Japanatter: Ramblings from my life in Japan

John Mayer's Continuum

2006-09-03T15:50:00.000+09:00

Yep, I'm back in the States after two years in Japan. Back home in Pittsburgh, finishing off my last semester at Pitt. Lots of little things to report on, like the new "futon" sofabed, playing lots of games, trying to exercise regularly, and tried yoga for the first time recently (power yoga, even).

But the reason I thought to blog after such a long absence wasn't to talk about the boring details of my life, but to recommend to you kind readers John Mayer's forthcoming album Continuum. I'm infamous among my friends and family for my unbridled and unabated fanboyism I have shown for him for the last seven years or so. It's to the point that I'm surprised my ex-girlfriends and fiance haven't gotten jealous. I think John is perhaps the most gifted songwriter and guitar player of my generation, and he often doesn't get credit because the radio stations chose to play the hell out of a few of his early songs which didn't show the world his full potential.

Being an uberfan, I have bought pretty much every CD, single, DVD, and sheet music he's ever put out, been to four of his shows, learned how to play a lot of his music (albeit in a simplified way), memorized all the lyrics, and downloaded all the live (i.e. legally-taped) shows sanctioned by his management on etree.org. In all that time, I have heard an awful lot of vocal and guitar solos, and heard the full gamut of his performances, and through repeated and careful listenings I came to realize what enormous potential and talent he has.

Even so, I never had heard one performance or album that was absolutely perfect...until now. He DJed his forthcoming album Continuum on STAR 98.7, an L.A. radio station, a few weeks ago. Apparently somebody taped it and made it public as a torrent file, and I happened to find a link when checking a fansite hoping to download a television interview I had missed. I wondered about the morality of downloading it but I went for it anyway.

In short, it's perfect. Every song is a masterpiece, beautifully sung and beautifully arranged. I've already pre-ordered the album on iTunes but come September 12th, I think I'll pick up another copy for two reasons: (1) so I can pour over the lyric booklet and (2) because it's good enough to own two or three. He's talked a lot about the album in various interviews over the 10 months or so, and while it just about killed me, it was worth the wait.

John, good work on an amazing album. Readers, you owe it to yourselves to at least give it a listen.

Translation of the tale of my encounter with poop in an elevator

2006-07-04T05:57:00.000+09:00

Yes, you read that correctly. Today I encountered some poop in an elevator. At work.

I have already written about the incident in Japanese, and instead of writing it again in English, I decided that it would be more fun to run my story in Japanese through Google Translations and post the machine translated results to this page.

It's a strange story, and a true one (cross my heart and hope to die), but it's surreal in that nothing like this has ever happened to me in Japan. Perhaps through the linguistically-impaired eyes of a machine translation program, this feeling of surrealism can be further enhanced, bringing you closer to vicariously experiencing my odd tale. If you want me to explain aspects of the story that are unintelligible due to translation errors, just leave a comment and I will try to clear it up.

Notes:

The text indicated in red was English I used within the original Japanese story, which explains why it's much easier to understand than the rest.
I was reminded of David Sedaris' "Me Talk Pretty One Day" as I read the translation below. If you get a chuckle out of reading this entry, please give his audiobook a listen!

So without further adoo, I hereby present "My Encounter with Poop in the Elevator."

------------ MACHINE TRANSLATION FOLLOWS ------------

9 hours passing, what is not believed happened. O which works with the same office to the just a little front which work ends saying “the [tsu] [te] before,” it faced to the elevator. Because as for the office there are 6th floor of the building, until the elevator comes, only maximum being, 2 minutes it is required. Because is, I being settled, the document and the daily report when it came out of the office, O stood still before the elevator and when you observed at that it has stopped was surprised. O but kinder one (superior?)Because is, normally, but the relationship which you do not speak only concerning work O laughing just a little so shy, you said.

O:　“You looked at the man who now has changed clothes.”
Me:　“To obtaining? It is true?! In elevator?”
O:　“So. Dream was kana. . .”
Me:　When “it does perhaps, metamorphosis. . . Is?”
O:　“Well, it is not understood.”
Me:　“.”
O:　“.”
Me:　“It could obtain, and, the clothes at all it had not worn, it is?”
O:　“It is, as for the upper body not to have worn the clothes, under of the [te] was just the underpants.”
Me:　“.”
O:　“.”
Me:　If “well, now, it was completed, because probably will be, it probably will try once more?” O:　

Me who push the button. 30 seconds the elevator which is required. The door which you open... And, the man who has changed clothes seems that is not. Nature it does, circumstances of the elevator the strange shelf...Something it has fallen on the floor! Just a little waiting, the portable telephone falls and takes and, the carpet becoming dirty with the mud, the [ru]. As for the smell. . . Ill-smelling [tsu]! What the fuck?!! How densely the [tsu] it is?! That this of the floor had been covered in the feces. Being ill-smelling, being dirty, they were two people whom you did not insert in the elevator.

O:　“It had leaked. Lowest.”
Me:　“.”
O:　“It cannot be.”
Me:　“The kana where the person who takes the portable telephone as the evidence which can be provided to the police is good.”
O:　

And the door closed. The department manager hearing our voices, you inquire something has happened about. O the man who has changed clothes reaching, explaining thing to the department manager, the department manager “(for self defense) the method which had the stick is better”, the [tsu] [te] you propose. O explaining also the fact that to the feces you have been covered, I without explaining that to strange thing, thought that it is completed gratefully. When “returning home in the other staff of the office, the person who avoids the elevator absolutely is good, is. That please get off with the stairway”, it increases advice, A of the Canadian graduate which only can do Japanese a little looking at the agitation around, worrying, it hears in me.

A:　“Is there anything I can do to help?”
Me:　“Uh, not really and I guess. But when you leave work and you should definitely take the stairs.”
A:　“Why and what happened to the elevator?”
Me:　“Well… first O saw a half-naked man changing in the middle of the elevator…”
A:　“Oh God.”
Me:　“…So she let it go without her, and when the doors opened again and the elevator was…” A:　
Me:　“…I mean and somebody had defecated all over the elevator…”

O and already to the 1st floor getting off from one person woman staff and the 6th floor, walking injustice, it arrives to the front of the building. You discuss with the form where the people of the newspaper delivery trader who to the 1st floor is dropped. O it understood from the reaction that the man is not. Only O it seems like the man who does not look at that man to seem, () has worn the suit of 40 generation ~50 generations partly. After teaching that you have known three people who face to the station.

O:　“You could not be patient, kana.”
Me:　“So you think? However you think that there is no expectation of problem of patience. . .”
O:　“You will forget. Because it was present payday, shopping, we would like to try to forget.” Me:　“It is, it seems the tired way.”

However the [tsu] [te] it was I who was said, after that kind of incident which is foolish, it divides into some wind and should have greeted probably? Always however it made greeting of sort, although if afterwards it should have made already a little cheerful word, that you had regretted. Don't you think? so the senior (the superior) it put out, “it was serious. Immediately in you should have forgotten the shank.” Perhaps and so on inadequacy and, you think that it was possible to make after all brief. Color is that the person is, however you think, that it is good thing, it prays the fact that from now on either one time does not encounter the droppings of others with the elevator to this society deeply.

Map to Our House

2006-07-01T10:29:00.000+09:00

Sorry, this isn't a real post as such, I just needed a quick way to get a map to our house on the web (so that people can find their way to Anna and my forthcoming house sale).

Recent obsessions

2006-06-23T15:16:00.000+09:00

I haven't written for a while and there's been a lot of news, so here goes.

Anna and I will be heading back to the states at the tail end of July (between the 29th and the 31st). We'll stay in Elgin with her family and then head back to Pittsburgh, where we'll be for at least six months or so while I finish my last semester at the University of Pittsburgh. Shortly before classes begin, we are looking forward to seeing John Mayer play at the Post-Gazette Pavilion on August 24th. We're both huge John Mayer fans and are really excited that Pittsburgh will be the first stop in his summer tour.

The next bit isn't so much news, but rather an admission of an obsession. I have spent an unhealthy amount of time recently trying to find the latest information about the Nintendo Wii, the game console which will go on sale sometime in the fourth quarter of this year. The reason I'm so excited is because of the revolutionary controller, which many websites have taken to calling the "Wiimote," which can detect motion in three dimensions as well as acceleration. This feature will make it possible to play a tennis game by swinging the controller instead of merely pushing a button, as has been the case for almost every game console ever made.

My excitement has been further fueled by the fact that I have an idea for a game which I believe could become a reality if I can assemble the right people to help me. I can't share details about it on this blog because I don't want the idea to get ripped off, but I've told my family about the idea and they seem encouraging.

However, I am going to force myself to stop seeking out more information on this system, as it's wasting way too much of my time. I really ought to just wait until the official details are released, and then just take it from there. To that end, I hereby vow not to visit any gaming-related website for two months, no matter what. That means that the magic date is August 23rd, the day before the John Mayer concert, so it should be easy for me to remember. Mark my words -- no visits to wiicentre.com, kotaku.com, gamespot.com, or any other such visits until then. Perhaps by making this credo public I will feel some accountability for following through.

Okay, phew! Now that that's off my chest, I'll move onto what's new with us. Our time in Japan is quickly running out: 5 more weeks and we'll be on the plane. We have no idea when we might return. There are a lot of things that we're definitely going to miss: we have come to know some truly wonderful people in these two years and it will be hard not getting to see them for a long time. Japanese food is another biggie...and having the opportunity to speak Japanese on a daily basis with native speakers could possibily be the hardest part to deal with on a daily basis. Anna and I are both really worried about forgetting what we've learned, so we'll have to re-join the JSS (Japanese Speaking Society) at the University of Pittsburgh, and keep our eyes out for other ways to maintain our current level (I would say improve, but I think that's an impossibility while living outside of Japan unless our jobs involved interpreting, translation, etc.)

With only five weeks left, there are a lot of things we have to take care of in terms of selling all our appliances, giving away miscellaneous knick-knacks, shipping the majority of our wardrobes, books, and computer equipment home, etc. It took about24 man-hours just to clean, sort, and organize the office in our rented home, and there's a lot more still to go, but the worst of it is behind us. We are hoping to visit Okinawa during our last week, and maybe we can catch up with our friends Nancy and Hitomi while we're there.

I remember feeling some reverse culture shock after my previous trip to Japan, and that was only after 9 months. This time it will have been just shy of two years, and I imagine that there are a lot of subtle things about America that have changed. We've more or less kept track of the big changes by reading online news, but I think readjusting to the American mindset after having gotten used to doing things the Japanese way will be pretty difficult. I certainly won't mind the relatively cheaper prices for just about everything except for health insurance, which is proving to be a big snafu. I was under my parents' insurance before I came to Japan because I was still a university student, but that is no longer the case so we'll have to be clever in order to stay protected without going broke. I was amazed to hear that health insurance very well could cost us more than our apartment will! Admittedly I know next to nothing about why the system is the way it is, so I'll try to withhold criticism given my ignorance, but my fingers are crossed that we can both find employment that has a decent healthcare plan. Apparently Starbucks gives health insurance to even their part-time employees, so we'll keep that in mind...

There have been many challenges that Anna and I have both faced during the last two years. Living abroad is sort of a rollercoaster...there are these breakthrough moments when one comes to understand a mystery of the culture or the language that feel wonderful, and sometimes there are horrible moments of loneliness and isolation. Yet in spite of the difficulties we have managed to have an interesting and productive experience that we will never forget, regardless of whether or not we ever return to Japan for an extended period of time.

As a foreigner here, you have to work harder than you would in your home country to hammer out a living. This is especially true if you don't only want to teach your native language to Japanese students. I enjoy teaching very much but didn't want to take a full-time position teaching because I thought it would hinder my Japanese ability. It took several months of searching and interviewing around for various positions before I finally found a job at an international patent office about six months ago. It has been a great learning experience in many ways. My employer is having trouble finding a replacement for me, which gives me a feeling of accomplishment, but then I started thinking about another aspect. Maybe I'm not such a hard worker in America, but I work particularly hard in Japan because I have to overcome so many difficulties here. Just as Americans have stereotypes about Japanese, Japanese have stereotypes about Americans, and I think that a big factor behind what drives me to work so hard here is that I want to prove people wrong -- I want to show that I can work just as hard as a Japanese, if not harder, that I'm not lazy and careless about others' feelings and have a strong work ethic, etc. That pressure, largely self-induced in my case but certainly also influenced in large parts by the Japanese culture, has been a really good motivator. In Japan, you know where the bar lies for your work very clearly. I confess to being worried about finding motivation in the US, where I have a long history of procrastination and a tendency toward mediocrity in large groups (e.g. university) and excellence in small groups (e.g. middle school, high school, etc.). Will my past catch up with me once I get used to the American way once again, or will my time in Japan prove to be a truly life-changing experience strong enough to allow me to overcome my time-proven character flaws and deficiencies? Time will tell I guess...but I'll do whatever I can to make sure the latter is the case.

On the other hand, there is also a change in me that I hope to get rid of ASAP which I attribute to Japan (or, to be more accurate, to the somewhat hazardous combination of a serious person plunged into an even more serious culture). I find that these days, I almost never smile at work, while on the train, or almost anywhere in public. I have always been a serious guy, since I was a small child in any case. However, after having spent a combined 17 months or so in Japanese companies, I find that I am much more reserved about showing emotion than I used to be. I am sometimes shocked to see my reflection in the window during my commutes to work. Whereas my internal image of myself has a subtle smile and a generally congenial countenance, my real face looks hard, impatient, and mean. My mom used to tell me that I frowned too much and that I would get wrinkles, and looking at myself in the mirror, I see that she was exactly right -- my forehead is covered with wrinkles at the ripe old age of 24. I can still laugh with the best of them with Anna, or sometimes with my students, but most of the time I look (and feel) deadly serious. Certainly I am responsible for working toward reversing this frightening trend, but I am hopeful that the more laid-back mainstream culture of America will help me on this journey.

I guess I ended up getting pretty personal in today's post...hope I didn't turn any of you off. If anybody is reading this who doesn't know me personally -- if you have experienced anything similar, please feel free to leave a comment.

I'm going to wash the dishes and go to the gym now. Signing out,

-J

Cleaner Diesel Fuel in America?

2006-04-11T23:25:00.000+09:00

I am currently researching cars, as I will be returning to the US from my two-year stint in Japan in July, and public transportation alone will not meet my future transportation needs. I am thinking about getting a hybrid, and in searching around various articles on the net, I stumbled upon a bit of surprising but great news: that Ultra Low Sulfur Diesel fuel will be available at many (if not all?) US gas stations starting in September. I had no idea this was the case, but if it leads to more clean-burning diesel vehicles being developed for America, I'm a happy camper. A clean-burning diesel/electric hybrid would be nice, but I guess I shouldn't hold my breath on that just yet...

The following is from Chrevron's website:

S15 (ULSD) is defined by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as U.S. diesel fuel with a sulfur content not to exceed 15 ppm (parts per million). S15, S500, and S5000 are designations for diesel fuels that meet 15 ppm, 500 ppm, and 5,000 ppm maximum sulfur content, respectively, as defined in the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) standard D975 Table 1. In different regions of the world ULSD may refer to different maximum sulfur content values, but ULSD and S15 are often used interchangeably in North America (U.S. and Canada).The S15, S500, and S5000 designations also apply to the Canadian diesel market.

Beatboxing + Harmonica = Awesome

2006-03-14T13:44:00.000+09:00

I was blown away a few years ago when a friend first showed me a Rahzel CD, in which the rap star sang and laid down a beatbox at the same time.

Shortly afterward, my Japanese linguistics professor introduced me to Tuvan throat singing when he lent me a CD of Ondar. Tuvan throat singers can articulate up to three distinct musical tones at the same time (i.e. harmonize with themselves while laying down a beat).

Except for those two incidents, I haven't really heard of too many innovative ways to use one's mouth to create amazing sounds. That is, until a few minutes ago when I saw a video of a guy named Yuri Lane, ostensibly Israeli but apparently living in New York.

He's just incredible.

Go hear his stuff for yourself at his website at http://www.yurilane.com/home.html. He has lots of multimedia up, including video clips and streaming audio so you can hear his work.

And check out the video I saw below! You'll need the Shockwave Flash plugin.

Happy Birthday to Me

2006-03-11T00:47:00.000+09:00

I'm 24! Woo-hoo!

It's not such an exciting age, but the first 45 minutes have been nice. Anna and I found Seinfeld on DVD at the local video rental shop, and watched four episodes. I haven't seen Seinfeld even once since the series ended in 1998, so it was thoroughly enjoyable to see it again. It's hard to believe that almost eight years have passed since then!

Another nice surprise was that my friend Taka from Gunma called to wish me a happy birthday (even though I had forgotten his today -- I think). We had a good talk, even though it sounded like they were out at an izakaya. He sounded well, and has stopped working as a chef at a club/lounge in Kiryu in favor of being a mechanic/welder. He has always loved cars, and he seems to be really happy. Aki, my friend and his girlfriend, sounded well also, and they will try to visit sometime in late April or early May.

Also, I finally got a beta copy of Windows Vista, so I will spend the first several hours of my 25th year installing it on Anna's computer to get a first look. I would do it on my aging Fujitsu Lifebook, but there's not enough hard drive space free for the install. I will definitely install it on the new Sony VAIO which should arrive sometime within the next two weeks.

We went for Korean food this evening after Anna got back from work, and were amazed by how delicious the rice and Korean nori (韓のり) was. We also had scallion chijimi and bibimbab, and came home very stuffed. I was sure that they had put something in the rice to give it such an intoxicating, smooth flavor, but it apparently was just plain Korean rice. Who knew it was so good? And I imagine it has to be cheaper than Japanese rice, what with the price fixing the government does in order to keep the farmers running profitably.

I shouldn't just leave the post hanging like this, but Vista just finished burning so I want to give it a run! Yeah I know, I'm a nerd.

Oyasumi nasai...

Experimenting with subtitling

2006-03-10T13:35:00.000+09:00

I have always wondered how to add subtitles to movies and video clips, so today I decided to experiment around. It turns out that all the necessary software to add subtitles to a movie and render the subtitles directly to the video file is available for free. I use Windows XP at the moment, and it only took me a few minutes to get the subtitled movie created once I had prepared the text, and installed the following software:

Sub Station Alpha v4.08
TMPGEnc
VirtualDub
Subtitler - Sub Station Alpha v2.x/4.x subtitling plugin for VirtualDub

These downloads total 7.63 MB, which isn't too bad at all.

There are many people out there whose hobby is translating and publishing subtitled Japanese shows/movies/animations in their native language, for various reasons. Many of them want to practice their Japanese skills, or simply want to help their fellow countrymen (and women) experience these Japanese productions in a way that wouldn't be possible with the language barrier looming large. Others are trying to release so-called "fan-subbed" versions of titles that are not scheduled for release outside of Japan, meaning that the only way to watch some Japanese shows/movies/animations is to buy a ticket and hop on a plane. These aims are justified in some cases, but not all the time...on the consuming end of the equation, many people just like Japanese stuff and want to get it illegally for free.

There are a few animes out there that I like, but I'm not really a big fan of the genre overall. My intentions for getting into the subbing scene is to hone my translation and (currently non-existant) video production skills while helping foreigners in Japan understand more about the society in which they're living. Last month I was a volunteer interpreter for a trip to the Disaster Reduction and Human Renovation Institution in Kobe. It's actually really nice because they have really good multilingual facilities for foreign visitors: guided tours on tapes are available in at least Korean, Chinese, and English, there are in-house interpreters available, and the movies in their theater can be heard in English, Chinese, or Korean by using miniature radio receivers. This is great, because they want to help educate foreigners in Japan about what to do in the event of an earthquake, how to make one's home safer, emergency checklists, etc. However, not all Japanese institutions are so easy to understand for foreigners who speak no or limited Japanese. My post yesterday about the upcoming law about used electrical appliances is one such issue. English-language Japanese newspapers exist both in print and online, but subscription is somewhat expensive and it's hard for busy people to read the news every single day. So I thought I would try to set up a free service on behalf of my company Chameleon Language Services, in which I would translate documents (and subtitle videos) for free provided that (1) I have enough time and (2) they are aimed at improving the health, safety, and or education of the public. This is a very new idea of mine, and not very well-developed yet, but I thought I would take a stab by translating and subbing an informational video clip aimed at educating consumers about the forthcoming enactment of new provisions to the Electrical Appliance and Material Safety Law, which relates to my post yesterday.

So without further ado, here is my first, albeit very small, translation/sub!

Video Link

It took me all of 5 minutes to make the damn video, and 5 hours to find an appropriate streaming codec. I first tried streaming Windows Media Video, with no success, then tried a pure Java player for OGG video viles, RealPlayer, etc. with unsatisfactory results. Finally Flash provided the easiest and best solution. Thanks, Macromedia! If you have trouble viewing the video, please let me know.

We need more bacteria, damnit!

2006-03-09T23:16:00.000+09:00

I think I have definitive proof that a segment of Japan is obsessed with numbers.

This morning, I saw a TV commercial for a drink called Bifina Super which apparently contains bacteria to improve the health of your stomach and intestines. That's all well and good, and I think I have even tried a similar product before.

The weird thing about this commercial is that they were actually posting the number of bacteria contained in each serving. The package is pictured below; the Japanese text translates roughly as "Guard [your health] properly! In each packet, 500 million 'bifidobacteria will be delivered all the way to your intestines!'" As a bonus, they are throwing in one billion acidophilus bacteria! How magnanimous!

That's strange to me, because even as a math- and science-oriented guy, I really couldn't give a shit how many individual bacteria there are in something I eat. In fact, given that they are bacteria, I'd almost rather not know...having watched too many 20/20 evening specials featuring news that the average kitchen sponge contains X billion bacteria, relative to only X/2 in your toilet bowl. It's also strange that they can put such a precise figure. I was under the impression that bacteria continue to multiply without stopping until they run out of food. Perhaps there's some way of temporarily stopping their growth to make the advertising true, and after consumption they recommence their exponential growth rates.

I didn't know how to say "acidophilus" in Japanese until this post (乳酸菌) nor did I know how to spell it in English. (^-^)

Sale of older electronics in Japan about to become illegal

2006-03-09T22:51:00.000+09:00

That's a somewhat sensationalist title, as there are caveats. But I was surprised to see a news article reporting that beginning in April, it will become illegal to sell any appliances made before 2001 which do not sport a "PSE" logo stating that they are safe.

In the past, the Japanese government has apparently been in charge of certifying the safety of used electronics under the Electrical Appliance and Material Safety Law (warning: Japanese link), which was originally passed in ~~1959~~ 1961. Amendments in the past few years, though, transferred that responsibility to used electronics dealers. The mark is on almost if not all new electronics sold in Japan, so the mark being there doesn't prove anything except that it was made after 2001, but I guess the Japanese government has insisted on making them required to sell used electronics so that a citizen can't sue the government after an old TV malfunctions and burns down his house, etc.

This is bad news for us because we bought a lot of used electronics that we were intending to sell in July before we head back to the US. Much of what we bought is older than 2001, and hence doesn't have the necessary seal. However, we may be able to get a seal for some of these appliances by taking them to a certified used electronics dealer who happens to have a $12,000 current analyzer that ensures that there is little or no current leakage when 10,000V are sent through the appliance. That's fine and dandy for our speakers, but what about our 200-lb refrigerator?

Evidently a poll conducted by the news showed that 65% of used electronics dealers were unaware of the law, which will be enacted just three weeks. As a foreigner who wasn't in Japan when this law was passed and publicized, I certainly didn't know either, and I may have chosen to buy slightly newer but slightly more expensive appliances had I known that the older ones would not be resellable.

This is what the marks look like, for those of you living in Japan:

The mark on the left is for "designated electrical appliances," and the mark on the right is for "all other electrical appliances." I'm not yet sure what the "designated" refers to.

I couldn't help but wonder about what this means about the used video game market. While software for video games (i.e. cartridges) would probably escape the law, I imagine vintage game machines could meet the axe, at least through legal channels. Does that mean I will have to go underground to procure a replacement SNES or NES console?

Dirk and Lura will visit Japan!

2006-03-07T08:54:00.000+09:00

Anna's father Dirk and his girlfriend Lura will be visiting Japan for about three weeks, from March 22 through April 6. Anna and I are really happy that they will be able to make it before we head back to the states in July. Unfortunately, we will both have to work for at least half of their visit, so we'll attempt to take vacation time (paid in her case but unpaid in mine) in order to take them around to some interesting spots, and perhaps we'll send them on a few trips by themselves. We are planning some interesting things for them, including various tours and a sampling of various kinds of Japanese cuisine. It's hard to plan such a large-scale visit though, so we will have to consult some travel guides for advice.

Will post more details on and pictures of their visit as they become available!

Shu Dar visits my blog from Berlin!

2006-03-07T08:52:00.000+09:00

Recently it seems nobody at all has been reading my blog. I guess I should upload some more pictures to spruce up my sleep-inducing prose.

Shu, thanks for visiting!

The Phantom Poet strikes again!

2006-03-05T13:48:00.000+09:00

Last week something very strange happened to me as I was riding the subway/Keihan train from Sanjo to Tambabashi on my way home after recording a radio program.

I was listening to Monkey Majik on Anna's iPod and studying Japanese with a textbook I had bought recently but never really cracked open, just minding my own business. Monkey Majik is a Japanese group featuring two foreign guys and two Japanese guys which recently got really popular on the Japanese music charts. The train was almost completely empty. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a form pass in front of me, and then I felt the seat shake a bit as somebody sat down immediately to my left.

Let me stop there and explain how strange that is in and of itself. As is true in America, but even to a stronger extent, people tend to spread themselves out evenly in public places in Japan (i.e. urinals, largely-empty traincars, park benches, and what have you). I guess it's just human psychology kicking in, that we don't want to interact with strangers unless we have to ask directions or we feel attracted to the stranger. Trains are much more prevalent in Japan than the states, and during rush-hour periods, I think most people are resigned to the fact that they have to be uncomfortably squashed right next many strangers. However, when the trains are less-crowded, there is a very interesting phenomenon that frequently takes place. Even if there are plenty of open seats, many people choose to stand up in the empty space between the doors on each side, or in the aisle between the two rows of seats. (I will try to take a picture of a train sometime later and post it here.) In some cases, maybe people just like to stand up, perhaps to hone their balancing skills. But I think most of these people stand up because they feel uncomfortable or embarrassed sitting next to whoever happens to be sitting down already. This sometimes happens in the so-called "Priority Seating" areas which are usually established for elderly people, people with physical disabilities, or pregnant women, and I can understand that some people feel reluctant to sit there, even if there are no such people still stuck standing on the train. Maybe they feel like they will be negatively judged by the other people on the train if they don't look like they need to sit down. I don't think it's out of politeness, because there are a lot of really rude people on the trains. One often hears stories of very fragile-looking little old ladies who body-check everybody in their path when trying to exit a crowded train without warning. I have experienced this before, though it's not fair to say that all or even many elderly Japanese women are like this. On the other side of the coin, there doesn't seem to be a public consciousness that you should give up your seat for people who look like they need to sit down more than you do. Anna and I both routinely give up our seats to elderly people on the bus or train, and they almost always seem to be incredibly surprised that we would do such a thing. One woman bowed deeply to us about seven times, and then continued to smile at us and bow slightly whenever our eyes met during the rest of the train ride. That much is common sense to most Americans, and we didn't feel particularly benevolent after having done such a minor thing. Younger Japanese often don't give a shit, which is quite disturbing to us. Another important piece of background to the story I'm about to tell is the fact that Japanese trains are usually dead quiet except for the rhythmic sound of the tracks clunking by.

Anyway, that bit about the trains was a big deviation from what I wanted to talk about, which was my recent encounter with the Phantom Poet. I hope I was able to convey a microcosm of the atmosphere in Japanese public transportation. So there I was, listening to my music and studying Japanese, when this guy sits down right next to me. Due to the fact that I had earbud-style headphones, the entire world was muted by my music, but the man had brandished a typed piece of paper and was looking at me and his mouth was moving. That was also strange, as the average bloke out there understands that people wearing headphones and listening to music don't want to be bothered. For the first three seconds or so, I sat uncomfortably as he spoke to me unheard, hoping that he would give up. He didn't show any signs of stopping, though, so I took out my earbuds, stopped the song, and looked skeptically at him. He was already in the middle of a sentence talking about the grammar of a phrase written on the paper. I can't remember it, but it went something like this:

It is far away from a station Green light waiting for a dancing snow help traffic light ...

He basically ordered me to help him fix the English. To be honest, I didn't hear the first three seconds of what he said, but judging from the way he behaved toward me, I'm absolutely positive it had nothing to do with "Excuse me, but could I have a few minutes or your time?" or "Excuse me, but do you speak Japanese?" or even "My name is ..." The cheeky bastard just started explaining his bloody poem in Japanese, going on and on and on about what he was trying to say in the poem, but without really making any sense. My Japanese listening comprehension is not 100% when it comes to the news or something, but I understood 100% of the words and grammar he used, and he just wasn't making any sense. He continued talking for about two minutes straight, and then paused, waiting for my response. Taking a shot in the dark, I suggested that he change the first two lines as follows.

It is far away from the station Waiting for the green light

Then I said that I couldn't for the life of my understand what he wanted to say in the third line.

a dancing snow help traffic light

I asked him to please clarify exactly how the dancing snow was being helped by the traffic light. He responded (in Japanese), "A green light means 'go ahead, please,' a red light means 'stop, please,' and a yellow light means 'hold on a second,'" and then looked back at me. I said (in Japanese), "Yes, what you've said is true, but how does the traffic light relate to the dancing snow?" He responded, "The snow is blowing very hard because it's the middle of the winter." We continued this pointless, frustrating conversation for another six minutes or so, and then I was happy to see that I could make a getaway because my transfer station was the next stop. When I told him that I had to transfer at the next stop, he looked at me blankly and said "Oh." Then he waited a few seconds, as though deep in thought, and then said "By the way, I have to transfer at the next station too." I just ignored that comment completely. He tried to get me to help him fix the last line again, so I said (in English) "The traffic light illuminates the dancing snow," knowing he wouldn't understand what I said, and to my relief, he stayed on the train. He didn't say "goodbye" or "thank you for helping me" or anything.

I imagine he's crazy.

The kicker of the story is that when I got home, I told Anna what had happen, and her eyes got very wide, much wider than they should have gotten given the fact that it was merely a bizarre story, and we are used to bizarre stories from Japan.

No, her eyes got wide, it turns out, because exactly the same thing happened to her last year when she was riding the subway/Keihan train from Sanjo to Tambabashi, the same route as me! Her description of the man matched my observations, and his ungracious mannerisms and nonsensicalness matched exactly in both our stories. The one difference was that in her case, the man shoved a box of strawberries into her hands as she exited the train.

So this nutcase evidently rides around on the train system, looking for foreigners and attempting to have them fix his English. I would like to tell him off the next time, if there is a next time.

What do you think of this guy? Have any of you readers experienced a similarly bizarre encounter?

Super Nintendo rests in piece

2006-03-05T13:38:00.000+09:00

When I first moved to Kyoto last September, one of the first things I purchased was a vintage Super Nintendo Entertainment System, known as "Super Famikon" (Super Fami[ly] Com[puter]). It took me a long time to find a job, and I didn't really have any friends in Kyoto except for Anna of course, so I had lots of free time and thought it might be fun to enjoy playing the video games I had loved as a child and teenager.

I only bought two games, Super Mario Kart and Super Mario RPG, but I had a lot of fun with them and was looking forward to taking the Japanese console back to the States and giving it to my friend Nick, an avid gamer who is interested in Japanese and Japan. Today, Anna and I were playing the Nintendo DS version of the Mario Kart franchise, and kept having to take turns because we only have one DS, so we decided to fire up the old classic version. Sadly, it seems that the console has broken for reasons unknown to us. It is old, to be sure, but it had worked fine the last time we had used it a few months ago, and it had been stored in a cabinet that, while not completely sealed, is hardly ever used and mostly closed off to dust-bearing air currents circulating throughout our living room.

Our emergency rescue efforts, consisting of prying off the dark gray plastic cover and cleaning out the delicate terminals with a soft pipe cleaner, were sadly in vain, so while I cringe at the thought, I think my beloved Japanese SNES is destined to be taken apart, a hobby I started as a child when one of my parents' consumer appliances came to an untimely end.

If I am really motivated, maybe I will try to clean up each of the electronic components, and try to make a portable player following the instructions of some talented reverse engineers and modders out there. Knowing me, though, it's ultimately headed for the dustbin.

Let us all have a moment of silence. (;>;) ← read upright, in the Japanese style

New Laptop!

2006-03-04T10:58:00.000+09:00

Well, it's ordered, at least...and boy, am I excited!

It's a Sony VAIO S-Type (VGN-SZ90PS). That will mean nothing to any of my usual readers, so check out these pictures!

And now the specs:

Intel Centrino Core Duo Proessor
13.3" Wide-format WXGA Screen (1280x800 px) with XBRITE (LED Backlight)
Between 22.8 and 33.7 mm (0.9~1.32") wide
1.69 kg (3.7 pounds)
Carbon-fiber casing
80GB Serial ATA/150 HDD
Wireless WAN, WLAN, and Bluetooth technology
Biometric fingerprint security scanner
Hybrid Graphics System with two graphics cards

NVIDIA GeForce Go 7400 with NVIDIA TurboCache (for 3D performance)
Intel Graphics Media Accellerator 950 (to conserve power)

There's lots more that's cool about it, but I'll brag about it more when it arrives sometime in the second week of March!

I originally wanted to get an Apple, but although I love Mac OS X dearly, the hardware is just still too expensive per unit performance when compared to many other companies. My computer is now literally falling apart (I'll post pictures later), so I decided to get the Sony instead. I will plan to join the Mac crowd sometime around March 2007, when Intel is expected to release so-called "Santa Rosa" Centrino processors, which will have 4GB of cache, an 800 MHz FSB, next-gen wireless built in, and a lot of other nerdy things that I'm excited about. Most importantly though, it's expected that these "Santa Rosa" processors will be the first to support Intel's Robson cache technology, which uses Flash memory together to dramatically increase the speed with which applications load, increase battery life, and boot the operating system almost instantaneously!!!

By the way, here are the specs on my aging Fujitsu Lifebook S6010:

Released June 4, 2002
33 mm (1.3 inches) wide
"Magnesium-Alloy Casing" → read "cheap-ass plastic that breaks easily"
1024x768 Resolution
33 mm wide
Intel® Pentium® III Processor 1GHz-M supporting enhanced SpeedStep® Technology
1024MB SDRAM (PC133) [Maximum]
40GB (Ultra DMA/100 and S.M.A.R.T. Support)
Intel 830MG
13.3" XGA TFT Colour (Max 1024x768 pixels)
Integrated VGA (Max 48MB w/ IDMS) with 3D Graphics Accelerator and MPEG-2 Support (for DVD)
Integrated V.90 modem & 10/100Mbps Base-T LAN
Built-in Wireless LAN Antenna (NOT WiFi)
Combo Drive (DVD & CD-R/RW)
IrDA1.1 (max. 4Mbps)
Programmable Application Launch Buttons for Internet, Email and 2 other customisable Software / Security Buttons
Approx. 3.5 hours* Li-Ion 10.8V 3400mAh (I never saw anywhere near 3.5 hours...)
1.71kg

Stub: First steps as an interpreter

2006-02-23T08:21:00.000+09:00

Recently I've been thinking a lot about interpreting. I don't have enough time to write a full post today, but I just wanted to dash off a list of topics to fill out later.

My recent volunteer interpreting at the Disaster Reduction and Human Renovation Institution (人と防災未来センター) in Kobe
My forthcoming volunteer interpreting for the Kyoto Prefectural International Center's "文化紹介デー" this Sunday.
My first attempt at interpreting at my former host company, Mitsuba
Whether NHK English news is being interpreted simultaneously, or whether a pre-prepared translation is simply being read.
How it is possible for anybody to attempt simultaneous translation between English and Japanese and actually transmit over 80% of the original information
Pros and cons of becoming a professional interpreter

I will try to modify this post sometime next week when I have some free time.

Stub: Homeless Linguist

2006-02-23T07:22:00.000+09:00

Recently I talked with my friend Tetsuo about a really strange, interesting encounter I had with a homeless man who spoke flawless English, authored and edited the world's first Japanese-English collocation. Tetsuo was really interested about this story, but I had misplaced the man's name and the name of his book. I just spent the last two hours searching for it, and I think I finally found it. I will add to this post later, because it's a really interesting story, but for now I will just post the man's name and the title of his book.

Title: 和英口語英語表現辞典 (Japanese-English Spoken English Expression Dictionary)
Author: 後藤正次 (Shoji GOTOU)
Link to ISBN data on the Japanese National Diet Library website
Link to the book on Yahoo! Books Japan

Boy, does it feel good to rediscover some long-lost bit of information that you feared would never be found!

My "trustship" of Japanese English

2006-02-23T07:14:00.000+09:00

First off, am I forgetting English, or is "trustship" a word? Being surrounded by English that is half-right or completely wrong every day, especially when teaching, I fear that I'm starting to lose the ability to distinguish between bona fide English and Japanese home-brewed English. But this morning, in between my last e-mail and this one, I turned on the TV for a second to check out the news, and I saw a new commercial for Mitsubishi-UFJ Bank. It shows a man playing catch with his aging father, and he says (in Japanese) "I was always very serious when playing catch with my dad." Then the bank flashes their new slogan onto the screen: "Trustship." I attached a picture so you can see what I'm talking about. The Japanese word they use is 信託, which means "entrustment" or "trust" (as in charitable trust). I think it's great that they tried making a new word; it's very creative, but I suspect that a highly conservative bank didn't intend to do so. It's interesting viewing English through the eyes of non-native speakers, as they often try to match patterns (in this case, friendship and hardship are probably the models). During our first lesson, one of my favorite students, when asked what she would be doing in America after she moves there later this year due to her husband's transfer, responded that she would be "husband-sitting." This is probably my favorite pseudo-English phrase of all time. It was coined in earnest as she frantically struggled to express her feelings, and yet it bears a truth relevant to many so-called housewives (I don't hear the term homemaker much anymore, so I assume it's okay, i.e. sufficiently politically correct, to say housewives). To natives, it has a tongue-in-cheek sort of humor to it. I have heard so many interesting phrases like this, but I haven't made an effort to record them all, which I am starting to regret.

Living Linguistics Tidbits

2006-02-21T15:24:00.000+09:00

Recently, some of my ESL students (all Japanese at the moment) have been asking me about whether there are any American dialects. I know of course, both firsthand and via my Intro to Linguistics course from a few years back, that there are a great many dialects in America, but I'm not so good at impersonating them, and I don't have a full enough understanding to be able to describe the differences in a meaningful way. So it was fortuitous that I stumbled upon a CNET link to a recent All Things Considered piece from February 16 entitled "American Accent Undergoing Great Vowel Shift" (the linked page includes audio files in both Windows Media and RealAudio formats). Interviewer Robert Seigel spoke with Professor William Labov, a linguist from the University of Pennsylvania, and I found their conversation to be fascinating. Professor Labov is the author of the newly released Atlas of North American English Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change, which I'm happy to report includes a CD-ROM with interactive maps and audio samples which supports his research. For somebody like me who has a basic understanding of linguistics but is not 100% confident in his ability to replicate IPA symbols with complete accuracy, it's a great addition to what seems like a fascinating (but staggeringly expensive for students like myself at 598 euros/106,993 yen/$620). I probably won't buy it unless I can somehow get a student discount, but luckily it's possible to sample the multimedia content by registering with the book's German publisher.

Some of the content available once one registers involves something called the "Northern Cities Shift." I thought I would post an image and a description here for easy viewing, but the following content is copyrighted material by Professor Labov, his co-authors, and perhaps the University of Pennsylvania. I will remove it immediately if any of the above wish me to do so.

"The Northern Cities Shift is a chain shift affecting the short vowels of the English spoken in U.S. regions bordering the Great Lakes. It is triggered by the general raising of all /æ/ vowels in man, that, back, etc. followed by the fronting of /o/ in got, cot, socks and the lowering of /oh/ in caught, lawn, law, etc. Short /e/ then shifts back to the center of the mouth, and // moves back to the position formerly occupied by /oh/."

...

"The region of Western Pennsylvania is a part of the original Midland area that was distinguished from the rest at an early stage by a complete form of the low back merger of /o/ and /oh/.
At its center is the city of Pittsburgh, which is marked by the glide deletion of /aw/. It shares with other Midland areas the fronting of /ow/ as well as /uw/."

So thanks to Professor Labov, I finally have come to understand part of what makes Midland and Northern Cities' accents so distinctive.

-------

EDIT: I changed the two images in the above post so that the publisher of the book would not have to field traffic from my blog. Not that anybody even reads this, but just wanted to change it out of principle.

Long-lost juggling

2006-02-03T13:24:00.000+09:00

Anna has taken a renewed interest in juggling recently, and I recently did a small performance at an international festival in Uji, so I decided to spend a few hours today polishing some of my more difficult tricks and staking out some new territory.

One highlight was that using my small gray faux leather balls, I was able to complete 26 catches with a three-in-one-hand pattern. I have attempted three balls in one hand many times before but never had a result anything close to that. The problem for me has always been that there doesn't seem to be enough time to get my hand sufficiently to one side enough to provide enough horizontal motion to keep the balls from colliding mid-air. I had tried cascade and shower patterns with no success, but today I suddenly hit 26 after just a few warm-up attempts. It was something of a cross between columns and a reverse cascade...not a very pretty pattern, but it was exhilarating to have it continue for such a long time!

I also tried flashing seven for the first time in five years or so. After getting a hundred throws with five balls, I had thought that flashing seven might be possible, but it was way out of my reach at the time, so I gave up on that until today. My five-ball cascade is now to the point where I still drop a lot, but once I get a good run, I can keep it going for a few minutes, and I can maintain a very low, tight pattern for dozens of throws with a high success rate. I nearly flashed seven...I was able to release seven huge (for numbers juggling) balls with good timing and in two clearly-defined arcs, and managed to catch five of them. So maybe after a bit more practice I will be able to report on my first 7-ball flash!

For you non-jugglers, which will probably be everybody who reads this (if anybody reads this), a "flash" is throwing and catching the same number of tosses as the number of balls that you are using. So if you are attempting to juggling five balls, a five-ball flash entails throwing all five up and catching them all. A flash is not the same as "qualifying," which requires a double flash (i.e. ten throws and ten catches with five balls). So even if I get the flash down, I won't be able to say that I can actually juggle seven.

Anna has more or less learned to juggle four balls in a synchronous and asynchronous fountain pattern. Will try to post videos whenever I get the motivation to bust out the video compositing software.

New Japanese word!

2006-01-28T09:52:00.000+09:00

It's hardly news when a new word is created, as that happens in every living language all the time, but sometimes I get really excited when I discover a new word and can pretend to be, for a brief glistening moment, a gumshoe linguist.

Last night, Anna was reading a Japanese fashion magazine called "GISELe." She came across a katakana word she didn't know, chirarizumu (チラリズム), and asked me what it meant. The -izumu suffix is common in Japanese foreign-derived words, which are called gairaigo. Can you non-Japanese speakers guess what it means? It sounds somewhat like, and means the same thing as a common English suffix.

...

Any ideas?

No? Well I'll give you a hint. I'll throw out a few other romanized Japanese terms sharing the same suffix.

posuto-modanizumu (ポストモダニズム)
terorizumu (テロリズム)
minimarizumu (ミニマリズム)
dadaizumu (ダダイズム)
anakizumu (アナキズム)
sōsharizumu (ソーシャリズム)
komyunizumu (コミュニズム)

Okay, take a look for a moment and don't read further until you've either figured it out or want to read the spoiler.

...

Okay. The spelling is a little strange, but perhaps you figured out that it corresponds to "-ism" in English. The words in the list were: "post-modernism," "terrorism," "minimalism," "dadaism," "anarchism," "socialism," and "communism."

So back to the story: what the heck is "chirarizumu?" I struggled for a few minutes to map it to an English word before giving up. I then tried looking it up in several dictionaries and it wasn't there...so I figured it must be a fusion of Japanese "chirari"(a fleeting [glimpse]) and the English suffix -ism. So I said to Anna that I guessed it must mean "the quality of being fleeting." She then smiled and said that given the context, that was probably correct. The article was a list of sexy secrets for women, and the author was suggesting that her readers try showing some skin on purpose, yet making it seem accidental.

What an interesting word, huh? I'm still stuck on a translation though..."fleetingism" doesn't seem to work very well. Maybe I'm English-challenged as a result of being in Japan for a few years. You true natives out there, if you have a good idea, let me know with a comment!

News update

2006-01-13T08:07:00.000+09:00

Hey guys, it's been a while. I have gotten a few small part-time jobs and which have kept me busy and away from my blog.

First, a bit of consumer electronics news that I hastily translated from an article from the Shikoku News: Nikon has stopped production on six of the eight SLRs they had been making until recently. The F6 introductory model and the FM10 professional model will be the only two to continue production, and these remaining two models will not undergo new development. All other Nikon SLRs will stop being sold as soon as stock runs out.

In personal news, I recently got a part-time job (half a day, two days per week) with a patent office/translation company in Osaka. It's a relatively small office, and most of their work is in translating patents, although they often handle technical, medical, and literary translations as well. I don't have a job title; mostly I will be doing translation and proofreading, but I will also be maintaining their computer systems and upgrading their website on an as-need basis. It sounds like a perfect job for me in terms of content: I get to use both my language and my computer skills. However, it doesn't seem like such a dream job, at least judging from the first two days.

The company where I worked last year, Mitsuba Corporation, was a large company with branches and factories all over the world. My department alone had about 70 people. I enjoyed the challenge of my work, and while my supervisors were often tough with and sometimes even mean to me, it was at least a relatively comfortable working environment. When I first arrived, they gave me a detailed orientation, showed me where to put my coat, where to store my computer, where my folder on the network was, and gave me several projects to work on if I had free time.

In contrast, my current employer doesn't seem to want me there at all. It's not that they're mean to me. Rather, nobody seems to pay me any attention. The manager talks to me when she is in the office, and she seems quite nice. Another woman, whose title has not been announced to me but seems to be one of my immediate supervisors, seems extraordinarily reluctant to talk to me. When I arrived at work the other day, I said "Good morning" even though it was the afternoon because I'm told that's more polite. I was still standing in the doorway, but she just got up and left the room without saying anything. About eight minutes later, she finally came back and asked me to follow her into the actual office, which I had never entered until then. She asked me if I could upgrade some software called PatentBoy/XML Jr+. I had never heard of it, but I looked it up and found that it is software that allows patent applications and webpages to be made using Microsoft Word. They asked me to ugrade it from v3.30 to v3.31, but wouldn't tell me where the program was. Eventually I figured out that it had already been upgraded, and spent the rest of the day translating letters and a court ruling from Japanese into English in a corner desk against the wall, with shit piled all over the desk that I was afraid to move, so I ended up with a backache and headache from having my left elbow airborne as I typed away. I only interacted with two people all day, and only very briefly. One of them seemed to be kind, so maybe things will improve in the future.

Anna and I went snowboarding last month and we don't have many pictures, but the few I took are on my computer (I'm using Anna's right now), so I can't upload them yet. Will get to it later.

I think I may be getting another cold, because I have a headache and stomachache in the morning, which is rare for me unless I'm getting sick.

Pictures of Kimono Contest Posted!

2005-12-13T18:04:00.000+09:00

I hate using Blogger's photo upload tool, and their options for embedding photos within a post are atrocious, so I decided to post them to my website instead and give you readers the link.

Click on the picture to continue.

Anna's in the Newspaper!

2005-12-07T12:25:00.000+09:00

The Kyoto Shimbun ("Kyoto Newspaper") ran an article the other day on the Kimono-Wearing Contest I mentioned a few days ago. It mentions the news about Anna's victory (along with the other winners), which also caused her name to appear in Japanese on Yahoo's search engine for the first time.

I will try to get a copy of the actual printed newspaper article for posterity's sake, and will post a scan here when I can. Here's my translation of the article, for starters:

Speedily and beautifully-worn Japanese clothing provokes admiration and wonder at the Kyoto Kaikan's "Kimono Contest"

At the Kimono Wearing Contest, the entrants competed to see how beautifully they could put on their kimonos (Kyoto Kaikan, Sagyō-ku, Kyoto City)

　The Kansai Regional Finals of the All Japan Kimono Dressing Contest and a Kimono Festival were held at on the fourth of December at Kyoto Kaikan in Sagyō-ku, Kyoto City, to see who could put on kimonos most beautifully and quickly. The reaction [from the crowd] in response to the participants' graceful, deft performances was one of admiration.

　The contest, which is sponsored by the All Japan Association of Kimono Consultants, had its 34th anniversary this year. It has been six years since the last time the contest was held in Kyoto. This year, about 160 competitors from all over Kansai appeared, divided up into seven categories, including divisions for furisode, tomesode, men, and foreigners.

　The marking criteria included the finishing touches and [aesthetic] sensibility with which the kimono is put on, one's behavior, etc. The competition began with the entrants having only draped the kimono itself on, and tied and put on the obi without looking at a mirror. Their speedy preparation drew a large applause from the visitors in the audience.

　The coveted top-spot of the women's divisions, the "Kimono-Wearing Queen," was won by Yoshiko Ohtuka (22), of Shirahama Town, Hyōgo Prefecture. The top-finishing winners of each division will appear in the World Championship to be held in April of next year.

　The other winners were as follows (only the first-place winners are mentioned; honorifics have been abbreviated):

　Associate Queen: Tomoko Tamura, Hiroko Higuchi, Satomi Iwasaki; Furisode Division: Yuka Yokoyama; Tomesode Division: Akiko Matui; Casual Division: Chikako Nishimura; Men's Division: Akira Nago; Foreigner's Division: Anna Dypold; School Competition Division: Kyoto Women's University and Junior College

A mini-tour of Kyoto dining

2005-12-05T14:59:00.000+09:00

Recently, my friend Aki came to visit from Nagano for a few days. She asked me to show her around Kyoto, so one of the things we decided to do was to eat lunch at a restaurant called Ume no Hana (梅の花), which features authentic Kyoto cuisine for lunch at a reasonable price.

The restaurant is pretty high-class, at least judging from the atmosphere and the excellent and extremely polite service, so I felt silly and touristy taking pictures of everything that came out, but I did take five shots with my cell's camera with the intent of blogging about it.

I ordered the Ume no Hana Lunch (梅の花ランチ), but there were some dishes that contained egg and fish. As I am vegan, I explained this to our server, who immediately reassured me that she would have replacements arranged. This level of service in regards to special dietary needs is somewhat rare in Japan in my experience. As my friend Taka explained to me, a Japanese restaurant's mission is to serve its guests the most delicious food possible. Service is important too, but can offend a chef if you go against the recommended/established dishes, as he has worked hard to create a unique taste for you. Putting salt, pepper, or other spices on a dish without tasting it first is considered in extremely poor taste, and although most chefs will politely ignore the infraction, some will evidently become very upset and even berate you. I'm sure that's very rare, and I've never experienced such wrath, but then again, I'm not wealthy enough to frequent high-class restaurants with renowned chefs.

Above is the replacement they gave me for a sort of egg custard with seafood embedded in it (I think it was called chamushi but I can't find any references on the web so I may have misheard. The replacement was a tōfu and potato croquette that was delicious. It was light and not at all too oily. I was also impressed with the classy lemon-squeezer they gave me. I had never seen one before...am I just a country bumpkin, or are there others out there who didn't know such tools existed?

Next on our tour is grilled nama-fu (生麩), wheat starch, served warm in two different flavors, matcha (powdered green tea) and yuzu (a Japanese citrus fruit similar to lime). It was divine, and if you ever want to get an awesome, delicious present from Kyoto, I highly recommend skipping the ubiquitous Yatsuhashi/yūko and grabbing some of this nama-fu instead.

Above is an earthenware pot filled with tōfu and yuba (a dried, tōfu-like food). The translucent broth you can see is nigari (苦塩), or brine, and turns white as it cooks, which serves as a signal for when you can eat it. The flowers are made of nama-fu. We ate it with soy sauce, crushed sesame seeds, and ginger, and it was delicious. Below is a shot of some other assorted dishes that came with the lunch: an okara (雪花菜) puree to the left and fresh yuba "sashimi" with wasabi (山葵) at center.

It doesn't look like much, but there was also rice and other dishes which I didn't take pictures of, and I was plenty full by the time the final course was served. For anybody new to Kyoto, I definitely recommend this lunch set at Ume no Hana -- it will set you back about 2000 yen, but is well-worth the expense.

Konquering the Kimono

2005-12-05T13:07:00.000+09:00

Apologies for such a long absence from the blogosphere. Since it's been a while, I'll break up the recent news into several posts for readability.

This one is to celebrate Anna's recent victory! Loyal readers already know that Anna and I have been learning how to put on kimono for the last three months, but some of you may not have realized that the end for all this preparation was to compete in the Kansai Regionals of the All-Japan Kimono-Wearing Contest (a rough translation of 全日本きもの装いコンテスト・関西大会). This contest is, to my understanding put on every three years by the Japanese National Association of Kimono Consultants (全日本きものコンサルタント協会).

Yesterday we spent the whole day at Kyoto Kaikan, as we had to arrive at 9:00 AM to attend the orientation, do several rehearsals, etc. Anna and I had entered the Foreigner's Division. Kyoto Kaikan is a big event center with several large auditoriums, and the Kimono-Wearing Contest was held in Hall #1, shown at left as seen from the stage. It's a cavernous space with a capacity of over 2,000 and fancy things like acoustical tiling and a remote-controlled microphone that comes up from the stage floor through a trapdoor. I didn't have a chance to take any photographs myself, so I grabbed the picture from Kyoto Kaikan's website.

We ordered two copies of the contest on VHS (unfortunately they didn't offer a copy on DVD), and our friend supposedly videotaped the whole thing, so I will try to digitize the footage and post it here or on my website as soon as I get the tape. In the meantime all I can show you are pictures of the certificates and awards we received.

Anna won first place in the Foreigner's Division! I didn't place in the top three, but my certificate shows that I came in fourth place. This is not exactly true, as every contestant who fails to make the top three received a 4th-place certificate. I'm not sure whether that system is unique to this contest, or if it's common in Japan...I will look into the issue. I know the picture is small, but the text "第１位" to the left of "ANNA DYPOLD" is the part that shows her finish...I think it's a beautiful certificate, but it would have been nicer if they had written her name phonetically in Japanese.

Below is mine...it looks identical to hers except for the name and the fact that the ranking shows "4" instead of "1." The text is a bit hard to read so I'll type it up. In English:

"In recognition of this individual who has taken to heart the culturally different ways of traditional Japanese attire, participating in this Festival of Japanese Spirit and Beauty / The All Japan Kimono Dressing Contest Regional Finals / For high marks and an excellent showing, with due praise, this award is presented."

Moving on to the goodies we got for participating! I still haven't taken pictures of everything, but by far the biggest steal for Anna was receiving the beautiful purple silk kimono she has been using to practice for the last three months. It was brand-new when our teacher, Taniguchi-sensei lent it to her. When Anna started showing a lot of potential early on, she issued a challenge that if Anna could win 1st place in the regionals, she would give Anna the kimono. We suspect it would have cost a fortune, so we're both really happy for the gift/prize. The only thing is, a kimono by itself is not very useful, as many other garments and accessories are needed to wear a kimono in the style that Anna did in the competition. Aside from the obi (帯), a.k.a. kimono sash, which can be extremely expensive, there are also undergarments called nagajuban (長襦袢), a form for tying the obi called a biyō-sugata (美容姿), and a variety of clips, plastic pieces, ropes, cords, and collars. We will try to collect a full set for her before we leave Japan, and with hope we can get some reasonable deals on this equipment since our teacher also runs a wholesale kimono business.

I didn't win anything worthy of mentioning, but Anna also won two beautiful furoshiki (風呂敷), Japanese-style handkerchiefs for wrapping presents, a pair of zōri (Japanese-style shoes), a purse, and a trophy.

On a technical note, although Blogger's easy publishing is convenient, I'm frustrated with the lack of options for layout and editing pictures. The text-wrapping features are extremely difficult to use with their WYSIWYG editor. Maybe I'll just write my own blogger and host it on my website.

Number 2 in Google!!!

2005-11-17T11:27:00.000+09:00

Don't get too excited, as I don't mean #2 on Google's web search engine. But if you search Google Base, Google's new free database system (similar in some ways to Craigslist) for "Translation," I show up as the number two entry! Proof follows (by the time you read this, I will probably have skyrocket downward to the bottom of the list, although you can check by clicking the hyperlink above).

Granted, the service only went live yesterday, and there were only 525 results containing "translation" as of the time I made this post, but still I feel almost giddy that lil' old me was near the top of the chart for a search as broad as "translation." Maybe that says something about the kind of times we're living in. So much for the "15 minutes of fame;" I am content with about three seconds every now and then.

I won't re-write my ad just to try to get a higher rank, unless it becomes plainly obvious that sites totally irrevant to translation have eclipsed me through devious advertising methods. Have any of you readers experienced an similar emotional reaction to a Google search with personal meaning?

Today I will give a lecture to a group of young entrepreneurs of the Nishijin district of Kyoto, famous for the weaving industry there. It's supposed to be about the differences between American and Japanese businesses, as well as the "inside story" about how 9/11 changed American life (stuff that they didn't hear through the Japanese newsmedia). The problem is that I wasn't in Japan at the time so I don't know exactly what they were told! I'm trying to read articles in Japanese from the time but it's a really time-consuming and difficult task. The speech is in about 6 hours as of the time I'm writing this post.

Then tomorrow I will participate in a volunteer radio program or two through a program run by the Kyoto Prefectural International Center and 79.7 San-jo Radio Cafe. We will be talking about the different ways New Year's is celebrated in each of our countries. I'm from America for any internet readers who don't know me personally, and in my group there is also Kyo-san from Guangdong, China, Jennifer-san from Kiryu of all places (she is a British-Japanese biracial), and Hasan-san from Iran. We will also have a visitor, Rai-san from Bhutan. These radio broadcasts make me really nervous (this will be our first official recording, and only my second time in the recording studio) but I think we will have a really interesting program this time. The people in my group are all really nice and intelligent.

Okay, I have to go work on the speech now!

Popularity of Names

2005-11-07T08:54:00.000+09:00

This morning, I had the strange idea to research how popular Anna and my names have been historically. This was prompted by a question by one of my Japanese e-mail penpals, who wondered which baby names were popular in the U.S. now. I had no idea so I googled the topic and was presented with the Social Security Administration's website, which features a large amount of data. I made some quick graphs on the findings in OpenOffice 2.0, so without further ado, here they are!

"Anna" held down 2nd place from 1880 (when data on her name was first recorded) until 1889. The name hit a low in 1971 at 106th place, but has been steadily regaining popularity ever since. In the 2004 census, "Anna" was the 20th-most popular name for girls in the US.

It seems that Jeremy had it's peak in 1976, when it was the 14th-most popular name for American boys. It used to be an extremely unpopular name (905th in 1942), but came out of obscurity in the 1960s, when it moved from 619th place (1960) to 70th place (1970). I'm not sure what social factors were behind this surge, but I would be interested to know if anybody has any ideas. "Jeremy" came in 111th in the 2004 census.

If you want me to make a similar graph for your name, just send me a comment or an e-mail and I'll see what I can do!

Recent animal welfare measures around the world

2005-10-27T12:44:00.000+09:00

A summary of recent animal rights/animal welfare news:

Rome, Italy: Goldfish bowls banned, mandatory dog walking enforced
Gujarat, India: Indian Supreme Court upholds cow slaughter ban
Washington D.C., US: Horse slaughter ban proposal in jeopardy
Virginia, U.S.: Inmates take in cats displaced by Katrina

Chilling

2005-10-26T20:05:00.000+09:00

I had a nice talk with my mother this morning which served as a good reality check. I have been making a lot of wild assumptions about graduation, work, etc. but my mom knows how I work so she saw through my bullshit and gave me some really good advise.

As a result, I think I am going to give up on the computer engineering degree after all and just get my B.A. in Japanese. Computers are a hobby for me, and they always have been, but I don't think I'm suited for a career in high technology. I lack the discipline and am sidetracked too much by parallel disciplines. I think I will just pursue technical skills on my own (i.e. programming/web design/robotics) and if those skills happen to double as a selling point for future job interviews, so be it, but I won't try to keep the charade up any longer. Oddly, much of the joy of computers seems to be lost in me when I step into a classroom.

I went to the local employment office and registered for their employment database. However, it doesn't seem like there will be too many positions available with my target hourly wage: 1500 yen. There would be many such full-time positions, but I can only work for 28 hours/week given my current visa. Maybe I will be able to bolster my future income with some English lessons and translation work here and there.

Tonight I cooked dinner for Anna and our friend Yoko. My menu featured a mushy vetetable/textured soy protein stir-fry, a soymilk soup with corn and tomatoes, and some black sesame tofu (which Anna had bought at the local grocery). It wasn't a very good meal but Anna and Yoko were very gracious and pretended to like it. They went to a kimono lesson across the street about an hour ago.

In the meantime, I reinstalled Windows XP on my laptop because it was getting to be way too slow. I am going to be very careful about installing software from here on out so that I don't have to waste the few hours it takes to get everything re-installed to my liking. I really should burn the XP Service Pack 2 update to a CD next time so I don't have to put my computer at risk until I get my firewall software installed the next time.

Despite my conspicuous lack of income, I splurged on a FireWire/USB 2.0 DVD-RW burner with LightScribe technology. I had never heard of this technology until last week, but it allows you to laser-etch labels right onto specially designed DVD and CD media with the same laser that burns the data to the disc. I have never owned a printer...so it will be nice to have professional labels on my future CDs/DVDs.

What else?

After I make some handouts advertising my rates for teaching English, I am going to go on an aggressive flyering/leafletting campaign, putting pamphlets in every mailbox in the area and posting on local community information bulletin boards and at local schools. Word of mouth is just not cutting it for me.

I am going to start doing some unconventional travel advice. Maybe through my website I will start posting unusual FAQs and tours about Japanese things based on suggestions from friends, family, and visitors to my blog. For example, if asked how tofu is made, I will actually go in search of a tofu-making shop willing to let me do a little investigative reporting, and do a little photojournalism to explain the process, instead of just regurgitating information I got from Google, as so many people tend to do (myself included).

More later...please leave a comment if you have any ideas!!! I'm at your service, loyal blog-readers!

Can't find a job

2005-10-25T22:24:00.000+09:00

I apologize for the several-week hiatus in my posts as well as not having written back to e-mail in the last week and a half or so...I've been kind of morose lately after my tenuous financial situation here took a turn for the worse.

I had applied for a job with a certain translation/interpreting company in Osaka through an introduction from one of Anna's friends about a month and a half ago. At the time, I didn't have working permission so there was nothing I or they could do...in the meantime I applied for various other jobs including one as a fitness instructor at a local gym and another at an English-teaching company popular in Japan called NOVA. Ultimately I was offered a job at NOVA for 28 hours/week, the maximum number of hours I am permitted to work. The pay was not extraordinary but it was pretty good, and I was going to take it. However, I got word from a certain person that the translation company was abuzz with excitement that I would be soon joining them! That was a huge ego boost which I needed very badly at the time, as I had been out of work for several months and was feeling really, really disenfranchised. I fantasized that my potential career in translation/interpreting was about to unfold...and just as I was wondering whether I should go with a sure thing and take the English-teaching job at NOVA, I heard -- again through the same source -- that the translation company (which is quite famous and reputable) just couldn't wait to hire me. Having heard this twice, I foolishly threw all caution into the wind and turned down the NOVA job. I suppose my choice of words gives the rest away...

To sum it up, I got my working permission approved, and the company asked me to take a trial proofreading test (they had wanted me to work first as a proofreader of technical translations and then begin translating later). I did my best, found a number of mistakes in the document they had sent me, and wrote detailed notes on why I made the various changes as well as including stylistic advice for the translators.

Two weeks later I got news that I did not meet the required level as a proofreader, and that they regretfully must inform me that they cannot hire me. The word regretfully sort of pisses me off...of course the letter was in Japanese, but 残念ながら means pretty much the same thing. What do they regret? I'm just one among hundreds who are desperate for a job...they have nothing to regret at all...The official mail was about two lines long and didn't tell me much about what had happened, but I found out later that (1) the reason I couldn't be hired as a translator was not that I was lacking any skill but that I didn't have three years of professional experience under my belt, and (2) a native [English-speaking] manager had been the one to judge that my proofreading skill was insufficient to warrant hiring me. As I have never been a professional proofreader, he may be right, but I think possess a much greater knowledge of grammar and style than the average guy, and what I don't know could be taught to me within a month at most.

The company has the right to hire me or reject me...I don't dispute that part. But I would have prefered not to have my chain jerked around by false information that had me turn down an other-wise steady job. Now I must start this ridiculous job search over from square one.

It's pretty depressing, and although being with Anna is a wonderful thing, part of me is counting down the days until I go back to the US, where I can once again have something resembling a life. I have applied online to about 30 jobs in the last week but have only heard back from two of them, and unfortunately one is too far away and the other is hypothetical work. Tomorrow if I can dredge up the energy I will put on my suit and head to the employment office to see if I can drill holes or tighten screws all day in a factory for about 700 yen/hour (not much).

What made me think I deserved better?

Test from Flock

2005-10-24T10:50:00.000+09:00

There's a new browser in development called Flock which makes it easier and to blog and keep track of your bookmarks, so I'm giving it a spin for the first time. If this post makes it to my blog, it will have worked!

My own little business

2005-10-08T12:11:00.000+09:00

I have recently been making efforts to turn my freelance translating/teaching into a proper if tiny business. I will soon start designing a website, which ought to help me brush up on my very rusty network/web design skills. I also had some business cards, so I thought I would share them with my online readers. The cards are double-sided, with English being on one side and Japanese on the other.

This is a different topic altogether, but I was searching Google for my name, and found the following post that I made to Ask a Scientist website over ten years ago. I didn't even realize that I was using the internet ten years ago! Here is the page, and here is what I had written:

My name is Jeremy Bailey, and I am a student of Dorseyville Middle School. I have been working on a science project about Venus' Fly Traps. A recent addition to the project involved designing an experiment about something I found interesting about them. However, I don't know where to get them or how to grow them in the moderate climate of Pittsburgh. Also, I don't know how a successful experiment could be designed.

I ended up getting the Venus Fly Trap with my dad from Hechinger near Ross Park Mall. I couldn't find many live insects to feed to it, and it started to look sickly after a few weeks, so I decided to feed it peanut butter so it could have some protein, which ended up killing it.

Although I have never realized it until this moment, I have a long and colorful history with inadvertently killing plants by feeding them strange things. For example, I also did a PJAS experiment when I was in junior high school, where I fed blueberry juice, cranberry juice, orange juice, and water to bean plants in order to see which produced the healthiest plants. As I recall, the acidity of the juice weakened all but the control group (i.e. water), and I even managed to cultivate a thick covering of white mold on all the experimental groups. Perhaps these early failures in botany, along with lots of sunburns incurred while running a weeding/landscaping business as a teenager, are some unconscious factors behind my lack of enthusiasm for the garden in our home.

Today is rainy, and Anna went to get a haircut and a straight perm.

Brass knuckles that double as a graffiti printer?

2005-10-07T08:50:00.000+09:00

I came across one of the most interesting devices this morning. It's called the FatJab, a printer that looks like a set of brass knuckles, using five print heads (or spraypaint nozzles) to spray on any surface. It's controlled entirely by hand, so the user can create effects like skew, distortion, rotation, etc. by free movement of the hand. This may be a fake, but I doubt it, because it was displayed on an MIT Media Labs art show, which gave it the following description:

A super-expressive spraying clicky-blaster that allows the empowered wearer to leave hypertraces in the four dimensions. The FatJab offers another perspective to the process of reclaiming public spaces. It's an expressive tool that enables the wearer to spray-paint letters, patterns and shadings wherever they feel appropriate.

So we may be seeing some pretty sweet-looking graffiti in the future when this thing goes mainstream. Still, I doubt that many taggers would incorporate a printer into their arsonal of tools.

Today I have my first Mandarin lesson in a long time! My goal is to learn how to say that I am a vegetarian, describe my hobbies, memorize the basic colors, and express the basic idea "X is more ... than Y." It's a language exchange with a Chinese woman I met in a group English lesson I taught a few weeks ago. I will report on the lesson later today.

Anna and I are hoping to go somewhere this weekend, maybe to an outdoor hotspring to enjoy the crisp early autumn weather and go hiking a little. Not sure where we'll go yet, so finding a destination will be my other task for today.

People named Laura Bailey

2005-10-04T15:41:00.000+09:00

My sister's name is Laura Bailey.

She wrote me an e-mail yesterday in which she said she also was doing an online journal of sorts on Xanga, so I tried googling her to see if I could find it. What came up, however, was information about two other Laura Baileys out there in the world. Have you ever tried googling your own name to see what other people share your name?

My sister is now an art major and Italian/history minor. She spent the summer in Italy studying art and Italian. She and her boyfriend Howard just got a kitten! I'm very jealous because our landlord won't allow us to have any pets. Lots more to say about her, but in a different post.

It seems there are at least two famous Laura Baileys out there, one a strict vegetarian British actress/model and the other an American voice actor.

Laura Bailey the strict vegetarian British model
Laura Bailey the voice actor
Laura Bailey the younger sister

I once did a similar search for my own name, and discovered that there was a professor of mathematics and a WWF-style wrestler named Jeremy Bailey. I would do a search now but I've spent an unhealthy time sitting in front of the keyboard, so I am going to opt to do some stretching and exercise instead.

PET Bottle Mystery Discovered!

2005-10-04T14:31:00.000+09:00

I had quite a shock just now.

Earlier this morning I had been trying to set up a way to do mobile blogging from my cell phone (Vodafone), but failed using Mail-to-Blogger, so I decided to set up an account with Movable Type. When signing up, it asked me for my blog's URL, so I typed in the following address:

http://jerinjapan.blogspot.com/

It actually loaded, and had the same design as this blog, and is by somebody named Jeremy who was living in Osaka last year. At first I did a double take and didn't realize what had happened, before it hit me that my URL is jeremyinjapan, not jerinjapan. The various challenges I've encountered throughout my time spent here in Japan have left me with the sense that I am one of the few foreigners undertaking such an ordeal. This is absolutely untrue, but I kinda figured maybe I would be the only Jeremy in the Kansai region who goes by Jer. That I have the same Blogger design and the same nickname as this guy just freaked me out a bit.

I guess my ego wants me to differentiate myself a bit more. There are a lot of foreigners here, and many of them speak some Japanese, and some of them speak it quite well. Why do I feel this urge to make myself special among the pack?

In other news, I finally discovered the roots of a mystery in my neighborhood (and many others, it seems). I had spent the morning reading various blogs, especially blogs by foreigners living in Japan. Here are some of the ones that captured my attention:

Alive in Kyoto
Antipixel
Tokyo MetroBlog

The latter was not my favorite of the bunch, but it was the key to solving the aforementioned mystery, so I must give credit where credit is due. Surrounding many homes in the Ogura ward of Uji City where I live, there are many plastic PET bottles filled with water. Anna and I have sometimes wondered about why they are there and what they do. We thought maybe they were trying to utilize the sun's energy to heat the water, which they maybe used in some way to cut down on their gas bill.

Evidently, we were dead wrong.

A post on the Tokyo MetroBlog shed some light onto this strange occurence. Evidently it is to prevent animals from peeing on their property!

No joke. As the theory goes, someone discovered that by filling clear PET bottles with water and placing them along the perimeter of your property, a cat or dog, before lifting it's leg, would see his reflection and become frightened, electing to move on to pee in a more suitable spot.

If you have lived in Japan for a while, you'd probably recall how the ol' pee-proofing PET bottle trick used to be big news about 5 or 6 years ago. Some building owners still swear by it--the PET bottles are clear message aimed directly at the pee-petrators: "Don't urinate here."

As far as Japanese people go, "tachi-shoban" (or standing while pissing) also used to be more a visible Tokyo sight years ago than it is today, however, it still isn't all that uncommon to a witness a drunk middle-aged businessman unzip his fly and piss on the side of the street at night. During the day, you might happen to catch sight of a taxi driver pull over and urinate on some short bushes on the side of the road. Japan is not yet a country totally of laws, where one is arrested for inconspicuously alleviating his bladder on the side of a city street. However, I suspect the must be a law on the books somewhere against urinating in public.

Anyway, as the saying goes: Peeing is believing.

Credit goes to Mr. Jim O'Connell for solving the mystery.

Kimono Lessons

2005-10-03T18:44:00.000+09:00

So I think I mentioned in an earlier post that Anna and I are taking lessons (for free!) in how to wear a kimono. There are many types of kimono for women, and the style Anna is learning to wear is called a furisode (振袖). This shows up as "long-sleeved kimono" in my dictionary, but the etymology is more like "wave-sleeve." Evidently young single women in Japan used to wear this type of kimono, climb a mountain and wave the sleeves around, trying to attract single men to come court them. Furisode (roughly like "who-re[run]-sew-day") tend to have bright, vibrant colors. Along with the kimono itself, Anna is learning how to tie an obi (帯), or "kimono sash," in a style called fukura-suzume (脹雀・福良雀), which literally translates as "plump swallow." The first kanji compound is the more traditional way of writing it, and the second seems to be a play on words, having the same reading but using two kanji meaning "luck" and "good" instead of one meaning "plump" for the fukura portion of the word. Sorry to everybody reading who is not a student of Japanese...these explanations must make my writing really inaccessible. Please indulge my long-winded explanations, as I am writing this blog as much to support my horrible memory as to share my stories about life in Japan.

Anyway, that's what Anna's learning, and I'm learning how to wear a men's kimono, consisting of a kimono, hakama (man's formal divided skirt), and haori (formal coat). I have it a lot easier, because it's awfully complicated for women, but not too bad for men.

I decided to post some pictures of us and our friend Yoko, who is taking lessons with us, so enjoy!

The intricate and lovely part of the fukura-suzume obi is in back, as you may know, and unfortunately I don't have any pictures of that yet, but will try to post some next Sunday after our next lesson.

Still plugging away...

2005-09-24T17:46:00.000+09:00

So this translation feels like it is never going to end, but I have an entertaining example that illustrates both the characteristic repetitive nature of Japanese mission statements and the inadequacies of machine translation systems (which I use from time to time as reference):

I plugged in "大学管理運営幹部特別研修," which became "University management management management special study." I can't blame the program though, as "管理," "運営," and "幹部" all really mean "management." So why did the author have to say it three times in a row? I guess we have something similar in English in the phrase "administrative management."

My best literal translation would be "special traning of university headquarters' administative management," but I decided to cut it down to "special training for university administrators" considering the context.

::Exhaused but nostalgic sigh::

"Management management management" reminds me of my old job as an intern, where a coworker's attempt to translate a PowerPoint slide about techniques for evaluating suppliers resulted in the word "Ram" appearing randomly and nonsensically all over the page. (^o^)

Translation Rant

2005-09-23T10:12:00.000+09:00

Okay, so two nights ago (i.e. before I wrote the post yesterday) I had stayed up until 5:00 AM working on the translation, and I ended up passing out for most of the day and not getting anything done.

So I started hauling ass early today to make up the lost time, and I came across this beauty:

すなわち×××がアジア太平洋地域のハブ大学になるということは、アジア太平洋地域の個々の大学と交流するだけではなく、アジア太平洋地域各国の拠点大学と学生交流、共同学位制度確立、教員交流、共同研究の推進を行うことによって、×××がアジア太平地域の教育・研究のネットワークのキーステーションの一翼を担える大学になるということである。

Those of you who don't read Japanese (which will be a vast majority) may not understand it, but do you notice that the phrase "アジア太平洋地域" appears four times in one sentence?? It means "Asia-Pacific region." The phrase is relevant in the context of the memo I'm translating, but why would anybody ever have to use the same word four times in one sentence?? Hasn't the author ever heard of a pronoun? They have them in Japanese too, ya know...

And that's a freaking long sentence...grumble grumble...

I'm officially a freelance translator!

2005-09-22T12:48:00.000+09:00

A few months, when I was depressed and wishing I could do something productive and income-generating with my life here in Japan as a university student in limbo, I signed up for the Japan Association of Translators (JAT) in order to get access to their electronic bulletin board and many articles about every aspect of Japanese/English translation. I wasn't doing it as a promotion of my translation services at all. But yesterday morning, I got a random call from a guy who wanted me to translate a 25-page memo for a Japanese university by Sunday night. I was quite unsure about my translation speed so I asked him to send the document so I could see whether I felt comfortable with the material, volume, etc. I think he could tell by the way I spoke that I don't have a long history as a professional translator, and I didn't want to commit to a deadline that I am not able to make, so we struck across the following agreement: I would take a shot at the translation last night, and assess whether the deadline was doable or not; if I thought so, I would send him a copy of the translation up to that point and he would get me the job.

I was somewhat surprised when I found out the compensation: 180,000 JPY, about $1611 going by today's exchange rate. I have worked for about six hours on it so far, and estimate that it will take about 38 hours to finish the whole document. If I speed up, it may only take me 25 hours or so. That seemed like a shitload of money to me at first, because I didn't even get that much from my former internship in a month, before taxes!! Also, if I had steady work at that rate (which is a big impossibility), I would be making $77,300 per year, which isn't at all bad. However, it wasn't until I did a bit more research that I realized that I had agreed to a rate that is probably unfair. The reasons: (a) Japanese-English translation rates are based on the number of kanji (called "words" in the industry for some reason), not the number of physical pages. Although certain fields (biomedical, patents, etc.) garner higher-than-average wages, the industry standard is that a billed "page" amounts to 300 kanji. There are about 24,000 kanji in my document, or 77 billed pages, which should pay 231,000 JPN at the standard rate of 3,000 yen per page. This means I'm actually doing a cutrate translation at 80% of the established standard.

I'm a little uneasy about this for two reasons: (1) the JAT community warns very sternly about accepting jobs on the cheap in order to gain experience as a beginner, because that will drive down the industry rates and eventually damage your and others' wages later on in life, and (2) it may be difficult to negotiate for higher rates if this guy calls me for translation work in the future.

I hate sitting in front of the computer for 10 hours a day, but I have often done so out of my own will in the past, so I better just suck it up and work, since money and my reputation as a professional translator could be on the line this time.

In case you're wondering what sort of language I'm tackling, check out the following excerpt:

しかし今日の改革は、全学を挙げて一つの課題を集中して行う段階から、幾つもの改革を同時並行で行い、かつそれぞれの部毎に持続的な改革能力が求められる段階に至っており、全学的な戦略企画調整部門の確立とともに、部門毎に全学的視点に立った企画・執行能力のある多様な専門家、少なくとも10年先に責任をもてる人材の大量確保・育成が必要となっている。これらの人材が確保できなければ、国際的競争に耐えられる《検閲》の持続的な改革は不可能である。

現在、旧帝大系大学を始めとして、わが国の拠点大学たらんとしている大学は、能力さえあれば、学内の元文部科学省の職員、コンサルタント企業の専門家、銀行などの民間会社の社員などから、その経歴にこだわらず、大規模にかつ教員系列の形式にした大学管理運営の専門家集団を組織し始めている。《検閲》学園は、これらの動きに立ち遅れることなく、大学行政センターにおける職員研修をはじめとする様々な形での養成と、外部人材の登用を含め抜本的な仕組みで大学管理運営プロ集団の形成に努めなければならない。

However, the reforms of today range from single issues affecting all faculties to the many issues handled simultaneously and in parallel requiring continual reform effort. In addition to establishing an interdepartmental strategic planning department, these reforms also require the securing and cultivation of large numbers of talented people -- diverse specialists in each department who have experience in executing plans with a university-wide scope, each of whom shall have at least 10 years of experience. If these talented people cannot be secured, continuous reform of [CENSORED] which can stand up to international competition will be impossible.

Our country's base universities, beginning with the formal imperial universities, are now beginning to organize specialist groups of university administrators; they are seeking out capable people from among employees of private corporations, the former Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, consultant company's specialists, banks, and so on, without giving too much regard to their career. The [CENSORED] school must take radical measures in striving to create a professional group of university administrators without lagging behind. These motions will begin with staff training in the university administration center, and will also include appointment of external personnel.

Exciting stuff, isn't it? Just imagine doing that for pretty much forty hours in a row, with a little bit of sleep thrown in there. My translation is not very beautiful, but it's roughly functional. Japanese mission statements are so hard-handed and repetitive, it drives me crazy! (Maybe they're the same in many other languages/countries, to be fair...) And they use the same words again and again as though the author just learned them the morning the document was composed. It is a mammoth struggle to produce high-quality non-repetitive English prose from a Japanese source document while staying true to the original. I hope it gets easier soon. Maybe I had work really hard in engineering when I get back to Pitt so that I don't have to get stuck doing this forever...

Okay, I'm going to take a little exercise break to relieve my eyestrain, and then it's back to work. I promised myself I would put in 10 more hours today. If I am not too braindead after it's all over, I will report back with a status update later today.

Howdy from Kyoto

2005-09-21T11:14:00.000+09:00

Hey all...I'm sorry it's been so long (over two months!) since I've made my last post. I wish I could blame it on the fact that I've been incredibly busy, as had been the case until July 2005. In fact, I have been so idle that I haven't been able to summon up the psychic energy to think of things to write about and then actually type them out. I will try to make myself write a little bit a few times a week as a minimum.

I still haven't gotten around to fixing the formatting of the pictures on my last post either, but I'll try to get that done within the day.

So here's a list of news about Anna and I:

We have started taking lessons on how to wear kimono, and Anna ties a mean obi now.
We participated in the "Sports Festival" of one of her elementary schools.
The next day we were invited to a similar festival in which adults from the community can participate.
At said festival, I won first prize in the obstacle course, and was rewarded with soy sauce.
I found a Japanese woman named Satoko with whom I started a language exchange.
The iPod I got her got broken in an accidental drop. ；＿；
I got the results back from the JETRO Business Japanese Proficiency Test.
We have become friends with two awesome Japanese couples. Being friends with other couples is so nice...it makes socializing a lot simpler in many ways.
I bought a Japanese Super Nintendo, a Chinese device capable of playing Nintendo (NES) games, and have been wasting embarrassing amounts of time playing Rockman (a.k.a. Megaman), MarioKart, and Super Mario RPG.
I started a blog in Japanese, not for an audience but more so I can practice my written Japanese and hopefully have an excuse to build my vocabulary and sentence patterns. If you're' interested, you can check it out at http://jerblogjapanese.blogspot.com/.

I also got my visa extension approved by the Japanese immigration authority, and more recently even got permission to work up to 28 hours per week. I can't work full time because I haven't yet graduated from university. I have a few job offers that I will jump on very soon, which will give me some income as well as help me figure out what to do with the vast expanses of free time which I have been largely wasting up until now.

I have done two relatively useful things with my time:

Give a speech to veteran host mothers/host fathers at Konan University -- where I did a successful exchange three years ago -- taking about tips for what to do and what not to do in order to have a good relationship with their host students. I gave the speech entirely in Japanese and I felt like it was really flowing. Rawk!
Give a speech to the incoming students for this year's exchange. I thought about this one a lot and prepared three single-spaced pages of tips and guidelines packed with my own personal experience as well as problems some of my friends and peers encountered. I did this in English as their Japanese levels were all over the board, and I was pretty nervous, but five or six of the 33 students came up to me and thanked me for making such a helpful presentation! That was a pretty awesome feeling.

Moving on, Kyoto is beautiful but it is absurdly muggy in the summer. I never had a problem with sweat until I moved here, but all of a sudden I find myself drenched after just a few minutes outside in the 95% humidity, with the sun blazing down on my pale-ass white skin. Natives here seem to have adapted to the climate. I, on the other hand, perpetually look as though I have been for a swim with all my clothes on. Anna sweats more than Japanese do, but nothing like me. I have started to think that I am a freak of nature. If I had a video camera, I would try to capture the sheer outrageousness of my Kyoto sweat.

Also, one of my favorite temples, Higashi-honganji, will be under construction until 2010! The rebuilding is to repair roof tiles and other wooden parts which have succumb to frost damage. The occasion is to celebrate the 750th anniversary of the sainthood of Shinran (親鸞), founder of the Jōdo Shinshū (浄土真宗) school of Pure Land Buddhism. I guess I will have to wait until my next trip to Japan to enjoy its beautiful architecture again, as the Goeidō (御影堂), or "Sacred Picture Hall," is now enclosed in massive scaffolding.

More later.

Photo test remarks

2005-07-08T01:53:00.000+09:00

Okay, so the formatting of the pictures is not the same in the published blog as it was in the preview window. I will fix it later, but it's time for me to go to bed. I apologise for the horrible design.

Random picture post

2005-07-08T01:51:00.000+09:00

Some news: I managed to get an interview with a Kyoto-based electronic parts manufacturer called Rohm next Tuesday, 7/12/2o05. I have no idea whether I have a good chance at getting a job, but I will wear my suit, bust out my most polite Japanese, and hope for the best. At the same time, various sources are telling me that it will be difficult to impossible to get my visa extended. This after plunking down $1200 on a set of air conditioners for Anna and my house next year, as well as extra for a refrigerator, all-in-one microwave/oven/toaster/grill machine, table set, etc. I figure that if worse comes to worse, I will head back to the US just before my visa expires on August 22, spend some time with my family, take care of miscellaneous business with school and other issues, apply for an English-teaching job, and come back. I really would prefer not to teach English though, as I have little aptitude and even less interest (although I do like teaching and helping my foreign friends with their ESL studies).

Other news: The Kiryu Times will be interviewing me tomorrow, presumably about my internship at Mitsuba through JETRO. It is my first newspaper interview ever, let alone in Japan, so I am a bit nervous but I think it will go okay. I will post the article in this blog after it is published.

Still other news: I have Anna and my new address for for the forthcoming year, to which care packages, letters, and other goodies may be sent (highly encouraged). If you want to know, ask, because I don't feel like publishing it to the public.

And now tonight's feature: some random pictures I took with my cell phone throughout the last 11 months in Japan...

Section 1: People

The first two are of me now, the second from last month when I had to get a little dressed up to interpret for my company's Global Purchasing Conference, and the last is my nametag for work. My company is called Mitsuba, the first line of Japanese text says "Intern" and the second line is my name written phonetically in Japanese.

Anna being cute as usual...

...and struggling to beat an arm-wrestling robot in an arcade near Isesaki City, Gunma.

Fanart from Anna's little tykes. The text on top says "English" followed by "Anna-sensei."

More fanart. The text says "Anna-sensei." I felt just slightly jealous after seeing these and reading some of the adorable cards her kids wrote her. It's so different working for a Japanese company...

My friend Taka with about $3000 after he won big at the slots.

Taka's cousin Hide intently playing Super Mario Bros. on the original Nintendo Entertainment System.

My friend Shu Dar when she came to Tokyo for a short-term study abroad, with a friend.

Section 2: Food

From left to right: (1) my "birthday cake," constructed from a base of silken tofu and topped with avocados, carrots, seaweed, and Japanese crackers; (2) an adorable "bentō" lunchbox Anna made in perfect Japanese style - the cubes on the left are made of a kind of tōfu not readily available in the US called kōyadōfu, and the mixture on the right consists of beans, carrots, shītake mushrooms, and a variety of seaweed called hijiki - almost too beautiful to eat; (3) a platter of yuba (a thin sheet of tōfu prepared by letting a film form on the top of soymilk as it is boiling), prepared and served in different ways. In the rear are three types of Japanese noodles: buckwheat "soba" noodles on the left, udon noodles in the middle, and green tea-flavored noodles shaped like soba on the right. I got this with my friend Shannen in Nikkō, a famous temple town a few hours away from where I live.

A hamburger with rice balls instead of bread for buns and spicy flavored burdock root (i.e. gobō) and carrots instead of meat. Way to go!

A spaghetti sandwich. Had to buy it.

The first vegetarian hamburger I have seen in Japan, given to me by my friend Shannen.

Section 3: Engrish

I don't mean to poke fun, but a little copy-editing could have prevented this. I for one am excited that my winter jacket is an authentic cloth made for me. Who wouldn't be?

Ah yes, the good ol' days of froppy disks.

Section 4: Random interesting images:

Some aluminum scraps at a factory I toured. Pretty...

A phallic candy for sale at a tourist trap. The large text reads "power candy," and the text to the left in red says "A mysterious power is floating."

I have never seen a bug with this shape and coloration before. Lying on the ground at the laundromat where I dried my clothes earlier this evening.

A plant that starts off as a seed buried in some cork and nutrients, that eventually flowers after a week or so to reveal the message "Let's stay close forever" in Japanese on each half of the sprouting bud. Amazing!

The "i-ro-ha" hills near Nikko. This image is of a GPS navigation embedded in my colleague's car. The curves are ridiculous.

I never thought I would see these two words juxtaposed, but I stand corrected.

Section 5: Misc.

"See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" is a proverb in Japanese as well. This picture was taken in Nikko. Monkeys are portrayed because it is a Japanese play on words. The archaic form of the negative verb conjugation is -zaru, which rhymes with saru, the Japanese word for monkey.

Who knew I would see an advertisement for Pittsburgh's most well-known roller-coaster in Yokohama! Pittsburgh is properly cited in the text at the bottom.

Okay, maybe they're not so interesting, but I'm sure it's better than reading through my sleep-inducing prose about nothing in particular. Please leave comments if you are curious about anything I have put up!

Heat wave

2005-06-28T17:58:00.000+09:00

In Tokyo today it was 36.2 degrees Celcius (97.2 degrees Fahrenheit). It was about the same in Gunma, but also it was ridiculously humid. This humidity is unlike anything I have ever experienced in the US.

I was going to write a lot more but I am too tired...sorry.

Heavyhands in Japan

2005-06-01T00:07:00.000+09:00

So it seems that Heavyhands will be sold in Japan once again. I haven't been able to figure out the name of the company which will be marketing and selling the product, but the person in charge of this effort, a Mr. Koike, is apparently the president of the Japan Heavyhands Association, and a Japanese website for HH is already partially made and published (http://www.xpoint-plan.com/test/index.htm).

I will be going to Yoyogi Park in Tokyo to meet Mr. Koike, who is called the "Len Schwartz' of Japan" (i.e. the "my grandfather" of Japan...this is a very strange and interesting phrase to me), as well as a guy named Paul Shepherd who has been promoting Heavyhands and running a fitness class in Tokyo for four years, a yoga teacher interested in incorporating Heavyhands into her Yoga routines, and the members of the aforementioned club. Ostensibly I will work out with them, introduce myself, and possibly go to dinner with them in Shibuya...I will try my best to make a good impression and to improve communications between the Japanese and American branches, in promoting a global Heavyhands network of sorts.

Will report the results sometime on Sunday...very excited about this.

In other news, I met a disgusting man at one of my host company's factories today who blatantly insulted and demeaned two guests from our Mexican factories throughout a two-hour long tour during which I was acting as an interpreter. I don't want to get into it now. Fuck him. If somebody leaves a comment and wants to learn more, I'll write more; otherwise I probably won't bother.

I recently got the Japanese version (i.e. the original version) of my favorite video game of all time, Rockman 2 for NES (known as Megaman 2 in the US). After a good 8 years or so, it has built up a considerable nostalgic value to me, and is even more fun than I remember it being. I had never stopped to think about this until moving to Japan and talking to friends about video games, but in Japan the "Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)" is known as the "Family Computer" (famikon for short). My Japanese friends get a big kick out of the fact that most Americans simply called the NES "Nintendo" for short, since it's really just the company's name. On the other hand, most of my American friends think it's hilarious that it would have been called the "family computer" in Japan. Both are pretty stupid names I guess.

My room is a mess again...want to write about many more interesting things that are happeningo to me, but I'm too tired to write more. Oyasumi...

Long time, no blog

2005-05-24T00:06:00.000+09:00

Yeah, that was a lame title, I know.

Anyway, I will try to summarize what has been going on in the last few weeks. I had wanted to write many times in the last two weeks, but wasn't able because (1) I paid my internet bill late and they temporarily suspended my service and (2) I have been working a shitload and probably would have been too tired to write anyway.

The best recent news is that I had a reunion with my friend Hitomi, who I met when she was an au pair in Pittsburgh last year. I had written a post to a d-list for Japanese living in Pittsburgh called komachi, looking for a Japanese calligraphy teacher. She wrote me a nice letter saying saying that I seemed nice and suggested that we meet. We started off as language partners but became good friends before too long. On Thursday of last week, we met for the first time in Japan. Oddly, although 80-90% of what I say in an average day is in Japanese (at work), I got nervous about speaking Japanese with her, so we spoke pretty much in English the whole time. We went to see the famous Kaminarimon (雷門) in Asakusa (浅草), one of the older merchant neighborhoods of Tokyo. She wanted to get some fresh-made Japanese crackers called senbei (煎餅), so we wandered around for a little while and eventually found a place I had been to before where they bake them right in front of you. We were going to get them fresh, but then we saw something we had never seen before, wet crackers called nuresenbei so we opted for them instead. They were interesting but not very good, as you might expect buying wet crackers. We stopped in a café and talked for a while...mostly I complained about work and she listened diligently (sorry Hitomi!!!). When we were in Pittsburgh, we often used to get Vietnamese food from a place called Tram's Kitchen (spring rolls and pho), so in the spirit of our reunion we decided to look for our old favorite. She called her sister, who was able to locate a Vietnamese-Thai place nearby. Unfortunately, the pho had animal-based stock, and although they offered to try to make something special, I felt bad making them do that, so I just got Som Tam (green papaya salad), a dish of which I have fond memories because it was my reward for learning how to say "I'm a vegetarian" in Thai. We talked for a while longer and eventually left the restaurant to get closer to the station, and she told me about her badass apartment which she is getting for something like 24000 yen a month, which is ridiculously cheap given how big it is. She also seems to have gotten a compact car for 50000 yen including an inspection. Maybe Anna and I will have to move to Okinawa someday with prices like that! Anyway, Hitomi and I had a nice reunion, and she even brought me some Okinawan juice but we forgot that it was stored in a locker at a different station than the one I had to depart from, so I didn't get to taste it...too bad!

Other news: I pulled an all-nighter at work the night before our reunion, cramming away on an extremely difficult translation. I expected to be thanked and praised but I got yelled at instead, and they even insinuated that I wouldn't get any compensation time. What a load of crap.

I also bought a pack of very light cigarettes for the first time in my entire live and smoked my first three cigarettes. I will not get addicted, and am not sure why I did this exactly...I was really stressed from work, and many of my friends who smoke say it helps them deal with stress. I guess I was hoping for a release from the stress but it didn't do that for me at all. I did feel slightly delinquent and cool as I smoked it though. To horrified friends and family members, don't worry, I will not come back from Japan a smoker.

I have been really into footbagging recently (known in some American circles as "hackysacking"). I'm still not that good, but I have learned a few basic tricks like consecutive toe stalls, leg over, and mirage. That probably means nothing to everybody reading this, but I promise to make a video after I can afford to buy a video camera.

It's 1:18 am already, and I have a long, long day of translation tomorrow. Lots of other things to report on but it will have to wait for the next post.

Oh, if you readers have any comments, please feel free to leave one! I think I had comments turned off before, but they should be working now. Give it a try.

Ciao for now...

Observations about Japanese TV

2005-04-27T17:57:00.000+09:00

I am watching TV after getting home from work and noticed a few things so I thought I woudl write about them.

The first was a program which introduced some restaurants of historical significance in Kanda (神田), one of the older neighborhoods in Tokyo which seems to have been famous for its dining during the Edo period. Each time the two hosts of the program entered one of these places, they would order the archetypal item on the menu. After it came, each host would put the first bite in her mouth and chew thoughtfully for about 8 seconds before doing one of the following: 1) going off into a lengthy monologue about the complexity of the taste and texture, or 2) saying a one-word description about the food, like "Soft!" or "Yummy!" I have seen these programs with exactly the same reactions many times throughout my time spent in Japan but the first time I realized the entertainment value in these reactions was today. Japanese culture is obviously the reason for this behavior, which seems funny me as an American. I think if they don't say anything, or give a half-assed reaction, the restauranteur would be offended, and the viewers of the program would be disappointed, or at least be less tempted to go there themselves and eat the item in question.

Then came the news, and watching it caused me to realize another interesting feature of Japanese TV. When covering court cases, the camera will very frequently show in-court footage, but the camera typically looks straight at the head judge or pan around the courtroom. Nobody ever seems to be talking, or doing anything except looking straight at the camera, unblinking. The announcer will describe the background of the case via voiceover. I have not once heard actual testimony from a case broadcast on Japanese television. I wonder if that's because it's illegal...I'll have to look into that someday.

Anna is coming on Sunday morning for Golden Week, a string of holidays in succession in Japan that will give us just short of a week together. We haven't spend that much time together since Christmas. We will go to a juggling festival in Tokyo together, and maybe try to climb Mt. Fuji together if she is up for it. Will take pictures!

I haven't mentioned my little sister yet in this blog...Laura is 20 and studying studio art, film studies, languages, and various other things at Pennsylvania State University (PSU for short). She will be going to Italy for a few months this summer, and then travelling around Spain and France with one of our cousins who goes to school with her, Kristen. At first we thought maybe she would come to Japan for a little while at the end of her trip, but evidently she won't be coming after all. Apart from my ex-girlfriend coming to visit a few years ago, nobody has come to visit me in Japan yet. I would like some visitors!

That's all for now...going to the gym.

The highs and lows of veganism in Japan

2005-04-17T09:28:00.000+09:00

I haven't posted anything for slightly over a week because nothing much has been happening. There were some interesting stories from work, but I have been working 11- or 12- hour days recently, so I have been too tired to even turn on my computer lately. Yesterday I had such a stark contrast of culinary experiences that I felt compelled to write it up.

My day started out when the newspaper guy crammed yesterday's paper into the mail slot in my door. There is a spring-loaded metal strip embedded in the door that makes a racket every time this happens, so my eyes shot open shortly after 5:35 am. I managed to fall back asleep for another hour or so, but eventually I was just lying in bed wishing I were sleeping. Two hours of this, and I felt the urge to talk to somebody, so I called Anna even though I knew she would be sleeping. I let the phone ring 14 times or so before I heard the sound of clattering plastic on the other end as she struggled to wake up and answer the phone. We talked for a little while about what we did on Friday night but eventually she said that she wanted to get more sleep, so I let her go. I waited until 9:00 or so, then called my friend Shannen to see if she felt like playing some soccer or hackysacking. I managed to wake her up too, but she agreed to play after she woke up in a few hours. Bored stiff in my apartment, I decided to hop on my bike and ride around the town. First I went to a convenience store downtown to get some money and some breakfast. I had a nine-grain breakfast roll, a konbu onigiri, a green-tea flavored dairyless pudding-like concoction, and a steamed bun filled with sweet-bean paste (anman). Unexpectedly, at that time in the morning more foreigners seem to be roaming the streets than Japanese; in the ten minutes it took me to withdraw some money, buy the food, and eat it, I ran into and talked briefly with my Australian friend Tracey and my Texan friend Daniel. My British friend Jason also drove by on the other side of the road on his bike in the same time period.

As I was eating, something sort of funny happened. Generally in Japan people don't eat on the street unless there is a festival or event going on, in which case there are many yatai (push-carts) selling various foods and everybody eats in public. I understood this, but there were no parks around, and I was really fucking hungry, so I just found the closest bench and dug in. That bench happened to be in front of a bank, so early-morning customers kept passing me as I ate. For the most part we ignored each other, but there was one interesting exception. A man had pulled his car up near the bench, and got out of the car. He had almost made it to the sidewalk to the left of my bench when he saw me, upon which recoiled, returning quickly to his car. I had just showered the night before, was wearing clean if not particularly stylish clothing, and was eating in what could be regarded as a tasteful manner. It seemed like he was looking for something in his car for a good while, before exiting the car again and walking quickly past me. Probably he hadn't seen me at first and just got a start; maybe he had forgotten his card. But I couldn't helping wonder whether he thought I was going to mug him or something.

After eating, I biked around the city, looking for open stores in vain, eventually deciding to practice lifting ("juggling" a soccer ball with your knees, feet, head, etc.) in the park by myself. I got tired and hot after 45 minutes or so, and decided to go home. On my way home I passed the studio (where Taka's mother teaches drawing and painting) and ended up talking with Fumiko (i.e. Taka's mom) for a long time. Shannen called me after an hour or so and invited me to get to lunch at a tōfu restaurant. I wasn't expecting that much, but it was amazing! A full-course lunch, 80% vegan, for 1500 yen ($14). They were really nice and offered to substitute vegetable tempura for the soba, which had fish extract (katsuobushi) in the sauce. I ate myself silly but it was all healthy. It had been a long time since I have been able to eat everything served to me in a restaurant.

Later on that evening I went out with Taka, Aki, and Hide. I hate to interrupt the story but just realized that maybe I should explain the pronunciation of their names. Taka is like "tah-tah" with Calipso added on, stress on the first syllable: TAH-ca (these rhyme). Aki has the same vowel sound, with "key" added on: A-ki. Hide is not the same as the English word to conceal; it's two syllables: he/she+deference. I think the stress is on the first syllable but I haven't paid enough attention to know for sure. Back to the story - so we went out to an izakaya downtown, and each ordered something. They routinely get sashimi (刺身), so I am used to it, but what came out on the plate was a little bit fresher than the standard fare. Behind the pile of fish slices, the fish's head and tail were visible. There was a bit of lettuce in the middle so I couldn't see the whole fish, but I thought the effect was supposed to be as though the fish were whole. I've seen that before so it didn't bother me particularly. They seemed a little bit nervous and I wondered why, because they always eat fish in front of me and never worry about it. Aki and Taka muttered something about how they thank the fish for its life before eating it, which was also strange in context. Although we have talked about veganism many times, they don't usually thank the fish, so I thought something strange was going on. I saw Taka pointing to the fish's head, and Hide was looking quizzically at it. I was curious too so I watched where he was pointing. About ten seconds went by and nothing happened.

Then the fish squirmed and opened its mouth as if gasping for air.

For the next ten minutes, it continued to die slowly in agony as the majority of its flesh, piled neatly in two stacks several inches from its head (and in view of the dying fish), were consumed. Were the fish able to understand English, and had it an extraordinarily black sense of humor, it might have taken some small amount of comfort in the fact that its meat was being enjoyed. Judging from appearances and some basic knowledge of biology, that did not seem to be the case. Even after ten minutes, when the tastiest parts had been devoured, it was still gasping and squirming. I imagined myself as the fish as chopsticks or a knife dug relentlessly inside my mutilated body, satiated customers laughing in the background. I felt sick to my stomach and left suddenly.

It's one thing to understand the basic process by which animals are transformed into food. For somebody like me, it's quite another to see it happening. In the past, I have gone through various stages of involvement in the animal rights cause. When I first got started at 16, I bought, watched, and showed videos of fur farms and slaughterhouses, I devoured books documenting the horrors of experimentation on animals, made a website about animal rights for my senior project, found a way of writing papers about animal rights even in economics and English literature classes, wrote essays about the economic, social, political, and environmental benefits that could be gained by a world more compassionate toward animals, tried to start an animal rights group at my school, etc. Since then my activism has tapered off and I have felt pretty guilty about that. An episode like last night just might be the shock I needed to hone my convictions about what is right and what is wrong.

In the words of Forrest Gump, that's all I have to say about that.

To calm my nerves, I walked about 45 minutes to the next town to a video rental shop and got a movie called Appleseed. The animation is all 3D and incredible. I only understood about 50% of the Japanese; it's a futuristic science fiction action movie so there were all sorts of scientific lingo I didn't understand. Even so it was greatly enjoyable and I recommend it, but the people I've told about this blog don't tend to be into that sort of movie so I guess it's a moot point. Laura, if you run into Nick, make sure you tell him that he had better see this movie or else!

My room is clean

2005-04-06T18:43:00.000+09:00

Well, compared to yesterday anyway. I feel much better just being in a tidy atmosphere, but the downside was that I stayed up later than I should have and ended up sleeping and being 15 minutes late for work. It obviously depends on where you work and what sort of boss you have, but I think that generally being late to work is pretty taboo in the US. I've done it a couple times and gotten yelled at, anyway. It's really bad to be late at my company, and not because somebody screams at you. Walking into a largely silent open office with no cubicles when everybody has been working for 15 minutes is humiliating in itself. If you try to put a very serious expression on your face and run to the changing room to hang up your jacket, you will look foolish and dissheveled. If you try to look cool and composed, you probably will get sharp remarks from your boss/supervisor/coworkers to the effect that being late is a big deal and asking you to reflect on your sin.

That was the battle I faced this morning, and I chose the former: already sweating slightly from a furious if laconic bikeride after just having waken up, I blinked rapidly as I passed each person on my 25-meter jog from the doors to the Purchasing Department to the changing room. I put my coat on the hanger as fast as possible and apologized with very humble but consise words, and set to work. My stragegy largely paid off in that I didn't have to hear that damned speech once more. Hurrah for reverse-engineering the Japanese business culture!

There was one other nice surprise today. I went to the Family Mart, one of the major Japanese konbini (an abbreviation of "convenience store") where I often buy my lunch. Up until now my choices have been limited to either a nattou onigiri (fermented, slightly rotting beans in a rice ball...seriously, better than you might think from the description) or a kombu onigiri (a salty seaweed rice ball), but I was happy to see that they had a salad with thirty different ingredients, all vegetarian. The dressing had a smidgeon of egg-white in it, but I ate it anyway. It was leaps and bounds more delicious and nutritious than the standard cabbage salads you find in such establishments. Also, I ate outside overlooking the Watarase River, and the weather was gorgeous. I wish I had been able to spend the whole day outside.

I recently bought a HUGE external hard drive (ca. 250 GB) and have archived all my pictures and music on it. Once I get Photoshop installed again, I will resume work on editing the many thousands of pictures I took from my year in Japan and my trip to Thailand with Anna two years ago. I have already color-corrected, cropped, resized, optimized the contrast, and done other photographic manipulations on about 8,000 pictures and deleted 4,000 or so duplicates and clunkers. Eventually I would like to make them available on my website with captions, which I still haven't started writing.

I am going to be taking the JETRO Business Japanese Proficiency Test later this summer so I need to get serious about learning higher-level grammatical patterns and vocabulary. No time to lose...

Oh, I may go to Okinawa during the Golden Week holiday at the beginning of May. Anna and I would like to meet up with our friends Nancy and Hitomi. Not sure if they will have any time available to hang out with us, but we want to go anyway!

Photo test

2005-04-05T22:31:00.000+09:00

Just testing to see whether some photos on my website (nothing to see yet) show up as links from this blog...I will probably delete this post later and replace it with a more comprehensive one.

Anna with our friend Ronnie a few years ago in Ise (伊勢):

Me with my friend Shu Dar after a rainstorm in Pittsburgh:

My two best friends here in Kiryu, Taka(yuki) and Aki:

A sign for an Egg Party I saw in nearby Maebashi City:

Just a smattering to test whether they display correctly.

My room is messy

2005-04-05T17:51:00.000+09:00

I mean seriously messy. The little hallway that separates the main room from the front door is not too bad, but as far as the main room goes, it is pretty close to the worst I've ever soon. There is barely any floor visible to be honest. I have wrappers, clothing, unopened mail, contracts, CDs, pottery, a guitar, empty boxes, silverware, and textbooks all over the place. I've been feeling a bit down lately and I think my more-than-filthy living conditions have a lot to do with it.

I admit responsibility for letting it get this bad, but it's really hard for me to get motivated to clean this place when even after hours of vigorous cleaning, it still doesn't look good. Anna doesn't like having to stay here because the carpet and walls are so filthy. I don't blame her...my room is about 50 years old, and maybe there have been a few hundred tenants so far, most of which must have spent most of their time inside smoking cigarettes, judging from the yellowish color of the once-white walls. The carpet has all sorts of hidden surprises, including caked-in dirt (not everybody who lived here seems to have followed the Japanese custom of taking off one's shoes before entering the room), iron burn marks, and myriad other stains of various colors and sizes. My friend Shannen, who lives two doors away, gave me two plants, a Eucalyptus plant and another one whose name I don't know. They definitely help to improve the atmosphere inside, but there is still a lot lacking. Tonight I promised myself that I would go to the gym because I haven't lifted weights for a long time, but I am too tired, so my new goal is to finish cleaning my room. I have lots of new good music that my best friend here, Taka, recommended to me, so I will try to boogie my way through the job while listening to Faye Wong (a very famous Taiwanese singer, 王菲), Daft Punk (a French techno group), and Quruli (くるり, my new favorite Japanese group).

Between my daily expenses and my travels to see Anna, I haven't been able to turn a profit at all this year. In fact, I am in the red, as they say. I am trying to trim the fat off of my budget, so instead of buying fresh vegetables and fruit - which are ungodly expensive at the closest supermarket - I decided to go for the canned stuff instead. I had a nice surprise shopping today, when I realized that they sell one of my guilty pleasures for relatively cheap - creamed corn. Thankfully, it was absent altogether of fish extract, which may sound like a matter of course to you, but fish extract finds itself in almost everything here.

My friend from our year in Kōnan, Ronnie, is in Kyōto for the day visiting Anna. Evidently he is teaching at the second-worst middle school in Ōsaka, and the kids are horrendous. They throw chairs and desks out the second- and third- story windows routinely but are very clever about covering their tracks. You'd think that they would just install security cameras to catch the kids, but I guess that would be too expensive. He didn't renew his JET contract, no wonder.

I don't have too much else to say right now. Maybe I'll post again to report on the success of my room, including before/after pics.

I remembered a dream

2005-04-02T08:46:00.000+09:00

I really enjoy remembering dreams, but it's an experience that only happens once or twice a year. For some reason I remember just a few foggy details of one that ended shortly before I ran to my computer to write it up.

My cousin Ryan, my mom, and my aunt Jodi were all visiting Japan, and we must have been in Kiryu City. As were debating between going to a pizza place and an izakaya (居酒屋, i.e. a Japanese-style pub), one of Ryan's friends in Japan called him to tell him that he absolutely had to go see the rock at Fūgetsudō (風月洞, a popular bar in downtown Kiryu that I sometimes frequent*) before the sunset was over. For "rock," he chose the word iwa (岩), which denotes a large, craggy rock somewhere inbetween a stone and a boulder, and if somebody were to tell me in real life that I had to go see the rock at someplace or other, I would have no idea what he meant. However, because I was in control of the dream, I understood that he wanted to go see a rock garden (which doesn't actually exist at said bar, but that's what dreaming's about I guess). I knew of a pizza place right nearby there, but my mom and aunt were tired so they decided to stay back while Ryan and I made a trip downtown. We arrived at the restaurant, but all of a sudden it wasn't just the two of us; two friends had materialized out of nowhere, but in typical dream fashion, my brain just went with it. It was some special night where customers could play vintage video games for free, and since Ryan and I played a lot of video games growing up together, we were excited. To my left, I heard somebody say "wan shang hao" (晚上好), Mandarin for "good evening." I was surprised at this as I only have seen or met about 5 Chinese or Taiwanese nationals since moving here. Looking up, I realized that there were a few people from my Chinese class last year, Xiao Ma and Xiao Ge, as well as one of my classmates from Hawaii while I was studying abroad in Kobe a few years ago, Jax. I think I woke up right after that, which is a shame because it was an interesting dream, but then again if I had slept through to the end, I probably wouldn't have remembered it.

Regarding the asterisk way back there, maybe it's just me, but I just realized what an interesting phrase "sometimes frequent" is. I guess "often frequent" is even more cool since in another sense often means the same thing as frequent. I bet it could be a good cryptic crossword puzzle clue, except I can't seem to think of a single word that has the same meaning.

In the previous entry I had said something about not writing for an audience, which is turning out not to be as true as I imagined. I guess the very nature of publishing a journal on the internet makes it very difficult to avoid explaining things. Allow me to revise that statement to say that I will not be writing only for an audience. I just wanted to say that I don't intend to make this a showy blog.

Speaking of other blogs, I remembered that LiveJournalers let their readers the song they happen to be listening to, their current mood, the weather, and other such details. I felt jealous for a brief moment before I realized that I am almost always listening to Daft Punk or John Mayer, my mood falls in between mildly happy and moderately blue, and it's always either bloody cold and windy or bloody hot and humid in Kiryu (I have yet to experience the latter but I'm told it's pretty harsh). Now that I've gotten that off my back, I am no longer jealous! And I have saved myself some mouseclicks two birds with one stone. (^o^)

Yesterday work went as usual. There is a woman I work with (I'll call her Mrs. X) who seems to enjoy tormenting me. She has done some really nice things for me as well, but for one reason or another she will strategically pick a time when nobody from my section is around, and they lay into me for not doing some vague task she never asked me to do, or for not having a calculator, or any number of petty things. I think she would actually be a good senpai (先輩, one's elder at a work or a school who helps train the newbies) if she were not so incredibly condescending all the time. I have been slugging away at my company for over six months now, fighting through my linguistic and logistical challenges, but I never received any formal training. I was handed a packet of data about where our foreign factories are, the mission statement of the purchasing department, and so forth. I don't think my company was wrong for neglecting this; in fact, I think it was probably a necessary evil. There are so many minute details that I probably wouldn't have been able to remember them right away. However, I would expect veteran employees to understand that the American guy who's never studied business is bound not to understand certain things, and to explain them when they surface. Everybody but Mrs. X does this to some degree or another. Some go out of their way and are really nice about it, showing me multiple examples, and others just give me the answer I'm looking for and dismiss me - I'm fine with both. But Mrs. X twists everything around and mocks me for asking such a stupid question. She does this really mean laugh (I suspect she may not realize she is doing this) and asks me why I would ask her such a thing. Statistically speaking, she then tells me that she is disappointed in me and wishes I would think more carefully before asking her the next time. I could go on and on about how miserable I am sometimes having to sit next to her, but there are four more months of internship to go, and I'm sure she'll surface in future entries.

After work, I taught my weekly English lesson, for which I had a lot of good ideas thanks to Anna's suggestions. However, only two students showed up, so we reviewed what we had done a few weeks before. After that, I hung out with my usual crowd, Taka and Aki, along with my friend Hide, who is Taka's cousin. I brought my Stratocaster over and played a few songs for them, and then we went to a pub called Yōrō no Taki for some food and drinks. Soon after we walked in, about 15 younger women came in as a group. A few minutes later, I hear "Jeremy, Jeremy!" coming from one of them. I didn't recognize her at first but went over to say hello, and it turned out that they were teachers at the local nursury school I used to volunteer at, Hirosawa Hoikuen (広沢保育園). I was sort of impressed that one of the women had remembered my name, because I hadn't directly worked with her at all.

I got to thinking about the name of the pub last night and decided to look into it. The kanji for the pub is written 養老乃瀧, and I didn't understand the meaning until today. Evidently 養老 (Yōrō) means old age, 乃 is a way of writting the possessive particle no (の), and which is usually written in hiragana (one of the two syllabaries of Japanese), and 瀧 is a more complicated form of the character 滝, "waterfall." I googled it and found that the origin of the name comes from a Japanese fairy tale about a woodcutter who ventures further than he normally does into the mountains in search of firewood. He comes across a beautiful waterfall, and falls into the water as he tries to get a closer look. He loses consciousness for a while, but when he regains his senses, he realizes that it was sake! Somebody told this tale to the emperor of of Mino no Kuni.* The emperor praised the story highly and decided to go and see the waterfall himself (on which the story was based). The water was said to be a sort of fountain of youth, and after having a drink, the emperor declared that he indeed felt youthful. As an imperial gift to all his subjects over 80, he even renamed the era - so 717 in the Western calendar is Yōrō 1 in Japanese. The story was later written translated into English and published as "The Enchanted Waterfall," as part of a set of ancient Japanese fairy tales which featured color woodblock prints on washi (和紙, traditional Japanese paper). The series created a stir in Europe, where French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese versions were also published.

*Mino no Kuni (美濃の国): an ancient kingdom that along Hida no Kuni (飛騨の国) formed present-day Gifu Prefecture (岐阜県).

Google is the most wonderful thing. I would never have had the ambition to go to the library and do all that research, but I was able to throw it together from about eight Japanese and two English sites. I'm not all that particularly interested in Japanese folklore, but I enjoy puzzles a lot. I think that's why I enjoy life halfway across the world...it's not always happy but it's incredibly interesting much of the time. Things that seem really insignificant on the surface (like the name of a pub near my apartment) can lead to really fascinating stories with just a little bit of gumshoe spirit. Also, Google runs the Blogger service I am using to publish the text you are reading. They have incredibly tasty, healthy food (very often vegan) in their main office...I want to work there so badly...

More to write, but it's time for lunch. Maybe I'll try to write again later today if time permits.

Up and Running!

2005-03-31T01:44:00.000+09:00

It has taken me seven months to setup a blog, but I'm finally here. I have been thinking recently about some of the adventures I've gotten myself into here, and decided it would be better to write them up instead of relying on my shoddy memory to keep track of everything. I don't intend for this blog to be viewed by many people beyond my friends and family, so I don't intend on writing for an audience.

I guess I ought to establish some basic goals for this blog, or it may go the way of the 10+ websites I have designed, used for a brief period of time, and then abandoned shortly thereafter. Up until now, I had been making the webpages out of interest in the technology, but this time I am much more interested in content. Not that I have such an exciting life...

Basic goals:

Give my family and friends a chance to read about what I'm up to
Post photos of my various trips
Post progress on the Japanese-learning software I am planning to create
Write at least a little bit every day I possibly can, covering roughly what happened

This is my first time using a blogger since the concept first started to gain attention, and I see the technology has gotten a great deal more advanced. If there is a way of generating blogs on a thematic basis, I would also like to post Japanese lessons for anybody interested, but if that turns out not to be possible, I still intend to publish these on my website (still in development).

Enough about the blog itself -- there is much self-absorbed rambling to be done. Currently I am living in Japan, in a smallish city called Kiryu (桐生) of about 115,000 people, including 2,000 or so foreign nationals. No, I didn't just happen to know that; I looked it up because somebody asked me recently and I had no idea about the population of my city. E-Fox, if you ever read this, I shudder to think of your reaction... : ) Last year I applied for the International Internship Program offered by the Japanese External Trade Organization (aka JETRO) and got a job with Mitsuba Corporation, where I've been working as an intern in the Purchasing Department ever since the beginning of September 2004. My contract will run out at the end of July, after which I intend to move to Kyoto and begin my life together with Anna, my fiance. I have currently finished 4/5 years of university but may not graduate for a few more years as Anna and I plan on staying in Japan for another year or two to improve our language skills.

I live by myself in a small, sparsely furnished apartment provided by Mitsuba, which means "three leaves" in Japanese. I have met some truly wonderful people in my time here, but to be honest there is not much in the way of entertainment. In fact, most stores close down at 5:00 PM or so, even on the weekends, and armed with only a mountain bike to commute, I haven't done much travelling locally. In my spare time, I exercise, juggle, study Japanese and Chinese, listen to and play music, learn about computers, and talk with my friends. Sadly, as Anna is now has been in Kyoto since June and transportation is very expensive in Japan, we only get to meet about once a month on average. Our next plans to meet will be at the Noge Daidogei (野毛大道芸), a street performing festival in Yokohama. I haven't been to a juggling festival since I was 14 when I first started learning, and Anna has never been to one before, so it should be fun. We also plan on going to the 2005 World Exposition in Aichi sometime later.

I meant to write a lot more, but it's already 2:00 am and I need to get some sleep. I hope I make good on my promise to keep writing everyday. Oyasumi...