Tokyo 2017: Lost in Franslation

Yeah, I'm back from Japan, and yeah, I went with that title. I couldn't help it - the movie and its soundtrack kind of informed large parts of the time I spent there, since I listened to the music as I rode in on the bus from Narita Airport and since I went to the hotel where the movie was set. There's obviously more to the city than Lost in Translation, but it made for a nice backbone to the trip for me.

View from the hotel in Lost in Translation

First things first: Tokyo's amazing, and you really need to go. It's big and sprawling, but orderly, clean and well-run. There's shopping, museums, sights to see and amazing places to eat. I feel like I could have spent way more time there, even just walking around the city - and if I'd had even more time I'd like to have gone out more into the rest of the country.

This is, of course, despite the fact that Tokyo was being hit by a typhoon and the fact that the government was holding an election. While I noticed the typhoon, because I was out at the Tokyo National Museum that day, the election completely passed me by until I saw mentions of it on social media the next morning.

That kind of leads into one of the points I made in my last post, about language. I was warned ahead of time that English-speakers aren't very common, and while this turned out to be true, it also proved to be unimportant. Almost everything important was signposted in English, especially on the Metro, and the unlimited 2G data on my roaming plan meant that in a pinch I could just use a maps app to get around. This turned out to be helpful for getting around on foot between spots that were closer together than they seemed on the transport maps.

I also determined that I had just about enough Japanese to accomplish the fairly limited range of things I needed to do. Restaurants, museums, stores - all of it was completely navigable, and I found the people working in customer service to be very patient. Heck, there were even some normal folks on the train back from Kamakura who were either able to speak a little English or give easy answers to my basic questions. It's probably different if you go to the real countryside, but for where I spent my time, I got on perfectly well.

The locals seemed to be pretty patient in general - a refrain I kept telling myself was that to them I'm kind of a barbarian, and so barbaric behavior is expected of me. This ranged from taking pictures of everything, to asking confusing things in restaurants, to not knowing the proper greeting when entering a store or restaurant.

In terms of activities, I feel like I struck a good balance between seeing museums and exploring neighborhoods. My first full day there I walked from my hotel in Akasaka to Roppongi, which is nearby, and caught a couple of art museums and a couple of malls. The second day, when the typhoon hit, I was at Ueno Park for the National Museum, and the rest of the time I was hopping around between neighborhoods on the Metro, including checking out the nightlife in Shinjuku and Shibuya (the site of the famous crossing with all the big animated advertising).

I even managed to check out a couple of residential neighborhoods, places that looked quintessentially Asian to me - narrow streets that from the outside looked like alleys but happened to be where all the residential buildings were. When I went to Kamakura on the Tuesday, I determined that this layout was common to both big cities and smaller towns.

Kamakura

The other notable thing about the built environment was much green space there was, and how much you could find if you just turned down a street. In the park next to the Canadian Embassy (which has a rock garden that my guidebook highly recommended), you could see little shrines dotted around among the trees. Others could be found on random corners in Tsukiji, near the fish market, and in Roppongi, just off the main drag as I walked back to my hotel that first day.

I was also lucky enough to have a friend of a friend who I was able to meet in town my first night, when I'd just got off the plane. She introduced me to a couple of friends of hers, who took me first to an Italian restaurant (done Japanese style, though) and then to a little hole-in-the-wall sake joint where the sign outside and the menus inside were all in Japanese only. Certainly you could eat perfectly well if you stick with places that have Western signage, but if you know someone there, have them take you to someplace local; failing that, you can use startups like Vayable (which is actually founded by a former classmate of mine, though I haven't used it myself) to get someone to show you around. In places where you can't read the language, and are in fact as helpless as a child, that's a fun way to visit places you'd miss otherwise.

Spotted at Tsukiji Fish Market

If there was a negative, it's that the bookstores didn't have much in the way of English books. It's kind of a shame, because there were loads of bookstores everywhere I went, but at the same time, most of what I did find in English was stuff I could get back home. On the other hand, it was nice to see how many bookstores there were, all dotted around the city. Contrast that with Singapore or Hong Kong, where most of the bookstores were pretty terrible.

So Tokyo comes highly recommended. There's loads to see, do and eat, and it's easy to get around. Once you figure out certain things, like which side of the escalator is for standing, or how to determine which platform your subway train leaves from, it's pretty easy to navigate. And if you turn even minimally adventurous, for example by walking down the narrow alleys of Tsukiji Fish Market or dropping into the cat cafe in Akihabara, you can have some amazing, unique experiences.

Yep, this happened

Go check it out. Now!

Some Business Before Going to Tokyo

On Thursday I'm heading out to Japan for a week, because I haven't been before and I really wanted to spend a couple of thousand that I don't have on a nice vacation. I've been eyeing it up as a destination for my big solo trip this year, reasoning that now's as good a time as any to do, well, anything. And if the geopolitical situation is anything to go by, this might be the last chance any of us gets.

I'm kidding, of course! But it's hard not to think about that, and all the missiles that might be flying overhead at any given time. I console myself with the fact that my stated goal is to see the world or die tryin', and if anything weird happens, well, I'll have met that goal.

On a more positive note, I've been preparing by watching some of my favorite movies set in Japan, namely Kill Bill Part 1 and Lost in Translation (which I watched last night, as I write this). Not sure how accurate the picture provided by either film is, but in any case it was fun rewatching them close together - coincidentally that's also how I recall watching them the first time, in London, with my mom, and in the exact same theater in Leicester Square. I can't think of two directors less similar than Quentin Tarantino and Sofia Coppola, but those two movies, at least, will always be indelibly linked in my brain.

The movie I haven't watched to get myself ready is, oddly enough, The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift. Not because I don't want to, but I've already had toxic levels of exposure to the damn thing and I'll just be disappointed when I don't locate the city's underground multilevel car park racing scene. I've been thinking of downloading the Lost in Translation soundtrack, but as I write these words I should probably do the same for Tokyo Drift.

I also spent some time messing around with Japanese on Mango Languages, but it hasn't stuck and frankly I'm kind of relishing the opportunity to get around with my limited Japanese and inability to understand any answers I'm likely to get. Or if not relishing, then intrigued to see how I get on. Loads of people do it, right? It'll be good practice if I ever lose the ability to read because of brain damage caused by watching too much Tokyo Drift (even if I consider that a contradiction in terms).

In any case, I've got my guidebook and am collecting ideas on what to do for a day trip outside the city. Current front runner is Kamakura, labeled as Tokyo's Kyoto, because I won't be able to get to the real Kyoto. I'm also looking up ideas for museums and restaurants in the city, and whether I can find a good English section at Kinokuniya bookstore - I keep having to remind myself that the one in Singapore had an amazing English section because everyone there speaks English, and the situation is slightly different in Tokyo.

Obviously I'll also have my phone and iPad with me, so I'm hoping to lard the next post with a crapload of pictures. And the best thing is, I've got an Airbnb guest staying while I'm away, so my damn house will make me some cash while I'm away! The money will come in handy when I'm deciding which life-size Gundam model to bring home.

In any case, this scattershot blog post should show how damn excited I am to be going. I feel like my earliest exposure to Japanese culture (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) and every video game and anime and manga and Takeshi Kitano film I've consumed since then is leading to this trip. And I'm really hoping to get out to the Park Hyatt Tokyo, where Lost in Translation takes place - then I'll know I'm in Tokyo...

Catching Up With Blade Runner

With all the hoopla over Blade Runner 2049, I thought it would be a good time to check out the original. I'd been seeing discussions and reviews and thinkpieces for a while, and I think what tipped me over the edge was a discussion on The Verge about which version is best. I'm not going to wade into that argument, but I will say the article made me decide to rent the original, theatrical cut, instead of the Final Cut that Ridley Scott released in 2007 (and which stands as the only time I've seen that movie in the theater).

What's odd is that I actually remembered very little. I could still recall the broad strokes of the plot - the replicants coming to earth to confront their creator, Deckard being sent after them - and some of the smaller moments, like when Deckard retires Zhora, the stripper replicant, or Roy Batty's demise as he tells Deckard of the things he's seen. But I didn't remember the connecting glue, how we got from one plot point to the next.

This might be down to the length of time since I'd last seen the movie (i.e. that Final Cut in 2007), as well as the fact that there are so many versions floating around, with different scenes and editing, that it's hard to keep track of much more than the big stuff. However, I also think it's related to where I was in life when I first watched the movie, vs where I am now.

As a 15 year old (or whatever age I was when I first saw it; might have been earlier, come to think of it), it was hard to see beyond the surface of the plot, and beyond the aesthetics. Deckard drinking alone in his apartment is an image that's stuck with me for decades, for example.

But this time it was easier to see the movie from the perspective of Roy Batty and the other replicants. Batty's line at the end, where he asks Deckard how it feels to live in constant fear and compares it to slavery, landed much more squarely for me this time. It's also easier to appreciate Rutger Hauer's performance as a man struggling for every last moment as the end of his life approaches - where I would have seen the menace and little else, now I can see him as the hero of his own story, in which Deckard is the villain (although the bit where Batty crushes his creator's head is pretty villainous).

It also helps that I'm considering these points both in my own life (not imminently, thank fuck, unless something happens with North Korea) and in my fiction, where I've just written my hacky robot short story. Consciousness and existence, and cogito ergo sum, and all that.

More than anything, though, I'm reminded of what a weird, singular film it is. Amazon helpfully tallies up all of the main crew and cast on the Fire TV, and shows you other movies they've worked on, so you can buy or rent those, too; of Ridley Scott's body of work I count ten movies that I've seen. They're maybe not as highly stylized as some other directors' work, like the Coen Brothers or Wes Anderson, so it's hard to draw a connecting line between Alien, Blade Runner and Gladiator (to choose several at random).

In a lot of ways it has more in common, thematically and visually, with Alien Covenant, which also plays with questions about the nature of life and intelligence, while building on weird design and art for its settings. But I don't know if I'd be able to connect them to the same director, and certainly not to Gladiator or A Good Year.

That's probably the Philip K Dick influence, though even that is relatively faint, when I think back to what little I remember of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Still, it's a very weird, brooding type of film, especially if you contrast it with Harrison Ford's other big roles at that time; that, and the surfeit of edits and director's cuts is probably what's made Blade Runner such a rich trove of discussion on What It All Means.

I can't pretend to have the answer, but it was interesting to watch it this time with the knowledge in mind that Deckard himself may be a replicant. Ridley Scott has certainly implied as much, and it sounds like there's some resolution, or discussion, of this point in the new sequel.

Still, the reviews make me cautiously optimistic, as does the fact that it's helmed by Denis Villeneuve, who seems to revel in weirdness and symbolism. He, after all, also directed Arrival, which has a similar dream-like quality to it in which you never know exactly what's happening.

If nothing else, by watching the original Blade Runner, I'm up to speed and can go and enjoy the new one. Here's hoping that one also has people debating it fiercely for the next thirty years.

Top of the Funnel, or Why We Aren't Successful

As I'm fond of noting, I've spent a lot of time over the last few years consuming self-help and productivity books, blogs, podcasts, what-have-you. For the most part I think I've been lucky, because most of it has been transferable to my own life, even if I still have trouble with the concept of not checking my email first thing in the morning.

But I think that we, or at least I, sometimes lose sight of what we're trying to accomplish when we adopt life hacks and come up with really complicated ways to accomplish things. And then we, or at least I, get pretty frustrated at the perceived lack of progress in our chosen areas, which means either giving up the self-help stuff or getting more of it.

Still, the most insightful thing I heard on this topic was on Tim Ferriss's podcast, where some internet entrepreneur (I'm too lazy to go look it up) mentioned the concept of "top of the funnel". Someone out there is probably shaking their head right now at how basic this is, but bear with me, because everyone who's not where they want to be is doing this.

The example in the Ferriss show was getting a new router, to make sure you're downloading the internet at the most optimal speed - everything else you do, from buying Wi-Fi range extenders to upgrading your laptop or whatever, can deliver only incremental gains but replacing your router (ie improving the process at the top of the funnel) means those improvements can deliver even better value.

It's not a 100% match to what I'm thinking of, but at heart it's an illustration that if you want to fix something, you have to get the basics right. If your internet is slow, then the basic thing is to get a new router (I'm not saying to get a new ISP because if you're in America you don't have any choice).

Here are some examples from my own life:

• So why am I single? Because I don't know enough single women. And because on a Sunday evening I'm writing this blog rather than meeting more single women (though in fairness I was out and about in downtown Palo Alto last night).
• Why am I not the shredded Adonis that I think chicks would dig? Because I eat quite a lot of crap and sit at desks all the time, either working or writing this blog.
• Why haven't I sold the proverbial good fantasy novel? Because I don't write enough and I don't submit enough. Simple as that. And when I say write, I also mean edit, revise, fine-tune, etc.
• Why am I broke? Because I spend too much money on frivolous things and because I work at a job that doesn't pay well.

Now these may apply to me but they're also universal. People are fat, sick and nearly dead in developed societies because they eat crap. They don't have good relationships because they sequester themselves behind their computers or smartphones. And they don't have cash because they don't learn how money works.

The financial basis of the internet, according to another Tim Ferriss guest (I think it was Ramit Sethi this time, but again - too lazy to go check) is to help people get rich, get skinny or have sex. That's besides porn, of course. But nobody would buy any of it (except for porn) if the advice consisted exclusively of "Get a well-paying job and don't spend money stupidly; eat more fruits and vegetables and move around once in a while; and be a nice person who has lots of friends."

I'm aware that this may seem to contradict previous posts I've written where I talk about doing less and not being too tough on yourself. This post is also borne of my own frustration at not accomplishing as much as I think I "should" have. But it doesn't contradict those earlier posts, in truth, and it carries a hopeful message, which I'm going to share with you now.

Being in good shape may seem unattainable, but it's not an arcane thing - all you have to do is eat better and move more. Meeting romantic partners is only possible if you make some effort to go out and meet them, whether by getting shot down in bars or by swiping all night on Tinder. And having money is as simple as getting a job that pays you enough to live off, and not spending so much that you can't support yourself.

You may say there are external factors stopping you in one or more of these cases, and for individual people there may well be. But the hopeful bit is that it's in your control, at least to a certain extent.

One of my favorite parts of Brian Tracy's book, Goals, is when he refers to Barry Sears's Zone Diet, and specifically where he notes that falling off the wagon and eating something not Zone-approved isn't the end of the world. Instead, he says, getting back into the Zone is as easy as eating another Zone meal.

For our purposes today, getting back on track is as simple as taking the actions needed to get back on track. You don't have to build it up into anything more complicated than that. And once you have the top of the funnel sorted out, then you can start making the incremental changes to see even more success.