Regina Glei's Blog, page 38

Shanghai Trip June 2013

This time around in Shanghai started with the biggest queue at the immigration that I have seen so far in Pudong airport and that on a Sunday afternoon. It took some 40 minutes to advance to the immigration officer

I made my way to the normal taxi booth and almost staggered backwards. There was an over hundred meter long queue at the taxi stand!



Right after coming out of the building and heading for the end of the line a guy approached me and offered in good English: “Taxi with no waiting”? I asked him how much and his answer was 400 RMB which is a ridiculous price. I happen to know that it costs about 180 RMB from Pudong airport to my hotel because I stayed there before.

I advanced to the end of the line and there were two foreigners in front of me and we got hassled by several taxi offerers and the prices went down over 350 to final offer 250 but none of the foreigners reacted and I also declined. These guys run unregistered taxis and are not very trustworthy. One of them said: “Two hour wait”! But I did not really believe that because there were taxis driving up next to us constantly and the line was progressing quickly.

Policemen came by and shouted at the guys in Chinese and they finally left me alone and tried with the next foreigner, with the police sometimes telling them to piss off but they of course stayed and kept on looking for customers.

The two hours was a complete lie, despite the impressive length of the queue, I was up front in half an hour. Faster than with the immigration.

As an upgrade to my previous taxi ride to the hotel this one had seat belts in the back, yeah!

I gave the driver, who of course didn’t speak a word of English, my map to the hotel including its address in Chinese characters. Again that proved to be an absolute necessity if you want to take the usual taxi service and don’t want to pay for limousines.

The taxi driver pretended not to know where the hotel was and called someone on the phone. I have a fairly good sense of direction and I have been to that hotel now a couple of times and noticed the guy made a detour, he drove too far and then toured back. He timed it so precisely that the meter read exactly 200 RMB upon arrival. That’s what he got then from me and no tip. First of all I didn’t have smaller bills yet and second, no tip for a detour (despite him complaining about that).

Traffic went astonishingly smoothly and without any major fearful maneuvers.

The weather… Hazy hazy, hot and hazy. And a lot of that haze looked like smog… More on that topic in the next paragraph.

I rewarded myself for the survival of yet another taxi ride with an excellent dinner buffet at the hotel

During the conference at our office in China, we of course talked (extensively) about the smog. My German colleagues (not so much my Chinese colleagues) all have “pollution apps” on their iPhones. In Japan we all have (the Japanese included) “earthquake apps”, in China it’s pollution apps.

One colleague showed me the announcements of the Chinese authorities in one app and the different announcements of the US embassy app. Apart from the values of the US app being usually higher, the definitions of both sides of what is unhealthy and what is safe are different.

While the Chinese authorities still say it is “safe”, the American app was using the PSI and that one defines anything over 100 PSI as unhealthy. The PSI is at the moment big in the news due to the pollution in Singapore, but for the people in China this has become daily business!

Here is a PSI definition from Wikipedia.

We had the highest amount, about 190, on the 19th of June and wherever you looked there was hazy filth in the 35 degrees humid heat. It looked like this from the hotel window:



Anything above 200 is “very unhealthy” and over 300 means “hazardous”. I did not feel any immediate effect from the close to 200 values (I guess because I spent most of the days indoors), but it is spooky to look into that haze. Such are the hazards around the world. I’m not sure what is better or worse to live with, earthquake threat or heavily polluted air… since I am “used” to earthquakes, I am tending to chose those over pollution.

On one of the days we had no joint evening event and I went to the hotel alone by taxi. The taxi driver took a weird route to the hotel, which turned out to be an attempt to avoid the ever present traffic jams and he drove through back alleys. And what back alleys they were. They looked like full blown slums to me. Completely decrepit and ramshackle houses (I didn’t dare to make a photo). Dirt everywhere, some houses only rubble and piles of debris in them. Looks like no rubbish collection happens in these areas. Next door to the rubble a shack stood where someone sold old – non-flat TVs. Food stalls are crammed in between the rubble and jobless (?) people in threadbare clothes sit in the streets and watch the cars driving by. Then, across one single street a “development” area starts and the slums are gone. Suddenly construction sites and already finished high rises in parks stand around you: Quite some contrast.

My hotel and the new posh shopping mall next door were a mere 500 meters away from those slums but the slum people did not come into this area. I suppose the multitude of guards would hush them away if they dared.

The divide between rich and poor is very distinct and deep. On the flight to Shanghai a Chinese couple sat next to me – the newly rich who have been presumably going shopping in Tokyo, both of them had iPads and iPhones and jewelry on them. Also the clientele of the hotel’s dinner buffet of course fits into that category. They are many many miles away from the slums not half a mile away…

I had some time that evening and checked out the new shopping mall next to the hotel, international brands but the shops were rather empty. Maybe due to it being a weekday or the location of the mall in a yet not “fully developed” area.

I wonder where the slum people will go once they are being chased away from their current residence. I went into the giant Tesco market at the bottom of the mall which was the first shop to exist in that complex and i had been there once before when the rest of the mall was still under construction. The variety in that shop is amazing, also the quality looks excellent and the prices are rather steep for Chinese standards I suppose. I still cannot quite come over the open meat in that shop though. It lies packed in ice openly there and indeed two customers stood around it and touched the raw meet with their bare hands, poking. Now that does not seem very hygienic or appetizing to me.

I bought a variety of sweets there from the Japanese producer “Glico” as a souvenir for my office colleagues at home. Glico’s “Pretz” sticks brand is popular in Japan too but they sell flavors in this Tesco the likes of which I have not seen in Japan. Funny that they produce other flavors in China and I’m thrilled to see how my Japanese colleagues will react to the stuff

I had three dinners with my colleagues, in a Chinese, Mexican and Thai restaurants. The Thai restaurant was in yet another giant luxury shopping mall. A Japanese one -Takashimaya – which I of course know from Tokyo. Except for the food court the department store was yawningly empty. I really wonder how these shops survive and how the many a clerks’ salary is paid.

The weather got a little better in the latter half of the week. Less hot, only 29 or so degrees instead of 35 and more. On the way back to the airport on Friday afternoon I tried to get a peak at downtown and it’s high rises, but unfortunately they were shrouded in smog. This was my 5th time in Shanghai within some 20 months and this time the smog was definitely worst. It was as bad or even worse as in Wuxi in November last year. I can very well understand that also the Chinese are getting worried and angry at the air pollution. Shanghai is still rather well off, I suppose. Beijing, lying in aside valley is much worse and other, not so famous places surely as well. China faces a big task and challenge concerning the environment.

This won’t have been my last time in Shanghai and I am thrilled to see how the smog situation etc. will look like presumably next year around the same time in June again. For now I am happy to return to the in comparison super fresh air of Tokyo.

Enterprise 2.0 Musings

Last week’s blog post was about a very concrete example for Web 2.0 – official Facebook page or not. I will push the release button after I’m back from China and beg for people’s “likes”

This week I would like to expand a little bit and muse about the “company” aspect of Web 2.0 which is summarized under Enterprise 2.0 – for a nice if not exhaustive definition of Enterprise 2.0 you can check this Wikipedia article.

Due to my job, I got a bit involved in this topic and will probably be much more involved in it in the future.

There are many things bugging me about this and the currently biggest is this:

Up to, let’s say, the 1970ties or even 1980ties we did business via phones, typewriters and letters, telex and faxes and stuff like that. Then we got the computer revolution and we got fancier phones, computers and email instead of typewriters and letters. There is no doubt that email made the world faster. All sorts of information, large documents, etc. were suddenly delivered instantly.

Now we have the next revolution around the corner, maybe we will not communicate via email anymore soon but by company equivalents of facebook, twitter, linked in, google + etc.

I am wondering though whether this will speed things up or not? Speed = time = money, speedier, speedier is the ultimate goal, and companies are greedily looking for anything that could speed up their processes.

At the moment I do not feel that social media are speeding things up though. They are rather slowing down, they create digital noise. Everybody throws out random information of whatever sort that he/she hopes his/her friends will take notice of, “like”, respond to, etc. … All that takes time.

Now, companies don’t want people to chat about the weather or their dogs during working hours but about business relevant topics. But even there, they want you to talk about business related topics that are relevant for YOUR specific job and not what department xyz is doing. I think the key success factor for companies in the Enterprise 2.0 area is to get the people to minimize digital noise = irrelevant crap, and to make them to issue the right information in the right amount at the right time to the right people. A mammoth task in my humble opinion and I don’t see a recipe anywhere on how to do that.

If I look into the social media tool that the company is about to launch and of which I am a pilot user I am confronted with an endless jungle in which I have to invest time to find the information relevant to me = it takes me longer than writing a few emails! I don’t think that companies know how to use social media for their advantage yet. It seems to me that at the moment they are counter productive to the desire for faster speed that companies have.

The social media issue is also scratching at another “holy cow” of companies: Leadership. While in the past there was the boss and people did (or did not) what he/she said, now the focus shifts to more cooperation, collaboration, team-work and bosses having to enable their staff rather than issue orders. That in itself is a nice thing, but many of the older generation that grew up with typewriters and letters find it difficult to adapt. Social media could help here or again hinder and make it more difficult for business leaders to decide something.

One thing is for sure, we are living in times of change and it doesn’t get boring!

Any opinions or experiences from your side? Would social media or do social media make companies slower or faster?

Thanks for your opinions!

Official Facebook Page Pains

While crawling through the jungle of book marketing, I am as always looking for more ways to get “exposure” for the least time investment possible. Yes, time investment, rather than monetary investment. Of course, money is also a factor but I am more and more tending towards fiercely protecting my time rather than my money. Time is so much more precious than money – at least in my opinion.

Under this premise I have been doctoring around with an official Facebook page. Of course I have my normal profile but only friends can see that. In fact I made a page for “Regina Glei – Books” already and selected a user name, made a banner pic and all that. But I have been hesitating to press the “publish page” button, since I fear the amount of work such an official page might cause.

I am, after all, already maintaining an HP, this blog, am tweeting occasionally, am facebooking occasionally, have a profile on Goodreads that needs to be maintained once in a while, have an author page on Amazon that needs to sometimes be maintained and I’m sure I have forgotten something now.

Do I have the time and the energy to maintain yet another something?

I am tending at the moment towards the easy way out – I have already put my twitter feed into the Facebook profile and also the “Regina Glei – books” page. My tweets are public anyway, since their feed also goes into Amazon and Goodreads, so no secret here and they can as well be fed into an official Facebook page. Other than that I would of course announce there whenever something noteworthy happens book-wise, like a new story coming out, etc.

At the moment, I do not intend though to “muriyari” post and post and post there like some of my colleagues do. “Muriyari” is a nice Japanese word which means “forcedly” but when you look at the characters you can also read them as “impossible doing”.

If I were to pull “articles” out of my ass every day to post there I think it would be and feel unnatural. I am not tweeting every day but sometimes, when something crosses my path, I tweet several times a day (that doesn’t happen super often, but it does). I like the spontaneity of the tweets, which then feels natural as opposed to “OMG I need to post something today, something, anything!”

While I do admire some of the official Facebook pages and the efforts some of my colleagues put into them, the amount of time this eats up is scary. If it’s spontaneous it also takes less time to do it than when you are under pressure to have to post something intelligent today, preferably several times per day. That is where time loss kicks in and where the effort becomes “impossible doing”.

So I will probably push the release button for the official page (and beg my current Facebook friends for “likes”) after I am back from another business trip to China in two weeks. It would be kind of awkward to release it before China, since during the week in China I won’t be able to access Facebook or Twitter = forced silence……..

Nevertheless, I’d be happy for some opinions on this official-Facebook-page topic from the worthy readers of this little blog

Thanks!

Gig Reports

For many months there was no gig around Tokyo that would have caught my interest but then there were two only three days apart – Loud & Metal Attack (Finland Fest) and Kamelot.

On the 25th it was Finland Fest time which happens in Tokyo once a year since 2005. Since next to Nokia, heavy metal seems to be one of the major exports of Finland the Finland Fest here, sponsored by the Finnish embassy, sports a heavy metal event with Finnish bands.

This year’s menu was Omnium Gatherum, Mokoma, Jessica Wolff, Turisas and Nightwish. Another band, Crash Diet was announced but had to cancel their participation.

The gig happened in Studio Coast – a lavish live house in Tokyo’s east (Shinkiba station).

Start was at 15:00 and I planned to be there around 14:30 but three-quarters to the train station (3 km by bicycle) I realized I had forgotten the bloody ticket at home! Ahhhh…

I turned around, pedaled back like a madwoman and dashed again to the station. Luckily I realized that I forgot the ticket before getting onto a train.

I arrived maybe ten minutes late due to this mishap but did not miss any of the Finnish bands. The first act of the day was the only Japanese band of the event called Liv Moon: A female vocal band singing in a Japanese/English mix. I guess I missed one or two songs. During MC the lady said she had been inspired by Nightwish to form this band. They had a good sound, and she had a nice and powerful voice despite being rather tiny. Even not considering the language there were some distinct Japanese riffs in there which reminded me a bit too much of Japanese pop music. The gig was rather short – which turned out to be characteristic for the day. Every band got only some 35 or 40 minutes, which was a bit too short for my taste. During Loudpark every band got an hour, which is a much better time frame for a festival like that.

Since Studio Coast has only one stage, there was always quite some time between the gigs due to stage rearrangements, meaning that waiting time and band time almost reached equilibrium, which added to the “short” feeling of each gig.

The first Finnish band up was a death metal act called Omnium Gatherum and they are clearly a live band and managed to heat up the audience big time evoking the first “maelstrom” of the event = moshpit with mostly guys running in circles and shoving each other around. I stayed at the side and watched the spectacle.

Next up was Jessica Wolff and I must admit I stayed only for two songs, since it was more rock than metal and since the lady seems to have had a “bad hair day” – her voice was a bit strained and not exactly hitting the tone… I checked out the goodies in the meantime and chatted with a girl I had met at Loudpark the year before and who had come to this gig too – the usual suspects

The next band was Mokoma and my, that’s a fun band. It’s thrash metal and they are singing in Finnish which sounds very interesting! The coolest comment of the singer during MC was – you know, we’re from Finland where we have lots of snow and where it’s bloody cold and you know what, sometimes we have also snow in summer and the next song is about that. They knew how to heat up the audience and caused lots of maelstroms. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a heavy metal musician coming on stage with glasses on his nose. The singer of Mokoma provided this first time experience

Between Mokoma and Turisas I watched some fans getting ready for battle metal = painting their faces in red and black like Turisas. My, these guys are loud! I think a bit unintentionally though, the bass sounded “over-steered” as we say in German and unfortunately drowned out the guitar and the violin and pretty much everything else. That didn’t deter the painted crowd though from the most intense maelstroms of the gig and lots of crowd diving. The guitarist had the most trouble with the heat and his make-up. The red and black warrior paint completely dissolved, lol. Amazingly the other guys’ make-up more or less stayed on. The time for Turisas felt especially short, they had just warmed up and the make-up was oozing when it was already over. Of course they played Stand up and Fight and Battle Metal was their last song.

Between Turisas and the final act, Nightwish, I had a bite to eat at the excellent food stalls outside the hall. Nightwish’s front lady suffered a bit from a hoarse throat since Nightwish had done a full headliner gig the night before. Despite Floor being double in size from Liv Moon, the voice sounded thin and strained, but nevertheless the singing was leagues better than Jessica Wolff.

Bassist Marco’s best comment that night was – oh, we have been having fun here in Japan but alas, tomorrow we have to return home and some of us will go back to their wives and husbands where they will get cooked socks for dinner… lol.

I had sort of expected that Nightwish would get some more time since they were the main act, but also Nightwish had only some 40 minutes and the show was over without encore.

Thus the entire event was finished at 20:00 already. Since they also had one act missing (Crash Diet) it would have been kinda nice if they had given each band a bit more time.

Anyway, it was a fun event with interesting bands and let’s see who will come next year.

Kamelot had their first gig of their short Japan tour three days later. If my calculations and information are correct it has been six years since their last visit to Japan for the Ghost Opera tour.

Their support act was a Japanese girl band called Cynthia. While the girls were all highly professional and had good sound and a good lead singer, they did not really fit to Kamelot in my opinion, being a bit too J-pop. That was reflected in the crowd as well, who gave them a rather cold welcome for Japanese standards and there were only very few hands in the air for the poor girls.

That changed entirely of course when Kamelot appeared and the crowd in Shibuya’s On-Air-East 1000 people venue was right with them from the start. I guess that because of the long break between their Japan visits, they played a lot of their old songs and only four from the new album Silverthorn. That of course means Kamelot’s new singer Tommy was singing Roy Khan songs all the time, which caused me one or the other cringe. Tommy did a great job but I hope he will develop his own style soon and sing more new songs that were written for him. I was very positively impressed by Kamelot’s support vocal lady Alissa White-Gluz from Canada’s The Agonist. The lady has great charisma and does rough as well as clean vocals and her rough vocals for March of Mephisto were superb. I’ll definitely check out her band.

The next gig on the horizon for me will be Avantasia in July and then it’ll be off to the ultimate festival: W.O.A. (Wacken Open Air), yeah!

Izu Oshima Travel Report – part 2

Day 3

Close to nature my hotel was. In my new sea side room I killed a smaller spider, two other unidentifiable bugs and worst of all a large centipede… giiiiiii…. In the morning at breakfast, I met the only other hotel guest that day, a young British guy who had spent some years in Japan teaching and was back for a holiday visit. He told me he killed three of the monster spiders in his room the night before, and that this hotel was the dirtiest he has ever encountered in Japan… Reassuring that this wasn’t only my opinion!

Anyway, it rained 9 in the morning but just about stopped at 9:30 when I left the hotel to catch a bus at 10:00 for the “Oshima Park”. Considering the weather I still thought it was no good idea to tackle the volcano. Already arrived at the bus station I noticed that I had forgotten my sunglasses in the hotel and it was too late to go back to the hotel for them. I see nothing without sunglasses when the sun is out and jogged back to the only sports store of the island half way to the hotel and they sold some sunglasses indeed even if they had only five different ones to choose from.

Back at the bus station I noticed that one of the sunglasses’ arms missed the protective ear piece and pure metal stuck out at me. I wrapped it with a tissue and jumped on the bus, being one of three passengers.

After a ride of about half an hour and being the only remaining bus passenger, I arrived at the Oshima Park, which is a lavishly wide garden with a zoo in the center. To my utter surprise everything was for free. Well, our taxes pay for that, but I am really wondering why they take no entrance fee for the zoo. The zoo has a walk-in bird house with peacocks and swans, geez, flamingos and also some tiny wallabies. The peacocks were very busy appealing and opened their brilliant feathers every few moments. Their hens completely ignored them though

After some falcon and eagle bird houses they have another walk-in parrot bird house. Next to a porcupine, two smaller parrots were busily flying around and two giant macaws waited inside a cage. You could feed them with peanuts in their shells, which you could buy at the little souvenir shop at the park’s entrance.

The parrots gently took peanuts out of my hand, then cracked them open holding them with their feet to get to the contents, very cute guys.

Next they had camels, lamas, giant turtles, all sorts of goats and a giant enclosure with mountain goats and lemurs. They also had an armadillo, sloths and red pandas and last but not least a petting zoo with normal goats, pigs and three donkeys. I asked an animal handler what to do with the rest of my peanuts and he said, oh, the goats eat them, the donkeys eat them, and the pigs eat everything anyway. All three specimen turned out to be very eager for those peanuts.

I’m really surprised they have a big zoo like that on this island in the middle of nowhere. In contrast to Ueno zoo in downtown Tokyo where there are more people than animals, the animals on Oshima have a quiet and I guess much better life – I saw a dozen human guests and that was it.

Among them was a girl from Osaka and we ended up wandering through most of the zoo together. She had brought her bicycle via boat from Atami and was bicycling around the island, which is some 50 kilometers.

She jumped back on her bicycle and I strolled through the park next and climbed down to the sea or at least until there was no further way down (see flickr pics). Back at the souvenir shop I had a late lunch with the only thing on the menu: ramen. Funny, you either get ramen or nothing, well considering the number of guests one’s gotta be grateful they offer food at all! Then I practiced some hiking and climbed around some more in the utterly lonely park and that done waited for the bus, again being the only passenger on board.

Back in Motomachi I went to the sports store and complained about my new sunglasses. Japanese service – the sales lady apologized and let me exchange the sunglasses for another of the five pairs that she had

What sort of freaked me out the whole day was the lack of people on the island. I frankly had not excepted the place to be so lonely. It was great in a way, since this is the main purpose of getting out of Tokyo during golden week, to escape the masses for a while. But the level of expectation determines how you feel about something a great deal. When I went to Tasmania for example I expected it to be lonely and was not “freaked out” in the least. But Oshima did freak me out a bit – I had not expected Tasmania-like circumstances 120 km way from Tokyo!

Day 4

Thoroughly freaked out after yet another night fighting bugs, this time a nasty, big, black cockroach in the loo, I decided to head home and to cancel my last two nights at the crawly hotel on the lonely island. The Chinese owner lady was very friendly though and gave me back the money for the last night and offered to drive my suitcase to Okata port so that I would have more time on Mt. Mihara.

The weather was still not awesome but since this was the last day, I rushed to the bus stop and took the only bus within two hours at 8:50 in the morning up the mountain. There were two people on the bus to the greatest attraction of the island… Arrived at the end of the road before the volcano it was very cold (after all this was 600 meters high) and the icy wind made me happy that I had taken my warmer jacket plus the rain-jacket and threw them all on. No cell phone service was available at the top but luckily they had a public phone – there are times when you still need those! At 9:30 I called the ship company to rebook my return trip and luckily everything went well. I called the hotel once more and asked her to bring my luggage to the port at 16:00.

That done I could relax and turn my attention to the volcano.

It looks pretty awesome and you can still clearly see the lava flow from 1986, which you will doubtlessly note in the pictures. The maybe 45 minutes walk through the extensive caldera to the top of the volcano was freezing cold but luckily the sun was coming out more and more. Some lonely hikers were around here and there but this was nothing like for example my hike to Mt. Fuji where you are standing/walking in line to get up the mountain.

Mt. Mihara’s crater is pretty awesome and the steam coming out of the mountain here and there adds to the “whew, this is an ACTIVE volcano” feat. Interestingly the steam does not smell of sulfur at all. There was hardly any smell from the smoke but I caught a nose full here and there and it smelled like charcoal if anything. It’s been a while since I visited an active volcano, before Mt. Mihara it was Mt. Aso in Kyushu during my student times and it stank so badly of sulfur that my greatest memory of Mt. Aso is getting sick.

When I went to Hachijojima by boat in 2011, I caught the sulfur smell of Miyakejima miles away on the boat even, but Mt. Mihara just smelled like a BBQ fire – luckily

The hike around the crater is 2.5 km long and the views are awesome. On a very good weather day, usually in winter, you can see Mt. Fuji from Mt. Mihara as well, but that day it shied away behind clouds. Around 13:00 I was back at the bus stop and had lunch in the empty, old and run down souvenir and eating hall looking down at port Motomachi.

After lunch, I went back out some more to the “urasabaku”, the “desert on the other side”. This part of the caldera looks like a desert where, for what reason ever, plants do not find enough to settle down in the black sand. Time permitting, you can walk to the other side of the island through that part of the caldera but with my boat waiting, I took the bus back down to the port and waited there for my suitcase, which duly arrived thanks to the hotel lady at 16:00. I had wanted to take the slow boat where you can go on deck back to Tokyo but it sails only once per day and that around noon, so I had to take the jet ferry again back to Tokyo.

I have now been to three of the islands under Tokyo-city administration, Ogasawara, Hachijojima and Oshima and have detected an interesting divide.

Funnily, the furthest away island is the “richest” one. Things on Ogasawara are relatively new and relatively rich, built by dropouts who decided to quit city live and moved to Ogasawara for freedom and sub-tropical paradise.

Hachijojima was once a tourist resort during economic bubble times and is not completely “degenerated” yet, although, in another ten years or so it probably will be. Oshima made a very old and neglected and rather shabby impression on me. What the tax payer pays for, the zoo, the roads, all that is in great shape, but the people’s houses are very old and run-down. Oshima has never been a real tourist island I suppose, it’s not warm enough as Ogasawara is and somehow just too close to Tokyo. The volcano is great and well worth a visit, but the rest of the island…

This “divide” among the islands is quite fascinating me and I don’t think I am done yet with Tokyo’s islands Next could be Niijima, a bit further south (you can see it from Oshima), with 2700 people on it, even older and even lonelier? But who knows, maybe I will next challenge the most isolated one of the inhabited islands – Aogashima, which is south of Hachijojima and there are only 230 people living on it! Despite that there are a few guest houses, checked that already. You get there via Hachijojima, there is one ferry to Aogashima per day.

Let’s see what I will challenge next in terms of Tokyo’s lonely islands

Izu Oshima Travel Report – Part 1

I have a weakness for lonely islands, especially those in the Pacific, and after having been to Hawaii, Palau, Saipan and Guam I started to explore islands closer to home.

In my student times I have been also to Okinawa by the way.

So, in 2011 I started with my exploration of the islands that belong to the municipality of Tokyo. I went to the one in the middle of the island chain straight south of Tokyo, Hachijojima, first – here is the report on that one. Last year I went to the furthest away islands (there are more further south, but uninhabited), the Ogasawara or Bonin islands – here are some of those reports.

Now, having been to the one furthest away I found it a bit odd to not having been on the closest island: Izu Oshima. There are seven Izu islands that lie close to the Izu peninsula and Oshima is the biggest one of them and the one closest to Tokyo. Oshima simply means Big Island and lies only 120 km south of Tokyo. There are about 9000 people living on the island.

The active volcano Mt. Mihara is responsible for the island’s existence.

There are three ways to get to Oshima: by plane from Tokyo’s Haneda airport which takes 30 min, by jet ferry and by ship. Since I love the sea I am of course choosing the ship method. Getting to Oshima with a “normal” ship is a bit awkward, since the ship sails at night and arrives at 5 in the morning or so in Oshima. That’s way too early for my taste and I decided to take the jet ferry on the way to the island and planned to take the normal boat on the way back during the day.

The jet ferry has the disadvantage that you cannot go on deck, since there is no deck.

The ride to the island was very smooth thanks to awesome weather and also I suppose thanks to the manner of motion of the jet ferry. The thing sort of flies over the water at 80 kilometers per hour or 44 knots, powered by two jet engines that make the same amount of noise as an airplane.

Arrived at the island after a mere 1 hour and 45 minutes, my hotel was kind enough to pick me up from the harbor. The inquisitive lady from the hotel talked me up immediately and it turned out she is Chinese, living in Japan for over twenty years and since five years ago on Oshima. Funny that two foreigners are communicating in Japanese. Her Japanese was better than her English she said and I don’t mind much which anyway.

There are three main villages on the island, Okata, Motomachi and Habuminato. Okata and Motomachi are the two ports and Motomachi is the biggest of the villages and also housed my hotel. After checking in at around 15:00 the hotel lady very kindly explained to me what to do and where to go. Since there was not much time for anything else on the arrival day, I went to explore Motomachi and the harbor and to do some food shopping. There is no convenience store on the island and the only bigger supermarket of Motomachi closes at 19:00 but at least it was open also on the arrival holiday. Down at the harbor you can see the Izu peninsula in the haze and if the weather is really nice you can even see Mt. Fuji, but not on the 29th. The famous mountain did not show itself during the rest of my stay on the island either.

Further south I could see the next two islands in the haze as well, Toshima and Niijima. Maybe one of them will be my next target

At the wall of the arrival hall building of the pier is a hilarious mural with scary kraken and deep sea fish, which I found to be quite amazing. See pics on flickr.

They have a nice park-like area for several kilometers up the coast with BBQ places and resting houses and on the way there is a public onsen with outside baths (routenburo) from where you can see Mt. Fuji if you are lucky. In the park next to the onsen the next awesome surprise awaited apart from that hilarious mural: a man-height statue of Godzilla or Gojira as his Japanese name is. See pics! On the little panel next to Gojira was an explanation saying that in the first Godzilla movie it says that Gojira is reawakened by hydrogen bomb testing and his resting place is inside the volcano of Mt. Mihara and we shall all be nice and well-behaved so that he does not rise again.

Even during the short walk up the coast there was some nice stuff to see – lava fields that look like a moon landscape and rough terrain. Yes, this is very much a volcanic island. Mt. Mihara broke out last time only in 1986. There seems to be ash around all the time, since in the hotel there was a fine black film on some not so often cleaned surfaces. But maybe that was because of the general cleanliness problem of that hotel…

Man, the hotel was close to nature. I killed three mosquitoes in my room, one fly, prevented a giant crane fly from entering and when I returned from the bath a big fat spider sat at the wall and an even bigger one hovered on the carpet in the corridor and I was scared shitless! I have a size limit with spiders, small ones I can ignore, mid-sized ones I can kill but big ones I am unable to kill by for example hitting it with a shoe or so and the spider in my room was too large to kill indeed. Oshima = monster island…

Day 2:

I had a restless night due to the spider attack and didn’t dare to turn the lights out, since I wanted to see where the monster was. What scares me most about them is the thought to have them crawling over me (and biting me). Until three in the morning she did not stray too much for her original resting place, at least not that I noticed when I woke up from time to time and checked on her. Between 3 and 5 in the morning she decided to wander around and parts of that right over my head, hanging below the ceiling. Shudder! I wasn’t awake the whole time but for quite a bit. Then at five she settled on the sliding door to the wash basin compartment and I managed to open the sliding thing and she indeed crawled to the other side and I slammed the door shut, meaning, I banned her to the washbasin compartment. I finally turned the lights out with it getting bright already and slept for another two hours. At seven thirty, when I woke up I looked at a tiny jump spider that sat half a meter from my face on the tatami mats. Well, I left that bugger alone and got up. The big spider still hung on the other side of the sliding door and I slammed its over half into it and thus trapped her between the two sliding doors.

During breakfast the Chinese lady talked to me and we had quite a nice chat about living in Japan as foreigners and about North Korea and China during Mao’s times. I also complained about the spider stuff but she just shrugged, that’s what you get for living “close to nature” was her comment.

Since the weather wasn’t too great, extremely windy and threat of rain, I decided to go to the southernmost village named Habuminato by bus instead of challenging Mt. Mihara. After a forty minute bus ride, I arrived there and set out on foot. Habuminato is the oldest settlement on Oshima. Actually, a shogun or some of his helpers were banned there from Edo (Tokyo’s old name) for not having obeyed whatever orders. There are some of the old houses left with the biggest one of them being a mini (free) museum. There is nobody on duty there, you can just walk in. Somebody opens the door at 9:00 in the morning and closes it at 16:00. You can write something into a guest book and I had to grin at the request on a panel next to the guest book which, if a little politer, asked for not writing crap into the guest book. Another thing that made me grin was a museum worthy old telephone for emergencies inside the house.

Next I made my way to a lookout which also served as WW2 fortification with old bunkers boring into the hill. The wind was so strong that it blew an old lady over who went up there with her apparently son or daughter plus wife or husband and a small child and they quickly fled the place again. Next I wandered around in search of some place where to get lunch but there was not much around and the weather was getting ever worse. So I decided to take the bus back to Motomachi and since the buses run only once per hour in this place you better don’t miss one. Habuminato, as well as the rest of the island is very sleepy, lonely and old. Only two,three people ride with the buses and their average age is 60+. Despite it having been golden week, there were only very few tourists on the island.

Back in Motomachi all hell broke loose with heavy rain and I fled into the harbor’s arrival hall building that sports the mural on its outer wall where luckily a lunch place had still open and I got the last lunch that they served and slurped my ramen soup looking out onto the sea swept pier which I had leisurely walked the day before. I waited until the rain stopped for a moment, took a look at the pier which had “off limits” signs at its entrance and made my way back to the hotel, getting hit by yet another heavy rain shower.

The Chinese lady from the hotel allowed me to change rooms for two nights with ocean view, I hoped for less bugs but was disappointed in that. More on the bugs, other wild and tame animals and Mt. Mihara in this report’s part 2 next weekend

Hal-Con Report – Day 2

On the second Hal-Con day, I held two panels and the first one happened right away in the morning about “Traditional vs. Indie Publishing”. I discussed/presented the pros and cons of the two.

I recently like to say it like this: every author is a tree in the Amazon rainforest – there is a mind-boggling number of them and they all try to get heard and want to be bigger and prettier than the other trees around them. They all look pretty much the same though and it is very hard to rise above the crowd. No matter in what form you are published, if you are not published by a big house you have to do most or all of the marketing work yourself, since neither you nor small presses have any advertisement etc. budget, and also the big houses don’t spend much on advertising new authors these days.

You have to howl like the others do and somehow try to be heard.

The advantage that self publication brings you is that you are in total control of your project and not subjected to publication schedules and too busy small press editors. The advantage that publishers give you is that someone else beside your friends and relatives has liked your book and has endorsed you. However, apart from this little advantage, I see no great difference anymore between the indie way and the small publisher’s way.

One fun aspect of my panel was that I had to say everything twice. Once in Japanese, once in English, since there were non-Japanese in the audience. It was a bit confusing and exhausting but also fun to juggle the panel on my own in two languages.

I had given my second panel in the afternoon the odd title “Time Management for Authors”.

At first I threw two readings at the audience, one from “She Should Have Called Him Siegfried” and right after that one from my latest publication the contemporary fantasy novella “Lord of Water”. The former one is on YouTube since last week, the latter I uploaded right now.

After those two readings, I showed the audience a little mind-map I made about tasks an author has nowadays. There is so much more than sheer writing and trying to improve your craft. There is workshopping, social media as one big branch and submission wrangling as another big branch of marketing. Then there are all the issues surrounding publication: All the tasks you have when doing it yourself and the not significantly fewer tasks you have when going via a publisher. Another big branch is reading in your field and reading in general and last but not least there are conventions.

Now, how do you manage all these tasks plus a day job and family and friends? In my opinion you need to plan, plan, plan, prioritize and organize and plan some more. Pareto analysis is an interesting aspect – it says that you need 20% of effort to do 80% of the work and you need 80% of effort to do thee remaining 20% of work. At least in my case that is completely true. I write quickly and have 80% = a first draft done in 20% of the time. Then I take forever to revise, workshop and revise again and so on. I am seriously searching for a more efficient way to handle the remaining 20% of what it takes to write a novel without having to use 80% of effort. So far I have not yet found a recipe and will continue looking.

I think my panels were well received and thanks to them and thanks to Katoh sensei’s support I managed to sell quite some books despite many of the buyers having difficulty reading them

Busy with my own panels, I did not manage to attend much else, but I must come back to Joe’s Tauran.

In the evening of the first day, one diligent model builder had made a model of the Tauran and presented it to the Haldemans, who were of course highly impressed by the speed and quality of the work. I don’t know who got the Tauran in the end Then, Katoh sensei did a life painting and he used the Tauran as well. So in the end there were three Tauran’s, Joe’s whiteboard original, Katoh sensei’s painting and the model. Since nobody dared to erase the Tauran on the whiteboard, the chairman of Hal-Con asked Haldeman san to do so himself during the closing ceremony – see the picture on my Flickr account. I don’t know who got the other two Tauran works

And so the Con was already over.

There was a nice happening though during the dead dog party. Several young Japanese SF writers whose short stories appeared in an anthology (in Japanese) had also come to the dead dog party and one of our staff members (the great lady who allows me to borrow some space on her booth in the dealer’s room) dragged them one after the other before Joe to greet him, talk to him and shake his hand. One guy was incredibly excited and half collapsed and I was doing simultaneous translation for him. The admiration and devotion was great to see and it was fun to translate.

I think we had a great convention and thanks a lot to the Haldemans for coming and a special thanks to Katoh sensei for his support for me little aspirer

I’m looking forward to next year’s Hal-Con already.

Hal-Con Report – Day 1

The Hal-Con is our annual international convention in the greater Tokyo area with one foreign guest of honor (GoH) and usually his/her Japanese edition cover artist as the artist GoH.

The convention started in 2010 and is the staff’s training ground for another SF Worldcon in Japan.

Our guests so far have been Charles Stross in 2010, Robert Sawyer in 2011, Alastair Reynolds in 2012 and this year it was Joe Haldeman (and his wife Gay).

This year’s artist guest of honor was Naoyuki Katoh again. He was already our artist GoH in 2011, since he does the Japanese covers for Robert Sawyer as well as Joe Haldeman.

So, in 2011 was the first time that I met Katoh Sensei and then was so bold to ask him if he could do covers for my books as well and he agreed

This year’s event started out with the usual opening ceremony and was soon followed by an initial GoH interview where staff members had gathered random questions for the two GoHs and threw them at them.

The highlight of this session was that someone from the audience asked what a Tauran from the “Forever War” actually looks like and since Haldeman san is quite an illustrator himself, Katoh Sensei teased him into – why don’t you paint a Tauran onto the whiteboard over there? – and that is what Haldeman san did to the great joy of the fans.

You can find pics of the Tauran and other impressions from Hal-Con on my Flickr account, and it became a continuous theme throughout the rest of the convention.

Joe also gave us some info concerning his writing process. He started out writing on a type writer, then used one of the first Apple computers for five years until he decided to write in long hand. Ever since, he writes with fountain pens into bound (empty) books and it takes him about 18 months to 2 years to finish a novel. Since he writes at such a slow pace, he usually does not much revision at all. What comes into the bound book via fountain pen is more or less the finished product. It was very interesting for me to learn about his writing style, since mine is so completely different – hack first draft into the computer as fast as possible (my record is five weeks) then let it rest for a while, and revise and revise and workshop and revise and revise.

I then had my first official action (apart from jumping in as simultaneous translator at the GoH interview panel) and interviewed Gay Haldeman, Joe’s wife. The two are an inseparable team. While Joe writes the books, Gay does most of the administration and correspondence and deals with the business side of writing, which is awesome for Joe of course, since he can thus focus on the creativity part. Both also teach at MIT during the fall, Joe teaches creative writing and Gay teaches English as a foreign language.

Joe and Gay are now married 48 years and Joe tested whether Gay likes SF before he proposed

In the last panel of the day, Joe read from his short story Blood Sisters, which found its way into the Hal-Con book of this year and then answered more audience questions.

At the art show I was very astonished to learn that Katoh Sensei had thrown in a print of the Dome Child cover he made for me and the pic was up for auction. Wow! Thank you!

The day was concluded with the GoH party in the con hotel and its obligatory bingo session. It was a great first day of the convention.

And although the readings happened on the second day, I just uploaded the first reading from my novel “She Should Have Called Him Siegfried” to YouTube.

Stay tuned for next weekend’s report on the second convention day, where I had both my own panels on “Indie vs. Traditional Publishing” and “Time Management for Writers”.

Greetings from Hal-Con

I’m currently on my way back home from the first Hal-Con day. A full report about the seminars will happen next week.

I just feel the need to mention that I’m very happy to see our artists guest of honor Mr. Naoyuki Katoh having put up a print of my Dome Child cover for auction. It looks so cool I’d love to have it myself but feel awkward bidding for it

Thanks to that I need to bring more Dome Child copies tomorrow for sale, since the five I brought have sold out

Katoh San did the Japanese covers for Mr. Haldeman’s books, that’s why we asked him again to be our artist guest of honor.

Pretty tired now, please stay tuned for the real Hal-Con report next weekend.

Company Zombies

Last week I wrote about horror movies, this time about the horror of real life

I attended two company related trainings recently, one about intercultural competence and one about project management. Don’t worry, I won’t bore you with the contents of those seminars but rather with an observation concerning some (Japanese) colleagues participating in such seminars.

First of all some (very simplified and shortened) take-away from the intercultural seminar: in Asia people learn “Confucius” style in school – they absorb information top down and do not challenge the teacher and prove what they learned in tests. In Europe and the Americas people learn “Socrates” style in school – they debate, they challenge the teacher, they ask why and the more “active” you are, the better is your evaluation.

This brings with it that Asians are “listener responsible” = it’s your fault as a receiver if you don’t get it, and Europeans (and North/South Americans) are “speaker responsible” = it’s the teacher’s fault if the students don’t get it. This makes Asians good listeners and Europeans (and North/South Americans) bad listeners, and bad speakers vs. good speakers respectively.

Another “result” of this general behavior (of course there are always exceptions) is that in Asia students tend to be rather passive, also in all the courses that I am sitting in either as a student and recently ever more as a teacher.

In the stuff I teach (moderation techniques) people are forced to be active by the sheer nature of the methods conveyed and the issue did not “jump” at me so badly. One of the reasons for that is that the people who come to my courses usually want to do it and bring some motivation and mental preparation with them. But the four day project management course I just attended as a student showed me the “usual” reality again in sledgehammer style.

We were 14 people and four of them were Europeans, the rest Japanese and Chinese participants and who ran the show? The four Europeans. (Well, actually one Australian, and three Germans). There is the issue of language barrier of course, since the course happened in English, but it’s so much more than that. It’s that passive versus pro-active behavior.

One guy drove me nuts. Over fifty, stiff as a log, not participating in any teamwork, just standing/sitting there with a hunted and scared expression on his face. He did not say more than 50 words during the entire four days and produced no idea, or contribution whatsoever. He was obviously sent to the seminar by his boss, and it was a total waste of time, money and resources to “educate” this guy. A zombie from The Walking Dead would have had more benefit from the seminar than this person.

Confucian system or not, I also see a lack of mindset behind learning. I am eagerly jumping at whatever opportunity I get for learning and it doesn’t get into my head that other people don’t want that. Well, it should get into my head, since I know from all my workshops that people are not fond of change, but nevertheless, it don’t understand how people can be so passive and bare of energy. The desperate attempt of this guy’s boss to breathe some life into the zombie has in this case miserably failed.

Another observation I am making again and again in seminars I am attending as teacher as well as student is, that Japanese women are way more active than Japanese men – at least in our company. Let me introduce a zombie ratio.

Categories: alive – zombie – positively dead

Japanese male colleagues: alive 60% – zombie 25% – positively dead 15%

Japanese female colleagues: alive 90% – zombie 8% – positively dead 2%.

Since our female staff is quite much in the minority, the girls can’t save the day.

Anyway, it saddens me to see the passivity of the Japanese colleagues and to see the “Westerners” taking over – as so often. I have not yet found a recipe or an idea about how to tease these zombies back to life… if I find a method, I’ll write a non-fiction book about it and it’ll sell millions of copies. I already know the title, if unfortunately not the contents: “How to re-animate your company’s living dead”…