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.