Oh, let’s go crazy and do a blog post two days in a row…

I was on my way to the subway this morning to meet a friend for lunch, and I saw this - a Far Side just begging to be written:

It then reminded me that a few weeks ago I’d seen this - all the traditional Japanese Autumn symbols set up for some portraits at a local dog boutique (jugo-ya full moon, tsukimi dango, pampas grass or could be bush clover - both are traditional Autumn symbols and I can’t tell from the photo but would guess the former):

The former surprised me a lot less than the latter. I suppose it’s because when I first came to Japan, it was not very usual to see a dog that was not a “traditional” Japanese dog (Shiba or Akita, etc.); and the dogs you did see were usually chained up outside the family house on a chain or rope that always seemed just a little bit too short. Now, of course, only several years later, you can barely go for a walk without tripping over a pack of long-haired dachshunds or several chihuahuas and you are then at the other extreme with scenes like this (and, in case you are wondering, there is no baby):

I was just updating another blog I maintain and thought I’d pop over and take a look at my blog. I was a wee bit shocked to realize that I’ve had an iPhone for almost 3 months. Oh well, at least I like it more now than I did before (although it is still lacking a few features I think it needs: “Mark as Read” would be a good starting point) (but, just as I typed that, it occurred to me that the feature might exist but I’ve yet to discover it).

Anyway, it’s been a busy few months and it does leave me pondering, yet again, if I should just scrap this endeavour. A kind commenter in Montreal, Van Hus, seems to think I should (but he also has some perverse desire to defend CNN writers, so I’m not sure we can take him too seriously).

My sister was here for a visit and we did a bit of travel: went to see F1 (hence the photo above, which was taken with the GIANT lens I lugged to the track 3 days running), went to Kyoto, toured around Tokyo. In case you are interested (and don’t worry if you’re not because I am not really an F1 fan either and don’t know much about it beyond the usual), the photo is the winning driver at Fuji Speedway this year, Alonso.

Here’s a classic Kyoto photo - this is Kinkaku-ji (aside from the striking gold facade, it is famous for being burned down by a monk in 1950 and then the act itself was immortalized in Mishima’s novel The Temple of the Golden Pavillion):

I don’t really take too many classic touristy photos these days - I tend to be more interested in things like this if I go “temple tromping”:

I’m off on another tour of the countryside for a few days on Thursday and I’m hoping the leaves are in full colour (although they seem a bit muted in colour here in Tokyo this year; but, at the same time, they are not fully changed yet). We’ll see…

PS: In case you are wondering what I mean by a “GIANT” lens, this will help you visualize it:

My goal today is to push that Madonna apartment billboard off the front page of this blog (yes, of course I know there are other ways to do that, such as reducing the number of posts displayed on the page, but it’s really just a way to push myself to get back on track with this whole blogging thing). I don’t have anything against Madonna, and I certainly own as many (if not more) Madonna CDs as anyone who went to high school in the 80s (so I never really did understand the nasty comment a disgruntled fan left here a few months back - I guess said fan didn’t like my comments about celebs shilling all sorts of things in Japan they’d never push back home).

Anyway, what to write about? Well, how about the series of iEvents I was plagued with on Friday afternoon - a complete snowball of iChaos that now means my Big Mac is off to the iDoctor for some iService.

So, in a flurry of spontaneity (not catalyzed by me), I now have a 16GB iPhone. To be honest, I had been feeling rather ambivalent about the acquisition of an iPhone: Japanese mobile phones are pretty feature-rich compared to North American models prior to the iPhone and, despite the many Apple products I own, I wasn’t in a hurry to get one.

I’d had it for a few days and was being a bit lackadaisical about inputting my contacts, etc. (because unlike switching to other mobiles here, where the provider transfers all of your data from old phone to new, the iPhone requires you to start from scratch and, oddly enough, the CD that Softbank provides to help you transfer your data through your PC is for Windows only), but I decided to bite the bullet Friday and get it done.

As I was reaching to plug the USB connector from the phone to Big Mac, I pulled the monitor towards me slightly and inadvertently unplugged the computer while it was turned on and had a whack of programs open. Normally, when this happens with a Mac, you just turn it back on and you get a message saying “Your computer was not shut down properly, so now we are going to have to realign the solar system and make sure that you are still standing in the same spot on the same plane of reality” (okay, that’s not really the message, but it’s along those lines and you have to wait a bit as it takes your computer a few minutes to sort out the permissions, etc.).

Not this time…

After watching the sleep indicator (the little white light on the bottom right) flash intermittently and beep for a while (3 flashes in quick succession and a loud beep and then a lag and then 3 more, etc.), the screen went black and there were some sounds you definitely don’t want to hear coming from your computer: deep, high-pitched radio squelch and a lot of fuzz and static - it sounded like ET was indeed phoning home. This went on for quite some time (read: I let this go on for quite some time in the hopes that ET would actually connect to his home planet and bring up my desktop).

Now, for most people, because they never back up their data, this moment would be the moment of absolute fear and panic. Unlike most people, my problem is that I have too many backups (I experienced a hard disk failure a couple of years ago that left me extra cautious) and, in these backups, I have quite a bit of duplication of my data (which means a lot of hard disk space is eaten up by my cautious approach). So, for the most part, a computer meltdown doesn’t really phase me too much (and I have a laptop as well anyway, which is what I’m using to write this).

However, I did realize in that moment that I had not backed up approximately 5000 photos from the past 4 months because I shoot in RAW and each file is quite large and I didn’t have much room left on my 3 external hard drives. Oddly enough, on Thursday, the day before this happened, I went to Bic Camera and bought another 500GB hard drive, but hadn’t done the backup yet.

Anyway, what I realized in that moment was that I don’t really care all that much for all of that data - sure, it’s a lot of photos to lose, but in all of that mass I realized that there are really only about 20 photos within all of that ridiculous mass that I would really be sorry to lose - just 20 or so, including these few:

A kind of interesting realization…I’m much less attached to all of my photos than I thought I was.

Long story short, I did somehow manage to boot once from the startup CD and transfer all of the photos to the new backup drive. However, when I rebooted again from a cloned copy of my system on another drive, my hard disk was gone…poof…not visible and that’s that.

¥49,000 (about $500) and Apple will pick up my computer, pack it up and repair it in 4 to 10 days. I am glad I was able to retrieve my photos and am hoping I’ll have my big desktop back again sooner rather than later.

A headline that I am sure grabbed your attention the other day, and certainly grabbed mine as I thought “hmmm…must be a slow news day for CNN…why report on real news (like the quagmire in Iraq) when you can bring such hard-hitting news from across the Pacific…?”

Yes, you know the headline I am talking about - Japan: Bunch of Grapes sold for $910:

I don’t really have any problem with such a story being reported, and it is certainly true that some pretty high prices are paid for fruit over here, BUT, in the AP wire story that almost every newspaper in the world seems to have picked up, it’s this sentence that gets me :

Fruit is generally expensive in Japan, and people often buy grapes, peaches and melons as luxury gifts. Japanese are often willing to pay top prices for high-end fruits, especially for the prestige of owning the very first ones of the year.

“Often” is used twice and it leaves the reader with the impression that what was a completely exceptional purchase (something that could happen only once a year for this type of grape and for a few other select fruits) is almost commonplace.

The truth is that most Japanese people buy their fruit at the supermarket, just like everywhere else in the world and some fruits are significantly more expensive than in other places (for example, a watermelon is probably an average $15 U.S.) while others are just slightly more expensive (say 30% more than you’d pay in North America), while others still are on par (for example, bananas and kiwis). But everything’s relative right? Bear in mind that food is either imported (think: transport costs, distribution costs, etc.) or grown domestically (think: limited agricultural land availability, a high cost of living for farmers, and an extraordinarily strong agricultural growers union) and also that Japanese shoppers are notoriously picky (they won’t overlook minor blemishes or bruising, so the fruits need to “look perfect”) and you can understand why general prices would be higher.

So, on to the real story behind the $910 grapes. To understand why such an auction and purchase would take place, you need to get deeper into Japanese culture than just saying people often buy certain fruits as “luxury gifts” - a number of factors come into play.

In general, Japanese consumers do not make purchasing decisions based on price alone - perceived freshness and quality are more significant and, in fact, a price that is “too low” suggests that the product must not be good enough quality. When it comes to food, most Japanese people prefer domestically grown produce because they feel it is safer (there’s a mistrust of food from China in particular), fresher, and tastes better.

In addition, there is the quest for perfection. Ask anyone working in Quality Control for a multinational company that does business in Japan and you are guaranteed to hear stories that detail either how Japanese customers (which include middle men/distributors) reject products regularly due to perceived flaws that would go undetected by buyers in other countries, or how quality standards are just so much higher here than any of their other production facilities in other countries. As an example of the former, I recently discovered that distributors often reject shipments of goods because the boxes are damaged even though the goods inside (i.e., the hundreds of packaged products inside the boxes) are completely intact and undamaged.

Imagine, for example, taking 40 china plates and packing them individually in cardboard and then placing those 40 cardboard packages in a large box filled with straw and styrofoam popcorn and then shipping that large box to a distributor on the other side of the world. The large box arrives and there is a minor rip on the outside that was incurred at some point in the shipping process. However, inside the large box, all the individual boxes are in perfect condition. Now imagine being told by the distributor that he cannot accept the large box because he will not be able to deliver such a box to his customer, a department store, because of the minor rip in the large box used only for shipping. If you’ve ever worked in shipping or procurement or package delivery, you’ll understand just how unbelievable this situation is (but it is true).

The third element, which is a core concept in Japanese culture dating at least back to the Heian period is the love of the ephemeral. If you’ve ever wondered why it is that Japanese people turn out in droves to sit under cherry trees while they are blossoming or why you cannot book a hotel room in Kyoto during the Autumn when all the leaves are changing colour or why those green tea Kit Kats are only in the stores for 1 month before they are replaced by a new flavour.

And this segues into the fourth element: an absolute love for newness. This love is self-evident in many aspects of Japanese culture, most documented perhaps is the marketing concept of Shinhatsubai (which basically translates to “new and improved product” and can help you understand why products are constantly appearing and disappearing and then re-appearing with modifications in this lightening fast market). Newness, however, is everywhere here: people don’t want to rent apartments that are more than 10 years old, culturally significant landmarks (such as temples) are regularly renovated or even knocked down and rebuilt, and you would be hard pressed to find a car on the roads that is more than 7 or 8 years old (those all get shipped to other countries in what is a very lucrative re-sale market).

So, the $910 grapes are domestic, they are new, they will only be in season a short time, and they are in perfect condition. This means they are valuable and their rarity only helped to boost that price.

First of all, thank you for the “welcome back” comments - unexpected, but a
very pleasant surprise. I’ll try my best to keep you entertained with my
pithy commentary from this place I affectionately refer to as The
Rock (do with that what you will: if you want to make Alcatraz
analogies, be my guest; however, that would be your own subjective reading
of potential symbols…). The cosmetic changes are still not complete and I even managed to lose my entire blog today in my efforts to “tidy up” the file tree (yes, Jay, have upgraded to 2.6 - might have to hit you up for some pointers).

So, anyway, as I was contemplating my return to the blogosphere
(could there be an uglier neologism?), I was kind of passively brainstorming
(is there such a thing? perhaps if you do it at my relaxed pace…)
potential topics and I happened to be in Shinjuku the other day and it
happened to be about 37C (but really felt about 42C in the sun) and I just
happened to come across this:

I have barely written a blog entry this entire year and, in the intervening 8 months, nothing’s changed outside of Krispy Kreme (okay, that’s not entirely true: they made a snake-type ramp at the front so that people don’t have to line up across the bridge and all the way to Takashimaya Times Square). Really…what compels people to line up for these things in the sweltering heat?

Okay, that’s done. I solemnly swear that I will never ever blog about Krispy Kreme again (that was the third time and that is my KK limit - always good to know one’s own limits, I say).

So, on to the next Shinjuku oddity.

As I rounded the corner from Odakyu Southern Terrace (the home of the now unmentionable greasy dough ring franchise) onto Koshu-kaido (the big main street that runs in front of the south exit of JR Shinjuku Station), I see this:

It is quite possibly one of the most amazing clouds I have ever seen - it was absolutely MASSIVE and, here’s the kicker: NOT ONE PERSON (aside from me) looked up and took notice (except the one old chief who noticed me and my camera and then followed my line of vision - if I hadn’t been taking a picture, he probably would’ve just carried on right across the street without looking up). Seriously…I took about 10 photos and in every frame it’s heads down across the board…

Life: you miss out on it if you’re never looking beyond the tip of your own snout…

So, August 12th seems about as good a day as any to crank up the old blog machine again…yes, it has been a while and, to be honest, I have considered just deleting the whole show; however, a good friend of mine has been urging me to “blog again”.

Being obedient, here I am.

(That was a joke obviously…anyone who knows me would see through that in a nanosecond: “obedient” is the last adjective on the face of the earth that applies to me…)

Anyway, as you can see, a bit of a cosmetic change going on with the blog - bear with me as I bring the whole look in line with my website and find the time to write a proper blog entry: tomorrow evening’s project…in the meantime, jump on over to my Flickr page and look at some sushi porn and some seagulls…