APOKALIPSIS

This is my last night in Asia, and I’m a bit exhausted, but I thought I should blog from Korea while I still can! Kim and I had a great two-week whirlwind tour of Japan that included cat cafes, Doraemon, Astro Boy, Totoro, Pokemon arcade games, sushi trains, biking around Mt. Fuji, staying in temples, riding bullet trains, and all sorts of wonderful Japanese stuff. Even though most people don’t speak English, they are always friendly and polite, and the immaculate public transit means getting around is a span. Plus, everything is strange and interesting, from the oldest shrines and geisha districts to the newest arcades and electronics stores. There may not be a better country in the world to be a tourist than Japan.
Korea, on the other hand …
Korea is … weird.
They are currently massive protests going on here because the president has decided to start importing beef from the U.S. again. CNN reports that hundreds of people were injured in beef-related riots in Seoul yesterday, but no one seems to be able to explain to me exactly why this issue is worth rioting over. Supposedly it’s the threat of mad cow disease, but American beef is considered safe by almost the entire world. I’ve had people tell me that the people were just looking for an excuse to be upset at the president, Lee Myung-bak, or that the Koreans are afraid that this will bring an unwanted American influence to their country, or that it will negatively affect the price of meat in Korea by introducing cheaper imports. Myung-bak was elected by a large margin of victory back in December, but has seen his approval rating plummet below 20% during the beef scandal. I don’t unnecessarily think that the Koreans are unjustified in protesting, I just don’t comprehend why they have picked this particular issue to protest.
They are also upset about a small rocky island between here and Japan where TWO people live. Both Korea and Japan claim the rocks, and it seems that nothing would make Koreans happier than having Japan renounce her claim to them. I don’t understand why Japan wants these rocks, but Koreans believe it is a threat to their sovereignty.
I can’t really pass judgment or pretend to draw conclusions. Apparently, there are emotions that only Koreans can feel. One of Elizabeth’s Korean friends on Jeju Island told us that one thing she liked best about Korea is a certain feeling (which I forget the name of) of love which all Koreans feel between each other. It sounded to me like what you would call “kinship,” but that would be a universal feeling, not just a Korean one. There is also the concept of Han, which is the feelings of bitterness and resentment that all Koreans feel as a result of their past oppression and occupation. Elizabeth says her host mom insists that the Koreans are like the Jews in how badly they’ve been mistreated.
I need to brush up on my Korean history, but I’m not sure how much that would really help me understand, because the culture and the people here seem to be distinctly unknowable.
Everyone I have met has been friendly, though — an old man even gave up his seat on the subway to me when he saw I had a large bag, and no one has tried to rip me off, even when I have been an easy target and accidentally tried to pay twice what I owed. The scenery is beautiful. The food is pretty decent. But that doesn’t change the fact that this place feels impossible to delve into. Just when you think you’ve figured it out, something shifts.
Korea is like a sphinx, and I feel that I may never unravel its riddle.

more later…

It’s 1:30 a.m. and I have spent a good aprt of the evening walking around the alleys of downtown Kyoto looking for a Tanuki (mythical badger) shrine. I’m too tired to write much, so here is a photo of Totoro, your neighbor and mine, at a Shinto shrine in the Fuji/Five Lakes region that Kim and I biked around yesterday. Also note the wasps’ nest in the statue’s eyebrow.

The trip has been awesome so far!

Greetings from Akihabara, Tokyo’s “technology city,” where Kim and I are spending our second night in Japan. We flew out of Adelaide to Sydney at about 6:30 a.m. on Saturday, which meant we had to be up even earlier. After Sydney we had a nine hour flight to Osaka, which was delayed by an hour and didn’t get in until 9:30 p.m. It was a long, long day of traveling, made worse by the fact that Kim and I were both doing our best to recover from colds.
We finally made it, though, and within a few minutes of landing in Japanese soil we were being fingerprinted and photographed by customs. Everything here seems very clean and every efficient. That didn’t stop us from having a number of mishaps getting to our hostel, however. We nearly wound up taking a train to the wrong side of Osaka, ended up in the middle of the city with no change to pay for subway fare, got into the subway station just as the train arrived and were told to wait for the next one — except to be told immediately afterwards that the station was closing and there would be no more trains that night. It was nearly midnight at this point and we weren’t even sure if our hostel was still open. Once we figured out how to make local calls using a phone booth, we were able to verify that our hostel would take us, and we caught a cab there.
We stayed at a Ryokan, a traditional Japanese guesthouse. Mattresses on the floor, cushions to kneel on, the whole place smelling like tea, that kind of thing. It was awesome.

The TV actually had a VCR player! That’s how old-fashioned it was. Also, in just about every place you stay in Japan, you get a robe (to borrow) and a toothbrush (to keep). We took much-needed showers, I made some tea, and then we passed out on our tatami mats.

I still felt a bit sick and tired the next morning, and all I wanted was a breakfast of noodles. Fortunately, there was a cafe nearby. Kim got some frenchtoast, and our waitress looked surprised when I told her I wanted the fried noodles (even though they were the one “recommended” dish on the English menu). We read the comics they had at the cafe while we waited for our food.

Then I got my steaming plate of noodles. I never would have thought this would be an ideal breakfast for me, but my palate must have adjusted to them in Borneo. It was exactly what I needed, and I felt great the rest of the day!

We put our Japan Rail passes to good use after breakfast and caught a shinkansen bullet train train to Tokyo — a four hour trip! Fortunately, we had picked out some bento boxes from the station in Osaka before we left, which made the ride that much more enjoyable. We didn’t know exactly what we were eating — I identified eel and shrimp in mine, and I think squid — but it was great.

The scenery out the window was also excellent. I never realized quite how lush Japan is, but this part of the country at least is green, green green! We watched the hills and buildings roll by, alternating rice paddies and factories, mountains and skyscrapers.

There was a young man on our train who kept making unearthly sniffing and snorting noises — he clearly had a cold and wanted everyone around him to know it. Apparently in Japan it is impolite to blow your nose in public so you are allowed to do anything possible to keep it all in, even if it means disturbing the whole train! It was pretty funny, but also annoying.
Before long, we were in Tokyo!

We found our accommodation for the night — a capsule hotel, and then headed back to catch the train for some sight-seeing. First we hit up the Pokemon Center, which really has to be seen to be believed:

Then it was off to the Harijuku district, which is a trendy area where teenagers walk the street dressed like vampire maidens or Strawberry Shortcake and most of the shops play American R&B music. We stopped in a punk rock-themed store that sold $300 “Tokyo Punk” leather jackets and was blasting the decidedly non-punk sounds of Contemporary Country Western music. Oh Japan!

Since we had traditional food earlier in the day, we slum it for dinner and sample the cuisine of Loteria, which is a Japanese fast food chain and not, as its name suggests, a Spanish lottery. Their ads featured cheese-drenched beef patties colliding into each other with seismic force, sending grease particles flying. We had to try it.

The actual food was somewhat less impressive. The massive advertised double burger was small by Western standards and actually managed to taste completely unlike a hamburger (it was still good!). Kim ordered something that looked like a chicken burger but was decidedly NOT made from chicken. Well, probably. She has convinced herself that it was probably whale.

We strolled Harajuku for a while longer. I bought some trendy socks (I have only had two pairs since arriving from Borneo), including some with skulls on them. Then, worn out from walking, we got on the train back toward our capsule hotel in the technology district. We learned that there had been a huge stabbing attack in the area before we arrived which left seven people dead. Strange.

Now I’m about to head to my capsule to sleep. It’s just a bed, pillow alarm clock and TV in a space just a bit larger than a coffin. Despite all that, it seems like a pretty cozy place. Further adventures are to come! More later…

xo

In about 30 hours I will be heading off for a month-long tour of Asia.
I just printed out first draft of the script for the graphic novel I’m doing with Peter. It’s over 40,000 words, which I think makes it the longest thing I’ve written. It took a lot of paper to print, and I had to keep refilling the printer. I’ll be taking it on the plane to make edits and revisions on the 14 hour flight to Japan.
more later.

xo

My younger (no longer “little”) brother Nathan is big into freeride mountain biking, which is something I’ve never done, but it seems to involve biking through trails in the forest and across elevated wooded platforms that look like they came straight from the Ewok treehouses in Return of the Jedi. So it seems pretty fun.
Along with surfing, skating, snowboarding, parkour and any other sports that involve kinetically weaving your way through natural and man-made obstacle courses, the a huge part of the culture of freeriding is videos and DVDs that show people tackling the trails. Every time I’ve been home to Oregon over the past year or so, I’ve seen Nate watching these DVDs over and over again. There’s something inherently dramatic about see dudes speed through the trees on their bikes, riding along tiny tracks made of logs, soaring off of dirt ramps, and crashing head-first into mossy rocks. It turns was is a solitary effort into something more like an art, halfway between a sport, a dance and a documentary. Plus, it allows for enthusiasts to share trails and techniques with each other, since the hardcore trailriders are spread out around the world and can’t all make it to Peru or Andalucia.
Nathan rides at a place called Black Rock which is not too far from our hometown and basically right next door to where he works at a summer camp, and for those of you who can’t make it out to Black Rock (like me at the moment), you can check it out in this video, where Nate charts out a “sick” route.

He described the movie to me thusly: “I ride some trails and then meet this random old guy there and we talk. Then it’s like he gives me wisdom and we ride off.” He said the filmmakers did some “artsy-fartsy” shots that he wasn’t completely keen on, but that he felt pretty good about how the whole thing turned out. I think it looks pretty cool, and I am proud to see Nathan in one of those videos he spent all winter watching.

I had felt certain or years that there would never be another Indiana Jones movie. Harrison Ford has been past his action-hero prime for well over a decade, and the bloom just seemed off that particular rose. But as it turns out, aging the character almost 20 years is possibly the best thing they could have done to the franchise.
Unlike the perennially popular James Bond and Batman who need to be “re-launched” every decade or so to remain current, Indiana Jones exists in a universe that lags about 50 years behind the production of his films. Temple of Doom, set in ‘35 and filmed in ‘84; Raiders of the Lost Ark, set in ‘36 was filmed in ‘80; Last Crusade, set in ‘38 was filmed in ‘88; Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, set in ‘57 was filmed in ‘07. As a result, the actors and the filmmakers have aged in time with the character, which is actually a pretty interesting effect.
Most action heroes are perpetually young, fit and in their prime. Their relationship to the world around them usually remains rather static, even when the characters are “updated” — in the original Iron Man comics Tony Stark had ties to the Vietnam War; in the new film he’s connected to the war in Afghanistan. It’s nothing more than a change in scenery; the character is essentially the same.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is fundamentally very much an Indiana Jones movie. In form and function it does not deviate much from the established formula; the free-wheeling Temple of Doom is still the anomaly of the series. The difference is that Indy himself has changed, and crucially, so has the world around him: the Second Great War is over, the United States is riding an economic boom, the Cold War is in full swing, and McCarthyism is on the rise. Indy finds himself going gray and slowing down (if only a bit). He’s lost some good friends over the years, and seems to have grown more attached to his tenured professorship — he gets the most angry in this film when threatened with losing his comfortable job. At the end of the movie he makes a crucial decision that the younger Indiana Jones would have blanched at.
As much as this film is about gracefully aging and the dawn of the Atomic Age, it’s fascinating and great fun. This the only Indiana Jones movie where the best scenes take place on the homefront, as seeing Dr. Jones navigate late ’50s America is a hoot.
Sadly, when the more typically action-oriented stuff in the jungle of the Amazon rolls around in the second half of the film, it all feels a bit too by-the-numbers. The performances are excellent all around, and there are a couple of great bits of action and vintage Indy visuals, but the film wears its formula on the sleeve. It’s easy to play opening-night quarterback, but the notes I had for the filmmakers about the last half of the film seemed really basic: there was no real character conflict, too many characters hanging around with nothing to do, a climax slim on emotional resonance. It almost felt like they were trying too hard to make a traditional Indy film and not hard enough on making it a good story.
Still, each Indiana Jones film has its own flaws, and this one nicely expands the series. I might add some other thoughts about the film after it’s been out a while longer and I don’t have to scream SPOILER WARNING. What did the rest of you think?

June will be another month of traveling for me.
First it’s off to Japan with Kim for two weeks. She has a medical conference in Tokyo, and I’m tagging along. My number one thing to see is Mt. Fuji, which hopefully we’ll get to climb if the weather is good. Kim’s number one things is cat cafes. These are cafes where there are cats crawling around and you can pay to go play with them for an hour. I guess they are all over Japan because most people aren’t allowed to have pets in their apartments. Kim has promised me that we will only have to go to one of them, but I don’t quite believe her.
After Japan, Kim returns to Australia and I head onward to Korea to visit Seoul and see my sister on Jeju Island. I’ll be there for ten days, then it’s back to Australia for me, too!
I’m so exciting to be visiting both Japan and Korea!! I’ve got a major project I’m trying to finish before we leave though, so it’s crunch time for me for the next thee weeks. Does anyone have travel tips?
xoxo

I got to see Iron Man early! Kind of. Movies debut on Thursdays in Australia, which is actually Wednesday in the United States. So through the magic of simultaneous world-wide film releases and the International Date Line, Iron Man came out in Australia two days before it hit the United States. This is not really that much to be excited about, but there’s something cool about being able to see a sci-fi film on opening day.
Despite being based on a character created 45 years ago, Iron Man feels like a remarkably modern superhero film, and the hi-tech armored suit our hero wears is only part of that. Robert Downey Jr.’s performance feels fresh, and the script manages to avoid most of the familiar genre tropes. Crucially, while most superhero movies take place in our backyard metropolises, Iron Man is set in a globalized world. The finale takes place in Los Angeles, but most of the film’s action takes place in Afghanistan, where the villains speak more languages than most Americans can probably name.
In fact, the idea that the United States is meddling in places we do not understand is central to the movie’s plot. Tony Stark is the ultimate example of the ugly American. He lives for money, technology and girls. The first thing he wants when he gets back from the Middle East is a cheeseburger, dammit. He’s the head of a gazillion-dollar corporation that makes bombs, guns and grenades, and he’s proud of just how well they do their jobs.
Or he is, until he finds himself face to face with the destruction his profitable weapons have wrought. At that point, he decides to change his ways — instead of destroying the world, he’s going to try to save it.
In one way or another, superhero films all deal with power fantasies: what if you could save the innocent? what if you could fight crime? Iron Man asks: what if the military-industrial complex suddenly grew a conscious? It’s one of the most compelling fantasies I’ve seen a film like this entertain, and perhaps one of the most unlikely.
Unfortunately, the climax of the film is a typical knock-down, drag-out slugfest, which sees Jeff Bridges’ formerly complex character reduced to a monster that spews generic pull-string bad guy lines in a generic gravelly bad guy voice. The scene was reportedly inspired by Robo-Cop II, which makes sense, since it plays like nothing more than a throwback to the ’80s. But if you can overlook that final battle — usually the centerpiece of this kind of film rather than its weakest moment — Iron Man works as an entertaining, of-the-moment superhero thriller that stretches its genre’s conventions right up to the final line.
(And nerds should stay past the credits for a secret cameo scene!)

Today was ANZAC Day, one of Australia’s biggest national holidays. ANZAC stands for Australia & New Zealand Army Corps, and the holiday commemorates their landing on Gallipoli during World War I. More than 10,000 of the ANZAC troops were killed during the campaign, which was ultimately a failure. However, the event helped forge a national identity in both Oz and New Zealand, and the Anzacs today are said to embody something of the spirit of Australia. Each capital city in Australia holds a dawn service on April 25 to honor those who fought in Gallipoli, and all the other fallen soldiers. Like America, Australia has almost exclusively lost her servicemen and women to foreign wars, although the country was under the threat of invasion during World War II. American and Aussie troops fought side by side in the Pacific theatre, which resulted in the first real cultural exchange between our two countries. I’ve got a facsimile of the handbook given to American GIs who served in Australia, which I’ll try to post some scans from tomorrow.
Kim and I went to Adelaide’s ANAZC dawn service this morning, which was a well-attended, if low-key affair. The service started with a speech that paid respect to the fallen and the need to stand together as a country, but didn’t gloss over how horrible and unnecessary war can be. Then there were hymns, a bugle call, and laying of wreaths at the war memorial, which we couldn’t see because of the crowd. I also heard the Australian national anthem for probably the first time. It’s the most quaint national anthem I have ever heard.
It was interesting to attend the service as an American. In the United States, we really go all out with our patriotism, but here it doesn’t seem to be quite so demonstrative. I only saw one Australian flag the entire time, and there was no shouting nor fireworks. Just a moment of silence, a quiet chorus of Advance Australia Fair, and then the crowd began to disperse to view the wreaths laid in remembrance, or headed off to have breakfast.

This is Doraemon

I was first introduced to Doraemon in Spain, where he appeared as a tiny KinderSurprise toy inside of my friend’s chocolate egg. The toy was just a little figurine that didn’t do much of anything, so the instructions simply explained who Doraemon was.

“Doraemon es el amable gato robotico del siglo XXIV. Tiene un caja extradimensional en su pachuco por ayudar su amigos.

I remember reading that in Spanish and having to ask a friend if I was translating it correctly because it just seemed bizarre. But no, I had understood the description correctly: “Doraemon is the friendly robot cat from the 24th Century. He has an extra-dimensional box in his stomach to help his friends.”

Wow. They had me from robot cat, but the box in his stomach really clinched the deal. That is how you create a compelling cartoon character. I didn’t have to watch a Doraemon cartoon show or read a Doraemon comic to understand the guy, and since he hasn’t made it to the shores of the USA yet, I couldn’t if I wanted to.
On the other hand, he’s big ubiquitous in Japan, where he simultaneously starred in six monthly comic series, each for a different age of children, plus a weekly anime series which produced well over 1,000 episodes from 1979 to 2005, only to be replaced by a new Doreamon anime in 2005 on the occasion of the show’s 25th anniversary. There are upwards of 30 Doraemon feature films, more if you include spin-offs, dozens of video games, and probably gazillions of toys and stationary items. Time Asia magazine named him an Asian Hero in 2002.

Here’s Doraemon’s first appearance, in which he arrives from the future … in a desk?

Unlike fellow superstar Hello Kitty, who is simply a girl kitty-cat with no mouth and a bow, there appears to be an actual story behind Doraemon. He has been sent back in time from the future to make sure that an inept fourth-grader passes his classes and doesn’t screw things up for his descendants. That’s right: it’s like a grade-school version of The Terminator. However, Doraemon assists his young charge not by blowing up everything in their path, but by using that extra-dimensional pocket on his tummy to pull out helpful items from the future when the going gets tough. Who wants a friend like that? I do.

Now, if I were confronted with images of the bubbly blue robo-cat every day of my life, I would probably not find him quite so appealing. But he has successfully crossed over into many other countries, from Algeria and Argentina to Vietnam and Qatar. Doraemon is broadcast around the world, in Italian, in Tagalog, in Hindi, you name it, but Singapore is currently the only place you can watch Doraemon cartoons in English. So unlike a huge percentage of the world’s population, Doraemon is still a novelty to me. After that Kindersurprise wrapper in Spain, I didn’t really encounter him again for years, until I was in Borneo with my sister.

On our first day there, Elizabeth needed to buy a watch before we set out for the jungle, so we risked our lives crossing the main highway into town to go to the shopping mall. We found a little cart there where all sorts of watches were on display at about three US dollars a pop. As the three pre-teen girls who ran the cart helped Elizabeth pick out the perfect watch, I perused the selection to see if there was anything I might like to get. And that’s when I met Doraemon again.

My Doraemon watch was something I was very proud of, because it gave me a reason to talk about a robot cat. People I talked to either had fond childhood memories of the helpful mechanical feline, or they had never heard of him at all. I wore it every day I was in Borneo, along with a bracelet of prayer beads I had bought in Taiwan. I liked to think that the prayer beads signified my quest for spirituality while the Doraemon watch epitomized my thirst for pop culture; on one wrist the sacred, on the other the profane. In reality, I probably just looked a bit silly.

Among my traveling companions however, my watch quickly became notorious for another reason: it broke almost immediately. It continued to tick and to tell time, but the clear plastic cover fell off on the first day I got the watch, which meant there was nothing protecting the hands from being jostled. As a result, my watch told reasonably correct time unless it brushed against something the wrong way. Whenever someone asked me for the time, I had to give them the time “according to Doraemon,” which was something you just had to take on faith.

Having a Doraemon watch, particularly one that couldn’t tell proper time, was a bit absurd. But Doraemon himself is absurd. I suppose for me that’s part of the appeal — he is happy not making any sense at all. If you do a Google image search for “Doraemon” you’ll get a lot of crummy, cutesy pictures that don’t do justice to the idea of a robot cat on a mission from the future, which suggests that a huge part of his global appeal is not that he is absurd, but that he is cute and happy. Fair enough.

I don’t really know that much about the global empire of Doraemon, so I don’t know what drives the franchise. But I did pick up a Doraemon comic while in Borneo, which is reprinted in Chinese on crummy paper, and it is certainly more absurd than it is cute.

On the cover, Doraemon looks blissfully happy (and possibly on drugs), but on the inside, he spends most of his time either frustrated, confused or in a blind rage. For example:

(Doraemon is furious!)

(Doraemon is melancholy [and flying sideways].)

(Doraemon is simply doing all he can!)

These images are all taken from the same two page scan. I don’t really know what’s going on, but it seems to have something to do with magic straws? On the next two pages, part of the exact same story, they decide to build a rocket ship. A rocket ship made of paper and propelled by straws:

Then they go to a jungle planet, get their space ship stolen, and return to earth thanks to propellers which grow out of their heads. I’m not sure if being able to read Chinese would make this comic better or worse.

In just this one poorly printed, pocket-sized comic book, there are more amazing things than I can possibly count or scan for my blog. However, I will post the one panel which convinced me I had to buy this book. Please prepare yourselves, because it is actually horrifying.

Taken on its own, I believe it is a portrait of existential terror, the conflict and overlap between the idealized machine and the deficiencies of the human flesh:

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OH NO, DORAEMON!
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It’s like something from a David Croenberg movie. It’s even greater because of the page that immediately follows it:

Stay strange, robot cat. You’re adored by millions and you have a human crawling out of your chest.