And So It Goes

Tokyo Orchid Show, YouTube version

Orchids at the Japan Grand Prix International Orchid Festival in Tokyo on Saturday and Sunday at (of all places) the Tokyo Dome. Which is an indoor baseball stadium. Low-def YouTube version.

Tokyo Orchid Show, Vimeo version

Some of the orchids seen at the Japan Grand Prix International Orchid Festival in Tokyo. High-definition video, I hope.
Tokyo Orchid Show from Calton Bolick on Vimeo.

Snowy Light Show at Tokyo Midtown, YouTube version

The low-def, YouTube version of the light show video:

Snowy Light Show at Tokyo Midtown, Vimeo version

A big snowfall hit Tokyo on Sunday, and I took my video camera to see the effect of snow on the landscape. What I got was an eerily beautiful lightshow at the park behind the Tokyo Midtown development in Roppongi... This is the letterboxed, Quicktime version, supposedly in HD. We'll see.

Snowy Evening at Tokyo Midtown - QT version from Calton Bolick on Vimeo.

A bit of Hollywood shows up in Tokyo

A couple of weeks ago, I saw the trailer for an upcoming movie called Jumper, a science-fiction thriller starring Hayden Christensen (you can see it here, at Apple's trailer page). One bit caught my eye, in the scene (45 seconds in) where the main character is standing in front of an auto showroom; namely, the dealership name, Yanase, which is the name of a big luxury-car import business here in Tokyo. (That's a screenshot, to the right.)

"Huh, someone did their research," I thought, assuming (given how relatively generic that sort of setting is), it had been filmed in Los Angeles or Toronto using some random storefront with the "Yanase" sign attached. Nice touch in putting a Japanese taxi on the edge of the scene, I thought.

Last night, I was walking through the Ginza, having left someone's sayonara party¹ and having walked with several participants as far as the karaoke place that they were bound for afterwards. Since there's not enough alcohol in Tokyo to get me to sing karaoke, I left them there and cut through the back streets on the way to Shimbashi station. Which is where I ran into this strangely familiar building:

Yes, it's the same building. Which means some Hollywood film crew came all the way out to Tokyo to set up and film (what I assume) is a short scene that -- practically speaking -- could be faked relatively easily (assuming the art director was a stickler for details) in downtown LA or Toronto. ²

Man, that's going the extra mile for authenticity.

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¹ At a nice Italian place near Yurakucho station called "Scorpion Stazione". Next to the big Muji store and highly recommended.

² I mention Toronto because it's a very common location for film producers looking to save a few bucks over filming in Hollywood, though I don't know how the weak U.S. dollar is affecting that business.

Tokuzo Mitsuda

While browsing through Wikipedia today (hey, everyone needs a hobby), I came across the oddest reference in their short item about a British steamship called the S.S. Sauternes, a freighter built in 1922 which sank in a storm off the Faroe Islands on December 7, 1941. Whoever wrote the item saw fit to list the names of every one of the 25 crew and passengers who died in the disaster.

It wasn't the excessive detail which really caught my eye, however, it was one of the names: in the midst of names like "Captain George Albert Perris", "Robert Brown Palmer", and "Donald Fraser"  was the name Tokuzo Mitsuda.

Tokuzo Mitsuda? What the hell was a Japanese man doing on a British Merchant Navy ship in the North Atlantic in 1941?

A little digging turned up very little, once I had plowed through all of the various websites that reuse Wikipedia content (and therefore simply reprint the Wikipedia article). I did find out a little something, courtesy of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which tracks memorials and cemeteries of UK and Commonwealth war dead. According to their entry for Tokuzo Mitsuda, he was a member of the crew of the Sauternes, a 57-year-old Fireman and Trimmer (meaning he worked down in the ship's engine room). Because he was lost at sea, there is no grave: rather, he has a spot on a memorial panel at the Tower Hill Memorial in London, near the Tower of London.

Which, of course makes it a bigger mystery: how did a Japanese man, born in 1884 -- only 17 years after the Meiji Restoration -- wind up in Britain, at age 57, shoveling coal (or stoking the oil fires) in the boiler room of a steamship in the North Atlantic on the literal eve of World War II?* Somehow -- though I doubt I'll be the one to do it -- I sense there's a story here waiting to be told.

*Yes (to forestall the nitpickers) I am well aware that for Great Britain, war with Germany started in 1939. But war between the British and the Japanese did NOT start until 1941, when Japan attacked British colonies in Asia at the same time they attacked Pearl Harbor.

More Songs Posts About Buildings and Food

Another late start, as is usual for me on Saturdays. First, I stopped by my old company’s offices in Tamachi to drop off some paperwork – technically, I’m still a part-time employee there, even if it’s one (1) hour a week – passing by a group of Japanese Christmas carolers inside Akabanebashi Station. Not completely fluent – no surprise – and while I have no proof, I suspect this wasn’t a Christian thing, but a hobbyist thing, kind of like people in the U.S. who sing Latin Masses for fun even if they’re not churchgoers.

Paperwork dropped off, I went on to the GA Gallery in Yoyogi to see another architectural show. The GA Gallery is the bookstore/exhibition space for a publisher of big glossy books and monographs on modernist architecture – in a small modernist building, of course – and they regularly put on exhibitions displaying models, conceptual drawings, and presentation posters for contemporary projects and proposals. A few months ago, for example, they had one on the latest work of French architect Jean Nouvel, highlighting his designs for the huge new Quai Branly Museum in Paris and the new Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. Today, it was a catch-all covering recent proposals/projects by modernist Japanese architects. This included a competition entry proposal by architect Arata Isozaki for a massive mixed-use development project in Ho Chi Minh City (aka Saigon), Vietnam. The project, called the Diamond Island New Urban Quarter Development, I quite liked the look of, including the look of how some of the residential units were stacked on top of it each in oddly overlapping ways.¹

I headed back to Yoyogi Station and did my biweekly browsing of the magazine rack at the big Kinokuniya Books nearby (bought three) and browsed the travel guides for Italy – I’m considering a Spring vacation there – and by the time I was ready to leave it was dinnertime and I was hungry. I crossed the pedestrian bridge to check out the new Krispy Kreme doughnut shop on the other side, maybe to buy a snack or a box to bring to the office on Monday but it was still jampacked with an incredibly long line.  Still, the sign on the door said they open at 7 AM, so if I really wanted a doughnut, I should come back early Monday morning as a long detour on the way to work.

So, wanting dinner and not wanting to wait until I got home, I headed back in the direction of the GA Gallery, to check out a place I’d passed earlier, a French bistro calling itself Bistro d’Artemis. It’s small stand-alone building – rare enough in this densely built urban center – tucked on an odd-sized lot under a highway not far from Yoyogi Station. Maybe 20 seats total, informal-looking, open kitchen, windows and walls covered with an assortment of authentic-looking bistro signs, menu in French. Seeing this had given me a bit of a craving to try cassoulet², so, stymied in my attempt to buy a doughnut, I went back for that. You might ask, “A choice between some sugar-laden American fat bombs and what is probably authentic (this being Japan, probably disturbingly so) French bistro food? You had to think about this?” Yeah yeah, I know.

Inside the Bistro d’Artemis, it was very Gallic – though I don’t know if the average Paris bistro has a four-meter (15-foot) tall glass-enclosed wine rack with attached ladder built into one wall. In any case, I ordered what I believe was some variant of Navy Bean Soup (as I say, the menu was in French) steak tartar, and cassoulet, along with a small carafe of red house wine. I’d never had steak tartar (it was good) and the cassoulet was pretty much how I’d remembered it. Of course, I’ll need to run further experiments to be sure, or maybe I can try some of their other specialties, like boudin noir (blood sausage, if I recollect, but my French is more than a little suspect). I'll have to bring my friend Sonja, who is very much into French food, being, you know, French.³  I'm sure she'll love it.

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Notes:
¹I looked it up when I got home, and sadly, it looks like the developers rejected Isozaki's proposal in favor of a much blander proposal by a German architect named Albert Speer. No, not THAT German architect named Albert Speer: this one is his son. Speer the Younger’s much duller proposal for the project, in my opinion, looks like it would fit in, say, Berlin – East Berlin, that is, before the Berlin Wall. Blah.

²A cassoulet is ”a rich, slow-cooked bean stew or casserole originating in the southwest of France, containing meat (typically pork sausages, pork, goose, duck, and sometimes mutton), pork skin (couennes) and white haricot beans” says Wikipedia.  The first and only time I had ever tried this was during my vacation in Paris, and I was still unsure about how authentic it was. If that sounds strange (“How could you be worried about whether you got authentic French food in FRANCE?!?”), it’s because the cassoulet I had was frozen.

Really. Short version: while in Paris, I was listening with my iPod to an episode of the radio show This American Life (previously recorded, of course) featuring an American expatriate named David Sedaris who’d moved to Paris to be with his lover, not because of any inherent love of the place. In fact, he bragged that he’d never been to any of the obvious landmarks such as the Louvre (“Why go to the only place in Paris that won’t let you smoke?”) – which struck me as a really annoying reverse snobbery, but neverthemind. In the course of the show, Sedaris mentioned the Pantheon. Nope, never had been inside, but he knew about it because it was across the street from a frozen-food store he frequented.

Now, it so happened that a few years ago I had heard a radio news story about a relatively new chain of stores in Paris that sold frozen foods – but high-quality frozen versions of classic French dishes, or so the report had it. I filed it away mentally, but had no recollection of the name of the store or where to find one – now, with Sedaris’ mention, I now had a landmark and knew exactly where to find one: across the street from the Pantheon, just down the road from my rented apartment in the 5th. So late one afternoon during one of my rambles I aimed myself in that direction.

The Pantheon, it turned out, was fairly large, so “across the street” covered a LOT of territory, meaning that I had to almost completely circle the Pantheon to find it. But there it was: Picard, a modern and spacious store with wide aisles and nothing but frozen-food cases. I went in and browsed, but since the store also had one entrance and one exit (through the cashier stands), I felt somewhat impelled to actually buy something rather than run the risk of having to explain to a cashier I had to pass that no, I wasn’t actually shopping, I was merely playing tourist in a frozen-food store. So I picked up a frozen duck-sausage cassoulet, frozen broccoli florets, and raspberry sherbet for that evening’s dinner. And you know what? It was good.

³Okay, technically she's American, but her parents are French and she spoke French at home in rural northern California where she was raised. so it's pretty close.

In the Chair

Today was the big day I had to go to the dental surgeon to yank out my three bad wisdom teeth (see this post for why). Yes, it absolutely needed to be done – the alternative of a permanent diet of codeine and liquid food sipped through a straw didn’t seem practical – but I absolutely loathed the idea of doing this, of dealing with needles stuck into my gums and big metal pliers being jammed into my mouth. I woke up this morning feeling all squirrelly and anxious, dreading this appointment.

Bad dental history
My long-time discomfort with dentists and dental surgery comes from my experiences back in high school in suburban California, when I went to my dentist's one day for a routine exam and cleaning. The guy, after looking at my teeth, announced that I had a wisdom tooth that needed to be yanked immediately, and he knew a dental surgeon across town who had an opening today and could do it right away.

Doing it immediately meant that I couldn't have general anesthesia -- i.e.; gas -- since it requires a 12-hour period of fasting beforehand: it was the needle or nothing. But he was the professional, and if he said the tooth had to go immediately, it had to go immediately, so I went along, and drove over to the dental surgeon for the extraction.

That experience? Horrible, even nightmarish.

"Don't worry about our sticking a huge needle into your gums," the dental surgeon back in California had assured me. "We'll use a local anesthetic first so you won't feel it." Except, of course, that local anesthetic was applied using a needle, albeit a smaller one -- poke poke poke -- and I STILL felt the big needle full of Novocain -- jab jab jab -- when he jammed THAT in, too.

And, of course, there was the unforgettable experience of lying back in the dentist’s chair, half-woozy from the anesthetic, looking up at the ceiling as the dental surgeon kept jamming a variety of cold metal implements into my mouth, culminating in my distorted view of a pair of pliers coming in at me, clamping on the offending tooth, and feeling my jaw being pulled up as he tugged away, finally loosening the tooth and yanking it free.

The right side of my face was utterly numb to sensation for an hour or so after -- poking it gave me the curious sensation of being able to feel it with my finger but not getting the corresponding feedback from my face, so it was akin to fondling a rubber mask – and the codeine pills the dental surgeon gave me only just took the sharp edges off the pain with I suffered over the next few days.

I was supposed to eventually remove the remaining three wisdom teeth, but there was NO WAY I was going to repeat that experience, absolutely not unless the dental surgeon knocked me out cold with general anesthesia. But finding a dental surgeon who used gas, when I went looking, proved to be more difficult than I thought, so I eventually gave up and returned to my program of benign neglect.

The present-day consequences
Which brings us to the present day.

Fearing the worst, I took the entire day off, figuring that I would be in no shape to return to work afterward. It was with extreme trepidation that I showed up at the dental surgeon’s office this morning – the pain had mostly subsided, depending on how I chewed – and I was rationalizing up to the last minute about how I could get by without the multiple extractions. “Stiff” would probably be an accurate description both of my demeanor and posture in the chair, like I was awaiting execution.

Bottom line result: not even close to being an ordeal. Quite the opposite, in fact.

My first hint came as I was lying back in the dentist’s chair, staring up at the lamp lighting up my face, its brand name -- “DELIGHT” -- looking back. (“DELIGHT”? Har har, just the message I want to read just before someone RIPS MY TEETH OUT.)

“Open wide, please,” said the dental surgeon, and I complied, shutting my eyes and bracing myself. I felt as he swabbed my gums with a Q-tip, and I waited, eyes shut, for whatever came next. What I felt, after a short wait, was an instrument inserted into my mouth, resting slightly against the side of my open mouth. I could feel very slight movement, like metal or plastic being rubbed, through the instrument. The instrument was moved to another part of my mouth, and I felt the very slight movement again.

Because I had my eyes shut and wasn’t expecting it, it took me until after it was done to figure out what had happened: the “instrument” was a hypodermic syringe, and what I felt was the movement of the plunger inside its cylinder, delivering anesthetic through a needle inserted into my gums. I opened my eyes and said, “Did you just inject anesthetic into my gums?” The dental surgeon admitted he had. Huh, and I hadn’t even noticed.

The rest of the experience was, essentially, just as pleasant. The only thing that really qualified as unpleasant was the moment when he was reapplying some anesthetic and some of it dripped down my throat, gagging me. God, the stuff tasted awful.

But after some relatively mild poking, prodding, digging, and pulling, he took out the three remaining wisdom teeth, displaying their fragments to me: they varied from peppercorn-sized to pea-sized. Unlike the dental surgeon I went to years ago (where the memories of his handiwork with his instruments runs through my mind like a cinematic cross between Barry Sonnenfeld and David Cronenberg), this was a VERY skillful and gentle job of work.

He gave me a few pain pills to take when the anesthesia wore off – I took one, later, because that was all that was really needed for some slight discomfort – and I made an appointment for next month for a long-overdue teeth cleaning – given that the interval between my dentist’s visits are measured not in months or even years, but in Presidential administrations, it’s going to take two visits with anesthesia, using some technique called “dental planing”, to remove the plaque. I’m surprised he’s not going to be using C4 to blow it off.

I was presented with a booklet on aftercare (which advised me to avoid chewing on the side where the tooth had been extracted, difficult to do when they’ve been pulled from both sides) and the bill, which was ¥63,000 total, with each tooth charged at a different rate – how they figured it out, I don’t know, maybe by the gram? – which will be reimbursed by my New Zealand-based insurance company after I send them the receipt.

The whole thing, from the time I arrived until the time I was out on the street, took about 40 minutes.

And other than a slight soreness and that rubber-faced numbness around my jaw, I felt fine, so with plenty of free time on my hands (since I'd taken the day off), I called up my friend Sonja, who worked in the area and left a message on her voicemail. This message astonished my friend Sonja, which she later told me she found slightly boggling because my calm tone seemed to clash with my meaning (“Hi, Sonja, this is Cal. I just had three of my wisdom teeth pulled at the dentist’s, so I’m in the area now. Want to have lunch?”).

Maybe going to the dentist won’t be so bad after all.

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Happy X-mas

Liz and I got out of the Roppongi Hills Cinema about 4:30 AM after our all-night movie marathon, worn and slightly bleary-eyed. We shuffled past the skeleton clean-up crew, passing through that weird lighted tunnel the theater complex has on its upper level, down the big escalator with the other shuffling and bleary-eyed moviegoers, and outside into the deserted and cold Roppongi Hills shopping complex. People were still out on the streets though, the all-night party-goers winding down as dawn was about to break. We descended into the subway station and the platform was almost rush-hour crowded -- though, unlike the morning commuters, a large percentage were sprawled on the floor or slumped against the walls. Liz and I split at Shibuya, and I made the quiet ride home to the 'burbs on the Toyoko Line, coming in my front door just past dawn.

But I woke up today just after noon, and, not having much better to do and think perhaps to witness a bit of Japan style Christmas spirit,  I went to downtown Tokyo and took a ride on the monorail out to Odaiba -- a man-made island on Tokyo Bay built for development -- and paid a visit to Venus Fort.

Venus Fort is a upscale shopping mall which opened a few years back, looking like a cross between Disneyland and Milan. "Over the top" is probably a good pocket description -- there's even a large Roman-style fountain in the center and, at one end, an atrium intended to evoke some ancient Roman piazza, complete with an oversized Roman temple facade and faux-sky. The whole scene features slowly changing lighting that simulates sunset and sunrise, which was a spectacle I watched from my dinner table on a "temple" balcony overlooking the piazza -- a Chinese restaurant done up as a faux-1930s Shanghai movie theater (you pay your bill at the "box office window" in the lobby), complete with artistically grotty stairwell leading up to the dining room. The clash of competing highly detailed fantasy worlds was a bit much -- dining on my sweet-and-sour pork, steamed greens, and fried rice while enjoying a faux sunset on a faux-Roman Holiday -- but I did like the food. ¹

(This sort of theme-park approach to shopping malls is nothing new here -- elsewhere on Odaiba, for example, are shopping centers based on Hong Kong and on a nostalgic post-Occupation-but-pre-Bubble Japan. In fact, as I recall, some ads for Venus Fort were referring to it as a "theme park for women".²

I did do some shopping -- in the sense that I looked at some of the goods on display in the stores and thought "Boy, I can't afford that" or "Why in God's name would anyone buy that?" I'm not that big on Christmas shopping, honestly (though I do have a few train-related items I bought earlier from some railfans back in the States that I still have to mail).

After dinner, I also dropped by the huge Toyota corporate showcase, MEGAZONE, attached to one end of the mall. It's a two-level auditorium-sized space where the automaker shows off their new cars, their new technology, and other whiz-bang corporate and automotive-related stuff -- featuring things like tiny prototype computer-steered cars giving rides to visitors on an elevated roadway winding in and out of the buildingand displays of F1 cars from the Toyota Racing Team. Great fun for the gearheads and tire-kickers alike, no doubt.

However, somewhere in the back of this noisy gearhead paradise (right by the stadium-sized videoscreen show MTV-like videos of their F1 racing team) was one of the weirder bits of the Christmas spirit I've seen so far: an exhibition of the artwork of John Lennon, under an enormous Christmas tree decorated with plenty of lights and a large neon version of Lennon's famous self-portrait sketch.

There were a few dozen limited-edition lithographs of Lennon's drawings on display, along with about a dozen old photos of Lennon and Yoko Ono together, clearly dating from the early days of their relationship. The speaker system was playing (of course) John Lennon songs (his solo stuff, not the Beatles material), though between the barn-like acoustics and the blare of the big videoscreen nearby it was hard to hear the music clearly.

Appalled? I dunno. Fascinated? Yes. I can choose to view it either as a small tribute to John Lennon (and his work and spirit) in the midst of this noisy and garish commercial space, or as a crass commercial attempt to put a façade of art in this noisy and garish commercial space. Either way, it's with the approval of Yoko Ono, so how you may feel about it, I suspect, depends entirely on how you feel about her. Me, I think she cares deeply about John Lennon and his memory and only wants positive portrayals, which is her right, of course.

As I looked at some of the old photographs of the couple, I was struck by a couple of weird thoughts; first, Yoko is almost exactly as old as my mother, and in the photos (which dated from the mid-1960s) she even RESEMBLES my mother, something I'd never twigged to, since I really hadn't seen old photos of Yoko before. There's certainly no other resemblance I can think of -- personality, life, upbringing, education, fame -- nor any reason to think there could be any other parallels, but the physical similarities still brought me up short.

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¹Seiryumon is the name of the restaurant, part of a chain

²Endorsement of view not implied.

A Doughnut (Actually, 12 of Them)...

After puttering around the house, I headed out to Shinjuku on Saturday afternoon, having nothing really better to do and curious about this new Krispy Kreme doughnut shop that had opened the day before. It turns out to be in what used to be a two-story Italian restaurant at the foot of the pedestrian bridge over the tracks, the walkway that leads over to Takashimaya Times Square. (Here's the map, or you can use this satellite photo to get a sense of the location: it's on the left side of bridge in the center of  the photo, though the location is obscured by the office building) So it wasn't a little hole-in-the-wall, like I expected.

I expected it to be crowded, what with the novelty and all, but there was a huge freaking line of a few hundred people snaking around in front of the building, behind the rope lines next to the traditional good luck floarl arrangements new businesses always put up, with security guards directing traffic (foot traffic, this being a pedestrian mall). The line even extended out onto the pedestrian bridge. The doughnut machine was working full blast, and they were selling box after box of the things. I looked into the place, and thought, despite my plan to maybe buy a box on Sunday night to bring into the office on Monday morning, I had to try it again right now. Yes, I had a lingering toothache -- perhaps a sign I ought not to be eating doughnuts to begin with -- but doughnuts are soft and not likely to cause any real pain, and it was a little late to be worried about tooth decay now anyways.

So I joined the line on the bridge, just ahead of a young Asian-American couple (Vietnamese, I think -- their conversation kept veering between Valspeak and an Asian language I couldn't identify). The woman seemed particularly excited to see Krispy Kreme again ("Like, when I'd see the sign lit up when I'm driving on the freeway, I'd take the exit and go in").

I waited about forty minutes -- I was actually killing a little time, as I'd called my friend Sonja and she was coming out to meet me for dinner -- and would have waited longer if I hadn't taken the offer to jump the queue: as I was nearing the door, a Krispy Kreme employee came up and offered to let people go straight in to the register selling boxes to go, if that's all they wanted. Geez, a dozen doughnuts at once...but what the hell. The Asian-American couple followed me, because by that point in the line they -- well, mostly she, I think -- had worked themselves up from wanting two to wanting a full dozen. I snagged my box and went out to sit on a nearby planter.

While fresh doughnuts are good, there is such a thing as too fresh: my doughnuts were probably, due to demand, straight off the line, so the first doughnut I ate then and there -- okay, two doughnuts -- were far too soft, sort of being mushy and falling apart. Once I gave a few minutes for them to set, as it were, they were good, if incredibly sweet.

Today's Statistics:
Cost of a Krisy Kreme doughnut (Original Glazed) in Tokyo: ¥150 (tax included)
Cost of a dozen Krisy Kreme doughnuts (Original Glazed) in Tokyo: ¥1,500 (tax included)
Number of calories in one Krispy Kreme doughnut (Original Glazed): 200
Grams of fat in one Krispy Kreme doughnut (Original Glazed): 12

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