Kimi's travels

Plea for help, from Japan

2011-05-27T12:15:00.000-07:00

A friend in Tokyo asked me to share the following with you. It contains an update on the current nuclear radiation situation in Japan as well as a request for you to send emails to Japanese government officials urging them to comply with international radiation standards. Please take a moment to read this and send an email.

Itsumi's message:

Since radioactive particles have started spreading around the world, your message will help to save the world and people (especially children). Here are a few examples of what is happening now in Japan:
1. The Japanese government allows fresh food to be on the market although it contains radiation 20-30 times higher than the global safety standard.

2. The Japanese government does not do anything even with food which contains radiation higher than Japanese safety standards.

3. The Japanese government does not inform its citizens of the results of the seafood radiation investigation, and does not allow Green Peace to conduct a thorough investigation of the sea environment around Japan.

4. According to UK researchers, more than 400,000 additional cancers will occur within the next 50 years on account of the radiation if no preventive efforts take place.

5. Air dose levels of radiation do not reflect the actual doses. Official air doses are half or quarter of the actual doses.

6. The Japanese government insists that 20mSv/year is safe for children at a school yard. The amount is 20 times higher than previous safety standards.

7. Data and information about Fukushima has been hidden, although radioactive particles keep spilling into the water and air every day.

8. Several millions of residents who evacuated from the area surrounding Fukushima still live in public buildings, gymnasiums, and such. There is no plan for them yet.

9. Several millions of Geiger counters donated by foreign counties are sitting, unused, in a warehouse.
Please send an email about these issues to the following Japanese officials:
Mr. Naoto Kan, prime minister (for all of the above): kan-naoto@nifty.com
Mr. Hosokawa, Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (Points 1.2.3.4): h04091@shugiin.go.jp
Mr. Takagi, Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (Points 5, 6): g02653@shugiin.go.jp
Mr. Kaieda, Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (Points 7, 8) office@kaiedabanri.jp
Mr. Matsumoto, Foreign Ministry (Point 9): info-matsumoto@memenet.or.jp
Please urge them to:

1) Conform to global standards on radiation safety in terms of food, water, and the environment
2) Check radiation levels in the air and water, and on the ground, which are more suitable to protect human life

3) Make all updated radiation information easily available to everyone

4) Disclose information and data regarding the Fukushima plant to Japanese and also the world

5) Take appropriate care of residents who have evacuated and who want to evacuate from Fukushima prefecture

6) Utilize the Geiger counters and other resources donated from foreign countries

*****

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this message. Itsumi regularly tweets about the radiation and earthquake situation. You can follow her tweets at http://twitter.com/#!/ikrockhopper

Update on the ongoing nuclear disaster in Japan

2011-05-12T07:57:00.000-07:00

TEPCO (the Japanese power company) finally was able to enter Reacter No. 1, and they found that a complete meltdown had happened there. For weeks they had been dumping sea water into the container that holds the rods, but they now know that it was to no avail, and none of the water stayed in the container. When they entered the area they found that the water gague was not working, so all of their readings had been false. They also found that there was no water in the pressure vessel (critical container) or in the container vessel (shell of the pressure vessel), although they had already poured 10,000 tons of water in to keep the rods cool. TEPCO finally admits that the rods are exposed, and probably melted down to the bottom of the pressure vessel.

One surprise was that the temperature of the pressure vessel is very low, which implies that the hot rods are not at the bottom of the pressure vessel. The rods may have melted the bottom of the pressure vessel and piled up at the bottom of the container vessel. Or, even worse, they may have reached the concrete ground of the building, or even lower. Nobody knows.

TEPCO planned to fill the vessels with water and cool down the rods, but, since they now know that the pressure vessel is broken, they must change their plan. However, the only thing they are able to do is keep pouring on the water, even though they don't know where it is going. Nobody knows where the 10,000 tons of radioactive water have gone.

Many experts including those in the U.S. say that a meltdown has happened in three reactors to a certain degree, but they can't say to what extent. Now, a 100% meltdown has been confirmed at Reactor No. 1.
Presumably the situation at Reactor 3 continues to be dire, and is especially dangerous because Reactor 3 contains the more dangerous MOX plutonium fuel. The situation at No. 4 is also obviously not good, because recently the No. 4 building has been visibly leaning. A video about the leaning No. 4 building and the fact that information is being controlled in order to avoid panic is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPWLwTiSv_Y&feature=youtu.be

The nuclear disaster hasn't gotten any better, but life continues on in Japan. I summarized this update from news that Itsumi, who is in Tokyo, has sent me. She is tweeting regular updates about the disaster situation in Japan. You can read them yourself at http://twitter.com/#!/search/ikrockhopper, or go to http://twitter.com/ and search for ikrockhopper.

Pirates!

2011-04-01T02:02:00.000-07:00

We made it safely past the pirate area in the Gulf of Aden. Our crew took many precautions to protect us from Somali pirates, who take many ships hostage in this area, demanding ransom.

During the two days that it took to pass through this area, we traveled in a convoy with several other ships, and we were accompanied by a Japanese Coast Guard ship on the rear and another coast guard ship in front. The crew covered all of our windows with cardboard to make it more difficult to see our ship, and we were not allowed to go out on the decks after dark.

If pirates tried to enter our ship, they would approach in small speed boats that are not visible on radar, and they would shoot ropes up to our decks, which they would then climb. Our lowest open deck is on the seventh floor, and is usually used as a bar for crew members. While we passed through the Gulf of Aden, the crew closed off this deck and also put razor wire around it, as you can see in the photo. (The other photo shows the Japanese Coast Guard ship that accompanied us). A bar for passengers is one deck higher, and every night crew members kept watch on this deck.

We are safely through the area, and had no pirate incidents, although pirates were on everybody's mind. In the daily ship newspaper there was an announcement for a "yoga and pirates" class, the typical Japanese mistake of mixing R and L.

While most of the world sees the Somali men who target ships in this area as pirates, the pirates see themselves as a volunteer coast guard. Since Somalia has no Coast Guard, many foreign fishing vessels illegally take fish in Somalia's waters, and foreign ships have also been known to dump hazardous and even nuclear waste in Somali waters, causing environmental and health problems on shore. Somali fishermen who could no longer make a living due to this illegal fishing and dumping have turned to piracy. Their efforts have greatly reduced the illegal fishing and dumping, and have also lined their pockets.

But please don't worry - we are in safe waters now. I will blog about our visit to Saudi Arabia soon, and you can look for my article on Peace Boat's website in a few days. Our next stop will be Kochi, India!

Egypt

2011-03-27T05:00:00.000-07:00

I heard that Peace Boat was the first cruise ship to visit Egypt since Egypt's revolution began, less than one month earlier. We were not allowed to enter Egypt freely, but instead were required to join tour groups. All of our buses headed to Cairo in a convoy. I don't think this requirement was anything new, but the many military tanks we saw along the highway are probably new since the revolution, as the country is now under military control.

The great thing about being among the first travelers back is that there were few tourists at the pyramids, and we had them much more to ourselves than could ever normally happen. The down side was that the souvenir hawkers and camel ride vendors seemed to have saved up a month's worth of energy to expend all on us.

A few days ago in Athens I was amazed by the ancientness of the Acropolis and Parthenon. Built more than 400 years BC, they were the oldest human sites I had ever seen. But they are new compared to the pyramids at Giza, completed around 2,600 BC.

We visited Tahrir Square where much of Egypt's revolution took place, and then we met with two of the young people who were part of the revolution. They told us about some of the reasons for the revolution. These included:

having the same ruler for 30 years
poverty (60% of the population lives under the poverty line)
poor health care (because of a lack of hospital beds, many patients sleep on the floor)
police violence
human rights violations such as lack of free speech, and an "emergency law" which allows people to be jailed for opposing the government, for example in a blog or newspaper

The young revolutionaries felt very good about conducting their revolution in a peaceful way. Because the media was controlled by the government, they did much of their organizing over Facebook and Twitter, and this was successful even though only six percent of Egyptians have access to the internet.

Since President Mubarak stepped down, Egypt has been under military control, and the military will run the country until elections are held in September.

When asked about the situation in neighboring Libya, the revolutionaries expressed their disappointment that Qaddafi has not stepped down, but they spoke against foreign military intervention. "We do not need another war in the world," one of the revolutionaries said. "Who knows if those countries will pull out after overthrowing Qaddafi? A revolution can be done peacefully."

Naples, Italy: Atomic Bomb Survivors Call for Abolition of Nuclear Power

2011-03-21T23:54:00.000-07:00

Nine survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were on a bus in Naples, Italy, when they heard the news that hundreds of people are being treated for radiation exposure due to explosions at a nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan in the aftermath of the massive earthquake that struck Japan on March 11. The atomic bomb survivors, or Hibakusha in Japanese, gave testimony of their experiences several times in Naples, to junior high school students and to the public.

"The most horrible part of the atomic bomb is the radiation that it releases," said Sakaguchi Hiroko, a second generation Hibakusha whose mother was exposed to the atomic bomb at the age of 23 in Nagasaki. "Radiation has no color or shape. However, it penetrates the body and damages DNA." Because Ms. Sakaguchi's mother was not near the hypocenter of the atomic bomb, she didn't have any immediate injuries. But later she died of rectal and lung cancer.

The radiation released from an atomic bomb and the radiation released when a nuclear power plant malfunctions are the same, and Ms. Sakaguchi is concerned for the people who have been or are being exposed to radiation in Japan following the earthquake and tsunami which led to an explosion at a nuclear power plant. "The myth that Japanese technology is good enough to make nuclear energy safe and clean has been broken by this earthquake," Ms. Sakaguchi said. "We cannot stop earthquakes, but we can stop nuclear power. And we must," she said, quoting Felicity Hill, a leader in the struggle against nuclear energy. She urged the audience to work toward developing sustainable energy and creating a world with no war and no nuclear weapons. "It's not only the nuclear bomb, it's all stages of the nuclear fuel cycle, including the uranium mining, that create risks for human beings."

Ms. Sakaguchi, born four years after the atomic bomb, emphasized that radiation affects not only those who are exposed but also future generations. "Radiation causes a special damage, and that damage is also in my body," she said. Several of her classmates and cousins, also second generation Hibakusha, have died of leukemia.

An Italian junior high school student asked why Japan, after having experienced nuclear bombs, has nuclear power plants. Tasaki Noburo, who was exposed to the atomic bomb in Nagasaki, explained that until now Japan has relied heavily on nuclear power, and has exported nuclear power overseas. "But because of the earthquake we now know for sure that nuclear power plants are very dangerous," he said. He recommended the use of solar and natural energy. "The use of nuclear power is not just a problem in Japan. Many countries use nuclear power, and they all share the same concern," he said. "As Hibakusha we know the horrors of radiation. We really have to think about how to move forward to make clean and safe energy," he said.

Yamanaka Emiko, exposed to radiation in Hiroshima when she was 12 years old, explained how radiation affects not only future generations, but also human relations. "When I was a teenager I had a boyfriend," she said. "For four years we had a lovely relationship, and eventually he proposed to me. But his parents forbade our marriage, saying that they didn't want any Hibakusha in the family."

Nishida Goro, exposed to the atomic bomb in Hiroshima at the age of three, also emphasized that radiation is the scariest part of nuclear weapons. Mr. Nishida's mother was not in Hiroshima when the bomb exploded, but she was unknowingly exposed to radiation when she entered the city of Hiroshima several days later. His mother passed away when he was in high school, after she had suffered many years from an enlarged spleen caused by radiation. "Radiation is invisible but it comes out in sicknesses such as cancer and leukemia, and it has a strong effect on people and the environment," Mr. Nishida said.

Currently in Japan, radiation has been released during several explosions at a nuclear power plant in Fukushima, and radiation has been detected in the populous Tokyo area.

Kakefuda Itsumi, a psychologist in Tokyo, said that in evaluating nuclear power people should consider the psychological impact of nuclear disasters. "People in Tokyo and the surrounding area are experiencing a lot of stress due to worry about radiation," she said. "Some have started to move away. Radiation is not visible, and people can't obtain accurate information. Even the authorities don't know what is happening," she said. "Nuclear power plants are not worth having."

Worried about Japan

2011-03-16T04:11:00.000-07:00

I was on a bus with nine Hibakusha (survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) when I heard the news that 400 people in Japan are now receiving treatment for radiation exposure due to the nuclear accident caused by the earthquake in Japan. The Hibakusha had just given testimony about their experience of nuclear bombs to a group of junior high school students in Naples, Italy. I'll have an article about it on the Peace Boat website soon.

It seems like my friends in Japan are doing ok, although I'm very worried about the radiation. I am not able to get news every day, but today in Naples I was able to use internet, and buy an English newspaper. On the ship we're doing fine although of course people are worried.

Here is a photo of me in Morocco taken just before the earthquake. This party was our welcome as we got off the ship! My favorite experience in Morocco was going to a hammam (public bath) with two friends. We were scrubbed, massaged, covered in mud and wrapped in plastic, and it was sooooooo relaxing. Also in Morocco, I visited an NGO that works with street kids.

Before Morocco, we stopped in Las Palmas on Spain's Canary Islands, and I visited a center for immigrants. I've also been busy onboard giving a couple of presentations about migrant farm workers and immigration issues and human trafficking.

Tonight we will leave Naples, and in a couple of days we'll be in Piraeus, Greece.

In a new ocean

2011-03-04T07:18:00.000-08:00

We spent an entire day passing through the Panama Canal, and then we were in the Atlantic! I had a free morning in Panama so I went to the beach with a couple of the English teachers onboard. In Cartagena, Colombia I visited a dance school that teaches low-income kids to become world class dancers, and in Trinidad (Trinidad and Tobago) I went to a steel pan factory and learned how that instrument is manufactured. I haven't had time for blogging, but you can read my articles about the ports and more on Peace Boat's website. Now we are crossing the Atlantic, heading for the Canary Islands. In a few days we'll be at the mid-way point around the world.

Due to the war going on in Libya, we won't be stopping there, and we will instead spend an extra day in Naples. It looks like things have settled down in Egypt and we will be able to go there, and if everything works out with visas and government permission we will also make a quick stop in Saudi Arabia!

Onboard, I'm busy with events and writing articles. I gave a talk on migrant farm workers a few days ago. Also, I have a volunteer Japanese teacher (classes started last week), and amazingly I have a lot more opportunity to practice Japanese here on the ship than I ever did in Japan. I try to go to dinner by myself rather than with other volunteers. That way I get seated with passengers, and they are always happy to try to chat with me in Japanese. I've been improving at making basic conversation. Many of the passengers are retired people, and since older Japanese people tend to speak less English, and they have lots of time, they make good conversation partners for me.

Here's a picture of a performance at the dance school in Cartagena, and one of me climbing up on the top deck of the ship trying to get a good shot of the Panama Canal locks.

Just left Peru!

2011-02-21T21:59:00.000-08:00

We made it across the Pacific and spent two days in Peru where I joined a cultural exchange with a theatre and art collective in a slum near Lima. They have a circus which provides education and fun for local kids. You will be able to read more about it on the Peace Boat website in a few days.

Tomorrow we will pass through the Panama Canal and stop in Cristobal, Panama, on the Atlantic side of the canal. I've been pretty busy writing for Peace Boat, and haven't had much time to write on my own blog, but I'm enjoying this voyage immensely, meeting many great and fun people and learning and participating in all kinds of interesting things. I do miss being in touch with all my friends and family, though! I hope you're all well.

Aboriginal Australians and uranium mining

2011-02-11T03:09:00.000-08:00

On Peace Boat I interviewed a group of Aboriginal and activist Australians regarding uranium mining. Getting to know many interesting guest educators who are onboard between ports is one of the many things I'm enjoying on the ship, and I particularly enjoyed writing about this group. If you have a chance to read just one of my articles, I recommend this one:

http://www.peaceboat.org/english/index.php?page=view&nr=94&type=20&menu=64

Aboriginal Australians and uranium mining

2011-02-10T23:18:00.000-08:00

Swimming with sharks, petting sting rays

2011-02-06T02:41:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I swam with sting rays and black tip reef sharks on the island of Moorea, next to Tahiti! The sting rays rubbed up against me and let me pet them. They feel exactly like cooked portabello mushrooms! The sharks were small, and although they were literally right next to us, and I could look right at them with a snorkel on (my first snorkeling experience - thanks to Lasik!) our guide said that they have plenty to eat and are not interested in biting humans.

I also got to snorkel over a coral reef, and I saw lots of tropical fish, sea anemones with fish swimming among them just like Nemo, and lots of sea creatures that I can't identify. Since it's my job to report on the voyage, I get to go on tours for free at most of the ports. And I'm lucky it's free, because Tahiti is VERY expensive! A can of beer at a convenience store costs US $4, and my dinner of raw tuna in coconut milk, and no beverage, cost $17!

Today we are back on the boat heading toward South America, and our next stop will be Callao, Peru on February 17. Onboard there is lots to do and I seldom have any down time. During the first segment of the voyage, we had a conference onboard which brought together survivors of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Tahitians fighting to get compensation from France for the health effects caused by French nuclear testing in French Polynesia, and Aboriginal Australians fighting the uranium mining that is destroying their home and their health. As a reporter, I have a chance to interview all of the interesting guest speakers who come onboard. I especially enjoyed getting to know the Australians and writing about their issue, which is devastating their communities. My article about them will be posted on Peace Boat's website in a couple of days. http://www.peaceboat.org.

In researching the article about the Tahitian nuclear test site workers, I learned that France conducted 46 atmospheric and 137 underground nuclear tests in French Polynesia between 1966 and 1996. Before 1966, France tested nuclear weapons in the Sahara Desert in Algeria. The local workers, working next to the mushroom cloud, had nothing but army-issued shorts and T-shirts to protect them. The U.K. and the U.S. conducted even more nuclear weapons tests. The U.K. tested nuclear weapons on Aboriginal land in Australia, and on Christmas Island, and the U.S. did nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands, which the ship passed a few days ago, as well as New Mexico and Nevada.

Local people are still suffering and dying because of this, and the environment is forever destroyed. What makes some countries feel that they can test nuclear weapons in places inhabited by people they deem less important? Many of the tests were done not to gain scientific information, but merely to show off might. It's nuclear colonialism and nuclear racism, and it continues to be perpetrated to this day. Countries that buy uranium from Australia are causing Aboriginal people who live near the mines to become sick and die. We need to stop using nuclear power as well as eliminate nuclear weapons!

But not everything is serious on the ship -- the weather has been beautiful and tropical for the last couple of weeks, and I usually eat breakfast and lunch outdoors on the pool deck. I have a nice spot for practicing yoga in front of windows looking out at the sea, but I haven't yet been able to do balance poses on the moving ship! Dancing is more difficult, but fun, on a ship too. When I'm in my room, which is on the 4th deck, just above the water line, I can hear the waves crashing against the outside of the ship.

We crossed the International Date Line last week, and so January 30 was 48 hours long for us. I haven't seen my email in almost two weeks, but I'll try to check in and answer them soon! I hope that you are healthy and happy and staying warm!

The photos above show me swimming with a sting ray, sting rays and sharks swimming where I swam, and me at the beach in Moorea. The water was an amazing turquoise!

Day Five at Sea

2011-01-26T19:19:00.000-08:00

When I was in high school I had a fantasy that I would get a job on a ship and travel around the world. In my fantasy, I worked my way around the world by carrying crates on and off the ship. I never imagined that in reality I would work for my passage by taking photos and writing to promote peace.

From Japan we headed south to a warmer climate where we can enjoy the pools and jacuzzis on deck. Now we are heading southeast toward Tahiti. I've been busy taking photos and writing about the guest educators that are on the ship with us for this portion of the voyage. Over the next week we will have an onboard global conference to promote a nuclear-free world. The conference will include Japanese survivors of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Tahitians opposed to France's testing of nuclear weapons in Tahiti, and aboriginal Australians who oppose the destructive mining of uranium which causes their traditional lands to be contaminated with radiation. We will learn about all stages of the nuclear fuel cycle.

I'm enjoying getting to know the volunteers, staff and participants who are onboard, and we've had parties, dances, games and general fun. The volunteers come from around the world. Last night we had a Fiesta Latina, and the day before we saw a Tahitian and Hawaiian dance and music performance.

When I stand on the deck I see nothing but water in every direction. I haven't even seen any other ships. The horizon is all around me. I can hear the sloshing of the waves against the ship.

I haven't had any motion sickness so far, but I'm drinking ginger tea, a natural remedy, just in case. I share a cabin with a roommate. She grew up in Japan and New Mexico! Our cabin is a bit smaller than a college dorm, but we each have a bed, closet, safety box, drawer, and there is a bathroom and shower for us. We are on the fourth deck, out of 11 decks. We do have two windows in our room, but we can't open them on the open sea. We may be able to open them when we are on the Mediterranean Sea since it will be calm.

For breakfast and lunch, we have buffet-style meals, and every day we have a nice dinner that is served as in a nice restaurant. Sometimes the restaurant serves Japanese food, and sometimes it serves western food. We have two swimming pools, three jacuzzis and a gym, which I have been using every morning. We also have several auditoriums for lectures and parties, and every day is very busy!

One fact of traveling around the world eastbound is that nearly every night we must set our clocks one hour ahead. I had better start getting used to 23-hour days!

I've been writing about and photographing the many events on board, and my first report was posted on the Peace Boat website yesterday. You can follow my reports at http://www.peaceboat.org. Click on the link for the 72nd (current) Voyage. I'm writing this blog entry offline, and when I go online to upload, it will be my first time trying to use satellite internet from the ship. Satellite internet is slow and expensive, so please understand why I haven't answered any emails.

Departing for a voyage around the world!

2011-01-20T23:53:00.000-08:00

In two days I'll be leaving for an 86-day voyage around the world working as a volunteer web reporter on Peace Boat, a Japan-based NGO that works to promote peace, human rights, equal and sustainable development and respect for the environment. I'll be writing articles and taking photos for Peace Boat's website, and you will be able to read them here:

http://www.peaceboat.org/english/index.php?page=view&nr=96&type=4&menu=64

They will be posted toward the bottom of the page.

In addition, I will update Peace Boat's Facebook page every few days, so if you would like to see where I am and what I am doing, "like" Peace Boat on Facebook. Let me know if you don't find it and would like me to send you an invitation.

Aside from my duties as a web reporter, I will have limited internet access during the voyage. I will post a blog entry from time to time at http://travelingkimi.blogspot.com/, which will be automatically posted on Facebook, but aside from that my use of Facebook will be very limited, so please contact me by email, and don't be surprised if it takes me awhile to answer. I'll try to check in about once a week. Nonetheless, I look forward to hearing from you! I will return to Japan on April 18.

Happy New Year!

2010-12-30T14:28:00.001-08:00

It's a winter wonderland in Nasu where I am working. Wishing you all
the best in 2011!

"Just lynching"

2010-11-17T06:02:00.000-08:00

I read an article about Japanese girl gangs that engaged in lynching. The article, about the world’s five most bizarre gangs, said that sukeban, or Japanese girl gangsters, modified their school uniforms, used yo-yos as weapons, and sometimes engaged in lynching.

I asked Itsumi about sukeban. She said that when she was in high school in the 80s the sukeban were the girls who drank and smoke and maybe shoplifted, but they weren’t really so bad. They were well-liked, and sometimes stood up for other kids against the school authorities.

I asked Itsumi if the sukeban ever did anything violent, and she said not really, by today’s standards. But sometimes there was conflict between different groups of sukeban or within the group, and they burned each other with cigarettes. I asked if there was anything else, and she said not really, just lynching.

“JUST lynching?” I said. Occasionally, she said, but it wasn’t too serious.
Japanese borrows many words from English, and sometimes uses them in novel ways. For example, in Japanese, a “mansion” is an apartment building with more than four floors. And “lynching,” it turns out, means several people beating one person up, and it’s usually not a very serious beating.

In English, unfortunately, lynching means “to put to death, especially by hanging, by mob action and without legal authority.”

Machine demolishes landmines, as more are installed

2010-11-08T04:16:00.000-08:00

Hitachi Construction Machinery Company has built a machine that can hammer its way across the countryside, smashing landmines to pieces.

The machine is so sturdy that exploding landmines seldom damage it. Larger mines, the type designed to destroy tanks, cause minor but reparable damage to Hitachi’s machine.

I recently had a chance to see and climb into this machine at a Universal Design exposition that Itsumi attended for her work. I saw a display of some common landmines, including mines produced by the U.S. (below photo, third from left).This photo shows landmines produced by the U.S., Russia, Iran and China. The large ones on the right are designed to destroy tanks.

There are more than 200 types of landmines. While some are designed to injure or kill adult civilians, others are specifically designed to target children. Today, there are hundreds of millions of land mines waiting to explode in some 120 countries. In Cambodia and Angola, for example, there are two landmines for every child, and forty percent of the victims of landmine explosions are children.

Detonating mines by hand is very slow and very dangerous, causing many deaths every year. Hitachi’s machine uses flailing hammers to detonate mines while the operator is safely inside a sturdy cab. On the back of the machine, a tiller prepares the de-mined area for farming.

So far, seventy of Hitachi’s machines have been delivered to Angola, Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, Colombia and Nicaragua. The focus has been on demining fields that surround schools and housing areas.

It takes only about $5 to install a landmine, but removing it is incredibly expensive. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be just to transport and maintain demining machines in countries that have few roads. When I visited Laos, I learned that per capita Laos is the most heavily bombed country in the world. More than 1.3 million tons of ordnance were dropped on Laos between 1964 and 1973, mostly cluster bombs of which 30% did not detonate. Ten of the 18 Lao provinces are severely contaminated with land mines and many other types of UXOs.

The U.S., responsible for this contamination, has still not signed the Ottawa Treaty against landmines. Parties to the Ottawa Treaty agree to destroy landmines within their possession, clear their territory of mined areas, provide assistance to mine-affected persons in their own country and provide assistance to other countries in meeting these treaty obligations.

The U.S. should sign the Ottawa Treat, and take action to stop the production of landmines.

I can see clearly now...

2010-10-12T17:43:00.000-07:00

The morning before my intra lasik surgery, I read and signed the doctor's informed consent form, which made it explicitly clear that by undergoing this elective surgery I could become permanantly unable to drive, or even go blind. Contemplating this, I took what potentially could have been my last look at some photos of my family before taking the 40-minute train ride to the clinic.

The surgery was quick. Throughout the process I was supposed to look up at a light. I continued to do so but for a few minutes when my corneal flap was open I was not able to see much but gray, even though my eyes were open. The other disconcerting thing during surgery was that I could smell my eyeballs vaporizing, which smelled like burning flesh, and I have to admit that, thinking about that informed consent form, I was pretty terrified. But the doctor continually talked to me in English during the surgery, encouraging me, and I was glad that I could only hear his words and couldn't understand what was said among the technicians and assistants in the room. I didn't really feel pain during surgery, since my eyes were numbed by drops.

The hours immediately after surgery were uncomfortable, so I went to bed as soon as possible, wearing goggles to prevent me from rubbing my eyes.

The next morning, I could see at a distance but everything, near and far, was blurry. This worried me, but when I went back for my next day checkup Dr. Aoyama assured me that the blurriness is caused by dryness, because the layer of tears is gone from my eyes, and that it is normal and temporary.

Something that surprised me was that, after surgery, ordinary things like beverage cans and letter-sized paper and magazines seem much bigger than before, so much so that I have to read the labels in order to know what size things are. This is because I am suddenly free from glasses, and glasses cause things to appear smaller.

I need to take good care of my eyes in the coming months so that they heal properly, but I am looking forward to

1. buying my first pair of fashionable sunglasses
2. going scuba diving for the first time, and
3. seeing the inside of showers.

This morning, two days after surgery, I have already done two of those things, and I woke up singing "I can see clearly now ..." Everything looks clear and wonderful!

Orlando

2010-09-08T15:10:00.000-07:00

I just learned that my good friend Orlando Martinez passed away.

Orlando, then around 70, kept me company through law school, informing me at great length about communism, capitalism and all sorts of topics, and reminding me of things other than the narrow world of law school. Orlando often brought me a bowl of homemade chicken soup and a welcome break from my studies.

At that time Orlando was my neighbor, an artist and writer, writing for leftist publications like the Montelibre Monthly and trying valiantly to get his books published. He sometimes took care of my kitty Elfi when I was out of town, and he even painted a portrait of her as a gift for me. I treasure it. Orlando gave our apartment building a sense of community.

Once, Orlando agreed to visit my law school class as a volunteer juror for jury selection practice. He dominated the event and gave the law students some real world jury selection practice of a kind they couldn’t get from the standard law student volunteers. I don’t think anyone else got a word in, and I think Orlando enjoyed the disruption he created! I enjoyed it too, as I think law school students should be disrupted and made to think outside the textbooks a little more often.

One winter Orlando rescued a kitten and its mother who were in danger of freezing on the back porch of our apartment building. Together Orlando and I caught the mother kitty, which wasn’t easy because she was wild, and the pair lived in Orlando’s closet until the kitten, who Orlando named Bucky Linn, was old enough to adopt out. We found a home for her with a law student.

Orlando moved to Albuquerque, but we kept in touch and I visited him one year at Christmas time. We had Christmas dinner at a youth hostel in Albuquerque, and I enjoyed watching Orlando entertain the other guests.

In his later years Orlando became an advocate for the rights of medical patients, and he was a generous donor to the scholarship fund for Lidia, a young woman who I met in Bolivia. Thanks to the donations of Orlando and many of my friends and family, Lidia has completed more than half of her five-year nursing course.

Orlando was a regular reader of my blog, and he often chided me when its contents were not political enough.

Orlando delighted in making people think, and in helping others. I will miss him dearly.

Lying fallow in Anhui

2010-07-23T01:53:00.000-07:00

The morning after hiking Huang Shan my legs and knees ached so much that I could barely descend from my third-floor hostel room, so I decided to take a quiet trip to a village. The villages around Tunxi are known as Huizhou style. Absent any kind of economy beyond subsistence farming, the locals traditionally sent their sons away at the age of 13 to work as merchants. Many did well, and sent money back to their villages, where their families built mansions. Today the village lanes ramble among crumbling Ming and Qing era black and white tile-roofed structures, while farmers continue to harvest rice in the same way they have done for centuries.

I chose to visit Chengkan, dating from the Han Dynasty, because farmers rather than tourists continue to walk along its narrow winding alleys. The fact that it takes a series of four buses to get from Tunxi to Chenkan may be what keeps the tourists away. On the fourth bus, a man deposited a huge bag of Purina feed, paying the driver to deliver it somewhere, and another man boarded with some kind of motor that he and his friend were barely able to heave up the bus steps.

The sign at the entrance of Chengkan said “Welcome to Chengkan for tourism, visit, research, making holiday, lie fallow and sketching.” My aching legs told me that my plan in Chengkan was to lie fallow as much as possible.

Outside the city gates I paused to watch the rice farmers tending their paddies. In several inches of water one man in waders uprooted the densely planted seedlings and stacked them in a basket. Another man, barefoot, re-planted the seedlings, one by one, in the next water-filled paddy while a third man, also barefoot, used a hoe to shore up the clay wall of the paddy. In another paddy, an ox chewed its cud while waiting, hitched to a wooden plow.

In the distance, other farmers performed the same tasks, and one man stood on his wooden plow while a water buffalo pulled it around and around in the paddy.

The farmer who had been pulling the seedlings finished this task and stopped to take a drink. I greeted him with ni hao and offered him a package of Oreos. He refused it but said something to me in Chinese which sounded friendly enough.

The man who had been hoeing put a board over his shoulder and, balancing two huge baskets of wet seedlings, staggered to carry them to the next paddy.
All of the tools, including the plow, hoe, ox yoke, baskets and trays to hold the baskets appeared to be hand made, of wood and reed.

I paid 80 RMB (US $11) to enter the city gate of Chengkan. Villages in China charge a steep entrance fee, double the price of a night in a hostel. Chengkan is a quiet village consisting of a maze of narrow winding lanes between high walls concealing I don’t know what. I spent a morning wandering among the picturesque lanes and avoiding dogs as best I could, since China has a big rabies problem, and a traveler from Ireland told me that he had nearly been bitten in a village.
When I saw a woman washing her clothes in the river, beating them with a stick, I felt silly for having been disappointed that the spin cycle on my hostel’s washing machine hadn’t worked the day before, and I had had to wring my clothes dry by hand before hanging them to dry on the bamboo pole.
I had lunch at the village’s only restaurant. The waitress spoke a little English, and asked me if I wanted rice, noodles or dumplings. After I chose rice, she asked me to step into the kitchen and choose a vegetable. Since vegetables are not cooked together, I could only choose one. So I got a huge bowl of plain rice and a plate of cabbage fried with garlic and bother. Together with a beer for the hot day, it was a pretty good lunch. On the way back to Tunxi, two of the four bus drivers remembered me and gleefully helped me get on the right series of buses.

The next day I took a bus to Hongcun, a more touristed but still beautiful village, famous for its Moon Pond. In Hongcun, I rented a bicycle to ride out of town to the Mukeng Bamboo Forest, where parts of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon were filmed.

I rented the bike solely using gestures and drawings, and amazingly the shopkeeper and I correctly communicated the price, rental period and deposit which would be returned to me.

Anhui is a peaceful respite in bustling China.

Anhui: The New Mexico of China

2010-07-17T23:17:00.000-07:00

I took the maglev train travelling 301 km/hr (187 mph) from the airport to downtown Shanghai. Maglev is short for magnetic levitation, because the train doesn’t actually touch the tracks. Magnets provide lift and propulsion, so the train hovers just above the tracks, eliminating all but air friction and electro-magnetic drag. Maglev trains are quieter, faster and smoother than wheeled mass transit systems. China’s is the world’s most well-known commercial high-speed maglev. Its top speed is 381 km/hr (268 mph). By bus the trip would take 45 minutes, but we made it in 7 minutes 20 seconds, just slightly slower than an airplane could, and I found myself wondering why we don’t have a better public transportation system in the U.S.

At a youth hostel on East Nanjing Road I dined on take-out pizza and beer. For some reason the multitude of Pizza Huts in Shanghai had caught my eye, and I didn’t yet know that a meal of pizza cost about six times the price of a much tastier Chinese meal.

In the hostel I met backpackers from South Korea, Canada, China and the U.S. A man from Tennessee who had lived in Japan gave me his three-day pass to the Shanghai World Expo, with two days unused. He said that it was disappointing, and one day was enough for him.
In the morning I had spicy sour ramen noodles (8 RMB) while reading the China Daily. Drawn by the sound of drumming, I headed to a little park sandwiched between high rises and glittering shopping malls. A group of women was busily drumming and marching in formations. Further down, the tree-lined pedestrian lane was crowded with small groups of senior citizens doing tai chi and other exercises. One group of particularly energetic middle aged women was performing an aerobic dance to Chinese pop music using pink rubber balls as props.

I had read that because only two percent of Chinese smile at strangers, the government hired professional smilers to encourage smiling among the population before the Expo, so that visitors would feel more welcomed. Either it worked, or the original statistic was wrong, because in the bustling city of Shanghai, strangers greeted me with “ni hao,” smiled at me, waved, and generally tried to communicate with me in a friendly way. Shanghai felt vibrant and warm, brimming with talking and laughing and cheerful activity.

I spent a day at the expo which involved lots of waiting in lines to finally walk through mediocre exhibits consisting mostly of videos and a few products from each country while throngs of Chinese people rushed to get their Expo passports stamped but didn’t seem to look much at the exhibits. I realized that I’m pretty fortunate to be able to collect stamps in my real passport. Below is Britain's Seed Pavilion.

The two highlights of the day were the stuffed grape leaves I ate at a Bulgarian restaurant, and the African Pavilion in which countries which could not afford their own pavilion created smaller exhibits in a shared building. Their lower tech exhibits were actually more interesting, and had fewer lines. But overall I tend to agree with the man from Tennessee who gave me the three-day pass. The Expo is a huge waste of money and resources, and since all the buildings but two are built with temporary building materials and will be torn down in six months, it is an environmental outrage.

When Expos began in the mid 1800s, they were a place to showcase new technology and inventions like the ice cream cone which made its debut at an expo in the early 1900s. But today the expo seems to be a reluctant exercise in foreign relations. The U.S. nearly didn’t participate this year due to a lack of funds, but not participating would have been such an affront to foreign relations with China that the U.S. eventually raised the funds and built a large pavilion.

After a night in the hostel dorm room with four Chinese women who came to Shanghai to see the expo, I got up early to take a morning bus to Tunxi, a small town in the beautiful but impoverished Anhui province.

So far I had not seen the famed Chinese ni hao toilets “hello toilets” where everyone reportedly squats together with no privacy walls. The expo and other places I had been in Shanghai had great toilets, often even with paper. I hoped to see a ni hao toilet at the long distance bus station, but instead I found individual stalls with a shared trough running through. No need to flush, as water automatically flushes through the trough regularly. It’s a pretty good system, but the only strange part is that one can see other people’s business floating by in the trough.

Before the bus took off, the driver handed each passenger a plastic bag. “Bag” he said to me in English, passing me mine. I wondered if it was for vomiting in, as I had done years ago on a mountainous bus ride in Mexico. But I decided hopefully that it must be for garbage. Later I saw a man spitting in his, employing that less than endearing Chinese practice of loudly hacking and spitting, usually done on the street. Apparently people are not able to refrain from doing it during a bus ride.

Chinese people seem to readily talk to strangers on buses and in public places. The man sitting next to me on the bus to Tunxi tried valiantly to have a conversation with me. Unable to understand anything he said, I handed him my phrasebook which gave him and his friends some good chuckles but didn’t help us communicate much.

At my hostel in Tunxi I met a young Russian couple at the beginning of a two-year world traipse. They thought it was funny that I am from Minnesota, since earlier in China they had bought T-shirts that said “Minnesota” and “Iowa,” and people from those places kept approaching them.

To me, Anhui is the New Mexico of China. Frequent floods and mountains keep its agricultural ability marginal, and it has no other industry, but the atmosphere is laid back and the mountains and ancient villages are absolutely stunning. Anhui’s top draw is Huang Shan, a mountain comprised of a collection of granite cliffs laced with trails on the side of sheer cliffs flanked by odd and beautifully shaped trees and shrouded in misty clouds. Huang Shan’s beauty inspired a whole school of ink painting during past centuries, which even extended to Japan, and more recently it inspired the set of the movie Avatar.

I spent a day in Tunxi, absorbing the beauty of the Ming Dynasty (1600s-1800s) architecture that surrounded Ancient Town Youth Hostel, getting a foot reflexology treatment and stocking up on supplies for the two-day trek on Huang Shan. Seeking trail food among the aisles of unfamiliar food at Tunxi’s supermarket left me with a couple of duds (black hard boiled eggs – eeew – and dried fruit meant for cooking, not eating raw) but mostly hits (jerkey of unknown meat, canned tuna, cookies, chocolate) and I found an especially good bonanza at a local bakery (cheese and herb bread - yum!).
On the bus to Huang Shan a collection of solo backpackers from Holland, England, China and Ireland befriended me. Together we took the cable car part way and then hiked up the east slope, through packs of package tourists in matching hats swarming around megaphone-wielding guides. Still we managed to take some pictures of the beautiful Huang Shan pine trees for which Huang Shan is famous.
After 2 ½ hours we left the hordes behind and entered the loop, which consists of cement paths precariously built hanging from the sides of sheer cliffs. I can’t imagine how many people must have died building them. The loop hike took about six hours up and down cement steps, and is not for those afraid of heights or without sturdy knees.
We staggered to our hostel, the Baiyun, located near one of Huang Shan’s summits, where we watched the sunset from a peak and then limped to our beds in an 11-person dorm for 140 RMB per night.

I shared my room with nine Chinese tourists and one Columbian doctor who practices medicine in Miami but is working in Beijing for four months.

After the first day’s strenuous and knee-killing hike, Floor from Holland and I just managed to limp down to the eastern cable car. Back in Tunxi, our new Chinese backpacker friend, a pilot who had studied aviation in Phoenix, guided us to an excellent restaurant where I broadened my regular menu beyond the boiled dumplings on which I had been subsisting.

A Batek Village

2010-04-24T02:59:00.000-07:00

In Malaysia, I visited a village of hunting and gathering people called the Batek. The Batek live in the rain forest and hunt only with blow darts and spears, moving from place to place following their food sources. The village I visited, within Taman Negara National Park, consisted of six families living in temporary open shelters.

I had never before visited a nomadic village, and I didn't know what to expect when I signed up for the river tour that included a visit to the village. Without giving us any kind of orientation, our guide secured his motorized canoe against the river bank, and told me and the seven others in the group to walk up the path into the village. We did so, and found, amid the collection of huts, a group of Batek children who were pausing in their play and waiting to be photographed by us. They were waiting to be photographed because every day canoe loads of tourists stop by their village to photograph them. The village leader has an agreement with the tour agency, which provides a small sum to the Batek people.

In Malaysia nearly everyone I had encountered spoke English well, so unfortunately I had not learned even the most basic words in Malay. The Batek, of course, speak their own language but also speak Malay as a second language. Completely unable to communicate with the residents of the village, I awkwardly wondered what to do and felt sorry I had joined this tour which I felt treated the village like a zoo. But since the kids were waiting for me to do so, I took out my camera and snapped a few pictures.

The village consisted of 10 or 12 shelters. Most were made of bamboo rattan, but a few were made of blue plastic tarps. In addition to the 4 or 5 children playing in the center of the village, a couple of men passed by, but I didn't see any women. A young Batek man, the son of the village leader, demonstrated how to start a fire using only a piece of wood and a piece of bamboo rattan, and how to make a blow dart. He then demonstrated how to shoot a dart using a blow pipe, and gave us each a turn at blow pipe target practice. I was surprised that just a light blow was able to send the dart into the target with a great deal of force.

Our guide, who was not Batek but rather Malay, which is the dominant culture in Malaysia, gave a little talk about the Batek.

He told us that the Batek men hunt only with blowpipes equipped with poisoned darts, and with spears. They hunt small animals, such as monkeys, and they also fish. Although I didn't see any souvenirs for sale or in fact anything for sale in the village, our guide said that the women make wooden carvings which are sold to tourists. In addition, the Batek gather roots. During the dry season they get their water from the river, but when the river is muddy during the rainy season they get their water from streams or vines. They are nomadic, moving periodically in order to obtain food. They have been in their current village for five months.

They don't do any farming, but they sometimes do some work for cash, such as selling firewood to non-Batek people. They sometimes keep wild pheasants to be used for food.

Our guide said that in the last twenty years there have been changes in the Batek way of life. In the past, they had only bamboo rafts, which could move them down river, but when they wanted to move up river they had to walk. Nowadays the people have a boat which they can use to travel. And nowadays the Batek people eat rice which they buy from the outside.

Our guide said that the Batek sometimes leave the village in order to do some business in the outside world, but that they never stay away from their home for longer than two or three days. The Batek look markedly different from other Malaysians, and it is true that I never saw any outside of the rain forest. I wonder how they are received in the outside world.

When I asked about the Malaysian government's policy toward the Batek, it became clear that our guide knew little about the Batek other than the uninformed rumors that people in a dominant society tend to spread about their indigenous neighbors. His statements reminded me of the type of racist comments that one can hear in any predominantly white American town located just outside an Indian reservation.

Our guide said that the Malaysian government provides schooling and encourages the Batek to assimilate to the outside world, and that the government tries to provide health care for the Batek but that they won't accept these services. When I asked if there was any conflict over land, our guide said that there was none.

Through a bit of quick research I later learned that, in fact, there has been a lot of conflict over land, and that the Batek have been forced from nearly all of their traditional land, and the only place they can live is within Taman Negara National Park.

In addition, I learned that the Malaysian government does not do such a good job of providing education to Orang Asli, or aboriginal, children. Recently it was reported that the government was seven months behind in paying the boat drivers who were supposed to transport the Orang Asli children to school. In protest, the drivers finally stopped transporting, and the children couldn't go to school.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to chat with any of the Batek people and learn anything about their way of life and their hopes for the future from their point of view. From an outsider's point of view, it seems truly astonishing that the Batek, living in a rain forest surrounded by Malaysian rubber tappers, loggers, hunters, tour operators and all sorts of entrepreneurs, have managed to preserve their traditional nomadic way of life, surviving on hunting and gathering, governing themselves, and seeking refuge in the national park in order to avoid being completely pushed from the land that has always sustained them.

They choose to accept some parts of the outside world, such as blue tarps, transistor radios, and sometimes even cell phones, which seem like they would be an extremely useful form of technology for nomads. The Batek in the village I visited didn't have cell phones, as there was no service there, but our guide told us that others, living in other places, do.

The Batek interact with the outside world when it benefits them, such as through occasional work, selling handicrafts, and inviting tourists to their village. Some of the travelers in my group seemed to find the Batek use of blue plastic tarps and radios to be somehow "inauthentic." But the Batek did not build their village in an attempt to create a modern living museum for the enjoyment of tourists. Rather, they have adopted some useful things from the outside in order to preserve their lifestyle. And if I were a nomad, I would most certainly want to have a blue plastic tarp, too.

Taman Negara Malaysia, one of the world's oldest rainforests

2010-03-24T06:18:00.000-07:00

After a bus ride that made me wish I were wearing a sports bra, and three hours in a motorized wooden canoe traveling upriver past monkeys playing in the tree branches and water buffalo cooling themselves in the river, I arrived in Taman Negara, which, at over 130 million years of age, is said to be the world's oldest primary rain forest. Planning to do some hiking, I bought a cigarette lighter which I was told was necessary to remove leeches which are of the huge biting variety that can fall from trees and begin to suck blood on any part of one's body. I also bought some long socks and rented a pair of high topped leech resistant hiking boots. And a man in a camera store cleaned my smeared lens for no charge.

One might think it's lonely traveling alone, but actually I am seldom by myself. At least once a day I tend to be joined for a meal,either by a local or by another traveler. On the way to Taman Negara I was joined by Tom, an 18-year-old Englishman who I met on the bumpy bus ride. Tom has been traveling alone for the past six months, in New Zealand and Asia. We shared a delicious meal of roti canai, a flat bread dipped in tasty curry sauce, for U.S. $1.50.

In Melacca I ate dinner at an outdoor riverside table with the cafe owner, a Malaysian named Bert who had worked for JR Reynolds Tobacco Company in Borneo for many years before returning to Melacca to open a restaurant. I ate lunch with another Malaysian, who explained that he was the son of a Seek father and Indian mother, and had spent several years in Japan while training to be a Christian missionary. He lives in southern Malaysia but returned to Melacca for the Chinese New Year holiday.Above: Me with Ming Wei

On the boat ride to Taman Negara I met Ming Wei, a banker from Malaysia's capital, who, along with 20 friends, was visiting Taman Negara for the first time in her life. I mentioned to Ming Wei that years ago I had made my first backpacking trip with my good friend Eileen, who is Malaysian, and that in Mexico Eileen had tried to teach me to bargain (I wasn't at all good at it!), and had introduced me to my first mango. As we parted, Ming Wei gave me a wonderful fresh persimmon, one of my favorite fruits. Although persimmons are now grown primarily in Asia, the word persimmon comes from the Powhatan language, and persimmons were first cultivated by Native Americans. What a global world we live in!

In Taman Negara I shared several meals with Tim, an American investment banker who quit his job a couple of years ago and has been traveling ever since. He visit every country in South America before heading to Southeast Asia, and plans to travel for yet another year!

On my first night in Taman Negara I joined a guided night walk in the rain forest, during which I learned to spot spiders at night by aligning my flashlight with my eyes, which enabled me to see the spiders' eyes glowing. There were thousands of them on the trees and on the ground, and I saw several huge hunter spiders waiting for their prey. Rather than using a web, hunter spiders use the style of hunting dogs.The rain forest is alive and vibrant at night, and I saw stick insects, a cricket, a cockroach on a tree, giant ants, a huge millipede, scorpions hiding in nooks, sleeping birds (from the bottom), a wild pig, and deer. Best of all, I saw a slow loris slowly crossing a wire above my head. Although it seemed scared when everyone was looking it it, it continued to cross the wire, very slowly.Above: Slow loris

Upon returning to my bungalow, the Durian Chalet, I sat outside in the dark for 30 minutes listening to the beautiful medley of jungle sounds, which seemed to include crickets, cicadas, birds, frogs, and many more sounds that I couldn't identify. I chose the Durian Chalet in part because it's next to a durian field, and I really want to try that odorous fruit, but alas it was not in season. The other reason I chose the Durian Chalet is because it's a fifteen minute walk outside of town, which I detested when I was lugging my heavy backpacks in the humidity and heat but which I loved during the night when I heard all of the jungle noises through the open window of my room, including a wild screaming at two a.m., which I first thought was cats, and later thought was children, and hoped might be jungle wildlife.

Later during the night I heard an animal inside my room, jumping. I could hear it as it hit the floor, making a suction cup sound, and I immediately guessed that it was a frog. I turned on the light and removed a small and very scared frog from my room. And before dawn as I walked fifteen minutes in the dark past a rubber and durian field to town I heard a startled rustling and snorting in the brambles, most likely a wild boar.

Above: tapped rubber tree

Trying to get an early breakfast I walked to one of the floating restaurants on the edge of the river, but found the restaurant closed and the staff sleeping on the floor. Most of the workers in the village come from the surrounding area to work in the tourist industry. I had a nice chat with Aiyu, a 25-year-old Malay woman who works at one of the travel agencies in Taman Negara. She is from a village two hours away. Her parents work as rubber tappers in the rain forest, and care for Aiyu's five-year-old daughter while Aiyu and her husband work 12 or 13 hour days for the travel agency. Aiyu goes back to her village to visit her daughter a few times a year. She speaks English well, and told me that she completed one year of university but couldn't afford to continue.

Above: floating restaurants

When I walk through the rain forest, I can hear leaves falling from the canopy high above. I hear them as they reach the lower forest levels, like the sound of raindrops, and occasionally they tumble down further, finally reaching the jungle floor. Although I didn't see any leeches, my morning hike in the rain forest proved to be harder than I had expected, due to the heat and humidity, but I managed to reach the canopy walkway, a hanging rope bridge made of wooden planks and ladders which allowed me to see different levels of the rain forest up to 45 meters above the ground.

On the way back, I sat under a tree to eat my lunch and listen to the jungle sounds, some coming from high above in the canopy and others right around me.

I didn't see many of the larger animals that live in Taman Negara, such as the Asian elephant (endangered), the serow, the Malayan Tiger (endangered), the black panther, Malayan Tapir, civet, the wild cattle-like gaur (protected), yellow-throated marten, Asiatic golden cat, red dog or dhole, or the mouse deer. And of course I didn't see the Sumatran rhino, which is extinct.

Scientists believe that Taman Negara, now a national park, is the oldest rain forest in the world. Taman Negara is protected, but many of Malaysia's other rain forests, especially, those in Borneo, are threatened by logging, agriculture and urban encroachment. According to the United Nations, Malaysia's deforestation rate is accelerating faster than that of any other tropical country in the world. Malaysia's annual deforestation rate jumped almost 86 percent between the 1990-2000 period and 2000-2005. In total, Malaysia lost an average of 140,200 hectares—0.65 percent of its forest area—per year since 2000.

Sitting in the rain forest, a recurring thought that I first had while visiting the rain forests of the Pacific Northwest came to me. Life must have been more comfortable before humans built cities, which trap and reflect the heat and destroy the natural shade. In the rain forest there is no need for sunscreen or a hat, as only a few speckles of sunlight reach my skin. The rain is not really bothersome, since it is filtered by the trees, down to their roots. However, journal writing in the rain forest is definitely not easier. None of my pens worked in Taman Negara, whether due to the humidity of the pages in my journal or the stickiness of my hand I don't know. My notes consist of barely legible scribbles on my journal pages.

Children walking to school

Melaka, Malaysia, and "Enduring Beauty"

2010-03-14T00:45:00.000-08:00

When traveling, I usually ask the bus driver to let me know when we reach my stop, and sometimes I ask another passenger. In Melaka, Malaysia, better known worldwide as Malacca, the passenger sitting next to me not only advised my of my stop but also got off the bus with me, before he had reached his own destination, in order to help me find the guesthouse where I had reserved a room. I half expected that he would try to follow me in, or show up later, but he just kindly said goodbye, advised me to walk slowly so as not to tire in the tropical heat, and I never saw him again.

I left my shoes at the entrance of the Samudra Inn before checking in to my $3 per night room with a fan and a shared bathroom, complete with a water hose to be used rather than toilet paper.

Since it was Chinese New Year, many local people were traveling and the inn was full of Malaysian travelers rather than foreigners.

Malaysia, slightly larger than New Mexico, is populated by a beautiful mix of cultures including mainly Malay, Tamil Indian, and Chinese.

This cultural mix produces some wonderful hybrid cuisine! This photo shows an Indian grocery. The man in the photo was a recent immigrant from India.

Malaysia gained independence in 1957 after centuries of colonialism under the Portuguese, Dutch and then British, with a brief period under the Japanese during World War II. Singapore was initially a part of Malaysia but broke away in 1965.

Before it was first colonized in 1511, most of peninsular Malaysia was first a Buddhist Malay kingdom, then a Hindu kingdom and finally a Muslim Sultanate. During the Muslim period, Malacca became a regional trading center with Chinese, Arab, Malay and Indian merchants. This rich trade attracted the European colonists.

I visited a reconstructed Sultanate Palace, the Portuguese fortress, Catholic churches built by the Portuguese and Dutch, the residence of the Dutch governors, Chinatown, and several mosques and Chinese temples.

Melaka Sultanate Palace and Cultural Museum is a replica of a 15th Century Malay palace.

Christ Church, built by the Dutch, was converted into an Anglican church by the British.

St. Francis Church, built in 1849 .

Kampung Kling Mosque, with Sumatran architectural features, is one of the oldest mosques in Malaysia.

I also visited The People's Museum which, in addition to displays on the cultures of Malacca, had an exhibit called "Enduring Beauty." This exhibit explored the things people of various cultures do or have done to their bodies in order to appear attractive by their cultural standards. "Enduring Beauty" is a double entendre meaning lasting beauty and also referring to the pain people must endure in order to achieve this "beauty."

The exhibit included piercings, lip ornamentation, tattoos, neck elongation, head flattening, foot binding, and the European and American focus on a woman's waist.

Since the 14th and 15th centuries, from bodices to corsets to hoop skirts and other garments which didn't allow women to sit down, European and American women have had an obsession with the "wasp waist." This obsession obstructed free movement and, in addition to much discomfort, caused deformed and cracked ribs, weakened abdominal muscles, deformed and dislocated internal organs and fainting due to an inability to breathe properly. Seventeenth century American feminists opposed clothing which restricted women's movement, and proposed bloomers which were ridiculed and never caught on. It was not until World War I when women who needed to move freely in order to enter the workforce began to abandon the use of corsets.

But the Western obsession with tiny waists has not faded, as evidenced by the prevalence of eating disorders and the occasional women who still strive for the wasp waist.

During the 1930s through 1950s, Ethel Granger was famous for having the world's smallest waist, at 13 inches.

From an American perspective it is easy to assume that an emphasis on the female waist is universal, but I don't think that is so. Traditional Japanese clothing such as the kimono completely obscures the waist as a focal point of beauty.

Other forms of "enduring beauty" currently prevalent in the modern world are high heeled shoes, cosmetic plastic surgery, and some types of hair removal.

While on the topic of style, I should mention head scarves. Malaysia is the first primarily Muslim country I have visited. Sixty percent of this ethnically mixed population is Muslim, and the Muslim women wear head scarves. Americans tend to view head scarves as an onerous restriction on women, but I was surprised to see that Malaysian head scarves are quite beautiful, brilliantly colored, in several styles and sometimes beaded.

I saw them fashionably displayed on mannequins in shopping malls.

I enjoyed seeing Malacca along with a handful of Dutch tourists and many Malaysians who were home for the holidays. From Malacca I headed up to Taman Negara, possibly the world's oldest rain forest. Blog entry coming soon.

Trust in Southeast Asia

2010-03-03T19:42:00.000-08:00

I arrived in Singapore at 1 a.m., planning to sleep in the airport and then take the first available bus to Malaysia. Instead, using the airport's free internet, I found that there was a train leaving for Jerantut, Malaysia at 4:45 a.m.

While I was considering my options, a smiling local woman wearing a Muslim head scarf and with a handful of kids in tow offered to give me a ride to the train station, saying she was going that way anyway. Picking up a good vibe from the woman but reminding myself that I should be leery of strangers who offer to give me a ride at 2:30 a.m., I thanked her and instead found a shuttle bus to the train station.

At the station, I ate a bowl of laksa (a spicy noodle soup combining Chinese and Malay elements) and waited for the ticket window to open at 4 a.m., only to learn that all tickets were sold out until the next day.

After sleeping for an hour on a train station bench, I went outside in the dark to look for a taxi. I found a row of taxis but no drivers. When I was about to give up, three men walked out of the train station and got into one of the taxis. I ran up to them and asked where I could find a driver, saying that I wanted to go to the nearest rapid transit station. The taxi driver told me that he had just finished a 12-hour shift, and was taking his friends home, but that he would take me to the nearest rapid transit station for free, since it was close.

After I got in he told me he would take me all the way across town to the bus terminal, for free, and I started to worry about his motives. In some places in the world, taxi drivers are known to rob people, or worse. But true to his word, he took me all the way to the bus terminal, gave me good advice for my journey, and refused money when I tried to pay him.

As a solo traveler I have trained myself to be wary of people and to be ultra cautious for my safety, but time and again in Southeast Asia the locals shower me with kindness and prove my wariness unwarranted. No doubt I could have safely accepted the ride from the woman in the airport, too.

In many places in the world, travellers must be very vigilant to not be overcharged or short changed, but in Malaysia when I accidentally handed a teenage waiter two bills vastly larger than what I owed, obviously mistaking them for smaller bills, the waiter was quick to correct my mistake. He could have easily kept the money, which might have been a week's pay for him.

In Melaka, Malaysia, the toilet attendant was fast asleep but moments after I took this photo a customer walked up, left her payment on the table next to the sleeping attendant, and walked into the bathroom.

Whenever I leave Japan for a country that uses the Roman alphabet, I am always stunned at how different life feels when I am once again literate. The primary language in Malaysia is Malay, but street signs are always bilingual in Malay and English, and English is widely spoken along with other languages including Chinese and Tamil.

In the past Malay was written in an Arabic-type script, but under the Portuguese colonizers in the 17th century, the alphabet replaced earlier scripts, making travel in Malaysia very easy for westerners like me.

I really enjoyed the way that words adopted from English are spelled in Malay, using a spelling that seems to be more simple and phonetic. For example, "minit" means minute, and "polis" are police. Other easily-recognizable words I saw written in Malay are kampus, karnival, butik, texsi, arkitek, projek, struktur, kaunter tiket, bas and domestik.

Since Malaysia is a Muslim country, most of the population doesn't drink alcohol, smoke tobacco or eat pork, and many guesthouses prohibit these activities on the premises. Because there is a high tax on alcohol, a cocktail costs about the same as a night in a hostel bed, about $3. To save my ringit (Malaysian currency), I decided to do like the Malaysians do, and I refrained from drinking while in Malaysia.

In Malaysia I visited the historical trading port of Melaka (Malacca), on the Straits of Malacca, and Taman Negara, one of the world's oldest rainforests. But I'll save those for my next posts.

Followup on Nana Entertainment Plaza

2010-02-11T23:54:00.000-08:00

My last blog entry was about Nana Entertainment Plaza, a center of sex tourism in Bangkok. As a follow-up, here are a few quick facts about the sex industry in Thailand, mostly from Wikipedia:

Although Thailand has had a long history of prostitution, Thai sex tourism originated during the Vietnam War, providing a venue for "rest and relaxation" for American servicemembers.
Thailand's Health System Research Institute reports that 40% of the prostitutes in Thailand are children. However, the workers I saw at NEP did not appear to be children.
Thailand is considered among the the world's top destinations for human trafficking victims, and also is a major source of trafficked persons. Some of the sex workers in Thailand are trafficking victims, either from Thailand or elsewhere.
Ethnic minorities such as people from the northern hill tribes are at high risk for trafficking within Thailand and abroad. The destruction of traditional hill tribe economies due to opium suppression programs has exacerbated the problem.
Thais from the impoverished northeast sometimes become trafficking victims.
People from Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos and China are sometimes trafficked into Thailand to work in the sex industry.
Thai women are sometimes trafficked to Japan where they are sold by yakuza (Japanese mafia)-controlled brothels and forced to work off their price.
An NGO called Empower, http://www.empowerfoundation.org/index_en.html, provides services to sex workers and recognizes that while some sex workers are human trafficking victims, others are migrant sex workers who are working to support their impoverished families.

Nana Entertainment Plaza

2010-01-31T23:20:00.001-08:00

On my second trip through Bangkok I decided to avoid Khaosan, the tourist carnival, and instead stay in Sukhumvit, which turned out to be right next to Nana Entertainment Plaza, one of Bangkok's centers of sex tourism.

The first thing I noticed about the Atlanta Hotel was its huge sign proclaiming "Sex Tourists Not Welcome."

The Atlanta, established in 1952, long before the sex tourism industry sprung up around it, still retains its original decor.

Note the cat in the lobby.

Two blocks away, Nana Entertainment Plaza offers three floors of go-go bars and sex shows across the street from hotels that rent rooms by the hour.

Walking through the area I noticed that 9 out of 10 westerners on the street were men. The go-go dancers were mostly young women and men from Isan, Thailand's poor agricultural region in the northeast. Khon Kaen, where Allison and I had attended the silk festival two weeks earlier, is in Isan.

Despite its seedy surroundings, the Atlanta Hotel proclaims itself a "bastion of wholesome tourism" and has plentiful signs warning that "sex tourists, junkies and other degenerates" will be expelled from the premises. The signs further explain that those who must engage prostitutes should do so in their own countries, rather than causing emotional damage in developing countries where their only advantage is a favorable exchange rate.

It so happens that Elizabeth Gilbert, author of "Eat, Pray Love," has stayed at the Atlanta, and an autographed copy of her book was on display.

After watching local people do aerobics in a park and then seeing a wholesome traditional Thai puppet show, I decided that, solely for the benefit of my readers, I should check out the goings on in Nana Entertainment Plaza (NEP). At first I hesitated near the entrance, a bit afraid to go inside. A stream of somewhat scruffy-looking white men was going inside and, as it was early in the night, a trickle of white men was crossing the street toward the hourly hotels, each with a young Thai woman in hand.

Many women in shorts and high heels were loitering near the entrance of NEP, presumably trying to pick up work. Not wanting to linger with these freelance women any longer, but wanting to observe more of what was happening at NEP, I decided I had better conquer my fears and go inside. Just then, I noticed a group of eight clean-cut young Americans (including two women) who looked very out of place and I immediately guessed that they were Christian missionaries of some sort. They were having a last minute meeting outside the entrance of NEP, and their leader was saying "look for people who are drunk or lonely."

The missionaries then quickly filed into NEP, and I filed in behind them. We quickly circumnavigated the first level, which consisted of hostess bars where not-so-hot-looking western men were coupled with hot-looking Thai women, having drinks together and looking quite bored, really.

Following the Christians, I climbed the stairs to the second level. There, they convened into another meeting and I continued exploring on my own. Level two of NEP consisted of go-go bars with topless dancers. In one, called Spanky's, the customers were invited to smack the dancers' G-stringed bottoms with a foam "noodle" such as children would use in a swimming pool.

In some of the bars the dancers are "lady boys," as they say in Thailand.

Everything I know about go-go bars I learned from a book I recently read called "Bangkok Boy," an autobiography by a young Thai man who spent many years working as a go-go dancer and prostitute. The bars pay the dancers, but the dancers make their real money when a customer buys them. The customer pays a "fine" to the bar for robbing the bar of a dancer, and then disappears to a nearby hotel with the dancer, and pays the dancer's fee for whatever ensues.

The third floor of NEP seemed to be more of the same, including a bar where customers can ride a mechanical bull with a lady boy, trying to remove her bikini while staying on the bull.

After taking a moment to snap a couple of pictures and then watch the stray cats snatching discarded food and devouring it in the dirty corners of NEP, I exited and went back onto the street.

Among the loitering prostitutes, the missionaries were standing around and I decided to chat with them. They were doing a survey of the Western men who were visiting NEP. I listened in on their surveys, and even interpreted a bit when they interviewed a tourist from Spain, but the surveys didn't turn out to be that interesting as they inevitably resulted in an argument between the missionaries and the tourist about religion or about the morality of prostitution.

A plain-looking but seemingly intelligent and well-spoken American man passionately explained his gnostic beliefs, and then said that he visits NEP because he likes sex. I guess that would pretty well sum it up for most of the men being entertained at NEP that night.

Having glimpsed a world I don't usually see, I went back to my zero-tolerance-for-sex-tourists hotel and packed my backpack for my early morning flight back to Tokyo.

Luang Prabang, Laos

2010-01-26T23:05:00.000-08:00

Thai and Lao buses always leave five minutes early! But we caught the eight-hour "VIP bus" from Vientiane to Luang Prabang. A VIP bus is one with air conditioning and free bottled water, but the VIP status ends there! At one point we pulled over on the side of the road and everyone got out and wandered into the bushes. A Lao bathroom stop!

We stopped for lunch and fruit, and a Lao passenger bought a couple of tuber-shaped vegetables for me and Allison, and showed us how to peel and eat them. They tasted like jicama. In Laos we enjoyed many delicious tropical fruits such as mangosteen, lychee and dragon fruit, and others we can't name.

Luang Prabang, a Unesco World Heritage city, is the former royal capital of the Kingdom of Laos, and home to many beautiful Buddhist temples as well as French architecture.

In Luang Prabang we visited a small Lao library, where we bought a couple of books for local children. Surprisingly, in this communist country, the library displayed a framed quote by Milton Friedman about the importance of the private market economy.

The library has two computers with free internet, and an eclectic little selection of books in English, no doubt donated by an NGO. Allison and I, both geeks for information, skipped the books called "Condi," "We Are Americans" and "Thanksgiving" (not sure why anyone would want to read those in Laos), and magazines such as "Seventeen" and "Good Housekeeping" and instead perused the "Socio-Economic Atlas of the Lao PDR."

While as backpackers we considered ourselves budget travelers, we were sobered to realize that on a typical day we spent much more than many Lao citizens earn in a month. That particular day, since we had booked a bicycle tour costing a whopping $32 (including bicycle rental, a full day guided tour, museum entrance fees, a meal, water and snacks), we had spent more than even the richest category of Lao citizens spends in a month.

During our 32 kilometer bicycle tour we visited villages where the local people make paper, silk and whiskey, and then we bicycled to a cave that contains many images of the Buddha.

Above, a woman weaves silk behind two spinning wheels. Below, a woman harvests silk from the silk worm.

Above, a woman makes paper. Below, a girl makes lao lao, or Lao whiskey, distilled from sticky rice until it is nearly 100 percent proof.

I am always happy when I am on a bicycle. But in Laos, we were careful to go with a guide and to stay on the well-traveled road, because of the unexploded ordnance (UXO) which the U.S. placed there during the American Vietnam war.

Per capita Laos is the most heavily bombed country in the world. More than 1.3 million tons of ordnance were dropped on Laos between 1964 and 1973, mostly cluster bombs of which 30% did not detonate. Each cluster bomb contained hundreds of bomblets, called "bombies," which are especially attractive to unexpecting children. UXO continues to affect a quarter of all villages.

At least 50,000 people were killed by UXO in Laos between 1964 and mid-2008, and the number continues to rise. UXO contamination also prevents farmers from using land, causing poverty and limiting long-term development. More information is available at http://www.maginternational.org/laopdr/.

Ten of the 18 Lao provinces are severely contaminated with land mines and many other types of UXOs. The U.S., responsible for this contamination, has still not signed the Ottawa Treaty, which bans landmines.

Allison and I took a Lao cooking class in which, together with five Australians, we learned to cook some delicious Lao food.

Here, our teacher steams sticky rice, also known as glutinous rice. Sticky rice is the staple food in Laos, but the Lao also eat long grain rice.

Essential ingredients in Lao cuisine include greens from the local mountains, ginger, galangal, kaffir lime leaves, lime, cilantro, lemon grass, tamarind, basil, oyster sauce, soy sauce, fish sauce, padak, shrimp paste, chillies and large chilli peppers, coconut milk, rice noodles, vermicelli noodles, rice, bamboo shoots, woodear fungus and choko. Traditionally the Lao eat with their hands, and they only use chopsticks when eating noodles, which were imported from China.

The class included a trip to the local market, where we saw local food. There is no supermarket in Luang Prabang, and people do their daily shopping here.

We even saw the infamous durian fruit.

The durian is called the king of fruits, but is said to have a disagreeable stench which will stay with you long after you eat it. People have described the durian's stench as like a bathroom, or rotten mushy onions, pig feces, stale vomit or "turpentine and onions garnished with a gym sock." Due to the stench, the consumption of durian is prohibited in most public places, and I have not yet had an opportunity to taste it. Maybe next time.

On my last morning in Luang Prabang I got up at 5:30 a.m. to see 300 monks and novices receiving their alms. The monastic men who reside in the temples are not allowed to grow or prepare their own food, so every morning they walk the alms route through Luang Prabang.

For 45 minutes before dawn groups of orange-clad monks walked silently through Luang Prabang carrying metal bowls and receiving handfuls of sticky rice and other foods from kneeling townspeople who give alms in order to accrue merit for themselves, their ancestors and their families. As I watched, all I could hear was the swishing of the monks' bare feet on the street.

In recent years the monks' morning alms collection has become a tourist attraction, and some street vendors got into the business of selling rice to tourists who wanted to give alms to the monks. Unfortunately, some of the rice was not fresh, and the monks got food poisoning. So now, tourists are invited to participate only if their heart is really in it.

A local woman who was giving alms saw me and invited me to give some of her rice to the monks, but I communicated through gestures that I would rather take pictures. I did so without a flash, because I had read that flashing cameras are distracting to the monks.

In Thailand and Laos, nearly all boys and men serve a period as monks, many for three months or even more, and all of the men who I asked told me that they had, at some point, been monks.

My experience in Laos was so relaxing, and I met so many laid back and kind people. But it was time to board a plane back to bustling Bangkok.

Vientiane, Laos

2010-01-22T23:05:00.001-08:00

Upon arriving in Laos I made an ATM withdrawal and was impressed to see my nine-digit account balance! Nice! Except that it was in Lao kip, and there are more than 8,000 kip to the U.S. dollar. Due to continual inflation, the zeros on the bills are hard to count, and coins are completely obsolete. However, Thai bhat and U.S. dollars are often acceptable.

Our first stop in Laos was Vientiane, a sleepy capital on the Mekong River with only 200,000 inhabitants, some of them monks dressed in bright orange or saffron robes.

Allison and I took an evening walk past the Lao cultural center, where a Japanese taiko drumming performance was letting out. A Lao high school girl, inspired by the performance, was saying in Japanese to her friends "My name is ...." I answered her back in my basic Japanese, but she just giggled shyly. Her friend, not so shy, picked up the conversation with me in English, and I was surprised by the level of English spoken by high school students. But I don't think that kids in rural Laos get such a good education.

During our first day in Laos we brushed up on our Lao vocabulary, which consisted of the Lao for hello, sorry, thank you, how much, yes, no, vegetarian (for Allison), please, good luck, and no ice please.

We took a bicycle tour in Vientiane, riding on a small track along the Mekong River, past shacks and nice houses and tiny local stores.

I exchanged greetings of "sa bai di" with the locals we passed, and everyone was happy to let me take their picture. Some people even ran to gather more family members so that I could take pictures of all of them!

Above is a family in their home, and below is an extension of the same home, built onto the bank of the Mekong. Every meal on this balcony is a picnic over the Mekong.

We saw people grilling bananas and we tried a sweet cassava and rice treat which was wrapped in banana leaves and grilled. Our guide said that when he was a kid everything was wrapped in biodegradable banana leaves, but now, like most everywhere in the world, the country is littered with plastic bags.

We veered from the Mekong and rode next to a very active irrigation ditch, passing rice paddies, lots of people, goats and water buffalo.

Our guide spoke English well because he grew up in Hawaii. His close relative was prime minister of Laos before the communist takeover in 1975. When the government changed, the entire family had to flee the country. Our guide and his parents went to Hawaii. In 1992 they were able to return to Laos, but they remain careful not to get involved in politics.

As far as I can tell, Laos is like Vietnam in that it is a communist country that doesn't feel communist but for the party propaganda in the National Museum in Vientiane, and the ubiquitous communist flags. Here, the main post office displays the communist flag as well as the Lao flag.

Everywhere, people are engaging in small businesses. The internet is available and the Buddhist religion is thriving.

But it seems Laos has abandoned the communist ideals of caring for its people. The state fails to provide basic necessities such as a free education for all children. On the other hand, education was not available in rural Laos when it was a French colony or when it was under the Royal Lao government. And in the cities I visited I didn't see people begging, or homeless people, although I heard that many young Lao migrate to Thailand to work in the sex industry or at other undesirable jobs. The Lao government has tried hard but without success to stop this, and to eliminate prostitution. In fact, it is illegal for a foreigner to have sex with a Lao citizen if they are not married.

It seems that the Communist Party rules Laos in name, but that its leaders have largely abandoned communist ideals, save repression of dissent, which sporadically continues. Some of the Lao and Hmong exiles who fled ethnic cleansing and other horrors during the early days of the communist regime have returned.

According to "A Short History of Laos, the Land in Between," by Grant Evans, there has been an effort to "re-traditionalize" and Laos has in many ways reverted to a situation similar to that which existed under the pre-communist Royal Lao Government. Laos continues to be economically weak and dependent on outside suport. Its people, outside of the few small cities, are largely subsistence farmers, and produce little or no tax base. The minority populations, which together make up more than half the population of Laos, continue to struggle in the face of poverty and discrimination. Foreign forces, now in the form of NGOs, continue to weild influence in Laos.

Our guide pointed out that many Asian countries have had a one-party system for years, and that this has helped them develop economic strength, so that in some ways having a one-party government is good for a country. Laos, however, still has a long way to go before it builds any kind of economic strength.

In the past it seems that Laos was not very open to tourists. Tourists were only allowed to see certain parts of the country. Now, that has changed, but still my guide book warns me not to take any pictures of government workers, government buildings or even bridges as it could result in confiscation of my camera.

The Mekong River was low, and much of it seemed to be a sand bar. Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar and Laos have an agreement about management of the river, but China, which is upstream, is not a party to that agreement and is diverting much of the water.

We stopped for drinks at a hotel on the Mekong funded by Hmong refugees who now live in the U.S. The Hmong like to stay at this hotel when they return to Laos for a visit. Here, Allison enjoys fresh coconut milk.

Although the Hmong live in Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar and China, the Hmong who have immigrated to the U.S. come primarily from Laos. Tens of thousands of Hmong fled to Thailand and later to the U.S. and other western countries after cooperating with the U.S. to fight a losing battle against the Pathet Lao during the Secret War in Laos. About 8,000 Hmong refugees remain in Thailand.

Finishing up our bicycle tour, we ate lunch at a fabulous vegetarian buffet restaurant. Our waitress was MTF transgender, known in Southeast Asia as a lady boy. She was completely decked out in heels and a dress, fancy hair and lots of make-up in the middle of the day, and nobody seemed to mind at all. Our guide told us that in Laos, as in Thailand, nobody cares if you are gay. There is no problem, no need to hide anything, and families are fine with it. He said it's sad that some countries are not as accepting. We saw several transgender people in Vientiane, and nobody seemed to give them a second glance. Laos and Thailand seem to be the most queer-friendly places I've ever been, and I saw openly queer folks in every city and town I visited there.

In the evening we went to a Lao cultural show. On the way, we got lost and asked directions from a group of foreigners, who turned out to be men from Peru, Panama and the U.S. who were working on an agricultural project involving cassava in Laos. In Spanish and English, they helped us find the hall where we watched a beautiful cultural dance show and ate a Lao vegetarian feast.

(Sorry, I cannot turn this photo right side up for some reason).

Lao food is usually eaten with the hands using sticky rice, which comes in a basket for keeping it warm. Roll the sticky rice into a tightly packed ball and use it like a tortilla chip to scoop up the food.

Also in Vientiane we visited a nursery for rare wild orchids, which Allison, as a botanist, fully appreciated but which I just thought were pretty cool.

Later, I stopped at an internet cafe where I was invited to a behind-the-shop party to down a few Lao-whiskey cokes with some locals and Polish residents of Vientiane. Like everywhere I've been in Southeast Asia, the locals were friendly and generous and not just after my kip.

We were sad to leave Vientiane because the people were so nice there, and the friendly manager of our guesthouse spoiled us by giving us rides to places such as the orchid nursery, providing free purified water and answering all our many questions in excellent English. But we wanted to see Luang Prabang, the ancient capital of Laos.

Northeast Thailand

2010-01-13T00:48:00.000-08:00

On the way through northern Thailand toward Laos, we stopped in the provincial city of Khon Kaen, arriving just in time to see the annual silk festival. Other than the festival and the beautiful but impoverished Thai women, there isn't much to attract foreigners to Khon Kaen. Nearly all of the other foreigners I saw in Khon Kaen were middle aged European or American men who went there to marry Thai women, or to meet their Thai mail order brides for the first time. When googling Khon Kaen, I found little information other than a blog by an American man who visited Khon Kaen to meet his "little honey" before bringing her to the U.S.

The northeast is one of the poorest regions of Thailand, and many of the local people must migrate to Bangkok or other areas to find work.

The silk festival parade consisted of marching bands, floats, Thai boxing and lots of people dressed in beautiful silk clothing.

In the evening we feasted on local street food

(well, we passed up that food and instead went for the tiny eggs)

while watching dance performances,

and I paid a few baht to feed an elephant on the street, which in hindsight probably wasn't very responsible in terms of the welfare of elephants.

There was little English spoken on Khon Kaen, and we got by with gestures, the patience of locals and a phrasebook which contained lots of words but didn't tell us how to pronounce them. Thai is a tonal language written in a sanskrit type writing system which is not easily transcribed into the Roman alphabet. And in any case, people in northeast Thailand primarily speak Lao rather than Thai. Despite our linguistic stumbling, people in Khon Kaen went out of their way to help us and make our visit enjoyable.

One of the many things I like about Thailand is that people smile easily. When I flashed someone a smile, they flashed it right back, and many times they were the first to smile. Thailand is, after all, known as the "Land of Smiles." I like it there.

Bangkok

2010-01-05T00:23:00.000-08:00

Last month I took a trip to Thailand and Laos, where I traveled for two weeks with my friend Allison from Colorado. We spent our first couple of nights staying on Khaosan, Bangkok's backpacker street. Khaosan street is a carnival of blaring music, tourists and costumed vendors hawking things. In the evening, street performances of break dancing, fire dancing and limbo under a burning pole spring up.

A friend told me that Khaosan is like a zoo. Foreigners go there to see Thai people, and Thai people go there to see foreigners.

I'd guess that you can buy anything on Khaosan. Half a block from my hotel a street booth sold fake IDs including California drivers licenses, international driving permits supposedly issued by the United Nations, international student cards and press passes. They could take your picture and print your personal information on the card while you wait. I passed these up and instead visited a Dr. Fish foot spa where the fish feasted on my dead skin and callouses, particularly my peeling Balinese sunburn.
The food on Khaosan is unremarkable backpacker fare, and everything is international. While drinking a mojito at an outdoor restaurant I watched as a Thai woman, working in a shop that sold dreadlock wigs and Bob Marley hats, painstakingly created dreadlocks in a white tourist's hair. Nearby, a human billboard advertised a Mexican restaurant, and a street vendor sold Latin American style hammocks. Other street vendors wore beautiful Southeast Asia hill tribe clothing, but I suspect it's just their work uniform. Scantily clad women in Heineken outfits advertised a restaurant. Khaosan has a 7-Eleven, a McDonald's, a couple of Subways, and many drunken backpackers from all around the globe.

In Bangkok we watched Thai dancers performing at a shrine,

and we visited the beautiful Wat Po, a Buddhist temple with many golden Buddhas including a 46-m long golden reclining Buddha which fills a gigantic building.

Wat Po is full of beautiful glass-decorated stupas that house the cremated remains of wealthy people.

Wat Po is also famous for its excellent massage school, and I enjoyed a Thai massage, which is done while wearing loose fitting clothing, and involves stretching as well as deep massage. The massage therapist used her arms and legs to maneuver me into the stretches.

We also visited the Grand Palace and the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, which housed the royal family from 1782 until some time ago when the royal family moved to a new palace. I had never seen so much glitter and gold before. I can't imagine that the Wizard of Oz's Emerald City could have been any more sparkly! We also saw a Thai masked dance performance.

A highlight of my visit to Bangkok was a spectacular dinner with my two United World College friends, Amporn and Sally, and Sally's husband Narut. Sally arranged a really special dinner at Chakrabongse Villas, a former palace on the banks of the Chao Phraya River. The palace is owned by a woman who is the granddaughter of a Thai prince. A century ago, the prince was set to inherit the throne of Thailand until he committed the misstep of marrying a Russian woman. His granddaughter has converted the palace into a beautiful villa overlooking the river with beautiful sunset views of Bangkok's most picturesque temple, Wat Arun. We were able to enjoy a private dining experience at the palace because the granddaughter is a friend of Sally! Thank you so much, Sally and Narut! I hadn't seen Sally and Amporn in 17 years!
The next day I took a bicycle tour, which started with a tour of a local market where I saw more kinds of hot peppers than I had ever imagined!

Above and below: Mangosteen

I hope this guy's mask was protecting him from the bird flu!

We tried mangosteen fruit, spring rolls and spun sugar wrapped in crepes.

Then we rode over several canals which once were part of the major transportation network which earned Bangkok the moniker "Venice of Asia," through crazy Bangkok traffic, and through a slum under the freeway. It was an area of crowded unpainted plywood housing which reminded me of migrant farm worker housing I've seen in the U.S. Many of the people, especially the children, came out to wave at us and shout "hello" as we passed. In addition to shacks, there were several tiny stores operated out of people's homes and a daycare in the slum. We then crossed the Chao Phraya River on a longboat, together with our bicycles. Once we arrived on the opposite bank we were no longer in the city but rather in an area of fruit orchards.

Here, we cycled along a narrow cement path raised 3 to 4 feet above the ground in a marshy area. Our guide cautioned us against falling off the path, as she had done while learning to bicycle on those paths as a child! We rode past small farm houses, a small temple, and banana and other fruit trees. We saw a couple of green water snakes and were greeted by many locals.

After the tour I took Bangkok's efficient new elevated Sky Train, and then a river taxi back to my hotel area, avoiding Bangkok's traffic jams. Allison is so cool! In our hotel room, she was pumping water. Rather than buying plastic water bottles, she brought a small water purification pump to Thailand, so that she was able to drink tap water!

The next day we would leave Bangkok to travel through northern Thailand to Laos, but I'll save that for another entry.

Bali

2009-11-22T17:46:00.000-08:00

One of the courses I was scheduled to teach got cancelled, and I suddenly had a two-week vacation, so I decided to take a trip to Bali with my friend Maki.

Bali is famous for its beaches, but the place I really loved in Bali was Ubud. An hour into the island’s mountainous interior, Ubud is a vibrant tropical paradise full of culture and warm people. We checked into a guesthouse called Sania’s House.

Entering the grounds felt like entering a temple, and I can hardly describe how beautiful Sania’s House is!

Apparently the place is a rich person’s estate turned into bungalows. A series of beautiful stone buildings are nestled among a tropical garden and swimming pool, stone sculptures and flowers. All for $30 a night for two people.

In the morning I took a bicycle tour which started with breakfast overlooking a volcano and crater lake.

From there we bicycled 35 km downhill through terraced rice fields and small villages, giving high fives to local school children who came out to meet us with shouts of “hello.”

We stopped at a coffee plantation where we learned that coffee beans come in female and male, and we watched two bean sorters meticulously sorting the beans by their sex, which will result in different tastes of coffee. I may be completely undecided about my future career path, but I’m sure I don’t want to be a coffee bean sex sorter!

Then we sampled several coffees and teas, including a very special and expensive one called luwak coffee. This coffee is made with the help of an animal called a civet.

The civet, who eats the coffee bean when it is enclosed in a fruit, is quite a coffee bean connoisseur, choosing only the best beans. The fruit passes through the civet’s digestive system and the bean comes out whole.

The coffee farmers were angry with the civets, who ate the best coffee beans! Trying to recoup their losses the farmers gathered the beans from the civet poop and washed them, roasted them, and made coffee from them. They discovered that the civet’s digestive process actually removed the coffee’s bitterness, resulting in a spectacular cup of coffee! The below beans on the right are luwak coffee, while those on the left are regular coffee.

So now, luwak coffee, made from civet poop, sells for up to $100 a cup in gourmet restaurants in the U.S., Japan and Australia. In Bali, it’s only $3 a cup, and I tasted a sip of it although I gave up coffee a couple of years ago.

On the bicycle tour I also visited a rice field and saw how the women threshed the rice by hand.

First they loosened the hulls by flailing the rice stalks against a board. Then they separated the grain from the chaff by repeatedly tossing the rice in the air. The chaff slowly floated away.

When finished, the women poured the rice into 50 kg bags, which they carried on their heads, seemingly without effort.

A Swiss tourist did it less gracefully!

We visited a Balinese farm where we saw a typical kitchen.

In Bali, the women cook only once a day, at 5 a.m. They leave the food in the kitchen and the family members can come in and get something to eat any time they like, as there is no set meal time and the families, who work together all day on the farm, don’t eat together.

In Ubud Maki and I watched several beautiful dance and music performances and met many kind people.

In addition to Balinese and Indonesian, most of the people I met in Bali spoke English very well, and many also spoke some Japanese.

Here, a woman paints a beautiful batik.

I feel that in all my travels no locals have been as warm and friendly and helpful as the people of Bali. Although this island is heavily touristed, the locals remain friendly and genuine toward the tourists. Maki was especially good at making friends with the locals.

Every morning the locals make small offerings and place them everywhere, in shrines, on the sidewalk, on the beach, and they look beautiful.

It turned out that Julia Roberts was in Bali at the same time as I was, filming part of “Eat, Pray, Love” which is based on a travel novel which I read last year. (Thanks, Sue, for giving me that book!) The locals were all excited about it, but I didn’t see her.

Of course we also spent a couple of days on the beach, where Maki tried surfing and I played in the water. I hope that I can return to Indonesia soon, to visit its other beautiful islands.

Hokkaido Part V: Foot baths and new Taiwanese friends

2009-10-11T01:35:00.000-07:00

On my last day in Toya-ko Onsen I explored the small town, the volcano museum and the remains of the destruction caused by Mount Usu's most recent eruption in 2000. Then I soaked my feet in a free "foot bath," or hot spring for the feet only, overlooking the lake and the most striking volcano.
In the evening, after watching a beautiful sunset, I met three Taiwanese tourists who had checked into the youth hostel, and they invited me to ride with them in their rental car to watch the evening fireworks on the lake shore. Afterwards we enjoyed another foot bath.

The Taiwanese tourists were an interesting group of two men and a woman who met on an internet site that helps people find travel partners. They emailed, decided to travel together, and met in person for the first time at the airport in Taipei! The woman, Sylvia, told me that she has traveled that way several times in the past.

Sylvia had an electric heating element which she plugged in and stuck into a pot of water and vegetables to make fresh soup in the hostel dormitory!

Meeting other travelers is one of the reasons I enjoy staying at youth hostels.

In the morning I flew over a typhoon and back to Tokyo, in a Pokemon airplane!

Hokkaido Part IV: Bicycling around Lake Toya

2009-10-10T20:37:00.000-07:00

On my second day in Toya-ko Onsen I rented a bicycle again and rode around the 50-km perimiter of Lake Toya. In Japanese, ko means lake and onsen means hot springs area, so Toya-ko is Lake Toya and Toya-ko Onsen is the hot springs area on the Mount Usu volcano side of the lake. With lots of stops for photos, exploration of parks, a picnic lunch and a detour to a fruit stand selling local plums, the trip took six hours, all along a quiet road on the rim of the caldera lake.

As I rounded the lake I enjoyed views of several different volcanos behind the reflective waters, and I saw birds and forests and a snake, several parks, sculptures, and some cute little camping cabins.

Touring by bicycle is definitely my favorite way to travel. I can enjoy nature, fresh air and the countryside, exercise, and make as many detours and stops as I like. I see things at a speed that allows me to digest them, and people wave and talk to me. While bicycling around Lake Toya, I decided to look for a way to see part of Southeast Asia by bicycle this winter.

If you want to read more about the Ainu ...

2009-10-10T17:51:00.000-07:00

I received a nice comment on my post about the Ainu from a woman named Deborah Davidson, who is a native of Hokkaido and has translated a lot of Ainu folklore to English. Deborah has a good website with information about the Ainu. If you're interested, you can check it out at http://projectuepeker.blogspot.com/. There is an interesting video on the first page.

Hokkaido Part III: Showa Shinzan and the Ainu Museum

2009-10-09T22:58:00.000-07:00

In Abashiri we enjoyed a quiet sunset walk along the river, and saw a couple of Russian tourists. In the morning we took the train to Sapporo where we stopped by Autumn Fest, which is really Oktoberfest and consisted mainly of people drinking and eating outside. No polkas or waltzes.

In the morning Itsumi flew back to Tokyo while I took a train and bus to Lake Toya, a beautiful round caldera lake. Lake Toya, the center of a collapsed volcano, is surrounded by several active volcanos making a beautiful view from any direction. There are four small islands in the center of the lake.

I checked into a youth hostel and rented a bicycle and rode up to Showa Shinzan, which means New Showa Mountain.

In the early 1940s this place was just a wheat field but from 1943 through 1945 a series of earthquakes raised it to a plateau. Then the volcano surged up out of the ground eventually creating a 1,200 foot volcanic mountain, which is still smoking today.

Since Showa Shinzan came into being in the midst of World War II, Japanese authorities tried to hush it up and even urged the locals to douse the volcanic flames (they didn't) so that Allied aircraft couldn't use them for orientation.
Today, Showa Shinzan has become a tourist destination and visitors can take a cable car up the neighboring and much larger Mount Usu for panoramic views of Showa Shinzan, Lake Toya and the Pacific Ocean. Mount Usu is also an active volcano, with its most recent eruptions in 1977 and in 2000.Above is an apartment building damaged during a mudflow caused by the 2000 eruption. We are looking at the second floor, as the first was buried in mud. The damage caused to the corner of the building was caused by a huge steel highway bridge that was carried into the building by the mudflow.

Showa Shinzan seen from the higher Mt. Usu
A smoking crater on the side of Mt. Usu, above the Pacific Ocean

Also at Showa Shinzan I visited an Ainu museum, which consisted of a replica of a traditional Ainu house complete with Ainu tools, clothing, and arts and crafts.

The docent, a woman who is half Ainu and half Japanese, dressed me in Ainu clothing and took my picture, and gave me a gift of a beautifully embroidered tissue case.

The Ainu are the original inhabitants of Hokkaido, northern Honshu and Sakhalin, an island which now belongs to Russia. Compared with other Japanese, the Ainu have rounder eyes, lighter skin and more facial hair, and some people believe they come from Caucasian origins.

Whatever their origin, they suffered greatly when Japan encouraged Japanese "settlement" of Hokkaido for farming in the 1800s. The Ainu faced cultural destruction and discrimination, but in the last three decades there has been a greater appreciation of the Ainu culture.

The tools and clothing and household items I saw in the Ainu museum reminded me of things I've seen in Native American museums in the U.S. and Canada.

In fact, the item on the left in the above photo is marked "Inuit glasses." I'm not sure if the Ainu used the same type of glasses or whether the museum just threw whatever they could find together.

I think the similarity I noticed is because of a similarity in lifestyle, as hunting and fishing in Hokkaido must be similar to hunting and fishing the the Pacific Northwest, and maybe because of a similarity in the way dominant cultures portray indigenous cultures in museum exhibits, as a people of the past who lived a simple life in harmony with nature and reduced to the tools and household items we can see in a museum.

The Hokkaido tourist brochure has a two-page spread on the Ainu. The title is "In Harmony with Nature" and the brochure speaks of the Ainu in the past tense, describing their traditional lifestyle, religion, clothing and dances, with glossy photos to promote tourism. One can see Native American cultures marketed for tourism in exactly the same way, in brochures produced by state and local governments. These brochures, almost always written in the past tense, glorify a culture of the past, but seldom mention the modern lives of the people whose culture they market.

Because of the language barrier, I couldn't ask the Ainu/Japanese docent any questions about her life or culture today, but she did tell me that she is from Asahikawa, which has the largest Ainu population in Hokkaido.

Hokkaido Part II: Sounkyo and Shiretoko National Parks

2009-10-04T04:33:00.000-07:00

(Republished with photos)

We took a　bus　to　Sounkyo　Onsen　hot　springs,　which　I　accidentally　called　Sounko Onsen　(unko　means　shit　in　Japanese) but I will never call it that again! Our hotel was in a beautiful valley of hot springs and red and yellow fall leaves, and during our stay we soaked in three different sets of baths. My favorite was an outdoor bath under the brightly colored fall leaves, which felt especially wonderful in the cool mountain morning air.

Our morning plan was to hike up Mount Kurodake in Daisetsuzan National Park, Japan’s largest national park.

Mt. Kurodake is 1,984 meters, or 6,000 feet, pretty high when you’re coming from near sea level. We took a rope-way (cable car) up part way, then a ski lift and then we hiked the last two very rocky and steep hours.

We had great views of the fall leaves, and at the peak we took pictures and ate a great lunch scavenged from our hotel’s delicious buffet breakfast.

During the hike we saw a couple of chipmunks. In Japan it’s nothing special to see monkeys but people think it’s exciting to see chipmunks and squirrels! Below is a photo of the peak we hiked to, seen from the ski lift on the way down.In Japan, it's always easy to get a box lunch. Here, we had dinner at the bus station.

From Sounkyo we took a bus and train to Abashiri, where, with some English-speaking Chinese tourists, we had the freshest sashimi breakfast ever at the fish market next to the harbor.

Afterwards we watched as workers loaded huge metal boxes of freshly caught salmon onto a semi truck.

Then we took a tiny train, consisting of just two cars, along the coast to the Shiretoko peninsula, a world natural heritage site and the most remote place in Japan.

In Shiretoko National Park we hoped to see higuma bears in their wild and natural habitat, not trained ones like the posing bears in Kamikawa, cute as they were. (I think bears are really not supposed to be cute). But most of Shiretoko is roadless, hiking is difficult, dangerous and illegal without a permit, and we were still limping after the rocky climb up Mt. Kurodake. So we took a sightseeing cruiser boat along the north coast of the Shiretoko Peninsula through the Sea of Okhotsk which borders some Russian islands all the way to the peninsula’s tip.

Along the way we saw lots of beautiful coastline, many amazing waterfalls, cormorants, and finally a higuma bear! The bear was fishing in the mouth of a stream. It was beautiful to watch such a huge creature jump and leap after salmon with such agility!

During the last part of the boat trip we got completely drenched with salty spray, so after a quick cold limping walk back to our hotel we enjoyed a wonderful soak in the hotel’s hot springs before dinner. There were three large pools on the seventh (top) floor of the hotel, one colored and scented with lavender. From these pools we looked out over the harbor and the ocean – a beautiful view but not as amazing as the view from the outdoor pool on the rooftop above the seventh floor! There we soaked outdoors breathing fresh air while enjoying a view of the ocean.

Since all of our clothes were wet we used the hotel’s coin laundry machines. We looked around for a soap vending machine before we realized that the washing machine was equipped with soap and would automatically add the right amount at the right time! I continue to be amazed by Japanese technology.

The next morning we took a short hike in the five lakes area and saw some beautiful views of lakes reflecting the surrounding mountains. Access to three of the lakes was closed due to recent bear activity.

In the afternoon we ate delicious sushi including sea urchin, a local specialty, which Itsumi likes more than I do. Then we took a train back to Abashiri.

Abashiri is famous for its prison, a cold and miserable, largely unheated outpost on what once was the Japanese frontier. Abashiri is as famous for its Siberian air as Alcatraz is famous for its rocky, desolate island. We didn’t visit the prison, which is still in operation, but we took the obligatory photos of ourselves behind the fake prison bars at the train station before heading back toward central Hokkaido.

Hokkaido Part I, Ice Museum and Higuma Bears

2009-10-03T16:38:00.000-07:00

(Republished with photos added)

Itsumi and I are on vacation in Hokkaido, Japan’s north island. We flew here from Tokyo’s domestic airport and I learned that, if you need to remove your shoes during screening, the security people give you a pair of slippers to wear in accordance with Japan’s rules about shoes. In addition, you don’t have to show photo ID in order to enter the secured area. A ticket is enough. And best of all, you can bring plastic beverage bottles through security! They are scanned by a security machine, and this eliminates the massive throwing away and repurchasing of water bottles that occur at U.S. airports every day.

We arrived in Asahikawa, Hokkaido, where we bought lunch boxes and ate them on a bench in front of the train station, under the beautiful sun. We bought one box of fish including sushi and fresh crab, and another box of Genghis Khan. Genghis Khan is popular in Hokkaido and means Mongolian barbecue. Our Genghis Khan contained lamb and sautéed vegetables and rice, and we heated it by pulling a

string in the packaging that ignited some kind of heating material underneath the food.

In 3 minutes, it was piping hot! (But the packaging is probably not very good for the environment). We took a　train　to　Kamikawa　where　we　went　to　the　Ice　Museum　which　advertises　temperatures　of　-41　degrees　Celsius (-42 degrees Fahrenheit).

Paying to visit extremely cold temperatures seems like a silly thing for a Minnesotan to do, and this place was quite the tourist trap, but I couldn’t resist the temptation to see what a museum says about temperatures that low. It turned out Kamikawa has the Ice Museum because the town once registered real temperatures of -42 degrees Celsius, the coldest registered temperature in Japan. Before entering the museum the docent had us blow soap water bubbles through a wand to see how the bubbles behaved at a normal temperature. Then we put on parkas and entered the Ice Museum, which consisted of a long and windy tunnel through ice formations and was indeed very cold, especially since we weren’t dressed like Minnesotans!

The temperature in the ice tunnel was actually -20 degrees C (just -4 degrees F) but that felt plenty cold especially with bare hands and trying to blow bubbles and take pictures. Some of the bubbles did indeed freeze when they hit the ground, and I must say that I never thought to blow bubbles in the winter in Minnesota!

Then we got to the main draw of the ice museum, the -41 degree part. It turns out that the real temperature was still just -4 F, but we pushed a button that caused a ten second wind storm creating a wind chill of -41 C (-42 F). Although I've experienced real temperatures of colder than -40 F and a windchill of -75 F in Minnesota, I must say it was very hard to endure ten seconds of the wind chill effect! We literally ran to the exit of the museum where I took this photo of Itsumi with a frozen wet towel.

Outside, in the beautiful sunny fall weather beneath birch trees like the ones in Minnesota we saw higuma bears, Hokkaido's brown bears. They are VERY big, bigger than any other bears I've ever seen! But these bears, a side attraction at the ice museum, were in a rather sad condition, confined in a cement enclosure and waiting for tourists to throw food pellets provided by the museum. As we entered carrying our bags of pellets, the bears struck many cute poses, some even like yoga poses, hoping to be rewarded with treats. Unfortunately, by visiting this attraction we encouraged it to continue.

This bear tries to catch a treat thrown by a tourist.

There were also a few Kodiak bears from Alaska, which have very long claws but are smaller than the higuma bears.

The town of Kamikawa reminds me of North Dakota with its wide empty streets, tiny business district and small grocery store where the locals gossip about each other. This is a part of Japan much different from the Tokyo area which I have become accustomed to!

Barcode Hair

2009-09-28T23:17:00.000-07:00

My favorite new Japanese expression is "barcode hair," pictured above. Second favorite: "pudding hair." Pudding means flan in Japan, and pudding hair is dark hair dyed blonde, with dark roots growing out on top.

Summer yukata

2009-09-19T18:57:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone,

I haven't written much lately because I've been working many consecutive shifts this summer. Japanese people want to go up into the mountains to escape the heat of Tokyo during the summer, and consequently my English classes up in the mountains are really busy!

But I have had a day off in Tokyo here and there to relax, and on one of those days recently I wore the yukata that I received as a birthday gift and walked to a nearby shrine to take a few pictures.

In the photo I'm carrying a furoshiki, or wrapping cloth. The furoshiki is a square piece of beautiful fabric, and Japanese people can tie it into many beautifuly styles of handbags. Here, I tied a simple one using two wooden rings. The furoshiki was a birthday gift from my friend Mika.

I hope you're all doing well and I will catch up a bit on my blogging when my work schedule settles down. I enjoy receiving your emails even though I haven't been so good at answering lately!

Dance Festivals!

2009-09-13T04:58:00.000-07:00

During summer, there is a festival almost every day in Tokyo! Itsumi and I attended two dance festivals recently. The first was a samba festival, in the style of Brazilian carnival.

This festival may have originated because of the many Brazilians living in Japan. Many of the Brazilians in Japan are actually Japanese who immigrated to Brazil in the early 1900s when opportunities for farmers were better in Brazil than in Japan. Later, some of these Japanese-Brazilians immigrated back to Japan in order to work in the booming industries here. Now that there is a recession, Japan is encouraging this labor force to move back to Brazil. Just as in the U.S., immigrants are sometimes welcomed here and other times encouraged to leave, depending on the economy.

In any case, the samba festival consisted of a parade of dancers dressed (or barely dressed) in beautiful costumes. A few dance troupes were comprised of Brazilians, but most of the dancers were Japanese.

The skirts on the compasses pictured below twirled around and around.

The costumes were beautiful and I was so happy to see samba, but I felt like the dancers didn't dance with the same energy and dedication as the carnival dancers I saw in South America.

I also noticed that the audience consisted mainly of older men with big cameras!

The next weekend, Itsumi and I went to an awa-odori festival, which is a type of Japanese dance performed to Japanese instruments.

Although a typhoon blew in part way through the parade, the dancers danced with as much energy as I've ever seen anywhere.

The women in the awa odori parade dance on their toes while wearing geta, or traditional Japanese shoes. They danced on their toes through the entire parade route, and I never saw so much energy!

The samba festival was beautiful, but the Japanese dancers were simply wearing another culture's costumes and dancing to another culture's music. The awa odori festival, in contrast, is a Japanese tradition and despite the typhoon the dancers danced and the musicians played with all of their energy, and it was truly beautiful.

Maid Cafe

2009-08-05T19:23:00.001-07:00

I visited a maid cafe yesterday. Maid cafes are popular in Akihabara, a section of Tokyo where the otaku hang out. Otaku are hard-core fans of anime and manga, and they enjoy the fantasized French-style maids who serve the customers as a maid would serve her "master" and "mistress" in their home. I heard that the maids greet customers by saying "welcome home master" but if they said this I wasn't able to understand it.

Customers are not allowed to take pictures inside the cafe, but I managed to take a couple of shots of maids on the street, inviting potential customers to visit the cafes. There are more than 30 maid cafes in Akihabara.

Really, I thought the "maid" service was not much different from service in a typical Japanese restaurant (which is much better than service in American restaurants, and you are not expected to tip). But the maid server did lots of cutsy things like making a cute drawing using ketchup over a plate of food. She drew a ketchup bunny, and as she drew she said, in a little girl voice that I can't even begin to imitate, "these are the ears, and the nose ..." For my benefit she said this in English. One visit to a maid cafe was enough for me. The food wasn't so great, and I don't really care for the idea of being "served" by a maid, but it was something to see once.

Also, it helped me see the importance of fantasy in Japanese culture. Japan is a huge exporter of its fantasy culture such as anime and manga.

People can go to a maid cafe and enjoy the fantasy of being served by a maid for an hour or two over coffee and dessert. But like all fantasies, some people take it too far. Maid cafes often have printed rules warning customers not to touch the maids, not to ask for their phone numbers, and not to wait outside the cafe for a maid to finish her shift.

There are also butler cafes, which cater to women customers, and cross-dressing cafes where men dress as maids or women dress as butlers.

More information about maid cafes is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maid_cafe.

Soba

2009-08-05T17:50:00.000-07:00

Soba are buckwheat noodles, a common food in Japan. You can eat soba noodle soup at cheap restaurants where the customers eat standing at a counter, or at expensive specialty restaurants where the soba is made by hand in the front window of the restaurant, as pictured here.

Soba noodle soup is eaten with chopsticks, and should be slurped. I find it funny to stand in a restaurant eating soba with twenty standing slurping strangers. I like eating soba with chopsticks, but I'm not very good at slurping. At first it took me longer than average to eat a bowl of soba, but now I can eat it as quickly as the other customers.

Below is a plastic model of a plate of soba. Japanese restaurants usually have realistic-looking plastic models of their food in the front window. This is great for illiterate folks like me. The factory that makes most of this plastic "food" is in the mountains not far from Tokyo, and I've heard that tourists can try their hand at making plastic food there for a small fee.

I also like soba in the form of tea, made by pouring hot water over buckwheat kernels in a mug. More information about soba is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soba.

Sumidagawa Hanabi, or flower-fire festival

2009-07-25T19:17:00.000-07:00

Each summer Japan has many fireworks, or "flower-fire" festivals, and the biggest is the Sumidagawa Fireworks Festival on the Sumida River in Tokyo. The festival, dating from 1732, is a competition between rival pyrotechnic artists resulting in fireworks in beautiful complex shapes such as a willow tree and a sunflower. A million people attended the festival, which contained 21,500 fireworks this year.

Itsumi and I went to the festival with four friends who all wore beautiful traditional yukatas, complete with fancy obi, or belts, and geta, or traditional shoes.

Because the festival is so popular, we arrived several hours early to claim a square of pavement for our picnic cloth, and waited with thousands of other people at Senso-ji temple, from where the papers said we would have a good view of the fireworks.
When the fireworks finally started, it was clear that the papers were wrong and our view was blocked by two tall buildings.

Luckily, we were able to find another spot from where we had a good view down a street, and we even got a glimpse of two geisha as they slipped through the crowd! We just got a quick glimpse and no photos, but we saw that their faces were painted white and they were adorned with many dangling accessories.

As a Minnesotan used to watching fireworks over a lake, I found it fun to watch them in such an urban environment between miles and miles of skyscrapers.

And the fireworks were like one continuous grand finale, shooting off right in a row or at the same time, with no pauses, for an hour and a half. Beautiful! Afterwards we went to a Bangladeshi restaurant. Mmmm.

There are several free festivals every week in Tokyo during the summer. Sometimes it's hard to keep up!

Yokohama and the Black Ships

2009-06-07T04:13:00.000-07:00

I went to Yokohama, just outside of Tokyo, for the 150th anniversary of the arrival of Commodore Perry's "Black Ships" which lead to Japan's opening to foreign trade with the U.S. Perry arrived just south of Yokohama with a fleet of American warships, demanding that Japan open several ports for commerce, and the Tokugawa shogunate agreed by treaty.

Yokohama became the base of foreign trade in Japan, and in 1861 sprouted Japan's first English language newspaper. Foreigners occupied a moat-surrounded district.

It seems strange to me that Yokohama residents now celebrate the 150th anniversary of the arrival of foreign warships making demands upon Japan, but they do.

At the celebration I saw a chalk painting by American artist Kurt Wenner. Wenner's art is known for its 3D effect which causes it to appear to float. Due to the heavy rain the picture was covered with plastic, but it still was amazing. When viewed from this side, it appears 3D but from the other side it looks very distorted.

Unrelatedly, my boss gave me a box of sweets from Japan's city called Obama, which is capitalizing on the fame of the American president. Obama is really a small city, but is trying to make a name for itself!

Parasols

2009-06-05T05:22:00.001-07:00

Japan is the only place I've ever been where women use parasols! On a recent sunny day, I saw many women using them. Here, in contrast to in the U.S., people like to keep their skin white, and many women use "whitening cream" on their face.
In addition to parasols, people also use gloves, etc., for UV protection. Such contrast to our current attitude toward the sun in the U.S., although we too used parasols not so long ago. Nonetheless, I still love being in the sun!

Odaiba

2009-06-02T05:44:00.001-07:00

Itsumi works in the Odaiba region of Tokyo. Odaiba is a series of human-made islands that have been re-claimed from the ocean. Now, the area is futuristic and high-tech, reached by a driverless monorail. We spent an afternoon and evening playing there.
First, we took a ride on the ferris wheel, in a completely transparent gondola which gave us a great view of the area.

This is a parking lot on top of a shopping mall.

An airplane comes in for landing, over freight ships on Odaiba.

On the left is a wide pedestrian bridge, and on the right are bridges for the highway and monorail.

This is the most rectangular island I have ever seen!

Next, we stopped by the Toyota showroom to play some virtual reality games for free.

This is a reflex game. We weren't very good at it!

We saw some cool cars.

And drove go-karts.

These go-karts are hybrid, to demonstrate how a hybrid car works. The go-kart is powered by a combination of foot pedaling and electricity. The foot pedaling worked great on the down hill and even portions of the track, but we had to use the electric power on the hills.

I liked the uniforms.

I got to "drive" this little electric car. Actually, I sat behind the steering wheel (on the right side) and pushed the start button, and the car did everything else. Having my hand on the steering wheel is just for looks.The car navigates its own way around the course. Below, the car is driving but nobody is in it. I'm not sure how it does this.
We saw some more cool cars.

And some futuristic vehicles.

All this was free. Then, we ate dinner at a Russian restaurant.

Stew covered with a "lid" made of bread.

And we pretended to be in Rome (but we really were in a shopping mall).

This sign is in Japanese, Chinese, Korean and English, and the sign below offers tourist information officers speaking all of those languages. I am amazed at how many different writing systems there are in the world.

As we left by monorail, we had a beautiful night view of the ferris wheel.

Odaiba was built as a set of six island fortresses in 1852, to defend against the U.S. Navy's "Black Ships." The area was dramatically expanded during the late 20th century as a seaport district, and has developed since the 1990s as a major commercial, residential and leisure area.

Walmart in Japan

2009-05-30T01:04:00.001-07:00

Eeeew, Walmart is somehow affiliated with my local grocery store.

Walmart-brand disposable chopsticks.

Inubo-zaki

2009-05-21T04:17:00.001-07:00

Itsumi and I took an overnight trip to Inubo-zaki, the eastern-most point on Japan's main islands. To get there we took several trains, ending on this tiny one-car train, a one-man operation. Some of the stations where this train stopped did not even have a ticket taker, and instead the driver took the fare.

We got off at Inubo-zaki, a small and rustic-looking station that would look more appropriate in South America rather than in Japan.

We checked into our ryokan, or traditional hotel, and penguins greeted us at the door! I think they are part of a cooperative project with the marine park next door.

Our hotel was right above the lighthouse, on the eastern-most point of Inubo-zaki. From here, you can see 330 degrees of ocean, and only 30 degrees of land.

We took an evening walk on the beach before soaking in the hotel's hot springs.

On the beach we found a washed-up tire, covered with living baby shellfish! I don't think they survived though, because they had washed up in the tide.

The sand made beautiful patterns on the beach.

We got up at 4:30 a.m. to watch the sunrise over this eastern-most point. After New Zealand and Australia, it is one of the first sunrises in the world. It was beautiful! I took these pictures from the terrace of our hotel.

Inubo-zaki seemed to be a bit warmer than Tokyo, with palm trees and these cacti, which remind me of the prickly pear cactus from the American Southwest and Mexico.

Below are carp-shaped flags in honor of Children's Day, celebrated on May 5 in Japan.

From our hotel, we took a hike to Inubo-zaki's observation tower, passing the tiny train as it trundled past vegetable fields.

We saw some farmland from the observation tower, but mostly we saw 330 degrees of Pacific Ocean!

And a wind farm

And ocean

From here it is possible to see a mountain in the Phillippines, using a telescope. We couldn't see it, but in the photo you can read the katakana word for Phillippines, which is pronounced hu-i-li-pi-n. (I can read this now!)

Japan has vending machines everywhere, even ice cream vending machines!

An old-fashioned wheelbarrow

Inubo-zaki has the largest and most delicious sushi I've ever seen! Usually sushi is eaten in one bite, but it would be impossible to do that here!

On the way back to Tokyo, we stopped at the Kameido Tenjin Shrine, which is famous for its wisteria blossoms.

Wisteria blossoms

There are many beautiful places just a short trip from Tokyo!

Sumo

2009-05-18T21:50:00.000-07:00

I went to a sumo (pronounced s'mo in Japanese) tournament yesterday, and I got a great seat! I paid for a cheap general admission ticket, but since it was a week day and I got there early I was able to sit in an unoccupied front row seat for most of the tournament.

I'm not big on sports, and I've never been to an American professional boxing or wrestling match, but I have to say that watching sumo was exciting, and not only because of the size of the wrestlers. Sumo originated more than 1500 years ago, as part of a harvest festival, but later became the national sport of Japan.
Today, the matches are decided really quickly, as soon as one of the wrestlers steps outside of the ring or touches the mat with any part of his body other than his feet. There are no weight limits in sumo, and the wrestlers are not matched for weight.
The day starts with the low-ranked or unranked wrestlers, but after lunch the higher ranked wrestlers come in during the entering the ring ceremony. They wear embroidered aprons that can cost $5,000 or even $10,000 each.
The higher-ranked matches last a little longer especially because of all of the maneuvering and stretching before each match. According to the brochure, this is the time when the wrestlers glare fiercely at each other, but compared to American wrestling that I've seen on TV I didn't think that their glare was that fierce in most cases.

Some of the sumo wrestlers, perhaps this one, have been recruited from other countries such as Bulgaria.

I was impressed that after each match the winner seemed to check to make sure that the loser was ok before returning to his side of the ring, and there was no taunting or cheering or shouting by the winner. The wrestlers just bowed to each other and left the ring.

The top wrestlers, or yokozuna, enter the ring wearing a massive braided hemp rope weighing up to 35 pounds tied in a bow at his back and ornamented in the front with zig-zag paper, a religious symbol in Japan.
Yokozuna are attended by other wrestlers, one bearing a sword, and they perform the dohyo-iri ceremony.
Before a match, each wrestler does a purification ceremony consisting of rinsing his mouth with water, wiping his body with a towel and throwing salt in the ring.
Sumo wrestlers wear a silk loincloth, approximately ten yards long and two feet wide. The loincloth is folded in six and then wrapped around the waist from four to seven times, depending on the girth of the wrestler. Many sumo moves involve grabbing an opponent's belt, but the wrestlers are not allowed to grab other parts of the loincloth. The high-ranked wrestlers wear a special topknot shaped like a gingko tree leaf.

Before and after the tournament, wrestlers wear kimonos and can be seen in the stadium and entering the building.
The referees, or gyoji, wear kimonos patterened after the samurai style from 800 years ago. Their black court hats are in the style of a traditional Shinto priest's hat. The lower-ranked gyoji are barefoot, but the higher ranked refs wear tabi socks.
Between matches, the water boy replenishes the salt basket, prepares the water and towels and helps sweep the ring.

At lunch time I tried a bowl of chanka nabe, the traditional food of sumo wrestlers.
The chanka tasted good and seemed pretty healthy, with lots of vegetables and just a bit of chicken. It doesn't seem like chanka would make you fat, but the key to sumo wrestlers' large physique is that they don't eat breakfast or lunch. They eat just one meal per day, dinner, and they go to bed immediately after eating. That way, the calories turn into fat while they sleep. Because they don't eat during the day they have a really low metabolism and don't process many calories during the day. Don't try this at home!
Traditional Japanese seating at the sumo tournament

Yoyogi Park

2009-05-11T20:05:00.000-07:00

You never know what you will see in Yoyogi Park. I really like this guy's hair.

This Rockabilly group danced away a Sunday afternoon to hits like "Let's Go to the Hop." The shirt says "American Junior Bowling Congress."

Rockabilly was really popular in Yoyogi Park in the 1980s, and the police actually shut it down for awhile because so many dancers were blocking the streets. Now there are just a couple of small groups who dance on Sundays.

This looks to be a father-daughter duo, complete with saddle shoes.

This is an all-male and rather tougher looking Rockabilly group. Some of these guys had tattoos, even one tattoo of Mexico's Virgin of Guadalupe! In Japan, tattoos are viewed as a sign of membership in the Japanese yakuza, or mafia. Many hot springs refuse to admit people with tattoos. But these guys were just having a fun time in the park.

Moving on through the park, the person pictured below was offering free hugs (in English). I'm not sure anyone could read his sign, and nobody seemed interested.

I'm not sure what this person was doing.

Or these.

Itsumi and I went to Yoyogi Park to join the Earth Day celebration, which was very crowded and commercial. The park's more spontaneous activities were much more interesting!

Dr. Fish

2009-05-07T19:40:00.000-07:00

In Japan, it's all the rage to get your feet nibbled on by tiny fish. For about $5 at a hot springs bath you can immerse your feet in warm water and the fish will nibble all the dead skin off your feet. The fish are imported from Turkey, where this trend began with fish who lived naturally in thermal water.

I had the opportunity to try this last week, and it tickles! It doesn't hurt at all, but feels really funny especially when the fish nibble between my toes. The fish only eat dead skin, not live skin. Now my feet feel soft and smooth!

Here is a video about "Dr. Fish." http://video.aol.jp/video-detail/fish-snacking-on-feet-the-latest-spa-craze/3196439193

Yabusame

2009-04-23T05:38:00.000-07:00

I went to a yabusame, or archery competition recently. Yabusame, originating in 1192, is done on horseback. The shogun encouraged yabusame as a necessary accomplishment for samurai.

First, the participants paraded through the grounds accompanied by other costumed people.

While riding at top speed, the archers shot their arrows at this small piece of wood, pictured below.
According to the brochure, today's yabusame is held by the Ogasawara family, which has inherited the shogunate in this area since the Kamakura Era, beginning in 1192. At least one of the archers was a woman, although I didn't get a picture of her.

Sumida Park

2009-04-23T05:09:00.000-07:00

I recently saw a homeless man and a homeless cat enjoying each other's company in Sumida Park, Tokyo.

The man is wearing a mask, probably due to a pollen allergy, and drinking cheap sake while waiting for his laundry to dry. In Tokyo it's legal to drink in parks and public places. The man noticed me just after I took his picture, and gave me a smile and a friendly wave.

Teaching English in the Mountains

2009-04-20T02:19:00.000-07:00

I just got back from a two-week shift at my English teaching job. Usually I work for seven days, and then get seven days off, but this time I had a long shift due to a busy holiday season. Last week was Golden Week, during which there are three national holidays in a row and most Japanese people take vacations. Some use their vacation time to study English in the highlands.
I teach in an immersion language program. I stay in a log cabin in the mountains, and four students join me for five days or for a two-day weekend course. I teach English conversation, grammar, telephone calls, speech and debate. And we speak English all day and all evening, during meals and free time. The "free time" is for the students - I don't really get any free time when I'm at work - but it's fun and worth it because I get lots of time off between work weeks.
The cabin, pictured above in winter although it's beautiful spring now, is set up like an American cabin, with board games and books in English and lots of American food and snacks.

The students are amazed at the size of American products. Parmesan cheese is about 1/8 this size in Japan, and the same is true for shampoo and shower products. I like to introduce peanut butter and apples as a traditional American snack, but the students don't usually like it. Peanut butter is a uniquely American taste!

My boss provides delicious meals for lunch and dinner. Shabu shabu is a special Japanese meal that most people only eat twice a year (maybe like turkey for Americans) but I get to eat it twice during every week that I work.

To eat shabu shabu, we swish fresh vegetables and meat in boiling water at the table. Of course we cook the pork fully, but the beef is eaten rare. We dip everything in a tasty sauce. I love Japanese mushrooms!

Two nights a week, the students cook using recipes in English. This is fun for them and requires them to cooperate to complete a task using English. I help with vocabulary, but other than that the students do the cooking.

Japan has a type of sweet potato that is really slimy when grated! I think that Americans, including me, don't usually like slimy food but Japanese people don't mind it. This potato is really slimy when grated and raw, but it becomes a part of the batter for okonomiyake and when cooked it's a delicious eggy pancake-type food.

Here, the students made gyoza, or Chinese dumplings. Mmmmm.
In the evenings we either watch movies in English or play games like Scrabble and Monopoly. Since Monopoly is about life, it's a great game for learning English.

Outside the cabin is a beautiful bamboo forest, and behind the forest are rice paddies. Now that it's spring, I can hear the frogs in the rice paddies every evening. It's now warm enough that I can sleep with my bedroom window open, and I hear the frogs all night and the birds in the morning.

Now you know a little about my job in Japan!

Sakura snow

2009-04-18T07:04:00.000-07:00

It's the end of cherry blossom season, and riding my bicycle through the falling blossoms feels like a surreal snowstorm!

Engrish Part 2

2009-04-17T17:27:00.001-07:00

Here's another one from Engrish.com. Love those Japanese Ls and Rs. I've had several requests for Texas "The Love Star State" T-shirts, but I'm sorry, I haven't seen them in a store! I just saw a guy with a jacket saying that in a park recently. Enjoy the erection party!

Sorry I haven't answered emails lately. I just came off a week-long shift at work. I'll catch up soon!

Meanwhile, it's 69 degrees in Tokyo and I'm looking forward to the Earth Day celebration in Yoyogi Park!

Engrish

2009-04-08T01:14:00.001-07:00

In Japan, people think it's cool to have English lettering on things. They often can't read it, but think of it as a fashionable decoration, just as Americans like to have Chinese characters on things, but many of us don't know what the lettering on our karate uniform says, for example.

High school style letterman's jackets are in style here, and they are always decorated with lots of English writing. Yesterday I saw one that had a picture of Texas, and said "The Love Star State." Personally, I would like to start thinking of Texas as the Love Star State. It could help its reputation after the Bush years.

In a store I saw a woman's shirt that said "I am a dog."

I never seem to have my camera handy when I see a funny T-shirt, but fortunately lots of other people do and you can see their pictures at http://engrish.com/

Lest you think Americans don't make the same mistakes, a Japanese friend told me that while in the U.S. he saw a man with the Chinese character for "kitchen" tattooed on his arm. The man had no idea what it meant, but it sure looked cool!

Hanami

2009-04-05T04:56:00.001-07:00

It's cherry blossom season in Tokyo, and that means that everyone is engaging in hanami, or flower viewing. People line up to enter parks with cherry trees! Below, people line up to enter Rikugien Garden, a quiet and non-party hanami atmosphere.

Other parks are full of hanami picnickers: families, groups of friends and co-workers picnicking and drinking on plastic tarps beneath the blossoms. Below is Hikarigaoka Park, within walking distance of where Itsumi and I live.

The crowds of people in parks remind Itsumi of Fourth of July fireworks viewing crowds in the U.S. In the evening, lights shine on the cherry trees and the party continues.

These guys seem to be co-workers. The man in the front is wearing a head cloth that is traditional for construction workers.

Most people bring bento (boxed lunch) boxes and sake, wine or beer, but a few people bring McDonalds or KFC fast food.

Kids enjoy climbing trees, playing badminton and doing all the things kids do in parks.

Itsumi and I had a hanami picnic with friends at Yoyogi Park in conjunction with a peace festival.

Later in the evening we went to an Izakaya, or traditional Japanese bar. Japanese people don't like to drink without eating, so an Izakaya is really more like a restaurant.

Cherry blossoms are beautiful, some very pink and some more whitish, and they are everywhere. We can see some from the balcony of our apartment. It's too bad that hanami season only lasts for a couple of weeks, as I would enjoy going to a party like this every weekend!

Mother's Bicycle

2009-03-24T20:24:00.000-07:00

I bought a bicycle! Getting around Tokyo by bicycle is so much more fun than using the train! I bought what is known here as a "mother's bicycle." It comes with a basket in front, and I bought a second basket for the back so that I can carry groceries like all of the mothers that use this type of bicycle.

In Tokyo it's impractical to have a car due to the crowding, traffic, and the high cost of parking, so many people don't drive. Mothers do their errands by bicycle with kids in tow. This bicycle, photographed in the parking lot in front of my apartment building, can carry two kids, with a seat in the back and a smaller one behind the handle bars, and groceries in the front basket.

I think it's inspirational to see so many Japanese people, including mothers, using bicycles for transportation. Using a bicycle rather than a car is one of the most effective, fun and healthy ways we can reduce our consumption. Bicycles should be for transportation, not just recreation!

The standard mother's bicycle comes equipped with a headlight that is powered by the bicycle rider. The bicycle wheel turns a small wheel on the headlight apparatus which powers the headlight. This means that my pedaling not only moves the bicycle but also powers the headlight, so I don't need to buy batteries which are harmful to the environment and also a pain if you forget to turn your headlight off. During the day, I shift the light apparatus so that it is not next to the wheel and I don't have to power it.

This is my bicycle lock. It uses a key, and doesn't lock the bicycle to anything. It just prevents the rear wheel from turning.

Compared to the U.S., Japan has very few car parking lots, but lots of bicycle parking! Bicycles line the front and side of the grocery store where Itsumi and I shop. An attendant constantly reorganizes the bicycles to make room for more. Side streets are crowded with bicycles but have few cars. Just think how much oil is being saved by every person who is not driving a car. This is how it should be!

I bought a helmet (special ordered it, because it's unfortunately not common for adults to wear bicycle helmets in Japan), I'm looking for a bicycle map of Tokyo in English, and I'm enjoying finding my way around Tokyo by bicycle!

Plastic

2009-03-23T22:50:00.001-07:00

Related to my last post, I just read an article in the Japan Times. The article, available at http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20090322x1.html, says that there is a floating dump of plastic debris called the Eastern Garbage Patch in the ocean, just west of California, and this dump is now larger than the area of the United States. Plastic garbage from the coasts of Asia and the United States accumulates here, harming the ocean, the fish and marine life, and anyone who eats the fish. This is the largest and most well-known floating dump, but there are many others in oceans around the world.

The article stresses that we need to use less plastic. In 2004, Japan discarded ten million tons of plastic. I don't have a corresponding figure for the United States, but according to http://www.thegoodhuman.com/2007/03/20/how-much-trash-gets-thrown-away-each/, Americans throw away 2.5 million plastic beverage bottles EVERY HOUR.

Every year, Americans throw away some 100 billion plastic bags, equivalent to dumping nearly 12 million barrels of oil.
Only 1 percent of plastic bags are recycled worldwide -- about 2 percent in the U.S. -- and the rest, when discarded, can persist for centuries. Source: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/08/10/plastic_bags/

There is no excuse for the amount of plastic that we use and throw away. Recycling is of course good, but it can never be enough. We need to drastically reduce our use of plastic. That means I shouldn't eat so much bento. I should instead choose food that is not so heavily packaged. As consumers, we have the power to change the industry. Let's do it now.

Bento, yum!

2009-03-23T20:06:00.000-07:00

Japanese food to go is really good! From any convenience store, such as 7-11, you can buy a lunch box, or bento, for $5 or $6. The bento are usually really delicious and contain rice, pickled vegetables, breaded shrimp, pickled plums, vegetables, egg, and lot of other delicious morsels of food. I say morsels because everything comes in bite-sized pieces, and there are many kinds of food so the meal never gets boring!

The only thing I don't like is that bento, like Japanese food in general, is heavily packaged. I think that Japan is as bad as or worse than the U.S. when it comes to packaging food, unnecessarily using lots of plastic, cardboard and styrofoam. Much of this packaging can be recycled, but still it would be better not to use it in the first place. The disposable chopsticks, used in cheap and mid-level restaurants, waste a lot of wood, but are probably not as bad as the plastic knives, forks and spoons used in the U.S. Both Japan and the United States could learn from poorer countries like Bolivia where the food is not heavily packaged.

Shower toilets

2009-03-23T05:32:00.000-07:00

Lest you think I got tired of writing about the amazing Japanese toilets...

I finally figured out how to use shower toilets. The orange button on the left means stop. The next one is a "shower" for after going number 2. The next is a bidet for after going number 1. And the last one is a dryer. The round buttons below adjust the force of the water, and can move the spray forward or backward. And the seat is always heated for your comfort.

Izu Oshima

2009-03-23T03:07:00.000-07:00

I took a short trip to Izu Oshima, an island off the coast of Tokyo. It took about two hours to get there by hydrofoil, and I enjoyed a beautiful evening walk on the beach.

Izu Oshima is technically part of Tokyo, but it feels so different. Its towns are quiet, working class and a bit run down, which makes me feel comfortable there.

There was only one restaurant in the town I stayed in, and since I chose not to have meals at my hotel I either ate at the restaurant or bought food at the grocery store for every meal. This is a sashimi (raw fish) rice bowl. This fish is marinated in sake and soy sauce.

Oshima is famous for its active volcano, which most recently erupted in 1986. This is the volcano from a distance.

There is a hiking trail to the top of the volcano, going through the hardened lava flows.

Periodically along the trail there are shelters, in case of eruption. I was glad that I didn't have to use one!

Along the way there were places where smoke came out of the ground.

This is the crater. I didn't stay long because it was really cold and windy, and snowing!

Me with lava rock - trying to smile but it was so cold up there!!

Izu Oshima is also famous for its flowers, especially camellias. These are Oshimia cherry blossoms at the entrance to the camellia park.

Camellias come in many colors.

Every evening during the camellia festival, the island people put on a show for tourists. I really like that men in Japan can dance around with fans. People here don't have the same image of masculinity as we have in the U.S. For example, men like to attach tiny stuffed animals and decorations to their cell phones, and recently I saw a 40-year-old man with a small teddy bear attached to his tote bag.

The performance was part of the island's camellia festival. There was dancing, and a pachinko (Japanese gambling) game. I was the only gaijin (foreigner) in the audience. I think most of the Japanese tourists were in tourist groups rather than traveling independently, and I was the only one by myself. A group of three local men was sitting near me, and they were enjoying a few beers and cheering boisterously while watching the performance. Seeing that I was the lone foreigner, they befriended me and brought me gifts of tea and the island's famous milk.

They showed me how to play the pachinko game, and at the end of the performance when the dancers invited the audience to dance, the local men insisted that I dance. They borrowed my camera and took lots of funny pictures of me dancing.

Also in Oshima I soaked in a hot spring pool on a cliff above the ocean. It was amazing to soak in the water while watching the ocean and the activity in the harbor. Even though it was raining, it felt great to soak in the hot water.

Unlike most hot springs in Japan, bathers wear swimming suits at this one because women and men bathe together. Photo borrowed from the internet.

Not too many people spoke English on Izu Oshima, and I had to struggle more to communicate in the little bit of Japanese I've learned, but many people on the island reached out to help me, the lone foreigner, get my transportation, lodging, eating and entertainment needs met. I want to visit this island again in the summer time.

A fancy ryokan

2009-02-16T05:24:00.000-08:00

I received my work visa to live and work in Japan for the next year! I have my passport stamps, my "alien" card, and even a library card from a local library that has a whole wall of books in English and even some in Spanish!

To celebrate my work visa, Itsumi treated me to a weekend getaway at a beautiful ryokan, or Japanese traditional inn, in the Kawazu area where we looked at cherry blossoms (see the previous post). The ryokan was beautiful, with several beautiful indoor and outdoor hot springs and traditional tatami-mat rooms, but the best part was the amazing food!

This was our dinner spread, and we were served more dishes even after I took this picture!

The seating was traditional Japanese style, cushions on a tatami mat floor.

This is a beautiful sashimi (raw fish) platter, with four different kinds of fish from the local area, as well as shellfish.

Turban shell shellfish

Clockwise from the lowest point: octopus, shiitake mushrooms, two types of hu (cooked soybean gluten), turnips, show peas, and another type of hu. Center: bamboo shoots.

Clockwise from top left: salad dressing, pounded mochi cake flavored with cherry blossom leaves, salad, soymilk tofu, half-cooked egg. The center tray contains small appetizers.

At one point I counted 40 vessels on our table, and the server had already taken away some empty bowls at that time. There must have been at least 50 in total.

In Japan, people really like to cook their own food at their table. I think it's all about the freshness. On the right is shabu shabu, and on the left is a steamed rice dish.

Shabu shabu is a dish that involves swishing a piece of raw fish or meat around in a pan of boiling water until it is semi-cooked. Then you dip it in a delicious shabu shabu sauce, and eat it! You can make shabu shabu from fish, beef or pork, but of course you must cook the pork fully. You also boil delicious vegetables in the water. This is fish shabu shabu.

This is a fancy dish of soymilk tofu, with salad in the background.

The half-cooked egg is a garnish for the salad, along with salad dressing, and it was very good!

Just when we were almost finished, the server brought us deep fried shrimp croquettes, lotus root and other vegetables, and a gelatin type dessert which was not the actual dessert, just an appetizer dessert.

I'm not big on octopus, but Itsumi likes it!

Clear soup with egg cake and vegetables.

Dessert! On the left: bavarian cream. On the right: fruit.

In the morning we had a delicious breakfast, with another huge spread of food! At a ryokan, guests are provided with robes and outfits like the one I'm wearing in the picture, which we can wear as we walk around the ryokan and eat in the dining room.

The breakfast spread

The burner in the back is steaming fresh locally grown vegetables, and in front a fresh scallop is being grilled.
Fresh scallop, which we ate with butter and lemon.

Me in a yukata robe.

Cherry blossoms and spring are here!

2009-02-16T02:33:00.000-08:00

Cherry blossoms are a symbol of spring in Japan, and the cherry trees are blooming in Kawazu! Kawazu is on the Izu peninsula southwest of Tokyo, known for its warm weather, tea production, tangerines and oranges, fish, hot springs and earthquakes. Kawazu is right on the ocean, and surrounded by mountains.

Most cherry trees bloom at the end of March, but Kawazu has a special type of cherry tree that blooms starting in February. The town has several walks lined with these special cherry trees. The trees look so beautiful in bloom because they actually bloom before their leaves emerge. So we see all pink and no green. Kawazu also has a lot of field mustard plants which are edible and provide a beautiful contrast to the cherry blossoms. Many of the cherry blossom observers wear surgical masks because spring is allergy season in Japan, too.

A cherry blossom viewing festival was going on, which means that vendors were selling lots of locally-produced food, such as half-dried salted anchovies (below)

another type of dried fish

and cherry blossom waffles filled with pounded rice cake (mochi).

Above, a man roasts fresh chestnuts (below).

Roasted chestnuts are delicious!

This is fresh wasabi root.

And above I am walking on a massage walkway made of massaging stones.

After two days in Kawazu we returned to Tokyo where it is still chilly and doesn't quite feel like spring yet, but we are assured that spring is coming soon!

Happy Valentine’s Day!

2009-02-14T01:05:00.001-08:00

In Japan, women give chocolates to men on Valentine's Day. This is not just for love interests, but also for men who are co-workers, etc. During the weeks before Valentine’s Day, the stores are filled with chocolate for sale. Below is a picture of a chocolate booth in the Valentine Chocolate Extravaganza at the Seibu Department Store in Tokyo. In Japanese department stores, only a small portion of the merchandise actually belongs to the department store. The rest of the space is rented out to small shops, and around Valentine’s Day the space is rented to chocolate shops.
February 14 is all about women giving chocolate to men, but men get their turn a month later, on March 14. On White Day, men must give white chocolate to all the women who gave them Valentine's chocolate, and the white chocolate must be double the value of what the men received! A Japanese man told me that one Valentine’s Day he received chocolate from fifteen women, which meant that he had a very expensive March 14!
Left to right: fresh white chocolate from Japan's north island of Hokkaido, a chocolate tin with the Penguin Suica Card logo, fresh caramel from Hokkaido, and chocolate truffles.

Vending Machines

2009-02-13T04:42:00.000-08:00

Japan is a vending machine Mecca. You can even buy eggs from a vending machine, in front of a farmer's house! Some vending machines are refrigerated, and others are hot, for hot drinks.

And the vending machines have recycling!

Some even accept my Suica card, which is a plastic card that I use for train fare. It's a pre-paid card, and I add more money to the card as needed. In addition to using it for train and bus fare, I can use it at many vending machines and convenience stores.

The Golden Unchi

2009-02-09T01:24:00.000-08:00

This is my favorite building in Tokyo. It's the headquarters of the Asahi beer company. The story goes that Asahi paid tons of money to a French architect to design this building. The portion on the left is supposed to look like a golden glass of beer with foam on the top. The yellow thing on the right is supposed to look like a flame, the "burning heart of Asahi beer." What do you think it looks like?

Japanese people think it looks like a cartoon drawing of poop (unchi in Japanese) and so this building, described on Wikipedia as one of Tokyo's most recognizable modern structures, is known as The Golden Turd (kin-iro no unchi)! The 360-ton golden flame, which is completely empty, was made by shipbuilders using submarine-construction techniques.

KitKats

2009-02-08T18:50:00.000-08:00

Japan has cool varieties of KitKats!
Above: Sweet potato with sesame seeds; tiramisu; green tea tiramisu

Chile pepper. I didn't buy this one; it was too expensive!

Strawberry

Cookies; flan.

Muscat (a type of green grape). This one is my favorite!

Tsukiji Fish Market

2009-02-07T23:50:00.000-08:00

I visited Tsukiji Fish Market, a bustling place in Tokyo. Tourists are no longer allowed to visit the early morning fish auction, but visitors can still walk through the huge market while dodging vehicles and trying to stay out of the way!
This is frozen tuna, which probably came from long distances such as coastal Europe or the Indian ocean. I thought all of the sushi in Japan would be fresh and local, but the salmon actually comes frozen from near Norway!

Scallops and shellfish

Boiled octopus

After visiting the market, I went to a restaurant across the street for some of the freshest sushi ever. A Taiwanese tourist sitting next to me ordered this shrimp sushi, which was still moving on her plate. You can see that it lifted up its tail while I was taking this picture! A gruesome sight to me, but Itsumi said that, since the head had already been removed, the shrimp was already dead and this was just a reflex, and an example of Japanese emphasis on freshness. This is certainly no more gruesome than what happens in the slaughterhouses in the United States every day.

Around the same time, my cousin MJ bought fish from Tsukiji market on the other side of the ocean, in San Francisco!

Japan is incredibly safe!

2009-02-06T19:54:00.000-08:00

I am continually amazed at how little people worry about theft in Japan. In the morning, delivery trucks leave boxes of new products in front of the stores. The boxes sit unattended on the sidewalk for hours before the stores open, and nobody takes anything!

In restaurants, I frequently see a woman, dining alone, leave her purse unattended on her chair while using the restroom. People sleep on the trains while leaving laptops on the shelf above the seats. Remember that I am in Tokyo, the capital city, not a rural community!

The shop pictured below sells antique coins, and displays them unattended in bins outside the store. Some of these coins sell for US$70 or more.

Bicycle locks here are a flimsy affair. There are several styles of lock. Generally they hold the rear wheel in place so the bike can't be ridden, but there is nothing to stop a thief from picking up the bicycle and carrying it away. Nonetheless, the bikes don't seem to get stolen. A bicycle with this type of lock in Fort Collins, my former town, would surely be stolen, (people will steal just a wheel or a seat if they can get nothing else) but not in Japan!

In the farm communities outside of Tokyo, and even in an agricultural area within Tokyo, farmers sell their produce at self-serve stands. Customers take what they want and leave payment in a tin can. Neither the produce nor the money in the can is protected from theft, but the system seems to work here. Below you can see yuzu, a special kind of oranges used for the flavorful peel, and a money can on the left.Of course, I am always careful about the way I carry money and belongings while traveling, but it's really pleasant to live in a place where I don't have to worry much about crime.

Strange sushi

2009-02-01T15:30:00.000-08:00

This is what raw horse sushi looks like!

Mild earthquake

2009-01-31T18:44:00.001-08:00

I experienced my first earthquake this morning! I had been wondering when there would be one. It was just a light trembling and lasted only a couple of seconds. At the epicenter, in the ocean east of Japan, the magnitude was 5.8, but the quake was very mild in Tokyo. If I had been walking in the apartment I probably wouldn't have felt it at all, but since I was lying in bed I could feel the slight trembling. Call me crazy, but I have been excited to experience an earthquake ever since I got to Japan!

Toilets

2009-01-25T04:13:00.000-08:00

As you know, I like taking pictures of interesting toilets. So when I saw a newspaper advertisement for an exhibition on toilets, I had to check it out. The exhibition was put on by ToTo, a Japanese toilet manufacturer.

This is one of Japan's earliest styles of toilets, a platform over a river, next to a rice field, used 4,000 years ago.

Later, people used a device similar to a western chamber pot, although it had a drawer for sand which could be removed, kind of like kitty litter. The box on the left is for poop, and the one on the right is for pee.

The box on the left is filled with fragrant tree branches. The one on the right is a miniature replica of a compost device, and people used the human manure for their gardens.

This is an early ceramic squat toilet, which would be set into a wooden floor above a pit.

Japan's first western-style toilets were manufactured in the 1940s. The seat and lid are made of wood.

This women's urinal was produced for the 1964 Olympics in Japan, but it never became popular. It seems to be a compromise between Western toilets (which don't require squatting) and Eastern squat toilets (which are cleaner because the user doesn't have to touch a dirty toilet seat).

Today, Western style toilets are replacing squat toilets in Japan. Most apartments and hotels and public places have Western style toilets. In public restrooms in the train stations, both kinds of toilets are available. Usually people wait in line and use the first toilet that becomes available, either squat-style or Western. I am comfortable with either style. In Japan, cleanliness is not an issue in public bathrooms, but in other places where the restrooms are sometimes dirty, I prefer a squat toilet because I don't have to touch it, and it's certainly more comfortable than trying to "hover" over a Western-style toilet. I have used squat toilets in Peru, Bolivia and Vietnam.

Above, the requisite slippers are pictured next to the modern Japanese toilet. In Japan, you must remove your shoes before entering a house or apartment, so as not to bring dirt from the outside into the home. Similarly, when entering the restroom in a house or apartment, you put on the toilet slippers that will be provided, and remove them when leaving the bathroom. This way, you don't bring dirtiness from the bathroom into the rest of the house. (Not to worry, the bathrooms are always very clean in any case!)

Many Japanese toilets have a bidet or shower feature, operated by controls on an arm. The shower water squirts out of a nozzle at the back of the toilet seat, and it is clean water coming from a spigot, not from the toilet bowl or tank. Often, the seat is heated for your comfort, and (as I mentioned in a previous post) there is a "flushing sound effects" device which makes a fake flushing noise so that others won't hear you using the toilet. I have even seen a toilet with a light in the bowl, so you can see it as you enter a dark restroom.

Some toilets, like this shark one, have a lid that opens automatically when someone enters the stall.

There are extra large toilets for sumo wrestlers (while a normal toilet seat measures 370 x 452 mm, the sumo wrestlers' toilet is 420 x 530 mm),

extra small ones for children,

and extra fancy ones for adults.

ToTo, the company hosting this exhibition, exports squat toilets to Southeast Asia,

and Western-style toilets to China.

This is how Japanese people draw cartoon poop!

Hand driers in Japan work much better than driers in the U.S.! The air comes out both the front and back of this device and whirls around in this compartment rather than dissipating into the room. Your hands dry very quickly!

By Japanese standards, this is a very large tub! In Japan, people use their tub for soaking and warming the body, not for bathing. Since people shower and wash before entering the tub, the water in the tub stays clean and can be used by several family members in the course of an evening. The flat object on the left-hand wall is a lid for covering the tub, to preserve the heat. In the past, all Japanese bathtubs had a water heating device to re-warm the bath water that was in the tub, but since some people were burned by the device, it's seldom used anymore.

This is a more compact Japanese bathroom, with a shower and bath tub. The little stool is for the people who like to sit down while taking a shower. Squatting or sitting is the traditional Japanese way to take a shower.

In this fancy room, you can watch TV while taking a bath.

And speaking of fancy Japanese technology, here Itsumi looks at a model kitchen shelf for storing dishes. This shelf is normally above head level, but when you push a button the shelf lowers into reach. The floor of the shelf is a metal rack, and the drawer that Itsumi is holding collects water that drips through the rack. This way, you can put your clean dishes directly onto the rack to dry, skipping the drying rack step and saving space that a drying rack would occupy on your counter. Much of Japanese technology is about saving space!