Kevin Ryan in Tokyo

Category: Japan

  • Tokyo: smelliest place on earth

    nioibu.com lets people warn others of smelly places
    nioibu.com lets people warn others of smelly places

    According to the new Social Networking  website that relies on Google Maps to point out smelly places in the world, Tokyo must be the smelliest place on earth.

    That is, until you realize that the site is in Japanese, and that it is almost brand new. Of course, those of us that live in Tokyo, and have good noses, would be the first to post sites. Each flag is color coded, depending on the type of smell.

    Google Maps is being used for numerous applications. For example, in San Francisco, they link together the location of searches on mobile phones for key words like flu or disease to try to map out a progression of a breakout and where it might be headed.

    Only would the Japanese think of applying it to avoid smells.

  • Ministry of Education back tracks

    On the backs of babes.

    backpack200-bbIt seems since the scores are falling in international tests, and Japanese kids aren’t learning stuff you can test as much, there is a panic to find a solution.

    About 10 years ago there was a move to restrict time at school because kids were not very well-rounded. They tend not to play together, or learn about cultural activities. To increase “humanity” among the kids, they were given most Saturdays off (yes, they used to go most Saturdays). The number of school days dropped from about 240 to 210 (the US has about 180).

    The drop in scores on these international tests didn’t start appearing until about 5 years after the change. Of course, the first thought on the cause of the drop was the changed schedule. No solid indication of causation here, but everyone thought something must be done.

    So what did the Ministry of Education come up with? Reinstate Saturdays, and double the page count of the textbooks. You see, the system here in Japan is incredibly centralized. There is a week-to-week curriculum that everyone in K-12 follows. So a kid could move from Hokkaido down to Kyushu over the weekend, and pick up exactly where he left off. (The textbooks might be different, the content is the same.)

    So now the kids will be carrying much heavier backpacks, and the publishers fat and happy. There is a constant outcry when new textbooks are brought out, because of their (non) treatment of WW2 and things like the Rape of Nanjing. Now they will have twice as much room, but we can be fairly certain there won’t be twice as much content.

  • Life is what happens…

    While you are waiting to be successful. Watch this short clip of Alan Watts, a 1960’s “guru” of eastern religions, recorded with visuals made and produced by the makers of South Park. Very Curious.

  • Recumbent fixed, again

    About 7 minutes from my house on my bike is a repair shop with an old man in it. He should be retired, and could probably sell his shop for enough to retire on. But he and his wife, both in their 70’s, show up every day. They go slowly, but this guy can fix anything. You rarely find people like this. I like to hang around and talk to him while he fixes my bike. He doesn’t mind. He’s fast, and really good with his hands. A beautiful thing to watch. He loves his work, is my guess.

    My bike is a little unusual. It is called a “recumbent”, because you kind of lay back on it. He had the tire off and replaced in a little over an hour, even though there are two gear switching systems; a 3-speed hub, and an 8-speed derailler, to make 24 gears in all.

    bikeE is no longer in business, so the bike was cheap

    bikeE recumbent
    bikeE recumbent

    bikeE recumbent

    I wrote about this guy in one of the listening passages for the Entrance Exam for my university. I’ll add the script here, just for fun.

    Changing a bicycle tire

    I really like riding my bicycle, and it makes a wonderful break from work in the morning and at the end of the day. Riding also helps me to think. Usually the experience is the same every day, but not recently. I rode to work a few days ago, and when I started to go home, my bicycle was hard to push. I looked down and saw that my tire had gone flat. I wanted to get home in time for dinner, so I started pushing the bike, and I had a really interesting experience with the people of Tokyo.

    I asked a housewife standing outside her house where a bicycle shop was. She didn’t know, but took me to an old lady at the next house. The old lady knew exactly where a shop was, and it was only about 200 meters away. I thanked both women and pushed my bike to the shop. There was a woman there fixing a bicycle. But as soon as I got there, she stood up and came to the door of the shop. I explained that I had a hole in my back tire, and she was back in a few seconds with her repair kit. It was amazing to see her work. She took the tube from inside the tire, found the leak, patched it, found the small sliver of glass that had caused the leak, removed it, and returned the tube to its place and pumped the tire up again, all in about eight minutes. Another amazing thing was the price. She charged me ¥1,300. I calculated in my head that she was making, at that rate, about 10,000 yen an hour. But I also thought she must have long periods of time with no customers, and keeping her shop open was also an expense. So I paid happily and started riding home.

    About a kilometer later, my front brake cable broke. I could ride without a brake, but it would be dangerous. So again I started looking for a bicycle shop. I found one near my house, with a very old couple, the man fixing both motorcycles and bicycles. As soon as I entered the shop he stopped what he was doing and fixed my cable. He was very careful with every detail. Again, he was very fast, taking only about 20 minutes. What was really astounding was that he charged me exactly one thousand three hundred yen. I figured that all charges for fixing a bicycle in Japan were ¥1,300.

    Unfortunately, I was only carrying 1,100 yen. The man said, “Don’t worry about it, I’ll just charge you what you have. I was embarrassed, but I paid what I could and then left. I came back the next day and gave him the other 200 yen, and a small present as thanks.

    Living in Japan has some real advantages. Small business owners are so attentive and helpful, and do things quickly and correctly. These two shop owners made me remember one of the reasons I stay in Japan; it is a country that works, and works well.

  • Implicit Knowledge

    Thanks to the guys over at Freaknomics, specifically Ian Ayers editorial in the Los Angeles Times by the Police Commissioner, I have found a new tool.

    Ayers did a study on who gets stopped by the LA PD. Minorities are stopped much more often, searched, frisked and questioned much more than whites, even when violence is controlled for. His study also shows that these minority searches and questionings turn up far fewer results than when questioning and searching whites.

    So the Police Commissioner complained in an editorial about Ayers study. The link above is the response by Ayers to those remarks. Very telling, and very scientific. Clear thinking, as opposed to the blustering of the Police Commissioner.

    In any case, near the end of the post, Ayers suggest that to begin to alleviate the problem, every officer on the force should take the Implicit Association Test, developed at Harvard and free online. These tests measure whether you have a prejudice (prejudging) toward some group of people or ideas. I took the Fat/Thin test as an example. It showed fat people and thin people in pictures. I had to quickly identify by pressing one of two keys on the keyboard (one on the right, the other on the left) as quickly as I could, without thinking. Then I had to match vocabulary to the words GOOD and BAD. Then the pictures and words were combined in different orders. I had to match faces or vocabulary quickly, without thinking.

    It takes about 10 minutes to do a test, and it takes your full concentration. Try it out for a number of possible unconscious (or pre-conscious) leanings. I am going to get my students to do the gender one. They have versions in many different languages.