A week after the 3.11 quake and tsunami, Japan experiences a new reality (in photos): radiation levels, evacuation zones, radiation precautions, store shelves with no food, elevators turned off to save scarce energy.
The other night I attended the local Irish community's St. Patrick's Day parade queen contest -- its first ever -- and wrote this story (voluntarily) for the Irish Network Japan:
The first time I visited Nakamura Katsuji (中村活字), on a quiet backstreet in Higashi Ginza, was about a year ago. I was unhappy with the business cards I had ordered from a printer in my neighborhood and had decided to search for a letterpress printer. I found Nakamura-san's listing on the Internet and dropped by. I wasn't the only one. Nakamura-san says that recently he has been seeing a new customer every day. That's quite a feat for a company that doesn't advertise (his daughter Tweets for him, though) and just celebrated 100 years in business last year. "I don't have enough people," Nakamura says.
What should cars of the future sound like? Should they emit a high-pitched whine, like a jet taking off, or rattle? The answer depends on whom you ask. Concerns that quiet hybrid and electric cars are a danger to blind pedestrians, the elderly and children led policymakers to draw up guidelines in Japan in 2009. The guidelines are specific: Chirps, barks and melodies are off-limits. Just last month the U.S. Congress approved a bill that requires car makers to add a sound to hybrids and EVs sold in the U.S. as a safety measure for pedestrians. Here's what Nissan did: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-electric-car-noise-20110101,0,328876.story
The construction of a 14-story apartment bloc in front of my house in Tokyo has got me thinking about city noise. When the steel skeleton was first going up, workers strung up an elephant-grey curtain that was designed to dampen sound. I know this because bo-on -- sound-proofing -- was printed in huge Japanese kanji characters on the side facing my house. Did it work? Not well enough. I am regularly distracted by the clanking of metal or high-pitched whine of machinery, whose disonance resembles the rhythm section of an orchestra warming up backstage before a concert.
While reporting a story for the Los Angeles Times about the Tokyo metropolitan assembly's approval of an ordinance to restrict hardcore sexual acts in manga comics and anime films, I came across this man in the plaza between two government buildings shooting his paper airplanes high overhead with a rubber band. He might have been in his 60s but he seemed younger chasing his paper creations as they made lazy arcs in the air.
