It’s only been a little over a month since the tsunami in the Indian Ocean, but I’m sure it’s seemed like much longer for Ryohei Sugimoto, 12, whose story has been the focus of much of the human interest coverage of the event here. When the rest of his family was swept away from the Pipi Island resort where they were vacationing, it fell to him to identify his father’s and brother’s remains. His mother’s body has finally been found and identified (dental records). Ryohei and the uncle who went back to Thailand with him will be coming home.



With Mrs. Sugimoto, the number of Japanese confirmed dead comes to 26.

This, via Amritas, is great. There are few things more annoying than the view among many Westerners that spraying kanji all over something immediately lifts it from its actual mass-production banality into a realm of cosmic spiritual Significance.



The potential mistakes can be every bit as hilarious as the more-famous fractured English one sees here in Asia. One of the guys in my department, who started out in China studies, notes that the implicit message of the T-shirt in this post is “I have a rack.”



A slightly different example, in that it dealt with concepts and not kanji, was on this week’s episode of CSI. (I mean, they showed it this week on AXN here in Japan–it was probably filmed in 2000 or so.) Sara, the tough chick, was working overtime on some case that had struck a nerve, and Grissom, the handsome department head, leaned forward and said to her, with a comical air of profundity, “You know, Sara, if you chase two rabbits, you won’t even get one.” Maybe those weren’t the exact words, but (as the subtitle writers knew) he was definitely citing the Japanese proverb ニ兎を追うものは一兎も得ず (nito wo ou mono ha itto mo ezu: “the man who chases two rabbits fails to catch either,” or, if you insist on attaching a tone of Charlie Chan/Mr. Moto/Suzie Wong wisdom to all things East Asian, “he who pahsue two bahnny not obtain even won”). I half-expected a gong to sound during the ensuing pregnant pause, though I myself was rolling around on the sofa laughing.



Actually, before Friends declined into a self-referential snore, there was an episode that beautifully satirized this tendency. Ross talked about taking a self-defense class and learning to achieve “a state of total awareness” that he grandly announced was called “unagi.” Rachel (“Isn’t that a kind of sushi?”) and Phoebe (“Yeah, it’s…it’s freshwater eel!”) knew better, though.

Japan changed the design and composition of its ¥500 (about US $4.50) coins a few years ago, and a few months ago, it released new bills, too. The Japanese economy being huge and having a fair number of disgruntled unemployed people, it’s a target for counterfeiters, and they’ve sunk to the challenge:

After a large number of counterfeit ¥500 coins were discovered in Postal Savings ATMs, Japan Post announced on 3 January that [its machines] would stop handling all coins at post offices in Tokyo Metro and in Fukuoka and Kumamoto Prefectures.

The fakes they’re finding correctly use an alloy of nickel and zinc (the Sinitic compound for which is 亜鉛 [aen: “sub-lead”], which I’ve always found kind of cute), but the composition is different from that in real coins. They also have misaligned stamping and leave off some marks, but according to the authorities, you do have to look closely to see the problems.



There’s also been a rash of fraudulent withdrawals of cash using faked cash cards. I believe it’s the iC system (comfortingly, the one my JAL card is allied with) that’s had the most problems, though I haven’t paid close enough attention to understand where the chink is that makes it easy to trick. Anyway, they’re still trying to determine whether the legal fault lies with banks or depositors. Koizumi says his financial team is working on it.



As far as the bills go, this is as good an explanation as I’ve seen of the new technology and the reasoning behind it–mostly, as I say, that Japan has a huge consumer economy and is a target for counterfeiters. Of course, counterfeiters have already started making funny-money versions of the new bills–as industrious and clever as these people are, couldn’t they find a way to make their fortunes honestly?–and the fact that the old notes are still in circulation means that the tricky holograms aren’t yet having much effect. After the New Year, it was discovered that large numbers of false bills had been used to buy fortunes and souvenirs at temples.

If Andrew Sullivan is so over and no one reads him anymore, how is it that everyone knew about his hiatus the moment it was posted and is now speculating who’s going to become the new Daily Dish for non-leftist gays? People are very odd.



Added at 21:11: Wow. This commenter at Tim Blair’s appears to have read my mind. The comment is so good I wish I’d written it myself, though my version would have had five paragraphs and way more em-dashes, as we all know. Anyway, here it is:

The problem was not that Sullivan wrote too often about gay issues, it’s that as soon as Bush came out in (mild) support of the FMA, Sully shifted in about a day from defending Bush to excorciating him on every aspect of his presidency. Since then (and his unacknowledged shift from pro-war in Iraq to anti has also highlighted this), Sullivan comes across as driven by emotional urges, rather than analytic thought. I have no use for that in a writer.

Many’s the time I’ve sat on our toilet, patted its little control arm, and sighed, “O faithful ultramodern Washlet, you spray and dry and warm me faithfully at my command, and yet I feel among the world’s poor because you never play me soothing music.” Apparently, all that could change. This is one of the Mainichi‘s photo essay thingies, so I’m not sure whether the link will last, but clicking on the following graphic should get you to the original:

I think kitsch devotees have pretty much told the world about Japanese electronic toilet seats, but if you’ve not heard: a lot of private houses and more upscale office buildings have them. There’s a seat heater (most Japanese bathrooms are unheated, so this is very useful in winter), a bidet, a butt-cleaning spray (warmed to your specifications), and a warmed-air drier. Many of the newer ones also have an air freshener. Toto is, to my knowledge, the market leader, if it does not, in fact, have a monopoly.

One of the ironies of our apartment–from my American perspective–is that you can set the toilet seat’s jets to expel water at your tenderer membranes that’s hot enough to seriously scald them…but the sink at which you’re supposed to wash your hands afterward gives you only cold water. On the other hand, as a lover of baths (the English genes, maybe?), I am completely smitten by the bathroom. The control panel for the tub looks like something you’d find in a cockpit. To run a bath, you put the drain plug in and push the “On” button; if you keep the plug in out of habit, and you have the water level and temperature settings to your liking, you can turn it on from the kitchen. Either way, it fills and beeps when it’s done.

This kind of system is designed, of course, to go with the traditional Japanese practice of taking baths at night, family member by family member from grandfather on down to the baby, using the same water. Everyone showers and lathers and rinses clean, then just uses the (wonderfully hot) bathwater to soak in for a while. Except in the middle of summer, when the slightest bit of standing water turns scummy practically overnight, the water is kept for a few days and reheated. Accordingly, there’s another setting you use for 追い焚き (oidaki: “lighting the subsequent fire [under the cauldron]”).

It’s funny how you get used to these things, to the point that going back to the way you grew up is a shock. Whenever I’m at my parents’ place, I have to remind myself that I can’t just walk away from the whooshing taps and expect them to shut off when the tub is full. And that if I leave the water in when I’m done, my little brother will ask me just what I think I’m doing. (Well, I think his actual comment was, “What, are you thinking of buying a turtle, or something?” Everybody’s a comedian.)

Returning to Toto’s new technological gift to civilization, I suppose I don’t mind that it can expel scents at you–by this point, one is all too accustomed to using bathrooms that have been contrived to smell like scratch-and-sniff stickers. That “soothing music” worries me, though, given Japan’s track record. It’s very common here to, for example, call a major corporation, be put on hold, and have a toy-synth version of “The Entertainer” or “Hungarian Dance No. 5″ played at you. I can only hope that the “Off” button for the music is easily recognizable for those of us who prefer to commune with ourselves silently.

Added on 3 February: Eric also has tubs on the brain, largely because he no longer has one on his deck. In his case, of course, the subject is a hot tub, which strict Mid-Atlantic parents like mine regarded, in the Love Boat era, as a frothing symbol of hedonistic California excess.

I didn’t mention in the original post here, of course, anything about Japan’s famed devotion to hot springs, which aren’t hot tubs but serve the same sort of purpose (assuming you just want to bathe). I like hot-spring bathing in the winter, with the cold air and stars above while most of your body is submerged in sulfurating heat. Mostly, though, I prefer the bath at home, which has a glass of white wine and Dusty Springfield playing. You can’t really get away with sinking in languidly and sighing, “Oh, Mary Catherine, it’s true–the others have no idea what you and I suffer” in public, even if you have a folded towel on your head.

Faced with one of the highest suicide rates even in Japan, Aomori Prefecture has at least one town that isn’t just going to roll over and play dead. The government of Rokunohemachi is introducing a new “Save our reputation–stay alive!” program. Well, no, because they weren’t savvy enough to hire me as their PR director, that’s not their tag line. They decided to go with the old give-away ploy:

Alarmed, Rokunohemachi town office decided to provide each household within its jurisdiction with a “mental health card” appealing to anyone in emotional distress to visit one of five counseling offices.



Cardholders can seek help free of charge at any of the centers, located at three hospitals, a dental clinic and a home-care support center.

A dental clinic? Considering what a lot of dentists here dispense as care, you’d think visiting one would be likely, if anything, to send the unstable right over the edge. But here it is again:

Town officials hope that the project, which will begin Tuesday, will help detect the early signs of depression.



If depression is suspected, staff at the centers can refer the victim to a psychiatrist.



The five centers are staffed with a total of 16 nurses and dental hygienists.



They were registered as “mental care nurses” in November after completing a training seminar.

A training seminar is all you need to be certified as a mental care nurse? I have no professional knowledge of this, and the translation may not say the same thing as the original, but isn’t dealing with depressed people who are thinking of offing themselves kind of…tricky? I suppose the “training seminar” could have covered a lot of material, and it’s got to be better than the preparation the nurses had before. (As you might imagine, seeking professional help for mental and emotional problems is frowned on in Japan, and stimulus for the development of psychotherapy is correspondingly low.) If the idea is simply to prepare nurses to assess who needs referring to a psychiatrist who can make a real diagnosis, it might be a good investment.