journal features

ironing board

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Tokyo, 2019.12.15

Today I decided I'd had enough of the cell-like "hotel room" in which I've been hold up at the surprisingly cheap cost of ¥5000 a night and went on a long walk. I found a store with used stuff and in that store I found an ironing board for ¥500 and an iron for ¥1800. These I bought in preparation for further interviews while in the city.

Other than that, not much to report. I cleaned all of the laundry including the bedding, and had the dryer (which is the shower area of the bathroom) running all day. That triggered the lunatic Brazilian who lives next door, who was ranting and screaming at the lady who runs the B&B this afternoon. He was complaining about the noise, I think, I only heard him say that I'd gone out and that I'd left the "fan" running. He said this just as I emerged, and he scuttled away from me like a preposterous crab, but one that couldn't look me in the eye. Then he started hollering about a "check" from the landlady, and that if he didn't get one he was going to the police. I was heading out at the time, and didn't hear how it was resolved but I would have paid to see him go to the police, that's just an amazing thought.

I was heading out to see the old electronics area of Akihabara. Sadly, I suspect it is no more, most of the stalls seem to have been replaced with a glitzy lifeless retail area with a Starbucks.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)