We carved some pumpkins a couple days ago in my department. I carved the Panorama logo above, but also one of the Stata Center.

More Jack-O-Lantern photos, including great ones of Chomsky and Norvin Richards, are up on Flickr.

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JSConf.us:

I’ll be putting my Mozilla Jetpack Ambassador hat on to represent Mozilla Labs’ Jetpack project at the premier Javascript conference in North America, JSConf.us, which this year will be April 17-18 in Washington D.C. and has a pirate theme.¹ I’ll be giving a short talk in the main session and will also lead a hands-on Jetpack workshop in the hacker lounge. I’ve heard that JSConf is a lot of fun and I’m really looking forward to it!

WordCamp San Francisco:

I’m honored to have been invited to give a talk at WordCamp San Francisco 2010. WordCamps are community-organized events for the WordPress community, and the San Francisco WordCamp is the original and biggest. WordCamp SF will be at the Mission Bay Conference Center on May 1st. Tickets available.

My talk is tentatively titled “Abstract Your Code.”² WordPress is a great platform to build amazing content-rich applications on, and many of us have written new functionality in the form of plugins. I hope to encourage developers to make their code more portable and reusable after the project is done—or, ideally, to even start with abstraction in mind—to add to the “life” of the code and to consider then open-sourcing that functionality.

Hope to see you there!

International Association of Chinese Linguistics (IACL) 18:

Finally, I’m thrilled to say that I got a paper accepted to the annual meeting of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics which this year is at Harvard on May 20-22. IACL is the big conference for Chinese linguistics, with about 180 papers presenting. I’ll be presenting Two Onlys in Mandarin Chinese, my recent work on the formal syntax/semantics of two only words in Chinese: zhǐ (只) and éryǐ (而已). I’ve put up a handout of some of this material in work-in-progress form which I recently presented at SNEWS.

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Extend the Browser with Jetpack

I felt the audience was very engaged and we had almost a dozen questions in the question period and throughout. Most of the examples centered around the use of capabilities and the new security model. For example:

• What level of granularity will the manifests have? Do you have to just say “I use xhr” or “I talk to twitter but not facebook”?
• What will be the review process for capabilities?
• What license will capabilities use?

Perhaps I simply did not present this material in the clearest manner (it didn’t help that I didn’t have any particular slides covering the capability and manifest model) but it also reflects the reality that these particulars of the manifests’ security sections are still being fleshed out. I’m looking forward to the next time I speak on Jetpack when hopefully the discussion of the Reboot will be more concrete and I’ll be able to give a clearer overview and demo of these aspects of the Reboot.

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We spent a good chunk of time with a team from Invisible Elephant who came in to give us some training on making technical presentations, and then dug into the code on Day 2. It was great to have the geniuses at Mozilla Labs like Atul and Myk show us the latest Jetpack code as well as get the latest project direction from Daniel, Aza, and Nick, from which we could see the amount of careful consideration and effort that’s gone into the Jetpack reboot.

The best part of the whole experience, though, has to be the fellowship with the other Jetpack Ambassadors. The Ambassadors came from all over the world, encompassing Europe, Asia, S. America, and of course N. America. Each are involved with some really exciting projects and have each made a name for themselves in their respective communities. I’ve put together a twitter list of all the Jetpack Ambassadors and the core team members and invite you to follow them.

We also had the greatest number of Ubiquity core developers to have ever been in the same place at the same time, which of course had to be documented.

(More photos can be seen in my gallery.)

I had a fantastic time in MV and it was a shame I could only be there for such a short time. I feel honored to be a part of this group and am looking forward to speaking on Jetpack soon at an event near you!

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3. Mozilla By The Numbers

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This past weekend I gave a couple talks at the inaugural WordCamp Boston. WordCamps are local, community-organized events for WordPress users and enthusiasts. We had about 400 people at the Microsoft Cambridge campus.

(I invite you to also check out more photos below as well as my full WordCamp gallery.)

My first talk was “Getting Into The Loop,” which gives a quick taste of The Loop which is a central programming construct in every WordPress application. (SlideShare, SpeakerRate)

My second talk was an Ignite talk on the importance of beta testing plugins. Ignite talks are five minute lightning talks with 20 slides which auto-advance every 15 seconds. (SlideShare, SpeakerRate)

The videos for both talks will ultimately go up on wordpress.tv.

The event was a huge success and I’m looking forward to help organize WordCamp Boston 2011 as well!

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Being a longer time slot than I previously have used to talk about Ubiquity, I decided to dedicate a good portion of the talk to Jetpack. Being outside of Mozilla for the past few months, this gave me an opportunity to get reacquainted with the Jetpack APIs. I myself was impressed by how easy it was to develop a quick Jetpack. I ended up preparing two to live-code during the talk: one called Helvetica which, with one click, replaces all fonts on the current page with Helvetica; and You Are Here which uses an open API from IPinfoDB to display the physical location of the domain you are currently visiting in the status bar. Both are now on the Jetpack Gallery.

Unfortunately there was a bit of a snowstorm leading up to the event, but there was still a nice turnout and I got to meet some fantastic people there. Ken Shoemake of slerp and quaternion fame came up to me after my talk and said “the Ubiquity parser reminded me of the dancing bear… it’s less surprising that it works well as that it works at all.” I also enjoyed the other great presentations in the technology track, covering the virtues of REST and basic iPhone development.

Mashup the Browser with Ubiquity and Jetpack

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1. Extending WordPress talk at the Boston WordPress Meetup
2. Talking Ubiquity in Japan: 拡張機能勉強会にて発表
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My talk was a general introduction to WordPress plugin development, beginning with the concepts of actions and filters, and concluding with a description of HookPress, my new plugin which enables webhooks in WordPress. Here are the slides:

The talk included some live coding which is always dangerous, but it all went off without a hitch.

Kurt Eng was kind enough to get video of the talk as well which hopefully we’ll get up on wordpress.tv in the near future. Bryan also sent me a link with some photos on Flickr.

Thank you to all who attended¹ and of course to Microsoft who provided the venue and food! The Boston WordPress Meetup is a great community and I hope to keep supporting it and its activities.

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We see photographers on the street from time to time taking pictures of the building. In fact, the first day I got to Boston this fall, I walked into my hotel room and there was a framed photo of Stata on the wall.

The department basically occupies the eighth and ninth floors of the Dreyfoos tower side. There’s a nice common space with some red couches and a spiral staircase.

All of us first years share an office together on the ninth floor (32-D976). The room is elliptical, with our desks along the side with windows and the other “wall” being a series of wooden bookshelves. It’s great to share an office with the cohort, as we all take all the same classes the first year as well.

Here’s the room for “Meg Data” just across the hall from our office. I was really hoping it was a woman named “Meg Data”… marrying her would get me one step closer to becoming “Dr. Data.” Alas, “Meg Data” or “MEG Data” apparently is simply a label for some data store—possibly some servers.

The majority of the building is the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) so there are posters up for fun-looking talks that I’m too busy for.

Here’s my desk (with Foxkeh!) and my new bike which I’ve been bringing up to the office. The final photo is a photo of me with an “I ♥ The Web” poster in commemoration of OneWebDay.

We’ve been getting pretty busy with the readings and work for our classes, as well as occasionally hanging out. I hope to write some more posts both linguistic and non-linguistic in the coming days on life at MIT.

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Time working for Mozilla: 6.5 months

Mozilla-related blog posts written: 69

Academic papers written on Ubiquity: 1

Ubiquity presentations given: 5

Screencasts made: 8

Most popular video on Vimeo: Ubiquity 0.5 日本語紹介ビデオ, the Japanese Ubiquity 0.5 introduction video: 2252 views

Languages Ubiquity commands and parser now support: 6

Commits to the Ubiquity repository: 492

Other web projects started during this period: 2+ (Ten Grand Is Buried There, HookPress)

TechCrunch references: 2 (1, 2)

Countries worked in: 2

Mythical Kiwis worked with: 1

References to bugs I introduced as “glitcho”s: 1

Extremely disturbing homages to me and Django: 1

Friends made; experience gained; lessons on Open-ness learned; personal growth: priceless enumerable

Thanks to all who made this experience amazing, beginning with Aza, Jono, Atul, Blair and the rest of the Labs team; intern extraordinaire Brandon; the always thoughtful and friendly Mozilla Japan team; and of course the fantastic Ubiquity community! Please visit me in Boston—I should be around for a while.

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This past Monday I presented at Tokyo 2.0, Japan’s largest bilingual web/tech community. I presented as part of a session on The Web and Language, which I also helped organize. Other presenters included Junji Tomita from goo Labs, Shinjyou Sunao of Knowledge Creation, developers of the Voice Delivery System API, and Chris Salzberg of Global Voices Online on community translation.

I just put together a video of my Ubiquity presentation, mixing the audio recorded live at the presentation together with a screencast of my slides for better visibility. The presentation is 10 minutes long and is bilingual, English and Japanese.

Ubiquity: Command the Web with Language 言葉で操作する Web from mitcho on Vimeo.

The event also coincided with Dave McClure’s Geeks on a Plane Asia tour, attracting even more interest to the event. In the end it was the largest Tokyo 2.0 event ever.

As I leave Tokyo next month, I’ll be sad to not be able to continue to be a part of Tokyo 2.0. I’ve met a lot of fascinating people and learned a lot at the monthly events. I’ll definitely make sure to schedule them in in my future travels back to Japan and I highly recommend any of you who travel to Tokyo do so as well.

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昨日は文部科学省の先端ITスペシャリスト育成プログラムの学生の為に講義をしました。ちょっと長めの時間だったので、二つのトークに分けてみました。第一部は「オープン」と言うアイデア、特にオープンなデザイン過程の利点について。第二部は未来のインターフェースと国際化とUbiquityの紹介でした。スライドをここにslideshareにあげておきました。

Design processes in the open-source era オープンソース時代のデザインプロセス

Ubiquity: Interfaces and Internationalization インターフェースと国際化

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Asa Dotzler: Firefox, Mozilla, Humans, and the Internet We Want

The first talk was by Asa Dotzler, Mozilla’s Director of Community Development, who was last in Japan seven years ago for the launch of Mozilla 1.0. Asa’s talk took us back to the history of the Internet and its great impact on all people. He reminded us that the values which built the successful internet of now are those of participation, transparency, interoperability—all of which are currently threatened by the forces of commerce. We must work together to balance the forces of commerce to prevent exclusivity.

Asa argues that the web browser—as the window through which we access the internet—has an important role to play in ensuring the open web. 23% of the world uses Firefox as its browser, spreading Mozilla’s non-commercial values with it. He retold the Netscape 7.0 popup-blocking fiasco as an example of commercial forces working against the public good.

While Firefox doesn’t have the great revenue stream of its competitors, what it does have is an impressive community, as demonstrated by the Mozilla gumi in Japan. There are over 1000 contributors to Firefox code—almost 10 times the number of actual employees—not to mention the thousands of daily testers who support this development. As we look forward to Firefox 3.5, it will support over 70 different languages, thanks to the great work of localization communities and organizers.

Asa argues that the key to Firefox’s success—and the success of the open web—is the involvement of users in its development. Firefox is a better product due to this community process, and he encourages users to get involved however they can to continue this success.

Bob Chao (趙柏強): Activities of the Taiwanese Mozilla Community

Bob Chao is the Community Liaison for the Taiwanese Mozilla Community, MozTW. As his day job, he works for Creative Commons Taiwan at Academica Sinica and is also affiliated with Dharma Drum University’s School of Philanthropy.

Bob started off by remarking that the Taiwan is in many ways much like Japan: both use Kanji or Hànzi (漢字) for writing, both love baseball, and both have great senses of humor. Bob then gave a quick overview of the Taiwanese internet space. While there are no official numbers, Bob reports that Firefox has between 10-15% market share in Taiwan, and most are still using IE6. The most popular social networking service in Taiwan is not even on the HTTP web, but rather is PTT.CC, a telnet service. For this reason, there are two Taiwanese Firefox extensions to add telnet support. Taiwan is also a leader in mobile technology and Bob is looking forward to Fennec, the upcoming Mozilla mobile browser.

MozTW started in 2004 on the site moztw.org with hosting by the Open Source Software Foundation of Academica Sinica. MozTW now hosts a number of forums, wiki, and a planet as well as the popular Mozilla Links news blog. Some of their off-line activities include:

• Firefox Parties for major version releases,
• A “Firefox month” campaign for Firefox 2, including a tour of talks at different college campuses,
• Their own local Firefox mascot, Foxmosa (狐耳摩莎),
• Regular seminars and tutorials on localization, web standards, add-ons, etc.,
• Community education courses for basic web applications, and 自由新生代 (Freedom for Generation Z) seminars on open source software for high school students,
• A weekly gathering in Taipei called MozTW Lab,
• A monthly BarCamp-like gathering in different locations called MozTW Gathering.

On-line, they also run a Top Extensions contest one month after each major release. This past April they also ran a campaign called Experience IE8 (體驗 IE8) to highlight new features of IE8 which already existed on Firefox. This MozTW site became the first hit for Google searches for “體驗 IE8”. They are also currently working on Project GFX, a social network around Firefox usage, with a public beta planned for this summer, with the aim of further growing their local community.

In late 2009, the MozTW community will be involved with Mozilla Service Week and another 自由新生代 (Freedom for Generation Z) seminar series for high schoolers. Bob states that the MozTW community aims to help spread open standards and open content on the web, not just the Firefox browser through these efforts.

mar: Natural Language Interfaces and Ubiquity

mar is a very active contributor to a number of localization efforts and Japanese SuMo who has been working on various modifications to Ubiquity’s Japanese support. mar introduced Ubiquity with a quick demo and showed how easy it is to write new verbs in JavaScript and jQuery.

A linguistic interface has the advantages of increased efficiency, precision, and great extensibility. Like many software projects, however, its roots were in English. mar then gave a general overview of the functions of Ubiquity’s parser and his work on making Ubiquity better support Japanese. I finished up at the end by highlighting some of the features of the upcoming parser for Ubiquity, Parser 2.

Canvas Programming in the Cloud Computing Era (har har)

gyuque is a community member who caused a storm earlier this year with his demo of 3D rendering in 2D canvas. [slides]

gyuque gave an explanation of how different aspects of the 3D in 2D canvas demo were done, like how he accomplished texture mapping using affine transforms, and how the ray-tracing approximation was done on-line. He concluded that forcing 3D in the 2D is unreasonable and absurd—but that 3D canvas API’s are actively being developed at Opera, Mozilla, and Google. He demoed versions of his js touch demo ported to Opera Canvas 3D, Google O3D, and Gecko Canvas 3D (demo here). He compared and contrasted the various API’s and concluded that those who are interested in learning Canvas 3D technology now should try and familiarize themselves with all three systems.

Lightning talks

Mr. Horin (jus) MC’d a series of eight lightning talks with a gong to kick people off the stage after exactly five minutes. Without further ado…

1. Yuriko Ikeda spread the word on the J2 outdoor Mongolian barbeque parties,² with the first J2 held in 1989. The dates are announced on Usenet, but information is also on j2.org. It’s an open source Mongolian barbeque, so people bring their own food and take their trash back. The next Kanto (eastern Japan) J2 will be held on 2009-09-06. [slides]
   
2. piro of clearcode, the famed developer of about 25 add-ons, advocated for building unit tests into add-ons. Unit tests may be hard to write and difficult to maintain, though, so piro wrote UnitTest.XUL (abbreviated UxU) which offers a framework to make the unit testing task less painful. He then mentioned some successful uses of UxU.
   
3. dynamis of Mozilla Japan presented 10 ways to enjoy open source software: [slides]
   
   1. use it,
   2. talk about it,
   3. support other users,
   4. document and translate,
   5. test it, report it,
   6. suggest new features,
   7. design, illustrate, and mock up,
   8. write add-ons,
   9. develop: “bugs are waiting for you,”
   10. embed it into your projects.
4. potappo gave an update on the Mozilla Developer Center Japanese translation. He introduced MDC, described the ramifications of the move from MediaWiki to DekiWiki, and made a call for contributors. [slides]
   
5. Taro Matsuzawa (btm), head of Mozilla-gumi, gave a quick overview of his Mozilla hacking experience (including definitive proof that it helped him lose weight). He’s now more involved with community development, including running the regular Firefox Extension Development meetings in Tokyo. He would now like to help support people interested in hacking the core of Mozilla itself and hopes to dragoon more people into doing so.
   
6. Masahisa Kamataki from the Japan Open Office User Group showed off the add-on (extensions) functionality in Open Office. He first covered some news, including UNESCO’s promotion of Open Office and the promise of further interoperability with Microsoft Office in the future. He then introduced three Open Office add-ons: the Sun Report Builder, Sun PDF Import beta, and Sun Wiki Publisher. Add-ons can be written in Java and C++, but some do not require any coding.
   
7. Kazuyuki Ashimura of W3C discussed the multimodal web which goes beyond HTML + CSS. He described the architecture of MMI and gave a vision for such ubiquitous devices. He noted that the W3C Multimodal Interaction Working Group is currently going through a rechartering process.
   
8. An anonymous presenter presented some ideas for a new issue escalation system for Mozilla. He believes a bugbase could also act as a knowledge base to support users and act as a hub for developers. Some ideas are up on this website. He’d love to get people involved with this mozwiki project, as well as further development of bugzilla-ja. [slides]
   

Talk session with Hirotaka Yoshioka and Satoko Takita

The last session of the night was the talk session with Hirotaka Yoshioka of Miracle Linux and the Yokohama Linux Users Group and Takita Satoko (chibi), the Chair of Mozilla Japan, in the style of many Japanese radio talk shows. They stepped through the history of the web and recounted some tales from their experience in the early web. They discussed their struggles for and with internationalization of web technology and their initial reactions to open-source software. They noted that open-source projects used to be used only by those who contributed, but now many open-source projects are used by many who are not active contributors themselves. They discussed the status of various open-source projects in Japan and how they’ve attempted to get people involved.

Yoshioka and Takita finished up by giving their conceptions of the future of the web, as the internet becomes more and more ubiquitous and continues to change the way we live our lives. The internet will continue to develop and transform, and its continued creative development is best spurred through open and free development.

After the party there’s the afterparty

And with that, Mozilla Party JP 10 came to a close and the participants moved to the afterparty. I personally wasn’t able to make it, but makoto has some photos of the great food and various shenanigans up on his flickr.

Thanks to Mozilla gumi and the various sponsors for putting on such an outstanding event! It was great to feel the overwhelming energy of the Mozilla community here in Tokyo.

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1. Localizing Ubiquity: an open letter to linguists
2. Talking Ubiquity in Japan: 拡張機能勉強会にて発表
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CC-BY-NC iMorpheus

Here are the slides I used in that session. There are two “demo” sections in the slides… the first was a simple demo of Ubiquity 0.1.x showing off the translate, map, and edit-page commands. The second demo was of Ubiquity Parser 2 and showing off how little code it takes to add your language to Ubiquity with Parser 2.

I also led a brief afternoon discussion on open ideas: the approach of working in the open, making the thought process and decisions public, not just the results. Here are the slides for that one:

My impetus for doing this discussion is probably clear to many—as I go back to academia this fall, I’ve been recently wondering about whether I could apply the open process used at Mozilla to my own academic work, blogging frequently about little thoughts and discoveries, even if they turn out to be wrong or dead-ends. For those who are interested, Brian Lockwood caught some of my slides and the discussion on video.

I also found a great photo from the discussion—I’m right there on the left edge.

CC-BY-SA LostInInaka

Sun’s facilities had a combination of different styles of rooms (lecture/presentation, this large seminar-style, a small-group one) which was very nice for different styles of sessions.

I really enjoyed meeting the Yokohama International School IT department folks who had an interesting presentation (video) on how they live stream their department meetings every week and try to be open and benefit from (and give back to) an ed-tech community larger than themselves. Other highlights for me included Mitch Altman’s session on hacker spaces and “hacking” of all varieties and sorts, Karamoon’s very knowledgeable longer session on security (video).

Finally it’s good to point out that my friend Kim Ahlström open-sourced his website jisho.org. You can now get that entire repository on github. He also demoed the Cereling library/wrapper for various parsers and morphological tools which his company will be open-sourcing in the future. Happy hacking!

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Every day on the way to work I walk by a fine establishment known as Yoshinoya (吉野家), Japan’s largest gyudon (牛丼) chain restaurant. For those of you whose lives have yet to be graced by gyudon, it’s a bowl of rice topped with beef and onions stewed in a sweet-savory soy-based sauce. Loving gyudon and being a cheapskate, I naturally noticed the recent 50 yen off gyudon promotion at Yoshinoya. The above photo is a photo of part of that sign.

Part of this sign, though, made me think about our new Ubiquity parser. In particular, it was the attachment ambiguity in the end date of the promotion. The text in the photo above literally is “April 15th (Wed.) 8PM until”. (Note that Japanese is a strongly head-final language, and that the “until” is a postposition.) There are two possible readings for this expression, as illustrated by the two composition trees below.

The first tree, on the left, represents the reading “until (April 15th 8PM)”, while the second represents two arguments: “on April 15th” and “until 8PM”. In other words, in the first reading, the promotion begins at some earlier date and extends until April 15th at 8PM while, in the second reading, the promotion is one day only, on April 15th, until 8pm. Such syntactic ambiguities are called “attachment ambiguities” in linguistics as it is an ambiguity of where different arguments “attach” in a tree representation.

This attachment ambiguity was possible because there was no clear marker on “April 15th,” which may have disambiguated it as “on April 15th”. In fact, in many languages this time position argument comes with no case marker or preposition, or it’s optional, making parsing for them difficult. If such a sentence is entered with spaces, the Ubiquity Parser: The Next Generation would try a parse where “8PM” is the “until” or goal argument and “April 15th” is an object argument, but it will only check its noun type, not put it in the correct semantic role (position). Perhaps this is something to think about in the future.

These types of situations will surely come up as we continue work on the Ubiquity parser, making it essential to look at different languages. Are there certain kinds of arguments in your language that do not have any word-external markers such as case or prepositions/postpositions?

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Last weekend my family (including my aunt Mikako and Bailey) took a short trip to Yugawara (湯河原) at the base of the Izu peninsula. Last weekend was possibly the peak of the cherry blossoms this year, making it a very picturesque trip. It’s quite rare for the four of us to all be in the same place at the same time, so these photos are definite keepers:

One of my personal highlights was going down a slide at Azumayama Park in Ninomiya right through a grove of cherry trees in full bloom—it was so beautiful that I had to go back down it again and take a video! Unfortunately the Flash video encoding (or my camera) doesn’t do it justice, but I hope you can fill in the gaps with your imagination.

Cherry blossom slide - 桜のすべりだい（二宮吾妻山公園） from mitcho on Vimeo.

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photo credit: jimgris

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明けましておめでとうございます！

Happy New Year!

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My trip began with the three-hour bullet train (新幹線 shinkansen) ride out to Osaka. I hadn’t purchased a ticket in advance, so that meant standing in a non-reserved seating car for most of the way there, the sole consolation being the great view of Mt. Fuji. Lesson learned: buy reserved tickets for holiday weekends.

大阪城

Our first stop was the Osaka castle (大阪城 ōsaka jyō). Located at the center of the city, the castle is surrounded by a moat and a pretty big park. Many of the paths are lined with cherry trees, making it a popular cherry blossom viewing venue in the spring.

The castle seen today is actually not the original but the end product of the history of its complicated history. Toyotomi Hideyoshi (豊臣秀吉) built the castle began its construction in 1583 but were stripped of its outer baileys at the end of the Toyotomi era in 1615. Since then many have tried to rebuild parts of it while it endured lightning strikes, Meiji restoration civil unrest, and World War II bombings.

Here Bailey reconnected with her inner Bailey:

道頓堀 and 文楽

We continued on to Dōtonbori (道頓堀), the flashy and touristy part of the town. Particularly famous is the crab restaurant with the huge mechanized crab sign. The main strip runs parallel to a boardwalk which offered a comfortable contrast to all the shops.

We also had たいやき (taiyaki), the fish-shaped cake with red bean paste inside. No fish were harmed in the making of our taiyaki.

Afterwards we met up with Bailey’s classmates and professor from her nō (能) and kyōgen (狂言) course to see a bunraku (文楽) performance. Buraku is a Japanese puppet theater tradition which originally began as street performances in Osaka and registered as a UNESCO Intangible Heritage of Humanity. Bunraku today is only performed regularly in Osaka and, compared to other traditional theaters such as nō or kabuki, has an uncertain future for its continued performance and teaching.

A bunraku performance consists of key scenes from a few different famous stories (or, stories that were famous 300 years ago), like a review show. The puppeteers are accompanied by the storytellers who have a distinct style of sing-speaking, much like in opera. The language they use is an older style of Japanese (think Shakespearean English, say), so the theater has supertitles. These storytellers are in turn accompanied by a handful of musicians.

Each puppet is controlled by often four different people, with only the lead puppeteer’s (who controls the head and right hand) face visible. You can obviously see all the puppeteers, but if you ignore all the people dressed in black and just look at one of the dolls, they really do move like people and express human emotions. It’s riveting. Unfortunately we weren’t able to take any pictures.

We love Ikeda and Momofuku Ando

The next morning we went up to Ikeda, a northern suburb in Osaka prefecture, in search of Momofuku.

Earlier this year Elvis Costello released the album Momofuku with The Imposters. The album features Rilo Kiley frontwoman Jenny Lewis. But this is not the Momofuku we were looking for.

We went to Ikeda for the Momofuku Ando Instant Ramen Museum. Andō Momofuku (安藤 百福) was of course the inventor of instant ramen and cup ramen and founder of Nissin foods.

The museum is a beautifully designed building full of cute ramen-related displays and, on that day, dozens of elementary school groups. The display first takes you through the history of instant ramen—its discovery, marketing, evolution, and ultimate world (and space) domination. Have you ever wondered why the ramen in cup ramen cups are floating towards the top? Or why he decided to seal the packages with an aluminum foil top? Well, if you went to the museum, you would know these answers.

There was also a huge “Instant Ramen Tunnel”: a genealogical timeline of all the Nissin product lines, beginning with the original 1958 package.

The museum was also filled with the adorable instant ramen chicken character. We found a huge one on the second floor.

The highlight, however, might have been Mister Ando himself. Just look at him:

Frankly, that looks way more like an album cover than the actual Elvis Costello Momofuku album art.¹

勝尾寺

We took a train and then an expensive taxi up to Katsuō-ji (勝尾寺), a beautiful temple up on a mountain. The leaves were turning so it was the perfect time of the year to go.

Walking up the mountain, we started finding a bunch of daruma dolls—little dolls based on Bodhidharma, a prince-turned-monk important in the early history of Zen Buddhism. Legend has it that Daruma went into a dark cave to mediate for nine years and his eyes fell off. Even now in Japan, you buy daruma dolls with blank eyes, filling in one eye when you make a wish and filling in the other once the wish has come true.

It turns out the daruma dolls are a kind of symbol of the temple. Most temples have omikuji (おみくじ) fortunes that you draw and if you like the fortune² you can tie it to a string or tree in the temple. This temple sells omikuji that come in little daruma dolls, so many people will take their daruma and leave it someplace in the temple grounds for good luck.

The temple also had something else bizarre. A little background: there’s a famous pilgrimage route of 88 Buddhist temples on Shikoku island in western Japan. Well, why would you bother taking time to visit all those temples when someone can bring some of the ground from each of those temples into a central location!? This is what they did at Katsuō-ji… neither Bailey nor I are Buddhism experts, but we agreed it’s bizarre, to say the least.

Overall, though, Katsuō-ji and the mountains were beautiful. We had a great weekend.

Related posts:

1. Weekend update: 師大 café, 南方澳, and 淡水
2. ETA-ROC and Another Weekend in Taipei
3. 北京 Part 1: Fulbright love, the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, and Houhai

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From the 2004 Scav Hunt list:

Item 80. Brain Farts: The Collected Works of The University of Chicago Bathroom Graffiti (organized by theme, but attributed to location). [102 points. 15 bonus points for an inset detailing the entirety of the “Grout Work.”]

I spent a day or so going around campus with a friend (so I didn’t have to be snooping around in ladies’ rooms) taking pictures and compiled the booklet. In good Scav Hunt spirit, I opened the booklet with this tongue in cheek forward:

The anonymity and collaborative nature of bathroom graffiti makes it an amazing reflection of the world we live in. People can write what they want to in their own honest words—it is a clear window into the modern human psyche.

Oddly enough, the latter part of this passage on anonymity jives with Dean Levmore’s talk. For posterity’s sake, I’ve made a compressed—but still pretty big—PDF version available here:

Make sure not to miss the highlight: the three pages of grout-fiti, collected from three different buildings. I might even venture to say it’s the groutest collection of egroutica ever compiled.

Related posts:

1. Scav Hunt!
2. Krashen The Party
3. Jerry Sadock’s Automodular Grammar on iTunes

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