The Tanuki Ramble

Thanksgiving Buffet

Here's a full course of reading material for those with turkey in their bellies but hungry minds. 

Gates of Vienna  Conservatives are more generous.  As we all know, liberals are the folks who want to be generous with other people's money.

Belmont Club: What we fight against: real intolerance.  While some in the States go to great lengths to fabricate hate crimes, in other places hate crimes are the law.

A one-stop site for Tanuki Goodness.  Sex, lies, and even vide0--sounds like a Washington headline.

Brothers Judd: How the Pilgrims abolished communism.  I think I posted about this a year or two ago, but it's a true (literally) classic.

People's Cube: It out-Borats Borat!

Some typically common sense from Stanley Crouch on Kramer  What goes around comes around.

Ian Buruma gives us a short history lesson about Dutch-style cultural suicide multiculturalism.

An Act of Insurrection in Tokyo

Last weekend I was able to combine business and pleasure with a partially work-subsidized trip to Tokyo, where I met with old friends and attended a book-fair/symposium for English teachers in Japan.  On the whole it was very nice--several of the classes were informative, and I unexpectedly met another old friend there.

One of the pleasures of heading into the big Tokyo is going to the Shinjuku branch of Kinokuniya, which has on its fifth floor the largest (as far as I know) English book section in Japan.  How grand it is to wander unencumbered by linguistic shortcomings among hundreds of thousands of titles.  Of  course, Kinokuniya's fifth floor is comparable only to a modest Barnes and Nobles in some rural American backwater, but still...

There are other drawbacks.  My friend wanted to look for something in the 'Religion' section, which we had a hard time finding.  There was a fairly large 'Eastern Religion' selection, but no trace of Aquinas, Augustine or Kung nearby.  Finally, we found our quarry, huddled next to the Penguin Classics.  It consisted of one meager section of titles by various authors, Christians, with their turnable cheeks next to the jowls of a couple Muslims, and another section comprising various versions of the Bible.  Slim pickings for the hungry soul, variety wise. 

My friend was surprised, but I saw the Invisible Hand in this.  The bookstore sells books, does it not?  That is its reason for existence, and as the great majority of  native English speakers in Japan are either young English teachers to whom their traditional religion is an obstacle to more seductive opiates, or are more interested in Zen, that Snark of spiritual fulfillment, why keep a large selection of unsellable religious titles?  I had no problem with that.  After all, that's what Amazon.com and trips home are for.

What I did have a problem with was this.  There seems to be a fine old tradition here in Japan of the staff slapping reader advisory labels on unacceptable books.  Here in Niigata, someone had taken great pains to make a decorative, interestingly-shaped cardboard cut-out done up in several marker colors about the danger of carbon emissions and Bush's refusal to ratify Kyoto on Micael Crichton's State of Fear.  The reason being..."this book is full of it, but you might learn something from this guy's errors..."? It couldn't be, "Don't buy this piece of tripe!" could it?

Likewise, at the Tokyo Kinokuniya, there was Ann Coulter's latest, Godless, The Church of Liberalism. (By the way, I was looking for Mark Steyn's America Alone, currently #25 on Amazon's bestseller list, but could not find it.)  Again, there was a cardboard cut out with a printed out quotation featuring a very snarky (in the non-Zen sense) litany of abuse by a negative reviewer pasted on it.  On the front cover of the book Kinokuniya was ostensibly trying to sell. 

Now, I had no intention of buying the book.  And I didn't buy it.  I happen to agree with Coulter on many issues, but in a bare bones kind of way.  That is to say, you have to boil the issues for a good couple of hours so as to remove all the nasty gunk: over-generalization, needlessly offensive sarcasm, hyperbole, oversimplifications, etc.  Yes, Joe McCarthy was more right than wrong about communism in 50s America, but that doesn't mean he was a persecuted patriot with only the purest of motives, driven to drink and to an early grave by...godless liberals.  But then again, would Coulter be a best-selling author if she wrote only the most scrupulously objective, fact-driven, balanced investigations of the matter at hand?  (And looked like a female version of me, to boot?)  I think not.

I would go so far as to say that she is the equivalent of a professional wrestler.  Those guys are actually very large men with enormous muscles, and would probably be quite formidable in most altercations, but they wouldn't get nearly the gate if what they did was straight.  The audience loves it, the rasslers get paid, and that's what showbiz is all about.   Coulter, too is a very smart woman capable of cogent criticism...but she wouldn't be ANN COULTER if she went this route.  She knows what she's up to.  So do, I suspect, do people like Michael Moore ...well, maybe not, as he seems to have jumped both the shark and the pier and has landed in the drink.  By the way, his books, for all their nasty gunk, were prominently featured and had no advisory labels.

To get back to the story, there we were, my friend and I, standing in front of Coulter's latest, with about 60% of the cover obscured by a huge, Kinokuniya staff-created (I wonder if s/he did it on the clock and thereby got paid to discourage customers from buying the book?) warning sticker.  Risking expulsion, I gingerly removed the disclaimer and stuck it on the underside of a bookshelf, where it seemed too conspicuous, so I took it off and looked for a better place.  My friend, however, had a stroke of genius, and put it between the covers of a nearby copy of State of Denial.

Touche!  And who knows...maybe I helped Kinokuniya sell a book or two.

Wendell Berry

I hit Relapsed Catholic at least once a day.  I think I have a lot in common with the woman who writes it, Kathy Schaidle, a Toronto-based blogger who apparently used to subscribe to the punk rock vision of the world--anti-Reagan rallies, anarchy now, safety pins and purple bangs, etc. 

But eventually, the drip drip drip of reality wears away our stony resistence to it.  Then again, I know some stalagmites who seem to grow more deluded with every bit of evidence to the contrary of their world view.   For those of us who are certain we've relapsed into the truth, there's a tremendous urge to take a sledge hammer to those stalagmites, and I guess that's one of the reasons I started this blog.  Kathy takes aim at what she thinks is an especially tempting target in "Wendell Berry is a boring old fart!"  (Sorry--can't perma link, so here's the whole thing minus quotes from the article she links to.)

I'll bet Wendell Berry has, like, $10-million bucks in Exxon Mobile stock under his futon, like Ralph Nader.

Look: nature is covered in dirt and has bugs all over it. Ugh. I don't want to know where my food comes from and where it goes. Garbage should be burned in giant piles -- hell, people would pay good money to watch. Recycling is a waste of time, money and, yes, energy. If we all had to live in a big glass dome and eat pills like the Jetsons, then good, as long as it pisses off hippies. The world should be like Las Vegas everywhere, no bikes allowed.

And NONE of this eco-poo has ANYTHING to do with Christianity, no matter what Wendell Berry and all his scrubby friends say. Jesus was nailed to a cross -- doesn't that tell you that wood is evil? Was it a plastic cross? No it was not.

Sheesh already.

I hat to say it, but it seems some of the old punk spirit of  "bash first, question...whenever" seems to be showing here.  Shaidle has Berry pegged into a very small hole.  I'm willing to bet that if she withheld fire until her target were a bit more in focus, then disagree as she might with Berry on certain points, she'd realize that he was far more of an ally than enemy, not to mention a rare example of a man who walks what he talks, and in his way, is the truest of conservatives.  Wendell Berry is an opponent of the strain of anti-human enviromentalism that has come to represent an uncomfortably large percentage of the whole, a questioner or dogmatic feminism, a staunch supporter of traditional communities, a damn good writer (essays, novels, poetry), and someone with enough integrity to walk away from the ivory towers of academia on the verge of a comfortable career and risk life as a farmer in the mold of his grandfather just as traditional farming seemed to be all but disappearing.   Not to mention the fact that should Shaidle ever have the opportunity to actually debate Berry, I'm confident that she would leave the event far, far more chastened and enlightened than he.

I became a fan of Berry's back in the late eighties, maybe about the same time Shaidle was beginning to renounce The Dead Kennedys and all their works .  There was an article in Harpers (which I can't seem to find online, but am sure that I still have someplace in a trunk back home) that outlined his ecological stance.  As I recall, it was a polemic against industrial agricultural in that it  was as destructive of traditional communities as of the earth itself.  Tons and tons of topsoil was being allowed to wash away through indiscriminate plowing in places where it made no sense, and the families who were once needed to tend sustainable farms on a human scale were  displaced by expensive machinery that was dependent on foreign fossil fuel.  More calories were consumed in plowing, planting, maintaining and harvesting the crops (in gas fumes) than produced as food.  I'm not sure if it was Berry or the writer of the article who suggested that Ehrlichian famine was the sure outcome of all this.

I recall a boozy night in a Pittsburgh bar, with me trying to convince a friend that we were surely headed for starvation if we dont wake up.  My friend to me..."Whaaaaat?'  My friend was right.  There was no real evidence for this.  Of course, I didn't concede the point that night, but I respected his judgement, and eventually his cynicism and stuff like this (check out the section on agricultural resources) and sheer lack of evidence to support finally convinced me that Berry was simply wrong about some things.   Yes, Berry writes like an angel, is a man of courage and conviction whose ethical seriousness and intelligence dwarf my own, and has a red-tailed hawk's eye for the shortcomings of the society we have created, but is far too dismissive of the benefits of the system that doomed the agricultural community that he was born into just in time to watch die.   

I once admired Berry to the extent that it worried me.  I couldn't find anything to disagree with him on, and you know that just ain't right.  As a no longer quite so young a man, I was shaken by his book What Are People For? What indeed?  To toil for the allmighty dollar?  To drudge the hours away in a cubicle, board room, or assembly line when you could be enriching yourself  in the bosom of God's green earth, close to home, close to family, close to all things that matter?   Aren't the Amish far better off in most ways than we are?  No doubt, no doubt.

But what have the Amish contributed to medicine, music, science, literature, to the process that has given the grandchildren of peasants in many countries the chance to enjoy health, facilities, freedoms, and intellectual opportunities that beggar those of the wealthy of the entire history of humankind?  (And what about this headline from the CSM: Want World Peace?  Support Free Trade)  Not to knock the Amish by any means.  They enrich the world in their own way. 

And you'd better be careful about knocking Berry, too.  No, he is not another Chomsky who rails against the same economic processes he invests in.  He doesn't have tens of thousands of gallons of jet fuel burned on his behalf so he can collect checks for speaking dates about the dangers of global warming.   He plows with horses rather than tractors and scavenges his forests for firewood because he means what he says.   Do I agree with everything he says?  Not anymore.  Do I respect him.  You bet. 

A while ago, Berry wrote an essay about why he would not buy a computer.  Here's a page which includes that essay, letters attacking him, and his reply.  Here are further reflections on the whole matter, and the issue of feminism (he was attacked for reporting that his wife helped him to type his manuscripts). 

Re-reading these, it becomes clear that Berry is what many would call a libertarian, but one that respects freedom not so much as a value in itself, but for its use in allowing him to do what he feels is right.  He will be damned if he'll have anything to do with the forces that have destroyed and are destroying what he loves.  If that means doing back-breaking labor, arguing against things which everybody is for, and being called a "boring old fart" by someone who skims one article about him, so be it.  People who write things like this are often called boring old farts.

Whatever is forseen in joy Must be lived out from day to day, Vision held open in the dark By our ten thousand days of work. Harvest will fill the barn; for that The hand must ache, the face must sweat. And yet, no leaf or grain is filled By work of ours; the field is tilled And left to grace.  That we may reap, Great work is done while we're asleep. When we work well, a Sabbath mood Rests on our day, and finds it good. A Warning to My Readers Do not think me gentle because I speak in praise of gentleness, or elegant because I honor the grace that keeps this world. I am a man crude as any, gross of speech, intolerant, stubborn, angry, full of fits and furies. That I may have spoken well at times, is not natural. A wonder is what it is.

Ever have one of those days?

More sumo-kin' photos from the World Sumo Championship at Sakai.  There are even some sumo babes, believe it or not.

Japan Times hits the bottom and starts digging with Dillon

I'm certain that one of the attractions of Bush bashing is that no matter how unoriginal, boring, boorish, ill-conceived, and divorced from reality your ideas or opinions are, you'll get a pass if you can work some abuse in.  I even see it in my comments box from time to time. 

In a throw-away article that appears to have been thrown together three minutes before the deadline (Ultraman would be so disappointed), Thomas Dillon, a writer for the Japan Times (or perhaps a male OL who got pressed into service  because a real writer was unavailable?), plays the jaded ex-pat and writes about over-rated and under-rated aspects of Japan.   No one's ever come up with that one before!  Among other topics, we are informed that the Japanese monkey is under-rated because they are more clever and charming than both Reagan and Bush.

UNDERRATED -- Japanese monkeys

And why not? They're just as smart as chimpanzees and even take baths. Somehow chimps have a cuter image, which to me seems a sort of racial prejudice, monkey-style.

I feel certain a Japanese monkey could have upstaged Ronald Reagan in any film, although "Bedtime for Bonzo-san" might not have stirred the box office in the postwar climate.

But mark my word, one day the stars will shine on these clever apes. So much that if George Bush were to reverse Ronald Reagan's path and go from politics to movies, I could see him one day sharing the bill with a Japanese monkey, especially considering how well he got along with Koizumi. I mean, Bush seems to connect with Japan.

But Bush can't follow the Reagan film storyline. There has to be some twist reflective of the higher skills of Japanese monkeys. Perhaps something like:

"Bedtime for George."

What th'....?   And don't get me started on Japanese monkeys, who ate the best tomatoes from my garden and devastated my buddy's corn crop this year!

Other losers include Mount Fuji because...you can't always see it from Tokyo.  Like, dude...you ever try visiting the place?  High up on Dillon's list we have girls dressed in bunny outfits... Playboy, that is.   (So Japan is where Butthead wound up after losing his TV show!)

If the Japan Times is this hard up for copy, I'll recommend some of my Writing 201 students.

There's plenty...plenty to legitimately criticize Bush about.   What rationale did he have for believing Iraq could be transformed into a peaceful democracy?  What is he thinking about in terms of his immigration policy?  What's up with the trade deficit to China?  However, about 80 percent of the abuse you read and 99% you hear is a faith-based initiative.  And being young once myself, I imagine that many indulge in BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome) out of simple laziness, lack of ideas, and the desire to be, what's the word you kids use all the time?..."cool."

A new  (but I'm sure I'm not the first to note this) equation for the noughties: the higher the level of anti-Bush invective without the slightest pretense as to understanding the actual virtues and shortcomings of the man, the higher the mendacity and ignorance of the author. 

I would say that in terms of this scale, it might be impossible to over-rate Dillon's performance.

UPDATE

Well, I checked around and I have to admit, Dillon is certainly not an OL. Actually, he seems to be a fairly decent (if unmemorable) writer whom I have read before, and article mentioned above was most likely a buzzer beater that missed.   Everybody's entitled to a couple.  Yes,  he can write informative and entertaining bits like this, coincidentally on a theme I just covered here.   But for cryin' out loud Dillon, don't try to distract us from your failures with the most cliched of cheap shots.

Ultraman

  Now there's some real Japanese culture for you. 

Ultraman.

The other day in class, I was trying to illustrate some point and needed an example of an Achilles heel, so I asked my class what Superman's weakness was. 

Yeah, I know, Superman is not nearly the icon here that he is in the States, but with the hit movie not so deep down the memory hole, I figured that at least one student could come up with "kryptonite."  Nope.  Somebody did say, "Three minutes."  I instantly knew what he was talking about.

Here's a good primer on Japanese culture that matters.  You want to bond with a Japanese kid?  Shut your trap about bushido and geisha and tell him you love Ultraman. 

And find out why it's so important to get the job done in three minutes.

Dalrymple Radio Interview

Laudator Temporis Actis has beat me to the punch with its Dalrymple Watch, featuring the four latest Anthony Daniels offerings on the internet.  No permalinks, so scroll down to the bottom of the November 8 post. 

For those to whom this is simply not enough, you might want to check out this hour-and-a-half  Dalrymple interview with WGN Radio (Chicago) personality Milt Rosenberg.  Actually, there's a bevy of interviews worth listening to (Mark Steyn, David Mamet, Victor Davis Hanson, Shelby Steele, etc.).  Scroll about one-fifth down the page (at the time of this writing) to the 6/08 interview, about 40 interviews down.

As the purpose of the interview is mainly to plug his new book, Romancing Opiates,  most of the conversation centers on Dalrymple's view that the modern notion of drug addiction is more of a meme than a disease.  He cites the case of "Dr Mao," who single-handedly cured around 20 million addicts simply by prescribing a death sentence for continued drug use.   It all boils down to motivation.  Is Dalrymple sanguine about the chances of his message (he points out that he doesn't condone  the Chinese Communist Party Cure) revolutionizing the treatment of heroin addiction?  Not a chance.   As in  the  case of the environmental movement, there's too much money at stake to be objective.  Overstate the problem and the the government will probably throw more money at you.  Dalrymple adds that  doctors specializing in drug addiction "need the addicts more than the addicts need them." 

At the end of the interview, Dalrymple brings his experience as a prison psychologist into play by recounting that many of the angry, young Muslims in the West that he has administered to observe Islam far more often by insisting on their right to oppress women than by living devout lives.  They drink, don't demand halal food, and are indifferent about Ramadan...but woe to the infidels who try to date their sisters.

A man calling in praises Dalrymple's "clipped British accent," and to my lower-middle class American ears, it is a wonderful complement to his extemporaneously well-crafted sentences and rare common sense.

Under the weathers

Talk about climate change.  Yesterday, we in the little city of Tainai, neé Nakajo town, were treated to a gentle morning rain in unseasonable warm temperatures for November.   Then, sporadically, a low, sustained hiss in the trees and along the ground would signal one of the many mini-deluges that struck us.  Often, these would be falling through a bright, silvery sky, sometimes even blue.  This created the ideal condition for rainbows, and in the afternoon, the little valley behind our school sprouted a bright double rainbow that set off the foliage in the mountains beyond.

By nightfall, the rain was still coming and going, sweeping up the ten kilometers or so from the sea (you can watch it coming from our spot on the hill); this time, it was accompanied by fierce winds, and rather than pouring straight down, came slanting into the windows and doors.  I could hear a tremendous grinding, like the gears of the world were in need of a shot of oil.  Then the thunder and lightning hit.   Big bombs of it, along with the first hail of the year.  But that passed too.  We went to bed last night listening to the wind picking through what had been knocked down earlier.

I wonder if our weather had anything to do, in a more-or-less direct, meteorological sense, with this tornado in Hokkaido?  Northern Hokkaido's a long, long way off, so I doubt it.  Funny, though, but the way the wind was twisting the leaves into spirals yesterday, that's exactly what I though was headed our way.

First Things on the Fifth

Years, years, yeeears ago when I was a college freshman sitting in my dormroom listening to John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band album (you know...the one with "Mother," where Lennon treated his listeners to primal scream therapy vocals, the one with "Working Class Hero") I asked my roommate what the hell Lennon meant by "Remember...remember....the fifth of November," and why there was the sound of a huge explosion at the end of the song.  Bright guy that he was, Gleghn (wherever you are now, good on ya) told me that it was some sort of British holiday commemorating the gunpowder treason plot, when the nasty old Catholics were trying to blow up parliament. 

The story came up again in last year's political comedy V for Vendetta , which features Koran-cherishing atheist homosexuals being persecuted by a totalitarian Christian regime.  Certainly a movie that speaks directly to the problems that confront our generation. 

And yet, maybe there are those to whom the threat of Islamic fundamentalism is a petty annoyance compared to the mounting menace of creepy Christians.  Of course, this drives ex-jihadis, like Tawfik Hamid  (From Canada's National Post plus hat tips to Relapsed Catholic and Dr Roy's Thoughts) who are trying to warn us of what we're up against, a bit batty...

He's exasperated now, visibly angry at what he sees as a willful Western foolishness. "Stop asking what you have done wrong. Stop it! They're slaughtering you like sheep and you still look within. You criticize your history, your institutions, your churches. Why can't you realize that it has nothing to do with what you have done but with what they want."...

...but the thought that someone out there somewhere who represents your cultural heritage might not approve of your idea of a good time is simply too much for many modern minds to bear. 

Anyways, back to the Gunpowder plot, updated-like.  According to this Commentary piece that appeared in Arts and Letters Daily, the Mackerel Snapping Catlicks are at it again.  A former writer for First Things, Damon Linker (which name, I think, Satan would choose if he ever were to become a blogger),  has identified a wicked cabal who have worked their tentacles into the White House for clearly sinister purposes:

Slavishly advancing the dictates of the Vatican, the theocons, in Linker’s judgment, already endanger the free practice of science and of birth control. If they have their way, things will become far worse. They will saddle us with “a future in which American politics and culture have been systematically purged of secularism,” in which “the separation of church and state as we have known it will cease to exist,” in which “anti-Judaism [will] be reborn in America,” and in which “the Constitution of the United States [will be brought] into conformity with the moral and sexual worldview of the Vatican.” Even if they do not succeed in all this, the theocons will surely “lead us back to a world of religiously inspired social and political strife from which the American founders worked so hard to liberate us.”

The author of the Commentary article, Joshua Muravchick, didn't have to dig very deep to prove that either the "Theocons" are doing a rather poor job or the whole thing is simply Linker's imagination.

Abortion, illegal in Kennedy’s time, has been legalized, and efforts to restrict it have succeeded only at the margins. Divorce is easier and more common. Contraceptives are more varied and plentiful and more readily available. Premarital sex is more widespread, as are births out of wedlock. Sex education in the public schools is ubiquitous. Marriage between homosexuals is recognized legally in some localities and by some employers. Gambling, no longer a monopoly of the state of Nevada, is available legally around the country. Pornography is the leading product sold on the Internet. Euthanasia, although still rare, is practiced with relative impunity. Embryonic stem-cell research, restricted though it still is, receives billions of dollars in support, mostly from state governments. Living creatures have been cloned, and humans may not be far behind.

In short, the theocons and their allies, whether right or wrong in their beliefs, are far from having brought about a more sanctified America. If anything, they would seem to be fighting a rear-guard action against the relentless liberalization of norms.

Along these lines, there's a piece by historian Paul Johnson in this month's New Criterion exploring the mitigating role that religion has played in subduing the human beast. His essay takes the form of a very, very brief history of the world from, oh, about 13 billion years ago until the present day, not omitting details like the mean-spiritedness of Catholic novelist Evelyn Waugh. 

I recall the words of Father Karl Rahner, the Jesuit, reflecting on the efforts of modern totalitarian states to drive out the spiritual element from society. “If ever God is banished from the world so that even His image is eradicated from the human mind, we will cease to be human and become merely very clever animals—and our ultimate fate will be too horrible to contemplate.” Even with religion, and its restraints and exaltations, the story of mankind has been ferocious enough. Without it, what might we not have done to each other? I was struck by a story Nancy Mitford told about Evelyn Waugh, whose Catholic-convert piety contrasted strongly with a nature full of malice. She once reproached Waugh after a particular act of mental cruelty he had inflicted and said: “How can you reconcile your belief in God and your church with your odious behaviour?” He replied, grimly, “Nancy, I may be as bad as you say I am—and worse—but, believe me, were it not for my Catholic faith, I would scarcely be a human being.” The expression on his face, she recalled, as he said these terrible words, was unforgettable.

Read the whole thing.  And then start worrying about things that need to be worried about.

Ikkyu, IQ, and Lupi lets one

Laudator Temporis Acti is always full of pleasant and enlightening surprises, although you can always count on the blog for the classiest examples of scatological humor.  This month, there's a story that ranks up there with anything the medieval Japanese monk Ikkyu could offer.   (Also, scroll down Laudator for the poignant rejoinder Sam Johnson served Boswell  ("Bozzy's Blues") up with when the latter was kvetching about depression.  Sounds like good advice!  So much for regular visits to your therapist!)

I was surprised that the web doesn't have much to offer about Ikkyu--most postings are from western Zen faddists who groove on Ikkyu's reputation of irreverence and randiness.  As seen in the print, he enjoyed his visits to brothels and wrote some rather explicit poems. 

Like the clever ventilator  in the Laudator post, Everardo Lupi, Ikkyu had a reputation for turning a situation inside out with words.  His stories are quite well known here in Japan...this site uses a couple of them en face to teach English.  There's even a family restaurant chain that uses his name as it's name, although that may be because the kanji also suggests the meaning "a (one) break", as in "you deserve a break today." 

In fact, Ikkyu is practically a synonym for spontaneous wit, as this Japanese advertisement for a costume illustrates.  The get up is supposed to transform the wearer into the young, shaved (hence the blue chrome dome) monk in training era Ikkyu, saying "I'm getting a good idea!"   

Still, I'd have to say that Lupi beats out anything I've ever read that Ikkyu did.  For instance, his greatest hit relies on a particularly lame pun on the word hashi, a word that bedevils gaijin learning Japanese.  Based on very subtle differences in pronunciation, it can mean "bridge,""chopsticks" or "edge."  Once, Ikkyu marched across a bridge once that had a large sign posted on it warning, "Don't cross the bridge (hashi)."  When he was called on breaking the rules, he pointed out that he walked down the middle, not the edge (hashi).  Samui!

High IQ holder or smartass  (which Lupi literally was!), you tell me.