JAPANESE SUMMER
I’m writing to try and wake myself up. I refused the Korea network project because as far as I could see it required someone to be on site full time for a couple of months. I’m still settling in here so I didn’t want to spend my time traveling back and forth, or worse, spend it all in a hotel in Korea. So here I am, pretty much finished all my projects and unable to find anything else to do. There are more projects coming up, but they’re not here yet. Add to that the fact that the air conditioner’s set to about 26 degrees in here and you can understand why I’m in danger of falling asleep. Even a good technical article on a home area network can’t keep me awake.
I shouldn’t complain about the heat in here because it’s much worse outside. It’s 36 degrees and 90% humidity every day so the drop to 32 degrees at night is a relief. It’s actually meant to be raining for another week or so, but I’ll have to renounce my status as rain god. It’s been sunny for a week now, and I long for the relief of cool water. I’m lucky enough to have found a place that has doors on both sides so I can get a breeze through the house when there is one. I have a fan to help me sleep, and I will shortly add curtains (yes, I had help – you wouldn’t trust me to choose them on my own) to keep the heat out during the day, and an air conditioner to keep me cool at night.
One thing that’s really enjoyable about the heat is watching the kids on holidays. The walkway past the office is a maze of ponds, bridges, sculptures (in water and out) and parents bring their kids to play in the ponds. Walking to and from work, and watching from the 17th floor window during the day, I get to see and hear the excitement of the kids playing chasings, hide and seek, and whatever other games their imaginations come up with, all over the maze. It brings back memories of the feeling of freedom that summer used to mean as a kid. And it’s a damn sight better than the ‘beach’ we used to sit at in Parramatta.
Speaking of beaches, I had a BBQ at a Japanese beach last Saturday. The company volleyball club were celebrating summer by having a beach volleyball day. We arrived at the strip of sand, which actually looked a lot like a beach to me, at about midday and started setting up. There was a strong breeze which probably made it feel a lot cooler than it was, but it made eating a hassle. Never one to enjoy the heat, I found that trying to balance a bowl of dipping sauce and a cup of juice in one hand while picking meat slices and vegetables off the BBQ grill with chopsticks in the other just a little too much. I never understood people who say that they lose their appetite in the heat, but I gave up on eating before I felt full. Maybe that’s what they mean.
I decided that while I was there, I might as well give the beach volleyball a go. I lasted about 30 seconds before putting my shoes back on, deciding that a bit of sand in the shoes was better than leaving bits of burnt skin spread all over the beach. It was the slowest game of volleyball I’ve ever seen with everyone looking enraged (jokingly of course) if someone dared to hit the ball into the sand more than a step away. ‘You expect me to move that far?’ was the war cry of the day. I was very happy to get back under the shade of the tree and fall asleep in it’s upper branches. When I got down again, all the guys had run back out to join a group of girls that had taken over our court. I wasn’t that keen in chatting up a bunch of girls that looked like they were still at school… ??.. You’re right. The sun had affected me more than I realised.
At about 4:30 everyone started packing on cue and the young girls went their own way. Somewhat stupidly, I decided to join the majority of the team for our weekly Saturday practice and spent the next 2 hours in a sweltering gym pretending that the reason that I wasn’t blocking very well was because I had a broken leg and couldn’t jump. I don’t know where they found the energy.
MY NEW STEREO
From here, it should get a little hotter and stay that way for a couple of months, but at least the humidity will decline. Summer is also a time for a lot of festivals (romantic festival tonight – hmmm, could be interesting) and that generally means lots of drums. I don’t know that anything could live up to the 20 strong rendition of Sing Sing by NDW and friends at their last concert, but Japanese Taiko has to come close. The biggest taiko drum I’ve seen (and played) was about 2m diameter. It was at an exchange student’s camp in the mountains when I was living in Nagoya. They called for anyone in the audience to come up and have a go. For some reason everyone was shy and hung back. Bugger that! There was a 2m drum there waiting to be whacked. I did pretty well too, keeping beat with the masters (I’m sure they chose a simple beat for the simple.. never mind), but then I started thinking about the movements. Don’t think! DON’T think! I’ve got to learn to stop thinking – especially when it comes to coordination. The inch thick drum sticks flew off into the audience and were brought back by a couple of cheerful Japanese with black eyes. I wasn’t allowed on again. And the next guy to give it a go was a drummer back (where ever he came from) so it was even more humiliating. Still, I had fun.
Drums, Beats, Music!! I have to tell you about my new stereo system. Oooooohhh!! It’s SOOOOOOOOO kool! I naturally went through a stage of disappointment (where would a story be without some cynisism) when the amp was delivered without transformer or correct plug. The night I had been waiting for, the night where I could play my CDs through MY speakers, found me listening instead via the speakers in my new 28″ wide screen Panasonic multi-voltage, multi-system TV. I had a good night anyway. Na! Not telling.
The real excitement came on the weekend when I finally got the 500W transformer necessary to run the amplifier. I got home and put on a Not Drowning Waving CD first – and not even Sing Sing. The DENON DVD-2000 (sorry, I’ve just got to show it all off) player pumped the sound digitally through an optical cable to the 450W, 25kg DENON AVC-3800G international model AC-3 home theatre amplifier, then on to the 2 main speakers. Wow! The volume dial seems to go from -60 all the way up to +60, and so far I haven’t been game to take it past -20. I’ve had to move the other components away from the amp because they were just burning up. Dad suggested I save on my gas bill by doing all my cooking straight off the amp – since I would have the amp on anyway. I thought about it, but I don’t want to burn the food.
Next, I put on ‘Batman’, the only DVD I have so far. It took me a while to get the surround right, but having spent the time, I settled back to a couple of hours of being surrounded by chases, dark suits and great music (and a certain absence of words like ‘thwak’ appearing on the screen). It’s interesting to note that the rear speakers aren’t actually noticable unless you stick your ear up next to them, but turn them off and suddenly you’re back in the room. Having 5.1 (2 main, 1 centre, 2 rear, and a subwoofer) separate channels is an unbelievable difference. I first put the movie on without configuring the system, and couldn’t hear a word they were saying. I quickly realised that this was because all voice is pumped into the centre speaker which I didn’t have attached. I’ll put that on when I get my custom designed cabinet and have a place to put it above the TV screen. I don’t have a subwoofer either which I’m also convinced will make a big difference, but then this is not really the place for shaking buildings – my personal theory on how the earthquake started is that DENON was testing the first version of this amplifier.
If you’re planning to come and visit, you’d better put aside a few days, nay weeks, for me to blast this system at you. You’re not getting out into the country until you’ve heard it. But then, you probably won’t want to go once you’ve heard it. sigh! My dream is alive!!
CRIME IN JAPAN
So how much did this all cost? About half the recommended retail price which is significantly less than what you’d pay in Australia. The REAL question is ‘what is it worth’, and the answer is of course that I can’t answer that because I can only count to a billion. I will have to look at getting it all insured soon, since it seems crime is on the rise in Japan.
I was told before I came out that the only black market in Japan is for mountain bikes. I’m being VERY careful of mine. I don’t take it anywhere. I’ve since found that there is also a big market for umbrellas. On many an occasion, I’ve seen people come out of a shop to find it’s raining. They quickly walk back inside and grab one of the umbrellas that someone else has put in the stand on the way in. Even when it’s not raining, I’ve seen people check out the umbrella stand and walk off in disgust if there aren’t any good ones left.
A friend here found out through personal experience that bag stealing is also on the increase. To give it an even more personal feel, I’ll tell you about my weekend when it happened. I was doing some upgrade work at the office. I’d been in the office, basically baby sitting the vendors all day (from 9am to 10pm) on Saturday and I was buggered (sorry, got to throw in the classic quote one of the girls in this story got from her student – ‘you look like you’ve been buggered’) when I got home. I won’t get too technical but.. things didn’t go according to plan. I had a delightful opportunity to wake a support person up in the US at 4am asking him to fix the system for us. He couldn’t, and got his revenge by saying that he’d go into the office to fix it that day, then call me when it was all OK, at, oh, around 2am.
So there I was unable to sleep properly because of the heat (no curtains, no air conditioner..) and because I was expecting an important call, when at 3am, the phone rings. No, it wasn’t the engineer, it was the girl who’d been told she looked like she’d been buggered. They (she and another friend) were at the police station and could they stay with me for the rest of the night? Police Station? Guess I’ve never been able to choose my friends well. They arrived some time later, during which I didn’t sleep either, and informed me that one of them had her bag stolen. It contained the keys to her place, her address, her wallet, .. They then shouted at me to let them get some sleep and flopped onto the spare bed. Well, one did. The other quietly got up and draped herself on my living room floor and curled up with my phone!?
I did the gentlemanly thing and went into the other room and tried to get some sleep for the last hour, but knowing there was a slinky black dress voluptuously draped in the next room was too much. I left them there in the morning, with my key and went to work at 8am. Through some fluke, we actually got the upgrade finished by 7pm and I went to the farewell for the girl who’d called initially. I never did find out how she managed to get home when her plane ticket was also in the bag that got stolen. I eventually got home at about 11pm only to find that the spare key didn’t get me into the flat. No problem with the security door, so it must be for one of the other units in the block. One day I’m going to find out . Luckily, I had the key to my bike lock or it would have taken me longer than the hour it did to pick up the original key and get back again. Next day I noticed that I’d managed to get bike grease all up my brand new, quite expensive, unbleached trousers. Not happy.
There were a few conversations during all that about exactly what happened when the bag was stolen and after a while I pieced it all together like this. They were at a nightclub and left the bag next to the dance floor. When they noticed it was missing they ran outside and started searching for the remains. They actually found the guy going through it in his car, but he almost ran them down trying to get away. The real surprise was that it was a Japanese guy, and some suggest he was a friend of the owners of the nightclub who have a scam going. Giving up, they went to the police and you know the rest. Their friends, meanwhile, went back inside and saw the guy again about an hour later. Not quite sure what happened but they missed him again.
The story flows over a little to the next night when, after the first girl had gone back to Australia, and the other still hadn’t had her locks changed, I was on call for support if she had trouble during the night. Imagine me on my feet, trying to pull on some decent clothing, adrenaline pumping through my system at midnight, only to realise that the voice on the other end of the phone is a drunken friend in Nagoya calling to ask if I knew who sang ‘unchained melody’ in Ghost. I haven’t spoken to her since.
I was going to add a section on Japanese amenitities (the last corner of my house) here, but it’s long enough already. Maybe next time.