Super Cool Biz

Not so Cool Biz.

A recurring feature here every summer lately is "Cool Biz"; a campaign to limit air conditioner use in offices during summer and have office workers dress a bit more casually - no tie and no jacket - to combat the heat instead. This campaign has taken off, and it seems most offices go casual between June and September or so.

Cool Biz.

This summer the campaign becomes more important than usual. The Tohoku disaster has caused major disruptions in energy production. It's not just - or even primarily - the broken-down reactors at Fukushima; a couple of major coal and gas power plants were also heavily damaged, a number of power plants were emergency shut-down, and one plant - Hamaoka - that lies right on top of a fault overdue for a quake has been ordered to halt until safety measures can be strengthened. A number of other reactors are due for yearly maintenance and inspection and are or will be shut-down for summer. If no reactors get permission to restart again - and in the face of the ongoing Fukushima disaster it would be difficult - Asahi Shimbun estimates that 42 out of 54 reactors, 80% of the nuclear capacity, will be offline during the hot summer months.

The government is setting an enforced 15% power savings target for eastern Japan during summer, and capacity is stretched thin in western Japan as well. The environmental agency is instituting "Super Cool Biz" in their own offices, where they allow employees to wear t-shirts, jeans and Hawaiian-style short-sleeved shirts. They also recommend extending the Cool Biz period to between May and October.

Really Cool Biz.

I don't expect a lot of companies will go as far as allowing t-shirts in the office, but NHK did have a segment last week on a company that institutes "Extreme Cool Biz" this summer, with no air conditioner at all, just fans and open windows, and employees wear t-shirts or tank-tops. It's a web design company, with an average employee age of 25 or so, which makes it a tad less surprising perhaps. You're unlikely to ever find the branch manager of a major bank in a tank-top at the office (and when you consider the physical condition of middle-aged office workers I doubt you'll want to).

Cool Biz doesn't really affect me personally; I wear the normal academic uniform of jeans and open shirt all year round. But I do see it during my commute of course. It's become a sign of summer when the dark coats and ties all but disappear in the subway, and when the coats and ties return you know we're due for autumn. It almost makes me wish for a festival or something; each company with its own salaryman dance troupe parading down Midosuji street on the morning of June 1st, ceremoniously casting off their coats and tie to welcome the summer.

I've noticed a possible longer-term change. Some years ago, salarymen all wore their suit jacket and tie in the mornings, ready for the office. But the past couple of winters more and more office workers - up to one in four perhaps, this winter - elect to go casual for their commute, and put on their tie and coat only once they reach the office. It seems Cool Biz is gradually eroding the perception of proper business attire. After all, if it's OK to wear an open shirt when it's 35 degrees, why not when it's 25? The strict suit-shirt-tie uniform is certainly here to stay for now, but I would not make any bets for the next generation.

Relax Biz.

Kabuki

We saw a kabuki performance in Kyoto this weekend; Ritsuko is very interested and wanted to take me along. I'd seen the occasional few minutes of kabuki on TV and on YouTube before, and was pretty mystified by the whole thing. Still, it's fun to do stuff together, I figured it'd be a neat experience, and if nothing else I'd have a nice long nap in the dark theater.

You can't take pictures of the performance, obviously, but here's a pre-show shot of geisha and maiko spectators to give you some local color.

How about having one or two performances specifically for people that want to take pictures? Charge double the normal seat fee, and let people bring cameras, tripods, strobes and shoot to their hearts content. Everybody is there to take pictures so they're not disturbing anyone else. Allow only private use of the pictures, and have separate, optional per-image contracts for commercial release. I bet a lot of hobbyists would jump at the chance; I know I would.

The performance stars Tamasaburo Bandō, a top kabuki actor. The main feature was a play called "Tsumoru Koi Yuki no Seki no To". The whole program was about two hours - and it was amazing, spectacular.

I realized that this, to me, is very much like opera: It falls flat on television or CD but a live performance is electrifying. I've never once seen a televised opera or heard a performance that's managed to engage me, but the few live shows I've seen have been great.

I really think it has to do with format shifting. You know how the movie is almost never as good as the book it's based on? And how book tie-ins to popular movies aren't as engaging as the original? How online reproductions of photographic prints are kind of flat and uninspiring? All works are made for a specific format, and you lose something important when you shoehorn them into a different one¹.

This performance was two parts, with a first, 15-minute dance number by Bandō from one play; a break; then a 1.5 hour play that, itself, is apparently a part of a longer work. The theater specializes in making fairly modern productions, with up-to-date language and music score, so to my surprise I actually understood a fair bit of the dialogue and singing.

Now, like opera, the story is secondary. As Wikipedia describes it, kabuki was originally an all-day event, and people would drift in and out, chat with friends, eat and drink and only focus on the stage when something interesting seemed to happen. Plays and sets have also always been fluid, changed at the whim of the actors or producers with scenes added or removed, dialogue changed and characters changed or replaced. Updating the dialogue or playing only pieces of a play is perfectly normal in other words.

What's the story? Not really sure. I understood a fair bit of the dialogue, but I didn't follow the story itself. When I came home I looked it up on the Japanese Wikipedia, but I still didn't really understand. When I found an English description and still didn't get the story I realized there's not much of a story there to get.

In short it's your typical drama: girl reunites with boy, then girl leaves; boys brother gets killed by bandits and sends bloodied letter saying "Hullo brother, how are you? Me, I'm being killed by bandits"; the gatekeeper turns out to be the bandit chief in disguise; drunk bandit chief finds bloody letter, decides he's going to take over the kingdom, then tries to cut down cherry tree but is stopped by cherry tree spirit - who turns out to be the secret lover of the killed brother, takes the letter and realizes the gatekeeper is the bandit that killed her lover. At which point the playwright finished off the whole thing with a five-minute axe-fight. I'm not kidding. Big axe.

Just like opera is all about the music, kabuki is about the dance. The performers are dancers first and foremost, and only occasionally lapse into dialog. In fact, while they do speak, more often than not it's singers in the orchestra that speaks or sings while the actors dance to the dialog. The dance, the costumes and the scenery is all fairly stylized and symbol-laden, so it helps to look things up in advance - blue, for instance, is evil, so you know the character in bluish makeup is the villain. You don't actually need to understand much of it to enjoy the spectacle.

And it is a spectacle. Lots of flashy costumes and makeup, over-the-top dialogue, extravagant acting and haunting music. Bandō, who plays the female parts, is brilliant, even to my completely inexperienced eyes. He makes it look completely effortless and natural. Shidō Nakamura, the villain, is young but was also very good². He has the most physical role by far, and it doesn't help that he's wearing three sets of costumes that come off during the play. He's sweating buckets - really, I'm surprised people aren't slipping on the stage after a while. Hayato Nakamura that plays the lord is only eighteen and it showed, even to me. He was clearly still thinking about his performance as a set of dance moves to be performed, while the other two were playing their characters and letting their moves flow naturally from that.

There's lots of fun things going on in and around the play. Stagehands in all-black keep going on stage to rearrange props, help the actors with their clothing, and at one point holding a fake bird on a stick (it's delivering the dying younger brothers letter) and so on, but by mutual consent they're "invisible". This really works; they're plain and silent where everything else is loud and gaudy so they really don't interfere. There's a "bridge", a narrow strip going from the stage all the way to the back of the theater, and several dramatic moments are acted on that bridge, right among the spectators.

If you haven't seen a kabuki play, go do so. It's worth it. I'm not going to link to any youTube videos; they're really dull and flat compared to the real thing. Go see it live, you won't regret it.

--

#1 The only exception that I know of is audio books; for some reason the printed word generally works as well - sometimes better - when read aloud. It may have something to do with the primacy of the spoken word for our brain language centers I guess.

If true, it means that essays and short stories should be read one at a time, not as part of a collection. Novels like some of Dickens and Dumas' works, that were originally serialized, perhaps really should be read piecemeal, with a week-long break between each chapter, in order to get the right pacing of events.

It also means that I probably should give ballet and modern dance a chance at some point. It is possible that they, too, are fun to watch live after all. Not going to go out of my way for it though.

#2 He's also known for a public divorce some time ago. He was in a minor car accident - no injuries - and the police report showed he'd been in the car with a woman that was not his wife. Kabuki actors are very much part of the celebrity gossip scene in Japan.

Nanapi

Nanapi is a Japanese website filled with everyday tips for living. The name seems to be a conjunction of "7分" (nanabun - seven minutes) and "レシピ" (reshipi - recipe), which nicely encapsulates the format: quick, easy-to-follow tips in a cookbook form.

The site is in Japanese (sorry), but it's easy Japanese. The tips are in a how-to format so there's not much room for complicated expressions or lots of vocabulary. Each tip is short (many are just a few sentences) so if you're a Japanese learner you're not likely to get discouraged and give up even if it turns out to be harder to read than you thought.

The tips themselves range from the banal to the useful to the somewhat odd. One useful tip I didn't know about, for instance: If you use a permanent marker on a whiteboard by mistake, you can erase it by painting over the text with a whiteboard marker. The solvent in the whiteboard marker dissolves the permanent marks too so you can wipe both off at once.

You'll also find how to water plants, how to stop a yawn during an important meeting (lick your upper lip, or press your tongue against the back of your lower teeth), how to make online passwords that are easy to remember and 50 excuses for coming too late to work (among the less obviously useful ones are "Had to give a statement to the police after helping a woman connected to the Yakuza", and "Well, it seemed like such a bother").

Some of the tips are somewhat odd, though, in the sense that I don't get why you would want to do it in the first place. One such tip - the one that alerted me to this site to begin with - is how to eat curry and rice without dirtying your plate. Japanese curry is basically a thick meat and vegetable stew - it's simple but amazingly satisfying, and one dish you can count on even the cheapest food place to get right. I don't have a single picture of it (a major oversight I have to rectify), but if you click on the link there's both a picture and illustrations to follow.

The idea is to make sure your curry is on one side of the plate and the rice on the other. You eat the rice and the curry that mix together down the middle. Then you push the rice towards the curry side and repeat. As the curry and rice disappears the white rice will soak up and wipe the sauce off the plate. When you're finished the plate will be white and clean with hardly a trace of the thick stew.

Princess girls, Shinsaibashi
No sticky stew for them.

Sounds good, and you can bet I'll try it, just to see if it works. Now why you would want to do it is something I didn't really get. According to a local authority on Japanese culture (my wife - it doesn't get more local or authoritative unless we let our spare room to an anthropologist), the tip is aimed at young girls going on dates.

Apparently, when you're doing your damndest to come off as all Ethereal Dreamy Rainbow Tinkle Princess-like, leaving smears of brown, sticky stew clinging to your plate kind of ruins the overall effect. And never mind that your juvenile date is likely just as self-consciously preoccupied with his own behaviour to actually notice anything you do. I don't really get it - but then, I didn't get teenage culture even when I was a teenager so no major surprise there.

Capital Comments.

I'm just back from a short trip to Sapporo; I'll write about it soon, but meanwhile, here's a helpful tip for those who like to post comments anywhere on the net:

When you CAPITALIZE random words to MAKE a POINT, you're NOT really PERSUADING ANYBODY. You JUST make it DIFFICULT to READ your post, and YOU make yourself LOOK like an IRATE CRANK. Please STOP DOING it.

On Housing

Our Man in Abiko has a quick video up about housing in Japan (his videos are good fun, though I believe Ingmar Bergman can rest easy for a while yet). Mutantfrog has a companion piece with some statistics highlighted. One point Our Man makes is that buildings are badly built and near worthless when old. There's a reason for that.

Corner house in the neighborhood. It was torn down two years ago.

The climate and the geology here is hard on buildings, with typhoons, hot, humid weather, floods, landslides, earthquakes and so on. The climate and resources also dictate light wooden buildings rather than stone; the islands are volcanic, so there's a relative lack of hard stone good for building, and stone buildings are susceptible to earthquake damage.

And as buildings just weren't expected to last all that long anyway, there was little point in wasting effort and material to overdesign them. Make it last for a generation or two instead, and let people rebuild from time to time. Even temples and shrines sometimes schedule a periodic tear-down and rebuild of their halls.

A peculiarity of the throw-away mentality is that many houses have serious brick or tile facades only toward the street. Out the back they're completely plain, even unfinished-looking.

Today we can make buildings that last longer, but the idea that old houses - single-family homes especially - are near worthless lives on. The land is everything and the building on it is generally worth nothing at all unless near-new. In fact, old buildings may actually detract from the land price since the new owner will have to pay to tear it down.

And since you won't get your money back if you build to last, people usually don't. So you get family homes and apartments with badly insulated paper-thin walls and single-pane windows, no central heating, creaky floors, dingy fake wood paneling and cheap-looking facades. Buildings that naturally are nearly worthless after thirty years, further reinforcing the idea that old buildings are no good.

If a few far-sighted people started building for the long term, attitudes could change of course. But they'd be just one unfortunate landslide or earthquake away from looking less like visionaries and more like wasteful dunces.

Rowhouses in south Osaka. No new rowhouses are being built and the last pre-war houses are rapidly disappearing, so this will soon be another historical footnote.

Umeshu

'Tis plum season and time for umeshū again, the sweet, savoury Japanese plum liquor. It's getting more and more popular in summer - sales are twice what they were ten years ago - and for good reason. It goes well chilled or on ice, and even better with a drop of lemon juice or mixed with apple cider (my favourite). Best of all, it's really easy and cheap¹ to make your own.

Ume, Japanese plums. These are sour and hard and nothing you'd want eat. Great for making a drink from.

There's nothing to it: put some sour plums in a large jar together with rock sugar and "white liquor" - flavourless alcohol, usually about 30-35%. Recipes typically call for around 1kg plums, 2l alcohol and 400-600g sugar. Wait six months² to a year, then drink. The plums themselves become soft and really savoury and make an excellent jam if you wait no longer than a year to take them out. If you start a jar now, you'll have your first taste right around New Year.

All you need: ume, rock sugar, some inexpensive alcohol (the good stuff is wasted on this) and a jar for it all. Mix. Wait. Drink.

Last year we made vodka-based and rum-based umeshū, just to see what'd it be like. A year later we can say that they're both good, though a little tart for our taste; we ended up adding a bit of sugar to them over the winter. We used the cheapest white rum we could find, and that may have been a mistake, as the rum flavours have almost disappeared. A dark rum may be more interesting.

Brandy Umeshū

So this year we're doing another experiment, and making a brandy-based version. Our recipe is very simple: 1kg green plums, 400g sugar and two bottles of cheap brandy. Unlike umeboshi that needs high-quality fruit, you can use tart, damaged and scarred plums for this. No need to waste money on the expensive stuff.

Clean the plums (wash them and remove the stem ends with a toothpick). Spend an hour taking a picture of all the ingredients while your wife patiently waits. Put them in a jar with the sugar and pour over the alcohol. Spend another two hours trying to take a decent shot of the jar without having it look too much like a specimen in a disreputable medical museum. put the jar in the closet for the next six months and call it a day. See, not difficult at all.

Ps. This is my entry to this month's Blog Matsuri and the theme is living on a budget in Japan³. ds.

 
--

#1 OK, so cardboard-box umeshū is a bit cheaper, but that's not even made with whole plums, and we do get a whole jar of ume jam out of this too. If you compare with good-quality stuff, you do save some money making it yourself. If you have a local source of plums, or your own tree, it's really no contest. Besides, cheaper or not, making it yourself is more fun!

#2 It's drinkable after three months, but it really needs at least half a year to develop the flavour.

#3 Not budgety enough? Here's an easy tip: Don't shop. The shopping culture here is hysterical; there's a ridiculous amount of shops around. Half the country states shopping is their main hobby. This is frankly one of the less attractive aspects of this place - on beautiful, temperate spring weekends you'll find the beaches and riverbanks half deserted but the malls crammed with crowds.

If you want to save, don't get sucked in. You don't need those clothes or that eggtimer or DVD player or a box of Pocky or a new phone or a new strap for the phone or cleaning liquid for the strap or a sailor outfit for your dog or a designer bag in which to carry it all; you want it. There's a difference. Buy what you need, not what you want⁴ and you'll be surprised how much money you save.

#4 Cameras are naturally a completely different matter.

Temple Of Love

Time is short, so no long explanation, but one item in this morning's news is worth mentioning: A Love Hotel - the pay-by-hour establishments catering to couples looking for some private time together - has found a nifty way to avoid those pesky taxes: be owned by a religion.

That's right: religious organizations are tax exempt here (it's unclear why, to me). So if they own and run a love hotel under the guise of a temple, there's no need to pay taxes or even account for your earnings. The "Universal Truth Association" is a temple so you are of course not paying for your stay - perish the thought - but "giving alms" (at a fixed hourly rate) is compulsory when you enter.

Is this really legal? Apparently not. It does bring up the question of why an organization should be exempt from taxes and even some laws just because the members all share the same imaginary belief.

Cellphone Dependency

Stereo Phone

Some fun stats in Asahi Shinbun about cellphone dependency here in Japan in the paper. No, not "do you have a cellphone" - that's close enough to 100% not to matter - but where you bring your cellphone.

The highlights are, I think, that over 90% have their phone next to their bed as they sleep; over 50% bring their phone to the toilet; almost 50% have it next to them as they eat; and almost 20% take it to the bath.

I do wonder how those numbers are skewed by the fact that a lot of people use their phone as alarm clock (we do at home), and that whenever you go to the bathroom at work or outside you bring your pants - and the cellphone in its pocket - to the bathroom with you by default.

 
Oh, and the survey says that 48% of university students secretly use their cellphone during classes. It may be right but a bit misleading; from my experience here the other 52% simply don't bother hiding it.

Salaryman Senryū

There's a yearly contest for the best "Salaryman Senryū" (comic Haiku), and this years top ten has just been announced for your reading pleasure. Unlike haiku the composition rules for senryū are relaxed; there's no absolute demand that it adhere strictly to a 5-7-5 pattern for instance. You could see this as a finger on the pulse of the life of the corporate worker; if that's the case, then this year he's worried about growing fat and about losing his job.

My Japanese is pretty bad, still, and I have all the poetic verve of a cement mixer; nevertheless, here's a couple of my favorites in translation:


#4 about a fad diet:

朝バナナ　効果があったの　お店だけ
"Morning Banana" \ its benefits extended \ only to the shop

#5 "metabo", weight increase:

やせたのは　一緒に歩いた　犬の方
excess weight got lost \ when we walked together \ only by the dog

#7 about cost cutting - including bonuses and raises - in the workplace

コスト下げ　やる気も一緒に　下げられる
company cuts costs \ they get cut together with \ my motivation

Vegesh

"Vegesh" is a beer-strength alcoholic vegetable drink. Finally you can feel drunk and healthy at the same time! It's a collaboration between Asahi and Kagome (maker of vegetable juices) so the mix is kind of obvious of course. The taste is perfectly fine. You'd expect something akin to a Bloody Mary, but it's milder and mellower, and there's nary a hint of the alcohol.

This is one mighty curious aspect of the Japanese retail landscape; the incessant - obsessive, even - drive for new canned and bottled drinks. No flavour is too obscure, no concoction too strange not to be mixed, canned and put on sale in vending machines and convenience stores. Most of these appear, sell for a few weeks or months, then disappear again without a trace.

Many of these novel drinks actually taste quite good. Of course, tasting good is probably not nearly enough for them to survive in the long run. We consumers are a conservative bunch, and we won't switch drink type (or political party, or keyboards) if it's just a little better than whatever we normally drink. It'd have to be substantially better (or a lot better marketed) to really have a chance. Still, new and strange drinks are always fun to try.

 

Hanko Typography

The owner of Neat & Grog here in Osaka sometimes holds barbecues at his parents place. His father is a former hanko maker. A hanko is the namestamp you use here instead of a signature. It's usually the kanji comprising your family name laid out in a circle or, sometimes, oval or square. In my case I have no kanji of course so my hanko spells out my family name in katakana instead. They can be simple, like mine, or very large and complex, as in the case of official hanko for businesses or public authorities. People will usually have more than one stamp, with one official hanko, and one or more casual stamps. The official one is registered to your name at the local ward office; you'd use that one only for important business like buying a house or car, or dealing with your bank. Then you have one or more casual stamps you use for signing post packages, receipts and so on.

Hanko are sometimes criticized as being inherently unsafe, since it is possible, if somewhat tedious, to copy the exact image. But then, a signature is just as insecure - if not more so, as a persons signature varies quite a lot, making it even more difficult to determine if it's the "same" signature. But that is beside the point. The real value of signatures and hanko lies not in the markings on a piece of paper but in the act of applying the mark. You have a standard gesture where you show that you accept or approve whatever the document is stating. Making that gesture, especially when witnessed by third parties, is what confers validity. The resulting mark is secondary.

Book of hanko. This page has variations on the character "時", "time". Click on it to see it larger.

Anyway, as a hanko maker he has a lot of books related to the business, and one I found intensely fascinating was a collection of hanko from different makers, grouped by character. It gives a focused view of just how large a variety of graphical forms can still be considered the same in some abstract sense. Those of us who have grown up using the roman alphabet are quite used to seeing wildly varying letter-forms and think nothing of it, even when they're so obscure as to be unreadable out of context. The enormous variety hits you more when you see to see it in graphical forms you're not familiar with to the same intimate degree.

The character "書", "write", with the standard block-type version in the center, surrounded by a selection of forms from the book, inverted and resized to be easily comparable.

No Reason

I've finally finished "Reason" by Miyuki Miyabe, after just about a year of reading, mostly on the morning train. To recap, the story begins with a multiple murder in a Tokyo high rise; four people are dead - three stabbed inside the apartment, one jumped or pushed from the balcony. It turns out they are not related to each other in any way even though they lived together as a family.

Miyabe explores the reasons for the murder by looking at the lives and backgrounds of all the people involved with or touched by the events. It is written in a documentary style where the author interviews people about a year after the crime, trying to piece together the events leading up to the murder. We often get to hear about the same event or situation from different viewpoints; sometimes the recollections differ so much they could be different events altogether. Some characters are appealing and likable, others are truly disagreeable. But Miyabe treats them all evenhandedly and with a surprising amount of sympathy and understanding.

「理由」 means "reason" or "motive" but also "pretext". The title alludes to unearthing the reasons for the murder, but the actual murder is really only discussed in the first part of the book, and then again at the very end. The crime is just a pretext for Miyabe to delve into the lives of a disparate group of characters that would otherwise have little in common. And I really mean delve; even staffage characters that would otherwise come and go within a single paragraph can still get a page or two with their life story, their concerns and their worries. It seems clear to me that Miyabe is really writing about the lives of all these ordinary people, and the crime story is there mostly to give her a reason to do so.

So, how was it?

The book is difficult. Really difficult; in fact, my teacher first recommended it to me but soon had second thoughts. She realized that it was too difficult for my level, but decided not to discourage me by telling me so. At first I could barely manage two or three sentences over one commute, and even now towards the end I manage perhaps five or six pages on a good day. One reason is that we have a lot of people in the book, more than a dozen central characters and perhaps twice as many again in supporting roles. All of them have their own way of speaking, often using Tokyo dialect, schoolyard slang or rough spoken language. In one chapter a lawyer was using legal language and terminology to such an extent I basically gave up on understanding it all and just focused on getting the gist of his explanation. When a plot follows just a few central characters you get used to the way they speak, but here we keep shifting from person to person, never staying long enough to really get comfortable.

The second source of difficulty is her use of unusual or archaic writing. A Japanese word can often be written either in hiragana or kanji, and sometimes with a choice of kanji. Problem is, Miyabe has never met an unusual kanji she didn't like. Some words are normally written using hiragana, such as "ある", to exist; but Miyabe prefers to use the unusual kanji form "在る" whenever she can. The word "listen" is normally written as "聞く" but Miyabe prefers to use "訊く" instead, with the same meaning but rare enough that my Japanese-English dictionary doesn't even have it. ALC has 774 example sentences using "聞く", and 1 (one) using "訊く". A few unusual forms like this is OK, but she uses them a lot, and that slows down my reading something fierce. It's like linguistic flypaper, trapping the freeflowing tale in a sticky mess of obscure language.

With that said, the book is good. It is, in fact, excellent. I spent a year slowly reading through the slow story, endless digressions and asides, and getting caught in the language traps she litters throughout the text - and yet I never once thought about quitting, that's how good it is. She is simply a very engaging storyteller, and can relate something seemingly banal, like the business difficulties of a sandwich shop, in a way that makes it interesting, even engrossing. The most ordinary lives cease to be ordinary once they get depicted with skill and flair. If you can read Japanese (and better than me, preferably) you could do much worse than to pick this one up.

What's next? Don't know yet. I'll wait a bit before I decide what to tackle next. Another mystery or crime novel would be good, though a little easier and faster to read. I'll see what my teacher will recommend; this one was an excellent choice so I have no doubt her next suggestion will be good too.

EndNote sues Zotero

Citations power
your research

When researchers write a paper, we need to give references to any other paper from which we've used an idea, or any paper that is related to your own work in some way. Those references are cited in the text, then collected at the end of the paper, always in some very tightly specified format. This reference list is not some afterthought; the references are almost as important as the paper itself. So we tend to spend an inordinate amount of time collecting, sorting and generally dealing with references in some way or another.

There's several pieces of software that can help you handle this task. I use BibTeX and some related tools myself; another popular software is EndNote. It'll help you keep a database of references with links to the actual paper, your notes and so on, and can let you share your reference lists with others. Like BibTeX, EndNote also has a large collection of style files for various journals and conferences that will format your reference list in the appropriate way. It's worth noting that both reference lists and style files are generally created by the users - us - not by the software developers.

 
Enter Zotero. It's a paper and citation organization tool, as a Firefox plugin. It's completely free and open-source, and is more at home on the web than any of the earlier tools. I've tried it previously and while it hasn't displaced my current tools yet (old habits are hard to break) it does look very, very promising, and it's steadily becoming more and more popular among academics.

So promising, in fact, that Thomson Reuters (owners of EndNote and a lot of other academic-related property) is suing the makers of Zotero for allowing its users to convert EndNote style files and citation files into Zotero format. Files, worth noting, that were contributed by their users in the first place. More from Crooked Timber

This is exceedingly stupid. Or desperate - EndNote may be losing market share to open tools much faster than people realize. The stupid part is, they are antagonizing their own customer base - they're suing part of it. People whose livelihood depends in part on their citation databases are naturally a little wary about keeping them in a closed format like EndNote's, and now Thomson have given them ample reason to be anxious. They are stating, in effect, that they will do anything they can to prevent people from moving their own data away from the EndNote system. EndNote is an intellectual roach motel - your data enters but it can't leave.

The legal case itself seems to be on very shaky ground even in the US and it certainly has no merit at all in much of Europe (where reverse-engineering for interoperability is expressly legal). But that is beside the point. There is possibly not one single thing they could have done to damage their own product and promote Zotero further than by suing them in court.

This is the same Thomson Reuters that is one of the giants in scientific publishing that are already seen with some suspicion and hostility by the community itself due to their antagonistic stance on open access. If you ever needed a reason not to consider EndNote for your own work, this is it. And take a good look at Zotero; it may be everything you need and more already.

Halfway

I'm at chapter 10, page 337 of Reason, where Naomi Ishida explains where and why he decided to become an architect. That's just about exactly halfway. Since my last update it's been around 50 working days, and 184 pages, for 3.6 pages per day on average - call it 3.5. At that pace it's 95 days to finish the book, or just over four months. To finish the book within a year I'd have to step up the pace a bit. Which I won't; the pace fits the book, and taking just a few minutes every morning doesn't intrude into anything else.

I just wish Miyabe - the author - didn't have such a ravenous appetite for asides and digressions. This latest digression on the importance of a well-designed internal environment in public buildings for people's well-being is kind of fun, but I don't so far see how this actually relates to the four murders that the book is about; I doubt it was a mad murdering rampage caused by a flickering fluorescent strip.

Obon

The Obon holiday is upon us here in Kansai. Up to a whole week off where we're supposed to leave the city for our home towns to celebrate our ancestors. Of course, my "home town" is rather ill-defined (where I was born? Where I grew up?) and on a different continent; Ritsuko's home town is Chuuo-ku in Osaka city so we're already there, no travel required, with the family grave a quick bicycle ride away. But many people are travelling this week; there'll be fireworks and festivals, polishing up family graves and general attention will lavished on the old folks still living in some rural district far away from the big cities.

I have the entire week off. We are going to Kobe a couple of times - we just recently found another excellent Indian restaurant - and see friends and relatives. This weekend we went out to eat and watch the fireworks with a cousin of Ritsuko's and her husband. Today we're seeing the World Press Photo exhibition that opened in Osaka this week. This travelling exhibition of the best in news photography over the year was very good last year, and I have no doubt it will be fun this year too. The exhibition is held all over the world, basically, so check out the website and if you can, please go.

A week off also means taking the time to do some of those projects and chores that always end up unfinished. I'm trying to get an old camera working, so I'm making a shutter speed meter (very simple, just using a photodiode connected to the computer microphone input), and I'll be trying to get back on an old project of mine doing a small independent rover (where, incidentally, I'll have use for the same speed metering circuit as above). It's been long enough that I may simply need to start over - I don't even have the computer with the original code anymore. Since my project ends this year I'm looking into what I should be doing next, and having a week off is a good time for that; I'll probably post more on this at some point.

If you make your own umeboshi (pickled plums) then Obon is the perfect time to take them out to dry. They've been pickled in salty brine since June, and now they'll dry out, becoming firm and meaty. You need three days or so of sunny weather, and you need to watch the weather so you can get home and take them inside in case of rainshowers. When dried, they go back into the brine which they'll partially soak up and creating a very juicy, savoury balance of tastes. We are doing two kinds this year; one jar with shiso leaves creating the intense red color and adding some flavour, and one jar without shiso. Both should be good.

Interesting Times

Interesting times at my current job. Things will get better again in due course. Meanwhile, a few things I've wanted to write about but never found the energy:

A straightforward way to cut welfare costs and improve your ministry's economics: Refuse to accept welfare applications. Applicants would be refused application forms, or officials would refuse to accept and process the forms when presented. Three confirmed dead from this policy so far; but of course the welfare statistics look good. When it comes down to the wire - support your ministry or help the downtrodden people you're supposedly hired to assist - it's good to know which side these officials will come down on.

Teachers need certifications to teach. A certification is gained by passing a written and oral examination, and is given locally, at the prefecture level. It is a very competitive exam, with only one in ten or so passing each year. In Oita prefecture, officials have routinely boosted the scores of applicants that were relatives of government officials, or whose parents gave gifts of money or goods ("bribe" is such an ugly word, isn't it) to officials in return for having their children pass. In order not to have suspiciously many applicants pass, some applicants with neither connections nor money got their score lowered instead, having them fail. The two test officials are under arrest. Naturally, the higher officials on the take solicitous of their constituents' interests - the ones that assembled lists of people who should pass; or the well-off, well-connected parents who plied them with bribes gifts will likely not have anything so vulgar happen to them.

 

Tokyo University medical researchers have faked patient consent and ethics committee approval for a medical studies on leukaemia. For anyone not involved in research, this is a serious, major offence. In most places this would be grounds to cancel the research program and withdraw the funding. It would also likely be the end of the research career for the directly responsible. But I guess since it's Tokyo University they'll probably just have to apologize instead.

This is an interesting country to live in, but honest - honest it is not.

Nursing Crisis

Asahi Shimbun notes that there is a real, serious and increasing nursing care - home care and daily life assistance especially - staff shortage in Japan, one with potentially disastrous consequences as the aged population in need of care increases, and the pool of potential staff decreases along with the number of young people. In order to swiftly and decisively rectify this situation, the current government has just enacted its solution into law.

The solution? To "take necessary measures" by April next year. The actual measures deemed necessary are left undefined. I'd love to have a job where this kind of declaration can be passed off as having done actual work. Perhaps I should adopt the same work mode: instead of doing actual research, analyze the results and spend months getting a paper into shape and published, I'll just occasionally send out a declaration that a paper with "appropriate scientific content" should be published sometime in the future. I think I'll use the freed-up time to learn golf perhaps, or crochet.

But I digress - why is there a shortage of workers? As Asahi Shimbun points out, the nursing schools aren't even close to filling their quotas of students and 20% leave the profession every year. As it turns out, pay has a lot to do with it. The average - not starting - salary is 200000 yen per month; a Swedish junior nurse has an average of 320000 yen (11000 and 18000 crowns respectively). You work long hours (lots of unpaid "service overtime"), nights and weekends, with up to 16-hour shifts. Oh, and you need a license to practice, so you need a year or two at a vocational school minimum, which you (or your parents) have to pay tuition and living expenses for.

How bad is this? If I were to shift careers from research into something more hands-on, would this be a choice worth investigating, or would I be better off economically with - let's say - the fast-paced glamour of convenience-store clerking or chain restaurant management? Let's see!

Just yesterday a local branch of the Yoshinoya chain was looking for temporary workers; the hourly rate was 900-1100 yen depending on experience, rising to 1100-1300 yen an hour for night shift work. Convenience stores have similar rates. Let's assume 50 hours a week of work for the nurse; with a nominal 40 hour workweek and unpaid overtime this sounds approximately right. With 200000 yen a month that comes out to just about 1000 yen an hour; pretty much exactly what I'd make as a convenience store clerk with some experience and occasional night-shift and weekend duties. But of course, there's differences too:

The nursing care worker has professional responsibility for elderly and ill people, and can get into very big trouble if she (I'd write "he or she" but who would we be kidding?) mixes up medications or fails to recognize early signs of acute distress. The convenience store clerk, on the other hand, has professional responsibility for little more than the till and the sale time limits on the onigiri and reheated sausages. The nursing care worker is licensed and has spent a fair bit of money on the studies needed for their profession. The convenience store clerk and the restaurant worker, well, hasn't.

But of course, the clerk is facing limited-time contract jobs with low pay and few prospects of advancement. Which, it turns out, is usually the case for the nursing care worker as well, with a majority not being regular employees, but working under the same kind of dead-end temp contracts as the clerk.

I'm not surprised 20% leave the nursing profession every year in Japan; I'm surprised the number isn't much higher.

Hotchkiss

[Repost] You've never heard of mr. Eliphalet Hubbell Hotchkiss? He was an American business owner whose company started production of a paper stapler at the end of the nineteenth century, and exported a lot of them to the Japanese government. Which is why a word for "stapler" in Japanese is "ホチキス" (hochikisu). Which I found strange, started to look around and found this site on antique staplers. Which, if nothing else, it's a good place to get your fill of esoteric knowledge you can bore people to tears with.

"Easier visa for Japanese Speakers" plan announced

I wrote in January about a tentative suggestion that Japanese language ability be counted in your favour when applying for visas.

Now, Asahi Shimbun reports in Japanese and English that a firm plan is being announced today. And it seems it might really be an easing of restrictions as a way to encourage language ability (rather than a roundabout way of imposing further restrictions on those with little language skill). Among other things, the article mentions extending visa durations to five rather than the current three years; and relaxed qualifications for the professional visas. As it happens, the vague rumours of a revamped Japanese Language Proficiency Test seem to be solidifying as well, with documents floating around suggesting the possibility of testing language use in some manner, not just understanding.

Spring

The winter in Osaka is chilly and grey, and the summer is long and hot, punctuated with typhoons. The intervening spring feels neither as long, nor as well defined as the slow, lingering season of Sweden with the first hopeful sun-driven snow-melt in early March gradually seguing into the first really warm summer days in June. This really is a fairly unmemorable season in comparison. The two things that do set it apart is the cherry blossoms heralding its beginning, and the "Golden Week" holiday signaling its end.

A colleague asked me to take a few pictures of his car during cherry blossom season. "His car" turned out to be a meticulously renovated Chevrolet Corvette in absolutely gorgeous condition. To the left, outside a temple in Takanohara; to the right, in the mountains between Nara and Osaka. A few more pictures here.

Hanami, "flower viewing" is having a party under the cherry trees. For Osaka castle, that means tens of thousands of people barbecuing, eating, drinking and generally enjoying themselves. And this being the age of the digital camera, I doubt a single flower petal has managed to avoid ending up on picture sites by now, as you can see on the left. On the right, a few too many beers have taken their toll, and a couple of revelers decide to settle some grudges.