The sound of summer

On August the 15th at the height of summer I wandered over to the local cemetery with the intention of taking photos of the lanterns which people here put out to guide the souls of the dead back to their homes. Unfortunately, there were no lanterns and everything was pitch black. So instead I took this film which records the sound of night time in Matsue. You probably need to turn your volume up to hear it, but if you do you will hear the cacophony of insect sounds that marks summer here in rural Japan. This sound is constant all night long, and later (in September and October) will be punctuated by the sound of singing insects. On this video you can hear the ringing of bell-ringing crickets (I think) just before halfway.

I will take another recording in late September, when the music starts. For the meantime, please enjoy a moment of Japanese summer.

（また）花火大会写真

These are some pictures from the second fireworks festival, on Sunday night. I took my tripod, so they look a little better maybe, but perhaps also a little overblown...

これは第２花火大会（日曜日）の写真である。さんきゃくを持って行ったので、この写真が土曜日の写真よりよかった。

　　　　　

花火

これは土曜日に写された松江花火大会の写真である。日曜日にも写真を写したけど、土曜日より下手だた。花火大会が楽しかった。

These are some photos taken on Saturday night of the Matsue fireworks ceremony, which occurs near Shinji Lake. I took photos of the Sunday event (which lasts longer) but they weren`t as good. The screaming of children behind me notwithstanding, the fireworks ceremony was a lot of fun.

(In Japanese, fireworks is literally translated as "Fire flower". I think you can see that this name has a certain poetic truth to it).

Child rearing, Japanese style

I have been pondering the way in which Japanese children are raised from the moment I arrived here, for one simple reason: they are so quiet. Adorable little things, and very cute, but on top of that terribly well behaved, and very quiet in public. Sure one sees the occasional tantrum, but in general the children one sees here are noticeably quieter and noticeably better behaved than their western counterparts. How is this?

I have, of course, hatched a theory, which I shall introduce with a fireworks anecdote. It is, as everyone knows, the curse of parents that they have to occasionally take their children to completely age-inappropriate events which they know their children are going to make difficult, and the classic example is fireworks. Children panic at loud bangs, and start to cry. So last night while I was sitting watching fireworks with the Delightful Miss E and the Stunningly Handsome Mr. H, two children nearby in the crowd were screaming their little lungs out. One was being comforted by an Englishman, one by a Japanese woman. I swear the Englishman made as much noise as his child, trying alternately to shush it, talk to it, calm it down or generally just give it as much attention as possible; but the Japanese woman, while cradling her child close to her breast (as he was doing) completely ignored the crying. She was completely ignorant of her child`s cries, except for occasional amused chuckles with the other adults, and was intent on the fireworks she had come to see.

One sees a similar kind of phenomenon in supermarkets and other public places. When children under maybe 5 years old decide to get overactive in public here, their parents ignore them. Where western parents would attempt to reason, cajole, curse, coerce or spank their children into silence, Japanese parents seem to prefer looking the other way and ignoring the whole thing.

I think this goes against all our notions of children as needing a disciplined world. I have a suspicion that the Japanese see children under 5 as incapable of reason, and therefore beyond reasoning with. Perhaps they are just cute machines, and their behaviour is not amenable to interference. I don`t know, but I see this happening and think of the social interactions and strong sense of social responsibility of Japanese adults, and I wonder. Perhaps there is something to this method. After all, the child at the fireworks has learnt from the moment he or she was old enough to scream that begging for needless attention is not going to help. By the time this child is old enough to bother making a fuss at the supermarket, he or she will already have given up the distinction between negative attention and no attention because it is simply not relevant. And frequently I think that the difference between the world of the individualist west and the collectivist east really just lies in the amount of negative attention being demanded and given. Maybe our much-vaunted individualism is really just a bunch of children crying out for attention, because we learnt from the moment we were born that yes, if you scream loud enough, attention is what you will get...

A random wish

In the chill-out tent at the Tottori beach party, there was a wishing tree, where one could tie one`s wishes for the future. I found this wish, which I think must have been written by someone Japanese:

I wish to have hope again when I lost everything this year. I wish I can wish again.

My Moral Panic!

In the interests of furthering my Japanese prowess I recently bought my first novel, "Tokyo Real". When I say novel I mean novel in the sense that a 5 year old might. "Tokyo Real" is a novel of maybe 100 pages, the book itself b5 size and written in maybe 18 point type with large spaces between every paragraph. I bought it because, looking at the introduction, I could read the entire first paragraph without having to pick up a kanji guide.

So, I have almost finished chapter 2 now and aim to be onto chapter 3 sometime this weekend. The book is a classic "I was a schoolgirl junkie" moral panic story, except that in this case the junkie is addicted to ecstacy, and that's about it. There isn't anything worse in this country to be addicted to. If you are all very nice to me I aim to give rough translations, but I'm waiting to see if my patience lasts through the whole book, or if it gets too hard.

In any case, it's good to see that the same style of dodgy sensationalist "schoolgirl has sex [not with me! honestly!] for drugs" story is available here. Where would we be without this fine genre?

I shall keep you, as it were, posted...

A note on textbooks...

This is just a tiny comment on the Japanese school textbook "controversy." It is a cliche of foreign views of Japan that the Japanese have not come to terms with their role in the war, and do not understand what happened. This cliche is commonly backed up with the claim that Japanese students are not taught the truth about their history, as evidenced particularly in their school textbooks.

Well, now anyone who wants to have an opinion on this cliche can check the truth of it for themselves. The authorised middle school textbooks (aimed at 12-13 year olds) have been translated and are available online, here. If you have an opinion on this issue, I suggest you go investigate for yourself; you may be pleasantly surprised...

My favourite lunch...

These are the ingredients of my favourite lunch, ochatsuke (which I call "Tea Rice"). I have this maybe 3 or 4 times a week, because it is so damn delicious. Because I am pretending that I am healthy, and it is so easy to do here, I have my tea rice with sashimi, which you can see here. The ingredients are:

• 1 packet of sashimi, your choice
• 1 onigiri (rolled rice packet), your choice
• 1 packet of ochatsuke tea, suited to the onigiri

I always buy pickled plum onigiri. Onigiri is a ball of rice with some kind of flavouring in it, often wrapped in nori seaweed. My favourite has a sour pickled plum ("umeboshi") in the middle, and nori on the outside. I tear off the nori, break the rice ball into a bowl, and then rip the nori into strips and chuck it on top. Then I boil some water to make the tea mixture, pour it on, and eat as fast as I can.

The tea mixture contains various flavourings besides tea, for example mustard seeds, powdered plum or wasabi, various dried herbs, and often strips of seaweed. It is absolutely delicious. 6-10 packs will set you back $1. The onigiri costs maybe $1, and the sashimi (you can see if you look closely in the picture) about $3-4. The sashimi pictured here is, I think, Tai (Snapper). The whole meal, for $6, ends up looking like this:









Yum!!!!

Studying in Japan

Summer has arrived, and so Naito Teachers Laboratory has a summer holiday coming: 1 month, from August the 10th until September 9th, beginning with a beach party and culminating with a conference in Kobe. In the meantime, we all get a break to do whatever we like. It struck me that this is the ideal opportunity to describe the nature of my first 6 months of PhD study in this country.

The first thing which will strike my more astute readers as a little strange is that I am in a laboratory at all. How do Statisticians have a lab? Well, probably really this means "research group", which in this case consists of my supervisor (Dr. Naito), his 5 honours students, and me. The honours students are a bunch of funny lads, to whom I have made passing previous reference. They are Gosuke (who has been Dr. Naito's student for some time), Masaru (who has a Canadian girlfriend), Takuma (who is striving to become a teacher), Yashiki (the poet) and Yamasaki, who will stay on next year as a masters student. The 5 of them share an office which adjoins Dr. Naito's, but because I am on the other side of the building I do not spend much time with them. I see them mostly during Seminars.

Seminars are the preferred teaching method here, where teaching of senior students is heavily focussed around what my friend calls the "Sensei System". Senior students are heavily dependent upon their teacher (Sensei) for their education, so perhaps Honours students here behave much more like PhD students than they would in Australia. A large part of their training in more complex mathematics involves preparing and giving seminars. So on Monday Dr. Naito sits through 3 seminars: Financial Mathematics, Model Selection, and Survival Analysis. On Wednesday he sits through one more: my seminar, Semi-parametric Smoothing. The honours seminars are 90 minutes long and are presented by one or 2 students, who work their way through a text book and present the material therein in detail for our delectation. In my case, I work through the details of a mathematics article, and present the more complex parts for Dr. Naito's consideration. When we don't understand things, Dr. Naito gives a brief ad hoc lecture on the material. So far since starting my PhD I have worked through 3 articles and part of 2 text books. My seminars are, in consequence of this, quite long - 2 - 3 hours a week. I have to spend most of the week preparing the materials for these.

So, it is a cauldron of activity. The Honours students also have some lecture courses to attend to, so they work quite hard preparing their seminars, doing their other homework and (of course) working part time. I spend most of my time working on the seminar, and also attend the Survival Analysis seminar on Mondays. Survival Analysis is a topic I already understand, so I can use this seminar as an opportunity to practice my technical Japanese (a whole other topic, that is!) Because I work all day Tuesday, and Friday is taken up mostly with Japanese classes, I really only have half of Wednesday, all of Thursday and half of Wednesday to prepare my seminars. This means I put in a fairly large effort on those days to catch up. It also means that since I began my PhD I have done at least 3 days' study every week, and so after 4 months I am about to embark on developing the first original work of my PhD. I'm sure this has to be close to a record (at least for someone as lazy and ignorant as me!)

Also, Dr. Naito has me writing up all I have done so far during the summer break. So in addition to doing a little extra study, I will be preparing some appendices and proofs for my PhD thesis - within the first year!

I have heard rumours that this "sensei system" can be bad if ones sensei is a complete dickhead, but I really can't see how the system differs from PhD programs everywhere in the world. As ever, the success of a PhD depends entirely on ones supervisor, and in this case it seems I am (this time at least!) in safe hands...