One of the many places I’ve lived in Tokyo was Koganei, for two and a half years. I lived in Higashi-Koganei, near Asia University. I used to ride my bicycle in the area quite a bit, in particular to a Home Center (a kind of store, like a cross between Home Depot and Walmart; not as big, but big for Japan) on the south side of the tracks. So I know what it’s like to cross the Chuo Line–and yet, from the news I see, it is now even harder than ever before. More on that below; first, a bit of background.

Crossing the Chuo was always a chore. First of all, trains in Japan are much more widely used, so there are a lot more of them. Back home in the Bay Area, a train crosses an intersection every thirty minutes to an hour. Here in Tokyo, it’s once every few minutes on the busier lines. Second, the barriers at railroad crossings in Japan go down long before they would in the U.S., sometimes almost a minute before the train comes. And if the crossing is next to a train station, just forget about it; even though the approaching train will stop at the station before it crosses the intersection, the barriers go down just as soon–so people at the intersection have to wait not only the one minute for the train to get to the station, but also the time it takes for people to get off and on the train, then for the train to start up again–and finally cross the intersection.

To make things even worse, there are times when the trains from either direction are staggered–you wait a few minutes for a train one way to get through, then just as it passes, the lights indicating a train is coming from the other direction light up. Then just as that train passes through, an express train from the first direction lights up that way again. Choose the right intersection close enough to a station, and you can get caught like that for what seems to be an endless time. My own record for that is waiting for five trains to pass, each one on the heels of the other. That’s not counting the one time when there was a slowdown due to an accident, with trains lined up behind each other; the trains were so close and so slow, the barriers stayed down for more than half an hour (in the rain, of course). Finally, everyone at the intersection just got fed up, lifted the barrier and went through when it was clearly safe to do so.

But now, things are worse. JR East, the railway company that runs the line, has begun construction on an elevated line for the Chuo. The plan to get the work done involves laying extra tracks beside the original ones, thus widening the railroad crossing. This requires more warning time before each train comes, which has been causing great traffic jams. The elevated line, ironically, is intended to relieve traffic congestion caused by the difficult crossings. I guess it has to get a lot worse before it can get a lot better.

I first noticed this trouble when flipping through channels, and saw one station at a railroad crossing, showing how ridiculously wide it had become–taking even some young people more than 20 seconds to cross, impossibly long for some elderly people. I didn’t note at the time where it was, but then I started seeing it on the news more and more, and so started paying attention.

The crossing most in question is the one on Koganei Boulevard (Kaido), next to the busy Musashi-Koganei Station. The crossing is usually 56 feet (17 meters) wide, but due to the construction, it has been widened to about 120 feet! that’s 35.7 meters. kind of hard to believe, but you understand when you see it. It’s wide. Vehicles have become trapped in there, causing crossing guards, always on duty, to signal the emergency stop for approaching trains. The same guards are constantly having to hold up the barriers for the later pedestrians to get through. Elderly people, frightened into moving faster than they should, often trip and fall.

It’s worse if you’re waiting to cross. As mentioned before, back-to-back train passes make for long waits, and the widening of the tracks makes them even longer. The TV show I saw tonight clocked one wait at an entire hour before the barriers came up. Drivers just give up and go elsewhere.

Pedestrians don’t have that option, so Musashi-Koganei Station has started issuing special passes to people so they can enter the station, walk to the far end of the platform, use the stairs to cross the tracks, come down the length of the opposing platform, and then depart the station on the other side. At other stations, people are lucky enough to have pedestrian overpasses (still a major pain to bike riders), or even better, elevators up to the overpasses.

I’m just glad I don’t live in Koganei these days… I hope they finish the elevated tracks as soon as possible–but JR East is saying that it will take six months just to install temporary devices, such as approaching train sensors so the gates don’t go down so early. Lord knows when the work on the tracks will be done; years away, no doubt. The entire project, in four parts, is due to be completed in 2011.

I first came to live and work in Japan since 1985. Since then, there have been a slew of improvements for foreigners looking for a touch of home. A few:

International Telephone Calls. KDD used to have the monopoly on that market, and rates used to be ludicrously high, especially calling from Japan to America. I remember that I used to have to call my parents through the international operator, calling collect. I would give the operator our family’s cat’s name, and tell her I was trying to reach someone with our dog’s name at my parents’ number. When my dad got the message that our cat was trying to make a collect call to our dog, he knew it was me saying, “call me now.” He would then refuse the call and give a coded answer as to when he would get back to me, which the operator passed back to me.

Even then, we’d have to keep our conversations short, else dad would get charged $50 a pop or more. Now we use a lot cheaper services, and we may even start using Messenger’s audio linkup (or iChat) soon, making the conversations completely free.

Internet Access. This really wasn’t even on the radar screen in 1985, and it was depressingly poor in Japan up until just a few years ago. But then it took a quantum leap, just as America’s service started to falter. Two or three years ago, I was still forced to use ISDN (max speed, less than 64 Kbps), and had to covet my folks’ 300 Kbps ADSL connection in the San Francisco Bay Area when I visited them at Christmas time. Now, my dad is paying more than before for a crummy half megabit, while in Japan, DSL speed is now up to 26 Mbps for just about $30 a month, and if your building can accept the cable, 100 Mbps fiber optic can be had for about $70 a month–what my dad pays for his now-slower ADSL.

Unfortunately, I live more than 2 km from the telephone station, so my 12 Mbps ADSL is really only about 2 Mbps. But at my college, our LAN has a dedicated fiber optic connection, and man, that thing is blazing fast. The main thing limiting it is that almost no one else has a line that fast. But I have gotten download speeds as fast as a few megabytes per second from big sites, like Apple.com. Sweet.

English-Language Media, for that matter. I remember when it was hard to get any English-language books, magazines or newspapers–you had to get them through Kinokuniya for outrageous prices, else have them shipped from the states (I usually bought them on my trips back home). And on TV, all we got was the Wednesday night bilingual (like the SAP deal in the U.S.) movie, usually something stupid like Death Wish 3, and we were grateful for it. This is not one of those I-used-to-walk-ten-miles-in-the-snow stories, I really mean it, I watched that garbage, and so did most of my foreign friends, because that was about it on TV. There was the video rental place, and you can bet we used it.

Now, we have cable TV with CNN and options like Super Channel. There is Amazon.com, and Amazon.co.jp, and of course, there’s the Internet for all kinds of media. A lot nicer. It does make a difference.

Cheaper and More Available Foreign Foods. First we got the Foreign Buyer’s Club in Kobe, which has, for a long time, been a good place to get imported foods. They still will deliver to your door for a 1000 yen flat fee, even if you order 20 cases of Diet Caffeine-Free Coke. Where else can you get sunflower seeds in the shell? Or a ton of other stuff, for that matter.

And now, Costco is making a big entry, with four stores in Japan now (Fukuoka, Chiba, West Tokyo, and Hyogo) and growing–they say 50 stores in the next decade or so may open. Next: maybe Saitama. It’s a godsend for me, with the West Tokyo store opening a year ago just a few stops away from me on my train line. just went there today, getting some bagels (real ones, not the kind you usually find in Japan) and whipped cream cheese, four-cheese ravioli, microwave butter popcorn, a bag of cheap lemons, a big net of garlic cloves, five rotisserie chicken legs and thighs (fresh baked) and some other nice stuff. There’s a 4,000 yen yearly membership fee, but for what you get at the prices they have, you can’t beat it.

And even local stores have a lot more imported stuff, a lot different from the protectionist 80’s when an imported can of beer–when you could find it–cost almost twice what it does now. A lot of foods, snacks and other groceries you can get which you couldn’t before.

Plane Tickets. I remember the shock of calling a travel agency and being told that my round-trip ticket to California and back would cost about US$2,000. Sure, you could get cheaper tickets, but not by much. Many of you who were here in those days will remember the old “yobiyose” tickets. Essentially, they were three-leg plane tickets bought overseas and then sent to people in Japan. For example, the ticket would go from Hong Kong to Tokyo, then to San Francisco, and then back to Tokyo. The buyer in Tokyo would just toss out the first leg and use the second two. And still the ticket would be a lot cheaper than one bought in Japan. Others would just buy one-year open-ended tickets in their home country, and just make sure they went back every year, buying a new ticket each time.

Somewhere along the line, the pricing system changed, and now it’s a lot cheaper–perhaps even cheaper coming from Japan. I just got a round-trip, non-stop ticket for my Christmas visit home to the S.F. Bay Area for 47,000 yen (plus about 10,000 yen for airport, airline and sales taxes). That’s $430, or $520 with taxes–not too shabby.

All of this makes life quite a bit easier in Japan–a nice place to be, all on its own.

It is nice not to have the lights go out like they used to. No, I’m not talking about living in California or New York, but rather here in Tokyo, where power outages are very rare indeed. Instead, I’m referring to the low amperage allotted to apartments in Tokyo, and how my breakers used to trip all the time.

Used to be that whenever I had an air conditioner and the clothes dryer going at the same time, then SNAP! Out the lights would go. Time to grope my way to the breaker box and switch the power back on, then to reset half the clocks in the place, and fiddle all the other settings around the apartment which got wigged out.

Eventually, I got tired of this. I’m not a big energy hog, but there are times when I want to use more than just a few appliances at a time, thank you. And thirty amps just wasn’t enough. So I called up the energy company, and it turned out they can upgrade–though in my case, only to 40 amps. Good enough; I asked them to come over, and the electrician installed the new breaker in just a few minutes.

It costs a few dollars more a month (my basic energy usage hasn’t gone up in itself), but it is very nice to be able to run the nuke wagon with the TV and cooler going and not find oneself suddenly in a dark room.; I haven’t had a single breaker trip since the upgrade.

On the way back from Minami-Tama station, a local festival troupe passed by. I still don’t know what it was all about, but it was fun….

My favorite of all the photos was the second one. A bright sky background led to a very nice effect above the mikoshi. If you would like to see a larger rendition of the photos, click here.

Here are a few more photos I have taken around town lately.

This fellow, photographed outside Minami-Tama station on the Nambu Line, is an excellent example of the transition in telecommunications. When I first came to Japan, many people depended on payphones; I did, from time to time. There was an array of public telephone types, with different colors and abilities for connections (remember trying to hunt down a phone booth that could dial internationally?). And the prepaid telephone telephone cards were a big deal, sometimes used as business cards, and sometimes sold “recycled” by shady characters atop train platform staircases.

Today, most people use their cell phones instead–and in the case of this guy, in exactly the same spot he’d use if speaking on a payphone.

Right after I took the shot of the fellow at the phone, a squad of female Kyudo archers came by. You see students like this from time to time, dressed in their traditional hakata pants and keiko-gi shirts (apparently the tabi shoes are optional). If you’d like to know a bit more about Kyudo, go here.

Got a nice photo of the sunset tonight from the roof of our 9-story school building. This is a composite of three separate photos. For space purposes on this main page, I can’t show the full-size image. However, if you would like, I have available a larger version (1200 pixels by 320 tall, better for computer screens) available.

Once or twice a week I’ll stop by a place on the way home. If I’m willing to go out of my way for a treat, I’ll go to Akiyoshi yakitoriya in Ogikubo. But on my train line home there is a sushi place I drop by, a place I believe is called “Ganso” Sushi (possibly “Genroku”), a “Kaiten-zushi,” or conveyor-belt sushi joint.

This particular place is reasonably priced–about a dollar per plate (two pieces per plate) and up, with my favorite, maguro, being on the cheapest plate. But what I like about this place is that you don’t have to eat the stuff on the conveyor belt, and can instead order new plates to be made for you. This is a big thing for me–I hate having to choose from the hour-old fish that’s starting to turn dark from dryness. Ganso has always let me order fresh–with the singly, highly disappointing visit I made when my father was in town and they shoved the old stuff in front of us (we came during lunch, so the policy may have been different).

I always thought that I was rather stodgy in my selection–I always have maguro, six or eight plates of it. One after the other, maguro maguro maguro. Sometimes people stare.

Tonight I dropped by for, of course, some more maguro. Had to wait a few minutes for a seat to open up, and two did at once. So the other solo guy who’d walked in just after me sat down on the next stool. But this guy made me feel a bit less like the most unusual customer in the shop. He ordered eight plates of the same kind of fish, more than my six for the night–and then ordered ten plates of ika (squid) all at once. The chef had to ask twice to make sure he’d heard right.

I left before he was able to scarf down all the squid, but he was making admirable progress. And for all I know, he ordered another ten plates after I left.

The norm of many foreigners in Japan (usually the short-termers) is to talk about the things that are wrong with the country, and like any country, there are indeed a lot of things wrong to focus on. But what about the better things? Well, people often mention the bigger things, like greater public safety and on-time trains. But here are a few nods of recognition for the lesser positives that are nonetheless appreciated.

English. Okay, this is not so much a small thing, but still not huge, and not acknowledged enough. When I hear people complain that English should be in more places in Japan, I think of how spoiled people tend to be; English is available in so many places, especially considering that only about half a percent of the population consists of non-Asian foreigners. In the U.S., bilingualism usually is triggered when a much more substantial portion of the populace in non-English speaking. But despite the relative sparsity of native English speakers in Japan, there is a wealth of English to help us, from signs in train stations, bilingual ATM machines, materials in city offices, English speakers at business help numbers, and more. Recently, I bought a cell phone which included an abbreviated English manual, and had the option of switching all displays into English.

Stalls in Public Toilets. Ever been sitting in a stall in a public restroom in America, and someone outside peers in at you from the crack between the door and the frame of the stall? Not exactly a comfortable moment, that. Well, in Japan, that doesn’t happen. Toilet stalls in this country were designed for privacy. The doors go all the way to the floor, and bevels on the door ensure that there is no crack for strangers to peer at you through. An added nod to privacy, though less certain as a positive because of the water it wastes, is the “courtesy flush” that men’s urinals automatically set off by infrared sensors. This masks the initial sounds, and for many people, helps get the old waterworks running as well.

Walk and Shop. The relative lack of cars as a means of popular transportation means that things tend to be more localized in Japan. In the U.S., one usually has to drive to the market, or at least suffer a long walk (well, suffer on bad weather days, at least). In Japan, things are still smaller and more localized, despite recent trends towards mall-ization. Almost anywhere you set down here, there will be some small businesses where you can get what you need. Convenience stores are everywhere. Supermarkets are more easily found. Restaurants, or at least fast-food joints, are more likely to be nearby. And vending machines, sometimes looked down upon, are nevertheless quite handy at times.

Department Store Clerks. Ever been to a department store in the U.S. where you had to hunt down a clerk to give your money to? And when you found them, you had to wait behind three or four other people buying half the store with a personal check? And forget about asking someone a question. In Japan, clerks are all over the place in department stores. Yes, less so that in the booming 80’s, but still they can commonly be found, usually just by standing where you are and turning 360 degrees or less. It’s only at the high-volume stores like Yodobashi Camera, or the lower-cost value stores like home centers, that you have to really look for someone to ask a question–but even at these places, there is no shortage of cashiers.

More to come as I keep my eyes open for them–and that would be a good thing for all of us to be on the lookout for here in Japan–the little things that make life easier here, that usually go unappreciated.

Anyone have observations they’d like to contribute?

I’ve noticed that a lot of cars have little TV screens for the DVD navigation system–but all too often, I noticed that people are watching TV instead of the navigation maps. Makes me wonder exactly how safe these drivers are. You see enough people smoking or talking on cell phones–watching TV is not a distraction you really want to add. In the back seat, for the kids, maybe….

Some photos taken in the past few days. First, I caught a sunset–not great as a sunset, but some interesting photos within nevertheless. Then a sunrise, after a very late night up, taken from my dining room window.

Seiseki Sakuragaoka, on the Keio Main Line, seen from the bridge. A time elapse shot, about 10 seconds.

An egret in the water below. This shot is not reduced in size, but rather is a crop from a much larger photograph; otherwise, I would never have gotten it so close up. A “digital zoom,” I suppose you could say.

A nice two-second elapse shot, a truck rolling by.

And the shot out my dining room window. A nice view, I just wish it got sunsets rather than sunrises–I’m not awake for enough of the latter.

A pretty strong quake just hit. I had just been on the phone with my father and sister for a few minutes when I felt the room shake. It wasn’t violent, but it was a pretty darned respectable shaking, probably the strongest I’ve felt in Japan so far. The glass doors on my video cabinet were shaking, and the ceiling lamp was swinging quite a bit. It has been announced on NHK as a 5.5 quake (don’t know if that’s Richter or Japanese scale), 80 km deep under southeast Chiba prefecture, just east of Tokyo. That’s not the biggest quake I’ve felt since in Japan, but it was the strongest because it was the nearest big quake.

Tenki.jp and Hi-net are both not responding, probably deluged by people like me, trying to access their pages to see about the quake.

More as it comes in.

Here’s a map that came from the Tenki.jp site, which is now responding again:

I find it ironic that I live in Tokyo, where Internet access is perhaps more advanced than anywhere in the world–heck, I even teach computer classes–and yet I’m stuck at about 1.5 Mbps, which for the uninitiated, means I can download almost 200KB per second, or the equivalent of a floppy disk in 7 seconds (which, ironically, is faster than a floppy drive could read all of that data to my hard drive). To many in the U.S., this may sound pretty fast; broadband speeds in America are now fairly slow, slower than they were 2-3 years ago in fact. My father pays about what I do for a 300 Kbps (0.3 Mbps) DSL connection; to get even close to my speed, he’d have to cough up $70 a month or more.

A bit about Internet connections first (those in the know skip to the next paragraph). While data on a disk is measured in bytes, transmission speeds are measured in bits, which are one-eighth of a byte. 100 KB (kilobytes), for example, is 800 Kb (kilobits, that’s a lowercase “b”). The slowest connection nowadays is referred to as “dialup,” or “analog,” which means you stick your telephone line directly into the back of your computer and then dial the telephone number of your Internet service provider (ISP). This gives a theoretical maximum of 56 Kb per second, more realistically about 40. The next step up is ISDN, which allows you to dial up the Internet on your computer while at the same time using the phone to call someone; it uses a digital line, and gets you up to 64Kbps. Then there’s a big jump up to DSL, which ranges from just over a megabit (Mb) per second to 12 Mbps, and soon up to 26 Mbps. And finally, fiber optic cables, which go considerably faster than that–top speed of 100 Mbps.

Up to about three years ago, Japan was hopelessly behind. We were stuck with either analog dialup or ISDN, which sucks because both require not only a monthly charge for the telephone line but you also have to pay by the minute–Japan has no free local telephone calls. Meanwhile, in the U.S., my father had DSL and was getting about a megabit of broadband DSL, which you can stay connected to all day long, no phone charges incurred.

Then things flip-flopped. The U.S. hit its current economic slump, and American DSL providers started raising rates and lowering speeds. Japan, in a program to help the country out of its decade-long economic crisis, completed a new phase of its Internet infrastructure plan and got DSL, quickly followed by fiber optic. DSL speeds started out at 1.5 Mbps, then got upgraded to 8 Mbps and 12 Mbps, and recently they started selling 26 Mbps (more than 3MB sent per second at theoretical top speed!). DSL costs only about $20 per month here, including ISP fees. I have the 12 Mbps service, but because I live in a nice, big place in a remote, gree area, I am more than 2 km from the switching station and so my speed is degraded, probably at about 2 Mbps–but I’m not complaining, er, too much.

I looked into getting fiber optic, but the cables are big and stiff and cannot be fitted into most older buildings, like mine. If it were possible, I could get 100Mbps (12.5 megabytes per second) for about $70 a month, same as my father in California would pay SBC for a connection 1/100th as fast. However, I can get fiber optic at the school where I work. We got the connection for the school a year ago, and it is fast. So fast, in fact, that we can’t get near the top speeds because almost no one else has such a fast connection to send the data. But I have pulled down data from Apple’s web site at 2 megabytes per second. What’s funny here is that my school of 300 students or so has had this for a while now, and I see CNN articles about how a 40,000-student university in the states is bragging about their new 100 Mbps connection.

There is hope for my apartment in the Tokyo outback, though. A new service, called VDSL (yeah, I know), may be available in a year or two; VDSL brings fiber optic to a local phone switch, then converts to DSL. I’ve been told that we could get 18 Mbps by then.

I just can’t resist. Took this one only a few minutes ago. Came out very nice.

Got another beautiful Sunset on my way home again tonight. My new schedule lets me get home earlier than before, and I’m seeing some nice ones. The first one I caught early, but was not in place to take great pictures–but I was able to get to a good bridge in time, and got the following ones there.

This last sunset shot I was able to capture blind–my digital camera’s battery had quit twice, and only let me take shots with no viewfinder. But it turned out great:

And then, when I got home, I got a great moonrise to boot.

In subsequent variations on the gyoza recipe that I’ve attempted, I’ve discovered a few things that help round out the rough edges to the formula.

First off, when using meat, it is important not to use lean meat; this results in the gyoza being dry. Some fat content in the ground meat is desirable.

Second, use cheese. A good amount of shredded mozzarella, I’ve found, can help contribute to a softer texture.

Third, remember that gyoza is a malleable thing; you can change the ingredients and their amounts to your taste.

Check out the trailer for the new movie Lost in Translation starring Bill Murray. Murray plays a celebrity who gets $2 million for making a whiskey commercial in Japan, and meets a woman there with her photographer husband; friendship ensues, so the blurbs say. The big attraction to me is that the whole thing is set in Tokyo, and promises to have a lot of very amusing interaction between Murray and Tokyoites. It is slated for a September release in the states, but I can’t find any published release dates for Japan. It opens in some countries as late as December, though. (IMDB page)

As I was heading home tonight, I noticed that the sky was growing more and more threatening. When I walked in the door, I felt lucky to avoid being rained on–but as it turned out, rain was not on the menu. Lightning was.

Soon after I sat down to relax, I noticed some lightning outside. Well, nice and normal–I like lightning. I like to listen to the thunder, too. Once there was a lightning storm at my work, real close by, and I went outside to watch and listen. One bolt cracked down and hit a lightning rod atop an apartment building just a block away, right in my view–the blast of sound was just about instantaneous. Now, that’s entertainment!

Tonight, it was far away, but something was strange. I noticed some lightning out of the corner of my eye as I sat in my living room. Then again a few seconds later. Then again, and again. I thought I was imagining it–sometimes, reflections off the frames of my glasses can appear to be something else. But when I went to the window, I was right–there was a hellacious lightning storm going on in central Tokyo

Lacking my digital video camera (at school, for a project), I got out my trusty digital camera and took some shots of it (above right, and below). Unfortunately, it was hard to catch the full feeling of it–it was far too light for a good time-exposure shot. But the camera has a movie mode, so I took several 30-second movies (the time limit for higher-quality movie files). I then edited some of the shots together; they are available here. Like with the Bon Matsuri movie, you must have Quicktime and/or the ability to view MPEG-4 files. This movie is only about 500KB in size, and is reduced in size–but you’ll get a better idea about the storm from it.

Toyota just released a new car, it’s environment-friendly Prius (which I have heard good things about), this time with 10% better gas mileage than the last model, and with an interesting new feature: it parks itself.

Apparently, if you get into a tight parking situation, the car will do the job for you with built-in sensors detecting the close-by obstacles. It was only mentioned that the parking assist works “when reversing into parking spaces”; I am not yet clear on whether or not it parallel parks (which would impress me a lot more). The “intelligent” parking system is a $2000 add-on, and includes a DVD-navigation system.

Toyota has sold about 120,000 of the Prius model, and expects to sell another 74,000 next year.

The hybrid car runs on both gas and electricity, using flywheels for the brakes to gather up the energy that would otherwise be dissipated as heat. Especially while driving in the city (with short starts and stops), the energy returned from the brakes helps to sustain the battery for longer periods and increases energy efficiency.

I wouldn’t mind having one of those puppies.

My neighborhood had the annual Bon Matsuri today. I should have been paying attention to the notice board, but instead I found out by hearing the music playing from my apartment window. On my trip down to the supermarket, I stopped by and took a few photos.

The dancers…

And some kids who will be up there in a few year’s time.

And a group of kids very talented at the taiko drums, both hitting the drums and tossing and twirling the sticks.

A small movie (240 x 360) of the dancing can be seen here. The file is an MPEG-4 Movie, so you will probably have to have an MPEG-4 codec (or an OS X Mac) to view it. The file is 1.7 MB, 43 seconds long. You may have to wait a minute or two before it loads and starts playing. Enjoy!