Regina Glei's Blog, page 44

Skull Fist Gig Review

Went to a heavy metal gig on Friday evening, (behold, Friday the 13th).

The main attraction (band) of the evening was Skull Fist, an up and coming band from Canada. Their helpers were altrockers Solitude from Japan and a band called Widow from the US.

The venue was a small, but among insiders quite famous, live house by the name of Astro Hall in Tokyo’s sub-culture center Harajuku. It’s a 300 people or so venue right on Meiji Road not too far from Harajuku’s landmark department store Laforet.

I didn’t have a ticket yet and was worried whether I’d get one, but arriving at the hall twenty minutes after door open I found the place more or less empty. Some more guests arrived before things kicked off at seven p.m. But the hall remained only half filled till the end. As far as I could see, I was the only non Japanese guest .

The evening kicked off with the Japanese band who turned out to be solid altrockers and I’ve used that term twice now and should explain. “Alt” is German and means “old”. Altrocker refers to old rock’n rollers, let’s say from 50 and upwards. Well, the Solitude guys were still under 50 I suppose but nearing the mark. I think altrocker is a very cool term and I found no equivalent in English, so I vote for the English community adopting this word

Solitude seem to have a long career already and one could feel that in their experienced and solid performance , these guys know what they are doing. They are a band that chooses to sing in English by the way, with some heavy accent of course, but cute. They had a great sound and a cool bunch of songs that felt very easy and comfortable to headbang to.



I must make note of two special guests that evening, a rock couple had brought along their two kids. The boy was maybe 8 or so and already super cool, dressed in befitting clothing complete with a black hat, a band t-shirt, a silver rucksack and checkered rocker’s pants. The couple had also brought along the boy’s little sister, and she looked like only two years old. I thought, hell, she’s gonna cry because it’ll be too loud. But the little girl sat on papa’s arm and was imitating him waving her little fist about in the air and rocking along!

It looked like the couple and their kids were fans or friends of Solitude, since they left after that band had done their gig. Very cute and especially the girl looked like a potential rock queen of the future

“Widow” is a three guys band with the bassist singing and the drummer on back vocals. Unfortunately the bassist needs to look at where he puts his fingers on his bass now and then and thus is too far away from the mike and half the time one could not hear him properly. They are the kind of band that groups its songs around elaborate and long guitar solos, which were excellent, but I personally prefer songs that are composed for the sake of being a song, rather than to be an excuse for a solo. Thus to my ears the Solitude songs sounded much more whole and invited an emotional response and had a rhythm that went into blood and body.



One word about the drummer though, having played drums myself for a while, I can appreciate how awesome it is what this guy can do, he sings with drumming, which is quite amazing but not only that, he has ample time while drumming. No clue how he does that, but he swirls his sticks around between beats, makes not required movements with his arms like holding them up in the air and so forth. Wow, a very impressive drummer that.

All in all the Widow guys were clearly enthused by the awesome Tokyo crowd which was small, but as always in Japan, very supportive. I don’t know if they say that at every live but they said this was their best gig ever well, maybe it was! Lol.

Last episode of the evening was Skull Fist from Canada, which is a four guys band like Solitude too by the way. The singer also plays guitar and in contrast to the bassist from Widow he did not need to look at his fingers while singing and came across much better as a vocalist. While Skull Fist loves their solos too, their songs have more integrity and are more to my personal liking than were “Widow’s”. Skull Fist are a very harmonious band for being so young and it was a pleasure to watch and hear them play. The skill level of these young guys is amazing, endless hours of rehearsals behind that for sure. I liked it very much that the singer holds his guitar “the right way”. He’s left-handed, like me, and it was balm to my eyes to see a guitar hold the correct way! Lol.



Of course they did their shoulder act, for which they are famous by now it seems. The singer carries the other guitarist on his shoulders and both are still playing, which is pretty awesome. They also understand to make some fun on stage and a highlight for me was their song “No False Metal”. At the intro the singer verifies whether his guitar buddy can play metal or not – hilarious.

Very fun band that could become quite big.

Both, Widow and Skull Fist were stressing the drinking part after their shows during MCs and I’m sure they’ll end on the floors of several izakaya drinking holes during their stay in Japan – have fun guys and don’t start bar brawls

Time – or the lack of it

With half an eye, I saw an interesting program in Japan’s NHK – “Close Up Gendai” (Gendai = presence, our times) while preparing my dinner. They talked for half an hour about the “worth” and significance of one second in our times and the urge in various fields of life, for example sports or business, to break down seconds into ever smaller time units to maximize and optimize results, profit, etc.

Nowadays, especially in the developed nations and even more especially in mega cities, time is something we never have enough of. Sometimes I wonder how indigenous tribes left in the Amazon region perceive time, for example. Quite differently, I am sure, and most likely they will not feel our lack of time to such an extent.

I myself am struggling with time every day personally as well as professionally. Personally because I have three jobs – company (to pay my rent), writing books and marketing them. In my new day-job I am also dealing more with time than in my old one, since kaizen or any form of improvement needs one thing to kick in: Time.

You need time to investigate a problem, then time to find reasons for the problem and appropriate counter measures and more time to implement those counter measures and time again to check if they were effective and more time when you find that they are not and have to investigate the problem again. And time is what my colleagues, who want their problems to be solved, have the least of, since they are drowning in their daily tasks.

So every day (more or less) I find myself preaching to various people that it takes time to change and hopefully improve something, and that they have to invest time in order to save time in the future.

If there is one experience I have made during my nine months now as a consultant it is that if you take the time to step back and reflect on your daily problems, or that if you take a time-out and just have a team building workshop without discussing your problems, people are happier. Trust is a function of time, the more time you invest into it, the higher is the level of trust. Just this week, I facilitated a big team building workshop with 40 people from 6 different nations. The bosses of the team had decided to take a time-out and to not work on their project that day but just on getting to know each other better. A good decision, everybody liked the time-out and gave positive feedback and felt motivated afterwards.

People need time but we have less and less of it these days.

I wonder where that lack of time in our fast-paced society will lead to. One thing seems obvious, more and more mentally unstable people, stress, depression, anxiety, panic attacks…

So what’s a second really worth? More than any money can buy, I think.

Dexter Season 6 Review

I am not sure whether I have a real favorite TV show at the moment, but Dexter ranks definitely among my top 5. I just watched my way through season 6 and yes, it starts to drag and to wear off, the pattern is always the same after all, isn’t it? Dexter is, as usual, up against another serial killer (and John Lithgow from season 4 was the most impressive and scary one by far).

This time it was the “doomsday killer”, who enacted scenes from bible and thought the world would end and he could bring about a new one with his deeds at the time of a solar eclipse. Hm… not the most innovative serial killer plot around, there’s been “Seven” and countless other bible enacting Hollywood versions of the theme.

Despite Edward James Olmos cast as one of the doomsday dudes, I wasn’t convinced. He seemed a bit listless, exhausted and old… His doomsday killer counterpart, did, in my opinion, also not really pull off the change from assistant to “main killer”.

Also the psychological stuff going on around Debra seeing a shrink didn’t knock my socks off and the conclusion that she’s “in love with Dexter” was very predictable and thus lame as well.

A positive highlight was the Brother Sam character, though it was again totally predictable that he’d get shot.

All in all I found myself getting bored and thinking of “I don’t need to see season 7” – that is, until the very last episode.

Ahhhh, something’s happening! Debra walks in on Dexter and sees him thrusting his knife into plastic-wrapped Travis! Now that’s a good cliffhanger and seeing that, I of course have to watch season 7 now too to find out how Deb and Dex deal with each other after that “revelation”. Seems like the writers of Dexter felt themselves that it was starting to get lame and that they needed to introduce a new twist of some sort and what better twist than to let Deb finally find out “her” Dex is a killer.

So, the writers of Dexter persuaded me to watch season 7 as well some day when I can get my hands on it.

The morale: when writing a series you need to keep inserting new twists, if you don’t, the pattern becomes repetitive and people loose interest.

The Little Things

We all know that the little things are what can make one’s life fun or awful, depending on their nature and the degree of accumulation. I had three little things happening to me this week that fall in the rather unpleasant category: a mosquito bite, stench, and a near bicycle accident.

A tiny but aggressive Japanese mosquito bit me in the hand on Monday night. I felt the itchy pain when it stung and even saw the blood sucker and snipped it away, but too late, the damage was done. I am allergic against mosquito bites and as a result the tiny sting of that little animal gives me fun for an entire week with swelling of my hand to epic proportions, the bite getting awfully hot and itching like hell. Tiny thing – big consequences.

Another tiny thing that so much undermines the quality of life (at least in my opinion) is bad smells. On Tuesday morning I managed to get a seat on the cattle wagon to work and sat down between two salary men, both looking neat and respectable in shirt and suit. But alas, a rotten odor arose and reached my nose every few breaths emitting from one of them, I couldn’t pinpoint which one.

It smelled like bad breath and very bad it must have been that it reached me like that. I felt like choking and my imagination was running wild sending me visions of germs and decay, shaping themselves into reality on front of my nose. Images of zombies and rotting innards on a morning ride to work are very entertaining indeed. It was impossible to get up and flee, since the train was packed. No way to escape the zombie… worst thing is, you cannot tell people when they smell bad. I wonder why that is such a taboo. The problem is quite frequent, and yet we negate it and pretend it is not there.

If you tell someone, he/she smells bad or has bad breath he/she will be mortally offended. You do not dare to tell the smelly person, because you fear his/her reaction. It reminded me very vividly of what I have recently learned in all these seminars I am attending for my new job. A human is a trivial machine. If you put in A into a non-trivial machine, you know that B will come out (if the machine works). If you put in A into a trivial machine, you don’t know whether B, C or D or T or X will come out. Unsure of the outcome = the reaction of the smelly, trivial machine, you prefer to keep your mouth shut and endure the stench.

Last but not least I had a near accident this week involving my bicycle and a car.

I rode my bicycle as every day, rushed by a few parked cars and suddenly a car door opens… I had not seen that anybody sat inside and the occupant had forgotten to look into the rear mirror before opening the door. I sailed past the car’s door with a last second swerve and only my pants brushed the metal but if I had been riding only a centimeter closer to the car the door would have caught me and catapulted me through the air. Ouch… the lady who had opened the door shrieked as loud as I did and shouted “sorry” after me and I guess we were both very happy that there was that one centimeter that prevented a rather serious accident.

So, those little things that happen to us every week can/could be quite big. A centimeter more and I might write this from a hospital bed, but I’m not, so lucky me!

Indie-pub Nikki 12

After a bumpy start, my next novel is now in the depths of the CreateSpace book creation process and will probably see the light of day in July or latest in August.

Why bumpy? Because I have a lot of stress in my otherwise very interesting new day job and have made some initial “mistakes” out of sheer exhaustion. In my day job I stayed in the same company but changed from a number cruncher, glued to her desk, to a process consultant who is dealing with whatever groups/departments and their problems now every week traveling between the various offices of the company throughout the Kanto area.

Anyway, the main “mistake” I made was simply clicking “yes” when CreateSpace offered me something they call “interior file help”, I was already wondering why it was so cheap, but I thought, hey, maybe they reduced prices and presumed that this was what I had received for my Dome Child novel too. Thing is, it wasn’t. When you get “interior file help” you have to do the conversion from whatever program you wrote your book in to book form yourself and I was reading something about “bleed” and margins and spacing and let out a big sigh… Even during Dome Child I had not the nerve or the time to care about stuff like this, and now, with the new day job even less.

So several emails were going back and forth with me asking for the same services that I had received for Dome Child, which include me simply sending them my Word file and them converting it into book form.

In case you ever want to do something like this yourself and like me want to rather pay than spend hours with formatting, behold that the service you want is called “Author’s Advantage Interior”.

Then my CreateSpace account had to be “reset” from the “interior file help” to the “Author’s Advantage” and finally, yesterday that happened and I uploaded my Word file.

This little misunderstanding has cost a week, but well, it won’t kill anyone.

I also uploaded the cover yesterday, which, like for Dome Child was created by the Japanese illustrator Naoyuki Kato and it’s a blast (at least in my opinion). When you compare the two covers for Dome Child and the new novel you will see what a great artist he is. The Dome Child cover is SF and from a bird’s perspective, depicting a cityscape with the giant black temple of the Flock of Mukol as the center piece. The cover for the new novel, which is an urban fantasy, is shrinking the perspective from miles away to right in front of your nose, depicting the cellar of the main character’s house.

I discussed with Kato san whether it would be better to have the protagonist in the picture or not and thanks to modern times computer magic, he sent me two version of with and without Mr. Hagen Patterson inside his cellar. The choice was very easy: Mr. Patterson had to be in there.

If by now you’re wondering what the title of the new novel is… just wait a little longer. It’s a weird title, a long one, and an eccentric one, but it is the only title that this book can have. You’ll find out why while reading it. Titles are always important, but among all the stories I have written until now, this is the most significant, unique and non-negotiable one.

So, now I am waiting for the interior design to happen and for the title to find it’s way onto Kato san’s amazing cover. The journey continues…

Dome Child is selected Runner-Up at the 2012 New York Book Festival

Juka-Productions proudly announces that Dome Child has gained the Runner-Up position at the 2012 New York Book Festival.

After receiving an Honorable Mention at the San Francisco Book Festival, I’m very happy that the Dome Child managed to get one step further and gained the “silver medal” in another contest

Here’s the certificate for the San Francisco Book Festival and the even nicer one from New York will soon follow.



and the pretty digital badge, too:

Very glad to be soon able to add the certificate and badge from the even better Runner-Up as well (once I receive them).

Shanghai Old and New

Thanks to another business trip I went to China again for a few days and travel always means adventure

If there is a mentality comparison possible between Europe and eastern Asia it would be this: the Japanese are mid-northern Europeans and the Chinese are south Europeans. What I mean by that is:

Before even setting foot on Chinese soil, waiting at Narita airport for my flight to Shanghai, it was fascinating to watch the behavior of Chinese and Japanese travelers. The Japanese travelers are quiet and mindful of their surroundings (at least most the time) whilst there was a group of Chinese travelers who were spread over several rows of waiting seats and were full-throatily chatting with each other without a care in the world about their noise level. Quite a different temperament

Japanese people can also be very noisy, but they usually are so in an environment or context where that is socially accepted by their society. They are totally noisy and drunk and rude and loud in izakayas = drinking holes, they are totally noisy at rock concerts and scream their guts out, but not for example at the airport… Simply waiting for the flight to Shanghai showed a cultural difference and the restrictions that the Japanese seem to so much like to put on themselves

The plane ride was rather bumpy due to thick rain clouds over Shanghai but when I arrived the rain had stopped, though the clouds still hung threateningly over the island of Pudong. Last time I had flown via Haneda in Tokyo and Honqiao in Shanghai, this time, due to a different hotel, I flew via Narita and Pudong. The latter being Shanghai’s more modern airport on the “new half of Shanghai”, the island of Pudong where all that new development of Shanghai is going on.

This time I was determined not to repeat my previous blunder of letting ridiculously expensive limousine services take me to the hotel and I followed a sign first leading to “hotel shuttle buses”. Arrived there, unfortunately there was no bus to my hotel as one guy told me, immediately offering those ridiculous limousine services. I declined and asked whether there is a train and he reluctantly pointed back at the building. The next guy offered me limousine services for 300 RMB but by now I know that this is pretty ridiculous and declined.

I went back into the airport building and headed for the subway and the so called Maglev, which is a high speed magnet train and the subway the normal subway. Unfortunately there was no explanation or map whatsoever that I could find around the Maglev entrance and asking the ticket sales guy didn’t help much either, he threw a name at me that told me of course nothing. Then I tried the subway, which I had taken a couple of times last autumn as well and yes, familiar things seem more reliable and easier to use.

I showed my printed out hotel map to a lady behind some counter and she spoke decent English and told me to take line 2, then line 7 and to get off at some station that looked reasonably close to the hotel on the map. I bought a subway ticket for a ridiculous 6 RMB… nice comparison to 300 for a limousine.

I boarded the subway and found the station where I was supposed to change some 10 stops down the line. Of course, after two or three stations an elderly lady boarded the train with a harmonica playing blind boy behind her. Much like the old man with the flute from last time. The lady mounted herself in front of me because I am a foreigner but I pretended not to have Chinese money yet and she left me alone.

After 8 stations everyone got off the train, which I found a bit suspicious, but did not think much of it yet. The train filled up again and a Chinese man sat down next to me and told me in perfect English. You should get off, you need to change tracks here if you want to go downtown, this one goes back to the airport. Oh thanks!!! I thanked him very much and rushed off the train. Very nice of him to help the lost foreigner!

The ride to the station where I was supposed to change took a total of 45 minutes and it was starting to get dark outside. I felt a little less adventurous looking for my hotel in the dark and it wasn’t as if the subway station would be right next to the hotel. The map I had printed was not very detailed and at my last visit the hotel was about a 20 minute walk away from the next best subway station. So I decided to grab a taxi at the station where I was supposed to change trains, fearing that if the other station was “too close” to the hotel, a taxi driver wouldn’t want to take me.

So I got off at the change over station and fought my way through the masses outside. I grabbed the next best taxi and showed the driver, a relatively young guy, maybe in his late 20ties, my map. He seemed to understand where to go and babbled to me in Chinese. I heard “Pudong” and a question and presumed he asked me if I had come from Pudong airport. I said yes and he laughed.

I speak about 10 words of Chinese and two of them are “bu hau” which means “not good” and I asked him that and he went on “bu hau, bu hau, … taxi!”, lol, meaning obviously I should have taken a taxi from the airport. Because I had said “bu hau” he seemed to presume that I kind of spoke Chinese and babbled on and looked disappointed that I didn’t understand him. At a red traffic light he turned around to me again and tried to start a conversation, then asked “no Chinese?” and I answered accordingly and he pointed at himself “no English” and we laughed and he drove on.

He brought me safely to my hotel (which I always find kind of amazing, since you are so at the mercy of these taxi drivers, they could take you bloody anywhere and could do quite some horrible things to you if they wanted to). The taxi ride cost 25 RMB, plus 6 for the subway = 31 RMB = ten times less than the limousine thing! I was so proud of myself that I gave my taxi driver a 20 RMB tip because I had no other bills available

I liked the hotel on this trip much better than the one on the last, mainly due to its excellent location at the Huangpu river (which features in Dome Child by the way), facing the town’s core – the Bund. Check out the hotel room with a view pics during the night and during the day. Also, this was my first hotel ever I believe that provides gas masks (in case of fire) for its guests.

This having been a business trip, there was of course again not really any time for sightseeing, but since one of our task was actually outside, we did see a little bit of the city. Our task led us to the … Part of town located in Shanghai’s “old” half, Puxi, where I had the time to snap some nice pics (I think) of the atmosphere. The contrast between new and old is quite extreme in Shanghai

Next to the Shanghai World Finance Center with its lighted corona and the building with the hole at the top, the Jinmao Tower, let me call it the bottle opener, the construction of a new skyscraper has started, tentatively dubbed Shanghai Center Tower. The bottle opener building is 490 meters tall and the new one is supposed to become 620 meters high… Wow… Another 130 meters higher and that should make it the second tallest building in the world after Dubai’s Burj Khalifa. Since I expect to be traveling to Shanghai more often in my current job, I hope to be able to witness the development of the Center Tower a bit. I haven’t noticed or heard anything about it during my trip to Shanghai last October. On the back of the “to be” postcard I took a picture of it says the thing is set for a 2014 completion.

On the way to the airport I took a normal taxi (not limousine service), which costs 150 RMB and drove in bright sunshine through all of Pudong. It’s quite a sight: not much green anywhere, nothing but high rises (some 20, 30 floors or so) with nothing but apartments and apartments. While Puxi is a city and has grown and changed over the ages, Pudong is nothing but new and seems rather monotone but it is also a symbol for the incredible speed of development of China and its rapid urbanization. Puxi is more like Tokyo, old and full of diversity and contrasts, Pudong seems like something out of and SF movie.

I’m looking forward to my next trip to Shanghai, which might already happen in autumn.

Tokyo Sky Tree and Penguins

For reasons still unknown to me the Tokyo Sky Tree opened to the public on the 22nd of May (2012), which happens to be my birthday! I applied for a ticket to go up to the viewing platform but didn’t make the cut out of the one million (? more?) applications. Nevertheless, I took the day off from work to check out what the fuss was all about and to be there. I think they opened the Sky Tree on a weekday in order to avoid millions of people showing up.

Unfortunately (or fortunately?) it was raining heavily the entire day. Nevertheless they said later in the news that 220,000 people came throughout the day. They had expected 200,000. Good estimate. I have no clue how many they are expecting for this weekend.

I was surprised to know that indeed 220,000 people came which showed that the facility can handle that amount of people without a problem. It was full of course but not scarily full and there was no hectic or panic in the air.

Those poor chaps who managed to get a ticket for the tower’s viewing platform itself though have seen NOTHING. Well, nothing much but clouds.

The complex consists of the tower and a shopping mall around it plus an aquarium.

The escalator construction when coming up from Oshiage station is amazing (see the Escher-like photo on Flickr) and at their bottom a giant canvas depicting the complex from above greets you (see photo). B1 till 4th floor is the shopping center which is called sora-machi = Sky Town. In Japanese there is no real “l” or”r” but a sound in between and depending on which kind of roman letter transcription you use you write a word like “sora” = sky either “sora” or “sola”. The more common transcription is “r” rather than “l” but I think they decided on the “l” because it is a little play on words with “sola” sounding like “solar”, which has something to do with the sky after all.

There is nothing really special about the shopping mall, it’s geared towards a tourist crowd but also towards locals and there is basically something for everyone. The noise level in the whole shopping town was gargantuan, since the newly opened shops had all their staff standing around offering bits of food in the food court and holding up special opening presents (tinker) in the fashion district trying to lure customers into their shops. I went outside once in a while to catch glimpses of the tower but the rain didn’t stop and was very heavy at times.

On level four of the complex is the Sumida Aquarium and there was a guide shouting that it’s not crowded at the moment and you can get in immediately. I used that opportunity and went into the aquarium and I’m glad I did, because this aquarium is of course super new and state of the art. It’s not really big but very well laid out and has excellent facilities. It’s geared a bit towards science and there are several “labs” where staff is present and explains things to you and shows you how they raise jelly fish or how they take care of their corals and so on. The main attraction of the aquarium is a colony of penguins next to four sea lions.

It was about to be feeding time for the sea lions and I had the opportunity to chat with one of the animal handlers. They have 47 penguins and all animals moved into the facility at the end of April. At first the penguins didn’t want to get into the water and the animal handlers had to persuade them with fish The aquarium, along with the rest of the whole complex was open to the public for the first day, but the penguins and sea lions seemed un-phased by the people around and the penguins had gotten used to their basin and were swimming around quite happily it seemed to me. Very cute little guys. They get 10 years old in the wild, but in captivity they can get up to 20 years old. Same for the sea lions, they get about 20 years old in the wild and can reach 30 in captivity, the animal handler said.

I learned something interesting from him too about the sea lions. I often felt a bit sorry for them that they are being trained to perform tricks, but the handler said that they need that. In captivity they don’t have to hunt for food or escape from orcas and they simply get too bored and have nothing to do and therefore, to stimulate them, they are being trained to perform some tricks. So it’s also for their good, not only for entertainment of humans. I don’t know if that’s really true, but it kind of makes sense. The four sea lions in the new aquarium are very young yet, the oldest is 3 years and they didn’t know many tricks yet, which, very Japanese, the animal handler apologized for I thought they were already pretty good though, they followed hand signs, and directions to pick up their fish.

Back in the shopping mall I found a window in the 3rd or 4th floor that allows you to take a look at the sky tree’s actual structure. (see photos) It’s a tree indeed, and that mesh construct looks very stable to me and I sort of can believe that the tower will withstand even a magnitude 7 earthquake under its feet… It’s a highly impressive construct and I’m looking forward to getting up there onto its two viewing platforms some time in winter, when hopefully the first rush for getting onto the tower is over

Kansai vs. Kantou

I’ve been in Osaka this weekend and that reminded me of the good old and cute rivalry between the Kansai area (Osaka) and the Kantou area (Tokyo). It’s a bit like Hamburg vs. Munich in Germany with Tokyo = Hamburg and Osaka = Munich. Like in Germany there are language deviations between the cities. For example the Tokyo people asking “hontou?” for “really” and the Osaka people saying “honma?”.

Then there is pride. Both, the Tokyo people and the Osaka people, are damn proud of their cities. The differences are expressing themselves even in funny things like where people line up on an escalator. In Tokyo it’s standing on the left and walking on the right. In Osaka it’s standing on the right and walking on the left side. As a Tokyo resident I promptly got it wrong

This year’s summer won’t be fun for the Kansai area. At the moment all nuclear power plants are shut off and the Kansai area will have a 15% deficit in energy compared to previous = pre-earthquake and Fukushima drama years. In Tokyo we actually have 4% more than last year because we got used to importing natural gas. We still have to save energy but we are already used to that from last year, while the Kansai area will suffer quite a bit this round. It’s usually even hotter in Osaka than in Tokyo if only by a degree or two, so the Kansai people won’t have fun this year. I have no doubt though that they will adapt somehow.

On the journey it was nice to see all the freshly watered rice fields. As a European the sight of rice fields is still “exotic” and so much means Asia.

I also got treated to a very special view of Mt. Fuji: To my surprise Mt. Fuji was visible. One can see Mt. Fuji about 100 days per year and 90% of those days are in winter. From spring onwards it is usually too humid and thus too hazy to see the mountain. It is starting to tune in for rainy season and summer and I wasn’t expecting to see the mountain, but it’s snowy cap peaked gloriously out of some clouds while its base was invisible in the haze below those clouds. That means it looked like it had no base and was hovering in the sky – very surreal, like many things often are in Japan Unfortunately I did not manage to snap a decent picture.

Hakone and Kaizen

I just have to write a few notes about my recent two-day business trip to Japan’s famed Hakone resort.

Located in the Hakone mountains in front of Mt. Fuji, this area is a hot spring (onsen) resort also at the doorstep of the greater Tokyo area.

To get there by train is a funny exercise. Until Hakone Yumoto runs a “normal” train, then you have to change trains to a mini local mountain climbing line that leads up to a town called Gora. This funny old train has only one track and goes in serpentines up the mountain, sometimes waiting for the down-coming train and riding back to change tracks and to climb further up (which means it goes in zig-zag pattern as well as serpentines). It takes about 40 minutes to climb roughly 400 meters in height.

Arrived in Gora, you then change to a cable car that goes up the mountain until you reach a rope-way station (where you finally see Mt. Fuji when you ride down the other side of the mountain again to Lake Ashinoko) …

The hotel where our seminar was held lay in the middle of the cable car track and when the train stops it opens its doors on both sides. Now I didn’t check which side my hotel was on and got off to the left…

I went up a steep hill to a hotel on the left only to find out it was the wrong one. I should have gotten off at the cable car’s right side! The guys at the reception said, oh, your hotel is right over there, but there is no way to cross the cable car tracks around here…

Great! After 7 p.m. the cable car runs only every half hour and they advised me to wait for the cable car to come down again, and hop through it to the other side. I told them I don’t want to wait for half an hour, and asked if they couldn’t call me a taxi and then they said, you know what, we’ll drive you over… Now that is Japanese service

So this guy from the hotel drives me for two kilometers or so around the cable car tracks to their other side to my hotel. He said that actually a hell of a lot of people get out on the wrong sides and the hotels are pretty much helping each other out and drive their lost guests around the tracks, happens about two three times a week or so on average that he drives someone over.

Actually it happens more often, since they send the people back to the cable car tracks when the train frequency is higher during the day and they only need to wait 10 minutes or so for hopping through the cable car… Now a bit of Kaizen would be to build a few pedestrian bridges over those tracks! I shall suggest that to the city of Gora.

The “grand spa” of my hotel, which I hit in the evening was nice, but I’ve seen quite some onsens during my time in Japan already and was rather disappointed that the one of our hotel had no “rotenburo” = an outside portion. One disadvantage of living around hot springs is sometimes the smell. I didn’t notice anything when I arrived, but in the morning, when I opened my window, the distinct whiff of sulfur tickled my nose.

But, I do not live there and so, once in a while a little sulfur doesn’t seem too bad

The seminar went well and on the way back some colleagues took me by car, which, with smooth traffic, took half the time of the train ride, but that was only because we left the mountains early enough to avoid the traffic jam.