Well, I had been planning to take a trip this summer in which I would go by train from Kyoto to Fukuoka, visit a couple of friends there, then head down through Kyushu by train to Kagoshima, from where I would take a ferry to Okinawa, spend a few days, and then take another ferry to Taiwan. Unfortunately, it looks like the only ferry company servicing the Okinawa/Taiwan route has gone out of business. Arimura Sangyo, which had been making the run for decades, is apparently no more. Their website is gone, the phone number is out of service, and an unofficial mirror of their former web page has added a statement informing that they officially ceased service in June, and went into corporate liquidation just on July 11.

So, apparently there is not currently any sea route between Japan and Taiwan, which has probably killed my entire concept for the trip. I may still book a flight for a couple of weeks in Taiwan, and I will probably at some point do the boat trip to Okinawa, but without the ferry connecting Okinawa to Taiwan, there seems to be little point in linking it all into one trip- unless someone reading this has info on another ferry company which somehow doesn’t turn up with any amount of googling.

Although plenty of other ocean routes still seem to be pretty active, ship is certainly long past its prime as a method of passenger transport. But, as fuel prices continue to climb and air travel becomes increasingly expensive after a long period of relative affordability, might we see a resurgence of medium distance (by which I mean a day or two, say between Pacific Islands, but not trans-Atlantic or Pacific) as an affordable alternative?

On a related note, while looking for currently active ferries, I found this rather neat web page on the history of long distance ferries in Japan.

[Update]

Someone posted the following report on Arimura to the Lonely Planet message board.

Arimura Industries, a ferry operator, that is based in Okinawa Prefecture in Japan, plying between Japan and Taiwan, intends to liquidate sometime soon mainly because of the current drastic fuel cost hike. The service has been completely suspended since 6th June. When the operations will resume is uncertain at the moment.

Arimura has been petitioning the Okinawa Prefectural Government to establish a new entity to continuously run the business only to have got an evasive answer. The company will keep on hiring the 120 employees. Its three vessels have been moored idly at Naha Sea Port.

It has been under reconstruction since 1999 based on the Corporate Rehabilitation Law.

Roy and I were walking in the Nippombashi area of Osaka when we stumbled across a suspicious-looking cigarette machine. The first thing we noticed was that it wasn’t wired for Taspo age-verification cards (as it legally should be). Then we noticed it was selling Chinese cigarettes (Chunghwas, to be exact).

Upon further examination, we realized that the cigarette machine was not actually working, which explained why it wasn’t wired for Taspo. Or perhaps not being wired for Taspo explained why it wasn’t working.

Anyway, it turns out that we had not only stumbled across a Chinese cigarette machine—it was guarding the entrance to a seven-story Chinese superstore called the “Shanghai China Maul.”

This was not the only Engrish on display: there were “flesh vegetables” on sale upstairs. Besides cigarettes and vegetables, the place also has:

1. A massive karaoke room which was apparently running at night for public singing orgies (free for ladies, ¥1,000 for men)


2. Right above the main lobby, there’s an immigration lawyer (gyosei shoshi) and Softbank sales agent working next to each other at very similar-looking open counters. I guess this is so you can get your Japanese visa and your mobile phone in one place…


3. The top floor is a well-stocked Chinese bookstore with a special shelf for Hong Kong news magazines (i.e. Chinese media banned on the mainland), but curiously very little content from Taiwan other than music.


4. One floor was covered with what I can only describe as “random crap,” among it suitcases, electric fans, wooden tables and an oddly-twisted female mannequin torso.

And here you can see Roy wondering aloud why he didn’t bring his digital SLR from Kyoto:

In Hong Kong over New Year’s, I hopped on board one of the island’s incredibly cheap streetcars and randomly rode from Central, the bustling business center of the city, to the quieter but still absurdly developed alcove of Happy Valley. The district is best known for its racecourse, which (not being a fan of equestrian sports) I first learned about from James Clavell’s very fun novel Noble House.

The name “Happy Valley” comes from the area’s use as a burial ground during the early days of the colony. As was the case in many tropical colonies (see Guns, Germs and Steel), the hot climate and marshy terrain of the island were quite incompatible with the Europeans moving in, and the resulting waves of diseases made Happy Valley one of the most populous areas of Hong Kong (if you’re counting corpses).

Even today, the cemeteries of Happy Valley are its most prominent and unique feature, next to the famous racecourse which is literally right across the street.

One of the more fascinating parts of the cemetery is the Muslim section, which happened to be open as I walked past. The headstones, dating from throughout Hong Kong’s history, are written in varying combinations of Arabic, Chinese and English.

The Muslim cemetery occupies a number of slopes wrapped around a hill, which makes it an excellent vantage point for viewing the lower, flatter Catholic cemetery below. Another case of awesome real estate wasted on dead people.

A high-level US court just ruled that American paper money must be redesigned so that blind people can distinguish bills by denomination. Other countries accomplish this through subtle tactile differences or different bill sizes, but all US currency feels more or less the same, at least when it’s fresh off the presses.

When I went to Albany in February to be sworn into the New York bar, I had a number of odd experiences, among them:

• Drinking Chinese state-brewed beer in a sketchy hotel room while discussing what would happen if they went to war with Japan (this would have led to nothing good had the sole Chinese attendee not decided to “go to bed” early)


• Sitting in a crowded waiting room next to a lawyer who works literally within eyeshot of my office window in Tokyo


• Touching a girder from the World Trade Center

But probably the weirdest experience was when I bought a pack of gum inside the New York state government Cloud City.

Everything was normal until I went to the cashier. I put the gum on the counter. The cashier said “Hi, what are you getting today?” For many people, that would merit some kind of sarcastic response. As usual, I bit my tongue, which was probably a good thing because the cashier was blind.

I tried to act as un-shocked as possible, and said “Umm, a 5-pack of Doublemint.”

“OK,” she said, and started pushing buttons on the register. The register read out the numbers as she pushed them. “POINT SIX NINE ENTER. SEVENTY-THREE CENTS.”

“That’ll be 73 cents,” she said.

I handed her a five-dollar bill.

“Out of how much?” she said.

“Uhh, out of five.”

Anyway, I wonder whether she works there all the time. Maybe they just put her there on bar admissions day as an ethics test for new lawyers. Or maybe people really work on the honor system in Albany. Who knows. At least her job will be a bit easier in a few years’ time…

So I haven’t posted anything here in well over a month, in fact since before I left home to come once again to Kyoto. In short, here is what has been going on:

Came to Kyoto University as an auditing “research student” on Japanese government scholarship in the History of Education division of the Faculty of Education, with Prof. Komagome Takeshi, who specializes in Japanese colonialism, as advisor. In theory, I should be going into a MA course next year. As an auditing student I participate in a couple of seminars (“zemi”) and am taking one language class for foreign students, on how to read Meiji era Japanese (“bungobun”) but so far nothing else, although I will probably start sitting in on a couple of undergraduate courses just to get better background.

I spent the entire month of April staying in a friend’s spare room at his apartment down in Fushimi, which is about a 20 minute train ride on the Keihan line to Demachiyanagi Station, and then a 10 minute walk to campus before I moved to a place about a 15 minute walk from school. I dislike living in the super-cramped Japanese style one room single person apartment so I am considering trying to share a house with a friend of mine from the Ritsumeikan study abroad days who should be coming back to Kyoto in 3-4 months to do some sort of program at Doshisha, but for the time being I’ve found a very good temporary place, which is somewhat small and decrepit, but very cheap and very close to campus, and has no reikin or anything else to prevent me from moving immediately should I find something better. More about the apartment another day, once I have a way to upload photos again.

Both my friend’s place I stayed at in April and the place I’m staying have no internet, and so I’ve been online very sparingly. I’m the sort who prefers his main computer to be a desktop, so my plan was to just take with me the hard drives and video card from my computer at home and build a new one when I have a place to live and a Net connection, but since a: I still only have the first of those and b: moved in so recently I don’t even have a fridge or desk yet, it’s going to have to wait. I did bring my venerable 7-year old slow, heavy and gigantic Dell laptop, which I bought before my very first stay in Japan, but unfortunately it has now completely died, and so I am reduced to using the public computers at school, which means I have no way whatsoever of doing things like uploading photos, and really can’t be motivated to do much more than the occassional email, much less blogging, until I get a better setup. I did order DSL, but (I think because of NTT’s monopoly over the physical circuits) in Japan it takes an entire month wait from time of order to installation, I won’t get a hookup until the end of May/beginning of June.

And basically, that’s it. Living in Fushimi for a brief period was not particularly interesting, as the region seems to have fairly little of interest aside from the famous Fushimi Inari Shrine and the very attractive Chushojima historical district, which includes some very nice Meiji era architecture, such as the Gekkeikan brewery (Fushimi actually has Nihonshu (sake) breweries everywhere, but most of them are merely ugly modern industrial structures). Now that I’ve moved from down there back into Kyoto proper I feel a little better, but lack of such things as furniture, a computer, a bicycle (which I maybe shouldn’t get until I have my increasingly painful right knee examined) still needs to be remedied before I can really say I’m settled.

As part of Tokyo’s Earth Day festivities last weekend, author/rapper Seiko Ito held a poetry reading set to techno music, dedicated to the message of setting Burma free from tyranny. From the Burma Info website:

In the following video clip of the performance, Ito can be seen reading his statement, demanding that the military regime stop killing, beating, and imprisoning monks, and enter into dialogue. Htin Aung, the Democratic Voice of Burma stringer in Tokyo , reads out a statement in Burmese.

With a double DJ, Ito’s reading quickly turns into a hip-hop event. The audience rises, and many begin dancing and responding to Ito ’ s calls, waving arms, signs, and in some cases, babies. It was likely the first time ever that this many Japanese in one place expressed their support for a free Burma.

Watch the video here.

Here is my unauthorized translation of the poem:

You must not intimidate the nonresisting monks
You must not beat the nonresisting monks
You must not imprison the nonresisting monks
You must not kill the nonresisting monks

For they are outside the realm of power
And live under a wholly separate Law

Intimidating, beating, imprisoning, and killing such people is an overwhelming failure to understand, an overwhelming act of violence, in short the destruction of the other.

And, we too are the Other!

You must not intimidate the nonresisting monks
You must not beat the nonresisting monks
You must not imprison the nonresisting monks
You must not kill the nonresisting monks

For they are outside the realm of power
And resolutely possess a freedom to live under a wholly separate Law

Intimidating, beating, imprisoning, and killing such people is an overwhelming failure to understand, an overwhelming act of violence, in short the destruction of the other.

You must not destroy others
You must not destroy them, nor us

Don’t intimidate them!
Don’t beat them!
Don’t jail them!
Don’t kill them!

The junta in Myanmar
The Chinese government!

Free Aung San Suu Kyi!
Free Aung San Suu Kyi!

Free the Dalai Lama!
Free the Dalai Lama!

We are they
And they are we!

You must not refuse dialogue!
For dialogue is the sole path to connect the other with the other
If the other and the other are not connected, hence springs intimidation, hence springs beatings, hence springs imprisonment, and hence springs murder!

So talk to them! Talk to them!
Communicate for the sake of dialogue!!
Freedom of speech and freedom of the press exist to prevent intimidation, beatings, imprisonment, and murder
Calling for dialogue and communication is to stand in the way of intimidation, beatings, imprisonment, and murder

The junta in Myanmar
The Chinese government!

Talk to them! Don’t intimidate them!
Talk to them! Don’t beat them!
Talk to them! Don’t jail them!
Talk to them! Don’t kill them!

Talk to them!

We are they
And they are we!

Anyone reading carefully over the past couple of weeks would have figured this out, but I never said quite specifically. Tomorrow I will be flying back to Japan, and living once again in Kyoto. This time I will be studying again, but instead of as an exchange student or employee at Ritsumeikan University (what I did the first and second time I lived there) I will be a graduate student at Kyoto University, on the Japanese Ministry of Education foreign research student scholarship.

I have to find a place to live once I arrive, but I do have a place to crash for a couple of weeks while I make long, or at least medium-term arrangements. Anyone living in or near Kyoto or who might be passing through is encouraged to let me know, and I will of course be visiting Tokyo from time to time, and other areas of Japan at some point in the future.

I know that a lot of people reading this may be interested in the application process for this scholarship program, so at some point I will post a detailed description of my own passage through it, which I began writing as an email to a friend of mine who told me that he had changed his mind about applying for it when I was about halfway through.

My onlineness may be a little unstable for the next couple of weeks, but hopefully I will be able to respond to messages with moderate promptness, and of course I will have my trusty vintage 2006 keitai-at least until I buy a fancy new 2008 model, with my fancy new student discount.

I just upgraded the blog to the brand new Wordpress 2.5 codebase. This is a major software update, so if anyone sees any odd behavior (particularly that wasn’t there before) please drop me an email.