The Internet is amazing, its wonders to behold.

Keeping in touch with home means so much more than email; it means reading newspapers from the foggy land Left of the Left. I love my San Francisco roots, but sometimes my New York genes make me want to rip those roots right out of the ground.

Recently, SFGate.com posted a daily poll question that read: Is it too late for the conservatives to gain the upper hand in the “culture wars”?”

Blink. Blink. Excuse me?

Too late for… I first thought it was a joke, a hacker with a sense of humor. Instead of bollixing the entire site, this creative soul would just muck around with the content. Headlines that would make writers at The Onion blush, that sort of thing.

Oh, how wrong I have been proven. I’m not sure just what color the sky is in the world of the Chronicle and SFGate editors. I’m not sure who they think is controlling the agendas of the presidency, the Congress and a damn good portion of the judges.

I don’t know what drugs they’re on, but if these recreational pharmacuticals make them think that the conservatives are somehow losing the “culture wars” then I’d like whatever it is they’re smoking.

As much as I am progressive in my politics, part of the progressiveness is awareness of reality, and the reality is that the liberals and the progressives are not winning much of anything these days.

It’s going to take a lot of work to change that. But stupid question editors bully-pulpitting and preaching to the converted isn’t going to help matters.

No, I haven’t been caught doing anything illicit in a long time, except for that night a few weeks back involving the midget circus and the broomsticks.

But it’s nice to know that after nearly a year and a half in Japan, I can still milk my students for juicy tidbits of information. One lovely lady, who is a clothing boutique shop owner, the kind that sells $400 sweaters, provided some interesting information on the nature of stealing here.

It comes down to this: Japan is not only a great country to lose something, because you’ll get it back, but also to shoplift, because the first question the security guard asks you – even if the item has been rudely tucked into your waistband – is, “Did you pay for that?”

If you answer something to the effect of, “Oops, I forgot,” you march back to the cash register, slap down your plastic, tag the receipt and off you go, new item in hand.

This means that as long as you’re willing to lie, which shouldn’t be much of a moral dilemma if you’re willing to steal, you can attempt to pay for just about nothing here.

I’m curious to see if this is true. I mean, I don’t doubt the word of my student, but of all the cultural differences between Japan and America, this ranks fairly high on the WTF list. Taking the word of the suspected criminal at face-value sounds so… naive, but what if what we see as the suspected criminal is seen by the mall security as being higher on the social scale, and therefore must be given the benefit of the doubt?

So here’s the proposal: Since I would never condone stealing, if you’ve ever tried to shoplift, five-finger discount, lift, extended borrow, misappropriate, shrinkage, or whatever your favorite euphemism is, in Japann leave a comment on this entry and let me know how the experience went.

Any volunteers?

An empty bowl of Sapporo ramen is a good bowl of Sapporo ramen. Everybody knows that the trains run on time here, but ramen has been one of those unexpected pleasures of living in Japan. I think I’ve even mastered the Art of Slurping.

I could be wrong here, but I think I get the Theory of Slurping. The noodles are too hot to allow them to touch the tongue, so you need to avoid as much surface contact as possible with the interior of the mouth. It’s kind of like the opposite of kissing: no tongue, no mouth, teeth only used sparingly, except that you probably shouldn’t be using your teeth when you kiss, unless the kissee likes that.

But it’s a long walk down the train station platform from Slurping Theory to Slurping Practice. You’re not only contending with hot noodles, but hot broth, hot crab or pork or whatever meat product is in there. Hot bamboo shoots, hot everything. So you slurp, and while you don’t want to have excessive contact with the noodles, you do want to taste all the other goodies.

Ramen: not for the faint of heart, or the strong of Western manner.

Eating ramen is in some ways similar to the other famous Japanese soup, the human soup of the onsen. Onsen are hot springs, but there’s more than that. They’re affordable, they’re comfortable, the good ones have several baths both indoors and out.

In Noboribetsu, the onsen are among the best in Japan. The mineral water is piped directly from the nearby valley. Japan is: floating in those murky waters, steam rising so thick I could barely see my own feet floating in front of me, a light dusting of snow falling and melting on my head, plipping into the water around me.

Some people, usually foreigners, are uncomfortable with the onsen experience. Public nudity isn’t a commonly broached subject. But for a pittance compared to a similar experience back in America, you can feel your muscles loosen from the heat of the hot water, your pores contract in the cold baths, your stresses dripping away in the sauna.

Best of all, it’s a great coping mechanism to deal with the sometimes unbearable number of fellow humans around you. The soup lifestyle is easily addictive, because the relaxation comes so easily. Tough day at work? Hit the onsen for an hour. Didn’t sleep well? Go to the onsen, instead of taking your morning shower.

Still, going from the peace and serenity and steam of Noboribetsu to the crowded train and flight back to Tokyo was practically culture shock.

I was swooshing down the mountain at the Sun Raiba ski area. We’ll get to the name in a minute, I promise, but I was in snow-white heaven, back again on white fluffy Hokkaido powder when I saw it.

A skier with a green camoflauge Army helmet.

How unusual, I thought to myself. Must be a new fashion thing, comparing it to the idiosyncrasies of the Tokyo fashion scene and finding it on the conservative side.

Then I noticed he was wearing a full-on green military uniform.

Then I noticed that there were about 20 others dressed like him, standing in a line on the hill, and another two dozen at the bottom of the hill doing calisthenics. In a blizzard.

I wasn’t sure quite what to make of it. Was it Ground Self-Defense Force Day at the slopes? Two for one, if you bring your rifle?

I watched them ski for about five seconds, and figured it out. One soldier skied a bit of the way down the hill, and then the others imitated him, one by one. A brief snapshot of me doing the same thing when I was 10 flitted across my memory.

They were all learning how to ski.

I’m not sure how useful it’ll be in Iraq – I hear the snow isn’t so good there – but that’s kind of cool. At least some of the soldiers here get to learn to ski. Neat.

It was the best part of the day I spent skiing at Sun Raiba, and let’s face it, I haven’t a clue as to what the name means. However, for such a small resort, it’s got great snow.

Last year, I went skiing in Hokkaido, and had a fantastic time. The big frozen H quickly became my favorite place in Japan. Great food, great snow, what else do you need?

This trip had enough room for only one day of skiing, and I wasn’t going to complain. While the snow was still amazing, a light, fluffy powder that fell on my head like angel dandruff, I forgot that dealing with ski resort operators is always a sketchy endeavor.

There were only three lifts, but it was snowing hard enough for the lift managers to use leaf-blowers to clean the snow off the chairs after each revolution. And it was snowing hard enough for the resort to close the lift that went to the top of the mountain.

Talk about getting gypped. Good thing the full-day lift ticket was only 3000 yen.

Fortunately, dinner in Hokkaido is fairly difficult to screw up. The island is home to the best food in Japan.

The first dinner at the Mahoroba ryokan (Japanese-style hotel), where I was staying, was a biking dinner. “Biking” is a wonderful katakana-ization of “viking,” which the Japanese use to mean “stuff your face ’til you puke and pillage the nearby towns.”

Okay, so most don’t do the pillaging bit. I’m not even going to speculate on why they call it that, instead of tabehodai, the proper Japanese term for “all-you-can-eat.” Maybe the rumors of high mercury content in the fish are true. Who knows?

The food was good, but they made the mistake of putting out sashimi. I love sashimi. Usually, I’ll avoid it if it’s tabehodai, because the quality of the fish is much lower, but in Hokkaido, it’s hard to find low-quality anything.

Except ski resort managers, but good versions of those are harder to find than honest politicians.

I probably put away about a kilo of sashimi.

The second night was far more refined, elegant. My friend and I ordered the “special” dinner, which they brought to our room and laid out on special low tables. We had everything, and it was all fresh: crab, sushi, sashimi, miso soup, chicken nabe, and other delicacies I can’t remember at the moment.

It’s so nice living in a foodie culture.

It’s not often that my students surprise me.

Which is not to say that I’m not cynical or jaded, because it’s nearly impossible to grow up New York Jewish without having that Woody Allen perspective come charging through your DNA.

New York Jewish: When your parents are New York Jews, probably from Queens or Yonkers, but you might not necessarily be. In fact, if you’re religious you thank whatever higher deity you believe in that you popped out somewhere besides New York. Okay, enough digression.

Cynical: check. Jaded: check. Leaving the door open for suprise, like a little bit of Elijah: check.

Student who requested that I not teach him because I had the audacity to tell him that bigotry doesn’t belong in my admittedly meager classroom, randomly showing up on my schedule: check.

Well, I wasn’t expecting that one.

So, we’ll call the aforementioned student Kenji, for the sake of his privacy. I walked in to the school, and there’s Kenji’s name on my schedule. I asked the Japanese staff if that’s okay, since he had made a point of requesting to not be in my classes.

Tabun daijoubu desu, ne. Maybe it’s okay, they said.

Maybe!

I walked into the class, my last of the day, not really sure what to expect. Kenji, who is a respectable salaryman and a quick study at English, was smiling warmly. Okay, I thought, who stole my Kenji and replaced him with a pod creature?

The conversation was polite, and interesting. We talked about several different subjects, I carefully avoided talk of anything we discussed in our last class, and at the end he thanked me and said that it had been a long time since I taught him, and that it was good to see me again.

I won’t even begin to speculate on what happened. Did Kenji change his mind, or did the staff tell him that I was the only teacher available tonight? Doesn’t matter.

It’s great when students learn, but sometimes just the appearance of it is good enough for me.

The Shonen Knife show started inauspiciously.

Shimokitazawa’s Club Que, shoved into a building’s basement like a bastard redheaded step-child, was small enough, and packed enough, to force me to make mental notes of where the (two) exits were.

It didn’t help that the place was jammed with people, crammed in much like the Yamanote is during the morning commute. Except the Yammy gets infused with fresh air every two minutes when it stops. Que was, for all intents and purposes, hermetically sealed. If there was an earthquake or fire, we’d be cooked.

Putting those cheery thoughts aside, the lights went down and the first band came up. I don’t remember their name.

I don’t want to remember their name.

They were loud and largely unlistenable, and up and down within the first half-hour. Maybe they were having a bad night, who knows?

The second band was a tight little three-member outfit called Detroit 7. They started off their set with the audio clip of Cheech Marin giving his front-door barker speech in “From Dusk ‘Til Dawn.” (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s the most interesting part of the movie, aside from Salma Hayek as a stripper playing with a white boa constrictor.)

I don’t remember much of the lyrical content, although it was in English. Their songs might even’ve been catchy, if the sound system wasn’t crap. And I know they had a drummer, since I could hear him, but there was so much artificial fog he was invisible.

Nevermind all that, though. They played a fast set that got the house moving, mostly by songs featuring distinctive music by the drummer, guitarist and bassist. In the world of local rock, this was no mean feat. It didn’t hurt them that the lead singer/guitarist oozed charisma.

Everybody was nice and geared up for Shonen Knife, and they didn’t disappoint. Not in the slightest.

I’m not overly familiar with SK. But as I headed up to the pit, the love for their music shone off their faces. They were on, choosing old standards of theirs that the crowd knew and newer tunes that people couldn’t mouth the lyrics to, yet, but still had them thrashing about.

Stage-divers, crowd-surfers, and a rockin’ pit where I was surprisingly one of the biggest guys there made it a great night.

SK is kind of like They Might Be Giants, in that they bring a sense of humor and whimsy to what can sometimes be a dreary scene. Rising stars take note: Taking your music seriously is good; taking yourself seriously is not.

The three housewives from Osaka, who’ve been playing for nearly 20 years – I think – finished up their 90 minute set with an encore featuring hilariously cheesy choreography and canned music, as they sang “Chinese Disco” and the crowd alternatively cheered them on and joined in.

To no surprise, when the ladies came back out for their encore, people started bowing – not Japanese-style, from the waist, but Egyptian style, with arms raised. All hail the Queens, indeed.