shipboard website

I’m on the website team for our Semester at Sea shipboard website. There’s a lag in updating because it has to be approved by the Powers that Be, but it’s pretty nifty.

http://www.semesteratsea.com/voyages/fall2006/fa2006_onboardwebsite.html

(by the way, we’re in Vietnam, which is turning out to be an amazing and mind-bending experience).

typhoon!

We left Japan in a hurry and are chugging along to Hong Kong at a rapid clip to avoid the typhoon that was supposed to hit the Japanese coastline the day after we left. We’re supposed to be the fastest passenger ship in the world, and the captain has assured us that we can outrun the storm, should it change course. We have changed our itinerary and are bypassing Qindao (China) entirely, going directly to Hong Kong. This unfortunately cuts 2 days that we were supposed to be in China, but for SAS field programs, like the Beijing university visit I’m signed up for, ISE (Institute for Shipboard Education, which runs SAS) will be shouldering the extra cost of changing our plane tickets, as well as giving us a 50% discount on our trips since they’re going to be shortened.

This gives us all an extra 2 days on ship without classes, which is good for catching up on sleep and work, but the ship is pitching and rolling and a lot of people are feeling seasick. I’m fine unless I try to do focused work, such as reading. Which is what I have to do. We’re skirting the worst of the storm – in the center, winds are over 100 nautical miles an hour, and the swell (waves) can get up to 13 meters. We’re staying where the swell is under 2 meters, but it’s windy enough that at times they’ve closed all the outside decks, and we’ve been told to secure everything in our cabins.

update 9.25.06: We made it to Hong Kong and have already left again; now we’re moving past a tropical cyclone en route to Vietnam. We only have two days between China & Vietnam, so I’ll be posting about China after we leave Ho Chi Minh City.

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum

At the last minute, I got a cheap ticket to Hiroshima and went off at 5 in the morning to see the Peace Memorial Museum. I will try to recount what I saw there, but I won’t be able to adequately convey the sense of chaos, destruction, and loss caused by the bomb, and its continuing legacy today in cancer victims.

When the bomb exploded just above Hiroshima, the heat of nuclear fission vaporized people and buildings, killing thousands instantly. A pressure wave of 19 tons per square meter swept out from the hypocenter, caused by the extreme expansion of superheated air. Nearly all buildings – wood, steel, stone – within a 1 km radius were completely flattened. Flying shards of glass from exploded windows knifed deep into walls and organs. People were burned beyond recognition, their skin flayed to the bone, hanging in shreds off their limbs, dripping blood. Everyone left alive struggled to get out of the city, seeking shelter and water to cool their burns. As they fled before the flames that swept through what was left of Hiroshima after the explosion, survivors begged forgiveness from those they left pinned under debris to burn alive, unable to free them before they were engulfed. Black rain poisoned the rivers with radiation.

The city has since been rebuilt, but the consequences of the atomic bomb are still harbored in the bodies of the hibakusha, the bomb survivors. Cancer continues to claim them, one by one. A whole generation of babies with microencephaly – brain damage due to radiation exposure in the womb – have grown up, and their aging relatives worry about who will take care of these victims of the radiation after they pass away.

To me, one of the most poignant moments was the realization of why there were bottles of water left along with flowers in front of the Cenotaph, the memorial containing the names of the victims. After the blast, people who were not killed instantly struggled to get medical attention, to flee from the raging fires, but most desperately they begged for water to quench thirst and bodies sucked dry by the intense heat. One little boy tried to suck the puss from the stubs of his fingers as he stumbled home. The water offerings are a request for forgiveness by survivors who could not provide that water to those victims.

Why is it that I had to come here to be concerned, really concerned, about war and violence? Yes, as a child I was taught that war is bad and I condemn violence, but I have never before acted to end it. What is it about our humanity that we must experience these horrors so closely in order to arouse the kind of passion that leads to action? I am reminded of the white moderates Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. refers to in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail – the population Dr. King said posed the biggest obstacle to his mission, for while they agreed with him, their apathy was the inertia holding the social institutions firmly in place.

impressions of Japan

I’m back on the ship after 5 days of traveling around Japan. I had a great time wandering through this beautiful, peaceful country. Highlights: wandering through Kobe, visiting the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, doing the Ritsumeikan University student exchange in Kyoto, and seeing the high tech district of Osaka. I’ve tried a bit of anything that looked remotely interesting, and had some delicious experiences (iced matcha tea, dried squid, and Japanese pancakes made with turnips) as well as some that I could barely finish after the first bite (raw squid). My philosophy when buying snacks in Japan was to always buy at least one item that was completely unidentifiable. I didn’t always feel in the mood to be adventurous, but I did it anyway, and had very interesting culinary experiences as a consequence. I’m going to stick by this practice in all the ports.

Japan is packed, with a population half the size of that of the US and a land area roughly equivalent to California (but only 15% of the land is arable due to the mountains, so all those people are mostly packed together in no space at all). However, I would never have guessed that Kyoto and Kobe each boast populations of 1.5 million. There is a lot of public space and even on the main streets the city is very quiet. The people are quiet; even the cars are quiet. The Japanese place a premium on tranquility. Most cities I’ve been in are the antithesis of tranquility, possibly with the exception of Seattle. There are much more stringent expectations on maintaining that tranquil atmosphere, too. When we were staying overnight at the Ritsumeikan University, we were warned that if we wanted to stay up we needed to draw the shades to prevent light from streaming out the window, or the university would get calls from the neighbors. I hear that Tokyo (which I didn’t make it to) is much more bustling and louder, being the largest metropolitan area in the world with a population of 25 million. I’m not sure how exactly that is measured; it must include a fairly large surrounding area outside the city proper, but it still gives you an idea of how incredibly packed that city must be.

In many ways Japan felt very comfortable and familiar. It was almost like I was in Japan Town in San Francisco. Signs were written in kanji (characters) and Japanese phonetics as well as Romanji (the Roman alphabet, aka what English is written in). In many cases there was also some English on signs, menus, etc. All Japanese students are required to study English for a number of years, starting in elementary school. The food didn’t feel very foreign to me, as I’ve been exposed to much of it growing up – red bean, black sesame, dried squid, sashimi, matcha, udon, mochi. Although I couldn’t read the Japanese phonetics (which I later learned from the university students is a syllabary system) I recognized a number of the kanji, characters which were borrowed from Chinese. This allowed me to make guesses at foods on menus, shop names, and a slew of other things that turned out to be very helpful.

The people themselves are also very courteous and helpful. In Ecuador when drivers see a pedestrian darting across the street, they floor the accelerator. Compare this to the time we were taking a group picture in Kyoto, with the photographer across the street from the group, and a car stopped to allow us to finish. At the open mic for reflections on Japan, many people had stories of how they were approached by strangers when they looked lost and walked to their destinations, or how someone returned their wallet or Rail Pass (a $250 value).

Japan is committed to accessibility. The train system is clean, freakishly punctual, and trains run very frequently. We noticed Braille on the lids of soda cans, and on all the streets there are raised bumps and grooves for the blind to follow and be able to find steps, bus stops, and street crossings. There are also vending machines everywhere, but that might reflect a capitalist mentality more than devotion to convenience.

Here’s one of my favorite Japanese cultural practices: when you enter many buildings you have to remove your shoes, including for some restaurants and shops, nearly all temples, hostels, and even the shower room of the university I visited. Inside the door there is a small space to remove your shoes, then a raised area (often covered in finely woven reed mats) indicates where you cannot walk in shoes. I like the connotation of respect this confers on the space you enter (often aided by the presence of banners hung over the entrance, which force you to duck your head as you walk in). It also feels more friendly and intimate, and cleaner.

There is a uniquely Japanese aesthetic that involves the contradictory combination of sober tones and a desire to be in harmony with nature juxtaposed with the hyper, brightly colored “cult of cute” phenomenon. People present themselves soberly: most dress in shades of black, grey, white, and tan, and cars come in the same colors. On the other hand, companies represent themselves in loud, bold colors. Many stores are decked out in neon colors (especially hot pink), and colorful, cutely rotund anthropomorphized animals and objects decorate everything. This isn’t to say that the Japanese dress conservatively or that there isn’t personal expression in dress – there are some really outrageous haircuts, and I think that guys’ haircuts are more varied than in the US. On girls, there were shirts with cutouts, ties, chains – the works. I think there was a higher percentage of flamboyance than in the US. Yet most of this expression was in the same neutral tones.

There is great attention to detail in Japan, which you can see in the careful, tasteful packaging of everything. In many shops, products are displayed on low tables or shelves, without large stocks set out – much in the way you see in high end stores in the US. Even though space is at a premium in Japan, the aesthetics of display supersede the desire to maximize the number of products displayed. This makes it very pleasant to walk into shops because they feel very open.

Five days in Japan was just long enough to get a taste of the country. I’m glad it wasn’t any longer, because I was getting tired, but I would love to go back and see Tokyo, taste tako yaki, (fried octopus balls), and learn some more Japanese.

Look out for more posts in the new couple days on the Hiroshima Peace Museum, Ritsumeikan University student exchange, and the high tech district of Osaka.