San Francisco
I write that byline because I lost
about half of my weekly readers with the Tokyo byline. I was regularly
getting more than 20,000 hits a week before going to Tokyo. It
dropped to half of that with the Tokyo byline. Maybe I should have emphasized that I am not a conventional tourist. I have been going to Japan for 30 years and Tokyo for 25. I have had many clients and been a partner in a Tokyo social think tank.
The trip back began with political venom. I found I couldn't cut a juicy fresh apple with the plastic knives available on airplanes. I asked myself whether the loss of silverware on airplanes, the long lines for screening and the total cost of airline security and customer delays justified: the possible hours of lost sleep of inmate jihadists and Islamophobic lipstick on the panties of interrogators at Guantanamo. My answer is “yes.”
I also took out my radiation meter when
the plane was at six miles up, over the Aleutians. The reading I got
was 76 clicks per minute. Exactly seven times the number of clicks
at sea level in Tokyo and San Francisco. The flight home exposed me,
and the other airborne travelers, to as much radiation as we get in
two and a half days on the ground.
Re: Top right photo of "Grand Old Ladies" of San Francisco. I took the first photo of this image in 1973 when I started the Third World Tours of San Francisco, the first non-Grayline tour. I gave out thousands of postcards with this image, taken by me, as a promo item.