a perfect lover has no memory

It’s been a while since I wrote a purely personal update, so I felt I ought to write at least a quick one. Of course, I’ll still throw a bit of Theatre stuff in because so much of my life is Theatre, but I’ll try to save the weightier content for other posts.

I’ve spent a lot of time waiting this month, which means a lot of time in my office in front of my main computer, so for this afternoon, I’ve decided to move up to the Tatami room on what may be one of the few days of the year it’s comfortable to do so. I’ve got my second hand iPhone (functioning as a music player using iSub client and Subsonic server) hooked up to the surround system playing (what else) Leonard Cohen. The sudare-filtered light and air is coming in. A large stuffed gorilla sits in the Golden Corner, and I’m working off my old X60s with the dead battery. Or hell, why don’t I just show you:

Damn, I love this rickety old house.

So, status: I’m moving closer on everything. There are lights at the ends of the various tunnels of current life, art, and work goals. I’ve got four or five things that I’m ready to launch into action on… but I can’t. I should just enjoy the limbo time, I guess, and play computer games or something, but with everything pending, I don’t feel like this is the time to switch off. What’s killing me is the waiting. And what’s killing me is that it’s all no one’s fault. There’s no one to push. The people who need pushing are at two to three removes away from me, and in one case, there’s no one to push at all. Unless its possible to push nature or the changing of the seasons, and frankly, if I was pushing the seasons, I’d be pushing the opposite way: today is the first day of summer by my method of reckoning.

How do I measure the beginning of summer? Well, it’s either the first day of the year that the air temperature goes over 25 degrees, or the first day I get a thick glaze of sweat from walking from the station to my house. As I said, that day is today. There is a nice cool wind, though, which is why I can work in the Tatami room.

Two other things I’m waiting on: a new cell phone and an air conditioner for said Tatami room, which should make the room usable for the entire year. At the moment, the Tatami room is usable during the two weeks of Yokohama “spring” and the maybe four weeks of Yokohama “autumn”, but during the long, sweaty summer and the nut-scrunching winter it becomes only usable for short periods or with enhancements (loads of blankets, several glasses of ice water, an expensive radiant heater, etc.).

The problem with summer is no matter how nice a breeze is blowing through the room (it is nice and breezy), I sweat profusely wherever my body comes into contact with anything (a table, the floor, my seat, my own hand, etc.). The problem with winter is that no matter how many blankets I pile on or no matter how many thousands of yen worth of electricity I spend heating myself, the air in the room ends up turning my fingers and toes numb. A proper A/C unit that actually cools or heats the air will make a huge difference in whether or not this room is usable on a more regular basis.

So yeah, everything’s moving, but at a glacial pace. I’ve had enough of being a dreamer for the time being: let me be a man of action for a while.

(Speaking of glacial movements and taking action, this is probably the final week or so, unless we hit another roadblock, to become a YTG “Founding Sponsor”. Take action and sponsor the long-time coming NPO incorporation by ::CLICKING HERE:: )

No Comments | In: your man in japan | tags: gorilla, Kamiooka Tea House, summer, tatami room, waiting, winter. | #

It’s been a busy week for YTG. Lots of promising developments, but if I am completely honest, I have to admit that’s all they were: promising. Nothing is in ink yet, and we’ve got a bunch of deadlines on the horizon.

***

I had my first interview with our third international intern. That went quite well, and I’m really hoping everything works out. However, even if all goes well, the internship will occur during the three hottest months of the year, so I am a bit worried that our northern European friend will melt. If his school agrees, I should be getting the paperwork quite soon, and then we can discuss dates.

***

On Tuesday, Mayu and I went to see a possible studio space. It was like a massive airplane hanger, but modern, insulated, and really nice. However, it was more geared towards visual artists than it was to Theatre, although the fellow who interviewed us at least seemed interested in what we do. It’s a government building, so we need to be vetted first, before we can even decide if we want the space. There’s also a few things that are unclear: whether or not we can run the Ytheatre School out of there (restrictions on access to the space); if we can have access to a big enough space to rehearse in (we were told we could rent a small space as an HQ and use one or more of the bigger spaces in the building); or if we can continue our tradition of occasional open rehearsals (the access problem again).

Also, there’s some questions about electrical outlets and such, but I’m sure those questions will be answered before we have to make our decision. The studio space question has been a monkey on our backs for a while now, so I suspect that if we get through the vetting process and the use of a larger space is included, we’ll probably go for it. Yeah, IF we get through the vetting. We went into that interview having no idea of what they were looking for from applicants, so we’ll see.

***

Grants! Thanks to Arts Commission Yokohama having TWO COMPLETELY DIFFERENT WEBSITES, we didn’t find the updated grants forms until today (the Japanese version of the site linked from the English one is one year out-of-date). Deadline for the application is FRIDAY. I’m pretty sure that they’re going to require a full project budget as well as a performance date. This is going to be tight. Did I mention that all the forms are in Japanese? Whether this gets done or not is going to depend on the dedication of the Yokohama Theatre Ensemble members. Gambarou, everyone!

***

We’ve booked space for the final four weeks of the workshop (yay!), but only two of those weeks are currently set in stone (i.e. paperwork completed) (boo!). I was going to push Mayu to get the paperwork done this week (she’s our contact person for the Chojamachi space), but the grant stuff is going to have to take priority. So by the end of next week. Until this paperwork is done, though, I am going to be sweating bullets.

***

So there you have it. A lot of great things happening, a lot of promise, a bunch of deadlines, and nothing yet confirmed. That’s been my week.

No Comments | In: the ol' gymkata | tags: theatre, Yokohama, Yokohama Theatre Group, ytheatre school. | #

Okay, so it’s all been sorted out. (I’m sure you were all holding your breath to find out what happened next with my plumbing.) The plumber showed up today at around 9:30. Despite the pouring rain, we were able to show him the leak.

Less than 30 minutes later, he’d used a hammer and chisel to knock a 30cm by 40cm hole in the concrete in front of our house and had dug down to locate the leak.

I snapped a photo of it (right). It doesn’t look like much, but this was taken after the main water valve was turned off and the pressure was dissipating. The leak itself was tiny, like an invisible hole pricked with a needle in a garden hose, but under much more pressure (remember, this pipe services the first floor toilet and all the upstairs facilities). When we first turned the water on with the pipe exposed, the force at which the water came out was frightening.

The plumber went off to get some specific tools, but by the mid-afternoon, he’d replaced the damaged section of pipe with some ABS he clamped on. Sadly, he buried the whole thing before I could get a snap of it. (And yes, we tested to make sure there were no other leaks.)

So it’s actually going to cost far less than we thought. Except… the question we need to ask ourselves is this: given the condition of this old pipe, should we not replace the whole length of it before something else happens, maybe with worse results? That will cost quite a bit more. Or, being rather depleted, do we simply content ourselves with the patchwork and hope that nothing else breaks for a while?

Decisions, decisions…

No Comments | In: house hunting, your man in japan | tags: Kamiooka Tea House, Maintenance, plumbing. | #

It has been a long time (more than a year, I think) since I last posted about the house. That’s because there hasn’t been much to say. More than 18 months since we moved in, we’re still enjoying everything about it: the neighbourhood, our renovations, the large tatami room, the modern bath, etc. Most of all, we’re enjoying having a place that is ours.

Of course, the downside to that is that when shit happens, there’s no landlord to call to fix things.

I was working on the Yokohama Theatre Group website yesterday when the doorbell rang. I answered it, and the woman from the water company was there. She showed me my bill, which was insanely high (think 4 times the usual) and asked me if any water was running in the house, as the meter was spinning around. After a quick check to confirm that there was no water running, she explained to me that I probably had a leak somewhere.

Ichikawa-san, my neighbour, overheard our conversation, and we quickly discovered the leak. A wet area in front of the front door that I had dismissed as runoff from the recent rain we’ve been getting was the giveaway. A closer inspection revealed a crack in the concrete pad and water trickling out.

This is bad for several reasons:

1. I have to turn off the water until we can get it fixed, turning it on only for short periods so that we can wash dishes, shower, flush the toilet, etc.
2. The house is built on the side of a hill, and there’s no telling if the extra water we’ve injected into the ground over the last few weeks has done anything to weaken the land the house is built on. (My wife is more worried about this then me; I don’t see how this would be much worse than rain.)
3. The leaking pipe is embedded in concrete which runs from the meter, under the front door, to the northwest corner of the house. The cost of chopping through concrete alone is approximately 50,000 Yen ($500) per meter.

<—You can see the leak on the right, just above the white stones. The pipe runs from the top middle right of this photo (the meter) under the tree, under the concrete pad at the front door, and another meter or two off the bottom left of the frame. The repair work means that we will probably lose the marble stone.

<—This is the water meter that I have to turn on and off every few hours so that we can get on with our lives.

So, with any luck, this will be repaired on Saturday. (The leak, that is. Rebuilding the concrete might take longer.)

Someone on twitter (@martintokyo) suggested that the water company would help pay for the repairs or at least the amount of the bill consumed by the leak. However, the info paper given to me by the water company shows that they changed their policy five years ago, and that even if the leak had been between their tank and the meter, I wouldn’t get a red yen from them.

On the other hand, the meter-reader who came to the door was super nice, and even dropped by the house today on her way somewhere else (not in uniform)  to make sure I’d got things sorted out and had a plumber coming.

So there’s that.

The other happy thing is that the leak hasn’t managed to get any water on the inside of the foundations, which I was slightly worried about.

No Comments | In: house hunting, your man in japan | tags: Kamiooka Tea House, Maintenance. | #

Okay, the big controversy today has been caused by Invisible Children’s Kony2012 campaign. To stop me from having to recap, here is the film they released: http://vimeo.com/37119711

And, trending this morning, here’s an article, reposted by Neil Gaiman on his tumblr feed, by Grant Oyston: http://neil-gaiman.tumblr.com/post/18900935579/i-think-this-is-what-im-most-comfortable-posting-on

Below is my response (originally written on a friend’s repost of Gaiman’s repost on Facebook):

I don’t know enough to endorse Invisible Children, but the critical point is that the professor giving the 31% figure is doing so because he doesn’t include film-making as programming. However, Invisible Children’s strength is that they are raising awareness about Kony, so to deny the film-making as programming is, I think, a bit off.

 

Not every charity is Charity:Water or the United Way or The Red Cross. Whether you agree with the Kony2012 campaign or not, it’s only by massive awareness that it will work, far beyond the level of awareness needed by those other organizations that I mentioned.

 

Staff salaries and transportation are also a big chunk, but keep these two points in mind: 1) the group’s activities are centered around Africa, which is far away, and 2) 8.7 million dollars is not a huge budget for an American charity doing international awareness work.

 

The professor who Gaiman reposts here seems to disagree that film-making and slacktivism can be effective drivers of change, but then seems to say the opposite by discouraging people that military intervention is a good idea, as if KONY2012 can be successful.

 

As I say, I haven’t done enough research yet to know whether direct military intervention is needed, but the fact that Kony has been able to do what he does for more than two decades offends my sense of justice. I’m not thrilled about the Ugandan military’s record either, but sometimes our decisions are between "bad" and "the worst", and the real question is: will waiting for the best solution allow the worst to continue while we waffle?

 

And one final thing: I wonder about the professor’s motives. I clicked the link to Charity Navigator in the article, and the rating of Invisible Children is actually 3 out of four stars.

Since then, I’ve found this article in the Independent, which I think is more balanced and has less of an axe to grind: http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/03/07/stop-kony-yes-but-dont-stop-asking-questions/

JusticeInConflict also offers an opinion: http://justiceinconflict.org/2012/03/07/taking-kony-2012-down-a-notch/ One of the main points of this article is that Kony is already famous enough. I think the writer is living in a bubble. Ask someone on the street today who Kony is, or even who the Lord’s Resistance Army is, and chances are they will have no idea. The goal. it seems to me, is to make Kony as famous as Osama bin Laden.

And finally, I think the best writing about Kony2012 is here: http://securingrights.wordpress.com/2012/03/07/lets-talk-about-kony/

I really like the idea of Kony2012 mobilizing people to do something about the issue, and it’s not professor Oyston’s rather dubious criticism that deters me, but the idea that Invisible Children, in order to make the issue, shall we say “actionable”, have perhaps removed the nuance from it.

If you’re learned nothing else from reading my blog, you have learned that I like facts, and I don’t like when facts are obfuscated for a storytelling goal (see http://jpquake.info). It would be one thing if the video contained a link to more information on the issue and actually discussed the nuance, but it doesn’t. The website simply lets you sign their petition or buy merchandise/donate. Despite the fact that I want to get involved and strongly feel that Kony needs to be stopped (and I don’t mean that as a euphemism, I mean captured or killed, preferably the former so he can be brought to justice in front of the world), I would call on Invisible Children to make public their analysis so that people can actually know what exactly they are supporting.

Invisible Children: you’ve almost got me. Give me more info and I may be able to move from the role of cautious friend to an endorser.

No Comments | In: face to the world | tags: Africa, facts, Joseph Kony, Kony2012, Lord's Resistance Army, LRA, Neil Gaiman, nuance, social media campaigns, Uganda. | #

Last night’s rehearsal, our first since the showcase, was disappointing in some ways, and great in others. Disappointing because most of us weren’t there. Great, because Takahiko, Mayu, and I had a really great follow-up conversation about what we discussed with the audience on Saturday after the show.

I learned more about Takahiko in that 90 minutes than I had in the last six months of working together. I found out that he’d seen Seven Streams of the River Ota (my favourite show ever) when it was in Japan, and that he also like the same Kurosawa films that I’m in love with (Ikiru and Jigoku to Tengoku in particular).

Mostly, though, as I said, we reviewed the 30-minute discussion we had with the audience after our showcase this past Saturday. During that discussion, I asked  the audience what they thought about two scenes in particular.

Both scenes were based on Rosie DiManno’s Toronto Star article entitled No Escape Valve for So Much Grief.

The first scene, which we called No Escape Valve, consisted of an underplayed scene playing out the events of the scene described by DiManno prior to her self-insertion into the narrative. A cub reporter for a Japanese radio station, assigned to her first story, speaks self-consciously into her IC recorder, setting up the time and place of the scene: March 19th, 2011, outside a sports stadium in Miyagi-ken. The stadium is serving as a holding facility for recovered bodies. The other characters in the scene include a woman who is looking for a relative, a stadium employee working as a guide to those coming for the first time, and the family described by DiManno’s article.

The rest of the scene is played out almost sub-vocally, with overlapping dialogue. We’re very conscious of not wanting to put big speeches in the mouths of victims, so the speech is improvised and not at normal performance level. As the scene begins, a man (that was me) sits at a desk, reading to himself.

About halfway through, as the scene in Miyagi continues to play out, the man at the desk tells the audience that he’s reading the article by DiManno and starts to read excerpts aloud to them. Initially, he distances himself from the article, but in the last few lines, he throws on a scarf and becomes the writer herself, gradually moving to a histrionic falsetto that matches the tone and character of the article. His loud voice easily overpowers the scene, and as he reads the last few lines, the other actors become aware of him and turn to look at him, puzzlement playing over their features.

The second scene consisted of me dressed in a headscarf and african-style wrap skirt to complete the out-of-touch hippie look, playing guitar and singing a song entitled I Will Make the Japanese Cry while various Japanese stereotypes unenthusiastically performed a broadway-style dance number behind me.

What I wanted to know from the audience was what their feelings were about us covering this topic. Not so much the bad journalism aspect (I think we’re all agreed on that), but about actually representing tsunami victims in the scene itself, as we did in the No Escape Valve scene.

Interestingly, the opinion was divided, with Japanese members of the audience feeling uncomfortable with the scene, and expats not being put off by it. There was a little more nuance to the conversation than that, but that was the general gist. On the other hand, no one was offended by the musical number (unless they were simply offended by my terrible singing and simply refrained from telling me so).

Since we didn’t have anyone in the audience who was actually from the affected areas in Tohoku, we were getting feedback by people who had friends or relatives there. The way people worded their concerns about the scene was interesting and mirrored what I’ve heard from others when I’ve asked them about it and what Mayu said when we first started rehearsing No Escape Valve. To wit: “we’re worried that people from the Tohoku region will be offended by this.”

While I sympathize with the feeling, I wonder if it’s worth worrying about. We plan to approach the scenes like this carefully, as we did with this one. The applicable section of No Escape Valve was done in what one audience member called a “documentary” style. If it’s okay to go up to Tohoku and point cameras at things and people, then my feeling is that we’re okay recreating a similar effect on stage. As I wrote earlier, we don’t plan to put any big long speeches into the mouths of tsunami victim characters or try make their lives into entertainment. (That’s not what the Wall of Shame show is about, anyway.) However, to explore the topic seriously and honestly, we certainly can’t shy away from scenes like this.

We still have more discussion to do within the whole group itself before we resolve this, but I wanted to post my feelings on this while they’re still fresh.

No Comments | In: pen drool | tags: Discussion, JPQuake, Showcase, theatre, Wall-of-Shame, Yokohama Theatre Ensemble, Yokohama Theatre Group. | #

Well, here I am in the rehearsal room again. I’ve mopped the floor, put on some Leonard Cohen, and am typing this while I wait for the floor to dry and the others to arrive.

The showcase on Saturday was a great success, not in any sense of having put on a polished show (although it did come out much cleaner than I expected), but in the sense that had an audience, and we seemed to engage most of them.

The show itself clocked in at 60 minutes, which is astounding, because when we rehearsed, it felt much more like 20 minutes, AND we cut the Satsuki-tan’s Brain  scene. The most successful part for me, however, was the 30-minutes discussion with the audience. It was exactly what I hoped for in the sense of feedback.

Even better yet, Emmy Nagaoka was there with a video camera and later sent me a rough transcript so we’ll actually be able remember what was said. I had meant to tape the whole thing myself, but someone who I will not mention, but whose name begins with GRAIG RUSSELL, forgot to bring my video camera. We managed to capture bits and pieces of video with my still camera, but a few key moments (including the end) are missing, since Canon cameras are limited by the SD card’s limit of 4GB per file.

The missing video might be for the best, since this gave me the idea of actually make a project of shooting some of the segments as they exist now so that we have more video content on the YTG website.

I was really impressed by how the whole group stepped up to the challenge. What we need to start reinforcing amongst ourselves, however, is that we need this kind of commitment all the time, not just when we have a public showing. That’s kind of the whole point of the ensemble. I want us to keep a sustained level of energy going into our rehearsals so that we don’t need to go into crunch mode when a show comes up.

That “crunch time” is the main reason I wanted to stop doing Theatre the old way. Sure, there will always be a little extra pressure on the week of the show, some of it imposed by the fact that, in Japan, you’re lucky to afford to get into the Theatre more than 24 hours before the day of the performance, but if the performance itself is ready due to sustained efforts beforehand, then a lot of the usual stresses are removed.

Speaking of “crunch”, we also had an evening performance at the Yokohama Honda Gekijou as part of a group show. We took a subset of our material and modified it. It didn’t feel as good as the afternoon performance (a prop gun failed to discharge four times in a row, which kind of took the ‘oomph’ out of it, although Saori handled it like a pro and shouted “パン!” each time the gun didn’t fire), but it was still a great way to end a crazy day.

I’d woken up with a migraine, and had been unable to even eat breakfast. The headache had subsided enough by our 14:00 showtime to allow me to do the strenuous bits required for the showcase without absolutely killing myself, and by the time we were talking to the audience at 15:00 it was pretty much gone. By the time the photo you see above was taken (at around 20:30, after our evening performance), I was not only headache free, but RAVENOUS. So our day ended with a “cast party”, if you can call it that, around a table at the local First Kitchen, with us all eating something disgusting and fatty.

All in all, a very satisfying day that gave us a lot of information on how to move forward from this point.

No Comments | In: the ol' gymkata | tags: Graig Russell, Showcase, theatre, Yokohama Theatre Ensemble, Yokohama Theatre Group. | #

The current alien registration system in Japan allows foreigners to adopt a Japanese "nickname". "Nickname" sounds very informal, but what it is is an official alternate name that can be used on any legal documents not related to immigration.

The info about the new registration system has been released ::HERE::. Worryingly, on page 15, it says that these legal nicknames will no longer appear on our cards. This is problematic because I’ve always used my registration card to prove that my kanji name is real when using it on documents (I bought my house under my Japanese name).

I do have it as well as a note on the back of my driver’s license (glad I put it on there, now), but in the past, pulling out my alien registration card was an easy way of proving my name. I can probably still use my driver’s license for this, but what about people who don’t have driver’s licenses? Does that mean carrying some kind of paper certificate around  whenever you might have to sign or hanko something? Is that certificate even available to us? (I wouldn’t know: never had to use it.)

There are a few things to like about the new system (longer periods of stay, for instance, although that no longer affects me much), a few things to worry about (the rules for re-entry of under a year look a bit fuzzy; enforcement (see below)), and a few things to dislike (more trips to immigration, which since a few years ago in Yokohama, has been relocated from downtown to the sticks). On the whole, it seems like a net loss to me. My main concern is that by tying the card directly to immigration and decoupling it from municipal authorities, the penalties for not following the rules will be enforced more harshly.

For instance, if you change jobs in Japan, you’re supposed to notify immigration within 30 days. In the rush of leaving one job, looking for work, finding work, and starting a new job, it’s sometimes possible to end up with a gap of a few days or a few weeks when you’re between jobs and over the 30-day limit. In the old days, the municipal workers didn’t blink twice. My concern is that people will start being penalized (i.e. deported) for minor violations of this sort, the way they are now for overstaying their visa by one day (which is negligent, but also not impossible to do when dealing with flying out to a country on the other side of the dateline). As a permanent resident (who is freelance), I don’t think this affects me, but I am worried about the consequences of the new system. The old system wasn’t perfect, but it was old, and we understood how it worked, in practice.

No Comments | In: your man in japan | tags: alien registration, gaikokujin registration cards, government, immigration, japan, nickname, regulations, resident cards, rights. | #

We’re four days from the Yokohama Theatre Ensemble’s first showcase. Yikes. I’ve got a million things to do: memorize lines, find the flashes for my socks, buy a few props, memorize a song, create content for the show’s programme, buy the snacks for post-show party, email people directly to remind them about the showcase, send out a reminder newsletter about it, and, hell, probably five or six other things I’ve temporarily forgotten about.

I think I’ve also picked up that flu that’s going around. I’ve been headachy and nauseous since noon. I think I may be running a slight fever, and my stomach and  joints ache.

One of the things that’s been on my list for weeks, however, is a new blog entry, so I’m going to get that done right now, since there’s so much to cover. (Don’t worry, I’ll be brief: I want to hit the hay.)

We’ve had two incredible rehearsals with Tania Coke, who will be teaching the Ytheatre Physical Theatre workshop in March (this may be a one-time only thing—sign up now!). She’s helped us develop that moving screens piece that Mari and I first experimented with in December into something that involves five members of the ensemble (and in it’s final version will involve all six). It’s amazing how much easier the rehearsal is when she’s there to be our outside eye, particularly on a piece like, where my expertise is rather limited.

I’ve arranged for more outside eyes this week to help rush us into being ready for the showcase (and another show that same evening at the Yokohama Honda Gekijou! Graig Russell will be joining us tomorrow, and Nerida Rand on Thursday.

Friday is going to be a frightening night of pulling everything together, starting the set up of the space, and trying to finish early enough that we’re able to crawl back in on Saturday morning at 9:00 in order to prep tech for 14:00.

More when I have the energy again—maybe next week.

No Comments | In: the ol' gymkata | tags: Flu, Showcase, Stress, theatre, Yokohama Honda Gekijou, Yokohama Theatre Ensemble, Yokohama Theatre Group. | #

Am trying out this new translation site "Conyac". http://cony.ac

Really good idea, I think. You get one translation for free, and I tried it out, and I think what I got was decent (at least good enough to suit my current needs).

However, the site does raise some, if not "red" flags, then certainly "amateur" flags.

1. Bad site layout/coding.
   When you first visit the site, you’re presented with two options. Either to become a translator OR to get something translated. Either option requires a facebook account to login with. There’s an option to open the FAQ instead of logging in, which then opens, heavily truncated, within the login popup window.

   Once you’ve logged in using your facebook account (or whatever), you’re presented with a window in which to input your free 720 character translation request. If you want to buy more credits, there is no obvious way to do it. You have 4 items along the top of the page: Request, Translate, Vote, [Username]

   Request and translate are obvious. Vote allows you to vote on accuracy of translations (done for other people) into your native language. Clicking on your username brings up a dropdown menu that gives you:

   Setting, Balance/Withdraw, FAQ, Logout.

   Setting lets you tinker with a (very few) options for your profile, including what languages you speak.
   Balance/Withdraw, which is where you’d think you could buy credits, is only for withdrawing money earned from translation.
   FAQ is where you go to find the link about buying credits, except that it’s not a link. It’s a non-hyperlinked URL that you must cut and past into your address bar. Seriously? What the hell were they thinking?

2. Communications issues.
   After submitted my test translation, I was not notified in any way that I had received results. Only a chance visit to the site revealed my completed translations. This despite the umpteen permissions the site’s Facebook app asks you to grant it.
3. Consistency
   While writing this, I discovered that they have two homepages: http://cony.ac and http://conyac.cc/. .cc appears to be the original one. But even on that site, the pricing is different from the front page and the page where you sign up. On the front page, there are different character limits for English and Japanese; on the page to buy credits, one credit gives you 720 characters, which is more than before (500 characters for English, 200 for Japanese), but now seems distinctly unfair, since you can say a lot more in 720 characters of Japanese than in 720 English characters.

This site is a really good idea. I just hope that the young men behind it realize that their pants are too loose and hike them up.

It is inexpensive enough, and the translation I got seems good enough, and I am desperate enough right now that I will give them a test run this month, though. I hope with my money, they can buy some website experts. (I recommend fusionbureau.com)

Update: Add sinister to the equation. For their monthly plans, credit cost 30% less, and you can get special features. For the “lite” plan, this gives you the option of only allowing native speakers to translate your request. Fair enough. For the “medium” plan, they have something called the “Private” option. Apparently, this means your translation won’t be searchable after 12 hours. So that means any translation request I put in there is searchable forever? Why, other than to extort people to use their more expensive plan?

I’ll just have to make sure I limit my translations to things that don’t include search terms that point back to my site, since I don’t want a translation site (with possibly bad translations) showing up in searches for my Theatre company. Yikes!

No Comments | In: doctor angry, your man in japan | tags: amateur, conyac, dodgy, good intentions, how-not-to, startup, translation, web, Website. | #

Both phones essentially require you to have an account in order to properly operate the devices. In this post, I compare the iTunes account and store to the Google account and market. I’ve managed to successfully buy an app from each store, and it is a fairly different experience.

iPhone: This is where I lose patience with the iPhone: endless accepting and re-accepting of terms, confusion over which country I’m in, endless inputting of my password, etc. The Apple Store is famous for being safe and well-organized. This is true. It’s also a fucking morass of red tape.

For some reason, when my wife wiped her old iPhone (the one that is now mine, in case you haven’t been following this epic), it got set to Canada as its region. Not sure why. During the setup screen, I never set language. Anyway, when the time came that I actually wanted to try to BUY an app, it turned out that I couldn’t put in my Japanese address. Strangely, I could do so on the Apple website, but then when I checked the account on my phone, it was always mangled somehow.

Finally, after searching several support forums, I realized that I had to switch the store location on my phone. So I did that, put in my Japanese billing address and credit card info, and proceeded to try to buy an app.

Nope.

Tried to download a free one (as I had many times up until this point).

Nope.

The message? That my apple ID was only valid in the Japanese App Store. But I’d set my store location to Japan, right? Okay, maybe things didn’t set right. I killed the App Store task and restarted. Nope. Rebooted the phone and tried again. Nope.

Another arduous search (during which I had to agree to more Apple terms of service to access their user support forums—where users support each other), and I finally figured out that I had to log out of my account and then log back in. Why? I have no fucking idea. This is iOS 5.01.; they’ve had plenty of time to iron this kind of crap out by now.

Absolute frustration.

Oh yeah, and NOW all the reviews are in Japanese.

HTC Magic: This is one of the few areas that the HTC Magic wins, hands down. The Android Market just works. It lets you download whatever. It lets you pay for stuff without waving 15 screens of agreements in your face, and without really giving a shit what region you’re in. Once your phone is hacked and you’ve got root access, your provider can’t stop you from downloading and using whatever software you like (and, of course, you can sideload applications as well). In fact, Cyanogenmod 5.8 firmware has USB/Bluetooth tether built right in. Of course, you can do some of these things with a jailbroken iPhone too… I’ll bet it doesn’t even ask for your password as much. But, like I said in my first post, this comparison isn’t fair.

The only downside is the speed and stability, and again, that’s because I’m pushing this device to do far more than it was designed to do.

Android phones also require that you have an account. In this case, it’s a Google account, which I already had since I run my entire life off of Google. For some reason, using that account felt better and less intrusive than setting up the iTunes account. (By the way: number of times I have to input my password to the Google Market? 0, once the phone is authenticated. I had to redo it once when I set up 2-step authentication.)

No Comments | In: com-pew-tars | tags: android, Apple, cell phone, Cyanogenmod, Google, htc magic, iOS, iPhone, iTunes, ketai, mobile. | #

Camera

Both: Both cameras on both phones suffer from similar problems.

1. They are cheap and crappy
2. No screen-side camera for video calling
3. They are both sluggish
4. They both suck and have fucked-up colours and blurring in anything other than perfect lighting conditions
5. Neither of them have a flash and they both REALLY FUCKING NEED ONE (see #4)

iPhone: The iPhone slightly nudges out the HTC Magic in this contest. The camera software is a little more responsive, but more importantly, you can lock the auto-focus by touching the screen on the area you want the camera to focus. Oh, and it’s somewhat better in low light. This isn’t the place to mention it particularly, but Instagram is the killer app for the iPhone’s camera. The Android alternatives just can’t compete, either on community or performance.

HTC Magic: I think of this camera being absolutely worse, but when I compare the best of the photos taken with this with the best of the iPhone photos, they’re pretty much on par. I favour the iPhone slightly in this contest because of the focusing issue (although, even with auto-focus locking, there is almost always blur) but mostly because of Instagram’s ability to make the photos look half decent. (The software I use for the Android is called picplz, and it’s good, as you can see on the left, but it is sloowwwwwww on the Magic.)

The one reason I’d sometimes choose the HTC Magic’s camera over the iPhone? The hacked firmware doesn’t make a shutter noise. I don’t necessarily want everyone in the restaurant knowing I’m photographing my pizza. Oh wait… one more reason: the HTC Magic is a lot easier to hold when shooting a self-portrait. Maybe the smaller size helps.

No Comments | In: com-pew-tars | tags: android, Apple, Camera, cell phone, Cyanogenmod, DoCoMo, Google, htc magic, iOS, iPhone, ketai, mobile. | #

**NOTE: This is by no means exhaustive. Much more has been written on this, but I’m obviously writing about those aspects of the UI that are important to me. I’m also mixing in performance issues as well. And a titch of hardware. So fucking sue me. (It should be noted as well that the UIs are very similar, so I’m not covering things that I feel are either identical or equivalent.)

User Interface

iPhone: Wow. Suddenly I understand why all my friends who have iPhones are endlessly tweeting. YOU CAN ACTUALLY TYPE ON THE iPHONE! It’s not perfect, but it’s far more responsive and easier to use than the Android keyboard (even pre-hacking). (Even Japanese support is built-in.) The larger screen definitely helps. I find it fiddly for go-back-and-fix work, though. It’s much worse at letting you drop the cursor in the middle of the word.

The UI is almost always responsive (although it does choke at weird times; times when I don’t have a lot of apps running), and it is reasonably intuitive, although annoying. I am not a fan of having pages and pages of icons as my default display. And yes, I know you can collapse them, but that really defeats the utility. So, yeah, let’s just say that I’m not a big fan of a homescreen that looks like an old man’s Windows desktop.

It’s an interesting choice to put the settings for each app under a universal “settings” button. I’m not sure yet whether I like or hate the idea. I will say it’s a bit weird when you’re in an application and you want to change settings to have to back out to the homescreen first.

Something that’s nice though, and this isn’t really a UI thing, but a Process Management thing, which is not going to get its own section so I’ll mention it here: the double tap to manage the iPhone’s running applications is a nice touch. To do the same thing on the Android is a pain in the cojones and usually involves installing an application (and I’ve never found any of them very satisfying).

HTC Magic: Typing. Ugh. I dread having to type on my Android phone. It was not great originally, but now that my HTC Magic is constantly choking on the large dick of Cyanogenmod 5.8, typing is usually an ordeal, especially while listening to music via Subsonic (more on music in another part). Also because I switched to a 3rd party firmware, I also wound up having to install a 3rd-party Japanese input method (Simeji), which may be superior to the Magic’s DoCoMo firmware input method, but I wouldn’t know because it is resource intensive and really drags on the Magic. If I dread typing on the Magic in English, I dread typing in Japanese even more. It’s something that I avoid at all costs. Oh, and fuck you Google Maps for making me have to type in kanji addresses (while we’re on the subject).

I will say, however, that the placement of the period and comma on the same screen as the alphabetic characters is a much better idea than the iPhone’s strategy of requiring the user to hit the button for numbers and special characters every time he or she wants to use a comma. Now I know why my iPhone using friends are so miserly with their punctuation. It should be noted as well that now that I’m using the Magic only as an internet access point for the iPhone and not running any other heavy-duty apps on it, typing is actually quite decent… though still not quite as pleasant as on the iPhone, mainly because of the difference in screen size (more on that later, too) and my fat fingers.

I mentioned with the iPhone that cursor placement is problematic. The Magic’s solution to that is the mini-trackball it inherited from its older brother the HTC Dream (a.k.a. the G1, the first Android phone). The trackball is a pain in the ass most of the time (I’ll get to that when I talk about hardware), but it is simply unbeatable for getting the cursor to the letter in the middle of the word that you need to fix. I also find that cursor placement is the one area that the Magic’s touchscreen beats the iPhone for accuracy.

The homescreen on the Android is much nicer than the iPhone’s. The sea of icons is absent and in its place is 3 screens (more or fewer screens can be set) of my beautiful wallpaper and just a few of the most crucial icons, buttons, and widgets. A touch of a button brings up the entire list of installed apps if I want it, but most of the time I only use the old favourites. The advantage here is, of course, not just aesthetic, but utilitarian: you can have widgets that give you important info like weather and calendar, and also functional buttons controlling things like silent mode, wifi, bluetooth, and GPS status, whether or not the machine is syncing accounts, and screen brightness.

Of course, with the underpowered HTC Magic, I removed all but the most necessary widgets, as they do serve to slow the phone to a crawl.

Can you tell I wrote these on the fly from no notes? No? Maybe you should read on…

Next: Part II – Cameras

No Comments | In: com-pew-tars | tags: android, Apple, cell phone, Cyanogenmod, DoCoMo, Google, homescreen, htc magic, interface, iOS, iPhone, ketai, mobile, Softbank, typing, UI. | #

PRELUDE

So, as some of you know, I inherited my wife’s old iPhone 3G when she recently took the free softbank upgrade to a 4s or whatever the hell the new one’s called. My own phone is an old HTC Magic that DoCoMo resolutely refused to give me some kind of upgrade deal on recently when I signed on for two years of service. Fuckers!

I mentioned on G+ that I would be using both of them for the next week and comparing them. Since they are the same generation of phone (they were on sale in Japan at the same time), it would be a fair comparison, right?

Well, my friend Tommi argued that the Android phones at that time were effectively one generation behind the iPhone 3G in terms of blah blah blah whatever. What he says is true, and my testing kind of bears that out.

I say testing, but it’s not really scientific. I chose the Android device for reasons that most users wouldn’t (hackability being one of the key motivators), even if the iPhone blew me away, I would probably make the same choice again if given the opportunity by some Apple-phile time traveller. But, as a non-iPhone user, I wanted to actually try to use the phone on a day-to-day basis and see if it really lived up to the hype.

Okay, first off, here are some ways that the comparison isn’t really fair:

• My HTC Magic is running a 3rd Party firmware: Cyanogenmod 5.8, which is a version of Android 2.1 or 2.2, I think. If I hadn’t installed that, I would still be running the stock DoCoMo firmware with Android 1.6.
  • Advantage: I have functionality with this phone that DoCoMo would probably like to string me up for, and that the iPhone has no chance of replicating.
  • Disadvantage: The HTC Magic is WAAAYYYY underpowered for the firmware and for all the stuff I’m asking it to run. So it’s slow. Way fucking slow.
• The iPhone doesn’t have a SIM in it. So no cell service. Everything I do with it is over WiFi. Ironically, I can test it outside the house, but only if I tether it to the HTC Magic using one of those apps that DoCoMo probably would rather I not use.

More coming in Part I …

No Comments | In: com-pew-tars | tags: android, Apple, cell phone, Cyanogenmod, DoCoMo, Google, htc magic, iOS, iPhone, ketai, mobile, Softbank. | #

Went to the Gekisalon bonenkai tonight at the Yokohama (Sotetsu) Honda Gekijou.

Mari and Takahiko were there as well: Takahiko in his normal capacity as a volunteer staff member at the drinks table (and his less-normal capacity as Santa Claus), and Mari as my wingwoman.

I did less mingling than usual: I had nothing to promote this time. There is lots of big news about to break, like the launch of the school, the date of the group’s first showcase, and the launch of the new website, but the former two are delayed by the struggle to find a space, and the third by the lack of Japanese translations. So: nothing to talk about, really.

Tonight was the last gekisalon of 2011, so it cost 1000 Yen instead of 100 Yen, and there was lots of food—most of which I couldn’t eat because it had meat in it. However, I still managed to come away from the event comfortably full. We’ll disregard that a lot of that filling-up was done with bread and dessert.

All in all, an enjoyable event. I just hope I have something to pitch by the next one on January 23…

No Comments | In: the ol' gymkata | tags: Gekisalon, Mari Kawamura, Takahiko Arai, Yokohama Honda Gekijou, Yokohama Theatre Ensemble, Yokohama Theatre Group. | #

The new website for YTG is basically done. However, it’s still not live, because most of the content is still in English.

The change of direction of Yokohama Theatre has meant that most of the content on the old site will not be moved to the new site. That means I’ve had to write new items, which I did, but it also means that those items need to be translated into Japanese before I launch.

So I’m trying to rope in everyone I know: my usual volunteer translator, the ensemble members themselves, and some family members too.

Hopefully this means I can launch the site mid-week next week and start directing people towards it.

If you’re bilingual and want to help out, drop me a line, though. The sooner I can launch, the better!

No Comments | In: the ol' gymkata | tags: translation, Website, Yokohama Theatre Group, YTG. | #

That’s right, we were back in the space in Kanagawa-Shinmachi last night for our rehearsal.

I’ve been waffling on several things recently. Will we have some kind of showcase/presentation this calendar year? If we do, what will the content be? How much should that content be prepared and polished?

At the moment, I’m trying to figure out a way we can do a showcase for invited guests in the final few days of December. That means I’ve got to deal with venue and content.

For venue, we will probably rent the Kanagawa-Shinmachi space for the day.

For content, well, nothing’s ready just yet. The Elements piece is a no-go. For one thing, we haven’t had the whole group together for a long time now, and for another, the group needs a lot more training (probably guest training; I don’t really have the skills to train actors for physical Theatre) before that piece becomes do-able. We’ve started working on people’s personal stories, and have started running some improvs and Object Exercises in order to support them.

I was doing the “Three Entrances” exercise with Mayu (just one entrance, though), to create the environment of her shared house in England—a location that features prominently into the story she wishes to tell.

Working on that showed me that, really, I need everyone in the group to do this exercise, so I’ll be assigning it one by one.

We then moved on to an improvisation in which Mari and Mayu dealt with the question of how to deal with a slob roommate.

It was a good evening of rehearsal. We got back to what, to me, were basics, but to them were new ideas. It showed me more clearly that with group being small these days, maybe it’s these things that I should be working on. It will be good practice for me, too, since I hope to be teaching all this stuff in the new year.

No Comments | In: the ol' gymkata | tags: acting, Rehearsal, theatre, uta hagan, Yokohama Theatre Ensemble, Yokohama Theatre Group. | #

I’m sitting in a tatami room at the Katakuracho Kumin center, waiting for Mari and Takahiko to show up. Hiraku is on sabbatical until the two shows he’s committed to are over (my suggestion, since he was starting to look like he was operating on no sleep); Mayu is on training for work this week; and Saori has started additional classes on top of her work schedule.

Mari is later than usual because she’s just taken on an extra contract job.

When I got to the space, I thought we had the whole room. I was rather surprised to find two obaasan fussing around inside it after I came back from the toilets. They were using the sliding doors in the space to section off a square part of the room.

Then one of them started asking me if our group was going to make loud noises and could we not, please, because they were doing yoga. Huh? I informed her that we would do our best, but that this was Theatre, and that we were rehearsing, and I couldn’t make any guarantees. I’d told her we’d try, but we would have to at least speak at normal conversational tones.

This once again serves to illustrate the problem with not having a proper venue. It’s not simply the cost of renting spaces that is the problem: it’s the inflexibility of said spaces, and their unsuitability for Theatre rehearsals.

I contacted the real estate agent managing the building at Kanagawa-Shinmachi that we’ve occasionally worked in, courtesy another Theatre group. I once asked one of the guys in that Theatre group how much it cost to rent per month, and he told me 180,000. I thought about it later and realized I must have misheard him. He must have said 80,000. The building is so decrepit, and it’s totally unoccupied except for that group, that the number couldn’t be right.

It was. The next smallest room, at 43 square meters, would have cost us 230,000. The agent, very kindly, offered to bring it down to 200,000. I told him that he could call me when the owner was serious about actually having tenants. The agent told me that we were unlikely to do better. He may be right, but we simply couldn’t afford that. Even with the Theatre school running at full tilt, 230,000 yen would be pushing it. It might be doable if we were in downtown Tokyo and could rent the space out to other groups the way my friends at the Our Space rehearsal lounge do. But not at some po-dunk station halfway between Kawasaki and Yokohama, and not in a building in that condition. This is evidenced by the fact that we appear to be the only Theatre company that sublets from the group already renting the space there and the fact that the small amount they charge us in no way covers their costs.

If anyone has any suggestions about where to look next, I’m all ears. Next week, I will be visiting the Yokohama Arts Council to see if they have space tucked away somewhere, but I’m not terribly hopeful. What I really need is a private landlord whose sense of pride isn’t so bloated that he’d rather make 0 Yen rather than 30,000 Yen while he holds out for bubble-era prices.

As for today… I expect either Takahiko or Mari to show up any minute. Maybe we’ll do some quiet voice exercises or something. I might take some time and force them to write their biographies for the web site. Hmm….

No Comments | In: the ol' gymkata | tags: Kanagawa-Shinmachi, landlord, Obaasan, OUR SPACE, Rehearsal, Rehearsal Space, Yokohama Theatre Ensemble, Yokohama Theatre Group. | #

I’ve recently reviewed my backup plan. It turns out, I’ve been spending too much money.

I’ve been very happy with datastorageunit.com, and in principle, I love it. I love the owner, John Wooten, who gives great support. I love the fact that it’s a small business, which means that you can negotiate—John gave me a bunch of extra free weeks on my trial just so I could get my data uploaded.

The problem is, at $150 US a year (for 300 GB, of which I’m using about 270 GB), it’s getting overpriced. Not to say that it’s expensive: it isn’t. It’s a good deal. It’s a fraction of what I was paying to store the same data using Jungledisk on the Rackspace storage network. And it’s a DIY kind of solution: you use standard software (like rsync) to connect to it. I initially chose it over Crashplan, because Crashplan was only marginally cheaper, and forced me to constantly be running their client.

However, in the last 10 months, the cost of Crashplan has dropped. They now offer an unlimited subscription for less than $3 US a month (that’s less than $36 a year) per machine. That can save me a lot of money, so unfortunately, I will allow my datastorageunit plan to expire this coming March. I’ve installed the Crashplan client again.

I am paying for the unlimited plan for one machine. That one machine is my homebrew NAS, from which I will back up everything. With this new unlimited plan, I will not only be able to backup my photos to a remote server, but also all my videos (the ones I make myself).

I will be getting rid of my main documents backup set as well (the one I’ve been synchronizing via Jungledisk to Rackspace). My rackspace storage is only costing me $4.50 a month right now, but that’s more than the entire crashplan subscription. I’ve decided to synchronize my main documents folder using Windows Live Mesh, since 90% of my syncing happens on my LAN anyway, and back up that folder to a folder on my NAS (using a scheduled Beyond Compare script), which will— surprise!— be backed up remotely to Crashplan’s servers. I should be able to bring my Rackspace and Amazon S3 accounts down to minimal amounts (will probably leave my wife’s documents on them for the time being), and pay under $0.40 US per month (since payment is only based on usage), using them only when I need to post something publicly that’s too big for Dropbox or my webhosting company.

One frustrating issue, though, is Crashplan’s support.

After subscribing (I did my 30-day trial back in February when I was also evaluating datastorageunit), I found my upload speeds very slow. Something on the order of 200 – 300 kpbs. which might sound fast, but it meant that my photo backups would take more than three months to upload. After browsing the support forums on Crashplan, and trying all the tweaks, I came across several threads that suggested that while this was a widespread problem, it seemed to apply mostly to users assigned to a datacenter in Atlanta. I had already opened a support ticket after doing all the troubleshooting I could think of (not, as of yet, responded to), when I came across a forum thread that suggested resetting the backup machine’s ID.

This meant losing three days of backup, but at the speeds I was getting, that wasn’t a big loss. I did it. I checked my settings. This time, I was assigned a server in another datacenter. I started a backup. 7000 kbps!

The interesting thing is this: Crashplan seem to refuse to acknowledge in the forum that there is a problem. The issue seems widespread, and the fix is to switch datacenters– which suggests the problem is with them, and not their users. I do wonder what I’ve gotten myself into by signing up with them, but now that I’ve got decent speeds again (usually 1000 – 7000 kbps, seemingly more limited by my hardware than by bandwidth on their side), the low cost is encouraging me to continue with them.

However, as I mentioned before, I am starting a backup consulting business, and I am now considering taking crashplan off the menu for my clients due to this serious issue with support. I’m just waiting to see what happens with my support ticket.

No Comments | In: com-pew-tars | tags: backup, bad support, Crashplan, datastorageunit, helpdesk, offsite. | #

I’m quickly rushing to type this off before heading to tonight’s  rehearsal.

Last night, we met at Nippa (新羽) station on the Yokohama Blue Line and proceeding to walk to our rehearsal space. This was another new one for us, and it was about a 7 minute walk through darkened streets.

When we arrived, we weren’t sure we had the right place. There was a sign, but it wasn’t lit. There was no lighting on the path leading up to what appeared to be the main lobby. There was only dim light coming out from inside the glass-enclosed lobby area.

Nonetheless, there appeared to be no other way in, so we approached. As we looked in from outside, we saw a man in a yellow vest vacuuming the floor. Were they closing at 18:45?! Mayu thought for a minute that maybe this was a hospital, and not a Kumin Centre.

We went in and it turns out everything was fine, although we had to complete about five minutes of paperwork to register YTG with the place. After that, the old man behind the desk led us through the darkened building, up a flight of stairs, through a library (!) and into the “playroom".

What a great space. The room was huge. Half of it was a waxed hardwood floor, and the other half was dojo-style tatami (sprung tatami, I guess you’d call it). On top of that, the rent was only 450 yen, making it the cheapest space we’ve worked in so far.

The drawbacks: like all Yokohama city Kumin centres, they close at 21:00. And they are very anal about getting you out of the building BEFORE that (they start playing incessant music and making loud PA announcements from 20:45 on). We were out of the building at 20:59 by their own clock, and we still got scolded! Also, you can only book this room twice in any given month.

Enough about the space… what did we do?

Due to sickness and inflexible job schedules, we won’t have the whole group together again, so rather than work on any of the group elements pieces, we instead worked on a improv that we’d started on Monday as a joke: a re-enactment of trying to get a room that we’d paid for without the receipt. We focused on objectives and tactics work, and are now in the process of stripping the Tatemae off the characters without turning them into caricatures. That is the work that we’ll continue tonight.

Okay… off to rehearsal!

No Comments | In: the ol' gymkata | tags: Kumin Centre, Nippa, Rehearsal, theatre, Yokohama Theatre Ensemble, Yokohama Theatre Group, 新羽. | #

Last night was the first YT Ensemble Rehearsal for me in just over two weeks. I’d taken a break from rehearsals while my parents were visiting from Canada. It was also nice to give the group a chance to find a dynamic without me, as so far I’d been the only constant.

During my two weeks “off”, I was hardly idle, though. I was working on a new YTG website, as well as looking into a possible rehearsal space that we could rent by the month.

The group was also not idle. The first week they worked on their presentation for the monthly Gekisalon meeting, and in the second week, they continued work on our elements series.

Unfortunately, we had barely any working time last night. We were in a kumin (community) centre, and it closed at 21:00. I mean REALLY closed. Like we had to be packed up and out the door at 21:00. Also, Mayu (who had booked the space) had misplaced the receipt, which really put the staff’s noses out of joint. After thinking we’d solved the problem, they actually came and interrupted our rehearsal to make Takahiko do almost 20 minutes of paperwork!

We didn’t make a mess in the room, so we were planning to work right up until 20:50, and then change and exit. That plan also proved unworkable, because from 20:45 on, the centre kept playing loud end-of-day music and announcements over the P.A. system.

We’re back in that space tomorrow (Wednesday), but we’ll have the receipt this time, and I’ll try to be primed to make the best use of our time.

Our experiences at some of these Kumin centres simply serve to drive home the point that we really need our own space, ASAP.

No Comments | In: the ol' gymkata | tags: Kumin Centre, theatre, Yokohama Theatre Ensemble, Yokohama Theatre Group, YTG. | #

Sunday’s rehearsal started out as a bit of a disappointment. Due to some schedule adjustments to accommodate one member’s participation in another show, this was our last full-day rehearsal of 2011.

By the end of the day, two of the ensemble members had called in sick, one got stuck at work, and one showed up, only to run to another rehearsal after just an hour and forty-five minutes.

For the entire morning, there were only two of us (Mari and me). We ended up doing some voice work and started moving into some text work before lunch. (I need to remember to borrow some voice training books from YTG Voice for the Actor instructor Graig Russell… or even better, I need to borrow his brain.)

After lunch, Hiraku arrived and we moved into some movement work, although not the main exercises I had planned, since I need to save those for the whole group. Takahiko pulled in around 14:00, and then there were four of us. At this point, we finally had enough people to do what I consider the ultimate acting exercise: tag. I should probably write a whole post on tag and why it’s an incredible Theatre exercise someday, but that day is not today. For now, those of you not in the know shall have to scratch your head in puzzlement.

Hiruaku booked at 15:00, and I gave the remaining two members a few minutes break so I could sort out what to do with just the two of them.

I still had my list of exercises, and I chose several that didn’t require a large group, and we started again, this time on some physical Theatre exercises suggested to me by Utrecht School of the Arts grad and former YTG intern Jos Avezaat.

The last exercise we did was a breathing exercise, and it led to something that made the whole day worthwhile: our first spontaneously created scene since we started working together. I don’t want to say anything more, because I don’t want to ruin the scene’s effect when we eventually showcase it, but I will tell you that it involved Mari spending more than 40 minutes teaching and drilling some basic salsa steps to Takahiko.

So despite the rather iffy start to the day, and the difficulty shifting gears with people coming in and out, we accomplished something very important. The process we’re designing together allows for us to grab an idea or a promising tangent and run with it while it’s still hot in our minds, and today’s idea hints that although we’re still just feeling our way in the dark, maybe we’re on the right track.

I’m looking forward to having the whole group together again on Tuesday to pursue this new scene.

No Comments | In: the ol' gymkata | tags: Breakthrough, Hiraku Kawakami, Mari Kawamura, Salsa, Takahiko Arai, theatre, Yokohama, Yokohama Theatre Ensemble, Yokohama Theatre Group. | #

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the idea of people who hold two sets of worldviews simultaneously. In particular, those who simultaneously maintain an evidence-based view of the world we live in and a set of religious beliefs.

It shouldn’t be such a mystery. For a good chunk of my youth, I was interested in the paranormal and the occult, and kind of half-believed that this God-creature everyone talked about was actually watching me all the time. But when I actually started applying critical reasoning to superstition, I found that, after a time, I could no longer maintain a belief in any of those things that used to interest me, because to do so would be to exempt them from the standards I worked hard to apply to everything else in my life. (The sense of being watched, however, took a lot longer, and remains very much part of my psyche.) And since that time, I’ve been puzzled by those otherwise rigorous skeptical thinkers who do exempt their religious/supernatural beliefs from examination.

I think maybe I’ve found part of the answer.

I was doing the dishes today, and out of nowhere, it occurred to me that I still hold some irrational beliefs. Allow me to list a select few of them for you:

• left is a better direction than right
• odd numbers are better than even numbers
• 7 and 13, in particular, are probably two of the best numbers
• west is a better direction than east
• north is the best direction of all

If you had a powerful supercomputer that was able to simulate my whole life up to this point, you could probably point to a rational explanation for why I hold these beliefs. However, these beliefs are still irrational and useless. They do affect me, however.

If I were to be in a situation, say exploring a large shrine, and I came upon a gate with two paths, barring any additional information (for instance, a map or guidebook telling me which path would lead where), I would almost invariably follow the left path.

If you were to present me with a map of a city, with points of interest marked with numbers but otherwise in a language I couldn’t read, where all said points were equidistant from my starting locations, I would choose to visit either location 7 or 13.

Absolutely irrational. But these beliefs really have no effect on my life or anybody else’s life, except in situations where I might as well flip a coin to decide what to do.

And that’s where this breaks down, of course.

Someone can be a skeptic and, deep down, believe in fairies. However, if that someone makes decisions in his or her life based on the idea that fairies exist while there are other pieces of information available to them, then he or she has crossed some line, and THAT’S the part I don’t understand.

If I gave my irrational beliefs the same level of respect and weight as people do to their religious beliefs, my behaviour would be crazy. If I got in an elevator, maybe I would have to visit the 7th floor, despite the fact that the office I need to go to is on the 6th floor. Maybe instead of turning right when I leave my house, I would have to turn left in a circle until I was facing in that direction.

What would happen? People would question my actions and beliefs. Do I have the right to have and act on these beliefs, provided I hurt no one else? Of course! Do I have the right not to be questioned, mocked, or ridiculed for them? Absolutely not. If I keep these beliefs to myself and do not overtly manifest them in my day-to-day behaviour, then no one will question me.

By now, you can probably see where I’m going with this. Skeptical people who also hold religious beliefs should not be allowed to wall of that section of themselves from their fellows. Of all people, they should understand this.

I heard recently that some (American) skeptics’ groups don’t allow the subject of religion to be discussed at their meetings. I find this absolutely ridiculous. A skeptics’ group is not an atheists’ group, but I think that people need to be intellectually honest about irrational ideas that they hold that affect their lives, even if those ideas are, unlike left being a better direction than right, traditionally protected ideas.

No Comments | In: doctor angry | tags: atheism, belief, faith, intellectual honesty, irrationality, religion, skepticism, Skeptics. | #

It looks like the Ytheatre School won’t be properly gearing up until March 2012, so I’ve decided to start a small business in the meantime; something that can help make ends meet until I can move to doing Theatre full time.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about and experimenting with personal backup solutions for a while now. Maybe I can help people who don’t have time to think about that kind of thing with theirs, thought I.

So having pulled that idea out of thin air, I made a quickie website to advertise it, and presto:

http://squeeze-box.net –> my personal backup consulting business.

My target demographic is relatively affluent but busy expats, who simply don’t have the time and figure out how to protect their data on their own. They just want someone to come in to set things up, and then pass over the keys, which suits me fine.

I’m really only interested in working with people on personal data, not businesses, because businesses require more specialized and expensive solutions that demand ongoing and time consuming support, and I don’t really want to work in that world. There are already consulting businesses charging an arm and a leg for much more comprehensive service packages than I could offer. Helping individuals protect their documents and important memories at a more modest price is more my style. I envision completing most jobs within a day or two, depending on their complexity.

I’m not quite sure exactly how I’m going to get the word out yet, but I think I will need to make some paper flyers in order to get them into the right hands. Of course, if you know someone who fits my target demographic, has lots of personal data (photos, documents, etc), and wants to make sure that a housefire, virus, or earthquake doesn’t erase years of memories, then feel free to point him or her my way if you are so inclined.

(Why only people who live in Kanto? Because I need to work on the computers I’m backing up. Also, I want to meet with prospective clients to determine their backup needs so I can customize a solution for them.)

No Comments | In: com-pew-tars | tags: backup, consulting, hard disk, squeeze-box.net, ytheatre school. | #

Yesterday was the Yokohama Theatre Ensemble’s first all-day rehearsal (10:00 – 18:00). I had convinced ESL Theatre Project’s Lei Sadakari and voice instructor Graig Russell to come in and run some sessions for us.

Lei’s morning session consisted of a movement workshop, using group yoga poses and exercises to get us moving our bodies in new ways. Lei is constantly training overseas to learn new skills, so it was great to have her come in and share those with us. I am constantly surprised, however, about how I seem to be in better shape than the other ensemble members, despite being significantly older (and fatter) than most of them. Maybe they’re just pretending to be out of breath to make me feel better?

The afternoon session, run by Graig, was a voice class. He took the ensemble (and Lei, who stayed to participate) through the basics of making noise. I’ve been working with Graig on and off for a couple of years now. He was my assistant director on William Shakespeare’s R3, and helped with voice training on that show as well. Since then he’s come in to help out on other projects, and taught the first Ytheatre Voice workshop earlier this year, and he’s always done great work. It was amazing seeing him fly through yesterday’s training session, though. He’s really evolved his teaching style into something natural and engaging. I think he’s finally found the headspace of being a teacher; something that I have yet to master.

One problem we continue to have is tardiness and absence. There are still a few of us with commitments that predate the creation of the ensemble, but even these are sometimes communicated at the very last minute, and thus, we need to come up with a solution together to try to curb the absentee/lateness problem.

The kind of work we’re doing requires that we’re all present and ready-to-go, so it’s much more important to us than a normal group of performers working on a show. We’ll discuss this the next time we all meet, and I’m sure we’ll come up with a solution together.

No Comments | In: the ol' gymkata | tags: Graig Russell, Lei Sadakari, theatre, Yokohama Theatre Ensemble, Yokohama Theatre Group. | #

So the YTheatre Ensemble has started working on our first project. The first official project will still be Wall of Shame: The Musical, but we’re going to start doing a series of mini-projects to get us in the right headspace.

The first project is to expand the world that I and a bunch of high school students created for our 2009 Kanto Plains Drama Festival piece The Tribe of Dirt.

At the end of that piece, the tribe is led off by their new shaman to find a new life, and maybe a new element to base their culture on. I’ve given the ensemble the task of expanding on this, so we’ve started exploring the journey of the new shaman as he searches for the tribe’s new home and purpose.

Last night, we started working on the element of water, and thus did a lot of rolling around on the floor.

I find that I’m still having to do a lot of kickstarting of ideas with the group, since they’re used to being “just actors”. I will continue to work to make them part of the creative process. Last night’s stalling over some points of mythology and the archetypal quest have also convinced me that I may have to create a reading list for them.

Finally, here are some photos from last Tuesday’s “Opening Ceremony”, as I called it. After rehearsal, we convened at my house to drink some sake. I gave each of the “First Five”, including myself, a little packet of gold leaf that I’d bought last year in Kanazawa, and we sprinkled it into our cups to symbolize our collective wish for good fortune in our Theatrical pursuit.

No Comments | In: the ol' gymkata | tags: Ceremony, Gold, Kanto Plains Drama Festival, Sake, theatre, Wall-of-Shame, Water, Yokohama, Yokohama Theatre Ensemble, Yokohama Theatre Group. | #

More than six months have passed since the great Tohoku earthquake on March 11, 2011. And thus more than six months have passed since I started the Bad Journalism Wall of Shame. Although entries still trickle in (reporting on Fukushima in particular continues to be sensationalistic and unscientific), the Wall’s heyday has passed, so it seems like a good time for me to gather together my thoughts about it.

The Wall became more than I had intended it to be. As I’ve written before, I did not expect it to go international, and I did not expect so many people to read it and submit stories. I also did not expect the media attention around the issue (although, interestingly, other than a student paper in New Zealand, the Berliner Zeitung. and the Columbia Review of Journalism, and one or two other small outfits/bloggers, no international media source that ran the story bothered contacting me or anyone involved—many of them just reprinted the dismissive Japan Times story that didn’t even give the link to the site).

Having said that, I think that the Wall, ultimately, was a failure. I know that a few people might disagree with me, but I mean a failure in the sense that the Wall’s potential was not achieved and that there are lessons to be learned by acknowledging that failure.

But let’s start out with the positive. What did the Wall of Shame accomplish? Some of these items are general, and some of them are personal to me.

• Documented the great anger that prevailed over the media coverage.
• Provided material for an upcoming Theatre production
• Introduced me to a bunch of people I never would have met otherwise
• Did manage to document a number of actual, in-the-flesh, bad pieces of journalism
• Did generate several offline discussions about the state of journalism

Now for the negatives. What did the wall fail to do?

• Failed to initiate a productive discussion online about the state of journalism
• Failed to generate or motivate any action on the part of news organizations
• Failed to compile a high-quality list of bad articles.

I’ve done a lot of pondering over the last three months about what I might have done differently, and come to the conclusion that, erm, not much. There are things I would have liked to have done differently in terms of setting up the wall, but to this day I don’t know of a single way to combine the wiki-ness that I wanted (i.e. people could contribute and edit, but be identifiable by user names, discuss entries, edit others’ entries, etc.) and the the ease-of-use that I needed without creating a very custom solution. My use of wikispaces originally caused a lot of problems because a number of contributors couldn’t figure out how to use the tables… and worse than that, the tables couldn’t be easily exported (for, say, alphabetical sorting). The switch to Google Spreadsheets allowed people to submit with no technical knowledge required, but made the submission process irrevocable and anonymous.

The fix I (and my five valiant editors) tried to apply by creating an edited version of the wall didn’t really do the trick either.

But, I really don’t think, in hindsight, that we could have done much better.

However, moving forward, I do have some ideas of what should be done.

Since March, I’ve thought up and discarded grandiose ideas for fixes to the problem of sensationalism and the status quo of journalism, including:

1. Treating journalists like we treat other professionals like lawyers, dentists, etc.
• pay is higher for members of the professional organization
• licensing is required and can be revoked
• there are written standards and set consequences for not meeting those standards
2. All media companies need to be non-profit
• eliminate the profit motive of news organizations
• funding is transparent; donors must be listed OR run through a separate agency in such a way that the news organizations have no specific donors

These methods wouldn’t work for a number of reasons. First of all, they all require a massive change to how the economics of news works today. Furthermore, the first solution has the problem that if the professional organization is compromised/corrupted, then all reporting is similarly compromised or corrupted.

The second solution has the problem that non-profits are more heavily vulnerable to government regulation, and in some countries (and to some people), this move might be seen as a nationalization of the media (which I think we can all agree is a very bad thing when it actually happens). While, philosophically, I think that all corporations should be non-profits, I realize that this is not currently a viable solution.

Both of the proposed solutions also marginalize or exclude the emerging ‘citizen journalist’ movement, which, while frequently frustrating and annoying and low quality, has become an important part of the modern news landscape.

The best I’ve been able to come up with, then, for the future, is this:

An International Media Watchdog Organization, which will rate all news organizations and sites, is non-profit and has a number of permanent employees. Readers submit articles that they think are incorrect, or factually wrong, and those articles are evaluated by editors. Evaluation is done using a grading system and a short summary.

All media organizations start out with the highest rating possible (let’s call it 10 stars), and ratings will be lowered by a set amount based on submitted stories. Organizations can get their rating raised again by prominently issuing retractions/corrections. Media ratings are displayed on the watchdog website, and can be searched using several criteria. Individual journalists and pieces can be searched as well. (It’s possible that individual journalists could have a rating as well, but that might be problematic for several reasons, not the least of which being that two or more people could have the same name.)

There’s a little more to it than this, but those are the essentials. The advantage of this system is that it does not require the participation or cooperation of the Media corporations themselves. It simply gives readers the ability to research a particular news story (a la Snopes.com), or, if a story is not yet in the database, to check out the trustworthiness (by rating) of the publisher of that story.  The other advantage is that it doesn’t stop anyone from publishing anything. Mr. 9/11 Truther McGillicutty can still run his blog about how 9/11 was caused by the ghost of Jimmy Hoffa; the watchdog NPO might give it a bad review/rating, but that’s not the same as preventing him from publishing (and true believers won’t care anyway).

If this caught on, and people learned to check stories on the watchdog site, then the media corporations (and individual bloggers too, I suppose), would actually have a economic incentive to keep a high rating.

I think it could work. I really do.

And that’s the main lesson I learned from making the Wall of Shame site.

No Comments | In: your man in japan | tags: Bad Journalism, Journalism, Media, non-profit, Wall-of-Shame, Watchdog. | #

The Yokohama Theatre Ensemble met for the first time as a unit this past Friday at the Kanagawa Earth Plaza (or Global Citizens Plaza, or whatever it’s called).

In addition to myself, the ensemble includes four brave souls: Hiraku Kawakami, Mari Kawamura, Mayu Cho, and Takahiko Arai. I say brave because we’re doing something different than every single one of us is used to while working on Theatre.

Normally when a group of strangers comes together in the name of Theatre here in Japan, we know a few things going in:

• what show we are going to do
• what the show will be like (style, content, etc.)
• what the rehearsal process will be
• when the show will be going up
• what part(s) each person is going to play

The YT Ensemble knows none of these things. Well, we do know that our first show will be called Wall of Shame: The Musical, and that we hope to perform it for the first time sometime near the end of this calendar year. I’ve set that as the first show, because, firstly, I believe that it’s an important show to do, and secondly, I think that it’s important to have a first project in the pipe in order to prime our creative processes. In the future, we will be developing the shows together, as a group.

But other than the name of the show and the vague theme of journalism and the 3/11 earthquake, we know nothing. Not what the form of the show will be, not what the content will be, not even a running time. And that’s kind of the point.

So, that’s kind of scary. We’re creating Theatre without so many of the safety nets that we’re all used to. The worst safety net to work without (at least for me) is that of enforced relationships. With a scripted show, or a devised piece developed with a proper ‘director’, there are excuses to break social taboos. For instance, the script or the director will frequently dictate to you your in-show relationship with another character. If that relationship is intimate or hurtful, certain behaviours on your part are appropriate within the context of the rehearsal room. With people who have worked together for a long time, this becomes less of an issue, of course, but the five ensemble members have never worked with each other before. Moreover, we didn’t even know each other before forming the ensemble. I predict that we’re going to spend a lot of time, if I may switch metaphors, just breaking the walls we’ve all put up around ourselves. More time than usual for a cast.

I will post further as things develop, but I think the intimacy of the ensemble will be a recurring theme for the first little while as we try to figure out ways to break down the social walls between us. That in itself might make a good show someday…

No Comments | In: the ol' gymkata | tags: Hiraku Kawakami, Hongodai, Kanagawa Earth Plaza, Mari Kawamura, Mayu Cho, Takahiko Arai, theatre, Wall-of-Shame, Yokohama, Yokohama Theatre Ensemble, Yokohama Theatre Group. | #

(mumble mumble) years ago, I was sitting in an apartment in Toronto, watching the real actors smoke, including Sam Rosenthal, now Artistic Director and General Manager of the Vaughn City Playhouse. This was a party of some sort (my memory is vague), possibly even the closing night party of The Diary of Anne Frank, my first semi-professional show and my first real show unconnected to an educational institution I was studying in.

My eyes weren’t blinded: I knew that this show, in a grotty little Theatre called, appropriately enough, The Annex, was not a high budget affair. And though they seemed seasoned and wise to me then, the creative forces behind the show (the aforementioned Sam Rosenthal and his partner-in-crime Eli Lukawitz) were young and just starting out into the world of making Theatre. Don’t get me wrong, I knew this at the time, but I also felt inspired by their energy to create Theatre and so I spent most of my time hanging on their every word. They were really doing it; they were making it happen.

Eli and Sam were very influential on me just at the right time, much more than most of my university professors, and I’ll always be grateful for the opportunity they gave me by casting me in that show, and letting me see how a semi-pro company should be run (i.e. as much as possible like a professional company). I’ve held every group I’ve worked with since up to the standards that those two set for me, including my own casts and crews. But beyond that, something that Sam said that night at the party has stayed with me ever since.

He talked about how his dream was to run a rep company. Simple as that. Back then, I still pretty much wanted to be “just” an actor, although at that point, I think I’d at least narrowed it down to wanting to be a stage actor (i.e. I’d realized that I found film shoots intensely boring), so I probably nodded sagely, even though he was talking to someone else (Walter Young, I think¹).

(In case you don’t know what a repertory company is, at its most basic it is a cast and crew that stay together for an entire season (at least) and perform several different plays together. If you want more detail, go look it up.)

In any case, at the time, a rep Theatre didn’t sound so great to me. Not bad, mind you, just not particularly special. But for some reason, I carried the idea with me over the years, and by 2001 or so, I’d basically stolen it and made it my dream. However, I ran into the problem that when you’re not paying them, actors don’t want to commit to more than one show at a time. Who’d have thought it? Well, Sam, obviously, which is why he’d been smart enough not to try it.

I realize now that part of the problem was that I was trying to do very conventional Theatre. Although my company was emphasizing original works and new interpretations of classical works, my approach to Theatre was still, in many ways, very conservative. With no money on offer, and able to get very little attention from critics, what did I have to offer actors? Basically, my Theatre company was one of the places to go to get something on your resume until a better job came along. Why would anyone commit for the long haul?

I closed up my Theatre to move to Japan, and when I started working with the Yokohama Theatre Group, I put the idea of a rep company aside. With the way that expats come and go here, a rep company was unthinkable.

And then I made The Tribe of Dirt with a bunch of high school students in about four hours one Saturday afternoon as part of the annual drama festival put on by some of the Kanto-area international schools. If you look that the video on the other side of that link, it’s rough, sure, but there’s something that happened that day that caused the penny to start dropping. Working on that show caused me to want to work on developing something wholly my own, in rehearsal, which led to my show 39, developed over three months of rehearsal with Kimberly Tierney. Doing 39, and the summer Fringe tour to Canada that went with it inspired me further, and by the time I got back, I was eager to develop more… which got me into trouble as I worked that ambition into the Tartuffe project I’d committed to the year before.

It’s now been nearly ten months since Tartuffe ended, and after much experimentation and farting about, I hit upon a possible answer to the question of “why would an actor commit to more than one show?”. The answer I hit upon was: an actor won’t.

Okay, but why would I? I would because I’ve come a long way since that night at the party, and I no longer think of myself as an actor: I think of myself as a Theatre Maker, as utterly pretentious as that sounds. What it means is that I want to be involved in the whole process of making new Theatre. I’ve known for years now that I want to do more than just interpret a playwright’s words in the way that a director wants me to: I have ideas that are too big to fit only into that niche. Which means I’ve been doing writing and directing. But what I’ve yearned for, and what Sam Rosenthal’s stolen dream has turned into is that I want to work with a group of people who want the same thing. Maybe they will want it in a more limited way than I do, I don’t know, but I want to find out.

The reason I’ve always loved Theatre so much is that I love collaborating with other people, and now that I’ve realized that the way I want to do that is much less conservative and more hippy-dippy than I had initially thought (owing more to the 1970s collective Theatre movement than to the rep companies of mid-20th century England), I think I may have found a way, if I’m really lucky and things go my way, to fulfil that dream I swiped from Sam.

¹ No link there, by the way; he doesn’t come up on Google, and on Google images, searching [“Walter Young” toronto actor] brings up unrelated photos including Pennywise the Clown and Hitler.

No Comments | In: the ol' gymkata | tags: 39, acting, Art, collaboration, dreams, Ensemble, Repertory, Squeeze-Box Theatre, Tartuffe, theatre, Toronto, Yokohama, Yokohama Theatre Ensemble, Yokohama Theatre Group. | #

Have not had great luck with subways today.

STORY 1

On my way to give my talk for ASIOS at Bungeisha, I had to take the Tokyo subways.  My final train change was at Akasaka-Mistuke. I followed the signs on the platform, noting that the line I needed to change to was a whopping 600+ meters from where I now stood. Not unused to silly distances in the subways, I started walking.

When I arrive, I realize that I have actually walked to the next station on the line– and the opposite direction of my destination. I assume if I had disembarked at the opposite end of the platform at Akasak-Mitsuke, I would have seen a sign directing me to my transfer, less than 100 meters away.

Score another victory for the absolute shit signage on the Tokyo subways.!

STORY 2

Arrived an hour early for my talk (whoops). Spent the time eating in the shambolic Subway Sandwiches near Shinjuku-Gyoenmae station.

1) Entrance so crammed (architecturally) that I could not get in the door.
2) Napkins rationed (one tiny one apiece, and no extras available where customers could get one)
3) Not enough seats (maybe 10 counter seats), and 50% of the people in them lolligagging, i.e. finished eating and playing with cellphone, or in one case, SLEEPING.
4) Once I got a seat, I realized that the counter and floor was filthy; it looked as if someone had put his/her cigarette out on the wall. Propped my bag on the footrest to avoid having it touch the slightly sticky floor
5) No toilets. I dropped some sandwich on myself because I am a massive klutz, and had only my tiny napkin to wipe it with. Staff were so overwhelmed it was daunting to even try to talk to them.

I realized that for North America, I’ve probably described the height of luxury, but for Japan (and a major chain), this is pretty low.

Am now sitting next door in the (comparably) high-rent St-Marc Cafe (of Chococro fame), idling the rest of my time away.

No Comments | In: doctor angry, your man in japan | tags: japan, Subway, Subway Sandwiches, Tokyo. | #

I’m having a hell of a time deciding on which task management web app to use. I have at least six YTG ensemble members coming to our first meeting tomorrow to set up their email accounts, scheduling web app (tungle.me), and task management web app.

The task management piece is critical. As the group’s only administrator and coordinator, I need to have a way of assigning tasks to people and checking task status without dozens of emails going back and forth.

COHUMAN

Prior to July, I was using Cohuman, and had been for about five months. It’s an amazing social network-style task management web app, and I fell in love with it. Best of all, it was easy to get other people to use it. Then, near the end of July, Cohuman announced that they had been acquired and would be closing on August 31. This was a huge blow on many levels. First, I was losing a wonderful and free web app. Secondly, I was going to lose the trust of all those people I had brought onto it. How was I going to convince them to move to something less intuitive?

MANYMOON

So began the hunt for a replacement. I latched onto ManyMoon. It didn’t have the great interface and social network feel of Cohuman, opting instead for a more businesslike approach. It was also lacking some features that I thought were very important (more on that in a moment). However, I spent a month getting used to it, and while I lamented the passing of Cohuman every day, I got used to Manymoon, and even began to appreciate it for what it was good at. Having been burned once, I decided not to invite anyone more than essential cooperators to Manymoon until I had been using it for a while. I had a lot of trouble getting other people to use it. The big thing, though, was going to be getting the Yokohama Theatre Ensemble members to all use it.

THE RETURN OF THE CURSE OF THE LIVING DEAD

So, everything was decided. On Thursday, I was going to introduce all the new company members to Manymoon. Then, the unthinkable happened. Yes, the very thing I would have given my eye teeth for a month ago: with barely two days to spare, Cohuman announced that they are no longer shutting down. And I’m glad. I really am. But now I have a big decision to make, and I thought that maybe writing this would help me work it out.

FEATURES

I’m going to start by talking about features of the two web apps. They each have the ability to create PROJECTS, and within those projects, TASKS. As many as you like. For free. In Manymoon, you also can create Milestones, which are apparently important to people who have been doing project management in the past. By contrast, in Cohuman, you can instead set task dependencies (called “blocks”). Manymoon apparently has a workaround using milestones to achieve the same effect as Cohuman’s “blocks”, but I couldn’t figure it out from a simple glance at the instructions, so I never tried it. Creating a block is Cohuman is much more intuitive, but there are still a fair number of clicks, and you have to wait for things like task lists to load, etc. (Although testing it right now shows that it’s faster than before—maybe because so many users have left the service due to the announced closure.)

Sometimes using the web interface isn’t an option. Both Cohuman and Manymoon let you manage tasks via email to a certain degree, and both of them appear to let you email back and forth with another project member, which then ends up in the comments section of the given task. This is useful for preserving the email chain on a particular topic.

Both solutions have a way of handling repeating tasks, although Cohuman’s feels a little more tacked on, I’m sure that will change in time. Both apps also offer time tracking, although, again, Cohuman’s is an add-on text box, while Manymoon’s is much more integrated in to the app.

Neither company, however, has an Android app yet. Cohuman has an okay iPhone app, but as an Android user, I care more about that platform. A 3rd party app, called TodoToday has a version that supposedly works with CoHuman, but I’ve never been able to get it to work (it’s frustratingly shoddy). There is nothing available for Manymoon… except…

Except what I consider to be Manymoon’s killer feature: Google Tasks integration. True, it has some bugs, and it can only be accessed from one screen, and the sync must be done manually, but it’s this feature that makes Manymoon much more usable on an Android Device. I installed a Google Tasks app and BINGO, I had a way to update my tasks from my phone. There are limitations, of course. New tasks go into a general pool, since G-tasks has no project tracking (it has separate lists for that, but Manymoon only syncs to the default list), but who cares? It’s easy to move them into the correct project the next time I use the web app.

Cohuman does have Google Tasks integration, but it doesn’t work with a Google Apps account (which is what I’m using). They claim that it’s a problem with Google’s API, but the fact is that Manymoon can get it working, why can’t they? I would even accept a manual sync, particularly if the button was available in the page header or something like that (meaning always available to be clicked). Cohuman does have Google Calendar integration, which Manymoon lacks, but since Google Tasks is integrated into the Google Calendar by default, that’s hardly a big problem for me.

In fact, the way tasks appear in the calendar is much nicer than how Cohuman’s calendar entries appear. Mainly, because they appear with little check boxes so you can mark them as complete (and then sync back to Manymoon). As far as I’m concerned this is the main feature that is missing in Cohuman. (Yes, it’s only missing for Google Apps for Domains users like me, but that is me, and so I care.)

On the other hand, in Manymoon, when you look at your entire task list, your tasks are sorted by the order in which they are do. This sounds logical, right? Well, one of the coolest things about Cohuman is that they didn’t take this logic for granted, and they actually have an algorithm that rates the importance of a task, taking into account factors like: when is it due (of course), how many people are members of the project or task, task dependencies, etc. I really liked this. You still get notifications of tasks that are due today or the next day in the daily email you can ask Cohuman to send, but when looking at the web interface, the algorithm-driven priority view is actually very useful.

The killer feature for Cohuman, though, is the tweetdeck-like interface. It means that you can have several views open at once (they scroll off your screen to the right). Click the first photo in this post to see what I’m talking about. In contrast, Manymoon only lets you see one view at a time (unless you multitab in your browser, I suppose). For me, it’s the ability to juggle different views that’s important.

This is by no means an exhaustive feature list, but I’ve touched upon the items that are most important to me. The features are summarized in the table below:

WAXING PHILOSOPHICAL

There are also organizational differences between Manymoon and Cohuman, and they bear talking about since, for me anyway, they play a big part in the decision I need to make.

OUTLOOK

Manymoon is more business in outlook, and it shows. The interface looks nice and respectable if you have a salaryman client reading over your shoulder. It’s obvious that Manymoon sees itself as a simplified web version of the big-boy project management tools (with many more collaboration features, of course—I’m not trying to sell them short here).

Cohuman is very heavily influenced by the world of social networking. As I mentioned before, their interface is more fun and lighthearted, and this makes it easier to get teams to use it (especially teams of artists, like I’m dealing with). The Cohuman “feel” may not be right for very serious business people, but it suits me.

PROJECT PHILOSOPHY

As mentioned in the feature table, Manymoon allows a task to have multiple owners. People frequently work on projects together so it makes sense that they should both be responsible for it.

Cohuman allows only one task owner to be assigned to each task. However, their system allows the task to change owners (when you comment on it, if you hit “reply”, it reassigns the project to the person you replied to). The philosophy here is that multiple people may be working on the same task, but one person is always responsible for it, or responsible for the next step. Personally, I like this “hot potato” approach, because when the new owner sees it in his or her task lists, then he or she will probably want to finish the task, or do their part and pass it on to someone else.  Not sure if I explained that well, but it’s a philosophy I agree with.

SUPPORT

Cohuman uses GetSatisfaction to handle its support. GetSatisfaction is a site that creates a support community for the companies who use it. It encourages open discussion about issues, questions, and feature requests, and quick responses to problems. Sometimes the system will refer you to a previous post that is the same question or problem that you had, and you can elect to “follow” that post and get any replies posted to it. The community is very active and the Cohuman team are also really good about replying in a timely manner, usually with useful advice, or the “er… we’re working on that feature”, which is a common response from startups. I’m not sure if the customer service is better than Manymoon’s, but it feels better. A variety of Cohuman staff respond to postings, which gives the impression that the company is very involved with its user community. (I also really like GetSatisfaction’s feeling icons that you can activate to show how you’re feeling about what you posted. There’s a little graph on the left that shows how many happy, sad, confused, neutral posts there are on a topic.)

Manymoon, on the other hand, has its own internal support page. As far as support pages go, it’s very well organized and contains a lot of useful information. However, it looks like only one employee responds to posts, and I get the impression that he prevaricates and stonewalls a lot. I don’t think he actually does this any more than the Cohuman guys do (frequently, both companies will not comment on timing of an upcoming/requested feature, or don’t report back on it for a long time), but the support setup does make it feel more like an adversarial relationship.

I guess what it is is that It feels like the Manymoon support guy is standing between the users and the rest of the company, whereas in the Cohuman GetSatisfaction community, the CEO and a variety of employees regularly respond to user praise, questions, problems, and feature requests.

VERDICT UNREACHED

So why can’t I decide?

Here’s what it really comes down to:

Manymoon’s ability to sync tasks to Google Tasks is a killer feature.

I like the Cohuman philosophy, style, and community more.

Which leaves me leaning  towards Cohuman, with a wistful eye cast back to Manymoon’s Google Tasks integration.

But, [insert GW Bush quote about being fooled]. I really feel put out by Cohuman’s flipflop on the shutdown. They’ve made me look bad in the eyes of the people I invited to their service, and now I would have the unenviable task of trying to bring some of those people who followed me to Manymoon back to Cohuman. Two changes in two months? I know what these people are going to ask me: “They’ve been acquired. How do you know they won’t do it again?”

And it’s a good question. It’s the one I would like to pose to Matt Work, the CEO (if he’s still the CEO, of course). If not him, then the new overlords. Aside from not cancelling the service again, how do we know you’re not going to make it a pay-only service, or limit the number of projects or collaborators in the near future?

Look, Manymoon could do it, too, I know. But the fact is, I have no special reason to think they will, but Cohuman, under new owners, is just such an unknown quantity. Plus, THEY JUST DID IT.

If the timing was different, I’d wait for some announcements out of Cohuman, and evaluate the new direction of the company, but the fact is that my ensemble will be joining one service tomorrow (unless the typhoon rains out our meeting), and I need to decide which it will be. Because moving them to another one after the fact, is going to be a pain.

What to do? I don’t know. Anyone who uses either of these services is welcome to leave a comment.

3 Comments | In: com-pew-tars | tags: cohuman, Google tasks, manymoon, productivity, project management, task management, trust. | #

I was supposed to have my cast a month ago. It’s taken me a long time to set up auditions, get people to come to them, and then convince them to join.

Actually, the auditions are more for the candidates to evaluate whether or not they want to work with me than they are for me to judge their talents. Why? Because most Theatre people here aren’t used to the idea of a long term repertory unit, let alone one that is going to specialize in a type of collective creation. (I think dance people are, but that’s a whole other blog post.)

I’m asking the people to sign up to essentially commit for an indefinite term, an unspecified number of shows, and an intense (3 days a week) rehearsal schedule. I think we all will have the goal of doing this for a living, but for now, there’s no money in it. I am asking people to do this for the love of making collaborative Theatre. And that’s a big ask.

That’s why I’m not running the auditions to weed out people based on skill level. A Theatre producer friend of mine once gave me the advice, while we were casting one of the Amos Takes Hogtown shows, that I shouldn’t mistake enthusiasm for talent. Which is good advice when you have a 6 – 8 week, three day-a-week rehearsal process gearing up for a show that is going to get just one production. It’s less good advice when building an ensemble for a long-term creative project.

The fact is that someone can learn to be a better performer (indeed, one of the principles on which I’m founding the ensemble is that we all must always be open to learning new skills), but what can’t be taught is a desire to express oneself through live performance. That desire, that need, is what I am looking for.

What I’m keeping my eye out for in auditions is a flexibility of mind and a desire to jump right in and participate. So far, I’ve seen a lot of that. It seems like the kind of people who come out to this type of audition are already cut from that cloth. This is encouraging to me.

So, one more set of auditions on Tuesday, and I should have a company of between two and five people set up and ready to go by the end of the week.

No Comments | In: the ol' gymkata | tags: acting, Auditions, Ensemble, theatre, Yokohama Theatre Group, YTG. | #

Once last Kaku post. Here is the video in which he says that we’ve stopped evolving and below that a link to a blog that explains very clearly why he’s wrong.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/02/why_do_physicists_think_they_a.php

Should we be taking any advice from this guy? He obviously doesn’t have any power of self-editing, and thinks he’s an expert on everything. It’s never clear when his expertise ends and his wonky opinions begin.

No Comments | In: doctor angry | tags: Bad Journalism, Bad Science, Bibliography, Biology, Evolution, Experts, Michio Kaku, Science, Skeptics, Wall-of-Shame. | #

Recently, someone on Google Plus posted this gem from some high-falutin’ type at CNN:

http://www.cnngo.com/tokyo/visit/tell-me-about-it/andre-vltchek-why-i-hate-traveling-japan-342716

Go read it. I’ll wait.

Among other things it stirred up in me that I cannot phrase politely, it put me in mind of a piece I wrote almost a dozen years ago for a short-lived comedy group I was part of.  Here it is:

AN ARGUMENT AGAINST CHILD LABOUR

by O. Oscar Oscarson, Railroad Tycoon and Oligarch

 

My shoes are falling apart. The other day, I purchased a pair of shoes. I have worn them only once, and already they are degenerating. The sole is coming away from the bottom of the shoe like the fetid lips of my dear Augustine, and all the leather is rotting away like the pelt of a dead groundhog lying bloated in the sun.

 

Now, I heard recently that this particular shoe company has been using child labour. Good for them! I know from my days running a chastity belt factory and a chain of brothels that minors, especially when they’re under 12, are especially inexpensive workers. Unfortunately, there is a reason that this child labour is so cheap—children are, by their nature, incredibly incompetent. A child constantly makes errors, thus consuming the valuable time of an adult who has to not only fix the child’s error, but also whip the insolent youngster senseless. However, I have found that in my experience, after several such beatings, the little tykes perform remarkably well, perhaps out of terror.

 

So what’s the problem, you ask? (or would ask, if I permitted you plebeians to speak to my face) After all, I did entitle this mono-speech “An Argument Against Child Labour”, and I would hardly do that unless I either meant it, or was horribly insane. BAAAHH. Well, the issue is this: the children who work in the factories these days are fat and lazy. They are accustomed to as many as three meals a week! Sometimes, when they are given less, the little ingrates will even go so far as to pass out in protest on the factory floor, or, even worse, topple into the gears of the heavy industrial machines they are using, thus clogging up the production line with flesh and bone! Surely then, these modern, spoiled, third world brats must be shown that such strong-arm labour tactics will not work to drive up the prices of shoes in North America and Western Europe. I say, send these naughty children home without dinner, and move operations to even poorer countries where adult workers will slave away making shoes for little more than chicken feed and water thrown on the factory floor every day at tea time.

 

So what will I do about my ruined shoes? Why, buy another pair, of course, for I am exceedingly wealthy!

No Comments | In: doctor angry, pen drool | tags: child labour, CNN, comedy, entitlement, first-world problems, Idiots, Oscarson. | #

Arnold “Arnie” Gundersen is in some ways the opposite of Michio Kaku. He’s not flashy, he avoids sounding over-the-top, even when he talks about grim scenarios, and he doesn’t wave his arms around like a mad scientist.

The first time I saw Gundersen, I thought he looked like the kind of man I could trust. He looks like somebody’s kindly grandpa. He was doing a demonstration in his back yard with a blow torch about the effect of heat on the cladding of a nuclear reactor fuel rod. It was informative and educational, and not at all dishonest, as far as I could tell.

I realized quickly that Gundersen was anti-nuclear power, but in the early videos that I saw, he was very cautious and said very few things that made me think he wasn’t being honest. It seemed to me that he was just interpreting the information coming out from Japan. I didn’t find his commentary particularly interesting, so I didn’t pay much more attention to him. I also missed his statement early on on “Russia Today” that the Fukushima incident was “Chernobyl on steroids”.

Then, on March 31, Gundersen posted a video claiming that the spent fuel pool in Reactor 4 was dry and that the spent fuel rods were exposed to the air. He based this not on information released, but on his analysis of a low-quality video of the reactor building that he found on Ustream. This video started spreading on Facebook, and so Arnie Gundersen once again wandered into my field of view.

Something felt wrong. He was more slippery than Michio Kaku– he wasn’t saying anything that I as a non-scientist could pinpoint as factually incorrect. As far as I could tell, he was just extrapolating a little more than I felt comfortable with.

Over the days and weeks that followed, I found his videos being posted on Facebook and Twitter more and more, saying more and more scary things that just didn’t sound right. It was around this time that he started being interviewed as an expert by the mainstream media. So I did a little digging to see if this grandfatherly man who seemed so trustworthy was really what he appeared to be.

What I discovered was that Gundersen’s company, Fairewinds Associates, is a for-profit company that hires him out to provide expert testimony and write research papers for anti-nuclear groups. He has a lot to gain then by making sure his appearances in the media make nuclear power sound dangerous.

Gundersen is the “Chief Engineer” of Fairewinds Associates, and is often introduced as such on news programs. That title is meaningless since Gundersen is the only engineer at Fairewinds: the company consists of just him and his wife.

On RT (“Russia Today”) in a clip that has been translated into Japanese and posted on YouTube, the host talks about Gundersen being “part of the nuclear industry” in what seems to be an effort to make Gundersen look more credible. “Oh!” thinks the viewer, “He works for the nuclear industry and he’s saying all these terrible things about Fukushima and nuclear power. He’s speaking against his own interests, since he won’t have a job if nuclear power is abolished, so he must be telling the truth!”

The truth is, as I’ve shown already, that Gundersen is a for-hire anti-nuclear consultant, and although he claims “39 years of nuclear power engineering experience” on his website, that is not the case. Since Gundersen has been an expert witness in several cases, his accurate resume is available online in the public record for anyone to see. According a version of his resume from 2006, Gundersen’s career did start 39-40 years ago in 1971, but he only worked in the industry until 1990.

In 1990 he was dismissed from his job in the industry. He claims that he was a whistleblower, his company claimed defamation, and they settled out-of-court. From that time until at least 2006 he seems to have worked full-time as a teacher at various private schools in Vermont, doing “expert” consulting in order to supplement his income. I don’t think either teaching or being paid as an “expert” witness count as “nuclear power engineering experience”.

Gundersen also claims that he was a licensed reactor operator (he calls himself a “critical facility reactor operator, instructor” on that portion of his resume), but some investigation reveals that the reactor in question was a 100 Watt “critical assembly” at a school. That reactor generated no power and cannot be said to have provided Gundersen with any experience in operating or maintaining an actual nuclear power plant.

A browse through the Fairewinds Associates website is also telling. There is no video content on the site that predates Gundersen’s March 15, 2011 appearance on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show. His first self-produced video appears on March 17. It appears very slick from the get-go, with good production values, and makes me wonder if Fairewinds, smelling money in the air, hadn’t suddenly hired a PR firm right after the Fukushima crisis began. I don’t have any information to prove this, but the timing is a bit suspicious.

So why am I picking on poor Grandpa Gundersen? Because as he got more media exposure, his international profile grew, and his statements were being accepted without question by the English-language media and then being spread around in Japan. And as time went on and less new and exciting information emerged from Fukushima, his exaggerations and distortions became easier to spot, even by a guy with a Fine Arts degree.

For instance, you’ll remember that Gundersen claimed the spent fuel pool in Reactor 4 had gone dry. According to a June 15 story in the Associated Press, a new video emerged proving that the Japanese officials were right and the spent fuel pool had not gone dry, as the U.S. officials (and Gundersen) had insisted. Gundersen has not removed the video about the spent fuel pool going dry from his website, which is to be commended, but neither has he issued an apology or retraction now that evidence has emerged that contradicts his analysis.

On June 12 Gundersen released a video on the Fairewinds Associates site that I think is very illustrative of the kind of nonsense Gundersen is spreading into the media. He records about one “update” on Fukushima every week, but I thought this one is the most illustrative of how he is becoming bolder in his claims as time goes on.

Gundersen claimed:

• The stricken reactors had released more “hot particles” than TEPCO had originally thought and that people in Tokyo were breathing in 10 of these every day in April
• These “hot particles” are undetectable with a regular Geiger counter
• These “hot particles” were detected by “independent scientists” in Tokyo using air filters
• These “hot particles” are undetectable inside the body
• These “hot particles” latch onto tissue and irradiate a small area (he expanded on this in a June 14th interview on CNN) (this is “hot particle” theory)
• “People” in Japan are reporting a metallic taste in their mouths
• People also reported metallic tastes in their mouth near Three Mile Island, when undergoing medical imaging, after Chernobyl, etc.

These claims, particularly those of “hot particles” were repeated in interviews on CNN, Fox News, and other TV networks, as well as in many online articles.

As we’ve already discussed, “hot particle” theory is pretty solidly debunked, but more worrying in this case is that Gundersen has started being cagey about where his information is coming from. For instance, the “independent scientists” in Tokyo who were allegedly sending him data on “hot particles”. Who are they? There doesn’t seem to be a compelling reason to hide their identities… unless they don’t exist.

Also, assuming for just a moment that any of what Gundersen said was true (I cannot find anyone other than him originating information on radioactive particles in air filters; all links about it lead back to him), my question would be: how many “hot particles” per day were we breathing in before this? Radioactive particles were already in the air, long before Fukushima Daiichi got hit by a tsunami: particles that were put there by other industry, from bomb testing during the cold war, etc. So the missing piece of information is what’s the difference now? But even at 10 particles per day– if we’re talking about particles with radiation levels so low that they cannot be detected, it seems odd to hit the panic button.

The whole story about people reporting metallic tastes in their mouths is also a bit of a shocker, coming from a scientist. There are many things that can cause a metallic taste in a person’s mouth. Here is a partial list:

antibiotics and medications used for treatment of

• kidney stones
• antidepressants
• prenatal vitamins
• anaesthetic ~ lidocaine
• heart failure ~ captopril
• giardiasis ~ metronidazole
• trichomoniasis ~ tinidazole
• CT scan ~ contrast medium
• chronic alcoholism ~ disulfiram
• rheumatoid arthritis ~ auranofin
• high blood pressure ~ captopril
• low calcium treatment ~ calcitriol
• weight loss, diabetes ~ metformin

dental problems

• gingivitis
• periodontitis
• tooth infections

other

• cancer
• food allergy
• peptic ulcer
• lichen planus
• marine toxins
• too much iron
• hypercalcemia
• lead poisoning
• bleeding gums
• kidney disease
• eating pine nuts
• copper overdose
• selenium toxicity
• iodine intoxication
• mercury poisoning
• cadmium poisoning
• acute kidney failure
• burning mouth syndrome

Tokyo is a city of over ten million people. Given all the possible causes, surely every day a number of people experience a metallic taste in their mouths. Reporting on anecdotal evidence like this is not only unscientific, but unethical given the anxiety that it causes.

Gundersen has got a lot of play in the international media, and his videos have spread virally via bilingual Japanese people who have translated and posted them on the Internet. I hope that I’ve shown that Gundersen is not a trustworthy source of information about Fukushima for the following reasons:

• He has been dishonest about his qualifications and work experience
• He misrepresents himself (or at least allows others to misrepresent him) as part of the nuclear industry
• He has an undeclared direct financial interest in increasing his profile as an anti-nuclear power consultant in order to attract new clients
• He subscribes to a theory of low-level radiation damage that has been discredited
• He has made claims that have been proven to be false
• He has made claims that don’t stand up to investigation, are anecdotal, and are unfalsifiable
• As time goes on and Fukushima produces less dramatic news, Gundersen’s reports become more dramatic.

I hope this has been helpful. I wish that the media would be a little less credulous when dealing with experts, and challenge statements that sound wrong, but failing that, it’s our job to not take whatever an “expert” says at face value and to ask questions.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The information about Gundersen’s company, Fairewinds Associates is mostly available on the company’s own website at fairewinds.com.

Gundersen’s 2006 resume is available online here: http://www.necnp.org/files/docs/NEC_March_8_2006_Appeal_re_Docket_6812_filings_3_8_06.pdf pages 26 – 29.

The information about his claims about running a reactor were first reported here: http://atomicinsights.com/2011/02/arnie-gundersen-has-inflated-his-resume-yet-frequently-claims-that-entergy-cannot-be-trusted.html

The information about the spent fuel pool not being dry originally came from a June 15/16 Associated Press article (date depends on your time zone). That article has now been taken down, but the text is still floating around on various news sites:
http://articles.boston.com/2011-06-16/news/29666500_1_fuel-pool-nrc-fuel-rods

The list of conditions that can cause a metallic taste in a person’s mouth were lifted directly from an article at Healthblurbs.com: http://www.healthblurbs.com/many-causes-of-metallic-taste-metal-taste-in-mouth-and-taste-of-metal-in-your-mouth-symptoms/

Other references are the same as the ones for Kaku.

No Comments | In: doctor angry | tags: Arnie Gundersen, Arnold Gundersen, ASIOS, Bad Journalism, Bad Science, Bibliography, Experts, Fukushima Daiichi, Hot Particles, japan, JPQuake, Nuclear Power, Science, Skeptics, Wall-of-Shame. | #

Just a quickie bibliography for my recent post about bullshit artist Michio Kaku.

On Plutonium toxicity:

Most of my points about plutonium can be found in the plutonium article on Wikipedia.

The quotation about 5000 respirable particles was sourced from a plutonium human health fact sheet published by the Argonne National Laboratory.

More info about plutonium toxicity, and the list of organizations who have dismissed “Hot Particle” theory was sourced from Bernard L. Cohen’s book The Nuclear Energy Option, chapter 13 (see the section on plutonium toxicity) and his paper The Myth of Plutonium Toxicity. The latter is also the source of my statement that a microgram of ingested plutonium will give you one chance in a million of getting cancer.

Bernard L. Cohen is a controversial figure in the Nuclear debate, but he uses the most conservative model of low-level radiation danger (the Linear No-Threshold Model) to come up with his figures.

Information about MOX fuel comes again from Wikipedia’s page on the subject.

When using Wikipedia, I have clicked through to the references and read the source material whenever possible.

No Comments | In: doctor angry | tags: ASIOS, Bad Journalism, Bad Science, Bibliography, Experts, Fukushima Daiichi, japan, JPQuake, Michio Kaku, Nuclear Power, Science, Skeptics, Wall-of-Shame. | #

Michio Kaku, despite his Japanese name, is American, and not very well known over here. Kaku is a respected theoretical physicist, professor, and the co-founder of string field theory. He also is a populariser of science, meaning that he works to communicate science to the general population by making it easier to understand. He is also a futurist, which means that he attempts to predict what life in the future will be like. He frequently appears on science and news programs in the west, and has a definite facility for making science sound exciting. He’s a very imaginative man and can paint very compelling images with his words.

The problem is that as far as I can tell, Kaku will accept any offer to appear in the media and comment on science stories, even when they are outside his area of expertise. Kaku has said that humans have stopped evolving (“gross” evolution, he called it, using a word he just made up); opposed the Cassini space probe launch because it had plutonium on board; and has stated that UFOs are real and that aliens have visited Earth (and they’re invisible).

Regardless of how silly these claims are, I will limit my analysis to his comments on the Fukushima incident and its aftermath. He appeared on many television shows (Late Night with David Letterman, Real Time with Bill Maher, Fox News Insider, CNN, NBC’s Nightline, ABC news, Democracy Now, and more…) in the days, weeks, and months following March 11, saying whatever he could to make the situation sound even more dramatic and dangerous than it was.

But isn’t he an expert? He is a physicist, after all. True, but he is a theoretical physicist, not a nuclear physicist. Aren’t they close enough? Not really. An anatomy lecturer and a neurologist are both highly trained people who hold doctorate degrees, but if you had a rare brain disease, you’d want to consult the neurologist, who actually practices medicine, and not the lecturer, who mostly deals with paper and the occasional dissection of a cadaver.

As a theoretical physicist, Kaku works on paper with ideas and mathematics. He does not work with things that exist in the actual, physical world, the way an experimental physicist or engineer would.

Of course, this isn’t enough to condemn his opinion as uninformed or dishonest on its own. To get a clear picture of Kaku’s style, you need to look at what he’s actually said:

“[Reactor] 3 is so dangerous because it’s the only reactor containing what is called Mixed Oxide Fuel i.e., plutonium. Plutonium is one of the most toxic chemicals known to science. A dust particle that you can’t even see, inhaled into your lungs, could cause lung cancer.”

-Michio Kaku, ABC News, March 26, 2011

“Plutonium is the most toxic chemical known to science! A speck of plutonium, a millionth of a gram, could cause cancer if it’s ingested.”

-Michio Kaku, ABC News, March 25,2011

Kaku has a habit of saying things that are inaccurate and therefore misleading. In this case, his words make Mixed Oxide Fuel– the same MOX fuel that the Natural News was hysterical about– sound as if it’s just another word for plutonium. In reality, MOX is generally manufactured with 5% – 7% plutonium, the other 93% – 95% being uranium. 30% of that plutonium is consumed when the fuel is used.

He also describes plutonium as “the most toxic chemical known to science”, which begs the question: “Really?” Kaku seems no more informed on this subject than the people he is being interviewed by. Especially since he claims that ingesting a millionth of a gram could cause cancer. He’s right: ingesting one millionth of a gram of plutonium can give you about one chance in a million of getting a radiation-caused cancer. So yes, it could cause cancer. So can a sunburn, but people still go outdoors.

What about Kaku’s other claim? That a tiny particle of plutonium can give you lung cancer? This is a claim we hear over and over again from the likes of Helen Caldicott and Christopher Busby. It’s mostly based on the “Hot Particle” theory, which has been discredited for years.

“The leadership [in Japan] is disconnected from reality. They’re not physicists, they’re not engineers… ” -Michio Kaku, In the Arena on CNN, March 18, 2011

As early as March 18 and well into early April, Kaku was making the rounds on news and entertainment shows, urging the Japanese government to “call in the military” and “bury the sucker!” (meaning the Fukushima reactors). He didn’t seem to realize that the JSDF were already deployed, or that burying the reactors was a bad idea while they were still generating heat. (So apparently, he’s not much of an engineer either…)

Why do people believe Kaku, and why do news shows keep asking him to comment? Partly because he is able to talk in very simple, direct, and above all, entertaining language (“…we could lose a good chunk of northern Japan!”) that appeals to newscasters and their viewers, and partly because he obviously makes himself available.  In my opinion, he is a shameless self-promoter who cares more about getting himself public exposure than the truth.

On the same episode of “In the Arena” quoted above, Kaku slyly seemed to accept credit for Prime Minister Kan’s statement that burying the reactors was a possibility once they were stabilized:

“I was on national television, and it got picked up by NHK… and their Prime Minister finally got around to saying ‘And oh gee, maybe we should think about this option.’ So it’s seeping its way now into the highest levels of Japanese government.”

I could probably write a whole chapter just on Michio Kaku alone, but I hope that I’ve given an overview of why what he says should not be taken at face value. My impression is that his comments have not been directly reported much in Japan. The problem is that because he is so widely respected, and appears on television so much, on American networks of all political stripes (from Fox News to Democracy Now), what he has said has shaped the tone of the reporting coming out of the U.S. He was leading the charge of people shouting to bury Fukushima, he was giving the American networks many of the doomsday scenarios that flowed back to us over the Internet, and in general he was feeding the fear machine and enabling other doomsayers with his thoughtless “science”.

UPDATE: Have added a quickie bibliography in a follow-up post.

No Comments | In: doctor angry | tags: ASIOS, Bad Journalism, Bad Science, Experts, Fukushima Daiichi, japan, JPQuake, Michio Kaku, Nuclear Power, Science, Skeptics, Wall-of-Shame. | #

Okay, here’s the blog entry I promised to write back in May. It’s fucking long, so I won’t blame you if you don’t read it. If you’re one of the amazing people I met and made friends with up in Oofunato, I really hope I don’t lose your friendship because of this post. But I need to get this done so I can forget, forgive, and move on.

As you may recall, All Hands was the name of the group I volunteered with in Oofunato from May 21 – 28. I mentioned after returning from that trip that I hadn’t been all that impressed with the organization, and that I would write a blog entry about it.

The reason I haven’t already done it is simply because I feel weird about calling out a group that is doing really important volunteer work. On the other hand, I feel the need to get this off my chest.

Let me open by saying that I’m a dick. It will help if  I’m clear with that up front. Me = dick. Anyone who knows me will probably agree that I’m a hyper-critical puckered anus of an excuse for a human being. And it’s true. It’s one of the reasons I was able to work in I.T. for so long: that job was constantly about finding new problems or inefficiencies and trying to fix them. It’s also what I try to do when I work on Theatre. A play is a problem, a question of how best to tell a story, that I try to solve—never to my own satisfaction, I might add.

So, now that we’ve cleared that up, here are my problems with All Hands:

Bad Communication & Organization

Probably all non-profits suffer from this to some degree, and with as many projects as All Hands has going on in the world, I can’t say I’m shocked. I think they may have expanded operations too quickly. The bulk of the paid staff appear to have been lifted from volunteers on other projects (mostly Haiti); they’re really young and not very experienced. I’ve heard it joked that the left can’t organize. I don’t think that’s true, but certainly the hippy-dippy attitude towards organization didn’t help.  Examples:

• Time sensitive emails did not get answered promptly.
  • It happened a lot but the most annoying one was: One of my emails about whether I needed to bring certain bulky items of gear sent two days before I left for Oofunato didn’t get answered until about one hour before my arrival in the city.
• Despite the fact that they were expecting me the evening I arrived (as requested, I was sending constant updates about my ETA as things changed) and that people frequently arrived in the late evening, the All Hands HQ has absolutely no markings at street level, nor are the inside lights visible from the street. If I hadn’t been sure about the location on google maps, I probably would have wandered around for an hour trying to find the place.
• They had not told me that I’d need a copy of my Japanese health insurance card (I’m still not sure why), which I needed to get my wife to fax in after I was already there.
• I had to convince them that they didn’t need to see my passport (and in fact, by law, I was not required to show it to them), and that they could use my driver’s license instead. Despite the fact that there were other long-term expats in the group, as well as native Japanese, it seemed that they were at a loss in terms of handling me
• House rules were not communicated clearly (more on this and Marc’s insane “No Sign” rule later)
• Towards the end of the week I was there, the group meetings which we had every day after dinner were averaging about 90 minutes in length.
• Their introductory letter said that vegetarians would be accommodated, but advised us to have a sense of humour about it because food was sourced locally and that sometimes getting vegetarian meals might not be possible. On arrival, I was told that ALL lunches were non-vegetarian bento. Ha-ha-ha.

There was more, but that’s what I can remember off the top of my head.

The Young Bunch 

As I mentioned before, most of the paid staff are not very experienced. Most of them aren’t yet comfortable with the idea of being an authority figure, I think, and tend to take a kind of elementary school-teacher approach to it.

Granted: it’s a hard line to walk between trying to treat everyone like equals, but also assert your authority when necessary. The Flying Spaghetti Monster knows I’ve failed at exactly the same thing. But I was expecting a group of admins who had had more experience at, you know, administrating.

This is partly my problem too. I don’t respond well to authority figures who I feel are even more clueless than I am. No matter how much I like them (they were all very likeable people).

Cliques

A group like this is going to get cliquey. There’s nothing you can do about it. You’ve got some people who are more charismatic than others, you’ve got some people who everyone knows because they’ve been there since day one… and then you’ve got schmucks like me who fade into the wallpaper. This is going to happen.

But if you’re a paid staff member, I expect you to be above this crap. The first night I was there, since I was sleeping in the main common room (common practice for people’s first nights), I could hear the staff and some of the volunteers who had been yanked into doing some of the office work being catty about about people. This did not impress me, and it was clear right from the beginning that there was an “in” group, and like a bunch of high schoolers, they were going to gatekeep the hell out of it.

You can say this is sour grapes on my part because I was on the outside of that group (and the other groups as well). But I’m always on the outside, and I’m perfectly happy doing my thing on the periphery. What bothers me is that people who are being paid to handle the volunteers can’t even seem to pretend to be above it all. Later on, when I had a problem with another volunteer, I didn’t feel I could talk to anyone about it because she was a member of that main “in” group. (In fact, she’d been one of the people keeping me awake that first night being catty.)

The two older members of the team, Satoshi and Marc, the two directors of the project, did hold themselves aloof from the cliques, but I didn’t feel comfortable going to them for other reasons, which we’ll get to.

“Cultural Sensitivity”

All Hands is an American group, with most of the volunteers coming from outside Japan, mostly the US and UK, so they need to be extra careful to make sure the community doesn’t reject them. Oofunato is a small town, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that while small town people can be extremely friendly, they can also be wary of outsiders. Accordingly, All Hands was worried about making sure their volunteers, many of whom would be considered a bit rough around the edges, didn’t do anything to upset the locals. Totally understandable.

They had some weird policies carried over from the project in Haiti: don’t give gifts, and don’t accept gifts. Just before I got there, they’d been persuaded to ease the rules on accepting gifts. We live in a gifts-based culture here. It’s a matter of pride for some of the locals to give things in thanks for the work that the group was doing. They weren’t doling out lavish presents: they would just drive by and drop off some Coca-Cola, or invite a few people in for tea or soup. Refusing these tokens would have been very rude.

The rule on gift-giving, however, had not been lifted. I came with an entire suitcase full of art supplies that I ended up bringing back with me to Yokohama because I was told I couldn’t give them away. (One of the other volunteers talked about arranging to have them donated to a local school on a hush-hush basis, but it never happened.) A gift of a guitar to an evacuee girl in the center we were staying at had also be made on the sly.

I’m not sure who they got their initial advice from, but by the time I got there, most of their “cultural sensitivity” information seemed to be coming from this sour, middle-aged woman from Tokyo. She would scold people for leaving their slippers or shoes pointing the wrong way outside the door, among other things. I shouldn’t need to write this, but Japanese people leave their slippers the wrong way around all the time. In fact, not three meters from the door to our common room in the community center, the residents in the center were doing exactly that.

Guess who my partner was on my first crew?

Yup.

We were going to clean baths at an evacuation centre, and the work pants I’d brought to Tohoku were Japanese-style construction pants (nikka-pokka), which are tight in the ankles, and not very easy to roll up. So I changed into my casual clothes.

Have I mentioned I normally don’t wear pants? I wear a kilt.

A casual kilt, but a kilt nonetheless. Great for a job in a place that would leave pants soaking wet.

Well, this sourpuss I mentioned earlier takes one look at me, and it’s not a nice look. I smile, but before I can say “hi”, “おはようございます”, “nice to meet you”, or any of the other things one might say to someone when meeting him or her for the first time, she puckers up her face as if passing a kidney stone and says: “Is that what you’re wearing?”

“Yes."

"Can you change your clothes?”

“Nope.”

I figure that’s going to be the end of it, and I’m not going to stand around and let a fight start so I go to my bag to pack my mini-bag for the day. As I do, I hear her speaking sharply in Japanese to the woman she’s sitting with. I can make out enough to know she’s bitching about me, so I stop what I’m doing and say: “何ですか？どうした？"  Basically: “What is it? What’s the problem?” It’s a little bit rude of me, but this type of person gets under my skin easily and I’ve only had about three hours sleep thanks to the chatty staff last night.

I take a deep breath and make an attempt to politely explain why I’ve chosen to wear this article of clothing. She goes quiet.

Fifteen minutes later we’re downstairs, and I see her talking to Satoshi (one of the two project directors I mentioned earlier), and the next thing I know I’m being trooped upstairs again to talk to Marc (the main project director). I don’t actually talk to Marc: Satoshi pulls me aside and has a talk with me. I try to be reasonable: the guy’s in a tough position, and he’s either decided it’s more important to keep sourpuss happy than me, or he’s accepted her claptrap that I’m going to upset the (mostly older) residents of the evacuation centre. He speaks English perfectly, which leads me to wonder if maybe he hasn’t actually spent a lot of time in Japan. If he had, he’d probably know better.

I make the point that I’m not fresh off the airplane, I’ve lived in Japan for almost a decade, and that I’ve already volunteered, kilted up, in several volunteer centres, with no negative results, and he tells me that this isn’t a volunteer center in Tokyo or Chiba. (If you’ve been reading this blog, you’ll know that I’d been working in other Tohoku volunteer centres.) He then does his best to mollify me with some weak-ass “It’s okay that you want to be different, BUT” bullshit , using his best “conflict resolution” voice, which I think they teach you in management school to use on assholes. What they don’t teach you, I guess, is how fucking condescending it sounds.

Frankly, if this former corporate suit can’t understand that I wear a kilt for the same reason other people might prefer a certain style of shirt, then I’m not going to win this, am I?

I swallow my fucking pride and change into the carpenters’ pants, realizing that while this sourpuss from Tokyo doesn’t have any more insight into Tohoku culture than I do, because my face isn’t a Japanese one, I’m going to get zero credit for any of my knowledge. I never expected to be put in this position by a group of foreigners.

Later, I found several other expats who complained about the same thing (many of whom were fluent in Japanese). They weren’t being taken seriously by the gang in charge on matters of culture either because they weren’t Japanese.

The Great Communicator

So Marc was the other director of the project. He left before I did, being replaced by Chris 1 (I think of him as pretty-boy Chris). I liked Chris, but by that time I’d had it with the group’s culture and I’d decided I was just going to concentrate on the work and then go home at the end of my tour.

Marc, I like less. Like all the others, he’s a decent man. The world is a better place for having Marc in it, and I’m not sure I can say the same about myself.

Having said that, I was not impressed with his management style. On my second night, my first night in the community centre I was going to call home for a week, I got a tour of the facilities with the other newcomers. We came to a set of shelves with food all over them. Some of it was snack food, and some of it was more substantive. We were told we could eat it. Throughout the evening, I watched people do just that.

I’m used to eating late, like around 20:00 or 20:30, so I wasn’t really hungry at dinner time. But by the time 21:00 rolls around, my stomach’s growling. So I take a piece of bread and put some peanut butter on it. The next thing I know there’s a guy making a bee-line for me.

“That bread’s for breakfast. You’re not supposed to eat it now.”

Oh. Whoops. “Oh, sorry,” I say, genuinely penitent (I don’t like to break rules like that), “No one told me.”

“Well, I’m telling you now,” he replies.

Maybe 40 minutes later, I seek him out and apologize. I did break a rule after all. Even though I don’t think I was snippy (I think he was), I apologize for that as well. Why? I guess naivety. I think that by apologizing to him it will give him an opening to apologize to me. But he doesn’t. He just accepts my apology.

The morning after, we have a morning meeting at the HQ, but before that, we have a pre-meeting at the community centre at which we’re scolded as a group for eating breakfast bread.

Okay, I get it. All Hands provides the breakfast food; it costs them money. The snack foods are things that people have given to us, or that other people have bought and dumped in the communal area. If we eat the breakfast food at night, there’s less at breakfasts, costs go up, etc. I get it.

Someone suggests a sign and we get treated to a speech by Marc about how he doesn’t like signs all over the place, because if there are signs, it means people aren’t communicating. Fair enough: we don’t want post-it notes with rules on them stuck onto every available surface. But come on! By his logic, we should tear down road signs, because we should just communicate our way around town. Besides, since when are signs not a form of communication?

No one’s saying to put up a sign that says “Don’t eat!”, but a simple sign over top of the breakfast food that reads “breakfast food” would not only make people stop and think about whether or not they should eat it, it would help remind those giving the tours to tell newcomers: “Only eat this food in the morning.”

(The next day is our day off. Chris 2, who I think of as EM Chris (effective microorganisms, don’t ask), goes to the grocery store and buys half a dozen loaves of bread and sticks them under a sign that reads “24-Hour bread” in English, and “Fuck You” in Anti-establishmentese. Awesome guy.)

As the initial director of the project, it’s Marc who sets the tone for the whole group, and I think he could have done a better job. At least now I understood why there was no sign on the HQ at street level.

(Although, as a side note: every night at dinner, there would be sign over the vegetarian food. Somehow that was okay.)

“Now Class, Aren’t We Ashamed of Ourselves”

For a group that seemed so concerned about harshing anyone’s buzz by having too many signs, they certainly did impose a lot of rules on the group who stayed in the community centre. Marc oversaw the community centre group, which, by the time I got there, was where most of us were staying.

I can understand his concern. Unlike at the HQ, we were living among Japanese people and even some evacuees at the centre, so there was a need to be less shouty and rude. Not that the group was shouty or rude at all. It wasn’t.

The community centre had a 22:00 curfew, and limited us to certain hours for taking baths, but there were other rules imposed on us by Marc and All Hands. Aside from the “breakfast bread”, there was the rule that all luggage had to be off the floor and on the shelves that lined to wall. This was a rule that kept getting repeated to us despite the fact that there was no room for everyone’s shit on those shelves. In the sleeping room I was in, my bags alone took up a shelf and a half on the only shelving unit we had to share between initially 7, later 15 people. I also wondered about the safety of this policy, given the intensity of the aftershocks that were still ongoing in the area (yes, there were people sleeping directly under the shelves).

Further, while drinking (booze) was allowed in the HQ, we were not permitted to drink alcohol in our centre. The Japanese volunteer group staying there did. The residents did. But we weren’t allowed to. I don’t drink anyway, but I did see people get drunk outside of the centre and none of them were badly behaved.

And that’s what it came down to. The group was extremely well-behaved. I’m used to touring with actors, who will tear screen doors off of trailers and other dumb stuff, so I was prepared for the worst: practical jokes, lots of shouting, vomiting, etc. But this group was incredibly well-behaved and respectful, and it drove me crazy that at every meeting, the staff would be scolding us for some minor infraction of some rule (sometimes a violation that hadn’t even happened yet, but that they were anticipating for some reason).

The one big time a rule got broken was when five people came back after curfew at the centre and snuck in through a side door. Strangely, as far as I could tell, they didn’t really catch that much hell. And honestly, while you wouldn’t want to encourage that kind of thing, they snuck in quietly, nobody from the centre saw them come in, and they didn’t make a big deal of it. Now, probably what they should have done is the 20 minute walk to the HQ and slept on the common room floor, but still, for a major infraction of the rules, the damage was 0.

But the next day at the daily meeting, we sat there for a quarter-hour lecture on “blah blah blah, these people know who they are, blah blah blah, next time, there WILL BE CONSEQUENCES!”. Five fucking people, and you need to lecture the rest of the group, who had done nothing wrong—to do what? Put the fear of a stern talking-to from a 22 year-old in them? This was sort of the final straw for me, twenty-somethings scolding us like we were 15 year-olds on a school trip, and it’s when I resolved to just put my head down and get through all the meeting bullshit and just keep my mind on the work.

I mean, if someone breaks a rule like that, you pull them aside, give them a ticking off, and then you punish them or you don’t. There was no reason to talk to the rest of the group as if this was going to give us “ideas” or something.

So they went way too far in one direction as far as rules-enforcement on our bases. The worksites were another story.

Freefall

As far as I could tell, there were no worksite rules—at least none that covered volunteer safety. When we arrived on our first day, they made us each sign a waiver form (which they did not send us to read beforehand—seriously, WTF?) that basically said if anything happened to us volunteers, it was our own damn fault. It went on to say that the team leaders were amateurs who didn’t know what they were doing and we were not obliged to follow their instructions if we felt unsafe.

So this may have absolved All Hands from any legal responsibility for us, but they seemed to think it absolved them of any ethical responsibility as well. There were a LOT of onsite accidents, mostly from people being too gung-ho. Everything from lacerations to punctures to fucked-up backs, you name it. Some of it was probably inevitable, but a lot of the accidents could have been prevented with a few safety rules. A lot of the volunteers wore their injuries with pride, but this is exactly the sort of culture that workplace rules are there to counteract. Workplace rules are not just there to protect workers from management, but to protect workers from themselves.

There were also no mandatory breaks. On my first day of heavy crew cleaning the canals, there was one guy who didn’t even stop for lunch. The team leader pushed us really hard, and I felt guilty even stopping for the four or five minutes it took to pull off my sewage-soaked gloves and drink from my water bottle. Later in the afternoon, after I’d run out of liquid, I felt such pressure to get done, I didn’t take what would have been a 15-minute break to walk to the hose and fill up my bottles. I ended up severely dehydrated (I didn’t piss once that day between 8:00 and 18:00), dizzy, and with an aching head.

And while that was totally my own fault, and I learned from it (and changed to a crew that had a more concerned team leader), I saw other people push themselves even harder than that on a regular basis. They’re real heroes and everything, but All Hands should be taking more responsibility for the health and safety of its volunteers. Part of that is telling someone: “No, you need to take a break right now. I don’t care if it ‘breaks your rhythm’; you’re no good to anybody dead.” The team leader took pride on pushing his team to get the maximum amount of work done, but didn’t seem to realize that his other responsibility was the health and safety of his crew.

What’s interesting in this whole rules thing is that the rules that were heavily enforced were the ones that, if broken, might potentially make All Hands look bad in the community. Safety of the volunteers barely registered as a concern. The project started in March, but the week I started was apparently the first week they bought steel inserts for our shoes (to avoid nail punctures)—and there weren’t enough, particularly in the larger sizes. Also, there reportedly HAD been mandatory breaks at some point, but they’d been removed because people had complained that it broke their rhythm if they were in “the zone”.

Conclusion

Jesus, mother of piss, this got long. I really expected this to be four or five paragraphs, tops. I didn’t realize it was going to be a novella. Anyway, if you’ve read this far, you’re a fucking saint or a masochist, so thanks. I really needed to get this into the public space to feel that I’d spoken my mind about it.

I mean no disrespect to the people up there with All Hands, doing fantastic work (yes, even those people I’ve basically called douchebags in this post). And on some level, I want to go back and join them. I just found that it wasn’t an environment I felt safe or valued in, and I’ll have to find another way to get back up to Tohoku and do my part.

No Comments | In: doctor angry, your man in japan | tags: All Hands, Cliques, Complaining, japan, Oofunato, Tohoku, Volunteering. | #

Wow. It’s been more than a month since my last posting—I’ve got a lot to catch up on.

The main thing that was taking up my concentration was a book chapter that I was asked to write by ASIOS about the coverage of the 3/11 quake and the Fukushima nuclear crisis by the international media. Feeling confident in myself, I said “sure”.

Truth be told, I’m not much of a writer. I can bang a few words out here and there, but I have a very idiosyncratic style and I doubt I’d be able to make a living as a freelance writer for that reason. You’re reading my blog; you know what I’m talking about. What’s up with all the semi-colons and bracketed stuff I can’t jam in where it belongs?

Something else I’ve rediscovered (forgotten since my University days—damn! brackets!) is that I am weak at structure. One of my biggest struggles was figuring out how to structure my chapter and tie it all together. I guess a normal person would have put a structure together, done the research, and cobbled together an outline before sitting down to write the meat. But me? Hell no. I sit down and start typing, flying by the seat of my pants, researching as I go, having to change direction as I discover new information. I get bogged down in detail while researching, as I find stuff that I can’t put into the piece because, while fascinating, it’s incomplete.

I don’t like to admit this, but my brain hurts when I try to write like that. I got great grades on my essays in University, but I swear it wasn’t because they were good; I think it’s just because everyone else was worse.

In a Shakespeare class I was taking, a girl was complaining about the grade she got from our T.A.  I asked to look at her essay, and the very first sentence had so many grammatical and spelling errors in it, I wasn’t actually sure what it meant. Her first paragraph was incomprehensible. I am not exaggerating for effect. She was complaining about getting a ‘C-’.  I told her: “A ‘C-’ is a pass. Take it.”

“What?” she said, ripping it back out of my hands.

I tried to be gentle: “Look, you should have proofread it more carefully. You’ve got a lot of spelling and grammar—“

“He can only take 5% off for spelling and grammar,” she said, citing a very famous rule that students made up.

She didn’t listen to my advice and submitted it to the professor for re-grading, and ended up with a ‘B-‘.

That should tell you something about standards and how my decent grades on essays did not mean I could write. It meant I could put a sentence together without drooling all over myself.

That why I mostly write plays.  Plays and poetry.  Much less of the latter since moving to Japan, though.

Plays are great. My tactic is to write scenes as the ideas come. After a while I sit back and look at what I’ve got. At this point, a story has formed and I’ve got some kind of narrative. I know what happens to the characters. I then print out all the scenes I’ve got and spread them out on the living room floor (I guess tatami room floor now), finding some kind of order. Gaps show up. Story bits are missing. Information is missing. I write those down on a piece of paper and stick the paper where the scene would go.

Once I’ve got the order figured out, I write the missing material. This is usually the hardest part (second only to writing a whole new draft), but I can discipline-write, as long as the structure is there.

But that structure, man, in a straight piece of writing? That’s a doozy. I’m not used to that. I never wrote essay outlines because I found it easier to just bang ‘em out. But an essay? 800, 1000, maybe 2000 words, tops. This chapter? 10,000 words. I’ve learned my lesson.

But I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

In any case, I’m waiting to hear back from the translator. Since the book is being published in Japanese, I’m hoping that I can post some excerpts on here.

No Comments | In: your man in japan | tags: Idiots, japan, University, Writing. | #

I’m typing this (or at least starting to type this; we’ll see how long the battery holds out) in Sendai city, waiting for the Curry Express to come and pick me up, ostensibly at 16:30, but we’ll see. While I wait, I’m burning a good ass-mark into a seat in the Starbucks near the station’s East exit.

Given that I’ve been occupying prime real estate here for over an hour, I should probably buy something else, but since I haven’t had a call from my rescuers yet to tell me they’re on their way, it might be wise to save that for later.

So how to sum up the experience of volunteering in Oofunato? I have no idea. I’m not going to get all drama-queen on you and say stuff like it was shocking, or that it was a life-changing experience. The images I’d seen immediately post-quake had prepared me to some extent, and I had been pre-warned about the various smells and such. None of my crews came across a human body (or even an animal body, barring one dead frog I found yesterday); maybe that would have changed things.

Despite my differences with All Hands as an organization, which I’ll deal with fully in a future post, I was very impressed with all the people (yes, even the ones I think are assholes and/or idiots) who came out from all over the world and volunteered to help the country that I love. Many of them have been and will be here for months, and we, as residents of Japan, owe them our deepest thanks. Even people who are assholes and idiots can be good people on some level, and I salute them for that. I particularly, though, salute the volunteers I met who not only worked hard, but weren’t assholes or idiots. I met some amazing people, who will remain in my memory for the rest of my life. In a good way.

The work itself, being out on the streets and in the fields, in many cases doing work that no one else was willing to do, made me feel like I was finally doing something concrete to help Tohoku. I only really did three days of back-breaking labour, a drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of things, but it did feel good, and I want to do it again.

I read yesterday that there is a shortage of volunteers in Iwate-ken, so I will be looking for ways to get back there and ways to encourage others to go. We are just beginning to take the first few steps on the long road back to normal, and we’re all going to have to pitch in if we want to get there.

And wow! My ride’s arrived 45 minutes early. Will post more later in the week when I’ve caught up with all the work that’s been piling up.

No Comments | In: your man in japan | tags: All Hands, Curry Express, Iwate, JPQuake, Oofunato, Rikuzentakata, Sendai, Starbucks, Tohoku, Volunteering. | #

Today I got back into the canals… the ones on the rice field, though, not the ones in the city. The ones on the paddies definitely smell better.

I’m so tired that I can hardly type. I’m writing this while I wait for my photos to transfer from my camera card to the PC. That will be done in a moment, and I will brush my teeth and go to bed. All I am waiting for is an appropriate photo to post with this entry.

Annnddd…. nope. Too tired. Will try tomorrow on train

No Comments | In: your man in japan | tags: All Hands, Iwate, JPQuake, Oofunato, Rikuzentakata, Tohoku, Volunteering. | #

Today I signed up for the Paddywhacking crew, which meant that we went out to a bunch of rice paddies in Rikuzentakata and pulled junk out of them. We also started work on the canals and ditches around the site.

<—THIS PHOTO IS NOT ME

I stuck with paddy work today because I was wearing my tabi workboots, which are not waterproof, and I hadn’t brought a change of boots to the HQ base at Sakari in the morning.

It was hard work, but my crew chief today was Brian, who encouraged hard work without making us feel like we couldn’t take breaks or rehydrate, etc. I drank a lot of liquids, but I must have sweated more than I thought, because there was no toilet out there, and I didn’t have to pee until we ended up back at the HQ, six hours (and about 2 litres) after we started.

Great lunch today, though. It was ebi fry, so I could eat it, and fellow crew member Xavier doesn’t like shrimp, so I got double portions for once, instead of half portions. Huzzah.

We got back to the HQ at about 16:45, and then waited a bit longer than usual for dinner. Then we waited an extra long time for the evening meeting to start because the staff wanted to get the 15 new arrivals today processed before we kicked off. Then the meeting went on forever. For. Ev. Er.

Finally, we got to sign up for crews. Despite a couple of interesting new ones, I picked the rice fields again for tomorrow. I nixed the idea of walking back to the FS centre (where the majority of us sleep) because it was likely too late to go to the grocery store anyway, which is what I wanted to do.

Looking forward to tomorrow’s crew; I plan to diving into the canals and clearing them. It will be nice to have a hard work crew for my last day. Then, afterwards I can come back, go to sleep, get up, and get away from all the organizational bullshit. I can then make plans to come up again, either on my own or with a smaller group of people.

I’ll try to post my other photos from the paddy tomorrow; I left my camera in the other room, so I can’t transfer them now. Well, I could, but I don’t want to go back to the sleeping room to get the camera. If I go back to the sleeping room, as I will in a few minutes, it will be to sleep.

Yes, so: time to hit the hay.

No Comments | In: your man in japan | tags: All Hands, Iwate, JPQuake, Oofunato, Rikuzentakata, Tohoku, Volunteering. | #

So I finally manned up this morning and joined a proper crew: the Ditch Bitches.

Our job was to clear out the canals that drain the grey water from local houses because they are totally blocked with tsunami debris.

Ow. I hurt.

My job was to shovel or otherwise haul muck that others lifted out of the canal into wheelbarrows and haul them over to the nearby refuse piles.

Mud is heavy.

Our crew chief, Mark, is a pretty hardcore worker. Within the first ten minutes, he’d got a huge gash in his arm, but when i pointed it out to him, he just said that he would let it, and I kid you not, “clot up”. Yes, while he continued to work in sewage.

As you can see from the photo, I was originally pretty kitted up. After lunch, I took off the safety glasses and the mask, as they just got in the way (and fogged up my real glasses so badly I couldn’t see).

I will probably not join that crew again, if I can avoid it. As I mentioned, Mark is pretty intense, and he expects everyone else on his crew to be similarly so. I didn’t feel like I could even stop and walk two minutes away to fill my water bottle, especially near the end of the day when he’d assigned my an extra (simultaneous) task. This was around the end of the day when my mouth was dry, I had a pounding headache, and obviously was in a state of dehydration. I was so thirsty, I was tempted to drink the canal water (bad idea).

Now Mark is a cool guy, but this is the reason that you need someone leading a team who has had some training in doing so. A trained team leader would be enforcing break times, not allowing team members to work through lunch (as one did), etc. Oh yeah, and probably notice when one of his team members was so dehydrated that he could barely walk straight.

I find it so weird that All Hands has all these rules governing our lives and behaviour (and endless meetings about those rules), but very few rules in terms of onsite safety.

But don’t get me wrong. I would not voluntarily do canal crew again (unfortunately, as the biggest crew, it’s the most likely crew one will end up on), but I actually do like Mark. He’s just one of those guys who kind of expects everyone to live up to his example.

There are a fair number of people I don’t like here (as there are in any communal living situation), and most of them are what I call the “Happy Camper” type. That means they’ve drunk the organizational kool-aid, and the organization can do no wrong in their book. They also feel the need to play the camp counsellor role and take over situations. I really hate that. They also frequently happen to be recent Business program graduates. I really hate that.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to tomorrow. We’re clearing debris from a rice field, and the team leader is a guy who I know I will feel comfortable with (meaning that I will work hard, but still do what I need to do to take care of myself).

Time to sleep!

No Comments | In: your man in japan | tags: All Hands, JPQuake, Oofunato, Tohoku, Volunteering. | #

I need to write this briefly, because I don’t find myself with a lot of time. There are a number of people here who are awesome and I’m loathe to trade time with them for writing on this blog or any one of the other things that I REALLY need to get done before Saturday.

Today was our day off, but try as I might to be productive, it just wasn’t going to happen. So I will just list some of  the highlights and lowlights of my volunteer experience thus far.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Cleaning photos at a local evacuation centre on Sunday * (see caveat on this in the lowlights section)
• Working in the Greater Kitchen Co-Prosperity Sphere with Adam and Ranko to make dinner for the whole group on Monday night
• Karaoke on Monday night and racing back to make curfew (the community centre we’re staying in locks the doors at 22:00)
• Buying a 1000 yen microwave at a recycle shop and stealthily setting it up in our common room.

LOWLIGHTS

• Getting told off by the person in charge of the photo project for not doing the work properly (despite the fact that we had no instructions and that she’d said she’d bring some over in the afternoon and never did)
• Getting told I could eat any of the food on the food shelf and then being told off later by the project bigwig for eating bread outside of breakfast time
• Being forced to change my clothes to go to the evac centre to do the bath cleaning/photo cleaning job by my team leader, a middle-aged uptight Japanese lady, because I would scare the residents. When i refused, she sic’d a bigwig on me who used his bullshit conflict-resolution voice on me to tell me that I basically had to do it. (If we had ended up cleaning the baths, my workpants would have been totally inappropriate, as they don’t roll up) All in the name of ‘cultural sensitivity’, which is fine, except that I’ve been volunteering at evacuation centres now since April, and it’s never been a problem before (Tohoku people are really cool).

SUMMARY

I’m really enjoying a lot of the people here, and I’m enjoying the work. I think that next time I come up here, though, I will try to come with a smaller group. The realities of a large group seem to mean that those in charge feel like they need to treat us like children. Now that I’ve made some friends, and sort of carved a place, I’m really looking forward to next week.

No Comments | In: your man in japan | tags: All Hands, JPQuake, Oofunato, Tohoku, Volunteering. | #

Typing this on the air mattress, which turns out to be like, a queen-size.

I’m sleeping in the All Hands common room at the HQ tonight, because they didn’t want to move me over to the second set of facilities in the Evac center. Which is fine. Except they made a big-ass deal about quiet/lights out hours starting at 22:30, and it’s now 23:15 and the main gaggle have gone off to the sleeping room, while the admins continue to talk in here with lights blazing.

Given that this room is supposedly going to turn into Grand Central at 7:00, I’d really like to get some shuteye.

Also, it seems like I’m hearing a lot of drama stuff that I probably should—whoops, earthquake—should not be hearing.

Oh well, it’s the first night. I should be happy that I have a degree of privacy to write this that I likely won’t have when I move tomorrow.

First impressions of Oofunato:

• Smelly: partly fresh, sea air (which I think I’m not a fan of), partly dust, partly sewage
• Quiet (well, it is a small town)
• That’s it so far: I arrived in the dark

First impressions of the group:

• A little bit immature
• A bit catty
• A little bit disorganized (they really need a sign down at street level; I found the building no problem, but there’s no indication until you walk up the stairs, which I was loath to do due to my heavy bags… maybe something I’ll suggest when I get to know them better)

First impression of the HQ

• No flush toilets (washiki that’s just a hole into a sack of some sort)
• Stinky; toilets are particularly bad
• Definitely worse for wear
• More amenities than I expected (I may be able to have occasional sento privileges!)

Anyway, really not looking forward to waking up all bleary-eyed with a whole bunch of volunteers eating breakfast over my head, but I figure I’ll get into the swing of things tomorrow, and once I’m installed at the other place, cheek-to-jowl with my/the comrades, these first impressions will improve.

I’m really looking forward to it.

Maybe if I pretend to sleep now, they’ll be quiet and turn out the lights…

No Comments | In: your man in japan | tags: All Hands, JPQuake, Oofunato, sleep, Tohoku, toilets, Volunteering. | #

And the good ship Curry Express is off for Tohoku! (@ YC&AC) http://4sq.com/jmI0TI

I woke up at 4:30, and was on my bike and off to the departure site by 5:20. Good friend Dave had driven my heavier bags over yesterday, so I didn’t have to worry about how to carry them. He will also pick up my bike and drive it back to my house today.

Someone farted on the Curry Express. I suppose it was inevitable.

We left nearly on time (6:10), and while it was inevitable that someone farted, at least it wasn’t me.

The driver didn’t forget to take this down; I saw him put it up. (Aboard the Curry Express.) http://lockerz.com/s/103320684

None of us were quite sure what this mean, other than the driver had less patience with us this week. Who can blame him? A bus full of adults is noisier and much hard to control than a bus full of easily-cowed schoolchildren.

Road breakfast of muffins and samosas aboard the Curry Express.

I personally preferred last week’s croissants, but the samosas were amazing.

The Curry Express is making great time. Only 130km to Sendai from here.

We changed routes this time, avoiding central Tokyo, and saved more than an hour just by not sitting in traffic!

Just a few klicks out of Sendai. Stopped for a slash, and suddenly had to run back to bus before they closed the highway!

This was a hoot, watching our Japanese navigator and bus driver trying to herd everyone back from the toilets when they found out the highway was closing.

Arrival in Sichigahama. Time to serve some curry (in the rain).

Photos soon (still on a bus). Fewer people than last week, and although it was raining when we arrived, we actually ended up serving indoors this week, AND it stopped raining and got sunny. After we finished serving the people living there, we served the volunteers, some of who were cute, and some of whom were very tattooed.

Curry served. Cats herded. Back aboard the Curry Express and bound for Sendai station.

Not quite. The group did its usual kerfuffling. This isn’t an exact science. I could see that our driver and guide were getting a little antsy, as was I by this point, because we were coming up on 15:00 and I had a feeling that my last train from Sendai to Ichinoseki was sometime around 16:00. My bus from Ichinoseki wasn’t until 18:20, which I probably shouldn’t have mentioned, because I think people fixated on that time…

We just passed a 5-storey mountain of bulldozed rubble.

And I just checked the train schedule. It’s now 15:15. My “last” train is at 16:43, which will give me about 45 minutes on the other end, in a station I’ve never been before, to figure out where to catch the bus.

There is some doubt as to whether I will make my train at 16:40.

Given how close we were to Sendai, I kind of wish they’d dropped me before this second leg of the trip to drop off some food, find out what else is needed, and chat with volunteers. By this point I’ve made it clear what my deadline is. The driver and our navigator know what I fear: we will not make it in time.

Train duly missed. Will take the next one and will have 7 minutes to get from train platform to bus stop or I don’t get to Oofunato.

Sure enough, we pull up to Sendai station at 16:45. I quickly try to rig up a way to effectively carry my bags, but to no avail. Also, this entrance has no escalator/elevator. Hilarity, I’m sure, ensues. The next train I know of leaves at 17:43, and will arrive at 18;13 in Ichinoseki. Only 7 minutes before my bus departs.

Paid an extra 1780 to get on the Shinkansen. Now I have 11 minutes to find where my bus is with my Zsa Zsa Gabor overpacked bags.

Good news: found a train that leaves at 17:30 and arrives at 18:09. Bad news: those extra four minutes cost me.

Have made the humiliating call to a good friend for help. Will owe said friend big time.

I call my friend, @peacefulandjust, and humbly ask her if she can find out where exactly I need to catch my bus from Ichinoseki. Just knowing where to go will save me precious minutes.

Made it just in time, all thanks to @peacefulandjust. On the last leg of my trip to Oofunato.

@peacefulandjust comes through. As I’m retying my bags together (this time using my bungee cable), I get a message telling me Bus Stop #5, West exit.  The train stops and I bolt… well, as fast as I can with my bags. I make it just as the bus pulls in. Minutes later, we are on the road.

So, that was my day, in a nutshell. Going to sign off now and save what little power is left on my laptop for an emergency.

No Comments | In: your man in japan | tags: @peacefulandjust, Bus, Curry, Curry Express, Ichinoseki, japan, Seatbelt, Sendai, Shinkansen, Sichinohama, Tohoku, Universal Brotherhood, Volunteering. | #

I’m writing this on the bus to Oofunato, which I caught with just moments to spare, thanks to the help of @peacefulandjust (I mean, her help is the reason I caught it at all, not the reason I was running to catch it).

Where to begin?

About a month ago, I signed up with ALL HANDS to go to Oofunato and help out. They rejected me.

Then they changed their minds and un-rejected me.

In the meantime, I got involved in the Universal Brotherhood of Japan’s day trips to serve curry (see my last entry regarding the good ship Curry Express). When they offered to take me again this week to save me money on my trip to Oofunato, how could I have refused?

Packing. Well, there’s an interesting story, too. I’ve never really done this kind of thing before, and All Hands was a little bit vague about the exact work I’d be doing and the conditions I’d be doing it in. Plus, they made it pretty clear we volunteers would be living in our own filth for a week (only cold running water, no showers, 20 people in a small room). So I packed a lot. A LOT. Like the Zsa Zsa Gabor of volunteers. It didn’t help that I also bought 5000 Yen + worth of (heavy) art supplies to donate to local kids in shelters. That was the small grey bag I have dubbed “Megaton” right there.

Aside from that, I packed one pair of work clothes (Japanese carpenters’ pants I bought for a costume party two or three years ago, and a work shirt); a pair of underoos, socks, and an undershirt for each day; a set of good clothes, including a couple of extra underthings, not including the kilt I am wearing right now; two pairs of boots on top of the ones I’m wearing, one pair rubber, one pair tabi carpenter boots; a heavy sleeping bag and a hard hat (which, according to an email from All Hands that I received JUST AN HOUR AGO, I don’t need); an air mattress (probably a mistake); batteries for air mattress; charger for batteries; first aid stuff; safety stuff; my camera; my laptop, plus all adapters and AC… shall I go on, darlings?

Suffice it to say that my luggage consists of one small grey suitcase (carry-on size) filled with art supplies and snacks; a green canvas army surplus laundry bag filled with clothes and, apparently, bricks; the air mattress; my overfilled backpack; my camera bag; and my hard hat (which wouldn’t fit inside anything else.

They said “pack light”. Have I arsed this up?

Oh well…

No Comments | In: your man in japan | tags: All Hands, Bus, japan, JPQuake, Oofunato, packing, Tohoku, Volunteering. | #

I set out yesterday morning to clear a bunch of stuff from my to-do list, related to my upcoming volunteer trip to Oofunato. I had 40,000 Yen in my wallet, thanks to scrupulous scrimping and saving over the last three months, which I planned to use for the volunteer trip.

The day started out with a ride to the insurance office to buy volunteer insurance. Score one for my Japanese skills. I took the insurance card and popped it in my wallet.

Then I rode back to to my neighbourhood to get my hair chopped into a maintenance-free style since I will likely not be able to shower between May 21 and 28.  I had a dentist and doctor appointment at 14:00, but I didn’t have enough time to run my other big errand (home center to pick up mask, gloves, work shirt, eye protection, etc.), so I rode back out towards Maita and found a little Italian place to eat lunch at.

I totally scored on the Italian food and had the best margherita pizza I’ve had since moving to Japan. The staff were friendly and chatty. I paid, took the receipt, put it in my wallet, and then shoved my wallet into my vest pocket (I wear a workman’s vest during the summer because I need the extra pockets). I went outside, slung on my backpack (strapping it across the middle) and rode off.

I arrived at the doctor’s office about five minutes before my appointment time. The receptionist asked me for my insurance card, and I started hunting through my card holder. Hmm… not there. I must have transferred it to my wallet at some point. Well, I’ll just—wait—no—what?—shit!

Wallet gone.

I had strapped my bag over top of my vest, and the strap must have put pressure on the lower part of the vest pocket, pushing my wallet up and out.

The dentist and doctor both agreed to see me on the promise that I’d return tomorrow with the insurance and the money. The receptionist was kind enough to call the restaurant for me and confirm that I had indeed put my wallet in my pocket before leaving.

Right after my appointment, I retraced my exact route. A normally 15-minute ride become 60 minutes as I pissed off other vehicles on the road by riding extremely slowly, looking for that square of light brown. I got all the way back to the restaurant, where the manager helped me search the bushes outside where I’d had my bicycle parked.

The bushes that line the side of the road for much of my ride are these super-dense thickets, which began to get me worried that my wallet had perhaps fallen into one of them. So, as I began to retrace my route again, I experimented by dropping my card case into one of them. I was hoping that it would bounce off or stay on top, but it dropped into the middle of the bush and was almost impossible to find even though I knew exactly where it was.

I finished retracing my route a second time, which put me back in Motomachi where I thought I would check with the police. The sign in the window of the Koban (police box) said “On Patrol”. Just after I read that, a cop bicycled by, completely ignoring my waving. I waited another 25 minutes or so for him to return, but no luck, so I got back on my bicycled and retraced my route a third time.

This time I actually started searching bushes, concentrating around areas where the road was a little bumpy. But there kilometres of these bushes, and it was impossible to search them all. So I bicycled to another nearby Koban to file a report.

Once again, no cop. This time, I did notice a sign inside.  It was pretty clear that I needed to dial one of the three numbers printed on the sign.

Actually, the sign says essentially “pick up the phone and be connected to the police”. Well, picking up the phone only connected me to a dial tone.

I snapped a photo of the sign and posted it to Twitter. Within 5 minutes, a friend (@peacefulandjust) had replied with instructions. I was able to summon an officer of the law and make a report. Sadly, no one had turned in my wallet.

So, after spending another hour searching bushes (it was dark by now, so I removed the headlight from my bicycle and used that), I headed home empty handed, knowing that on top of having to repeat my errands again the next day (back to the Doctor to show insurance and pay; back to insurance office to see if they will give me another card; no second haircut, thanks…), I would have to report my credit card missing, cancel my bank and Yodobashi point cards… and worse, I would have to tell my wife that I’d just lost the replacement wallet she bought me in December after having lost the last one in Tokyo.

Yeah, this is the second time in six months.

Here are the possible scenarios, in order of my preference:

1. I’ll find it today while I rerun my errands (highly unlikely)
2. It was lying in an obvious place and someone picked it up and dropped it in a mailbox (according to @soness, this is a good way of returning wallets) or will turn it into the police today
3. It was lying in an obvious place in Motomachi, and someone popped it in to a nearby shop; the shopkeeper will turn it into the police this morning.
4. It was lying in an obvious place, someone picked it up, removed the money, and dumped it in a mailbox.
5. It fell into the bushes, and it won’t be discovered until fall.
6. It was lying in an obvious place, and someone stole it.

So. Yeah. Bad day. I still feel sick to my stomach thinking about it. But no time to dwell. I need to hit the road before 11 to redo all the errands from yesterday, plus today’s. First step… find a temporary wallet…

No Comments | In: doctor angry, your man in japan | tags: bad day, bushes, cop, dentist, doctor, italian restaurant, japan, koban, lost, pizza, police, wallet, yodobashi, Yokohama. | #

In real life, I run a 111 year-old Theatre company called YTG, which I am in the process of registering as an NPO here in Japan.

The first half of the mandate of the company is to bring contemporary Theatre to people in Yokohama and Japan. To fulfill this mandate, we obviously mount shows, but we’re also trying to get a Theatre school off the ground. There are several reasons why the school is an important part of what we do.

Firstly, with our limited resources, shows can only happen a couple of times per year for the time being. This gap between productions causes YTG to drop out of public awareness for months at a time. Running workshops gives us something to publicize all year long.

Secondly, good training will empower and inspire students to go off and do their own projects, which will mean more Theatre buzz. I strongly believe that art begets art in a positive feedback loop. A city that has lots of active artists has lots of demand for art because everyone is aware of it. That is true for all the arts, but especially performance-oriented arts like dance and Theatre.

Thirdly, there is a dearth right now of Theatre artists who have both the need to create contemporary work and the technical skills to do so. The YTG classes are being designed to develop both of these requirements in the hopes generating future YTG company members.

We’ve had some problems finding suitable rehearsal spaces for these classes, so we’ve just got one coming up: Voice for the Actor. But what a class to start with. My friend and Theatre colleague Graig Russell has been working his butt off to write the curriculum for the class, and it’s going to be eight weeks of intense voice work. It’s not all the time I get to work with someone like Graig whose philosophy toward Theatre is so much like mine that it’s uncanny. Although voice work will always involve technical elements, what’s great about this course is that it doesn’t concentrate on technique to the exclusion of all else. Graig has really built a workshop that emphasizes the idea of the individual voice, so that each student will learn not something that’s standardized, but something that’s unique to his or her own body.

(And I’m not talking sight unseen here; Graig was my vocal coach on William Shakespeare’s R3 two years ago, and did some wonderful work with a number of my actors.)

Because we’ve had trouble booking space at YTG’s usual Yokohama haunts, this workshop will take place in Tokyo at the OUR SPACE rehearsal lounge. I’m so lucky that the management at that space are also good friends

So my job now is to sign up seven students to take this course. I’ve printed flyers and we’re sending them out to Universities; I’ve sent out the YTG newsletter announcing the class; I’ve notified a Yokohama English-through-Theatre school; I’ve sent email to my international school contacts; I’ve updated the YTG facebook page; I’ve tweeted it; etc., ad nauseum… Publicity is definitely the part of the job that I’m worst at.  I know that there are people out there interested in this course… the question is simply: how do I reach them?

Oh well, I’ll find the magic formula one day. In the meantime, I just need to keep plugging away. I really do believe that if I build something based on good, solid, ideas and ideals, that it will eventually generate interest. Art begets art and all that.

No Comments | In: the ol' gymkata, your man in japan | tags: acting, Art, Facebook, Graig Russell, NPO, OUR SPACE, Publicity, theatre, Twitter, Voice for the Actor, William Shakespeare's R3, Workshops, Yokohama Theatre Group, YTG. | #

I’m writing this aboard a school bus borrowed from the Indian School in Japan that I have dubbed The Curry Express (related more to its function as a curry delivery platform and less to famed actor Tim Curry), as we hurdle through the night at full bore to try to make Yokohama before 2:00 am.

This was a trip I’d planned to go on way back at the end of March, but plans changed.

The plan: this group, called the Universal Brotherhood of [I forget] is a mixed group of mostly Indian and Japanese folks was going to go to Tohoku to server a curry dinner at a shelter for tsunami evacuees. They would drive up to Tohuku, serve curry, and drive back.

I was actually going to be riding shotgun in one of the follow trucks carrying supplies for the volunteer center provided by Yokohama Country & Athletics Club members. The driver was my friend and occasional partner in Theatrical misadventure, Dave.

At the last minute, Dave got sick, but the fellow in charge of the operation, Chugani-san, assured me that there was room on the good ship Curry Express and that I could still be useful. So, I woke up this morning at 4:30 and hopped on my bicycle at 5:15, before the first train, to meet the group at the YCAC premises.

After loading the Express with supplies, we boarded it, and after much discussion about seats which I stayed out of, I sat in one of the jump seats.

This was fine at first as the jump seats provided slightly more legroom than the regular seats, but after the 7 hours it took to get to Iwanuma the metal from the seat was digging into one particular vertebrae so hard that I was sure there was a bruise there. I cracked my back painfully as I descended from the Express and onto the unsuspecting residents of the shelter, who had likely never before seen a 185cm tall gaijin man in a skirt. (Interestingly, I found that Northerners, despite what I’d heard of their reputation for directness, were actually really polite about it.)

Long story short (photos to fill in the gaps posted later when I’m on a non-bouncing and pitch-black platform), we served curry lunch (with me mostly filling a support/gopher role, making children laugh when my kilt blew in the wind, and shooting photographs), I donated some art supplies that I’d personally bought to the kids of the shelter, and then the good crew of the Curry Express hit the road again in order to make landfall at another shelter and a volunteer center to offload more goods and check needs for the Express’s trip next weekend. On the way, we stopped in Ishinomaki, in a neighbourhood hit by the tsunami in order to get a grip on what happened.

While it was awful, it wasn’t the bleak hellscape I had been expecting, possibly because a lot of the major bulldozing and body recovery work has been done. But seeing it still immediately made me feel like I was trying to swallow a fist-sized stone. I took a few photos, mostly concentrating on minutia, because I couldn’t really wrap my mind around the whole thing in a photographic way.

A quick stop at the second shelter, and then on to our last stop at Ishinomaki’s campsite for volunteers. What a bunch of great guys. Yeah, so much for being a great prose writer, but I can’t think of any other way to describe these man and women. I look forward to joining their ranks next weekend, although I am no going to be hardcore and camping out in a field like these rock stars were. We passed over the last of our supplies to the volunteers and then after about an hour (no kidding) of goodbyes, we were back aboard the Express and on our way.

Well, after stopping for alcohol we were on our way. Which, inevitably, led to a busload of Japanese and Indian ojisan singing a mix of very off-key Enka and Indian Bollywood songs; an inordinate number of toilet breaks; spilled beer; many complaints that the bus was too hot; and snoring. In that order, precisely.

As I type this, it is 23:00, and, barring the unlikely event of heavy traffic heading into the Tokyo area late at night on a Saturday, we should be back at the YCAC between 1:00 and 2:00 in the wee hours of the anti-meridian. One of the (non-intoxicated) crew members of the brave ship has offered to give me and my bicycle a ride home. Despite the fact that I managed to secure a non back-crippling seat for the return, I am way more tired and stiff than I’d like to be for a wee hours cycle, so I am very grateful for his offer.

This has been a great day. I should probably say that the whole thing kind of depressed me, but it didn’t. Wherever we went, I saw good people, tsunami survivors and volunteers alike, working hard to make the best of a terrible situation. I should have been filled with despair or pity, maybe, but instead I felt hope and pride, and I aspire to do the best that I can to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with these men and women who represent to me the best of my adopted country.

Oh yeah. And I ate Fukushima manju and my skin isn’t peeling off, so fuck off Helen Caldicott, Chris Busby, etc.

Yeah, sorry. If I end too many blogs on an inspirational note, I’ll lose my reputation.

No Comments | In: your man in japan | tags: Fukushima, Ishinomaki, Iwanuma, japan, JPQuake, Manji, Miyagi, Tohoku. | #