Halloween

Ok, so let's return to the recent past for a bit and visit Halloween. Usually there's this unofficial party that takes place on the Osaka loop line. Hundreds of merrymakers gather in costume on the platform of Osaka Station, and after partying for a half hour or so, all dive simultaneously into one train. They take this train around the entire loop, getting out at every station to switch cars, causing great confusion to the Japanese people riding the train, who barely have any idea what Halloween is at all.

Anyway, it seems like it might still be a cool idea, until you consider the number of participants. I went last year, and the train cars were completely packed. Normal Japanese people trying to go about their lives were anywhere from simply annoyed to genuinely freaked out by all these foreigners in outrageous costumes (to be fair, quite a few Japanese people participated too) and this detracted a lot from the fun. With about 1/4 the number of people, I think it might actually be fairly cool and not really get in people's way too much, but it's just gotten way out of control.

This is what it looked like last year:



This year, however, the Osaka police cracked down on the party, refusing to let the partiers onto the trains and threatening to arrest people. This was well-publicized ahead of time, and consequently I don't know anyone who went this year. So we must bid sayonara to the tradition of the loop line party.

Instead, I went to a house-rewarming party chez my friend Ben, who just returned to Japan. Since it was Halloween I felt obligated to take my way-cool hand-made party-mask-to-end-all-party-masks that Yuki gave me from her trip to Italy. We ended up meeting up with some friends in Umeda afterwards and dancing all night at a place called Club Noon, which was decidedly NOT a Halloween party, although a bunch of people in our group did in fact come in costume, which attracted quite a bit of attention from the hundred or so "normal" people there. Crazy gaijin.

And here come the pics - consider this my penance for such wordy posts this week. ;)



Party at Ben's house. But... where's Ben? He kind of vanished as soon as the party started...



"Drink from the orange bottle and the story ends. You go home, get a good night's sleep, you wake in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.

"Drink from the violet bottle, and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes."



Haha... it's been so long since I've had to correct red-eye on TWO people in a picture.



"Arr, that's quite a cutlass ye got thar, what ye need is a good scabbard!"



"I think carefully before acting rashly."
"Sound advice."



"Daahling, aren't we FABulous?"



Awww... too cute for words.

---

And finally, here is a natsukashii shot from last Halloween. I had been working on hair for the costume, but I didn't finish it in time, and thus, out of probably 150 people I talked to, only two knew what I was supposed to be (hint: look at what I'm holding in my hand).

Capitalism vs. Socialism

Ok, tonight I talked to two people from Socialist countries who are against socialism. They say that the older generations work hard but the younger generations are lazy. I'm personally from a capitalist country, and all I see are the failings of capitalism. Single-parent families where the mother has to work two jobs to support the kids, etc.

There must be a happy medium, where nobody is in a dire situation, yet people have motivation to work hard, to innovate, etc. I open this up to the peanut gallery. Does anyone have a good solution?

Again I apologize for the brevity of my blog. In a survey of 5 people, 5 out of 5 skipped "the middle part" of my previous blog entry, which I sweated and slaved over for two hours the night before last. Thus, if you find this entry to be too brief, feel free to read over my older stuff. If you really did read everything, wow... I'm impressed. You have the kind of attention span I wish I had. :)

By the way, I spent most of the evening hanging out over a couple of bottles of red wine with two really cool Mongolians. That's the kind of thing that never happened to me back in the states. :)

Oyasumi...

Places I've been

Ok, with last night's post I again seem to have gone a bit overboard in terms of length, so I'll keep it very short today.

Saw this on Berta's blog - it's a personalized map of all the countries you've been to in the world. Looking at mine, I suppose I really need to do some catching up in Europe. You can sign up for free and generate your own map at world66.com.

By the way, it looks like you can set it up to display the places you want to go to in addition to the places you've been, but I haven't played with that yet - too much thought required to decide where I want to go.

Silence and Technology

It's great to have so many comments on my blog! Please, keep it up, everyone, and don't feel shy to post. My posts are but the humble work of one man, but when we discuss and collaborate, this blog becomes a living, dynamic work of our collective mind, an existence far superior to any individual alone.

But yet... it is said that, "a person is smart, but people are stupid". At what point does the dynamic change from the idiocy of a crowd of panicked people, all intelligent when taken individually, stampeding away from the emergency exit, ignoring clearly marked signs in the throes of blind panic; to the brilliant and complex ballet of individually unintelligent bees working together to maintain and develop the hive, breed young, and communicate at a level where they can systematically harvest nectar and pollen from specific locations that can be miles away?

I'm not going to address this question today... I'm just throwing it out there. My thoughts today, rather, are about silence. And technology.

One of the valuable lessons I learned in college, I learned not from the classroom, but from my a cappella group. I arranged a number of songs for them, and while some were so bad that merely uttering the name of the song became its own punchline, I steadily improved, to the point where one musician I respect declared one of my arrangements to be his favorite song ever. (Though he had somewhat of a penchant for hyperbole, I did sense a fair bit of honesty in his statement).

Now as you may know, in Japan, there are some people who practice tea ceremony for the majority of their lives, dedicating 70 years or more to the refinement and development of their aesthetic sense of wabi-sabi, as well as the coordination of body, mind, and spirit. Other traditional arts are studied the same way - flower arrangement, martial arts, calligraphy, taiko drumming, as well as my personal favorite, the game of go. In all of these cases, the specifics of the activity have only secondary significance. A true and thorough explanation of the primary purpose of this study and practice is probably beyond my understanding and ability to explain. I believe an important part of it is to develop a deep aesthetic sense, not limited to a single game or art, but fundamental and underlying everything in life, and to engage oneself in applying it. In doing so, we learn about the patterns of things in the world, we recognize our limitations, and we learn valuable lessons that can be applied, perhaps non-consciously, to unrelated aspects of our lives.

In go, I have observed and lived countless patterns that apply to business, to relationships, to personal development, and elsewhere. It's a game about balance and about compromise. Play all your stones too high, too aggressively, and you'll have your base cut out from under you in no time. Play your stones too low, and you'll be walled out from the center, pressed down into a low, inefficient position with no potential. Every time you take something, you give away something else - it's not like chess where you just destroy everything in your path. This is not American foreign policy. It's a game for a realistic, civilized world of give and take, and I believe that by developing a good sense for the game, one can also develop the skills to be successful in business, negotiations, relationships, and self-improvement in life.

I feel that a cappella, or rather music in general, has many valuable lessons like these to teach us. While not a literal microcosm for the exchanges and relationships in life, music certainly does embody deep aesthetic principles that are true everywhere. Take harmony and counterpoint, for example.

Harmony describes the vertical arrangement of notes at any given moment into chords, and the relationships between those chords over time. It's concerned only that the group of notes fit well together and do not clash with each other at any given moment in the song.

Counterpoint, on the other hand, describes the horizontal flow of notes in their parallel and complementary melodies, and the relationships of these melodies between different instruments or voices.

To demonstrate the difference, consider that it's possible to freeze one's right hand in the position of a C major chord on the piano, mash it down alternately with the thumb on C, then G, then A, then F, and repeat, producing something that resembles the structure of a song. Mozart would never go for that, though - it has no finesse, no delicacy. Now imagine six virtuoso violinists in the room. You simultaneously tell them all to rock out on their most beautiful and emotional violin solo. Any one of them individually would produce a heartwarming melody, but in this room their melodies have no relationship to each other, and all that results is a cacophonous mess. This is perhaps a clumsy and not completely accurate representation of what harmony and counterpoint are, but I think you get the point. [Ed - This example was kind of off the top of my head, and I know it's slightly wrong - if you can think of a better example of counterpoint without harmony, please write it as a comment to this post! :)]

Japanese society places great value on their "wa", which literally means harmony (both musically and in the general sense). It might not be too much of an oversimplification to state that the ultimate ideal of their society is to preserve peace and harmony, even at the expense of individual freedom. The result? Low crime rate, high suicide rate, no guns allowed. Ok, that really IS an oversimplification. But as this is not the central point of my essay, I'll move on. Likewise, in the USA, we value personal freedom over just about everything else. In many cases I think this has been taken to too much of an extreme, as everyone and their mother expects "special treatment" for this or that, and people are aggressive and irritating because "it's their right" to be like that. Customer service sucks, and you have to fight for just about everything you want or deserve in life. Counterpoint out of control.

Possibly the most surprising (to me, at that age) insight I had came during grad school. I had just finished my undergrad degree, which taught me about the equations of science, the processes and tools of engineering, and that everything was done by the textbook. Analytical tools were available for everything from simulating lift and drag on a wing, to developing requirements dependency trees for top-level systems design. My music classes had taught me the rules for determining whether the next note should go up to the 5th, or down to the 3rd. I had learned everything there was to know, except for a few low-level specifics that I expected to learn in my Master's courses. Seldom have I been more wrong.

Though the learning process was rough in both cases, I gradually realized the truth - that musical composition, engineering design, scientific discoveries, and mathematical proofs are all arrived at the same way - through intuition. The analytical rules can then be applied to justify the conclusion you have come up with, which is of course a formalism necessary for communication with the scientific community.

The big lie, of course, comes when these discoveries are always presented as if they had been arrived at in the bottom-up manner in which they are described, rather than as flashes of guided inspiration. The key word here is "guided". All those years of education are not worthless; on the contrary, they build the foundation of concepts and ideas these inspirations are based on, and they create the networks of connections in the mind along which these inspirations flow. But in the end, it is our insight, our aesthetic that creatively synthesizes ideas and guides us in the right direction.

So it is in music - the rules and structures are merely the framework, the "lines on the field", to give a soccer analogy. The beautiful coordination of play, the graceful passes and daring steals in a well-played soccer game are no more defined by those lines than a musical masterpiece can be synthesized using formal rules.

There are many guidelines and patterns, however, that can be discovered through practice, whether on the soccer field, in an engineering lab, or at the piano keyboard, and this brings me to my last analogy, the inspiration for my title, "Silence and Technology". This was an extremely valuable and deeply fundamental principle that I learned over years of composing a cappella arrangements.

The principle is this: Silence is an essential element of music. It must be given consideration equal to that of the other instruments or voices in the composition of a piece. It is far too easy to be caught up in the harmony and counterpoint, or in complex rhythms and counterrhythms, or in clever ways of weaving lyrics into the background parts of an a cappella piece, and to forget the critical part that silence plays in a composition.

It's like they say with young children - I read somewhere that an elementary school teacher was famous among her colleagues for the beautiful artwork her students always produced. When asked what her secret was, she simply replied, "You just need to know when to take away the pencil." Young children often have little or no sense of the value of silence (or white space, in this case), and taking away the pencil forced them not to fill it all up. I remember some of my drawings as a child - they looked like some of those traditional Japanese tapestries, with thousands of little tiny people, each one living out his own life, surrounded with bridges, buildings, forests, trees, and maybe a parade or a battle going on to add to the complexity. Though the content differed (my drawings were mostly of spaceships and grotesque aliens), my mom often remarked about how busy those drawings were.

However, this is not merely an aesthetic principle for the visual arts. I think, and I'm sure many agree, that it is essential to apply this principle to our lives as well. Surrounded as we are by media of all sorts, advertisements, propaganda, meaningless trivia, and pop music racing like a cloud of informational sperm to be the first to get into our heads, it has become essential to manage our silence. There are many who choose not to do this, leaving the TV on in the background for the entire time they're home, or constantly listening to music on their iPod whenever they go anywhere. Certainly I'm guilty of the same thing - the first thing I do when I get home is switch on my computer. I believe, however, that this is not the way to live a balanced and fulfilling life.

The internet has only compounded this problem. Not only do we now have access to incomprehensibly vast sources of information, we have had a dramatic increase in noise as well - spam, popups, and annoyances such as spyware, of which we need to vigilantly keep abreast, that alone sucking away our attention and time. Although I fully recognize and appreciate the availability of information, I often find myself in a state of information overload. First it was email... trying to keep up with far more friends than I ever would have attempted staying in touch with using mere pen and paper. Then it was blogs - I have so many friends whose blogs I want to read, but opening them every day takes time and effort. Then I discovered RSS. I can have the information from my friends' blogs piped directly to me... as well as a profusion of news sites and blogs that I find fascinating - lifehacker.com, robots.net ... the list is long, and life is short.

So often it seems the timesavers that are meant to help us, consume more of our time than they save. It becomes a gamble. Is it worth my time to sign up for Orkut, Facebook, Mixi, or MySpace? Where should I host my photos? The importance of our digital data has brought up new concerns on our home computers as well. Which firewall should I use? Which antivirus? Antispam? Defragmenter? Photo organizer? Music organizer? Backup utility?

Perhaps one of the most disconcerting things is that these peripheral choices - decisions that must be made that aren't really essential to the content of our lives - are seldom permanent. Each year, or every few months, old services die. New services are released. One must remain ever on the lookout for the new trends in supporting technology, a huge burden considering that it has almost nothing to do with the things we truly care about. I use my computer to stay in touch with my friends, to manage my photos, and to write and record music. Ideally, 100% of the time I spend on my computer should be devoted to those tasks, but the other things are too distracting - installing the new version of Firefox breaks compatibility with plugin x, so now I have to search for a new solution for that, etc. etc.

Maybe the biggest thing that bothers me about computers and the digital age in general, is that by spending all this time on maintenance, I feel like I'm falling behind. I'm not sure with respect to what standard this is, but I have a perpetual feeling that I need to catch up. Organize my contact lists, tag my mp3's... and I find that this eats into the time I should be spending in real life. Sleeping, for example, or cooking, shopping, organizing my apartment, or ... even relaxing?

Again, silence (downtime, in this case) is the key. Until this NaBloPoMo thing started, I was even enforcing a 30-minute delay between when I got home from work and when I turned on my computer. I noticed immediately that it improved the feeling of relaxation in my life... except for those times when I felt pressed to deal with something over email. I've heard of people who refuse to check email outside of one hour per day, say from 7-8pm. Lifehacker, the blog I mentioned above, is full of ways to save time and improve efficiency. There are many books written on these topics, and yet... I seldom talk with my friends about it, or hear others talk about it. Is that because it's not a problem for some people? Or is it that we're living in denial?

I suspect that some people find it desirable to live without silence, because it relieves them of the responsibility of being introspective. Many people don't like to think, and especially when our lives encounter deep contradictions and dilemmas, we prefer to distract ourselves, rather than face the difficult thoughts and choices.
Is this our fate? As more and more of us enter the Age of Distraction, will we cease to be introspective, and become consumed with maintenance of information and persuit of new technologies? Or are we merely going through a rough transition to an era where computers and technology really will be transparent to us and save us time?

As I once again seem to be approaching the two-hour mark with my philosophical ramblings, I shall end this post with two recent quotes from ... me. :P

"A computer should not be like a hammer. It should be like the shirt on your back."

"When Google is out of beta, the human race will no longer have any need for biological memory."

...With a little help from my friends

*Whew!*

Yesterday's post was a bit much... it took me around two hours to write, and even after deleting several paragraphs, it was still up near 1700 words - and not even a coherent point to show for it!

If I'm going to keep this up for 25 more days, I really need to start pacing myself. Also, I feel bad for my Japanese friends who are actually trying very hard to read what I write. So I'm going to keep it light today.

Today, I'd like to give some thanks to my friends. I was looking through the logs for my site, and I noticed that I've had a number of visitors linking here through my friends' blogs. After I finish posting tonight I'll properly link back to them to return the favor, but here are the numbers of people who've visited me from my friends' blogs, in ascending order:

Bobby : 5 visitors
Berta : 16 visitors
Sayuri : 23 visitors
Mina : 27 visitors
Lily : 37 visitors
Cameron : 90 visitors
Kern : 100 visitors

For the record, direct links from google.co.jp and google.com were tied at 47 visitors each, so Kern and Cam were the only ones who beat Google. I guess I know who my real friends are now... sorry Bobby. :P

Anyway, I'm not really sure what to make of these numbers... it could be indicative of how connected each of my friends are, or maybe it could be a sign of how many curious (or bored) people my friends tend to attract.

Regardless, thanks for sending those readers my way. Now I have to come up with something interesting to say to keep them reading. :)

But maybe not today. :P

Finally, I just want to show you this fantastic picture Masumi took at my birthday party two weeks ago. I absolutely love this picture, because it was supposed to be a straight group shot, but ended up being so quirky, with me being distracted by some cute Japanese girl and Anton doing ... whatever he's doing in the background... I love the way everyone else came out, too. This is my current wallpaper on my home PC, and I just wanted to share it with you guys.

Men, Women, and Lichen

The theme of the weekend is "going back to being friends after breaking up".

It's happened to me recently. It's happened to many of my friends. It's probably happened to most people... you meet somebody as a friend, then you both gradually become more attracted to each other. You start dating, maybe things start getting serious, then you break up for some reason. If it's not a fighting/shouting kind of breakup, chances are you're still on speaking terms. In most cases one person is still in love with the other one, and in many cases you're both still attracted to each other on some level. Mix in a web of interconnected friendships, maybe even coworkers, and you get a wonderful assortment of awkward social situations.

In the midst of all this complexity, you try to go back to being "just friends" and fail miserably. Sometimes you hook up again, even though you both said you wouldn't. Sometimes one person gets unreasonably jealous of the other. Sometimes you find yourselves bickering and arguing over nothing, when you used to get along fine. I'm sure there are many more possible outcomes, many of them ugly.

The age-old question, "can men and women just be friends without sex getting in the way?" has been voiced throughout the ages, and if I were the kind of person who read books I might be able to quote something besides "When Harry Met Sally". We're dealing with fairly complex systems here. It's hard enough to program simple behaviors into a robot and keep all the subsystems running in sync, from position estimation, navigation, and motor control, to computer vision, sound processing, and voice synthesis. This is nothing compared to humans, who are run by enormous networks of biochemical pathways and complex interchanges of often-contradictory information in our intertwined network of nervous, endocrine, and limbic systems.

Although I'm not going to deal with the question of free will here, I think most of us would agree that our behavior is often shaped by our emotions. Instead of doing what is logical, we do something stupid or foolish and often regret it later. This is the fundamental struggle between our intellectual and emotional selves that has forever been a part of the human condition.

To accelerate off onto a far-flung tangent, I think that this is indicative of something that makes us unique as humans, and separates us from most other life forms on this planet (don't ask me if these statements apply to chimpanzees and dolphins - I do robots, not biology). The key, fairly obvious difference between us and other animals is technology. We can record, pass on, discuss, challenge, extend, and be inspired by ideas.

So significant is this difference, I argue, that we have broken free of the laws of natural selection that guide the forces of evolution that created us in the first place. In the animal kingdom, an eagle born with bad eyesight will end up starving and dying because it can't see its food. In our technologically-enhanced world, a person born with bad eyesight can just buy corrective lenses. Natural selection is the shepherd that guides species along the path away from genetic malfunctions, and towards fitness, efficiency, and resistance to disease. We have thumbed our noses at the shepherd and gone off to graze in a new field, where the fitness of an individual is as much a product of the tools and technologies of society as it is of the proteins encoded by DNA sequences.

A philosophical consequence of this, of course, is related to another age-old and likely unanswerable question -- that of nature vs. nurture. How significant a role do our genes play in defining who we are, compared to our education, environment, and upbringing? The answer to this question has all sorts of implications regarding adoption, educational policies, and choices regarding how to rear a child, as well as the justifiability of censorship and information control -- far more implications than I could possibly branch into today. But it raises the question - have we already, or will we ever, develop into a society where the passing on of one's ideas and values is more important than the passing on of one's genes? Perhaps there are those who would argue that we, as intellectual and rational beings, have already reached that point. However, I believe our instincts and emotions would certainly disagree, as they seem to place reproduction pretty high on the priority list.

Which brings us back to the struggle between the mind and body. Our minds, like software, are constantly being updated with new experiences and ideas. Our bodies, however, are running on the same old hardware. Even if we replace a peripheral now and then - an appendectomy here, a filled cavity there, maybe even a prosthetic limb - it's all still plugged into the same old motherboard. Before I dork out too much here by making comparisons like saying that immunizations could be compared to minor BIOS upgrades, why don't I take the analogy out of the computer world and into a realm I have little to no knowledge of: biology.

The other day on our bike trip, my friend Charles and I noticed some lichen growing on an ancient stone lantern at a shrine we visited. We both recalled, I from my 7th grade biology class and he from his TOEIC test, that a lichen is a symbiosis between a fungus and an alga, although neither of us could figure out where the fungus ended and the alga began. The alga performs photosynthesis to generate energy to support the fungus, and the fungus provides the alga with minerals, water, and protection. Is this not, thought I, a beautiful analogy for the mind and body? What better organism to "liken" ourselves to? (ouch...)

It is certainly an interesting thought exercise to consider the purely intellectual part of the self as a separate entity from the primal, emotional, biologically-bound component. These two selfs within each of us are bound together, each necessary to the other but yet always struggling in different directions.

Although our instincts may help to keep us alive when our mind begins to entertain dangerous ideas, our increasingly artificial world often necessitates that the mind veto the body's desires in situations that may not have been an issue for an early homo sapiens 200,000 years ago. The mind may think, "hey, wouldn't it be cool to jump off this cliff", but the body smacks it upside the head with a good dose of vertigo. Likewise, when the body decides that it really is hungry and wants to eat that tasty-looking biohazard sample in the petri dish, the mind picks the body up by the scruff of the neck and shakes it around a bit until that urge is gone.

Getting back to the "just friends after a breakup" issue, there's a clear struggle here between the emotions, who are still totally attached to the other person, and the intellect, which knows that it's a bad idea to keep the relationship going.

So what is the answer, then? In a conflict like this, is our mind always right and are our emotions always wrong? In a society obsessed with keeping emotions in check and allowing only rational arguments as valid in discussions, perhaps the answer is yes. It seems like most people eventually acquiesce and either (a) force the will of the intellect over the emotions, causing great conflict and internal distress, or (b) just avoid the other person completely, to avoid having to do (a).

But why is it so hard to go back to being "just friends" for the emotional side of us? Didn't we have a connection as friends before? Has that connection been broken or changed? I think that simple descriptors like "friends" or "lovers" are not sufficient to capture the entire state of a relationship. In many cases, "friends with potential" seems a better term. For "friends with potential", the emotions may be quite interested in the person, but they are held back not only by intellectual inhibitions, but also by a variety of fears and uncertainties. It's like a hungry rollerblader looking up a hill at a forbidden bowl of spaghetti, held back not only by the societal taboo against forbidden spaghetti, but also by the level of physical effort of skating up the hill. Once you break up and become "friends with history", those fear and uncertainty barriers are gone, and the analogy becomes that of the same hungry rollerblader looking downhill at the spaghetti.

Of course, understanding the dynamic does little for those of us who have already found ourselves stranded uphill our own forbidden spaghetti. The more important question is what to do next, and how to put that spaghetti out of mind, with its delicious meatballs adorned with tantalizing shreds of Parmesan cheese. Perhaps the answer is to skate further up the hill, to where the aroma of the tomato sauce cannot reach us. Perhaps it is better to go find something else for lunch, munching on a peanut butter sandwich instead, or curry rice, or anything besides pasta. Some may even have the self-control to stare down the spaghetti and, through sheer force of will, drive all desire for those firm and supple, yet slightly al dente noodles from their mind.

Regardless of how we choose to deal with the situation, one of the keys to happiness, I think, involves nurturing the lichen within, helping the fungus and alga to learn to live in harmony together. Just like a relationship between individuals, the relationship between the emotional and intellectual self needs to be recognized and managed carefully, with compromises made when necessary. We are no longer feral animals prowling in the jungle, and nor are we disembodied brains in sterilized jars. Each of us needs to come to terms with our position between those two extremes. I think none of us can live a balanced existence without having a true sense of who we are, which means being in touch with both the algae of our mind and the fungus of our soul.

Agonshu Hoshi Matsuri

So tonight I am again faced with the question of what to blog about. One of the reasons I joined NaBloPoMo was to motivate myself to catch up on blog posts I've missed over the past several months. Thus tonight I take you back in time... let go of the present and drift away, sailing back, past the festivals of summer, past the rains of June, past the brief but beautiful bloom of the cherry blossoms. Tonight we go back to February 11, which in Japan is known as National Foundation Day, commemorating the establishment of the first Emperor, in the year 660.

A few weeks prior to this day, I had been stumbling along with the crowds through Osaka Station, hands in my pockets and teeth chattering in the bitter cold, when out of the corner of my eye I saw two immense posters for the Agonshu Hoshi Matsuri. Agonshu is one of Japan's "new new religions", most of which contain a creative mixture of elements from Buddhism and Shinto, along with a smattering of ideas from other world religions such as Christianity or Hinduism, and perhaps a pinch of new-age religion and pseudoscience. Top it all off with a charismatic leader, and you have the recipe for a phenomenon that will spread like wildfire in a culture where belonging to a group is a priority of utmost importance.

I sipped some of my homemade milk-tea to soothe my sore throat as I sat with Yuki, David, and Olivier on our shuttle bus ride up into the mountains from Kyoto. The religion's compound was located deep in the forest on the side of a mountain, slightly removed from central Kyoto, and the winding mountain roads were choked with chartered buses and an endless stream of taxis. Disembarking and joining the flow of the crowd, we entered the grounds. Several festival centers around the mountain were separated by narrow roads, and as we walked along with the throngs of thousands, we passed some small parades and musical performances given by priests and volunteers dressed in flamboyant robes.



Eventually we began to approach the main event grounds. The first task that awaited us was to write down our prayers on Buddhist prayer sticks. A massive sign of staggering proportions towered over us, indicating the exact wording we were to use when writing prayers.



Inside the grounds, we were faced with a myriad of stations packed with eager well-wishers lining up to scrawl prayers on the seemingly endless supply of prayer sticks that churned through what impressed me as a highly efficient example of supply-chain and event planning. Behind the scenes (and not visible in my picture) armies of pom-pom-bedecked workers carried boxes and boxes of the sticks to and from the writing stations with military precision.



Eventually these prayer sticks were tied into bundles and stacked en masse in several stations on the lower grounds. The sheer prayer density per cubic meter was overwhelming.



These were not static preparations by any means. The great machine had been continuing since the morning, crowds of people packing in and writing down their prayers as other crowds of people streamed out. In the middle, those who weren't busy buying good-luck charms and trinkets stood in the stands to behold the spectacle of the festival's main event, which took place in an enormous field of bare earth below.



As we walked in and beheld this spectacle, we and the crowd were swept up with the pounding of drums and the rhythm of chanting, broken from time to time with the echoing call of a horn that would have sounded more at home rallying an army in The Lord of the Rings than keeping time to a festival in modern Japan. Below us, the ranks of drummers and chanters formed an unmoving backdrop to the ant-like rows formed by bearers of prayer sticks busily scurrying back and forth.



Yet, we barely noticed any of this, for in the center of this maelstrom of activity stood two enormous bonfires, flames reaching some six meters in height swirling and broiling above the miniscule figures of the soot-covered people running about on the ground. Even in the back rows of the stands, we could feel the intense waves of heat on our faces.



The fires were awe-inspiring. In each of the massive fire pits made of heavy wooden timbers, the ferocious power of nature lurched about, fiercely threatening to tear free from its bonds. Below, the keepers of the fire tirelessly hurled buckets of water on the timbers to keep the flames contained. Vast human chains provided hundreds of gallons of water to the base, as armies of bundle-hurlers swarmed around them, hefting more and more of the hand-written prayer sticks into the heart of the ravenous inferno.



For what seemed to be an eternity, this perfectly-choreographed dance to the pounding of the drums fed the fires below with the prayers of the masses until, at the appointed time, the drums and chanting abruptly ceased. Only the minimum number of fire-tenders remained at their posts as all the other workers knelt, their uniforms blending into a sea of white cloth and multicolored pom-poms tinged with soot.

As giant red fans were moved to block the intense heat from the fires, the charismatic leader ascended to the dais. Holding high his golden ... um, buddhist thing that I don't know the name of ... he blessed the onlookers and the world, announcing his own prayers for world peace and prosperity.



After the leader's speech, the drums returned, and the grounds exploded back into activity, the endless hurling of prayer sticks and water whirling back into motion, feeding a new influx of handwritten prayers to the insatiable infernos as distant onlookers found themselves caught in the vicious struggle between the mighty fury of the towering pillars of flame and the bite of the cold mountain winds on that overcast February afternoon.