The White Peril 白禍

I know I stand in line until you think you have the time to spend an evening with me

Sean — 2008-05-28T00:05+00:00

I spent part of the Memorial Day weekend going to a college friend's wedding outside Harrisburg. Most of us from the old group gathered, so I got to see everyone and meet the latest babies. Very exciting. Funniest moment: four of us were from small-town Pennsylvania, and we all--independently of one another--looked the venue up and down and said, "A wedding at the fire hall--we're so totally home!"

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I am in love with Dunkin Donuts. No, not the coffee--I know everyone loves that--the doughnuts themselves. I grew up with Pennsylvania Dutch sweets, so there was no shortage of real sticky buns and tender homemade kieffels and glorious pies--those transplanted Krauts make the best pies ever--but I went into Dunkin Donuts for a half-dozen on a whim a few weeks ago, and now I can't stop. They're so greasy they stick to the roof of the mouth, the cream filling tastes like chalk, and the crumb is about as tender as a Nerf ball. But I have two with a cup of coffee, and I feel American all over. Bonus points for the would-be sleek new box and stylized logos and tag line: "America runs on Dunkin." Right, Dunkin Donuts provides fuel for, like, an active life. Didn't you know that?

*******

The buddy I'm staying with has a few early seasons of The Simpsons on DVD. This is good. One of them includes that classic episode in which Sideshow Bob gets out of jail and marries Aunt Selma. Also good.

Now I have Selma and Bob's karaoke version of "Somethin' Stupid" going through my head non-stop. This is bad. Very, very bad.

おめでとう！

Sean — 2008-05-10T14:05+00:00

Happy birthday to Atsushi. (I won't specify which particular milestone it is.) We're no longer partners, but he's a true gentleman and has remained a friend and a real rock in time of need. I'm sorry I'm not there for the celebration, but his love of sweets is well known among our friends, so I'm assuming he's happily chomping his way out from under a pile of cake as we speak.

Candy shop

Sean — 2008-05-07T21:05+00:00

Everyone keeps asking whether the culture shock has set in. The question is delivered with a gleam in the eye and an eagerness in the tone that I can't quite pin down; I hope my friends aren't running about thinking, Won't it be fun when Sean encounters some sassy-rude salesperson and just totally cracks? I make a practice of not cracking, thank you very much. And the adjustments I've had to make so far have mostly been pleasant ones.

I do somewhat miss the Japanese cleanliness fetish. Back offices and kitchens and hospital rooms may be as grimy as they are anywhere else, but rare is the office or shop in Japan that doesn't work overtime to ensure that no customer has to deal with so much as a dust mote. Grittiness on the street in New York is welcome and invigorating; grittiness in the produce section is less so. I also got my hair cut in New York for the first time in a decade today. It wasn't a particularly exclusive place, but it wasn't a dump, either. And yet, there was stray hair everywhere (including stuck inside the lid of the jar from which my cutter guy retrieved a good six cc's of hair goop and plunked it on my crown before I had the chance to protest. New York moves quickly).

On the other hand, the City, with its old brick buildings and stone and concrete detailing, has a much more earthy built environment. It feels like a place built by people for people. Tokyo's steel-and-glass, its tiles, its molded HDP, give it a moon-colony quality that can be a lot of fun; but it can also be draining to navigate through, especially in the rain or snow.

And of course, New York is noisy. We're Americans, and we're boisterous. I grooved to Tokyo's brittle, reined-in, well-behaved hum, but of course the flip side is that people need to explode, forcefully, when they're off the chain. You get used to being surrounded by people so drunk as to be near alcohol poisoning: hanging from straps on the train, roly-poly-ing down the sidewalk, tenderly placed face-down over storm grates by friends (who perch jauntily on a nearby curb and chat) so they don't drown in their own vomit. No one will ever accuse New York of not drinking, but after-work life doesn't feel like a 180-degree change from the business day.

People do start drinking here earlier, though. In Tokyo, it's still kind of a sign that you're not important if you actually get out of the office at 5:00 or not much after. I'm not going to an office at the moment, of course, but everyone I know is, and I don't think I've gone to an after-work gathering that started after 6:00 in the two weeks I've been back.

Speaking of things that go down the hatch: there's no point in my repeating in its entirety my rant about American food portions, but sheesh! You know things are cockeyed when even your flippin' arugula salad is too big to finish. Arugula salad! Who gorges on that?

Last night a friend asked me to go to the symphony at Carnegie Hall, and it turned out to be a charming confluence of things Philadelphia, Tokyo, and New York. It was the Philadelphia Orchestra doing its annual series, and last night's piece was Mahler's Eighth. (The Tokyo tie-in is that the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra is known for its Mahler performances.) Much classical music in Asia is very good, but there's something nice about sitting in a Western audience, which shouts cheers and goes a bit over the edge when genuinely moved by a performance. The Philadelphia Sound had been put to good use.

帰国

Sean — 2008-04-23T08:04+00:00

Thanks to everyone who wished me a good trip. The flight was uneventful, and here I am in New York.

Jet lag. Luckily for me, Atsushi's going-away present was two sets of DVDs--the first and last series of「古畑任三郎」, the Japanese detective show modeled on Columbo that we used to watch together. I'm through six episodes already!

[Added on 29 April: Since I was talking about product design in the next post, I might mention that 「古畑任三郎」has some of the coolest titles I've ever seen. The Japanese are known for their sleek design, but to a degree that's because what we see in the West is selected by other Western visitors, who bring back the most striking artifacts. Lots of graphic and industrial design in Japan is as clunky and unprepossessing as it is anywhere else. That's especially true where words are concerned. Print media, web pages, and movie credits often have cutesy visual themes and are crammed with text. For a culture so renowned for maximizing the impact of spare design, Japan goes in for the clutter an awful lot.

Fuji TV doesn't seem to have streaming video of the opening credit sequence up on its page, which is a shame because the music is pretty cool, too. You can still can get a sense of the way it flows by clicking on some of the links:

If you click around on the site, actually, you may see what I mean by clutter. Even if you can read the Japanese, the page is hard to navigate.]

Speaking of jet lag, a word to American Airlines: When your flight is landing at JFK at 6 p.m., it's flat-out cruel to keep the cabin lights off and serve breakfast an hour before beginning descent. I mean, seriously? As if my sense of time weren't already screwed up enough.

誕生日

Sean — 2008-03-21T10:03+00:00

Happy birthday to my father and my little brother. Yes, both of them. When my parents converted to Sabbatarian Christianity when I was little, they went full-on into Nature: avoiding doctors in favor of anointings from the ministry, growing their own vegetables. My mother baked all our bread until I was in high school. (That's why the reception of Rod Dreher's Crunchy Con thing as if it were NEW! and EXCITING! made me giggle a while back.) And they decided on a home birth for my brother, so my father spent the morning of his own birthday delivering him. Dad tied off the umbilical cord with new white shoelaces. I read him (my brother, not my father) his first story. My mother, I'm assuming, rested. I have this feeling massive doses of painkillers were not part of the natural birthing plan.

Now he (again, my brother, not my father) is thirty. Thirty.

"You're turning thirty! That makes me--"

"Past it."

"Try waiting until the next time I visit home and saying that to my face, buddy."

"Sure. I'm taller than you now."

So happy birthday, guys.

It would also have been my last remaining grandfather's birthday this week.

Three of my grandparents died in their early sixties, in rapid succession, between 1981 and 1984. My father's father was the only one left. He remarried after my grandmother died; his second wife died, too, a decade ago. After that, he lived alone. His hearing was always bad, and he was in his own little world, but he lived in his own house until the end. His woodworking shop was in the basement. (Contemporary safety Nazis would have a coronary if they saw the way we used to play with Dad's and Pop-Pop's tools when we were little.) He used to make furniture for people in need at church--bedsteads and things like that. He was a regular churchgoer and made a Bible stand for the congregation that was much beloved. His income was limited, but he gave to charity regularly. He spoke with benevolence about the new neighbors--noisy, the other old-timers on the block complained, but they were polite and kept their property tidy and didn't cause trouble.

My father's sister checked on him and helped him out every week. My father gretzed that if he kept insisting on doing woodwork, he was going to kill himself with the circular saw at his age one of these days. I visited most times I went home. (No, not every time, to my discredit.) He was kind of abstracted in later years but always happy to hear that I was still enjoying Japan. He wasn't totally out of touch with the talk of the day, either. Once not too long ago, I gave him a bag of rather frou-frou green tea, and he said, "Thanks! Full of antioxidants, they say, huh?"

He wasn't the story-telling type of grandfather. He never talked about his childhood in England, or about being in Europe during the war, or about how Allentown had changed over his lifetime. He'd outlived both his wives and had trouble getting around. When he died in November, I think he was ready. My mother hadn't even had time to get word to me that he'd been taken to the hospital. He would have turned 93 on Tuesday.

Things I don't get

Sean — 2008-03-19T05:03+00:00

Cab drivers in Taipei don't like taking you to an intersection. Ask for "Zhongxiao East Road where it crosses Dunhua South Road," and you frequently get a blank look. "Which section?" the driver asks. (As in, "Do you mean the 300 block, or the 400 block, or what?") Once I didn't remember, and since I can write Chinese street names but can't speak Chinese, I drew a little diagram: See? These two streets. They cross here. Take me to the intersection...any old corner will do by this point. I stabbed conclusively with the pen. No reaction. Finally, I remembered I wanted Section 4. Scrawled it down. The driver beamed. Oh, okay. Zhongxiao East Road Section 4. Why didn't you just say so? Well, I gave you the intersecting street. We're not talking about Moebius Avenue and Tesseract Boulevard--they're two major arteries, and they only cross in one place!

Another time I was in a speeding cab with a few guys who do, in fact, speak Chinese. They asked for the intersection of Something and Something. "Which section?" An exchange of looks among the passengers--did anyone remember? "Section 2!" the guy next to me said, in clear confident tones. Then he turned to the rest of us. "It probably isn't Section 2, so when we get there, we'll just ask him to keep going to the next section until we get to the right intersection."

I've lived in Japan for twelve years and am used to being baffled by cultural differences. I have to say, though, I'm stumped by this one. Maybe it's because the cities I'm used to are New York (where the address numbers can't be divined from the street numbers) and Tokyo (where half the streets don't even have names), but most of the cabs I've been in in my lifetime refuse to move for you unless you pinpoint the intersection you're going to. No one has been able to explain to me how Taipei ended up developing the other way, though I can see why passengers would use addresses more often, since the address-numbering system here is very intuitive.

*******

You can be openly gay and get the benefits (nothing to hide), or you can be closeted and get the benefits (acceptance into the mainstream at all levels). You cannot do both. Those who want to be vociferously gay and simultaneously demand that people accept and adore them for it are insufferable, but it's people with the opposite problem who've been inflicting themselves on me lately, so they're the ones I'm going to grouse about.

You want to get married and have children? Good for you. It's none of my business. Whether you really feel affection for your wife or just want your family elders to get off your case or think you'll look more socially stable when it's promotion time at work, I don't care. However, sweetie, if you're going to sit in a gay bar (run by someone who's not afraid to show his face to the licensers and beer distributors and everyone else as the manager of a known gay bar), drinking whisky (served by guys who are not afraid to work at a known gay bar), talking to me (gay, for those who haven't noticed), then do not expect sympathy when you launch into a monologue about how hard it is to lead a double life, how you hate sneaking around, how you feel lonely all the time, and how you're really scared you'll run into a colleague in the wrong place someday. What exactly is the reaction you're expecting? We all make our trade-offs, and by definition, that means we're not going to get some things we want. News flash: If you hide what you are, you're going to feel like you're hiding all the time. Part of taking grown-up responsibility for your own choices is accepting that and not taking every opportunity to whine about it. Sheesh.

華航

Sean — 2008-03-16T04:03+00:00

I'm returning to Taipei today, and my company has booked me on China Airlines; but that's fine, since I don't think CI has had a fatal incident for...hell, it must be six or so years. So we're all cool! I just hope they remember to close all the doors before we take off.

Can't fight fate

Sean — 2008-03-07T05:03+00:00

Back in Tokyo for a half-week stay to attend to a few things before going back for my last few weeks in Taipei. This time, it's the clear weather that's following me around, which is nice. Not even I, with my English genes and sense of dramatic melancholy, like rain and overcast skies that don't stop for weeks at a time.

Japan appears not to have undergone any major changes, though I have to say I loved this item from the other way (which I was too busy to post about at the time):

Cutting bureaucratic fat may be a lot tougher than anticipated.

A government advisory panel's proposal to reduce branch offices of central ministries and agencies is expected to meet with fierce opposition.

While terms such as branch office and regional bureau may conjure up images of "outposts" of central government ministries, those venues are considered by entrenched bureaucrats as comprising the "core" of their ministries.

...

Past developments do not bode for fast progress. Last year, the decentralization committee asked for suggestions on possible mergers of branch offices.

Not a single central ministry came up with a positive proposal.

"Tougher than anticipated"? Asking central ministries whether they have any bright ideas about how to shrink their own territory and limit their own authority? The degree of ingenuousness on display here is touching. Every battle over restructuring federal ministries--from the game of musical chairs finalized in 2001 to the Koizumi administration's "trinity reforms"--has amply demonstrated that bureaucrats do not willingly look for ways to give themselves less power. And they know how to work the system to get their way, largely because they pretty much are the system.

*******

It's confirmed that Toshiro Muto is the candidate whose name has been submitted to committee as the next head of the Bank of Japan. (Toshihiko Fukui's chances for a second term were scotched by his involvement in the Murakami Fund/Livedoor maelstrom.)

*******

I'm starting to get the new Janet album, which makes me happy. It's been a while since a celeb put out an album that actually grew on me instead of provoking an immediate and unshifting love it/hate it/enh reaction. The single seems to have gone nowhere except in dance clubs, of course.

*******

Happy belated birthday to Rondi, who was born on 5 March.

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Happy on-time birthday to Lynn Swann, Taylor Dayne, and Tammy Faye (wherever she is), who were born on 7 March like me. This is apparently the day Apple was granted the patent for the iPod two years ago, too, which is very cool.

*******

Eric has a good post about maneuvering in the Pennsylvania primaries. I agree that those who think goosing Clinton's campaign in order to help McCain along later are playing with fire:

Unless that is, I do something about it, and fast. The way I see it, Hillary is going to win this state, and the forces of Rush Limbaugh are going to do their damnedest to increase her margin of victory. This, it is believed, will help John McCain. Not only do I disagree with this approach, but I distrust it. Almost without exception, Limbaugh and the other major Hillary promoters hate John McCain and make no secret of it. So I am deeply suspicious of their claim that they are "helping" John McCain by helping Hillary at the polls.

I think this might very well have the opposite effect. Yesterday's election results demonstrated the fragility of Obama's house of cards, because the Obamamania is already starting to wear off. I predicted that in the long term, he would be the weaker of the two candidates for this very reason, and that he, not Hillary, would be the easier of the two for McCain to beat.

Divisiveness in the Democratic Party seems to be building just fine without trying to foment it...with the side effect of reinforcing HRC's renewed viability. I don't think I'm misunderstanding the argument, but I really don't think it's a good idea.

*******

Remember when Janet used to sing songs like "He Doesn't Know I'm Alive"? As often happens, the release of the new album has reminded me how much I love her old stuff, so I've been on a real Janet kick, and I was just thinking, you know, if she did a song with a similar storyline today, she'd be all like "He doesn't even know that I'm alive...so I hired a private detective to find out his address, put on my studded lilac pleather catsuit, got into my SUV, plowed it through the facade of his McMansion, stepped grandly out into his now open-air foyer, and introduced myself as Miss Janet Robo-Damita." I mean, rhyming and stuff, of course.

I guess that's not as interesting as it seemed a few minutes ago. Uh, have a good weekend, everyone.

When I think that I'm over you / I'm overpowered

Sean — 2008-02-24T11:02+00:00

Disconnected thoughts that may prove to have been better left unexpressed:

Am I the only one who's afraid the new Janet album is going to suck? I actually liked 20 Y.O. She sounded relaxed. She seemed to be having fun. Yeah, she was ripping off herself and everyone else, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating. "Feedback" sounds great while you're listening to it, but I forgot I'd even downloaded it a day or two after it was released.

I'm enjoying Taipei, but it's a very...intimately-scaled place. Over the first few weeks I was here, I was introduced to three or four guys in the Family ("Ooh...I have a friend you'll just LOVE! He's gay, too!") and met a few others separately out and about. When I got back last Saturday, I was invited to a party. They were all there and all knew each other. It was kind of cute. Good thing I live a simple life, or the moment of realization might have been a little sticky.

And the weather in this place! Rain, sunshine (briefly) smog, mist, more rain, the temperature going up and down wildly. The friend I'm staying with lives part-way up a mountain. It's still officially Taipei City, but it's not urban at all. There are hot springs. The wind howls constantly, often flinging rain at you. Going for a run is great; the steepness of the roads makes it feel like you're doing stadiums. It's all nicely primordial...and she has cable! So yeah, things are going fine. Just busy.

Added 25 February: Another thing that's struck me since I've been here: Taiwan is full of South Africans. Canadians, too. In Japan, you get used to every third foreigner you meet's being Australian. Australia and Japan (touchingly, considering their war history) have very good relations nowadays, they're comparatively close together, and Australians like to knock around other places. In Taiwan, I think I've met one Australian in six weeks. Just about everyone from North America here seems to be Canadian. Handful of English. And lots of South Africans. This appears to be one of the places it's easy for the young and adventurous to make money away from home.

ご無沙汰しています。

Sean — 2008-02-22T11:02+00:00

No, I'm not dead--thanks to those who've asked. I'm forcing myself to follow the primaries, mirthlessly, and I have little to say about pesticide-laced gyoza or the latest alleged criminal behavior by our military personnel in Japan--not because there's nothing to say about them, but because my attention is distracted by other things. My project in Taipei requires a lot of attention. That's mostly a good thing, but it means that at the end of the day, I'm not exactly champing at the bit to spend more time at the computer. I may have more breathing room next week. Until then, I hope everyone enjoys the weekend.