Posted Tuesday, June 17, 2003 by Robert Brady [Permalink]

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THE AMAZING W-MEN

So many things to post, but all pre-empted by this astonishing ad in the Japan Times on Monday June 16, from Japan's "Institute of Cetacean Research," in which ad 5 individuals (a mayor, a "commentator journalist," an actor (trustee of the "Panda Protection Institute of Japan"), a comic artist and the "Director General" of said "Institute," seriously make these amazing statements:
The Mayor: "...By protecting only whales that are at the top of the marine ecosystem, humans are destroying the ecosystem. Who on earth is going to take responsibility for this?"
The Commentator Journalist:" Left as it is, the ban on whaling--an overprotective measure--will allow whales to consume all the fish..."
The Actor-Panda Protector: "Considering the future of mankind, I believe it is our responsibility not only to utilize whales as a food source but also to resume sustainable whaling in order to regain the balance of the ocean."
The Comic Artist: "This is what the whales in the waters surrounding the Japanese archipelago would say: 'Our numbers have increased a bit too much, we have to scramble for fish, as things stand now we're worried if we, whale species, will be preserved for the future, it may seem a radical measure but we were wondering if someone would balance up the situation by whaling.'"
The Director General: "The world is beginning to understand that overprotection of whales is an inappropriate management strategy that has a negative effect on fisheries industries and may lead to a destruction of the ecosystem."

This is the biggest mental black hole I've seen on one page of newsprint since Dubya's last unscripted press conference! What a team! The W-Men!! All that vapor and not a word even hinting at the fact that it's human predation that has brought the whales and the fishes and the ocean and the earth and ourselves to these very ruinous straits, and these dits (no 'pun' intended) think the solution resides in doing more of the same!! Sounds like blinkered big business to me. I have never knowingly used whale products, but I for one am henceforth carefully boycotting all whale and fish products.

Posted Tuesday, June 17, 2003 by Robert Brady [Permalink]

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My apologies for the past few days of no text on PLM, it's BLOGGER'S fault, and not a word from them in five days so far (I don't know how many more there will be, I'm posting this into a whiteout...) but I'm going to start posting anyway...

Posted Saturday, June 14, 2003 by Robert Brady [Permalink]

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rain and leaves
taking turns
becoming each other

Posted Saturday, June 14, 2003 by Robert Brady [Permalink]

ILLNESS AS BELIEF

It remains a constant source of amazement to me that so many people believe that illness throughout life is inevitable; and even more amazingly, that drugs and surgery are the prerequisite approach to these varied illnesses, tacitly accepting also that illness is best treated by doctors with perhaps decades of experience, and not by the body itself, with a lot more than several million years of experience. Also tacitly agreeing thereby that modern treatment, not ancient prevention, is the way to go. Colds are inevitable; allergies are inevitable; doctor consultation is inevitable; hospitalization is inevitable; surgery is inevitable; and the older you get, the moreso.

The medical industry just loves this illusion profoundly, and of course will always seek to preserve and deepen it (witness monthly ultrasound examinations on healthily pregnant women), will never do anything to change it, indeed will fight and discredit those who try. As a very simple example, I hear and read often of people who have been laid low for days, even weeks, with severe colds, and are only now recovering at last thanks to long bed rest and the drugs their doctor has given them or that they bought at the pharmacy, a regular shopping stop. Such 'colds' occur twice a year or more, and nothing but this can be done about them: only doctors and inactivity and drugs and lost weeks, throughout life. It's inevitable, they believe.

I, who am only a minor-level health nut who makes it a policy to break the rules now and then, have in the past gone for up to 10 years without a cold. I have not had a full blown (no pun intended) cold now for several years, and when I do (always as a result of aforementioned rule-breaking behavior to excess) it begins with that tickle and then I prevent it.

The last time I was in a hospital for treatment of illness was 57 years ago; my parents took me. In the collective 163 life-years of my immediate family thus far, not one hour has been spent in hospital for treatment of illness. My kids had all the childhood illnesses invisibly; they were unaffected while for example their schools were closed for 10 days for chickenpox, their classmates staying in bed for 10 days with sores all over them and no sleep, high fevers, doctors and lots of drugs to worsen the unnecessarily traumatic situation. All this when illness can be minimized, even prevented, very easily! And at way less expense than medical insurance and doctor bills, not to mention the permanent invasion of surgery!

Over the years I have been governmentally forced to pay millions of yen (tens of thousands of dollars) in medical insurance I and my family have never required, never used; I was subsidizing all the illness believers. I could go on about this endlessly I think, and will herein rant about it now and then as the bile requires. I wonder, though, if people don't perhaps in some way enjoy their illnesses. What else could explain it?

Posted Friday, June 13, 2003 by Robert Brady [Permalink]

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BE CAREFUL IF YOU'RE COMING TO JAPAN!!

Be careful if you're a foreigner coming into Japan who is kind (and naive) enough to carry someone else's luggage for them: when immigration discovers the drugs hidden there, you're likely to get 14 years in the slammer like this innocent British architect did, more than some Japanese are recently getting for murder, under the one truly inscrutable thing about Japan, its judicial system. Guy was kept in solitary for 10 months because he wouldn't plead guilty!!

Posted Friday, June 13, 2003 by Robert Brady [Permalink]

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RAINWALLS

Tsuyu (rainy season) appears to be upon us, heavily upon us, and in no uncertain terms, my ears tell me at the niagara roar on the roof in the night, and my eyes confirm in the morning as they attempt to discern the world through occasional gaps in the rainwall, and it begins to get really humid, erasing the difference between inside and outside; soon there will be fungus growing on anything organic that doesn't move. The air is still, everything is still, except for the steady falling of the rain, and if you are not careful, in time you'll hear voices from out of that silvery structure, voices that convey very important information like racing tips and hints from god...so it's good to stay busy and not fall too still yourself if you don't want to be totally fungoid; and if you want to hear something, try a long slow conversation with others or yourself, or listen to the muses...great weather for that, and for staying at home and reading. As for gardening, this is the garden's vacation, till further notice.

Posted Thursday, June 12, 2003 by Robert Brady [Permalink]

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The strange, cold tale of Takako Konishi.

Posted Thursday, June 12, 2003 by Robert Brady [Permalink]

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THE PALACE OF DR. CROW

This morning as I dressed I was looking out the window, checking out yesterday's progress on the new log house being built just up-mountain from us, when who suddenly swooped into the unfinished window opening on the far side but Dr. Crow. He tucked away the big wingspread and settled himself comfortably, looked around at the interior of his new place, saw that it was good, then flapped down to the still-plywood floor and began walking around inside, checking out his new digs, looking for scraps of the workmen's lunch or anything else he could find, quite content to make the place his own, all in good time. He came to the undoored doorway and stood there slowly scanning his kingdom like a corvine Mussolini, then went back inside. I hope I can be there to see him on the morning he swoops in great blackness to reenter his new palace and discovers that the window has been glazed.

Posted Wednesday, June 11, 2003 by Robert Brady [Permalink]

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THE VAGARIES OF KITCHENLESSNESS

(June 20, 1995 entry from my housebuilding journal) Received word last night that the Japanese kitchen company whose kitchen components we decided on months ago and ordered because of price and height and the fact that we could get the stainless steel counter in the length we wanted (which 'fact' was later refuted by the same woman who had said 'of course you can get the stainless steel counter in the length you want'; 'it was a mistake,' she now said, when it was too late for us to back out), has gone bankrupt and now we have not even an imminent kitchen, though the cuisinal horizon is not absolutely kitchenless, I trust. There is of course a kitchen somewhere in our future, is there not? Perhaps somewhere over there by the national lottery prize with our name on it; but then who needs a kitchen? I was born without a kitchen, and I have every confidence that I will die without a kitchen. I don't mean to sound like sour kitchens; things could after all be worse: we could have paid already, and our kitchen could then have fallen from the delivery truck and broken into kitchen fragments, or we could have received and installed the kitchen and been about to pay when another, ruthless company might have taken over the suddenly defunct kitcheneers and demanded a kitchen's ransom for the thing.... But it appears that nothing pertaining to our order had been going on in the busily bankrupting company all the while we were waiting; nice of them, I must say. So now we are in the ranks of the kitchenless minions that have peopled history since man first walked erect and gave meaning to the concept of stovetop height, that to us here today is but a cruel mockery...

Posted Monday, June 09, 2003 by Robert Brady [Permalink]

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PAIN IN THE ACREAGE

Artemisia vulgaris L. var. indica Maxim can be a real pain in the acreage if it takes over. Which like any weed it is always trying to do. I know, I know-- I'm being a bully, I'm being unfair in so crassly calling such a wonderful plant a weed, it's--well, the thing is, yomogi is a nice plant, I have to agree. It even looks nice, gentle and unsassuming, like a short crinkly-eyed monk dressed in splotchy green with droopy leaves. It grows all over the place in spring-summer, the garden is practically covered in green monks by mid-June. Need some yomogi? Just stick out an open hand and close it. If you're at my house you'll get a handful of yomogi; if you're anywhere else, who knows.

Yomogi spreads like a slow green fire, and would definitely be a noxious weed were it not so easy to pull up and so darned not-noxious at all, not to mention uniquely fragrant, in fact-- ok, downright useful, and in so many ways no less, and plants that grow wild in that quantity are just not supposed to be useful, it never happens; throughout life one wonders (mainly in childhood, when such questions are less subject to prompt resolution, and then again in the gardenhood of latterly life, when one's special throughbred varieties too often wither and die as if cursed, and one cries to the garden gods in greater measure the question one first asked as a child, to wit): why don't plants we love grow like weeds? Well yomogi does grow like that, so the love is therefore somewhat iffy. Just goes to show you can't have everything, even when you do.

This yomogi I speak of in such confusedly weedy terms is mugwort, Japanese mugwort, mogusa, to be locally specific, in addition to being the yomogi of excellent tempura and yomogimochi (q.v.). What other not-really-a-weed type plant has the range of uses yomogi has, from profound medical to profound comestible, and gets away with looking and growing like a bona fide weed, yet makes those who would call it a weed honorary members of the Green Meanie Club?? Artemesia vulgaris, that's what: moxa, as in moxibustion. Back when I had a big pain in the-- when I had sciatica and plunged a thick glowing toke of moxa onto a shochu-marinated biwa leaf placed right atop the sore spot, the heat went in and in and in and took the pain out the other side and far away, leaving me grateful throughout. Still am. Yomogi is my friend actually; I love yomogi. It is not a weed. Who called it a weed? Yomogi rules!!

Posted Sunday, June 08, 2003 by Robert Brady [Permalink]

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narrow road
through the village
long story

Posted Saturday, June 07, 2003 by Robert Brady [Permalink]

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YES, WE HAVE NO MORE ONIONS

This afternoon I heard then saw a small troop of monkeys going ape, yelling and flailing in the trees, clearly over some sizable misfortune. They were across the road at a safe distance from my garden, so it took me a bit of the simian equivalent of eavesdropping to determine why the rambling thieves were practically tearing their hair out in utter flabbergastion as they swung despondently from pointless branch to even more pointless branch: they had just confirmed the rumor that I have no more onions, and that in their stead I have Thai dragons and tabascos and jalapenos. I did, however, get a care package of sweet white onions from Yuri, Ken Rodger's very kind wife, who has no monkeys and took pity on my onionlessness; the monkeys do not like this one-sided largesse, however, though they like the Thai dragons less, and keep their distance. Even now they go wild.

Posted Friday, June 06, 2003 by Robert Brady [Permalink]

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WILL BUSH INVADE THE YAKUZA?

A US State Department talking torso said just now that North Korean WMDs are financed in part by funding from Japan's yakuza. Somehow I can't picture the yakuza funding anything with as low a vig as WMDs, let alone in another country run by an even bigger gang. But the US bureaubabble on this (those desk careers know all about what's really going on on the world) is oddly remeniscent of the extended froth over the Iraq-al Qaeda link, and look what happened to Iraq, for not even a single WMD. So apart from the truth of the accusation (how often does truth get in the way of government?), after the Bush coalition has invaded and occupied the entertainment districts and the pachinko parlors, are there any statues of famous yakuza they can pull down?

Posted Friday, June 06, 2003 by Robert Brady [Permalink]

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JAPAN'S BIRTH RATE REACHES RECORD LOW; 'CHRISTMAS CAKES' A THING OF THE PAST

The average fertility rate in Japan fell to 1.32 this year, the second straight year-on-year decline. Nearly 17,000 fewer infants were born in 2002, a greater drop than expected by the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry, whose minions will be hard put to increase their bonuses. Average age of first marriages for women is also up, at 27.4 years. Gone are the days when a woman was over the hill at 25, marriage-wise (back in the sexually oppressive days they used to call such women 'Christmas cakes' (after the 25th they're unmarketable). You go, girl!!). Fading too are the days when one might expect such lifelong things as pension, health care. The few young grownups around in 2025 won't cover it for all the elders. Details and varied discussion here.

Posted Thursday, June 05, 2003 by Robert Brady [Permalink]

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VOX POPULI, SO FAR

In my end-of-May post about the Shiga-cho mayoral recall petition, I mentioned that they still needed 850 signatures to reach the necessary 6000 plus-- by the deadline they had gotten over 7000 people to sign. Now the real fun begins, of getting over half the voters to vote the old mayor out and a whole new, clean, honest faction in. Now to find a whole new, clean, honest faction. Shouldn't be too hard. Am I being ironic? I'm not sure.

Posted Wednesday, June 04, 2003 by Robert Brady [Permalink]

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FLYFIRE

Tonight we chased a sliver of a moongrin across the big bridge over the Lake to take Kaya to a famed hotaru (firefly) stream far through the soothing dark of narrow village roads sparked here and there with houselights all the way to the path lit by tiny lights that could not be mistaken for fireflies but were just enough to get you safely to the steps down through the deep dark to the firefly kingdom along the stream in its place beneath the tall trees, where the even deeper darkness was lit like a microstarry night with nothing but wisping flights of limegreen, surprisingly bright flashes rising, swooping, curving, softly floating, flitting here and there going on and off, sparkles resting in their hundreds on the leaves or falling sudden to the ground, kids, mothers, fathers and grandfolks trying to coax the little green stars to their hands, everyone glowing with the mysterious green fire that reflected in the eyes, the faces lit with awe and Kaya too was wide-eyed watching light walk in her hand

Posted Tuesday, June 03, 2003 by Robert Brady [Permalink]

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THINNER THAN A MINUTE

Kaya fills her time the way everybody fills time. At two years of age, though, she just hasn't got enough experience to waste it properly as a youth, flaunt it as an adolescent, market it as an adult or treasure it as an elder. She's now engaged in the lifelong step-by-step process of learning to do all that, and like all of us, must begin at the beginning and take it as it comes. So at the moment there are great differences between Kaya and me in the way we generally navigate the day. To Kaya, the world is effortlessly an open book, a playground, a carnival, a banquet, every day a birthday. I have to make a bit of a metaphysical effort to stay in that world with her for the hours we are together, but she makes it delightfully easy for me to do so.

The initial difference may reside in the six decades that separate us, but I somehow suspect that, as with just about everything in the universe I've ever run into, there's much more to it than that. Kaya paints green stripes on her legs and spends many minutes hopping back and forth across the living room with the greatest of glee in her heart and eyes. She does it spontaneously, without a second thought, in complete naturalness and with no embarrassment whatever. For my part, I can't recall the last time I did anything of the sort. Maybe at a frat party. Being alone with Kaya for hours at a stretch has given me new perspectives on just about everything, including the unheralded calligraphic powers of wet rice on an oak floor.

Historically, when I was two years old I probably spent my time pretty much the same way Kaya does now: practicing faces, being completely in places, posing all the poses and making all the noises in my untried repertoire, observing the effects of my extensive menu of screams on the large, slow servants that surround and seek to control me yet cater to my infant whims, come at my every call-- though I discontinued all that at some point after college. Or maybe later.

One isn't really aware of, let alone keeping track of, the chronomentalities one phases through in life, those randomly spaced existential speed bumps that time and place and hormones and societal experiences and mood enhancement put here and there along those decade-long inclines and declines that comprise one's well-intentioned but essentially ignorant path. Then one day later in life-- if one is lucky enough, after all that, to have a later-- and if one is then lucky enough to spend four sunny afternoon hours with someone like Kaya, all the fun part comes flooding back in all its glory to a wiser perspective, from a place that isn't so far away after all; the distance between childhood and elderhood turns out to be thinner than a minute.