Arboreal irony

This is a little bit hard to see, so click on the image to see a bigger version. I went to a park on Sunday in Suma, west of Kobe, and I encountered these two trees were there. On the left is a Japanese maple, and on the right is a "Juugatsu-zakura" - an October cherry, which apparently only flowers in the fall.

To anyone who has spent any time in Japan, this is a shocking juxtaposition, as the fiery hero of fall brandishes his vermilion foliage against an unlikely opponent, the undisputed champion of spring, wielding her delicate but poignant blossoms, blushed with the faintest suggestion of pink. Yeah, it's hard to see the blossoms in the picture. Keep in mind that this is an October cherry, and it's already what, like the end of November...

Anyway, big a cappella show coming up - I'll probably have more time for blogging once that's done.

Geography / 地理学

Great conversation with this guy Tomo on Tuesday night at the Moon Walk in America-mura:

Me: "So where in Osaka are you from?"
Tomo: "I'm from Hirano-ku. Do you know where that is?"
Me: "Um yeah, I think so. It's in the north, right?"
Tomo: "It's actually the southernmost ward in Osaka, past Tennoji."
Me: "... oh."
Tomo: "So where are you from in the US?"
Me: "I'm from New York."
Tomo: "Oh, that's great! So you're really close to Vancouver, then!"

この間アメ村のバーで友君って言う人と話して：
俺：大阪のどこからですか。
友：平野区。それはどこか知っている？
俺：多分。なんか北の方ちゃう？
友：ちがう、大阪市の一番南の区。天王寺よりむこう。
俺：。。。あ、そう。
友：アメリカのどこから来ている？
俺：ニューヨーク。
友：あ、ええな。じゃ、バンクーバーの近くやね！

ATR CEO BBQ vs. IBL

So everything turned out fine on Friday. I found my license, rented a truck, and got the kotatsu home, despite torrential rains. I was a little bit nervous about driving on the left side, but the only really tricky bit was making sure I turned into the lane on the correct side of the divider. Oh, and squeezing around motorcyclists on the narrow roads. Yeah, all in all I probably only broke about 7 or 8 traffic laws in a 1-hour period. :P

This weekend I went to a party at the house of the president of ATR. It was interesting... I once went to a party at the spectacular home of one of the CEOs of Sapient, who owns an entire peninsula on the north shore, including several islands, many tiers of gardens and patios, an enormous mansion, and of course a dock where he keeps his jetskis and other watercraft. The house on its rocky promontory towers over the relatively modest mansions of several other CEO's of high-tech companies living across the bay, a bold statement of corporate success and financial power.

President Fugono, on the other hand, lives in the woods on a little hill near Nara. Actually his place is surrounded by other houses, but he and his brothers own a big (by Japanese standards - maybe 2-3 acres? Hard to tell how far the woods extended) chunk of undeveloped land right next to his house, and the trees kinda block out the neighbors. It really felt more like a relaxed barbecue party back in Jefferson than a corporate event in Japan, with muddy paths connecting clearings in the woods, people sitting on logs and chatting, and kids fishing in the pond for crayfish.

I thought it was really cool that the president of a high-tech robotics research company in Japan, who I assume has the means to support any lifestyle he likes, would choose to live in surroundings so similar to the way my parents and all their friends back home live. This guy even has his own little mini-backhoe - apparently he dug the pond himself and uses the backhoe to keep the trails clear.

So once again my life experiences come full-circle and I find that a journey of thousands of miles, across cultural, linguistic, and intellectual barriers, brings me home again. I guess the Institute for Better Living is on to something after all. :)

Why we need Eddie Van Halen

Hey, so I know I haven't posted in a while. Been busy. As if you couldn't guess! (笑)

Honestly I don't know what it is... either (a) my available time has decreased, (b) my list of things to do has increased, or (c) my time management skills have atrophied. I constantly find myself overwhelmed with time commitments.

Anyway, quick summary of the recent past. I went to Tokyo last weekend to see an outstanding performance by up-and-coming pop vocalist Sawaka (http://www.sawaka.com) and then spent a day shopping for hair accessories at the mall. Yeah, I know... It's an addictive habit, and I'm trying to quit.

This week's Osakapella rehearsal was a lot of fun - the entire group was there, and we sounded pretty good! We have a gig on Sunday in Nakanoshima, so we reviewed our set. Given that we haven't even practiced a lot of these songs since August, I was pretty impressed. Good vibes. Hope things continue this way!

Furniture. I continued my quest for some sort of organizational drawer unit for my room as well as a kotatsu for the winter (a Japanese kind of coffee table with a quilt around it and an electric heater underneath, so you can put your legs under it and eat oranges in the winter). I think I found the one I want to buy, but of course transportation is an issue. Since I'm never home, having the store deliver it isn't really an option. They do let people borrow their small trucks, though, and I do have an international driver's license. So this may well be my first chance to drive in Japan! However...

1) To buy an organizational drawer unit, I need to be able to transport it home.
2) To transport it home, I need my International Driver's License.
3) To find my International Driver's License, I need to clean and organize my room.
4) To organize my room, I need an organizational drawer unit.
5) See (1).

And that is why we need Eddie Van Halen!

Birthday celebrations ... The thrilling conclusion!

ごめんね、最近全然日本語書いてへんな。もう午前二時やから短いバージョン：誕生日のピックニクの後で一つの小さいディンナーパーティーして、アルビンとリンダリンダとキャムがめちゃ美味しいもん作ってくれた！その後の土曜日めちゃ楽しい餃子パーティーやった。新しい友達も来たし、長ーく会ってへん友達も来たし、ケーキ二つもくれたし、とってもいいパーティーだった！囲碁ももちろんやって、その後ﾋﾞﾙ･ｱﾝﾄﾞ･ﾃｯﾄﾞｽﾞ･ｴｸｾﾚﾝﾄ･ｱﾄﾞﾍﾞﾝﾁｬｰって言うめちゃくちゃ好きな映画を見た！俺とキャム以外はみんな寝ちゃったらしいけどな。(>_<)

So I'm still way behind in documenting everything. I'll try to keep this less wordy and more photojournalistic. The short summary - Thursday night, a quiet dinner with my Vancouver buds back at Alvin's place. Alvin, Linda, and Cam threw together an outrageous meal complete with log roll birthday cake for me! You guys are so awesome.


As the winds started to pick up Friday night (in a figurative sense, of course) Linda helped me out with planning the menu and doing the shopping for Saturday's party. Alvin provided hardware - frying pans, mixing bowls, a cutting board, and his laptop (handy, because it doubles as a cutting board. yes, I'm just being silly). The plan was to get gyoza stuffings and chop them ahead of time, so that as guests arrived they could start folding and puckering the gyoza into their mature form. Then throw them in the pan, sizzle, steam, and serve. We planned for the worst, buying ingredients for something like 280 gyozas, using seven different recipes. Hauling the stuff back to my house was like stocking a fallout shelter in preparation for a nuclear winter. My fridge was stuffed beyond its capacity, and what vegetables would not fit were piled around my kitchen.

After all that shopping, nobody had any energy for chopping, so we gave up on preparations for the evening. We needed to save our energy for carrying a mikoshi the next morning (I'll write about this in a separate post).

Skip ahead to 2pm, when we were supposed to get back from the mikoshi festival. No, actually, why don't we skip ahead to like 5:30pm, when we actually DID get back. :) Everybody went to their respective homes to refresh / get dressed / crash from the physical exertion. I frantically cleaned my room and dashed off on last-minute shopping runs. Finally 7pm rolled around. Yuki and Yuki and Yuka show up, I hand them knives and cutting boards and veggies. More and more guests show up and join in the maelstrom of chopping and mixing. I'm running around, either meeting people by the station (several people got lost trying to follow my directions - my apartment isn't in the most obvious location) or mixing drinks for people, occasionally tag-teaming in to chop some nira or garlic.

There was a great mix of people there - my old friends Peter and Miki showed up, as well as one of my completely insane Japanese coworkers and an amazing international mix of other friends. Two different groups of friends brought me birthday cakes, too! That was really awesome, and actually it was a good thing because we had way too many people for one cake.

After a couple attempts, I had all the candles out (hey, I'm getting on in years! and aerodynamically speaking, it's much more difficult to generate sufficient flow velocity when you're trying to cover the 90 degree span containing two cakes with a single breath... and you're inebriated. ;)

That brief interlude over, the flow of the party swept back into full force, steam and oil flying from the kitchen, with trays of folded gyoza sweeping in and trays of cooked gyoza coming out in their place. The flow of it all was greased with alcohol and conversation.

I got some great presents - some funky socks, a rare piece of abstract art, a takoyaki cooker that I'm now obligated to use at my next party, and a Hanshin Tigers jersey! This was like 4 days before they lost their fourth straight game in the Japan series... guess I'll have to wait till next year to wear it. (yeah, right - like there's ever an off-season for Tigers pride in Osaka!)

So, being surrounded by good friends, with good music on the iTunes shuffle list, good food in my tummy, and good alcohol in everybody's cups, I decided to get the party started, so to speak, and I busted out the go boards, awww yeah! (Wish I had a pic to put here!)

Long story short, after some crazy action on the go boards and some spinning-flying-how-the-hell-did-he-launch-himself-in-the-air-like-that dropkick-on-my-neck action, we all settled in to watch Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, an excellent finale for the evening since half the people there were starting to zone out anyway. The Japanese people didn't understand it, the Chinese people had never seen it but were only present and awake for like 5 minutes of it, and the Germans were lost somewhere in the torrential 4am downpours outside. Cam and I were the only ones completely aware of the movie, and we both were chuckling 30 seconds before each funny part, and nobody had any clue why. I translated the first 10 mins or so of the movie for the people near me, but ... sometimes you've just gotta be there, ya know?

Anyway, it was all in all a worthy party to kick off my alleged adulthood. Thanks to Cam for taking pretty much all of the pictures here. Anybody else got pics? I was too busy partying! Thanks especially for this picture on the left here with all the beautiful ladies! Little fantasy of mine - ah, if only every day could be like that!

Oh, wait, it is...