Today’s New York Times article on the growing economic relationship between Japan and India contains the following line:
Consultants are trying, so far in vain, to coin the catchphrase, like “the Samurai and the Swami,” that will sum up the nascent strategic economic relationship between the countries.
Do the MFT readers have any brilliant suggestions?
On my last post Aceface asked:
Hey,why not write some more about the garden state for non American readers for this is travelogue afterall.
I’m wondering what becomes of the turnpike after nearly quater of a century of my absence from New Jersey.Is Great Adventure(of the six flags theme park) still there?What happened to Flushing/Fort Lee Japan town that I’ve heard it is now changed as Taiwan/Korea town?I really really miss New Jersey!
You should come visit then!
I did just do a NYC related post the other day, and when I start carrying my camera around more you may see more local things. But if you really need a New Jersey fix, I recommend Weird New Jersey. Get some copies of the physical magazine if you can, it’s loads of fun.
The Turnpike is pretty much the same. They briefly discussed privatizing it before people realized it was just a cash infusion with no real long term gain or service enhancements. I believe tokens have been completely phased out- the toll is 35 cents cash, or in some areas 70 cents but only in one direction (to improve traffic flow the other way) and most people who use it more than once in a blue moon have EZ-PASS, a battery powered radio transducer box that sits on your dashboard or sticks to the windshield up by the rear-view mirror and passes your account information wirelessly to the toll booth as you drive through, making the whole payment process way easier. To get one of these boxes you pay a small deposit ($20?) and get a free replacement when the battery runs low. There is an electronic sign that warns you when your account is low on money.
Six Flags is still there, I have not been since I was in 8th grade though.
Flushing is Chinese and Korean. I don’t know if there are many Taiwanese there or not, but Cantonese still go to Manhattan Chinatown, and Chinatown definitely has a Taiwanese presence still. I was there last week and saw a sign for the USA headquarters of the KMT, and there was also a sign in the window with Lien Chan’s (連戰) name on it.
I feel like Fort Lee is almost all Korean, but also Japanese still live in the Fort Lee/Edgewater area. There is a Japanese supermarket/shopping center there in Edgewater, which used to have a Kinokuniya branch, but I think now has some other bookstore in its place. I haven’t been to Fort Lee or Flushing this year, so I haven’t got any current personal observations.
In NYC, St Marks Place, the former locus of punk culture in the region (a culture which has taken a near mortal blow with the passing of CBGB’s), is now the closest thing to a Japanese area in the city, with at least a half dozen izakaya type places on just the one block, and a little Japanese market around the corner to the north, which is on the second floor above a bookstore (elevator access), and sells Japanese products. I believe last week I saw a sign down the street to the north-west that Kinokuniya was either opening a second location near there, or perhaps moving from their old Rockefeller location, which makes sense. I doubt many Japanese are hanging out over there these days, compared to the numbers you see every day in the Village.
One of these places, which I was at last week, is labeled as something like “日本帝國居酒屋” (Japanese Empire Izakaya – although I forget the place’s actual name), with lots of old-timey Showa-period kitch and decoration, like old posters, antique pachinko machines, etc. Signs with random vaguely pro-Japanese imperialist slogans and phrases, also written on the t-shirts worn by staff, such as “神風特攻隊.” (Kamikaze special attack squad) In the men’s bathroom, next to the mirror, there was a red sign that just says “長崎原爆.” (Nagasaki Nuclear Bomb) This is also the only place I have ever seen outside of Japan that has “Hoppy” on the menu- and even in Japan it’s usually just places going for an oldy-timey kind of mood. (This paragraph is taken from some comments I just made on a tangentially related topic at Neomarxisme.)
Update: the friend I went with reminds me the place is called ケンカ, meaning “to argue.” They also have an actual stuffed tanuki inside, posed to look like the cartoonish tanuki statues you often see in Japan, which is both a little awesome and a little creepy.
There are of course many, many other Japanese restaurants and bars throughout the city, which there’s really no need to discuss. There are also a few other Japanese markets/stores of note, but actually for Japanese food products your best bet is probably a Korean store, some of which are much bigger and carry a large amount of food and drinks from Japan. Of special note is the NYC branch of Japanese used bookstore mega-chain Book Off, located on 41st St, just south of Grand Central Station, and just east of the public library. Just down the block from Book Off is a Japanese restaurant, a Japanese bakery/cafe, with some of the sorts of baked goods that you normally only see in bakeries in Japan, and a Japanese market/lunch place that does things like katsudon for eat-in or take-away.
Anyone else have some observations to share for Aceface’s NY/NJ travel guide?
Yesterday’s New York Times had an article on the short-lived wave of electricity powered automobiles that were popular in the city almost exactly one century ago.
Starting in 1914, the Detroit Taxicab and Transfer Company built and operated a fleet of nearly 100 electric cabs. Customers would often wait for a smoother, cleaner, more tasteful electric cab, even when a gas-powered cab was already on station.
At the turn of the 20th century, quiet, smooth, pollution-free electric cars were a common sight on the streets of major American cities. Women especially favored them over steam- and gasoline-powered cars.
Last year I posted a 1906 article from the same newspaper’s archive on an auto show at Madison Square Garden, which discussed electric vehicles in use at the time.
Breweries are still the leading users of motor trucks. The three-ton truck that is ordinarily used will carry fifty half-barrels. As an indication of its utility, it may be interesting to note that one of these will leave a big brewery around New York at 6 o’clock in the morning, make a trip to Coney Island, return at 2 o’clock, and finish a short city delivery before 6 in the evening. With horse-drawn trucks, four horses would be needed to make the trip to Coney Island, and the team would not get back until late at night, while the following day it would be necessary to give the horses absolute rest. Most of the big breweries have their own electric plants and thereby reduce the cost of recharging their electric trucks to about 2t or 30 cents, representing only the actual cost of the fuel. If recharged in an electric garabe, the cost is about $1.25. The Vehicle Equipment Company maintains a large electric wagon garage at Ninth Avenue and Twenty-seventh Street, where over 100 cars in daily use are kept.
The electric wagon can run only 30 to 35 miles on a single charge, and this limited radius naturally restricts the use of the electric wagon for city purposes. With good roads and with its simpler construction, requiring less mechanical work than is needed to keep the gasoline trucks in good condition, the electric wagon has become firmly established as the ideal method for deliveries in large communities. There is little difficulty now in securing capable men to manage them. The manager of one of the large concerns stated that motormen of the surface and subway lines are applying for jobs to drive electric wagons in great numbers. Their familiarity with electric motors fits them admirably for the work, as they can make light repairs and prevent needless damage, elements that enter largely into the economy of the motor commercial vehicle.
I asked then, “Did you know we had electric cars in 1906? Why are they still so scarce in 2006?” A place like New York City does in fact seem like an ideal environment for battery powered vehicles, and you actually see them in use quite a bit in parks or train stations, where speed is no factor, but would it in fact be effective to re-introduce electric vehicles for commercial purposes, much in the same way as described in the 1906 article, but with modern motor and battery technologies?
The Chinese Baiji river dolphin may be extinct, but if any survivors are eventually found, at least they can safely be relocated to the tunnels used by the New York City subway until this morning.
We had a discussion a while back on this blog over whether it made more sense to post items using my real name, or my “Mutantfrog” handle. After speaking to a relative the other day and hearing that there was some confusion over the multiple author situation (realization that I wasn’t writing everything on here struck after seeing Adam mention his wife in a post), I decided that it would probably be a good time to switch to my real name.
Readers should take note that the author name appears under the title of each post, next to the date, and to the left of the author icon. While Adam and Joe have actual photographs of themselves for the author icon, mine currently remains the frog icon, which is also now the site icon, but I suppose that could also change in the future.
Readers who remember my discussions of Kokaryo(光華寮), the Kyoto student dormitory for overseas Chinese students which became the center of the longest duration lawsuit in Japanese legal history might be interested to know about Seikaryo (清華寮), a Chinese student dormitory located in Tokyo, which was purchased under significantly different, but also interesting circumstances.Seikaryo recently made the news due to a tragic fire that killed two women living there, which was brought to my attention via an email from Curzon. Seikaryo, like Kokaryo, was originally purchased as a dormitory for Taiwanese students studying in Japan, but where Kokaryo had been purchased by the Taiwanese Republic of China government (possible with funds that may have been repayment for property taken by Japan from mainland China-this and other vagaries led to the bizarre and complex circumstances of the lawsuit, about which one can read in my earlier pieces), Seikaryo was constructed in 1927 by a foundation belonging to the Japanese colonial Governor General in Taiwan, when Taiwan was an internationally recognized colonial possession of Japan.
According to this article, the property rights of the dormitory were unclear after the war, leading to problems involving such things as the assessment of taxes, but apparently-unlike Kokaryo- it remained a residence for students from both Taiwan and China. This article, from a mainland China source, claims that both Kokaryo and Seikaryo were purchased by the Taiwanese government while it was under Japanese occupation, and after Japan’s surrender became property of the People’s Republic of China, but since Kokaryo was in fact not purchased by Taiwan until 1952, when the ROC government had already lost the civil war, the Chinese article is clearly false. Last, this article from a Taiwanese source states that the actual land is owned by Japan, with a term that I believe means something like Right of Occupation (房舍產權) residing with Taiwan. It is unclear however if this refers to the situation at the time of construction (1927), or the present.
If anyone has more information on Seikaryo, particularly as it compares with the somewhat more famous Kokaryo, I would be very interested in hearing.
My original piece on Kokaryo is here, and my piece on the resolution (at least for the time being) of the legal battle is here.
Today’s New York Times has published a moderate sized article on the Chinese phenomenon.
No one can say with any certainty what the full tally is, but there are easily a dozen unauthorized Harry Potter titles on the market here already, and that is counting only bound versions that are sold on street corners and can even be found in school libraries. Still more versions exist online.
These include “Harry Potter and the Half-Blooded Relative Prince,” a creation whose name in Chinese closely resembles the title of the genuine sixth book by Ms. Rowling, as well as pure inventions that include “Harry Potter and the Hiking Dragon,” “Harry Potter and the Chinese Empire,” “Harry Potter and the Young Heroes,” “Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-Up-to-Dragon,” and “Harry Potter and the Big Funnel.”
Some borrow little more than the names of Ms. Rowling’s characters, lifting plots from other well-known authors, like J. R. R. Tolkien, or placing the famously British protagonist in plots lifted from well-known kung-fu epics and introducing new characters from Chinese literary classics like “Journey to the West.”
Harry Potter and the Big Funnel? I’ve heard of that one somewhere before…
In related news, of the 100 or so blogs and other websites that linked to my fake Harry Potter post, this post at the blog of the comic book fansite Newsarama may be the only one to offer a substantial contribution. Now, I had posted a couple of pages from a nice, wholesome Harry Potter Japanese fan comic (dojinshi), but someone at Newsarama had apparently dug into their personal bookmarks collection and dug out links to online archives of-ahem-less than wholesome product. The sort of thing that chronicles the sort of activity that English boarding school was famous for before Hogwarts. Am I going to paste the links here? No, but anyone curious enough to click can take that extra step.
In this BBC article on cultural assimilation of Asians into British society, I encountered the term “coconut,” which apparently means someone who is “brown on the outside but white on the inside.” While I am familiar with similar slang terms used in such as “banana” or “twinkie” (yellow on the outside, white on the inside) and “oreo” (black on the outside, white on the inside) this one is new to me. Does “coconut” have any currency in other Anglophone countries besides the UK? Are my American examples also used in the UK or other countries? Do any readers know of other similar terms in use in American, British, or some other form of English? Best of all would be equivalent terms in other languages-properly translated of course.
The following is a brief exchange from this video, beginning at around 4:20.
Narrator: Who is the Antichrist?
Woman: He will be charismatic but he will also be a man of peace, so he will be one who has promoted peace for many years.
Man: There is gonna be a peace treaty, but that’s a false peace treaty. Eventually when The Lord comes back, that’ll take care of it.
Mustachioed man: The one who forces Israel into a peace treaty with the Arabs is the one who is- you have to watch out for.
Narrator: Is the beast.
Mustache man: Right.
So, if Tony Blair succeeds in his new job, that makes him the Antichrist?
Some readers may have been wondering exactly why Germany hates them so much. And while Slate doesn’t exactly answer the question, today’s column does make a half-hearted attempt.
Some German officials believe Scientology’s ideology is rooted in a kind of political extremism—a bit of a sensitive area for Germany since World War II. They also argue that Scientology is not a religion but a business, since local churches operate like franchises of the main organization.
How much do they hate Scientology in Germany? Well, aside from a ban (later overturned ) on Tom Cruise from filming at German military site, there was also the following statement made against him.
Thomas Gandow, 60, chief spokesman on religious cults for the German Protestant Church, described Scientology as a “totalitarian organisation” and said that Mr Cruise had become “the Goebbels of Scientology”.
Germany also apparently considered forcing Microsoft to debundle the Diskkeeper anti-fragmentation software from Windows 2000, not for anti trust reasons, but because the company who licensed the product to Microsoft is Scientology-led.
Another fringe religion (although probably a much larger one) getting a lot of attention recently is Mormonism. It is a widely known piece of computer history trivia that the late, great Wordperfect was created by Mormon, and despite the shaky reputation that Mormonism has in some quarters, as far as I know there was never any particular controversy over using software developed by them.
Bonus trivia: Bruce Bastian, one of the two original Mormon developers of Wordperfect, later came out as gay and now devotes his time and fortune to gay activism.
