Greg Sanders

Off at the American Political Science Association annual meeting

It’s been fun, and getting to meet an intellectual inspiration or two. However, the combination with work has burned out all my posting energy and time.

Stops along sloping stone streets and steps 2014-05-30

The main exit to Kiyomizu-dera deposits you on Matsubara-dori and a series of stone-lined streets and enticing storefronts. I had fond memories of this walk to Yasaka-Jinga (also known as Gion Shrine and regularly in our journey around that neighborhood). The shops were a fun place to wander and pick up some of the range of chopsticks and tchotchkes we’d promised the family. The rest of the group also stopped for snacks while waiting and kindly shared with my mother and I.

Further along the walk, the balance shifts more in the direction of restaurants, tea houses, and other higher class establishments set back a bit from the main road. If memory serves, one of my favorite gardens in my prior trip was somewhere in this district. I did not find it again this time, and doubtless the first time some of the romance was its hidden nature behind the gate. But I quite enjoyed the trip nonetheless.

We took a  short break in Maruyama Park, sitting on benches around a pigeon statue and appreciating the garden which much be stunning when the trees are in blossom. I fear on my prior visit to the park I didn’t maintain proper decorum as my stomach proved highly upset. The consequences were thankfully not long-lasting then, and I attributed the ill-affects to some combination of octopus and jetlag. Being in better state this time, we had the chance to admire the fine detail work of the shrine on the way out and back to the streets of Gion.

We were headed on to dinner on the far bank of the Kamo River, again swinging by the aforementioned statue of Kabuki founder Izumo no Okuni. We would see performers there later that night, which is fitting. The statue apparently dates only to 2002 although it was in November so I could not have seen it on my first trip in January of that year, which makes sense as otherwise our professor would likely have told us about it. I go on about this statue, as I did with Mina-san while walking, because it does get to a contradiction at the heart of my enjoyment of Kabuki. That highly stylized form of theater was easily my favorite of the several kinds I saw in 2002, even beating the Bunraku puppet theater that was my assigned research area. However, thanks to Tokugawa-era social restrictions, female parts are typically played by onnagata, male actors specializing in female roles. Some day, I shall have to find a performance that finds good ways to nod to the theater’s traditions but also lets women back in on the fun and the art.

Kiyomizu-dera high and low 2014-05-30

What I most remembered from 2002 was not standing on the grand promenade of Kiyomizu-Dera itself, but instead the view back along the path that traversed the hill.  The skyline of Kyoto is visible through the haze in the distance, as it has been for the hundreds of years the temple has been in its present form.

The buildings behind us were also under reconstruction, so we quickly proceeded down the the path. The picture on the right, taken earlier in the visit, gives you a feel for the mix of old and new in the renovations methods. I’ve seen bamboo used in that manner before, most prominently in Hong Kong and mainland China. I’m guessing they may have used that approach to comply with UNESCO world heritage site rules, although I’d imagine it may also just be cheaper when a ready supply of bamboo is available. It wouldn’t have come from the immediate vicinity, though; preservation issues aside the slope was covered with deciduous trees. There were also a large number of thin signposts, each looking around a meter tall. We never did figure out their purpose.

Continuing along the path, we climbed up to the base of a pagoda dedicated to easy childbirth. Certainly a noble cause and likely indicative that of the historic need for such a thing. I do wonder if there are any historic records of what prayers and petitions were offered up at any given shrine or temple. They would be a fascinating means of studying the concerns of the day. I did for instance note a fair number of charms for safe driving, which is quite a  sensible place to focus one’s concerns. That said, there are always the classics, for example while we do not have any news to announce on that front, the picture on the left of the two of us was taken by my mother with great enthusiasm.

Near the base of the main hall of Kiyomizu-dera is terminus of Otowa waterfall, the source of the pure water and the name of the shrine. Visitors can line up for a more elaborate version of the cleansing ritual found at the entrance to most any shrine or temple of significant size. Cleaning one’s hands and mouth is a way of preparing oneself and showing respect, even though I accidentally mucked it up back at Itsukushima shrine. The cups on poles may be longer than usual here, but they are a standard feature, aside from the fact that they are stored on a shelf in back, bask in some sort of UV light meant as health measure, and are used with a spring rather than a basin. The water was indeed cool and fresh and while I cannot say if it will extend our lives, it certainly was a welcome respite on a hot and humid Kyoto day.

We then proceeded back up the hill to the gate of the shrine, preparing to re-enter Kyoto. I’ll close with a picture of a cobblestone track down that seems like it would be an excellent path to skateboard down. Moti and I had a rather silly discussion about that, and since he’s my top commenter, he gets little perks like this.

 

Shrine of good matches and the temple of clear water 2014-05-30

Jishu-Jinja is a moon apart from the rest of Kiymizu-Dera. Stairs wind up to a cluster of close-packed small buildings including a number of places to buy charms. The shrine is also a satellite in that it backs onto the hill rather than being surrounded by the larger temple as was the case in Ginkaku-ji. Such joint arrangements mean that it is often a bit of a challenge to discern temples from shrines, although after having played that game in 2002 in my cultural arts class I did try to regularly train up my mother in telling the difference. The sometimes colocated places of worship and the commonality of many elements between various branches of Buddhism and Shinto reflect a larger intermixing in Japanese religious life.

The term is syncretism rather than the Christian concept of ecumenism. The majority of Japanese people don’t profess a particular faith but do engage in both Buddhist and Shinto practices at various stages of life. To try to de-exoticize that a bit, every culture has rituals and traditions particularly when it comes to birth, marriage, and death. In the U.S. context even secular weddings often have Christian wedding accouterments. I’m told that they have become popular in Japan, and indeed I saw a fair number of ads to that effect.

Also, traditions that persist are often appealing in their own right. Moti’s friend and our gracious hostess Mina-san did take the challenge of the shrine to wander between the two stones embedded in the floor of Jishu-Jinja with her eyes shut. She had ready help, as the rest of our group had all had the blessing of having found terrific matches, although with my father’s passing a few years ago we did only have two couples. The main obstacles of the walk are the other visitors, although to my surprise there weren’t very many attempting the walk on that day. The ground atop was flat, although if your quest is heedless and rushed, you could speed past your goal and face disaster on the stairs. However, there’s no restriction from being helped by a potential partner or, in this case, friends. By tradition, it means that any matches will take some help from others, but that hardly seems a terrible burden to bear.

Finally, in the picture to the left,just behind the statue of patron god Ōkuninushi, is a helpful reminder that some parts of Japanese folk practices may prove more familiar than a Western traveler might first think. The three foot tall rabbit is no Easter bunny, but instead played a role in the stories of the god’s successful match. As seems to be common in stories the world over, this hare was a fairly gentle trickster, one that got in over his head and paid dearly for it. I was born on Easter and since I’m not Australian I’m quite fond of rabbits and do like taking pictures of them where err I see them. I’ll leave to my treasured readers whether this indicates a tendency towards being a bit of a rogue although I do confess that I enjoy garden vegetables (that I pay for).

The giant building blocks of Kiyomizu-dera 2014-05-30

After finishing the Philosopher's Walk, we were ready for lunch. Fortunately, Moti’s friend Mina-san had recommended a place for us to eat. It was a prix fixe menu with ten distinct bowls per person on a tray, each having a serving of a different culinary treat. This is not an uncommon style of Japanese meal. We ate at a long thin table along a plywood wall with Venetian-inspired art hanging from it. The size of a truly small Japanese eatery may be familiar to a Manhattanite, but is fairly unfamiliar throughout the rest of the U.S., as space is rarely at that much of premium.

We then met up with Mina-san herself on the way to our next attraction, Kiyomizu-dera. My memory had tricked me on the approach to the heritage site. I was incorrectly thinking it was further out of town, but instead we climbed directly from the streets of Gion to the entrance gate. The day was quite hot, but I recall the elevation helping. The aquatic theme of the complex certainly didn’t hurt; the name Kiyomizu means pure water and refers to a cascade down the foothills on which the mountain was built. As the picture on the left shows, the giant blocks were quite real, a consequence of renovations. Which is only fair as the current wooden buildings date back to 1633 and were constructed without nails.

The main building has a vast balcony, from which you can gaze out on the hills, see a pagoda dedicated to easy childbirth, or look down at the stone building where the water flows out of the hill and into the extended cups of waiting visitors. The view I most remembered from 2002 was looking back at this balcony, but before we would get there some of the group would brave crowds to walk up to Jishu-Jinja.

That Shinto shrine to Ōkuninushi, a god of love and good matches, is accessible through the Buddhist temple in a way that is not at all unusual in Japan but represents a blending of religions that I’m used to only seeing in ecumenical collaborations often driven by necessity or seeing in pictures of the trips to the Holy Land where sites are revered by multiple religions operating in close proximity. We’ll pick up with the visit to that shrine tomorrow.

What can happens when you set an orchestra in motion?

Copland’s Appalachian Spring is a fairly well known and loved bit of Americana and a ballet piece in its own right. This past spring, the University of Maryland Symphony Orchestra at the Clarice Smith Center gave a performance of that piece I believe will be with me the rest of my life. I was overjoyed to discover today that it is up on youtube. I do not doubt the recording won’t compare to having been there, particularly when by necessity the technical aspects of dance and concert both must make compromise when performed by the same people simultaneously. But watching Liz Lerman’s choreographed piece again still leaves me crying, both for the memory of the entire experience and the story told by the two lead dancers.

The performers had to memorize a twenty five minute piece in addition to simple choreography, to the extent that doing something wholly unfamiliar with your instrument, such as swinging one’s contra-bassoon, can be called simple. This fit the frontier nature of the piece quite well, as you’d multiple people circling around said contra-bassoonist in a way evocative of line dancing or see the brass sections standing together to represent part of the town waking up. The two dedicated dancers acted both as the leads and to an extent the conductors, walking through and at times directing the action. The skill set and blending of art forms is perhaps most like a marching band, but the tone and mix of instruments is starkly different than any such band I’ve ever seen.

For a more elegent review, I recommend Anne Midgette's review in the Washington Post:

On Sunday afternoon at the Clarice Smith Center, the University of Maryland Symphony Orchestra offered a literally moving performance. Playing Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” from memory, the musicians stood, and walked, and swayed, and danced, and even lifted each other and their instruments. From the very first notes, when the players offered quiet arpeggiated awakening phrases from one side of the stage, gently bathed in quiet blue light, the performance felt powerfully, viscerally emotional. Freeing all the latent creative forces in those usually still players brought a powerful sense of release. I finally realized, in a kind of epiphany, that this is what “moving” really meant…

Or best of all, just watch it for yourself.

Source: Tickets from my mother who saw the show with us. Thanks Mom!

So how should you handle protests?

Randy Balko of the Washington Post, who has been on this story and literally wrote the book on Warrior Cops, lays it out:

Wilson believed that an intimidating police presence didn’t prevent confrontation, it invited it. That didn’t mean he didn’t prepare, but he put his riot control teams in buses, then parked the buses close by, but out of sight of protesters. Appearances were important. In general, instead of the usual brute force and reactionary policing that tended to pit cops against citizens—both criminal and otherwise—Wilson believed that cops were more effective when they were welcomed and respected in the neighborhoods they patrolled. “The use of violence,” he told Time in 1970, “is not the job of police officers.”…

Maj. Max Geron is in charge of the Media Relations Unit, Community Affairs and Planning Unit of the Dallas Police Department… cautions against setting arbitrary expectations, such as mandatory dispersal times. “Most protesters will meet, protest, and go home when they feel they’ve made their point. If they aren’t breaking any laws, they can be left to express themselves.” Establishing a dispersal time then gives protesters something to rebel against.

That’s just a sample of two points I found particularly interesting, Balko has interviewed a range of police officers actually using the community policing approaches to great effect.

One final, important point: Policing is often cast as a balance between safety and freedom. The problem with that formulation is that it implies that to get a little more of one, we have to give up a some of the other. You need only look at Ferguson to see why that isn’t true. I doubt the residents of that town feel particularly safe or particularly free right now. The corollary to this is that there’s also a zero-sum relationship between officer safety and less aggressive, less militaristic more community-oriented policing. You have to give up some of one in order to get more of the other. Again, Ferguson is a pretty compelling argument to the contrary. The town is essentially a martially law zone right now. And I’d be surprised if you could find many officers on duty these last few nights who would tell you they feel safer today than they did a few weeks ago.

The police in Ferguson perversely demonstrate why military occupation can be hard

As ever, speaking for myself and not my employer.

Ferguson Missouri has been patrolled by body armored, heavily armed and equipped, nominal police officers. As Matt Yglesias notes, among many others, this hasn’t worked out so well. Reporters have been arrested, largely peaceful crowds have been tear gassed, and the situation is getting tenser. As Kelsey D. Atherton documents with testimony from veterans, U.S. military doctrine and training intentionally cuts against what was being done there.

Having gone to grad school during the Iraq War and having followed humanitarian interventions before that, there’s a range of reasons that taking a para-military approach runs into trouble. If you’re interested in reading more about grappling with the line between military and policing and various attempts to effectively straddle it, check out Where is the Lone Ranger When We Need Him? by Robert M. Perito for the U.S. Institute of Peace.

Military and paramilitary approaches can be escalatory

James Gerrond notes “In the USAF, we did crowd control and riot training every year. Lesson 1: Your mere presence has the potential to escalate the situation.” This is fairly easy to understand on a human level. Being around people with weapons out, particularly if you don’t trust them, is just stressful. That can even extend to body armor, which is why many NGOs intentionally eschew it even in conflict zones. Worse, if heavy-handed tactics are used in response to genuine provocation or simply without justification, those already protesting suddenly have more cause. Ferguson does not have a notably higher violent crime rate than the nation as a whole. This entire thing was quite avoidable.

Policing is challenging and political

Military force is hardly apolitical, but in the strict sense of the term national defense and a focus on external enemies means that the military isn’t responsible for enforcing the domestic social order, be it good or ill. However, when keeping the peace, particularly in reference to a protest, police can’t avoid confronting the fissures and fault lines in society. This of course is especially true when they represent the target of the protest. Most any occupying military will want to rely to the extent possible on local police forces, but those forces will often have political problems of their own if the country has notable existing fault lines.

Legitimacy matters

The question of whether people trust the those patrolling the streets is both squishy and critical. CSIS’s Bob Lamb put out a report this summer on assessing legitimacy that does a good job of nailing down the concept and what it provides:

Legitimacy is a worthiness of support (or, in some contexts, of loyalty or imitation), and illegitimacy is a worthiness of opposition. Legitimacy sustains and illegitimacy impedes. In the short term, legitimacy also induces compliance with demands and requests and encourages supportive participation and public action, while illegitimacy induces opposition.

The Ferguson Police Department’s legitimacy was already tarnished by the shooting of Michael Brown and was further squandered through their choice of tactics. Most everyone is now hoping that the Governor Nixon’s deployment of the State Highway Patrol will change that dynamic not because they know the territory better or they’re more trained in crowd control, but because they’re avoiding escalation and are trusted in a way that the local police no longer are.

We’ll know soon enough if that works, but I think there’s a good chance it will. The most successful form of foreign intervention, as Rolan Paris elaborates, are peacekeeping operations. The biggest advantage peacekeepers have is legitimacy. They are coming into a situation with the agreement of all major parties to a conflict.

Last night’s police response in Ferguson was certainly an example of ineffective militarization, but it’s important to remember all the advantages they had. They lived there, they knew the territory, they spoke the language. It’s that much harder for even far better-trained outsiders to play that role. Peacekeeping shows that it can be done, but I suspect that a key enabler of success is having a measure of legitimacy from the start. Meanwhile, I’m gratified that there appears to be a widespread realization that our police forces shouldn’t try to act like occupying forces: they aren’t good at it, and it makes their job harder in the first place.

What’s a brick aqueduct doing in a historic wooden temple? 2014-05-30

After visiting Ginkaku-ji, we headed South via the Philosopher's Walk to Nanzen-ji temple. The canal-side route is known for cherry blossoms in spring but is still a pleasing diversion in the hot and humid Kyoto summer. There were even a few animals about, from butterflies, to cats, to ravens, to koi. The east side led up into the same sort of hills that the Silver Pavilion was built on and seemed to hold other older temples, shrines, and estates. The west side seemed more commercial or suburban and is the part you walk through once the path diverges from the canal.

Unlike many of the prior spots we’d visited in Kyoto, the walk was not especially crowded. There was reasonable foot traffic, including the kimono-garbed strollers you see on the left. Walking around in traditional formal garb seemed to come up more in Kyoto than any other part of Japan we visited and did add a fun touch of class to the city.

Taking our time on the journey, we arrived at the sanmon, the grand gate, of Nanzen-ji temple after about an hour.  Most of us took the opportunity to climb to the top; my mother declined, not out of a fear of heights so much as a leeriness of thin steps. The sanmon have impressive views, whether looking at them, from them, or around the upper level. They doubtless have a crowd control function but they tend to stand independent of any walls, making them rather different from city gatehouses.

After paying to climb the tower we did visit the gardens in the back right side and were confounded by the sizable brick aqueduct running through it. Given its historic character, if you know some Japanese history you might correctly place it as Meiji Period (1868-1912) construction. That was a time when Japan invited foreign experts wholesale to visit the country and apply their expertise. This sort of inspiration from outside is a longstanding Japanese cultural tradition but one especially applied to a Western audience after Commodore Perry’s fleet effectively opened up the country. As we would learn later in the Tokyo-Edo Museum, even laying aside later politics these borrowings weren’t always for the best. Brick is far better against fire but by default does little good against earthquakes.

Which do you prefer, the golden pavilion or the silver pavilion? 2014-05-30

That was the question I was asked by the first group students that interviewed us, just prior to my return to Kinkaku-ji. But I couldn’t answer that question for myself until we’d seen both. We’d gotten up that morning, returned to the same cafe, and then took the bus over Ginkaku-ji’s neighborhood, passing a giant Torii gate along the way. The path up to the temple was full of small charming shops, catering to visitors with souvenirs and treats. The pavilion itself was is not actually silver, as you can see on the right, instead maintaining the naturalistic feel common to Japanese temple design.

So why isn’t it silver? The history of pavilion, officially the Jishō-ji, temple of shining mercy, is outlined on the wikipedia page and is fairly interesting. As you might expect, wars and lack of funds appear to be the culprit, although the history of the gold in Kinkaku-ji may also be quite different than what is visible today. However, rather than focus on the history, I’m more intrigued by the idea that the pavilion represents the Japanese cultural aesthetic of wabi-sabi, an acceptance of transience and imperfection. This should not be mistaken for accepting less than excellence, as you can tell by admiring the elegant gardens that fill the center of the grounds.

After admiring the other temple buildings and garden, we walked up the hill to enjoy the view down and the landscape of northern Kyoto. I don’t know if that is part of the wabi-sabi aesthetic, but I found the grounds more appealing than those of the more luxurious pavilion in part because they stood on their own to a greater extent rather than primarily being a vehicle to often literally reflect the main attraction.

We stopped by the temple shop as well as the stores leading up to the temple on the way out. This time Moti again was chosen for an student interview as we walked out. Particularly appealing to me was a rabbit themed store. They’ve been my theme animal since my Easter birth and are generally fairly well represented in Japan, although not nearly to the degree of cats.

As you might guess from that slightly silly end, I greatly enjoyed both temples, but I do give the edge to Kinkaku-ji. I quite respect both opinions, Moti goes the other way on the matter. I admire the aesthetic behind Ginkaku-ji more. I think there’s genuine wisdom in embracing imperfection and the actual state of the  building as the creator last saw it rather than the grandest vision for it. There are some parallels to epicurean virtues which place emphasis on living modestly and tranquility. [The golden pavilion is remarkable in part because it was singular, creating more, even in a mix of other metals, misses the point.] However, what one finds most beautiful is not always the wisest nor the most practical. Taste is ever a thing to cultivate rather than an endpoint to immediately achieve or a resting point to complacently lounge in.

[Update: A few edits as this was a late night post. There may be a few more coming.]

No entry tonight

Was busy with Otakon prep. Actually figured out how to use sculpey with some help from Kate and am pretty happy with the result.

In the meantime, here's a video from the post of D.C. practicing streetcar operations:

Preparing for Otakon: The guidebook app has social features

I was excited to discover that Guidebook now offers the ability to share one’s schedule. Two years ago, I was hoping for this social feature, and now that it’s here I’d like to exploit it. I’ve tied it to my Google+ account and am happy to connect with friends. Because of Otakon preparations and a crunch period at work, posts may be sporadic over the next few days.

In addition, I’ve slowly been getting photos up on Flickr. Check out my Japan collection to see them as they get posted. I’m also going back and adding them to older posts as I go and hope to start including them in new posts regularly.

69th Anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima tonight at 7:10 p.m. Eastern time today (August 5th)

Kate’s Mother passed on a reminder to me.

I thought I would pass on the link to http://www.worldpeace.org/ in case it was of interest to anyone that’s been reading along.

[Update: Fair warning, audio quality on the stream is not the best, there’s a buzzing, hopefully that’ll get fixed.]

[Update 2: We’re guessing it’s actually cicadas in the background which does make sense for summer time in a park.]

2014-05-29 The return to Gion [Completed]

After returning from Daitoku-ji, we decided to grab something to eat.  Francis’ guidebook recommended the Karafuneya Coffee shop, which apparently not only specialized in a wondrous variety of sweets, but had incredibly detailed models of them to look over while waiting to be seated.  If you’ve ever wondered what over two hundred varieties of parfait would look like, look no further.  From individual treats to a 50000-yen variety that would likely feed an entire school class, it was here.  Kate reveled in the sheer concept and ultimately decided on a caramel apple pie parfait.

The shop didn’t just serve dessert, it also had a selection of diner classics including salads and onion rings, but the displays at the front showed you where their heart was. Our visit also showed us how attitudes on smoking were evolving. We were given a choice sitting at two tables or sitting together but within close proximity of the smoking station. We’d later dine at places that did not have a non-smoking section, but the balance did seem to be shifting both in the restaurants and on the streets. In that latter case, smokers were increasingly clustered and carrying a lit cigarette while walking was discouraged, at least in the larger cities.

After we finished we crossed the Kamo river at Sanjo Dori and made our return to Gion. Looking up the Kamo and walking the streets of Gion were disproportionately strong memories from my 2002 trip, and the actual reality did not disappoint. The west bank (the right of the picture) was backed with restaurants often with deck dining and that seemed to be open much later than those we encountered the prior night in the depths of Gion. The east bank had a linear park that helped serve as a transition between the two parts of the city.

Kyoto can be a hot city. It certainly was while we were there, with easily the highest temperatures of the trip, hitting the eighties and nineties. This made the attraction of the Kamo quite obvious and tall buildings with rooftop decks proliferated in a delightful mix of styles. However, there’s nothing new about gathering by the river for entertainment; that’s where Izumo no Okuni founded Kabuki on dry riverbeds. The Kabuki-za theater, shown on the left, and a statue of the lady both owe their proximity to those origins. Famously, though, Kabuki subsequently became entirely the domain of male performers, as a consequence of the social controls of the Tokogawa era, a subject we’ll return to in a future post.

We then proceeded to weave through the streets of Gion. The section by the Kamo seemed densely packed with any number of diversions housed in an eclectic mix of architectural styles and accouterments. Our destination for the night was the Gion-Shimbashi district, a charming historic pair of streets and canal that had quieted down for the night but still was an exciting new atmosphere for most of us. At the end of the strip was a restaurant with its own patron cat, shown at the right. If you look at the slideshow below you’ll see that it even has a shelf at the base of the hostess stand with a pillow for it to rest on. I won’t try to draw any larger observations from that, aside from noting that distinctive character proved easy to find in that part of town.

After completing our circuit, we headed back towards our guest house, along the well lit streets of Shijo Dori. We made it home more easily this time, the twisty avenues at the end of the journey were becoming more familiar. Also welcoming was the sight of the Yasaka shrine at night, which unlike the many other portions of that walk actually shows up nicely in nighttime photography.

 

2014-05-29 Exploring other temples of Kyoto: Ryōan-ji and Daitoku-ji

Kyoto was Japan’s ancient capital. It is overflowing with temples, shrines, and history. The closest equivalent for the United States may be Philadelphia if the historic core were both far older and scaled up. Amusingly though, there were more odd moments of familiar culture than even Tokyo, although part of that is that hip hop is a bit more popular in the present capital. The Omerice (Omelet + Rice) let us sample a fairly common Japanese take on a western classic, although my dish with yuba, layers of the skin of soybean milk, was tasty but particularly unfamiliar. Nonetheless the Beatles were playing on the sound system in the second story dining room.

We then finished our walk from Kinkaku-ji to Ryōan-ji temple, which apparently translates as the Temple of the Dragon at Peace. It is known for its dry garden and I read of it in 2002 although I still need to verify whether I had a chance to see it on that rainy day more than a decade ago. As is often the case, the temple grounds have far more than just the elements its most known for. There are traditional gardens, with a central pond, that all visitors first pass by. After ascending the stairs, the temple building itself is a remarkable mix of white plaster and find architectural detailing. The interior has illustrated mountain landscapes or floral depictions, the former being a favorite of mine that I tend to associate more with Chinese art.

The paragon of Zen gardens itself has more than a dozen stones, although they are arranged such that you are not likely to see them all from a single position. Several of the clusters of stones blend together when viewed from a distances but are clearly distinct when gazed at directly. I don’t know the specific theology or aesthetic behind the arrangement, but it certainly does reward study from a range of perspectives and contemplation.

After leaving, we meandered the remainder of the path around the pond, seeing both ducks and turtles.  The ducks were more common, and a favorite of Francis dating back to childhood, although I went with the turtles in this instance because it had the better broad picture of the pond and perhaps also because of my University of Maryland bias.

Our next stop was another Zen temple, Daitoku-ji. The day was coming to an end, and we proved only able to visit one of the four sub-temples. Based on the walking book we had with us, subsequently returned, that temple was strongly associated with Sen no Rikyū, a pivotal figure in the evolution of the Japanese tea ceremony. I had the opportunity to participate in a tea ceremony in 2002, at a different temple that I’d gotten confused with Daitoku-ji. However, it was still interesting to wander the moss garden grounds and read once again about the history of the ritual.

One critical thing to note about the ceremony: it is meant to be a place apart.  The entrances can be fairly small, require humbling ducking, and are not conducive to carrying a sword. The practices do promote a certain equality among the participants, which may have contributed to Hideyoshi ordering Sen to kill himself, an incident allegedly prompted by Sen placing an image of himself near the top of a gateway the leader of Japan passed through. How can such a fancy ceremony promote harmony? I think the short answer is that clear rules of interaction can be empowering to those with less prestige and social capital.

After Francis successfully rescued himself from the closing temple, we proceeded out to a bus and back to central Kyoto.

Curious about language and how it works?

Language is important to all of us, in a lot of ways. Readers of this blog may have more of an interest in international relations, and foreign language, but even if you're monolingual, the question of how language works can be quite important. Gentleman, scholar, and trained linguist and teacher Moti Lieberman is debuting a new channel that will episodically explain concepts in linguistics on September 3rd. The trailer for the channel is below and was a lot of fun for me as it gave me a chance to witness why he's such an effective teacher. Ling Space should be a lot of fun. I've seen a preview topic list and there's going to be a good mix of ones of broad interest and dives into deeper questions in linguistics. Check it out and subscribe! Even if the deep dives aren't of interest, there should be something for everyone that uses language and likes to think about how things work. [Update: Typo fix]

2014-05-29 Kinkaku-ji, the Golden Pavillion

The official name of the landmark is Rokuon-ji, the Deer Garden Temple. Based on the wikipedia page, the appearance of the shrine has changed many times over the centuries. The crowds are quite intense but friendly and we twice more encountered groups of students; this time they interviewed Moti and then Kate.

There are other buildings and gardens around the temple complex, none of which quite rival the building and its mirror reflected in the pond. This was actually my second time through, though the first time was a rainy day back in 2002. There were fewer people about but the mood was understandably dampened.

Watching Moti interact with the students was fun in its own right. He has an excellent command of Japanese, but like a proper teacher and linguist, he stuck to English for the questions because if he just gave them the words for everything in their native tongues then it wouldn’t really be much of a lesson.

Kate’s interview came later, after we’d walked up the hill, past waterfalls and smaller ponds, and by an excellent sitting rock and a nearby tea shop. Hers was the first coed group of the bunch and they even eschewed the traditional v-sign in the group photo. I’m guessing that was because they were a bit older.

We went on to see other temples at my suggestion, to be covered in a future post. If I’d actually planned a bit further ahead, I’d have realized that the cost was our opportunity to see the Manga Museum or the Kyoto Peace Museum. That was a shame, but one that can be remedied by visiting the city again in some future year.

2014-05-29 Our first morning in Kyoto

Morning in Kyoto broke gently. Despite having the windows open there was not that much noise on our tiny side street. My wife and my mother’s first night on futons may have been eased by exhaustion, but they are generally notably more comfortable than the American convertible couches baring the same name. As the view down the street shows, what Gion lacks in navigability, it does make up for in charm.  There was even a small ukiyoe (Japanese woodprint) museum down the street, though lamentably we never did make it in.

After settling in to our new abode, taking advantage of the showers two flights of stairs below (Kate’s only real complaint about the place, particularly as the last set was rather steep) and doing a bit of planning, most of us went off to breakfast at Café 3032.  We would return regularly; it was just a block and a half away, the food was good, and it was one of the first places open of a morning. The breakfast was more a Western style with a Japanese twist, as was the music from a cover band with a name that translated as Adult Reggae and included songs by Nirvana and an instrumental cover of Sublime. When we asked, we discovered that apparently the Japanese female vocals were popular with the American guests, so apparently they know their audience. Regardless, if you visit, I recommend the French toast; it was delicious.

After regrouping and delivering a carryout sandwich, we walked down to one of Gion’s main thoroughfares to catch the bus to Kinkaku-ji, the golden pavilion. Just before we got to the stop, we discovered that we happened to be traveling in the midst of school trip season. Delightfully, we were one of the attractions. Several groups of students we met in Kyoto and Tokyo had assignments to interview foreigners and practice their English. The first group of schoolgirls picked me, asked their questions clearly, and handed around the assignment book so everyone got a chance to participate. The questions were fairly standard: I like baseball, sushi, and did not yet have an opinion between Kinkaku-ji and Ginkaku-ji as I had not visited the silver pavilion on my last trip. I’ll likely never forget the enthusiasm of my lead questioner and was charmed in a way that didn’t wear off when we boarded the standing room only bus to one of Kyoto’s best known landmarks.

International Relations Debate Notes: Reputation for Resolve

Routine reminder: I speak for myself and not my employer.

What’s a reputation for resolve? The summary below will lay out the technical definition, but the short version is that those calling for more coercive action (be it military or economic) backing up U.S. threats and red lines regularly cite reputational benefits that will go beyond the immediate incident. Alternately, those believing in the importance of reputation for resolve may simply argue for making more limited use of threats and red lines, as is outlined below. This ties into a variety of related concepts; reputation in general, deterrence, and credibility all tie together to the concept, but the biggest controversy lies in the resolve component.

The Foreign Entanglements show on Blogging Heads TV recently had a debate on the matter that I summarize below because I think that you often can learn more of the strengths and weaknesses of each side when they actually talk to one another. To more succinctly summarize the discussions, I’ve grouped arguments thematically rather than by when they occurred in the video. For a literature review going in, check out the blogging heads link or this Drezner piece from a few years back.

Mercer’s Deterrence Theory:

Deterrence is based on credibility/reputation which has three parts:

• Power: What a state’s capacity is. What forces or tools does it have available and how costly is it to use them? In general the United States is the highest capacity state in the world, but it varies from case to case. When it comes to Iran or Russia, Europe has more economic tools available.
• Interest: How much does the country care about this issue? The United States does not have a high interest in Libya or Syria, but fought a war in the former case and not the latter. By comparison, free travel of oil through the Straits of Hormuz is considered a high interest of the United States.
• Resolve: Whether a country’s leadership seems likely to use its power to assert the interest in question. In poker terms, does the county’s leadership have a tendency to bluff?

Critiques to a reputation for resolve

Going back five years or so, the resolve portion of that triad has faced substantially more skepticism from academic political scientists. Farley was defending the strong critique, not just that a reputation for resolve is not applicable as the situation varies, but that it is not even well enough understood to be a useful concept. Farley argues that the reason for this is that we cannot predict how actions that send messages will be received. There's too many moving parts. Specifically, had the U.S. bombed Syria without overthrowing Assad, this might have been viewed as a result that failed to demonstrate resolve.

Debating the examples

Farley countered that we we have not seen a reputation for resolve in practice. Our red lines against Iran include, for example, mining the Straits of Hormuz. These have not been pressed and what we have done in Syria has made no difference. The reason for this is that we obviously have greater interests at stake in Iran. On the other hand, red lines often do not work when our interests are weak; for example, our red line in Syria did not work even though we had just deposed Qaddafi in Libya.

Gartenstein-Ross argues resolve when your interests are highly involved is different than when they are peripheral. He outlined the reputation for resolve as relevant in two categories 1) where U.S. interests are low but a clear threat is made, 2) where U.S. interests are directly involved but the situation is messy. He argued that Syria was reacting not to Libya but instead the lack of U.S. response to Iran's support of insurgents that killed Americans in Iraq and Assad's allowing foreign fighters to transit through Syria to Iraq.

Farley argues that we have no real visibility into the Assad regime; one could tell a competing narrative that the U.S. would be interested in payback when an opportunity arose due to the weakness of his regime. This leaves reputation for resolve as a variable without predictive content. Gartenstein-Ross agreed that the Assad regime would consider both stories. This is a case of acting with incomplete information.

Farley points to Cold War history, saying that if academics and historians can't establish a how a reputation for resolve works with the extensive archives from the Cold War, then policymakers should be extremely careful about making any decisions on the basis of a reputation for resolve.

How to implement academic humility

Gartenstein-Ross laid out that he believes that reputation for resolve is a case where the academics are experiencing a bias towards variables they can measure. In one example, for a time the statistic-oriented baseball fans undervalued fielding because there wasn't a good way to report on it, unlike hitting. Leaving out an important variable could then lead to an undervaluing of certain players and worse performance for the team despite a more scientific-seeming approach. Gartenstein-Ross specifically believed that academics were prone to make this mistake and believed they made the same error when discounting the specific religious content of belief systems in militant organizations.

Farley replies that practitioners are not acting in a theory-free zone; they are operating with theories that come out of Cold War deterrence theory and Thomas Schelling. They continue to operate with this Cold War understanding because that's where they gained much of their experience. Those with the strongest and most visceral feel of reputation and resolve were old Russia hands. Academics should be humble, but that humility encourages tearing down previous academic theories that are now obsolete. It is possible that we will find a way to show the impact of reputation for resolve in the future, but in the absence of such evidence we should not expend blood and treasure to maintain a reputation for resolve.

Gartenstein-Ross says that the two views are not necessarily irreconcilable. He is not arguing for expenditure of blood and treasure to maintain a reputation for resolve. Instead, when things are not in our interest, we should be very hesitant to make any sort of threat if we are not willing to fulfill it. By this means reputation can be obtained, and we should use this mechanism.

The utility of bluffing and a reputation for resolve

Farley queries whether this means Gartenstein-Ross wishes to take the bluff away from the United State's strategic toolkit. He further charges that many of those who say we should have acted in Syria are doing so on the basis that we could better bluff our way through Crimea. Farley raises the example of the Chinese air identification zone. In that instance, the U.S. flew B-52s, planes that you cannot possibly overlook, through the zone and China did nothing. Similarly, he says that Putin has effectively deployed bluffing on multiple occasions.

Gartenstein-Ross stands by his view and argues that the Chinese bluff was counterproductive. During the unipolar moment in the 1990s we had a high ability to bluff.  However, our relative decline over the past thirteen years have weakened our ability. He finds the U.S. bluff on Syria to be outmoded thinking much as Farley argues that the reputation for resolve is outmoded. Bluffs are now more likely to be called, both because of the reduced capability and because of the vicious circle of he reputation for resolve because bluffs that are called.

Gartenstein-Ross then returns to the Iran example in pointing to the utility of a reputation for resolve. The U.S. has a variety of red lines with respect to Iran. Some are clear, like the Straits of Hormuz. However, there are subtler moves regarding the nuclear program where a reputation for resolve can matter. Reputation for resolve is not as important for the bluff, or the big policy areas and matters of war and peace, but for subtler decisions it plays a bigger role.  He says that while he's more skeptical than Farley of political science's ability to truly measure something like the reputation for resolve and thinks Farley overstates a legitimate critique, he believes that it's something that should be better understood.

My own thoughts

Gartenstein-Ross argues the more limited case for reputation for resolve and I think to really judge that debate we’d have to get into the literature on bluffing. That said, it is important to remember that in the specific case of Syria, tons of chemical weapons were removed from the country and their existing facilities were demilitarized. There are allegations of continued use of chlorine gas and continued atrocities by the Syrian government are indisputable, but the significant quantity of weapons and facilities destroyed is a boon in its own right.

What’s more telling is that the Gartenstein-Ross’s limited case for a reputation for resolve points to greater restraint when U.S. interests are low. He repeatedly argued that President Obama’s mistake was setting the red line, not in failing to enforce it. While he noted that our reputation for resolve was diminished by failing to engaged in unspecified retaliation against Iran and Syria for aiding insurgents in Iraq, he did not lay out any positive mechanisms by which to increase our reputation for resolve. If spending blood and treasure are off the table and limited strikes will make little difference, than wherefore complaints from other commentators about the President’s policy in Ukraine? U.S. sanctions have slowly been ratcheted up. European allies have been slower to act, but due to greater connections with Russia their actions have had greater effect.

What about complaints from allies?

This debate did not touch on one source of complaints of ill-resolve: those from U.S. allies. Gripes have been made in public and in private. Vehement critiques of resolve like Daniel Larison do not dispute the existence of such complaints but instead argue that they play to Washington’s pride and insecurity. I don’t doubt that some of that goes on, but I think some of the behavior may have a less harsh interpretation, namely allies bargain about who should bear the burden of common interests. Matt Yglesias gives an example of how this works in European debate over sanction policy:

The biggest gas importer is Germany, which would rather see someone else's ox gored. Angela Merkel has been talking up the idea of a ban on the export of military equipment to Russia. Conveniently, Germany doesn't have a big outstanding weapon sale to Russia. But France is scheduled to sell advanced Mistral naval vessels to Russia. Much of the international community wants France to cancel that deal, hurting the Russian military and the French economy while leaving others unscathed. Meanwhile, from the French viewpoint a better countermove might be for the UK to seize Russian funds and property squirreled away in London.

It’s not that France, Germany, and the UK doubt one another’s resolve, they’d just genuinely prefer that someone else pay the bill and no doubt can come up with compelling normative reasons why this is so. Rather than applying the deterrence-elated concept of reputation and credibility writ large to allies, I would argue that we should apply a range of appropriate tools, such as collective action problems to negotiation theory to security dilemmas. This is not to say that complaints from allies are merely bluffs and puffery – the current alignment of the Middle East in particular is genuinely unstable - but that their use of the word credibility should not dictate our choice of intellectual framework.

Okayama to Kyoto 2014-05-28

The trip back to Okayama Station from the Kōraku-en gardens was much tighter than I hoped, but we made it. My favorite landmark on the remainder of the trip to Kyoto was seeing Himeji castle. Like many of the castles in Japan, it was reconstructed after World War II. However, it was rebuilt using not just the original floor plan, but also with classical building methods. I toured it with friend and co-traveler Chad back in 2002. We were considering trying for Hiroshima, but when that was rejected as too far, seeing the castle at Himeji was an appealing alternative. After touring it, in slippers that were at least two sizes too small, we went on to check out their botanical garden. It was more of the scale you see in the West, but still quite nice. So while we did not stop back in Himeji this time, it maintains a fond place in my heart.

We also passed through a train yard on the way into Kyoto Station. All of the engines pictured on the left are part of full blown shinkansen. I suspect that a good part of the system’s timeliness is that they have ample reserves. By comparison, I still didn’t have my act entirely together on hotel directions, so between the comparatively small lunch earlier, we ended up getting into Kyoto with a crew that was starting to get grumpy. Moti had some success with station wifi and I cross-referenced street names, but he did end up having to call to be guided into the place once we were within a few blocks. Not my finest hour, although I’m proud to say that for every subsequent stop on the trip, there was a copy of a map saved in the trip google doc. Our residence, the Gojo Guesthouse, proved to be a terrific experience, but we were disappointed to learn that we had yet more travel to do through intricate streets, as we were not staying in the most prominent of the ryokan (traditional Japanese inn) buildings.

So, instead, we did the only sensible thing and went for food. Gion is quite a wonderful neighborhood, but unfortunately, it also can be a tricky place to eat as it gets later in the evening. Not because it’s dangerous - not in the slightest - just because so many of the restaurants, including most everything in our Lonely Planet guide, was closed. Moti and Francis scouted about and soon enough we found our salvation, an okonomiyaki place! This was not Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki but was instead in the more common mode of nearby Osaka. The meal was quite good, although we did get rushed out the door despite having ordered a succession of dishes and drinks, so we won’t be specifically recommending the place in question.

The last stretch to our rooms was not that far, but it did seem so at the time, in part as I was carrying an extra backpack. However, from here on out the news was largely good; the guest house certainly does earn our recommendation and proved a fantastic launching point for our adventures in Kyoto. But that shall have to wait until tomorrow.

More Culture: Legend of Korra Book 3 episodes 4 and 5 have pleased me and Film Hulk on Bond

I forgot to bring my laptop power chord home tonight, so I'm going to be lazy and skip the travelogue entry.

Let's start with Bond. Moti pointed me to Film Hulk critics four part analysis  of the entire franchise (you can click to all four parts from the fourth). It's made me feel a bit time for the time I compliment Yaphet Kotto on his performance in Live and Let Die. I still liked that he had a character willing to take out Bond and shoot him, but really I need to familirize myself with more of the man's work beyond Homicide and Live and Let Die. I still quite loved Casino Royale, but was left with the feel that I'd really drifted away from that sort of thing. After reading through Hulk's discussion of all the films and his argument that the best Bonds are romances, I'm instead left feeling that I might want to watch From Russia with Love and On His Majesty's Secret Service again, though those two will likely suffice. That's a nice place to be.

He also made one interesting argument about overthinking pop culture:

It's not that we can't have adult conversations about our childlike impulses, it's that we can go so far as to dress up our stuffed animals and bring them to a fancy dinner. We can't just want to make our childish things seem adult.

As I mentioned in the last post on the series, I enjoyed both seasons 1 and 2 of Legend of Korra but felt let down by the respective endings. Some of that might just have been expecting too much on my part; it's a kid series and ultimately more nuanced bad guys can get away from problems that a super-powered character like the Avatar can solve. That said, I do think some of the graphic novels have gotten to this a better, although I've disagreed with a friend on that matter.

Anyhow, based on episodes four and five of the present season, Legend of Korra is doing a great job of focusing on the sort of stories it can tell well and that are still ones I'm very interested in. The issues of Mako and Bolin's class background, a critique of the conscription power of the state, and a family dispute between two sympathetic characters all have a lot of potential. Also Varrick, our favorite sketchy magnate is back. I have high hopes for him! The most direct villains are a group of superpowered criminals that appear to be enemies of the whole one powerful spiritual person will be charged with keeping power system. There's a whole lot of potential there without needing a great shades of gray main conflict.

Finally, one bit of possibly spoilery speculation on episode 5. I believe a quote from Honoré de Balzac will prove appropriate: "The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, for it was properly done."

In any event, if you aren't watching, you can wait to see if Nickelodeon posts full episodes, but I continue to feel well rewarded for buying it on Amazon after missing that first air date. That said, if you wish to be patient, it will probably eventually be on the Nickelodeon site and it's probably still safer to buy the physical form of series as digital distribution doesn't seem any cheaper.

Review: Journey

Journey, by thatgamecompany, has already been well considered by adoring critics, but we wanted to briefly interrupt our travelogue to give our impressions. I played it for the first time on Saturday and had a chance to watch Kate play last year. We both loved it. One playthrough is about the length of a film and the name is quite accurate; the game is a pilgrimage through wondrous and at times frightening lands towards the glowing mountaintop on the horizon. There are challenges to unravel, secrets to find, and threats to avoid. However, they are all minimalistic to focus on the core themes of the game and make it accessible even to those often neglected by high profile video game releases.

So does it even qualify as a game? Yes, for two reasons. First, Michael Abbott argues that the mechanics serve the aesthetic and help the player achieve flow, a meditative sort of enjoyment that videogames are well-suited to deliver. In addition, on a less theoretical level as Jason Killingworth discussed the jumping is just delightful.

“Psychology has proven that the behavior of our physical body directly impacts our emotional state. Test subjects who were tricked into arranging their facial muscles in the shape of a smile were more likely to claim to find a cartoon amusing. In the same way, a game that effectively imparts a sense of physically lifting off the ground will engender in the player a sympathetic emotional response of uplift and inspiration. Journey’s leap has a frolicking grace to it. Not only do you lift into the air, but your character will occasionally even twirl playfully like a sea otter before drifting back to earth. You may even grin while doing it.”

Going into a little more detail, your character can make small jumps just by navigating the world, but with the power of their elongating scarf or the help of the various friendly fabric creatures that inhabit this stricken land, you can for a time bound into the air. Your ability to do this is limited by geography and the charge on your scarf, but in either case is readily charged by visiting with the wildlife or spending time close to your traveling companion. In this way, the leaping is moderated but unlike power pellets or a time-based recharge, the way to replenish the power ties you closer to the world and your companions.

The companions are where the real wonder of the game comes in. After the first stage, you will often be paired with another player, elsewhere on the internet, but given only the most rudimentary means of communication. Perhaps surprisingly, this results in interaction that is entirely different than the hostility that too often defines online interaction. This was entirely intentional. Jenova Chen, one of the designers, discussed his influences and motivations with Simon Parker of Eurogamer.

"I believe that there are only three ways to create valuable games for adults. You can do it intellectually, whereby the work reveals a new perspective about the world that you have not seen before. The closest thing I can see to this is Portal. The second way is emotionally: touching someone. You can touch kids emotionally very easily, but it's far harder to touch adults because they are so jaded.

"The only way you can touch an adult is by creating something especially relevant to their lives, or by creating something that is so authentic that it becomes empowering. In order to reach those heights you have to reach catharsis. So that after the strong emotion the adult can begin to reflect on his own, start to find meaning in his own life. That's how I can see I can make games for people around me. The third and final way is by creating a social environment where the intellectual or emotional stimulation could happen from other people. Those are the only three ways."

Earlier in the piece, he noted that that third piece is often challenging because most multiplayer videogames are about killing one another. It’s well worth reading the entire piece, about how they choose to take out many of the puzzles, elaborate interactions, and even collision detection while working to reinforce the loneliness of the places.

And it works. Scott Juster discussed how this changed his outlook to fellow players. So many of the discussions of Journey focus on what happened with their companions, be it Jamie Love’s and Brendan Keogh’s reviews or the collection at Medium Difficulty and the Journey Stories Tumblr.

We shall post a discussion of our own Journeys on a future night.

Image credit: Promotional screenshot from thatgamecompany.

Quick Review: Tokyo Vice by Jake Adelstein

This was an interesting book that changed its character over time. Adelstein managed the comparatively rare feat of becoming a Western reporter working directly for a Japanese newspaper. The start of the book focuses broadly on workplace culture, the police beat and policing practices, and crime in Japan. The latter is actually fairly rare even though laws against the native organized crime outfits, called Yakuza, were so weak that membership was printed on business cards. Similarly, as Adelstein got more on the vice beat, he’d realized the extent to which human trafficking can be difficult to crack down on because the system’s first priority would often be to punish the victims for immigration violations.

The latter half of the book gets seedier, focusing on a few stories and reflecting the costs of the vice beat of the years. Adelstein broke a huge scoop about a Yakuza boss (and confederates) that was given priority treatment for a liver transplant at UCLA. As an interesting side note for a longtime Washington Post reader, John Pomfret, experienced Asia hand, actually played an admirable key part in helping Adelstein get the story out. The book unflinchingly documents the cost of getting that story, although the individual passages tend to be less connected and I often lost track of time in the back part of the book, perhaps because Adelstein was no longer embedded in the structure of his paper and seemed to be slipping away from his family.

The seediest places we actually saw in Japan were in Tokyo’s Akihabara Electric Town, not the sort of thing that even gets a cursory mention in this book. This is to be expected; in most any developed and safe country, investigative reporters can and should find the gaps and weaknesses that the ordinary person doesn’t encounter unless they are hard up for a loan or try their luck at an overseas job offer or the like. That said, I think the extremes can be useful to read about as they do tell you something about the country; for example just today in the Washington Post there was a story by Petula Dvorak about visiting a free medical clinic that got 1,500 attendees in Southwestern Virginia, a region that’s economy had been reliant on diminishing coal jobs. Those coming out, sometimes camping overnight, would be covered by Medicare were it not for sadists in the Virginia legislature who are among dozens of states rejecting the expansion that comes with the Affordable Care Act. While the magnitude varies greatly, there’s systemic cruelties in every country. However, understanding them, and the larger culture they reflect, requires the sort of solid reporting Adelstein manages.

To end on a lighter note, how do visitors to Japan, and indeed everyday citizens, interact with the police? Based on our experience, the answer is traffic management and police boxes, called Kōban. Between the two, we saw police out on foot a lot more than we do in a typical American city. The Kōban are particularly great because they’re also there to go to when you need help or directions, as most tourist guides will mention. We didn’t end up needing that service, but it shows the advantages of integrating police more into the community rather than having them patrol on cars.

Image credit: We had taken the Kōban picture, but the picture of the book is a promotional image from Japan Subculture, the site for which Adelstein is chief editor.

No posts tonight or probably tomorrow

I need to take a brief leave, but hopefully will be able to resume by this weekend.

Interrupting Review: Legend of Korra: Book of Change, Episodes 1-3

We’ve enjoyed both prior seasons of Legend of Korra, although they both had weaknesses in their endings. That seemed in part driven by taking on a bit too much and then not being able to rely on finishing them in subsequent seasons. There also tends to be a turn towards fewer shades of gray in the endings than the start.

So far this season has done fairly well on two fronts. First, it has been reincorporating often antagonistic characters and forces from prior seasons or shows as part of the new status quo. I’d actually like even more of that, but there’s been a great start so far. Second, the characters face problems that resist easy solutions for sensible reasons. This will probably prove even more true as they try to take on Ba Sing Se, a corrupt, oppressively unequal monarchy that seems to be in a position roughly comparable to China at the end of the Qing Dynasty.

One somewhat costly change is that they’re no longer posting full episodes on the website fully after broadcast. We missed the show times, so I did end up buying the first three episodes in HD at about $3 each. I’m okay with that, although I’m a bit annoyed that they took a few weeks to put them up. If they’re going to charge, please at least let us catch up to the where the show is now.

Okayama Kōraku-en garden 2014-05-28

Japanese tourism promotions like to work in threes. Miyajima is one of the three great scenic spots in all of Japan, along with Matsushima which we would visit far later in the trip, and one more which we did not visit. The town of Okayama, meanwhile, has one of the three great landscape gardens of Japan, Okayama Kōraku-en, and conveniently was right on the way to Kyoto. We ended up scheduling things a bit tightly, although my mother helped make sure we had a bit more time than we may first have planned.

The station itself was a bit challenging, as we ended up having to split our luggage across multiple locker locations. Thankfully, Japan is saner than the U.S. on this front, so station lockers are easily available. However, they are still fairly costly and the time picking up our luggage on the way back our nearly made us miss the train. Thankfully, at least the bus ride to and from the garden was quite pleasing and we got to see some of Okayama’s trams on the way. We had to pause for a moment while negotiating lunch and figuring out which bus to take back. However, once we were inside the garden proper it was easy to see how it earned its reputation.

The crow castle on the horizon to the left of the picture is not part of the garden, and the best views of it cost a separate admission, but even for the frugal it provides an atmospheric backdrop. The proximity to the castle is not coincidental, as Kōraku-en had been the garden of the daimyo (local lord) until it was opened to the public in 1884. While the view from the castle is no doubt impressive, the garden has its own mound that we proceeded to next that offered a look down at the pond and the inaccessible island buildings.

On the way down from the mound, Moti and Francis encountered a cat. Feline wanderers were not uncommon on the trip, but I don’t think we encountered them that much more frequently than we would in the U.S. This is perhaps slightly surprising, as cats are definitely a favored animal and well represented in souvenirs and anime characters. This particular sunbather looked fairly well fed, but I wouldn’t venture to guess whether it was actually a pet or was just well-treated by gardeners and visitors.

If you want a full view of the garden, you’ll have to come back once we have the slideshow attached to it; there’s too much there to summarize even in a long post. We’re definitely fans of both Japanese and Chinese gardens. we saw three to five of each on our last trip to the Pacific Northwest, so we weren’t caught by surprise by classic elements like teahouses and zig-zag bridges. However, what did surprise me was finding a building with a stone-strewn stream running through it. It was quite a meditative place to sit with one’s shoes off and I’ve never seen the like before or since.

We split up some throughout the journey. My mother actually went at a slightly faster pace and was rewarded with a closer look at the cranes kept in a large enclosure at one end of the garden. The rest of us did more swift dawdling, taking the time to buy teahouse snacks for later consumption aboard the train later and then looping through the agrarian fields and forests of the garden.

This was actually the second time we’d seen such plantings in a garden in Japan, but they were still rather surprising based on our past experience with such gardens in the United States.The forests were arboretum worthy and showed remarkable color even in the summer. In this case, I believe the well known kaede, red maples, was the source. However, throughout the trip we saw a bit more color than we expected for the season. Classically speaking, I slightly prefer Chinese gardens to Japanese because such fancies as large rocks and elaborate courtyards appeal to me. This visit changed my mind to an extent. I still am quite in love with the Summer Palace park in Beijing, but Okayama has definitely made it into my top list of gardens. Fortunately, as an American, I can pick a top ten rather than needing to limit myself to three.

Update: Minor typological fixes.

Transit Blogging: Hyperdia: emperor of route finders

After we finished at the Hiroshima Peace Museum we explored the city a bit more while Moti and Francis finished their visit. The next step our trip was Kyoto, but during research during brief down periods, I’d discovered that our initial scenic plan along the Sea of Japan just wasn’t going to work. While the Japanese rail system is amazing and extensive, it sensibly isn’t high all speed rail, particularly when crossing from one coast of the country to the other. As a result, there were a few different points along the trip where our desire to check out interesting routes was foiled as we realized that the train trip alone would take an all day commitment.

Thankfully, there is HyperDia.com which, while not primarily a mapping tool, is far and away the best route planner I’ve had the pleasure of using. For example here’s the search we used to get to our next destination, a stopover in Okayama on the way to Kyoto.

The output format is fairly straightforward and familiar. The strength is really found in the speed and stability combined with a wisely designed interface. It isn’t without flaws - use of the back button rather than scrolling down to the bottom will result in you having to regularly re-input parameters - but I found it a stalwart companion throughout the trip and only once did it not cover all the modes of interest.

There are a few different aspects that makes the interface so convenient:

• The English interface is top notch and in no way feels like a neglected variant of the main Japanese page.
• The destination completion works well. Try it out and just type in a few Japanese cities you know and you’ll quickly see a range of options.
• The option to set up to three pass through cities makes it easy to try out scenic trips and experiment with brief stopovers. The only flaw there for tourists is that it doesn’t do loop trips; you can’t have the same destination twice on the list.
• The check boxes make it easy to customize your choices. For the average JR Pass rider, you’ll probably want to click off the Nozomi and other top-tier Shinkansen, as they aren’t covered. More fine tuning is also allowable, but in most cases for inter-city travel, the first few options will just be JR anyways so you don’t need to worry about it.

This doesn’t mean that you don’t want a companion book or the like; we certainly recommend Japan by Rail although most any reliable guide should mention station names. Hyperdia isn’t meant to be the Amtrak Interactive Rail Atlas or the like; you’ll still have to figure out where you want to go and what you want to see on your own. But once you have a couple possibilities worked out, it’s easy enough to experiment with a range of ways of running your trip. To be fair to the American sites, Hyperdia is such an amazing tool because it works with such an fantastic infrastructure backbone. The trains stick to their timetables and three-minute transfers are both achievable and not catastrophic in the event of a failure. The sprawling stations do have consistent numbering systems that are reported through the trip planner. Best of all, most anywhere you want to go, you can get there by train, possibly with a bit of help from a bus for intra-city travel or when going off the beaten path.

Hiroshima Peace Museum: Main Building 2014-05-28

Content warning: The main museum gets most directly into the consequences of the bombing of Hiroshima, beyond even what is shown in the East building.

Walking through corridors showing the damage done to Hiroshima to property and to people, I certainly felt a moral imperative that these weapons never be used again. However, how is it that nuclear weapons have only been used twice in battle? I believe deterrence and mutually assured destruction is part of the story, but a key related concept is what Thomas Schelling calls the nuclear taboo. At first the escalation to nuclear weapons was seen as more of a continuation of existing policy than a radical break during WWII, and President Eisenhower made nuclear first use a policy in the event of a conventional Soviet invasion of Europe. However, by 1964 President Johnson declared “Make no mistake, there is no such thing as a conventional nuclear weapon. For 19 peril-filled years no nation has loosed the atom against another. To do so now is a political decision of the highest order.” This reflected earlier decisions not to deploy them in Korea and subsequent avoidance by the U.S. in Vietnam, by Israel against Egypt in 1973, and by the Soviets in Afghanistan. Nina Tattenwald discusses the origin of the taboo (summary by Patrick Lam) and the main building passionately and decisively makes the case that this taboo must be maintained whether you believe in full abolition or that they’ve contributed to the decline in great power war.

The displays (excerpted online) covered the multitude of ways that nuclear weapons can visit destruction upon cities: the rays of heat, the blast itself, the conflagration of flammable materials, and of course the radiation. The picture on the left shows a portion of the facade of a bank where someone was sitting at 8:15 that morning, likely waiting for it to open. Given the location, the person died on the spot, the stone around them was blasted white while the steps underneath them left the remnant of their “shadow” in the middle of the picture.

The mangled remains of the city, stone, wood, and steel filled many of the displays showing the widespread extent of the damage from a single nuclear bomb with a small yield by today’s standards. The museum did its best to mark where each piece came from within the blast zone. The details filled out the almost incomprehensible damage shown in the photographs and the detailed model on the right. One piece I don’t have the heart to include in the display was the shredded remnants of the school uniforms of children who died in the bombing or the days thereafter (let alone the photographs of the burned bodies directly afflicted). Some had been evacuated to the country but others were conscripted to create firebreaks and in anticipation of conventional bombing.

Death and devastation can come in many forms. As I’ve earlier mentioned, more people died from a single raid in the firebombing of Tokyo; however, that raid involved 334 B-29s with 279 dropping bombs. By comparison, the Enola Gay flew with only two other planes, suggesting a terrible potential to scale that was achieved by both sides in the Cold War. This is also where the radiation comes in, as experienced by many of the hibakusha, the survivors of the atomic bombs. Sadako Sasaki, who helped inspire the Children’s War Memorial, had been two at the time of the bombing but died years later of leukemia despite having been quite healthy in the interim. The picture on the right are some of the cranes she folded; you may have read or heard of her story when you were a child.

The remainder of the museum focused on the stories of survivors, the rescue and recovery efforts, and even pictures drawn by those who were there. This was complemented by prayers and wishes for peace from around the world and a view out to the rest of the park. Based on the wikipedia page, one million people visit the museum a year. I hope, in addition to whatever else we do to make this a better world, we all work to keep this taboo from fading.

Hiroshima Peace Museum: East Building (Pt. 2) 2014-05-28

The first floor of the museum continued to show a variety of consequences of the bombing, but I’d like to focus on the letters that make up the wall undergirding the model of the A-Bomb Dome. They are written on behalf of the people of Hiroshima to protest every nuclear weapons test. The letters continue until present day and are primarily not driven by states like North Korea, but instead are by ongoing sub-critical tests by Russia, China, and the United States. Such test produce no yield of fissile material and are allowed under the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. However, while such tests are safer than other forms of testing, the city government objects to their intent as it seeks nuclear disarmament. I’d be interesting in discussing those issues in further depth at some point, although it was not my international relations focus and at my think tank (who I continue not to write on behalf of) the topic is handled by a different program. However, suffice to say, the topic is not a flight of fancy. The arsenals of the U.S. and the former Soviet Union have shrunk dramatically and there are any number of steps that disarmament advocates call for, such as de-alert weapons or ruling out first use, short of total abolition.

The second level dealt with Hiroshima under Allied occupation, specifically British Commonwealth forces in this city’s case. This is a topic I am somewhat familiar with, although it has been several years since I read Embracing Defeat. The exhibit focused on the ramifications of the bombing, from the Red Cross hospital where survivors were treated on the left, to the U.S. government studies of the effects of radiation poisoning that at times prioritized secrecy of treatment of the afflicted. Particularly hard-hitting for us, due to my Mom’s prior work at the United States Information Agency (not extant at the time), was the discussion of censorship on reporting of the extent of the damage to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Restrictions imposed after the outbreak of the Korean War also prevented public gatherings including the 1950 peace festival, although the mayor did travel abroad to speak on the topic in France. The occupations of Japan and Germany are widely viewed as the best examples of the potential of rebuilding an enemy after a war. I still agree with that assessment, although I think there are many factors that resulted it in not being an applicable model elsewhere and it’s important to remember that even after the war ended there remained policies that put security concerns above ethical ones.

Finally, the top floor focused on the current state of nuclear weapons in the world, with the globe on the right showing declared stockpiles. I found this part to be informative and well-argued. I also particularly appreciated the sheer number of languages offered in the digital displays. That said, there’s a few other books I’ll be ordering and a few debates I wish to watch before I write in greater detail on these topics. The next portion was the museum shop, from which we acquired a good number of bilingual children’s books on the Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes and other materials before proceeding to the second building. That one was rawer now that the the context has been established, and included more artifacts. It reminded both Moti and myself of nothing so much as the Holocaust Museum, both in content and caliber. I am yet unsure if I can do it justice in this format. I may continue on with the trip in the next post and save any further discussion for writing that is not travelogue.

To end on a slightly more hopeful note, I do want to emphasize the extent to which the de-escalation and then end of the Cold War has dramatically reduced the global stock of nuclear weapons. This should not encourage complacency; North Korea has gone nuclear and even now the world powers are in talks to reach a deal with Iran to prevent further proliferation in the Middle East. But if anyone tells you that the world is scarier now than it was at the height of the Cold War, they are trying to sell you something or just don’t know what they’re talking about. The progress we’ve made on preventing the annihilation of the human race is vital, and some credit must go to those who have made it their lives’ work to convince leaders and peoples of the world that these weapons must be constrained.

Hiroshima Peace Museum: East Building (Pt. 1) 2014-05-28

Some years ago, in my home town of Washington, D.C., the Air and Space Museum had an exhibit about the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. I believe I went through it, but I may just be conflating pictures of the plane with past trips to the museum in my ever fallible memory. Regardless, that exhibit unsuccessfully sought to avoid controversy by focusing on the technical aspects and avoiding politics and context. Worse yet are museums that actively distort the past for propagandistic purposes. By comparison, the Peace Museum takes an extremely challenging topic and addresses it in a forthright and informative matter.

The initial section gives the history of Hiroshima leading into the Second World War. Hiroshima was a garrison city a staging area for troops in various wars, one of the centers for emigrants from annexed Korea, and an industrial town with a significant reliance on mobilized students and forced labor. The panel on the right discusses the invasion of China: “Early in the War with China, the Japanese Army occupied many Chinese cities. In December 1937, it took the capital city, then called Nanking. The occupation of this important city cheered the Japanese people, who considered the war in China a holy crusade. Hiroshima’s residents celebrated with a lantern parade. In Nanking, however, Chinese people were being massacred by the Japanese army.” It goes on to briefly discuss varied estimates of the death toll. Wartime atrocities are not the subject of the museum - for that there is the Kyoto Museum for World Peace - but it squarely addresses the context of the bombing before making the hard case against it.

After reviewing the history, the museum proceeds to the actual attack. There are any number of artifacts, although the greater detail is held for the second building and a future post. On your left is a pocket watch donated by Akito Kawagoe, stopped at the exact moment of the bombing. The discussion of the decisions of the U.S. government does not rely on hyperbole. Instead it presents key memos and minutes from the debates, showing various competing views. As is somewhat widely known, the old capital Kyoto was also considered as a possible target. However, its selection was vehemently opposed by Japan experts within the U.S. government as a sacrilege which would destroy any hope of future peace with Japan. The museum did not specifically argue that there was a clear course that would have achieved peace without the use of the bomb, but did highlight that possible concessions, such as allowing the continuation of the imperial system as the occupying forces did anyways, were not deeply explored before the attack.

 

The destruction of the bombing was shown in multiple forms, including the two models above. One related point mentioned by the museum, but not an area of primary focus, was that the firebombing of Tokyo and not the bombing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki is widely cited as the source of the largest casualty count from a single air raid. The horrifying specter of nuclear war is not just the enormity of the individual bombings, but that the threat can scale up in a way that more air force-intensive operations could not. This relative continuity in death toll is perhaps one of the reasons why the specific morality of the atomic bomb was not as hotly debated. In many ways it was a continuation of existing policy by other means. However, the questions raised there require research beyond the scope of this post.

No post yesterday

Sorry about that. I had a medical appointment and was feeling a little wiped out. Although that may have just been biking up to Georgetown in the summer.

I’m also deciding if I want to put all of the Peace Museum posts sequentially, probably two to three of them are coming and they’ll be a bit heavy, as you’d expect. If you have any thoughts on that question, weigh in via comments.

Our last morning at Peace Memorial Park 2014-05-28

The entire group wanted to spend time at the museum, but Kate, my mother, and I decided to get up earlier and attend the daily carillon ringing at Peace Memorial Park one last time. The chimes toll electronically, with a slight background buzz, but I’m still moved every time I hear it.

When approaching the carillon, we passed by a large number of students, respectfully gathered at the Children’s Peace Memorial. They presumably were there with similar intent when it came to timing. Moti was not with us, so I could not tell you what exactly was said, but the sentiment was unmistakable.

We then walked to the west side of the island, which we had not yet explored. It was perhaps the portion in which the weight of history was felt most heavily as it included the Atomic Bomb Memorial Mound which sat over a vault holding the unclaimed remains of many of the victims of the bombing.

Further south is a monument specifically to the Korean victims of the attack. It estimated their number at twenty thousand, about ten percent of the dead. [The total casualty count estimated by the memorial is higher than most other sources, but the estimate of the number of Korean dead is in line with what I’ve seen elsewhere]. Japan occupied Korea well before the U.S. had entered the second World War and the garrison city of Hiroshima had a population that were soldiers, mobilized students, and ordinary civilians. Later in the trip, at the Osaka Human Rights museum, I got to see video of other Koreans, then residing in Japan, celebrating the end of the war and as one might expect very glad to see the end of the occupation of their nation. The placement of this memorial on the main island is actually a relatively recent change, one that happened only within the past few decades. I’m very glad that it did.

Update: Fixed the date in the title and add a note on the casualties.

Transit Blogging: Hiroshima

With my family’s longstanding advocacy on behalf of Maryland’s prospective Purple Line, we check out light rail most anywhere we travel. An interesting thing about trams and streetcars, at least in cities that have had them for some time like Hiroshima, is that there is a huge variety vehicles in service. I’m sure there are multiple factors at work, but one big one is that many cities abandoned their surface rail networks in the latter half of the twentieth century. As a result of that, and the standardized gauge, many cars seem to have shuffled around the world to various cities and transit museums.

This is not to say that the city doesn’t have a range of shiny new cars. There were several varieties about, including an underground line I visited on our last day there, after finally going to the Peace Museum. The underground line thankfully had a machine to get a Paspy, the local smart card. As I believe I’ve earlier mentioned, the trick to getting these cards is to look for machines labeled IC, probably for intelligent chip or the like. The best strategy is typically to just find the card when arriving in the station, a task that has grown much easier than it once was. Just a few years back, finding cards normally involved hunting down an authorized retailer or one of a small number of valid distribution points. As you would expect, things vary greatly from city to city, but I think that smart chip cards have just gotten cheaper and more widely available, so distribution has gotten more convenient.

For me, the trams really epitomized the city’s charm and resilience. They were running again at an astonishing pace after the atomic bombing and even with a wide range of types of cars they manage to provide service with remarkable regularity. If you missed one, there always seemed to be a new car just down the line. The interiors were often crowded, but the riders were courteous and sometimes the cars themselves were full of whimsy such as the art contest winners depicted on the right. The friendly and welcoming nature ultimately comes from the city and its people; the infrastructure just reflects and reinforces it. But the enjoyment of the place’s vibe was common throughout the group. Francis was pleased to discover that one of Hiroshima’s sister cities was Montreal. I can see it.

Happy Independence Day

Regular posting to resume this weekend.

Itsukushima Shrine and Evening in Miyajima 2014-05-27

After reaching the base of the mountain we bid a fond adieu to Toshi. Our next priority was clear: food. Fortunately, like popular tourist spots everywhere, there was a town happy to ply wares to satiate our hunger. In a precursor for the remainder of the trip, there were also vast crowds of students. This appeared to be field trip season and Moti told us that the volume was far greater than he was really used to. While the picture-taking was sometimes more challenging as a result, sharing the sights with the Japanese students was a consistently enjoyable experience and the times later in the trip where we interacted were all the more so.

My mother then took a break to sit by the coast, write postcards, and be accosted by deer as the rest of us went on to Itsukushima Shrine. I managed to make a cultural faux pas on the way in by sitting at the edge of the stone basin used for washing one’s hands on entry. That said, they still let me in and we were able to wander the orange painted halls of the complex. When the tide is up, the wooden floors would be consistently surrounded by water, but at this hour we could clearly see the flood plains.

In a touch of home, the muddy earth also was home to tiny crabs. Not the sort we normally see (and eat) in Maryland but a smaller type that reminded me of the burrowing crabs of the west coast of Florida. I wasn’t aware of such a phenomenon and may have to check out their place in Japanese myth. The rest of the shrine was a bit more familiar. There was a stage for Noh theater, miko (shrine maidens) selling incense and charms, and places to leave prayers behind or to get your fortune read.

Many of those elements can also be found at Buddhist temples, which made it challenging when I quizzed my mother later on identifying whether a place of worship was a temple or shrine. I primarily learned the difference thanks to my 2002 cultural arts class. The easiest way to tell typically is that the presence of Torii gateway, like the famous one on the left, indicates Shintoism and thus shrines. There’s any number of other signifiers, from the color orange to hanging paper, that also are good clues, but the Torii are the most reliable. That said, there are times when small shrines can be found in temples so sometimes you just have to read shrines and books to be sure.

After touring the Shrine we went on to a tasty meal, primarily consisting of the local specialty: anago (salt-water eel). I enjoyed it, although my favorite is still unagi (fresh-water eel). That said, when I was checking the wikipedia pages to get the words right, I saw that there are apparently real sustainability concerns around unagi, so I should probably make that a rarer treat.

After dinner we road the ferry back to the mainland and then took the train back to Hiroshima for our last night in the city.

Descending Mount Misen by Ropeway

Our next destination was clearly in view from the summit. That building in the middle-left of the picture is the upper terminus of a hanging cable car system. As the picture also shows, it’s a bit of a distance from the summit, with a few ups and downs in between. We could have hiked the whole way down, but we were getting hungry for something more substantial and my mother was hardly the only one that was getting rather tired.

This particular journey was not covered by our JR passes, but we were happy to pay. The trip actually came in two parts. The first in a larger car that could hold more than a dozen people. Ours reasonably had another group with us, but that didn’t prevent appreciation of a slightly closer view down to the water below.

The next stage was a transfer to smaller, more numerous cars on a steady loop. This made for easier photographs and Miyajima was no less scenic as we returned to sea level, even if the shrine itself was not necessarily on full view along the route. The legend of Itsukushima Shrine is that is that a crow led three goddesses to the site. Given the aerial views, it isn’t hard to see what that legendary guide saw in the place.

The base, as you’d expect, was not as fascinating as the peak. There was a koi pond and other adornments around, but it was actually the sign on the left that most left me charmed. I don’t make a habit of posting signs with unusual English as I’m dreadfully monolingual despite a fair number of classes in a smattering of languages. However, sometimes another’s spin on your native tongue has a special appeal.

Geo-tagging and Flickr related delays

The first trip I rigorously photoblogged was my tour of China in 2007. Back then, as now, Flickr offered a rather good deal on storage and had some helpful online tools. For reasons I do not understand, perhaps relating to the increasing size of photos or mismanagement by Yahoo, uploading to Flickr has gotten steadily harder over the years. Back in 2013, I was regularly stymied when trying to upload photos from my trip to attend Guy’s funeral. The Uploadr tool, since deprecated, would inexplicably leave out some of those photos and consulting with technical support did me little good. I’ve tried using Flickr’s new website uploading tool and found it to be slow and quirky. It simply failed to register many of my Picasa tagged photos until I’d given it ten to twenty minutes to finish processing the photos. I’m going to try a few third party apps like jUploader and slow updating for now, but at this point I’m largely sticking with Flickr for legacy reasons. If I ever get around to swapping my site to Wordpress I may find a new photo hosting solution as well.

Happily, the geo-tagging delays were playing with a new toy and not a frustrating attempt to reproduce what once was simple. On the left, you can see our first morning in Tokyo mapped out in Google Earth. Our new camera has wifi abilities and could grab geo-tags off another source, but I have not yet linked them up or worked out whether it could get these tags from my phone without draining the battery. Once I’m further along in blogging I will try to figure that out and may pick a dedicated wifi geotagger if need-be. This effort is worth it to me because I take far too many pictures (between my mother’s camera and ours we took some 9,200) and actually sorting through them and tagging them to make them usefully findable in the future is no small project. In essence, the photos regularly serve as my trip notes. Many of the more banal images are there just because of some cross-cultural or geographic detail that I wanted to remember. However, if I at least know where the photos are from, deriving many of the tags should be much easier as should jogging my memory.

The Picasa geo-tagger works with Google Earth, allowing you to do text based searching or visual scanning of the 3D map in order to find where your photo was taken.  The interface can be a little rough, you notably you cannot change the size of that tiny little window in the lower right to give you more of a photo to work with. Similarly, while you can control the number of photos being tagged on the Picasa end, you cannot shift-select once you’re in Google Earth. Tagging one or tagging all our your only option. Finally, I had a bit of false hope based on the fact that the size of the focus reticule, seen in the upper left of that picture, stays the same size at variable level of zoom. My initial naive take was that if you tagged from a greater zoom, it may somehow track that, perhaps in an error measure or just by rounding off the latitude and longitude to avoid false precision. That is not the case, so I’ll have to consult my friendly neighborhood esteemed information scientist about geo-tagging best practices.

The climb up Mount Misen

Mount Misen is the highest peak on Itsukushima at 534 meters and despite having been here in 2002 was the first time I’ve climbed one of Japan’s many dark green summits. We choose the Daoshi-In route up which goes by a historic hill temple. Based on one of the pictures outside, it looks as if the trail could once have passed through the temple, but now it’s just an interesting side-trip requiring some doubling back. We spread out a bit, depending on how much time people wanted to spend looking around versus spending on the ascent.

On the way back we could see that people were now walking all the way up to Miyajima’s famed Torii gate as the tide continued to recede. The view points back were not that common, but they made welcome rest stops on a fairly steep, albeit typically paved, path all the more satisfying. There were some deer scattered throughout the journey, but they weren’t as common as in the densely visited  areas and were beaten by a tiny blue-tailed lizard for role of my favorite animal of the walk. We encountered perhaps a dozen other travelers on the way, including one musician, but by and large we had space we needed to commune with the beautiful surroundings.

We had regrouped, including meeting up again with Toshi, by the time we reached the end of the Daoshi-In trail. There was much discussion about whether to make it all the way to the top. Remarkably, the musician, a bugler, who had passed us earlier made it all the way to the peak of a nearby mountain and practiced his craft for all to hear. He’s a speck near the top of the rock-face  in the picture on the right. The choice to play Taps within his set was taken as perhaps an ill omen, but nonetheless we made it to the temple near the peak. That place had more tourists, many of whom likely took the ropeway up. It also sold  drinks even there was neither food nor a cafe as I’d misread in the guidebook.

We decided to press on to the very peak, which did have a multilevel viewing stand that made the climb all the more rewarding. The view on the left includes some of the islands of Hiroshima Bay and also the lesser peak that would be the our next destination. I reached the summit first, in part by miscommunication, but I made it back quickly and stayed with the bags as everyone else made the final trek. All-and-all I do recommend the trip; I’d just say to be sure to pack a lunch and to understand that the journey may take a fair portion of your day.

The journey to Miyajima 2014-05-27

The trip to Miyajima from Hiroshima is quite straightforward. If you have a JR Pass, just grab the train to Ono and ride the ferry over to the island. Both are covered. There’s also a tram line that runs parallel which may well be cheaper for non pass-holders. However, it’s a good thing we took the train as it meant we met Toshi, our on-and-off companion for the day. He noticed Moti was actually reading the Japanese on the platypus-labeled signs that told tourists how many stops until they had to get off (why a platypus? short answer: Japan loves cute things; longer answer: the platypus is the mascot of JR West and also appears on their smartcards). Toshi is a civil engineer who works in Germany but was making a trip back home on vacation.

Between my leaving my pass at home and earlier trip to the park, we hadn’t made it out in time to see the Itsukushima Shrine’s fabled torii gate at the high tide, when it appears most to be floating in the water. On the day we visited, that happened around 8 am and low tide struck at 2 pm. When the tide is entirely out, the gate is fully accessible by land and the floodplain around the shrine is similarly dry. Nonetheless, even in the middle stages, the gate is a sight to see and the deer are almost as prevalent as they are at Nara. We didn’t make that site of legendarily large wooden temples and bowing deer trip, although I still have fond memories of it from my 2002 excursion.

In the morning, we did not actually stop in the shrine, although we did take our time to look at the torii gate while the water was still in. The architecture does do a beautiful job of accenting the natural beauty of the bay and the mainland and island mountains. While we did look around the town, it was primarily a waypoint on our journey to the base of Mt. Misen. That hike would take us most of the day and is the subject of the next post.

Our first return to Peace Memorial Park 2014-05-27

There is a Peace Clock Tower at the north end of the park, one built by Seiko with atop a triangular tower with a twist at the bottom and a ball at the top. It plays at 8:15 AM every day and my mother set out early to make sure that we heard it and to give her a chance to see some of what she missed the prior night. Nearby is classical large temple bell etched with a map of the world and an atomic symbol. The prior night I had tapped it with a ring to hear a tone but when the park opened at 8:30 one of the staffers released the clapper for visitors to use. I have a video of my mother tolling the bell, but in the video depicting my effort I’m taking a bit of time, contemplative and pensive, and the ring of the peace bell can’t be heard by a larger audience. There’s a troubling metaphor here with my international relations work, that is sufficiently on the nose that I will not further explain it.

To the south of the clock tower and bell, there’s the Children’s Peace Monument, dedicated to all the children who died in the bombing with a statue inspired by Sadako Sasaki, a girl who later died of leukemia brought on by radiation exposure. The booths to the back of the picture are filled with strings of paper cranes as well as artwork with the cranes as a medium. Sasaki had attempted to fold the cranes near the end of her life in keeping with a legend about 1,000 cranes granting a wish. The effort behind that gesture and the sentiment that underlies it left me awed.

My mother and I then explored a bit further and then headed to the intersection of two major tram-lines to meet with the rest of our group. I went off to pick up a convenience store breakfast for the both of us and realized that I’d left my passport and rail pass in the hotel room in my eagerness to make the sounding of the carillon. Thankfully, the regularity of the trolleys is such that I was able to rush back to the hotel room and rejoin the others in time to catch the train and subsequent ferry to Miyajima and a rather different sort of encounter with the spiritual.

Travelogue resumes tomorrow. Tonight, congratulations to the winners

Not all the races I’m watching are done yet, but from what’s known I’ll be happy to support Maryland’s (and specifically Montgomery and Howard’s) slate of Democratic candidates. This isn’t that surprising of a result to me, as most of the races had a lot of strong contenders and even many of the candidates that did not make the cut this year should be proud on a race well run.

I feel rather lucky to be alive in this period of Maryland history. There’s still a general election to win, but I think the theme for the next four years really has to be state-level execution. We’ve made some real strides, but the Silver Spring Transit Center and the first round of Health Care website problems show that we can sometimes mess ourselves up without needing much help from Republicans. We have a chance to be a hopeful example to a divided nation, but we have to bring our A-game. Let’s start by building the Purple Line now!

Japan travel blogging resumes tomorrow. Good night and good luck.

Travelogue interruption: MD primary endorsements and Vote411 plug

I’m rather happy with my choices this year. Maryland, my present home of Howard County, and my birthplace of Montgomery County have all been well governed for the past few years. There’s been a exception or two, mostly notably the health care website, but it seems like that’s under control now.

So, if you have any races you still need information on, allow me to recommend Vote411.org. That has the candidates answers to pertinent questions for races at all levels of the ballot. That’s not just MD, check it out for any U.S. election (though obviously many elections have already happened or may not be tomorrow).

So, speaking strictly for myself, and not for my organizations or employer, and certainly not for the League which doesn’t do endorsements, here’s the Action Committee for Transit scorecard for Montgomery County and various statewide races (scroll to the second page for state government stuff). One of the candidates did object to the scoring, here’s a discussion by David Alpert of GGW on what goes into that sort of thing.

If you favor building the Purple Line, now, then please allow me to point you towards two County-Council-At-Large candidates in particular: George Leventhal and Hans Riemer. Both have been with us from the start and  push for the line even when inconvenient. As the ACT scorecard shows, the Purple Line has many friends in Montgomery and I’m grateful to all of them. However, I wanted to emphasize those two as I hear the at-large race is pretty competitive this year and I want to be sure they stick around.

Hope your election day experience is or was a good one and that turnout is high for an off-year.

Okonomiyaki, Hiroshima-style! 2014-05-26

Hiroshima loves okonomiyaki! How can I make such a bold statement about a city? Well, it has a three-story tall building full of okonomiyaki stands, Okonomimura, in the central business district. I think that qualifies, don’t you? Happily my wife Kate also loves okonomiyaki and the last time she had it was with our friend Coby in L.A. This is in large part my fault, as my diet restrictions on mammals and cephalopods runs right up against some favored ingredients in the cuisine.

The dish is a grilled one, typically prepared in front of the customer either at a common bar like the one in the picture to the right or at grills at the table. The word basically means grill what you like, so this isn’t really a cooking gimmick so much as intrinsic to the style. Ironically, the only available local option we know about in Howard County is premade, so I can’t get it without pork. All of the chosen ingredients are combined to form a pancake-style final product, although the Hiroshima style is a particularly large one, in part due to its inclusion of cabbage and noodles.

We picked a place by going up to the third floor, walking to the pack, and then sniffing. The back right place had a pleasant odor, and though almost all of the menu items contained pork, I was able to request a special order. Our noses served us well; our range of selections were all quite good and our server was quite the charmer. She already had a smattering of relevant English questions and worked with Moti to start to master follow-ups. She’d learn from him to go for “Where in Canada?” or the like after people named their country of origin and then tested it out on the other people at the table.

I don’t have the card handy at the moment, but I intend to specifically list the name and location of the place, as we’d all recommend it to anyone visiting the city. Kate continues to love okonomiyaki in all its forms, and I should perhaps just come up with a written Japanese explanation of my preferences. That said, we consistently had a fun time with later places that served it, and it’s popular throughout Kansai; don’t miss an opportunity even if you aren’t in Hiroshima.

Arriving at Hiroshima 2014-05-26

While I loved the entire trip, Hiroshima is what I cite as my favorite part. This was partially true because I had been to Kyoto, Osaka, and Tokyo in the past, so while still spectacular they were not as packed with discovery. Also, while Japan is a treasure trove of trains, Hiroshima is flush with trams, both of the single car streetcar and the two car long trolley variety. The short length is made up by volume, a mixture of classic cars like the one on the right to smooth curves of modern models. After completing our misty ride on the Sakura line from Osaka to Hiroshima, we rode one of those classic cars into the city center and then walked down to our hotel, the Tokoyu Bizfort.

My mother called it in for the night, and the rest of us walked down a covered promenade towards the river and the Peace Park. I’d seen such plazas on my past trip; they’re a natural outgrowth of large pedestrian-friendly cities that have an extended rainy season. We stopped for a chocolate snack at the Stick Sweets Factory before walking the rest of the way to the Peace Memorial Park.

The Park was once a busy downtown commercial and residential hub. In 1945 Hiroshima was a garrison city, but still an urban space in its own right. The nominal target of the atomic bomb was the Aioi bridge at one end of the island. The building Hiroshima is perhaps most known for, the A-Bomb dome, was the Hiroshima Prefectural Commercial Exhibition Hall, the closest building to survive the blast. We walked through the park as the sun went down.

The first Shinkansen 2014-05-26

The Japanese bullet trains, literally translated as new highways, began operations in 1964, coinciding with the Tokyo Olympics. Some of that difference with the history of the United States is of course driven by geography and the fact that it’s much easier to build straight rail in country forced to redevelop itself after bombing. Nonetheless, given the decay inflicted upon our cities by the interstates, I feel confident in saying that President Eisenhower should have gone with trains, at least on the North-East corridor and the like.

Our journey south had two legs; the longer stretch was between Tokyo and Osaka. The picture on the left is of the more rural end of the spectrum of what we were seeing. Cities and towns were also regularly present at the foot of misty mountains. Prior to going to Japan we had picked up a deck-building board game called Trains with a Japanese theme. One of the features of the board was that plains were in light green and mountains were in dark green. After this section I understood why; vast hills were everywhere and from what we could see beneath the mists they seemed consistently below the tree line.

The stop in Shin-Osaka was fun for me, although we didn’t have time to leave the station. Shin-Osaka refers to the new Osaka station; the older central one couldn’t affordably be expanded to become a network hub and as a result you’ve got to catch a quick train to get between the two. General fans of technological wackiness should note that there’s an escalator that briefly turns flat in the middle. This was actually our second strange pedestrian aid of the trip. When we were transiting through Toronto they had a high speed moving walkway with foot-wide platforms moving at higher than usual speed, spreading out for most of the journey and scrunching together at the ends. I suppose the lesson there is just that inventors and designers think a lot about how to efficiently move people through hub stations.

Tsukiji fish market, Hama-Rijyu gardens, and leaving Tokyo for the first time

Our trip was skirting on Japan’s hot and wet summer, so our overall plan involved a journey from South to North with a bit of time in Tokyo at both ends. This ultimately worked out fairly well; we faced some days of persistent rain and all-encompassing fog, but the temperature was only a problem for the Kyoto stretch. However, since we were jetlagged and rising early anyways, we gave ourselves the morning off in Tokyo and went to see the Tsukiji fish market. As during my trip in 2002, we didn’t feel up for doing the 5:30 AM tuna auction. What we hadn’t realized was that under the current rules, if you don’t get one of the small number of slots for the auction then the commercial side of the market is closed to tourists until 9 a.m. No matter, we still got to see tuna being carted around, to dodge the ubiquitous mini-trucks with their conical front steering columns, and to have a lovely sushi breakfast.

The commercial district and small nearby shrine are fun, but it’s the right off the boat fish that’s the most appealing part of a morning market visit. That particular day, the chef was pushing a batch of oysters that was apparently the pick of the market not an hour before. We took that advice and were impressed; I’m not really an oyster person but trying something in top form is a great way to better understand the appeal.

After leaving breakfast (and procuring an octopus tea cup), we visited the fruit and vegetable market. There was a range of fascinating selections and it did help me understand the Japanese side of the constant trade battles regarding their restrictive agricultural  markets. Moti, who had worked with the JET program for a year in cherry-producing Yamagata, told us stories of getting vast numbers of cherries gratis because of small imperfections preventing their sale on the market. I’ve seen impressive fresh produce at U.S. farmers markets and fine grocery stories, and I’m no expert on these issues. However, the food we saw and the ate throughout the trip successfully cultivated a gourmand feel that is markedly different than the industrial agriculture portion of the U.S. market. It was also the first time I recall seeing wasabi in the raw and I was pleased to discover that the spice had a spiky covering to matched its flavor.

Wandering around the market itself was still remarkable if claustrophobic at times. The market itself may be moving before too long, a subject of some controversy, and seems to have a somewhat uneasy relationship with its status as a tourist destination.

We ended our Tokyo visit on a more relaxed and open note and visited nearby Hama-Rikyu gardens. One of many gardens once reserved for the ruling elite and now open to the general public, it has many elements you can find in Japanese gardens in North America but on a far greater scale. What could not have been anticipated by its original designers was the contrast of old and new, nature and city, of wooden plank bridges and skyscrapers. Such contrasts can certainly be found at Chicago’s Skyline Drive or New York’s Central Park, but the sheer density and continuous history of Japan makes such striking combinations the rule rather than the exceptions. After finishing that walk we returned to our hotel and caught our first Shinkansen to Hiroshima.

Recovering from Jetlag on our first night in Japan 2014-05-25

The ride into Tokyo takes an hour on the N'ex (Narita Airport Express). That fact, combined with the sexy streamlined N'ex engine you see on the right, confused me as I knew high speed rail should be able to travel the distance between even a far flung airport and its base city in a fraction of the time. The answer was quite straightforward, mere streamlining does not high speed rail make. The actual Shinkansen require far straighter track and have streamlined nose cones that are reminiscent of airplanes.

The countryside witnessed on the journey into Tokyo is not rural but does include rice paddies. As in China and Egypt there is no arable land to spare, in large part because of the widespread hills and mountains. As I understand it, the difference is that Japanese production is artisanal rather than subsistence. Japan is a net importer of rice but has particular standards when it comes to that staple and other crops.

When we arrived at Tokyo station, Moti took a moment to exploit the JR station provided free wifi and get a map for our hotel. That said, don’t necessarily rely on that trick, in part due to use of a range of bands, some of our phones often did not see or could not use any given wifi service. We did already have an address, but under the Japanese system, addresses refer to neighborhood and block numbers rather than position on the street. The numbers are sequential within the neighborhood, but there are no numerical avenues or grid-style positioning reference points. Thus, if you don’t have mobile internet access, it is best to have the closest transit stop with a map image handy for any locations not listed in a guidebook.

Fortunately, our hotel, the Mitsui Garden Hotel Shiodome Italia-ga, was labeled on the station map. The Italia-ga part of the name refers an Italian theme in the district as a whole, also reflected in the Italian restaurant in the hotel. That said, we favored cheaper fare for the night and went to one of the local convenience stores, a FamilyMart. The name convenience store does accurately describe the longer hours and range of products, but notably these stores offer a range of fresh pastries and food choices more in keeping with the prepared food section of a high-end grocery store than any counterpart in the U.S. What’s remarkable is that the prices are in line with conveniences stores in the U.S., the breakfast and snack items on the right were under ten dollars and will easily feed two. FamilyMart was Moti’s favorite variant, and indeed this one had a nice seating section and had a melon pastry (in the center top of the photo) that was a favorite of Kate throughout the trip.

We made an early night of it, to better handle the jet lag. The next morning, we would rise early to head over to Tsukiji, Tokyo’s famous fish market and the associated vegetable market. After that it was on to Hiroshima for the first leg of our trip.

Arrival in Tokyo 2014-05-25

The flight was smooth, although our plan to simultaneously watch Her on three different seat consoles didn't quite work out due to deficient headphones. My capsule review is that I thought it was effective both as a romantic film in its own right and a critique of the failure of many other AI-centric stories to incorporate the possibility of continued growth.

Upon arrival in Tokyo's Narita airport we united with our Canadian contingent, changed over some money, holding back because of a spike in the strength of the yen, and tra ded in our Japan Railways (JR) vouchers for full on JR passes. For those not familiar, the JR pass is a godsend for foreigners traveling between multiple cities in Japan. The very fastest four lines of the bullet trains, called Shinkansen, are off limits. However, a plethora of trains, including Shinkansen faster than anything in the U.S., traditional inter-city lines, and any number of local trains can be ridden for free. You'll still often wish to take the time to make a reservation for the longer hauls, but that similarly has no additional cost. The total charge is comparable to a single significant roundtrip ticket, so if you qualify and are train-savvy at all than its a can't miss deal that you've got to book ahead of time. If you're actively enthusiastic about trains, than I'd wholeheartedly endorse the Japan By Rail guide, version 3 of which has been one of our core references for this trip.

In continuing transit geekery, we then got Suica smartcards. Transit smartcards have proliferated since my first visit in 2002. The Suica belongs to JR East and is particularly fancy in that you can have your name printed on it. Different smartcards are issued by the various competing geographic divisions of the JR group, by department stores which sometimes have their own train lines, and by various regional cooperatives. As is becoming increasingly common, these smart cards can also hold money which can be used in local stores and the like. Given all the different systems, this could easily be a confusing mess. However, there is a fair amount of interoperability and cash registers and fare gates are labeled with the systems they'll accept. The biggest complicating factor is that it's tricky to have two in your wallet at once and getting a hold of one in the first place. Generally speaking, they're available at major stations if you find a machine that says 'IC.' Mercifully, a good percentage of the machines we've encountered so far have had a button for English.

With that out of the way, we were ready to ride into Tokyo on the Narita Airport Express. During my trip a dozen years ago I'd also flown in, though that time we'd then transferred to a flight to Kyoto. One of my first observations on that trip was that the escalator handrails were often blue. That had seemed like a fairly innocuous if curious distinction at the time as most every handrail I was familiar with back home was black. I later realized the reason, the flexible handrail material can easily get marked up and turn partially black with the combined residue from hands and machinery. I suspect it's easy to create an escalator with any color scheme you desire, but maintaining it will take real work. I suspect that's true of many of the modern wonders we'd see this trip; on-time trains and the like are not magic, they just require paying a lot of people to make sure it happens.

Review: The Last Days of Judas Iscariot; Forum Theater @ Silver Spring through 6/14

Judas is on the docket for the trial of the millennium in purgatory, catatonic with guilt and unable to speak in his own defense. Fortunately, he has a lawyer ready to take on figures from Mother Theresa to Lucifer himself. This courtroom drama is vulgar and philosophical, hard-hitting and comedic, and full of characters that are contradictory but unlike Judas are quite capable of speaking in their own defense.

That last point is one of my favored criteria for all fiction: a range of characters capable of full-throated defenses of their viewpoints that are forced by circumstance and dialogue to make the hard case for themselves. At no time is this more clear than back-to-back showstopper witnesses: High Priest of the Sanhedrin Caiaphas and Roman Governor Pontius Pilate.

All the more remarkable, the play does not rest on its characterization; the debates show a remarkable intellect and a firm grounding in actual history, to the limited degree that it is known. The playwright, Stephen Adly Guirgis, is happy to speculate, particularly when it comes to the asides and the characterization of St. Monica, who takes after her namesake boulevard. However, it maintains a broader relevance by favoring the report of the four Gospels when other sources are not available and avoiding reliance on any esoteric revelations. The play shows its commitment best when, in my opinion, the second most guilty character in it defends himself by noting that the very plausible case against is notably lacking in proof. The playwright achieves this wisdom the old fashioned way, by making heavy use of great writing that came before it, incisively choosing from and at times challenging well-loved writing on relevant topics rather than seeking to start from scratch.

I fear that that last paragraph understates the appeal, but worry not those with little interest in theology. This play has absolutely no interest in how many angels can dance on the head of the pin or what exactly communion means. And in the end, even questions of theodicy fall away as the strictly human implications of the debates move to the fore.

Finally, all of this would just be a book review were it not for the excellent direction by John Vreeke and performances by the cast. I’d normally prefer to go through and call out performances by name, but we’re presently in Japan and have not had much time to write and we wanted to post this in time for people to go see it. However, in doing a last Googling to finalize this piece, I did see that Frank Britton, who memorably played Pilate, was attacked and robbed after a cast party. His performance was one of the ones that exemplified all I’ve said above and our best wishes go with him. As for the rest of the cast, I enjoyed the actors and actresses that were new to me and it is quite exciting to see returning faces often playing very different roles. I’ll be renewing my subscription without hesitation after this show.

Book review: Nothing Left to Wish For

Nothing Left to Wish For is a swashbuckling tale in an unforgiving desert world. The story starts with sky pirate Esmeralda, Esme for short, leading a raid of a local potentate’s ship seeking a rumored treasure of immeasurable value. Protagonist as pirate isn’t that unusual, particularly nowadays, but the real reversal comes when she discovers the nature of the cargo, an effete young man who declares himself Sasha, the governor’s son and worth a prince’s ransom. Esme and Sasha face a range of dangers (which notably includes each other) as they both seek their freedom in a harsh world.

The world Andrew Schneider crafts is fantastical, but with a consistency that will appeal to fans of steampunk, space opera, and genres in between. The runes that power the flying ships are also used in weapons and enable the grafted arm Esme uses to captain ships and flying carpets and to give her an edge over her opposition. However, this shortcut often comes with a cost, as attested to by the lower level denizens of the flying cities, suffering from rune rot and ignored by the masses barely getting by in their own right.

How does nothing Left to Wish For stand out from the pack? The author is a friend, but even so I’d say there’s something more remarkable about it even in a genre where heroines and dying worlds are not uncommon. Esme isn’t coming of age; the dark story is suitable for young adults but stars a woman with some questionable choices, a broken engagement, and a few years already behind her. Such women may be common in comedies and romances, but are less frequently seen in adventures.

Nothing Left to Wish For is by turns exciting combat, treacherous ruins and adversaries, and exhilarating piloting. Esmeralda, and her interactions with those that she works with and against - often simultaneously - are quite memorable. She occupies a space between the rare archetypes of female hotshot and anti-heroine. If that appeals, but you want more of a sample of the writing and the world, check out the Noir prequel story: Cool with plenty of water. However, no pre-reading is necessary before taking the $3 plunge for at Apple, Barnes & Noble, Diesel, Kobo, or Smashwords.

Image of cover from AndrewGSchneider.com. Cover by Sarah Schanze.