Scot is now in Japan.

I had to wake up at 7am for the early departure of an organized trip of international students to the Mt Fuji ice caves. I have been to the Fuji area a few times. I have even climbed the cursed ashtray. But I had never seen the reverence and awe of a crowded bus full of exchange students gasping and cooing whenever Fuji came through the clouds. They were so taken with the view that they practically trampled one another to snap a photo through the moving bus' windows.

The ice caves themselves were underwhelming, but the entire trip was only 1000 yen, a sum I couldn't stay under if I was staying home all day. And we had barbecue and a nice hot spring visit in sight of Fuji. I wonder how they managed all that? Must be the power of group prices.

I hung pretty close to the Brazilians, as I didn't know most of the others. I tried to strike up conversations with a few Koreans who spoke Japanese, but they are a little standoffish. I even told them I was interested in studying Korean, had been to Seoul for a week, and wanted to go back to Korea to see the countryside. Most of that is true. They still only warmed up slightly. Tough nuts to crack, those Korean kids.

I got back and convalesced in front of Japanese TV, finally catching the show all of the Japan legal scholars had been telling me about: "Uttaete yaru!" Loosely translated as, "I'm gonna sue your ass!" Does a quiz show/variety comedy of celebrities guessing whether a certain fact pattern presents a colorable legal claim really constitute a new wave of legal consciousness in Japan that can overcome the now mythic reluctance to litigate among the general public? Who knows?

But there are at least two other shows of note in this vein that I have seen. One other is a tamer version of the above concept, only instead of having the legal issues resolved by four famous lawyers who are encouraged to argue, there is only one less famous lawyer who is the sole authority. And the celebrities are not as young and hip.

Then there is the (Monday?) night drama "Beginner," about a group of adults in a bar exam preparation study group who all debate the legal implications of an emerging conflict that usually is presented indirectly by one of their own members. Whenever a difficult legal concept is mentioned, it appears in titles at the bottom of the screen with a definition. This is significant to me. If there is any way to interest the general Japanese public in the workings of private law, it is probably through real life dramatic scenarios with credible yet obscure concepts introduced in this easily consumable fashion. Sound convoluted? It is. But if I can generalize wildly here, Japanese people love obscure items of information. There is a stronger trivia urge here than most places, I would wager.

So, we'll see if lawsuits by private individuals escalate as a result...

Having more lawyers, lower fees, and more streamlined proceedings wouldn't hurt, either.

I had a lie-in, I had a nap, I got ready to go out and meet one of the American attorneys in a Japanese office I've met. He is so disgruntled and dissatisfied with his job. I became party to his budding alcoholism as we went first to a restaurant designed to resemble a cathedral on the inside. There were large backlit stained glass pieces lining the walls and gruesome crucifixes staring down at us as we picked at our salads. What a freakshow. It was just what I had wanted. Of course I had picked the place out.

Then my friend suggested a bar he knew and liked, and which turned out to be fixated on the theme of "your granddad's basement bar." There were muskets mounted on the walls, Bing Crosby crooning carols, and the shelves behind the bar were full of single malts and strange liqueurs untouched since 1954. Weird again.

We split, I went back to my digs, and was roped somewhat innocently into playing a Finnish drinking game with 2 Brazilians, a Swede, two Spaniards, an Australian, a Hollander, two Hungarians, and a Finn. (My weekends always sound like the beginning of a bad joke.) I wasn't paying for the alcohol, so I happily acquiesced. The rules were convoluted, but the game was explained and conducted in English, so the Australian guy and I were at a distinct advantage. The Hollander taught me how to say "My parents like to attend antique auctions," in German, but I've almost completely forgotten it already.

I have added a few phrases to my list of nonsensical things to say in different languages, but this year I've been half in the bottle when I learn them, so my retention is poor. The Finnish guy taught me how to say "Half a chicken is not enough," but I've forgotten it as well. The Brazilians taught me how to say, "Stop pushing my sack," in Portuguese. I remember that one, at least.

My favorite on the list is still "I eat glass, it doesn't hurt me," in Danish. Where did I pick that one up again, anyway?

Off to bed at an ungodly hour.

Deaf or mute?

I'm leaning towards mute. I would carry lots of cards with witty things written on them and wait for the proper moment to pull one out. They would all be very very context-specific and say things like:

"No, but that waiter's got one hell of a porpoise!"

"It can't be any worse than Japanese country music."

"I'd be delighted. I think it would go very well with yak butter tea."

I'd also have to hone my leering and offensive gestures. Perhaps I could go to Italy to study offensive gesturing for a year. Maybe there's a government scholarship...

The air is getting a bit crisp, and the leaves are all brown and blowing about. I really like Fall. It's got to be my favorite season. Especially in Japan. There's nothing like being in the mountains here when the colors are changing and taking off for a dip in a hot spring. I live for that. I'm glad I had a chance to do all of that in Kumamoto.

But the good feeling is still lingering here in Tokyo. I have an office party tonight for a secretary who is leaving, and we are going out for kamameshi, a nice hearty rice dish made in a cute little metal pot. Very good for Fall. Woot.

Bokki shougai = erectile dysfunction

Woo!

That's the most interesting thing I've found in this patent text so far.

I think I'm feeling better. I hacked a bit of sealife into the sink this morning, and there was a certain finality to the act. I looked at the little greenish-brown oyster and it looked back at me, as if to say, "yes, you've finally expelled me. I am the embodiment of your sickness. Farewell."

Glad to be done with that. Flying back from Kumamoto with a cold was somewhat harrowing. All of that pressure builds up in your sinuses because you can't equalize properly when you're congested. Then it all kind of splorts out at one moment when you hold your nose and blow hard enough. Your head starts to feel like a balloon that has been hastily deflated and reinflated one too many times.

Picked up LIFE OF PI by Yann Martel.

Now that I'm back from Kumamoto and not sick, I need to get back to the grindstone. But I just realized that today was Thanksgiving. Or rather, one of my fellow researchers told me that it was Thanksgiving. I had completely forgotten about it. She was so surprised that I had forgotten that she even asked if I was really American. Hmmm, good question. I guess my people are out there somewhere having turkey and yams. I wish I was, too.

Where am I going with all of this? I am feeling very ramble-tastic today. Maybe I should just pinch this one off and edit later if I get the urge...

When I think about how I interact with people, I often wonder if I'm manipulative. Well, I don't really wonder. I know I am. I always start with the premise, "What do I want to happen?"

If something or someone annoys me or disturbs me, I see no point in getting upset. I just think about what I want to happen, then I try to imagine what speech or behavior on my part and that of others might achieve this end. There are, of course, ground rules. I don't lie, I can't force anyone to do something they don't want to. But I may choose not to reveal all, or even to inflate the importance of an event or emotion.

But I think this is a positive mode of thought. It's a future-creative paradigm. It's game theory. I was chatting with Alli about how I recently taught a friend to play Go. I intentionally let him win his first game ever, so that he would be excited about it and want to play again. I didn't want him to feel like it was too hard. I wanted him to have fun, and associate that fun with the game of Go, with me.

But I realized later, this is what hustlers do. They throw the first game just so they can string along the mark in later games and encourage him to put more money on the line than he would normally. I do the same thing, but my goal is closeness, friendship.

That's still not enough to distance me from the hustler, though. The hustler also offers fun, confidence, maybe even intimacy. The confidence game is like making friends. Am I the con man's good twin, the hustler's doppleganger?

Perhaps. But still, I envy the hustler his eventual honesty. His games have an end, one where everyone involved understands their role. The mark wakes up to find their friend and their money gone. They know they've been had. But what about me? My games go on and on.

Want to dance?

Long day in the rain. I went to main campus to receive some work on the Japan law book that I toiled with last year. Didn't have much say in the matter, really. I don't have any other paid work yet, and this may help me get a job.

But slogging there and back was wet and cold, and it may have made me sicker...

Then another patents class tonight and I went out with some of the attorneys from the class afterwards. One of them is at the firm where I interviewed, and he is now trying to see if he can arrange an associate position for me instead of (or in addition to?) the translation gig first imagined.

I don't know which end is up. I'm packed to the gills with antihistamines right now. As far as I can remember, they're still illegal in Japan, but I scored them off a Brazilian friend last night whose computer I helped set up. Tech support for drugs. That can't be a first...

After an absolutely brilliant bowl of Kumamoto ramen, I hopped back on a plane and returned to Tokyo. Back to the crowds, the fluorescent lighting, the rain. Blehh. And I seemed to have picked up a cold while in Kumamoto.

But good memories. Seeing Tim and meeting Hiromi was nice. And seeing some old Kaketsuken people again. And hot springs. And mount Aso, which was erupting violently with huge plumes of smoke the whole time! I love that place!

I also went out to meet the Amanogawa crowd, the Seattle Monbusho people. Cheap izakaya, just the three of us.

Went to another hot springs, this one with an outdoor bath for mixed bathing. That would be a mixture of men and women. Nothing new, I go to these all the time. Very rarely, if ever, do women actually come in, and when they do, these women are usually over 70. Women over 70 in Japan don't care if they're naked, or if you're naked in their line of sight. They seem to have pretty much already seen everything. But today, a young woman in her early twenties entered the bath. And she was cute!

How long have I waited for my notions of mixed bathing as cover-up for licentious gawking to be realized?! A long time. But she was modest, covering the lower half of her body with a towel. And I tried not to stare. I tried, but I kept sneaking peeks. I couldn't help it. The other guys did too. I watched 'em. I have no idea why I even thought it was a big deal, considering I used to skinny dip with friends all the time. I guess because it's Japan.

I treated my hosts to yummy Japanese food for dinner, including raw horse meat, one of the delicacies of Kumamoto.

Played golf today. Wasn't expecting to. I don't really like golf. Or even know how to play. None of this seemed to matter at the time. We were all done and off to the hot springs before I had a chance to complain. Or decide that I liked it, either.

We had dinner at a western style izakaya, so I told them I'd treat them to a Japanese izakaya the next night.

Went back to my old haunt in Kumamoto for the long weekend. I am staying with Tim and his new wife, Hiromi. They're a cute couple. Very happy. Moving back to the states in January. He's been there for 13 years. Yep, 13 years. He's going to have reverse culture shock out the wazoo. Especially now, when the U.S. is still freakers about terrorism but everyone's gotten used to it. Oh well. They made me kim-chi chige. Yum.

I saw the people at Kaketsuken, my old workplace. They mostly commented on how impressive it was that I was now at Todai and that I had put on weight. Whatever. I threw business cards at them until they went away.

But I love Kumamoto. The air is clean, the mountains are pretty, the hot springs are hot. You can not ask for much more.

Picked up YOU SHALL KNOW OUR VELOCITY, by Dave Eggers. It's not bad. I love the way he presents that perfect feeling of spastic energy and unexplained urgency in his characters. I know these people. I am these people. Or at least I can remember when I was these people. My mom once confessed she thought I would die in an accident before I reached 18. God knows I came close on at least three occasions (car, chainsaw, mountain).

These characters are desperate for affirmation of life, driven to destruction and distraction by the obvious wrongness of everything around them. So sure that things could be different, so unsure how. Kerouac without the bold posturing. Miller without the self-inflating fabrication. Drunk on life, yet driving anyway, just praying for the telephone pole that brings meaning to the still-theoretical but ultimately unavoidable accident...

And in that twisted pile of metal laid bare, still dripping with the effluvium of youthful exuberance, a bare trickle of meaning. Because that. is. all. you. get.

I may be losing my marbles, but I've been thinking about my interaction with people lately here as a heat-transfer process. I get fairly excited about ideas. I talk about these ideas. People hear me talking. They get excited too. I may provide just enough heat to start their own exothermic reaction. The ideas are the fuel. The talking is the combustion. The excitement transferred is the heat. Other people heat me up with their ideas also. I like people who respond to heat and generate lots of their own.

I went out with Kato-san and a Japanese attorney I just met in our Patents class, after that class ended last night. We talked about competition and dominance in the Japanese semiconductor industry, the all-too-conservative nature of the Japanese pharmaceutical industry, and even radical new organizational ideas for non-profit orgs in Japan that would allow them to perform better in the still nascent dawn of philanthropic culture in Japan.

They were even responsive to an idea I am passionate about, the notion of trying to encourage spending equivalently on the proliferation of low-end technology and the development of new high-end tech. I was trying to make a case for the greater efficiency and social benefit of millions of low-end networked processors all over the world as compared to thousands of high-end processors networked in a single country as they perform a distributed computing project. The low-end higher-volume model brings computing to diverse communities across the globe and allows for better use of processor time. It's such a hippy-geek concept. I have to admit I love it. I wish I knew more about it, to be honest.

That led them to mention how a similar model is emerging in philanthropic communities in Japan. Few people make large cash donations to NPOs in Japan. It's just not really a done thing. They don't get tax benefits equivalent to those in the U.S. But volunteering is a familiar and popular concept in this country of (mostly) communitarian values and cooperation. So there is a new system set up to recognize dollar-hour contributions of volunteers who give their time to a number of NPOs. Believe it or not, there is a central bank of volunteers who let others bid on their time based on the special skill set of the volunteer. Put simply, an attorney could do pro-bono work for an NPO with whom she was paired with through this system, and the atty's firm would be recognized as if they had given a cash contribution.

I still don't understand all of the particulars, but I will surely get to meet this guy again and hear more about it. Think of it! Distributed computing applied as a starting point for non-monetary donations to NPOs yields the concept of Distributed Volunteering!

Fuel. Ignition. Combustion. Heat. And the light that changes the world.

My Dad e-mailed me an article about the recent success of the Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives in creating a virus from commercial materials. He asked me whether I thought they had succeeded in creating life.

Hmmm. Is it life indeed?

That mostly depends on your definition of life.

[Borrowed from WIKIPEDIA]
Something is usually defined to be alive if it matches the following conditions, at least once during its existence:
1. Growth
2. Metabolism: the uptake of food, conversion of food into energy, and disposal of waste products
3. Motion, either moving itself, or having internal motion
4. Reproduction, the ability to create more-or-less exact copies of itself
5. Stimulus response, the ability to measure properties of its surrounding environment, and act on certain conditions.

Controversially, according to this definition,
1. fire is alive
2. mules are not (cannot reproduce and produce a mule)
3. viruses are not (cannot grow)

I think the definition that resonates for me, however is Lynn Margulis's definition of life as an autopoietic (self-producing), water based, lipid-protein bound, carbon metabolic, nucleic acid replicated, protein readout system. Viruses barely fail this definition. But it is easy to imagine that a synthetic organism could match these requirements in 5-10 years.

The greater hurdle, I think, is coming to grips with the idea that we are just another phenomenon in a string of replicating or self-sustaining phenomena. How many steps away are we from self-replicating memes, or ideas? The hammer is a self-replicating concept. When one human sees another human using a hammer, they have inherited the self-replicating information that forms the concept of "hammer." They become able to produce and use one on their own, in the process delivering its constitutive concept to other humans who will make more hammers. Most humans are more elaborate than hammers, but can we not similarly be reduced to our constitutive memes?

What I mean to say is, the philosophical barrier is not to be found in our aspiring to create something so amazing as life, but in the reduction of our notion of life to the level of mere machina, lowering our own lofty anthropocentric expectations in the process. Partial human life, tissue generation, and regenerative medicine are the projects that will test our mettle, our ethics, and our notion of what it means to be alive.

Faced with such challenges, I am more impressed than ever with the ability of humans to continue with dignity and compassion in the midst of what appears to be the sheer meaninglessness of existence.

Alright. We are focused. We are zooming. We are communicating ideas at light speed, and I am glad you could join us. Making phone calls, sending e-mails, collecting research papers, getting job offers. It is Monday, and all is good.

Of course, the job offer wasn't from the Japanese firm. I haven't actually heard back from them yet. It was from a Professor at the Law Faculty at University of Tokyo, an American who used to teach at my law school. He wants me to resume an editing project I worked on last year, a book of papers presented at the 2002 Law in Japan conference in Seattle that the Asian Law department put on. Hmmm, it's okay work. I know the material, I'm pretty good with it. I don't imagine it pays very well, but if I do a good job, I know this professor will go out of his way to get me in with a good firm for next summer...

Mehhh... I'd rather not take on more work, especially if this Japanese firm wants me to start coming in, but I will probably end up taking it anyway out of obligation and because I need his connections and influence... Crikey. I'm such a schmoozy sycophant already. I always feel soiled by any value-for-value exchange among humans. I like it better when I can pretend that the world turns on and on as humans interact with each other only for the sheer mental, emotional, and physical stimulation provided thereby. I guess that marks me as hopelessly bourgeois and naive.

Do I think I'm better than people who play the game? I'm obviously not, and my distaste for schmoozifying only hurts me. No one seems particularly impressed by my integrity in preferring to live by my talents rather than by the favor and well-placed words of people in power who I've managed to impress. Not that I really impress them all that much or all that often. I think. I don't know. Thinking about it makes my head hurt. I see so many people in law school who do the done thing and get the desired job and spend no time investigating their own motivations for any step along the process.

I suppose I must imagine myself superior to them in some way or outside of the system of favor and blowing-of-smoke-up-the-ass. But I am most certainly not. I need a job. I don't know how else to get one than by describing myself in detail to everyone that might give me a job, and making sure to drop as many names as I can. Blagggh. When I recreate the universe, I'm going to do things very, very differently.

You can count on it.

Woke up laaate again. This is getting to be a bad habit to break. Now I know why I miss breakfast so much. It's because I never seem to wake up in time for it.

Went to an Italian restaurant for lunch with Brazilians and a Japanese restaurant for dinner with Hungarians. I feel like a restaurant guide at the U.N. Maybe I should be trying harder to hang out with Japanese people. Bah. Can't be bothered.

Stayed up until past 4am reading, surfing, and talking to Alli on the phone. Almost done with THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY. Not bad stuff. What will I read next?

Woke up laaate. Went to go see a band tonight at a club in Akihabara called Goodman. The band was called SPOOZYS, a Japanese surf-garage-electronica band where all the members wear space suits. They had a great moment after the first song, a cover of the Ventures' "Telstar," where they all simultaneously removed their space helmets in that slow, straight-up-and-down motion from old sci-fi movies. Funness.

The show ended early, around 10pm, so I went back home to crash. Still tired from the night before.

Apparently, the Ventures didn't actually write "Telstar," they only made it famous. 10 points and a cookie to whoever can tell me who did write, "Telstar."

So I went back to the Japanese firm, and the comments they had on my translation weren't so much about inaccuracies as things they were just mildly curious about and a few spots I could have edited with a heavier hand. I guess I was overreacting. But that first e-mail they sent me had a very nasty tone to it. I should have remembered that Japanese people e-mailing in English often flub the tone in things like that. Ok. We're cool.

I received another translation piece, this time a patent opposition opinion in Japanese that they wanted me to translate into English. I spent about three hours on it, and I felt pretty good about the work. I could have done more googling to get the precise terms for a few technical bits, but I think I'll be ok. What's a "multi-axis intervention measurement system," anyway? Not knowing the meaning of something you're translating is sometimes dangerous business, but it's a reality most translators have to face quite often. Just grit your teeth and hope that no one thinks "substrate support member," is an utterly ridiculous phrase.

So I finished that up right when I got a call from Lak, the Indian-English guy we met out at Karaoke last weekend. He wanted to go out, so we headed to Shibuya (urgh) and popped into a Greek restaurant for very expensive and unsatisfying Moussaka. Quite possibly the worst I've ever had. But Lak was good for conversation. And his employer covered the bill! He's a researcher working on modeling bank performance for investors. He works for Goldman Sachs and travels the world teaching people the software he invented. Bright guy. And five years younger than me. Yeesh. I guess I'll have to get used to that eventually.

We finished up our meal, and went to a few Japanese hip-hop clubs, which he was dying to see. Everyone thinks it's just hilarious to watch Japanese kids get down to Missy Elliott in their baggy pants. Whatever. We stayed out until 4 am, I threw him in a cab, and I walked home.

I'm such a dinner whore. Take me out for a meal, and I'll show you any part of Tokyo you want to see. I guess that makes me more of a dinner pimp, and Tokyo is my bitch. I could get used to that. Yes, that works quite well. Smashing. I'll have to add that to my business card...

Hmm. So maybe the Japanese firm wasn't telling me to piss off. When I responded to their e-mail and told them how I had no time and no dictionaries, they wrote back to ask me to come in again. Is this what I would term a "callback" in the U.S.? I have no idea, especially because I would have been reluctant to call my first visit there an "interview."

In related news, the patent attorney who first brought me to that firm (his own), came by this morning before I got in and was asking about me. He asked the secretary whether I had considered working with them or not, then he went on a spiel about how amazing I was. Apparently. This is all hearsay.

I'm getting more mixed signals from this place than I know what to do with. But it would only be a few months and I would only be doing it to get the feel for a Japanese firm environment.

I met a U.S. attorney working in a Japanese firm yesterday. He spends most of his time doing translation. Well, that's not true. He told me that he spends most of his time trying to figure out what exactly it is that people want him to do, and most of that eventual work is translation. He sounded miserable. He tried to put a nice face on it, but I could see it in his eyes. He was tired, beaten. He glowed for a few moments about the types of opportunities he thought I would have as a bilingual attorney and tried to persuade me not to do things the way he had...

Creepy. But I saw myself in him, that was the scary part. He did not decide to go to law school because of some innate desire and love for the law (does anyone match that description?) or even the money (I guess that works better for most) or the legitimacy/prestige (which is contestable, anyway). He went there because he was interested in Japan. He wanted to work in Japan, and he needed skills to bring there. He was also looking for a way to CONTEXTUALIZE his life in Japan, and law seemed to provide a rich context.

Deja vu. That's basically the reason I went to law school, but it's a reason I'm not supposed to confess to anyone. When asked, the appropriate response during an interview is to say something that shows you want to do hard-core legal work. You're apparently not supposed to emphasize language skills or interest in a certain country, because then your resume gets sent to THE JAPAN GUY, who either doesn't have enough work for another person, or smells you as a competitive threat and shreds your resume. (I am not making this up, this is the independently corroborated advice of several attorneys I have spoken to...)

So that's what happens to guys like us, I guess. We have romantic notions about working in a Japanese firm, and we get ground under like last year's crops. Well, I think I've learned my lesson. My dealings with this one Japanese firm have been proof enough. I'll take a short-term translation gig if they offer me one, but ALL of my efforts will go into getting a job with a U.S. firm, hopefully one with an office in Japan. (I can't give it up, entirely, can I?)

Arrgh. I just got a response back from one of the Japanese firms I interviewed with. Apparently, I didn't catch a few mistranslations in the 30 pages of technical translation that I reviewed against the original in one hour with no dictionaries. Well, duh. Let me use a fucking dictionary and give me a little more time to work on it if you want the damn thing to be perfect!

If I had known those were the conditions and that a few missed spots would disqualify me, I would have just refused. Crap! That's so annoying!

Aaaargghhh!

What the fuck do I know about fiber optics anyway! I'm a goddamned molecular biologist by training!

And still, I feel like it was my fault, like I wasn't good enough. Like I have a Master's degree in technical Japanese and it isn't worth spit. Like I'm a defective wad of rusty machinery covered in dirty spots of discarded chewing gum lying under a subway overpass.

I don't think I'm going to get much else done today. I should probably just go for a bike ride and blow off steam...

I had another Patents class last night. The legal content was still pretty basic, but the lecture was amusing. This time, he rapped on criminal sanctions for peeing in the street and "It's me," phone calls.

After the class, which was in Roppongi, I decided to go to a nice theatre I knew nearby to see a movie, "Ashura no gotoku." The film was interesting because it presented a dramatic family situation in a very traditional Japanese household.

As I was watching, I couldn't help feeling that, even though the story presented some tragic situations, the family in the film was represented as kind of a fantasy version of how many Japanese people wish their families could be. This family was very uncommonly Japanese in a traditional way: the mother always wore kimono and the father wore yukata in the house, the daughters were all very close to their parents, and spent a lot of time at their house taking care of them. And all of the daughters had completely black, undyed hair. That alone seemed rare enough for Japan.

It was interesting to think also about the contrast with the the way foreign movies fantasize about traditional Japan, especially with that major wank-fest "The Last Samurai" on the way. "Ashura" is for Japanese consumption, and "Samurai" will be for non-Japanese consumption. I find the latter trite and sometimes even disgusting, but the Japanese fantasy-view of its own tradition still appeals to me. I watched Ashura no gotoku and thought, "Wow, what a nice house. Everyone's so polite. But they have real problems like normal folks. I wish I could hang out with them. Gee, their younger daughters are kind of cute..."

And I think that is the response that Japanese audiences are expected to have, if I were to venture a guess.

Swelling, unbalanced, like it's going to tip over and roll off my shoulders. Am I getting sick, or do I just have such a weird sleeping schedule that dizziness and mild hallucinations are unavoidable? Whatever. I'll enjoy it while I can.

Not much else to do. It's cold and rainy again, like Seattle, I suppose. Seattle, Seattle... It's already pretty far from my mind. I think about the people I love and miss there, but when I think of them, they live in a nondescript, generic city that does not actually exist. Seattle does not form the backdrop for the people I think of there.

That's not the case with Louisiana. When I think of my family there, they are integrally connected to and contextualized by familiar Louisiana-ness. I do not think of them in generic settings, but rather in a certain room of a certain house, in a well-known restaurant or other public place in Lafayette. Is this the psychological imprint of home? Are the people I think of there less individual in my mind because they form part of a tableau called "home"?

I'm not sure.

Woke up in time for lunch today. Not recovering very well from weekend activities. I generally need a few days to get my head back on track.

Had another bio patents class. I wish the professor wouldn't read from his notes. I wish the students would take a normative stance, and back it up with a persuasive argument. I wish I could find something other than convenience store food to eat for dinner when I have night classes.

Drag, drag, drag. Bitch, bitch, bitch.

I did get a letter from some Shimane friends today. They're going to be in Tokyo while I'm in Kumamoto 2 weeks from now. Bleah. I haven't seen any old friends since I got here, and now I go off to see one while the other comes to Tokyo... Who thought that would be funny?

Did I mention I was going to Kumamoto before? Yeah. Tim and his wife said if I could get out there, they'd take care of me while I was there. That's nice of them. I think. It's especially nice of them if they remember how much I can eat and drink.

But I will also have a chance to visit my old work place in Kumamoto, where Tim still works. I think they are clients of one of the firms I interviewed with here. I have to remember to bring that up, and see if I can get any dirt on the firm...

Laid low today, not so much because of hangover as because of bad weather and a big pile of laundry. My Sundays are always the same.

I thought more about the moral basis of beauty. The idea being, I guess, that in the same way that moral acts appear beautiful, our perception of beauty cannot be separated from some moral value that forms the premise of beauty. Those who worship beauty in the form of function and simplicity have made a moral judgment that "nothing without function can be beautiful." Likewise, those who extol ornament, excess and abstraction may have made an opposite moral judgment: "only those things separated from the tedium of human toil and created for the sole purpose of representing beauty can be beautiful." Lots of grey in between.

I found a nice Picasso quote:

I hate that aesthetic game of the eye and the mind, played by these connoisseurs, these mandarins who appreciate beauty. What is beauty, anyway? There's no such thing. I never appreciate, any more than I like. I love or I hate.

Picasso: genius amoral aesthete or blundering fool? There is an exhibit of his early work here at one of the Ueno art museums. I was never a fan.

I went to the Soshigaya culture festival for one of our sister dorms in another part of Tokyo. There was a lot of international food, including some Brazilian stuff. I went with the Brazilians from this dorm and we had a nice time. We went out afterwards, in Shibuya of course. (I'm so sick of that place, but it makes the most sense, because it's so close.)

We were at a cheap English Pub called THE HUB. Some other Brazilians joined us, including an older ecologist who studies animal-plant interaction and seed dispersion at a research center in the Amazon. Fun guy. I asked him for his ecological evaluation in Japan and got quite an earful of what I already knew would be very bad news. The living parts of this country are dying. Japan is going to make the transition from its current cyborg state to chrome-plated mobile home sometime in the next century, I predict.

We also picked up a random wandering guy from London and all went to a karaoke, where I screamed myself hoarse to Japanese punk and rockabilly favorites. That was my first time to a karaoke this go-around. It was all fun and games until one of the Brazilians, a theoretical mathematician named Anderson, entered the surly, stumbling phase of drunkenness and had to be dragged home.

It was time to go home anyway. It was 4:30 AM.

I don't know if I listened to too much heavy metal in junior high or what, but I still have an abiding interest in cannibalism, scatology, cabal, the paranormal, medical oddities, piercing, scarring, tattooing, fasting, sleep deprivation, kink, and other things less than wholesome. I remember trying to buy a book on witchcraft when I was nine years old that had a really neat figure showing how a pentagram could be seen to represent both a goat's head and the inner structures of female genitalia. I didn't get past the checkout line before my folks snagged that one and had it returned to the shelf.

Am I going to grow out of this? Do I want or need to? My curiosity in the grotesque, like I said, is an abiding one. I have the same sociological interest in most things. There are very few things, I guess, that I just don't find interesting at all. Maybe I'm just noticing that my all-encompassing curiosity extends also to things that you don't talk about at family reunions.

I'm curious about people and the things they do. Like this 40 year-old soldier who goes to gay orgies every weekend. Or this London call-girl with a flair for the dramatic.

And I bought a few really grotesque manga tonight. I was always a fan of GARO when I lived here, and I happened on a set of books tonight whose art style and irreverence reminded me of that venerable mag. I was walking through Tsutaya in Shibuya, where I go to rent movies and stuff. I hadn't been to the manga floor yet, and I actually wandered up there more or less by accident. I glanced through the stuff on the shelves, and I found one section where the titles just leaped out at me. It was the section of stuff by Kago Shintaro.

In any manga artist gross-out contest, he wins. I don't even know how he gets his stuff published. He is also responsible for the capsule-toy vending machines with sets of small plastic toys like "Dismembered Corpse" and "Japanese Turds," both on the site linked above.

If I was nine, someone would snatch this stuff out of my hands. But I'm not nine. And I'm really far away. So there.

I have had a few semi-dark moments since I arrived in Japan, but last night was not among them.

I went out to meet a U.S. attorney whose firm I was interested in. I met him at the office, and we went to a nearby bar. He had asked me on the phone if I wanted to meet and talk in the office, or go out for beer. I had said "beer," but I hadn't thought much about the difference between the two options. Once we were out, another attorney friend of his from a different firm joined us, and I just asked them about different elements of their practice, their lives in Japan, and other bits.

We ended up having about four beers each, and they were very free with the information by the end of the night. One of them also asked for my resume and said he would do his best to try and get me hired for the summer. I was pretty happy about that. His firm is trying to move into the market for patenting biotech and medical devices, and they need people pretty badly to get that started.

They said over and over again that my future seemed bright, which is always nice to hear.

I left them and went back to Shibuya. I wandered around in the rain, thinking. Shibuya is not so bad in the rain. There are fewer people, and you can take your time to stop and look around. Shibuya is a neon jungle of blaring speakers and crawling cars. Herds of slow-moving umbrellas fill the streets. Scores of Chinese girls hawking massages tug at my sleeve. I stop for a bowl of miso ramen to fight off the chill, and step back into the rain. I look straight up at it, falling into my face. Sometimes Tokyo is beautiful.

This morning, with a clearer head, I thought about the positive response I'd had from the two attorneys the night before. Best not to get my hopes up too soon. Lawyers will tell you anything. Especially when they're drunk.

My cell phone woke me up at 5am this morning with a c-mail offering free access to thousands of nude photos. I couldn't get back to sleep. Spam on a computer is bad enough, but spam in another language that wakes you up and won't let you go back to sleep is a pretty little slice of hell. Especially when you had only gone to bed four hours before.

I discovered that I can indeed hear my Polish neighbor snoring through the walls.

So I stayed up. I got some breakfast at the convenience store, and on my way back to my room, I heard someone singing in the bath from one of the houses nearby. That was almost enough to salvage what had been a fairly bleak morning.

On a regular day, I might just be waking up now. Maybe this is for the best, then. A chance to get my sleeping schedule back in order. We'll see how I feel about that idea at 4pm today...

In visual-kei news (see Sunday post for reference), a 16 year old girl into dressing up as a lolita-goth has been implicated in internet threats to her family and connected to a university student who killed his own parents in what look like the beginnings of a pact between them to kill their families and then themselves.

Crime is being reported in the news very heavily right now, and almost all of the stories seem to have been culled from a long police sheet for any sort of quality that make them outstanding enough to be considered newsworthy. Among these characteristics are crime by youth or foreigners, or anything severe or grotesque or flagrant enough to really catch the public eye.

Unfortunately, this editorial process leads many Japanese to assume that most (or even all!) crime in Japan is perpetrated by foreigners or the young. The press whips up public concern over these statistically minor areas of crime, and the public exerts pressure on officials, who must then take a stance on youth and foreigner crime that may be far out of proportion to the actual occurrence of offenses by these groups.

It is getting so bad that two-thirds of Japanese people say they do not want to see an increase in foreign tourism in Japan (recent Yomiuri poll). Two-thirds! True, some foreigners come into Japan on tourist visas and overstay their welcome, which is in itself a crime, but this is not violent crime, and it does not reflect the intention of all foreign visitors to Japan.

The overwhelming majority of violent crime in Japan is committed by Japanese people, and of that, the majority again is over the age of 20. But that kind of information doesn't sell papers. Or magazines, like the Yomiuri Weekly, which has published a special edition including a map of Tokyo with neighborhoods ranked by the probability that visitors to these areas may become victims of crimes committed by foreigners. The soulless muckrakers...

Criminologists like David Johnson of the University of Hawaii have been detailing the declining effectiveness of criminal punishment as deterrent in post-war Japan, and have noted a rise in the tendency to view criminal punishment as punitive, incapacitative, and retributive rather than reformative, restorative, or deterring. This is a bad trend for Japan, and it will get much worse before it gets better. The real problem is a breakdown in communitarian thought and neighborhood closeness. If you feel no shame, then there is little to stop you from committing crimes in Japan. Japan tends to be shame-motivated, while the U.S. is usually more guilt-motivated in that regard. If you don't know your fellow citizens and don't care, nothing stops you from committing violent criminal acts.

Japan could face the same explosive growth in prison populations seen in the U.S., and the prisons here will become places that foster the creation of career criminals just like they are back home. I stick by my belief that restorative justice is the only way to counter the trend...

Have a nice day.

Back at the research center today, trying to get my research stuff in order.

It's slow business. I have to set all my own goals and follow through. I'm so bad at that, though. It requires constant effort.

I've been drinking for two days. What did I expect?

But I stayed home (national holiday today!), drank lots of water, did laundry, and watched DVDs. 24-Hour Party People wasn't bad, but "The Wesley's Mysterious File" ("Blue Encounter" was the Japanese Title) was a disgustingly bad Hong-Kong sci-fi film. Bad in a funny way most of the time, though: when one of the American actors gets hurt, he immediately screams out the words, "Terrible pain!" as if that's a normal instantaneous reaction to injury. I understood exactly what he meant, though, having watched 2 hours of such poor dialogue and cheesy CG effects.

I did go out for dinner with Kaoru, one of the students from the Biotech Patents class to discuss U.S. and Japanese Patent law in Japanese English, just as a weekly practice thing for both of us. We went to Sonoma, a "California-style" restaurant tucked away in the middle of Shibuya. It wasn't bad. I had the "Seared Tuna on Baba Ganoush with Red Onion Jam." Quite nice, really. I would go back. They had cornbread and black-bean soup, which are rare enough in Japan to make this place worth remembering.

Then we stopped by Segafredo for a coffee. Not bad, though not a very full-flavor. I'm trying to stay away from the millions of Starbuck's locations in Tokyo if I can.

I went out with a bunch of Brazilians to Harajuku to see the hordes of Japanese kids who gather there in costume to act out their visual-kei fantasies. They were organized into groups like little fashionista gangs from the movie The Warriors: there were the girls dressed like Victorian English schoolboys, girls in pink and white lace cupcake dresses, girls in black goth-frocks, girls in motorcycle gang overalls with orange wigs, girls in Barbarella leather catsuits, and more.

We also saw a troupe of dancing rockabilly kids who had brought an amp and generator to play their music. Now that's dedication. Very twisty moves, lots of attitude.

We hung out at the dorm later, drinking caipirinha, a Brazilian cocktail made from crushed limes, sugar, ice, and cachaca, a sugar-cane derived Brazilian liquor. We sat around drinking and talking and listening to and discussing Brazilian music until we were all quite drunk. A few spoke good English, and most of the rest spoke passable Japanese (these were the second-generation Japanese-Brazilian kids), so I didn't have much trouble communicating.

But I still love the way Portuguese sounds, and I really, really, really want to visit Brazil.

I ran into a bunch of people partying in the dorm lounge and had a fine time talking about Le Corbusier with Min, a Vietnamese-French architecture student until we were all kicked out by the security guard for being too noisy.

We then rode our bikes down to Shibuya to look for a place to drink, and ended up in a small hip-hop club called Sky. As with many clubs of that type in Tokyo, there were foreigners outside hawking the place and trying to get people to go in. What interested me in the hawkers though, was the fact that they were non-Americans hired for their ability to appear American.

Indulge me for a second while I pretend that hip-hop is a purely American cultural export, but I just think it's funny how their set-up worked. There was a Canadian hip-hop dancer on the floor at all times for dancing authenticity, and several Nigerian guys in hip-hop gear were milling about, trying to get Japanese people to go dance. The Japanese people there, for their part, were wearing very faithful representations of U.S. streetwear, hip-hop style: sideways baseball caps, large gold chains, oversized basketball jerseys over white T-shirts, jogging suits, and Nike shoes.

I kept wondering what to make of it. There is supposedly a low-level brand of resentment (or perhaps pride?) in some African-American hip-hop communities that hip-hop culture was so rapidly and completely co-opted by suburban white kids in the states. But how would they feel about African-AFRICANS co-opting African-American culture? I can't even predict that outcome. Perhaps it's just one more example of how the race equation in the U.S. is so often construed with almost no global context, mostly without input of race consciousness from other countries. To be fair, though, hip-hop as a musical form traces its roots to African music and theatre pretty easily, so there is no easy equation of who is co-opting who.

But when I see Nigerians in full street-gear passing themselves off as African-Americans to hip-hop-interested Japanese kids, I get a nice chuckle out of it. Cultural commerce? Ethnic exploitation? More jobs for Nigerians? I don't even know where to start...