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.

Back home

We're home. We took a night flight back to Tokyo and arrived this morning at 7:45 a.m. (A Japan Airlines 747 makes a 16-hour round trip between Narita and Denpasar, Bali's capital, once a day.) We dragged our stuff into our house, Blaine made pancakes for the children, and I took a 3 hour nap!

We had a great trip in Bali - very relaxing, lots of sleep, and we loved being in a warmer climate without the humidity of Tokyo in the summer. The children are getting better about traveling, though Arno lived on pancakes, pasta, and french fries for 10 days.

We spent a week at the Westin in Nusa Dua, which is the equivalent of a gated community for enormous resort hotels, and three nights in Ubud, the alleged "cultural center" of Bali. I took heaps of photos and will write some blog posts about our trip this week, but here are a few of my favorites shots.

Lucinda sipped coconut milk from an actual coconut!


At the Westin, Blaine and I usually read for 1-2 hours every morning in a thatch-roofed pavilion.


Arno at the cliffside Ulu Watu temple.



And this is what I learned on my winter vacation:

- Lots of rich Russians vacation in Bali! The men are huge and hulking, with Russell Crowe's "Gladiator" hair, and the women favor peroxide-white long hair and the flashiest outfits imaginable.

- Being a tourist in Bali couldn't be more enjoyable. Beautiful beaches, well-managed hotels, spa treatments, and it's shockingly cheap - we often spent $36 for dinner for all of us, and we hired a driver for $40 a day. (The traffic is nuts there.)

- As a tourist, though, it's pretty rare to see anything that's authentically Balinese other than, say, people carrying heavy loads of stuff on their heads. Bali is known for its inexpensive, good-quality crafts like woodworking, basketweaving, batik, and silver jewelry. But any impression of this as "culture" is diluted by the craft shops lining the streets in every town near tourist centers. Which doesn't mean I couldn't find trinkets to bring home.

In Bali

We're in Bali - at the Westin in Nusa Dusa. It's one of several hotel resorts along the eastern coast of a peninsula south of Denpasar, the site of Bali's int'l airport.

The 7-hour Japan Airlines flight was thankfully very easy; JAL has great service even in economy class, with decent food, a toy for each child, and a long list of movies to keep everyone occupied. Arno bonded and traded toys with a boy sitting in front of him, making our flight that much easier.

At the Bali airport, we had our first adventure: Blaine had to pay a $200 bribe to the immigration service to enter the country! Though many friends in Tokyo told us how much they love Bali, no one mentioned an immigration shakedown.

Arriving at 10pm, we paid $25 per person for a visa and waited in a long line to present our passports. An immigration agent noticed that Blaine's passport would expire in less than 6 months (5 months and 1 week, to be exact). "So?," Blaine said, with the blase tone of man who's seen to his fair share of third-world airports. We were told that he needed a special visa to enter Indonesia, and he was led to a small office to discuss the situation; the children and I waited for a few minutes and went into the office, where a half-dozen immigration agents were chatting and smoking clove cigarettes.

I took the kids behind a partition to see Blaine, who listened as another official repeatedly explained the situation: Blaine's passport could not be accepted and he would have to return to Tokyo. (Conveniently, the JAL plane was leaving for the return trip in about an hour.) With the kids on my lap, I explained that we were there for a family vacation and would gone in 10 days - couldn't the agent help us? Blaine said he was a journalist on vacation. The man repeated himself, and again, and again. Then, finally, he said that Blaine might come in... if the agent manually entered his passport expiration date as 1 month later.

The kids and I left the office, which I hoped would speed a resolution - fewer witnesses, etc. We waited. Blaine emerged 20 mins later. The man, who was slow to come to the point, had finally written "$200" on a piece of paper and directed Blaine to an ATM. By now it was 11:30pm. The ATM promised dollars but didn't have any. Blaine went back to consult, and was told that 2,000,000 rupees would be acceptable. (The currency is approx 10,000 rupees for $1) He paid, we grabbed our suitcases and arrived at the Westin at 12:30 a.m. The kids were very heroic and didn't whine the whole time.

Since that unpleasantness, we've had a great time. The room is comfortable, hotel staff friendly, the kids love swimming in the warm pools, and there's a fantastic breakfast buffet for $15 for the whole family. We met our Tokyo friends, John Murphy and Rena Singer and their children, at Padang Beach yesterday afternoon for a swim before we found a restaurant w/sunset views. Today, the children are in the hotel's Kids' Club - a big reason why we stayed here - while Blaine and I are hanging out and reading.

I have my camera but can't download to Blaine's computer, so pix will wait until our return to Tokyo.

Age of achievement

I'm turning 41 tomorrow. To celebrate, I'm making gingerbread cookies for Lucinda's winter concert, making a pasta dish for Arno's class holiday party, having a playdate with Arno at a friend's house, and taking the kids ice skating. Then we'll go home, have an early Christmas present-opening, eat a birthday dinner, and pack to go Bali.

I should add here that I've also recently pitched some stories to magazine editors; my sumo story for KIE reminded me how much I like writing as well as editing. But it's true, and I'm only sometimes regretful, that my life in Japan has much more to do with domestic work than with professional work.

So it's been kind of fascinating lately to notice that a handful people I know -- sometimes very well, sometimes very tangentially -- who are my age, are in the news. Mostly for good things, but not always. To wit:

Shaun Donovan, Obama's nominee for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, is married to a woman, Liza Gilbert, who is the sister of my good friend from J-school, Anne Gilbert.

Anne Gilbert, meanwhile, is married to Gordon Goldstein, who just published a very well-reviewed (and by Richard Holbrooke, no less) book, Lessons in Disaster, about McGeorge Bundy. (Those Gilberts are pretty spectacular!)

Next, Jason Grumet, who dated a friend of a friend of mine at college, has been advising Obama about energy issues and was mentioned as a possible Sec'y of Energy. He won't get that job, but he may well be the #2 or, almost certainly, very high up in the dept.

When I was watching a 60 Minutes piece about Barney Frank, I noticed that it was produced by Shachar Bar-on, a brilliant guy who is married to another of my J-school friends, Laura Rabhan, who is, herself, an Emmy-winning documentary producer.

And then comes the Madoff scandal. Bernard Madoff, who was running a $50 billion Ponzi scheme, apparently stole a lot of money from the Fairfield Greenwich Group hedge fund. The fund is run by Walter Noel, whose daughter, Alix, graduated from Brown in my class (I knew her very slightly) and whose husband is also a top exec in the firm. I can't imagine she's having a very good week.

My point, however, is not that it's all about me. Instead, it's about how many well-educated people - especially but not exclusively men - have, by age 40 or so, very defined, successful lives because they've focused intensely on a profession or subject. Which can turn out well or not.

I should add here that writing about this isn't a self-criticism; it's reality. I'm plenty focused - though not on public achievements - and there's no reason I won't find new achievements by age 50 or 60.

Editorial

The Washington Post has an editorial today (Monday, 12/15) about North Korea based on Blaine's story. The headline: "Three Kernels of Corn." It's worth reading.

Blaine's latest about North Korea...

...is the disturbing story of a 25 yr old North Korean man who is the only known escapee from a DPRK gulag.

It's on the front page of The Washington Post on Thursday, Dec 11, and has been picked up by the Huffington Post, so it's getting lots of attention.

The man, Shin Dong-hyuk, was born in Camp No. 14, ate corn kernels from cow dung, was held in solitary confinement and tortured as a 14-year-old, and watched the executions of his mother and brother. He escaped by climbing over the body of a fellow prisoner who got hung up on an electrified barbed-wire fence.

If you want to read more, this website has an English version of Shin's life story - including a few gruesome drawings he made about his torture.

By itself, Shin's story would be amazing. But Blaine, in his Blainian way, made a larger, more important point: South Koreans have all but ignored Shin because they don't much care what's happening in North Korea right now. And that indifference lessens the pressure -- to the extent that there is any pressure -- on the DPRK to change its ways.

Underparenting

Lately there's been heaps of talk about "overparenting." The New Yorker labeled it "The Child Trap": when accomplished well-educated people view their children as their latest project, as extensions of their successes as adult, and coddle them to distraction.

Overparenting is over-catering to your children and signing them up for every imaginable afterschool activity to sharpen their developing brains, turn them into little geniuses, and set them up for Ivy League educations.

I'm worried that I'm underparenting.

Most 1st graders at Nishimachi have unbelievably busy schedules. On top of 30-60 minutes of homework every night in reading, spelling, math, writing and Japanese, most children have afterschool lessons four days a week. It's typical to hear that these 6 or 7 year olds are learning piano or violin; soccer, tennis or ballet; French or Chinese; have tutoring in Japanese at least once a week, and/or go to Kumon to practice speed-math.

The academic and music training (and pressure to do all of it) may be more intense here than in the US, though, having said that, my 6 yr old nephew, who goes to public school in Iowa City, takes Suzuki piano, scores heaps of goals on his soccer team, and adds up 3-digit numbers in his head.

In any case, knowing and hearing about these other children is making me insecure that I'm the outlying underparent. I keep telling myself that "She's only 6 years old!", but maybe I'm too laid back about Lucinda's schedule.?

This is what Lucinda does every week: She wanted to take hula lessons on Mondays. She has a Japanese tutor on Thursdays. She sometimes has Brownies on Fridays. She doesn't like sports where there's a winner and a loser, quit soccer after one semester last year, and has so far refused tennis. She plays tag for three recesses a day and likes to come home after school to draw pictures, play with her little brother, have a playdate when I can arrange it, watch TV for an hour while I make supper, and do her homework before bed.

Am I underparenting? I'm not sure. Lucinda is doing well in school but not astonishingly so, and I worry that adding new tasks will make her feel exhausted and pressured. But maybe I'm missing an opportunity to introduce her to experiences - especially music or Kumon's math program - that require a fair amount of time and practice? It's a parenting dilemma for the modern age.

Movie tickets

On Friday, which is movie night at our house, we are taking Lucinda and Arno to the movie theater at Roppongi Hills. This is quite rare for us because most American/English kids movies don't come to Tokyo at all or arrive weeks or months after we can rent it on Apple TV.

We're going to see Wall-E - six months or so after it opened in the US.

This is where it gets tricky. The easiest way to buy tickets is over the internet to choose your seats before the theater sells out, as it always does. But Toho Cinemas recently changed its website, and the explanation of which tickets (adult, child, discount, senior) are available at which prices is entirely in Japanese. I guessed at 4 tickets for 1500 yen each, which is probably the adult price; if not, we will have to sort it out on Friday night.

This is the email I received to confirm. Fortunately, I don't have to know Japanese to figure it out.

Kowal Jessica 様

￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣
このたびはご購入いただきまして誠にありがとうございます。
Thank you very much for your purchase.

■購入番号 Confirmation Number XXXX　(TEL:080-XXXX-9785)
■映画館 Theater ＴＯＨＯシネマズ六本木ヒルズ　TOHOCINEMAS ROPPONGI HILLS　
■上映日 Date 2008/12/5　■時間 Time 18:40～
■合計金額 Total Price \6,000　■座席番号 Seat Number I-24 I-25 I-26 I-27
■映画名称 Movie （字）ＷＡＬＬ・Ｅ／ウォーリー WALLE/ENGLISH

※チケット発券時には、上記の電話番号と購入番号の入力が必要となります。
*You need the above phone number and the confirmation number
when you pick up your ticket(s) at the vit ticketing machines.