Ultraman Redux

I mentioned Ultraman in an earlier post, but I still owe Eve some photos so I figured I'd do that for today's post. Here's the dubbed pilot episode of Ultraman if you're still curious/masochistic. Japanese doesn't dub well to English for some reason.

One of the "neat tricks" in movie and television production from the 1960's was to build a set in miniature (kind of like a model train), and then film the action on your miniature set. That way, you could add giant space ships, huge monsters, or epic battles without actually spending very much money. Nowadays you'd accomplish the effect with computer graphics, which looks a lot better but isn't nearly as funny. Anyway, it seems that somebody decided that it would be fun to make a television show about a giant spaceman fighting giant space monsters, and thus Ultraman was born. I don't think there's any particular significance to the name (the explanation of the name at the end of the pilot is ultra-cheesy). I guess superlatives make popular names for superheroes.

Ultraman became a pop-culture phenomenon in Japan, and is still very popular with boys (Boys have interesting taste in TV shows). I was introduced to it for the first time by the Ultraman aisle at Yodobashi Camera, a large shop in Tokyo that sells just about everything for males of all ages. Eve, the dazzlingly attractive young lady pictured in a previous post, had heard of Ultraman in the English classes she teaches and was immediately fascinated by the aisle. At this point, I received the impromptu commission to photograph every single model of Ultraman available, and was exhorted to make said photographs available online later. This was difficult for three reasons:

1. Japanese electronic shops are jumpy about people taking photographs inside. I didn't see a "no pictures" sign within eyeshot, but I still wasn't particularly enthusiastic about the prospect of attracting official attention, so we had to photograph on the sly. That meant no flash, so the pictures are a bit blurry.

2. Do you know how many versions of Ultraman there are? At least this many. This is only about half of them (and I left out "Ultraman Nice" because it was too badly blurred).

3. After about the first five photos (complete with imaginative announcements), I was laughing pretty hard. This probably made the later photos blurrier than the early ones.

Nevertheless, I have now officially posted the Ultraman photos (it was somewhere between numbers 2 and 3, in case you missed it). If the link quits working, send me a message and I'll probably fix it--I'm changing servers soon, and my old links might break. And now, while the rest of you stay up through the rest of tonight reading the seventh Harry Potter book, I will head to bed.

Localized Chinese Food

Most of you probably know that when you eat out at an ethnic restaurant, what you're getting is not usually very "genuine." Taco Bell is not really Mexican food, Panda Express is not really Chinese food, and so on. It's more like those films that claim to be "based on a true story." Of course, this same thing happens in other countries too, which brings me to one of a handful of photos I managed to get in Japan after the Camera Incident. This is--believe it or not--a Chinese restaurant. Indeed, several of the items on my tray kind of resemble things you might find in Chinese cuisine, but the style is so Japanese that the Chinese food almost feels out of place.

The wooden bowl on the left has steamed rice, and the bowls on the upper left and upper right are the "main entreés." The first one is shrimp in some kind of sauce, the second one is sweet and sour pork. In true Japanese style, they are both very small portions, but they make up for this by giving you a million kinds of everything. The center bowl is half an egg roll with several kinds of decorative garnish and some kind of sweet, deep-fried sesame dumpling thing. Yes, they only give you half an egg roll, diagonally cut in artistic fashion. The bottom two bowls have a half dozen varieties of pickled vegetables, and the lower-right one is egg-drop soup, positioned exactly where the miso soup usually goes.

The most intriguing thing was that cup in the middle that looks like an egg. No, it's not an egg. It's homemade sweet almond tofu, and it's a good dessert. Tofu doesn't taste like much, to be sure, but it has a good texture for pudding, and the homemade style tofu is softer and wetter than most.

This restaurant was really good, by the way. If for some reason you ever find yourself in the Granvia hotel next to Hiroshima-eki, feel free to drop by the Chinese place on the second floor. It's good stuff. This is the place that got me thinking "I wonder if you could serve American food in kaiseki style?" That is, a little bit of roast beef on one plate, a little bit of mashed potato, a little bit of corn ... just for the heck of it. Seems like a ton of work, though.

In more contemporary news, I helped my sister and her husband move to Logan today. The picture here is of their living room before any unpacking. You'll note that Yoda (back left) is still around and doing fine after multiple moves. Logan is a 5 hour round trip from Provo, which meant that the drive was more painful than the actual work. We packed five adults into a Prius (note to self: never do this), and a few neighbors from the new ward showed up to help, so the loading and unloading was done in short order.

In related news, my sister had her second child on Thursday, a cute baby girl. The two-year old big brother is taking the news well so far, although I imagine he hasn't yet realized that parental attention is a precious commodity, and the younger siblings are going to steal it away. The new baby has continued the fine family tradition of being born with a full head of hair, which we're fairly sure is unusual but makes for cute babies.

Questions for the Readers

Been a few days since I last posted, and it'll probably still be short.

Firstly, my neck has gotten better, but it still hasn't completely healed. Is this the kind of thing one goes to see a chiropractor for? I really have no idea. It is healing on its own, but it does seem a bit weird for a pinched nerve to last for a whole week. It's usually fine except when I'm driving and can't turn my head quickly.

Secondly, what's the best way to watch for web page updates? It seems like someone told me about a service somewhere that could alert me any time a certain web page changes. This would be good for watching blogs, forum posts, all sorts of things.

I went straight from vacation into crunch mode at work. Well, if there's a good way to go into crunch mode, that's probably it--at least you start out pretty relaxed. I have a conference in Los Angeles at the start of August, and we want to have a lot of things to show off by then. Y'know, I hate Los Angeles. It's big, it's dirty, it's crime-ridden, and the single-minded selfishness of the place creeps me out. At least for conferences I don't have to look at anything more than the hotel and the conference center--and it is a very nice conference center. Oh, and I'm aware there are probably tolerable regions of Los Angeles, but I'm always stuck downtown, and downtown is a nasty place by most measures.

Tenki no shita

Post title means "under the weather," which means nothing in Japanese. I somehow managed to pinch a nerve in my neck, which aches like crazy. It made the plane ride home very unpleasant. I can't straighten my neck out without shooting pain, and working on the computer is also difficult. I'm going to go lie down now.

I will try to keep the blogging momentum going, but please excuse me for this short post.

Turbo Shrine Dash!

So, I'm going to Tokyo to hang out with Eve tomorrow, which means that whatever else I want to see in Kyoto had to be seen *today*. Unfortunately, Kyoto is the city of a million shrines (this may be an exaggeration, but I dare you to prove me wrong: There's way too many to count). I mentioned that this was probably because the city had been the capital of Japan for 1,000 years, and Sister Sakai (our helpful taxi service for the day) corrected me: "Actually, 1,200 years." But what's two centuries between friends?

It was Sister Sakai's day off, and of all the 25 years she's lived in Kyoto, she had never been on the thousand gate hike at the Inari shrine. Therefore, naturally, we went to the thousand gate hike first. We got about halfway up the mountain before discovering two things:

1. The 'thousand gates' is more metaphorical. And not in the usual way. I there are *way more* than a thousand gates. If anyone has bothered to count them, congratulations. The entire walkway for long stretches is bridged by gates as far as you can see, and it's an exhaustingly long hike. The hike even branches off along multiple alternative paths, all of them covered with gates.

2. This is a fairly difficult hike. Even though it's paved with steps the whole way, it's still really steep, and the weather's quite hot. Clarissa and Sister Sakai made it to the halfway point (complete with bathrooms, vending machines, and souvenir shop) before asking that we go back. I figured I'd seen enough torii gates to last a lifetime, so back down we went.

3. The gates are all painted bright orange!? They also have black kanji carved on them. The kanji give the donor of each gate -- large gates from bigger companies, smaller gates from individuals or small businesses. Inari is a fox god (so there are many fox statues) and also the god of commercialism and making money (I am not making this up). Thus, Inari is a very popular god in Japan, and the businessmen like to show up at his shrine and pray for business success. Apparently, for a goodly fee, you can even go into the inner part of the shrine to pray closer to the enshrined object. Crass commercialism seems somehow appropriate for a god of commerce. Oh, we also spotted a miko (something like a priestess) doing a rather interesting bell dance for some client, whom we were informed had probably paid a goodly chunk of change for the privilege. There was a koto and a shamisen playing for the dance, and it was pretty.

The next shrine was the 'bursting waters' shrine (I think; I can't remember the Japanese name). There's a spring and you can drink from it. They provide long-handled metal cups for catching the flow of water, and UV lights to sterilize the cups after you drink. Having ancient looking mossy stone coves glowing purple from the UV lights seemed like a funny anachronism. There was also a stage , and Sister Sakai said that there exists a Japanese proverb: "If you jump from the stage at the bursting waters, you can fly." I was skeptical. Had anyone tried this? "Yeah, quite a few people. They all died."

After that we went to make reservations at the Imperial Palace (the emperor still uses it on occasion, so the security is tight), then went to the garden castle until our reservation came up. Unfortunately, this meant that we ended up with only 10 minutes to look at the garden castle, so we kind of did it at a run. The garden castle has tons of cool painting and nightingale floors, which squeak like a room full of birds being tortured. This is to prevent assassination. That's about all I saw.

The Imperial Palace doesn't let you into most of the buildings, but they do keep most of the outer doors open so you can look inside. The whole tour is shepherded by swarms of policemen, and was impressive.

Come evening, we went to the Sakai family's house (eh, it's small, but it's not so small that they can't have guests) and we ate sukiyaki. *Really good* sukiyaki. If we can get decent sauce, we need to give it a try. Mom's cast iron skillet would probably work (you cook it at the table ... hmm, we'll have to work something out).

No sign of the camera still, so I'm assuming that it's really and truly gone. After a brief period of mourning (and a chance for my bank account to recover) I'll have to get a new one. Clarissa has yet to come through on her promise to lend me some photos, but she swears blind that she has them, so hopefully they'll show up ... one of these days.

Parents normal, kid is a southerner

My youngest sister arrived in Kyoto today, and we did some more of that hanging out thing. She only got about 2 hours of sleep on the train over, so she spent much of the day snoozing (falling asleep on the longer bus trips, falling asleep on the sofa in my hotel room, etc. etc.). Nathan had a work emergency, so he ended up stuck in the hotel room while we went to explore the silver shrine (he assures us that he's feeling a bit shrined out anyway, so this was no big loss). The silver shrine is not, as you might suspect, made of silver. No, it's made of wood. I think the only reason it's called the silver shrine is because there's a golden shrine on the other side of the city, and they wanted the names to match (the golden shrine IS gold-plated, so that's cool and all).

The silver shrine has awesome gardens. There's a cute display informing you that there are several types of moss. There's 'intruder moss,' 'normal moss,' and 'VIP moss' (with the latter being the most desirable). And sure enough, you may spot a gardener crouched down on the moss somewhere, hacking away at intruder moss to try and help the good moss flourish. It seems that all moss is not created equal! Japanese gardens are kind of interesting--they're deliberately kind of rough edged, with no obvious organization, to make it seem more like a natural forest. But they're also not natural at all--everything is just a little too perfect, the waterfalls arranged a little too conveniently, the bushes a little too round and the lilies a little too numerous for it to be completely natural. And of course, there's no bad moss.

After the silver shrine, we ate out with my sister's home-stay family from Kyoto. We had a very pleasant Korean barbecue. I think that the Korean barbecue in Los Angeles might be a bit more authentic, ironically, but it was very good Japanese/Korean food :-). The meat is Korean style, but they have to bring it neatly arranged in geometric patterns on decorative plates. If you order scrambled eggs and toast in this country then it's going to arrive in a geometrically arranged pattern on a decorative plate. Soup? It'll be in a decorative bowl, with approximately three separate garnishes, selected for their harmonious colors. Even at really cheap restaurants there's going to be some kind of effort to make the food decorative. It's kind of funny, but the Japanese expect it and like it, and it's also kind of fun. Oh, I tried both tripe and cow tongue, and they were fine.

One of the most entertaining things about the silver shrine was the sand gardens. The sand is carefully arranged with a rake into various geometric patterns. The sand is wet (naturally; dry sand happens to Other People in Other Countries), so it tends to stick together and keep its shape. Some of the shapes leave you wondering how they pulled it off -- large, perfectly flat plateaus with patterns raked into the top, much too large to reach across by hand. We were wondering if they have rakes with very long handles -- or perhaps they build the plateaus piece-by-piece, smoothing out the joins as they enlarge them? It is a great mystery.

My sister says she has photos of a lot of this stuff, so even though my own ability to produce photos has been cruelly removed, she should be able to supply handy supplementary materials later. Just as soon as I can get my hands on her laptop. Possibly after I get home.

The post title is in reference to the 12-year-old son of the homestay family. His parents have quite a normal, standard-Japanese accent, but the kid has a strong, slangy southern edge in the way he speaks. The accent in the Kyoto area is called "kansai-ben," and it tends to be a lot rougher and more informal than standard Japanese. The usual "wakarimasen" (I don't understand) becomes "wakarimahen." There are also a lot of different hesitation noises, and he has a bit of a schoolyard "tough kid" speech style. At least it's very entertaining to listen to.

Hiroshima, Osaka, and Kyoto

I'm having a bit of hard time with the Internet here. It's working fine for Nathan, and it SORT of works for me, but we'll see how it goes.

I've been riding quite a few bullet trains lately. The first hour or so I spent gawking out the window at the ridiculously spiffy landscape flyby, but lately I've taken to reading books. I got through some enjoyably brain-dead space opera, and now I'm now reading some enjoyably brain-dead Anne McCaffrey. Will they crack the conspiracy? Will our hero survive and get the girl? Will the girl forgive our hero for being a doofus? I'm mildly in suspense on the final point.

In a moment, I'm going to wander downstairs and find out if the hotel's sushi is any good, but before that I'll update you on our touring:

We went to the "peace memorial" in Hiroshima. It is very close to where ground zero was for the atomic bomb back in 1945 (August 6th, I believe? The date gets repeated over and over and over in the exhibits). About 140,000 people died, and there are a lot of people left in the area who are "genbakusha" -- that is, survivors of the atomic bomb. They tend to have unique medical issues.

There was one building that was almost directly beneath the blast, which meant that all the horizontal surfaces were blown out but vertical walls mostly survived. It's called the A-bomb dome, because the original building had a large central dome, of which only a metal skeleton survives. There's a large park with a cenotaph, fountains, trees, etc. near that, and at the south end of the park is the museum. The museum and park cover the tragedy from nearly every possible angle--there are newspaper articles about the bombing, both contemporary and recent. There are models of the city before and after. There were huge numbers of schoolchildren (mostly junior-high aged it seems) who were working on demolishing houses for firebreaks against bombings, so about 8,000 of these students died; there was various memorabilia of all the different students, some of whom lived for several days before dying.

As a whole, the exhibit is quite gloomy (but of course, given the topic, it's hard for it to be anything otherwise). There is a desperate, urgent feel to the place, that "this must never be repeated, anywhere." The people who went through it seemed very intent that some kind of meaning be made out of the tragedy, and the meaning they pull from it is to make Hiroshima a "world peace city." The mayor of Hiroshima sends a strongly worded protest to any government that performs a nuclear test, and the full text of all those telegrams is engraved in stone. It did occur to me that the present emphasis in Japan on world peace is probably drawn especially from the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (I've been told that a commitment to nonviolent resolution of problems is actually in their pledge of allegiance).

After Hiroshima, we went to Osaka. Osaka is (I believe) the second-largest city in Japan, and famous for its food. Unfortunately, we only spent a little less than a day there, so didn't have a chance to sample much of it. Osaka looks like it has enough things to do to occupy an entire vacation, so perhaps some other year. Osaka has an amazing aquarium--there were dozens of tanks with some mighty big fish in them. The walkway spirals downward weaving through the tanks, so you start by seeing penguins, otters, iguanas and monkeys on the surface, and then gradually descends into the brightly colored swarms of fish swimming below them. The aquarium is themed around the "ring of fire," with species from various places around the world according to the position on the outside, with the "Pacific ocean" tank in the center. The Pacific tank is the spectacular centerpiece of the whole thing. There's a whale shark of some kind swimming among the manta rays and schools of fish--perhaps twenty or thirty different kinds. The walls of the Pacific tank are made of nine-inch-thick acrylic glass (the whole aquarium uses some 350 odd tons of acrylic glass, which they mention is more acrylic glass than is usually produced worldwide in an entire year). As you exit, you're walked past tanks and tubes of creatively lit jellyfish, in all their tentacled glory.

The one place we did get to eat was an okonomiyakiya. That's a kind of cook-at-your-table omelet, with lots of cabbage, meat, and noodles, and the slightest hint of egg. You eat it with a bunch of sauces, and you're not allowed to cook it yourself (the staff does it for you, and exhorts you not to touch it!). It was definitely one of my favorite meals of the trip, and there have been quite a few great ones.

And now, we find out whether the connection will work well enough to let me post this.