autumn tactics

of standard train travel. That’s how long my trip is this morning. Starting at 5:45 am. I could have taken the shinkansen and been there in just over two hours, but somehow it just turned out this is the way I chose.

Inefficient by design.

Originally I planned to stay up in Minami Aizu in my tent last night, but typhoon William sufficently washed out those plans so to speak. So I spent Monday, my first day off in nearly a month, getting acquainted with FFXII, which I quickly became hooked on and spent most all day playing. I did, however, scurry out of my blanket and tatami combination long enough to get a fairly nice bit of closing time shopping done, picking up a Snow Peak mess kit to go with my compact gas stove that I received from Rodney, as well as much needed replacement cargo straps for my Ferrino hiking pack.

Black and white film, foma RC paper, and too much imported beer. Another warm chat with the always bright checkout girl at Yamaya.

Though it’s very nearly gone from my everyday life, there are times when the magic of first coming to Japan returns for a fleeting moment like a faded odor from a childhood jacket. I exit Akihabara station and having fifteen minutes to transfer, scan the area sleepily for a convenience store.

The montage of unfamiliar signs; the nearly empty streets of early morning; the lack of time being relevant… Like a drunken bee at dusk, I stumble down into an Am/Pm for some sandwiches and token omiyage. My groggy gaze lingers on the neatly presed-together legs of a girl reading a magazine.

Royal jelly. Beauty tea. Otsuka pharmaceuticals.

Entering into the subway for a minute I am uncannily lost. The mulitple branching stairwells lead to the same platform and remind me of Silent Hill 3.

There are times when Japan doesn’t feel like Japan, usually times without architecture. The majority of people on subways at six in the morning; it could be almost anywhere. Bums the world around have similiar mannerisms, free from the pall of ethnic strata, more or less. But it rises… oh how the rays fall so corn yellow on the sea of crescent-tiled rooves. It’s been so long since I’ve seen a morning, it’s almost foreign to me. Three hours on a single section express train. The low sun is so reserved and distant.

Power lines, ginkoes, and scaffolding. Wet streets and danchi.

Sister Charles used to say that the skies in October were the bluest all year. This always filled me with a senseless kind of pride, simply because I was born in October, even though this had little to do with me.

Today is October the 27th. In three days I am going to be thirty years old. I wanted to spend a lot of this month celebrating and reflecting on this, but things were busier at work than October usually is and I had no time for much of anything. However, leaving that aside this week will be quiet and mostly reserved. I’ve been thinking of life and how simply you can change it. I could still be with the same someone a number of someones, but that doesn’t suit me now. To be honest, I see others making those kinds of commitments and I wonder are we so much in charge of our happiness? I used to think that finding someone and falling in love was rare and magical, something to desperately dream of. But after twelve years of dating, cheating, and heartbreak, I’m not sure I believe in courtly love anymore. Only the inexperience of relationships can lead one to search and hope for love. Now more than anything, love feels like a choice, the driving forces of which outside of loneliness or security I can’t fathom. I don’t say this because I’m bitter, I say it because I really can’t see it any other way. If that is innate cynicism, then I am sad and forlon that I made an environment to change me this way.

In Japanese, koi and ai (love viewed from the perspective of fancy and devotion, respectively) are separate things. My senpai at work once described koi as a feeling/circumtance, whereas ai was an action. Maybe in experience I’ve lost the ability to feel koi, but I’ve learned in practice what ai takes.

Does anyone over the age of thirty fall in love? Why do people marry? Why do people choose to remain with one person? I think the answer must exist, and if I talk to enough people I’ll find out this is just like any other question of human behaviour. I just need more outside influences to help me find peace in myself. It’s not impossible, just too ill-defined a problem space.

Rain. Fields. Cool autumn wind.

The rain in Fukushima is steady but light. If my mother were here, she’d say it’s a good day for ducks. Even though the weather maes taking pictures difficult, the overwhelming power of the countryside buoys my spirits. Rows of vegetables run into crimson and yellow underbrush. Tractors and very plain utility shed dot the landscape. Terraced fields of cur rice build into hillsides, and carpets of wet leaves reflect the occasionally passing car.

The last time I came to the Fuji Lakes it was late 2007, just after my birthday– the last weekend of the year that Koyodai Camp Site was open. I got the entire campground to myself. Fifty-two bungalows and four bathrooms all to myself, so that I may read The Dharma Bums and enjoy the rich reds of Yamanashi in autumn. This year I’m a little early, but there’s already a brisk chill in the air. Last time I visited Asian Kung-fu Generation, this time it’s the soundtracks of Merchant-Ivory and the Kinks. Riding the stuttering Retro Bus to Saiko, the wilted buildings interspersed with renovated roadhouses zip by. The bus stops in the middle of a school trip. Dozens of students clog the streets laughing, pushing, and carrying on.

A trailers buried in weeds rests comfortably in front of a wind-surfing shop, wetsuit gently twisting in the breeze.

I’ve been planning it for a while, but a few days ago I finally decided to set aside the time for a trip to Vietnam. I took a couple days off of work and arranged a flight to the nation occupied so much of the American conscience in the late 1960s. Since our countries are still not the best of friends politically, an application for a tourist visa is required from the sleepy embassy in Moto-Yoyogi. Yesterday I did just that.

(This photograph was taken with my new 8-megapixel camera phone, not too shabby visual quality. I didn’t even have to apply any of my curve and sharpening Photoshop actions.)

I chose Hanoi over Ho Chi Minh (Saigon), as the city experiences 80mm less rain on average in September, though still technically the tail end of the rainy season. I’m just beginning to sift through the information on Wikitravel, but already it seems I have taxi scams, motorbike versus pedestrian, diarrhea, and cobra blood wine all waiting for less than three dollars. Hedging my bets, I’ve already starting digging up travelogues of vegetarian backpackers.

Oh Heart of Asia…

Last weekend, for founder’s day I got a chance to visit with Nami and her husband Taka at their home in Sumiyoshi. Nami and I have been friends since the first day I came to Japan, so she and I have quite a considerable amount of history. We met at the 2002 IWEC workshop in Makuhari. At the time she was studying art at an applied media school while I was starting my internship with ATR.

I’ve always been a fan of her doujinshi (fan published manga), the vibrance and exotic nature of her style always electrifies me.

For our New Year’s party I decided to make some cookies to share. The most fun part was decorating them.

Taka and Nami both wore kimono for the occasion, and I was fortunate enough to be able to try on Taka’s outfit after dinner.

Wearing hakama (divided skirt worn by males on formal occasions) feels pretty cool, actually. I put on my best Final Fantasy-inspired pose. Can’t you just imagine me overcoming all adversity to save mankind and more importantly, the heroine?

[Yes, technically if I was indoors I'd have my wakizashi out instead of my full length sword, since I'd very much be likely to get it stuck in a rafter during a strike, but this just looks cooler and my daimyou wasn't around.]

So all of the blog-synching and photo-adjusting madness is finished. As you’d expect, going through and touching up hundreds of Venetian photographs was as monotonous and stressful as scanning them. I could very well have made many more interesting photographs out of the material with the right adjustments, but in the end it was too repetitive and too much tedium. In any case, a so-so batch of seventy-nine shots are in the gallery.

Here is the equally dry set of journal entries from the second leg of my European trip, mostly for record-keeping purposes:

Ah, Venice
Uneventful
Old, new, and always the music
The islands
Stalling
A little bit of everything
Pensive; tea
Phony
Picky
Recap
In Soviet Russia, beard grows you
In Soviet Russia, security go through you

Tonight I finally finished scanning all of my film from last month’s European vacation. I haven’t run through the dust-and-scratches phase of Venice yet, but Vienna is complete, so now you can check out the photographs. Unfortunately there isn’t a lot of variety in the material, you may very well give up half way through the album. There are a lot of reasons for this, but I still haven’t eaten dinner so a detailed analysis will have to come later. For now, here’s a summary of the blog posts from the first half of the trip.

In Soviet Russia, plane boards you
In Soviet Russia, drink consumes you
In Soviet Russia, subtitle reads you
In Soviet Russia, baggage check you
Vienna smells of autumn
Wet and the colds
Memories
Quest for the Crown

I am back. For those who were out of the loop I was in Austria and Italy for a week. I have something to the order of 20 blog entries and 600+ shots from the trip. It will take me honestly weeks to get through them all, so please be patient. Right now I have to spend the next 144 hours at least focusing on Design Festa 28, which is this weekend. I am in complete ordered chaos as nothing is done, but somehow I will assemble a show with unique and original content. In the meantime, enjoy this corny picture of St. Mark’s Square and keep your eye on the blog.

Ciao.

So once again I have the displeasure of visiting Sheremetyevo International Airport, an establishment of mixed purposes and systems. New Russia wants Western money, but the long lines leading to a single makeshift teller in a terrible mood don’t exactly say, “Добрый день.” (Dobry vechar) The Russian travelers are pushy and impatient, you can set your watch to the number of times you’re cut off five minutes.

Not to mention the entire place is like a cave. I’ve seen rat warrens that are better lit. I’d take a picture but I’d probably have my camera confiscated by one of the many very bored looking guards. It wouldn’t turn out sans flash anyway.

Transfer doesn’t happen without a queue up at a disgruntled teller in a dank, dust-encaked booth. Then you have to go through a single security line with every other transfer flight at the terminal. The monolithic 50s era flip-letter departure board still hovers overhead, unused, while a series of new LG plasma televisions occasionally report departure times in between a maddening loop of the same six 20-second commercials. The shopping is duty-free and bright, but the toilets are overflowing.

Of course I couldn’t come back from Mother Russia without a huge fucking bottle of vodka. This is Russian custom, of course. Virtually every man, woman, and child on my Aeroflot flight from Venice had at least three one-litre bottles of import liquor. The guy sitting next to me was reading a tabloid with the headline, “Dementia time bomb for binge drinkers”. The irony was not lost on me.

So my precious Targus Stowaway appears to be on its last keys, so to speak, and I am relegated to typing one handed, wwith the occasional key studder. I am on an Airbus packed with Russians and dicey ticketing has me required to check-in again at Sheremetyevo before catching my flight to Narita. I can only hope we don’t have any of that circling/deplane on tarmac nonsense again at Moscow, I’ll probably end being seated smack dab in the middle of the plane as it is

So, my first trip to Europe in two years is ending, and as usual very few of my anticipated celebrity meetings did not take place. There were no Von Trapp family singers in Austria, nor sweet long kisses goodbye in the Austrian way by girls named Elsa. I did meet a nice lady named Caroline and her daughter on the train to Venice.

I’m still not sure if people assume I’m European, I think that nearly everyone just wants to assume that I speak whatever language they speak natively. In Venice I spoke Italian to Italian merchants, French to French tourists, German to Austrian tourists, and Russian to Russian flight attendants.

When checking in for my flight to Moscow, a tall, attractive Alitalia clerk looked at my passport and remarked mock disapprovingly, “A name like Ventura and you only speak English?” I felt the blood rush to my face and managed a half tongue-in-cheek retort that I did in fact speak a little Italian. If I was James Bond the response would have been in Italian and suggest that she could perhaps help me work on native tongue.

Actually, most of my success seemed to come with French elementary school girls. In addition to my hangman partners yesterday morning, today I got into a face-making match on the vaporetto with another little French girl, and later told her mother which station the airport bus was at and how to find it.

Anyway, I’ve veered off into another personal diatribe. The issue here is what I bought for myself: two small form factor books from the MAK, two John Lennon buttons, and a Beatles badge for my jeans jacket. That’s all. Tomorrow I will buy a couple bottles of wine at the Piazzale Roma Coop and squish them in my rucksack, but they’re consumables so they don’t count. As for the books, they both have at least one-time utility… one is on art nouveau pattern samples, the other on an avant garde rural art installation in the 1970s. To balance out the book purchases, however, I think I will recycle/sell a couple novels I currently have at home with low reread value. Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man comes to mind. I had such high hopes but it really let me down. Too preachy, too Catholic. ::grin::

So net material possessions on this trip will come down to the badge and buttons, but they are meant for my jacket so household-wise are virtually negligible. As they say, take only photographs, leave only footprints. Speaking of which, the shot breakdown for the trip is ready.

tmax 36×3, 108
presto 36×2, 72
centuria 4 27×3, 81
centuria 2 27×3, 81
superia 24×1, 24
film 366

5d 261

Total 12 rolls, 627 shots, 125.4 / day

I already have ten rolls of developed and unscanned film from October raves, so with this incredible amount of material I will very easily be busy through the end of November and very likely early December getting through it all. I can’t even start though until after Design Festa is over (no doubt this post will also go up after the fact). To be honest, I think that bringing twenty rolls of film was a bit of an overkill. I didn’t want to run out but in the end some of it just is making unnecessary trips through crummy Russian x-ray machines. Though I did want to get a good breadth of lighting conditions and lens combinations for the Venetian architecture, in the end I did get a little sick of it. I should have been doing more of that original interpretation I was talking about earlier, but the fatigue and pressure to see stuff kind of sapped the creative energy from me a bit. Though you’ll probably see less than twenty percent of the shots from this trip, upwards of seventy percent or so look the same. Different buildings, different exposure values, same viewpoints and impact. This was a good lesson in volume, though. I think this is the first time I’ve ever gotten sick of taking pictures in a single thematic session.

Oh I forgot to mention that I did buy a piece of clothing, a scarf in Vienna but that was for utility as it was cold and I don’t know where my other scarf is. Additionally, I’m down a sock that I think the guy I met on the train to Venice wound up with.

So Saturday evening has come and my European tour draws to a close. It feels like I’ve done a fair amount more writing than usual, but maybe that’s just the scale of the trip. As usual I’m under budget, but I really haven’t done anything extravagant so I guess that makes sense. The motivation to eat in a restaurant with courses is rather low when traveling alone. Still, it is my last night in Europe, so I think I’ll eat at the restaurant run by the hotel owner’s husband. I just hope I can eat everything I’m given. Traditionally I’ve been more of the “eat often with smaller portions” kind of person. The frequency is due to my metabolism, and the portion size is probably just habit from years of being frugal. In the end, I think it’s healthier this way, anyway. Eating a lot at once causes significant discomfort, which one could say is my body’s way of telling me I don’t need anymore.

Anyway, I’m a customer not a guest at a family’s house, so I suppose it’s not a crime if I can’t eat everything I’m given, especially if I don’t decide the portion size.

I also hate buying non-consumable (food) products. My home is only so big, and I don’t like having stuff that I don’t use. It feels wasteful, it collects dust, and it’s a pain when moving. Technology I can forgive because I make heavy use of everything I own photography related. Music is best downloaded so plastic CD cases don’t have to be thrown away. Clothes I do not buy unless something in my small wardrobe wears out to the point of being unusable (and sometimes not even then). So I guess the biggest problem I have it books. I love reading, I love having books for reference. However, books are heavy, they take up a lot of space, and chances are they only get touched once a year if it all. this drives me mad. if I wasn’t so fanatical about a lean lifestyle, I’d probably have tons of books. I have the disposable income, and I have a burning desire to learn and digest media for reference. Only the common sense that I don’t have any more free time to read keeps me in check.

But that’s my problem. I go abroad now and I judge. I judge instinctively, without though, just looking at appearances or quickly estimating the situation. Fake, processed, fat, indulgent. No thanks, I’ll pass.

I wonder, could I do it again. Could I rip up roots and start in something completely different in a whole new atmosphere? Could I be happy like I am now in Japan? Is Japan my place because it really does fit me? Or did I just decide that it did, and change myself to fit it, because I was twenty-two, felt ostracized from the society I spent twenty-one years in and needed an identity so bad it burned?

It makes me wonder, and I think this is a very important issue in my life. Because it’s going to dictate what I do with my adulthood, who I choose to share it with. And most importantly, whether or not I’m fake.

I suppose it’s just natural to be thoughtful on a trip alone. No one to talk to, no one to balance plans or “must-see” lists with. Also, my detox from work may have something to do with it. For the longest time I had to turn off so many normal levels of higher-order thought, like being pensive. I had to strip down my functions as a human being so I could do the one thing that mattered at the time: finish the project.

Anyway, now it’s early Saturday morning, my last day in Europe, and a pretty steady rain is falling outside my window into the canal. I was hoping that today the weather would clear up, at least for four hours or so midday, so I could use some of the barely touched Centuria stock I’ve brought with me. I only have one roll of black and white left, and then it’s all color. That’s pretty much been the weather this trip, though.

I wonder a lot about being sure of things, decisions I make in life. The more experience I accumulate and the older I get, the harder it seems to make decisions on a whim, impulsively. There’s always some bit of “oh I remember having something before that reminds me of that, and I didn’t really care for it, it’s not me.” Then you just brush it off, cull it away, and don’t give it any more thought, choosing something that looks more familiar or closer to your comfort zone. I think a good microcosm of this general problem is soft drinks. Every time I go to a different country they have different soft drinks. Sure, all countries may have some form of tea, but the ingredients and flavor vary wildly. There was a time when the only tea I knew was the iced tea with lemon and sugar that my grandmother made on holidays. So I came from a family of black tea; sugared, lemon. Ok, I knew what that was. Then the first time I met Melia for a date, we met on The Corner. I forget the name of the place but that tea place near Greenskeeper. She ordered a cold green tea with ice. I thought it was the craziest thing, and trying it absolutely hated it. It was so different from Lipton’s, lemon, and sugar. It was just… thin, slightly bitter, austere.

Then on a completely unrelated branch of my academic life I went to Japan, and of course everyone drank cold green tea there, in plastic bottles nonetheless, and I had to adapt. This was two years from when I first met Melia, and I think my mind was a lot more open to trying new things then. I mean, I was in Japan, out of the country for the first time, I had a passport, everything was new. And a girl I had a crush on swore by it, so truthfully my love affair with Itoen began with one for a woman. But now I can’t even think about not drinking sugarless tea cold. Sencha, bancha, mugicha, sobacha, jasmine… the list goes on and on. Pure, additive-free simplicity. And now in these last five years, every time I’ve gone abroad and found another convenience store or market filled with some semblance of green tea reconstituted with a ton of heavily processed sugar, it just breaks my heart. I just see a bottle with a flavoring written on it, “Peach tea”, and I cringe. Because I know it has so little to do with the actual fruit and so much with syrup and red six.

So I can’t be this tired. It’s just not possible. I worked four hundred hours in a month, over eight weeks without a day off and now I can barely keep my eyes open after being awake for only eleven hours. Am I really this out of shape?

No, I won’t believe that. I think we’ve just a number of factors colluding against me here. First, though I’m not normally susceptible to jet lag, I may be feeling it a little this time around. Second, I have technically had a cold all week, I’m just too stubborn to admit it and let it ruin my vacation. Third, I have been walking virtually nonstop and carrying around fifteen+ pounds of gear suspended on a single shoulder all week. Fourth, not by choice, but I’m eating a lot more meat this week. A LOT more. I’ve probably had more pork in the last four days than I’ve had all year. I am so not kidding. But, the Europeans love their buta (pig), be it bratwurst or prosciutto. The upshot here is I just don’t have the enzymes to break this stuff down anymore, so that takes energy, and I haven’t had natto, or fish, or tsukemono all week. Think about giving your Ferrari high-octane jet fuel and then all the sudden dumping regular in the tank.

So, I guess it’s not entirely inconceivable that I could be getting a little more run down than usual. I mean, it’s not like I’ve overweight or never do any aerobic exercise or anything. Still, I’m going to have to ganbare and have dinner tonight in an actual restaurant. I’m seriously worried though if I can handle the portions, though. I don’t want to be wasteful or offend. The other day I went to a Greek restaurant in Vienna and I couldn’t even finish my tzatziki, it’s just too much heavy stuff for a healthy man to finish (unless your Michael Phelps, I guess).

I got off track from my original topic, though. The key is that today was much more well balanced than yesterday. Admittedly I didn’t hit so many Frommer’s landmarks, but geographically and sociologically, I covered a much wider swath of the island.

In the morning as I said, I first took the vaporetto to San Michele and the cemetery. Then I continued on to Murano, where I passed about three hundred shops selling the same glassware. More importantly I got some photographs of a slightly different part of the city, architecturally. Then I took a string of vaporetto and made it all the way out to the other side of Venice in particular La Giudecca. There are not many shops there at all, mostly just blocks of Venetian apartments. Again, the buildings and the streets have a slightly different layout, so that was interesting to compare. Just as all practical ambient light disappeared I finished another roll of film and walked past the Venice Hilton, which to be honest is quite an eyesore, not fitting in at all with the rest of the island. The fact it occupies a ridiculously large piece of land doesn’t help either.

On the chain of vaporetti back to San Toma, I played hangman with some gap-toothed, little French girls. I could guess and understand the words they chose, but I realized I don’t know my French alphabet. I could guess the letter ‘r’, but I couldn’t properly pronounce it. I tried saying it and the little girl with glasses, she said “pardon?” in French, it just about killed me. They were sitting up on top of the life raft compartment by the window, but the younger one wasn’t tall enough to climb up completely, so I had to keep giving her butt a shove so she could climb up on the ledge every time they switched positions to draw on the window. After we got off the boat we cast glances at each other through the crowd, I mean we didn’t like say goodbye or anything, but it was a strange, mixed-up kind of feeling.

A little bit of everything, not a bad day I guess.

After I had a glass of chianti and a pantina at the bar around the corner, I came back to the hotel to go up to my room. I got my key from the lady just fine, but when I started to ask her what time the restaurant opened, I realized half-way through the sentence that I forgot what the word for “time” was in Italian. She told me but I was still thrown off by having forgotten the word for time that I wasn’t ready to parse what she had to say. I stood there with a blank look on my face until with her eternally heavy-lidded eyes stated, “seven o’clock.” I blushed and managed an embarrassed grazie before scuttling off to my room. For the most part I did really well today though, really. French and Italian.

[Checking the "City time" app in my Visor, I noticed that it is almost two-thiry a.m. Tokyo time right now...further proof to the fact that I may very well be still jet-lagged! I have no idea what's going to happen when I get back on Monday, though. Somehow I doubt I'll just break even on the whole process.]