I'm currently reading Ishikawa Masayuki's manga series, Moyashimon: Tales of Agriculture (2004-). The winner last year of the 12th Tezuka Osamu Best Manga Prize awarded by the Asahi newspaper, it depicts the travails of Sawaki Tadayasu, a first year student at an agricultural college who has the mysterious ability to see microorganisms with his naked eyes. He is accompanied by his faithful childhood friend Yuki Kei, the very sexy grad student Hasegawa Haruka, the wise-but-mysterious Professor Itsuki, and hundreds and hundreds of germs and viruses, all of whom have carefully defined personalities. It gets the gritty details of Japanese campus life just so, in part because it can depict the microscopic creatures responsible for all those moldy odors.

The Los Angeles Times featured a nice article yesterday on former Dodgers' pitcher Jerry Royster, who has become a national hero in South Korea as the skipper of the Lotte Giants. Thanks to the article, I also discovered East Asia Windup Chronicle, a terrific English-language blog that covers baseball in East Asia.

As for me, I'm just buried under a mountain of work that really needs to get done before March 14, when I get on an airplane bound for Tokyo....

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