Karen Sandler

Tag: osaka

  • When Japan is Right Next Door

    Let me say right at the outset that I hate earthquakes. They scare the crap out of me. Just my luck to grow up in Southern California, one of the earthquake capitals of the world.

    There are three in particular I remember. First, the San Fernando quake in 1971. My two older sisters and I were way underage, but one of them had hidden a bottle of booze in a dresser drawer. After the quake stopped, they both went running for the dresser, worried that the bottle might have broken.

    The Whittier Narrows quake in 1987 happened while I was driving, so I didn’t feel it. I do recall riding out an aftershock gripping my younger son’s crib while the house shook. No fun for me, but my husband thought it was cool. Crazy guy likes earthquakes.

    The Loma Prieta quake in 1989 was the worst of them all. No, that one wasn’t in Los Angeles. Its epicenter was up in the Bay Area. A double decker section of Interstate 880 collapsed, trapping hundreds. A section of the Bay Bridge also collapsed, although overall the damage wasn’t as bad as on I-880. Even so, I still get uneasy driving the Bay Bridge into San Francisco, not to mention the realization I’m driving into earthquake country.

    When we moved to Northern California (thankfully before the Northridge quake in 1994), we settled in a wonderfully seismically stable area. Yes, we contend with wildfires in the summer, but at least the earth doesn’t move.

    Japan is more than 5000 miles away from me. I’m well inland, so the tsunami that followed the earthquake had no impact on me. But I have a connection to Japan that makes the events there seem very personal. My older son lives in Osaka and teaches English there.

    That’s Eric on the left with his friends Yusuke and Kae. Living in Japan was a dream of Eric’s since junior high, but I admit I passed it off as one of those things kids think they want to do but gets cast by the wayside when they grow up. But he never gave up on that dream and worked very hard to make it come true. He spent the last year and a half attending a Japanese language school and now is staying one more year in Osaka to teach English.

    Skyping with him every week, hearing his stories of the neighborhood, seeing his pictures, hearing about the food he’s eaten and the temples he’s visited makes Japan seem much more real than just a country drawn on a map. We even stayed up until midnight one night so we could meet some of the people he works with and a couple of the kids he teaches. We spent most of the time on Skype laughing and smiling. It was clear they like my son very much.

    So when a terrible event like the earthquake and tsunami happens, it hits hard. Yes, I’m grateful my son is safe in Osaka. But my prayers are with everyone in Japan, to those affected by the earthquake, those who have lost loved ones, those working hard to save others. God’s blessings to them all.

    Click for the American Red Cross.

  • The Future is Now

    Last night, my husband and I used Skype to meet some of the folks our older son, Eric, works with and teaches in Osaka, Japan. It was so very cool to have a chance to meet his boss, his co-workers and some of his young students (Eric teaches them English). He coached each of the girls to tell us in English their name, age and grade in school. It was so neat to see my son switch into “teacher mode” and to hear his boss praise him to the heavens. We had to stay up past midnight for the Skype session (that’s when Eric’s lessons start), but it was well worth some lost sleep.

    We were all a little unsure what to talk about, so we did some show and tell via the Skype display. I brought each of my three cats to the computer. My son’s boss showed off a cute anime-type drawing one of her students had colored for her. They all laughed when they saw our “Japan clock.” It has Kanji instead of numbers and is set to Osaka time.

    Of course, we’re used to using Skype to talk to Eric. We speak with him once a week, usually on our Saturday afternoon and his Sunday morning. It’s currently a 17-hour time difference (they’re nearly 3/4 of a day ahead of us). In March, we’ll “spring forward,” but Japan won’t, so they’ll only be 16 time zones ahead of us.

    But even though Skype is old hat, it was still a wonderful experience to meet some of the folks he talks about so much. It was like we had a window between the U.S. and Japan. It was almost a magical thing, as if we could reach out and shake each other’s hands.

    Skype could someday become even more cool. Scientists are now working on a holographic “telepresence” that could send 3-D video across the Internet. They’re using a special plastic that refreshes the holographic image every two seconds. It’s sort of like running old fashioned film through a projector and each frame is projected for two seconds before moving to the next frame. That might seem too slow (well, yeah, it is), but it’s actually world’s better than the older technology the military uses. That technique can take an entire day to refresh from one frame to the next. The full story about the new technology is here.

    What makes this scientific development especially intriguing to me is that in TANKBORN, I use holographic projections throughout the story. In the book, fanciful holo designs are projected onto the plain white exterior walls of the houses, and the designs can be easily switched from one to another. You could be living in a castle one moment and a circus tent the next.

    I learned from the article that holograms need a “screen” to display on, just like the plain white walls of the houses in TANKBORN. It’s nice to know that what I imagined isn’t all that far-fetched. That the future is getting closer all the time.

    I’m still waiting for my flying car, though.