The Cove is not gonna make Japan many friends among the world’s dolphin and whale lovers, but it is definitely worth a watch.

Although it could probably go lighter on the whole Mission: Impossible antics (unfortunately, it seems you just can’t sell a documentary nowadays if it doesn’t feature endless gratuitous action montages), the scenes it captures are captivating and hard to ignore. Beyond the expected money shot of an expanse of ocean literally red with dolphin blood, the investigative work offers some fascinating insights into the cynical political maneuvering that goes on to ensure the fishing doesn’t stop.

The vast farce that is the International Whaling Commission and a long tradition of Japan’s bribing third world island countries for votes, gets the bashing it deserves: I don’t care what your opinions on the whaling issue are, if you seriously believe in the “scientific whaling” argument, you are very misinformed or a moron.

Casual observers of Japanese modern history do not need to be told of its infamous propensity to always side with industries against public welfare, when environmental or public health scandals strike. Others will probably think that the recount of Minamata disease’s infamous cover-up is exaggerated… After all, while Western countries routinely poison locals in remote third-world countries and get away with it, it is quite a rare thing for a country to let companies do it on its own soil and unfalteringly support them when things go awry (and long after that). Long-time residents will also enjoy the nod to Japan’s sub-par criminal justice system, delight in spotting the usual cast of Japanese administration characters (the blatantly corrupt – yet utterly polite – cop on local business’ payroll, the roboticized bureaucratic talking-head, the government “scientist” spouting pseudo-science etc. etc.), without, unfortunately, escaping the usual trite clichés (is there a single japanese story that cannot be illustrated with a nail and a hammer?).

This documentary is not without its faults and I honestly have my doubt about the efficiency of the “Us vs. Them” brand of activism, when confronted to Japanese culture. But regardless of which side of the Blubber Hamburger / Cute Smiling Cetacean debate you stand on, there are a couple items worth pondering in there.

End-of-year Japanese Music Quiz, over at KanjiBox’s dev blog: 10 tracks, 10 artists, many genres…

Guess them all and win a bunch of iTunes coupons for free installs of KanjiBox for iPhone (along with my undying respect for your extensive musical culture).

Personal Health Update

I wasn’t exactly handed a winning ticket at the Genetic Lottery. As a kid, it would have taken less time to list the parts that did work as they should have. But things got under control and I am generally fine these days (beside that violent twitching on the left side of my face and the regular furball coughing, that is).

However, God personally hates me and wants to make sure I know it. Which is why I belong to the statistically improbable demographic of young people with recurring kidney stone problems despite relatively healthy dietary habits (people in their twenties who barely drink a can of coke a month aren’t supposed to get kidney stones, let alone chronic ones). On a nearly regular basis, about once every two years, I get to enjoy the pain of childbirth, minus naming process and postpartum hormones rush.

On the plus side, with the years, the routine has started to take the edge off (or I am developing a much higher tolerance to pain): when a stone episode strikes, nowadays, I just casually recoil in a fetal position for a couple hours at a time while waiting for it to pass; years ago: I would longingly stare at a kitchen knife while considering my options for self-surgery on the spot.

The other good thing is that I have learned to recognise early symptoms (as well as the time they are likely to occur: mine always happen in Winter, for no reason any specialist has ever been able to explain satisfyingly), which helps preventing me from making bad decisions… such as embarking on a 15 hour trip home to San Francisco from Paris via London (aka: the Story of my First Stone). Testament to the good old pre-911 days: when some security guy at Heathrow noticed the sweaty, grimacing guy waiting for his plane, went and asked “Sir, I must ask you: have you been consuming any drugs?” and got a near-hysterical answer of “No, but if you have any, I’ll take them!” through gritted teeth… he just walked away as he came.

These days, once the chest pain shows up, I would know better than trying to lob it with 2 aspirins and a cup of boiling hot tea purchased on the Eurostar for sole comfort.

Three days into the current episode, I finally went for a consultation at my nearby hospital: a CT scan confirmed the obvious and I was sent on my way with the usual advices and a couple prescription drugs.

Incidentally: I payed ¥5,000 (less than $50) for a full consultation and a CT scan, both of which took a grand total of 40 minutes, from the moment I stepped into my neighbourhood clinic. The actual cost, pre-universal-coverage, was ¥19,000, or about $200 (for that money, a US CT technician won’t even spit on you): dear US readers, aren’t you glad you live in a country gloriously free of such pesky Universal Healthcare and reasonable health costs.

Anyway, all that to say that I am slightly incapacitated at the moment, and lagging on communication (although oddly productive on whatever I manage to put my mind to, in between two bouts of holding my abdomen, wondering if downing a bottle of Draino might help). It will get better and I’ll catch up on email and everything, soon (i.e. anywhere from next week to next year).

That’s it for the immediate personal health update. Everybody with a normally working pair of kidneys and zero interest in the practice of hobbyist medicine at home can (and should) stop reading right now. Trust me, there’s nothing interesting under the fold.

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Japanese girl at local bar: Do your prefer Japanese girls or foreign girls?

Dave: Err… huh… dunno… Country doesn’t have much to do with it…

Japanese girl: Aaah, of course… It does not matter…

Dave: Indeed.

[...]

Japanese girl: Ok, so… Which type of girl do you prefer: long straight black hair or blonde with blue eyes?

After keeping it on the back burner for way too long, I felt I should finally make this project public, no matter how unpolished:

KanjiStory.com is a website geared towards people studying Japanese kanji (and, I guess, to a lesser extent, Chinese… but it probably needs some tuning for that). It provides a simple yet powerful interface for people to write kanji mnemonics in the form of a simple story.

The best way to see what I mean is to go register (10 seconds, one click), read a few stories and finally: take a stab at writing your own. Allowing users to contribute stories is at least 90% of the point of this website at this stage, so please do not just go, check out the dozen sample stories and call it a day without trying the editor.

The current version of the website, although quite spiffy code-wise, needs a huge amount of work to be called a proper beta. And then, there are two million cool features just waiting to be added. However, given my very limited time resources, I figured I would first check to see how much interest (and active participation) in the project I can raise, before committing any more time working on it.

Do not hesitate to post your comments and suggestions below, but keep in mind that this is all very early-stage development and that many new features will come, once (if) this ever takes off the ground as a community project.

As an aside, if you are a reasonably experienced PHP dev with an interest in contributing to this project: get in touch (use the address: “zedrdave” at Google’s mail).

If you want to be kept informed of future KanjiStory-related news, easiest way for now is to sign-up as a fan on the facebook page (until I set up a proper forum and RSS feed on the website).

Note to Self of Two Weeks Ago: Great foresight on that massive batch of bolognese sauce in the freezer! Should consider storing more Saturday-morning emergency food around the house.

Note to Self of Yesterday Night: Maybe not so heavy on the distilled sweet potato juice, next time. Should consider picking a recreational heroin habit instead.

So… the crowd of people standing near that building down the street, last week, with lots of people in all sort of suits and uniforms and a large blue tarp across the entrance… wasn’t a fire, as I thought it was at the time…

It was… MURDER!

The things you learn, chatting with your elderly neighbours, stark-naked and soaking in boiling hot water…

You could be on your way to a beach.

A beach where the sand plays koto with the crashing waves for backup singing, you could be meeting up at the front gate of Kyoto Estación with your icebox, your sun hats, enough ice to build an igloo and bags upon bags of useless 100en beach toys, you could be riding a train small enough to fit in your childhood railway model kit, diving through mountains and popping out along the coast, you could be walking a deserted country trail down to your very own 10 acres of pristine white sand, swimming the warm waters of the Sea of Japan in August, you could be preparing fresh guacamole in the sunset with a piña colada in your hand, you could be barbecuing tandoori chicken in the dark, you could call on to your cro-magnon roots and be the Master of Fire for a night, you could sit around a bonfire, burning your fingers trying to melt marshmallows on chopsticks, you could be laying back on a beach, sand in your hair, skies in your eyes, noticing the Great Starry River for the first time since you started living on an island of neons and streetlights: for every late Summer shooting star you catch out of the corner of your eye, drink your tequila and bite a lemon, if you missed it: drink anyway because it is damn good stuff and made from cactus so it can’t be bad for you, you could start running along the beach, throw your underwear at random and dive headfirst into the sea for midnight skinny dipping, you could light up the sky and wake up the fishes with fireworks until you run out of lighters or energy, whichever comes first, you could be playing poker with a flashlight and a stash of one-yen coin and realise that beachwear makes for very quick rounds of strip poker, you could be falling asleep with the sound of waves crashing at your feet, you could be eating chocolate on bread for breakfast with an aftertaste of salt on your lips, you could be making fresh yakisoba with grilled slices of pumpkin for dessert, you could be spending your day playing in the waves or napping in the shadow, you could be listening to the sand singing under your feet, you could be doing a thousand other things under the sun…

Of course, you could.

Happy birthday to me. Another year of backward aging and waning maturity on the way back to infantile bliss.

Taking a small break from my break to introduce:

KanjiBox for iPhone

By far the best way to spend your Summer while improving your Japanese (whether at the beach or on a crowded Tokyo subway, wedged between two sweaty salarymen). This application works on all iPhone and iPod Touch models (provided they run iPhone OS 3.0 or later) and is entirely offline (doesn’t use any internet connection at all).

More info and screenshots on KanjiBox’s website…

And of course, for our ipod-deprived brethren, there is always KanjiBox for Facebook: free and full of fun multiplayer goodness!

So, after spending a whole five days back in my exciting Kansai countryside, I was on my way to Tokyo again on Friday night, this time to fulfill a very specific (and lovely) calendar imperative.

This 48 hour stint in Tokyo was much more compact than last week’s but we still managed to fit a couple funandhappythings.

Saturday, Ken and Shizu drove us to Design Festa where we spent the afternoon looking for those elusive two or three pearls of awesome/weird/crazy, usually lost in a sea of homemade flea-market t-shirts and Tokyu Hands-style jewelry (hey, starving art students need to eat too). To be honest, nothing mind-blowing (and not even that much of the usual WTF shock stock that people tend to expect from Design Festa)… but some entertaining live shows:
Dora video played drums while random bits of video samples (including at some point, a strident Japanese CM for toilet air freshener) played in the back. The result sounded at times not quite unlike a Death Metal band, from which you’d remove everyone save for the drummer: loud, energetic and quite funny.
Somewhere on the main stage, three butt-naked guys covered in gold paint and sporting massive fully-erect fake penises (also covered in gold) were executing some sort of butoh-like contemporary dance involving a chain and the music from William Tell overture. Somehow, Design Festa always seem to feature a few naked guys doing strange contemporary dances. Never twice the same guys.
The last act we caught before leaving, Crazy Angel Company wasn’t breaking new grounds, comparatively, but did a nice job of livening the venue a bit with their energetic Japanese-style brass band music and accompanying choreography. They closed with their own rendition of the Soran Bushi, a famous Japanese folk classic with an infectious back-and-forth chorus, of which H. eventually grew very tired, after a weekend of constant humming from my part.

On the way back and after running a couple errands for the following day, we lucked out in grabbing a table at Chacha Yufudachi on a saturday night with no reservation (strange, I know, to be going to a Kyoto-cuisine place while on a trip to Tokyo, but both Chacha branches are among my favourite restaurants in Shinjuku, both for the food and the atmosphere). We capped the night with a few drinks at Albatross’ brand new extension in Golden Gai: in fact, merely the first floor of their previous location, which has been added as a semi-independent branch to the second-floor’s bar. Same familiar faces and friendly crowd as usual, although we unfortunately had to make it home for last train in order to be fresh and rested for the next day.

And next day was awesome, indeed: lovely people, gorgeous groom and bride, delicious food, excellent wine (of course) and charming surroundings… But I won’t bore you with the details of my gorgeous friends’ happiness: after all, if you are of those who care, you were probably there (and if you weren’t, you know where to find much better reports than my own very incomplete remembrances of that wonderful day).

One (short) night and a nozomi ride later, I am back at plotting world domination, one DNA strand at a time… Which reminds me I might finally get to that piece about the why’s and how’s of Bioinformatics this week, if I can escape the tempting embrace of procrastination long enough…

Last week was Golden Week: a string of bank holidays eagerly awaited by every last Japanese salaryman. Four or five days usually spent busy sitting in massive traffic jams in order to reach one of Japan’s perennial vacationing spots, presumably amidst a few million other people intent on same.

Yes, it doesn’t take a genius to realise that you are better off staying at home during Golden Week and wait until pretty much any of the remaining 51 weeks in the year to take your vacation at half the price and half the crowds.

Unfortunately, things being what they are (and my days off being what they are), Golden Week vacation or no vacation, were my only options.

After securing two extra days to make it an actual week (Golden it may be, but that “week” ends on a Wednesday night), I took a rest from the deadly boring lovely Kansai countryside and headed back for my hometown: Tokyo.

Although I would have been just happy sharing my time between sitting on the grass in Yoyogi and drinking under the bar in Shinjuku, relationship diplomacy dictated that a compromise be found with the traditional holiday activities and a 2-day trip to nearby Choshi was on the program. Considering its proximity to Tokyo (about 2h by train from Tokyo station), Choshi peninsula is a pleasant enough destination for a weekend, provided you do not stay anywhere close to the main city (your usual ugly mix of generic concrete jungle and urban decay that make 99.9% of all Japanese cities in rural areas) and head out for the smaller villages along the coast. Although the sea still wasn’t warm enough for bathing, we kept busy with a couple walks around the coast (cue obligatory lighthouse, seaside temples etc.) as well as inland crossing through countless patches of cabbage (a local specialty, apparently). Among the locales accessed through the picturesque Choshi Dentetsu railway line, Choshi boasts of Inubō, a station whose name literrally means “Woof” (or, in a less vivid translation, “Dog’s Bark”).

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Hanami season is officially on.

Yesterday was the day I chose to take care of all official administrative duties required by my new occupation and place of residence. Since I am not one to spread the pain, I went the all-inclusive package road and decided to do in one fell swoop: Foreigner Registration, National Health Insurance and Postal Savings Account (required, since the Monbukagakushō won’t give me my money on any other type of account)…

A delightful half-day excursion into the darkest recesses of Uji’s city hall and its – luckily adjacent – post office, made only more fun by the foreshadowing brought upon by close to five years living in Japan and nearly as many trips to a local city-hall…

First, was the usual cursing-under-my-breath of my parents’ screwed-up sense of humour whimsical inspiration, while trying to explain a frightened counter guy that, really, I could do with only two of my five given names and that anyway, the form would never fit them all. All in vain, of course, as the 500-pages form-validation manual for employees is very clear on that: [all] given names must be filled-in. Unfortunately said manual did not indicate how to deal with printer limitation on field size leading to half the names being left out of the printed version. But it only took another couple breaks of cold sweat and a dozen trips to various superiors to be settled by manual use of a ballpoint pen.

Then, I must be becoming really jaded (or I have done this too many times), but the only question on my mind while filling my slightly unusual (yet technically EU territory) place of birth was not: “will they take it as is” but: “how long before they come back to the counter with their world atlas in hand”.

I was wrong.

The employee who came back 10 minutes later, was carrying Wikipedia printouts. Times, my friend: they’re a-changing.

Incidentally, my current home address, not counting name and apartment number, is:
京都府宇治市五ヵ庄三番割官有地
京都大学国際交流会館おうばく分館.

Do you know how many kanji there are in there?

I do.

After filling out by hand eight different forms requiring my address, I. most. certainly. do.

And for the record: don’t even think of abbreviating 京都大学 to 京大 to save two kanji, because she’ll catch you and make you correct it like the naughty schoolboy that you are.

I just can’t wait to do it all again in six months when I move cities.

When I first arrived to Tokyo, I noticed that, come the end of winter, weather forecast screens (in trains, on TV, wherever…) would start adding an extra line under the main sun/cloud/water-drop pictograms. Since the new icons usually depicted lovely little pink flowers or trees blowing in the wind, I naively assumed that this had something to do with upcoming sakura blossom (which wasn’t completely far off, considering most local newscast do have an official daily progress report around sakura season).

It is only a couple years later that I finally understood what this seasonal indicator actually referred to. The infinitely less enjoyable season of eye-puffing, nostril-irritating, headache-inducing, Japanese hay fever. The main reason behind these infamous surgical masks you see people wearing in every damn last “Nippon culture” TV reports.

However, it wasn’t until I moved to the Kansai countryside last month, that I started experiencing for myself what it might feel like. Apparently, my city-dwelling organism was sufficiently immune to Tokyo’s own brand of pollution-laden pollen to go through Kafunshō season unharmed, but much less happy about living in the middle of the woods. Woods no doubt entirely planted with deadly cypress and cedar.

If you happen to be walking in the hilly area surrounding Kyodai’s research campus in Ōbaku, these days, and spot a gaijin with puffy red eyes on the verge of tears, rest assured it does not [yet] have anything to do with feelings of sadness or elation at living more than 20 minutes away from the closest place selling proper balsamic vinegar or non-ersatz chocolate, it’s just the damn neighbouring conifers trying to copulate with my mucous membranes.

When leaving the residence, this morning, I found a note in my mailbox.

Under a delightful MS-Word Clipart-esque depiction of what your mum’s 60′s medicine cabinet might have looked like, sat an ominous “Urgent Warning” about the evils of (illegal) drugs, in big bold red letters. Promising resident researchers somewhat decreased health and much decreased freedom of movement, should they choose to ignore said warning during their stay in Japan.

The thoughts going through my head were, in that order:

1. “What’s so ‘urgent’ about that warning? drugs are bad? Quick, somebody gets the message to Syd Barrett and Janis Joplin before it’s too late.”
2. “You mean there are drugs within a 300 mile radius from here?”
3. “Wait, what is this note doing in my mailbox. OH MY GOD THEY ARE ONTO ME!!!”
4. “No, seriously, where are the drugs? And how come nobody’s told me anything?”