contra-debito

boing boing gave debito another little fame boost. There are three kinds of people who know about debito. People outside of Japan who for some reason or another have researched Japan a little; people inside Japan who incessantly find fault with this place for not being American enough; and people in Japan who'd rather he disappeared.

Fans of this blog will quickly deduce that I'd rather he disappeared. To wit, I've done a lot of thinking on my own about how to make Japan a better place. I'm no genius, but no matter how long a list I come up with, "bang on the doors of the brothels until they let US in" just doesn't figure. While debito does some worthwhile work, the high profile stuff is petty, and counter productive.
In his on going segment, he goes to hostess bars and badgers the owners about the idea of "Japanese only" because he has a Japanese Passport, nyah nyah. Think of how many people in his circumstance who are suffering the interminable pain of not being welcomed in certain establishments. White + well-situated + fluent-speaker + Japanese citizen + interested in going to hostess bars... there must be close to a dozen!
But does it do any good for the rest of the foreign population of Japan, who are predominantly east asian, usually aren't so well situated, aren't fluent speakers, are in much more tenuous positions as regards their visa, and don't have the money, or self-obsession that it takes to have fun at a hostess club?
If you presume that these places have had or heard tell of bad experiences with foreign customers (since they're mostly in US military towns, or ports that see a lot of russian sailors, that's not hard to believe), you can understand their situation, even if you don't sympathize. They have hundreds of Japanese customers, and they all know the rules, and play by them, or break them within understood boundaries. One fluent, but pushy guy comes along and gives a sermon and some legal threats and forces his way into the club, and badgers the owner into taking the sign down. Now everything is hunkydory for the next brash russian sailor who doesn't know the rules, right?

If debito wins his war, what will Japan look like? I can't believe he expects to see all of god's children holding hands and singing kum ba yah. Either:
a. nothing changes, and Japan stays the best place ever.
b. the signs come down, and shopkeepers secretly dread the day that a gaijin comes to their shop, knowing that they're potentially at risk of a wrecked club or a lawsuit.
c. (this one is pure hysteria) the signs come down, and along with them, the reasonable assumption that your customers understand how your traditional business
works. clubs of all kinds march in lockstep down the path of strict legalese, and all the ambiguity that makes life fun is replaces with signed waivers at the entrance.

that was me

it turns out that was also what I look like when a nasty virus is building stem inside me, preparing to leave me bedridden for 2 days.

this is me

this is what I look like when I've just finished reading the longest book I've ever read. It's what I look like when that book was in Japanese, and was by turns convoluted, boring and depressing. It's what I look like when I am thinking about my initials being intentionally selected as NAM to match the first syllable of nam myoho renge kyou, and about how Japan was related to my father's dreams in 1979 and how it's related to my dreams today.

It's how I look when I know the first and hardest chapter of my time in Tokyo is over, and when I'm starting to feel proud of myself.

3 possibilities

about this sentence:

例えばデータを機器間で移動するには、CPUや画像処理チップの高い処理能力が前提になる。
"For example, to transfer data between computers, a powerful CPU and graphics chip are a must."

either,
1: my japanese and my dictionary are misleading me
or
2: my understanding of computer networking is fundamentally flawed
or
3: yomiuri's computer people really don't know shit.

Growing up poor is spending the rest of your life trying to escape (and never realizing that you have).