fashion tips (or, notes to myself)

1. wear a padded bra; otherwise, people will nudge each other and titter (pun intended) about what is visible through your t-shirt.

2. that layering thing? that is to make sure all angles of your belly are covered up, missy – for an inch-wide peek of skin visible between your jeans and t-shirt will draw scandalized stares from girls wearing skirts so short and flippy that they insouciantly flash bareasses and undies when they walk too fast, or up stairs, or through a revolving door, ET CETERA.

3. black baggy kneesocks with kitten-heel sandals are hot. rowr.

sumo smackdown

yesterday was the last day of the september sumo grand tournament.

i'd gotten a ticket for myself at the arena a couple weeks ago and saw some of the rikishi (wrestlers) leaving through a side gate. they had their hair oiled and drawn into those stylized topknots, and they were all dressed in cotton yukata (summer kimono) and wooden sandals, clopping towards the train station across the street. i unzipped my little camera from my bag and approached one of them at a respectable distance and politely asked if i could snap a photo. the rikishi i'd chosen said gruffly, 'i don't have time,' and kept walking – which, for a japanese person who'll usually say something like, 'please pardon me for my excessive rudeness, but i'm afraid i don't have the time,' was like yelling, 'BUGGER OFF!' so i did.

it's too bad, because then i suddenly got too shy to ask the next five huge rikishi clacking by. these guys are not merely big, fat men of leisure who train for sumo by sitting around guzzling beer and consuming large slabs of well-marbled kobe beef. i'm not really sure what their training does involve, but it makes them very substantial underneath that layer of insulation. their quadriceps are enormous and awe-inspiring.

these grand tournaments happen in tokyo three times a year, and three other grand tournaments are held yearly in other japanese cities. when i got my ticket, i was looking forward to the experience, but not dying for the date to arrive. televised sumo matches from my formative years were accompanied by my mom's patient explanations about why they kept throwing salt all over the place, and why they lifted their prodigious legs and stomped on the ground a lot (these are both purification rituals, to rid the match of evil intent and to purify the ring). even though it all looked sort of silly to a little kid who's seeing rare naked butts on TV, my mom managed to impart a sense of the ritual and ceremony of it into my wee brain. anyway, as a kid it's fascinating to watch two near-naked Buddha-bellied men sometimes flipping each other onto the ground and always pushing each other around a small circle.

what i didn't remember or appreciate from these childhood TV viewings was the ritual in almost every aspect of the tournament. the start of a match is not like in modern-day sports where there's a tangible, recorded, specific nanosecond in time when all players involved have an outside signal to start. in sumo, it's totally collaborative... and psychological. the match starts only when both rikishi are ready. this means that there's a lot of energy building up to the moment when they put their fists on the ground, the moment that signals they're both prepared to go at it. there's an official four-minute limit on how long the rikishi are allowed to take to settle into the squat and put their fists down.

so after stepping onto the platform of the ring and squatting in separate corners to receive a wooden ladlefuls of water for cleansing the body and spirit, the rikishi stand facing the audience and do the first series of foot-stomping. first they stretch out one arm, palm facing upward in a motion that reminds me of male hula, and then slap their thigh with that hand and bring the leg up for a forceful stomp to rid the match of evil spirits. the gesture is then repeated with the other arm and leg, and after both wrestlers have done this from their corners, they each grab a handful of coarse salt and enter the ring.

the ring itself is a raised clay platform in the middle of an arena that isn't so huge that you miss anything from the nosebleed seats. over the ring hangs a wooden roof that's supposed to resemble the roofs of traditional buildings in which sumo matches took place in the olden days. from each corner of the roof hang braided tassels and pieces of cloth much like those dark blue, batiked ones you'll often see hung in doorways of japanese restaurants. the ring is marked out by a braided hemp or straw rope that's been embedded into the clay, and the surface is covered with a thin layer of sand. the rikishi can touch the inner edge of the ring, but once any part of one's body touches the outside of it, the other wins.

as the rikishi enter the ring, they scatter salt into it (as purification, but also, it seems, for style and possibly intimidation) and then squat at either end of it, stretching both their arms outward with palms facing upward to show they carry no weapons and that their intentions to have a fair fight are pure. then there's more stomping, and they approach two lines in the middle of the ring. usually there are several seconds of facing off before one or both get up again and go back to their corners to get more salt. when they come back, scattering the salt around in large, wide arcs and strutting slowly back to the lines, there are somewhat reflexive but also psychologically-intimidating (and maybe meaningful?) slaps of the belly, the thighs, sometimes both thighs at once. i couldn't help giggling to myself when they did that. i think maybe the ring was miked, because oh my, the sounds of those slaps did carry.

after a lot of posturing and fitting-and-starting, eventually both rikishi would squat down behind their lines and put their fists on the ground in front of them. after which all hell broke loose. once all fists were on the ground, usually they charged immediately, with all sorts of techniques: a barrage of loud slapping (to the face and body), or simultaneous head-butting against each other's chests, a momentous push out of the ring, grabbing flesh or mawashi (silk loincloth). some matches lasted a few seconds – much, much shorter than the ritual leading up to them – when one rikishi would just steamroll his opponent out of the ring straightaway. the more exciting matches lasted several minutes, with turnovers every few seconds when first one, and then the other guy almost got pushed out of the ring. the excitement is infectious, and the crowd would OHHHH! and AH! excitedly, and applaud and cheer for whoever won after a particularly good match.

everything about the matches was colorful: the salt-throwing; the box seats which are sections of the floors outfitted with wide, flat red cushions; the rikishi all standing in a circle on the ring in their heavy, embroidered aprons before their divisons' matches; the colorful mawashi; the sweepers who circle the ring during the matches and then who, during breaks, sweep the ring in pairs in half-circles so that there's a faint design on it afterwards. then at the end, after the favorite – the mongolian yokozuna (top-ranking champion) called asahoryu – was beaten by this tournament's champion kaio, people started flinging their seat cushions at the ring. no one was booing or anything, and it seemed more of a happy thing even though it was an upset. and then kaio was given a long, ceremonial bow for the closing ceremony. with the bow he did a ceremonial dance, which involved spinning it and doing more hula-style gesturing, stamping his feet some more, and afterwards: accepting the loot.

i had to leave in the middle of the prize-bestowing ceremony so i could get the deposit back on the radio i'd rented for commentary in english. but before i left, it was like watching a prince accepting birthday gifts from diplomats all over the world. there were gifts from such places as mexico, saudi arabia, france and bulgaria: gigantic gold trophies, three-foot-high crystal goblets, framed gilt plaques, what looked like a bale of hay or a giant tamale, huge and elaborately enameled chinese-style vases edged with gold, and when i went outside there was a white toyota convertible parked outside and roped off from the commoners.

if you managed to wade through all that, here's salt in your eye!

hey americans, your vote doesn't count

...if you're serving in the military in, say, iraq or afghanistan,

or if you happen to live abroad.

but wait! if you do live abroad (and aren't too busy getting shot at), you can register here to get an absentee ballot.

amazing things japanese people can do on trains

1. after boarding the train and finding a seat, fall asleep so that one's head falls forward or backward and one's mouth falls open (lots of falling involved). a mere four stops and fifteen minutes later, wake up just before the train pulls to a gentle halt and stand in front of the doors to disembark.

2. in one smooth movement: board train, sit down. extract compact mirror from purse. dab face with special blotting pad. powder amazingly delicate, flawless face. tip head back and administer eye drops. insert contact lenses. curl eyelashes. pat perfectly styled hair as train pulls to gentle halt. stand and disembark.

3. train-surf like the train ain't moving (ie, balance oneself, swaying only slightly, without holding onto one of those sissy hand straps like a tourist, even when the train does not come to a gentle halt).

4. navigate from train door to correct escalator to correct platform on the other side of the station, then to the exact spot where the train door stops and opens, and then onto the right train, all while focusing one's intense stare at one's cell phone, texting texting texting like one has a homing device planted in one's brain, my god.

5. avoid eye contact with anyone even though the car is stuffed with 398 people.

tango en tokyo

my housemate E said last night that probably if you advertised an event or workshop on – he looked around for something mundane and obscure – crushing beer cans, for example, there would be people in tokyo to sign up. he didn't mean to imply that they've nothing better to do, but that they'd come out of curiosity: what's beer-can crushing all about? let's find out!

he said this as we sat at a small, round, metal table with spindly legs, sitting in pastel-colored lucite chairs, drinking asahi beer out of cans as we watched pairs of tango dancers whirl by across a blond wood floor. because YES, i found tango in tokyo and was hell-bent on attending at least one milonga.

in the kitchen a couple weeks ago, E and i discovered a mutual obsession with tango – he with the music, which he and his brothers have been collecting for several years, and me with the dance, which i began studying more than a year ago. he's a story in himself, a twentysomething mexican-parisian painter fluent in five languages and nearly so in two others. but in today's tale he's just my tango date (watch me flatten him out to two-dimensionality).

after finding the right metro line and the right station exit, we oriented ourselves on the street. walking and talking, turning my hand-drawn map upside down and sideways, we found the spot. and... nothing. closed-up buildings, convenience stores, hole-in-the-wall restaurants.

tokyo addresses are infamously difficult to find, as the address numbers don't follow a logical order and thus do not clearly indicate exact locations. none of the people we asked had even heard of the district we were looking for and i thought maybe i'd copied it down wrong, but in our circular journey we'd actually noticed a sign pointing us towards the not-imaginary district. we followed the arrow on the sign but it took us into twilight-zone nowhere, so we came back around later and attempted to deconstruct the sign's design in an effort to find out whether we'd misinterpreted it somehow (it was just a simple sign, with big arrows).

we walked around the main street and through little alleys, up hills, down hills, into art galleries and onto a bus looking for this place and asking people if they knew where the address was. we were getting so hungry for a sign that we got all excited when we spotted a mexican restaurant in an alley, but this building had no crucial fourth floor. then we came upon some 'international forum' ground-floor gallery space serving colombian (!) coffee and having an exhibit of latin-american (!!) painters. nope. so then E suggested he retrace our steps down the main road while i call the place to get directions.

when i called, i got specific-sounding but ultimately vague directions: 'do you see convenience store A? OK. from that store, walk towards roppongi. if you keep walking, you will see convenience store B. we are between convenience stores A and B. there's a sign that says "tango argentino" out on the street.' *

E and i reconvened and walked from convenience store A towards roppongi. no tango sign, no convenience store B. but... there was a wiry, ponytailed caucasian guy rolling an amp up the sidewalk.

'excuse me, do you speak spanish?' E asked in english.

'uh, yes...' said the guy, eyeballing us. and then we realized we recognized his rather striking face from the tango website. he rolled the amp up to the door, half an hour late to teach the lesson – perfect timing for us.

we small-talked in spanish in the elevator, then walked into a well-lit, wood-floored room with windows along one entire wall and a mirror across another. opposite the window was a well-stocked bar, and lining the edges of the room were small tables and chairs. a few minutes later, the lovely progression of a bandoneon's introductory notes rolled out from the speakers, setting my heart aflutter in anticipation, and the lesson began.

E joined the group for the uninitiated, and i joined the very well-dressed and serious-looking beginners and intermediates. the men looked polished in dark colors and chic pants, and all the women had on proper tango shoes. i started to get intimidated but pretended i wasn't (as is my way of getting through life – via judiciously applied denial and self-delusion) and after the one-hour lesson i turned to see E's face glowing with a huge smile. hooked.

then the milonga started and we got our first beers and snagged one of the tables to rest our weary feet for a song or two. even if you're not dancing, it's so entrancing to just watch people's legs move as they circle by, or the dispassionate intimacy of people in the close embrace.

but it's so much more fun to dance, and this we did until around midnight before catching the last train home. it was an all-night milonga going till 5am... but we'd had a long night already.

the end!
[contents by volume: 75% marginally-entertaining journey, 20% general miscellaneous, 5% tango]


* the distance between convenience stores A and B was about half a mile. and the sign: it was a sandwich board standing in a recessed doorway and was about 1' x 2' (a finger sandwich board?) and painted BLACK (to draw attention at nighttime!).

1000-plus

honoring those who've died in iraq: photos of a vigil held in SF.

car & driver

today, in the process of checking out a family-run duo of ryokan (traditional japanese inns), i rode in a car for the first time since coming here three weeks ago. the innkeeper of the first inn asked if i wanted to see the one his sister ran and offered me a ride there. it was strange to consider getting into a car, as it seems infinitely more difficult to get around that way. it also felt odd tearing down these very narrow alleys with pedestrians and people on bikes looking up indifferently and slowly getting out of the way even though the guy had his foot emphatically on the pedal. people just know that no one in a car is going to mow them down on their walk to the train station. there's no road rage. people seem instead to internalize their frustration and anger and despair and throw themselves in front of trains during rush hour. other than that, i love the train culture. i have not experienced any of the bad stuff: drunken salarymen harassing women and falling off the seats, nor the groping, nor getting shoehorned into a train car by the officials hired to pack people in like so much heel into boot.

so as he drove me, this english-speaking innkeeper told me the story behind his inn. how it had been in business for over 50 years in its current incarnation, and how before that it and his sister's inn had both belonged to their grandfather. both inns still bear the grandfather's name, who had run them as milk shops making daily dairy deliveries (quick, five times fast). the road we were driving – more like an alley, barely wide enough to accommodate one car and the parked vehicles crammed up against walls and gutters – used to be a small river that somehow got paved over. between his english and my japanese i couldn't suss out just when that had happened or why. did it dry up? get diverted? get filled?

and of course in my mind i marveled at how different this scene would be in, oh, saigon, for example. the river wouldn't yet be a street, but instead would be a black canal, filled with trash and raw sewage, and stinky enough to make your eyes water as you drove by. the driver, grumbling to himself, would be dodging the masses of motorbikes at a whopping 10 miles per hour while honking almost as often as he blinked. this driver would probably manage to run at least one motorbike into someone else.

so naturally, this japan story leads to an excerpt from a vietnam story i wrote a year or two ago, about my very first arrival in that country (names and identifying details fictionalized for everyone's protection):

I flew into this airport when I came to Vietnam for the first time. My seatmate on the plane, an overseas Vietnamese guy who ran a restaurant in LA, struck up a conversation with me in his obvious excitement to be back in Ho Chi Minh City for the summer. I shared a cab with this guy – Ken Nguyen – who'd negotiated a price with a driver in front of the airport terminal. The driver left the airport parking lot honking freely while my new acquaintance, taking no notice, asked how long I'd be staying in Saigon. On the road going away from the airport where a small park runs along the left, our cab seemed to speed swervingly close to the river of motorbikes flowing around us. Out of the corner of my eye I watched motorbikes fly towards us as we passed a corner of merging traffic. I must have flinched several times, sure we were going to see someone bounce off the doors, because my cab companion told me, 'Don't worry.'

'Ohmygod,' I blurted, as the driver dodged a family of four on a motorbike, who all glared as we passed.

'It's okay. They drive like this every day,' said Ken.

Then we hit someone.

'Oh,' he said mildly. The driver, angered, shouted and gestured at the guy we'd bumped from behind, who now fixed us with a reproachful, slightly wild look. It seemed that some part had fallen off his bike when we'd bumped him off to the side. Our driver never stopped, just slowed long enough to survey the damage – minimal, apparently – more out of curiosity than concern. Then, peering momentarily in the rearview mirror, continued down the road.

'Oh my god,' I repeated stupidly, turning to look out the rear window. The guy was backing up to pick up the broken part. 'We're just going to drive away?'

'He's okay,' said Ken. 'No problem.'

Thus went my introduction to Ho Chi Minh City traffic and a phrase I would hear continually: No problem.

at the end of my visit today, the innkeeper politely drove me back to the ueno train station, and no pedestrians were injured in the telling of this story.

weekend update

apparently this summer in tokyo has been the hottest on record, and today's one of the prettiest, clearest and sunniest days i've had here so far. which means it is hotter'n heck and would make research* brutal. but ha ha, the joke is on tokyo, because i am taking today off in honor of it being sunday and my staying out till 6am.

so i'm sitting here feeling smug because i went salsa dancing in roppongi last night with my housemate and her friend. not only did i wear heels and a skirt and NOT TRIP, but i also salsa'd and merengued (not to be confused with 'meringued,' for which the trick is to use cream of tartar) passably well after not having done it for several years. the first two men to ask me to dance were plastered japanese fellows who stepped from one side to the other and pointed at me to their friends who whooped drunkenly, but eventually i got to dance with a peruano who did know what he was doing and also forgave my sometimes random basic step because, he said, i had it. hence the smugness.

at the same time i'm rolling my eyes, because while i'm all impressed with myself for not falling down in shoes that most tokyo women can sprint across cobbled intersections in without sweating through their perfectly applied makeup, my little brother is competing in a freaking triathlon today (when today happens in LA). why i didn't get a smidge of those athletic genes, i don't know, but i'm glad he got them because he's obviously using them to better advantage.

and now that i have sufficiently fueled up on coffee, i'm going down to shoot some photos of the famous harajuku goth kids.


* research mostly involving walking around in circles for hours, squinting at signs written in kanji, and asking a lot of repetitive questions. i'm sure this is also listed somewhere in the DSM as some obsessive-compulsive disorder, but actually, it's my job description.

songs

on humid mornings
cicadas singing–and on
cool evenings, crickets

midnight moved

we wobbled in a wavey 7.1 (earthquake, that is) around midnight last night. just like back home.

saturday night

lightning, rain, wet hair
window-rattling thunder and
sweet, chilled asian pear

one plane crashing

on the pentagon plane crash, since i've got 9/11 on the brain:
a video to make you go hmmm.

(courtesy of shane in SB)

disjointed reportage

last night i finally saw 'fahrenheit 9/11' with several of my housemates in a sold-out theatre full of japanese people and a handful of expats. i had an idea what to expect, but not that i would be crying through half the film. added to the fact that i don't watch TV and was living in asia when 9/11 happened, the effect of some of the footage knocked the air out of me. things i hadn't heard or seen before. i wondered what the japanese audience thought. but one of the most shocking parts of it, for me, was the scene where some of the enlisted kids (skinny teenagers) were talking about how awesome it was that they could put their CDs into the tank they were driving and have the music piped into their helmets or headsets or whatever, and how that got them all pumped to blow things up, as if it were a game with a soundtrack.

i'm still getting lost in shinjuku station. there are many levels to the station itself (four, five, maybe six), which also has a multi-story department store on top of it. the southern exits have proven impossible for me to find without getting to the street first and then orienting myself that way. otherwise i just get stuck at turnstiles and entrances to subway lines i don't want to board. i feel like i'm inside a video game where i haven't found the secret trapdoor or drunk the bottle that says 'drink me.' however, i'm moving on to the next neighborhood—level 2, beep boop boop—tomorrow and hope to have a little break from highrises and giganto-malls. new subway lines and train stations to get lost in, banzai!

for lunch today i had a sushi special that included a roll with fish that came out of a tube, just like the much-savored swedish kind,* except surprisingly not tasty... in fact, so surprisingly untasty that i couldn't eat it. on the upside, i am almost daily treating myself to kusamochi, a sticky rice blob with a type of mugwort kneaded into it, and stuffed with or rolled in sweet azuki bean paste. one of my favorite snacks when i was little.

tokyoite umbrella patterns. if you are a guy, especially a serious businessman in a dark suit, you carry a clear plastic one. if you are a woman, an old man, or a child, then you carry an umbrella decorated with some kind of pattern—pastel stripes, retro print, flowers, cartoon characters—and if you are a real frou-frou kinda lady, your umbrella has scalloped edges bordered with lace.

the other day, i saw a woman standing in front of a fancy restaurant, who in my peripheral vision looked like little bo peep. when i did the double-take, i realized she was decked out in full victorian regalia: a pale-blue frock with a bustle, a parasol, powdered wig, white makeup, white gloves. she didn't appear to work there, but was standing in front of the door, blasé, casually scanning the passerby as though waiting for a lunch date. hardly anyone striding by batted an eye.



* link include bonus ABBA trivia!