Output from the Dream Engine

Hey, so .. yeah, I still suck in terms of posting photos and, you know, documenting interesting things about Japan and my life and whatnot. That aside, I wrote up the highlights of my dream last night, and I thought I'd share them with you. It takes place in New York, to which I may or may not be going in the next couple weeks, and it is vaguely reminiscent of the DaVinci Code, or at least I imagine it might be, since I have neither read the book yet nor seen the film. Anyway, kinda trippy. And there's drumming too! Maybe I should hang on to the movie rights for this... ;) Anyway, I left out some of the juciest bits in case Hollywood comes knocking. Think "Donnie Darko" meets a highly erotic version of "Yellow Submarine", and then you're starting to get an idea of what I left out here..

Ah, and one more thing... I wrote it all in Japanese. Sorry bout that. :P But it's actually more or less understandable if you click on the Auto-Translation link to the right! I'm actually pretty impressed by the auto-translation this time.

ブルックリン：夏、夕方。橋の横でだれもいない寂しい道を歩いてる。角を曲がって、和太鼓している友達とあって、
「太鼓イベントへ行くんっすか」って聞かれて、意味分からん。
「太鼓のイベント？」
「鼓童が来るって知らんかった？めちゃ行きたいねんけどチケットだいぶ前から売り切ってダフ屋がおらんか見てみようかなと思って来た。」
「そうなん。」
彼がどっかいっちゃった。
イベントの場所にちょっと行って見て、すげー人並んでた。でも後ろにいって、知り合いのえらいクラッシク作曲者のおじさんと偶然にあって、彼が、「黙って、こっち来い」って言って、裏口まで連れて行った。
二人で、でかいオープンスタジアムのステージに入って、静かだった。でっけー太鼓はもう置いてて、こんなに近くで見るのははじめて！感動して、おじさんに「ほんまにありがとう！！」って言おうとしながら、むこうのドアのとこでサングラスかけてる人を気づいた。そして、すくいなくなった。おじさんの顔をみて、彼も気づいてた。顔真っ白だった。ちょっと震えていた。
おじさんがしずかに、「すまんない。」って言って、違うドアから逃げた。
そして、俺が上の席まで上って、かくしといた。

イベントが始まった。スタジアムとしては小さかったけど何千人が入った。太鼓のリズムが全体で感じて、心の深いパッションが起こされた。

でも何か。。。

むこうをみて、ちょっと遠かったけど、なんでか分からんけど遠眼鏡を持ってた。それで見ると、不思議な美しさの赤い帽子のかぶっているお姉さんを見た。顔がちょっと地中海けいな感じで、スムーズな唇とほそい、とげた鼻の上からミステリアスな目で太鼓を見ていた。暗くて、ほとんど白黒でしか見れんかったけど目が逸らせなかった。何でか、分からなくて、ずっと遠眼鏡で見てた。

そして、顔を向いて、直接俺を見てた。遠くて気づくはずじゃなかったのに、。。。心がドキッ！

彼女が意味のいっぱい一目で見て、そしてすぐたって、ガードに走った。なんやろうと思って、ちょっとずつパニックの気持ちが心に入ってきた。

下を見て、影のなかで何か動いてた。アドレナリンが血にどんどん流れて、走り出した！
心が大太鼓のように「ドン！ドン！ドン！」しながら観覧席の後ろから飛んで、出口まで。。。ドカン！
最後の思い出では、俺の上に黒ずくめのFBI見たいな感じのガード５人以上おった。そして。。。

。。。

どれぐらい時間がとおたか分からん。たまに起きて、暗い部屋でいろいろ聞かれてたのは確かだ。そして、外へ行って、大きいグループで周りは警察ばかりでとこか連れて歩いて行っていた。重いではほとんどぐちゃぐちゃだったけど途中で、警察のむこうからちょっとだけあのお姉さんの顔を見た。

「ごめんなさい！許してくれる？」なきそうな顔で願っていた。
「どうなるかよー分からんけど、これが終わったら、お茶しようよ」しか言う時間がなくて、すぐ逆の方にながされた。

そして大きい、ふるい建物に入って、名前の分からないえらい人が重たいデスクのうしろから、「特別な命令がきた。こいつを留め置く事が危ない。ささっと放せ！」

・・・

次の週、なんかいもその不思議な姉さんとあって、話は軽いことしか出来なかった。でもどんどん好きになってきた。次の土曜日のごご、木のいっぱいあった公園で二人でぼーとしてた。彼女が虹の色の太い紐の夏用などレスを着てて、夏のごごの金色の光が葉っぱの影の間で踊っていた。

彼女が近くに来て、「何か忘れてない？」ってきいた。今までの快くすずしい風が急に止まった。
そして彼女が倒れた。すぐ後に、俺倒れて、。。。真っ暗。

・・・

起きて、石のブロックと誇りのいっぱいあるところで起きた。目の前にクラシック作曲者のおじさんだった。
「ごめんな、もう始まっちゃった。これからあんたにはどこにも安全な居場所がない。この本をよめば、分かる。」
「え？何？」
「この世界の深い大秘密。世の中でこの本を４、５冊ぐらいしかない。全部手作り。でももう含まれているから知った方がいいと思った。」
それで、古そうな黒いレザーの本をもらった。ふとくて、やっぱり紙のページだけじゃなかった。いろいろはいっていた。

うえをみて、おじさんがもう歩いて行っていた。
「あーあの・・・」

もういなくなった。

さて、本を開けた。ページの順番めちゃくちゃだった。１－１６を呼んで、なんかチャートがあって、「１チャプターから来たら次は６０ページ。２チャプターから来たらつぎは１４２ページ」などわけの分からん事書いてた。でも頑張って読み始めた。

最初はいっぱい知らない人の名前がでてきて、なんかドイツの戦争前の歴史も書いてあったし、何かいろんな聞いた事のないヨーロッパの村の名前とか。。。一ページ、一ページ読んで、そして、次のページにポケット二つついてた。

下の大きいポケットを開けて、焼き物のガーゴイルが入ってた。上の小さいポケットをあけて。。。なんやろう。千円札ぐらいの大きさのかみだったけど、すごく細かく折っていて、いっぱい穴がなかに焼いていた。これはどう言う手掛かり？

でも考える時間がなかった。。。だれか近付いて来てた！出来るだけ静かに近くの川の方に走った。そのガーゴイルはどこかで見たことあるような気がしたな。あ、そうだ！スペインのカテドラルやった！

じゃ、次スペインに行くしかない。。。

Chicks dig scars

So... once again, I find myself putting off blogging again and again, waiting until I can write that perfect blog post that at once wittily conveys deep insights about life while providing thoughtful commentary on subtle differences between Japanese and Western culture. And has cool pictures.

And once again, I find myself without the time to produce such a masterpiece, and thus my blog sits unbloggen.

I think the only way to start reversing this trend is to write lots of short, quick notes and intersperse them with the aforementioned masterpieces when time allows. Or when time is forced against its will to allow. Usually involving lack of sleep. :)

Somehow inspiration to do this seems to come only when I have Japanese homework to do for the following morning. If the human race could only learn to harness the energy of procrastination and use it to do good, we would be well along the road to world peace and universal prosperity.

So, anyway, this last month had a lot of major milestones for me. One biggie was that I paid off my credit card debt that I had accumulated over two years of looking for a robotics job in Boston! That was pretty sweet.

And I got to relive that feeling of accomplishment a second time, when I got my next credit card statement with a $4 finance charge based on my average daily blah blah blah, and I paid it off once and for all, once again.

Another big milestone: My first show with Utaurara 6! We performed up in Kita-Senri, and even though we only had time to perform 2.5 songs (there were some 40 groups performing at this event!), we were received well. Now I have a big pile of sheet music to learn for this weekend, when we're going to give a little informal show here at Takanohara for some of my friends from work.

Next milestone: Not final yet, but I'm planning to submit my first academic paper this coming week. It was supposed to be two days ago, but the deadline was extended. It's not such a big conference, but this could be the first step down a new career path for me, as the engineer within me and the scientist within me wrestle for domination.

Other... hmm, I wouldn't necessarily call them milestones, but a few of my good friends left over this past month or so. Linda went home to Canada about a month ago, and David and Olivier went back to France a couple days ago. I miss them all, but especially Linda - she'd been here since I first got here a year ago, and she was sort of the last one to leave from that first circle of friends I had. She gave me a bunch of her stuff while she was moving, and it's mostly still strewn about my apartment... gotta clean up and reorganize at some point. In fact, I ate some of her umeboshi tonight for dinner. I think I ate like 4 of them, so I'm REALLY thirsty right now! I estimate that it would take approximately six umeboshi to osmose all the water out of the dead sea.

Um, what else... working on a new arrangement for Osakapella. Not sure how it's going to turn out, but it's like the blogging thing: lots of imperfect arrangements is a surer path to improvement than saving it all up for one masterpiece. Wait, I think that's the case with academic papers too. And language learning (how many Japanese people have said, "Yes, I've been studying English for 11 years, but I'm not going to speak a word until I've learned it perfectly?"). You know, sometimes I wish I could just sit down and distill out the 86 Universal Patterns in life, which would be generally applicable to everything, and then just sit back and surf out the rest of my years, knowing I had figured everything out.

Maybe I should write a book.

Then again, maybe claiming at this point that I have everything figured out is a BIT premature, considering the number of expired things in my fridge that I have to keep throwing away. I sometimes feel like I throw away more stuff than I buy, a feeling I keep repressed due to my faith in the law of conservation of mass... but yet... it's as if it's ... reproducing..? euuu... maybe something's MUCH more expired than I thought!

What else did I do this month? Hmm... camping trip at Biwa-ko. We went to the same place we went to last September. It was awesome, except that the water was freezing. Didn't stop me from swimming though. I need to live it up before the suffocating heat of summer lowers its hazy and humid fist to crush the life out of me for the next 5 months. Already I've had a couple days this year with Japanese girls nearby shivering in their long-sleeved shirts while I'm dripping sweat in a T-shirt. Sometimes it really sucks that my body temperature's set point seems to be a few degrees off from everyone around me. And sometimes... it doesn't suck at all. :) I relished the moment, frolicking about with a polar bear's glee while my evolutionarily disadvantaged friends huddled together for warmth under their furs on the shoreline.

But seasons change, and Tsuyu has come. The Rainy Season. In fact, I feel inclined to quote a haiku from one of my wonderful students at Toyonaka. I believe it went something like this:

The rainy season
We have a lot of water
The rainy season

Biking to work this morning, I started noticing how little traction I had as my bike started skidding every time I tried to stop. Slowing down to a cautious roll... (bikes can't crawl... what's the word I'm looking for here?) I was crossing a pedestrian overpass and working my way down a winding ramp, when suddenly my bike shot out from under me and I found myself in the air, then skidding along the ground, trying to decide in real time which body parts and accessories I wanted to shred, and which to try to preserve. Head... that's a good one to save. Might need it for soccer sometime. Knee... um, tough one - gotta go with that or the arm. Guess I'll sacrifice some arm to keep the legs working... I can always bike with no hands. Can't really bike with no legs. Ok, arm down. Backpack... um, I guess I'll kinda roll halfway onto my side.. ok, time's up. BANG!

Damage report: big scrape down my lower arm by the elbow and a smaller one at the heel of my palm. Minor external knee damage... a little bit of a limp, but I mostly saved the knee, I think. Bike - a few things out of alignment. iPod, fortunately safe. Plastic case holding my Japanese homework, smashed into shards. Blood running all down my arm. No serious wounds as far as I can tell, but visually quite colorful.

The secretaries in my lab came running as soon as I got into work, and they patched me up with the help of a sketchy, ancient first-aid kit (expiration date on the antibiotic ointment: 1997...? puts my fridge to shame! And why are there calcium supplements in there?) and soon I was back up and running in the frantic pace of life on the edge.

Speaking of which, I'd better get back to my homework. :P

The Secret To Learning Kanji

Ok, just a quick note here because I still have to finish my homework.

I'm studying kanji right now. For years, these characters simply would not stick in my head, no matter how hard I tried to pack them in, no matter how many hours I spent in front of my flashcards. Never, that is, until I discovered the Secret To Learning Kanji.

There are three aspects of kanji that you need to learn: their writing, their reading(s), and their meaning(s). To the beginning student, there isn't much you can do beyond rote memorization. However, with a little background knowledge, the studying begins to do itself. Once you become familiar with how kanji are constructed, it is vastly easier to read and understand new characters, thanks to a limited number of common groups of strokes that are often repeated and have specific meanings, similar to the role of Latin and Greek word roots in English. Even a cursory study of the meanings and readings of these key stroke groups paves the downhill road to literacy with teflon and oils it up for good measure.

So, to take an example from my homework tonight, the character "催" can be broken down into three groups of strokes - first, the two strokes on the left are a reduced form of "人", which means person. The three strokes on the top are "山", which is the kanji for "mountain", and the snarl of eight strokes on the bottom right is "隹", an old radical meaning "bird".

"Person", "mountain", and "bird". By assembling these primitive meanings, one will intuitively grasp the meaning of the verb "催す", which means, of course, "to hold (a meeting)" or "to develop symptoms of".

It's that easy.

But it doesn't stop there! Most kanji have multiple readings, and knowing the radicals helps there as well. The Chinese-derived reading (on-yomi) of the radical "隹" is "sai", and ... what do you know? The on-yomi of "催" is also "sai"! Likewise, the Japanese-derived reading (kun-yomi) of the radical "人" is "hito", and ... the kun-yomi of "催"? You guessed it - "moyo-o(su)"! Because, well, duh.

Get out the map!

Hey everybody, apologies for the shameful seven-week gap in my blog. I've been working some serious overtime lately and I really need to learn to pace myself.

So, for today's topic... I think I often write and talk about how great this country is. There are so many things I love about Japan - the people are wonderfully hospitable; the public transit system is quite convenient, runs on time, and is generally clean; the TV commercials are hilarious; the food is delicious; and people are like, "yeah, I went to Boston once and visited MIT. I also visited... what's it called again? It's a pretty well-known university kind of up the road from MIT..." Yes, this is a wonderfully quirky and interesting place.

But if the ability to produce a clear and accurate map were a skill essential to survival, the entire population of Japan would have died off long ago.

No, despite the meticulous attention to detail for which the Japanese are famous, despite their love of complex graphical representations of information, and despite the extraordinary lengths to which they go to make the world accessible to everyone - the blind, the physically handicapped, the hard of hearing, and pretty much any other disability you can imagine - they seem to be unable or unwilling to convey geographical relationships effectively through a map, particularly to foreigners. (Somehow, it appears that many Japanese people are able to navigate effectively using Japanese maps. How this is possible is an absolutely unfathomable mystery to me.)

Of course, I've tried to understand the cultural context for the seeming universality of inscrutable maps. I long ago discovered that very few Japanese have any sense of direction. I've noticed that a lot of my Japanese friends have difficulty giving and receiving directions over the phone. Why this should be, I don't understand. I can't say whether it applies over all of Japan, either. The Tokyo subway system, for example, is so complex and convoluted that it makes New York look like Beijing. I can't imagine people not having a pretty good grasp of where they are and where they're going if they can navigate that. Likewise, Sapporo is laid out in a very rigid, equidistant grid system oriented along North-South and East-West axes, so it is certainly possible that people there have an intuitive grasp of cardinal directions.

In general, though, people here seem to have no knowledge of or interest in cardinal directions at all. All directions here are relative. On the street, in the train stations, at the temples, every map you find is oriented to be relative to the observer. Up is forward, down is back. The narrow, twisty, unnamed streets in residential neighborhoods are notoriously hard to navigate, and so every few blocks it's not uncommon to find a local map, always oriented in relative coordinates.

Perhaps this is related to the general inward focus that seems to permeate Japanese culture. Most buildings here are horribly ugly on the outside, yet beautifully architected and elegantly decorated on the inside. Most people I've met here don't think about big things like global economic trends, government issues, or international politics as much as the Westerners I know - rather, the focus seems to be inward, local, personal, on the details. Movies, too, seem to me to have much smaller-scale themes than the movies back home. Does this society not value the "big picture"? That could be why maps are so highly localized. (the follow-up question, of course, is whether it is necessarily so important to focus on the "big picture" - maybe if Americans spent more time working on the tiny details, we'd have a more harmonious society...?)

Or maybe one could look at it from a religious perspective. In monotheistic religions there is a clear-cut distinction between right and wrong. In Shinto, however, where countless kami are all around us, there doesn't seem to be such a need for moral absolutes. Morality, or so I've read in a number of places, is judged relatively, with respect to the group - harmony or disharmony is a more important distinction than absolute ideas like right and wrong, good and evil. It seems like one might draw a parallel here, too, to the widespread disregard for concepts like "north".

Another possibility... one of the wonderful things about Japan is their customer service. Rare it is indeed to find someone behind a register not armed with a genki smile and greeting you with a cheerful "irrashaimase!" and a cheerful sparkle in the eye. Maybe it's considered a courtesy to the customer to provide a custom map in the most convenient, personalized orientation possible.

While walking, hopelessly lost, in misguided circles today for almost 40 minutes in the hot sun, getting navigational misinformation from absolutely every person I asked, passing parks, high schools, and highways not to be found anywhere on my map, and searching for streets that existed only in the deranged imagination of some creative cartographer, a few other thoughts occured to me.

The first thought was that perhaps this is a manifestation of the ever-mysterious dichotomy of "tatemae" and "honne". "Tatemae" means the outward behavior and actions of a person, whereas "honne" is a word for their true feelings and intentions. In Japanese culture these are not expected to be even remotely connected. Back home that's called scheming, two-faced hypocrisy. Here, it's called everyday life. Why should that not extend to mapmaking? The actual layout of roads and buildings is the "honne", and the map is merely "tatemae". Is it really so bad to draw two buildings right next to each other when actually they're a 15-minute walk apart? What if drawing them that way made the map-reader feel better, thinking the destination was right around the corner? Is that really so different from asking whether it's wrong to lie in order to avoid hurting somebody's feelings?

Then I had a vision of an apprentice cartographer and his master, in a setting reminiscent of the bonsai tree scene in The Karate Kid:

"Daniel-san, close eyes. Trust. Concentrate. Think only 4-lane elevated highway. Make perfect picture, down to the last exit ramp...

"Wipe mind clean, everything but the highway...

"You got it?

"Open eyes. Remember picture?"

"Yeah"

"Make like picture. Just trust the picture."

"But master, how do I know my picture's the right one?"

"If come from inside you, always the right one."

Seriously. I strongly suspect that a number of the roads on my map today were placed there for aesthetic value alone.

My final thought was that maybe the reason why there is so much less illegal drug use in Japan than there is in the US is that THEY DON'T NEED IT. Living in their little universe of imaginary streets connecting at nonexistent intersections, seeing the world through psychedelic noneuclidean lenses where all distances between topologically similar forms can be considered equal and even the twistiest, most convoluted maze of snaking streets can be warped into a perfectly symmetrical grid, and simply erasing from the map and the world anything negative, anything they don't want to see... it makes me wonder whether anything was really accomplished when they made shrooms illegal here a few years ago. The trippiness in this culture comes from deep within its roots.

The system ... is down. (Dm dm dm dm...)

(Note: that's supposed to be a Homestar Runner reference, not the Dragnet music... ah, text is so flat.)

Hmm... ok, so I really, really was planning to post some pics this weekend, but it seems my computer has had a little crash. I suspected the culprit might be Google Desktop, as the crash occurred after I upgraded it to the latest version, but I tried uninstalling that and it doesn't seem to have fixed the problem.

Around New Year's I was thinking to myself that it might be time for a reinstall. Now I'm thinking that even more. Computers accumulate gunk, like your bellybutton or the space behind the TV cabinet. A good reinstall is like a really thorough cleaning of your room (and rebuilding of the furniture therein). Or maybe it's more like that tea Tom's sister used to drink to "purge the system" before closing the bathroom door with a smile. :P

I've got a 4-day weekend coming up, thanks to my company's founding day being the day before the vernal equinox (which is a national holiday here - Japan ROXX!). I had been thinking about doing a little trip somewhere, maybe traveling around Gifu-ken or something, or even just spending the days wandering around Osaka doing some shopping or something. Now it's starting to look like I'll need that time to do a nice slow reinstall, maybe take a hot bath while I wait with these nice new bath salts I got last week.

I remember when there was a lot of talk about e-appliances, for example, a box that does nothing but email. I haven't heard too much about that lately, but it is certainly a relief to be able to do things like listen to my music on my iPod and make calls with my IP phone without needing my computer to be in a stable state.

Anyway, in conclusion, computers suck. Maybe it's time to switch back to Linux.

Ping

Sigh... so once again I'm going more than a week without a post. Quick little update though so people don't think I dropped off the face of the earth. :)

Things are going pretty well. My old buddy Ernest (from my Unified class!) and his wife Patty came to visit, and I showed them around Osaka, Nara, and Kyoto. That was a blast! But his DSLR puts my little Pentax Optio to shame, so I'm just going to wait for him to send me copies of his pictures, and then maybe I'll post something. ;) But who can resist the title? "Ernest Goes to Kansai". hahaha, yeah, you all shut up. I know I'm old. :P

Did some partying this weekend - my friend Yuki just turned "18", so we had a little celebration for her on Saturday. We made cheese fondue from scratch... before realizing that our lactose-intolerant friend was coming. (>_<) Delicious though. A cappella was really awesome on Sunday too - moving ahead with new songs in both groups, and good vibes all around. I even got a few compliments on my beautifully resonant bass voice, which, well... was pretty hilarious, given that I'm supposed to be a 1st tenor, but I guess Osaka nightlife can do that to you. :P

And yes, my email performance has been shameful - way back above 150 again. Gonna rock on some email this weekend though. Haha.. and learn me some kanjis too. I swear, there is just too much awesome stuff to do in life. Was it Nathan Hale who said, "I regret that I have but one life to spend catching up on emails and blog entries, and learning Japanese, practicing for a cappella, programming my robot, improving my go skillz, going to festivals once in a while, and at some point getting around to sending my sister her long overdue birthday presents that are all essentially summer things anyway, so maybe it would be better to just hang on for another couple months?" ... or did I misparaphrase that a little bit?

Violence, Poison, and Danger!

Yes, it was quite the weekend...

Saturday, in an old, traditional Japanese-style house deep in the heart of Nara prefecture, the most intrepid of us gathered to partake in one of Japan's most mysterious and dangerous rituals. We ate fugu.

This was no supermarket sushi. On a bloody chopping block behind my friend's house, we watched firsthand as three of these unwitting bearers of deadly poison were coolly dispatched in swift strokes of merciless accuracy by the hands of a professional. Yes, we were unusually fortunate - my friend's classmate (in nursing school(!)) is a licensed fugu assassin. From his carefully wrapped case he pulled a long knife, its hilt darkened with the blood of countless kills, its blade showing the wear of its years, but carefully honed to a fine edge. "Eight years ago", he said, he bought this beauty from a knifemaster in Osaka. "But back then, the blade was this much longer," gesturing about six inches from the tip.

Casually slicing out and casting aside a small sac of poison that held the power to kill all of us standing there many times over, he talked us through the intricacies of his art. Everything from the special cut to open the cavities in the head where the parasites live, so that they could be cleaned out before the skull was thrown in the stew, to the delicate layer of "skin between the flesh and the skin", which had to be ever so briefly touched to boiling water before eaten essentially raw.

As his knife worked through the ritualized sequence of cuts and motions, the fish before him twitched and squirmed. "The sashimi from this side always has a bit of a ragged shape", he explained, "but once you get past about here, the fish stops moving so much, and you can cut more cleanly." His fingers and knife swiftly worked their way through slice after slice so thin they were translucent.

Unfortunately, I have no photos from that night, but if I can get copies of Linda's, I'll put some up here. Suffice to say, that we not only survived the night but had a most delicious meal. I have to say, though, that it was ... strange eating the gonads of the male fugu. That just seemed wrong. Bizarrely smooth, creamy texture, though.

However, the most dangerous experience was yet to come.

Sunday morning, we took part in an even darker, more violent ritual buried in the shadows of ancient Japanese culture. A ritual producing a substance even deadlier than fugu, which is then eaten and ... yes, even given to children sometimes! (And they wonder why they have a problem with decreasing population here...)

It's true. In fact, if you look at the statistics, substantially more people die each year from eating mochi than from fugu. Due to its resilience and extraordinary stickiness, it gets lodged in the throats of its unfortunate victims and kills them! Not a substance to be trifled with.

Fortunately for us, the personnel at the Kizu-cho International Exchange Center were highly trained and highly organized. When undertaking a hazardous project of this complexity, it is absolutely critical to coordinate your teams with meticulous efficiency.

We were divided into action teams and briefed by our squadron leaders. Then we were assigned to our various posts.

Shen and I were assigned to the yellow team and sent to the aerial operations bay, announcements over the PA to the other teams echoing in the background ("Red squadron, go to the bathroom and wash your hands NOW! Move!! Move!!")

At our tables we were instructed in the ancient art of Japanese kitemaking, sort of a minimalist approach stressing historical accuracy. We were given only the materials and tools that the ancient Japanese would have had - four thin strips of hand-hewn bamboo, some rubber bands, a clear plastic garbage bag, some neon kite string, and a bright pink plastic ribbon for the tail.

They taught us all the ancient secrets, from the delicate grip required to splay the bamboo strips in exactly the right way to optimize aerodynamics to the mindbending topology of "wrapping" a rubber band in a robust way around an intersection of three struts with no ends protruding.

The finished product:

But the kitemaking was just a distraction. Soon our team was taken out the back door to engage in the real action.

Many people condemn the Japanese educational system, saying it puts too much pressure on children at too young an age. Well, some may believe junior high school is too early for ulcers, but one effect of the intensive youth education here is that children's minds are sharpened to a degree that can't be attained by the slow, inflexible adult mind. Precision operations such as the one we were about to engage in involve split-second reflexes and an intense level of focus that are simply beyond the reach of adults.

Our diminutive drill sergeants schooled us on the finer points of "mochi-tsuki", the delicate process of transforming specially-prepared rice into perfect-consistency mochi by mercilessly assailing it with vicious blows using an enormous hammer.

And thus we took turns "mauling the mochi", "poundin' the paste", "rammin' the rice", or whatever alliterative euphemism you prefer. The unfortunate woman on the right in these pictures had to swiftly splash a tiny bit of water on top of the big mochi glob and then knead it a bit with her hand just before each blow ("slappin' the slab" and "lubricating the loaf"?) which is why historically, that job used to be reserved for only the most heinous of criminals - seldom does a glob-kneader ever escape a mochi-tsuki session with both hands intact.

And finally, once the physical violence was through, it was time to revisit our inner peace and shape the mochi into perfect little deadly snack shapes. Again, only the youngest among us are still pure enough of mind and heart to see through the sins and distractions of our world and visualize the ideal form of the perfect mochi ball.

All of us tried our hand at it, each of us striving for the unreachable ideal - just the right amount of smoothness and roundness, a plump shape that felt good to hold in your hand. It had to have enough heft to feel substantial, but as the ancient Japanese saying goes, "bigger than a handful is a waste". Of course we all had to resist the temptation to play with it too much - overkneading the mochi made it stiff and hard to shape - a supple firmness is the ideal, so that as you stroke your fingers gently over its ample curve, you can just barely feel the rise of the anco underneath. Since only the purest of undistracted minds can visualize such an ideal form, I was of course the only one in my group who was able to do it.

And voila, our creation!


We ate our mochi and flew our kites. At last check, nobody in our group had succumbed to any serious mochi-related injuries. We were fortunate, this time. But such is the way of the Japanese spirit. The ever-present possibility of death only heightens the sweetness of life, and here they savor every drop.