Conversations in Kamakura

It is rare, in Japan, to have a stranger approach you on the street and strike up a conversation. So rare in fact, that it hasn’t happened to me in the nine months since I moved to Tokyo. In contrast, this was not a rare occasion in China or in the U.S. Of course, I’m not even counting the two million times someone approached me on the street in Shanghai and asked me if I’d buy a “DVD, Rolex or Mont Blanc”. In Japan, no one just walks up to a stranger, much less a foreigner, and asks them anything. That is, until yesterday on my day trip to Kamakura. Then I hit the jackpot.

On the hour-long train ride from Ebisu station in Tokyo I was reading an article on my iPad when the 80-ish lady setting next to me pointed at it and said “ōkina denwadesune?”, or “that’s a big telephone isn’t it? As best I could I explained to her that it was an “ai pad-u” and showed her some of the functions. She was especially taken with the ability to stretch my fingers and make the words bigger. At Ofuna she told me the train was stopping because of a problem and I should follow her to another train that would take me to Kamakura. I followed her as she rocketed up and down stairways and to the right platform. As we waited for the train I noticed she was about 5 feet tall and the roots of her hair had a bright orange-red tint that matched her coat. At Kita-Kamakura I thanked her and got off to walk to the Engakuji Temple.

When I left Tokyo it was raining but as I entered the temple grounds the sun came out and the wind began tugging at the huge cedar and pine trees that towered over the temple buildings. This was by far the most beautiful and peaceful temple I’d been to in Japan. There were very few people and the complex was dominated by the old growth forest. I sat on a bench near the hulking wooden entrance gate and listened for a long while as the wind rushed through the high cedars and tossed around the giant paper lantern beneath the gate. I never get tired of the whisper of the wind through evergreens. It’s one of the three sweetest sounds on earth (baby laughter and rushing water being the others).

After a spiritual refill at Engakuji’s forest I took a trail up and over the mountains overlooking Kamakura. For most of the way I was all alone, losing the trail here and there, marveling at the twisted trees and the calming views out to the ocean. At the top of the mountain I came upon a Shinto shrine and a fork where the trail split into five routes. As I was pondering which way to go an old man with a pink poodle popped out from between trees and asked me where I was from. He said his daughter lived in Salem, Oregon but before I could ask him anything else his attention focused on two young ladies walking by and he bounded off toward them to ask them to pet his poodle.

I selected a trail and soon came across a young man setting by a trail sign rolling a cigarette. “That’s a nice camera you have,” he said in English. Another unsolicited but welcome conversation! He was about 28 years old, working part-time jobs trying to get by while he studied to become a nurse, “a safe career” in aging Japan he said. He had studied sociology at PSU in Oregon and had lived there for 8 years. He couldn’t find a job. Back in Japan for a few months he still couldn’t find a job but was enjoying being back in his hometown of Kamakura. “We need more nurses he said. We are hiring lots of Filipino nurses but are running out of them.” I wished him luck and set off downhill.

Scenes of Kita-Kamakura

A Randomized Life or The Second Law of Thermodynamics

I’m a naturally disorganized person that loves to be organized. I’ve spent much of my life thus far fighting entropy as it and the Second Law of Thermodynamics manifest themselves most personally. As the Law says, energy is a constant, inevitable and irreversible process of becoming increasingly randomized. All one has to do is lie on the couch and watch as everything around us, including our bodies, become increasingly randomized. The yard grows wild. Books fall off the shelves and mix together. Cords in boxes quietly tangle together. And our neurons die off. If we don’t get up and straighten things out, take a shower and delete old files from our computer we will become so randomized that we cease to exist as a recognizable lump with a name.

But I love a good fight, even if I know I will lose in the end. So organizing my offices and my virtual office are actually fun – especially if it involves gadgets and software. A trip to the Container Store is always a pleasure. Who doesn’t need boxes to put their boxes in? I also love organizing software. I’ve used Mindmanager mind mapping software for many years to organize my thoughts. I use “The Brain” to organize my virtual files. I use Scrivener to organize my writing. I recommend all of these great tools. But there’s one tool I need and that is some software that will clean out my computer files and my virtual office – magically getting rid of old files I no longer need. It takes hours to go through those old files on four different computers and drag those old files into the virtual trash bin.

Inadvertently I did discover just such a tool last week when my hard drive crashed at work and destroyed eight months of files. I thought they were backed up automatically but they weren’t. So suddenly I’m unburdened by all that accumulated information I spent hours accumulating and organizing into tidy folders. It was a crash course in digital entropy. Yet somehow I feel unburdened. Pleasantly randomized.

Piss Alley Found

Japan's address location system is so difficult and illogical it can often take hours to actually find a place - especially if "the authorities" don't want you to find it. I've talked about the Japanese lack of a logical addressing system before, so I won't go through it again other than to point you to this explanation. After World War 2 MacArthur and the American occupiers gave Tokyo a real address system, with named streets and building numbers that were sequential and everything. After the Americans left the Japanese undid it all and went back to their non-system. Today, we suffer the consequences.

I thought there must be a key to the non-system that Japanese magically understood - otherwise, why would they continue to use it. But it doesn't work any better for them either - except they are better at reading the signs of course. But still, they almost always have to go to the area police box and ask the police where such-and-such a building is. And this is largely what police do in Japan. Instead of fighting crime 24-7 (there just isn't enough crime here) they spend most of their time showing people which way to go to find the place they are looking for.

It wasn't until I was talking to a Japanese friend living in the States that I realized the Japanese don't realize there is a better way. "I couldn't believe how easy it was to find my way around in the States," she told me. "All I have to know is the street name and the number of the house and I can drive directly to it!" Here's where I felt like saying, "well, duh!"

What brings this up? Today I organized my afternoon around finding a well-known but rarely seen place in Shinjuku called Golden Gai or sometimes just "Piss Alley". It's an area famous for tiny cheap eateries, especially yakitori stands that sell grilled chicken, meats and vegetables on sticks. I had heard of it for decades but never tried to find it. I looked it up on the Internet last night and found few directions and not many mentions. All the directions were nearly useless. "Exit Shinjuku station, go towards a railroad track and turn left" For those of you that have been to Shinjuku station you already know that this is the world's busiest subway and train station - with about a hundred exits (not kidding) and 11 railroad and subway lines going in and out. Needless to say it took me four hours to find the place and many miles of walking. It could have taken 15 minutes if I had an address or a map with the neighborhood listed on the map.

The tourist authorities don't want tourists finding this place either. It is definitely "down-market" and seedy. Thus, all the maps the city puts up at street corners to show the hopelessly lost roughly how far off track they are - none of those maps or signs have the name of this area on them. It's as if it doesn't exist. I would not be denied however. I have a knack for finding seedy so ultimately the secrets were uncovered. More about that later.