Day Thirty-Four - 072306 - Home Again (Naturally?)

Okay so today I met up with an apartment rental agent to check out an apartment. Overall the place looked decent although the location was a bit far away from everything in a rather quiet residential neighborhood. The place is somewhat between Yokohama and Tokyo so it is on the one hand not quite convenient for either, but the benefits include the absence of key money, agent fees, and other such drawbacks that are normative in the Japanese rental scene. Overall, the place looks good and the main issue is that I have to commit pretty soon with my options running out fairly quickly. We'll see how it goes. . .

Day Thirty-Three - 072206 - A Picture Speaks a Thousand Words

Today I met up with my friend May-yi and her boyfriend Fumi in Ebisu. Sadly I was a bit slow out the door that morning, but I eventually met up with them and we had a nice talk over a lunch of curry rice at a nearby place. The food was pretty tasty I must say (but then again I was pretty damn hungry). Fumi, like May-yi is a graduate student in Anthropology at Harvard University, who interestingly enough, is studying Japanese perspectives on whaling. We had a truly interesting conversation on whaling and I learned quite a bit about the government and local perspectives on whaling.

Afterwards we went to the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography (http://www.syabi.com/). It was great timing because they had just opened up a new exhibit there called "things as they are: World Press Photo 50th Anniversary." The picture to the right is of a panel of the people who put that exhibition together, which we were able to hear.

I must say that the other main exhibit, called "World Press Photo 2006" was one of the more depressing exhibits that I have seen in a while. The World Press Photo group (http://www.worldpressphoto.nl/) puts on an annual photo competition that honors the best works in photojournalism each year, and the exhibition was an exhibit of the prizewinners. I was constantly moved by the pictures in the exhibit, and can only say that the exhibit hall was very, very quiet. One photo that moved me quite a lot was a picture of a father in Pakistan holding his son while his son is getting his arm amputated in the aftermath of last year's earthquake tragedy (To see the photo, go to the World Photo news gallery and click on the General News 1st place winner). For some reason the poignancy and pain in the father's eyes really moved me and struck a chord. There were also many other pictures as well that were incredibly moving. An exhibition like this truly shows you the immense amount of pain and suffering that still exists in this world even in the year 2006, when we as human beings are supposed to have progressed so far. I would recommend anyone to check out the other highly regarded images of the exhibition online at the website listed above.

Overall the day was quite a good one (the utterly depressing exhibit notwithstanding), and afterwards the three of us sat down and had a beer in a nearby restaurant. We talked some more about our work and experiences and overall it was a nice opportunity for us to talk a bit. May-yi and Fumi are truly nice and genuine people in the field and I was glad to meet up with them.

Day Thirty-Two - 072106 - Dinner and the Lingering Smell of Smoke

Today, under the planning of Dennis, who I knew from the University of Chicago, we had a small dinner after class with Suzuki-sensei, one of the Japanese language teachers at the IUC. She is pictured in the picture to the left in the middle. Overall it was a fairly decent dinner, and a good chance to practice Japanese. There was only strange student there (out of the many at the IUC; Again, why are so many of the foreigners who study in Japan so weird?), but overall it was relatively decent.

I was pretty tired that day especially after talking to the real estate agent. The agency smelled like smoke, since some employees must regularly smoke inside. It reminded me of the old days when people used to regularly smoke in their offices. Such practices have become much less common now, but even as recently as 2000, I remember being able to light up a cigarette right in the Shinkansen and in many regular restaurants. These practices have changed somewhat though there are still quite a few holdouts.

Day Thirty-One - 072006 - More Apartment Hunting

Nothing much to say about today, other than to say that the apartment search continues. I set up appointments to see a place on Sunday and also to meet up with a rental consultant for Friday, so things are moving, albeit slowly. Thanks to some advice from my friends I have had a few interesting leads however.

What a royal pain. The thing that makes it hardest is my lovable cat. Finding an apartment that takes cats is the hardest bit of all, combined with the difficulty of even affording a down payment for a year rental in the end.

Day Thirty - 071906 - Yasukuni Redux and Women in Japanese Policy

So our class went to Yasukuni Jinja today and it was now my third time visiting this place. Strange that I of all people should be here again. As you can see in the picture to the left it was raining that day.

I've already talked quite a bit about Yasukuni before, so I need not go over it again. Suffice to say that I was able to check out some of the movies in the exhibits again and think some more about what the exhibit is saying and the manner in which it is saying it.

Afterwards I went to the Doitsu Nihon Kenkyujyo again, this time to hear a talk by Patricia Boling from Purdue University who in her talk asked the important question of "What role for women in shaping Japanese social policies?" or just how effective is the current womens' movement in Japan in the development of policy.

Interestingly there has been an opening in the government to develop avenues for collecting information and feedback before developing policies related to women's issues in recent years. These moves, however, as argued by Professor Boling, while in some ways offering avenues for policymakers to hear about the compexity of womens' issues (many of whom are blissfully unaware of womens' issues to begin with) at the same time serves to limit more militant voices from being heard, and also serves as a control mechanism, where the government in essence defines legitimacy in the political process.

Ultimately, Professor Boling seems to argue that much of the movement on womens' issue in recent years has been framed by less by the militancy of a widespread grassroots womens' movement, but more by the political preoccupation with Japan's decreasing birth rate, which has been seen as addressable primarily by making policies that would make it more amenable for women to be able to work as well as raise families. Boling argues that a large proportion of the female population in Japan has not been participating in the political process around this issue, though some questions raised in the following discussion seem to raise questions about the discreet micro-level family planning decision making going on in Japan (eg. women choosing to get married later or not at all, choosing to have fewer children or not at all, choosing either family or work), and the difficulty of assessing how it is that such often personal decision-making is in effect translating into political policy. Overall the discussion raised some utterly fascinating questions regarding the current womens' movement(s) in Japan in the context of recent developments related to womens' issues and other issues such as population growth, caregiving, and the like.