A heartfelt plea

If you know anyone planning on going to NYC in the next few days to demonstrate against the Republican National Convention, please do what you can to stop them.

Some reasons why:

Get mad. Act out. Re-Elect George Bush

The War Resisters League, like A31.org, cites a Martin Luther King Jr. quote that includes these words, offered as if a taunt: "Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue."

It would have taken all of King's powers of Christian love, I think, not to laugh in these people's faces. King would never ever simply say, "We need to do what our conscience tells us is important to do," and somehow leave it at that. King planned his insurgencies with the strategic care of a military general, and with the characteristic obsessions of a top-drawer publicist: no risk of arrest, of violence—even when arrest or violence was welcomed, embraced for its communicative power—was ver left to chance. (Today's protesters revel in their embrace of improvisation, as if it were a good in itself.) And he never left the field of battle satisfied with mere moral victory, that his side had demonstrated more righteousness than the other. He always had a concrete political goal, that concrete goal but a step toward his continually evolving transcendent goals.

In Chicago in 1968, and in New York in 2004, these are lessons forgotten.

Something protesters should think about in general, but, at this time, with respect to the upcoming RNC in particular.

catch up

1. The trip to Ibaraki was great. We fetched grandma from the home, and went to see relatives at three different houses out in the countryside (which, in Japan, is still quite heavily populated). At each stop we were fed a fair amount of food. I recognized one of the houses, sort of, on the way in, enough to remember playing some Nintendo Famicon there once upon a time. We then went to see grandma's older sister at her nursing home. I believe some dust might have found its way to my eye when the two old ladies had their reunion.

The "family tomb" turns out to be a cluster of old stone markers on a bit of a rise. The maternal family name was all over the place.

2. I had my first all-nighter in Tokyo. I simply had to do it once, but I'll probably only ever do it once, at least on nights preceding work days. I and a few compatriots sang into the wee hours of the night. There were a few casualties, in the form of people passing out due to exhaustion or other reasons. I left sometime around 5, and had the rather eerie experience of walking through a nearly deserted Shibuya--no huge crowds, no streetside bands, no loud announcements from drug stores or karaoke joints, no flashing images or blaring music coming from 10 meter tall TV screens. I walked across Hachiko crossing with maybe 3 other people.

Made it to bed by 6, up at 9, to work by 10:50.

Fast forward 2 days:

3. Moving was a treat. By which I mean to say it was bloody awful. The new place is about 20-30 minutes walk along a path running down the fairly scenic river, so we made a few trips on foot, carting stuff on wheeled devices of various sorts. Our timing was off, which is to say our final push was made via taxi at about 2am--we had to work the next day, of course.

4. A week later, we're basically still in the moving process. The "sayonara sales" found in Metropolis magazine's classified section yield some great deals. Stuff bought through coworkers who are leaving the country can also be a boon. The trick, though, is getting the stuff from their door to yours. Today from a now-ex-worker we acquired 1 electric blanket, 1 small table, 8 plastic drawers, a pot and assorted kitchen items, a TV/VCR, and 2 light fixtures for a total of 6000 yen (they were only asking 5000) plus train fare (two trips for me, one for Kate). It's difficult, though, to put a price on effort and stress.

5. In speaking to some other people who also climbed Mount Fuji, and had somewhat worse luck with the weather than we did, I must doubly stress that the Fuji Kyuko bus is the pits. You cannot reliably predict the weather on Fuji more than maybe a day into the future, and you do not want to go up if there's a chance you could face even a few drops of rain. Apart from my altitude sickness, our trip up was absolutely wonderful; if it were cloudy it wouldn't have been particularly impressive, and if it were raining it would have been (I gather) akin to one of the less impressive circles of hell, but hellish nonetheless. So reserving Fuji Kyuko bus tickets two days in advance ought to be out of the question.

6. Probably it's good to have a day of truly solid rest sometime after hiking up Mount Fuji. I'll remember that next time. 6 day work week coming up, because of a favour done for a complete stranger, of all things. I was told he wanted different days off so that he'd have more time to move, and unfortunately I'm currently in a state where I tend to be sympathetic to that sort of thing.

Update

A couple of things:

1) Yay for the Greek guy who won his Judo weight class! And yay to Canada for finally making it onto the medal-winning country list (we are not a summer country).

2) We are in the process of moving today. Unfortunately, our internet won't be hooked up until the 24th, so we may (if there's no wireless at the new place) be offline for a few days. Our telephone number will also be out of service until that day.

3) We upgraded our internet from 12 Mbs to 47 Mbs. It will work out to be 200 yen cheaper per month. I think that's pretty funny.

That's all for now.

Climbing Mt. Fuji

Just about every webpage I could find about climbing Mount Fuji recommended taking the Fuji Kyuko bus from Shinjuku straight to Gogome--the fifth of eight stations up Fuji, and the standard starting point for a climb to the summit.

They make it sound so easy. I don't know what these people are thinking.

Don't get me wrong--the bus does have its attractions. I do not doubt that, as claimed, it is pretty much the cheapest and fastest way to get to Mount Fuji.

On the other hand, during the very peak of the climbing season, Fuji Kyuko runs six, count 'em, six of these buses every day. They tend to be somewhat crowded. You cannot (as some of these pages strongly suggest) simply waltz up to the ticket window on the day of your trip and buy yourself a ticket on the next bus. Rather, you need to plan your trip (there and back) days in advance.

So, first you need an ability to plan ahead. Good luck with that! An additional difficulty would be posed by the marked absence of any English whatsoever on either of the relevant websites. (This National Geographic article links to the entirely Japanese online reservation system, perhaps assuming that the culturally enlightened readers of NG must necessarily be fluent readers of Japanese.)

As it happened, though, none of this really mattered anyway, since while I was making the reservations I somehow came under the impression that our 4 day weekend started on Tuesday rather than Wednesday. Oops.

When I discovered my error (having been informed of it by the bus driver on the bus) I kinda felt like crawling to the nearest izakaya to drink away the two days that were meant to be spent on Mount Fuji. Luckily, though, Kate was there to egg me on, so after some effort, and having looked none of this up on the internet ahead of time (gasp!), I got us there anyway.

I'll run through it for the benefit of the websurfers who (judging from their referrals) occasionally drop by this site looking for actual information: Take a limited express on the Chuo main line from, say, Shinjuku (or wherever--Tachikawa actually works better for us) to Otsuki. Transfer to the Fujikyu train, take to the end of the line at Kawaguchiko, then take the bus the rest of the way to Fujisan Gogome.

To be sure, it's a bit more expensive, and takes a bit longer. But you can do it entirely on the fly (I recommend jiyuseki, or non-reserved seating on the Chuo), and the company can be more... colourful.

We had been planning to hike up Mount Fuji at night, to catch the sunrise at the summit. What with the last minute changing of plans, we ended up on the very last bus to Fuji Gogome (shortly after 9pm), which runs according to an anarchic seating system. No one was left behind at the Kawaguchiko stop--and there were a lot of people there. The aisles were full (just about everyone chose to sit), and one woman up front was sitting in the stairwell. My half-hearted attempts to take a nap on the bus ride were stymied by a tourist from England who kept shifting her weight on my leg, which she was using as a backrest, not to mention the Chinese guy from Vancouver sitting next to me who just wouldn't stop talking. And I think some guys in the back might have been setting off fireworks or something, because on a couple of occasions there was a burst of cheering, and I turned back to see a cloud of white smoke filling up the back half of the bus.

All in all, a pretty good way to build some excitement for the upcoming trek.

We enjoyed clear skies that night, so not only did we get a full view of the stars, but also of the Perseid meteor shower (which Kate knew to look out for thanks to SpaceWeather.com), not to mention Venus and a crescent moon side by side.

Our plan to see the sunrise at the summit was jeopardised by two difficulties. The first difficulty is that everyone and his dog wants to see the sunrise from the summit. Not all of them want to hike up all night, though. Most, it would seem, hike up to the eighth station during the previous day, have a short sleep at one of the "hotels", and get up around 3:30 to resume their journey. And they tend to do this in tour groups. Which is to say, when we made it to the eighth station, at about 3:30, and looked up toward the summit, we found ourselves staring at a solid, zigzagging line of tourists, indentifiable by their wavering flashlights, and the occasional blinkingredbatton-wielding tour leader. This made our final push to the summit rather unpleasant. In order to get around the lines of hikers whose idea of hiking is taking a step every 30 seconds, it's necessary to do rather difficult climbing up sections of the trail that maybe aren't really legitimately considered part of the trail at all.

Compounding this difficulty, in my case, was the return of my altitude sickness (which just about stopped a preteen me from reaching the summit during my first trip up Fuji). My arms and legs served me just fine as we hoofed our way to the top, but my head kept protesting... it turns out that if you need to concentrate really hard on finding handholds and footholds, and are also kinda stubborn, it's not so hard to ignore a little headache.

Kids: if you're climbing up a mountain and you start having a headache, stop climbing the bloody mountain.

The headache got pretty much unbearable at the summit, and was shortly followed by nausea. Let's just say that the next few hours were rather unpleasant, and that the Fuji policy to not leave anything behind on the mountain has never had such grim consequences. And talk about the kindness of strangers--we got a free can of oxygen and a container full of wipes because of my performance.

But for all of that, it was worth it. The night sky, occasionally punctuated by streaks of light, looking down at the distant city lights, watching the moon peak over the horizon, walking right through the clouds, seeing the sunrise from the summit--well, the pictures make that last experience look pretty good, though I wasn't in the right frame of mind to appreciate it at the time.

Currently, my legs feel OK, and somehow my feet managed to stay blister free, but there's something wrong with my left elbow, which I never even walked on.

Next: Obon, Ibaraki, "the family tomb".

Sweet, sweet long weekend

Moving is a headache in and of itself, especially when you're spending a lot of time trying to explain what a handcart is in a foreign language, because you haven't yet figured out that the appropriate word happens to be "cart" (or, at least, "kaato").

When faced with such a difficult situation, the obvious remedy is to try, say, going to a BBQ with some Japanese hippies in some part of Tokyo that you've never been to before and are certain to get lost in, while simultaneously planning for your four-day weekend which will involve a visit to "the family tomb" preceded by a hike up Mount Fuji, and of course you'll want to schedule the most difficult part of the move, which is to say the transportation of your new (used) washing machine and fridge from two people at two different locations to your new apartment that doesn't even have electricity yet, right after a full day at work which is also the day before the hike up Mount Fuji, and the day before that you'll want to stay up late agonizing over what to write to convince your bosses to promote you.

Thank God I can relax now. And by "relax", I mean struggle my way up to the highest point in Japan--in the dead of night, as the plan goes.

Good times, bad times

Our new washing machine is going to cost us 2000yen.

This makes me happy.

This guy I know (but wish I didn't) used some ghetto-ism (which I can't currently recall) to refer to the act of getting drunk. He is of course a rich white nerd-boy from New Jersey.

Ugh.

The fireworks here are spectacular (which is what you would expect from a spectacle). Some nifty pictures (if I do say so myself) can be accessed through the appropriately labelled link to the side.

I've just finished reading Of Love and Other Demons. A beautiful book, and a quick read fit even for my attention span.