Regina Glei's Blog, page 46

Hal-Con 2012 Report

On the 14th and 15th of April the third Hal-Con took place in Yokohama with Alastair Reynolds as writer guest of honor and Naohiro Washio as artist GoH (Washio san has been doing the cover art for the Japanese editions of Mr. Reynolds novels). Hal-Con is a once per year international Japanese convention where the Japanese con runners of Nippon 2007 SF Worldcon in Japan are practicing for another future Japan SF Worldcon. The first Hal-Con’s guest of honor was Charles Stross; last year’s GoH was Robert Sawyer.

I wanted to check my report on last year’s Hal-Con before writing this one, but I couldn’t find any. Seems like in the after-earthquake-craze I somehow forgot to write up a report…

I held two seminars/panels/programs/talks (I will call them talks) myself, one on the indie publishing of my “Dome Child” novel and one on the translation of my short story “Half-Life” into Japanese.

Both talks went very well, though for the indie publishing one only two people showed, since my talk was scheduled opposite a program featuring boths GoHs. For the translation talk some 15 people showed up, including Mr. Reynolds.

During my indie publishing talk, I made a short reading from my Dome Child novel (about 5 min) and asked one of the participants to take a video of the reading. I hope to have it up and running on YouTube next weekend.

For me the highlight of the first day was a reading by Mr. Reynolds. He read from his novelette “At Budokan” that has been translated into Japanese by Hal-Con staff and is a part of the Halc-Con book that is published via Hayawaka every year for the convention. “At Budokan” was originally published in the “Shine” anthology and it’s about dinosaurs playing rock’n roll

A fun story and the alternating reading in English and Japanese went very well.

At the GoH party in the evening Mr. Reynolds and me were the only non-Japanese around and my job as an interpreter started

The second Hal-Con day opened with my talk on the translation of one of my short stories into Japanese.

Last year Hal-Con staff and myself translated my time travel short story “The Ghosts of Tinian” (you can find it here in English and here in Japanese). This year I thought I continue with the topic of time, though in a quite different form. “Half-Life” is a short story about an evil watch that gives you a pre-warning by showing you the half-life of your life before killing you. I hopefully will come around to uploading it onto my homepage next weekend. In both cases I myself pre-translated the short stories into Japanese and Hal-Con colleagues improved my Japanese into a printable form.

During the talk, we had an interesting discussion about reading vs. seeing. In English (or any other alphabet based language) you read more or less every word of a story/novel/article (well, we start skipping when it gets boring, but in principle, we read every word). In Japanese (and Chinese) though you have characters instead of alphabet-based words and when you see a character you often know its meaning without necessarily being sure about that character’s particular reading. So even the fundamental process of “reading” is different in English and Japanese.

Another discussion point was the title of the short story. The Japanese term for “half-life” is “hangenki”, which, according to the characters means half – reduction – period. There is no “life” in the Japanese term for half-life. Thus the play on words in the title, that the evil watch in the short story shows you when half of your life is over, does not work. My translators added the term “jinsei no hangenki” = “a human life’s half-life” to convey the idea. Using the title as an example, I picked up a number of other difficult to translate topics, which we went through during the talk’s discussions.

Another issue I would like to mention about translations is how to translate setting into another culture. There is an expression in the short story when the protagonists young son’s face “lights up like a Christmas tree”. The story is set somewhere in North America. As a translator into Japanese you have to decide whether to leave that idiom as it is, or whether to “japanize” the entire setting. With foreign novels that rarely happens nowadays but sometimes it still does. Even in translations from English to German “germanization” can take place. I remember reading an old German translation of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and the characters’ names had been (horribly) “germanized”.

Translation is a very broad and important topic, and as SF and Fantasy authors we even have to translate within the same language, as Mr. Reynolds pointed out. He recently wanted to use the “light up like a Christmas tree” idiom too, but then realized that in the world he was describing there are no Christmas trees anymore and the characters wouldn’t use that expression.

The rest of Hal-Con was filled with interview style panels of Mr. Reynolds and I had to do quite a lot of simultaneous interpretation, which showed me yet again the beauty as well as the difficulty of language and communication. Humans do have a hard time understanding each other! But when they do somehow at an international event like that they all turn out to be very happy! So the effort is well worth it. At least I for my part left the convention tired but happy and I am looking forward to next year’s Hal-Con!

Muppets, Artists and Other Creatures

One of the advantages of long flights is time to watch some movies On the way to and back from Thailand I watched five:

The Artist

Three Musketeers

The Adventures of Tintin

Ratatouille

The Muppets

The Artist

The movie received quite some attention and academy awards but nevertheless it left me untouched. I have nothing against silent movies, in fact I love Chaplin and am a big fan of his Modern Times, or The Gold Rush. So it's not the silent movie issue that disturbed me about this production, it's rather that I found it to be simply boring. There were many redundant scenes. For example the protagonist walking towards the door. They tell you on the first day in any film school that a good director wastes no film time on things that the audience does not need to know.

I supposed the director used those scenes to calm the film down, to make it slow, but if that is the only purpose of the scene than this is waste. Chaplin did not waste scenes, silent movie or not. All his scenes had something to say in contrast to The Artist. In my opinion the hype about the movie is based on nostalgia. The movie is woefully looking back to glorious days, forgetting the biggest rule of film making – don't bore the audience.

There was fine acting involved but what stirred me more than the people was the abilities of the dog…….. The movie left me yawning and I found its artsy escapades into doing some sound effects after all annoying rather than clever. If you make a silent movie make it right and don't cheat with sound. Chaplin needed no sound to convey his message (only music). Somehow the movie left me with the feeling that the director and screenwriter have not really learned from the masters.

The Three Musketeers

So, this is about the 500th version of Alexandre Dumas' Three Musketeers and it is surely the flashiest and most ludicrous one, but it had some stuff going for it and those were the king and queen of France whom I found delightful, Christoph Waltz as Richelieu and most of all Milla Yovovich and Orlando Bloom as the remaining bad guys. It was just pure fun to watch how the latter two enjoyed playing evil dudes, especially Orlando. You could, at least in my opinion, really see that he had fun with the part and who would have thought that the slimy bad guy was fitting so well to the sonny-boy whelp Orlando.

Interestingly neither D'Artagan nor the three musketeers left any sort of impression on me. They were kind of necessary to make the bad guys shine but that was about it.

Story wise… What is there to say that hasn't been said yet about the Three Musketeers? Nothing, so I won't bother. It's a fine story (also without airships) that contains all the "necessary" elements for drama rooted in betrayal and intrigues.

A fun piece to watch but also a movie to be rather easily and quickly forgotten.

The Adventures of Tintin

Wow, what a fine piece of animation. We've come a long way from Mickey Mouse or even Toy Story. What I was wondering the entire time though was, why did they not shoot that in live action? There is nothing in the movie that could not be done by special effects and stunts. Too expensive maybe? (Especially the scene in the Arabian town with the falcon chase) . I read some though not all of the Tintin comics when I was a kid, and it was nice to revisit the stories and the characters. I was never a real big fan of Tintin though, since I always found him to be "too clever". He outsmarts everyone all the time and is just too brave and has no big flaw whatsoever and I always, already as a kid, found that kind of lame. It was fun to follow his reasoning and to revisit childhood reading but I prefer more quirky characters like my all time childhood favorite Scrooge MacDuck, who has many flaws but is still lovable and so much more interesting than a super-smart Tintin. He reminds me of Mickey Mouse also in his "he is always right and never loses" way and I never liked Mickey either. Guess I always had a weakness for the dark side of the force Nevertheless, a fun movie to watch and what a nice tweak that the bad guy looked very much like Mr. Spielberg himself

Ratatouille

A nice premise: A rat who wants to be a chef in a Parisian restaurant. That is what Hollywood calls high concept. It's a nice idea. but it also bears plenty of pitfalls. For that "rat as a cook" premise the viewer has to completely suspend disbelief and accept that the rats have been entirely anthropomorphized. That's fine and it happened in many movies with great success. E.g. nobody has a problem with accepting that all the toys in Toy Story come to life. The trouble with Ratatouille is that there is interaction between the humans and the rats and the way the rat communicates with the human hero (by pulling his hair) is funny but it also shows the limits of humanization of the rat. It would have been less awkward I guess if the rat would simply have been able to talk to the humans. Anyway, the story is a simple one, outsider receives recognition because he remains true to himself. The characters were only a little but not too much cliche and the food critique who loved his ratatouille was a nice opponent. A fun story, but I don't think I will remember it for a long time.

The Muppets

Another childhood revisited movie but that one managed to engage me much less than Tintin. I loved the muppets when I was a kid (who didn't at that time), especially the two grumpy old guys. If I ever had a favorite muppet it was the animal and his drumming But alas, I guess the movie was too much geared towards a young audience to engage me. Somehow there was no edge, no bite. I think it was the wrong move to make the movie about the revival of the muppets. If you need to revive something it means it is dead. Had there been another story line, simply some adventures of the muppets for example, I suppose I could have enjoyed it. To make their revival the topic of the movie felt as if they had no other story left to tell… In a way, alas, the muppets are history indeed…

Thailand Trip March 2012

Thanks to a business trip, I had the opportunity to go to Thailand for the third time in my life and for the first time since 2008. Back then I only passed through Bangkok to go to Pattaya (not for swimming or something else (…) but also that was a business trip). My first trip to Bangkok is as long ago as 1999 and after 13 years I of course did not remember much of Bangkok anymore. Even if I did, I would not have recognized much, since the city has changed a lot.



First of all, it has a public transport system now. It only opened in 2001 or 2002 or so and the one thing I remember best from 1999 is the endless traffic jams. Those have not diminished in their intensity, but luckily you can now leave them behind by riding on the two elevated train lines that run through Bangkok, called the BTS (which probably means Bangkok Transport System or something like that).

Our hotel was located near the National Stadium and its respective BTS station right down the street from the huge MBK shopping mall.

A first impression of Bangkok on 2012 I got on the roof of our 25 story hotel a bar is located and where one of my colleagues and I had a light dinner in 30 degrees of heat, and that during the night. The thick, rich, tropical air felt like quite of a shock after a maximum of 15 degrees in an on the verge of spring Tokyo.

Our five day work seminar was indoors (luckily) and lasted every day from 9 to 6, which in effect meant that I haven't seen much of Bangkok during daylight.

We had the evenings off and on the first night three girls (me included) followed a colleague of ours to Sala Daeng station on the BTS to receive a massage in a massage parlor our colleague knew around there.

Not remembering quite so well where the parlor was, we walked around for the better part of an hour through an open street market with tiny stalls to the left and right (and the cars rushing by beyond that). The atmosphere was incredibly loud, and dirty too. Above our heads were a few trees occupied by hundreds of chirping hysteric little birds that constantly shit down on the pavement. Every stall has its goods covered with birdshit-covered plastic sheets… not very inviting to shop, I must say. In between the stalls there is no protection though and one of my colleagues got hit by falling shit on the shoulder…

Also a giant cockroach caught my eye, as well as a quite fat rat amongst the chaos of the stalls.

Finally we found the massage parlor in a side street and I enjoyed the first foot massage of my life, which was quite nice and much less ticklish than I thought, though I did make the experience that my left foot is less ticklish than my right! Who would've known. After that we went to a Thai restaurant (inside) and had a good, dirt cheap but too spicy dinner.

If you are in Thailand you have to take at least a tuktuk at least once and we caught one to bring us back to our hotel. Although it being after 10 in the evening we got into some traffic jams and the exhaust fumes of your own as well as the surrounding bikes and other tuktuks and cars aren't the most pleasant in the world. I think the life expectancy of a tuktuk driver cannot be that high because of those and also the danger of accidents of course.

Nevertheless we arrived safely in our hotel, hit our showers and fell into our beds.

The next evening was one to remember: Having had a nice foot massage, I wanted to get a shoulder and neck massage as well, which are always stiff from too much typing and dragged a few other colleagues to that massage parlor street again. We went into another parlor than the night before, which was probably a mistake.

Two of the other ladies of the group wanted a neck and shoulder massage as well, one more lady and two guys opted for foot massage which was downstairs. We shoulder ladies were led up into the second floor and put into separate rooms. The lighting was very dim and I was in a stall right next to where some guy was receiving special services… if you know what I mean. His noises were quite explicit and the lady who massaged me (not 100% sure if it was a lady or a ladyboy, which you can never really tell in Thailand) noticed of course that I noticed the sounds from beyond the thin wooden wall. She said something I did not understand and I asked her to repeat it, she said it again and I still didn't get it because of her strong Thai accent and then she took my hand and put it into her neck saying "I'm so hot…", Now I got her… I withdrew my hand and told her "no thanks". Luckily she stopped and kept on regularly massaging me. But of course my calm was gone and I tensed up but she kept on with normal massage without proposing special services again and five minutes later the guy next door was finished with his business and left… that was a freaky experience! Well, I kinda find it cool that women are being offered special services as well, but nevertheless… yikes! She was actually pretty good at normal massage and my shoulders felt better. But for the moment I had enough of massages.

The dinner afterwards in a department store's food court was quite harmless.

On the Third night shopping was the order of the day and six ladies including myself went to a station called Chidlom which constitutes the department store center of Bangkok.

I found those department stores exceedingly boring because they were not Thai in any way but international. All the Guccis and Pradas and Louis Vuittons of the world gathered and one of the ladies who didn't care for this kind of shopping either and myself strolled around instead and found a lovely shrine where we sat down for a moment and watched people pray and also some dancers.



The fourth night was reserved for a common dinner of the entire group and we went to Thaksin station where a Mekong river boat picked us up and brought us to a restaurant by the riverside. We passed some great buildings, including the Grand Palace and seeing it by night was great, though it kind of made me regret that we were locked up in our hotel seminar room during the day. Nevertheless, also from afar and at night the Palace looks more than beautiful. The dinner was outside and much too spicy for me again and it was way too hot and we were all sweating and happy to sit on the cooling boat again after the dinner was over and we rode home by train.



On Friday, our last seminar day, we stopped at 16:00 and I hit the hotel's pool for half an hour, which was gorgeous and on the 11th floor of the hotel (outside, constructed like a large kind of balcony). Then four of us went souvenir shopping in the MBK mall, which has an indoor cheap clothes and souvenir section. I bought some herbal shower gels and incense and the obligatory t-shirt and some Thai style summer pants and other knick knack. I liked the mall very much because it was indoors = air conditioned and much less crowded than I had expected. The stall owners are also less aggressive than those on the streets and allow you to search around in relative peace.

Last day:

Finally we had a day off and could see Bangkok in daylight, but alas, the temperature was so unbearably high that I gladly followed my Japanese colleague who had to pick up a jeans which she had asked adjustments for from the MBK shopping mall. We ended up staying in the mall until shortly before noon getting into shopping mood again and then returned to the hotel. The few meters from the mall to the hotel were torture in terms of temperature and I was glad I had not followed other colleagues who had been so brave to go to the Grand Palace. The heat was worse than Japanese summers and probably one of the worst temperatures and climate I have experienced so far.

After a short rest at the hotel, a Thai friend of my Japanese colleague picked us up by car (very happy about an air conditioned Nissan) and she drove us to a spa where she had booked a two hour course of massage for us.

Arrived there (inside, luckily) we went through a great massaging experience. After the disaster on Tuesday I had insisted not to be separated from my friends and we three girls shared one massage room where we were first thoroughly scrubbed for half an hour (felt very sandpaper like and was on the verge of being uncomfortable) then we had to take showers and next we were oil massaged for 90 minutes, which was divine. Our masseurs were female (we had insisted on that) and I got the sturdiest of them for the big foreigner who was apparently one of the bosses of the spa and she did a great job on me and I could finally really relax and enjoy being kneaded. She called my shoulders stone though and I wish she would have continued another hour just with my shoulders.

Compared to the disaster on Tuesday I could truly feel that this was a professional who knew what she was doing. I am usually quite ticklish but that lady managed not to make me feel ticklish one bit and she knew exactly where to put in force and where to be gentle and I could really feel the difference between the more or less skilled amateur on Tuesday and this pro. Great experience and well worth the 1350 bath, which is still very cheap for a two hour course, compared to Tokyo.

While we were being massaged, the weather turned and when we left the spa it was raining and thundering. Over those two hours inside, the air had cooled down and cleaned up and it felt like heaven to have only 30 degrees and some fresh air instead of 38 degrees and smog.

We drove back to the hotel, then walked down the street to a small canal with the Jim Thomson house, museum, shop and restaurant next to it. We did not really know how to get there and crossed a bridge to the wrong side of the canal and walked along its sides through food stalls and cats and goats and just a few meters away from the big streets this felt like a local neighborhood with a special flair. Our Thai friend said it was quite unusual for 31st of March to rain like that and so long and to get so cool but I highly enjoyed it. In the end we arrived at the Jim Thomson complex and strolled through its shop, the museum itself was unfortunately already closed and the restaurant not open yet.



In the restaurant we ate the best Thai food of our trip in my opinion, well, no wonder, we had a local with us who recommended stuff to us and who selected something that was not too spicy for our Japan used tongues. The food was excellent and still compared to Tokyo very cheap again, with under 2000 yen per person. The only thing about the restaurant was that only foreigners dined there, exclusively. the only Thai were our waiters and our friend.

We finished the evening in our hotel bar because it was still raining and we couldn't get up onto the roof bar in that rain. A lovely day with great shopping massage and food and I felt quite decadent at the end of it



Sunday morning was tough for me since I am not a morning person and we had to get up at 4 in the morning, which is in fact in the middle of the night. When arriving at the airport at around

5:10 I thought, oh dear… Should we have got up at 3? They were queuing for Thai airways out of the airport building onto the street! Progress was in the end smoother than I had expected and although the airport is undergoing some reconstruction at the moment the dreaded immigration area where apparently at the worst time only 2 officers could do duty which caused 4 hours of waiting, was widened and well manned and gave us even some time for last minute air port shopping .

All in all it was a great trip, work-wise as well as travel wise and if it wasn't for the heat I could well imagine staying in Thailand for a longer period of time, but alas, there is the heat! So I suppose my future visits to Thailand will be short

Sawadee

Romans and Iron Ladies

I watched two movies on the big screen recently, both in the non-Hollywood, rather serious category (British productions): Coriolanus and The Iron Lady.

Coriolanus:

I didn't even plan on seeing Coriolanus, because I am a bit skeptical concerning modern versions of Shakespeare but ended up watching it after all and am glad I did. This is one of the few modern Shakespeares that works. Ralph Fiennes, of Voldemort fame, has played many a bad guy in his career (one of the best the nasty Nazi guy in Schindler's List) and also Coriolanus falls into the at least "dark hero" category and he does it exceptionally well.

He starred, produced, directed the piece and you could feel throughout the entire movie, that he wanted to do this and he managed to convey his enthusiasm onto the screen. The supporting cast is also of the finest, Gerard Butler as Aufidius Maggie Smith as Coriolanus' mother and the wonderfully slimy James Nesbitt as Tribune Sicinius. All of them did an exceptional job and helped to make this modern times Coriolanus a fine piece of art. The story is about pride and politics and is truly timeless since it is anchored in human nature itself. It works in a Roman or any other setting (with the right actors, that is).

I found the little detail most impressive that you totally believe Coriolanus when he turns to his formerly mortal enemy Aufidius to plot his revenge after Rome has banished him. That's quite a character arch to achieve and it is done in a credible way. This is one of the movies that prove that excellent story telling is worth more than special effects. Well done, Mr. Fiennes.

The Iron Lady

One thing in advance – Meryl Streep's portrayal of Margaret Thatcher is excellent, this is one fine piece of acting and Meryl's voice training was quite remarkable. In my opinion she managed to imitate Thatcher's voice to an amazing degree.

As for the project in terms of a movie… hm… I cannot say that I liked the approach of showing Mrs. Thatcher fighting with her dementia and the flashback style of "the most important events of her political life". The script felt jumpy and the constant turning back to her dementia and her hallucinations of her late husband felt repetitive and added nothing much to the story. The selection of events felt also rather arbitrary (Falkland war, IRA incidents) and had a "sensational" smack to them.

I'd have liked to see a bit more of the government's decision making process. The way it was portrayed here seemed rather like a dictatorship than a democracy with too much stress on Maggie reaching the "hard decisions". The "decline" from power also felt rather abrupt and was not in line with the previous portrayal.

In contrast to Coriolanus I did not "buy" the change = the character arch. Well, one way or the other, the movie is worth watching for Meryl Streep's fine piece of acting and I am now determined to watch "The Queen", which I haven't seen yet, to see how Helen Mirren approached her task in comparison to Meryl Streep.

Japan – The Obsession with Food, part 2

In my second story about Japan's obsession with food, I'd like to talk about a dear tradition called Omiyage.

When someone living in Japan had gone on a journey, he or she has to bring something back from it for those who stayed behind. That something is mostly food and there is a thriving industry in Japan of "omiyage" which means "souvenir" but it very often refers to food.

Every town, village, and gathering of more than five houses has some sort of omiyage and not only one form of it. I guess in 99% of all Japanese towns you can buy omiyage that contains red bean paste (anko) in one form of the other and you need a liter of green tea to eat it. Okay, I admit, I am not a fan of this bean paste stuff. There is of course plenty of other produce too, mochi (usually sweet dumplings made from rice flower), osenbei = rice crackers. There is tons of westernized inventions too meanwhile, for example mochi with chocolate in them etc. The Japanese are very inventive when it comes to that.

The omiyage culture is not only present in private life but also in the business world. It's an unwritten rule that if you go on a business trip somewhere, you have to bring omiyage to the office. When you are in a department where a lot of traveling happens you are lucky and get cookies, crackers and bean paste dumplings on a weekly basis. When people go overseas they of course have to bring stuff as well, usually chocolate that you can buy at every airport in the world and that, needless to say, I prefer to bean paste. But exotic stuff is also welcome. When you went to China you better bring something Chinese and not some boring airport chocolate. I will go to Thailand next week on business trip and I already know what I will bring back: Durian chips

When your department is big, you are bad off. You have to bring enough for everyone. In my former job I had to feed about 10 people, now it's about 20! Poor me. Some of the traditional Japanese omiyages actually taste really nice and they are, of course, always formidably packaged. That is one of the many ways in which the Japanese economy sustains itself… Every village has people in bread and butter by producing the omiyage, along with the people who are country wide engaged in producing the packages to put them in.

There is lots of exotic stuff in Japan too of course. Eggs boiled in sulfur hot pools in the Jigokudani (Hell Valley) close to Mt. Fuji for example where volcanic bubbling spews hot water and sulfur into the air. I gotta admit that omiyage is fun. It's interesting to sample local omiyage produce and to find out which village/area was clever and came up with something unusual.

So, long live the omiyage industry.

One year and 5000 earthquakes later

I am sure many people will share my feeling, that it's hard to believe that already one year has gone by since our near dooms day here in Japan. A year ago today our world was turned upside down at around 14:46 in the afternoon when Japan was hit by its first M9 quake on the Richter scale. Half an hour later something even worse happened, the tsunami, which then caused the sadly famous nuclear meltdown disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, which had withstood the quake, but not the 14 meter high tsunami that hit it.

If it had just been the quake, things wouldn't actually have been that bad. Sure, a few buildings collapsed and a 1000 people or so would have lost their lives I presume, but the consequences would never have been so devastating if there had been no tsunami. In total about 19,000 people lost their lives. I guess more or less every paper in the western world and any TV station will write something, show something about Japan's triple disaster of 2011, so I will leave the official line now and rather write something personal.

How do I feel one year on? Pretty much normal under the circumstances, except for the fact that I have become a bit hysterical about the building I work in. To have felt it swaying at a felt magnitude of "5 strong" on the Japanese "felt intensity" scale was no fun at all and every time it shakes now a little bit, which still happens some, one, two, three times a week, I am getting heart throbbing. I am pretty un-phased anywhere else, though that is probably naive, but I don't mind being at home or outside or wherever when it shakes, only the company building freaks me out. Guess that is because I was there when it happened and because I have this underlying fear that the building will collapse if anything stronger than a felt "5 strong" hits us in Tokyo one day. The fine cracks in the building's stairwell have been plastered over and my trust in that building is gone. I don't know if my fears that it will collapse when something worse than "5 strong" hits us are justified but the fear sits deep and I don't like it to be in that building when it shakes.

As mentioned before it shakes on an average of two times per week and this is amazing proof that you can live with a lot of earthquakes. We had more than 5000 all over the Japanese islands since the big one. It's not pleasant and there is always the fear that it gets worse, but under felt magnitude 4 nothing even falls and in principle you can shrug a quake like that off and that is what we all do. Even felt magnitude 5 is not really bad, it's scary but usually nobody gets hurt. It's the big one that we all fear that is said to hit Tokyo one day. Sitting on the edge of a tectonic plate there is no doubt that a big quake will happen again: the question is when not if. There are a lot of predictions, panic etc. going on as to when that will be. Many a scientist is calculating through earthquake prediction models but so far they have all proven to be bogus.

I thought about leaving to Japan to go somewhere else, but where? There are frequent earthquakes along the entire ring of fire from my beloved New Zealand over Indonesia, Taiwan, to my beloved Japan, and across the entire coast line of Northern and South America. There are earthquakes in China in Turkey and Italy and so forth. I don't exactly feel a desire to live in the Saharan desert… hey, India doesn't have many earthquakes, I have never been to India yet, maybe I should travel there and see if I like it. The essence of that is: it ain't safe anywhere in the world and I'd rather live in fear of quakes than in fear of being shot or raped as I would have to fear in many other parts of the planet.

Now, do I think about Fukushima? Much less than about earthquakes, not at all really. Radiation in Tokyo is less than in Berlin, haha! I drink tab water. I do not avoid produce from Fukushima prefecture. I am not seeking it out, but when there is no other choice, so what. I feel very sorry for the people who have been uprooted by the nuclear disaster. There are many ghost towns now around the power plant.

Japan is a first world country after all and meanwhile everybody who lost his or her home lives in makeshift houses etc. and does not have to starve. At the moment people in the northern areas of Japan are suffering worst from joblessness. Many companies, especially in the fishing industry have gone out of business with their facilities being swept away by the tsunami. I saw a statistics recently: out of 4600 businesses in the tsunami affected area still about 1500 have not resumed operations. Gambling (pachinko) and drinking are major problems in the north now, because people don't know what to do with their time.

Towns that have been wiped of the map are contemplating whether to rebuild, there are talks about rebuilding on higher ground = in the mountains. But Japanese mountains are young and steep and it would be a major undertaking and have a lot of environmental impact to ablate some of these mountains to rebuild towns. As for the area around the power plant… that land is dead for the next thirty years or so. Nobody died from the radiation and I don't think anybody will, but nevertheless many many lives have been destroyed by the nuclear disaster.

So, I just changed jobs within the company and that means I have committed myself to another at least two years in Japan. I don't know what will happen after that. One advantage of my new job is that I am traveling a lot = the time I spend in the company building gets reduced, I like that!

The atmosphere in the company has eased too. Many expats have left and did not return, some returned for a short while but tried hard to get assignments elsewhere and are gone now, but some new "brave" expats have arrived too and the Japanese colleagues are friendly and forgiving and say stuff like, well, agreed, the Japanese expats fled New York after 9/11 too.

All in all life has long returned back to normal for the people outside the tsunami and nuclear power plant disaster area and I hope it'll stay that way for a while and I hope the lives of the people in the affected areas will also get better soon.

I wish you well, Japan, and a few peaceful years ahead.

Geek wants more Star Trek

I am a Trekkie and not ashamed to admit it. "Of course" I am in favor of Next Gen = a fan of the bast captain the galaxy has ever seen = Jean-Luc Picard

I have never seen the last season of Deep Space 9 and I admit that I never watched more than the first Season of Voyager. A couple of years ago I watched the first three seasons of Enterprise but somehow never came around to watching the fourth and last season. That was corrected now by all four seasons of Enterprise being available on hulu Japan. I now finally watched the fourth season and hmmmmm…

Some episodes were fun (though it was a stupid episode in Enterprise, I just have to watch one of my favorite Original Star Trek episodes again – Mirror Mirror, and being about it, I gotta watch the Tribbles episode again too these days. Enterprise and the Original Star Trek are the only ST related series available on hulu here). Especially the last Enterprise episode was pretty much bogus though… the sudden death of Trip caused me to quote from one of my favorite movies of all time: Galaxy Quest. Gwen DeMarco: This episode was badly written! (when she and Jason Nesmith encounter the chompers on the way to the Omega 13).

Nevertheless I managed to watch through 4 seasons of Enterprise until the bitter end, in contrast to Deep Space 9 and Voyager.

There will be another Star Trek movie coming out some time in 2012 it seems with Zachary Quinto as Spock (who is a damn well worthy Spock) and I'm looking forward to it but hey… What about a new Star Trek series??? I wouldn't mind one at all = I would be watching it. Why not go a little bit more into the future and have something after Next Gen? I kinda miss Klingons and Romulans and even the Borg! Some more Qs would be nice too and and and.

But alas… as far as I know there are no plans for a new Star Trek TV series, are there? Sniff…

Well, at least I can explore now something that I have never come around to yet. Unbelievable as it may sound, I have never watched Doctor Who. As long as I still lived in Germany I cannot remember Doctor Who ever having played on German TV. But! There is relief around the corner. Hulu Japan has recently added the first season of the (starting in 2005) Doctor Who series to its program and actually I just watched the first episode and must say it looks promising!

Nevertheless, maybe I should write the Star Trek fanclub and ask them to collect signatures begging for a new ST series!

Live long and prosper fellow geeks.

Japan – The Obsession with Food, part 1

Japan: the obsession with food

The Japanese obsession with food is too big a topic to make only one blog entry out of it, so, I will make a food-tetralogy and publish it here within the next few weeks (or months).

The tetralogy will consist of the following installments:

1) Obsessed with freshness

2) Omiyage

3) Food Travel

4) Food TV

Part 1) Obsessed with freshness

I find it to be highly interesting that a country, which is so obsessed with food, has relatively few to no problems with obesity. Does that mean that if you care a lot about food, you don't gain weight as opposed to if you don't care about food and eat junk you bloat? That explanation is surely too easy, but I think it does play a big part when it comes down to what we eat and how we eat it.

There is no doubt that Japan is a haven for gourmets. Fresh produce is expensive, but of astounding quality and freshness. If you buy a four-pack of apples you can be sure that they are all in top shape. In contrast to many shops in other parts of the world there is no half rotten apple anywhere in any Japanese supermarket. The stuff here looks, smells and tastes impeccable. Even "mass produce" is of highest quality. In general there are no "dumps" in supermarkets where you can buy fruits or veggies in bulk. There are open apples of which you can buy as many as you want, but they are neatly lined up on foamed and shaped cartons, not thrown randomly in a big storage space like it happens in Germany or also the US.

In my home supermarket around the corner they have Brazilian mangos on a regular basis that have a label reading "export to Japan". I suppose that means the "perfect" mangoes are lined up for export to Japan, the rest gets shipped elsewhere where the customers don't mind a "non-perfect" shape and color of the fruit. Such mangoes usually cost some 400 yen, which is 4 Euro at the current exchange rate (but at times when a Euro was 160 yen that was only 2.5 Euro). I guess that's expensive, but the stuff is worth it and the people are willing to pay for good quality.

There is not one brown leaf on any cabbage or lettuce anywhere. All veggies are presented flawlessly as well.

The funniest thing (for me as a German) is single packed and wrapped potatoes. Potatoes are considered vegetables here and not a staple food and people cook one potato to put it into curry for example. One potato wrapped in vinyl closed with a golden clip is just hilarious to watch and costs an average of 50 yen. The usual size for potatoes in "bulk" is some five or six of them in a vinyl bag and they cost 200 yen. Expensive, yes, but faultless.

Even higher standards are the norm for fresh meat and fish, of course.

A couple of years ago there was an initiative where farmers sold six apples instead of four in one pack with a special sign on them saying something along the lines of "they might not look perfect, but they taste good". That didn't last. I haven't seen such offerings anywhere the past few years. There's just too much perfectionism going on in Japanese kitchens I wonder where the not so perfect apples etc. go. I hope into export or at least into animal food instead of being thrown away.

There is another thing worth mentioning about fruits. They are often given as presents to someone who is sick. For that purpose special, super expensive fruits are grown, especially melons, that are wiped, nudged or whatever every day so that they show perfect patterns on their rinds. Melons like that can cost up to 10,000 yen. And a couple of years ago someone came upon the idea to grow water melons in cubic boxes and the melons became cubes as well. I haven't seen those in a while though, guess even the Japanese thought that a water melon cube is kinda WEIRD…

Judas Priest Live

It's quite impossible to argue about tastes in music. Unlike a movie or a book where there are criteria for whether it is a good or a boring story, music has no such limitations. You either like metal or classical music or pop or you don't. Of course within the categories there is good and awful music but the genres are in your genes, simple as that. I definitely have the metal gene. Music leaves me untouched and cold unless I can bang my head (evil grin).

So last night I had a good portion of headbanging – actually so bad (or good) that my muscles are protesting heavily today!

Went to see Judas Priest. They announced that their Epitaph tour would be their last World Tour and so maybe this was their last time to come to Japan and I went to see them in the legendary Budokan hall (more about the hall in my Eric Clapton concert review). The place was nearly sold out, though not entirely, with some odd "block" vacancies in the arena. I have been to Budokan quite a number of times from J-Rock concerts over Clapton to Priest and the arena is always filled with chairs. I think they have some security/safety issues about the hall, which does not allow them to have the arena as "all standing". Interestingly the Saitama Arena where I saw Metallica, two years ago had no such issues and the arena was without chairs, Budokan and Tokyo Dome though always come with chairs. I don't know the secret behind that.



Anyway, despite the chairs the atmosphere in the hall was great and, as I like it, nobody (or almost nobody) remained seated as soon as the lights went out. Everyone jumped to his/her feet and a guttural "Priest" rose from 10,000 throats.

I was amazed by the punctuality. The concert was supposed to start at 19:00 and it did start at 19:00 sharp. Didn't know British heavy metalists have a nick for punctuality

Priest did 7 concerts in Japan, three of which in the greater Tokyo area. Their Budokan gig was the last of their tour through the country.

I had expected Rob Halford to appear on stage with his Harley right in the beginning and was a bit disappointed when that wasn't the case. I had not much time for giving it much thought though, since the band fired up the audience right from the start. After two songs Rob Halford addressed the audience in three stages: hello Budoukan, hello Tokyo, hello Japan. He completely ignored that half of the audience probably did not understand what he was saying and explained the concept of their world tour: to take the fans through 40 years of Judas Priest history and announced that they'd play one or more songs from every of their albums. No matter what he said or whether he was understood, the crowd roared appreciatively

I forgot about four fifths of the set up, but they played: Star Breaker, Judas Is Rising, Never Satisfied, Beyond the Realms of Death, You've Got Another Thing Coming and many other songs. The only ballad they played was Diamonds and Rust (unfortunately not my favorite "Angel".)

Rob changed his costume (mostly coats and jackets) after every or at least every other song. My seat was on the second stand to the west of the stage and luckily Rob did his costume changing there and I could see him vanishing from stage and into a little tent behind a curtain very clearly and follow the costume changes.

They had a screen behind the drumset on which they mostly just showed photos of the album jackets from which they were just playing a song.

Priest played without much pause, the longest break was maybe two minutes and the atmosphere in the hall was fantastic. People had a great time and celebrated their band. I was standing on a gallery of the second stand and had ample space for headbanging and jumping and a bunch of Japanese youngsters around me did the same. The average age of the audience was definitely under that of the band. Good to see people in their twenties screaming at the 60 year old heavy metal grandpas.

About two hours into the concert we got our Harley and Rob rode it (very carefully) on stage where it remained for the last few songs. He wrapped a Japanese flag over his shoulders for one song, then draped the Harley with it. Rob said his only Japanese word three times, giving us a triple farewell: arigatou Budoukan, arigatou Tokyo, arigatou Japan.

As we thought the concert was over at 21:20 and everyone had left except for the drummer, the band had a little surprise for us in store. The drummer, Scott Travis, went back to his drums, grabbed a mike and said. "Thank you all, Japan has always been very good to Judas Priest, we thank you for that and we love you and if you scream loud enough we'll play another song." Of course the audience roared and they played one more round. For that last song, they let down this gigantic cloth over the screen in the background.

So, we got a nice long two and a half hours of Judas Priest and they proved that one is never too old for metal. They had power, energy and enthusiasm and managed to ignite the crowd. It was a fantastic evening and I gotta go to more metal gigs again! Thanks Judas Priest for coming to Japan.

Experience with the KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) Select campaign

There has been lots of talk about the KDP Select program in the industry and being at the lowest end of the food chain I most certainly won't benefit financially from it, however I highly appreciate the program for one simple reason: You get 5 days of "download for free" for every book that you enroll in the program. (The condition of enrolling is that your book must only be available in electronic form on Kindle and nowhere else. Since I haven't come around to publishing my Dome Child novel in any other e-book format yet, I thought, why not, and joined the program).

I don't know if other benefits of KDP Select will unfold for me, but the 5 days "download for free" feature has turned out to be a definite benefit.

The KDP Select program allows you to use your 5 days within a period of 3 months in whichever pattern you want (single days, all 5 days in a row, etc.). I enrolled in KDP Select on the 29th of January and thought to test out the download for free feature the weekend after, starting Friday, 3rd of February and lasting through Sunday, 5th of February. The remaining two days of the "download for free" campaign I wanted and have saved for the HalCon weekend (a local SF convention), which will happen on the 14th and 15th of April. I am scheduled to hold a panel at HalCon talking about the indie-publication of Dome Child and want to offer the panel participants a free download of the book. I am yet undecided as to whether to make the 14th and 15th free or rather the 15th and 16th. Well, I still have some time to decide on that.

Back to the first three days of "download for free" campaign.

I created my first ever "event" on facebook and invited some 120 of my facebook friends to the free download period = those are still people who know me already in one way or the other. The one most difficult thing for the "new" author is to find an audience that does not know you personally for some reason.

So, people I knew were starting to download but then, maybe, hopefully, finally some buzz effect was created by the following factors.

a) Ranking:

After about the first "download for free" day, the Dome Child rose in the ranks of "free books in the SF/adventure category" and entered the top ten, where it stayed for most of the free download period climbing as high as rank 4, averaging out at about rank 7. There is a wonderful advantage of this feature. Presumably other people than the author's friends look into this ranking, see the book there and, since it's for free, they download it. Yeah! Thus the author managed to make people who don't know the author buy his/her book.

b) "People who bought this item also bought that item"

I, of course, have no clue about Amazon's algorithms but I suppose that after a certain amount of downloads your book enters the feature of "people who bought this book also bought this and that item". Meaning, a new feature pops up on the homepage of your book showing "people who downloaded this also downloaded that". Thus the top ten on the SF/Adventure list are cross-pollinating each other and each book appears on the other's page. I think this is the second factor that makes some people download the book of an author they have never heard of before.

c) Finding the author

Last but not least, a little side-effect. When I searched for my name in the Amazon system before the campaign, the Dome Child eventually popped up, but also with a comment "did you mean Regina (someone else)". Now it's just me who is popping up when you enter my name into the Amazon search system and right below the Dome Child glowers my photo from my Amazon's author page. That means to me that the Amazon algorithm has learned who I am (smart algorithm, I like you) because I probably have exceeded a certain threshold of downloads etc. for the thing to recognize me.

I don't know the final number of downloads yet and I won't until the mid of March (around the 15th of each month Kindle gives you the detailed sales figures of the previous month) but I am really thrilled as to how many people actually did download the free Kindle version.

Whatever the figures are, I think I will be pleased with them, since this is the first mini "buzz" I managed to create thus far with any one of the many marketing methods that I tried so far.

Which means, I am pretty glad that I entered KDP Select and I appreciate that Kindle offers this opportunity.

Now, after the "download for free" period is over, sales have of course plummeted again, but I hope the "people who bought this book also bought…" feature will stay up there for quite a while now and maybe lead to one or the other customer to pay 2.99$ to download the Dome Child.

One way or the other, there are still two more days of "download for free" campaign left and I'm looking forward to the hopefully next mini-buzz in April.

Thanks to everyone who downloaded the book, and now I hope that everyone who did download it will read and like it as well