And So It Goes

Now in the Publishing Business

I am now officially in the publishing business, courtesy of Amazon and the Amazon Kindle. I'm calling the venture "Jinrikisha Press".

It turns out that the Amazon Kindle Store allows self-publication of books: just format the text, upload it and the cover image,  and set a price, and (after a delay while they look over things) your book is ready for instant download to be read on a Kindle device (the large version, which is only available in the U.S., and the small version, which works internationally). If you don't own a Kindle or don't want to pony up the money for one, you can read e-books from Amazon through the free Kindle Reader for the iPhone  or for the PC (no Mac version yet).

And, thanks to things like Project Gutenberg, many old books about Japan which are now in the public domain text are now available in full (more or less).

Putting two and two together, some entrepreneurial (but lazy) types have grabbed those texts and have uploaded them to the Kindle Store and put them up for sale. Unfortunately, most of these have been lazy cut-and-paste jobs, leaving in the numerous scanning errors, line breaks at the end of each line, undigested-by-ASCII characters, and even the original headers from the copied source (one particularly lazy job I noticed even left in the (now non-functional) search box from the Internet Archive page).

Well, I can do better. I've taken some of those old books about Japan that I found interesting, copy-edited (yes, actual copy-editing) and formatted them properly, added some footnotes in a few places, and uploaded them to the Amazon Kindle Store. I've done this with four so far, and they've (finally) just gone "live".

I did a fairly straightforward clean-up and republication on those, but those are really test cases for the REAL book, one which I started work on before all the others and am still working on. This one is going to be a full-blown annotated version: I've got 214 historical footnotes so far on that book, and will probably add several more, at least, not to mention the background introduction and biography which I still have to write. More later when I'm closer to completion.

So far, the titles are in two categories. The first imprint, which I'm calling "Western Narratives of Old Japan", are travel books and memoirs by Westerners responding to Japan. So far, I have:

• Jinrikisha Days in Japan by Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore (1904), a fairly detailed -- and, on traditional Japanese culture, still relevant -- travel book by an American woman who was the first female trustee for the National Geographic Society and the person who came up with the idea of planting cherry trees in Washington, D.C.
• A Diplomatist's Wife in Japan, Volume 1 and Volume 2, by Mrs. Hugh Fraser (1899). Aka Mary Crawford Fraser (yes, she published under her married name), the American wife of British diplomat Hugh Fraser, recording their four years (1889-1894) in Japan as he negotiated the end of the "unequal treaties" Japan had been chafing under since 1859.

The second imprint I'm calling "Western Tales of Old Japan", and are fictional -- usually highly romanticized -- stories based in Japan but written by Westerners. The first title is:

• The Stolen Emperor by Mary Crawford Fraser (1904), which is a historical romance set in 13th-century Japan. Think Sir Walter Scott with kimonos.

I have some other titles in mind, but sometimes it's like looking for gold among the dross, as there is a fairly huge number of candidates to sift through. As I find more, I'll edit those, too, and add them to the collection. Someday, if I have enough of these collected, I may venture into regular printed editions.

Geek Styl(ing)

So let's say you're a software engineer or computer programmer in search of good hair styling, and maybe some pampering, too. Well, there's only one place to go when you're in Yokohama near the main train station -- and you can treat yourself to Buffalo Chicken Wings right after, too!

Seeing and not seeing people

One slightly odd thing -- to me, at least -- about yesterday was that after we had given up waiting while standing in front of Suntory Hall, I turned around, and the man standing behind us in the plaza, I swear, looked almost exactly like -- Steve Jobs, of Apple. True, this guy didn't have a beard, but I looked twice and yeah, he could have passed for Steve Jobs and not just in dim lighting.

Which is ridiculous, of course: what would Steve Jobs be doing in Tokyo, and even if he were in Tokyo, why wouldn't he be inside the hall with the audience of dignitaries, listening to the speech? Steve Jobs, after all, could probably get Barack Obama to return his phone calls and wouldn't need to stand waiting outside with the rest of the everyday folk.

In any case, found the notion of seeing Steve Jobs when he couldn't be there slightly ironic because a few years ago, I pretty indisputably was looking right at Steve Jobs only a few meters away -- and didn't spot him.

In that case, I was in the employee cafeteria at the Apple campus in Cupertino, California, about to have lunch with an Apple Computer employee who's a friend of mine. I was standing by the pizza section when my friend sidled up and whispered, with a slight nod, "Steve's over there." My first thought was of a mutual friend. "What?" I said, startled, "Steve G_______g is here? Where?"

"No, no, Steve JOBS." I turned and peered in the direction of the salad bar (and a very good salad bar it was, too, by the way), but I couldn't spot the Apple Steve. I gave up pretty quickly, though, because I didn't want to be caught gawking. So while quite probably light reflected off of Steve Jobs hit the back of my eyeballs, my brain never processed the data.

So there you have it: I'm seeing Steve Jobs when he can't be there, and not seeing him when he is there. I'd make a lousy paparazzo.

Obama in Tokyo

President Obama's motorcade arrives at ARK Hills.

UPDATE: Okay, I'm back home. Yes, I went into downtown Tokyo and Suntory Hall this morning, hoping to catch a glimpse of President Barack Obama. I shot that photo with my camera phone while standing by a pack of TV news crews standing on the corner by Wolfgang Puck's, and caught a glimpse of the motorcade as it came down the hill from the Hotel Okura and into the ARK Hills underground parking garage, then and e-mailed it directly into Typepad.

It may not be of the highest quality or very informative, but with modern technology it was by-God fresh.

Update 2: I was joined by a friend outside Suntory Hall, where we waited, hoping (along with a small crowd) that President Obama would step outside, even briefly. Also thanks to the wonders of other modern technology, by the time we finished our wait, had lunch, and walked back to the Metro station, I was able to download and read the New York Times' story on the speech, and my friend and I could discuss what it meant.

Anyways, I might just as well put up a better photo, one taken with an actual camera:

For Veteran's Day, the USS Oneida

Appropriately enough for Veteran's Day (at least still in the US on the other side of the International Dateline), something I came across just last week, just a few miles from my home across the river.

This is gravestone marking the remains of US Navy sailors, on the grounds of Ikegami Temple in southwestern Tokyo. In all, 117 sailors were killed when their ship, the Civil War-era sloop USS Oneida, was run down and sunk in Tokyo Bay by a British steamship in January 1870. I stumbled over its existence when I read references to it in two 19th-century travelogues about Japan, and immediately bicycled over to see for myself.

From Jinrikisha Days in Japan by Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore (1891)

To citizens of the United States Ikegami has a peculiar interest. When the American man-of-war Oneida was run down and sunk with her officers and crew by the P. and O. steamer Bombay, near the mouth of Yeddo Bay, January 23, 1870, our Government made no effort to raise the wreck or search it, and finally sold it to a Japanese wrecking company for fifteen hundred dollars. The wreckers found many bones of the lost men among the ship's timbers, and when the work was entirely completed, with their voluntary contributions they erected a tablet in the Ikegami grounds to the memory of the dead, and celebrated there the impressive Buddhist segaki (feast of hungry souls), in May 1889. The great temple was in ceremonial array; seventy-five priests in their richest robes assisted at the mass, and among the congregation were the American admiral and his officers, one hundred men from the fleet, and one survivor of the solitary boat's crew that escaped from the Oneida.

The Scriptures were read, a service was chanted, the Sutra repeated, incense burned, the symbolic lotus-leaves cast before the altar, and after an address in English by Mr. Amenomori explaining the segaki, the procession of priests walked to the tablet in the grounds to chant prayers and burn incense again.

No other country, no other religion, offers a parallel to this experience; and Americans may well take to heart the example of piety, charity, magnanimity, and liberality that this company of hard-working Japanese fishermen and wreckers have set them.

From A Diplomatist's Wife in Japan, Volume 1 By Mary Crawford Fraser (or "Mrs. Hugh Fraser", as she is credited), published in 1899, reprinting a letter from 1889:

I must tell you of a strange and touching ceremony which took place in Yokohama the other day. This was a requiem service in a Buddhist temple, for the repose of the souls of a number of officers and men who were drowned when the U.S. warship Oneida was sunk, by a collision with a P. & O. steamer, just in the mouth of the bay nineteen years ago. Lately the wreck was bought by some Japanese gentlemen, who discovered the bones of many poor fellows who had gone down in her. These they brought to shore, and buried beside the bodies of their comrades which had been recovered after the misfortune. Having laid the bones to rest, they thought that it would be kind to do something for the sailors' souls, and organised at their own expense a magnificent requiem service called Segaki, or the Feast for Hungry Spirits. They invited all the foreigners and the American admiral with his officers and men. Admiral Belknap was anxious to take some share of the heavy expense, but the five merchants would not hear of that at all. It seemed to me a kind and holy thought, this unasked benevolence shown to a handful of long-forgotten strangers. A local English newspaper describes the promoters of this charitable function as a “Japanese Firm of Wreckers”!

Mrs Fraser got a few details wrong, I notice: Ikegami is NOT in Yokohama, though it is partway between the British Legation in Tokyo and Yokohama so perhaps the mistake is understandable, and the few bodies which were recovered from the original fruitless rescue attempts in 1870 were buried at the Foreigner's Cemetery in Yokohama.

Later today I'm going to drop by the Japan Foundation Library to look up the story's details.