Eeek! I'm a Retro-Criminal!

I just realized this morning after an online discussion, that I am part criminal! No, really, it's true!

If I were to do all the things I once did under today's laws and regulations, I would be breaking the law on a regular basis. Let's see . . .

• I drank in public when I was 18 years old.
• I drove an automobile at the tender age of 16.
• Shhh . . . I still talk on my cell phone while driving, for the purposes of communicating my whereabouts to my family! (Note: It is not yet illegal in my state.)
• I went through airport customs without so much as a second thought as to what I was actually bringing in my toiletry bag.
• A few years ago, I actually made it through TSA customs TWICE, unwittingly carrying a heavy-duty BOX CUTTER that I had used at the recycling dumpsters to break down cardboard boxes (keep in mind that this was post-911).
• Speaking of recycling, once upon a time, I didn't bother.
• I used to walk into a museum or an amusement without opening my purse for inspection.
• I used to ride in the back of a pick-up truck, without a seatbelt!!! (Not that I would recommend that to anyone on the road these days, mind you.).
• When I was really small, I used to ride in the front seat of my grandfather's caddy, sitting ON the armrest that folded down onto the bench, WITHOUT a seatbelt, WHILE the car was moving. (Again, not recommended now.).
• We played dodge ball in school.
• We ate raw eggs. Yes, I know it's not illegal, but it sure feels like it.
• We used to give gently used toys to charity. I've been informed by those who take in donations at thrift stores that it is no longer legal for them to accept ANY stuffed animals and many toys because of lead.

If I had more time to sit here and think, I'm sure the list would be longer, but then you might not have time to read it.

Feel free to comment with a list of your own!

Apple Pie for Breakfast . . .

Shhhh. Don't tell the kids. They're not awake yet.

Dear Santa

My two younger children have written their letters to Santa for this 2010 "Season-to-End-All-Seasons," my youngest enlisting her teenaged sister to help her in dashing out the letters (which she did lovingly and painstakingly) that composed the Greeting and Body of the letter. Said youngest is capable of signing her own name, thank you.

I was highly amused. It began, "Dear Santa, This year for Christmas I would like the following items: . . . ," followed by a list of the desired, mostly girly, items.

Her sister, a few years older than the girly one, simply followed suit—and quite pointedly—with, "Dear Santa,  For Christmas I would like the following items: A dog (I must choose breed); An awesome Christmas; To put the presents under the tree; To get a Santa costume." And the various pieces of the aforementioned costume were drawn and labeled beneath, in lieu of a signature.

Now, I do hope Santa is a secure person because no longer do my children ask how he is doing, nor do they attempt to account for their behavior during the past year. Only one of them signed off, "Thank you! Love, . . . ." (and that was probably something her elder sister slipped in anyway). The other one signed the letter with disembodied costume parts, and she addressed it to her parents . . .

If you've ever seen the movie "The Santa Clause" with Tim Allen, you'll know how Allen's character gets the job in the first place. Well, I think my husband and I had better keep an eye on this one to make sure that child #3 doesn't use some clever device to relieve us of our Santa-ly responsibilites. I just hope in all the excitement that she remembers how Santa actually foots the bill for his once-a-year shindig. Her bank account couldn't handle it.

All in all, I think it's funny, even though we constantly have to swim upstream to teach our children what's really important in life. Forgive me, they do make me laugh sometimes. Ho Ho Ho!

Soberspace. I mean, cyberspace.

Since my Social Network controls the interface with all of my contacts, and it won't allow me post more than 240 or so characters on a status update, I'll post here what I've been trying to say . . .

MELANIE is not sure she likes email, social networks, the internet, or cyberspace. I want my life back. Give me paper stationary, even if it doesn't happen as frequently. Give me face time with my family instead of watching them watch the screen as they carry on multiple online conversations simultaneously. Take away this temptation, this nuisance, this bane of existence, and make life feel real again instead of virtual. But, alas, I love all my friends and family, so, no, I'm not ready to give it up yet . . . what price, connectedness?

. . . but I type and sigh, type and sigh . . . and think of all those people in the movie Wall-E, with their virtual screens, carrying on individual conversations with virtual faces, while their real-time, flesh-and-blood neighbors, no more than an elbow's distance away, do the same. And the entire time, none of them consciously recognizes that there are people all around them.

Am I conflicted? Obviously. My vanity as a social person who likes to "have my share of the conversation (Lady Catherine in "Pride & Prejudice")" would be loathe to separate from the round-the-clock party that exists "out there" in 2010 and beyond, while my vanity as someone who likes to write, would feel bereft without my electronic umbilical chord to the wild west of the publishing frontier.

But there is also something in the back of my mind that tells me that this is not a good road we're all on. It is inevitable in its own way, and it does deliver to us the illusion that we are all celebrities, all the time, but a sense of loss continues to hover. Loss of what? Loss of time, for one thing. Loss of skills developed through meaningful pursuits for another, which leads to a loss of real-time productivity. The time I used to spend on handiwork of many descriptions—hands-on, real, touchy-feely work in which skills were acquired and honed a little at a time, day-by-day, year-by-year, and which enriched my life and the life of those around me—is now often spent catching up on the latest gossip, photos, rants, and brain-dregs that any of us cares to throw up there for the cyber-world to consume, and be consumed by. And it is no good trying to paint a pretty picture of this new reality using the crumbs of past productivity and euphemisms designed to distract us from the actual.

I don't think my life would end if I just stopped contributing to the flow of electrons. But I do think that I would feel out-of-step with those closest to me. I wouldn't get the joke; I wouldn't know that there was something happening this weekend that I really did need to know about; And I know from experience that others would feel justified in chiding me for being a troglodyte, or the proverbial camel with its head in the sand.

After all, everyone is expected to be accessible online, by email, social network, mobile device, and any other means possible to the known world and beyond. I guess it's a bit like the paparazzi for celebrities, convenient when you want the publicity, inconvenient when you want peace and quiet. In the end times, connectedness will be the currency, and we will all be slaves to it.

I'm not prepared to change my level of exposure to the cyberworld yet, and I certainly can't tell anyone else what to do, even if I wanted to. But for me, it is a subject that bears scrutiny from time to time, and you just happen to be witnessing one of those times.

Japanese Real Estate

I hope everyone's Thanksgiving Holiday was enjoyable. We were able to spend a good bit of time with family we don't get to see very often, so we have no complaints—aside from the usual, "We never get to see enough of everyone; we should get together more often!"

This week everyone headed back to the working interim that falls between the end of November and the end of December, though it is hard to take any of it seriously with all the invitations to the various festivities that litter the calendar at this time of year. That being said, I, too, shall attempt to get back to work . . .

 Okay. I bet this is what most people think of when they think of Japanese cities. This is actually the view from our hotel room in Yokohama, near the bay.

Another city street scene, this time from Miitaka, Tokyo, I believe. The McDonald's franchises there have a great garlic and lemon sandwich. I'd go for it in a heartbeat if they offered it here.

Another hotel view, this time of Yokohama Bay and Yamashita Koen ("Park"). This bayside park makes for a fantastic early morning walk. The park, according to Wikipedia (and I think I heard this long ago when we actually lived in Yokohama.), was built on the rubble from the 1923 Kanto Earthquake.

Now, up the hill we go in Yokohama to where all the interesting old gaijin ("foreigner") homes are located. Yokohama was where all the foreigners settled in the late 1800's, and there's a very large cemetery devoted to them, fittingly called the Foreign Cemetery.

 It's impossibly large and overgrown with old growth to catch a shot of very much of it, but I'll show a couple of photos of particular spots within the cemetery.

That will have to do for now where the cemetery is concerned. I happen to really like cemeteries. They're peaceful places conducive to meditating on the more profound aspects of life. That being said, however, I do not seek them out in the evening. Overly active imaginations and all that.

Below are more shots I couldn't resist including.

 

The problem with waiting four months to report on a set of photos is that memory is not as reliable as digital format. I can't remember the precise purpose of this gorgeous old building, though I know that there were a couple of tea rooms/coffee shops in the area when we lived there, and there was a community organization housed in one of them as well. Probably a historical society.

Above, one of my favorite photos. It is currently up as my wallpaper. I see it every day.

 

A closer shot of the same house and garden.

One of the churches on the Bluff.

Another lovely old home. I would love to have gone inside these homes, but between having little time (We followed our adventure muse and simply wandered up the hill to see what we would find at the top of it!) and not knowing the owners in the least, it was, alas, not meant to be.

Now this one above, I'm pretty sure, had a coffee shop inside, with seating in the garden outside. I ate here once or twice with a co-worker when we worked on the bluff at one of the international schools. True to Japanese form, all of the homes we saw were meticulously maintained. They were beautiful. I don't know if there is an association to preserve historical homes and other buildings, as we have in the U.S., but it would not at all surprise me. Just gorgeous.

Modern siding (and color) on an otherwise antiquarian home.

This one, too, looks like a real gem. Love the columns, the iron work and the green trim against the grey(ish) stucco.

Well, that's it for the foreign (mostly Victorian era) homes in my collection of photos from our recent jaunt to Japan. I guess I haven't even touched on the traditional Japanese homes and establishments. Another post, another day.

Sayonara.

Kyoto International Manga Museum

Well, I really don't have too very much to offer about the museum, and there are no photos in my possession of the inside of the museum. It was primarily a grand library of manga (comic books) from the earliest days of Japanese manga—the first children's manga was published in 1905—to the present.

The museum contains exhibits of the development of the manga art form, laid out chronologically, and the library houses about 50,000 manga, spanning a period from the 1970's to the present. The visitor can purchase a yearly membership and have daily access to the manga if he/she wishes, so it really is possible to read a whole series from the "Wall of Manga."

Here's the link to the museum's web site, however, so that anyone who's a fan might have a look.

http://www.kyotomm.jp/english/

There is actually quite a bit of information on the site, though the illustrations/photos appear to be mainly of visiting exhibits.

Whod'a thunk?

The Mei & Satsuki House, Nagoya, Japan

Come walk with me. Today I'm dropping in on the world of Hayao Miyazaki, one of Japan's most famous and best-loved animators. If you've never had the pleasure of viewing any (and all) of his films, I highly recommend taking the time to do so. I'm fairly picky about the films I choose to view, because life is short, and time is precious. Every one of his films, however, is worth the hours and minutes.

The quaint little house below is a literal re-creation of the house inhabited by the family of Mei and Satsuki Kusakabe and their parents. At least in the story it does. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Neighbor_Totoro. This one can be found in Nagoya, Japan. It was constructed based on the detailed plans and illustrations—and I mean detailed—of the house in the animated film in which the two sisters and their father move into an old house in the country. It is a sweet enough house in the film, but a sheer delight in tactile 3-D.

We were not just invited, but encouraged to look at, touch, move whatever we wanted. We couldn't drink the water or go up the attic stairs. Nor could we take photos inside. But for half an hour we had the run of the place, the eleven of us plus the other 10 or so from our group. I should note at this point that a friend of ours, Junko-san, a Nagoya resident, was the one who put us onto this entire experience. She arranged for the tickets, which were free, but which required advanced reservations. She also drove my in-laws, my youngest and me to the site, while my husband and the older girls took the train.

We slid open drawers and cabinets, pulled out 1950's era gloves and labeled tins of powders and pomades, smelled camphor (an inside reference for anyone who knows the film) in the storage chests, pumped water by hand at the outdoor well, peeked our heads into various closets and windows. It was wonderful. 

Every one in my eight-person family (six of us plus my in-laws) felt a nostalgic longing to live in this house. Never mind that the reality would likely never live up to our dreamy expectations. It was simply a fictional slice of life from a different time (and place). The thing about a real time 3-D snapshot of someone else's quiet life is that it always comes across as being so idyllic. But even in the story of Totoro, life is far from perfect. The mom is sick with a malady unknown to us in the audience and has been in hospital for some prolonged period of time. It is 1958, and the hospital is some three hours away by foot. Professor Kusakabe still has to work at the university, while his four-year-old and school-aged daughters attend school and remain under the watchful eye of a kind neighbor. Perhaps life was quieter and safer in the 1950's and in Japan specifically, but to be realistic, not to mention fair, no life is without its struggles.

Disclaimer time here: though we were not officially allowed to take photographs inside the house, the ones I took are outside looking on, with a few looking in. Honesty can be such a pain in the neck sometimes, but I guess it's worth being able to sleep well at night.

I must include a few photos of just lovely sights, as there were many, on the way from the parking lot through the park and on to the house itself . . .

Okay, I guess that's enough for now. I only wish I could figure out how to enlarge them enough for you to see better. A tutorial for another day, I suppose.

Professor Kusakabe's study at the side/back/front? of the house. True to character, he is function over form. His study looks like my house—books everywhere, papers piled and in disarray, knick-knacks and tell-tale travel souvenirs dotted throughout. I love the tiny little chair to right of the doors. I didn't even notice it when we were there because there was so much to see.

Another view into the house. This would have been an all-purpose room that could be opened up to its largest dimension or divided by the screens you  might just be able to see suspended about halfway through the room. These are called sudare. In recent decades it has become immensely popular over here in the west (U.S., at least) to use sudare as window shades. They have a very natural, calming appearance to them and we get to feel as if we are getting back to nature.

The best sudare are just gorgeous, and they are intended to provide light and privacy at the same time. A larger room such as the one above could be divided into sleeping quarters at night, but be opened up as  living space during the day. Believe me, when it comes to making the most of space there have been many times when I have thought that the Japanese are the ones who got it right and that we need to re-think our floor-plan. Can you imagine what a simple ranch/rambler, or a two-story townhouse would be like with all that space opened up during the day?

Here we have two cute and curious little girls pumping water at a real well. Yes, that is a watermelon in the barrel, and there is a sock/sack attached to the end of the pipe. The sock was put there to reduce the amount of dirt and minerals that came up with the water. We weren't allowed to drink from the wells, but the kids certainly had fun playing and pretending.

Under the back entrance (where the little Totoro would have snuck in under the house ^o^) rests Mei's little tea set and some water vessels, dwarfed, as you can see, by Dad's geta.

A peek into the kitchen—to see how the kitchen would have been used, you should really watch the movie. You can clearly see another water pump here in the kitchen.

Supply of wood for the stove just behind the kitchen, and a wooden cart used for . . . whatever.

Older roofs in Japan are just beautiful, but everything in Japan has a purpose, even the most ornate and beautiful objects. That is one of the things I really love about Japan, that there is both beauty and a purpose to everyday things. Here, it isn't difficult to see that the roof channels rainwater and makes it easier for the sun and warm air to melt snow and ice, rather than let it sit in a thick, undisturbed, and possibly dangerous, sheet of ice. It is because of this Japanese insistence on form as well as function that we decided to install rain chains from the under-deck behind our house. Why shouldn't the rain tumble down in an esthetically pleasing waterfall into a catch-basin or rain barrel beneath?

And for a few last looks at the outside of the house . . .

Don't worry. I won't leave you without real photos of the inside of the house. I just have to go through official channels and send you to the right web sites. Enjoy! (Word to the wise: if you go looking at other sites for more info, you may find some imagery from other artists and animators that you hadn't bargained for. So if you are looking at the computer with your kids, a bit of pre-screening is probably a good idea.).

The official 2005 Expo site:
http://www.expo2005.or.jp/en/venue/experience05.html

Wikimedia photos:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Satsuki_and_Mei’s_House

Another fun site:
http://www.totoro.org/

Or you can go to Google Images for Totoro-related photos and illustrations, including some of the house.

One day soon, I'll post photos of our trip to the actual Studio Ghibli Museum in Miitaka, Tokyo. 'Til then, ki o tsukete, ne? (Take care.).

Lunch a la Japonaise

Bento (lunch) prepared and waiting for a very hungry customer.

Let's see. In this lunch I see pickled vegetables, shrimp croquette, smoked salmon over shredded raw diakon radish, mini quiche, prosciutto or raw ham, tuna sashimi with a yummy-looking melange of sauce, sesame seeds, and chopped greens (probably onion), Vietnamese summer roll, and one or two other things I can no longer see well enough to identify. For the record, at the center-top square of the bento on the left is a funny herb that is very much like a shallot, but also very different, called Myoga (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myoga). I have never found it in the U.S., but I would very much like to.

Sliced pork, called char shu (as closely as I can transliterate).

Sarada (salads).

If I'm not mistaken about this one, it is a box of fish cakes. The kana on the label indicate "surimi", which is the pollock-type fish that is used in imitation seafood here, and which the Japanese have used to make their own fishcakes for far longer than we've known about it.

A variety of bento, the more expensive of which appears to be over $10.00, and the least expensive about $7.00.

Close-up of more salads, some containing meat and seafood.

For all you caviar lovers out there, I think this would be salmon. And the next photo is of a variety of caviars. Of course, the Japanese palate appreciates this item in a different context than a western appetite would. Rice, often vinegared, is the preferred medium in Japan, while in the west, of course, breads or blini would be chosen.

And last, but not least, good old sandwiches. Though you will likely find it a bit odd at first to bit into a potato salad sandwich, it is actually quite tasty. It is not uncommon to find two and three layers of filling in a sandwich, along the lines of a double or triple decker, but the fillings will be familiar and yet unfamiliar at the same time. Always good, though. I don't remember ever having had a bad sandwich.


So, that will wrap up lunch at the Sogo Department store. I'll have to look back through my photos and see what strikes me as a good post for the next go round. Sayonara for now.

I Know I Promised Furniture, but . . .

Food is pretty important. In fact, in the grand scheme of things, it's a good deal more important than furniture, I'd say. So, with that in mind, I thought I would torment all of us with just plain food photos from Japan.

Zaru soba with mountain vegetables. The sauce is a soy-based sauce to which sugar, mirin, and dashi have been added. Mirin is cooking rice wine, and dashi is a dried and smoked fish stock. There is no fishy taste to it, however. Not in my opinion, anyway.

A bit blurry, but this teishoku (lunch set) is Tonkatsu—pork cutlet breaded in Panko, then deep-fried, served, usually, with shredded cabbage, white rice, pickles, and miso soup.

For all you food lovers out there, you have never seen anything until you've shopped in the basement floor(s) of major department stores in Japan. Above is just one sliver of the offerings available in the sweets section of Sogo department ("depaato", in Japanese) store in Yokohama. I think I'll show a few more before moving on to savories.

Isu-kuremu (ice cream).

Chokoreto (chocolate).

More sweets . . .

Including a green tea torte

and a selection of green teas to go with your sweets

Unless you would prefer to have a ko-hi (coffee) instead.

I believe that rather than make this post as long as the great wall of China, I shall save the savories for another post. It is after lunchtime by now, and all these sweets should be making people look forward to teatime, which, by the way, is observed in Japan.