My Favorite Suit

The other day, I was walking in a brown suit. Then an ex-pilot of the U.S. Navy spoke to me, saying, "General, don't you go to Iraq?" (Read details in a recent story of my "Femto-Essay" site.) It seems that he thought me in that suit to be a high-rank officer of the Self-Defense Force of Japan. There are more stories about this brown suit.

It was August 1979. I visited National Research Council in Ottawa, Canada, in that suit. (I use the suit for so many years, less than a few times per year.) There I saw Dr. K. W. Geiger, a son of Hans Wilhelm Geiger. -- The German physicist H. W. Geiger (1882—1945) is famous for the development of the Geiger—Müller counter to measure radioactivity. -- K. W. Geiger wore completely the same suit as mine. He said, "This was made in Korea." I said, "Oh, no! I bought this in Japan." Then I checked my suit and found the words, "Made in Korea." I had to say, "Oh, I didn't know this had been made in Korea."

Some years later, I went to Tokyo in that suit. A foreign lady stopped me at the Yaesu entrance hall of the Tokyo station, and asked me a donation or something like that in Japanese. I rejected her request in English. Then she said in English, "You look nice!" (So, I like that suit). However, I didn't change my answer to her. -- An old fox is not easily snared. --

Note added later: Hearing this story, a lady friend of mine said to me, "It can be amusing for a man that another person is in the same suit, but for a woman it would be a serious problem. Women pursue originality in their dresses." Sure!

Talking about Spirits Is Scientific

A blog friend of mine, who nicknamed herself obachan (a Japanese word to mean middle-aged woman), recently wrote on her web page as follows [1]:

[My grandma] strictly made me finish the rice, literally all -- without leaving any single grain in the bowl. According to her, there were gods (or spirits of nature) living in rice, so we should never throw them away.

My wife's and my own mother possibly belonged to the same generation as her grandma, and they also taught us to eat rice to the last grain. Regrettably, however, we did not tell our daughters about the spirits in rice. As a result, they do not share with us that good habit about eating rice. I thought that my wife and I were too scientific to talk about spirits. However, I happened to find the following passage in a book written by F. David Peat [2]:

Indigenous science also teaches that corn is the manifestation of something deeper, of something that transcends the particular individual plant and links all corn together -- in this case spirit.

Then Peat describes that the spirits of corn and Native American people had a form of mutually supportive relationship. Corn would grow in response to a request that it should feed the people; and in turn the people acknowledge the power of the plant and care for it in special ways. This represents indigenous science. It moves slowly. On the other hand, genetic engineering of Western science today is impressive, but, Peat criticizes, scientists don't really understand what they are doing to the general ecology.

Speaking of spirits might have been more scientific. I'm not joking here.

1. "108 Gods in Salad" in "Obachan's Kitchen & Balcony Garden" (2004).
2. F. David Peat, "Blackfoot Physics: A Journey into the Native American Universe" (Fourth Estate, London, 1995).

Related Site Added Later

• National Museum of the American Indian (Opened September 21, 2004, in Washington, D.C.).

Frogs or Flags?

Past April I made my first trip to Shikoku, and found the street name "Hata" in the city of Kochi. "Hata" means, "Flags (are) plenty (here)," and is expressed by two Chinese characters. The faithful pronunciation of the characters would be "Hatata." Two ta's must have been shortened to a single ta.

My last name "Tabata" is expressed by the same two characters as those of Hata put in the reverse order. I say to the overseas friends of mine, "My last name means many flags." The flags of Hata and Tabata are of a vertically long kind (nobori-bata) such as used by samurai in wars. I suppose that many samurai of the Taira clan (Heike) secretly lived in Hata after being beaten by the Minamoto clan (Genji) in 1185 in a naval battle at Dannoura.

Possibly my last name comes from the fact that my father-side ancestors were fishermen, not samurai, in a village facing the Japan Sea. They must have come back from fishing with many flags on the boat when they got much fish.

On hearing the explanation of my last name, some friends of mine ask me which I mean, frogs or flags, because my English pronunciation is poor. I say, "Stars and Stripes is the American flag. That flag!" Once I said this to a British friend of mine. I should have referred to Union Jack.

(Modified from my comment on "Another Typhoon" posted at the website "Obachan's Scribbles")

Physics of Stone Skipping

In January 2004, my wife and I joined a 13-day travel to New Zealand organized by JTB West. It included a two-day visit to Moeraki in the heart of South West New Zealand World Heritage Area. In the morning of the second day in Moeraki, the local guide Andy brought us to Monro Beach facing the Tasman Sea. There he often played stone skipping picking up flat and circular pebbles.

I said to Andy, "To get the maximum number of bounces, you had better give maximum spin to the stone and throw it so as to make the attack angle between the stone and the water surface 20 degrees. Do you know the world record of stone skipping?" He did not know the world record. I told him that it was 38 rebounds.

I learned all these things about stone skipping just before going on the travel. It was from the article entitled "Secrets of successful stone-skipping" and written by the French scientists Christophe Clanet, Fabien Hersen and Lydéric Bocquet [1].

However, a different set of experiments would be necessary to find the optimum throwing for Andy's stone skipping. The wave of the Tasman Sea was rather large, so that Andy was throwing stones not directly to the sea but to the region of the wet sandy beach from which the wave had just retreated. The stones rebounded five or six times on the sands and then on water!

1. C. Clanet, F. Hersen and L. Bocquet, Nature Vol. 427, p. 29 (2004).

Another Statistical Study on Right and Left

In an earlier story of this collection of essays, I introduced a psychologist's statistical study on the side of a pair's turning of their head in kissing. Amar Klar of the National Cancer Institute in Maryland, USA, made another statistical study on right and left.

According to an article in Nature Science Update [1], Klar secretly inspected people's top of the head by spying on them in airports and shopping malls, ignoring the longhaired and the bald. He found the followings [2]: More than 95% of right-handers' hair whorled clockwise on the scalp and that the locks of lefties and the ambidextrous are equally likely to coil either way.

I write with the right hand, use a driver and some other tools with the left hand, and have a pair of whorls curing clockwise and anticlockwise. This is quite consistent with Klar's reuslt.

Klar is reported to have said, "A single gene with either 'right' or 'random' forms might underlie the trend. People with one or two copies of the right version would be right-handed, with clockwise hair; those with two random versions would split 50/50 for handedness and hair whorls." He is now seeking such a gene.

The article also says: Left-handed or ambidextrous people are more likely to store language in the right side of the brain, are more prone to schizophrenia and, anecdotally, are more often creative or even geniuses. -- Oh, I'm prone to schizophrenia or may be a genius! --

1. "Handedness equals hairstyle: One gene might control both - and explain the divided brain," Nature Science Update, Sep. 4 2003.
2. A. J. S. Klar, "Human handedness and scalp hair whorl direction develop from a common genetic mechanism," Genetics, in press (2003).