Anybody who has kept up with these travel adventures will understand how pleased I am to hear that Kabuki is coming to Beijing. Just for two days in September, but if you are in the city and want to see a Japanese art form, which is certainly the most spectacularly beautiful stage art I have ever seen, then buy yourself some tickets.
See here and here for my previous encounters with Kabuki in Tokyo.
The Couchsurfing website was down for a good part of today and I haven't managed to get a place for tonight. It now being tonight means that I'm in the office again after a day which has not bought many surprises having had less than two hours sleep last night. I expect similar tonight but tomorrow evening I'll be flying back to Beijing where, unless my last guest has booby-trapped the flat (something which I'm not ruling out) I should have a good night's sleep waiting for me. 4 hours in 3 days isn't ideal but I can catch up soon.
Anyway, because I'm not going to write anything remotely original in this state I'll try and catch up with some links from the last week or so.
It's a little past 7am here in Tokyo. I'm in the office and have managed perhaps 2 hours sleep, so I'm feeling a little weary but the early morning light is filling the room and I'm not going to manage any more. I must point out that my current situation is completely down to my own frugal state. The university funded me for a generous number of days and simply because of possible flight times I had a few days over at the end. I try and avoid talking money on the blog but the idea of spending almost a week's wages on a night in a cheap hotel doesn't appeal very much - I'd much rather spend the money on good food; just my personal set of priorities in life.
Today is my last full day in Japan and depending on how I'm feeling in a little bit I may do some more exploring, though there aren't many major tourist sites left to see. Yesterday I took a morning walk around the Shinjuku area which is home to many government buildings along with plenty of shopping and the red-light district. The architecture is a mixture of very stereotypical modern Japanese high-rise with some great little alley-ways filled with noodle bars and run by the local Yakuza (The area I've been staying, Ikebukuro, is also one of the largest Yakuza areas). So, a few of snaps from Shinjuku:
A good tip is to skip going up the Tokyo tower, which is expensive and head to the Metropolitan Government Offices which also has a great viewing area and is free.
(The photo which looks like it's been taken with a fish-eye is a panorama of three shots tied together using ArcSoft Panorama Maker which I found online yesterday).
After some lunch in one of the local soba restaurants I hopped to the other side of the city with a couple of students from the department to go to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo (MOT). The museum is an exciting and well designed space with very good lighting, showing some of the best of modern Japanese art. Currently the temporary exhibits are also excellent with a collection depicting the idea of the individual in today's digitised society, and an amazing collection of work by Hiroshi Nakamura. I wish I could find more online to link to but have had little luck.
Sayaka Akiyama records her journeys in a scrap/map format on homemade paper, fabric and any other materials which are relevant to her particular travels (be it within a single building or a more distance trip). She has a series of perhaps 20 or 30 maps created from her time in Barrow-in-Furness in 2004. I find it hard to believe that Akiyama hasn't been heavily influenced by Peter Greenaway's short film A Walk Through H: The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist which is filmed almost in its entirety as a voiceover describing the mysterious journey of Tulse Luper showing a series of maps through H. This is a rather hypnotic film and the DVD of Peter Greenaway's early short films are intriguing if not always fully comprehensible.
Among the other interesting works at the gallery I would advise looking out for Daisuke Nakayama who has some haunting and rather pessimistic views of the digital age and Yuri Shibata whose "Material Color works involve the harvesting of some natural material (hair, kudzu, etc.) to be ground into pigments and made into paint. The resulting paintings are both of and by their subjects. One cannot conceive of a more completely representational art form". Sounds cliched but the work is actually rather fine.
In comparison the Chinese contemporary art scene often feels less polished but consequently more visceral than the Japanese scene which has been growing pretty steadily since the 1940s. The Japanese work seemed knowingly clever whereas the work in Beijing feels more reactionary, which is no surprise.
I've recently discovered artWALK Beijing which looks like a great resource and I'll be going to the next meet-up if at all possible.
I'm really looking forward to getting back to Beijing now, though I've had a great time out here. I have three or four projects to work on and really want to push them forward quickly. This whole trip has been immensely valuable, from the serenity of Kyoto to the frenetic but stimulating atmosphere in Tokyo, both of which have been useful for my work in different ways. When I get back I'll have to prepare some lectures for an upcoming workshop to introduce AdS/QCD which will be more detailed than my previous seminars. I also have a friend/collaborator turning up in a few days and several friends and family booked up to head out. It don't stop!
I am become sumo, the eater of worlds. I am more sushi than man, more okonomiyaki than flesh. It transpires that brain work in the day and foot work at the weekends is not enough to counter the calorie intake from the stupendous food out here.
I should take note from the 24 hour a day food programs which fill most channels on the television. Whereas in the UK there are an uncountable infinity of programs related to cooking, most of the food programs in Japan are about eating, they are filled with slim men and women who populate every channel and clearly spend all of their time stuffing their faces. The key to how they stay svelte, however, is that they expend the same amount of energy gasping and wowing over the food as they take in, in Calories - this is truly over the top enthusing. Spend your meals jumping up and down excitedly, waving your chopsticks and you too can eat what you want as often as you want. Atkins et al, eat your heart out (err)!
This is another food post, mostly unrelated to Japanese cuisine but the science of food.
Ever since reading about Heston Blumenthal and his nitro green tea and lime mousse, I've been rather fascinated by molecular gastronomy; the idea of using science in the kitchen as a driving force rather than a way of explaining why something works after the fact. With practice we become pretty good at using our intuition to come up with combinations of flavours and tastes which will be complimentary, but this intuition is also clouded by prejudices, the likes of which are now being broken down. I can see that all of this may seem a little like the Emperor's New Clothes, and people are simply being cheated out of large sums of money just for the novelty of eating bacon and egg ice-cream but I buy into it - I've eaten enough weird combinations to know that most people live in a tiny corner of culinary parameter space and there's a lot more to be explored.
On somewhat less extreme notes the basic methods of cooking are being questioned. For instance, the lore which says that steak should be cooked quickly at a very high temperature to seal in the juices turns out to be fiction. The Maillard reaction does sear the outside and give a good flavour and colour, combining the proteins of the meat with the natural sugars, but in fact this method drives out the moisture, rather than sealing it in. A better way to prepare a steak is to put it in a sealed plastic bag, in water at around 60 degrees centigrade for an hour or so and then at the last minute, remove it from the bag and quickly sear the outside. The details of this and many other molecular gastronomy tips and tricks can be found at this site, which includes a rather fun blog.
One of the major bonuses of molecular gastronomy has been the study of the aromas and flavours in a large number of ingredients to see which will combine well. This often results in strange mixture, but I am promised that the outcomes can be spectacular - white chocolate and caviar, for instance both contain high levels of amines and compliment each other extremely well - I'm looking forward to trying this one. I've always enjoyed playing around in the kitchen with rather unusual combinations and it's great to understand some of the reasons behind why such odd mixtures work well.
Heston Blumenthal not only aims to please the taste and smell senses but has experimented with sounds and counterintuitive combinations of temperature. From this article:
"In doing work on the perception of crispness, we were looking at sound cues and the sound of food," says Spence. "The feel of the food in your mouth is determined largely by the sound of it in your ear. We looked at the particular sounds of food that give you that sense of crispness or crunchiness. Can we do things to the taste by manipulating the sound? We both worked on an idea for the restaurant in which headphones are used to pick up the sound of the food that you are eating, which is then played back to the customer by changing the sound subtly and thereby affecting the perception of the crispness."
I haven't had the chance to go to The Fat Duck but I am told by a friend who has that it is truly spectacular (T - please feel free to add your thoughts in the comments).
Living in Asia I'm regularly faced with tastes and textures which are out of the ordinary for Western pallets, for instance in Japan, chicken cartilage is regularly crunched on, grilled in a soy based sauce, and I'm coming to rather like this new addition. The list of new tastes and textures I've come across in China is almost endless.
In fact I was motivated to write the above having found out about El Bulli, voted in 2006 as The Best Restaurant in the World (The Fat Duck took top spot in 2005). El Bulli uses techniques from molecular gastronomy for its recipes and the head chef, Ferran Acosta, spends six months out of every year experimenting in his workshop, perfecting his recipes. The 30+ course meals are fully booked for 2007 but as I will not only be in the same continent but the same country (Spain) by this time next year, I'm highly tempted to see how to get on the waiting list.
and back to Japan where I'm beginning to learn how onomatopoeic the language is. Perhaps onomatopoeia isn't quite the right name because many of these words describe feelings as well as things which make a noise - if anyone can tell me if there's an alternative word for that, I would be grateful to find out.
I asked on the off-chance a few weeks ago if there was a specific word in Japanese for the feeling of wasabi going up your nose, and indeed there is. Tsunn, which I can't find in the dictionary but I have heard it from separate sources, describes the feeling as the wasabi wafts up into your nasal cavity and makes your eyes burn. This is in the same class of words as kyeen (spelling unknown) which is the Japanese for brain freeze - the icecream induced headache. In fact every thought or feeling I've asked about has a Japanese onomatopoeia to describe it. Today's was petti (pronounced like the French petit) as the sound of tobiko (flying fish roe) popping in your mouth. I'll leave it there for today. Happy eating!
I'm in a minor pickle right now but will get onto that shortly.
It looked like I was going to miss the cherry blossom in Japan for the second time this year but the TV news informed us that just outside the government buildings near the Imperial Palace a few trees had blossomed early. Most of the trees around the city are predicted to be in full bloom by Monday, by which time I will have left but I'm delighted to have been able to take a visit to the early-starters. These photos were taken yesterday when I went with a couple of students and one of the professors from the department.
Officially I'm now free to go see the city but there is some work I would like to finish soon and am now back in the department. On top of this I am, as I mentioned above, in a minor pickle.
I Couchsurfed last night at the flat of a student from Tokyo university. I hadn't expected to stay up till late chatting about emergent phenomena, Boltzmann brains and Milliavin calculus, but my host happens to not only be doing research into complex systems in biological processes but also has a strong mathematics research background and seems to be up on just about any subject I bought up and frequently knew a lot more about it than I did. Pretty impressive, especially for an undergraduate!
Anyway, it was my fault but I had misconstrued the e-mails we'd exchanged and expected to stay for four nights. Looking at them again it was reasonably clear what the deal was, so now I'm without somewhere to stay tonight or indeed until Sunday, when I fly back. I'm going to do a quick Couchsurf call and see if I can find somewhere in the next 12 hours or so. Forking out for a hotel is not really a last resort.
So, that's where we are I think, it's going to be a bit of a frantic day so I'd better get about my business.
Oh, before I forget, there was a small earthquake last night, my first in Japan and a pretty strange experience. Very different from the small tremors I've felt in England and China. I'll mention it when I'm not so homeless.
I wanted to mention one of the features of the Yukawa Institute which particularly impressed me. In the departments I've been in as an undergrad, a postgrad and a postdoc I've found that the various subgroups in a physics department have not mixed as much as I'd hoped. I think that this is less at the higher levels and it seemed that the professors knew each other through committees which they commiserate each other for having to sit on, teaching arrangements and various social events. However, certainly at the grad student level, apart from a few friends I had in other sub-departments I had little idea what went on in the astrophysics department, the 'ultra-fast' department or the geophysics department, for example. I would occasionally peer into a lecture but was quickly put off by the quantity of buzz words which were incomprehensible to me.
Anyway, once a week at the Yukawa Institute is a lunch meeting, for the whole department. The first 20 minutes or so is set aside for having a bento lunch and chatting with whoever you find yourself near, be it a cosmologist, a solid state physicist or a string theorist, perhaps a new masters student and perhaps the head of the department. Then there's a short talk, really very short, perhaps 15 minutes or so introducing the basics of somebody's research area. It's at such a level that people in the audience start asking questions although it's not in their research area and by this simple, sociable meeting once a week, there seems to be more healthy discourse between the research groups.
It's not necessarily vital for a cosmologist to know about advances in traffic theory phase transitions, but it certainly introduces them to a slightly new subject and makes the department more of a transparent place to work. A good thing in my book.
Another inclusion, though of a technological nature which I was impressed by were the whiteboards in all the coffee lounges - though these are no ordinary white boards. I spent some time at these explaining to various people about what I did and chatting to grad students who asked questions, mostly about the fundamentals of the AdS/CFT correspondence. I would fill the white board with diagrams, equations and a few words at which point the student would press a button, an arm would move across the white board and a scanned printout of what I had written would appear. I'd then wipe the board and start writing again. By the end the student was left not just with the memory of my illegible scrawls but a solid copy. Perhaps this is an expensive addition, but in the land of such gadgets, this one ranks about as highly for me as the electronically controlled toilet, a fine invention in my book!
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Tomorrow is officially my last day at Ochanomizu, though I may return for a couple of meetings if I get the chance before I leave. After tonight I will be Couchsurfing for the rest of my time here and I'm not sure how likely an internet connection is. I'll report when possible.
I've been pondering about how to write this post for a few days now, but I'll just start and see where it goes.
I had been surprised when I arrived in Japan to see how many sushi restaurants served whale. I spoke to several people about this subject and certainly had no intention of having any myself. In fact I even shied away from the horse meat sushi, though that was more to appease a friend than from my views on equine dining.
Those I spoke to had positive memories of eating whale meat at school, mostly because the high fat, high protein content makes it a very powerful source of energy and nutrition. I did a little scouting around on the internet to read more on the subject, to find out the current state of affairs and to try and understand some more of the moral implications. As in any hotly debated topic there is strongly worded rhetoric on both sides. I certainly find the claim of killing 500 or so whales a year for scientific research a poor excuse, though if you're going to kill them, better not to let them go to waste. However, the idea of making money from the trade certainly muddies this argument.
The latest hunting methods, when they are implemented, at least finish the job faster than the traditional techniques. The grenade spears can still lead to a pretty unpleasant death. It seems that the cost of this method is somewhat too high and sometimes the scientific research crews need to cut some corners - frankly that's completely unacceptable from any scientific standpoint.
The question of how intelligent a whale may be and how much of an issue this is is something that I haven't got to the bottom of but whatever the levels of thought process it all seems like unnecessary cruelty. Unfortunately I feel that the majority of farming involves unnecessary cruelty and I buy free range whenever possible (almost always in the UK). I don't remember the last time I bought chicken or eggs which were not free range (This does not include shopping in China!). Paying a little extra helps to ease the conscience but I'm not convinced that the non free-range is always great either.
Anyway, I read enough to know that I wasn't going to be ordering whale meat any time soon. Unfortunately sometimes life isn't that simple. On Friday evening I went to a sushi restaurant with a student from the university and sat down to peruse the menu. An elderly Japanese gentleman in a finely tailored suit, a gray trilby and sporting a most preposterous handlebar moustache started talking to us. He had a smattering of English but most of the time my friend translated admirably. We exchanged the usual pleasantries and I mentioned that I was planning to go to Tsukiji the following morning. Aha, he said, he knew just the person for me and got out his mobile to call a woman he knew who worked at the market, she was to be my tour guide. Unfortunately she was busy but I greatly appreciated the offer of assistance.
He then asked if I liked sushi, I nodded energetically and at this point he started telling me that I must try, something. He kept repeating something, something bacon but I couldn't make it out. I looked at my friend and as I did so he called the waiter over, said a few words to him and pointed at me, smiling wide-eyed. At this point he remembered the English and repeated whale bacon, whale bacon. When it dawned on me what he was saying my heart sank, I turned to my friend and gave a worried look. "Whale meat? Really? I really didn't want to try that.". I'm sure it's OK, my friend said, thinking I was worried about the taste. I responded that I was not happy with the culling of whales to which I got the scientific research response. I told her that I didn't believe that that was a valid reason but by this point the piece of whale was being sliced in front of me.
I asked if I turned it down whether this would be very insulting, but the answer was pretty obvious. Perhaps turning it down would make a statement but my reasoning at the time was that it would simply indicate how ungrateful and ignorant foreigners were. So, there it was, sitting in front of me, four thin slices of whale bacon and four thin slices of whale fat, on a bed of dressed lettuce. The trilbied gentleman, Cheshire cat-like at my side. So, I gave in, I ate it, it was OK, but marred by the feelings of guilt as I did so.
OK, I'll admit something I wasn't going to admit, I was thinking more: what would other people think about me doing this, than that some whale had been slaughtered for this. The whale was already dead and I had no thoughts of it being my fault - that's the truth.
and it's been playing on my mind since - not that I did a bad thing, but what the right thing to do was. I guess the point is that my feelings about whaling are not much stronger than my feelings about intensive farming methods. As I said above I think that both involve unnecessary cruelty and the latter involves a huge number of animals, while the former a small number but has a large environmental impact. If I was as bothered as I should be I would probably not eat any meat in China, but I do.
The decision was not 'shall I kill a whale or not?' but 'is it worth me insulting those around me and embarrassing myself to make a point?'. Well, the answer is above and given the same choice I'd probably make the same decision again, but I would certainly never order it myself and would try and talk a friend out of ordering it if they were planning to. By the time I'd finished the plate, the gentleman in gray had vanished, his grin still lingering at my side.
I'm interested to hear what other people think and whether they would do the same thing. I've been reading around more on the subject and the surety with which both sides state their cases doesn't draw me to either side, though I state again that I am against the practice. There are some interesting articles linked to below:
The British Commissioner to the International Whaling Commission has some discourse on humane killing standards here which includes the statements that:
We accept that it is not easy to define exactly what constitutes humane killing. The aim must, as with the slaughter of terrestrial animals, be to render a whale immediately insensible to pain, and for its subsequent death to occur without avoidable pain, stress, or suffering. It is accepted that this is unlikely to be achievable in 100% of cases, but we would not wish to define as acceptable anything that falls short of this standard. We are, moreover, firmly of the view that current whale killing standards, with, at the most, some 60 % of whales killed instantaneously, is not acceptable.
From this definition I can't see that whaling could ever fall within these standards unless the grenade tipped harpoons were made unfeasibly large.
and from the same source comes this discussion on the ethics of whale hunting. Some good points here but I think that the ideas that:
# Man has no right whatsoever to harvest whales, in other words, that whales have an absolute right to live
# It is unethical to violate other people's feelings by killing their symbols - whales have become an important symbol for the environmental and animal protection movements in the western world.
are too general to apply to such a discussion. The first four points in the article are much stronger, in my opinion.
Some comments from Greenpeace here include the interesting remarks that:
Japan claims it only hunts whales for 'scientific' reasons. Yet the body for which the "research" is being done, the International Whaling Commission (IWC), does not need the data, and has called for the programme to be ended.
I haven't noticed this claim stated so strongly anywhere else and indeed in this in depth article from the International Whaling Commision which discusses the decision making process in giving permission to hunt whales for scientific purposes there is both information to the contrary to the above view as well as some in agreement. The IWC states that main points to be taken into account when granting scientific permits are:
1. whether the permit adequately specifies its aims, methodology and the samples to be taken;
2. whether the research is essential for rational management, the work of the Scientific Committee or other critically important research needs;
3. whether the methodology and sample size are likely to provide reliable answers to the questions being asked;
4. whether the questions can be answered using non-lethal research methods;
5. whether the catches will have an adverse effect on the stock;
6. whether there is the potential for scientists from other nations to join the research programme.
It seems that of the four Japanese whaling programmes there are some positive research outcomes but there are also major question marks over certain important details, for instance (for one of the programmes):
In the discussion of these permits in the Commission, an additional factor raised is that the catches take place within the Southern Ocean Sanctuary declared by the IWC in 1994 (to which Japan lodged an objection with respect to minke whales). If a Sanctuary is in place, it can be argued that information on improving management of whaling in that region is unnecessary. Each year, the Commission has (by majority vote) passed a Resolution urging Japan not to issue a permit for these catches.
There are also a couple of interesting articles from Retrospectacle here, and here with a good dose of vocal opinion in the comments.
Well, I hadn't planned to go into quite so much detail but there's a lot of information out there.
I didn't manage the 5.30 start for the tuna auction, though it transpires that tourists can no longer view this early morning spectacle. The likelihood of me blagging my way in as a Japanese tuna salesman was minimal, so I decided against that plan. I was however out of the hotel before 7 and at the market in good time. Tsukiji market is the largest seafood market in the world and I recommend it as a must see for any food lovers, or for those simply interested in seeing this incredible spectacle. The market is on reclaimed land in Tokyo harbour and sees around 2 million kilos of fish pass through its doors every day.
The 900 or so wholesale dealerships are packed close together with just enough room to walk through the rows and enough space for speedy little trucks to dash through the columns, transporting large pallets of marine produce. After you've been struck by the efficient hustle and bustle, the people slicing frozen bodies of tuna with bandsaws and the incredible colours of fish around you, the smell, or near lack of seems quite remarkable. The fish is all so fresh that the only odour in the whole place is sweet and the similarity with what you'd call a fishy smell is almost non-existent.
I spent a good hour walking around the stalls, taking photos and marveling at the quantity and quality of what was around me. Rather than posting them all here individually I've linked to this Flickr set on the slideshow below. It really is an incredible place and certainly worth the early start.
A two hour seminar yesterday has left me pretty tired. I hope that I will be able to lecture at some point in the future, though I don't know how people manage it day in, day out. I enjoy it a great deal but it knackers me out no end. It's also great to have an audience who wants to work on the topic I'm talking about and has lots of interested questions.
I have lots of things I'd planned to talk about but I've got one paragraph in and am flailing about listlessly on the keyboard. It's been a good week and with just three days left in the department I think that I will be finished off concentration-wise by then. I'll have a couple of days break before diving back into Beijing life though I can't see a proper break being imminent. The Spring Festival has been and gone so I think that the next holiday probably comes some time around August. Deep intake of breath! Having been on the go, non-stop every day for this long is beginning to take its toll.
All being well I'm off to Tsujiki fish market tomorrow - the biggest fish market in the world and the source of the best sushi, though everything kicks off at 5.30 am, which may be a bit of a struggle.
Nope, a failed post I'm afraid but I currently can't even bring myself to delete it, so I'll simply link to a couple of interesting articles which have come up over the last couple of weeks:
Robots teaching themselves to walk, from the BBC, and a very nice explanation from Scott Aaronson on the Shor algorthm, for factoring large numbers on a quantum computer - a subject I studied and enjoyed a great deal as an undergrad.
I'm at the last leg of my Japan trip, now at Ochanomizu University to discuss some work they're pursuing here. Kyoto was a wonderfully peaceful city and I got more done there than I have done in a long time and Tokyo is also proving useful, if not peaceful. The fact that it's been non-stop now since I spent two weeks being pretty unwell in Korea means that I'm reaching my limit and my level of concentration is slipping. I'll be giving my last talk out here on Thursday and I'll be talking AdS/QCD - that will be three different (though similar) talks to three somewhat different audiences in two weeks. Comparatively not that many but I'll be pleased to have them all wrapped up.
Currently the students are slowly returning to the department here having spent the last week at the Japan winter school in Hokkaido studying string field theory, with the likes of Zwiebach and Kazakov amongst others. They seem to come back filled with enthusiasm, which is great to see. Hokkaido, the Northernmost island of Japan is really a winter resort where there are both hot springs and great skiing from what I hear. They also have there own regional cuisine which consists of high quality seafoods in rich stock - great for the winter!
There are too many things to finish to write anything extensive at the moment but I wanted to post a picture which I remember seeing in a book of astrophotography at school and wanted to share it.
From NASA and the NSSDC and produced with ESA's Faint Object Camera (FOC) on the Hubble Space Telescope. This was certainly the first and, as far as I'm aware, the only direct observation of the surface of a star, other than the sun. For the pinpricks in the sky to suddenly become real, tangible objects was quite a revelation for me. Betelgeuse is a huge star (probably around 300 million times greater volume than the sun), nearing the end of its life. The extra hot regions on the surface are more easily visible in infrared. The star will at some point in the not too distant future (astronomically speaking) explode as a supernova, sending off its outer layers to form a nebula. When it does explode it will probably be a similar magnitude to a crescent moon and will be clearly visible in the day, just as the crab nebula was 1000 years back. Anyway, just wanted to share that.
Another couple of spectacular photos (and here) from the Cloud Appreciation Society. I guess there may have been some HDR play going on but they're still pretty eerie.
Anyway, enough procrastinating, I have calculations which need finishing off. So much to write about, so little time!
I have discovered to my cost the extreme generosity of Japanese businessmen. This post will be a somewhat labour intensive task for my now slightly dazed brain cells.
After going for a meal with the department on Friday evening, post-talk I made my way to my Couchsurfing host's flat. Couchsurfing is a fantastic scheme and is built in large part on trust. I met up with Chi on Thursday evening for a bite to eat and a trip to a Gifu bar where we chatted and she made sure that I was a reasonably trustworthy sort. Having passed the test I futonsurfed for Friday and Saturday night. Not only is CS a great way to get free accommodation all around the world (almost 200,000 members now) but it's the perfect source for useful local information.
Gifu snacks of Natto and egg:
Last time I visited Tokyo I spent most of my time looking at traditional Tokyo, the temples, and the Kabuki-za amongst many other things, so this time I've decided to see some more of the modern city. On Saturday we headed to the West, to Shibuya, Harakuju and Shinjuku, to see the famed fashionable areas which have a good mix of both big name brands plastered all over the buildings in neon and very alternative, counterculture shops if you get off the main streets.
Shopping is big here and some of the shops (mostly the 'underground' shops) are so popular that there are queues just to enter. People wait in line outside sipping on McDonald's milkshakes waiting to get into their favourite place to buy the weird and wonderful.
This area is famed for the huge crossroads where the people flow like ants across the street in a huge wave of bodies and then, just as suddenly it stops and the traffic resumes. It's a strange sight to see so many people synchronised like this. Interspersed between the shops are many little galleries for art, hand-made jewelery and clothes. My host makes bags made form vintage kimono fabric (I'm quite happy to advertise these as they are really very good indeed, they would make superb presents. The prices look high but many of the fabrics used are over 100 years old). We popped into a few places selling whole kimonos and pieces of old fabric, some of which are hugely expensive, just for a small patch of design. A paradise for anyone wanting to make their own clothes.
The Omotesando shopping complex:
The design Festa art space:
contrasting with the Audi building:
The main attraction of coming to this area (if you're not much of a shopper, like myself) is to simply people watch. Dressing up is big here, and I don't mean simply taking care of your appearance. There are several very distinct styles readily apparent as you walk around the streets here. This is most visible with the women, but some of the men fit into distinct categories of counterculture.
The shopping area is mostly noted for the gyarus. Girls with a dark artificial tan, towering heels and bleached or coloured hair. On the way to Yoyoji park we passed a group of gyarus practicing their dance moves in the street, possibly ready for a competition. You can't see here but usually they have white makeup around their eyes giving them a startled panda look.
Regular gyarus are perhaps the most un-extreme of all the subcultures, though the ganguros are more to the panda end of the spectrum.
A lot of the styles are derived from Manga and the Harajuku bridge is mostly populated with cosplayers who dress in clothes to look like Manga characters. Unfortunately it seems that they take the day off on Saturday, so I didn't see so many of them and got fewer photos. However, Flickr has lots of images of some of the interesting costumes and makeup which go on display on the bridge. Some of the most startling cosplayers I've seen are: The blue bride, Tatsurou, Ninja, and these girls in black.
It seems that some of the locals are not cosplayers but simply like to come and dress up in their own style. Also available on the bridge are free hugs, though there didn't seem to be many takers.
Near Harajuku is Yoyogi park where there was some Samba going on which we sat and watched having been on our feet for a few hours. I'm told that the woman on the right is a famous actress, but I haven't pinned down a name yet.
After dinner (number 1) in a conveyor belt sushi restaurant we headed to the East side of the city where Chi works in a bar. I wandered off and had a look around the local temples, which were closed by that time but the grounds were open and wonderfully quiet after the hectic crowds in the West.
I headed back to the bar, expecting to have a quick drink before going back to the flat and at this point the trouble started. It was a small bar and there were a few businessmen in, each with a bottle of shochu in front of them, gradually being consumed with green tea. It didn't take long to start talking with them. First there was a test of my Chinese character skills to see if I could read their names in Kanji, then there was the explanation of what I'm doing in Japan which resulted in a short explanation of electrons in metals and the electrician in the group literally jumping up and down with excitement as his job suddenly, apparently became clear (this has more to do with shochu than my skills at explaining atomic bonds). I was sitting happily chatting with, um, everyone in the bar, nursing my one pint that I felt I could afford and trying to keep four conversations going at once when the first drink arrived in front of me from the ship salesman to my side.
Unfortunately it seemed that if one of them was going to buy me a drink, the others would look bad if they didn't join in and so, inevitably I got through a fair number of the consumables in the bar, including several plates of the not inconsiderably portioned snack-food - mostly of the raw meat variety.
At one point I was being asked about my thoughts on Japanese life and culture and I mentioned mono no aware, which I know of only from reading about Japanese cinema. The bar became hushed, everyone looked at each other, rather confused and then shouts and cheers as I realised I'd pushed just the right button. I guess that the knowledge of this concept was enough to get me into 'the club' and the generosity only increased from this point on.
Somehow 1 o'clock rolled around, I was still relatively stable and had acquired a rather nice leather passport holder at some point. I was asked if I liked Korean food , I confirmed and we headed to dinner (number 2) a little way down the street. Dish after dish piled up as we got through a huge Korean barbecue. I'm pretty sure that conversation, though still extremely enthusiastic, had diminished in its fluency and for some reason French and Chinese dominated linguistically on and off.
Leaving the restaurant there were five of us, though we quickly lost one who fell asleep on the pavement. The fact that one of them had just bought me a very nice dinner left the other one looking bad, so a Japanese dinner was then offered. In another favourite restaurant of theirs, dinner number 3 arrived in the form of a large plate of sushi. I was truly stuffed but to turn this down would have been very insulting. It was great sushi but I probably didn't appreciate it as much as I should have!
Anyway, by 4 am after three dinners the others seemed to have forgotten how to get home if not which way was up. The group dispersed and I have to presume that the others made it back intact.
Sunday was not a lot of fun. Taking my luggage on the Tokyo underground with a stonking hangover and a belly fit to burst was not a pleasant experience. After a good sleep and a bite to eat I was a good 30% on my way to recovery and today (this post has taken a day to write) I'm 95% back to 'normal'.
I haven't been able to post for a few days, partly because I've been too busy, but mostly because Blogger blocked this site using its clever spam-prevention tool. Apparently my blog has all the hallmarks of being written by a spamming robot - not impressed.
This has to be a quick post but I wanted to update on my current whereabouts. In fact my exact whereabouts are in the flat in which I've just couchsurfed, but more of that soon.
On Wednesday I lugged my now considerable quantity of luggage (including whiskey, wine, many books and a fishing rod - don't ask) on the shinkansen to head to Tokyo. The Shinkansen is a joy to ride, covering the 500 km in about two and a half hours. The journey was smooth and almost silent, save for an orchestral man sitting, sleeping two seats away.
So, I'm now at Tokyo University which has a rather beautiful campus here at Hongo, not far from Tokyo central station. I'm meeting with Professor Imamura to discuss some work I've been doing and will be presenting a talk tomorrow (Friday). The string theory group here is large and experienced and so my talk has to be adjusted from the seminar I've been giving for the last few months (not that I haven't been talking to experienced groups, but that the ratio of string theorists to non-string theorists is much higher here). I gave this talk on Monday in Kyoto and got a lot of good questions and I expect more tomorrow. Should be fun.
I'll try and post some more over the next couple of days but things are busy.
For now, here are a couple of photos from the train. Fuji was as stunning as last time I saw it, a year ago, but this time covered in a layer of cloud.
And the food on the train is somewhat better than that found at most British stations. There's a great deal to be learnt from the service industry in Japan.
OK, more to post soon, including the weekly world-in-blogs summary. Though I'm staying in a flat in Kiba at the moment I will be moving to Ochanomizu University on Sunday for a week or so and should be able to catch up a little on Sunday evening.
As I only have another few days left of my stay in Kyoto I packed in a good deal of sightseeing on Saturday. On Wednesday I will be heading off on the Shinkasen to Tokyo where I will meet with various researchers in different Universities to discuss possible projects. I will certainly miss the gentle pace of life here in Kyoto which has enabled me to get a lot of both research and background reading done - I'm not sure I could keep up this pace indefinitely however. I expect life in Tokyo to be more frenetic but from my experiences last time Ochanomizu is a very relaxed and friendly place to work.
However, Saturday was anything but gentle sightseeing, though it was very enjoyable. After an early start we headed by train to Osaka, about a half and hour from Kyoto central.
Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe blend seamlessly into one another and you are reminded starkly of the lack of usable land here in Japan. We headed up Osaka's Tsutenkaku Tower for the city view. Originally designed as an Eiffel tower on top of an Arc de Triomphe, the first version burnt down and was replaced by a 1960s take on an Eiffel tower on top of an Arc de Triomphe - This is not an astounding architectural success, but it does give a good view of the city.
We spent an hour or so seeing some of the highlights of the city including sampling the famous takoyaki, choux pastry surrounding vegetables and chunks of octopus cooked in a giant waffle-iron - highly recommended. If you find the main arcade street there will be a stall with quadruple the number of people as any other stall; it's worth the wait.
Parisian/Japanese street style:
The mossy Buddha, continually watered by worshipers:
From Osaka we took the train along the coast past the refineries, which caused such terrible problems after the Kobe earthquake (which cost over 6000 lives and 200 billion dollars of damage), and through the city of Kobe itself, on to Himeji castle, an ancient fortification of stereotypically Japanese design, though quite unlike the counterpart Medieval European castles.
I read that this castle was not only used extensively in The last Samurai and Kurasawa's Ran but it was Tiger Tanaka's Ninja training camp in You only Live Twice. It's an impressive construction and quite a startling view from below.
Back to Kobe to take in the night view from the hills overlooking the city via a walk through China town. Though I love the food here (as is beginning to show abdominally - regular swimming is losing the battle against sushi, I fear) I'm missing many Chinese dishes and baozi eaten in the street was a good reminder of treats 'back home'. 
Back to Osaka where Saturday night was beginning to rear its head and we made our way to a sushi restaurant which Tatsuya's father, a veritable epicurean by the sounds of things, had suggested. Everything from uni nigiri (a sea urchin roe/gonad treat - one of my favourites) to raw horse sushi was on the menu (though we missed the latter). Another superb meal and the best otoro I've ever eaten. One of the five exquisite plates we gobbled our way happily through:
and finally we took our weary feet and swollen bellies back to Kyoto where a planned Saturday night on the town disintegrated before our tired eyes.
Today (Sunday) has been another useful day working in a local cafe. There were festivities at the nearest temple which is currently in full plum blossom bloom. I braved the crowds for half an hour but whatever the Japanese version of a baboushka is has sharp elbows and the pushing power of a rhino and with battered mid-riff I made my escape, hoping to return in a couple of days when the crowds will have dispersed.
In the language challenged state I frequently find myself in, one of the most difficult situations to confront is the hairdressers. It's mainly the unspoken staring from both staff and customers while I'm trying to gesticulate as to roughly what I'm after that makes me feel rather awkward. In my local in Beijing I'm now quite used to this and have enough vocab to speak a little, so that is not too much of a problem anymore. They still haven't managed quite what I'm after but I think we're going in the right direction.The other great thing in Beijing is that if you get it all horribly wrong then the hair catastrophe which ensues is a remarkably cheap disaster (about 70p for cut).
The difference here in Japan, as I've just discovered, is that for the price of one major hairtastrophe, I could have at least 30 bad cuts in Beijing. After finding a hairdressers near my apartment and establishing that there was no common language between us, I was given several magazines to peruse and choose which of the Japanese men with very straight hair I would most like to look like (for those who don't know, my hair has waves upon curls upon waves, as soon as it gets long enough). I gave up and pointed to something which looked plausible and half an hour later walked out of the shop, substantially poorer (about two days Chinese wages), looking nothing like the man in the photo but with some semblance of having been to a barbers rather than a wind tunnel.
This is always a difficult situation and I've only ended up with a few really bad haircuts due to communication problems. I'm not expecting this situation to change much in the few months I have left in China.
I have a sudden burst of energy. Usually this is the first sign that I'm about to come down with a bug, but I'm going to ignore that for now and go with the flow. NormallyI would go to the gym, have a big session and completely wear myself out. Luckily the swimming pool I've been going to here is closed now so I'm going to try and use this burst of energy to be productive and get some of the things which I've put off for a while out of the way.
The burst of energy is partly a sudden realisation of the number of things I want to get done in a finite amount of time. The number of places I still want to see in Kyoto in the week I have left. The number of papers I want to read, books I want to finish, calculations I want to do and on, and on, ad infinitum. In fact I'm too tired now for much of the above to be accomplished succesfully, so I shall try and write up some of the less taxing things I wanted to put on the blog.
In fact, I'm sitting on the bus on the commute back to my hotel as I'm now staying the other side of the city. Everyone is giving me strange looks, as I type away, but I'm in the mood that a half our sitting, doing nothing is a wasted half hour. Usually I would be listening to my Chinese practice lessons getting similar strange looks as I mumble the conversations back to myself, but now's not the right moment. (I'm now around 40 lessons through the Pimsleur course and my opinions haven't changed that it's the best resource for beginner's Chinese that I've yet come across - two lessons a day will give you some very basic, but usable Chinese in a month. Without a teacher this is as good as you're likely to get.)
So, four weeks into Japan and the status report is that my work is going OK. I've spent a fun, but tiring couple of weeks working in an operational mode which is very enjoyable. As a theoretical physicist, I often spend a lot of time getting the mathematics of my calculations right. The physical interpretation often fits in at the beginning and end of a calculation (in my experience).
That is, you think of an idea, you work out how to do it, you then spend a long time doing the calculation and getting it to the stage that you believe it to be the 'correct' answer to your original question. The last stage is then working out why you got the result you ended up with. The first and last stages are the stages where I get to call myself a physicist. The middle is usually mathematics and computer programming. They're enjoyable and challening, but it's for the buzz of coming up with the idea and the thrill of understanding the answer that I do what I do.
I'm lucky that the work I've been doing for the last few weeks is a good mix of maths and physics. My collaborators and I have simply been working out what the mathematics that we're playing with means, physically and how we can push it in different directions, without making the physical picture meaningless. That's in some senses the idea of theoretical physics. You come up with an idea which is on the edge of what is known, you then play with the idea and see if it keeps you within the realms of possibility or whether the results are simply impossible. That's clearly a great simplification, but it sums up some aspects of it.
In order to work out whether the ideas we're coming up with are meaningful I've had to do lots of reading of papers in areas which I am not familiar. This is good for me but is also challenging, learning the terminology and methods of reasoning in (what in this case is) a far more phenomenological field than that which I am used to.
Another thing that has got me buzzing this evening is reading a post over at cosmic variance on Boltzmann brains, a topic which I know very little about, though it is something that I've been thinking about from a non-technical standpoint, for a long time. Reading this post, and the far more in depth study written previously here, has motivated me to sit and read some of the papers, though there are so many topics that I want to learn about that I fear this one will simply be added to the ever growing pile. Read the above linked posts for an interesting, if cursory discussion of some of the truly deepest questions in physics, including: why does time seem to go the way we perceive it to. Whether or not you've pondered this before, it's a truly massive question and a fine line to tread between metaphysics and real science.
I have my own thoughts on Boltzmann brain's, but I want to ponder my arguments before baring my soul :-)
Pause - OK, I'm back home in my flat. I went to a cafe that I spent all Sunday working peacefully in to see if I could use my laptop there but they didn't have wireless connection. In fact of the 6 or 7 cafes I've spent time working in here in Kyoto, only 2 have had internet connection. Compare that to Beijing where almost every cafe has internet connection and all expectations are suddenly reversed. This is a pity because the gentle hum of a cafe late at night is one of the most conducive places I find for good work. So, I'm back in my apartment, the terrible Japanese television programs are well and truly turned off, msn is off, skype is off, even the BBC news site is off and I will see what I can achieve now.
The things I want to get done are not all related to my work. I've been reading some great novels so, in the next post or two I will try and give some brief reviews. If you're looking for a synopsis of the storyline in a book, you're unlikely to find it in one of my reviews, that's not the way I work.
Talking of books I've just written a large section about my confusion with the Japanese fascination with Manga, and then deleted it. I can't quite state my thoughts on this clearly. I find it strange that this nation is so engrossed by these comics. I know I appear to use Wikipedia as a default but it often happens that I search around on the web and find that Wikipedia does have the most complete information that's accessible on a subject which I'm not familiar with. Again, on the cultural importance of Manga, there's this interesting paragraph in Wikipedia:
"Though roughly equivalent to the American comic book, manga holds more importance in Japanese culture than comics do in American culture. In economic terms, weekly sales of comics in Japan exceed the entire annual output of the American comic industry. Several major manga magazines which contain about a dozen episodes from different authors sell several million copies each per week. Manga is well respected both as an art form and as a form of popular literature, though it has not reached the acceptance level of historically higher art genres such as film or music. However, approval of Hayao Miyazaki's anime and other works of manga are gradually changing the perception of anime and manga, placing them closer to the status of "higher" arts (Top of box office charts of all-time in Japan is Spirited Away by Hayao Miyazaki, 30.4 billion yen). Like its American counterpart, some manga has been criticized for being violent or sexual. For example, a number of film adaptations of manga such as Ichi the Killer or Old Boy were rated Restricted or Mature in the States. However, there have been no official inquiries or laws trying to limit what can be drawn in manga, except for vague decency laws applying to all published materials, stating that "overly indecent materials should not be sold." This freedom has allowed artists to draw manga for every age group and for about every topic."
In the cafe I've been frequenting in the evenings to work, students spend hours sitting flicking through these comics, sometimes in deep concentration, sometimes casually browsing through the pictures. I find it strange that so many people of all ages engross themselves for hours at a time in what, at a cursory glance, seem to be somewhat facile stories. I'm genuinely interested by this cultural phenomenon and if any manga fans can enlighten me I'm happy to listen.
OK, I'll try and sum up a couple of novels in the next post or two.
I return to the office rather cold but extremely pleased to have fulfilled some wishes I've had for many many years.
While watching the sunsets from my office I couldn't help noticing that the campus has an observatory tower on top of one of the buildings.
(As long as the sun keeps setting I'm gonna keep taking these pictures!)
With a little research it turned out to be the astronomy and geosciences department. Today after lunch I headed over there and found the appropriate student who uses the telescope to inquire whether I could tag along if they were going to be using it, hoping to see what goes on. I knew this was a little cheeky but couldn't resist and he was very happy to oblige.
After a warm spring day the evening had turned rather cold and when we arrived at the building to meet him again it was distinctly chilly, but the sky was clear and the moon, at only a small sliver of light, was not overwhelmingly bright.
In the observatory tower sits a fine Meade 14" Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope, somewhat putting my 4inch Newtonian, bought after my bar mitzvah, to shame. 
My telescope saw me through many frosty evenings, though all one could see was a fuzzy Jupiter and Saturn, a solid Venus, a wobbly mars and some fine detail on the moon. The occasional comet that came through was also marginally magnified and stared at for hours.
The guy who was kindly showing us the observatory has been at the university almost a decade (from undergrad). He's studying short-period binary star systems and in all that time he's never used the telescope to look at any of the incredible things one can see at in the sky, only to investigate the light emission from the binary systems! I could hardly believe it, but as we went from object to object he gazed in the same wonder that I did, extremely happy to be seeing these stunning sights for the first time.
The first object on view was Saturn, which is particularly easy to spot at the moment and the rings and three of the moons were clearly visible. Of course it looks just like it does in the books, but to actually see it for real is quite something. There's a photo on my flickr site, though attempting to put my 3 megapixel camera up to the lense without damaging anything didn't make for a great shot. So, courtesy of NASA and STscl is a rather stunning image of Saturn with a polar aurora to boot.
While I was in Australia in my gap-year, the highlight of the trip for me almost without a doubt, was spending eight days camping in the outback in the Kimberleys, many hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement and ten times that distance to the closest city. The night sky was truly unbelievable and the images remain with me. On a clear night in the UK you can see stars, of course, usually a few of the planets, though they are easily mistaken for stars, the moon and, on a very clear night if you're lucky, the faint band of the Milky Way and a tiny smudge of Orion's Nebula.
In the outback everything was infinitely clearer. The Milky Way was no longer a faint haze but a dazzling streak across the centre of the sky and, what blew me away, were the views of the large and small Magellanic clouds and the Andromeda Galaxy. I never knew that they were visible to the naked eye but with enough time to adjust to the darkness they are all stunning, perspective changing views of the cosmos.
Hubble views of the Large and Small Magellanic clouds.
Again courtesy of Nasa and STscl.
In the telescope that we were using it was not possible to view Andromeda without using the electronics to take in more of the light than we can with our eyes and the large and small Magellanic clouds are visible only in the Southern hemisphere.
We could however see Orion's Nebula, M42, beautifully and again this is a perspective changing view. Instead of just seeing planets and stars you are viewing a giant cloud of dust and gas, producing new stars in its heart. The colours are a lot more diffuse than those that you would see in a text book, but the shape is unmistakable and the beauty of it is stunning. Objectively this isn't the case, it's just a bright smudge in the sky, but if you consider what's really going on there it's quite a mind blowing view of a completely new aspect of our universe that I had never before seen.
Again from NASA and STscl:
With the electronic eye attached to the telescope and plugged into the computer we had a great view of the crab nebula, an object first seen around 1000 years ago when a star exploded making it visible in the daytime for almost a month. This was recorded in Chinese texts and now what we see is the gas hurtling away from the rapidly rotating neutron star at the centre at somewhere near the speed of light. The pulsar rotates at roughly 30 times a second! I remember learning this when I was a kid and truly not believing such things could be possible, I still find it pretty crazy. The fastest pulsar weighs a little more than the sun, has a diameter of around 16 km and spins at over 700 times a second. The equator is going at roughly a quarter the speed of light. That completely blows my mind!
The Crab Nebula from NASA and STscl:
I'll end this post by linking in to a pen and ink sketch from my mother, drawn recently while on an art trip to Florence. I haven't talked about telescopes in any detail here but, in particular, the production of lenses for telescopes is an incredible process which often takes months to slowly spin and cool the lens and grind it to an accuracy such that they deviate from the perfect shape by less than 1 part in 100,000. So, to tie in with the modern story of the telescope I include the following rather older lathe for grinding lenses:
None of the things that I saw were particularly unusual, but I've simply never had a chance to look at them through a half-decent telescope. I hope to again some time, though now my main aim is to view the aurora. Any trips to Northern Europe will be happily accepted (post November).
First of all a tip for anyone coming to Kyoto. Japanese cash machines generally do not accept foreign cards. I've spent the last three weeks hunting for one which will, to no avail. However, scouting around on the web, the most convenient one can be found just outside Kyoto station in the basement of the building below Kyoto tower (very easy to spot). This is a niche tip perhaps but it may come in useful for some weary traveler.
On Saturday, on the way back from the station I spent some time wondering in and out of buildings, cafes and areas which looked interesting. I was drawn to the mildly cacophonous sounds emanating from what looked to be an old scrapyard. I carefully peaked inside to have a look and was met with the surreal sight of musicians, dotted around randomly, playing their various wind instruments, standing between the mangled bikes, scrap metal and garbage blowing around the ground. It seemed to be some piece of conceptual art, though when I found someone to ask I was told that they were university students and this was simply the best place for them to practice. Somehow the strange contrast was rather relaxing and I stayed for a while listening to the practice and sneaking in a few shots.
Tuba practice:
and trombone practice:
Looking back now, I probably should have found a chair and stayed longer. Enjoyable in its rather eccentric way.
No Valentine's day post would be complete without a link to the eternal embrace.
Valentine's day in Japan (and Korea) differs from the traditional form that we celebrate in the West. On this day it is only the woman who gives the gift (usually chocolates). The man then thinks he has got the better deal. However, this is a double bluff. A month later is the man's turn to give a gift to the woman. With a month's warning now the man is in twice as much trouble when he forgets!
In fact this tradition has become somewhat of a burden as the women in an office are often expected to buy chocolates and flowers for all their male co-workers. The translation of this gift is 'obligation chocolate'.
Anyway, enjoy your day and if you don't, then partake of the Korean tradition whereby the men who don't receive a gift get together in March to mourn over bowls of black noodles.
Though work is very much on the boil, I don't want to miss the opportunities while I'm here to take in a good deal of the area in and around Kyoto. So that's taken up both Saturday and Sunday. Friday night was an extremely enjoyable evening spent chatting over drinks, do-it-yourself sushi and many other fine foods at a local postdoc's house with physicists from a good range of international locations.
Seven hours spent sitting on tatami matting took its toll but it was great to talk about a huge range of subjects and learn a good deal about Japanese history and culture, both ancient and modern. It was particularly interesting to hear views about the present Prime Minister who, it seems, has thoughts on altering the constituation which currently does not allow Japan to have an army (imposed after the second world war).
"Article 9: Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. 2) In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized."
(The constitution makes for interesting reading in general.)
This absence of army has saved Japan both lives and money and it appears that the money saved may have helped the electronics boom over the past few decades. Though views from the evening seemed very sensible, I've since discussed the issue with others and heard a spectrum of opinions on the subject.
Anyway, the restriction imposes a protectorate relationship between Japan and the US which some would like to get away from, the point being that if relations with the States soured in the future Japan would be forceless except for the defense Army. In fact the defense army did go to Iraq in order to dig wells but, as they are not allowed to carry arms, they were guarded by Dutch soldiers.
It's a thorny issue and in the turbulent climate, while the ideal is clearly for everybody to have only a defense army (which would therefore be needless), many Japanese feel vulnerable. It seems that the current Prime minister may also be more likely to avoid the prickly relations with China and Korea which are ignited every year by going to visit the war memorial at the Yasukuni Shrine (including the spirits of 14 class A war criminals which are remembered there - this is the main controversy).
The relationship between the two nations is one that I often find a difficult subject, though one that I continue to be interested in on the level of individual Chinese sentiment. Almost every Chinese person I've spoken to (though not 100%) has gone from placid to raised hackles at the mention of Japan and strikingly strong language is frequently used. This is not just on a national level but many people I've spoken to have said that they could never be friends with a Japanese person.
A sad state of affairs and one which I initially tried to parallel with Germany's post war relationship with the rest of Europe - these are not appropriate parallels to draw. The continued bad feeling stems mostly from the lessons taught to children in Chinese school and the many films on Chinese television about the cruelty of the war (this is not to trivialise the subject in any way) - it seems they are taught that Japan would enact the same atrocities if given half a chance. The situation is also perpetuated greatly by the continued trips by Japanese politicians to the war memorial and by the publishing of Japanese textbooks with extremely biased discussion of the war - speaking with people and reading around a bit it seems that though the children may be briefly fooled by these books, the general knowledge of the well-educated population is closer to the truth.
(There's a TIME article here on the education of Chinese children on the subject of the war.)
I had the pleasure when my Japanese collaborator came to visit Beijing to introduce him to various friends who afterwards claimed, to their surprise, that in fact some Japanese could perhaps be good people and though true friendship would still be difficult, some of the prejudice had clearly been lifted. Though it's only a small step it was extremely pleasing to be part of this link.
Anyway, so the evening continued and we went from discussing links between Nordic and Asian language structures through Japanese cuisine and whiskey manufacture to the current boom in wine sales in Japan, into European history. It turns out that my knowledge of English common law is pitiful and if I'm tested on the differences between the continental and English judicial systems I'm likely to be left floundering. This was after the others had waxed lyrical about their nation's past, present and future legal systems.
By three o'clock the Euro debate and the price of pizza was being hotly contested and as my legs were beginning to make noises they shouldn't and with a schedule to keep to the next day, I left at just 3 o'clock. It turned out that the drinks kept flowing and the conversation continued on past 7am, and though it would have been enjoyable I would have been even more exhausted than I am now.
Whatever the conversation, it's a lovely change to sit around and chat like this. It's something that for various reasons I haven't had a chance to do as much as I'd like in Beijing.
