Basaball, She Be My Life

I don’t think the younger readers of this blog will find this reference, even with Google.

Japan – Day 2, Part 2

TO and I hopped on the bus that goes directly to the nearby mountain lake, a popular tourist site. The buses here have a very sophisticated method of calculating how much you owe. At the front of the bus is an electronic board that reminds me of Jeopardy. This shows the prices of your ticket based on where you got on relative to where you get off. *****BUS SIGN

The 1-hour (?) bus ride gave me an opportunity to scan the surroundings for both people and cultural characteristics. One thing I noticed is that biking is more of a recreational sport here than it is in China. Evidently the ride up the mountain to the lake and back is a popular route for serious cyclists.

One of the things that’s quickly noticed is that apparently all Japanese take their gardens and landscaping very seriously. Those living in relatively modest houses spend a good deal of their non-working time pruning their trees and shrubs,…

…while those with more expensive properties probably hire the stereotypical Japanese gardener to maintain their surroundings.

TO and I arrived at the lake and we had to pass through a narrow opening (“gate”) in the fence. Here, TO, who weighs in at about 32 pounds, is looking back at me on the outside of the gate, making a derogatory comment about the possibility that I won’t fit through.

Fortunately, thanks to my diligent omission of bread, rice, and noodles from my recent diet, I was able to squeeze through.

Though it was about 11 a.m., long past lunch time, we decided to walk around a little, buying a few vegetables,…

…almost buying some meat on a skewer (none of which looked like intestines),…

…and, one of my favorite pastimes, reading restaurant menus.

In case you’re wondering what whole bamboo shoots look like, see the large brown things on the right:

*****BAMBOO SHOOTS

We passed a small outdoor theater where a few people were listening to a woman singing traditional Japanese songs.

There was a little stream with lots of floating cherry blossom petals…

…and small koi (not floating).

These fish are not just for decoration. In the picture below, the white building to the left is where you, as a little kid, can rent a small bucket, pole, and bait.

Your dad may be the one to help you bait the hook, but YOU need to do the fishing…

…and, if you’re brave enough, put the fish in the bucket.

We finally ended up at this restaurant…

…where TO explained the lunch options.

My good friend TO…

…was very diligent and dedicated to this explanation, resorting often to his Japanese-English dictionary. This was necessary as my command of Japanese is on par with that of Chinese.

We had a leisurely lunch…

…of noodles and tempura…

…that I had trouble finishing.

We walked around some more, enjoying the views of the lake…

…and of families playing on the large grassy field.

Watching a father and son toss a ball back and forth always makes me a little nostalgic.

保罗

Just One Word: Plastics

Japan – Day 2, Part 1

My hotel…

…did not offer a free breakfast and the paid one was too big and too expensive, so I took off down the street to find something suitable. I first saw this guy carrying a cello, which set a good tone for the day.

Notice that, as throughout China, these sidewalks also had a strip for blind people. The women in Japan also seemed to pay a bit attention to their style of attire. Note the “no bicycles” sign on the sidewalk, something I haven’t seen in China except at their parks.

Before leaving this main thoroughfare, I took a shot that shows (a) the cleanliness of the streets, and (b) that they drive on the wrong side of the road here, something I either forgot or never knew.

I found this coffee shop on a little side street,…

…inside of which was an advertisement for Mother’s Day stuff.

I didn’t realize the Japanese celebrate Mother’s Day. I also didn’t realize it was necessary to advertise the holiday a full month before its occurrence.

On Japan Day 1, I showed a bunch of bikes outside a “gaming establishment”…

…that seemed to be little more than a bunch of slot machines.

Even on narrow alleys there were areas designated for pedestrians where cyclists had better beware.

On this same alley I saw from a distance an interesting group of signs.

It turned out that every one of the places in the adjacent building was a “night spot” of one kind or another.

I saw a girl walking her bicycle through a turnstile after paying…

…and I was impressed with how clean and neat everything was, in contrast to the bike areas in Beijing.

As I’m sure you know, Asian restaurants are really into visual stuff. I passed this restaurant with a nice display in the window of its food that’s allegedly served inside.

Next door was a restaurant that decided to one-up his neighbor by putting his display in a case on the sidewalk.

TO informed me that producing these models is a big business. They’re made specifically to order and are quite expensive. Unfortunately, I have yet to order a dish in Japan or China that even remotely resembled its model.

A little farther on I passed this karaoke place,…

…which reminded me of an interesting evening I spent in Nara (Japan) a couple decades ago. Several of us were sitting around a hotel after dinner having a beer. Around 10 p.m. someone suggested we go to a karaoke place and I immediately thought, “What, is this guy crazy?” as visions of the pizza-place karaoke dumps in America. Because the guy who suggested it was a moderately high-level official in the Japanese government, I bit my tongue before I could say what I was thinking. Another one of the people was the main environmental guy for Seiko, so I looked at my friend TO for guidance.

Within minutes we piled into a couple taxis and went to a place that looked like a warehouse on the outside with rusted metal steps leading to a second floor metal door with no name. (“What have I gotten myself into?!!”)

Inside was a very posh place with a small double horseshoe bar and a few small tables. There were 4-6 of us and we took over the bar. Someone (not me!) ordered a wonderful (and certainly expensive) bottle of brandy, and the barman brought us 2 microphones. This was my first exposure to the phenomenon that I’ve now seen in both Japan and China: people who are quite reserved and shy in the workplace and just about everywhere else turn into would-be rock stars in karaoke places. All shyness departs and even those who can’t carry a tune “sing” at the top of their lungs.

I perused the large songbook to see if there were any songs in English. There were, and almost all of them were cowboy songs. In those days (and maybe still) the Japanese had a thing about the American West and they loved cowboy songs. I remember calling companies in Japan in those days and, when put on hold, the electronic music was either Red River Valley or Don’t Fence Me In. (Do you remember the opening scene to the movie Rising Sun with Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes?)

Moving on. Next to the karaoke place was a shop that advertised “plastic hair” and to this day I’m not sure what it is they do or sell there. Anyone know?

I passed a Denny’s and thought I might dine there the following morning, though I contained this temptation and went back to the Mother’s Day coffee place.

Some young people were congregated outside a florist. Note the orange socks and red shoes.

As in China, many women use umbrellas on sunny days.

TO picked me up at the hotel so we could catch to bus to the lake. (See Japan – Day 2, Part 2.) We went to the bus stop and saw that we had about a half hour to wait. As there was no line, we decided to go around the corner to a multi-level, indoor shopping mall. He wanted to show me the view of the mountains where we would be heading shortly.

On the way there I noticed that the women here also wore either pants or short dresses. Note that several people have masks on, which surprised me because the air was crystal clear.

The view from the 6th (?) floor was nice, and I was looking forward to our sojourn.

I had to make a pit stop, so I found the public bathroom on this floor where I discovered the swankiest public facilities I’ve ever encountered.

On this same floor I was walking by a table with a display of women’s clothes when something caught my eye.

There was a stack of books that looked like sheet music, and I thought “What a classy display, to have real music next to the clothes!”

All the books in this pile were identical…

…and appeared like much of the music I have of the Peters Edition.

Also, inside was no music but one of the most sophisticated clothes advertisements I’ve seen.

Time to go to the lake. When we returned to the bus stop, we found a long line of people, most of whom were associated with a boys soccer team on its way to a game…

…so the bus was a bit crowded. The kids graciously stood and waited while TO and I found seats.

OK, off to the lake.

保罗

One Flu Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

If I were a stickler for judicial process, I would recuse myself from comparing China and Japan. I have a long and warm history with Japan and Japanese culture. This started in 3rd grade when I first took group piano lessons from a Japanese teacher. That person, Suzi O., was and still is like a second mother to me, and I could write a book just on here (which I may do one day). In 4th grade I started private piano lessons, continuing for 15 years. Most of her other students were Japanese, and I was constantly rehearsing and performing with them.

There is a large Japanese population in Santa Barbara, and many of my mother’s closest friends were Japanese. My brother Barry worked many years for the Japanese owner of a nursery. I played a Japanese guy in my high school’s play (“Teahouse of the August Moon”) during which I developed a crush on my Japanese co-star, Masaye O. (That’s another story.)

I have been to Japan several times on business and had magnificent times among those fabulous people. (You haven’t seen real karaoke until you’ve been to a posh karaoke place in Japan.) During those times (when I had my company) I developed a warm friendship with my business counterpart from Japan.

So you may be tempted to take my next statement with a grain of salt – but you shouldn’t: 4 of the happiest days I’ve since coming to China have been in Japan.

Japan – Day 1

Except for the fact that I was 10 minutes late leaving (5:40 instead of 5:30), my trip from Beijing to Tokyo was uneventful. That’s not to say that it wasn’t interesting, especially if you’re a minutiaephile. (I wonder why Word doesn’t recognize that?)

Too early to be able to take the Airport Express subway (first one is at 6:23), I grabbed a taxi. It’s interesting being up that early in a country that does not do Daylight Savings Time. The sun also rises early. Here it is around 5:00 a.m.

I’m sitting in a window seat and next to me is a 20-something Chinese girl with a guide book to Tokyo. She was fidgeting a lot and I was hoping she’d settle down soon so I could take a nap. As the plane took off, it banked a little and she grabbed the seat in front of her with both hands as if she were afraid of falling out. I said, “A little nervous?” She nodded emphatically, blurting out that this was her second time to fly. I said it’s perfectly safe but if she needed any help, just ask.

I had a similar seatmate decades ago once when I was flying to St. Louis. This middle-aged woman next to me asked if she could put her hand on my arm to steady her nerves. I said OK, and by the time we landed she had drawn blood in several places with her finger nails.

Anyway, it’s hard to know whether I’m leaving a place of some danger to a place of less or more danger. I left Beijing during the height of the bird flu scare in China and went to Japan during the North Korean threat to attack Japan and anyplace else within range.

The first thing you notice when you land in Tokyo coming from Beijing is that the airport is not overcrowded with people. It seems more like a typical American airport. It reminded me of the times I returned to Washington from the Amazon rain forest.

With some help of nearby people, I found the bus to the Tokyo suburb Atsugi-City, which was my destination. Despite warnings from the bus company’s Web site that traffic through downtown Tokyo generally causes delays for this bus route, the 3-hour was smooth and traffic-free. The ride through Tokyo leaves one clear impression: this is not Beijing, a large city in a third-world country, but a modern city. More on that later.

Let me stop here for a moment and explain the reason for my trip to Japan. When I was a consultant prior to my teaching tenure, I was head of the chlorinated solvents trade association in the United States. My counterpart in Japan was a guy I’ll refer to, at least at this point (until he comments himself), as TO. Though I hadn’t seen him in many years, I have always regarded him as one of my dearest friends.

In my experience, Japanese people are very reserved, and while TO still falls into that general category, he and I have developed a warm relationship that has revealed in him a clever and sophisticated sense of humor. One of the first times I met him was in the late 1980s in a small restaurant in Florence where we somehow ended up at the same time. We joined tables and I quickly warmed to him when he said he couldn’t finish his dinner and offered the rest to me (which, of course, I devoured as if it were my last meal). I have many more stories to relate about us, but those will have to wait for another tome. TO has always been one of the kindest and most generous people I’ve known, and I’ve been trying to get back to Japan to see him for a long time.

TO met me at the bus stop in Atsugi-City and we walked down this quaint side street to my hotel.

Going up the elevator, my attention was drawn to the buttons for the floors,…

…which were numbered in a way similar to those in my apartment elevator…

American elevators, of course, are numbered right to left going up. (Maybe I should have titled this post “Miss Otis Regrets.”)

My room was cozy, clean, and perfect.

The hotel, like most hotels I’ve visited in Asia, provides a pair of inexpensive but new slippers for its guests,…

…all of whom must be children under 10.

I’ve formed the habit of taking a picture from my hotel window whenever I travel in an attempt to help me remember my travels in future years. Looking out my 6th floor window to the left, there were these non-descript apartments.

To the right I was surprised to the hotel’s small chapel sitting on top of the 5th floor’s roof.

After about an hour, TO took me to dinner at a nearby restaurant with a non-descript exterior…

…and an anything-but-nondescript interior.

Japan is a nation of “loafers.” When you enter someone’s house or a traditional Japanese restaurant, you remove your shoes and replace them slippers that are provided. Consequently, most men in Japan wear loafers instead of shoes with laces. (I, of course, had on tennis shoes.)

This restaurant was impeccably clean and tastefully decorated. We were led down a short hallway…

…to our private little room with the sliding bamboo door where my friend consulted the menu.

While he was doing so, I glanced around the room and spotted this unusual looking, egg-shaped thing.

I asked him what it was, and he demonstrated its function by pushing down on the clear part, whereupon it lit up. Seconds later our waitress, dressed in a beautiful kimono, slid open the door, and TO ordered something for us to start nibbling on.

About 25 years ago I visited Japan for the first time. My business colleagues and I stayed at a very nice hotel where our Japanese hosts (including TO) treated us to a lavish and delicious – and Western – dinner. Later that evening (or perhaps the next day), TO asked me how I liked the dinner. I said it was delicious but I added, in a fleeting moment of indiscretion, that I could get Western food in America and that while in Japan all I wanted was traditional Japanese food. I recall him responding that his own colleagues thought we Americans would rather have “American” food (whatever that is). For the rest of that trip, I had very interesting traditional Japanese food.

I find this to be one of the distinguishing differences between Americans and many Asians. People living in China and Japan were for a long time rather isolated from other cultures and thus most did not have much opportunity to sample non-local food. Pasta, steak with Béarnaise sauce, and green beans with cream of mushroom soup topped with canned fried onion rings were too unusual, and after a short time in America, the Chinese would long for Chinese food and the Japanese would long for Japanese food. Several Chinese visitors to America have told me that they couldn’t wait to get back to China where they could get some good food.

I think these episodes reflect two truisms: (1) the average food in China and Japan is indeed spectacular, especially compared with the average food in America, and (2) the general low-level exposure to non-local cuisines in those two countries, resulting in a high degree of culinary ethnocentrism.

Back to my own dinner.

I now think there are three culinary areas where China outshines the rest of the world: tea, mushrooms, and tofu. Still the tea, mushrooms, and tofu in Japan are outstanding. Just as I was thinking this, the waitress brought a bowl of different tofu preparations.

Then we had a small salad…

…to which TO added the dressing, which was automatically served separately so it would be fresh upon the greens.

Then came a little sashimi, which, of course, was delicious.

By far, the best sushi and sashimi I’ve had has been in Japan. (The next best was in a tiny strip mall in Sacramento. Whooda thunk?) The Japanese, like the Chinese, insist on very fresh ingredients, which makes all the difference in the world, especially when it comes to seafood.

We had some stuff on lightly grilled onion slices,…

…perfectly grilled squid,…

…and wonderful deep-fried pork (?) pieces.

When this dish came,…

…TO asked me to taste it and guess what it was. I did so but guessed wrong. (Unusual for me.) He told me what it was but for the life of me I can’t remember. Maybe TO will fill in the gaps.

When this setup came…

I couldn’t guess what was inside either. It turned out to be freshly cooked (at the table) tofu…

With a variety of interesting seasonings.

We ended with a delicious meat dish (duck breast? chicken breast?). Once again, bird flu crossed my mind, but I shoved that aside and enjoyed every morsel.

I know I should have written everything down, but I didn’t want to make a spectacle of myself (at least, not any more than I usually do) and I didn’t think it would be this long (2 months!) before I wrote about it. (TO to the rescue?)

In his customary way, TO wouldn’t let me contribute even the slightest to the dinner. For as long as I’ve known him (i.e., since he gave me the rest of his meal in Florence), he has always been one of the most generous, self-sacrificing people I know.

Walking back to the hotel, I took a couple photos of things that caught my eye. First, I noticed these pedestrians actually waiting patiently for the light to turn green. Note that some have masks, even though the air was crystal clear (at least compared to my point of origin that day).

Second, I saw a long row of bicycles, neatly lined up outside a gaming establishment. They were newer and cleaner than those around Beijing, probably a function of both no dust from Mongolia and a higher standard of living.

All in all, it was a very exciting day for me to see my old friend again. By the end of the evening, it was like we had been visiting each other regularly for the last couple decades, which I hope will actually be the case for the next couple decades.

保罗

You’ve Got Mail

Mail sent to me has arrived has taken as short as 1 week and as long as 3 months. Perhaps some has not even reached me; I wouldn’t know. If you are so kind and generous with your time that you make the effort to send me anything by mail, it would be helpful to let me know to expect it and what it looks like. A major part of the hang-up is here at the school.

In the future, please send all mail to me at the following address, including the Chinese characters:

Mi Qi
for Paul Cammer
Ren Da Fu Zhong
No. 37 Zhangguancun Street
Beijing, China 100080

北京市海淀区中关村大街37号 100080
人大附中 宓奇收(转保罗)

Here’s a JPG that you should be able to copy and print then affix to your envelope.

All mail is welcome. While I’m not a soldier in Afghanistan, there still are many times when I feel quite isolated. For example, there was a confluence of events this week that exacerbated this feeling: there was a 3-day holiday during which everyone else was gone and also during which the school’s Internet was down. I did get a lot of reading done, as well as cigar-smoking. Also, I had long chats with my friend in Renmin Park.

Still…

保罗