Letters to the Editor
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@WT re: Japanese not living in used homes
I asked my friend who spends half his time in Japan why the Japanese are doing that and as usual they have a practical reason. Here’s his reply:
Yes the article was in the Economist, saying that Japanese houses are built to last about 20 years, and then be torn down because the value is in the land not the house, and at least in the pre-bubble in 20 years the land was too valuable to hold what ever you could have afforded to build. This is standard practice here.
Allegedly the Government is passing/has passed some new laws to encourage building houses that will last, we will see. A “second hand” lived in house generally sells for the value of the land and not much more. The Japanese like things new and shiny. These are houses not swords. 99% of the current houses are pre-fab and absolute crap as far as quality is concerned.
The concept of a garage sale where you sell your old crap to the neighbors is simply outside of the local mentality.
Obviously Mr. Timberman has not lived here; if he is rational I can not blame him.
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OT No surprise, more US government torture
New Charges of Gitmo Torture, Time, 2-6-08
In 2005, CIA officials ordered the destruction of videotapes depicting the harsh interrogation of prisoners in the agency's secret overseas prisons. CIA Director Michael Hayden admitted that in December 2007 amid a public debate over the use of "waterboarding" on detainees and whether or not the technique — which simulates drowning — constituted torture. At that time, Hayden said that only a few prisoners were ever subjected to "special interrogation techniques," which can include waterboarding, and that nothing was recorded on video after 2002. That claim is now coming under additional scrutiny, in part due to a classified briefing that will be delivered to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence this Friday. Lawyers representing one current Guantanamo detainee tell TIME that they plan to present evidence that he was subjected to videotaped interrogation, in addition to unspecified "systematic torture" when he was held in secret CIA prisons. The lawyers, from the Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York-based legal non-profit with a long record of advocacy for prisoners at Guantanamo, note that their client has said the videotaping occurred after his arrest in 2003.
http://tinyurl.com/39h77w
Maybe our Dems are slow, but they are taking some action.
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RMP - re: Big Japanese Houses - The Way To The Future
The Japanese Home Builders Association should encourage the marketing of the best of American and English Victorian literature to young Japanese families.
Pretty soon lots of large houses with gables, gun turret rooms, and bowsprit trim hovering over large, airy, wraparound porches will pop up all over the country.
Of course, if these grand mansions are not constructed with anything more substantial than rice paper, more study may be required.
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@ RMP
No, I've never lived In Japan, but I admit I wouldn't mind trying it. Without the language, though -- and I'm too old to learn it now -- I don't suppose I'd learn a whole lot.
What intrigues me is what intrigued my parents' generation; here's a fully developed, modern, and now post-industrial civilization based on premises as different from our own as though it had been -- from our point of view -- transplanted from Mars. One of the factors not mentioned in your friend's reply, for example, but central to the Economist's article was what they deemed the Japanese obsession with personal hygiene. I don't know much more about the subject than is available in Western magazine articles, but it's a thread which runs through them all; everything from the design of their toilets, which seem to have more controls than an espresso machine, to the penchant retainers had in Shogun for tossing our Dutch pilot into a hot tub every time they encountered him.
Ah, well. We used to get a new car every year, and everyone thought the habit completely rational. It was true of our cars what your friend says about Japanese houses -- they were cheap, shoddy and not meant to last. My last car -- a Honda -- lasted eighteen years without visible decay, and was still as functional when I gave it away as it was the day I bought it. Japanese, you see....
In a culture which reached the level of art and craft which the Tokugawa Japanese did, what they care about and don't care about has to be of some interest, wouldn't you say? Especially if we're looking for new approaches to life's universal difficulties ourselves. I don't think we'd want to develop their attitude toward real estate, but still....
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I even enjoy reading the Salon cheap-o readers adds. (hint)
I can't help but say, "I wish Barbara Bush would read the 'beautiful minds' here. What sweet treats.
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To those who like Tao Te Ching tea in the mornings.
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Those who do not speak; Those who speak do not know.
Block the passages, shut the doors, let all sharpness be blunted. All tangles untied, all glare tempered. All dust smoothed. This is called the mysterious leveling. One who has achieved it cannot be either drawn into friendship or repelled, cannot be benefited, cannot be harmed, cannot either be raised or humbled, and for this reason...*( I add and tease)
Let's admit we all only partially 'know'...but I do enjoy W.T.'s and others who add a meditation thought...
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I got to dust the furniture. It's accumulating mouse dung droplets. The dishes need to be licked clean. The laundry needs to be scrubbed at the creek. The good news...I go to a farm learning event but my assignment is to be babysat. I'll loiter at the hotel, swim in the pool, and read children books.
P.S. (There is a new expensive 'dump-shack' near here with a $85,000 spiraling mahogany wood arm-rail. If you go inside ya's want to wail because you sense a lonely suffering...A few earthen 'critters' do understand. Those 'stare' hold-on arm-rant-rails would purchase two homes if ya's invited rural skilled "hicks" to help raise a barn or construct an affordable livable simple palace) The working together is the best fun...yet...O, Al-Kooky monster will eat the chocolate chips and sip your warm goat milk? gads.