Oh, my. How very unfortunate. You know how, despite different cultures, languages, and aesthetic and spiritual traditions going back thousands of years, all East Asians are basically the same and can communicate with each other intuitively, using their yin-yang-mystical Oriental powers and stuff? Well, somehow, that’s not the way it’s working on the set of Memoirs of a Geisha. I can’t say I’m sad. Why that book was hyped so much is beyond me. I do think it’s funny, though, that the fact that a bunch of people with different native languages can’t communicate is considered remarkable.



Added on 14 December: Laughter is, apparently, the universal language. Either that, or the chatroom is the great global equalizer. Maybe both.

This is what the quilt looks like in its new habitat:

As you can see, the apartment is outfitted in resale-value beige, so even a hint of color is welcome. Of course, this is more than a hint, but what I liked about this particular quilt was that it didn’t scream, “Look how tricky it was to make me!” The design isn’t ostentatiously complicated, but when you look closely, you see that the whole thing is made of rectangles of fabric that aren’t more than 2″ * 2″ each, and many of them are smaller.

You can also get a sense in that exposure that I was able to avoid having a bedspread covered in girlie-ass flowers. (Not that I have a problem with real flowers. I just don’t need them printed all over the place.) The border, as you can see, is made of flowered cloth, but the flowers all look dark and tangled and menacing rather than prettied up. Like the brambles a medieval knight might have hacked through to rescue the hot stable hand at a neighboring castle from a life of certain drudgery.

The only drawback is that now I’m going to have to stop eating and drinking, slovenly-bachelor style, in bed. Or I guess I could try to stop spilling stuff all over the place, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.

The Japanese government publicized a new defense outline, including a rejiggering of the mission of the SDF, Friday. The Yomiuri‘s English article is ineptly translated but gives good background; the Asahi‘s English article gives more information about the outline itself. The new outline stresses that flexibility and resilience (not to mention missiles, which the LDP’s coalition partner the New Komeito has not been keen on) will be key elements in the portfolio of possible responses to terrorist and military threats from here on. It also breaks new ground by naming names: China and North Korea are referred to as potential threats, and the Middle East is deemed a key strategic region with respect to Japan’s defense. The old assumption that SDF activity would be limited to reactions to threats in or very close to Japanese territory is gone. And a good thing, too. The last time the government updated its SDF mission statement was to deal with the end of the Cold War, nine years ago. The world is a different place–or rather, we now recognize how different it is.



On the other hand, the head of the SDF announced this weekend that if the situation in Iraq becomes too dangerous, the non-combat SDF personnel, whose deployment there has been extended for a year, will be pulled out anyway. That’s fair enough. They are not, after all, on a combat mission.

Atsushi told me about this last week, but I forgot until I just saw the ads for it: CNN has sent Bill Hemmer here to Tokyo, from which he’ll be broadcasting for the first half of the week, giving a rare inside view of this most enigmatic of East Asian cultures! Are you excited? I’m excited. We’ll learn about the latest controversies within the royal family, we’ll talk with US Ambassador Howard Baker, and we’ll see all those futuristic gizmos with which Japan has touched off a worldwide youth craze! This is great. I’ve always wanted to know more about Japan.



Pfft! Look, I know that not everyone lives here and that, given limited time, even a resource-rich network such as CNN is going to have to focus on familiar themes of interest to a broad audience. But do we really have to come here and say the exact same damned things for the home-folks every dad-blamed time? I suppose the Baker interview might be somewhat illuminating, but I’ll probably need to take my Dramamine before I can confront the rest. Expect more bile than usual; Atsushi is already chuckling in anticipation.



Of course, CNN doesn’t have to dispatch one of its Ken dolls here to be annoying; the Atlanta-based Barbie contingent isn’t exactly acquitting itself admirably, either. I don’t want to pick on Colleen McEdwards personally, since her sins are the same as those of just about every other news network anchor, but can we please remember that it’s okay not to show off our telegenic smile occasionally? She interviewed some toxicologist about an hour ago about the poisoning of Ukrainian opposition leader Viktor Yuschenko, and I swear, it went something like this, “So, [twinkle, twinkle] how could such a large amount of dioxin get into Yuschenko’s body? Would it really [beam] be possible to put that much in a serving of soup?…Now, he has these acute symptoms [moue, twinkle]–how long will it take, you know, until it’s out of his system?” When I was little, newscasters were notorious for pasting on a look of inauthentic gravity all the time, but at least that showed some awareness of the nature of the topic at hand. I guess it’s possible that Colleen et al‘s frown muscles aren’t working anymore, but they seem too young for Botox.



And while I’m wound up, can all those with-it hair stylists please find some fad to replace the fake-split ends thing? I know they needed something to do after the Friends shag got old, and the sleek crown + egg-beatered ends routine was it. But that was years ago. Time for something new. If we’re supposed to be looking at these people for minutes at a time while they tell us what’s going on [twinkle, twinkle] in the world of politics and artificial Christmas trees, they could summon enough effort to be distinguishable by something more than the colors of their Escada suits. Christiane Amanpour’s hair may look like a fright wig, but at least it’s her idiosyncratic fright wig.



Added on 16 December: Too funny! Rachel Lucas, in her new guise, has noticed this abominable hair abuse, too. Only she actually had it perpetrated on her, the poor thing.

The search string gods are favoring me early this month.



Someone wants to know the “duration of 2004 niigata quake.” To which one can only respond, “Which one?”



Someone’s inner Whitney Houston needs soothing: “how can you know boys if had a feeling with you.” Do I know where you’re coming from, or what, honey! But, you know, there is one way to tell. You could get a broken nose rather than an answer to your prayers, but what is this life without some risk?



I’m hoping “koda shosei kill sean” is a product of unfortunate syntax and not a minded use of the imperative mood.



Some poor soul just can’t quite remember what song goes like this: “i like the way you cross the street cause you’re…precious.” It’s the first song on Pretenders , and trust me, you need to buy the album, and don’t just skip through to “Brass in Pocket.” The whole damned thing will rock your world.



I know I’ve got at least one would-be comedian of a reader who tries obnoxious search terms to see whether he can get me going. If “homosexual inferior trash” is not from him, I will have you know, whoever you are, that my garbage is always put out on the right day–properly separated and in city-approved bags. Well, except the newspapers, which are stacked at exact right angles (I check with a T-square) and tied off, gift-style, with whimsical blue twine. I defy Shintaro Ishihara himself to find a reason to kvetch about it.



Finally, we have “alex kerr homosexual.” Hmmm. Wouldn’t surprise me. Art collector, lives in Bangkok with partner of unidentified gender. Cute and well-preserved, too. Even if he’s a het, we’ll make him an honorary. The guy hangs around kabuki actors; I doubt he’ll mind.



All right, little more cleaning to do so the place is ready for tomorrow morning. I was a bit casual about my unpacking this time.

From the Mainichi:

Schoolboy attacks gun shop employee with golf club in failed robbery bid.*

* I know, I know. Since only hunting guns are sold in Japan, I guess they weren’t likely to be loaded, and the shop clerk probably would’ve gotten into big trouble for brandishing one, anyway.

For a stretch there, I was remarking quite a bit on the repatriation of Hitomi Soga and the attempts to get her husband and daughters to Japan to live with her, largely because the developments weren’t getting much play at home and it wasn’t clear how things would pan out. I haven’t lost interest in the story, but I was kind of wary of reading the Time interview with Charles Jenkins, largely because Nancy Gibbs is often the reporter Time gives big-deal human interest stories to, and for some reason, her approach really tends to annoy me. So I know every man, woman, child, and ficus tree in the Western world has read the thing by now, but for the sake of completism, I’ll link it anyway.

It doesn’t really contain a whole lot of new information about Jenkins’s life in the DPRK. It was already known that he lived for years in a house with other American defectors and that they were tortured and assigned to beat each other up as punishment for disobedience. It was also known that the Jenkins-Soga family lived well for North Korea but was no more free than anyone else, and that their daughters were enrolled at the country’s most prestigious foreign language institute, where they would probably be trained to do some sort of espionage work.

The part about how he first got into North Korean hands, however, is new. (At least, I haven’t seen it narrated before.) While Jenkins is not an innocent party, his is a very sympathetic story, and it makes you glad that, at the very least, he and Soga had the comfort of falling in love with each other–I think I speculated a few months ago that theirs may have been a marriage of convenience, but it’s nice to be proved wrong–and starting a family. And that they’ve now been able to come to Japan and bring their daughters with them.

*******

BTW, there’s a push here in Japan again for sanctions against the DPRK, which has squandered the goodwill it earned by releasing Jenkins and (especially) his daughters by throwing together some bones and purporting that they’re the remains of another abductee, Megumi Yokota. The cabinet is not all of one mind on the matter. A nice detail is that the Minister of the Environment (whose name–dead serious, here–means Lily Littlepond!) was one of those who said essentially, “If we cooperate with the US, we can fry their ass!”

My quilt just came–very exciting. Japanese housing tends to have sketchy insulation, and heating costs (naturally) compound quickly, so a few years ago, when my parents asked what I wanted as a major Christmas present, I suggested one. Since we’re from the edge of Pennsylvania Dutch country, this is not a difficult thing to come by.



The problem is, of course, that many quilts–cleverly designed and skillfully contrived though they be–look like grown-up versions of some Holly Hobbie nightmare, preciously strewn with tulips, hearts, and (blech! heave!) distelfinks. (I think distelfink literally translates to “thistle finch,” but my understanding is that it’s the German word for goldfinch.) So finding one I’d go for was not easy, and we ended up just making a little family day trip into Berks County to look for one while I was home. Found the perfect specimen at the first farm we visited, and had it shipped here.



Unfortunately, while our bed is a double (you guys thought you’d get to make a “queen-sized” crack, huh? suckers), it’s a Japanese double. That means that it’s narrower than a US double, so the main panel hangs a little over the edges. But the nice thing about using a good quilt is that it keeps you warm without being heavy, and the delivery guy brought it just in time, since the night temperatures have dipped noticeably since I got back from the States. That, and my hunk of Japanese man is coming home for the weekend tomorrow.

You know, I really am a self-critical guy. It just takes time to get results sometimes. For a while there, I’ve been getting search after search for “white peril” and wondering why the people out of the bunch who were looking for me wouldn’t just use the URL.



Then the other day, I had to get to a site that was called something like geschlumfelflugenhammerkohl.net, and I thought, Who the hell would choose such a f**king random domain name? I swear, it took a good three hours before I was like, Oh! I wonder whether maybe…. So I went to see whether www.seorookie.net was, in fact, available. It was, so I took it. It’ll take a few days for processing and things, I suppose, but I’ll direct it to this page so I’m not the only one who can find me without Google or the ability to bookmark.

The holiday-time newsletter from the citizen services division of the American Embassy (you can sign up for it if you’re a citizen who lives here and register for it) contains this charming bit of advice for party animals here in Tokyo:

We note that an American Citizen was murdered in early December in the Roppongi district of Tokyo. The murder occurred in an office building within walking distance of the local police station. We previously advised Americans in our June 2004 newsletter of six reports of western foreigners (including Americans) allegedly overdosing on heroin, resulting in three deaths. The heroin was allegedly purchased in Roppongi. In the July newsletter, we noted that several Americans reported the theft of their purses and wallets, stolen from them while in bars and clubs in Roppongi. A number of Americans have also been arrested over the past year in Roppongi for various offenses. Americans are strongly advised to exercise caution should they choose to visit the Roppongi area.

I think I’ve been to Roppongi maybe seven or eight times since moving to Japan, and I’ve enjoyed myself there maybe zero times. It’s not that I mind sleaze. I lived in the Dogenzaka section of Shibuya, in one of the two or three apartment buildings there among the love hotels, for five years. Loved every minute of it. Of course, my apartment was clean, quiet, and tucked at the top of a hill. But still, Shibuya is cool because it’s kooky-sleazy. Roppongi is grim-sleazy. (BTW, I love the way the paragraph above seems to come within a hair’s breadth of saying, “If you’re going to buy heroin, at least don’t get it in Roppongi!”)



I think it’s great that there’s a neighborhood where foreigners who live here can congregate; but living abroad tends to produce a feeling of being off the chain, especially in younger people, and it’s not surprising that when there’s a critical mass of them gathered at a cluster of bars or clubs, they frequently cut somewhat looser than their parents might be back home hoping. That kind of atmosphere is ripe for crime, especially because so many Westerners have been brought up to think of Japan as 100% safe and are not on their guard as they would be in, say, Bangkok, New York or (especially, these days) London. One hopes people will learn to be more careful.



Added at 21:29: I’ve changed the title, since the way I originally had it struck me as being too on the obnoxious side of snarky. Besides, the new cyanide imagery is more in keeping with the ghoulishness of the newsletter.