Electric Vehicles (EVs)

An electric car is still a car with all of its inherent problems except the exhaust from the tailpipe. It steals space with roads and parking. It's a fast, dangerous piece of machinery that shouldn't mix with people, but is allowed to. It doesn't solve a basic issue with cars; the privatization of transportation. It doesn't make us any slimmer or get us exercising more. It still needs insurance, fuel, and maintenance, and still causes traffic jams and stress. It's the illusion of a new green panacea. It lets us assuage our consciences without making any basic changes. With it we can stay in the suburbs, cling to our old lifestyles, and gain the panache of change without the substance.

ピッツェリーアヴィアナポリ

今日、お天気がよかったので、突然魔が差して、”ピザが食べたい！ポタリングしたい！”と思って、矢板へ向かって行きました。初めての矢板でしたが、予想した通り小さな都市、（大きな町？）です。ま、でも矢板見物を後回しにして、今日はピザを食べに来ました。先日、ローカル誌に載っていたヴィアナポリというピッツェリーアがまあまあ駅の歩ける距離内にあって、（第一条件満たされた）、そして美味しいピザを作るにはなくてはならない石釜がお店に置いて有ります。こんな店が矢板に有るのはちょっとびっくりでしたが、トライしてみようと決めました。矢板は宇都宮より更に３０分北にある町で、駅を出て、携帯の地図を見ながら１５分ぐらい歩いたら、お店にたどり着きました。結構賑やかで、満席だったのでウエーティングリストに名前を書き、呼ばれるのを待ちながら隣に座っていたお客さんとおしゃべり。ちょっとすると、タイミングが良かったせいか、あまり待たないでテーブルへ案内してもらいました。ロマーノピザ（モッツァレラチーズ、バジリコ、アンチョビ）を頼み、先ずサラダが出てきました。折角の日曜日なので、久々のビールも。ピザが来たらサイズにおったまげた。大きい！アメリカンサイズみたい！でも、お店の方は残した分を持ち帰り用にしてくれました。デザートはノッチョーラというヘーゼルナッツのジェラート。最後にエスプレッソをもらって、失礼しました。僕の条件は全部クリアーしました。１。食べ物は美味しかった。２。対応はフレンドリー。３。お店の雰囲気は居心地良かった。４。お店まで楽に歩けた。又，行きます。

矢板駅

サラダとイタリアンビール

ロマーノ

持ち帰り用の残り物

ジェラート

エスプレッソ

Autonomy

Autonomy. 

Recently on Streetfilms I saw a video describing a progressive narrowing of children's range of mobility over the last forty to fifty years. Children who once had the freedom to explore and roam their towns and villages are now restricted to their streets, virtual prisoners to small proscribed areas in their neighborhoods.  The cause, a car centered transportation system and ultimately federal, state and local policies in thrall to the car. 

When I was young I had a great deal of autonomy in my mobility. My parents rarely had to chauffeur me anywhere. I walked to school, walked downtown, rode my bike to friends' houses and stores. I was not a rarity. It was the norm for children in my town to be independent. I was free to explore woods and fields and make little field trips. This independence nurtured autonomy:  planning what to take, contacting friends and what routes to take. Coming and going were up to us, within reason. Our independence gave us and our parents the freedom to be free of each other for a while, a healthy need. 

Children in Japan still have access to the autonomy which has been lost in America. School buses are not the norm here. Students are expected to get to school on their own. They walk, bike or take public transportation. In most of Japan, chauffeuring your children doesn't even occur to parents. Movement is one's personal responsibility here, from elementary school onward. Safety is not a concern as Japan is incredibly safe. (Safety is a given here). And most children move in groups. As a result, like me when I was a child, their activities place much less stress on their parents than their American counterparts. 

If we wish to give autonomy back to children, we must give them safe, car-free ways to move about. We need more road diets, more human-interaction-friendly streets, more separated bike lanes, more public transportation and zoning reform. This would allow the facilities children, and by extension all people, use daily to be reached within safe walking or biking distance and those long haul errands done by public transportation. 

A life of autonomous mobility recognizes our need to provide transportation that serves a broad set of values: health, equity, community, environment, safety, work, and pleasure. When we recognize that car centered design is more a burden than a liberator, then, hopefully, we will take action to change it. 

There's So Much to Learn

I started gardening again last May after roughly a 40 year absence. I don't remember gardening with much fondness or enthusiasm when I was a child. It was a chore. An inescapable duty as a family member. This was due to youth perhaps. Wanting to be with friends rather than weeding or rotatilling or watering or the hundreds of other things that need to be done to make a garden productive. 

I was in my head much of the time then. And gardening requires attention. To be successful at it requires active participation. Thoughts of drawing, Mad magazine or Saturday morning cartoons were distractions. Unfortunately, they were also my mantras. 

My parents had no such distractions. My dad loved work in general and coming from a farm family had the requisite knowledge for gardening: what the best fertilizer was (aged horse manure), composting, making sure any wood ash ended up in the garden, when to till, how deep to plant, when to plant, when and how to thin, what to plant next to what to keep away pests, what to grow yourself and what not to waste one's time on. 

My mother knew much of this also and was in charge of provisioning us through the long New York winters. From late August to October she was busy canning beans, tomatoes, pickles, and applesauce. Our basement shelves were lined with jars of yellow, green, red and pink. Like so many jarred vegetable soldiers waiting to be called into action. Our root cellar was full of white and red potatoes, onions, apples and squash. Our garden was a cornucopia; I slept walked through most of the experience. 

So, here I am. Approaching my sixth decade and just now rediscovering gardening. So what's different this time? It's not the solitary activity it once was. My mentor, Mr. Maeda, is generous with his knowledge and patient in teaching me about gardening. We talk and I learn anew or am reminded of things buried in my subconscious. How to use a hoe, how to thin, how to plant, when to plant. But, of course, some things are different. I've learned how to construct a hotbed to give sweet potatoes a jump on the gun. I know how to plant and thin daikon radish, a skill unneeded in the an American garden. I've planted sweet potatoes and peanuts for the first time, learned that peanuts don't need chemicals or pesticides to thrive and are therefore safe to eat no matter what their country of origin. The drives to and from the field are filled with conversation about topics I didn't know previously: rice fields are kept full of water until about two weeks before harvest to keep the weeds down; sweet potatoes and peanuts will not grow much further north than where we live; northernJapan is too cold for most root vegetables; there are two kinds of fireflies in Japan. It's all very edifying.

I know so little still. If I had to survive on my present skills as a farmer I wouldn't last a year. That knowledge gives me tremendous admiration for the millions of small farmers around the world who manage to feed their families year after year. It also explains why farming is an inherently conservative occupation. One doesn't meddle with success until what you are doing doesn't work any more. Tradition and experimentation in equal parts. It's a constant puzzle to figure out how to stay ahead of the game. 

There's so much to learn. 

The Pea Patch

As usual, Thursday was field day. It was warm, but not hot. It had rained a little earlier and had fortunately spared us in the field. We hilled potatoes, dug up and transplanted green onions and harvested what was ready. The beans that we planted and and trellised about a month ago are now coming on. The beans are difficult to pick as they are the same color as the leaves. You have to constantly change your angle to see them.

As I was picking, a little salamander skittered out from the leaves. He must have been hunting insects. The bean patch is a micro-jungle full of all sorts of tempting delicacies for a salamander, I'm sure. He stayed very still and I reached over the top of the trellis and shot this.

The pheasant was very vocal, crying from various places on the perimeter of the field. I glimpsed him briefly in the next field of pampas grass. I did not see his mate, but then she blends more easily with the dun color of the pampas.

It is interesting how quickly vegetation becomes an ecosystem for whatever critters are in an area. We have a type of badger that makes its appearance in the summer. It's nocturnal so I haven't seen one as I'm there only in the daytime. The badgers love what people love: corn, tomatoes, eggplant and peanuts. Insects are prolific and are a major problem in an organic garden. Last year most of the potatoes were ruined. A type of lady bug decimated all the leaves on the plants and stunted the potato growth. The harvest was a disaster. Most were hardly bigger than the seed potatoes we originally planted. Mr. Maeda says that can't be helped. You have to figure in a certain amount of loss in organic gardening. He said that if he was doing this for his survival he would judiciously use pesticides as needed. But he isn't. So he doesn't. He prefers not worrying about it and being able to eat his produce without the concern of chemicals. It's obvious that the wildlife prefer it that way.

Hunger

In 2006 I went to Guatemala for three weeks of Spanish language training. I didn't learn much Spanish, but I did get quite an education. I got a front row seat to globalization. It wasn't pretty.

I spent three weeks in Antigua, a popular destination for tourists and Spanish learners. The language school was staffed by locals who may or may not have known anything about pedagogy, but it provided them income and most of their students, me excepted, were fairly comfortable in Spanish anyway. The city was old, the first capital of Guatemala, and therefore full of historic churches, a lovely square, and cobblestone streets. Amidst the historic grandeur of the past, however, my fellow students and I were constantly accosted by people selling beads, hand-woven clothes, and knick-knacks. They were overwhelmingly women and children and they were everywhere: on the street, in hotel lobbies, in cafes and in restaurants plying their wares until they sold something or were chased off. 

My host family provided two meals a day, breakfast and dinner. Meals were simple and good, but I noticed at the market that prices were expensive. My fellow students and I sometimes went to restaurants at night on weekends; Not fancy places, rather average. Surprisingly, prices were not any different from prices in the US. There were almost no Guatemalans to be seen in these establishments other than the staff and the ever-present women and dirty, barefoot children selling things. Our host mother said that life was hard for the average person. The wealthy were doing well, she said, but that was only a tiny fraction of the population. According to her, most people were struggling. 

The children I saw were gaunt. Hollow cheeks and rather short in stature, attesting to a life without enough to eat. One evening two children approached the table where some fellow Spanish teachers and I  were having dinner to sell us beads and hand-woven bracelets. Although we didn't buy anything, my Spanish speaking friends began talking to them. "Where are you from?", "Where are your parents?" (No parents. Grandmother took care of them.) "Where do you live? (Under a bridge.) We let them sit down and ordered dinner for them. The Guatemalan waiter didn't look too happy about two little waifs of maybe ten and eight sitting at the table with us, (we were surrounded by other tourists), but since they were there at our invitation, he didn't say anything to them. Toward the end of the meal, the grandmother came along and put the remains of the meal in a plastic bag. She looked very tired and very old, although I don't know for sure how old she was. They said thank you and disappeared into the night. I still remember their faces. 

Other than learning Spanish, the main purpose of our trip was providing school supplies to a school in a small Mayan village. We had all brought pencils, pens, paper and articles of clothing such as T-shirts, sandals, and jackets for the children. Their school was a small two story concrete building that had been constructed with aid from a German NGO. It seems that the Guatemalan government does not see  building schools and providing texts and teachers to poor Mayans as its responsibility. The teachers lined their students up for the supplies that they had organized into bundles.  The students were grateful. The teachers were grateful. I felt inadequate and quite humbled. But I could leave. They stayed. It was dizzying to look into the maw of poverty and exploitation

Guatemala changed me. I saw people hungry in a land of plenty. Most of the land was under the cultivation of multinationals. Rows and rows of bananas, broccoli, mangos, etc. People in the country walking miles to springs for clean water. Pickup truck "taxis" full of people in the back, roadsides littered with plastic bags ands water bottles. Roads you had to be careful on because of bandits. Tiny plots tilled on mountains because the best land had been confiscated for bananas. And then coffee. And then asparagus and broccoli. Gaunt children and a drunken man staring at our bus at a rest stop. Like Native Americans everywhere, the Mayans of Guatemala are exiles in their own land. These were the images of in-your-face globalization that have been branded into my memory. It's not happy. It's not up-lifting and it's not democratic. Guatemala's gift to me was to let me witness it first hand. 

The 5-2 Diet

I stumbled across an article on this diet reading the Guardian the other day. I was thinking about my health and was fairly satisfied with the progress I had made here - losing weight, walking more, riding my bike, eating and snacking less. However, somehow, this diet made sense to me for the simple reason that it didn't really seem like a diet. It doesn't require anything I can't do. On this diet you fast two days out of seven.  Two consecutive days of fasting is not encouraged. I've fasted in the past and was able to do it as long as I kept busy. My first day fasting was busy. I worked, and followed my usual routine minus breakfast, lunch and dinner.  There were no particular urges to run to the local convenience store for a snack or raid the fridge.

I looked at the Wikipedia page on the Fast Diet and under criticism was the following:

According to the UK National Health Service there is no evidence that the diet meets its claims of benefit and that "due to the very real uncertainties about the 5:2, especially as little is known about whether it could be harmful to health in the long-term, most health professionals would recommend you stick to the tried and trusted methods for weight loss and disease prevention."

NHS goes on to label it a "fad diet" that can be "bad for your health." ^[5]

I am usually skeptical of diets, but I'm even more skeptical of government organizations that are critical of something that would have profound impacts on the way we eat, purchase and choose food. It would seem that there is a vested interest in preserving the status quo. 

For most people, tried and true methods of weight loss and disease prevention, that is, diet and exercise, don't work. We have been seduced by sweet, salty, fatty foods. Exercise is something we have to add to our life rather than it being a natural part of it. Essentially, we have to go out of our way to be healthy.

The beauty of this diet is that it does not require us to make any radical changes other than cutting down on eating for two days of the week. Why is this bad for your health? Westerners eat too much in general.  The real threat is probably the harm it might do to major supermarket chains if people go to the store less, not if  "you stick to the tried and trusted methods for weight loss and disease prevention". For most people those tried and trusted  methods involve medicines with rather severe potential side effects. They also do not allow our bodies to use their potential to heal ourselves. If the possibilities of treating cancer, heart disease, lowering cholesterol and blood pressure, and controlling insulin levels can be ameliorated with something as simple as fasting, then long term clinical studies would seem to be warranted. I hope the NHS plans to carry some out. 

In the meantime, I will take the plunge. I already live in a culture that doesn't believe in overeating. I just want to take it to the next level to prevent problems that might be lurking down the road; My mom developed diabetes and was battling with weight control in her last years. She had had bypass surgery, high cholesterol and high blood pressure. That gives me plenty of motivation to try a regimen that can help my body control those risks naturally. Given the alternatives, fasting doesn't sound so radical to me. 

Refuge 2

Religion is a facet of Japanese life that lacks religiosity in an American sense. In Japan, religion is less about professing faith, than it is about incorporating its forms and mores into one's day-to-day life. In Japan the gods are everywhere as evidenced by the many shrines throughout the country. Every house has a kamidana, god shelf, which protects the family from harm. There is a talisman for fire in many kitchens. To make matters more confusing (at least for Americans),  most Japanese households also have a Buddhist altar for departed ancestors. Ancestor worship, furthermore, is an important component of Confucianism, a philosophy which gained importance during the Edo era (1600-1868).  

Japanese religion can be highly syncretic in practice and form. Most Japanese are dualists in their relationship with Shinto, the native animist religion, and Buddhism, the import from the Asian continent. These two religions have coexisted peacefully for most of their 1400 years together here. Both play different roles in rites of passage. Birth is commemorated by a visit to a shrine with the baby. Weddings are performed in shrines (Although, now, in a further syncretic step, many Japanese get married pro forma in a church in order to wear a wedding dress, although the bride often changes into a kimono at the reception later). Funerals and death related events e.g. death anniversaries are the territory of Buddhism. This is due to the Shinto view that death is unclean. 

It's interesting that Christianity, since it's legalization in 1868, has never regained popularity here. In the 1500s when it was introduced by Spanish and Portuguese missionaries it was wildly popular. So popular that it frightened the highest levels of government who saw it as a fifth column plotting to open Japan to colonization. (They were probably correct.) It was outlawed from roughly 1620 to 1868 and practiced in secret on remote islands in southern Japan. Instead of a resurgence of Christianity after it's legalization (it hovers at about 10%),  the Japanese pick and choose those "Christian" traditions which appeal to them. In this case it is all of the secular trappings of Christmas: Santa Claus, gift giving, carols,  the Christmas tree and illumination. 

Finally, it is worth noting that Japan has never had a religious war. The Japanese trait of tolerance, fascination with new things, and imbuing foreign imports with Japanese values has somehow managed to blunt tendencies toward dogmatism and intolerance. Whatever the reason, I'm truly grateful.  

a temple gate

Trees are sacred. What a concept!

A Shinto corner inside a temple grounds. Syncretic!

A typical Shinto gate separating the outside and sacred worlds. 

Refuge 1

Today I went by Kishibojin temple near Ikebukuro. Ikebukuro is very crowded and busy with the typical hustle and bustle of a busy area in Tokyo. However, about a five minute walk away, Kishibojin is tucked away at the end of a tree lined street. A little oasis of green in a residential neighborhood.

main building (hondo) of Kishibojin

transition from sun to shade

The Tour Guide

fish and sake at Suzuden

Tokyo is a fun place to show people. I got an email from a friend in the States the other day,  unexpected but pleasant, and had the pleasure of showing off a few places I like.

First we went to a stand bar in Yotsuya, in central Tokyo. The bar, Suzuden, is also a sake shop which has possibly one of the best selections of sake in Tokyo and by extension, in Japan. They purvey sake to the Imperial household so they have great stuff to sample. (In spite of that, their prices are very reasonable. Cheaper than a night out in a major city in the States by a long shot.) The menu is all in Japanese which I have become so accustomed to, I don't even see the problem until I'm out with non-Japanese readers. I ordered a glass of a brand that I like and I got a different style (slightly sweeter) for my friend and some fish that had been braised in soy sauce and sugar to go with it. We drank it at room temperature which is how I like it. Yum. For some reason, I don't like it heated anymore. It tastes too harsh to me warm.

We then moved on to Kanda. Kanda is an old blue collar area in the center of Tokyo. There are rows upon rows of little bars under the railroad tracks there. I had a favorite place to go, but, as luck would have it they were closed because of construction. I figured this was a message to try someplace new so we tried a little hole in the wall yakitori (barbecued chicken on a stick) place. It was pleasantly old and blue collar and this time I decided to introduce Anna to shochu, the Japanese version of vodka. First we ordered a variety of kebob like chicken parts and then we had wheat and sweet potato shochu, hers straight and mine on the rocks. She liked my on the rocks so we had wheat on the rocks for round two.

A small concession to healthful eating

We split up soon after that. Tokyo is about two hours from home for me. But I want to thank Anna for giving me the opportunity to be a tour guide. I love to show off Tokyo. Next time - Osaka.

shochu and yakitori at ? in Kanda

Seeing

My father was a welder by trade, but an artist by temperament. We often went on drives through the back country to look for stone in Schoharie County where I grew up. One of my dad's passions was masonry and he loved to work with stone. We would find stones of varying shape or color and throw them in the back of the pickup for his current project, whatever that happened to be. At times a wall, at times a patio.

The trips were edifying in that my father never just saw rocks when we were out rock hunting. He had an amazing eye for spotting wildlife. He would be the first to see turkey, red tail hawks, deer, or whatever else there was out there. I can still hear the excitement in his voice upon a discovery. "Oh! Look there's a hawk!"," Look there's a fox!", " Look there's an owl!" No matter where we went there was always a discovery.

I cannot say that at the time I was as appreciative of his gift of observation as I am now. I was fairly oblivious to what went on around me, often in my own world of comic books, Saturday morning television, drawing and solitary play in the woods and fields. I wasn't weird. Just not particularly present and not all that interested in the physical world in spite of my outdoor play.

Over the years, however, I came to share in his enthusiasm for spotting those things which I did not see then. Now when I'm out I see the egret looking for food in the local river, the sparrows flitting in the trees or grass, the sea hawks soaring in the draughts above me, and the pheasants in the garden. This awareness of my surroundings has taken time and training. But the spark was definitely planted by my dad. This gift has helped to hone and broaden my artistic eye and for that all I can say is, "I miss our drives, dad".

Mamachari

I am a two-bike household. I have a small folding bike and another bike known as a mamachari. If a Japanese household owns a bike, it will, first and foremost, be a mamachari. This bike is ubiquitous here. Children and adolescents commute to school on them, police patrol on them, salesmen make their rounds on them, and housewives shop with them. In fact in Utsunomiya where I live, the bicycle commute rate to school is about twenty percent of the population at large.

As you can see, the bike is very utilitarian. It has those accouterments that were common to  bikes when I was a boy. Standard equipment on a mamchari are a basket for grocery shopping, a kickstand (remember those?), a bell, (which is one reason it's called a mamachari - mama for "mom" or housewife, and chari for the sound the bell makes to the Japanese ear - "chari chari"), a clamshell lock to make locking your bike quick and easy and a light generated from pedal power. Gears are either a basic one speed for most bikes or a three speed for the more upscale crowd. There are also electric assist models for the elderly or physically disabled. For mothers with small children there are child seats which can be attached to the front or the back. It's the two-wheeled version of a small truck.

The mamachari is very affordable. For a basic one-speed model you can expect to pay around $120.00. This makes the bike an inexpensive means of transportation for everyone.

Why are mamachari so popular here? Part of it is zoning. Since Japanese zoning is much more mixed than in the United States, going to the grocery store is usually not more than a five minute bike ride for most people. Many small shops and factories are located in residential areas and so people commute to work on bike and even make deliveries with their mamachari. Students are not provided school buses here. For most of them the mamachari is the most convenient way to get to school and allows the Ministry of Education to focus on curriculum.  For many Japanese the mamachari is their default transportation mode.

The effects of this are obvious in some ways, subtle in others. The mamachari is based on the assumption that people need a practical transportation mode other than the car. It comes from a mindset that does not see the bicycle as merely a means of recreation or sport. As most students use the mamachari for commuting (through university) and many housewives for shopping or getting to the station, you see far fewer overweight and obese people here. Exercise is simply woven into the daily routine. Another benefit which a friend pointed out to me is that with a basket instead of a trunk, the tendency to impulse shop is cut down and thus cuts waste. You also see mamachari used across a wide age range keeping people healthier longer. It is not uncommon to see people in their 60s and 70s shopping and doing errands by bike.

The last time I was in the States I noticed that I became completely car dependent. I started to gain weight. By the time I returned to Japan I had put on about half the weight I had lost here. In America, not using your car is a conscious decision. In suburban America where free parking is still common, the lure of the car is very seductive. In urban Japan where parking is expensive, the mamachari offers a viable transportation alternative. Now that I'm used to the mamachari life-style, I cannot look at cars without seeing an opportunity missed in the U.S.