Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Just as Japanese society is more intricate, if less varied, than U.S. society, the topography of settled Japan is more intricate than the U.S.  Where we would say “this area is too broken up by mountains and inlets so we’ll build towns elsewhere” the Japanese don’t have that option.  The result is an amazing number of bridges and tunnels.  I have driven through more tunnels in three weeks and 4000 km. here than in my previous 24 years of driving cars.  If you’re a fan of civil engineering you’ll giggle with childlike wonder every 20 miles or so as you come across a new suspension bridge, elevated road, or new tunnel.

Being illiterate is a serious impediment to navigation when you know where you want to go and robs you of the opportunity to decide whether or not a previously unknown roadside attraction is worth the stop.  Even with limited Japanese, however, asking directions is very effective.  One hundred percent of the time the person whom I stopped either knew where the place was or was able to figure it out after consulting a map.  Not once was I given bad directions.  Twenty five percent of the time the person asked would take a detour and lead me to the destination.  Twenty five percent of the time the person asked would produce a map or atlas, mark it up and give it to me (scored a complete 100-page detailed street atlas for the island of Hokkaido in this manner–sadly all in Kanji except for a few route numbers but subsequently very useful).

Gas costs 2X as much as in the U.S. but the rental car is nearly 2X as efficient as my minivan so the cost of a fill-up is about the same.  The price in Japan includes two attendants who pump the gas, clean the windows, walk into the street to stop traffic as you’re leaving, and bow from the waist as you drive away.

Japan essentially has no highways–imagine California with only I-5 and a few spurs.  This is one of the world’s most densely populated countries with  approximately 335 people per square kilometer, about the same as Israel, and more than India’s 320 per square km.  For an American, coming from a country with 31 people per square kilometer, it is hard to understand how these folks get by with a network of 2-lane roads and a couple of arterial 4-lane expressways.  Even when a local highway goes through a town that is mile after mile of fast food, supermarkets, Vegas-sized pachinko parlors, etc. it won’t get widened beyond 1 lane in each direction.  This plus the heavy traffic results in ridiculously low average speeds, much lower than the 40, 50, and 60 kilometer per hour limits that prevail on most roads.

Such roads as the Japanese have are the apotheosis of that type of road.  It might be a shoulderless 2-lane road but it is the best damn shoulderless 2-lane road in the world.  Despite winter freezes you will never drive over a pothole.  Overhanging poles with arrows point to the edge of the travel lane so that the snowplows can be exact.  Solar panels in those poles charge up batteries all day so that they can flash with LEDs at night, reminding drivers of where the curves lead so that you don’t have to watch the white lines in your headlights as carefully.  Every curve is signalled with strange white patterns painted on the pavement as you approach the curve.  If a curve is sharp there will be a sign telling you exactly how sharp, e.g., “R=100m”.  If a brief section goes uphill you will be told exactly how steep, e.g., “grade=3.6%”.

Given the excellence of the roads, the heavy traffic, and the low speeds one can’t help wondering how the Japanese became the world’s best engineers and builders of high-performance cars.  A 1935 Hudson Terraplane would be more than adequate for getting around Japan.  Even in Hokkaido there would be no way to stretch the legs of a Mazda RX-8 or Honda/Acura NSX.

Drivers here are highly skilled (number of accidents or fender-benders observed: 0) but not especially observant of the official rules.  The speed limit on the mostly empty toll expressways is 80 kph but plenty of folks go 120 or faster.  People try not to be the third car through a red light.  Parking is simple.  You stop the car wherever you feel like, turn on the hazard lights, and walk away.

And the last thing that I learned about driving in Japan… When the policeman waves you over to the side of the road and says “Speedo” he is not interested in seeing you change into your latest European-style swimwear.

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This is a book report on Paul Theroux’s Dark Star Safari, an account of his 2001 journey, overland by public transit, from Cairo, Egypt to Cape Town, South Africa.  This was an interesting book for me because I’m currently planning a few trips to southern African.  Theroux writes with a certain amount of authority because he worked as a teacher in Africa during the mid-1960s.  The words below are summaries of Theroux’s 485-page book, not opinions of the author of this blog (who has only once visited Africa and then only to Egypt). 

Black Africans are very comfortable leading a life of subsistence farming and frequent casual sex with lots of different partners starting at about age 10.  They are basically quite happy and unmotivated to change this lifestyle, which makes sense because, at least in the villages, it is a great lifestyle (especially for the men, who get to spend all day every day drinking beer with their buddies while women work in the fields).  Black African governments, however, are not happy watching their subjects dig potatoes in between bouts of lovemaking.  This is not because they have anything against subsistence farming or sex but rather because it is difficult to tax subsistence farmers or 14-year-old working girls.

Black Africans sometimes express confusion as to how others achieve economic prosperity, particularly the Indians who operate most of the continent’s small shops.  One boatman on the Zambezi relates that his people believe that “Indians [kill young African girls] and cut out their hearts.  Using the fresh hearts of these African virgins as bait on large hooks, they were able to catch certain Zambezi fish that were stuffed full of diamonds.”  A girl in South Africa notes “They say Indians never sleep.  They just stay awake, doing business night and day.  That’s why they are rich.”

Africans are basically incompetent at anything other than having a good time.  They can’t drive.  They can’t prepare a vehicle for a journey properly or change a tire.  They can’t grow food on a large scale.  The smarter Africans sometimes are able to dupe a white person into making something work and then they steal it.  This has been refined to an art in Zimbabwe where the blacks got the whites to set up farms that they could subsequently take over under land reform.  Sometimes a farmer would go through two cycles of buying land, improving it, and watching it get stolen by “war veterans” before giving up.  The whites eventually got wise, however, and moved their operations across the river to Zambia.  The blacks who took over the white farms are unable to do anything other than have sex and farm enough for subsistence.  To avert famine the government buys much of its food now from their former white citizens now living across the border in Zambia.  This generalized incompetence doesn’t keep villagers from having a good time but city life is a challenge because the colonialists who built the roads, sewers, etc. packed up and went home.  Consequently Theroux finds the urban and infrastructure portions of Africa in every way and in every country worse than it was 40 years ago when he lived there.

Foreign aid requires the direct involvement of whites and/or Asians on the ground at every level.  You can’t give aid to African officials because they will steal the money.  You can’t give food to African employees in local villages because they will sell it.  You can’t give food to African parents to feed their hungry children because children have almost zero value in Africa and the parents will eat it themselves.  So you need (mostly) Europeans at every level of the distribution chain right down to the troughs at which the hungry kids will eat.

Foreign aid workers are the most loathsome people on the continent.  They roar around in fancy new air-conditioned SUVs and won’t give rides to travelers such as Theroux.  They aren’t good for conversations in bars, either.  Basically the only thing that foreign aid workers are good for is sucking the initiative out of the Africans themselves.  But they are necessary because no Africans are willing to do the job.  Any African who gets enough training to, say, become a medical doctor, either emigrates to a rich country or refuses to leave the largest cities.  The only people who are willing to work in clinics in villages are white.  Theroux’s favorite stories are when earnest white Christians work for years sheltering and feeding street kids and then get set up and robbed by those very same kids.

Africa is blessed with an awe-inspiring landscape and interesting animals, which are challenging to access due to the deterioration of the road network in the years since decolonialization.  Africa is a bad place for seeing African art; all of the good stuff has been looted and sold to museums and individuals in rich countries.  Touring Africa on a luxury organized tour is a sham.  Those people never get to see the real Africans that Theroux interacts with.  Touring Africa Theroux-style involves dangerous cramped smelly transportation, waiting days for visas or buses or boats, sharing beds with vermin, getting sick, bringing home a stomach parasite that required many months of medical treatment in the U.S., etc.

Johannesburg really is the most crime-ridden place in Africa.  At the very end of his trip Theroux lost all of his baggage that he’d left in care of a top-end hotel for a few days.

Well… that’s how Theroux saw it.  I might post another blog entry with my reactions to Theroux’s text.  Meantime it is off to sleep in my little salaryman’s hotel room in Mutsu, Japan.  This town is at the very northern tip of Honshu and tomorrow I’ll be taking my rental car on the ferry to Hokkaido.  Japan is, of course, a fantastic country for tourism but terribly hot and humid in the summer.  I thought that I would be okay up here in the north but this has been a summer of record-breaking heat and humidity.

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My first 24 hours in Japan included the following:

• a soak in a traditional Japanese public bath


• a swim in a 25-yard pool


• a visit to an enormous Buddhist temple complex that has been an important pilgrimage site for hundreds of years


• a semi-traditional tea ceremony


• walking around three koi ponds


• a meal in a restaurant that has been in the same family and at the same location for more than 300 years

All this without leaving Narita, the town in which Tokyo’s international airport is located!

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In http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/house-design/ (commentable) I put forth some ideas for building houses that are designed for single people.  The document asks the questions “Why have more than one room if you live alone?”, “What about creative space if you don’t have an office or studio?”, and “Is it feasible to build an industrial loft in the middle of the woods or suburbs?”

Comments appreciated, especially from folks with some experience in architecture or construction.

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I’m back in New England as of this evening, at a secure non-disclosed location safe from the security goons of the DNC.  Here are some highlights and statistics from the little airplane excursions.

Approximate route:  Up to Quebec City, northeast up the St. Lawrence River to the northern tip of Newfoundland, down the west coast of Newfoundland to Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia then over to Prince Edward Island before returning via Bangor, Maine.   About 3000 miles traveled during 20 hours of flight time.

Most Interesting Place:  L’Anse aux Meadows in St. Anthony’s, Newfoundland, the first European settlement in the Americas circa 1000 AD.  The Vikings came, they saw, they loved it, but they left because they didn’t have sufficient military power to hold out against the local Indian tribes.

Best Aerial Scenery:  Whales (100+) in the St. Lawrence, icebergs on the east coast of Newfoundland, the mountains of Gros Morne National Park from 1000-2000′ above the waves on the west coast of Newfoundland.

Favorite Modern Art Observed:  International Garden Festival at the Grand Metis (Reford) gardens near Mont Joli, Quebec (6000′ runway) on the Gaspe Peninsula.  The range of ideas in this Extreme Gardening event was inspiring and included an Asphalt Garden by Se Busca, a team from Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Favorite book read:  Skinny Dip by Carl Hiaasen.  A woman gets rich after her casino-owning parents are killed in a Gulfstream that crashes while transporting a performing bear.  Her biologist husband subsequently tosses her off the back of a cruise ship in an attempted murder but she survives by clutching a floating bale of marijuana.  Not exactly thought-provoking but fun.

Favorite newspaper article read:  “Woman’s whale phobia justified…  [headline] Behemoth Slaps Boater in Head with Tail [subhead] Labrador woman with a lifelong whale phobia was badly injured after an unidentified whale slapped her with its tail on the maiden voyage of her husband’s new boat.” (from the National Post, subscription only; also see this CBC story).  Runner up is this Guardian story about a French book about being lazy at work, “an elegantly written call to arms to the neo-slaves of middle management and the damned of the service industry, condemned to dress up as clowns all week and waste their lives in pointless meetings.”

Favorite radio show heard:  Senior citizen’s call-in hour on CBC where a woman requested Dory Previn’s song “Twenty Mile Zone”.

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I’m planning on renting a car in Tokyo around August 5 and heading north to Hokkaido and tourist sights along the way.  My only previous trips to Japan have been via public transit and/or getting rides from locals.  Is there any hope of navigating around rural Japan if one (a) does not speak Japanese, and (b) cannot read Japanese characters?  I was hoping that perhaps there are GPS units that have all of their user interface in English.  So, for example, I could type in the name of a temple in Nikko and have the GPS guide me there with English voice prompts.  The fact that www.hertz.com won’t let you book a car at Narita and www.orbitz.com says “we’re sorry; an error has occurred” is worrisome.   Is a Japanese road trip not a good idea for a stupid white man?

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Flying up the St. Lawrence River from Quebec City to Labrador and Newfoundland I saw about 100 whales in the water.  This at the same time that the newspapers were covering a debate about whether to allow renewed commercial whaling.  It is so easy to find whales from a plane, especially when the water is flat like the upstream portion of the river where the whales swim to find the richest food.  You just look for streaks of bubbles like a dotted line and the whale will be at the front.  What chance do these animals have against modern technology?  None, obviously.  Yet must we ban whaling?  Perhaps a compromise would be to allow whaling but only with the technology described in the book Moby Dick.  The whales had more of a chance back then and not infrequently managed to kill their hunters.

But maybe as the world population becomes ever more obese people will feel a greater kinship to these multi-ton creatures.  Once we’re all incredibly fat and easy to spot from an airplane we will have enough sympathy for whales to leave them alone.

[If you are looking for a summer trip and wish to see a lot of whales without getting seasick, you can see Belugas, Humpbacks, Blues(!), et al., at the confluence of the Saguenay and St. Lawrence rivers (tourism site).  Sadly there is no airport right near the town of Tadoussac (Charlevoix is closest) but it is only about a 2.5-hour drive from Quebec City, right along the lake shore with a beautiful cathedral and then a big casino on the way.]

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Young people want to be powerful and imitate those whom they read about in the newspaper.  During George W. Bush’s presidency, whom have they read about in the paper?  Osama bin-Laden, Saddam Hussein, Zacarias Moussaoui, Abu Musab Zarqawi, Muqtada al-Sadr, and the list goes on.  Nearly all of these guys are powerful take-charge ass-kickers.  Unlike the Gangsta Rappers whom kids were imitating in the 1990s, the Muslims in Western newspapers don’t merely wave 9mm pistols out the windows of their SUVs.  These guys actually do manage to kill the people they hate, often by the thousands.

If George W. Bush had delegated the pushing aside of Saddam to an underling in the State Department or Defense Department and never mentioned the words “Iraq” or “Saddam” in any speech he might not have glorified being a pissed-off Muslim to such an extent.  But as it happens W. has given center stage to angry Muslims for the last three years.  This might encourage older folks with a lot of property to protect to become fearful, vote Republican, and give up their civil liberties in exchange for security.  But for young punks without much to lose one would think that the sight of all of these Arab bad-asses on TV would encourage them to convert to Islam and at least talk the talk if not actually walk the walk.  (According to this International Herald Tribune article, it is already happening in France, especially in the prisons where more than 50% of the inmates are Muslim.)

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While I’ve been “oot and aboot” (as the Canadians say) with N505WT the natives seem to have become restless and angry with the Philippines.  From what I read the Filipinos were in Iraq on a “humanitarian” mission.  One of their guys was kidnapped so they went home.  So now we Americans are pissed off that they caved into the demands of the kidnappers/beheaders.  None of the newspaper articles that I saw, however, questioned the original purpose.  Though some Iraqis appear on CNN to complain that they don’t have air-conditioning and 24/7 running water it is hard to see them as a hardship case in a world where many people have never had A/C or running water.  Shouldn’t “humanitarian” missions go to places where either (a) folks are really doing badly, (b) folks are genuinely grateful for assistance, (c) folks are living right next door to us (charity begins at home), or (d) all of the above?

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Quebec City, despite its proximity to the U.S. and confederation with Anglophone Canada, is in many ways more authentically French than France.  Our global village of cheap jet transport and liberal immigration policies has resulted in many of the world’s cities drawing their inhabitants from whatever countries are most populous and/or whichever countries have the most poverty, crime, and government oppression.  This results in enough similarity of one big city to another that some folks don’t bother traveling anymore.

Quebec, by contrast, has stubbornly resisted immigration for centuries.  After the British took over in 1760 they tried desperately to get English speakers to move here to dilute the French language, culture, and loyalty.  In the 19th-century the Quebecois themselves began leaving for various New England states in which high-paying mill jobs were to be had.  Instead of the hoped-for immigration this was an outflow of roughly 1 million people.  Today Canada brings in nearly 250,000 immigrants per year but most of them want to go to Toronto, Vancouver, and other English-speaking cities.  Quebec, with 24 percent of Canada’s population, is the choice of only 15 percent of immigrants and most go to Montreal where it is possible to get by with only English (Montreal was where Ahmed Ressam started his life in the New World).  Some combination of cold weather, a persistently moribund economy (they’ve tried everything here:  big government, small government, agriculture, heavy industry, high tech, etc.), and the terror of having to learn French keeps folks from wanting to pile into Quebec City and, to an even larger extent, the small Francophone towns of Quebec.

All of the folks who work basic service jobs seem to be native-born Quebecois.  Any signs in English are directed at tourists.  McDonald’s has a section “reserved for smokers”.  Can this island of pure French culture survive?  A schoolteacher told me “I know that the day will come when I can’t speak French here anymore.” At the inception of the language wars in the 18th-century the French language was holding its own quite nicely in the worlds of literature, science, and day-to-day use.  Today, however, the results of England imperialism have spread the English language far beyond what could have been foreseen 250 years ago.  The huge number of countries and people that use Spanish and Chinese have further reduced the French language to obscurity.

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