has hitotsubashi got its thumbs up its ass or what?

I have no idea what the school itself is like, but at a glance, it's web presence is sort of laughable. see evidence lifted directly from their site below.





yep, captains of dispute resolution. it's not an album name, or an intentionally awkward t-shirt phrase, it's the ambition of the hitotsubashi legal program.

clinton 1997 or japan today?

Every dollar we devote to preventing conflicts, to promoting democracy, to stopping the spread of disease and starvation brings a sure return in security and savings.

Yet international affairs spending today is just 1 percent of the federal budget -- a small fraction of what America invested in diplomacy to choose leadership over escapism at the start of the Cold War. If America is to continue to lead the world, we here who lead America simply must find the will to pay our way.

A farsighted America moved the world to a better place over these last 50 years. And so it can be for another 50 years. But a shortsighted America will soon find its words falling on deaf ears all around the world.

Almost exactly 50 years ago, in the first winter of the Cold War, President Harry Truman stood before a Republican Congress and called upon our country to meet its responsibilities of leadership. This was his warning.

He said, "If we falter, we may endanger the peace of the world -- and we shall surely endanger the welfare of this nation."

That Congress, led by Republicans like Senator Arthur Vandenberg, answered President Truman's call. Together they made the commitments that strengthened our country for 50 years. Now let us do the same. Let us do what it takes to remain the indispensable nation -- to keep America strong, secure and prosperous for another 50 years.

In the end, more than anything else, our world leadership grows out of the power of our example here at home, out of our ability to remain strong as one America.




I've lifted this all from atrios who lifted it from elsewhere... but thats from clintons state of the union in 1997 (far cry from the terrorist boogeymen we call a sotu today). it strikes me that a country that's thinking like that, or whose leaders are thinking like that is a country that's set to maintain long term prosperity. But I suppose the prosperity of 1997 wasn't really that long term.

april 30. the last day of this phase.

I'm just putting the finishing touches on the application for the big monbushou money. These few thousand characters of japanese I've written, if they work out for me and get me to school, could be worth $100,000 or so, and that's just the school fees and stipend... there's a lot of future after law school that would have been built on that foundation.

from here, it's about actually getting admission to the schools in question, which means its really about studying japanese again. hurdle number one is the two tekisei shiken(s) coming up in early and late june. they are the japanese equivalent of the lsat.
from there it's the written tests and interviews at the schools themselves.
and then, I don't know yet. drinking myself into oblivion?

If I were to make a flowchart, each box would have a failure option that goes directly to the last step.

also, stephen colbert is a funny man. “This administration is soaring, not sinking,” he said. “They are re-arranging the deck chairs--on the Hindenburg.”

rough draft. first serious thing I've ever written in japanese. lots of revising to do.

excised for terribleness. if you happened to read the essay, I apologize. it was so full of dead end sentences and mismatched subjects and objects that I'm really quite embarrased by it.

I've fixed it up quite nicely in the meantime.

aww man.

Just now, on my second practice test, I nearly doubled my score on the logical reasoning test from the Japanese LSAT, but there's a big lame catch. The first test I took was a lot harder, if you reason from the average scores. The average results were around 30% better on this test than the first one I took.

Still, I do feel like I've made a lot of headway in learning how to read these sort of questions. I like practice tests a lot.

pleasantly surprised

I hadn't expected that I would actually get a better shave when I changed razors, but I did. I did get a better shave. The bright green vibrating razor thing from gilette (which it seems isn't even their most recent razor) gave me, hands down the best shave I've ever had. And to think, they say the market doesn't deliver justice to the needy.

I left my spare razor handle at the onsen, and the regular old mach3 seems to have fallen out of currency in Japan, so I had to get a little more up to date. As a consequence, I have a good number of spare mach3 razors, if you, the dedicated readers of my blog want them. Just let me know.

why not blog?

sorry for not blogging for a long long time. it may be the norm from here on. i'm sort of shifting to permanently "busy" from here on. i'll still be posting junk every now and again, but making regular entries here is not how i need to spend my time right now. how will i be spending it? studying like a maniac.

something else i wanna get out there: the jet programme has probably been the best three years of my life.

night time on the bridge from the residential area to the red light district

night time on the bridge...
Originally uploaded by notnato.

It's slowly getting warm enough to venture outside the house after sunset. I doubt we've broken a daytime high of 12 degrees (54 or so F) so far this year, but it wont be much longer. The sakura are due to bloom in the next few days, and then even the cruel, cruel mother of aomori nature can't hold out on us, can she?

It's not warm enough yet to turn off my heater, or to spring clean my back room . I got a good, long look at the room while I was looking for my diploma, which may or may not be in this country. I bumped into my suitcases back there too. In less than a 100 days, they'll be overfilled with all my junk.

ill na na

ill na na
Originally uploaded by notnato.

There was a short break in the 7 month long cloud yesterday, so I went photographering. This is a photo of part of the roster at Jasmac, the biggest of the night palaces in Aomori.

In principle, its kind of like a shopping mall of very small bars. In practice it looks like a hotel with a sign over each door, and a small bar in each room in place of an uncomfortable bed with a dirty cover sheet.

That one really is called "ill na na". That means two things: #1, I've got to go; #2, Foxy Brown's got some explaining to do.

for my next trick...

I shall turn 27!

*poof*

astounding, isn't it?

class and cafes.

A funny memory just surfaced.

A couple of days before I left Sacramento for Japan, I was studying Japanese in the same cafe where I had been spending a lot of time lately. Somehow or another, I wound up in a conversation with a professional looking older guy (early 50s?), about Japan, and from his perspective, business in Japan.
It got kind of catty because he was a drooling fan of the marketplace and international free trade, and I was anything but. It was a restrained cattyness though. Not a very meaningful moment.

However, I had just today been thinking about how I'd like to go back to that cafe, and drink an iced tea and study Japanese law books and feel elite as all get out. The professional looking guy is just another of those moments in my meandering youth that I feel bound (by some sort of sense of honor) to revenge.
This symbolic revenge is a good 2/3 of the reason I've changed gears in the last year. Success in an entirely non-specific sense will chase out the ghosts of the great cafes.

jlsat, first time, not a charm.

so I decided to give a shot at the japanese version of the LSAT, the 年統一適性試験. Things didn't really go that well. I've only taken the first section, but in the alotted time, I only managed to get about 23%. On the bright side, I actually got 63% of the questions I answered. That implies that the biggest (though far from only) problem is my reading speed, and not my comprehension.

Extrapolating totally unreasonably, if I were to be able to finish the test (meaning raise my reading pace dramatically), and if I could get similar scores on the logical analysis and reading comprehension tests, I would score in the top 30%. of Japanese people!

Or I could just not extrapolate, in which case I still beat the single lowest score among the 9759 people that took the test. I've got until June 11th to make those extrapolations come true.

monbushou, fuck.

San Francisco is an ass. I had asked the san fran consulate about the monbushou scholarship deadline for this year, and they said, "yeah, probably about the same as last year". It's a month earlier... and the interviews are mid-week.

I'm gonna have to play hooky in early june, hop on an airplane, put on a suit, and smile wide enough and keigo humbly enough to convince them that I'm the man they want to educate in the ways of Japanese law.

Enough blog entries, I gotta get reading. (my j-blog SHOULD spring back to life within the next couple of days)

update-o:

(IN SF) Japanese exam = thursday June 8
Interview = friday June 9
(airplane noise)
(IN Tokyo) Japanese equivalent of the LSAT = Sunday, June 11
LSAT = Monday, June 12

That means that if I want to take both of those tests, I've got to hop on a plane directly after the interview, fly back to tokyo, take a nap, and then go take the J-lsat. 20 hours later, it's english language LSAT time. 20 hours after that, I'll probably be standing in front of a bunch of very bored students again.
I sort of need them both: the japanese one as a testament to language skill and my worthiness of admissions to a japanese law school in spite of my a non-japanese, non-law background; the english one, in case things don't work out, and I need to shift to plan B, american Law school (not the morning after pill).

facial expression, accent, pitch. (choosing my own adventure)

I'm blessed/stuck with another long weekend, and even less money than the last two. So How will I occupy myself for 5 days? Well, studying is job one. But after that, there are a couple of things that I've been meaning to do. I'll probably choose one of these three.

#1, try and improve my karaoke. I don't have enough sense of shame to keep me off of the karaoke stage, but what I even more thoroughly lack is a half-decent voice, or any sense of pitch. I may try and get a handle on how bad my voice is, with the mic I have in house... and see if I can do anything about it.

#2, same thing, but with my japanese accent.

#3, work on those crazy eyes. I'm really self concious about photographs. There's this clear divide in the world of photography subjects between people who know how to look natural for a camera, even when looking at the lens, and people like me. People like me, no matter how natural a face they try to put on, they look nuts...like all the problems in the world are trying to escape through their eyes, and onto flickr.
Since I'm not nuts, I have a feeling that I could learn to make a phony face like everyone else. So maybe I'll take some time with a mirror, and a digital camera to learn how to hide my inner torment.

dandan umai.

Suntory jouki nama

this stuff really isn't bad. I think if you don't come in assuming you know what beer should taste like, this is actually a bit better than the mainstream beers that I've had. This despite it's being a zasshuu 2.

Whose side are you on?

Today, I spent the day in the library reading up on Japanese contract law. I've been working for about a week on an intro to civil law book, and dutifully noting all of the wonderful new words like 瑕疵 and 強制執行. It wasn't until I got out of the library, and in front of a window that I actually started thinking about these words and laws meant.
I was at mcdonalds, listening to the blue notebooks, and like always, the music made me look at the sky. Except the sky was mostly obscured by a giant アイフル sign. Aifuru is one of the dozens of instant, high interest loan companies here.
Seeing the sign reminded me of two things. First, who it was that these laws regarding default and forced liquidation of assets were referring to. The book I'm reading doesn't even grant them facial features, but there's a huge swath of this generation that is getting by only by the skin of their teeth. A lot of them are the inaka Okies, fled to the big city in search of warmer climes, and better times... and a lot of them are still residing in the economic wastelands, like Aomori.
What really tests my ability to ignore the contents, and just smugly say "fuck the poor", is that that was kind of what my family looked like when I was 17 or so. As well kempt and well edu-ma-cated as I may be now, there was a pretty long period where we were on the receiving end of these laws. Where some contract shenanigans cost my dad his 20 acres; where irresponsibility lost us our house, or our plane tickets home. It's not nice living on the cusp of disaster.

Now that I feel "in the clear", I wonder: Is becoming the Man the best revenge?

japanese laws you may not know.

In Japan, if someone performs a necessary service for you in your absence and without your consent, you may still be liable to reimburse them. It's right there in section 697 of the civil code.

Say for example you were on vacation, and a storm blew into town that could potentially damage your house. If your neighbors paid for or performed some necessary pre-storm maintenance, you gotta pay them back.

In section 698, there's some mention of the rule being applicable to face-saving situations too.