ROCK, SCISSORS, PAPER: $20 MILLION ART AUCTION

"'Everybody knows you always start with scissors,' she added. 'Rock is way too obvious, and scissors beats paper.' Flora piped in. 'Since they were beginners, scissors was definitely the safest,' she said, adding that if the other side were also to choose scissors and another round was required, the correct play would be to stick to scissors - because, as Alice explained, 'Everybody expects you to choose rock.'

Sotheby's took a different tack."

Story (NYT)

PHILOSOPHIZING WITH KAYA

These are just a few of the epistemological subjects Kaya and I discussed yesterday:

train food
centipede shoe stores
snake feathers
spider bicycles
fish hands
elephant fingernails

Of course this list merely skims the surface; the heights and depths were pretty much unconfined by what we stodgy grownups like to call "concepts."

TOROKKU TRAIN

Echo and I had taken the regular JR train along the Hozu River gorge from Arashiyama in NW Kyoto before, but we'd never taken the famous Torokku train (which once an hour makes a 25-minute run along the old track section from Arashiyama-Sagano, traveling the edge of the cliff above the river gorge to Kameoka, then immediately heading back the other way; 600 yen one way) so we decided to do that today and take Kaya with us, since she's a Thomas the Tank Car fanatic.

The scenery along the gorge is spectacular enough at any time of year (renowned for cherry blossom time and Autumn) - you can travel down the river by boat most days in Spring and Summer, we passed a lot of boats along the way - but the Torokko train (5 cars), a little open-car chuggy red-and-yellow train, is endearingly rickety and satisfactorily clickety-clackety to win the heart of any train lover four years old and above.

The train was perfect, the weather was perfect and by strange chance we arrived everywhere right on time; the only thing that at first seemed a drawback was that we'd picked the first day of Golden week to do it, as had several million others, looked like, but the family crowds were as festive as crowds can be, so it was one big party after all.

Everyone was in the best of moods, even the conductors and the long-haired Oni (demon) that rode the train and got off at every stop to dance around on the platform, help with the boarding and deboarding, give the kids a happy fright. Kaya had a great time (she loved when it all got dark, cool and noisy in the tunnels); she waved to all the boaters on the river and was beloved by all the grandmas on the train.

KAYA REMEMBERS THE DARK

Kaya arrived last night, about 2 inches taller, quieter, with a much clearer Kayaface and a more crystallized, more adult personality, though she’s not yet 5. She now enjoys style, loves to show off her new clothing with the bunnies and the kittens on it. Beholding these changes is one of the wonders of grandparenting: you get to see the miracle in stop motion.

But having grown up most recently and exclusively in the city, Kaya has forgotten much about darkness, which I didn’t expect. When we went outside together last night to do some fireworks it wasn’t half-hearted city dark we went into, but deep genuine country dark, that summons the strength of the eyes and the depths of the spirit. It was odd to see Kaya looking around edgily and staying close to me, trying to keep her back away from the dark and finally asking to be held, so I laughed as I held her and told her to listen to all the singing frogs - did she think they were scared? No, they were singing. Loudly.

And had she forgotten all the times we’d gone out right into this very darkness with our flashlights and walked around the mountainside looking at frogs and bugs? Hadn’t that been fun? She had to agree because it had been, so when she got her feet back on the ground again and we began to do the fireworks she felt more and more at home in the darkness and was soon running around in it waving sparklers, one in each hand. Few things are cuter than Kaya in the dark by fireworks, running around covered with kittens.

NEOHERESIES

"Over the next ten years, I predict, the mainstream of the environmental movement will reverse its opinion and activism in four major areas: population growth, urbani­zation, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power."

Environmental Heresies
By Stewart Brand

JAPAN'S TRAINS EXCESSIVELY ON TIME?

They certainly are on the dot; you can practically set your watch by them. If a train is late even by half a minute, waiting veteran passengers know immediately, begin looking at their watches and down the track for the reason. Conductors and announcers apologize profusely if there is even a slight delay. So there is a point to the linked article below, but I think the Amagasaki train wreck is due primarily to incompetence - on the part of the 23-year-old driver and the folks who allowed him to drive a rush-hour train. An experienced and capable driver would have dealt appropriately with (self-caused) delay, but this was the second time this guy had screwed up. And this apart from the pressure these drivers are under.

Japan's problem: Trains that are too punctual

Quiet Japanese town turned into scene of horror

GOLDEN WEEK

Well, in what seems like only a few months we have made it to the verge of another Golden Week, when many of the many city people in Japan crowd the highways on their way to non-city elsewhere, a good number of them traveling from urban Kansai out to all the nature there is around where I live, to enjoy the often beautiful weather of this period.

Kaya, for example, will be coming tomorrow to stay with us for a few days on a huge vacation from her noisome little twin sisters, during which time she will bask in being the complete focus of attention, as she deserves, at least for this time in her young life. She is outgrowing that need already, as day by day she becomes a genuinely individual little lady.

It’s fascinating to observe how Kaya develops in separate durations as she comes to visit every few months, a phenomenon you can’t appreciate with your own children as they grow up invisibly, right before your eyes. I look back at photos of my children when they were that age, clearly recall them like that and wish I could have those thems back for just one day, but Kaya will fill that need perfectly, in her own special way. That's one of the many reasons we have grandchildren.

DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'RE MISSING?

"The promoters in the U.S. have become loath to even book or schedule foreign acts these days, as the odds are just not in their favor. The prospect of spending money on promotion, ads and radio only to have the show cancelled by the INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service] when the act applies for their visas is discouraging, and financially ruinous to some small promoters - so they eventually just don't end up taking the risk. Likewise, many small U.S. labels who might release recordings by foreign artists will think twice if there will be little likelihood of a local live show to generate press and interest. Often that's the only way they have of generating press and word of mouth. So, many times, the labels 'edit' what they release based on these legal and economic factors.

It amounts to a kind of cultural censorship. Call me paranoid, but given all the manipulative tricks the Republicans have gotten up to recently, I am prepared to believe that this has less to do with Homeland security and more to do with keeping the American public ignorant and free of foreign influence and inspiration. An ill-informed, isolated, ignorant populace is a populace easily manipulated. Fed a diet of reality shows coupled with faith-based reasoning (an oxymoron if ever there was one) and you have a perfect recipe for a country in which the government that can do more or less whatever it wants. Democracy becomes a farce without access to information. And culture - music, theater, dance, etc. - is information for the heart. Yes, we can still obtain news reports and recordings online, but without live performance there is a hole where there should be face to face 'news' about how others live, how they love and why and what their passions are. If we are not allowed to feel the rest of the world then we can be told anything about it and not know what those people are really like. If the Other is hidden from you, then you don't even know to ask or inquire about what it is you're not getting - because you don't even know it exists.

Any government that can cynically manufacture fake news reports, install fake reporters, create fake media outlets and then simply shrug it off when caught is capable of doing this as well."

From David Byrne's Journal

Be sure to check out the superb David Byrne Radio, if you've got broadband.

EUREKA!

Many of those who are kind enough to visit these pages on a regular basis have noted my occasional microscopic examination of scientists who spend so much time and grants doing studies to learn stuff you and I knew all along but didn't get a penny for knowing, like there's dandruff in the air, or monkeys don't steal if you watch them, scientists doing grueling seven-year studies on tropical islands and suchlike, addressing urgent scientific issues in their bikinis.

Or enjoying all the free popcorn they can eat. Yes, other of those clipboarded individuals staunchly advancing the banner of truth have raised the summit of knowledge yet again. Putting differently sized issues like disease and world hunger on the back burner, in a questionably crunchy study funded by Purdue's Whistler Center for Carbohydrate Research, our dedicated seekers of wisdom have resolved an issue that has plagued mankind ever since prime time: unpopped popcorn.

In the most shocking aspect of their revelations, the team of certified popcornologists found that "the percentage of unpopped kernels ranged from 4 percent in premium brands to 47 percent in the cheaper ones." (47%!! Is it still that high? What has science been doing all these years?) And that there were "17 billion quarts of popcorn sold each year in the United States." Which means that the US is about up to its hips in popped corn. Here in Japan it only ever gets ankle deep.

The research will appear in the July 11 edition of the journal BioMacromolecules. Watch out for the unpopped ones at the bottom.

COMMUTING TODAY

The death and injury tolls still climbing from that train crash in Amagasaki, folks on the also crowded train into Osaka this morning screamy-skittish as the train made a few unusual sudden jerky stops, the train schedules hereabouts affected by the wreck - Japan's worst in 40 years - everyone's got those images in mind from the practically 24 hour tv coverage since it happened, and sitting or standing similarly jammed on much the same kind of train as it streaks past now uncomfortably close big brown apartment buildings on the way into the big city doesn't help...

AND AS TO THE FROGS THEMSELVES

The frogs are singing in the moonlight, there is a full moon - but whispered through the clouds - nevertheless in what light they have they know it is time and the moon is full and so they sing in full earnest their massive chorale majestically from silver sheets of water, taking on every aspect there ever was of Greek theater, the ears of merely standby humans hearing in that vast rap the rhythms of a sprightly Irish jig that segues easily into reggae with a touch of Mozart and a few riffs Beethoven never heard of--

The listener standing there truly listening hears the very earth speaking, saying what worlds have always said to anyone who might listen: take the night unto yourselves, enjoy its moon, there is no other...

HAWKFEAST

As on this evening I sat on the deck watching the sunset over the Lake, a farmer was tilling his lower paddy with a mechanical tiller, taking long slow sweeping passes over the surface of the swelling water (deep tilling in water is no fast process), and there on the verge of the upper paddy sat a dozen hawks, who never ever flock (the most you ever see is two together, and they’re in love).

This was partytime bigtime, so the multihawks sat there in the fading sun watching hawkeyed as the farmer stirred their supper, yet arguing among themselves over the best vantages whence to first spot what the farmer turned up with his tilling, the farmer paying as little attention to the hawks as they to him - which is in the natural way of things and much to be recommended – would that humans did the same.

Then when one of the hawks spotted something tasty from bug to frog it would swoop on big wings regardless of the machine with the man in it and snatch the morsel from the watery earth - making amazing exceptions to the basic hawk rule, to life-and-death avoid any motion that particularly involved humans. When successful, the hawk would fly up to a convenient tree or telephone pole (whichever was more convenient to the delicacy) to have dinner. When one hawk swooped, laggards would follow, as hope always does, but the genuinest hawkeye would have it, every time. (There is a big lesson there, which I will perhaps delve into if I live long enough).

Now, at the end of the long feast - i.e., it’s too dark to see and the farmer and the hawks have gone home - the surviving frogs in the already plowed upper paddies are singing the night as if it were their own. And it is. They’ve made it this far.

ELABORATE CHAIRS

All this endlessly ongoing royalty folderol in England about kings, queens, princes and princesses, ascendancy, legitimacy, dukes, dutchesses, consorts and people in waiting - all a holdover from way back in the days when one could become king by virtue of having a horse, some luck and a good change of clothing - I wonder why they don't simply do away with it all. Though in a way it's better than soap opera if you have an empty afternoon, metaphorically speaking.

Here in Japan the people enjoy a much more staid version of aristocracy, with imperial deities whispering diatribes at each other in antique syllables and the nation carefully weighing the earthshaking issue of whether or not it would be possible perhaps to allow a female to inherit the right to sit on an elaborate chair.

It's sobering to realize that so many people have nothing better to do with their afternoons, let alone their thoughts and fealties. The nature of leadership can be much worse, though, as it currently is in the States, where aristocracy is purchased pretty much at auction, though multilevel incompetence can last for no more than 8 years at a time, quite long enough to do considerable damage, yet giving the people extended pause to thank their various deities for term limits.

As an American in Japan, I have no king but Elvis.

POTBOUND

As stacks of strictly deadlined editing work keep me indoors on this heavenly blue day I gaze now and then out the window at my large and newly composted ginger bed hungering for ginger root, my freshly tilled lemongrass bed lying there so deeply earnest in the sunlight, awaiting seed and covering soil so it can get to work, to say nothing of the places I've set for basil, beans, spinach various herbs and lovely potbound flowers crying for their new homes... In gardening, as in all else, some days are without mercy.

THEY CALL IT MY PYRAMID!

The old new nutritional pyramid was bad enough, with meat and dairy all over the place, but you put pyramid building in the hands of bureaucrats and this is what you get: the new new nutritional pyramid, sort of a rainbow sliding board thingy with a sinister, darkly deformed figure climbing up the side, perhaps toward some sort of sacrifice at the top in which the still-beating heart is offered to the sun god whose light has been cut off.

But why pyramids, for paperpushing sake, why not have just a simple low-sided BOX like I use, into which you throw everything organic that isn't refined or processed to death and certainly isn't mostly meat, with just a few select cheeses on the side, along with some wines and the occasional fine cigar? Then you just pick some things out, combine them and eat, drink or smoke the result.

Look inside the pyramid

In a similarly clogged vein, see Meaty Diet Linked to Pancreatic Cancer

And then there's the meat industry's predictable response to the study: Meat industry slams cancer study

"A new study that suggests high consumption of processed meats could raise the risk of pancreatic cancer was 'not capable of proving cause and effect' claims the American meat association."

Sounds like the argument the cigarette folks used for decades...

NIGHT JEWELRY

In the city all the windows stare at other windows, the day is indoors, the night is neon, everyone busy moving - no one yet where they want to be - only pausing, then hurrying to otherwheres, and I was one.

When I got home to the mountain last night, though, the house by the forest was dark, the all-around filled with a quiet calm proven by the singing frogs, the sky-high air aglow with the light of the swelling moon reflecting off the rice paddies trickle-flooding down the mountain, the hundreds of single perfect mirrors of still water giving back the moonlight like thin sheets of silver against a vast genuine darkness pierced here and there with starlight, it was like being inside a moonstone.

MY PART IN THE DOWNFALL OF FERDINAND MARCOS

Tabasco sauce? Great topping for ice cream.

Jalapeños? Mild, mouth-refreshing chewing gum.

I'd had those long red peppers and those long green peppers, I'd had straight red pepper relish in red pepper juice with my huevos rancheros in Mexico City and sweated it out no-o-o-o problem. I'd graduated, man. Nothing could touch me now.

So when in beautiful Baguio in the Philippines in a cute little sidewalk cafe I ordered an appetizing rice dish from a friendly waiter and the sun was shining and the birds were winging and singing and it was a wonderful world and people smiling and I on my vacation and my meal came looking sooo good and on top were these three cute little green peppers, the cutest trio of pale green tiny-teeny peppers, miniatures of the real thing, right out of Peter Rabbit or a little doll house, like mini-toys so eentsy and cutely cultural, kind of cuddly, I ate all three of them in my first spoonful of rice and my life changed and I became a herd of flaming wild horses stampeding in a desert of blast furnaces beneath a sky full of screaming meteors, with blowtorches for ears and lasers for eyes and then I went blind and then I went deaf and then my skin vaporized and I became the great tree of fire that burns for all eternity and then my bones became charcoal and I had no identity and knowledge went away from me and there was nothingness filled to overflowing with the absence of the passing of time and then there was a spinning with a shrill keening like a white-hot nervous system imploding in razor-sharp fragments toward a naked point of light that had unbearable sounds coming from it and I was whirled through a pinhole of illumination and sizzled molten into a raw body brokenly sprawled in a chair in another world before a plate of rice on a table and the body was going guhhhh....., guhhhhh...., and a waiter was bending over it going Are you all right sir? What happened?

And a woman there, who I later learned was my wife, said He ate three of those cute little green peppers all at once, could that have something to do with it, and the restaurant fell silent, and the waiter said THREE? He ate THREE? At ONCE? Are you sure? And everyone in the restaurant came over to look, saying THREE? He ate THREE? At ONCE?? Are you sure? Oh my god did you hear that, this guy ate THREE at once babble babble and he's still ALIVE babble babble and they watched to see if I stayed alive and could talk and everything, and I said my name, and the year, and how many fingers they held up, and how much was two plus two, and people came crowding in from the street and the neighborhoods around and mobs came in from the countryside saying where's the guy that ate three at once, did it really happen, and I was identified and they asked me all sorts of questions and the crowd started chanting that someone like me should be leading the country, not Marcos, and that Marcos should step aside but I just said get me to the airport quick and got a plane out of there to someplace cool and not long after that Marcos did too.

[Previously published, in sightly different form, in Kyoto Journal and Utne Reader]

JAPAN DEMANDS COMPENSATION FOR BROKEN WINDOWS IN PEKING

"Windows of the Japanese Embassy in Beijing and those of consulates in Shanghai and other cities were smashed by hurled stones, and the buildings' walls were defaced with ink and paint. Hundreds of PET bottles were hurled into the missions' yards."

The horror, the horror! But for genuine horror,

JAPAN AGAIN REFUSES TO COMPENSATE CHINESE VICTIMS OF WAR ATROCITIES

"The plaintiffs had sought 100 million yen (930,000 dollars) for atrocities including the Nanjing massacre, bombings by Japanese forces and the "Unit 731" that performed medical experiments on humans."

But then perhaps if you can create a unit 731 and never even apologize (while erasing it all from your children's history texts), refusing compensation must be even easier than using a comfort woman.

And as if that weren't enough warped righteousness,

JAPAN LEADER ANGERED BY CHINA'S REFUSAL TO APOLOGIZE FOR PROTESTS

********************

And now they're thowing gunpowder on the fire:

"Japanese lawmakers announced Tuesday that they would visit a controversial shrine that critics say glorifies past wartime atrocities. Every visit by a Japanese prime minister to the Yasukuni shrine - where Japanese war dead, including war criminals, are enshrined - prompts strong official protests from China."

For a good take on the roots and ramifications of Japan's behavior, see The Schizophrenic Superpower by Alan Dupont

EYEWINE

Yesterday evening being the date of the first event in the 8th International Symposium on Fireworks' display series, we set out with a comfortable travel time-cushion to Ogoto, south of here on the Lake (usually a 20-25 minute drive), where the first show was to be.

Unfortunately, everyone within a hundred kilometers of the site had the same idea, so we were still a good distance away being passed by snails when the show began silently lighting up the sky a tantalizing distance ahead. Since this was the first night, the fireworks were either British or Chinese; they did not look Japanese, they were more… impressionistic? In any case these would be blasting-edge fireworks, making their first public appearance in Japan, maybe the world.

In all the urgency of new fireworks we therefore took an immediate hard left and headed for the lakeshore where we knew there was a nice park from which we could view the fireworks across the water - and hear them loud and clear - from a couple of kilometers away. Also it would be darker there, so in that way better for the watching than being part of the deafened jam right at the site (sour fireworks).

Unfortunately, everyone within ten kilometers of the park had the same idea, so the park and the road to it were packed with cars and pedestrian fireworks fans bumping into each other in the dark as explosions rocked the air, flashing glimpses of the faces of the toes you just stepped on…as China and Britain showed their stuff on the skycanvas.

And it was impressive. Things I’ve never seen fireworks do before: like gigantic slowly swelling globes of multicolored light quanta, pulsing from within, very long lasting and very slow fading; and fernlike columns of golden fire climbing very slowly way up into the sky, now and then pausing in place, then climbing onward…

There is a gourmet quality to fireworks, like wines made of light… Wednesday night Italy and China will be serving their eyewine in Moriyama, across the Lake. We'll be there early, as part of the deafened jam.

FOREVER, EVEN

On Saturday, with the cherry trees shouting pink all over the place beneath nearly perfect blue skies, and a river of pink flowing down from the mountain where the cherry trees line the winding road up to the ski resort, that's where we went to celebrate Spring. At the top there was a taiko concert by some very talented lady drummers.

Then on Sunday, all things being the same except now the sky was perfect and with a light breeze, we walked up the mountain again, but this time with some friends who have a house further north along the Lake. The husband of the couple brought along his sanshin (the Okinawan three-stringed musical instrument that evolved into Japan’s shamisen) and played some Okinawan folk songs (I love Okinawan folks songs!) as we walked up the mountain road beneath the scented pink canopy to the top where there was very fine Okinawan music playing on the stage among the cherry trees.

Today, Monday, as the first of the cherry petals begin to fall like tremulous sparks from a living flame, the loss of each petal infinitessimally diminishing the beauty, there comes that melancholy feeling at sight of such tender visible transience - you want them to hold on a bit longer, stay, stay where they are in such beauty... forever, even...

THE BIG HEART ACHES

The big heart aches at all the bysmal mistakes being made in the name of faith and intelligence, which leads to the abysmal thought that what is genuine is not being honored. You heard it first in your own soul.