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Just back from a trip to Japan. My first ever. Enjoyed it immensely.

It is also a very tiring trip–not only it was short and compact, but I was left with so many impressions and had so many thoughts, it is now quite an overwhelming task to write them down.

I tried to take notes on Euro and Brazil trips but gave up on Xin Jiang. The history and culture of the ancient West Realm (??) was just too high a mountain to scale.

But Japan is different. I feel like I am floating in thoughts, ready to write them down. But don’t know where to start. So I will try a different tack …

I will start with a poem that can best summarize my trip:

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Thought about “?????” but the above poem is more secular and existential.

I was fortunate enough to have experienced both the Urban Japan (Tokyo) and the Rural Japan (Susami)

The Urban Japan:

Tokyo is a very crowded place but is surprisingly clean and quiet. The only exceptions are occasional foul smells from underground sewage and the ubiquitous door sensor chimes.

Tokyo is the epicenter of urban living. Urban living in general is about constantly generating symbols, meanings that are trivial but full of subtlety. You define who you are and which “tribe” you belong, by choosing where to shop for cloth, for shoes, or where to get what pastry from which bakery, let along to say your choice of restaurants and bars. It is something Pagans will never understand.

The Tsukiji fish market (????) is the best-kept secret from mass tourism. It is a photographer’s heaven. One can never appreciate Japanese seafood culture without visiting this market. I saw more creatures from the sea there than from any aquarium I have been to. Yet the place doesn’t smell fishy at all–just tells you how fresh the products are.

Japanese food is the opposite of Chinese food: healthy, lean and single-themed: you can trace most of the flavoring ingredients to one single item–soybean.

Japanese are relentless in their pursuit of perfect appearance: young ladies apply makeups (mostly moderately) and dress stylishly. The Brazilians like to show off their bodies but not their faces, the Japanese are the opposite but with the same intensity.

Tokyo is perhaps the best indexed city in all the places I have been to. Not only every subway stop, but every exit of every stop is marked by numbers. Tokyo’s public transit is denser than the spider webs outside of my window, yet once you understand how it is indexed, you can get around without knowing any Japanese.

Japan is clean. Very clean. Wherever you go–construction sites, store front, subway entrances …–you don’t have look hard to find a spot to put down your backpack. This is especially amazing consider how few trash bins are on the streets. I bet everyone walking around me have some trash in their pockets.

Japanese may use plastic wraps rather liberally, they have a first-class recycling culture that totally offsets the excess. Here are the categories: glass bottles, plastic bottles, paper, burnable trash and landfill trash. Public trash bins don’t always label which hole is for what–that is why I often had to carry trash back to hotel.

The recycling schedule is quite complicated (I will try to get a copy). It should be programmed on cell phones and PDAs to remind people.

All Japanese seem to use one kind of cell phone: thin, large screen shell phones.

Tokyo public transit has everything: bus, light rail, subway and train. One thing to note though: subway is privately run. Every company is called a “line” and has several “routes”. You don’t always get the integrated, city-wide subway map at the stations.

The subway entrance at Shiboya (??) happens to be the intersection of several lines. Song and I had no idea when we walked in. Suddenly, torrents of people coming from all directions and caught us in the middle. For a second, I had a sensation of drowning.

As a tourist from America, I made two mistakes during the trip:

1. Movement: ALWAYS stay on the left–particularly when riding bicycles! Never make sudden movements without looking first. In front of Asakusa Temple (???), I tried to take a picture and stepped backwards (without looking). Boom! I bumped into an old man. And that is not the only time. After all, Tokyo is a much more crowded place than most places in America.

2. Passing food using chopstick to chopstick: I was told that is a very inauspicious move–people only do so when picking unburnt bones from ash urns.

Jon Lee Anderson: Fidel’s Heir

Just after I finished Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, I came upon Anderson’s “extremely short” essay about Hugo Chávez. Convinced me more of my criticism of Arendt: in pursuit of an answer to the Holocaust, she stretched extreme instances of popular demagogy into “Totalitarianism”.

Chávez’s Venezuela is arguably at a midway point in the spectrum of demagogy: Chávez is not a total despot, for he does tolerate some opposition, submit himself to fair elections and accepts the results. Yet he is also very manipulative and inflamatory (e.g. how he humiliated Uribe in the Latin America summit meeting). In addition, he has two other traits Arendt would find interesting: appearing selfishless and has an international agenda.

Then there was Augusto Pinochet: who was not very popular (in a liberal sense) but very brutal. He is probably also somewhere on the spectrum. It is just very hard to demarcate what is true “Totalitarianism”. I don’t think Arendt found the right answer to Holocaust. If anything, she should have looked at the Continent during 1968 and find some solace in an emerging liberal civic culture.

To propose an alternative answer, I’d say that: for the Germans, there is always an element (however faint now) of collective romanticism and fanaticism in their cultural tradition. For the Russians, it is the Hobbesian distrust of each other and the longing for a powerful patriarch that led them to Stalin. Therefore, whether there is a countervailing force growing in each civic society is perhaps a much better indicator of how likely the past predicament will repeat itself.

A quick comment: very very painful to write again after school. But I am glad I tried.

Judith Thurman: First Impressions

Just a beautiful article. There is one paragraph talking about the short and possible interactions between the Neanderthals and Homo sapiens that is so very moving:

“They coexisted for some eight thousand years, until the Neanderthals withdrew or were forced, in dwindling numbers, toward the arid mountains of southern Spain, making Gibraltar a final redoubt. It isn’t known from whom or from what they were retreating (if “retreat” describes their migration), though along the way the arts of the newcomers must have impressed them. Later Neanderthal campsites have yielded some rings and awls carved from ivory, and painted or grooved bones and teeth (nothing of the like predates the arrival of Homo sapiens). The pathos of their workmanship-the attempt to copy something novel and marvellous by the dimming light of their existence-nearly makes you weep. And here, perhaps, the cruel notion that we call fashion, a coded expression of rivalry and desire, was born.”

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When one is physically ill what does that do to one’s mind? I had many hours of sleep but dreaded the dreams. It was the day time stress and anxiety repeated over and again. I was making arguments that at once seemed to make perfect sense and no sense at all. Just like my paper… Early in the morning, I didn’t want to go back to sleep just because I didn’t want to go back to the dreams. But when I was at 39c, it wasn’t always up to me.

While sick, I had time to watch some TV and to read from New Yorker:
1. Watched the Indy Race in St. Petersburg on TV, I think the cry “it is green flag racing!” is very sexy!

2. Watched Carman the opera: I always enjoyed listening to Carman. After all, the Toréador Song was what got me into classical music to begin with. And I watched the opera couple of times before. But this time it was different. Something clicked. Micaëla’s solo in the Gypse’s camp is the most moving: not only the music beautiful, but perfectly encapsulates the obsession of Jose and the power of Carmen. Although Don Jose’s possessiveness is pathological, Carman’s free-will almost justifies one’s total admiration: she is woman worth dying for.

3. Watched One Flew over Cuckcoo’s Nest: It is more Owellian but definitely not Foucaultian. The antagnistic nurse Ratched is NOT how mass society works today. Rather it is the elaborate weddings and ceremonies that David Brooks talked about in the Bobos in Paradise. However, the movie is superb at portraying the tension between the subjected and the privileged once the sensation of being free is discovered and the pursuit of liberation is on.

4. Read Eric Alterman’s “Out of Print” on NYKr. I am certainly in Lippmann’s camp. For a while, I thought that is what Alterman’s argument too. But that is just not progressive enough, uh? This article deserves another entry. But in summary, I do think politics and governance are becoming too complicated, too nuanced to be decided by the general public.

I remember a skit from SNL where a weekend party is going on in a loft apartment somewhere. That was right after 9.11 and the invasion of Afghanistan. Suddenly a guy rushes in and says, “the Northern Aliance just took Jalalabad!” and everybody raises their glasses and cheers.

The moral of the joke is that the world is just too complicated. Alterman seems to be finding hope in the newly burgening phenomenon of “participating” journalism, or a mixture of opinions and leaks and rumors. He is well aware of the ptifalls of such a development: the degradation of journalistic integrity. And more importantly, the polarization of public opinions. But strangely, he seems to say this is actually good for democracy: the reason that more Europeans voted than Americans is because they have so many tabloids.

Of course, his musing stops right there. No further reasoning offered why these two are even corelated! That is rather ridiculous for a serious article (or posting, should I say). But he has several good points, for example, that the “veneer of neutrality” is becoming increasingly unsustainable. And the very effort to stay “above the fray” may render print journalism cold and distant.

5. By the way, just saw my old boss Dan Hesse on TV in a Sprint commercial. I was such a fan of his while at Terabeam. I still think he is a heck of communicator and salesman.

Just a collection of some old favorites and new interpretations:

“Ah, there you go; ‘93! I was expecting that word. A cloud had been forming for the space of fifteen hundred years; at the end of fifteen hundred years it burst. You are putting the thunderbolt on its trial.”
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—Chapter X. The Bishop in the Presence of an Unknown Light, Les Miserables
I read it over and again during the summer of 89. Now I realize it has more to do with the theme of enlightenment, not “democracy”. Still very powerful however you read it though.

Thus at Time’s humming loom it’s my hand that prepares,
The robe ever-living the Deity wears.
—Spirit, Faust. Part I, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
One of the most intriguing lines in Faust. The first Chinese version I read was translated by GMR, I think.

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Tonight’s SNL started with a skit that poked fun at media’s adoration of Obama. It was really fun.

The media’s adoration for Obama is almost naked. Yet everyone in the business carries on as if nothing is wrong. There has been so much talk about media giving the Bush administration a pass prior to the Iraqi War. But by my count, that wasn’t as bad as what I see today. This behavior not only tarnishes the profession, but also does disservice to the candidates and the public.

Therefore, it is great to watch the skit where the media was made fun of. This skit also reminded me of an article I read in New Yorker many years ago, “Standup Guys“.

Before, I thought political comedy as an inherently liberal expression. But that article really changed my mind. Political humor is not about liberalism versus conservatism. It is about the powerless versus the powerful. In other words, political humor lives to expose the poseur of the powerful, particularly the elaborate symbols and rituals created by those in power. To put it simply, it is the little boy that is destined to cry “but the Emporer has no cloth!”

In a liberal society as the U.S., the powerful doesn’t have to be the authorities. It could be the masses (a la de Tocqueville). Unfortunately, even as the message conveyed in a joke is actually true, it is only effective when packaged in humor.

Is this a case of tyranny of lie or impotence of truth?

NYT introduced a couple of recent books (“Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge”)on America’s anti-intellectual tradition.

Quotes:
Ms. Jacoby, whose book came out on Tuesday, doesn’t zero in on a particular technology or emotion, but rather on what she feels is a generalized hostility to knowledge.

T. J. Jackson Lears, a cultural historian who edits the quarterly review Raritan, said, “The tendency to this sort of lamentation is perennial in American history,” adding that in periods “when political problems seem intractable or somehow frozen, there is a turn toward cultural issues.”

The article also cited Ms. Jacoby (started as a Washington Post reporter) as saying the problem was with the flawed educational system and religious foundamentalism.

I disagree. This is just another manifestation of the knowledge-power relationship. Or the ontology of knowledge: if people already feeling empowered, why do they still need knowledge?

This may seem obvious, but my contention is: this is NOT an abnormly, nor a unique phenomenon.

Recently, something happened in business school that made my head spinning…

As the Chinese New Year draws near, students in B School planned to organize a China-themed Friday party. One student from Taiwan was quite insistent about displaying ROC’s flag. That motion caused quite a disturbance among students from Mainland. As part of that gang, I witnessed outbursts of pretty strong feelings.

I thought about preaching my brand of tolerance but thought the better of it. What made me wonder (not the in-disbelief kind, but the courious one) is, even people from Mainland having been living closely with those from Taiwan, this experience did not really change their attitude much, if at all. I mean we studied, worked, lunched, teamed, and partied together. If anything, I believe most of us feel the two sides are closer–however involuntary–than each with the non-Chinese crowd. Yet that is still not enough to cause some of them to rethink how ridiculous it is to go back to a relationship that we didn’t initiate nor appreciate. In other words, the hatred and distrust between the two side was started by our grandparents. They may have geniune reasons to do so, but we can never truly appreciate this geniuneness since we never lived through that period.

(A related point is that how Chinese government handles Taiwan’s status is rather short-sighted. I always wanted to write an essay that is titled “Defeating a State, Losing a Nation”)

It is just another example of impossibility of “truth”. If one is blind to her own experience but rather fall for something others planted in her mind and internalize it, what does that experience matter? Ironically, someone organized a panel and having a group of students who spent three month in China, in an exchange program tailored for foreigners, to discuss the future of the country. I thought she put way too much weight on that three-month.

Of course, there are always exceptions. Like John Walker Lindh, whose short stint with another culture suddenly made him a complete convert. But that is why there are mental institutions. For most of us, we are likely to carry our little world around us–wherever we go.

After we came back from Xin Jiang, we had very busy days: family visits, old friends, etc. So I never had the presence of mind nor the time to write down my daily experience. Here I am just writing down pieces of memory here and there. Not sure how readable they are but hopefully they will remind me of this trip in the future.

Eating Buddhism
9/18
Went to a vegetarian restaurant (with Teng Song). Exquisite setting, excellent presentation–reminded me of scenes from ??????. But a lot quieter.

Waiters dressed like Buddhist monks. Quiet voice and gentle demeanor. Menu full of Buddhist terms–as if dish names were randomly inserted into ????????. When we walked out of the restaurant, ?????????????????????????????????????“?”????“?”??

What is Buddhism any more? Are these “knowledge”? Metaphysical concept becomes stimulants for sensual pleasure. The force of commerce dictates interpretation.

Art Beijing 2007 and the Art of Commerce
9/19
My old pal Sun Ning is a newbie art dealer in Beijing. He took me to Art Beijing 2007. an industry expo.

Surprised by how many art works bear naked political statements: an artist uses egg shells to build a model of the iconic CCTV building. Chinese newspaper printed on a huge roll of toilet paper. Met a guy from Germany who was totally awed by another work: a pair of bloated breasts on top of a pile of RMB cash, 100 millions worth. And another: a bronze sculpture with very classic looking dragon on top of a characterless middle aged women as if raping her.

A very impressive piece of work: a bunch of toddler boys, dressed in full military uniforms as if in a meeting, all watching one boy whipping another boy who is kneeing on the floor with pants pulled down. The watching boys all appear disinterested and absent minded, with a hint of boyish innocence on their faces.

I was told the work is priced at $600K. I thought it was pretty high for an artist in mid 40s. But SN told me it is how the market works nowadays: an artist creates a unique style, manages to get in an oversea’s show, and being recognized by Western critics, his/hers works rocket up immediately. Then copycats will spurn up and fill in the lower tiers with less distinquishable works.

There are many many excellent works I’d love to have. But there are some that have too much ??.

Talking to Sun Ning really helped me to appreciate contemporary art. True appreciation has to come in incremental steps: who are the contemporaries, what are the works before and after the one in front of you, what segment (even age group) the artist is in, what others are saying, etc. Gone is the time when one can look at a piece of work and say, “I like it”.

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9/20
Seeing blue sky for the 2nd day in Beijing. Visited ??? with my parents.
Visited ??? inside YHY. A pleasant surprise: it houses the best of antiques found in YHY. Because it charges extra, very few people were in there. We hired a guide to show us around. Having visited the Art expo the day before, I was not surprised at all at the selection by the guide: she picked the ones with the most stories, not those that appealed to our eyes.

After seeing so many tourist art works, it is easy to tell how great the collection is. I felt it wasn’t bad to be an emporer after all. Fell in love with a piece of ????, reminded me of those I saw in ??. Didn’t buy after all.

Many bronze pieces from pre-Han dynasties. Great stuff.

Song is leaving for Beijing again. We thought it would be nice to spend a day in the city instead of being stuck on the east side.

Dinner at Waterfront Seafood Grill: Great sound view, spectacular sunset, pricy menu (the burning-through-your-wallet kind), excellent Lamb Rack.

Seafair Torchlight Parade: The lamest street fair I’ve ever witnessed. Where the New Orleanians turn funeral parade into a festival, the Seattlites turn a festival into a funeral parade. There was even a large contingent of Fa Lun Gong band: a wierd sight that left me … ???? (or “not sure to frawn upon or to laugh at”).

The Simpsons Movie: for an long time fun, the movie is hardly any more entertaining. But it didn’t ruin the brand either. The really fun part was the experience of watching it: as different people picking on different jokes, it reminded me watching an episode with a group of guys in a bar. There is “solitary” movie and “social” movie. The Simpsons certainly belongs to the latter.

Why people are addicted to junk news?

On the one hand, it becomes obvious that, if left to free market, the main stream media will sink even lower than it is today. On the other hand, the guarding angels of serious news are somehow incapable of building a profitable business.

This news story prompted this observation, “Brzezinski Makes Noise With Paris Stand“. Basically, a TV personnel, sickened by the dominance of the Paris Hilton story, decided to thred the newscript on the spot. Of course, she became an instant hero among her peers. Yet at the same time, the one show that devoted everything to the Hilton story–including paying her for the story, the Larry King Show, enjoyed trippling audience.

Another related story is the one Ken Auletta wrote on New Yorker, “Promises, Promises”. As persuasive as ever, Auletta made the case that Murdoch cannot be trusted: he will bring the Journal down, down and down.

Yet why the suddenly beloved Journal is in such a predicament? How come NYT or Washington Post has not bought this obvious “low-hanging fruit”? On the other hand, if one really cares about WSJ, the opportunity RM brings to the table is just too tempting to walk away from.

So what is wrong? Is there a model, with only a few exogenous variables, can explain why most people are inherently attracted to vulgarity AND the high-minded are inherently inept in turning knowledge into profit? I am dying to find out …