M Thomas Apple Author Page

New Year’s at the Dojo

January 30, 2016
MThomas

This past Sunday, my fellow Shorinji Kempo kenshi and I held our dojo’s “New Spring Law Meeting” (terrible translation of shinshun hokai; basically, “New Year’s Ceremony”). We usually hold it on the second Sunday of January, but delayed it this year due to everyone’s busy work schedules. The ceremony took place after a special three-hour intensive practice for higher level practitioners (we use the term “kenshi,” similar to those who do judo, who use the term “judoka,” or karate, “karate-ka”). No central heat in Japan, below zero temperatures…no problem. Body heat was more than enough.

As with most new year ceremonies in Japan, our ceremony includes one person (this year, the woman in the picture above) reading out a carefully prepared speech on a long horizontal paper folded many times, the contents of which summarize the events of the previous year and then end with a promise to work hard for the upcoming year. This is followed by an exhortation from the shisho (master) for us to do our best and work together to achieve our goals. The ceremony was longer this year because it was the 50th anniversary of the dojo foundation. Only top-level kenshi attend, which is a little disappointing; out of 80 members, only a handful can attend. Continue Reading

Christmas in Japan

December 26, 2015
MThomas

It’s been a long fall. Lots of work the past two months, with intermittent bouts of family sickness, but somehow we managed to pull through in time for the holidays.

Of course Christmas is not a national holiday where I live (central Japan). It’s mostly treated as an excuse for couples to enjoy a romantic evening at an overpriced restaurant. Except for us, where it’s an excuse for moms and dads to have their kids wreck the house while the parents have a few drinks.

Fortunately. the food is good. Very good. No Christmas turkey or ham here (the main fare is typically KFC actually, since some KFC chief in a brilliant PR stroke managed to convince the entire country that Americans eat fried chicken at Christmas). But there are plenty of parents nearby who are really good at cooking.

And of course there’s always cake:

So Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, Happy Kwanzaa, Happy Holidays, and other non-denominational festivities to you and your kin!

And no, I don’t want to talk about the 2015 World Series. I’m too busy using the NL Champions shot glass set to be depressed…

The bells of silence

October 3, 2015
MThomas

It’s been a while since I wrote here for (again) work and family-related reasons. For starters, like most Mets fans I got caught up in the division-drive with its ebbs and flows and occasional near-cardiac-arrest-inducing turns. It wouldn’t be the Mets without some sort of chance of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

It was, in fact, during the last week of mind-numbing play that lead to the clinching game against the Reds that I started to notice a turn for the worse…in my health. My daughter Erina had had a fever approaching 40C (104-105F), and I had a lost at least a couple nights of sleep, running over to her room as she woke up every two hours or so. Fortunately, she recovered, but proceeded to pass whatever bug she had on to me. I endured — what else could I do, really? — and last Friday morning, woke up just in time to watch the final pitch from Familia that sealed the deal.

Problem was, I could barely hear the crowd.

My life as a tree

July 26, 2015
MThomas

Kyoto, where I work, is chock full of temples and shrines. Every day I walk to campus, I walk through a Rinzai Zen temple along the way. While the temple itself is not as famous or as old as others nearby, it is popular among tourists for its gardens, open public lectures, and guest houses. There’s a nursery school within the temple grounds, and TV crews occasionally can be seen filming for various end-of-year specials. Because it’s located in a residential neighborhood near several high schools, students and office workers alike travel through it daily. After a long, crowded train ride during the morning rush hour, walking through a zen temple is an incredibly relaxing experience. I’ve walked through the temple grounds every day for three years now; I have to remind myself how lucky I am.

Last week, after a typhoon crossed over Japan just south of us, I was heading home through the temple when I saw an older man squatting down in front of a small pine tree. He had taken off his hat, with a small white towel draped over his shoulders to prevent sunburn, and was silently contemplating the tree. I watched as he took a drink from a water bottle, then poured the rest of the bottle around the base of the tree.

I don’t know what he was thinking, of course, but I like to imagine: how long would it take for the sapling to equal the other pine trees in the temple precinct in size? He might no longer be alive then. How long ago had the older trees been planted, as saplings? Perhaps he had not even been born yet.

Pine trees (matsu) have long been associated with zen Buddhism and zen temples. Zazen (sitting meditation) is practiced by Rinzai Zen monks, and visitors to this temple are encouraged to join the morning zazen when they stay at the guest house. But really all you need is a tree, and your imagination, to understand how short life is. How mysterious. How tenacious. How precious.

A sobering reminder on the way to and from work.

Space seeds: fruits of our labor?

July 19, 2015
MThomas

In my blog about child-care and child-raising, I’ve written about cooking food with my kids and growing vegetables in our backyard garden. I grew up in a small countryside village (total pop. of about 3,000 if you include the three-quarters of the county that the township comprises), so this meant lots of land that could be used for growing green things. At home in Japan, I’ve tried to recreate what I can of my childhood backyard; that said, it’s of course impossible given that my parents’ land is at least four times the size of my property (even in rural Japan, land is not cheap, and often not even for sale).

Try to image this scene on Mars…outside a greenhouse…

No doubt this is a main reason why I chose to include a scene in Approaching Twi-Night where the main character’s family relationships are first described by his meeting his father and brother in their backyard garden. Although unlike my own father, the father in the novel is somewhat incompetent as a farmer…

Now that I’m beginning to turn my writing attention to other-worldly venues like the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere, I wonder how humanity would survive in environments that had no vegetation, where they had no access to fresh fruit and vegetables, where survival would depend on food rations and pre-prepared freeze-dried kits or soy-based products. Food flavor would be entirely chemical-based (even more than it already is, I mean). At least until we managed to terraform, we could also use greenhouses, but the area around any outer space settlers would be grey, red, brown…but no green. No free-standing bodies of water. No living things in the air, in the sea, on the land, but us.

How would the average person react over time, mentally and emotionally, in a sterile, lifeless environment? Not the average astronaut; I mean the average person. For civilization to survive and thrive off-world, people who don’t look like Hollywood actors or athletes would have to live on their own, isolated from terrestial food and energy sources for years at a time. What would children be like, growing up having never seen a tree or a bush, or even grass, without having touched a dog or a cat, or even ants? Living in a lush environment is connected to mental health; the new settlers would likely be extremely stressed out, all the time. Add multiple competing settler populations of ethnic groups with historical griefs and you have a recipe for interplanetary strife that might last for generations.

So, the moral of the story is simple: eat your greens to avoid endless internecine war in outer space. Who knew veggies could be so powerful?

BEA 2015 and Why I’m Not There (But My Book Is!)

May 30, 2015
MThomas

Yikes. It’s been over two months since I posted something. Bad writer, bad writer.

Well, that’s what work will do to you. My book is being promoted at the Book Expo America (BEA) in New York City this week, but I’m not there…because I live in Japan. And, of course, because the Japanese academic year just started. No, really, it did. The year begins with the fiscal year, in April, and the first term ends in late July/early August. Much as I’d love to visit the US, and especially New York, it’s just not possible right now…but not to worry, the whirlwind book signing / relative-visiting trip will come in August, just in time for the end of the Glens Fall Dragons season (ideally).

Aaaand, baseball season started, and I returned to the traditional Mets fan high-low-very low-damn them again-why do I torture myself every year with this-ah, hell, they’re getting better, I guess-remember 1986? cycle of vicarious baseball watching/listening/reading games whenever I can life. The 13-hour time difference makes for a challenging sleep schedule.

So, yeah, that’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it. Now, who’s up for a game of Parrises squares?

Blast from the Spring Past

March 30, 2015
MThomas

With only one week to go before the regular MLB season begins, I thought I’d go back and take a look at my old baseball pictures.

Only it turned out that I only had one: a tiny black and white picture of me standing at third base that appeared in my high school yearbook. Proud baseball Poppa to the rescue!

My father dug up about eight photos of me as a gangly 16 year old, doing what I did best that year: protecting the left bench from foul balls.

I also got really good at keeping score. When I wasn’t standing in right field while it snowed. Spring in the Adirondacks: we never played any of our scheduled games the first week of April, and even during the second and third week games typically featured flurries, sub-freezing temperatures, and rock-hard dirt surfaces to bounce on…ah, slide on when stealing second. Even now in my hometown, there are three feet of snow on the field, and I’m sure the players are tired of practicing inside the gym (the parking lot is also a favorite for ground-ball drills). Continue Reading

What’s “creative non-fiction”?

March 24, 2015
MThomas

Yes, this is a real lake and not fictional.

This past week I’ve been scouring through some short stories of mine that have been sitting collecting Microsoft dust for years now…in preparation for putting out a collection of stories and poems later this year or early next (tentatively titled “Notes from the Nineties,” which lets you know how long I’ve been sitting on these files). Some of the earliest versions of the stories were written so long ago that MS Word consisted of a single 3.5″ floppy.

What’s a floppy? To quote George Carlin, next person who asks that gets stabbed between the eyes with a pencil.

As I began the tedious process of converting the files to newer, editable forms of word processing software, it occurred to me that much of my fiction is really very thinly-disguised non-fiction. Kind of. Continue Reading

I like stats. Go figure.

March 16, 2015
MThomas

I like stats. There. I said it. I’m a stats geek.

This past Sunday, I was invited to give a presentation/workshop in Kyoto called “Basic Statistics for Language Teachers.” That’s what I do: educational statistics. Writing about statistics is usually not as interesting as writing fiction. I think that probably goes without saying.

But actually, the history of sports, and of baseball in particular, is exactly that: writing about statistics. Continue Reading

High school baseball here costs how much??

March 3, 2015
MThomas

Big news from my university’s affiliated high school this year: the high school baseball team was chosen to enter the national Spring Invitational Tournament. This is the first time in five years, and the fifth time since the university bought the failing school two decades ago and turned it into a regional powerhouse for international studies.

All they need is 40,000,000 yen. Continue Reading

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