Domino the special cat has been all excited lately as it gets warmer..

Unintended consequences…

VIDEO: TV Tokyo (Japanese)

March’s Earthquake now linked to a rise in crime in big cities… how? Read on..

1. First, Japan is very hot & humid in the summer, but I bet you knew that already.

2. Second, Because of the earthquake & Fukushima’s daiichi Nuclear power plant being down (amongst other power reasons) there’s been a BIG push to “save power” this summer (i.e. dramatically reduce AC, lights, fan use) known locally as “Setsu-den” （節電）.

3. Thirdly, according to the video, to save power at night power-companies and local municipalities have turned off a large number of the street lamps & residents, to stay cool, have opened up their windows (this instead of leaving their windows closed and turning on the AC).

As a consequence, however, of the streets being pitch black now and everyone’s windows being gaping wide open– ‘crime-in-the-dark’ has gone up (surprise- surprise). This, naturally, has citizens of big cities worried.

As a response police have increased their rounds of patrolling neighborhoods and “Neighborhood Watch” groups are getting together during their free time to also ‘patrol’ the neighborhood (though during the day in seems?!) for signs of ‘fishy activity.’

Additionally, residents of Japan are advised to start purchasing ‘anti-theft and safety devices’ for their homes such as window jams, loud crunchy lava rock for their yards, buzzers on sliding doors & windows, and my favorite ‘locking window bars’ which cost (up to) $1,000.

Personally all of this sounds like a compounding problem. Sure it’s good to save power when there has been some serious power usage issues happening, but really at the cost of safety? Locally around here when I ask people about “Setsu-den” the general answer is most people ignore it. They’ll turn a few lights off, but when it hits 33C during the day its murder not to run an AC or fan.

It’s obvious that Japanese people are stressed out. Yesterday’s earthquake here is just a reminder of what’s happened this year and that its not exactly over yet.

~J out

Admittedly I’ve taken a big step back from the ‘online social scene’ (this blog, Facebook, & twitter) in order to just take a break and think about everything that’s been happening around me.

A lot has happened or is happening and its had me confused over what to do next or what I want most. So in this post, the risk I’m going to take is to try and explain by using a passage from a well known story, “The Little Prince” by Antoine De Saint-Exupery (which I recently re-read last Friday) to help contextualize what just ‘it is’ I’ve been struggling with lately. I hope in reading this, perhaps you can also identify with these characters as I do.

The following passage is a dialog between the ‘little prince’ and ‘a fox.’  The passage, even though written in World War II, tells a lot about the perceived thinking of young people (‘The Little Prince[s]‘) my age (mid 20′s) and how I (in this case ‘the fox’) sometimes feel amongst some of them.

So here it goes…

(*Note– This passage is abbreviated as indicated by these symbols [...])

“…It was then that the fox appeared.
‘Good morning,’ said the fox.
‘Good morning,’ the little prince responded politely [...]
‘Who are you?’ asked the little prince[...]
‘I am a fox,’ the fox said.
‘Come and play with me,’ proposed the little prince.
‘I cannot play with you,’ the fox said. ‘I am not tamed.’[...]
‘What does that mean – “tame”?’[...]
‘It is an act too often neglected,’ said the fox. ‘It means to establish ties.’
‘”To establish ties”?’
‘Just that,’ said the fox. ‘To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world…’[...]

‘My life is very monotonous,’ he [the fox] said. ‘I hunt chickens; men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike and all men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored. But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain-fields down yonder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the colour of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat …’
The fox gazed at the little prince, for a long time.
‘Please – tame me!’ he said.
‘I want to, very much,’ the little prince replied, ‘But I have not much time. I have friends to discover, and a great many things to understand.’
‘One only understands the things that one tames,’ said the fox. ‘Men have no more time to understand anything. they buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more. If you want a friend, tame me …’”
(*Emphasis added by me)

<later on the fox teaches the little prince how to tame it>

Here, the point is that the fox wants to be tamed by the little prince, which is a different concept then to have a relationship with the little prince. The fox understands the little prince will move on someday, and so doesn’t demand the prince to stay with the fox forever– rather the fox wants something unique– the fox wants to have some meaning to his environment. The fox wants to have new ties between his average life to something unique like the memory of a friend who took time to tame him.

As time is a precious thing, investing time in something with little tangible reward is difficult nowadays to understand. What is easier to understand is to invest one’s time in something that either has a great tangible reward, or several rewards over time and/or of different types (something that’s multi-goal centric). As the prince said, he “had not much time and he had friends to discover, and a great many things to understand.”

In each of our lives there’s times when we believe a relationship is the only thing to pursue, and what is truly most important. However, as this passage shows, there is something equally as important– what the fox calls “taming”. An act that meant to ‘establish ties’ with somebody else and as a result will make somebody feel special and unique, even though the person taming might not make a great effort in living with the subject, changing one’s career goals in order to relate better towards the subject, or sacrificing one’s future for a life with the subject.

We get mixed up over feeling that A.) in order to have long-term meaningful time with someone else or to impact someone’s life we must be “in a relationship” with that person; and B.) that to have this relationship means we would need to sacrifice nearly everything for it. We forget that any time we spend or have spent with someone is meaningful and that spending time taming one another (in the sense of ‘establishing ties’) is more then just an alternative to a relationship, but likely just as necessary to our mental well-being (as probably well as to the foxes we meet on a day to day basis.)

~J out

My wine is soon to be done and I plan on having a review of it soon along with a review on my apple cider I started ages ago.

~J

The ground around Mutsu has been dormant for months as the winter lingered on, but now Spring seems to have broken through and as a result of the recent good weather– dandelions have literally popped up out of the ground.

Recently I read an article about making Tanpopo Wine (Dandelion) making (hat tip to Lexi) and thought how hard could it be to try? To date I’ve made beer twice, attempted grape juice “poison” (which was horrible), apple cider (which has been sitting for at least 1 or 2 months), and now I wanted to make this. The details to making can be found here:

http://georgiapellegrini.com/2011/05/10/recipes/dandelion-wine/

I more or less followed this using my desecration & experience as a guide.

As to the taste of the wine, only time will tell, but in my experience the brewcrafting of teas & wines are related in someways. I mean if you’re going to make mint wine, then I’d wager that you’d have to you make a mint tea first– then add sugar & some other stuff to a brewing vessel– add your brewer’s yeast– wait a week for it to brew the booze part– then another month or two for conditioning and you would have some sort of alcoholic mint type wine.  Thus, the taste of the tea is likely a good guess to what the wine might taste like. So with the left overs I made a tea, added sugar & cinnamon spice, and had a sip.

The taste of dandelions was apparent, but not intrusive. The sugar & cinnamon complimented it, as well as hid the likely bitter taste of the flowers. My best guess based on the tea is that the wine will be a bit bitter like a bitter beer might be– but it’ll have a great spring smell and taste like dandelions. We’ll see I guess.

So next up on the brewer’s schedule is another beer and maybe another cider (like perhaps a fresh squeezed orange juice cider). The beer will be an ale– it’ll likely be very similar to my last two beers, but probably light in color- but heavy in taste. It’ll be a combination of both my last beers’ recipies which I believe will make the perfect balance between flavor (which my first beer had) and carbonation (which my last beer had).

If anyone has an idea for a unique wine or beer recipe for summer, or autumn, I’d like to know about it.

In the meantime,

Cheers!

~J out.

So typically when I have free time at schools I try to study Japanese or do something Japanese related to better understand this culture I live in. Most of the time when I encounter a new word I look it up in a dictionary, but sometimes dictionaries are boring and lack context for the word I’m searching. So for fun I use Google Japan’s image search to see what images the word brings up.

Today I noticed one of my schools (Ohata ES) had picked up on a unique type of slogan.

Dream, Challenge, and the Future (toward)

Every classroom has one of these banners and every hallway has a flag saying the same thing. The banner has only three important words on it, 「夢、挑戦、そして未来へ」 or in Romanji, ‘Yume, Chousen, soshite Mirai e”

So what does the slogan mean? Well there’s probably a number of ways to translate it/read it via a dictionary, but I thought it’d be more fun to run it by Google Japan’s Image Search just to see what comes up for these words. So this was the result: (click for biggie size)

Google’s result for yume (Dream) is a pink wish-granting genie Elephant,

Chousen yields a Japanese man punching through his underwear,

and Mirai comes up with two kids with a dog from like the ’60′s with flying space age things & tube trains.

These are the ideals the school wants in schools? Heh, maybe not exactly but I think it’d be fun to think so.

~J

It’s safe to say that the outlying areas of where the earthquake & tsunami hit are getting back to a regular pace. Most grocery stores have meat, vegetables, Milk, and eggs (though slightly at a higher price), People are regularly attending work again (though some never even stopped), and on the whole everything is up to about 85%. That said, it is not 100% and there are some things to watch for as we head into the next weeks and months ahead. The primary area of concern is, “what all was in the affected areas?” The image I have is either small coastal towns or farm land and certainly we all watched the tsunami wipe out both.

What I’m getting at is this. Japan isn’t so large that a majority of essential businesses can be replicated all over (as in redundancy) and thus for the whole of Japan to work every region has to be producing equally. However this recent catastrophic event has turned Japan on it’s head with long term problems that plague the nation all through out the year. Here are just a few examples I can see.

Issue 1: With a death toll of over 10,000 people (estimated), and a even greater amount missing, that’s a potentially sizable  portion of the workforce for Tohoku which may have included doctors, workers, or specialists.  Their loss could be felt in a number of different ways.

Issue 2: The Japan Times reports Tohoku coastal-area job losses are estimated to be over 81,500 in total. This isn’t jobs that need to be filled in Tohoku, but jobs that no longer exist anymore due to there being no businesses, factories, or schools to work at anymore. Those displaced workers who survived will need to find jobs in already densely populated areas like Tokyo, Osaka, etc. causing demand for resources to further rise.

Issue 3: If theoretically a demand in resources rise there would have to be an equal supply to meet demand. If the demand is electricity use for say air conditioners & fans to combat Tokyo’s notoriously hot & humid summers, but electricity is in short supply then another issue will be how people will cope and how that will affect the social & economic welfare of the country then.

Issue 4 & others: How people will cope with potential permanent shortages or long term shortages, what industries contributed what to manufacturing that no longer are operational, with plants closed will other companies pick up the slack effectively (i.e. Beer producing plants in Fukushima down- will other plants double production to fill the gap? what additional resources will that take?), The clean up of the affected region, Property rights (Who owns/can buy a property-lot full of debris if the owners are missing or dead?), etc.

There has been a huge out pouring of generosity from the world to Japan and Japan is very thankful for it. What remains yet to be seen is what long term problems will there be (either by the bureaucracy, supply problems, etc.) and how this nation will cope through each one.

However it goes, I remain hopeful for the future of this country

~J

My journeys on the train eventually landed me in the great city of Hiroshima. There I was to meet my lady at the station and what a truly wonderful greeting I got too. In the shining city lights of Hiroshima at the turn styles outside Hiroshima Station was her waiting for a big hug that I promised her upon my arrival.

From there we ate a hardy plate of Hiroshima’s fabulous Okonomiyaki then walked along until we found a Tully’s coffee shop. From there we went to her home in the prefecture over– Shimane. There I spent about 5 days relaxing and enjoying some wonderful company & food.

In that time we also wandered about the prefecture. Shimane is a beautiful prefecture with lush green forests filled with evergreens and bamboo alike. It’s situated on the coast as well with Route 9 that connects most of the major cities along a gorgeous coastal road overlooking the Japan sea. On one of our excursions we went as far as Matsue where we took a ride on a boat around Matsue Castle’s Moat. Ending at a shop that had a micro brewery featuring Pale Ales and Pilsner beers.

It was real good to spend sometime with Lexi especially after all that’s happened up north. After about 5 or so days, however I left to go more further south to Hakata/Fukuoka where I met up with Alex on our loop to the ‘steemy’ Onsen town of Beppu.

More to come…

J out