Bonus French fun fact!

Just like in Japan, there's nothing wrong with installing a urinal by a window on the ground floor of a building in France.

And on a lighter note:

The accepted context for imported ideas and characters isn't even considered before use in Japan; exhibit 77d.

In Japan, the dark lord of the Sith digs jail-bait.
Totally.

Too many ideas, not enough understanding

You know, after re-reading that last bit, something just occurred to me. I can recall the first time I realized that someone like Batman would, by necessity, have to be a criminal. Generally, you can't just beat up other people no matter how much you think they deserve it, without being labeled a vigilante, a hooligan, or a criminal. Excepting, of course, those seemingly apocryphal stories about Judo stars beating up muggers. But by and large, we're not supposed to do anything besides calling the authorities. Which is logical, I guess, if you don't live in the Montana territory in the 1880s.

But for some reason I keep seeing stories about people resorting to extraordinary measures to protect what they think is just. C'mon, Knight Rider, The A-Team, Spenser for Hire, Mannix (no, "Mannix" is not a breakfast cereal...) and on and on and on. Why do we keep asking for someone to break the rules to make things better?

Initially, I was trying to be sarcastic. Just talking about a trend in fiction, y'know. But then it hit me: there are quite a few people who believe that justice is something worth struggling for. But they tend to be described as "radicals," "extremists" and "terrorists." Why else would someone strap a bomb to themselves and walk into a crowd? Why else would you fly your plane into an aircraft carrier? You don't do it for fun, and you probably don't honestly do it for the chicks. If you didn't actually believe that you were acting in the name of justice, that you were serving a higher cause, why else would you do it?

I am certainly oversimplifying an awful lot of things. First off, I don't really know anything about suicide bomber training, kamikaze pilots, CIA sleeper agents or army guys who throw themselves on grenades to save their buddies. Secondly, I don't claim to be able to define "justice" well enough to withstand any sort of honest philosophical inquiry. And I don't mean to imply that wearing spandex while beating up purse-snatchers and machine-gunning a bus load of civilians are even on the same continuum of valid moral choices. But if you use small, unambiguous terms, you can easily describe both motivations with the same sentences.

"Acting outside the law to meet one's idea of justice."

And that is where I start feeling more uneasy. You can usually spot a hypocritical act by the depth of the bullshit it's wrapped in. Anytime what sounds like a good idea comes with a lot of extra syllables, someone is being lined up to for an ass-fucking. Do you really think that

"...The President's goal to help unleash the productive potential of individuals in all nations..."
-2004 Republican Part Platform Statement

has anything do with actually helping individuals attain self-sufficiency in terms of food or health-care? Or is it just another effort to exploit a potential source of profit like oil, timber ormigrant labor?

My point is that you can usually understand an essentially moral idea because it can be explained simply. "Don't hit weaker people." "Be kind to people in trouble." "No raping." So why can such seemingly incompatible ideas be explained with the same simple words? Why can someone say "the rules are so wrong, the way society has treated those dear to me is so wrong, that I have to go outside what is accepted and fight for something better" and wind up killing so many people?

And what's wrong with my head that allows Batman and Spider-Man to wind up classified with the same essential reasons for action as a suicide bomber or an IRA assassin?

The thought which might worry me more is the prospect that there something about the "spread of democracy," as it's been practiced in the last 100 years, that winds up becoming a force that people feel a need to fight against? If the problem is in my head, that's just me. But if there's something essentially wrong with the way democratic ideology is practiced, that does and will affect a lot more people.

Approved by the Comic Dork Authority

I'm sorry if this is something I've said before, but I think it bears repeating. You really shouldn't let your kids spend too much time reading comics. Especially not books by Warren Ellis, Garth Ennis, Kurt Busiek or Frank Miller. Leaving aside the issues of violence, sex, language or questionable taste, letting your kids spend any amount of time reading these books is likely to warp their priorities. In general, these writers' books tend to follow one rather disturbing theme: that in a troubled world, people, struggling very hard to do the right thing, may suffer setbacks and losses, but in the end do manage to act on behalf of what they consider just.

Think about that for a moment. Do you really want your children to grow up with expectations influenced by ideas like that? Do you want to raise kids with the notion that justice is something worth struggling for, worth sacrificing for?
Really, save them and the rest of us a lot of trouble, disappointment and disillusionment by keeping them off of the hero-books. Give them an XBox 360 or something so they can play Tony Hawk 5 or Madden 2008 or whatever else has been carefully co-branded and synthesized for easy, dilemma-free consumption.

I also sort of miss public radio...

In my former, non-Japan existance, I used to really like This American Life. And not just because host Ira Glass is willing to devote whole hour-long shows to easy ideas like pets, but the less easy ones like fiascos, superpowers or what makes a Canadian Canadian.

Each week on TAL, as they refer to it on their own web page, they tackle a different topic in (usually) three acts. And sooner or later, it seems, they hit something that I can relate to, think about or laugh my ass off at.

What did they say "idle hands" were?

One of the things I most enjoyed about living in Santa Monica was occasionally running into unexpected art. And I don't mean stuff from the kind of people who make easy, boring crap that you could just as easily buy at the state fair. I'm talking about stuff from groups like The Billboard Liberation Front or the California Department of Corrections, or running into something from the Cacophony Society or seeing the Santa Rampage.

I seem to recall that there was something invigorating about seeing normal routines disintegrate for a while. Like meeting, in front of the Blue Man Group, a bunch of orange-suited boozers with trading cards of themselves. There was a sense that life still had surprises in store.

But life in Tokyo does not seem to hold any surprises in its immediate future.

We'll have to see what can be done about that.

Another cultural difference...

In Japan, no one thinks there's anything wrong with putting a window in front of a urinal on a ground floor bathroom.

Teach them well and let them lead the way...

When you work as an ESL teacher in Japan, you tend to face a lot of the same questions again and again. Part of it has to do with the level of the language skills you're dealing with. If all you know is the present tense, your questions will naturally be limited to immediate lines of thought.

"Do you like Soccer?"
"Do you like strawberry?"
"Are you a college student?
"Do you like Japan?

Lots of yes/no questions. And thanks to a rather puzzling textbook choice, they don't learn all the interrogative words until age 14. So you can finally get gems like:

"How old are you?"
"Where do you live?"
"How tall are you?"
"Why did you come to Japan?"

Of course, thanks to the drill-repeat-drill-repeat and memorize-regurgitate teaching methods favored for language education here, by the time they get to the interrogative words the kids have largely burned do you like into their brains as a single, indivisible unit. Which means you also variations on the following theme.

"What do you like sports?"
"What do you like Japan?"
"Do you like food, what?"
"Who do you like school's cute teacher?"

In general, this has very little to do with what I'm used to as communication. It's not bad for people raised on TV interviews and magazine profiles, and given that it's usually teenagers and pre-teens coming up with these, I might even say they were doing all right. But there really isn almost no emphasis on comprehending the response and using it to continue the conversation. My adult students actually have to be trained how to ask follow-up questions, and textbooks often include formulas that looks something like

"Really? What about [previous answer] did you like best?"
"Oh? What kind of [previous answer] is your favorite?"
and my personal favorite
"I don't know much about [previous answer]. Please tell me more."

But that's really only attempted by the more advanced students. Most people peak out at "I like [blank.] What do you like [blank]?" Which is why what happened last week was such a treat. I had to conduct speaking tests for the 9th graders here. All 211 of them, at around 7 minutes per test. Of itself, that was no treat. And the vast majority of the answers were entirely adequate for people with a minimal command of an illogical lanugage taught with an emphasis on rote memorization in an educational system that discourages abstract thought.

What did happen was that more of the students than I could have hoped for asked questions that indicated they'd been paying attention to earlier replies. I must admit that I was flattered when some students made a point to ask me about eating ramen, reading comic books or playing video games, because they remembered my introduction in class. And when they actually had their own opinions about whether Final Fantasy or Dragon Warrior was a better game, why Kamen Rider was a better hero than any of the Power Rangers, or what was most surprising thing they'd ever seen on the TV show Fountain of Trivia, well, I was quite satisfied.

And a few, a rare, precious few, actually gave smart-ass answers. One of the questions they had to answer what "what will you do if [teacher's name] comes to your house?" And while most said they would speak English or study history or something, a very few had the backbone to say things like

• "Lock the door."
  
• "From the, back door, run fast."
  
• "Not open front door and windows."
  

and my personal favorite,

• "Throw many many stones."
  

Now, that question was actually presented as a sample question on the preparation sheet. So the students had a chance to memorize something like that beforehand. Even beyond those, a few students had the presence of mind and confidence to give answers off the top of their heads, in another language. After three years, I had gotten used to getting blank stares, formulaic answers, and paint-peeling dullness a painful majority of the time. But these kids, well, I'd almost say they gave me hope. There was a girl who said that if the weather was nice that she "will stay home and play Tekken 5" because she "dislike[s] outdoor sport." Or the boy who would spend $1000 on "pachinko-gamble games and Aya Ueto photo magazines." And my personal favorite, when asked what he would do after he finished his studies at university, the boy who made a gesture like pulling a hood over his head while saying "I will join the dark side."

I only hope that these little sparks of anarchy and dissent from what's expected don't flare out in these kids. If only I could find some way to help them stay lit up. Some way to, I dunno, throw alcohol on their fires to keep them burning or something.

Not, you know, literally by pouring booze on them. Besides, I have faith in these kids. They're among the best and the brightest here. I feel they'll be smart enough and strong enough to find ways to get their own drinks while they're underage.

Let me see if I understand this:

On Independence Day, a day above all others to remember the ideals of freedom and liberty that America is supposed to be a living example of, I have to read that

• the press is being required to make all aspects of its investigations accountable to the government when reporting on that government or it will face punishment by that same government
  
• that the Pentagon, under a clause stuffed into an education bill, has been quietly collecting a nationwide database on all high school students to keep track of each student's name age, GPA, SSN, address, phone number and race, to better target their military recruitment, primarily at families too poor to afford college.
  
• and that once again the nations legislators are finally taking a stand on the inexplicably-timed issue of flag burning, rather than publicizing who they'll support to take O'Connor's place on the supreme court or why they're continuing to give war-profiteers Haliburton and KBR billions of dollars to provide over-priced supplies to troops in a war that their former CEO pushed for while working as Vice-President.
  

This isn't even irony.

This is hypocracy.
This is lying.
This is the citizens of the United States getting fucked by their government again.

Happy birthday, America. You think you'll get a holiday reach-around?

What did Roosevelt say about opportunity?

Oh yeah, something about

"We know that equality of individual ability has never existed and never will, but we do insist that equality of opportunity still must be sought."
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt

Which, I guess, could be read as saying that everyone, even the poor, the non-white, the female, the stupid, the crippled, the belivers in different religions, and the members of the political party that is out of fashion all ought to have a fair shot at life.

Of course, money tends to skew things, but it's a nice enough sentiment, and it sounds especially good when you slap it on something like education. Who could be against a fair chance for children? Even for those truly, butt-ugly children. Naturally, there've been causes for improvement in the execution of this fairness idea, but generally, it's a pretty straightforward concept.

I bring this up because the principal of the school where I work has been chatting with me about his school and schools in Japan in general. As a foreigner, I can offer him the perspective of an outsider as well an aspect of the confessional. Since he speaks to me in fairly rapid English the other teachers can't understand what he's saying. And even if I did want to tell someone else what he said, no one would really listen to me or take me seriously. I'm not Japanese, you know.

To get back to the point, he explained that there is nothing like gifted and talented or AP classes available in Japanese public schools. During the post-war reconstruction of Japan, the education system was totally re-organized with 1940's America as a rough model. While this did mean giving up the Imperial German style of education adopted during the Meiji restoration, complete with unthinking monarch-obediance and a military-preperatory emphasis, it did allow for a greater sense of opportunity. Under the new system, education was supposed to be available to all children, regardless of ability or gender.

But as the revolutions of the 40's ossified into the policies of today, there has been a similar hardening of ideas. According to my principal, most parents today insist on an equal treatment for all students. Even in cases of wildly different ability. A dyslexic child will be kept in the same class as his peers, just as a math prodigy will be kept in the same class, regardless of ability. There is no variation in curriculum within an age level. There are no advanced placement classes, no accelerated courses, no college level courses for those nerdy kids in the high school who were always wrecking the curve. Nothing. Most school districts do have one or two schools per age range that offer a class for developmentally disabled children, and occasionally an entire school for a specific disability, like blindness or deafness. But in general, the kids are kept together by age. Period.

It seems puzzling to me that a child with extraordinary talents would not be allowed to move as quickly as their mind would allow, but the idea of wasted potential never even enters the debate. Maybe it's just an expression of the "sticking out nail gets hammered down" idea, but that really strikes me as wrong. Especially given the tendency to spoil children in Japan. As long as a person is considered a child, they tend to be indulged far more that seems usual from an American point of view. And it strikes me as sort of, well, callous to keep a kid in a class that's below what they're capable of. Having been stuck in manditory lessons myself, I can tell you it's no picnic.

But maybe I'm just viewing this as a synecdoche of one of my biggest problems with both Japanese and American society. People are expected to applaud and appreciate and even worship people who are set up as special for some reason or another. But if a person should actually demonstrate some measure of superiority it's considered in poor taste. Why else would so many people in Japan, more than are statistically possible to fit into a "median group," claim that they were middle class? Why else would people in the US who make several hundred thousand dollars a year say they were "just, y'know, kind of upper-middle class?" Why would it be considered offensive to act superior if you are, in fact, better than someone at something?

Of course, I'm trying to cover a bit too much here. The point is: kids here have to stick together, whether the class is too easy or too hard. And the educators don't like it, but there's not much anyone thinks can be done about it...