Sunday, January 21st, 2001
Today was also another really lazy morning. After Echo and I have breakfast, I take a shower. Which is only a little cold, and takes only minor acts of contortion to fit into. Echo's house is not atypical for older houses in Japan; and a cold wind gently makes its way across the bathroom, even though the water is warm.

Next I go for a walk around the neighborhood by myself, just wanting to discover my surroundings and get a feel for the place. I meander past the high school, right along the side of the archery range section of the PE area (only in Japan,) and down a two-way street I could have stretched all the way across lying down, but paved, signed, billiard-table smooth, and helpful convex mirrors on posts at each intersection (only in Japan.) I encounter a used micro-car sales lot (only in Japan) and stand on a pedestrian bridge over the expressway and under the train tracks, with enough sound insulation I can't hear the trains. It is strange to feel like a still observer as the world impatiently but ryhthmically passes me by, the trains and cars both in cycles. The wind is just tickling my hair, but it is enough to get the brige wiggling up and down...yikes! I decide that it is a judicious moment to leave my post on the bridge over the highway.

All that remains of the snow from last night. Note the elevated walled train tracks in the background, and the Mitsubishi Lancer Evo and the Austin Mini in the parking lot.

Another picture from my walk around Saitama. A nice illustration of typical suburban planning and housing.

I return through the local park, which is alive with many birds I don't recognize. Young families are everywhere, the kids scaping a surprising number of snowballs from the muddy melting scraps of snow. I hear an R32 Nissan Skyline with very loud exhaust. I can hear it long before it is visible, a strong combination of harmonic pitches. The driver rev-matches, double-clutch downshifting twice up to the stoplight. He blips the throttle a few times...super light flywheel! The car is red with a black wing and hood, plus red and black wheels...but more important, the sound of it. Loud and very hard to describe, wonderful and unlike any other car I have heard...mesmerizing... A high pitched hum/wail from the turbo, not as incidental or as insignificant as the usual whistle. The engine note at idle is straight six, a smooth bellow. The overall effect is not unlike an American V8 with a crossover header, low powerful engine noise, with a harmonic scream of the exhaust over the top, but six-like, smoother, freer-revving, and almost like an overtone. Or maybe it could be described as a loud, resonant, muffled BMW racecar taking off, but with a turbo too. The revs keep gradually climbing in first as the traffic accelerates away out of sight. Slowly higher (Boy, he is revving it,) steadily higher (showoff!) slowly climbing (Jesus, he better shift...) Little did I know that it is just coming into the powerband! A hole must have opened up in traffic, and he really gets on it...the turbo is no longer linear with the engine, spooling to incredible speed, the whole sound is so frantic that my adrenaline is pumping just from hearing it. The volume and the revs had gotten so high, the upshift to second was almost like a silence, with a little flutter from the blow-off valve, and then he was accelerating in second, gone. I stood for probably a full minute in awe, and then started to comprehend the numbers: 2.6 liters, approaching 300 horsepower stock, tuneable to around 700 hp with a stock bottom end, and 1200 hp with heavy mods. 8,000 rpm and gearing for 180 mph...I guess that experience makes sense?...I am still dumbfounded!!!

More observations: Japan is very water efficient, with bathroom sinks feeding the toilet tank, low-flush toilets, ultra-high efficiency washing machines, plus clothes are all dried outside. Heat efficiency is another story. One cool thing is that Echo's hot water heaters are small inline natural gas units right before the faucet. However, old houses have no insulation, sliding doors, and sliding paper windows. Echo's house has many places you can see outside around the window sash, or the holes cut in the wall for the plumbing. Bring a big comforter and extra jackets for indoors, because you don't even try to heat the house! Many stores have open storefronts, or nearly continually open automatic doors. And big glass windows...glass walls, glass everywhere in commercial Tokyo. The space efficiency blows me away. I never realize how haphazard, disorganized, and sprawling we are in America. Dave Barton's garage is everyday life in Japan. Space is used in ways I never imagined-businesses storing things beneath an open stairwell, parking cars between houses, elevating all the trains, so as to use the space under the tracks. I think I know why hatchbacks are so much bigger in Japan than in America. After you fold your sideview mirrors in and park between walls, or other cars, the hatch is the only way out of the car!


A big fancy-pants house with garden in Saitama...notable becuase of how big the garden is. Also notice how narrow the street is? And the mass of power lines.

January 22nd, 2001

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