Across the street from where I live, there’s a picturesque little house with a clay tile roof, dark wooden-framed facade, and gracefully arching eaves in the Japanese style. This is the home of the man I’ve come to call the Screamer.

When I imagine what he looks like, I picture a sinewy older gentleman in his underwear, his hair an unkempt spray of dirty white. In my imagination, the TV’s set to the History Channel, and he ashes into a plastic TV dinner tray that’s piled high with the crooked butts of dead cigarettes.

This is all just conjecture, of course. If it’s as cold in the Screamer’s house as it is in mine, he’s probably wearing something other than just his underwear or he’d be unconscious within minutes. Venturing into the unheated hinterlands of a typical Japanese home without the proper gear in winter is like jumping into the North Atlantic in swim trucks. You’d have to be very brave or very foolish.

And maybe he’s a beer drinker, I don’t know. Judging by the hours the Screamer keeps, he’s either retired or living on the generosity of the Japanese government. He has a cigarette voice, though. That much I’m sure of.

Once he’s begun, he usually holds forth for 15 or 20 minutes, though he’s flirted with the upper thirties. This happens I guess three or four times a day on average, sometimes more. The Screamer is not on a schedule. Occasionally he starts in at midday, other times he cranks it up at midafternoon or dinnertime. Often he’s punching in at two or three in the morning, then again literally at the crack of dawn, baying to bring the roof down. I keep earplugs beside my bed for just this reason. Whatever it’s about, there’s no point in both of us losing sleep over it.

This has been going on for five months.

When the Screamer is operating on all cylinders, I’m pretty sure everyone on my block can hear him. The difference between them and me is that they can presumably understand him. They don’t have to wonder. Me, I have no idea what he’s yelling about. It sounds important. Though almost anything sounds important when it’s delivered at the top of an invisible person’s lungs in a foreign language. For all I know he’s raving about the weather. But I don’t think so.

In between sessions, I sit in my one warm room and wonder about the Screamer. What could a person find so irritating that he’s got to yell about it at top volume for 15 minutes roughly every six hours? If the street construction crew from last fall were still out there, I could maybe understand. I’d probably be doing the same thing, having by now been driven completely insane by the machine that cuts through concrete and its evil operator. But those sadists moved on months ago to another unlucky neighborhood several blocks away.

I’ve considered that maybe it’s the talking trucks. These are a small fleet of vehicles outfitted with loudspeakers on their roofs that pack the wallop of air-raid sirens. The trucks are driven at a crawl through the neighborhood while blasting impossibly loud recordings of somebody speaking Japanese in the kind of monotone usually reserved for professors of statistics and automated messaging services. The movement of the vehicles creates a Doppler effect that gives the speeches, whatever they’re about, the eerie quality of messages from Satan, if Satan were a statistics professor.

The talking trucks come through several times a week. Each time I hear one coming, I’m tempted to splash ketchup on my ears and run out into the street, frantically waving the truck away, ketchup leaking from my ears down my neck. When the truck doesn’t turn around, I’d fall to the ground in front of it, writhing in agony. I figure it’s worth a shot.

Maybe, I’ve thought, he’s a dog person who’s been forced to care for a relation’s cat for an extended period. Cats will sometimes have that effect on people. Deliberately.

I’ve eliminated the possibility that he’s a rabid sports fan whose favorite team is having the worst season in its, or any other team’s, entire history. Likewise, I’ve dismissed theories involving repeatedly stubbed toes and misplaced keys. I’m at a loss to explain it. Is it a single thing that constantly pricks at him? Or is he set off by a whole catalogue of events that happen throughout the course of each day?

Out here where I live, the dense sprawl of the city’s bland industrial center gives way to residential suburbs speckled with rice fields. The streets are narrow, without sidewalks, and the tiny houses are packed together like teeth. In front of every home, no matter how small, there’s a pocket-sized Japanese garden instead of a yard, separated from the street and the houses to either side by a low concrete wall.

Their owners obsess over these little patches of land. Were a typical American family to find itself with the same amount of yard space, they’d set about filling it with a barbecue grill, bird-shit covered plastic deck chairs, an inflatable wading pool, and a crumbling dead Christmas tree skeleton.

But the Japanese person’s relationship to this space is different. For my neighbors, a garden is an idealized representation of the living world, a microcosm of the relationship between people and nature. The result is a little like a work of art: sculpted trees and shrubs, stone lanterns, rocks and gravel, a clutch of bamboo, a little stream or waterfall with a few koi kissing the surface of a tiny pond. Each element, from the trees to the rocks and even the moss on them, has been carefully selected and arranged just so, like a painting. It’s supposed to be a place for stillness and contemplation, a little Zen zone where one can let go of worries and concerns for a little while and think about how big the universe is and how little we, and our problems, are.

In front of the Screamer’s house, the low little wall is there, but it’s empty inside, just bare dirt and dead grass. It’s like a garden waiting to happen. But it never does.

Usually the Screamer sounds angry. Sometimes I can hear him pounding on the walls. His voice jumps with rage, like bursts from a mortar. It has the tone of someone who is, say, moments away from plunging a sharp instrument repeatedly through the ribs, neck and eyeballs of another person, then dragging the bleeding carcass to a trapdoor in the living room, beneath which is a dirt pit whose depths are piled with lye-covered, rotting remains. He always seemed a little different, I’d say when they interviewed me about him. But I never thought I was living next door to a serial killer.

Other times, there’s a different quality to his tirades. The anger’s there, but it’s tinged with desperation. These are the times when I worry, despite myself. I’ve often thought about asking one of my Japanese-speaking friends to listen in on one of the extended rants and provide a translation. But a big part of me is afraid of what I’d learn. Do I, as a close neighbor, have any responsibility for the Screamer? I’ve never seen anyone enter or leave his house. I’ve never even seen him. What would I do if suddenly, one day, the shouting stopped?

*

When I was a kid in junior high school, I was deeply unpopular. This is not surprising. I probably would have disliked me, too, had I had several classes with me and had to share a table at lunchtime. In class pictures from elementary school, I’m easily identifiable as the shaggy-haired kid in too-small, brown plaid pants with buck teeth and an overbite so severe I could have eaten an ear of corn, as they say where I’m from, through a chain link fence. Usually my picture is slightly blurred, as if I’d been moving as the photo was snapped, which I probably was.

I was an energetic kid. Actually, I was way beyond energetic. I had a condition that in those days doctors used to call “hyperactivity” or, when they really wanted to fuck with your parents’ heads, “MBD,” which stood for “minimal brain dysfunction.” Today they’d say I suffered from an acronymic euphemism known as ADHD. Simply put, I was hyper. To the kids at Harbor View Middle School, though, I was a spaz.

(more…)

Across the street from where I live, there’s a picturesque little house with a clay tile roof, dark wooden-framed facade, and gracefully arching eaves in the Japanese style. This is the home of the man I’ve come to call the Screamer.

When I imagine what he looks like, I picture a sinewy older gentleman in his underwear, his hair an unkempt spray of dirty white. In my imagination, the TV’s set to the History Channel, and he ashes into a plastic TV dinner tray that’s piled high with the crooked butts of dead cigarettes.

This is all just conjecture, of course. If it’s as cold in the Screamer’s house as it is in mine, he’s probably wearing something other than just his underwear or he’d be unconscious within minutes. Venturing into the unheated hinterlands of a typical Japanese home without the proper gear in winter is like jumping into the North Atlantic in swim trucks. You’d have to be very brave or very foolish.

And maybe he’s a beer drinker, I don’t know. Judging by the hours the Screamer keeps, he’s either retired or living on the generosity of the Japanese government. He has a cigarette voice, though. That much I’m sure of.

Once he’s begun, he usually holds forth for 15 or 20 minutes, though he’s flirted with the upper thirties. This happens I guess three or four times a day on average, sometimes more. The Screamer is not on a schedule. Occasionally he starts in at midday, other times he cranks it up at midafternoon or dinnertime. Often he’s punching in at two or three in the morning, then again literally at the crack of dawn, baying to bring the roof down. I keep earplugs beside my bed for just this reason. Whatever it’s about, there’s no point in both of us losing sleep over it.

This has been going on for five months.

When the Screamer is operating on all cylinders, I’m pretty sure everyone on my block can hear him. The difference between them and me is that they can presumably understand him. They don’t have to wonder. Me, I have no idea what he’s yelling about. It sounds important. Though almost anything sounds important when it’s delivered at the top of an invisible person’s lungs in a foreign language. For all I know he’s raving about the weather. But I don’t think so.

In between sessions, I sit in my one warm room and wonder about the Screamer. What could a person find so irritating that he’s got to yell about it at top volume for 15 minutes roughly every six hours? If the street construction crew from last fall were still out there, I could maybe understand. I’d probably be doing the same thing, having by now been driven completely insane by the machine that cuts through concrete and its evil operator. But those sadists moved on months ago to another unlucky neighborhood several blocks away.

I’ve considered that maybe it’s the talking trucks. These are a small fleet of vehicles outfitted with loudspeakers on their roofs that pack the wallop of air-raid sirens. The trucks are driven at a crawl through the neighborhood while blasting impossibly loud recordings of somebody speaking Japanese in the kind of monotone usually reserved for professors of statistics and automated messaging services. The movement of the vehicles creates a Doppler effect that gives the speeches, whatever they’re about, the eerie quality of messages from Satan, if Satan were a statistics professor.

The talking trucks come through several times a week. Each time I hear one coming, I’m tempted to splash ketchup on my ears and run out into the street, frantically waving the truck away, ketchup leaking from my ears down my neck. When the truck doesn’t turn around, I’d fall to the ground in front of it, writhing in agony. I figure it’s worth a shot.

Maybe, I’ve thought, he’s a dog person who’s been forced to care for a relation’s cat for an extended period. Cats will sometimes have that effect on people. Deliberately.

I’ve eliminated the possibility that he’s a rabid sports fan whose favorite team is having the worst season in its, or any other team’s, entire history. Likewise, I’ve dismissed theories involving repeatedly stubbed toes and misplaced keys. I’m at a loss to explain it. Is it a single thing that constantly pricks at him? Or is he set off by a whole catalogue of events that happen throughout the course of each day?

Out here where I live, the dense sprawl of the city’s bland industrial center gives way to residential suburbs speckled with rice fields. The streets are narrow, without sidewalks, and the tiny houses are packed together like teeth. In front of every home, no matter how small, there’s a pocket-sized Japanese garden instead of a yard, separated from the street and the houses to either side by a low concrete wall.

Their owners obsess over these little patches of land. Were a typical American family to find itself with the same amount of yard space, they’d set about filling it with a barbecue grill, bird-shit covered plastic deck chairs, an inflatable wading pool, and a crumbling dead Christmas tree skeleton.

But the Japanese person’s relationship to this space is different. For my neighbors, a garden is an idealized representation of the living world, a microcosm of the relationship between people and nature. The result is a little like a work of art: sculpted trees and shrubs, stone lanterns, rocks and gravel, a clutch of bamboo, a little stream or waterfall with a few koi kissing the surface of a tiny pond. Each element, from the trees to the rocks and even the moss on them, has been carefully selected and arranged just so, like a painting. It’s supposed to be a place for stillness and contemplation, a little Zen zone where one can let go of worries and concerns for a little while and think about how big the universe is and how little we, and our problems, are.

In front of the Screamer’s house, the low little wall is there, but it’s empty inside, just bare dirt and dead grass. It’s like a garden waiting to happen. But it never does.

Usually the Screamer sounds angry. Sometimes I can hear him pounding on the walls. His voice jumps with rage, like bursts from a mortar. It has the tone of someone who is, say, moments away from plunging a sharp instrument repeatedly through the ribs, neck and eyeballs of another person, then dragging the bleeding carcass to a trapdoor in the living room, beneath which is a dirt pit whose depths are piled with lye-covered, rotting remains. He always seemed a little different, I’d say when they interviewed me about him. But I never thought I was living next door to a serial killer.

Other times, there’s a different quality to his tirades. The anger’s there, but it’s tinged with desperation. These are the times when I worry, despite myself. I’ve often thought about asking one of my Japanese-speaking friends to listen in on one of the extended rants and provide a translation. But a big part of me is afraid of what I’d learn. Do I, as a close neighbor, have any responsibility for the Screamer? I’ve never seen anyone enter or leave his house. I’ve never even seen him. What would I do if suddenly, one day, the shouting stopped?

*

When I was a kid in junior high school, I was deeply unpopular. This is not surprising. I probably would have disliked me, too, had I had several classes with me and had to share a table at lunchtime. In class pictures from elementary school, I’m easily identifiable as the shaggy-haired kid in too-small, brown plaid pants with buck teeth and an overbite so severe I could have eaten an ear of corn, as they say where I’m from, through a chain link fence. Usually my picture is slightly blurred, as if I’d been moving as the photo was snapped, which I probably was.

I was an energetic kid. Actually, I was way beyond energetic. I had a condition that in those days doctors used to call “hyperactivity” or, when they really wanted to fuck with your parents’ heads, “MBD,” which stood for “minimal brain dysfunction.” Today they’d say I suffered from an acronymic euphemism known as ADHD. Simply put, I was hyper. To the kids at Harbor View Middle School, though, I was a spaz.

(more…)

Indignant environmentalists have had plenty of grist for the mill recently with the hot debate over Japan’s renewed slaughter of endangered fin, minke, and humpback whales in the Antarctic for what they call “scientific research.” Said research is a loophole in the 1986 worldwide moratorium on whaling that allows the killing of a couple hundred of the animals each year. The results of the research seem to be fairly elusive, mostly along the lines of the Relationship of Explosive-Harpoon Size to Tastiness in Intelligent Cetaceans. But for Japanese officials, it’s a matter of honor and national pride, on a level with asking Texans to give up rodeos.

For Jouzu Bagofdonuts, though, the issue seems to be purely academic. Whale meat or kujira, I’m told, is disgusting: oily, tough, and tasteless. At a class I taught last weekend with five adult Japanese women, a couple of them recalled eating it after WWII, when there was little else available. Now, they’d sooner eat a whole raw octopus. (Actually, scratch that metaphor. Whole raw octopus is a treat here.) My point is that they couldn’t care less whether they have ready access to whale meat in the kitchen.

In any event, I’m told I can find canned kujira at any major supermarket. I’m not crazy about contributing to the appearance of demand for the stuff by buying it. But I feel kind of obligated to try it. For the record, I’ve eaten raw whale before – in the summer of 1987, which I spent in an Eskimo community called Barrow in northern Alaska. It was called muktuk there, which is a pretty good description of what I remember it tasting like.

I’ll report back when I’ve tasted the local variety. The whole raw octopus is, I’m afraid, not going to happen, so there’s no point waiting for it.

My Australian friend Will, who lives in Osaka, may have the only unheated toilet seat in all Japan. I don’t know for sure, not having sat on every toilet in the country, but he’s definitely got the only unheated toilet seat I’ve seen or heard of, which is saying something.

That might sound like an insignificant detail. But after five months of heated toilets, sitting on one that’s not heated is a startling experience. When it’s an Arctic zone out there in the apartment, and you’re mentally and physically prepared for a nice, toasty seat to mitigate in some small fashion the effect of watching your breath freeze into solid form while you’re doing your business, it’s an unpleasant surprise to suddenly find yourself squatting on a horseshoe-shaped block of ice instead of an 85-degree ring of warm coziness. In fact, it’s just the sort of thing that can cause a stunned sphincter to shut up like a fist and refuse to cooperate, forcing you to go through the whole miserable ordeal again an hour later once everybody’s had a chance to calm down and recover from the initial shock.

Heated toilet seats are a fundamental part of existence in Japan, in much the same way that heated homes are fundamental in the U.S. Obviously, a comfortably warm toilet seat is no replacement for a comfortably warm apartment, but it’s something, and when it’s not there, you notice it.

Japan goes rather wild for toilets, actually. Many times you can find an electronic box about the size of a remote control, which in fact it is, next to them, bristling with buttons, dials, switches, and cryptic Japanese characters – the brain of the toilet, as it were, giving the user access to a vast and bewildering array of posterior-themed effects. Assuming you can master the controls, you can summon music to help you relax, a squirt of warm water up your backside – in jet, pulse, or spray form, directed at the specific nether region of your choice – a gentle blast of hot air, a deodorizing splash, massage options, and for all I know a nice pat down with baby powder, I wouldn’t be at all surprised. I try not to mess around with the control box; you never know what you’re gonna get. It’s just not worth the risk, in my opinion.

Contrast this with the other most common such appliance in this country, what natives delicately call the “Japanese-style” toilet. Here’s a fun experiment: approach anyone you know who’s been to Japan, and ask them what they think about the traditional Japanese-style toilet. Guy, girl, doesn’t matter. Watch their face and their body language as they compose their answer, and as you’re doing so imagine that you just asked them what they think about eating live cockroaches. You’ll find the real and imagined responses are indistinguishable. That’s because the hi-tech, space-age, Jetsons toilets are limited pretty much exclusively to private homes and big hotels and restaurants. Far and away the most common public toilet here is the Japanese-style variety, which uses a different technology, one dating from roughly the Pleistocene Era.

What I’m talking about is a narrow, rectangular porcelain hole in the floor. Sitting is not remotely an option, and don’t even think about kicking back with a magazine, because you’re going to need both hands for balance. The specific means by which any waste material relocates itself from its position inside your body to the bottom of this shallow dish on the floor two and a half feet away is entirely up to you, and you’re allowed to be as creative as you like, though you’ll have to do so without the use of handholds or any other kind of support.

When you’re finished with this adventure, you may or may not find that you share the stall with a roll of toilet paper, so it’s best to check in advance. These devices do flush, but the water emerges from one side of the bowl and drains out the other side, grudgingly dragging with it anything in the center than might happen to be lying about. It’s as humbling a bathroom experience as you’re likely to have outside of a camping trip.

But Will’s toilet is just a plain old, garden-variety western crapper, mounted in the floor uncomfortably close to the wall it faces, so that there’s only about 18 inches of maneuvering space between the two. When sitting down is called for, a person has to first drop his or her pants, then wedge himself into this space and make like a Hindi contortionist to end up on the seat itself. There’s the slow way, which requires the use of abdominal muscles evolution hasn’t yet provided human beings, and there’s the fast way, which basically involves falling backward. Hence the shock. As with the Japanese-style version, the nature of this process precludes reading material. Though who really wants to curl up with a book on an icebound toilet seat in a noxious, closet-sized room with the ambiance of a walk-in freezer? Color me uninterested.

Still, when you gotta go, you gotta go, and on this particular evening I was committed to going. In about two hours, I had something approximating a date, and rule number one with a date is Never Forget To Take a Dump Beforehand. Nothing takes the luster off a romantic evening like excusing yourself right after you’ve polished off a rack of ribs, a bowl of slaw, a pile of home fries, two ears of corn, and a heaping bowlful of ‘nilla pudding for a ten-minute trip to the little boys room, from which you return sweating. She’s no dummy. She knows there are only two things that could require ten full minutes in the bathroom, and neither one of them gets you into her apartment at the end of the night. The only real competition this rule has for the number-one spot is Never Forget Your Wallet, but the penalties for flouting either one of these commandments are bad enough that the difference between them is negligible.

During the early part of the previous Monday night – New Year’s Eve, as it turns out – Will and I had found ourselves at a bar in Osaka’s Umeda district called Captain Kangaroo. It’s a divey sort of smallish place with an antique shop’s with of generic Western bric-a-brac strewn over the walls – old movie posters, cowboy hats, neon signs for American beers, roadsigns, that sort of thing. The name was a mystery: there was nothing remotely maritime about the place, nor did it seem to have any visible Australian motif.

When I hear “Captain Kangaroo,” my mind snaps immediately to the long-running children’s television program on PBS from my youth. I wasn’t sure how I felt about watching the calendar tick over from 2007 to 2008 in a place I associated with Baby Duck, Mr. Moose, the sexually ambiguous Mr. Green Jeans, a bunch of sock puppets, and a grandfatherly figure whose only qualification for being a captain of anything was that he wore a red coat with great big pockets.

But Will had raved over an early-evening deal the place offered: a burger and a beer for ¥1,000. That’s a bargain, especially in the world’s eighth’s most expensive city. Captain Kangaroo is also apparently a favorite of Osaka’s non-native population, and the chance to speak English with someone other than Will on New Year’s Eve had a definite allure.

Five minutes later we were seated at the bar, bottles of beer in front of us, and burgers – real ones, I was assured – on the way. We were almost alone in the place. Sitting a seat over from me at the bar was a doughy, curly-haired man with a mouth of teeth that looked like a train wreck from which there’d been no survivors. He was dressed in jeans, penny loafers, and a tucked-in flannel shirt – the kind of person you’d expect to see using hand signals on a bicycle. He spent a few minutes glancing over at us and nuzzling his beer in a pensive way that made it clear he was working his way up to starting a conversation.

“Cheers, then,” he finally said.

We lifted our bottles. “Cheers.”

Will immediately leaned over toward me. “Kiwi,” he whispered.

“Twooooooo thousand eight,” the guy said after a moment, as if this were a profoundly insightful observation.

“Yup,” I said.

“Ten years I been in this country. Come here for a six-week job in 1997 to cut up cars fer a comp’ny what ships ‘em back to New Zealand.” Will elbowed me in the rips. “Just never left, y’know? Tell ya the truth, I never thought I’d be here this long. Still cuttin’ up cars, too. Funny how life works out, innit?”

“I suppose it is.”

“I like it good enough, though. Food’s alright, long’s ya like fish.” He took a sip. “Bloody hard to find a decent girl, though.”

“Mm,” I said.

“Gets a bit lonely sometimes, it does,” he said after a pause.

Please don’t do this to me, I thought.

“You married?” he asked.

“Nope,” I said. “So how ‘bout those Osaka Tigers? They win?” I had no idea what I was talking about. Was it even baseball season in Japan?

“Me either,” he mumbled into his beer.

“Twooooooo thousand eight,” I said.

“When I came out here ten years ago,” he went on, “all my mates back home said I was sure to come back home with a Japanese girl on my arm. ‘Wait and see,’ they told me. ‘They go bananas fer western fellas over there. Even the western lassies won’t be able to get enough of ya.’ Sounded pretty good at the time.” He paused for a sigh. “But it’s bloody hard, I tell ya. The lassies here are all crazy, is the problem.”

“Mm,” I said. Inside me, alarms were screaming, klaxons were sounding, and sirens were wailing.

“Maybe tonight, eh?” he sighed. “New Year’s Eve and all.”

“You bet.”

I looked at Will. Either help me out here or kill me, my eyes pleaded, but do one or the other quickly.

Will took a sip of his beer and cleared his throat. “So there was this Australian fella walking down a country road in New Zealand one day,” he started. “He happens to glance over the fence and he sees a farmer goin’ at it with a sheep. The Aussie’s quite taken aback by this, of course, so he climbs the fence and walks over to the guy. Taps ‘im on the shoulder and says, ‘You know mate, back home, we shear those.’ The Kiwi looks around at him, panic in ‘is face, and says, ‘I’m not bloody shearing this with no one!’”

Will laughed, probably for longer than was strictly necessary, and our burgers arrived. He was right, it was a real burger, the first I’d seen in Japan. A little more on the rare side than I usually cared for, but I wasn’t complaining. “Seems like all the best Kiwi jokes are about sheep,” Will said, tucking in.

“Yeah,” the Kiwi said, taking a sip and staring straight ahead, “we’ve noticed.” (more…)

Canon PowerShot SD800 serial number IXUS8501S, admired documenter of Japanese sights, people, vistas, and odd foods, was pronounced dead in Fukui Prefecture on Tuesday, January 15. It was four months and two days old.

The cause was prolonged water damage resulting in impaired cognitive functions, which led to an advanced vegetative state from which the camera never recovered. The previous day, at a special facility in Kyoto, attending physicians announced there was no chance of resuscitation for the young camera and pronounced it dead. The body was immediately returned to the next of kin, Patrick Sharbaugh, a current resident of Fukui and the camera’s closest living companion.

Best known for its photographs of famous Japanese locations such as Kanazawa, Takayama, Kyoto, Kamikochi, and Nagano, the camera was also hailed for its photos of less well-known sites, including the Ichijodani Asakura Clan Ruins, Eiheiji Temple, and many locations around the camera’s lifelong home of Fukui Prefecture. Throughout its brief life, Canon IXUS8501S was irrestably drawn to images of sunsets, crashing surf, mountain peaks obscured by drifting fog, small children walking with umbrellas, sleeping people on trains, cloud formations seen from airplane windows, and postcard-perfect landcapes just behind and to the side of attractive women.

Of particular note were a series of pictures taken in Seoul, South Korea – a trip for which the camera had only a single day to prepare. Those mostly spontaneous, handheld photos of street vendors, rusted bicycles, autumn leaves, and frolicking schoolchildren remain some of the camera’s most popular work, if not as original as the efforts of some of its contemporaries. It was also lauded in broad circles for its ambitious documentation of a 2007 summit of Mount Arashima-dake in eastern Gifu Prefecture, where it survived several near-fatal slips, falls, and collapses in its dogged ascent of the 1,500-meter peak.

Canon IXUS8501S was additionally known for its many portraits of Mr. Sharbaugh, with whom it usually traveled. Often taken from less than an arm’s distance, these portraits provide an intimate look at the travels, wrinkles, and, often, the nostrils of Mr. Sharbaugh, who, like the camera, came to Japan by way of America.

The camera’s ultimately fatal accident occurred just prior to a Christmas party in the small town of Sabae, when it slipped during a bicycle ride to the supermarket and fell into a Tupperware container of shrimp sauce. The camera never regained consciousness.

“I honestly don’t know how I’ll ever be able to replace it,” a despondant Mr. Sharbaugh said, after the announcement. “Literally – I don’t know. It was, like, $200. I don’t have that kind of cash laying around right now. Also, it was a birthday gift. I can’t tell you how much this sucks.”

The camera is survived only by Mr. Sharbaugh. Its photographs will be on view to the public at Mr. Sharbaugh’s blog indefinitely. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that condolences be sent in the form of cash via PayPal to psharbaugh@yahoo.com.

Canon IXUS8501S will be laid to rest at a small, private ceremony at the oceanside cliffs of Tojimbo in Mikuni next weekend, when it will be doused in kerosene and hurled into the sea, which should be pretty cool. Photographs are welcome.

Growing up on the tongue of sand, marsh, and pluff mud known as Charleston, S.C., I was aware from an early age that seafood there is far more than just food; it’s practically a religion. So I never thought I’d find myself among a people whose devotion to seafood makes coastal Southerners’ fancy for it seem like tepid apathy. There is nothing that swims, crawls, creeps, floats, bobs, dives, drifts, or filters that a Japanese person won’t eat, often whole and raw. This is a country whose per capita consumption of octopus is probably double that of chicken but still less than its taste for glistening, Twinkie-sized sacs of raw fish eggs. And don’t even get me started on squid.

Despite an 18-year-old international ban on hunting whales, Japan kills hundreds each year for what it claims is “scientific research.” Curiously, all the “research” ends up on supermarket shelves. I’ve never seen any, though, and I haven’t met anyone here who eat the stuff, which is saying something.

I read this morning on John Tierney’s science blog for The New York Times about the the ongoing battle between Japan’s commercial whaling association and the rest of the civilized word, including some remarkably tenacious Greenpeace activists. Straight out of the Department of Tortured Rationalizations, Japanese officials have offered this gem of an argument to bolster its case: according to one Japanese official, the whales are “depleting fish stocks.”

Something tells me this guy wasn’t on the debate team in high school.

But he’s not finished. In his closing argument, the guy also manages to squeeze in a dig at the Koreans, which always gets you bonus points in Japan.

“Yoshimasa Hayashi, a member of Japanese Parliament from the ruling party, crystallized the Japanese position in an interview with the BBC. ‘In Japan we have pet dogs,’ he said. ‘But we don’t tell the Koreans to stop eating dogs. Nor should people tell us to stop eating whales.’