Reconstruction

This week on the "This American Life" podcast by Chicago public radio was an excellent look into reconstruction following the major battles of the war in Iraq and "lessons learned". The podcast contains one option to reduce the number of troops and continue a "long game", pointing out that the military are often the ones most adept at achieving results for civil reconstruction amid lingering conflict.
Another interesting idea in the program was that winning a war is dependent on the peace that pursues, which puts more emphasis on reconstruction after the "battles" are over.
So this got me to thinking that, now that Prime Minister Abe of Japan is pushing through Constitution reform to revise Japan's position on using military force, what will that role be? My hope is that Japan pursues a policy as "a stabilizing force" rather than an insurgent force. I don't mean to say that Japan should be given the job of cleaning up someone else's mess, however. Simply, Japan is oft quoted as an example of successful post-war reconstruction itself and is thus in a unique position to lead in this capacity. Just a thought.

La Statue de la Liberte

It's becoming more and more apparent that Tokyo wants to be "another New York", as exemplified by this statue, which was a present from France in 1999. Last Saturday, J and I went down to Tokyo Bay to walk around and take in the sights. This area is called Odaiba and is a well-known "date spot" in Tokyo. Couples can enjoy dinner and a movie, shopping and apparently domestic international travel (wink wink). Well, in any case, as a foreigner in Japan, I suppose it was nice to finally be greeted by the Lady of Liberty, despite her diminished size.

Dinner with I-san

Today I had dinner with my co-worker, I-san, who specializes in cartography and GIS applications. His desk is behind mine, and he's usually buried in huge map sheets, measuring coordinates and matching contour lines, or otherwise writing reports about his current project in Montenegro.
I suppose he must be in his late 40s or so, as he has two children aged 19 and 22. We talked about how his youngest is thinking to study overseas for a year. He said when thinks back to when he was in university himself, he would have liked to study abroad if he'd had the chance. But through his work at our company, I-san said he's been to about 25 countries now. Wow! Myself, I can count 6 countries in the 10 years since I made my first trip overseas. Then there's our Section Chief, D-san, who I remember saying once that he has been to over 40 countries, and I don't think he's even 60 years old yet. (Then again, you have the most widely traveled man in probably all of history, former Pope John Paul II, who traveled to 117 countries during his pontificate.)
I-san told me anecdotes about his recent trips to Montenegro and Macedonia, and a one-day siteseeing trip in New York City on his way to Brazil. I also learned that there was McDonald's in Sri Lanka (surprising, as I thought most Sinhalese were vegetarian. To which you might respond, "But there's McDonald's everywhere!" On the contrary, there are still places where the golden arches do not exist: list of countries without McDonald's.) He told me about what a great time he had in Paris for two weeks once, and was surprised to find a little Japanese restaurant in a Parisian suburb 50km outside of the city, run by a Cambodian staff. "I guess Cambodian cuisine doesn't fare as well," he said,"but who knew a Cambodian could make such good Japanese food!" Although, the question remains, would this little restaurant receive a stamp of authenticity through the new government certification system that goes into effect this year? (see here)
All-in-all, I was glad I-san asked me if I had time for a beer after work. I suspect he wanted to practice his English, which I would have been fine with actually, but in the end we spoke in Japanese for the duration. It was a good time and nice to get to know another of my co-workers.

Before there was rice...

...there was millet. Well, at least to prehistoric northern Chinese. According to wikipedia, thousands of years ago in China, millet - the small, yellow grain - was more common than rice. Well then, maybe it's not surprising to find millet in a Chinese grocery store today, even in central Tokyo. In fact, that's exactly where I bought it.
I finally tried to make a dish using millet last night, and although it turned out nothing like I expected, it was alright. I took a friend's suggestion and made a sauce with veggies, like carrot and onion, and then I added some chunks of chicken to the mix. The millet was a little too saturated, but hopefully with some experimentation, I will get it down to a science. In any case, the left-overs are in my lunch box today :)

French Press and Français

This morning I woke up and made a cup of coffee in the french press as usual. This has become, by far, my favorite way to brew coffee beans. Thanks to Japan's "tea culture", it's common to have boiled water on hand in an electric hot pot, so it doesn't take much time at all to prepare coffee this way. I put in one scoop of coarsely ground beans and fill with hot water, give it a quick stir and put the top on. 2 minutes later I give the plunger a push and the coffee is ready. This gives it a deeper flavor than drip coffee with a paper filter, but even more is the fact that you keep the essential oils from the bean in the coffee. I don't know how to express the difference except to say, imagine drinking chicken soup out of the pot or after putting it through a paper strainer; I think you'd want to get rid of the strainer in that case as well.

Anyway, there was more thème français to come as the day went on. In the afternoon, J and I went to Shibuya (downtown neighborhood of Tokyo) where there is a 7 Floor Tower Records. The store was hosting an event for a French artist I happen to like this afternoon. Born in Senegal, but living in Paris, Tété sings folk rock-style with blues undertones. I actually had no idea he was in Japan this week. I was searching the internet, drinking my french press café, looking for when tickets to his concert in September would go on sale. To my surprise, at 3:00 he was giving a promo show.

Well, J and I already had plans to go to the Thai Festival downtown in Shibuya, but we cut that short so we could make the promo show. Lunch at the Thai Festival was great and we had pad thai, green curry, spring rolls and papaya salad, not to mention a Phuket beer, which was all good. Then we stopped by the tsunami relief booth where my friend Kenji was volunteering. It was great to see Kenji and talk for a bit. I told him we were on our way to see Tété and he said he liked his music too, so maybe he'll come to the concert in September with us.

Anyway, we trotted off to Tower Records and got there early enough to get Tété's latest CD so I could get it signed. Tété came out and played 2 songs acoustic, which was great. There was a huge crowd there, clearly more than anyone had expected. Everyone cheered and asked for one more song, and Tété was great and said okay and sang us another one. For the signing he had a translator so he could talk with his Japanese fans. He speaks English though, so when it was my turn I simply said "Thanks for coming out" and we shook hands. Anyway, here's a pic of Tété below during his promo show.


you can hear some of his songs at the link below:
Tété on MySpace

Spectacular Specs

My Italian wire frames were recently given the new role as "back-ups" when I picked up my order for handmade Japanese eyeglasses last Sunday. My new spectacles are, in one word, spectacular. However, I'm still fond of my old spectacles and remember well when I picked them out them back in '98. I even had new lenses put in a few years ago when I updated my prescription. So why the change? Please excuse the diatribe here but the following two comments I heard were a bit too frequent for my liking:
1) "You look like Harry Potter"
Not that there's anything wrong with Daniel Radcliffe himself, but I don't want to be compared to a school-aged, aspiring wizard.
2) "They make you look...intelligent."
To be thought of as intelligent, in and of itself, is a great compliment - I'm not disputing that. Being told you look intelligent because of the words coming out of your mouth, or even due simply to one's posture or tone of voice would imply a true and innate wisdom. On the other hand, being told you suddenly look intelligent when you sport a pair of glasses on your face, misconstrued, could be taken to mean that you look aloof when bare-faced, or otherwise be attributed to the fact that spectacles are a crutch for being a weak-eyed squinter or a bookworm in bad lighting.
In any case, I decided that I would go for a new, spectacular look; one that made an impression suitable to the eyeglasses themselves and less on the brain behind them. Basically, I went for a bit more style and chose a pair of Japanese styled frames. I made the switch from the wire framed variety to more durable, full-bodied and somehow lighter feeling plastic ones.

It's Golden Week in Japan, which means a few National holidays in a row, giving quite a nice little hiatus from work.

J and I have recently discovered a downtown park in Tokyo that is fun to go to on weekends. We first went to Yoyogi Park on Earth Day (Mar 22) for the events they had there that day; food fair, shops and booths by organizations involved in enviro-biz or education.

Last Monday we went again with a packed lunch and I brought my didgeridoo (Australian aboriginal instrument). J brought her scetch book and some drawing pencils, but ended up listening to the didge music I played along with a group playing djembe drums a few yards away. I reckon we'll continue going to the park throughout the summer, so I plan next time to watch J draw the drummers or the landscape.

Incidentally, J just put her webpage back up of some drawings she did in 2004-2005. Click on the title: Beautiful Life
(navigate by clicking the months on the left, days at the top, and drawings for the same day on the right. for example, August 4th shows 8 drawings for that day.)

The Ice King

On April 19th I gave my third speech at Toastmasters, titled "The Ice King", for which I won Best Speaker of the evening. This time one of the objectives for giving the speech was to memorize the material, so I only wrote notes to practice before hand. I did my best to recreate the speech here to post, although this is probably longer than the 7 minutes and 30 seconds for the actual speech. In any case, I hope you find it to be as interesting to read as it was to research and write.

The Ice King

Ice cream is a popular treat in Japan. A day out in the city and one is likely to pass by a Baskin Robins, Hagen Daaz or, recently, a Cold Stone Creamery store. Japan consumes 780,000 kiloliters of frozen desserts a year, or in other words, 200 million gallons. This, however, pales in comparison with the U.S. penchant for ice cream, ranking in at 1.2 billion gallons consumed in 2005. U.S. ice cream exports are also quite impressive, coming to 400 million gallons, and much of that is commonly sent the 6,000-some miles to Japan. So, one must ask, when imagining all this “frozen dessert” being shipped so far away, what life was like before refrigeration?

Before the introduction of refrigeration into industrial mass production, only the extremely wealthy could afford the delights of ice cream. As recent as the 19^th Century, people used natural ice to preserve their food. At that time, ice was a product used to cool foods more than to be consumed itself, and was an important product for restaurants, dairies, breweries, meat packing establishments and hospitals, which needed ice year-round to ensure even temperatures.

The winter harvest of the north east U.S. in the 19^th Century was largely centered on harvesting ice from the natural ponds located there. In fact, the well-known Walden Pond – vis-à-vis Henry David Thoreau – was a major source of natural ice for export, not only domestically to the southern states, but even overseas. Thoreau wrote in the winter of 1846-7:

“The sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well... The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.”

In those days, this industry was famously led by a man named Frederic Tudor, otherwise known as the Ice King. During his life, Tudor accumulated a fortune shipping ice thousands of miles around the world.

Tudor’s first international conquest was in 1806, when he had the idea to ship 80 tons of natural ice from Massachusetts ponds 1,500 miles to the Caribbean island of Martinique. The journey took 3 weeks to complete, and upon arrival, as one might expect, any potential for profit literally melted away. Tudor lost $4500 on that idea, which in 1806 was worth millions. Still, Tudor made three more attempts in the following years, this time to Havana, Cuba, where he tried to establish an exclusive agreement with the island. But it seemed as if there would be no profit from shipping ice internationally and Tudor’s debts far outweighed his income.

But Tudor’s luck would change and in 1815, straight out of debtor’s prison, he managed to borrow $2100 and build an ice house in Havana. The ice house was a double-shelled structure that would hold and protect 150 tons of ice even in the summer heat, insulated with straw and sawdust. It seemed this was the key to the Ice King’s success and over the next two decades, Tudor would work hard to improve his methods to get ice to arrive intact over long distances.

However, in 1833, people started to wonder if the Ice King had lost his mind. The Tudor Ice Company announced that they would make an ocean journey from Boston to Calcutta, India – a distance 10 times that to Havana – which would take 4 months. Tudor packed 180 tons of natural ice onto his ship and set sail in May, 1833. When he arrived in September people thought it must be a joke, however, he was able to maintain 55% of his product – something unthinkable today – but selling over 100 tons of ice, Tudor make a large profit. Over the next 20 years, in fact, building an ice house in Calcutta as well, it would be one of his most profitable ports, making him millions - $72 million in fact (2005USD value).

So how did Tudor pull it off? Well, aside from increasing efficiency by attaining less melt by using straw, sawdust and rice chaff, he fit the blocks of ice tightly together and encouraged the introduction of new ice cutting techniques (it used to all be done painstakingly by hand). He watched the temperature closely to maximize ice depth when he harvested, drummed up demand for ice in the market, and most importantly, built ice houses in New Orleans, Charleston, Havana, Jamaica, Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, Galle (on the southern tip of Sri Lanka), and Singapore.

The irony in all of this? Ice houses were the answer to the Ice King’s success, however, they were not a new invention. The technique of preserving ice in this manner goes back to ancient Persia where they built yakhchals that would hold ice from the mountains well into the summer. The Romans and the Chinese are also reported to have used ice houses centuries ago. Marco Polo reportedly told stories of “milk dried into a kind of paste” that he saw in China in the late 13^th Century – this was, of course, ice cream. And funny enough, ice cream may have been one of the factors that caused the downfall of the natural ice business altogether.

In 1870, an artificial ice plant opened in Louisiana. While the artificial and natural ice markets continued to exist side-by-side for quite some time, it wasn’t long before manufactured ice would take the lead. A vaporization process utilizing ammonia had been used to make artificial ice for industrial purposes – such as at breweries - since the 1840s, and the development of this new technology was a major advantage to those who before had no choice but to buy their ice from the Ice King. In 1892, the Tudor Ice Company closed its doors once and for all, and by 1913, the first DOMestic use ELectric REfrigerator, “The Domelre”, the first such system to feature “ice cubes”, was introduced in Chicago at a retail price of $900.

Many ask why Tudor hadn’t invested in refrigeration, when it must have been clear to him at some point early on that his business was not “ice” but “cold”. However, Tudor probably understood cold more than anyone, demonstrated by his keen eye for getting the largest, deepest cuts of natural ice when the temperature was at its lowest in the winters, and his uncanny ability to retain both cold and ice for such long durations over thousands of miles.

The irony of artificial ice taking the place of natural ice in the world market is this: No one knew at the time, but the introduction of CFCs to replace the toxic chemical ammonia in 1928, would eventually be linked to ozone depletion and global warming. Who would have thought that methods for artificial ice production would eventually threaten to melt the natural ice on earth and bring humanity to the brink of a climate disaster? We now face a worldwide challenge to preserve the world’s ice in order to stop sea levels from rising and inundating or flooding low-lying cities and islands. At a time when many of us may be asking how this could have happened, we needn’t look any further than the ubiquitous ice cream cone to be reminded of the paradigm shift that led us to our present situation.

Tudor lived and died before our civilization was faced with the consequences of industrial overload, however, I believe we can learn from something the Ice King surely understood. Frederic Tudor worked on the basis of what nature had to provide, and developed a dependence on nature in a way that would help to preserve it, year after year. The Ice King left the naysayer gaping at his achievements and provided the power of preservation in the form of ice to the dairy farmer, the butcher, the beer brewer, the doctor, and, for those who were lucky, the ice cream man.

Some links:

Natural Ice Harvesting in New England
Engineering achievements: refrigeration timeline
The Hindu: "Ice Houses through the years" (newspaper article)
Frederic Tudor (wiki)