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Yesterday CNN ran an obit for Tetsuro Tamba. The headline was “‘You Only Live Twice’ actor dead,” which makes sense given that their audience is likely to be most familiar with the 1967 James Bond movie, but I was surprised to discover near the end of the piece that he had also starred in the 1973 film adaptation of Japan Sinks.

As a connoisseur of the post-apocalypse, I read Japan Sinks in translation in college (I had to get it on interlibrary loan). The basic premise of the novel is that Japan is going to be completely dragged under the ocean by tectonic activity; while there is some earth science fiction going on there, the real story is a speculative fiction description of the frantic attempts of the government to secure a future for Japanese culture. While other governments are happy to take custody of art treasures, they are less enthusiastic about refugees. The influence of the immediate post-WWII/atomic bomb era is obvious in the general sense of the rest of the world’s indifference/hostility to Japan;* the story does not really close on an optimistic note.

It’s not EXACTLY the (post)apocalypse, unless you consider Japan to be the entire world, but then again, this was not then and is not now an unimaginable attitude among the citizenry. Consider The Day After Tomorrow, as well, which was basically the story of a North American apocalypse with similar social issues, although less drawn out. (And really was just a USA POST-apocalypse, since I assume the entire population of Canada was just supposed to be dead.)

Interestingly, when I searched the IMDB for information about the movie, I also uncovered this year’s remake–of which I had been aware although I hadn’t realized it had been released yet–and I discovered that while the 1973 version was titled Nippon Chinbotsu, the 2006 remake is Nihon Chinbotsu.

The implications of this shift are unclear. In the present day, the use of the pronunciation “Nippon” makes you sound a little right wing. I don’t know if there were similar implications in 1973. I also don’t know how you would indicate this difference if you were writing in Japanese, which uses a two kanji character compound for “Japan” and as far as I know it’s the same regardless of your political leanings. I tried and failed to find an indication of how the book was originally titled/pronounced.

In fact, I think “Nippon” is probably more appropriate to the tone of the story, which as I recall had a fairly strong “wareware Nihonjin” (”We Japanese”) kind of feel to it, what with the tragedy of diaspora and all.*** The user review I saw on the IMDB remake page complained that it had largely ignored the sociological story in favor of big budget disaster effects–so closer to The Day After Tomorrow, although I assume without the dire wolves loose in the big city. It would be interesting to see the 1973 and 2006 versions together, although I don’t know when the latter will be available in English.

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*Although as I recall, this focused mostly on the white Western world and less on the rest of Asia, which has more immediate and arguably justified reasons to be hostile toward Japan.

**Do not discount the possibility that I am talking out my ass here.

So in 2000, or possibly 2001–I could look this up in the archive of my old domain journal, The Scorpio Papers, but I’m lazy–I purchased a Sony CyberShot digital camera in Tokyo.* It was 3.3 megapixels, which at the time was EXTREMELY cutting edge. I took all kinds of pictures, including approximately 437,003 shots of the cherry blossoms in March/April 2001, so we know it was before that.

…Wait, we know it was in 2000, actually, because there are pictures from Kyoto, which I visited in November 2000. Possibly I purchased this camera in the wake of ridiculous interpersonal drama. That’s how I deal with emotional problems, you know; I shop. Okay. So: I bought this camera some time before November 2000, the upshot being: in September 2006 it was no longer, by any stretch of the imagination, cutting edge.

Furthermore, it had developed an issue with the battery (which I replaced in 2003 and it didn’t really solve the problem, so I think it’s likely that the camera itself was the culprit) wherein it never really believed that it was charged, so even if I’d had it on the charger for hours beforehand, it would constantly flash the low battery light at me and shut itself off. I took it with me to San Francisco last weekend when I visited Katherine and took, like, maybe four photos, because it’s such a pain turning it back on all the time.

I’d been meaning to get a new camera for some time, but that motivated me. After a great deal of comparison shopping on Amazon, I settled on the Nikon Coolpix L1, which at $199 features 6.2 megapixels and, more importantly, 5x optical zoom. The 6.2MP means you can make 14″x19″ “photo quality” prints; the 5x optical zoom means they’ll actually be in focus. I don’t have a lot of call to make 14″x19″ prints of anything–not that it isn’t nice to know I could–but the optical zoom was what I was really looking for.

$200 was about what I was hoping to spend, actually, although then I ended up getting a 1GB flash memory card and a set of rechargable AA batteries with charger, since the L1, like most of the newer digital camers, uses AA batteries, and since it also has no viewfinder, only an LCD screen, it sucks up the juice pretty fast. It’s a nice, compact little thing, though–smaller than my old CyberShot, and a stylish matte black, too.

Anyway, it came today. Unfortunately, the memory card did not, which meant that I was able to take seven photos on the default settings before the 10MB of internal memory was full, but the card should be here tomorrow or the next day. In the meantime, I present this photo of my backyard:

Why, yes, that is a decommissioned toilet. When I moved in, the landlady told me that her son-in-law would be carting it away within the week. I told Katherine this when she inquired about it while dropping me off last week.

“I’ll bet you twenty bucks it’s still here when you move out.”
“Do I look like an idiot?”

I really like that flowering purple tree, but so far no one knows what it is.

And in related news, I paid for a Flickr Pro account, because they only let free users have THREE SETS. Three! It was not to be borne.

Look forward to an exciting photo tour of my neighborhood, and, as a bonus, the Route I Walk to Work. You may have to wait until Saturday, since the weekend is normally the only time I see much daylight except for the morning walk to work. I know it’s not true, but I have this vague, unshakeable impression that it gets much warmer in California on the weekend, because during the week I am inside all day and I get chilly sitting at my computer. I know this is not actually the way things are, but you try telling it to my toes.

While you are waiting for that, anyway, I am uploading all my old Japan photos to Flickr. I’m the blonde, in case you get disoriented.

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*Consequently, it came with a Japanese manual, which you might assume, in the digital age, would be no big deal. You would be wrong. Over the next five years, no English PDF of the damn thing ever became available anywhere known to Google. I’d had the camera for at least four years when my friend Matt figured out–over AIM, FROM AUSTRALIA–how to use the timer function.

There’s something about being Far From Home that seems to drive me to book sales. I mean, it isn’t as if the Madison library doesn’t have “Friends of the Library” sales, although I think they’re rather fewer and far between than the monthly ones put on by the Palo Alto Public Library… and probably the selection isn’t as good. But I almost never went to them anyway.

In Tokyo, I once went to the Kinokuniya foreign language paperback sale after a full night of karaoke and a very awkward traditional Japanese breakfast at Denny’s (one of the other foreign exchange students was having personal issues), and, needless to say, no sleep whatsoever. This meant that later in the day, I had to teach two conversational English lessons also on no sleep whatsoever, but I didn’t regret it, because I’d gotten a giant bag of Y500 English fiction, which is no mean feat in Tokyo, where an English novel usually runs about Y1400 (~$12 at the time).

It was in Tokyo that I started reading Terry Pratchett, who I’d been avoiding because I erroneously believed him to be similar to Piers Anthony, and also where I read White Oleander, which I’d been avoiding because it was on Oprah’s Book Club and I am sometimes incongruously snobbish.*

Here in northern California, I think of White Oleander frequently, because the stuff is everywhere. More specifically, as I noted to my sister Hannah after she had checked the online bus schedule for me and determined that the bus I wanted back from the book sale doesn’t run on Sundays, when I see all that oleander, I think of People Whom I Would Like To Poison.

“That must be a long list,” said Hannah.

“You know,” I said. “Some people rate higher than others.”

My father always used to tell us that in Florida (where he grew up), every year a couple of people would die from building campfires with oleander brush, or, in some memorable cases, using oleander sticks to roast weenies. As a child, I was fascinated with poisonous plants. It may have started with the dire warnings I received from my mother about pokeberries, which were a lovely deep wine color and grew in our yard; I was also very interested in belladonna, an indication of my nascent goth tendencies. I thought it would be a good name for a girl.

Anyway, except for having to carry 52 books approximately a mile and a half to the nearest bus stop when it developed that the #88 (which would have taken me within THREE BLOCKS of my house) does not run on Sundays, I would say the book sale was a success. It was a bit picked over, it being the second day, but the second day is also when they let you fill up a grocery bag with books for $5 (or, the woman at the cash drawer tempted me, five bags for $20, but even if the #88 had been running this seemed a bit beyond my means). So I spent $5.50 for nine books at the regular sale, and $5 for 43 in the bargain room:

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