Spring Garden

left: Flower about to open















left: Our plot in the foreground













left: Baby broccoli


















left: Almost done planting!

Sorry!

If you are one of my one or two loyal readers, I must appologize: I have been a pathetic blogger as of late. One post a month for the past two months? Sweet Jesus! A dead, armless, once-blind, computer hater (you know, one of those "Email? Ughh!!! Only hand-written letters for me, they're more pure..." folks) could have blogged more than I have in the past few months. I truly am sorry. Sound the sirens, wake the junkies, close the schools, and tell the hermit crabs to peek out of their shells once again, the blogging drought has ended. Monsoon season has arrived!

I've been a busy man recently. We had two guests out from Hawaii last week, and I've also been spending a lot of time getting the garden planted and ready for the summer season. I put the blog on the back burner. But it's back cooking again, so pop up that popcorn, crack that Sierra open, put on your hideous Lazy Sunday Sweater and Day-After-Thanksgiving Sweatpants and enjoy the posts!

Where the Hell are the Photos? And a Great Read

I know, I'm looking for them too. My camera's battery charger died a quick, sudden death last month so my camera has been out of commission. I'm in the process of getting a new charger. I'm hoping to steal a few pictures from the Photographer in Residence to put up on the blog. Coming soon, I promise.

Oh, by the way--I just finished reading A Million Little Pieces by James Frey. I don't care if he made a few parts up, the memoir is awesome. I couldn't put the thing down and read 200 pages one day at my desk at work. It's based on his experiences dealing with multiple addictions in a rehab center near Chicago. Literary critics have their panties in a bunch because he admitted that he fudged a few parts to make the story more "dramatic"--like the part about him going to jail for 3 months (he really went for 3 hours). And the part where he drives his car into a police officer (he never did that). Who gives a shit? The book is still great and he challenges readers and critics to debate the boundaries of autobiographical writing. I also dig how the book is paragraph-free and filled with tons of random capitalization. The writing flows naturally (even though parts of it are made up, ha!) and the story is...well...unbelievable! It's a great read, just take it with a grain of salt.

Fire Drills Ain't No Joke in Japan

So I witnessed my first school fire drill the other day. It was scary. It was so real and the atmosphere so tense that I had to constantly look down to make sure I wasn't burning from the flames that I couldn't see but knew must have existed. There was fake smoke everywhere!! I don't know how they did it, but the blokes from the fire department (yes, they're on hand during the drill to oversee everything) made sure the first floor and courtyard were blanketed in thick, white smoke. The students, calm as cucumbers, walked in an orderly fashion into the gym (it was raining heavily outside) and quickly formed rows according to class. Very few students spoke, the lines were perfectly straight. When all students were accounted for by their homeroom teachers, the principal gave a speach. Then the chief of the fire department gave a speech. Then each homeroom teacher had his/her students form a small circle so they could discuss how to save fellow students and teachers in case of emergency during a fire. I found this part very Japanese--discussing how to preserve the strength of the group in case disaster strikes. No one is left behind, the classes leave as a unit, even if each kid has to drag out a body.

The Fourth Time's a Charm!

I don't want to go on and on about it because I'll end up wanting to crucify someone, but after four failed attempts, I've finally passed my driving test and earned (read: bought) my Japanese Driver's License! I failed four times for ridiculous reasons, each time I paid over $20 to take the test again, each time I was informed about driving lessons that are offered by the Dream Driving School that is affiliated with the Japanese DMV, and each time I wanted to strangle the neck of the sad sad human being that failed me. I waited two hours and paid another $20 to pick up my license. I'm glad to be done with the whole scam. I'm convinced any politician could win any election in Japan if he/she promised to reform the corrupt DMV's policy and procedures. The Japanese DMV angers everyone, and anyone who wants to drive legally in Japan has to bow down to it and smooch its boil-covered ass. Burn in hell Japanese DMV!

Hiroshima and Kyoto!!

Jenna and Matt, our two friends from Maui, came out to Japan to visit for two weeks. Luckily, we had off during the first week of their visit for Golden Week (a string of national holidays in a single week in May = Golden Week in Japan). Armed with a tiny, under-powered car, enough snacks to fatten up a horde of Japanese high school girls with Kate-Moss-crushes, and the confidence that comes from driving with a seasoned mechanic like Matt, we loaded the car so that not a single ray of sunlight could make it through the rear window and drove six hours down to Kyoto.

For three nights we stayed at our favorite guesthouse and wallowed in the hospitality that Kazuo, the owner of Guesthouse Bon, showers down upon each and every guest. We stuffed ourselves with sushi, vegetable tempura, miso soup, natto, and sake. By bike, we visited temples that Col and I have come to love and also explored new areas of Kyoto we have never seen before. The more I visit Kyoto, the more I fall in love with the city. Its coffers are filled with temples and artwork older than the hills yet its nightlife and fashion are saturated with the ever-changing energy and charisma that only a country’s youth can generate. Modern shopping districts scratch the backs of ancient temple gardens. Its darkest allies on the darkest nights are safer than New York’s most well lit thoroughfares on the sunniest days. People smile and bow if you make eye contact with them on the street. If the sun is out, the banks of its main river are lined with picnic blankets and street performers. It’s a city as a city should be.

As always, we left Kyoto with that empty feeling in our chests that kids get after they hastily finish eating an ice cream cone…topped with extra sprinkles and chocolate sauce…and about 20 cherries. Even though we didn’t say it as we drove away, we all were thinking, “Shit, what other place in Japan could possibly be cooler, what food could be better, what accommodation could be more comfortable?” The skies were overcast when we left, and spending another night at the guesthouse to wait for a sunny day to make leaving less depressing seemed like the most rational thing to do. But alas, the lure of visiting Hiroshima was too strong and Kazuo’s guesthouse too filled with other guests for us to stay another night in Kyoto, so we re-filled the car to the brim with stuff and headed off down the highway.

A long drive is most easily endured when one chooses to use a well-fortified castle as a rest stop. Or so I’ve heard. So we decided to stop at Himeji Castle on the way to Hiroshima. The castle, called the White Egret for the sweeping, curved stone walls of its foundation and its white color, is perched high atop a rocky bluff that looks out over the city. Upon first seeing the six-tiered fortress surrounded by a jagged maze of outer and inner walls, it became immediately clear to me that anyone throughout history who thought he could overtake this thing must have been a complete idiot and/or some distant, power-hungry relative of the Bush family. Logic begs would-be imposters to drop their weapons at the city borders and run for cover. The sheer number of weapons racks, reserve ration rooms, archery holes in the walls, trap doors, and look out points in and around the castle let contemporary visitors peek back in time (or stare teary-eyed at the present and into the future) to days when power could (can and will) be yanked out from under popular leaders like a greased rug by men with big armies, bigger wallets, and small regard for anyone other than themselves and their friends. The inside of the castle was set up like a museum, filled with old scrolls, weapons, paintings, and descriptions of the castle’s various inhabitants and the dramatic ways in which it was acquired by warring government officials in centuries past.

When we visited the castle, the winds were strong, and as we stood on one of the upper balconies, my hat blew off my head. When the nearest castle guard saw my green hat flipping through the air like a flapjack in a hurricane, he immediately used his walkie-talkie to contact the guard on ground level. The guard below fished my hat out of a tree while the top guard literally ran down a four flights of stairs to retrieve it for me. A guard in America would have laughed and said, “Ooooo, shit out of luck, kid! Serves you right, next time don’t wear your hat on a windy day!” It’s going to be very hard to leave this country when my contract ends…very, very hard.

When we arrived at Hiroshima at 10:30 p.m. with no hotel reservations, we did what any sensible traveler in a similar position would do: We searched high and low for the flashing fluorescent lights of the nearest love hotel. Love hotels, from all I’ve heard about their tacky inner sanctums and all I’ve seen of their gaudy exteriors, are truly awesome. Because many married Japanese couples live with their extended family in small living quarters, finding a time and a place in the house to knock boots and stink up the joint with hard-earned sweat requires skills that not even Sherlock Holmes possesses. The nights are quiet in Japanese neighborhoods because the walls are literally paper thin, often being nothing more than a sliding shoji screen door, and maternal and paternal in-laws, sleeping under the same roof in configurations cast and set by the selective hand of Alzheimer’s and other late-onset illnesses, could easily hear the moans of their offspring (a sound no parent, young or old, wants to hear). Romance digs more private playgrounds.

Love hotels offer couples privacy for a few hours or an entire night. If you’re traveling and looking for a cheap place to lay your head, love hotels are the perfect alternative to staying in an expensive Japanese ryokan.

Apparently no couples in Hiroshima have sex because we couldn’t find a single damn love hotel in the hour and a half that we drove around looking for one! I guess all of the babies that are born in the city’s hospitals come from parents who fornicated outside of Hiroshima’s city limits. All of the vibrating bed salesmen pass Hiroshima by. Neon lights burn out instantly if they are ever turned on in Hiroshima. Blood-red satin sheets loose their sheen if they are ever spread across a bed in Hiroshima. Heart-shaped Jacuzzis, when filled with hot water from a spigot in Hiroshima, break in half instantly.

Because there are no love hotels in this famous phoenix of a city, I’ve come to the conclusion that Hiroshima is allergic to loud, sweaty, destructive, heart-attack-tempting sex. The only sex that could possibly be had in a city with no love hotels is quiet, quick, dutiful, quota-filling, quickie-in-the-closet-while-the-kids-have-their-piano-lesson-downstairs sex. I could be totally wrong with this conclusion, but from all outward appearances, love is in dire straits in the City of Peace. Hmmm…City of Peace. Actually, yeah, wait a minute, shouldn’t Peace and Love always go hand and hand? Isn’t nothing more arousing from a biological perspective than a tranquil and peaceful environment? A creature can’t satisfy its primal urges if security and safety are not first…well, secured. Sex and Extreme Danger speak foreign tongues and can’t properly introduce themselves to one another at dinner parties. It’s been argued by evolutionary biologists that most males climax after less than two minutes of direct sexual stimulation because being in a state of heightened sexual arousal makes one vulnerable; all of the unlucky blokes that foolishly chased orgasms with crossed-eyes and mouths agape for 20-30 minutes in centuries past were killed off while in the act by other men or large predators. What we are left with today is the sexually efficient, the men who can do the job in a flash and get back to their senses before tragedy strikes. Consensual sex hides from war and violence. Very few people get turned on by smoke and mortar fire. A calm meadow, an apartment set aglow with afternoon sunlight, a quiet stroll by the park after dinner on a fall evening—these are the scenes that prime the pumps and set the stage for Arousal’s matinee and Climax’s encore. The City of Peace, one bisected in every which way with quaint, restaurant-lined alleys, canals, and stretches of grassy parkland, should be love’s amusement park, a place where couples can act on erotic impulse at the drop of a dime. Instead it’s love’s salt flat, love’s Antarctica on a winter night, love’s city dump.

In the middle of Hiroshima sits the Atomic Dome, a government building that refused to slide quietly into the radioactive ashes of a city brought to its knees by the nuclear sword of war. The concrete shell of the building, thanks to dozens of braces and metal crutches, has stood for decades and, according to the mayor who christened the Dome, “will stand forever” as a monument to the memories and lives destroyed or affected by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The structure stopped me in my tracks when I first laid eyes on it. Surrounded by modern buildings, taxis whizzing by with places to go, grass and flowers radiantly alive in the sunlight, the Dome seems alarmingly out of place. It looks as if it has been ripped from the pages of a graphic history textbook, one that details the history of some barbaric, lawless place somewhere far, far away. Any other place, but not here. Not this place that sweats prosperity and stability and vitality from every concrete pore and park bench. But the Dome is part of the Hiroshima that was lost, and its eerie presence reminds every visitor of the dangers of nuclear war.

The following thoughts streamed through my mind like electronic ticker tape when I first stood before the Dome with tears welling in the corners of my eyes:

Holy shit, how much force must have been exerted on this city to rip such large chunks of concrete and brick away from this building?

Those steel beams, the ones that the building was built around, are completely twisted and melted. How hot must it have been at this exact spot some 60 years ago?

Everything around this place has been built in the last 60 years. Wow. Wow!

Everything around this place was destroyed to this degree or completely flattened.

Everyone in that building died instantly.

Everyone in that building died instantly.

Everyone in that building died instantly.

I can’t believe my government did this to another group of people.

I can’t believe any government could do this to another group of people.

Has President Bush or any other dumb fuck wasting money on developing nuclear weapons arsenals ever been here to see first-hand the effects of nuclear war?

After we spent time at the Dome site, we walked across a bridge to the Peace Park to go to the Peace Memorial Museum. The museum, with a smartly priced admission of 50 yen (about 45 cents), was spectacular. It was filled with information about Japan’s military exploits leading up to the war, copies of letters and memos sent by U.S. government officials and officers before the bomb was dropped, huge photographs of Hiroshima after the bombing, and photographs and artifacts of and from people burned or killed by the bomb.

I was shocked by how gruesome the entire ordeal was for the people of Hiroshima. I know it seems that the effects of an atomic bomb blast would obviously be gruesome and horrific, but until you see the photos and see the wreckage, you have NO idea of the way in which humanity and science intertwine in a split second after an atomic blast, the other-worldness of it all. In the 1-2 kilometers surrounding the epicenter, there was no gray area, no pocket of hope or miracle—every living thing was immediately incinerated like a bale of hay being dropped onto the surface of the sun (at 7,200+ Fahrenheit, the ground temperature soared as if the whole of Hiroshima was being enveloped by a solar flare), every building destroyed, no questions asked. It’s a final weapon that gives no breaks or pardons.

The U.S. government censored newspapers and photographs for years after the bombing to try to prevent the world from knowing exactly how horrible the blast was. After the bombing, generals and government spokespeople wrote about the incident using strategic jargon and referred to the incinerated innocent civilians as “casualties” and Hiroshima as a “target” that had been “successfully affected” to make the mass homicide seem as clean as a daisy. The reality of what happened in Hiroshima is heavy and pock-marked with the moans of charred children, the bone-chilling images of Truman, Churchill, Stalin, and other rich men smiling and sitting through huge round table discussions in which the fate of 200,000 people was toyed with like a fucking yarn ball, and the fact that hundreds of thousands of families were sliced apart in a single second partly because the U.S. government needed to justify the massive expenditures it was pissing away on its nuclear development program—creating ends, dropping ends out of the sky on innocent people, to justify their means. The museum made me sick to my stomach. It made me furious. And it wasn’t seeing the pictures of bomb victims—many were children ordered to help prepare the city of Hiroshima for war by clearing fire lanes and preparing rations—that made me most nauseous. No, seeing images and reading letters that came from the other side of the Pacific forced my jaw to clench and my eyes to water with rage.

The letters sent between war generals and Truman’s administration made me irate. They were filled with language that was clearly designed to let Truman and the American people sleep at night, language that covered up their murderous actions with soft words and focused fantastically on the future instead of the present. Gone are the days when world leaders charge into battle at the front of the cavalry with raised swords and fiery eyes. Now, spineless, blue-blooded men in suits who have never thrown a punch (let alone fired a gun) can slyly sit behind closed doors and order up the destruction of a country like they’re ordering a fucking hamburger. And for what? To preserve the high standard of living they’ve been tricked into believing they require to survive?

Dropping bombs and engaging in war is clearly a game leaders play with generals and soldiers who are merely pawns lubed up for action with some strong doses of synthetic confidence and sense of purpose. Accomplish your mission! Fight with honor! Your country is counting on you! This type of thinking is both over simplified to the point of abstraction and is far from critical. After a while, the reality of war fades into the flames of the funeral pyres and no one remembers which far off world leader first spit on the shoe of some other world leader. To bomb is to admit diplomatic defeat, which makes a bombing country a cognitively pathetic member of the global community. Bombing is easier than talking and making compromises and it requires far less creativity and tolerance. The museum proves to visitors that war is a sham, nothing more than a tragic play with lead villains trained by dynastic mentors and a supporting cast comprised of the ignorant and/or easily-impressionable. The extras roped into performance against their will, the innocent civilians without speaking roles, are killed off beyond the edges of spotlight illumination and never named in the play’s credits. Ughh! Just thinking about Truman’s smile and those ice cold, hollow letters makes my stomach turn.

After leaving Hiroshima and driving for a few hours, we set up camp out behind a rest stop on the expressway (in Japan, you can set up a tent by the side of the highway and sleep soundly without fear of being slaughtered or raped, it’s wonderful), and made our way back to Ueda.