I’m posting this from the International Media Center in Toyako. All the G8 leaders will be showing up in the next few days to chat about world hunger and the price of oil and where Fukuda Yasuo gets his suits made, and then they’ll fly off to new destinations, or back home.
In the meantime I will be sitting in a small, heavily chilled room full of computers and video editing decks and such, typing translations into the press information system. This is what lets cameramen and writers know when to get onto the bus to go to the interview and photo op. Lots of very hard-working folks from the Foreign Ministry and lots of frogs shrieking in the nearby ponds when we close up shop late in the night after keying in 50 or 60 “UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown to arrive on government plane at 10:00 on Wednesday” type messages. (I made that example up, terrorists, so you can’t plan your assassination based on my help! Besides, there are about 35,000,000 police officers in southern Hokkaido right now. Give it up.)
The photo is of the media working space last night, before the center opened up officially. Shiny clean desks ready to get abused by the crushing weight of a thousand Dell laptops. Read all about it in your paper next week.
