Here’s how you get to Omotesando Koffee in Tokyo: take the Chiyoda (C) metro line to the Omotesando station. Once you arrive at the station, walk to exit A2 (there are a lot of exits in this station, and if you take the wrong one you could be wandering around for hours). Walk out the exit up the stairs (taking care to note the “up” and “down” arrows on the stairs so you know what side to walk on).

At the top of the stairs walk out and then take the first street on the right, a tiny alley-size street. Watch out for cars and trucks and bicyles, all competing for space. Walk up this street, past the Lawson’s and the HMV on the right, past the Starbucks on the left, until you come to a T-junction wih a chopsticks shop on the right and a Royal Host restaurant on the left. Turn left.

Walk past the See’s Candies on the right and then, the next block, past the parking lot on the right, and then take the next street right, along an even-smaller residential street. Just after you cross the next street, look for Omotesando Koffee on your left; watch out for the square metal sign near the opening to a small courtyard. It looks like this:

If I had to pick one transcendent destination on our trip to Japan last month, it would be Omotesando Koffee, this tiny perfect coffee shop in a quiet residential neighbourhood. We visited half a dozen times over two weeks. I loved the coffee; Oliver loved the cubes of baked custard; we both liked enjoying the March sunshine sitting on a bench in the small garden.

You walk into Omotesando Koffee through this garden, and then up a step into the main room of an old, simple house (be sure to watch your head on the way in; you’ll bang it if you’re anything like me). Inside there is a steel frame cube containing a counter, a coffee machine, and a single person, a friendly man who will take your order and make your coffee.

The coffee is really, really good. The “kashi” – Oliver describes it as sort of like crispy crème brûlée – was Oliver’s favourite morning food in Japan. There’s jazz on the stereo inside which drifts out into the garden, where there are a couple of benches to sit on, one of which you can – almost – keep dry on if it’s raining. It’s amazing that it’s such a quiet, calm and peaceful place given the crazy busy intersection that’s only 5 minutes walk away. Here’s what our coffee sounded like one morning:

I found Omotesando by way of Peter Bihr, who has now steered me right on two continents. If you’re a lover of coffee and design and calm, I highly recommend a visit next time you’re in Tokyo.

Since receiving a copy of the City of Charlottetown Zoning Map in digital form (as an ESRI shapefile), I’ve been thinking of various ways of using the data. An obvious one is to build a tool that allows a civic address to be entered and the current zoning designation to be returned; there’s no online tool that supports this sort of lookup right now (there’s this tool on the city’s website; it’s not pretty or particularly intuitive, but it will return the information), and, partly as a result, I think most city residents are ignorant of the zoning of their own property and those around them.

I decided that I wanted to build this as a standalone browser-based tool, which meant nothing on the server side (MySQL, PHP) would be required, and the tool wouldn’t need to rely on a data connection to be used, making it more suitable for mobile use. Here’s how I did it.

Convert the dBASE Database

The attribute data for ESRI shapefiles is stored in a dBASE-format database. To get this data out I needed a tool that would dump data out of dBASE files and into plain ASCII, and shapelib fit the bill. I downloaded the latest source code and then simply:

With this done, I could now use the dbfdump utility to convert the dBASE file:

I now had a fixed-width ASCII file that looked like this:

Get the Civic Address Data

For the civic address data I was able to leverage some work I did many years ago that automates the download of the civic address data from the Province of PEI’s website, giving me a companion ASCII file, also containing the PID number, which I could then use to merge with the zoning information.

Merging Zoning with Civic Address

To ease the merging of the civic address and zoning data, I dump both datasets into SQLite3 tables; I chose SQLite3 because it’s pre-installed on my Mac and easily available otherwise.

Rolling all of the above and this together, I ended up with a PHP script to download and convert the civic address and zoning data, merge it together based on PID, and dump out the result to a JavaScript file. This JavaScript file looks like this:

For each zoning designation that matches a civic address (there are 942 that don’t) this newly-defined zoning object holds information about the PID, the civic address and the zoning.

Making it Searchable

There are plenty of ways of searching through a JavaScript object; I opted for jSQL, a JavaScript library that offers some SQL-like features, allowing me to search for addresses in my zoning object as simply as this:

Which returns all of the addresses where the street number is 222.

I wrapped this all into a single HTML file (you can try the search out here at this live demo) that looks like this:

The 20th anniversary of our “short visit to Prince Edward Island” passed unmarked in mid-March. I first applied for a job here in February of 1993, foolishly saying, in my job interview, that I could start work “in a couple of weeks.” Apparently it takes longer to move your life across the country than “a couple of weeks,” but we made it happen by leaving Catherine back in Peterborough, Ontario for an additional month to mop things up and to wind down her own committments there.

I started work at the PEI Crafts Council, on an 18 month contract, on March 15, 1993. It was an ACOA-funded project to develop a database of suppliers to the crafts industry and Catherine and I never talk seriously about the idea of staying on the Island once the contract was up. But, as it happened, we ended up buying a house (a tiny house on the Kingston Road for about $40,000; how could we not!), and Catherine built herself a studio, and I transitioned from local database work to work on the (then novel) Internet with the Province, and we had Oliver and before we knew what hit us, we’d stayed a lot longer than 18 months.

Half the time I’m pretty sure that we’ll live out our years on Prince Edward Island, happy in the community we’ve developed around ourselves; the other half of the time this prospect deeply disturbs me and I start browsing the apartments for rent in Kreuzberg or Malmö or Tokyo or Bilbao. Presumably it’s this duality that prevents me from ever attaining full-Islanderhood.

In the meantime, let me take this opporunity to thank all the people who’ve helped us along the way; Prince Edward Island is an easy place to love and a hard place to like, and your kindnesses to us have made our lives richer and easier. I hope we’ve been able to reciprocate even a little.

In April of 2033 I’ll either be posting my “40 Years on Prince Edward Island” post as a 67 year old or I’ll be fondly recalling our two decade stint on the Island from the porch of my villa on the Adriatic. Only time will tell.

Regular readers may recall that I’m somewhat stationery-obsessed. Drop me in a new city and I’d far rather visit the local stationery shop than almost anything else. It’s why, in part, I love Berlin so much.

Stationery is obviously an important part of the cultural landscape in Japan: the quality, and breadth of products available was awe-inspiring. The Ito Ya store in Tokyo Ginza was dizzying: 5 floors of everything from name seals to date books to fountain pens to fine Japanese paper. It was a miracle we emerged with me only having spent $100. But it’s not only at the high end: I saw a better selection of stationery in “100 Yen shops” (aka “dollar stores”) than at any dedicated stationery shop in Canada.

One of the items seemingly unique to Japan was the pack of “word cards.” I saw these for sale everywhere, and the form-factor was pretty standard: a deck of small blank white cards, perhaps 50 or 100, bound together with a locking metal ring. 

I’d never seen anything like these in other countries, and I asked my Japanese friend Nori about them; he confirmed that they’re extremely popular in Japan, and that they’re a “tool for students for remembering foreign words, historical facts, chemical formulas and so on, writing a name or title on one side and something need to remember on the other side.” The name for these in Japanese is is 単語カード, or “tango kādo” and a Google image search shows the variety of designs they’re available in.

Since receiving an ESRI Shapefile of the Charlottetown zoning map I’ve been experimenting with different ways of looking at and publishing the information in it. Here, for example, is a map showing all the areas in the city that are zoned “Open Space”:

I generated this map using the open source MapServer GIS tool to create a WMS server that I then displayed using the excellent Leaflet JavaScript library. I’m working my way through the process of re-learning GIS fundamentals so that I can reproject this map over top of an Openstreetmap of Charlottetown; in the interim, standalone it’s an interesting way to visualize how much (or how little) parkland we have. Permitted uses under this zoning are:

• active and passive recreation;
• band shell;
• Campground;
• curling Club;
• Golf Course and driving range;
• Officers Club;
• Open Space;
• Park;
• pavilion;
• Public Park;
• public recreation centre; and
• trails and fields.

Here’s the same map, but only showing parcels zoned “Institutional” (cemeteries, fire halls, hospitals, libraries, and so on):

I’ll continue to plug away at this. In the meantime, the easiest way to experiment with this information yourself is to grab this KML file of the zoning map and load it into Google Earth.

The old “Enter Quietly, Please” sign on the theatre door beside our office has always bothered me. And so, faced with a strong desire to procrastinate this morning, I decided to develop an alternative. I especially like the rousing romantic duet between Abraham Lincoln and a cowboy that’s being interrupted.

Remember my travails with trying to borrow and then return a digital audiobook about learning Norwegian? Well in late February I recorded a short interview with CBC’s Nora Young about my experience, and CBC Spark has incorporated this into the introduction to a panel discussion about ebooks and libraries that’s a compelling listen:

My favourite quote from my chat with Nora, if I don’t say so myself, is “I don’t know what the answer is, but I gotta imagine that there’s a better way to deal with all this than prohibiting people on PEI from learning Norwegian for 21 days.” The panel that follows has thought much more deeply about these issues than I; it was good to heard the broader context.

One of my favourite purchases in Japan came from TRUCK Furniture: it’s a porcelain-handled rubber stamp of the Japanese word お知らせ, which is “announcement” in English.

Osaka wasn’t even on our radar while we were planning our trip to Japan. We knew we wanted to visit Tokyo, and Oliver was bound and determined to stay in the 9 Hours Hotel in Kyoto, so they were set. But Osaka wasn’t in our plans.

We’d left the end of the trip free, however, and so we had 2 or 3 days unplanned. I’d assumed we head off into rural Japan to experience the less frenetic side of the country, but it turned out to be remarkably difficult to book lodging at the last minute in the rural areas of the country – everyone was heading out into the warm spring air, I suppose – so when we cut our trip to Kyoto short a day we decided to head 40 minutes south to Osaka for the weekend, a move spurred, in part, by snagging a fantastic deal on a last minute room at the Hyatt Regency Osaka.

We found Osaka to be an unexpected delight. More manageable than Tokyo and with a distinctly different flavour, we spent a great weekend there. Here are the kid-focused highlights.

Kids Plaza Osaka

Perhaps the best children’s museum of our trip – indeed, perhaps the best children’s museum we’ve ever visited – Kids Plaza Osaka was just wonderful, and it’s a must-do for any family with children visiting the city.

The facility is built around a multi-level castle-like structure designed by Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser. I think you could have fun for hours if all you did was explore its towers and slides and ladders and balconies. As you can see in the video above, it’s teeming with kids running and sliding and enjoying the novelty of it all.

Extending out from this castle core are floors devoted to “playing” and “making” and “trying.” There are science-museum-like activities about this like animation, the human body, ecosystems, and a television studio were kids can record an entire newscast (you can watch our try, kindly facilitated by an English speaking guide who wanted to make sure we had a chance at the end of the day). There’s a set of exhibits about the music and clothing and language of countries around the world, a food lab with an activity about the 11 types of sugar, and a really create activity that lets kids use a wheelchair to navigate around a transit station set to see what challenges they’d face.

The signage and interpretation is almost all in Japanese-only, but the activities are so clear and well-signed with pictures that it’s not really an issue.

Kids Plaza is located in a busy neighbourhood filled with restaurants – we ate in the Mos Burger right across the street – and it’s directly connected to the Ogimachi metro station.

Osaka Science Museum

The Osaka Science Museum, in what seemed to us like “downtown Osaka,” was, like the science museum in Tokyo, a solid old-school science museum in the style of the Exploratorium. It was the least accessible museum we visited language-wise, but with the help of our translating mobile phone we managed to make our way.

The museum is spread out over 4 floors and you buy your tickets in the basement and then immediately take the elevator up to the 4th floor to start your visit (there’s an option to purchase a planetarium show ticket for an additional fee at the ticket desk, but we were warned off this as there was no English translation available). Each floor has a different focus: magnetism, astronomy, earth science, chemistry, physics. Surprisingly, it was the earth science floor that caught most of our attention, especially a series of displays illustrating the elements and their relationships to everyday materials:

(That’s a fuzzy photo, but on the top is “earth” and then below it the component materials of earth, and below each of those the more refined versions of those components, and below those the products made from those materials).

Other highlights include a Rubik’s Cube-solved robot in the first floor lobby, and a really fun traffic signal exhibit on the first floor (where you can turn the signals on and off with switches, something that, personally, made me feel omnipotent).

There’s a not-too-exciting-but-serviceable cafeteria on the first floor (you can exit the museum to eat and then re-enter if you like; just show your ticket stub). But we highly recommend you head across the street to Graf Studio (right on the river-side), where you’ll not only find tasty food and drink, but an intriguing marketplace of locally-made products.

Children’s Museum Big Bang

This museum certainly qualifies for the “weirdest architecture in a children’s museum” award: shaped like a UFO landing on Earth, big bang is a sort of hybrid between a children’s museum and a science museum. Located about 40 minutes south of central Osaka by train near a large shopping mall complex, Big Bang was, well, weird. In a mostly enjoyable way.

Oddly, given the shape, there’s not too much emphasis on space or astronomy: on the top floor there was a mixture of science museum activities and a recreation of a historical Japanese street scene where the alleyways played hose to a kindly man showing kids how to wind and throw a traditional wooden top. The highlight of this area was a darkened room that captured your motion and converted it into colourful animations on the screen in front of you; Oliver loved this:

One floor below was a dinosaur and alligator-themed play area. It was noisy and full of activity – the dinosaur is hollow and filled with darkened passageways. Kids seemed to love it; Oliver was a little put off.

Big Bang was unique in the museums and children’s centres we visited for requiring additional ticket purchases for a lot of the activities: the animated 3D movie on the top floor, the crafts activity on the second floor, and an activity we never quite got a handle on that took place inside the tall tower you see in the photo above, all required tickets. One activity that didn’t was a really neat “draw a character on a piece of paper, scan it, and watch it become part of our animated world” exhibit; it’s difficult to do justice to in words, but suffice to say, here’s (our) Archie riding a dinosaur in outer space:

Almost all of Big Bang is Japanese-only, making it a little hard for the English speaker to penetrate completely. We receive a photocopied English-language guide when we arrived that was helpful, but incomplete. I wouldn’t make Big Bang my first stop in Osaka, but we had fun, and for the crazy building alone it’s a fun visit.

Right next door, connected to the train station, is a large shopping mall complex with many places to eat. We particularly enjoyed the “conveyor belt sushi” restaurant that’s close to the station; there’s also coffee, crepes, and a Baskin Robbins inside the mall, and a nice MUJI store if you’ve some additional time to spend.