Tokyo Adventure On Pause

Well I'm off to Boston for my sisters wedding. I'm very excited to see family and friends back home. Blogging is a quite new experience for me, I didn't really have a clear plan when I started this thing so I thought it would be interesting to look back on what I've written so far.

What, you didn't think there would be statistics?

In any case here's a few of my favorites posts in each category.

Stories

My recent Nagano Aventure and climbing Mt. Fuji have been my biggest adventures so far. But I personally thought my movie theater trip was quite good although it wasn't read that much.

Random Pictures

This ones real easy the cat, the baseball poster, and the chinese restaurant. I have to admit this category has gotten a bit weaker lately, I'll have to do a better job keeping my eye out for stuff.

Interesting Stuff

Nomihodai is the clear favorite here, but I also though my post on Katakana was good.

Ruminations

My recent what am I doing here post is my favorite but probably has the least page views of the category.

IYI-Economics

Really only 2 (2 too many perhaps?) Trade and Housewife FX Traders.

So that's it so far. As always I would really appreciate feedback. I see the page views, I'm curious what people think! The more brutally honest the better, am I just full of myself?

Anyway I was working this evening and I had to get a document together before I left, I decided to grab dinner while I was waiting for someone to produce some figures for me. I sat down at the restaurant, looked at the menu figured out what I wanted, took 30 seconds to look up the correct reading for the kanji for the food I wanted and ordered. I was sitting there thinking how nice it was going to be back in the states to just be able to order food without making a whole scene. Then I realized actually my last interaction just now was almost routine and wasn't really difficult at all. Baby steps...

Chasing a Crazy Filipino Guy Around the Japanese Alps - Nagano Adventure Part 2

Part 1 here

My alarm went off at 4:30 and I was immediately awake. The plan was to have breakfast by 5, grab a cab to the base of the hike, and be on the trail by 6am. The four of us were on a fairly tight schedule we had to be back at the hotel by 4pm to get on the bus. The rest of the people on the trip, including my 3 roommates, were still asleep. Their wakeup call would be a few hours later. Most were planning on heading up to a mountain lake called Happoike then on to the summit of a mountain called Karamatsu. Those who did more then their proportionate share of work finishing off the bottle of tequila last night, might only make it to Happoike.

After breakfast we piled in the cab and took off towards the mountains. The road up to the base of the trail was impossibly narrow and snaked its way through a dense forest up the mountain. The three of us sharing the back seat kept lunging into one another as the cab swerved around hairpin turn after hairpin turn.

At the base of the trail was a single building that sold supplies to hikers about to attempt the hike up Shirouma.

On schedule, we started on the trail just after 6am. It was fairly easy going at first, but even just a mile or so into the hike we had already started to get a look at some great scenery.

We were hiking up a ravine, surrounded on all sides by deep green forrest. At the end of the ravine lay the great snow field.

We made good time up to the snow field. We even allowed ourselves a 1 minute break to take a picture of the group.

From left to right, Stefan, this guy, Stevan, and Ricky the leader of the trip. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to come up with the best punchline to, "A German, American, Australian, and Filipino are climbing a mountain in Japan..."

Now I know what you're thinking, "Is he wearing pink camo shorts?" Answer. Yes. But it's worth a quick digression. See in Japan there is a whole fad going on to be stylish while doing stuff outdoors. These shorts, if there was any doubt, are stylish.

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

Prosecution rests. Moving on.

Once we got on the snow field we picked up the pace. Ricky suddenly just turned it on and took off, leaving the rest of us to try and catch up.

I had kind of figured in my head we would all just regroup at the top of the snow field, but when I reached the top he was already off scrambling up the steep ravine that was the crux of the hike. This was also the most dangerous section of the trail. Steep walls on all sides with loose, snow, rocks, and boulders make it a rather hazardous place to be. Every few years some unlucky climbers are killed by rock fall in the area.

At this point I started to make a concerted effort to try and catch up with Ricky. I charged straight up the trail scrambling over things as fast as I could. After about 20 minutes or so I managed to get close enough for him to turn around and yell

"We are making great time! If we keep this up we could do Happoike in the afternoon!"

Jesus is this guy fucking crazy? I thought. Before I could say anything he was back off. Catching up to Ricky-who as it turns out is a serious triathlete and marathoner- was not going to happen.

I contented myself just trying not to stay to far behind, which still required moving at a very rapid pace. At this point we were well over half-way up the mountain and we hadn't even been hiking for more then two hours. Once we reached the crest of the ravine where things started to level off a bit and we could see the ridge above that led to the summit. We suddenly found ourselves in a sea of bright green mountain grass dotted with yellow, purple, and red wild flowers.

It was gorgeous...

Once we reached the top of the ridge we were treated to spectacular scenery of the surrounding mountains.

And off to the west the mountains gave way to the Sea of Japan (That would be the one between Japan and Russia).

The summit itself came to sharp point and was perched next to dramatic cliffs.

We made it to the top in just over 3 hours, covering over 5,600 vertical ft. We didn't stay at the summit too long, we had decided to actually attempt to try and make it up to Happoike before we had to get back to the hotel at 4. It was a bit after 9:30am when we started back down the mountain.

We moved quickly.

We made it back down to the snowfield and were quickly overtaken by a cloud rolling down through the ravine.

The cool mist was actually quite pleasant.

We made it back down to the base of the trail before 12:30. We even had time for a quick celebratory beer before we piled back into a cab. Ricky had worn off one of the soles to his hiking boots on the way down so we had to make a pit stop at the hotel in order for him to change boots.

Ricky told us that from the top of the gondola and two chairlifts the hike to Happoike was supposed to take 90 minutes. That of course would mean we wouldn't have time to go there and back and be at the hotel by 4pm. However, he thought we could do it in 30 minutes. Neither Stevan, Stefan, or I bothered to argue with him. In a tempt the fates kind of move Ricky decided to leave his pack behind since this was going to be such a short hike.

We got on the gondola about 1:15. Just before we got on the first chairlift we started to feel a few drops of rain. I decided to put on my rain jacket, which turned out to be rather prescient as the few drops turned into a full downpour while we were on the chairlift. Ricky's jacket was in his pack, which was nice and dry and back at the hotel.

By the time we reached the top of the lift we were all fairly soaked so we stopped in the mountain cafe to dry off, get coffee, and assess our options. We saw a small patch of blue sky in the distance and the rain seemed to have lightened up a bit. I had an extra soft shell jacket in addition to my rain jacket (after Fuji I was big into layers) which I lent to Ricky. Not fully waterproof but better then nothing.

We decided to continue on.

On the third chairlift we saw a bunch of people from the trip on the way down who,

A - were shocked to see us

B - thought we were crazy

This may have had something to do with the fact that we were the only ones going up the chairlift at the moment and the break in the heavy rain proved to be temporary. However, having come this far, rain or no, we were determined to see the lake. We reached the top of the lift and saw a long line of people waiting to get on the lift to go back down. Many without any rain gear at all.

Having lost some valuable time on the way up, we took off along the ridge-line trail at a mixed running pace. We made it to Happoike lake in just about 40 minutes.

And would you believe that literally the moment the lake came into view the sun parted the clouds and shone through.

It was some serious double rainbow shit. The lake itself was beautiful, and over the course of the 15 minutes or so we hung around the sky just opened up around us.

The lake reflects the mountains around it. Mt. Shirouma is there on the right. Where we were earlier that morning. The whole scene was stunning.

It got us to thinking what else would look good reflected in a pristine mountain lake, surrounded by scenes of natural beauty?

Let's just say the sun and the moon made an appearance.

We made it back down to the hotel by 4pm and even had time for a quick onsen and to pick up a few beers at the 7-11 for the ride back.

Quite the day.

Also note I stole a bunch of the pictures from Stefan (it's the better ones if you must know).

It's Like Yosemite but with Monkeys - Nagano Adventure Part 1

This past weekend the temperature was in the mid to high 90s in Tokyo. The concrete jungle was a virtual oven, which was unfortunate for everyone in Tokyo.

I managed to escape the city for a trip up to Nagano prefecture. Nagano is probably best known outside of Japan for hosting the 1998 winter Olympics. The trip was organized by Tokyo Gaijin's an organization kind of like BSSC back in Boston that organizes outdoor/athletic/social events specifically geared towards foreigners in Tokyo.

The leader of the trip was a Filipino guy named Ricky who also happened to be the founder. He told a few of us that he used to organize trips like this for his friends and then eventually decided to make a job out of it.

The trip started when we boarded a bus in Shinjuku early Saturday morning and headed out towards Komikochi. Komikochi is kind of a wilderness park/resort. The first day of the trip we would be spend leisurely exploring Komikochi. The second we would be in Hakuba, a ski resort town in Japan's Northern Alps or the Hida range, where participants had two options for hiking in the surrounding mountains.

Komikochi actually reminded my quite a bit of Yosemite in California. A river valley surrounded by mountains and dramatic alpine scenery.

I played around with the cool hipstamatic app on my phone which recreates Polaroid style pictures.
Also like Yosemite, you're not exactly roughing it just wandering around. There are plenty of Hotels and souvenir shops to cater to tourists. Also two types of locally brewed beer were available. One sold on the north side of the river one on the south.

Of course Komikochi has one thing Yosemite doesn't.. monkeys!

Late in the day we suddenly stumbled on to a whole pack of them that were just hanging around.

After exploring the valley, and sampling the local beer we boarded the bus for the two hour drive up to Hakuba.

At our Japanese style hotel we were treated to a huge all you can eat shabu shabu meal. Shabu shabu is very similar to Chinese hot pot, where you dip uncooked meat and vegetables into a pot of boiling oil. It was delicious and we ate our fill.

The first option for tomorrow's hike involved taking a gondola and two chair lifts up to the top of the Hakuba ski resort then hiking up a ridge to a mountain lake called Happoike, and if people were more ambitious to continue on for another two hours to the peak of Karamatsudake.

The second option was a much more difficult hike up Mt Shirouma. At about 10,000ft Shirouma is the tallest mountain in the Hida range, the 26th tallest in Japan. We would have to get up and down the 5,600 vertical ft by 4pm to catch the bus back to Tokyo. Because of the ambitious pace we would have to make up the mountain (and the 4:30am wake up) only 4 people including Ricky decided to take on the challenge. I was one of the 4.

After dinner we settled down for a few drinks in the Hotel lobby. Someone broke out a bottle of tequila and announced their intention not to bring in home with them.

I headed back to my room around 11:30, and made myself comfortable on the Tatami mat floor along with my four roommates. I would need to rest for what turned out to be quite an adventure tomorrow...

Tokyo Street Braille

One of the first things you'll notice in Tokyo is the yellow lines on the sidewalks with little raised grooves and bumps you see snaking their way all over the city, like a super version of the freedom trail, or that green line from those Fidelity commercials (will the trail lead you to your sound financial future, answer - no).

It turns out they are actually a form a street braille to help the blind navigate the city. What's really astonishing is how extensive the use of this system is. These lines are in every single train station, no exceptions. They can be found on big roads, and small streets.

Pretty much everywhere you would need to navigate around a lot of people. It's particularly valuable because things rarely move in straight lines in this city.

The braille has a bit of a system to it. Tiles with linear ridges for straight walking and tiles with round bumps for turns, traffic intersections, stairs, etc.

Traffic intersections also have audio cues as to when it's safe to cross.

See in the picture below that the braille path leads to the stairs by the railing, and picks up again at the bottom.
I would just like to reiterate how impressive it is to implement a system this universal on the scale of a city like Tokyo.

Although to be honest I'm at a loss for why it's all painted bright yellow.

And then I found myself accosted by a gang of fourteen year old girls...

In Japan if a kid is old enough to walk he's old enough to take the train to school by himself. Every day during my commute I see tons of the groups of kids of all ages making their way to school. Of course because this is Japan every single one of them is impeccably behaved. There is no shouting, if they talk its usually in hushed whispers to one another.

Seriously, everyone on the trains is incredibly respectful, no one talks on their cellphone, no one yells, even wasted salarymen seem to pull themselves together before getting on the train.

So it was a little strange this morning when I was standing on the train on my way to work when I looked over and found a group of 10 or so 14 year old girls laughing at me. I tried to ignore them, but they keep giggling to themselves. Eventually one of them waves at me and tells me in Japanese to look up. It turns out I'm standing under this

See the resemblance

To these girls this was very, very funny.

In case I didn't get it they said

"onaji kao" or "same face" followed by more laughing

I responded with

"wakarimashita" or "gotcha"

Then I found myself facing a barrage of questions from the whole group

Where are you from?

Where are you going?

How old are you?

What's your name?

Do you have a girlfriend?

I do my best to field the questions with my kindergarden level Japanese. Fortunately I'm saved by my stop before I'm totally overwhelmed.

So What Am I Doing Here?

Me: Yea I'm definitely interested in going to Japan

Future Boss: Well if you're still interested when you're sober I'm going to send you an email Monday

9 months, 6,710 miles, a massive earthquake and tsunami later...

To be honest I didn't really have any ambition to move to Japan before this opportunity came along. So what am I doing here?

Well the most literal answer to that question would be working- for those really interested I'll be giving it the old college try to explain what I do in the least dull way I can think of in a bit. The opportunity came along rather unexpectedly, to come and work in Japan and I took it.

Why Japan? I mean I was gainfully employed with a career doing something I didn't hate, in cool fun city where I had lots of friends and family, and a really, really sweet apartment. Again, the easy answer is that it was a good career move. I would get experience, and make connections that would open a whole new set of doors for me, while at the same time preserving all the inroads I had made back in Boston.

But the more honest answer was that things were becoming a little too comfortable. It was easy to see my future kind of unfolding on autopilot. In my routine time seemed to fly by quicker and quicker things I had planned on doing kept getting pushed back. My trip to Brazil last fall helped crystalize this a bit in my mind, time slowed down, each day brought a new and unique experience. Moving to a new place would be a way to break up the routine, slow things down force myself to figure out new ways of doing things. The observation that time seems to speed up when your in a routine is hardly original, here is author Steven Johnson, via Ben Casanocha

And then there's the passage of time. Another old friend -- my oldest, in fact -- wrote an email to me after I told him the news of our move. We've both been in New York for two decades, and we are both watching our kids growing up at lightning speed. "Change like this slows down time," he wrote. When you're in your routine, frequenting the same old haunts, time seems to accelerate -- was it just four years ago that our youngest son was born? But all the complexities of moving -- figuring out where to live, getting there, and then navigating all the new realities of the changed environment -- means that the minutes and hours that once passed as a kind of background process, the rote memory of knowing your place, suddenly are thrust into your conscious awareness. You have to figure it out, and figuring things out makes you aware of the passing days and months more acutely. You get disoriented, or at least you have to think for a while before you can be properly oriented again.

Tokyo is about as different as I could get in the developed world. The language, culture, food, and daily life in general are constantly stimulating and filled with challenges, frustrations, and rewarding experiences. Do the sum of these positive and negative experiences add up to make Tokyo an objectively better place then Boston? Of course not, it's a silly question. Without a doubt my life is more difficult and challenging here, but that's not because of Tokyo itself, but because of the experiences I bring (or don't bring) to it.

Tokyo certainly has the potential to be just as comfortable as Boston, likely even more so. But to me right now, it's still a jungle, and that makes it quite an exciting place to be. I hadn't really considered moving to Tokyo before, but now that I'm here it's difficult for me to imagine another place that I would rather be. I like that Tokyo is in many ways inaccessible to foreigners, it will take time, knowledge and experience to find the really good stuff. There's a sense of pride about living in a place that doesn't offer up all it's treasures to just anyone just passing through.

So anyway I promised I would try and explain what it is I technically do here, this bit is strictly IYI. Really I only continue because people in Tokyo seem to be genuinely surprised that I'm here as a young person doing something not related to teaching English.

So anyway, I'm an Actuary working for a large multinational insurance company (well technically I'm one test away from being an official one). Now what is an actuary? It's a question, we tend to get a lot, and despite this frequency of the question no one seems to have a good answer and it is a constant source of dread for those of us in the profession. According to the Society of Actuaries website

An actuary is a business professional who analyzes the financial consequences of risk

Sounds sexy right? Sometimes we actuaries have been known to "quantify risk" as well. The main problem I have with this class of definitions is that their primary goal seems to be to impress upon the reader/listener the importance of the profession rather then relating it to them in a way that seems intuitive. Of course virtually no one is impressed when you say this and usually you just convey the sense that you think the reader/listener should be impressed by you, which invariably leads them to think that you are a douche.

To be fair, I don't tend to do much better. My standard bar tailored response is something along the lines of "Oh, I do math, and statistics stuff for an insurance company." You see I've cleverly avoided the "come off like a douche " trap by being dismissive, I recognize that you probably aren't interested in the particulars of what I do, and implicitly support this belief. I've told you just enough to mentally sort me into the bland "professionals" bucket and we can move on to a more interesting topic of conversation.

I believe the root of the problem is that Actuaries belong to a class of professionals which operate in kind of the nuts and bolts of the modern economy. It's the kind of behind the scenes work that rarely, directly interacts with your average person's daily life and for which people have very little intuition.

My theory is that you can sort professions into two broad categories. Those whose professional knowledge would be valuable if you were suddenly stranded on a desert island, and those who would be jostling not to be the first one cannibalized.*

In the first group you have your doctors, engineers, farmers, etc. In the second you have your investment bankers, accountants, actuaries etc. (personally I think the ibanker gets eaten first, he's clearly the most likely to steal your coconut when you're not looking). People have very good intuition about what professions in the first group do because they understand the tangible impact on their lives that they have. The second group is really only valuable in a modern developed economy, defined by laws and professional standards of practice. Their value comes in facilitating the interactions that are necessarily to keep the whole engine running smoothly.

So what do Actuaries facilitate? Actuaries are concerned with a very particular kind of transaction. Specifically when one person wishes to exchange the financial consequences of some future event to some other person. The type of transaction people are most familiar with is insurance. If a fire destroys my factory that will be very expensive for my business, I would like to transfer the financial consequences of that event to someone else so I purchase a fire insurance policy.

Some parties demand compensation for this transfer of risk, like private insurance companies. Some do not, as in the case of government social insurance programs, or companies which view the provision of a pension as a benefit to their employees. But, everyone is concerned with how expensive assuming these risks will eventually be, what regulatory restrictions apply, and what strategies can be employed to make sure the entity in question can be relied upon to pay out future debts.

Actuaries advise these parties either as independent consultants or as employees in their service, as I am. By advise I mean explain explain the financial consequences of entering into a given risk transfer arrangement. In my case I work for an insurance company. In the grand scheme of things the two classes of people I exist as an intermediary between are policy holders or my company's customers and my company's shareholders or owners. Now in reality there are many other intermediaries who separate me from both of those people, insurance agents on one end, and my company's senior management on the other.

On a day to day to day basis what do I do? Well actuaries serve in many capacities at large insurance companies, but I currently work in a pricing area. We develop new products or reprice existing products which may be obsolete or unprofitable. Basically we figure out what the terms and conditions of the contract will be and get regulators and our internal risk management to buy off on what we want to do. In practice these means building models to produce financial projections of proposed transactions, putting together exhibits, writing memos etc. Lot's of the work can be tedious and boring at times, but the work needs to be done with care and the consequences of botching it can be huge (see AIG).

Despite my generally dismissive attitude in my bar tailored actuary description there is actually quite a bit about actuary work I do find interesting. Behind all the spreadsheet work, memos, and tables are some questions that are really impossible to answer. Investigating these things can be interesting, and can often lead to some surprising results. But I think I've gone on long enough already.

Now that I've gotten this out of the way I can go back to finding funny pictures.

*Relax, smart ass, I know this analogy breaks down in all kinds of ways, entertainers, programmers etc. But those people are generally responsible for things people interact with on a daily basis media, computer programs etc.

Odori-don the Dancing Squid Rice Bowl (brace yourself)

Called Odori-don, or the dancing squid, the dish is served with a headless squid on top. Even with it's brain detached it still moves when you pour soy sauce on it.

More info here

umm I'll pass...