When the Aged P’s are in town for a day, there’s only so much you can do. Since I inherited good Foodie genes, the best thing to do with parents who appreciate fine dining is to take them to a restaurant.

We were travelling around with my Japanese friend Shigenori and his girlfriend, so they recommended a good fish restaurant in Nishi-Shinjuku: Zau-o. Now, Zau-o is apparently an upscale chain of sorts, where you can order your fish as normally as at any other normal restaurant.

Or, you can catch the flippy-floppy buggers yourself.

Y’see, throughout Zau-o there are these giant fishtanks. The arrangement of the tables is clearly around the tank, not the other way around. We’re talking a lot of fish here. So you can ask for a fishing rod and a net and if you catch a fish, they’ll cook it up however you request and charge you a slightly lower price for it.

So I ask for this “fishing rod,” not expecting a top-of-the-line toy, but man. It was a plastic rod with a string on, and sad little hook dangling from the frayed end of the string. Fortunately, the net look sturdy.

After killing about 20 minutes trying to get a bite, my parents were getting ravenous. Shige and his girlfriend were respectfully not mocking me. And I had started gnawing on my left hand.

I had to take drastic action. I rolled up my sleeve, fish net in hand, and stuck it into the tank. Within a few minutes, we had our first course of the night: sea bream!

The waiter came by, gave a little speech, clapped twice and took our tai off to be sashimi’d. It was time to catch the second course, so I stuck the net in again.

I turned the net so it was parallel to the current, and then waited. And waited. A fish came by, I snapped my wrist, the net opened and I yanked our wriggling, soon-to-be second course out of the water. Another sea bream, this one to be grilled.

The food, once prepared for consumption, was actually quite good. We had sashimi and grilled sea bream, crab, miso with lots of seafood in it, the re-grilled head of the bream, and a yudofu.

It just goes to prove the old adage: If you buy a man a fish in Tokyo, he eats for a day. If you teach a man to fish in Tokyo, he’s saved enough money to buy himself dinner for the next night, too.

So my Parental Units are coming to visit tomorrow. They’ll be here for one day as they extend a stopover flight on their way to more exotic locales. I don’t really have much to say now on the subject, except that this’ll either put in a really good mood or my brain will fry and I won’t post anything for the next four months.

This is getting ridiculous.

Judging by the English dailies around here, the Japanese approach to their own recent history is to take none at all. People are getting all huffy about the fact that Japan is finally taking an interest in the outside world that involves more than committing several billion yen to whatever the crisis is.

I fully support, for whatever my meager squeeky voice counts for, those who are protesting the war. War protests are good things. They encourage debate, and no war should ever be entered into or continued without vociferous discussion (cough, cough, America.)

Those folks though, and it seems to be mostly politicians and their ilk, who are protesting because Japan is violating its “right to live in peace” are shockingly naive.

I think it’s an incredibly good thing that the Japanese Social Defense Forces or whatever they call themselves are getting sent off to Iraq in a peacekeeping role.

There’s two reasons why. Most importantly, Japan, like any other developed nation in the world with a sizable populace and GDP, has an obligation to the global community. If Germany could have been integrated back into the world arena, and it obviously was, with great success, then there’s no reason that Japan can’t either.

But a country just can’t be involved financially. Throwing money at a problem helps, at least until you run out of money. However, it’s not an effective solution, and the problems that are being faced now in Iraq merely hint at the problems that will come, if they are not effectively dealt with now.

Which gets us to the second problem, that of Japan’s finances. If the state of the State is in such bad shape, you’d think the government would jump at the chance to throw some people into the fray, instead of cash which it doesn’t have a lot of.

Why are all the people who know how to run the world writing blogs?

I was sitting in my favorite lunch spot in Nakano the other day, a Japanese version of a greasy spoon that as far as I can tell doesn’t have a name.

It’s down a wide alley, up a flight of stairs, and its clientele is usually male, blue-collar workers who live nearby, in Nakano or the other towns on the Chuo corridor between Shinjuku and Mitaka.

The TV is always on at The Big Feed, so-named by my predecessors at Nakano Nova for the low-priced huge portions that get served there. Yesterday, I saw the news on a Japanese lawmaker who claimed in the electoral races of last November that he graduated from UCLA.

Nothing wrong with that, except that his degree seems to not exist and the school up until now didn’t know he existed, either. I did some Japan news site surfing and came across this article, where we learn that the poor politican claims to have attended most of the universities, colleges and other facilities of higher learning in Southern California.

Now, some people find this kind of behavior deceitful. Misleading, some say. Lying, others shout.

Me, I think this Mr. Junichiro Koga, representing beautiful Fukuoka – or at least a part thereof – has the right idea. Who wants to be tied to one past? If you’re going to ask silly questions about where I was and what I was doing 25 years ago, I’d probably say that I was pooping in a diaper somewhere.

Or maybe I was the youngest expedition leader on Mt. Everest. Ten years ago, in fact, I dropped the test tube that contained within the only viable cure for cancer while I was working as an assistant at UCSF. Millions of deaths since then are the fault of my quaking, butter-fingered hands.

Six years ago I suffered a crippling injury, the legs in my bones shattered by an oncoming Mack truck. I had jumped in front of it to push to safety a crying five-year-old girl looking for her lost puppy.

The doctors told my that the damage to my bones was repairable, but the muscles had been ripped apart. I would be confined to a wheelchair until death. Fortunately, Dr. Lisa Dhanvantari of New Dehli had been experimenting with a physical therapy regimen involving kaballah, shiatsu and large doses of Hydroxy-chloroquine sulfate. I was able to walk again, only seven weeks after the accident.

See how much fun this is? If I’m going to have a past, it’ll be multiple choice or none at all. Just ask the estimable Junichiro Koga.

I feel I must apologize for my part in the recent “discussion” in the comments of the January 15th and 20th entries, and letting it get out of hand.

Anything on the web is going to attract some kind of unintentional attention. Even though I started and still use this site as a method of first keeping track for myself of my life in Japan, as well as keeping friends and family updated without having to send out a mass email every other day, it would be ignorant to pretend that other people aren’t reading it.

This initially unexpected attention is most welcome, even from those who share different points of view than those that I espouse. Life is not a monologue, and we learn through conversing with others, exploring, defending and rejecting various opinions. All well and good.

I draw the line at flame-throwing, despite whatever vitriolic language I may use in my entries. I should have put an end to the personal attacks days ago, and for that I am most deeply sorry. Insults in jest are of course appreciated, and I expect them to continue. Others, fugghedaboudit.

Part of writing a blog that does reach the public means conveying personal experience. If conversation is a war of words, then I’m essentially giving you a large cache of W.M.D.s to use against me.

Anyone who writes a blog of personal experience is doing the same, and that’s where the success in this genre lies. You are all voyeurs, looking in on my life. When I write for the blog, there’s a bit of exhibitionism involved in opening up my life to public scrutiny. These roles are of course mutable, changing as I go to read about someone else’s life, and vice versa. Maybe I’m reading about yours.

I try hard to not make blogging a pseudo-event. The point here is to record as much of my life in Japan that is appropriate for public consumption, not to blog about blogging (although there are very useful blogs out there that do just that, with excellent tips on how to make these damn things work.)

Getting back to Japan, I think in the past 15 months I’ve had far more positive experiences in Japan than negative. I hope I’ve conveyed this to you all. It’s true that some things that happen here make me very angry, but they’re no different from the things that anger me about America. If I was writing about America, I’d be getting cranky about the same shit.

I also try to keep mention of work to a minimum, since the job is not my life. It is, however, part of my life, and so when something worth mentioning happens, take a wild guess where I’m going to talk about it.

To my Japanese readers, please understand that I’ve got a dry sense of humor, and there’s a lot about your country I find strange. And wonderful. And utterly bizarre bugfuck terrible, and simultaneously perhaps the most perfect innovation on the planet. To not write something down because I wanted to portray how much I loved Japan would disingenuous, to say the least.

If one good thing has come out of this little recent tete a tete, it’s an excellent article from the Online Journalism Review on the portrayal of Jews in the Japanese media, and how they encourage and react to anti-semitism.

Alright, ’nuff said. Time for bed.

I spent most of today, a rare Monday off work, doing some tinkering to the blog that more or less involved trying to decipher JavaScript code and accidentally coming across some CSS code that made more sense.

I’m really enjoying this whole personal web site thing, but crikey sometimes it’s a big ol’ pain-in-the-tuchis. I need a beer.

More than that, I think I need to get my contact lens prescription checked. Ouch.

Not much has been going on recently.

There was a seriously alcoholic going-away party the other night, where we invaded Inokashira Park with a portable stove and made spiked hot chocolate while freezing our asses off.

I missed the last train in, and so I took one of the last ones out to Kokobunji, where a friend graciously offered up his couch.

I’ve been working a lot, shift swaps and trainings and other assorted hoo-hah.

But most importantly, my friend Yuko brought me back Real New York Bagels, from New York (duh!) As a Boston friend of mine would say, Yuko kicks eight kinds of ass.

Real. Bagels. Not round pieces of bread with holes in the middle. Poppyseed, pumpernickel, sesame seed, cinnamon-raisin and something… marbled. (No garlic-onion, but who’s complaining? Not me!)

Now, if only I could find some cream cheese for less than four dollars…