Scot is now in Japan.

I have been a fan of 'food porn,' the slick, well-photographed magazines featuring mouth-watering morsels on every page opposite recipes, for quite a while. So it comes as no surprise that I should fall so heavily for travel porn: magazines and travel guides that are light on comprehensive detail, but heavy on splashy photo layouts.

I dove into the stacks of travel porn at a Shibuya bookstore, thinking I would pick up a glossy or two to help my mother and sister decide where they would like to go during our upcoming visit to Kyoto. The magazine I eventually bought was all in Japanese, but I don't think it will matter much. The space devoted to articles is hardly worth reading. It seems to have been included as an afterthought in this stunning collection of well-lit temples, flowering trees, and cavernous yet elegant and empty restaurants.

Perhaps the emptiness of all of these staged pretty pictures is the real fantasy element at work here. What better way to entice tired and cramped Tokyoites to travel than by showing them breathtaking visions of spiritual and natural beauty with no other human in sight? But beware the promise of travel porn--a visit to Kyoto during the national holiday spree of Golden Week is nothing if not crowded by other people looking for the same elusive emptiness.

In a wonderful twist of understanding on the part of the publishers of this torrid little travel mag, there are perhaps an equal if not greater number of pages devoted to food as touring spots. After letting your metropolis-weary mind feast on the ideas suggested by pictures of pristine mountain temples, you can literally eat with your eyes all of the way-too-zoomed-up pictures of glistening cuts of meat and fish, steaming stews and hotpots, and bowls of noodles that seem to wink suggestively from the page.

I love how deliberate all of this is. I love the lots-of-pictures-ignore-the-writing niche of travel and food mags. I understand that food photographers speak in hushed and reverent tones about the perfect way to capture steam on film. I can likewise imagine the awe reserved for anyone who can get a daylight shot of the more famous temples in Kyoto when they are not mobbed by throngs of schoolchildren on class trips and gaping-mouthed, tired-looking German backpackers.

Long live the fantasy of travel porn.

And a long March it was.

I'm turning 30 in a week. The end of this month also marks the half-way point of my year in Japan. I'm fairly tripping over milestones nowadays.

I would love to make them mean something.

Back at work, but this time I have something to do. Sort of. This is painful.

Wish list for future jobs:
1. Meaningful contact with other humans as a required part of job description.
2. Work tasks that are challenging and thought-provoking.
3. At least the bare potential for being recognized as contributing individually to a group effort.
4. Reasonable hours.

I think the only one of those I have a shot at right now is #4.

Right now I'm feeling very alienated from my labor and its products.

I am almost halfway through my year in Japan. So far I've only borked my marriage and decimated my confidence re: finding a good job after school. What does the future hold? Life. Yay.

But I started Madame Bovary last night. Not much chance of it cheering me up is there? Maybe it'll have a happy ending, ha ha. Maybe this is the American version, where Emma doesn't commit suicide at the end.

And to top it all off, I for some reason decided that this was the weekend to visit Sanya, Tokyo's only slum deserving of the name. I don't know what kind of rejuvenating effect I'm expecting THAT to have.

Alright, christ, enough whining already. I sound like that terminally depressed comic Steven Wright.

I still think he's really funny, by the way.

There's nothing for me to do at the office today. These are times that try men's souls. Some, when confronted with the dread beast ennui, look for something constructive to do. And others maintain the courage to battle tedium without resorting to that pathetic crutch, work.

I would like to salute one such person, who shall remain anonymous out of my respect for his privacy and to allow him to maintain his status as supreme shifter of time and space. The amazing talents of this man became apparent to me as I worked alongside him a few years ago. The small group that he worked in had been made redundant through a change in corporate strategy, but he had not yet been reassigned to a new group or task.

On one of these workless days at work for him, I heard him complaining that Babelfish, the online text translator, did not support Swedish-to-English translation. Everyone turned towards him at that moment with pained expressions of confusion until one of us had the courage to ask, "Why do you need a Swedish-to-English translator?"

Almost unaware of his own greatness, this stalwart champion of the underassigned replied with a straight face, "Because I want to read a goddamn Swedish newspaper."

Hallelujah. May we all be able to follow in his giant footsteps.

Is the name of a sketchy drinking district in Shinjuku that's been around since the 50's, and has long been associated with nicotine-stained geezer businessmen and expensive or exclusive clubs. The place is enjoying a moment of retro-coolness right now as younger hipsters are discovering that the place is a non-stop freakshow of small bars with weird clientele and weirder staff.

The freakiest bar award goes to "Atom Heart Mother," after the Pink Floyd album of the same name. It was a modest five-seater bar specializing in older prog-rock like Yes, and the bartender was a dressed-down tranny with a funny laugh. The walls were decorated with Pink Floyd Album covers and childhood pictures of (I think) the bartender, chronicling a time when Johnny was a boy who wanted to be a girl.

Top honors, I say.

I saw Tabata (ex-Zeni geva), Melt Banana, and Bonnie Prince Billy last night. I don't know whose idea it was to pair Gary Oldham with weird Japanese speedcore, but it seemed to work out. I hadn't seen Palace back in the day, despite hearing lots of their stuff, so picking up a chance to see the BPB incarnation of Oldham was a welcome opportunity.

He had that funny habit of mixing old American folk about death, god, marriage, alcohol, and war with contemporaneously out-of-place lyrics about blowjobs and coffee. There were just enough foreigners (Americans? Must have been.) in the audience to build up some chatter.

Good times.

When my Mom and sister come to visit me in Japan in the beginning of May, we will use the down time on trains and such to book-club "Madame Bovary."

We tried out the whole vacation/book club concept two years back when my dad, sister, her boyfriend of the time, and I all read (or claimed to have read) "The Sound and the Fury," before gathering at a cabin on Mount Rainier. Unfortunately, I finished it 2 days into the trip, my sister didn't read it at all, and my sister's boyfriend tried only to recall it from distant memory. My dad, however, read it AND the Cliff notes. Cheater.

Not to mention it's not an easy book to begin with, even by Faulknerian standards. As such, the book club experience that time was mostly a matter of my Dad quizzing me and my sister's boyfriend as to whether we could tell what was going on in the novel most of the time.

We'll see how we do this time. My Mom's already read it, and my sister and I are getting ready to start.

My family must appear insufferable to normal people.

at work today. I slept really poorly last night. I didn't doze off until at least 3AM, and even then slept only fitfully until 8. I think it was that coffee I had yesterday afternoon.

While I was trying to get to sleep, I couldn't get this one image of a Butoh dancer I saw yesterday out of my head. She was flailing around madly in the street, wearing tattered clothing and pulling at her hair. She would storm off in different directions to shake street signs or climb lamp posts. People passing by seemed to not understand at first that she was performing. I suppose they must have thought she was a homeless person having a fit or something. That is, for the most part, what it looked like.

But every few minutes, she would slow down, tensing and relaxing various body parts so gradually that it was sometimes hard to notice any movement at all. She did all of this to the tune of "Fall in Love" by Bjork while I was watching. So last night, the images of her flailing around and the four-note orchestra hit in the song played over and over again in my head. Really disturbing.

No more caffeine after 3PM for me.

Oh, and she has a website (Japanese only) and offers workshops.

I've been avoiding blogging because I haven't wanted to think much about things at all. But I am trying to get back on the horse.

A few new things: I am working in a Japanese law office now. This is my first time working in a law firm, and it turns out to be a Japanese one. Strange. Everyone is nice, things are going well.

Slowly, with some thought and some blogging, maybe I can wrap my head around why I am here and where things are going for the next few years.