I can't go to the polls but I have the right to be polled.
By William Wetherall
Tomorrow's election day and the phone's been ringing more than usual. Half the time it's not for me.
"Is your wife there?" I'm often asked by a voice I recognize as that of a telemarketer.
It's almost always a woman. No man has ever asked me if my wife was home. Wives are supposed to be home and husbands at work. No one hires men to make calls and ask women who pick up, "Is your husband there?"
"Not that I know of," is my usual reply.
Which is not to say I don't have a wife, or didn't have one, or wouldn't want one. Simply that, if I did have one, and if she was home, I wasn't aware of her presence -- which might qualify her as a model wife.
Most telemarketers say goodbye at this point. A few ask more questions and get similar answers. The most persistent eventually give up. Hopefully they check the "Nut case" box and delete my number from their list.
Wrong numbers
Other callers are ordinary people who have punched the wrong numbers. One such call resulted in this conversation.
"Is Yoshie there?" a man said after some hesitation.
"No," I said. The same guy had called just a few minutes before. Then he had said "Oh, I'm sorry" and cut the line after I said "Hello."
"You sure?" he said.
"No Yoshie here. What number are you calling?"
He told me. I told him mine was 2, not 3. He needed to stretch his right thumb a bit more to reach the 3.
"I thought you might be a rival," he joked, then twice apologized and cut the line. I never heard from him again.
I was tempted to call Yoshie. Instead I wrote a short story about a guy who almost got himself killed finding a wife that way.
Wrong people
I've gotten several calls from pollsters over the years, but this is the first time I've been hit by election pollsters. Two have called this month, on the eve of what may be the most important election in Japanese history this year.
The first pollster said she was calling on behalf of the Mainichi, a national paper. Could she ask my views of the parties, candidates, and issues? Sure, I said. Did I intend to vote? No. Why not? I'm an alien and didn't have the right to vote.
She said she was truly sorry about that and cut the line. I felt sorry for her. The next person could be a woman who tells her she's only nineteen. And the next a man who says "What election?"
The second pollster represented NHK, the "public" broadcast corporation that thinks it has the right to force payment of a monthly viewer fee for every TV set in every home, office, hospital, hotel, or corrugated cardboard shack.
Her not-unpleasant voice kept flowing despite my efforts to jump in as soon as I heard the word "election". I thought for a moment it might be a recording, but no, there was something human about the affect. Finally I said something that caused her to stop midstream.
"Yes?" she said.
"I'm not qualified to vote."
"You're too young?"
"Nope. I turned twenty 48 years ago."
"Are you a, a . . ."
"Felon? No."
"Or in a . . ."
"Mental hospital? No."
"Then you must be a . . ."
"Foreigner? Yes."
"Really! Do you speak English?"
"A little," I said, affecting as much modesty as I could.
Follow-up polls
We talked for half a minute -- a long time when you count out thirty seconds. She'd spent a week in California. Where? Disneyland, Universal Studios. Never been there. Really! I'm from San Francisco and don't know much about the south. She had spent two nights there, ridden a cable car, been to Fisherman's Wharf. That's nice. So had I.
She had work to do, an hourly quota to make, a supervisor monitoring her calls. I too had other things to do, not necessarily more interesting than talking to her.
The election tomorrow may change who sits where in the chambers of the Diet, and who speaks for Japan at daily press conferences. Whether the government itself changes awaits to be seen.
I'm waiting for a post-election pollster to call.
"What do you think of the new government?"
"What new government?"
29 August 2009
2009-08-29
2009-08-16
Rites of passage
Some you go through everyday in your life without knowing.
Then comes the day you get the results.
By William Wetherall
"You've got a couple of blockages that bear watching." Or "It's shot up to 23."
Someone with a Japanese dream opened the Nepal/Indian restaurant called Kumari in the shell of a cast-off gas station a ten-minute walk from Toride station in Ibaraki prefecture. That's not as far from Tokyo as it sounds, but it's a long ways from India and Nepal.
The place is open only for lunch and dinner. Sorry, no breakfasts, which is too bad, because it was a quarter to eight in the morning and drizzling when I walked by the place on my way to a local hospital. It's a 30-minute walk, but to wait for the next bus would have made me late for the blood draw. Besides, my heart needs the exercise.
There's parking for six vehicles, a variety of dishes, a drink-all-you want deal, it's okay to bring kids, and a variety of credit cards are accepted. The meat, boiled in spices, is soft enough to cut with a fork, you can have your curry as hot as you like, and the Nepalese and Japanese staff are cheerful.
In all these respects it is a fairly ordinary restaurant, with different lunch and evening menus. Size wise too it's par for the course.
The Toride operation -- there's a twin in Asagaya in Suginami ward in Tokyo, which is on the other side of the world from Toride -- seats 26. So if your party has 27, someone will have to stand. The person who is standing can sit when someone goes to the toilet. And the person who goes to the toilet can stand until the next person has to pee.
But no will stand for long if everyone's chugging mugs of authentic Himalayan Gorkha Beer. The standing time will be even shorter if the party consists mostly of people with prostatic hyperplasia like me.
That's "enlarged prostate" in English. I was on my way to the hospital for a semiannual PSA test to determine if the proliferation of cells that are causing my prostate to swell is benign or malignant. That's "prostate-specific antigen" in doctorspeak.
Three years ago, my PSA shot up to 23 from around 2. Doctors were puzzled. I was shocked -- until two weeks later it was down to 10. And six months later it was 7. In another half year it was around 5, and for the next two years it hovered between 4 and 7. What would it be today?
Two hours later I was in the doctor's office. Fine, thanks, and you? Had anything changed in my general condition? He pursued that line of questioning for a few minutes. Any new medications? Now that you mention it, two months ago my heart doctor put me on XYZ instead of ABC. The urologist made note, but nothing else, of this fact.
"Well," he said, "your PSA has dropped again. It's now between 2 and 3. And there's nothing to suggest that it might be a false low."
We talked about the implications and he said I could go a year without another test. That was fine with me.
I took the bus back, as by then the sun was out and high, and the temperature and humidity were soaring. I gazed at the Kumari as the bus lumbered by it in the late-morning traffic.
I have it on the authority of several web sources that a kumari is a prepubescent girl who embodies the spirit of a certain goddess. Such girls are worshiped in a number of South Asian countries, but particularly in Nepal, by royalty and commoners alike.
Apparently the word means "virgin" in Sanskrit, Nepali, and a few other languages in the region. The goddess vacates the girl's body at the onset of menstruation. My anthropological muse tells me such celebrations of a girl's divine possession are communal rites of passage. Who am I to disagree?
I was circumcised a couple of days after my birth. It was something done, then, to practically all boys born in practically all American hospitals. I probably tripped over the C word in Bible school, but was well into my teens before I knew what it meant.
Someday I may have to submit to a prostate biopsy. It's been a few years since I read Bruno Bettelheim's "Symbolic Wounds: Puberty Rites and the Envious Male". Perhaps it's time to give it another look.
16 August 2009
Then comes the day you get the results.
By William Wetherall
"You've got a couple of blockages that bear watching." Or "It's shot up to 23."
Someone with a Japanese dream opened the Nepal/Indian restaurant called Kumari in the shell of a cast-off gas station a ten-minute walk from Toride station in Ibaraki prefecture. That's not as far from Tokyo as it sounds, but it's a long ways from India and Nepal.
The place is open only for lunch and dinner. Sorry, no breakfasts, which is too bad, because it was a quarter to eight in the morning and drizzling when I walked by the place on my way to a local hospital. It's a 30-minute walk, but to wait for the next bus would have made me late for the blood draw. Besides, my heart needs the exercise.
There's parking for six vehicles, a variety of dishes, a drink-all-you want deal, it's okay to bring kids, and a variety of credit cards are accepted. The meat, boiled in spices, is soft enough to cut with a fork, you can have your curry as hot as you like, and the Nepalese and Japanese staff are cheerful.
In all these respects it is a fairly ordinary restaurant, with different lunch and evening menus. Size wise too it's par for the course.
The Toride operation -- there's a twin in Asagaya in Suginami ward in Tokyo, which is on the other side of the world from Toride -- seats 26. So if your party has 27, someone will have to stand. The person who is standing can sit when someone goes to the toilet. And the person who goes to the toilet can stand until the next person has to pee.
But no will stand for long if everyone's chugging mugs of authentic Himalayan Gorkha Beer. The standing time will be even shorter if the party consists mostly of people with prostatic hyperplasia like me.
That's "enlarged prostate" in English. I was on my way to the hospital for a semiannual PSA test to determine if the proliferation of cells that are causing my prostate to swell is benign or malignant. That's "prostate-specific antigen" in doctorspeak.
Three years ago, my PSA shot up to 23 from around 2. Doctors were puzzled. I was shocked -- until two weeks later it was down to 10. And six months later it was 7. In another half year it was around 5, and for the next two years it hovered between 4 and 7. What would it be today?
Two hours later I was in the doctor's office. Fine, thanks, and you? Had anything changed in my general condition? He pursued that line of questioning for a few minutes. Any new medications? Now that you mention it, two months ago my heart doctor put me on XYZ instead of ABC. The urologist made note, but nothing else, of this fact.
"Well," he said, "your PSA has dropped again. It's now between 2 and 3. And there's nothing to suggest that it might be a false low."
We talked about the implications and he said I could go a year without another test. That was fine with me.
I took the bus back, as by then the sun was out and high, and the temperature and humidity were soaring. I gazed at the Kumari as the bus lumbered by it in the late-morning traffic.
I have it on the authority of several web sources that a kumari is a prepubescent girl who embodies the spirit of a certain goddess. Such girls are worshiped in a number of South Asian countries, but particularly in Nepal, by royalty and commoners alike.
Apparently the word means "virgin" in Sanskrit, Nepali, and a few other languages in the region. The goddess vacates the girl's body at the onset of menstruation. My anthropological muse tells me such celebrations of a girl's divine possession are communal rites of passage. Who am I to disagree?
I was circumcised a couple of days after my birth. It was something done, then, to practically all boys born in practically all American hospitals. I probably tripped over the C word in Bible school, but was well into my teens before I knew what it meant.
Someday I may have to submit to a prostate biopsy. It's been a few years since I read Bruno Bettelheim's "Symbolic Wounds: Puberty Rites and the Envious Male". Perhaps it's time to give it another look.
16 August 2009
2009-08-12
Garbage watch
Rights and duties of citizenship come in various bags.
By William Wetherall
My main duty, this hottest time of year, has been to protect kitchen garbage from crows, stray dogs and cats, and homeless people too weak to lift the plastic net I have had to put out three times a week for the past couple of weeks. The net is no barrier for critters small enough to crawl or fly through its holes.
My main right has been to vote on a garbage referendum in the neighborhood association which embraces my address -- and which puts me, with my approval, on its garbage watch roster.
I am, albeit an alien, a registered resident of the city -- a "citizen" if you will. My status as a municipal resident permits me to participate in the national health insurance and pension schemes, and obliges me to pay national and local taxes. I can't vote for National Diet representatives, or for municipal or prefectural assembly members. But I can cast a ballot for how to manage neighborhood garbage.
Neighborhood associations
Some neighborhood associations are involved in public safety, crime prevention, fire prevention, youth counseling, elderly care, child care, disaster preparation and relief, and local festivals. But most associations today, while passively circulating bulletins about municipal facilities and notices of recent burglaries, are mainly concerned about keeping their streets and parks clean and safe for kids, and with garbage collection.
Garbage collection is the main activity of my association. In most neighborhoods, pick-up points are established at a central corner that is also convenient for the garbage trucks. Newcomers to my neighborhood are surprised to find that pick-up points rotate from house to house every couple of months.
A couple of houses are not used because they lack adequate frontage on the street -- mine, for one, because my lot is at the end of a narrow 20-meter approach. Or they have suitable frontage but are located in places that would hamper the movements of garbage trucks. Practically all households, though, share weekly garbage duties.
Kinds of garbage
On burnable (kitchen and garden) garbage days, the household on watch sets out the net that protects bags of garbage from birds, dogs, and cats. On recycled garbage days the same household sets out the net for bags of plastic garbage (mostly plastic packaging), various bags, a box for batteries, and a vat for cooking oil.
One bag is for plastic bottles. Another is for cans. Three others are for clear, amber, and green bottles and jars. Yet another is for miscellaneous unburnable garbage (including broken glass and ceramic pots). Textiles, metal, and several kinds of paper and cardboard are also separated before setting them out. Each household separates its own garbage, with the help of elaborate charts that show various classifications and how waste should be bagged, cut and bundled, whatever.
There is only one truck on burnable garbage days but several on recycled garbage days. There is one truck for plastic garbage, another for plastic bottles, another for glass containers, another for cans, another for miscellaneous non-burnable garbage, batteries and light bulbs, and cooking oil, another for metal, another for cloth, another for paper including magazines and books, light cardboard, and waxed cartons (torn or cut open, not just flattened), and another for heavy corrugated cardboard.
The specialization makes sense, as there are lots of neighborhoods, and pick-up stations every three or four blocks.
What holds us together
In the ten years I have lived in my present neighborhood, the only controversy has been the garbage collection system. The pressing issue now is whether to continue to manage our garbage pick-up site ourselves -- or consign its management to the Clean Center -- the municipal organization that oversees garbage collection, dumping, waste management, and resource recycling.
The debate is over the comparative merits and demerits of keeping a hand in the management of our own garbage, versus contracting the Clean Center to do everything except separate the garbage and carry it to the collection site. Participation brings the neighborhood association a nominal income as its share of the value the company now realizes from selling recycled resources. Consignment would result in forfeiting this income.
The problem is not the money, since there is nothing to use it for.
One problem is that, as in many neighborhoods, the number of single-resident homes is increasing, including elderly people who live alone and who may themselves need assistance. The other is that, if the association leaves everything to the company, there is nothing left to keep the neighbors rubbing elbows with each other.
Supporters of the status quo argue that, while fewer households may be willing, ready, and able to participate in the garbage system, and while this will impose an increasing burden on those who volunteer for garbage watch, the present system will still provide an opportunity for neighbors to get to know each other in the process of cooperating on managing their garbage site.
As one neighbor put it, "Garbage collection is the only thing that holds us together." Well, yes and no.
My closest neighbors
Garbage site preparation and cleanup is almost always the job of the housewives who are at home most of the time. While the duties are assigned to a household, they are usually performed by the women who stay at home. You rarely see men, or kids, congregate at the garbage site.
I have met many of my neighbors but see and talk to some more than others. Sheer proximity, followed by common interests, seem more important than, say, who is in what neighborhood association and where they deposit their garbage.
I have still not met the father of the family that lives closest to me. I have met his wife and four children. I have met his parents, who live with them. And now and then I have heard what I take to be his voice. But I have never, to my knowledge, seen him.
Our homes are separated by about two meters, and there is no fence between them, which is rather unusual. The main entrance of their home, though, is on its other side. And their household is in a different neighborhood association. Borders, which have to be drawn somewhere, inevitably separate closest neighbors.
I regularly see the two women of the house when they come out their kitchen door, at the back of their house, which faces what used to be the front of my house. That is where they keep their garbage until pick-up days in their neighborhood. It is also between our houses that I have given them fresh black berries and tomatoes from my garden, and where they have given me potatoes and boxes of cakes they have picked up on weekend excursions somewhere.
Recycled-garbage management questionnaire
But back to my adventures in garbage citizenship.
The recent ballot on what to do offered three choices: (1) Continue to manage the garbage site locally, (2) Consign its management to the Clean Center, or (3) Either. The information provided with (2) stated that, at present, some 70 neighborhood associations among about 250 in the city have chosen to consign everything to the Clean Center. That appears to be the trend.
You could optionally check a reason for your choice.
I lay awake, these sweltering August nights, not wondering if there really is a Dog, for I know there are many. I hear them barking on one battleground or another throughout the known universe.
Rather I dwell on a more fundamental question.
12 August 2009
By William Wetherall
My main duty, this hottest time of year, has been to protect kitchen garbage from crows, stray dogs and cats, and homeless people too weak to lift the plastic net I have had to put out three times a week for the past couple of weeks. The net is no barrier for critters small enough to crawl or fly through its holes.
My main right has been to vote on a garbage referendum in the neighborhood association which embraces my address -- and which puts me, with my approval, on its garbage watch roster.
I am, albeit an alien, a registered resident of the city -- a "citizen" if you will. My status as a municipal resident permits me to participate in the national health insurance and pension schemes, and obliges me to pay national and local taxes. I can't vote for National Diet representatives, or for municipal or prefectural assembly members. But I can cast a ballot for how to manage neighborhood garbage.
Neighborhood associations
Some neighborhood associations are involved in public safety, crime prevention, fire prevention, youth counseling, elderly care, child care, disaster preparation and relief, and local festivals. But most associations today, while passively circulating bulletins about municipal facilities and notices of recent burglaries, are mainly concerned about keeping their streets and parks clean and safe for kids, and with garbage collection.
Garbage collection is the main activity of my association. In most neighborhoods, pick-up points are established at a central corner that is also convenient for the garbage trucks. Newcomers to my neighborhood are surprised to find that pick-up points rotate from house to house every couple of months.
A couple of houses are not used because they lack adequate frontage on the street -- mine, for one, because my lot is at the end of a narrow 20-meter approach. Or they have suitable frontage but are located in places that would hamper the movements of garbage trucks. Practically all households, though, share weekly garbage duties.
Kinds of garbage
On burnable (kitchen and garden) garbage days, the household on watch sets out the net that protects bags of garbage from birds, dogs, and cats. On recycled garbage days the same household sets out the net for bags of plastic garbage (mostly plastic packaging), various bags, a box for batteries, and a vat for cooking oil.
One bag is for plastic bottles. Another is for cans. Three others are for clear, amber, and green bottles and jars. Yet another is for miscellaneous unburnable garbage (including broken glass and ceramic pots). Textiles, metal, and several kinds of paper and cardboard are also separated before setting them out. Each household separates its own garbage, with the help of elaborate charts that show various classifications and how waste should be bagged, cut and bundled, whatever.
There is only one truck on burnable garbage days but several on recycled garbage days. There is one truck for plastic garbage, another for plastic bottles, another for glass containers, another for cans, another for miscellaneous non-burnable garbage, batteries and light bulbs, and cooking oil, another for metal, another for cloth, another for paper including magazines and books, light cardboard, and waxed cartons (torn or cut open, not just flattened), and another for heavy corrugated cardboard.
The specialization makes sense, as there are lots of neighborhoods, and pick-up stations every three or four blocks.
What holds us together
In the ten years I have lived in my present neighborhood, the only controversy has been the garbage collection system. The pressing issue now is whether to continue to manage our garbage pick-up site ourselves -- or consign its management to the Clean Center -- the municipal organization that oversees garbage collection, dumping, waste management, and resource recycling.
The debate is over the comparative merits and demerits of keeping a hand in the management of our own garbage, versus contracting the Clean Center to do everything except separate the garbage and carry it to the collection site. Participation brings the neighborhood association a nominal income as its share of the value the company now realizes from selling recycled resources. Consignment would result in forfeiting this income.
The problem is not the money, since there is nothing to use it for.
One problem is that, as in many neighborhoods, the number of single-resident homes is increasing, including elderly people who live alone and who may themselves need assistance. The other is that, if the association leaves everything to the company, there is nothing left to keep the neighbors rubbing elbows with each other.
Supporters of the status quo argue that, while fewer households may be willing, ready, and able to participate in the garbage system, and while this will impose an increasing burden on those who volunteer for garbage watch, the present system will still provide an opportunity for neighbors to get to know each other in the process of cooperating on managing their garbage site.
As one neighbor put it, "Garbage collection is the only thing that holds us together." Well, yes and no.
My closest neighbors
Garbage site preparation and cleanup is almost always the job of the housewives who are at home most of the time. While the duties are assigned to a household, they are usually performed by the women who stay at home. You rarely see men, or kids, congregate at the garbage site.
I have met many of my neighbors but see and talk to some more than others. Sheer proximity, followed by common interests, seem more important than, say, who is in what neighborhood association and where they deposit their garbage.
I have still not met the father of the family that lives closest to me. I have met his wife and four children. I have met his parents, who live with them. And now and then I have heard what I take to be his voice. But I have never, to my knowledge, seen him.
Our homes are separated by about two meters, and there is no fence between them, which is rather unusual. The main entrance of their home, though, is on its other side. And their household is in a different neighborhood association. Borders, which have to be drawn somewhere, inevitably separate closest neighbors.
I regularly see the two women of the house when they come out their kitchen door, at the back of their house, which faces what used to be the front of my house. That is where they keep their garbage until pick-up days in their neighborhood. It is also between our houses that I have given them fresh black berries and tomatoes from my garden, and where they have given me potatoes and boxes of cakes they have picked up on weekend excursions somewhere.
Recycled-garbage management questionnaire
But back to my adventures in garbage citizenship.
The recent ballot on what to do offered three choices: (1) Continue to manage the garbage site locally, (2) Consign its management to the Clean Center, or (3) Either. The information provided with (2) stated that, at present, some 70 neighborhood associations among about 250 in the city have chosen to consign everything to the Clean Center. That appears to be the trend.
You could optionally check a reason for your choice.
1. Because at present there are no problems.
2. There are measures for helping each other, including exemption from participation.
3. It helps the nourishment of harmony, and the mutual mixing of residents, in the area.
4. Because it's a source of precious revenue.
5. Because it's useful in raising awareness about separation [of garbage].
6. A manager/owner/consignment-company [system] would be implemented.
7. Because its troublesome to put out and bring in the collection apparatus [net, bags, etc.].
8. Others.
I lay awake, these sweltering August nights, not wondering if there really is a Dog, for I know there are many. I hear them barking on one battleground or another throughout the known universe.
Rather I dwell on a more fundamental question.
Is the regionalization and globalization of garbage collection tearing apart my community?
12 August 2009
2009-08-01
Mumbly peg
There was a time when you couldn't be a boy without a pocket knife.
By William Wetherall
I still have the Case knife I carried around in high school. Its two identical blades, one on each end, fold out from the middle. Each is about 6.5 centimeters or roughly 2.5 inches. Their edges will cut small limbs, and their points will stick in trees and of course sod.
The knife now sits in a small black lacquer tray in a recess in the wall of the vestibule of my home, where you step up into the hall after taking off your shoes. Sharing the tray are a pair of glasses, two screw drivers, needlenose pliers, the chop I use on receipts for registered mail and packages, and a pedometer with a chronometer.
I now use the knife mostly in the garden when I'm too lazy to get out the pruning scissors. At one time it was mainly used to cut the thick plastic straps that sealed the mail sacks of books that no longer come from the United States. I would whip it out and have the sacks open before the postman could unholster his cutter.
I also have a fairly modest Swiss Army knife. It has a large blade, a smaller blade, a can opener with a small screwdriver, a bottle opener with a large screwdriver and a wire stripper, a saw, a reamer, a corkscrew, scissors, tweezers, a toothpick, and a lifetime warranty that doesn't say which or whose life.
The saw could fell a tree or amputate a leg. Even the tweezers could be turned into a weapon of mass destruction.
The Swiss Army knife does not have a USB memory stick, but it does have a keyring to which I have anchored a thick lanyard. I used to tie the lanyard to a belt loop on my jeans when carrying the knife in my pocket, but no more.
The knife, with the lanyard, now rides in the bottom of the pouch on the back of my pack sack with a flashlight, radio, chopsticks, bronchodilator spray, and a zillion other things that will come in handy when the Big One comes, the train derails, and I have to break my way out of the wreckage and hoof it through the urban and suburban rubble and ford a couple of rivers and cross fields and hills back to what remains of my home, where a one-month supply of All Bran, trail mix, and bottled water awaits me.
One time, on my way in Narita airport to board a Malaysia Airlines flight to Los Angeles, the Swiss Army knife, in the pack sack where I had carried it on a number of previous flights, caused a commotion among the security staff. The man in charge decided I could not carry the knife on board. Someone put it in a bag, filled out a form, gave me a copy, said I could pick up the knife in LA, and advised that in the future I put it in my check-in baggage.
That was a decade before 9/11. Now it's hard to carry even yourself on board.
My pocket knives have been only marginally legal in Japan. Possessing them is not a problem. Their longest blades slightly exceed the legal length limit for double-edged blades, but they are single-edged.
The problem is carrying them around in public, unless you are going fishing or hiking. And you don't want to argue finer points of law, even with your local koban officers, however friendly, however well they may know you from previous offenses like roadside pissing and grinning to yourself.
My son also has a Swiss Army knife and he, too, is careful not to carry his in public. He is thinking of buying one of the new gadgets that has all manner of foldout tools but nothing that would cut or pierce. It too would be illegal on a plane but he could carry it around and flash it at the cops.
One time, when I was teaching, I brought my double-blade Case to school. We were having an outing that day in a nearby park. Everyone had to do a show-and-tell, and mine was about the knife. I said I had brought it because there were snakes, and when the girls stop shrieking, I showed them how to do mumbly peg.
That day on a spot of grass, the sun flashing on parts that had not rusted, I put my trusty Case through its paces. I showed them all the feats I could remember of the game I had played countless afternoons on neighborhood lawns in the Sunset District of San Francisco.
They were more amused by my shouts of joy when the blade stuck at least two fingers off the grass, than by my flips of the knife. They could not believe that I and most of my friends had carried pocket knives from the time we were in elementary school, when many of us were Cub Scouts. To class. In the play yard.
Human civilization lost its innocence many millennia ago. But children, boys and girls, have lost their innocence within my lifetime -- at least regarding knives.
The main complaint of older adults in Japan is that children no longer learn to shave pencils and skin apples. My complaint is that no one is learning to play mumbly peg.
1 September 2009
By William Wetherall
I still have the Case knife I carried around in high school. Its two identical blades, one on each end, fold out from the middle. Each is about 6.5 centimeters or roughly 2.5 inches. Their edges will cut small limbs, and their points will stick in trees and of course sod.
The knife now sits in a small black lacquer tray in a recess in the wall of the vestibule of my home, where you step up into the hall after taking off your shoes. Sharing the tray are a pair of glasses, two screw drivers, needlenose pliers, the chop I use on receipts for registered mail and packages, and a pedometer with a chronometer.
I now use the knife mostly in the garden when I'm too lazy to get out the pruning scissors. At one time it was mainly used to cut the thick plastic straps that sealed the mail sacks of books that no longer come from the United States. I would whip it out and have the sacks open before the postman could unholster his cutter.
I also have a fairly modest Swiss Army knife. It has a large blade, a smaller blade, a can opener with a small screwdriver, a bottle opener with a large screwdriver and a wire stripper, a saw, a reamer, a corkscrew, scissors, tweezers, a toothpick, and a lifetime warranty that doesn't say which or whose life.
The saw could fell a tree or amputate a leg. Even the tweezers could be turned into a weapon of mass destruction.
The Swiss Army knife does not have a USB memory stick, but it does have a keyring to which I have anchored a thick lanyard. I used to tie the lanyard to a belt loop on my jeans when carrying the knife in my pocket, but no more.
The knife, with the lanyard, now rides in the bottom of the pouch on the back of my pack sack with a flashlight, radio, chopsticks, bronchodilator spray, and a zillion other things that will come in handy when the Big One comes, the train derails, and I have to break my way out of the wreckage and hoof it through the urban and suburban rubble and ford a couple of rivers and cross fields and hills back to what remains of my home, where a one-month supply of All Bran, trail mix, and bottled water awaits me.
One time, on my way in Narita airport to board a Malaysia Airlines flight to Los Angeles, the Swiss Army knife, in the pack sack where I had carried it on a number of previous flights, caused a commotion among the security staff. The man in charge decided I could not carry the knife on board. Someone put it in a bag, filled out a form, gave me a copy, said I could pick up the knife in LA, and advised that in the future I put it in my check-in baggage.
That was a decade before 9/11. Now it's hard to carry even yourself on board.
My pocket knives have been only marginally legal in Japan. Possessing them is not a problem. Their longest blades slightly exceed the legal length limit for double-edged blades, but they are single-edged.
The problem is carrying them around in public, unless you are going fishing or hiking. And you don't want to argue finer points of law, even with your local koban officers, however friendly, however well they may know you from previous offenses like roadside pissing and grinning to yourself.
My son also has a Swiss Army knife and he, too, is careful not to carry his in public. He is thinking of buying one of the new gadgets that has all manner of foldout tools but nothing that would cut or pierce. It too would be illegal on a plane but he could carry it around and flash it at the cops.
One time, when I was teaching, I brought my double-blade Case to school. We were having an outing that day in a nearby park. Everyone had to do a show-and-tell, and mine was about the knife. I said I had brought it because there were snakes, and when the girls stop shrieking, I showed them how to do mumbly peg.
That day on a spot of grass, the sun flashing on parts that had not rusted, I put my trusty Case through its paces. I showed them all the feats I could remember of the game I had played countless afternoons on neighborhood lawns in the Sunset District of San Francisco.
They were more amused by my shouts of joy when the blade stuck at least two fingers off the grass, than by my flips of the knife. They could not believe that I and most of my friends had carried pocket knives from the time we were in elementary school, when many of us were Cub Scouts. To class. In the play yard.
Human civilization lost its innocence many millennia ago. But children, boys and girls, have lost their innocence within my lifetime -- at least regarding knives.
The main complaint of older adults in Japan is that children no longer learn to shave pencils and skin apples. My complaint is that no one is learning to play mumbly peg.
1 September 2009
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