Sagas of Saga

Defacing Cute Characters in Textbooks

2011-06-23T23:47:00.002+09:00

Japanese textbooks seem to have one unifying quality, which is the inclusion of cute mascots in order to keep the student from feeling like they're actually an adult.

For example, this textbook

has these two bean-shaped people...

Of course, when one comes across such things, the only appropriate thing to do is deface them.

After my last post, I was looking at the doodles in my old nikyuu textbooks and I noticed the further I got into studying, the more abstract and sometimes disturbing these "modifications" became.

At first it they were simple

but soon they became surreal and sometimes needlessly violent.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

If that's not enough, they started to drift into the murky realm of pop culture.

Video games which came out between 1997 and 1998 started making their way into the defacements.

Half-Life:

Fallout:

Cartoons I watched as a kid:

Dino Riders

Which quickly became more abstract and quite strange...

And so on. A fun trip down memory lane and a terrifying look into my subconscious.

JLPT N1 Textbook Quick-Caption Reviews

2011-06-14T06:30:00.001+09:00

Since the last time I posted-- last November(!)-- I've been in Canada, to Japan, and then back and am getting ready to start a *nasal voice* graaaaaaaad school program, and as part of my prep, I've been going a bit hardcore with Japanese.

Grind-studying Japanese when you're out of Japan is kind of weird because it doesn't take long before you completely separate the language from the country and kanji and grammar become abstract concepts.

My routine has been, going through two pages from a CLAIR-published "advanced" kanji textbook (basically JLPT N2-level vocabulary) a day.

Even though a lot of the kanji is pretty basic at this point in the game, when I was a JET, I ordered these free textbooks

...and totally neglected to use them. So it makes me feel slightly less guilty for draining the Japanese government's treasury with recycled (literally) textbooks all these years.

Then I go through the textbooks with the cute animals on the cover...

and

The grammar textbook, 日本語総まとめＮ１, I wouldn't recommend unless you're pretty confident already and want a bit of review. The reason is, there aren't really any explanations of the grammar points, and it leaves you to figure it out for yourself with example questions (badly) translated into English, Chinese and Korean. I ended up having to hunt for grammar in my Advanced Japanese Grammar dictionary, on the net, and occasionally just through guess-work.

The second one there, にほんご５００問, I would recommend for anyone studying for N1. It's really casual yet has a lot of content (500 vocab and grammar quiz questions divided into a month long course with about 5 or 10 useful bits of vocab per question), so doing three questions a day is completely painless and you end up learning a fair bit. I already went through this in its entirety, so I'm going through again and reading the sentences out loud.

And then I've been going through a couple of grammar textbooks.

The first one, 日本語総まとめ問題集一級, is really bare-bones with about 20-50 vocab points per chapter and a handful of test-questions for each, but is -- on the other hand -- really well organized and provides clear explanations of vocab in Japanese. I went through this textbook about a year ago and didn't absorb a whole lot at the time, but I'm going through again, and like にほんご５００問, I'm reading the vocab, example sentences and explanations out loud.

The second book, 日本語能力試験Ｎ１語彙対策, is somewhat similar, but doesn't define a whole lot of the vocabulary, so get your dictionaries ready, but does have really good example questions, hard quizzes, and target vocabulary is printed in red, and it comes with one of those red plastic sheets, so what I've been doing here too is reading through the example sentences with the target vocab blocked out, which is actually a lot harder than it sounds.

Even though you'll feel like a bit of an idiot doing this, I highly recommend reading the example sentences, readings, Japanese language explanations etc. out loud -- preferably in an huge operatic voice -- no matter what level you are. There are a few reasons for this.

You use a different part of your brain for speaking than reading. The more ways to experience new vocabulary/grammar points, the easier it will be to remember. It's also good listening practice for the same reason.
It's surprisingly hard. Especially if you're like me and studying outside of Japan where everything becomes aforementioned abstract concepts, this sort of thing happens a lot:

Along these lines, there are a lot of kanji I *think* I know. I recognize the shapes and know what it means, but I'll get to a point where I actually have to produce the sound, and nothing comes out.
If you're in public, especially if you're in a small town where 99% of the people are very very white and couldn't tell the sound of Japanese apart from Hindi or Russian, let alone Chinese, being hunched over a mysterious book with squiggly writing on the cover, concentrating with absolute focus to read "verses" out loud might prompt a terrorism alert, which is always fun. The added bonus is, if you're doing this in Japan, where everyone will understand what you're saying, the assortment of non-nonsensical context-free example sentences will make you sound like a human-Don Hertzfeldt cartoon.

Chariots of the Gods

2010-11-15T23:38:00.004+09:00

Exhibit A: A Japanese stone lantern in Hiroshima

Exhibit B: A Protoss Dragoon from StarCraft

Exhibit C: ...

Maybe? ;)

Redesign

2010-11-10T11:31:00.000+09:00

I redesigned the logo and was playing around with CSS settings, and I emphasize the word playing since this blog really shouldn't be high up on my list of priorities right now. But looks pretty snazzy, eh?!

How to Count Flying Bunnies in Japanese

2010-10-26T08:49:00.005+09:00

(Ignore that watermark)

Japanese is not an easy language to learn at the best of times. One of the things which is, while not exactly hard, a headache is the fact that it has a couple of hundred "counter words". We have these to some extent in English too, like three pants (the North American variety) are "three pairs of pants", or two cows are "two heads of cattle", etc. But in Japanese, there are tonnes of 'em. There's nothing outstandly difficult about learning these besides volume, but there are a few irregularities. One such irregularity is the counter for birds, which is 羽. One bird is 一羽, two is 二羽, and so on. This counter, however, is also used by one mammal: rabbits.

And why is that?

According to anglo Wikipedia:

Japanese Buddhist monks were not allowed to eat any meat other than birds, but liked rabbit meat so much they came up with the contrived "explanation" that rabbits are actually birds, and that their ears are unusable wings. The rationale was that while moving, rabbits only touched the ground with two feet at a time. Nowadays, hiki is the usual counter for rabbits.

I didn't quite buy this because-- Wikipedia-- and checked around a bit. And in response to this theory, somebody posted on the Japanese internets:

I was also interested in the answer that it is related to Buddhism, so I asked an acquaintance who is a Pure Land Buddhist monk. I asked the Pure Land monk, Have you ever heard 'You can't eat rabbits, but if it's a bird, it's okay?

"Rabbits, cows, pigs, birds and fish: you can't eat any of them! Doesn't that kind of theory sound like it has the intention of showing contempt for Buddhism?" he said angerly.

Accord to Wikipedia, "There are many opinions as to the origins, but according to the Nihonshoki, in the year 675, Emperor Temmu forbade the eating of meat of the five beasts -- cows, horses, dogs, macaques and chickens -- and ordered the protection of young fish between the dates April 1st and September 30th and through subsequent bans, rabbits (usagi) which are a pun of cormorants (u) and herons (sagi), were avoided by being treated as birds, or perhaps because because their long ears resembed birds feathers [...]."

[Editor's note: what?? Okay, there are some points where I have no idea what he was on about, so I apologize for any Engrishy parts]

「仏教的に……」という↑の回答に興味を持ったので、知り合いの僧侶（浄土真宗）に尋ねてみました。
「ウサギがダメで鳥ならよいという話は聞いたことがない」
とのことでした。
曹洞宗の僧侶にも尋ねてみました。
「ウサギも牛も豚も鳥も魚も全部ダメ！そのような説には仏教を貶めようとする意図があるのではないか」
と怒っていました。

Wikipediaによると、「この由来には諸説あるが、『日本書紀』にある天武天皇5年4月17日（675年5月19日）の肉食禁止令で、4月1日～9 月30日まで稚魚の保護と五畜（ウシ・ウマ・イヌ・ニホンザル・ニワトリ）を食べることが禁じられ、それ以降の禁令などにより鳥の鵜と鷺（または佐芸）をもじりウサギとし、「鳥」として扱うことでこれを回避した、あるいは大きく長い耳が鳥の羽に見えるからとする説が有力とされている」とのことです。

The author listed from other theories, but to be honest, the mix of extremely formal Japanese relating to empirical edicts and absolute nonsense about getting by dietary laws through semantics is a bit too much for me right now. I decided to test my luck elsewhere.

Another website states,

In Japan until the Meiji Period (from 1868), for religion (Buddhist) reasons, the eating of four-legged animals was forbidden. During that time, hungry people said "Rabbit's ears look like feathers, so let's make 'em birds so we can eat 'em!" "Rabbits fly (ie. leap), so they must be birds!

I don't want to argue for arguing's sake, but I think the "rabbit = birds", therefore "one bird, two bird" way of thinking is plausable. No matter how you look at it, rabbits are not birds (hah!) and it was just an excuse for people that wanted to eat meat. ;)

日本では明治時代まで、宗教上（仏教）の理由から四本足の獣を食べることが禁じられていました。そのときに「うさぎの耳は鳥の羽と同じだから鳥にしよう。だから食べてもいいんだ！」　「うさぎは飛ぶから鳥だろう！（実際ははねている）」といって食べていたそうです。

ただの屁理屈でしかないのですが、うさぎ＝鳥という考え方から「一羽、二羽」と数えるようになった説が有力です。どうみてもうさぎは鳥じゃないですけどね（笑）肉が食べたかっただけの言い訳にすぎないようです＾＾

Yet another website says (and this is the last one, I swear),

Before the Meiji period, there was a teaching that "If you kill a living thing, and eat it's flesh, a Buddhist curse will be put upon you", and it was forbidden. (Editor's note, I read somewhere they'd just sentence you to death, ironically, if you killed an animal to eat.) This meant, mainly, raising animals to eat was forbidden, but it was decided that hunting and eating deer or bears or wild birds and calling them "medicine eats" (Editor's note: I could probably translate that more gracefully but I choose not to) and the eating of meat little by little by sick people to help them recover was acceptable.

People who ate meat once didn't forget that taste, and for warriors who used up their energy in battle, it became a source of nutrients. Feigning that it was "medicine eats" and eating wildlife made them feel guilty. Especially the four-legged variety.

So, with their feather-like long ears and hippity-hopping around, rabbits are probably just birds, right? So, they started counting "flocks" of rabbits. If so, they felt a little less guilty and could catch and eat a lot of them.

明治以前は、「殺生して、肉を食べると仏罰があたる」という仏教の教え（名目？？）で肉食が禁じられてました。これは、食べるために動物を飼うことを主に禁じていて、狩猟したシカやクマや野鳥などを食べることは「薬喰い」といって、病人の体力回復のために少しずつ肉を食べてもいいと認められていました。

一度肉を食べた人はその味が忘れられないし、戦などで体力を使う武士は肉が栄養源になっていました。「薬喰い」と称して野鳥獣の肉を食べることは後ろめたい。特に四本足の動物は後ろめたい。

そこで、羽のような大きな耳を持って、ぴょンぴょん飛ぶウサギは鳥かもしれない、だったら１羽２羽と数えよう。それなら、すこしは後ろめたさが少なくなる。たくさん捕まえて食べることもできる。

So there you have it! There are many theories, but it is ostensibly because rabbits are delicious.

Senkaku Island Notes

2010-10-24T11:58:00.000+09:00

I've been going through a huge time line of the Senkaku Islands conflict which I found online in order to prepare for (maybe) having to write an essay for a grad school application. (We'll find out about that part soon enough.)

But I was reading through the time line and through some essays and newspaper articles and was thinking back to conversations I was having with Ikumi about it and what she was saying about extremely patriotic-- and sometimes just very extreme essays-- Japanese people were writing about the crisis on websites like mixi. I also happened to see a photo album on the Globe and Mail's website with a wide variety of far-right racist douchebags.

With all this swimming in my head I started reading a 40 year old essay by famous Japanologist Donald Keene and just-as-famous Mishima Yukio buddy talking about the cultural effects the Sino-Japanese War had on Japan, and he started off the whole essay talking about how before the war Japan still had a definite image of China as being culturally and militaristically absolutely superior to the still-東夷 Japan, with huge Chinese ironclad warships visiting Japanese ports and Japanese diplomats still being given "the treatment" in China while trying everything to impress Chinese diplomats in Tokyo. As the extremely popular war progressed there was a wide-scale propaganda campaign put on by newspapers and book and woodblock print publishers to glorify Japanese soldiers while depicting the Chinese as weak and cowardly and wholly undeserving of their now-perhaps-mythologized glorious past. This view of China seems to have continued on to this day amongst the previously stated far-right racist douchebags, some of whom are in parliament, and a lot more revealingly: it was during the same war where the image of the Chinese went 180° that China lost the Senkaku Islands to Japan. (This is only after an evenings pre- and post-StarCraft 2 reading, but) I think the economic and diplomatic conflict between Japan and China over the last two months, as well as the general attitude of nationalist groups in Japan toward China, really began during the war 115 years ago. The atrocities of World War 2 and subsequent US occupation, the communist revolution in China and sometimes forced attempts to "reunite" the country, and more than anything, the discovery of 100 billion barrels of oil in the vicinity of the islands of course have a huge role on this crisis, but I think the crux of the issue has, Japan and China are at a crossroads right now the same way they were 115 years ago in terms of regional power and influence and Japan seems to be relying too much on those old post-war stereotypes of China being a backwards, lesser country and China seems to be embracing the even older stereotypes of their own grandeur.

(How many Chinese or Japanese ultranationalists will leave long rants in the comments section now...)

The Etymology of Kaba

2010-10-09T01:01:00.000+09:00

Ikumi: your wish is my commend!

Kaba is the Japanese word for hippopotamus. This word probably has one of the strangest etymologies I've ever seen, so I thought I'd break that down.

The Japanese "kaba" uses the kanji 河馬, which comes from the Chinese "hema", using identical characters. The kanji in both cases seem to come from the Latin "hippopotamus", which is literally "river [河] horse [馬]", however, Japanese Wikipedia says it's also possibly a direct translation of the German word flusspferd, which is also literally "river horse", probably also coming from the Latin. Now, that Latin comes from the Greek ἱπποπόταμος, which you can almost see from the Greek characters is almost letter-for-letter the same. As you can see to your left, hippos used to live all the way down the Nile to the Mediterranean, where the ancient Greeks saw them in the mouth of the river and gave them that silly name. So, there you go! A Japanese word with an ancient Greek root.

The Etymology of Genki

2010-09-19T21:22:00.002+09:00

I've been using Google Anal-ytics to keep a bit track of who comes to this site and why, and I noticed people that come here via Google searches are coming here for completely unrelated reasons. This is unfortunate.

But one caught my eye, which is "etymology of genki". Genki, as my readers know, is already one of those words that foreigners in Japan use in daily conversation, but no one really knows where it comes from.

Until now.

The breakdown:

　　元気 ("gen - ki")
　　元 gen ("base, foundation")
　　気 ki ("chi, spirit, life force")

Somewhat similar to European humorism, you could have good ki and bad ki and they would affect you physically and emotionally. This is a major spiritual and linguistic concept in Japanese, where there are well over 10,000 words which use the 気 character. Now in modern Japanese, the common word byoki (病気) means "sickness", or literally "sick ki". However, in classical Japanese, genki was spelled 減気, rooted in the word herasu (減らす-- note the kanji), which means "decrease". So, if your bad ki gets reduced, you're genki. In modern Japanese, the character's changed and it has a more positive meaning, which is "happy and healthy".

Case closed.

SCREAMING JAPANESE ROBOT MONKEY

2010-09-17T23:04:00.001+09:00

from a BORED CANADIAN KEITAI CAMERAMAN

London 2012 Mascots Look Like Vortigaunts

2010-05-20T16:33:00.007+09:00

Former Saga resident Charlene posted in her blog about London's lovable... eh... well, shiny Olympic mascots for the 2012 games, Wenlock and Mandeville -- which I believe are named after the finger puppets from Salad Fingers.

I realized, though, that I'd seen them somewhere before. It's been bugging me all day, but as soon as I got home today it hit me like a sack of oranges.

Exhibit A: Wenlock and Mandeville, Mascots

Exhibit B: The Half-Life game series aliens, the Vortigaunts.

OH. MY. GOD!!

Wenlock and Mandeville are Vortigaunts!

This is probably to get us ready for the invasion!!

AUGHHHH! *hyperventilate*

Meanwhile at the Sock Kiosk...

2010-05-12T19:28:00.003+09:00

Introducing the official socks of the Rastafari religion:

I've been told this is revenge for marketing lattes as "zen".

Scary Japanese Toys 日本の怖いおもちゃ

2010-02-06T18:35:00.013+09:00

As seen in a claw vending machine at a mall near you:

Bits and pieces of Gloomy the magic bear!

No idea what these are, but they look like blood parasites of some sort. Maybe actual size.

Not sure about this fella either, but he seems to be a communist. I wanted him SO BAD (not in that way) but I suck at claw games, and they only give you one chance.

I've never seen Usavich, but I gather he's a guard. I was thinking that Usavich and Putin-chan might be capitalists or American spies or something, since why would the communist have put them in jail otherwise? Anyway, like I said, I've never seen it but I've worked out a pretty complex back-story in my head that I'll share sometime.

Whale!

Since this is food, it does not technically count as a toy, but it reminds me of a webcomic of years past and made me happy. This may or may not be whale-flavoured potato chips.

Anyway, my girlfriend is handy with the scoop machine and got me a Usavich masukotto, so this will have to do for now.

UPDATE: Usavich

Product Test: Suntory "Chocholate Sparkling"

2010-01-26T07:38:00.000+09:00

"Chocolate Sparling", or チョコレート・スパークリング, is chocolate flavoured soda and is about as disgusting and horribly misguided as it sounds.

Let me preface this by saying that in English "sparkling" is an adjective and not a noun, and is translated into Japanese as 発泡 (happou). Just to make sure, I checked out Yahoo's Japanese dictionary, which had no entry for スパークリング (supaakuringu) at all. And for the record, this drink has NO BLOODY BUBBLES AND IS NOT SPARKLING IN ANY SENSE OF THE WORD. So congratulations, Suntory. You've managed to fracture both the English language and the Japanese language in one go. That's a new one I think.

I was sceptical, but like with many impulse purposes in Japan, it had to be done for science.

It obviously doesn't have any chocolate in it, and it tastes less like real chocolate and more like scratch n' sniff chocolate. Or more specifically, at one of my schools the language lab key's key chain has a small scented plastic mock-up of a bun with chocolate syrup on top, and Chocolate Sparkling smells exactly like it smells. Chocolate Sparkling tastes like a key chain.

Since I began this article, I finished the bottle. I had to stop halfway for a while because I began to feel nauseous and dizzy. Less than 200mls to go and I began hallucinating and was rambling and speaking in tongues and imagining surviving snails on the edge of straight razors in no time.

Here's an after picture:

In short, stay away from this.

Follow-up: I Want You Under My Wheels

2010-01-25T19:58:00.001+09:00

I felt kind of bad for writing that, because I was definitely kind of hard on Saga. But since then, three very telling incidents have occurred:

1) An old man in a small truck almost hit me when he was driving on the wrong side of the road.

2) A woman almost hit me when I was crossing on a pedestrian crossing on a green, and she slowed down and just managed to avoid killing me, and when I passed she sped up again and went through the red.

3) Just today a woman was blocking a cross walk and she had a black courtin covering her driver's side window.

This is within the space of four days.

I Want You Under My Wheels

2010-01-18T21:46:00.008+09:00

FACT: The Japanese verb for "to run somebody over" is hiku (轢く). The kanji for hiku is made up of two kanjis: "car" (車) and "fun" (楽しい, or 樂しい in it's classical form).

If you have ever driven, rode a bike or walked in Saga City, even if for a single day, you've almost been hit by a car. You might not even have been aware of it, but your life was in grave danger. If expressed as a percentage, there is a 99% chance as a cyclist that you will be hit within 24 hours if you don't absolutely watch where your going, because god knows the drivers aren't.

FACT: This isn't just a(nother) gaijin complain-a-thon!

Saga is also well known in Kyushu for it's drivers. A quick search around the Japanese internets for the words 佐賀 (Saga) 運転 (driving) 怖い (frightening) gets some interesting responses.

「佐賀は運転が荒い人が多いから怖いんですよーー（涙）」(source)
"Saga has a lot of wild drivers, so it's scary -- (*breaks down in tears*)"

One user, asked their worst memory in the entire island of Kyushu, gave Saga drivers as one of many Sagan examples:

「運転が下手で車が怖い・・・激突、ザ・カー」
"The drivers are bad and cars are scary. Crash, SA-GAAAAAA."

On the same page, another user wrote,

「佐賀の運転マナーは九州一最悪だな。もういっぺん自動車学校に行って基礎から習え！！！」
"Sagan drivers have the worst manners in Kyushu. Go back to driving school and learn from the beginning!"

So as you can see, Saga well known for it's colourful driving culture.

For example, the other I was riding my bike to the mall, and I passed the entrance to a parking lot. The driver was sitting across the sidewalk (stupid mistake #1), well across the solid line marked with "止まれ" , or "STOP!" (stupid mistake #2). She was looking right to see if traffic was coming her way and kept her head at a 45° angle as she began to pull out (stupid mistake #3), barely avoiding hitting me (stupid mistake #4-- well, while technically #3 and #4 are the same, almost hitting *me* put her own life in immediate danger). A half second away from being under her wheels, I swung my hands wildly, and said "What the HELL do you think you're doing??" in English. She had a stupid look of shock and horror on her face similar to Sadako's victims in "The Ring".

"佐賀人の知らん日本語"

A couple of weeks ago, I was riding to the station with my friend, and we almost got hit twice within three kilometres. This is not a joke. Luckily my friend was in-between me and the car both times, which would have probably provided cushioning for me to survive if worst came to worst, but between a guy not looking to see if anyone was coming before pulling out (and already well across the solid line marked, of course, with STOP!), and a guy flagrantly going through a red light in front of the biggest train station in the prefecture, it's almost comically ridiculous.

One theory is, that similar to the film Maximum Overdrive, the cars in Saga have somehow gained senscience and are waging a terrible war against mankind which have enslaved them for over a century; their hapless drivers watching in horror from behind the wheel as pedestrian after pedestrian, cyclist after cyclist is mowed down like so many toy soldiers under the feet of wanton boys.

On the highway home from Fukuoka, there's a big sign saying "Be careful. Fatalities due to car accidents are increasing." Right there on the highway bus, I muttered between my teeth, "No shit!"

And when I say I have close calls on a nearly daily basis, I'm not kidding. I have no idea how I've made it this far. I've come to the conclusion that I'm not a victim here. I'm a survivor. And I used to live in Montreal! I know stereotypically bad drivers when I see them.

Thirsty?

2009-12-11T17:56:00.003+09:00

How about a bottle of Marie Antoinette's placenta?

Yes, it looks gross, but the name has a definite article, so you know it's quality.

On Host Clubs, Racism and Robotics

2009-10-01T17:08:00.011+09:00

This is a pretty snazzy little documentary by Japanese-American Adam Yamaguchi for the show "Vanguard".

Usually when I see Westerners talk about Japan about TV, especially when they talk about major cultural differences like femmy men pouring drinks for yuppie spinsters, or the emergence of robots in the workplace, they present it as being extremely weird-yet-common place (in a "that's so Japanese" sort of way), so it's refreshing to see something that's well analyzed and with a knowledgeable host.

I still don't quite get the robot thing though. Maybe Kyushu is too inaka (ie. the boonies), but I've never seen a robot in Japan. Not once, ever. But, unlike other news magazine documentaries I've seen about the robotics-versus-immigration debate (or, "non-humans versus sub-humans"), this documentary actually talks about cultural differences behind this phenomenon.

I was thinking too, about how people act in stores. I was just at the grocery store and was watching the kid in front of me at the till. The cashier was using ultra formal Japanese with him but not making eye contact. The kid took his change, didn't look at her or respond, and just walked away. This is not really unusual in Japan, and from a fuh-fuh-fuh-foreigner's point of view, at first it was kind of nice, but the ultra-formal Japanese sounded so scripted anyway after a while that now it doesn't even feel like they're talking *to* me. My point is, replace that cashier with a robot and no one would notice.

And I really feel sorry for the Koreans, Chinese and Brazilians in the documentary. I mean, there are enough angry rants in here as it is so I'll save it, but I feel for you, dawgs.

Edit: I want to become a host because, as some of you know, it's been my life-long dream to get drunk every night and talk about virility for some old grand-mama who might be-- nay-- is decked out like a Christmas... tree

The Furious Guide to Being Passive Aggressive in the LL Room

2009-09-20T14:24:00.012+09:00

Or, "How To Be An Asshole So Overtly That No One Can Really Be Offended" (volume 1)
Or... "I had a really terrible week at work."

If you're a long-term reader, you may remember, my pièce de résistance "The Furious Guide to Being Passive Aggressive in a Japanese Office Environment", which gave instructions on the following leftist revolutionary activities:

- If a coworker leaves a stack of papers on your desk, hide it

- Abuse the laminating machine

- Blame your own bad English on your "dialect" (etc.)

I wrote a guide on being an ass of an ALT, which many of us certainly are, but many of my Japanese coworkers have expressed concern that I took the ethnocentric route and ignored the Japanese point of view, because, dammit, we're all human beings and human beings are basically evil, spiteful simian turd-throwers.

So, in my second volume, I will give advice for any team teacher unlucky enough to be forced into working with a lazy, stupid, badly-dressed punk of a gaikokujin. Sometimes, if they push you, you gotta shove back.

So let me present, the The Furious Guide to Being Passive Aggressive in the LL Room.

1. Talk about the ALT to the students in simple, understandable Japanese in front of the Japanese-speaking ALT.

Have you ever walked into a classroom, noticed an ALT chatting with some students, and announced in a loud voice "彼は外人だから英語がぺらぺらだね！" (He's a white, so that's why he's fluent in English!"). If you have, then you're probably the former principal at my school.

2. Got team teaching class? Mark some papers!

Your prefecture spends $40,000 a year to bring a foreign language teacher in to assist you in your classroom to enrich the classes for both you and your students.

But this is probably a good opportunity to get some of that pesky marking done. So while the ALT is up at the front of the class "assisting" you, you should stand at the back, completely ignore him or her, and get the real work done. Marking tests and quizzes.

(Alternative: still ignore the ALT, and give him or her these tests or quizzes to mark!)

3. Bring up the war with a nuance of blame (even if the ALT is not American).

There's absolutely no better environment than an international communication class to bring up the war. Not only bring it up, but avoid any association with your country and any aggression, while still demonizing the enemy. POWs? Huh? Unit 731? What's that? Seriously-- what is that? I've never heard of it. Should I know? ...Let's talk about Hiroshima instead.

4. What's his name? I think it's "ALT" or something.

It takes time -- and time is money, as the students inexplicably all know how to say in English -- to ask the foreigner it's name, and it probably wouldn't understand the question in the first place, so let's call it by it's job title. The ALT. No wait-- ALT-sensei to be polite. Well... ALT-san, anyway. And the ALT don't mind if you use it's job title to describe it while talking about it in front of it as though it wasn't sitting right there looking at you. It is an ALT after all. It's like calling a spade a spade, or a German Shepherd a German Shepherd.

If correctly used, this guide will ruin all international communication, effectively destroy the chance that the ALT will choose to recontract, and spread hideous lies about xenophobia in Japan the world over.

Disclaimer: Dear bosses, there is no Nishimura-sensei. If there was, I'm sure he would be very nice.

The Difference Between "Gaikokujin" and "(Go Home You F'ing) Foreigner"

2009-09-02T11:06:00.007+09:00

One of the first things any ALT hears during orientation back in their home country is "don't try to change things." The system is what it is, the culture is what it is, and trying to change everything will probably alienate you further and cause you much frustration and gnashing of teeth. 99% of the time, this is true.

But back last winter, I was given a stack of essays to mark by students who made a trip to Asia Pacific University, a major international school in Beppu, Oita Prefecture. They met some of the foreign students there, of which there are many, and came back and wrote about their experiences. Most of them were okay, but maybe 20-25% of them kept referring to the full-time Japanese speaking students as "foreigners".

[Editor's note: In Japanese, gaikokujin (外国人) means "non-Japanese", though literally means "foreigner". It's applied very liberally, and has no particular negative nuance despite exclusion and generalization. Japanese people generally don't refer to people by race or nationality, for better or for worse. Most people here just think of people as being Japanese-- or not. So if you're a Canadian tourist, for example, you think of yourself as being a foreigner in another country. However, if you're a Japanese tourist, you might think, 'Ooooh look at all the foreigners here.' And just a side note, last time I went on vacation to Canada I said in shock and horror "God damn there're a lot of white people here!"]

So they kept calling these Chinese and Indonesian and Sri Lankan students "foreigners", and it kind of dawned on me how the students clearly don't know the difference in nuance between the benign word "gaikokujin" and the much more negative word "foreigner", so I showed them the distinctly negative definition in the Oxford English dictionary:

1. a person who comes from a different country
EXAMPLE: The fact that I was a foreigner was a big disadvantage.

2. a person who does not belong in a particular place
EXAMPLE: I have always been regarded as a foreigner by the local folk.

and left it at that.

Next essay, a couple of students talked about "the foreigners" [actually "foreign" fish from tropical "countries" invading Japanese waters], so I figured, yeah, I guess I really can't change anything. If Japan wants to be weird and xenophobic, they can do it without me.

But then when I got to school today the teacher from this particular class asked me to correct a draft of a speech one of these students wrote, and the whole thing was about the word "foreigner" -- about realizing through the experience at the university and my little lecture about it that the word "foreigner", or even "gaikokujin", can hurt or offend people. He went on to give his own opinion that this is left over from Japan's period of national isolation and said we should try to look at each other as being simply human beings before than anything else. Dude! I was absolutely floored, because, to be honest, I've been really sick of the whole "gaijin" issue lately. Sick of it being an issue. Both for recent depressing personal reasons, and broader reasons [for the latter, read the last two posts].

This is the first time where I know-- not hope, but know that I've made a difference here. So despite whatever you hear at orientation, if there's something that's really important to you, don't just do the whole "ALT gaijin clown" thing even though it's easier and it's what they want you to do, but do your duty as a teacher and as someone representing your country and at least try to tell people about your point of view. If you do it respectfully, it won't hurt the wa, and someone out there might just be listening.

You know what I mean...

2009-08-26T08:31:00.003+09:00

Big Daddy America and His Taste for Those Oishii Japanese Hamburgers

2009-08-24T19:25:00.023+09:00

I haven't really paid attention to Adbusters since I left Canada-- well, specifically before that, when I went from being a poor student to really poor student who couldn't afford to buy a copy, but McDonald's Japan's ongoing... uh... somewhat racially insensitive advertising campaign (involving much stereotypical gaijin boobery) and the flood of offended middle-class white people on Debito.org's forums talking about writing ineffectual letters to McDonalds asking the company to voluntarily cease what I assume is a multi-billion yen campaign got me thinking: it would be so much easier just to culture jam the hell out of it. If Japan's legal system is as "weak" with "really no protection for this type of thing" as some people claim, then maybe they should take another route. For example, if Mr. James cardboard cutouts in front of McDonalds stores across the country are so offensive, how about covertly decapitating his cardboard cutout next time you're there for your America Burger? You could even slash his corrugated belly as to make it appear to be seppuku if you want to get really theatrical (you then should make a cardboard tanto and leave at the scene of the crime). I'm pretty sure the actor that plays Mr. James might be considering seppuku that already anyway. At any rate, there are some excellent comments on the forums though, so I do recommend taking a look. [And, no, I'm not going to explain here what the big deal or what my own opinions are.]

Strangely though, this all led me to revisit Adbusters, which has an article on their front page called "The Soul of Japan". This article surmises that Japan's current socio-economic crisis is a psychological reaction to the country's subservience to America since the end of WW2. This article, written by a Japanese-American university professor runs the gauntlets of articles about Japan appearing in English media-- ie. mentions bullet trains and anime and kawaiiness. He also very curiously mentions Mishima Yukiyo, who back in the 70's famously tried to inspire a group of Japanese soldiers to overthrow the democratically elected government and reinstate the emperor by giving a rousing ultra-nationalist speech from a window high above. But the window he chose was so high up that the soldiers could hardly hear a word he was saying, and those that could started laughing at him. Realizing what a total ass he'd made of himself, he committed seppuku and had his teenage male lover cut off his head. Another dead hero dying for the motherland.

(Kelts, the author, does have some pure gold quotes from Murakami Haruki though, who says in horror of the mid-20th century influx of Americana: "It was everywhere. And we’re not French, you know. We liked it." But I digress.)

The author repeatedly sympathizes with nut-cases like Mishima and fascists like the colourfully racist Tokyo governor Ishihara Shintaro (pictured together to the right -- the far right), and claims that the emasculation of Japanese men is the result of the younger brother relationship the Japan apparently has with the US -- along with being kawaii. He quotes visual artist Murakami Takashi, claiming,

"Evolution teaches us that cuteness is a symptom of dependence, urging adults to care for infants, puppies and kittens who are, after all, entirely helpless. A Japan shaped by its reliance upon big brother/big daddy America would naturally perfect this form of expression. Murakami’s theory goes: Be cute, and Daddy might be good to you, however much you hate  it – and him."

I heard this sort of thing before before in Western media, but have never heard any Japanese people talk about it outside of that medium. It strikes me as bullshit and fits snugly on Western stereotypes of Japan, that somehow Japan and her citizens are over-saturated sickly sweet bunny-soft sakura-pink cuteness. Ugh. Was the grown who I saw hork into the sink in the staff room this morning just expressing his inner-kawaii? What about the pock-marked teenagers that laugh at me at the grocery store? It's very hard to maintain these cartoonish stereotypes while actually living in Japan.

Parallel to Japan, Canada has a similar ambivalent sentiment about the US. Back in the mid 20th century, like everywhere, there was sudden a massive flood of American pop culture and media. Most Canadians consume this media loyally and sometimes forgetting it's from a foreign country, but we also have politicians who do things like stomp on George W. Bush dolls on camera and say little quips like, "I hate those bastards!" [read: fired] (and we also publish magazines like Adbusters for that matter). And then we have Canadians who totally buy into anything Hollywood and talk about American foreign policy using the disturbingly and shockingly ignorant self-inclusive phrase "we". Canadians too have spent the last 50 or 60 years wrestling with this relationship, and how our own country's identity and culture fit in, and no one would say that we, for instance, like hockey because it appeases the Americans with the innocent ever-winter lumberjack image. Or produce maple syrup because it is associated with warm childhood memories of eating pancakes. Catch my drift?

The article ends with a sense that Japan is picking up the pieces, working out the baggage from World War 2 and overcoming the present pseudo-Western materialism, and finally starting to build self-confidence for a future where the article literally says Japan may even culturally eclipse America. (This is where my BS-alarm goes off again.) I do think Japan has a major self-confidence problem, but I don't think that comes from having post-war diplomatic or cultural links to the US. I think it comes from not having enough links to the outside world if anything. I think a lot of Japanese people are very insecure about their country's place in the world as an active member of the global society.

With all that being said, I do think that the article is correct that Japanese youth are now more than ever very strongly invested in the world around them and are not just interested in American pop culture, but their immediate mainland Asian neighbours and beyond. Kelts is also right, of course, that the not-so-liberal and only vaguely democratic Liberal Democratic Party's goose is cooked and Japan's future is wide open. That goes without saying.

However, this article and that recent Time Magazine article both seem to take a very ethnocentric view of Japan, with the former largely interviewing Japanese writers and artists who have extensive international experience but paying no attention to the millions of Japanese people that have never even left the country, or even their own respective islands. I love all those Murakamis, but what would a person who thinks Japan is it's own continent distinct from Asia say about globalization? But this overwhelming notion that Japan's future somehow rests in the hands of America, or "the West", is something that Westerners think about a lot, but isn't a big domestic issue here. I think the assumption of Japanese subservience to the West is by and large a Western one.

Where does this all links up to Mr. James gaijin circus campaign, itself sponsored by McDonald's (an Adbusters-targeted multinational that is a global champion of equal opportunity employment)? I apologize: it really doesn't directly, but I think both the stereotypes as Westerners as super-cool clowns and Japanese as extremely prone to cute pop culture and ritual suicide are damaging to international relations and very unbecoming for multinational corporations and the magazines that criticize them.

Smile!

2009-08-23T10:02:00.012+09:00

The BBC published an interesting article about how facial expressions -- the most basic and meaningful form of communication -- are not universal and can change quite dramatically from culture to culture. The study, carried out by Glasgow University, dealt specifically with Westerners and East Asians. This is great for me since I'm a Westerner living in East Asia.

According to the article, "East Asian participants tended to focus on the eyes of the other person, while Western subjects took in the whole face, including the eyes and the mouth." The study concluded that because of the relative importance of the eyes in conveying emotion, it can make things a bit ambiguous (and, really, a bit socially disastrous) cross-culture.

For example:

One of these faces expresses fear, and the other, surprise.

The article didn't mention smiles at all, which is interesting, because I think that's the biggest difference between Eastern and Western facial expressions. Here's a page from Canadian comic book artist Guy Delisle's book "Shenzhen":

Of course, this is not to say Westerners don't do this. To quote my old Japanese Studies professor, "is a matter of degree". I think we all do this -- dry laughs and sad smiles to smooth over anger or sadness or anxiety. I do this pretty much every day at work. I even know people who heartily chuckle when they're scared. The difference, I suppose, is people in East Asian people tend to do this at a higher frequency and maybe in different situations than Westerners.

In Will Ferguson's book, "Hitching Rides with Buddha" in Canada, or "Hokkaido Highway Blues" elsewhere, he talks about being given a ride by a Tokyo University professor and his less-than-enthused wife, who was "nodding with that painfully polite smile that many uninitiated Westerners mistake for being a sign of friendship. It is actually a sign of extreme disease." Later in the book, he describes someone smiling to express inexpressible sadness.

In other species such as chimps, I should add, baring ones teeth in what looks very much like a human "smile" is actually a sign of hatred.

Aside from the obvious anthropological reasons, the reason why this is all so important is -- like I said at the beginning -- facial expressions and body language are the cornerstone of human communication. In inter-cultural communication, being able to read things like expressions can be essential for assessing a situation. And so I'll end this with an open question-- has anyone ever had serious social faux pas with people from different cultures stemming in nonverbal communication?

Translation Exercise: "God Hates Japan" (5)

2009-07-23T19:38:00.008+09:00

Last time I believe I made some promise about writing real entries, but a man's got to do what a man's got to do. This might be another way of saying that life's been pretty swell lately but not in a write-about-it-in-my-blog sort of way. Do you want to hear about how good eel tastes? Care for the details of playing guitar, about why I chose not to watch the solar eclipse [damn evil spirits] or recording my own model versions of Martin Luther King-themed speeches for the annual prefectural speech contest? I didn't think so.

Anyway, here she goes. I transcribed the Japanese from paper while drinking-- nay, imbibing a White Russian and watching The Colbert Report (because that's how we roll), so if you notice any typos, let me know.

Original Japanese translation

例えばホール＆オーツやクイーンに、とにかく卑猥なものを･････。

マリコが自らの人生をトヨタに預けた時、彼女は、国民を洗脳するためにある日本の“和”への義理や尊敬や自己犠牲といった感覚を体験する事になる最後の世代の子供となった。

一九七五年以降に生まれた僕のような人間はどうだろう？僕らのことなんか忘れてしまっていい。僕らは繁殖し、よく食べ、際限なく増殖し、また際限なく壊れていく。それに、僕らに世代なんてものは存在しない。

マリコは僕の“シーン”について、いつもお姉さんぶった説教を始め、そんな自意識過剰で無意味なメヌエットが終わると、ＯＬとして稼いだ給料でまたバーバリー製品を買いに出かけた。彼女は一九九四年に千葉の歯医者と結婚し、僕のおいとなるはずの子を妊婦した。姉貴とは一年一度しか会わなかったが、僕が自分の人生をどれだけ無駄にしているか説教されるはめになった。

ずいぶん生意気なガキに聞こえるかもしれないけど、少しでも気休めになるなら、僕が自分に一番厳しいわけで、そんな厳しさは、僕を含めた無世代が受け継いだとしても、同時に、ダム、道路、食糧生産、人口衛星の打ち上げ、経済産業省、農業科学といった、この国の多くの遺産を維持することなどできないことを意味していた。いっそ、そんなすべてを爆破してしまった方がずっとおもしろいのかもしれないけど、自分にできないことはあまり言わない方がいいだろう。

My translation back into English

For example, on Hall & Oates or Queen. Anyway, really filthy stuff.

When Mariko handed her life over to Toyota, she became a child of the last generation that has to experience feelings of obligation and respect and self-sacrifice to the Japanese concept of "harmony", which exists to brainwash the public.

What are people like me who are born after 1975 like? You should forget about us. We multiply, we eat a lot, we breed endlessly and also break down endlessly. Besides, we don't believe in things like "generations".

Mariko would start to lecture me like a big sister about my "scene" and when she'd finish her ego driven, meaningless minuet, she'd go out again to buy Burberry products with the salary she earned as an office assistant. In 1995 she married a dentist from Chiba and became pregnant with the child that would become my nephew. I'd only see my big sis once a year but I'd always end up being lectured about how I was wasting my life.

I probably sound like quite the spoilt brat, but if it's any consolation, I'm hardest on myself and this severeness implies I cannot maintain the many inheritances from this country such as the dams, roads, food production, the launch of man-made satellites, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, agricultural science, etcetera. Really, it would probably be more interesting to blow all these things up, but I guess I shouldn't talk about things I can't do myself.

Commentary

There was a lot of odd non-JLPT vocabulary here. For my own benefit, I'll give a few examples of the curios I found.

際限なく・さいげんなく・Endlessly, without end -- there seem to be lots of ways to say this. Another one for the pile.
妊婦する・にんぷする・Basically means "to become pregnant", though as a noun this means "expectant mother", so it might be interpreted as "to become an expectant mother".
羽目になる・はめになる・To flatter, or to relax one's chi if you want to get technical -- but, the whole phrase "少しでも気休めになるなら" means "if it's any consolation", which is kind of neato.

Shout outs

Quick shout out to Kozo who posted his own translation of the last block of text in his own blog. He, I believe, can be counted as being a native speaker of both English and Japanese, so he picks up on some of the finer grammatical points that skip right over my head. And, he knows exactly what Burberry is, which is a little suspicious ;) [Disclaimer: I understood that it was a fashion company from context, but refused to acknowledge the existence of such a brand]

ザ・バーバリー

I'm still considering making a separate study blog, or maybe a half-decent multimedia job that could land me my next blog at some nerdy IT corporation. Maybe a third Japanese Studies blog that could get me into grad school somewhere half-respectable?

Translation Exercise: "God Hates Japan" (4)

2009-07-21T22:15:00.005+09:00

I think this is it. Next time I'll go back to posting real content. Honest.

Original Japanese translation

十分にいいところだった。だって、埼玉はコンゴじゃないんだろう。彼女たちが、そんな世界とそこに暮らす人々を見捨てたことはあまりに屈辱的だった。親友のテツもまた、信じられないといった様子で、モルモン教徒について聞いた話を教えてくれた。なんて呼べばいいのか分からないが、その教区司祭か神父かが、ひと月に１回、少年たちを一室に集めて、マスターベーションの罪悪について説いたことを。全員に特殊な透明インクのペンと紙を渡し、前の月にマスターベーションした回数分だけ、コイン大の印を付けさせた。それから紙を全て回収し、壁に画鋲で留めてから明かりを消すと、部屋にたくさんの星が現れた。それは実際、とても美しそうだった。とにかく、司祭はそれを「罪の世界」とかそんな名前で呼び、翌月の若いモルモン教徒たちの使命は、その星を全て消していくこととなった。

突然、僕とテツは、これの彼女の子バージョンがどんなものなのかは、ただ想像するしかなかった。

０４

えっ、僕かい？僕は一九七五年東京の少し北で生まれた。たった一人のきょうだいは、一九七〇年生まれの姉のマリコだったが、彼女の感受性が僕とあまりにかけ離れていたため、それこそ一九五五年に生まれたんじゃないかと思えたほどだ。

自分はどういう人間と思うかを、彼女に聞いてみれば、ひとこと目からたぶん、バーバリーの全商品を所有していることを自ら話し始めるだろう。もしバーバリーがタンポンを作っていたら、マリコなら絶対に買ってるはずだ。彼女が若い時に最も熱中していたのは、八〇年代のデュラン・デュランをパックた安っぽい外国人バンドだった。未だに彼女は、月曜毎に原宿へ出かけており、体育館の外でロカビリーの衣装を着て踊っていた時代のことをよく覚えている。なんて恥ずかしいなんだろう。本当に最悪だ。僕ら姉弟の最大のケンカは、僕がフェルトペンで、彼女が大切にしていた一九八二年から一九八六年のミュージック・ライブの表紙に、オッパイや牙を描き込んだ後に起きた。

My translation back into English

It was a perfectly good place. After all, Saitama isn't exactly the Congo, right? Those girls who abandoned the world and all those that live there were extremely demeaning. My best friend Tetsu also, in a state of disbelief, told me what he heard about Mormons. I don't know what to call it, but the parish priest or the father gathers all the kids together in one room one time per month and preaches on the sin of masturbation. He gave everyone some paper and a pen with special transparent ink and makes them mark down the number of times they masturbated in a month. After that, he collected all the paper and after tacking them to the wall, he cut the lights and in the room the stars appeared. That actually must have been beautiful. Anyway, the priest called that "the world of sin" or something, and gave the young Mormons the mission for the next month of extinguishing all stars.

Suddenly, Tetsu and I could only imagine while child-versions of these girls were like.

Chapter 4

Huh? Me? I was born in 1975 a little north of Tokyo. My only sibling, Mariko, was born in 1970 but because her sensibilities are completely different from mine, I could almost think she was born in 1955.

If you ask her what kind of person she is, probably in a word, she would first say she was the owner of all of Burberry's merchandise. Supposing Burberry made tampons, Mariko would definitely be buying them. When she was young, what she was most crazy about was the cheap foreign band Duran Duran. Still, she often thinks of the days when every Friday she'd go down to Harajuku and dance outside of the gym in rockabilly clothing. How embarrassing. Really the worst. The biggest fight we had as siblings happened after I drew tits and fangs on the cover of her precious concert calender from 1982 to 1986.

Thoughts

Exhausted. I'm not sure-- I actually have no idea who or what a Burberry is. Also, it took me forever to realize that 原宿 is "Harajuku", despite being plastered on Gwen Stefani-themed perfume bottles everywhere.

Also one of those annoying instances with those mutant words where the first kanji is the Japanese-reading and the second is the Chinese-reading, for you linguistics nerds out there.

There were also quite a few words and phrases that I couldn't find in any dictionary, so some of this translation is strictly a figment of my own imagination. So if you or anyone you know has accuracy tips, please share.

Translation Exercise: "God Hates Japan" (3)

2009-07-15T20:05:00.006+09:00

Long time no see. Last time I wrote here I was just starting to study for the JLPT, and since then I studied for pretty much two-months straight, overdosed on Japanese, jumped into the Tafuse River, drowned, was resurrected and now am sitting in front of my computer writing again.

So I continued translating Douglas Coupland's Japan-only novel "God Hates Japan", which is not an anti-Japanese religious diatribe by the Westboro Baptist Church, but rather, a look at how Japan and the Japanese people are handling the country's own modern era in a vein similar to how Coupland has tackled Canada or before that, the United States in his other novels. So here's the third instalment.

Original Japanese translation

０２

そのため僕は木曜の真夜中を待って、二人の黒い自転車に忍び寄ると、ブリキ鋏でスポークを中央の軸から切断してしまうことで、直接復讐を果たした。僕は誰が見ていようが全く気にならなかったし、実際、最低でも一握りほどの人間が目撃していただろうが、その後、警察からも誰からも連絡はなかった。

でも車輪のない自転車を眺めているのはおかしなものだ。まるで彼女たちが見つけ出そうとしていた星のような、家に帰ってからもなかなか眠りにつけなかった。あまりにむかついていたからだ･･････。

とうもろこしばかり食べてるマヌケどもめ、よくも僕らの国へのこのことやって来て、自分たちでさえ理解していない錆びついた絵空事を押し付けやがって。あいつらがキミコを誘拐したんだ。あいつらが、駅に入ってきた地下鉄の前へ押し出すように、リエコとカオルを殺してしまったんだ。

０３

その夜は気温も高く、暖かかった。僕は受験地獄のために猛勉強していなければならないはずだったが、ほんの一吹きのモンスーンで、とても集中なんかしていられなくなった。僕はキミコが何を見ているのか想像してみようとした。一体どこへ行ってしまったんだろう。神殿の中へか？宗教は神殿が大好きだ。それとも神様のもとへ行ったのだろうか？それにしても神様というのはあまりに日本っぽくない考え方だった。日本では一人の神様のところに行き、欲しいものを祈って、もしそれで叶わなければ、また次の神様に祈りに行くんだ。

他に何があるだろう？たぶん、僕は同時に、まともな理由もないくせに、どう見たって最低な、この地上の世界を見捨てる道を選んだ彼女たちに怒りを考えていた。僕らは比較的恵まれた地域に住んでいた。テニスコートやキャヂラックや貴族の称号なんてものとは無縁だとしても、十分にいいところだった。

My translation back into English

Chapter 2

For that reason, I waited until the middle of the night, snuck up to their black bikes and by using a pair of tin snips to cut the centre shaft of the spokes, I took direct revenge. I didn't feel uneasy at all that someone might be watching, and in reality, at worst probably only a handful of people saw me, but afterwards, I didn't get any word from the police.

But staring at a wheel-less bicycles is really strange. Like the star that the girls were searching for, when I got home I couldn't fall asleep at all. Because I felt over-irritated...

These goddamn idiots eating nothing but corn, how dare they come to our country and push this rusty pipe dream that they themselves don't understand. They kidnapped Kimiko. They killed Rieko and Kaoru, like pushing them in front of a subway train coming into the station.

Chapter 3

That night the temperature was high and it was hot. I was in exam hell and should have been studying extra-hard, but with the mere gust of the monsoon, I really couldn't focus. I imagined what Kimiko must be looking at. Where the hell did she go off too? In a temple? Religions love their temples. Or, did she go below her God? Nevertheless, "God" isn't really a Japanese way of thinking. In Japan, we go to one god, pray for the thing we wish for, and if it doesn't come true, we go and pray again at the next god.

What else is there? Probably, despite not having a good reason, and nasty now matter how you look at it, I was mad at these girls that chose a path that abandoned the world above ground. We lived in a relatively well-off area. Even if things like tennis courts and Cadillacs and the names of nobility are unrelated, it was a perfectly fine place.

Thoughts

Nothing mind-blowing here. Some of the grammar is a bit slangy, and lots of strange vocabulary which I won't bore you with. For some reason, the spell-checker doesn't like "snuck" as the past-tense of "sneak". Yup.

Just one small note, which is, it has occurred to me that posting several pages of a published novel-- published in the country from which I'm writing no less-- is morally iffy, so I should take this opportunity to say that this is really for the sake of my own studying. I'm only posting it in case anyone's interested or has comments.

And if anyone at kencho is reading this, this is how I spent my POD.

Translation Exercise: "God Hates Japan" (2)

2009-05-11T11:32:00.002+09:00

The second page I translated wasn't neeeeeeeearly as hard as the first one. It was actually pretty readable. Anyway, if you're into this nerdy stuff, take a look and give me your opinion.

Original Japanese Translation

逆に、カナダ人に典型的なブロンド髪のスコットは、クールなスケーター風にも拘わらず、彼もまたマヌケな感じがした。彼はモルモンの教団から支給されたダサい自転車でトリックもキメられ、キミコがはじめて彼に憑依したampmコンビニの前で、それをいつも披露していた。たぶん、そんな彼の陳腐な虚勢と完璧な歯並びが、後に宗教を見つけたキミコにウケたわけで、彼女の影響下にあったリエコとカオルも取り込んでしまったのだろう。

僕には、そんな噂がクラスで飛び交い始めたことが、とても信じられなかった。どうして彼女たちでなければならないのか？でもまず頭に浮かんできたのは、モルモン教が宣教師として、マヌケな連中ばかりを先進国へ送り込みながら、優秀な人間たちをシエフ・レオネやニュー・デリーといった僻地へ流していたことによる安堵感だった。

というか、宗教って一体ナンだろう……。そもそも宗教って本当に何なんだろう？いや、マジで……。僕だって別にイヤミな人間になりたくないけど……、さすがにキミコの目を見れば分かるさ。リエコにしてって、カオルにしたってそうだ。空っぽで死んだようなその目は、道路や廊下を歩いているときでさえ、ラーメン屋の看板や近づく人や車など、近くのものにまるで焦点が合ってないかのようだった。その目は地平線を見やり、夜空に浮かんだ一番星を見つけようとでもしているようだった。

スコットは僕らの世界から3人を奪った。人としての本質を消し去ってしまい、人間消臭剤に変身させてしまったのだ。

My Translation

Conversely, Scott, the typical blonde Canadian, regardless of his kakkou-ii skater style, also had an idiotic feeling about him. He'd always announce how he met Kimiko for the first time in front of the AMPM convenience store where he was performing tricks on his clunky Mormon Church supplied bicycle. Probably, that guy's hackneyed bravado and perfect teeth were the reason Kimiko found religion, and under her influence, Rieko and Eriko were also introduced.

When the rumours started flying around class, I didn't believe it at all. Why did it have to be them? But what came to mind first was, as Mormon missionaries, while they send no one but this stupid lot to the advanced countries, there's a flow of excellent people to remote places like Sierra Leone or New Deli.

Perhaps I should say, what the hell is religion? What's religion really in the first place? No, seriously. I don't especially want to become a sarcastic person, but, as might be expected, Kimiko's eyes speak for themselves. It seems she got both Rieko and then Kaoru. Those dead, empty-looking eyes, even when walking down the street or through the halls, when looking at ramen shop signs approaching people, cars, or with close objects, didn't change focus. It was like she stared at the horizon and was searching in the night's sky for the first star to appear.

Scott stole three people from our world. He erased their essence as people and transformed them with human-deodorant.

Thoughts

I'm not sure about the last two sentences of the third paragraph. One of those awkard situations where I knew what he was trying to say, but wasn't sure how to put it.

Translation Exercise: "God Hates Japan" (1)

2009-05-08T21:15:00.005+09:00

In 2001, Canadian author Douglas Coupland released a book in Japan strangely titled, "God Hates Japan" (神は日本を憎んでいる). I don't know that much about the book itself, but he wrote it in English, it was translated into Japanese, and published by a manga studio of some sort.

Anyway, I bought a copy off of the Japanese Amazon site a few years ago, and it ended up in one of many boxes with all my other books when I left for Japan. I'm home on vacation right now and was going through my stuff and thought I'd translate a couple of pages of this mouse-gnawed book since the Japanese Proficiency Test is coming up and I need some practice.

First here's the annotated first page of the original Japanese (for educational purposes only), then my English translation below.

Original Japanese translation

パート1

高校生活最後の年に、クラスでかわかった３人の女子が宗教を見つけた。物語を始めるには妙な場所かもしれないが、(1) それが結構そうでもなかったりする。何かの役に立つかは分からないが、そんなキミコとカオルとエリコの３人は、(2) クラスの中でも背の高い方だった。そんな彼女たちの身のこなしは見事と言うしかなく、(3) 生物教師のウエダをして、第二次世界大戦争の国民の食生活における乳製品の大量導入が、結果的に、日本人をより優れた民族にしたごとの生きた証だと言わしめたほどだった。なんて気味の悪いファシストなんだろう。とにかく、３人は現実に存在した。クラスでも有数の美人で、喩えるなら、タンポポやオヒシバの僕らと較べたら、薔薇や牡丹の３人は、正統派美人の確たる例として、僕らの前に叩きつけられた。

でも彼女たちが、偶然に宗教を発見したわけではない。それは、モルモン教宣教師のスコットとカービーが、僕の家から6軒先にあったキミコの家の隣にホームステイし始めてからのことだ。カービーのやつは、(4) いかにもアメリカのテレビドラマに登場する、カリフォルニアの砂漠の真ん中に取り残されたトレーラーを改造したクリスタル・メタアンフェタミン精製所に収入を試みそうなやつだった。(5) どこかマヌケな怠け者といった感じで、あの滑稽なモルモン教徒の定番（ユニフォーム）であるシャツとネクタイでさえ、その下品さをカモフラージュしきれなかった。しかも、教会が髪を切ってしまうまでは、きっと角刈りだったに違いない。

Notes:

(1) それが結構そうでもなかったりする
Bad way to start. I'm not sure what this is referring to exactly, which is a bit problematic. I found three hits for this phrase on Google so it is Japanese. If anyone has ideas, please let me know.
(2) の中でも
This phrase is used as "among" or "above".
(3) をして ... 言わしめた
My friend Kaori helped me with this one, and I finally found a entry in Yahoo辞典 with a translation of this phrase into standard, modern Japanese, which says something. The final verb is reflexive, stretching waaaay back to the を particle, which is used after a name to mean "make someone say".
(4) 登場する、... 収入を試みそう
Here too the final verb seems to modify the proceeding verbs. I'm also not 100% sure about this, but it seems to be "try to ... and ...".
(5) といった感じ
This phrase means "a typical ...". I don't know it's relation to the many other phrases that mean basically the same thing.

My translation back into English

Part 1

In their last year of high school life, three cute girls in my class found religion. This might be a weird place to start a story but, sometimes that doesn't seem to be enough. I don't know if this is going to help in some way, but that trio of Kimiko, Kaoru and Eriko were even the tallest in class. I won't say anything about them other than the way they carried themselves was splendid, to the point that they made the bio teacher Ueda say that they were living proof that the abundant introduction of milk products into the citizens' diet during World War 2 created a race that had surpassed the Japanese. What a creepy fascist. Anyway, these three actually existed. As the leading beauty queens in the class -- if you were to make an analogy, when you compare to us dandelions and wiregrasses, these three roses and peonies -- as definite examples of the orthodox beautiful girls -- slapped us in the face.

But these girls, they didn't just accidentally find religion. That is, the Mormon missionaries Scott and Kirby were on their first home stay trip in Kimiko's house six doors down from mine. This guy Kirby was the kind of guy that would try to make it onto an American TV drama or try to make a living in a trailer in the middle of the California desert modded into a crystal meth lab. He was a typical idiot punk and even in those funny prerequisite Mormon shirts and ties, it was impossible to camouflage that kind of vulgarity. In addition, as far as the church cutting his hair, it was no doubt a proper buzz cut.

Thoughts

So this was incredibly hard to translate. I would be surprised if my version is 70% accurate in terms of grammar, and not just because my Japanese is atrocious, but because a lot of the phrases are obscure and the sentences are really surprisingly complex. This is probably appropriate for ikyu-test takers.

If you have any comments, suggestions or translation ideas, I'm all ears, folks.

Translation Exercise: "Wolf Totem" (2)

2009-03-21T17:25:00.003+09:00

Here's part two of my translation of Wolf Totem (狼图腾) by Jiang Rong (姜戎). This time, to make it a little bit more readable, I mixed in the source text (the English) with my Japanese translation. And like last time, please feel free to point out any errors, irregularities or suggestions.

英和翻訳：

神なるオオカミ (Wolf Totem・狼图腾)

夜に、狼が狩りに出かける時に、陳が浅く眠る。彼はガスマイに交代する時に狼が囲いに侵入したら呼ぼうと言って、動物を退却させるのを助けて、必要に応じて真っ向から戦うと約束した。ビルギーはやぎひげをしごき、微笑し、そんなに狼に執着している中国人と会ったことがないと言った。北京の学生が表した異常な興味の程度に満足そうだった。

At night, when the wolves came out to hunt, Chen would sleep lightly. He had told Gasmai to call him if a wolf ever broke into the pen when she was on guard duty, assuring her that he would help drive the animal away, fight it head-on if necessary. Bilgee would stroke his goatee, smile and say he'd never seen a Chinese so fixated on wolves. He seemed pleased with the unusual degree of interest displayed by the student from Beijing.

最初の冬の間、ある雪の降る夜に陳は懐中電灯を持って、狼と犬と女の接近戦を目撃した。

Late one snowy night during his first winter, Chen, flashlight in hand, witnessed at close quarters a battle between a wolf, a dog and a woman.

「チェンチェン！チェンチェン！」

"Chenchen! Chenchen!"

陳はガスマイの逆上した泣き声と犬たちの荒っぽい吠える声で目が覚めた。彼はフェルトのブーツを穿いてデールのモンゴル風のローブのボタンを掛けてから、懐中電灯と羊飼いの棒を持って外に出た。懐中電灯の光が雪を切るように進んで、詰め込んだ羊たちから力ずく離しているため狼の尻尾を握ているガスマイを見せられた。狼が必死になってガスマイを噛んでみていた。同時に馬鹿な太っている羊は狼にぞっとしてほとんど凍死して密集し、風除けに後退りし、雪片が蒸気になったほどぎっしり詰め込んだ。狼は前部が動けなくされた、ガスマイと綱引きをしながら地面を足で掻き、羊に噛み付くことだけできた。陳は助けるためよろよろ歩いて行ったが何をすべきか分からなかった。ガスマイの二匹の犬は羊にがんじがらめにされた。大きいな狼に行けないから、荒っぽい無力な吠える羽目になった。同時にビルギーの五・六匹の猟犬が隣人の犬たちと一緒に、囲いの西に他の狼を戦っていた。吠える声と遠ぼえと苦しんでいる泣き声は天地を揺さぶった。陳はガスマイを助けたかったのに足が動けないほど不安定だった。生きている狼を触るという監房が身がすくむような恐怖で消えた。

Chen was awakened by Gasmai's frantic cries and the wild barking of dogs. After pulling on his felt boots and buttoning up his Mongol robe, his deel, he ran out of the yurt on shaky legs, flashlight and herding club in hand. The beam of the light sliced through the snow to reveal Gasmai holding on to the tail of a wolf, trying to turn it's fangs on her. Meanwhile, the stupid, fat sheep, petrified by the wolf and nearly frozen by the wind, huddled together and kept backing up against the windbreak, packed so tightly the snowflakes between their bodies turned to steam. The front half of the wolf was immobilized; it could only paw at the ground and snap at the sheep in front of it, all the while engaged in a tug-of-war with Gasmai. Chen staggered over to help but didn't know what to do. Gasmai's two dogs were hemmed in by the huddled sheep. Unable to get to the big wolf, they were reduced to wild, impotent barking. At the same time, Bilgee's five or six hunting dogs, together with their neighbor's dogs, were fighting other wolves east of the pen. The barks, the howls and the agonizing cries of the dogs shook heaven and earth. Chen wanted to help Gasmai, but his legs were so rubbery he could barely move. His desire to touch a living wolf had vanished, replaced by paralyzing fear.

Okay! That's it for now.

My question this time is the difference between saying "何々して" and "何々し". I know the "て" form is sometimes used to show a direct connection between cause and effect, and the stem form of a verb is often used in a list of events, but here I perhaps inappropriately mixed and matched where I saw fit. Any comments about this?

I also wanted to thank Kozo, a friend of mine from university and easily one of the nicest people I know, who gave me heaps of good suggestions. He's been doing translations as well, but rather than doing them are grammar-vocabulary exercises, he's refining his already-excellent written Japanese. He also asked if he could give a shot at his own translation, and needless to say, his is a lot more accurate. But interestingly, there are a few places where mine's not necessarily wrong, or at least not completely wrong, but our choice of words is quite different. I also saw a version his parents did, which was again quite different. Maybe he'll let me post them in some sort of translation exposé.

Translation Exercise: "Wolf Totem" (1)

2009-03-16T10:56:00.005+09:00

Classes are over and I'm starving for something to do. I've been translating pretty much anything I can get my hands on, just for the practice, but unfortunately most of the English language literature I have is itself a translation -- either from Russian or Chinese or Japanese -- or is written in post-modern vernacular and is almost impossible to render in another language.

A few weeks ago, I tried to translate a few paragraphs of "Wolf Totem", a famous modern Chinese model by Jiang Rong. Here's the broken-Japanese result:

英和翻訳：

神なるオオカミ (Wolf Totem・狼图腾)

(甚だしい誤りを見たら、教えて下さい。)

ビルギーと一緒にいるのは慰められる。陳は頭がすっきりするように目をこすり、静かにビルギーにまばたきし、そしてガゼルと狼を眺めるように望遠鏡を上げる。

陳は先の狼と遭遇してから、草地の住民―遊牧民―はいつも狼に囲まれるまでは長くないと理解するようになった。ほぼ毎晩幽霊のような狼の姿を見つける―特にひどく寒い冬に。一、二――あるいは五、六――それとも、十二もの明るい緑の目組が放牧地の周囲に動くのが見える。百里以上。ある夜には陳とビルギーの嫁のガスマイが懐中電灯で二十五匹まで数える。

ゲリラ軍のように遊牧民が簡単のために努力する。冬の間に羊小屋は防風柵として役立つ大きいなフェツトじゅうたんが付けている荷馬車によって移動垣根となった半円だ。しかし狼を防げない。広い南部の通路は犬の一群と当番の女に守られる。時折狼が羊小屋に侵入し、犬と戦う。体がユルトの壁にドサッとぶつかって、内にいる人に目を覚めさせる。陳陣に二回起こって、寝台に落ちるのを防ぐのはその壁じかなかった。しばしば遊牧民は狼から二枚のフェルトじゅうたんだけで分離する。

注：陳陣＝チェン・ジェン

質問：

日本語の小説は一般的に現在形で書かれるながら、英語の小説はよく過去形で書かれる。日本語では、聞き伝えとかあるキャラクターの過去の経験について話すときに、過去形は適当でしょうか。

Source text: Wolf Totem (狼图腾) by Jiang Rong (姜戎)

Having Bilgee beside him was comforting. Chen rubbed his eyes to clear away the mist and blinked calmly at Bilgee, then raised his telescope again to watch the gazelles and the wolves.

Since his earlier encounter with the wolves, he had come to understand that the inhabitants of the grassland, the nomads, were never far from being surrounded by wolves. Nearly every night he spotted ghostly wolf outlines, especially during the frigid winter; two or three, perhaps five or six, and as many as many as ten pairs of glittering green eyes moving around the perimeter of the grazing land, as far as a hundred li or more distant. One night he and Bilgee’s daughter-in-law Gasmai, aided by flashlights, counted twenty-five of them.

Like guerrilla fighters, nomads strive for simplicity. During the winter, sheep pens are semicircles formed by wagons and mobile fencing, with large felt rugs that serve as a windbreak but cannot keep out the wolves. The wide southern openings are guarded by packs of dogs and women on watch shifts. From time to time, wolves break into the pens and fight the dogs. Bodies often thud into yurt walls, waking people on the other side; twice that had happened to Chen Zhen, and all that had kept a wolf from landing beside him was that wall. Frequently, nomads are separated from wolves by no more than a couple of felt rugs.

Question:

Japanese novels are generally written in present tense, while English novels are frequently written in past tense. In Japanese, when talking about hearsay or a character’s past experiences, is past tense appropriate?

Tarzan-ben Japanese

2009-03-10T17:12:00.010+09:00

Or, "Condescension: how pidgin languages are born"

Some people here seem to immediately assume Westerners can't speak a word of Japanese and will use oversimplified Tarzan-like Japanese (ie. me... *points to chest* frrriend!), lacking grammar or appropriate politeness levels and reinforced with inane grunts, redundant hand gestures and with whatever bits and pieces of English vocabulary they remember from high school in order to try to accommodate the hapless manchild foreigners. For example, as I was writing this, a member of the main office staff at Ichikoko came in an had an Tarzan-ben conversation with me.

Free you say?

And of course, the badly pronounced basic English vocabulary just happens to correspond to the simple Japanese vocabulary that all the foreigners in this country know already, and it ruins the rhythm of the conversation making it a lot harder to understand than if they just used one language or the other in the first place, and makes whoever it is trying to talk to you sound condescending as hell.

The Furious Guide to Being Passive Aggressive in a Japanese Office Environment

2009-02-26T20:53:00.011+09:00

Or, "How To Be An Asshole So Subtly That No One Really Notices" (volume 1)

1. If someone leaves anything on your desk on days you aren't there, hide it on the days that you are.

I've had huge stacks of marked tests, sample MEXT-approved textbooks and a big bag of white rice (only in Japan) waiting for me on my desk after a couple being away for a couple of days. While there's a 99% chance that if it happens, this belongs to a teacher directly beside you who forgot you actually work there, studies have shown [citation needed] that quietly picking up this object up, bringing it to an empty table nowhere near the offender's desk and discretely abandoning it sends a firm but absolutely innocuous message. The first time you'll get an apology from the offender, and after that they'll keep quiet.

2. If you forget your lunch, there's always omiyage.

Shiroi-koibito and day old green tea are part of a balanced lunch.

Plus, Shirokoibito was my club name back in Roppongi in the 80's.

Surely, no one will notice a few extra missing, but they may quite possibly notice those few extra wrappers on the edge of your desk and wonder who the hell you think you are.

3. Cut someone off when they say goodbye

If you're in the process of stealthily "going home for lunch", and someone catches you red-handed and begins to say "otsukaresama desh---" [have a nice d---], cut them off with a friendly, if not brisk "konnichiwa!" You're the forty-seven ronin, and the front door is Kira Yoshinaka and Nishimura-sensei is Prince of Sendai [see below]. Right?

You gotta do what you gotta do, man.

4. Laminate shit.

That's what the laminating machine's there for.

5. If you make a spelling or grammar mistake in class, blame it on your dialect.

This happens to the best of us, where the teacher -- who obviously has read "The Furious Guide to Being Passive Aggressive in the LL Room", or felt scorned by what they read in "Your ALT is Just Not That Into You" (both available from Doubleday) -- smugly points out an obvious mistake you made in front of the whole class, and it's always embarrassing, unless you act a bit holier-than-thou, up on your English high-horse, and say that they're wrong and it's actually a very common way of saying it in your own dialect, and then indignantly lament the misfortunes of the Americocentric English education system.

If used properly, this guide will help bring about antipathy, foster a vague infamy, halt pesky enkai invitations and help cement negative stereotypes about Westerners.

Case of the Racist Hatemongers

2009-02-14T20:30:00.004+09:00

So I was walking around Tenjin, Fukuoka this sunny February afternoon, spending copious amounts of money on CDs and music equipment, singlehandedly saving the local economy. I walked past a group of fascinating gentlemen -- pictured below -- and out of the corner of my eye I caught the word 外国人 ("foreigner") on their banner. My interest piqued, and I joined their small audience of a two old women and a glassy-eyed junior high school student.

On closer inspection, it turns out they're racist hatemongers. It's easy to tell a racist hatemonger in Japan from any other kind of protester* because, try as you might, they will not make eye contact. They won't even pose for a nice group photo.

* Note: There are always protesters in Tenjin, it seems, and the vast majority of them are pretty cool, so I don't mean to generalize them or Japanese people at large. Last time I was there we were approached by some people protesting the war in Gaza, who were interested in discussion, not shouting scat out of megaphones.

So what makes them racist hatemongers? Well, let's focus on what makes them hatemongers to start. This group is called "在日特権を許さない市民の会", or "Association of citizens who will not allow special rights for zainichi", with "zainichi" (在日 -- properly "Japanese people of Korean descent" but literally "Koreans living in Japan") being a common ethnic slur for Koreans.

To let the matter speak for itself, I'm going to quote their website:

過去の誤った歴史認識に基づき「日帝の被害者」「かわいそうな在日」という妄想がいまだに払拭されていない日本社会では、在日韓国人・朝鮮人を特別に扱う社会的暗黙の了解が存在しているのも事実です。

In a Japanese society where wild ideas based on a bygone mistaken understanding of history such as "victims of the Empire of Japan" or "poor zainichi" have still not been wiped out, it is a fact that an unspoken social agreement to handle Japanese of Korean descent and [mainland] Koreans* still remains.

* Note: A slur for mainland Koreans this time.

If you're unaware of who these "victims of the empire" are, I suggest you head to your local library. I'll give you a hint though: it's about the same number as "victims of the Reich".

On group leader Sakurai Matoko's website, he describes the Japanese colonization of East Asia to be a very good thing for the region, and describes the Chinese (using another slur, of course) and Koreans as "beasts" who hold no value in human life. And one fun little tidbit even accuses Confucius of cannibalism.

Anyway, not to harp on this, because -- like I said -- there are more people in Fukuoka who are protesting for human rights than protesting against them, but I have a personal problem with the way these right wing groups that talk about Koreans. This stems in something I saw at ground zero in Hiroshima last year. In front of a monument dedicated to the 20,000 Korean victims of the atomic bomb, many of which were "forced labourers", there was a black van giving an idiotic racist rant similar to Sakurai's.

This is like skinheads protesting in front of the camp in Dachau. Absolutely jaw-droppingly disgusting.

And the reason I would post any of this here is, I think the vast majority of Japanese people want nothing to do with assholes like Sakurai, but in a general sense, there are a lot of soft-core historical revisionists in Japan, and to make a spectacle of these hate group's ignorance is the best way to fight this dangerous ideology. The best way that doesn't involve balaclavas and baseball bats, that is.

And if you want to send a message to Sakurai personally, you can reach him by e-mail.

Sakurai's screen name, by the way, is "Doronpa", which I believe translates as "scatmuncher".

Bored @ Work?

2008-12-17T21:45:00.002+09:00

Could be.

100 Tiny Screams from the Microwave

2008-12-03T18:55:00.004+09:00

I don't usually eat potatoes, but I needed some sort of energy for studying that doesn't involve white sugar and trans-fats, so I popped a jagaimo into the microwave. It seemed a bit undercooked after, so I decided to cut it in half and put it in for another minute, but noticed a rotten bit. Cutting further to see if it was salvageable, I found this:

A REALLY rotten bit. But then I realized...

ANTS! ANTS! GOD DAMN ANTS! There was a colony of ANTS in my FRIDGE! And I while was more impressed ingenuity of the ants than horrified (there was no hole in the potato; merely a crease that they exploited), I felt kinda bad about the small-scale nuclear holocaust and all.

HOLY [expletive deleted]!

2008-11-28T17:47:00.006+09:00

I was marking some papers today after some lengthy studying / Simpsons watching in the LL room. The students had to answer very basic questions like "Why do you study English?" (I gave full marks to one student who replied, "I don't know," and gave about 50 zeros for "Because I..."), "What is your favorite (sic) way to relax?" and "Why do you go to the library" (another lucky student who wrote "I don't go to the library" got full marks on this one). This is all a bit below their actual level, and all very standard.

Part two was a bit more interesting. Chains of "If I have a lot of money", [which in standard English, mind you, would use the past participle verb "had", but this is bloody Japanese textbook English], it's more like "If I have a lot of money, I would quit my job and go to Florida. If I go to Florida, I'd join NASA. If I joined NASA I'd go to the freaking moon!"

One student wrote "If have a lot of money, I would go Italy. If I go to Italy, I'd buy wine. If I have wine, I would drink it." [14 years old]

Then I got to one with the following:

I don't know if you can make out number five, but it says, "If I have a lot of money, I will enjoy playing many times (sic). If I enjoy playing many times I will buy guns. If I buy guns, I will kill everyone." HOLY CRAP! This kid would be at the police station right now in Canada.

I affixed a note onto his paper for his teacher telling her my thoughts on making a joke (I hope) about mass murder while in Mumbai the terrorist attack isn't even over yet. I didn't get to talk to the teacher, but I wonder how the school would react to it.

For those Westerners reading this who imagine threats of violence as a non-issue in Japan, Saga borders a city called Sasebo in Nagasaki Prefecture where four years ago a 11 year old girl slit a classmate's throat during school hours.

Anyway, either a really bad joke, or a baaaaaad sign.

A Tested Cure to Economic Woes

2008-11-16T19:56:00.013+09:00

With the elections in Canada last month and America this month, and notable lack of elections in Japan, I thought it would make a timely lesson, steal David Suzuki's idea of "If YOU were Prime Minister". I asked my Ichiko 3rd years [grade 12s] to write short essays on the topic, picking any world issue they like and giving a creative solution.

If YOU were Prime Minister...

Before this though, we brain-stormed. Each group contributed problems like war, racism, global warming, (etc.) and two groups gave the current economic crisis as their number one issue. We wrote this on the white board, switched up the groups and assigned them a problem.

The groups stood up one by one and gave intelligent, if not somewhat safe answers. Then it was group number four's turn -- one of the two groups in the class assigned to singlehandedly correct the worst economic crisis in human history.

A hush fell over the LL room as group group four's janken-chosen leader stood up to deliver what no doubt would be a stirring and memorable address.

Her: "Colony!"

The class erupted in laughter.

Me: [WTF?] "Uhhhhh... umm... *teeth suck* Okay, colonies." I wrote it on the white board with a big fat '?' beside it.

Not so PC, especially given early 20th century history. But then, last class I hard a girl give her solution to ALL problems, suggesting that she should be the benevolent God Emperor of the whole world using fear and violence to enact a terrible peace.

But, I turn around and hoping they'll at least choose a funny place to colonize like Switzerland or the Falkland Islands. So, I say, "Colonies. Okay, for example?"

Her (without thinking): "Taiwan!"

My mouth hung open. More laughter from students, but this time all of it uncomfortable.

Then the JTE pipes in and says, "Sensei, I think she meant 'block economy'."

Me: "Ohhhhhhh..."

Since everyone laughed to begin with, apparently EVERYONE heard this as "colony" too, but what she was really suggesting is an amiable bilateral partnership with Japan's formerly colonized-neighbour. :O Sweet Jesus!

Peeing in Japan

2008-10-11T09:27:00.003+09:00

I was at YouMe Town today ("[shopping] town" being Engrish for "mall", and "youme" being close to the spelling of "yumé", or dream). Yes, I went there again. I'm not proud of it, but there I was.

Anyway, I used to washroom -- the second floor one beside the dentist office and smoking room that's always empty. I tend to have a bit of a predilection toward that one, because the ones on the main floor seem to always have "Part of My World" from the Aladdin soundtrack playing while middle aged women obliviously clean the floors a few metres behind me, while old men hock loogies into the urinals, glance at my gaijin manhood, and then shake just a little too much, all the while swarms of five year olds pee Butters-style.

But, there I was, and I walked up the the urinal, completely alone and as I unzipped my fly, I heard a voice from somewhere say, "cha-ching!" I was absolutely sure I was alone, but I heard this two or three times. It was like an adult trying to imitate a child's voice and ended up sounding eerily like Michael Jackson. I thought I heard "cha-ching!", but it slowly dawned on me that I probably actually heard "chin-chin", which is childish Japanese slang for "penis". Needless to say, I got out of there as soon as possible.

Then I walked by a group of probably-stoned teenagers pushing eachother over and laughing hysterically -- which, given that drugs are tightly enforced here -- is almost unseen in Japan. Just after this, I walked by a woman who was wearing a tight navy blue t-shirt with the well-known English word "MILK" written across her chest in big white letters. In Japanese, the word for milk and breasts uses the same kanji (乳, for you pervs), so Japanese people should be much more aware that this is a a strange thing for a woman to write on her chest. Maybe this is a very popular shirt these days? Maybe she works on a dairy farm? Or maybe she has no idea what it says... being Saga, none would surprise me.

All in all, a very strange day at YouMe Town.

"Tragicomic"

2008-10-07T15:31:00.012+09:00

I was flipping through some books at work looking for something-- anything-- teachable, and I happened upon a picture dictionary. A picture dictionary, for those not in the know, are glossaries of vocabulary arranged by subject which use illustrations instead of definitions.

I found this one series of pictures which was keeping it real to the point of being depressingly bleak, but had a strong streak of perhaps-intentional irony running through.

Let's call today's protagonist "Bob". Bob's my age, I reckon. 25 years old, but with a wife and eight year old daughter to support. Judging solely by the pictures, Bob's from a bad home and married young. He's an aspiring rapper from St. Louis who goes by the stage name "Ferret", because of his knack for weaselling out of things. Bob's job at the warehouse gave him time to think. Perhaps a little too much time, because after one night of heavy drinking with the guys, they decided get revenge against the bourgeoisie by breaking and entering. Someone called the cops, and while Bob's nimble friends got away easy, Bob, always the slow one, was run down by even the heftiest of middle age cops.

Caught! The misnamed "Ferret" is not looking too proud of himself. I want you to take note of one particular detail: mullet and sideburns. But in the next shot, Bob's cleaned himself up a bit for his impending trial.

But look at that vacant look his eyes. The eyes of a criminal.

His lawyer's hired/provided by the state, so now LET THE TRIAL BEGIN!

Bob and his lawyer are optimistic, but unfortunately that optimism is unfounded.

Look at his expression:

Poor Bob! He looks so sooooooooooooo sad. ☹ Good thing Bob has a lot more time on his hands, to think about his sins and how to survive on the inside.

Actually, from the look of it, the stress of prison aged Bob terribly through those seven long years, because the last panel has a significantly greyer, balder Bob walking back out into the world, so new and frightening.

He appears to be wearing the same suit that he wore to his sentencing too, leading me to believe this is the only possession from his old life that he has left.

I invite you to take a closer look at his radically different hair styles:

I think the moral this depressingly blunt story is, DON'T DO CRIME. Though, in my version, he finds religion, joining the Five Percenters, and focuses his experiences in the clink into his debut album, which sells a million copies in it's first week.

Last we heard from Bob, he was living in a 50,000 square foot mansion in Farmington, Connecticut and was doing family movies.

Indigence

2008-10-03T01:11:00.005+09:00

One of my schools is really horribly disorganized right now. Actually, I have no idea if it's actually is disorganized, or if I only get that feeling because no one tells me a thing about what's going on. EVER.

It's a little like that scene in Apocalypse Now where Willard asks the soldier at Dung Lo Bridge, "Who's in command here?" and the guy looks a bit freaked out and says,

Weird thing about being an ALT is, no one - NO ONE - is sure what I'm supposed to do, and for a variety of linguistic and sociological reasons, I'm permanently out of the loop, and no one's sure who's in charge of me anyway, or if I'm in charge of myself, or if the idea of "being in charge" of a gaijin is simply absurd anyway, since we're as inexorable and untameable as 1000 wild stallions.

And now, Sagas of Saga presents "Natto: A Comedy of Errors"

2008-09-28T10:41:00.006+09:00

It all started at the ruggedly beautiful and yet refinedly classy Shikian Ryokan in Oita Prefecture, Japan. I'll save you the details of the ryokan, other than a fantastic main building and individual Japanese-style guest houses, each with a large private onsen bath made of solid granite and the size of a car.

Breakfast the next morning was a buffet style with really well made Japanese food. This is where our story begins. I piled up the rice, fish, soup and a small paper cup with the following label:

Me: Ohh... "yuu... ki... something-something mame." Mame means beans! It's probably dried soya beans. Mmmm!

Misato: I thought you hated natto.

Me: *thinking something else I took had a tiny big of natto on it* Oh, yeah, it's okay. I don't hate it. I just don't like it.

I opened the label and peered in at fermented soya beans reeking of ammonia and the sweat of the oppressed.

In pure desperation, I mixed in as much rice as possible and added a little packet of Japanese mustard, which is essentially like watering down poison. If anything, it just draws out the pain.

I started out optimistic. In fact, I decided that I'd man it up and eat it. Japan is a waste-not-want-not society, which means it's rude and shameful to leave even a grain of rice on your plate. This, I actually really respect, so I wanted to try my best.

Me: Wow! It's sticky! Fun... exotic...

It started out all fun and games until I started getting it on my hands. My enthusiasm wained after this.

Me: Um...

Misato: Ganbarinasai.

After finishing about half of it, and absolutely everything else on my plate in some depressing attempt to filibuster, I started to give up on manliness and maturity altogether, reverting to a child-like state.

At this point, a storm was brewing. In my bowels.

Eventually, I gave up and shovelled the rest of the beans back into the paper cup and tried to hide my shame with napkins and the label. An hour had passed and I had completely failed at Japanese food and table manners. Clearly, not my best moment in Japan.

Top 10 Japanese Words that ALTs Use In Casual Conversation (Part 2)

2008-09-21T21:00:00.004+09:00

Part two of my top 10 list of most common Japanese words used by foreigners in Japan. I hope you enjoy!

Konbini [kon-been-ee]
- noun

Ever wish there was a place where you could buy such things as snacks, stationery, a bottle of French wine, concert tickets, some lunch, DVD movies, clothing, video games, umbrellas, and "love magic", and where you can even pay your bills; all in one convenient store? Try 7-11, Lawson, AM-PM Mini Mart, Family Mart, or one of the many other fine Japanese konbini.

Yes, I know 7-11 exists outside of Japan. In fact, most of the Japanese konbinis started off life as American companies, then were bought by Japanese companies, but in Japan they're unbelievably highly competitive, doing very specialized and localized market research which they call "Dominant" (yes, an English adjective), and end up being something else altogether. So much so, that they go beyond the North American image of a "corner store" and little by little has become... the konbini!

[Origin: Japanese コンビニ, itself from the English convenience store]

Gaijin [gahy-jin]
- noun, adjective, interjective

I've been in Japan for about a year, and I'm willing to guess that anyone who knows a smattering of Japanese phrases has come across this one already, so I won't go into the details of the nuances or etymology beyond the meaning "foreigner", except that it's a shortened form of gaikokujin, or "person-from-a-foreign-country". And, it's pretty rude. And Japanese people say it all the time. And the Japanese people that use this shortened form of gaikokujin would be horrified if they I used the shortened forms of "Nipponjin" or "Japanese".

And let's not even get into nanban chicken.

All this, of course, does not stop the gaijin community from using "gaijin" in every other sentence. In fact, just the other day I was in Fukuoka with my gaijin friends and spotted some strange, suspicious, possibly criminally-active foreigner-looking gaijins coming our way and I said, "Goddamn, there're a lot of gaijins here!" with a bit of autoxenophobic excitement.

I personally used the word "gaijin" 46 times today. I counted.

See also: Gaijin Smash.

[Origin: Japanese 外人, itself a contraction of 外国人]

Eki [ey-kee, ek-ee]
- noun

Train station. I don't know why we use this particular Japanese word since Japanese train stations closely resemble their Western equivalent, but maybe because very few of us had lives so intimately connected to a mere train station. Ever wake up at 6:15 AM to be on time for a lonely commuter train? If you have, you feel my pain. Pushing through a noisey, hostile crowd of uniformed students, barely (and sometimes not) avoiding hitting your head on handle bars which are all at a painfully low six-foot level -- pushing through just to get out at your stop...

At the same time as I associate the eki with so many terrible things, it's also the home of plenty of good memories, so what can I say? I love my eki.

[Origin: Japanese 駅]

Onsen
- noun

Ever feel like sitting in a bit bathtub filled with sulphuric water, ass-naked with a few of your best mates? Well then you'd best to Japan, me son! This is at first the most uncomfortable thing in the world, but after a couple of times, it stops being anything of an issue and becomes one of the most relaxing things to do on a Sunday afternoon. Especially if you're sipping a beer and are outside in the warm water on a cold winter day staring off at the mountains. Said to be quite healthy too.

The first time I went to an onsen was at the very end of operating hours, and as we were leaving, a security guard came to ask my naked self to bend over and pull out the big onsen bath plug to let the water out for the night. Awkward!

[Origin: Japanese 温泉]

Keitai
- noun

Keitais! Teacher, mother, secret lover. While you Westerner types are spending X amount of dough on Blackberries per month ($100+?), my little keitai -- the Japanese word for "cell phone" -- was the smallest of the small and cheapest of the cheap, and it combines an ordinary phone with a dedicated e-mail client, web browser, mp3 player, video player, digital camera, digital video camera, dictionary, calculator, etc. Behold(!):

Much like Golem from Lord of the Rings, I love and hate my keitai. I love it because it's fairly useful for communication, but really because it's an endless source of entertainment. Get bored? Send an innane e-mail to all my friends. I hate it because, aside from brain tumors, and for that matter a tumor on my thigh where my pocket is, it's annoying! First of all, I use it as an alarm clock, with it's handy mp3 player playing Kid Koala's "Like Irregular Chickens" (starting at the one minute point) and so I associate it with waking up at 6:15 for crowded commuter trains, but also, it's like a computer in every way, but much less convenient. I don't LIKE typing e-mails with my thumbs, damn it! Lastly, I got that ultra-slim model. The purple one on the top right, actually, because I thought it was dark brown in the muted lighting of the store, and I think dark brown electronics will eventually replace the white lacquer look that Apple's been pushing, so might as well get behind this one now. But I got the smallest phone they had, because my goal was a phone the size and shape of a credit card, and the only drawback, or at least the principal drawback is, I have to endure all manner of folk telling me "It's cute that such a big man has such a small keitai." Pff! Whatever. At least I'm not overcompensating for anything.

I know this is a "top 10" list, but I didn't number them, let alone choose a favourite. Have a favourite? Post a comment and tell me which! Also, I put two movie and two TV references in this post: figure out which, and I'll buy you a beer.

Marriage Proposal On the First Day

2008-09-19T17:20:00.007+09:00

Friday was the first day of my class at Ichikoko. I did my standard, professional, squeaky-clean, painfully boring self-introduction amidst cries of "kawaii!" and "kakko ii!", and then had them write short essays introducing themselves to me.

Most of them talked about their hometowns, their love of studying and their dreams of someday going to America™ -- all very standard. One, though, one was a little bit special. It's both the scariest and by far the funniest thing I've got from a student, or anyone else for that matter.

For the sake of privacy, I've changed her name, age and hometown, but the rest is in it's absolutely original formatting right down to the colours of the hearts.

Dear Michael

Hello (: My name is Yuri. ♥

I'm fifteen years old. I live in Saga.

My birthday is June 20th. ♥

My hobby is singing a song. ♥

Let's sing together!! ♥

I love LL class. Because I'll meet you ♥_♥!!

My dream is to wedding foreign man ♥

I like foreign man
you are foreign man ♥

I want to be a good friend with you. ♥

When you see me, please say "Hello" to me ♥

good bye

Do you have a girlfriend?
or boyfriend?

Top 10 Japanese Words that ALTs Use In Casual Conversation (Part 1)

2008-09-13T14:43:00.012+09:00

I've heard the Japanese in Vancouver is rather "slangy". The English in Montreal's soaked up Francicisms enough to be considered a distinct dialect, and Acadian French contains such witticisms as "ridez le truck". Minority languages tend to work this way-- slowly creolizing, de-creolizing, and then eventually disappearing.

I used to be one of them Montreal English, and now I'm a foreigner living in Japan. There aren't too many of us, and if there's one thing that unites us, it's how we fracture the Japanese language at the expensive of our own. Here's the first half of my top 10 list:

Haro! [hah-roh]
- interjection

English, sort of. Think of this as English fried and then refried. If you've ever been within 50 metres of a group of 10-year-old Japanese boys, you've heard this. If you've been in Japan long enough, you've probably said it.

Today's kids are getting savvy to the fact that... not every white person is a English speaking American citizen, and they occasionally throw out the buenos días and namashites. One time when I got a "haro!" from somewhere behind me, I threw back a nice, crisp "bonjour!". You know, to internationalize. I assume it's the first time he ever heard this, 'cause I faintly heart a sad and confused "bon... jour?"

[Origin: Japanese school children ハロー!, var. of hello, itself var. of hallo, itself var. of hollo, itself var. of earlier holla]

Genki [gen-kee]
- adjective
Genki isn't in any English dictionaries I know of, but make no mistake: we gaijins have bastardised and Anglicised the sucker until it's Sino-Japanese etymology is just a painful memory. But what does it mean? Genkiness is a mix of exitement, happiness and healthiness, or in other words... "exuberance"?

A quick Google image search yeilds a genki carrot:

Notice the glassy look of excitement on his face and the gung-ho attitute. After spending even days in Japan, everyone's genki or not-genki. There are no other emotions.

[Origin: Japanese 元気]
-Related forms
Genkiness, genkize, genkify, genkerific

Nomihodai [noh-mee-hoh-dahy]
- noun, verb

All you can drink for two hours for about $15-20. Way to give'r to your liver, eh? Sometimes you get free food and it often it involves making an ass of oneself with coworkers singing terrible songs in karaoke.

I did this last night, in fact, and now I'm feeling not-so-genki.

Note: nomihodais may lead to liver failure.

[Origin: Japanese 飲み放題]

Tabehodai [tah-bey-hoh-dahy]
- noun, verb

All you can eat for about $10. Sometimes it's à la carte, and sometimes buffet. Either way, prepare to eat a lot of meat, fish, squid and pizza or indeterminable quality.

Sometimes, you can get "nomi-tabehodais", which combines the two into a swirling vortex of fatty meat, a cynical single vegetable serving consisting of some raw cabbage and an endless amount of watery booze. Highly recommended.

[Origin: Japanese 飲み放題]

Quotations from Actual Compositions

2008-08-29T13:35:00.009+09:00

Being an ALT means reading a lot of snippets of student's English, ranging from point-form answers on worksheets to reading long, often-convoluted essays. Now, I'm not here to make fun of broken English because I am well aware of my limitations in Japanese, but some were so sound-out-ish in bizarre or cute ways that I absolutely have to post them.

As part of a grammar exercise, all students were asked what their favourite way to relax is and why. A depressingly high amount of students chose "sleeping". This is because most of them get up at 5:30~6:00 to catch the train to school and then study until 9:00 or 10:00 at night every freaking day, but this one response is especially bleak:

Not only did he start a sentence with a capitalized "because" AFTER I TOLD THEM NOT TO, but his favourite pass time is turning off his mind. God! That's Lowbott showing his disgust, there, by the way.

Now, just after Christmas I did what every good ALT does: dedicate an entire class to "what did you do for your winter vacation?" lessons. One student wrote:

Powers, eh? This may be an example of the semantic differences between the English 'raw power' and Japanese 'energetic power', but the student obviously wasn't aware that 'powers' is pretty much reserved for high ranking corrupt politicians and superheroes. But, reading this, this is precisely what came to mind.

Finally, I've posted this before, but I think this is the best thing I've ever got from a student:

A bit hard to read my scrawled handwriting, but it says, "Hello! Today I'm going to show you a pig doll. It is very cute, isn't it? It's about 2000 yen. It's name is "Boo-chan". He is very pretty because his nose is big. [Editor's note: I guess that's why Japanese people find me so pretty]

"My grandmother gave me a pig doll in Safari Park for [sic] years ago, but there aren't any pigs in the park.

"Do you like pigs? I love pigs. Pork is delicious and pigs are a lot of fun. Thank you."

Sichuan Awesomeness

2008-08-08T21:10:00.007+09:00

With the Olympics officially underway, Japan seems to suddenly have a strong interest in everything Chinese.

Japan has a long and complicated history with China, but beyond the politics, Japan does owe a lot to China culturally, and the emerging Chinese youth culture seems to reciprocate to some degree, involving a large amount of anime, manga, video game systems and the odd C-pop singer adopting a Japanese stage name.

But, back to the sudden interest in the Sinosphere! (Note: doesn't "sinosphere" sound like an invention, possibly a space craft, that an evil genius might have in the not-too-distant future? "Put him in--- the SINOSPHERE!")

Mundanely, and yet very tellingly, just today they started some takeaway hamburger patties in the bento section of the Max Value proudly proclaiming "中華ハンバーグ", in that colouring, which would translate to "CHINESE HAMBURGER STEAK". I don't know what constitutes a Chinese hamburger, but it is interesting that this dish was conveniently invented to coincide with the start of the Olympics. I also casually watched some Mandarin lessons on local TV, distractingly food related. They showed this cho genki chef cooking up a storm and chatting away in this really animated Mandarin and effortlessly cooking some amazing-looking food. I made up my mind about dinner.

I went for "Sichuan-style braised shrimp", from a big Chinese cookbook/massive coffee table book that I found in my apartment when I moved in (note: and haven't opened once). I happened to buy shrimp earlier today, so I just browsed through the 300 some-odd pages looking for a recipe where I could use that and the tofu, and that wouldn't require me going to the grocery store again (note: the grocery store is directly across the street).

Maybe Sichuan cuisine is a bit of a strange choice for spontaneous cooking, seeing as how I've never cooked anything resembling Chinese food (note: that didn't come in a box) before and that I'm suddenly learning to cook Chinese food in Japan

Being the bastardizing bastard that I am, I read over the ingredients a couple of times, instructions once, and mixed and matched a bit, threw in some tofu, and finally served it over rice noodles. For the record, the most important part of the recipe was a paste made of soy sauce, rice wine, toban jiang and a pinch of sugar, and I stuck to the recipe for that as closely as I could. I actually already had a bottle of toban jiang -- a mix of hot chilies and miso paste -- in my fridge, which is a bit strange. It was right beside the mayonnaise and can of Guinness.

Anyway, here's the money shot:

Yay! It looks terrible with the camera flash, but it was really good! I promise!

Anyway, try googling "chili shrimp" or "Sichuan shrimp" if you get the chance. It was easy to make, and even to improvise with the recipe a bit, and even if mine wasn't exactly authentic, it tasted great and was easy to cook.

Misdo: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Japan

2008-07-25T10:18:00.011+09:00

About six weeks ago we had a near-Biblical flood after several days and nights of rain. And the day of the flood was the day I had to commute an hour.

I rode to the station in knee-deep water and it was still raining, so I wasn't sure what I'd be going to-- work, or to a terrifying nightmare of floods, mudslides, emergency helicopters and mostly likely Jihadists, based on alarmist terrorism posters that the train stations have been suddenly plastered with:

I hesitated. The train that arrives just before mine was, for the record, three hours late. Mine was on time, but I still couldn't get in contact for any sort of authority figure to find out of schools are cancelled when there's a threat of a natural disaster like today (--they aren't). I wasn't going to get on that train until I knew for sure I could, so I ended up having a breakfast of waxy doughnuts and sugary, milky café au lait at the American-founded but so so Japanese chain, Mister Donut, affectionately called Misdo. In Canada we have doughnuts with exciting names like "Maple Dip", or "Sour Cream Plain" -- and in Japan, they have names like "Maron Whip" and "Old Fashion Maccha Choko". It's bizarre and wonderful, because it was originally an American chain, and in the same way you wouldn't want to go to a sushi restaurant in your home town and see a menu of English translations, in Japan, restaurants with Western-style food will have a lot of English on the menu, but shamelessly mixed in with untranslated Japanese nouns. It has a similar kitsch appeal to bilingual packaging in Canada with brands like Cap'n Crunch being famously rendered in French as Capitaine Crounche -- not quite a literal translation, but this strange middle ground.

I was exhausted by the time I made to the station through the floodwater, so I was sitting there drinking my coffee in a haze. I hadn't put my change away, so it was lazily sitting there on the tray. I got a refill of coffee, which was somewhere just below boiling, and burning my mouth when I took a big gulp, I left in disgust, having forgotten about my change. A pretty sizable 600 yen.

Having made an ass of myself, I decided never to go back there again. There is NO tipping in Japan so it wouldn't have been misinterpreted as a friendly gesture. Just pure gaijin stupidity.

Finally, one day last week I bit the bullet because I was jonesing for that coffee. As far as coffee goes, it's just as bad as Timmy's back home, if not worse, and the heavy cigarette smoke somehow adds to the appeal. How often do you come out of a coffee shop stinking of nicotine in Canada? I rest my case.

So, I got to the counter and there was a bit of a rumbling. One of the ladies was taking a long hard look at me and said something inaudible to her coworker and I thought, "Awee shit. They're thinking, 'That's that guy! Thanks for the change, you idiot foreigner!'" Instead, she comes up to me with a baggie with my change in it! At least a month later. Every last yen was kept behind the counter, waiting for my return. In kind of a Grinch-like moment, my general feeling of alienation that's slowly been building as a foreigner in Japan disappeared and I gave probably the most sincere thank you I've have since coming here. I was absolutely amazed, and something this simple really shows just how civil this society can be. Thoughtfulness (omoriyari) is a sign of adulthood in Japan and is promoted constantly. But human nature, no matter what country, can be pretty selfish -- I really wouldn't have been surprised or even angry for minimum wage workers at a doughnut shop to pocket the change. But, this really opened my eyes to a cultural difference that I can't quite put my finger on. Something prompted the woman to see my money, not take it, inform the other staff members and have it kept for me. This is sort of thing that really only exists in Canada in small towns amongst particularly well-raised people, but having this at a train station with thousands of people passing through a day-- really impressive.

No longer will I make fun of your silly Engrish, Misdo! No longer will I mock your wax-covered doughnuts and burnt milky coffee. From now on, you have a special place in my heart, and will remain an shining example of everything that's good about Japan.

I Don't Feel Like Satan, but...

2008-05-27T18:26:00.007+09:00

Today in class I had the students do an interview activity, as directed. They really just asked for each other's phone number, and as usual, the 15 year old boys were absolutely terrified of the idea of approaching a member of the opposite sex, and as usual, the girls seemed a bit put off.

I caught this one kid chatting with his friends, sitting down, in the corner, and I saw that a couple of them had at least done the two short interviews with other boys. I asked this kid to show me his paper and he reluctantly unrolled it, and the kid hadn't done a single damn thing. Not even the minimal heterophobic gender-segregated half that he could have done in two minutes. I told him he had to interview me on the spot, which he did awkwardly, and even wrote down my fake phone number wrong. I asked him what the hell had you been doing to no response and then said, "Ganbatte" -- do your best. He gave a sullen "hai," so I said, "Iya. Hontou ni gan-bat-te." No, really, do--your-- best.

It used to bug me how unresponsive students are when you give 'em pep talks, and then I started to see teachers sit the students down in the office and give them sometimes hour-long lectures about how they screwed up. The kids would either look-- you know-- dead inside, or else stare off into the distance with a hateful expression on their face.

Near the end of the class I picked a few students' names off a seating plan to read off one person's name and phony telephone number. It was all in kanji, so I really just chose students whose names I could read. So, "Okay-- Daredare-kun please read one name and telephone number," and it was that same freaking kid! I felt a bit flushed and slightly guilty, and the kid mumbled out my phone fake phone number without giving a name or putting it to anything resembling a sentence. The other kids gave him a long, sarcastic ovation after, which I'm sure didn't help. But, that same kid.

Metaphorically speaking, this kid had buried himself in his own ignorance and I pulled him out of the dirt and owned him in the face.

Metaphorically speaking.

Kicking, If Not Flogging, A Dead Horse

2008-05-13T06:49:00.002+09:00

Good morning, everyone. It's a bright and sunny 6:50 AM here in Saga, Japan, and I overslept by an hour. That is to say, for a week I'd been waking up at 5:30 or earlier due to jet lag and had a couple of hours in the morning of free time, which got less depressing and more awesome every day. That 7:30 train that used to me mind-numbingly early? Now just a cool breeze through my morning.

So speaking of mind-numbing! I've been a bit slow updating this thing. In fact, I didn't see Adam's comment telling me to update for at least a couple of weeks. This, despite appearances, is not an update. No, this is simply a promise that I will update.

I've been to Hiroshima. I've been to Miyajima. I've been to Toronto, to Halifax, to Calgary and to Vancouver since I last wrote here, and I have the pictures to prove it. And since it's now 6:55 and I'm starting to think about a shower, I must leave you hanging on that last promise. Cheers!

I'm No Sciencetician, But...

2008-02-06T16:04:00.001+09:00

I've been told Japanese people get sick all the time in winter. I've heard this relaying my own experience of getting sick once every two weeks -- one persistent virus, actually -- and have seen it. Japanese people tend to wear what appear to be white surgical masks when they're sick. I've heard that they help you get better, which I won't comment on here, but they are in the very least a clear stay-away warning. Also, an easy way to tally up who's who of the virally/bacterially infested. Upwards of 50% of the staff at my school!

Average Toronto temperature for February is -4.5℃ -- indoor temperature, at least in whatever apartment I'm living in, is 25℃. Median temperature, of course, is 20.5℃ and skin-peelingly dry.

Meanwhile in Japan -- the average temperature for neighbouring Fukuoka is about 6.5℃. A generous (it's not supposed to steam up when you pee) estimate for the average indoor temperature is around 10℃. Median being 8.25℃ and humid.

Scientists, I've heard, don't blame winter colds on their namesake -- the frigid terrible godless cold -- but, rather because people stay huddled together inside. This makes sense, but the truth is your immune system is significantly effected by your mental state. Comfort and happiness and relaxation and exercise and other things can make or break you no matter what season it is, and in Japan it's difficult to feel comfortable and relaxed in the winter. There's a whole industry surrounding this fact (insulation or central heating companies need not apply) that sell heated coffee tables called kotatsu or heated drinks in vending machines (including corn soup!) and all sorts of blankets and jackets and weird puffy elasticy bits of sweater that you put around your arms or torso. As a foreigner, I also have to deal with immunoglobulins which are apparently not well suited for this environment, and I have classes full of literally snot-nosed kids (ha-hah). Of course, traffic between East Asia and Southern Ontario is constant and diseases tend to pass both ways too (remember SARS?) and before standing in front of classes of 40 students, I was sitting in lecture halls of sometimes ten times that and I got sick once or twice a year at most. I'd get more sick, but it wasn't a chronic thing. Not only that, but I don't remember international students from Japan getting sick with Canadian germs every two weeks. So what's the deal?

I don't have an answer. The entire reason I'm writing this, is I've been at home for two days with some sort of stomach virus, and I'm still on medication for another illness. All I can think of is George Carlin talking about his own immune system saying, "You know when I wash my hands? When I get shit on them!"

Lesson of the Day: Pigs Are Awesome

2007-12-21T16:39:00.000+09:00

Today, much like Wednesday and Monday, and next week, I was correcting and reviewing scripts for student's show and tell presentations which they will do early in January. It's been incredibly frustrating, because I have reason to think the English level in the scripts is generally below the testable level of the students -- second year middle school. In worst case scenarios, I might describe the scripts as "impressionistic", as in, I can get only an impression of what they're trying to say. The problem is, major grammar mistakes. I don't know where they got these from, but they're pretty consistent. With maybe 25% of the scripts, it seems to be laziness rather than lack of understanding. Starting sentences with "And", "But", "Because" or "So" is just plain bad grammar that any native speaker's English teacher snapped at them about at some point or another. "Because, the reason is because..." came up a few times. I hope this pattern did not come from a text book, or I'll flip out and take out a whole village. Other big problem is, students trying to overshoot their previously stated "testable English level". This is commendable because they're trying, but, if they're making up sentence structure and grammar as they go long because they want to say in English what they'd like to say in Japanese, it's yabai. The top 25% of the scripts are, however, fantastic. Basic but succinct, charming English. There's one that's by far the best thing I've seen a student write, and I want to share it with the world.

Hello! Today I'm going to show you a pig doll. It's about 2000 yen [CDN $17.50]. It's name is "Boo-chan" [something like "Oinky"]. He is very pretty because his nose is big.

My grandmother gave me a pig doll in Safari Park four years ago, but there aren't any pigs in the park.

Do you like pigs? I love pigs. Pork is delicious and pigs are a lot of fun.

Thank you.

I actually cracked up laughing in the teacher's office when I read the last line. BRILLIANT!

A Lil' Taste of Home

2007-12-06T13:57:00.001+09:00

No, not maples products. Not beaver tales, not Nanaimo bars, nor Thousand Islands sauce, poutine or Digby scallops lightly buttered and rolled in crushed dulse and pan fried to perfection (oh... my... god...). But rather, good old fashion Thai red curry. Yes. Thai red curry is by far the most Canadian meal I could think of.

It turns out the most widely sold brand of Thai curry you can get in Japan is a variety I used to buy back in "the old country". Since produce from Japan is almost the same as Canada, I'm able to make pretty much anything I want and -- to seal a phrase from a of a long-dead Japanese emperor -- "manifestly so," I cracked open some coconut milk with the jackknife-like Japanese can opener and served up some red curry with satsuma imo (more or less, a sweet potato), broccoli, spinach, onions and chicken! For the record, this is not the first time I made curry in Japan. Last time I made a from-scratch recipe involving the appropriate spices, yogurt, peppers and octopus, and had some sort of bizarre allergic reaction that I at this point can only attribute to strong agricultural chemicals on the peppers. The last time I made curry, I thought I was gonna die, so this new curry is big news!

Anyway, my only reason for posting this atrocity of a blog entry is to brag about my lovely curry, which did satisfy my nostalgic for home since this was my old stable food, so I should just stop now.

Nevermind the last post

2007-11-27T19:12:00.001+09:00

So, I was in Kyoto. More on that later, maybe. But first...

If wearing a thousand dollar suit makes a man feel like "a million bucks", then how about a ten thousand dollar kimono?

Remembrance Day in Japan

2007-11-12T21:11:00.001+09:00

Today I spontaneously decided to be cultural and teach some second year middle school students from Ichikoko just what Remembrance Day is! For those Americans, etc., reading this, Remembrance Day is a solemn day of ceremonies and, for some, prayer, which -- at least in Canada -- is largely focused on honouring the dead and striving to understand the horror of war, as opposed to the celebration of soldiers and victory.

I was inspired by the fact that I forgot the moment of silence, which is ordinarily customary on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month (or, in the other words, yesterday when I was sitting in front of the computer listening to loud music), and perhaps because I'm a little older now, or perhaps because I'm half a world a way and am struggling for any connection to Canada I can find, I thought the best thing I could do to redeem myself would be tell some Japanese kids about this. The problem being, the kids I was teaching today have learned English for less than two years and are 14. They listened to every word of my little speech, which was very kind, and my JTE asked some good questions.

I find it strange though, that I suddenly feel so sentimental about this holiday. I think any person -- or at least any decent person -- would agree that remembering the dead and spending just a couple of minutes on one day a year meditating on the brutal reality of war is a worthwhile thing to do, but I felt the need to try to get these kids to understand. The Japanese have a similar holiday, largely marking the nuclear holocaust that closed Second World War, so hopefully the kids know where I'm coming from here -- especially since Nagasaki is an hour away from here. But, this is really the first time that I've felt the urge to put myself into a teaching position-- to tell them something genuine about my culture, rather than Canadian dialect or pop culture references.

The language barrier is so frustrating sometimes.

On a higher note, I've been putting cartoons from explodingdog, Toothpaste for Dinner and Don Hertzfeldt on every worksheet I make! No one's even asked about them yet, but I think it's contributing to the kid's understanding of... uh... international understanding, and is definitely contributing heaps to my own amusement.

Three Festivals

2007-11-05T22:58:00.001+09:00

I haven't written in here for quite some time, and I suppose I should check in. I've been out and about quite a bit lately. Work has been a bit busier, and quite a bit more challenging as I've started carving out my niche in a country that is famous for denying foreigners niches. At first, I was too busy just figuring out how to teach, and after that wore out, I began to feel like a stray dog that no one knows that to do with, but instead, they just tolerate out of vague sympathy. My current method for breaking past this and gaining the acceptance and love that I so sorely deserve from staff and student alike is to just make myself visible, interested and active. It might be dancing in front of 500 high school students (check), it might be lugging a locker up a flight of stairs to a teacher's room (check), and it more often involves just talking to people and trying to communicate that I'm interested in what I'm doing and want to do as good a job as I can do.

Well, that sounds lame. Let's move on, shall we?

'Tis the season here in the Ken of Saga, and in the last two weeks I have witnessed three distinct festivals, or matsuri: the Yoshinogari Fire Festival (吉野ヶ里ふるさと炎祭り), Karatsu Kunchi (唐津くんち) and the Saga International Balloon Fiesta (佐賀国際熱気球祭り). And somehow I managed to miss anything remotely interesting... mostly just festival food. BUT, I had a hell of a time with some great company, so I thought I'd share some photographs.

Let's start with Yoshinogari.

I love the grass at the bottom of the shot.

Absolutely heavenly sky with those yayoi-period huts and the mountains in the background, without the usual haze.

A good illustration of why Kyushu, Japan is a nice place to live.

In case you can't see that properly, there's a guy riding a huge drum the size of a bull in the background.

Next was more recently: the mighty Karatsu Kunchi. Kind of rhymes with "crunchy". I missed the parade itself and we definitely did not get invited to any impromptu drinking parties in people's houses, which I was expecting, but we mostly just walked around acres of food stands near this one central shrine. It was pretty cool taking in the atmosphere, and I did really enjoy spending time with Lee-ann, Andy and ]Tiffany, who I had not met up to that point.

The tori'i in front of the barely-visible shrine. Pretty impressive crowds. A lot of punked out Japanese kids.

In case anyone's every wondered what it's like to see the world through the eyes of a 6"6' gaijin, here's a photographic simulation.

Tiffany and Lee-ann in front of the aforementioned tori'i.

A gang hit.

By the way, hip-hop fashion in Japan is my new favourite. I can go and buy a fairly conservative-looking hoodie in a Japanese shop that would be HUGE and atrociously baggy on your average 170 centimetre Japanese guy, and on me it's just right. Even fits in the sleeves!

Okay, last, and unfortunately least is the Balloon Fiesta, or Balloon Siesta, for those of us not willing to get up at 6:00 or beat the crowds at sunset to catch a glimpse. This, of course, is bitterness, since Charlene's pictures of the morning festivities are absolutely beautiful. But, I'll post what I've got and hope for the best.

That dot is a helicopter. The only thing airborne, since -- due to winds, I am told -- balloons took off an hour before scheduled.

Crowds and blue sky.

Concession tents.

Feel like yakitori, ice cream, or the mysterious French American dogs (フレンチ・アメリカン・ドック)? Otherwise known as FREEDOM American dogs. You can get it here.

This one's taken from the train to work a few days before.

But, because Misato asked for a shot of the balloon festival, I thought I'd try to create a virtual reality experience using my keitai, so you can feel what it's like to really be there.

A Fine Day in Dazaifu

2007-10-13T16:54:00.000+09:00

Last night about 60 of us crowded into two coach buses and began drinking beer and sake [super-illegal in Canada] on the way to a the luxurious Daikanso Hotel (大観荘), somewhere near Fukuoka-ken. Actually, from the outside, definitely not so luxurious, but it had washitsu (Japanese style rooms) and an onsen, which are public baths with ultra-hot sulphur-smelling spring water.

After this, some of us went to the Kyushu Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan (九州国立博物館; Kyushu National Museum), which -- please keep in mind -- we chose over a beer factory. But after the enkai, we were in absolutely no mood for more alcohol. Ughhh...

The museum was beautiful. One of the most incredible buildings I've ever been in. From the outside, somewhere between a space shuttle hanger and the Guggenheim. The ceiling was lined with what appeared to be logs in a grid pattern. And, greeting visitors was the display above.

The main theme of the exhibit seemed to be pottery, though, which -- I'm sure -- is appealing to some, but for partied-out gaijin, maybe a little dry... just a little.

We then continued on to a Shinto shrine called Dazaifu Tenman-gū in Dafaizu-shi, Fukuoka-ken.

We kept seeing these children everywhere in kimono. I assume there was some specific religious function for this. The Shinto equivalent to Christening, maybe? I spotted this one kid looking at koi just inside the main grounds of the shrine. Despite how immensely... creepy... it made me feel to take pictures of other people's children, I thought this scene was just perfect. And I think my gaijin status helps me "smash" through social taboos like this.

Group photo! Missing John here, but we have a nice group shot of the Canadian ALTs who turned down beer for high culture. That's right! Future astronauts, cancer cures and prime ministers.

The Boy and His Koto

2007-10-07T12:00:00.001+09:00

I've had -- let's say -- a healthy interest in the koto (琴), a thirteen stringed Japanese instrument for nearly three years now. Picture this if you may, a string instrument, not terribly different from your standard guitar, only the size and shape of a surf board. This thing, it wouldn't fit in my living room. I know that for sure, because I was at the Seikatsukan, a local junk store full of strange Japanese things. Katanas, tea ware, electronics, pornography, furniture, and other odds and ends. I bought a lot of my dishes there and my friend Daisuke asked if I could show him where the store was, so he, Andy and I perused the store and out of the corner of my eye I saw this giant thing leaning against the wall. Just an hour before I was looking at these third-sized mini kotos at a music store for about $400 Canadian. But this koto in the store was full sized and ¥8000, and I got a discount, so I paid exactly $58.75. INCREDIBLE.

But, I first heard from traditional Japanese music a few years ago working on a Multimedia project with my friend and former housemate Alana, and happened upon some traditional songs. A couple of tracks struck out, because as an amateur guitarist, my ears perk up when I hear something ridiculously good placed on a vaguely familiar sounding instrument. I learned a little about the koto in the year to come, and tracked down some songs here and there and found my guitar and piano playing to be somewhat influenced by Japanese styles.

Then, just last Spring I went to a Chinese-Japanese cultural night and (long, frustrating) discussion at McMaster University. At the end of the lengthy discussions, there was a performance of guzheng (古箏), a Chinese instrument with similar roots to the koto. This was my first time seeing this kind of instrument performed, and after I talked to the musician, Feihong. She agreed to play some guzheng parts for some musical pieces I was writing for my Multimedia thesis, and we quickly became friends. If you're interested in hearing what a master of this instrument sounds like, try downloading "Chun-xue", which is a collaboration we worked on.

Anyway, tuning the instrument was a bit of an experience. None of the pegs that guitars have. Playing it is rather interesting too, but not easy. I'll hopefully learn enough to record a little bit too.

Just Another Day at The Office

2007-10-03T20:52:00.002+09:00

Well I suppose I should write something. After all, I've been in Japan for three days shy of two months, and I haven't made so much of a peep other than a rather depressive rant about spontaneously developed allergies and newly worsened asthma. With this being said, things are generally really good. I've been a little sick for about 10 days now and have become a bit of a shut-in. Not so sick that I'm sick, but just enough so that I feel like I'm gonna get a cold sometime in the near future. Second week in a row. So, in other words, my immune system is not great, not bad. Just mediocre.

It's a pretty good excuse to sit at the computer listening to some old school NYC hip-hop and drink a glass of white.

Today, which here in the archipelago known to some as Japan is a Wednesday, is a day where I have one hour of teaching. One hour! Add a half-hour of tutoring, and another half hour of lesson planning, and you have a two hour work day, which is not exactly slave labour. Except of course I desperately had to pee all class, so it felt more like five hours, so that's a bit more respectable.

My base school, which shall be known as Ichikoko for the purposes of professional anonymity, is an incredible school to work at in a number of ways. The kids are fantastic and the other teachers really shattered my karoshi-inspired preconception of working in Japan. They work hard, no doubt, but are pretty relaxed otherwise. Lots of joking -- or so I'm guessing based on the combination of often incomprehensible Japanese followed by laughter. But I have no idea what to do with my time between classes. In today's case, a couple of three-hour blocks. I studied Japanese a bit, which I really need to get back into, being in freaking JAPAN. But I mostly just read... which perhaps I should not admit in public, but I got through a rather big chunk of Mr. Douglas Coupland's Generation X, which happens to have a chapter on the intricities of Japanese sociology in the workplace! So productive!