Posted 9:17 AM by Blah blah

Moving Again, Today

Move #2, into the new house. At least it's not pouring rain like last weekend. Installing the DSL will be delayed another week. Get ready for a whole day's workout, Raymond.

How are you, cowriters?

Posted 6:23 AM by Blah blah

Three Articles on Japan

Last week, my local paper published a series of three explosive articles about Japanese society today. Please comment! I'd like to hear your views on this.

All three by Michael Zielenziger, San Jose Mercury News Tokyo Bureau:

1. Japan's Shut-in Society: Reclusive Young Adults Reflect An Anxious Nation:

TOKYO - Kenji has seldom left his bedroom in five years. On a good day, when he forces himself, he can almost get to the front door of his mother's small Tokyo apartment before fear overtakes him.

"It requires a lot of courage just to go downstairs and get the mail," said the 34-year-old shut-in, who is thin as a twig and nearly as fragile. "I have two personalities: one who doesn't want to go out and one who does. They are fighting with each other constantly."

At least 1 million Japanese adults, mostly men, share Kenji's reclusive behavior, just one symptom of the nation's decline after a decade of recession and economic stagnation. Sleeping by day and pacing their rooms at night, these men epitomize a country that has become isolated, apprehensive and increasingly unable to interact with the outside world, according to a growing number of professional counselors and other experts.

These men imprison themselves in their rooms for months or even years at a time, according to Tamaki Saito, the first therapist to write a book on the subject. They hardly ever leave except for a quick run to the 7-Eleven, if they can manage that.

Counselors and psychiatrists say Kenji's reclusion, known here as hikikomori, is an illness that exists only in Japan and was unknown even there until a decade ago. Hikikomori sufferers shut themselves off from siblings and friends, even parents, whom they sometimes attack in violent outbursts.

"I fear that Japan, as a nation itself, is becoming hikikomori," said psychiatrist Satoru Saito, who treats shut-ins and counsels families in his Tokyo clinic. "It is a nation that does not like to communicate. It is a nation that does not like to take risks. So what these young adults are doing is a mirror of what they see around them in adult society."

The United States and other wealthy industrial nations are also being buffeted by rapid economic, technological and social change. But few nations are as wedded to conformity and resistant to change as contemporary Japan.

2. Shifting family values: Fewer Births, Marriages Threaten Japan's Future:

Worried about their futures and unwilling to commit to others, a generation of Japanese is shunning marriage and childbirth, giving their nation one of the world's lowest birthrates, with profound consequences. A steadily shrinking labor force promises to starve the world's second-largest economy just as baby-boomers swell the ranks of retirees. And as Japan's population declines, so will its influence.

Japan's birthrate is 1.3 per woman per lifetime, compared with 2.1 in the United States. The nation's population will begin shrinking in 2005, and in 25 years, more than a third of Japanese will be 65 or older. And unlike other nations confronted with shrinking birthrates, such as Italy and Germany, homogeneous Japan gives no sign that it will welcome foreign immigrants to supplement its depleted workforce.

Like the hundreds of thousands of men who lock themselves in their rooms to escape the pressures of a rigid social system, Japanese women fear being trapped in marriage and are disengaging from traditional family roles. Smarter and better educated than any previous generation, they're unable to find companies that accept working mothers or husbands who embrace working wives.

Until the late 1960s, the average Japanese woman first married when she was 24 1/2 years old. A woman who didn't marry by 25 was considered ``Christmas cake,'' a sweet that no one would bother with the day after Christmas.

Now the average age for a woman's first marriage is 27.2 and rising. In 1980, when Japan's economy was growing vigorously, 80 percent of women age 28 were married. In 1995, 55 percent were. Today, 45 percent are.

Katsura Komami ought to be a catch. The 27-year-old executive at a giant automotive manufacturer is well-educated and attentive. She frequently travels abroad and enjoys musical theater and fashion. She wants a baby someday.

But like thousands of other ambitious women in Japan, Komami isn't thinking about marriage. She prefers to remain in the bedroom in her parents' modest apartment where she grew up.

Komami shyly acknowledges that she's a ``parasite single,'' a popular Japanese term for the more than 7 million unmarried Japanese women who live with mom and dad....

Professional women such as Komami who continue to live in their parents' homes -- where they usually make only token rent payments -- can take shopping trips to Paris or New York, go to fashionable restaurants and fill their closets with Louis Vuitton purses and Gucci accessories. They're Japan's biggest consumers.

A woman once ``had to get married in order to survive,'' said Suzuki, the researcher. ``But now, in order to live a better life, women choose not to marry.''...

Japanese companies rarely offer a ``mommy track,'' a flexible work schedule to accommodate child care needs. Career women face the same demands as men to work long hours; during peak work periods, many don't get home before midnight. If they get pregnant, they often are forced to quit.

Husbands, however, still expect their wives to rush home and prepare dinner each night.

``We've discussed it, and my husband says he simply would not take paternity leave if we had a baby,'' said Mika Kuroiwa, who works in the programming department of a Tokyo television production company. ``So that settled it for me. It means we're not going to have children.''

``If we get pregnant, we're moving to Australia,'' said Yuki Takahashi, 29, whose Japanese husband studied for his law degree in Melbourne. ``I could never raise my child in a society as rigid as Japan.''

Just meeting a prospective partner can be an ordeal. Marriages traditionally were arranged between families, and while arranged marriages have gone out of style, many Japanese still aren't comfortable with U.S.-style dating.

Dr. Shigesato Takahashi, the chief researcher at the National Institute of Population and Social Science Research, said government data revealed that 49.8 percent of unmarried Japanese men ages 18 to 34 said they had no social relations -- no casual friendships, no dating relationships, no love affairs -- with anyone of the opposite sex. The comparable level for women is 41.9 percent.

``People who are trying so hard to pass university entrance exams, they actively suppress their desire to go out,'' Takahashi said.

Men spend long hours in the office and pass most evenings entertaining male clients or socializing with male colleagues or bosses. While Tokyo boasts more than 80,000 restaurants, men and women rarely dine together, except in the most romantic venues.

``I really don't have much opportunity to meet people,'' said Yuriko Hirose, 35, who studies tea ceremony and flower arranging and helps in her mother's floral business.

When Japanese men and women do meet, they have trouble talking to each other. ``The single men seem so helpless; they are really the parasites who depend on their mothers,'' Hirose said.

Sex counselors and therapists say men and women seldom discuss sex or feelings.

And marriage isn't the ticket to a good sex life. In Japan's only comprehensive study of sex lives, completed three years ago, one in five married couples in their 30s and 40s said they were ``sexless,'' meaning they have sex less than once a month.

``It's hard for Americans to believe,'' said Takao Sano of Mitsui Homes, one of the nation's largest home builders. ``But 40 percent of our customers ask us to separate the bedrooms'' between husband and wife. Often the couples are in their late 40s. Usually, Sano says, it's the wife who wants a separate room.

3. As Japan's economy falls, suicides rise: Increase Among Salaried Workers:

TOKYO - Japanese are committing suicide in record numbers.

Nearly 600 die by their own hands each week, and every year, three times as many Japanese hang themselves, hurl themselves in front of speeding commuter trains or kill themselves in other ways as die in automobile accidents.

``Suicide is the single biggest health care issue in Japan today,'' said Yukio Saito, a Lutheran minister who runs Japan's largest suicide-prevention hotline. Japan's suicide rate, he said, is three times higher than America's; the World Health Organization ranks it the highest among industrialized countries.

The rise in suicides has closely tracked the decline of Japan's economy, Saito said. In a decade, they have increased 67 percent among men. In a nation of corporate warriors who have made their companies their true families -- with ritual obligations and enveloping social ties -- the nation's rising suicide level ``is like a barometer reflecting the epidemic problems of the economy,'' he said.

Japan used to be a society in which competition was limited, economic outcomes were guaranteed and a ``convoy system'' kept all ships afloat, the weak and the strong. Lifetime employment and a seniority system guaranteed annual raises that provided security.

``Now we are becoming more of an individualistic society'' in which competition is less polite and outcomes are uncertain, said Tomotake Yamazaki, who runs a mental health-consulting practice and is a member of the Health Ministry's task force on workplace stress. ``Japan today is at a turning point. If you don't have your own individual strength, you cannot survive.''...

Of the 31,042 suicides last year, 71 percent were male. Experts say most of the recent increase is among salaried workers who are anxious about their economic prospects. Another large segment of suicide victims is elderly rural residents, especially women, who fear that they have become a burden on their families....

Widespread pessimism and even depression have replaced the giddy optimism of the 1980s. A survey published earlier this month by the Pew Research Center found that Japanese are far more downbeat than others with comparable levels of prosperity. Nearly twice as many feel their lives have gotten worse in the past five years as think things have improved. By a 4-1 ratio, Japanese think that when today's kids come of age, life will be worse than it is today. Only Guatemalans were gloomier.

In a Health Ministry poll of nearly 12,000 workers, 16 percent of the women and 11 percent of the men said they suffered from moderate or severe depression.

``I would have to say we have a mental health crisis in this country,'' said Yamazaki, who estimates that 70 percent of his patients suffer from depression caused by fatigue. ``Either they work too long or they have too many burdens from work.''

Many employees worry that if they take time off, their companies will discover that they can get along fine without them. Government data shows that last year, the average Japanese worker took only 8.8 of the allotted 18 days of paid vacation, a figure that has been dropping steadily.

The epidemic of anxiety has collided with taboos against talking about it. Large Japanese companies are establishing ``nursing rooms,'' where workers can go for counseling -- but counselors say workers fear getting black marks on their personnel record if they are seen entering or leaving such a center. Many will visit a counselor only at off-site locations.

Yuuki Saito, 22, said it took him six years to talk to his mother about his father's suicide.

``In Japan, to openly discuss something like suicide is never appreciated,'' he said. ``We have been raised not to whimper.''

Posted 10:32 PM by Blah blah

The Top 12 New Year's Resolutions Made by Pets

12. Have a torrid one-night stand with a street mutt.

11. Try to understand that the cat is from Venus and I am from Mars.

10. I will no longer be beholden to the sound of the can opener.

9. Circulate petition that Leg Humping be a juried competition in major dog shows.

8. Call PETA and tell them what that surgical mask-wearing freak does to us when no one is around.

7. Take time from busy schedule to stop and smell the behinds.

6. Hamster: Don't let them figure out I'm just a rat on 'roids, or they'll flush my ass.

5. Always scoot before licking.

4. Grow opposable thumb; break into pantry; decide for MYSELF how much food is *too* much.

3. Get out of the castle more, maybe swim counter-clockwise this year.

2. January 1st: Kill the sock! Must kill the sock! January 2nd - December 31: Re-live victory over the sock.

and the Number 1 New Year's Resolutions Made by Pets...

1. I will NOT chase the damned stick unless I see it LEAVE HIS HAND.

Posted 8:26 PM by Blah blah

Happy New Year!

I wanted to wish everyone, both our cowriters and our readers, a delightful New Year and fresh hope and joy for next year! A man is enriched mostly by his friends and relationships, so I have been both surprised and very lucky to have met so many of you this year, either online or in person. Who would have thought a little blog would help bring people together from several parts of the world?

I got some very nice cards in the post from Key in New York, Rasee in Bangkok, and Christina in Nanjing. Thank you thank you thank you!! Key will be moving blogs soon. Christina, ever the romantic, has been posting many cute dog pix recently. But it's not her dog, Xiao Xiao. I wonder whose it is?

Some new people have linked to Tiger Cafe recently. They are very cool and interesting women. Thank you and a big HI to Valerie in Manila, Ida in the San Francisco area, and some blog in SPANISH which I forget.

Valerie posted this sweet poem:

Variation on the Word Sleep
by Margaret Atwood

I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun and three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again and become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
and that necessary.

Will say more later, about my move and the rest. In the meantime, have hope and joy for the fresh blank page of tomorrow.

See ya!

Posted 11:49 AM by Anonymous

New Years Resolutions

May I never be complete. May I never be content. May I never be perfect ~Fight Club

It wouldn't be New Years without the obligatory resolutions everyone makes and then breaks 2 weeks later. Since I started making resolutions I think that I have kept maybe 4 or 5 of them over the course of my life. I intend to keep the ones this year, they are really important to me.

Besides, if people never kept them Mona might never have met me. Her New Year's Resolution for 2000 was: Don't date any guys with recycled names. Clearly Raven is pretty unique =D

This year they are:
1) Get Fit! - I'm not fat but I'm definitely not as fit as I used to be in college. I used to run 5 miles a day and now I get winded walking up a few flights of stairs quickly. With my schedule its hard to adopt any kind of work-out ethic but I'm going to make a conscious effort to get into a little better shape this year. My dad and I are even going to have a contest to see who can do better. The man is 58 so at least I have age on my side. Bring it on Dad!

2) Learn Italian - Mona and I are going to France and Italy for our honeymoon. I want to be able to communicate with people while I'm there are not be the stereotypical rude American that expects everyone to speak English. I have started down the path to knowledge in earnest but I need to stick with it. Besides high school Spanish my track record for sticking with languages is about 2 weeks before I get bored of them and toss the books aside.

3) Drink More Water - I read somewhere that a ridiculously large percentage of Americans are constantly dehydrated because no one drinks water. I really want to make a conscious effort to cut down on all of the soda and coffee I drink and replace them with water. Ok, I'm not ready to give up my Starbucks addiction but maybe I can cut out cokes.

4) No Man Is An Island - Mona and I have become this "organism" that pretty much keeps to itself and is a homebody. I have friends in Dallas that I haven't seen in forever and we never seem to do anything with them on the weekends. This is sort of a joint resolution I suppose, but I want to try and hang out with other adults more often on the weekends so its not always just Mona and I.

I'm not sure where this tradition came from but if anyone has any insight into that please feel free to comment. It seems like it has been around since the dawn of time.

So what are your resolutions?

Posted 9:02 PM by Anonymous

Cheating on Raven with Hugo Boss!

It may sound absurd, but Raven shouldn't use any other cologne than Armani Aqua di Gio.

Smell is a powerful sense. In which, the smell of Raven's old shirt would make me smile while I close my eyes and inhale all the scent all I could out of this dirty fabric. That brings up another point: Raven should NOT use my towel. As much as I love how Raven smells, I don't like to smell his dead cells lingering in MY towel. uh, we must work on that.

So last week for Christmas, Raven's grandmother gave him Hugo Boss cologne and his aunt gave him Tommy for Men. I thought I liked Hugo Boss, until Raven used it on Saturday. When I gave Raven a hug, I honestly felt guilty; I felt like I was cheating on Raven with Raven! Absurd? I know. It's the same man that I love and will marry, but it wasn't Raven in Armani Aqua di Gio... the man with the scent I fell in love with.

So that bring me to these questions:

Does Raven's cologne contain pheromones that seduced me?

Will I be able to get off of this 'drug' and be satisfied with Raven trying on other cologne?

Posted 10:55 AM by Blah blah

Bette Davis, On Acting

From her excellent autobiography, The Lonely Life. She is one of my favorite actresses and a great role model, famous for playing bitches and fighting for women's rights in Hollywood in the 1930s-50s. My favorite movie of hers is Now, Voyager, in which she plays an ugly duckling who blossoms into a radiant loving woman. She received ten Best Actress Oscar nominations and won two of them, "many of those for her roles as strong-minded, and frequently disagreeable women":
=============
On starting acting school in New York:

The first day I was there and every day, Mr. Currie, our dramatic teacher, would deliver a scathing attack on the theatre. He informed the seventy kids in our class that we were heading for the toughest, least glamorous life imaginable. His picture of the artist's life was a pointillism, whose dots of color were sweat, jealousy, competition, disillusionment, insecurity and more sweat. It was a lecture of futility that he repeated over and over again.

It was really the most discouraging pep talk ever delivered to a group of novices. The class was soon decimated. The little society girls folded up their tents and silently stole away. There were twelve of us left at the end of the semester. It was then that Mr. Currie told us that a real actor---a real artist---needs no pep talk. If anyone really wants to be an actor, nothing can discourage him.

"A real artist brings his own conviction and hope. He may be encouraged along this line. He cannot be discouraged. If you've stuck this term out, you've at least got the stuff."

Tough! But so is the theatre. Everything he said was true. Any artist who doesn't know that the greatest reward is his own satisfaction in work should choose an easier way of life. Acting is work. But work when you love it and fulfill yourself is life at its best. (p. 46)
_____________
Frankly, I feel that the dramatic school is important only for the basic education it imparts....How to talk. How to move. How to sit and stand....The alphabet! Fine. But knowing all the letters from A to Zed does not make one a writer....there are things that cannot be learned.

There are various [acting] schools that lay claim to revelation. For the talentless, it is true that a chart gives them direction. It can even guide them to adequacy. I watch young men and women today in all three media struggling through a psychological maze and they do not excite me theatrically.

One can draw just so much from one's personal experience...If [the actor] has no intellect, no passion, no expansion of soul, he can hardly understand a part in which these elements take precedence. He cannot even understand a part in which they are absent. One must be aware of the negative areas. How, for example, can a stupid, phlegmatic bigot be played well unless the actor, his opposite, uses selectivity and observes the accents of the character, thereby bringing him to life.

The present trend of the actor to personalize all tragedy and recall the moment in which his puppy was run over or her doll was broken in order to convey misery is sad to me. [Method acting, or the Stanislavsky method.] Although man has a basic repertoire of emotion, the subtleties in each individual are blessedly countless.

Blanche Dubois and Ophelia both liquefy before your eyes; but they melt entirely differently. Oedipus and Lear both break at the end. One cracks in half; the other crumbles to dust. Can the recalled death of the actor's sweet old Uncle William really approximate the singularity of each character's wretchedness?...

[An actor]...galvanizes his energies and his faculties and then goes out of himself not in. He pretends to be this other human being. If he has insight, he intuits and projects himself into the character, never losing the lifeline, the umbilical cord, whithout which he is a raving maniac and even worse---an amateur. He must always know he is pretending. Some part of him retains this knowledge; but he must suffer as the character just as he must move like him and speak like him.

An actor without insight is a mannequin...[A]ny real artist---has a direct line to the collective heart. This isn't pretension....His costume is made up of a thousand and one details that fall into place when his own identity is sacrificed to the other's....

Many of the girls and boys today come over quite genuinely and charmingly as themselves, which is an accomplishment of some sort. But take them out of their environment and they are lost. The classics are impossible for them. Any change of locale or time throws them.

They have simply learned to express themselves; and I'm terribly happy for them. When they learn to express the character, I shall applaud them. All the walking like a cat and flying like a bird isn't going to mean a thing if the actor meows in a Brooklyn accent or quacks like Donald Duck when he is supposed to be Francis Drake....

As personal as these troubled actors are, there is---aside from much of a muchness---the same of a sameness. They are all so busy revealing their own insides that, like all X-ray plates, one looks pretty much like the other. Their godhead, the remarkably gifted Marlon Brando, may bring (as true stars do) his own personal magnetism to every part, but his scope and projection are unarguable. He has always transcended the techniques he was taught. His consequent glamour and style have nothing to do with self-involvement but rather radiation.

I return to that spark that is the individual. An actor must be true to the spark he find in himself. And with it, he must illuminate another man and then all men. (pp. 47-50)
_____________
There's no doubt about it. Working in a stock company will always be the greatest foundation for an acting career. An actor tackles a new part each week, and there's no time for nonsense. The necessary discipline can be found no other place, plus the confidence and the technique that is gained. Crises are met and conquered. A tempo is created and sustained. The constant tension either makes you or breaks you. Every actor knows that stock can make you slick rather than profound; but you can't play a concerto until you know your scales. There's nothing wrong with facility---no matter what the artsy-craftsy claim. Stock gives an actor facility. It makes him a professional....Nothing can teach you to act like acting.

The young actors today very often have a television series where for months they play only one part. They have a Broadway play and if, hopefully, it's a success, they play the same part over a long period. Then, if they're any good, Hollywood plucks them unripe from the vine. There are more "stars" today who cannot act. And it's not their fault. They've never been given a chance to learn.

The progress of acting careers like everything else has become so accelerated that amateurs are rewarded by international fame. There's gold in all this madness and the temptation is great. How many Brandos are there who will refuse, as he did, well-paying parts in plays that bored him or wouldn't encourage his growth? [Not true in his old age.] He also was a worker. That's something else that has gone out of fashion. Nobody wants to work....The easy way is usually the destructive way.

There is no luxury like the fatigue that follows a labor of love. Nothing in the whole, wide world as soul-satisfying as a job well done. Accomlishment. Few go all out. Few will gamble. Everybody wants security. If that were the end-all, America would still belong to the Navajos.

A good percentage of our lives is spent doing things we loathe. Marvelous! It puts starch in your spine. Who looks forward to brushing his teeth, painting the shed or changing the linens? We're making our beds all right. We are...up against an astringent, dedicated society which has been toughened by sacrifice and unhappy regimentation. (pp. 65-66)