This one requires comment. Reason too if you like, but not necessary. After nearly deciding Miller's Crossing, I have to say Mean Streets.
That doesn't mean I don't appreciate, in no particular order, Goodfellas, the Godfather in all its parts, Once Upon a Time in America, Casino, and so many others (and the Sopranos). It's rare, but this time I'm asking for participation. And remember, Francis of Assisi "had it all down."
"Beginning to cloud over" takes on real meaning at 3,000 metres.
Clouds.
And more clouds.
Watching the sun set.
Kitadake is famous for its alpine flowers.
Okay, the title is gratuitous sensationalism, but what an earthquake that was today.
As it struck, I was in the subway, at Hon-Komagome Station on the Namboku Line. I was in the middle of a thwarted quest to buy a touring bike.
I was talking to the people with me when it happened. And what I saw (and heard) makes today's earthquake the scariest I have ever experienced.
You know those big round poles that hold up the subway system? The ones that measure about a metre in diameter.
I saw one of them sway almost 45 degrees as the earth groaned. I was waiting for the roof to fall. I thought the ground levels were going to collapse down onto us, crushing everyone who happened to be in the subway. You're not supposed to feel earthquakes so much when you're down below.
I saw Japanese people, normally far too calm in earthquakes (and remember most of them were not alive in 1923), visibly panicked and perturbed.
The trains of Tokyo and the whole Kanto region stopped for just under two hours. They were probably checking for damaged lines. Many waited patiently, but the taximen also made a lot of money. The buses looked like New Delhi buses without the chickens. Saturday was interrupted, and I never got to buy my bike.
They can come at any time, and if they're big enough, a lot of us are going to die.
That, my friends, was a serious earthquake.
A "vulture obsession" is how the Salon.com writer described people's fascination with the 1996 Everest disaster in his review of Anatoli Boukreev's The Climb.
Three books on the topic later—Seattle journalist and climber Jon Krakauer's brilliantly-written account Into Thin Air, late Russian high-altitude specialist Boukreev's largely convincing defense of his actions as a paid guide on the mountain that year in The Climb, and Texas pathologist and climbing client Beck Weather's personal story of how Everest and mountain climbing disfigured him, ruined his career and nearly destroyed his family in Left for Dead—this vulture has had his fill.
There are two more books out there, one by one of the doctors and the other by Danish climbing client Lene Gammelgard, not to mention climber and filmmaker David Breasshear's famous IMAX film—but I've had enough.
Any distant thoughts I had of climbing Everest have been—for the most part—put in their rightful place in exile by reading these books.
The huge cost, the cruel, not-meant-for-humans world of the Death Zone above 8,000 metres, the vicious, vicious weather patterns of a peak as high as the cruising altitude of a jet airplane.
The need to develop technical climbing skills and to condition yourself through years of training and practice, the nerve-wracking walk across the hundreds of flimsy, tied-together steel ladders of the Khumbu Icefall in your crampons, praying you don't fall to your death into a crevasse or that a serac doesn't suddenly fall and crush you.
The real danger of sliding to your death from the icy Lhotse Face, the passing of the unburied, dismembered, frozen corpses of previous dreamers along the way, all being politely ushered down and away from the mountain's realm with the slow flow of the glacier, the exacerbation of the slightest sicknesses and injuries the higher you go, the inability to breathe or to heal.
The unimaginably fierce winds of the barren South Col, the technical challenge of getting up (and down) the Hillary Step when you have nothing left, the sheer vertical drops on either side of the Summit Ridge, the nagging worries about time and getting stuck coming down in the dark with no oxygen left. The concern that the weather will turn.
The constant fear of frostbite claiming parts of your body, the real likelihood of freezing to death, the deadly risk of sudden onset of high altitude cardio or pulmonary edema, the likely loss of your mental faculties to hypoxia and the risk of not knowing what you will do as a consequence, the danger you just won't have enough energy left to get back down, and that greatest of levellers, the biggest killer of all on the mountain—avalanches.
Yep, I feel like I've climbed it three times already and it wasn't fun. Fascinating, yes. But even the arduous, unpredictable landscape of the normal, functioning human relationship has to be more welcoming. Doesn't it?
Obsession? Most definitely. The drive that comes from a void. Vulture obsession? I don't think so. It strikes me that the one thing Krakauer, Boukreev, Weathers, their readers, this writer, and anyone who seriously considers Everest have in common is much less macabre—but much more of a problem. Whatever the degree, it's called escapism, fear of measuring out your life in coffee spoons, or to put it more bluntly—social dysfunctionality.
I'm thinking of doing a bicycle tour this summer.
That would mean buying a decent bike, panniers, a bag to carry the bike on the train, whatever other gear is necessary, choosing a place to go in Japan, and all the rest.
Any suggestions as to how to prepare for a bicycle touring holiday (in Japan) would be really welcome.
The main highway of the South Alps.
A fat bird on the Kitadake shoulder.
A barrel of water.
An old man.
And another shot of yesterday's mountain.
Not sure whether this is Senjyogatake or Kaikomagatake, but whichever it is, it's a pretty stunning mountain.
I got very cold standing around on the exposed shoulder of Kitadake at 3,000 metres high waiting to take this picture. As I was waiting around sipping some whisky to stay warm, I thought of Mitsuaki Iwago, the famous and incredibly humble Japanese wildlife photographer, who once stood for five days in the freezing, freezing Arctic waiting for a polar bear family to come out of its winter hibernation. The footage he finally got was his reward. That level of dedication is the measure of Iwago.
Japan's highest campsite had no shortage of tents Saturday night. These were the ones that got there late and had to camp on the exposed ridge. Dangerous, I thought, but I suppose people have pitched tents in worse places.
I told Dessie I missed the low skies and wonderful sunsets common to Australia and Ireland and he stunned me with a simple, obvious answer that I had never considered. What do both countries have in common? Nothing to the west. California sunsets must be special.
Great scenes of excitement once again at the peak.
Despite all the weather warnings, the views were close to perfect.
Not quite the roof of Japan, but the second-best thing.
I wasn't lying about the view. My uncle photographs Fuji from the peak of Kitadake at 5.30 this morning.
On the South Alps ridge early this morning. How beautiful is that ridge?
Respect. Will I still be able to do this when I'm 70?
A successful return to my old friend Kitadake.
Which sentence has the more positive slant?
(1) Despite poor economic conditions, sales were good.
(2) Sales were good despite poor economic conditions.
When I hear music, I hear the words, not the music. Maybe that's my handicap.
But it means I'm a big fan of people like Bob Dylan.
When you're feeling down in matters love, you need look no further than Tangled Up in Blue, and especially the mighty, all powerful, venomous and vicious Idiot Wind.
In good years, you spot the beauty of songs like Romance in Durango.
Poetry.
Like most Japanese offices, my office is usually silent. The non-Japanese are even quieter than the Japanese--and I often think this reflects our position.
So when I read something raw enough to make me laugh like a child, I bite my finger. I have a sore finger today. In the greater scheme of things, it's wrong to suppress real laughter.
"Invite the loons cause they
remember all the tunes
at the party in the woods tonight"
To my non-technical friends and my family, I am on the cutting edge of modern technological development. In reality, I'm at best an early-ish adopter--usually at least a year behind the leaders.
Anyway, for my non-technical friends, here's one of the new things I've been playing around with lately. Those of you who know more about technology than me can stop reading now.
Podcasting, in simple terms, is the downloading of mp3s of radio and other broadcasts and putting them on your iPod. And it's becoming mainstream.
The BBC, among others, are running a podcasting trial at the moment and offering some of their programs in mp3 format for download. You can also get some NPR programs this way too.
Of the BBC programs available, I find Sportsweek worth a listen, even if it has been dominated a bit lately with inane things like cricket, the Lions tour, some new Scottish tennis prodigy and London's successful Olympic bid.
There's also In Our Time presented by Melvyn Bragg, which usually has some Oxford or Cambridge literature dons talking heatedly in the most cliched of posh English accents about the profound significance of completely insignificant things like the real nationality of Merlin the magician or whether Christopher Marlowe would have been a better playwright than Shakespeare if he hadn't been killed in debatable circumstances outside a pub. Even after all these years, I still find nonsense like this from the kind of whoppers you find in the bell jar of academia "alarmingly enjoyable."
And for football fans, there's the Rumour Mill from Radio Five Live, presented by what can only be described as one of the most grating assholes ever employed by the BBC. He's not an Oxford don, this chap. Lesson No. 1 of good radio is the audience have to like or at least understand the motives of the presenter. I hate this fellow and wish he would shut up. But it's about something close to my heart in the close season, so I still download it faithfully every week, stick it on my iPod and listen to it on the train to work. Hopefully, as podcasting hits the mainstream, the BBC will offer some of its better football programming, like the 606 phone-in. (It's fashionable to knock 606 but I've always enjoyed it.)
There are also programs about the digital age, reports from the BBC's global correspondents, minority interest documentaries and some other investigative journalism, all for you to listen to on your bus or train or in your tent whereever you might be in the world.
And that's just the BBC--a quick search on Google will find you comprehensive lists of everything that's out there, and a year or two on (not sure when podcasting actually started and too lazy to check), the technology is moving out of the hands of the geeks, which in my view is always when it becomes really interesting. (That's not to say the geeks aren't interesting.)
I put the RSS feeds for the programs I listen to into Bloglines, so the programs come to me: it is announced to me automatically whenever the next edition of a show is available. (The new version of iTunes has a similar feature built in, but I prefer to organize as much of my life as possible through Bloglines. If only I could get Bloglines to cook.)
As a big radio fan and an expat in a strange non-English speaking land, the advent of the ability to listen to radio stations from all over the world live on the Internet was great. Really great. No more fiddling for hours with aerials and listening for human sounds among the cackle and the noise. The arrival of audio stream downloads--the ability to choose when to listen to your favourite programs--was even better. No more waiting up until five in the morning to hear a show.
Now, we've reached the next stage: with the help of the iPod and other mp3 players, radio on demand has gone portable. Here in Tokyo, the trains have developed voices and are starting to talk.
The only problem is waiting for the broadcasters to offer all their programming in mp3 format as well as Internet streams. In the meantime, though, I've recently heard of a technology for converting Internet streams into mp3s. That means I could even listen to the Irish stuff. The legendary Des Cahill might soon make his first appearance on an iPod in Tokyo. Or Eamonn Dunphy. Or even Ireland's national mother figure, Marian Finucane.
I'll probably look into how to use it in about a year. For now, I say thank you to the geeks.
Another of the marshes of Oze.
The flower of the skunk cabbage.
Shining down like water.
Mount Shibutsu in the distance.
It's been another one of those nights spent watching another one of those scenes, hoping everyone you know there--extended family, friends, and family of friends--are all okay.
Last week I bought a Thermarest self-inflatable camping mat to replace my foam groundsheet. No more not sleeping on hard, stony ground, or waking up in the night with sore hips and shoulders and a chill running through from the cold earth below.
With the final piece in the camping puzzle in place, last weekend was supposed to be perfect camping. Sexy camping even.
And it would have been, if I hadn't forgot the rice.
There I was, long walk done, rain stopped, tent up, blanket self-inflated, cooker out, ready to go. Slightly high-end curries taken out of the bag. Miso soup, mochi, chocolate, tea, and milk. A drop of whisky. The sun setting over Ozegahara. Mount Shibutsu sharp in the distance in the fading evening light. I'd even remembered the tent pegs this time round.
But not a grain of rice. Sexy camping had just gone Irish.
It was then I had the plan. Maybe one of the mountain huts would sell me some rice if I brought along my bowl. Who knows, maybe they even provided it as a service?
Sure enough, the first one I went to had a sign for rice for 250 yen. Cheap as you like, cheaper even than the freeze-dried stuff.
I was mountain hungry.
Maybe if I gave an extra couple of hundred yen they'd give me a big serving. In I went. The girl behind the counter was young and incredibly tall. And she was radiant, beaming goodness. One of those rare people--just entering their aura makes you instantly warm.
I asked her for a big serving of rice and she smiled in understanding.
"Are you camping? It must very tough sleeping in a tent with the ground all wet? It must be very cold. Very tough."
I've seen this reaction before. Non campers the world over can't understand why anyone would ever choose to sleep in a tent. Unless of course they had no money. So their common assumption is campers must be poor. Especially in Japan. Not poor and dangerous. Poor and pitiable. Kawaisou.
She took my paper bowl and went to fill it. When she came back, it was so full it could have fed four. Overflowing wouldn't describe it. It was so full it was difficult even to carry back to the table outside. I gave her 450 yen and went to leave, but she stopped me, gave me 350 yen change and wouldn't hear of me paying any more.
I smiled, thanked her sincerely and went back outside.
Cooking the curry, I heard the inviting call of beer. End of the day beer. Curry beer. Back I went inside and asked for a Kirin. She went to get it for me and returned.
"Excuse me for asking you this, but are...are you from Belgium?"
I replayed her question in my head to make sure I'd heard it right. Some time passed.
"Er, I'm not. No. I'm from Ireland."
"Oh, thank you."
Awkward as ever in spontaneous, unscripted second-language social situations, I wasn't sure what to say next. So I just stood there, a benign but slightly bemused-looking mute.
A smile of reassurance told me the unscheduled and unwarranted social interaction was officially over, and she was sorry for having taken such liberties and intruded upon my space.
"Here's your beer. Thank you very much."
Glowing, baffled--and just a little disappointed--I went back to my curry and my new-found rice.
Serendipity. And confirmation. Fukushima people are just so special.
Haven't ranted in a while. People might be thinking I'm mellowing.
Worked on a piece today to be submitted to the Asian version of one of the world's most respected newspapers.
Came back after lunch to find the client (the Japanese government) didn't like it and wanted it to be made more "smooth." They always deliver their instructions from a cloud of pompous vagueness for pieces to be either more smooth or more "sophisticated." Their decisions are mostly based on emotion ("I don't like this") and without reasoned analysis ("Here's what I don't like and why").
They gave one specific example, today. The sentence "Asia has many regional frameworks..." was to be changed to "There exists in Asia many regional frameworks..."
In any style of English, but particularly in a piece for a newspaper, "there exists" is pants. If I was being kind, I'd say replacing an active verb with that piece of strait-jacket pomposity is "perhaps not beneficial." If I was being honest, I'd laugh in his face and call him a word he wouldn't understand.
Then he says he wants the whole piece to be changed "in line with" this correction.
Ever wonder why official English in Japan is so shocking? It's because the Japanese government is full of jumped-up little twats, spoiled by their Mammies, who believe they know more than the specialists they commission.
And because people don't tell them so.
Some days it's hard not to believe this whole country, and its economy, is nothing but a sham, proliferated by agreement at all costs and the following of ridiculous orders because that is what the hierarchy dictates.
I'll never fit into a hierachical system based on the assumption of automatic deference as opposed to earned respect.
And even on the mature principle of picking your fights and letting their arrogance destroy their work, I want this one.
There exists an irate Irishman in Tokyo on this day.
The walkway at Oze Numa. Only used in photographs these days.
Some tired souls.
Clear skies make beautiful lakes.
So beautiful it's almost evil.
For Tokyoites, this place is entrancing.
Mount Hiuchi refused me again, for a different reason than last year. Third time lucky next year maybe, and a good excuse to go back to Oze.
Last year, the only real rainy season mountain weekend sludgefest I did was Kumotori, the highest mountain in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area. Slopping through the mud and puddles of Chichibu for two long days, baptizing my new tent with typhoon waters, rain and wind battering it all night long as I dreamt of sleep inside--it was not your normal weekend for me or my novice tent.
But all in all, it was the best of hikes, despite sliding most of way down the mountain like a bobsleigher without his sled.
So I'm not really sure why I'm so cautious about tomorrow.
I'm off to the biggest mountain in the north of Honshu--in the sense that north of this one there is no bigger. The plans are in place and they're good plans, but Old Man Forecast is being stubborn. He's been issuing rain warnings all week and he's not backing down.
But he's been crying wolf a lot lately, too, the old bastard. His cockiness remains, but he's been losing his touch. Many times I listened to his confident warnings and stayed home, only to wake up to a smiling sun shining in through the bedroom window, mocking me and my faith in false prophets. However certain you state the future, it doesn't make it fact. And the sun doesn't dance to human tunes.
I really hope Old Forecast's got it wrong again this time, because the mountains in the north of Honshuu have the most slippery of stones. They even close one of them for June because it becomes too dangerous. If the skies open tomorrow, things could get really tricky, especially coming down. It's the age-old mountain dilemma: do you call it off and retreat or do you move forward? One thing about spending a weekend in the mountains is you have to be decisive, and not regret your choices afterwards.
My tent is now a wizened old-hand. It's stood up in the worst of conditions in places other tents never have to go. And if tents had free-will, I'm sure it would refuse to go tomorrow. Likewise, its owner has gained experience, and with experience become more cautious. That's the only plausible explanation I have for the trepidation today. That, or I'm secretly yearning to sit home and watch American Cable TV. And I don't think so.
But I'm not entirely pessimistic. There's also something natural and alive about having your fortunes so closely linked to the rain and sun. Moreso than sitting in an air-conditioned office, anyway. See you Monday.
