In 1979, I flew to Kyoto to visit a friend. I had been obsessed with chess for the last year or so and had gotten a lot of practice. My friend couldn’t beat me even if I played blindfolded and gave him queen odds so he suggested, “Let me show you another game.” He showed me Go, and I hardly ever played chess again.
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When I was 34 in 1987, I joined the Alan Lee Kung Fu Temple on West 27th Street for two years. I remember the year because many of the other students were 17, exactly half my age, and going to the toughest high schools in New York. Training consisted of one hour of exercise and one hour of lessons and fighting, or as we called it, playing. I was in good shape in those years. I stopped smoking and practiced my horse-riding stance while watching movies on TV. We conditioned our hands by pounding on bags of grain or beans, on concrete blocks and by breaking boards and bricks, which isn’t as difficult as it sounds.
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I first went to Kyoto, Japan as a youth of 26 in 1979, where to my horror I discovered that even after three months of study, I couldn’t speak the language. At the time, my concept was to do a book on Nagisa Oshima, who you could say was the Godard of Japan, but I underestimated the difficulties and necessary budget. Forty years later, even though I’m now fluent, I am still amazed when I go to a small Japanese eatery that can’t possibly have a limitless menu, that the waiter will discuss what I can and won’t eat, as if there’s much of a choice in the first place. Rather than assure them that I am food macho, meaning “I can eat anything weirder than you have,” I prefer to name some far-out victual and say that I don’t quite enjoy it. “I really hate funazushi,” I explain, “but I like most kusaya.” Funazushi is historically one of sushi’s ancestors, a funa carp aged in salt for a year or four, intensely stinky and quite difficult to like. Kusaya is mild by comparison, being merely a fish that is fermented in aged sea brine, often a brine recipe handed down through generations of its craftsmen.
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I had a Jewish deli in Tokyo. Really. It was a sandwich shop that we set up across the boulevard from Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and the still extant Lehman Brothers of 1998. We served matzo balls and Reuben sandwiches to the bankers and to the U.S. embassy employees who lived up the street in a sort of dormitory.
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In September 2003, JJ came to me with a deal. He had been working for six months for a Korean company called C&C Enterprise Co., Ltd., a typical Korean-English name for a “computer and communications” company specializing in public transit fare collection. They had an idea that was so simple, it had eluded the world for decades. Instead of transit agencies issuing their own pass cards to the subways and buses of Seoul, C&C’s hardware accepted credit cards at the transit gates just like any normal credit card transaction. The charge would appear on your statement at the end of the month automatically. The system had been running in Seoul for eight years successfully but no other city in the world had adopted it yet.
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