Setsuden article in The Japan Times, plus suzumi or 'keeping cool' the traditional way

In my Japan Times article this month, I talk about setsuden or cutting down on electricity use, a critical topic this summer in Japan due to so many power plants (both nuclear and otherwise) being offline temporarily or permanently. This is not just in the devastated Tohoku region, or the Tokyo-Kanto region that TEPCO covers, but nationwide. With daytime temperatures nearing 40 degrees celsius already, it may be a long and difficult summer in Japan. Hopefully the article will give some ideas for making setsuden a bit easier, and even a little fun. (Incidentally, I’m sort of hoping setsuden becomes a widespread word; it’s so compact and descriptive, much better than ‘cutting down on electricity use’, isn’t it?)

Since my Japan Times article is in the Food section, I do focus on things you can do in the kitchen, but there are other low- or no-electricity ways to keep cool too. As I mention in the article, many department stores in Japan have set up suzumi or “keep cool” product sections, where they sell a lot of traditional items that help you feel a bit cooler. These range from things like fans, absorbent towels, bedding and handkerchiefs, to more aesthetic things like fuurin or wind bells. I bought the one pictured here and in the Japan Times article in Asakusa, Tokyo. They’re called Edo Fuurin, and they have been made in the Asakura area since the feudal Edo period. (Yep, even in modern Tokyo some traditional crafts are kept alive.) It’s very thin handblown glass, handpainted with irises. They had other summery designs too, like morning glories, hydrangeas, and goldfish.

Goldfish are associated with summer because they are, or at least used to be, a ubiquitous part of any summer festival or omatsuri. I remember trying to catch those elusive goldfish with wire rings lined with the weakest ever paper. If I managed to catch one, I would carry it home proudly in a little plastic bag of water, and dump it into a bowl…where it would live for a week or so at most before dying (I had no idea about filtering the water, etc.) and I had to give it a fishie burial.

Here’s another suzumi item - a little strap or netsuke to hang from a cellphone or, in this case my coin purse. It’s shaped like a tiny glass eggplant-shaped fish bowl, and it has a miniscule goldfish and a gold coin inside. It doesn’t physically cool you, but looking at such a cool, cute item does perhaps make you feel a tiny breath of imaginary cooling air. It’s resting on another traditional item that helps to keep you cool, a woven cotton cloth called a tenugui, which is used in all kinds of ways, including just to wipe off sweat.

In any case, if you happen to be visiting Japan this summer, do be aware that trains and stores are not blasting the air conditioning as much as usual. You may want to carry a little fan with you to keep cool. Japan has terrific absorbent handkerchiefs, made of toweling and cotton gauze and things like that, which are great for mopping your brow with. And why not look for little, cool suzumi items too? You may learn a little about Japanese traditions as you combat the hot, sticky weather.

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Keeping Japan Going, Part 2: Konbini love, plus there are angels

I’ve talked about the awesomeness of konbini, or Japanese convenience stores, before. Actually, almost everyone who has been to Japan raves about the awesomeness of konbini. Like convenience stores elsewhere, konbini are usually open 24 hours a day, and stock things like soft drinks, bottled water, snacks, everyday sundries and more. They just do it better. They are clean, the prices are reasonable (they used to be more expensive than supermarkets, but are no longer, and even have inexpensive house brand items and such), and seem to always have the right combination of items that you need - from gas canisters for your tabletop cooker in the winter, cheap yet sturdy umbrellas during rainy season, the basic fruits you need for breakfast like bananas, and much more.

Not only that, they’re also pretty useful places to check out if you want to know what’s going on in the packaged-food world in Japan. Where do you go to check out the newest limited-edition soft drinks or strangely flavored potato chips, or cup noodles? A konbini of course. In fact I think that a konbini visit is a must for any first-time visitor to Japan, who’s interested in what regular people eat here. (Unless you turn your nose up at such things and only consider what is served at famous or expensive restaurants…)

And of course, they’re a great place to get a quick meal or snack. You can’t really say most of their offerings are healthy - their inexpensive bentos get a bad rap for being unhealthy, mainly due to being packed with white rice and relying a lot on fried foods like chicken karaage. Their snack breads are fun and tasty, but not exactly good for you. However, the thing that makes the Japanese konbini industry so great is how responsive they are to consumer demands. Recently they’ve been actively working on improving the quality and variety of their bentos, as well as instituting programs like home delivery of pre-ordered, healthy bentos (see my article over on JustBento about 7Meals).

Konbini stores offer many other services depending on the chain, such as ticket services for various events, ATMs (Note to Americans in particular: if you’re on the Plus network you can withdraw cash from 7-11 ATMs in Japan), package delivery services, billpaying, and much more.

In densely populated urban regions like the Tokyo-metropolitan area, konbini are so numerous (there are at least a dozen within a 1 km (.6 mile) radius of where I am now) that people take them for granted. But konbini stores have really proved their worth on March 11, in the days since. On that day and night konbini stayed open despite the earthquake. They kept the hundreds and thousands of people trudging home on foot or forced to stay in town in their offices fed and watered. Many people commented appreciately on how the clean, brightly lit konbini stores were like little safe havens on a dark night. And some of the first stores to re-open in the hard hit disaster areas have been konbini, even as “mobile konbini” operating from vans. Here’s a Lawson van operating in Sendai.

And here’s the inside of a 7-11 mobile-store van.

You may have heard news stories right after the quake of stores, including konbini, running out of food and other goods. (I even saw some stories in the overseas “news” media in March claiming people were “starving in Tokyo”. Yeah, right.) So, to get a first-hand report I went to talk to the closest konbini from where I am now, the one I compulsively go to at least twice a week. It’s a 7-11, which is a good thing since 7-11 is my favorite konbini (love their sandwiches), closely followed by Lawson (great place to get tickets to events and stuff) and Family Mart (carried Muji products!). (Incidentally, there are 9 konbini stores within about a 1 km (.6 mile) radius of where my mom lives in Yokohama.)

The day manager of our local 7-11 is a polite, cheerful 22 year old called Yoshiharu Ito. He was hired by the parent company, Seven and i Holdings, right after graduating from university. He was working part-time when he was in school at a 7-11 so I guess they liked his worth ethic. Most 7-11s are franchises, but the employees are hired, trained and sent by the parent company. Here is Ito-kun.

He says that right after March 11 they did indeed run out of certain items. Some of their perishable food items, which are delivered several times a day, were made in factories damaged by the earthquake and tsunami, were not re-stocked for days Then there was the ubiquitous yet to me, inexplicable panic run on toilet paper. Whenever there is some sort of crisis in Japan, people always go for the toilet paper, starting with the “oil price shock” of the 1970s. Ito-kun said that the toilet paper situation was pretty dire for a few days. People were driving to the store from far away to grab any left on the shelves. They even gave out emergency rolls from the stock they had for the in-store toilet to their regular customers for free.

A bit later there was a run on bottled water after the tap water in the Kanto area was contaminated with radioactive substances after a rainfall. Even after the tap water returned to safe levels and people stopped haarding, bottled water was still scarce on the shelves for a rather esoteric reason. It seems that a factory (or factories…since Japanese does not have a plural form unlike Western languages, it’s hard to tell unless it’s specifically stated) that made most of the bottle caps was damaged after the quake. Incidentally, to get around this problem if something like that happens again, the bottled beverage industry has now agreed to all use the same color bottle cap (white).

Anyway, this is the sign that was still up in the 7-11 as of early April. It says in the politest terms that there was a 1 liter of water per family limit. (“Per person” is crossed out. I wonder if parents were bringing in their kids and trooping out with a bottle per head.)

A similar sign was posted in front of the toilet paper and the tissue paper boxes too. Both signs were taken down in late April. And I should note that people did not have to go thirsty by any means, since no other beverages were restricted, nor did they run out (with the exception perhaps in some stores, not this one, of a few days when a few people overboard with the hoarding). Tea, juice, soft drinks of all kinds were still in stock. (Parents of infants who needed clean water for formula were given free bottled water in affected areas, as well as given priority in stores.)

Finally, another product they ran out of initially was the all-Japanese emergency food, instant cup noodles. Again, these photos were taken in early April. Ito-kun claimed that they were still quite a bit lower on stock than usual and that they had instituted some ‘tactical shelving’ techniques, but it’s hard to tell.

Another issue facing all businesses is the power shortage problem. Again, konbini chains were among the first to institute changes to their stores to cut down on power use. Store lights were dimmed or partially turned off and the temperature in the refrigerated cases was turned up 1 degree. As of this writing they’ve already started instituting more long-term solutions, such as solar power panels and LED lights too. (Ito-kun said that for the first few weeks when the power shortage situation was serious, they kept the Yahoo! Japan home page open, where they have a power-use monitor bar. If the bar was rising too much they’d shut down more lights or even turn off a refrigerated beverage case and so on.)

I asked Ito-kun his thoughts about March 11 and subsequent events, and the role konbini plays in Japan. He thought a bit and said that it made him realize just how embedded in the fabric of everyday life konbini like the one he works at is, and how much they are appreciated and relied upon by the people in the community. I think he is exactly right.

The toilet paper shortage situation was pretty bad for a few days. You might think it’s not such a big deal, since many Japanese households have Washlet-type toilet seats installed that rinse your delicate parts with a gentle spray of warm water. But for my mother, it was pretty dire. She has a condition called ulcerative colitis, and had her large intestines surgically removed last year. Since then she has had to go to the bathoom nearly 20 times a day. So she goes through quite a lot of toilet paper…and she was down to her last roll. She and my stepfather went to line up at the supermarket early in the morning in hopes of getting their hands on the latest shipment, but it was all gone way before it was their turn. She wasn’t one of the customers who got a free roll from Ito-kun, but she did get one from Takashimaya’s staff, and even resorted to taking a little extra paper from public toilets.

I rather jokingly mentioned my mom’s toilet paper problem on Twitter back in March. And…someone I’ve never spoken to directly before, who lives in Chiba prefecture and follows me there and on my blogs, wrote to me offering to send her some, since there hadn’t been a run on toilet paper in her area! And, she did. She may be mad at me for this but I’m outing Cherie, aka Rzmom on Twitter, as the kind toilet paper angel. People like Cherie give me a little hope for humankind. ^_^

(This is Part 2 of a 2-part series. Be sure of check out Part 1, about package delivery services.)

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Keeping Japan Going, Part 1: Kuroneko Yamato

In a couple of days it will be 2 months since the March 11th East Japan Earthquake. While there is still a huge amount of cleanup work, resettlements, and other very serious issues in the Tokoku region, life here in the Tokyo-Kanto area has settled down considerably. For one thing, the aftershocks have considerably lessened in both strength and frequency, though everyone will feel a lot better when the earth finally decides stop wiggling and shaking around beneath our feet for a bit.

It’s rather hard to explain to people who have never been to Japan, or to be precise the Tokyo-Kanto area, just how convenient and smoothly-running life generally was here before the earthquake and its after effects. Living in Japan is not worry-free of course by any means, but provided you have a decent source of income and a decent place to live, it’s not bad at all, relatively speaking; crime rates are low, healthcare generally works, food is delicious and abundant, the education system manages to get kids educated, and so on and so forth. And even if the economy has been, in the reckoning of many people, in the doldrums, jobless rates were still relatively low and the standard of life was generally high.

Right now, life in general in the Tokyo-Kanto area is perhaps 5% less convenient and smooth running compared to that very high, well-oiled norm. The main thing affecting people is the power shortage due to several power plants (not just those news-headline grabbing nuclear ones in Fukushima) being out of commission since March 11. But even there, things are not that dire in my opinion. There was indeed a bit of a mess in the first couple of weeks, when people were not sure what was going on. But since then, due to concerted efforts to cut down on electricity use (setsuden) by individuals and businesses alike, only a couple of rolling blackouts took place, with no more scheduled for the time being. And those reduced train schedules? Well, the local line I use the most has gone from running trains every 2 to 3 minutes during rush hours to about every 4 to 5 minutes, and during off-peak hours the trains are only running every 8 minutes or so. So trains are a bit more crowded at times. Lights in train stations and in the trains themselves are often dimmed, and half the escalators are not moving. In some places that have huge banks of vending machines, half the machines are stopped half the time. The nighttime security watch at my mother’s apartment complex is even checking up on excess power-use (i.e. lights on late into the night and so on) and sending polite reminders to certain households. (My mom got one when she forgot to turn a light off overnight. She hasn’t forgotten since.)

Life is not totally back to normal for sure. There’s even some discussion about whether the way things were before should be ‘normal’, especially in terms of electricity use. The outspoken governor of Tokyo wants vending machines and pachinko parlors to be abolished. Things probably won’t go that far, but life may change in interesting ways.

One cog in the wheel of Japanese society that kept on going even on March 11, with the exception of the truly hard-hit disaster areas, are package delivery services (takyuubin).

Yamato Transport is usually referred to by its informal name, Kuroneko Yamato (Black Cat Yamato), which comes from their company logo. The logo depicts a black mother cat carrying a kitten in her mouth. It signifies the care with which they handle your packages, according to the company blurbs.

There are other package delivery services, but Kuroneko Yamato has the largest market share in a highly competitive field. (Yamato’s two major competitors are Sagawa and the Japan Postal Service, which used to be a government agency but is now privatized.) Package delivery in Japan is quite amazing to me. They deliver from morning until around 8 at night. They delivery on Sundays and holidays. You can order overnight delivery of course, plus same-day delivery, time-specified delivery, and so on. Let’s say I wanted to have a cake sent to my mother on Mother’s Day. If the sender is willing, Kuroneko Yamato or Sagawa can probably do it.

You can find Kuroneko Yamato vans everywhere. Here’s one in a very picturesque old town (Murou) in Nara prefecture.

The cat motif is used extensively in their corporate gear. Here are the hands of one delivery person, wearing company-issue gunte, protective knit cotton gloves. (Gunte are worn extensively in Japan in all kinds of situations. You may have seen them worn by workers, volunteers and others in footage from the disaster-struck areas. They are as ubiquitous as face masks.)

This is Ms. Yamamoto, one of our local Yamato delivery people. She’s in her mid-30s, and always looks immaculate in her uniform, even when she’s hauling some pretty big packages out of her van. You can’t see it in the photo, but she’s wearing little pink crystal studs in her ears and a pink scrunchie to tie back her ponytail.

When I asked her how soon she started working after the big earthquake of March 11, she looked surprised and told me they never really stopped - they were delivering as usual on the day itself, and the next day too. She said that service in the Yokohama and Tokyo area wasn’t really disrupted. I asked her about the gasoline shortages and the power outages, and she said that they have just worked around them, to get packages delivered. I loved the matter of fact way in which she told me all of this. I guess she gets clear directions from up above and acts on them, which is nice to see.

Kuroneko Yamato itself is also back to full delivery service in the hard-hit areas of northeastern Honshu. Early on, they sent an Emergency fleet of 200 vans and 500 employees to the area to help with getting much needed supplies delivered to various addresses - something they should know a lot about. I don’t want this to sound like a promotion for Kuroneko Yamato, but I think the service they, and their competitors (Sagawa especially) offer is quite awesome, and defintely a part of the fabric of Japanese life that works. (Incidentally, Yamato is donating 10 yen for every package they deliver in 2011 to disaster relief. If they match the number of packages they delivered in 2010 , it should amount to around 13 billion yen (approximately US $160 million).

This is not about the Tokyo-Kanto area but I thought I’d include it anyway; it’s Kyoto. I’ve mentioned alread, Sagawa is the second largest package delivery service in Japan, and Yamato’s main competitor. I prefer Yamato myself because they’re just a bit more efficient and friendly. However, I give Sagawa big kudos for this.

This is the Gion, Kyoto office os Sagawa. Gion is a carefully preserved traditional neighborhood that is also known for the maiko and geiko (geisha) that live, train and work there. The Sagawa office, decked out to look like a 19th century style delivery service operating from a machiya (traditional Kyoto-style wooden town house) blends in perfectly and looks great! Local deliveries are made with that bicycle.

I did not manage to capture an image of a maiko walking past this storefront, but you can imagine one doing so, and see that she and the store go together perfectly.

You can check out both the Sagawa store and maiko in Kyoto, in the areas just south of Shijo Dori, down Hanakomichi. (The best time to catch a glimpse of a maiko on the street is around 5pm, when many are out and about going home from okeiko (lessons) or off to some job. Please don’t try to stop them or surround them or grasp at them though.) By the way, in Kyoto, Osaka, or any area to the west and south of Japan, life really is unaffected. No aftershocks, no dimmed lights.

This is Part 1 of 2 in a series. In Part 2, I’ll have an interview with a convenience store (konbini) manager, and I’ll also talk a bit about how people are reacting do and dealing with the nuclear power plant situation. You may also want to check out the piece I wrote for BlogHer a couple of weeks ago profiling three women in Yokohama. Life does go on!

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