“japan”

Loved it! Far more than I expected, and almost as much as I love Japan, which is surprising because I’ve long been infatuated with Japan. Truth is I knew next to nothing about the whole country when I arrived.

Being tired from sightseeing we, my sister and I, decided to stay in Seoul the whole week and just try to get the feel of it. Well, it can feel even more urban, media drenched, faddish and dynamic than Tokyo at parts, and yet it is noticeably less wealthy and developed, and most of the city is, while new, astonishingly drab and nondescript.

First, the country’s cheap, all the more so with the exchange rate at that time (exchange rates are changing all the time these days). It’s quite more developed than Mexico yet somewhat cheaper. Compared to Japan is consistently half as cheap. (Though some girl in the hostel, returning from China, complained about how expensive everything was.)

People bump with you, like, all the time and pretty deliberately. While individually they are very friendly, out and about they can be quite rude. Coming from uber polite Japan, it’s pretty shocking. Also, people are far taller than in Japan and while girls are not so prim I think they’re generally cuter. Though plastic surgery is BIG in Korea, particularly one to make your eyes Western looking (“double eyelids” they call them) which, to be honest, does make Asian faces more Western-ly attractive.

I was worried about the food because one previous experience in San Francisco was quite atrocious. It turns out it just takes some getting used to and some introducing. At its best, say, Korean BBQ, it is absolutely delicious. Very agressive tastes, sweet, sour, salty and spicy jumbled all together. There are street stalls everywhere, very Mexico city like, and many of them sell cheap, awesome snacks.

As for technology, flat TVs are indeed everpresent and so are PC bangs (web cafes), full of surprisingly decent machines and cheap as dirt (less than a buck an hour). The mythical 100mb web was fast when you downloaded but quite unimpressive when you were browsing. Cell phones, like in Japan, are not that impressive, though the average cell phone is indeed high above America’s, the best of the Canadian/American crop, full-keyboard BlackBerries and the iPhone, seems in my opinion better than anything I’ve seen here on the streets and playing at phone showcases.

Most interesting of all was all the history and analysis I read. It was exhilarating arriving at a country and not knowing even how to say yes or no, thank you or please. Even more disconcerting was not knowing anything about the country other than that the south was a rising economic power while the north was on the Axis of Evil. So I plunged into several history and analysis books, The Koreans one of the best, and emerged a newly minted Korean buff. It was surprisingly enlightening, there’s nothing like being in the place to pique your curiosity and there’s nothing like being internally motivated for so much history and facts to start to make sense.

Photo set:

...there’s a whole subculture of youngsters who have been ALL OVER the world.

Israeli chicks are straight talkers and have beautiful hair and are very hot.

The main purpose of giving you clean sheets is NOT having to clean the mattress cover or the blanket, so use them!

A segregation naturally occurs between staff and guests, owing to the latter’s transiency.

Tourism isn’t transformative or enlightening by itself, it’s just an opportunity.

English is, to an astonishing degree, the world’s second language.

Kids these days are, like, REALLY into Facebook.

Tokyo suits me. It’s just as enthralling, crazy, frenzied, urban and media-saturated as I expected. But it’s also a marvelously liveable city. Public transport is excellent. The streets are safe to a degree I didn’t think humanly possible (with millennia of uninterrupted experience, Asia far outclasses the West at organizing huddled millions). The skirts are short (by anatomical necessity thighs are the Japanese cleavage). The people really are unfailingly polite and graceful. The food’s amazing and there’s a little cheap restaurant at every corner. On top of it all, I find it surprisingly cheap (some disagree though and my only experience spending my own money is from SF, which is as expensive as it gets).

To be sure, I still miss San Francisco, the feeling at ease in a language and culture I own and love, the tangibility of the web, startups, the singularity. Never before had I been so clueless of the language or felt so markedly foreign. On the other hand, I’ve found a language and a culture I’m just as intrigued by and EAGER to own and love. And as for feeling foreign, you need the help of so many people and infrastructure to get by every day, and it all works so smoothly and organically most of the time, that soon enough, in an unsettling way I hadn’t experienced before, you just feel a part of the city, a cell in a huge organism.   

I haven’t yet tried the mythical 100mbps broadband speeds (it’ll probably have to wait till I get my own place), but even my hostel has far faster and more reliable web than at Mexico so I’m content for now. Neither have I tried a local keitai (cellphone), though to be honest, what I’ve seen has been quite underwhelming. I’m sure they’ll have incredibly fast data speeds and you can indeed watch TV or pay the subway with’em, but far as I can tell the iPhone’s still head and shoulders above them in terms of usability, design, elegance, interface and screen. That common refrain that cellphones here are 10 years ahead of the States is (or has become) quite misleading.

Perhaps the most important thing I’ve realized coming here though is that Asia is for real. I had never entirely believed the reports of its boom and bloom but if Japan’s any indication, Asia will indeed be the driving force behind the 21st century. Everyday something new makes me think of all the BILLIONS of lives that are going out from subsistence farming to this—and I’m happy, it really is one of humanity’s most breathtaking successes, inconceivable in its scale. There’s energy in the air in a way I had never felt before, the oldest world becoming the newest one as it reinvents the West. And this is comparatively staid Japan, I can only imagine what China or India or South Korea might be like at places.

I was frustratingly sidetracked with my hard drive collapsing and then with the incredibly time consuming, stressful but mercifully successful process of recovering my data, but I’m back on my digital feet again with barely a hiccup. There’s still some prior commitments to attend to (family websites…) but soon enough I shall do nothing but learn Japanese and craft up web experiments!

In the meanwhile, new pics on Flickr with lots of captions!

大人 = big people = adults
小人 = little people = kids (this and above like in toki pona)
写真 = reality copy = photography
売買= sell buy = trade
靴下 = shoes under  = socks
台訶= pedestal talk = speech
赤ちゃん= little red (one) = baby
西日 = west sun = setting sun
姉妹 = older sister, younger sister = sisters (older/younger sister are basic concepts!)

One of the coolest things about an idea-sign language, which motley Japanese at times is, is that it encourages making new words by combining simpler ones. It does this as a necessity (there are only so many signs you can remember), by making of words stable roots (idea-signs tend to be more stable than letter bundles—for one thing they don’t reflect pronunciation changes), and by not allowing for sound loan words (“Bon weekend!”), where meaning is lost in grafting a word from one meaning net into another.

Here a couple of interesting, basic examples:

火山 = fire mountain = volcano
下女 = down woman = maid
電話 = electricity talk = telephone
出口　= out mouth = exit
入口 = in mouth = entrance

One day in Tokyo and I already know the answer to one of the main questions that set me around the world. The answer is yes, THERE IS at least one city I like at least as much as San Francisco. I’m in love.

(Unfortunately, the prospects of being a free agent here even slimmer.)

Pictures of it all in my Flickr Japan set.

Ah, these are going to be some exciting 5 months!

In what is to date the biggest purchase of my life (my obscene former desktop was a gift), I just purchased the bulk of my travel for the next year or so. Check out my itinerary and start planning on visiting or bumping with me!

27 October 2008
    Mexico City MEX to Tokyo NRT (via London) for 4 months, 22 days of Japan!
20 March 2009
    Tokyo NRT to London LHR for 4 months, 29 days of Europe!
17 August 2009
    London LHR to Toronto YYZ for a month of Canada! (ticket back to Mexico to be purchased)

All the flights are with British Airways. All for $1,852, which still amazes me—BA is a great airline, flights are incredibly main-airport and nonstop (can’t stop in the US). It’s all beautifully simple, better than I dared hope. Past week has been a Kayak and travel agency blur but it was worth it.

So, so exciting!

The plan is to travel, to go places for a year or so, to live for some 2-3 months each time, in Tokyo, Barcelona/Madrid, London, and Toronto (in that order). Both Spain and Canada beckon with legal, short paths to free agency. The goal shall be to find out which city I like better as my fulcrum for the decade, but mostly to learn, to start projects, and to swallow the world.

I didn’t expect to like working remotely so much, as I’ve been doing this last couple of weeks, but I’ve loved the freedom, the flexibility, and the discipline it imposes. Most important of all, it allows for freedom of place and having been kicked out of the U.S. I might as well look around. So I’m looking for some sort of remote job, failing that savings and odd jobs would have to do, but having an unhinged fixed job would accelerate and catalyze everything.

There is, still, the possibility that there will be no place for me like Silicon Valley. If that’s so, then I’ll try to get a tourist visa again within a year and give de facto (ilegal) free agency another shot. I doubt, though, that they’ll grant me a visa, but there are many other, safe, if somewhat expensive means, to get inside. And once inside de facto free agency is not far fetched at all. I’m heartened by the sanctuary San Francisco itself always was for me (as opposed to the dastard federal gov’t).

But that’s just one possibility. Just having done that scenario planning comforts me and sets me free. The world beckons and Japan has always been, after America, the country I’m hungriest for. I’ve always wanted to try the sink or swim approach to learning a language! It’ll take me a month or two to get there, but just you wait Tokyo!

What structure would you give to Mexico’s 2006 GDP, the wealth it generated in a year? Just gather your prejudices, take a guess, and try to put it into numbers.

Fascinating Economist article on the music industry’s new developments. Very reminiscent of Dyson’s thoughts on intellectual property:

“[...it] is dead; long live intellectual process. Long live service; long live performance.”

and anime’s general stance towards piracy:

“If it succeeds, milk it; if not, try something different. And if the fans are into file sharing (which they are), keep the lawyers leashed and find a way to make piracy work for you.”

I’ve always hated, with a passion, moral-indignation ads against piracy—not only because they’re manipulative but because they’re stupid. And the best defense for piracy may be how hard it is to make an argument against it that doesn’t stink of moral indignation—if maudlin pleas are the best you can do, you’re probably rotten. (On a related sidenote, I found it mighty interesting when The Economist circuitously referred to Kazaa as “a file-sharing program that was widely used to download music without paying for it”—as much as ads want to make us believe pirating is stealing, there are crucial differences, which is why such circumlocutions are essential.)

To solve intellectual property’s malaise I’ve long sought for grand economic solutions (new innovative schemes or perhaps even a new concept of property rights) rather than grand political ones (which are just, ugh, imposed moral rules). While there has been plenty of both, I’m starting to see these days that maybe the solution will be simply to move on. Piracy is just another (admittedly extreme) form of commodification^WP. You don’t fight commodification by outlawing it, you take the next thing that hasn’t been commodified yet, you offer value however you can, you move on.