Junk art

Arno has a new passion at school: making what his teachers call "junk art" out of recyclables.

He's made dozens of these sculptures -- most of them are tanks or jet fighters -- in the past few weeks, and now we have a sculpture garden in our living room.

Origami of the week

Lucinda learned a new origami fold this week, a little box.


She came home from school and folded about 10 of them, lined them up, and made a dragon.

The flip side

In reading about the economic stimulus package passed today by U.S. House Democrats, I came across two editorials written in newspapers that seem to exist on different planets.

Here's the Wall St. Journal's "A 40-Year Wish List." Which criticizes the Obama Administration's "spending bonanza" on mass transit, childcare, arts, global warming, Medicaid, unemployment, food stamps and the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit for "people who don't pay income tax"

And here's the New York Times' "The Stimulus Advances." Which praises the Obama Administration's "carefully" calculated spending on mass transit, childcare, Medicaid, unemployment, food stamps and the "good tax policy" of the EITC.

The contrast is rather amusing.

Artful chess

The elegant magazine I work for, Kateigaho International Edition, recently held an exhibition of chess sets designed by the creative director, Alexander Gelman, and decorated by Japanese artisans. The finished works were featured in the magazine (above) and shown in this gallery in Nakameguro.


Here are two KIE editors, Takeshi Kudo and Miwako Sato. Miwako-san hired me; she has great style and story ideas.


And Gelman, a Russian-American with heaps of top-level experience in editorial and advertising. He has a strong personality and opinions but it's been terrific to work with him.


Gelman, or GLMN, is a "media artist" known for his mimimalist designs, whether on the printed page or in his own multi-media art and design. Traditional artisans carved his chess pieces in wood and then lacquered entire sets in actual gold and silver using the "urushi" method.



Other sets were shaped in porcelain and handpainted with shockingly tiny designs using the "kutani" method.



Even the snacks at the gallery were well-designed.

Going skiing

Lucinda has no school on Monday or Tuesday because of teacher training sessions, so I'm taking both children skiing with friends. (Blaine doesn't have vacation time.)

We are going to Karuizawa, a 1.5 hour ride on the Shinkansen bullet train. You apparently walk off the train and right into the resort complex. Arno will have his first real ski lessons - should be an adventure.

I'll be back to blog in a few days to blog about it.

Sunday in the trees

I woke up this morning with big plans for an excursion: to take the children to the Toto Company's "toilet museum" to see a toilet timeline! (Only in Japan, where there's a museum dedicated to anything and everything.)

Then reality hit: Lucinda and Arno hadn't had enough sleep on Saturday night and were already whining. So we took them, on their scooters, to Arisugawa Park. We've been there a hundred times, but today we found something new.



This was part of (I think) a temporary exhibition of treehouses around the city. The modern design had lovely carved railings and window frames, branches as art on the walls, and a lightweight ceiling/roof. Here's half of the inside:


On the other side was a stove that burned tiny pellets of compressed wood. I wonder if someone slept there overnight?


Lucinda and I went on the balcony...


And watched Blaine and Arno play baseball.

Inauguration Day

President Obama will be inaugurated when it's 2 a.m. on Wednesday in Tokyo - 3 1/2 hours after I post this. So we will watch it on our Apple TV or on the web when we wake up.

I'm feeling hopeful about what Obama can do - he is so brilliant and energetic and graciously non-ideological. But I'm also concerned that no human being can meet the expectations and difficulties that await him, and then what will we do?

Can he really tame the most severe partisans in both parties? Can he end the war, fix the banking system, re-arrange health insurance, fix Social Security, improve education, rebuild bridges and schools, make peace in the Middle East, walk on water, and all that?

It will be thrilling to watch, in any case. Good riddance, GW Bush.

Everyday Japan

My mother reminded me of another "everyday" experience - trash pickup - that is worth mentioning. The Japanese aggressively separate, recycle and burn trash to reduce - to the extreme - what is sent to landfills.

In our neighborhood, trash is collected 5 days a week, and when we moved in, our real-estate lady gave us a stern lecture on the importance of separating trash properly. Most people leave trash at collection points in the neighborhood, but we were told to put ours directly in front of our house - so the trash men can leave our garbage behind if we screw it up.

Here's the schedule and our typical trash output:

Every other Monday: One plastic grocery-bag of "non-burnables." In our house, this is mainly aluminum foil, but it also includes non-recyclable metal, broken glass and the rare burned-out light bulb.

Tuesday: 2-3 plastic grocery bags of "recyclable plastics," which here include any and every plastic if it's clean: small and large plastic bags, bottles, bottle tops and, in some households, even plastic wrap.

Wednesday and Saturday: 1-2 medium-sized bags of "burnables," which is mainly kitchen waste, plus any dirty plastic or non-recyclable plastic. Until last year, most plastic was considered a non-burnable, but Japan has begun burning ever more plastic because they don't have enough land to bury it. The twice-a-week burnables pickup is crucial here because people eat lots of fish (fragrant in summer!) and because most homes don't have garages or even much storage space for trash.

Friday: Recyclables. Newspaper, clean paper, and cardboard are roped together or bagged. Cans and bottles are put in separate collapsible plastic crates; the trash men load full crates on a flatbed truck and leave washed, flattened crates behind.

At first I was totally stressed out by this schedule - and annoyed that I had to deal with it almost every day. (In Tokyo, it's a no-no to put trash out the night before, because crows might attack and shred it, which is very rude for the neighbors.) But now it's old hat.

New vocabulary

Arno has a new word: Picklish, adj., as in "pickle-ish".

Definition: A "picklish" child is one who comes to your house, plays with and exhausts the batteries in your toys, and leaves.

Everyday Japan

I keep meaning to mention several everyday things about life in Japan that are different than in the U.S. - but I always forget because they're so common. Like:

- Every day at 5 p.m., the government broadcasts a short, tonal melody through hidden speakers on most streets in Tokyo - and maybe everywhere in Japan. I think it signals the official end of the work day but I'm not sure. It's kind of Star Trek-esque.

- When you get into a Japanese taxi, the driver uses a lever, sort of like what you find on an American school bus, to open and close the door for you. Only the left-side passenger door opens. Also, many drivers wear white gloves and place white-lace covers on the seats. It's a much more controlled environment than New York City's sweatier, stinkier cabs.

- Most drivers in Tokyo use GPS navigation or "navi" systems, which I think are more common in Europe but which I've never seen in the U.S. You type in a phone number or an address and the navi maps a route from your current location to your destination and a voice tells you to turn left or right. Most taxi drivers use GPS, too, but some pull out old maps and peer through a magnifying glass to find neighborhoods and streets.

- The navi is essential because very few streets in Tokyo - really only major boulevards - have names. An address, like ours, 3-3-13, means our house is the 13th oldest building on the 3rd block of the 3rd "chome" or district within its larger neighborhood.

- Most Japanese children in Tokyo travel to school alone - they take the subway or bus or walk - when they are 5 or 6 years old without the slightest fear that anything will happen to them. This is, after all, a nearly crime-free society. But Japanese cellphones for children have GPS and transmit their location to their parents' phones, and also have an obnoxious alarm system, just in case.

I'll think of more and try to remember to post...

Japanese New Year

It's very quiet in Tokyo during the week of the New Year. Offices close and many people leave the city to visit family elsewhere.

Last weekend, while the city was still mostly empty, we wandered over to Roppongi Hills to find a super-dynamic taiko (drumming) performance. Taiko is very Japanese in its orderliness.

For some stupid reason, I shot my taiko video sideways and can't rotate it, but here it is anyway - look sideways!



There were also some favorite Japanese games set up, which I assume are favorites to play during the New Year's holiday.

A group of girls were taught by older women to juggle little beanbags. In the foreground, you can see the girls' shoes, which were removed and neatly arranged before the girls stepped onto the tarp; this is a common sight in Japan when you go on picnics.


Here, a half-dozen boys competed with small, polished spinning tops. They used string to hurl the tops onto a drumlike table, then cheered as they watched the tops bump one another off the side until one top was left.

Adventure travel

Some families have big adventures on vacation - climbing mountains, floating down rivers, eating exotic foods. The New Yorker's recent food issue included a story about a couple that met in Tibet and traveled the world in search of amazing recipes, even with their young children.

We are not like that - so far. One couple I know in Seattle prepared their children for serious travel by having them nap in different places every day. We're just glad when our children go to sleep in their hotel beds, though travel is definitely getting easier for us; when Blaine was paying his bribe at the Bali airport, both kids were very patient even though they were exhausted.

Having said that, we booked ourselves into the Westin because it has a "kids' club" to give us a break on childcare and of course spent more time at the resort than on adventurous tours of Bali.

We saw the flipside of our equation when we crossed paths with our friends Rena Singer and John Murphy (of the Wall St. Journal). They stayed at a villa, as it's called, in Seminyak, a favorite Euro tourist town. Though obviously not a hardship post it was a stretch toward family independence, untethered from the Westin's unbelievable breakfast buffet.

Here's a picture of Rena and John's villa: big movable doors, open-air living spaces, a kitchen, a swimming pool, and frogs that hopped into the living room during a downpour.



Of course I immediately made an envious comparison between their arrangement and our hotel. Clearly, our vaca was more lame! Then I came to my senses: 1) Arno can't swim so the pool would be a hassle; 2) We enjoyed not cooking on vacation; 3) Without the Westin's kids' club, we'd go nuts.

But Rena and John, who lived in South Africa and Jerusalem before they came to Tokyo, did shake us out of our hotel stupor. They took us to Padang Beach, which is hidden behind an enormous cliff. You walk through a stone passageway to find this very calm beach. I thought it was neat that we were swimming in the Indian Ocean.



Then Rena and John's driver (we were in a taxi) took us to a restaurant on a cliff overlooking the ocean, with great views of the sunset.




We watched the surfers come up from the beach (they attach surfboards to motorcycles) and ate fried calamari and Indonesian fried noodles and beer, while the kids drank strawberry milk and watched lizards climb the walls.



We all had a great time.

A late Hanukah

This year, because we were going to Bali, we celebrated Christmas in Tokyo on December 17, which was conveniently also my birthday. On Christmas Day, Santa left some lightweight candy and toys for Lucinda and Arno at the Bali Spirit Hotel in the town of Ubud. (Yes, they still believe in Santa!)

Hanukah, which my mother, Sheila, has shared with the children, was left by the wayside this year. As usual, I'd forgotten its start date.

But this morning, January 5, Lucinda announced that we should make latkes for dinner and should light the menorah.

So we did, lighting all the candles in one night.