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Deadprogrammer Visits Japan or Sakura in Partial Bloom Part I

Part I : The Roots Of Russian Japanophilia

What are the roots of Russian (I should really be saying “Russian-speaking Generation X”, but that would be too long, wouldn’t it?) Japanophilia? Honestly I have no idea, but the fact is that it plays an important role in the huge number of high quality Sushi restaurants in Brooklyn, tremendous popularity of Japanese themed blogs in the Russian-speaking Livejournal community and the popularity of Erast Fandorin Mysteries.

Kitya, the author of the above mentioned outstanding blog, whom I met in Tokyo, thinks that the reason is probably the same as with the US Japanophilia – anime cartoons. I have a different theory. Before the first anime shown in the USSR,Flying Ghost Ship, made it’s appearance, I was already fascinated with Japan. The reason for that was the excellent book called “Branch of Sakura” that I found in my dad’s library. As it turns out, 30 years later the author of the book, journalist Vsevolod Ovchinnikov was invited back to Japan to write a second installment of the book. Ovchinnikov’s writing still has the same lucidity, simplicity and attention to detail. I think that he is one of the major reasons why Soviet Generation X is so interested in everything Japanese.

Some time during Perestroika there was a week of Japanese TV in USSR. They showed the most amazing stuff : how they make Japanese water sharpening stones (I own a set these days) and how a skillful sharpening master can sharpen a carpenter’s plane so that he could make a micron thick shaving with it. They’ve shown how chasen whisks (I have one) used in a tea ceremony are made by splitting bamboo by hand. They’ve shown a fisherman who could tell exactly how many trouts his net was catching and a master bamboo fishing rod maker. They’ve shown an awesome game show called Takeshi’s Castle. Oh, how I wish someone would make a DVD of that show! There was the usual exotic stuff like Sumo wrestling, Sakura festivals as well more unusual stuff such as a few clips of Japanese reporters walking around Moscow (a part of which I described earlier.

Before coming to America I thought that there must be hundreds of channels on TV there, and specifically a few that showed only cartoons (as opposed to 3 or 4 channels in the USSR with one to two old cartoons shown per day). My expectations were overly optimistic as the Cartoon channel came into existence significantly later. Now I hope and pray that there will be a channel of Japanese TV with English subtitles, Sumo, news, Abarenbo Shogun and other Chambara. And Takeshi’s Castle reruns. Ah, one can only dream. For now all I have is the couple of hours of Japanese shows on Fujisankei Lifestyle which airs for a couple of hours. Actually while writing this post I learned that there is a Japanese channel on the Dish network, but it’s $25 a month.

I never anywhere abroad since I came to the US and me and my wife did not have a decent vacation in years. So I decided to pleasantly surprise my wife, who knows and tolerates my extreme hate of traveling, and proposed that we have a vacation in Japan. Thanks to her diligent planning we had an amazing 10 day trip to Japan, spending 6 days in Kyoto and 4 days in Tokyo.

My camera died in Gion, Kyoto’s geisha district. But still me and my wife managed to take about 2500 pictures. I took a lot of 3d pictures. 3d picture technology is very simple : I have a lens that takes two slightly offset pictures at the same time. To view the image you can either learn a special technique and really, really strain your eyes or obtain a rather simple viewer of which there are many varieties, some very cheap, some a bit more expensive and some are pretty expensive. I find that the cheap viewer made by the same company that makes the lens that I use work very well.

[update] : due to the lack of interest there won’t be many 3d pictures in my posts.

[update] Ok, I did get one request for a 3d viewer. So maybe someone out there cares. So if you want one, send me your postal address to

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Where in the World is Deadprogrammer?

I am in Kyoto, Japan, with my wife, on a vacation of a lifetime. We are spending two more nights in a wonderful ryokan here, and then one more night in Tokyo. There are 4.43 gigabytes of pictures in my Tablet PC, I really hope Windows XP / Acer hardware is not going to eat them before I get them into a more secure location. My Canon EOS 300D broke (the poor thing does not power up at all even though the battery is ok), so I am down to my trusty Canon Powershot G2.

Meanwhile, enjoy this picture of a rainbow as seen from an airplane. Yes, it is circular.

P.S. Right, I forgot that it’s April Fool’s today. But I am actually in Japan, this is not a joke. I wish I’d have though of something witty, but it’s a bit too late now.

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What’s In Your Cave?

I usually feel bad leaving a bookstore after a lot of browsing without buying something. So, last time went to a Russian bookstore looking for Zemfira cds, but found no new ones. Fulfilling my obligation to the bookseller I bought a book by Tatiana Tolstaya, one of the few missing from my library. It was one of those – a cover tastefully designed by Tema Lebedev, and inside a mixture of the good short stories from “On The Golden Porch” bitter recent editorials/rants.

I was reading this book on the train this morning, and one of the new “stories” wasn’t even a story – it was an introduction to another writer’s book. Scraping the bottom of the barrel, I thought, but continued reading. I was rewarded as there was one interesting tidbit there – a new-agey psychological experiment .

Basically it goes like this: you close your eyes and try to imagine yourself going down stairs until you see a dark forest. In the forest you see a river which you need to cross to get to a cave. You look inside the cave and find an object. That object symbolizes something or other about you. Tatiana Tolstaya described finding a bone and the author for whose book she wrote the introduction found a lump of coal.

No time like the present, no place like the stainless steel worm. I closed my eyes and imagined myself quickly going down a dark spiral staircase, then arriving at a dark underground forest. Turning around, away from the forest, I found a river and a boat waiting for me. The boat deposited me straight at the mouth of the cave. The object that I found there first was an adjustable wrench. Right under it was a set of lineman’s pliers.

And now for a dose of useless trivia. It’s interesting to note that I was incorrectly thinking of the wrench in question as of “monkey wrench”. A monkey wrench is an older type not used much, and is called so after it’s inventor, “Charles Moncky, […] (who) sold his patent for $2,000, and invested the money in a house in Williamsburg, Kings County, N.Y., where he afterward lived.” A wise investment I might add – houses in that Brooklyn neighborhood are way out of reach these days.

The wrench that I was thinking of is properly known as a “crescent wrench” or a “bulldog wrench”. In Russia I remember it being referred to as “French wrench”.

I guess my choice of symbols is pretty clear – they are engineering tools. Good for plumbing and electrical work – and what’s closer to that than programming?

I don’t know about coal, but the Tolstaya’s bone is pretty much clear to me. She has a bone to pick. A rather nasty essay that she wrote about America’s glorification of Mickey Mouse made it pretty clear to me. She drove a point that most Americans think of Mickey Mouse as of an absolute good. I guess she never looked him up in a dictionary.

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Subway Doves

While a far cry from the exotic subway riding pigeons of Far Rockaway (I need to pay them a visit some time) described in Randy Kennedy’s “Subwayland“, there are some pigeons that live underground in subway stations. I missed my train to take this picture:

The black splotches of gum that cover so many sidewalks and subway platforms in NYC always make me think of a passage from “Roadside Picnic” (English translation is available on the official site for download) by Russian sci-fi writers brothers Strugatsky”:

“And, as was to be expected, there was nothing else to be seen on the road, except for the black twisted stalactites that looked like fat candles hanging from the jagged edges of the slope, and a multitude of black splotches in the dust, as though someone had spilled bitumen. That was all that was left of them, it was even impossible to tell how many there had been. Maybe each splotch represented a person, or one of Buzzard’s wishes.”

The 47-50th Street station has stalactites as well. It’s a very special station indeed. :)

You know, I feel that “pigeon” is just a pejorative for “dove“. Many of the pigeons that I see are probably descendants of the ones that Tesla fed.

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The Deadprogrammer Tarot Project

For a very long time I wanted to create my own Tarot deck. Complex symbolism of classic Tarot decks such as the Rider-Waite-Smith makes it next to impossible to recreate them faithfully in photographic format without posing people and items (which would look lame of course). I do want to stay relatively close to RWS canon though, so I am thinking about digitally altering my images to add swords and other things not commonly found in XXI century New York.

Please treat these as sketches, because final versions will probably be way different.

The Tower: Brooklyn College heating plant’s smokestack is as good a Tower as any. Maybe I’ll shoot it some day in a lightning storm.

The Moon: I need to reshoot this with the Moon between the towers and with the pond visible in the picture, but I think this is the right location for the card. The towers are Pierre Hotel on the left and Sherry Netherland Hotel on the right.

The Magician: I saw what is probably a bicycle inner tube rolled up in an infinity symbol along the glistening subway rails one morning, and the first thing that came to my mind was the Tarot card. Theoretically this should be a man with an infinity symbol over his head, but I really like this photo.

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Ow, My Eyes, My Poor Eyes!

One of the things that I hate the most about my job is overhead fluorescent lights. How, how could Mr. Tesla unleash such an evil invention upon us? Anyway, even after jumping through a few hoops to get the lamp directly over my cubicle turned off and talking most of my co-workers into turning theirs off (everyone seems to like it better without them), there’s still way too much glare from remaining lamps.

Short of building The Tent of Doom over my cube I found some relief by wearing a promotional baseball cap that found it’s way onto my desk. Yeah, it might say “Red Carpet With Joan and Melissa Rivers” on it, but the cap really cut the glare down.

This made me remember a stereotypical picture of an accountant or an editor: in cartoons they seem to wear those funny little green visors. Now I understood their purpose – it’s to cut down on the glare. I still don’t understand why they wear weird little bands or garters on their sleeves.

It’s interesting to know why the predominant color of the accountant/editor eyeshades is green. It might have something to do with the green color of the banker’s lamp. I once seen a blue banker’s lamp at Staples, but when I tried to buy it an extremely rude stockboy took it away because it was the only display copy.

These days it seems that the only professionals who wear green eyeshades are casino dealers. I could buy one, but I am afraid wearing it at work would make me look even more eccentric, which is probably not a good thing.

Turns out there’s such a thing as Green Eyeshade Award. Also copyeditors don the green eyeshades sometimes when going to their conventions. Who knew they had conventions too…

It looks like in the olden days eyeshades were worn by accountants, editors, typesetters and Morse code operators. I wonder if early computer programmers wore them too. I really don’t see a reason why nobody except the card dealers wear them anymore – if anything there’s even more glare in today’s workplace than ever before.

Researching the matter further it looks like the green eyeshade is a lot older than I thought. Here’s a self portrait by Jean Baptiste Chardin dated 1775:

Well, maybe the eyeshades are out because they look dorky, like many other old wardrobe elements. I don’t miss the old high waistline pants which really freak out generation Y kids when they see old James Bond movies, but I wish old fashioned headgear would make a comeback. I absolutely love the top hats, bowler hats and fedoras.

By the way, this quote from Great Fortune gave me pause:
“In the 1930s, one elevator to the Rainbow Room was reserved for customers in formal dress, meaning white tie; men dressed more casually in tuxedos had to travel second-class.”
I always thought that tuxedo or “black tie” was just about as formal as you could get. As it turns out that white tie is not just a tuxedo with a white bowtie. This reminded me about a newspaper story about a company that had “dress up Friday” and instead of dressing in jeans men came to work in tuxedos. Apparenly they had a lot of problems eating out – other restaurant patrons mistook them for waiters.