The pictures are from a train station near my apartment. I hate the way this blog posts my pictures. They never come out the way I lay them out or as they appear in the preview. Oh, well. I imagine you can sort them out.

The first one, well, one of them, is, I think, in a bank. My knowledge of kanji is pretty limited, but it looks like a bank to me and I think he’s holding a bankbook.

I like that this shows the way English is used in Japan, but my advice to this guy would be if you’re going to try to do something illegal, don’t wear a jacket that says Bad Man on it. What a give-away.

That’s a hanko falling out of his pocket. A hanko is a personalized stamp that every Japanese person carries. It’s required on all official paperwork. I had one made up with my initials, although foreigners are allowed to just sign or initial documents in the spot reserved for the hanko.

The second picture is similar to the earlier picture I posted of the signs that can be seen warning that perverts may be hanging around the area. This one, though, I think is warning the perverts (chikan). Basically, it’s reminding them that it’s illegal to grope the schoolgirls.

It reminds me of the 1940s and ‘50s noir art on magazines and paperbacks in the U.S.

I’m just reporting on the sociological import of the posters here and not making light of the problem itself. I think I mentioned earlier that groping is a big enough problem that many of the trains in Tokyo have ‘Women Only’ cars in use during the rush hours.

I understand that there are also plainclothes police on the trains on the lookout for gropers. The trains can get really unbelievably crowded (remember the guys with the white gloves who push people into the train cars if they can’t quite work their way in by themselves?) so there must be a lot of unintentional groping going on as well. I’ve never seen any confrontations between groper and gropee, but I’ve heard stories.

Speaking of crowded trains, I was in Tokyo last Saturday. I’ve tended to stay away from the city for the most part since the March 11 earthquake. I’m a bit paranoid of being stranded there in the event of another earthquake. I was planning to go up to the observation deck at the top of the Sunshine City building in Ikebukuro a while back and realized that I didn’t want to be up there if things started shaking again.

It’s kind of a phobia with me. Back in about 1980, I went to the top of the World Trade Center. Standing up there, I could feel the building move and I did not like it. I still have nightmares where I’m in a tall building and it’s swaying back and forth.

I live on the top floor of my apartment building and the frequent earthquakes - small ones, mind you - remind me of my nightmares. Of course, it’s only the fifth floor, but still...

At any rate, I was in Tokyo on Saturday. The possibility of earthquakes was offset by the reality of the heat. It was a very hot day and humid and sunny. People waiting to cross the streets all huddled into what shade they could find, even for the minute or two it takes for the lights to change. It wore me out and I was looking forward to getting home even to my hot, shaky, fifth floor apartment.

I went to a used book sale close to Ochanomizu (translation; Tea Water), where I’ve found some good books before, but there were no English books for me this time. I then went to Takadanobaba (translation: Takata’s Horse Riding Grounds) which is a good area for used bookstores. Unfortunately, there weren’t any English bookstores. Actually, there is one called Blue Parrot Books, but I’ve been there and I was looking for new places.

A friend of mine had told me about another English bookstore in the area, but, of course, I wasn’t able to find it.

I went into one bookstore and asked the person working there if they had any English books. The question was in Japanese - Eigo no hon ga arimasuka - but she asked me in English, “English books?”. I thought that was a little odd since our conversation was in Japanese, but I said yes and she said no and I just looked around the shop for a few minutes. Then it dawned on me that the shop specialized in movie books. ‘Movie’ in Japanese is Eiga, ‘English’ in Japanese is Eigo. She had just been clarifying in English whether I wanted English books or movie books.

She then gave me directions in Japanese to an English bookstore along with a map and I set off again on my quest. Not surprisingly, to me anyway, I never found the place.

I have a huge problem with maps in Japan. There’s some kind of cultural understanding of maps in this country that is foreign to, well, foreigners. Okay, it could just be me. I don’t think I have ever once been able to find a place on a map in Japan at one go. One time I remember, I followed a map trying to find a hotel and got hopelessly lost. I managed to find my way back to the train station where I’d started and got my bearings again. I looked at the map more closely and finally turned it upside down and was able to find the hotel that way.

Anyway, I wandered around Takadanobaba, hot and tired, for a while, but the only English book I found was a copy of Porky’s II. I gave it a pass.

Dragging my feet, among other body parts, back to the train station, I saw a sign that said, in English, ‘Used Books - Second Floor’. I was so beat at that point that I almost passed it by because I didn’t want to walk up the stairs. I talked myself into it, though, and climbed up to the second floor and asked the bookstore guy, in Japanese, if he had any English books. He told me, in Japanese, no. It was faintly reminiscent of a Monty Python skit.

Okay. Why would someone advertise ‘Used Books’ in English and not have any used books in English? What customers is he trying to attract? Japanese customers don’t need the English. English speakers looking for Japanese books don’t need the English. The only people who need the English are people like me who are looking for English books... and there aren’t any.

I think he just liked the way it looked on the sign. Ah, the power of English...

Well, it's been a long time since I added to this blog.

It’s Easter Sunday in Japan. I went back to Kamakitako today. These pictures are from the lake. I'm sorry about the layout, but I seem to be limited in what I can do with this blog format.

I go to the lake every season and it always has a new personality. The cherry blossoms are almost all gone now, lying in pink and white lines along the streets and in small piles on the spring ground, but there are other blossoms and trees to be seen.

I said Kamakitako and not Lake Kamakitako because ‘ko’ means lake and it would be like saying Lake Kamakita Lake.

That kind of language glitch pops up every once in a while. One of the bridges across the Sumida River in Tokyo is often listed in English guidebooks as the Nihonbashi Bridge. ‘Bashi’(or hashi) means bridge in Japanese, though, so they’re actually saying The Nihon Bridge Bridge. Then, too, a lot of times you’ll hear or see the river itself called the Sumidagawa River, but ‘gawa’ is river, so...

This little trick isn’t just found when going from language to language. Have you ever heard ‘ATM machine’ or ‘PIN number.’? Think about it.

I’m starting up again on my return to Japan after the March 11 earthquake. I was on break and in California when it hit.

Let me say at the start that it was and continues to be a tremendous tragedy for those in the tsunami area and for those around Fukushima. I, and everyone, I’m sure, hope and pray for progress in the recovery of the northeast coast.

My personal experience revolved around attempting to piece together information on the situation in order to determine when - and for a while, if - I would return to Japan. It took a month for me to feel it was all right to return.

I learned a lot about how news is reported.

What was supposed to be happening varied according to whom you were listening. CNN got on it right away, of course, and people like Anderson Cooper and Sanjay Gupta headed for Japan. There was a while when it seemed we were really being informed about what was going on.

Then CNN came on with a story about radiation hitting Tokyo and made it so alarming that I emailed all of my friends in Japan and asked if they were going to be able to evacuate.

One of my colleagues at the university emailed me back immediately and asked what I was talking about. There was no mention of the radiation hitting Tokyo IN Tokyo. Soon another wrote back and said that he had just sent his kids off to school and his wife was outside hanging out the laundry. A third replied that his family had not even thought of evacuating.

I started checking out NHK, Japanese news, online. For every sensational story CNN ran, NHK seemed to have a quieter analysis. Of course, TEPCO tended to minimize the danger. I began to realize that the truth was somewhere in between the fear-mongering of American news outlets and the downplaying of the situation being reported in Japan.

Then, when Libya hit the headlines, CNN seemed to leave Japan entirely. They had put up a page for the earthquake, but went for days at a time without updating it. The CNN ‘This Just In’ blog’s newest stories were always a week or more outdated. The U.S. Embassy called for voluntary evacuation and then seldom posted anything new on their earthquake page.

Most news sites have links at the bottom of their articles. CNN titles the section “We Recommend’. The stories are not dated at the link. I would read something like ‘Another Explosion at Fukushima Reactor’ and click on the link to find out it was a story about the explosion from the week before. One link was titled something like ‘Massive Earthquake Off the Coast of the Philippines’ and when I clicked on it, it was dated last October.

Somehow, I gradually put together enough to decide to return, but my belief in a connected world is badly shaken.

When I got to Narita, it seemed a lot quieter than usual. It was a quick trip through immigration and customs. (We still had a long wait for our luggage, though.) My flight on Korean Air had been full, but it was a smaller plane with only two seats on the window sides of the aisles. It was headed for Seoul, so I don’t know how many passengers actually disembarked at Narita. I also heard that KAL’s daily service to Japan from LAX has been cut back to four or five days a week.

The trains seemed to be running normally. I got right on the Skyliner bound for Ueno. The train was more crowded than usual, but I don’t know if that was because of cutbacks in service or not. Since fewer people are coming in to the airport, more crowded trains would seem to indicate fewer trains running, I would think.

In Tokyo, many electric signs had been turned off. Many escalators were also shut down. There’s still an effort to reduce use of electricity, but in my area, anyway, the rolling blackouts have been discontinued. The nights seem darker from my apartment window, though.

I was able to get gas for my scooter with no problem. Well, I didn’t have a problem with the gas actually being available, but I ran into trouble at the pump. It was my first time at a self-service pump in Japan and using the pump involved choosing gas type, choosing payment type, entering blood-type and clicking your heels together three times. Luckily, self-serve in Japan means having an attendant close by to help if necessary. It was.

The store shelves still have some bare spots. Several brands and flavors of bottled water are not available. For some reason, a few varieties of canned coffee, of which Japan has a whole lot, have disappeared. And yogurt is being rationed.

I found that out by coming up to the check-out counter with four containers of yogurt and being told two was the limit. The clerk was very apologetic in explaining the situation to me, but I’m sure that the word has gotten around that the foreign guy is hoarding yogurt. It didn’t help when I went back two days later and brought up two containers of yogurt and two small bottles of a probiotic yogurt drink and found out that the same thing applied. Once again, the clerk politely informed me of the rule and confiscated one of each of my yogurts. I must really be getting a reputation around here.

When people get together, everyone asks each other where they were when the quake hit. There are lots of stories of spending that night in the office or walking for hours to get home after the trains stopped. One guy I know confessed that he stole a bicycle to ride home. Actually, he said ‘borrowed’ so he might have returned it. I, of course, have to say I was out of the country.

There’s a little bit of guilt involved in not having been here for the shaking. Everyone I know has this shared experience and I feel left out. Yeah, well, all the same, I’m glad I missed it. I’ll deal with the guilt somehow.

I’ve had a similar experience. I was in Japan on 9/11 and only knew of that day on the day from what I could gather from Japanese TV. I still hear new things about it now ten years after the fact. Living through September 11 was a shared experience that I did not participate in and it occasionally sets me apart from other Americans.

In Japan, there’s still the occasional aftershock to deal with. There have been four or five noticeable shakes since I got back - more than we experience in a few years time in California - but they’re always over before I have time to react. The day after I got back, there was an announcement over the town’s loudspeaker system and a few seconds later, there was an earthquake. I thought that the Japanese had perfected an early warning system on seismic activity, but my friend, Yoh-san, said it was just a coincidence. The announcements are just public service-type information and the one I heard had nothing to do with predicting an earthquake.

The fact is, though, that Japan is well-prepared for earthquakes. Think about it. A 9 magnitude quake hits the country and there is very little damage done. All of the high-rises in Tokyo withstood it well. The deaths and destruction were mainly due to the terrible tragedy of the tsunami.

The current problem, of course, has to do with the nuclear plant. TEPCO should have been, but, unfortunately, wasn’t prepared for the double event of a huge quake and following tsunami. If the company had done what they should have done in the way of safety systems for any eventuality, Japan wouldn’t be dealing with this on-going crisis.

I’m back in Japan and continuing with my job, with my life, as is everyone around me. It’s a strange feeling, though, walking around and really expecting the earth to move at any time. I’m sure that all of the people who actually went through the great shake feel that way a lot more than I do.