[  Mood: Happy ]
[  Currently: Listening to Asobi Seksu ]
Like I mentioned yesterday, I’m going to be a grampa at 40. But I’m not 40 yet! Nossir, I have exactly one month to go from today. My birthday will be on Bastille Day. Viva la revolucion! or something like that.

So my darling Junko asked me what I want for my birthday, and I thought, hey, why not tell everyone? No, no, I’m not trying to get Revolution SF readers to give me presents. Seriously, I’m not. I do have family and friends who read this blog–for the rest, it’s more of a "life overseas" thing. That is, what does Superdave miss from back home? What, when the culture-shock blues hit (and yes, even after 12 years here, it happens now and then), gives Superdave comfort?

As Vincent Vega said before Butch Coolidge shot him to pieces as he was coming out of the toilet, "It’s the little differences." Mostly food-related. Every year, a few things we couldn’t used to get appear in stores here, but there’s still some crucial items that simply cannot be found. Friends and family will know that the first item on the list is sunflower seeds.

Now, I can buy sunflower seeds here. But they’re for baking, and they have no shells, and what’s the point of eating sunflower seeds without shells? I like sesame, too, but I’m not going to just pour a bag of sesame seeds into my mouth and start munching. No, the ritual of the sunflower seed involves a shallow dish balanced on my chest as I lay on the sofa, with a good book on my stomach and a glass of iced tea (preferably with a wedge of lime) in easy reach. I pour a few seeds into the dish, then, while reading, pop them in my mouth one by one, rolling them around to get the salt (or ranch-flavored powder, or BBQ, or whatever–anything but dill, yech) and cracking them delicately. Some people just chew them up and spit out the splintered remains of the shell, but I crack it into two hulls with my back teeth, fish out the seed with my tongue, and deposit the nearly intact shell into a growing pile on the dish, in a separate pile from the waiting seeds. When I really need to just chill out, this gives me hours of pure bliss.

Naturally, my favorite brand is David Sunflower Seeds, especially the low-salt kind, though other flavors are welcome for a change. Regular-sized bags are best–the economy-sized bags are too big, because half the seeds will go stale before I can eat them. I can nurse a regular bag for two or three weeks.

(And shout-out to my man Rich, who picked me up a couple bags on his recent trip home–thanks again, man!)

Next, something I ran across during my visit home in February: powdered energy-drink packets. Junko and I both love these. Our favorite is the Crystal Light On-the-Go Peach Tea flavor, though the Wild Strawberry is great too, and the Lipton Green Tea to Go with Mango flavor is pretty good. A box has ten little packets, each with just enough powder for a 1/2-liter bottle. Drinks in Japan are expensive, and these are way, way cheaper, and tastier than many drinks here too. Perfect for going to the gym. I bought four boxes, and I wish I’d bought more, because we’re almost out now.

A lot of other food that I usually ask for, like chili powder and gravy mix and the like, I don’t really need this year, because I bought so much of it in February. Maybe I’ll ask for that for Christmas. But I have finished off all my Jolly Ranchers and Strawberry Twizzlers, so I’m jonesing for more of those. I’m also craving Reeses Mini-Peanut-Butter Cups, but as we found out last year, you don’t want to send those in the summer. They will arrive inedible, especially if sent by surface.

Same goes for cheese, unfortunately. But even though cheese is pretty expensive here, it’s heavy; it’s still probably cheaper to buy it here than to ship it over, so that’s out anyway. And there are out-of-the-way gourmet shops that carry cheeses of all kinds here, if you know where to look.

As for non-foods, well, I’m pretty stocked up on Tylenol. I bought a couple of big jars, so that’ll last us more than two years, probably. But I’m tempted to start surreptitiously importing the stuff and selling it. Extra-Strength Tylenol is illegal here for some reason, and the Regular-Strength (300mg) is amazingly expensive. Let’s see, I figured it out once…the biggest box you can buy is 20 caps, which is something like 1800 yen, or $15. Stateside, I bought a 500-cap jar of 500mg caps for $8, which means Japanese Tylenol is about, um, 9,000% more expensive, if I’m doing my math right. I could be a drug lord here, selling it for half the local price. Until the Customs cops caught me, anyway.

I also have plenty of American deodorant. Japanese deodorant is getting a little better, but most brands still seem to work on the placebo principal. In any case, they do nothing for big, smelly Westerners. I bought more than a year’s worth of Arm & Hammer Ultra-Max Solid in Feb., and I heard that the local Costco has finally started carrying US armpit spray, anyway.

But I am nearly out of the very funky, sci-fi shaving cream I bought in the US. If I’d known how much I was going to like it, I’d have bought a couple extra cans. I tend to get lots of nicks on my throat when I shave, and this Gillette Complete Skin Care Multi Gel is better than anything I’ve found here. Combined with L’Oreal Men’s Expert ADS ComfortMax Anti-Irritation Aftershave Balm (man, these freakin’ names!), I have almost no shaving cuts now. I’m running low on both of them.

Hell, after all that, the companies should be sending me free samples. Um, other than that, I guess Amazon.com gift certificates are always welcome, and since they can just be emailed, there’s no shipping cost. I order a box of books from them about once every two months.

Anyway, for my close friends and family who would’ve been sending me presents anyway, the above is the kind of thing I would jump for joy to receive. For those of you who weren’t planning to send gifts, let me repeat: I’m not asking you to. This is for education purposes only.

EDIT: And a link to our very own Revolution SF Geek Gift Guide. It’s for Father’s Day, but that’s close enough.

[  Mood: Shocked ]
OK, for those of you just joining us, scroll down a little and take a look at the picture in the previous entry. That’s my daughter Sayumi and her boyfriend Shuuji. Last night, they took us out to dinner and told us they’re getting married, and that Sayumi is carrying a passenger, due to arrive in January. I’m about to gain a son-in-law and become a grandfather, at age 40.

Am I happy? Yes. Am I worried? Oh yes. But I’m more happy than worried. Shuuji’s a good guy, and they both seem to have good heads on their shoulders (aside from their apparent inability to handle birth control ). It’ll be a tough adjustment for everyone, but my life, especially since leaving Texas, has been nothing but one tough adjustment after another, so change doesn’t scare me. We’ll help them through it.

[  Mood: Happy ]
A couple weeks back, we took Sayumi and her boyfriend Shuuji out for dinner at an Okinawan place. Shuuji turns out to be a very nice, polite guy. He served out the food from the platters to everyone, and was fun to talk with. Excellent food–the goya pork was fantastic. Best thing about that was, the ladies mostly found it to be too bitter, so I got a bigger portion.

Once again I forgot my real camera, so you’ll have to be content with a blurry cell phone shot. That flower-bracelet/watch on Sayumi’s wrist is the present we gave her.

Sayumi surprised us by remembering Mother’s Day, and gave Junko some perfume that she’d bought at Walmart while we were in America back in February. I told her we still need to go shopping for her Christmas present: a notebook PC to take with her for her year in China, starting in September.

Dontaku is one of Fukuoka’s two big matsuri (festivals). There are three ways to tell Dontaku apart from Yamakasa:

Dontaku happens in the spring, during Golden Week, rather than in July.
It happens at a normal time of day, rather than kicking off at 4:59 am.
Everyone wears pants. Well, most people.

I realize I’m making Yamakasa sound more interesting–and, well, it is, but you’re going to have to wait for July before I tell you more. Hey, if you’re really curious about the lack-of-pants thing, google it. Warning: it’s the men who don’t wear pants. And many of them are very old.

OK, so Dontaku isn’t the big flashy dangerous pantsless event that Yamakasa is, but it’s fun in a more comfortable way. It’s about 800 years old, and these days involves turning the Tenjin downtown shopping district into a maze of stages, on which all sorts of groups perform, mostly dancing, and mostly amateur–but since it’s the most popular festival in Japan during Golden Week, there are a lot of stars and pros showing up, too.

The big event is a parade (two, actually) down Meiji-dori, a big thoroughfare. Just about anyone who can form a group can enter the parade–there’s marching bands from various schools, dancing troupes of housewives, lawyer groups, whatever. There’s a group from Pusan, the nearby Korean city, and a group of international residents. Meiji-dori is lined with the requisite food stalls selling things like squid-on-a-stick and octopus balls, and the games of chance like goldfish catching.

Squid onna stick–Terry Pratchett would be proud.

There are other, smaller parades, too, and avatars of the 7 Lucky Gods of China ride on ponyback with the main parades and the smaller ones, wearing wooden masks, to bless the city.

One of the distinctive things is the flowered crane hats that the ladies wear. The flowers are pretty, but the big crane head rearing up to peck your eyes out is a bit off-putting.

Oh, you may also notice these ladies have rice-paddles in their hands. This is another symbol of Dontaku. I’ve been told it’s because long, long ago some housewife heard the "don-don" of the drums, and went running out of the house to see the parade so fast she forgot to put down her cooking utensil. Anyway, the dancers use them for percussion.

Sorry about the picture quality–I only had my mobile phone with me, not my real camera.

[  Mood: Cool ]
[  Currently: Working between classes ]
Well, it was actually about a month ago, but since Jeff (see the post below this) did his GW thang, I thought I should do mine.

Golden Week is an end-of-April/start-of-May event when we have a whole bunch of holidays in a row, and pretty much get a whole week off. Let’s see…consulting the holy Wikipedia…OK, 4/29 is Showa Day. Oh yeah, that’s right–they changed it. Until this year, it was Greenery Day, kind of like Arbor Day in the US, but you get the day off. "Showa" means Emperor Hirohito. That’s right, the guy who was in charge in WW2. Actually, it has been a national holiday for a loooong time, because it was Hirohito’s birthday, and Emperor’s Birthday is always a national holiday anyway–and Hirohito ruled for a looong time. Since hardly anyone would’ve wanted to change something that had been a holiday for 63 years back to a regular day, they kept it as a day off, but renamed it Greenery Day. But from this year, it became Showa Day–just evidence of how the "Japan never did anything wrong/the Emperor is a God" neofascists are coming out of the woodwork now that the generation that remembers the War is dying off and the youngsters aren’t being taught history.

Oooookay, so not a very auspicious beginning. Right, so after that we have May 3rd which is Constitutional Memorial Day, which celebrates the adoption of Japan’s current, endangered Constitution (see this post), which gave us the peaceful democracy we have today. If they do move forward with making a new constitution, I wonder if they’ll adopt it on the same day. And I wonder if they’ll declare the Emperor to be a God again.

May 4 is Greenery Day. What? OK, until this year, it was Citizen’s Day, but when April 29 changed, I guess they decided green things were more important than citizens, so 5/4 became Greenery Day.

And Cinco de Mayo is Children’s Day in Japan. It used to be Boys’ Day, but since Girls’ Day (March 3rd) was not a national holiday, it was changed to Children’s Day to try to get rid of the sexism. Which didn’t work very well, since a lot of people still call it Boys’ Day.

So anyway, every single holiday in Golden Week used to be something else, and was changed for political reasons. No wonder even Japanese people can’t remember which day is which holiday, and celebrate them all the same way: by sleeping late and going to sales, or just taking a trip during Golden Week.

Since many companies (like Kyushu University) give employees the middle non-holiday days off, it’s a popular time for travel, which is why I always stay home. Ticket prices go through the roof, and the highways and trains are packed.

And I hate to complain about having a whole week off, but it’s only 3 weeks after the semester begins, and then there’s not a single holiday after that until Ocean Day in mid-July, during final exams. It means the spring semester really drags, while the fall semester has a day off every 3-4 weeks, which breaks things up nicely. I often wish Golden Week came about a month later.

My friend Jeff is heading back to Nepal to continue his art studies. Lots of good pictures on his blog, including those of my dear friend Greg Bevan, who was my officemate for 6 years until I got this new job. His soon-to-be-wife is there, too.

[  Currently: Working  ]
As someone who loves "what ifs," this game sounds totally cool. I may also check out the prof’s book.

One of the first PC games I ever played was this strategic simulator that starts off something like, "The Prime Minister of Israel has been assassinated. The Knesset has chosen you as the interim PM. Get to work!" Now this was back in the days before anyone outside a lab owned a hard drive–the game was run off a single 5 1/4" floppy. This was back when floppies were actually, you know, floppy. So it was just a map and text. You had to make economic and political treaties, buy arms from the US, France, the USSR, and a mysterious guy with a South African accent (the more you bought, the better deals and more interesting stuff they offered later), start up and fund anti-government groups in neighboring countries, betray those groups and assassinate their leaders when they started getting out of hand–man, it was amazingly complex for how tiny it was.

It would probably be too politically incorrect to make such a game today, but that seems to be the goal of the developers in the story link. If it can simulate without being too distorted by ideology, it could be more than just a fun game–a beefed up version could be used by governments.

[  Currently: Working  ]
BBC: Japan approves constitution steps

I’ve always had mixed feelings about Japan’s Constitution. Here we have the most important document for a country, written essentially at gunpoint by the victors. Can it last? Can it be respected by the populace? Shouldn’t the Japanese people, sixty years later, write their own Constitution?

But I’ve always loved at least the ideal in Article 9, and the idea of changing it is pretty scary, especially with the hawks currently in charge. It’s also pretty scary for Japan’s neighbors, and two of them have nuclear weapons. Let’s not cause Kim Jong Il to freak out, OK?

But this is encouraging:

That’s pretty much how I’ve been thinking for a long time. Technically, the Self-Defense Forces are illegal, and those support missions overseas are blatantly unconstitutional. But come on, you’ve got to have some kind of military! And having one in violation of your constitution weakens respect for the constitution–it becomes something to follow only when it’s convenient. You might as well not even have one, then.

Funny thing is, you can read that quote on the Beeb, but in the local news, I haven’t seen that–only that a majority of Japanese favor changing the Constitution. The caveat about remaining essentially pacifist is left off. That the local news is pretty much reporting the Liberal Democratic Party* line is no surprise. Freedom of the press is another constitutional right, but political/corporate intimidation is even more rife here than back home.

* The old joke about the long-ruling LDP is they’re not liberal (very conservative, actually), not democratic (decisions are often by fiat from the old-boys in charge), and not really a party (just a bunch of factions).

[  Currently: Working  ]
A How Stuff Works article on lightsabers.

[  Currently: Working  ]
A new solar-sail concept: A spinning web of electrically-charged wires. Coolness.

Quick catchup: We just had Golden Week here in Japan, which means a whole bunch of national holidays in a row, giving me and most other people a week off work. Whee! However, that just meant I had more time to be doing my part-time job, which is good for paying off my astonishing mortgage, but not good for my perpetually-thwarted desire to be a lazy good-for-nothing. I’m actually glad to be back at Kyushu University, as it’s more relaxing in a way than being on vacation.

The other problem with Golden Week is, it comes just 3 weeks into the new school year. We haven’t had time to feel like we need a vacation yet, and we know there’s not another national holiday until the semester is practically over in mid-July. Weeks and weeks with no variation loom before us. The Fall semester, with one or two national holidays every month to break up the monotony, is much better.

A bit over a week ago, I finished writing a paper titled "Searching for Utopia in Melville’s Novels of Polynesia–Part I: Typee and Omoo." I submitted it to the Journal of the Kyushu American Literature Society, which has a 10-page limit on articles, thus the "Part I." Part II will be Mardi, which is longer than the other two combined. As it is, I gave Omoo pretty short shrift there, but it’s a pretty boring novel compared to Typee anyway. I’ll be presenting that paper at the KALS Conference this Saturday, so I’m fiddling with it, tweaking it for speech-hood. I need to make a handout, too.

On top of that, I’m revising the paper I presented last year, "Babbalanja’s Rhetorical Masks in Melville’s Mardi." Part of it treats demonic possession as a rhetorical technique, which I think would’ve given Aristotle some pause. I got confused about the journal deadline and failed to submit it in time last year, so instead I’m planning to submit it to the national American Literature Society of Japan journal. If it gets accepted, that’ll be the highest-level journal I’ve been published in so far. Next goal: International! Maybe Leviathan. I’ve always wanted to be published in a journal that makes me think of Farscape.

Do we have a rimshot emoticon, to put after bad jokes?