Floating Papers on the Sea of Japan by Keith Fenske January and February 2000 Copyright (c) 2000 by Keith Fenske.  All rights reserved.

January 2000: Trust Is Singular

I received a bank draft from Canada.  The draft was from a Canadian bank but issued through a Japanese bank.  The amount was Y14,182 in Japanese Yen.  For all practical purposes, this makes the bank draft Japanese.  I should be able to cash it here easily.  My bank said differently.  There is a Y1500 (US$15) service charge for cashing a bank draft from a foreign bank.  I thought this was too much.  The fact that the draft was drawn on (paid through) a Tokyo bank didn't seem to matter.  Yamagata Bank told me that they would deposit the full amount to my account in two or three weeks, after I paid the service charge in cash.  I paid the service charge.  However, the bank deposited only Y12,882 to my account because they subtracted a second Y1300 service charge passed on from the Tokyo bank.  Total service charges were Y2800 or 20% of the value of the bank draft.  I reminded the bank that I had already paid their service charge, and that this was written on the transaction form.  Their attitude was that the second service charge was beyond their control because it came from another bank.  I reminded them that they had promised to deposit the full value of the bank draft.  They admit that they said this, but now say this was a mistake.

Effectively, the first bank charged a service fee for processing a foreign bank draft while actually collecting Japanese money from a Japanese bank.  The second bank charged a similar fee for paying out money that was already on deposit with them in the transfer account of the Canadian bank.  The only foreign part was when the second bank notified the Canadian bank that the money had been paid (which does involve significant paperwork).  The customer was not dealing directly with the second bank, and should not have been bothered with the details of this second transaction.  The first bank should have paid the second service charge from the money that they had already collected for this purpose.

When employees of a bank (or any organization) make a mistake, and the bank does nothing to correct the mistake, then the bank avoids responsibility for the actions of its employees and can not be trusted in other matters in the future.  The amount of money involved can be quite small yet the relationship with the customer suffers.  Since the problem was caused by wrong information supplied by a bank employee, the proper thing to do would have been to cancel the second service charge by paying it from bank funds.

Writing for a journal such as this, the hardest part is explaining a situation clearly enough so that you understand why I am happy or sad.  If I explain a bad situation poorly, then I merely sound like I am complaining.  Complaints have no value here.  Complaints should be directed at the person causing the problem, not someone who is reading about it at a later date.  Often it takes me a few weeks before I find the right words.  The computer is of great help because I can rewrite the words many times until they say exactly what I want them to say.  The point to the bank story is not the annoying service charges, which I can afford, but the bank's attitude that all banking is done at my expense including their errors.  I could go back and be really unpleasant and force them to repay me Y1300.  What would that accomplish?  The bank staff would be angry and wouldn't want to deal with me again.  Their policy won't change.  Even if it did, they would remember me as the terrible foreigner who made so much trouble.  Organizations don't like their faults being pointed out to them, and are much more inclined to shoot the messenger than to re-examine policy.  Let someone else be the messenger.  Besides, this gives me something to write about, and that alone is worth more than 1300 Yen!

Avoiding confrontation is typically Japanese -- one reason that unreasonable or unfair situations persist.  Nobody wants to be the one who stands up.  As the Japanese saying goes, the nail that stands up gets hammered down.  Nothing will change at the bank unless the bank wants something from me (unlikely!) and I make change to be part of my price.  Or if I borrow the services of a bigger hammer: ask for help from someone more powerful.  Asking for help creates other obligations which are far more expensive than a little Y1300 service charge....

Tonight is New Year's Eve, 1999.  In a few hours, it will be the year 2000.  Normally, I sleep through this party hour.  This time, I will try to stay awake.  It's not often that all four digits roll over to start a new year.  In fact, it's only once in a millennium.  I'm getting awfully tired of hearing that word, millennium.  We have adjusted, corrected, and outright changed our calendar so many times that the exact end of the year is not really known.  Some argue that the true millennium won't really arrive until the end of the year 2000.  All of which misses the point that people are celebrating the numbers 1999 and 2000, not the calendar or the history that goes behind it.  From an astronomer's point of view, only four days make sense for the start of the calendar year: the spring and fall equinoxes (near March 21st and September 23rd) and the summer and winter solstices (June 22nd and December 22nd).  These days are significant markers for the path of the Earth around the Sun, which is what gives us our seasons which we then use to measure our year, and so are reasonable for deciding the end of one year and the start of the next.  As for numbering the years, the several systems used worldwide are based on events in religious history or the birth of royalty.  I'm in a country that uses both the year of the current emperor's reign (year 11) and the Christian calendar (year 1999 and counting).  Just be thankful they don't change emperors as often as they change prime ministers!

Friday, December 31st.  A Japanese tradition for the new year is to completely clean the house.  I will follow tradition not because I am Japanese but because my apartment really does need cleaning!

backhoe scoop on gravel

The plan for New Year's Eve 1999/2000 was to walk to several of the temples since the new year is a big event here.  The temples are quite far from my apartment.  First I walk east to the school, and then continue the same distance to the closest temple, then north to a cluster of temples in an old temple town now called the Tera-machi district but best known for the main temple of Senshoji.  That's about two hours of walking.  I did it yesterday to locate everything and take some pictures in daylight.  (Winter pictures on cloudy days are quite dull, but I did get some great shots of the scoop on a backhoe.  Yes, you can say it: photographers are weird.)  Tonight it's doing the usual winter weather thing in Yamagata: mixed snow and rain.  Not a good night for walking and I'm not sure if I will progress much farther than the school's office.  I have my 500 mL plastic bottle of Coca-Cola full of caffeine and sugar, plus the nice ingredients from my codeine cough syrup.  That ought to keep me awake and blur my vision at the same time!

My stupid cough just won't go away.  The Tsuruoka sore throat seems to have brought it back in full force.  I need the cough syrup to control the coughing so that I can get some sleep at night.  Coughing my guts out is not very relaxing and must annoy the hell out of my neighbors.  Oh well, Mr. Video Game upstairs plays until 2 or 3 AM every Friday night.  I've never figured out whether it's Doom or Quake that he prefers, but it sure is loud.

The walking tour was a waste of time.  The Senshoji temples were closed.  The closer one in Suwa-machi was open, but nothing was happening inside and outside there were just some souvenir and food stands ... and I was the only visitor.  Obviously I misunderstood.  Or I went at the wrong time.  Or on the wrong day!  That's what happens when you have only half the story.  It would be nice to have some local help to find these interesting cultural experiences but that hasn't happened yet and, after three months, it's not likely to happen.  At least the rain stopped.  The walk was cold and damp -- my breath fogged in the air -- without being wet too.  I'll go home and listen to the radio until midnight, although I don't know why Japanese announcers think the sound of their voices is more entertaining than the music.  I wish they would just shut up and play the songs.  After midnight, I will make a few phone calls to tell the rest of the world that Japan is still here in the year 2000.

Over my winter holidays, I've been reading Tom Clancy's book "Debt of Honor".  It's a long one, as they all are: 766 pages in the hardcover edition.  There are lots of details to make you believe the story.  The computer details are fine.  I'm not so sure about the photography details.  One of the spies is pretending to be a Russian reporter and is taking pictures of a missile production line with a Nikon F-series SLR camera.  According to page 205, he is changing film rolls every few minutes and getting a few hundred frames (pictures) of the production line.  On page 206, he is using Fuji 64 ASA (ISO) slide film.  On page 216, seven film cassettes are handed over to the CIA office.  The numbers don't add up.  The longest standard rolls of film in 35mm format have 36 exposures.  Seven times 36 is 252, which is not enough to be "a few hundred".  (You can modify a camera to take 100-foot spools of bulk film, but only sports photographers do that because the camera becomes too awkward to hold.)  Fuji doesn't make an ISO 64 slide film; maybe he's thinking of Kodachrome 64 from Kodak.  Finally, no matter how bright the lights may seem inside a factory, they are dim compared to sunlight, and 64-speed film is much too slow to be hand-held indoors.  No, he's not using a flash, since his "flash" is actually an ultra-bright weapon used elsewhere in the book!

We judge the accuracy of a story by comparing the information in the story to what we already know.  If the new information agrees with our previous knowledge, then we are more likely to accept the rest of the story.  This is the difficulty for writers: to provide enough detail to make the story believable, but not so much as to introduce mistakes. I certainly couldn't write Tom Clancy's novels!  My knowledge is much worse than his except in very limited areas.

Saturday, January 1st.  There are special postcards here for the new year.  If you mail them early enough (before December 24th), the post office collects the cards together and delivers them on January 1st.  That's like getting all of your Christmas cards on Christmas Day!  Quite a nice idea.

I found the New Year's crowd at Kokubunji Yakushido temple.  Commonly called Yakushi, this historic treasure is said to protect the spirit of Japan.  My other boss (Aya) dropped into the office to pick up the new year postcards while I was busy typing these words.  She mentioned that she and her husband were going to Yakushi.  This encouraged me to revisit the Suwa-machi temple, where I found moderate activity, and the Senshoji temples, which were open but almost empty except for some people paying respect to the dead.  This brought me close to the river and I followed the line of parked cars to Yakushi.  I wasn't prepared for the size of the crowd: even after 4 o'clock nearing sunset, several thousand people were waiting to ring the bell and pray at the shrine.  Hundreds more were at the food and souvenir stands.  Finally, I found what I'd been looking for for three days.  Was this a case of third time lucky?  Or a reward for hours of footwork?

I do so much walking that my thighs feel like tree trunks.  Too bad the rest of my physique resembles a marshmallow....  My feet decided to make Sunday a holiday, which was a minor disappointment since today is the first partly sunny day after four holidays of cloud and rain.  The places where I want to take pictures are far from my apartment, so I will listen to my feet and hope for sunshine on Monday.

Shopping for groceries made me feel right at home.  I have a customer card from the Daiei grocery store.  You get a stamp when you buy more than Y1000 worth of groceries.  After 20 stamps (or Y20,000), you get a Y500 discount.  That's only about 2% since you don't get stamps for any fraction less than Y1000.  There are no stamps on days with sales -- like today -- when nothing I bought was on sale.  The cards were handed out in December and expire in February.  This card will expire long before I have a chance to claim my bonus.  Feels just like every loyalty card I ever had back home!

I've lost count of how many temples are in the Yamagata area.  Most are in a state of disrepair.  The climate is very harsh on wooden buildings.  The concrete that was once used to repair or replace rock foundations has gotten old and ugly.  The temple grounds are labor intensive.  There simply isn't enough money or people to maintain all of the temples.  At the same time, they can't be abandoned because they are burial grounds for ancestors.  Some temples in city areas earn money by renting out extra space for parking.  (Before you can register a car in Japan, you must prove that you have a parking place near your home.  There is no "on street" parking.)

Other temples are objects of great reverence.  Near Yamagata is Yamadera, a cluster of mountain temples more than 1000 years old.  Bus loads of tourists come every week.  The traffic alone causes great wear and tear on the old buildings and the 1100 or so stone steps.  Services for the tourists distort the appearance even more.  Japanese tourists expect to slurp their ramen noodles and drink their sodas anywhere they visit.  Selling souvenirs is a major source of income.  The garbage becomes a problem.  (This is true of any tourist area in the world, not just Japan.)  Retrofitting utilities into old buildings is difficult and expensive if done carefully, and ugly and offensive if done "efficiently".  It bothers me to see power poles and overhead wires in an ancient temple area.  Halogen yard lights are bright and consume less electricity, but low power lights hidden inside stone lanterns would be so much closer to the original style.

I am not a purist.  I don't believe that people who live and work in historic buildings should suffer.  I'm all in favor of using the most modern materials available to reconstruct the look and feel of the original.  If the Statue of Liberty can be repaired with surgical stainless steel, why can't similar high-quality and durable materials be used to restore other historic landmarks?  The problem is money, time, and skill.  Craftsmen are very rare when you demand knowledge of the old ways and of new ways to repair, rebuild, or reconstruct in the same style.  And even the best craftsmen can't control the damage done by thousands of people walking the same path each day.  To give you an idea of the level of skill involved, part of the damage to the Statue of Liberty was caused by previous repairs.  Those repairs were carefully thought out and well planned, but had aftereffects that could not be known by the science and engineering of previous years!  We can't predict which of our actions will be considered mistakes in the future, but we can avoid mistakes that we already know about.  That is what "skill" means.  Good luck finding those craftsmen.  Historic parks in North America have fewer and fewer people who know how the old farm machinery was used, and that is from less than 100 years ago.  Now find someone who knows enough modern engineering to repair or replace broken parts, without leaving any hint that the machinery has been updated.

Monday, January 3rd.  No sunshine today.  Lots of rain.  I've been meaning to take pictures inside the school, so today will be the day.  On cloudy days, the light from the windows more closely balances the indoor lights.  Time to get out the 28mm wide-angle lens, the pink FL-D (fluorescent light) filter, the tripod, and the expired Fuji NS 160 professional film.  NS (also known as NPS) is a portrait film with low contrast and soft colors, and is totally unforgiving of exposure errors.  Fuji discontinued NS film in 35mm format in Japan; now it's only sold for the larger cameras.  Oddly enough, I was able to buy new Fuji NPS 160 film in Canada before I left.  I wonder why Fuji stopped selling the film in Japan while still making it for the overseas market?  On a trip to Tsuruoka, I found ten rolls of NS film (one shrink-wrapped "brick") in a fridge in a camera store.  The expiration date was 1998/8 but I'm gambling that the cold storage will give me a little more time.  I need to expose one roll of this film under carefully controlled conditions before I can trust the other nine rolls for people pictures.  Later: the film is fine but, as always, exposes like ISO 125 or 100 film, not the rated speed of ISO 160.

Wednesday, January 5th.  The weather reminds me of an old joke.  How do you know that it's a working day?  Because it's sunny and warm.

Monday, January 10th.  Today is a holiday: Adults' Day, a coming-of-age day for anyone who is now twenty years old.  Half of the city populace is downtown for Hatsuichi or the first traditional street market of the year, enough for me to test my theory that all people stop in the usual places when they don't know where to go or when they need time to think.  That is, in a doorway, at the entrance or exit to an escalator, or in the middle of an already crowded intersection.  As I walk around, I can't find any snow in this city known for its deep winters.  Shrubs are enclosed in bamboo supports to prevent the heavy snow from breaking branches.  Except there is no snow!  The rains of the last few weeks have washed everything away.

By describing the differences, I sometimes forget to tell you what is the same.  The 24-hour convenience stores in residential areas look like the same stores in North America, including an easy parking lot for quick errands.  The major company names are FamilyMart, Hot Spar (whose logo looks like the Spar Aerospace company's in Canada), Lawson, Save On, Sunkus, and the familiar 7-Eleven.  The layout of the stores, even among different companies, is almost identical.  Obviously someone was paying attention to the marketing experience in North America!  Major grocery stores are like American supermarkets with a selection of products suitable for the Japanese taste.  If you work at a regular job and shop at the supermarkets, you could easily forget that you are in another country.

yellow car licence plate for engines smaller than 500cc

Just be careful when you cross the road.  Japanese drivers have a habit of running the red light.  At first I thought I was being a paranoid foreigner, so I didn't say anything about this.  Then I watched more closely.  Most drivers recognize the yellow light as a sign to clear the intersection.  Many do not.  Only when they see a red light do they think about stopping.  The rule in Japan is that you can not cross the stop line (marked on the pavement) after the light turns red.  By my observation, the light turns red, I look at the stop line, and cars continue to cross for one or two seconds.  For those few seconds, I have a green pedestrian light in the other direction!  Practice defensive walking.  Also be careful of blind alleys and side streets.  Cars coming out of those little streets often stop just short of the larger street, putting a lot of metal between you and the next sidewalk.  Pedestrians do have the right of way in Japan, legally and morally, but that's not going to comfort you much if your legs get crushed.

Being careful where you walk and not trusting drivers is good advice anywhere.  Some things don't change.

I spent fifteen minutes staring at the neighborhood map posted outside my apartment building before discovering that my street wasn't on the map.  A passing mother and child explained to me that the map begins with the next street.  I guess I won't be taking pictures of that map to send home!  I wonder which neighborhood has a map that shows my street?

A friend in south Japan commented that pizza is expensive here compared to Italy where it's a more traditional food.  The only pizza I'd eaten was the small lunch size at Pizza Hut costing about Y800.  I walked down the street to Strawberry Cones ("world's best pizza & ice cream since 1983 in Japan") and ordered a medium shrimp and mixed seafood pizza.  I picked that one because I know the word "ebi" for shrimp.  At Y1900 (US$19), it wasn't cheap but it tasted good, and they gave me a 10% discount for takeout.  I burped quite a lot that evening.  Now if only they had Italian cola....

Tuesday, January 11th.  Time for my first Japanese haircut, which is always a challenge in a new language.  The barber asked me what I wanted by motioning with his hands and asking yes or no.  The result is good, considering what I gave them to work with!  Do I look taller and more handsome?  Our school secretary says I look better -- not worse -- so I'll take that as a yes.

At Christmas, my other boss gave me two Miffy children's books for learning Japanese.  The titles translate as "Miffy's Alphabet" and "Miffy's From 1 To 10".  They're fun and at my low level, so today I went out and bought the third book in the series: "Miffy's What Time Is It?"  After a few months of study, I might even pass the quiz!

Wednesday, January 19th.  My editors (Ben J. and company) have strongly suggested putting pictures on this web page.  Who am I to argue?  Especially since they've offered to scan the photos and to store them on their server, which has a lot more web space than I do.  There will be small "thumbnail" pictures along the left or right sides of the text.  Click on a thumbnail for a larger view.  Maybe there will be clever captions.  I don't know how to put captions on pictures when the HTML text flows around the picture.  Perhaps Ben can figure that out.  I did this once with a table inside a table, but the result was ugly because the text didn't flow properly when I changed fonts or screen sizes.  Maybe the thumbnails can be a border dividing the different monthly sections?  Only my editor knows for sure!  This is a strange situation for me, since this is my web page and Ben is prohibited from changing the text or touching any of the other pages, but the Japan pictures will be entirely new and I can't ask Ben to do something creative without giving him free reign.  All I can say is: a package of prints is on its way.  I'll check back later to see what happens on my own web page....

Thursday, January 20th.  Another trip to Tsuruoka.  Pizza Hut was closed.  I don't know why.  The lights were on, a waitress was wandering around inside setting the tables, but the door was locked with a sign saying "closed".  I couldn't read the kanji explanation.  The posted business hours are from 11 AM to 10 PM.  Maybe this doesn't include afternoons when hungry people get off the bus after thinking about pizza for two hours!  This did not put me in a good mood for the 3 km walk to the train station in equally lousy weather (pelletized snow).  I ate a bag of "Ritz cheese sando" (Ritz cracker cheese sandwiches) in the food court of the Daiei department store.  Somehow it wasn't the same.

Friday, January 21st.  Winter is back.  The bus ride home had zero visibility in spots because of blowing snow.  I wasn't really looking at the winter wonderland.  My glasses are breaking.  A crack has opened in the metal bridge over the nose.  I'll be lucky to finish the day without them falling apart completely.  At least I have a spare pair at my apartment, while I ship this pair to Canada for repairs.  Yes, there are many optical stores in Japan that could attempt the repairs.  However, my optometrist in Canada sold me these glasses and is much more likely to find new parts.  Previously, damaged frames were replaced under warranty.  Today's problem looks like metal fatigue, not abuse by the owner, which is surprising considering all that I've done to them.

Tuesday, January 25th.  My fourth payday.  I like days like today.  After next month, I will have paid for the cost of coming here and starting a new job with a new apartment in a new city.  The Canadian government says that I should declare my 1999 Japanese income on my Canadian tax form, then subtract Japanese taxes paid and reasonable expenses.  That would basically leave me at zero since it has taken four months to pay for the first three months of being here!

A Goose in the Car

February 2000: Make Mistakes With Confidence

Soon my editors will be inserting hyperlinks to stories that my students or I write while I am in Japan.  After November's journal is the link to a comparison between Japanese and Korean chopsticks, which was a topic in one of my discussion classes.  After January's journal is a love story between a goose and a car.  February is only a few days old and already has a dark story about a birthday cake.  Read it twice before you try to guess the meaning....

The Birthday Cake

Tuesday, February 8th.  The snow is gone again.  This is not good news for the city of Yonezawa, which has its annual snow lantern festival on Saturday and Sunday.  It is good news for the construction crews that are widening a road near my apartment.  Yesterday they started dismantling a Nisseki gas station.  I hope nobody smokes there today.  There is the unmistakable odor of gasoline in the air, and I can see mixed water and gasoline flowing in the gutters.  (Gutters here are concrete trenches beside the road which are often exposed but normally covered by concrete blocks.)  The gutters are dry above the gas station so I know where the liquid is coming from.

Wednesday, February 9th.  The snow is back.  The snow is gone, the snow is here, the snow is gone, the snow is back, the snow is gone.  There, that's the weather forecast for the next couple of months!

Something that stays gone is the department stores.  Too many large department stores were built during the economic enthusiasm of the 1970's and early 1980's.  The spending habits of the Japanese people have changed.  First, by becoming more thrifty -- witness the success of Y100 or "dollar" stores for inexpensive household goods.  Second, by the introduction of "big box" retailers where one giant store specializes in a single product area such as electronic goods, sporting goods, or home improvement (hardware).  Department stores can compete by offering a carefully limited selection of products at reasonable prices.  For example, when I was looking for a radio/cassette/CD player, Daiei had the model that I liked for the same price as the electronic giants.  Other stores concentrate more on the remaining upscale markets such as clothing.  However, their balance sheets are not good.  Some nation-wide retail chains are several billion dollars in debt, including the Daiei group whose Daiei Hawks baseball team in Fukuoka won the national championship and delivered much needed advertising.  (Don't ask for exact numbers: Japanese accounting practices are far from transparent.  American companies that owed this much money would be bankrupt; not so in Japan.)  In smaller cities with less competition, the response is to reduce operations to the lower floors of a much larger building.  In big city markets, entire stores disappear: our 7-floor Vivre store closed on January 10th.  The Tokyo-based Nagasakiya group filed for protection from creditors on February 13th with declared debts of Y380 billion, which is about US$3.5 billion -- but I admit I've never seen this store.  A fancy Yamagata store that I have visited several times, Matsuzakaya, will close on August 20th after years of losing money in its 8-floor downtown location.  As in America, downtown retail areas are dying.

There also appears to be more big, solid bank buildings than the population can support.  After my previous comments on banking fees, this is one train of thought that I shouldn't pursue....

Friday, February 11th is "National Foundation Day", another holiday that I don't understand.  I was taking pictures in a snowstorm in Tsuruoka, so now my camera is disassembled and drying out -- along with all the accessories and the camera bag -- so that I can take pictures tomorrow in the snow in Yonezawa.  It's like washing your clothes: while all the clothes are never clean at the same time, you feel (and smell!) better if most of your clothes are clean most of the time.  Just be careful where you step on my linoleum floor: these "clothes" are fragile.

Makoto Omori and Keith Fenske at Ban Ban Ya bento restaurant

As I receive letters, I answer questions once, think about my answer for a while, reconsider, and then write a better answer for the web page.  I joke that I sometimes "over-generalize" because I write too much based on limited knowledge.  Yet that is my situation.  I see much, I understand little, and I can only guess at how big the gap is.  Think of the restaurants in the club district near the school.  I don't know what kind of food they serve because I can't read kanji.  Even if I could read the menu, I wouldn't know what the words meant because I have no knowledge of the various Japanese foods.  So I eat food that is familiar to me.  Thus, there is a huge gap between what I do eat and what is available.

Saturday, February 12th was the snow lantern festival (Yuki-doro Matsuri) in Yonezawa.  This was the first day that I took the train for personal interest unrelated to my job.  I wandered over to Yamagata station in the morning, took a few pictures, and didn't worry about the train schedule.  Trains leave every hour and I had lots of time.  I took a few more pictures at Yonezawa station and walked to Matsugasaki Park, former location of Yonezawa Castle and present location of Uesugi Shrine.  Melting temperatures had softened the snow lanterns; several collapsed.  The festival staff rebuilt as many as they could.  With that kind of dedication to the spirit of the festival, it was hard not to have a good time.  I finished one roll of film in the daylight.  Rain started in late afternoon, and I put my camera in a plastic bag for another roll of film in the evening.  (Only the front of the lens is actually exposed, with a filter between the actual lens and the outside world.)  As the old photographer's joke goes, I'll know if I had a good time after I get the film developed!  What didn't melt on Saturday is also available for viewing on Sunday.

Yonezawa Snow Lantern Festival

There were many people with cameras, as is usual in Japan, but only a few who seemed to know what they were doing.  I am surprised at how many people (usually men) carry expensive camera equipment that looks completely new, including the bags and tripods.  Do they ever kneel in the mud to get a good picture?  I doubt it.  Real cameras get scratched and dirty because real cameras get used.  Let me explain.  The light from candles is very weak, and it appears strongly orange on film.  To make a picture that looks the same as what our eyes see, you need a long exposure and a blue color correction filter.  I was using ISO 100 film with an 80A blue filter.  My exposure times were 30 seconds at f/4 -- with a tripod, of course!  Without the filter, you would still need 8 seconds.  With faster film (ISO 800), one second is needed.  Nobody can hold a camera perfectly steady for one second.  A tripod is absolutely necessary.  Flashes are useless because candles are sources of light.  It simply was not possible to get a good picture with a compact camera.  I only saw five or six people who were doing what was necessary to get a good picture.  The rest will probably complain that their photofinishing stores did a bad job, which is not fair to the stores because there's nothing on the negatives.  There was even one man using a white card to bounce his flash ... off what?  There's no ceiling outdoors!

The evening was marred by an incident on the way home.  I was leaving a souvenir (o-miyage) store.  As I pushed open the door, I hit an older teenaged boy.  (I'll be polite and not call him a punk.)  He wasn't going in or out of the door; he was standing there to stay out of the rain.  He grabbed me, shoved me backwards, and started shouting at me.  Sometimes it's helpful to be a stupid foreigner and not understand what people are saying.  I just looked surprised, gestured towards the door with my hand, and said "doa desu" in my kindergarten voice.  ("It's a door.")  Then I turned and walked away.  He didn't follow, which was good, because he acted like he was looking for a fight.  Maybe that was his reason for standing in front of a door.  I hope that he continues to stand in front of doors and meets someone stronger who objects to his behavior in a physical way.  I'm not going to get into a fight.  Should I win, the story would be about how a foreign teacher beat up an innocent little boy.  It's much more likely that I would lose, considering the violent undertone in Japanese male culture.  Either way, it's bad news for me.  I must careful to avoid similar situations in the future.

(The plate-glass entrance doors on many Japanese stores swing both ways.  There may be small signs saying "push" ("osu") when going in, and "pull" ("hiku") when going out, but Japanese people don't really pay attention to the signs.  If the doors can be pushed, then they push in both directions.  Anyone standing in front of the doors will eventually get hit.  This is especially true at night when the lighting is poor and the doors are tinted: people inside truly can not see what is outside.  I was in a crowd of people all leaving at the same time.  Pulling the door inward would have been awkward, and I honestly don't know if that particular door does swing inward.)

Monday, February 14th.  Valentine's Day is very strange here.  On "St. Valentine's Day" as they call it (combining the name of the man with the name of the day), girls give chocolate to boys.  There is no romance.  It's an exchange of obligations.  Women give chocolates to their male co-workers and bosses.  The boys are expected to return the favor on "White Day" (March 14th).  For us, Valentine's Day is a flurry of mushy cards at elementary school, and romantic sharing between couples.  The Japanese have hijacked the name and created a day near and dear to the hearts of retailers.

Tuesday, February 15th.  After months of medicine that didn't help, I finally got rid of my cough with a traditional family solution (pun intended): gargling with warm salt water, so salty that you almost choke.  Even though my cough was diagnosed as an inherited tendency towards bronchitis, I've never been convinced of this because I've met several people with the same persistent dry cough with symptoms similar to a throat infection and low-grade fever.  So, in the spirit of togetherness, everybody now grab your salt shakers and gargle with me!

wooden mallet

I fell down some icy stairs today, bouncing about three times on the way down.  I hurt both ankles, my left wrist, and bruised my side.  Fortunately, nothing was sprained or broken.  This happened at a pedestrian walkway going under the road between our school and the train station.  The steps looked clear and dry.  They weren't.  There was a thin layer of ice and water.  It was so slippery that I didn't stop falling until I reached the next dry landing.  A few days later, I looked at the stairs and I could see what had happened.  The stairs and the surrounding sidewalk are a decorative hard rock.  (I can't say what kind of rock because it looks "cultured" or manufactured.)  The sidewalk slopes towards the stairwell.  There is a slight lip of between one and two centimeters in front of the stairwell, but there is no drainage grating.  The lip is enough to cause rain runoff to flow around the stairwell onto the street.  It's not enough to stop runoff from melting snow because the snow piles higher than the lip, and people track snow with their shoes.  There are warm water pipes under downtown sidewalks to keep them clear, but no similar pipes under these stairs.  It's a freezing zone.  Some sand sprinkled on the steps would help.  However, there are problems with such a low tech solution.  Since temperatures range from -5 degrees Celsius at night to +3 degrees in the daytime, the typical attitude is to wait for the snow to melt.  Someone would have to pay attention to the condition of the stairs and apply sand when necessary.  Sand looks dirty and must be cleaned up later.  It's easier to ignore the problem and hope that nobody kills themselves.  After all, they should look where they're going, shouldn't they?  My opinion is that a civil engineer made a mistake when drawing up plans for this sidewalk and stairwell.  A lot of money is spent on public works projects in Japan, not all of it wisely.

Sunday, February 20th.  English words found on a package of "Strawberry Cake" cookies from the Bourbon company: "Enjoy the superb taste of strawberry cream with the finest ingredients.  Beautiful things are timeless.  Women's throughout history have never ceased to yearn for beauty."  The connection between cookies and the beauty of women escapes me....  For the size of these companies, they could afford to hire an English-speaking editor to check their spelling and grammar before they print a million packages of nonsense!

Monday, February 21st.  About two months ago, in December, I discovered water under the foam mattress of my futon bed.  It was nice, clean water -- I'm not so old that I pee in my bed! -- and only on the bottom of the mattress.  I tried moving the mattress to another location.  Same problem.  Then I figured it out.  My floor is linoleum.  My bed is on the floor with no air space between or tatami mats.  The heater is a forced-air unit on the wall.  There is no air circulation under my bed, so the floor is cold, my body is warm, and the water is condensation!  Every morning, I must air out the mattress.  It folds into three panels and I stand it upright in the middle of the floor.  Every evening I must really "make" my bed by putting all the pieces back together.

In my children's classes, most of the students now know the alphabet and can spell their names.  Given a random deck of alphabet flash cards, most are getting at least 22 correct and many get all 26 correct!  When they come to class, they can find their own textbooks even when I put their student book, workbook, and notebook in different places, mixed together with books from other students.  Some recognize dialog words in the textbook.  I don't ask them to read, because this isn't expected for such beginners, but they have discovered that reading is easier than memorizing.

Tuesday, February 22nd.  Huge piles of snow in Yonezawa ... too bad the snow lantern festival isn't this weekend instead of two weeks ago!  One of my pictures turned out well, partly by luck and partly by careful planning.  I made several reprints for the office and the students in Yonezawa who encouraged me to go to the festival and enter the photo contest.  The contest entry requires an enlarged print of 254 x 368 mm, that is, 10" x 14.5".  Fujicolor is a co-sponsor of the contest, so they will deliver the enlargement to Yonezawa after I fill out a contest entry form and pay for the print (on sale for Y800).  The winner gets Y30,000 (US$300) and bragging rights; the festival gets the negative for advertising next year's festival.  Asking for the negative is understandable yet not really necessary since today's computers can scan the enlarged print at high resolution.  However, legal tradition is that the person who possesses the negative also owns the rights.

Thursday, February 24th.  Tsuruoka no ofukuken (Tsuruoka round-trip ticket).  Depending upon which way the wind drifts through the mountains, some road signs are buried in snow ... and they're two meters (6 feet) above the ground!  I can see why these areas were considered impassable in the winter in ancient times.  Commerce developed along the Mogami river down to the seaport of Sakata, and from there to other port cities in Japan.  There is a good history display at the Bunshokan or former Yamagata prefectural office.  (A prefecture is an administrative region like an American state or a Canadian province.)  Originally built in 1916, the Bunshokan was in poor condition by 1986 when restoration began over a ten-year period.  The attention to detail is excellent.  Original furniture and office carpets were retained.  New wallpaper and hallway linoleum were re-created from fragments of the originals and, yes, the linoleum is nailed down not glued!  More modern heating, ventilation, power, and utilities were installed unobtrusively.  The whole building has a nearly constant temperature and humidity.  I particularly liked the way that electrical outlets were added to each room.  The building architecture is an English Renaissance style with brass fixtures; the electrical outlets are hidden in pop-up brass disks in the floor!  The building is both a museum and a center of community activity.  Our school will have our annual children's presentations in the assembly hall where the government members once sat.

I keep wondering when I will run out of things to say.  I guess when I do, then it's time to go home....  I did learn the Japanese word for athlete's foot: "mizumushi" or "water insect" which is a more accurate description than the English words, although the French words "foot mushroom" are even better.  Is that something you really want to know about?

Copyright (c) 2000 by Keith Fenske.  All rights reserved.
 

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