{"id":1264,"date":"2009-07-22T23:06:45","date_gmt":"2009-07-22T14:06:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2009-07-22\/1264"},"modified":"2009-07-22T23:06:45","modified_gmt":"2009-07-22T14:06:45","slug":"todays-total-solar-eclipse-and-a-rant-about-japanese-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2009-07-22\/1264","title":{"rendered":"Today’s Total Solar Eclipse, and a Rant about Japanese Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n
\nNOTE<\/b>: Images with an icon next to them have been artificially shrunk to better fit your screen; click the icon to restore them, in place, to their regular size.\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>\nD700 + 24-70mm f\/2.8 @ 38 mm, heavily cropped — 1<\/sup>\/<\/big>160 sec, f<\/span>\/5, ISO 6400 —\nfull exif<\/a><\/span>\nMy View of Today's Eclipse<\/span>\n<\/div>\n\n

Today saw a total solar eclipse visible across a thin<\/span> sliver of earth,\nstarting in India, cutting across China, then clipping a few<\/span> southern\nislands of Japan.<\/p>\n\n

Before I talk about the eclipse, allow me to rant about one of the most\nasinine aspects of Japanese culture, one of those “it's just the way it is”\nthings that distresses and inconveniences everyone, but still never changes...<\/p>\n\n

The tiny World-Heritage jungle island Yakushima<\/a>,\n50 miles off the southern coast of the Japanese Mainland, lies just within\nthe northern end of totality, while the larger Amami Oshima<\/a>\n150 miles further south (half way to Okinawa) lies across the southern edge\nof totality. In between<\/span> there are a dozen<\/span> or so scattered postage-stamp\nislands, only a few<\/span> of which have some human presence.<\/p>\n\n

More than a year ago, Fumie was able to secure a hotel<\/span> reservation on\nYakushima by winning a lottery<\/span> for one of the last rooms available on the\nisland. This was more than a year<\/span> ago, mind you. We were excited<\/span>, me mostly\nbecause of the eclipse, but both of us because Yakushima has long been on\nour want-to-visit list. Its dense-forest ecology is believed to be unchanged\nsince ancient times, and it's apparently quite beautiful.<\/p>\n\n

Some time during last winter, I went to<\/span> actually get our plane tickets\nthere, and found out that I couldn't<\/span>: Japanese domestic tickets go on sale\nat 9am two months prior to the day of the flight, so on that day (May 22)\nat 9am, those who had been planning for years would vie with those who\nthought about it the previous day on a whim,<\/span> for the few tickets available.<\/p>\n\n

I say “few tickets” because as I mentioned,<\/span> Yakushima is a World<\/span>\nHeritage site, and frankly, they don't want people visiting very much.\nThere are seven small-body flights a day,<\/span> and the number would not be\nincreased for the once-in-a-dozen-lifetimes event. (Actually, Yakushima\ngets an unfair share of the world's eclipse experiences, because they'll be\ntreated to an annular eclipse in just three years, and another in 2074; the\nnext total eclipse visible there is in 2218.)<\/p>\n\n

So, if you want one of the tickets: at 9am on the day<\/b>, you try to\nget through on the phone or the website, and if<\/b> you're luckily enough\nto do so, you will find that between the time you're told there are seats\navailable and when you actually get finished entering your contact and\npayment info, they will be gone. This has happened to us in the past, just\nlooking for normal flights to a normal<\/span> destination on a normal<\/span> day; gone by\n9:03am.<\/p>\n\n

People in the know have a travel agency use their special computer to\nget the tickets at 9am, knowing that by 9:01 they'll be gone. By the time<\/span> I\nchecked<\/span> (with much help from my friend Shimada-san) last winter, every\ntravel agency had a waiting<\/span> list to try to get tickets, with the somber\nrealization that they'd be lucky to get a ticket<\/span> for just the first person\non the list. It was a<\/span> total waste of time unless you counted on being very,\nvery lucky, in which case you'd do better to play the lottery.<\/p>\n\n

It's even worse than that, though. Yes, there are a huge<\/span> number of\npeople vying for only a few<\/span> seats, but even those few seats might not be\navailable, as government agencies and pseudo-government agencies like NHK\n(national TV channel) will likely appropriate many of the seats.... at\nleast those that the airline doesn't hold back for itself. There well may\nhave been zero<\/i> seats available. <\/p>\n\n

Okay, so what about by boat? Here's the kicker: boat\/ferry tickets don't\ngo on sale until 9am, one<\/b> month prior to departure. I should<\/span> interject that there's no law or requirement that it be this completely\nmoronic; it's just Japanese convention. The Way It<\/span> Is. The very knowledgeable<\/span> travel agent I spoke<\/span> at length with said that the huge\noverflow of those unable to get flights would all line up again in a month<\/span>\nto try to get ferry tickets, and that she'd be happy to try to get one on\nmy behalf (she'd have to call the ferry company just like I would<\/span>), but\nthat chances were exceedingly slim.<\/p>\n\n

As I sat in her office, the totally asinine nature of this system seemed\nso apparent, not just for special things like this eclipse, but for\neveryday travel. The Japanese<\/span> holiday system groups most people's travel\ninto two times: Golden Week in early May, and Obon at the end of August.\n(And, to a lesser<\/span> extent, during the New Year's holidays). If you have<\/span> a\nnormal<\/span> job your vacation travel is limited to those times, along with the\nrest of the population, but you can't make any definitive plans until one\nor two months ahead of time, and if you can't do it then, you're left\nscrambling. At least<\/span> much of the population's needs are served well by the\nshinkansen<\/i> (bullet trains) which can carry thousands of passengers\neach, and during peak times depart every five or ten minutes. (Despite the\nvolume of people they can move, they're still often sold out, but in this\ncase, the worse is that you move your travel half a day<\/span> one way or the\nother, to a less<\/span>-peak time.)<\/p>\n\n

I asked the travel agent “Isn't this really inconvenient for everyone\ninvolved?” and she readily agreed, showing empathy to my predicament, but\nit was in some way as if I had<\/span> asked “Isn't it inconvenient that the tide\nkeeps moving the shoreline back and forth?”. She didn't like the situation,\nof course, but had no angst about it (at least not anymore, or that that\nshe showed) because It's The Way It Is and she can't do a single<\/span> thing\nabout it. There's no use getting angry because you can't hold back the tide\nor move a mountain.<\/span> It Is What<\/span> It Is.<\/p>\n\n

The situation may be old hat to her, but it's fresh to me.... just\nridiculous... infuriating... disgusting.<\/p>\n\n

Maybe I should have played the lottery. Maybe I should<\/span> have actually\ntried to get a flight<\/span> or ferry. Maybe I should<\/span> have coughed up the $4,000\nto an exclusive private boat tour that would stop at the aforementioned\nuninhabited postage-stamp islands for eclipse viewing. But I didn<\/span>'t. This\nslice of Japanese culture so defeated me... so disgusted me... that I lost<\/span>\nmy will to even bother.<\/p>\n\n

Here's the uncropped view of the photo above:<\/p>\n\n\n

<\/a>\nNikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f\/2.8 @ 38 mm — 1<\/sup>\/<\/big>160 sec, f<\/span>\/5, ISO 6400 —\nfull exif<\/a><\/span>\nWatching the Eclipse on NHK<\/span>\nin Kyoto, at my in-laws', 400 miles from the path of totality\n<\/div>\n\n

The aqua label on the screen says “Broadcast Live from Iwo-Jima<\/a>”. In eastern<\/span> Kyoto, I was 782<\/span> miles away.<\/p>\n\n

My area of Kyoto got about 80.8% totality, which perhaps sounds like a\nlot,<\/span> but you could have been outside all day and you wouldn't have noticed\nit unless you knew to look for it. It did get<\/span> a bit<\/span> darker, but with the\novercast, it was decidedly of the “looks like a storm's<\/span> coming” type.<\/p>\n\n

<\/a>\nNikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f\/2.8 @ 24 mm — 1<\/sup>\/<\/big>2500 sec, f<\/span>\/2.8, ISO 200 —\nfull exif<\/a><\/span>\nKyoto at Maximum Eclipse<\/span>\nthunderstorms the other day darkened the sky more than this\n<\/div>\n\n

Some parts of the sky were less gloomy than others, and for a bit,<\/span> I could<\/span> look straight up and see the shape of the sun through the clouds. The clouds<\/span> made for great eye protection, so I could<\/span> just look directly.<\/p>\n\n

<\/a>\nD700 + 24-70mm f\/2.8 @ 70 mm, cropped — 1<\/sup>\/<\/big>2500 sec, f<\/span>\/9, ISO 200 —\nfull exif<\/a><\/span>\nFrom Kyoto<\/span>\n<\/div>\n\n
<\/a>\nNikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f\/2.8 @ 70 mm — 1<\/sup>\/<\/big>3200 sec, f<\/span>\/9, ISO 200 —\nfull exif<\/a><\/span>\n<\/div>\n\n

These pictures make the clouds look really freaky, but they weren't.\nThey were just normal, bland overcast. And I'm joking about “great eye\nprotection” – it was probably pretty stupid to look as we did,\nrisking a sudden<\/span> parting of the clouds.<\/p>\n\n

Watching news reports later in the day, it seems that Yakushima was\ntotally rained out. A friend\nin Amami<\/a> told me that it was completely clouded over during\ntotality.<\/p>\n\n

One report from an island whose name I didn't<\/span> catch showed fast-moving\nwispy clouds, but mostly you could see things, and the reporter was\nawestruck. Just offshore was a cruise<\/span> ship with many hundreds of people\nthat had apparently intended to dock to allow the passengers to experience\nthe eclipse from land (something I'd certainly want to do in preference to\na boat,<\/span> but it'd be especially important to anyone hoping to take\npictures), but it couldn't due to the choppy seas, so just sat out there,\npitching in the waves.<\/p>\n\n

So all in all it was a pretty big bust. I guess<\/span> I'm glad that I didn't<\/span>\nwaste thousands of dollars going to Yakushima or Amami, but frankly, I\ndon't<\/span> feel the better for it. I was well<\/span> aware of the likelihood of cloud\ncover and was more than willing to take my chances, and I would<\/span> much prefer\na washout<\/span> than the total disgust I have<\/span> with this travel slice of Japanese\nculture.<\/p>\n\n

Maybe I'll have better luck next time. In three<\/span> years there will be an\nannular\neclipse<\/a> – one where the moon is just a touch<\/span> too far away to\nfully obscure the sun, so you're left with a ring<\/span> of sun instead of\ntotality – that will be just<\/i> visible from my place in Kyoto.\nif I were<\/span> another few miles north, I'd miss it<\/span>. (It'll also be visible from a large<\/span> swath of the western United\nStates<\/a>, including Reno and Albuquerque.)<\/p>\n\n

At my house in Kyoto the eclipse will be fully annular, but the ring\naround the sun will still leave about 6% of the disk visible (put another\nway, 94% totality), which is still really really bright, and as such you\ncan't look directly without ample eye protection (such as an overcast day\nlike today!). An annular<\/span> eclipse is phenomenally less interesting than a\ntotal<\/span> solar eclipse, but you take what you can get: when it comes to\nnature, there's no sense getting upset, because That's The Way It Is.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today saw a total solar eclipse visible across a thin sliver of earth, starting in India, cutting across China, then clipping a few southern islands of Japan.<\/p>

Before I talk about the eclipse, allow me to rant about one of the most asinine aspects of Japanese culture, one of those \"it's just the way it is\" things that distresses and inconveniences everyone, but still never changes...<\/p>

The tiny World-Heritage jungle island Yakushima, 50 miles off the southern coast of the Japanese Mainland, lies just within the northern end of totality, while the larger Amami Oshima 150 miles further south (half [...]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1264"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1264\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}