Eugene's blog

Kumosuke

2012-02-02T10:56:00.005-07:00

Back in chapter ten of Serpent of Time, Ryô learns that discharged palanquin bearers often turned to lives of crime. In chapter twelve, she runs into two of them.

In Irezumi: The Pattern of Dermatography in Japan, Willem R. van Gulik points out that today the term "palanquin bearer" or kumosuke (雲助) can refer to a reckless taxi driver or ruffian. "When business was slack, palanquin bearers would often resort to highway robbery as a side line."

Ryô's concerns about her own palanquin bearers notwithstanding, kumosuke served middle-class travelers. Palanquin bearer for the noble classes were known as rokushaku (六尺), which refers to the length of the shoulder bars that supported the palanquin (literally, "six feet").

Starting in the fall

2012-01-30T11:43:00.007-07:00

In Japan, the fiscal and school years, public and private, corporate and government, have traditionally all begun in April. But over the next five years, Tokyo University (Tôdai) plans to shift the start of its school year from April to September.

Although Tôdai is the Harvard, Yale and MIT of Japan, it receives only a middling ranking in world-wide comparisons.

Tôdai believes that facilitating the exchange of students and faculty will raise its status. Giuseppe Pezzotti, a materials scientist at the Kyoto Institute of Technology, analogizes what Tôdai is after, a ruby made beautiful by a few parts per million of chromium:

Without this impurity the [aluminum oxide] would simply be white, while the chromium itself would be featureless. We foreign residents can similarly be regarded as intentionally inserted elements, or dopants, which make the society more beautiful.

Incidentally, demographically speaking, the "parts per million" part of the metaphor is apt. Japanese in general definitely do not embrace immigration as a "cure" for its birth dearth. But the less elegant reasons are probably the more important ones.

First of all, Tôdai is creating is a back door around Japan's punishing entrance exam system. Similar regimes used throughout northeast Asia are little more than draconian filters that sift students by raw IQ (with an emphasize on memorization skills).

As far as most employers are concerned, a student who can get into Tôdai has already proven he's got the right kind of raw clay. Job done. Time to party.

At the same time, the number of all Japanese exchange students has fallen drastically over the past quarter century, something about which Nobel Laureate Eiichi Negishi (who did most of his work at Purdue) has voiced concern.

I wouldn't dismiss a reemergence of nascent isolationism left over from the Edo Period at the heart of this. But the bigger problem is that Japanese corporations march in lockstep and do their hiring only in April. Missing that window can doom a career.

If Tôdai can start to shatter some of these deeply ingrained (and deeply stupid) bureaucratic conventions, the value of this transition to Japanese society will greatly outweigh feel-good pronouncements about "internationalism" and "diversity."

Onsen

2012-01-26T12:21:00.017-07:00

In chapter eleven of Serpent of Time, Ryô spends the night at an onsen.

Unlike public baths (sento), where tap water is heated by a boiler, an onsen (温泉) or "hot springs" (the literal meaning) is fed by geothermally heated and therefore often heavily mineralized water.

Sitting squarely on the "Ring of Fire," Japan has no shortage of hydrothermal vents and no shortage of onsen. But seismic activity can also change the "character" of an onsen, or turn off the tap entirely.

Although the sento has declined in use over the past fifty years, the onsen has seen increasing popularity as what was once an upper-class luxury became a middle-class vacation destination.

Whether a corporate retreat or spring break, the "traditional" ryokan-style inn with an onsen has become practically de rigueur. The onsen is a travel show favorite.

Even the staid NHK doesn't shy from onsen travelogues featuring naked kids and naked butts (male only, sumo having made the male butt an inconsequential sight; on camera, women sport white bath towels).

Incidentally, "mixed bathing" (kon'yoku) can still be found a small number of onsen, though the typical Japanese would find them as exotic in actual practice as the typical American.

The onsen featured in chapter eleven is based on the Katsuragi Mishima Onsen at the Hidaka crossroads in Katsuragi.

The soul of brevity

2012-01-24T10:33:00.000-07:00

As a good Mormon, Romney should remember from his days in Sunday School the "two-and-a-half minute talk" (no kidding, that's what it's called). Okay, if he's elected president, he gets to increase the time allotted one order of magnitude. Promise to keep the State of the Union (and all other excuses for meaningless gas-baggery) to twenty-five minutes and he's got my vote. Seriously, that kind of discipline alone would speak volumes.

Arrietty ("The Borrowers")

2012-01-23T10:31:00.010-07:00

Disney is officially releasing Arrietty, Studio Ghibli's version of The Borrowers, on February 17. At least based on the trailers, I prefer the U.K. dub to the U.S. version. Mary Norton was British, so it's not at all clear to me why there should even be an American English version.

The help

2012-01-19T14:30:00.002-07:00

In chapter ten of Serpent of Time, Ryô travels south from Kishiwada in the company of seasonal workers. The Edo period haiku poet Kobayashi Issa wrote often about the plain and practical aspects of life, including the disposition of servants and seasonal workers, as in this haiku:

出代の市にさらすや五十顔
degawari no ichi ni sarasu ya gojû kao

The fifty year-old face of a
a laid-off servant at market
there for all to see.

David Lanoue comments:

In springtime, old servants were replaced by young ones. The old ones would leave their employers to return to their home villages; the young ones traveled in the opposite direction. In earlier times this took place during February; later, in March.

Cars

2012-01-16T14:04:00.010-07:00

Cars is the most postmodern, meta, utterly surreal work of art I've seen in some time. Yes, I mean the Disney/Pixar film about talking cars.

To be sure, there is nothing original about the plot. Cars is a point-for-point retelling of the "arrogant big shot ends up in little town, learns life lesson" trope that Garrison Keillor has been parodying for years on Prairie Home Companion.

Doc Hollywood with Michael J. Fox is a good example (car included).

This again goes to my contention that the most creative and lasting art is accomplished by artists (John Lasseter being one of the best) who not only know how to do things the old-fashioned way, but understand the value of doing things the old-fashioned way.

What's prosaic and persistently unoriginal are those "avant guarde" types who think they are being "original" and "daring" by upending these familiar stories and betraying the expectations inherent in them.

But John Lasseter didn't simply do the same only better. With the story solidly nailed down, he unleashed his animators to create whole freaking alternate universe (including an alternate universe Pixar Animation Studios).

We're talking about world-building on a massively creative scale, and a mechanical world at that, down to the insects (which are, of course, Volkswagon Beetles; lightning bugs leave on the turn signals). Not a human being in sight.

A nostalgic romp through small-town Americana alone would have been a tad too sentimental for my tastes (Frank Capra annoys me too). Thankfully, Lasseter married this trusty old tale to a full-blooded celebration of the gas-guzzling American car culture.

And that most American of motor sports, NASCAR (which, like American football, is far more sophisticated than the aristocratic European versions). And then tied that squarely to the American landscape and those wide-open spaces the car was designed to serve.

The car and the freeway have evolved together to fit a unique ecological niche no less than Darwin's finches. So it makes perfect sense to depict the automobile as a vibrant, sentient, argumentative creature with a say about where the road is going to take us next.

Forget about robots taking over the world. Cars already have. We're just along for the ride.

Muko-iri marriage

2012-01-12T13:12:00.008-07:00

In chapter nine of Serpent of Time, Ryô briefly muses about marriage.

Jane Austen wrote that "a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." If she'd been Japanese, she would have written that a man with five daughters and no sons must be in want of a muko-iri (婿入り) marriage.

The task before a Japanese Mr. Bennet would have been to find a husband for one of his daughters slightly lower in social class but hopefully wealthier. Upon marriage, he would be formally adopted into the Bennet family.

Their children would inherit his money, but his wife's social standing and surname.

Although Japan is no less patriarchal than its neighbors, muko-iri marriage, a "liberal" approach to primogeniture, de facto polygamy, and the use of "cadet" families meant there were always plenty of "spares" in addition to the heir.

Before adopting the "European" monarchal model in the 19th century, the Fujiwara clan had four cadet branches; during the Edo period, the Tokugawa clan had three.

Because there were always ways to compensate for the lack of a male heir (until recently), uses could be found for the girls. At least that's one theory for why the birth bias against girls in China and India never fully materialized in Japan.

The prevalence of muko-iri marriage among the aristocracy may also explain the relative lack of surname extinction in Japan.

Commoners rarely used surnames, so surname extinction also had less time to take effect. In any case, unique surnames in Japan number over a hundred thousand, compared to only hundreds in China and Korea.

YA in Japan

2012-01-10T11:55:00.021-07:00

Most anime and manga start out as, or eventually become, "light novels," the publishing format favored by most young adult narrative fiction in Japan. Here's an in-depth exploration of Japan's vibrant and eclectic YA publishing world (in five parts) by Matthew Reeves.

I find the unapologetic commercialism of Japan's YA industry reassuring. It means in bottom-dollar terms that publishers pay close attention to their customers, delivering titles that are cheap, illustrated, and often quite "edgy," but without falling into the "Dreadlit" trap.

It's an approach that works on every level. One result is that, rather than avoiding YA, "boys have gravitated to it." And despite having the world most complex orthography, "a person would be hard pressed to find a country more in love with the written word than Japan."

A Man of Few Words

2012-01-09T10:48:00.002-07:00

The paperback edition of A Man of Few Words can now be purchased at Amazon. The ebook version (also sporting the new cover) is still available from all the major vendors.

Battle of Red Cliffs

2012-01-05T10:51:00.012-07:00

In chapter eight of Serpent of Time, I have the shogun's chronicler compare the end of the siege of Sakai to the Battle of Red Cliffs.

The Battle of Red Cliffs was fought on the southern bank of the Yangtze River at the beginning of the third century AD. It signaled the end of the Han Dynasty and led to the tumultuous Three Kingdoms period, comparable in geographical scope and devastation to the Thirty Years' War in Europe.

John Woo's "50 percent factual" Red Cliff captures the massive expanse of Chinese warfare of the period--a quarter of a million combatants took part in the actual battles--and vividly depicts in the big climax how Huang Gai sent boats full of wax and straw into Cao Cao's anchored fleet.

The movie suffers from too much melodrama, depicting the "bad guys" in black-hatted, vaudevillian terms. The good guys can not only forecast the weather with uncanny accuracy, but anticipate every move the bad guys make. (This confusing of luck with intelligence is a constant gripe of mine.)

But if a DeMillean or Leanean spectacle is what you're looking for, nobody these days does actioners with non-digital "casts of thousands" anywhere but in China. Here are a few more notable examples of Chinese historical spectacles:

Hero
The Emperor's Shadow
The Emperor and the Assassin

The Second Coming went

2012-01-02T10:44:00.009-07:00

Maybe you missed it, but the Second Coming didn't happen last year. Remember that Harold Camping guy? He had it scheduled for May 21, and when that didn't pan out, October 21. Oops! As with all unprovable negatives, Reverend Camping should have doubled down on the proposition:

"Hey, how do we know Jesus didn't return? He could be currently holed up in an undisclosed location. Like Japan!"

Incidentally, Camping's "apology" is a beautiful piece of spin. First he blames God, and then he blames the model. Yep, Dispensationalists (along with astrologers) were avid computer modelers (these days using actual computers) long before anybody was talking about "climate change."

"Amongst other things I have been checking my notes more carefully than ever. And I do find that there is other language in the Bible that we still have to look at very carefully and will impinge upon this question very definitely."

I suggests that all future presidential and Supreme Court candidates adopt that template (just swap in "Constitution" or any debatable chunk of legislation for "Bible") into their PR repertoire.

On the heels of the world-not-ending came the concern trolling (does the mass media do anything better?) about the world's population reaching seven billion. Another reminder of how much Dispensationalism and the latest environmentalist cause du jour have in common.

Just like global warming, "overpopulation" once triggered exactly the same apocalyptic visions of doom and gloom, and calls for a dictator of the world to save us from ourselves. Okay, nobody says it out loud now, but that's what it'd take to make any of these utopian schemes work.

By "work," I mean "address real problems," unless, again, an authoritarian government with a big army and few qualms about using it ends up running things. Again, note how both religious and secular utopians pin their hopes on an angry, almighty god to save us from ourselves.

Except that the biggest authoritarian government with a big army and few qualms about using it isn't exactly on board.

As P.J. O'Rourke puts it, "There are 1.3 billion people in China and they all want a Buick." Stopping continental drift would be easier than convincing China to cut its carbon emissions in a meaningful way (rather than nod solemnly until the earnest environmentalists leave the room).

We're all going to be doomed by global warming until the globe warms and doom doesn't arrive. But take heart. At that point, some other looming environmental catastrophe will rouse us to action, and the end of the world will again threaten our existence in equally exciting ways.

Besides, everybody knows the world is really going to end in December.

Related posts

Apocalypse not now
The world ends (and I feel fine)

The public bath

2011-12-29T12:02:00.013-07:00

The public bath in chapter seven of Serpent of Time is actually a steam bath (蒸し風呂). During Japan's medieval period, the residents of the "low city" couldn't afford the cost of heating enough water to fill an actual sentô (銭湯). It's cheaper to bake rocks to create steam and dole out the hot water parsimoniously.

The sentô as a public institution reached its high water mark during mid-20th century, before people became wealthy enough to afford their own baths. A sentô's best advertising was the tall chimney rising above it, as they would burn anything they could lay their hands on to heat those massive amounts of water.

Those chimneys are giving way as well to gas-fired boilers.

"Mixed bathing" (混浴) vanished for good from the public sentô during the post-WWII Occupation. During the mid-19th century, though, U.S. Consul Townsend Harris observed that

Everyone bathes every day . . . both sexes, old and young, enter the same [public bath] and there perform their ablutions in a state of perfect nudity. I cannot account for so indelicate a proceeding on the part of a people so generally correct.

Shogun (which, like Mr. Baseball, is a more accurate depiction of Japan than is given credit for, though often despite itself) had much fun with the fact that Europeans of the period were a dirty, smelly lot. This is one facet of Japanese culture whose commonsensical superiority remains unquestioned.

Toilets of the era were more advanced in Japan, and still are. The year-end cleaning rituals continue to this day.

Danjiri festival

2011-12-26T11:16:00.012-07:00

In chapter six of Serpent of Time, Ryô ends up at the Danjiri Inn in Kishiwada.

I got the name from the Kishiwada Danjiri Matsuri. It is the most famous of the danjiri ("cart-pulling") festivals, which feature portable shrines (o-mikoshi) the size of small trucks being pulled pell-mell through the narrow streets of the city.

If you think this sounds rather risky, you're right. We're talking about some serious Shinto shrine roller derby. Here's a compilations of near misses, collisions, and a few wrecks from past danjiri festivals.

Serpent of Time

2011-12-22T10:46:00.000-07:00

Serpent of Time is a young adult fantasy with a female protagonist. It takes place during Japan's early Muromachi period (1336–1573) and in the present day. It is now available as a Kindle ebook and as an ePub download from Smashwords (Nook, iBooks and other versions soon to come).

See the Serpent of Time website for more information, including maps and historical context.

Fujiwara Ryô is the last princess of Japan's doomed Southern Court. When a revolt against the shogun fails, she flees with Sen, her loyal lady-in-waiting. Atop sacred Mt. Kôya, Sen's uncle summons Kala Sarpa, the "Serpent of Time," and transports her to the present day. But the serpent harbors a grudge of its own against her family, forcing Ryô to travel back to the past to save her future.

Let there be incandescents

2011-12-19T11:52:00.008-07:00

Congress has graciously delayed the banning of the 100 watt incandescent bulb (okay, not really "banned," just rendered illegal using the old "efficiency" slight of hand that turned CAFE standards into a gas-wasting exercise in rent-seeking) a whole six months.

When it comes to consumer sovereignty, I'm a full-blooded libertarian. Governments only make things worse trying to control consumer preferences. In this case, it's even a matter of principle. I only use two incandescents: the reading light next to my computer and one ganged with a CFL that runs off the motion sensor in the kitchen (it require a low impedance load).

Though in the spirit of full disclosure, I should also point out that my apartment has electric baseboard heat and an electric water heater, which makes my light bulb choices utterly inconsequential in terms of power savings.

Let's consider the incandescent the government didn't have to regulate out of existence: the television tube. A television tube is a big vacuum tube, and the filament is basically a low voltage incandescent bulb. Vacuum tubes operate according to the "Edison Effect," observed by the inventor of the light bulb (it took another twenty years for Fleming and De Forest to put it to practical use).

To be sure, a vacuum tube only draws as much power as a Christmas tree light, though it pumps out a fair amount of heat. An old-fashioned television tube could severely burn you at one end and electrocute you at the other (the anode is charged to 25,000 volts). All-tube televisions and radios sported hefty transformers and sucked down a fair amount of current. You could heat a room with one.

Junction diodes and transistors replaced vacuum tubes, and were replaced by integrated circuits. The cathode ray tube was the last to go, but has been supplanted by plasma and LCD screens. I noticed a few years ago that tube televisions had disappeared from the shelves of the local Walmart, a good indication that a technology has saturated every economic stratum of the consumer market.

None of these steps had to be "mandated" by law. They occurred when they made technological, economic, and aesthetic sense to both consumers and manufacturers.

Related posts

Lights out
Old wine, new bottles
The last picture tube show

Official seals

2011-12-15T11:55:00.002-07:00

In chapter four of Serpent of Time, Ryô and Sen steal Yoshihiro's seal in order to forge a transit permit that will allow Ryô to pass through the barrier gates in chapter six.

One of Japan's living anachronisms is the use of a seal or hanko (判子) in daily life. There are five categories of seals, including a personal seal or mitome'in (認印) for when the FedEx guy delivers a package. Open a bank account and you'll sign with a ginko'in (銀行印).

There are also hanko for signing legal documents (jitsu'in) and artwork (gago'in).

If you plan on living in Japan for any length of time, you should at least get a mitome'in. Either have one made (the same time you order your business cards, which you should never be without), or buy a generic one at a stationery store for a couple of bucks.

The more formal jitsu'in (実印) has to be registered with the government, though when gaijin are involved, signatures are also accepted

Forging seals happens a lot in murder mysteries, but less often in real life. Like manual typewriters, even generic hanko produce a unique mark. But while ATM fraud is rife in Japan (relatively speaking), perhaps the weight of culture has preserved the sanctity of the hanko.

Symbolic value

2011-12-12T11:56:00.006-07:00

What can we learn from the great writers of literature about symbolism? First of all, to quit analyzing literature for symbolic value (the first rule of symbolism: do not talk about symbolism). As Sarah Butler reports in The Paris Review,

In 1963, a sixteen-year-old San Diego high school student named Bruce McAllister sent a four-question mimeographed survey to 150 well-known authors. "Did they consciously plant symbols in their work?" he asked. "Who noticed symbols appearing from their subconscious, and who saw them arrive in their text, unbidden, created in the minds of their readers? When this happened, did the authors mind?"

Amazingly, many of the famous authors wrote back. Ray Bradbury delivers a short, to-the-point lecture on the subject:

I never consciously place symbols in my writing. That would be a self-conscious exercise, and self-consciousness is defeating to any creative act. Better to let the subconscious do the work for you and get out of the way. The best symbolism is always unsuspected and natural . . . .

If people find beasties and bedbugs in my ink-splotches, I can't prevent it, can I? They will insist on seeing them anyway, and that is their privilege. Still, I wish people, quasi-intellectuals, did not try so hard to find the man under the old maid's bed. More often than not, he simply isn't there.

Speaking of Bradbury, in the comments, "Kevin" sums up what a lot of us felt in our high school and college English courses (redacted a bit):

I remember reading Something Wicked This Way Comes in high school. The whole lesson was centered on the symbolic meaning of every single person, place, or thing in the book. I knew there was no way the author meant every little thing to be a symbol.

But perhaps Norman Mailer sums it up most succinctly: "Generally, the best symbols in a novel are those you become aware of only after you finish the work."

That actually happened to me writing Serpent of Time. Well into the final draft stage, I started noticing some quite unplanned symbolism in the text. I did my best to ignore it because I didn't want it dictating the plot. But it's still there, and I'm now fully prepared to discuss it at length.

Hey, I've got two degrees in the humanities. I can deconstruct the unintended symbolism in my own stories too.

Escaping from castles

2011-12-08T10:52:00.009-07:00

Ryô's escape from Sakai in chapter five of Serpent of Time is partly based on The Story of O-An, the autobiographical account of a girl who fled a besieged castle during the Battle of Sekigahara (1600). Quoting from Haruo Shirane's translation (Early Modern Japanese Literature, 1600-1900):

My father came in secret to fetch us from the Keep. He told my mother and me where we were to go and put up a ladder at the far end of the northern ramparts; from there he lowered us with a rope into a tub, and we crossed to the other side of the moat.

During the Warring States period, escaping from besieged castles was a necessary survival skill, though as in the case of O-An, backchannel negotiations and quid pro quos were often involved.

Oda Nobunaga married his sister Oichi to a rival warlord in order to secure access to the territory around Kyôto. When the alliance broke down, Nobunaga sent his top general, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, to lay siege to the castle. Oichi was eventually allowed to "escape" with her three daughters.

After Nobunaga's assassination, Oichi married the warlord Shibata Katsuie. When a struggle over succession pitted Hideyoshi and Katsuie against each other, Hideyoshi lay siege to Katsuie's castle. Though granted free passage through the lines, this time Oichi chose to die with her husband.

However, she allowed her daughters to be "rescued." Hideyoshi appointed himself their guardian. The oldest, Yodo, later became his mistress and bore him his heir, Toyotomi Hideyori. The youngest, Gô, went on to marry Tokugawa Hidetada, who became the second Tokugawa shogun.

Gô's daughter, Princess Sen, eventually married her cousin, Hideyori, in an futile effort to unite the Toyotomi and Tokugawa clans.

When the power struggle between the clans escalated into open hostilities, Gô's in-laws lay siege to Ôsaka Castle. Her sister and son-in-law committed seppuku (the polite word for hara-kiri) while the castle burned. Sen was allowed to escape, but her stepson got the Richard III treatment.

Sports car apocalypse

2011-12-05T11:10:00.011-07:00

If you're in the mood to indulge in some 99 percenter schadenfreude at the expense of people who can afford to race around in $100,000 sports cars (the base price of a used Ferrari in Japan), well, here's a treat for you.

Though as Japan Today points out, owners of such vehicles in Japan aren't necessarily the "one percent." The sixty-something owner of the lead Ferrari may live in a "rabbit hutch" and spend all his disposable income on cars.

It was the lead Ferrari in a sports car club rally from Kyushu to Hiroshima that spun out changing lanes and triggered the fourteen car pile-up. The "casualties" include eight Ferraris, one Lamborghini and two Mercedes-Benzes.

The Benzes (three in some reports), plus a Prius, were collateral damage. The Wall Street Journal estimates a four million dollar price tag.

If nothing else, it's a credit to the design of modern sports cars that nobody got seriously hurt. Well, except the insurance companies. And all the other fuming travelers stuck behind the resulting six-hour traffic jam.

Hey, don't think of it as a traffic accident. Think of it as a Keynesian stimulus program!

The police suspect that excessive speed for wet conditions, not street racing, led to the accident. Here's the NHK story and footage that seems the basis for the ubiquitous AP feed. And the CNN version based on the above.

Yobisute

2011-12-01T11:59:00.013-07:00

In chapter four of Serpent of Time, Ryô is actually a lot more condescending than it sounds to western ears.

Namely, she refers to everybody by name alone, while Sen dutifully applies the expected honorifics, -san in the case of Koreya (only the vilest opponent didn't deserve grudging respect) and "Lord" (-dono or -sama) with everybody else she regards as her social "better."

Ryô's liberal use of yobisute (呼び捨て), literally "call" + "throw away," is a way for her to assert her superiority (whether deserved or not).

It's still considered rude to address one's superiors by name alone, let alone with a bare pronoun. This includes family members. A scene from the NHK historical drama Gô springs to mind, in which the three amazing nieces of Oda Nobunaga meet after several years apart.

Here's how the dialogue begins:

Yodo
Hatsu
Gô

Hatsu, Gô.
O-ne-sama, Gô.
O-ne-sama, O-ne-sama.

Revealed here is their familial status based on age. Yodo is the oldest, Gô the youngest. These sociolinguistic rules have barely budged in four hundred years. That exchange would be almost the same today (except for a more sparing use of the honorific sama).

In Scrapped Princess, for example (which takes place in a fictional alternate universe, not Japan), Pacifica consistently appends ni-san (big brother) or ne-san (big sister) to the names of her step-siblings.

As Peter Payne puts it, relationships in Japan are vertical. Students address teachers as Sensei, lower classmen address upper classmen as Senpai, never by their first names. In a teen romance, you know things are moving to the next level when yobisute kicks in.

Tangled

2011-11-28T11:02:00.019-07:00

Tangled is the kind of Disney fairy tale adaption I usually wouldn't pay any attention to, but Orson Scott Card was totally right about How to Train Your Dragon (one of the best movies of the past decade) and so when he recommended Tangled, I figured I should give it a chance.

As it turns out, he was completely right twice.

Like all good Disney animated features, Tangled has more to say to the adults in the audience than the kids (don't tell the kids that). To be sure, there's plenty of low-brow slapstick involving conking people over the head with frying pans (which I found hilarious) and a horse that acts like a dog (even more hilarious).

The hero (Flynn Rider) and heroine (Rapunzel) are pretty much the same only--well, the same--except with humor, panache, and a keen insight into human nature. These elements come together in a bitingly funny psychoanalytic montage that has Rapunzel harboring second doubts about disobeying her wicked witch of a "mother."

And even the wicked witch is less "wicked" (well, kidnapping and murder aside) than vain, manipulative and self-centered, dysfunctions exhibited under the guise of being "overprotective." If nothing else, Tangled makes for a perfect parable about overparenting.

As Card points out, the climax also contains a perfect example of "eucatastrophe," Tolkien's word for the point in the plot when it is darkest before the dawn, and then redemption springs unexpectedly from utter loss. Or as Milton puts it, "All this good of evil shall produce."

Of course, this is basic, by-the-numbers monomyth stuff, following the classic narrative arc that Robert McKee goes on and on about. Except that sticking to the basics is what makes these stories not only last but often improve in the retelling, like old Neil Diamond songs that get covered by hip bands and take on a new life of their own.

(Consider "I'm a Believer" as a case in point. We now have Neil Diamond covering Smash Mouth covering Neil Diamond covering The Monkees performing a song written by Neil Diamond. It's all good!)

But what again confirmed for me that popular entertainment is the place to find true "artistic genius" is the comic relief, especially Max (the horse). This isn't an actor mugging for the camera, but the writer (Dan Fogelman) and artists dreaming up a bunch of vaudevillian routines and then drawing them (albeit digitally), a skill I truly envy.

These powers of imagination are a tad lacking at the beginning and end of Tangled. The story clunks along getting started--more in medias res would have helped--and stumbles a bit finding the right note to end on. But those are tiny criticisms when the other nine-tenths of the movie is so wonderful.

The hostage system

2011-11-24T12:21:00.010-07:00

At the end of chapter 3 of Serpent of Time, Ryô rues becoming a "hostage." In medieval Japan, the exchange of "hostages" reached its apotheosis during Warring States period as a way of strengthening alliances between rival warlords.

Family members would take up residence in the castle of a rival to ensure against a double-cross or surprise attack. This meant, though, that things could get chancy for them if and when the alliance broke down.

Toyotomi Hideyoshi began systematizing the exchange of hostages during the late 16th century. The Tokugawa shogunate that followed converted it into a formal political institution known as sankin kôtai (参勤交代), or "alternate attendance."

Under sankin kôtai, provincial governors were required to spend every other year in the capital, and leave their wife and principal heirs behind when returning to their home territories.

Moving the seats of provincial government back and forth was a considerable undertaking. A Keynesian economist might point to the importance of sankin kôtai in maintaining Japan's heavily-trafficked coastal highways and inns.

However, the more Machiavellian purpose was to further weaken already overtaxed "outsider" clans by forcing them to make these massive expenditures, and to prevent them from concentrating their forces in one place.

Occupy the past

2011-11-21T12:20:00.006-07:00

Writing about the Occupy Wall Street movement, Victor Davis Hanson observes that

Revolutionary movements throughout history are so often sparked by the anger, envy, and disappointments of an upper-middle cohort, highly educated, but ill-suited for material success in the existing traditional landscape.

This brings to mind the Japanese term gekokujô (下剋上), or "juniors dominating seniors," which is used to describe revolutions from below.

Such as the overthrow of the Tokugawa regime in the mid-19th century. Not only was the regime brought down by the "outsider" clans (clans defeated by Tokugawa Ieyasu at the Battle of Sekigahara back in 1600), but the governors of those provinces often banded together with lower-ranked samurai against the entrenched interests of upper-class samurai.

The upper-class samurai--think of them as tenured professors--were fully invested in the system going on the way it was. They had theirs and as far as they were concerned, the entire purpose of society, government and the economy was to keep on providing it until the end of time.

Given misery stipends and prevented by sumptuary laws from engaging in "vulgar" business, lower-class samurai--think of them as adjuncts--were often worse off than the merchants at the bottom of the class structure. When the feudal order broke down, these lower-class samurai were at the forefront of the political and economic revolutions.

Unfortunately, even after upending the status quo, many remained prisoners of the delusion that the system could continue with slight modifications (namely, they'd be in charge). They became the personification of Upton Sinclair's observation, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

But there are limits to government largess, no matter how worthy the recipients. One of the first policies enacted by the Meiji government was the elimination of the feudal classes and the stipends paid to the samurai simply for being born government employees. In the words of Margaret Thatcher, they'd run out of other people's money.

Many of the same samurai who'd overthrown the Tokugawa shogunate decided that this was a bridge too far and launched a counter-revolution. In the ahistorical Hollywood version, we're supposed to identify with the ex-samurai fighting to preserve the feudal order and their class privileges. A probably unintended message, but still very telling.

The expectation that because we've been getting a "defined benefit" in the past, we deserve to keep on getting it (plus a cost-of-living adjustment) forever is deeply ingrained in human nature. It is our economic original sin and we can't bear to leave Eden. Which is why David Brooks throws up his hands and says "We're going to be Greece."

An entire country (with Italy and Spain nipping at its heels) is currently caught up in the same fantasy--kill enough geese and those golden eggs will surely show up somewhere--that led Saigô Takamori to wage a costly and pointless war trying to restore a largely imaginary past.

The tragedy of the Meiji Restoration is that Saigô Takamori's vision only grew stronger after his death. It took the destruction of the entire country to finally quench the flame. The worse thing we can do now is imagine that things can go back to the way they were. If we can't learn from the past, at least we can refrain from trying to live there.

The Dragon Princess

2011-11-17T11:35:00.015-07:00

In chapter two of Serpent of Time, Ryô muses about the etymology of her name.

Ryô (龍) means "dragon." Most famously, Ryô was the name of the wife of Sakamoto Ryôma (Japan's 19th century Alexander Hamilton), whose given name ("dragon horse") coincidentally shared the same first kanji.

Sen (千) means "one thousand." Princess Sen (千姫) was the daughter of the second Tokugawa shogun. She was married to her cousin, Toyotomi Hideyori, in an effort to unite the Toyotomi and Tokugawa clans.

The effort failed. These martial connotations may explain why Ryô and Sen are rare names for girls these days. The modern kanji for "dragon" (竜), pronounced ryû, is a boy's name.

The kun'yomi (Chinese reading) of 千 (chi) is more widely used in kanji compounds. In Spirited Away, Sen is the name the witch gives to Chihiro (a common name). The kanji is the same.

The subject of numbers as names for girls immediately brings to mind "Thirteen" and "Seven of Nine." As we'll see later on, numbers remain more popular in names for Japanese boys than girls.

The ebook revolution arrives

2011-11-14T12:06:00.008-07:00

Amazon's recent rollout of the new Kindle models impressed me that it was in the ebook business for the long run. Now Amazon has proved the point yet again, stealing a march on the ePub 3 standard by releasing Kindle Format 8, with HTML5 and CSS3 support.

As I mentioned before, ebook feature creep runs the risk confusing the whole point of an ebook device, which is to deliver text to the eyeballs, not to create illuminated texts. However, the new standard is necessary for textbooks, comics, and Asian languages.

This announcement reinforces the reality of the ebook revolution. The purchase of Kobo by Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten supplies more ammunition. Previously one of the also-rans, this makes Kobo a major player along with Amazon, Apple, B&N, and Sony.

The hope as well is that Japanese publishers will fall in line behind ePub 3 (which supports Unicode and vertical justification), rather than further fracturing the market with more proprietary standards.

Casting a backwards glance at where the word processing world was two decades ago, two standards (that are almost identical under the hood) is not a bad place for the ebook industry to find itself at this stage.

Continuing with that analogy, Amazon is Microsoft and the legacy publishers are WordPerfect for DOS, slow to realize the magnitude of the paradigm shift before them, and overly confident that their customers will forever pay the full retail price for their flagship products.

Alas, as Virginia Postrel points out, there is the little thing called a demand curve.

Related posts

eBook update
This screensaver for sale

The Lake Biwa dragon

2011-11-10T14:22:00.011-07:00

Chapter 1 of Serpent of Time takes place at Hikone Castle on Lake Biwa.

Like Loch Ness, Lake Biwa has a dragon. According to the classic fairy tale, the Dragon Queen of Lake Biwa entreated Fujiwara no Hidesato to slay the giant centipede that killed her children. As a reward, he was given a bag of rice that never ran out. He was known ever since as the "Lord Bag of Rice."

But perhaps Lake Biwa's most incongruous aquatic attraction is a Mississippi-style paddlewheeler called "The Michigan."

When I was a kid, my family often vacationed on Lake George in upstate New York. We rode across the lake a couple of times on a steam-powered paddlewheeler, the "Minne-Ha-Ha." Incidentally, Lake George has its own aquatic monster, though this one is an admitted hoax.

There's something about deep-water lakes that seems to attract magical serpents and paddlewheelers.

Just stand there

2011-11-07T12:20:00.004-07:00

One of the most destructive political impulses in the world today is the conviction that every identifiable problem must be addressed by having the government, at the highest levels, do "something" about it: invade it or regulate it or outlaw it or subsidize it or bail it out.

Bryan Caplan calls this the "Activist's fallacy":

1. Something must be done
2. This is something
3. Therefore, this must be done.

As Northern Japan found out, you can spend billions of dollars building a "solution" to a known problem, only to see it completely fail. And in the process, exacerbate the original problem by creating a false sense of security.

NHK has been conducting interviews with survivors from these costal town (an abridged version was broadcast on PBS). One thing that becomes clear is that people who could see the coastline got away, while those behind the immense sea walls--that turned these villages into medieval walled fortresses--often had no idea what was going on.

TEPCO was certain the sea walls surrounding Fukushima Dai-ichi couldn't be breached. The situation might have turned out completely differently had they built the plant with the assumption that a tsunami would flood the plant. The solution in that case--more redundancy in the backup power systems--would have been far more effective.

A Nightly Business Report (October 04, 2011) story from the fishing village of Kesennuma represents the kind of thinking that's too often missing when the gears of government begin to grind. Instead of fighting nature, the new Kesennuma wants to forgo the massive sea walls.

Especially because we want to draw more tourists, building a wall to block off the sea is out of the question. Tsunami are a natural phenomenon. There's one major tsunami every few centuries. So you insure yourself and figure out how to make it safe to live and work around them.

As correspondent Lucy Craft points out, "Even huge tsunami waves couldn't topple most of the concrete-reinforced shops in downtown Kesennuma and floodwaters rose no higher than the second story."

As it has turned out since, some large structures failed because they paradoxically became boyant. In other words, the basement levels and first floors of coastal buildings should be designed to "fail" and flood, not remain watertight and trap air.

This is another good example of drawing the line--between a storm surge and a tsunami--when it comes to confronting nature. And we really need to start drawing those lines. Rather than acting, Congress needs to learn when to sit on its hands. Don't do anything, just stand there!

Don't (re)build cities below sea level. Don't build suburbs in flood plains. Don't reinsure people who build seaside houses in the path of hurricanes. Quit lining every waterway with levees. We don't live in freaking Holland! (Oh, and don't give home and student loans to people who can't possibly ever repay them.)

Whether a bank or a flood wall or that latest Keynsian extravaganza, if it's "too big to fail," then the faster it fails the better. We'll pick up the pieces (the smaller they are, the easier to pick up), learn from our mistakes, learn to live with what we can't actually change or realistically prevent, and move on.

Related posts

Apocalypse not now
The Sendai earthquake

"Serpent of Time" website

2011-11-03T14:02:00.007-07:00

The Serpent of Time website is now live. I'll start posting chapters online next week. Official publication is scheduled for the end of December (subject to change without notice). Incidentally, my sister Katherine, who is diligently (exactingly and unflaggingly) handling the editing chores, has a story in the new anthology, Monsters & Mormons.

The witching hour

2011-10-31T11:15:00.015-07:00

To quote Wikipedia, ômagatoki (逢魔時 or "meet demons time") refers to the "moment at dusk when the sky grows dark." Toriyama Sekien describes it as "the time when the evil spirits of the mountains and rivers (魑魅魍魎) attempt to materialize in the world."

When I encountered the word while translating Maohden, my first inclination was to translate it as the "witching hour." Except that the witching hour usually refers to midnight (which never struck me as all that inherently spooky). So I defined it within a parenthetical:

The sepia light of early summer stained the falling dusk. Ômagatoki, it was called, the time when ghosts and demons prowled the earth.

Ômagatoki plays a big role in Serpent of Time, defining the powers of one of its main characters, the personification of a scheming Vedic yoga known as Kala Sarpa. This explanation I (made up but) attribute to the Heian Era diviner Abe no Seimei (Japan's Merlin):

During the uncertain hours of the dawn and dusk, when the stars cast a veil across human eyes and gods and ghosts walk unnoticed upon the earth, Kala Sarpa weaves in and among the worlds. But when the day fully conquers the night, when the waning light finally surrenders to the dark, all things must return to their proper time and place, to their natural homes.

Speaking of Toriyama Sekien, he was an eighteenth-century ukiyo-e artist and a collector of Japanese folk tales, a cross between Charles Addams and the Brothers Grimm.　A Google image search on his name returns a rich trove of his delightful sketches and prints.

Terra No (2)

2011-10-27T11:40:00.005-07:00

With the treacle and dreck filtered out, the stories so far on Terra Nova have been retreads of average fare on Stargate or Star Trek. Unfortunately, they're constantly bogged down by the "Wesley Crusher" syndrome and the even deadlier Sarah Connor Chronicles syndrome.

The former tries to "connect" with the teen demographic with a wimpy teenage character whose presence shatters suspension of disbelief. The latter tries to "broaden" the appeal by layering on soap opera plots (as if dinosaurs and killer robots didn't provide plenty of conflict as is).

A running joke on Buffy is that the Apocalypse is right around the corner and all she cares about is getting a date to the prom. Some people in Hollywood apparently don't think that's a joke (memo to Hollywood writers: stop trying to relive and romanticize your high school years on my time).

The problem is further compounded by having critical story elements depend on said teenagers doing stupid stuff. The result is to turn off the core geek demographic, who want to be intellectually challenged, not pandered to, and who want to leave their idiot teenage years far behind.

Discussing the politics of ressentiment, Daniel Foster gets right to the point:

Nietzsche was correct to point out that the leaders of men, the successful few--you might even call them the one percent--are too busy acting, doing, and accomplishing to complain about their "emotional crises."

(Incidentally, one of my favorite names for a conceptual alien race is the "Nietzscheans" on Andromeda.) Or as a reviewer on IMDB puts it,

I don't want to watch another show about the estranged dad, the angsty son, the nerdy daughter, the innocent child, the worried mom, the hot girlfriend and the over-confident military guy.

To be sure, Stephen Lang as Commander Nathaniel Taylor makes a pretty good Nietzschean. But this James Kirk or Jack O'Neill has no Spock or Samantha Carter to act as a counterweight. And no mission to get the blood moving every morning, besides babysitting a bunch of listless ingrates.

A competent, go-getting alpha male with no goals. A supposedly brilliant doctor who spends all her time treating oopsies and dealing with whiny teenagers. Man, that's so depressing. Scotty, hurry up and fix the transporter and beam me back to dystopia!

Related posts

Terra No (1)
Apocalypse not now
No way to wage a war

Terra No (1)

2011-10-24T11:40:00.016-07:00

The best part of the Terra Nova pilot was the dystopian introduction, only because it reminded me how much I'd like to see a noir detective series set in the Blade Runner universe. That got my hopes up.

Then the whole thing started sliding down the stupid scale. Some tropes--like overpopulation, the environment being more polluted than in the past, and society becoming more violent--are so pervasive that people readily accept them when they're contrary to the facts.

In any case, the climate was much warmer, the CO2 levels at least four times higher, back during the Cretaceous. But I'm willing to give hackneyed tropes a pass as long as the writers get the rest of the science plausible right.

Alas, bad science fiction always has that moment when it becomes clear that the writer and director and producer couldn't care to get it right. The jocks show up in their SUVs (what is this, Road Warrior?) and bargain for stuff (why not just shoot them?) with a box of meteoric iron.

Meteoric iron is iron that comes from meteors. What are they going to do with it? Make hood ornaments? You'd need tons of iron to make the steel to support that level of technology in a community that size. What are they supposed to do if the axle on one of those souped-up SUVs break?

Besides, how do a bunch of rebels living in a jungle canopy keep them going? As transportation, ultralights make more sense. Another top priority would be transporting the components of a rocket system through the time rift so they could launch navigational and weather satellites.

Several massive extinction events occurred between then and now, caused not only by asteroids, but supervolcanoes and ice ages. If the survival of the human race is the whole point, they'll need to gather a lot of hard data about the planet to stay ahead of the Darwinian grim reaper.

And speaking of culling the slow and the stupid from the herd, running around in shorts would sure do it, not to mention stripping down to a bikini in a prehistoric rain forest. Okay, maybe they chlorinated the water and bombed the place with DDT first (the contrarian in me likes that idea).

I was hoping for a Cretaceous version of Star Trek or Stargate, about exploring the "strange new worlds" in our own past. What I got was a painfully predictable soap opera about the most exclusive summer camp for spoiled rich kids ever, and run like a country club penitentiary.

Where are the explorers? A prehistoric Ferengi or two looking to get rich? There should be splinter groups and outlying colonies all over the place, not just one bunch of ineffectual conspirators. Our Guy in Charge would be working overtime keeping the unum in e pluribus.

That means multipurpose, military/scientific scouting teams, the challenge of establishing and enforcing the rule of law, and keeping the colonies from splitting into tribes warring over limited high-tech resources. That means plenty of story possibilities.

Instead, the primary concern is a squabble between the preps and the jocks so arcane nobody can explain it. I'm getting the feeling they can't explain it because the writers haven't got a clue. But who knows, maybe it's a scheme to get rid of the "useless third" of the population!

Because this bunch sure isn't useful for anything.

Compared to them, the Ingalls family was more adventurous. As Kate says, "the Stargate philosophy is that exploration is better than playing it safe, no matter what the consequences." Terra Nova is all about playing it safe and fretting over the consequences. That's boring.

Related posts

Terra No (2)
Apocalypse not now
No way to wage a war

My kind of fanaticism

2011-10-20T14:00:00.017-07:00

Nettchuujin is a fascinating "reality" show on NHK. The title loosely translates as "The Hobbyists." The meaning of nettchuujin (熱中人) makes it closer to "The Fanatics." Each fifteen-minute vignette documents the mostly solitary and very single-minded pursuit of some obscure avocational activity.

For example, making vacuum tube amplifiers (a different one for each artist in his record collection); restoring 1980s cassette boomboxes; tracking down and cataloging (often working) Edo Period wells; cataloging urban intersections; a 72 year old man who racks up "home run" records at batting cages.

This isn't the usual Nelson Muntz treatment ("Ha! Ha!"), but an honest appreciation of the singular obsessions of men (and the occasional woman).

In some cases, like the guy with an apartment stuffed with old boomboxes, even I think: Dude, there's medication for that. But there are also some who'd get "respect" as "real" hobbyists, like the guy who flies home-built airplanes, or the woman who puts on horse-mounted archery demonstrations.

The substance of these mini-documentaries jives with Seth Roberts's theory of art, technology, and human social evolution. He argues that

the specialized use of free time (resembling hobbies) created demand for hard-to-make "useless" things, [and so] shifted resources to skilled artisans, who innovated more than other people. Desire for novelty (fashion) and small improvements (connoisseurs) pushed artisans to innovate.

These amateurs additionally exemplify Roberts's contention too many scientists have abandoned the foundational tenants of true science, airily theorizing instead of collecting lots of data and experimenting. The hobbyist is a role model for good old-fashioned science, to a fanatical degree.

Related posts

Tameshite Gatten

Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan

2011-10-17T13:30:00.006-07:00

Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert Bix is somewhat misnamed, as 600 of 700 pages deal with the first half of Hirohito's life, from 1901-1950. 1950-1989 constitutes a long footnote. It's more: Hirohito and the making of WWII. It is Bix's analysis of WWII that set this hefty biography apart from previous efforts and common wisdom.

In short, Bix argues that the Showa emperor, rather than being a passive pawn of the Tojo militarists, was deeply involved in every aspect of WWII. He was, to mix modern terms, an "activist" emperor who hung onto power as long as he could and deeply resented giving it up.

Perhaps Bix's most disturbing claim is that Hirohito himself was responsible--contrary to the propaganda fashioned both by MacArthur's GHQ and the Imperial staff and Hirohito himself--for delaying surrender until after Nagasaki, while he attempted to secure (largely through fruitless negotiations with the Soviet Union) the continuation of his reign in a post-war Japan.

Bix is not as compelling a writer as John Dower (Embracing Defeat). For one thing, Dower draws from a wider spectrum of secondary materials, such as mass-media publications, to flesh out his arguments. Bix's primary sources--diaries and interviews by members of the Imperial household, the parliament and the cabinet--bring us eyeball-to-eyeball with the day-to-day machinations that drove both the war and the peace, but it also results in dryer prose. It's all "inside politics."

And unlike with Germany, one finds not so much a banality of evil arising out of deliberate, malicious intent, but rather a banality of evil rising out of ego and incompetence and self-ingested propaganda and raw political power struggles. Japan's war-era cabinets tossed around prime ministers like juggling balls.

One apt criticism of Bix's approach is that his focus is so narrow that he never pulls back far enough to examine in any kind of depth the horrifying consequences of this Machiavellian, play-king gamesmanship.

But as does Dower, Bix concludes that the Tokyo trials ended up a farce to equal any Stalinist show trial. The real quest for the truth was corrupted by MacArthur's desire to use Hirohito for his own purposes, and, as Bix notes, Hirohito was only too happy to be used if it'd get him off the hook (and sell his subordinates down the river in the process).

To make matters worse, a dozen judges from Pacific Rim nations showed up at the trials, all with competing agendas.

The Nationalist Chinese, who had collected mountains of evidence of war crimes, checked their severest indictments in hopes of securing Japan's backing against the Communists. The OSS spirited away all the hard evidence of Japan's battlefield use of biological and chemical weapons. An iconoclastic judge from India was hardly upset that the British had spent four years getting their butts kicked by Asians.

Of course, MacArthur made sure that his battlefield enemies in the South Pacific were summarily tried and executed. (Bix does credit MacArthur for being as aggravating to the Japanese during the war as he was to the Joint Chiefs. The Japanese navy had expected a mano-a-mano fight against Nimitz across the central Pacific and were unprepared to support a war against MacArthur at the same time, and ended up throwing away a third of their resources in the process.)

Perhaps Bix's most astute observations comes in the parallels he draws between MacArthur and Hirohito. They were diametrical opposites in terms of physical presence and personality, but both saw themselves at the center of all victory--the sole reason any great effort should and would succeed--while ascribing failure to dark forces and political conspiracy and placing the blame on their subordinates (and expecting them to do impossible things).

In the end, Hirohito's fascination with his own manufactured image as a divine emperor, combined with his incompetence (rarely questioned by his handlers), both led to the war and guaranteed that Japan would never win it. MacArthur's ego and presumptuousness (bolstered by a powerful cohort of ideological sympathizers in the State Department) meant that the emperor, and by extension the nation, would never take responsibility for it.

That is the Showa Emperor's true legacy, that unfortunately continues to this day.

Related links

Kantai Kessen
The known unknowns

Website update

2011-10-13T15:25:00.012-07:00

I've tweaked the CSS a bit, edited the essay links, and added Nook and iBooks buttons. Speaking of books, the most important change is prominently displayed on my home page. For now, you'll have to settle for being intrigued by the cover art and teaser description. I'll be adding more content (and a publication date) in the next week.

On Friday, I completed volume four of Yashakiden and started on Maohden. Altogether, the series came to about half a million words! Coming to the end of long projects like this, and thinking back to the beginning, it always seems improbable that you could have ever crossed the finish line, except for the fact that you actually did.

In praise of caricatures

2011-10-10T09:32:00.011-07:00

As I observed a while back, the supporting (stock) characters in How to Train Your Dragon are caricatures, but they come across as more "real" than flesh and blood actors in most live-action movies.

One thing that caught my attention early on was the running joke where the adults all speak with thick Scottish brogues and the kids don't. I think it's brilliant--because every teenager knows his parents speak a foreign language. They turned a caricature into a meaningful metaphor.

You can't play against types and expectations unless there are types and expectations to play against. This applies to storytelling. Just as cliche has great utility, so do caricatures. You can expend only so much time and so many words before getting a story underway.

It's the literary equivalent of the pyrotechnic crew adding gasoline to a cinematic explosion, because that's what people have come to expect. And it looks really cool. If "reality" is what you want, watch Mythbusters instead.　As Sarah Hoyt puts it,

Don't be afraid to give your characters outrageous characteristics or to make them larger than life. Even if you're writing "real life" you'll need to do that to some extent, or people will think they're blah and boring.

It's a balancing act at both ends of the scale. One of the great delights in genre fiction is starting with a stock character and watching as he first defines the caricature of a "bad guy," then moves beyond it, while doing what a stock character is supposed to--move the story forward.

A good example is Karl Urban in Red (he's McCoy in the latest Star Trek). For about 99 percent of the movie he is trying very hard to kill Bruce Willis. He starts off as a ruthlessly over-the-top stock villain, but slowly evolves into somebody we can almost empathize with.

This isn't one of those insipid gotcha! switcheroos, where the bad guys turns out to be the good guy (a truly uninspired dramatic device 99 percent of the time), but a simple recognition that making the bad guy a tad more interesting makes the good guy way more interesting.

To be sure, Karl Urban can't be more interesting than Bruce Willis. Especially in genre fiction, the protagonist is the character who changes the most or causes the most change. Bruce Willis goes from being a retired spy to action hero with a babe on his arm, plenty of change for an action flick.

Karl Urban doesn't have to do a one-eighty, just a ninety, or a forty-five. His character has to change enough to convince us of the open-ended possibilities in the big climax, and no more. Otherwise, the movie would be about him.

In Under Siege, Tommy Lee Jones gives us a caricature with two twists. Like Alan Rickman in Die Hard, he starts out as the sane thief pretending to be crazy. By the end, he really is nuts. But not without reason. He had this great plan and then Steven Seagal went and ruined it.

He's still the bad guy. We're not rooting for him to nuke Honolulu. But, yeah, I get where he's coming from, and that makes the cliffhanger ending all the more believable. Jones walks away with most of the movie in the process, but there's nothing wrong with that either.

Related posts

In praise of cliche
Playing by the rules

Before and After

2011-10-06T11:00:00.004-07:00

Before and After (not a translation) on ABC (Asahi Broadcasting) is like This Old House, except they do one house an episode. That means they race through the interesting stuff--the foundations and framing and plumbing--and spend more time on the boring stuff like interior decor.

Enough attention is paid to the nuts and bolts to make it clear that while ferroconcrete structures in Japan are the most solidly built in the world, and residential building codes have improved since the Great Hanshin earthquake, they still aren't as strict as building codes in the U.S.

One week on This Old House, while tearing down an old floor, Tom Silva pointed out all the once-standard construction methods that were no longer code. That same week on Before and After, there was an army of carpenters busily repeating pretty much every single one of them.

One of the big challenges on This Old House is retrofitting old structures for modern plumbing, heating and AC. The biggest plumbing challenge on Before and After is allowing the o-furo water heater to be turned on from inside the bathroom, instead of leaning out the window.

As I noted previously, south of Hokkaido, Japanese houses aren't likely to have central HVAC, high pressure hot water, or insulation. In my apartment in Port Town, the hot water in the bathroom and kitchen sinks ran off the heater attached to the o-furo, but only one faucet could be on at a time.

Another thing that becomes clear is that, as Alex Kerr laments, Japanese are pretty unsentimental about ordinary old stuff. The debut episode involved restoring a century old house. In the U.S., historical preservationists would have been crawling all over it. Break out the jackhammers!

To be sure, the idea of buying a house as an investment is a foreign one in Japan. The only worthwhile investment is in the property it sits on. You build a house in Japan knowing that the next earthquake may knock it down, and the next tsunami may wash it away. But there are exceptions.

The laundromat I used in Osaka was off a street crowded with old, two-story residences. Over the span of six months, I watched one get torn down to the ground--leaving a gap in the street like a missing tooth--and then rebuilt exactly the same, but using a frame of steel I-beams.

That's one house that isn't going anywhere, come hell or high water.

Related links

Unfurnished
Dogs, demons, and construction companies

Unfurnished

2011-10-03T11:19:00.015-07:00

A recent Heritage Foundation study counters a U.S. Census Bureau claim that "over 30 million Americans are living in poverty," by pointing out that

most of the persons whom the government defines as "in poverty" are not poor in any ordinary sense of the term. The overwhelming majority of the poor have air conditioning, cable TV, and a host of other modern amenities. They are well housed, have an adequate and reasonably steady supply of food, and have met their other basic needs.

In The Atlantic, Derek Thompson responds that critics have pointed out that "many families in poverty rent apartments where fridges and air conditioning units come automatically" while conceding that the "ubiquity and affordability of consumer technology is an astounding testimony to productivity in the electronics sector."

What caught my attention in this case are the assumptions about what comes "automatically" with an unfurnished apartment.

Port Town in Osaka is the kind of high rise, middle-class, high-density planned community that urban planners dream about. It really is a great place to live: modern, safe, clean, convenient, with two tram stations and two shopping centers within walking distance, lots of parks, trees, space and a nice view of the harbor.

For a sense of the size, the "green" spaces are the bedrooms. Each rectangle is a tatami mat approximately three by six feet (the number indicates the number of tatami mats, a common way of describing room area). By comparison, this apartment is at least twice the size of Shizuku's danchi apartment in Whisper of the Heart.

My apartment there was the largest I'd ever had in Japan, a 3DK. Here's what a nice unfurnished apartment in Japan doesn't provide: no refrigerator, no stove, no heat, no air conditioning, no phone (this was before cell phones became ubiquitous and a dial tone from the NTT monopoly cost you a $500 security deposit). No lights.

No lights!

Well, there was inset lighting in the foyer, over the sinks in the kitchen and vanity, and in the bathroom. But in the dining room and bedrooms, just the ceiling jacks. You had to buy the whole lighting assembly and snap it into the jack. Very clever and very inconvenient. I spent the first night there wandering around in the dark.

The rooms had connections for a heat pump, but it had to be purchased separately.

Probably the worse aspect of renting in Japan is "key money." Key money is the product of a tight housing market and well-meaning legislation that makes it difficult to evict tenants. Landlords calculate how much they stand to lose--half a year's worth of rent--and demand that much up front. It doubles as a legal bribe.

Since the housing bust in the 1990s, more and more landlords are offering to waive key money.

For foreigners, key money is usually a non-issue because few landlords will rent to non-Japanese without a Japanese guarantor. As a result, specialized real estate companies have sprung up in big cities that buy properties and then sublet apartments--high and low end--on the same terms you'd expect to find in the U.S.

Related links

Before and After
Dogs, demons, and construction companies

eBook update

2011-09-29T14:05:00.006-07:00

The default first-line indent on Kindle for PC annoys me. Was it always .5 inches? The Kindle Previewer default is 2 em and Mobipocket Reader is 1 em. The Kindle for PC feature set has otherwise improved greatly, and now supports NCX files.

(Though it still needs a line-spacing slide control.)

So I added a first-line indent style of .25 inches to all of the ebooks I publish. The first-line indents still aren't the same, but they're a lot closer. I also recompiled the Zarahemla Books catalog, tweaking the formatting here and there.

The Kindle is persnickety about how it interprets proprietary styles, making a style sheet the best bet for overall consistency. I've added a few examples to my Kindle template.

Even so, considering all the chapter headings and epigrams in the paper edition of On the Road to Heaven, the bestselling ebook in the Zarahemla catalog (meaning about fifty copies a month), it looks quite nice in the Kindle format.

While the Kindle XHTML feature set can be a bit too spare, I think Amazon is wise to stay conservative. The feature creep in ePub worries me, though distributors like Smashwords will continue to exert a lowest common denominator standardization.

Creating ebooks where precision placement of the text is called for remains problematic. To this end, Amazon has rolled out a format called "KPR" ("Kindle Print Replica"), which is simply a PDF file stuck inside its own DRM wrapper).

Speaking of technology, glitzy tech rollouts rarely impress me (what Apple has up its sleeve doesn't interest me at all). This time, though, Amazon has really impressed me. It's not just the panoply of products, it's the vision. Amazon is clearly in the ebook business for the long run.

Amazon is turning the Kindle into a literary version of Darwin's finches, adapting itself to every possible reading niche.

Related posts

The ebook revolution arrives
The end of books

It's not about the bad guys

2011-09-26T13:42:00.011-07:00

Kate's review of Sherlock, the "modernized" BBC Holmes series, got me to thinking again about why I found it so annoying. The casting and the setup is perfect, but the early introduction of Moriarty--a Moriarty of such inexplicable means and motives--wrecked it for me.

What Orson Scott Card says about the "Red John" character on The Mentalist applies here: "He was made too powerful, with tentacles reaching everywhere, so that we began to wonder why he didn't just kill everybody and become king."

Like Card, if he doesn't stay dead (he didn't), I'll stop watching (I will), because "I don't tune in to watch the same repulsive villain week after week. I tune in to watch intriguing and enjoyable heroes" dispose of the bad guys.

I watched the pilot episode of The Secret Circle. It's the kind of show I want to like, but I'll give it a pass. Besides being yet another 90210-with-a-twist soap, the thought of hanging out with the same mean girls and angsty teenagers and evil, Machiavellian adults every week is tiring.

Recall that Buffy was about hanging out with the same interesting, resourceful and good kids and adults every week. The underlying conflict did not depend on Cordelia perpetually being a bitch or even Spike being evil. In fact, the series got better as their characters matured.

The X-Files was big on conspiracies, but structured so that most of the episodes had nothing to do with the big conspiracy arc. They were entertaining ghost or crime stories solved by the odd genius and his level-headed sidekick. Which should also be true of Sherlock Holmes.

And when the conspirators did show up, more often than not, Mulder was caught in between competing cosmic forces. He wasn't constantly being preyed upon, at the mercy of fate or crazies. When he did end up in somebody's cross-hairs, the means and ends justifying them aligned.

Even so, as the conspiratorial twists and turns compounded, it became necessary to explain why the Cigarette Smoking Man just couldn't bump off Mulder. (The Cigarette Smoking Man also showed up in a hilarious episode that explained why running the world is boring.)

The problem seems to comes down to a dearth of writers capable of creating truly smart villains, so they instead create sociopathic and really lucky ones. They turn the bad guys into amoral demigods, and that is surprisingly dull.

This is a persistent problem with superhero series, and one that doesn't need to exist in the first place. As Kate points out, the vast majority of Agatha Christie's criminals are "simple and believable." Their actual crimes are comprehensible in the given context and rather mundane.

Especially when it comes to the police procedural, it's not the crime or the criminal that's interesting, but how the hero solves the one and catches the other.

Related links

The Big Bad
Oh yeah, we're baaad

Hey, watch this!

2011-09-22T11:29:00.011-07:00

Netflix beat Blockbuster the same way Amazon and Walmart beat their competition: supply chain mastery. Distributing physical things is that difficult. Inventory control is what ultimately did in Borders. Now Netflix is trying to compete in the same market as Apple and Amazon using the same Internet as everybody else.

But Netflix convinced itself that its physical supply chain was an albatross around its corporate neck. Even if it was spinning off the DVD division to sell it at a later date, the mystery is why it would destroy the brand now ("Qwikster"?) before any deal is done. PC Magazine has already added Netflix to its pantheon of tech debacles.

An obvious comparison is the Kindle. Amazon sees a big future in ebooks. It's built an entire publishing platform based on ebooks. But it isn't about to spin off its physical supply chain (call it "Bookster"). When launching the Kindle, Amazon could augment the still-slender Kindle catalog with its deeper catalog of physical books.

What does Amazon do with excess capacity in its supply chain? Amazon sublets it, even if that means competing against itself. It doesn't care as long as it gets a cut of the action.

As I mentioned before, Netflix no longer has the deepest anime catalog on the Internet, the only reason I signed up with them in the first place. But Netflix has what niche competitors like Greencine lack--a nationwide supply chain. Why not sublet that excess capacity to any other renter of "First-sale doctrine" IP materials?

In any case, had Netflix just nailed down a bunch of long-term licensing agreements with the major IP owners and the owners of the pipes all that data has to travel through, that'd be one thing. But with Starz still holding out, Netflix is negotiating from a position of weakness while kicking the business that brought it this far to the curb.

Like a hormone-addled teenager, it's as if Netflix CEO Reed Hastings thinks he can impress all those disenchanted subscribers and cute content providers who keep blowing him off by doing something as arrogantly grandiose as it is self-destructive. Hey, watch this! Or in the immortal words of Otter from Animal House:

No, I think we have to go all out. I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody's part!

And they were just the ones to do it. Of course, such demonstrations of desperate determination often end with a trip to the hospital. Or bankruptcy court.

Related links

Netflix flak
Blockbuster goes bankrupt

Sentiment vs. solutions

2011-09-19T13:46:00.005-07:00

Lisa Torcasso Downing has an interesting--and mostly favorable--review of Angel Falling Softly. I can't argue with her basic criticism, first because what a work of art ultimately means is what the consumer of the art says it means; and second because I can't really recall my frame of mind when I wrote it.

Call it the literary uncertainty principle, disentangling what people say about something you wrote from what you were thinking at the time you wrote it. It's like George Lucas learning that Star Wars was a retelling of the monomyth and then concluding, disastrously, that he'd done it on purpose.

I do know that my premise for the novel was that Rachel, having plowed through all the spiritual solutions and Kubler-Ross stages, had arrived at the "whatever works" stage, no matter how removed from reality (growing up, I witnessed a stalwart member of my Mormon ward hitting this wall and hard).

And third, because Downing makes a good point about the way the male mind approaches the world. As Chris (my publisher) comments,

I'm not saying the novel wouldn't have been enriched with developing the mother/daughter relationship a little more, but to me it's also a no-brainer that the relationship would be there, and it doesn't sound like something I want to read about.

There's a lot of truth in the Tim Allen school of male psychology: "I solve problems (preferable with power tools), therefore I am." When a man finds himself under assault by a tidal wave of emotion, screaming inside his head is the frantic plea: Is there a problem in here somewhere I can solve?

Though such preferences are equally influenced by by our subjective tastes when it comes to fictional representations of the world. Erica Friedman sums it up well:

What I want so desperately to see is stories of women who have made it past the scarring, have learned to not lose control of the situation, even when things are falling apart around her. A leader. A calm in the storm. Not the storm itself.

Alas, protagonists who are "the storm itself" have become a plague in action series and police procedurals, regardless of sex. Take the latest incarnation of Hawaii Five-O. Every male lead has "angst" and "issues." I much prefer Jack Lord's Steve McGarrett, whose only "issues" are with the bad guys.

Okay, I'm probably tilting too far the other way, but I'm totally on board with Kate that one of the most issue-free relationships on television is that between Major Samantha Carter and Colonel Jack O'Neill from Stargate SG-1, a big reason why Major Carter "falls into her own category of awesomeness."

Playing by the rules

2011-09-15T14:04:00.008-07:00

In his review of The Big Book of Adventure Stories, an anthology of classic pulp fiction, Allan Massie notes that

Sincerity is essential in this sort of work. The author must believe in what he is writing if the reader is to believe while reading. Irony is out. The masters of popular fiction always play by the rules.

And David Goldman points out that "ordinary people can't be expected to learn a new style every time they encounter the work of a new artist (neither can critics, but they pretend to)." In the real world of consumer art, not playing by the rules means that

today's "serious" artists write for a miniscule coterie of aficionados in order to validate their own self-invention, and get university jobs if they are lucky, inflicting the same sort of misery on their students.

As a result, the "sort of art that appeals to a general audience has retreated into popular culture," which, Goldman quips, "is not the worst sort of outcome." Agrees screenwriter Robert Ben Garant:

What people need to embrace and accept, if you're going to be a writer in Hollywood, is that every single movie has the exact same structure, exactly, whether it's Die Hard or Night at the Museum . . . But the problem that a lot of young screenwriters have--and by that, I mean the baristas at Starbucks--is that they are struggling because they think formula is a bad word.

This problem can trip up established veterans. Recurring flaws in Joss Whedon's work seem to spring from an unwillingness to leave the hard lifting to the formula. Or maybe it's because he turns over the reins to assistants, who then try to be "creative."

This was somewhat understandable with Buffy, because of the inherent age and setting limitations. Angel suffered from neither, and should have been a witty noir PI drama (with a supernatural edge), a once popular but sadly underserved genre.

Alas, the show kept piling on cast members and ending the world (literally) in order to generate enough conflict to keep everybody interested. By contrast, with David Boreanaz basically playing an older Angel, Bones has mostly avoided these problems.

Related posts

In praise of cliche
Writing to be read
The conservative hero
Good books don't have to be hard

Moments of silence

2011-09-12T12:54:00.002-07:00

Listening to the 9/11 ceremonies on NPR, the spare amounts of speechifying and the moments of silence reminded me of what is called mokutou (黙祷) in Japanese, or "silent prayer."

Although religious in origin, mokutou is unadorned by religious trappings. When it comes to memorials, the sparer the better (Bloomberg was also right to keep the ceremonies mostly secular).

In a strange, cosmic coincidence, 9/11 was the sixth month anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami that devastated Northern Japan on 3/11. Here is a clip of a first month mokutou.

The "mokutou" is always announced, though it's usually preceded by a chime, not a siren. (The reason for the press attention in this particular case is ex-Prime Minister Hatoyama, third from right).

A simple ritual can displace a lot of empty rhetoric. The basic form of kiritsu (stand) and rei (bow) permeates Japanese society, and sort of substitutes for the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools.

The timing of memorial services in Japan, however, is horribly complex.

Back to the digital future

2011-09-08T14:11:00.017-07:00

In this blast from the past, John Dvorak goes back twenty-five years and discovers how resistant to change smart people can be (smart enough to run an Ivy League school), digging up this quote by Harvard University president Derek Bok:

Harvard is not [emphasis added] committed to digitizing its library system or establishing a computer network between students and professors.

BYU had completely digitized its card catalog system by 1985. When I started graduate school the next year, an IBM XT loaded with the ERIC index on CD-ROM showed up in the second floor reference section (I can still visualize where it was).

Talk about a breath of fresh air! The BC (before computer) system required pawing though two dozen telephone book-sized indexes (plus the quarterly supplements) year by year for every topic you wanted to research, again and again and again.

And then searching the stacks and praying that the journal was there (if the library even had it), hadn't been lost, misshelved, damaged, or checked out (permanently) by a professor. Enough of this nostalgia for the moldy smell of paper.

That was also when I bought my first PC, a used Kaypro II (2.5 MHz Z80, 64KB RAM). It cost me about a grand. Twenty years later, I paid the same amount (adjusted for inflation) for an IBM ThinkPad (1.7 GHz Pentium-M, 1GB RAM).

By the way, let's also can the hand-wringing over format obsolescence. I still have every file originally saved to those single-sided, 5.25 inch floppies. All of the papers physically typed on real paper and stored away in the BC years? Long gone.

In another sign of those ancient times, I was actually allowed to board airplanes with that Kaypro as a carry on! It had a practically bullet-proof aluminum case and weighed thirty pounds! Back then, though, any portable computer was exotic.

No way to wage a war

2011-09-05T11:02:00.016-07:00

During one of those free preview weekends (Cinemax, I believe), I was watching Avatar (the most expensive anime film ever made) in short bursts (until my rolled eyes made it impossible to see), and came to three realizations:

When it comes to sermons about noble savages and the white man's burden, Dances with Wolves gets it pretty much right.
Though Avatar is more a remake of Independence Day and The Last Samurai.
The intelligence with which fictional cinematic wars are waged cannot exceed that of the writer and director.

Costner especially gets the scale right. Dunbar doesn't rise to the top of a huge, established feudal order (nor one that unlike any other feudal order in history is mysteriously united in purpose). Dunbar's prior training is commensurate to the task. He doesn't magically acquire skills out of whole cloth.

Costner doesn't ignore history. In the long run, the U.S. Army would not be defeated. Not even close. They would return with overwhelming force and a really bad attitude.

In glaring contrast to Dances with Wolves, Edward Zwick's ahistorical The Last Samurai demonstrates how desperately dumb Hollywood can get in its search for exotic noble savages and angsty white Americans to heroically shoulder their burdens.

I go into greater depth here, but the Battle of the Southwest was fought against a nascent democracy to preserve the feudal privileges of an aristocratic order, and was led by a man who quit the government mostly because it didn't invade Korea fast enough (they got around to it a few decades later).

Not to mention that Americans never served as military advisers or arms suppliers to the Meiji government. If anybody, that honor goes to an adventurous and enterprising Scotsman, Thomas Blake Glover (a way more interesting person than any fictional character in any of these movies).

An American Civil War veteran, Captain L. L. Janes, was hired by the Meiji government, but to set up a school for "western learning" in Kumamoto.

So I suppose James Cameron came up with the ideal solution and invented his noble savages out of whole cloth, making sure the black hats were naught but black and the white hats were bluer than blue, and every conflict was absolutely unresolvable by any rational means.

But the real formula being shamelessly exploited here is the classic underdog story. Except that Rocky going up against Apollo Creed is one thing. Having the good guys win grossly mismatched military conflicts is quite another.

In desperate, headlong attacks, victory depends on pinning down and overwhelming the opposition. The Indians at Little Bighorn were at least as well-armed as the 7th Cavalry and outnumbered Custer's men by two or three to one (but like the charge of the Light Brigade, it proved a Pyrrhic victory).

In a prolonged engagement, the only proven way to survive being hugely outgunned and outnumbered is with guerrilla action. Though facing off against a strategically overconfidence and tactically foolish foe (Custer at Little Bighorn, Lee at Gettysburg) can go a long ways to evening the scales.

Until Gettysburg, Lee got the better of larger, better-equipped Federal forces by keeping his greatest weapon close at hand: George McClellan. Once Lincoln put Grant and Sherman in charge, Lee's only hope was for McClellan to get elected president and offer an armistice. The fall of Atlanta ended that.

In Avatar, Cameron, borrowing from Roland Emmerich and George Lucas, evens the scales by manufacturing stupidity on a scale that makes McClellan and Custer look like freaking geniuses.

At the root of the problem (as discussed here) is the utter lack of moral sophistication on the part of the bad guys. If the bad guys really are that bad to the bone, if the ends justify any means, then dispatching the good guys would be a piece of cake.

Star Wars: the planet-destroying Death Star (talk about useless overkill) is defended by WWII-vintage anti-aircraft guns? What, they couldn't spring for an Aegis fire-control system?
Independence Day: nuke the Earth from orbit. The aliens wouldn't have to waste money on actual nukes, only pick up a few asteroids along the way.
Avatar: more asteroids. Or drones, cruise missiles, fuel-air explosions, poisonous gas, mines that turn those floating mountains (that look like the ones in Excaflowne) into big hand grenades.

Movies like Avatar push all the James Bond villain buttons in my brain.

In bubblegum entertainment terms, I can give Independence Day and Star Wars a pass. Blame the writers for creating stupid weapons platforms, but at least they give us protagonists who plan, strategize, and figure things out. And in Star Wars, a literally magical "force" is posited.

What exactly is the strategy in Avatar? What gets figured out? You know, basic military stuff like feints, flanking movements, diversions, sieges and subterfuge?

As far as I can tell, this is the essence of the deeply thought-out plan the good guys in Avatar come up with: let's all charge the machine guns and then the good white guy (and his babelicious blue girlfriend, mostly sans clothes and all sans body armor) will get really, really, really lucky and the bad white guy won't!

Yeah, that always works.

There's a simple reason movie directors turn every cinematic military engagement into The Battle of Britain or The Charge of the Light Brigade, regardless of technological advances: because it looks good on film.

So the climax of Avatar has a bunch of video game and anime characters reenacting the latter (though the Light Brigade did briefly overrun the Russian positions, just as Pickett's men briefly breached the Union line). The Last Samurai has a bunch of samurai cosplayers reenacting the end of Gallipoli.

During the real Battle of the Southwest, Saigo Takamori wore a western-style military uniform, his men fought with guns, and in the end they got wiped out by an unromantic artillery barrage without charging anybody.

Let's keep in mind as well that Tom Cruise's character in The Last Samurai "embeds" himself with a bunch of medieval wannabees, studies the culture, masters the language--and yet learns nothing useful and teaches them nothing useful. In fact, he helps get them all killed.

I don't think that was supposed to be the moral of the story, but it ought to be.

Related posts

The Big Bad
Dances with Samurai
Escaflowne: A Girl in Gaea

Useful Japanese stereotypes

2011-09-01T11:44:00.011-07:00

A while back, my sister asked what I thought of two books she's using in her Business Communications course--How to Say "No" Without Feeling Guilty (U.S.) and 16 Ways to Avoid Saying "No" (Japan)"--specifically, the sociological picture they paint of Japanese society. To summarize:

Japanese culture values non-confrontation over confrontation and discourages the expression of negative emotions (but more amongst insiders than outsiders; it is more acceptable to be rude to outsiders than insiders). An individual raised in Japan will make more group ("we") references, rely more on nonverbal communication (silence, eye contact or lack thereof), and experience more communication apprehension (get worried about communicating) than an individual raised in the United States.

As far as broad brushes go--which anybody painting big pictures has to use (stereotypes persist because they are useful)--I don't find much here to disagree with. But in explaining the what, the why perhaps needs more attention. It's too tautological to say that a culture is a certain way because that's the way the the culture is.

For example, generally speaking, it's true that Japan is a "high-context" culture and the United States is a "low-context" culture. Japan has maintained a common frame of reference for centuries (from 1603-1868, allowing nobody else in as a matter of national policy), while the United States has been integrating unique frames of reference for centuries.

Americans have to let the words speak for themselves because they can't automatically assume a shared context. Japanese can imply a lot more, trusting that the other person will understand what they are hinting at (which is not to say that this trust can't be highly misplaced).

Writers can play with this ambiguity and hide information from the reader. (Unfortunately, doing so also hides information from the translator.) It is grammatical in Japanese to drop subjects, and the passive voice is ubiquitous. Dialogue tags can also be a lot more vague, with the speaker being identified, for example, solely by the choice of pronoun (and I'm not refering to gender).

The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis--which goes in and out of favor, depending on the tides of academic political correctness--has its place. To quote Wikipedia, "Differences in the way languages encode cultural and cognitive categories affect the way people think, so that speakers of different languages will tend to think and behave differently depending on the language they use."

However, it can quickly degrade into a chicken-egg problem, encouraging nativist nonsense such as the Nihonjinron craze during the 1980s, which extrapolated Sapir–Whorf down to the genetic level and back up to the nationalistic level, pushing the notion of "exceptionalism" into the absurd.

Applying Occam's Razor, though, I think these approaches can overthink the whole thing. The biggest clue is that while Japanese are indeed "group oriented," they're not a bunch of extroverts who want to hang out together volubly emoting in a big Oprah-fest. It's more a collective action and safety-in-numbers thing.

As I point out here, the easiest way to understand Japan is that it's a country of 128 million introverts living in a country the size of California. It really is that simple. As the Wikipedia writer wittily puts it (with a bit of editing):

Under the alias of assertions of differences, expressions of nationalism in Japan, as elsewhere, borrow promiscuously from the conceptual hoards of others, and what may seem alien turns out often to be, once studied closely, merely an exotic variation on an all too familiar theme.

Considering Japan's recent feudal past--more efficiently run and deeply entrenched than medieval Europe's--and in light of an ultra-high population density, institutionalizing ways of not stepping on the toes of people who could ruin your day was a Darwinian necessity that shaped the society and the individual and the language (like those Russian foxes).

And has also resulted in a culture where the default coping mechanism is passive-aggressive behavior. Maybe that's why nerdy introverts all over the world instinctively "get it."

Related posts

Life is a sim
Understanding Japanese women (and introverts)

When in Rome (or Japan)

2011-08-29T11:13:00.023-07:00

How propriety easily gets confused with morality is amusingly illustrated by a pair of anecdotes from Michael Hoffman's historical overview of Japan-U.S. relations, written for the Japan Times (an informative and entertaining read).

First we have U.S. Consul Townsend Harris remarking in 1856 on the cleanliness of the Japanese people and the fact that staying clean involves, you know, bathing.

Everyone bathes every day . . . both sexes, old and young, enter the same [public bath] and there perform their ablutions in a state of perfect nudity. I cannot account for so indelicate a proceeding on the part of a people so generally correct.

A few years later, a Japanese delegation at a state function was equally shocked to see American women "nude from shoulders to arms," and was offended by the "insufferable" sight of "men and women, both young and old, mixed in the dance."

Japanese men and women have always danced together at festivals, but these resemble line dances (no touching involved). In any case, ballroom dancing has since become perfectly acceptable, as illustrated in the wonderful film, Shall We Dance?

Mixed bathing (kon'yoku) was frowned upon mightily during the U.S. Occupation (1945-1952) and persists only at a handful of hot springs resorts, certainly not at local public baths (sentô), which are still prevalent though not as ubiquitous as before.

"B-list celebrity visits local hot springs resort" (not of the mixed bathing sort) is a favorite travel program genre on Japanese television. Japan has no shortage of local hot springs resorts (onsen) with long histories and quaint local customs to explore.

Anytime an anime series needs a lame excuse for a bunch of gratuitous nudity or low-brow humor (or both), it sends the characters to a hot springs resort. The onsen episode of Full Metal Panic FUMOFFU (episode 9) is one good example.

The problem with projections

2011-08-25T13:26:00.007-07:00

And now to the root of my baptism bubble. It's all about (it usually is) statistics (including the lies and damned lies).

The beginnings in my case trace back to the late 1970s, when sociologists began paying serious attention to the Mormon church's membership growth. These studies culminated most famously in Rodney Stark's 1984 calculation of a 64 million to 267 million growth in membership over the next century.

Even if the church didn't directly, apologists didn't shrink from pointing to these studies and crowing about "independent" confirmation of inevitability of Mormon sectarian hegemony, and trumpeting the Mormonism's "fastest growing religion" status (an error that continues to this day).

There's one big problem with these rosy projections: the numbers Stark and others were using came from the church itself. The "official" membership numbers the church publishes don't count butts in pews. It's a number derived from membership records. It's a derivative.

Remember what happened the last time we treated derivatives like real things?

Every person a membership record has ever been generated for is included.⁽¹⁾ Because there are more "inactive Mormons" not attending church than "active" members, the database administrators have a problem: when to retire an entry. Answer: when you hit 110, you're officially dead.

In other words, Mormons who never attend church are, according to the church's membership database, the healthiest people on the planet.

Add to this "children of record." Although you don't "officially" become a Mormon until you are baptized, records are generated for children under eight. These records can be canceled at the local level, but that supposes somebody being around to remember (or care) to actually do so.

When my father was a membership clerk, he played private detective and went around tracking down these lost souls. That kind of fastidiousness is extremely rare.

Many COB (Church Office Building) watchers are aware of this, and try to invent other statistical proxies for church membership, such as the number of stakes. But outside Utah, stake and ward sizes are anything but a constant, the result being another loosely-derived derivative.

It is a very human problem. All bureaucracies behave like bureaucracies, and all bureaucrats behave like bureaucrats, whether church or state, whether the Boy Scouts or the Communist Party. Once you hint at measuring success using numbers, the Bernie Madoffs come out of the woodwork.

But that's unfair. The ones causing the most damage aren't the Mr. Potters chortling as they screw over the little guy, but those convinced they're doing God's work (while screwing over the little guy).

The irony here is that the church knows exactly how many butts there are in the pews on any given Sunday. The ward clerk does a head count (one butt per head). By now, though, the disparity between reality and fantasy has grown so large there's no easy way to paper over the differences.

This "butt number" is one of the best-kept secrets in the world. The CIA could learn a thing or two.

I can even imagine that Bernie Madoff never set out to run the biggest Ponzi scheme in history. But when it became apparent that he wasn't as smart as he thought he was, he didn't want to disappoint people or appear foolish, not like those bozos at Long Term Capital Management.

Madoff was once chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange. The board of LTCM was graced by two Nobel laureates. This isn't about being smart enough, it's about knowing when to hold 'em, when to fold 'em, when to walk away, and when to run. Yep, A Kenny Rogers ballad is all the wisdom we need.

Alas, even on a good day, very few of us are as smart as a country-western ballad. So the bean counters in the COB don extra-big blinders and gallop onwards, suggesting the possibility that the day will come when the entire world has converted to Mormonism, but nobody shows up at church.

1. If you have your records "removed," are you counted or not? Dunno. But the record is never actually removed, especially if you're an excommunicated polygamist whack job. The church doesn't want you hopping to another ward and sneaking in through the back door. You can check out of this church anytime you want, but you can never leave.

Related posts

Tokyo South
Blowing bubbles
The truth is worse
The weirdest two years

I'm being repressed!

2011-08-22T13:32:00.010-07:00

I read this:

Jewish people have the Anti-Defamation League "to stop the defamation of the Jewish people." Muslims have the Council on American-Islamic Relations "to enhance understanding of Islam." Now . . . the Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research is announcing the formation of the Mormon Defense League.

And after realizing it was not from The Onion, the first thing that popped into my mind was this:

Dennis: Come and see the violence inherent in the system. Help! Help! I'm being repressed!
King Arthur: Bloody peasant!
Dennis: Oh, what a giveaway! Did you hear that? Did you hear that, eh? That's what I'm on about! Did you see him repressing me? You saw him, didn't you?

A plague of professional offense-taking has been sweeping the nation for lo these many years. The antidote is to laugh it out of existence. The "MDL" is a good place to start.

(Frankly, practically every PR problem the Mormon church has is the result of trying solve its bad PR with more PR, instead of, you know, fixing the problem.)

Kantai Kessen

2011-08-18T10:57:00.009-07:00

As I mused previously, we human beings have a hard time believing anything we're not predisposed to believe until we are forced to believe it. By the same token, we have a hard time not believing what we used to believe--when the evidence turns against it--until we are forced to stop believing it.

This is no more true than the military doctrine of Kantai Kessen, that doomed the Japanese navy almost from the start the Pacific War.

Kantai Kessen posited a winner-take-all contest between battleships that would thoroughly demoralize the enemy and end the conflict in one fell swoop. The problem was, Nimitz declined to engage in such a contest, and the one man capable of shifting strategies with the tides of war, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, was killed in 1943.

Thereafter, all Kantai Kessen achieved was the systematic destruction of the Japanese navy as scarce military resources were mustered to create one more "decisive" contest after the next. This only allowed the U.S. navy to dominate each increasingly lopsided battle and eat away at conveniently concentrated Japanese assets.

Kantai Kessen reached its apotheosis during the Battle of the Philippine Sea, an engagement so one-sided that American airmen called it "The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot." At the end of the war, the Yamato, the largest battleship ever built, was summarily destroyed in a few hours from the air.

The Japanese military leaders couldn't stop believing in Kantai Kessen because it had proved so effective during the Russo-Japanese War.

Or at least they thought it had.

The Japanese navy did indeed crush the Russian fleet at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905, compelling the Russians to sue for peace. The brilliant Admiral Heihachiro Togo twice executed the classic naval maneuver known as "crossing the T," positioning every ship in his fleet to fire full broadsides at the enemy.

The "underdog" victory was hailed around the world (despite the fact that it began with a "sneak attack"), and the Japanese government was quick to believe its own press, conveniently forgetting that the land war going on at the same time had been anything but decisive, with the Japanese infantry taking as many casualties as the Russians.

Togo had fought an exhausted navy that sailed halfway around the world to engage them. The Japanese were fighting in their home waters and had a greater mastery of wireless telegraphy and torpedo technology. The Russian government was already weak, the loss further destabilized it, and it would fall apart a dozen years later.

Bizarrely, the victorious Japanese subsequently came away from the Treaty of Portsmouth claiming: "We was robbed!" This combination of aggrievement and overconfidence set the stage for the next forty years of accumulating disasters.

The real problem with history is not that nobody learns from it, but that we learn the wrong things. And having studiously learned them, the "facts" supporting those beliefs become almost impossible to dislodge from the collective consciousness.

Related links

The known unknowns
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan

The known unknowns

2011-08-15T10:36:00.015-07:00

On the 66th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, NHK broadcast a fascinating look at what the Japanese government knew--or should have known--about the impending destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The surprising answer is they knew--or should have know--a lot.

Combing through the archives of Japan's signals intelligence service, NHK unearthed the original log books and taped interviews with key personnel made after the war. What becomes clear is that the analysts "on the ground" had collected all the pieces, but nobody in the chain of command put the puzzle together.

Here is what NHK found about what they knew they didn't know at the time:

• The Japanese government initiated its own atomic bomb program (promising to destroy New York), but canceled it soon afterward, concluding that it was impossible and the American project would never succeed.

• Although they couldn't read the encrypted messages, Japan's signals intelligence service identified and logged the call sign prefixes of B-29s flying out of the Marianas Islands, and could roughly predict their destinations.

• Early in 1945, they detected a new call sign prefix (tagged "V-6") being used by a curiously small air wing comprised of only a handful of planes. These planes flew a large number of training missions from Tinian Island.

• The Supreme War Council was aware of the atomic bomb test in Alamogordo, New Mexico (perhaps through their Soviet contacts), but assumed it was a new kind of conventional explosive.

• On 6 August 1945, a single B-29 using a V-6 call sign was detected approaching Japan. The signals intelligence service sent this unusual information up the chain of command. No action was taken.

• That B-29 was the Enola Gay.

• A day later, the Supreme War Council announced that Hiroshima was destroyed by a small but powerful conventional bomb. When it became clear the bomb was atomic, they said it was unlikely the U.S. had more than one.

• The signals intelligence service requested permission to order evacuations if another B-29 using a V-6 call sign entered Japanese air space. Permission was never granted.

• On 9 August 1945, a B-29 using a V-6 call sign was detected approaching Kyushu. This information was sent up the chain of command. No action was taken.

• That B-29 was the Bockscar.

• At least five hours elapsed between the time the V-6 call sign was logged and Nagasaki was bombed. The Bockscar was delayed by a late rendezvous, then by cloud cover over its primary target, before diverting to Nagasaki.

A similar row of dominoes can be identified leading up to Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Hence the problem with post hoc reasoning and 20/20 hindsight. The branches all lead down to the trunk. But starting at the trunk, there is no telling where a branch will end up. That is what keeps conspiracy theorists in business.

However obvious a chain of cause and effect may be, we have difficulty believing anything we're not predisposed to believe until forced by events to believe it. With good reason--evolution selects against gullibility. Knowing when to stick with the known or embrace the unknown is a core challenge of being human.

Related links

Kantai Kessen
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan

Kids these days

2011-08-11T11:23:00.025-07:00

The Story of O-An, first published in 1737, is based on the reminiscences of a young girl escaping with her family from a besieged castle during the Battle of Sekigahara (1600). The account is considered historically accurate.

It's a harrowing tale. Her brother is shot and killed in front of her. Before the castle falls, her father is "allowed" to escape with O-An and her mother by floating them across the moat in a washing tub. A few minutes later, her mother goes into labor.

It was a girl. The adults gave the baby her first bath right there in the paddy water. After they were finished, the father [Haruo Shirane translates it as "her father"] wrapped it in his clothing, swung [her] mother over his shoulder, and fled to Aonogahara.

Note the "kids these days" conclusion (and remember that this would be the mid-to-late seventeenth century):

This is how things were in the old days: nothing was easy. We never even dreamed of eating lunch, and when night fell, there was no supper either. Young people today, with their fancy clothes and free-spending ways and fussy palates, it's truly scandalous.

In her home town, "Granny Hikone," as she was later known, apparently turned into the eighteenth century version of "Grandpa Simpson."

Even now, when an old person starts talking about things were different in their day, people call that a "Hikone."

O-An has a point. Working at McDonald's is one thing. Molding bullets and "putting tags on the heads our side took in battle to remember who they were" is quite another. A little perspective about what constitutes a "bad day" doesn't hurt at times like this.

I've mostly used a translation by Matt Treyvaud. Google Books has a translation by Haruo Shirane (Early Modern Japanese Literature, 1600-1900).

The Bow-wow Detective

2011-08-08T11:16:00.016-07:00

The prize for the police procedural with the goofiest premise goes to Deka Wanko ("Bow-wow Detective"). Based on a manga by Gokusen creator Kozueko Morimoto, it's about Ichiko Hanamori, a rookie cop who possesses a dog's olfactory powers.

Tagline: "Something about this case stinks!"

For unknown reasons, Ichiko runs around in impractically poofy outfits and manages several costume changes an episode. Well the reason is that Mikako Tabe looks really cute in them. She's the moe version of Abby Sciuto (NCIS).

Tabe makes the whole thing work because she's an excellent comic actress and plays the whole thing with a straight face.

The show is flagged as a goof from the start. The give-away is that Ichiko carries a gun. Cops rarely carry guns in Japan. The entire country can go years without a single police shooting (Utah is lucky to go a month without a police shooting).

A nice touch is that Ichiko can figure out things with her nose that would never stand up on court. So she has to work with her "ordinary" detective partners (who don't necessary believe in her superpowers) to provide the proof that will stand up in court.

Hollywood could make a go of the concept, albeit toned way down, something like Lie to Me, which I consider more a superhero show (and perhaps is even better when considered in that context).

Most manga premises of this sort tend to turn the volume up to eleven, which might work when you're maybe doing a dozen shows, max. But in a continuing series, they end up burning out the actors and quickly burning through all the plausible plots.

Here are three more quasi-superhero shows based on manga that would make good Hollywood properties (again, toned way down and paced for longevity):

• Hellsing
• Someday's Dreamers
• Ghost Talker's Daydream

My version of Hellsing would be Angel, except with an only grudgingly good Spike in the lead (and who might actually be the devil himself, but got bored with modern evil). And I'd lose the whole X-File-ish backstory.

The last one is basically Ghost Whisperer, except the heroine works in an S&M club (because ghosts don't hang out in S&M clubs) and she hates dead people. She also has a head of hair that strangles people who piss her off.

She gets talked into working for the local exorcism agency that cleans up crime scenes after the cops are done (and ends up playing detective). Like Someday's Dreamers it posits the existence of the supernatural in a very workaday fashion.

The manga can be quite good (I haven't read the English translation). A hacked-together anime version is quite awful. Incidentally, the anime version of Gokusen is quite good. A live action television series was hugely popular, and is perfectly dreadful.

Writing to be read

2011-08-04T11:10:00.008-07:00

A while back I pointed out this pair of paens to the pulps. The Wall Street Journal recently examined the actual substance of the genre in Allan Massie's review of The Big Book of Adventure Stories, edited by Otto Penzler.

Massie writes fondly of a time when the point of storytelling was (strangely enough) to tell a story. The result was "their day's version of the modern action movie." Not always good, often quite awful, but the "masters of popular fiction always play by the rules. And rule No. 1 is to grab the reader at once."

Somerset Maugham, Massie reminds us, defended the pulps much as G.K. Chesterton had fifty years earlier. Their authors, Maugham noted, wrote stories that "defeated time." And yet the critics "have the ingratitude to throw [them] aside with a sneer and look down upon their authors. It is graceless."

My only beef with Massie's analysis is his claim that these "stories belong to a time when our culture was essentially literate. That time has passed." No, these stories belong to a time when writers wrote to be read. Now their children and grandchildren work in television, and write to be watched.

Related posts

Down with literacy
Angsty angst ruins everything
A scientific defense of fiction
Good books don't have to be hard

The Big Bad

2011-08-01T10:44:00.016-07:00

The problem I have with LOTR is the same one I have with the Star Wars sequels, Harry Potter, The Dark Knight, even Narnia: I don't care about the bad guy. His goals and motives are incomprehensible, or he goes about achieving them in the dumbest way possible, or conversely, he's omnipotent--except when he isn't for purposes of plot.

Not caring about the bad guy, it's hard to care about the conflict challenging the good guys. What would Sauron do if he got the ring? Bad things! Um, what bad things? No idea, but it'd probably be more interesting than this movie!

The first Stars Wars is instructive in this regard. Darth Vader is a cog in a machine. His ostensible superiors disrespect him to his face. We get that he's defending a fading way of life in an efficiently managed Empire where the galactic trains all run on time. (It's not clear what the rebels bring to the table as a viable political platform.)

Then Lucas got all preachy and Manichean and perversely tried to "humanize" Vader, revealing that he had no idea what motivates anybody to do anything, except that we again see a disturbingly common pattern in all these movies: bad people are really ugly.

And incredibly dim and ineffective. Rowling (more ugly) has conveniently summed up everything she doesn't understand about villainy in her own arch-villain:

That which Voldemort does not value he takes no trouble to comprehend. Of house-elves and children's tales, of love, loyalty and innocence, Voldemort knows and understands nothing. That they all have a power beyond his own, a power beyond the reach of any magic, is a truth he has never grasped.

Voldemort was steeped in that culture. He couldn't not understand it. Nobody that clueless could gather around him the best and the brightest, and then almost pull off a successful coup d'état. The great villains of history have always had a finger planted firmly on the pulse of the popular will and the governing zeitgeist.

There's a basic confusion here about the means by which people rise to power, and the ways in which they exercise it once it has corrupted them absolutely.

If anything, Voldemort is a carbon copy of Joss Whedon's first Big Bad, the "Master" from season one of Buffy. Whedon's villains improved considerably after that, reaching the epitome of cool, calculating evil in the person of Sunnydale Mayor Richard Wilkins (Harry Groener).

And the coolest, most calculating thing about Mayor Wilkins? He got elected. Compared to him, Voldemort is a cardboard cutout.

Which is not to say there aren't good uses for cardboard villains. Where would James Bond be without them? But they have short half-lives. Take the (ugly) villains of Independence Day. They serve the purpose well for two hours. Any longer and their unfathomable stupidity would become intolerable.

Similarly, the one redeeming characteristic of "Evil Angel" was that he was a two-hundred proof nihilist. But two-hundred proof nihilism gets boring fast, which is what prompts Spike's famous monologue:

We like to talk big, vampires do. "I'm going to destroy the world." It's just tough guy talk. Strut round with your friends over a pint of blood. The truth is I like this world. You've got dog racing. Manchester United. And you've got people. Billions of people walking around like Happy Meals with legs. It's all right here.

Both Buffy and Angel eventually succumbed to too many Big Bads destroying the world one too many times. Though to give credit where it's due, Whedon did come up with another real bad beauty, the law firm of Wolfram & Hart. A half-century before the fact, C.S. Lewis had Screwtape describe it perfectly:

The greatest evil . . . is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.

Destroying the world is easy and dull. Corrupting it using the kind of enlightened people who contribute to PBS and wouldn't be caught dead (or living dead) at McDonald's or Walmart and earnestly believe they're doing the right thing for the greater good (and for your own good) is a much more rewarding challenge.

Related posts

Oh yeah, we're baaad
Apocalypse not now
No way to wage a war
It's not about the bad guys

The God complex

2011-07-28T11:21:00.007-07:00

Tim Hartford succinctly sums up the scientific process (not the cargo cult it has become of late), and what intellectual exploration is actually all about. Perhaps his most important point is that we live in a world where even the most basic social and economic interactions are too complex for any "great man" (or bunch of self-styled great men) to comprehend. So a little awe and humility is in order.

Related posts

"Pathological" and real science
Scotch tape X-rays

Death to high school English

2011-07-25T11:10:00.005-07:00

A new genre of academic essay has emerged of late, in which college professors grumble that their students "don't understand commas, far less how to write an essay." Complains Kim Brooks:

For years now, teaching composition at state universities and liberal arts colleges and community colleges as well, I've puzzled over these high-school graduates and their shocking deficits. I've sat at my desk, a stack of their two-to-three-page papers before me, and felt overwhelmed to the point of physical paralysis by all the things they don't know how to do when it comes to written communication in the English language, all the basic skills that surely they will need to master if they are to have a chance at succeeding in any post-secondary course of study.

The genre strikes me as a way of criticizing the teacher's unions without coming right out and saying so, because then people might assume you're in league with Scott Walker or Chris Christie or other fiends from the bowels of hell.

Though in this case, I wouldn't blame the unions. The problem begins in the universities and their "schools of education," where professors, believing that their students are blank slates, convince their students in turn that teenagers are blank slates, empty vessels into which they can pour "culture."

Even if they could, it ends up being all the same culture. All the same liberal arts education monoculture. The most important question Brooks asks is: "[Is] it really so essential that [high school] students read Faulkner?"

As for the students who did make it to more accelerated English courses, their recollections are a little less disheartening, but only a little. They read Shakespeare, they tell me, usually Romeo and Juliet, sometimes Macbeth. They read Catcher in the Rye or Huck Finn, The Sound and the Fury, a little Melville or Hardy. They read these works and then they talked about them in class discussions or small groups, and then they composed an essay on the subject, received a grade, and moved on to the next masterpiece.

The whole problem is encapsulated right there. I got good at composing those essays, and yet can't remember a book "taught" in high school English that I cared about. Most I loathed. The one thing that high school English classes do very well is make students hate reading, especially writing about reading.

Could there be a more useless real-world skill for everybody that isn't a humanities student (practically the entire population)? Or even those who are? In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Thomas Benton offers for our consideration the prototypical hard-striving daughter of middle-class parents who

goes to graduate school, earns a doctorate in comparative literature from an Ivy League university, everyone is proud of her, and then they are shocked when she struggles for years to earn more than the minimum wage. (Meanwhile, her brother--who was never very good at school--makes a decent living fixing HVAC systems with a six-month certificate from a for-profit school near the Interstate.)

As Car Talk's Tom Magliozzi (he graduated from MIT) says about high school math courses: "The purpose of learning math, which most of us will never use, is only to prepare us for further math courses, which we will use even less frequently than never."

The goal of math should be to add, subtract, multiply and divide. And balance a checkbook. Geometry would consist of identifying a radius, diameter, right angle and hypotenuse. Work in somewhere a simple primer on statistics.

"English" would consist of reading books the students would read if they weren't stuck in a high school English class. Want to learn about Shakespeare? Watch a movie. The goal of composition would be a one page, three paragraph essay.

That's it. Make everything else an elective.

Literary fiction defined

2011-07-21T10:25:00.002-07:00

1. Literary fiction is whatever English professors can teach without being ironic or apologetic. Novels will move in and out of academic fashion according to the prevailing intellectual trends.

2. Genre fiction that has become sufficiently obscure, inaccessible and fossilized in the public mind turns into literary fiction. (Shakespeare, Dickens and Chandler being three examples.)

3. People who read and write literary fiction attend "conferences" and read and publish in "journals." People who read and write genre fiction attend "conventions" and read and publish in "magazines."

4. People who write literary fiction earn tenure. People who write genre fiction earn royalties. (Though in purely monetary terms, the former is often more valuable than the latter.)

5. Literary fiction is whatever can be taught in high school without anybody getting in trouble with the parents, the school board, or local politicians. (Although 5 is a subset of 1, not all of 1 qualifies as 5.)

6. Literary fiction is that which everybody is expected to respect, but nobody actually reads. Genre fiction is that which nobody is expected to respect, but everybody actually reads.

Netflix flak

2011-07-18T10:33:00.005-07:00

I got on the Netflix bandwagon almost six years go, abandoning GreenCine mostly because the latter's sole distribution center made the turn-around times interminably long. Netflix had that fabled "long tail" (meaning: lots of anime titles), low prices, and a two-day turn-around.

Now it only has the last (thanks to a distribution center in Salt Lake City), and one out of three ain't good. Netflix seems to have adopted the technological Peter Principle: the penchant to keep "improving" a product until it's useless.

As both Lance Ulanoff and Bill Wyman have pointed out, Netflix is at the mercy of an industry still running on empty when it comes to "protecting" intellectual IP. As Wyman puts it, living out the sad remake of a old script "very similar to the one the music industry just acted out."

But now Netflix has taken that weak hand, shown its cards, and bet the house.

I started losing confidence when most of the new anime titles were only available streaming. There's a lot not to like about DVDs, starting with the Neanderthals who apparently use them as coasters. So I might have sprung for a converter box--except that every single title is dubbed.

It's like going back twenty-five years to the VHS selection at Blockbuster: a smattering of random titles, incomplete series, and only available as lousy dubs. Not to mention their still-lousy search engine and DVDs that disappear from the listings for months on end. This is an improvement?

For the time being, I've switched to the cheapest, two-a-month plan. Between TV Japan and my own DVD library, Netflix isn't worth a premium price. If I suddenly had tons of un-wasted time on my hands, there are several specialty anime DVD rental outfits that would get my business instead.

I don't understand people who pay for premium cable channels either, but Netflix may succeed for the same reason: make the incremental costs low enough that subscribers blithely fork over the money without doing any kind of cost-benefit analysis.

Related links

Hey, watch this!
Blockbuster goes bankrupt

A Man of Few Words

2011-07-14T11:36:00.016-07:00

The second edition of Kate's A Man of Few Words is now live on Amazon and Smashwords. Revised and extended! It's twenty percent longer, but thanks to the smoother and tighter narrative, hums along.

This version includes an NCX (Navigation Control for XML). The Kindle versions of Angel Falling Softly, The Path of Dreams, Tokyo South, and Mr. B Speaks! now have NCX files, along with the table of contents page.

On the Kindle, the NCX displays as a pop-up table of contents (as opposed to jumping to the table of contents page), and allows you to skip forward and back from chapter heading to chapter heading.

Though I have to wonder how many Kindle users know how to access it (or would bother using it if they did). The NCX works in the Kindle Previewer, but I haven't seen any support for it yet in Kindle for PC.

Go here for more purchasing information (and freebies).

The end of books

2011-07-11T10:15:00.001-07:00

This witty exercise in prognostication in Scribner's Magazine begins with a report of Sir William Thompson's calculation of the age of the sun. Unfortunately for Sir Thompson (Lord Kelvin), the publication of the special theory of relativity was a decade away. The math was fine, the results were useless.

Thompson's erroneous number--reported with great confidence--is a telling metaphor for the human inability to forecast how fast scientific advances--and errors--can upset the technological applecart. And yet conceptually, Octave Uzanne manages to predict the Walkman, the audio book, and television.

Keep in mind that he did so in 1894.

Parts of this article would be considered prescient if written in 1994. What Uzanne can't do is see past the limitations of the technologies available to him. He has a especially hard time not seeing technology as a zero-sum game, and dourly predicts that "phonography will probably be the destruction of printing."

However firmly he wedges tongue in cheek, he proves that not only does history repeat itself, but so do the same old arguments about literacy, taste, and the coming technological apocalypse. Nor can he stop himself from writing worshipfully of the past and condescendingly about the future.

We see nothing but copies of all sorts; copies of Old Masters accommodated to modern taste, adaptations ever false of epochs forever gone by, trite copies of nature as seen with a photographers eye . . . nothing that takes us out of our own humanity, nothing that transports us elsewhere.

Uzanne bemoans, "Can we indeed find many painters or sculptors who are truly original creators?" while anticipating in great detail the self-publishing revolution (then as now, it all comes down to distribution), and then fretting that it will generate just too much content for mere mortals to handle.

I calculate that, take the whole world over, from eighty to one hundred thousand books appear every year; at an average of a thousand copies, this makes more than a hundred millions of books, the majority of which contain only the wildest extravagances or the most chimerical follies, and propagate only prejudice and error. Our social condition forces us to hear many stupid things every day. A few more or less do not amount to very great suffering in the end; but what happiness not to be obliged to read them.

What Uzanne couldn't have anticipated is that in the future, the inundation would come as much from all that watching and listening, making reading a refuge.

Blowing bubbles

2011-07-07T10:48:00.008-07:00

Burrowing further back into my memories, I find another reason that made my "weirdest two years" so strange.

Shortly after arriving at the MTC, all the new missionaries headed to Taiwan, Japan and South Korea were shown a film (pretty sure it was 16mm, that's how old I am) featuring Spencer W. Kimball. In it he outlined the proselyting strategy in the Far East for the decades to come.

The impression I took away is certainly stronger that my recall of the precise details. The general idea was that the church would pour thousands of missionaries into those countries, baptize zillions, and then an army of Japanese and Taiwanese and Korean missionaries would invade China.

It was world conquering time. Hoorah! (Being a Mormon missionary reminds you why nineteen-year-olds make such good cannon fodder.)

Okay, not in those exact terms, but that's what the Risk board graphics implied. Including Korea and Japan in the equation was culturally naive, to say the least. And politically, China--which would be welcoming the church with open arms any day now (thirty years ago)--obviously didn't get the memo.

But as Oddball says in Kelly's Heroes: "Why don't you knock it off with them negative waves?" So thousands of missionaries were sent to Taiwan, Japan and South Korea. Missions divided and subdivided like bacteria in a petri dish.

Thinking about it now, it was exactly the same earnest spiel that every multi-level marketing business plan spells out: exponential growth is only a lot of hard work away. So when missions started delivering the big numbers, everybody was primed to believe it, proof that God was on our side.

Nobody wanted to know how. Caught up in the heady good times of any bubble, nobody does (except the cynics with the negative waves). Until the whole thing went pop and plop. And then came the inevitable Emily Litella moment: "Never mind."

Related posts

Tokyo South
The truth is worse
The weirdest two years
The problem with projections

Life is a sim

2011-07-04T10:42:00.017-07:00

Any missionary who has served in Japan quickly learns the expression, "Rusu desu." It means, "Nobody's home." Japan is a nation of 128 million introverts. The novelist Hyakken Uchida summed up the near-universal sentiment when he posted a parody of an old tanka poem on his front door:

There is no greater joy
than receiving a visitor
But I don't mean you

On this side of the Pacific, it's an extrovert's world, so they get to define the terms of the debate, expressed as anything from rolled eyes to "call the men in the white coats" exasperation to unbridled rage at all those activities introverts enjoy doing that don't involve, you know, them.

In Japan, if you shut yourself in your room and don't come out for a year, okay, you're probably an "introvert." Otherwise, you're "normal," and "normal" activities have been extended and refined to introverted degrees that shock extroverted sensibilities all the more, such as the dating sim.

The dating sim evolved out of the "interactive novel," one of those technologies that has forever remained stubbornly over the horizon--except in Japan, where it has merged with the manga/anime aesthetic and narrative style and succeeded amazingly well.

One of the most popular dating sims is Love Plus (Peter Payne touches upon it here), cited in some translated 2ch responses to this by-the-numbers rant about how Japan's whole problem is the "fantasy world of comics, video games and animated pornography."

• Oh, and its OK to be obsessed with movies and books then?
• Make reality more interesting than games, please.
• Yeah, I can live on games alone.
• If everybody became obsessed with games, then we would live in a peaceful society.
• Reality does not want to deal with me, you idiot.
• The world in the monitor is reality. The world we live in is just imaginary.
• To be honest, I don't want a (real) woman.
• Love Plus IS reality.
• But the 2D world is ideal.
• My [2D] girlfriend is Aika-san. She lets me meet her whenever I want and greets me with a smile if I forget a date, and she does not cost money. Thats all I need.
• I'm 30 and earn 3.5 million yen [$40K USD]--how am I supposed to get married?
• I tried to face reality and it became Love Plus.
• A country of Neets [England] being worried about Japan?
• Girls in games won't cheat on us.
• The solution is simple: make it so that anime and manga characters can get pregnant.
• There are too many Japanese people anyway, so decreasing the population would be just right.

As the first point makes clear, as with slams of romance novels, these kinds of criticisms ultimately boil down to snobbery: my ways of wasting time are more refined than your ways of wasting time. Not to mention that wasting it in a group is always deemed more productive than wasting it alone.

That last one is an important demographic point that the "birth dearth" people utterly fail to comprehend: the Japanese are choosing to not gallop mindlessly into a Malthusian catastrophe. Just to make this point clear:

• Japan has a population of 128 million.
• And is the approximate size of California, with less arable land (and even less than that since the March tsunami and Fukushima meltdown).
• The current population of California (37 million) is about that of Japan two hundred years ago.

Even so, as stubborn contrarian Eamonn Fingleton insists, no ostensibly "dying nation" has ever done so well as Japan.

I'm not a game player, so I can't offer any opinions in that department. But Kanon and Clannad--based on dating sims--are in my top ten list. The KimiKiss manga are pretty good too (very Jack Weyland-ish). Game-play imposes a structure on the narratives that lend to solid plotting.

Here is a Love Plus trailer.

Related posts

Kanon
Clannad
Understanding Japanese women (and introverts)
Fumiko's Confession (how a dating sim is not supposed to turn out)

The weirdest two years

2011-06-30T12:00:00.008-07:00

I previously mentioned leaving the really egregious stuff out of my missionary memoir. Here is a glancing summary.

Aside from nineteen-year-olds being their normal idiot selves, and the mission president taking the New York City teacher's union approach (short of felonies being committed, nobody was getting "fired"), the weirdest stuff was ecclesiastical in nature.

Specially, I'm referring to what I describe here as the "small district" concept.

Essentially, we created mission-run "districts" within already established wards where we could dump converts (at month-to-month activity rates in the teens), without them showing up on the ward membership roles and incurring the expected pushback.

This practice was far more widespread than I indicate, and was sanctioned up to the GA level. We created a baptism banking bubble and the equivalent of the SEC and the Federal Reserve enthusiastically signed off on it.

To avoid the tackiness of baptizing people in bathtubs, the mission distributed "portable baptismal fonts" (made out of blue plastic tarps and plywood), despite an actual chapel rarely being more than twenty minutes away by mass-transit.

Again, the point was to rack up the numbers without the locals--who would eventually be shouldering the "fellowshipping" responsibilities--getting in the way.

I met very few idealistic missionaries "bending the rules" with naive but good intentions in mind (what Parker and Stone posit). The ones justifying twisted means were doing so in order to accomplish the perverse ends they were called on to achieve.

Or got so burned out and disillusioned they didn't care, and neither did the mission president (as long as they weren't committing felonies). I was too confused to get disillusioned. What killed me was being an introvert trapped in an extrovert's world.

There is a certain bliss that comes from being completely out of your depth. I had a zone leader who got physically ill from the stress. I went with him to Tokyo Adventist Hospital, where he was diagnosed with ulcers, like an overworked Japanese salaryman.

But all bubbles pop and this one barely lasted half a decade.

When I went back to Japan at the end of the 1980s, baptisms had fallen 90 percent. The proselyting techniques we "pioneered" weren't just "discouraged," they were banned. Several missions and hundreds of units were eventually combined or shut down.

Even as the same scams were popping up elsewhere. It's a worldwide game of Whac-A-Mole. (And some missionaries can't stop when they get home, which is why Utah is home to so many multi-level marketing empires.)

When Japan's real estate bubble burst in the early 90s, all that "Japan as #1" exuberance fell down the memory hole. In an oddly parallel fashion, the church returned as well to the status quo before the craziness began, as if the 1980s were a bad dream.

Related posts

Tokyo South
Blowing bubbles
The truth is worse
The problem with projections

The "truth" is worse

2011-06-27T11:21:00.022-07:00

Jared Farmer's review of The Book of Mormon Musical is one of those overly-analytical approaches that attempts to say more about a subject than the subject deserves, and so ends up being profound about the wrong things.

What he does get right in the process often ends up being right but in the wrong context. Which is not to say that I don't appreciate the effort.

To start with, Farmer is right that Trey Parker and Matt Stone treat the subject with kid gloves. The biggest reason is that they are mocking what they love, or at least like, which should be obvious from this classic Matt Stone quote: "I hate conservatives, but I really [expletive deleted] hate liberals."

Mormons are the kind of white, middle-class conservatives that are safe to dislike without wasting the emotional effort it takes to actively hate something. Farmer correctly concludes that Mormons are the new "retro-cool" group that anybody can make fun of, and Mormons should be very thankful for that.

But he goes off track when he complains that "Most egregiously, the play mischaracterizes Mormon theology," and then spends the bulk of his review telling us why in detail. Except that in a story like this, Parker and Stone only have to be in the ballpark. Getting the "look and feel" right matters a lot more.

In the mission field, the emphasis is on sealing the deal, not wading through the fine print. In places like Japan, where sectarian distinctions pretty much end at distinguishing between Catholicism (that has historical roots there) and everything else, the fine print evaporates into a colorless, odorless mist.

To be sure, Farmer's discussion of the nexus between Mormon theology and popular culture is more interesting than the rest of the review. I'd like to see him tackle the subject at length, quite apart from the The Book of Mormon Musical. But even there he tends to overreach.

Unlike evangelical missionaries who want to save you from going to hell, LDS missionaries want to help you reach your potential in heaven. Mormon eschatology is radically egalitarian, and very American: everyone gets a second chance, everyone wins. It would make a great, cheesy musical number.

Except even most Mormons wouldn't "get it," and those that did would likely be "offended" (meaning, not really, but as a sign of solidarity). Again, for the dramatic goals of this story, it doesn't matter. Getting the theology wrong in The Book of Mormon Musical is like getting the science wrong in Star Wars.

(Though while we're on the subject of accuracy, the rank of "co-senior" was common on my mission. And hell is exactly what is promised a "failed" missionary in Mormon culture. Such fears are in no way invented.)

I'm always amused by critics who care more about Mormon theology than Mormons do. Since such critics inevitably draw a blogospheric reaction from those Mormons who make a hobby of caring (and deeply), the combustible results may suggest that everybody cares, when the church only reluctantly does (in public).

Mormons don't have to care unless they really want to (in their own free time). Mormonism is surprisingly free-thinking in this respect: you can subscribe to almost any theory about God and the universe you want to if you don't (openly) buck authority. The church cares more about your behavior than your beliefs.

Which is why even conservative Christians are coming to the conclusion that Mormons are "mostly harmless." Because the goofy theology aside, they behave well. When they grow up, at least.

Here's the real "problem" with the musical: based on everything I've read, heard and seen, Parker and Stone depict Mormon missionaries as far more naive, idealistic, and well-intentioned than about ninety percent of the missionaries I have actually known (including me).

They don't go light on the theology. They go light on the dumb shenanigans Mormon missionaries and their leaders are capable of, that make the vulgar kids of South Park look urbane by comparison. The last thing the church wants is somebody writing a popular play about what really goes on in Mormon missions.

Which, again, makes The Book of Mormon Musical a godsend to the orthodox church. Look! Squirrels!

As cynical as my own missionary memoir is, I wrote it soon after my mission and left out the really egregious stuff, mostly because my still-TBM self couldn't process how psychedelically bizarre the experience truly was. But here's an account of the same thing happening halfway around the world a decade later.

The first 15 minutes directly addresses the subject, and again starting at the 36 minute mark.

Imagine if Parker and Stone wrote a musical about that!

Related posts

Tokyo South
Blowing bubbles
Pelagius and the fools
The weirdest two years
The problem with projections

This screensaver for sale

2011-06-23T13:24:00.007-07:00

Amazon sells a Kindle model called "Kindle with Special Offers." It feeds advertising to the screensaver. My only objection to the idea is that the discount itself isn't enough, though I suspect Amazon is gathering data to justify steeper discounts in the future.

Of course, the hoity-toities who live to be offended by and and all "capitalistic" innovations will take offense (hey, then don't buy one), but this strikes me as a perfectly appropriate commercial activity.

It's the same advertising strategy employed by PBS and National Geographic (the print magazine): content framed by "a word from our sponsors" at the beginning and end. They make it work by running ads that appeal to the intellectual vanity of their audience.

Public radio and television have perfected the art of the non-ad ad. As with movie trailers, it's important to get the right balance so it doesn't become annoying and ruin the "commercial-free" spell. (On second thought, treat movie trailers as a cautionary tale.)

How many high-falutin' literary magazines don't take advertising?

In any case, what are book covers and blurbs but ads? Flipping to the end of a dull reference book I keep next to my desk, I find ten pages of promos. As long as I've been ordering books from Japan, I've been pulling out the blow-ins (and using them as bookmarks).

Advertising is information. Back in the pre-Internet computer magazine days, the ads were where the bleeding edge turned real, where the hypothetical turned into hardware. One reason I visit sites like Anime News Network is to check out the ads in rotation.

So bring it on, Amazon. Get creative. If the customer doesn't like it, you'll find out soon enough. That's what the experiment of capitalism is all about.

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Down with literacy

2011-06-20T10:34:00.023-07:00

As certainly as the Earth circles the Sun, adults must wring their hands over the ways teenagers choose to entertain themselves. Now some behavior--pretty much anything the average teenage boy thinks is "daring" and "original" and "cool" (in other words, dumb, prosaic, and done because everybody else is doing it)--is worth some wringing of the hands.

Reading definitely ain't one of them.

But Meghan Cox Gurdon, the latest in a long line of hand wringers, worried recently in the Wall Street Journal that YA fiction is "too dark." And, of course, this time it's so bad it's different. Which is another way of saying how special we all are. All those overpraised kids grew up to be adults equally convinced that their problems as parents are superduperspecial too.

If books show us the world, teen fiction can be like a hall of fun-house mirrors, constantly reflecting back hideously distorted portrayals of what life is. There are of course exceptions, but a careless young reader--or one who seeks out depravity--will find himself surrounded by images not of joy or beauty but of damage, brutality and losses of the most horrendous kinds.

The careless young reader? I can't help thinking of the old joke about how losing one parents is a tragedy, and losing two is just careless. A decade ago, in one of the better treatments of the same subject, Moira Redmond called the genre "Dreadlit," which consists of

utterly unmemorable, dreary, pointed tales in which girls and boys learn their lessons-actual and moral-in the most punishing way possible. What these books resemble most are Victorian tracts: moral tales where every action had to be met with an equal and opposite reaction.

Frankly, I don't care for it either. And frankly, there was nothing new about it then. Even when I was in high school (many, many decades ago), "dark" was treated as a synonym for "literary." Simply consider that Lois Lowry won the Newbery (twice!), not for her much better (upbeat and optimistic) Anastasia and Sam books, but for her "serious" and dystopian stuff.

And so what? Look, if teenagers want to read, let 'em read. A single sentence sums up the well-intentioned but wrong-headed thinking that Gurdon represents: "Entertainment does not merely gratify taste, after all, but creates it."

Maybe in the world of moralizing blank-slaters and bottom-line Hollywood producers (a very odd couple). I'm a living experiment, having grown up in a large, conservative family with no television but a love for reading (starting with the Bible), and fairly little supervision of what we checked out of the library (we checked out too many books for our parents to check).

As a result, the entertainment tastes of my siblings have ended up all over the freaking map. No, you cannot dictate taste. And when parents and authority figures stop trying and leave readers to their own devices, they will discover those "created" tastes doing cartwheels and one-eighties all by themselves.

More than anything else, by hating what kids read at their own initiative, this top-down approach (especially in English classes) makes kids hate reading. G.K. Chesterton saw this coming a century ago (in what also turned out to be a prescient description of intellectual attractions of HBO):

It is the modern literature of the educated, not of the uneducated, which is avowedly and aggressively criminal. Books recommending profligacy and pessimism, at which the high-souled errand-boy would shudder, lie upon all our drawing-room tables . . . . [And so] with a hypocrisy so ludicrous as to be almost unparalleled in history, we rate the gutter-boys for their immorality at the very time that we are discussing (with equivocal German Professors) whether morality is valid at all.

This attitude is almost nonexistent in Japan (the stuff that raises hackles there gets people arrested here). For going on half a century, manga and anime writers have been pandering shamelessly to every lowest common denominator that sells to teen males, including the nihilistic existential angst teenagers mistake for profundity. You know, the same way Shakespeare did.

(And that--I'm being perfectly serious--is a big reason why the literacy rate in Japan is so high, despite written Japanese having the world's most complicated orthography.)

The message of Romeo and Juliet, after all, is that hormone-addled teenagers will kill each other and themselves for the dumbest and most arbitrary of reasons. Teenagers think that's cool. They did four hundred years ago. They will four hundred years from now. But here's the thing about teenagers: THEY GROW UP.

At least they do when adults stop creating rebels without a cause by making transitory teenage tastes a world-ending CAUSE. Which, come to think about it, is also the message of Romeo and Juliet.

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Another aging rocker

2011-06-16T11:59:00.006-07:00

Eikichi Yazawa debuted on the pop charts in the 1970s and rekindled his career in his sixties. He has performed live at the Budokan over a hundred times, a unmatched record.

Incidentally, the Beatles were the first rock group to perform at the Budokan, but the name really entered the pop culture lexicon with the release of Cheap Trick at Budokan in 1978.

Here Eikichi Yazawa makes an appearance at Kazutoshi Sakurai's Bank Band music festival.

Kazutoshi Sakurai is the front man for Mr. Children, one of the biggest rock groups you've never heard of. Though like many Japanese groups, I'm more impressed by the sum of the parts than the whole.

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The E-ink revolution

2011-06-13T11:19:00.005-07:00

Legacy publishers and paperback publishers have good reason to be afraid, very afraid. I have finally seen an E-ink screen with my own two eyes.

I have three Kindle emulators/readers and two ePub readers on my computer. I've been coding and publishing ebooks for going on three years. In any case, I'm not talking about reading ebooks. I'm talking about the ebook reader screen.

This isn't some neato-keen gizmo, old technology in new bottles. It really is a paradigm shift.

Mention a grayscale display and I even I can't help thinking of my old Toshiba T1200 laptop with a 640×200 monochrome LCD screen. I'm not alone with this, hence the standard: "Who wants to read a book off a screen?" reaction.

E-ink really is much more like ink than any conventional LCD. To start with, the pixels are white and black--reinforcing the appearance of real paper--not black and "transparent."

My first reaction upon seeing a real Kindle at Walmart was that it was a dummy model plastered with a fake screen decal. I looked closer. I picked it up. It weighed less than a paperback. No, that was the real screen. And it was on.

E-ink is a "passive" technology. If you don't do anything, it doesn't do anything. It doesn't flicker, it doesn't refresh. It just sits there--like print. And uses precious little power doing so.

Press a button, and all those E-ink pixels haul their little butts out of one digital Barcalounger and plop themselves back down in another, which takes much longer than their LCD cousins. Don't expect E-ink video anytime soon.

That and the 16 level grayscale are the current technological limiting factors. Not color. Leave color to tablets for now. The immediate goals of ebook readers should be portability, format universality, and 256 level grayscale.

Plus an intuitive interface (the Kindle interface is a tad overcomplicated) and a price point that turns the product into an appliance and makes it disposable.

Once the book-buying public replaces their outdated assumptions about the capabilities of digital screens with the reality of E-ink, the paperback in particular will go the way of the LP. (And, yes, the LP is still around.)

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Scotch tape X-rays

2011-06-09T11:24:00.009-07:00

A fascinating lecture on sonoluminescence by UCLA's Seth Putterman, though it's more about several long-observed phenomena that have escaped scientific explanations based on "first principles." One notable example is static electricity, and how there still isn't a good theory for how scuffing your feet generates potentials of ten of thousands of volts. During the Q&A, he gives a tip of the hat to Philo Farnsworth, most famous for inventing television, but who also experimented with fusion.

Perhaps more than anything else, this lecture illustrates the joy a true scientist takes in saying "We don't know," never settling for second-rate explanations simply because the really smart people can't come up with anything better, or because "nine out of ten doctors agree." Science isn't a toothpaste commercial, and the only thing we know for certain is that we hardly know anything at all, except that there's always something more waiting to be discovered. And it's gonna be a blast finding out what it is.

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Mr. B Speaks!

2011-06-06T09:38:00.028-07:00

First published in 1740, Samuel Richardson's Pamela, the story of a maid who marries way up, was scandalous in its time. For those familiar with its profound influence on the romance genre, it continues to be scandalous now, though for quite different reasons.

Unfortunately, the book is largely forgotten outside of academia. Fortunately, Katherine Woodbury has read it so you don't have to!

As she did with A Man of Few Words, Fitzwilliam Darcy's version of the critical events in Pride and Prejudice, Katherine has again taken a classic novel written from a woman's point of view and flipped the narrative around to the man's.

This time, though, with a very postmodern twist.

In a world where characters from novels can be put on trial for their literary crimes, Mr. B, the famously redeemed rake of Pamela, must defend his actions before a panel of skeptical literary scholars. Can he salvage his good name and win back his wife?

Step into the courtroom and judge for yourself!

Kindle
Nook
iBooks
Kobo
Sony
Diesel
Smashwords
PDF (free)

Demon City Shinjuku

2011-06-02T14:00:00.004-07:00

My translation of Demon City Shinjuku is off to the publisher (scheduled for release in August). It's an inventive YA thriller with a teenage martial arts superhero and a distinct wuxia twist. It's definitely the most accessible novel I've done for Digital Manga.

Demon City Shinjuku is an omnibus volume. The second novel features as its villain: King Nebuchadnezzar II! And his awful wife, Semiramis (a prototype for Princess). Has anybody cast them in that role lately?

First published in 1982, Demon City Shinjuku was Hideyuki Kikuchi's debut novel. The bulk of his work since has been based in the Demon City Shinjuku universe. The massive Yashakiden series (I'm working on the final volume now) revises and extends the themes he introduces here.

Kikuchi writes near-future fantasy and urban horror (Yashakiden moves from YA into hard-core, Joe Konrath/Stephen King territory), always risky in the prediction department. He generally sticks to monsters and magic, but in a few places the anachronisms start to show up.

I still remember a passage in an Isaac Asimov novel I read as a kid that describes "miniaturized vacuum tubes," even though the field-effect transistor was first prototyped in the 1920s. The most informed science writers can fail to anticipate how some technologies will take off (and others won't).

On the other hand, I don't know if Kikuchi picked the year out of a hat, but there is this paragraph:

Since 2010, the entire world had been gripped in a dark curse. In the face of economic recession, growing regional conflicts, and rising crime rates, President Rama was as resolute in his actions as he was charitable in his words. And changed the world as a result.

To pick nits, crime rates have fallen in developed nations (if anything, the correlation between economic recession and crime seems consistently negative). Places like Mexico and the Middle East, though, are a very different story. And Kikuchi nailed the world recession business exactly.

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The uncanny abyss

2011-05-30T12:42:00.008-07:00

Ever since Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori's research on the subject back in the late 1970s, digital animation has been slowly but surely approaching the abyss of the "uncanny valley."

When a robot becomes 99 percent lifelike--so close that it's almost real--we focus on the missing one percent. We notice the slightly slack skin, the absence of a truly human glitter in the eyes. The once-cute robot now looks like an animated corpse. Our warm feelings, which had been rising the more vivid the robot became, abruptly plunge downward. Mori called this plunge "the uncanny valley," the paradoxical point at which a simulation of life becomes so good it's bad.

Now it appears that a major motion picture has fallen in. Jonathan Kim writes that "Disney's CG/3D animated film Mars Needs Moms [is] destined to become one of the biggest flops of all time," and identifies the culprits as a mediocre script, dull characters, high ticket prices, and the "zombie effect" of the uncanny valley.

Ryan Nakashima adds a few illustrative anecdotes:

Doug McGoldrick, who took his two daughters to see the movie, said the faces of the main characters "were just wrong." Their foreheads were lifeless and plastic-looking, "like they used way too much botox or something."

Frankly, even the human beings in Toy Story creep me out a bit.

Anime avoids this problem by creating an unique aesthetic that makes no attempt to mimic actual human morphology. Another good example is How to Train Your Dragon (one of the best films of the decade), whose characters are all caricatures, but as Craig Ferguson quips, his digital double is a better actor than he is.

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Scarcely believable

2011-05-26T10:39:00.002-07:00

A Japanese friend asked about the meaning of a sentence in the sample test questions from a Japanese university entrance exam.

a. I had scarcely spoken to him when he was gone.

The meanings of both "scarcely" and "gone" are ambiguous. The literal meaning of the latter is b, which could imply c or d.

b. I had scarcely spoken to him when he was no longer there.
c. I had just started speaking to him when he died.
d. I had rarely spoken to him when he died.

However, "was gone" can also mean "left." Here's an example from Frankenstein (published in 1818):

e. He was scarcely gone, when I hastened to my room to write to you.
f. Soon after he left, I hastened to my room to write to you.

This meaning implies g, though most people would say h:

g. I had scarcely spoken to him when he left.
h. I had just started speaking to him when he had to leave.

That was when my brain blue-screened. What sadist would put such a sentence in a test of English as a second language? Of course, questions like this have nothing to do with testing English competency, and everything to do the ability of the student to rote memorize huge chunks of information and regurgitate them on demand.

Consequently, the more obscure the material the better.

It's crap like this that gives me an dim view of test-heavy educational "improvement" efforts like NCLB. As bad as it is, the fuzzy-wuzzy approach is better. It produces enough performance randomness to compromise the efficacy the cram school approach. Feel-good, right-brain thinking and political correctness turns out to be good for something.

In Asian countries (Japan, South Korea, China) where getting into the college of your choice is based solely on entrance exam scores, students spend more and more time cramming for tests that elite universities make more and more difficult in order to maintain their standard deviation rank on the distribution curve, resulting in mind-boggling overkill.

It also means that these universities don't really have to be good at anything. They just have to be highly selective. It's a chicken and egg dilemma no elite institution can escape. I mean, if Harvard really was such a great educational institution, it could randomly matriculate students regardless of test scores and turn them all into geniuses. Right?

I'm reminded of the Darwinian dance of death between the poisonous dart frog and the liophis snake. Over time, the frog has become more and more toxic and the snake more resistant to the toxins, to the point that a small frog could kill an adult human. Yet the snakes still eat the frogs, even though the physiological effect is the same as going on a weekend bender.

Which pretty much describes the brain of a Japanese high school student who's made it into an top-tier university. They need to spend four years consuming unhealthy amounts of alcohol just to wash it out of their systems.

Tameshite Gatten

2011-05-23T10:29:00.010-07:00

I'm a big fan of slick NOVA and Nature productions, but there's a lot to be said for the laid-back simplicity of NHK's Tameshite Gatten approach. Roughly translated as "put it to the test and understand," it takes the more mundane aspects of everyday life and geeks out on them.

The closest examples that come to mind are Mythbusters and Scientific American Frontiers with Alan Alda. I really miss the latter, in which Alda stood in for the viewer as the smart everyman who could digest scientific explanations that weren't overly dumbed down.

David Pogue's Making Stuff series had the right idea, but I felt like he was trying too hard to be hip and, hey, you're hip too for hanging out with a hip guy like me doing all this cool stuff! Ain't science neat? Neato cool. Watch me doing all the cool stuff you wish you were doing!

Neil deGrasse Tyson is better, but Nova Science Now still spends too much time and effort selling the concept and grooving up the presentations, while assuring you that you're not a nerd for tuning in.

Tameshite Gatten hosts Shinosuke Tatekawa and Fuemi Ono (like Alda, smart professional entertainers, not scientists or wannabees) are confident enough about what they are doing to dare being totally uncool and unhip--to the point of outright corniness--and yet very educational.

They make it work by turning the show into the equivalent of a Lisa Simpson science fair project, explaining the topic of the week to a panel of three B-list celebrities. The result is a surprisingly demanding Socratic dialogue. (The celebrities do have to be reasonably bright.)

The presentations have a deceptively low-tech gloss. They must have a dedicated staff slaving away all week with sewing machines and cardboard boxes and Elmer's glue, creating oversized models and goofy costumes. Not to mention the staff members deployed as guinea pigs.

(When the producer announces to the crew that next week's show is about colonoscopies, who exactly volunteers? I suspect it's one of those jobs given to the "new guy.")

At the same time, they don't shrink from the hard stuff, the physics and biochemistry, while focusing like a laser on relevancy. And at the end of the show, an expert in the field will come out to sum everything up. Or conduct a short cooking class.

The shows are about 40 percent health and medical topics, 40 percent food and cooking, and 20 percent "home economics." With the first, I have to wonder if there's a "Tameshite Gatten syndrome," people flooding the doctor's office with the symptoms covered in that week's show.

On the other hand, though I rarely watch cooking shows on PBS (I will channel surf over to Kitchen Nightmares, a show more about running a small business), Tameshite Gatten takes a very left-brained approach and makes cooking look geekily interesting.

One program was about the perfect onigiri (flavored rice balls). Along with CAT-scanning onigiri, they selected a panel of best and worst onigiri makers, had them wear pressure-sensitive gloves wired to a computer, and then analyzed the results. That's my idea of cooking.

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In praise of cliche

2011-05-19T14:58:00.004-07:00

In a post about writing for an RPG called "The Battle for Wesnoth," Eric Raymond describes how modern definitions of "creativity" often send art off the rails.

We're all so marinated in the 20th-century idea that good art is required to challenge one's preconceptions and be original that it is perhaps difficult to receive this sort of deliberately derivative work as art at all. But it's worth remembering that standalone art intended primarily to express the artist's personal creativity is a very recent idea, not actually fully developed until the collapse of aristocratic patronage at the end of the 19th century and the "back to zero" impulse of modernism in the early 20th.

In most cultures at most times, quotation and bricolage have been as important to artists, or far more important, than individual creativity. Art was tied to and primarily generated for non-artistic purposes--as an evocative device for religions, as decoration for craft objects and architecture, as a peacock-tail display tactic for the wealthy and powerful. Individual creativity was restrained, additive, and incremental . . . too much originality would have separated art from its purposes and alienated its audience.

Or as Terry Pratchett puts it, "The reason that cliches become cliches is that they are the hammers and screwdrivers in the toolbox of communication."

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Room for the Holy Spirit

2011-05-16T10:26:00.005-07:00

I've previously noted what could be taken as covert Mormon references and/or jokes in Bones. Kate recently pointed out another one, "The Death of the Queen Bee" (season 5, episode 17).

The episode takes place at Brennan's class reunion. She and Booth are dancing together. She'd like to dance closer, but he's still struggling with his feelings for her, so he takes a step back and says, "Just keeping room for the Holy Spirit, that's all."

Okay, Catholics attending parochial school probably hear the same thing, a testament to the universality of a conservative religious upbringing. Booth, to be sure, is a cafeteria Catholic, but he eats what's on his plate, and his character is written and acted that way.

Kate thinks there might be two writers riffing off each other. Either way, this confirms my belief that an objectively conservative writer will more accurately capture the essence of quite different religious ideologies than all the touchy, freely "diversity" activists.

This comprehension is also demonstrated in how Brennan's rigid empiricism is evenly matched by Booth's apologetic rationalism. This requires an understanding of how the conservative mind interacts with the modern world, rather than the typical straw men.

Mormonism doesn't reject empiricism or even evolution out of hand, and so has the potential for producing C.S. Lewis-type apologists (like my father with a Ph.D. from Caltech). Whatever their religion background, the writers on Bones often skillfully bridge that divide.

The most recent episode, "The Truth in the Myth" (season 6, episode 18), essentially reframes the main argument of The Silver Chair, without Brennan sacrificing her scientific integrity or Booth giving up on faith. It would have made C.S. Lewis proud.

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Translated correctly

Being THAT GUY again

2011-05-13T16:33:00.002-07:00

As Kate puts it, in making Star Wars I, II, and III, George Lucas

wasn't just trying to compete against directors like Ridley Scott and James Cameron (although he was doing that too), and he wasn't just trying to be rich and famous because he already was. He was trying to be THAT GUY again, the guy who came out of nowhere with a picture that wowed the world.

John Polkinghorne, a renowned professor of mathematics and theoretical physics at the University of Cambridge, resigned to become an Anglican priest. In the Q&A after the lecture, he explains (starting at 37:00) that by his mid-forties, he knew he couldn't be THAT GUY again--the brilliant scientist--and didn't want to stay beyond his "sell-by" date.

Polkinghorne also illustrates what's good about term limits and bad about tenure. He did return to Cambridge and became president of Queen's College, but after pursuing a completely different occupation in the real world. The feudal inclination to perpetual self-entitlement reveals itself most powerfully in politics and academia and must be disciplined.

Related posts

A thought about Lucas
More thoughts about "That Guy"

The taxwoman

2011-05-09T12:28:00.006-07:00

When studying popular entertainment across cultures, "the same only different" is easy to spot. Samurai dramas and westerns, for example. But perhaps more compelling are the curious outliers in genres that appear on the surface to closely mirror each other.

The detective series and the police (and now CSI) procedural are pretty ubiquitous around the world. Once you've adjusted for culture quirks and legal differences, a British series and an American series and a Japanese series mostly share the same storytelling space.

But there is one particular genre of the police procedural on Japanese television that you're not going to see anytime soon in the U.S.: the IRS agent. Seriously. For the past several years, a new series about heroic tax inspectors has debuted almost every season.

Actually, there is an American precedent: The Untouchables. Al Capone was ultimately sent to jail by Treasury Department inspectors led by Eliot Ness. The television series and movie, though, are more shoot-'em-up actioners than adventures in forensic accounting.

That's exactly what these Japanese shows are about. They owe a lot to A Taxing Woman and its sequel, Juzo Itami's critically acclaimed 1987 and 1988 films about a tenacious government tax investigator.

Of course, the conflicts are spiced up for entertainment purposes. We watch them going after the big fish, not the sympathetic small fry. The protagonist is the expected combination of tenacious genius and rugged nonconformist (and if a woman, she's probably really hot).

In the current offering (the tagline: "This woman chases money"), Ryoko Yonekura has a ball playing against type as a frumpy, eccentric, Columbo-style investigator (albeit with a supermodel bod).

The puzzle is why Japan has such an abundance of tax cheats that tax inspectors are celebrated. In places like Greece, many of their financial woes boil down to the fact that everybody cheats on their taxes. In Japan, the conviction is that only the undeserving rich are doing so.

The reasons can in part be traced back to practices that date to the 19th century, such as the wide use of promissory notes and accepting signature stamps (hanko) as valid forms of identity. The sure sign of a tax cheat is a stash of bank books and hanko stamps.

But at the root of the problem is that even in the 21st century, Japan remains a largely cash-based society.

For practical purposes, personal checking accounts don't exist. Credit cards have become widely accepted only in the last decade or so. Most financial transactions are done in cash or by wire transfer. When ATMs appeared in the 1970s, so did the ability to wire money via the ATM.

The ATM wire transfer process has become so rife with fraud that police regularly stake out ATMs, not in order to apprehend the fraudsters, but to question the little old ladies targeted by the scams, to make sure they know who they're sending their savings to.

Banks rake in extortionary fees on these wire transfers and so have little incentive to change the system. Avoiding those fees means it's not uncommon for bonuses and even wages at respectable companies to be paid with envelopes full of cash.

The match that lights all this kindling was a post-war anti-corruption law that required the government to publish the tax liabilities of top-earning individuals and corporations. Every year, the tabloids took great pleasure estimating the incomes of the rich and famous.

The law was repeated in 2004, but this curiosity in the financial lives of others surely continues. Add to that historically lax reporting requirements and the temptation to imagine squirreling away tax-free money for a rainy day gains a whole new appeal.

A common comic enemy

2011-05-05T11:35:00.007-07:00

Kate wondered recently why so many time-travel television episodes/movies include a variation of the line: "In the future, I can't believe a B-actor will be elected president!" Okay, maybe writers are frustrated elitists who hate actors, but don't the actors have any self-respect?

Benjamin Schwarz gets at an underlying reason in this article about screenwriter James Cain (simply replace "Los Angeles" with the latest Hollywood gripe du jour):

Just as hipsters today use white pejoratively, denoting sterile, bland, non-ethnic suburbia, so sophisticates in Cain's day enjoyed skewering Los Angeles--[then] America's whitest, most Protestant, most bourgeois big city--as an artificial tropic teeming with displaced rubes, an opinion Frank Lloyd Wright neatly encapsulated in his contemptuous remark, "It is as if you tipped the U.S. up, so that all the commonplace people slid down to Southern California." So conditioned, writer after writer churned out the same derisive commentary on Los Angeles.

Because, as William Goldman observed, "Nobody knows anything" in the movie business, the reflex is to keep repeating whatever worked the last time until it utterly and undeniably fails, and then a few more times after that to make sure. So any "derisive commentary"--any trope no matter how overused--that once went over well takes on a life of its own.

Though it's also the result of the never-ending search for a Great White Menace that writers can mercilessly mock without arousing the ire of the professional offense takers. Add to this the earnest belief that there is nothing worse than having at any time (infancy included) been associated with anything held in high regard by religious conservatives.

The best way to dissociate oneself from the latter is to flock to the former like crows to road kill. Jokes about Republican politicians serve these ends perfectly. Actors willingly diss their own profession out of loyalty to their own ideological beliefs (and, to be sure, loyalty to a paycheck). Though I imagine self-knowledge has a lot to do with it too.

Raise the Castle!

2011-05-02T13:26:00.002-07:00

In order to enjoy Raise the Castle! it's important to realize what it's not. Despite the main character being a sixteenth century warlord named Ondaiji, it's not a samurai flick. Despite Ondaiji showing up in the modern day, it's not time travel. Despite a haunted cave, a witch, and spirit possession, it's not horror.

It's an "independent" film, meaning it was made independent of a sizable budget. It's more like somebody decide to film the local road show, which is what it is. Raise the Castle! belongs to that genre of quirky, feel-good films about the guy in a small town who gets a crazy idea and everybody pitches into make it happen.

In this case, the soul of the warrior Ondaiji possesses the town nerd, who then dons samurai armor (stolen from the local museum) and commands (in the Japanese equivalent of Shakespearean tones) the townspeople to rebuild his castle. That not being in the budget, they recommend making it out of cardboard boxes instead. And merrily set to work.

This has got to be one of the most unintentionally meta films I've seen, a movie about a guy who can't build his real castle and so makes one out of cardboard, made by a guy who can't afford to build scale sets and so makes them out of cardboard in the high school gym. In both cases, they get the townspeople to pitch in and make a party out of it.

There is one campy special effect that's even better because it's campy. I didn't notice most of the digital mattes, a tribute to how sophisticated desktop editing software has become. The acting (local stage talent) is good and Yo Kohatsu's direction is equal to the task (he wisely keeps the camera fastened down most of the time).

Lurking beneath the goofy, sweet surface is some real depth. The local historian learns to his chagrin that sometimes you "print the legend." The answer to an architectural puzzle makes a clever (and respectful) nod to Christianity (during the Warring States period, a small but influential number of local warlords were devout Christians).

All in all, the whole thing can be taken as an anthropological treatise about how local traditions and town festivals get started in the first place.

In the last scene, as the mayor surveys the big cardboard mess and gripes to his lackeys and wonders who to blame it on, the president of the Chamber of Commerce rushes up to him and exclaims, "This was so much fun! Let's do it next year!" That's what "community" really comes down to in the end--a big mess worth making on a regular basis.

Baseball according to Drucker (7)

2011-04-28T11:00:00.007-07:00

Drucker in the Dug-Out [sic], the anime version of 「もし高校野球の女子マネージャーがドラッカーの『マネジメント』を読んだら」 ("What if the Girl Manager of a High School Baseball Team read Drucker's Management?"), debuted this week on NHK (alas, only in Japan). It's being produced by veteran anime studio Production I.G. The official website is in Japanese, but Production I.G. has an English summary, and the Japan Times did an English write-up. I'd like to see a major U.S. studio or network license it, if only for the novelty value. Say, CNBC. Or PBS could run it alongside Nightly Business Report.

Related posts

Baseball according to Drucker (1)
Baseball according to Drucker (2)
Baseball according to Drucker (3)
Baseball according to Drucker (4)
Baseball according to Drucker (5)
Baseball according to Drucker (6)

Baseball according to Drucker (6)

2011-04-25T11:00:00.005-07:00

"What if the Girl Manager of a High School Baseball Team read Drucker's Management?" (now commonly abbreviated to "Moshidora") by Natsumi Iwasaki turned into 2010's unexpected best-seller, which spawned an anime series, and now a live-action feature film starring Atsuko Maeda.

She's a member of the fabulously popular girl group AKB48, 2010's best-selling pop group. This is called synergy!

Iwasaki previously worked on the business end of the AKB48 production machine and reportedly patterned his lead character after group member Minami Minegishi. As it turns out, though, "the role was given to Maeda because of her greater visibility and experience as an actress."

In other words, Minegishi had zero acting talent, while Maeda had greater than zero acting talent. Not to mention her other assets.

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Baseball according to Drucker (1)
Baseball according to Drucker (2)
Baseball according to Drucker (3)
Baseball according to Drucker (4)
Baseball according to Drucker (5)
Pop chart domination

We're already all wet

2011-04-21T13:27:00.000-07:00

Now that I'm thinking about taxes, an additional rant. As I pointed out last time, I didn't have to pay any income taxes this year, and in times past have even qualified for the Earned Income Tax credit. So I definitely qualify as "non-rich." But I'm against "soaking" them.

The problem with soaking the rich is two-fold: 1) If a bunch of rich people hit a rough patch and start making half as much, or decide to take their income in capital gains, they'll still be rich, but the government will be broke; 2) "No taxation without representation" isn't just a snappy slogan, it's a law of human nature. It starts in childhood. Weasel a couple of bucks out of your parents and they're going to want to what you're going to do with it. We all expect a quid pro quo.

The more the government takes from corporations and the wealthy, the more they are going to want to know what's happening to their money, the more they're going to care about where it goes and how much, and the bigger the payoff for corrupting the process. The fiduciary responsibility of a corporation is to its shareholders, and it'd be irresponsible of them to not spend a few million on lobbyists and tax lawyers to make sure tens of millions more flow to their investors.

The answer is simplicity and transparency. Eliminate all forms of corporate welfare, farm subsidies, green energy subsidies, the whole lot. In turn, eliminate the corporate income tax and treat capital gains as ordinary income. Reduce all deductions to a single, individual deduction that is the same for everybody. I see no reason why home buyers should be privileged over renters, especially after they ruined the world economy. Oh, and get rid of Fannie and Freddie too.

Washington witchcraft

2011-04-18T13:55:00.002-07:00

Once again, as a full-time starving artist I only had to fork over to Uncle Sam a pound of flesh in the form of "self-employment taxes." On the bright side, if the Social Security system survives in its current form until I hit seventy, I'll collect about what I'm making now!

Doing my taxes reminds me what a corrupt system this is. I didn't starve that much this year, so I was a little surprised when I ended up owning no income taxes. The "Making work pay" tax credit, it turns out. I had no idea it was there until I scanned the final PDF of my 1040.

The complexity of the tax code and the resulting lack of transparency means that however politicians may swear they're helping the poor and downtrodden, the poor and downtrodden are more likely than not being screwed over by those same "tax breaks" they don't know exist.

There was even a story on the local nightly news about the "Making work pay" tax credit, reminding people to take advantage of it. The only rational recourse is to use decent tax preparation software (I use TaxAct). But that, frankly, is an utterly undemocratic solution.

The income tax has become a magical black box that turns numbers into money for reasons known only to the alchemists, which politicians then pretend came out of their own generous pockets. We may be One Nation under God, but we're being ruled by witchcraft.

Not an apocalyptic thriller

2011-04-14T11:33:00.011-07:00

This video, shot by a crew of Video News Network reporters, reminds me of the 1979 Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker. The "stalker" is a mule who guides people into the "Zone," an wasteland devastated by a meteorite strike. Their destination is "The Room."

At the center of this zone is the Fukushima power plant. It's just as unearthly and weird as the movie. Despite the squawking radiation meters, they are never in much danger. The Geiger counters finally peak at 112 μSv/hour within a mile of the plant.

They didn't hang around, so shouldn't have gotten much more radiation than a single dental X-ray (5 μSv), about what you'd get every hour flying cross-country in a commercial jet. The average annual radiation dose for Americans is around 3600 μSv.

Radiation is one of those things that you don't think about until forced to by circumstances. But like the universe itself, we were born in radiation and will spend our lives absorbing and radiating it. It's not a question of whether or not, but of how much.

In Stalker, The Room is said to be a place where wishes are granted. The wishes in this case are obvious, but only time and a lot of hard, dangerous work can make them come true.

Related posts

Fukushima fallout
Sendai earthquake
Apocalypse not now

Ganbarou! Japan

2011-04-11T10:52:00.004-07:00

Quite coincidentally (it's been in pre-production for several months, and was scheduled to start three weeks ago), but perhaps quite appropriately, the current Asadora is a Showa drama. It follows the heroine from the 1930s to the 1950s.

Showa dramas typically depict Japan (symbolized by the protagonist) struggling through the ashes of WWII to reclaim her place in the world. They're romanticizations, to be sure--not that exaggerated--of an era when everybody put their shoulders to the wheel.

It's an ethos and state of mind summed up in the verb ganbaru: "to persist, to hang on, to stick it out." You now see the volitional form on banners everywhere: Ganbarou! Japan (がんばろう！日本). Such as at the spring national high school baseball tournament.

Related posts

Asadora
Showa nostalgia
Sendai earthquake

The new normal

2011-04-07T12:02:00.010-07:00

I noticed late last week that Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano has started wearing a normal suit coat at press conferences. I guess that's one sign things are getting back to normal.

Normally, except for the news, TV Japan time-delays the NHK satellite feed so that shows come on at approximately the same time as in Japan. During the first week after the earthquake, the NHK feed was live, including the regularly-scheduled drama series.

Little by little, the normal program schedule is resuming. This week, Morning Market (a current affairs show, not a stock market show) is actually being broadcast in the morning, instead of late in the afternoon the day before.

The second season of Rinjou (臨場) resumed on Wednesday. It's a CSI-type police procedural about the investigators who conduct the in situ coroner's inquest,⁽¹⁾ meaning that every broadcast begins with at least one dead body.

"Normal" means going back to being entertained by fake dead bodies.

Though that gets me thinking about all the second unit possibilities here. Shows like NCIS, CSI: Miami and Bones are mostly filmed in Hollywood, with a second unit shooting on location with stand-ins.

Yes, it's macabre, but Sendai should open up a film office so Hollywood can come over and shoot all kinds of high-def second unit material to be blue-screened later. Heck, with all the story possibilities, you could do a whole season of NCIS just in Japan.

Making money off the travails of others--what's more normal than that?

1. To an almost creepily thorough extent, basically everything but the actual autopsy. In contrast, the practice in the U.S. is to "scoop and run": bag the body and the evidence and bring it back to the crime lab.

Taking the "CSI effect" into account, this is an odd product of the tension between culture and religion (especially Buddhism) and modern science when it comes to dealing with the dead.

Only recently did cadaverous organ donation even become legal in Japan, and only in 2009 did it become legal for parents to donate the organs of a minor. Cadaverous organ transplants remain few and far between.

Doing as much of the coroner's inquest at the crime scene--under the aegis of the police, whose authority is far more encompassing and unquestioned--is one way to tiptoe around these social problems.

The eccentric, brilliant and brooding (aren't they all) lead investigator is played by Masaaki Uchino, though I'd prefer to see more of the light touch he's shown in previous roles.

Related posts

Disaster fashion
Sendai earthquake (1)
Sendai earthquake (2)
Sendai earthquake (3)

Fukushima fallout

2011-04-04T11:09:00.007-07:00

Japan's most immediate infrastructure challenge (thinking in stark economic terms) is power generation. A friend in Japan relates that when asked what they need the most, the people in the Tohoku region (around Sendai) say, "Send electricity."

The Fukushima's forty-year-old reactors were scheduled for retirement, so once things stabilize, Tokyo Electric will probably install gas turbine generators. The one meme the talking heads have all agreed upon at this point is that the "nuclear renaissance" has been stopped in its tracks.

Personally, I'm a nuclear agnostic. In the U.S., natural gas is the best solution in the near and medium term (heck, we could export it to Japan), though coal will continue to dominate (most of Utah's power comes from coal) because it's so cheap and plentiful.

But a country like Japan has no real alternatives to nuclear if it wants anything approaching energy independence.

Even if solar and wind could the surmount the storage, transmission, and baseload power problems, Japan's geography and weather make them less than viable. Japan would be ideal for geothermal--if the huge gap between theory and application could be bridged and scaled up.

The current state of the art nuclear designs eliminates most of the problems revealed at Fukushima. If we abandoned every initially risky technology instead of improving it, most comforts of modern life would not exist, starting with the automobile.

We happily live with enormous risks when we really want something. Forty years ago, cars were death traps. In the U.S., traffic fatalities per million miles have dropped by more than half in that time. But cars still are death traps, the direct cause of 1.2 million deaths around the globe every year.

Chernobyl included, the mining and burning of fossil fuels causes more direct and indirect deaths than nuclear by several orders of magnitude. The psychological problem is that, like airplanes, the risk is concentrated, and the ability of the individual to control his own fate greatly diminished.

I know the feeling. I'm not afraid of flying, but I wouldn't live in the River Bottoms. When my mom was growing up, the River Bottoms north of Provo was rural farmland, so-called because when it flooded in the spring, the land was often covered by the Provo River.

The completion of Deer Creek Reservoir in 1941 put an end to the flooding, and now the River Bottoms is home to upscale McMansions and office parks.

The odds of Deer Creek Dam failing in my lifetime is about zero (though dams elsewhere have failed with horrendous results). But given the choice, I'd rather not have to think about it. That's the human animal for you: existential dread has become our postmodern fear of the dark.

As I said, I'm not emotionally vested in this fight, other than disapproving in general of political/industrial "solutions" at either end of the green spectrum that only survive through massive government subsidies. A government subsidy won't change the laws of physics or economics.

So the following prediction is made in the abstract: environmentalists who seize this opportunity vilify nuclear do so at their own peril. They will be admitting that the whole carbon emissions business is not that important, not apocalyptic, and the least frightening of their fears.

Nuclear paranoia will drag down all the overpriced and heavily subsidized "green" solutions with it. When Germany steps back from nuclear, count on it sneaking Eastern European coal and Russian gas through the back door. Ah, I love the smell of green hypocrisy in the morning.

A case in point is a proposed nuclear power plant near Green River, Utah. Emery County is already home to five coal-fired plants. It's where most of the electrical power in the state comes from. How badly to environmentalists want to replace them? Not that badly.

For me, at the northern end of Utah County, Green River (also known as "the middle of nowhere") is well out of my existential dread zone. So I sincerely don't care. But then I also don't lose one wink of sleep worrying about atmospheric carbon dioxide or "climate change" either.

You know people are serious about solving a problem when the solution switches from pie-in-the-sky hypotheticals (if Uncle Sam would only give them a big enough chunk of money or twist enough arms) to what's actually sitting on the table in front of them.

This is another example of how much environmentalists and religious dispensationalists have in common. However firm their belief in the cataclysmic end of the world, very few (thankfully) act on those beliefs, other than to fervently proclaim them. Because by faith are we saved.

Related posts

Sendai earthquake
Apocalypse not now
Not an apocalyptic thriller

The pulps

2011-03-31T11:16:00.003-07:00

Dean Smith points out the most pertinent fact in the ebook pricing debate, and the ongoing woes of "traditional" publishing.

Paperback book prices went from 25 to 35 cents in the early 1960s to the $8.99 range today. If publishing had just adjusted prices for inflation, a paperback book priced at 35 cents in 1960 would sell for $2.60 today.

In that light, Amazon's $2.99 ebook "sweet spot" (the price at which the 70 percent royalty kicks in) makes a lot of sense. Nate Anderson aptly describes the publishing business as having a "global pricing problem."

It's equally revealing (literally) to remember what publishers used to publish when their goal was to get and hold readers. If stories like these were on the curriculum, I bet schools wouldn't find it so hard getting boys to read.

Periodicals. Those science fiction magazines created the modern genre and shaped how we think about the modern age.

Paperbacks. Some surprisingly NSFW covers and a few still-famous authors.

Zarahemla eBooks

2011-03-28T15:30:00.001-07:00

I handle the ebook catalog for Zarahmela Books. I hand code the Kindle versions and publish them region-free and DRM-free. The ePub versions for Apple, Sony, Kobo and others are distributed via Smashwords, which has lengthy previews in most ebook formats.

Besides the Kindle itself, there's a free Kindle app for just about every computing platform. Mobipocket reads MOBI Kindle files. B&N offers an equally wide variety of Nook (ePub) apps. Other ePub readers include Adobe Digital Editions and EPUBReader for Firefox.

All of the books sell for $2.99 or less. I've posted a comprehensive list here.

The p-wave network

2011-03-25T13:41:00.014-07:00

Japan is blanked by p-wave detectors. During an earthquake, the primary (pressure) waves propagate faster than the destructive secondary (shearing) s-waves. Depending on the distance from the fault, the lead time can be up to a minute. This early warning system stops Shinkansen trains and scrams nuclear reactors.

All of the reactors at Fukushima scrammed during the Sendai earthquake. It was the latent heat that caused all the problems when the backup generators powering the cooling system were wiped out by the tsunami. A nuclear reactor is basically a big stove, and it stays hot for a long time after the power is turned off.

Japan's earthquake detector network functions like Watches/Warnings alerts from the National Weather Service. When the triggering threshold is reached, a graphic pops up on your television screen, identifying the location of the quake. A few minutes later, a graphic or text scroll lists the magnitude and the affected areas.

There's a cell phone app for that too. And Yahoo Japan (and other sites, I'm sure) pops up a banner with similar information. The television graphic is accompanied by this sound. The first couple of days after the Sendai earthquake, it happened so often I started to feel like one of Pavlov's dogs.

Related posts

Sendai earthquake (1)
Sendai earthquake (2)
Sendai earthquake (3)

Renho

2011-03-23T13:41:00.004-07:00

Speaking of jackets, here's Japanese cabinet member and former fashion model Renho (married name: Murata, but she goes just by "Renho," the Japanese pronunciation of her Chinese name; her father is Taiwanese) sporting a turtleneck combo.

Renho started her modeling career while in law school. Japan is famous for having far fewer lawyers per person than the U.S., the result not just of culture, but of an incredibly demanding law school admissions process and one of the world's toughest bar exams. In other words, she's a lot more than just another pretty face.

Renho currently has two ministries in her portfolio: "Consumer Affairs and Food Safety" and "Government Revitalization." Before the quake, she was known mostly for the latter.

She had been conducting hearings similar to the U.S. Debt Commission, and is a lot tougher than her American counterparts. In a famous exchange about Japan's supercomputer project with a bureaucrat who insisted that Japan had to "number one" in the world, she pointedly asked, "What's wrong with being number two?"

Her dead-pan delivery was even better, between the lines saying, "And the taxpayers should fund this little pissing contest of yours, why?"

When it comes to supercomputers, being "number one" is a title as ephemeral as a mayfly. Not to mention that, in GDP terms, Japan has twice as much structural debt as the U.S., and going to have tons more. Wherever Japan is headed fiscally after this, the U.S. won't be far behind. We should watch and learn.

Related posts

Disaster fashion
Sendai earthquake (1)
Sendai earthquake (2)
Sendai earthquake (3)

Disaster fashion

2011-03-21T09:25:00.005-07:00

Watching NHK's earthquake coverage, I noticed that everybody in any kind of official capacity had shed the conventional suit coat and was wearing a jacket that identified his department or corporation or political party.

Once you figure out the jackets, it makes for a convenient visual shorthand, for example, to tell NISA (Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency) and Tokyo Electric apart when they're holding competing press conferences.

On the left: NISA. On the right: Tokyo Electric.

Here's Yukio Edano, chief cabinet secretary (on the left). Everybody in the cabinet, including the PM, wears this jacket. Except for the defense minister, who wears the more martial civilian military leadership jacket.

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Sendai earthquake (1)
Sendai earthquake (2)
Sendai earthquake (3)
Renho

Sendai earthquake (3)

2011-03-18T11:57:00.010-07:00

With the aftershocks receding and Fukushima stuck in a FUBAR remake of Groundhog Day, NHK ran out of new news and has been running time-filling weather graphics and soothing background music all day (all night in Japan), with semi-regular programming scheduled to resume at three this afternoon with Good Morning, Japan (6:00 AM in Japan).

So, let's discuss the semi-artistic angle.

The typical anime natural disaster serves to realign the social order in more "interesting"--libertarian--ways, such as creating a society where everybody's armed like in the Wild West. It's rarely framed in the more Christian "end-times" sense, and people adapt to the new order while seeking out new business opportunities, like battling evil robots and exorcising demons.

It's eerie but purely coincidental that I'm translating a fantasy series right now that begins with the destruction of Shinjuku by the "Devil Quake."

Japan went through a huge social upheaval in the mid-19th century, and a physical and existential cataclysm in the mid-20th century, so it's nothing new. As in those times, these events may lead to a welcome political realignment, providing an incentive, for example, to couple Japan's structural debt problem and reconstruction efforts with overdue austerity measures.

And perhaps the stark realities of actual suffering will put a deserved end to a recent, rather loathsome, flirtation with the angsty, sociopathic anti-hero. As Hiroki Azuma writes in the New York Times,

While many will revert [after the crisis passes] to their indecisive selves, the experience of discovering our own public-minded, patriotic selves that had been paralyzed within a pernicious cynicism is not likely to fade away.

I wouldn't be surprised to see a slew of dramas in coming years about the heroic nuclear plant worker struggling against all odds. The relatively minor 2008 Iwate-Miyagi earthquake has already produced a feel-good film about a bunch of brave puppies, valiant JSDF rescuers, and resourceful kids.

I think the most compelling future developments--the biggest opportunity for out-of-the-box thinking--will be tsunami hardening, how Japan prepares for the next "big one." The Patlabor series, for example, is premised on the building of a massive sea wall to protect Tokyo from rising oceans. This "can-do" fiction may yet turn into fact.

Related posts

Sendai earthquake (1)
Sendai earthquake (2)
The world ends (and I feel fine)

Sendai earthquake (2)

2011-03-16T10:40:00.005-07:00

I've been watching NHK's live, wall-to-wall coverage since the earthquake. The images are truly overwhelming, with magnitude five and six aftershocks occurring across central Japan almost every hour. It's like a large china cabinet being slowly being dragged across a rutted road.

Human beings are ultimately powerless before the forces of nature, but human ingenuity can help to mitigate their effects and recover from them. Keeping your wits about you in the meantime certainly helps.

NHK's coverage is calm, cool and collected. The reporters, you know, report. In one of those "what the foreign press are saying" segments, they broadcast a lead-in clip from ABC News with Diane Sawyer. It sounded in comparison like a movie trailer for a Michael Bay blockbuster.

NPR's Morning Edition (my clock radio alarm) has managed to keep things fairly sober and balanced. My only complaint is the way they time shift makes references to "today" (meaning: yesterday in Japan) very confusing, when I'd watched what was happening "today" last night.

Amidst all the destruction, one amazing realization that comes from watching "Showa nostalgia" movies like Always Sunset on Third Street is how quickly Japan recovered, not from the obliteration of one mid-sized city, but of every major population center in the country (except Kyoto).

The Marshall Plan in this case may be the $800 billion in U.S. Treasury securities that Japan currently holds. Despite running up huge structural deficits, they've wisely kept some money in the bank.

Nassim Taleb correctly argues that the best strategy for survival is to create systems robust enough to withstand the inevitability of the best predictions and forecasts, the most exacting theories and models, and the smartest experts being proved completely wrong.

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Sendai earthquake (1)
Sendai earthquake (3)

Sendai earthquake (1)

2011-03-14T13:36:00.021-07:00

The magnitude of 9.0 (revised) made it the biggest known earthquake to hit Japan in its recorded history.

The earthquake on Friday was preceded earlier in the week by dozens of five to seven magnitude deep-sea earthquakes in the same area, off the coast of Sendai. None of the tsunami forecasts at the time exceeded eighteen inches, and none of them reached even that height.

In this case, though, the boy cried wolf and the wolf came.

In a bitter irony, the 6.3 magnitude earthquake that hit New Zealand last month killed two-dozen Japanese students when an English school in Christchurch collapsed, until Friday the greatest loss of Japanese life from an earthquake since 2004.

The death toll is expected to at least double that of the 1995 Hanshin (Kobe) earthquake, which came to 6434. The Kobe earthquake had a magnitude of 6.8--less than several of the aftershocks--which shows how much local geology and building construction can affect the outcome.

However, the fires that broke out in the suburbs and bedroom communities of Sendai reveal a continuing problem that, together with its aging housing stock, caused the most deaths in the 1995 Kobe earthquake (and the 1923 Kanto earthquake that killed 100,000).

Even in a city like Sendai (the same approximate climate as New York City), very few houses and apartment have central heating/AC or high-pressure hot water. Instead, individual rooms are heated by portable electric, gas or kerosene space heaters.

Kitchens have a small tankless water heater over the sink and another one in the bathroom attached to the o-furo (tub). This increases the possible ignition points by an order of magnitude.

Automated cut-off technology has greatly improved in the past fifteen years, and the most serious fires this time were industrial in nature. (Though space heaters remain a major cause of accidental deaths in "normal" times.)

Failing nuclear power plants make for more dramatic headlines, though the panic in this regard has been confined to the western media. I woke up this morning to dramatic news of a second steam/hydrogen explosion--that had occurred and been dealt with twelve hours earlier.

The more ominous announcement was exposure of the number two core, the core pressure being too high to pump in water. But even this was reported in Japan with barely a raised eyebrow. Perhaps because the problem is one of latent heat, not an actively fissioning reactor.

And because, at times like this, the appropriate question to ask is: "A disaster compared to what?"

In any case, soon-to-be-retired, forty-year old technology has held up remarkably well in a real-world, worst-case scenario. It's important to remember that what modern technology does best is not produce "breakthroughs," but learn from the past and iteratively improve.

Current Boiling Water Reactor designs already address all of the major failings in the Fukushima reactors.

The only brief moment of panic I saw was a report--fairly quickly proved a false alarm--of a tsunami approaching the northern coast. Most of the power-related news yesterday was about a planned series of rolling blackouts and widespread train cancellations in Tokyo.

The greatest damage was inflicted along the coast, caused by the massive tsunami. When I was living in Odawara (left), the beach and the city were separated by a massive thirty-foot high sea wall, which also served as the foundation for a spur of the Tokaido Highway.

Sendai's outskirts (right) had no sea walls. If there was a strategy in place, it was to use the farmlands east of the city as sacrificial buffers. Fishing communities north and south of Sendai, tucked between the ocean and the mountains, were almost completely wiped out.

In the end, the death toll will depend on how well these towns were evacuated. Video has turned up of residents climbing to high ground as the tsunami poured in--not as a crashing wave, but an inexorably rising tide that just kept rising.

Even there, along the coast, reinforced concrete and steel structures are still standing--in small towns, usually the hospital and town hall and a multi-story apartment block--even after getting hit by a record-breaking earthquake and tsunami. A tribute to modern building codes.

My apartment in Osaka was a stone's throw from (well-shielded) Osaka Bay, but it was in a cluster of massive apartment buildings with sacrificial ground floors, that would spare the support beams from the full force of a tidal surge.

This suggests future infrastructure investments in breakwaters, sea walls, and perhaps the strategic placement of large, earthquake-proof structures in seaside towns. And a closer look at building codes for seaside residences, which the tsunami turned immediately into kindling.

When push comes to shove, the Japanese have never wrung their hands much over treating the environment like a bonsai tree--to be shaped and molded to suit human purposes.

Related posts

Sendai earthquake (2)
Sendai earthquake (3)
Fukushima fallout

Thank the new for the old

2011-03-10T12:38:00.005-07:00

Maps like this one are ubiquitous in Japan. The site I copied it from specializes in making them (go here for more examples). Like the plastic food that adorns restaurant windows, necessity combined with Japanese ingenuity turned the map into a showcase for utilitarian yet eye-catching industrial design.

Though the main roads in and between Japan's cities have street names, the traditional addressing system is block-based, not street-based. Think of a city as a big block divided into smaller blocks. At the street level of granularity, the buildings are numbered sequentially around the block.

This is quite logical and works fine--in theory--until the block is (inevitably) physically altered, at which point the numbering system goes haywire. And since only out in the sticks in Japan do you find towns that haven't been profoundly altered in the past fifty years, the whole system is haywire from top to bottom.

Hence the proliferation of WYSIWYG feature-based maps. Why don't they "fix" it? I suppose for the same reason we Americans talk a lot about it but never get around to normalizing English spelling or adopting the metric system.

Anyway, who cares about the addressing system when you've got GPS and Google Maps (and ubiquitous police boxes staffed by beat cops)? One irony of modern technology is not that it eradicates the old, but that it preserves it so well.

Chinese orthography was radically simplified under Mao (and not for the first time). In Japan, some hesitant steps were taken in that direction, but first the fax machine and then the IME (input method engine) made it so easy to convert phonetic characters to kanji that it's become a non-issue.

In fact, characters that were once abandoned in favor of kana are appearing again in wide circulation. A semi-literate gaijin like me can type the kanji for "rose" (薔薇) as easily as any native-born and educated Japanese. Cutting-edge technology keeps these antiquated systems chugging along.

Related posts

Off the map
Hero

Summer Wars

2011-03-07T14:41:00.008-07:00

The typical "Oscar bait" flick does its best to reinforce every grim "truth" the critics believe about the world, while patting them on the back for having such refined tastes. After all, no mere dilettante would willingly spend two hours watching such depressing, self-important dreck and then crow about it afterward.

Though if the production studio behind it has any aspirations of breaking even on the project, they'll have read their McKee and smuggled in the necessary quota of crowd-pleasing plot payoffs and made sure the word-of-mouth spreads it around.

With Summer Wars (English language version: WB/Funimation) director Mamoru Hosoda has done the exact opposite. On the surface, he panders shamelessly to the tween video game demographic with a by-the-numbers plot, while sneaking a gem of a human comedy in through the back door.

Summer Wars could be called "cyberpunk," but should more accurately be called "cyberstupid." Over the past fifty years, not only has this proved the rule rather than the exception, but it's getting worse. As computer technology improves, the popular entertainment depicting it gets cyberdumb and dumber.

The hoariest space opera manages to posit that planets are round and orbit the sun, and generally keeps pace with modern technology and scientific trends, even if they are rendered on screen with utter obliviousness. But at least starships don't look like V-2 rockets from the 1940s (unless the irony is intended), and don't run on vacuum tubes.

In the cyberpunk world, the "Internet" only exists as a conduit for impossibly high-bandwidth surveillance apparati. Every information superhighway leads back to one big mainframe, which somehow exists in a sealed unit with its own inexhaustible power supply, connected with invisible routers and cables, and lacking even an on/off switch.

And that mainframe runs some kind of glorified AOL/Facebook/Second Life mashup that controls--through a single administrative account--everything, from your email account to the local traffic lights, to medical life support systems, GPS, and, oh, nuclear launch codes.

The premise is so idiotic that the first five to ten minutes of these movies must be spent explaining why creating a single point of failure for the entire world's computing and communications infrastructure is a fantastic idea and the wave of the future.

And yet from 2001 (just a spaceship, but c'mon) to WarGames (cementing the conceit in the public imagination; Dr. Strangelove was not a documentary, okay?) to The Matrix (Second Law of Thermodynamics, anybody?) to Live Free and Die Hard (which was fun despite itself) to Eagle Eye (which killed many brain cells), nobody's wised up.

And now Summer Wars. And yet--for all its dumbness, even the cyberpunk aspects of the film are tolerable, for four reasons:

• There's no dark conspiracy, no Men in Black running around harassing hapless computer nerds. The computer virus that's destroying the world is a big oopsie! Granted, the U.S. military caused it, but a Japanese programmer wrote it. Bygones.

• Kids are kids. However precocious, teenagers are not preternaturally wise creatures who know more about life than their elders. When the time comes for important things to get done, it helps to have a bunch of resourceful adults around.

• It's not ponderous. It's not preachy. There are no Important Lessons to be learned about Our Foolish Ways. We're not expected to embrace world peace or see the folly of our technological dependency. Life goes on. Good for it.

And the most important reason of all:

• It's not cyberpunk movie, after all.

Oh, it pretends to be, it pretends mightily. But despite the gee-whiz computer graphics, the mimicking of Second Life/World of Warcraft, and major plot points lifted from WarGames (with a touch of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and a key idea from Ghost in the Shell), it's really a serio-comic family melodrama.

High-schooler Natsuki shanghais classmate and pathologically shy computer nerd Kenji into pretending to be her boyfriend (another true and tried plot), and hauls him off to the family estate in the country for her grandmother's birthday. Several generations of the Jinnouchi family turn up as well. Much lovable craziness ensues.

Sakae, Natsuki's grandmother and the matriarch of the family (voiced by Sumiko Fuji, who plays the same lovable character on Teppan) is unabashedly old school, with a spine of steel and a heart of gold.

A running joke throughout the movie is that the family once served the Sanada clan. The Sanada clan managed to end up on the losing side of every major conflict during the medieval Warring States period, but is remembered for doing it heroically and often ingeniously.

The once handsome estate may be a shadow of what it once was, but as far as Sakae is concerned, better to go down heroically and honorably than sell out for easy money.

So when the black sheep of the family makes a noisy appearance, promising to resurrect the flagging family fortunes with a shady deal that involves selling a nifty piece of computer code to the U.S. military, she tosses him out on his ear.

Meanwhile, an evil computer virus is taking over the world. Hmm, you sure gotta watch out for those egghead intellectuals and their get-rich-quick schemes.

More than anything else, Summer Wars is a tribute to the professional working man. Among the Jinnouchi progeny are a squid fisherman, fireman, policeman, EMT, JSDF communications specialist, a country doctor, and a computer parts salesman who installs mainframes. And who just happens to have a spare mainframe in his warehouse.

At which point I thought, those things draw a lot of juice. Enter the fisherman.

Squid fishing involves going out at night with a light boat to draw the squid to the surface. So the fisherman hauls his boat to the estate on a flatbed truck and cranks up the diesel generators. The JSDF communications specialist borrows a microwave uplink unit. Because no way the DSL way out there has the bandwidth to save the world.

Far-fetched, yes, but these real-world elements are completely plausible. It's a lot of fun watching a group of skilled professionals working together so the kids can do their computer magic. Of course, once they do get back online, the actual "hacker" strategy follows the Underpants Gnomes approach to solving computer crimes:

1. Evil computer hacker/virus is about to destroy the world.
2. ? (Much typing.)
3. World saved.

Step two involves stuff like cracking 1024 bit encryption codes by hand and beating the evil supercomputer virus at a traditional Japanese card game called "Koi-Koi." Yeah, right. My higher brain functions shut down during this part. Cute but meaningless. And then booted up again upon recognizing an ending straight out of Tenchi Muyo.

At first I was annoyed at director Mamoru Hosoda (who directed the creative and insightful The Girl who Leapt through Time) for making such a dumb and derivative movie, but I've reconsidered.

He's done something very clever. Yes, he could have made the movie I wanted to watch--a human comedy about a traditional Japanese family bridging the cultural gap between the old and the new--but no way any antsy fourteen year old was going to watch it. So he had a couple of teenage video gamers save the world instead

He's pulled a cinematic bait and switch, gone in dumb and come out smart. I doubt the kids consuming the eye candy will notice the nutritional center, but maybe the message will soak in around the edges.

Summer Wars possess what's always made good Disney movies great--the ability to dazzle the children while engaging the minds of their parents, who should enjoy seeing adults depicted as mature role models well worth emulating, and the traditional family unit as something worth preserving in a post-modern world.

As the poster for the movie aptly states, "Our connections are our weapons."