ロンドン日記

Go Here!

2012-01-06T23:40:00.001+09:00

Hi! This blog has been defunct for a while, but I sometimes use it to comment on other blogger blogs. If you came here from them, then my current blog is here.

My first kickboxing fight: video

2010-07-29T23:00:00.003+09:00

I'm in the black shorts and white helmet. I think this is the first round, things were still going smoothly at this point (in fact some of my defences here look quite good, and a few kicks quite savage!)

Here is perhaps the beginning of the second round.

Things still look okay and there's some okay movement here. But it went pear-shaped after this...

Oranges are not the only fruit

2010-02-05T00:47:00.001+09:00

Previously I wrote a long rant about farming, small hills, and the choice Japan faces in the future between permanent reliance on other countries for food, or changing its whole countryside in the interests of food security. In short, farmers in Japan are getting older and as they do, country towns are crumbling and the environment around them is becoming moribund. Currently the Japanese countryside is a picturesque collection of terraces for rice paddies, small hills covered in forest (invariably with a shrine on top) and occasional orchards. It really is the picturesque scene from My Neighbour Totoro, if one were to add in a lot of powerlines and a few hills that have been concreted over.

This choice that the Japanese face was brought home to me in a little more detail over the new year, when in the company of the Delightful Miss E I went to visit her friend, Mrs S, in the countryside outside Beppu. We were there to spend a day making rice cakes and soaking in a private hot spring, but while there we were taken for a tour of Mrs S's rather extensive orchard holdings. Mrs S has married a Japanese policeman, and they have together built a large house on a block of land they share with his parents. She has lived in Japan for about 15 years and speaks and reads Japanese fluently, and has essentially absorbed herself entirely in Japanese family life. Family life, unfortunately, comes with an inheritance of 1000 fruit trees, mostly mikans (mandarins) but also yuzu (a type of sweet lemony fruit) and kabosu (a kind of sweet lime-y fruit). Mrs S's parents-in-law have been running this orchard their whole lives, having inherited it from their parents, but have worked full time jobs this whole time. They are now past 60 and still manage the orchards, but they obviously expect that Mrs S and her husband will take on the same task, working in the evenings and weekends to maintain the orchard while they work day jobs. Mrs S is rather doubting her commitment to this project, but has been given to believe that 1000 trees do not turn enough profit to be worked full time. Unfortunately for the good family S, Mr. S works shifts and is often away for days at a time sleeping in a police box (like Dr. Who, only better looking), and Mrs. S has a full time job at the university. So the task of managing these orchards would fall onto her shoulders, mostly, and she doesn't relish it...

So here we see the problem of Japanese agricultural policy as it affects the ordinary lives of real people. Obviously the only thing which will keep the Family S involved in this orchard at present is a highly developed sense of obligation, something which holds a lot of otherwise barely-functional systems together over here, but it doesn't seem like a model on which to base food production for 120 million people. As these farmers retire the work they have done will fall on fewer people, and those people will have to work in what is still - for all Japan's modern industrial economy - back-breakingly hard old-fashioned labour. The full extent of investment in Mrs. S's orchard consists of an electric fence and a shed, primarily because like most orchards in Japan it stretches across a couple of steep hillsides and is completely incompatible with any kind of machinery. It's not quite the state of the art serried ranks of trees one sees in the Cottees adverts...

So what is Mrs. S - and all the other people like her in Japan - to do with this unwanted obligation? Bear up under it for another 40 years and pass it down to her (even smaller) family? Or sell up and leave the hillside to a conglomerate, to industrialise it and finally turn a profit? Such an act would mean significant changes to the area around her house, I'm sure, because in its current state it is not exactly the most productive orchard on earth. The whole joy of Mrs S's house is its position nestled in a forested valley between mountains, and in every direction one sees terraced rice paddies, forest, rivers or orchards. Industrialisation would change it so that the land her husband and children grew up in changes permanently. Should they work this way every weekend to keep it, or should they give in to progress and sell it?

I'm not sure why these decisions have been delayed in Japan compared to the rest of the world, but they are going to have to be faced as the population ages and the food situation becomes more perilous. As that time fast approaches we can think of people like the good Mrs S, wrestling with a lifetime of farming, and wonder how they will manage the conflicting obligations of family past, present and future, and the land they live on...

... but in the meantime I'm going to peel myself a mikan (they really are quite delicious), and think of distant friends, to whom currently my only obligation is to update this blog, and not to forget...

Like a komori out of hell...

2010-02-05T00:46:00.000+09:00

After 2 weeks of internet silence, I have finally got my act together enough to send you all an email, having finished all the necessities of settling into Japan - alien card, bank account, mobile phone, hot spring visit, rice cakes, sex museum visit, furniture shopping, descent into hell - so I can settle into the task of communicating with distant friends. It's 7pm here and freezing cold (tropical archipelago my arse), snow is forecast for tomorrow and all my chores are done until Sunday, when I have to hobble onto a bus to Fukuoka and the commencement of my Japanese studies. My arrival in Fukuoka corresponds with some kind of annual pub crawl (which in this weather will be like scott of the antarctic), but rather than burden you with tales of expected hangovers, I thought I might let you know about a few of the fun activities to be had in Beppu town.

Christmas Eve Fireworks Fantasia: The perfect combination of Japanese cute, Japanese weird and pointless western ceremony, christmas eve in Japan is like valentine's day in the west, and young couples go dating. in Beppu this has been turned into a fireworks festival, with traditional festival stalls selling overpriced greasy food, bands and then a big fireworks display. The bands were, in order: a group of children in santa outfits doing a dance; a heavy metal band ("visual" style), with a male and female singer singing passionately about various dark topics; a young female soulful singer-songwriter giving everyone a gentle and warm feeling; and a hip-hop band. All proceeded on the same stage within 10 minutes of one another, did a 30-40 minute set, and were introduced by a screamingly happy female MC. This dizzying combination of genres meant that the crowd was stuffed full of couples from every mix of sub-cultures on the peninsula... very strange. But the combination gets wierder, because after the bands finished the "fireworks fantasia" started. This consisted of fireworks set to a medley of really cheesy 80s romance songs, all narrated by a really cheesy narrator. We could tell he was cheesy because when the foreign music sets came on, he introduced them in English in a really cheerfully tacky American accent. Yay. I had been in Japan for 1 day when I was subjected to this several hour-long concatenation of craziness, and right down to the love-heart shaped firework explosions, it was comfortingly Japanese and completely disorienting.

Mochi making: traditionally in Japan at new year one eats o-mochi, rice cakes, and on the 31st December Emma and I went to her friend Sarah's house to make rice cakes. Sarah has lived in Japan since 1994, and is married to a Japanese Policeman, and is essentially immersed in rural life. She stands to inherit a massive orange farm, which is an interesting quandary about which I will say more in separate emails for those of you who are interested...

Onsen (hot spring) visits: I have been now to 2 onsens, one an open air onsen in the garden of hotel, in which I boiled my brain, and one in a rather exciting Kyushu specialty, the "family onsen" (i.e., love onsen), which is a private hot spring which you can book in advance for a one hour period. The onsen I visited had an inside and an outside bath, the outside bath overlooking hillsides and shadowed by a tree for privacy. I went with a family (who were, fortunately, in a different private room with their 3 rowdy children), and they recommended I experience this onsen with the aid of beer. It's a good idea, provided the water isn't so hot that it boils you while you drink - but fortunately this hot spring was perfect.

The sex museum: I went there today, just before I went into hell. This place contains a wax work of snow white having sex with the 7 dwarves (please press the big breast to see the dwarves move) while prince charming looks on in shock from a window; wax life-size replicas of animal genitals (including a whale's girly bits!) with pictures of some of the animals in action (my god giraffes are scary); a little cinema playing really hammy 80s Japanese police porn; wax replicas of jane fonda and some other western actress; and upstairs a long series of exhibits of early 20th century Japanese pornographic prints. All of these prints were under perspex covers which had carefully pixelated dots over the juicy parts of the picture, just like in a Japanese porno. How pointless! But the staff had conveniently knocked the prints so that the dirty bits were in many cases just slightly to the right or left of the key sections... also the front counter, which was staffed by a dour middle-aged lady, was selling a variety of quite inventive sex tools. Woohoo!

My descent into hell: the sex museum is rather appropriatley situated on "Demon Mountain", which hosts the 8 Beppu "hells", hot springs too hot for humans to bear, in various lurid colours, which have been turned into tourist sites and can be viewed for a small fee. We went into "Demon mountain white lake hell", which has a hot spring at 99.1 C, a lot of steam, and cages full of crocodiles. Go figure. I have no sympathy for crocodiles, steaming them alive seems too good for them, but I get the creeps whenever I'm in the same area as they are. I wonder if one can buy crocodile meat in Beppu? Apparently historically people were chucked into these hells by samurai as a form of torture, but I'm not sure I believe this tale. Samurai were noble and honourable, right? I think this hell is called the white lake hell because of the steam; it wasn't very white. Apparently the steam produces enough power to drag a single carriage, but for some reason noone in beppu has ever worked out how (or tried?) to harness the steam or the heat for power. I suppose selling overpriced tickets to Korean tourists is a more efficient use for them...

My other impressions of Beppu are that, besides being steamy and cold and smelly, it is a little backward compared to the previous country town I lived in. it's very pretty, being a narrow town pressed between steep mountains and the sea, and it has a typical mix of interesting bars and nightlife (I've already been on a tavern crawl on new years' eve, during which I was groped by a massively drunk overweight Japanese girl from her position sprawled on the floor by the door, and Emma was forcefed champagne by a self-styled hoodlum). People here are of course friendly and cheerful, and it seems like possibly a very nice place to spend a few years of my time. But it's early days yet, and I don't know yet what is going to come crawling out of those hells to get me...

イギリスの原野の音

2009-05-26T07:58:00.003+09:00

子供時に、ソーズベリの周りに住んでいた。その時に、よく里の近くにある downs と言うところに行った。downs て言うのは日本語で原野だと思う。

ストーンヘンジは、あの原野にある。最近ストーンヘンジに行った時に、原野の音が私に子供時の散歩を覚えさせた。ここで発表したいと思います。以下の映画には、原野の風やskylarkという鳥の歌が聞こえる。風が強いから、鳥の声は聞きにくいが、ちゃんと聞いたら聞こえる。

A strange way to be behind

2009-02-11T03:40:00.001+09:00

England is strangely behind Australia at times, but this is a very strange way to be! Britain has discovered the joys of giant tourist attractions - giant angels, giant horses, etc. Over in Australia we have been doing this for year - and it has always made us a laughing stock! So why is England jumping on the Giant Tourist Attraction Bandwagon? Wierd!

The Guardian is racist

2009-02-10T08:59:00.001+09:00

This is another off-topic rant which I'm going to cross-post with my other blog, because I'm a grump after watching a fortnight of insane british racism. The Guardian is the UK's supposedly intellectual, left-wing newspaper, ostensibly well-respected internationally for its quality. Unfortunately it is in reality a propaganda organ for the labour party (who are currently in power), which is probably the world's most illiberal left-wing party, and is best characterised by its being the only left-wing party in government to join the Iraq war. Need we say more? I suppose we could excuse them for being spineless lickspittles and quislings, but if that's their defense against allegations of racist mendacity, well, they can use it as much as they like.

I've been watching the Guardian defending racist language, standing by anti-foreign strikers, and supporting the government's open racism (in the form of the slogan "British Jobs for British Workers") and feeling my ire slowly rise for a week, but the straw that broke the camel's back is this piece of unmitigated shite - disguised as opinion, by a supposed academic - which tries to lay the blame for all anti-semitism in Asia at the feet of the Japanese. The Japanese! Who, let's not forget, rescued Jews through their German embassy in world war 2, even though Germany was their ally.

Now, I have tried to give this "academic" the benefit of the doubt but I find only one fact in his whole article which isn't straight from Wikipedia, but the breadth and scope of his assertions leaves me stunned. For someone who has studied the orient, he shows two types of nasty racism which really, really annoy me: first, he wants desperately to smear Japan specifically; and second, he sees the entire rest of Asia as in their thrall.

First, to Japan, which he claims has long been anti-semitic based on citations of books which coincidentally all appear in this wikipedia article labelled as "tondemo bon" (outrageous or dodgy books)[1]. He expects us to believe further that this anti-semitism - which is apparently confined to a bunch of phantasmagorical fringe texts - was exported all through Asia. He sites one book from China, and then proceeds to mention that Malaysia - a majority muslim country - also has anti-semitism. His support for this claim? Statements by the ex-Prime Minister. So Japan is the well-spring of anti-semitism in Asia, as proven by a few dodgy fringe books, while Malaysia "are not immune" even though their PM was publicly anti-semitic. This weak phrase suggests contagion from abroad, which seems a little topsy-turvy when one considers the relative importance of the media through which this anti-semitism is expressed in the two countries. But did our hero stop to consider this? No, he didn't, he certainly didn't. Japan, you see, is our misfortune. Sound like a familiar trope?

Our worthy scholar then proceeds to the usual claims about Japan - that it is a closed society with a short history of democracy, and so vulnerable to conspiracy theories. Of course, Japan introduced male suffrage in the Meiji restoration, 150 years ago, so its history of democracy is no worse than many other countries, and the "closed society" claim is just the usual ignorant rubbish. Perhaps not unusually, our noble inquirer then proceeds to link anti-semitism to anti-colonialism [2], which rather contradicts the implication that Japan is the well-spring of Asian anti-semitism, since it was never colonised (though Malaysia was...)

I'm sure I could write a piece of software which can assemble 3 or 4 stereotypes about Japan into a single paragraph, and then use them to justify any racist claim you want to make. Why employ shonky academics to do it when you can just do it with dice and a couple of slips of paper?

Buruma's other piece of racism, though, seems to me much nastier. His claim that Japan is the well-spring of anti-semitism in the region depends on the assumption that all the other Asian nations are weak, easily influenced and vulnerable to superior western ideals. Which claim, incidentally, relies on some sort of view of the Japanese as super-human politically and culturally[3]. But more importantly it relies on the idea that these societies are not capable of self-determination. Witness, for example, the breathtaking claim that The Chinese picked up many modern western ideas from the Japanese. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I recall the Chinese taking a somewhat different path to the Japanese in the '30s, through this chap Mao and this idea "communism" which he definitely didn't get from an itinerant Shinto monk. And you know, I think China might have a 1000 year long association with the West through this thing called "the Silk Road". They might have some independent ability to get ideas there, including anti-semitism, if they want it. Which they probably don't, Buruma's entire evidence being the claim that an anti-semitic book is selling well and even read by members of the government. The Chinese Governments' reading patterns are well known on account of its high level of public accountability, you see.

But this claim is obviously made about those nations - Malaysia, the Phillipines - which are generally viewed as less sophisticated. They're not, of course, but ranking them according to their similarity to western ideals is the classic stance of the cheap orientalist. This is slipshod academic work, and sloppy journalism to publish it. But it suits two combined tasks that the Guardian has to cope with. On the one hand, they have to fight off the hordes of right-wing Israel supporters who claim their coverage of the war in Gaza is anti-semitic, which defense they mount by regularly running critiques of anti-semitism; and on the other hand they have to remind themselves that yes, the British did win the war, and the Japanese are sub-human. Which they do by regularly running articles which assemble as many nasty stereotypes as possible, with the express purpose of reminding the reader of how awful those Japanese are. The final conclusion is irrelevant - it's the body, where the gentle reader is reminded that Japanese are inscrutable aliens with great powers, that is the important bit. And if that tactic sounds familiar to you, there's a reason...

So, this week, I have concluded that the Guardian is racist. Don't even get me started on the Daily Mail!

---

[1] The only fact he changes from the wikipedia article is the date of translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion into Japanese, which he claimed occurred in 1905 (two years after they were "discovered" during the war with Russia), while the wiki claims the translation at 1936. Tel Aviv University puts it at 1924. Obviously a true scholar! Japan was so anti-semitic that it only translated the text of the chief anti-semitic coda 21 years after its original publication, and only because some soldiers stumbled on it and brought it home. Imagine if the Nazis had been as anti-semitic as the Japanese!

[2] a fine trope, incidentally, for right-wingers who want to tar all national liberation movements with the same brush. I'm surprised he didn't fit a critique of Mao and Ho Chi Minh in there somewhere.

[3] projection much?

花の名 (Flower's name)

2008-12-23T07:58:00.002+09:00

This is my really poor attempt at a translation of my favourite Bump of Chicken song, Hana no na (Flower's name, or name of a flower, or something similar). I had to do this from a couple of lyrics sites (there is some dispute over "grew old together" or "put", amongst other things), and I'm really not good enough at Japanese for this task, so take it all with a pinch of salt. But as far as I know there is no other translation! Here goes...

Even though it's a simple thing
I want to be able to say it somehow
Even though it's a thing I can't say
I think I want you to be informed somehow

Even though I forget the sky we looked at together
I will not forget the time we were together

Even if you were a flower
and there were many just like you
still you would be chosen by a single person
There's a song that only I can sing
There's a song that only you can hear

That I am here is your proof that we were here
That I put this song here is your proof that I was put here with you
Because I gained the strength to live from you, I have to return this to when I lived

Just when you have forgotten my laughter and my tears, please remember
when you are confused by the same burdens as me
There is a song that only you can sing
There is a song that only I can hear

Everyone has a person who wants to meet them
Everyone has a person who is waiting for them
If there is a person who wants to meet only you, that person is waiting for you
always

Even if you were a flower
and there were many just like you
still you would be chosen by a single person
There's a song that only I can sing
only for me, only for you

Just when you have forgotten my laughter and my tears, please remember
You will be chosen without confusion by someone
There is a song that only you can sing
There is a song that only I can hear
There is a person waiting just for me
There is a person who wants to meet only you

It is, as one of the commenters on the youtube video says, pure love.

新しい家

2008-08-17T07:15:00.004+09:00

この写真は私の新しい家だ。仲間さんの家だ；仲間さんは１年間にアメリカにいるので、私が仲間さんの家に入れる。安い家賃が払えるのに、フラットメートを見つけないといけない。。。

アムステルダム

2008-08-17T07:00:00.003+09:00

７月の終わりくらいに、アムステルダムに行った。アムステルダムはちょっと、広島みたい：

路面電車がある
自転車が多い（日本より多い！！）
車が少ない
たくさん小さくておしゃれなバーやカフェがある
雰囲気がしずかだ

いい街です。ロンドンから休む事もいいです。。。

オクスフォード

2008-07-04T05:43:00.004+09:00

今週、オクスフォードで研究方法祭りを出に行った。研究方法祭り。。。何って？いろな研究方法の発表です。実は、「祭り」と言われたなのに、学会だけです。。。

今日、祭りの後で、オクスフォードの環境ができた。この写真をとった。オクスフォードはとてもきれいな街。ここの学生生活の想像ができる？私は想像ができない。

そして、城山稲荷神社の歴史的な工芸品を見つけるように、ピットリヴァーズ博物館に行った。博物館はその工芸品を小泉八雲にもらった。残念ですが、工芸品はカタログにいれずたくわえた。だから見つけなかって、博物館の学長を連絡して、また行って、特別条件に見ないといけない。できたら、たぶん小泉八雲のもらいものをカタログに入れてくれたいです。出来ないと思う。。。

その工芸品が見れなかったけど。。。おかしい工芸品が見えた！！ピットリヴァーズ博物館はじんるいがくの博物館ですので、世界の文化の工芸品がある。国ごとからきた事があった。ある国の小さくなった頭があった！！！！！下の写真を見てください。。。
これは小さくなった頭だ！！作り方は：

人を殺す（これは大切だ）
この人のずがいを出して捨てる（いらない）
特別な油に炊く
時間あとで、油から出して、中にあつい小石を入れる
待つ
糸でほうごう
カミのカットして、ピアスを入れる
友達に見せてあげる

写真の頭は、ちょっと特別なアクセソリがある。あの長くて、赤いと緑の色のかみは。。。光の虫のかぶとです。私のカメラのフラシュの下で光した。よくない！！！！

地下鉄で聞いた注意

2008-06-06T22:10:00.003+09:00

家に帰ったときに、これを聞いた：

“起爆してない太平洋せんそう時代ばくだんが「Bromley Bow」駅で発見されたので、北線と丸い線の地下鉄線はとてもおそくなりました。”

！！！？

ロンドンの大好きなこと

2008-06-06T21:50:00.002+09:00

ロンドンの大好きな経験：

マリリオンと言うバンドを聞きながら、リージェンツ公園に歩いている
ロンドンのやわらかい雨
ジャメイカから来た黒人の声
世界の全ての国の人を見ている
British rock を聞きながら、地下鉄を乗っている
私の仕事
ロンドン人の声（コクニーべん）
“あつい天気”のやわらかい太陽

このことで、ロンドン生活が楽しい。

レストランのリビュー１：鮨清（sushi say)

2008-06-06T21:30:00.002+09:00

昨日、日本に住んだことがある仲間パムさんと一緒に鮨清という日本レストランに行った。このレストランは、居酒屋みたいに日本料理をする。私達の家の近くにある。

レストランの店員は日本人であった。私達は日本語が話せることについて分かってから、私達ともに優しく日本語を話した。サービスやマナーが優しかった。日本に戻ったのみたいであった！

料理はおいしいがとても高かった。ねだんと説明は以下に：

刺身盛り合わせ：１７ポンド（４千円！）。内容はサバ、サケ、マグロ、ヒラメの３枚ずつであった。お魚は新たでおいしかった。
ゲソ天ぷら：５ポンド（１千円！）。ゲソがやわらかくて天ぷらがかんぺきであった！
なすデンガク：６ポンド（１５００円！）。ソースは柚子が入ったのでうまかった！！
てりやきタラ：６ポンドで小さい１個をもらった。おいしかったが高すぎた
お茶漬け(梅だよ！）：６ポンドであったがすごくよかった！！おすすめです！

このレストランはいろな自家製料理がある。梅酒もたくさんいろな日本酒がある。雰囲気は日本の忙しくて楽しい居酒屋みたいであったがロンドンにある。すごい便利な所！！！！ロンドンにいたら行ってください。。。

しゅうかんてきな生活１：鳥、春ネズミ

2008-05-31T00:49:00.004+09:00

しゅうかんてきに、イギリス人は冬ときにイギリスの小さい動物の死亡に対して守りたい。そうするために、鳥と小さい動物に食べ物をやる。例えば、この事で、鳥に食べ物をやる：

普通に、豚しぼうやナツなどやる。冬中なら、お湯もやる。

（この鳥テーベルはお父さんの友達のにわにある）。

そして、いろな野生動物に食べ物をやる。たとえば、田舎にすんだら、狐やアナグマなど食べ物をやる。私のお父さんの友達はちょっと街の近くに住むので、この動物が見えないが、春ネズミが見える！だから、にわの中には小さい春ネズミのお皿。

これだ！
小さい春ネズミをこれから食べていることの想像ができますか？かわいい！

イギリスの田舎３：猫、トゲイラクサ

2008-05-31T00:30:00.006+09:00

お父さんの家の近くで、この猫を見つけた：

そして、このてんけいてきなイメージを見つけた：

上のほうにはトゲイラクサ、英語で「stinging nettle」と言われた。この直物をふれるとひりひりさせる。痛い！下のほうは「dock leaf」という直物。この直物を刺されたところをこすったらすぐ直る。不思議だけどいつも効きます。不思議な事実は。。。この２つの直物はいつも一緒に植わってる。もしグゼンにトゲイラクサに刺されたら、１００％確率に「dock leaf」がすぐ見つかる。大丈夫ですよ！！！でも、この事実は不思議である。。。

イギリスの田舎２：街

2008-05-31T00:17:00.004+09:00

デヴォン州の街の写真である。

ロンドンと日本の関係１：服店

2008-05-27T06:49:00.004+09:00

オクスフォード道でこの写真をとった。ちゃんと見たら、なにが見える？ユニクロ！！！

ユニクロの店が多い！オクスフォード道で２つの大きい店がある。近くのリージェント道で、もう２つがある。ユニクロはロンドンでおしゃれである！！！！びっくりした！このユニクロのはんたいに（この写真なら、私の後ろに）は。。。は。。。無印！！！この会社もたくさん支店がロンドンで成り立った。

日本のきほん服は、ロンドンでおしゃれ！！！

そして、これはロンドンで買ったフレンチコネクションのシャーツである。せんたく情報は日本語である！なぜロンドンでフレンチコネクションという服は日本語情報がある？

分からない！

イギリスの食べ物３：貝の漬け物！！

2008-05-19T06:16:00.002+09:00

貝の漬け物だ！ビーチで発見した。これは人気の夏の食べ物である。

普通に、貝は：ザルガイ、イガイ、アサリ；エビとイカも食べる。

味はすっぱいと塩と思うけど、私はこれがあまり好きじゃないので、ちょっと味忘れてしまった。イギリスに来たら、食べてみてね。。。

イギリスの花見

2008-05-19T05:59:00.002+09:00

イギリスの春は日本の春よりさむいだから、桜は日本より長く残る。１ヶ月くらいに残るので、落とす前に木の葉っぱが起こる。この写真は５月５日にとったのに、花と葉っぱが一緒に見える。

この日に、道に運転する間に、桜が落としていた。（この事象は日本語で特別な表現だが。。。日本語で何ですか？だれかコメントで教えてもらいますか？）

（写真における人は私のお父さんです）

イギリスの食べ物２：パイ、マシュ、うなぎ

2008-05-19T05:52:00.003+09:00

デヴォン州でこの店をみた。小さい言葉は "Pies, Mash and Eels" という。これはしゅうかんてきなイギリスのレストランである：パイ、マシュポテトとうなぎレストラン。ロンドンでもこのレストランみたいな店で食べられる。

おいしいかおいしくないかどうかまだ分からない。エマさんがマシュポテトが大好きだから、エマさんが来たあとで、一緒に食べに行くかもしれない。。。

イギリス食べ物１：パースティ

2008-05-19T05:41:00.003+09:00

これは「コーニシュパースティ」というパイである。「コーニシュ」の意味は Cornwall （コーヌワル）州で発生された意味である。有名な西南イギリスの食べ物である。

パースティの中には、いろな味がする：

豚
チーズとネギ
野菜
じゃがいも

が普通である。上の写真のパースティはチーズとネギである。下の写真のパースティはりんごとクロイチゴである。

森の音

2008-05-18T06:29:00.005+09:00

デヴォン州の森の音である。

ビール１

2008-05-18T06:18:00.002+09:00

イギリスビールはあたたかくてアワがなくて飲まれている。イギリスの飲み場所は「Pub」（パッブ）といわれる。特製ビールを売るパッブが多い。デヴォンでこの２つのビールの種類を買った。上のほうのビールはとなりの「コーンワル州」で作られている。下のほうのビールの名前は日本語で「カワウソビール」である。デヴォン産ビールである。

私は、イギリスビールがおいしくて、パッブによってちがう特製ビールが買える文化が楽しい。イギリスにいる間、たくさんいろなビールをのんでみる！！！

ティンモス

2008-05-18T05:59:00.005+09:00

デヴォン州

2008-05-18T05:35:00.004+09:00

デヴォン州はイギリスの西南のほうにある、いなかが多いところである。私のお父さんの家は「ニュートンアッボッと」と言う街にある。しょうがないけど、お父さんの家はトレーラーハウスである。

デヴォン州はみどりが多い州である。歴史的に、有名な国王「アーサー王」がここで生まれて、近くの州に住んだ。私は、子供ときに、ここととなりの州、「サマセット、ウィルトシャー」に住んでいた。

この時、私は２日間だけにここに泊まった。そして、こわい街ロンドンに行くべきだった。。。

イギリス到着

2008-05-18T05:18:00.003+09:00

５月４日にイギリスに着いた。ちょくせつに、Devon　「デヴォン州」にバスで行った。お父さんはデボンに住むので、２日間にこの州で留った。

飛行機は大丈夫だった。となりの女性は、ニュージーランドに引っ越す予定だが、最後の引っ越し準備をするためにイギリスに行った。あの女性はイギリスについて私にたくさん悪い事を言った。はんざいが多いし、生活が高いし、人がぶれいだし、せいふが悪いし。。。waaaaaa!! イギリスようこそではなかった！！

ヒースローのターミナル３に着いた。建物はとてもきたなかった！安っぽいだった！カーペットが解れさせた！！会社員がこわそうだった！ようこそではなかった！

そして、バスでデボンに行った。７時なのに、日がまだ入れなかった。バスからのけしきがとてもきれいだったので、この旅はとてもおもしろかった。１１時にデヴォンのニュートンアッボットに着いて、４年ぶりでお父さんと会った。

イギリスのようこそは。。。？

The Daily Wanker 2008 review of bars: Matsue and Tottori

2008-05-02T14:49:00.002+09:00

Should one ever by accident find oneself in Matsue, rest assured that one of the first things you will need is a drink and some good food. So here is a review of some of the better bars in that benighted town, and in nearby Tottori (where the food is better).

kumakichi: located in kyomise, this Japanese Inn (izakaya) provides food and drink in a convivial, highly Japanese environment. Like most of the bars in Matsue it has no English language on the menu, and the menu has no pictures, so you really need to go with someone who can read. But there are too things you can eat without the menu - walk up to the bar and you will see a plate of what look like deep-fried fish skeletons. These are "karei karaage", deep-fried flounder, and absolutely no better is available anywhere in Japan. They look like the most horrific thing you have ever eaten but they are unsurpassedly delicious, and quite an experience. You eat the whole thing, by the way - head, fins, tail, everything. Do it with your hands, breaking the bones into pieces and crunching them down. The bar also has an excellent set of sashimi, and I thoroughly recommend the kawahagi if you go in winter. The kawahagi sashimi comes with a little piece of liver, which tastes for all the world like some kind of savoury cream. Crazy! The staff here are really friendly and it has its own brands of shochu (Japanese liqueur, a bit like whisky and made from wheat, rice or sweet potatoes) and sake. The food is universally excellent, and the atmosphere the cheeful, rowdy atmosphere of a typical Japanese Inn.

kagetsu: an izakaya near kumakichi in higashi hon machi, kagetsu looks from the outside like a wood-walled fortress. Inside it is superbly appointed in traditional Japanese style, with a fine curving bar downstairs and private rooms upstairs. There is a kind of curved aesthetic to the whole thing, as it is on a street-corner, so between the private booths and the open tables upstairs they have a little zen-garden curving around the tables, and curving windows overlooking the street. The food here is excellent, particularly the sashimi and salads. Once for a starter they served us a plate with a tiny, whole crab on it, roasted whole in honey. One had to eat the whole thing - legs, head, shell, the lot. Their selection of Japanese alcohols is excellent, with Plum wines and sakes and Sho chus from regions all over Japan, laid out by taste and style. The staff are friendly and accomodating, and the service inobtrusive. The service here puts a premium on Japanese style decoration, and regional foods and drinks.

foods inn, rise inn: two branches of the same restaurant, one near the university and aimed more at the university scene, one in the city and aimed at business people. These too are izakaya with a wide selection of foreign ("ethnic") foods to choose from, including Thai and European. Foods Inn definitely has a Handsome Boy hiring policy, while Rise Inn maintains an excellent cocktail menu. Once we had the all you can drink option at Rise Inn, and discovered that their all you can drink menu includes White Ladies and Martinis. I drank White Ladies for 2 hours, and got rather hammered. The decor at both restaurants is good and the staff friendly, but it is more businesslike than the other izakaya mentioned here. Fortunately the menu includes some pictures, but again no english.

Sign: Sign provides a bit of a cross between a restaurant and bar environment, with upstairs more like a bar. They provide Italian and Asian-style food, including excellent pasta, and bar-style drinks and coffee. The upstairs bar is decorated like a kind of lounge/bar, so there are many couches including couple couches facing the window, for privacy while flirting. Screens protect the customers from seeing the bar, so one feels one is in a loungeroom. The staff are a little busy and standoffish, but for large groups it is the best way to have a low-key evening of eating and drinking, and it is extremely convenient to the station.

Bihaiv: perhaps meant to say Beehive, is a macrobiotic restaurant near Sign which provides vegetarian and meat dishes, alcohol and hippy foods. It is decorated like a Spanish bar, very small and cosy. I cannot remember if the menu has English, but one staff member lived in NZ and has excellent English. They make some fine sake cocktails here, and the fake-meat food is great. Good for a hearty meal.

Bar EAD: the nicest way to have a relaxed drinking experience in Matsue, Bar EAD overlooks the lake near the older bridge, Ohashi. It is close to kumakichi and kagetsu for cheaper, after dinner drinks. The drinks are not sophisticated and it only serves finger food, but the staff are cheerful and inobtrusive, and the feeling is again that of a lounge bar. The view is excellent, providing a vista of the shoreline and the lake, with a stretch of river between. Always a good way to finish the night.

Cafe EAD: opposite bar EAD, cafe EAD is open only for half the week, from perhaps midday to 10pm. It serves food, wine and beer, and cakes and coffee. It is a tiny cafe, set in an old sake brewing shop, with 2 tables downstairs and 2 tables upstairs plus a couch. The decor is kitsch second-hand 50s and 60s stuff, battered wood and strange posters, just like an inner-urban cafe anywhere else in the world. The staff are very sweet and kind, and you can make friends with them pretty easily. Both levels have a view of the river and lake, but not as spectacular as from Bar EAD. The curry lunch is cheap and good.

Alibi: a cafe/bar near the University which provides excellent cheap lunch and dinner sets, and a range of simple cocktails, beer and wines. It plays jazz, has a couch and a couple of tables, and is waited upon by the most handsome men in existence (according to the Delightful Miss E, whose tastes we may recall are quite suspect). The staff are kind and friendly, the food is good and the atmosphere that of an unhurried lounge. An excellent way to end a hard day of "study".

Blue Crow: A food and cocktail bar across the road from Alibi, Blue Crow has minimal decorations but an excellent cocktail menu. Not only does it include its own creations on the menu, but the back page of the menu gives a list of suggested words you can throw at the waiters to get a unique taste. These include "first love", "snow", "spring", "rain", "sweat"(?), etc. It's a fine experience to come here with friends and try to guess the ingredients of the barman's first love. Mostly, it would seem, they are sweet and slightly purple.

In Tottori, my most frequently visited places are:

fuchan ramen: next to Tottori station, an excellent spot for a huge helping of karaage at lunch time. The ebi karaage (deep-fried prawn) for a mere 650 yen will keep you going for 2 days. A classic ramen restaurant, with a cheerful and welcoming obachan to draw you in.

luz restaurant: an izakaya on the main entertainment street, little more than a nook in the wall with an excellent range of foreign foods, including south east asian, and regional Japanese alcohol. The staff are friendly, it has a singing bird and a very cute toilet.

cafe chocolate: the food and drinks are ordinary, but Mr. Hiroki maintains that the bargirl is the most beautiful and sexy woman on the Earth. "She is perfect!" On hondori from Tottori station.

bar DNA: a bar with 80s disco style decor, popular with foreigners in Tottori but (due to the unique nature of Tottori foreigners) not a toilet. It runs regular night clubs, although at times it is simply open for a night of drinking and 80s music. If you want to meet a foreigner who has done more than anyone else to forge the unique foreign community of Tottori, visit DNA and ask for Stephen. He used to run the incomparable Viva Shiva restaurant, source of the best homus in Western Japan. Sadly that has now closed so he can focus on DNA - so make it worth his while and pay him a visit.

murthi: a South-East Asian style South East Asian restaurant between the International House and the big shopping centre (Jusco? Saty?) in North Tottori. It has a big projector for playing music videos, cane armchairs, friendly and welcoming staff, and good south east asian food. The Pad Thai is excellent. Also, a hippy shop is attached. Well worth a visit if you are staying at the Kaikan, or if you have a car.

These are the places I have mostly frequented over the last 2 years, though in Tottori particulary you can drop in pretty much anywhere and be guaranteed cheap, excellent food. For a culinary tour of Japan par excellence, I recommend the San In coast at any time of the year.

Job-seeking in Japan

2008-05-02T14:15:00.002+09:00

The Delightful Miss E and I have watched this year as some of our younger friends attempt to find work at companies now that their university careers are in their last year. As I mentioned when discussing Japanese universities, for most Japanese people university is a ticket to a job in a company, and their whole education focusses on getting them successfully to "shushoku", job hunting at the end of their university life.

Getting a job through shushoku means becoming a company man or woman, working hard but getting paid overtime and bonusses, yearly pay rises, and a career path. These jobs used to be much more the province of men and women, but as the pool of jobs has decreased the number of women taking them has increased. The assumption is that once one has joined such a company one will stay with it, and adopt the "job-for-life" model of Japanese fame. It is a tough but ultimately financially rewarding pathway through life, and most people who go to university plan to take this path.

For most of these people, however, work after leaving university will not involve any special tasks related to their study. So the exceptionally short Miss K, who recently took up work with Nissan, is doing some kind of management job in a factory or shop in Hokkaido, even though she did her undergraduate studies in Agriculture, including with stints to do experiments in Mexico and China. For these people the application process is easier, since they can apply to any company they think has good conditions. However, for people like the Unflappable ChikaChan, or the endlessly happy Miss H in Tottori, the process is considerably more difficult. Chikachan wanted to pursue a career in design and art, having specialised in art in her degree; and Miss H, undaunted as ever by having failed to enter a specialist course for perfumers in Shizuoka university, wants to try and find a job in a perfume or cosmetics company even though she has done a general food science degree. For these women, the application process is restricted to trawling through specialist companies, as Miss H has been doing for the last 6 months.

So what are the stages of this application process?

Attend an information night, probably in one of the big cities, where one can register ones interest
Take the online personality test (?)
Submit a proper application form and cover letter, if the online personality test was successful
Attend a group interview at the company offices in one of the big cities
If successful, return to the company office to give a presentation
If this is successful, return to the company office to give another presentation to the President
Receive the job

That's right, for a starting graduate job with a wage of maybe $25-28000 a year, Miss H has to make 4 trips to Osaka or Tokyo and undergo 3 interviews, 4 if there is a personal interview at any point. Should she take a job, she will then spend the first years of her work being shuffled through different offices and positions in the company, perhaps learning the ropes of different departments, before finally being given some kind of elevated responsibility. It is not unusual for company employees in Japan to spend 5 or 10 years being transferred regularly (sometimes with 2 weeks' notice) around the country.

There are other types of jobs (such as one in marketing recently snared by the Stunningly Handsome Mr. Hiroki) which require less intensive application processes, and are run by small local companies. But these do not come with the long-term security and benefits of the big companies. For example, my Japanese Teacher, Professor F, is married to a man who works for the Shadow of the Mountains Overall Combined Bank. He is paid overtime for every hour he works, and until recently worked until 10pm most nights. While it may be true that many Japanese work long hours, the company staff are paid for those hours, while staff in smaller local companies work shorter hours, but get no paid overtime. They also have less job security, and are less likely to receive bonusses. This system of distinction between company staff and everyone else is starting to create strains in Japanese society, and is receiving a great deal of criticism at present. The worst part of it all that I can see, though, is that while Miss H and Chikachan have had to jump through all those hoops to get their basic company job, the companies have been making record profits, but the starting wage remains stuck in the same bracket it was in the early 90s. The big companies have used the collapse of Japan's bubble economy as an excuse for 10 years of continuous cost-cutting and wage restraint, while forcing their new staff to jump through more and more hoops to get a chance at the shrinking slice of this pie.

Sound familiar to anyone?

Bullying and Quality in Japanese Universities

2008-05-02T13:00:00.002+09:00

My experience of Japanese universities is restricted to only 2, Tottori and Shimane, but by being in the system for 2 years I have got something of an insight into how the system works and what it achieves. A few comments are in order.

Bullying: As observed in various private communications, my reason for leaving my PhD was largely bullying by my supervisor. The bullying took a mostly classic, universal form: yelling, insulting, deriding students to other students (and in some instances, saying bad things about me to friends of the Delightful Miss E!), publicly humiliating students, isolating me, and trying to control my personal life. Not all of these had happened to me (yet), but were targeted at younger students in our lab and would inevitably have crept on to me. The uniquely Japanese element of the bullying was the use of a particularly degrading form of language, usually reserved for pets and small children, which is specifically intended to enforce the relative power differences between student and supervisor. Aside from this, however, the bullying was of the classic sort one observes in Australian university supervisors all the time (and of the sort which has been directed against me before in Australia). Some of my friends have asked me if the bullying was an integral part of Japanese University life, and I can honestly say I don't think it is. I checked my supervisor's behaviour against that of other teachers, and they behave very differently. They are kinder, they use different language, they don't intrude on their students' personal lives as much, and they are supportive in public rather than humiliating. They certainly don't adopt the cultural nuance which my supervisor took, described as "samurai manner". His bullying was not some kind of locally accpetable cultural manner, either - he had a reputation as a strange teacher, and he also has a reputation for aggressiveness and rudeness amongst the students. His behaviour in one seminar, in particular, embarrassed and discomfited the other teachers, so I think we can safely say his style was quite unique.

Like all bullies though he is at heart a weak and pathetic man, and I dealt with him accordingly. But day-in day-out preparing for confrontation is emotionally draining and creates a fair amount of tension, so I am glad to be rid of it. Particuarly when I was preparing to give an all-Japanese presentation at a two-bit conference in Tokyo - a conference I knew he had only organised for me after he discovered I was going on holiday to Australia, in order to force my early return - the pressure became way too much. My Japanese was sadly not up to the task, and I had no guidelines or information about the conference or the proper Japanese presentation style. It was a deliberate attempt to humiliate me in front of an audience of my "superiors", using the one method he knew was guaranteed to work - my language. He also was explicitly breaking an agreement we had for me to present in English this year and Japanese next. Obviously one cannot take on this kind of duplicity and bloody-mindedness for too long without wilting. But aside from the particular language-related elements, none of it seemed to be specific to his cultural origins. Anyone who has had as much bad luck with academic supervisors as I have knows that bullying of this sort is hardly specific to the Japanese.

However, there is a specific element of Japanese life which makes this harder to deal with. The university uses the "sensei system" for providing education to PhDs and 4th year students, and it is the backbone of their graduate system. It is set up to give almost complete power and control to the professors, and makes bullying very easy to do. Under the sensei system, one presents seminars to ones supervisor (sensei) every week as a form of education, and the sensei has near complete control over ones educational path and the content of ones studies. If ones sensei is a bully, or incompetent, or both, ones study will suffer. The sensei system not only grants the teacher great power, though - it is supported by the entire University system, and external means of assessment are minimal, as are external means of support or redress. Even yesterday, the day I left Matsue, I was receiving phone calls from the International Student Office pressuring me to change the contents of my resignation letter, in which I wrote I had "irreconcilable differences with my supervisor". Nobody at any level wants to interfere with the rights, authority or power of the supervisors, and they reign unimpeded over their students. In the case of some of my friends this has been fine, since their teachers are skilled mathematicians and good teachers. But in my case, and that of my other laboratory members...

Quality: I did not know this when I came to Matsue, but Shimane University is ranked second lowest in all of Japan's universities. I moved from a Masters Degree at the world's 31st ranked university to a PhD outside of the top 1000. Not such a good decision! The library is very small with many of its specialist books set aside for exclusive use in particular laboratories, and although there is a lot of money for equipment at one of the specialist labs here (geology), most of the normal facilities are lacking. There is no community amongst teachers, either - no seminars at faculty or department level, no staff lunches, no communal meeting place. All social life happens at the level of the laboratory. This ensures that bullying is not noticed by laboratory outsiders, and also ensures that poor-quality teaching is not noticed. It also ensures that everything one learns comes from senior figures inside one's own research group - there is no "corridor learning", no professional interchange of any sort that one does not seek out on a 1-to-1 basis. Even senior professors are afflicted by this problem, failing to learn anything about the activities of people in even closely-related areas without seeking it out on a personal basis.

Shimane University is, like a lot of Universities in Japan, on the edge of business failure. Japan has too many universities even for a society with a growing youth demographic, let alone an ageing society, and enrolment rates are plummeting. As this happens, third-tier universities seek to expand their pool of students by lowering entrance requirements, with the result that many of the students at Shimane University are really incapable of any form of organised study beyond High School. Students also expect that University study should be easier than school, and spend much of their University lives either bludging, working in part-time jobs or looking for full-time work in their last year. University life is a period of freedom before the company life, and universities are seen largely as a way to get a job in a company, not to learn a discipline. As a consequence, I am told that Japanese universities frequently provide no guidance on fields of study, and students do not have to choose majors/sub-majors along a particular educational path as I did. They pick and choose whatever they want to learn, because they know they will never be working in their technical field unless they continue studying past masters level. Shimane University is also pretty lazy with its pre-requisites and its assessments. Pressure to pass students is hardly unheard of in Australia, but in Shimane University it is so strong that I have personally passed a subject without meeting any assessment requirements because none were set.

Language has also for me been a problem, since for example there are very few statistics texts in English in the library and they are almost all sequestered away in individual laboratories. But why would English-language texts be sequestered away in a Japanese university? This points at a larger problem for Japanese universities - many technical texts are only available in English, and many of the best ones especially. One of my junior students in my lab told me there is only one basic Japanese-language book on the statistics programming language S and its corresponding software package S-Plus. The library appears to be funded only for general books, so specific texts and graduate texts go into the labs of individual teachers, not into the library. This is another educational consequence of the sensei system, I suspect, but it has profound problems for a non-Japanese speaker, or anyone working in a discipline like computational statistics which is not hugely popular in Japan. For example, one of the students in my lab had to write a program (for assessment) to complete a Cox Proportional Hazards Regression calculation explicitly using the Newton-Raphson method, handling ties. There is no information in Japanese for him to do this, and because his sensei doesn't do computational stats, he sent the student in question away to read an English text - though the student cannot read or speak English. Interestingly the Maths Department has a specialist library which is quite extensive, but it is uncatalogued, no-one uses it, no-one told me about it, I cannot borrow from it, and I don't have a key. I think this shows how much people keep their study within their own laboratories - even their perfectly well stocked library is unused, because being unrelated to a particular laboratory it is not funded and not supported.

Finally, the University system in Japan is suffering what I consider to be the long-term effects of running a fee paying, strictly user-pays system with limited public funds. Even though a University education is essential to get a company job, and even though science and technology is the bedrock of Japan's economic success, there is no student support system and limited public funds for professors. A mathematician in Japan can expect to spend a year looking for their first job after they leave their PhD, and their first job may not be a proper research job or a postdoc. The only form of student support available for living expenses is a loan, so almost every Japanese student has to get a part-time job or live off their parents' money. There is no student union and no compulsory subscriptions beyond tuition fees, so there are very few public facilities at the University. The sports clubs are entirely voluntary, their equipment falling apart and the grounds crumbling. The gym is absolutely terrible, because students cannot afford membership fees and there is no union to support renovations or staff. The university relies so much on student fees that even entrance examinations form a significant revenue source - some second tier universities used to take 10% of their annual income from entrance exams before the population of 18 year olds shrank, and they are having to revise their entire business model to account for the 10-fold reduction in income from this source. It is a testimony to the willpower, goodwill and community-spirit of Japanese young people that any kind of sense of community exists on campus at all, and most of it is powered by the voluntary effort of hard-working club members.

All of this obviously spells a serious problem for Japan's university system, and in time I think it will - like Japan's agriculture sector - have to go through a serious period of adjustment. My prediction is that Shimane University will collapse and be absorbed into Tottori University (which is vastly superior) sometime in the next 20 years, along perhaps with some technical colleges and prefectural universities in Yonago and Hamada, to form the "University of the San In coast", based in Tottori. Unless Japan reforms its agricultural sector significantly, this will have long-term implications for the economic prospects of a small rural town like Matsue.

And in the short term, it had terminal consequences for my pursuit of a PhD in mathematics. It hasn't helped my respect for academia or academics either. So for now I shall return to a real job, and try to forget all about the unsavoury personal relations I had to endure for the last 6 months of my time in Matsue...

The Daily Wanker 2008 review of international government services

2008-05-02T12:37:00.002+09:00

The Daily Wanker presents again, by popular acclaim, a transantional comparison of government services. For this year's comparison we took upon ourselves the task of obtaining a British Passport. In order to complicate the process, we assumed that our prior passport had expired, but had been lost (it may actually be in a box in Australia, but who knows). Being Wankers, we assumed the number of the lost passport and its expiry date were forgotten. To complicate the process, we applied for the passport in Japan; and of course, being Wankers we were born in New Zealand and have a current Australian passport, but are eligible for a UK passport by descent. Travel had to occur within 3 weeks, so we needed to test the efficiency and speed of the various departments contacted. Below is our review of the various departments involved. Except where otherwise stated, staff were of the same nationality as the nation in which the office was located. Each service is rated out of 5 for politeness, and 5 for efficiency/correctness. Because English deparatments were assessed, the rating could range from negative infinity (obviously, poor) to 5 (best).

UK Visa Information Service, Osaka: Being a Wanker, I initially rang this service to find out what documents I needed, but they don't actually handle passport applications. Nonetheless, they charged me $8 per phone call to ask a question, and gave me wrong information about a topic they aren't meant to handle. They never once told me to contact the embassy.

Politeness: 0 (being nice to me doesn't make up for charging me to answer questions!)
Correctness: -10000

The British Consulate, Tokyo: The obvious first contact point for my passport, sadly I didn't use them immediately. Their telephone service was excellent but much of what they told me was, unfortunately, incorrect. Also, they were extremely officious, requiring that the letter of the law be followed. In combination, this led them to tell me that I was ineligible to receive a UK passport because my prior passport was lost, and in order to get one I had to report my prior passport lost, even though I don't know when or where I lost it, or anything about it, and I don't live in the country where it was lost.

Politeness: 4 (they did that annoying thing where they kept interrupting me)
Correctness: - 100000000

The British Consulate, Adelaide: In amongst their mistakes, the consulate general in Osaka told me that the Adelaide consulate could witness my Mother's birth certificate. This, it turned out, was wrong, and when I questioned its wrongness in this phone call the staff at the other end offered very bluntly to "read the law" to me, and started ranting about overseas missions.

Politeness: 0
Correctness: 5

The Department of Immigration Passport Infoline, UK: The woman who answered this phone was possibly the rudest, most abrasive and unpleasant creature I have ever had the misfortune to deal with. From her first question "The nature of your inquiry!" (notice the lack of question mark) to her final question "Can't you just fly back to Australia and get the old passport?", her manner was beyond the pale. I recommend a re-education camp for this girl. Also everything she "told" me was wrong.

Politeness: negative infinity (no, I cannot "just" fly back to Australia to get a lost passport)
Correctness: negative infinity (subsequent checks will reveal my lost passport is irrelevant)

Matsue Police Station: surprisingly, there is no way that the Matsue police can accept a lost passport report for a passport lost overseas. Who knew? But they were very apologetic, and even offered to give me their number so the embassy could ring them to confirm this obvious fact.

Politeness: 5
Correctness: 5

Adelaide Central police station: It turns out upon speaking to the Adelaide Central Police Station that they will take a report for a passport lost 10years ago, provided that I say I looked for it last week (nudge nudge) and can give the correct passport number. Also they can do it over the phone. But they cannot give me a police report, even though the passport office think this is mandatory, because police reports are only available under Freedom of Information. They give a report number, which the passport office subsequently told me (contrary to the information on the application form) that this is insufficient.

Politeness: 3 (the officer was really nice to me, but I had to do some bowing and scraping first)
Correctness: 5 (and thank god for that, too!)

So how did all this resolve itself in the end? The British Consulate General in Australia has different information on its webpage to the consulate general in Japan (handy that), stating clearly that there is no need to worry about lost passports if they have expired. After pointing this out to the Embassy, they "checked" with the passport processing officer, and revised my application. The passport finally arrived in time.

I think we can see a pattern here, in terms of whose service is more accurate, whose is more polite, and whose is just shit. May I add for posperity that I had for the first time in my life the experience of actually changing a public service worker's interpretation of the law, and that the public service worker in question was Japanese...? An interesting achievement. If only the British Immigration Department could take a leaf from that book. In the meantime, I shall rate said department with a negative infinity for politeness (for their staff's behaviour and their stupid rules, and for thinking a visa to the UK is worth 55000 yen) and a negative infinity for correctness (nothing they told me was even near correct).

The Daily Wanker has spoken! Surely now heads will roll...

A frightening moment of Japanese Xenophobia

2008-04-24T17:58:00.002+09:00

So I was at Matsue Station, passing time while I waited for a train to Yonago so I could get my little Yakuza Tough Sticker, and this dodgy guy in a rough-looking suit sidled up to me. He had a bruise and a cut on one side of his face, and bad teeth - the latter being a very poor signifier of social class in this country, but I assume the former means something in a land of perfect grooming. He snuck up on me from nowhere too, the kind of approach which always starts a conversation with me on a bad footing.

"I am a policeman," he said to me in moderately well-pronounced English.

"I don't believe you!" I replied jauntily, assuming this was going to be another tedious foreigner-meeting conversation.

"Do you speak Japanese?" he asked me then, and whisked an identity card from under his coat. To my shock, he really was a policeman! The conversation then proceeded as follows:

Policeman 1 (P1): Could I see your passport please?
Me [chuckling, because that very day my passport was in the mail from Tokyo after some dispute over my eligibility]: I don't have one, but I can show you my Alien Registration card
P1: Yes, please, that would be good.
Policeman 2 (P2) [appearing out of nowhere, also in a rough suit]: Hello! Where are you from?
Me: Australia.
P2: Oh! Australia! How cool! And you speak Japanese!
Me: Not really. By the way, why are you checking my Alien Card?
P1: Because it is illegal to be in Japan [or possibly in public - I didn't catch this bit] without carrying an Alien Card or a passport, and we are checking foreigners to see if they are carrying theirs.
Me: Oh! I didn't know it was illegal!
P2: Hey, I recognise you from your haircut. I often see you around the uni with a foreign woman.
Me: Yes, that's my wife [meaning of course the Delightful Miss E, to whom I assume he is referring].
P2: She has red hair, right? What does she do?
Me: She is an English teacher at the University.
P2: Really? Cool!
P1 [with a certain glint in his eye]: I wish she would teach me English!
Me: well, you would have to return to University, right?
P1 [with the same glint]: Well, I want to return to University!
P2: Well, thank you for showing us your card and enjoy your stay in Japan. Say hello to your wife for us! Thank you very much!
P1: Thank you very much, goodbye!
Me: Um, thank you...

Another moment of Japanese xenophobia passes me by in scary technicolour...

Japan's Food "Crisis"

2008-04-24T13:34:00.002+09:00

As I noted before, Japan has been suffering a food crisis for some time now, perhaps decades, due to its declining rate of food self-sufficiency - only 40% of Japan's calories are grown locally. This has mostly escaped the notice of the foreign press until the recent round of food crises, which have caused all manner of journalists to notice that those haughty Nipponese may face a rise in food prices.

Of course, since until now those same foreign journalists have been cheerfully ranting on about how food in Japan is so expensive that they can't even buy a boiled egg and a beer, it hardly seems reasonable for them to be bragging now about Japan's new crisis of food affordability. Particularly when articles from newspapers as widely differing as The Age (Melbourne) and The Times (London) both cover the same element of the crisis - a sudden lack of butter, which in Japan (as elsewhere) remains a luxury. I note that both these articles contain the same message - that Japan is a harbinger of the problems facing other nations. It's almost as if the two articles were run from the same script, isn't it? Those whacky journalists with their special sense of uniqueness!

So, why the sudden attention to the issue? Japan has been suffering deflation for 10 years, so food prices have not risen while those in the rest of the world have, and their staples remain cheap and easily available. The bleating of ignorant food reviewers aside, Japanese food is cheap and Japanese people eat considerably less calories than the rest of the developed world, making them much safer from the kind of food price shocks which will affect other countries. Of course, they have to import a lot of their food, particularly wheat, but a small fact these newspapers haven't bothered to note is that food exporting nations aren't necessarily protected from international price shocks by dint of their overproduction. The two most efficient exporters - Australia and New Zealand - are efficient by dint of their low levels of protectionism and efficient farm practices, but this exposure to world markets means that locals in those countries pay international prices for food they export. The price of milk in New Zealand has been skyrocketing, and as the price of rice and wheat climbs it is likely that Australia will experience the same problem with domestic stocks of those staples. Australian producers of biscuits often change the local ingredients to match their much larger markets, the latest example being the removal of iodized salt from local biscuits because Japanese import conditions require it. A small country like Australia cannot afford two sets of machinery to produce export and locally-produced biscuits, so everyone eats the Japanese recipe.

As I noted in a previous post here, Japanese rice production is inefficient and its farm sector languishing, and there is actually a lot of room for efficiency gains and improvements in rice production here which could easily increase Japanese food self-sufficiency, at least to UK levels. Given the Japanese Government's penchant for doing nothing, and its cosy relationship with the farm co-ops, it is likely that it will take more drastic measures than merely a desire to reform to encourage these changes. The coming round of food shocks could serve as exactly the impetus that Japan needs to reform its agriculture sector, perhaps encouraging the return of young people from the cities to the country to take up farming. If such were to happen, the coming round of food shocks could serve to revitalise rural areas like Tottori and Shimane which are currently dying. Rather than restricting food availability and choice as our foreign journalists so gleefully predict, it may lead to a flowering of local agricultural industries which will widen and extend food choices in this country. The key to all this, of course, would be the dismantling of Japan's current system of protectionism and rural-government cronyism, which is a bigger task than perhaps the current government can handle. But perhaps in the future it can be done...

The really interesting question, from my perspective, is the attitude of the journalists reporting on this. Why do they take such a gleeful tone, and gloat so merrily over the apparent collapse of Japanese food choices? Were the journalists predictions to come true, Japanese people would lose a wide range of western foods, and become more culinarily conservative and inward looking. Why does this please journalists who, when they are not reporting on this issue, are constantly bemoaning Japan's conservativeness and inward-looking culture? These articles are rich with a kind of jealous insecurity, in which the Japanese are seen as a super-wealthy, haughty and aristocratic race of industrialists. We poor folk in the rest of the world mine and farm their raw materials, and buy the manufactured goods they make with those raw materials. Any change in world conditions which would disadvantage an economy with a largely industrial, non-agricultural base will disadvantage Japan and advantage countries like Australia and the US; and our insecure, small-minded journalists are pleased to think of the possibility of those inscrutable, rich Asians being brought hoist on their own petard. Maybe its just paranoia from long exposure to the stupidity and mendacity of journalists, but I don't think the central play of these stories is the nature of Japanese agriculture.

Getting a Tattoo in Japan

2008-04-24T12:23:00.002+09:00

This little note is not for those who might be interested either in my new tattoo (which I will post in time) or in what tattooing itself is like (which has been done to death on the internet) but for those who might be interested in finding a tattoo artist in Japan, and on negotiating whatever strangenesses may abound in the Japanese tattoo world. It's not, of course, the definitive guide - just a description of my experience.

Obviously, when one is in Japan one may prefer to get a tattoo in a Japanese style, particularly the traditional "irezumi" style. To do this one needs to find a good quality Japanese tattooist. Fortunately (particularly for those who are familiar with the tattooing world) these tattooists have much in common with Australian tattooists, particularly:

they advertise
they have folders full of pictures of their previous work in their shops
they have web pages
they are government certified

The latter is particularly good to know, and my experience at the tattoo shop where I went was that cleanliness and infection control procedures were broadly the same as any certified professional in Australia. This means that in choosing your tattooist you can be confident that the same measures (cleanliness, organisation, infection control) by which you might judge an Australian artist apply here too.

I found my tattooist first through walking past their Matsue branch, but confirmed their quality through a particularly useful shop: Peacemaker in Osaka. Peacemaker is a shop for officionados of death/thrash metal, runs its own clothing line, and has example artwork from many of the major tattooists in Western Japan, on display in folders in the shop. I examined several of these, and discovered that the local Tottori tattooist, knockover decorate, is quite famous and very good. So we (the Delightful Miss E and myself) went to their main shop in Yonago, to see what we could see.

It was here that we discovered just how easy the process is here. The apprentice tattoist, Miss Hotaru, was working at the counter, and speaks very good English (as you can see from the website, English is a common part of the tattoo world). Both the Delightful Miss E and I had no particular design, just an idea. We explained this to Miss Hotaru and she signed us up. We gave a 10000 yen ($100) deposit, and agreed to come back 2 weeks later to inspect the design and get the tattoo. Miss Hotaru explained what we wanted to our chosen tattooist (Mr. Takami) and when we returned the designs were ready. Neither of us were satisfied, so we conveyed our concerns to Mr. Takami and he changed the design admirably quickly, and well. The Delightful Miss E's design included art nouveau elements (of course) and he, Mr. Takami, had completely missed these on the first draft; however, when given an example of what needed to be done, he immediately produced on the spot a picture-perfect example of art nouveau for the tattoo. I suspect his ability to reproduce Western art styles is generally good, if that is what one needs.

Mr. Takami and Mr. Sohei (the resident tattooists) are both masters of the Japanese style, and given a general brief can produce a design to suit. My brief (cherry blossoms on a kind of flowing background) was pretty broad, but the design most admirable; another chap came in while I was there for a full back tattoo, all designed and laid out (and some to be done freehand!) by Mr. Sohei. A brief review of their website will show the level of their skill in the style, and I certainly have no complaints about the quintessential Japaneseness of my tattoo.

I should mention however that I think there is a limit to the flexibility of these artists. Not because they are limited as artists, but because the Japanese customer-service style often includes an element of "staff know best": the staff think they know what suits you, and aim to give it to you regardless. I have experienced this with real estate agents, among others, and I think it exists to a certain extent at this tattoo shop. I expect it is prevalent in all tattoo shops in Japan, though I have no proof. This means that the more information you can give the tattooist, the less he will be able to pull off this kind of service style. But in some instances with my tattoo, Mr. Takami's opinion was, I think, for the best - he is the expert after all. Of course the only way to manage this judgement between wise advice and personal opinion is to be very confident about what one wants, and not allow anything one doesn't want to be stuck on one's body.

I should also mention that books of tattoos in the shop included the works of female tattoo artists, so they can be found in Japan if that is one's wish. And also, I should mention that the tattoos were quite cheap comparatively - the Delightful Miss E's took about 3 times as long as my first tattoo did, and cost about 3 times as much - even though I got my first tattoo 10 years ago.

The actual tattooing was done quickly and professionally, and Mr. Takami showed appropriate concern for the Delightful Miss E, who was receiving her first tattoo and was therefore quite nervous. Miss E found his manner quite gentle, and thought he gave her just the right amount of breaks.

Finally, the manner of the shop staff and tattooists was, as always in Japan, kind, cheerful, warm-hearted and welcoming. The shop uses the usual formal language of Japanese customer service, with maybe just a tiny leavening of informality. The staff (even those who spoke no English) are friendly and welcoming and showed no reticence about engaging foreigners, and the shop itself was comfortable and well lit, with nice decorations and couches. The staff were inobtrusive during the tattooing process, genuinely interested in the design and the result, and polite and friendly throughout. Whatever gangster/yakuza associations tattooing may have in Japan (and I shan't deign to have an opinion on this), the tattoo shop environment itself retains the quintessential Japanese service traits of gentleness, politeness and inobtrusive attentiveness.

Though my tattoo hurt like buggery (and considerably more than the last one I got!) I heartily recommend the process for anyone who wants a classically Japanese, permanent reminder of their time here.

Tokyo's "apartheid of price"

2008-04-19T15:09:00.002+09:00

Is it because journalists are generally from the upper middle class, or that they are the stupidest people who ever managed to struggle through a university course, that they are able to make ridiculous comparisons between something as trivial as the differing cost of different restaurants, and something as serious as apartheid? I don't know, nor would I ever dare crawl inside the hulking shell of stupid that is the average journalist's mind long enough to try to understand how, but this is what one of these geniuses of print managed to produce in the Sydney Morning Herald today. Matthew Thompson wrote a review of Iron Chef Hiroyuki Sakai's Tokyo restaurant in today's Sydney Morning Herald, but in fact most of the review consisted of a complaint about the high cost of food in Tokyo.

Since, in fact, food isn't that much more expensive in Tokyo than in Sydney, this article presents an excellent opportunity to display precisely how terrible and deliberately deceptive much reporting on Japan can be.

First we consider the basic task which Matthew Thompson set himself, which was

We had thought we could cope on a daily food and transport budget of $100 or just under ¥10,000

which anybody who knows Sydney can tell you, is a pretty much impossible task to achieve in Sydney. So why try to do it in Tokyo? So you can make your article conform to a pre-defined script, perhaps? Matthew Thompson's first observation is that "our only affordable meal seems to be tiny watery noodle meals with small servings of beer or sake", which he claims cost a combined $30 for him and his partner. Putting aside his desire to have beer with his lunch, one has to ponder if when he chose these noodle dishes he had not, perhaps, looked at the rice, tenpura and noodle sets which every such restaurant also serves, and which cost less than $30 for 2. Or perhaps he had not bothered to find a 3-course Italian lunch for $10? Every time I go to Tokyo I manage to find a 3 course Italian lunch including drink for $10; I can also find curry/soup/espresso lunch sets in snazzy malls in Shinbashi for $12. Perhaps Mr. Thompson wasn't looking?

Mr. Thompson then commences with the deception. In order to "make it through the day", they buy boiled eggs at the convenience store for 70 yen, which is less than a dollar, and

"wash them down with ¥190 convenience-store cans of beer-like alcoholic drinks; brewers keep them cheap by using pea matter instead of malt or wheat to avoid a beer levy."

Perhaps Mr. Thompson is unaware that in Japan there are these things called "supermarkets" which are cheaper than convenience stores. But in any case, even in his ignorance he can get a real beer - real beer in convenience stores starts at 157 yen, 30 cents less than the beer-like drinks he is forced to consume. The quality beers start at 200 yen. And how much is a 200 yen beer in Australian dollars? $2.10, considerably less than a single beer will cost you in Oz, where 6 packs of beer are now $20. Even buying in bulk, Australian beer is more expensive than Japanese. But by avoiding either an intra-store or international comparison, Mr. Thompson is able to pretend that he is doing something terribly expensive. How tricky!

Then Mr. Thompson tells us that at night he and his wife would raid the supermarkets for "discounted sushi". He doesn't mention the price, and why would he? A pack for 2 would set him and his wife back a combined total of $10. It's not often in Australia that two people get to eat a sushi meal for $10. In fact, toting up the total of all the food he has eaten during the day, and generously including the $30 for their watery noodle lunches, we discover that Mr. Thompson and his wife have spent a total of $50, half their allowance, on 2 meals for 2 people. He claims to be always hungry because of the "tiny" serves of noodles - perhaps he should have bought a "setto" (set meal) at the same restaurant where he bought his tiny bowl of noodles - an extra $1 will probably get him rice and some tenpura prawns. Never mind, not everyone can read a picture menu, especially if they only have a journalism degree to bolster their feeble intellect.

Having read such deceitful dross, are we really to believe Mr. Thompson when he talks about Tokyo's "prestige-obssessed consumer culture"? I think not. But moving on, we find that this man who is so shocked by the pursuit of prestige decides to finish his time in Japan with a trip to the restaurant of the famous Hiroyuki Sakai, the French Japanese chef on Iron Chef. This, I presume, is what we are reading for. Mr. Thompson reveals that the meal for both he and his partner came to a grand total of $300 - and Mr. Thompson did not choose the cheapest course, either. That puts it a staggering $90 cheaper than the only comparable restaurant in Sydney, Tetsuya's, which is $195 per person. So, in Tokyo Mr. Thompson paid $300 to eat in a world-famous restaurant; in Sydney $390 to eat in a locally famous restaurant. And the food, he tells us, was exquisite.

Is this the apartheid of price to which Mr. Thompson refers in his last paragraph? No, the apartheid of price is his comparison of the normal cost of food and the cost of his expensive restaurant experience. He and his partner struggled to eat normal food for less than $100 a day, but they could eat at one of Tokyo's world renowned and best restaurants for $300. Clearly, the discrimination in Tokyo is heartbreaking in its proportions, so heartbreaking that one can eat like a king for $400 a day, or eat like a peasant for $100 a day. I'm sure it was just such a 4-fold difference in price which led the French to the Bastille in 1792...

This is the quality of routine Western reporting on Japan, and the reason it is best to believe nothing one reads from Western newspapers about Japan.

Daily Wanker Editorial Board: Administrative Notes

2008-04-16T14:09:00.004+09:00

Here at the Daily Wanker Editorial Board we pride ourselves on providing a timely response to customer complaints. It should come as no surprise to our loyal reader, then, that we have noticed a definite decline in output from our Japan correspondent since February. In keeping with our business motto, "Getting around to it", we feel it is high time our diligent reader received an explanation for this woeful lack of reporting.

It would appear that our correspondent in Japan has been somewhat consumed over the past 3 months with an intense and ongoing conflict with the management of his day job, and has had neither the time nor the inclination to honour the contract he signed with the esteemed managers of this humble journal. Since his holiday in Australia, however, said correspondent has managed to resolve this conflict in the time honoured fashion of men of his sterling qualities - he has run away. He has, in fact, secured himself a job with a think tank in London, and will be setting off forthwith for the United Kingdom.

This news may come as something of a shock to the reader, being imparted as it is a mere 2 weeks before your correspondent's estimated date of departure; but it has been in train for some time now, and represents the culmination of several months' planning. Our correspondent offers his apologies to those who need as much spam as they can get to fill their day job, and suggests you seek penis enlargement technology as an alternative way of filling your inbox while on holidays.

Of course, once our correspondent leaves for the UK no-one will have any interest in anything he has to say, the UK being the place it is; and he has in fact contracted to continue his despatches mostly in Japanese, for his Japanese friends. In the meantime, we can expect a few more commentaries from our only Japanese correspondent, on topics as diverse as:

A multinational comparison of public service assistance
Bullying and quality in Japanese universities
Drinking and flower watching with the Railway staff
some crazy aspects of Japanese work culture

Weighty topics, I'm sure we can agree. Our correspondent has also agreed to give one final post after his arrival in the UK, detailing some of the differences between arriving and living in the West, and living in Japan.

We here at the Editorial Board of the Daily Wanker would like to thank you all for your patience in enduring this pap for the last 2 years, and assure you that it will all soon be over - for you at least, though not for our long-suffering British Public, who do not yet know what is about to hit them...

２つのオーストラリアの問題

2008-03-12T23:18:00.003+09:00

１つ目：犯罪！オーストラリアの犯罪率は日本よりとても高い。オーストラリア人は公安を守らないので、公園、広場などがいつも安っぽいなかんじ表す。日本と違う！

２つ目：水。オーストラリアは今、水がない。川が死ぬし、野業が潰れるし、都会は水が少ない。メルボーンで、現在の規則は：

水道水をにわにかけないもの
水道水で車を洗えないもの
公園で水道水が使えない。

この写真は友達の家の近くにある公園である。すべては茶色である！

最近、シドニーはたくさん雨が降ったが、水の規則はかわらない。理由は、近くの川が死なないように、あの雨集めてあの川に送る。だからシドニー街はまだ水をもらえない。

オーストラリアの大きい問題である。

メルボーンの家

2008-03-12T23:04:00.002+09:00

この２つの家はメルボーンの家である。上の家は普通の家；次の写真は高い家。

上の写真は私の友達の家である。あの友達は、パートナともに家を買った。３LDKであって、にわもある。きれいな家である。ここで２日に泊まった。

フッティィィィィィィィィィ！

2008-03-12T22:43:00.003+09:00

この映画はあのフットボール試合の例である。最後の部分で、選手はマークをして、ゴールにキックをしてみる。ボールは外に行ってしまうけど。。。エッセンドン選手だから。。。

メルボーン＝文化

2008-03-12T22:17:00.002+09:00

２日にメルb−ンへ友達と遊びに行った。メルボーンはオーストラリアの一番いい街だと思う。

友達と一緒に「Aussie Rules Football」（オーストラリアの規則フットボール）と言うスポーツを見に行った。試合はSaint Kilda 対　Essendon （メルボーンの東区と西区）であった。

Aussie Rules Football はオーストラリアだけで行われた。だいたい同じようなゲーム、ゲーリクフットボール、はアイルランドで行われたけどAussie Rules Football はちょっと違う。上のリンクにクリックしたら、ルールがわかる。ゲームの写真には、Essendon の選手は「マーク」と言う移動してる。

＊発音：

Saint Kilda: セイント・キルダ
Essendon: エッセンドン

ケアンズの良点、悪点

2008-02-29T08:49:00.003+09:00

ケアンズへ行きたいですか？

ケアンズへ行きたくないですか？

ワニのうじょう

2008-02-29T08:32:00.003+09:00

月曜日に、ワニのうじょうに行った。こののうじょうはイニスフェールの近くにある。のうじょうの目的は食べられるワニを飼うことですが、観光者はここでオーストラリアの動物経験ができる。

最初に、エマさんとヘビを持った。

そして、ワニを持った。

かわいですね！本当のワニがいやらしい！

雨林の音

2008-02-28T22:01:00.004+09:00

ホテルの近くには。。。

2008-02-28T21:57:00.002+09:00

これです！

オーストラリアの最初の食べ物

2008-02-28T21:33:00.005+09:00

空港出た後で、ちょくせつ朝ご飯を食べに行きたかった。オーストラリアの町で、いつも朝の早いに朝ごはんか買える。特に、しゅうかんてきな朝ごはんは：

ソッセジ
「ｂａｋｅｄ　ｂｅａｎｓ」と言う豆
焼いたトマト
焼いたたまご
トースト
焼いたキノコ

私たちは肉食べないが、この写真を見てください：

肉なしでおいしい朝ごはんです！
３時間くらいかかる旅後で、ケアンズの近くのミションベイ（Ｍｉｓｓｉｏｎ　Ｂａｙ）に着いた。ここでホテルのチェックインして、すこしこの町の周り見に行って、この「Ｆｉｓｈ　ａｎｄ　ｃｈｉｐｓ」ランチを食べた：

揚げ物を食べ過ぎたので、すぐ気持ちが悪くなった！でも、これはオーストラリアの食べ物です：多くてたくさんホイルがある食べ物です。

ケアンズへようこそ！！

2008-02-28T21:26:00.002+09:00

日曜日の朝早くにケアンズに着いた。天気がよくて、降りたばっかりに雨林のにおいがした。本当にようこそだった！

謝罪の日

2008-02-14T14:21:00.002+09:00

昨日は、オーストラリアの謝罪の日でした。その間の大虐殺を覚える日です。普通に、この日に記念しか何も特別なことが行われていないけど、今年オーストラリアのせいふは特別な謝罪をアボリジニーに上げました。国会議事堂の開きに、オーストラリアの総理大臣は初めにアボリジニーに謝罪をしました。「Stolen generation」（盗まれた世代）のメンバーは議事堂の特別な誘いより見ていた。オーストラリアの周りに、オーストラリア人は公園や学校や会社でテレビに見に集まりました。

このブログを見てる人もここで謝罪が見られます。大使館からのほんやくはいかに：

我々は本日、この国土の先住緒民族、その人類の歴史上最古にしていまなお続く文化に敬意を表する。

我々は、過去の彼らへの仕打ちを反省する。

我々は特に、わが国の歴史における汚点の章である盗まれた世代の人々への仕打ちを反省する。

過去の誤りを正し未来に自信を持って歩むことで、オーストラリアの歴史の新しい一頁をめくる時が来た。

歴代の議会や政府が法律や政策を通じて、我らの同胞に対して深い悲しみや苦悩及び喪失を与えてきた点に謝罪する。

我々は特に、アボリジニやトレス海峡諸島民である子供達を、その家族やコミュニティー、そして故郷から引き離した点を謝罪する。

こうした盗まれた世代の人々と彼らの子孫の痛みや苦悩、苦しみに対し、また取り残された家族に対しお詫びする。

家族及びコミュニティーの崩壊に関して、母親や父親、兄弟、姉妹に対しお詫びする。

そして、誇りある人々、誇りある文化が斯くして侮辱され、貶められたことをお詫びする。

我々オーストラリア議会は、国家としての回復の一端として提示されるこの謝罪が、同様の精神で受け入れられるよう敬意を込めて要請する。

我々は、我らが大いなる大陸の歴史に、この新しい頁が今まさに書かれんことを決意し、未来への勇気を得る。

我々は本日、過去を認め全国民の未来への権利を謳うことで、この最初の一歩を踏み出す。

我々議会は、この未来において過去の不当な行いは決して再現されてはならないと決意する。

この未来において、平均寿命や教育、経済的機会における先住民と非先住民間の格差を埋めたいという全オーストラリア国民の決意を活かしていく。

この未来において、過去の手法で失敗してきた以前からの問題への新たな解決策の可能性を生かしていく。

この未来は、互いへの尊敬や相互間の決意及び責任に基づく。

この未来において、全国民は出自に関わらず真に平等なパートナーとなり、均等な機会を得ると共に、この偉大な国オーストラリアの歴史に新たな章を作るのに平等に参加できる。

私の国は、この公式謝罪されてから、原住民と白人の関係が治せます。これはオーストラリアの最大問題ですので、この謝罪は本当に大切です。これから、オーストラリアは前へ、大人の国として行ける。

Drinkin' kulcha 2

2008-02-11T22:13:00.000+09:00

This season has been something of a season for the booze, with not much to do outside in the freezing weather and many other people unable to do anything worthwhile in the cold. We have had cause once again to test that most disturbing of Japanese practices, "All you can drink parties" (nomihodai). And while drinking at home with my ever-patient Japanese teacher, Professor F, I discovered an amazing little aspect of drinking culture which, I am sure, will never take off in the Antipodes: Daiko.

Daiko is the kind of system which sensible people who live in small cities adopt willingly. In Japan it is illegal to drive after even one drink, but many people like to drive their cars at this time of year. The solution is daiko, in which a taxi comes to meet you carrying two drivers. While you are taken home in the taxi, one of the taxi drivers follows behind in your car, returning it to your house with you. The total cost of this is said to be marginally higher than a normal taxi driver.

Who in their right mind would let a Sydney cabby near their car? But here you get a valet driver with your taxi service... a particularly welcome luxury in the depths of a cold and snowy winter!

謝罪！

2008-02-07T16:58:00.000+09:00

来週、オーストラリアの総理大臣は、オーストラリアのせいふによるアボリジニーたちに謝罪する。水曜日に、新しいせいふは初めての期間を始まる。そのときに、初めて行動はその謝罪をあげるかもしれない。

この謝罪は,　19世紀の「Stolen Generation」と言う行動に関する謝罪である。「Stolen Generation」とは100年間の大虐殺の部分である。オーストラリアの大虐殺は、2つの部分でわけられる。初めに、白人がアボリジニーを殺し、特別な所に押さされた。これはオーストラリアの発見（18世紀）から19世紀の終わりまで起こった。そして、特別なけいさつがアボリジニーの子供を取った。特に、アボリジニーと白人のミクスの子供がその特別なけいさつに取られた。これは、19世紀の初期から70年時代まで起こった。理由は「Breed out the colour」（アボリジニーの人種を消すため）と言われた。

来週の謝罪は何年に待たれている。最近の10年間にほしゅとうがオーストラリアのせいふだったので、謝罪がだめだった。そのあいだの総理大臣は、正確なれきしをしんじられなかった。自分の想像のれきしを従って、あの大虐殺の存在しんじなかった。この考えはオーストラリアの普通の人の考えではない！！謝罪をあげたい人が多い。だから来週は特別な日。謝罪ができたら、オーストラリア人は歴史の問題が直せる。　お待ちにしております！

*イメージはアボリジニーのはたです

New Adventures in Japanese

2008-01-06T22:00:00.000+09:00

Beginning this week, on Wednesday 9th, my weekly PhD seminar shifts from being conducted in English to being conducted in Japanese. This auspicious moment has not been chosen because I am in any state to present in another language, but because I am supposed to be presenting my work to date at a conference in Tokyo in March - in Japanese. So I need to get a bit of practice in.

This has necessitated something of a flurry of (technical) Japanese study over the break, and it occurs to me that some of my readers are not perhaps aware of exactly what the phrase "Japanese study" really means. Because for me, at least for technical Japanese, "Japanese study" doesn't involve learning any grammar, or indeed anything complicated. It involves the incredibly painful and tedious task of breaking through what an acquaintance of mine refers to as the "physical barrier" of kanji. In the photo above you can see the tools with which I hammer away at this physical barrier, and I aim here to describe them. The photo is of my desk during a typical period of technical Japanese study. I am learning vocabulary, since the necessary grammar for presenting mathematics is simple and either mostly already understood, or to be learnt when I present. In the meantime, I learn words, and this is how. From left to right on the front row:

An exercise book containing new words: There is no easy way to learn new words in the technical world, since there aren't any dictionaries of statistics words in our university library (or anywhere, for that matter), and no Japanese course teaches them. So every week I attend the seminars of two of the fourth year students, one on Survival Analysis and one on Financial Maths, and I try to catch new words and grammar. I write these in the margins of this notebook (or, sometimes, I write maths notes in the margins of my new words) and look them up later.
A worksheet of kanji: every word is made up of two or three pictograms (kanji) and since I will be using these words on a blackboard, I need to be able to write them. In any case, one cannot read what one cannot remember, and these symbols aren't simple. So here I practice them. On the page you can see the kanji for eru (to get), shi (capital), osameru (to master oneself), nageru (to throw), kou (success), to (road), ryo (to master or complete something), yaku (promise or expectation) and the nasty bugger, ken (authority or power). Having practiced these a lot I can learn the words they are parts of: tokui (pride), toshi (investment), shuryo (completion), seikou (success), tochu (halfway), yakusoku (promise, appointment) and yoyakuken (option).
A list of kanji and words learnt to day: which summarises the above. I need these lists so that I can keep track of where I am up to, since these symbols start to flutter around my head like stars and I need the list to know what I'm doing
An electronic dictionary: with which I can look up kanji and words. Sadly mine is broken because I dropped it, so the corner of the screen is illegible. Of all the electronic devices to drop...
My book of kanji learnt to date: once I have practiced the kanji 20 or 30 times I write it and all its meanings in the exercise book at the far right of the photo. With this I can go back and check what I need to learn and what I should be revising.

Sometimes I also have a list of words from some other document or text which I need to learn. On the day this photo was taken I was working only from seminar notes, so it is not present.

On the back row, from left to right:

My collection of Japanese-English words: in this exercise book I write all the words I know in Japanese, with their English translation. This is necessary for looking them up in future (and to order my thoughts)
My English-Japanese collection: for the opposite (and perhaps more useful) path of translating from English to Japanese. This has a separate section for verbs and useful phrases.
My kanji dictionary, which contains only 1900-odd kanji plus 200-odd special name kanji. 99% of the kanji one needs are found in here, and I can look up any part of most words using it. It includes instructions on the proper way to write them, and common words formed using them. This is probably the best $30 I ever spent.

Not shown is my computer, on which is a website (JDIC, which I highly recommend) where more obscure words can be found, and a program for testing vocab and kanji randomly (very useful). Also I have some flash cards which the program is intended to replace. Using all of these tools together I can properly commit to memory, in about half an hour, 5-8 kanji and 4-6 words. So in a 2 hour study session I can usually get together about 12 kanji and 10 words. I think this means that I am learning new words only slightly more slowly than I forget old ones, thus maintaining through heavy commitment to memorization a vague resemblance of the status quo.

The really frustrating thing about this is that (my sloppy handwriting aside) there is nothing difficult or complex about kanji. This is pure memorisation and everyone has to do it to learn this language. Hence the phrase "physical barrier". In my estimation my language skills would be far, far superior to their current state if this barrier didn't exist, since from the moment I arrived in Japan I could have begun reading everything I saw. As it stands, it took me 2 months to learn the sign which said "push the button" at the traffic lights, due to the physical barrier of the kanji for "push". This hardly encourages regular reading, and it is easy to see why so many people with an informal education in Japanese don't ever bother getting past please and thank you. Reading is a really useful tool for fast language learning, and I would say essential for the development of technical or sophisticated language. How does one do this when one cannot read a line of a book after 2 years in the country? Simply put: one just doesn't bother. And it is still the case that, 99% of the time, when I pick up a book I cannot read the first line of it. But this all has to change, because as of Wednesday my sloppy language and sloppier handwriting is going to be on display for all my peers to see...

Japanese New Year cards

2007-12-31T18:36:00.000+09:00

Here we see the Delightful Miss E, hard at work preparing her New Year cards, an important tradition here in Japan. The cards should be sent to all one's friends and acquaintances, to thank them for being good to one in the year past and wish the continuation of their favour in the new year. The cards usually take the animal of the new year as their theme, so the cards you can see the Delightful Miss E writing have mice, the first syllable of the word for mouse ("ne") and lucky symbols galore spread over them. Since the Delightful Miss E is delightfully obssessed with stationary, there are also many mouse-y and happy stamps and seals sprayed haphazardly across the face of the card. (The writing paper you see in the pile of materials Miss E is using, is probably for the purpose of checking the writing of unusual address kanji).

Common slogans include "thank you for showing me favour in the year gone by, and please also treat me kindly in the year to come", "please enjoy an honourable new year", and such like. We chose our level of formality according to the person receiving the card, with I think one card using the super-formal passive voice: "much honourable assistance was received in the year which has passed; I humbly wish that you would deign to pass down to me similar favour in the coming year".

New Year is a time of many such crazy formalities here: we sent "osebo", gifts of practical use, to three individuals who have helped us over the previous year. They have already received these gifts, but by some miracle of organisation have not yet received their cards. This is because, although New Year's Day is a public holiday, the post office somehow conspire to deliver the entire nation's cards on that day. There is even a special kanji ("Nenga") written on the card to guarantee it is delivered on the day, and a separate post box at the post office for these cards. And people take this stuff seriously - when posting ours I saw some people bringing in wads of cards the thickness of decks of playing cards. That is hard work! We, however, being new to Matsue and new to this tradition, only had 14 cards to send. Though of course, they felt like the work of 50, because we had to learn and write the kanji for 14 addresses (which kanji we have promptly forgotten). For card writers and postal workers alike, this time of year is truly a challenging and complex period!

Lingerie University...

2007-12-10T23:15:00.000+09:00

While out for dinner last night with the rumbunctious Lady and Dr. S, I learnt a terrible new secret about Japan. Lady S, you see, is a graduate of a certain famous and esteemed Japanese Women's University, which has existed since before the Showa era, and for all the time of its existence has never allowed a single chap to study there. Upon hearing that Lady S had spent 6 years on this esteemed campus, both the Delightful Miss E and myself were eager to find out what life is like studying in the absence of men.

Lady S: "It's fun!"

Sir S (i.e. me, there are too many S'sss in this story): "How so?"

Lady S (looking slightly embarrassed): "Well, I probably shouldn't reveal these things about my University's system, but you see... in summer we would ... study naked ... because it was so hot!"

Sir S: ....

The Delightful Miss E: ....

It turned out upon further investigation that Lady S was using a slightly incorrect version of the word "naked". In fact, in Summer the women at this Certain University would study in their underwear - not naked. Usually in camisoles, to be precise. About half the women in a class would dress this way, with the other half wearing normal clothes (which strangely, in Japanese summer, means more clothes than winter). The other half would strip off as soon as they arrived at the University, and gad about all day in their diaphanous underthings, studying English and Japanese and God only knows what other sinister secret arts...

... upon asking about this amusing scene - half the young scholars in jeans and t-shirts and multiple layers of overshirts, as young women are wont to wear here in summer, and lounging around with them a bevy of undershirted beauties - Lady S revealed that the University has a middle and a high school, naturally for girls only. Women who have graduated from these schools and entered the University have only ever studied in this way during summer, and so naturally choose to continue their choice of sensible attire in the cozy environs of their all-female college. The other women studied at school with boys, and so have no stomach for public lingerie-lounging. But was it really all female? I return to the conversation...

the Delightful Miss E: "What about the teachers - were they all women?"

Lady S (giggling at our foolish incomprehension of basic manners): "No! Of course not! But they were teachers, not men!"

Sir S: "So you lounged around in class in front of your teachers wearing just your underwear?"

Lady S: "Of course."

Sir S (to his eternal shame): "I'm getting a job there!"

Dr S (Lady S's husband): "Yes! Let's!"

I always knew women here are quite quick to turn public spaces into little slumber parties, constructing women's spaces in lecture theatres and cafes using those cute blankets they take with them, separating themselves from the boys and running around in dangerous gaggles of giggling gushiness. But I never realised they would take it to the extreme of attending lectures as if they were in their own bedroom... what an accursed vision of languid Oriental exoticism it presents to this jaded western eye, and oh! how terribly suspicious I am that the good Lady and Dr. S were pulling our legs ferociously...

Mid-December news roundup!

2007-12-08T13:41:00.000+09:00

I have decided to post occasional roundups of local news, as it comes through to me. This mostly means writing about what I have read in the Daily Yomiuri over the last few weeks, since I don't get my news from anywhere else. Below this post I shall give a few more detailed explanations of things I have read and thought about. Stay tuned for more of these in the future!

Japan's crime rate has dropped by 28% in 4 years, according to the Japan Urban Crime Research Institute, which published its latest map of crime in Japan. Matsue's rate is a whopping 7-12 crimes per 1000 (comparison: NSW, Australia has an average rate of at least 85 per 1000). (See below for my view of this)
Japan's farms are becoming poorer and less productive, and the Japanese agricultural sector is in potentially catastrophic decline. Bold political moves are required to revitalise the sector, but the rural gerrymander in this country is a strong political effect, so probably nothing will happen (see below for my view of this)
The movie "Love Sky" (Koizora) has been released. This is a crazy-sounding movie about 2 young people who fall in love, go through various tribulations, and then probably explode or something. It's quirky trait is that it is based on a cell-phone novel ("keitai shosetsu"), a new genre in Japan of novels which are written on and broadcast to cellphones. These novels have their own attendant controversy (see here for an Australian take on this)
Asashoryu, the Sumo Grandmaster, has returned to Japan and training after taking some time off in his native Mongolia to reflect on his wayward attitude. The controversy over this chap has been raging here for months since he was filmed playing soccer in Mongolia, while bludging off of a big Sumo tournament under the excuse of a bad back. I think this is ridiculous - this man has to lift 120kg men out of a wrestling ring, which is an activity much more in need of a good back than playing social soccer in Mongolia. The media frenzy around this chap reminds me of when Mark Latham was too depressed to talk to the media, but someone on talkback radio claimed to have seen him playing with his kids. I mean, really!

In other news, it has rained every day in Matsue for a week. Night-time temperatures are routinely around 4 or 5 degrees, and the locals are complaining that winter is much warmer than usual. Some people are just crazy!

News roundup 2: infirm farms

2007-12-08T13:21:00.001+09:00

The recent elections here in Japan led to a change in the balance of power in the upper house, from the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). The DPJ benefitted partly from a swing in farming areas against the farmers' traditional ally, the LDP, and the first response of the newly-changed upper house was to pass a law passing pork-barrelling funds to rural areas. This law will likely be rejected in the lower house, but it displays the importance of farmers to the electoral process here.

Which is interesting, because farmers only constitute a tiny minority of the population, and Japan's calorific food self sufficiency has dropped from 78% after the war to 35% (compared with Australia, on a regular self sufficiency of about 250%). The average size of a Japanese farm is 1.2 hectares, compared with 3700 in Australia. There is a lot of resistance in Japan to improving farming efficiency, resistance which has been aided and abetted by pork-barelling political parties for many years. As a consequence farmers have become older (nearly 60% of farmers are aged over 65) and farms smaller, with many farmers also working part-time outside their main company job.

Because the farmers are propped up by subsidies, and many have shifted to part-time work, they have little incentive to make their farm work more efficient, or to leave the land and sell to a more committed farmer (or a company). Many have discovered that they can earn much more money by selling to development companies than to other farmers, so they are sitting on their land, using it unproductively, while they wait for a development company to make an offer. Of course, the main way to improve efficiency in modern farms is to enlarge them, but land reform is not possible while farmers are unwilling to sell to other farmers. The current DPJ pork-barrel proposal offers money to these part-time farmers to continue farming, essentially ensuring they are subsidized while waiting to sell on to a developer.

Obviously because Japan has such a huge manufacturing economy, it is easy for governments to look the other way from farming reform. No amount of improvements in farming efficiency will ever make Japanese farms relevant to the economy, which is after all still the world's largest exporter of high-tech products. But there is something creepy in the eyes of many people to be living in a country which cannot support its own population at a basic subsistence level (interestingly, Britain is in a similar though not so serious position). The best way to improve this situation is to liberalise and economise farming practices, but there is no incentive when farmers are an easy voting bloc and the impact on the economy will be zero. Particularly in an era of deflation, when food prices are stable anyway. Liberalising and economising farming practices also always means short term pain for some farmers, who have to sell up and piss off. Why should a rich country bother?

I have mixed feelings about this because liberalising farming here essentially means destroying the system of traditional farming which makes the Japanese countryside both so tight-knit and peaceful, and so quintessentially Japanese. Replacing smallholders with big combines, replacing hand-picked rice paddies with massive machine-intensive rice factories, and removing the small mountainside paddocks we now see, would completely change the look and feel of rural Japan, which I really appreciate now that I live here. I also wonder if it would have positive environmental effects. In addition to the usual problems of industrial-scale farming - in a country with a generally very clean and pure rural environment - Japan has a tradition of "satoyama", small forested mountains and hills scattered through the landscape. These satoyama are not only a crucial part of the image of the Japanese countryside - they contain much of the biodiversity and forest which stabilises the Japanese environment. As farm sizes shrink and farmers retire these satoyama are going untended, reducing their environmental benefits and (strangely) affecting how much of Japan's extensive forests can be counted in the Kyoto agreement. I wonder if industrialising farming would hasten this decline or slow it down, but I rather suspect the former.

Some farmers have maybe seen this problem coming, and are starting to do what South Australian farmers did years ago, rejigging their farming practices to produce luxury goods for export. Economically this is a good idea, but in terms of protecting Japan's food self-sufficiency it is probably counter-productive. I suppose Japan has to ask itself whether it wants to change its rural economy in order to protect itself against the collapse of foreign food markets (which is what self-sufficiency is really all about) or if it wants to see a permanent decline in its farming sector, in order to protect existing rural communities. I suspect this latter decision will never work, because rural communities are always ruined by all their young people leaving (as we saw in, for example, Inomecho, when we visited with our friends last year). But the decision to industrialise could be just as devastating. I suppose this leaves only one option, the option taken by the Scottish and, to a lesser extent, New Zealand: tourism...

... for which I am doing my bit, hosting visitors to rural Japan as often as I can. And they say foreign residents can't be patriotic!

News roundup 1: Japanese crime falls again

2007-12-08T13:01:00.000+09:00

The Japan Urban Security Research Institue released its regional crime map for 2006 this week, revealing that reported crime rates have dropped by 28% since 2002, when the last map was prepared, and all areas of Japan appear to have experienced a reduction in crime. I can't find the map online, but it is striking for the generally low level of reported crime. The highest category of crime shown in the map - for some areas of Tokyo and Osaka - is "38 to 71 total crimes per 1000 people". Rainy Matsue's region is coloured dark green, putting it in the second lowest category at "7 to 11.8 crimes per 1000 people."

It is difficult to find overall crime statistics for Australia, but a spreadsheet from the Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research gives 2006 crime rates in categories, and if we exclude the traffic and liquor crimes the average crime rate in NSW is 85 per 1000 people. That's right folks, average crime rates in NSW are higher than Japan's maximum, and 10 times Matsue's recorded rate in the same year.

Some researchers have suggested that crime recording in Japan leaves a little to be desired, and is not entirely comparable with western crime rates, and some people have argued that even supposedly concrete measures of crime - like homicide rates - can't be trusted here due to the unwillingness (and inability ) of police to do autopsies. But the lived experience here supports the statistics (this is my fancy way of saying "the numbers feel right to me!") The place feels safer than anywhere I have ever been, and certainly the best colour to paint a map of this country would be exactly the shade of dark green on its current crime map...

As for the reason for all this, who can say? I cannot fathom why Japan's crime rate is so much lower than other countries'. The decline seems explicable though - the population is ageing, so one would expect most major categories of crime to be on decline as well.

As an aside, the absence of autopsies here interests me. It is possible that a lot of murders here go unnoticed because no autopsy is conducted even for an unusual or suspicious death , and certainly there is a recent case of a Sumo wrestler who was murdered and would have been passed off as a heart attack had his family not insisted on an autopsy. This would certainly serve to reduce the reported murder rate. I wonder though, if by doing so the police are contributing to a general sense that Japan is a safe and communal place, which in turn causes ordinary people to be less suspicious and trigger happy, and therefore makes society safer. If so, such a situation would contrast markedly with the view of some supporters of the death penalty, that a few innocent deaths are okay if the existence of the death penalty drives down murder rates overall (they become a kind of sacrifice for the public good). I somehow suspect death penalty advocates would not be so willing to apply the same logic if it could be shown that not prosecuting some crime - in fact pretending it never happened - would lower crime rates overall.

Tokyo Graffiti: Summer Lifestyle

2007-11-28T23:26:00.000+09:00

It has been a while since I reviewed an edition of the magazine Tokyo Graffiti, because it was in truth a little plain during spring. But the late Summer edition heralded a new high in the magazine's achievements (which are many) so I shall return to singing its praises.

The September Tokyo Graffiti had as its topic "a collection of Summer Beach photos", its cover adorned with a series of pictures of girls in bikinis. But the contents were so much more than mere beach babery, and well worth comment.

Of course this edition had its regular entries: Tokyo Beauty and Tokyo Handsome, shots of individuals and couples on the streets in Tokyo, a page devoted to "beautiful older sisters", the recently-added "Grandpa's diary" (2 pages devoted to an old man's life story, in pictures), "sexy boy calendar", Tokyo local style and "living by yourself Gallery" (pictures of 1 room Tokyo apartments). These were up to their usual high standards, but were surpassed this month by the special feature, a series of multi-page spreads depicting Tokyo summer beach life.

First was a couple of pages of beach fashion, boys and girls displaying their choice of clothing. This was followed by a few pages of "bikini beach girls" who were, as is usual for Tokyo Graffiti, not of the usual strain of typical girls, but the ones the photographers thought were a little quirky or unique. All were, of course, supernaturally skinny (because supernaturally skinny people in this country are normal). Bikini beach girls were followed by "bikini girls on the street", women in bikinis returning to the beach carrying things they had bought.

This is of course standard Tokyo Graffiti fare, pictures of peoples' fashion. But after this it got interesting. Next was "Couples on the beach", a 2 page spread consisting of a picture of a girl sitting in the sand, with in the background her boyfriend running dramatically towards the camera, carrying cold drinks for both of them. The accompanying caption described them and gave information on their beach fashion.

This amusing little section was followed by "what are you eating now", 2 pages of perhaps 100 photos of people eating, all wearing swim suits and all saying what they are eating at that time. Most of the girls were eating water melon or shaved ice; most of hte boys were eating noodles or sausages. Everyone had to be pulling a strange expression while they ate.

Lastly came the three best parts of the magazine. First, "various leisure seats", a 2 page spread showing friends and couples lying down on their beach mat. The beach mat is, of course, a big plastic tarpaulin spread on the sand, with crazy patterns painted all over it. Some had penguins, some letters, some sunflowers, one a big green elephant. Following this was "The energy of young man", photos of men doing stupid things in the sea, mostly involving jumping or splashing.

And lastly, best of all, "Ukiwa puka puka girls", pictures of women floating in the sea in their inflatable rings. Japanese girls seem to have a universal floating style, which involves suspending themselves in the ring with their arse in the water, feet dangling in the air and hands splashing in the water. Since I am too scared of swimming to even consider turning on my back anywhere near the sea, I am incapable of imagining how this feels. But Japanese women (and it is always the women who do this) seem very familiar with the experience. The Tokyo graffiti crew, in addition to taking a photo, had asked the girls "What are you floating on?" The answers are less than a sentence long but are beautiful in their simplicity:

the current era
fashion, or the current fad
the speed of time
being satisfied by a person I like
music
a boy

So we see Japanese people at their summer play. The magazine doesn't stop here either, also taking pictures of families with their minivan, young women letting the air out of their float, and bodybuilders on the beach at Tomiura. Of course these pictures and scenes carry with them the usual sense of life and times in Japan: cuteness, everyone getting along, happiness and playfulness. Summer has brought out the best in Tokyo Graffiti, just as it brings out the good cheer of the people of Japan...

選挙パーティ！！

2007-11-25T12:49:00.000+09:00

土曜日はオーストラリアの選挙でした！！！オーストラリアは、州によって違うせいふがあっても、全国せいふもある。土曜日の選挙は全国（れんぽう）せいふの選挙でした。

最後の１１年間に、「The Liberal Party」（保守党）はオーストラリアを治めた。私はこの保守党が悪いです。アボリジニーや環境やせんそうや外国人などに関して、その保守党の考えがとても悪いです。だから、今週末の選挙なら、私は保守党が負けてほしいでした。

普通に、オーストラリア人は、選挙ときに、選挙パーティを行う。日本に住むなのに、「The Delightful Miss E」と南半球友達と一緒に選挙パーティを行った。写真は以下：
　

友達も保守党がまけてほしいでした。本当にうれしい日でした！保守党のはいぱいは、１９４９年から、一番大きいはいぱい！も、「John Howard」と言う総理大臣が自分の府をまけるかもしれません（結果がまで決めてない）。私達は、インタネットで、全てのニューズをアーストラリアのテレビで見えました。とてもうれしかったです！！オーストラリアのせいふは、また左に変わりました！！！本当にいい日でした！

Koyo in Hiroshima

2007-11-23T12:33:00.000+09:00

Last weekend the Delightful Miss E and I went to Hiroshima to do some much-needed winter shopping. In between the hustle and bustle of another hard weekend in Hiroshima we found time to visit the Delightful Miss E's favourite Hiroshima haunt, Mitaki Temple, for a little Autumn leaf viewing (Koyo). More (and better!) pictures can be seen at the secret diary of the Delightful Miss E. Hiroshima has a splendid mix of bustling big city fun and secret spots for reflective silence, making it far and away the best place in Japan to experience all the different aspects of this topsy-turvy land.

Making Friends in Japan

2007-11-21T09:19:00.001+09:00

Depicted here is the Endearing Miss C, looking cheerful as ever alongside the Delightful Miss E, despite being photographed in her last day at work. Until recently Miss C worked at "Cafe EAD", a little cafe near the lake in Matsue. This is where we originally met her, though we made friends at the University of Shimane, where she was studying art in the Faculty of Law and Literature. Since this photo was taken, Miss C has moved to Kyoto to commence working at a Wedding magazine publishing company in Osaka.

Miss C is perhaps typical of the kind of person it is unusual to make friends with when one moves to a foreign country. She speaks very little English, and while she lived in Matsue she was very busy at 3 jobs and study. Every second week she travelled to Tokyo to participate in a photography training course (hence all the extra work). As a consequence we didn't see her very often. Fortunately for us, the Endearing Miss C is a very calm, patient and relaxed kind of person, so she was never shy of meeting us or challenged by our language differences even though, in fact, our language differences were sufficient to give ordinary people the complete willies. Neither the Delightful Miss E nor myself are near to being able to sustain an interesting conversation without at least the help of a dictionary, and preferably also the assistance of our interlocutor. None of these problems phased Miss C in the slightest.

I have heard that it is difficult to make friends in Japan, because they are shy and reserved and perhaps also because they see foreigners as too radically different for ordinary conversation. While this may be true in some cases, I have found that the limits of my ability to make friends here are usually set by me - I often don't have the time, the language difference seems so hard, and I wonder why Japanese people would want to challenge themselves with this problem when there are so many Japanese people they can make friends with. However, since meeting the Stunningly Handsome Mr. Hiroki in Tottori, then Misses H and K, and on to the various kickboxers here in Matsue, it has proven quite easy to make friends. Miss C is merely the latest example of how wherever one goes it is quite easy to find people with whom you have enough in common to sustain a decent friendship.

The biggest problem with making friends here in Matsue has actually proven to be the opposite - the frustration of losing them. Perhaps because it is the country, perhaps because they are students, but it seems that a lot of friends here disappear through moving on. I moved from Tottori, my kickboxing friend Mr. Y returned to Yonago, and now Miss C has migrated over the Mountains to Kyoto. These sudden disappearances sometimes make the whole effort - particularly with students - seem wasted, though they carry with them a certain poignancy, happening as they do in October (Autumn, the end of things) or April (Spring, their renewal). So it is, perhaps, that after the dark days of this looming winter have passed, I will again find the possibility of new companionship. Let us hope that this time it lasts past the fall of next years' leaves!

Neba Neba never never...

2007-11-12T23:38:00.000+09:00

Here we see a truly terrifying sight - the stunningly Handsome Mr. Hiroki, eating Natto. This video was taken with the intention of showing the world just how terrible this stuff is, and how fiendish the man who willingly eats it every day for breakfast. Please post your opinion in comments...

Maples in a storm

2007-11-11T21:10:00.000+09:00

Today the Delightful Miss E and I travelled to Mt. Daisen with the stunningly handsome Mr. Hiroki and his friend Miss H to view the maple leaves, which are now just a week away from the full glory of their turn. Unfortunately winter is setting in atop Mt. Daisen, and we arrived in a ferocious hailstorm. It was only 4C when we entered Daisenji, the same temple we had been in a month earlier with Miss E's uncle, so even holding the camera steady was something of a challenge. On the way to Daisenji from a more remote viewing spot we passed several cars stuck on the road, slipping and sliding in place due to the thick hail that coated the road. Despite the weather the Maples were glorious, and with luck in the next 2 days we can take some photos in clear, and slightly warmer, weather.

The Daily Wanker 2007 Photographic Hall of Fame

2007-11-10T15:52:00.000+09:00

Here at the Daily Wanker we pride ourselves on the air of arrogant self-congratulation which we maintain throughout the higher echelons of management. Although the pinnacle from which we gaze beneficently down upon the masses is so lofty that we can barely see your toiling bodies, we still feel that you should be able to take the time out from your short, brutal existence to contemplate the sublime beauty of the world around you. And what organisation has better described and catalogued that world in the last year than the Daily Wanker, for whose greater benefit you mere peons slave endlessly?

In order to celebrate the delicate blend of hubris and condescension with which we have deigned to entertain you over the last year, the Daily Wanker has arranged an exhibition of its best photographs, which (since you are too busy slaving under our lash to visit in person) we have chosen to present to you through one of our online subsidiaries, which you can visit here.

Because our normal collection of illustrations has been slowly growing larger, but declining in quality, we have established this new, elite exhibition in order to make it easier for you, our loyal serf, to gaze in wonder upon the marvels of those higher beings for whom it is your destiny to toil selflessly. Perhaps if you spend sufficient time gazing upon these wonders - we at the Daily Wanker sincerely hope - you will be able to better yourself and in some small way move a little closer in your bestial nature towards our own perfection. Of course, your base natures are such that you are probably not even reading this, let alone enjoying rare art. It is the Burden of superior beings in these times, I suppose, that we must endure the indifference of our lesser man...

... nonetheless, in hope that your souls can be elevated, we will continue to add our best pictures to this collection as they become available. We at the Daily Wanker can only hope that you enjoy looking on them as much as we have enjoyed bringing them to you.

Matsue, Daisen, Autumn photos unposted

2007-11-08T23:23:00.000+09:00

I have been intending to put these photos up for some time now. They are photos of Autumn life in Matsue and surrounds. Posted here with only the briefest comment, for your delectation.

Green tea and sweets, at Mihonoseki.

Cleansing water, Daisen Temple, Mt. Daisen

The gate, Mt Daisen Temple

Autumn leaves at Shimane University (taken by the Delightful Miss E)

tsubureru, a new verb*

2007-11-06T22:46:00.000+09:00

A few weeks ago a Certain English Language School here in Japan collapsed after a brief period of confusion and chaos, during which its teachers were not paid on time and their rent - which had been deducted from their pay by that Certain Company - was not paid at all. Most of the teachers abandoned by that company are now at least a months' pay out of pocket, and desperately looking for another job. It so happens that this company used to employ the Delightful Miss E, though she had the good sense to jump ship (or hop ship, as the company logo might be more likely to do) in April, before the trouble started.

There is an awful lot of rumour flying around about this company, but one particularly striking rumour is that it employed upwards of 5000 foreign English teachers, and about 4000 of these were Australian. A certain fact is that this company had extremely dubious work practices**, including obviously underpaying its teachers, overcharging them for the rent it deducted from their pay, and giving virtually no sick leave or annual leave. It even penalised staff who did not call in sick before a certain time.

Many of the lower level managers in this company were Australians, and it is a salutary lesson about both Australians and people that, although these people came from a country where honest dealing and fairness at work are considered something of a national imperative, as soon as they were given the power to behave badly in their workplace, they took it. The most notable examples of the types of abuse they were offered were the little black book, and the apology. Both of these abuses were very popular with the lower level managers, who employed them well beyond the level required to be simply keeping up appearances for their own safety.

The little black book is a book in which management were encouraged to write down anything bad or "inappropriate" which staff said during their breaks or lunch times. Such "inappropriate"*** topics could include things like critical comments about students (even in cases where the students were masturbating in class, and the like!); discussions of topical issues in the newspaper; or comments about the Company itself. Needless to say, such a black book kept in an Australian workplace would soon disappear, and any low-level manager caught writing in it would be given an earful. How amusing, then, that the same people who would consider such a book abhorrent in their own country take so well to it here...?

The apology is the requirement that staff apologise to the Japanese desk staff if they are late or sick. Even if that sickness were caused by, say, being hit by a bus. The apology was expected in such cases to include flowers and a gift. Of course, the Japanese staff also had to do this apology to each other - but in practice they were never late or sick, so no problem. Naturally we all apologise to our coworkers if our sickness inconveniences them; but in this case the staff are instructed to do it by their management (those same Australian creeps...) and even, sometimes, expected to do so semi-formally.

The salutary lesson here is that while Australians may consider themselves to be the land of the fair go, the speed with which they embrace petty fascism when the cultural barriers are removed makes it pretty clear that they only extend that fair go as far as strong unions and good workplace laws force them to. Take those protections away, and it'll be "raus! raus!" all the way home...

And, for an entertaining side note, most of the staff at this Certain Company aren't exactly what one would call the sharpest blades in cutlery draw. They are also generally drawn from a pool of young, middle-class kids who don't understand industrial struggle. Were one to visit the forums, such as gaijin pot or lets japan, on which these people post - and I would advise against it, for many of the posters are an odious and sleazy bunch - one would see an amusing example of how modern, young, middle-class white collar workers react to their industrial world collapsing around them. In short, they run around flapping their arms and abusing each other for 2 months, and then when the chips are clearly down - off the table, in fact, and being vacuumed up by the cleaner - they begin to think of organising some kind of protest. If every cloud has a silver lining, then the only silver lining I can see for this one is that 4000 Australians may soon return to their home country with a much clearer idea of what they need to do to defend their rights at work.

*tsubureru, to collapse - I learnt this verb on the week that it happened
** one shouldn't assume - as many new arrivals at this Certain Company are wont to do - that the company in question represents standard Japanese corporate practice. While it is certainly true that workplace practice here is different to Australia, many Japanese have been horrified by this Company's behaviour, and the manner of its senior executives is very much beyond the pale of Japanese corporate behaviour. It is perhaps a case unto itself... or it was...
*** "inappropriate" is fast becoming my most-hated weasel word. Generally when people use it they mean to say "wrong", "rude", "immoral" or the like, but they are scared to be judgemental. And when management say it, usually they mean "something which makes our lives inconvenient"

野業と空

2007-10-21T23:39:00.000+09:00

この野業は家の近くにある。すずむし歌のリコードをするために行ったが、むしがいなかった。かわりに、雲、月、かがみの写真をとった。

秋の空

2007-10-21T23:31:00.000+09:00

松江山陰合同銀行本館からとられた秋の空である。

Rubbish day

2007-10-21T23:15:00.000+09:00

Here we see the Delightful Miss E posing with our rubbish before rubbish day. Matsue is famous for having the strictest rubbish rules in Japan, where you have to sort everything into its component parts. As a foreign student commencing at Shimane University I was taken to the rubbish processing plant, and I am therefore the proud bearer of all information one can know about Matsue rubbish. I am therefore qualified to inform my readers of all the contents of our rubbish separation system:

nearest the camera, magazines, which go out twice a month as "resource refuse"
just above the magazines to the right, cardboard cartons. These go out with the magazines, but in truth we haven't thrown these out in a while, so they have been piling up. Ultimately we will wipe our arses on these
Just above the cardboard cartons in line with the camera, a bag of tins and a bag of bottles (clear plastic bags). These don't go out in our rubbish area; instead we have to dispose of them at the nearest disposal area, fortunately for us across the road
left of the bottles, just under our dinky little oven, 2 piles of newspapers, which also go out twice a month as resource refuse (there are more behind the Delightful Miss E - we discovered these buried on the balcony)
at Miss E's feet, between her and the tins, are PET bottles, which need to be taken to a disposal centre. We don't use many of these, keeping most as reusable water bottles, so these go out very rarely. They become clothes and twine
To the right of the PET bottles, cardboard boxes, which go out as resource refuse twice a month
to the right of the Delightful Miss E and just past her daintily extended leg is a rubbish bin full of cardboard containers. These go out twice a month, at a different time to resource refuse for some reason. I don't know what they become
In the Delightful Miss E's right hand, a bag of polystyrene containers which also have to be taken across the road. These are reused by the supermarket.
Not shown: burnable and non-burnable rubbish, which is just out of sight on the right of the camera, and the only rubbish in our kitchen which is not recycled. We throw out one bag of non-burnable rubbish every 3-6 months, and one half-empty bag of burnable rubbish every week. Burnable rubbish is food scraps; non-burnable rubbish is razors, CDs, broken glass and wierd stuff. We also have a little box of batteries under the sink, which we can hand in at the camera shop.

In total I would say probably 5-10% of the volume of rubbish we create is not recycled. Of that, a good 90% is just food scraps and loose paper, and is burnt. That could probably be further divided into compost and non-compost; but I should not say that in case the city office get ideas. Proper recycling is an extremely painful and annoying task, but I can safely say that having done it I think that it is very feasible. I also think that any city waste disposal system which doesn't make you separate your rubbish is probably not actually recycling. Food for thought for Sydneysiders reading this...

Amusing food discoveries

2007-10-20T23:38:00.000+09:00

The other day, walking around Happy Mountain, the Delightful Miss E and I had our Autumn tranquility shattered by one of these bastards : the suzumebachi, "sparrow bee", or in English, hornet. This picture doesn't do justice to the size of the thing - it was huge. When we returned home (thankfully unscathed), the Delightful Miss E immediately googled this creature, and discovered many horrid things about it. Particularly, about 70 people a year die from its sting (apparently the poison is nasty, but I think it is because the sting is bigger than a small sword); the hornet lives by eating bees, which it does not by stinging them and digesting them but just by ripping them apart with its jaws; one hornet can kill thousands of bees; and it is not vulnerable to bee poison. When it has rampaged through the nest slaughtering the bees, it eats their honey and then takes their larvae back to its nest to feed its young.

What a bastard.

The bees do have a typically beeish response to hornets. When the scout hornet approaches a beehive, the bees smell its pheromones as it approaches and a gang of several hundred hold open the hive entry. When the hornet enters, a "bee ball" of several hundred bees swarm it but, instead of stinging it, they vibrate very fast and raise the bee ball temperature to 47 degrees C. This kills the hornet.

What bastards.

Anyway, these amusing facts (some of which can be viewed in real time online) are all irrelevant to the story, which is that Wikipedia claims some Japanese people in the Mountains eat hornet larvae raw, like sushi. I didn't believe this, mainly on occupational health and safety grounds (who's going to try and catch one of them - I bet even their babies are bastards), but also because they're gross. But we asked Sir T when we went to the sushi bar (it seemed appropriate) and he said that yes, some Japanese people do. Or rather, more did. Old people in the mountains still do. How they manage this is beyond me, but it does suggest two important lessons:

1. Wikipedia knows all
2. Don't argue with old Japanese Mountainfolk, they eat wasps for breakfast.

A further note on the Yasukuni Jinja

2007-10-20T23:06:00.000+09:00

While at dinner with the amusing Sir T, he gave me an insight into how the right think about the Yasukuni Jinja. The Yasukuni Jinja is a shrine in Tokyo which causes much international outrage because it holds the souls of all soldiers ever to have died defending Japan, and includes the souls of 14 class A war criminals which were put there after World War 2. Koizumi Junichiro used to visit every year, and this caused great anger in China and Korea (who rightly have a few issues with Japan's war past). It is supposed to carry the souls of all who die fighting for Japan. Most foreign thought seems to be that it is okay for the shrine to hold the souls of those who died fighting an illegal war (world war 2) but it shouldn't hold the souls of war criminals.

This line of thought obviously has 2 large flaws - one being that we as foreigners have no right to tell any country who they can and can't inter where; and the other being that before world war 2, presumably anyone interred in the shrine could have been a war criminal (the Geneva conventions being rather late on the scene). Let us put aside these two arguments for the moment, and suppose that prima facie foreigners have some right to be concerned about the souls of those from the modern era who did bad things to us.

While at Dinner with Sir T, he explained to me the history and nature of the Yasukuni Jinja a little more, and why it is so important, and what he told me helped me to understand perhaps why those 14 people really have to be there, regardless of the trouble they cause. He told me that the shrine was established after the Meiji restoration (of 1867) to pacify the nation. At that time there was a great civil war between those who restored the Emperor and the followers of the Shogun (the Samurai) who fought against the restoration. After it ended with the complete defeat of the Samurai, the nation needed calm. The shrine was established and the souls of the dead of both sides were interred therein. This was done because all soldiers of Japan were considered to be fighting for Japan, and the veneration of only one side would be an indication that Japan does not love some of her citizens as much as others.

Essentially the Japanese honoured the souls of people they would have considered, at the time, to be traitors and heretics (recall the Emperor is descended from the Sun-God, and any act against the emperor is treasonous and heretical); and many of them would have been war criminals to boot, considering how wars of that time were conducted. If they are to unconditionally inter the souls of those they consider to be traitors, criminals and heretics, it would be terribly unseemly for them to deny 14 people membership of the same shrine merely because they are war criminals. The shrine was established to pacify the nation (this is the meaning of the word "Yasukuni"), to ensure that whatever wrongs happen in war within or outside Japan, Japan itself - a concept viewed by the Japanese as almost holy in itself - will endure in peace and stability. The shrine existed for this purpose long before the second world war, and from the point of view of its purpose the second world war was neither unique nor particularly good or bad. From this point of view one cannot create exceptions to the rule that soldiers be honoured here. The shrine seems to embody the unconditional love of Japan for its people.

(I should add a little interpretive note here - I was conducting this conversation in Japanese, drunk on beer and sake, and Sir T was smashed. I tried to say "unconditional", but my limited maths training in Japanese enables me only to say "conditional" and "independent". I tried to construct a guess at the word "unconditional love" but it didn't quite work. So this part of the conclusions I draw here - which I grant is quite important - is based on at least some conjecture on my part. But the sake was damn good!)

I find this argument for the continuation of the shrine in its current state (i.e. with war criminals present) quite convincing. I am particularly impressed by the notion that a state should have unconditional love for its citizens, an idea which our western nations are rapidly forgetting in this age of expedient political victims and worthy and unworthy citizens. Sir T suggested to me a view of the shrine and its role which I think is more than defensible, possibly even noble. My mind is not yet made up, but I am considering the possibility that we could all learn a little from such a view, given the way our own countries are beginning to turn on their citizens in a most dishonourable and unloving fashion...

A note on right wing Japan

2007-10-20T22:22:00.000+09:00

Some of the more thick-skinned of my readership may recall a post I did some time ago about the Yushukan, that museum of twisted and warped right wing war history in Tokyo. You may recall my surprise at finding a statue at the front that had been made by a Japanese sculptor who travelled to Europe to study for years in order to do his commission justice. At the time it struck me as strange that a sculptor would spend years learning foreign art in order to adequately idolize a local hero. I thought it might be one of the many convenient hypocrisies which fascists the world over find so easy to overlook.

As I gain more experience of Japan, I think that my willingness to ascribe this contradiction to idiotic hypocrisy may have been seriously misplaced. I think it may in fact be an enduring (as in 150 year long) trait of Japanese Nationalism and fascism - and of the right generally in this country - that they have a love of foreign ideas. This isn't to say that in other ways these people don't make many stupid mistakes - they're conservative, right? But I think it may be a particular trait of right-wing Japanese - amongst all right-wing people in the world, I would guess - that they are fascinated with foreign ideas.

The more I meet Japanese people, the more I realise that the people most interested in and engaging with foreigners seem to be, in general, the more conservative elements of Japanese society. This point was brought profoundly into focus by the Delightful Miss E's homestay family, Sir and the Lady T and their million progeny. The other day Sir T, who is a 61 year old business man, took the Delightful Miss E and myself out to eat at a sushi restaurant. Sir T has had many, many homestay guests before, but was eager to have the Delightful Miss E to stay while I was away in Kobe, and has taken quite a shine to the both of us. During the course of a thoroughly delightful evening of excellent sushi, he revealed to us with expansive pride that he is right wing. We had no reason to doubt this, given the general drift of his politics. But how can we understand it? This is the man of multiple homestays, who has friends all over the world, constantly reads up on news and current affairs in other countries, is eager to learn about other countries, and has been overseas myriad times. He enjoys the company of foreigners even though he generally cannot communicate with them on a level beyond basic food and lifestyle conversation (his English is not very good).

This is not an isolated incident either. It seems that many of the men, particularly, who are motivated to engage with foreigners in this country are also quite conservative and/or nationalist in their outlook. I suspect that this creeps across to other aspects of Nationalist politics too. Now that I think about it, even the layout and style of the Yushukan was based on foreign museum ideas, and much more modern and accessible than many of the musty and pointless museums I have visited in this country. Trust the right-wing in this country to go find the latest in Museum technology. The presence of that statue outside the Yushukan (it is an old statue) suggests that this is not a new phenomenon either, not even a post-war phenomenon. This makes me think it is an enduring aspect of Japanese nationalism. How can this be?

The only explanation I can think of is that in this regard, like all others, Japan must in some way be the exact opposite of the West. But it truly is a strange way to be consistent with the Japanese rule of opposites... I shall be keeping my eye on this, and see what I can ferret out...

The passing of things...

2007-10-01T21:46:00.000+09:00

On the weekend the storm clouds rolled in and with a burst of wind and rain the summer ended. One day it was still hot, steamy and breathless, and two days later it was dry, cool and poignant. The evenings are closing in now, and before we have even had time to take more than a few breaths it will be winter again. I am told that October in Matsue is very wet, but I remember from last year the cool, dry days stretching one after another all the way into early December. This is my favourite time of year in Japan. The weather is comfortable, and the sky is suddenly so clear that you can see for miles and miles, and everything is in crisp relief even on the very horizon. The evenings are cool but the sun is bright and cheerful, and everywhere you go you can smell the smoke of woodfires. It is like the year has decided to pause and have a party, because it knows that soon everything has to slip away, into shadows and icy winds.

With the autumn breeze comes the second semester of university, and a two week period where, with the Delightful Miss E as my ever present companion, I have done literally nothing - we too have been breathlessly waiting the change in our little house by the river. To this end I have until today completely failed to get permission from the students in my laboratory to post pictures of them on my blog. Having finally done this, here are a few pictures of them at the summer beach party. From left to right: Dr. Naito (our teacher); Takuma; Gosuke; Masaru; and Yashiki. The second picture has Yashiki in funereal splendour. There is also here a single picture of Gosuke being cooool in our Kobe retreat. Interestingly he was completely confused by the idea that he should not do the two -finger salute in this pose, and merely act naturally. Apparently, two fingers in the peace symbol is natural for a young Japanese chap-about-town.

Some pictures of Kurayoshi

2007-09-22T19:01:00.001+09:00

Kurayoshi has an old town, shirakabe ("white walls") which is quite pretty to wander through and happens to contain a quite cool South East Asian hippy store and restaurant, which we visited after the Taiko. Here are a few pictures from that town (these pictures were taken by the Delightful Miss E).

The rhythm of the seasons

2007-09-22T18:35:00.000+09:00

The shift of the seasons is a concept so important in Japan that the appreciation of the change even has its own word, which of course currently I have forgotten. My labmate, Gosuke, tells me that he does not believe people born outside of Japan can properly appreciate the change of seasons, and this particular sensibility is born of more than merely understanding the language (though to me understanding every aspect of the change of seasons, right down to its non-linear dynamics, seems easy compared to his language!)

This change can be appreciated in many ways, the most famous of which are the April and Autumn cherry blossom and maple leaf viewing ceremonies. Some festivals, like setsubun in winter, anticipate the coming change, and in late summer all across Japan a series of such festivals occur, differing in every town in which they occur. The common feature of most such festivals is their dependence upon drumming, whose beat (hibiki) is perhaps meant to reflect the changing of the times. This drumming is called Taiko, and it just so happens that Mr. Hiroki's charming and pretty girlfriend Miss K is in a Taiko troupe. It being near the end of summer, the Delightful Miss E and myself travelled with my Tottori friends - Mr. Hiroki and the ever amusing Misses K and H - to nearby, atmospheric Kurayoshi to watch her performance. I didn't capture any of the sounds, but here I post a few pictures of the Taiko ceremony we attended. As you can see, the festival took place in a concert hall - in fact, anticipating the change of seasons in Kurayoshi requires the town's largest concert hall, which is packed to the rafters with Tottori Prefecture residents here to feel the pulse of nature.

Sadly this year the change of seasons seems to be coming late, and this abominable heat will not end. But I am waiting patiently for the next turn of the seasons to come. The days are shortening and as the drumming of the locals grows in intensity the throb of insects is fading, so soon that intangible something will happen, and the whole of Shimane will lurch from a seemingly endless summer to a sudden Autumn of warm, clear days and cool, lazy evenings.

Japanese rugby

2007-09-21T18:27:00.000+09:00

Rugby has been in the news recently due to that little festival of booty doom going on in France. Our cousins in the commonwealth are consumed with envy and anger at present, since once again all the Northern Hemisphere teams have made a poor showing - all the Northern Hemisphere teams, that is, except Japan, which has conducted itself exceptionally well in its World Cup matches so far. To wit, the Japanese team (the Brave Blossoms) have lost 3 matches:

Australia 91-3
Fiji 35-31
Wales 72-18

These are, believe it or not, good results by Japanese standards. For example, the team which lost to Australia was really "Japan B", and yet they lost by a smaller margin than against Australia A in the Pacific Nations Cup. The team which played Fiji received a standing ovation from the crowd, and apparently was cheered for several minutes. If Japan beat Canada they may leave the contest with more points than ever before. The dizzying heights of modern Japanese rugby!

So why is Japanese rugby so bad, in a country of 120 million quite sports mad people? Some people say that it is because the Japanese are so small, but I don't believe this - out of 120 million people you can find 15 men big enough to play rugby and good enough to do so internationally. I think you don't have to look any further than the picture at the top of the page for the reason. I took it in Tottori but I think it reflects the condition of rugby across Japan - gravel pitches and very old fashioned training methods. No-one who learns rugby on a gravel pitch will ever amount to anything, especially when their scrum machine could double as a railway buffer. But there is hope yet! In order to combat the urban heat island of Tokyo, every school in Tokyo is going to cover its playing fields with grass in the next 2 years. So 10 years from now maybe some players with real rugby experience will filter through to the national team...

The sound of summer

2007-08-31T22:51:00.000+09:00

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

2007-08-15T21:42:00.000+09:00

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

2007-08-06T21:23:00.000+09:00

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

2007-08-06T21:00:00.000+09:00

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

2007-08-06T20:58:00.000+09:00

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!

2007-08-03T18:20:00.000+09:00

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...

2007-08-03T17:54:00.000+09:00

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...

2007-08-03T17:39:00.000+09:00

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

2007-08-03T17:08:00.000+09:00

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...

歴史教科書

2007-07-16T14:49:00.000+09:00

初めての日本語論文である。日本人ブログを読んでいる人一人がいるので、時々日本語で論文をかざるそうです。（今日は裕貴！）今日のトピックは「日本の歴史教科書」である。

外国人は、日本についていろいろな先入観を持っている。一つは、日本人は自分の太平洋せんそうの歴史を知らない。「日本のせいとは正しい歴史の勉強をしない」としんじている外国人が多いである。私は、日本に来た前に、これは真実か真実ではないかどうか分からなかったが来た後で真実を習うために研究を少ししたかった。

海外で、一般的な意見は、日本の高校は正しくない歴史教科書を使う。高校の教科書は、太平洋戦争の事実関係を習っていないとしんじている。私は、日本に来た後で、この意見の研究をしたかったけど、教科書が日本語で書いているので、研究ができない。残念だった。でも、最近、この「歴史教科書のほんやくページ」を見つけた！このページに、本当の教科書の内容が読める。この内容は、オーストラリアの教科書とだいたい同じである。例えば、南京だいぎゃくさつの事実を含むしいあんふの話をしている。

私はびっくりしなかった。日本人は平和が大切だと思っているし、中国や韓国の関係が大切し、真実が大切ので、正しい歴史を習っていると思う。もう、日本に来た後から、外国人は正しくない日本の先入観をたくさん持っているそうだった。だから、外国人によるに事実をしんじられない。いつも自分でそうだんするほうがいい。この教科書の意見は外国人の正しくなくて悪い先入観の例である。

Some notes on the Time Person of the Year

2007-07-15T16:33:00.000+09:00

In a rare moment of personal honesty, I reveal for my readers a picture of myself. There are, in Japan, many ways for one to refer to oneself, and the choice of reference is probably quite important. I have been told by one of my teachers that, in keeping with my haircut and my sports history, I should be referring to myself as "ore" (the kanji for which looks dangerously reminiscent of a turtle). Apparently, this is the tough guy word. However, the choice of how to refer to oneself is not nearly so important as the choice of how one should refer to others. In fact, dear Reader, we are faced here with a problem. How should yours truly (ore) refer to you, when speaking Japanese?

This is an interesting problem I have recently had to grapple with, because in my dealings as a teacher at the Technical College, and as a student at the University, I have seen various forms of second person reference used, and am at a bit of a loss as to how I will ever be able to understand the nuances of their use. To this end, last weekend while in Tottori I had a bit of a chat with the Stunningly Handsome Mr. H, my Tottori regent, regarding the various forms of address.

There are perhaps 3 main ways to call someone "you" in Japanese: "anata", which is the most formal and polite; "kimi", apparently reserved for men to use towards women with whom they are friends; and "oMae" (which literally means "honourably in front of me"), which is mainly now used by men in addressing their close male friends, or by parents with their little children. Occasionally, women may refer to a strange man they do not know as "onisan" (older brother), though this seems to be a bit of a smutty, trouble-making form of address. It is, for example, used by the Delightful Miss E's friend Crazy Aya, who is most suitably named. And even she can only use it if she adds the word "cool" to the front of it (as in "Oi! Cool older brother! I want to order!", to which the reply is inevitably "who, me?").

All of this is very complex indeed. So what was the Stunningly Handsome Mr. H's advice? Sadly, not helpful. I asked him "how do you say 'you'?" And he said "My brain does not contain the word 'you'."

That's right, folks, when Mr. H speaks Japanese he never says "you". He either uses someone's name, or he finds a way to rephrase the sentence so the subject is omitted. This is the huge gulf of understanding I now find myself facing. Japanese people regularly omit the subject and the object of sentences, so for example Mr. H would never say "could you please give me that?" He would say "give, please" and consider his speech to be politer for it.

This, dear reader, may strike you as a problem merely of cultural adjustment - that I should quit my whining, and get used to people addressing me with such bluntness. But it is not so simple. Because it is almost impossible for the average English speaker to think of sentences without using "I" and "you". Any such sentence seems to be both terribly poor language, and horrifically confusing. In my fumbling attempts at reading Japanese I am continually confused by this lack of reference to the subject and object, particularly when written in the passive voice. I recently read an extract (in Tokyo Graffiti) from a girl's diary about her first sexual encounter. She managed to omit reference to the actual act altogether, and managed to give several sentences of facts about the encounter in which it was impossible to tell who was surprised at whose inexperience, because nowhere was a subject or object specified. My Japanese teacher considered this situation completely satisfactory, and took 10 minutes explaining to me the meaning of the sentences.

From the very start of my education in language, I have been taught that a sentence is meaningless without a subject and an object. Now I have to learn to speak entirely in the absence of these concepts, and present events as dry, abstract facts, states of existence of which I am merely assumed to be a part. And furthermore, I have to learn to be polite by saying such gems of soft, deferential language as "give", "come", "go" and "sell". Were I to say something unsophisticated and blunt like "could you please give that to me" I might offend.

At least in all this confusion about who is doing what to whom, I will be able to avoid assigning my interlocutors the wrong honorific. But God only knows what I'll have them doing in the meantime...

mukadelicious fun

2007-07-15T16:06:00.000+09:00

So, about a week ago, tsuyu having begun, I was sleeping happily in our little bed - which like all Japanese beds is really just a thin mattress on the floor - with my arm stretched out behind me, when I woke suddenly with a massive stinging pain in my right hand. I dashed from bed to the bathroom, thinking I had cut it, and washed it furiously, only to notice that I had, in fact, no signs of a cut. Closer inspection revealed two tiny little puncture marks on the inside of one finger. So, I tiptoed back to bed, turned on the light, and discovered my new little friend, a vicious little centipede bastard, nestling happily on the edge of my pillow.

So after waking the Delightful Miss E and engaging in the necessary immediate remedies, and after icing my finger for a good ten minutes, I searched the room top and bottom for any sign of any others, and went back to bed.

The picture you see is not of my hand - there's no way I'm that stupid - and the centipede therein is probably twice the size of the bastard that bit me. But that should give you some idea of their ferocity. After 10 minutes of icing, my hand still ached but wasn't too bad. The next day I had to write a 10 page seminar handout, using the same bitten hand, and it was now aching in little shooting pains halfway up to my wrist. Fortunately the ice had worked, and nothing had become swollen or unworkable, so by the end of my seminar everything was fine again (though I was very tired). I still have the lumps from the bite, and I am considerably more cautious in the house now than I was, but on account of that icing it wasn't too bad. Still, it has given me cause to conclude that I now know, without a doubt, the thing I dislike most about Japan:

the stupid insects.

Between stink bugs, massive spiders, hornets, wasps, midges that fly in my mouth when I am riding, dragonflies which fly in my mouth when I am riding, the spiders clustered above our door, and now these horrible multi-legged monsters (called 'mukade' by the locals), Japan has a wider selection of completely evil insect life than I had ever imagined. Between June and October this collection of creepy, stingy, multi-legged grotesquerie is out and about and always in my way, being generally unpleasant, creepy and/or smelly. I never would have thought that, coming from Australia, I would say that I was not expecting an insect assault, but the truth is - insects in urban Australia are scarce and pathetic in comparison to the wide range of nasties on display here, and their sheer abundance.

Gross.

Rain, rain, go away...

2007-07-14T15:04:00.000+09:00

Currently we are enjoying the pleasures of the rainy season here on the san-in coast. The rainy season, or tsuyu as it is called locally, is about a month long and is supposed to come as regular as clockwork near the end of June. Last year it just didn't come at all, so I am glad to experience it properly this year. It certainly did arrive on time in the last week of June, and since then it has rained pretty much every day except for a block of 3 days early on. The temperature has dropped, so you can't even really believe it is summer, but the humidity has gone crazy. Also, some days it buckets down for half the day and then turns stinking hot for the other half of the day. Today, however, it is just cold, and the rain is coming down in periodic squalls with high wind.

Washing clothes, going out, and even getting too and from work become a rather complicated task in this weather. In fact, washing clothes is almost impossible since they won't dry even inside, although I suppose they would if I turned on the heaters. The weather is completely untrustworthy too, so if you do anything on the assumption it will remain sunny or rainy for more than an hour you are surely going to come undone.

Overall though, tsuyu is nice. It's only a month long, which is handy, and coming from Sydney it really is hard to be anything but happy at the sight of teeming rain, flowing rivers and constant cloud. Also, the clouds are low and wispy, and they shroud the hills around my house in a very romantic fashion. Sleeping in of a Sunday morning while the wind and rain batters the windows is always a nice experience, if you don't have anywhere to go... which, mostly, we don't.

Today is going to turn less pleasant, however, because we have a typhoon incoming. The wind is picking up, and the rain is squalling, and apparently from 9pm tonight things are going to get thoroughly nasty. For me though the nastiest thing about the typhoon is what it forebodes - the end of tsuyu, and the imminent arrival of the furnace that is Japanese summer. No season here has its ending that is not a mixed blessing...

As the shards settle...

2007-06-26T22:04:00.000+09:00

A further note on the glass-smashin' fighters: it's a regular event here. Here is a youtube link!

Kombat Kulcha IX

2007-06-24T21:14:00.000+09:00

Here at Le Chateaux du Flash we have finally obtained satellite TV, a fine achievement given that for a mere $45 a month it gives us access to 68 channels of shit, and 3 extra sports channels. After it was installed I started flicking through these meaningless 68 channels, and within 30 seconds had stumbled upon some kind of game show involving a man ironing clothes while standing in a pool full of sharks.

Japanese TV.

So for the first 2 weeks we have more than 68 channels of shite, because all the non-adult channels are available for our consideration while we decide how much of our time we want to waste. Because we are in Japan, this list of channels includes the excellently named Fighting TV Samurai!, which gives unlimited coverage of fightin' sports for a mere $20 a month. This is too much money, but it doesn't matter; since we are in Japan, all the relevant fighting is also played on the mainstream entertainment and sports channels, so I won't miss much if I don't fork out the cash for Samurai TV. In fact, half of Fighting TV Samurai! is made up of Japanese Pro Wrestling (like WWF, only Japanese); the other half seems to be in equal measure repeats of old kickboxing fights, and a lot of Pancrase and other assorted nastiness. Pancrase seems to involve a lot of blood and gore, and isn't for the fainthearted.

In any case, while for 2 weeks we have this Samurai TV for free, I have been loading up on it. Why not? Tsuyu, the rainy season, is here, so there's not much better to do except sit at home waiting for one's teeth to mend watching other people losing theirs. So on Saturday morning I watched a very disturbing Pro Wrestling show, which I would like to share with you all.

As some of you perhaps know, I think these fake wrestling WWF type shows are almost as good a window into culture as porn. They were born in that crucible of High Civilisation, the Trailer Park, at about the same time as their haute couture cousins, Heavy Metal and Girls Gone Wild. So besides the enormous athleticism and hammy acting of their stars, they have a lot to recommend them. So much in fact that once I hosted a talk by Mr. Wonderful Paul Orndorff and Rowdy Roddy Piper with the topic "The Terminator 1 as Greek Tragedy." I'm sure you can imagine how this turned out, given these two scholars' ringside rivalry. In any case, when one sees the kind of analysis which WWF can bring to bear on modern social problems, one quickly concludes "bugger sartre" (and the rest).

On this basis, then, what does Pro Wrestling in Japan have to say about Japanese culture? In the manner of any foreigner in Japan, I shall answer this question by singling out one moment of interaction between 3 Japanese Pro-wrestlers, which I watched after breakfast on Saturday; and I shall then generalise it to the whole country. At least, I would generalise it if I could understand it.

After breakfast I turned on the fightin' TV to some kind of wrestling show from hell. I know everyone thinks these shows are faked, but I ask you: did Chomsky and Foucault fake their debate on human nature? No. So can the cynicism. In any case, I can assure you after watching this few minutes of bottled madness that this wrestling isn't faked. At least, the bits where they pull the splinters out of their arse aren't (and what is the meta-analysis of that, I ask you?) When I turned it on one of the wrestlers was lying on a table, already half-twisted and buckled, just outside the ring. The ring itself was a field of broken glass, and the wrestlers' opponent (I assume it was his opponent; just like modern humanities, the allegiances change fast in pro wrestling) was standing on the ropes, ready to leap. Which he did, landing squarely on the chest of his adversary, who bounced, and then landed on the concrete floor. The table suffered no further damage. This moment was no more faked than when Mr. Wonderful banged Roddy Piper's head on the concrete hallway leading to the changing rooms (and how's that for a rebuttal of the notion that the epistemology of scientific evidence is socially constructed, eh?) Stunningly the guy leapt straight to his feet, and rolled back into the ring, only to be whacked on the chest with a light fitting. Within moments one of his opponents had him in a choke hold using a fluorescent light tube, which he promptly shattered all over the (already splinter-shrewn) ring. The obligatory over-shoulder throw followed, with both men rolling around in the glass; and then somehow one of them got hold of a bundle of fluorescent light tubes and smashed them on the other guy. This was the source of the glass. There then followed the most berserk scenes I have ever seen on pro wrestling (aside, maybe, from the boogey-man eating worms, the only fitting thing to do given he's an adamant defender of the Keith Windshuttle view of history). Firstly, one of these Japanese chaps dragged a bundle of 6 or 8 light tubes out of nowhere and placed it on his semi-comatose adversary's chest; then the other wrestler climbed onto the ropes and leapt onto the tubes, shattering them all over his prone victim's chest and sending slivers of glass flying everywhere (thoroughly deconstructing Spinoza's theory of the subconscious at the same time). But this wasn't enough (it never is, when discussing Spinoza - Descartes is always at the edge of debate). So he climbed back onto the ropes and leapt again, no doubt intending to end matters in a suitably apocalyptic fashion; but his prone opponent rolled aside (defenders of Cartesian rationalism can be slippery); and our erstwhile hero landed full on his arse on a huge pile of broken glass.

Now, I don't look too closely (I'm not a philosopher, after all) but I'm pretty sure that these big boys don't wear any groin guards. So that chap is going to be picking shards of glass out of his masculine essentialism for quite a while to come. There was blood all over the three wrestlers in the ring, on the chest of mister light bulb and the arms and legs of his opponent; and the third chap was pretty slow getting up. By now the ring was pretty much carpetted with shards of fluorescent lightbulb (and that stuff is sharp). It was like they were wrestling in a prickly pear packing yard (say that 5 times fast while picking shards out of your arse!) And they hadn't even finished the debate!

Not that the debates ever end in pro-wrestling; it is a deep and insightful sport. But as I said, I am unable to pick the cultural generalisation out of this story; like the man ironing in the shark pond, it is too weird. I will leave it open to my reader(s?) in the comments; speak carefully though, my friends, for I have witnessed the wisdom of Oriental Philosophers!

The poetry of the dentist

2007-06-18T21:05:00.000+09:00

Because soccer is a "safe" sport, I do not wear my mouthguard when I play. So when I went to the dentist on Saturday afternoon, he wrote me some poetry to better help me understand my predicament. Here it is, for your edification:

Because teeth have broken, the nerve is angry.
Because the inflammation is strong, anaesthetizing is not effective.
The medicine that suppresses the inflammation is packed, and the medicine is put out.
It treats administering anaesthetics again even if the inflammation calms down later.

It treats over several-time. It will become after Tuesday in next week next time
if it is necessary to wait for the inflammation to calm down.
The god doesn't come recommended today because power to match is applied, and the pain occurs
strongly when following it in apprecation of the beautiful.

Treatment that removes the angry nerve is done administering anaesthetics again
next time. If it settles down the symptom, a temporary following is done.

I'm sure you can see it was very edifying, given the circumstances.

Notes on the status of Japanese women

2007-06-12T21:59:00.000+09:00

This post is not so much a comment on Japanese women - a topic too big for me even to consider undertaking - but an attempt to describe some details about the situation of Japanese women as I understand it from my encounters so far in the Land of the Rising Sun. I shall make no bones of the fact that this post is partially at least in response to the constant barrage of screaming hooting scorn which westerners poor down on Japanese society, with the constant claim that women here are "subjected" (because you know, in the rest of the world complete freedom of both sexes is assured). In a sense also this post shall take on a bit of a task of comparative feministology (and word invention), based on the simple premise that, in fact, women's rights generally throughout the world are not a complete project, and therefore every country has its ups and downs in this regard. It is my intent to show that, in essence, life for women in Japan is a trade of some things westerners take for granted, in exchange for some things westerners see as a distant dream. I also wanted to touch on the idea that some, at least, of these differences derive not from a different or superior Japanese view of women's rights, but from the different way in which society here is structured, but I don't think I will have time, so I shall put it off for another post. I don't want to make any pretensions to academic style, though, so I'll try not to act like I'm writing an essay. My posts are long enough as it is!

So the first thing I should say is that, far and above anything else, Japan is an incredibly safe place for people of all ages and sexes. Public sexual assault of any scale more serious than groping has a very low prevalence (and groping has declined since the city governments introduced programs to fight it). The Japanese are not exactly unconscious of safety, but it is reasonable to say that they are generally pretty ignorant of many of the basic practices we take for granted, such as locking one's door when one goes across the road; turning off the car and taking the keys when one goes to the convenience store; always keeping one's valuables near oneself; and, in the case of young women at night, travelling in company and wearing "sensible" clothes. A young woman, alone in a dark alley, hobbling along in stupidly high heels and wearing extremely revealing clothes, far away from any assistance, is as common a sight here as ... well, as women going out at night. The best two examples of this I have seen is a woman tottering alone through the darkened university at midnight in her nightclub clothes, something I'm sure women in Australia avoid at all costs; and the woman picking her way over sleeping homeless men after midnight under Hiroshima station, her skirt no longer than her heels. This sense of safety is a very real consequence of a very real lack of harrassment and abuse in Japan; for example women in skimpy clothes never get yelled at or abused in public, and even minor acts of intimidation like whistling or group staring by men just don't happen here. Women judge what they will wear according to the usual conservative standards of their day, but not, it would seem, according to what will happen to them outside the home.

A second fascinating thing to note about women's life in Japan is that, contrary to many of the claims one hears about the language, Japanese is essentially gender neutral. There are very few words for occupations or people which are gender biassed; and those that are, are almost universally imported. For example, the Japanese word for "businessman" is "kaishain", which means "member of a company" and is completely gender neutral. To describe the phenomenon of lowly paid office ladies and hard-working businessmen on career paths, they have introduced the foreign words of "OL" and "Salaryman". Even the word for humanity - ningen - is gender neutral, since the word "nin" literally means person. One cannot speak of "mankind" in any general sense in Japanese, nor can one have "manpower" (the nearest words are based on words for "people" and "work", or "names" and "work"). Japanese changes completely when it is reduced to daily casual language, and here the language used by men and women diverges radically, even to the level of its rhythms; but I have seen little evidence yet that these differences represent some kind of discrimination, rather than just a powerful type of gender segregation which extends all through Japanese society. In general, as surely as night follows day men and women in this country naturally separate into their own groups, and why and how this happens is a mystery to me.

Having said that, in most of the daily interactions I witness here, women are given a fair amount of respect and time to say their piece, though they undoubtedly do so in a less assertive fashion than men. This could be a consequence of my having hung about primarily with academics and young people, but I have watched women come and go at kickboxing and they are taken seriously in their efforts and interests. Age and seniority seems to be a far greater barrier to gaining respect in most of the environments I have seen, than does sex.

The topic of kickboxing leads to another interesting point, which is that women's sport, while highly segregated and gender specified here, is taken very seriously. Women do not generally play soccer or rugby, for example; but the sports they play get a great deal of respect relative to those of important western women's sports like netball - women's wrestling, for example, gets primary position in the sports pages of the newspaper when it is on, and women's figure skating, golf and tennis is very popular. Women in table tennis are taken seriously too. The status of women in the traditional martial arts is also surprising - I think the Shimane University kenpo club is run by a woman, for example, and there is never any question of her seniority in the training I have witnessed. The traditional martial arts are also very well stocked with women compared to Australia, and women take a great deal of interest in fighting sports - I have had several discussions about K1 and Sumo with middle aged women teachers, for example. Also, of the 4 women who taught me Japanese at Tottori University one was a fanatical surfer; one a black belt in Kendo; and one a black belt in Archery. The other one was a big k1 fan.

I think this represents a simple fact about Japanese peoples' attitude to each other which is very endearing - if you are trying with all your might to do something difficult, you win instant respect regardless of all the extraneous details of your private and personal life. One is judged first and foremost on what one does here, and only secondarily on everything else. Which is terrible if one is not allowed to do certain things, for example in work; and this is a topic we have to come to next, because work is seen as the big area where women in Japan are worse off than the West.

Certainly women's participation rate in Japan is terrible, with only 48% of Japanese women in the labour force, as against 74% of Australian women. Interestingly, the Australian participation rate has increased from 35% since 1970, while the Japanese rate has been consistent at 50% for all that time. So what do these statistics mean? Women's pay differential in Japan and Australia is broadly similar, although the statistics I have been able to find on women's pay in Japan seem to be heavily biassed towards the large companies, which do not represent a full picture of the many ways in which part-time women workers and self-employed women live. But then, probably Australian statistics don't either; certainly it does not seem to be the case that women are paid any less than men here in a way which is systematically different to Australia, but perhaps discussion of this topic requires an enormous amount of attention to the way in which modern women's earnings lag men's - a problem of balancing work and family commitments, and life courses, which is probably worse here in Japan because, ostensibly, women have less opportunity for maternity leave and flexible working arrangements.

Which, incidentally, is probably also not quite the way people outside Japan perceive it to be. It is a little known fact about Japan that the shared government/private health insurance scheme, Shakai Hoken, includes 9 months maternity leave paid at 60% of full-time wages, and equivalent paternity leave if requested. For full-time company employees, Japan probably has one of the best maternity leave schemes in the world. But as we all know, access to government paid maternity leave requires permission from the workplace to take 9 months off; and many companies are probably unwilling to give this time. People in Japan are also loathe to take it, and probably prefer not to put out their workplace than to do such a thing. But it is definitely there in black and white in the information on Shakai Hoken, which all salaried employees working more than 32 (?) hours a week are required to purchase.

Probably though, the falling birthrate in Japan relates to another, more complex series of social changes which no-one here is willing to discuss, and which I will go out on a limb to identify - most women don't want to, and have the freedom to choose not to, have children. Since the 60s women have had unfettered access to abortion on demand, with "economic" reasons sufficient for women to choose to have an abortion; they have had unfettered access to condoms since the war, and although the pill has been slow to catch up, a complete lack of religious barriers to abortion has meant that reproductive choice remained very free in this country when women in the West were still struggling for it. In fact, Japanese feminism has had a pretty complex relationship with the pill, and as late as the late 80s Japanese feminists were opposed to its use. It is, however, now freely available, so women now have complete financial and sexual independence. In a society which has stressed low birthrates since world war 2, and where having a child is generally socially accepted as requiring that the woman cease work permanently, this is going to lead in only one direction - a decision to defer or cancel childbirth in favour of work. And yes, it is my view that free access to reproductive medicine makes this choice easier, and I further think that is just dandy. Reproductive choice has to include the choice not to reproduce, or it ain't reproductive choice. If Japanese women are sensible enough to recognise that, and Japanese men are happy to go along with it, well and good to them. Japan has only 2 choices here if it wants to increase it's birthrate - revoke the choice, or revoke the cultural assumption that women should stop working when they have a child. They have the maternity leave in place, they have childcare in this country and working women use it; they simply need to complete the triangle.

(but on this topic, one has to consider; with a participation rate of 50%, there are an awful lot of working-age people in this country not working, so Japan does not need to increase its birthrate to avoid its so-called demographic trap; it just needs to encourage the half of its female population who are not working to return to work).

The topic of encouraging women to return to work is an interesting one, for it leads to another sly observation I have to make about Japanese women's supposedly terrible state of discrimination. One would suppose that in a society where not many women work, part of the reason they are choosing not to work is that they would rather be kept by a husband than have to take up some crappy service job they don't want to do. But this is not a requirement for women in Japan, because women in Japan actually have available to them a much larger range of socially acceptable jobs than their Western counterparts. Japanese women can be doctors, nurses, child care workers, school teachers and librarians just as they can in the west. But they can also work in construction, transport, fisheries, agriculture, engineering and industry. For example, 33% of farmers, lumber workers and fishermen are women (of course, in Japan "fisherman" is a gender neutral word). 6% of transport workers, and fully 43% of labourers, were women in 1998. To quote from my personal experience, I think I see a female taxi driver here in rural Matsue at least once a week; riding to work this morning I passed a huge dirt moving truck being driven by a woman; and I see a female truck driver at least once a month. Bus drivers are also female. The fantastically handsome Mr. Hiroki's pretty and charming girlfriend, Miss K, has a boat license at the age of 23, and works as a tour guide using this license. Women's work opportunities here are much wider than they are in Australia, and interestingly so are men's. Men can be hairdressers (all the coolest boys are) and, according to my Japanese teacher, child care work and old age care work is very popular with men. There is no such term as "checkout chick" in Japan, because they are half male; and clothing salespeople are also very often men. Floristry is also a popular pursuit for the cool boys, and why wouldn't it be? Flowers are very manly. This is precisely the opposite situation to that envisaged by the opponents of 60s feminism, who supposed that when women started working in construction it would push men into narrower job opportunities and out of the workforce; but here, where women can do much more, they work less and men take up their posts. A fascinating contradiction...

This sharing of labour seems to occur across the age periods, with for example retired Japanese men and women taking up farming. In this case frequently the man farms rice, and the woman farms vegetables and fruit (which makes the man a dole- bludger, since rice here is heavily subsidized). It is almost as if the Japanese are at every step of the working process blind to the differences in gender which sensitize Australians to "womens" and "men's" work; but at the same time acutely aware of women's role as wives and mothers, which forces them to think that women should leave work for children. This has a huge effect on women's lifetime earnings, since progress at work here is strongly associated with seniority and uninterrupted service, and this cannot be achieved by women who have to take time out for work. Which might explain why they don't return.

Finally, I should mention another area of "men's" and "women's" work which is far less discriminatory and much safer than in the West: prostitution. Prostitution is treated with much less scorn and derision here than in the English speaking world, it is much more open and it is much more honest. There is also a whole world of non-sex bars where men go to be charmed by, and spend money on, young women; and in this world of equal opportunity working roles, there are a growing number of such bars where women go to be charmed by young men. These bars undoubtedly come with the assumption that if you spend enough, your young charmer will put out; but you have to go through a certain ritualized pursuit first, and the young charmer juggles several suitors before deciding which one to accomodate. How different can this world be to the seedy backroom life of the Australian sex industry?

So there we have it, a society which for women is generally safer, offers a wider range of job opportunities, and comes with the massive benefits of complete freedom of reproductive choice and freedom from childbearing. In exchange, women have to endure some additional kinds of discrimination at work, which I think have a lot to do with the importance attached to the childbearing role; and greater restrictions on the range of roles available to mothers. This hardly seems like a nightmare of women's discrimination, unless you judge the entirety of women's rights primarily through the prism of work and family, the current boutique obssession of the Australian middle class. If, on the other hand, you also value (as I do) your partner's ability to move freely at night without harrassment; her ability to choose working roles freely; and her confidence in her complete right to control her own body; then Japan is a much less discriminatory place than you have been led to believe.

Tsudoi

2007-06-12T00:36:00.000+09:00

Our time tables had us down to wake up at 6:30am on the morning of the second day, and to do tsudoi at 7am. We were then to clean from 7:20 and have breakfast (awful) at 7:40. For an hour and a half. Weird. So I pointed out to everyone that we didn’t have to do anything before 7am, so could we please set our alarms for 6:55 and ignore the timetable. This led to some… confusion, and resulted in everyone getting up at 6:30. But not only did they get up at 6:30, but Ryugenji had to do some moving of things and getting ready, and making his bed (presumably this is what you do when you have half an hour to get up), and every time he moved something or did something he had to say “ush!” to himself, or “gozaimasu” or something. I think secretly he was horrified at our laziness for sleeping in, and was trying to rouse us to do nothing with him.

Which tactic worked; after 15 minutes (at 6:45) while I was clinging to the last shreds of my overly brief rest, Gosuke arose, alert as the day he was born despite an hours’ sleep (bloody kids). He wandered about groaning for maybe a minute and then, adopting his role as room leader, said to me “Stuart, you have to wake up!” to which I grunted. After two more attempts at same, I said “Gosuke, breakfast isn’t until 7:20, I’ll get up at 7:15”. To this he said “but you have to do tsudoi.”

Now, the night before when discussing the alarm settings, I had asked about this tsudoi, and no answers were forthcoming. Gosuke had said “it’s a thing”; and Ryugenji said “it’s a bit like prayer”, to which Watanabe sniggered and Gosuke hit him, and they both said “no it’s not”. So I assumed tsudoi was something like, you know, standing about on the balcony going “fuuuuuuuuuuuuck, mate, sparrow’s fart eh?” So when Gosuke told me I had to get up for tusdoi, I said “No I don’t” and rolled over.

So Gosuke says “You have to get up” and I said “Why?” and he said “Tsudoi”, and I said to him (actually losing all remnants of sleep), “Gosuke, WHAT is tsudoi?” And he said “it’s a thing”, and I said “Look, Gosuke, you’re standing around doing nothing. Your tsudoi is going to be going on the balcony and having a smoke; Ryugenji’s is going to be standing around saying “ush!”; and mine is going to be lying right here waiting for breakfast.” Which I think Gosuke didn’t understand, because he stopped making me get up, and wandered out. So at 6:55 I started hearing everyone swarming down the hallway, and I thought “what?” and decided I had better get up and have a look; at which point I discovered the rooms empty, and Gosuke wandered up and said “It’s tsudoi now,” looking pointedly at me. “I’ll be late,” I said, and went in to get changed, and when I emerged everyone was gone. So I wandered out of my room and down the hall, and was halfway down the hallway from our building to the main building when a gaggle of schoolgirls from another tour group went running past me in a mad flap, obviously rushing to this tsudoi. I followed in their direction and ended up back in the entry way to the whole building, and there before me stood the Gates of Hell, and beyond them my worst nightmare, writ large and waiting to pounce.

For tsudoi, it appeared, involved every single inhabitant of the camp gathering in the meeting room where we had been introduced yesterday, in lines facing the front. The doors to the meeting room were open, and everyone was facing away from them towards the stage at the front. The woman who had introduced the camp to us yesterday was just starting some kind of statement about “making a small speech” to which everyone was paying attention, and the little gaggle of schoolgirls I had seen running was just sitting down in a corner; and the woman was standing facing the door, so if I took even one step through the doorway she was going to see me, and everyone was going to turn to face me, and I had seen on the map that this room held 400 people and I could see now that it was chock full, so that would mean 400 heads turning, and there I would be, 2 minutes late as usual only this time 2 minutes late for the 400 person morning pep talk.

No thank you, Gosuke, I thought, and fled as fast as I could back the way I had come, with the woman’s words taunting me as I slunk back down the stairs … “Just a little speech”…

… which was just as well, because I discovered upon returning to Matsue that a friend of ours had been to this camp on a previous year, and part of their morning tsudoi was the flag-raising ceremony, at which she, the only foreigner in the camp, had been made to raise the Japanese flag. And she was on time!

(And by the way, curse my electronic dictionary for saying tsudoi means “gathering”, rather than its true meaning, “Convocation of Acolytes of Pure Evil, waiting to ambush tardy foreigners and hang them upside down from the flagpole” – the distinction could have been helpful).

Drinking

2007-06-12T00:35:00.000+09:00

Drinking in Japan is an interesting phenomenon, but this time it was also painful. Drinking was arranged to start at 7:30; as usual I was late (my version of punctuality, 0-2 minutes late is okay, is 2 minutes behind the Japanese version, so I constantly find myself turning up to events 2 minutes late, and everyone is staring at me). When I arrived I was confronted with another envelope, from which I drew the number 3 with alcohol-coated fingers (we were back in the dining room), and so was directed to table 3. Are we noticing a theme about seating arrangements here? I was fortunate to get a table with Masae (I think that's her name) who is in my Convex Analysis class; and Ryugenji, who was in my room. So there were two people at the table who know how to talk to foreigners (i.e. loud and slowly, using dumb words). We had to wait half an hour for the drinking to commence, and everyone always seemed to know without asking exactly why - "oh, we're waiting on so-and-so Teacher" - "oh, the food" - etc. Eventually we started and, horror of horrors, our first task was to stand up, one by one, and announce ourselves and any details about ourselves to the whole room of 110 people. We did it table by table, and when my table came and we were looking at each other waiting to see who would stand up first, people at other tables started saying my name ... anyway, with that out of the way, we could drink properly, which I did, quickly.

It never ceases to amaze me how Japanese people regularly take their supposed conformity, shyness and unwillingness to be publicly singled out, and also their formalism, and crap on it from a great height. For example, why do these people who refuse to be singled out insist on everyone standing up to talk about themselves? And why did Gosuke and Takuma insist on dragging me around to talk to every teacher? And why did I end up doing impressions of myself whacking Takuma from three feet away with an engorged penis, while his mates watched and laughed (this relates to the bath story)? This isn't the behaviour of shy and formalistic 21 year olds. Also, if everyone is so afraid of standing out, why is it that at midnight one of the camp seniors (a third year in my room) started talking about his dreams and goals in front of 12 people? He slowly became more animated, and as he did so the others in the room stopped to listen. He then gave a full, improvised speech to 12 people (including his teacher!) about why he wants to become a teacher, what he thought of Professor Miwa’s opinions, his study and lifestyle philosophy, and why education is important. Everyone listened raptly, and he finished it by assuming the most reverent posture he could (the Shinto bowing posture), saying “I will try harder to achieve my goals, and so should you” and bowing several times. Everyone else applauded him, and his teacher said “that was a good speech”. This is hardly the behaviour one expects of shy and retiring people!

Furthermore, the drinking was in 2 "stages" (their words, not mine); after the official drinking hall closed at 10:00 we all adjourned to our dorms, which were in their own separate building, and gathered in the larger rooms. We again waited for about 20 or 30 minutes while people gathered in the rooms (already drunk) and mysterious people ran around throwing alcohol at us. In my room for example we had 12 kids, and: 2 litres of plum wine, 750 ml of bad red wine, a 6 pack of beer, 3 cans of dark beer, 3 separate cans of normal beer, 6 cans of chu-hai (see previous posts) and some kind of odious crisps whose smell lingered on my fingers for 2 days. that's a lot of booze when you consider that almost everyone in the room weighed less than 60 kgs, and I wasn't planning on drinking much (it might also explain why some people gave speeches). It was this second stage which ended at 5:30 am, though I kicked everyone out at 1am and went to sleep.

Bathing

2007-06-12T00:34:00.000+09:00

Dinner and bath was slated for 5:30 to 7:00pm precisely, and because I am still a bit leery of the whole Japanese bathing custom, and didn’t want to intrude naked and alone into a huge bath with 60 students in it, I decided to go with Gosuke and Takuma (my lab juniors). This had several interesting consequences, the most immediate being that they worried hugely and vocally about how small their dicks would look next to mine. This happened quite a few times, and although I am not at liberty to divulge the details of my dimensions (since that encounter with the Queen I have had to sign the Official Secrets Act, or I would assuredly tell you). However, these boys had not read any secret details, and were merely passing on the fear that all Japanese men seem to have that their willies are smaller than everyone else’s.

So Gosuke and Takuma and I trotted on down to the bath room, with the obligatory comments as we passed the women’s bath on the way, and soon enough found ourselves in the men’s changing room. I have not mentioned the Japanese public bath (onsen) to my readers before, but shall give a brief introduction here. The front of the bathing area is a changing room, generally consisting of an area for shoes, a large open space with a sliding door on one side (entering the baths) and a wall lined with baskets for possessions on the other. There are no lockers of course – we are in Japan. One dumps one’s belongings in the basket, including one’s towel, and waltzes through the door (covered with a modesty towel if overly well-endowed) into the bath area properly, which is the most intimidating area. Here there is a huge bath filled with enough hot water to soak in up to the shoulders when seated, which takes up most of the room. There is a tiled area outside the bath, and on this area are many small stools in front of a shower apparatus. The purpose here is to clean oneself before hopping into the bath, so one has to scrub, fully naked, squatting on a bucket, in front of everyone in the bathtub. I don’t mind walking naked in front of strangers (after all, they aren’t going to see anything interesting without binoculars), and I don’t mind bathing naked in front of strangers; but I must say I don’t like scrubbing my bits in front of strangers. So I always approach this part with trepidation, especially since it is considered very bad form to enter the bath with any soap on one’s body.

So today was very busy, there being 100 students in the building. Gosuke and Takuma and I had to wait in the changing room while about 10 men changed, some drying themselves and some getting into or out of clothes, all packed in a rather small space and studiously avoiding one another. Takuma commented with words to the effect that it was all a bit gross, and then the space freed up and we changed. Both Gosuke and Takuma were suitably stunned, horrified and impressed by the sight of my tattoo (it is “formidable” and “scary”), and everyone else studiously looked away; and then we were into the bath room itself, which I entered with my towel and so then had to leave promptly to put my towel in my basket. Upon returning I had again that feeling of always being the last to enter the room, with the attendant extra attention. All the shower spaces closest to the door were taken, so I had to slink across the entire width of the room, starkers, to the furthest booth to shower (fortunately these washing spaces had barriers; frequently they don’t). I have heard many stories about how Japanese stare at foreigners in baths, but if they do the are quite good about it; so I don’t usually notice any undue attention, but I still feel it.

So having washed, I splashed in, and Gosuke and Takuma and I sat together in the water, discussing the size of Japanese men’s willies (topic du jour, as it were) and my tattoo. I suggested we all get a shared laboratory tattoo (maybe “math before dishonour”?) and they were horrified; I also told them I like Japanese style tattoos and wouldn’t mind getting one before I leave, a comment which has occasionally aroused very disturbed responses from my interlocutors; but in this case it merely inspired suggestions that I should get cherry blossoms, the guaranteed tough-sticker in this country which proves one is in the yakuza. I ain’t, so I probably won’t. Nor will they, since my suggestion produced shudders of horror. Interestingly they didn’t ask me if it hurt. Probably because Japanese people assume that if you want or need to do something, the pain is irrelevant.

The bath was also, I should add, horrifically hot, but soon after we entered there was a huge influx of cold water and it became really rather comfy. Ryugenji joined us, and a few boys left, and everything quietened down, and I was able to see the full form of all the boys leaving, and I must say that young Japanese men are intimidatingly skinny. They almost all, for example, have a six pack and a triangular upper body, simply on account of being so damn stupidly skinny. They are also all generally very small (I barely ever look up at people in this country). It’s quite an intimidating effect to be surrounded by slender, muscly, hairless men with perfect tans and clear skin. And always leaves me wondering why western women aren’t flocking here for the sex. But there you go. Maybe it’s the willy myth. Or maybe it’s the hairy bums; I noticed an awful lot of that. Weird.

Working

2007-06-12T00:32:00.000+09:00

On the first day of Orientation camp we had an hour long talk by 3 lecturers on what is expected of students, followed by 2 hours of self-study in a big room, where people were assigned seats according to their room number (I studied Hazard Modelling, i.e. I took an hour to read what I would have read in 3 minutes in an english text and wasted time on a proof which can be done in 5 minutes using induction). Then, after dinner and bath we had a 30 minute talk by Mr. Watanabe about joining NOVA. Almost everyone slept in these lectures, for this is the nature of the Japanese student – they sleep through everything. Professor Miwa, who is retiring this year, gave a long and suitably rambling talk on his own history and on peace, and when I looked back from my position near the front fully two thirds of the room were sleeping.

On the second day of the Orientation Camp we had more lectures; 2 on the life of a high school and primary school teacher, and then a question and answer session with the same two people, which I skipped because I ain’t graduating to become a teacher. This was interesting because of the difference in attitude towards teachers in this country. Many students want to become teachers, and they earnestly strive to this end, which is not easy. Primary school teachers, for example, have to be able to swim a certain distance in a certain time, play the piano, and do basic acrobatics. High school teachers attend a special test which is notoriously hard to pass, and many honours students in every field strive to do this test, taking it multiple times before they pass. So no-one slept through this presentation, which involved details about teachers’ schedules, their teaching materials, and their work conditions, which are abominable. The male teacher, a high school teacher, told the students in no uncertain terms, that he works from 8am to 8pm 5 days a week, with no rest, and is paid shit (about $3000 a month). He said to them “I’m sure that you are wondering why I decided to become a teacher?” and proceeded to explain to them that he did so thinking that it would be an easy, enjoyable job with good pay. No such thing, he revealed. And why does he keep doing it? “Because the job has great importance, and the reward of seeing my students understand something, or thank me when they graduate, makes it all worthwhile.” The Japanese value honesty in their dealings, and he wasn’t sparing the lash! The result? Takuma told me he “will try harder to become a teacher, because that man reinforced my desire to do it”. (There is more of this in the drinking).

Orientation Camp

2007-06-11T20:48:00.000+09:00

Life in the University proceeds apace, and so it becomes necessary half way through the semester to go on the Faculty of Science Orientation Camp, 2 days of ... orientation ... at a ... camp ... in the nearby Sanbe National Park (pictured).

Sadly for me Japanese society has many secrets, many of which I have not been let in on. I thought I was going to a weekend of drinking, playing frisby, long walks, and dawn raids on other peoples' dormitories with hoses. Isn't this the Universal Nature of Youth? Not in the society of tsudoi. I shall share the outline of my weekend of orientation, but the weekend was full enough of diversions and revelations that I have chosen to put some of them in separate posts, which shall be laid out after this one.

On Saturday at 9am I arrived at the University to catch my bus to Sanbe. I was greeted with an envelope with random numbers in it, which I pulled out to reveal my seating arrangement on the bus - ookii 11-D, seat 11 D in the big bus. My room had already been arranged - room 219, with Gosuke (a fine chap from my lab), Mr. Ryugenji ("Dragon Seeing Temple"), and Mr. Watanabe (a returning graduate who now works for NOVA) (We are seniors). Gosuke (and this is relevant later in the story) was to be our room leader. The bus left promptly at 9:30, everyone aboard. Punctuality is a strong point of Japanese life, and beyond fault.

On the bus we all had to introduce ourselves to our fellows. We were given a name badge to wear, which included a brief space to write our "PR point". Mine: blank. Gosuke's: Yesterday's enemy is today's friend. His friend Tamadani's: "A splendid person?" So on the bus we chatted but I slept, because I was sat next to a very shy girl and, let's face it, when you can barely count to 10 there is no point in belabouring the introductions is there? We also played bingo, but I didn't win. Then we arrived at Sanbe, and so commenced the Orientation Camp.

The very first thing we did was ... shuugo!! I.e., Gather! Everything Japanese people do as a group starts and ends with Shuugo. So we all filed into a big room and sat down to be given an introduction to the Sanbe holiday camp, which has four key points: 1) greetings (always greet others in the camp); 2) self service (you have to do everything for yourself); 3) take your rubbish home; 4) time - dinners and such like are on a strict schedule. So we were shown the timetable for the day, with dinners set out on their strict time table and at the beginning and end of the day this mysterious phenomenon, 20 minutes of cleaning (including the toilets!) preceded by 20 minutes of ... tsudoi! I didn't think about it at the time, but it was there, waiting for us...

So then we gathered again, before setting off to our rooms. We collected sheets on the way and made our beds, and then we went to lunch, which was awful but involved an excellent regimented hand-washing process (including alcohol sprays!) beforehand. Then we had to do the actual work of the camp. At my last orientation camp, work was an hour long talk about what could be expected of uni. Not so here! The work was actually really tiring, tiring enough to be put in a separate post.

After work was the allotted time for dinner (again, awful!) and bathing (an interesting experience, never so bad as one expects, and again posted elsewhere in detail). Then came the drinking, which I have also described separately and which lasted (in the case of people other than me) until 5:30 am. At least some of my fellow students were rushing hand over mouth for the bathroom before breakfast, so I think some were up for a dire second day.

The second day started in an amusing fashion, at least for those of us not puking. I have described the details of our arisal and cleaning in the post on tsudoi, because really they aren’t separable. My confusion was not helped by my foggy head after very little sleep, but I think I survived my brush with death admirably, and was able to present myself at breakfast without too much risk of embarrassment. From there it was a mere hour and a half at breakfast, and 2 hours of (still) stupidly banging my head on the arse end of an induction problem which I would solve in 5 minutes the following day, and then it was home and hosed – we left Sanbe 3 minutes late, with me in exactly the same bus seat I arrived in. And I think 3 minutes late is pretty good when you have to round up 110 hungover college students.

So that, dear reader, was my Orientation Camp, which has left me truly disoriented and discombobulated, and completely at a loss as to anything. I think I was meant to meet everyone and generally relax with them, but this went the way things always go with me – everyone now knows me and knows my name, and will remember it because they always do; and I didn’t even hear 90% of their names, and the other 10% sounded like “Sshhshhhnn” or I forgot them straight away (I could do a whole post on how hard it is to even hear people when they say their names in this country, let alone understand them – Japanese has a strange rhythm); so now everyone is saying hello to me and, to confound it all, I met them properly at the drinking binge, which was after the bath, so everyone’s hair was floppy, and I tell all these 18 year olds apart by their hair, so I can only remember Tamadani (who told me his first name 3 times, but buggered if I can remember it or if I even caught it); because his hair is dyed, and everyone else was just floppy. So there you go. 100 more people now know that I’m a big rude red faced foreigner with a tattoo and a ***** dick who is always late, doesn’t attend compulsory pep talks, and can’t remember their names.

Summer is coming ...

2007-06-05T23:08:00.000+09:00

The weather is warm, the insects are out, and summer is in the air. Riding home, swallows flit over the river and dive bomb my bicycle, chittering madly. In the late evening air, tiny bats replace them to ghost along the paths, circling the lamp posts and flicking through the arc of my bicycle light. The turtles bask on the rivers' edge beneath hovering dragonflies, and the afternoons are lazy with the warmth of early summer. Soon it will turn from pleasant, comfortable days in the shade to the buzzing furnace of high summer, when the air throbs with the hum of cicadas and drips with the constant, steamy humidity of Japanese summer.

Between now and then lie the rainy months of June and July, which the locals call tsuyu. Last year tsuyu didn't really come to this side of Japan, or if it did it is overrated; and although the first storms of this year broke like clockwork on the 29th May, there has not yet been much sign of a break from the perfect May weather. Everyone has paused, breathless before the next change, which in this country seems to happen so perfectly and suddenly. I am so used to summer in Australia, however, when the days just keep getting longer and drier and the months stretch out in a desolate, dusty eternity before me, that I cannot believe it will happen. It is hard to comprehend a summer which bursts over the country in mid-June, flares briefly and intensely in August, and then is gone by the end of September. Four months! One of them mostly rain, and another two only middling hot.

Summer is also the season of festivals, when the Japanese come out to celebrate the middle of the year with beer and fires. There is the hotaru festival in early June, when we visit dark forests to watch the fireflies; then in August we have Obon, the festival of the dead, when people light fires to guide their dead relatives back to their homes; and straight after, hanabi, the firework festival. Japan in summer is about fire and water, and the omnipresent celebration of the passing of things.

My new job...

2007-04-26T21:20:00.000+09:00

This April I started my new part-time job as a Business English Instructor at Matsue Technical College, a high school/early university focussed on engineering and science, built in the rice paddies of North West Matsue. I scored the job through contacts (no interviews needed, thank you very much), and it has added a much needed 50% to my income. It has also added an essential experience to my life in Japan: the Japanese High School. Some of you may be familiar with my earlier discussion of matters school girl, but the strange things we hear in the West about these sultry temptresses constitute only a small part of our (often misguided) take on what appears to be a huge part of Japanese popular culture: High School Life. For every high school story we have in English, there must be a million anime series about High School. There are tales of High School girls with strange Spirit guides; convoluted tales of Creative Destruction; schools for delinquents; and, of course, girls dressing as boys in their "special" high school club. And that's without even considering the porn. So I feel truly privileged to get a chance to walk onto the grounds of what is, really, Japanese popular culture's biggest set.

So what is it like? When I walked through the gate I found myself looking at the scene from any one of those crazy shows, with the exact same long, grey three story buildings; the gravel soccer pitch; the same multi-paned windows with slightly overhanging eaves, all looking like it was built in the same year in the `60s, for the same generation which has subsequently refused to repopulate the world it left (I wonder why?) . I walked the same window-lined corridors, passing students in brown uniforms who all bowed politely to me and greeted me with "konnichiwa" (it seems it is essential to greet teachers one does not know, even in passing). I watched the students cleaning the halls in their recess periods (they have to clean their own classrooms!) and I finally ended up in a room exactly like the one in the picture above, right down to the detail of the windows and the desks (though admittedly, the desks were not transforming into monsters - but I felt like they should have). At any moment I expected the schoolkids to explode, sprout tentacles, suddenly spin around in swirls of sparkles only to reappear wearing miniskirts and cats ears, start doing crazy martial arts fightin' moves in the hall, or manifest their multi-dimensional Demon masters. None of this happened, although from the way my students looked at me I think they were expecting the same of me. Maybe they've seen the high school porn with the foreign teacher.

Matsue Technical College is a mixed high school/university system, so it has the first 2 years of University on its grounds. It only teaches engineering, as far as I can tell, and the best students can choose to go on to Shimane Uni to finish their studies. Apparently the College has a 98% success rate in finding work for its graduates. So one would assume it has a pretty good teaching system (or that this country sucks up engineers like a big whirly sucky thing at an engineering convention). I only have two classes, and my older students are so shy it is hard to tell how good they are, but my younger class (the year 4s, equivalent to University 1st years) are excellent students. They are cheerful and funny, and although very shy they respond to my efforts to impart English knowledge with something resembling ... well, resembling a response. Obviously a physics graduate from Australia entering an engineering first year class would expect the only response to his presence to be paper planes (or, in this country, fireballs and flying demon-spirit things); but in fact they knuckle under and do what they're told, and barely even talk or cause any trouble at all. The worst so far is one of them falling asleep. They are almost all boys, but the few girls don't even chatter that much. Outstanding students! Now all I need to do is fight off their demon masters, find the secret key to the heart of the Universe, steal the meta-gem and return to my own dimension safe from the attentions of the cat-eared girls from the school music club...

More signs of spring

2007-04-26T21:08:00.000+09:00

In more signs that spring has come - and possibly also that the weather has vaulted straight through to early summer - the frogs are out. The sight of a frog with a cherry blossom petal on its head is too good to be true. Friendly blighters too.

In other countries of the world such a sight would be rare, and frogs are considered to be denizens only of the rare wilderness. We found one of these cute little green fellas hopping around outside the door to our house, and the bullfrogs are singing outside my office at the University. These pictures were taken 5 minutes' bicycle ride from our house (in the deeps of the wilderness, since Japanese cities become hillside and forest very fast).

So spring is here. No more snow, no more cold, just the music of frogs and insects from here until November. You can almost feel the whole world breathing a sigh of relief that the nasty business of ice and snow is gone, even though this year was mild, and the summer promises to be ferociously hot. But I don't care; the sooner summer comes on, the sooner my inevitable spring allergies fade, and I can venture outside to enjoy the frogs and insects, whose voices now herald the oncoming Pollen Wave of Doom.