Wrong About Japan Read Free Page B

off, I think. Cut their head off if they get too high. So nice they build a simple house, looks simple, butvery expensive to make. And they show just one expensive thing at a time, here in the tokonoma.”
This was the only time I heard this intriguing suggestion, that the origins of the tokonoma lay in the old sumptuary laws.
“These days everyone has stuffu. I show you.”
And he produced from deep inside his coat a little photographic book called Tokyo: A Certain Style , whose hundreds of untidy teenage rooms turned out to be the apartments of Tokyo designers, musicians, software inventors, Swatch collectors, publicists, editors, not one of them displaying anything like what you would call a Japanese aesthetic. They looked more like Charley’s bedroom in Manhattan and my son fell hungrily upon the thick square volume, identifying everything, item by item, brand name by brand name—Xbox, GameCube, Game Boy—stuffu.
“Dad,” he said, “this is so cool. There are things here I never saw before.”
“Very Japanese,” said Takashi. “This is what I said I would show you and your father, Charley-san. This week you will see the real Japan. You saw pictures of temples?” he asked me.
“One or two,” I admitted.
“Yes, rocks, gravel, nice Japanese room, so simple. Houses with rough timber?”
“Yes,” I said. “Very beautiful.”
“Real Japanese people not like that.” Takashi smiled.
I made my polite open-palm gesture toward the atomic toilet. “I understand,” I said. “More modern.”
Takashi got up and peered into the bathroom. “No, this is American.”
“But we don’t have these toilets in the United States.”
“Perhaps you are from Australia? Soon you will go to Macy’s in New York. You will see. In any case, I will show you these toilets here, in Akihabara Electric Town. But now you are tired. We can meet at Akihabara.”
“Where is that?”
“Everyone will know it. Akihabara on the JR line. At the station go to exit three.” He then produced a small gift-wrapped box and handed it to Charley. “Something you use in Tokyo,” he said. “You find me anywhere.”
We all stood, bowing in the little room. He stepped off the tatami and somehow managed to slip into his tall boots as easily as if they were a pair of slippers. Only when he’d left did we discover what his gift was: a wafer-thin iridescent orange object which, when opened, revealed itself to be a phone with a skittishly active little screen.
My first thought was that this was far too expensive, but Takashi’s carefully handwritten note explained he was simply lending it to us for our visit.
“You see this, Dad?” Charley was holding up a little string of luminous beads attached to the bottom of the phone. “You know what this is for?”
“No.”
“It stops cancer.”
“Charley!”
“Dad, you don’t know. It deflects the microwaves from the phone.”
“Oh, I see. What else does it do?”
“Sends text.”
“In Japanese?”
“In English. If you want to send in Japanese it’s harder.”
“How do you know this?”
But he was busy already with his thumbs.
“Okay, that’s enough. We’re going out to eat.”
“Can I take the cell?”
“No.”
“Please.”
“No, you’ll fiddle all through dinner.”
“Can I leave it in the tokonoma?”
“Yes. Yes, yes. Now let’s go.”

2.
On the Internet, I found this blurb for the anime Blood: The Last Vampire: “On an American military base in Japan, a new kind of vampire emerges: Teropterids, monstrous shape-shifting creatures that can only be killed by special swords. A mysteriousgirl named Saya is the last ‘original,’ the only person capable of dealing with the menace. Posing as a student at the base’s school, Saya races to hunt down the beasts before they turn an ordinary Halloween bash into a bloody massacre. Production IG, known for their pioneering digital effects, describes Blood: The Last Vampire as a full digital animation movie, which means that even though many