Tag Archives: Japan

Big Buddha

The first time I saw the Daibutsu,
the temple yard was filled
with hundreds of weekend visitors and tourists.
Now (Monday morning) it is nearly deserted,
more staff than guests.

As before, my engineer's eyes
see plates, joints and weldlines,
looped lift points, the technique
behind the object.
I go inside; it's much the same,
but with more recent extra bracing;
the outside all about appearance,
the inside all about structural integrity.
Show the what, hide the how:
a magic trick: all art is like that.

Back outside, a raven swoops,
perches on top of a sculpture, caws,
surveys his domain, before gliding
to the offering of fruit.
He has come not to pay his respects,
but to claim his tribute.
His motives are clear.

But I - why am *I* here?


Hasedera, Hase 2023/12/4

Hōkokuji

It's cold today,
even the Buddha statues are wearing knit red caps.
The gardens are welcoming,
the signs not so much:
    NO GRAFITTI, NO CARVE,
    OFF LIMITS, OFF LIMITS.
Temples grow old without getting any older;
unlike me.
Carol strolls among giant bamboo,
dusty green, 6-inch diameter trunks,
40 feet high.
I sit and write.
The bamboo pass through me, my pen,
are distilled into ink.
Life: we enter, we exit,
in the middle are bamboo,
and maybe a few people.
A century from now,
I will be gone, the people will be gone,
the temple will remain,
and it will be someone else's job
to distill the bamboo.

Hōkokuji, Kamakura 2023/12/3

47

It's only 250 meters
from the hotel to the temple,
from the commercial bustle of Cargo River
to the graveyard, but
the drop in decibels is astounding.
A little uphill to the original wooden gate
of the Asano estate, and then
the graves. So many. So few.
Visitors place fistfuls of burning incense,
so smoke and fragrance swirl everywhere.

People still care.

In a world of betrayals and compromises,
it helps to know
that loyalty can be more important than life,
that justice can be more important than death.
That when one no longer clings to survival,
one can grasp something greater,
see with absolute clarity.

They saw something needed doing.
They did it.
They died for it.
They didn't mind.
No more needs be said.


Senkakuji, Shinagawa 2023/11/26

Mada Shirimasen

(a tale from The Emotion Engine)

There really should have been a book written about the design of the Sony PlayStation 2, one of the most successful gaming consoles in history. I would have wanted to call it The Emotion Engine, which was the name of the main processor chip. I led the physical design of the R5900 CPU, which was about half of the Emotion Engine chip (the other half was graphics preprocessing), so I have some inside stories to tell. Here’s one of them …

In Japanese, there are two ways to say “I don’t understand”. The first one, wakarimasen, means “it isn’t clear” (to me). The implication is that, even though I have had everything explained to me, I still don’t get it. The responsibility for the lack of understanding is mine and mine alone.

The second way, shirimasen, means more like “I wasn’t informed” or “nobody told me”. It blames someone else for my lack of knowledge.

Depending on the context, shirimasen can be extremely rude even though it is in polite-form Japanese. For example, if a teacher asks you a question in school, and you say wakarimasen, it just means you don’t know the answer. But if you say shirimasen, it means that no one taught you. It means that the teacher is at fault.

The political structure of the Emotion Engine design team was a little strange. At the top was a group in Toshiba Kawasaki that was responsible for assembling the entire chip. Below them was our group in Toshiba San Jose that was doing the R5900. Below us was another group in Toshiba Kawasaki that had to deliver macro blocks (like register files) to us.

This led to some confusion about who was supplier and who was customer. Ideally, the top-level group should have been able to tell us what they needed and when, and we should have been able to tell the macro group what we needed and when. But sometimes, when we tried to do that, they would “change hats” and tell us that we didn’t need what we needed. It could be frustrating.

When we were just beginning the layout of the R5900, we needed to know what the global chip strategies were for power distribution and clock distribution. For our part of the chip to drop in smoothly and have the power grid match the rest of the chip, it was important for both groups to be following the same guidelines. And for there not to be serious timing problems at the interfaces, the total latencies in the clock networks had to match very precisely. Clearly this was a chip-level issue and had to be led by the top-level group. But even though I asked and asked, I could never get any answers.

Weeks dragged on with no resolution of this issue. It was starting to seriously affect my team’s ability to progress. I was getting pretty angry, but I couldn’t see what to do.

One day in a video meeting with Kawasaki, with Sony representatives present, someone asked me “So, what are you doing about power and clock distribution?” I nearly lost it. But I knew just enough Japanese to craft a short, polite-form but quite rude, response:

Mada shirimasen. Oshiete kudosai. “(I have) not been informed yet. Please instruct (me).”

There was total dumbfounded silence on the Kawasaki end for 45 seconds. Everyone had understood exactly what I said, and they all knew it was pretty rude, but they couldn’t be sure that I knew how rude it was. I just sat there and looked innocent.

Then the room exploded, with multiple people talking over each other. I couldn’t parse most of it, but I was pretty sure they were trying to verify that I in fact had not been told what the guidelines were, and determine who was responsible for (not) giving them to me.

I got what I needed 2 days later. 🙂

The Temples of Kamakura

Tokei-ji

Rakesh pays 300 yen to enter Tokei-ji temple.
Outside, cicadas sing furiously
and I linger, haunted
by a magenta-spotted white lily
with dark red anthers.

The breeze is cooling
in this otherwise bug-hot day.

Three girls speaking French
watch me write this, lose interest,
wander off with their parents.
One has a pierced nose.

Through the leaves of a bush
with tiny clusters of pale lavender flowers,
a large wasp,
striped black and orange-yellow,
prowls like some aerial tiger.

A helicopter sounds in the distance, then fades.

Rakesh emerges. "It was just a room
with some old scrolls."

At the end of the garden path
a Buddha sits,
one hand upraised.

Tokei-ji, Kamakura
August 10, 1997

Bug Hot

It's hot and humid in Kamakura;
mushi-atsui they call it, "steaming hot".
But when I first heard that phrase,
I thought of the mushi that means insect:
bug hot, insect weather. And indeed today
the cicadas are out in force, trilling
their urgent cries of love and loneliness.
After ripening in the ground for years,
they have only a few days to mate,
or not. Either way, they end up
as spent husks, littering the paving stones
in the cemetery above the temple.
Intact, still beautiful, their wings
are whole and clean, but will never fly again.

A loud buzzing nearby: I turn,
but the sound echoes strangely off the gravestones,
and I cannot find its source.
Will a potential mate face the same problem?
They don't have long ... this heat,
their desperate heat,
cannot last.

Engaku-ji, Kamakura
August 10, 1997

The Riddle of the Lotus
(questions for Buddha)

The thousand-petaled flower, pure, inviolate -
was it already there when you arrived?
Were scowling guardians waiting at the gate
to keep its long virginity untried?

How did you pass, and step into the center?
Was it by strength or speed or magic spell?
Or did you simply speak with them and enter
the circle where the sacred lotus dwelled?

These thoughts are all incredible. But then,
it's still more unbelievable that when
you merely chose a spot to sit and breathe, you

generated gods to guard you there
and form a fierce blockade surrounding where
the white and shining blossom grew beneath you.

Hasedera, Kamakura
November 22, 1998

Copyright ©1997,1998,2003,2020 Howard A. Landman