Saitama Bay

For those comedy fans out there, you might recognize the title as a reference to Bill Hicks's seminal album "Arizona Bay." The album features a lot of material about Bill's distaste and loathing of the city and culture of LA. In the opening bit, he fantasizes about "the Big One" that will drop most of southwestern California into the ocean, leaving a cool and serene expanse of water he calls Arizona Bay.

Yesterday, I had the distinct displeasure of doing some shopping around Tokyo, and I'm left with similar feelings about Tokyo. I started out at Takadanobaba (and no, that is not some Baba Yaga joke, that's the name of the station). I picked up a new pair of hiking pants, as I tore a huge hole in my previous pair when I took a tumble last year. That experience was fine.

Next, I stopped at Shin-Okubo, which is home to a huge immigrant population. You'll find lots of people from Korea, southeast Asia, and especially the Middle East. The later makes the area a great source for getting spices in bulk at reasonable prices. For whatever reasons, more than your typical quota of clueless assholes decided to go there as well. Maybe some of them were from some no-name Podunk town and this was their first experience in a big city, I don't know. I do know that they decided to gawk at the regular stores, stand and wait in utterly ridiculous spots, and in general clog the flow of foot traffic.

After getting my coriander and black pepper at great prices, I headed over to Shinjuku. Now, for the last two years, I've been commuting to Shinjuku once or twice a week for work, and I always dread those days. Like Ginza, where I also work once a week, there is a good chance that you will not hear any Japanese spoken on the street in Shinjuku. Instead, you will hear Chinese. Now, whatever your opinion might be of the Chinese government, Chinese food, or Chinese people, who are as diverse and varied as any other group that usually gets maligned in various media (eg, the French, Americans, Russians, Australians, etc), I think we can all agree that Chinese tourists are not the greatest people in the whole world. What is salient for me is that they tend to travel in packs, blocking traffic flow, and they tend to buy lots of useless shit, which happens not to be available in China or is much more expensive there, but which also serves to block traffic flow.

Shinjuku is a really popular shopping district, and when combined with Japanese people from the countryside gawking, tourists who don't know where the fuck they are or where they are going, and the generally sedate pace of shoppers and geriatrics, you get the congestion we all know and despise.

Another particular pet peeve ("I don't have pet peeves. I have major fucking psychotic hatreds." ~ George Carlin ) of mine is walking while texting or using a smart phone. Now, look. I've been lost before, many times. I've definitely found it useful to have Google Maps out with directions so that I can glance at it. This is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about texting, Tweeting, checking out food shots and ass shots on Instagram, etc. As if being in contact with anyone constantly is worth the chance of getting hit by a train or run over by a bus. As if that one message sent at exactly the right moment (which of course is while you're walking) will make or break your social life. You see these people everywhere in Tokyo.

The greater Tokyo area has a population of about 40 million people, with an area of about 13,500 km². No matter how you cut it, that is a lot of people, and even if 99.9% of people are great, law-abiding, and polite citizens, that leaves 40,000 assholes. You're guaranteed to run into about 3 in every square kilometer. 

With all of that in mind, I'd like to add my cosmic vote to the Saitama Bay Project. If a large earthquake occurs in this area, let it take this overcrowded city down to the depths. If we continue to use greenhouse gases and ocean levels rise, let the water embrace this city.

Shirakawa-go New Years Trip

Hey all,

For New Years 2018-2019, Michi and I made a small trip to Shirakawa-go, which is a village in Gifu Prefecture, Japan. From Tokyo, you're looking at a two-hour plus ride by bullet train, followed by about an hour and a half or two-hour bus ride. The reason you might want to travel to this out of the way area is because of the buildings. Shirakawa-go is home to dozens of traditionally constructed Japanese buildings, although the construction techniques and designs are somewhat unique to that area.

If you can ignore the lovely lady in the foreground, in the background you'll see a steeply peaked roof made of mats of woven grass. The walls are simple slats of wood, and the windows are made of rice paper. Yes, even in a place that gets several meters of snow each winter and regularly reaches temperatures of -10 C (that's 14 F for you non-metric folks), they have designed their houses to allow for maximum air flow.

Anyway. The buildings were fun to see, and you can pay a small fee to walk around inside them, where they also have tea and videos explaining the construction techniques. We spent the night at the wonderful Toyota Eco-Institute, which is a kind of research center that also provides accommodation for scientists who wish to study the Shirakawa-go buildings, although they also allow normal people to stay there. Dinner and breakfast were well-prepared and lovely, and the hotel offers a lot of different activities you can easily sign up for. Michi and I decided to take a snow shoe tour through the woods surrounding the hotel, and it was delightful. At one point the guide asked everyone to gather around a "special" tree so he could explain something about it, whereupon he shook the tree, dumping snow on everyone's heads. It was quite funny. Later, he invited those crazy enough to jump off the trail and into the snow, which was about 4 feet deep.

We also visited a couple of restaurants and locations in Takayama. Now, since the early 2000s it seems like Kobe beef has been a known item among foodies in the US. This is a kind of beef that is very tender, and has high levels of marbleization, due to the cows being forced not to move around, being given massages, and yes sometimes being force-fed beer. In recent years, another kind of beef has been gaining in prominence in Japan: Hida beef, which is beef from cows raised in the certain areas around Takayama in Gifu. So, whenever you visit here make sure you try some Hida beef and you will not be disappointed.

Although it was just a month ago that we made the trip, it really drove home how much I miss snow. The Kanto area of Japan has a little in common with Amsterdam, in terms of weather patterns. One is the overall mildness of the winters here, and the lack of snow.

I highly recommend checking out Shirakawa-go. Thanks for reading!