March  20, 2011

Praise the Lord and Pass the Irradiated Radish!

Let’s get this out of the way up front:

In my last post, written during what we can now dare call the Darkest Hour of Japan’s still-unfolding catastrophe, I made an observation to the effect that internet daimyos Matt Drudge and Arianna Huffington could “suck my cock” owing to the salacious and exploitative headlines they were posting in a cynical bid to enhance their web traffic. Further along, I bumped Arianna up to the lead-off slot on the basis of her being such a well-preserved “older white lady” and gave the odious Drudge something less agreeable to suck on instead. (Scroll up for previous post ↑)

Thus far, no regular reader has called me out for this vulgar departure from form; however, as my own traffic has (ironically enough) spiked of late, I can only assume that many visitors, including first-timers, were put off by the comment. Perhaps some have already dismissed me as “just another of those foul-mouthed self-absorbed blogger types” whose discourse is so famously coarsening our modern world. I can only speculate on your reaction, but would like to apologize anyway to my readers in general and to older white ladies in particular—most especially to those unable to match Arianna’s prodigious cosmetic surgery budget. 

But not to Drudge or Arianna, who are both still going at it, hot and heavy. [Apologies for the mental image.] Below are Drudge’s lead links, archived from the tippy-top upper-left corner of his site on Saturday night, March 19 Japan time, along with an explication of what the intrepid reader actually encountered if he could summon the fortitude to click on them.

That was Drudge on Saturday night. By Sunday morning, the Japanese citizenry’s irritating failure to die in a sudden and flamboyant fashion or even to panic photogenically has apparently moved a frustrated Drudge to back-burner us. Also, President Obama ordered missiles fired into Libya overnight, god bless him, thereby reminding Drudge who his Real Enemy is.

Enough of this dreary media criticism. Here are some odds and ends at the outset of Week 2 of “Japan in Kinda, Sorta, Quasi-Turmoil.”

I remain at the farmhouse in western Japan, where people continue to behave as though the earthquake/tsunami/partial meltdown fiasco took place on Venus in the mid-sixteenth century. Stores are well-stocked, the customers are few in number and not at all frantic to snatch up all the dry goods, the clerks are bright and chipper.

In Yokohama, the panic buying has been the greatest plague but reportedly is abating as I write this. Aftershocks are fewer and farther between, but no one has any delusions about being rid of them any time soon. (To understand my perspective here in the west, first imagine that you are a giant standing in Fukushima. Now, get out of there, you stupid giant! You’re making the ground shake, and people are sick of that. So you take one 165-mile step, which lands you in the neighborhood of Yokohama where I live and teach. You pivot right and take an even larger, 240-mile step and—Voila! You are here at the farmhouse. I should be grateful if you would now pee on the chicken coop of our neighbor across the road, as those roosters get up awfully early.)

My university has stopped canceling events and now vows to start the spring term on schedule in April, meaning that I will be obliged to return after another week or so here in the lap of luxury.

Deprivations have I none, but frustrations many. Chief among these is an inability to be of any immediate use whatsoever to the homeless and truly needy. Over the weekend, our local government finally announced the establishment of a mechanism for collecting blankets and other necessities to be shipped northward.

It occurred to me just this morning that I have not viewed any pornography for two weeks now, dating back to nearly a week before the earthquake. We have two computers here at the farmhouse: one is Mrs. Muggins’s and the other is a university laptop primarily designated for student use, which I brought with me. So at first, I was just terrified of inadvertently leaving any unseemly traces on either machine. Since the earthquake, there’s has been neither the time nor the temptation for such indulgences.

So I think this period finally resolves the issue of whether or not I have a porn addiction, one of those questions that seemed important (at least to me) long ago, in the proverbial galaxy far away. But I’ll tell you what has been validated in the past week, and that is my addiction to Japanese chicks.

Having confirmed the well-being of all my key people in Yokohama via email, I set about calling some of them last week. To be sure, I called a few dudes, too. But mostly I called chicks, especially the thoroughbreds, the cool and calm ones who have all the boys licking salt cubes from their hands (present company included). By chance, two of them were in the middle of important job interviews when the quake struck. One, who was on the twelfth floor of a vivaciously square-dancing building, reported that she made a good impression, she thought, by not screaming.

It was the ultimate tonic to hear the ready laughter of these chicks again after all that they have been through in Yokohama. They laughed at the panic-buying in the supermarkets. They laughed at exaggerated reports of radiation clouds headed their way. Above all, they laughed at the thin pretext that I was calling to “make sure you’re okay.” They understood long before I did that I was really calling to make sure that I was.

Addenda:

1. I’m not expert on charities, but non-Japan-based readers really can’t go wrong by giving to Save the Children, which is soliciting funds to help the youngsters left homeless in northern Japan.

2. Here’s a by no means less significant way to help out: Stop believing and, if possible, stop patronizing parasitic news aggregators like Drudge and Arianna Huffington who sow fear and reap paranoia for their own personal gain.

3. That said, feel free to scour any Japanese radishes that may come your way before preparing and serving them. It’s only civilized.

At this writing, more than a week has passed at the crippled nuclear power plant in Fukushima without any of the pretty ‘splosions that cable news networks do love so much. Vegetables grown in the area can no longer be eaten and our ultimate protectors—the US Navy—are drawing up contingency plans for removal from their base in Yokosuka, south of Yokohama (!).

Most of the reactors have fallen into line and are behaving themselves, but Reactor 3 persists in acting up: smoking, spitting out puffs of radiation, and generally behaving like a dick. People are ganging up on #3, though personally I’ve always had a soft spot for it. They say #3 is rotten to the core and needs to be buried in cement; I say it’s merely misunderstood.

The mood here in Japan near the end of Week 2 weirdly parallels the situation of the rebels in Libya. They, too, thought that their ordeal would be over by now. “It didn’t take this long for the Tunisians or the Egyptians,” you can hear them whining. “And now you say that we might not even win? Nobody said anything about losing when I signed on…” Yep, just two peas in a pod: me, and your average Libyan rebel.

I’m still in western Japan, far from my main computer and from most of the documents I need to get on with any meaningful work: hence, the blitz of posts of late. The lengthy lull we’re enduring now in the battle to get the reactors under control allows for some more general reflections on the earthquake danger in Japan.

It was in 1992 that I began to live separately from Mrs. Muggins in the earthquake-prone Kanto area, and in these eighteen-plus years I have lived in three apartments in Yokohama. When shopping for a room, the survivability factor always comes into play. How tall is the building? Which floor would I be on? Are there taller and heavier buildings that could fall down on mine? How far above sea level is it? Is there cable? 

Earthquake anxiety is like that, you see. It’s the spooky organ music that plays on a loop underneath our day-to-day lives. 

The Big One in (My) Literature

In two of my three books, How To Pick Up Japanese Chicks And Doom Your Immortal Soul and Wussie: In Praise of Spineless Men, weak-willed and self-centered men yearn for a killer earthquake and the attendant plummeting slab of concrete to put them out of their misery. The Big One is sure to come anyway, so why can’t we get it when we need it? Such are the ruminations of a selfish man living the prime of his life in the Kanto region. 

In contrast, there are times when, from an equally self-centered perspective, an author may pray for the forestalling of the Big One. In January of this year, for example, just prior to the launch of Wussie, I fretted that a massive quake would strike just before I could finish the submission process, thus forever denying the world this latest glimpse into the bottomless well of my genius. Please, God, oh please don’t let that earthquake strike until I can be sure that Wussie turns up on the first page of a Google search... Narcissistic? You bet. But I'm not the only one living around the Rim of Fire who launches such prayers.

The Big One in My Fantasy Life

Similarly, so very many of us, whether or not we admit it in blogs, have fantasized about the inevita ble Big One and our supposedly valiant reactions to it.

In my version of the fantasy, I would hack my way out the rubble of my apartment building and fight my way up the hill to my university, the designated evacuation site for my ward of Yokohama. Along the way, I would charge into a couple of flaming buildings at the behest of wailing young mothers to extract their infants. (In my imagination, these earthquakes always conveniently took place at midday. Were I to fantasize the earthquake occurring at night, I would also have fantasize myself performing these heroic deeds in Fruit of the Loom briefs and a baggy t-shirt, and nobody wants that in a fantasy. That image just throws you off your game.)

Once at school I would debrief my students, only to learn that one of our prettiest members was unaccounted for. I would promptly recruit a crack team of youthful and dispensable Red Shirts. Their two-fold purpose: leading me to the damsel’s apartment and getting killed in gruesome ways in the process. (I already have one male student earmarked for selflessly throwing himself on a compromised propane gas tank.) I alone would survive to extract the target from the twisted wreckage of her shower and gallantly drape my jacket over her to preserve her dignity. And I alone would receive the full brunt of her gratitude, though that episode would be spun off into a fantasy of its own.

The Big One in My Family History

A Muggins in Japan during a Big One is not unprecedented, though we Mugginses do have a Paulie-in-The-Godfather-like knack for being off duty when bad things happen.

Great-grandfather Muggins, who came to Japan in the 1870s as a missionary, was still merrily missionarying away at age sixty-eight when his generation’s Big One struck in 1923. It was late summer so Great-grandfather had fled sticky Tokyo for the resort town of Hakone well to the west the day before the quake hit.

His report to the home office of his church highlights his fears at the time for his two spinster daughters, missionaries themselves, who were scheduled to follow him out of Tokyo on the very day of the quake. Hearing of the disaster that had befallen Tokyo (over 100,000 would perish, mostly from fires), he immediately thought of a rickety bridge that my great-aunts’ train would likely be crossing at just that moment. If the main jolt had not collapsed the ancient span, surely the ongoing aftershocks would. He writes that the bridge did in fact collapse, leaving his God-fearing American readers in suspense before adding that this occurred just after his daughters’ train had made it across.

I suspect some poetic license in my forebear’s account. Reading Muggins Senior, you are led to imagine the tracks crumbling in the very wake of the train as the daughters, clutching the railing of the caboose, watch in horror. I somehow doubt that it was that close a call. Then again, in those pre-Internet days when fact-checking an account from a foreign land was a tall order, he could safely have stretched things a lot more egregiously than he did. If I were telling the tale, for example, I might have concocted a second train following close behind the one carrying my aunts, and sent that vehicle and its unfortunate passengers screaming into the abyss.

But that’s just me.

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