Japanese Oysters and The Book of the Dead

There are times when we reveal ourselves as the twilight species Desmond Morris described in The Naked Ape, creatures caught between a primitive state and our ultimate evolutionary future as truly sentient beings. The Japanese oyster debacle is one of these times. I love Japan. I always have fun there. One of my really good, lifelong friends is a little Japanese woman who lives in Tokyo. But this crazy oyster blunder gives me pause. It is, sadly, the kind of wasteful thing Americans would do. Here are the balls out brass tacks:

The Forest Waterway in Tokyo Bay is where all the rowing and canoeing events for the Olympics will take place. They put out over three miles of floats to make the courses and then, an unexpected delight! Oysters found them! What a strange and unlikely miracle! And the floats… started sinking. Closer inspection revealed that these were not just any oysters, however. They were none other than the prized magaki. No one knows why it happened. But it did. There will come a time, I have no doubt, when we will look on this as a charming boon and throw a beach side oyster party, complete with naked holographic dancers ten stories high, hangover free sake and more, but this time, they were scraped off and thrown away. Several tons of perfectly good magaki, toast. The issue, of course, is all the “red tape”.

There are bigger examples of this kind of waste. Take the ill-fated Keystone pipeline. Shut down, and with good reason, but somewhere out there, lying in piles, are endless miles of now useless conduit. It’s raining like a bastard on one side of the country and the other is scorched. In my twilight primate mind I think “Hmm. We need some big ass tubes to pipe that floodwater over to the burning zone.” Probably too much of that same red tape.

Waste not, want not. That only applies to you and me, dear reader. Recently I read something interesting that made me consider these kinds of problems in a new light. Researchers from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand put a segment of scroll wrapping from an Egyptian mummy into a digital database, and by golly, some research dudes and dudegirls at The Getty Research Institute instantly realized they had the other half of it. The completed scroll (complete again after who knows how long) contains a hieratic passage from The Book of the Dead. In short, a solution to a mummy scroll puzzle was solved by people who weren’t even in the same room. These same people, at least people with these same qualities, need to be in charge more often in my opinion. That had to be kinda hard, right? The ‘throw the oysters away or eat them’ puzzle was simple in comparison.