Zatsuroku

That's Japanese for "miscellany," or so Google tells me, and who would know better? I have quite a lot of odds and ends left to report from my trip to Japan, though I've been home for nearly two weeks and will be flying to Canada on Sunday (weather-gods willing).

Many of the oddities that one notices in Japan are social, differences in the way people move and behave within society. Social space and touch are prime examples of this. All humans (at least in large cities) project an "I am alone" field when they are forced into close proximity with strangers. It's what lets you share a park bench with somebody without having to hear their life's story (garrulous drunks and Forrest Gump not withstanding). These fields are different between Westerners (by which I principally mean Anglo-Saxons) and the Japanese. Our fields say "You are not really here, you cannot touch me. I am safe." Japanese fields say "I am not really here, I will not touch you. You are safe."

Body contact is another prime example. We all know from films that the Japanese bow constantly, instead of touching, and that is actually true. The Westerner in an interacting group of Japanese (at a store, for example) is reminded sometimes of a flock of pigeons all nodding and ducking at each other. The depth of the bow is significant and finely calibrated: whether from the head or shoulders or upper body or waist; whether a subtle nod or a full right-angled bend. When I saw what I presumed to be the first presentation of a new boyfriend to the girl's parents, they bent about 30° from the shoulders, but he bent stiffly from the waist, and went so far down that his head nearly bumped the table. The opposite is also surely true: that one can express a subtle but biting snub in giving a shallower bow than is appropriate. It strikes me that the Japanese have a far greater bodily facility for expressing social relations (for want of a word), there isn't nearly that much variety in handshakes even if you count the doublehanded or biceps-clasping options.

I was never on a subway train in central Tokyo in rush hour so I didn't experience the "pushers" who force people onto the trains, but buses and subway in Kyoto were dense enough. There too, social space is very different. The Japanese differentiate between intentional and accidental touching, in a way that we don't. The head-to-toe all-around full-body contact that you get when 50 extra people get on to a bus that was already overfull by my German standards, is perfectly acceptable in Japan. Because it's inevitable and in a way impersonal, it doesn't count as contact. As a consequence, it's acceptable to push your way quite forcefully between people to get on or off of a bus.

There would have been bloodshed on a New York city (or German) bus before it got to 80% of the density that I rode home from Ginkaku-Ji in, because we don't distinguish between somebody deliberately pressing against us and somebody who is forced against us by the people behind them: after a certain point, it's all offensive to us.

But intentional touching is taboo in Japan, whereas we allow it (depending on context and the bit that gets touched and what we infer to be the toucher's motives). I realized this on the bus, after it started to empty out. At one point we went around a corner at speed and hit a pothole. The bus rocked and a schoolgirl near me staggered and started to fall. I reached out to catch her, then stopped myself in time. She recovered, simply bumping into her friends who simply stood still and broke her fall. I'm sure that she would have been shocked and offended if I'd grabbed her arm, whereas a German or Canadian would not. They would understand that I acted to save them from harm, and would be pleased and grateful.

I'm afraid I mislead you when I stated that Japanese is read from right to left. That is not generally true. Normally Japanese is read from left to right, so the streaming-text signs in the Shinkansen were correct. The exception to this is fascinating. Single-horizontal-line Japanese is read right-to-left when it is a religious inscription in a temple or shrine! The reason for this is that the inscription is visualized as an entire page of text (which is read in top-to-bottom columns, from the right margin to the left), and the single line of characters represents the first character of each column of that conceptual page. So you read at the right margin a column of one character, then move left and read the next column, and so on.

Somebody commented on an earlier post (perhaps in the bowdlerized version under my real name on Faecesbook) that the Japanese are very ecologically-minded, and in regard to water usage that may be true; though paradoxically water is one of the few natural resources that are not scarce in Japan. They have a very different attitude to paper, wood and plastics. Take as an example the little moist hand-wiper towelettes that we typically know from airplanes. Almost all restaurants and cafes in Japan will give you one of those before your meal or snack. I gradually became very uncomfortable with this because of the huge amount of waste it generates. Consider: The wrapper weighs say one gramme, so each thousand people who use one generate a kilo of plastic waste. The population is 127 million, and let's say that on average every fourth person uses one a day; this is probably a low estimate since I was given up to five of them per day. That adds up to 32 tonnes of plastic waste every day, just from the wrapping around moist hand-wipers. Factor in the towelette itself, plus the meta-packaging that those packets are shipped in, plus the carbon cost of delivering the packages and collecting the waste … I don't see how that can be sustainable, or why this status quo should be maintained.

Disposable (wooden!) chopsticks are another example. I read that twenty-five billion pairs of them are used and thrown away every year, "enough wood to build 17,000 houses" it says in the Lonely Planet guide (which by the way I can recommend). How many trees per day does that equate to? I got sick of that almost instantly, and bought a rather nice pair of chopsticks and a carrying case, and earned amused and curious glances by producing them in restaurants for the rest of my stay.

It's getting too cold to type (the boiler/central heating unit is being replaced as I write) so I will post this and update it later on.

Cold

As in "Damn but it is." Right now the temperature is -14°C and it is very damned chilly indeed here indoors. I'm seriously considering putting on my long-johns. German houses (and apartments) just aren't built for these temperatures, this is far more uncomfortable than being in my sister's house at -42°C.

It snowed last night, starting at sundown and continuing into the early hours, and the resulting 5cm of snow are still underfoot. A harsh winter indeed by German standards. The next few days should be warmer, above freezing again by Tuesday, so I am pretty certain to get out of Frankfurt on Monday without too much trouble.

Apart from that, things are going well. I shall do a load of washing tonight, to be dry for Monday morning. I have to do a few more hours of work tomorrow, plotting drawings for the first meeting with the main contractors on Monday, so they can start in January. The ground-breaking ceremony is set for Jan. 14, and with about a fortnight of digging and preliminary work to be done, they should be able to start pouring concrete in early February. Perhaps there'll even be a complete set of structural plans to work from by then.

Spent the afternoon downtown buying sweeties (the agreed present-givings this year) and wine (for the hell of it), and saying goodbyes.

There may be another post before I fly, depends on how Sunday shapes up.

Surrender

I tried not to do it, truly.

Well, of course I knew that it was inevitable, I'm not a fool*. But I had hoped to spin it out a little longer, delaying the fateful moment: surely it doesn't need to happen now, not yet? I also had a fair amount of pride at stake ("I'm not such a softie"), not to mention money ("Can't afford it") or even the ecology ("Wasting resources!").

But this morning it did need to happen, and so I failed. I gave up. My resistance crumbled. My lofty principles were vanquished by my baser desires.

An hour ago, I swallowed my pride, lullabyed my conscience to sleep, and turned on the heating. Damnit, I had hoped to last until the first of October. Is that too much to ask? Apparently yes.

In other news the Internet connection in Rose Street died sometime Monday night, and is still resisting attempts at resuscitation. (Assuming of course, gullible as I am, that said attempts are actually being made. Pah.) Since G drank the free-telephony-over-the-Internets koolaid, there is also no telephone and no fax connection. It's very peaceful, but for the sound of G alternately weeping and raging into his cellphone at the providers.

In other, other news I've noticed from the weblogs that people continue to visit here, hoping against experience that I might have posted something since their last visit. My deepest apologies to you, dear reader, and my heartfelt thanks that you do continue to come by. Having said that, though, allow me to make your lives a little easier: download an RSS feed-reader and use it to review all your friends' blogs (and magazines, and newspapers, and Flickr photostreams, and the Recent Changes page of your favourite wiki). Most modern browsers recognize RSS too: Safari and Firefox display a little "RSS" icon in the extreme right of the address field of sites that have a feed. The advantage is that you see at a glance who has updated (and who hasn't) without browsing all those websites.**

The disadvantage is, of course, that you don't browse all those websites (unless the author has set the feed to give you only the first N sentences, as I have). You will miss the comments that are posted, and will be unable to post a comment of your own. My apologies here to folks like Dale and PostmodernSass, whose RSS feed includes the full text of their posts: I am still reading, but I am rarely moved to switch from the feed-reader to the browser to reply.

* At least, not that kind of a fool, but that's another story.

** Background info about RSS. I use and recommend NetNewsWire, available for Macs and iPhones/iPodTouch, but there are surely a dozen or more Windows feed-readers out there by now. (In case your browser doesn't display the link, here's the URL to my RSS feed.)

Sunday, not in the park, without George

Not yet at least. If the weather holds fine, I shall walk down to the river this afternoon.

I bought a pair of pyjamas yesterday, the first that I've worn in thirty-three years if not longer (though I do wear a t-shirt in bed, and often socks, and in winter sometimes even long-johns). I got into the habit of sleeping naked when I was in Italy on a summer study session, learning how to drink alcohol and coffee and a few quite fascinating things about the human anatomy, and carried on until fairly recently. It was only after moving here that I started wearing t-shirts in bed, because of the miserably damp winters; they bothered me even more here than in London which is not known for aridity.

Interrupting myself for a moment: I have a Norman Stove*. The four burners and single oven are controlled by a total of six rotary knobs, and at least once a month I nearly burn the house down by turning the wrong one on. I've developed the habit of checking and counterchecking which burner is on, but this doesn't help when I turn the knob in the wrong direction, causing the water in the pot to boil away rapidly rather than simmering slowly—as I just did. The year is 2007 CE, nearly 2008. Why is this still so damned difficult? Do the people who make ovens never cook for themselves? Have they no wives or husbands or parents or children? Have they never even watched anyone cook anything? Or have they merely no commonsense? Bah.

So, yes: pyjamas. It was purely wonderful, I was toasty warm practically in the instant that I put them on cold from the drawer. Those were by far the best 30 Euros I've spent lately.

"Cold" being the operative word. The heating seems not to be working properly, apart from the living room = office and bathroom, the radiators appear not to be receiving any hot water from the boiler. I thought this might have been due to low water pressure, but having topped that up this morning I realize that it's not the case. Something is grievously wrong.

And how has your weekend been?

* Named for Donald A. Norman, useability expert and author of "The design of everyday things" (among other books), in which he discusses (among other things) the particularly egregious and all too common form of bad design that has come to be known as Norman doors: doors that cannot be opened by performing the visually-obvious operation. Things that don't work the way that their appearance indicates that they should, or whose appearance gives no clues to their workings, are now generically known as Norman Whatevers.

Cold, and more serious matters

Yes, I know that I am the one who always rabbited on about how lovely winter is and blablabla. However, there was (at least in my mind) an implicit caveat in that statement: winter is lovely in a country where the houses have insulated walls and windows that close tightly. I realized that I am sitting in a draft which is making my neck, lumbar region and ankles cold. I've no idea whether it's new this year, due to a recently-opened crack somewhere, or due to my continuing jetlag-induced tired-and-unfit-ness, or purely imaginary, or whether it was always thus and I simply never noticed before.

I do know that the radiator in the kitchen is not radiating any warmth at all, it's as cold as the windowpanes. Have to see about that soonest.

Bringing in my plants from the summer office also imported a large number of interesting and unusual insects, which I have been capturing and killing with gusto and kleenex.

In more serious news I heard about the wildfires in San Diego and vicinity by chance last night, when I happened to meet in Second Life a friend who was waiting to be evacuated from her house! To think that we had been joking about forest-fire-season in California only a day or two previously. I wish all Californian friends and readers the very best of luck, may you all survive unharmed and find your homes needing nothing more than a good scrubbing.