Where Am I

The Circadian Room

Here’s a nice detail in the Amex Lounge in LAX: They have rooms for managing jet-lag.

Everything suffers jet-lag. Not just people, but plants and animals, too. In a classic study, crabs kept their same daily rhythms running up-shore to dodge high-tide, and running down shore to chase low tide, after they’d been flown to a different time zone where the tides weren’t at those old times any more. Plants opened their leaves and flowers when the sun rose and set in their home time zone, after having been flown to a new time zone. All multicellular life on our planet has an internal clock that remembers when it’s time to do everything that needs doing, and when we fly to a new time zone, it takes about a day for each time zone we moved for that clock to adjust to the change. Fly 8 time zones away, and your body will take more than a week to shift to the new sunrise/sunset times.

So the Amex lounge at LAX has rooms to help you start moving your circadian clock while you’re waiting for your next flight: A room with bright “daylight” light 24/7, and a room with dim “sunset” light 24/7.

Light is the main cue your body uses to figure out when sunrise and sunset is, and shift your internal clock to match. Strangely, the signals from your eye to your brain get crossed over en route: The nerves that come from your right eye go to the left side of your brain, and the nerves from you left eye go to the right side of your brain. And where they cross, there’s a little brain region that just tracks how much blue light you’re seeing. Sunrise and sunset are mostly reds, and oranges, and pinks, so blue light is a signal for the main part of the day. And that’s what your body uses to signal when it should be waking up and sleeping.

Naturally, days get a little longer as we approach the peak of summer, and shorter as we approach the depths of winter. So our bodies needed to shift our sleep/wake rhythms before there were airplanes, and even for rooted plants that couldn’t walk to a new time zone. But those shifts are only minutes a day. Shifting your sleep/wake rhythms maxes out at about an hour per day; that’s already faster than anything your body evolved to experience before the modern era.

So: The Day room and the Twilight room are cool tools.

Old Friends – Returning to Tokyo

Tokyo. Wake up. 8:30 AM.

Got in the night before, delayed flight. Got Yen. Crashed at 3AM.

Shower. Breakfast. Out the door.

The mission:

Visit old friends: Places I’ve been missing since 1999, when I left here. Two of my favorite restaurants in the world. Akihabara Denkimachi (Lightning-Town). Find an otaku shop: See if I can connect with Tokyo board-game culture. Visit the Kinokunia bookstore: See if the toilets there are still lit up with more glowing controls than a science fiction set.

First stop: Akihabara. Not finding the electronics parts stores of old, where folks would stand over racks and racks of specialized components. Did I miss the right turn off the main street, or has that moved to Huachangbei in Shenzhen?

Well, here’s an arcade, let’s get a game in at a sit-down machine.

Nerd stores: Well, this is awesome. Look at all these mecha kits. Look at all these random parts in baggies, so you can kit-bash your mecha.

Mission: Find boardgames in Tokyo: Failed.

Lunch: Find my favorite old soba stand. That was 14 years ago. The guy who ran it was old. Can it still be there? It was at the corner of a tiny alley out of an exit from a train station that defies the laws of geometry.

Yes, my feet still know the way.

(2021 Update: Apparently the alley is named “Omoide Yokocho”!)

It’s still there. Two young guys are running it tonight.

It’s just like I remember. The best soba in the world. 380 yen for a bowl, tempura and an egg on top.