Springtime in Tokyo can be pretty nice. Especially in the evenings. After you've been on a train that was jammed to maximum capacity with a bunch of stressed out office workers, half-drunk salarymen and inadequate ventilation, stepping out onto the platfom and walking home in the cool darkness is nice finish to the day.

Especially if you take advantage of public consumption laws and enjoy a beer on the walk home.

It's worth noting that tomorrow is Memorial Day, the official start of summer in America.

Summer in Tokyo can be a sweltering, fetid, endurance contest, where the prospect of blackouts, the heat-island effect, and being required to wear a black suit to work every day, often causes otherwise successful Tokyo dwellers to consider taking up sustenance farming in someplace less inhospitable.

Like Outer Mongolia.

I'm back in Japan now. The trip had no major surprises, and getting back was fairly uneventful. Except for one thing. Turns out that they don't send you a gas bill in Saitama (where I live) if you haven't filled out one of those auto-debit things. They just turn off your gas after a couple of months. Which wouldn't bother me in summer except that my water heater is the only thing in my apartment that runs on gas.

Really, cold showers ain't so bad. I almost wanna go on a date and get cockblocked just so I'll have a good reason to take cold showers.

On the up side, I was able to negotiate an appointment with a guy from the gas company to get them to turn it back on. Looks like I have actually learned some Japanese in the last year and a half. Hooray for me. I'll be able to have a hot shower by Saturday afternoon. In the meantime, though...brrr.

Tomorrow I will try to slip back into my hometown unnoticed for 3 days of catching up with family and friends, eating some god damnned real New Mexican food, and trying to avoid a lethal cocktail of jet-lag, reverse culture shock and poisonous levels of high-school reminiscing.

"Sounds dangerous. I recommend a strict regimen of the cheapest beer imaginable and one viewing of the Matrix Reloaded."
"Drunk or sober?"
"That's a foolish question, young man. It's my medical opinion that you stay drunk for the next 80 hours."
"You're a sick sonuvabitch, Doctor. I'm glad I came to you."

What do you believe in?

How deeply do you believe it?

This fellow wanted to know about his personal relationship with and responsibility to the government. He wanted an answer. And this is how far he's gone to get an answer.

Will he see it through? Will he get an answer? Your guess is as good as mine. But this guy seems to have made his stand and kept to it. So I ask again: What do you believe in? How deeply do you believe it?

A lot of people told me that medicine sold in Japan is ususally weaker than medicine in America. Whether this is because Japanese people tend to consume fewer chemicals and thus have a lower tolerance, or because American people tend to have more body mass (that is, "fat") and require a higher dose, I'm not sure. And honestly, I really couldn't tell you if it's true or not. I can't read Japanese well enough to buy medicine in the first place, so I haven't actually checked.

But one thing that is definitely stronger here is whatever is in the mosquitoes. I got a couple of bites and there's something in them that my system has no idea what to do with. They swelled up like purple-red easter eggs, itch like hell, and haven't gone down after four days. And bugs here don't respect the traditional no-bite zones.

Like the eyelid.

Yeah, one of the little bastards zapped me just over my right eye while I was taking a nap. I woke up and couldn't open my eye for half an hour. I'm lucky that no one at work felt they knew me well enough to ask who belted me.

Change Change Change

Just got back from a weekend in Fukui. Damn, but it was good to see everyone again.

But I suppose it needs to be said: a lot of things changed. A lot of things always change. Some people are dating other people, some buildings are missing, most folks changed their hair.

And everyone's lives went on, despite the huge, yawning void that my leaving Fukui must have caused.

No, wait, I meant to say "despite the huge, yawning void that my leaving Fukui caused my current life to become." Which isn't to say that I'm not totally satisfied, but I gotta wrap this up so I can ride a cramped train and go to work to make small talk for six hours. Damn it damn it damn it.

Small Victories

Special Agent K, who is much more observant than I am, said something that I often forget to mention about living abroad. That the sense of accomplishment that can be had from figuring out how to do stuff, especially in another language or culture, is like proof that your brain still works. Despite some out of date directions, I was able to successfully get to the right office, fill out the right papers and get a re-entry permit. That really felt good. It was like winning a sports match and figuring out a puzzle at the same time.

Riding high on that mark in the win column, I decided to look up a guy I met who said his shop sold big and tall suits. (That's another nice thing about living here. There are people who are willing to be civil, or even kind, just for the sake of being friendly to a foreigner. I'll have to remember to try and be good to other people someday...) So I went to his shop, and found they did have big and tall suits. Suits for people with up to a 130cm waist and 185 cm height.

Have I told you yet that I'm about 190 cm tall?

That was kind of a come down: to be reminded that, even by extra-normal standards, you don't fit.

Then again, no one leaves their home country to live abroad with an realistic goal of "fitting in." Mostly I was cheesed off because I really wanted a new suit. And really, the guy from the store seemed geniunely disappointed that they didn't have anything that would fit me.

So let's score the day a win by split decision. 'Cause in the end, I did figure out how to do some stuff. And I was never able to buy suits easily in the US anyway.

Since that last post was a little too desperate to leave out for everyone to see, it's been relocated here.

On a totally unrelated point, just when you think it's safe to start sterotyping people again, you meet a criminal court Judge from Tokyo who openly admits to being an animated film addict who spent so much of his time watching TV in university that he had to drop his Anglo-American Law class due to poor attendance, even though he's preparing to go to Philidelphia for a year to study the American Legal System.

It's really tough to stay bored here as long as you can talk to a few people.

It looks like the war is pretty much over, so now we can concentrate on more important things.
Like ignoring the reconstruction of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Or the evisceration of the average American's constitutional protections.
Hell, maybe we can even get back to asking why it is after cutting taxes and raising spending, the US economy is still spashing around in the toilet?

No wait. There's gotta be someone else to invade first. How about North Korea? They're part of that Axis of Evil thing and they are actively pursuing Nuclear technology. Oh, wait, they don't have anything under their despot except for starving, oppressed people. They don't have any oil or coal. And they've already tested all the swell new bombs and guns that had been stored up since 1992. I guess we can continue through diplomatic channels with North Korea.

Fucking hell, what a country.

Who Profits?

It's worth noting that my recent complaint about the firing of journalist Peter Arnett was not completely informed. C-Los, thank you for pointing that out. There were concerns about his journalistic integrity. I don't know whether or not he accepted payola for his reports about the status of America's initial assaults. If he did take cash in exchange for misrepresenting the facts, he should have been fired at once.

We rely on the media to deliver the truth about places and events that the majority of us cannot see or get into first hand. There is an expectation that the media will deliver the truth. The nature of the editorial is to deliver opinions, and the public has to remember that while we hope for an objective truth, we're often getting a subjective report.

Were Arnett's statements biased as a result of his personal opinions or because of a pay-off? I don't know. What I intended to object to was the repression of dissenting views. If his stated view of events was different because of personal opinion, that's one matter, and we should question the people we're trusting to tell us the truth. But if he made those specific claims in exchange for money, then his view is no more deserving of respect than that of any other type of propaganda.

If we, as rational individuals, are going to make good decisions, it seems we're going to have to ask the same questions every time we turn on the news: Who profits? Who stands to gain from telling us these things in this way?