The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by individualfrog:

pm215@150, I was told by a police officer in no uncertain terms that I was not allowed to ride in the street where there was a sidewalk. I suspect it varies depending on location, or maybe by police officer, ha.

It's true you don't usually lock your bike to anything. Considering the number of bikes it would be impossible to do so. But then a mamachari costs like 6000 yen at the supermarket, so it's not that big a deal. If you lock the wheel you can't ride, and why would anybody steal a bike except to ride it home when they're drunk? The parts are worthless.

I don't know why Japan doesn't get more hype for bicycle-friendliness. You know those enormous multi-story parking lots that they have at malls in America? There are lots like that, for bicycles, in Tokyo; I have seen them stuffed full far over capacity. I have seen three of them at one train station, so that you don't have to ride all the way around the station to park your bike. All completely full. It's the same all over Japan.

In Tokyo bicyclists are considered pedestrians, obliged to ride on the sidewalk where there are sidewalks (more usually, and better for everyone in my opinion, pedestrians and cars share the same road), and I think I've seen one bicycle helmet in three years, though I have seen plenty of people riding with a toddler sitting on a seat on the handlebars and a baby sitting in a seat on the back. Based only on my own observations, I've thought for a long time that helmet laws (or official encouragements) were a barrier to more people riding. But I've never had anything to back it up until now, so thanks for the link, Patrick.

This thread reminds me of watching Jackass for the first time. We were all howling with laughter, not because anything very funny was going on, but because the world was changing inside our heads. Despite living pretty rough-and-tumble in my childhood, I'd been hearing a steady drumbeat of Wear safety equipment to do anything because humans are incredibly fragile for so long, seeing some guy jump out of a second-story window into a bush and emerge just fine was a revelation.

Xopher's idea @458 of process-enjoyment and goal-enjoyment was interesting to me. For me, the Harry Potter books are the closest thing I can think of to pure goal-enjoyment. JK Rowling's writing itself never really gives me any pleasure; but the characters and the plots expressed in them do. I never sit back and bask in how beautiful or extraordinary any writing is, I want to get to the end! Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons is the opposite, pure process-enjoyment. As far as I can tell, there is no meaning beyond the words themselves. Many of the sentences aren't even grammatical. But the words and their rythms are beautiful. Most books are in the middle, of course, and that has nothing to do with genre at all. William Gibson is SF but definitely further into the process-enjoyment side of things.

This might be sort of the opposite of how some people might define the two, but then I get a great deal of process-enjoyment from hemming as well, and also from ripping seams out (I'm a dressmaker.)

As for what I dislike in books: I am terrible at puzzles, and I don't like my books to be puzzles. I like mysteries just fine, because they explain the puzzle at the end, but books with unreliable narrators where you're supposed to infer what happened by reading between the lines (like The Good Soldier), or allegories where every event, location, and character stands for something else (like Giles Goat Boy) both make me frustrated and annoyed. Not only does it mean that I usually don't get it, but it also makes me feel like there is a "right answer", and I like ambiguity. I've never had a teacher who said anything like "difficult = good, fun = bad", but I did have one who insisted there were correct "solutions" to poems by people like George Herbert and Emily Dickinson, and it really drove me crazy. Luckily it didn't poison their work for me.

Yeah, Michael Martin@84, I agree. THE PEOPLE THEY KILL GET UP AND KILL! It's an extra-terrifying reason to fight for survival; you don't even get the comfort of staying dead.

That said, I too am a bit tired of zombies.

Columbina @47: Whether that's a cultural/Western eyeballs situation (i.e. they just look young to me, as many Japanese women do) or wholly or partially intentional, I have never been able to decide.

I think you can safely guess that it's intentional, in some cases at least. I was in a porno shop in Osaka once, marveling at the enormousness (ten floors!) of it. On the top floor they had all the gadgets and sex toys, including rubber vaginas. Gross, but not that bad--until I noticed that they had tiny, child-sized ones. That kind of ruined my day.

(I don't have any political position on it or anything, about whether tiny rubber vaginas encourage or discourage sex with children, I just had an emotional response, which was to get vaguely depressed.)

Was this entry accidentally reposted from 1996? And then changed to Firefox from Netscape Navigator in order to cover it up?

Julie@#45 beat me to it! Soap operas have had continuity since they
were on the radio in the 30s. Serial shorts in the movie theater did
too. I think the "reset button" style (which I have no problem with
whatsoever--both modes are lots of fun) is rather newer.

Speaking of things I think but have no evidence of, Scott H@#35
says, "the vast majority of people will never attempt to build
anything", but my "problem" with this talk was rather that I think they
always have, it's just gotten easier to share/show it off. I say this
making no distinction between gardening, memorizing baseball
statistics, perfecting your barbecueing technique, building
supercomputers in your apartment, knitting, and editing
Wikipedia--almost everyone has some hobby. Just because you or I don't
find it interesting or valuable doesn't mean it's not creation. The
suggestion that "the average person" hasn't been creative in their free
time until recently struck me as wrong. But the scope of things you can
easily and cheaply do has certainly expanded in recent years, that's
true.

Ah, being vegetarian in Japan is very difficult indeed. I thought Xopher was just being John Boehner. Sorry Xopher!

I found people's attitude toward homosexuality in Tokyo to be one of benign ignorance. I would guess that a lot of gay people do not reveal their sexuality to anyone but their close friends, because that's the usual way of dealing with private matters in Japan. So most straight people don't know if they know any gay people. You do get a lot of the problems of ignorance: some men feel nervous about meeting gay men, etc. But they won't go around saying that gays should be locked up or will burn in hell, etc. It's far from ideal, but it's not so bad.

Just like everything else in Tokyo there is a specific district just for gay bars etc.: Shinjuku ni-chome. Just like you would go to Akihabara to buy otaku stuff, you would go to ni-chome if you want to meet gay/lesbian/etc. friends.

There was an accepted tradition of homosexual relations between samurai, so history is on the side of tolerance; and much the most popular kind of manga among young girls is "Boy Love" with beautiful feminine men falling for each other, so culture is on the side of tolerance too. There is a lot of work to be done in terms of education, but I think it will happen.

As for food, you can eat all kinds of food in Japan, simple "normal" food and "weird" food like natto, which is plainly not weird to gazillions of children who eat it every day. The weird food is somewhat more accessible than in America, but you still have to decide to eat it, after all. I found the people there went out of their way to "warn" me about "weird" Japanese food like natto, sushi, and so on. As for why invent it, it usually comes from a lack of resources, necessity being the mother of invention.

*China* is where the real weird food is, as far as I can tell.

Hard Gay has indeed been around for a long time. You can buy lots of Hard Gay merchandise, if you like, in Tokyo.

As for what he is, he's a perfectly standard "talent" in Japan, which is basically a professional celebrity guest. In the evening they have fun playing weird games and going "ehhh?" in tiny boxes in the corner of screens, but in the daytime they have to be bored silly sitting around watching non-"ehhh?"-worthy things in terrible daytime shows for housewives.

meredith@55: the convenience store clerk certainly turned it over to the local police box. Lost and Found is like a national hobby in Japan, it's amazing. I've lost my commuter pass (a few times), my camera, and a bag full of clothes, usually on the subway, and it always comes back to me. I know someone who has had less than 50 dollars worth of yen returned to him after leaving it in a bar.

But even in Tokyo, where the police are very honest in this kind of thing, I woudn't give a found item to any random cop on the street, and it might take me a little while to bring it to the koban. I guess from now on I'll never pick up lost items in NYC (maybe in all of America). What a great system we've got there.

Keir@65, do you really think recieving the Presidential Medal of Freedom is anything like the police pulling you over unexpectedy? I expected the old "If you don't have anything to hide, no problem! If you do, you deserve it!" argument, but that's a new one on me.

A lot of how we think of colors, I think, is probably based on the language we're using...Japanese people say the traffic light is "blue" when it's not red or yellow. Nowadays many people certainly will say "Well, it's green, but we call it blue" but it seems that in the past, blue and green were sort of mixed, or perhaps the dividing line between green and blue was different from where it is to Europeans. I certainly think it's possible for there to be more or fewer divisions between colors than we usually make, the number seems pretty arbitrary, especially considering how "purple" and "violet" overlap to most people.

I remember reading that some people...criticized? were disappointed in? Helen Keller's writing because she talked about sights and sounds, and they wanted to learn what it was like to live without them. But I think she said something like her whole consciousness was based on books she'd read, and every book, of course, describes sights and sounds. Her world wasn't made of physical sensations, it was made of words. (But I don't want to put words into Helen Keller's mouth, I may be misremembering completely.)

It's really going to be depressing to go back to the US after living in "train paradise" here in Japan. I've never been in a car in this country, and I've lived here two years. Not even a taxi.

This train is pretty sweet, but I think the Shinkansen is still faster. However, I would guess that the age of maglev is coming to an end, if conventional trains can go this fast.

Maybe clockpunk?

#28

"In the bikini rodeo pie fight that he links to someone comments that those are not rocking horses the girls are riding but Japanese sex chairs."

Which is nonsense, they are exercise machines, very very popular right now, although I'd guess they peaked a couple months ago. You can try them out at any Bic Camera or Tokyu Hands, there are a million infomercials for them every night; I'm sure a large component of the audience is men hypnotized by the spectacle, but there's nothing overtly sexual about them.

#28

"In the bikini rodeo pie fight that he links to someone comments that those are not rocking horses the girls are riding but Japanese sex chairs."

Which is nonsense, they are exercise machines, very very popular right now, although I'd guess they peaked a couple months ago. You can try them out at any Bic Camera or Tokyu Hands, there are a million infomercials for them every night; I'm sure a large component of the audience is men hypnotized by the spectacle, but there's nothing overtly sexual about them.

WARNING: the Godzilla statue (NelC @16 mentioned) is very, very tiny. In my opinion, there is nothing to recommend it. I work near there and tourists sometimes ask me where it is, so I bring them and watch their faces droop as their expectations are shattered.

When I first got here I had little to read but my roommates' travel guidebooks to Japan. I've found that any book that tells you it will tell you "the real unbiased truth about Japan!" is sure to be a compendium of the author's prejudices--either Japan as a morally corrupt nation of racist, misogynist robots (and lots of mindless, sexually available women) or Japan as delightful cartoon wonderland of marvelous contrasts between the futuristic and the ancient (with lots of inscrutably polite, sexually available women.) Not that I like guidebooks anyway, but I immediately put one down if it promises "the real unbiased truth" about anywhere.

Um, what else? I think some of the things people mention here are things you shouldn't trust, but you should probably read, and Vasari falls under that category.

Renatus, David Goldfarb: thanks! Sometime when I have all the books with me I'll see if I can find any more parallels. It's fun.

I was given the first one in Japanese, but I don't know if I'll read it. Maybe. I did read Kiki's Delivery Service in the original Japanese, and agree that kids'/young adult books are great for learning.

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