More April 1992

Just for contrast, yesterday was a cold April Saturday, following a day or so rain, compared to the previous two exceedingly warm April Saturdays. Today spring looks the part—clear skies, new greenery everywhere, birds atwitter (many seem to be perched over my car), but it’s still distinctly cool.

I dug up more verbage from April 1992. I didn’t know it was such a well-documented period. So I might as well post more.

April 20

Not long ago I made the trip to Nipponbashi, Osaka’s electronics district, poking around a clutch of stores, eyeing a host of PCs. I found a place that sells used computers—one of several stores all together down a small side street—and among the stacks of machines, there was an Epson 286 Book STD, an older model, for Y88,000. State of the art in 1988.

The newer model is a 386, but all I need is a word processor, so the extra speed is an extravagance. It’s a laptop of the slightly bulky kind, with a green screen that unfolds upward on a hinge, two slots for floppy disks, and an English keyboard with katakana characters alongside the Roman. It also has a standard spacebar; a remarkable number of Japanese word processors (word-pros in Japanese) have no long spacebar, but then again there’s no separation between words in written Japanese. Anyway, I bought it. I have a copy of software that I know will run it, and I’ve been using it like a new toy for a few days now.

Last week I interviewed my travel agent for a short article in the local English-language monthly, Kansai Time Out, about the befuddlements of Japan-originated travel. Mr. Kruger—a Canadian who’s been here 15 years or so, now running his own agency in Juso, which includes a used English book store—was a gusher. Inquires brought forth a torrent of words. So the interview went well, and I also took the opportunity to make a tentative booking to Singapore in late June/early July, on KAL via Seoul. I’ve been grazing various sources (research is too strong a word) on that city-state and Malaysia, and they look worth a visit.

Postscript 2005: As long as I lived in Japan, the Epson served me well, and I used it to write letters and articles, including the extract above. After returning to the States, however, it proved impossible to use, since no one could promise me that any particular printer would work with it. As for Singapore/Malaysia, I made the trip, and remember it fondly.