21
Oct
2016

Renewable liquid fuels – No silver bullet, but perhaps important.

Over the last few days I’ve seen a number of tweets appear like this

and like this

The story is one about a paper in Science which goes way over my head, but which appears to talk about a new catalysed method of sucking CO2 out of the air and using it to produce ethanol. A number of people have reacted as though this will solve all our problems. They are wrong. This is not a clean fuel source that will solve all our energy problems, because the process will require an energy input greater than that which is released by burning the ethanol. I’m no organic chemist, but if that wasn’t the case it would be bucking some of the most fundamental principles of physics. This isn’t free energy, and it isn’t going to make climate change go away.

However, it may still be important. If the round-trip efficiency is good enough, it may provide a useful means of long-term storage of energy. Even if the efficiency is relatively poor, it may still be important as a sustainable way of producing an energy-dense liquid fuel for those transport applications, such as aircraft, ships, or heavy trucks, that don’t show any prospect of being electrified any time soon. In this way the new technology is in competition with other ideas for producing methanol, ammonia, or (beloved of many) hydrogen. If the new catalyst makes this more efficient, all the better.

Posted by simon in The wider world
05
Oct
2016

Timber structures and notions of permanence

There was a sign that amused me, on the summit of a sacred mountain, which read,

“The Konpon Daitō is the tallest building in Kōyasan… In later centuries the Konpon Daitō was destroyed in fires caused by lightning striking five times, and rebuilt each time. After the great fire of 1843, only the foundation stones remained. The existing building was rebuilt in 1937.”

Some people just don’t seem to get the message!

But it illustrates a wider observation, which is that in Japan an ancient wooden temple or other structure can still be ancient even if it has been rebuilt many times, the latest sometimes being quite recent. Indeed, it is tradition that some of the most important temples are deliberately torn down and rebuilt every few decades. Other places are “renovated” every 50 years in a way that pretty much entails dismantling them and putting them back together again, replacing timber wherever it is no longer sound. These processes don’t cause anybody to think of them as modern structures.

A white, traditional castle. Although it's hard to tell, it's constructed from concrete.

Kokura-jō: Four hundred years old, or sixty?

A similar concept applies to castles. Castles in Japan were made of wood, and thus prone to being burnt down – sometimes by accident, sometimes by the enemies of the occupants, and sometimes by the occupants themselves on the occasion of their departure. When one visits a castle one tends to find a litany of all the times they were destroyed and rebuilt. It’s not unusual for the last rebuilding to have been in the 1950s or 60s, out of reinforced concrete, but they’re not really thought of as replicas.

There’s a strong element of My Grandfather’s Axe here. It’s echoed to some degree in descriptions of British churches (and occasionally pubs), which tend to go “There has been a church here since 1273…”, but the British think in terms of the site: there was a church here, but it was not this church. The Japanese view of it, at least as I perceived it through the flaws of translations, is that it’s the same building. It’s as though it’s the notion of the building that’s important, rather than its physical or material structure.

A new-looking timber building behind a fence in woodland, built in the style of a pre-buddhist Shinto shrine

Ise Grand Shrine: Two thousand years old, but rebuilt every twenty. Photo: Flickr user Kzaral, licensed CC-BY 2.0

Posted by simon in Working in Japan
17
Sep
2016

Japan is not afraid of infrastructure

I’m writing this as a lay visitor; I have no insight into the Japanese planning processes.

A mess of overhead power cables meeting at a street junctionBut travelling around the country, it struck me that infrastructure in Japan is visible, and they don’t seem to be ashamed of it. Streets have their power lines overhead, rather than buried – like much of America, but strange and messy-looking to a European eye. In areas suitable for heavy industry, there is heavy industry. One sees large power plants, chemical plants, gas storage tanks, etc., close to populated areas, with no attempt to disguise them. Plans for any of these facilities would cause uproar in the UK.
Most towns, even agricultural ones in pristine valleys, have one or two large radio masts, painted red and white, rising out of a municipal building (often one belonging to the former state telecoms company, or sometimes a post office). Some of these are festooned with microwave dishes, but most just have cellphone antennae now; I suspect that they are the relic of an extensive microwave network that has since been replaced, but they haven’t been torn down. Contrast to the arguments in the UK that led to some cellphone masts being disguised as metallic trees.

Communications tower rising from a municipal telecoms building in Japan

Photo: Wikimedia commons, user Prosperosity. Licensed CC BY-SA 3.0.

There isn’t much onshore wind power, and I don’t know why that is – but I don’t think it’s likely to be about visual impact, since everywhere one sees electricity transmission lines “marching across the landscape”, with the towers once again painted bright red and white. It’s notable that – in a way that will be familiar to everybody who has lived near such things – after a few days they stop being obtrusive, and become a part of the landscape that is largely filtered out of conscious perception.
The shinkansen, built from the 1960s to the 2000s, zooms across the whole country on elevated tracks, visible for miles in every direction. Recently there have been complaints about noise from high speed trains, and as a result the latest line has noise barriers – which help with the noise but make the tracks themselves more visually obtrusive. Contrast with the “debate” about HS2.

I’m not praising or criticising the British or Japanese attitude here, and I don’t feel that I understand enough to hazard any guesses in public as to the reasons behind the differences, but I found them very striking.

 

Posted by simon in The wider world, Working in Japan
10
Sep
2016

I aten’t dead.

I’ve been rather quiet on here. Sorry. I have a couple of draft posts awaiting photos, but I probably won’t have the photos sorted until I get home and catch up with life. In the mean time, here’s a really bad photo of Tokyo Haneda airport just after midnight:

View through a window - Cartier store reflected in the glass, and planes behind.

I’m on my way home, and I have very mixed feelings. After two months I’m ready to resume “normal” life, to see friends and family, to speak English without always gauging how much I should slow and simplify my language according to the listener, and to sleep in my own bed. Probably for about a week. On the other hand, I will miss Japan. It’s a fascinating place, and while I understand it a lot better than I did eight weeks ago, there’s a long way to go on that front.

I hope I have the opportunity to return one day.

Posted by simon in Working in Japan
31
Aug
2016

Shrines, mines, and tourism

A very large vermillion torii (shrine gate) rising out of the sea

The grand torii at Miyajima. Photo: Jordy Meow, CC BY-SA-3.0. Original here.

After leaving Fukuoka on Saturday my first stop was the island of Miyajima, literally “Shrine island”. At one time the whole island was considered too sacred for common people to set foot upon, so the famous “floating” temple, with its maritime torii, was constructed on stilts on the coast. I took a cable car to the top of the island’s hightest peak (about 530m) and admired the view right across the Seto Inland Sea. I decided to walk down, but had not anticipated the Japanese penchant for steps… where in Europe the gradient would have resulted in a winding, cliffhugging path, here it was basically a 2.5km staircase. My right knee was not impressed.

At Miyajima I felt a kind of reverse culture shock. For the last six weeks the number of white people I’ve met is in the low double digits, and the number with really fluent English somewhat lower. Here, suddenly, everywhere I look there are people from all over the world. Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising at one of the country’s top tourist attractions on a Saturday in summer…

The worship hall and then mail hall of a shinto shrine, both very large and in a style uninfluenced by Chinese buddhism.

The grand shrine at Izumo. Photo: miya.m, CC BY-SA 3.0. Original here.

Two days later, after a stop in the hill town of Tsuwano and then a day of travel problems caused by heavy rain, I arrived in Izumo. I visited an Edo-period silver mining area, now a World Heritage Site. Considering its status, there were surprisingly few visitors, and apart from myself I only spotted one group of non-Japanese. In contrast to a few days earlier, things felt more like they had before… apparently the foreigners don’t reach too far beyond the major cities and the shinkansen lines. Later I visited Izumo-taisha, arguably the second most important Shinto shrine and said to be the oldest. Again, I was the only obvious foreigner. I have the feeling that most Brits, and others, visit Tokyo->Kyoto->Hiroshima and then go home.

I’ll be joining them for the rest of my trip: today I’ll be travelling to Kyoto, and eventually east to Nagoya and Tokyo.

Posted by simon in Working in Japan

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