日本
you're strange and you're beautifulDon’t let it snow, don’t let it snow
So, the worst snow storm to hit the East Coast in ten years decided to arrive while we were moving to New York from Florida. Ahem. It’s been interesting. Am borrowing some internet just to check emails and write up a quick update. I’m so pleased that the otaku post come across well to some people, I think there are more folks out there fed up with the labelling than I thought.
I’m itching to respond to comments, post, read all my google reader…incredibly frustrating. Must unload van and sleep at some point.
Damn, I was going to write a closing in Japanese but forgot that most computers don’t have Japanese keyboard installed. I am so lost! I’m going to think of Jo Odagiri wearing those tight white trousers in Maison de Himiko to keep me going.
Off to NYC…
I’ll be moving up to Manhattan on Saturday, cats in carriers and all. My head is spinning slightly as we (husband and I) had only put our British lives in storage and left England 3 weeks ago, have chilled out in Florida since then, and are now bundling off to a cupboard in the Upper East Side for who knows how long. I’m still referring to all prices in pounds and pence and no one believes I was born and raised in the US. Strange times indeed.
Probably more details than anyone cares to know, but I’ve got a pretty good rhythm going with my reading and writing that will be put on hold for the next few days. Which may be for the best, as I’ve been ruminating over a rather political post relating to the parallels between the US politics I live in here, and Japanese politics that I study at least as closely, if note more.
ぺらぺら! Blah blah!
The title of this entry comes from a cute clip of an anime showing a funny/awkward interaction between a gaijin and two young Japanese women. In it, the white dude and the Japanese girl exchange a seemingly dynamic and friendly conversation, all the while babbling just one word: ぺらぺら! (perapera – fluent), translated in the video as ‘blah blah!’ Honky looks smug about his Japanese ‘fluency’ and the girls run away like New Yorkers from a tourist asking where Sex and the City is filmed.
This little clip makes me so incredibly happy and inspired. Pretty extreme reaction to a one and a half minute clip from a cartoon, but I’ll explain.
私はオタクではありません。(or so it seems?)
This is an unusually lengthy and opinionated post, which may prove unsuccessful. I don’t usually venture out with my own perceptions as they’re not very developed, but this topic has been pretty active with Japan bloggers and provided a lot of information. The following is just my take on this whole issue. [It's also the first time I've typed a full sentence in Japanese on this blog - probably wrong, but ho hum]
For years, I assumed that I was a geek. I took 4 years of Latin in high school, became HTML literate at 17, studied biochemistry* during my ‘down time’ in my mid 20’s, and have now become a fully fledged Japanophile. These supposedly marginalised interests and the fact that I am a shameless obsessive has earned me the appellative geek by ‘IRL’ (In Real Life) friends. When I started becoming infatuated with all things Japanese, it was automatically assumed that I had become オタク (otaku), that special brand of manga-reading, anime-watching, J-pop-listening, techno whiz geek.
How things change.
Facebooking Michio Kaku
Another in what will be a long-running commentary on the great and good who can be followed/friended/subscribed to…
In my mid-twenties, I became a serious lover of science. Having been told all throughout my education that I was a science moron, my ‘knowledge’ (if it can be called such) is negligible. But the stigma has thoroughly worn off, and I am reading books well beyond my comprehension…simply because they are so beautiful.
Two such that I make tentative dips into when the brain is full with coffee are Hyperspace and Beyond Einstein by theoretical physicist Michio Kaku. He has an incredible mind, as well as a rather canny ability to reach the layperson; hence why someone like me can enjoy the following snippet posted on his Facebook:
The curious feature of superstrings, however, is that they can only vibrate in 10 dimensions. This is, in fact, one of the reasons why it can unify the known forces of the universe: in 10 dimensions there is “more room” to accommodate both Einstein’s theory of gravity as well as sub-atomic physics. In some sense, previous attempts at unifying the forces of nature failed because a standard four-dimensional theory is “too small” to jam all the forces into one mathematical framework.
Okay, so maybe I can’t contextualize that as well as, say, a really smart person but it still feels important to me as a human being. The great Unified Theory in the sky ought to be a concern for me, as it’s pursuit is always driving humanity further.
Alright, I’m going to curb the proselytising and just reccomend anyone else who was conditioned by education to give physics a wide intellectual berth to check out his site.
No romaji for me, thanks
stand-up, knock-down kanji!
Something I have found on my hitherto solitary journey into Japanese is that the rate of learning is vastly different with this particular language.
I’ve had my very brief dalliances with Spanish, French and Italian, with 4 years of Latin thrown in for no particular reason. All of these languages had a pretty consistent rate of progress for the serious learner. The most obvious common denominator is the ability to almost instantly pronounce words, even if their meaning is still unknown.
This all sounds incredibly obvious so far; but when I volunteered to help out high school freshmen year students studying French, it opened my eyes to the value of script. I realised that all writing systems were in fact ideograms developed and therefore associated with cultural and social meanings, sights, sounds, images, and even tastes. Everyone is in some way a synesthete.
The most complex website about Japan I’ve ever seen
In my daily Japan blog trawl, I’ve come across Néojaponisme many times but for some reason or other never clicked over to it. Well, a blog post (via @Japan_Blogs) by one of their founders/compatriots/revolutionaries finally led me round to it.
No-sword author Matt Treyvaud is a ridiculously intelligent translator, linguist and thankfully, blogger. [He's also composed some 8-bit versions of Madama Butterfly, and therefore assumed a level of rarefied cool in my eyes.] His level of accomplishment and knowledge of Japanese is food for inspiration when the daily rote of memorisation gets this student of 日本語 downhearted. I started my slow-paced tread down this road because of the hints given by translators at the hit-or-miss-ness of translations into English. Even at their best, a translator will lament the futility of squeezing a trim, elegant Japanese expression into a lengthy, detailed English sentence.
John Hersey’s Hiroshima
During a browse around Borders, I noticed a newly minted edition of John Hersey’s Hiroshima featuring a colour-enhanced photo of the skeletal, eerily beautiful Peace Memorial Dome that survived the bomb. Finding this 2009 edition was a matter of days after Barack Obama accepted the invitation from the Mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be the first US President to visit the two cities hit by atomic bombs. The date has yet to be fixed, as his recent Asia tour wouldn’t allow sufficient time to do such a historic visit justice.
Back to the book: I found my own copy at a vintage bookshop in Chichester, with the iconic original 1940s Penguin cover (orange bands top and bottom). I was surprised to see a fresh edition on the bookshelves, and a quick check of the publishing dates explained why. The two most recent ed’s were in 2002 – when I emigrated to the UK – and 2004 – the year I was married. I wasn’t likely to be scouring the bookshelves as I normally like to do during those years. This being my first experience with a copy yet to be coffee-stained or have its spine broken, it was like fresh hope for a whole set of new readers from 2009 onwards. Read the rest of this entry »
Zen and the Art of Book Reading
X-Post from MutantFrog on Japanese Libraries. I left a comment/query about an observation of Japanese students in libraries, which I thought I’d note down here (along with my love of libraries). I’ve generally taken more notice of the Japanese students in the areas where I spend most of my time (Chichester and Portsmouth), something made even easier because they are both major university towns.
They’re all a bit too young for me to talk to, though I did chat a bit with a young Japanese lad on an art course – this was a few years before getting immersed in the culture and language. Sadly, I was too frenetic and off-the-wall for him to get a word in edgewise…and I used to sniff him. He had the most lovely, subtle cologne and I liked to take a good sniff off the front or sleeve of his shirts when I saw him. For one of our final projects, he absolutely clobbered the whole class at the final design exhibition with a stunning advert about trains done in sunset shades and black ink. I finally lost my nerve to smell him due to my awe of his skill.
Aaaanyway…
Photographs of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Euro tour
Apropos of my last post, the man himself has tweeted a series of atmospheric photos taken by Aoki Takamasa. These were shot at the Berlin concert, and show the level of precision taken in organising a performance that is disarmingly and beautifully minimal when performed.
And thanks to the interconnectedness of the internet, fans of electronic chillout tracks should check out Takamasa’s music (though such fans will probably already know him).
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