The Long Picture

This is an unfinished drawing I've been working on in the art club of the Japanese junior high school where I've been working as an assistant English teacher. "You like love," said one of the students, looking at it. I guess that's true. I'm posting it now because I'll probably immediately give it away to one of the students when I finish as I've done with previous drawings. It's really relaxing drawing in that club and it's nice to be able to pass on some basic knowledge about pencilling and inking, the kind of stuff artbooks are reluctant to divulge. Though a lot of the kids need no help from me, wow. The kinds of drawings I see, I couldn't have dreamed of producing when I was in junior high. A group of girls sit with me while I draw and one of them likes drawing highly detailed clockwork dolls. All her drawings look like they came right out of a professional manga.

She joked that her friend is famous and, since I can't use my Japanese (part of my job is to create situations where the kids are forced to use English), I had to forgo the opportunity to use a joke in Japanese I actually managed to formulate, that for all I knew, everyone at the school was famous behind all the masks. It's a strange new world. It's gotten so it's positively weird when I see someone's face. When I leave school, I see lots of kids without masks while they're exercising--after two kids in China died from wearing masks while exercising in the heat, policy has relaxed to allow kids to remove their masks while playing sports. It's almost shocking to see so many bare faces. I have this strange impulse to cry out, "What are you doing, everyone? Hide!"

I'm really not sure how much good any of the rules are, though, when the kids are constantly hugging and wrestling between classes. It's kind of silly watching their horseplay one minute and then two minutes later watching them observe rules requiring them not to pass papers to each other. Hopefully the virus doesn't get too widespread in Japan. How do I tell kids not to hug each other?

Here are some of my recent photos:

I think I saw one of the fabled "murder hornets". It was dead.

Twitter Sonnet #1365

A paper bed confused the back at night.
The ocean spoke of heavy water eyes.
The mammals turned as motion bubbles might.
The darkest depths desist on open skies.
The numbers held in mind were one to ten.
Beyond the teens the dice create a void.
The mountains came to seem a woody pen.
The island served a cake too long enjoyed.
A little water floods the sugar sea.
The desert throat reports a set of sounds.
Entire drums of honey move the bee.
Another buzz precedes the lunar rounds.
The endless trunk contained forever leaves.
Resentful habit slights what thought achieves.

Adventures in Grocery Shopping

My new oatmeal. I feel classier already. When I got to Japan, I worried I wouldn't be able to find oatmeal and, indeed, most of the grocery stores near me don't carry it. But for some reason, the two next to Yamato-Yagi Station carry a lot of foreign food, including oatmeal--even Quaker Oatmeal. There's a little supermarket inside the station and there's one across the street, accessible through an underground tunnel, that's much bigger. It's worth going despite the fact that Yamato-Yagi for me is a fifteen minute walk plus a train ride of about 210 yen. I was surprised to find the little store inside the station itself was closed due to the Corona virus to-day, though.

A state of emergency has been called in Japan, still voluntary. There's a tension between people wanting to follow government instructions and people wanting to celebrate Golden Week, a period of traditional holiday, lasting from April 29 to May 5. The government has tried to rebrand it as "Stay at Home Week" but the street was pretty crowded to-day. Many of the restaurants and cafes were closed but many also had outside stalls set up with "take out" signs and tasty looking packaged meals. I settled for two rice balls and sandwiches and a couple Soy Joy bars at the station.

The mall is closed, though, except for the grocery store and the Daiso (a really nice, popular 100 yen store) on the ground floor. I was really starting to like that mall, too. Now I hear talk all this might not end until September. I doubt it, though. Once the rest of the world is out of lockdown, I doubt Japan will keep the state of emergency going on its own, even it was late to start, especially since the effectiveness of the lockdowns is debatable. According to Pathology Professor John Lee at The Spectator:

We have substantially reduced the number of people circulating in the community. If lockdown is working, and stopping the spread of the virus, it might be reducing the circulation of milder versions among the population, while at the same time concentrating people with the most severe disease in hospital wards. There we can find the perfect viral storm, containing everything needed for rapid evolution: huge numbers of reproducing units (the virus), an environment for rapid reproduction to take place in (patients and staff), and selection pressures (things that alter how the virus spreads, such as density of people, severity of disease, or length of survival).

Apparently even WHO has recommended Sweden's strategy of not having enforced lockdowns. I suspect his alone will be enough to keep Japan from doing anything more severe than it's already doing now.

Meanwhile, I'm limiting my time out to trips to the grocery store but I've still been able to enjoy a few of the sights. This big beautiful egret has been hanging out in a nearby canal:

Of course, butterflies are out in force:

And the mystery of abandoned gloves continues:

The Efficacy of Castles

Here's beautiful Osaka Castle, which was just a few blocks from my hotel room. The tower was closed but there were still regularly people outside strolling or bicycling, most of them wearing masks. But I can tell the strain is wearing on people even as crowds are starting to get thinner. I've been surprised to notice more security guards and construction workers not wearing masks and the divide between blue collar and white collar seems to clearly reflect who buys into the Corona virus and who doesn't. None of the three guys who came to install my rental appliances yesterday were wearing masks.

I said "buy in" like maybe I don't believe in the pandemic. Well, I certainly believe it's real though many media outlets are clearly aiming to manipulate people's emotions and make them more afraid than necessary. A retired U.K. National Health Service consultant pathologist has written some very clear and concise articles on how statistics related to the Corona virus have been misrepresented. It's not actually clear if the virus has been much deadlier than normal seasonal flu. Even so, I have been wearing my mask whenever I've had to go out, which is been relatively often since I have a new apartment I need to stock and furnish and I've had to transport everything by train since I don't have a car.

It sure is nice having an apartment again. It's about twice the size of my two room apartment in San Diego with about ten times the closet space. The rent is around a third of what my last place's was. There's no widespread homeless crisis here, everything's cleaner, there are beautiful temples and sakura blossoms everywhere. Everyone takes their jobs seriously. Maybe that's the best thing of all--everyone at the train stations and the shops, everyone seems to believe in the importance of and honour in doing their jobs properly. I don't get the feeling that everyone believes they're secretly rock stars or movie stars who are only temporarily enduring this purgatory.

Do I miss the U.S.? I kind of miss the U.S. in 2005 or, even better, 1999. That's kind of what Japan feels like. For a few years now, I've been overcome with this feeling of the impending death of the U.S. I felt a kind of urgency, like I needed to leave or I wouldn't be able to before it got too bad. Now that the whole country is basically quarantined, I feel uncomfortable about how prophetic those feelings seem to have been. The virus crisis will probably get worse in Japan. Just to-day I see a state of emergency has been called in Tokyo and Osaka. But it can't really get as bad here because there isn't a massive homeless crisis and the healthcare system is better. That's two things I used to be able to say about the U.S., you know. I guess this situation really is showing the widening faultlines.

Twitter Sonnet #1342

Created eyes observe from haunted caves.
The clover lives for rice and whisky meals.
The numbered deck began and ended knaves.
Electric Ken in candor slowly deals.
Supportive beams elect the plate to dine.
A sunny look submerged beneath the drink.
The eaten fish array in squiggly line.
The bluish space decides to order pink.
The dueling trains forget the rails and ways.
Traversing fields the crows behold the waste.
The blades of grass will grow for passing days.
Confections wrought anew for novel taste.
The flatter floor amassed the wooden will.
In quicker creeks the water jumps the mill.

On Viruses and the Virulent

Here's a picture from Tennessee. Currently I'm in flight, over New Mexico, I think. Oddly the twelve hour flight doesn't seem like very much time to me. I have a nice seat, the seats next to me are empty and I have plenty of room for my laptop case. I suppose this is a side effect of the Coronavirus. If my attitude about the Coronavirus seems callous or inappropriately casual to you, I would like to assure you I do appreciate the seriousness of the situation. I would be more than happy to self-quarantine and avoid travel if I had a place to self-quarantine to and my job didn't depend on me travelling right now. I've been preparing for this job in Japan for over a year and have made many sacrifices including donating or discarding all of my furniture, selling or donating many of my books, and finally selling my car to a relative in Tennessee. I might have enjoyed staying at the Embassy Suite forever but my funds simply won't allow it. I consider myself fortunate that I'm not one of the many forced to spend the duration of this crisis on streets and in shelters. Maybe I should use language to show feelings of anguish and people may be upset that I don't seem to be participating in the communal dismay. I don't like what's happening and hate that the virus has killed so many people and has made others sick while the changes being made to status quo operations have caused problems that go beyond inconvenience, including staff shortages at hospitals. The reason I may not seem very emotional about this thing, and the reason I seem to be focused on other things, is because this seems to me the most practical and considerate way of conducting myself. Although I feel calm and not panicked, I feel like any attempt to provoke panic or terror in myself places an undue burden on other people. It seems to me an expression of pain, emotional or physical, is a form of cry for help and it takes resources and energy for people to help other people, emotionally or physically. So if I don't actually require such assistance, I would be wasting other people's time if I demanded it when I might contribute more constructive and entertaining things about my particular experience to distract people from what they may be going through. Several years ago, I had a conversation with a young man who told me that he reacted to the news of any death, of anyone in the world, the same way he'd react to the death of a loved one. Since he told me this while not sobbing or appearing in any other way especially upset, I could only assume he avoided news all the time (I know he didn't), he was lying, or he was a psychopath. So I tend not to trust some people when they say it's our responsibility to always be empathetic. You couldn't do that and remain sane. Can you enjoy watching the cute cat video while knowing, right at that moment, someone like you or your loved one is experiencing pain or death? So I respect the seriousness of what is occurring without feeling like I must be experiencing the full extent of the pain internally. I don't think that would do anyone any good. Understandably, some people are more sensitive to the imagery and news than others. Maybe it's because I'm distracted by so many other issues at this time that I'm not feeling the same level of shock as some of my friends. On the other hand, I generally find I'm at my most calm in the middle of a crisis.

Asking the Bird

Here's a surprisingly noisy little bird at one of the occasional designated picnic areas scattered about the Texas desert. Adding to the post-apocalyptic feeling of any scrubby desert was a gas station sign limiting purchases of water bottle cases to two per person. Otherwise, I haven't seen much evidence of the Corona virus, though having no frame of reference I suppose every place I saw may have been 50% less crowded than usual. The outlet mall I stopped in to use the wi-fi in Tucson was certainly packed. Despite pouring rain, just like in San Diego, people were wandering around in t-shirts, some of them looking askance at this archaic contraption I carry called an umbrella.

I overheard one guy in a Mexican restaurant in Sonora, Texas speculating I had a sword hidden in the umbrella. A very young white man was my waiter. He was excited to see me reading Robert Louis Stevenson whom he said he reads at the library.

Some of you may wonder why I'm travelling now, at this worst of times, why didn't I stay at home? Well, I haven't got one, for one thing. I'm certainly not alone in that--having been in L.A. recently I've seen the tent cities on the sidewalks are even bigger than the ones in San Diego. Funny how easily the media so often overlooks such things.

I'm lucky enough to be able to stay in motels on my way. Travelling has sure gotten easy thanks google maps and travel sites where I can find decent motels for 50 or 60 dollars a night, often identical, blocky buildings with tiny rooms and weak water pressure. But they have free wi-fi which is all it takes to make them seem like paradise to me.