Years of Poems and Spirits

Just back from a trip to Japan. My first ever. Enjoyed it immensely.

It is also a very tiring trip–not only it was short and compact, but I was left with so many impressions and had so many thoughts, it is now quite an overwhelming task to write them down.

I tried to take notes on Euro and Brazil trips but gave up on Xin Jiang. The history and culture of the ancient West Realm (西域) was just too high a mountain to scale.

But Japan is different. I feel like I am floating in thoughts, ready to write them down. But don’t know where to start. So I will try a different tack …

I will start with a poem that can best summarize my trip:

绿蚁新醅酒
红泥小火炉
晚来天欲雪
能饮一杯无

Thought about “一花一世界” but the above poem is more secular and existential.

I was fortunate enough to have experienced both the Urban Japan (Tokyo) and the Rural Japan (Susami)

The Urban Japan:

Tokyo is a very crowded place but is surprisingly clean and quiet. The only exceptions are occasional foul smells from underground sewage and the ubiquitous door sensor chimes.

Tokyo is the epicenter of urban living. Urban living in general is about constantly generating symbols, meanings that are trivial but full of subtlety. You define who you are and which “tribe” you belong, by choosing where to shop for cloth, for shoes, or where to get what pastry from which bakery, let along to say your choice of restaurants and bars. It is something Pagans will never understand.

The Tsukiji fish market (築地市場) is the best-kept secret from mass tourism. It is a photographer’s heaven. One can never appreciate Japanese seafood culture without visiting this market. I saw more creatures from the sea there than from any aquarium I have been to. Yet the place doesn’t smell fishy at all–just tells you how fresh the products are.

Japanese food is the opposite of Chinese food: healthy, lean and single-themed: you can trace most of the flavoring ingredients to one single item–soybean.

Japanese are relentless in their pursuit of perfect appearance: young ladies apply makeups (mostly moderately) and dress stylishly. The Brazilians like to show off their bodies but not their faces, the Japanese are the opposite but with the same intensity.

Tokyo is perhaps the best indexed city in all the places I have been to. Not only every subway stop, but every exit of every stop is marked by numbers. Tokyo’s public transit is denser than the spider webs outside of my window, yet once you understand how it is indexed, you can get around without knowing any Japanese.

Japan is clean. Very clean. Wherever you go–construction sites, store front, subway entrances …–you don’t have look hard to find a spot to put down your backpack. This is especially amazing consider how few trash bins are on the streets. I bet everyone walking around me have some trash in their pockets.

Japanese may use plastic wraps rather liberally, they have a first-class recycling culture that totally offsets the excess. Here are the categories: glass bottles, plastic bottles, paper, burnable trash and landfill trash. Public trash bins don’t always label which hole is for what–that is why I often had to carry trash back to hotel.

The recycling schedule is quite complicated (I will try to get a copy). It should be programmed on cell phones and PDAs to remind people.

All Japanese seem to use one kind of cell phone: thin, large screen shell phones.

Tokyo public transit has everything: bus, light rail, subway and train. One thing to note though: subway is privately run. Every company is called a “line” and has several “routes”. You don’t always get the integrated, city-wide subway map at the stations.

The subway entrance at Shiboya (渋谷) happens to be the intersection of several lines. Song and I had no idea when we walked in. Suddenly, torrents of people coming from all directions and caught us in the middle. For a second, I had a sensation of drowning.

As a tourist from America, I made two mistakes during the trip:

1. Movement: ALWAYS stay on the left–particularly when riding bicycles! Never make sudden movements without looking first. In front of Asakusa Temple (浅草寺), I tried to take a picture and stepped backwards (without looking). Boom! I bumped into an old man. And that is not the only time. After all, Tokyo is a much more crowded place than most places in America.

2. Passing food using chopstick to chopstick: I was told that is a very inauspicious move–people only do so when picking unburnt bones from ash urns.

Jon Lee Anderson: Fidel’s Heir

Just after I finished Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, I came upon Anderson’s “extremely short” essay about Hugo Chávez. Convinced me more of my criticism of Arendt: in pursuit of an answer to the Holocaust, she stretched extreme instances of popular demagogy into “Totalitarianism”.

Chávez’s Venezuela is arguably at a midway point in the spectrum of demagogy: Chávez is not a total despot, for he does tolerate some opposition, submit himself to fair elections and accepts the results. Yet he is also very manipulative and inflamatory (e.g. how he humiliated Uribe in the Latin America summit meeting). In addition, he has two other traits Arendt would find interesting: appearing selfishless and has an international agenda.

Then there was Augusto Pinochet: who was not very popular (in a liberal sense) but very brutal. He is probably also somewhere on the spectrum. It is just very hard to demarcate what is true “Totalitarianism”. I don’t think Arendt found the right answer to Holocaust. If anything, she should have looked at the Continent during 1968 and find some solace in an emerging liberal civic culture.

To propose an alternative answer, I’d say that: for the Germans, there is always an element (however faint now) of collective romanticism and fanaticism in their cultural tradition. For the Russians, it is the Hobbesian distrust of each other and the longing for a powerful patriarch that led them to Stalin. Therefore, whether there is a countervailing force growing in each civic society is perhaps a much better indicator of how likely the past predicament will repeat itself.

A quick comment: very very painful to write again after school. But I am glad I tried.

Judith Thurman: First Impressions

Just a beautiful article. There is one paragraph talking about the short and possible interactions between the Neanderthals and Homo sapiens that is so very moving:

“They coexisted for some eight thousand years, until the Neanderthals withdrew or were forced, in dwindling numbers, toward the arid mountains of southern Spain, making Gibraltar a final redoubt. It isn’t known from whom or from what they were retreating (if “retreat” describes their migration), though along the way the arts of the newcomers must have impressed them. Later Neanderthal campsites have yielded some rings and awls carved from ivory, and painted or grooved bones and teeth (nothing of the like predates the arrival of Homo sapiens). The pathos of their workmanship-the attempt to copy something novel and marvellous by the dimming light of their existence-nearly makes you weep. And here, perhaps, the cruel notion that we call fashion, a coded expression of rivalry and desire, was born.”

为什么政客们亲那么多Baby不会得病，我亲一个就病得摇摇欲坠?!

When one is physically ill what does that do to one’s mind? I had many hours of sleep but dreaded the dreams. It was the day time stress and anxiety repeated over and again. I was making arguments that at once seemed to make perfect sense and no sense at all. Just like my paper… Early in the morning, I didn’t want to go back to sleep just because I didn’t want to go back to the dreams. But when I was at 39c, it wasn’t always up to me.

While sick, I had time to watch some TV and to read from New Yorker:
1. Watched the Indy Race in St. Petersburg on TV, I think the cry “it is green flag racing!” is very sexy!

2. Watched Carman the opera: I always enjoyed listening to Carman. After all, the Toréador Song was what got me into classical music to begin with. And I watched the opera couple of times before. But this time it was different. Something clicked. Micaëla’s solo in the Gypse’s camp is the most moving: not only the music beautiful, but perfectly encapsulates the obsession of Jose and the power of Carmen. Although Don Jose’s possessiveness is pathological, Carman’s free-will almost justifies one’s total admiration: she is woman worth dying for.

3. Watched One Flew over Cuckcoo’s Nest: It is more Owellian but definitely not Foucaultian. The antagnistic nurse Ratched is NOT how mass society works today. Rather it is the elaborate weddings and ceremonies that David Brooks talked about in the Bobos in Paradise. However, the movie is superb at portraying the tension between the subjected and the privileged once the sensation of being free is discovered and the pursuit of liberation is on.

4. Read Eric Alterman’s “Out of Print” on NYKr. I am certainly in Lippmann’s camp. For a while, I thought that is what Alterman’s argument too. But that is just not progressive enough, uh? This article deserves another entry. But in summary, I do think politics and governance are becoming too complicated, too nuanced to be decided by the general public.

I remember a skit from SNL where a weekend party is going on in a loft apartment somewhere. That was right after 9.11 and the invasion of Afghanistan. Suddenly a guy rushes in and says, “the Northern Aliance just took Jalalabad!” and everybody raises their glasses and cheers.

The moral of the joke is that the world is just too complicated. Alterman seems to be finding hope in the newly burgening phenomenon of “participating” journalism, or a mixture of opinions and leaks and rumors. He is well aware of the ptifalls of such a development: the degradation of journalistic integrity. And more importantly, the polarization of public opinions. But strangely, he seems to say this is actually good for democracy: the reason that more Europeans voted than Americans is because they have so many tabloids.

Of course, his musing stops right there. No further reasoning offered why these two are even corelated! That is rather ridiculous for a serious article (or posting, should I say). But he has several good points, for example, that the “veneer of neutrality” is becoming increasingly unsustainable. And the very effort to stay “above the fray” may render print journalism cold and distant.

5. By the way, just saw my old boss Dan Hesse on TV in a Sprint commercial. I was such a fan of his while at Terabeam. I still think he is a heck of communicator and salesman.