Butterflyblue

Sayonara

2005-10-20T11:23:00.000+09:00

I am weary of blogging, so I'm going to take most of this blog offline. It was too much work to maintain both this and my livejournal site, and I decided I like lj better, so I'm keeping that one. If you want to know how I am, just send me an e-mail. I don't want to lose touch with anyone, but I've got to be realistic about my time management. I'm not spending hours every day on the Internet anymore, which is a good thing. I will continue to write and post in other places (mixi and livejournal) when I have time. Thanks for reading, and goodbye!

Weekend, Golden Week, etc

2005-04-26T09:44:00.000+09:00

Last Saturday, N. and I took a drive in his car, a tiny Honda convertible, with the top open. We went to Rinkuu town, an American shopping plaza near Kansai airport. We did a little shopping and had lunch at a delicious Chinese restaurant there called 紅虎餃子房. After we returned to Osaka, I took the train back to Kobe alone and went straight to Akashi for Homodachi's takoyaki party.
At the party we made takoyaki and then played "takoyaki roulette," which means that one or more of the takoyaki are filled with wasabi or karashi (hot mustard), and everyone stands in a circle and takes one each by turns, and you have to eat the one that you take. Mine was safe. The people who got the wasabi ones actually seemed to kind of like them, but the karashi was a different matter entirely. The ones who got those won a takoyaki-ki (a takoyaki maker, kind of like a waffle iron). It was a fun party.
On Sunday, N. and I went to Osaka again. A few weeks ago, I joined a board game community on mixi, which meets at a family restaurant in Osaka about once every two months. It was my first time, so I had never met any of the people before. The group founder's favorite game is Clue, so we played Clue twice and Yatzhee once, both very natsukashii for me since I played those games a lot as a child. Then we played two games that another group member brought. The first was "Tom and Jerry," a Japanese board game by Bandai based on the cartoon of the same name. Each person gets two "Tom" counters and two "Jerry" counters. Jerry moves twice as fast as Tom, and it's a race to get all your pieces to the finish first. It seemed like a simple "sugoroku" or race game at first, but then it got more complicated and fun because of the way you can jump on other people's pieces for extra turns, so there was actually a fair amount of strategy. Then we played another game he brought, Einfach Tierisch, which is called 珍獣動物園 (Zoo of Rare Animals) in Japanese, or High Society in English. It's an auction-type German card game by Reiner Knizia, and it was very enjoyable and simple to play.
I don't remember rock-paper-scissors being a feature of Clue when I played it as a kid, but here somehow janken has become part of the game dynamic. If two or more players have cards that are part of a player's guess, they raise their hands, and they have to janken to see who has to show their card to the player who guessed it. As for playing Yahtzee in Japanese, 3 of a kind is called スリーダイス　(three dice), 4 of a kind is フォーダイス　(four dice), and the rest of the rolls are pretty much the same as English.
It's a good thing I didn't make any plans to travel during Golden Week (next week), because a lot is going on here in Kobe. My school's Bunkasai (Cultural Festival) is on Friday and Saturday. It sucks because N. has Fri and Sat off and I had originally made plans with him before I remembered I had to go to school. But my school's Bunkasai was really good last year, and I can't miss it, so we changed our plans. N's going back to visit his hometown on Monday, but my friend Sophia is coming to visit me on Tuesday. She's staying one night, and then I'm going to a Cinco de Mayo party Thursday. So I don't think I'll be bored at all.
There was an awful train accident in Amagasaki yesterday morning around 9:20 a.m. They turned the TV on in the teachers' room so we could watch the coverage. We all knew people who COULD have been on that train had it been just a little earlier, since it's not far from here, on the route from here to Kyoto or Osaka. They haven't found the driver yet. It's the worst train accident in a long time, a terrible tragedy.

Love Exists

2005-04-20T09:40:00.000+09:00

...beyond all my expectations.
I'm so happy.
Words fail me.

First Day of School

2005-04-14T14:28:00.000+09:00

Today was my first day of teaching the new first-years. Ah, I am so blessed to have such great students. I hear other ALTs complain about "bad kids" and "behavior problems", but I never have to deal with anything like that. The JET program's main flaw is that most ALTs are underutilized. I just spent 6 weeks without teaching at all, and where is the sense in that? But when I have the chance to teach, everything is good. My memories in the classroom are all happy ones.
Usually the class is split in half, but today we had the whole class. First we three teachers introduced ourselves. One of the JTEs likes to put these outrageous statements in her self-introduction. I don't know why she puts down her own English ability in front of the students. She wants them to respect her, doesn't she? Then she told them she likes to go to a tavern (izakaya) and drink shochu (sweet-potato wine). I'm not sure why she thinks this is a good thing to say to a group of 15-year-olds she's meeting for the first time. What kind of first impression is she trying to cultivate? If a high school teacher of mine told me she liked to drink, my opinion of her would surely change for the worse. But whatever they were thinking, the students listened respectfully like angels until we were done.
In the first term I like to do some TPR in every class. So today I used some commands like jump, clap, step, stomp, turn around, raise your right hand, etc. Then I make it more complicated like "jump on your right foot while turning in a circle with your left hand on your head," or something silly like that. I also tried "Smile!", and noticed that most of them were already smiling. Then I said "Frown!" and they tried to look all serious. It was the cutest thing.
We also did a short activity which I found in the JET lesson plan booklet we got recently. Most of the sample lessons were not so usable because the theme this year was grammar. However, there was one that I thought was really cute. There's a picture of a crying baby, a ringing telephone, a knock at the door, water running in the sink, and clothes on a clothesline outside while it starts to rain. You have to imagine that all of these things are happening at the same time, and decide what to do first. Your answer tells what kind of person you are, that is, what is most important to you in life. So we had the students do that (writing their answer and a reason) and then we told them the meaning (the baby means family, the clothes means love live, the tap means money, the door means friends, and the phone means career). It takes longer to explain than to do. We still had time left at the end of class, so we had them all stand up and face their partner in the next row and introduce themseleves in English, and have a simple conversation. Most of them were pretty genki about this. I think it was a good start to the year.

There is now a video game about everything

2005-04-12T14:47:00.000+09:00

D3 recently came out with a lot of new Simple 2100 Series games for the PlayStation 2. There are now seventy-some different titles, and they seem to cover every major or minor facet of life, real or imagined, from learning to speak Korean to encountering a gigantic beautiful woman to performing surgery. It surprised me to see how they are mining specific careers for ideas for games, like The Surgeon and The Forensic Investigator. The one I bought the other day, though, was The Kanji Quiz Challenge - Kanji Kentei, and it's the best thing ever! Recommended to all you kanken-crazy folks out there. You can take real tests from level 10 all the way to level 2, and if you take them more than once, the questions will change, keeping the challenge fresh. Of course, the questions are all multiple choice, making them that much easier than the actual tests. The study value lies mostly in perfecting your kanji-reading skills, though some of the stroke order and radical questions can be challenging. This is the game most likely to have you writing kanji in the air with your finger while you play. Yes, it's lots of fun with 5 mini-games you can play on one-player or two-player mode, including a decent 四字熟語 game (the best of the mini-games, I think).

Some other amusing titles - check out the first two especially-

The Let's Speak English Journey
The Let's Speak Korean Journey
The Romance with a Prince "Riburu's Egg" - For Girls
The Fantasy Romance Adventure - Her Legend, My Stone, Version
The Catfight
There's also one called "The Defender of the Weak" - or The 任侠、which Reading Tutor translates as "a man of chivalrous spirit". And the meaning of that is...what, exactly? The people on the cover all look pretty worried.

Good stuff. I wonder when I'll be able to learn to manicure my nails or fix my washing machine by playing PlayStation. Games are getting so practical. I love how the covers of the English conversation and Korean conversation games look practically the same except for the girl's huge hair clips.

6 Ways to Tell if a Book is Readable

2005-04-09T16:45:00.000+09:00

In a second language, that is.
Friends who are learning English as a second language sometimes ask me to recommend/pick out for them/lend them English books. My own literary tastes can cause me to misstep and give them something much too difficult. Likewise, when I pick books for myself to read in Japanese, I often choose something too ambitious, then give up as soon as I feel discouraged. The problem is I really love science fiction and fantasy, long books, obscure books, and literary classics. However, I've come to realize that buying books I never read in Japanese is a real waste of money and time for me. Even worse, it's discouraging. In the interest of making more reasonable choices, I offer for your comment this list of guidelines for choosing a novel to read in a second language.

1) Pick a short book.
The most important, but oft-neglected first rule. It can be very motivating to read a short novel and realize you can finish it in just a couple of days.

2) Don't choose a book that is more than 20 years old.
Languages change with each generation.

3) Read a bestseller.
Bestsellers have something to appeal to the popular taste, and that something can help you to finish it.

4) Novelizations are easier to read than novels.
Sometimes after a successful movie, someone will write a novelization of it. Because it's based on a movie, it will probably be driven by a strong plot and be easy to follow. Also, reading a book that was made into a movie can be nice because you can see the movie afterwards. However, bear in mind that books that were made into movies are generally more difficult to read than books that were written after the movie.

5) Pick mystery, horror or romance over fantasy and science fiction.
Mystery, horror and romance feature everyday situations in the real world. Some science fiction and fantasy books CAN be easy to read (Examples in Japanese are anything by Hoshi Shinichi, and Ono Fuyumi's 月の陰陰の海, which was the first book I finished reading in Japanese after coming on JET) but more often they're not, and you have the added burden of wondering whether the words you don't know really exist or if they were just made up by the author. Plus, it can be hard to figure out what's going on if literally ANYTHING can happen. Once you figure out the rules of the alternative world you're reading about, you will probably be able to read it as well as any other genre, but getting into a new series without knowing the rules can be confusing.

6) Choose a book that was written in your target language, and is famous among native speakers.
Don't read a translation. It should also not be a book you've read before in translation, since you won't have the motivation of wanting to know what happened. If in doubt about whether or not it's well-known, ask a couple of native speakers if they've heard of the book before reading it. A good book will create a splash when it comes out that should be remembered.

By the way, why isn't there a way to search Amazon, or any other book database, for "easy-to-read", either as a key word in the reviews or as some kind of independent search criteria? I am seriously going to write Amazon about that one of these days. Sometimes I don't care about anything else, I'm just looking for something "読みやすい".

Books that are easy to read in English:

Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
Janet Evanovich, One for the Money
Marilyn Sachs, Hello, Wrong Number or Class Pictures
Torey Hayden, One Child

Books that are easy to read in Japanese:

Yoshimoto Banana's Kitchen 吉本ばなな　　キッチン
The novelizations of movies like Ju-on, 呪怨 Ju-on 2, and Old Boy オールド・ボーイ by 大石圭; in the same series(角川ホラー文庫), there's one of Saw （ソウ） by 行川渉。　　
Nishi no Majo ga Shinda, by Nashiki Kaho
梨木香歩　西の魔女が死んだ
Natsu no Niwa - The Friends, by Yumoto Kazumi
湯本香樹実夏の庭―The Friends (translated as The Friends in English)

Others...? Please comment.

Note

2005-04-06T23:38:00.000+09:00

I finished reading George R.R. Martin's A Storm of Swords - wow.
I also just watched Saw - wow.
Both were so good, both impressive for what they were.

This just in: I reserved tickets to go home (for the first time in 2 years) for nearly 4 weeks this summer. If all goes as planned, I'll be there from July 15 - August 11.

Weekend

2005-04-05T16:49:00.001+09:00

It was another exciting weekend. Malifact came to my house Saturday, where we played Resident Evil II and made udon. I enjoyed the game, a classic I'd never tried. We rented Saw and Tansu, but ran out of time to watch them. I'll have to try to watch them later this week.
On Sunday I went to Osaka with Takashi, namely the Dotonbori area, which is very cool:

Dotonbori
Originally uploaded by moglet.

We went to see live manzai at Yoshimoto. No photography is allowed inside, but outside you can buy likenesses of popular comedians baked into tiny spongecakes:

Yoshimoto
Originally uploaded by moglet.

The parts I could understand were quite funny, the parts I couldn't, tedious. One highlight was a "shiritori" segment where one guy was able to end any shiritori word with "su", even words shouted out from the audience. Another funny thing was a pair of robbers in the skit at the beginning (not really manzai) who try to rob a house, but when the old man comes home, are very successful in pretending that one of them is his grandson. Of the manzai performers, "Football Hour" was the most famous duo, and they performed first, allowing people who just came to see them to leave early, which they did.

Osaka has some quirky place names, like this one:

Sennichimae
Originally uploaded by moglet.

This train station's name means "A Thousand Days Ago".

Oh yeah, and the streets were paved with takoyaki.

There's no place like Osaka.

Hurrah for Spring

2005-04-01T17:05:00.000+09:00

The cherry blossoms will bloom any day now. The weather is nice. Yay spring.
Interesting news at school today. We got a new principal and vice-principal. The previous principal retired (to everyone's relief) and the vice-principal was promoted to principal of another school. The vice-principal was hardworking and friendly to me, but he watched my arrival and departure times with an eagle eye to make sure I did not go home early even in the case of major natural disaster. Because he has been distracted lately and the new vice-principal only arrived today, I got off scot-free again for arriving at work late and leaving early. I've done this all week long!
Even better, I got my wish for another class. A teacher I've never taught with before (but he seems nice) will team-teach a writing elective for the third years with me. We still don't know how many students will choose to take the class, or what textbook we'll use. It's pitched as "English composition with (butterflyblue-sensei)". I've helped some third-years with writing (actually translating) before so I know the kinds of convoluted and vaguely worded Japanese sentences they have to try to wrestle into passable English for the university entrance exams. Although I have no experience teaching this, nor any clear idea how it will be accomplished, I'm thrilled to be entrusted with something meatier than OC1.

Another thing that didn't happen last year is that three new teachers at my school came up and introduced themselves to me in English while I was in the computer room. All were male and two were math teachers. They were so friendly...which makes me wonder why the new teachers last year totally ignored me. Oh well. This year: I need to make more friends among the teachers. Having no one around to talk to sucks.

The Zompist article of my last post suggested joining an Internet community in your target language. I think that's a sound idea. Ideally you would join real life communities that are monolingual in your target language, but it's hard sometimes for an English teacher to get into monolingual no-English territory. So joining Internet communities can be a good first step. You can set up the expectation that you communicate in Japanese before you meet them. Then, if you ever meet the people in real life, they'll expect to speak to you in Japanese. I made some posts and messaged someone I hadn't met before in Japanese yesterday, (someone in Osaka whose dream is to open a board game bar, so I need to befriend this guy) and he sent me back a nice reply, so I'm encouraged about the possibilities of this approach. For all my time on the Internet, I usually spend shockingly little of it on Japanese sites, probably because I'm endlessly diverted by all the fabulous English language content on the web. I must post in Japanese more often, even if they are grammatically flawed and stupid little comments. Then the peer embarrassment factor will work for me to help to refine my Japanese. Like when I posted a comment misspelling series しりーず　しーりず. That was embarrassing. But now I'll remember.

Note: those words should be katakana, but my computer is being weird. The correct one is the first one, shiri-su. It's funny that katakana spellings are so nonintuitive for English speakers. I have a hard time hearing them since I "know" the correct spelling of series is s-e-r-i-e-s. Learning two correct spellings for the same basic sound-meaning pair messes with my head. Likewise, I "know" apron is spelled with an "a" so I had a hard time grasping the katakana spelling for that one (it starts with "e").

Linguistic Musings

2005-03-30T10:22:00.000+09:00

A couple days ago, I read this excellent article on why people learn languages or fail to do so. I didn't blog about it right away because I figured that it had probably been on the Internet a long time and other people have read it. However, it touches on a lot of issues I often think about, both as an EFL teacher and as a person who wants to be fluent in a second language (Japanese), and perhaps a third (Mandarin). This article explains both why I never get around to learning a fourth or fifth language (I'm interested in learning Thai, Cantonese or Vietnamese but can't seem to spare the time), and why not all of my students are as motivated to learn English as I might hope.
I tend to naively assume that all non-Japanese living in Japan are as motivated to learn Japanese as I am (not true) and that all people studying English are similarly highly motivated. Some facts support that hypothesis (people who rabidly put themselves and their children in my path to practice English with me) other facts do not (people who go just as far to avoid me). This article was helpful in reminding me that learning a language is a lot of work. More interestingly, it proposes that it's just as much work for native speakers of the language as it is for second language learners. The native speakers just don't remember how much work it was. Because we think in language, we don't remember how hard it was to learn it in the first place.
(Also, from the same site, this is the funniest thing I've read for awhile; actual search strings people used that led them to his site about linguistics and culture).
Having an accent when you speak Japanese, or any other language you learn as an adult, is not inevitable. It is hard to learn perfect pronunciation, because it's hard to see what's going on in someone else's mouth. However, native speakers ALL faced the exact same thing as children, and eventually they all learned to do it. We think that children don't have problems mastering the pronunciation of their own language, but you've probably known children who had trouble saying certain words, and every day many children in the U.S. are taken out of class to work with therapists on their "speech impediments". Which leads me to think that perhaps children's mispronounced words and speech impediments are not so different from the mistakes we make when learning to pronounce a new language. That means that we too can overcome all of those problems if we believe that we must.
With that idea to inspire me, I'm doing some pronunciation exercises with this book, 日本語の発声レッスン. It's a great find because it packages a lot of difficult pronunciation drills conveniently into one volume. Japanese, with its small and predictable number of syllables, isn't terribly hard to pronounce anyway, but how well can you say long strings of meaningless syllables, or pages and pages of tongue-twisters? My Chinese friend U., who has excellent pronunciation in English, told me once that she used to practice English pronunciation drills every day until her throat hurt. Until yesterday I'd never practiced Japanese pronunciation to the point of physical pain, but the exercises in the book made my throat hurt in no time at all. I planned to practice for two hours yesterday, and could only do about twenty minutes. I like the fact that it made me more attentive to variations in Japanese pronunciation around me.
While I'm on the topic of language, I really benefitted from Language Two, a treatise on language learning I read before coming to Japan. The main point is that people learn a language better if they receive instruction in the language (on another topic they need to understand) rather than about the language (explicitly teaching grammar, for instance). I've used that idea to the extent I could in my own language teaching, structuring communicative lessons wherever possible, but half an hour a week is not enough to give the students the feeling that they NEED to learn to understand spoken English. So in a way this idea combines nicely with the point of Zordist's article, that people won't learn a language unless it's absolutely necessary for them. What makes something "absolutely necessary" differs from person to person though, and the reasons I found it "absolutely necessary" from the age of thirteen to learn Japanese when no one in my family or immediate surroundings spoke it, remains incomprehensible to everyone but me. Still, I believe that psychologically in some strange way it was "absolutely necessary" to me.
Another interesting thing: I've heard on the news recently that Japan is planning to revise the immigration laws to make it easier for unskilled foreigners and ones with skills besides teaching English to live and work in Japan. For example, the new laws will encourage doctors and nurses from outside Japan to practice in Japan, along with people in the threatened industries of agriculture and forestry. Due to the aging population and declining birth rate, the measure makes a lot of sense. I'm interested to see the future effects. Will it help weaken the perceived wall between "Japanese" and "gaijin" in Japan? I have a personal interest in wanting that wall to come down. My heart gladdens every time people don't assume I only speak English because of my blonde hair. The more foreigners in Japan, the less often we will be automatically stereotyped. I don't want Japan's "cultural uniqueness" to be "subsumed", but I don't think that will happen, as amorphous and illogical as "cultural uniqueness" is. Unless "cultural uniqueness" really is just another word for the wall, in which case it should give way to a more sensible pride in Japan's considerable cultural assets.

Memorization Tools

2005-03-25T11:46:00.000+09:00

Check Set
Originally uploaded by moglet.

This red transparent sheet is quickly supplanting the ring of flashcards as the memorization device of choice among students in Japan. When I first started seeing students using them on the subway during exam time, I guessed that certain books have the answers written in red, rendering them invisible under the sheet. It's true that there are books like this: test prep books designed for a target audience known to be hardcore memorizers. But you can also use any book for your memorization needs with this "Check Set". Just highlight the information you want to memorize with the green pen. When you cover it with the red sheet, it will appear black. Once you've successfully memorized the item, you can go over it again with the white pen. It will erase the green pen mark, leaving barely a trace.
Years ago when they first came out, I used to like the ring of flashcards, also a Japanese invention. They were an improvement on the separate flashcards used until then. However, after a certain point their usefulness decreases. A person who needs to learn the very basics of a language should use flashcards. But later, when things have started to make sense on their own, you're better off questioning and applying what you know, not just learning to passively recognize vast quantities of information.
This "Check Set" seems to promote slightly more active learning, depending on how you use it. You could, for instance, use it to study grammar by turning any paragraph into a cloze exercise for yourself, blacking out particles and verb endings. Or just use it to review your wrong answers in a textbook until you feel like you know them well enough. I want to do this starting from the second book in the U-Can Kanji Kentei course. I will finish the assignment at the end of the first book today.
I would be interested to know if the red transparency is used in other countries, or if other countries have other memory aids.

Nagoya Castle

2005-03-22T15:18:00.000+09:00

Nagoya Castle
Originally uploaded by moglet.

This is Nagoya Castle, where I went on Sunday with my friend Sophia. It had been awhile - gasp, a decade - since I'd toured the inside of a Japanese castle, so I was long overdue.
My favorite parts were the gold fusuma screens on the third floor and the simulation of the castle town on the second floor, which darkened and lightened again to simulate night and morning. Though I liked it, it was a bit disorienting to simulate the area OUTSIDE the castle INSIDE the castle.
If I'd visited Nagoya next weekend instead of this one, I could have gone to the the World Expo, where they will have excavated remains of a mammoth and various robots. It will be going on for quite awhile (March 25 - Sept. 25; click here for the English site) so I plan to go at another time. I tell myself this was just a rehearsal to see exactly how troublesome it is to go to Nagoya from Kobe on the weekend. It is troublesome, but not unfeasible. A JTE told me that people in Kobe and Osaka make fun of the way people talk in Nagoya, because they think Nagoya dialect sounds like the meowing of a cat.

Nagoya Drum

2005-03-22T15:05:00.000+09:00

Nagoya Drum
Originally uploaded by moglet.

I took this picture with my new mobile phone. Look how well it turned out...I mean, much better than my old phone camera.
This is a large taiko drum that was in front of Nagoya castle on Sunday. They were selling ceremonial arrows along with a chance to pound the drum yourself and make a wish for 1000 yen. No, you don't pound the drum with the arrow. It was not a hard decision to pass on this offer.

Food Review: Soy Milk Yogurt

2005-03-18T12:13:00.000+09:00

Toraku is a Kobe company that makes Kobe Pudding, Raku Raku Whip and other dessert treats. They also have a health food branch called Soyafarm for soy products. I wasn't expecting much when I decided to try their Soy Milk Yogurt (豆乳で作ったヨーグルト)　at lunch today, but it was really good...easily the best soy milk yogurt out of the two I've tried. With a hint of lemon juice, the plain variety is a light, sweet confection of soy milk yumminess. In addition to plain, there's also a fruit flavor (the "fruit" is aloe and lychee). Soy milk yogurt has the health benefits of regular yogurt (it contains active yogurt cultures), but without the cholesterol, fat and other possibly harmful things contained in cow's milk. It's also rich in soy protein. One container is only 100 yen/110 grams/76 calories.

To see the commercial for this product that aired in the Kansai region, click on the box marked 新CMはこちら　in red letters at the bottom of the Soyafarm page. It shows a man with an oversized yogurt container affixed to his head being mauled by an overzealous woman shopper. Doubtless you are now wondering, "How did they ever achieve such amazing special effects? How did they find a man with a tub of yogurt on his head?" so you can also click CMメイキング to see the "Making of" the commercial.

Quote from the blurb on the commercial page:

頭のかぶりものもさることながら、商品に囲まれ、狭い冷蔵庫の中に座高状態で長時間入っていたため、撮影は非常に大変そうでした。

It would have been difficult enough just wearing something on his head, but since the actor also had to sit upright for a long time in a narrow refrigerated area surrounded by merchandise, it seems that the filming was extremely difficult.

Japanese Name Trivia

2005-03-17T10:07:00.000+09:00

Today I think I'll share with you some fun facts from a children's book on names I got at the library yesterday.

Why are Japanese names so difficult?

I don't know about you, but I feel stupid when I can't read a Japanese name. The truth is, though, that the same kanji name can often be read different ways, so there's no way to be sure unless you ask the person.

木下　is usually "Kinoshita" but it can also be "Kishita"
古谷　can be "Furutani" or "Furuya"
熊谷　can be "Kumagaya," "Kumagai," "Kumatani," or "Kumaya"
...and the list goes on.

I used to think that there was a limited number of surnames in Japan so I would learn the tricky readings eventually. But it would be better to think of the number of surnames as unlimited. Unlike other countries that have a small number of surnames, Japan has too many to be learned by the average person. In fact, Japan has more different surnames than any other country in the world.

Compare these numbers: China only has about 500 surnames. Korea only has 249. Japan has about 120,000.
That's insane. That explains why when I see an unfamiliar name on my student list and I ask my JTE for the pronunciation, she usually doesn't know what it is either.

Another reason Japan has more names than China and Korea has to do with Confucian thought, which seemed to have made narrower inroads in Japan. In China and Korea, it was believed to be disrespectful to your ancestors to change your surname, but premodern Japan had no such compunction. People were expected to change their names many times as they grew older. Toyotomi Hideyoshi, for example, had four different names at different stages of his life. An Edo-period politician named Saigoh Takamori changed his name 9 times.

"Common" names

There are no really common names in Japan, compared with the commonness of certain names in other countries. In Western Japan, "Tanaka" is very common, and I must admit I've known many Tanakas. However, in all of Japan, "Satoh" and "Suzuki" are supposed to be the most common. I've never known a Satoh or a Suzuki. Go figure.

Weird Names

Here are some unusual but real Japanese surnames and their readings:

子子子　is pronounced "Nejiko"
子鳥遊　(the characters mean "small birds play") is pronounced "Takanashi" (no eagles)
煙草　is pronounced "Tabako" (cigarette)
障子　Shoji, sliding door
醤油　Shoyu, soy sauce
犬飼　"Inukai," dogkeeper
林林　is pronounced "Rinbayashi". This is just crazy. You will notice they are the same character.
谷谷　is "Tanigaya". Again, they combined two readings for the same character.
九九 is "Tsukumo"
一尺八寸　is "Kamatsuka"
四月一日　(the first day of the fourth month) is pronounced "Watanuki"
More like that-
八月一日　is "Hozumi"
八月十五日　is "Nakaaki"
十二月一日　is "Shiwasuda"
三十日　is "Misoka"
The last one, I can understand because New Year's Eve is "Oomisoka". I assume the other days are old words for dates in the lunar calendar. But can you imagine if your last name was "Fifteenth of August?"

Is it true that most people didn't have surnames until 1875?

Yes, that's true. Farmers and merchants weren't allowed to have surnames. In 1875, the eighth year of the Meiji period, there was an edict suddenly requiring everyone to have surnames. Some people at that time must have thought "soy sauce" and "tabacco" made good names, I guess. Others went to the village chief or someone else they trusted and got themselves a name based usually on where they lived (in a rice field, in a forest, by the well...) or what they did for a living ("Watanabe" means "ferryman"; "Kodama" means "jeweller"). Suzuki doesn't have anything to do with bells. It's the name of a stick used for Shinto rituals; in Kumano dialect, 聖なる木 (sacred tree) is "suzuki". The kanji for "bell tree" 鈴木　is an ateji.

梅田, which is a place in Osaka as well as a surname, doesn't really mean "field of plums," as the kanji suggest. It really comes from 埋め田, buried rice field, which sounds equally strange but means that the field is dug out of wet swampland.

Names from the past

"Hiko" and "Hime" as name suffixes you often see in fairy tales and legends are often translated into English as "Prince" and "Princess". Therefore, Kaguya-hime is "Shining Princess," to give a well-known example. I never gave them much more thought than that. Actually, the origin of "hiko" is 日の子 (hi no ko), child of the sun, and "hime" is 日の女　(hi no me) daughter of the sun. This fact is obscured because now they each have different kanji （彦 and　姫).

Scatalogical Names

Yes, in the Heian period and after, it was common to use "Kuso" in names, which means just what you think it means. The famous poet "Kinotsurayuki," who wrote the Tosa Diaries, is a notable example. His birth name was "Ako Kuso," which means "my child...shit." Amazing that a man with this kind of name grew up to be successful in life. Nor is he an isolated case. Names like "Kusoko" and "Oguso" were in vogue among the nobility. The book explains that this has to do with the belief in the god of the toilet. Since the toilet god keeps you healthy, it stands to reason he would be helpful in rearing a healthy child. This seems very out of place in the Japan of today, but it persists in a small way in the superstition that a pregnant woman should keep her bathroom clean if she wants to have a beautiful baby.

Source: 人名のひみつ　　Jinmei no Himitsu, 1999 Toshihide Kunimatsu and Satoshi Kumagai
Published by Iwasaki Shoten

My Weekend

2005-03-14T00:34:00.001+09:00

I'm in a good mood now, since I managed to have a fairly social and active weekend. On Thursday I met Homodachi for Scrabble, on Friday I met N. for dinner in Osaka, on Saturday I met Malifact and we hung around Sannomiya (afterwards I went to a boxercise class), and tonight I went to a Japanese friend's house, where his mom cooked us dinner. Takashi went too and afterwards we went to Sannomiya to return my videos. I rented "House of Sand and Fog" and "Dot the I". I loved "Dot the I," it was so sexy and thrilling with a good surprise ending, therefore more my kind of movie than the other. I know "House of Sand and Fog" is good in its way too, both the novel and the film have been hyped a lot, but I didn't personally relate to the characters. I even thought it was rather exploitative. I don't want to spoil the ending for anyone, but I guess I'd prefer to see the minority family survive and the spoiled white people die for once, and needless to say it didn't happen that way. Also I'm not the kind of person to get all emotional about a house. I've moved so many times in my life I don't relate well to the kind of character who is willing to risk everything for the place they were brought up. It's only a house. No house is worth dying or going to jail for, and if you think it is, it's past time to get a life. Before she had to give up her house, the woman in the movie was apparently doing nothing - not working, not checking her mail, not smoking or drinking, not telling the truth to her family, living in a vacuum as it were. I found that hard to accept. She relied too much on the house to give her an identity, and I thought that was pretty messed up.

Food/Drink: Stay Away!

2005-03-07T10:31:00.000+09:00

Starbucks coffee jelly

1) The Starbucks Coffee Jelly Frappuccino.
This is a seasonally limited variety of frappucino with small cubes of coffee jelly at the bottom. In my opinion, it is inferior both to the regular Coffee Frappuccino and a similar product at Wendy's you eat with a spoon, the Coffee Jelly Frostie. I feel that the Coffee Jelly Frostie, made with chocolate ice cream, is a superior coffee jelly dessert. Firstly, chocolate and coffee make a more complementary flavor combination than coffee and coffee. Even more significantly, the cubes of coffee jelly in the Wendy's dessert are larger, so you can savor them at your leisure. The most enjoyable feature of coffee jelly is the unique texture, but you don't have time to enjoy it with the Starbucks product. That is because the pieces are so small and numerous that they fly up your straw at an alarming speed. The effect is similar to the feeling you get from sucking up balls of tapioca when drinking bubble tea, but in that case you have a chance to savor the texture of the tapioca because it stays in your mouth much longer than the coffee jelly. The small bits of coffee jelly merely get swallowed almost as soon as they enter your mouth, adding scant benefit to the frappucino except perhaps for excess caffeine. I recommend the Wendy's Coffee Jelly Frostie over this product.

Wendy's coffee jelly

2) Peanut Whip. It's not peanut butter. It's like marshmallow cream fluff with a hint of peanut butter. Maybe it would be good for a dessert ingredient, but I have at least ten healthier things I prefer to spread on my toast.

3) Tomato Amatare. I like Spinach Amatare, so I tried the tomato one last night. The experiment failed. Maybe I added too much of the stuff; it just made the cooked tomatoes soggy and ultra-sweet. Tomatoes are one vegetable that don't really need a sweet sauce, even if you decide for some reason (influenced by East Asian cooking styles, perhaps?) to cook them rather than eat them raw.

Amatare means sweet sauce. In Japanese, Western sauces are called sauce, while Japanese sauces are called "tare". Because it seemed interesting, I translated some of the Wikipedia article on tare:

"Tare" is used as a general term for a seasoning liquid typified by the tare for yakitori, the tare for yakiniku, and the tare for grilled eel. The word is used mostly for Japanese cooking, and the equivalent word "sauce" is used for Western cooking. Tare originally referred to "taremiso," the prevalent sauce in Japan until soy sauce became widespread. From the Meiji Period on, the fluid used for grilling eel and other foods also can be called "tare".

To make "taremiso," add miso to three times its amount of water and mix well. Boil it down and strain it. You could carve some dried bonito flakes with a knife (until the end of the Meiji period, there were no machines to carve bonito flakes, and it was usually carved by hand with a small knife) and add it to the boiled-down sauce, but because bonito flakes were expensive, it is thought that taremiso usually consisted only of miso. Tare that was not boiled down first, which used less water, was called "Namadare" ("raw" tare).

Isn't that something like pouring straight miso soup on your food? Without cooking it first?
The article continues with the history of tare, quoting a cookbook from 1643 and concluding with the intriguing headings, "the Disappearance of Tare" and "the Resurgence of Tare." Basically, soy sauce, invented in the 13th century, eventually gained nationwide acceptance, spelling a decline in the consumption of tare. The "revival" of tare happened in 1955, when Korean-style restaurants achieved popularity in Japan. The invention of shabushabu in 1952 (it's a wonder they can pinpoint these modern discoveries so exactly, but I'm still not clear about what happened to soy sauce between the 13th century and the 18th) brought tare into the public consciousness, and thereafter tare came to be used widely for many kinds of sauces. In 2004, some people began, for the first time, to call the soup for soba noodles "tare". This historic moment was also documented for posterity in the Wikipedia article on "soba tsuyu."

That's Cunning!

2005-03-03T13:57:00.000+09:00

Japanese Comedy Review #2: "That's Cunning! Shijo saidai no sakusen?"
"That's カンニング！史上最大の作戦？"
1996
Director: Hiroshi Sugawara

"Cunning" means "cheating" in Japanese. Therefore, the title means something like "That's Cheating! The Greatest Scheme in History?"

The opening sequence, which shows a lecture hall full of college students using very creative means to cheat on their exam, is hilarious. So is the climactic scene when they execute their "greatest scheme in history". However, the plot and dialogue are weak and cliche. For the most part this movie is not that good, with the exception of an appealing performance by the lovely pop star Amuro Namie.

The plot, such as it is, involves a group of chemistry students (all of whom live in a notorious dorm called "White Bear") whose only hope of passing organic chemistry is by cheating. Their professor is a manaically strict man who hates cheating. Ironically, he is also a cheater - it comes out later that he is plagiarizing another professor's work. Anyway, the maniac professor hates cheaters and the students of the White Bear dorm, who happen to be one and the same. He hatches an anime-villain-worthy plan to tear down their dorm and build a hotel on that spot --UNLESS the group gets good grades on their finals, WITHOUT cheating.

The White Bear is a boy's dorm originally, but Yumi (Amuro Namie) decides to move in and, predictably, fight with the boys to preserve the dorm.

After a brave effort, the group realizes they don't have a hope of doing well on the final without cheating, so they create a new original cheating scheme that their professor will not be able to detect. This turns out to be really funny, and it provides the second highlight of the film, after the first sequence.

There are a few laughs here, but not much substance. No matter what, don't show it to your students.

The Inventor of Information

2005-03-03T12:44:00.000+09:00

The English-version Wikipedia article on Mori Ogai contains an interesting antecdote, if true:

As a physician, Mori specialized in beriberi, an ailment caused by a deficiency of vitamin B1. His questionable decisions involving the contents of soldiers' rations during the Russo-Japanese War might have cost the lives of thousands of Japanese soldiers (ironically, to the beriberi disease that Mori specialized in).

Curious, I went to the Japanese Mori Ogai page. I didn't find the story repeated there, but the Japanese page did credit Mori with the invention of the word 情報, "information". It explains that the word is a combination of "passion" 情熱　and "report" 報告. The word currently enjoys the same status in modern life as the English word "information," which we think of as consisting of objective facts; yet perhaps there is a bit of "passion" in it too, for us nerds at least.

In my personal life, some problems with my apartment have been solved, but others remain. A synopsis.

SOLVED: I had a problem with tiny gnats in my apartment. I found where they were hiding out and got rid of them. Once destroying their hidden lair, the best way to kill them is simply to vacuum them up.

SOLVED: I didn't have a computer or Internet in my apartment for a year and a half. This caused me to spend an alarming amount of time at a certain Internet cafe. However, my friend Sophia kindly gave me a computer (Mac i-Book), and yesterday I took the day off work in order to have the Internet connected (Yahoo BB).

NEW PROBLEM: My bathtub's gas-powered hot-water heater, which has always been a pain anyway, completely gave up the ghost the other day. I had a repairman to my house (since I was already home yesterday waiting for the Yahoo BB people), and he said he couldn't take off the cover to fix it because it's rusted shut. He pointed out that it's twenty years old. My apartment is truly ancient and decrepit. Let me also point out that the kitchen hot water heater has never worked since I moved in. What scared me most was that my neighbor-across-the-way had the same problem last summer, and he couldn't take a hot bath or shower for a month! Which he said was still tolerable in the summer, but it's chilly now, and I don't think I could face cold showers - for a month, or ever.

My neighbor eventually had his whole bathtub replaced, which is probably what I'll have to do. The company that owns my apartment is sending someone to take a look at it today (I told them to come sometime after 5), so I'm going to hurry home from school.

I had to make do with a shower at the gym last night. In a way it's almost okay, because I've been going to Step Aerobics and other classes at the gym almost every day anyway, and I don't even mind getting in the public bath with the other women, but I still hope I can bathe in my own bathtub soon. I was looking forward to using my citron-flavored bath salts. More importantly, what will I do if there's a string of holidays and the gym is closed...?

I'll leave you with this. The other day when I bought tofu okonomiyaki at a tofu shop near my house, the tofu vendor gave me a big smile and asked if I wanted "ohashi stick". I must have looked confused, because he said, "Aren't ohashi called ohashi stick in English?"
No, but it's a cute guess.
I told him "chopsticks." My English teacher instinct kicked in, and I repeated it again a couple times until his pronunciation improved marginally. Meanwhile his coworker could hardly control her giggling.
By the way, tofu okonomiyaki is kind of gross.

Reading...

2005-02-28T09:34:00.000+09:00

I'm beginning to become addicted to George R.R. Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire" fantasy series. I just finished the first book, "A Game of Thrones". It had considerable charm, and according to reviews I've seen the next two are even better. The fourth book in the series comes out March 7.
I'm also reading a long fantasy series in Japanese, but it's a secret for now, since I'm reading it pretty slowly and I don't know when I'll finish.
I also read Ishmael, a philosophical treatise featuring a talking gorilla; a compelling read, although after a few days had passed I found that the urgency of the message was receeding in my mind. The author divided human societies into two groups, the "Leavers" and the "Takers". Almost all civilizations in recent history have been "Takers," consumers who are destroying the earth for the sake of our own short-sighted advantange. The book urges us to look to "Leaver" societies for the solutions to today's problems. But how? Perhaps the later books in the series provide more answers about how we can stop seeing enviornmental destruction as progress.

Friday

2005-02-25T21:50:00.000+09:00

I just finished a lavish dinner with my school English department at a French restaurant called ルー・サロメ　- La Salome. I don't even like French cooking that much, but even I could recognize that this place is a cut above the ordinary. Everyone was quite impressed with the food and atmosphere.
Due to the fact that there are fewer kids, nationwide, each year, there will only be 8 homeroom classes at my school next year, down from 9. For me, that means only teaching 8 times a week - and my schedule is bare enough as it is.
There is some talk, though, of letting me have another class. Dare I hope that it might actually happen this year? It would make so much sense to let me teach a writing elective for the third years. Heaven knows the JTEs don't really like to do it.

Looking at your pudding

2005-02-24T15:03:00.000+09:00

Last night on Trivia no Izumi they convened a panel of experts to determine "the male mannerism most likely to arouse a woman's maternal instinct".
The answer was: "Innocently holding up a cup of pudding to inspect it from the bottom."
I have to say it really doesn't do anything for me.

If you haven't seen this link already...

2005-02-22T12:29:00.000+09:00

A faithful re-enactment of Katamari Damashi in Playdoh is here.

What counts as 助詞

2005-02-22T11:01:00.000+09:00

I took my first Japanese classes way back in the eighties, so no doubt the teaching methodology has changed a lot since then, but in my experience I distinctly remember the prefixes "o-" and "go-" called "honorific particles" along with direct-object-wo and other nakama of that ilk. It turns out though, and this makes sense if you think about it, they aren't really "particles" if by particles you mean 助詞 (joshi). They're 敬語　keigo, honorific language.
The grammar pretest in my textbook on 国語の常識 contained a section where you had to identify all the particles in the given sentences. と、が、を、は、の、and に are easy. But did you know that だけ　and ばかり are also particles? I thought they were just, you know, words. Maybe I thought that because you can translate them into English, and because they are more than one syllable long.
You might be surprised also at one of the "particles" in this sentence:

太郎と次郎だけが、そのことを知っていた。
Taro to Jiro dake ga, sono koto wo shitte ita.

Okay, so we have と、だけ、が、and を so far. Can you find the last one?
It's the て　of 知っていた。　And here is one way that the grammar taught in Japan seems really different from the way Japanese is taught as a second language. It seems counterintuitive to end any word or morpheme with a small っ, a character that is meaningless and unpronouncable without something after it. But according to this, the basic word is 知っ　, and て, like た in the sentence 物足りない食事だった, is a 助動詞 - in other words a separate unit, a kind of particle that "helps" verbs. In another part of the test, I was asked to write the adjective in the sentence:

そのできごとはとても珍しかった。
Sono dekigoto ha totemo mezurashikatta.

I wrote 珍しかった, (mezurashikatta) which I think of as one word.
The answer was 珍しかっ. (mezurashikat-)
In other words, they treat 珍しかっ and た as separate morphemes.
This seems strange to me. I mean, you can't even type 珍しかっ　on a computer keyboard without typing the final -ta and then deleting it.

Some of the things they told me in the chapter on grammar really go without saying, though. I consider the following sentence the finest example I've seen of stating the obvious.

英語などでは固有名詞の語頭を大文字にするなどの表記の法則がありますが、日本語ではそうしたきまりはありません。
Some languages, like English, have rules about capitalizing the first letter of proper nouns, but Japanese doesn't have that kind of rule.

Anyone who is reading that sentence and doesn't know that ...

Lest you say that I don't understand the intention of sentence, I'll state for the record that I do realize it was probably to point out that proper nouns are capitalized in English (something you'll know if you've ever seen English), and not to say that they're not in Japanese, but I still think it's funny to imagine Japanese with capitalization, or anyone needing to be told that it's not there.

Weekend

2005-02-20T09:30:00.000+09:00

Yesterday I met with Pretty Sunshine for the last time before she goes to Inner Mongolia. I'll miss her! She and I had okonomiyaki and cake with Malifact, Homodachi, and Tisha.
Afterwards, Pretty Sunshine and I went to the library and worked on translating a list of names from the battle of Okita Nawate. It's not for me. Do you think I would do that for fun? I did it for someone else. Even with the help of Pretty Sunshine, a curious student sitting next to us, and the reference librarian, there were some we couldn't verify for sure. I spent a long time in the public library reference section, where they have books especially devoted to names of people in the Sengoku era, and still there were some that could have more than one reading. It was really hard, since there's no good Internet database of the readings of historical Japanese names. I can't wait until the Japanese Internet is big enough that you can look up that kind of thing easily.
I also rented Ringu and watched it, finally. I've been kind of obsessed with it ever since seeing The Ring several months ago. Everyone told me Ringu was scarier, so I was prepared for the worst. I've read I-don't-know-how-many reviews and message boards about it, trying to work up the nerve to see it. However, I actually thought The Ring was better and scarier. It's really just a matter of preference though. They're both great and really creepy.
I don't believe in ghosts. But here's an unsettling thought. The Wikipedia article on ghosts says:

The natural occurrence of infrasound, which are sounds below human auditory frequencies (below 20 hertz), could possibly explain the notions of feeling a 'presence' in the room, or unexplained feelings of anxiety or dread, as certain infrasonic frequencies are known to have these effects on the body. The frequency of 18hz is known to cause the human eye to vibrate, which can make pale forms appear in the peripheral vision.

Sometimes I have "spooky feelings" in my apartment (especially after watching a horror movie, especially one that features Japanese closets like I have in my house...ew), maybe there are some infrasound frequencies coming from somewhere. The "vibrating eyeball" effect sounds like it could be real, so in a way it's scarier than actual ghosts!

So Busy in March (...Not)

2005-02-17T14:52:00.000+09:00

Graduation is the last day of February, and I have no classes in March. Last year I nearly went crazy with boredom. With two parts anticipation and one part dread, I look forward to the most boring part of the school year. I have my correspondence courses, books to read, websites to surf, etc. etc. Nonetheless, I feel like my sanity suffers a little bit each time I have to go a long stretch making believe those things count as work.
I spent my 3 class periods today teaching the kids how to use Google and Wikipedia in English. It was fun, but oddly stressful. The students seem less Internet-savvy than I thought. There are a few computer nerds in each class, definitely, as I've noticed on other occasions, but on the whole they were unfamiliar with basic search methods, especially in English. Also, I can't count the times they messed up their searches with spelling and punctuation errors --even though all they had to do was copy from the handout. I was always running around and correcting them. That must be why I feel more tired than I usually do after class. Like typing "load of the rings" instead of "lord of the rings". Unfortunately, "load of the rings" also exists as a kind of joke, and so they got a list of sites for it and didn't have a clue anything was wrong.
One girl even typed "lordoftherings" without spaces into the search box. Doesn't she know we need spaces between words in English?
I'm not blaming them - as usual, my expectations were a bit too high.
I feel so negative and irritable lately. I need to snap out of it. I've been taking the "Step" classes at the gym, which are really good. I need to go to the beginning aerobics class today, then maybe I'll feel better.

The Gentle Twelve

2005-02-14T15:27:00.000+09:00

Nostalgic for really funny comedies, and tired of not being able to find obscure American movies at the video store, I thought it would be a good idea to seek out the funniest Japanese comedies I could find. The Internet is full of lists of "funniest movies of all time" from the perspective of an English speaker, but the results of a search for 邦画　(Japanese movie) and 爆笑 ("explosive laughs") is rather sparse. However, Japan is not a comedy vacuum. I think the movie "Water Boys," about a boys' synchronized swimming team, is pretty funny. "Shimozuma Monogatari" seemed funny, although I had trouble understanding what the whole point of it was. What else is funny? Please comment if you have any recommendations.

This week I watched a spoof comedy called 12人の優しい日本人. A parody of the 1957 American film "12 Angry Men", the title means "Twelve Nice Japanese People," or "The Gentle Twelve", which is the English title on the DVD case. Actually, the DVD has no English (or Japanese) subtitles and it seems it to have never been released outside Japan. It is directed by Nakahara Shun, who is known for "The Cherry Orchard".

Since I had never seen the original "12 Angry Men," I decided to watch that first. In the original film, 11 of the 12 jurors are convinced at the outset that the defendant is guilty, and it takes Henry Fonda about 90 minutes to overcome their racism, class-based and generation-based prejudices enough to persuade them that he might be innocent.

The Gentle 12 starts from the premise that the jury system is introduced in Japan. Instead of having 12 angry, opinionated people arguing, we have 12 nice, gentle people who believe from the beginning that the defendant is innocent. Then one young man, playing the Henry Fonda-like role, starts asking them to reconsider. The opening scenario is thus the opposite of 12 Angry Men.

The Gentle Twelve preserves the tension and group dynamics of the original, with some amusing parallels and twists. The case itself, though, has been completely changed. Here is a summary of the scenario we are asked to consider.

The defendant is a beautiful, 21-year old, divorced single mother who works as a supermarket cashier by day, a club hostess at night. On the night in question, she ordered a pizza for her 5-year old son and then went to meet her ex-husband, who was drunk. After drinking canned soda from a vending machine, they had a disagreement. A witness saw her and the ex-husband fighting in the street, and testified that she yelled "Shinjae!" ("Die!") and then pushed him in front of a truck. The truck driver honked his horn, but could not stop in time, hit the man and killed him instantly. The woman is now on trial for murder.

The jury that is asked to consider this case is a motley crew of men and women of varying ages, each with their own personality quirks and behavior patterns. I particularly admired the acting of Juror 10, a woman who absolutely could not defend her point of view and was nonetheless obstinant until the end. All of the acting was pretty good. Some of the characters who got on my nerves in the beginning started to grow on me as time went on. Anyway, as a group they represent kind-hearted but indecisive ordinary people, and this can be seen in the very first scene when they have trouble deciding what drinks to order. From there on out you know it's going to be 優秀不断, folks.

The only one who does not seem to be affected by indecisiveness is the young man who sets himself up to convince the others that she's guilty. To do that, he tries to get them to re-examine their assumptions and look at the case logically. There are several tense and amusing scenes with him arguing with another character, asking them why they believe the defendant to be innocent. They come up with a lot of ridiculous reasons, from "She bought her ex-husband a can of juice, so she must be a nice person." to "Feelings, I guess?" to "Because the chestnut told me so." ("Can chestnuts talk?" was the icy reply). In this dialogue, he is questioning a guy who believes the defendant's story over the witness'.

Ａ　僕は、被告の話を信じるな。
Ｂ　なぜですか？
Ａ　え？
Ｂ　被告は、21才で、美人で、スタイルもよく、証人の主婦は年まで太っていて、脂ぎってからですか？
Ａ　そう！　(pointing his finger like a gun) 当たり。ピンポン！

A As for me, I just believe the defendant's testimony.
B Why?
A Huh?
B Is it because she's 21 years old, gorgeous and fashionable, and the witness is a fat, greasy old lady?
A Yes! That's right! You hit the nail on the head.

Then there is the man who says 有罪でも、無罪だね ("Even if she's guilty, I'd vote innocent!") and laughs like it's a big joke. He later expounds that he believes the victim clearly deserved to die.

At first I thought that it would follow the pattern of 12 Angry Men, with one juror convincing all the others. Therefore, I felt the film had a low point in the later middle when it seemed like no ground was being gained or lost. Actually, though, the outcome was different and well worth watching, surpassing my expectations. It had seemed to slow down because the tide was changing direction.

I enjoyed the parallels with 12 Angry Men. In 12 Angry Men, the eyesight of one of the witnesses is called into question. In The Gentle 12, it is the witness' hearing that is disputed. She claims she heard the defendant shout "Die!" - Shinjae! However, she could have misheard her shout "Ginger Ale!" - Jinjaeru!

In 12 Angry Men, the jurors automatically believe the witnesses, and it's a big revelation to them that witnesses could lie or be mistaken. In this movie, it was funny that the jurors discounted the witnesses' testimony immediately - "oh, of course they're lying!" Likewise, another big "revelation" of 12 Angry Men - that you might say "I'll kill you" and not really mean it - is again treated lightly by these characters. "'Die!' - I say that all the time, what does that prove?"

In 12 Angry Men, the men don't identify themselves by name during the discussion, but a couple of them boast about their occupation. At the very end, as they're walking out of the courthouse, two of the jurors introduced themselves by name, and shake hands. The Gentle Twelve imitated this, with its own spin. As in the original, the jurors don't introduce themselves by name, and it comes out during the discussion that one of them is a bank employee and another is a lawyer. At the end, they leave the jury room two by two, and each pair has a short conversation where they say something real to each other, giving us a glimpse of their lives outside the jury room. The two jurors who made a special point of their professions inside the room both revealed that they were lying. The bank employee was really a dentist, and the lawyer confessed he is really an actor playing a lawyer. I liked that.

I recommend this film if you're a fan of the original "12 Angry Men," or if you tend to like films that feature tense group dynamics taking place in a single room. As a comedy, it was a subtle social commentary with many funny scenes.

Keitai

2005-02-10T19:31:00.000+09:00

I bought a new mobile phone today. It's a Foma P900i. My phone number and keitai mail address are exactly the same as before, so please start contacting me again if you have any wish or desire to.
I received the correspondence course materials from U-Can the other day. The kanji kentei course looks okay, but nothing revolutionary. The other course though, 国語の常識, I'm really psyched about. Ever since I opened the box and saw all of the cool stuff included, I was really into it. The kanji course is just kanji. But the 国語 course covers everything - grammar, proverbs, kanji, keigo, even making speeches and writing letters. There are two cassette tapes, lots of good reference materials, 6 textbooks, and you even get an electronic dictionary (no English, but it has a yojijukugo game). The level is quite high (3rd year students who were at my desk yesterday to ask my help with English paged through it and told me they found it difficult) but it's motivating.
I'll post a couple of expressions I learned from the first textbook.

玄人はだし (くろうとはだし）　(origin: contracted from 玄人がはだしで逃げる）

"Professional barefoot"

To be such an expert at something that even the professionals, frightened, run away from you in a hurry (barefoot). The textbook pointed out that you cannot say the opposite, 素人はだし - amateur barefoot. In the context of an online game, though, this would be a cool expression - you are so hardcore that the newbies all run away from you barefoot.

紺屋の白袴　(こうやのしろはかま）

"White pants at a dye factory"

To be so busy working for others that you have no time to do the very same thing for yourself. A JTE told me she is an example: "I'm a teacher, but my son is uneducated." It's easy to think of other examples - you don't develop your pictures, even though you work in a photo shop; you don't fix your computer, even though you're an IT technician. It seems like we *should* have an expression with the same meaning in English, but I can't think of one, can you?

Trippiest Commercial?

2005-02-09T10:23:00.000+09:00

My vote goes to the Kewpie Mayonnaise Tarako Pasta Sauce commercial, which is playing non-stop on a television in the pasta section of my neighborhood Daiei.

You can see the commercial here.

An army of pink kewpie dolls with no legs rhythmically jump forward, chanting "Tarako, Tarako" in an odd sing-song voice. Then it cuts to a zombie girl sitting at a table in front of an electric-blue wall with a clock. The effect is weirdly hypnotic. The kewpie army just turned the girl into an undead monster! Should we be frightened? Or is she just pale and sleepy? Why is it impossible to walk away while this commercial is playing?!

I found the online movie of the commercial on a bulliten board titled キューピーマヨネーズのCMがかっこいい (Kewpie Mayonnaise Commercials Are Cool!)

Tarako is codfish roe. I don't think it sounds that yummy as a pasta sauce, but just to let you know I did start eating fish and seafood again after one year without any. I still don't eat meat (chicken, beef, pork, etc), and I try not to drink milk (I use soy milk, even in coffee) but my case against fish has always been comparatively weak. It was mainly fish's reputation as a brain food that made me relent. Not any subliminal messages from TV commercials or anything.

E3 Classes

2005-02-04T14:50:00.000+09:00

Debate

The topic: "All Convenience Stores Should Close at Midnight."
My favorite argument, by a student on the "against" side: "Bad people need to have a meeting. Having a meeting is very important to them. So the convenience stores should not close at midnight."

Next class -

Thanks, Matt, for posting on your blog the link to the Retrojunk site. I got permission to use the computer lab for 8 of my 9 classes next week, so we're going to have fun watching those zany commercials. I love them. I made up some listening comprehension questions for them this morning. My favorites are the Cheetos commercial, Encyclopedia Brittanica, First Legend of Zelda, Pepsi Michael J. Fox, and Transformer Insecticons. I think "The Clapper" and "Allmost Home Cookies" are relatively easy too, so I'm including them. Priceless!

This is a map that shows you how much more you need to travel. Here are mine, showing countries visited:

create your own visited countries map

And states:

create your own visited states map

I had to keep re-doing the states, it was really hard - each time I tried doing it, I looked at the map and realized I forgot one. I think this version is accurate!
(ネブラスカに行ったことがあるんだっけ…なんで覚えられないかな…）

Phat Jobs

2005-02-02T10:51:00.000+09:00

If I weren't planning to recontract for a third year, I could try for these lucrative but temporary jobs near Seattle.

I love job listings like this:

Do you speak Japanese? Do you like to play video games?

Yes, yes!

Then there are questions like these:

Want to build the best Japanese search engine on the planet? Want to work on the most exciting team at Microsoft?

No, and no...and it seems they want a native Japanese speaker, anyway.
Ah, why do I even bother to drool over job listings, when the die is cast and everyone knows I'm fated to spend another year on JET. I'm addicted to Kobe. It's convenient, nice, friendly, comfortable, everything you could want in a city. Trying to support myself in Seattle on those 3-6 month type jobs would probably be rather stressful. I've been there, and I know what it's like. After much angst I turned in my recontracting form marked "yes". Who knows, they could decide not to recontract me, but the vice-principal told me the principal wants me to recontract, for what that's worth.
My Japanese still isn't as good as it should be, and that's a reason for staying. After my kanken defeat, I developed the following tentative study plan:
- I registered for two 10-month correspondence courses through "U-Can University" - 国語の常識 and 漢検 (levels 4-2). If you're not satisfied when you get the materials you can send them back at no charge, so I'll look at them first and possibly only continue with the best of the two, since they are a bit expensive. If they both look great though, I can afford to take both of them. The kanken one should provide me with a more systematic way of studying - I didn't really enjoy the yellow-cover books I bought to study for the test last time. You practice writing the kanji, if you have the energy you look up the compounds you don't know in the dictionary, you do the tricky, repetitive little exercises. Boring. I never felt like I was really mastering the material.
- With the help of one or both of those courses, I want to get a good score on the 3-kyuu kanken in June and the 2-kyuu in January a year from now. If I take the J-test on top of that, I should certainly have enough Japanese qualifications for my resume.
I bought two new board games recently: Lord of the Rings, the 2000 game by Reiner Knizia, Japanese version; and Lost Cities, also by Reiner Knizia, German version. We're planning to play the Lord of the Rings at my game group meeting on Sunday.
I finished reading T.C. Boyle's "Riven Rock". Based on a true story, it chronicles the 20 years that Stanley McCormick, a schizophrenic, misogynist millionaire, spends isolated from all women, including his long-suffering wife Katherine. I liked the historical detail, but I was hoping that there would be a more meaningful ending to Eddie O'Kane's subplot, since the author devoted so much time to him, Stanley's male nurse, that he almost eclipsed Stanley as the main character. There also wasn't much closure for poor Katherine. It was so unfair.
I watched the Korean movie "My Sassy Girl" (Japanese title: 猟奇的な彼女) the other night. What a dysfunctional relationship. Those who are, in any way, sensitive on the topic of male and female relationships should be warned to avoid it because of all the female violence against men. The main character is constantly being hit, threatened and knocked around by both his mother and his girlfriend, and that's not funny. His mother hits him with anything on hand, and his girlfriend is dangerous from the beginning. However, there were a few genuinely funny scenes in the film. My favorite was the excuse the crazy girlfriend gives to get the guy out of class. It was also cool how she told off people who were misbehaving in trains and restaurants. I almost liked her when she was yelling at a guy in a restaurant for underage prostitution. To remind you it's supposed to be a love story, there was a cheesy frame to it all involving burying a time capsule in the ground and meeting to unearth it two years later. Way over the top. The very end was nice, though.
It's better viewed as a comedy than a love story. I couldn't see anything romantic about what happened between those two pathetic characters. One commentator on Amazon.co.jp said that the plot was like a manga. I guess the violent femme/hapless male combo is common in manga, not that I would know; I don't like that kind of manga. But I can see why the movie might be popular with manga fans in Japan. It was recommended to me by a guy in Taiwan during my trip there.

Bad Luck!

2005-01-30T20:32:00.000+09:00

Looks like I failed the kanken and lost my mobile phone on the same day.
If you mailed my mobile phone today, please send it again to my regular e-mail. I lost it somewhere between my apartment building bicycle parking lot and my nearest train station's Starbucks, a fairly short distance, between 11 and 12 this morning, as I was on my way to the test site. I checked at the Starbucks, some nearby stores, and the police box near my apartment, and nobody's turned it in.
I knew this morning - and yesterday - that I wouldn't pass the test, but I tried anyway, and was actually surprised at how close I came. The first time I totaled my score (after we finished the test, they gave us an answer sheet) I got exactly 140, which is passing (70% of 200). However, when I looked at it later, I noticed another small mistake. So I probably missed passing by a mere 1 or 2 points. I would have passed if I hadn't had second thoughts about a couple of answers and changed them- making them wrong. Annoying. But I was pleased that I was able to answer so many of the writing questions, yojijukugo, and taigigo/ruigo questions.
I'll definitely take the kanken again in June. It's a good experience. I think I got stared at a bit by the other test-takers. More so than at the Chinese test. The group taking 3-kyuu was all ages, but there were probably more middle schoolers than anything, one very young child, and a sprinkling of older adults.
The test question I'm kicking myself for the most is シャソウ. I knew it was some kind of window from the context. If only I'd just thought "(train) car window" and written it that way! The answer is 車窓. I've never heard that word before, but I should have been able to figure it out from the sentence, and I should have remembered that the onyomi of 窓 is そう。

24-Hour Writing Contest

2005-01-24T09:13:00.000+09:00

Yesterday I entered the writersweekly 24-Hour Short Story Contest. You have to register in advance (it costs US $5) and the entrants are limited to 500 people. At the designated time, they e-mail you a topic and the maximum word count. You have to write a story using their topic and e-mail it back within 24 hours. If you're entering from Japan, you'll need to keep in mind the time difference: the contest starts and ends at 3:00 a.m. here. However, it doesn't really matter that much; no one says you actually have to start writing at 3:00 a.m.
Yesterday's topic was:

She screamed, "No! Did you hear me?! I said no!!"

She slapped him hard but he had already catapulted out of
reality...

The word count was 1000 words (the website says they usually range from 500 to 2000 words).
When I read the topic, I thought it was quite easy. 1000 words is also really short. I wrote my story in about 6 hours. Reading it over though, I was embarrassed by my theme and the unavoidable cheesiness of it. To get to a scene that dramatic, I had to throw in some emotional elements I might have otherwise avoided. So I wasn't really satisfied with my story, and I'm not going to post it here. I don't think I'll win anything this time.
I signed up for the contest because I want to work on my creative writing this year. I'm uncertain about my future, but I think that writing is at least as important as studying languages. If I can't express myself well, it doesn't matter how many kanji I know. There's no immortality in learning kanji, but your writing can have power long after you die. I've neglected creative writing for a long time, but I want to start to remedy that; if I write anything I'm proud of, I'll post it here. Anyway, I encourage all of you to enter the 24-hour short story contest next time. It really is a cool idea. I like the winning story of the autumn contest...here is a link.

Misfortune & Frusteration

2005-01-20T13:14:00.000+09:00

The misfortune is, I hope, a small one: the gums on the left lower side of my mouth seem to be infected. The swelling started yesterday, but I didn't have time to go to the dentist. Today, it's so swollen I can't close my teeth together. I called the dentist, and 3:00 is the only time they could see me today, so I need to take an hour of nenkyuu and miss an important ESS club meeting that I should really be there for. At first I was going to postpone the dentist visit till tomorrow, but the pain makes it difficult to concentrate on anything, so I probably wouldn't be much good at the ESS meeting anyway. So I called the dentist's office back to say I would go today.
I like my dentist - I think going to the dentist in Japan is rather calming, not at all the stressful and frightening experience it was with the incompetent dentists I had back home. I even find myself looking forward to seeing the dentist again. Weird.
The frusteration is due to studying for the kanken. I wish I had more time. I don't think I'll be ready.

Inkan & Debate Updates

2005-01-13T08:47:00.000+09:00

So there are 2 kinds of inkan (also called hanko): 実印　(jitsuin) and 認印　(mitomein). The larger one that I had made in Taiwan is suitable for a jitsuin. This is the official inkan that you can register at the yakusho (city hall) and use subsequently to prove you are who you say you are. It may be required for very official documents, for example when you buy a house. The jitsuin is NOT for everyday use, however, so you need a smaller one, a mitomein, for more mundane things like receiving packages in the mail or stamping your attendance book. I haven't seen enough of other people's inkan to verify this, but I'm guessing that the jitsuin has your full name, and the mitomein is an "abbrieviated" version for which any part of your name is okay. Correct me if I'm wrong about this. I was surprised when the woman in the shop in Taiwan asked me if I wanted my FULL name on the inkan, because if I chose kanji for my last name too it would be really long and it wouldn't fit on a regular hanko. Now I kind of wish I had made a full-name version, although any kanji I picked for my last name would be utterly fanciful ateji . There are a few choices I like for my last name, but I've never ventured to proclaim them publicly because they just seem a bit silly.
In Japan they don't seem to mind if you have totally different kanji on your jitsuin and mitomein. It doesn't matter. On the other hand, if you're a foreigner with a middle name, you'd better make sure your middle name is printed exactly the same way on all your paperwork or on none of it, or you'll have hell to pay. Likewise if you're a foreigner with a mistake on your original passport, you need to go with the passport version on all your paperwork. They aren't flexible when it comes to the naming options of other countries, but they're surprisingly flexible with their own. Another instance of this is the fact that although the kanji you can choose for your newborn child are limited by law, you can still choose to have those kanji pronounced any way you want. It's interesting that flexibility with how-many-ways-can-you-write-your-name differs from country to country.
Debate is going well. The students and teachers seem into it. The ESS club also decided (independantly of me) they want to do debates this year.
Here is a sampling of topics proposed by students in my class this morning- these are the ones I selected, so next week they have to vote and narrow it down to one topic per class-

(First half of the class - 20 students - proposed these topics)

1) Do we need P.E.?
2) Should this high school have us come by 8:30?
3) Should all high school students wear uniforms?
4) Should we get married?
5) Should we run laps? (Note: my school is particularly strict about only one thing, and that is 周回走, running laps around the school grounds. It's not optional and it's required regardless of the weather. The students hate it.)
6) Should we have homework during summer vacation?
7) Do we need Luminarie?
8) Should we use mobile phones?
9) Should we do club activities on the holidays?

(Second half of the class)

1) Nattto is delicious. Agree or disagree?
2) English is necessary. Agree or disagree?
3) Music is better than art, yes or no.
4) Do we need weather reports?
5) Do we need TV?
6) Should we make children believe in Santa Claus?
7) Should we eat fish or meat?
8) Does Nobita need Doraemon?
9) Is Ultraman a hero or not?
10) Should we eat bread or rice for breakfast?

The bread or rice debate is really tired and I wonder it hasn't been beaten to death by now, but some of the other things they talked about I didn't realize were such hot topics. The subject of whether I am very cute or not is apparently under debate -at least, one student wrote that down as a suggested topic. But no way will I let them choose that one. Then there is Ultraman. One student was asking (in Japanese, but I was listening) does Ultraman have a good sense of justice, because sometimes don't you feel sorry for his enemies?

Inkan

2005-01-11T11:35:00.000+09:00

Inkan are the name stamps used on formal documents instead of a signature in East Asia. Because each is custom-made and unique, it has a legal status similar to (but not quite as serious as) a signature in Western countries. I didn't need one when I was an exchange student in Japan in college, but now that I work in Japan I need one for the attendance book, which I have to stamp every day, and to signify receipt of my paycheck. My inkan is also registered with the bank. Most people also register theirs at the post office, but the post office will also accept a signature.
When I arrived, my school ordered the very cheapest kind of inkan for me, made of wood. I was not very happy with their selection of kanji for my name, but I didn't say anything because I'd just gotten there and I didn't want to cause a fuss. I chose my own kanji for my name long ago, and the ones the school gave me were different. Although my kanji name is different in Japanese and Chinese, I like the fact that I can use one of the same characters in each--it gives me a certain feeling of continuity of identity, I guess, even though the character's meaning has nothing to do with the actual meaning of my name, if there is one. Anyway, the meaning of the kanji the school gave me were unrelated to anything. So I've always wanted a better inkan.
When I went to China last summer, I had one made by a street vendor using my Chinese name. It was also cheap, and when I got it home I didn't like it because the imprint was so faint. It is made of stone, not wood, and has my Chinese zodiac animal carved on the top. I didn't do anything with it.
When I went to Taiwan, I had a really nice inkan made. The stone is fossilized coral and very pretty. I gave them my desired kanji name. It would have been very expensive in Japan, but in Taiwan the price was much more affordable. The woman in the shop didn't make it in front of me like the Chinese street vendor, but sent it to me in Japan afterwards. I received it last week.
Initially, I was disappointed because the imprint also seems rather faint. However, pretty-sunshine told me I just need to get the right shuniku for it. Shuniku is the red inkpad used with inkan. (The word means "vermilion flesh," and is one of my favorite Japanese words). I was also disappointed that at first glance, the characters weren't recongizable to me as my own name. They could almost have been anything. They were carved in the ancient semi-hieroglyphic style which I can't read. My other inkan have characters in the modern style, so I was unprepared for this. However, with close scrutiny I could eventually pick out which character was which (my first name is spelled with three kanji in Japanese; in Chinese, I use one character for my last name followed by two for my first). Now that I'm used to looking at it, I have no complaints with the design.
I proudly took my new inkan to my school office and asked if I could start using it from now on. Unfortunately, I encountered yet another setback: the office staff pointed out that the new inkan is too big! It takes up the whole square of the date in the attendance book, covering the date number. To make me feel better, she told me that I could use the new one once a month when I get my paycheck.
Having this pretty new inkan, of course I want to use it; although it doesn't make any difference to anything, some part of me rebels at using the cheap little wooden inkan every day with characters I didn't choose myself. At least I can register the new one with the bank and the post office, and get some high-grade shuniku to go with it. Hopefully if I get another job in Japan after JET, I can use the good inkan from the beginning.
Here is something I wonder about inkan. I can't imagine ever throwing one away. If it were my family, and my parents and grandparents had inkan when they died, I would keep the inkan forever. So do people keep all of their dead relatives' inkan? In which case do inkan keep accumulating infinitely from generation to generation? Or do people throw them away after someone dies?

Third Term Starts

2005-01-11T09:44:00.000+09:00

I have 360 students in 9 homeroom classes, all first-year high school students. That sounds like a lot of work for me, but actually it's not; I only teach them in groups of twenty, once a week for 25 minutes each. Each 50-minute period is divided in half and each homeroom class of 40 is divided in half, because my school believes that a 40-student class is too big for a conversation class.
Planning 25-minute, once-a-week classes that have any meaning or educational value at all is my sole challenge.
Last year, because the third term is the last and the shortest, I didn't do much with them except play quiz-show style games and have them read the tongue-twisters in Dr. Seuss' Fox in Socks for pronunciation practice. In the first and second terms (last year and this year) they had speaking evaluations, but not the third because it's too short. Anyway awhile back I got the crazy idea I wanted to do a debate in the third term this year.
Making Japanese students do a debate in English is kind of a pet project of many ALTs, and I've heard the topic covered many times in my teacher training seminars for JET. My ALT senpais seemed to believe that if you could just get students to debate in English, you will have succeeded on some fundamental level. The students are, as a rule, so shy in class, apathetic, non-opinionated, and non-forthcoming with their ideas, that I can understand why many ALTs seek debate as their holy grail. Debate is actually pretty alien to the Japanese educational system, but at my school the first-year students do debate in Japanese in their social studies class.
For the hundredth time, I regret not taking debate in high school. I had to look on Wikipedia to find out what the rules of debate actually are. I've never seen a real high school debate, much less participated in one, so I'm hardly qualified to teach my students how to do it. But then I'm a bad public speaker too, and ever since I came to this school I've been forced into the role of expert on making speeches in English. I'm used to that, and maybe it's even made me a better public speaker. So now I'm learning about debate in order to teach it.
The most memorable of my Chinese classes in college was the one where we had a class debate in Chinese. It was only one hour-long class, and we didn't get to pick the topic; it was the pros and cons of the "One Child Per Family" policy in China. Although initially unmotivated by the topic, I found myself becoming enthusiastic about it as the class progressed, activating my limited Chinese vocabulary in the process. With this good memory of debating in a foreign language in mind, I'm cautiously optimistic about the chances of success with my students.
I simplified the rules of the "world schools style" debate listed on Wikipedia for my class - each side will have three speakers, but I don't think we need the final "reply speaker". The last speaker can summarize and give the "final appeal." I'm thinking of assigning three judges for each class, one student from each side and one teacher (me or the JTE). The other teacher will be in charge of making sure the debate proceeds in a timely manner.
The debate lesson plans I just completed this morning will take 3 25-minute lessons. In the first class the students themselves can think of ideas for what they want to debate. I want each of the 18 classes of 20 to debate a different mini-issue, so that at the end we'll have an interesting little list of what they debated and which side won to publish in one of the school newsletters or something.

More Yojijukugo

2005-01-04T13:14:00.000+09:00

...than you can shake a stick at.

A romantic one:

比翼連理
ひよくれんり

比翼　refers to a legendary bird that has one wing shared between the male and the female.

連理　refers to two trees that grow together to become one.

Put these two words together, and it means a couple that are extremely close.

Another romantic one:

一日三秋
いちじつさんしゅう

One day, three autumns

Every day I don't meet you is like three years to me.

Some more of my favorites:

百鬼夜行
ひゃっきやこう

hundred-demons-night-go

A situation where many suspicious individuals are secretly engaged in shady dealings.

玩物喪志
がんぶつそうし

Play-thing-lose-will

To become enraptured with a novel amusement and lose your sense of purpose. This is a way of life for us Internet addicts, I'm afraid.

対牛弾琴
たいぎゅうだんきん

Facing-cow-play-koto

Like playing a harp for a cow, in other words a wasted effort.

白河夜船
しらかわよふね

White-river-night-ship

"Fast asleep, without knowing what's going on."

This one is unusual because it originated in Japan, not China; therefore, the kanji are read with the Japanese readings. It apparently came from a joke about a farmer who went to the capital, Kyoto. When asked if he remembered "Shirakawa," the farmer thinks it's a river and answers "oh, we crossed that river by boat at night so I didn't see it clearly." Since it's not actually a river, his answer displays his ignorance.

朝令暮改
ちょうれいぼかい

Morning-orders-dusk-change

When the rules keep changing and you can't trust them from one day to the next.

晴耕雨読
せいこううどく

Fine day-till-rain-read

When the weather is good, you work in the fields; when the weather is bad, you read a book. A description of a quiet, pleasant life.

器用貧乏
きようびんぼう

Skillful, handy-poor

Jack of all trades, master of none

I like the English expression better, actually.

自他不二
じたふじ

Self-other-not-two

A Buddhist phrase. Not distinguishing between yourself and others, a desirable state of mind.

馬耳東風
ばじとうふう

Horse-ear-east-wind

Not paying any heed to other people's advice or warnings. It's like the east wind blowing in the ear of a horse.

我田引水
がでんいんすい

My own-rice field-pull-water

Watering your own field--only doing what's best for you without caring about other people.

The following three all mean basically the same thing.

金城鉄壁
きんじょうてつへき

Gold-castle-iron-wall

A very strong defence.

金城湯池
きんじょうとうち

The same - this time the moat is hot water.

難攻不落
なんこうふらく

Hard to attack, will not fall

Defensible terrain, or a well-defended position. I misunderstood this one at first to mean something like "an uphill battle" as we would say in English, but that expression is from the point of view of the attacker- this one actually has a positive meaning.

Soup

2005-01-03T19:43:00.000+09:00

Taiwanese bean soup
Originally uploaded by moglet.

Bowl of spiky vegetables

2005-01-03T19:41:00.000+09:00

Bowl of spiky vegetables
Originally uploaded by moglet.

Spiky vegetable whole
Originally uploaded by moglet.

Spiky vegetable broken
Originally uploaded by moglet.

water chestnuts
Originally uploaded by moglet.

Mystery solved - the spiky vegetable is a water chestnut, which you can buy canned at any grocery store in the United States. Amazing.

Fruit

2005-01-03T19:37:00.001+09:00

Fruit
Originally uploaded by moglet.

This fruit tastes like a cross between an apple and a watermelon.

Taiwanese Kakikori

2005-01-03T19:37:00.000+09:00

Taiwanese Kakikori
Originally uploaded by moglet.

This is kakikori (shaved ice), but it has bits of candied fruit and mochi in it.

Frog egg stand

2005-01-03T19:35:00.000+09:00

Frog egg stand
Originally uploaded by moglet.

Not real frog eggs, but a gelatinous beverage (if beverage is the right word?) popular in Taiwan. I wasn't too crazy about it actually.

Tarokko Gorge

2005-01-03T19:32:00.000+09:00

Tarokko Gate

Fun with 四字熟語

2005-01-01T17:26:00.000+09:00

F. and I went to 初詣　in Kyoto last night. I was surprised to learn that you can do hatsumode (first shrine visit of the year) at night. Actually, so many people were doing it that we had to wait an hour and a half at the gates to Yasaka Jinja as they let people in one group at a time. It was worth it though. It started to snow around midnight. From Yasaka Jinja we walked to Kiyomizudera, and in the snow it really looked amazing. Like an enchanted fairyland, with snowy wooded mountains and a pagoda in the distance. Kyoto in the snow on New Year's is a magical sight.

Today I want to post some ways to make studying yojijukugo fun, because I've been studying them lately and I'm a feeling little frusterated with all the ones I don't know.

Ways to have fun with yojijukugo:

1) 創作四字熟語. This means making up your own original "yojijukugo". Here are a couple that F. and I made up during our 初詣 trip to Kyoto last night:

毎週違傘
まいしゅういさん

Every week, a different umbrella

This refers to a person who has a different umbrella every time you see them, because they are constantly losing them.

絶景不写
ぜっけいふしゃ
Beautiful scenery, no camera

I wanted to say 絶景無...camera, but damn it, there is no one kanji that means "camera". So we settled on 不写　to mean "can't take pictures".

The view at Kiyomizudera last night was definitely "絶景". I had a camera, but my batteries had run out.

2) Yojijukugo games:

There is one for Gameboy, but I don't have it & don't know how good it is.
Here is the best web game I've found so far for yojijukugo:

http://chibicon.net/slink/070606/

Once you download it, use the arrow keys on your keyboard to play it. (Press the up arrow first to select the normal course). It will show you four kanji in random order. Rearrange it to make a yojijukugo - for example, if the bottom kanji is the first one, press the down arrow; if the right one is next, press right. At the end it will show you your score and the right answers. You can play it many times and get lots of new ones each time. I still have so many to learn...

3) Kanji tattoos are popular in many Western countries. A lot of yojijukugo would make undesirable and downright embarrassing tattoos. Imagine if you will, and this is just a mental exercise, the absurdity of going through life with something like
有名無実　(undeserved fame) tattooed on your arm. Which prompts me to ask these questions:
a) If you *had* to get a yojijukugo tattoo, which one would you choose?
b) Which one would be most embarrassing to have as a tattoo?
If at least 3 people post their answers I'll post mine.

****

Update: Well, for some reason the view comments function on this post is broken; I sent an e-mail to blogger about it. In the meantime I'll keep my promise, since more than 3 people posted their best and worst yojijukugo tattoos.

I would get a small tattoo of 知者不言　ちしゃふげん　"Those who know don't tell" - because I think it would seem rather mysterious. For sheer aesthetic coolness, nothing can beat 魑魅魍魎　ちみもうりょう, but the meaning isn't that good for a tattoo unless you think of yourself as four different kinds of monster.

Most embarrassing: I thought of several. For example, 完全無欠　（かんぜんむけつ）　would be pretty embarrassing because it means perfect and without flaw, and you'd have to be pretty arrogant to claim that. The worst tattoo though in my opinion would be

酔生夢死
すいせいむし
drunk-life-dream-death

A wasted life, that you dream away in a perpetual state of drunkenness, and when you die you realize you haven't really lived.

My pocket yojijukugo jiten mistakenly prints this as:

酔生無死　
すいせいむし
drunk-life-without-death

You go through life drunk - and you never die! That would be something. But that must be a mistake, because two other dictionaries I looked in have the "dream-death" version.

Travel Journal, Taiwan

2004-12-29T19:50:00.000+09:00

Over 60,000 people died in the earthquake and tsunami this holiday season. I'm very sorry about this tragedy. My family seemed to think it was kind of a close call for me since I was in Thailand at this time last year. However, I went to Northern Thailand, which wasn't affected. And bad things can happen anywhere, even if you never leave home. Natural disasters are not a good argument against traveling.
With that out of the way, the rest of this post will be upbeat.
I don't have my pictures from Taiwan uploaded yet, but they're on the way. We had an exciting and wonderful time.

A Day-By-Day Account of Our Adventures

Dec 21 - We arrived in Taipei. The Lin family met us at the airport and we spent the night at their house. We had a lot of trouble communicating with them. They don't speak Mandarin at home but Taiwanese, and their Mandarin was difficult to understand. The grandmother couldn't write Chinese characters. When we ran into a communication hurdle, she asked her son or husband to write the characters for us.

Dec 22 - A young woman who is a friend of a friend of pretty-sunshine, and speaks Japanese, agreed to take us sightseeing in Taipei. We went to the National Palace Museum and the night market.

Dec 23 - Pretty-sunshine gave me a birthday present: a manga called ダーリンは外国人. It gently pokes fun at a certain kind of male foreigner in Japan. It's funny.
We took the train to Hualien, a city on the east coast that is near to Tarokko Gorge, and spent the night there. In the evening, we had dinner at a vegetarian buffet--I was selfish in wanting to go there instead of the wonton place, which I regret now, since wonton soup is a local specialty of Hualien--and went shopping for clothes.

Dec 24 - The owner of the guesthouse, an older Japanese man, took us and a Taiwanese couple on a sightseeing trip to the gorge. It was very beautiful, especially the waterfalls and pools with aquamarine or slate-colored water. We had lunch at an open-air restaurant at a Buddhist temple on the mountain. We were served by vegan Buddhist nuns. I was very impressed with them, partly because in Thailand and Japan I've only met Buddhist priests, and they act a little weird about talking to women. The nuns had short hair (but not completely shaved) and they were always smiling. They spoke some English, better than my Chinese. There were no animal products consumed on the temple grounds, and the temple gift shop sold bags of vegetarian beef jerky along with nutritional yeast supplement, which you can't get in Japan. I bought a bag of it from the smiling nun.

It was at least a 3-hour train ride back to Taipei. We had a couple of stressful episodes. First of all, we couldn't get seats together on the train. Our seats were on adjoining cars. At first, pretty-sunshine sat near me, but then someone came and kicked her out of the seat. I went to sit by her for awhile, but the same thing happened. Eventually she just sat by me on a step thing that isn't really a seat--because I'm in the first row of a car, there is some extra room. Across from us were four young soldiers in the Taiwanese army, three men and a woman. We talked to them, and learned about the draft in Taiwan: all young men have compulsory military service. Women don't have to join, but can volunteer if they want. One of the men had been studying English, so our conversation went mostly through him. There was something sad and weary about him, probably because he didn't want to be in the army. Neither Japan nor the U.S. has compulsory military service, so the whole thing seemed very foreign to us.
At the end of the voyage, I was preoccupied with thoughts of the people we just met, and I stupidly left one of my bags on the train. I realized it when we went to the bathroom at the station. I told pretty-sunshine, and with her quick thinking, we took immediate action. We asked one of the station attendants what to do, and he said to go to the information desk (fu wu tai). At the information desk, we had to explain in Chinese what happened, and the woman there, to my great relief, put in a call to the train. Unlikely enough, I was able to remember the number of the seat I was sitting in, and she was able to tell what train we were on by the fact that we'd just arrived from Hualien. My bag was located and saved for us at a station a few stops away. Then I made another mistake: I wanted to buy two tickets to the station where my bag was, but I accidentally bought round-trip tickets instead. Pretty-sunshine went through the ticket gate, but it beeped and stopped me. We were pressed for time because we were supposed to meet her friend I.L. later, so pretty-sunshine said to just give her both tickets and I could wait until she went back. She understood how to get to that station, and I didn't. She gave me I.L.'s phone number so that I could explain the situation to her.
I waited for her for about an hour. It was nerve-wracking. On the edges of my stress was the awareness that it was Christmas Eve; what an unlikely way to spend it. I couldn't get through to I.L. right away, and I was afraid of missing pretty-sunshine while I was using the public phone. Finally I reached her on the phone. I was worried that she would have a bad first impression of me, since she didn't know me and I'd inconvenienced everyone with my stupid mistake. However, I soon learned that it's not in her character to be mad about things like that. She speaks fluent Japanese, and she's an incredibly sweet person, so talking with her reassured me that things would be all right after all. She told me to meet her mother in front of the Mitsukoshi outside Taipei station. Mitsukoshi is a Japanese bank; I wondered how to ask for directions to it in Chinese. San-yue? It was a bit confusing. I would later learn that there are many Japanese department stores thriving in Taipei, such as Sogo and Takashimaya, and that the everyone recognizes their Japanese names.
I managed to catch pretty-sunshine again just as she was paging me from the Information desk. I was thrilled to see her. She had retrieved my bag with no problems, but she told me that they offered her tea and snacks there, wanting to chat with her about where she was from and so on, so that's why it took so long. I told her about waiting in front of Mitsukoshi, and we found it and met I.L.'s mother there.
Later that night, we went to a shabu-shabu restaurant with I.L. It was much better than Japanese shabu-shabu, which is kind of tasteless. Also, it had an extensive vegetarian menu. We were invited to stay at I.L.'s family's beautiful house. The family we'd been staying with before was middle-class, but I.L.'s family is very rich. Japan is a prosperous country, but it doesn't have many filthy-rich families. Taiwan does. I was impressed with the opulence of the house and the surroundings.
After our late dinner, I.L. took us out to a fashionable dance club called Mos, which she said comes from England. Japan has nothing on the scale of this place. One floor had laser lights and a DJ wearing a santa suit; the other floor had an MTV screen and live dancers. It was so packed it was difficult to dance.

Dec 25 For Christmas night, I.L. and her friends had rented a private room at another dance club called Plush. We spent most of the day shopping and beautifying ourselves. A new department store had opened in the neighborhood, and it was wall-to-wall packed with fashionably dressed shoppers.
I wound up buying a lot of clothes in Taiwan: three cute skirts, a Chinese Betty Boop sweatsuit, and three sweaters. I wouldn't necessarily say that Taiwan is the best place to shop for clothes. As in the rest of Asia, the sizes run small, and good things aren't ridiculously cheap like they might be in poorer countries. However, you can buy things that would be fashionable even in Japan for a slightly lower price, and they will usually lower the price further if you ask them nicely. Pretty-sunshine was impressed that even the most exclusive brand names have sales in Taiwan. That never happens in Japan. Japanese fashion tends to be a bit too modest, plain and subdued for me, too 地味、and it's often not flattering to my shape or coloring. The best thing for me to do would be to go shopping in my own country, but I don't have plans to go back until next summer. So I was happy that the Taiwanese fashion mentality isn't quite so afraid of showing off the body as in Japan. You can buy more brightly-colored, loosely flowing and sexy garments there.
Although popular culture is similar on the surface to Japan, with the same kind of pop idols, purikura and karaoke dominating the youth culture scene, people's behavior is different in at least two major ways. One is that Taiwanese people are more comfortable touching each other. Our friends often took us by the arm or the hand to guide us somewhere; it's not unusual to see same-sex friends holding hands. They pat the back of someone who is drunk to make them throw up; they hug more tightly in the purikura booth. I found all this friendly touching very nice and soothing after Japan, where people rarely touch each other. It makes a person feel good.
The second major difference is the sleep cycle. Japan is a 9-to-5 kind of a country. Everyone goes to work in the morning on packed subways and comes home in the evening on trains that are just as crowded. Banks and post offices have inconvenient hours, and stores close early. Taiwan, on the other hand, is a night-owl paradise. It's 2 a.m., want to go shopping or get something to eat? It's no problem in Taipei. Most places seem to be open till 3 a.m.- not just the night market, but regular stores, restaurants, and even onsens. Although there is only a 1-hour time difference between Taiwan and Japan, the night-owl life made me feel jet-lagged upon my return.
Our hosts were so enthusiastic about entertaining us they often took us out to eat several times in a row--we would go to one restaurant, then go directly to another restaurant, then go to a food stall for dessert or a snack. I don't recommend going there if you're on a diet.
To get back to my story, we went to Plush for the night. In Japan, a night out usually ends at midnight with the last train. In Taiwan, the night out got a late start and lasted almost all night. They rented a red velvet (plush!) room with couches and cushions where we could drink champagne and wine, have snacks and talk when we were tired from dancing. I've never seen rooms like this in Japan or the U.S., but they are popular in mainland China too. We met a lot more of I.L.'s friends there, as well as her brother and sister. They are cool people. A few of them just sat on the couch and went to sleep. I thought their behavior was odd and unsociable, but no one else seemed to mind. A while later, I started to get tired and one of the guys suggested I take a nap. I felt safe and comfortable there with all of I.L.'s friends around, talking in a language I mostly couldn't understand, so I dozed off for awhile. It was the first time I've ever taken a nap at a disco.
When I danced, the music was good and it was fun in its way, but it was so crowded I didn't have much freedom of movement. Looking around, I saw nothing but Taiwanese people, and I felt almost like I had the only non-Asian face in the world. It was an extension of the disjointedness I sometimes feel in Japan when I realize I'm not Asian and no matter how much time I spend in Asia I never will be.

Dec 26 In the daytime, we were invited to karaoke by two of I.L.'s male friends. The four of us went together, and were led at first to a huge room that could seat 20 people, with its own bathroom and an all-you-can-eat-and-drink buffet right outside the door. The entire karaoke place was as big as a large hotel. We decided something a bit smaller would be more appropriate, since there were only four of us! So we moved to a smaller room. It also had its own private restroom. To select the songs, you use a computer with a menu organized in several different ways. You can look up songs using the alphabet, Chinese characters, or bupumufu (the Taiwanese phonetic alphabet). Their selection of English-language songs was disappointing. I can't sing, and do not wish to sing, cheesy love songs in any language. Pretty sunshine had been practicing a Chinese song, which she sang to much applause. I made half-hearted attempts to sing a couple songs, including Sekai ni Hitotsu Dake no Hana, but singing is not one of my strengths so I mostly just listen when I go to karaoke, and watch the videos. The karaoke videos in Taiwan are real MTV videos the artists made themselves, with flashy effects, not the sentimental and completely irrelevant videos you see in Japan. It was explained that this is because Japan doesn't have their own version of MTV, but China (or Taiwan?) does. Some of the videos were labeled "Taiwan Only!" in large letters.
The music I liked best was by a Taiwanese rapper named Stanley Huang (黃立行) and his brother Jeff Huang, who is a member of the rap group Machi (麻吉). Later, I bought their CDs and some others fairly cheaply. Also, I didn't know this before, but most music DVDs don't have region codes; the music DVD I bought in Taiwan worked on my DVD player in Japan.
We stayed out late again. One of the guys took us for a scenic drive in his car. We could see a view of the night lights of Taipei, including the 101 building (the Yi-ling-yi building), which everyone was talking about because it recently opened. We even went to an onsen in the middle of the night. Good times.

Dec 27 Our last day; we did last-minute shopping. For days I had been trying to get to an Internet cafe to update my blog and spend a little down time away from the whirl of shopping and being entertained. I was (justly) accused of being an Internet addict. I did eventually get to go, but everyone went with me and I wound up feeling selfish for taking up everyone's time. I really just wanted to be dropped off there for awhile during the day while they did something else--I didn't mean to impose my will on everyone. But we found during our stay that if we mentioned we wanted to do something, our hosts would be bound and determined to take us there and not leave us alone for a minute. It was completely contrary to their idea of hospitality to leave us to do our own thing. I can see the practicality of this in a way, because Taipei is big and confusing and if we got lost, they have no way to call us. We could call them, but we don't know the area or the language well. As a cultural contrast, I think homestay families in Western countries often expect more independence from visitors, and instead of taking them sightseeing it's more common to expect them to find their way by themselves. This seems cold to Japanese exchange students. I think homestay families should be aware of this difference.
We ate a lot of amazing foods I'll talk about later. Then we took about a gazillion purikura. Pretty-sunshine remarked that it was the first time she'd seen someone bargain for a better price at purikura. There wasn't time to sleep, so we stayed up all night. We parted warmly as good friends with promises to write and visit. They treated us like we were family not (in my case) some stranger arriving on their doorstep, and I really admire that. They urged us to stay for New Year's. I'm sure New Years with them would have been a blast, but we had things to do back home. We went to the airport early to buy a few last-minute omiyage.

Dec 28 - The flight home. We were back in Japan before noon. Our airport chatter, which had been entirely in Japanese on the way there, was now Japanese sprinkled with some easy Chinese expressions we'd become used to using on our trip. I knew pretty-sunshine was tired and coming down with a cold, and I felt remorse for acting selfishly at times on our trip. I probably should have tried to be perfectly selfless and happy with whatever happened, without trying to go to an internet cafe when other people didn't want to, for instance. Still pretty-sunshine said she had a great time, and so did I. It was a good learning experience for me. I learned that I could enjoy a trip without having time on my own, being totally dependent on people to show me around. It's contrary to my usual way of being--I'm very independent and individualistic most of the time--but it's more in keeping with Asian ideas of hospitality, and therefore more of a natural way to experience an Asian culture first-hand. I'm happy and grateful for the time I spent with I.L., her family and friends.

Taiwan

2004-12-23T18:37:00.000+09:00

We arrived in Taipei after a mere 3-hour flight from Japan on the evening of the 21st. Misa had arranged for us to stay with the family of her Taiwanese friend. Although the friend herself was not around, the family has been taking very good care of us. They even came to pick us up at the airport. Since we'd never met them before, this was a bit tricky. Misa sent them our pictures, and we knew their names, so eventually we managed to connect at the airport. They took us to their spacious 2-story house in Taipei, where we get to stay in comfort as long as we're there.
The grandmother of the family tries the hardest to communicate with us. Unfortunately, the language gap is rather substantial. Although both Misa and I are studying Chinese, they speak Taiwanese at home, which is a completely different language. The father speaks understandable Mandarin and some English, but when the grandmother speaks Mandarin it's still nearly impossible for us to understand her because we're not used to her accent. Some words sound the same to me when she says them, especially basic verbs like "eat" "to be" and "go". In Mandarin, eat is "chi" (prounounced "chur"), "to be" is "shi" (pronounced like the English word "sure,") and to go is "qu," (pronounced like the English word "choo" as in "choo-choo" - without the tones, of course). But in Taiwanese, the way she spoke, all three words sounded like "sz" to me. "Sz, sz, sz," she says, and I don't know whether to eat, or go, or what.
Misa is better at understanding her than I am. The grandmother is always urgently trying to impart some information to us or ask us questions. Occasionally we triumph over the language barrier and understand each other, but its a hard-won victory. When she talks to me she often rubs my hands together with hers, saying my skin is pretty.
My vegetarianism was no problem from the beginning. Misa told them before we came that I was a vegetarian, and it was almost a non-issue. Each morning before we wake up, the grandmother goes to a food stall across the street and gets us two veggie burgers for breakfast. It is essentially a vegetarian hamburger, but with lots of sprouts and even bits of fruit (I think) in it. Very delicious. She is also always feeding us fruit. Fruit is abundant in Taiwan, and there are many varieties we've never seen or tasted before. Even though it's the middle of winter, we had fresh orange juice the grandmother squeezed herself, red fruits something like apples but with more water content and different-looking inside, kumquats, bananas, melon. There is always lots of fruit on the table and the grandmother is always urging us to eat more of it.
Also, when we go out I see a lot of signs for vegetarian restaurants--su shi in Chinese. We ate at a vegetarian buffet for dinner tonight and although I wouldn't say it was all that great--huge pieces of konbu and imitation fish were featured--it was filling.
Overall, I have a favorable impression of food in Taiwan. There are a lot of delicious things. The grandmother's sister made us some sweet bean soup that I rather liked. It was a pitch black liquid in big styrofoam cups when she gave it to us, and we had no clue what it was--it reminded me in appearance somewhat of motor oil. They said it was a kind of tea. It was hot, and so black you couldn't see the bottom of the cup. Then Misa told me to look at what was in the bottom, and sure enough when I used a spoon to scoop at the bottom, there were a lot of beans and mochi-looking things in it. They sprinkled peanuts on top and we ate it. The taste was sweet.
Then there was a kind of dark-brown vegetable with a lot of pointy ends. They had been talking about corn, for what reason we didn't know, but when we broke open the hard brown vegetable and scooped out the inside with a toothpick the way they taught us, sure enough it tasted like hot buttered corn! We were very surprised.
Taiwan is also the birthplace of bubble tea, my favorite kind of drink stand. There are plenty of coffeeshops too.
I'm having a satisfying time in Taiwan. We went to the National Palace Museum and the night market on the first day. Today we took the train to Hualien, which took about 3 hours. From here we can go to the scenic Tarokko Gorge, Taiwan's #1 tourist attraction, by bus tomorrow. We're staying the night in Hualien, at a guesthouse run by a Japanese man and his Taiwanese wife called Hi no de (Japanese for sunrise).
In other news, I turned 30 today. I haven't had much time to dwell on it though, which is good. I turned 10 in my own country, 20 in Japan, 30 in Taiwan. Where will I be when I turn 40? I hope it is somewhere good.

Yay!

2004-12-20T08:39:00.000+09:00

I passed the Chinese test I took in November (3級中国語検定試験）.
Of the two sections, listening and the written exam, I got 95% on the listening, and 73% on the writing, which doesn't surprise me at all since the written section seemed so much harder to me. A further breakdown of the written test is 6/20 on the "identifying the tones" section (wow, I still suck at that, even though that's one of the things I studied the most!) 18/20 on fill-in-the-blank grammar questions, 16/20 on the rearrange-the-words-to-make-a-grammatical-sentence section, 20/20 on the reading comprehension section, and 13/20 on the translate-Japanese-into-Chinese section. Out of 5557 people who took the same test as me, only 1951 people passed.
I leave for Taiwan tomorrow. Today will be really busy. I teach four classes, and after work I have to change some money, maybe get some travelers checks, GoLloyds some money for my student loan, and then go home and PACK. My friend U. has agreed to go to my apartment every other day to feed my hamster while I'm gone.
It was a good weekend, but busy. On Saturday, pretty sunshine colored my hair. The teachers have not remarked on it so far but I bet the students will notice. It's not *that* different from before, but more bright gold. On Sunday, we had a board game meeting/Christmas party in Higashi-Kakogawa. I was there until late. Pretty-sunshine and I also bought some omiyage for her friend's family in Taiwan--a box of 10 containers of Kobe pudding, and a Hokusai ukiyoe calendar.

And the kanji kentei saga continues...

2004-12-18T20:39:00.000+09:00

Maybe I should write about Luminarie or something else for a change. But I find I get more comments when I talk about Japanese study. So here we go.
First of all, I went ahead and registered for the 3kyuu kanji kentei on January 30. I did it at the Lawson's by my house, and it cost 2000 yen. When I asked the salesclerk to help me, he directed me to a little machine I've never noticed before (it looks like a cash machine) in one corner of the store, where you can choose various things to subject yourself to, the kanji kentei being but one of them. You have to enter your name, address, and the level you want to take, and in return you get a little receipt. You take this to the register and pay. The guy said that they would send me something in the mail later, which I'll have to fill out and send back.
I only have 6 weeks to study, which seems rather short for this difficult a test. So I plan to study every day. I bought two more of the ubiquitous yellow study books: the one of last year's test, and the one dadsweb recommended (Thank you dadsweb!) 漢検分野別問題集. This one looks really helpful, because it breaks down the test by sections and gives you strategies. That way you can target your weak points (basically everything for me at this point). The list of 四字熟語 at the back looks very helpful. I have a 四字熟語辞典 already, by the way, but still, there are probably hundreds of them in there, and I wouldn't know where to start. So the list of the ones that will probably appear on the test is really good.
Finally, there was one more thing I needed. A new dictionary. My regular kokugo dictionary--which I like for reading because it explains things very clearly and simply, for middle school students--is not enough for the kinds of things I find myself looking up now. Not only does it not have some of the kanji compounds listed in my kentei study books, it's also lacking in any sort of etymological explanation. I find myself wondering where certain kanji come from and why they are that way. If I only understood that, it would be so much easier to study them. So I bought a dictionary called Kangorin, a big kanji dictionary in Japanese with lots of etymological stuff. A hidden benefit of this is that it will help me remember the radicals and radical names, since I'll have to use them all the time.
Out of all the people I've shown my kanji kentei study books to so far, the only ones who think they look easy are the two JTEs I teach with. One of them has passed kanji kentei level 2 already. The other has never attempted any kanji kentei, but upon seeing my books decided she would also take the same level as me in January. Copycat. She wrote down the title of my book so she could get one too. Now she's Japanese, and she's about twenty years older than me, so isn't this just a little bit unfair? But after she said that, I decided I couldn't back out now, so that's when I decided to go ahead and register for the January test.

四字熟語

2004-12-17T10:27:00.000+09:00

Another mini quiz from the book 漢字学習ステップ:

Here are your choices. Change these into kanji and choose the appropriate one to complete each 4-character expression.

くうちゅう・じゅうおう・じゅうじん・せいしょう・ぜつご・てんか・
どうしょう・としょく・ふえき・りょうとく

１）　一挙（　　）
２）　空前　（　　）
３）　責任　（　　）
４）　無為　（　　）
５）　白砂　（　　）
６）（　　）無尽
７）（　　）楼閣
８）（　　）環視
９）（　　）異夢
１０）（　　）流行

Answers, and my English translation for each 4-character expression, are in the next post.

Further into the book 西の魔女が死んだ: The main character, Mai, is a young girl. Her mother is half-Japanese, and her grandmother is British (!) Her grandmother is the "West Witch" of the title. The book is very easy to read. Recommended if you like reading books about little girls and their grandmothers. When asked "Why did you decide to come to Japan, Grandma?" the Witch of the West says that her grandfather came to Japan during the Meiji period, and he returned praising Japanese people for their good manners and other positive qualites, so she always thought she wanted to go there when she grew up. She later became an English teacher in Japan, met a Japanese man who was also a teacher, and fell in love. Aw.
I realized just now that "Witch of the West," which I thought was a reference to the "Wicked Witch of the West" in "The Wizard of Oz", also must mean witch from a Western country.

四字熟語　Quiz Answers

2004-12-17T08:53:00.000+09:00

1) 両得　　"With one action, receive two benefits." 一挙両得
The meaning is similar to 一石二鳥, "Hit two birds with one stone." Pronounced いっきょりょうとく.

2) 絶後 "Never before and never again." 空前絶後
It means something that is extremely rare. 空前　means without precedent, and 絶後　means that it will never happen in the future either. Pronounced くうぜんぜつご.

3) 転嫁　"Blame it on your second wife." 責任転嫁
To shift the blame from yourself. 責任 is responsibility, 転嫁 is your second wife. Pronounced せきにんてんか.

4) 徒食　"Eating without working." 無為徒食
Living aimlessly, not doing anything. Get a job, you slacker! Pronounced むいとしょく.

5) 青松　"White sand, blue pines." 白砂青松
Beautiful beach scenery. You see this on travel brochures. Pronounced はくさせいしょう.

6) 縦横　"Down and across, without limit." 縦横無尽
You have complete freedom of motion, like in the new Dragon Quest game for PlayStation. Pronounced じゅうおうむじん.

7) 空中　"Castle in the sky." 空中楼閣
A pipe-dream. I think English also has the similar expression, "castle in the sand." Pronounced くうちゅうろうかく.

8) 衆人　"Being observed from all sides." 衆人環視
衆人 means many people. 環視　means being observed from the outside. Therefore, you are being observed by many people who surround you. As a teacher you may have this feeling a lot. Pronounced しゅうじんかんし.

9) 同床　"Same bed, different dreams." 同床異夢
Similar to the English expression "strange bedfellows." Describes people who are on the same side, but for different reasons. Pronounced どうしょういむ.

10) 不易　"The eternal and the changing" 不易流行
This phrase is associated with poet Matsuo Basho. It is too deep for me to fully understand. 不易　is "unchanging," and 流行 refers to those fads and fashions of the day that do change. But how do you use it in a sentence? Pronounced ふえきりゅうこう.

After all of that mental effort, how about a candy cane martini?

Two more completely unrelated books

2004-12-15T15:47:00.000+09:00

In the mood to read about other people's problems, I recently read Marya Hornbacher's memoir of bulemia and anorexia, Wasted. Let me assure you that I don't have an eating disorder myself--in fact, I think the whole idea of dieting is really stupid. I never talk about my weight or weigh myself, except maybe once a year at the gym. However, I find reading about problems like this to be interesting from a psychology/women's studies standpoint, and in the past I've enjoyed reading anorexia classics such as Starving For Attention, The Best Little Girl in the World, and Joan Brumberg's excellent history Fasting Girls : The History of Anorexia Nervosa. I learned that once people start starving themselves, starvation becomes a physical addiction. This was certainly the case with Marya Hornbacher. In times past, this phenomenon occurred when people fasted for religious reasons, and now the reasons for deciding to fast are more secular, but it's not truly a "brand-new" disease.
Anorexia and bulemia are just a couple of the horribly destructive things this woman did to her body from a young age. She was also picking up strangers at the mall to have sex and shoot heroin with at the age of 13, but clearly what she thinks is important to talk about is her eating disorders. There are some shocking episodes here too, for example one weekend when her parents were away and she did nothing but stuff herself with food and purge for three days straight. Later, she stopped eating almost completely, 100 calories or less a day, until you could see her teeth through the skin of her face and her doctors gave her a week to live. Even in a state of starvation, she did things like eating a box of laxatives every day or drinking a whole bottle of ipecac on an empty stomach (Why?! It hurt to read it). What impressed me was that she still remained so intellectual until the very end of her careening course to self-destruction. Because of the importance the brain-body connection, I was expecting her to lose her mental abilities far quicker than she did. After months of neither eating or sleeping more than tiny amounts, and looking like a skeleton, she could still "write a very good paper on Dostoyevsky". I have no respect for what she did to herself, but it made me realize that I tend to be perhaps a little paranoid about the slightest little discomfort of my body affecting my mental condition. If I inhale secondhand smoke in the elevator today, or get 6 hours of sleep instead of 8, or drink alcohol, or don't exercise, or don't eat 3 square meals a day, I'm afraid I won't remember my kanji as well the next day. I tend to take care of my body because I want to be an intellectual, and I want my brain to have every advantage to memory and concentration. Therefore, it was sickly fascinating to me that Marya continued her rather intellectual pursuits while still cruelly abusing her body. The anorexics I read about before weren't intellectuals. Marya was a poet, journalist and voracious reader and her writing style is fairly erudite, despite the fact that at the very worst part of her disease, she could no longer read words on a page. It's interesting how well she regained her mental abilities after her brush with death. Of course, she paid other prices for her recklessness - a shortened lifespan, a heart condition, and an appearance that looks much older than her chronological age.
Reading the comments on this book on amazon today, I saw a new one from a reader who bought it in order to get tips on how to starve herself. Yuck. Don't do it, people.
Marya had two things in common with me, in purely superficial ways: we were born in the same year, and we both took a trip to Japan in high school. The fact that she was my same age in each year made it interesting to read how differently she spent her life.
Incidentally, I've seen a bulemic in Japan. I mean, I didn't actually see her throw up. But what she was doing was pretty weird. My friends and I were at an all-you-can-eat buffet in Umeda, Osaka. The woman ahead of me in line (a Japanese woman about my same age, neither fat nor thin but just medium) was intent on piling as much food as possible on her plate. She made a mountain of food and pressed down on it to pack it together, all around the edges of the plate. She did the same thing with the other plate on her tray. She was alone. She ate the food expressionlessly, then went back for more. The other women in line were kind of staring and gesturing at her behind her back. I rejoined my friends and mentioned her, and my friend said, "Yes, I always see her here. She does that every day."
I know nothing about the prevalence of eating disorders in Japan, but I think she must go somewhere to throw up after her lunch--no other explanation makes sense.
I think it's a good idea to alternate reading English books with Japanese books. If I read too many Japanese books, my work performance suffers, and I can no longer express myself well in English, but if I read too many English books, as I've done lately, I can't express myself well in Japanese. So alternating my reading material seems like a good compromise. Anyway, I started one that looks promising because it is EASY TO READ:

西の魔女が死んだ　(The Witch of the West is Dead)　　by 梨木香歩　(Nashiki Kaho)

I'll tell you more when I finish it. I bought it because it came 1st in a "reader's favorites" poll by the publishing company 新潮文庫. こころ was number 5.

Kanji Kentei Study, Day 1

2004-12-15T14:15:00.000+09:00

Thought I'd share with you some of the obscure facts I picked up during my first day of seriously studying my Kanji Kentei Step book. Try this quiz to see if you can evade the traps I fell into. The answers will be posted in the comments section.

1) 五月 is commonly read ごがつ、but in the expression　五月晴れ, it has an irregular reading. What is it?

2) What is the irregular reading for 霧雨 ?

The next several questions require you to identify the radical of a given kanji. Hint: it's not what you think. (I only scored 1 out of 10 on this section!)

3) 恥

4) 勝

5) 黙

6) 載

7) 垂

8) 率

The following two questions require you to pick from five possible relationships between kanji in two-character compounds. Here are your choices:

ア Two kanji with the same meaning redundantly put together
イ Two kanji with opposite or contrasting meanings
ウ The first kanji modifies the second one
エ The second one is the object of the first one
オ The first one is the subject, the second one is the predicate

(I think knowing some Chinese helps me with this kind of problem. Still, I made some mistakes...)

9) The word 鎖国 was translated as "Country in Chains" by my Japanese history professor in college. Pronounced sakoku, it refers to the time when Japan was closed off from the outside world. What kind of relationship exists between the two kanji? Choose one （ア～オ）.

10) 授受　Pronouced juju, it means receive. What is the relationship?

11) 瞬間　Pronounced shunkan, it means moment. What is the relationship?

Write the kanji for the katakana in the following sentences.

12) ルイジの商品がたくさんある。

13) 人事イドウが発表された。

The following pairs sound the same and have similar meanings, but different kanji.

14) 問い合わせにカイトウする。　　／　試験問題のカイトウを掲示する。

15) 夕方には目的地にツく｡　　　　／　　学校の卒業して職にツく。

16) 荷物を小包でオクる。　　　　／　　恋人に婚約指輪をオクる。

The above questions are from the book

3級漢字学習ステップ

Tricky, huh? I've studied most or all of the kanji in this book before, but for the kanji kentei, just being able to read them is not enough.

Slightly creepy

2004-12-14T15:13:00.000+09:00

A (married) teacher at my school has told me that he is burning me a CD of his favorite '80s music and giving me some chocolate (he asked if milk or dark chocolate is better). Creepy or not?
Is it normal for ALTs to get such personal presents from teachers (he is not in the English department, and I don't work with him directly)? It's a bit weird. He's much older than me, not my type at all, but after the enkai-before-last he creeped me out a little by walking me to the subway station entrance and asking "Will you teach me English?"

"Where do you get the word 'Hankyu' out of that?"

2004-12-14T10:27:00.000+09:00

I asked a group of noisy boys in my class this question as they were giggling and saying the word "Hankyu," the name of a private railroad company, while doing my worksheet on winter holidays around the world.
"Hankyu," said one boy, pointing at "Hanukkah".
Women's Christmas, Twelfth Night, Boxing Day, Kwanzaa, and Winter Solstice were among the other holidays I put on my worksheet for them to identify.
I'm tired, paying the price today in tiredness for my enjoyment of "Howl's Moving Castle" and a late dinner last night. I went to see it in Akashi with Takashi, not noticing the rhyme until later. First, though, I had some time to browse in the Junkudo bookstore at Akashi station. I didn't know there was a Junkudo there! It's almost as big as the ones in Sannomiya. I've been thinking about taking one of the kanji kentei tests, so last night I bought my first book to study for it. I decided to take level 3. The kanji kentei differs from language tests I've taken before in that it's designed for native speakers of Japanese. Therefore, I expect it to be both trickier and more thorough than the tests designed for learners of Japanese as a second language. Here are the sections included in Level 3:

Providing the readings for kanji used in sentences
Identifying and naming the radical of a particular kanji
Constructing kanji compounds
Okurigana - accompanying hiragana to use with kanji
Selecting synonyms and antonyms
3-character compounds and 4-character compounds
Identifying kanji mistakes
Writing the kanji, when given the hiragana

If I succeed at this level, I plan to try the next two levels - 準２級　(pre-2nd level) and ２級 (second level). The bar for passing is fairly high, though - 70%. Is anyone interested in taking on this challenge with me? C'mon, it will be fun...
And did you know that if the whole family passes the kanji kentei (3-6 members), you get a special certificate from the Ministry of Education? It's true!
This test was created because Japanese people themselves are forgetting kanji. They can read them, they can choose them from menus on the mobile phone or word processing program, but the ability to write kanji is diminishing each year. Today's students know fewer kanji than their parents did at that age, who knew fewer than their parents, who knew fewer than their parents. It's a crisis. In promoting the kanji kentei test, the Ministry of Education tells us that "kanji get more interesting the more you study them," and the website has testimonials by students and adults who discovered a lifetime love affair with kanji while preparing for the test.
Is it true? Will I fall in love with kanji by studying for this test? I'll find out. I mean, I already like kanji. But I'm not a kanji fanatic or anything. Really, I'm not. They are more of a means to an end. I'm always looking for the magic bullet that will help me read Japanese novels more easily.
I'm trying to think of something to say about "Howl's Moving Castle" that hasn't already been said, trying to sweep the non-sequiters from my mind like cobwebs. Yes, it's wonderful, it satisfies your need for Miyazaki's cute weird excesses of fancy. There's an antiwar theme, but the overall tone is rather upbeat. I liked the characters a lot.

Quiz Online

2004-12-13T09:33:00.000+09:00

My first funtrivia quiz is online. If you have read T.C. Boyle's "Drop City," please follow this link to take the quiz. More people need to take it before it can be given a difficulty rating.
I met my Japanese tutor last night at Modernark Cafe. Both our umbrellas were stolen. We put them in the umbrella rack before we went inside, and when we came out they were gone.
She is correcting my writing, introducing me to some good poetry, and helping me read こころ. I decided to attempt to read こころ in Japanese because it's the only really famous Natsume Soseki novel I haven't read at least part of in English. The poems I like so far are Nakahara Chuuya's (中原中也, 1907-1937) "Circus" and Hagiwara Sakutarou's (萩原朔太郎, 1886-1942) "Bamboo".

A Story

2004-12-10T10:02:00.000+09:00

The Akashi edition of the Kobe Shinbun ran a short article that touches on the remarkable fact that Mr. M., a 47-year old teacher at my school, still keeps in touch with his 83-year old California host father from an exchange program 32 years ago. The host father, whose first name is Elmer, and lives in Akashi's American sister city which I don't know the spelling of but the katakana is バレホ, sent Mr. M. a check for $200 with a note saying he heard about the typhoon and he hoped it would be of some use. Mr. M. donated the money to a fund for the victims of typhoon #23, and the newspaper took a picture of him holding the letter. The story explained the strange path that the $200 had taken to Japan.
I think the moral of this is that you should keep in touch with your former host families, because maybe someday they will donate money for a random disaster that didn't affect you, and it will be really touching.

Should I recontract?

2004-12-09T09:56:00.000+09:00

It's getting closer to that time when I should decide for sure one way or the other. Staying in Japan but not on JET is an option that is attractive to me, since my job is good but unchallenging and somewhat unsuited to my particular strengths and weaknesses. Unless you consider wasting a lot of time on the Internet a "strength," which I don't. So if you have any strong opinions either way, now is the time to make your case.
In terms of Internet time-wasting, still an important job skill for me since this week is exams and I have no classes and nothing to do but be here, I've gotten bored with KoL after seeing all the areas. Lately I've become interested in creating quizzes for funtrivia.com, and when I saw there were no literature quizzes for T.C. Boyle, I thought I'd do one after reading each of his novels, starting with Drop City. As that site has gained in popularity, however, they've decided to be more strict with their quiz creating criteria, so now you have to take 100 quizzes on their site and be a member for a month before you can create quizzes. I finally passed that hurdle and wrote my quiz on Drop City. I submitted it to the editor, and now it's pending approval. If any of you have any requests for a Japan/Japanese language quiz theme you want me to create, please let me know. There are already many interesting quizzes on the site on the following topics (clicking on the link will take you to a page where you can select from a list of quizzes)
Japanese language
Chinese language
Japanese foods
Chinese food
Asian Cultures
Japan (general)

So why not give it a try? And if you notice a mistake in any of these quizzes (I noticed small mistakes a couple of times) you can send the author a message and they'll fix it for you.

Recent Reading

2004-12-01T15:02:00.000+09:00

This week, I read two books in English that were each, in very different ways, impossible to put down. The first was Iris Chang's nonfiction bestseller, The Rape of Nanking. The second was Drop City, my first exposure to American novelist T. Coraghessan Boyle.
The subject matter of The Rape of Nanking is shocking enough, and I think everyone should read it--but more shocking by far is the denial that the massacre ever happened, which persists in right-wing rhetoric to this day. Note, for instance, that The Rape of Nanking has NOT been published in Japanese translation, but a rebuttal of it has--titled ザ・レイプ・オブ・南京』の研究―中国における「情報戦」の手口と戦略, (Researching "The Rape of Nanking" --Strategies in the Information War of China.) When I saw that on Amazon.co.jp, and all the reader comments denouncing The Rape of Nanking as Japan-bashing Chinese propaganda, my blood turned to ice. Maybe there is an error or two in the book, but the massacre happened--no doubt about that--and it was more horrible, cruel and and unnecessary than the one or two lines Japanese Ministry of Education textbooks give the topic now that they have been pressured into mentioning it at all.
It is illegal in Germany to say that there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz, but it's not illegal in Japan to make similar claims regarding the Nanking Massacre. According to Chang, "even the Nazis were shocked" by the cruelty of the massacre, and one Nazi in Nanking, John Rabe, emerges as an unlikely hero in her tale, one of a handful of foreigners who stayed in Nanjing saving the lives of thousands of Chinese in the International Safety Zone. But you can see people denying the existence of the massacre just by going on Amazon Japan, which I never previously considered to be a bastion of right-wing nutcases.
Even manga are affected by the politics of history. See this article in the Japan Times about the manga "Kuni ga Moeru," which was cancelled for portraying the Nanking Massacre "as if it really happened." To me it doesn't matter so much exactly how many people died--a number hotly contested by Japanese sources--but rather, the cruel manner in which they died. I don't blame present-day Japanese people for the atrocity--it's not their fault, any more than I'm personally responsible for killing Native Americans and taking their land--but I would have serious misgivings about anyone who rushed to defend the actions of the soliders.
I went to the Japanese Wikipedia, and found that the "Nanking Massacre" page is being "protected" from further editing due to a re-editing battle. The English-language Wikipedia shows no signs of such a battle. This is an indication of the information gap that still exists between English and Japanese.
A sad postcript on this already horrible story is that the author Iris Chang committed suicide this month. This story just gets worse and worse the more you learn about it, but I do know that not all Japanese are denying the massacre; many of them go so far as to personally apologize when they go abroad to other parts of Asia. The problem is simply that this issue has become politically charged and the record hasn't been set straight yet. Every time Koizumi goes to Yasukuni Shrine, where the war criminals are enshrined, there is a new outcry from the victims' families.

OK, that was interesting but bad, so now on to my next book, which I finished reading this morning although I never wanted it to end. Drop City is the sweeping epic of a California hippie commune, circa 1970, that, for reasons that will only make sense if you read it, relocates to the remote interior of Alaska. My expectations were low when I picked this book out from a bin for 300 yen in a used bookstore. I expected choppy writing, sensationalism, infighting, violence, but what I got instead was a delicious treat of good writing that made me feel calm and comfortably blissed out every time I picked it up. I still don't know why the book made me feel that good. I don't have much in common with any of the 5 main characters. None of them are remarkable or heroic people. If you knew them in real life, you wouldn't notice anything special about them. You probably wouldn't even like them. But somehow, even when they're being bad, the characters' perceptions are familiar, comfortable, irresistably human, portrayed in a sympathetically golden, mellow light. I couldn't get enough of it.
My one complaint was that the book wound up endorsing monogamy over free love. The prosaic, conventional values won out, in some ways, against the crazy tapestry of the collective community. However, this reflects history. I loved the collision of cultures between the hippies and the trappers in Alaska, more subtle and human than you would think, each population influencing the other.

Learning Some

2004-12-01T10:59:00.000+09:00

Last Saturday, I went to Rokko Island High School to learn some (or somemono), a traditional technique for dyeing pictures on silk. Think of stained glass on cloth, and you know the general look of it, art that is all bright colors and nothing else. The medium seems to lend itself especially well to the portrayal of cuteness, flowers and hearts, unicorns and rainbows, the whole cute pantheon from my 4th-grade sticker collection reproduced here as a modern handicraft. Seeing the students' art projects displayed on the second floor of the high school inspired me when I visited the school for a speech contest recently. Nice people that they are, they invited me back, which is how I wound up there at 9 a.m. last Saturday with a sketchbook in my hand for the first time in years.
Since I hadn't brought a sketch with me, I spent my first hour and a half just trying to draw plausible chrysathemeum petals. The teacher, who is in charge of the fashion design department at the high school, had me choose a picture to copy from an illustrated encyclopedia. Although I eventually want to try to dye animals and insects, perhaps a blue butterfly to photograph and put on my blog and a turtle emblem to use as an avatar for the KoL forum, these are long-range plans. I thought starting with a flower would be easier. After all, I haven't tried to draw anything difficult for years, but anyone can draw a cute flower.
I chose a hanawagiku from the encyclopedia, an unusually colored chrysanthemum with a ring of yellow and a ring of red tipped by white. White is the one color you can't use, since the cloth is white to start with and it will look stupid without any dye. Later I wound up using purple for white, thereby creating a monstrous flower unknown to man or beast. Anyway, my first sketch was dismally bad, and the teacher, though very encouraging and without a hint of blame, showed me how to fix it by making the petal outlines more complete and sharply defined. The design needs to be traced, after all, so a plain, clear outline is best.
Me: "I'm done!"
High School Art Teacher: "OK! Now, how many more do you want to do?"
Me: "???"
High School Art Teacher: "How about 3 or 4? Because one flower will be lonely!"
He took me to the hallway where a framed student somemono of lotus blossoms was displayed. "See, these are all the same flower, only she changed each one to make it slightly different. Some bigger, some smaller. See this?"
Me: "OK...I'll do 3 more."
I was slightly more successful with my second, third, and fourth flower, outlining all the petals completely the way he told me too. A word of advice: small chrysanthemums are easier to draw than huge chrysanthemums. Next, we cut them out and he asked me to put them together in the way that I wanted. I made a rather symmetrical display, to which he said "That's boring" and tilted it off-center a bit. Then we taped them together and carried them to the other room.
In the next room were many students working on pottery and dyeing projects. One girl came in wearing a shirt she had made herself. It was cute, with kind of a necktie in the same fabric as the cloth and red flowers dyed all over it. There was a really good atmosphere in there. The teacher asked one of his students, I'll call her Ms. I., a third year fashion student who was nonetheless in the unoriginal attire of a school uniform, to teach me the basics. She put my flower drawings on the table and sprayed them with glue from a can. Then, she unrolled some white cloth over them, carefully smoothing out the wrinkles with both hands. I asked about the cloth. She told me that some should ideally be done with silk, but because silk is expensive the school uses this synthetic fabric instead, and it takes the dye just fine.
With the cloth sticking to the paper, the outline of the flowers faintly visible, the next step was tracing the outline with nori--the glue, not the seaweed!--from a squeeze bottle. This was the hardest part for me--it was so hard to squeeze from the small bottle, it made my hand ache in no time. Slowly, petal by petal, taking turns when my hand got too tired, we outlined the first flower in glue.
"Shall we just dye this one first, to see how it looks?" suggested Ms. I.
"Sure," I said. (By then it was almost noon and I was only supposed to be there until 1:00. I was frightened by a brief daymere of having to stay there without food and drink until it was completed, squeezing glue around the clock until Monday.)
Ms. I. taught me how to use the dyes and the usumezai, which will lighten the color. (It's dye-thinner, I guess.) She is quite good at delicately tinting each part of an outline in a second color. This is the most fun part of the process for me, watching the color spread quickly over the cloth, and if you dab the dye on just right, you can create stunning effects in seconds.
With her help, and making my share of mistakes, I managed to complete the first flower. We were happy. The teacher came in and admired our work. Some of the dye escaped the lines of glue that had sought to confine it, dabs of wine color from the center leaking out into the petals, but the overall effect, even with that, wasn't half bad, and the first thing I wanted to do was take a picture with my mobile phone. Next, we agreed on a time I could go back to finish the job. It was too much work for one day. They let me leave the whole thing there to finish some other time. Going home on the Rokko Liner, I had a delicious afterglow from the experience. Ideas for future some projects, ambitious and improbable, flooded my mind. Best of all was the kindness the teacher and students at Rokko Island High School showed me. It's not even my school, and they were wonderful to me.

First Glance at the New Dragon Quest VIII

2004-12-01T10:48:00.000+09:00

It's beautiful.
I don't know when I'll have time to play it, but I impulsively bought the RPG titan of the year last night at Toys R Us. The 3D graphics are gorgeous. I was a little surprised not to hear voice acting, but all the better for our Japanese reading practice, hm? I can't wait to play more.

Taking the 3-kyuu Chinese Test in Japan

2004-11-29T09:29:00.000+09:00

The thing that struck me most is that they don't go around checking everyone's picture ID before starting the test. There were no warnings to tell us "you must not, under any circumstances, take the test for anybody else" like we heard while taking the JLPT. Do they do that at all the JLPT tests, or just 1-kyuu? Maybe it doesn't matter as much for a 3-kyuu Chinese test, because it's not a life-or-death sort of test anyway, and there is little motivation to pay someone to take it for you. Whatever the reason, I felt weird about there being so few precautions against fraud. I wondered how many people in the room were who they were pretending to be.
By the time the test started there were no empty seats in my room. The classroom was full of nervous adults looking cramped in their tiny desks. There were no children, as there sometimes are in the JLPT tests, and no ethnic diversity, except me of course.
The test itself was...easy. Easier than the practice tests. Not just the listening, but the whole thing. Most people finished early, and left early; I finished early, but stayed almost until the end checking a few answers and making sure all the bubbles were completely filled in. You can take your test booklet home with you, which is cool, and the results are sent out within a month.
No one made small talk with me in the halls or the classroom before or after the test. It wasn't that the test-takers were unfriendly, it was just that it wasn't that kind of scene. Not a social event like the JLPT, an excuse as if any were needed for ALTs to get together and gossip. The attitude was just "this is a test, let's get it over with and go home." And where's the fun in that?

Studying Chinese

2004-11-24T09:04:00.000+09:00

I am using these books to study for my level 3 Chinese proficiency test on Sunday:

Intermediate Spoken Chinese by Liu Delian, Peking University Press
中検３級問題集2004年版　(book of test questions from actual tests, with grammar notes and definitions in Japanese. Includes a CD and a glossary in the back)
中国語検定3級 - 予想問題と解説 (basically the same thing except the test questions are made up, and there is no glossary)

The CDs that come with the two books are ridiculously easy, which makes me think that I should have no trouble with the listening section of the test. The written sections are trickier, but I'm getting there.
I bought Intermediate Spoken Chinese in Beijing. It's for foreign students studying in China, and it's a little difficult for me, but I basically like it. The dialogues and pictures are interesting, and I like the fact that it's all in Chinese except for the definitions of vocabulary words, which are in English. On page 136 is my new favorite Chinese word definition:

si (first tone) a threadlike thing

Wow, that's so...precise. Does that mean I can use that word for any threadlike thing I encounter? Why bother to define a word if you're not going to tell me what it really is?
I also like the expression on page 10, yikou chicheng pangzi, "becoming fat in one bite," which means that you can't achieve good results all at once. I like it because of the assumption that becoming fat right away is a good thing. No...wait...you can't get fat right away! Be patient!

Kanji Misuse Link

2004-11-20T22:10:00.000+09:00

You must see this
Misuse of Chinese Characters in Western Culture

Some Japanese examples

We think funny English is bad, but no one tattoos funny English on their bodies.
Thank God.

Demented Japanese Acrostic Word Game

2004-11-16T10:25:00.000+09:00

OK, the really demented thing would be to do this in Chinese, but let's start in Japanese and see how it goes. Those of you who know Japanese, please post. You have to make an acrostic/anagram of the given word. Like this:

げつよう　Monday

げんきな
つるが
ようやく
うごきはじめた．

"The healthy crane started to move at last."

--and then post a new word for the next person to anagram. (Don't use ん）

It should form a single idea that makes sense - not complete nonsense, but it doesn't necessarily have to be a complete sentence. Part of a sentence is OK. Katakana words and names are OK. Bonus points if it provides a definition of the word.

First word: きょういく　Education (treat よ　as its own syllable).

Student Speeches Summary, Part 1

2004-11-11T13:09:00.000+09:00

Every year, we tell our first-year high school students to make a 2-minute speech in English for their second-term grade. They can choose any topic, but they must memorize it and bring a visual aid to show the class. This morning, my task was to listen to and evaluate 3 hours of student speeches.
It's pretty interesting to see what they come up with to talk about, so I'll summarize their speeches here. The most impressive one today was the girl who talked about Beethoven's face. She brought in two pictures of him looking stern and angry, (the Japanese expression is "he has a hard face"), and she discussed 3 theories about why he always wore that sour expression. One was because he loved coffee. The bitter coffee he drank every morning made him look that way. (I guess that explains my sour expression, too.) The other two theories had to do with his loss of hearing and his personality type. She said he probably made that face because he wanted to be left alone.
First hour speech topics: a windchime shaped like My Neighbor Totoro, a key ring, a karate trophy won in elementary school, Shokupan-man (Anpanman's friend and "children's hero", a bike key ("I lost my bike key. So please help me look for it"), my dog, my club, money, the book 今会いに行きます, my pencil case ("This pencil case is my treasure." If I had a hundred yen for every time I heard this or a similar sentence, how many pencil cases I could buy!) Beethoven's face, Giant Baba, Okinawa, my club, Okinawa, tennis, the parts of a baseball uniform, soft tennis, NBA player Yuta Kabuse, and a music group called B'z.
Second hour speech topics: The photographer Hoshino Michio, piano, my birthday, volleyball, mountain climbing trip, MD player, swimming club, my peach monkey, a funny story about something that happened in Mr. Donut ("All of the doughnuts were on sale for 100 yen each. My friend ordered an apple pie. When we got the receipt, it said 149 yen. My friend shouted 'Why!' They told us that apple pie isn't a doughnut.") the electone (an electronic keyboard made by Yamaha. I didn't think this was an English word, and I confirmed this by checking Wikipedia), finding love and playing tennis (This speech was hilarious. The boy began, "Where is love?" He asked this question a couple times, and people started to snicker. Then he said, "I tried to find love. But I couldn't find love. I want to find love. Please help me find love." By now everyone was laughing. He paused and then said, "I like tennis." The rest of the speech was about tennis) yesterday's dinner (the girl had drawn a picture in her sketchbook of what she had for dinner last night), mountain-climbing, dance (this girl brought a video of a dance contest, but her team didn't win so they weren't recorded on the tape. Why did she bring the tape, then?), animals of the world, my pencil case (The speech began: "This is pencil case. This is very important for me. Let's explanation this.") Brass band (I was rather shocked to see the word "faggot" in this girl's speech. It turns out the fagott (misspelled in her written draft as "faggot") is the Japanese word for bassoon, a wind instrument--it comes from French, not English. She held up a picture that said in big letters, Yamaha Fagott) and the book White Fang by Jack London. (The girl who read this book is actually fluent in English, since she went to junior high school in Florida, not Japan. I feel sorry for her, since the class is way too easy for her. I also feel kind of embarrassed in her class, speaking my usual teacher-speak easy English, and then meeting her eyes and realizing how dumb I must sound).
Third hour speech topics: The painter Mark Chagall (this was one of the best speeches; the girl brought several color copies of his paintings, explaining the artist's use of color and symbolism), the American TV show "24", which is really popular in Japan now; blowing bubbles with a plastic toy ("I like blowing bubbles. I blew bubbles with my friend last summer. It was very exciting.") a CD of junior high school graduation, table tennis club, badminton, tennis, Reggie Miller, climbing a mountain, a bracelet (The speech began, "I introduce you to my bracelet." No humor was intended), my hamster (this kid brought a framed picture of his hamster. After his speech was done, another kid who hadn't prepared at all asked him for it, and when his turn came he tried to make a speech using the same picture-some completely impromtu story about an imaginary dead hamster named "Sabu" . The class laughed a lot, but he couldn't think of enough to say about "Sabu" to spin it out for two minutes, so we told him to prepare something for real and try it again next time), my hair pin, my pencil case, the South Alps (I thought this was in Europe at first, but it turned out he meant the "south Alps" in Japan, moving from Wakayama at age 6 ("My teacher told me 'You can do in new place.' I was happy when I heard her words." -- You can do what in a new place?!)
Nonsensical as some of the speeches were, I understood them a bit better this year, because I told the students to give me their written draft while they spoke so I could read it. I used it to prompt a couple students when they completely forgot the next line, too, so we didn't have quite so many awkward stage-fright silences as we did last year.
More student speech fun to follow.

Forum games

2004-11-10T08:57:00.000+09:00

Orange actually has a rhyme. It's porridge.
That's something I learned while playing one of many silly
forum posting games on KoL. The games that are loosely based on the idea of "cleverly insult the person before you, and/or the next person" remind me of a game I used to play with my brother when we were kids. We would each say a word until we had a complete sentence, and the object of the game was to make the total meaning of the sentence insult the other person. Being older, I usually won. I can't believe how mean I can be sometimes. Does anyone else have fond memories of playing games like that with siblings? Anyway, it's not exactly mature, but it's fun to see that verbal battle games are alive and well.
If you click on the link above, you'll see that "Last letter frenzy" is what they are calling English shiritori.

The Bike and the Mechanical Cat

2004-11-09T16:18:00.000+09:00

My vice-principal gave me the bike. It's purple! And it has a basket! Lots of fun. I rode it to the station this morning, the first stage in an exciting triathalonlike commute that includes being crushed in a packed subway car and trekking uphill with my usual supply of books and dictionaries on my back. Unfortunately, it was too late in the month to buy the monthly pass, so I had to buy these little paper single-use parking permits. Each time you use one, you have to take it to the ticket office (on the other side of the station from where I parked) and they give you another paper to affix to your bike. Riding a bike to the station instead of walking, I wound up losing more time than I saved.
Weird fact about book publishing: According to The Official Torey Hayden Web Site,Torey Hayden wrote a novel, The Mechanical Cat, that was rejected by American publishers but became a bestseller in Japanese translation. The Japanese readers are requesting an English edition, but this is difficult since it was never published in its original language.

Quote from the website:

THE MECHANICAL CAT has not been accepted for publication in English. In rejecting the novel, her publisher told her this was because the book did not fit into an existing genre. It was actually described as "too novel". As a consequence, the book had its world debut in Sweden, followed a week later by the Italian publication and in Finland. Now published in Japanese, it has gone on to become a best seller in all four countries.

I don't know what to make of this, other than to say 1) Torey Hayden is wildly popular in Japan, 2) Japanese publishers seem to have more tolerance for experimental, open-ended, vaguer, weirder sorts of novels, especially if they are written by a well-known author.
In the "Interviews" section of the website, Torey was asked if she can speak any languages other than English. Probably in acknowledgement of where most of her fans are,Torey answered that she is learning Italian and Japanese.

The Unhalloween

2004-11-01T08:39:00.000+09:00

Yesterday I went to an alternative bookstore, Village Vanguard, with Takashi. While we were in there, I got a call on my mobile from my vice-principal. I was stressed out at first, thinking that my slacking at school had resulted in some terrible error. What else would be urgent enough to merit a call on a weekend? However, he was just calling to offer me his daughter's old bicycle, which she no longer needs since she got her driver's license.
Since I wasn't at home he couldn't deliver the bike to me yesterday, but we agreed to meet at the station next Saturday, and he'll give it to me then. I'm happy.
I didn't buy anything at the bookstore, although I saw some interesting things. I have so much to read right now it's not even funny. I'm almost done with Seirei no Moribito. It's good, but I find the idea of a 11-year old boy carrying an egg from another world inside his body to be a little unsettling. He's a boy, but some of the description makes it sound like he's pregnant. That's just weird.
The Village Vanguard has a lot of art and photography books (including one with photos of love hotels from all over Japan), books about drugs and fetishes, large sections on certain authors such as Edogawa Ranpo and Yukio Mishima, and some American products like Spam and root beer.

Warm and fuzzy meme

2004-10-30T14:34:00.000+09:00

At the risk of looking like I'm fishing for compliments, I'll try this little game...from a friend's livejournal...

1. Tell me one thing you love about me.

2. Tell me two things you love about yourself.

3. Look through the comments. When you see someone you know, tell them three things you love about them.

4. Do this in your journal so I can tell you what I love about YOU.

Taiwan

2004-10-29T09:34:00.000+09:00

My news this week is that I've made my plans for Christmas travel. I'm going to Taiwan with Misa for a week (provided my school approves the nenkyuu, as they should). She found a good deal - round trip to Taiwan for under $300 - it was just over 30,000 yen including the airport tax at both airports. Isn't that good? This will be my cheapest overseas vacation so far. I have a Lonely Planet Taiwan, a couple years old, from a used bookstore, and Misa has a guidebook from this year in Japanese. We're in the process of deciding what to do in Taiwan. I plan to be there through the emotionally tricky season of Christmas and my birthday, and come back before New Years.
I've been interested in visiting Taiwan since high school - when I met my first friend from there. I've heard their popular culture has been heavily influenced by Japan. Should be interesting. It will be a little warmer than Japan in the winter, but still cool. I'm really looking forward to it.
It gets crazy expensive to fly out of Japan after the 22nd of December, so we have to leave on the 21st. Since my last E3 class is on the morning of the 21st, that means leaving in the afternoon (taking half a day off) to go to the airport.

Trivia no Izumi goes to North America

2004-10-27T08:56:00.000+09:00

Fuji Television has announced that they will create a North American version of Trivia no Izumi to air next spring in the U.S. and Canada. Instead of releasing the same show with English subtitles, as they have done in the past with other programs, Fuji decided to remake the show for an American audience, including the utilization of American actors and the collection of trivia that is more appropriate for an English-speaking audience.
The dynamics of the show will remain the same. The symbol of the show, the "heh" button, will stay the same, but in English it will be called "HEY".

source: 日本経済新聞

Random Quote from Kingdom of Loathing

2004-10-22T15:43:00.000+09:00

Around the bend, you find a curious thing: A door completely covered with salad...

読書の秋

2004-10-22T09:54:00.000+09:00

In Japan, autumn is considered the best season for reading. As we say "summer reading" in my country, they say "dokusho no aki" here. I don't know why it's any better for reading than any other season, but I'll go with it. I have a lot of time to read this week because it's exam week, and I have no exams to grade.
Last night I found the legendary Sannomiya Public Library for the first time - usually I go to the Chuo library in Okurayama. Having heard that the Sannomiya library has a better selection of English books - and all in one place - I was happy to find it. All I wound up getting there was Great First Lines, edited by Celina Spiegel; a book of famous quotations, and a Torey Hayden book I hadn't read yet, Ghost Girl.
From the book of great first lines (the memorable first sentences of famous novels, with the answers in the back so you can test your powers of literary trivia) - my favorites:

"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show."

-Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

"Incredible the first animal that dreamed of another animal."

-Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra

"In eighteenth-century France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages."

-Patrick Suskind, Perfume

"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."

- L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

"I stand at the window of this great house in the south of France as night falls, the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life."

-James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room

"I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as "Claudius the Idiot", or "That Claudius", or "Claudius the Stammerer", or "Clau-Clau-Claudius" or at best as "Poor Uncle Claudius", am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the "golden predicament" from which I have never since become disentangled."

-Robert Graves, I, Claudius

I found several books I wanted to read after reading their first lines. I tried searching for them on the library homepage first, but having no luck, I ordered three books from amazon.co.jp, two of which because I liked their first lines. I ordered I, Claudius and Giovanni's Room, and yet another Torey Hayden book, Beautiful Child.
The "Perfume" book looked interesting too, but I think I'll wait and read it later. I could get it slightly cheaper (or at the library?) if I read it in Japanese. Since it's a translation anyway, not originally in English, I might attempt it. I learned a long time ago that I don't enjoy much reading Japanese translations of English books, but if it's a translation from German, Japanese should be just as good as English.
Now for my reading in Japanese. I'm trying to get through a chapter a day of Seirei no Moribito, but it's more difficult to read than I expected. I do like it though. Here is a summary of the chapters I've read so far:

Prologue: The heroine, Balsa, a 30-year old female bodyguard, is walking along a bridge minding her own business when she sees a child falling from a royal procession, which is going by on another bridge. The procession is the household of the second wife of the emperor, and the child is thrown off when the ox pulling their carts begin rioting. She acts quickly and saves the child.

Sample obscure word appearing in this chapter: いしづき　On an umbrella, spear, staff, or mushroom, this is the small pointy bit that touches the ground.

Chapter 1: Expecting a mere monetary award, Balsa is startled to find herself treated to an elegant feast to thank her for saving the child's life. The child is the 10-year old second son of the emperor. In this culture, it is not seemly for a commoner like Balsa to look in the face of royalty, so her hostess, the prince's mother, does not appear. However, during the meal, her chief retainer entreats Balsa to stay the night in the palace. Thinking it strange, Balsa complies. There is a detailed description of the marvelous onsen bath she takes in the palace (a bit of Japanese culture creeping into this story about a supposedly imaginary kingdom...)
In the middle of the night, Balsa is awakened by none other than...the empress and the prince! The empress tells Balsa the strange story of a mysterious power that has possessed the boy, urging Balsa to take him under her protection. It seems that the boy's life is in danger, and his own father is trying to kill him! If news leaked out to the people that a spirit (suspected to be a legendary water spirit from the foundation myths of this country) had taken up residence in the boy, the people would lose faith in the royal family and revolt. The empress loves her son, however, and touchingly remarks that she would far rather he be safe, even if she should never see him again, than to have to look upon his dead face. She reveals that the fall from the bridge was no accident. Another attempt was made on his life not long ago, an accident in the bath, but he survived. The reason the boy is thought to be possessed is that he behaves strangely in his sleep. When he is possessed, he glows with a strange light, and the noise from the outside world stops. She has consulted two experts on magical phenomena about him, but she cannot openly allow an exorcism to be performed or word would leak out to the commoners that the royal family had not vanquished the water spirit hundreds of years ago.
Balsa reluctantly takes charge of the boy, although she thinks protecting him is likely to cost her her life.
One thing that amuses me about this book is that it contains the place names 二ノ宮　and 三ノ宮. It's funny to me that a fantasy book would have the place name Sannomiya in it, the name of a place I go to all the time in real life. I know the real meaning though is something like "second palace" and "third palace," so I shouldn't make too much of the coincidence.
Upon undertaking the mission, Balsa suggests that the second empress set fire to the second palace, making it seem as though her son set the fire in his sleep and perished in the blaze.

Uncommon words found in this chapter:
つかのま　soon
生業　（なりわい）an old word for 職業
跡目　(あとめ）　succession
歯を食いしばる gritting your teeth - both the empress and the small boy are always doing this.
夏至　（げし）　summer solstice

Since this book has furigana over all the kanji, I have gotten some knowing remarks from people assuming that I am reading it for that reason, but much of the vocabulary is so obscure and so far removed from my everyday life that the furigana does not really help me understand it. I still need to look up a ton of words every chapter.

Chapter 2

This chapter starts with a new character, Shuga, an astrologer, as he watches the smoke from the second palace burning. Having watched the stars all night, he is suspicious about the fire and resolves to go consult his superior, the highest ranking astrologer in the land. There is then a digression about the history of the kingdom (Shin Yogo Kokoku), set forth in order to inform the reader "why astrologers are so important to this kingdom." Actually, the history lesson is not as boring as I feared it would be. The author's university major was cultural anthropology, specializing in the Australian Aborigines. She used some of her knowledge in this area, I think, to enrich the history of her fictional kingdom. Shin Yogo Kokoku also has aborigines, the "Yakuu" people, and from their legends comes the idea of a water spirit that takes the spirit of a child once every hundred years. The founders of the current regime supposedly vanquished this spirit two hundred years ago, but we are left to believe that the creature was never really destroyed.
Shuga pays a visit to the grand high astrologer, who favors his observations with a promotion to the status of favored disciple, over his rival who is older than him. You can imagine the levels of keigo here, as well as in the conversation in the previous chapter between the empress and the commoner Balsa. After Shuga takes the irreversible step towards becoming a grand high astrologer himself, it is revealed to him that there is a "dark face" to the emperor's work that he never before suspected. Basically, the emperor and grand high astrologer have assassins at their command, whom they call "Hunters" (狩人　- かりゅうど）, and they use them to carry out a lot of dirty business. Both Shuga and his master think that the young emperor did not perish in the flames, and they guess at the strategy plotted by his mother, to send him to safety in the company of the bodyguard who saved his life. They even know Balsa's name and reputation. The Hunters are deployed to find her and kill her, and capture the prince. 　

Chapter 3

Balsa escapes with the prince, whose name is Chagumu. She tells him that as a prince of the blood, he died in that fire; in his new life he must behave as an ordinary boy. He "grits his teeth" and accepts this fact. She tells him that if things go well, he might someday see his mother again.
After walking most of the night, they arrive at a town where Balsa seeks shelter from a boy and a girl living in a handmade shelter under a bridge. Balsa saved the children in the past from violent ruffians, so they are eager to help her. She gives them some money in exchange for sheltering her and Chagumu for the day and doing some shopping for them. The boy, Tohya, is happy to do this. It's his normal job anyway, since he earns his living as an errand boy. Since it is not uncommon for him to do other people's shopping as part of his job, it will not rouse suspicion. Balsa knows it is likely that she is being followed. Balsa tells the children a little of her task, without telling them the whole story, or the identity of the boy. She and Chagumu fall asleep. Chagumu is possessed by the spirit while he sleeps, a frightening episode for Balsa. Tohya and the girl come back later with all the supplies and food. Here is the second Japanese culture thing I think is funny in the book so far. It's the first time I've read a fantasy book where people buy bento lunches and eat them with chopsticks. Yum yum, there is a lot of description of the yummy rice and fish bentos they eat in this chapter. To give credit to the author's powers of imagination they are not exactly like Japanese box lunch bentos. The sauce on the fish sounds a little different from what you could buy any day at the train station. Still...

Chapter 4 - This is the chapter I must read today. It's going to be one of those books where the point of view changes every chapter, so it's going to be a bit difficult to get into the shoes of each new character at first. The story I'm most interested in, of course, is Balsa and Chagumu. That's the main story. What is the creature possessing Chagumu? My student who recommended the series to me told me that her favorite character is Chagumu. She said she has Chagumu's picture on her keitai. Thus far, Chagumu has not done much but "grit his teeth" and bear the fact that he's being separated from the only life he has ever known, but because of my student's comment "He is so cool!" I think he must eventually do something more than this. So I'm curious about what kind of person Chagumu will turn out to be. I also like Balsa. What a coincidence, I'm turning 30 soon, and little did I expect to find a 30-year old main character in a children's book! She's very cool to me - she has a fearsome reputation as a fighter with her "short spear" (短槍).
Another thing I like about this series is the attractive and intriguing illustrations. They are more detailed than the usual manga style, so much so that they remind me of some of my favorite illustrations in books I read in childhood --C.S. Lewis' and Zilpha Keatley Snyder's books had expressive illustrations like these. A cryptic motif in some of the pictures arouses my curiousity - namely, a recurring emblem of a young face or hand with an aged one. This must relate to some interesting theme about the aging cycle, I think. So far there has been no clue what it might mean.
Seirei no Moribito won the following children's literature awards:

サンケイ児童出版文化賞・ニッポン放送賞
野間児童文芸賞・新人賞
路傍の石文学賞
中央児童福祉審議会特別推薦文化財
全国学校図書館協議会選定図書
日本図書館協会選定図書

Trivia no Izumi Part Two

2004-10-20T13:18:00.000+09:00

No.468　 "Run Merosu" was inspired by the time the author, Dazai Osamu, had to rush around to pay off a loan.
No.467　There is such a thing as an emerald green cockroach.
No.466 The ancient Egyptians shaved their eyebrows if their pet cat died. If their dog died, they shaved their whole body.
No.465　There is a boy band with Ultraman singing backup vocals.
Trivia Seed No.046　The height of newspaper stands in train stations is about 5m 80cm.
No.464　There is a play based on "Planet of Giants".
No.463　There is a crab that makes a beckoning gesture with its claw to the female to invite her into his lair before mating.
No.462　There is a karaoke single consisting entirely of the shouts of action star Bruce Lee.
No.461　Worried about growing bald, Yamada Kosaku, who composed the song "Red Dragonfly," added the katakana symbol for "hair" (ケ）to the kanji of his last name.
No.460　There is a lake called "Chaagogugagogumanchaugugagoguchaubanagangamaugu".
No.459　The actress who did the voice of "Shinku" (悟空) in Dragon Ball once called a friend and said "Hi! I'm Shinku!" (homophonous with 真空, vacuum, void).
No.458　The most probable die roll is "5".
Trivia Seed No.045　The place Japanese housewives most frequently stash their pin money is in a chest of drawers.
No.457　 Once a pro wrestling tournament was held with everyone wearing tiger masks.
No.456　The character "Noppo-san," famous for his line "Dekiru kana?" wrote a play called "Open up! Bonkikki".
No.455　There is a rose called "chinchin" (penis).
No.454　In order to walk without making a sound, ninja walked with their feet standing on the back of their hands.
No.453　 In the Warring States period (15th century), there was a samurai general who wore a helmet emblazoned with the word "Love".
No.452　Sanyuutei Koyuuza lit the sacred fire for the Olympics.
No.451　Kentucky Fried Chicken was originally a gas station.
Trivia Seed No.044　Out of all the mascots of Japan's pro baseball teams, the one that can run the fastest is Hokkaido's Nihon Hamfighters' "B.B.".
No.450　In the movie version of "Heidi," the role of "Peter" was played by Charlie Sheen.
No.449　There is a May Doll that has ridden on a motorcycle.
No.448　 There is a fossil of dinosaur vomit.
No.447　The Nobel prize was established because Alfred Nobel was deceived by a young woman.
No.446　The Ishiwara Army had a comedy show.
No.445　"Tsuutengaku" belonged to "Yoshimoto Kougyou". (I know Yoshimoto Kougyou is the comedy company associated with manzai, but I don't know the significance of "Tsuutengaku" (通天閣). If anyone knows, please explain! Thanks.

全日本中国語スピーチコンテスト

2004-10-18T16:09:00.000+09:00

Yesterday was the National Chinese Language Speech Contest (全日本中国語スピーチコンテスト), sponsored annually by the Hyogo Prefecture Sino-Japanese Friendship Society (兵庫県日中友好協会). My Chinese tutor was a volunteer helper this year. She encouraged me to enter. No thanks, I said, but, curious as to how this event compares with the English language speech contests which plague ALTs and inflict untold suffering on our students, I decided to go as an observer. Most high schools in Hyogo prefecture don't even have Chinese language programs, which should have been a warning to me.
First, the master of ceremony and the judges made some remarks, and then my tutor made a nice speech in Japanese. She compared language use with cooking; just because you have all of the ingredients together (vocabulary and grammar points) doesn't mean you can combine them well to make a delicious dish. Her speech was to be the last speech I understood for the rest of the day.
The first part of the program consisted of high school students who seemed to be reading short stories in Chinese off of a paper. I guessed that they were short stories or fables because several speakers read the same ones. It was difficult to understand their heavily accented pronunciation. I would have liked to read along and thus have some chance of understanding them from looking at the kanji, but I was kept in the dark, because the packets with the texts of the speeches were only given out to the contest participants, not gatecrashers like me. I am not sure whether to blame them or myself for my utter lack of comprehension.
The second part of the program was for high school students who had written their own speeches. There were only two of these. They were seniors in high school (I understood that much) and one spoke about "我的理想”　(My ideals) while the other spoke about "My self-introduction and my ideals." At the end of each of these two speeches, one of the judges, a Chinese native speaker, asked the speaker really easy questions about her speech in Chinese. Despite my lack of comprehension of the girls' speeches, I understood the Chinese woman's questions perfectly. She asked questions like "What is your surname?" "You want to be a doctor, is that right?" and "Have you traveled abroad?" In both cases, the embarrassed girl said "対不起" (Pardon me), not understanding the question. The Chinese woman asked again more slowly, but still the girls couldn't answer well, even though they had just been talking about those things in their own speech. It was pathetic to watch. I hate to think what would happen if they did a question and answer segment of the English speech contest. I'm afraid it would have the same results. The problem is that kids are expected to speak well before they learn how to listen. It's all backwards.
After that, two middle-aged Japanese housewives gave speeches in Chinese, which I didn't understand but I think were about friendship between China and Japan, and then there were more speeches by other advanced speakers, mostly college students from 神戸外国語大学, 関西外大、 and other foreign language-intensive colleges in the area. Some of them seemed pretty good. During the advanced division, the time limit was lengthened to 5 minutes (it was only 2 minutes for the first group of speakers). I didn't want to sit through all the 5-minute speeches at my painfully low level of comprehension (would you?), so I left about two hours into the contest, sending an apologetic email to my tutor. If I'd stayed to the bitter end, it would have been about 5 hours total. Now I know that one of the few things more boring than an English language speech contest is a speech contest you can't understand at all.

On Friday, I finished reading 呪怨. It was a quick read. Irrationally, a couple parts of it did scare me. Not consciously but subconsiously, and I actually had a nightmare about it one night. However, the second half of the book was disappointing because nothing really was resolved, and the same things kept happening over and over again to different people. Sometimes the exact same scene was repeated with different characters. It's eerie, but it's too repetitive to be good writing.
There were three parts of the book where the characters didn't take off their shoes in the house. Apparently if you're entering a haunted house with the intention of burning it down, or if you're entering someone's apartment to kill them, it's okay to leave your shoes on.
The most overused word in the book was 充満する。It's a verb meaning that the air is suffused with something like a bad smell or a sense of foreboding. That happened a lot.
I think the movie will be better (scarier) than the book, but I read the book first to prepare myself. I'll watch the movie soon.
Now I'm starting to read 精霊の守り人, the first book in a fantasy series recommended to me by one of my students. It has furigana on all the kanji so it should be easy to read, but on the very first page I got tripped up by some of the obscure vocabulary, like ずだぶくろ、a large cloth carry-all bag, originally for holding Buddhist scriptures. To remember this I'm imagining that my new Italian handbag is a ずだぶくろ, but I know this is incorrect usage. I have probably never seen a real one and never will. Despite such extinct vocabulary on the very first page, I want to like this book, because the series is supposed to be one of the best of Japanese fantasy.
Still enjoying Kingdom of Loathing. I also started playing Dragon Quest V on Super Famicon yesterday. I finished 1, but 2 didn't grab me so I skipped from one to five. It seems fun. You can get monsters to join your fighting party, and the story seems more well-developed than the earlier two games I saw.

I am sad

2004-10-13T10:27:00.000+09:00

I just heard that someone I cared about committed suicide.
Colin's obituary
Although I have not seen him for years, I've thought of him often. In 2003, his close friend Rachel Corrie died. She was run over by a bulldozer in the Gaza strip while defending Palestinian homes. There are so many sites on the web about Rachel Corrie, I didn't know which link to include, but click on the above one and it will take you to a nice Wikipedia page that tells the whole tragic story. Here is a memorial speech given by Colin in honor of Rachel Corrie in 2003. From this speech you can see that he was a beautiful, spiritual person who loved her deeply. I'm so sorry he's gone.

I want to marry a 漫才師

2004-10-12T11:29:00.000+09:00

...or become one. My friend S. and I were talking about this over the weekend when I visited her in Mie-ken. We decided that she would be the boke and I'd be the tsukkomi. It would be great. I would love to see a movie about a pair of non-Japanese women who try to succeed in Japanese manzai. Would that be a funny movie or what?
I don't know much about manzai yet, I just think it's cool. My exposure to this two-person comedic form is limited to the 2001-2003 M-1 Grand Pris competitions I watched on DVD over the weekend. Hopefully by watching enough of them, I can decide on some manzaishi I like and go to see them live in Osaka. Here is the website where you can look up performance dates. I love Osaka.
S. told me that once a pair of manzaishi went on the Larry King Live show in the U.S. and did their routine in English. It fell flat and they protested, "This is very funny in Japan!"
Comedy is probably the hardest thing to translate.
The "Shiritori Essay" book got a little boring, so I didn't finish it. Instead I'm reading "Juon," the novelization of a hit horror movie. It's very grotesque, but easy to read. I'm also watching "The Office," a British television comedy about a paper company, and playing Kingdom of Loathing. This is a refreshingly fun and addictive, free online game. I'm a Turtle Tamer.

Trivia no Izumi Complete Trivia List! Part I

2004-10-06T13:07:00.000+09:00

Part one of my project to translate the complete List of Trivia from the popular TV program Trivia no Izumi. To read the complete list of trivia in Japanese, see this website. It's on Wednesday at 9:00. The idea of the show is that the viewing audience submits their surprising bits of trivial information, and the guests on the show give it up to 20 "heh" points each depending on how amazed they are. There is a golden brain awarded at the end of every show for the trivia with the most "heh" points. They get an expert in the field to confirm each thing, which is usually rather amusing, and they always show a demonstration of whatever is being discussed (i.e., an octopus opening a bottle).
Each show also has a "trivia seed," which is a question sent in by a viewer, usually something really stupid along the lines of "which would win in a fight, a Japanese sword or a machine gun?" Honestly, this was the "trivia seed" for a recent program (not posted on the website yet). Every now and then, there is an interesting one, like the time a viewer asked them to find the most common things mothers say when scolding their children. They interviewed people all over Japan to find the top ten. I found that segment to be rather culturally informative.
If my translations are inaccurate, your corrections are welcome. Enjoy.

No.519　One of the verdicts a badminton referee can choose is "I didn't see it clearly."
No.518　To promote morale, there is a CPR dummy that says "Thank you."
No.517　The 4th of April, the 6th of June, the 8th of August, the 10th of October, and the 12th of December are on the same day of the week every year.
No.516　There is a baseball league where amateurs can play retired Major Leaguers.
No.515　The ants that are working above ground are all grannies.
No.514　There is an automatic machine for mixing ink on your inkstone for calligraphy.
No.513　A rhinoceros horn is made of fur.
No.512　Milk from the mother is called mother's milk, but milk from the baby is called "witch's milk."
Trivia Seed No.052　When a pro golfer uses an umbrella to golf a par 4 course, the best results are achieved with a gentleman's #13 umbrella.
No.511　There is a contest to determine who has the smelliest shoes in America.
No.510　There is a plant called "meat" (o-niku).
No.509　To help improve the relationship between his wife and his mother, Mori Ogai made them play a board game together. (Note: "Sugoroku" is a simple race-style board game resembling "Chutes and Ladders" or "Candy Land".)
No.508　There is a newspaper about kamaboko (a Japanese food made out of fish paste).
No.507　There is a Kansai Dialect version of a CD by the Carpenters.
No.506　Lupin the Third and Zenigata Keibu went to the same university.
No.505　What a rhinoceros beetle eats in its pupa stage determines whether it will become a king in the future.
Trivia Seed No.051　In a fight between a Japanese sword and a water cutter, a Japanese sword wins.
No.504　The word next to "nodochinko" in the dictionary is "nodochinpo". (I'm not sure why this is funny.)
No.503　The Japanese word for "cockroach," gokiburi, was originally gokiKAburi. It became "gokiburi" due to a typographical error.
No.502　Mizuno Seiro was the Okayama Prefecture representative in a contest for counting bills quickly.
No.501　An octopus can open a bottle.
No.500　There was a pro baseball pitcher who used to throw the ball over his shoulder.
No.499　A bug exists whose farts are 100°C.
No.498　Noguchi Hideyo read his own biography and said "It's all made up."
No.497　 The name of the liquid that collects at the top of yogurt is "whey". (This is one of those things English-language related that are not at all surprising to an English speaker. Of course it's called whey.)
Trivia Seed No.050　 A lion's favorite roast meat from a yakiniku restaurant is harami.
No.496　 An adult man's urine stream turns 180°after flowing a length of 2 cm.
No.495　A stink bug can lose consciousness from its own stink.
No.494　There is a Chinese 4-character expression "kitto baka" (sounds like the word for "certainly stupid."
No.493　 In medieval Europe, when a woman declared her love to a man, she gave him an apple scented with her underarm odor.
No.492　The concept of "warp," previously considered possible in space science, was declared impossible in 1997.
No.491　A frog exists that can survive a fall of more than ten meters.
No.490　 There is a haircut model doll that is bald.
No.489　The word for the condition of appearing to be frightened and unable to calm down is "rori rori."
Trivia Seed No.049　The "Bottomless Swamp" in Hokkaido known as "Dragon God Swamp" has a depth of only ２ｍ37cm.　
No.488　Akai Hidekazu and Takada Nobehiko once had a fistfight in a karaoke box over who would get do the next song.
No.487　The Vietnamese word for "dove" is "chinpoko" (a dirty word in Japanese. Another kind of trivia that is not so funny from the point of view of an English speaker. After all, some Japanese words look like dirty words in English, and we got over that a long time ago. It's nearly inevitable that such things will happen between languages. I guess we English teachers are lucky there are no English-to-Japanese examples of this, or we'd never hear the end of the giggles.)
No.486　Rika-chan's shoes (she is a doll similar to Barbie) taste bad. (It was explained that they are deliberately flavored that way to discourage small children from eating them.)
No.485　When crawfish mate, the male turns the female face up and clasps hands with her.
No.484　In the "Ninja village" in Mie Prefecture, Ueno City, there is a train with a ninja's face.
No.483　Ultraman once sang a rap song.
No.482　In the Edo period, the shogun had an attendant whose only job was to carry around a receptacle for his urine.
No.481　The name "Bach," translated into Japanese, is "Ogawa" (creek). I think the reason this is funny is because Ogawa is also a Japanese name.
Trivia Seed No.048　When a snail races with a slug, the winner is... the slug.
(I watched this one. It was really stupid. They showed the tape in fast motion because the actual race took all day.)
No.480　Ishikawa Takuboku (a poet and intellectual, lived 1886～1912) once wrote a love letter to a man thinking he was a woman.
(Ha! I wish I'd seen that one. I have a book of his poems.)
No.479　The lead of a mechanical pencil glows when you heat it in the microwave.
No.478　 The crustacean called a daphnia, or water flea, has an extremely sharp head which it uses for self-defence.
No.477　The daphnia's head becomes sharp when it senses danger.
No.476　"Yakubusoku" 「役不足」(a kanji compound that looks like it means insufficiently useful) is a compliment.
No.475　 When you play Hitoto Yo's "Weeping in Sympathy" in slow-motion, it sounds like Hirai Ken singing.
No.474　A narwhal's horn is its tooth. (Note: A narwhal, also called a "sea unicorn," is an arctic whale. The Japanese word is 一角, pronounced イッカク, meaning one-horn.)
No.473　The sign for the restrooms in the Sapporo subway is wearing a scarf.
Trivia Seed No.047　When you go fishing for crawfish on the Amazon River, using cuttlefish as bait, you catch crabs.
No.472　There is a manga set on a post-nuclear war earth where people fight by playing Nintendo.
(Only in Japan...)
No.471　There is a choral song called "Samuburi no Uta" (Song of the Cold Yellowtail).
No.470　There is such a thing as a snail with fur.
No.469 The Columbian military hatched a plan to drop pornography from the air in order to sap their enemy's will to fight.

That's all for Part 1 - will post Part II soon.

Update II

2004-10-05T15:11:00.000+09:00

I don't have to do the speech about human rights after all. I'm glad. It's a good thing I didn't really want to do it anyway.

Update

2004-10-04T09:47:00.000+09:00

My friend invited me skiing in Nagano in early January. That takes care of my winter plans in January, but late December is still unaccounted for. Suggestions? I'm so scared of being stuck on my birthday (Dec 23) and Christmas with nothing special to do.　　It's a "bad" birthday number too... I don't even want to say it :(
I am working on translating the trivia of Trivia no Izumi from their webpage and so I can post it on my blog in English, but it's really time-consuming (over 400 things). I might start posting it bit by bit as I get it translated.
I went to Costco on Saturday. Yes, they had Halloween candy (or candy that could pass as such) that I bought for my students. They also had Halloween pumpkins, which tempted me, but I didn't buy one because I thought it would probably rot before the 31st.
Today really feels like a Monday. The weather turned cold suddenly over the weekend. This post seems to have a gloomy storm cloud hanging over it. Can you feel it? Oh well. I have to go teach now.

Swing Girls

2004-10-01T22:19:00.000+09:00

Tonight I went to see Swing Girls, the new Yaguchi Shinobu comedy about a high school jazz band. The director followed up on his success with the hit Water Boys, about a high school boys' synchronized swim team, with this similarly structured teen movie. I loved Water Boys because it was so funny and captured the essence of something I can't describe about Japanese high schools. Swing Girls did the same thing, with many funny moments and a great performance at the end. Although in a way it's just the same old story of an unlikely club pulling together and succeeding despite the odds, there's something a little edgy about both films. The acting and directing are terrific. The boy in Swing Girls, played by Yuta Hiraoka, was particularly adorable.
The movie of Wataya Risa's Install is coming out this New Years' Day. Here's the website. I saw a preview for it at the theater! I am definitely psyched to see that, although the preview looked a little over-intellectual and not as stylish as I would like it to be after reading the book. I love the gerbera design on the website, though. It's my favorite flower.

Rating Language Fluency in Japanese

2004-10-01T14:05:00.000+09:00

I remember looking at this Rate Your Language Fluency Test soon after I arrived in Japan a year ago, and I think I score farther along the fluency continuum now than I did, particularly in the area of being able to understand overheard speech on the street. This test is not specific to Japanese though, and I think it would be good to make up one tailored for Japanese fluency. For one thing, these self-score fluency tests always use "reading the newspaper" as a barometer of your reading ability in a language. I don't think this is necessarily the most appropriate measure when it comes to Japanese. Personally, I hate reading the Japanese newspaper!

Here is my attempt at devising such a self-rating system...please make comments!

DISCLAIMER: THIS SELF-RATING SCALE IS FOR AMUSEMENT ONLY. IT IS NOT INTENEDED TO DIAGNOSE OR TREAT ANY DISEASE. IT IS NEITHER STATISTICALLY NOR SCIENTIFICALLY VALIDATED. BE AWARE THAT YOUR LANGUAGE FLUENCY MAY CHANGE FROM DAY TO DAY AND VARY DEPENDING ON WHO YOU ARE TALKING TO AND YOUR OWN STATE OF MIND. REMEMBER THAT YOU ALSO HAVE GOOD DAYS AND BAD DAYS IN ABILITY IN YOUR NATIVE LANGUAGE.

SCORING NOTE: FOR EACH SKILL, CHOOSE THE ONE LETTER THAT SEEMS TO DESCRIBE YOU BEST (a, b, c, d, e, or f). IF THAT GROUPING ALSO INCLUDES ONE OR MORE ITEMS THAT YOU CAN'T DO, SUBTRACT ONE POINT FROM YOUR SCORE FOR EACH SUCH ITEM (THE MAXIMUM YOU CAN SUBTRACT IS 5; THIS OF COURSE PUTS YOU DOWN TO THE NEXT GROUP).

FOR BEST RESULTS, I SUGGEST TAKING THE TEST AGAIN IN ONE YEAR TO SEE HOW MUCH YOUR JAPANESE FLUENCY HAS IMPROVED.

1) Reading skills (choose one)

a You have not yet learned hiragana and katakana.

b You know hiragana and katakana. You can read simple sentences with some effort. You don't know any kanji. You are afraid that if you learn kanji, you will forget hiragana and katakana.

c You read hiragana, katakana, and up to a few hundred kanji. You can read e-mails, signs, maps, and other things useful for daily life in Japan.

d You enjoy reading in Japanese. You read manga, novels, newspapers, or other books or magazines while consulting a dictionary. Although your reading speed is much slower than your native language, you can finish reading a story or book with some effort and enjoy it. You frequently make mistakes with kanji with multiple readings, because you're not sure which way to pronounce it in context. You also may encounter many kanji while reading that you don't know at all. I think this level is approximately equivalent to JLPT Level 2.

e You can read well without consulting a dictionary. When you come across an unfamiliar word, you can guess the meaning from the context. If you then look up the word anyway, the dictionary confirms the meaning you thought it was. You know approximately 2000 kanji or more. When you finish reading a page, you can often guess what the first word on the next page will be. You have favorite Japanese writers, and own several of their books in Japanese. You can get accurate information from Japanese webpages and instruction manuals. You use a kokugo dictionary more often than dictionaries to and from your native language. You can watch a foreign movie (Chinese, Korean) with Japanese subtitles without feeling like you're missing anything important. You sometimes know kanji that your Japanese friends don't know (this can occur at any level, but is more likely to happen here, unless you are a kanji prodigy). When you see a kanji with multiple readings, you know the correct reading, hesitating or making a mistake only very rarely. I think this level is approximately equivalent to JLPT Level 1.

f All of the above and more. You can read things that are difficult for Japanese people to read such as classical texts, textbooks containing specialized technical language, poetry, Noh drama, that kind of thing. When there is a game show or quiz book with kokugo questions designed to stump the Japanese audience, you know the answers and wonder how the game show contestants can be so clueless! You know many "四字熟語” (Chinese 4-character expressions) well. You have favorite "四字熟語.”
You can read kanbun. You can read "grass script". I'm just throwing a bunch of things in here that I can't do. I don't really know anyone who can do all of them!

Your score:

a) 0 points - Get out there and learn kana already.
b) 5 points - Kanji don't bite.
c) 10 points - You can live comfortably in Japan with this.
d) 15 points - It's amazing how many years it takes to get to this level.
e) 20 points - I think this is "fluent" at reading.
f) 25 points - You are amazing.

2) Listening skills (choose one):

a) You cannot understand spoken Japanese at all except for the occasional word.

b) You can usually understand what people are saying when they talk to you directly. They must speak slowly and use easy Japanese for you.

c) You can listen to things that are more detailed and use more vocabulary than basic conversation, and get the gist. You can understand Japanese cartoons such as Doraemon and Atashinchi. If you ask for directions on the street, you can understand the answer.

d) You can understand conversations both in standard Japanese and in your local dialect, although you may not know all the slang words you overhear. You can enjoy going to Japanese movies without subtitles, although you might not understand everything. You have favorite Japanese TV shows. If someone leaves you a voice mail message in Japanese, you understand it after listening to it a few times. When the cashier tells you the price of something at the cash register, you understand and find correct change without having to look at the visual display.

e) You can understand Japanese conversations overheard on the street and in other public places. Your Japanese friends talk quickly and use idioms when they talk with you without stopping to explain themselves, because they know you can keep up with them. They don't slow down their speech for you. If someone leaves you a voice mail message in Japanese, you understand it the first time. You can understand news stories and documentaries in Japanese. You could write large numbers accurately if they were dictated to you quickly in Japanese.　You have no trouble understanding the TV and radio, although you may occasionally miss details. Sometimes you draw a blank on a slang term or katakana word that you hear for the first time. If you are having trouble programming your VCR or connecting to the Internet, you can call customer service and follow their detailed instructions without requesting customer service in English. You can not only watch Japanese movies without subtitles, you can walk in after the movie has already started and infer what you missed.

f) You understand 100% of what you hear on the TV and radio, just as if you were listening to your native language. No details escape you. You are familiar with slang terms and abbreviations used in the spoken language, such as Raishin (来神） for "Coming to Kobe" and "Dorakue" for "Dragon Quest" - when you hear a shortened word like that you guess immediately what it's referring to, whether it is a shortened katakana word or shortened kanji compound. You can watch a TV show that has been dubbed in Japanese with the voice actors talking very fast in order to keep up with fast-talking non-Japanese actors, (I am thinking of Chris Barrie's speech on Red Dwarf and Chris Tucker in Rush Hour--they sound absurdly fast in the Japanese dubbed versions!) and you can follow their speech and enjoy the jokes. You can listen to Japanese comedy such as manzai and rakugo, and understand it. You can understand slang in more than one local dialect.
Listening comprehension in Japanese is fairly easy compared with the other 3 skills, but I tried to put in the (f) category everything I still consider to be difficult.

a) 0 points. Take a class.
b) 5 points. Many English teachers in Japan are at this level.
c) 10 points. You're getting there.
d) 15 points. Only more time in Japan will improve your ability further.
e) 20 points. Listening fluency.
f) 25 points. Nothing escapes you.

3) Speaking skills (choose one)

a) You can speak a little, but you must use gestures and English words to communicate most things.

b) You can explain what you want or need, ask questions, and use grammar constructions such as -koto ga arimasu. You tend to overuse the word "watashi wa." Sometimes people find your accent difficult to understand.

c) Your accent seems more natural, and you can say many things with confidence. You still have trouble talking about anything beyond common everyday situations, and you break down and speak English frequently.

d) You can speak on a variety of topics, but you often have to ask the person you're speaking with how to say the word you want in Japanese. You can ask questions and talk to people wherever you go in Japan, but sometimes you mispronounce words, especially katakana words　and words with double vowels or consonants, leading to misunderstanding. When you have an in-depth conversation in Japanese, you find it helpful to have a pad of paper nearby to aid communication.

e) Your vocabulary has grown, so you almost never have to use an English word or ask people how to say something. Instead, if you don't know the exact word, you just explain what you want to say using different Japanese words. You have Japanese friends whom you talk to primarily in Japanese. You can communicate adequately with a person who doesn't speak English, whether that person is Japanese or from another country with Japanese as your only common language. You have no fear. You don't need to take a dictionary or a pad of paper with you when you go out knowing there will be a need to communicate in Japanese. You can talk on the phone easily, whether it is a phone interview for a job or consoling a friend who broke up with her boyfriend. You can express any need or question you can imagine in Japanese. Even if your speech isn't always perfect, you are confident in your ability to make yourself understood.

f) You would have no trouble giving an academic presentation or defending your doctoral dissertation in Japanese. You are frequently mistaken for a native speaker on the phone or in dim lighting, as long as your appearance doesn't give you away. You think in Japanese to the extent that it is difficult to switch back to your native language. You speak more quickly in Japanese than in your native language. You are eloquent and persuasive in Japanese. You use keigo and kensongo well enough to impress employers at a job interview.

a) 0 points. More time in Japan and/or a class for you.
b) 5 points. You need to talk with Japanese people more, and get them to help you.
c) 10 points. This is an intermediate level.
d) 15 points. Another year or so in Japan will take you to the next level.
e) 20 points. The much-coveted prize of fluency is yours.
f) 25 points. You can now become rich and famous appearing as the celebrity foreigner on talk shows. Milk it for all the ego-boosting shock value its worth.

4) Writing skills (choose one)

a) You are practicing writing kana using a children's Anpanman coloring book.

b) You can write hiragana and katakana.

c) You can write hiragana, katakana, and some simple kanji.

d) You can write a one-page essay, speech or letter in Japanese, but you have to consult the dictionary and if you ask someone to correct it for you, they point out many grammatical mistakes. Your handwriting looks a little strange to a native speaker. If you're a teacher and you write something in Japanese on the board, your students may laugh at you and you don't know why. You can send keitai mail in Japanese. You think in Japanese while you're writing.

e) You can send long e-mail in Japanese (several paragraphs). You can write a letter or essay and proofread it yourself, making sure it doesn't contain any mistakes. You think in Japanese while you're writing, and know when something doesn't sound right grammatically. You use idiomatic expressions in your writing. You can write fiction in Japanese. Your sentences are often long and complex, whether you're sending an e-mail or writing a formal essay. If you notice your writing contains the same word or grammar too many times, you change it to make it read better, just as you would in your native language. You don't make mistakes when choosing kanji from the computer or keitai program, but you might not be able to write them all by hand. When you write by hand, your stroke order is usually right. Your handwriting is similar enough to a native speaker's that you would not get ridiculed for writing on the board or making a handwritten comment on a handout that you distribute at a class or a meeting. It would be hard for anyone to tell from your writing that you're not a native speaker.

f) You can write accurately all of the one thousand-whatever frequently used kanji, without making mistakes between easily confused kanji. You can write poetry in Japanese. You always know the right stroke order and how many strokes something is. You win prizes for your calligraphy. You have had newspaper columns published in Japanese. You are working on a novel, play or poem in Japanese, and are looking for a publisher.

a) 0 points. Anpanman will help you.
b) 5 points. Don't stop now.
c) 10 points. Now to put them all together...
d) 15 points. This is intermediate, but not so far from fluency as you might fear.
e) 20 points. Writing fluency.
f) 25 points. Go you.

As you can see, the person who scores 25 points in all four categories (and I seriously doubt there could be such a person!) gets 100% on this test, but I consider 70-80% fluent, don't you?
I hope this test isn't seen as being unfair or cruel to people at the beginning stages of learning Japanese - or people learning Japanese outside Japan. No one is meant to score 100% on this test, certainly not me. I don't pretend to have all the answers about learning Japanese. I just hope this post will amuse you and generate some comment about Japanese study.

As Sparkling As Ever

2004-09-28T10:30:00.000+09:00

"I want to say that the students' 目がいつものように、輝いています。”said a teacher at my school. "I mean to say it, sort of sarcastically, you know? How would you say it in English?" He showed me the words "Your eyes are as sparkling as ever." He meant that their eyes are shining with enthusiasm, eager to learn.
"I think we would say, 'Your eyes are shining as brightly as ever,'" I said. Addressed to a bunch of first-year high school students, who have lately been dragging themselves around wearily like the very picture of apathy, this will come off as sarcastic all right. He means to put it in a newsletter. Who said they don't understand sarcasm in Japan?

Do You Remember Me? My Name is Mayonnaise

2004-09-21T13:14:00.000+09:00

Some students of my high school were hanging out at my station one day. They recognized me, so I went over and talked with them. After some nervous giggling, one of them said:
"Do you remember me? My name is Mayonnaise."
More giggling. I tried to place Mayonnaise's face in my memory, but could not. And yet, how can you say "I'm sorry, I don't remember you, Mayonnaise?" In the end I just nodded and smiled.
I think she must have meant that her nickname is Mayonnaise. She is probably one of those people (a "mayonnaiser") who puts mayonnaise on everything. The "pocket mayo" bottles I've seen in 100-yen stores are targeted for this market. It's bad for you and has no taste of its own, but mayonnaise is a food with a cult following in Japan.
This opening is really just a ruse to talk about my 3-day weekend.

SATURDAY

I thought there might be a game meeting this Saturday, but there wasn't. So it was a staying home/doing laundry/playing video games kind of day. I toyed with the idea of going alone to Nara, but ultimately didn't go. I'm glad I didn't, because I was talking to M & U later and we all made plans to go to Nara together, which will be so much better. I haven't been to Nara for 10 years, and when I did go I couldn't see anything due to contact lens trouble that day. So why not go again now? M. says she hasn't been there for 10 years either.
I was stuck on Dragon Quest I because I couldn't find the 太陽の石, but once I found it (not by myself, I cheated) I had no problem finishing the game that day. It was right in front of my nose, but I wouldn't have thought to look there. I have the Super Famicon game that is DQ I and II together, so I started DQ II after that. It is barely more advanced out of RPG kindergarten than DQ I, but it does have a few innovations: more than one character in your fighting party, more spells, and more than one monster can appear at a time during a random encounter.
Then I started "Fratricide Grass," the suspense horror sound-novel game I mentioned earlier. It's cool. I played for a long time and my character and his girlfriend are still alive. Does that mean my choices are good? It's a good game for Japanese reading study, because it's all reading, and you have to pay attention to make good decisions. You can even flip back to see the previous pages - always good for language learners. I wish some other games had that feature. It had a lot of horror game cliches, like a wandering suit of armor, a ringing phone, and a wheelchair. The two people are basically exploring a haunted house. They spent a long time exploring the bathroom and I thought they might die in there from the hot water, but for some reason they got away unscathed. Sometimes the choices for what your character can say are kind of humorous. You see a mummy in one room and then some dried fish in the refrigerator, and you can choose to point out that dried fish is really mummified fish. I guess this isn't so funny really, but some of the dialogue seemed amusing at the time. I haven't solved the mystery of the house or the "fratricide grass" yet, so I have to keep playing. Another cool thing about it is that it saves your game instantly as you play. The save slots look like bookmarks --because, of course, you're supposed to feel like you're reading an novel, not playing a game. Actually, the writer of the game script is not from the video game industry at all; he's a novelist and scriptwriter who had never worked on a game before. Perhaps for that reason, it seems more "well-written" than most games.
They rereleased this game for PlayStation, but the reviewers seem to think the original was better. The original I'm playing is here. Otogirizou on Amazon

SUNDAY

From 10-1 I studied Chinese/tutored English with Y. She invited me to a moon-viewing party next week. I made some Chinese mistakes that made her laugh, as usual.
While still at Sannomiya station, I ran into 2 other ALTs, and we talked for a few minutes. Then I caught a bus to Kita-ku (the mountainous North Kobe). My friend U. and her husband have a cheap 2-room apartment there. They had to put in their own shower; the former occupants had taken the bathtub and shower with them when they left. She told me that this is customary for cheap apartments in Japan. There was a space where the bathtub used to be.
Our friend M. was there too, and the three of us hung out there for awhile and cooked dinner. Later U.'s husband came home with two of his friends (all of them are from Inner Mongolia) and I taught all the guys how to play Settlers of Catan in Japanese. Japanese was the second, third or fourth language of everyone in the room except M. -- but they all spoke it well, because they have been living and working in Japan for several years. The guys speak Mongolian, Chinese, and Japanese, so Japanese is their third language, and for U. it's her 4th language, because she speaks English too. She told me that most Inner Mongolians choose to study Japanese instead of English in school. The guys liked Catan so much we played 2 games, but sometimes they traded places with each other because the games were so long. It was after 1 am when everyone went to bed. The 3 guys slept on the floor in one room and we 3 women slept on the floor in the other. We could hear them snoring in the next room though.

MONDAY

The guys woke up early and went to work. It was a holiday (Respect For The Aged Day) so I had the day off school. M. and U. had part-time jobs, but not until later, so we hung out some more in the morning, took showers and had breakfast. U. helped me with Chinese a bit and I made her read part of a Japanese book I had - M. was studying Chinese in the next room too, much more difficult than what I was studying.
After leaving U.'s house so she could go to work, M. and I took the bus back to Sannomiya. We had coffee and a sandwich at Doutour. By that time I had been speaking a lot of Japanese over a 24-hour period, much more than I do normally, and I was feeling good about that, but I was also getting a little tired. At 3:30 I had plans to meet another ALT for a movie, so I said goodbye to M. with plans to meet her again the next day (today).
I met a first-year ALT (J.) and we went to the movie theater. We wanted to see Fahrenheit 9-11, but it was sold out, so we saw "The Village" instead. It was okay - not a great movie, but I didn't feel totally cheated to have watched it because it had a couple cool moments and it was kind of interesting. I didn't like the way the talking was so stilted and the plot was very implausible, but visually at least it was kind of cool.
Next I want to see "Swing Girls," a Japanese teen movie by the creators of "Waterboys," but the fact that it's in Japanese narrows down my list of potential people to ask to see it with me, and M. and U. aren't interested, so I'm wondering if I should just go see it alone.
I finally got home at about 7 in the evening, fed my poor neglected hamster, and ate some ice cream. The end.

Sports Festival; An Unexpected Assignment

2004-09-16T10:38:00.000+09:00

A student at my school ran away from home and was missing for two weeks. I was worried about him. His parents think he ran away because his grades were in a downward spiral and they had asked him to quit the soccer club. I wondered why the story wasn't in any newspapers or on the news. No one knew where he was, and I thought he might be dead - but then this is Japan, and I was forgetting how safe it is here generally. Today I was relieved to hear that he returned home. He didn't go very far; he just stole a bicycle somewhere and rode around living on some money he'd been saving, and the farthest he went was Kyoto. I don't know yet if he'll come back to class at this school.
Today is the Sports Festival, an annual event where each homeroom class competes in athletic events such as relay races, tug-of-war, synchronized jumprope, and the 41-legged race, where the 40 students in each class have to tie their legs together so that between 40 people there are only 41 "legs." My favorite to watch is kibasen. This is a battle simulation exercise whereby one student (the "rider") is supported by three other students (the "horse"). The rider has a colored cap on his or her head (red or white), and the object of the game is to steal caps from the opposing team. In the morning it's the all-girl kibasen, and in the afternoon the boys do it. It's so funny to see how aggressive they are about trying to slap each other's caps off. I like it because, while it looks violent, no one really gets hurt. On the other hand, after the 41-legged race, there are always a lot of injured students with bloody scratches on their legs going to the first-aid tent.
Another funny thing to watch during the Sports Day is all of the special colorful T-shirts the students are wearing. The students in each homeroom class make their own designs especially for Sports Day. They often have funny things on them - caricatures of their teachers are common, and so are puns. The first one I noticed this time was a white shirt with a picture of an eggplant on it. On the front it said "We love Nasubi!" in English. Nasubi is eggplant. On the back it had this in Japanese, and the letters in the top row were all encased in eggplants:

なすび　＝Eggplant
んてな Vertical words read: "My, what super handsome young men and
ときん beautiful young women!" (I think binanbijo
　なび is a word used in anime and manga
　　じ for beautiful people)
　　ょ

The teacher in charge of the first-years sat next to me and we got to talking about this shirt. "Do you know why it's an eggplant?" he asked. I had to admit I did not.
"Their homeroom teacher's nickname is 'Eggplant.' Do you know A-sensei?" I did. "His head is shaped like an eggplant, isn't it?"
"Does he mind that kind of teasing?"
"I don't think so. He started a class newsletter called Nasubi Tsushin." (Eggplant Times.)

Another punning shirt was 必笑, "will certainly laugh," a pun on 必勝, "will certainly win," having the same pronunciation. I asked why one of the classes have a definition of mitochondria from a dictionary on the back of their shirts, and was told this is because their homeroom teacher teaches biology.
If you had the misfortune to miss the TV show Trivia no Izumi last night, they asked a team of humor experts to come up with the most unfunny possible gag and perform it in front of an audience of 100 men and women who didn't know what they would be watching. The humor experts debated their differing views of what makes something funny for 11 hours before reaching an agreement. The gag they concluded was the most unfunny possible was a series of 3 puns (板は痛い、とか）followed by a statement that was not a pun. (セメントは、セメント）(Cement is cement).
I had the same sense of baffled disappointment when confronted with student T-shirts that were not based on puns.

It's nice and cloudy today, so my eyes don't hurt from watching the festival like they did last year. The talkative teacher started talking to me again.
"What is kibasen in English?"
"You asked me that last year!"
"I forgot."
"We don't have that word in English."
"But if you want to be a professional translator, you should try to translate it into English."
"I would just put kibasen in italics and explain it. No one in other countries will understand what it is unless you explain it."
I remember being just as annoyed last year by the persistent requests to translate the untranslatable into English - as if my translation would have any meaning to English speakers without a lengthy explanation. I sighed and wrote "Battle of the Knights" across the bottom of my Sports Festival program.
"Ohhhh!" cried the teacher, satisfied at last.

Later the teacher said, in the hesitant tone of voice that I knew meant ominous news for me, "Um...it is not decided yet and I know it is still early to think about it, but some of the teachers were talking and we want you to make a speech to all the students about human rights."
Uh-oh. This doesn't sound good. "When?"
"Um, next February."
"I'm not an expert on human rights. They should really ask someone else."
"Well, your predecessor said no at first too. But in the end, she did it. I told her she didn't have to take it too seriously, and in the end she did it."
"How long should it be?"
"30 minutes."
"30 minutes!" (Oh my god...)
Seeing my shocked expression, he said, "...or less. You can use PowerPoint!"
Oh, that makes it okay then. Never mind I don't even know how to use PowerPoint yet.
We talked some more about it. I hated the idea at first, because I thought someone decided that the foreign teacher would have lots of knowledge about human rights, being from another country and all, and that would make me mysteriously qualified to talk about it. And I'm not qualified to talk about it just because I'm from another country. I've never even volunteered for Amnesty International. 30 minutes is a hell of a long time to talk about something you have no expertise or qualifications to speak on, without making a fool of yourself. Furthermore, I'm supposed to give the speech in English, which makes the speech easier to compose, perhaps, but no easier to deliver - I know my students' listening comprehension level, and it's not high.
"Twice a year, the students have a special curriculum on human rights. During the summer, as you know, they all saw a film on apartheid. Many of the teachers take turns in preparing something for them, and this time the teachers want you to do it."
This makes it a little better. At least it's not just me. Other teachers are expected to contribute something to the human rights curriculum sometimes too. In the end I said I'd do it. I suggested talking about women's rights and gender equality, and he was pleased because he said the students are probably bored of hearing about the same old human rights issues, and this would be something new for them. I have some ideas about this after spending enough time with the students to realize most of them really do have a rather rigid view of gender roles. Shown a picture of a man cooking and holding a baby, they assume that the wife is sick so the man is doing her job for the day - it doesn't occur to them that the woman is at work while the man stays home, which is what the picture was actually intended to represent. Again, during a guessing game about jobs we did recently, they seemed to think "Am I a man or a woman?" would give them some clues about which job was the answer - e.g., doctor or nurse. (Haven't they ever seen Ben Affleck in Meet the Parents?)
So I have some ideas about this, but it's going to be a ton of work...I know I shouldn't be complaining about work but I'm just not used to it anymore...finding some interesting pictures to use with PowerPoint will be the first step...then make some easy to understand lists and charts with statistics...I can put those on PowerPoint too so the students will have something to look at and it will be easier for them to follow my English. Then I have to actually write and practice the speech. How to start...let's see, 板は痛い...

Sundry Amusements

2004-09-15T09:09:00.000+09:00

Before studying Chinese and reading my students' English diaries (they are so CUTE!) I'll create a quick post to fill you in on what I've been doing this week.

Now reading: しりとりえっせい、　中嶋らも作　
Shiritori Essay by Nakajima Ramo

　 This is a humorous collection of essays in the "shiritori" format--that is, the topic of each essay must have the same first syllable as the last syllable of the last one. This technique creates some unexpected sequences of topic that are funny in themselves, and the essays are full of amusing anecdotes and pictures. The author is from Hyogo prefecture, so he's local. I didn't know of him before reading this book, but apparently he's a celebrity who not only writes essays but also appears in theatrical productions and on television.

Recently read: The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson - Wow!

Comparable to Dune in scope and weirdness, this cyberpunk fable is set in a future China where nanotechnology has made everything possible. National borders have almost vanished. Instead, most people belong to tribes called "phyles" with others who share the same values, religion, and economic status. Therefore, Shanghai has many such phyles whose members seldom interact, as evidenced by the fact that the heroine, Nell, is born and bred in Shanghai yet does not learn any words in Shanghai dialect until adulthood. She learns many other fascinating things however, and much of the first half of the book is an emotionally satisfying lesson in the civilizing power of education. Her teacher is a marvelous piece of interactive software called A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. It comes from the Neo-Victorian enclave - "Atlantis/Shanghai" - hence the Victorian-sounding moralistic name. I enjoyed the fact that "Nell" is also a Dickensian name. The plot continues to spin weirdly ever onward, occasionally going on some unexpected tangents, but always intellectually stimulating and staggering in its coolness.
The part that resonated with me the most was this: while discussing the content of the Primer, the client tells the engineer: "Contemplate, as a starting point, the meaning of the word subversive."
I did contemplate it, and am still contemplating it. Also, contemplate this: a comparable word does not exist in Japanese.
Now for those of you who have read this novel, here were some things I wondered about. Maybe you could tell me your ideas. If you haven't read the novel, you should skip this part - it includes spoilers.

1) Miranda was the ractor for the Primer and she did all the voices. Are we to assume she also did the male voices, e.g. Dinosaur and Dojo?

2) On the subject of Miranda, while Nell was a child, what would have happened if she opened the Primer at some unexpected time when Miranda was not at work?

3) We're told that after the success of "version 1.0" of the Primer, if you will, Hackworth was able to translate it into Chinese and equip it with voice generation capability. We're given no details about how he accomplished this. It seemed like he did it in no time at all. He even localized the Primer to have appropriate cultural and historical information for Chinese users, but no details were given about what must have been a TREMENDOUS endeavor. I really wanted to know more about this. Later, it said that the Chinese girls who had used the Primer spoke in a lovely Victorian accent. Did their Primers start in Chinese and gradually teach them English?

4) The first story told by the Primer foreshadows that Nell will come back at some time in the future to free Harv from the Dark Tower, but he will not recognize her and an arrow he shoots will hit her in a locket he gave her. I was expecting some similar scenario to play out in real life, but all we're told later is that Harv dies and Nell buries him. I realize that there are obvious limitations to the prescience of an interactive storybook, but why did the author choose to foretell this episode if he never intended to make it happen?

If you have any ideas, please comment.

Recently played: Ghosts!

This is the "good ghost, bad ghost" board game I've heard about but never played until last night. It's like a whimsical reinvention of checkers or chess, but it only takes 15 minutes or less to play, and less time to learn. Very fun.

Still Playing: Dragon Quest I

I got the Silver Harp 銀の竪琴、 but the game is getting tedious because I've already explored the whole world and all the monsters are easy now. I have a spell to turn off the random encounters, but it only works for a very short period of time. What am I supposed to do now?

Going to play: 弟切草　"Fratricide Grass."

This is a "sound novel" on Super Famicon. A friend lent it to me, and I can't wait to try it. My quest for Japanese gamebooks led me to this, the first great sound novel which spawned many imitators. We don't have this genre in the U.S., but it seems to be a choose-your-own-adventure type gamebook you read/play with a game console. It has some kind of music or sound effects to go with the story - hence "sound novel" - and, of course, pictures. I heard there was one for Silent Hill, which I want very much but haven't seen anywhere.

Last weekend - Himeji

I went to a JET party and wound up staying out all night in Himeji. The strangest thing that night was watching an American friend practicing her karate kata in a convenience store at 4 a.m. We killed an hour or so in that store laughing at the dirty manga and slutty fashion magazines. I've never really looked at those things before, but if you're in the right mood man are they funny. We also went to Jankara for karaoke.

For an account of the same night by another person present, you can look here. It doesn't mention me, but I was there too, that crazy night in Himeji.

Don't get the wrong idea, I don't go off on escapades like that every weekend - but it's fun once in a while.

What's that in my green tea?

2004-09-10T15:49:00.000+09:00

Until recently, I was unaware that there are two different kinds of Sokenbicha, a popular brand of green tea sold in many vending machines. Therefore, I didn't know why sometimes when I buy it I get a pleasantly refreshing green tea beverage, and other times it tastes like a mouthful of random herbs and lawnmower cuttings. It turns out that the one I like is called Sokenbicha Green Tea Blend. It has the bracingly cool, slightly bitter taste of unsweetened green tea. The other one is the original Sokenbicha. What kind of weird things are they putting in there? I compared the ingredient labels to find out. At first I thought that the name "Green Tea Blend" meant several different varieties of green tea blended together, but the truth is a little different.

You can go to Sokenbicha's website for fascinating information on the health-giving properties of these ingredients (Japanese text only).

Here's the list:

Regular Sokenbicha

ハトムギ "dove wheat" - I don't know what this is, but the website asserts that it has been enjoyed in Japan since the days of yore and includes "high-quality protein, vitamins and minerals."
玄米　　Brown rice
緑茶　　Green tea
オオムギ　Barley
プーアル茶　Pu-ehr tea　(Chinese weight-loss tea)
ナンバンキビ　"barbarian millet"
どくだみ "a bad-smelling perennial plant of the family Saururaceae"
はぶ茶 "Habu" tea　- haven't a clue
チコリー　Chicory
月見草　　Evening primrose
ビワの葉　Loquat leaves
ビタミンＣ　　Vitamin C

Green Tea Blend

緑茶　　Green tea
クマザサ Low, striped bamboo (Sasa albo-marginata)
オオムギの若葉 Young leaves of barley
紅茶 Black tea (wait a minute...)
シソの葉 Shiso leaves (Perilla frutescens crispa)
キダチアロエ - a kind of aloe
ビワの葉 Loquat leaves
みかんの皮 Tangerine peel
カンゾウ Licorice
ビタミンＣ Vitamin C

Sokenbicha - it means "refreshing, healthy, beautiful tea." It's made by the Coca Cola company. How come Coca Cola doesn't sell healthy things like this to Americans? Are we really that bad that the beverage companies are justified in thinking we won't drink anything without a ton of sweetener in it? I couldn't find the sales figures to support this assertion, but it seems like in today's health-conscious market, Sokenbicha is selling much better than, say, Coke.

Probably Not Recontracting

2004-09-08T14:06:00.000+09:00

I want to get a job using Japanese, not English. This job isn't challenging me. When I think of my aspirations and goals in life, how many of them would I get closer to by spending a third year on the JET program? I'm almost ready to move on, already, and I still have almost a year left in my current contract. Therefore, despite my love for Japan, I'm seriously considering NOT recontracting next year.

In a way I'm shocked that I'm even considering this path, since I love Japan so much. But job satisfaction is important to me, too. I've always liked to be busy, and to feel needed at work.

Two job search possiblities after JET appeal to me right now:

Hong Kong - when I was in Hong Kong I pored through the job listings. I found a few that were recruiting people with Japanese ablity to work for Japanese companies, or companies that did business with Japan. That sounds exciting to me, and I'd like to try it. I'd love to have more time to explore Hong Kong.

Seattle/Redmond - Microsoft, Amazon, and Nintendo - and the smaller companies that contract with these three giants - often recruit for employees with Japanese ability. I'm interested in software, e-commerce, and video games, so jobs in these fields are attractive. An obvious plus is being close to my family and friends in that area. I'm also interested in the UW Extension course in Software Localization. When I last looked into it, it started in September, and was a year-long certificate program with classes in the evening. If I decide to return to my home country (scary thought!) I could start it as soon as next year. Then look for a job as Project Manager localizing Japanese software, which would be sweet.

In a way it scares me that I'm considering leaving Japan as soon as a year from now. But if I'm bored by my job now, at the beginning of my second year, the boredom will only get worse as I teach the same lessons again and again for another fall, winter and spring. And 3 years on JET is not going to look any better to a future employer than 2 years on JET. Better to move on, and collect some of the job skills I'll need in other areas. I need more than Japanese ability to get my dream job - I need to know about something else, too. I can always come back to Japan, and I will.

Storms Have Their Uses

2004-09-07T08:20:00.000+09:00

Classes were cancelled today at my high school due to storm warnings.
I'm just as glad not to have to teach today, actually. I'm at school, but we will probably be sent home early. As I was writing this, there was another earthquake!

Chinese Test, Earthquakes

2004-09-06T08:31:00.000+09:00

On Saturday, I registered for the Chinese Language Proficiency Test (Chuuken), 3rd level, which will be held on November 28, 2004. I passed Level 1 of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) last year. Differences between the Japanese and Chinese tests in Japan are plentiful. The most obvious one is the demographic that takes the test. Since the Chinese test here is designed for Japanese speakers, the instruction book and study materials are all in Japanese, while the instruction book for the JLPT is in 4 languages, including English. When you go in to take the JLPT test, the directions and questions are all monolingual Japanese. This is only fair, since there are people of many different native languages taking the test. However, the Chinese test features numerous sections involving translating Chinese into Japanese and vice versa. In terms of the test questions themselves, they're different too. The only easy thing about the JLPT Level 1 is that you don't have to write any kanji. The Chinese test does seem to involve writing kanji (called hanzi in Chinese). Secondly, in a Japanese test it would be meaningless to have word-rearranging grammar questions, since the verb always comes at the end. So the JLPT has none of those, but in Japan they seem to like creating those questions for other languages, namely Chinese and English. You've probably seen these questions on English tests in Japan - the words in a sentence are all mixed up, and you have to rearrange them to form a grammatically correct sentence that matches the meaning of the Japanese sentence. These questions are actually easy if you're used to a SVO word order, but students taking the university entrance examinations seem to find them difficult to do in English. The Chinese ones I tried in the study book I bought were quite easy - the Chinese word order is also SVO, so it's not hard for an English speaker to have an intuitive understanding of sentence construction in Chinese.
There is one diabolical type of question on the Chuuken test. They give you a word consisting of 2 hanzi characters. You have to match that word with another word, unrelated in meaning or romanized pronunciation, that has the same two tones. If the word you're given is third tone followed by first tone, you have to remember which of the other four choices are pronounced that way. The test recognizes five possibilities for each syllable - the four tones, or an unaccented syllable. It would be roughly equivalent to asking a learner of English to match words based solely on the accent of their syllables. Actually, I think they probably do this kind of question in Japan for English too, and a native English speaker looking at the question would not immediately be able to think of the desired answer. The human mind is not good at thinking of words like this, divorced from any meaning or context. It's not natural. It forces you to pay attention to the tones, which you might otherwise be tempted to ignore. But just as you don't need to have a conscious understanding of syllable accents to speak English naturally, you don't need to consciously think about every single tone when you speak Chinese either. In fact, doing so would slow your speaking speed down to paralyzed slug velocity. The best thing is to imitate how a native speaker of Chinese says a word, and remember that when you say the words yourself until you are so practiced at it you do it without thinking. When you're learning a new word, knowing how the tones look on paper does not necessarily prevent you from mispronouncing it. I think the same is true for English.

The levels of the Chuuken test, and the cost of taking each one:

pre-4: 3,150円
4: 3,675円
3 4,725円
pre-2: 6,825円
2: 7,875円
1: 8,925円

The harder the test, the more expensive it is to take it. Psychologically, this has a peculiar effect--you actually feel good for paying more money. The prices seem more arbitrary that the JLPT test (I think the cost for all the levels were the same for that, except Level 1 was 1000 yen more). The only rationale I can think of for those prices is that the harder tests might have more questions, and the test-taker has to pay per question. Having to pay more for them to devise more difficult questions for you just doesn't make sense.
Two earthquakes yesterday. The first one occurred in the evening while I was riding a bus. The second one woke me up out of a sound sleep in the middle of night. It was scarier. But I'm okay.
In an attempt to be cute while wearing sandals this weekend, I bought some of those decorated fake plastic nails for my toes and glued them on with nail glue. The nail glue is kind of scary, since the package warns it "instantly bonds to skin." The chic shops are full of the fake fingernails decorated with rhinestones and flowers and ribbons and glitter and pom-poms and fruit baskets and butterflies or whatever else they can think of. Just joking about the fruit baskets. My toes feel silly.

Politically Incorrect Board Games...

2004-08-31T15:08:00.000+09:00

...make me realize I'm uncomfortable with history.
The #1 ranked game out of thousands reviewed and discussed on the huge site boardgamegeek.com is "Puerto Rico". Although 16th century Puerto Rico repels me as a setting for a game because of the evils of colonialism and slavery, I succumbed to the hype (that it is a game of infinite depth and strategy) and bought the game yesterday at Yellow Submarine otaku supply store in Sannomiya. I think now after reading this thread (after I had already bought it) that I should have trusted my initial impression and avoided this game, which is blatantly politically incorrect.
This is what I bought at Yellow Submarine after my online research and before the typhoon confined me indoors last night. Now comes the hard part - bugging people to play them with me.

1) Puerto Rico - Will "brilliant and innovative gameplay" overcome my moral repugnance for playing the part of thinly disguised colonial slaveholders?

2) The Settlers of Catan - Capcom Standard Version
Although everyone who plays this game seems to love it regardless of cultural and ethnic background, and it's so abstract it's not representative of any particular place or period of history, there are some issues here too. First of all, the colonization theme. We're led to assume that the island is uninhabited when the settlers arrive, but if so who is the "robber" figure? And why is the "robber" black? I was swept up in the hype over this game and forgot my initial discomfort with this aspect of it, until reminded of it again by Puerto Rico. Maybe the choice of color for the robber is unintentional, but I'll paint mine a different color anyway to express my lack of complicity with board game racism.

3) Carcassonne Hunters & Gatherers - According to my online research, this seems to be the most played of the "Carcassonne" series of tile-laying games. I think it will be a good one to have because it can be played with two players, and it's not very big or complicated so I can take it around with me in my backpack and inflict it on...I mean teach it to...my language exchange partners.

4) Die Neuen Entdecker - They didn't have Sid Meier's "Civilization the Board Game" or "Tigris and Euphrates" at Yellow Submarine. However, both Tokyu Hands and Yellow Submarine had this one (YS was 2000 yen cheaper!) and boardgamegeek reviewed it favorably, so I bought it. It's by Klaus Teuber, the creator of Settlers, but more importantly it looks fun in its own way. It reminds me of the exploration part of Civilization, the PC game.
Except for Settlers, which is in Japanese, the games are all in German, which makes me feel like a total nerd if I didn't already, but I just printed out the English rules from the boardgamegeek site. I also don't even know how to play any of them yet except Settlers. Minor details.
I'm not sure if I mentioned this before, but the last time we played Cranium it seemed very culturally biased - there is no way the Japanese players could answer the questions. It wasn't a language thing - it was culture. Games are unnervingly culturally specific sometimes - what is fun for one group of people can be offensive if carried overseas. Well, video games aren't that way, but board games tend to be - is it because most board games are created in Europe or America and most video games are created in Japan? Actually, it's not true that video games that are okay in Japan are never considered offensive overseas. Come to think of it, that happens a lot, too - see this article about the "Twin" monster in SH4. My copy of SH4 has the "Twin" in it (shudder).

I'm also TEACHING soon (it's about time). I'm trying to encourage my 360 students to interact with me more by giving them stamp-cards for extra credit for either talking to me outside of class or keeping an English diary. I presented my idea to my two co-teachers at the lesson planning meeting today, and they seemed impressed. They think I'm going to have a lot of work on my hands, though, correcting 360 students' journals or talking to them individually. I'm not sure how many students will actually do it though, so I'm not scared yet about the effects this will have on my copious amounts of free time. If I lost ten hours a week for every time I told another teacher "I'd like to be busier" - well, I'd still have free time at school to spare.

I'm Bored, But Fighting It

2004-08-27T10:35:00.000+09:00

Only a week until I start teaching again. It will be good to start doing something useful for a change, even if it's just playing word games with shy teenagers. In this entry I'll tell you how I'm fighting the boredom of summer vacation now that I'm back from China.

Last night:
After work, I went to Tokyu Hands to look at their selection of board games. I was surprised to see that they have several German board games in now. Cool. Today I'll look them up at boardgamegeek.com to see which one I want to buy. I can't read German so I couldn't read the backs of the boxes, but they come with Japanese rule books. I might host my gaming group again soon, and I have nothing good to play. I want to play "Tigris and Euphrates" or "Sid Meier's Civilization, the Board Game" (I love the PC game Civilization III!) - but they are impossible to find in Japan, and so expensive to ship from elsewhere (the price of the game instantly doubles when you ship it.) If you have any information about finding games like this in Japan, PLEASE tell me. I have a collection of the suckiest board games ever, having inherited some old ESS club standbys from departing JETs. Must get better games.
While in Sannomiya, I got a keitai mail from my pal Takashi who was also there on his day off, so I met up with him at Logos Cafe. It was good to talk about my trip with an actual friend, not just a coworker or student. Some of my friends are still away for the summer, so it's been kind of lonely for a first week back. Tomorrow, though, I'm going to the BBQ party of a good friend of mine, so that will be great. I'm just nervous about cooking the Chinese food I said I'd bring. Sure, I can cook vegetarian Chinese food...I took a cooking class in China...no problem...right? This morning I made Chinese-style scrambled egg and tomato like we had almost every morning for breakfast there, but that doesn't require a lot of skill. I just added a little sugar and soy sauce, and some green onions to the tomato and egg as I was cooking it. Yum.

Currently Reading:

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. At the recommendation of imagimancer. Cyberpunk sci-fi with a Victorian motif, it's set in a futuristic Shanghai. I'm curious to see how these disparate elements come together.

Recently Read:

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman - I read this in China. I bought the rest of this critically acclaimed children's fantasy trilogy and had them shipped from Beijing, along with some other books (i.e. Chinese novels in English translation). I wasn't disappointed by The Golden Compass. It's stylish and appealing, original fantasy.

The Importance of Being Earnest, by Oscar Wilde - I read this in China too. It was so funny. Yesterday a teacher at my school demanded to know what I'd read while I was gone (HE has read over 20 books, he told me!) and I tried to tell him about this, but I had to go on the Internet to find the Japanese title - まじめが肝心. I'm unsatisfied by this translation of the title, because the whole play hinges on the pun between the name "Earnest" and actual earnestness. Without using the name Earnest in the title, I think the charm is lost.

The Lady or the Tiger - a short story by Frank Stockton. I read this on the Internet the other day. If it were me, it would be the lady, because love that is that jealous isn't really love. It's murderous. Jealousness isn't benign. I think you have to let people be, especially if you love them.

Ordinary People by Judith Guest - I finished this yesterday. Because it's mostly dialogue, it's a quick read. I bought it because it's in English and I'd heard of it, not the soundest of reasons for reading something, even if it's cheap. The author let the characters, who were totally out of touch with their own emotions and inarticulate about expressing them, do all the talking. If you're going to let your characters' dialogue dominate the book, at least let them have a clue about how they are feeling instead of always saying "I don't know, man" and "Let's not talk about it right now."
I did sympathize with Conrad, the depressed teenager at the center of the novel. He was getting over his brother's death and trying to reintegrate himself with his old life after a suicide attempt and a stay in a mental hospital. I could feel his pain, but the problem was that he couldn't express himself at all, normal perhaps for a depressed teenager, but annoying to a reader who wants to know what's going on. The author decided to cheer him up by throwing him a perfect romantic relationship with a beautiful girl (how often does that happen to suicidal teenagers in real life?) -sure, lucky for him, he falls in love and everything is happy again, except that his mother is still a cold evil monster for liking a clean house and traveling. Horrors! I don't understand why the author thought liking to travel is so sinister. Like everything would be okay if only she didn't want to take the family to Europe or Florida. Apparently her taking the family to Florida for Christmas last year was to blame for Conrad's suicide attempt! At the end the author just conveniently got the mother out of the picture without EVER showing her side of the story at all. The writing style was also coarse and stupid, with a lot of swearing and '70s slang.
I did like the novel Mrs. Bridge, which has a similar sort of theme ("ordinary families are sick") - because the writing was more poetic and elegant, and it was like the surface of a still pool, with hidden depths. On the other hand, it occurs to me that Ordinary People is a famous novel that may have influenced a whole generation of psychological novels about characters with repressed emotions. I think the best examples of that genre are The Prince of Tides (I like the movie too) and Susan Howatch's novels. Ordinary People just proves to me that characters can be annoying if they are too uncommunicative.

Three Kinds of Blog Entries

2004-08-25T15:27:00.000+09:00

1) Contributing to the Internet
"I have an original idea or some information that I want to share with others on the Internet."
The most noble kind of blog entry.

2) Responding to the Internet
"I see a web page that interests me, and I have an opinion about it, so I will publish my response."
It doesn't matter if the site in question is new or ten years old, because all time is now. The blogger has freedom to comment on all things from the broadest to the most trivial.

3)　Putting Personal Drivel on the Internet
"I have moods, listen to me whine while I tell you about the minute details of my humdrum day."
In the past, before the Internet, these writings would probably not have been shared with a large audience, but would instead have been hidden away in a diary or personal letter. Now, you can read about the roller-coaster emotions of complete strangers. This is a huge change in the social geography of our times. What will it mean?

Perhaps we're headed for a widespread loss of privacy. I often think it would be dangerous to maintain a blog if I had a stalker. How would I code my entries so that my friends and family would know what I was up to, and my stalker wouldn't? I don't delude myself that a stalker couldn't find out my page address without my help--I challenged an ex-boyfriend to do so, and he succeeded in less than 5 minutes. Would it be better to just leave things out, or write them in an ambiguous way? Or what if I needed to prove that I was really myself by knowing something only I would know (a situation that I'm sure occurs more often on TV than in real life) and this was impossible because everything secret and meaningful to me had already been blogged? Why am I willing to risk my privacy for the sake of self-expression?

Pronunciation Practice

2004-08-25T15:03:00.000+09:00

Sure, we English teachers think we have perfect pronunciation, but do we? The link is a list of frequently mispronounced English words. To practice eradicating bad pronunciation habits, I wrote the following story to be read aloud:

Last February, I went camping in the Arctic Circle. The campsite was comfortable, but I wanted an espresso. Patience is not my forte, so I asked around until I located an old coffeepot and a minuscule amount of ground coffee. I decided to practice my pronunciation as I watched it percolate. I probably mispronounce all of these words often. In the past I was insouciant, but now I would like to sound suitably cultured before my upcoming nuptials, or else my fiance’s family will lambaste me. The last time I went to his family’s house, they wanted to argue with me about the role of the electoral college. When I didn’t want to discuss it, they asked me embarrassing questions about menstruation. It made me nervous. They seem to have a plenitude of difficult topics to discuss with me.

Is your pronunciation perfect?

Note: Dictionary.com explains that while pronouncing forte as "for-tay" is technically incorrect, 74% of people polled prefer the two-syllable pronunciation. I agree with the majority vote on this one. The correct pronunciation ("fort") is dumb.

Black Vinegar Ice

2004-08-25T09:27:00.000+09:00

aisum_4000
Originally uploaded by moglet.

The name of this product is "Black Vinegar Healthy Ice." Unable to imagine such a flavor, I bought a box from Daimaru and hurried home to try one.
Along with the health food elixir black vinegar, it contains pineapple juice and lots of sugar, so the taste is not that bad, but it's not exactly what you expect to taste when biting into a popsicle. Sour and unexpected, the brown-sugared aftertaste reminds me of molasses.

More pictures of ice cream bars in Japan
here.

Return To Japan

2004-08-23T16:59:00.000+09:00

I returned to Japan yesterday. Outside is a torrential downpour, just like the rainy weather I experienced in China. I filled both of my memory cards with over 200 pictures on my trip.
On my second day in Hong Kong I went to a great museum - The Hong Kong Museum of History. I was totally fascinated.
The best bargains I got in China were a 12-disc DVD set of all Miyazaki movies for about US $20 and a new pair of glasses in Beijing for about the same price. Beijing is a great place to buy glasses. I took my broken ones in to be fixed there, but they just made me new ones. They had them ready the next day. I wore them on the overnight train rides when I didn't want to deal with my contacts, and they're fully as good as the expensive ones that broke. As for the Miyazaki movies, I was careful to buy Japanese DVDs that would work on my PlayStation 2, and when I checked one last night it did work.
Three weeks is a long time to be removed from ordinary life. I feel rather surreal resuming my old life as if nothing had happened. I saw China, I saw how big and desperate and poor it is, rich in culture but grimy and chaotic in contrast to Japan's pristine streets and impeccable manners. I don't want to be unchanged by the experience, but on a day-to-day level my routine is identical to the way it was before. I feel like I need to make some meaningful change to convince myself that what I learned matters.

Grotesque Imitation Japanese Food

2004-08-23T15:27:00.000+09:00

Nihon Fuumi
Originally uploaded by moglet.

Perhaps created by someone who had seen Japanese food once but never tasted it. This photo was taken at the night food market in Beijing, where a hundred stalls sold food of dubious edibility from every province in China. There WAS authentic Japanese food in China, but this wasn't it. The yellow brick in the center that looks like tamagoyaki is actually banana cake. The bright orange balls that look like uni sushi are actually hard, tasteless, artificially colored dumplings. The bamboo thing has coconut rice inside. To my knowledge Japanese cuisine never uses banana and coconut. The "leaves" are plastic.
Nihon Fuumi Close-up

Hong Kong

2004-08-20T19:56:00.000+09:00

Arrived in Hong Kong this morning. What a beautiful place--calm, modern, friendly, prosperous. I love the place names in Hong Kong; Kowloon, Nathan Road. I love looking at the bilingual street signs and trying to sound out how sets of two or three Chinese characters make the sounds of "Austin," "Kimberly," or "Parks." They DO make those sounds, magically. It's true what I've heard, that everyone speaks fluent English here. And as my Canadian friend Melanie found out, everyone says they're from Canada. Unless you hate crowds, you should definitely visit this great city.
China was SO censoring my blog, along with other Internet sites I was trying to access there. It's so stupid to censor the Internet. I couldn't see my own blog while I was in mainland China, but I can see it just fine in Hong Kong. Why were they hiding my own thoughts from me?
I found a large Japanese bookstore here. One of the English teachers at my school goes to Hong Kong every year. I can understand why.
I wish I had longer than 2 days in Hong Kong - and that I was here with someone special - and that I had lots of money here. I'll be back with all three of these wishes, someday.

Hiking in Longji

2004-08-19T17:22:00.000+09:00

After Shanghai, we took the train south to Guilin. I read in my guidebook that there is no old city of Guilin anymore since the Japanese destroyed it. No wonder they seemed a little hostile to foreigners. Actually people just stared at us coldly wherever we went. I'm normally oblivious to the "People are staring at me!!!" complaint that afflicts some travelers in Asia, but in this case even I was observant enough to notice the calculating, mean stare we got from the men on the streets as we walked around. They would not break their stare, even when we stared back.
After a night in Guilin, the outdoor adventure part of our trip began. Steve hired a local guide for a few days, codenamed "Daisy," who was super nice. Daisy led us up and down the gorgeous rice terraces of Longji in the countryside not far from Guilin. This area is home to the Yao and Zhuang minorities. We stayed in a Zhuang village, which was awesome. You had to climb a lot of stone steps to get to the guesthouse. It rained the next day, so our planned 6-hour hike in the terraced mountains became a mere 2-1/2 hours. It was treacherous to find my footing in the rain, since the stone steps were steep, slippery and muddy. Near the beginning of the hike, we were told to take off our shoes to wade across the river, and it just took off from there with more fun stuff in the pouring rain. One guy's shoes went floating down the river, but luckily they were saved. I scraped my hand on my umbrella and bled. But as you can see, I survived this unaccustomed brush with outdoorsiness. And the scenery at the top was incredible.

Longji
Originally uploaded by moglet.

Right: The terraced rice paddies of Longji on a rainy day. Find the butterfly.

You can see how steep the rice terraces are. At the top, Daisy told us that no water buffalo will live this high up, so farmers were forced to use their women as plow animals. This was so shocking it somewhat tarnished the view.
The kids here had computers to play with, and it looked like the tourist industry was putting lots of new money into the village. We were shown the old buildings, but the villagers have already started living in new buildings bought with tourist money.
Next door was the Yao village, which is called the "Long Hair" village because the women grow their hair down to the floor and wrap it up in a turban during the day along with pieces from their mothers' and grandmothers' hair. To see one of them comb out her hair, we had to pay one yuan each. Another unusual thing we saw in this village was hair-handled baskets. They were big baskets for carrying on the back and the straps were made of braided (apparently) human hair. Imagine if I took one of these on the subway to work in Japan...
In the traditional village, the people lived on the second floor and the animals lived on the first floor. Melanie and I discussed the question of how weird it would be to hear animal sounds all the time in your house, because the pigs, especially, were quite noisy, when we were shown to our room in the guesthouse and guess what, there were pigs on the other side of the wall to our bedroom. So we got to experience that for ourselves. Lots of other farm animals everywhere, notably free-range chickens pecking around with their chicks. Nice to see after I've read so much about the cruelty of keeping chickens penned in crowded dirty conditions like we do in the U.S., but I didn't enjoy seeing a pig slaughtered as I was walking around one evening. Also, as we were getting back from our hike, we saw a cute little girl of about 5 or 6, but before we could exclaim over how cute she was we saw that she had a bloody meat cleaver in her hand. Daisy told us that she must have just killed a chicken. As if it were nothing for first-graders to carry bloody knives around. In this world, I guess it isn't.
The next few days were full of more hiking, biking and outdoorsy stuff. Daisy led us on a long bike ride to her village in Yangshuo, our next destination, and we split up to either go to a mud cave or climb Moon Hill. I wanted to go to a cave, but this one is a dark river of mud in a cave, and you go down a huge mud slide and get completely covered in mud, mud up to your armpits, and you might get hurt or die in there if your flashlight goes out and you lose your way. The advertisements boast: "The best mud in the world." No thanks. I really got muddy enough in Longji. So I climbed the top of Moon Hill instead. It was so beautiful and calm at the top. I felt great.

Yangshuo scenery

The scenery around Guilin and Yangshuo is famous throughout China for the striking limestone peaks that grace the landscape. Since it's summer now, everything is green and lush, more beautiful than the pictures of the area I've seen in any other season. You can see people rafting along the green rivers and working in the rice fields, children playing with bamboo waterguns, brightly colored flowers and red-bodied dragonflies. The air is clean and misty, the weather warm and rainy.
I'm in Yangshuo still, and we're leaving for Hong Kong tonight. Yangshuo is a destination I would recommend for backpackers, since there is a lot of cool caving and hiking you can do from here, although the social vibe still seems a bit harsh compared to the friendliness of Thailand and Japan,and the coffee and food here has been disappointing. I would have gone to the Black Dragon Cave today, which I hear has no mud, but unfortunately I'm sick today. Everyone has been getting sick all week. If it's not one thing, it's another, and two of our group had food poisoning so bad they had to call a doctor. We got back from our cooking class and found them in bed with an IV drip hung up on a stepladder with a Chinese doctor sitting by their beds. Fortunately, they are well enough to travel tonight.

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