The White Peril 白禍

Mark's Cloud Observatory doesn't have comments, and I can't find a contact address on his site, so I guess I have to post this here and figure he'll see it.

I've discovered that there are a lot of clouds shaped like the PRC. Not just China, but the whole thing including Xinjiang and (sorry, Richard Gere) Tibet. No joke, I see one at least, I'd say, every few weeks. (There are a lot of clouds shaped like Ireland, too, but the way the island is massed, I don't find that surprising.) Are there PRC-shaped clouds over the US, too, or just over Tokyo? The latter would sort of freak me out if I were the type to believe in omens and stuff.

On a more pleasing note, the entryway to our apartment is perfectly positioned for viewing Mars at around midnight right now. It gives you such a cool, primal feeling the way it hovers over all the rooftops and wires.

Well, we didn't end up doing Japanese last night. There was a hole-in-the-wall restaurant-bar in the neighborhood, whose decorative scheme involved a chair rail with back-lit Superballs, that we decided to cast our lot with. Vaguely Italian, with good salad and rather nice chicken. (The wine, unfortunately, was apparently a throwback to the mid-90s here, when the red in all but a handful of very expensive places was vinegary and served ice-cold. Having been chastened by years of bad experience, I opted for white.) Not exactly traditional, but companionable and moving for me, since the friends I went out with were the couple who hosted the Thanksgiving dinner we had during my first year in Japan, when we were in language school.

The American element was supplied after dinner, when we decided to go to Starbucks. In 2005, it doesn't get much more all-American than a triple-shot latte and cranberry bliss bar, huh? Of course, it's not a holiday weekend here, so I'm back at the office today. (Later, I mean.) Hope everyone else had a great holiday.

Thanksgiving is one of those things I have a hard time explaining to Japanese people. Occasionally, someone here will very frankly say that he doesn't see how the United States can think of itself as a unified culture and country--we've only existed for two hundred years and are of mixed ethnicities. Only once, to a particularly obnoxious interlocutor, have I ever mischievously replied, "Well, your ancestors arrived here on boats at some point in the past, even if it was quite a bit longer ago. They were from Korea, by the way, weren't they? Ethnography is so fascinating, though I'm afraid I don't have the head for it."

Mostly, I just try to explain that America was a set of ideas about individuals before it was a country. (Japan has a lot of ideas about what it means to be Japanese, too, of course; but the sense of uniqueness springs from the genetic heritage.) How you can read things from the Bible, things people were writing in ancient Greece and Rome, and things people were writing later in Western Europe--and you can see the formation of the United States as picking up these threads of the ideals of personal liberty throughout Western history and weaving them together. How we're taught, from the time we're very young, that people risked death to get to the Americas, risked death to stay there and establish hard-scrabble settlements, and later risked death to separate themselves from a motherland that was mistreating them. We actually have their written records, often thin but still there. Nowadays, it's hard to drive around the East Coast and believe that anyone once thought it, of all things, impenetrable or uninhabitable. (If the first settlers could see New Jersey now, huh!) But that was before central air and GPS navigation.

Today, by the unexpected favor of the elements, I'm going to be able to have Thanksgiving dinner not only with other Americans but with Americans who are dear, long-time friends. We were in language school together a decade ago, and they returned to San Francisco in 2001 or so. They've just come back to Tokyo now. We haven't decided on a restaurant yet--this Thanksgiving may be light on turkey and cranberries and heavy on raw fish and shiso; but I plan to make something more conventional when Atsushi and I have our dinner on Saturday.

So I get two Thanksgiving celebrations, which is good because we have so many riches to think about. I'm thankful for our forebears' long-ago perseverance. I'm thankful for our soldiers' current perseverance. I'm thankful that the new Madonna album didn't suck. I'm thankful that my family's in good health. I'm thankful that, of the thousands of available men in Tokyo, I was the one Atsushi asked out five years ago.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

There's a post I've kind of been meaning to make for the last few months, and given the fraternal love electrifying the atmosphere in the US Congress and blogosphere, this seems like a good time to make it.

I've been getting an increasing number of hits from people looking for information about Japanese defense. Quite a few of them are from university and US military ISPs, but I assume even they are mostly from people who are just kind of curious about what's going on here.

There's always the possibility that someone doing Real Research is blundering into me, though. If so, I hope this is obvious, but just in case: I'm not a moron, but I'm also not a political scientist. Still less am I a military strategist. I tend to choose each story I post about for one of a couple of reasons.

One is that Prime Minister Koizumi, while hardly perfect, has taken real political risks in so firmly and ringingly allying himself with the Bush administration in the WOT. A lot of Americans--educated general readers like me--seem not to pay much attention to Japan now that its period of dizzying economic hypergrowth has been over for fifteen years, but the Pacific Rim is a region of extreme importance to US interests. Japan's loyalty to us as an ally and the evolution of its own military policy matter a great deal, and I think they deserve more notice.

Another factor I consider when posting is that the usual media line about studious, slave-to-tradition, unfailingly safe, enlightened-social-democratic, mysteries-of-Zen Japan is grossly reductive. I'm sure most foreign correspondents make a good-faith effort to report things accurately, but you don't have to live here long to realize that some of them simply don't know what they don't know and can't formulate the right questions. When a story shows a side of Japan that doesn't fit the usual pattern, I often find it worth calling attention to.

Finally, there's a ridiculous idea abroad in the world that Americans are provincial while everyone else is cosmopolitan and intellectual. That kind of crap is bad enough when it comes from Everyone Else; when I hear other Americans buying into it, it drives me crazy. Japan, despite an educational system that's the envy of much of the world, displays plenty of what we now call cultural insensitivity...and sometimes plain ignorance. I think it's helpful to remind people that that kind of thing is a human, not an American, problem.

I might also say a word or two about my sources. Japan's tabloidish news magazines are frequently the first to report major scandals and such. I don't cite them because it's generally necessary to wait to see whether the major dailies pick up on a story, anyway, to find out whether it has any substance or was just a sensational rumor. The dailies are a little slower, but if there's meat in there somewhere, it's in their interest to get to it eventually. And they're usually far ahead of Reuters or CNN. If a link goes to a Japanese story, the translation that appears here is my own. That means you have to trust me; but I have several readers, at least one of whom comments regularly, who also read Japanese fluently. If I'm parsing anything incorrectly, I have no doubt that it will be pointed out to me immediately and triumphantly. (Don't make that face at me, boys. You know it's true.)

One more thing for those reading from the military: We support you. There's a lot of jabber lately about polls and yanking people out of Iraq by next Friday and stuff, but the Americans (and a handful of English and Japanese people) I know believe what you're doing, whatever your individual assignments happen to be, is worthwhile and meaningful. If the President says you're not done, you're not done. Thanks for staying on the job. We all owe you. I don't say that nearly often enough.

Added on 22 November: From the Grandstand kindly links this post and adds a Thanksgiving-specific message for our military folks to my general one.

Added on 23 November: Thanks to the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler for the link also. He adds his own thanks to our soldiers.

Audrey...whoops!...Jeff has been posting at Beautiful Atrocities with some regularity again. Here's the latest. Hilarious.

Today, Alice's teatray offers this slice of very good seedcake:

I've finally figured out what I want to say about Maureen Dowd's argument about most men only marrying women who are younger/ poorer/ dumber than themselves: (a) what else is new, and (b) why would anybody want to marry "most men" unless they are distinctly average themselves and therefore perfectly happy with the status quo anyway?

...

It isn't easy to find a fantastic life-partner. The best things in life are not supposed to come free, you have to work at them. But not necessarily in the way you might expect: attending hundreds of singles-meets might be part of the job, but more important than that is living your life as well as you can, reaching out to other human beings in an attempt to contribute to the world on a personal as well as professional level, and stretching your own preconceptions and seeking out life's challenges rather than shrinking from change.

It's a real head-scratcher when people who aren't looking for ways to be thoughtful and interesting wonder where all the thoughtful and interesting people are. Why would they be hanging out around you? one wants to ask.

I think Dowd may have some other problems, though.

She was on Larry King this morning; somehow, I don't think I'd ever seen her live. Well, the show was taped, but I mean, I knew what she looked like from her photograph, but I didn't remember her voice and mannerisms.

Oh, my.

I suppose I should have expected this--in fact, once I saw her, it all made sense. Maureen Dowd is a major tease. It was so obvious I giggled into my apple streudel. She flipped her hair. She simpered. She did that thing where girls cast their eyes downward momentarily and then--with their heads still tilted slightly, intimately forward--glare liquidly up at you from under arched brows and thick lashes. Her mouth worked itself into a sassy-petulant moue so frequently you could have made a drinking game out of it. I didn't see her move her upper arms forward surreptitiously to squeeze her boobs together, but every other arrow in the flirty-girl quiver was there.

Now, personally, I say: Work it, baby. But if you're going to work it, at least in that fashion, there's something important you need to do. You have to integrate your intellectual jousting with your girliness (or maybe some women find a way to divide them firmly) so they don't seem schizo. Otherwise, you're sending potential mates a subliminal message that you don't know what you want and aren't quite together. Not knowing Dowd, I wonder whether she does in person what she does in her writing, which is to careen, seemingly uncontrollably, between analytical chilliness and giddy sassiness. It's the uncontrollable part that gives off "STAY AWAY!" vibes. In a culture in which couples make lives in their own little households, without the constant presence of the larger clan to bring things back to equilibrium when tensions arise, you'd have to be nuts to choose a spouse who promises to be an emotional pig in a poke.

What's funnier than the fact that someone landed on this page after searching Google for "discreet chastity" (a sorely underused phrase, more's the pity)? That mine was the first site to come up.

Today Toshiba finally deigned to call me and tell me how much ransom I'm going to have to pay to get my laptop back with a new CD-ROM drive: about the equivalent of US $420. Not all that bad, I suppose. So I assume it's going to be ready within the week, because Nittsu came to pick it up Monday a week ago and the last person I talked to at Toshiba said the turnaround time shouldn't be more than ten to fourteen days. Yes, I'm aware of Toshiba's rep for atrocious customer service, but the hype is that they've been working hard to combat it, and all the people I talked to in tech support (when I first thought it was a driver/software/settings problem) were great. So I'm hoping to be wired at home again by this weekend.

I'll definitely need my Dynabook back within a few weeks, because I'm going to a company meeting at the beginning of December. I like travel, but I have to say that I find the idea of going all the way to the Caribbean a bit fatiguing, especially since Atsushi and I haven't been able to take a vacation together for a year and a half. I will, however, be able to sneak in an extra week to stay in the States after flying back to New York. I wasn't sure I'd be able to, but I have a month or so to get things arranged. I'll be writing to people individually, but let this be the first notice to friends in the NY-NJ-PA-DC area that I'll be around to shuttle frantically among you during the second third of December.

Actually, when the time comes, I don't think I'll mind the Caribbean so much. Today is the first day that the coldness is sharp enough that I may actually put on a sweater before leaving the apartment [!] later, and fall is my favorite season. (It's such a relief to be able to use that word--most Japanese people don't know what you're talking about unless you say "autumn.") But by December, there will be a fair amount of non-sharp, non-crisp, gritty-gelatinous rain. Love that particulate matter!

For those who are slow on the uptake--actually, your flue would have to be entirely blocked not to have noticed this--this is one of those scatty brain-dump posts I deposit here at regular intervals, usually when my datebook is beginning to do its tyrant act and I am VERY SLIGHTLY irritable. Time for home and a cup of tea.