What was that sound?

    Hello everyone, it's the beginning of another week here in Nagoya and here I am again sitting at my computer looking out of my window into the dark, sipping nanchan(orange juice), grazing on bananas and peanut butter, and listening to National Public Radio. All the while some unholy beast rattles it's bones just beyond the construction site behind Ohmeikan.
    I've become accustomed to Japan in some aspects, but the weird noises that I hear at night is something I do not think I will become adjusted to. I've always held a special place in my heart for the sounds of the night, one of my first memories is of waddling over to the window in the house where I was born and listening to the crickets and spring peepers murmur in the dusky twilight. Then we moved to Newington, where the crickets and peepers were still there, but were now joined by the rowdy lifeblood sounds of the nearby city. Then it was off to Green Mountain, where the spring peepers and crickets reigned once again, now joined by the joyful wolf-howls of my more free-spirited comrades.
   Now, however, I'm in Japan in the middle of a port city where most people have probably never heard a cricket or a spring peeper calling out into the silence. Instead of the cooing of owls and the occasional howl of a coyote, there are sounds that I assume originate as something comprehensible, but are mutated by the canyons and valleys of the cityscape. To better explain these noises I've broken them down into three categories; the whine, the message, and the call.

Name: The Whine
Probable Place of Origin: The sheer amount of electronics that surround this place.
Description:
I may be dating myself here, but do you remember how old TVs used to make a kind of low key screech when they were starting to break down? I've owned a variety of TVs older then I am over the years and I have been starkly reminded of this sound by the periodic screeching whine that permeates my room once in a while. It's clearly originating outside of my room, it dies once I close whatever door or window is open, but I can't for the life of me figure out what it is.

Name: The Message

Probable Place of Origin: An over-exuberant promoter or politician.

Description:

Quick fact about Japan: to the best of my knowledge you can't promote yourself on television if you are a politician. This doesn't man that there is no airtime for politicians, just that they are all given the same brief standardized time to state their case, and the rest of promotion is done through posters and people driving through the streets with megaphones. Another thing of note is that these are not the best megaphones for speaking Japanese, a fairly nuanced language, into. The result is something that sounds remarkably like someone alternately saying something underwater or in a room with poor acoustics. The message is further complicated by the fact that I am in a part of japan with a lot of buildings, and the echoes seem to bounce off of  buildings, careen around corners, and then clumsily fall into people's unsuspecting ears.

Name: The Call

Probable Place of Origin: A remote cavern deep under the sea.

Description:

These are the sounds that make you start to believe that the Godzilla films were a remarkably accurate series of documentaries. They start low in the distance and you don't really notice them at first. Then comes the loud exclamation, as if whatever monster was stalking downtown was suddenly frightened by a mouse. Some people I've asked have told me that it is probably a ambulance in an emergency. To that I say this, I have heard ambulances in emergencies here, Ohmeikan is right by the hospital, and I have yet to hear one that sounds like what I hear at night. It might be just me, but if I was injured the last thing I would want to hear would be something remarkably to a T-Rex assaulting a live orchestra consisting solely of the Oboe players.

The current sound is somewhere between a whale song and a building being destroyed, set to the pattern of an Obama speech...

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I was rather surprised to wake up on my keyboard this morning, though I suppose that is my just reward for researching the United Nations Charter for seven hours then attempting to write a complete blog entry. Here is some multimedia for you, in the form of one particularly vehement and radical politician.

I fully support American politicians singing at the top of their lungs in order to get votes.
Facebook users can find it here.

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Japanese Time! Japanese Verb of the Day!
English: To sing.
Japanese: うたいます。
Pronunciation: uu-tai-mas.

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Best wishes,

Dan