thduggie’s blog

And again I rose early, to pack, even though flying west I should attempt the opposite, packing until late into the evening and rising as late as possible. Instead, after four and a half hours of sleep I rose at 4 am and packed with such efficiency I had time to mindlessly zap through early morning Japanese news and some odd channel that seemed to be explaining math. I checked out at 6am, noticing again on the way down that except for the push buttons all number eight indicators in the elevators had been flipped left to right before being mounted. I guess front and back looked and felt the same on all but the push buttons and whoever mounted the elevator thought the mirrored eight looked better.

With my train only leaving at 6:44 I had enough time to get breakfast somewhere, but the only places open at that time were McDonald’s and Matsuya, a rice bowl shop. Matsuya requires buying a ticket at a machine and looked a little too cramped for me and my suitcase (and a little too full with fashionable young girls) so I got myself a McGriddle (makkugoridoru) and registered quite some surprise at how tasty it was. It looks fake and probably is, but that can be said of a number of delightful things. The funny bit about eating at McDonalds at the crack of dawn was the amount of sleepers on the benches and the employees coming up and gradually waking them up because “customers were coming.” I don’t remember a lot of customers coming beyond myself.

I did feel like I’d betrayed some honor code of international travel by eating breakfast at burger chains for two consecutive days (I’d eaten at Wendy’s the day before, in part because it was right below the hotel and I got 10% off as a guest).

Still way too early, I walked over to the train station past the unlit Christmas decoration, looking anemic and weak in the shadowless twilight. On the platform I had enough time to take a few pictures of the ads I mentioned previously and the station itself.

I am a cupboard.

I am a fruitcase.

Form follows function.

I read on in “Travels with my Aunt” and found another less than flattering but funny quote concerning Switzerland: “Switzerland is only bearable covered with snow.” I wonder if Graham Greene had some sort of chip on his shoulder when it came to Switzerland, although Greene in the preface to “The Third Man” credits Orson Welles with the cuckoo clock line.

At the check-in I had to wait for a few minutes until they opened the counter, and although I’d stood in line where the TV screens had indicated economy check-in it switched once the employees arrived and set everyone moving across to the other check-in. I stayed, figuring that even if for some reason they wouldn’t accept my silver-actually-already-gold card they’d at least be lenient and check me in anyway because the line wasn’t long. They did accept my card, though, and it showed up in the system as a Senator, which allowed me to get a lounge invitation. I first headed to the United lounge, where the same lady that had shown me out in July now explained to me the benefits of this lounge and the ANA lounge further down the terminal wing. I’m sure she didn’t recognize me, but it did give me some satisfaction.

Boarding also went faster when I pointed out the magic letters SEN on my boarding pass and lead to extra smiles and expressions of gratitude, but not to an upgrade, even though the plane wasn’t entirely full. I didn’t mind much, though: I had a bulkhead seat, a free seat next to me, and was one of the first on the plane with plenty of space and time to pack away my carry-ons. After I’d settled in I suddenly remembered the advice about warning the flight attendants about my children’s menu, so I told the one closest to me, who, after I alleviated her concerns and confirmed that I did actually want one, broke into a big smile. In other words, the bait works - add “I’m the guy with the children’s menu” to your pick-up line collection. Chicks dig it. I’m not keen on applying our pink-shirted friend’s manual to flight attendants so I don’t know if takes you any farther than a smile (which, in my book, is worth a lot).
The captain came on with a rolling r like a 1950s diesel, informing us of our route and telling us we’d start eastward and then turn rrrright and head north toward Russia. That only works with a 270° angle, and I was interested in seeing that on the flight map, but they only showed the downward camera and then NHK news. I don’t understand why NHK news is mandatory. No other program - not even simple flight information - can be chosen during that show, and it’s not subtitled.

Once the entertainment system did come on, I took advantage of it and watched “You kill me” (meh), two Simpsons episodes, “No Reservations” (not too bad, hits some right notes, ends with a plot hole you could drive a truck through), “Ecoute le temps” (atmospheric but odd), and “The Unforgiven” (brutal, honest, and sparse).

It turned out that the guy on the same row as I was a Swiss photographer living and working in Japan, taking pictures mostly for newspaper reports but also working on a photo book on the Chinese internal migrants.  He still works with analog cameras and said he wouldn’t change unless some day someone makes him an offer he really wants but places the condition of digital photography on it.  His reasons for not switching are the haptic quality of film and photos along with the uncertainty about the longevity of digital media.  He showed me his compact but dense Leica which is still all manual - I love its look and feel but still prefer my bulkier and more automatic digital SLR.  It saves me time.  If you want to see his pictures you can log in as a guest on LookatOnline and enter “japan” or “china” as a search word.  Most of the photos in those categories are his (Andreas Seibert).

When we had landed and got ready to disembark another flight attendant noticed that my camera bag had an Anpanman address label on it, which made her smile.  It’s the second time in a few days that the label had that effect on a Japanese woman.  In other words, wear your Anpanman proudly.  Chicks dig it.

As usual, the plane arrived just at the hour so that I just missed the :04 train, so with a lot of time on my hands I called my Mom so she’d know I was in.  Then I bought mivella and fizzy water and a “Silserli” with “Bündnerfleisch.”  It was good to be home.  I stayed surprisingly awake for only having dozed briefly on the plane; it was not until Frick that I started dozing a bit, but by the time I arrived in Basel I was awake again.  When I got up onto the overpass I saw that even here Christmas decoration was already going up.  Maybe the only reason I’d thought it happened later was that I’d been away most of last November.

There you have it.  My possibly final blog for the year.  Let me therefore conclude with two profound predictions for 2008: we will see more black and eggshell-to-tan combinations and an increase in colored tights.  But that ain’t gonna change a thing.

Here are a few more photos.

Me in a Toyoko Inn mirror.

Tea plantations from the shinkansen window.

Tea plantations, again.

Fields and dormitories.

The only silk a man can safely wear - even in pink.  

Silky softness.

Three long days - I’ll keep it short. 

Up early on Monday to pack and leave the hotel by about 6:15.  The trick was packing so that the suitcase could be sent to my next hotel in Tokyo while I went to Osaka for a night.  I met my colleague on the shinkansen platform; we bought breakfast and boarded.  The window seat did me little good, because I was more interested in sleeping than in catching the early morning sun.  In about three hours that thanks to a lack of consciousness seemed like a lot less we had arrived; two changes later we were rumbling on a local train to the Osaka main office. 

At the office we discussed the upcoming demonstration, then after a lunch at a family restaurant where I surprised everyone by having no more than a salad but then following it up with a large helping of ice cream we drove to the customer site.  The visit proved frustrating and there were moments where I had to struggle to contain my impatience and anger.  I can’t understand the reasoning behind giving an unknown sample that has never been characterised to a vendor for a demo measurement.  Whatever the results, you can’t compare them; you don’t know what to expect; it almost always turns out to be a colossal waste of time.  In our case it would have been a total waste of time had I not decided in a moment of irritation to measure a standard sample I’d brought along which allowed us to demonstrate that even in an environment acoustically dominated by pumps and fans we were able to measure a 1.8 nm high step with the system that’s not designed for high resolution.  The customer samples indicated more about their level of knowledge of those samples than anything else, with almost all of them exhibiting characteristics an order of magnitude different from what had been indicated.  It was about eight when we returned to the office. 

We went straight for dinner at Namba station, picking initially a restaurant called Watami but after being informed of a 20-minute wait decided to pick the restaurant a floor higher instead, called En.  There we had all manner of tasty food, after moving to another room because the head of the Osaka office didn’t like the noisy neighbors.  The restaurant had some trouble with delivering the food quickly, and the tuna cheek in the end never appeared, but after tofu skin and spinach salad, natto and ground meat on cabbage leaves, fried mozzarella in tofu skin, tofu boiled in soy milk with tororo kombu and ponzu, grilled onigiri, salmon and avocado sushi, hot sake, Perrier, and walnut ice cream I left stuffed and happy.  I have to admit that liking the natto while one of the Japanese almost spat it out made me feel a winner, but if it was indeed his second time ever then he deserves praise for his courage.  He got extra tamagoyaki to make up for it. 

My colleague from Tokyo and I stayed at the Toyoko Inn at Namba station.  I was tired, hence the lack of blogging activity.  As always, this Toyoko Inn resembled any Toyoko Inn, except that they served croissants and cinnamon rolls for breakfast. 

We visited an existing customer on Tuesday, who I was afraid had bought the instrument without really knowing anything, but it turned out that he had a good grasp of the technology and the theory and simply hadn’t ever gotten around to using the system.  I hope the meeting with him gets him kick-started.  He did say that seeing the system he thought he’d manage with the more complex measuring modes, which is a change from the questions we’d received.  Sometimes I wonder how much gets lost in transmission when a customer writes in Japanese and I end up getting a translated message - it’s like Chinese whispers with translation issues thrown in.  Even so, with the meeting beginning at 2pm in Kobe, a three-hour meeting meant leaving on a seven o’clock train from Shin-Osaka and arriving in Tokyo main station at 10pm.  I only bought a small dinner at the train station because I’d had a large miso “here” (filet) tonkatsu (pork cut, batter-fried) set menu for lunch.  Again, I dozed for quite a bit, though I also read from David Malouf’s short story collection “Antipodes,” which I don’t know how to pronounce, so I’ll go look it up now.  Be right back. 

It’s what I feared it might be, another example of English pronounciation gone haywire.  Learners of the German language get frustrated with the vowel changes from singular to plural, but at least one can still recognize the connection between the two. 

On both the visits recounted above there were the same four of us: my Tokyo colleague, an Osaka salesman relatively new to the company but who looks the part and seems sharp enough to pick up on the instrument skills, and the assistant who lived in Canada in her youth and translates for me when necessary.  It sounds like a lot of manpower, but I welcome any exposure to our systems.  I noticed that the assistant sat up right at all meals, so I asked her if she did sports.  I thought she might have had ballet or other dance lessons, and I wasn’t far off: she does yoga.  Another thing I noticed was how the corners of her mouth are always turned slightly upward as if her lips were spring-loaded to smile, and she does smile a lot, so it’s hard to tell whether her disposition influenced her features or if they were created to suit her disposition. 

Anyway, after the ride home and the antipodes I got to my hotel in Ikebukuro, which turned out to be located on a pedestrian zone in a movie district, with - at that hour - terminally fashionable guys guiding their equally fashionable girls by the buttocks while a few hundred meters away in the Ikebukuro train station homeless guys hunker down along the walls for the night, dotted lines of misery in a sea of neon prosperity.  Connect the dots and they spell out a larger story of many more dots around the world in even worse situations; a larger story of how the twentieth century has made humanism an untenable belief system for all but the blinkered and bunkered.  But who am I to speak?  I sell microscopes that cost more than a car… 

Today I had a discussion with another partner and then headed to Hamamatsu with him for a local show.  It was very small but surprisingly interesting for me.  I finished Malouf’s collection, enjoying at least two stories enough to recommend the book which I think starts with the weaker half and then ends with some pieces of real insight.  One story talks about how telling a true story means giving one’s life to back it up: “The Bloody Sergeant comes on, announces that a battle has been won, bleeds a little, and after twenty rugged lines retires into oblivion.  But what he has been called upon to tell has to be lived with and carried through a lifetime, out there in the dark.”  That’s why telling about independently verifiable facts is easy, almost cowardly: it requires no personal commitment.  But telling someone about your faith - now that’s a story! 

I started into Graham Greene’s “Travels With My Aunt” after that and can already tell I’ll enjoy this one too.  Greene manages to be both entertaining and deep at once.  Pearls in slop, perhaps, but obviously there and there for the sifting. 

With a stop at a T-shirt store near the train station I took care of the last item on my shopping list.  And yes, I walked there blinkered.  I don’t know what else to do. 

I forgot to mention yesterday the odd encounter on my way to sartorial improvement.  I bumped into Ms. Mizuo, who lives at the dorm I used to live at when interning at Nippon Steel.  I don’t know what it says about me that I forgot to mention randomly meeting someone I knew in a city of ten million. 

This morning I headed out with just yoghurt and orange juice in my belly and got on a train for Kamatori, the station closest to the Oyumino chapel.  This is the chapel I used to attend in 2001/2002 before they built the new and bigger one in Honda where I’ve gone on all my business trips.  Being back there, even though most people I knew must have been at Honda today, was a touching moment - to sing and experience fellowship with a glimpse of bright sunshine outside the curtains in the same place I’d done before with dear friends.  Scotty Smith, our guest speaker that Sunday because of a missionary conference, took Zephaniah 3:14-20 to look at “love so amazing, so divine” which “demands my soul, my life, my all,” which resonated with my emotional state.  I won’t recap the message, just go ahead and read the passage. 

I spoke a bit with some visitors there for the conference, as well as with Roberta and Sally, two long-term missionaries, and Mrs. Soneda, who is one of the few people I remember clearly from my original stay in 2001/2002.  I can’t say why or how, but she’s a thoroughly pleasant woman to talk to and somehow projects a peace beyond that seems to settle on people around her.  Or maybe only I am affected that way. 

I also learned that I really can’t tell age with the Japanese.  The lady sitting next to me had raised her hand when Mr. Dedachi asked who might stay for a seminar on “Shepherding a Child’s Heart.”  I asked her afterwards if she had children, to which she replied with a frightened look and a “Me?  I’m still in high school.”  I guess it’s universal, but perhaps more successful in Japan: women in high school try to look grown up and women out of college try to look like they’re still in high school.  The amount of mothers I see that still look girlish I find staggering. 

For lunch I bought an unfiltered Kirin beer and some kara-age and tatsuda-age.  I’m sure the Japanese approve of that match, but I don’t know that the beer was a great idea.  I only drank it in Chiba in front of the train station, and as soon as I got on the train back to Tokyo a wave of drowsiness hit me.  The only reason for getting off at Chiba was to go to the dingy PASEO store where I always got Super Salaryman toe socks and found racks of T-shirts with silly English, but when I got there, the building was gone and replaced by a construction site.  I suppose this sudden flash of the ephemeral and the dwowsiness combined to send me into that sweet Sunday afternoon melancholy that makes me feel drained of everything but longing.  It makes me simultaneously aware of a desire to fly away and of lacking any reason or motive force to do so; it makes me at once regret things not done and admit that doing them would have changed little; it makes me feel an urge to take a bold decision to change everything while knowing that the boldest decision wouldn’t keep this melancholy from reoccuring.  All the while, I know sleep will change everything, but in these times it would be infinitely better to have someone to hug.  It is strange, though, to feel lonely in a city of ten million. 

I got off at Ikebukuro and found the DVD I didn’t find at Shinjuku, then got back on for Shinjuku.  Ads passed by with the bold message “you are what you buy” - ads, I think, for a credit card.  The message was reinforced by the image: the woman’s clothing taking on the background, in one case a fruit stand and in the other shelves with earthenware.  In my frame of mind it was immediately obvious that what you buy adds to your burden: it weighs you down with additional responsibility. 

Back in the Ikebukuro train station I bought a half-liter bottle of jasmin tea and again took to playing with it in my hand, swinging my hand forward and backward and making the bottle rotate 180 degrees around the short axis on the forward swing and catching it without obviously letting go of it, something of a toned-down urban variant on drawing a revolver with a flourish.  I got too confident on my way up the stairs, failed to catch the bottle and launched it up the stairs, past one elderly man’s feet, and then down the stairs again on the other side of the man.  He kept walking as if nothing had happened; the elderly man behind him stopped and answered my embarrassed but amused smile with a smile of his own that seemed paternally entertained more than anything. 

On my way back to the hotel I stopped at an outdoor cafe because it was still light and the temperatures balmy.  I got a hot chocolate (plus five creams) and a “Salami-style Frank” which turned out to be a peppery short sausage stuck on a bone, a morbid naked corndog of sorts. 

In the hotel I had to bring the Innis & Gunn bottle I bought yesterday to the receptionist to open the cap.  Beyond being fixed to the bottle in the usual way, a sticker kept the cap from falling loose once opened, but the receptionist insisted on taking the cap away and discarding it herself.  Her reason: it’s dangerous.  I think a guy walking around a hotel with an open bottle of beer is more dangerous than a beer cap on the loose, but I held my tongue.  The beer, by the way, is one of the best I’ve tasted.  It’s aged in whisky barrels, which means it doesn’t taste like beer and doesn’t burn like whisky but instead provides a delightful combination. 

I better get to bed.  Tomorrow’s a long day and I need to get up early to pack.  The shinkansen leaves at 7:13. 

Today I got up early enough for an onigiri and miso soup breakfast (which according to my colleagues do not match) supplemented by the orange juice I’d bought on Thursday.  I headed out around nine o’clock to get in touch with my feminine side (i.e. do some shopping). 

First, I took the subway to Shin-Okachimachi.  On the subway I noticed a guy playing on his playstation mobile, which reminded me of yesterday’s suit-and-tie salaryman playing his playstation mobile with such verve and vigor we heard the buttons click across the aisle above the train noise.  I asked the guy manning the wicket at Shin-Okachimachi how to get to Kappabashi-dori, and instead of telling me to get back on and take the subway to the next station, which would have been closer, he gave me vague directions.  Fortunately, the area is used to tourists and has maps and signposts everywhere, and it wasn’t my first time either.  I didn’t make it to Kappabashi without encountering one of the black vans blaring allegedly nationalistic music and slogans - I can’t understand what he’s saying.  If you want the Yankee to go home, you’ve got to tell him in English. 

From Kappabashi I walked to Asakusa for more shopping and passed the wonderful denim store where I got my split-toe rubber boots.  Despite a recent appearance as Permit the Frog with those boots I had no orders, so I just peeked in to make sure they still had some, just in case.  At Asakusa one of the shop ladies told me that today was a national holiday by way of explaining the masses ambling around the shrine and the surrounding shops.  With that, she also explained the black van.  They come out more often on national holidays. 

I got more than my share of shopping done and after buying a hot lemon drink headed back across town, this time to Harajuku, the epicenter of youth fashion.  I find the term epicenter all the more appropriate as most youth there fall in the category of fashion victims.  They sport faux period costumes, frilly multi-layered skirts, colorful embroidered stockings, velvet tailored train conductor uniforms, pointy wizard hats, lacy bonnets, skull caps with cat ears and a skull design, and they’re probably shopping for more.  As soon as I start thinking about the product life cycle of this garb, it makes me sick.  What an accumulation of future waste, with precious little opportunity for use!  At least they entertain the passersby (purposely? unwittingly? contre coeur? the psychology escapes me). 

As usual, I succumbed to the temptation of a crape [sic] booth and ate my vanilla ice cream and apple cinnamon crêpe on the bench belonging to the booth and labeled “no smorking.”  My stroll down Takeshita street didn’t lead me to the perfect T-shirt I was looking for.  One came close, showing Colonel Sanders with a runny nose and the letters KFS, standing for kafunsho, the Japanese word for hay fever, but I wasn’t too impressed with the price.  Richärds (imagine gothic script) sold goth clothes; what “white trash charms japan” sold, I don’t know.  I do know that at the end of the street round a corner stood a Döner Kebap box, where I only resisted giving in and eating one (rationalising it as a valuable support of Döner culture in Japan) because the line was long enough for me to think about the consequences: nobody wants to eat a Döner walking in a crowd.  I walked back up Omotesando past a Japanese lady taking her two guinea pigs for a walk and past the former site of the Hiestand bakery, may it rest in peace.  Apparently (according to the Japanese Hiestand website) there may still exist opportunities to find their goods in Japan, but I couldn’t find an alternative direct sales outlet. 

I fought my way through the crowd onto the platform for the train to Shinjuku, where after using the facilities I took the closest and likely smallest exit on the South exit - one that goes directly into the Lumine building.  I passed the Seijo Ishii market and spotted what might have been dark beer at the far wall, so I walked in, but before I could get there I was completely distracted by the cheese display.  Cheeses from France! Denmark! Holland! Switzerland! England (hey, even Blue Stilton)!  Blue, yellow, orange, and white, they were precious in my sight.  They even had one for 2900 yen that closely resembled a Vacherin Mont d’Or, which reminded me of what I mustn’t miss when I’m back.  In the end I settled for a plain Gruyères, 510 yen for 135 grams, but I was beyond caring.  My confidence that a store that carried decent cheese would also carry decent bread wasn’t disappointed, although the selection wasn’t as wide, and so for a total of 720 yen I had a lunch of bread and cheese, seated opposite the store on a chair belonging to a soft-ice joint I’d patronized before not knowing what treasures lay in store a few meters away, staring at the store’s display of champagne and wine and trying to guess how the katakana spelling translated back into French.  “Dikemu” for instance I figured must mean “D’Yquem.” 

I headed to the Tower Records store with the goal of finding if a certain DVD was available, but it took me an hour to just get to that section because of all the time I spent on the way listening to other CDs.  In particular I spent a lot of time on the new Spitz album, which I almost bought - I’d describe their sound as “süffig,” but can’t find a good translation for that word.  It’s a combination of smooth, melodic, harmonic, upbeat, and anthemic components, and the skill of shamelessly using standard conventions nearly up to the point where they become overused clichés.  Other CDs I enjoyed included the New Cool Collective and Haggis Horns albums.  The DVD, it turned out, wasn’t available.  I also spotted a Morning Musume singles collections, but left it alone.  By an odd quirk I found out later tonight what the Morning Musume could have been with talent and funk in their blood: Tokyo Brass Style.  As much as I enjoy their sound, I still feel just a tad like a dirty old man for watching the video.  Irritating. 

Next I went to Kinokuniya, the bookstore, where I bought too many books, but Shusaku Endo’s books are hard to get otherwise.  I spent some time browsing through Alex Kerr’s “Dogs and Demons” and nodding at descriptions of how Japan has eviscerated its cities by replacing traditional structures with prismatic upward projections of tile, steel, and glass.  Walking back to the hotel afterwards through the faceless deracinated modernity of Shinjuku drove the point home.  If I didn’t know it was Shinjuku and couldn’t recognize the script on the neon signs as Japanese I’d have a hard time placing it.  Other browsing led me to discover that two books, “Uneasy Warriors” and “Securing Japan,” use the same photo for their jacket design. 

I dropped off my loot at the hotel and went back to yesterday’s suit shop, Sakazen.  I won’t bore you with details of me picking suits, but I got two suits for a little more than what I paid for my one suit in Switzerland last summer.  We’ll see how well they hold up.  They did reveal that I’ve put on weight.  What I’m looking forward to is seeing if the delivery to the other hotel I’ll be staying at in a few days will work.  If not, I’ll have a lot of money riding in some delivery van…  I’m reluctant to calculate the total cash drain today, but feel a bit better when I think that roughly 10% went toward gifts and books and clothing fall into the category of honorable purchases. 

On the way back to the hotel I stopped again at Lee’s gyoza place.  Because of the wikipedia research on NOVA yesterday I now connected the dots and recognized the guy on the wanted poster in the restaurant as the guy who’s suspected of killing a British NOVA teacher in March this year.  Unfortunately, I have not yet developed my visual discernment to the point of being any help with wanted posters in Japan.  I had Lee’s special gyozas and bacon/cheese gyozas with a coke.  From there I went on to Don Quichote (don kihoote), a discount store, where I bought drinks and chocolate.  On my way back to the hotel I discovered a love hotel with a particularly attractive and romantic name: Hotel SPECK.  But despite all the love hotels surrounding my (regular) hotel and the title of this entry I’m not guilty of any hanky panky - only Panky. 

We were scheduled to visit a customer today to explain the possibilities of a Nanosurf AFM.  Fortunately, we left early.  We got on the Odakyu line in Shinjuku (unfortunately not on the Romance Car, whatever that was) and thought we were on the express headed to Hon-Atsugi (who names places Genuine Thick Tree?).  I recognized some of the scenery from a previous trip to Komae, but we soon passed that.  We also passed the point where we should have changed cars because we we headed for Enoshima instead, and it wasn’t until three stops later that I noticed.  The advantage of that was getting to see a truck with the blog title posted on it and a far away sign that said “Feel Wood.”  It reminded me of nothing but the Häring company (and wasn’t posted in Genuine Thick Tree).  We caught a train in the other direction that left a few minutes after we got off and after changing where we ought to have changed we were soon in Hon-Atsugi, with still enough time to spare to have a quick lunch. 

But it had to be quick, so we grabbed a bite at the incredibly cheap Sakura Sansui, where we got full meals with all-you-can-eat rice and raw eggs - obviously not a place catering to foreigners.  I’ve gotten used to it, so I had my cholesterol for the week there: one egg on the rice and one in the miso soup.  Along with that I had saba (mackerel, not the island). 

A short taxi drive later we were at the customer site.  One of the guys we spoke with had a pencil that looked like a regular wooden pencil with a hexagonal cross-section, but was fitted with a tip that gave it away as a push pencil.  I give him as many style points as one can give a uniformed Japanese engineer. 

The taxi driver’s first name on the way back was Luna, fueling suspicions among us that there might have been something odd about him.  Guys in Japan aren’t called Luna.  We took a brief break in a coffee shop, where I had a large hot cocoa and astonished my colleagues by emptying ten little cream containers into it.  I wouldn’t have to do that if they went easy on the chocolate and used more milk.  Across the table sat a young woman in a pink coat with a pink purse obviously trying to read a research paper of some sort and not managing because apparently watching ducks molting would have been more exciting. 

The pit stop may have been our downfall, because the train we caught ended up being delayed because of an accident.  It appears my week was framed in accidents, Tuesday seeing one on the Saikyo line that delayed the Narita Express and today one on the Odakyu line that ended up blocking traffic between Sagami-Ono and Shinjuku.  Usually, “accident” is a euphemism for a suicide jump; Monday and Friday see the highest number of jumpers, those who can’t bear another week or those sucked dry by a bad one.  We got off at Ebina and took the Sotetsu line to Yokohama, then the Shonan-Shinjuku line to Shinjuku.  This ticket would have cost about twice the ticket we had, but we got a free pass from the Odakyu line.  They’ll somehow figure out how much they gave out in free passes and invoice it to the family of the jumper.  It sounds nauseatingly cynical, but implementing this rule led to a decline in suicides by jumping in front of a train in Japan. 

During the extra time we had, I don’t remember how we got onto that topic, but someone mentioned that NOVA had gone bankrupt.  This will, I suppose, lead to a lot of English teachers looking for work or hiring on with less centralized setups like Smith’s or just going private, as intimated in the blog I already quoted above. 

On the way back from the office, I took a slightly different route and happened past a store that sold men’s underwear.  I thought I might perhaps find a pair of boxer shorts with a quirky design as a stocking stuffer, but instead of that the store boasted a wall of DVDs with titles like Bareback Mountain.  Then I remembered I’d been warned about this part of town.  Sure enough, the next store offered a similar combination of merchandise.  I continued on and was glad when I reached the Yasukuni road.  There I stopped in a men’s clothing store and found out that I can find a suit in Japan, if I’m willing to accept that I’m the second largest size in height and largest size in waist. 

Through a maze of love hotels I made my way to the hotel, stopping on the way at Lee’s gyoza restaurant for a small dinner.  I had mushroom gyoza (potstickers), but this joint has all sorts, so maybe I’ll stop by again tomorrow. 

We checked out today, Ola to catch a flight back and I to check in to the Toyoko Inn that I originally had intended to stay in.  By nine o’clock we arrived at our partners’ office, where we stopped in for a quick coffee and tea before I took Ola to the Tokyo station.  As it turned out, he could have managed on his own, but it doesn’t hurt to provide a safety net.  We were already later than the worst rush hour, so the subway was not too crowded, and again emptied at Akasaka-Mitsuke.  At the Tokyo JR station I was a bit peeved that just in order to get on the platform I had to buy a ticket and couldn’t get a refund, which is something they manage to do at the Metro station.  A corollary of that I suppose to be that if your loved one (your darling, your joe) boards a bullet train (shinkansen), you get to wave goodbye at the wicket gate.  Romantic, eh? 

After I got back, we soon headed out to visit a customer who had recently bought our instrument.  He had some suggestions and questions but was satisfied with the results he was getting.  I improvised a scan protector with the top of a steel vessel for a specialty coating system, which might get him better results, but (a) he can’t measure with it and coat at the same time and (b) the Scan Protector we make is five times lighter and easier to handle. 

On the ride there I’d dozed on the back seat, but on the ride back I sat in the passenger seat and stayed awake and alert the whole time and discussed music promotion in Japan with Mitch.  He used to do that before he joined our partners. 

We’d had lunch at the Gusto family restaurant and I’d eaten too much despite having ordered a small meal, so I decided to eat less tonight and got myself some combini food.  Ground pork on a stick, beef on a stick, bread with mochi and mushroom paste in it, a vitamin C drink, and buckwheat tea made a balanced meal except that the fourth food group, ice cream, was missing.  Back at the hotel I discovered that this brand sold their little ice cream without the spoons that more expensive brands secret away in the lid.  I was about to cut up the lid to fashion a spoon when I remembered I’d just tossed away the contents of the Swiss International Air Lines Children’s Menu shoulder bag: plasticware and a napkin.  So it was thanks to the children’s menu that I could eat my ice cream in a civilized manner. 

I’m a bit tired and not feeling too great, so I’ll quit here.