Regina Glei's Blog, page 27

Interview

There’s an interview with me online – check it out

It’s about my Dark Quest Books titles “Lord of Water” and “That One Minute“.

Miyakojima Travel Report – Part 2

I set out at ten already on the 28th of April, because they had said to would rain from noon, so that I could get at least a little bit done but luckily the rain waited until the late afternoon. At first I went to a tiny island to the south of Miyako called Kurima, which is also connected to the main island via a bridge. The rental car’s navigation had trouble finding the viewing platform I wanted to get to and sent me through tiny back alleys, not that I’m getting used to them but since I must go through such alleys to my hotel I at least didn’t freak out.

From the viewing tower one could see the entire tiny island. Back across the bridge, I checked out a popular beach and shortly watched two guys wind surfing with parachutes, they were pretty good.

Then on the road led to the “German culture” village, which turned to be much more interesting than expected. While at least a hundred children were having a picnic on the main lawn in front of the “castle”, the castle itself was closed. Whilst the castle looked like Disneyland rather than “German”, the other “German” building in the distance seemed pretty real from afar. Nobody, not even the kids came close to the second building, which is an imitation of a villa on the island of Mainau in Lake Constance according to some map. The Mainau imitation looked much better than the Disney castle but it turned out to be abandoned and in a state of decay. Lovely! I love places like that and it reminded me of the abandoned luxury hotel on the island of Hachijojima.

The German park was opened in 2000 it seems, not even fifteen years and it’s all in ruins. I managed to take some shots into the building through windows and I got into the kitchen via a broken door, but to my great disappointment the door from the kitchen into the rest of the building was blocked off by ropes. There are some shots of the premises and the half flooded cellar entrance on Flickr. I find such places very inspiring – nice sources for horror or at least adventure stories

Since it was barely noon, I rode on down the southern coast of Miyako wanting to get to a marine park as the map said, but that proved to be just another viewing platform only, which was also inaccessible due to being under construction. So I rode on until the most southern tip of Miyako, a tongue of land with a lighthouse at its tip. Paying 200 yen to the lighthouse keeper allows you to climb up and get a fantastic view over the southern end of Miyakojima. Well worth the trip.



Then I had to drive back 25 km across the island to get back to my hotel. The roads in the south are to my liking = lonely. Ten kilometres inland more traffic welcomes you back to civilization.

All in all traffic is much easier though than in Kawasaki and I proudly rode 65 km that day

After a big thunderstorm the previous night, which caused two tiny blackouts, it was heavily clouded when I left the next morning but didn’t rain, yet. It started raining badly while I was halfway where I wanted to go. High winds made my poor little rental car shake. There was a “famous” beach I wanted to get to but arrived there it was still pouring in sheets and on top of that they wanted 500 yen for parking. Wow, that was the first (and only) time I encountered a parking fee on Miyako, except for paid parking spots downtown, which I kinda understand. But parking at a beach for 500 yen and in rain? No thanks. I made a u-turn and went on to that lighthouse again, which was only another seven km away. When I reached it the worst rain was over. I walked around there a bit and then went on to another beach. It was a challenge to get down the mountain to that beach, rickety, small and wobbly road, but I made it and got talked to by a kid from Sendai who is jobbing on Miyako between April and September selling beach rental gear. Yes, nice life when you are in your twenties, but I hope for him he is not regretting having learned nothing special in ten years or so. I put a toe in the water at that beach and yuk, cold! Not really bathing weather yet.



There were cute little crabs on that beach, the size of a little finger. You don’t see them at all since they are the same color as the sand and then suddenly the sand starts moving and darts away from you! They were too quick to be caught on camera. Nice on the beach but I don’t want to have them crawling over me in my bed! Lol.

On I went to another viewing platform from which I could see next day’s target island, Ikema, and then on to the botanical garden of Miyako. It’s a nice park but too close to the airport and two planes thundered over my head while there. The weather still being very cloudy and not very inviting, I rode back to the hotel. Again 50 km done despite the weather.

Miyakojima Travel Report – Part 1

Arriving at Haneda airport, I realized that it’s been a hell of a long time that I would board a domestic flight. Last time was probably a flight to Osaka on a business trip a good ten years ago. All other domestic traveling usually happens by train or to all the islands off Tokyo via ship.

Therefore I found it kinda weird that nobody even wanted to see my fresh, new 48-page passport when boarding the first plane to Okinawa. I also heavily miscalculated how long it takes to get to Naha. I thought the flight takes 90 min, oh…. It takes two and a half hours, not one and a half. Japan is bigger – longer than you might think.

From Naha then it took another 40 minutes to get to Miyako island. Well, it’s sort of next door to Taiwan already, where I was last year for Golden Week.

Riding a car is still a major challenge for me and I was very nervous because of it and woke up early. Now what? I was supposed to pick up my rental car at noon. (Since the return flight was also around noonish, I didn’t want to pay for an additional day for a few hours and thus rented the thing from noon to noon.) Going to the rental place by taxi would have taken fifteen minutes… So I walked the five kilometers to the car rental! It made me appreciate going to have a car and it also gave me a nice first impression of my surroundings.

I arrived at the rental place at 11:30, had a bit of downtime, then got the car. It was my first time in a Honda N-Box of course and I drove the first hundred meters with hand break on, parked at the side and searched for the bloody thing! Lol. It was a foot break, so no wonder it took time to find it.

Then I was ready for adventure and drove north to a beach called Sunayama, very pretty, and then on to the lonely cape of the main island, then back home, in total some 40 km, not bad for me. Most of the roads were easy and traffic was sparse, max speed limit I encountered was 50 km This island proves to be the same or even worse than Izu Oshima, no way to get around without a car. It’s too big for getting around by bicycle, at least for my pace and stamina.





The parking back at the hotel was a nightmare. I almost hit another car, and almost a pillar. there were maybe three centimeters left before hitting something! I needed a good fifteen minutes of maneuvering before I stood somehow right. Jeez! Nice practice!

I met the lady who is in charge of the premises later and we discussed about the parking and she said, oh, I had thought you’d park in that spot nose first, while I had tried back first! Lol.

We negotiated another spot (the pic below) and that proved to be not much but at least a little bit easier to get into, especially because of no danger of hitting another car, just pillars and walls. I must admit that it helped immensely that nobody was watching my parking endeavors! Lol.

After riding some 40 km on the first day, it was 55 km on the second. Apart from the island of Miyako itself, there are four inhabited islands around it which are connected to Miyako by three bridges. I tackled the biggest bridge and the biggest separate islands first, which are called Irabu and Shimoji. Those two are only a stone throw apart from each other and three tiny bridges lead from Irabu to Shimoji. Heard around 800 are people living there. Shimoji even has an air strip. On both islands it was for the most part very lonely. That’s how I like driving, with no one else around!



Lol. Very nice scenery with lonely beaches and sink-hole-like ponds and my favorite spot, the rock-dotted bay. To the north of Irabu are maybe 50 meter high cliffs. Wandering out there, I fell and bumped my knee pretty bad, sigh. Back over the bridge I had still too much time on my hands and went to a small mangrove forest. But then I got tired of driving, it still costs so much of my energy, and rode home.

More pics on Flickr later, at the moment there is upload trouble, hmpf…

A few words about the island people.

Many still greet you in the streets and not only because I am a foreigner. Then I twice met a 70 year old grandpa from Saitama prefecture on his bike who even spoke two sentences of German. Next I met a couple from Kanagawa, where I live too on the lookout parking bay on top of the bridge, then two elderly men at the Irabu cliffs. Not only the tourists talk to each other, also the islanders greet you. Very nice, that didn’t happen in the Izu islands I so far visited, nor on Ogasawara. Must be outer Okinawan island flair More next week

The Hardest First Draft Yet

Last weekend, I finally finished my hardest first draft yet – the third installment of the Dome of Souls series, whose so far only published member is Dome Child.

The Dome series is with me since „forever“ and once, a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, I wrote them all in TV screenplay formats, then revised them into novels, next abandoned them. Dome Child was originally written as a novel only and represents the very beginning of the series. I wrote it „last“ = ended with the beginning, in 2007 and after endless revisions published it in 2011.

After finishing Dome Child, I turned to other things and started several other series, thinking I would not return to the Dome world. The TV script format version represents my 1 million words of crap, or rather 2 million, and for a few years I was determined not to go back to them.




Let me add that the Dome series is spanning many thousand years of future human history and the four parts that I wrote in screenplay format and the one (Dome Child) that I wrote in novel format, are happening in the same world/universe but at different times and each deals with different characters.

Last year though, the Dome bug bit me again suddenly and without even looking again at the original screenplays, I decided to write the second Dome novel (title is yet a secret, let me call it AA) from scratch. That went very well and I am quite happy with the result. AA was easy to write, since everything in it leads to one big, inevitable conclusion.


Without much looking into the finished AA, I decided to write the third Dome novel right after it, again from scratch. Now this one, let me call it JJ for now, is the central piece of the whole Dome of Souls idea. JJ was the first Dome project and from it spawned all the others in the following order, one prequel (AA), two sequels and another pre-prequel, which is Dome Child.

JJ, the central beast, sits like a spider in the middle and throws its threads into all directions. It is the hen and the egg at the same time. The renewed beast had 120,000 words, but then I discarded an entire story line and went back to about 70,000 words and wrote again up to 90,000, which is the current word count of the „finished“ „first“ draft. I have never rewritten anything so heavily yet and have never fought with a story so much. It feels like I wresteled with Shelob herself! A bit exhausted now, I shall let this draft rest and take care of some other books of the plenty I have still in store, before going back to JJ.




The plan is to release the second Dome novel (AA), which flowed so nicely, around the end of the year and it will be JJs turn then next year. I’m thrilled how I will still like it (or not) when I go back to JJ in a couple of months. JJ must be the natural „end“ of what happened in Dome Child and the second Dome novel (AA) and it also must prepare what will happen in parts 4 and 5 and a probable part 6 that spooks around in my head but that has neither been written in screenplay format nor as a novel yet.

JJ has changed so much since its screenplay days. Almost unrecognizable. I deleted and killed entire story threads and characters, other characters are completely re-invented. I am very relieved that for the moment, I think, I managed to tackle the beast and to whip it in shape. Let’s see if I still feel positively about it when I go back to it.




So, an enforced writing pause will commence now in order to review tons of already existing stuff (7, (yes, seven!) novels, which are written, but not out yet). What a pain – since I have another 3 Dome novels to write. Apart from the Dome series, I have another 6 novels in four different worlds in my head! Kyaaaaaaa…. So much to do, so much to read, so much to write and so little time!

Hal-Con Japan 2015 Report

It was again time for our local two-day SF convention in Tokyo – Hal-Con to which we invite a non-Japanese writer GoH (guest of honor) who is published also in Japan, plus his Japanese cover artist. The guests this year were Hannu Rajaniemi and Noriko Nagano (thanks for coming!).

For the first time we repeated the venue and the convention happened at the Kawasaki International Center where Hal-Con 2011 has happened with Robert Sawyer as the GoH. The Hal-Con GoH’s so far have been Charles Stross, Robert Sawyer, Alastair Reynolds, Joe Haldeman, Peter Watts and now Hannu Rajaniemi.

On the first day, the highlights were a general interview with Hannu san moderated by fellow writer Preston Grassman, and the bi-lingual reading of Hannu san’s short story „Tyche and the Ants“. Hannu read the English original of course, but as a first for Hal-Con, the Japanese version was read by three young voice actors with alternating parts.

I had a little autograph session in the dealer’s room and thanks to Chie san and Rene san for coming! Lol. Next to me sat a Japanese YA author called Tsukasa Tsuchiya, who had as few guests as I did and we had a good laugh.

During the GoH party in the evening, I tried out part one of two virtual reality demonstrations. Goggles and headphone shut you out from the real world and in part one you are inside a giant robot of Pacific Rim style (Gargantia) and bounce around an attack on two (or was it three) ships at sea. I kinda was expecting a kaiju to appear but was disappointed in that regard

I am pretty resistant to motion sickness but felt a bit woozy despite that from the roller-coaster ride the episode put you through. I tried the other demonstration, the next day, Yamato 2199. You at first get a (longish = too long) tour of the ship’s outside, whilst „standing“ on a mobile platform wearing a space suit. At the end of the tour, hostile forces attack the Yamato and there was a bit more action, if far less stomach turning than the robot experience. The Yamato 2199 presentation also suffered from one of the main reasons for why I don’t like most Japanese anime. A „woman’s“ voice explains things to you and that voice is ridiculously high, cute and sounds embarrassingly stupid. = women are cute and stupid and I do NOT agree with that concept one bit.

The second day of Hal-Con was way more busy for me, starting with an excellent panel right in the morning with Hannu, the Japanese SF writer Taiyo Fujii, and myself, moderated by Rene Walling on writing in a second language. Hannu’s mother-tongue is Finnish, mine is German, and even though Fujii san is not writing in English, he checked an English translation of one of his works in detail.

One aspect we dwelled upon was that in Japanese, Finnish and German it’s very easy to make new words – just add nouns or kanji. It’s also easy to make verbs out of nouns and vice-versa in all three languages. Thanks to that we might be taking more freedoms or have less scruples to take them when writing in English.

Another interesting topic was that in Finnish and Japanese you can hide the gender of a person whilst in English (and German) you have to state whether your characters are he/she/or its, otherwise your sentences do not work.

Multilingual people have a quite different approach to language than mono-lingual ones and I for my part am happy for my German background and Japanese capability, even if it makes my English imperfect.

Next up was a difficult to translate panel where a Japanese colleague and I shared the translating. Meiji University professor of information ethics Andrew A. Adams interviewed Hannu on the subject of privacy and information security in the future. The talk covered the privacy setting concept in Hannu’s novel Quantum Thief, current attempts at hiding or finding information by individuals as well as governments (how we don’t know what really happened at Fukushima nuclear power plant or what is happening between Russia and Ukraine, how individuals try to poison networks by randomly adding key-words like bomb or terrorist to unrelated texts, etc.) and that „lies run twice around the world before truth’s got its boots on“. We need a new awareness of how to deal with information, our own, as well as that of others. It will be interesting to see where the story goes, and how we will deal with our future memory.

Finally, it was my turn and I held my by now „traditional“ reading session at Hal-Con. This time I read from the third and last part of my trilogy around the modern day alchemist Hagen Patterson „Give Substance to a Thought“ and from a soon to be published space opera. (by the way, I’m planning to release this one under a male pseudonym, so the reading was not recorded ;-)) Then I got „grilled“ by one of the fans as to whether the space opera is an anti-theses to „normal“ space operas and whether my Hagen trilogy is an anti-theses to „everyone’s dead at the end of the Ring of the Nibelung“. Well, no, not really, the space opera is mainly about the protagonist’s special hearing and the Hagen trilogy is mainly about the ups and downs of Hagen and how he deals with the unusual circumstances he finds himself in. It was a nice dispute, but I’m afraid I got a little bit in the defensive ;-).

Here is the link to the reading from Hal-Con 2014 from my 2nd alchemist novel “To Mix and To Stir“. I’ll upload this year’s reading soon as well.

The dead dog party (the party for the staff at the end of a convention) was great fun and I successfully swapped souvenirs with another fan and got my hands on a signed copy of Katoh sensei’s (he’s my cover artist) a live paint of the aliens from Joe Haldeman’s „Forever War“ two years ago at Hal-Con 13, yeah.



Nothing is decided yet about Hal-Con 2016, but probably see you all there again

Greetings from Hal-Con Japan

I’m at Hal-Con Japan this weekend, report to follow next weekend

   

   

Candy Curse

I have a confession to make. I am a Candy Crush addict. Sigh… what the hell is it with this game??? What’s so appealing to combine reds and greens and yellows and…

I don’t know!

I am proud of having never paid a single yen for the game and yet having made it to level 299 at the moment. In the Odus part, I am currently stuck at level 125 and just can’t get over it and in candy crush soda (with which I started only a few weeks ago) I am at level 54… that’s how addicted I am.

In the past I used to read books on my commute home, now I am playing candy crush, for more than a year or so already. I have several excuses: I have a demanding day-job that requires me to think a lot (don’t get me wrong, I like my job about 80% of the time, maybe even 90%) and whilst riding home to my other, even more beloved job: writing, I find it just wonderfully relaxing to crush some candies.

Usually, I am done with my five lives that I get for free in each category by the time I arrive at my home station. Further, I am candy crushing during lunch break for a few games and then sometimes while watching some series or a movie on hulu. If the movie or series is really thrilling, I quite naturally stop playing but if the movie is not gripping me a hundred percent on the candy crush goes.

So far I have managed to control the candy crushing in that respect as that it neither interferes with my writing nor my day-job. The one thing that is suffering from candy crushing is the amount of books I read. I feel bad about every commute I am wasting on candy crush instead of reading, however most the time I am just too tired to generate the amount of concentration necessary for reading. Another aspect coming into play here is that the nature of my job changed entirely 3 years ago. The current job is more interesting than what I did formerly, but it also requires more brain juice which is making me more tired.

So, there I am, huddled into a corner of the train, squeezed in by my fellow commuters, trying to get those striped candies and packed candies and fishes and shit instead of reading books… sigh…

I do not see a cure. I don’t even know how many levels candy crush has, but I seem to be not even half way through the map. I am astonishingly patient too with candy crush. In every episode there are a few hard games that sometimes cost me weeks to conquer. I stand there in my train corner and try and try relentlessly. I wish I was submitting my novels to cold and unfeeling and mean agents and publishers as relentlessly!

I am just not getting tired of this stupid game. It reminds me of that game in Start Trek Next Gen, where Wesley Crusher fights against his fellow crew members getting addicted to thinking a pallet into a funnel. Is my iPhone sending out similar vibes? I guess it’s the satisfaction of completing yet another level without help of „boosters“ bought by money.

For the moment I am humbly accepting that I am too tired for reading on the commute home and I’m hoping that I will just hit some game somewhere that I can’t crack and that will result in getting too bored to continue and give up on the whole bloody thing… but until then – happy candy crushing… sigh.

The Trouble with Descriptions

In the workshops that I conduct I often use an „ice break“ (interactive, fun, gamefication activities to start a workshop session, to get people to talk, make them notice small (or sometimes big) things) called „Tangram“. It’s a puzzle game that consists of only 7 pieces, two big triangles, three smaller ones, one square and one diamond. Two people sit back to back, one person gets the puzzle, the other person a piece of paper depicting a shape that can be formed by those seven pieces.

The job of the person with the paper is now to explain to the person with the puzzle how to form that shape without showing him or her the piece of paper. It’s always amazing to see how difficult this is and how limited our powers of description are.

The first questions is with whether the person with the shape on the paper sees a form or just a seemingly random arrangement of the seven pieces. Some classic pictures you can form with the tangram are for example a fox, a bird, a soccer player, a rabbit, a dancer, a sitting person, a horse, etc. (it’s another absolutely amazing thing just how many shapes you can create with just those seven pieces). Some people completely lack the imagination of seeing those shapes and perceive nothing but a jungle of triangles.

Those who can recognize, for example, the fox or the bird have a little bit of an easier time explaining. It always helps to convey the big picture first to your counterpart who cannot see the completed shape. This advantage does not necessarily result in success, since your counterpart might have a completely different picture of a bird in his or her head than the person who explains.

Then the details – amazingly difficult to confirm. Some people work with cardinal points trying to convey where the top of a triangle goes, others use a clock for reference, others degrees of a circle and so forth, meaning every person has a slightly different set of references while desperately trying to convey what he or she sees.

Language does not matter. Even if two people speak the same mother tongue – no guarantee for successful communication.

On average one out of ten pairs gets it right. Many get it almost right – one or two wrongly set pieces. Many do not get it at all and the result has not even a faint resemblance to the shape on the paper.

Every time I let workshop participants do this game I have to think of the act of writing. Just how difficult it is to convey what is in my head, the story that I see, to the reader. Will the reader „get“ what I mean when I write it this way or that way? On top of that I am writing in a second language.

I’m looking forward to the upcoming Hal-Con (11th and 12th of April) where I will be in a panel with our GoH (guest of honor) Hannu Rajaniemi, who, like me, writes in English instead of his native tongue (Finnish for him, German for me). We’ll discuss about the difficulties, advantages and disadvantages of writing in a second language.

I recommend that every writer tries to play the tangram game once (or twice) to experience just how difficult it is to convey what you want to say with nothing but a bunch of inadequate words. And maybe I take the tangram game with me to Hal-Con and try it out there too

Fifty Shades of Nothing

Curiosity drove me to see Fifty Shades of Gray – just how is it possible that horrible, low quality fan fiction made it into a bestseller and a Hollywood studio movie? The answer – inexplicable.

I have no intention of reading the apparently badly written fan fiction monster and I cannot judge it, so this review will be about the movie, not the book.

First of all – who did the casting? They should never do casting again. The two protagonists leave me puzzled. It’s been too long ago that I watched „9 1/2 weeks“ but I do remember that Mickey Rouke and Kim Basinger were at least HOT! There was some chemistry going on and it sizzled. The two (to me completely) unknowns Dakota Whoever and Jamie Something seemed like frigid puppets, no chemistry or sexiness anywhere. The girl is cute. Period. Nothing to add. And the guy? Yawn! I had to laugh when several people somewhere in the movie say things in the lines of „he is so hot, isn’t he?“ Uh? What I saw was an passion-less, boring guy in a slick suit.

Everything that happened was way too controlled, the plot is thin, full of cliches (Gray adopted by rich people, real mother a prostitute, etc., you gotta be kidding me… jeez…) the dialogue horrible, it takes way too long (an hour???) until something happens. The build up doesn’t pay off. If you had two hot actors with some chemistry between them, the build up could have been delicious, but… As for the SM aspects, well, this is a Hollywood studio movie not a porn and everything still seemed very clean and timid and I just couldn’t buy it that a real sadist or „dominant“ would be so „careful“.

It’s difficult to walk the fine line in terms of SM on the non-porn screen and I don’t remember whether 9 1/2 weeks was better at it. I do remember another submissive/dominant topic movie though that is an exciting jewel compared to the Fifty Shades of Boring – the movie „Secretary“ from 2002 starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader (now that guy was hot in his days!) as the dominant male. I had no problem believing his relationship to his secretary and it sizzled nicely between them and there were delicious twists of wickedness on her part. The big difference between Secretary and Fifty Shades of Boring is that the couple in Secretary are quirky CHARACTERS, whilst Gray and Anastasia are just puppets that their actors didn’t manage to bring to life.

There was debate about Fifty Shades being degrading to women. Yes, but I think it’s degrading men too to be depicted as unfeeling, non-committing, unromantic, brutal, cold idiots…

I personally feel rather offended by how boring and non-provocative this thing was. It’s simply a lame story, with lame characters, cluttered with a thousand cliches. Take away the (not even hot) sex scenes and nothing is left. It truly is Fifty Shades of Nothing.

I guess every ten to fifteen years we need our little SM movie scandal. Maybe it’s a sign of our times that Fifty Shades of Nothing is particularly shallow and unexciting compared to former ones…

Four Years After 3/11

It’s already been four years since Japan got shaken through by the great Tohoku earthquake, the ensuing tsunami and the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

In Tokyo and surroundings earthquake activity is continuing to decrease, but there are still quite a number of aftershocks, especially in the Tohoku area. Well, M9 was one big quake…

In Tokyo itself all’s back to normal for quite a while already. The last aftermaths you can find in some subways lines that still run with half their in-cabin lights to save energy. Other than that, the office I work in, for example, is hopelessly overheated this winter – no trace of energy saving there.

We all received an emergency rucksack in the office containing batteries, a flashlight, gold-foil to keep you warm, gloves and other essentials. We store them now under our desks together with our helmets. Kinda funny it took 4 years to get those (they were distributed this January), but better late than never.

Personally, I keep a lot more food and water at home than before the earthquake and can easily survive for two weeks or so, should my apartment not collapse. I am finding myself already obliged to eat some of this stuff, since its expiry date is coming near and I am gradually replenishing it with new supplies.

The news were full of Fukushima stuff these days. In the not radioactively contaminated areas rebuilding has progressed quite a lot, as I also saw myself when I visited Higashimatsushima city in December for the company’s Santa Clause charity event.

In the contaminated areas things look of course still different. Most reports were about displaced people who cannot return to their contaminated homes and how they cope or rather not cope with the extended refugee life.

The reports were all rather teary with many elderly people whining to sad background music they want to go home and cannot. What struck me most was an elderly couple who returned to their house 9km or so from the nuclear plant to retrieve some stuff, and discovered that the wife’s expensive kimonos have been stolen. So… somewhere on the used-kimono market are radioactive ones… also, their house was ransacked by wild boars… the only mentioning anywhere that of course animals roam the abandoned areas, eating contaminated plants and digging in contaminated soil.

I didn’t sit in front of the TV for hours, I have only seen bits and pieces but they make you wonder…

While there was no more talk of tsunami wreckage – has it all been taken care of? There was talk of sacks upon sacks of contaminated soil and what to do with them and where to put them. While Japanese TV showed orderly lined up sacks of soil, one Facebook friend posted an article from a non-Japanese news site showing abandoned sacks of such soil on a beach, plunging gradually into the ocean…

Other programs focused on the Fukushima plant itself and philosophized about clean-up taking more than 40 years… One of the three melt-down reactors is now covered in a house, the others are still too hot to send workers close? I didn’t catch the details. 300 tons of radioactively contaminated cooling water is added per day. Kilometer-wide nothing but water tanks. Where to put all this stuff? I do not envy the people who have to deal with these problems.

On the surface all is back to normal – as long as it lasts. The next big quake could happen tomorrow. Below the surface? The waters are deep, that’s for sure and no clue what lurks beneath. I am still not buying any vegetable produce from Fukushima prefecture, I must say, but I don’t know where the salad I eat in the company’s canteen comes from. I don’t know where their fish comes from, or the meat, or the mushrooms. But still, I think we live healthier here, even if we might glow a bit in the dark, than vast parts of environmentally polluted China for example… I do not practice a head-in-the-sand kind of lifestyle, but on the other hand I also think it’s unhealthy to worry day and night and to fall for conspiracy theories. Thus my major concern is and remains the next quake rather than Fukushima… I just hope very hard that we’ll be spared a big one for the coming forty years or so…