Tsurumi

Back again after a two-night trip to Riken in Yokohama. Actually, of course, the institute isn't in Yokohama city itself, but in a ward - a local community - called Tsurumi, north of the city. And if you want to be all nitpicky, it's not so much in Tsurumi as in an industrial park in the harbour area outside Tsurumi itself. Nestled in between a sewage pipe factory and a Tokyo Gas facility, and just down the road to the Yokohama garbage treatment plant and incinerator.

The Riken institute in Tsurumi. The cool-looking buildings is not in fact an alien spacecraft docking station, but the NMR research center (MRI, that you can use to scan brain activity, is one kind of NMR scanning, but you can use NMR for scanning all kinds of other materials too). And no, I have no idea what it looks like inside; you're not even allowed to eat in the cafeteria without a site ID card, much less visit the actual facilities.

This, by the way, seems to be a deliberate policy in Japan. Almost all institutes and research labs I've worked at or visited here are placed in inaccessible rural or industrial areas; the more desolate and harder to reach the better. I fully expect future institutes of higher learning to be accessible only by helicopter.

Anyway, the meeting was fun; it was focused on poster sessions rather than talks, which suits me fine. I learn a lot more from talking to people about their work standing by their poster than listening to a twenty-minute monologue about the same thing. I find it much easier, too, talking about my own work with other people directly than stumbling through an incoherent speech. And since this was a multidisciplinary meeting ("computational science" was the connecting thread, with contributions from computer graphics to neurology to solid-state physics), posters make it easy to focus on the stuff that you are interested in, and skip the stuff you have no clue about.

Tsurumi seems to be a typical no-frills town. Busy center around the train stations, surrounded by mixed business and residential areas with apartment buildings, single homes and half-shuttered shopping streets; all criss-crossed by elevated highways and local train lines. The only real wrinkle to the place is the large harbour area with its industrial park. It's decent enough but not a place you'd visit without a particular reason to do so.

Much of Tsurumi actually looks like this when you get away from the main roads. Quite cosy and inviting small-town feel, but still close to major cities. I bet most residents really like living here. I probably would.

Shuttered-up shopping streets, by the way, are a real and growing problem in many communities. Places like Tokyo, Osaka and so on are doing OK of course, but you can't have a news report on the problems facing regional economies without the camera panning across a desolate shopping street, shutters all drawn and customers conspicuously absent.

Shuttered, or at least temporarily closed, shops along one street, mid-afternoon on a weekday.

A major culprit is of course faltering local economies. The recession hits regional areas far harder than the large metropolitan areas. Another reason, specific to these kind of streets, is that shop owners typically own the building and live above the shop itself. When they quit - for whatever reason - they are unwilling or unable to rent out the business space to somebody else; the shop really is part of their home after all. So the shops stay closed. And closed shops sour the mood on the street, leading to fewer customers and more closures.

But I wonder if there isn't a simple problem of over-establishment as well. A walk from the center of Tsurumi down to the harbour sees not just one but several long, roofed shopping streets on the way, with what to my naive eyes looks like way too many shops to be sustainable. It's like every street wanted to be a shopping street during the economic boom, and competition is killing most of them off again.

Tsurumi Ono station out toward the harbour on a Friday evening, and commuters are all gathering to go home.

All pictures from Tsurumi is in the set Here

Tsurumi

I'm in Yokohama - actually, in Tsurumi, north of Yokohama proper - and preparing for a research meeting tomorrow and Friday; don't expect any substantial posts for another few days in other words.

This meeting is oriented around poster sessions rather than talks. This is good: posters mean you get to talk one-on-one with people doing research you're interested in. But every poster submitted - our included - has a 1 (one) minute talk telling everybody why they should come by and check it out.

This is hard. This is really hard. I've done this kind of poster presentation before, and it's really difficult. I can talk about our research of the cuff for ten or twenty minutes, no problem. I can do a one-hour seminar with some preparation. But condensing it all into 60-90 seconds - including title and contributor names - is really tough.

And then you have to actually deliver it in that brief time, with a hundred people looking at you (well, they're mostly surfing the web, but still). You can't "iummm" or "ahh", or "well" or "maa" no matter how much you may want to. I'm a champion "umm"-er, but one good "ummm" - delivered with confidence and gusto - could eat up half the time you have. If I would try an unscripted delivery I wouldn't get as far as the names of my collaborators before people start forcibly pulling me off the stage with a hook.

So yes, I'm going to sound stilted and wooden when I rattle through my presentation tomorrow. Not a major problem; anybody with an interest in our work will get as much detailed, unscripted explanation as they can stand.

Statue at the soccer stadium in Nagai park, Osaka. Yashica Mat with Kodak Ektar film (Fuji has some real catching up to do here). No connection to the above; I just like this shot.

Spirals

I have a fair amount of things to take care of as I'm heading to a symposium in Yokohama towards the end of the week. On the political front everybody is waiting for the Tokyo local elections and for prime minister Aso to a) be kicked out of office by his irate party members; b) get off the pot and just call the national elections already; or c) admit that he's been stringing everyone along just to see how many blogging pundits' heads will explode in frustrated anticipation before the time limit expires.

So to shift gears a bit, the spiral below¹ is a pretty cool visual illusion (from here):

Red, green and blue spirals.

There's three wide, coloured spirals going clockwise inward above: a red, a green and a light blue one. They're crossed by narrow orange and purple lines.

Except that those wide green and blue spirals are actually the exact same colour. You don't believe me? Go ahead and check - you can save the image and compare the colors directly in a drawing program if you want.

One of those greenish spirals is crossed by thin orange lines. The other one is crossed by purple lines. And that's enough for our vision system to get completely fooled; in comparison to the orange colour it looks green while in comparison to purple it's blue.

This kind of thing is fun of course, but it's not just a neat demo or toy. Illusions like this one help us figure out how the visual system works. It's very hard to figure out exactly how the visual system processes the images it gets. But when it fails - like when we get fooled by an illusion - the way it fails can tell us a lot about exactly what our brain was trying to do.

This also reminds us that our vision is not some passive, deterministic mechanism. Our eyes are not cameras and our minds are not memory cards. We don't see what we think we see, and we don't remember what we think we saw. Eyewitness reports are notoriously unreliable for this very reason. Far from any objective observers of reality, we spend every waking moment actively fooling ourselves.

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#1 I'm certainly not implying any suggestive likeness to the Aso governments slow spiralling down the drain of political defeat into the cesspool of history. Well.. OK, but only a bit, mind you.

DPJ - No hurdle too low, no goal too open

So, the LDP is crashing in the opinion polls. The party is in complete disarray, Aso has lost what little authority he had but refuses to step down, and an election must be held within months. It's an open goal for the opposition.

Of course, the DPJ has never yet seen a golden opportunity they can't squander. The ink not yet dry on his appointment, new DPJ leader Hatoyamas office is already under investigation for illegal campaign contributions. This time it's money from himself donated to his campaign office with the names of unwitting - and sometimes dead¹ - people used as cover. There's a 10 million yen limit for donations by any one individual but this way his campaign aide could transfer several times that from his personal accounts.

Now, when the predecessor Ozawa was ultimately forced from office for illegal campaign contributions, did it even once cross what passes for the DPJ leadership's minds to perhaps vet the candidates for this sort of thing? Couldn't they even have just asked him if, oh, by the way, you don't happen to have any illegal campaign money-related problems do you, the kind that will completely derail our attempts at a once-in-an-era chance at political power? No, of course not. I suspect that if they really did, they'd have a hard time filling a single post in the party.

As the incumbent LDP and the Aso government is exposing itself as a thieving group of dishonest, sleazy, money-grubbing, power-mad, backstabbing selfish bastards, a lot of people seem to be asking why anybody would ever want to vote LDP in the upcoming election.

I do understand why. At least the LDP people are good at being dishonest, sleazy and money-grubbing. The DPJ can't even manage low-grade sleaze competently. Imagine having such clowns bumble about in office, completely fumbling the large-scale corruption that comes with being in office. It'd be embarrassing and painful to watch. It'd be like one of those TV amateur talent shows where an earnest and likeable singer who should never have passed the first round is making a complete and total ass of themselves on a national stage.

I don't vote in Japanese elections of course. And I'm happy I don't; I'd really hate to have to choose between two such miserable alternatives. Let's hear it for a resounding win by mr. None Of The Above.

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#1 Ah yes, dead "voters". At least he knows the classics in political fraud.

Aso Government Death Watch

'Tis a Dark and Stormy night. In the old, run-down house, Aso, the ancient sorcerer (curiously resembling a grumpy potato) is fighting desperately to keep his tortured creation alive, even as the whippoorwills outside sing about its imminent death. Aso looks up in panic as the protective seals and sigils groan and weaken when an indescribable eldritch horror - formed in the darkest reaches of space, forged from the pain and anguish of a million betrayed LDP supporters - inexorably forces its way inside to reach the tortured ..thing that still agonizingly moves on the granite slab in some cruel mockery of life and reclaim it as one of its own.

Aaanyway, we're well into the Aso government death-watch in other words, and possibly (only possibly) the end of LDP as the dominant force in Japanese politics. Right now we have three elections and three dates to consider.

First, on July 12, the Tokyo metropolitan area holds their local elections. Yes, they're "local", but it's greater Tokyo we're talking about. They matter a lot, and they're widely seen as a bellwether for the national election.

Second, we have the upcoming national Lower House election, which must be held in early September at the latest (though the election date could apparently be prolonged into October). The exact date is decided by Prime Minister Aso.

Third, the term of office for Aso himself expires on September 30, and he has to stand for re-election as party leader in the LDP no later than that. He is hugely impopular even within his own party by now, and a fair amount of LDP members want to push him out and elect a new leader before

One question is basically if Aso calls the election before the Tokyo elections or after. Coalition partner New Komeito is dead set against calling it before, as they don't want to fight two election campaigns at the same time in the Tokyo area, but their clout with the LDP may well be on the wane.

If Aso calls them early enough he can schedule the election to August 8, during the Obon holidays. At that time many, many people return to their family villages to see their old folks and visit the family graves. And since you can't vote by post or by proxy here, it means a lot of city folks (who tends to support the opposition) will not be able to vote, while the rural population (who tends to support the LDP) can. This would be sneaky and underhanded - and frankly a creative, well-played political strategy, as long as it doesn't ruffle feathers enough to cause a public backlash.

The other alternative would be an election in early September. This would give the economic mood a bit more time to improve and perhaps lift the LDP approval ratings along with it. Of course, waiting as long as possible risk looking like Aso has no grip on the situation and is unable to take initiative.

The wild card really is how long Aso can stay in office. On one hand, most LDP members recognize that they'd stand a greater chance with the Kuidaore Tarō doll as their prime minister candidate than with Aso at the helm.

On the other hand, switching the Prime Minister for a fourth time in a row, just a month or two before the election, would come across as a cynical, transparent attempt at manipulating voter sentiment for short term electoral gain. It might actually hurt the party even worse than keeping Aso around - also, I suspect that Aso's accession was an attempt to do the same thing, and look just how well that's turned out.

Still, things have gotten bad enough that Aso apparently no longer is in full control over his own cabinet anymore. And last week some high-level LDP people even asked a popular governor and former comedian Higashikokobaru to run for a seat on the LDP ticket, who responded he'd run if he'd be a candidate for the party presidency. This did not sit well with the exisisting LDP members and underscores how the LDP is lacking in any kind of actual leadership. edit: Shisaku has a good, oven-fresh post on these events.

But the Prime Minister has the nuclear option: he, and only he, calls the election. If calls to push him out get too strident he can always push that button and end it with a political bang as it were. Consider his position: well into his 70's, at the topmost post he's ever going to hold, and most likely the last post no matter what happens. He may well want to go out fighting and go in history as the last prime minister of the LDP era, rather than be recorded as Temporary Nobody #3 in the row of short-term prime minister stand-ins.

40

I turned forty today. My beard is visibly graying. My next pair of glasses will be bifocals. The top of my head has better use for sunscreen than for a comb. I am officially no longer "young" or "promising" for anything. Any year now, I may have to decide what I want to do when I grow up.

On the other hand, at 40 half my life still lies ahead of me - two-thirds, if you count just your adult life. That's statistically speaking of course; I could live to a hundred, or I could get run over by a bus tomorrow. Thirty, forty years of adulthood is a long time. It takes less than ten years to go from novice to proficient in most fields; in forty years you could have another two full careers.

The 40th birthday seems to create a lot of anxiety in many people; I don't really see why. Much worse, for me, was 25. That's when you're irrevocably an adult with adult responsibilities and expectations piling up. That's when you're expected to "go out in the world", "make your mark", "be all that you can be" and so on. You're supposed to build your career, start a family, become famous, become rich, seize the day...

"Be all that you can be" - well, by 40 you know what "you can be". You know what you'll be able to achieve and what you will not. Nobody expects you to do more than muddle through life, experience piling up and body gently falling apart. Which is great. With the pressure to succeed gone you're free to make you and your family happy instead. Do things because they're interesting, not because they benefit your career or your social status. And if you do decide to embark on something new you can do it quietly, with little fuss, and without expectations weighing you down.

No, 40 is not a problem. If anything this is the best time of my life so far. I have an interesting (if temporary) project to work on, fun hobbies, friends and acquaintances dotted around the world, and I'm happily married to a woman I love to distraction. I may finally be getting the hang of this whole "life" thing. I'll take 40 over 25 anytime.

Anyway, on our birthdays we always treat each other to dinner, preferably somewhere we would not normally go. Somewhere too expensive, too far away or too special for us to go on a normal weekend. On my birthday last year we had Kobe steak, and on Ritsuko's birthday we had traditional French cuisine. This year we ate dinner at "Rote Rose", a German restaurant and wine importer in Kobe.

Restaurant Rote Rose, Kobe.

The menu is very German, of course, with a fairly extensive wine list but only one beer (Löwenbräu). Ritsuko had today's fish and I had eisbein with sauerkraut. It was very good; the meat was savoury and very tender and the fat was not runny or bland. I have to say, though, that I'm no longer used to this kind of food; it was all I could do to finish the plate. Good food overall, if perhaps a bit overpriced. Not a restaurant for a beer lover but if you like German wines this seems a very good place to go.

Campaign Money - the Neverending Story

Japan's Finance minister Yosano seems to have been accepting donations from a dummy front set up to pay politicians for more than twenty years. He may possibly have acted illegally in accepting the money, though my guess is he didn't. Maybe he knew the source was dubious, but probably he did not. It hardly matters.

The elections are a couple of months away and as finance minister he's one of the most high-profile members of the cabinet. This is not a good time for the Aso government to remind everyone of the low-grade sleaze and shady deals that has become a hallmark of the LDP era. It's perhaps especially inconvenient that it's the minister of finance, who is supposed to be the man of the hour in this economic crisis. A bit difficult to send him out to calm the electorate if the journalists keep bringing up suspect campaign donations.

Also of note: The monthly Japan blog matsuri is up, with the theme of Living on a budget in Japan. Plenty of good entries there.