The Fear

For a while there's been a big hoo-hah about a plan to introduce government ID cards that will be mandatory for all UK citizens. As it stands now, UK nationals are not required to carry any ID while just walking around in public.
Although there is no federal law in the US requiring people to produce ID on demand from police officers, there are a variety of statutes authorizing police to hold, detain or arrest individuals for failing to identify themselves on demand. Now, whether or not that goes beyond just giving one's name and address is not entirely clear to me. But the general rule is that in the United States the police do have the power to stop and search anyone at any time provided they can offer a reasonable justification to do so. While I think that agreeing to be searched, especially while at the business end of a gun or baton, seems like a ridiculous way to help keep streets safe, it would technically be at the request of an officer. And at least one state I know of specifically says that refusing to assist an officer is a crime.
All of which is to say that while you're not technically required to carry documents that support your claims of who you are while in the US, it is easily within the powers of an officer of the peace to make things rather unpleasant for you at any given time should you not produce those documents upon request.
I don't suppose that I should be too surprised, then, by the steps taken in the UK to start requiring non-UK citizens to carry ID. Not to over dramatize things, but I suspect that the rise in interest in keeping track of who's going where and when isn't going to subside any time soon. And this current shot is aimed at, surprise surprise, foreigners.
Should I be upset that, as an outside-type-person, I'd be required to carry id at all times in the UK? I guess that abiding by the laws of the land I choose to enter, as opposed to the one I'm born in, leaves me little ground for dissent. But I can't say I'm particularly pleased at the prospect of
1) toting around a card with detailed biometric information about me that seems to be easily hackable,
2) being made vulnerable to arrest and deportation simply for not carrying a card
3) being marked as separate from any other "law-abiding" person simply for being born somewhere else.
But then, I guess there are a lot of things that don't particularly please me...

National appeal. Or Emma Peel. Whatever.

I know I've said it a bunch of times before, but Japan was a crazy-wack-cartoon-opera of a country. It was absurd and dignified and too often surreal to be as bad as it seemed. There were so many things about that place that were just unimaginable in an American context that it was easy to find something fascinating. Sport as art? Check. Writing as spiritual exercise? Got it. Mutant-grasshopper-cyborg as cultural hero? Of course, haven't you been paying attention?

Somehow I expected to stumble into something like that in England. Some sort of British cultural item that would be fascinating and endearing and would give me a entry point from which to start getting into life here. Maybe not anything as immediately satisfying as, say, Sapporo-style ramen, but something, right? I mean, besides cricket. Which seems to be something that England can't really claim as a specialty anymore anyway...

Words

I am, at this very moment, supposed to be writing a short story for this M.A. course. But I don't have a single idea that seems worth a damn. It seemed like an ideal opportunity to raid the old journal I used to keep when I first got to Japan but I got distracted by what may have been a most prophetic comment by one of my colleagues from Fukui:

"You've outlived your uselessness. Now get back to work."
-D. Rosenfeld

Damn. He may have been right...

A little bit of that dough-ray-me

A while ago I tried making my own bread. I think it came out all right. The crust was a little thick, but tasted all right, if I do say so myself.

Next baking task: challah!

Compromise

One of the things that seems to be in the British media kind of a lot lately is stuff concerned with managing the impact of human life on the ecosystem. Stuff like reducing your carbon footprint or cutting back on the distance your food has to travel from source to stomach. So there's a sense that everyone is expected to sorta pitch in and do their part. Which may be some sort of green descendant of Britain's WWII spirit.

Being a civic-minded chap, I figured to do my part too. Last night when I saw a spider the size of a nine-volt battery hanging out near the sink in the bathroom, I thought "great, he can live in here and eat bugs."

It wasn't until I was going to bed that I realized that I was going to try and sleep in a poorly sealed room with a spider the size of a nine-volt battery roaming around, probably looking for somewhere warm to bunk.

Ecolomologism sucks sometimes.

Do it yourself

Tried something new this morning: making my own bread. Modified a recipe I found on the internet, and had a bit of trouble converting the instructions and quantities to metric. Turns out you can't reliably convert a volume measure like cups of flour to milliliters of flour. Even if you find a volume-weight conversion, the type of flour will vary, and that'll throw off the conversion.

Anyway, the dough is rising now. I'm going to punch it down and see if the yeast has got backbone enough to try rising again. I'll let you know how it turns out.

-Loafing in London

Funny, right?

So, like, a couple of years ago I went to Japan. And I met this great girl there.

But then she went to England.

Then, later, I went to England.

Now she's gone to Japan.

Okay, only for a couple of weeks. But still, c'mon.

Inconvenience Store

I've been here long enough to need to go grocery shopping. C'mon, I can't eat highly corrosive fish and chips all the time. And while food shopping here isn't as difficult as in Japan, I'm still having some trouble. Yes, there's the ever-present 'ou'-flavor. As in "Beef-flavoured tea" or "damson flavour jam." And yes, there is still some confusion as to what exactly is the need for two sets of names for things like eggplants, zucchini or fried-blood-scab-sausage. But the thing that may cause me the most trouble is the fact that I can't always actually attempt the act of purchasing food.

Stores here tend to close around 5:00 PM. Like, every single weekday. Some of the more radical ones stay open 'til 6. You want something after that? Hard cheese, old chap. You'll just have to wait until Sunday. Between the hours of 11 and 4. Maybe. And if you've happened to wind up needing, say, food, well, you'd best head to the pub. Yeah. After hours in this part of London your only options for food at the late hour of 7:20 are a pub, a bar that serves food, or a 40 minute train trip into London where you'll be able to find something at, er, a pub. Or maybe one of those chi-chi restaurants where the chef has his own TV special and a plate of artistically arranged pasta will set you back $37 plus tip.

And there is no such thing as a Kwik-E-Mart.

Oh, you can go to a "Food Shoppe" on a "motorway." Assuming you have a car and about forty minutes to drive to get to a place that sells microwave wraps, diet cola and little tiny baggies of salt and vinegar chips.

Which they will insist on calling "crisps."

I wonder how long it's going to be until I resort to some other way to get a meal here...

Second Language

British1 English words learned in the last three weeks:

ice lolly - noun, Popsicle
khazi (ka zi) - noun, toilet
Pelican crossing - noun, a crosswalk with pedestrian controlled signals across the street. Not to be confused with a puffin crossing
Puffin crossing - noun, noun, a crosswalk with pedestrian controlled signals on the same side of the street. Not to be confused with a Toucan crossing
rock up - verb, to arrive (note: considered dated by under-25s)
slapper - noun, a promiscuous woman. See also slag.
toad in the hole - noun, sausages cooked in batter, usually served with gravy and vegetables
Toucan crossing - noun, a crosswalk with pedestrian controlled signals, also for cyclist use. Not to be confused with the now obsolete Panda Crossing.

1. I am aware that khazi is a British adoption of a foreign word. I am also aware that your average Brit is more than likely to claim that because it's spoken in the cradle of English language that it's a more valid English word than something like MILF, dingleberry, bling or aluminum.

How far is East?

It's been almost three months since I left Japan. From Tokyo, I went to Los Angeles for a week, and from there I went to Albuquerque. Try to imagine one of those Indiana Jones maps with the red lines on it to make this part a little more interesting. Anyway, after some rest, I continued more or less east on to England. Yeah. I'm living in England now. Pip pip. But being in this bastion of Western culture, I'm finding that there's a wholly different understanding of east and west here. It seems like for most people here, Asia is the part of the world that includes Pakistan, India, China, and uh, is Hong Kong part of...? Er, yeah, and China.

And that isn't to say those aren't Asian countries. But that's pretty much it, at least in terms of what affects most people's thinking here. That stuff about Korea? Primarily troublesome for people's mental rearranging of the "List of Countries That Can Nuke Something Besides TV Dinners." The recent coup in Thailand? Tack that on the "Places folks go on exotic vacations that I've always wanted to know more about someday" list. Laos or Cambodia? Same list. And Japan? That place I devoted the last five years to? "Oh yeah, I've eaten some of their food/seen a movie or dance from there/know a guy who went there and listened to his half-baked observations" list.

Which is to say that there is a whole world of stuff here that is considered "Asian" that I'm going to have to learn about. For instance, it's a little after sunset here and my otherwise quiet neighborhood sounds like an old west gunfight. It's fireworks being set off to mark the Hindu festival of Diwali. But that shouldn't be confused with the celebrations for the end of the fasts for Muslim holiday of Ramadan, which also took place tonight. It's just a coincidence that this year the first day of the tenth month in the Islamic calendar coincides with the end of the seventh month of the National Civil calendar of India.

And the recent Japanese holiday of 体育の日? Or about the upcoming 文化の日? Not even worth mentioning to people here. It's not really a part of what's been included in British international culture exchanges. East, but not Asia? Too-far East? Or is it so far away that I need to say it's Western Pacific?

What the hell, people?

I leave you alone for a week, and what do you do? Claim that the Patriot Act didn't go far enough and let a Senate committee pass a bill allowing even more wiretapping, surveillance and all around snooping on Americans.

Then the Attorney General claims that he needs ISPs to give up information on all their users to catch child pornographers. I'm sure that there's very few people who want to defend child pornography. But just between you and me, I've never actually met a child pornographer; I don't get around enough, maybe. And I suspect most producers of said materials aren't going to hand out business cards that say "Kiddie Porn." And most of them aren't going to fill in "Child Smut Producer" in the occupation section of any sort of questionnaire. And I'd be willing to bet that 99% of them would operate outside of a country that requires a law like 18 USC 2257. Incidentally, this law requires everyone the producers to get proof of id from anyone who is visible in a porn film, nude or otherwise, and keep it available for the attorney general of the US. Presumably so he can, y'know, check they're all 21 or something, and not just to cruise for names and phone numbers and stuff.

Now, in all fairness, this hasn't just been to make the DOJ look cool. As a matter of fact, just this month they arrested some guy for importing some rather nasty videos.

But they weren't child porn. They didn't even claim to be. It was just a bunch of adults who seem to have a thing for excretions that most people don't like. Now, does this bust make your life any worse? Probably not. But it does mark one more fringe group that has been separated from the herd and picked off at leisure. The main reason these guys got busted? Their product was "obscene."

You know the classic legal definition of obscenity, don't you? Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, when speaking of what could be considered pornographic, said "I know it when I see it."

That's all we have to go on: the opinion of a person who isn't even elected by the citizens of the country. And in this case, it's a person who was appointed over the objections of a great many people for his views on, among other things, who was and was not suitable for normal treatment as opposed to "special handling."

Sorry. I've gone on a bit long here. My point is this: the current administration has already clamped down on professors and teachers with politics and home countries they don't like, now they're going after people who like things in their bedrooms that this administration doesn't like.

What's to say you're not next?

Onwards and, er, overwards...

All right, as you may or may not know, I spent the last four and a half years in Japan. Really, about as good a place to be made to feel like an alien as any. Safe, clean, and brimming with societal norms that have no logical level of correlation with the norms I was raised with. Sure, "Sayonara, Robocop!" correlates one to one with "Goodbye, 8 Man!", but there's absolutely no correlation between the English "that'll be difficult" (this is where you bribe me) and the Japanese "that'll be difficult" (Are you stupid or just foreign? No.)

So it was an exercise in trying to adapt.

And I'm not done yet. This will be my last post from the US for a while. Next stop: Merry olde Eng-lande. I'll be trying to restart my official-type education there, so from now on, replace "outskirts of Tokyo" with "outskirts of London" and "Konichiwa, biatch" with "Cheerio, biatch."

New island.

New language.

Same old dumbass Datsun. See you in Soho, suckas!*



*Note: actual presence in Soho not guaranteed.

It's a Miracle...

The birth of a baby boy for the long-suffering Japanese imperial family means a couple of things, in my own humble opinion:
a) We can stop listening to jackass throwback neanderthals talk about the need to protect the throne from the enervating effect of women1,
b) We can listen to a bunch of people whose job it is to make noise about things make a lot of noise about how this will be the thing that inspires Japanese families to finally start having more kids to reverse the population decline,
c) An all-important return to the news that really matters: Killing kittens, the value of Pluto and which half of T&A is more naughty than the other2.

1. "I'm glad it's a boy," said Ryoji Inoue, 33, a salaryman interviewed at a subway station here. "I want the male succession to be maintained. That's because Japanese society is still led by men. I hope a couple of more boys will be born. The imperial law can be changed when we don't have any choice in the future."
- For Japanese, their prince has finally come, By Norimitsu Onishi The New York Times, September 6, 2006

2. "Our earlier request to cover the photo [of a naked, pregnant Britney Spears] from the waist down was because of nudity, not because we had anything against pregnant women," he said, adding that officials later decided that censoring the photo would be inappropriate. -Tatsuya Edakubo, Tokyo Metro spokesman
-Tokyo Subway to Display Naked Spears Ad, By MARI YAMAGUCHI, Aug 24, 2006 (AP)

Surprised?

Workers lose traction over past 10 years
Despite strong productivity growth, wages don't keep pace and fewer workers receive health and pension coverage.
By Jeanne Sahadi, CNNMoney.com senior writer
September 2 2006: 8:56 AM EDT

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Working for The Man may never have been an overpaid joy, but it has offered a decent way to make a living.
Yet it's become less decent, especially considering how strong productivity growth has been, according to findings from the 2006 edition of The State of Working America from the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal nonprofit research group.
Between 1995 and 2005, productivity -- a measure of the quantity and quality of what workers produce per hour -- grew 33.4 percent. But hourly wages rose only 11 percent, with almost all of that increase coming during the late 1990s, according to EPI.
Looking back even farther, the disparity is greater. Since 1979, productivity rose 67 percent, while wages rose only 8.9 percent.

So, if productivity, which is supposed to be a quantifiable measure of the value of work, is up one third but wages are only up about one tenth, where's the value of all that extra work going?

Hmmm.

This is a tough one.

Who could possibly have an answer?

The Bends

I thought that I could try and ease myself back into Western life. So I've been, except for a weekend in Austin, mostly staying home. Turns out that I'm in need of something like a hyperbaric chamber for the rest of the world. Small talk is still difficult, I'm having trouble catching the verbal and gestural cues that augment meaning, and I can't stand more than 30 minutes of commercial television. I mean, I used to be able to watch TV for hours on end. And now, well, let's just say some old or foreign commercials are more entertaining to me than the programming

2:49 AM and I don't feel like sleeping. 1:37 PM and I couldn't stay awake.

Let us just say that I may be trying to get back too quickly, and the change has carbonated my brain.

Y'all come back now, y'hear?

Been in Austin, Texas over the weekend.

Having a very good time.

Photos and comments later...

Fight Cavities: Aid Terrorism

Okay, so some people (who we're not being allowed to see,) were apparently foiled in their plot to blow up multiple airplanes (which flights/airlines we're not being allowed to hear) using some sort of liquid explosives.

So now US travelers are not being allowed to bring any liquids, gels, pastes or non-Newtonian fluids onboard.


With the exceptions of prescription medication, baby food and breast milk.

The toddlers in front of me got to keep their applesauce, but I had to throw away my toothpaste and deodorant.



Seriously: gel deodorant = bad, breast milk = okay.

Like Malaria, I figure...

I get the feeling that it's going to take me quite a while to get Japan out of my system, and that it'll probably never be gone completely. I'll be minding my own business when suddenly I'll get all dizzy and feverish under a wave of nostalgia for getting a hot towel served with my beer or having a room full of kids repeating after me "vampires want blood." The last week was a struggle (that I usually failed in) to not start every sentence with "in Japan..."

Sorry, y'all, but that's pretty much all I've got in the way of personal experiences for the last couple of years. So while I try and accrue some new material, I'll be working through a backlog of stuff that I meant to post but never got around to. And hopefully, at some point in the near future, I'll be able to talk about something else.

Like maybe my long-rumored-but-as-yet-unsubstantiated plans to go back to school...

(Did that do anything in the way of building suspense? C'mon, tune in next time.)

The Dork Who Fell To Earth

Been back in the US for three days, maybe. The jet-lag is making it a little tough to tell. I suppose I should be appreciative of that garrulous old jerk who helped me stay awake for most of the flight by rambling on and on and on about his travels, opinions on LAX, family problems, plans to sell his house and dealing with hagglers. Whether I was reading, eating, writing a letter or listening to headphones, he very kindly kept me from falling asleep. Or reading, eating writing a letter or listening to headphones in peace.

Anyway, now that I'm back in the US, I'm having a little trouble. Maybe I should have been prepared for some of what's hit me lately. I mean, between what the Grade School Role Model wrote down, what Esporion told me, and what my Dad laughed about from his own experiences, these sensations shouldn't have come as such a shock. But here I am, and they are somewhat shocking. Nothing here looks much like what I've become used to seeing. Nothing anyone has to say makes much sense to me, unless they're referencing something five years old.

This is going to be... unsettling.

I'm in trouble...

Leave aside the fact that I've got about 50 hours until I'm supposed to have all my stuff packed up, all but 30 kilograms of it shipped and my apartment cleared out so I can get on a plane. I'm going to have to try and shake 52 months of being able to do and say almost anything I wanted to in public. Generally, most folks here didn't have high enough listening skills to follow my speaking speed and enough vocabulary to follow the content. Especially when I got off on rants about miscegenation being one of the only acceptable options for introducing non-Yamato protagonists into domestic graphic narratives (alluding to the tendency for foreign-type characters in Japanese comics and games to be given some Japanese ancestry as a way of making them more palatable for local audiences.) But apart from obtuseness of topic, I could usually talk about whatever the hell I felt like most of the time; even if people understood, I wasn't expected to follow those arbitrary rules of society that make it okay to talk in a cafe about the societal problems of bulimia, but not to talk about vomiting all over a valet parking sign in Las Vegas.


But I'm going to have to give up that sort of freedom, since people will no longer just dismiss my antics as those of "just another abnormal foreigner." Once I'm back in America I'm going to have to try and re-learn how to live in a society that could need a guide for How to Laugh Naturally on Cue.

Really, are you people serious? Some western people, probably Americans, put this together, and now you expect me to live in a place where there's a need for instructions like this?

3. Pay attention to your surroundings so you can judge when it is appropriate to laugh. When people are jovial and smiling, it's probably a good time to laugh. But when people are being serious or somber, it's not a good idea. If you see everyone else laughing, join the party and start laughing yourself! Even if you don't know exactly why you're laughing, you can call on whatever you thought of in Step 1 and feel like part of the crowd.

This ain't going to be easy...

I'm so short, I could parachute off of a dime

I've got one week left. And following the principal's request, I still haven't told any of the students and most of the teachers that I'm not coming back after summer vacation. But tomorrow is the 1st semester closing ceremony, and I'm supposed to break the news to everyone tomorrow.

So now the question arises: how much do I tell them? The truth is usually best, but it's also not often convenient. And I would like to leave at an intersection of the civil/respectful curve and the avoiding-unneeded-pointless-blather curve that has high values for both.

Just a thought.

Evidence of... Intelligent life? On Earth?

All right, this is another train of thought thing. But it struck me as interesting. In trying to write that last post about the test translations, I had to find a page explaining what a "Somebody Else's Problem Field" was. And since from even back before the old days of Hypercard on the Macintosh SE, it was considered cool to connect ideas with little clickable buttons, most of the pages had connections to other related topics. Like Bystander Effect, the Milgram experiments, mimicry (both biological and social), the Stanford Prison Experiment and groupthink.

But one of them had a rather odd phrase which I had never heard before: “incestuous amplification.” It seems to refer to the part of group thinking in which most people in the group tend to acknowledge only that information which reinforces the mutually accepted positions or beliefs, then continue in supporting those positions/beliefs based on all the supporting information they've got.

But what struck me during my search for a definition was that it was used in a discussion on a blog written by a "liberal Quaker" and publisher. Since I really don't eat much oatmeal these days, Quakers really don't cross my mind so often. But this page had some surprisingly thoughtful posts, including a couple on dressing plainly.

Although I had some vague notions about why the Amish dressed that way, I was unaware that practicing Quakers had rules about dress. And the way some people were thinking about those rules was really surprising.

No, let me be honest. The very fact of that thought surprised me. It never occurred to me that Mormons on the road would question their outfits. Or that Catholics would have any serious discussions about coordinating the outfits. But here were a group of people putting serious thought and discussion into what was essentially a tenet of their faith. They were actually grappling with the issues, and not just claiming that prayer would solve it all and continuing to do whatever they felt like.

It came as a bit of a shock to me. I've long known that I had some preconceptions about practicing religious types. But now I'm going to either going to have to re-evaluate my prejudices, or else be more specific when I start in with the slurs and epithets, which could take some of the sting out of them.

"Man! That's exactly the sort of thoughtless dogma I'd expect from one of you!
... except for the theologically inquisitive Quakers, Orthodox Jews and Jesuit-trained scientists."

Testing, among other things, my patience

It's time for the last big exams of the semester before summer vacation. I'm sure you remember what it was like from the student side of things. But what never really crossed my mind was that on the teacher side, quite apart from the drudgery of grading however many dozens of tests, there was still a need to actually make the damn things. I mean, someone actually has to sit down and type in an essay with all the place names blanked out. Or compile a list of vocabulary for the class, and then choose then 10 most important (or arbitrary) terms. Or copy pictures of music scores, compound microscopes, dymaxion projections of the earth or that picture of the old Greek dudes hanging out after classes, and then make up questions about them. I realize now that it's not a particularly easy task. But it is done to try and accurately assess the degree to which the students have learned, retained, guessed at or copied from someone else the material covered in class. The point, as near as I can tell, is to check what they know.

Which is where my student from Ghana runs into some trouble.

Given that she is learning Japanese on the fly here, she is in the situation of being able to understand more than she can express. Usually it's easier to learn how to listen and read more quickly than how to speak and write well, especially in a foreign language. Which means she can't fully express what she knows. At least, not without a translated edition of the tests. Which is more or less where I come in. Her homeroom teacher (who also teaches English) and I have been translating the midterm tests for her.

Now, I can understand most of the teachers who have classes with this kid not making much extra effort to help her. Most of them speak no English and have no training in second-language education. For them, there's almost no precedent for having a student who can't understand their language. Or sure, they know tons about students who just don't understand their explanations, diagrams or need for classroom discipline. But most of them will erect a Someone Else's Problem field around her and get on with their days. And honestly, they don't have to give a damn about her in class. It really doesn't affect them if she fails or not, generally she is very well behaved so there's no discipline problems, and anyway she's all foreign and stuff.

But I'd have thought they'd give a crap about their coworker, her homeroom/English teacher. Since she's the one who has to translate the tests into English, and that she began asking them for copies of the exams around three weeks ago, when they put off finishing their tests until, say, 8:15 PM on the night before exam day, their behavior is really saying "whether you stay up all night translating or she can't understand the test doesn't matter to me one iota."

Of course, since I'm the one who helps the English teacher with the translations, you'd think I would be included in that blow-off. But my work hours really don't matter to them so much. And anyway, it's not that big a deal. First off, these tests only happen twice a semester, so naturally anyone who is inconvenienced can just take one for the team. And besides, I don't really need to be taken into account anyway. 'Cause I'm all foreign and stuff.

And now, a moment of silence...

I think, since we seem to live in an age where every act that is even moderately lamentable seems to merit a memorial, we should institute a new one to be celebrated on July 4th. We can all gather around and celebrate the memory of whatever freedom or constitutional protection we seem to have lost, sacrificed or given away out of pure stupidity in America in the last year.
There could be a short speech from someone on, say, the freedom from unauthorized search and seizure. Then a video montage of people looking the other way while state and federal judges piss all over the constitution, followed by a weenie roast and fingerprint/retinal scan party.
We could even call it Independence Memorial Day, in honor of what we so quickly and proudly sacrificed in exchange for the privilege of living in a star-spangled police state.

We can still be friends though.

"This is it Japan. We're finished. I'm leaving you. I thought I could learn to deal with all of it, with you. But we're just too different. The odd hours, the incessant demands on my time, the limits on what I could and couldn't do with you, all the rituals you insisted on introducing in everything we did just to protect your "wa." Why didn't you just come out and admit you stole that from Cuba Gooding Jr.'s bit about the 'Kwan' in Jerry McGuire, anyway?"
"Look, Japan, we're just moving in two different directions. Let's just try and end this civilly, all right? We're paid up through the end of the month, so let's just go out separate ways at the end of July."
"Besides, you'll meet someone else. You're a great country, and there's loads of people who are looking for someone like you. Well, just not this person. Not anymore. Japan, But after July 26th, well, let's just say we'll both have some looking around to do."
"I'm sorry, Japan. It's not me. It's you."

Talk to a Cubs fan sometime...

Last night the Japanese soccer team took the field for the last time in the 2006 World Cup. Although they successfully advanced in 2002, they drew a much harder group this time. And, somewhat predictably, took a 1-4 spanking from Brazil to finish with two losses and a draw.

Japan is not known for being a sports powerhouse. Oh, sure, the competitive eating circuit is a bunch of fat guys from America's eastern seaboard praying that a tiny woman will finally be able to challenge the unstoppable Japanese five year champ and bring the gluttony title back to the USA. And their women's' wrestling team slammed the crap out of the US on the way to winning their second consecutive world championship. Oh yeah. And there was that baseball thing, wasn't there?

Let's be frank. With the exceptions of Judo, which I'm told they invented, and Women's' Wrestling, which I understand was created on the magical island of Themyscira, Japan has shown its international prowess in primarily American pastimes. Really, was anyone thinking that the Netherlands was holding all its best second basemen out of the majors as an issue of national pride? And is there any other nation on earth that can boast so many people who have enough to eat that they can compete in eating too much?

All of which is to say that it wasn't terribly surprising that Japan's heart-breakingly sincere supporters had their honest hopes of a three-goal victory over Brazil dashed. But what did surprise me was that the recurrent theme on all of this morning's news programs went something like this:

"Just wait 'til 2010."

Japan's coach, Zico, is not sticking around for four years. I'm pretty sure he's going back to Japan just to pick up his already packed luggage. There's no telling how many of the players are going to be in any shape to play again. Really, between now and then, almost anything can happen. But I guess that's what fandom is. "Just wait 'til next time."

Recently

Okay, so a little over a week ago, one of my old friends from New Mexico came to visit. It took a while to get my place, well, not exactly tidy, but cleared out enough to allow a second human-sized form to enter. And after that I sort of had to get back into my routine of working. Which is why I haven't posted anything in a while. But I'll try and get some of the highlights of the trip listed here.

Incidentally, the next two or three days are going to be set aside for the city junior high schools to have tournaments in just about everything. The kids will be competing in soccer, baseball, judo, table tennis, kendo, something called "soft-ball tennis", basketball and track and field. Naturally, after three months of practice they're all quite excited to finally compete.

I, however, have been spared the difficulty of choosing which teams to watch and cheer for. I'll be giving speaking tests to all 271 of the first year students.

One. By. One.


I don't know if you can believe it, but somehow the kids aren't nearly as excited at the prospect of a foreign language test.

I should have paid more attention at the racetrack...

For most of the last week I have been dog tired. Largely due to the annual sports festival held by most schools in Japan. Yeah. I'm so far out of shape that a 100 meter sprint and two hours of hauling field equipment in the rain tired me out. I know, some exercise is in order.

But I also have not been sleeping so much each night. For the last couple weeks I've been averaging about 4.5~5 hours of sleep most weeknights, with a 20 minute nap around mid-afternoon. Is it good for me? Depends on what you mean. Since I have to eat the school lunches every day, I'm probably getting a better diet in terms of nutrition than I've had since I left home. So I'm not so concerned about getting sick. And apart from the odd sports festival, my job is not so physically demanding. The problem is that it's not always so mentally demanding either.

Sometimes it's a struggle to stay focused on the job when it's just a matter of waiting to see what example sentence you'll be asked to repeat next. And since a huge part of my job is providing vocal models and then waiting for the head teacher to shout "repeat" at the kids, I have rather a lot of waiting to do. In an average 45 minute class I might spend 6 or 7 minutes enunciating and the rest of the time trying to keep the kids on the same page. Like, actually clarifying the teacher's Japanese instructions to turn to page 18.

Seriously, the teacher will say, in these kids' native language: "open your textbooks to page 18." It's not in English or German or pig latin, and he doesn't use some ceremonial, anachronistic sentence structures.

"Pray, openne thy volumes of the tongues of the islande kingdom of Albion, and allow thy gaze to rest uponne the leaf numbered with the eighteenth ordinal indicating the place in sequence."

But for some reason, there will always be five or six students blinking dimly around at their peers, trying in vain to understand the meaning of "textbook." It didn't seem to me that a visual aid for something like that would be needed, but sure enough, not only do I have to demonstrate opening the book, there's actually a diagram of how to do it in their textbook.

But the relative dimness of some kids isn't the tangent I wanted to lead you on. My point is that after three years, I've become pretty familiar with my job, and it doesn't always keep me interested. But being really tired makes it a lot easier. If my mind is only running at, say, 60% capacity, it becomes much harder to get lost in a really interesting thought. Mainly because it's a lot harder to think of anything really interesting when I'm that tired.

But last night I got a full 6 hours of sleep. It's like someone turned up the power on all the inputs: colors are sharper and have more contrast, I can hear and discern more sounds, my mosquito bites are itchier and I can feel the difference between the cotton of my t-shirt and the cotton of the shirt I've got on over it where it changes on my upper arm. Smells, tastes, the whole shebang. And it has been a trial keeping on task in class. When one student starts drifting off, it's obvious from his body language. When another stops taking notes and starts writing letters to her friends, I can hear the difference in the speed and rhythm of the scratching sounds her pen makes. And even while all this is going on, underneath it my train of thought has turned into a freaking subway system. It's easy to get lost in all of that, and miss the cue to repeat the dialogue for the sixth time that day. Or was it the seventh?

Which is why I guess I've sort of been handicapping myself. In order to make sure I'm applying myself to the mundane stuff, I've been preventing my mind from being able to wander so effectively or so far out of the bounds of work...

Wait. Did I just admit to sabotaging myself in order to be able to work more efficiently?

Cultural asset?

One of the things that is contractually a part of my job is to act as a person who can "help introduce students to foreign cultures." It's a nice little bit of lip service that got slugged into the ALT job description, and usually takes the form of explaining things like why people don't take their shoes off in a western home, or comparing notes on whatever Hollywood/MTV exports have become popular here. Occasionally we'll be asked to explain a non-Japanese holiday. Usually Halloween. Sometimes Thanksgiving.

But now I've been asked to assist in teaching a class on discrimination. A common image of Japan is that it is generally homogeneous, monolingual and monocultural. Let's leave aside the question of whether the nation of Japan, which has the vast majority of its citizens identifying themselves ethnically as (Yamato) Japanese as opposed to Ainu, Ryukyuan, "Korean person in Japan" or general foreigner-type, can be defined as homogeneous or not. That's a level of definition I'm not competent to make or inclined to attempt.

What concerns me is that I'm going to have to try and explain the concepts of discrimination and tolerance to a group with no real sense of the existence of "others" in their society or even as human beings like themselves. It'll be difficult partially because the students are 15 years old. No one has a whole lot of ability to think outside of their own experience at that age. But it's also where they live, what they've experienced and what they're likely to experience that concerns me. They probably won't have any sort of first hand experience with anything like this until well into their adulthood, if at all. It sounds like a very nice plan to teach them about discrimination, but without finding a way to get them to internalize the ideas, it'll wind up leaving them with a false sense that they understand the situation and therefore don't have to be concerned with it.

Hell. Maybe I'm thinking about it too much. But the odds are good that Japan as a nation is going to need to have more foreigners trying to immigrate in the future, and these kids will have to deal with it.

Train of thought now boarding...

During one of my free periods today, one of the newer Japanese teachers of English asked me if the students should call her "Miss" or "Ms." A reasonable question, deserving of a properly considered answer, I figured. Given that my understanding of things has been shown to be incorrect/unpopular/anachronistic in the past, I figured a little research into modern, popular opinion was in order. Which lead me to these links from the Guardian on-line. Incidentally, I was entirely unaware of the weight these terms seem to carry in old Blighty.

Anyway, my curiosity piqued, I started looking for other information about titles and gender, which lead me to a couple of abstracts concerning Congruence between a theoretical continuum of masculinity and the Rasch model. Which introduced me to the CMNI, a sort of 12 point manliness checklist. Honestly, I had no idea there was so much interest in quantifying crap like that. Then again, I'm not a social scientist and really don't get into those "What popular series/character/personal trait describes you?" quizzes so much anymore.

But that somehow led me to look up the geek hierarchy. Which naturally led to this discussion of how Lucy and Ricky wound up associating with Fred and Ethel in the first place...

See, this is more or less what it's like in my head all the time. Start off thinking about grammar, wind up wondering about what would have happened if the CIA had succeeded in removing Castro's beard.

As long as we're talking about photos

Behold! The 1st place winner of the National Press Photographers Association: Best of Photojournalism 2006 - Conceptual Photographic Illustration: Hot Mama of Invention

Those pesky Americans...

It seems that there's yet another field that American imperialism has made enemies in.

Seriously, is there anything a corporation (nominally based in) America can do internationally without stepping on someone's toes/unfairly exploiting a regional resource/poisoning the locals?

Frequently Asked Question

It's fairly common in Japanese to initiate or advance conversation by remarking on a patently obvious fact. It's not too different from the British prattling on about the weather or Canadians blathering away about liberal dope laws and healthcare for all. But personal comments are fair game in Japan, assuming they are clearly obvious. I can't count the number of times I've heard people who weren't talking to me start a conversation with each other by saying something (about me) to the effect of

"Tall!"
"Seriously! He is tall!"
"How tall do you think he is?"
"I dunno. But he's tall."
"Isn't he, though? Tall..."

And so on and so on. Younger people, larger groups and drunks tend to be more likely to start commenting abut a stranger in audible voices.
But even people who've known you for a while will comment on things that may seem obvious or even insulting, just because they're trying to start a conversation. The most flagrant comment is the one about chopsticks. Admittedly, Japan has something like a 1000 year lead over western societies in using chopsticks as they're known today, but given that there have been crazy foreigners trying to learn how to live in Japan for at least 400 years, it doesn't seem so outlandish to me that some of them might have learned how to eat with chopsticks. I mean, no one I've ever spoken to has been impressed with a Japanese person's fork or spoon skills.
But again and again and again, all of us non-natives types eventually get asked: "Can you use chopsticks?" It's usually asked after observing someone successfully eating with chopsticks. But of all the replies I've ever heard, my friend Jort may have come up with the best one:

"No I can't. I try every day, but I still haven't been able to eat anything."

A sense of perspective

This week is the first mid-term test of the year. (One more time: the school year starts in April here.) And I got to see the exam contents for the first year students. They'll be tested on their mastery of the following:

• The Alphabet (upper and lower case)
  
• Writing their own names in English
  
• Basic classroom commands (stand up, sit down, raise your hand)
  
• "Hello, my name is [your name here]. Nice to meet you."
  

My first thought was that given the kids have had about one month, that's not much at all. But then it occurred to me that they have to memorize 52 distinct symbols¹ and 10 sentences in a foreign language. Is that too much for a 12 year old kid? Particularly one who's been spoon-fed most of the answers for the previous six years of school?

---

1. I am aware that O, S, V, W, X and Z have the same shape in upper and lower case, but the kids are required to learn the relative sizes to differentiate upper and lower case.

How much assistance?

One of the rather sneaky things that was included in my contract was a clause alluding to "assisting the school with various activities, as they relate to student life and may reflect on yourself and the employer." Now, generally that only means things like eating lunch with the kids, going to one of the school club activities and trying to take part, or helping with checking papers and recording dialogues for the listening tests. The general idea is that since we're Assistant Language Teachers, we ought to assist. Seems fair enough.

But the school I work at his recently had a rather large number of foreign students enrolled here: 3. All of whom have varying levels of Japanese. One of them is fluent. He's been here with his family since he was five or six, and can regularly be seen taunting the hell out of his classmates. Something about his ability to think in another language has made him quite clever in his insults, comebacks and heckling. And his spoken English is probably among the top three in his grade. But the other two have a harder time waiting for them.

One of them is from China, and relocated to Japan last December at the age of 15. Which left him about two months to prepare for the high school entrance exams. Now, if he doesn't pass an exam for one of the schools, his education will pretty much end there. Mandatory school attendance only goes up to age 15. Which would leave him with either trying to find a private school/tutor and studying independently for 3+ years to try and learn enough to pass a high school equivalence test so he could then apply for work/university application, or just giving up and dealing with being an unintelligible unemployable. Which isn't really what his parents wanted. Fortunately, the principal here shows a surprising amount of compassion and arranged, against the recommendation of the school board, for young Mr. Chen to re-take the third year of junior high so he can improve his Japanese to the point where he's got some chance of getting into high school.

The other has grown up in Ghana. She's not facing the same time crunch to learn the language, but is coming from an entirely different schooling background. And since one of her two languages is English, I am more aware of what problems she's looking at. For one, she hasn't had any sort of PC lessons. Most school children in Japan officially start learning how to use a computer sometime around the fourth or fifth year of elementary school. So by the time they get to junior high, they're pretty comfortable with searching for stuff on the internet, tracking down flash movies and games that they shouldn't be accessing at school, and wasting the better part of a class fooling around with the fancy text options in Word. For another, her English skills are pretty much going to stop at a 13-year old level. Her official education will never include any sort of advanced grammar, vocabulary or how to write an essay. She will undoubtedly learn how to write a report in Japanese. Japanese education is rife with reports. The kids are trained from an early age in the finer points of tracking down the most widely accepted facts, memorizing them, and presenting them again in a predesignated order. But there's precious little attention paid to using those facts to support any sort of position.
And as a contentious bastich, it worries me a bit that this kid won't get the training she needs to be able to argue well.

But as an ALT who is scheduled to be in 22 out of 24 possible classes every week, there is a clear limit to how much time I have to help her in. I am contractually obligated to be available for rudimentary English lessons. There's nothing that says I can take time to teach this kid how to organize a paragraph, support her thesis sentence, or even how to use a word processor. And the school system here is primarily concerned with making sure the maximum number of kids are as close to getting above the failure-point as they can. No one is every held back a year because of bad grades here. Everyone moves up, and keeps moving up until they reach a point where they can't pass the entrance exams.

Best case scenario: her Japanese improves enough to let her start passing her other classes, like history, science and math. Worst case: she falls through the cracks in Japanese, gets left at the back of the room and never called on, and is bumped up for the next two years, until she turns 15 and is no longer required to be a subject of and burden on the school system. And there's not much I can do to help.

Someone else in Japan

Not every foreigner living here spends their free time venting their spleens over politics and booze and their work. Some of them engage in other, presumably healthy pursuits. Like my buddy James, who enjoys photography.

Primarily of pretty, pink flowers, it seems.

Boo-yah.

My belly-laugh for the week was courtesy of:

Wondermark by David Malki! 155: In which a Dude is hit in the Nuts.

Golden Week

It's the second of this year's extended holidays in Japan. The first, in January, is the New Year Holiday. Today is the first day of the so-called "Golden Week." Today, May 3rd, is "Constitution Day," a holiday traditionally celebrated by the Dwarf character classes.
Friday is "Children's day." Formerly "Boys Day," the holiday was intended to celebrate familial hopes that their boys would grow up fine and strong, until it was decided that excluding the girls from the hopes of being fine and strong was unfair. On an unrelated note, the March 3 festival of Girls Day has not been expanded to allow boys the hopes of becoming a fine woman who can land a good husband.

Anyway, May 4 is my favorite of the holidays, "Declared Official Holiday." The government wisely realized that a five day weekend is way cooler than a three day work week where you have to come back in on Thursday.

Most Japanese people celebrate Golden Week by exploding from their homes and offices like locusts and jamming up the trains, freeways, airports, parks and shopping centers.

And me? I celebrated last night with sesame wings and beer. Tonight I'll celebrate with curry and beer. Guess what tomorrow holds. Go on. Guess.

Hint: It probably rhymes with "-and beer."

Trust me, I checked.

If you stay in the country where you were raised it's fairly easy to take some things for granted. Like being able to ask a person at the information desk for information. Or a knowing what to do with most of the vegetables you see in the market.

Or having proper mixers for your booze.

Oh yeah, it sounds like a joke. But what are you going to do when you most of your peers tell you that a great drink is one made of fermented sweet potato mash served cold with a salt-pickled plum mashed up in it?

I figured as much. So let me offer you a little tip. Pick up a the biggest bottle you can find of C C Lemon. Yes, it's a soft drink. A shockingly lemony soft drink, which claims to have enough vitamin C to fend off scurvy for a couple of weeks at sea. And its ad campaigns have generally tended to fall on the weird side.

But it is a suitable mixer for use with whiskey, vodka, sho-chu, and gin. And if you try it with tequila, with which it is delicious, be sure to refer to it as a "Si Si Uno Mas."

Unexpected

At the public school where I work a number of experienced teachers got transferred to other schools, and a number of other teachers were transferred in. One of whom is an English teacher. Which means I'm supposed to assist her in teaching English lessons. But last week we ran into some difficulty in getting one of the (somewhat dim) classes through one of the exercises. Sometimes a class will suffer what looks like a collective attack of nerves and even the capable students will freeze up. So I asked her if I could take over for a minute, distracted the kids with a little toilet humor, lobbed up a couple of softball questions to get them back, and then turned them back over to the main teacher.

Pretty simple stuff, really. But after the class, she said something that surprised me. It seems that this is her first year as a fully licensed teacher, and that she hadn't expected any assistant teachers to do that sort of thing. By which I mean "gauging the mood of the kids and adjusting the lesson accordingly." But that was enough to surprise her.

It looks like I may actually be good at my job. And not just in a strangle-the-troublemakers-and-draw-amusing-flashcards way. Imagine that. A six-foot-degenerate with a predilection for booze, sarcasm and offensive humor may be good with children. Har de har har.

This [is]land is my land...

Basically, Japan and Korea have been fighting over ownership of these islands ever since they developed boats sturdy enough to get to them. What was at stake for the first 300 years of the disagreement? Bragging rights, mainly. What's at stake now? Money, in the form of rights to control an area of the ocean thought to have rich fisheries and natural gas fields. And bragging rights.

For the record, these plugs of stone had been accurately mapped by Korea as early as 512 AD, and are approximately 90 km/56 miles from the Korean-inhabited island of Ullung. In contrast they are approximately 157 km/97 miles from the nearest Japanese-inhabited islands of Oki, and weren't formally recognized by any Japanese government until 1618. Now, it would seem logical that they belong to Korea by historical precedent. But I don't know how well that argument would carry in a world where the international organization dedicated to rule of law was formed in the aftermath of a punitive series of post-war treaties, spearheaded by a nation enriched from slave labor, built on land stolen from a number of nations that were essentially wiped out after a series of broken contracts and trades made with counterfeit currency.

Now, I don't normally advocate following anything found in the bible, but my initial instinct was just to suggest getting rid of the disputed islands, splitting the territory in two, and getting on with fighting about other, more interesting things. But that would be neither just nor reasonable.

Which leaves me with a couple of questions, none of which lead me towards answers I like:

• Who, after even a cursory look at the history of the islands, could possibly believe that Japan has a legitimate claim to control?
  
• Why would Japan's leaders be pushing for such an indefensible and inflammatory claim?
  
• Who stands to benefit?

"The decider?"

Bush defends Rumsfeld amid increasing criticism

The World Today - Wednesday, 19 April , 2006 12:30:00

"I have strong confidence in Donald Rumsfeld. I hear the voices and I read the front page, and I know the speculation, but I'm the decider and I decided what is best and what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the Secretary of Defense."

Hold on a minute. This idiot man-child who has mismanaged everything from the Texas Rangers to the reconstruction of a nation with a continual disregard for input from wiser heads has "decided what is best"?

This is hubris. Megalomanaical hubris.

My Spidey-sense is tingling...

Did someone call for a precipitous lurch towards nationalism?

LDP, New Komeito OK 'patriotism' definition

The Yomiuri Shimbun

The ruling coalition agreed Wednesday to a definition of patriotism to be included in a bill to revise the Fundamental Law of Education, which the government hopes to submit to the current session of the Diet, sources said.

The issue over how to define patriotism--aikokushin in Japanese--has attracted attention as the focal point of the law's revision.

The Liberal Democratic Party and New Komeito reached an agreement that would define patriotism as "a mind that respects tradition and culture, loves the nation and homeland that have fostered them," according to the sources.

Although the minority party member of the ruling bloc requested that "the nation" not be specifically referred to as the government that administrates to it, the final draft didn't seem to make that distinction.

Does anyone else feel the slightest twinge of anxiety when a bill is presented requiring teachers to instruct children so that they will "love the homeland that fostered them?"

Trash Day

Well, one of four trash days, actually. Today was the recyclables and non-burnables day. But the nylon mesh sack that's supposed to be for the "non-burnable, soft plastic" was missing from my apartment. So I went about 10 yards up the street to dump my stuff at the next drop off point. It was there I met one of my neighbors... who wanted to know if I was planning on putting my trash into her drop point.

Turns out that in addition to the ridiculously strict rules about how you're supposed to prepare your trash (you have to wash plastic before you throw it away, discarded cloth materials should be folded and/or cut into pieces no larger than 50 cm...) and when you're allowed to throw it away (designated days only, no more than 6 hours before the official pick-up time...) it turns out that you're limited as to where you can throw it away too. She went to great pains to explain that the garbage point I was so callously planning on using was reserved for the four houses at the end of the block. When I pointed out that my building no longer had the mesh sack for plastics, she proceeded to accost one of the other people who live in the neighborhood to ask his opinions on A) where the dividing line was for the trash point she was protecting, B) where I should be taking my trash, C) what might have happened to the mesh collection sack and D) what should be done next.

All told, it didn't take much more than five or six minutes to decide that I should just leave the bag in front of my assigned trash point and hope that the wind didn't scatter my washed, disposable, non-burnable plastic all over the neighborhood.

About an hour later, the trash guys came by and picked up all the plastics in the neighborhood and put them all in the same part of the back of the same truck.

What was accomplished? Not a damn thing, near as I can tell.


Seems to be a bit of a theme in my life lately...

Minimally Important News

Prehistoric Worm Droppings Found
AFP
April 14, 2006 — Swedish scientists have found half-billion-year-old droppings thought to be from an aquatic worm and hope the discovery will contribute to the understanding of prehistoric ecosystems, researchers announced on Wednesday.
"We have found fossilised excrement dating back 500 million years," Lund University researcher Fredrik Terfelt told AFP.

Seriously. This was really important to a bunch of people somewhere.

More on following instructions...

I took this picture a while ago, but in thinking about that last post, it came to me again in a different light.

To me, hot dog assembly seems like a pretty self-explanatory thing. But what about in a society that makes it a point to tell children how best to get in order to line up to go outside together for their class exercises done in unison? Maybe there's a serious fear for well meaning mothers that they'll be making hot dogs for their kids, and the kids will break down in anguished tears because they must be the only children in Japan with a mother so degenerate as to prepare them with barbecue sauce or chopped onions or something. What kind of pressure to conform are these people living under?
As a foreigner I'm pretty much expected to behave in an societally unacceptable way. C'mon, I wasn't lucky enough to have been born on the blessed island and at some point I'll be expected to leave because, well, I'm not Japanese. So I really have no idea how it feels for people who have grown up in this whale-bone corset of a society.

Don't Stand on Ceremony (addendum)

It occurs to me now that the most disastrous lesson activities I've run in Japan have been the ones that ask students to make up their own responses without first having seven or eight examples for them. From the first days of nursery school the kids are told what to do and when to do it so that they won't fall out of step with the rest of the class. Pretty much all of their education is presented in the following format:

1. Teacher explains task
2. Teacher demonstrates task
3. Teacher explains demonstration
4. Students mimic demonstration
5. Repeat until all blanks on worksheet are completed

Now that I think about it, maybe those ceremonies of repetition serve some purpose other than boring me senseless. Maybe it's like a reminder that things are still going according to plan and that everything is still under control.

Of course, I could be quite wrong. Maybe the point is to bore everyone into an easily controllable state of submission. You never know.

"go enryo naku shi-te kudasai"

It means something like "don't stand on ceremony; relax, be comfortable." In effect feel free to do what you'd like. Perhaps modern linguistic theory has moved on from the assumption that social tendencies are revealed in the language, but it's a damn tempting idea to hold in Japan.
I mention this because the school year ends in March here. So the last couple weeks have been a time to prepare for conclusions. And the sense of preparation is never omitted here. At the junior high where I work, the third year students had their graduation ceremony on Wednesday the 15th. (Mandatory education in Japan is only 9 years total. In theory, the junior high graduation could be their official entrance into adult life. Most kids choose to go on to high school for an additional three years of schooling, though.)
So to finish up the year we needed a final chorus festival, in which each of the homeroom classes, five classes for each of the three grades, performed both of the songs they'd been practicing during the third semester, a graduation ceremony, and an end-of-school-year ceremony. But before each of those ceremonies, there had to be a practice session to make sure than everyone knew how and where to enter and exit each of the venues. And each rehearsal took the better part of a morning.
Just to sum up, each ceremony, of which there were three, required a rehearsal for entering and exiting. And to top it off, each rehearsal was treated as a school-wide gathering, which means the protocol for organized seating by class and gender as well as opening and closing remarks by the head teacher must be observed.

Really, hearing "don't stand on ceremony" must be an immense relief.

Manufactured Nostalgia?

The Japanese school year starts in April and ends around mid March. So the current school year is just about over. And the schools are all in the middle of their end-of-year events. But at my junior high they'd scheduled a special song event. It seems that this school is really good at, and proud of, its skills in chorus-style singing. So last week was the school chorus contest. Each class in each grade sang two songs: one they could choose and one mandated by the head music teacher. Then they were graded on performance and conducting, and the best class from each grade was chosen.

Yep. Two songs times sixteen classes plus the 3rd year mixed choruses groups A and B equals 36 songs in a poorly ventilated town hall auditorium. But most shocking was the end of the day. After choosing the winning classes and the best student conductors, there was a photo-retrospective for the 3rd year students to remind them of all the good times they had over the years.

Followed by a video message from their teachers from the first or second years that had gone to other schools.

Followed by a skit by the underclassmen showing their appreciation.

Followed by an interview session with the teachers chosen most popular by the class and their comments on the third year students.

Followed by a final song with choreographed group dance performed by the entire 3rd year class.

Can you imagine that? Like in one of those made for Family Channel movies, the entire class ran up on stage and started singing and dancing along to some radio-friendly (Japanese) pop song in unison.

. . .

I'm glad these kids have a good enough school environment for them to enjoy so much about being students here. And I can't honestly begrudge them actually liking most of their teachers, the lucky little bastards. But I do have to wonder about what receiving so much ready-form memory-fodder does to their ability to process unscripted events.


Eh, maybe I just can't let go of my hatred over being forced to watch Grease.

Just... I mean... it's...

Go ahead. Try to deconstruct this and tell me where it leaves you.

I have chosen to live in a country that has some people who have, in the most literal sense of the word, profoundly weird hobbies.

The program title says it all...

So far, my favorite Japanese TV show is "Trivia no izumi," or "Fountain of Trivia." Each week they examine a little-known bit of information, and explain why it's true. Each of the points is researched in a painfully sincere manner. For example, this tidbit about the last Emperor of China, prompted an interview with a scholar of Chinese history and a trip to China to visit the imperial grave. All so they could announce with authority that the final meal of the Last Emperor of China was... instant ramen.

There's other entries worth bringing up, but this one was easiest to explain.

Sweet?

Apparently, this is a succesful way to sell chocolate in the UK.

It's just chocolate. What's so manly about that? There's no raw meat in it, no cutouts from a Snap-on Tools calendar, it doesn't even burst into flames.

Whatever else in life may be casting doubt on your masculinity, putting this big, long, thick, piece of chocolate in your mouth is the thing to set the record straight.

What is your major (mal)function?

Not too long ago I had a chat with one of the Japanese teachers at the one of the schools I work at. And she told me something that genuinely surprised me.
She's what would be considered a senior teacher. She's around 45-50, and has been a teacher or a substitute for most of her career. And she started talking about her own experiences as a junior high student trying to study English. At that time there was no policy of importing foreigners for English classes, and as a result her classes were taught solely by a Japanese teacher. She, and most of the kids she went to school with, never saw a non-Japanese person until they were out of high school, at the earliest. The functional differences between a werewolf, a robot and a foreigner were all equally academic to her and all her classmates. She seemed to genuinely regret missing the chances her students have to get familiar with the existence of alien peoples.
One of the things that is expected of me, but which I never really grasped, is this role of, well, test-gaijin. I, and other people who have taken similar work, have been checked for terrifying deformity, sufficient patience and appropriate attitude. Command of the language is almost entirely irrelevant. I've been aware of how tangential my teaching skills were to my job for a while, but I never really grasped why.
Most of the people who are now of policy-making age in Japan's various bureaucracies were in school at about the same time, or earlier, as this teacher. These curriculum choices are being made by people for whom English ability is an unnecessary abstract. The curriculum choices are being made by people whose primary understanding of English language use is not one of nuance, fluency or even function, but one of fear of contact with the unknown, as represented by a non-Japanese person.
Regardless of what the board of education told my employers, regardless of what they told me, my main job really isn't to teach; In the minds of Education Ministry policymakers I'm like a safe strain of foreigner-serum introduced to the children so they'll develop the defenses to handle encounters with foreigners in the wild.

Is that role in any way unimportant for a nation struggling to come to grips with globalization? No, of course not.

Is that role one I can take any great amount of pride in doing well?


How would you answer that?

A Quick Thought on Patriotism

No disrespect intended to one or two particular people who have devoted a lifetime to the pursuit of a specialized art and succeeded at the pinnacle of their fields of endeavor. But can anyone justify why a group of millions of people should feel better about themselves because one person from their country has won first prize in a regularly scheduled sporting event?

Ms. Arakawa should be congratulated for her patience, endurance, grace and skill.

Mr. Davis should congratulated for his speed, determination and power.

Everyone not actually on the ice should be happy for them. Then shut the hell up or find something of their own merit to to puff themselves up with. The achievements of humans performing at the highest levels can enrich us all with a sense of what is possible. But nationalistic flag-waving cheapens their successes and leeches off of their efforts.

Frame of Reference

I'm sure that the Japanese Imperial Family is a subject that occupies a lot of your time. I mean, I can't go a day without devoting at least a couple of hours thought to their Y-chromosome problems. Specifically, that the Japanese family hasn't produced a boy since 1960-something.

Now, the country I was born in didn't have anything in the way of official royalty. Elvis and Michael Jackson excepted, of course. But I don't have any real sense of why a royal family is worth all the effort and expense. What with the Magna Carta and all, non-royal types are admitted to have the same basic human value as blue-noses. Or blue-bloods. Whatever.

My point is, most royal folks these days just hold symbolic posts, with a few exceptions like that guy who seized power in Nepal or the Saudi royal family. But the Japanese royal family is prohibited from exercising any actual power outside of officially endorsing parliament's choice of Prime Minister. Yet there is a nearly venomous debate over the future of the royal family and whether or not the Imperial House Laws (the part of Japan's legal codes that control what the royal family can and can't get away with) need to be changed.

As things stand now, there are a couple of people in line to succeed the current emperor. But they are all men over the age of 40. There's no sign of a male heir to the throne, and the current law specifically limits succession to males. While this seems like an easily solved problem, it has, in fact, exposed all sorts of rather disturbing opinions floating loose in modern Japanese society. Like the minister who theorized that if a woman was allowed to become empress, she might marry a strong-willed man of poor morals who would manipulate the throne for his own nefarious ends. Like, uh, presiding over the wrong sorts of charity galas and receiving honorary degrees from universities with departments of evil studies. Or the far sighted Cassandra who pointed out that an empress-to-be might follow and imperial tradition and study abroad, but come back with a "blue-eyed foreigner" and want to have his ungodly half-breed babies, which would then ascend to throne, bringing about the end of, er, whatever.

Now, let's forgo that fact that they seem to think that no woman, not even one raised as the heir to the chrysanthemum throne, could possibly refuse the wishes of her husband. The end-all fear is that she might come down with a case of Wonder Bread fever and bring home some honky? All this time I was under the impression that there was more depth, more resilience, and just more will to survive in the Japan's cultural heritage. Consider, for a second, that the English royal family has been regularly infused with German blood for the last couple centuries. Is there any reason to think that the Japanese family couldn't find some Asian nobility hanging around somewhere? Even if that isn't an option, are we to believe that the thread of nobility is so thin that it can't cling to blood without a y-chromosome?

Sorry. I'm going on too far here. The idea of a royal family strikes me as being fairly pointless in the first place. But all this sexist bullshit trying to pass itself off as tradition and heritage makes me sick. If you want to hang on to believing in an outdated ideal, fine. But don't expect it to apply to people who actually live in the present without being mocked.

Suddenly, a shot rang out!

Local ranch owner claims Vice-President Dick Cheney is "a very safe sportsman."

Of course, this is after Mr. Cheney, using a shotgun, nailed a fellow hunter in the face. Admittedly, it was only quail shot. He didn't even put anyone's eye out.

Of course, the fact that a fellow was shot in the face by the vice-president of the United States, on Saturday and the news only broke on Monday seemed a bit odd to me.

But hey, I guess we should be grateful that the information was let out at all. I mean, it's not like this administration has left much doubt about the public's right to know anything...

A word about your author

I heard, indirectly, that somone who had read this, but that I don't generally communicate with individually, was surprised to hear from someone who heard from someone who was reading over someone else's shoulder that I was doing things which weren't mentioned directly in these posts.

I never presumed that my life was interesting enough to merit detailed entries about my daily travails.

Gee, that's a swell word, isn't it? "Travail." Not entirely accurate, though. I do very little hard labor these days, apart from occasionally hoisting a kid upside down by his ankles and shaking him to see what falls out of his pockets.

Anyway, here is a brief update that's only stuff to do with me. No politics or anything.

I'm in the process of applying to grad school. This working schtick is for the birds. It's high time to get back to the bosom of academia.

I went to the Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum again yesterday. That makes my ninth visit in four years, and my seventh time going specifically to take somone else there for the first time.

My bicycle, which I got for free, has a flat tire.

I can make a pretty good Japanese-style curry. Which I did on Friday. It was great, and I'm going to eat the leftovers tonight.

In my opinion, the song "Papa Was A Rolling Stone", by The Temptations, is simply excellent. You should have a copy of it.

Gotta go. More later.

But I ain't promising when.

This is what a dogma will fetch...

People offering to kill other people over a bunch of comics. Seriously.

This story about protests concerning a bunch of cartoons that are considered blasphemous ought to be laughable. Do you remember when one particular holy man from a dusty desert town decided that something which didn't jive with his view of the world needed to be...dealt with?

Although there is nothing wrong with the tenet of Islam that says images of the prophet Muhammed are blasphemous, that is, like most Judeo-Christian rules, intended to be applied only to members of the tribe. All that crap in Leviticus about who needs to be put to death for what sort of fornication is specifically prefaced with the line "say unto the children of Israel," which means the members of this group exclusively. That part of the bible/Torah is a historical text that refers to the government of a specific group of people (frequently living as expatriates/refugees in a foreign land).

As swell as the US constitution claims to be, it doesn't have anything in it that allows its regulations to be enforced in other countries. There's nothing in the Magna Carta that allows parents from outside the British Kingdom to give away their heirs in marriage and claim authorization from the crown. These sorts of rules are only meant to apply to members of the groups that they were written for.

Religious intolerance is indefensible, but intolerance in the name of religion is no better.

Just keep your peanut butter out of my chocolate, your laws out of her uterus and everyone's dieties out of my face. Besides, don't people have more important things to worry about than some obviously inaccurate caricatures?