MON 12 JUL 99

Unfinished Business at the Big Udon

The day is quiet. The clock hands move slowly. The pile of sekozus to be reviewed is diminishing, only to be replaced by more. Like emails, they multiply exponentially. They come down the conveyor belt like Lucy and Ethel’s cakes. They pile up but the ammonia-laced paper is no substitute for icing.

Ahh-h, but think of the satisfaction derived by knowing that all has been made well. All of the boxes have been appropriately checked, all of the comments clouded, and all of the stamps pounded onto the sheets. Then the transmittal is typed, signed, stamped, scanned, sent and spindled.

This is how art is produced. This is the essence of creativity. This is the moment.

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Back at the hotel the phone rings. Su-Fei and her enthusiasm have arrived. We head across the street on the east side of the Hilton. Two floors below the street is Ashoka, my favorite Indian restaurant. We are vegans in paradise as the two vegetarian thalis arrive. Su-Fei is unable to finish her dinner, and even I’m unable to finish my naan.

We stumble out and wander a bit through the Osaka Ekimae Buildings just south of the Hilton. Heading east, we cross Mido-Suji Avenue. A block north is the eight floors of the Asahiya bookstore.

We spend some time poking around among the architectural section. I buy a Japanese book about Frank Lloyd Wright and a guide to sake. Wright was an avid collector of Japanese prints and even wrote a book on the subject. While neither of the books deals with the prints, the guide can sure help in imagining them.

Su-Fei makes a find—a CD Rom dealing with Tadao Ando. He is the architect’s architect in Japan and is famous worldwide. She gets mad, because she and her husband were planning a similar project—and now somebody has beaten them to it. Maybe. She is torn between wanting to see what the competition has to offer and the ¥6000 price tag. Frugality wins out. “Maybe next time.”

On the seventh floor is a large English section, with mystery and science fiction sections dominating the fiction shelves. The nonfiction deals mostly with things Japanese—from cooking and eating, to etiquette and diplomacy.

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We go north to the corner of Ogimachi-Dori, then east a short block. Turning right, we head down the arcaded Ohatsu Tenjin Dori. The smallish winding street is alive with shoppers, hustlers, teens, vendors, hostesses, average Joes and Janes (Yoshis and Yukis?), and slick suited mafia toughs. The storefronts contain a mix of fast food, pachinko, souvenirs, clubs, convenience stores and restaurants.

A quick walk down a five-foot wide alley tweaks the nerves and keeps them on edge. Who knows what lurks in the darkened dead-end passages that branch off along the walk? It’s like a kinetic version of telling ghost stories—you walk through spooky stuff, you don’t just hear about it. Some have said that opium dens still operate is some areas. We pass by a speakeasy window where pachinko prizes are turned in for the real winnings.

Shortly we reach the gate to the Ohatsu Tenjin Shrine. The courtyard within is throbbing from the giant bass drum mounted flat on a cart. A young man is teaching eight boys the elements of style for beating the drum. The mallets are not quite a foot long and about two inches in diameter. A thong tied to the mallet’s middle is looped around the wrist. When the drum is struck, the left hand is to appear to bounce back up to the shoulder. The right hand stays in position where the mallet strikes, but the mallet bounces and flips after striking and is caught by the hand. A group of teens is nearby, practicing the same, but with an imaginary drum. Their girlfriends look on adoringly in some cases, boringly in others.

            Kids practicing drums

            Girls playing flute

            Other kids with cymbals

            More kids doing a dragon dance

Return via Kita-Schinchi

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My favorite (and only) morning paper, the Mainichi News, carries this to further prove that some among the Japanese do strike out:

Condom machine gives Dane the clamp

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AFP-Jiji) – A 20-year-old Danish man spent two hours with his finger stuck inside a condom vending machine at a bar before finally giving up and taking the machine with him to a repair center to be freed, Danish radio said.

The man, whose name was not disclosed, had tried to buy a condom from the machine at a bar in Thisted in northwestern Denmark late on Saturday night, but the distributor suddenly clamped down on his finger before he could get his hand out.

Two bar patrons tried to help the man, but without success.

The man was finally taken—machine and all—to a Thisted emergency repair center where he was separated from the machine.

UK tabloid saves squaddies sphincters

LONDON (AFP-Jiji) – The top-selling British newspaper The Sun on Tuesday announced that it was sending 2,000 rolls of soft toilet paper to the country’s troops in Macedonia after complaints that army paper was too hard.

The paper said it had learned from a British army magazine that the 1,250 troops in Skopje, Yugoslavia, to join a possible NATO peacekeeping force for Kosovo, had said that the recycled paper issued to them was “like corrugated cardboard.”

Teaming up with manufacturer Andrew, The Sun said it had launched “Operation Loo Roll” to help “Our Boys in the Balkans.”

German man flushes savings away

HANOVER, Germany (AFP-Jiji) – A German man who hid 23,000 marks (12,900 dollars) in his underpants during a train journey for safety’s sake lost the money while going to the toilet, police said.

Police from this northern German town managed to find the money on the rail line after the passenger told them how he had lost his savings, with which he had planned to buy a car.

The 36-year-old man hid the money in his underpants fearing pickpockets but forgot it was there when he went to the toilet, where he flushed the stash away and on to the track.