This morning, my wife and I had pancakes and coffee for breakfast.
Recently, Hawaiian style pancakes are becoming more popular in Tokyo. One of the famous Hawaiian pancake shops, Egg ‘n Things, opened a new branch in Harajuku, Tokyo, which has customers lined up.
Basically, I love almost everything about Hawaii, but I have some question about Hawaiian style pancakes, which are full of fresh cream and fruits.
I prefer the burnt pancakes and weak coffee that can be found in any ordinary American diner. Don’t you think that Hawaiian style pancakes are too much for breakfast? American diner pancakes are enough for me.
I love drinking espresso in an Italian bar. It really wakes me up. But I don’t want to have it with pancakes for breakfast in an American diner. Weak “American” coffee doesn’t taste great, but it does the trick.
The Master said, “The virtue embodied in the doctrine of the Mean is of the highest order. But it has long been rare among people.”
子曰、中庸之爲徳也、其至矣乎、民鮮久矣。
I’ve just finished reading the book “The Emperors of Chocolate.”
As I wrote in my previous entries, “"Gibu Mi Chokoreito": Ration D Bars and Japanese Children” and “The Ethics of Protestantism and The Spirits of Chocolate,” this book is about the U.S. chocolate industry, focusing especially on the competition between Hershey and Mars.
I was interested in Milton Hershey, who was a founder of the Hershey Company. His life was full of amazing stories.
He was born in 1857 in rural Pennsylvania. His parents were Mennonites, who were similar to the Amish. His mother expected that he would be a farmer like the people in his community were, and he went to school just until fourth grade.
But he didn’t become a farmer, instead he established a candy maker. In 1893, he found that chocolate machinery was exhibited at World’s Columbian Exposition and he bought all of the equipment after the exposition. He became the first major chocolate maker in the U.S.
At that time, Milton Hershey didn’t know how to make chocolate, so he learned it through trial and error. In the end, he created a chocolate with unique Hershey’s flavor. Because of its flavor, Hershey’s chocolate became quite popular in the U.S., but they couldn’t sell it well abroad.
Although his chocolate was almost dominat in the U.S. market, Milton Hershey himself was rarely interested in business. Using the huge profit by his chocolate, he began to build the city Hershey, near his birthplace.
In the early twentieth century, Milton Hershey built not only his huge chocolate factory but also infrastructure of the city Hershey, like streets, transportation, water supply, a park, a swimming pool, a theater, a hotel, and a church, and he supported his factory workers to build their own houses.
Since he didn’t have any children, he transferred a great part of his assets to the Milton Hershey School Trust fund to support the Hershey Industrial School, where many orphans, who got a scholarship from the fund, studied.
The fund had a majority stake in the Hershey Company, so the Hershey Company virtually earned profit in order to support the fund. It is the ultimate philanthropy.
After his death in 1945, the Hershey Company changed. In his days, although the Hershey Company didn’t do marketing, their chocolate sold quite well and earned huge profit.
But the competition in the chocolate market got more severe, and it got more difficult for the Hershey Company to support the city Hershey. And now, the Hershey Company is an ordinary “Fortune Top 500 company.”
Someday, I want to visit Hershey’s Chocolate World and stay Hotel Hershey in Hershey, Pennsylvania.
I saw the movie “the Great Gatsby” yesterday.
I love the novel “the Great Gatsby,” so I was looking forward to this movie, and at the same time I felt anxious about it.
Of course, the plot is great, not due to any staff of this movie but to F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Gatsby devoted whole his life to Daisy, who wasn’t what she really was but what he believed that she should be. He did anything that he believed that she would love, but actually it wasn’t sure that she would love it. In the end, he was betrayed by the real Daisy, because she wasn’t what he thought that her was.
In this sense, “the Great Gatsby” is tragedy and comedy like “Don Quixote.” Gatsby and Don Quixote lived in their own imagination. All of us also live more or less in our imagination, but we can’t forget the real world at all. Therefore, we look down on them and adore them at the same time like Nick Carter.
Would you like to live your own life at any cost and go to ruin like Jay Gatsby, or to watch someone else’s life from a safety zone like Nick Carter?
Tobey Maguire was adequate as Nick Carter. Although sometimes Leonardo DiCaprio overacted, I can’t imagine that another actor palys Gatsby. Carey Mulligan was cute enough for Daisy who Gatsby loved.
But I was really disappointed that the direction was so cheap.
In my entry “Punk Rock and the Digital Camera: the Impression of the Documentary Movie “Side by Side,” I wrote, “I want to watch a movie made by punk rockers more than by Thomas Edison.” I don’t deny developing of the digital technology, but I just hope that directors would use them effectively.
In this movie, everything in the images was unnatural. If it was a music video, I could say that their images were fashionable, but in this movie they broke my concentration on the story.
Did they use such artificial images in order to express the cheapness of the Roaring Twenties? If they wanted it, it would be successful. In fact, I seemed this movie to be cheap.
I’ll try Robert Redford’s “the Great Gatsby.”
Ben Folds, one of my favorite rock singers, sang in his song “Rockin’ the Suburbs” as follows:
Let me tell y'all what it's likeBeing male, middle-class and whiteIt's a bitch, if you don't believeListen up to my new CD
I perfectly understand what he meant.
I grew up in an ordinary uptown in Tokyo in an ordinary middle-class family. I was almost happy, because my family wasn’t poor and I wasn’t discriminated. But nothing special ever happened in my childhood. I was a male, middle-class and Japanese child in Tokyo.
And now, I become a male, middle-class and Japanese "salaryman” in Tokyo. I don’t have any special complaints about my life, but sometimes I feel, “it’s a bitch, if you don’t believe.”
Last weekend, I watched the movie “Fight Club.”
The main character, who was played by Edward Norton, is young, single, male, middle-class, and white-color, enjoying his urban life. His life seems to be perfect, but he suffers from insomnia. He begins to dream another life.
This movie reminded me of the movie “American Beauty,” which I really love.
It is about a typical “happy” American family somewhere in an urban area. People in the family begin to do what they want in their heart, and the family is getting broken down.
I think that nobody can be just ordinary. At this time, I don’t get violent like “Fight Club” and quit my job like “American Beauty,” but I can’t be just an ordinary Japanese “salaryman.” When I “look closer” at my heart, I also would find something in it.
I write my weblog in English very eagerly. In order to be an ordinary Japanese “salaryman,” it is completely useless to do it, but I can’t stop it. My colleagues can’t understand why I keep doing such a thing. I don’t want to fight someone with bare knuckles in the Fight Club, but I also want to do something unordinary.
I might be lucky for me that what I want to do incidentally isn’t antisocial. It might be possible for me to fall down (rise up?) from my ordinary “salaryman’s” life to “the Fight Club,” someday.
I’m reading the book “the Emperors of Chocolate.”
As I mentioned in the previous entry “"Gibu Mi Chokoreito": Ration D Bars and Japanese Children,” this book is about the U.S. chocolate industry, focusing especially on the competition between Hershey and Mars.
The chocolate industry is one of the typical industries in the U.S. When you read the history of the chocolate industry, you can understand the characteristics of the U.S. industries.
For example, Forrest Mars, who made Mars Corporation the biggest chocolate company in the U.S., was the typical capitalist, who Max Weber described in the book “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.”
I’d like to summarize what Weber meant in it briefly. Of course this summary is my own interpretation, so if you want to know exactly what he meant, you should read his original book.
He pointed out that the modern capitalists behaved in rational ways with irrational motives.
In every region, in every age, there were people who wanted to be rich. They wanted to be rich, because they wanted to spend money for their own desire. So when they really became rich, they began to live extravagant lives. In short, they were utilitarian.
The first modern capitalists were Protestant. They worked quite hard for success, because they believed that their success proved that they were selected by God. In fact, many of them got successful, because they worked quite hard. After they became rich, they didn’t spend money for their desire but they invested their money to their business. So they got much more successful and earned much more money. They were not utilitarian but ascetic.
Forrest Mars was an ascetic hard worker. His father and Forrest had a conversation as follows:
“My father says, ‘we’re making enough money. We have an airplane, we’ve got the fishing place, we got horses. Why do we need any more?’” recalled Forrest.
It’s a question he himself would never ask.
“Why do I want to go on?” Forrest mused. “I want to go on because it’s fun. I like building businesses… I like the tension. I like the gamble… The word challenge isn’t too good a word for it. I think it’s better to say the truth: I like the tension.”
He was greed for business but not for money. He had “the ethics of Protestantism and the spirit of capitalism.”
