. Anyway:

山深み春とも知らぬ松の戸にたえだえかかる雪の玉水

式子内親王

yamabukami / haru tomo shiranu / matsu no to ni / tae-dae kakaru / yuki no tamamizu
Shokushi-Naishinno

Deep in the mountains
My cabin door of pine planks
knows nothing of spring
But melting snow now and then
slides down with a gem-like flash
--The Princess Shokushi

Okay, fine, so there's actually more cold weather to come in 2005--I told you the poem didn't fit the solar year. What strikes me as apposite about it (it's the first of many for the Princess Shokushi in the Shinkokin-shu) is the sense that new beginnings don't always announce themselves explosively. They creep up on you, the way the year begins with an arc in the sweep of the second hand, just like any other top of the hour.

Once again, Happy New Year to everyone. Special thanks and good wishes to our troops and to the Japanese SDF for working to keep us safe and help others achieve what we have, and to their families for enduring chaotic lives to help them do it.

Ooh, Tokyo is getting its yearly day of schnee. Of course, it's just fluffy, wet stuff that disappears on contact with the (non-frozen) ground. The nice thing about a third-floor apartment, though, is that if you stand back a bit from the window, you just see the snow falling, not meeting its premature end. Atsushi comes in tomorrow. Unlike me, he hasn't just gotten back from 2.5 weeks of lolling at the homes of parents and various friends; and banks are, of course, the sorts of environments in which the end-of-year crunch is especially intense. He apparently hasn't even had time to write his New Year's cards.

The New Year is a big deal in Japan, in a way that sort of combines the meanings of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's celebrations at home. You're supposed to pay your debts (a dark joke in this economy of massive household debt, but charming as a traditional ideal nonetheless), right wrongs you've committed and seek forgiveness, and reflect on your good fortune. To my very American palate, the festival foods--a select group of crustaceans, mollusks, and piles of fish eggs--are somewhat less yummy than Thanksgiving dinner; but the symbolism of good fortune and longevity is nice. And I like the oranges and glutinous rice.

Ornate expressions of gratitude are woven through all Japanese social forms; but around this time of year, things get positively orgiastic, with gifts of beer and tea and cakes and other goodies to be sent to and received from clients and suppliers. The Japanese have not forgotten that their country's staggering riches are of recent vintage, and the last 15 years of economic shake-up have reminded them that prosperity is fragile; the formal expressions of goodwill that can feel merely dutiful at other times of the year have extra power now.

This is a good time to thank everyone once again for visiting here. When I asked Dean to set this site up in the spring, I was primarily looking for something to play with as a distraction from self-pity over Atsushi's being transferred to Kyushu. I'd enjoyed commenting on other people's blogs--yes, I'm aware that this is getting to be an old story--but frankly, I wasn't eager to set up my own because of trolls. The decline in American civility gets me down enough so as it is. 200 visitors a day is a very modest amount of traffic, but it's certainly enough to be trolled. The courtesy people have shown in their comments here and e-mails to me has reassured me a lot. I mean it. Thank you. And once again, Happy New Year.

I'd like to use this morning's Nikkei to illustrate a point a lot of people seem to have trouble with:





If I weren't so lazy, I'd PhotoShop it, but the main headline (vertical, in reverse type at top right) says, "津波で邦人10人不明." That translates to "10 Japanese citizens missing in tsunamis." The subhead does say, "Over 8600 dead in 8.9 M quake," and the story naturally makes it clear that the events happened thousands of miles away and killed mostly Southeast Asians, but because this is a Japanese newspaper, the main story is believed by the editors to be how the event affected Japanese people.

My point is that, while people are constantly complaining about how provincial American media are, it never seems to occur to them that if they just spent, literally, a single day of the news cycle in another country, they'd see that the focus on local interest is universal. On 9/11 also, as well I remember, NHK and the other Japanese stations focused at least half of their coverage on the Japanese firms in the WTC complex and on whether all their personnel were accounted for.

It's been a day and a few hours since the first quake hit. The estimated number of deaths will probably keep climbing for a week or so; the busy winter holiday season has begun, and the resort islands and shores that were slammed were probably close to full. Luckily, on the other hand, there seem to have been a fair number of people who were on the beach, noticed the sea being sucked outward, and knew what was coming. On Phuket--a major, major, major tourist destination in this part of the world--there also seems to have been a convenient ridge behind which people could flee to safety. The awe-inspiringly efficient distribution network we enjoy means that aid is already coming into devastated areas, but it looks as if Colombo, Sri Lanka, is seeing unusually high tides right now; as always happens after an earthquake or tidal wave, people in the affected areas will be on edge for the next week or two.

Added at 13:10: I should probably clarify something here, since this post and the one I put up yesterday may seem to contradict each other. What I was talking about last night was what stories get covered at all; what I'm talking about above is what's emphasized in stories that do get covered.

Just saw Atsushi off. He did the dishes after dinner yesterday, so there's not much cleaning up to do. Of course, the inside of my refrigerator looks like most people's hall closets--leftover everything wedged in wherever there was still space. I'm going to be having sauerbraten sandwiches and fried potato dumplings for days, but it's always worth cooking for Atsushi. Like all Japanese boys, he was brought up to believe that he'd live at home or in a company dormitory until about age 25. After that he'd marry and have someone to take care of him.

The mouthy, hairy, oversexed American man he finally found to take care of him at 32 is not exactly what his acculturators had in mind, but, while he learned to do laundry and brew coffee while passing through his twenties, he fortunately remained innocent of cooking know-how of any kind. Thus, he still gets that priceless look of delighted surprise whenever I put food on the table: Wow, hon. How'd you turn those three bags of groceries into this?

The only close call I had was with the dumplings. I didn't try to cut corners by paring them before boiling, but I did kind of start making the batter before they'd been chilled really thoroughly. And we all know what happens when you don't chill your potatoes thoroughly before you make your dumpling batter, don't we? Your dumplings fail to hold their shape, that's what. Luckily, they don't taste any different as cumulus-cloud-like oblongs from what they would as perfect spheres, and with the breadcrumbs and butter mixed in and the meat and gravy and vegetables joining them, shapeliness was beside the point.

With dessert we had coffee made in the coffeemaker that was half of Atsushi's Christmas present to me. The other half is the much-needed vacuum cleaner I've been doing without. Yeah, I know, it sounds a little Fred-and-Ethel, but we've gotten into the habit of giving each other something practical for Christmas and something more romantic for our birthdays. Today is the last housecleaning day I'll be faking my way to clean with a push mop between washings.

This was a bad weekend for weather and other natural forces in multiple parts of the world, so I hope everyone was able to stay safe. Only three or four more workdays until Atsushi comes home for the New Year's holiday, which is when life really stops for family-and-friends time in Japan. Best to everyone else who still has a few more days of the grind to go.

Virginia Postrel's feelings about the newest must-discuss topic basically mirror mine:

Why criticize merchants for including all their customers in wishes for a happy holiday season? The holidays do, after all, stretch from Thanksgiving to New Year's, both nonsectarian holidays. "Happy Holidays" includes Christmas, for those who celebrate it. But it also includes holidays we all share, as well as some others only a minority observe.

When you extend these greetings, are you wishing people happiness? Or affirming your Christianity? Do you want people who don't celebrate Christmas to be happy (or merry)? Or do you want to make them at least mildly uncomfortable? The answers will determine what you say.

I say "basically" because what she leaves out is the self-righteous wing of her own side: people who are not content to say "Happy holidays" themselves but feel the need to expunge any mention of Christmas from all conversation, loudspeakers, and surfaces within a five-mile radius.

But she herself isn't taking that extreme a position, and she's right about the standing-boldly-up-for-Christmas positions people are taking in droves. The argument is frequently made that we should all say "Merry Christmas," whether we're Christian or not, because Christmas is the origin of the holiday season. It strikes me as iffy, though--solstice rituals are, if not universal, widespread in world culture. That Christianity adapted one in the process of converting pagans may have been enterprising, but it's not much of a distinction. Nevertheless, Christmas is the direct origin of the particular holiday season most of us celebrate, and forcing people to pretend they aren't Christian, or being so taken aback when they acknowledge it that you can't respond, is stupid.

It also becomes flat-out ridiculous when the reason given is that people of other faiths might be offended. It's truly outrageous to see world religions, from Islam to African animism to Buddhism to ancient Mexican earth cults, treated as anthropologically fascinating repositories of deep spiritual wisdom about the mysteries of the cosmos...while Christianity, whose philosophers helped develop many of the principles that undergird our free society, is regarded as a set of hokey superstitions that some folks still can't shake.

Personally, I'll be celebrating Christmas the Japanese way, which suits my capitalist-atheist beliefs perfectly: on Christmas Eve, couples go out for dinner, exchange presents, and retire to love hotels. Atsushi, who wasn't originally going to be able to come home until the New Year's holiday (that's when the Japanese have their big family gatherings), surprised me by promising to fly home on Saturday so we could at least have Christmas day together. At first, I figured we'd go to a restaurant, but then I remembered that this is the man who, after four years, still looks at me tenderly and calls me "GI Sean" whenever I come back from getting a haircut. He's worth a week's worth of preparation to have sauerbraten and dumplings at home.

Anyhow, happy holidays to you all. And in the interest of cultural diversity:

良いお年を御迎え下さい。
(yoi o-toshi wo o-mukae-kudasai: "Happy New Year!")

Added after tea and cake: Ooh! I almost forgot. Everyone does read Miss Manners, right? I think her edge has dulled just a bit over the last ten years or so, but her advice is still on-target, and the books she's published are great reading. Perhaps my favorite column of hers ever is about hospitality and presents. It's immortalized in this book. The piece isn't holiday-specific, but I always reread it around this time of the year. It starts like this:

Offering hospitality is such a serious obligation of etiquette that it is mandated in the sacred literature and traditions of many religions. Just about everyone has been taught one version or another of the holy personage in disguise who was turned away by the uppity rich, but generously welcomed to share the humble home of the poor. In case anyone misses the point, a vivid description was provided of how significantly the hospitality was reciprocated and its absence punished.

So how are we doing with this lesson? The question most frequently posed to Miss Manners these days concerns how to make money from one's guests, or at least how to make them pay for their own entertainment. Another question that has begun popping up concerns the efforts of hosts to enjoy a better standard of living than they are willing to share with their guests. Miss Manners suspects that these people are going to fry.

It actually gets better from there.

I think I've successfully gotten whiteperil.com to redirect to the front page here. I'll add it to my masthead/banner/whatever as soon as I can figure out what font and size to use to avoid making it look too cluttered. Apologies to anyone who might have tried to memorize iwamatodjishi!

In the shuffle of being at home and then returning to non-vacation life here, I forgot about this on the exact day, but....

Last year, AgendaBender posted a post called "A Day without Bill," which is one of my two or three favorite posts ever by anyone. (I was going to fix all the redundant uses of post in that last sentence, but since Tom's story is about a very tall man, maybe they're kind of fitting.) It's a good read for this time of year, and I'm glad I remembered about it again while we're still in the zone between World AIDS Day and Christmas.

This is cool--a Black Republicans' club has formed at Penn, reports Erin O'Connor. What is not cool is that the DP article misspells supersede, indicating that it hasn't gotten much less retarded in the ten years since my graduation. I don't know how the campus climate really is now, but when I was a student, it was not hard to have civilized conversations with a wide range of political viewpoints--informally. The university-supported campus culture was as PC-addled as you'd expect, however, so I hope Sean-Tamba Matthew eventually has enough of a membership to march on Houston Hall and seek funding.

Oh, this is kind of along the lines of that last post, but not really: Yesterday, Amritas said, "If Sean can quote from songs, so can I." He's right, of course. What was funny was that he was the first to mention it. See, I'm sure this will strike people as weird, but post titles give me the darnedest amounts of trouble. I'm not a journalist, so I often feel as if Sam-the-Eagle-serious headlines are...maybe not misrepresentations, but a bit gussied up for what they're being used to label. Occasionally, a stray line from a pop song would seem fitting, so I started using one when it came to me.

Then I got into a serious Kylie Minogue jag, and before I knew it, it became like a game: If within 5 seconds, I could think of something from one of her songs that fit the post and would help me recognize it in a list if I needed to edit it later, I went with it. If not, I used something more ordinary. But it was off the cuff. I mean, at some point, I noticed I'd named a good five or six different entries for lines from "Spinning Around," which is not exactly what you'd normally consider a model of quotability. It gave me a chuckle precisely because it was so random, and I figured few readers would have reason to pick up on it.

Then I noticed that I was getting a decent number of hits from Australia, the UK, Canada, Israel, and other non-US sources. I think most Americans know this by now, but Kylie is a massive celebrity of the Madonna/Janet/Mariah order just about everywhere on Earth except the States. You start using lines from her most inescapable hits, and the chances are not slim that people will recognize them, so I kind of started to expect that sooner or later, I'd open my inbox and be confronted by a message that ran something like

Dear YankeePoofterBitch,

Not a bad blog, but the Kylie lyrics as post titles?

WORST THING EVER.

Cheers, from the Commonwealth,

[name]

This is not to be taken as an offer to change my MO, you understand. Life is too short to be sitting around ruminating over the perfect single-sentence title for a blog entry. I just found it funny that, of the things people comment on in correspondence, that one never came up. In fact, Amritas himself put it in a casual footnote to a post of his own, not anything directed at me. You just never know.

To whoever it was who nominated me for Best Japan Blog: Thank you! What a sweet gesture. Please don't feel slighted because I've asked Simon to remove me from the list. I'm very, very to myself in some ways, and that's one of them; but it doesn't change the fact that I feel very fortunate that people read what I post here.

I do think the Asia Blog Awards do a good service by giving people a chance to look at clusters of sites they may not otherwise have been able to look into at once, and Simon's being generous with his time by taking charge of overseeing the nominating and voting. So if you haven't, please go see the variety of blogs in the region that are represented, and remember that when you visit them, they'll have other worthy sites blogrolled that you may not have seen in the lists of nominees.

The search string gods are favoring me early this month.

Someone wants to know the "duration of 2004 niigata quake." To which one can only respond, "Which one?"

Someone's inner Whitney Houston needs soothing: "how can you know boys if had a feeling with you." Do I know where you're coming from, or what, honey! But, you know, there is one way to tell. You could get a broken nose rather than an answer to your prayers, but what is this life without some risk?

I'm hoping "koda shosei kill sean" is a product of unfortunate syntax and not a minded use of the imperative mood.

Some poor soul just can't quite remember what song goes like this: "i like the way you cross the street cause you're...precious." It's the first song on Pretenders, and trust me, you need to buy the album, and don't just skip through to "Brass in Pocket." The whole damned thing will rock your world.

I know I've got at least one would-be comedian of a reader who tries obnoxious search terms to see whether he can get me going. If "homosexual inferior trash" is not from him, I will have you know, whoever you are, that my garbage is always put out on the right day--properly separated and in city-approved bags. Well, except the newspapers, which are stacked at exact right angles (I check with a T-square) and tied off, gift-style, with whimsical blue twine. I defy Shintaro Ishihara himself to find a reason to kvetch about it.

Finally, we have "alex kerr homosexual." Hmmm. Wouldn't surprise me. Art collector, lives in Bangkok with partner of unidentified gender. Cute and well-preserved, too. Even if he's a het, we'll make him an honorary. The guy hangs around kabuki actors; I doubt he'll mind.

All right, little more cleaning to do so the place is ready for tomorrow morning. I was a bit casual about my unpacking this time.

You know, I really am a self-critical guy. It just takes time to get results sometimes. For a while there, I've been getting search after search for "white peril" and wondering why the people out of the bunch who were looking for me wouldn't just use the URL.

Then the other day, I had to get to a site that was called something like geschlumfelflugenhammerkohl.net, and I thought, Who the hell would choose such a f**king random domain name? I swear, it took a good three hours before I was like, Oh! I wonder whether maybe.... So I went to see whether whiteperil.com was, in fact, available. It was, so I took it. It'll take a few days for processing and things, I suppose, but I'll direct it to this page so I'm not the only one who can find me without Google or the ability to bookmark.

Mr. du Toit has kindly given me a link this morning, and everyone and his grandmother who reads him seems to have followed it. I doubt this is quite the kind of destination his readers are used to clicking through to from him, so I hope no one's too taken aback. I'm thankful for the mention, though.

It puts me in mind of a story from last year, when Atsushi came home with me to meet my parents. My mother has a handgun and a well-developed sense of mischief. It was a given that she was going to show both to my boyfriend and see whether she could get a reaction out of him.

So we're sitting in the living room, and she gets the gun out, brings it into the room, and deposits it with a flourish on the coffee table in front of him. And Atsushi looks at it--I mean, he didn't peer; he leaned over and looked straight at it--and says enthusiastically but with perfect Japanese composure, "Wow. Oh, yes. That's very menacing." At which point, Mom was all his. Between that and the comfy, unassuming way he played with the cats, I think my parents were ready to ask him to replace me as the elder son.

Anyhow, speaking of the unexpected, I've been getting more links lately from more sites. That's very gratifying, but it occurs to me that the mixture of topics I write about probably seems kind of random to someone blundering into this place for the first time. When I myself have been in those situations, I've found that if there's a list of "Best Posts" or some such, it's often helpful to look at as a representative sample of what I'm in for if I start digging into someone's archives. So I've thought of adding one here to help new readers navigate my (ahem) eclecticism, but I'm a terrible judge of my own writing. If anyone reading here has any suggestions for things I might want to include, I'd be grateful to hear. (Suggestions of the "Whatever you do, leave out that ridiculous post titled 'XYZ'" variety are fine, too, as long as they're put politely.)

I would be remiss if I didn't publicly thank the du Toits for their amazing hospitality over the weekend, which was of the old-fashioned variety: the constant flowing of coffee, the constant passing of treats, the wandering of conversation agreeably from topic to topic. After one particularly wonderful dinner, I picked up a plate to carry it five steps to the kitchen, and the proprietor of Serenity's Journal practically got me into a hammerhold to wrest it out of my hand and shove me toward one of the living room couches.

And the children were, of course, wonderful. They were respectful and non-strident but completely at ease in adult conversation around someone they hadn't met. This is clearly a household of people who regard each other highly. Spending time with them reminded me of everything I love about America, and I can't thank them enough.

By contrast, my message for American airlines (including American Airlines) is, "Thanks for nothing." I mean, the flights were generally smooth, and the flight attendants were generally fine. In the sense of job performance, that is to say, not in the sense of attractiveness. I make it a practice not to make physical evaluations of people who are on-duty.

Yeah, right, you got me. I noticed. But it's not the fault of the flight attendants that they age badly, is it? Something to do with all those UV rays at 35000 feet. And working in confined spaces gives them an unfortunate tendency to mince. All that flying did give me yet more occasions to marvel at how TOTALLY HOT American men on average are, though. Even the guys who aren't hot are hot. Probably part of it is that I'm a sucker for good forearms--you know, the sinewy, hairy, I-am-a-male-mammal kind. The businessman sitting next to me on my flight out of Dallas had his sleeves rolled up, and every time he turned the page of his newspaper, his muscles rippled, and the hair on his wrists spilled over his watchband at a different light-catching angle. I can only hope he thought that what I was staring so acquisitively at was his Rolex. Of course, looking resolutely forward didn't help, because every time some guy reached up into the light of his reading lamp to close his overhead ventilator, I thought I'd die.

I wasn't literally afraid of dying, despite the turbulence over Texas, because our captain did an ace job of skirting around the bad weather almost as soon as we encountered it. While the various excitable parts of my anatomy are getting their appreciative messages in, my stomach would like to thank him--but it would also like to ask, purely out of scientific interest, whether the head of food service at AA (and United, which got me from La Guardia to DFW) was actively trying to give us all a stereotypical airline-meal horror story with which to regale friend and foe alike in the coming weeks. I mean, good grief. In my experience, JAL, ANA, and Thai Airways--even Tiger Economy cellar-dweller Korean Air--have managed to contrive in-flight meals that are about as good as leftover homemade food that you microwave too long so it has a few hard pellet-y bits. Not yummy, but not repellant. The food on United and American was a whole other deal. Holding iced vodka (WTF is up with making people pay for liquor on trans-Pacific flights, BTW?) in the mouth for a good long time to deaden tongue and palate helped a bit, but I'd kind of hoped that, this being a code-share flight with JAL, those involved would be motivated by shame into achieving peak-performance mode for those of us who are used to better. No such luck.

My fortune improved dramatically on arrival at Narita Terminal 1 (the flight was operated by AA, remember), however. The seatbelt sign was off at the gate at 5:45, I made the 6:13 Narita Express, and I was waiting for a cab in Shibuya by 7:40. It's probably not the first time such a thing has happened in the history of Japanese commercial aviation, but neither is it the sort of timing any frequent flyer in his right mind would plan on. To achieve it, I had to have uncommon luck at every potential bottleneck point: there was no line at immigration for holders of Japanese passports/reentry permits, my bag was among the first out, the girl at customs waved me through in seconds, and I was in line at the JR counter by 6:10. It's the kind of exception-that-proves-the-rule that reminds you what a production flying in and out of Tokyo usually is. But at the end of the line was a bath in my own bathtub, a welcome-home call from my audibly happy boyfriend, and sleep in our own bed under our own comforter. Well, until 3 a.m., when jet lag woke me. But that'll be over in a few days. It's good to be home. Thanks to everyone who helped make this the best 里帰り (satogaeri, "return to the hometown") ever.

Comments were down for a few hours because of spam directed at MT--all those people who seem to think I need Viagra at 32 finally had their effect, though not in the way they imagined, I gather. Sorry if anyone had things to say and couldn't get through. Oh, yeah! Apropos of nothing: Does anyone else remember "Dizz Knee Land" by Dada, from...'92, it must have been? The friend from college that I'm staying with was messing around with iTunes and downloaded it while his girlfriend and I were cooking, and it was such a throwback it made me shiver. But in a good way. Belly, anyone?

Tomorrow morning, off to Dallas, where I plan to demonstrate to Mr. and Mrs. du Toit how glaringly apparent my defects of education are when I'm not writing at leisure with the ability to edit. Should be fun!

2 December 23:25 EST