I loan out books to everyone. With a few exceptions, I don’t expect to get them back.

But over the last couple of months, every time I’ve gone to look for a specific one to loan, it’s already gone. Tod asked last night “Do you know what happened to His Dark Materials?” Someone is enjoying it, I imagine, but I have no idea who it might be.

So now I’d like to figure out who has what, so I can engineer trades to get the books into different hands. It’s like solving word problems. “If Friend A in Meguro wants to read book X which is currently held by Friend B in Kanagawa, how long will it take to get book X to Friend A?”

Do you have any books I loaned you? Which ones? Leave me a comment or drop me a mail…

I’ve found a place to swim and it’s practically in my backyard. (If my backyard was as big as a 20 minute walk, anyway). The Bunkyo Sports Center near Myogadani station is where I’ll be taking my exercise. They don’t mind if I have a tattoo and it’s pay as you go—450 yen/swim. I think there’s a monthly pass as well.

Swimming is one of my favorite athletic endeavors. I learned when I was 11 or 12 and took to it like a fish to water. By the time I was 15, I was a lifeguard. My school didn’t have a swim team, so I never became competitive. I just spent my summers swimming laps.

But that was twenty years ago and I haven’t done too much swimming since. I have to get myself back into form. There’s a lot to re-learn and my body has changed over the years.

I swam for a brief 20 minutes on Monday evening and wrenched my shoulder trying to breathe on the left instead of the right. But it feels OK today, so I’m going back this morning to try for a slower, longer workout. And I’ll stick to breathing on the right today.

On the same day Tracey & I made ume shu, we also put together a batch ninniku shu—garlic tonic. It will be ready at the end of October, just in time to ward off chills, strengthen our blood, test on my visiting mother and mother-in-law, and all the other healthful benefits it’s said to bring. Really it was just too unusual (and tasty sounding) a combination of flavors not to try it!

Ninniku Shu

500 gr garlic
50 leaves shiso
4 lemons
60 gr white sesame seeds
80 grams fresh ginger root
1 cup honey
1.8 litres white liquor (35% alcohol)

Peel the garlic and trim off the ends. Steam for about 5 minutes. Rinse the shiso leaves. Slice the ginger root. Peel the lemons and slice into 2 or 3 pieces. Put all the ingredients into a 4 litre jar, and cover with the white liquor. Store in a cool dark place for about 5 months. Drink straight.

I’ve been floundering. I can’t seem to get anything finished. None of my projects are going where I want them to. There are lots of hurdles and blocks— some are of my own making, others not. It’s rather frustrating.

My frustration morphs into a series of bad feelings, irritable moods and depressed thoughts including all of the time-honored artistic temperament classics: Do I have any talent or skill whatsoever? Any original ideas? Why am I doing this stuff anyway? What’s the point? How can I possibly think my work is any good? Mr. XYZ is better at this than me, so why should I try? Wouldn’t I be better off with a “real” job pointlessly shuffling papers somewhere?

So my daunting digital pile of uncompleted work sits untouched. And so do my physical piles. Nothing’s getting done at all, even my normally tidy house is adrift in dust. The lack of progress aggravates the bad feelings, further preventing me from getting anything done. A vicious cycle.

But it’s breakable. This morning, I decided to look at the situation from a different angle:

I have accomplished a great deal. The unfinished projects are avenues for continuation and growth. Books, stories and screenplays started. Art underway. Footage shot but unedited. There’s effort behind it; look at how far I got. No reason to stop now. Let me add more to what I’ve already done and see how much farther it goes.

I think this is the secret to happiness in many aspects of life, not just creativity. People who focus on what they want but don’t have—whether it’s consumer goods, love, fame, creativity or something else—are rarely happy.

My glass is not half empty. It’s half full.

Maybe shopping would be easier if I paid attention to what’s in fashion, but I don’t, so I always seem to desire something that doesn’t exist.

This time my goal is a black straw cloche. A cloche is the close-to-the-head hat, small brimmed style from the 1920s. But apparently it’s not a style for 2004. I can find all sorts of floppy sun hats and narrow-brimmed fabric hats with square crowns, and some dreadful caps I remember from the 1970s. One lovely hat I tried on was the right shape—but it was the wrong color (burgundy) and definitely the wrong price (41,000 yen).

So I will have to look again because I don’t have the millinery skills to make a straw hat.

I listened to the first drops of rain fall this morning, breaking the Sunday morning silence with faint plop-pitters against our deck umbrella. This will be a familiar percussion for the next six weeks.

Although I don’t think it will be officially declared for a few more days, I do believe tsuyu, the rainy season, has begun. UPDATE: The start of tsuyu was declared today.

Look at that forecast… For current tsuyu details, weathernews has a national tsuyu map and information about tsuyu on the Kanto plain where Tokyo sits.

Tsuyu begins in the southwest and moves northeastward. Last year Tokyo saw on June 10th and said goodbye to it on August 2nd, but on average it starts on June 8th and ends July 20th. I guess we’ll have to wait to find out how this year’s rainy season compares. Here’s hoping for short and wet.

Six months living in Singapore gave me a taste for Malaysian food—spicy, flavorful dishes of meat and vegetables. But spicy foods aren’t really to the Japanese tastes, and we haven’t seen much Malaysian food here. But wandering the streets of Ginza looking for a place to eat, we spotted a sign for Rasa. “Malaysia - Singapore cuisine” Oh, wow!

The menu is full of my old favorites—beef rendang, chicken rice, and a host of seafood dishes with peppery sauces and exotic names. Prices range from 700 - 1800 yen. There’s also an extensive drinks menu including local beers and Singapore favorites like kopi, the-O and wheatgrass juice.

We splurged on the 4,000 yen set. It was eight courses, from steamed chicken salad through black pepper beef and finishing up with mango pudding. Each dish was better than the last and as authentic as you’re likely to find in Tokyo. The chef spent 13 years in Malaysia and 11 in Singapore.

Malaysia Airlines is connected to Rasa (the store card features the airline’s logo, and they play Malaysia Airlines travel videos in the dining room). I wonder if they get their blacan and other key ingredients flown in specially from the source.

Rasa is 1 minute from Ginza Station, exit A3. Go out the exit, and walk towards Citibank. Turn left at that corner and the building is two or three doors down on the left.

Rasa: Malaysia - Singapore cuisine
Ginza Five Star Building, 8F.
Ginza 5-8-13, Chuo-ku
03-3289-1668
Weekdays 11:00 - 14:30 & 17:00 - 23:00
Weekends/Holidays 12:00 - 23:00

This morning I attended a 9 am meeting at FCCJ. I was dressed and out the door at 8:30, just in time for rush hour on the Marunouchi line.

A hundred people in the train car with me multiplied the effects of today’s sticky weather. By the time I reached my stop, 11 minutes after I’d boarded the train, my upper lip was beaded with perspiration, my hair was damp, and sweat dripped down the curve of my spine.

I’m lucky, though, because I got to come home and strip off my clammy clothes after the meeting. While everyone else suffers in their suits and ties, I’ll spend the rest of the day in a t-shirt (and not much else).

The US president doesn’t have to abide by international treaties and his own federal laws? Isn’t that sort of like saying the Pope doesn’t have to follow the ten commandments?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush, as commander-in-chief, is not restricted by U.S. and international laws barring torture, Bush administration lawyers stated in a March 2003 memorandum.

The 56-page memo to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld cited the president’s “complete authority over the conduct of war,” overriding international treaties such as a global treaty banning torture, the Geneva Conventions and a U.S. federal law against torture.

“In order to respect the president’s inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign … (the prohibition against torture) must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his commander-in-chief authority,” stated the memo, obtained by Reuters on Tuesday.

Source: Reuters

This was a surprise. We had a half a French loaf and some eggs, but it was dinner…aha! A jar of pasta sauce, a few sausages and a dish of spinach with mushrooms, voila, dinner was done.

Savory French Toast

1/2 loaf french bread
3 eggs
3 Tblsp parmesan cheese (grated)
salt
pepper
olive oil

Beat the eggs until smooth, blend in the parmesan, season with salt and pepper. Slice the bread into 1 or 2 cm slices. Dip the bread in the egg to coat, allowing excess egg to run back into the egg mixture. Fry on both sides over medium-high heat in a little olive oil.

Heat up some pasta sauce, serve on the side instead of maple syrup.

Here’s a challenge. Unplug yourself this weekend. Turn everything off—the TV, your computer, radio, stereo, cell phone, answering machine. Take in no media and be completely unreachable for a day or two.

At first this is going to be uncomfortable. At least it is for me. No computer? How will I answer all the questions that pop into my head? No cell phone? But what will I do if I want to meet someone and I’m running late or can’t find them?

After the initial panic, I settle into a very mellow and leisurely groove. No distractions from thinking. I can take my time and enjoy my life without the subconscious stress of ringing phones and e-mail. I can pursue my pleasures quietly. It’s a good stretch of time to paint, to cook, to plan things.

What will you do with your unfettered time?

(Digging through my older writing, I’ve found some essays written for the mailng list that was a precursor to my weblog. For my long-time fan (yes, Mom, I mean you) the next few entries may be familiar. This one was written in June 2000.)

Have you ever bought a $30 cantaloupe?

Expensive melons are given as gifts in Japan. I might have selected another item to present, some French cookies perhaps or a decorative tin of seasonal tea, but the melon seemed appropriate. Tod & I, melon-headed Americans, had to pay a formal call on a neighbor who we had inadvertently upset.

It all started three weeks ago. The imminent arrival of my sister and her family spurred us to take on some tasks we’d left undone when we moved in in February. We bought a low, Japanese-style dining table and zabuton cushions to sit on. I finally moved my office a few feet vertically and set it up on a desk instead of the floor. And we took the initiative to build a deck on top of the triangular patch of mud and weeds that sits outside our living room and dining room.

A bilingual carpenter friend constructed the deck while we were away from Tokyo for a week. We had the fun of arranging the work with Eddy, leaving for Singapore, and returning to find a beautiful deck. We celebrated by painting the outdoor table and chairs.

It was when I was struggling to move the table back onto the deck that I had a hint things might be a bit touchy. Our table is wooden and lightweight, but tricky to squeeze through the narrow funnel of space between our house and the house next door. I’ve done it before, but this time I slipped and bumped the neighbors’ kitchen wall. Just a tap, nothing damaging. I didn’t even ding the new paint on the table.

But the neighbor, a balding Japanese man in his 50s, came out and complained. He didn’t yell, of course, but he looked at me and pointed to the table, then the wall and said “Don don” indicating the noise I’d caused. I apologized as well as I could considering I was still holding the table and he went away. I gave up on moving the table and when Tod arrived home from work, we successfully and silently put the table on the deck together.

Two days later, our carpenter’s wife gave me a call. “How’s the deck?” she began. I told her how much we were enjoying it and she launched into a story. “I think you may have a little problem…the noise from the construction upset your neighbors. A man came over and complained about Eddy’s saw. And he said he wants a fence put up between your house and his. He wasn’t very nice about it at all. I think you ought to know this because the Japanese will never complain to you, but they will go directly to your landlord. I know you don’t want to have any of that sort of trouble,” she warned. I agreed, thanked her for the warning, and started to fret.

What should we do? An apology was certainly in order. But my Japanese isn’t capable of much more than simple conversation, much less the rigorous grammar of a formal letter of apology! Miss Manners has nothing on the masters of Japanese etiquette, let me tell you.

There are numerous social protocols in Japanese life. We know some of them—how and when to bow, how introductions are made, when to refill someone’s glass—but our experience is limited by the casual social situations we’ve been involved in. Most of our Japanese friends have traveled and have international attitudes so they just laugh at (or are only slightly embarrassed by) our social gaffes. But a formal apology doesn’t leave much room for error. Screw it up and we could find ourselves alienated for a long time.

So we enlisted some assistance. Tod polled his office colleagues for advice. “Ah, you must begin with some set paragraphs about the weather and the season of the year before discussing the problem and apologizing,” suggested one woman. “Take them a gift,” said another. Two men on Tod’s work team wrote up sample apology letters.

I decided that I was not going to apologize alone; we needed to present a united front. I waited for a day when Tod would be home. Jenn & her husband & daughter arrived from America on Friday night. Saturday we went to the zoo. Sunday was The Day.

I sketched a little card and pasted in the letter that Koki wrote. It was brief and to the point—perhaps that was not in its favor it as didn’t chat about the weather but we understood what it said and it seemed profusely apologetic.

“Recently, the noise and dust from the construction at our house must have been very annoying. We have no excuse; we are extremely sorry.

“However, the construction is not finished yet. Before long, we plan to build a fence along the front of our house and between your house and ours.

“It will be very annoying, I think, but please bear with us. We appreciate your continued patience and goodwill.”

Message complete, my sister and I walked to the fruit shop and selected a melon from the gift shelf. The prices ranged from 1800 yen to 8000 yen ($18 - $80). I picked a beautifully round, ripe, evenly veined cantaloupe with a stem sticking off the top. The fruit shop man boxed it and gift wrapped it for me then placed it carefully in a shiny white shopping bag. It was lovely.

Armed with the right tools, we were ready. Tod wanted a few more minutes to procrastinate, but I insisted that we had to do this before my courage gave out. We had the letter and the gift. But how were we supposed to deliver it?

“We could drop it on the doorstep and run,” Tod suggested.

Good idea, certainly easy to execute, but maybe not as neighborly as we ought to be. We abandoned the thought and walked out to the street. Immediately we got lost trying to find the door to the apartment. There is a clothing shop out front (Sendagi Yashima—Sporty & Casual) and Tod noticed a door to the left. But the door leads into a small entryway with mailboxes and a staircase up to the second floor. No first floor apartment.

We dithered out front for a few minutes while we decided what to do. We even looked at the side of the building near our house to determine that there was, indeed, living space back there. The way in, we concluded, must be at the back of the shop. So we entered the shop and looked around.

Outfits of iridescent pastels and bright summery knits designed for bulky older women hung on hangers lining the walls of the shop floor to ceiling. Behind the outfits, I glimpsed plastic-wrapped stock piled on shelves. A center island displayed scarves and accessories—patterns and colors jumbled into an undefined mass. Floor space was limited to the area created by moving two racks of sale items to the outside of the shop. It was tiny and cramped.

And empty. “Oh, no,” we conferred. “Now what?” We called out a cheery “Sumimasen!” to alert someone to our presence. A woman came out through a hidden doorway. She wiped her hands on her apron as Tod asked “Excuse me, but do you live here?” She looked at him, then at me and called for her husband.

The balding man I’d met the other day appeared. Tod, his shaking hands betraying his nervousness, introduced us both and explained that we lived next door. “Our Japanese isn’t very good”, he said, “so we asked a friend to help us write this. Please read it,” He extracted the card with Koki’s letter.

The man read the note, then he lead us outside. He pointed to the deck, to his wall, to the deck again. He said that the deck was too close to his house—it was on his property (by about 2 inches, I think!). We’d have to fix that. He asked us where we were from—actually he guessed we were American (our reputation precedes us, I fear). He talked to us about the fence and mentioned our landlord. Unfortunately, I didn’t entirely understand what he said. Then we handed him our gift, awkwardly thanked him and it was over.

We don’t know if we did it right or not. He never gave us his name…maybe it’s Yashima, like the store name, and he assumed we’d know. Or maybe he was snubbing us. I am too dense to recognize a snub in Japanese culture. He tried to speak English with us—a word here or there when he knew one and we looked lost. We walked away with mixed signals and uncertainty.

Since we handed over our gift and apology we haven’t seen him or his wife. No more complaints, but no greetings either. I guess time will tell which side of the fence we’re on. We will tread lightly and be prepared to buy more melons as necessary.

(September 2000)

I won them. Five little goldfish, kingyo in Japanese.

Our local end-of-summer festival blocked off the shopping street. Makeshift stalls in the street grilled corn on the cob, yakitori and takoyaki. Lines of children in yukata waited for their turn to get a cone of shaved ice. All along the street, games of skill awaited those who would try to toss a ring, shoot a cork-gun or catch a fish.

A little girl squatted at the side of a large, shallow tank of water filled with goldfish. She dipped a paper-covered frame into the water and scooped up a fish. It flopped off the frame and back into the water. She tried again.

This time her catch landed on the sidewalk. I squeaked, but she just reached over with little fingers and dropped the fish into her bowl of water. And she dipped again for another fish…this time she aimed carefully for one of the lovely orange and white ones. Fish number two was swimming in her bowl a few seconds later. Again and again she captured fish and deposited them into the bowl at her side.

I had stood there watching for so long and with such interest that I almost didn’t notice when an older man approached holding out a frame for me.

“Douzo,” he said, waving the frame at me as though I ought to take it from him.

“Ikura desu ka?” I asked, reaching for my wallet.

“Sebisu…” he answered. Service, for free.

I thanked him profusely and kneeled down to the fish basin. I studied the little girl’s technique. Pick a fish, slide the frame gently into the water and under the fish. Lift. Didn’t look so hard. After all, the little girl had more than a dozen before she finished.

I managed six. I decided that I’d rather have five, so I put the largest one back into the tank and handed the man my catch. Still unsure whether I should be paying for these fish, I asked again “Ikura?” but was waved away. Little did I know how much I’d be paying for these fish in the end.

I was smiling when I approached Tod with my catch in hand. “Look, Tod, I got fish!”

“We have no place to keep them,” he pointed out.

“Well, I know, but yesterday I saw some big ceramic bowls, like giant planters, on Hongo Dori. We could go get one of those because I want to make a water garden with these fish and some water lilies.”

Tod looked a little bit startled at this rather elaborate plan, but agreed to walk up Hongo Dori to the antique shop where I’d seen a dozen ornamental urns stacked up outside.

But when we arrived, the store was closed and the giant bowls were neatly covered with a tarp tied over them.

We settled on stopping for supplies, distilled water and fish food, at the BanBan Bazaar down the street. The shopkeeper grinned when she rang up our purchase and realised I was holding a baggie full of fish.

“Cute,” she crooned. “Are they from the festival?” she asked as the baggie mysteriously sprung a leak. Together we tucked the fish and their water into a second bag to stem the rush of water. Tod & I hurried home to install the fish into a bucket.

Tod named three of them. Pinky, Dinky, & Calico. I named the other two Fish-piki. Hiki is the counter for small animals…one fish is ippiki, two fish are nihiki, three fish are sambiki and so on. I decided that all of my fish taken as a group were fish-piki and the two without names were also fish-piki. It was easier that way.

We were aware of the brief mortality of festival fish and I worried about the fish-piki having sufficient oxygen, food and a happy environment. They made it through the night and lived all day Sunday. By Monday morning, they were still all alive, but their water was becoming cloudy. It was time to think about a more appropriate container and a filtering system.

So Tod did some research on the Internet and came up with RTW’s Goldfish Information Page (http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/4468/). RTW is a real aficionado; he has a basement full of goldfish. He gave some good advice about feeding, tank cleaning and even how much space a healthy goldfish needs.

“For two fish a twenty gallon tank will be big enough for several years. You can start with a ten gallon tank, but you may need a bigger tank within a year!” he writes.

A quick calculation showed that we would need a 50 gallon tank for the fish-piki. The big ceramic bowls I had seen don’t come quite that big. Time to rethink.

A few cruel options discarded, we had a decision. We’d go on safari to Sudo Park and release the fish-piki into the wild.

After dusk, I gathered up the pink bucket containing the well-fed fish and handed it to Tod, who carried it through the back streets from our house to the park.

We reached the park, a generous block of trees, pathways and the pond. Looking around to make certain we weren’t seen I climbed over the railing of the bridge down to the edge of the pond. Tod handed me the bucket and I tipped the fish in.

The water was a little chillier than their bucket and they slowed down for a few minutes, but when they adjusted to their new environment, they swum around energetically.

We said goodbye walked back home.

A few days later, we returned in the daylight to see if we could find them. The pond teems with fish of all sizes. Tiny fish the size of baby carrots swam in schools in the shade of rocks and trees. Large, venerably aged goldfish (dinner for six?) cruised the pond or rested near where the turtles sunned themselves.

We looked and looked. It seemed like the fish-piki might have had a chance with so many fish sharing the pond. We saw one goldfish that looked like Pinky or maybe Dinky. But we saw no sign of Calico or the two unnamed fish-piki. I was sad, but Tod was hopeful that they were there, swimming around unseen.

As we climbed the hill out of the park, we turned around to look back at the pond. A boy with a bucket was climbing over the railing where I had released the fish-piki. He had a bucket in his hands. He dipped it into the water, scooping up an unseen treasure. Maybe it was Calico.

I hope the fish-piki are enjoying their new home.

(August 2000)

Kinichi Kitano wore a red and orange plaid shirt, tan shorts and black Birkenstock clogs.

“Today we’re going to tour Akihabara for Made-for-Linux items. Does anyone want to buy anything special?” he asked the group assembled in the Computing books section of Shosen Book Tower.

A short list of desired items was produced: a SCSI hard drive and two internal, 50-pin (narrow), terminated SCSI cables. And soon we were out of the bookstore and on the broiling hot streets of Akihabara.

Akihabara is Tokyo’s famous electronics district. It grew from a few small shops under the railroad tracks selling black-market radio components after World War II. The district was originally called Akiba-hara, after a shrine in the neighborhood, but when the train station opened in 1890, a misprint on the station sign turned it around to Akihabara. Akihabara is still called Akiba by those who like nicknames.

Tokyo neighborhoods are well known for their specialties—near Ueno station you’ll find many motorcycle shops; Otsuka has love hotels; Nezu offers up art supplies in abundance. So when the original radio stores became famous, many related shops opened up in Akiba.

Nowadays the electronics district spans many blocks and includes hundreds of stores ranging from the behemoth Llaox to tiny one-room shops on upper floors of narrow buildings. You can find everything from resistors and soldering equipment to the latest model of dishwasher or massage chair. If you know where to look, you can still find radio parts and antique radios.

Kitano-san was going to show us where to look for cheap computers and components. He’s a member of the Tokyo Linux User’s Group (TLUG) and had volunteered to lead an expedition around the bewildering maze of shops to show us the best places.

Our group comprised seven people. In addition to me and Tod, there were five men, all gaijin. Michael was youthful but very quiet; his clear eyes revealed depths that he otherwise kept to himself. Victor, from the Ukraine, had been a chemist until deciding that programming was more fun than research. He credits the ease of his career transition to the free availability of the Linux operating system.

One member of our group, a tall lanky man with a tangle of curly grey hair, never identified himself to me. Tod recognised him from previous TLUG gatherings, but didn’t learn his name.

Two Steves rounded out our group. One Steve was an impassioned man who pretty much disagreed with every topic discussed for the seven hours we were together. Except for zsh, I can’t think of a single thing he spoke positively about. He looked completely bemused when non-computing topics were introduced to the conversation. I found him to be slightly irritating; Tod was amused.

The other Steve was an engineering professor at a local university. He fit the mold of an academic to a tee—curious and opinionated. He’s co-authored a popular book on Japanese in Linux recently published by O’Reilly. At the post-tour nomikai (drinking party), several people brought out their copies for an impromptu signing, but conversation moved as swiftly as the beer flowed and Steve absentmindedly neglected to sign them.

Weekends are especially crowded with tourists and locals coming to shop so we battled our way through human traffic to reach our many stops along the tour.

Kitano-san valiantly attempted to keep us on track in and out of the dozen or so shops on our route “It’s difficult,” he confided to me. “We get into a store and some people are really excited about what’s there and others are bored.” He managed pretty well, though, pacing us through several kilometers of streets and up and down countless elevators and stairs.

“There are some Akihabara rules” Kitano-san intoned before we started out. “No smoking or drinking in the stores. And don’t mention Linux, you’ll just be wasting your time. Nobody knows what you’re talking about.”

Later on he added an explanation of ‘junk,’ the Akiba term for most used or out-of-date goods. “Junk has different meanings in different stores, but usually it means the staff won’t answer technical questions and there’s no guarantee it will work. Sometimes junk is tested by the staff, but sometimes it isn’t.”

The tour covered a lot of ground over the course of four hours. There were some overall favorites: everyone seemed to like the glass-topped computer rack-cum-desk,; we laughed over the mouse shaped like a nude female torso; but the best of all was the first store we visited—it had a mix of used computers and office equipment, including a pay phone.

Kitano-san imparted some of the local lore to me, giving me tips on good places to eat. And he paid me an indirect compliment by telling me about a female colleague who came to Akihabara with him but decided that every store was exactly alike. That is patently untrue, though I will admit that after a few hours searching fruitlessly for a particular item, the stores do start to blur together. I suggested that next time his friend comes along, he drop her off at Livina, an upscale furniture and household goods store on the fringes of Akihabara.

By the time we neared the end of the tour, everyone was weary and even the genki Kitano-san was getting tired. We all hoped it was “one more store and then to the nomikai for a beer.” Victor made the last purchase of the day, and then our tour group broke apart at the train station as quiet Michael headed home. The mysterious man abandoned the tour halfway through. The remaining six of us met up with five other TLUG members at the Ebisu Garden Place beer hall.

I sat between Victor and Simon, who spent some time discussing the merits of various Ukrainian and Polish vodkas. Simon, a 25 year old programmer originally from Montreal, taught me the differences in pronunciation of the Polish z. He’s learned Polish and English recently (French is his first language) and now is working on Japanese. This is a young man with a very big brain.

The general conversation was naturally centered on computing and there were some very spirited discussions of the best 1970’s era terminal, how to improve your programming by using a profiler, and whether or not Xemacs has stylish code. Richard Stallman, known to the Unix world as rms, was invoked as a hot potato topic—he owns the copyright to all of the freely distributed GNU programs; will rms ever choose to betray the foundation of his intellectual property and cash in on all that open source software?

Ah, being geeky is fun. Often I deny being a geek, but I followed every conversational thread with interest and with some familiarity, and although I didn’t feel the same passion for the topics as some people did, I found it quite entertaining. Particularly after several beers.

(October 2000)

Tokyo, like many metropolitan areas around the globe, has not one trash day, but many. In fact, we have four—two for burnable trash, one for non-burnable and a final one for recyclable metals and glass.

Everyone in the neighborhood puts their trash at the same place. Tokyo’s streets are so narrow that event the miniature trash trucks—they are about the size of a pickup but shaped like a normal garbage truck—can’t squeeze through. So for their convenience, we all plop our bags at a place designated by a color-coded sign which also tells us what days belong to what type of garbage. Which is good, because I’ve always had some problems remembering what day which sort of trash was to be taken out to the collection point.

When we moved to a new neighborhood earlier this month, I ran into a problem.

Our house sits in the crook of two roads that intersect to form a Y. One branch of the Y goes uphill; the other goes down. The downslope side is bound by a wall where lots of people park their cars during the day and the street leads to the main street, Hakusan Dori. The upslope side leads into a residential neighborhood.

Across the street on the downslope side there is a printing company, very small, that churns out lots of A1 sized sheets that are cut and folded into A4 sized booklets. I enjoy hearing the ke-chunk of the presses all day and the triplet beep of their forklift backing up the hill with it’s palettes of paper. They seem to be the only industry in my neighborhood (zoning in Tokyo is nothing like zoning in American cities—homes and businesses, even manufacturing plants—sit side by side.

But back to the trash trouble.

The day we moved in, I looked for the place to put our trash. There was no sign designating a spot on the downslope side, so I walked uphill. Nothing up there either. I turned around and walked down the trunk of the Y. No sign anywhere!

There’s construction going on all over the neighborhood right now. Two brand new buildings are going up—one outside my bedroom and one outside my office. I guessed that the signs had been removed during the construction.

So I planned to keep watch and see where people put their trash and examine it to sort out match type of trash and days of the week.

Two days went by and I didn’t see any trash. I was starting to wonder if maybe our neighbors had some special high-tech Japanese gadget that vaporized their waste. But I was busy unpacking and really didn’t worry too much. We have a two car garage and no cars, so there’s plenty of room for a few trash bags if I didn’t find the collection point for a little while.

But as I was unpacking the books in my office one afternoon, I heard a knock on the door. I ran downstairs to answer it.

“Sumimasen,” began a woman in her 50s. She was wearing a casual housedress and wanted to chat. In Japanese of course.

“My name is Shimizu. I am a friend of Matsuno-san, who used to live here. I wanted to welcome you to the neighborhood,” she said. “How long have you been living in here?”

I wasn’t sure whether she meant this house or Japan. I fumbled my way through a sort of an answer.

“Ah, I see. I live over there,” she pointed up the hill. “If I can help you in any way, please ask.”

Aha! A neighbor. Surely, she would know where the trash goes. I asked her about the collection point.

“Hmmm,” she started. She didn’t really know where, since her house is distant enough to have a closer collection point. But she gamely looked around for the color-coded sign. Of course, it wasn’t there.

As we stood in the middle of the intersection, discussing the possibilities—maybe the trash was collected down there, around the corner, or perhaps it was at the apartment building up the hill—a woman on a bicycle in front of the print shop asked if she could help.

She and Shimizu-san completely ignored me as they discussed my predicament in rapid Japanese. I just stood there, trying to look grateful.

After a few moments of explanation, the bicycle woman suggested that trash was collected next to the utility pole just past my garage door. Wow, very convenient!

But Shimizu-san was not convinced. After all, there was no city sign there. How could it be a collection point with no sign? She decided that we would go ask at the apartment building.

So we walked up the hill and climbed the stairs to the entry. The reception window, where the caretaker or guard normally sits, was curtained off. He was gone for the day. But Shimizu-san was determined to find me an answer, and she rapped on the window.

A moment later, a man peeked out. Shimizu-san asked to speak to him and he waved us into the lobby, gesturing to us to come around the corner.

He greeted us at the door, his wife coming out of the kitchen wiping her hands on a towel. Shimizu-san, once again, took the lead and explained why we were there. I did interject with a polite introduction in Japanese.

“Do you speak Japanese?” the caretaker asked me. I explained that I speak a little bit and still study the language.

“Gambatte!” his wife said to him. She meant for him to try hard to speak English to me. Inwardly I sighed. I really do want my Japanese to improve and if people insist on speaking English to me, it never will. But, then maybe my neighbor-caretaker wanted to improve his English.

I don’t know whether Matsuno-san, the previous resident of my house, had put her trash at this apartment building, but Caretaker-san was happy to show me where the trash belonged, what days it was collected and even what time it was to be placed.

“Nama gomi on Monday and Thursday,” he explained in halting but comprehensible English before switching back to Japanese for the more details explanation. “But it must be at 8:30 exactly. I bring the building’s trash out here then and the truck comes right after that. Don’t be late, and please don’t come early.”

I parroted back to him what he had said to show that I understood. Eventually, after a few more careful iterations, it seemed that we truly did understand one another and all was well. I was welcome to put my trash in his building’s pile as long as I made sure to follow his rules.

No problem.

Shimizu-san and I stood at the edge of the sidewalk and thanked him, bowing over and over with every more humble and sincere thank yous. Once Caretaker-san had gone back inside. I did the same for Shimizu-san. She certainly pout herself out to help me and I was very grateful for her aid.

Ironically, we left town the next day for a two week holiday, so I didn’t get to put out the trash until we returned.

And even more ironically, it turns out that the utility pole next to the garage is a collection point. It has no sign, but every Monday, Thursday and Saturday, there are bags of garbage there. And no time restrictions…

Not long ago, a 6th grade girl in Sasebo, Japan, killed her classmate in a rather gruesome way at school. Investigators discovered the girls had once been friends and things had gone sour. The victim had written some unkind things about the girl on a website. The murderess (so sad to think of an 11 year old that way, but she is…) also had a website where she posted poetry and other writing expressing her unhappiness and problems.

Today a survey company, Interactive Marketing Interface, announced that 69% of sixth- and seventh-grade female students have their own websites. Do you think that websites will be tied to school violence like video games were after Columbine?

This lemony Greek chicken soup is a good choice when you’re sick and tired of chicken noodle.

Avgolemono
serves 3-4

4 chicken filets, or 1 skinless breast diced
2 cans chicken broth
1/2 can water
1/2 c rice
2 lemons, juiced
2 eggs
2-3 Tblspn milk
1/4 cup flat leaf parsley, chopped

In a stock pot, cook the chicken quickly over high heat until seared. Pour in the stock and water. Add the rice, cover and simmer for about 20 minutes or until the rice is cooked.

In a bowl, beat together the eggs and milk until very well blended.

When the rice is cooked, pour the egg mixture into the boiling soup in a thin drizzle, stiring to form egg threads. Remove from heat, add lemon juice and parsley.

Variation 1: use 10 finely sliced shiso leaves instead of parsley.
Variation 2: add some diced carrot with the rice. Add 1/2 cup chopped spinach after the rice is done and allow to cook down, then do the egg threads.

You have an inner critic, don’t you? I think most of us do. Mine’s a middle aged man—the ringleader of all reviewers—who lies in wait in my head, looking for a chance to tell me what’s wrong with what I’m doing. He’s harsh.

But today I’m going to write him a letter to tell him why I disagree with his reviews.

Dear Inner Critic,

Kristen

Now it’s your turn. What would you like to say to your inner critic?

The next few entries (not including Recipe Thursday and Creative Perspectives on Friday) are another set of essays I wrote years ago describing my trip to Shikoku. I’m publishing them as they were written (sloppily) and presented to the group of readers who came before my weblog. This first one is from 4 August 1999.

It’s been a pretty amazing two weeks. I just arrived home from the long trip I mentioned last time I wrote to you. What an adventure. Or rather a long series of adventures. There’s far too much to tell all in one go, so I’ll dole out the highlights in a series.

The first part of my trip was spent with the Aono family. I met Aono-san when I worked at the bank. When I mentioned one day that I wanted to visit Shikoku, the smallest of the four major islands of Japan, he invited me to come along with him and his family on their summer vacation.

Over 25 million people live in the Tokyo metropolitan area and suburbs but most of them aren’t native to Tokyo. They’ve come to seek their fortunes in the big city. Once a year, at O-Bon in the middle of August, they head back to their hometowns to visit family and in the ancient tradition make peace with their ancestors. The Aonos were traveling to Aono-san’s hometown on Shikoku for O-Bon this year.

This was an invitation not to be passed up. To see Shikoku with a native and to get to meet Aono’s family was a major big deal.

Japanese are pretty reserved about showing their private feelings and sharing their private lives. There is even a special word for the external mask used at work and with people who aren’t relatives or close, trusted friends. This is the “face” you hear about so much in Western press—as in saving face, you know. But there is another side of the Japanese—playful, loving, silly. I was being given an opportunity to see that private, family side of Aono-san.

And it was such fun.

I traveled by Shinkansen to Kobe where Aono-san, his wife, two kids and brother-in-law met me. The kids, Ko and Yuka, were in the backseat of the car asleep with their mom, Ayoko. When I nudged Ko, Aono’s 6 year old son, he looked at me rather dubiously. A big, pink gaijin was invading his space! But he climbed onto his mother’s lap, squashing his little sister in the process, and soon we were on our way to a local pottery.

Pottery has an 800 hundred year history in the town of Tachikui. There are over 5 dozen family-run pottery businesses in the tiny village and a pottery museum complex that includes a workshop where you can try your hand at making a pot with the local clay. Mine turned out very lopsided!

The museum and pottery workshop whetted my appetite for more information about the pottery of the area, so the fearless Takashi went into the museum’s offices and interrupted the board of directors meeting to find out if I could interview someone! This was a very bold move, but Takashi is a man who does not fear stepping outside his social rank and talking to people. The president of the museum complex, who kindly took a few minutes out of his meeting to talk to us, encouraged us to visit any of the local potters who would be happy to show us around.

So we piled into the car and Takashi picked a place at random. Through Aono and Takashi’s patient translating, I learned about the local wood-fired nobori-gama (inclined kilns) and saw works of art created by a third-generation potter named Ichino-san. He was happy to give us a tour and to answer my questions. He showed us all his kilns, going so far as to jump in his truck and drive down the road to show us his ana-gama (hole kiln) where he fires artistic, old-styled pottery. This was great country hospitality.

I think that Takashi and Aono enjoyed it as much as I did. I gave them an excuse to go outside the bounds of what they normally might restrain themselves from doing—dropping in unannounced on an artist at work and asking questions. They grinned ear to ear that afternoon.

After the pottery, we headed to Takashi and Nanako’s house. They live in an abandoned vacation resort! much like the one where I grew up. The house is on a small lake and surrounded by hills and trees. It’s very beautiful. Nanako who is Aono’s older sister had prepared a picnic feast for us—dish after dish of food arrived on the table as presided over the grill with a blowtorch and a fan. We gorged ourselves on yakiniku, yakitori, pickles, salads, fresh fruit.

Eventually, dinner concluded and Yuka’s impatient insistence on fireworks was rewarded. The hanabi came out and we all played with dangerous explosives. I think I had as much fun playing with the hanabi as the kids did because it was quite novel; this is not something I can imagine doing in the US. In addition to handheld fireworks which we lit over candle flames, there were rockets and huge spark-spitting monsters that Takashi set off three feet from us.

Over dinner, Nanako told me that they have a pair of wild tanuki who come up to the house for dinner scraps. Tanuki are “raccoon dogs” which are neither raccoons nor dogs and there’s no equivalent beast in the States. They are the mythological pranksters and while you won’t see any real ones in Tokyo except at the zoo, statues of them posed with sake flasks and straw hats sit outside many bars. So I was anxious to see my first wild tanuki to compare.

And they did not disappoint. After the cacophony of the hanabi had died down and our after dinner hilarity had become a quiet conversation, a pair of eyes appeared in the bushes. A step forward brought a head into the light followed by quick dart to the patio door for some food and then back into the bushes. I went into the house to stand at the patio door and get a better view. The female of the pair was a little more skittish. She hung back, then came forward, but froze and looked around at every sound. She didn’t like me standing in the doorway, either. Her approach was slow and halting while her retreat was lightning quick.

The tanuki statues are round and jolly and show really huge testicles (part of the prankster image, I suppose). The wild tanuki in summer are lean and the male was too fast for me to check underneath for size. Takashi and Nanako say that their tanuki get fat but only in winter. They had the same mask-like eye markings and multicolored fur as the statues depict but no sake flasks and they weren’t wearing straw hats. Maybe that’s saved for winter, too.

Before bedtime, the kids taught me some new card games—”babanuki” and one whose name sounded like “shichi-nana-bai”—which were easy enough for me to understand and play. Ko is a game fiend and a good strategist. Yuka’s still sorting out the idea of rules (she’s only 4) but she plays enthusiastically nonetheless and doesn’t mind when people help her a little bit. We played a few hands and then it was time for sleep for all of us.

My arrival and guest status meant that the entire Aono family vacated the 8 mat tatami room where they had been sleeping for the past three nights and moved themselves to a tent outside while I occupied their former quarters. That was a little strange and I felt bad for having put them to so much trouble and inconvenience. I felt worse in the morning when I saw that it had rained in the night.

5 August 1999

Sometimes you end up seeing the strangest places. On the trip from Kobe to Nyugawa, Aono’s hometown on Shikoku, we stopped for a few minutes at Nihon no Heso, the Bellybutton of Japan. At 35 N latitude, 135 E longitude, Nihon no Heso is the very center of the country.

There are a number of monuments competing to be the actual center—a sundial, two obelisks and a large stone monument share near proximity. I suspect that varying survey techniques produced slightly different results. But one of them must be correct, so I stood near all four of them…at some point I was standing dead center in Japan!

There’s a park surrounding the monuments and a small art museum. There’s even a special train that comes out to the park. The station platform is decorated with kids’ paintings and a ceramic tile map of Japan done complete with a crosshair showing the center.

But we didn’t stay too long at Nihon no Hesa. The drive to Nyugawa on the northern coast of Shikoku was long and we had other places to visit along the way.

We passed from Honshu, the largest island, to Shikoku when we crossed over Seto Ohashi a huge span of bridge near Takamatsu. We stopped for lunch and photos and tried to catch donbo (dragonflies) by holding our fingers up in the air near a swarm of them. None of them took our fingertip bait though and soon we were back in the car.

At Kawanoe we stopped to try our hand at papermaking. Kawanoe is known for its papermills and the whole town smells like sour paper pulp. The paper museum exhibited washi techniques and raw materials as well as the myriad things done with Kawanoe paper. The kids were impressed with the long, uncut rolls of toilet paper. I liked the beautiful and elaborate knotted paper strings. They’re used on gift envelopes and these examples were some of the fanciest I’ve ever seen.

Behind the exhibits on the second floor is a huge workroom where you can make your own paper postcards. While you are not making the traditional Japanese rice paper, which takes years to master, papermaking is fun and even Yuka had a successful postcard making experience.

The man who ran the workroom has been making paper since he was 14 and has volunteered at the museum since he retired from his job 11 years ago. When the Empress came to visit the museum, he helped her make paper—hers was especially beautiful. He helped us commoners, too. Yuka had his assistance in dipping the frame into the slurry of pulp and water. Ko shyly helped him decorate a sample postcard for us.

How do you make paper? It’s really not too difficult.:

1. Create a soupy mixture of paper pulp and water. You can do this in a blender by ripping up old paper or cartons, adding water and pureeing.
2. Carefully and evenly pour the pulp into a special hinged frame with a screen on one side. Or put your paper pulp in a basin and dip the screen in. In either case, the water seeps out through the screen.
3. While the paper pulp is wet, you can add bits of flowers, shreds of colored paper and tissue, or pour colored pulp in patterns on top.
4. Start the drying process. The workroom had a special vacuum dryer that sucked out most of the water. But without the dryer, you use towels and blotting paper to soak up the water.
5. Turn the pages out of the frame and onto a table to dry. The workroom was fitted out with a steam heated table to shorten the drying time.
6. After the paper has dried most of the way and is curled up on the edges, you iron it flat which simultaneously completes the drying process.

All this education came at the price of only 10 yen per postcard!

Back in the car it was only a little further to Aono’s parent’s home in Nyugawa. “It’s a very old house,” Aono-san warned me. He sounded apologetic. But I don’t understand why. It is a beautiful, pre-war Japanese style house. It has a tile roof with ornate caps and a carved turtle tile on the peak over the door. There’s a pond of ornamental koi in front.

“That pond seemed so big when I was a kid,” Aono confided. “But now…it is pretty small, isn’t it?”

Inside, the main room has a tatami floor and on three sides of the room, sliding panels of wood and frosted glass to shut it off from the hall which surrounds it. Two sides of the hall are floor to ceiling exterior windows. The third hall opens into another room which has been renovated in a western style. The fourth wall of the main room is the alcove where the family shrine sits, complete with candles and a can of mandarin oranges for the hungry gods.

We ate dinner in the main room the first night. We ate well—do it yourself temaki (handrolled sushi), with shrimp, egg custard, crab sticks, daikon sprouts, a flatish shrimp thing called shako that was very difficult to shell, and a variety of sauces.

I noted a conspicuous absence of raw foods—certainly done for my benefit. There was a lot of care taken to ensure my comfort and food was one of the foremost issues. Aono-san noted that I did not eat like an American—meaning I didn’t eat as much as people apparently expected me to eat. Was I on a diet?

Because I didn’t eat enough, I think, I was treated to a special bowl of one of Aono-san’s fathers favorite foods, chazuke. It is rice mixed with green tea like a porridge. It’s salty and delicious.

After dinner, while the Ayoko did the dishes (I was never allowed to help in the kitchen), Aono-san and I looked through his photo albums. His father even fetched out the baby pictures. It was so much fun to see my friend as a child and then as a young man on his exchange trip to America and later being crazy in college with a former girlfriend (one that Ayoko doesn’t know about!). You never really can know another person—just parts of them. But paging through the photos helped me to see Aono in a different light.

Aono-san’s mother had taken Yuka and gone off to a min-yo (folk-singing) rehearsal at the community center down the street. I wanted to listen in, so Aono and I walked down the block and into the center. It was eerily quiet until we got to the second floor rehearsal room.

We gingerly slid the door open to reveal two neatly arranged rows of tables with six middle aged women and one man sitting at them. Sheet music in hand, slippered feet tapping and tape recorders running to capture the session, they sang to the accompaniment of their sensei as he played the shamisen.

We entered the back of the room, making as little noise as possible, but a foreigner and a stranger coming into a rural folk singing class is a bit of a spectacle. Class came to a brief standstill and we accepted the proffered chairs while an embarrassed yet proud Aono’s mother explained who we were. Yuka was sitting next to her grandmother being only minorly fidgety, but as the singing resumed, she came to sit on her father’s lap.

This folk music is ancient. These are the songs the working people sang as they farmed, picked rice, sailed boats. It’s high pitched, slightly syncopated and tuned to a scale I couldn’t recognize. It’s beautiful and very foreign. The three string shamisen has a tone that is distinctive but difficult to describe. In any case, it was played with a large triangular pick or sometimes plucked to provide the simple accompaniment to the singing.

Sensei played and everyone sang. But a look of displeasure crossed his face and he stopped to deliver a lecture about starting on the downbeat. He demonstrated, tapping out the rhythm on the table and speaking the lyrics in time with the taps. Recorders clicked on to capture the wisdom and instruction. He started from the top and six slightly wobbly voices sang. Some of them hit the downbeat.

Aono and Yuka made their escape on the pretext of Yuka’s bedtime, but I was fascinated and stayed an hour until the rehearsal was over. There were a number of lectures on the finer points of changing notes on the correct beat. The accompaniment doesn’t give the singers the notes so they need to know exactly when to change one long drawn out syllable for the next. I certainly couldn’t have sung that music correctly even with the lectures.

At the end of class, as the participants put away their tables and chairs and tidied the room, Sensei showed me the shamisen. The tuning was in half steps for part of the major scale, but some notes were missing and there seemed to be others thrown into places where they shouldn’t be. This is absolutely not a Western instrument! He played a major scale for me, to prove it could be done. Then he launched into a very fast, finger-numbing solo. At first I thought he was mimicking a rock riff, but later I encountered a similar shamisen tune and I realized that this was part of the traditional style used in the interludes of plays. Really impressive in either case.

That night, I slept in the Western-style room. Unlike the other rooms in the house which were sparsely furnished (tatami flooring is not made for furniture), this one was crammed with a sofa, two easy chairs, a coffee table, a karaoke machine and bookshelves. A mantle over an empty fireplace spanned one end of the room and the other end of the room was wall to wall bookcases. Orange carpeting complemented the golden colored drapes and rusty-brown flocked upholstery. The furniture had been moved aside to make room for my futon which seemed completely incongruous in this bastion of Western tastes.

If you have read “36 Views of Mount Fuji” by Cathy Davidson, you’ll recognize this room as the Practice Room. If you haven’t read the book, I highly recommend it.

6 August 1999

I woke to the sound of the local announcements at 6:45. Why the community centre needs to broadcast information about the evening’s events so early in the day is beyond me, but there was a man reading slowly and solemnly from a sheet of paper about a party and some classes. When he reached the end, there was a pause and then the dreaded “mo ichi dou” (one more time) that I know so well from class and the announcements began again!

A bit later in the morning, after breakfast, laundry and a tour of the vegetable garden, there was a bit of an argument between Ko & Yuka. Ko didn’t want to come on the day’s excursions; he wanted to play go with his grandfather. Yuka wanted to stay with her brother who she adores and imitates. But Yuka’s destiny was to be in the car with us as we toured some of Ehime prefecture’s highlights. Eventually, she gave in and we were all in the car and on our way.

Aono-san took such great pains to make sure I got to see all the things that interest me. We started at the Iyo Sakurai Lacquer Hall a small factory that had an area where you could watch the craftsmen working at carving the lacquer, filling it with gold leaf, painting details and polishing the finished items. It was fascinating to watch the process in action. I was so entranced that it was startling when they all got up and left the room for a smoke break.

The hall also had an exhibit of antique lacquerware and new products for sale. Some of the large bowls and boxes with gold and mother of pearl inlays were as much as 500,000 yen (about $5,000). On the lower end of the scale, chopsticks were only 300 yen.

Our next stop was in the middle of nowhere. I have no idea how Aono managed to find this place in the middle of a rice field, off the side road, off the main road, over a bridge, past a tumbling down village. The drive took us on one lane roads with hairpin curves and two way traffic—exactly the sort of driving Tod loves! It’s a shame he wasn’t with us.

Anyway, we arrived at an old schoolhouse where an artist named Atsushi Tanaka has set up his studio. The halls of the school are filled with fragrant camphorwood, called kusunoki. Tanaka-san was a salaryman in Tokyo until about 10 years ago when he moved to Shikoku and took up the artistic life full-time. His handcarved dolls and puzzle pictures are now sold in one of the major department stores in Tokyo. He welcomes visitors (if they can find the school!) and has set up one of the former classrooms with a low key display of his works and a wall of photos and flyers from his exhibits around Japan. My favorite carving was of “Momotoro, the Peach Boy” who is the Japanese equivalent of Thumbelina.

When you think of Japanese pottery, do you think of white and blue glaze? Tobe, a town not too far from Nyugawa, produces some of Japan’s best known blue and white pottery. We went there to try our hand at painting some of our own.

The Creative Ceramic Art Center holds classes in pottery making from the ground up but for those like us with limited time, there is a painting-only room. Shelves full of greenware, the unglazed pottery, in the form of tea bowls, sushi plates, platters, rice bowls, sake sets and every other imaginable size and shape of dish, are available. I selected two small tea bowls. Ayoko painted a nameplate and Yuka decorated a small oval dish. Painting on the porous surfaces was more challenging than I expected, but after making a lot of mistakes on the first teacup, I did better on the second one.

Yuka’s dish was quite a masterpiece. She didn’t want her mother’s help with writing her name or making an outline around the dish—she did the whole thing herself. I’m sure she will treasure it forever. :-)

Nearby is the Tobe Pottery Museum. I was feeling a little bit “potteried-out” when we entered, but I’m very glad we went. The first thing you see is a giant pottery globe. It’s easily 2 meters in diameter. The seas are blue; the continents are raised out of the water and glazed in brown. And dotting the globe are little round stickers placed by all the international visitors.

I got to put my sticker on Pittsburgh, though it might have been closer to Erie in reality as a two meter globe really doesn’t give much margin for error. For my troubles, I was given a present from the Ehime Prefectural Tourist Association—a lovely straight-sided pottery tea cup. That was a really nice surprise.

The museum helped me to put into context all the pottery things I’d seen during the trip—the potteries I’d visited and learned about were all given in a timeline and on a map that pointed out why each was important. And of course, there were beautiful examples of Tobe style pottery. My tea bowls are shabby in comparison.

When we arrived back home, Aono-san’s mother met us outside. “Ko and Grandfather have gone to Hontani onsen for a bath before dinner,” she said. We ran inside, grabbed our bath things and were back in the car and on our way to join them.

“I’m afraid I won’t be able to guide you in the onsen,” Aono-san said to me, meaning that the baths are segregated by gender. He paused a beat then added, “Does that count as harassment?” I laughed and shook my head.

Hontani onsen is a hot spring bath about 10 minutes from the Aono’s house. It’s been visited by ancient emperors and is as beautiful as it is popular. A curved red bridge spans the gorge below the bath house and in the spring, cherry blossoms tint the hills pink.

The bath was very busy! There were more women than taps to bathe at but as the honored guest (a role I was getting more than a little embarrassed and uncomfortable with), I got to bathe first when a tap opened up. I washed quickly and settled myself in the cedar-lined bath which was warm but not too hot.

Some friendly women—everyone in Ehime is friendly—tried to talk to me. But I am still not confident about my Japanese ability. I answered their questions as best I could, but I’m sure I introduced some non-sequiturs. The standard conversation that I had—almost every time someone talked to me they asked the same questions—went like this:

“Where are you from?”

“I come from America.”

“Are you on holiday?”

“Yes, I am. But I work in Tokyo.”

“Oh, really? How long have you been in Japan?”

“One year.”

“You are very skillful at Japanese.”

“I only speak a little bit.”

“Where have you visited in Japan?”

“I like Japan very much. Tomorrow I am going to Takamatsu and then to Kotohira-gu.”

And then they would invariably ask something I didn’t understand at all and the conversation would end with me putting my head in my hands and mumbling, “Gomen nasai. Wakarimasen.” Please forgive me, I don’t understand.

But this particular conversation ended in an unusual way. As I sat there talking to the nice bathing women, the water was getting hotter. Soon steam was no longer gently rising from the surface of the bath, but billowing up in great clouds!

“Atsui desu yo!” I said, meaning Wow it’s really hot!

The women smiled and giggled as I got up to leave the bath in search of cooler water at a tap. Where I’d been submerged, I looked like a boiled lobster! I cooled off and washed my hair, then Ayoko suggested I try the steam bath.

Man that was hot! The bath was really a tiny, cedar lined closet with a bench running around the wall and a big rock formation in one corner. There was a thermometer and an egg-timer sized hourglass on one wall. The thermometer read 92 centigrade (that’s 198 F) and the egg timer was to make sure you didn’t stay in too long. Five minutes at a time is the maximum. I lasted for three minutes before I had to escape to the icy water in the basin outside. Ayoko was right behind me but the other women who were in there stayed in the full five minutes. They were tough old women!

But at least I wasn’t the only pink one anymore. I still held the title of most pink, though. We left the bath and went home fir a delicious Japanese curry dinner and to admire the tanabata decorations that Ko had made while we were driving around.

Tanabata is a summer folk holiday that celebrates the legend of the stars Altair and Vega who are known as the Shepherd and the Weaver. Doomed lovers, they were banished to opposite sides of the sky for some slight they made against one of the gods. But they are allowed to come together once a year on Tanabata. People decorate poles of bamboo with colored strips of paper bearing wishes (usually romantic). In Tokyo, Tanabata is celebrated on the 7th of July, but outside Tokyo, most people celebrate it in early August.

After dinner, we played games again. Aono’s father played ceaseless games of go and elementary shogi (Japanese chess) with Ko while I was there. But in the evening, it was my turn to entertain. I showed Ko how to shuffle cards and though his hands were a little too small to do it right, he did really well. After a few rounds of babanuki, Aono-san’s father brought out another card game to show me.

Karuta is a poetry card game. There are one hundred famous tanka poems which are short sometimes humorous verse in two parts. The original selection of hundred poems was made by a famous poet in the 13th century. Some newer poems have been substituted since then and in the Edo era, someone came up with a game to play with them.

There are three players and two sets of cards. The reader has a set of 100 cards with the full poem written on them. The other two players share from a set of cards that has only the second half of the poem. Each player lays out 25 cards face up in front of them. The other 50 “second half” cards are out of play.

The reader reads the first half of one of his cards. The two players have to match the second half of the poem from among their cards. The first one to do so, removes the card from play. You can take the card from your own or your opponent’s layout but since the goal is to clear all 25 cards from in front of you, if you take one of your opponents cards, you get to give him one of yours.

Among good players, the pace is fast and furious. Aono-san’s father is the prefectural Karuta champion and he teaches people how to play at the community center. He gave me not only an overview of the game and hints on how to win but also a full set of 200 cards and a book on the history and gameplay. So now I need to memorize all the poems and see if I can play!

I fell asleep that night trying to translate the cards and so ended the first phase of my travels—life with the Aonos. The next morning, I was on my way to meet Tod in Takamatsu.

7 August 1999

I left the Aonos with my new karuta cards and pottery souvenirs filling my bag. After thanking Aono-san for all the trouble he’d gone to to make my vacation so special, I bid the family goodbye at the station and was on my way east to Takamatsu and Tod.

Takamatsu is not a very exciting city. It’s kind of flat and although far smaller than Tokyo, it’s made of ferro concrete and asphalt just like its larger cousin. But it is a great jumping off point for other destinations and there are a number of nearby sights to see.

Tod took the Shinkansen from Tokyo early on Saturday morning and after chaging to a local express train, arrived in Takamatsu at about 12:30. I scheduled my arrival from Nyugawa to give me enough time to visit the tourist information centre for maps and to scope out the coin lockers. But I left plenty of time for a good blunder, too.

I walked up to the information desk and asked

“Sumimasen, Matsuyama no chizu ga arimasu ka?”
Excuse me, do you have a map of Matsuyama?

“Matsuyama no chizu ga arimasen,”
I don’t have a map of Matsuyama, the man at the counter answered.

“Ah, so desu ka. Sumimasen.”
Oh, ok. Thanks.

And I walked away but I was confused—why didn’t the information centre have a map? Then it dawned on me…I went back to the window.

“Sumimasen. Watashi wa ‘Matsuyama’ wo iimashita ka? Machigaimasu! Takamatsu no chizu ga arimasu ka?”
Excuse me. Did I say ‘Matsuyama?’ That was a mistake. Do you have a map of Takamatsu?

The man happily handed me a map of the town I was in, Takamatsu. Matsuyama is on the other side of Shikoku and I wasn’t due there for four more days!

Tod arrived sometime shortly after I stopped blushing my embarrassment. We locked our bags into coin lockers at the station—the first of many times my bag was to be shed from my shoulders and locked into temporary storage—and headed toward the only attraction in town we wanted to see.

Ritsurin Koen is a strolling garden designed by a lord of Sanuki (the ancient name for Kagawa prefecture) about 370 years ago. As we walked along the paths, each turn brought a new vista:

A 300 year old pine tree with a weathered rock placed in front of it dominated the landscape. But we turned down the path to the right and in five steps were standing on a bridge over a lotus pond in full flower.

A carefully cultivated hedge of pine trees with limbs painstakingly twisted so that the branches face the gravel path opened out to the shore of a different pond with a tiny islet in the centre.

Following the path around the water’s edge we came to a teahouse which we couldn’t see when we started our walk at the pond.

The teahouse served two sorts of green tea—sencha, the brewed leaf, and matcha, powdered tea which is frothed into boiling foam with a whisk—along with a traditional sweet-potato filled cookie. But better than the refreshments was the view. The teahouse was placed on the shore of a pond and no matter which of the openings we gazed out, we saw water and greenery. The sound of late summer cicadas was very soothing.

The teahouse was larger than it appeared from the outside when we approached it. Used by the feudal lords for large and small receptions (some of the rooms are barely big enough for two), it can be divided into many rooms by opening or closing the sliding panels. After our tea, we wandered through the teahouse to see the views, admire the simplicity of the architecture—and even accidentially stumbled upon a young couple seeking privacy in the farther reaches of the interior.

Slipping back into our shoes at the door and continuing the stroll, we saw the foundation of the park which looked to me like a bunch of rocks on a hill but to the experts in ancient park design, the style in which the rocks are placed tells the history of the park. I dunno; looked like rocks on a hill to my Philistine eyes.

To reach the park, we had walked two kilometres down Japan’s longest covered shopping arcade (every town in Japan claims some superlative thing—tallest, prettiest, longest, oldest), but we opted to take the train back to the station to pick up our bags and settle into the hotel with no further ado. Dinner and breakfast were included in the price of the room and we wanted to make sure we didn’t miss dinner.

The hotel was conveniently near the station but it wasn’t much to write home about really. We had a Japanese style room with tatami flooring and futons to sleep on. I have become a fan of real Japanese futons on the floor. They are most comfortable! This was a business hotel so there was no shared bath—we had to bathe in our own room. Dinner was a standard Japanese meal with lots of little dishes of pickles, some sashimi which was very good, and other local delicacies.

After dinner, which was over by 7, we decided to wander around outside again. A cold beer was what we craved. So we tooled around the back alleys looking for someplace interesting. Eventually, having seen nothing that jumped out at us, we stopped on a corner and said “Ok, this place (Snack Love) or that place (Pub Patohiru). Patohiru won out—I just couldn’t go to a place with Love in the name.

It turned out to be a good choice. We opened the door to a tiny bar with maybe a dozen seat. All of them were empty! The barkeep and his assistant were sitting chatting and they looked more than startled to see two foreigners coming in. Takamatsu has a pretty small foreign population and I suspect none of them ever make it to Pub Patohiru.

Tod put them at ease by asking them in Japanese if they were open. Tod carried the conversation mostly. I answered my four common questions—where are you from, are you on holiday, how long have you been here, where have you visited—and that was the end for me. But Tod carried on a more normal conversation. He even made a joke.

Pointing at the umbrella stand full of forgotten umbrellas, he said,

“Kyaku-san ga imasen, keredemo kasa ga takusan arimasu.”
There are not too many customers, but there are a lot of umbrellas.

OK, it wasn’t very funny, but it was in Japanese! The bartender laughed.

He also warmed up to us and started giving us some of the local sake and even dug into his collection of postage stamps and gave us a first day of issue Ritsuren Koen stamp set and some other very pretty scenic Japan stamps.

So even though it was a little scary going into an unknown bar where we knew we’d have to speak Japanese exclusively and even though Tod carried the conversation for us pretty much entirely on his own, it was a good experience.

But after our beer and sake, we were tired so it was off to bed before another full day of adventures.

8 August 1999

Kotohira-gu enshrines Kompira, the sailors’ god who has expanded his business to include all travelers. On this long trip, it seemed foolish not to go invoke his good favor. So we woke early to catch the train that would take us about an hour west of Takamatsu.

Morning is not Tod’s best time of day but he normally manages to make it through with the help of a few cups of coffee but Japanese breakfasts don’t include coffee, just green tea. And while green tea has enough caffeine to get me going, Tod would have to drink several pots before he was awake. So I led the way that morning. After our breakfast we walked to the tram station at the other end of the street and were on our way,

When we arrived in Kotohira, we walked along a river to the main street. The main street turns into a staircase leading up to the shrine. A staircase that has 785 stairs! We knew because the guidebooks said so. And to confirm their accuracy Tod counted every one of them as we went up.

As we started out, the stairs were lined on either side by shops selling t-shirts, wooden statues, things to offer to Kompira, drinks, masks, all manner of souvenirs. Green and blue tarps strung over the stairs from the tops of the low buildings furnished some shade to walk in.

As we reached stair 50 or so, Tod realized this was going to be a very hot climb and he bought himself a red paper fan. This 100 yen investment turned out to be very useful on the next 735 steps and beyond.

About a third of the way up, the shops ended and the steps were lined with tall stone pillars inscribed with dates and the names of patrons of the shrine. Then came stone lanterns. When we reached a broad plaza with shady trees, and a giant golden ship’s screw near the first gate to the shrine, we were perplexed by a dog statue wearing a yellow cloth bib. People stopped to have their photos taken near it. Never did figure it out, but we had a good rest while we tried.

Even more perplexing was the nearby stable of horses. Real horse in a real stable eating real hay and making real horse noises. Halfway up a 785 step staircase! It wasn’t until later that I remembered that horses are often depicted as messengers to the gods. So here were some real live messengers. Japan’s a quirky place!

Rested a little bit, but not enough for Tod, we continued upwards. Overachieving eight year olds ran circles around us, calling back to their struggling parents “Hayaku! Hayaku!” which means ‘quickly’ or in more vernacular terms “Hurry up!”

We finally reached the main shrine. Exactly 785 steps from the start—though there was some confusion over whether to count the occasional step down in the flatter areas as a negative step, a positive step or nothing at all. I don’t remember how we tallied it, but in the end we had 785 steps to the top so we must have counted the same way as everyone else.

The first business at hand was to pay respects to Kompira-san. I tossed my small denomination change into the wooden offering box and clapped, asked a favor for a safe trip and came away to make room for the next pilgrim. Tod just stood by too tired to make the three step ascent to the altar.

There was a little tent off to one side of the shrine where two urns of water and an urn of green tea were available. Freshly rinsed plastic tea bowls were stacked up at one end of the table and at the other end, the used tea bowls were stacked almost as neatly waiting for one of the shrine’s acolytes to takes them to be washed.

We had our ration of water, admired the view and explored the precincts of the shrine. Beyond the water tent were two open galleries of offerings to Kompira. Many of them were photographs or paintings of ships. Some were quite old and weathered. Others were new. All had been carried up the steps by people wishing to get Kompira’s blessing. Several of the ships depicted in large, ornately framed oil paintings were commercial cargo vessels. On the other end of the scale were snapshots of people’s rowboats and pleasure craft.

Not all of the offerings were two dimensional. There was a 5 meter long, solar powered, one-man craft that looked like it had been either an experiment or in a race—the entire thing was there. Maybe it was a post-event offering

Someone else brought up a beautiful wooden model of his three mast sailing ship. One ship model was made of lucky 5 yen coins (which have a hole in them) strung together with copper wire in the most ingenious way.

Although ships dominated the galleries, they weren’t the only things there. There was a large bronze statue of an elephant signifying Mt. Zousa, “Elephant Mountain,” which we’d just climbed. Japan’s first astronaut was captured in a painting. Monkeys seemed to be a minor theme, too. And the bib-wearing dog appeared a few more times in various media.

Fascinating as the galleries were, they only held our attention long enough for us to move on to the next discovery—-more stairs! A map showed a 1.2 km route to another shrine further up the mountain. I was game and Tod came along. It was a lot more stairs. I think by the time we reached the summit we had climbed at least a million steps. Maybe as many as a million and a half.

But the view from the top was spectacular. And we saw a number of interesting fauna on the way including a butterfly that glided rather than flapping its wings like regular butterflies. It doesn’t sound like much now, but when you’re climbing a million stairs on a very hot day, anything that captures your attention is good.

We were also distracted by the electrical lines running up the mountain along with the stairs. In Japan where there is electricity there is a machine vending drinks. We buoyed ourselves on the hope that at the top we could find a shady spot and have a rest and a drink.

But Kotohira is the only place in Japan where electricity does not equal vending machine. Poor Tod. His legs, now well conditioned from biking to work, are not happy when climbing or descending stairs. By the time we reached the bottom he was dehydrated and very achy. We had more water at the main shrine, but even three bowls of it didn’t slake Tod’s thirst.

It wasn’t until he’d had a bowl of handmade udon noodles that he started to feel better. The Kompira udon was topped with vegetables, fish cake, meat and mushrooms. It was delicious.

Thus revived we wandered out into the town and came across a surprise. A giant bottle attracted my attention. After a moment of puzzling over what it was, we figured out that we’d found a sake museum. Inside was the history of Kinryo Sake company and very detailed descriptions of the process of sake brewing. Side by side photos compared the ancient techniques and today’s modern methods. Dioramas and films described each step.

At the end of the self-paced tour, three vending machines doled out samples of different types of sake. We took our tiny cups of sake out into the courtyard and sat in the shade of an 800 year old camphor tree and contemplated the art of sake.

The sake kicked my brain into gear and I remembered that there was one more thing I wanted to see in Kotohira. Kanamaru-za is Japan’s oldest extant theater. I had only a vague idea of where it was, so after we wandered around without finding it, we asked someone who not only pointed us in the right direction, but drew our attention by clapping briskly when we almost missed the turn we needed.

Live kabuki is performed at Kanamaru-za only once a year and the shows are sold out well in advance. For those of us attending on non-performance days, there is a great videotape that reveals on-stage and off-stage action. The theater was built in 1835 and underwent a number of changes (including being used as a movie theater) until its restoration 25 years ago.

Of course the theater obliged our day’s theme of “uphill” and was at the top of another set of stairs but it was worth the climb. It was the most beautiful theater I’ve ever been in. It wasn’t angels-on-the-ceiling-ornate like beautiful theaters in America. This theater had white painted walls with exposed beams and tatami mats on the floor for seating in front of the stage. The wood and the rice straw made the theater smell so sweet. From the ceiling hung ranks of paper lanterns painted with the red circled-shaped bird crest of the theater. The stage was lighted with footlights and with daylight that filtered through screens in the wings.

Backstage, narrow ladders led to second story, communal dressing rooms for the cast. The stars were assigned private dressing rooms at stage level. The technical crew had rooms on the second story wings with bamboo blinded windows that commanded a view of the stage and audience.

Best of all was the area under the stage. The stage revolves under the power of four young men who are strapped into thick harnesses and strain against stone footholds embedded in the floor like the marks on a compass. Two trap doors allow the actors and scenery to be lifted to and lowered from the stage. Those strong young men power the lifting as well as the rotating. Actors can run along a narrow corridor to the back of the audience where another trap door lets them pop out for a grand entrance as they walk along a stage-level walkway to the front.

We made our exit along this walkway and headed back to Takamatsu for a quiet evening before another fun-filled day.

This makes a fabulous lunchtime picnic. At least it did for me. It can be assembled al fresco if you bring a knife.

If you can’t find bread with figs in it, use a chewy grain-studded loaf and slice up some figs. If you can’t find peppered smoked chicken, I think you might be out of luck with this recipe.

Smoked Chicken and Blueberries on Fig Bread
serves 2

2 small loaves fig bread
2 fillets peppered, smoked chicken
2 oz full-milk soft French cheese from an obscure village
1 handful fresh blueberries

Slice open the fig bread, tuck two chicken tenderloins into it, smear with cheese and garnish liberally with blueberries smushed into the cheese.

Sometimes, you need to give your body a workout to get the brain flowing freely. I know I sit too much at my computer cranking out words and images. When I go for long walks or swim laps, my brain changes gears and I enjoy a meditative state while my muscles do their thing. When I’m done, I feel tired, refreshed and full of energy. My fancy flies and I end up in places I didn’t expect—creative leaps from my desk-bound routine.

Go take some exercise today. A good walk at lunch, a bike ride after dinner, a session at the gym, a splash in the pool. Make sure it’s long enough to allow your brain to disengage and your body to get tired (but don’t overdo it—gentle and easy is fine for this exercise!). Then see where your mind goes.

8 August 1999

Working under the first rule of travel, allow extra time to figure things out, I woke Tod very early so that we could get to our destination in a timely way. We had dined, checked out and walked to the station before 8 am. The next train to Naruto left at 8:23.

It took about 90 minutes to reach Naruto, and operating under the second rule, sort out your return trip as soon as you arrive, we figured out what train Tod needed to be on to get back to Takamatsu in time for his 15:29 train back to Tokyo. If he missed the train in Takamatsu, he’d miss his connection and forfeit his seat on the Shinkansen which would mean standing on the next train. A three hour trip seems much longer when you can’t sit down.

So at 10:00 we were in Naruto, our bags were living in the coin lockers, and Tod had a ticket for the 12:46 Naruto to Takamatsu train. The next step was to get to the park where we could (maybe) see the whirlpools. Over to the bus stop we went.

The 9:56 had left only a few minutes before. The next bus was at 10:56. Ouch…that didn’t leave us much time at all for whirlpool-viewing, though by this time we’d resigned ourselves to not actually seeing any whirlpools. Maybe there was another way to get to the park.

Aha! A taxi stand with a taxi waiting for us! We hopped in and 20 minutes later we cruised past the bus stop we’d need for the return trip. The taxi driver pointed it out to us as he gave us the bad news that were no taxi stands at the park. Two minutes later he dropped us off at the viewing area.

As we pulled up, we saw two dozen costumed festival dancers boarding a tour bus to leave. We had just missed their annual dance show on the beach! The morning’s timing really wasn’t very good. Our 10:20 arrival fell 10 minutes after the tide, too.

We did get to see some whirlpools and the cruise ships that ride people out to see them. It wasn’t as dramatic as I’d hoped. In fact, since we didn’t know whether the sea at the straights was ever calm, we didn’t know if the churning waters were a tidal effect or just normal. We concluded “normal” until I saw a tide table later on that day.

So it’s 10:30. We know Tod has to be back at Naruto Station for his 12:46 train. And we also know that the bus is on an hourly schedule. But we don’t know the schedule or how long the bus takes to get to the station. How long can we stay at the park before we lose our chance to get back to the station in time? I was living an algebra word problem!

The kind shopkeeper at one of the souvenir stands had the answer for us—a bus schedule! We had enough time to buy some omiyage (souvenir gifts), have an ice cream and take some photos. Then we walked to the bus stop and boarded the 11:16 bus to the station.

Tod is not a master of time and I’ve never seen him more tense about a schedule. Losing the Shinkansen seat would be a bad way to end the day. He tried to be relaxed about the disappointing showing of the whirlpools, but he checked the time frequently and was pretty high strung about getting back to the station. Fortunately, we caught the bus and got back to town with no problems.

Until Tod went to check the time again…his clock which is actually the display of his cell phone was gone. “Oh my god, my keitai denwa is gone!” he exclaimed. “It must have fallen out of my pocket on the bus.” This was bad. He had managed to hang on to that phone for more than a year while his colleagues kept losing theirs. He used it all the time as a phone and even more frequently as a watch. Its loss devastated him. A slightly bad day had turned into a disaster.

My watch, still firmly attached to my wrist in the conventional manner, told me we had 45 minutes before the train. So we headed to a restaurant nearby the station to discuss the day’s disasters. As we reviewed the plastic food in the display case, the waitress (who didn’t know I could see her) looked at us, turned to her colleague and made the arms crossed sign that usually means “Sorry, we’re out of that” or “no.” She meant, I think, that she wasn’t looking forward to having to deal with foreigners during the lunch rush.

But we went in anyway and spoken entirely in Japanese to her. She had nothing to worry about. Our level of personal distress required some calming foods so even though it was only noon we ordered two mugs of beer and a plate of edomame, salty steamed soybeans in their pods.

Two beers later, we had a plan. Although Tod was returning to Tokyo, I was about to begin the next leg of my journey at Tokushima. Amazingly enough, Tod’s phone was headed there, too. I would check in at the wasuremono (lost items) office and see if Tod’s phone had been found.

Which was easier said than done. I arrived in Tokushima at 1:45 and the first place I went was the bus office. I explained that I had lost my portable phone and told them which bus I was on. The woman who I explained this to picked up her intercom and broadcast to all the buses in the lot, as well as to all the passengers in the queues, to see if the Naruto Koen bus was there.

But the bus hadn’t arrived yet—it was due in at 3:00. At 3:00 on the dot, I returned to the bus office. As I walked through the bus lot, I saw a bus bound for Naruto Park pulling out.

“Excellent,” I thought. “They’ll have the phone.”

But they did not. The woman at the bus office were very nice, but I didn’t understand everything she said. Eventually, we got around to drawing a map of the bus to pinpoint where I had been sitting. I described the phone’s color and manufacturer. The woman said the bus driver would search the bus again when he got to Naruto and she would call me at 3:45 at my hotel.

This gave me enough time to check into my hotel and get settled in. Packing lightly as I do, I was anxious to get some laundry done. I had rehearsed in my head on the train how to say so in Japanese.

“Sentaku o shitai desu ne,” I carefully enunciated to the kimono clad woman who was showing my room.

“Eh..?” she answered and showed me where the bathrobe was.

“Sentaku o shitai desu,” I ventured again. Maybe if I said it enough, she’d understand. It was a simple declarative,’ I would like to do laundry,’ that I hoped would elicit a response of “Oh yes of course. We can do your laundry for you and add it to your bill.”

However, on my repetition, the room attendant led me to the bathroom sink and showed me that I could put the stopper in and use the little bar of soap to wash my clothes. So much for an easy afternoon of sightseeing!

So I did my laundry by hand. I kept my fingers crossed that it would dry in time to wear it the next day. In the middle of the third t-shirt, the phone rang. It was the bus office.

“Keitai denwa o arimasu,” the nice woman said. We have the phone.

“Hai, wakarimashita. Domo arigato!” I answered.

Then she went on at length about something I didn’t entirely understand. I asked her to repeat and then to repeat again. I feel sorry for, but very grateful to, the kind people who struggle patiently along with my language problems. Not everyone does, but she repeated more slowly and simply until she was sure I understood that the bus would arrive with the phone at 6:00 and I could pick it up then.

I dispatched the remaining laundry in few minutes and went out to explore the city. Most of the day had been spent in the vicinity of the bus terminal, so I opted to head in the other direction—towards the Mt. Bizen Ropeway.

As ropeways go, it was perfectly fine. The view from the top was panoramic and the mountains on the far side of the city faded into the late day haze like a classical painting. I took some photos and then headed back down to recover Tod’s phone.

We had agreed that I would mail the phone back to Tod if I found it. In my numerous walks around the station, I found the main post office and noted it had an after hours section. So with the phone in hand, I went in.

“Hello, I’d like to send this phone to Tokyo, please,” I explained in Japanese as I held up the phone.

“Um…you can’t send that phone like that,” the young, pudgy postal worker answered me in rapid fire Japanese. He called over a colleague to confirm. “Yes, I think you need an envelope.”

“Just a second,” I said as I made room for the next transaction. I was not prepared to deal with a post office that didn’t sell envelopes. I needed to bolster my vocabulary. I checked my dictionary and got back into line.

Back at the front of the line, I inquired about where to buy an envelope. The post boy lectured me that I needed a box. But he spoke very quickly and I didn’t understand exactly what he said. I asked him to repeat, more slowly, please.

At this point, I wish I’d had my camera ready. The man cupped his hands around his mouth and spoke very loudly. But not more slowly. So classic and really funny. But at the time, I was frustrated and insulted.

“Yes, yes, I see,” I countered. “But where can I buy one?” The post boy was speechless. I thanked him for his help and left the post office shaking my head.

Fortunately my walks had also taken me past a convenience store. I bought a ten pack of manila envelopes and a pair of socks. The phone was a neat package shortly thereafter. When I returned with the sock-padded, wrapped phone and asked the post boy to have it sent special delivery to Tokyo, the transaction was complete in 30 seconds!

And it was time for dinner. I’d joked with Tod that now that I’d be traveling alone I would end up eating exclusively in fast food chains where I wouldn’t have to talk to anyone. But I did not. I walked around another area of town and found a little restaurant that had food I had never tried before, zousui, which turned out to be a delicious rice porridge.

I was the only customer and the mama-san talked to me. We had the four questions conversation and she was patient with my fumbling attempts to conjugate verbs fast enough to continue the conversation. I was pretty stupid and I was glad to finish my dinner and get back to my hotel for a well deserved period of oblivion before another day.

9 August 1999

The reason I went to Tokushima was not to chase Tod’s phone or even to do my laundry. I wanted to see some of the prefecture’s traditional crafts. Tokushima boasts indigo dying, traditional weaving, puppet making, pottery, paper making and a special local dance called Awa Odori.

The day dawned and I was full of excited anticipation. I had a list of places I wanted to go and things I wanted to see. Bur first, I’d fortify myself with breakfast.

I had asked for an early breakfast because I wanted to get a jump on things and leave enough time to figure out which busses to take and generally manage my illiteracy. So I was the only person in the dining room when I came in. At my place at the low table was the usual array of tiny dishes filled with pickled things. To one side was a brazier with a grate. As I puzzled a bit over this, the room attendant from the previous afternoon appeared bearing a bowl of rice, some miso soup and a fish which she placed on the brazier.

So I had to cook my own breakfast and it stared at me the whole time. As long as I concentrated on the rice I was OK. The attendant came over and flipped the fish over when it started to burn on the first side.

She also noticed I hadn’t cracked open my raw egg and she asked me if she could help. Well, I really had no way of resisting her help, so I just sat there while she cracked the egg into my miso soup. Which partly cooked the egg and made me lose my taste for the miso.

At least the pickles were all vegetables and they looked good. There were some light brown colored beans in a bowl to one side. I dug in and came away with two beans and some silky stringy stuff like you see on okra. Weird but I eat okra so no problem. Except this wasn’t beans with okra goo. It was natto. Fermented, rotting soybeans.

They actually tasted fine. But the texture was impossible and they upset my stomach for two hours afterwards. So breakfast was not a big hit with me that day.

No worries though, I hadn’t lost my enthusiasm for the day, just my appetite. I beat as hasty a retreat as I could politely manage and walked to what was becoming my Tokushima Point of Reference—the bus terminal.

Where I discovered that I wasn’t in Tokyo anymore. Not that I hadn’t been aware of this all along, but it really hit home when I looked at the schedule and saw that the bus that heads to Tokushima’s main tourist center, ASTY Tokushima, only runs once every 90 minutes. Either A) everyone has cars or B) nobody goes to ASTY or C) they are all on package tours.

Option C turned out to be the correct one. I caught the bus and got there at about 10:00—three hours after breakfast. So much for an early start!

ASTY promised me the chance to see the main points of the prefecture—some of the far-flung sights I wasn’t going to have time to travel to see in person—and give me the chance to try some of the crafts and learn the Awa Odori dance, too!

But the promises weren’t kept very well. Since I was traveling alone instead of with a busload of companions, the center’s staff weren’t sure what to do with me. They hurried me into the 360 degree film theater where the film had just begun. It was a nice film and the 360 view was interesting. The film showed the natural highlights of the region—gorges, seascapes and mountains, and also portrayed the Awa Odori dance festival.

In real life, the dance festival started the day after I was left Tokushima. Bad timing! But I did watch a lot of festival preparations and that was fun, too.

Once the film was over, I wanted to learn to do the dance. But a bus tour was being ushered past the dance corner and away from the place where you could try the gong and drums that accompany the dancing. I tried to resist the flow of traffic, but it was over the “vine bridge” and into the puppet theater for me.

The puppet show was Bunraku, a traditional Japanese art form with puppets that are half life size and handled by three to four puppeteers. But this particular show was a computer controlled mechanized version. It was interesting, but I’d rather have seen the real thing. After the show, I dawdled at the exhibits of puppet making and handling until one of the docents came up to me and handed me a puppet head to try to manipulate. It was more difficult than I expected to keep the neck from flopping around while opening and closing the eyes with a little pull chain inside the neck.

The docent, having discharged her duty, sat me in front of a three dimensional film box and started a puppet film for me. Then, as I was getting interested in some puppet heads, she decided I needed a change of scenery and led me off to a room lined with wavy wooden benches representing mountains and a TV playing videotaped seascapes. Lovely but not very exciting.

I made my way through ASTY in about 30 minutes and missed much of what I’d hoped to see. But there was also a Handicraft Hall where I would be able to try some aizome (indigo dying), papermaking and other crafts. The handicraft hall held the key to a good time.

Except the handicraft hall was more of a shopping arcade. At the back of each specialized craft shop—one for indigo, one for bamboo craft, one for puppets and dolls and so on—most of the shops had an area where you could either watch an artisan at work or try the craft yourself.

However, none of the Craft Corners were manned. The bus tour that had sped ahead of me after the puppet theater was long gone so I suspect the shopkeepers and craftspeople were having a rest before another busload arrived. To the credit of the single shop that was in action, two women who were folding handkerchiefs for the dyepot did nod at me as I walked past and gesture for me to come try which, being completely disgusted by this time, I did not. So it was back to the bus stop to wait for the bus back into town.

But my afternoon was still free. I could do what I ought to have done in the first place. Go see real artisans in their actual workshops. Not sanitized films and the ten minute tour at ASTY. I fortified my finally calm stomach with some tonkatsu, breaded fried pork cutlet, and went in search of indigo dying and shijira, a local weaving that produces cloth similar to seersucker. I would get to try dying after all.

The tourist information center had lots of brochures on places that promoted these fibercrafts and I decided to hop on the train and go three stops down the line to a village named Ko. Ko had six or seven places to observe and participate in dying and weaving.

The station at Ko was once a train car. Not big. Neither was the town. With my cartoon map in hand, I tried to find the nearest aizome place.

“OK, exit the station and just about a block ahead there should be a big road,” I coached myself as I walked along. Good. I was on track. There was the big road.

“Now, turn left and go past two traffic signals…” I was still consulting my cartoon map when I saw a big painted map on a billboard across the street. So I crossed and compared it to my map. Which was a mistake, because the big painted map was oriented backwards. I ended up all turned around and heading the other way which I didn’t realize was wrong at the time.

So I walked past two signals but saw nothing that looked like weaving or dying. But as I walked along I discovered the Ko is home to four of the 88 Temples of Shikoku.

The 88 Temples of Shikoku form a famous pilgrimage that was first undertaken by a Buddhist priest in the late 8th century as he founded temples and brought his brand of Buddhism to Shikoku. To walk the entire pilgrimage can take up to two months. Most people now do it as a bus tour or by private car. But there are still those who walk the entire route. Pilgrims, whether in a bus or on foot, can be identified by their white clothing and hats.

Since I was having no luck finding my craft places and I was less than two kilometers away from temple number 16, I decided to walk there. It was hard to miss. Village street signs pointed the way. Stone obelisks erected at key intersections showed the direction and distance to the nearest temples. Hand lettered signs tacked to lampposts gave maps. If only there had been this much publicity for the indigo and shijira places!

Oh, have I mentioned that it was raining? By the time I left the temple, I was soaked, but the rain had stopped. I walked back to the main road with renewed hope that I would find what I was looking for.

At a crossroads near a Shinto shrine, an older man stopped me and asked if he could take my picture. Ever the ambassador for my country, I assented and stood near a Mickey Mouse statue in the shrine’s precincts for an all-American photo. The man asked for my address and said he would send me a copy of the photo. For all I know, we’ll see him on our doorstep soon, but he seemed harmless and sincere so perhaps I’ll have a souvenir of my damp walk.

Do you think it’s possible that certain types of people gravitate into your life? This man who took my picture was another in the “palm reading” series. I will have a good life and two children according to what he says. And I should stand up straighter, he recommended.

After that brief exchange which was mostly Japanese with a smattering of English, he launched into a long comparison of Buddhism, Shintoism and Christianity. Of course it was lost on me, though I did comprehend that he was Shinto and he didn’t understand the idea of the crucifixion.

To extricate myself from having to try to explain a theology I don’t understand myself, I explained I was in a bit of a rush and asked him if he knew where I could find the shijira places. He pointed me in the direction I started out when I left the station and I left.

And promptly got lost again. Ko is a one street town. How I could get lost was beyond me, but I was not where I expected to be. However, the community center was on the corner and I went in for directions.

The women behind the counter pulled out maps, consulted with coworkers and ended up deciding which of the (honestly) many options would be best. They gave me another map and told me some landmarks near where I needed to turn.

Thus armed, I headed back outside and followed their directions. Three kilometers later, I was at the corner of a three rice fields and a house with a minvan parked outside. Wrong turn? I don’t know…I turned at the Elegance Fair shop like they told me to!

Once again, I retreated to the main road. I continued on until I reached the river at which point all my maps told me I had gone too far. But I did find a German pretzel shop (a wonderful surprise) so I had a soft pretzel and a box of juice before walking back to the train station. About a kilometer from the station, a trendy, bleached hair boy in a car with friends called out and asked me where I was going, but before my brain could parse the Japanese, the traffic signal turned green and they pulled away.

I reached the hotel in time for a rest before dinner. I decided I required a dose of English so I consulted with the ladies at the front desk and went off to see Eyes Wide Shut at the local theater. What a treat. Cool air conditioning and my own language for more than two hours! After the movie, I went back to the hotel and had a bath and fell asleep hoping for a better breakfast in the morning.

10 August 1999

Over the course of the previous week, I had stopped marking time by meals and begun paying attention to check-in times and bath times. Eating had become less important than washing away the day’s grime and soaking in hot water.

The New Tokushima Hotel had two baths. From 3 p.m. - midnight, women bathed on the first floor. From 6 a.m. until 9, they bathed upstairs on the fifth floor. The men’s schedule was opposite—upstairs at night and downstairs in the morning. I’ve learned that when baths are switched like this, there’s usually something special about one of the bath rooms. So before breakfast, I decided to have a bath upstairs.

And I was right. The fifth floor bath had a rotenburo, an open air bath, with a little garden. It was nice to sit in the warm water with my wash towel piled on my head and listen to the traffic below me on the street and the calls of early morning workers unloading trucks of produce. Although maybe these aren’t the poetic sounds of nature, I enjoyed them. No matter where you are, there’s a world around you that you never imagine. And vice versa—how many of those produce workers gave a second thought (or even a first) to a foreigner’s bath that morning?

I finished my bath and back in my room I packed up my things. Breakfast turned out to be much less dreadful that the previous morning’s. No natto and raw fish today—it was ham and cabbage with my egg broken into the miniature cast iron skillet atop my brazier. Plus rice, miso soup and all the little pickle dishes. Japanese breakfasts are really quite a feast!

Today I was going to be spending some time on a train heading west to Matsuyama and Dogo Onsen. When I had made my reservations the day before I decided that I wanted another morning in Tokushima to see some craftsman. But my enthusiasm for crafts waned a bit after the trip to Ko and now I had several hours to wait before the train left. I decided to walk around the castle museum and park.

The next day marked the start of the annual Awa Odori festival. For three days & nights the town would dance. There’s a saying written all over posters and all the promotions for Awa Odori “Fools are dancing and fools are watching. Why not dance?”

Dance parades fill the streets, contests and impromptu lessons are held anywhere there is space. Brilliantly costumed women wearing cotton kimono and straw hats tied to their heads like folded paper plates dance for hours balanced on the toes of their wooden geta sandals. Arms point into the air as wrists rotate and legs fold then step forward. Men bounce along standing tall then suddenly doubling in half as they writhe to the beat of the drums they carry. It’s quite a spectacle.

But I was witness only to the preparations. Young men in light green uniforms and white gloves spliced electrical wires to create endless streams of red and yellow lanterns that would be hung along city streets and waterfront parks. Metal pipes clanked as burly workers, skin shining and brown from the heat of the day, constructed the bleachers flanking the parade routes. Traffic was disrupted by slow moving trucks bearing port-a-potties.

In the park near the castle museum, in the shadow of the ancient castle gate, a handful of bleached blond boys inspected the sound equipment going up for the concert scheduled for the evening. Their roadies, dressed in baggy t-shirts, long shorts and flat bottomed skateboarding shoes, could have been college students from any US university. But the ubiquitous Japanese towels tied around their heads gave away their national identity as they worked busily adjusting cabling, moving monitors and lugging carts around while two well-wrought women with clipboards discussed the progress off to one side of the event stage.

Eventually, I boarded my train to Matsuyama. The trip took four hours and the only thing to break up my studying was the view of the Shimanami Kaido bridge at Imabari. This bridge was the beginning of the next two days’ travels—I was planning to cover the 60 km span on a bicycle. The approach to the bridge, all curves and circles, looked so much steeper and intimidating from my low vantage point than from the aerial photographs in the brochures. I wondered if perhaps I was getting myself into something I couldn’t handle.

I tried to put that thought aside and c