Air Travel III - Thin Atmosphere Reading

People will sometimes ask me how long it takes to fly between Tokyo and New Jersey. My answer usually elicits a contorted expression and a syllable or two of pained commiseration, reactions I personally would reserve for someone in truly insufferable straits. A diehard Glee fan, for example. Or someone with a full-time job. 

I don’t know why people consider thirteen hours in the air something akin to torture. In my case at least, I’m flying because I want to, unlike the poor saps up in the front of the plane who have no choice but to fly off to another meeting somewhere. And what’s so bad about being able to sit around and watch movies while people bring you food? If you’re flying with an Asian airline there’s the added bonus of free beer and wine. Plus the flight attendants are still selected in step with the time-honored tradition of chauvinistic arousal. Are you kidding me? If demurely beautiful women in flattering silky garb are bringing me free beer I’ll fly for weeks on end.

Continental offers neither free beer nor chauvinistic arousal. They compensate, however, with an almost comical overload of movie selections and an in-flight magazine that is worth its weight in glossy paper – though probably not in a way Editor in Chief Mike Guy and his team intend. I’ve long had an unabashed affinity for in-flight magazines – the travel articles, even the boring ones, in their own way, are good fodder for future adventures; the crossword puzzles make me feel smart (unlike the sudoku); and the fiction pieces inevitably reassure me that I really can be a writer someday.

The magazine on my most recent flight, however, was an altogether new experience. There was no fiction (unless you count the open letter to Continental-United's customers by CEO Jeff Smisel on page 11). I didn't even get to the crossword (I was mentally trashed after the sudoku and didn't want to risk what little self-esteem I had left). And my appetite for travel didn't have the opportunity to be whetted what with the comical (in a sort of Michele Bachman way) distractions on almost every page.

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Air Travel II - (sk)In-Flight

I step through the door and come face to face with a half-naked middle-aged man. Well not face to face; he’s turned toward the wall so all I see is his pasty, mealy back. On the shelf in front of him is his open carry-on. He’s got one arm raised high as he slathers on his deodorant. I feel like I’m at the YMCA.

The door to my stall bangs shut as I step around the corner – to see another shirtless man pushing fifty bent over one of the row of sinks. His gut rests on the countertop as he washes his face. This guy didn’t make it very far in the Gladiator audition process either. I take one of the sinks on the opposite wall…and there’s the guy, his back and his front, reflected infinitely in our opposing mirrored walls.

This is nothing compared to a Japanese onsen in terms of proximity to naked strangers and their degree of nakedness. Still, I can’t wait to get on my flight to Tokyo.

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Air Travel I - Wonder & Woe

Three weeks ago I flew from Newark, New Jersey to Tokyo’s Narita Airport. (If this were a facebook status update I’d simply say ‘EWR-NRT’, assuming such snark has not yet become passé.) It had been a while since I’d flown –six weeks almost – so it took no time for the incongruous wonders of air travel, like the burn of a jalapeno, to rip into my senses once again.

Of course, the physics alone are mind-boggling. I’m sure Orville and Wilbur never imagined an eight-million-pound plane, loaded with another eight million pounds of people, luggage and processed dinner omelets, could make it over a sand dune let alone the Pacific Ocean. Legalized extortion (commonly known as the fuel surcharge) notwithstanding, that we can in twenty-four hours get from any semi-major city in the world to any other semi-major city not currently steeped in rioting and/or armed conflict is nothing less than an everyday miracle (until we figure out those wormhole things). Yet people will still complain about the dinner omelets.

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Go Find Your Own Top Ten

Every time I turn to my twitter feed there's somebody, or several somebodies, or one hyperactive somebody, tweeting relentlessly trying to outdo all the other somebodies, linking to an article or a blog post centered around a numbered list: Top Ten Mistakes New Tweeters Make. Seven Kinds of Shoes You Should Never Wear to a Job Interview. Thirteen (13? Really?) Words You Need Right Now To Get You More Traffic!

I hate these lists, partly because I read them knowing full well they are written because research shows most people gravitate toward numbered lists when they want information, advice or more traffic. And I hate being most people. Sounds snobbish I know, but Yogi Berra wasn't like most people and look, people still remember and repeat his advice. I doubt anyone is going to remember WebBizMan for all those great numbered lists he tweeted to his 152,804 followers (149,934 of whom he himself follows, very closely no doubt). Given the choice, I'd much rather be Yogi Berra than WebBizMan.

Despite my curmudgeonly wishes, these Nine/Top/Best/Most Dangerous/Sexiest Whatevers to Get You That Job/More Hits/Fired lists seem indeed to draw the attention of the masses. (Christ, even pieces about lists have lists.) And it isn't just your blogosphere pseudo-savants. Time magazine flushed their dignity down the drain about five years ago, putting out a piece of rubbish - thrown together I'm willing to bet by someone's idiot nephew who should never have been offered an internship in the first place let alone been handed a pen - on the 100 All-Time Albums (their apparent disclaimer to intellectual liability or possession being they didn't include an adjective). The trolling hoi polloi were in an uproar. 'Backstreet Boys? Are you kidding me?' 'Where the @#%& is Janis Joplin?' 'Burn in hell, Kansas haters!'

A much more appropriate response might have been something like '100 All-Time Most Moronic Time Articles: #1 - 100 All-Time Albums'. Or, alternatively, 'You forgot Levelling the Land by the Levellers.'

The catalyst for this, my latest in a long and distinguished (and un-numbered) list of diatribes, was, as you might imagine, a top ten list. I found it thanks to the folks at Yahoo, who are above writing articles of lists but are fine with linking to them ad nauseum. The article, found here, gives a run-down of the (ostensibly) ten best restaurants to watch a sunset - according to someone who, it can be reasonably assumed by the photo credits (Xoopla, Flicker, TripAdvisor) and the descriptions that scream Lonely Planet, has never been to any of them.

To be fair the article starts with a rather promising entry: The Oasis restaurant in Austin, Texas, an apparently semi-swanky joint that sits above a 450-foot cliff overlooking Lake Travis (yeah that sounds like Texas all right). Personally I didn't think there was anything that high in Texas since Yao Ming left town (unless you count Ron Washington but that was only temporary). Sadly, perhaps predictably, the list swiftly turns antiseptic. San Fran, Maui, San Diego? Seriously, you could find a McDonald's in these places with fantastic sunset views.

I refuse to be fed such uninspired drivel spewed out by self-appraised champions of the best anything whose experience begins and ends with search engines. And I know you feel the same way. That is why I've decided to offer my own lineup of superlative somethings - compiled from actual experience, in the order they pop into my head, limited not to a number but to my bedtime, and unfettered by whether you agree with my reasoning, because I don't much care.

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Going By The (Immensely Popular and Profoundly Flawed) Book

We were making unbelievable time; seriously, I thought we had entered some kind of worm hole. The trip from our hostel (way overpriced – and no breakfast) back to Bratislava Station went much faster than the initial walk across town to the Linoleum Sheraton now that we knew which way was hore. We hopped a train to Trenčin, a small city with a quaint old town and phenomenal ice cream, then traveled on to Ružomberok via a silky smooth connection in Žilina. (Switzerland, I thought at this point, had nothing on Slovakia’s rail system – except maybe in the sanitation department…and in overall comfort…and on a baseline decibel level.) 

Right outside Ružomberok Station we jumped on a bus (after a stuttering, embarrassing back-and-forth with the driver). The seats and aisle crammed full of students (wonderfully forgiving of our bulky bags), we stood for the ten kilometers down the road to Vlkolinec, an idyllic one-dirt-road village whose residents’ lives have been turned upside down since its appointment to Unesco’s World Cultural Heritage list. After a prying look around we would take another creaky bus back to Ružomberok for our last train ride of the day; if things continued to proceed as they had since our fortuitous encounter with that blessed street vendor in Bratislava we would make it to Liptovsky-Mikulaš in plenty of time to find a place, fire up some dinner and relax as the sky turned dark over Jasná and the peaks of Chopok Sever. We started walking, me pushing a suitcase, a loaded pack on my back, my wife pushing our son in his stroller right behind. According to the map in our guidebook, Vlkolinec was right there along the main road…

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Nowehere to Call Home

<This guest post is contributed by Alisa Gilbert, who writes on the topics of bachelors degree.  She welcomes your comments at her email ID: alisagilbert599 at gmail dot com.>

Shanghai developmentI grew up next door to some of the most inviting and charming neighbors any young child could ask for. They were a couple - Henry and Mei - who had immigrated to the United States in the 1980s from the bustling city of Shanghai in China. Having become fast friends with their daughter, I was often over in their home and learned much about the culture and history of the country they had left behind decades before. 

As the years rolled on, the formerly jovial couple became more and more restless. After a trip to China to revisit where they had spent their formative years, the couple returned to America feeling rootless. Numerous expatriates are like Henry and Mei, who feel as if they have nowhere to call home. 

At a time when money was tight and the chances of finding great financial success in Shanghai were slim, Henry and Mei grew restless.They had heard rumors about the positive prospects available overseas in America, the Land of Opportunity, so they jumped to take advantage of them. Over the next decade, Henry and Mei scrounged and saved all that they could before they finally had enough to pick up their things and move to the United States with their respective parents, siblings, and cousins. A new beginning was waiting for them there, and Henry and Mei were determined to start a new, prosperous life in a new, prosperous nation.

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Flights of Fancy

Suvarnabhumi International, BangkokMy wife’s wallet is fat with stamp cards. Card for the gas station, card for the camera store, card for a curry shop I don’t think she’s ever even been to. She doesn’t even like curry. I myself don’t have the organizational skills to keep track of a stack of store cards, even if I did possess the inclination to hold onto them or the capacity to remember to use them. My wife hands me a supermarket card as I am heading out the door of the apartment, and by the time I’m walking through the automatic doors two minutes later (assuming I hit or ignored all the traffic lights on the way) I’ve completely forgotten about it.

Really, it’s hard to exist in Japan without amassing at least a modest collection of these insidious little gimmicks. I have a mess of them in a drawer from the haircut place up the street; I never bother or remember to bring the last one I got but I feel culturally insensitive if I don’t let them make me a new one. And every time I promise to bring my others to combine them and see what sort of discount I can get on my next cut. I may have enough to take over the place. Then once I do I am going to get rid of the stamp card system.

Before Japan outlawed free plastic bags at the supermarkets they gave out little green stamp cards to encourage people to reuse their old bags. I’m a pretty green guy, I reuse anyway, but I kept my ‘green card’ (get that double entendre?) (no wait, triple!) and after twenty eco-friendly trips to the market I got a buck off my eighty-dollar bag of rice. Once I did forget my card and they politely insisted they make me another one, the extra paper cancelling out the good of reusing my old bags but hey, this is the system.

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An Interview with Kevin Kato

It has been a great pleasure working with Kevin Kato for the past several months.  Kevin and I have worked together at the same English school in Japan, and we have both done various work for NOK, Fujitsu, and the Japanese government.  Kevin has written a guest post for The Inductive comparing and contrasting his trips to Angkor Wat and Yosemite National Park; and he has been kind enough to allow me to post on his blog: Travel. Write. Drink Plenty of Fluids.  Kevin is the author of one book, The Tunge Pit, a collection of interconnected short stories which I described before in this blog as a pungent mixture of the American Gothic, ensemble tale, horror nouveau, and pulp suspense genres.  From the publisher's statement:  

Jon Dolan reaches for his cell phone, unaware he's helping to kill a woman a mile away. A woman he's never spoken to. A woman he can see. A woman who will spend her own last moments watching him die first. Kris was sure she knew what she was doing. But sometimes our decisions go wrong. Horribly wrong. So she high-tailed it out of town to save herself - and landed in the middle of a stranger's deadly game of self-preservation. The neighbors in the hills think they know something about Terrence - and turn their prejudice into prophecy. Reading the obituaries leads a budding con man to widowed Mrs. Danbury, her balcony garden and her desperate grip on her family. What the hell is tunge anyway? Carson asks Nicholas mockingly. The ugly answer, he'd soon learn, would involve him. Twenty-odd stories, each grounded in the last. Each with its own sordid ending. And a plot that throws the reader into a world that doubles back on itself, shooting shreds of humanity like shrapnel in this never-ending tale of human fallibility. 

In addition to publishing the Tunge Pit last year, Kevin has recently translated from the Slovenian Damjan Koncnik's Greenland - The End of the World, an account of an adventure to that massive island in the far north:

Do tupilaks really harbor supernatural powers? Is there more than one way to spell 'Ittoqqoortoormiit'? And just why is sleeping in a tent in this icy, rainy land better than a beachfront hotel in Waikiki? These questions are only the tip of the iceberg of mysteries and surprises Damjan Koncnik uncovers over three expeditions to this island 'way up there.' Chock full of history, humor and hardship, these tales of an everyday man's adventures in the Far North will stoke the imaginative fires of avid travelers and armchair explorers alike.   

I was originally planning on reviewing either or both books for this site; but now I believe such reviews might be a superfluous conflict of interest, since Kevin has agreed to write for the Inductive on a regular basis from 2011.  Without further ado, I present an interview conducted via email with Kevin Kato over the last month or so:

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Luxury: The New Spirituality

stone staircase at Angkor, CambodiaA number of years ago – 7 2/3 to be exact – I visited Cambodia’s venerated Angkor Wat. This was to be my first trip to a country without any semblance of a sanitation department so naturally I was pretty excited. I met up with a couple of friends in Phnom Penh and we headed for Angkor on the tandem bicycles they were riding. We rode 100 kilometers or so that first day, along undulating dirt roads cutting across tree-studded plains, only an occasional village to keep us on the more pleasurable side of dehydration. ‘What’s that?’ I asked Jamie as he poured a small packet of something into his bottle of purified water. ‘Electrolytes,’ he said, and nothing more. These guys, Jamie and Garryck, were biking around the world and, I figured, needed lots of electrolytes. I was okay with just water. Lying in a hammock at our guest house for five hours that evening, unable to keep down so much as a leaf of Cambodian lettuce, I learned firsthand the wonders of cellular osmosis – and, for future reference, how to ask for electrolytes in common Cambodia-speak.

Next morning we elbowed our way around a crowded and litter-strewn riverbank looking for someone we could trust to tell us where to go to catch the boat up the Tonle Sap to Siem Reap, the de facto base town for Angkor day-trippers. The boat ride was magnificent; the inside of our barge-esque vessel was stuffed with food and other such necessities for the locals all over the countryside which meant we tourists were offered by default an unobstructed rooftop view of the surrounding fields of wild grass and water buffalo for the four-hour trip that is equally fascinating whether you put on sunscreen or not. (The consequences don’t surface until later.) Once in Siem Reap Garryck followed his nose to a guesthouse where we could drop our stuff and take a meandering look around the town, which I found surprisingly and pleasantly serene. Where were all the day-trippers and other assorted backpackers? Left to explore the dirt roads and side streets in solitude I was not going to complain. Until my sunburn began screaming.

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Reflections on Spending Thanksgiving in Japan

I have spent Thanksgiving in Japan for the last four years, and I have slowly begun to forget about this great American holiday.  Yesterday for me was a regular work day.  I woke up early in the morning, played with my older daughter, made breakfast for everyone, played some more on the grassy expanse in front of the art museum, went to teach four classes in the afternoon, was home by eight, enjoyed my younger daughter's newly developed capacity for belly laughter, ate pasta for dinner, and fell asleep at ten.  

The fourth Thursday in November is a regular workday in Japan, as is December 25th.  In the past -before I worked for myself - I was made to feel guilty for wanting to celebrate Thanksgiving or Christmas or Easter.  At Nova, my Australian boss explained to me that Christmas was not a special day for the Japanese.  The students would have no sympathy if I wanted to take the day off.  They might even quit the company or start hating America!  My first Christmas Eve here, a different Chris went out until 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning with some other wild foreigners and slept through his Christmas Day shift.  After that, I decided never again to spend Christmas in Japan.

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Conspiring With Him How to Load and Bless

November in Japan is a lonely, depressing month.  The bright colors of fall have peaked and gradually turn to brown.  It is still too early to ski, and Christmas vacation remains over a month away.  The weather is too cold to play outside, but not cold enough to play outside in the snow.  Days end at 4:30.  And there is no football.  Or Thanksgiving.   

To alleviate periodic episodes of anomie, I turn to the rustic luxuries of onsening and the harvest.  

An onsen is a Japanese hot spring resort.  Unlike western hot springs, onsens are not simply muddy holes in the ground, but carefully decorated and managed pools of varying size, shape, and material.  They are often deep in the mountains, or at least on the outskirts of civilization.  Fukushima being a rural urban center, I live at the confluence of several onsen resorts and often visit one if I have a free half-day.

A few weeks ago, my family and I went to a modern hotel which sported a swimming pool, a jacuzzi, a traditional indoor bath, an outdoor bath called a rotenburo, and a sauna.  No one else was swimming in the pool, and the afternoon sun reflecting off the peak fall foliage on the other side of the river behind the resort shone through floor-to-ceiling windows and turned the slightly broken surface of the water a flickering golden, orange, and red hue.  Freshly fallen fall leaves floated on the surface of the rotenburo.  The dry heat of the sauna provided a comforting respite from the crisp fall air and the pervasive water vapor of the indoor bath.  After soaking in a welcome and rare aether free of infants screaming, I bought a glass bottle of 5% milk from the vending machine and floated aimlessly back to my home with my family in our four-door Nissan

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Close Bosom-Friend of the Maturing Sun

We slept late.  Rosalind was angry, and Kanako was sick.  For brunch we ate ramen.  I took a shower.  The weather was hot, sunny, and windy - that rare combination.  Kanako decided to go.  We sangalong in the car: Old MacDonald, I've Been Workin' on a Railroad, The More We Get Together, etc. - Raffi songs; it was not such a memorable ride there.  It was pleasant, like a Norman Rockwell painting.

There were matsutake stands on the side of the road - traffic in the middle of the mountains for mushroom stands.  No one was west of Azuma.  We eventually got to Inawashiro uneventfully with no directions or planning.  We entered "herb garden"; there was a documentary of a Canadian chainsaw sculptor playing on a 1990s cathode ray tube television set in the corner of one of the indoor rooms before the gardens.

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Fukushima, "Floral Paradise"

the top of Mt. AzumaI came across this tourist video on YouTube for my Japanese prefecture of residence, Fukushima, while searching for video of a crazy moth/ant attack from ten or twenty years ago near one of the schools at which I work.  I couldn't find what I was looking for, but the tourist video, discovered accidentally, is sufficiently corny, campy, trite, whathaveyou, and with kool muzak, so please enjoy.  

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Flash Tourism in Kyoto - Part IV

at the southern end of Kyoto Imperial Gardens

Immediately, I decided it was time to leave Ryouanji and move on to other sites.  This time I took the path straight out of the main hall: elegant stone steps brought me through more peak foliage, and I made my way to the main gate, where I thanked the man with the clipboard and turned left towards the road.  The stop for the bus back to Kyoto was a bit beyond where I had disembarked earlier.  This allowed me to walk past a dark, dense Buddhist cemetery hidden behind a fence on my left.  I wondered how old the graves were, if this cemetery was even part of Ryouanji, and if so, was this obscure, modest place where the seven Hosokawa Emperors were buried?  While I waited for the bus, I pushed my face up to the fence and cupped my hands around my eyes to block out the sun, but still, I couldn’t see much.  There were a few nondescript gravestones, some altars and miniature shrines for burning incense, and what I can only describe as a moai, among thick forest, like some scene from a Miyazaki Hayao film.

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Flash Tourism in Kyoto - Part III

A salaryman contemplates the Zen sand gardens at Ryouanji.

The land that is now Ryouanji was originally an estate of the Fujiwara clan, which married into the imperial line and dominated Japanese politics from roughly 794 to 1185.  Hosokawa Katsumoto controlled the property during the Ounin Civil War from 1467 to 1477, which ushered in the Japanese Warring-States Period that eventually ended in the Tokugawa Shogunate around 1600.  The Fujiwara estate was destroyed in the Ounin War, and Hosokawa Katsumoto declared in his will that it be converted to a Zen Buddhist temple.  Seven Hosokawa emperors are buried on the property.

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