I know that a simple web search could have solved this problem, but then it never occurred to me to do it.

I think i mentioned this when I was posting about my stay in Japan. But ever since I got napster, long ago... and it will be missed, I have known about this band called the ZooBombs (NO-FI "MAGAZINE" interview with ZOOBOMBS). I found two songs of theirs by accident: Mo' Funky and Soul Bomb. They were great. When I told Salmon about them, she already knew and all that. Then came 9/11 and the Zoobombs cancelled their tour. Or something like that.

I lost my chance. But when i got to Japan, it was time to go ZooBombs shopping. No luck. No band named ZooBombs. Very helpful people in the record stores, but no ZooBombs. There was a very small Zed section though. Like 3 CDs. And one of them was called "Super Funcy of Zbons". So I got it on a whim. And viola! It was ZooBombs! I just was spelling it wrong....

Fast forward to today. Yuka and I took the streetcar along Queen to Roncesville, and walked up Roncesville (someone spell this right) to Howard Park, then all the way back down Dundas to home. That's about a 2-2.5 hour walk, with lots of stops.

Going up Roncesville, I found a store called "Boom, she said." Of course other people know it by the non-dyslexic name of "She said Boom." It is the twin of the "Boom, she said" near Salmon's house.

And inside, in the Zed section, they had a CD called "Let it Bomb" by the ZooBombs!

Two countries. Two names. Both in English. One band.

Now I know... and they rock.

Yuka found a reference to 12 year old Charlotte Aldebron on the Asahi New web site. She seems to be getting a lot of press for her view on war. Of course, it took us forever to find her web site, as names are written different in Japanese, and we had to guess... Charlotte's Peace Rally Speech is interesting to me, as it is something that gets heard in the media in times of trouble... young people taking the future by the horns and making an impassioned plea for peace/the environment/willy the whale. I'm a teacher, so of course this is good. But what triggers the ever close to the surface cynic in me is how great a sound bite it makes in the media, and again how easily it is dismissed by most people with the condescending "children just don't understand the issues" retort..

When I was in Japan, I saw PAPAYA SUZUKI WITH OYAJI DANCERS. It was the funniest thing I saw that month. A bunch of wonderfully aging Japanese guys dancing in Bollywood. Yuka helped me track down the site. Now I'll go and complain that there's no English site. How monolingual of me.

Gawd. I miss tokyo. I'm on the Keisei Skyliner going from Ueno to Narita airport. And as I thought last night as I was coming in, I can't imagine that I've ever seen so packed a city ever. You can reach out from the window of your apartment and touch the house next to you. You can look through your neighbour's window, and right through their house, and watch the TV in the living room of the house beside it. Yet people live here, thrive. It is not a ghetto or a jungle... but a massive uneasy alliance of humans... endlessly alive and varied. Well, not so varied. And some might say not so alive, but amazing none the less. The thing that gets me, as someone who has thought a bit about community and bioregionality and the environment is that Tokyo really seems to have no plan. No urban development plan with any consistence. All the houses out my window are less than 4-5 meters from the track. Windows are right open to the trains. And the houses and apartments give way to commercial and industrial facilities without a moment's warning, only to immediately give way to a temple or more houses the train station I'm at now... is actually 5 or more stories in the air, hovering over apartment buildings below and there are 6 tracks of rail overlapping. Does tokyo work because of this lack of planning? Think about it. The cities with big problems in the west... NYC, Chicago... whatever designed. And administered, with places for residence and places for commerce and places for industry. The organization of locations of human activity seems to collect and consolidate human activity. according to some rational empirical sense of order. And what in life is really so ordered? Nothing I know. Life and experience is chaotic. Dynamic... and yes, of course fecund. Could a tokyo exist as it does because of the inherent chaos of its urban structure. A structure that no amount of social engineering and concrete, and trains can ever really segment into an ordered whole.

In the past, I had compared Tokyo to a cancer, because of its grown and uncontrolled nature. But perhaps it is the ordered cities that give rise to cancers, because they cannot engage successfully with the chaos of human experience. And then perhaps Tokyo is more like the swamp. The swamp is in my mind an ultimately good location. One of many growing things in a messy struggle for self expression. Versus the well ordered planted field which has lost everything but the vaguest genetic memory of it's organic and biological origins.

I'm not trying to be profound... just looking at the world out my window, and trying to figure out why it is that I find so much appealing in this dense maelstrom of cluttered buildings, and endlessly confused streets, bifurcated by these railways of seeming order, which are themselves, seen from a sufficient distance to be just a metatangle of transportation. I feel immediately more in touch with tokyo through its physical being than I did with Hakodate because of this intricate web of incommensurable spider structures all striving for the same rays of light and life. And I'm still not trying to be profound... just looking for words to conceptualize what I feel, as the train I'm on is passing under a contrcuction site, and travelling along side it... and the construction is to build another level of trains above tracks above the one's we're on now.

In Toronto, we have the gardner expressway. It is the noose around our city. The black mark that keeps us from our rightful place on the water front. Is it really the 4 lanes of transportation 4 stories in the air? Tokyo has more elevated transportation that Toronto probably has streets. And remember that Tokyo probably has the population of Canada crammed into the greater toronto area. I don't think that it is the expressway that is a problem. But that it is not 2 stories in the air, as it needs to be to allow transport trucks to go under it, but 4 or 5 stories. Not that it is 50 meters wide, but that there are 50 meters on either side in which nothing is allowed to grow. It is not the pathway, but the space that it is, zoned from being a path to being a monolythic impediment. So, do you remove the imedement or do you remove the pathway. Couldn't you leave the pathway in tact? and surround it with life? yes, it would be cosmetic, but I'm wondering if the problem is itself not just cosmetic. If you covered the gardner expressway with ivy and had it dripping with green, and surrounded it with buildings, enclosed green houses, malls, movie theatres or just growing stuff that might suck up the toxins that it produced. Night clubs and bars would be great. No worries about auto exhaust or noise with the music and second hand smoke. I do think that homes would not be a good idea, because they'd quickly become a ghetto.. .but what am I saying, the south side of the gardner is already awash with condos that remind em a bit of what is ubiquitous in Tokyo.

So, what are we left with at the end of my musings? Perhaps a couple of things. One is a deep and abiding questioning about the notion of urban planning, and the "a place for everything and everything in its place" mentality. Not that I've ever seen planning accomplish much good in this regard. Well... what's left. I think that I'm not advocating a free for all of capitalist expansion for the market. The market is what prefers order, wanting only variances to increase profit. I think that rather than putting industry afar away that allowing industry to co-habitate with homes, but focus on industry that is no more polluting per unit area than the houses are. The same goes for agriculture and commercial locations. I wouldn't mind living next to MacDonalds, if macdonalds produced no more garbage, smell, waste, noise than any of the houses around it did. It is not the industry that is a problem, but the fact that when we segregate or ghettoize a facet of our lives, we allow that facet usually to have a greater negative impact on our lives than we would if it was next to us... the Nimby mentality, no doubt. but if everything is "in your back yard so to speak, then in a sense you have to confront your pollution. Confront your noise. Confront your garbage. I'm not going to apply this to tokyo, except to say that they have at least confronted some of this, successfully or not and I somehow have left ueno forty minutes ago, and am now pretty far from tokyo, perhaps 10 minutes from narita, in a world that is newer, and seemingly more ordered. I think Alan called it something like shopping mall country, or parking lot country. Or someone did. I guess when you have the car, and economies of scale, the structures are forced back onto even a non system. The political economy of the car culture requires that it have primary affordance... hmmm... No wonder we can't ban cars from Toronto. THey drive our culture, so to unuse them would be to divest ourselves of our own culture. And how can anyone be expected to do that? And as I watch the drainage pipe for a train terminus empty into the ditch next to a dozen acres of rice fields, you'll get my sense that I'm not ever ever positioning Tokyo or Japan as having some essentialized solution or quazi-aboriginal closer touch which the way things should be, but that every time I experience it, Tokyo sheds light on every other social experience I have with cities and urban spaces.

Ah... my flight awaits.

Alan emailed me this this morning from the other part of the house. It isn't even just funny any more. Microsoft is just a technological terrorist. Opera Press Release: Opera releases "Bork" edition

I'm finally gone. Atsuko's taking me to the airport now. Had a couple of hours of work to do here at FUN to try and finish things off... done as best I could. Out to a nepalese place tonight with Alan and Yuko. Spending the money I'd saved for a hotel to treat them, since they're letting me stay on the floor. That is a totally great use of money. Better than paying for a hotel. Thanks Alan!

See y'all.

And thanks SO VERY much to Larry and Atsuko for inviting me over for a wooly and wonderful time. And thanks to Hillel, Lehan, Bob, Caroline and Satoko over at FUN for making it a great experience.

Not too much to talk about today... unless you want to hear about techy stuff. Been doing laundry and packing, and looking for odds and ends.

And thanks to my great amazing travel agent (Robin who works at distinguishedtravel. If you want his contact info, just let me know), I changed my flight, and I'm going to Tokyo at 1:35pm tomorrow, arriving at 3:00pm. Unlike most travel agents, Robin never sleeps. And unlike web pages, he responds to normal Jason requests, like "Robin, can I go earlier or something?" And even when he gets it straight and I screw it up, he fixes things with out a hitch. Thanks Robin.

I'll have time to spend with Alan and Yuko. And say bye to japan without having to rush.

See you when I get back!

Hakodate beer review. With new pictures.

Saturday.
I'm a bit shocked. Hakodate has not only got a really good microbrewery, it has three. I'm drinking "Hakodate Beer" brand at the moment as I sit in the factory brew pub on the harbour downtown. The beer is "Two Hearts". Their valentines day brew. Only in Japan would such a beer be a bitter dark ale, almost a stout.

It is a bit thin for me, as a lover of Russian Imperial Stout, but it is ideal as a summer dark, and probably more than enough for the average palate. THey have other regular brews: a weizen, alt, ale and a kolsch. I don't know what a kolsch is, but I'll look it up. I bet it is a bitter, since it has the caption, "Enjoy its bitter and clear taste." Versus the alt: "Enjoy its rich and bitter taste." They sound like imperative statements to me. And who am i to not follow orders to the letter?

I'll bring home some of this, as it comes in neat, though all too small, cans. Actually they have 125mil and 3 litre sizes. If you don't already know, most of Japanese beer comes in 1 million and a half sizes from 125 mil up to 4 litres, in 250 mil increments.

Just finished a wonderful "set dinner" of broiled Hokke (fish). When I walked by the fish market on the way down, I saw this fish for sale eve rwhere, but I don't know what the english name is. Generic Delicious Fish.

Finishing off another beer too. The weizen. That's wheat beer for you unlettered in the art of zymurgy. More fruit and yeasty zip than regular beer. Also usually cloudy. THough this one seems partially filtered. I think it is the wheat proteins that make it white. Dave? Am I right?

Hats off to larry (an a bonus for anyone who got the del shannon ref) for the use of an iPod. And apologies to Bernie. He and I talked about carrying music around, and I said that I didn't like having music on when walking. I was wrong. The celtic guitar music in my earphones almost completely washes out the Whitney Huston drone. Almost but not enough.. Need something more acoustically dense... Ramones: Cretin Hop.

It is 4pm. I left my place at about 12:30, and walked all the way down here. Took a bit over 2 hours, about 10-12k I'm told. I was too lazy to wait for the bus, and too confused, and I did want to walk all the way down here once. Kenny and I made it half way down here a couple of weeks ago, before larry caught up with us in his SUV.

I have not spent as much time down here as I thought I would. Skiing with larry ate up saturdays wonderfully. But I did make it down here a couple of times. Perhaps four. I'd probably live down here in the summer if I was in Hakodate. The old part of town is definitely big enough to keep one occupied. And if I had to have a car to live in Hokkaido at all, I'd rather be down here, and drive out than the reverse.

Today's goal is shopping. The weeks' goal is to read some chapters I'm to be editing for the handbook joel and I are working on. And to get a couple of conference proposals in for the AoIR conference this coming october. Prolly do that tomorrow, that is today in terms of when I update this journal. Gak.

I just remembered that I'm having trouble sending email to hotmail, fis, chass and kmdi. Though I sincerely doubt that anyone from these domains are reading my blog, aside from KAT! and Julia (sometimes juliaD). But I've talked to them enough on IMs.

A big "Hi!" to EvaB. I finally connected with her on iChat this week.

Oh, This Weizen is definitely the best glass of beer I have ever had in Japan. Bar none. The only thing that would make it better would be if it was naturally carbonated, and if it was bigger.

Love to you all to whom that wouldn't be an embarassing statement to make, and a profoundly respectful "best wishes" to the rest of you. And we know who you all are. At least in a general statistical sense.

it is now 4:17 pm, and the waiter has taken my plate and glass, and left me with a hot glass of green tea. Sweet.

Not that much. It was a burner of day. Ripping up floor tiles and laying down ethernet cables. Then lifing them back up and taking them out. And back, and forth... "Thirty years with my head in a dirty oven. This is marriage?"

Was installing a highspeed wireless network for St Larry and crew. Finally got it figured out in the end. It is tough when you can't go and ask the networking guys how things are set up, cause they don't want to tell you, cause then you might know that it is borked.

But we finally worked out a compromise, larry and I, that bypassed the networking guys. Remind me to tell you about them some day. They all sit in a room on the third floor, and they have slippers on. And they came to work in suits, but they took their jackets off, though not their ties. And they work for a big company that contracted them out to the university. And they're scared that if they let anyone do anything that something might break and they'd be thrown down a deep dark hole. But they seem like nice guys.

Anyway, nothing much more useful done, as it took all day. What happened to the funding proposals and the conference proposals I'm to write? Not much. That'll be all next week, or larry's toast. And so am I.

Luckily I got to chat with yuka for a good bit, then Julia (sometimes JuliaD), and Simsim. Simsim did a great job redesigning her blog, by the way.

Tomorrow I'm going shopping. And I hope that that's going to be a great event. Pray for me.

This is just for yuka... I had to hide my camera and set it to autoshoot to catch this miraculous shiba inu!

I just had to show you this. A nice pesto pasta with a myriad of veggies and flash fried pork. All cooked in a single 4" pan. The wine was pretty good too.

And yes, this is my entire kitchen. Well, there is a fridge and a microwave.

I'm chatting with yuka in iChat, and she wanted to know how I could cook it in the small bowl... so: I had to cook fast. First cook the meat in pesto and olive oil. Put the results in bowl #1. And cover it with the chopping board. Then cook veggies in the same pan/sauce, and dump it in bowl #2, covered with a plate. Then pasta. The put pasta on plate, and reheat the veggies and pork, and voila.

Snow Massage.

Dr. Chau is going to hate me. Whether, she reads this or not. I think that today, I undid the past couple of years of chiropractic therapy, let alone a few millennia of special evolution.

Today I went snowboarding for the first time ever at Greenpia Onuma, just across the lake Onuma valley from Nanai, where I went skiing for the first time in only 20 years. THAT was an unqualified success, and a triumph of experience over whatever experience should triumph over.

Yes, snowboarding should be illegal for over 40s.

I have no bones left. I'm not just jellied protoplasm on toast. And anything that still resembles a muscle is as tight and stiff as the recently jellied bones. From human to ameba in 4 hours or less.

My calves are as hard as diamonds. Walking is not an option. My feet feel like they were on loan to the Russian ballet, ridden hard and put away wet by the most prima of ballerinas. My knees. They're in good shape. Somehow falling on your knees is not a painful thing when snowboarding. I think that this is due to the need to pray for deliverance from the spirit of bravado that led you down the path to consider snowboarding in the first place. Arms, elbows, wrists, fingers all struck hard surfaces with the intensity of a cannibal with a meat tenderize mallet. My butt hurts. We can leave it at that. My lower spine, however, cannot be left as is. It needs remedial therapy. It was wacked, but good. Upper back? I'm not sure if it was the whiplash from smashing the back of my head into the snow, or if it was merely the tension and fear now permanently lodged therein. The fear of snowboarding.

Of course I loved snowboarding. Once I figured out that you will die if you try to treat a snowboard like skiis, and that it is easier on a steep fast hill than on a slow one, things got both easier and less painful. When you fall at high speeds you tend to slide on your butt or well padded stomach. When you fall at slow speeds... like almost standing, you fall like someone who tries to walk with their feet tied to a big flat piece of wood. You fall flat on your: face, back, butt. All damage was done on the easiest hill. The flying cartwheels that I did down the main intermediate hill were mere technical faux pas. Not even a memory.

So, as Larry and Ayaka mastered Ayaka's fear of skiing on the easier hill, I moved up to the intermediate. And larry even got the opportunity for a run down the difficult hills.

There are no pictures, of course. I was wise enough to realize, before the fact, that no camera, let alone a mother's child, would survive this experience. So the camera stayed in the car, surviving to bring you this wonderful picture of Ayaka cutting onions.

Oh, I did forget to mention that the hills were filled with classes of high school students, all in matching outfits, learning to ski and snowboard. The hills were dotted with hundreds of kids in various states of disrepair. The obstacle course they themselves created merely added to the joy and confusion.

As I write, we have two nice bottle ofchianti open, and larry's cooking up a pasta storm. Ayaka's on her gameboy, having finished her cooking chores. Larry certainly has 'italian' figured out in a way that is pretty amazing. I have never seen that much garlic in my life. I wish I knew how to cook like that. And before I go, I have to learn how to make a proper italian salad. I was stuffed to exploding... especially since wine is a bit cheaper here than in Canada. Though the quality is not as good on average, Larry helped me find some stuff that turned out to be really good.

Just for comparison, you can get bottles of french wine here for 300 yen. That's about $3.60 canadian. I got a couple of bottles of Rhone valley stuff for $7 which looks drinkable. Just need to try it out... tonight perhaps.

There was a wonderful package waiting for me when I got back to the Davies-Noguchi household. It was a large box from professor Yoshiko Akamatsu at Notre Dame Seishin University. Yoshiko's a friend of yuka and mine, originally through LM Montgomery conferences. Yuka had told me that Yoshiko was reading my journal, and had invited me to visit her. Okayama is pretty far from Hokkaido though, and it wasn't really possible this trip. But she sent me this wonderful package full of oranges and mandarins and kiwii from her garden, as well as some "Shinchan" candy, which I may never open, but add to my great shinchancollection. I must open the other package, which seems to be chocolate hena dolls. I'll have to take it up to the university to get some professional help in setting this up, you just have to see it... It was a great surprise, and an even greater breakfast!

It is a winter wonderland like I've not seen in decades, so I thought I'd share: night snow, bright snow, white snow. (sorry, the images are a bit big)

kawaii, animals, and strange pictures abound... at least on my web site. Here's a page for Yuka, that I think I blogged about already, but it is updated. The first image is for Salmon, and her ilk. The next few are for Rochelle, if she's reading this blog. And for Rochelle if she is not. Then dogs and cats for Yuka... with a Ken+cat at the end. That's it for now folks. Well, just a second, as I upload more pictures.

I've been going camping with Kenny for almost 20 years. Most always to Algonquin Park, sometimes to my mom and larz' place at Eagle Lakes. Sometimes even with our partners, though Yuka and Angela have supreme good taste and usually prefer that we go off on our own.

Well, it has gone too far. We're sitting in my apartment in Hokkaido, Japan. And we realized it was back to our old camping lifestyle. Which means sitting around, making coffee by the fire. Hanging the bear bags. Foraging for firewood. Making stupid comments to one another from our sleeping bags in the dark. This morning, we're drinking 'Blendy Coffee' from bowls, eating Hokkaido camembert with baguette, and oranges. Ken looks supremely relaxed. Or asleep.

Last night we went out to an isakaya (Japanese pub/eating place) and had this strange stuff in a pot. I forget what it was called. But chicken, leeks, fish, shellfish, cabbage, mushrooms. Plus a big plate of yakitori and other yakiStuff (yaki == BBQ). (see previous entry for picture.)

Yesterday we went up to the university, and Larry gave Ken the tour while I played (skip to next paragraph if you don't want compspeak) with the bits of Redhat/Linux 8.0 that are totally wacked. It has changed a lot since system 7.2, and some of the tools I'm used to using aren't there, like linuxconf. And some don't work, like the firewall setting tools!!! So, the frigging firewall's up, and I can't use the tools I'm used to to reset it. Can't even find tripwire!!!!

Luckily, Hillel brought professor Nakauye to visit. He's from Mukogawa Women's University's Department of English. And we talked about MOOs, Blogs, and Slashdotty things. It turns out that he's teaching unix tools to students as tools of learning and reflection. Teaching text editors (not word processors), grep functions and FTP. To English majors. So very cool. Anyway, he wants to get involved with some of our projects, and was helpful when Hillel went off to a meeting with the system admins about getting them to support some of our projects.

Kenny had brought some of his strange distractors. Like his "Listen to the Paper" activity. You'd know about it if the doof would get a web site up. That an some of his other acoustic ecology projects. Larry and Hillel are interested in adopting the ideas for some of their projects. I was expecting them to find kenny's stuff interesting.

Today's a national holiday... though about what, I don't know. It's 9:45am, and kenny and I will soon head downtown, probably walking the 6k, if bus service is too slow. Not wanting to pay 2000 yen for a cab. I am so cheap. Then we'll hook up with larry this afternoon, and perhaps go out for a bite.

Who knows. I may even find an internationally able phone, and give yuka a call!!! If it wasn't for instant messaging on the computer, I'd have had no contact with her at all. Sad. But the trip's 40% over, and a lot has been accomplished. Enough to consider the trip both a success and worthwhile.

No time to tell you want I was doing. Only time to show you. I went skiing on Saturday with Larry and Hillel. My first time in 20 years, and I was scared. It took only one run to get the technique back.

There was also an interesting event with chairs. Hillel didn't like me sitting on the student chair all day, and thought I whould have a professor's chair. But the admin said no. They thought I might spill coffee on it. So I got a researcher's chair. I'll spill coffee on it for them.

The day before, Larry took me for a tour around town, and we saw some animals. I took pictures for yuka.

Kenny's here now. I'll get a picture up, when he stops spinning out.

I put up this small kawaii or cute stuff page for Yuka. Note larry's gozilla firewire hub.

Will it ever change? I'm at larry's office. It is sunny and snowing outside. Still playing with MySQL, MoveableType and now SlashCode. He wants it all... But I have revenge... first of all I put up a small web site: FUN (Future University) with Larry. And second, I'm making him download Linux 8.0 and install it on his dell server with only my words of encouragement, while I blog and eat green apple Mentos.

Cooked for myself last night. First time I've had the chance since I was here... so, it was yakisoba! (Fried soba) with green peppers, garlic chives and bokchoi. And larry lent me a Python DVD.

Oh, and someone, aka Yuka, said that I didn't have enough pictures of people on the site. So here's Larry and his daughter Ayaka, and Atsuko.

I talked to Yuka!!!!!!! It was a great adventure. I can't call overseas from Larry's office, or from his Cell phone. I can't stay awake late enough to call from larry's house. Yuka's email was down, so we couldn't email. So. I got on AIM, ICQ and MOO looking for help. Rhonna agreed to call yuka, and give her my number and ask her to call now. Funny thing is that Rhonna's in Norway. So, Japan > Norway > Canada. That's a good tech moment.

Yuka called... and aside from the great mushy bits I'm not going to tell you about, it turned out that the wireless network at home had borked. Nothing left to do but disconnect it, and reconfigure the place as wired. You try that from the other side of the planet. Yuka, who usually refuses to touch wires, did a great job of rewiring everything, and testing connections. We then switched to AIM.

Got my pretty photo id... and now I'm an official visiting d00d. Got some office space too. Though I don't think I'll use it much. Larry's got a better place... now that he's letting me clean it up. I feel like typical Jason. Walk in and start rearranging things. We actually ripped up the drop floor yesterday and dragged up more ethernet and power cables from under the floor.

Then I stole one of his computers... It's called blowfish. A nice g4 tower. When he wasn't looking I erased all the hard drives. Well, he was looking. I just can't handle it when someone has 160 gigs of hard drive space. Spending the day installing mysql, and installing moveable type. Got pretty far along, but I need to print out the 300 page manual for mysql. Ick. I'd rather leave this for people like emma who get a kick out of it. But I'm here, and the only one at the univ who's going to do it. So here we go. Not much trouble, but I'd rather infinitely postpone the honour. Luckily, I'm keep detailed notes of everything I'm putting where, so it is not a problem for me to knock off now, and come back tomorrow. i won't be lost.

Going to spend the evening reviewing poems for theharrow.com figuring out which one's we're going to publish...

Anyway, here are some pictures of FUN.

Here are nine views leading up to Future University. Compared to the historical environs from where I start. The mountain in the distance, by the sea, is mount Hakodate, and the oldest part of the town is down there. There's nothing behind the university, except parkland.

House

Fields and Mountains

Vista 1

Vista 2

Vista 3

University 1

University 2

University 3

University 4

Went out for sushi last night with Larry & Atsuko (and chibi-chan, Aiya? Not sure how to spell it.). I can see why Atsuko wants to move out of a small town like Hakodate. There are some people who seem so un-self-aware that you wonder how they remember to breath. Then there are others who just dropped in to say hi, on their way between walking the Silk road alone and trying to culturally relocate Edward de Bono in a Japanese context. (Just pretend I said "Between two interesting and wildly incommensurable things.) Aiya can hold her own against two parents who are chastising her simultaneously in Japanese and English, and is as fluently bilingual as any eight year old can be. She and I left the restaurant poking at each other and muttering "Tsun! Tsun!" Which is, of course, the sound that poking at someone with your index finger makes. She's very much at eight, what my niece Marie is at 12; an independent soul in Japan. And as with both, the question is how parent can nurture it.

Foood: The sushi was excellent. Garish and noisy and family restaurant like. Line-ups, 6 shouting sushi chiefs in the middle, and a beltway of delicacies circling them. The shouting was as people requested special things. The sushi was like sashimi that had been mistakenly dropped on a few grains of rice. Ate mostly things I knew: squid, octopus, salmon, tuna, maguro (minced tuna belly, with green onions), crab, and cucumber (a favourite). Probably more, but we just kept piling up plates. And my gracious hosts entertained me with chat and stories. I don't usually feel that relaxed with people I've met so recently. But Larry and I have chatted so often, though usually for brief periods, online for the past couple of years, that it was easy to slip into casual. Atsuko, as mentioned, would be someone you could strike up a conversation with during an earthquake.

Then larry and I went out to a coffee shop for some brewskis. I had 25 grams of blend B in 150 mil of water. Larry and 20 grams of B in 150 mil of water. It was about 50 ¥ (70¢) more for the extra, but I wanted a boost. Excellent coffee. If you don't know, in Japan, you pay premium for coffee, but that's really just a charge for the opportunity to have a quiet place to chat unmolested. Just like the extra charge for first class peace of mind when traveling, rather than standing all the way.

And I got 5 full hours of sleep, getting up a 5:30. Going in to see larry's uniZoo in about an hour, after finishing some yoga, and more microwave rice.

Today was fun. Forgot to take pictures, but I do have some of the university that I took yesterday when I walked by. Larry has more computer toys that I've ever seen anyone have. It is just insane. Every little toy and gadget. I fixed up some problems he was having with his previously unused iPod, getting 18 gigs of mp3s off a computer. I'm going to wipe this puter and set up moveable type and PHP nuke, and mysql on it. And maybe OJS (Not Orange Juice Simpson). It's a nice g4 mac. Then we'll drag in the Dell server from the other side of the firewall room, and set it up for MOOOOOing. It will take for ever to download and apply all the patches, but it should give me a list of what I need to do for Achieve when I get home. It's behind on some of its patches.

Larry introduced me to one of his colleagues, and I met some staff, watched a pile of student presentations (some more tomorrow too) and then I got my picture taken and got a space in the visiting scholar's wing. I'll probably spend most of my time in Larry's office, because more of the hardware is there, but when I have to retire somewhere to write, I know I've got a private space.

But the highlight was Atsuko's decision that we were going out for Ramen!!! I love ramen more than sushi. It is a Japanese adopted chinese dish of noodles. I've always heard that the best ramen was in Hokkaido. And it was really really wonderful. No shit. It was a great bowl of noodles. Probably the best since 1988 when I was in Yuka's home town... another special area for ramen. Figures that they're the two parts of japan that have had some of the most non-japanese contact during the shogunate.

I've been up for about four hours. Nothing new for me in Japan. The jetlag frog has me in its clutches. When I've been over in the past, I've always woken up early for the first couple of days. But usually I'm staying at my sister-in-law Yoshie's house. There I can creep out of the house, and grab a hot canned coffee or two from a 24 hour vending machine at the side of the road, and go for a walk. Usually, I'd go out among the rice fields, and stop at a shrine or temple, or just polk about the town. Once, I remember calling Yuka after I'd been out for 2.5 hours. I'd walked through town and up into the mountains, and I needed instructions regarding which bus to take to get home.

Apartment pictures: hallway, bedroom 1, bedroom 2

Not this time. There's work to be done. I finished transcribing a couple of chapters of William of Newburgh's Historia Rerum Anglicarum that Ben needs to have so he can translate it for our vampire conference. UNFORTUNATELY, I didn't photocopy all the pages I needed. So I wrote an email to the always lovely and ever talented Mudsey to grab the book out of my office and to photocopy, and hopefully fax, the missing pages to Larry's office.

Of course, I was watching TV, and saw the pictures of something streaming across the sky, accompanied by the words NASA and Texas, and bits and pieces of the Japanese from the announcers I could figure out. Strange feeling, as I was sitting alone in a bachelor apartment typing back in 1986, just before I moved to Japan for a year, with the radio on behind me, when I heard about the challenger disaster. My uncle was a senior engineer on the space shuttle program, responsible for the heat shield team, and he'd passed away the previous summer. So I've always had a special interest in the space shuttles, even though I find the whole space exploration thing a real problem.

You probably don't care about my reminiscing about this. What about the cool apartment Larry and Atsuko (larry's partner) arranged for me. I've got a tiny apartment about 15 minutes on foot from Larry's house, and 25 minutes on foot from the university. Views one and two show the inside of the main room, and view three shows the entrance way. It is about three times larger than the one I had when I lived in Japan in the mid 80s. So it is luxury plus. TV. Washing machine. Japanese style bath. Everything looks brand new, and the heater keeps everything toasty. Only the main room is heated. The kitchette, bathroom and toilet are unheated... wise. Of course the toilet seat is heated.

Larry took me out to a 100 yen store, and we picked up some necessities. Bowls, cups, glasses, chopsticks, cutlery, and the sort of foods you can get for 100 yen. Dried seaweed soups and stuff. I have some rice in the microwave as I type, and I'll probably sprinkle some soup mix over it, and that's breakfast! Nummy.

It is friggen cold outside. Not like it has been in Toronto, but I want to go out and explore here, and just walk about. I know it will be a challenge today, but as soon as the sun's up, I'll head out, probably in the direction of the university, to see what I can see. Larry's going to call me this afternoon, and I'll probably go out with he and Atsuko for dinner.

And tomorrow, I'll start in at his office, to see if I have some workspace. He told me that they've approved my internet access, so I'll be able to post these blogs in rapid succession, and get email sent out. What fun!

Just got back from that "little walk when the sun's up" but it took about 5 hours. Didn't get lost. That would be too easy. Walked the 2.5 km up to the university. More on that when I recover. Then walked back. Then continued on downtown for another 3km. Looking for something to eat, on a Sunday at 10:30am besides eating from a 7-11. Ended up with KFC, which is better here than in Canada. Did some real shopping: carrots, peppers, satsuma (oranges), bokchoy, fresh noodles, bottle of wine. I can start eating civilized.

Larry called me on his cell that he's loaned me to say we're going out for sushi tonight! And asked if I wanted to go to a snow festival. I need some sleep though. Got 3.5 hours to do it.

I'd like to say that I'm in pre-packing mode for my trip to japan. But that's not the case. I'd like to say that I'm busy working on the AoIR conference, but that's off the mark. I should be preparing more on the KMD1000 assignment 3, and I will... tomorrow.

Right now, I'm transcribing latin. William of Newburgh's Historica Rerum Anglicarum, and figuring out which sections of Newburgh, and Walter Map, that need to be translated by "our man in the Ancient world" Ben. Getting all my photocopies ready to take to Japan with me, so I can work on these venerable d00ds whilst I'm abroad.

Oh, did I mention that I'm going to Japan for the month of February? Invited to Larry's university (Future University) in Hokkaido.

Doing less, but doing it very well
Japanese butoh dance troupe receive standing ovations is from the Ottawa Citizen, and gives a review of the Sankai Juku performance that Yuka and I saw in Ottawa last week.

I think that the show was just not that good, and that makes me very sad, as Sankai is the only troupe that I've ever liked in any form of dance. That is they're the only group who could hold my attention for more than a second.

I got the sense that the reviewer didn't know Sankai's previous work... like "The Egg Sands Out of Curiosity" which nearly fried my cortex. I can't remember the first performance I saw of theirs back in the late 80s, but it too was so completely overwhelming that time stood still, and the only thoughts in my head were those of the movement of the dancers. No meta-conceputalization. No consideration of the narrative and construction of the piece. Just movement. Each turn of a wrist was an explosion. Butoh is often said to be the child of Hiroshima,and is as post-apocalytic as possible. And post modern without being european.

This time, I was recognizing the vocabulary of motion from previous shows, and it seemed overly self referential. And that's death for dance. And I guess that's the death of Sankai Juku. They're now performing themselves.

As yuka said, after 27 years, perhaps the founder Amagatsu, need to pass the cowl to someone else.

BUSINESS: Things could be worse %uFFD1 just look at Japan

I just cancelled my trip to Japan. The university admin at Larry's school couldn't get it together and just kept asking for more information. When the administration runs things in Japan, things fall apart. We'll try again for January, perhaps.

I'm happy that I'm at the stage when I'm willing to turn things down, rather than accept and give in. I'm too old to compromise, and I just don't care about making everyone happy any more...

Just got in with the crazy three-some from our tour of Midland, Bala, Algonquin Park, Ottawa, Kingston (Eagle Lake) and home. More news to follow. Lost no one. Crashed no cars. Took lots of pictures. Ate lots of Japanese food... wait. Something's strange here.