March 17th, 2011
Our hopes and support are with Japan, of course.
Salon.com has a pretty good collection of ways to donate, and it’s a good idea to stick with reputable charities. Scams crop up after every disaster, and some of them, like United Way, just stick around forever. For some reason this is not common knowledge, but United Way has a pretty horrible history of corruption, greed and questionable competence. United Way just takes a percentage off the top before distributing funds to its member charities; they add exactly nothing but overhead (and occasional corruption) to the equation. Cut out the middleman.
Personally, I really love seeing the different grassroots funding drives. For example, Dreamwidth and LiveJournal have various fan-related Help Japan communities, where people are auctioning off their talents and services (the dreamwidth community is open until Sunday and Livejournal’s is open until the 26th), and YaoiCon has their own auction of goodies, open until the 20th as well.
My favorite, though, comes from SomethingAwful. Someone made an idiot of himself, and after he failed his chance to redeem himself, one of the Goons decided that he had to donate $10 to the Red Cross or be banned (temporarily) from the board as punishment. After a little discussion, another Goon pledged another $10 if the rulebreaker had to choose between matching the donation or being banned forever. Wonderfully horrible people that they are, the Goons dogpiled onto this idea, kicking off a massive fundraiser for Japan. The poor guy now has to match all of the donations or be banned forever. If he does match, he gets all the perks and upgrades the forums have to offer, and major kudos.
So far the Goons have raised over $15000.
I think he’s getting banned.
April 27th, 2010
Living in the United States, breadbasket (and corn bushel) of the world that it is, it’s really easy to get used to the idea that food is cheap. Just looking at my weekly Safeway circular, I see whole chickens for $1.69/pound (buy one get another free), pork ribs for $1.79/pound, apples for 99¢/pound, and oranges practically there for the taking ($2.99 for an 8 pound bag). Part of this, I’m sure, is that I live in California, specifically, land of fruits and nuts that it is, but the basic premise remains.
Compare this to Japan, where an apple costs at least ¥398 (about $4.25 at time of this writing). That’s one apple. You can see it off to the right. It’s a beautiful apple, uniformly frosted red all around, and it’s pretty big, big enough to make me spread my fingers a bit when I hold it, but it’s just one apple all the same.
Truly, I live in a land of plenty.
On the other hand, I wonder sometimes if we pay something for that abundance. It’s easy to think of food as a commodity, to think that one apple is the same as another, but that really isn’t the case. Food is a biological product, the end-result of some living thing and the environment around it, its lineage, handling, and care. For example, the Red Delicious is very red, but it’s only nominally delicious, because it’s been bred to be harvested early, in enormous quantities, and trucked across the continent. On the other end of the spectrum, Japanese farmers have made a science out of growing delicious, picture-perfect apples. That apple was simply better, crisper, sweeter, and better-balanced than anything I’ve ever bought at Safeway (or Whole Paycheck, for that matter, or even farmer’s markets and freeway-side stands), and I would love the chance to indulge in more, if only once in a while. At $4.25 each, Japanese apples could get almost as expensive as a bad Starbuck’s habit.
In Japan, though, that was more-or-less a standard apple, and by Japanese standards, it was quite reasonably priced. I found apples just like mine in every grocery store I visited, at train station fruit vendors, and sometimes in department stores and even 7-11s. Japanese consumers expect apples of that quality, and they’re willing to pay for them, so there are no cheap apples, only precious, semi-rare treats. Here in the United States, I’m guessing, we don’t and aren’t, so apples are cheap and plentiful, everyday in every meaning of the word.
I wonder, what does this say about them? What does it say about us?
April 11th, 2010
I’ve been in Japan for the past week and change now, and I haven’t had as much time as I’d like to post. It’s been a wonderful experience, and I hope to come back in the future.
A detective stopped me in the Akihabara police station and asked to see my identification, but he seemed to lose interest almost immediately once I took it out, and he only gave it a cursory glance-over. I couldn’t understand why he did that, until later when I was fishing around for my rail pass. If I have a particularly large load in my upper left pockets, I realized, my jacket makes it look a little like I’m wearing a shoulder holster. Handguns are highly illegal in Japan, so naturally I think he felt compelled to investigate. Really that was a very clever trick – he stood off to the side slightly while I did this, enough to get a look into my jacket and see that the bulge was just a pocket full of wallet, papers, and other random bits that tourists pick up. It stayed low-key, he was in full control the whole time, and I didn’t even realize he thought something was wrong until much afterwards.
A few days later, on a much lighter note, I visited an onsen bath, about an hour south of Tokyo proper. The hostess mistook me for a girl at first and nearly handed me a key to the women’s locker room. She caught herself in time. It’s not the first time that’s happened to me, and I’m used to laughing it off (really I think it’s a nice sort of compliment).
It’s been a little bit of a whirlwind overview tour, and I’m still a bit shocked that it’s coming to an end. Right now it’s some ungodly-o-clock and I’ve been traveling all day, so I’ll post more pictures when I get a chance.
