The Rafatola
Spontaneous, imaginative brilliance. There's a plan being hatched to dye the fountain in Trafalgar Square red. Boxes of red dye have been ordered. This will be followed by a procession of 10,000 Liverpool fans from central London out to Chelsea. At the front of the procession they will be carrying the "Rafatola."
Mick, if you're reading, I know you'll appreciate this! Pure class.
As I was saying to Pat earlier, before Liverpool's Champions League semi-final against Chelsea tonight, I feel as apathetic as a dead trout. As apathetic as a bag of sand.
Chelsea inspire nothing. They've spent hundreds of millions of a Russian gangster's money on top footballing mercenaries from all over the world and now, surprise surprise, they're starting to win things. I don't care.
At least I can despise Manchester United. Or admire Arsenal. Or sense from a distance the local rivalry with Everton (though it means little to me). For Chelsea, there's nothing. I don't hate cockneys. I don't see Abramovitch as any more dodgy than any other Russian gangster. I don't mind Mourinho and his Portugeese Cockney wide-boy routine. I look out for Damien Duff's form and, from a technical perspective, enjoy the defensive brilliance of Carvalho. In fact, I admire a lot of Chelsea's football. Dispassionately. But I have no history with this team with no history.
At most, all they can prove is the bleeding obvious: with enough money, you can buy whatever can be bought. The satisfaction for an honest, intelligent Chelsea fan when they do inevitably start winning trophies can only be comparable to the satisfaction I get from putting 120 yen in a vending machine and winning a cup of coffee.
Likewise, the disappointment of losing to them is like the disappointment of not winning a cup of coffee if you don't put 120 yen into the machine.
I promise to be more enthusiastic when we play Milan in the final.
The slow ritual of packing.
Thursday night. Raingear. Torch. Cooker. Cup. Tea. Sun protection. Sunglasses. Map of Tanzawa. Photocopies of trail descriptions. Two water bottles. Old Uniqlo fleece. Spats. Hiking pole. Rucksack cover. Electronic dictionary. Pens. Music. Insect repellent. The camera and the hat. Old friends. The pleasure of unrushed, loving preparation. Extensions of the self. The plan becoming real.
The smile of the weather god.
Saturday morning on the Odakyu Line again. My Odakyu Line. Not a crowded weekday commuter hell. A route to happiness. Just after 6am. Youngsters, still well behaved, going home from the night before. Oldsters going to the work, others to the mountains. Sunshine coming in the train windows. Most getting off at Sagamiono, leaving the train and the ones that are left to go on to the mountains. A glance outside. Sun alone is not enough. The skies must be cloudless, too. And they are.
Putting in the hours
At the Okura bus terminus groups of lively old folks are doing stretching exercises. At any given time, Okura must have the highest population density of middle-aged and elderly stretchers in the world. To the mountain. Idiot's ridge. The steps. Quick Tanzawa rising. Already the surrounding urban world in view. Beyond the forest layer. Neverending steps. The engine of the body beginning to purr. Water. Chocolate. Sunglasses. Photos. A stream of friendly hellos, and the ones who say nothing. The spirits rising with the sun. Fuji suddenly appearing. Putting in the hours. Doing the work.
The quiet exhilaration of the peak
And then the work is done. The peak. Fuji to the South, majestic. Old men setting up tripods. Monks chanting sutras. Another bustling mountain hut. Hikers cooking up lunch. Photos, the inner happiness of a small but uncompromised achievement, and the hunger of a farmer coming in at lunchtime from the fields.
Ruling the world
A kingdom below you, stretching out before your eyes. A belly full. Energy levels restored. A camera half-full of new memories. Exercising the body and the mind. No computer screens or soulless offices anywhere. A return to your proper position in the healing, revitalizing and benign dominion of the much maligned sun. Memories of childhood, when you ruled the world.
The first signs of decline
Back into the forest layer. A darkening and cooling of the world. The first strains on the legs. Twinges of pain from old injuries. A mind beginning to wander. First lapses in concentration. The waning time. A time to avoid mistakes.
Enough
Late afternoon. Body tired. Forests no longer inspiring. Hunger back again. The thought that comes to me every time: "I can't wait to get off this fucking mountain."
The satisfaction of return to the place you wanted to leave
At the Okura bus terminal, they're stretching again. Satisfaction and winding down. The end of another day in the mountains. The bus ride out, pleasant as ever. A time for choosing your music. The happiness of going home.
Another picture of sunlit flora.
You have to work hard to get there, but it's always worth it. Does the peak of Tonodake have the second best view in Japan?
Hikers doing a band photo on another beautiful day in Tanzawa.
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Ojisan getting stuck into some serious group photography.
Blue skies and cherry blossoms.
Photos in the gallery.
I've talked about wanting to kill Junichi Inamoto once before. Well, the murderous intent is back. The Premiership season draws to a close. Liverpool are involved. Sky Perfect TV has even been showing Liverpool games. All nice.
Enter my pudgy nemesis.
Two body blows.
One, he declares himself fit and off the pies.
Two, he returns from a loan spell at the prestigious Cardiff City club to warm the bench of the even more prestigious West Bromwich Albion club. Yes, that's sarcasm. Prestige, Cardiff City and WBA have never appeared in the same sentence before.
Seeing Junichi back in the Premiership--albeit motionless on the WBA bench--Sky Perfect TV have decided to disrespect the intelligence of the Japanese football viewing public and start broadcasting WBA games again.
In its own right, broadcasting WBA games to a mass audience is just wrong. At the very least, it should come with a warning to viewers.
In the context of pulling Liverpool games to make room for them, it's a motive for murder.
Junichi, our paths cross again. I am the unwitting street, and you are leaving Paula Radcliffe.
Nobody doubts Japan is ready to renounce pacifism. Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution is gradually being eroded, and opinion polls suggest its days are numbered. Politicians including Koizumi are already calling the SDF what it actually is--an army.
But how do we interpret Japan's move to the right? Is it a "dangerous reawakening of Japan's martial instincts" or "the emergence of a pragmatic new realism that is natural and long-overdue"?
This article in The National Interest answers that question convincingly. Timely piece too. Recommended reading for indignant, intransigent nationalists all over Asia, especially ones with positions of power and those thinking of setting fire to themselves outside embassies.
This Mainichi article about the rise of spyware in Japan got me thinking about practicalities and ethics.
Practicalities first. I just scanned my computer with Ad-aware and found 64 different items spying on me without my knowledge. And I thought I ran a tight ship here.
Now ethics. No matter where you are, it's pretty much illegal to install monitoring software on computers you don't own. I think we'd all agree that that's right.
The problem arises when it comes to computers you do own. As it stands now, it's okay to install monitoring software on computers you own.
This means, of course, that it's in effect legal for companies to spy on their employees.
I don't know about you, but that strikes me as being a bit too 1984. The law seems to make sense, if you view a workplace computer merely as an item of property belonging to its owner.
But the situation is a bit more complex than that. A computer used in the workplace could as easily be seen as an extension of the identity of its main user, regardless of who has the property rights. Especially when so many of us spend our working lives joined at the hip to one of these machines.
And if you look at it that way, allowing companies to install monitoring software on it is a blatant violation of privacy.
There's also the breach of trust aspect. As it stands, companies don't even have to inform their employees that they are/could be using spyware to monitor their computer activities.
I'd be reluctantly willing to accept companies being allowed to spy on their workers if they had a duty to make it known they were doing so. The more dubious the right, the more obvious the need to balance it with responsibilities.
But the more respectful, more humane, and thus clearly more productive and efficient way of approaching it would be to see the real picture: An employee's computer is more an inviolable extension of an employee's self than a piece of property of a corporation.
This tech-oriented Wikipedia description really focuses on the merits of the PDF file format.
Theoretically, the portable document format is a great unifier: with PDF, your document looks the same no matter what software, hardware and OS were used to make it or are used to view it. Compared to flash but unpredictable HTML, the PDF format is dour, dependable consistency.
Only thing is, because this consistency takes soooooooo much time and memory to generate, using PDF always feels like you've injected yourself with instant paralysis. PDF is the rigor mortis of file formats. And most of the time it isn't even necessary. Format consistency hardly ever matters that much for screen viewing. Ninety-five percent of the time, we just want the info quickly.
And if the information superhighway has an equivalent to road rage, it's when a PDF granny-mobile from the days before the motor engine plants itself in front of your souped-up, highspeed broadband Internet browsing mean-machine and starts to congeal. Paralysis. Relapse to dark habits of dial-up days. Things not moving anymore. The desire to kick something that is not alive, even though you know you'll hurt your foot. I get PDF rage every day at work. I'll be honest with you: I hate PDF, I hate that people don't understand what it's for, when it's needed and why it's mostly not.
So it was with disappointment that I read this Economist article (obviously written before the news broke of Adobe's merger with Macromedia), which details a brilliant new invention that unfortunately means PDFs will be clogging up our roads and arteries for some time to come.
Normally matter-of-fact Nippon Goro Goro couldn't contain the amusement. In a bid to clean up the image of Kabukicho, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government has erected a statue of Freddy Mercury.
I don't really expect anyone reading this to be able to answer this question for me, but you never know. It's worth a try. Is planning to climb Oku-Shiranesan (2578m, Nikko National Park) in early May unrealistic?
The best articles show you unexamined contradictions within your own thinking. Take me. I view depression as a disease, but on some level I also buy all of the following: (1) depression gives you greater insight into the world; (2) depression means you're not a heartless bastard; (3) depression makes you more creative; and (4) depression is not something like poverty that can be eradicated. (Not sure I ever thought depression gets you chicks, though.)
This article in the New York Times Magazine is a kind of cultural history of how the West has viewed depression. It forces you to take a stand. Is depression a disease that should be eliminated or an intrinsic, valuable part of the human condition?
Peter D. Kramer (NYT Magazine): There's Nothing Deep About Depression
Went to see a film yesterday in Waseda Shochiku Cinema called "The Legend of the Weeping Camel." It's about Mongolian herders in the Gobi desert and their camels.
If a camel rejects her newborn offspring after a traumatic birth, refusing to allow it to suckle, the herders perform a ritual to fix the situation. A local musician is summoned. He straps the Mongolian equivalent of the fiddle to the camel's back, and then takes it off and plays a traditional lament, the herders chanting along. It seems designed to sooth the camel. At the same time, another herder brings the baby camel to the mother, who not only finally accepts it, but also starts weeping.
The alternative "cruel to Iraq to be kind to the world" long-term view of the "preemptive war" on Iraq: The US is no longer a force for peace and world order and must fail in Iraq so that we do not return to the laws of the jungle, says Karel Von Wolferen.
Today is the 16th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster. If you feel like crying, read this (and the comments).
In an otherwise meandering article, Gregory Clark, writing in the Japan Times, asks an interesting question about Japan's international relations.
Clark says Tokyo has been insensitive to its Asian neighbours, and that claims that it has truly apologized are "meaningless." Then he wonders why Japan continues to damage its own diplomatic position in the region.
Even allowing for the emotionalism and ad hoc manner in which Japan conducts much of its diplomacy, it is hard to believe that Tokyo wants deliberately to antagonize its neighbors. Some other factor must be involved, and I suggest that deep down it goes back to Japan's largely unstated view of itself as a victim of obstinacy and insensitivity from others.
Japan as victim, he continues, is a justifiable position to partially explain World War II and Japan's advance into Asia. But if Japan is a victim, it is a victim of the West, not China or South Korea.
Then he asks the key question:
But there is one puzzle in all this: Why don't Japan's conservatives and rightwingers take out their postwar resentments more on the West, the U.S. especially, rather than on Asian neighbors?
Gregory Clark (Japan Times): Shedding Imposed War Guilt
The Juve ultras displaying something of a sense of humour. Pity they couldn't leave it at that.
In the stressful, ridiculous, embarrassing, clearly inexplicable, and sadly vicarious existence of a rational person who suffers the addiction of attaching crazy importance to a meaningless distraction, nights like that are torture, then disbelief, then joy. Madness is an abstraction. In reality, it's just the normal condition of one human being. And every form of it has its own rewards.
The best banner in the Liverpool end? "Make us dream."
Tonight Liverpool play Juventus in Turin. Turin and its surrounding provinces have banned the sale of alcohol for 48 hours. Liverpool supporters have been advised not to travel independently to the game, not to travel in small groups, not to wear Liverpool colours, and not to use taxis to travel to the stadium. The Italian police have sent in an undercover special police unit to help deal with possible crowd violence. Last night in Milan, thugs fired flares -- how did they get flares into the stadium in the first place? -- and other missiles from the terraces. AC Milan's goalkeeper suffered burns when a flare hit him on the shoulder. He was lucky. The game was abandoned and trouble erupted in Milan in the aftermath. This followed one of the worst weekends of fan violence in Italian football history.
As it was in the dark days of Heysel, football is out of control again. I fear for the Liverpool fans in Turin tonight. This time it's an Italian problem. Regardless of what happens tonight, it's time for UEFA to be brave, accept the resulting loss in revenue, and impose a blanket ban on participation of Italian clubs in European competitions. The whole culture and organizational structure of Italian football needs to be changed.
I grew up practically on the runways of Dublin Airport. The windows in my house were constantly resonating with the airplanes overhead. Visitors were often awake all night, while my family slept soundly. On the football pitches I used on Saturday mornings, the landing planes sometimes flew so close their tailstream would knock you over, or you would duck for fear of them actually hitting you. I also spent large parts of my youth up to no good around the airport, and from my experiences as a young loiterer, this news doesn't surprise me. Be ready for "vigorous" security checking the next time you fly into Dublin. I wonder if it also means they'll stop losing my luggage.
Racism is never black and white. It's the watery colors of human weakness: blinkered equivocation, fear of the unknown, insane logic, tribal self-righteousness that sees only wrongs done against you, the sick chameleon of different voices for different audiences, beating the drum more loudly when sensing support from the rats coming crawling out from the dark corners, glib "jokes," the sniggers of tribal bonding, and the weak, silent consent of the ones who should know better.
After their great work last week in attempting to apologize to Juventus fans for the Heysel Stadium disaster in which 39 Juventus fans lost their lives, the tribe over at Red and White Kop (RAWK) let themselves down badly yesterday. And they don't even know.
It started from nothing. One forum member created a thread wondering why local rivals Everton were producing quality young players but Liverpool were not. A completely innocuous thread.
Except the forum member's username was Chinese Red.
The thread continued with some long-term members informatively explaining naiveties in Chinese Red's thinking about the youth development system. That's why I read RAWK: there's a wealth of well-informed people.
Then enter Spartacus. Spartacus is RAWK staff, so you'd expect her to be one of the well-informed. Her forum tagline is "I dragged Rafa into the bar" (Rafa being Liverpool's Spanish manager Rafael Benitez) and she's posted over 10,000 times. She's a forum heavyweight. As RAWK staff, she was partly responsible for creating the forum guidelines, which don't include warnings about racism (they should), but at least ask people not to make overt personal attacks on other members.
She must have forgotten the guidelines, because her comment is clearly an overt personal attack.
"Local players and local fans only - that's what we need, where are you from Chinese Red?"
When is a question not a question, you ask? And if so, why put it in question form?
Chinese Red, to his/her credit, sidesteps the nasty ad hominem and returns to the substance of the post, adding "so who cares where I'm from?" at the end.
But the Pied Piper of local ignorance has already started to play, and is becoming more and more confident in the sound of her own ugly tune.
Her response is filled with the false bravado of the ignorant:
"Me, local players and local fans. So you're from?”
And out come the rats. The jokes begin, Spartacus leading the way. Maybe Chinese Red should move his family over to Liverpool and get them a job in the local chippy, she suggests.
Because we all know, all Chinese people only work in Chinese take-aways and chip shops. Just like all Pakistanis run corner shops, all Irish are drunks and all Liverpudlians are thieves. Oh, wait, can't say that last one. It might offend Spartacus.
The sniggering begins. Some of the other RAWK staff post on the thread, none of them saying anything about the attack on Chinese Red.
Then, though it hardly seems possible, it gets even more disgusting. An Australian, obviously a friend of Spartacus, tries to curry favour with the racist with a "But what about me?"
Her response is predictable.
"Local people and people from down under—that's about it."
This is the "I hate all foreigners...but you're not a foreigner, you're my friend" school of xenophobia. We see that one a lot in Japan.
All true racism comes in shades. The more different the race, the worse they are. We all know that. We should know when Spartacus says she wants local fans only, she doesn't mean she doesn't want Australian fans. No, no. Of course not. And she certainly doesn't have anything against Spanish involvement in Liverpool FC. Rafa is the saviour, don't you know? In fact, when you think about it, Liverpool's successful teams have always contained at least as many non-locals as locals. No, why can't you understand the logic? It's simple. She just means those dirty Chinks, coming around trying to sound intelligent on her forum.
Thanks Spartacus. Have a good time in Turin, and if Liverpool fans are attacked over there, you should be able to find it in yourself to understand why.
Sarushima, off the coast of the Miura Peninsula at Yokosuka.
A haven for the U.S. military.
That didn't escape the concretization of Japan.
On the eve of Liverpool's highest profile game in years, I have to say I don't know so much about Juventus or Italian football in general, because I don't like the Italian style of play.
On paper, Juventus look formidable. Buffon is apparently the best goalkeeper in the world. Nedved is a former European player of the year. Cannavaro is called by some the best central defender in the world. Zambrotta is considered the best left-back. Del Piero, well we all know about him. Same applies for Trezeguet. Emerson is the captain of Brazil. Abrahimovitch is considered one of the world's best strikers. Manager Capello has seen and done it all before. And Juventus are currently joint-top of the Italian league.
On paper, we're bunched.
I'm going to agree with the conventional wisdom on this game: Liverpool need to avoid conceding any goals in the first leg. I'd add one thing I haven't seen mentioned on Red and White Kop or elsewhere: we desperately need to avoid injury in the first leg, especially of central players, be they in defense, midfield or attack. We have no cover.
If the Man. Utd/AC Milan game was a harbinger for tonight's encounter, the message it brings is one of doom. AC Milan laughed at Man. Utd. Their defense was almost rock solid (apart from one chance from Fortune in the first leg and one from Giggs in the second). And United, whatever else they might be, are not a team who can't create chances.
We got the draw we didn't want and things look bad. If we get a hiding over two legs, not many non-Liverpool fans would be surprised.
But.
We're going to make one or two chances, especially at Anfield. Here's hoping those chances fall to Garcia, Riise, Gerrard, or Biscan (yes, you're not reading that wrong).
There are some worries about Hyppia's confidence coming into this big game. I wouldn't worry about it. I think Hyppia will do a job on the big smiling Swede, leaving Carragher to deal with Del Piero and the rest of us hoping Trezeguet never gets onto the pitch.
This is a big chance for Baros up front. Despite his enthusiasm and ability to get past defenders, I'm not convinced that he's much of a striker at all, but tonight is his big chance to shine like he did at Euro 2004.
I do have faith in Benitez, though, who certainly won't be daunted by the occasion. Expect Liverpool to play a very tight game tonight and Juventus to do the same. It's going to be low scoring and possibly boring, with either team winning by the odd goal, or more likely a 1-1 draw.
Smicer to start, Garcia to score, Liverpool to go out bravely over two legs, AC Milan to win the tournament.
Report on a lecture by a US historical geographer on the "creation" of the Japanese Alps and the distinct characteristics of Japanese alpinism and travel to the mountains.
I was particularly taken with talk of how Walter Westin's introduction of Western concepts of Alpinism has caused a transition from traditional Japanese worship of famous places (名所) to a more modern appreciation of remote places with beautiful scenery (風景).
Luckily, this transition isn't happening as fast as the historical geographer believes. Yesterday was a perfect example. I started off with 風景 on the ridge of Myojingatake and then had to pass through the town of Hakone-Yumoto, surely one of Japan's most famous 名所, on my way home. Beautiful and remote Myojingatake was all mine but empire of tackiness Hakone-Yumoto was crammed. There wasn't even a table to be had at the Cafe St. Moritz!
Call me a snob, but I'm all for 名所 as places to keep the hordes occupied and away from the real beauty of Japan.
Billmon is back writing his own sentences.
"We're fortunate, I guess, that the only life at stake in this particular kangaroo court was that of poor Terri Schiavo. For better or worse, good or evil, her time on this earth is over. But when I think of the thousands, or even millions, of lives that could ride on the next big trial-by-media -- when the topic could be something as potentially apocalyptic as war with North Korea or rapid climate change or the copyright laws governing the music industry (I'm kidding! I'm kidding!) -- I do get worried. Because right now, the corporate media (and the dumbed-down culture they've helped create) are looking more and more like the intellectual equivalent of Dr. Kevorkian. And any of us -- or all of us - could be their next patient."
The fakeness of the coverage of the Terry Schiavo story--that never should have been a story--was nothing short of hideous. Billmon talks about the dumb news hosts who now think they know more than doctors. But what about all the fake concern? If one thing was clear, it was that none of these people pretending to care about Terry Schiavo gave a shit.
TV is an evil, vain medium for news reporting. If we were sane, we'd ban TV news. CNN and now even the BBC advertise their news shows with exactly the same techniques--even the same deep, booming voices first heard as the voices of God or the prophets in old Charlton Heston epics--used to advertise Hollywood blockbusters like Armageddon and that one about the wave.
And if TV news is sold as Hollywood movies, the people appearing in it are going to start thinking of themselves as Hollywood stars. Bafflingly, most people seem to want to be stars (except poor old Prince Charles and fair play to the man--the most refreshing thing I've seen on TV for years).
So interest groups like the US religious right can find loads of wannabes bending over for them for the chance to become part of the great cheesy "human interest" blockbusters they choose to produce.
"Being Terry Shiavo," produced by the religious right (so big they are above the law), directed by CNN (happy to go along for the ride), and starring the biggest whores of the lot (the chosen ones, or the only ones who'd agree to overact in something this bad).
The Schiavo flick was so awful, it made Armageddon and that other one about the wave look good. Both of them were just more sincere. "Debbie Does Dallas" was more sincere. The promotional video I'm currently working on for a Japanese septic tank company is more sincere.
I stopped watching TV news last November, but started again sometime this month. That was a mistake.
