natasha nakamura's diary

Dinner with Tim. He told me that he has a medical problem and has to have an operation. He asked his New Zealand insurance company if they would cover medical costs incurred in Japan and they told him  they would prefer to fly him to Auckland, have him operated on there, and put him up in an Auckland hotel for as long as required. Evidently doing this would be cheaper than having the operation done in Tokyo.

I wonder what it would be like to get a job as a commodities trader or some sort of wheeler-dealer in the Tokyo stock market... I think I'd be good at it.

A turret of Tokyo Station

natasha nakamura's diary

The company bonenkai, the ritual New Year's party. Various company officials, after apologizing for distracting such busy people as ourselves from our duties, went on and on about our glorious future prospects and everyone's determination to work harder than ever. Then a toast in beer and uninspiring wine, after which a standing buffet and aimless conversation until we were divided into teams and asked to provide answers to a bone-headed quiz. I drifted away as soon as I could....

At the bonenkai I was approached by one of the big wigs who told me he brought up his daughter in Hawaii and she's now 26 and living at home and wants to find an American husband to take her away from all this and did I know anyone. The Natasha Nakamura Matrimonial Agency. Results guaranteed 

natasha nakamura's diary

Wandered into the Sony Building in the Ginza. On the fourth floor, you can make an appointment to go into a special listening room where just you and a Sony guy can listen to Sony's new speakers and a phenomenal new amp/CD player. I hear Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg Variations and some of the Symphonie Fantastique, where it seemed I could hear every instrument individually. I was in tears, just beautiful.

The problem is that if I installed this system in my tiny apartment, the sound would shatter my sole window.  Another problem is that the amp/CD player is only made to order and costs about 800,000 yen, but hey, what's life all about?

Seller of lottery tickets

natasha nakamura's diary

OK, civilization. Bach. King's College Cambridge. Lafite Rothschild. PG Wodehouse. But it seems to me than anyone who has ever soaked in a Japanese bath hasn't experienced civiization in its purest, simplest form. Another reason I could only live here.

New windows added as building evolves.

Flags for children to hold up when crossing the road

natasha nakamura's diary

Difference between Tokyo and New York in a nutshell: In Tokyo, subway announcements are models of elocution and as detailed as marching orders ("Watch out for the closing doors"). In New York, the announcements, if they are made at all, are mumbled in various accents and the announcer if he's in the mood will even make jokes ("Hey hey hey folks, this should be Times Square if we're lucky").

natasha nakamura's diary

Ten days ago at a corner a car hit a motorcycle. The car overturned and the motorcyclist was killed. For the past ten days people of the neighborhood have been putting out flowers at the corner where the accident occurred--sometimes elaborate arrangements, sometimes just one flower in an empty sake bottle. It's a Tokyo thing....

natasha nakamura's diary

The living space in my apartment in Jiyugaoka can accommodate no more than a bed, a chair, and a  desk. Rent: 170,000 a month, absurd of course. I've got some ideas on how the space might be put to better use--bed collapsible at the touch of a button--but I must think of my neighbors so there's not much chance of taking up the 'cello or installing an exercise machine. I have to use earphones to listen to music as it it. I'm attracted by the scented candles in the up-scale stores, but I'm afraid they  might put the neighbors off. Is it possible to be allergic to lavender? 

natasha nakamura's diary

Inscribed on the chain guard of a bicycle: "RALPH, the basis of richness is responsibility." Makes sense.

natasha nakamura's diary

Tokyo is even more drenched in flickering Christmas lights than New York. Coffee houses play "Jingle Bells" over and over and householders of a certain cast of mind seem to be determined to out-glitz their neighbors. I notice, though, that houses with carefully tended Japanese gardens do not deign to decorate themselves: bah, humbug. There is a definite Christmas culture evolving here but at this point Christmas in Tokyo seems like a wintery Fourth of July.

Anyway, I'll have some peace and quiet when I visit Papa and Mama in Kyoto during the holidays. Kyoto is the real Japan; Tokyo is just a rude upstart. (But I'd wither away if I had to live in Kyoto.)

natasha nakamura's diary

People who find cause to speak to me in English in spite of my more or less Japanese features often apologize for what they call their "Japanese English." I invariably can understand what they are getting at because they never try to say anything complicated and in fact their communications can have a certain charm, so what's the problem? Is Japanese English so much different from French English or Sicilian English? Or for that matter is Des Moines English much different from Chattanooga English or Birmingham English? The answer is - of course it's different, but so what?

When somebody says "Sayonara, baby," is that English Japanese? I guess.

English is a vigorous language because pulls in words and phrases from other languages. It is only language schools in Japan that have a vested interest in convincing people that they will somehow be looked down on if they don't speak the English the schools are prepared to teach them - for 4,000 yen an hour. A language-school ad on the train insists there is a crucial difference between "to go up" and "to climb." Fuggedabowdit!" 

Preparing platters of sashimi

natasha nakamura's diary

If you know where to look, such as in the basement of almost any large department store, Tokyo has as good or even better sliced ham and sausages as you could buy in Munich. Mustard - no problem. Ten years ago there was still a bread problem, but no longer.

I have found only one thing that Tokyo lacks - cans of baked beans to be eaten with frankfurters. Evidently, baked beans are not easily found Even in US supermarkets these days, except of course in New England.

natasha nakamura's diary

If you know where to look, such as in the basement of almost any large department store, Tokyo has as good or even better sliced ham and sausages as you could buy in Munich. Mustard - no problem. Ten years ago there was still a bread problem, but no longer.

I have found only one thing that Tokyo lacks - cans of baked beans to be eaten with frankfurters. Evidently, baked beans are not easily found in US supermarkets these days, except of course in New England.

Here at the pet shop, you can choose what food you think your dog would prefer. Detailed explanations are offered.

natasha nakamura's diary

Desiderata:

1. A man to live with. What sort of man I am not prepared to specify now but I know I will know him when I see him. Possible minimum requirements: he buys interesting CDs regularly and plays them during dinner; most days he prefers to make his own breakfast; he is clean and energetic and literate and naturally sympathetic.

2. A house to live in. It can be a very small house, perhaps as small as the 5.5-meter-square house designed by Architect Hagiwara, in which case there will have to be a basement with shelves along the walls for CDs, books, and curios. The house should not be in a fashionable neighborhood like Jiyugaoka, but in an emerging neighborhood we can work to make our own.

3. Money enough to travel abroad at least every other year.

4. Children? Maybe, but at least a male pug or French bulldog or Boston terrier to perhaps be called "Looie." (100,000 yen at a pet shop in Roppongi or Aoyama, which is cheaper than children because they don't have to be educated.)

5. The possibility of maintaining a small sailboat of classic design at Zushi.

I feel that for reasonably hard-working people in an affluent society, these are reasonable requirements.

Desperate decoration

natasha nakamura's diary

If you were lucky enough to be able to live any place in the world you want, the place you would choose would tell a lot about you.

Put simply, I have chosen to live in Tokyo because I like things to be done right, with proper attention to detail. This does not mean, I think, that I am obsessive, only that I like to be able to feel free to think of other things than if the train will come on time or that my dinner will be served gracefully.

On the other hand, to live in Tokyo is to give up the delights of irony.

Shibuya Station

natasha nakamura's diary

     In England, fox hunting is an ancient sport. Tally ho! 

     I propose a new sport for Tokyo: crow hunting. Crow's survival skills are finely tuned. They fly away if you look at them so it wouldn't be anything like shooting pigeons. We could shoot while riding a bicycle and use rifles of small caliber, perhaps even upgraded  bb guns. After the hunt we could gather at a congenial izakaya to celebrate our kill.

Tokyo is a great, great city for used books, like this store in Jimbocho.

natasha nakamura's diary

The case for living in Tokyo is simple. It is a complete and very congenial city. We have the magazines, the books, the food, the music, the design, the fashion, the little and big theater (like the Spanish National Ballet the other night), and the galleries that New Yorkers, Londoners, and Parisians think is their special province. It is true that we do not have the architecture of those cities (because the city was leveled during WW2, but we do have our own brand of patchy, quirky architecture and many world-class buildings are now being built).  We don't have political discussions in our cafes or little drinking places (because Japan has essentially no politics)--Tokyo  talk is a familiar tune hummed together, not a chess game. But we have here things the strident cities of the West don't  have because nobody abroad calls for them, like hand-carved toothpicks and a police box in every neighborhood to answer questions and give directions, that make Tokyo the city it is…

Dog haircuts, maybe once every couple months

natasha nakamura's diary

  "To  be human is not to know one's self. The "I" that we confidently broadcast to the world is a fiction, a jerry-built container for the volatile unconscious elements that divide and confound us."--from a review in The New Yorker of a new play by Michael Frayn.

Exactly! The word "I" suggests a single, immutable entity. But I am a different person every day and I glory in this because it means I am alive. Certainly I am different on a rainy day and a sunny day. Most people are, in fact, but it frightens them so they don't like to admit it.

Who is the real "I"? you just have to make yourself up as you go along.

natasha nakamura's diary

Tokyo seems more casual (more thoughtless?) than when I lived here three years ago. Kids sit in the middle of a sidewalk  mindless that they are blocking traffic. Motorbike raiders wear their helmets slung off the back of their heads, just keeping within the law. But maybe this loosening up will in the end have positive results. Tokyo seems stiff after New York and Paris. Stiffness (or call it discipline?) has advantages when trying to operate within a complex society, but stiffness in an individual leads to loneliness, to associating only with other stiffs.

natasha nakamura's diary

Where are the posh neighborhoods?

Tokyo has always been a city where everyone lives together. True, the samurai sometimes had large houses--castles, even--with walls around them, but stacked up right next door where the houses of the hoi polloi and factories making fish paste. There was no such thing as a "good" neighborhood.

This is still true, generally, although train lines like the Toyoko Line and the Inokashira Line have discovered that some people like to live in communities with sidewalks and straight roads lined with trees, and will pay for the privilege. Thus, Den-en-chofu.

But still, it is difficult in Tokyo to identify where the money is: the city remains a great jumble.

Here are some clues as to where the money is:

--All trains, including all expresses, stop at the station, which may in itself be of some architectural interest. The posters in the station advertise musical and theatrical events in the city.

--A portion of the cars parked at the station are BMWs or similar.

--There is probably a wine shop, a cheese emporium, and a French bakery in town.

--A portion of the kids coming home from school are wearing the high-collar black uniforms of private schools.

--There are no street carts selling ramen noodles.

It may not be obvious, but there is money in these neighborhoods. The vast majority of Tokyo is bemused by such towns, but finds them generally devoid of interest.

Neighborhood shrine

natasha nakamura's diary

A couple months ago, Maximilian kindly brought me from San Francisco a pound of coffee beans. I don't know where he got the idea that we are deprived of first-class coffee beans in Tokyo--I'd say we have easily to hand as good coffee beans as Wien.

But you know how it is. The sack of unground beans lay on a top shelf in the kitchen until just the other day when I found time to go to the little shop I buy my very fine coffee beans from. I was going to ask them to grind my San Francisco beans for me.

They looked at my beans critically. They smelled them. "I'm very sorry to tell you that these beans are old. Please understand that we couldn't ask our machine to grind them for you. They would contaminate our machine."

Fortune teller in the Ginza, early evening

natasha nakamura's diary

Last night before meeting with Hugo for dinner at our favorite sushi place at Mitsukoshi in the Ginza, I had a chance to roam the Ginza's back streets.

I noticed that a fleet of taxis  began to pull up to the curb, dozens of taxi like a swarm of bees, crowding out other traffic, and their doors swinging open and out of each taxi lightly stepping a beautiful woman, dressed with quiet taste, with her hair and makeup seemingly done professionally. So beautiful, so poised, so confident.

Then it came to me: these were the ladies who when invited would come to sit at your table in the expensive clubs on every floor of certain buildings in the Ginza. To view them on their way to work is one of the great sights of this city much more glamorous than the early morning fish auction at Tsukiji market, say, and at a much more convenient time of day. I wonder when the tourists will begin to line the sidewalks to take in this elegant scene…

Drink in Tokyo

In Tokyo, you can buy the best potables the world has to offer: the finest vintage French wines, lusty German and Czech beers, complex Scotch whiskies--but they will be a lot more expensive than if bought on their home ground. More sensible, as well as perhaps more adventurous, would be to drink Japanese. Realize, though, that most Japanese beer is made in the American light-lager style (that is to say, dull) - the products of Japan's many small craft brewers being an exception - and that Japanese wine still has a way to go, although on its own terms it may be coming along. We'll see.

First thing to know is that in Japan "sake" means simply alcoholic beverage.  What you may be thinking of as "sake" is in Japan called Nihonshu. Nihonshu, which of course can be a beautiful, delicate drink, is made of rice and is brewed, like beer. Think of it as rice wine, although Nihonshu doesn't improve with age.

But Nihonshu is not the most popular drink other than beer in Japan: shochu is. Shochu, of which there are hundreds of makers (there are thousands of makers of Nihonshu) is distilled from about anything you can think of--barley, mostly, and sweet potatoes (imo) for the shochu favored by connoisseurs, but also pumpkins, acorns, green tea, cactus, and seaweed. Shochu has a somewhat lighter feel to it than Nihonshu and is usually somewhat more alcoholic. Although shochu is by tradition the drink of  southern Japan, Kyushu in particular, it is now distilled all over the country, but it still has the reputation in self-conscious urban drinking spots of being a less sophisticated drink than Nihonshu. A bit of snobbery there, perhaps, but of course you'll pay no attention to that.

Shochu on the sideboard

Shochu will be difficult to find outside Japan but in cities that appreciate the finer things in life, the city's best liquor dealers should be able to find some for you. It is gaining popularity in New York and San Francisco, they say.

Suntory began distilling whisky in 1923, which at the time baffled everybody, but now Japanese whisky is well established in Japan and is cultivating a market among whisky drinkers abroad. Japanese whisky makers offer a range of styles: peat-smoky, with a delicate flowery bouquet, and well-matured in imported sherry barrels, for instance.  For several years a Japanese whisky has taken top honors at the annual whisky blind-tasting in Scotland.

The lesson to be taken away from this quick rundown of the drinking scene in Japan is: try some shochu if you can. At the very least, you will find it interesting.

--Zeke S.

Japan is now making its own wine. This is going to take some time,
but we've got time...

natasha nakamura's diary

I live on the Toyoko Line, which connects Yokohama to Shibuya and so it is a key component of our urban transportation system. It's a mighty fine line, with its cars always polished and its staff ultra-polite.

Every month the line publishes a free magazine called Salus which gives news of what's going on along the Toyoko Line and connecting lines.

This month there's a rundown of French restaurants along the Oimachi Line--Trois Petits Loups, Allo, Porte Bonheur, and Les Chevreuils. There's also news of a couple new French bakeries. Most everyone knows there are good croissants at Quatre in Hiyoshi but now there may be easy-to-hand alternatives.