It's a magical world

Yesterday morning I dreamed that a major earthquake struck Kyoto while I was there. In the dream I was in some teahouse-type place down around Gojô-zaka, which slid partway down the hillside secondary to all the shaking--the earthquake was a 6 or a 7--with us inside it. In the dream I had that resigned nervousness of knowing that you're either going to live or die and there's nothing you can do about it either way so you just have to wait to see what it will be. Afterward once we confirmed our identities and being alive with the authorities (note: this is not how earthquake protocols actually go, in Japan) my primary emotion was annoyance that I was going to have to walk all the way home from Gojô to Matsugasaki.

I did feel a few earthquakes while I was in Kyoto this time; they were all 1s or 2s. I've at least gotten over my clueless habit of thinking, when I lived closer to the fault that runs under Kyoto University, of thinking the jolt quakes it throws off fairly frequently--a 3 or 4, lasting a second or less--were cars driving into my building.

---

I went to Tokyo for the weekend three weeks ago. I was there for about sixty hours, all told, and there were three aftershocks that I and my friends H & H felt, one of them large enough to wake us up from a sound sleep at three or four on Sunday morning (so a 3 or a 4). Worryingly, that one didn't send an alert to my friend H's smartphone. My friend H, who moved to Tokyo the week after the earthquake, still has an ancient cell phone that she bought used when we arrived in Japan four years ago, and can't get the earthquake alerts, but she was telling me how, in the weeks afterward when subway service was initially restored, they couldn't keep the subway to a schedule (!) because of the aftershocks, and how she'd be riding around and the cell phone of everyone in the compartment would go off with the earthquake alert ringtone and the train would stop and she'd just have to clutch the bar and hope that it wasn't a big one.

I suppose I'm telling this story to make a point about how much fortitude going about your daily life can require at times, in a place like Tokyo, and I do hand it to the people there who've endured blackouts, energy saving, and aftershocks for months on end. But the Japanese government recently confirmed what, I think, everyone had long known, that the 12-mile exclusion zone around Fukushima Daiichi won't be habitable again for a long time, if ever, and people who lived there won't be allowed to go back, and I've seen the photos and heard the stories from people who've been volunteering in or visiting the tsunami zone (Google Maps/Earth of Minamisanriku-chô is currently using satellite photos from April), and…Tokyo is so far from being the worst off it almost doesn't merit mentioning in the same sentence.

When the big one hits Tokyo, though, it'll be a different story.

What I've been thinking of as my vacation from my feels-like-a-vacation, quacks-like-a-summer-program summer in Japan is drawing to a close. Tomorrow (later today technically) I'll take a bus over the Akashi-Kaikyo and Ônaruto bridges back to Kansai, and then on Wednesday afternoon I leave KIX for OAK via SEA. (I have the name of a beer lounge at SEA with Mac & Jack's African Amber on tap, though, so I'm all set for my layover at least.) It's been relaxing, and quite enjoyable; so relaxing in fact that I managed to miss two straight OTW meetings. *facepalm* The Awa Odori is pretty awesome, though!

There will be many posts forthcoming in future, I hope; suffice it to say that thanks to swan_tower and K and loanwords and D I've had an awesome week and a half. The new semester, which starts in a week and a half, is already looming in front of me; it's going to be intense, but hopefully a lot of fun. And I swear I'm going to read more this fall.

---

On the Dreamwidth front, yvi is looking for feedback on the idea for a non-native English celebration fest.

As copracat reminded me, Dreamwidth's diversity policy is explicit, and worth a reread. The Dreamwidth that's my second home welcomes all users regardless of language or writing system, among countless other variables.

Parallels 2011 is live!

I received for summer to come, an understated, very sweet Natsume Yuujinchou OT3 fic. Thank you, dear author! It is just the perfect thing to read in the oppressive heat of a Kyoto summer. ♥

As for what I wrote, you'll just have to wait a week to find out. But, you know, the collection's quite small (and awesome); if anyone wants to hazard a guess as to what I wrote, and gets it right, I'll happily write something to your prompt. You have until authors are revealed to guess!

---

A very long, weather-induced intense day of wandering around Kyoto culminated in the Biwako Fireworks tonight, which are still both my favorite and the most impressive in the world, in my experience. Before that, though, in a timely rebuke to my delusions of total competence, I managed to think I was ordering two mini parfaits with lunch for us and instead received surprise! parfait to the tune of two full-size parfaits and a mini parfait. This is not the worst thing in the world, as parfait is delicious and these were quite good, but it was pretty hilarious.

---

I wouldn't know Dwarf Fortress from a hole in the ground, but I was just linked to this gameplay retelling by snarp and for some reason it both cracks me up and reminds me unspeakably strongly of my friend S, who was regaling us with his archaeology stories tonight while we waited (and waited, and waited) for the train back from Lake Biwa. I'm doubly lucky to have a fluctuating cadre of awesome friends in Japan, with whom it doesn't feel like three years have passed at all.

1. What's the best but least-known (to Westerners, to Japanese people in other parts of the country, whichever) thing about Kyoto you've discovered?
Hmm, this is tough! Kyoto never ceases to throw new things into my path, but on the other hand, I've grown to know the city fairly well (partly, yes, because I had a lot of time and money and few responsibilities the last time I was here).

So, let's see. One of the things you can find in Kyoto that I love, and that even people from Kansai don't often know about, is hiyashi ame, cold ginger juice. It is SO GOOD. I've found it two places in Kyoto (actually near Kyoto technically, but close enough): at Mii-dera, across the mountains in Shiga, and at Mimuroto-ji in Uji, during the hydrangea season. I also found it at the Tenjin matsuri in Osaka last month, which was awesome.

As for places…I love just about all of the major Kyoto sites, which is good because I inevitably wind up making a circuit of them when I show people around, but some of my really favorite places are slightly more out of the way. Mimuroto-ji in Uji above, Ishiyama-dera a bit further east, Kajû-ji in Yamashina, Myôshin-ji up in the northwest (it's so cool to wander around there, just so cool; it's like a little town made up entirely of temples). I also really love the Garden of Fine Arts up on Kitayama, which bills itself as the world's first outdoor art garden and is a cheerfully bizarre little place, with architecture by Andô Tadao, who is one of my all-time favorites and luckily for me a Kansai native, so there's lots of his buildings around to explore. The Garden of Fine Arts is quirky and awesome.

It's really hard to choose, actually. I just love Kyoto, period.

2. What's your favorite thing about A:TLA (a character, a trope, an episode, etc.)?
Well, I think my favorite trope is actually the willingness of the show's creators to remix so many things from actual history and Asian cultures with such wild, though respectful, abandon. The most obvious example is the fauna (turtleducks! they are awesome!), but you see it everywhere (how awesome is the lion turtle? How awesome?).

Also, I really just unreservedly love Toph. TOPH I LOVE YOU.

And also, 3x17, "The Ember Island Players," is just golden, golden, golden.

3. Are there other quintessentially Jersey musicians you dig as much as Bruce Springsteen (like, dare I ask your feelings about Bon Jovi)?
Hmm, there aren't that many musicians that I think of as being quintessentially New Jersey! Really the only ones I can think of are The Gaslight Anthem, Titus Andronicus, and My Chemical Romance. The Gaslight Anthem really only have a few songs that I like, but I do like "High Lonesome" a lot. As for MCR, I really love their newest album Danger Days, which is ironically the least obviously Jersey-ish of their albums because it's (not) a concept album, but their older, more Jersey-ish music is less of a surefire win for me. But I really like Titus Andronicus a lot (their album The Monitor is really quite good, if you like alternative/indie rock-ish music exploring what the hell is with the States now via the Civil War), though I've been told that they don't perform live well. There's just something about their music--it's not even completely my experience of New Jersey, because just from their music I can tell that they are so, so North Jersey, and honestly the album that probably best reflects my experience of growing up in (the northern portion of) South Jersey is Arcade Fire's The Suburbs, which tells you a lot right there, but even so, Titus Andronicus have managed to tap into the core of New Jersey somehow, not just place but people. And, yeah. It doesn't have to be my experience of home to remind me of home.

I actually enjoy Bon Jovi, but only on a song-by-song basis, and usually only at parties or when driving around in a car singing along with the blasting stereo.

4. What do you want to be doing this time next year?
Well, I'm hoping to either spend the summer in China doing language study, or to get a summer fellowship at the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco. Hopefully either or both of those will actually be possible…the real question is whether I should be trying to be in the Beijing or the Shanghai area. Opinions on that question welcome!

5. What's your favorite outfit for daily wear & for fancy occasions?
Hmm. It depends on where/when I am! Here in Kyoto I have basically fallen back into what I think of as the gaijin uniform, namely Bermuda shorts, a shirt, and sandals or sneakers, though my bucket hat and umbrella-repurposed-as-parasol, and geta (wooden sandals) when I wear them, are adaptations of Japanese fashion that I couldn't live without. On the days when I actually wear a skirt or a sundress I feel much more in step with the people around me, though I just don't have the wardrobe to layer in the summer months, unlike people here.

In California my sartorial skills have also backslid; I tend to wear jeans, a shirt, and sneakers or sandals, with a scarf and a blazer or hoodie as appropriate. Given that I'll be teaching starting this year, though, I'm going to be making the effort to dress a little more professionally, again. This is basically in direct conflict with a) the campus ethos and b) the fact that I really love T-shirts, but clothes are a quick route to being taken more seriously, so there it is. When I make the effort to wear a skirt or a blazer I usually wear heels, though I also sometimes wear heels with jeans, just because I can.

For fancy occasions…I have several dresses that I wear frequently, depending on the weather, and several pairs of higher-heeled shoes that I enjoy wearing for short stretches of time, but one thing about grad school so far is that there's a dearth of fancy occasions in general, and half the time I just throw on my suit for the academic ones. Mind you, I love that suit (three-piece), and it looks good, so that's okay, but I will need another one eventually. I'd like something slightly less classic; we'll see.

I also need to get a good hat, like a straw trilby, before I come back to Japan again.

It`s a different city with the lights off.

So marina asked about Japanese food recently, and qian posted not one, but two epic posts of Japanese food, and I thought…I could do that too! 

I used to have many, many more food photos, but I lost about 6000 photos the day after I got back from Japan in 2008, and I've been much less photo-happy on this trip & haven't been eating out as much, so I don't actually have that many. But! I am dragging showing around some friends next month, and we are going to go to many great restaurants including a place that serves "punk" kaiseki cuisine, so there will certainly be a follow-up to this post anon.

I should explain that I have several guiding principles for eating in Japan. One: I tend to prefer Japanese or Japanese-style cuisine rather than futilely seeking pizza or Mexican food, particularly this time since I'm only here (*sob*) for 2.5 months. (That said, I enjoy Japanese pizza quite a lot. In fact, I've had some amazing Italian food in Japan.) Two: whenever you can, eat the local specialty (often called meibutsu); eat local in general. Three: whenever there's anything that says "limited time only" (gentei kikan), get that. Four: I refuse to eat whale (or dolphin), but everything else is on the table, literally and metaphorically.

All these things being said, a preponderance of these photos are from cafes. YUM. ( Twenty-one photos of food, mostly from Kansai and various cafes. )

People have asked me what's changed, to my knowledge, in the three years between my departure from and return to Kyoto. It depends. There are more Starbucks, and quite a few shops, cafes, and chain stores that I used to go to have closed or moved. The sidewalks are nicer in a lot of the city. There's more Korean language information, more bike parking, and stricter enforcement of bike parking rules. The police have started handing out flyers about rising bike theft, urging us to buy C-locks for our precious contraptions. The Keihan Nakanoshima line is in operation, and the city finished relandscaping the canal along Horikawa-doori, both projects that weren't finished when I left. The train schedules, and stops on the express services, are slightly different. People seem more willing to cross against lights, but that might just be my imagination. And of course, I've changed too.

But in large measures the city seems more or less as I left it, and aside from being back in a place that will forever have a chunk of my heart, it's good to look around Japan and to realize anew that all the doom & gloom coverage about Japanese society, the economy, you name it, is only part of the story. I look around Kyoto and I see parents and children playing catch by the side of the river, old couples taking evening strolls hand in hand, people of all ages taking up running (often in street clothes!), a women's pro baseball league getting off the ground, couples on dates at the movie theater and on the banks of the Kamogawa. I see a city that has endured for 1200 years going about its business in much the same way that it has for the past several centuries, through good times and bad, people shopping at hyaku-en shops and luxury stores and every venue in between, restaurateurs spreading water on the sidewalks in front of their establishments because that's how it's done in Kyoto, no matter the decade, and Japan is still the world's third-largest economy. I know a lot of people have been getting a lot of mileage out of predicting decline for Japan for the past twenty years, and to them I say: the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost.

And, above all, I see everywhere signs saying Ganbarou, Japan! and Sasaeyou, Japan! and We know we will get through this and Let's build a new and stronger Japan and Never give up. I think every temple and shrine and almost every store I've been to has been collecting money for the victims of the Touhoku earthquake and tsunami; the sakaya all have signs pointing to the Miyagi and Fukushima sake, urging people to buy all of it, because the brewers were devastated just like everyone else and after what's on the shelves now is gone there will be no more.

It was three months today since the earthquake, and a few hundred people in Kyoto marked it by holding an anti-nuclear protest march past the city hall and into downtown. I caught the tail end of it, and it seemed to me that in comparison with other protesters the police were giving them a pretty respectful time. Left-wing protests are very much a part of Kyoto life, and I was glad to see them even as the cause for the renewed vigor of the anti-nuclear movement is frankly too cruel. The NY Times reports that, since so much of what we know about long-term effects of radiation poisoning comes from studying hibakusha after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in which victims received one catastrophically high dose of radiation, no one can quite say with certainty what the limits for long-term low-dose exposure are or should be in the area around Fukushima Daiichi.

I'm not sure where else I was going with this. I had a lovely day today, karaoke downtown with some people from my program and then wandering around on my own--I had shincha, the new tea crop from Uji, at Ippou-dou and as I was walking out of the shop I ran into one of my Kyoto friends and her son; we recognized each other immediately, which was pretty awesome. I've spent too much money on manga, as usual, but so it goes. I should probably do some homework, since I am technically here for a class.

I'm sitting in my efficiency apartment in Kyoto as I write this. It's even smaller than my last one, I think, but not by much, and probably nicer when you throw in that it's completely furnished. 

So, I got here safely, with no real adventures to report between here and Phoenix, other than that it was raining in Seattle and it's raining here and security in Seattle took forever. I managed to nap on the plane--I literally slept like the dead between the snack and the first meal service--and I actually think Delta's international meals have gotten better in the three years since I've flown them. Frightening. 

I splurged on the express train from KIX to Kyoto, but at dinner (at the modanyaki place in Kyoto station that I last ate at with KTP in summer 2008, for those playing along at home) I realized that I can't really afford to drink beer in this country. The exchange rate is unbelievable--I got ¥78.44 to the dollar at KIX and felt lucky, since they were offering ¥71 in SEA. This is why I always wait to change my cash. 

I need to work up the willpower to go down the street to the conbini for something to eat tomorrow morning before I collapse. It's wonderful to be back, truly, I'm not sure I can express quite how good it feels. I've missed Kyoto dearly, though I've tried not to talk about it too much. 

Also I got the first "Nihongo jôzu desu ne!" of the trip from my immigration agent, so I guess the days of being able to play the clueless foreigner card after I open my mouth are over. 

Yoshinaga Fumi. Not Love But Delicious Foods Make Me So Happy! Trans. William Flanagan. New York: Yen Press, 2010.

I was pointed to this manga by rushthatspeaks' review of it, and it was so worth it. Not only is it an idiosyncratic restaurant guide to Tokyo written by a discerning and passionate foodie, but it's also an absolutely hilarious dissection of the ridiculous lifestyle of the contemporary mangaka, with an added dash of paranoia thrown in due to the fact that Yoshinaga, as the hilarious and brilliant translation has it, "makes her living by drawing men engaging in anal sex." The manga is also partaking in the venerable tradition in Japanese literature of the "I-novel" (watashi shôsetsu), which applies a thin layer of fictionalization to the author's life so as to allow them to speak more freely. Yoshinaga pokes knowing fun at herself as well as all the people she shanghais into going to restaurants with her, and the reader is privileged to go along with them.

I don't know how many of these restaurants are still around, and after the Tôhoku earthquake, I don't know how many of them are operating with full power. I'll be bringing the manga to Japan with me this summer, and I shall certainly report back on both those things as I can. In the meantime, I've been watching the beautiful, and unnerving, video below rather more times than I should. The use of light in Japanese cities is more pervasive than in many U.S. cities, I think--a lot of the cityscape is a lot more like Times Square than anywhere else in that respect--and the changes the video shows are correspondingly dramatic.

Things I have learned this week: it is possible to do fine, even well, in all one's classes while approximating a zombie in terms of fatigue, of having done the reading, of brain power, and of caring. Also, I can't listen to Japanese and read Greek at the same time. Good to know!

Information: NHK's livestream has instituted time restrictions for its broadcast, but Katz of Yokoso News is live-commenting on the news in English.

Ways to Help
via wintercreek, LivingSocial has a "deal" on whereby they'll match every $5 donated for Japan relief (requires registration).
And for a $5 donation or more you can download a Vienna Teng and Alex Wong song!

Random help_japan offers:
icons by glass_icarus
translation, summary, or scanlation by torachan
1000 paper cranes/1 wish by melannen
a hand-knit Dalekling by melannen

Random help_japan offers:
Marie Brennan: short story to your prompt drawn from Japanese history or folklore
Me, starlady: translation services (no bids as of yet)

bookshop has been participating in the Japanese Cinema blogathon. Fascinating stuff!

rachelmanija is doing a read-a-thon for disaster relief in Japan and Pakistan through Saturday!

As a note, I've seen more than one person on Twitter in Japan reaffirm that what's needed is cash; these donations will unequivocally help people--the survivors of the tsunami in particular have lost everything or almost everything, frequently including their savings.