Tokyo Blog

I don’t want to destroy the planet, but I can’t cope without air-conditioning any longer. I woke up really early today, because it was so hot in my apartment. The weather widget on my computer says it’s hovering around the 30° C mark, but it feels way hotter because of the humidity (it climbed as high as 93% recently).

I heard stories about the Tokyo summers so I tried to prepare myself for the worst, but it’s still so hard to get a days work done. I asked my friend the other day if it was particularly bad at the moment due to the fact that it is the rainy season, but they told me, in fact, it would get much, much worse!

Every now and again, I do something ‘touristy’ in Tokyo. I certainly didn’t get round to see everything when I was here in 2003, and I’ve still got loads of stuff to see. So, on a steaming hot Saturday afternoon armed with a bento and my camera, I went to somewhere I’ve been wanting to go for ages: Korakuen.

A Japanese guy I know has a leopard skin handbag. Except in the west we don’t call them handbags (although that’s what they are), we call them ‘manbags’. The amazing thing is, he pulls it off. The other amazing thing is that, in Tokyo, it’s common to see a guy carrying this kind of bag, usually with both straps slung around the one shoulder.

What isn’t quite so common to see on the streets of the metropolis, is a man IN a bag being carried by another man, but when I was in Kichijouji the other Friday night, I actually saw this happen.

We came around past the entrance to the station, and there was a girl crouched over a guy who seemed to be injured or maybe even dead. There were 4 policemen stood around scouring the far side of the street in anticipation of something. More people gathered and the girl seemed like she was sobbing. Then, from behind us came another policeman carrying something made of rubber or plastic. When he arrived at the scene, the policemen tried lifting the guy off the floor by his arms, but he started freaking out, and screaming at the top of his voice. We guessed he was another casualty of over-drinking. The police were all around him and a few of the people from the crowd had started to close in to get a better view. I could only see from the shoulders up on the guy on the floor, but I saw the bag go over, get pulled up and then zipped up, so that just his head protruded from the end. Everyone stepped back, and the four policemen, followed by the fifth, carried the guy (still screaming) from the front of the station, to their police car, place him on the back seat, then drive away, sirens blaring.

The Japanese: Lords of invention.

This shot was taken as we pulled out of Shinjuku station at 12.39 on Saturday night. As you can see, it’s sea of suits, and as the train lurches they slosh up against the sides of the train and you get caught in the current. Suprisingly, it’s not annoying at all. It’s pretty hilarious, actually. The train is so ridiculously full that you can’t help but laugh (and take pictures).

FireFox 3.0 has been released, but the mozilla site has been inundated and is now down (as of the morning of Tue 1st July 2008). You can still get it from various mirrors though. I got mine from Mac Update. Get yours today, it’s well worth it. Gone now are all the things that used to irritate me about older versions. Mainly the UI and the awful form controls (buttons, radios, checkboxes, etc.). The new UI is a little twee in my opinion, but a major improvement on the old one, and the new features make it my new browser of choice over Safari. It loads pages really quickly, and the Netscape legacy image loading placeholders are finally done away with.

By 2009 the powers that govern the internet will put in place a new system for dealing with domain names (web addresses). Companies and organisations having the money to do so, will be able to create their own custom suffixes. Instead of .com and .net, you will start to see a new range like .sport and .news, etc. This comes at the right time, because most of the current top level domains like .com and .net are already taken. This will create more possibilities for new combinations of words and suffixes used in urls. The first of these should start to appear towards the end of 2009.

My apartment is getting turned into office space, so I’m getting turfed out. I didn’t mention my expired contract before, because I thought it would give me the freedom to move out whenever I wanted, but it seems to work both ways. I need to be out of the flat by the end of July. The question now is: where to go? Shinjuku, Meguro, Nakano and Kichijoji are all likely candidates, but I quite like living in Taito, so maybe I will find another place around here.

Of a night time, I’ve been watching old episodes of BBC’s Horizon programme on YouTube. I’ve been getting a bit of a thing for outer space recently, so I was checking out the one on super-massive black holes, and I also saw the one about computer advancement, where the progress of computers was forecasted as was the mapping of the human brain. This was pretty scary in itself, because one of the possible scenarios was that we create a neural network capable of learning that supersedes humanity and then destroys it!

Actually, that was nothing compared to the stuff I saw on the Large Hadron Collider, the huge 27km round ring buried deep under the Franco Swiss border near Geneva. It’s the largest collider in the world, and also the most energetic. It will reenact the conditions found a billionth of a second after the Big Bang. This is what’s so new about this collider. Normally fast moving particles are fired at stationary target particles and create a safer kind of phenomenon, but the Large Hadron Collider sends two beams of particles the opposite way around the enormous ring until they are travelling at the speed of light. Then, they align the beams and…

Well, that’s the problem. Scientists have estimated what might happen at the moment they recreate the beginning of the universe, but there is still much uncertainty. Scientists independent from CERN (the authority heading up the experiment), warn that one of several ‘doomsday scenarios’ could occur. What is almost certain is that the process will create micro black holes. Lots of them. These are expected to be short lived, based on the theory of Hawking Radiation - but this theory hasn’t been proven. What could happen when a MBH is created at a slow speed, is that it gets trapped by Earth’s field of gravity and (since it can pass through matter, and is incredibly small) will come to rest at the very center of the Earth. It is conceivable, therefore, that several of these could end up there. The immense heat, pressure and gravitational force at this location would start the black hole feeding. One scientist estimated that it would take less than 50 months for the black hole to accrete the entire earth. The other fear is that a ’strangelet’ is produced that turns everything it touches to ’strange matter’ in a chain reaction-type fashion, or that a ‘monopole’ causes a similar chain reaction catastrophe. More far fetched suggestions include a possible tear in space time that would result in either time distortions or a time loop local to the occurance of the experiment, the creation of a fully-fledged wormhole at the surface of Earth (not good), or even the creation of a new Universe at the expense of our own!

Either way, it sounds a bit risky to me. The thing that worried me most, is why do so few people know about it? It’s the biggest, most expensive experiment in the history of mankind. It was actually due to go online this month, but it’s real start-up date is a bit of a mystery now. A law suit filed in the US may have set it back to 2009, but that is unconfirmed. All that is known, is that it’s finished and is being prepared (the chambers have to be cooled to 2k before it reaches it’s operating temperature). Please Google this for yourself.

I watched Sukiyaki Western by Takashi Miike the other day. It was typically Miike in that the film was highly original, really well shot, and charismatic, but there was something about the plot line that didn’t quite work. Also, Tarantino was pretty awful in his side-role. Despite the film’s weaknesses, I was totally engrossed. This always happens when I watch Miike films. One of his previous films called ‘Gozu’ was really good too.

Now the new site has been indexed, I checked how it was doing on Google. Suprisingly, the search term ‘freelance web designer tokyo’ landed me on the first page! I’m worried that things are going to get busy in the foreseeable future, so I’d better get my projects finished.

It’s nothing much, but I decided I had to put something up ‘in front’ of my blog. My blog doesn’t really mention my freelance web design work, so I had to rectify that by creating this site. The work on there is somewhat lacking due to the fact that I have only just started freelancing in earnest. Expect at least one new project a month in the portfolio from now on (give or take). There’s lots of freelance web design work lined up, but I’m still accepting new projects, so please get in touch via the new site at Stephen David Smith (dot) NET.

I’ve just put some more photos up on flickr, this time of the recent festival that took place in the streets in and around Taito ward (where my neighbourhood is), Tokyo. There are also a few of Naka Meguro from when I visited a week or so ago. Naka Meguro is famous for being a trendy neighbourhood, but I didn’t find much during my visit. It struck me as being a little bit difficult to penetrate, and probably the cool places are hard to find, so I’ll head back there at some point with a bit more info.

Karaoke is better than I expected having done it twice now. Both times were after a night out and lasted until daybreak. You drink beer and sing a few songs with your friends. I did ‘I Want to be Adored’ by the Stone Roses, ‘The Way You Make me Feel’ by Michael Jackson (very difficult and a bad idea), ‘It’s so Easy’ by Guns n’ Roses, ‘Burning Down the House’ by Talking Heads, and ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go’ by the Clash amongst others. So you take one hangover and add stressed vocal cords into the mix for good measure.

Recently, a few tracks have been perfect to listen to walking around Tokyo, or for riding around the underground train network. The tracks that best fit Tokyo life for me, now, are Spying Glass by Massive Attack, Parks by Four Tet, She Moves She also by Four Tet, Journey by Gentle People remixed by Aphex Twin, My Angel Rocks back and Forth again by Four Tet, Untangle by Lusine and a few tracks by Boards of Canada also. I’m pretty sure Four Tet is a bit of a Japanophile judging by the influence present in his tracks. All of these are getting a lot of listens on my MP3 player right now.

Izakaya are a highlight of living in Japan. We went to one the other day and the food was nice, and not really that expensive. We had a boat-load of Sashimi to start with and beers, followed by Tempura. Then a woman came into the private room you get for your group, and showed us the freshest fish they had in stock. They were laid out on a tray made from woven straw and each fish had a small wooden sign with the name written on it. We couldn’t read the names so we just chose a good looking one and asked to have it poached in some sort of soup. You can ask to have it prepared in a few ways, like stir-fry or grilled. When it came it was the nicest fish I’d ever had but wasn’t big enough for everyone to share really. In Japan it’s customary to eat the soft part of the fish’s eye (avoiding eating the eyeball), so I did and it was horrible, but it’s supposed to be good for the brain so I washed it down with beer. We chased this with posh Sake which you drink from a glass placed in a small open top box (like a square cup), and the Sake is made to overflow the glass and run into the cup around it. This means that when you start to drink you have to leave the glass on the table and drink the first bit out from there. Then, after, you use the contents of the square box to top the glass up.

We also ordered Udon and squid ink risotto and maybe something else, I can’t remember. Came to about £70 for three people.