Run, Tokyo, Run!

I wrote a post for Japan Pulse about running in Japan and the tech stuff runners are using. Apologies for cramming it with running puns.

Tokyo Double Bridge Run

Today is the Tokyo Marathon. We watched the start on TV. We heard the starting gun go off on TV and then live a few seconds later, which seems hard to believe. Could that be right, that the TV broadcast signal is faster than the speed of sound? I will ponder that over more coffee. Jim applied for the marathon but didn't get in. (He'll be running the LA marathon next month instead.) For training, he's been running rings around the Imperial Palace (shown in the Pulse post) and crisscrossing Tokyo. His favorite is a bridge run he's mapped out that goes over Rainbow Bridge to Odaiba and then across the brand new Tokyo Gate Bridge. Here are the details of the Tokyo Double Bridge run. It's supposed to be a good one, if you like that kind of thing.

Our friend Joseph Tame is broadcasting his marathon run today from the helmet camera on his "iRun" rig. Check him out!

What's so great?

The Old 97s anticipated this UK tourism campaign years ago. (The video is jumpy but the sound is good. And the questions are just as hard-hitting as ever. What is so great about the barrier reef?)

Stuffed animals lashed to a trash truck in the rain

A meal fit for a monk

Kakusho Shojin Ryori, a set on Flickr.

A really fancy monk. We went to a 250-year old restaurant in Hida Takayama last weekend. It was an exquisite experience. I was surprised that each course was placed on the floor in front of our cushions on the tatami floor. You could make a lifetime study out of this kind of vegetarian cuisine, which is traditionally temple food. It's cliched (and inadequate) to say everything is prepared with utmost attention to detail. But that will have to do for now. Have a click through the pictures and see what I mean.
The place is called Kakusyo. The way it's written is the equivalent of a ranch being called, say, Circle R. The symbol on the sweet in the first picture is the whole name: the kanji "sho" in a square, or "kaku."

Because it is dangerous you may not enter

There are dangers

We're back in Japan after another two-week, four-state, five-bed tour. We were mostly lucky with the weather while we were there. Maryland was bizarrely balmy and New York, while ear-bitingly cold, was not covered in thick ice and slush this time. We left dogged by storms, though. The six-a.m. road to the airport had already had a few inches of sleet plowed off it. The freezing rain didn't stop us from taking off, but thunderstorms in Atlanta sent us into a holding pattern and finally to a refueling stop in Columbus, Georgia. After waiting in line and then on the phone and then in line again for a few hours, we slipped out between thunderstorms on a flight to LA with reports of tornadoes behind us. Jim's dad picked us up at John Wayne International and took us out for fish tacos and fries. We paused for a digital refueling in a Starbucks parking lot, sipping a little free WiFi to send emails explaining our half-day delay, and then he dropped us off for a midnight flight out of LAX. From LA it was smooth sailing. Behind us, though, we again left a trail of rain, as the City of Angels was soon hit with unusual downpours. We arrived at five a.m. to clear skies in Tokyo. By afternoon it was raining, and that night the city got a few record-breaking inches of snow and commute-ruining ice. Frozen sidewalks and streets are no joke. There were almost three thousand car accidents and hundreds of people went to the hospital with injuries. On my walk to work, I saw a few old men scraping the sidewalk with coal shovels. Friends reported shop owners pouring hot water over the ice to melt it. Er. I didn't see any salt or sand. The picture above is my favorite strategy for keeping people from slipping: roping off the dangerous area and putting up a wonderfully generic danger sign.

Recycling day, Roppongi

Each truck has its own cargo and its own personality.

Yakudoshi: My horoscope said it would be a bad year

Happy 2012! Would be a shame if anything bad were to happen to your nice new year...

Your yakudoshi is an "inauspicious year," or a "year of calamity." Other translations put a more positive spin on the expression as a "critical year," but overall, during the ages 24, 41 and 60 for men and 18, 32 and 36 for women, you should stay sharp. You are supposed to be extra vulnerable to sickness and general poor luck during these years and the years immediately before and after. Luckily, you can go to a shinto shrine and have the bad juju removed by purchasing some combination of charms and purification rituals. And lest you think you'll take your chances with the less-bad luck of the year following the main yakudoshi, my friend says that this atoyaku is trouble for the people around you, you selfish bastard. Have they got every angle of this protection racket covered or what?
This photo is at Meiji Jingu. I strolled over in the late afternoon today. There were hundreds of people lined up waiting to go for first prayer at the shrine. I stuck to my new year's resolution to stay out of insanely long lines and just walked around. I had a bowl of restorative tonjiru pork soup and enjoyed the atmosphere. Most of the friends and families were casual, and some were in suits or kimono. It was crowded but relaxed, except near the subway entrance that appears among the trees only once a year and opens directly onto the shrine grounds. Here uniformed traffic controllers with bullhorns stood every few yards.
I imagine there were a few prayers that the deep earthquake this afternoon is the last one for a while. This is year Heisei 24 on the Japanese calendar. Entire countries can't have a yakudoshi, can they? I'd buy a charm if it would help.

Evil earrings

This came out blurry. One-handed iPhone photos are almost impossible to focus. This Harajuku shop, Before the Boom, has ten thousand pairs of sparkly pretty earrings and then this guy, lurking around on a knee-high rack. Don't tell him your secrets!
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 "I have your secret. Can I give it away? HA HA HA"

I wrote a novel (more or less)

I wrote a novel for National Novel Writing Month.
The main tools I used on my computer were Scrivener, LeechBlock and SimplyNoise. The main things that helped offline were coffee*, a daily word-count requirement, and a few real and virtual writing buddies. The main things I avoided were how-to-write articles and editing as I went. The main thing I learned was that writing fiction, at least the first draft, can be a lot of fun. Also, people seem to be inordinately impressed that a person with nothing but time on her hands can string together 51,000 words in a month. I'm super impressed at anyone who did it while holding down a full-time job and/or feeding and cleaning up after other people. But me? I've got room.

I don't know if I'll do anything with the thing. It's about some foreigners in Japan, which -- hey, come back! The villain is a naturalized Japanese citizen of Canadian descent, and the heroine is a headstrong woman from the US who doesn't know (or care) a thing about Japan before she comes over in pursuit of a vague job. The company she and her fellow recruits work for turns out to be quite sinister. There's a friendly ex-yak and an unlicensed accupuncturist.

Anyway, it was fun. A lot of people I talked to said they'd been thinking of trying NaNoWriMo sometime. I had heard of it a long time ago and thought, There's something I'll never do! But then the day before it started this year I thought I'd give it a try, and the next day I thought I'd keep going for another day or so and here we are. I figured out the plot, such as it is, in the third week. It might want some revision.

*Everyone always says "Coffee! Ha ha!" and I felt compelled to include it, too, but more because I did a lot of writing in coffee shops than because I was staying up all hours alternating between pounding caffeine shots and tearing out my hair. I think we novelists** like to project the latter image, but, unusually for me, I did most of the work*** during daylight hours.

**Oh, please.

***It also feels silly to call it work in this case.

Merry Christmas from Tokyo!