I learn a little more about this country every day.

welcome to thunderdome labor policy!

Unless I've really really misunderstood this editorial, the Ministry of Labor wants to abolish the overtime pay system for all "white collar" employees. It seems also to imply that the way this corner of the government wants to pursue the matter, salaried employees (as opposed to hourly wage earners) who are much more common than back in the US, could be expected to work much longer hours without any sort of legal rights to compensation.
I think the term "white collar" would include John Q Eikaiwa teacher.

What a fucking brilliant idea.

Why do so many people have it lodged between their ears that the road toward technological progress and increased financial security leads away from increased freedom?

life is a checklist! ride with me.

Maslow, that son of a russian jew, proposed long long ago that humans had a heiarchy of needs. Regardless of the dubiousness of his little pyramid, it made its way into my intro psych class, and consequently into the vaunted "long term memory".
I bring it up because of the wonderful security I feel gazing at that huge pot of curry in my kitchen, and the growing stockpile of dry and canned goods I've begun to amass. Observe:



Down there at the bottom, you'll see breathing (check), water, food, sex, sleep, homeostasis, and excretion. Sex has been sorely lacking for a good long while now, but this is one that I can find the power to take in my own hands. To tell the awful truth, at the moment I don't really feel driven to leave the house and meet people, so a lady back in Aomori who's very nice but not the prettiest and isn't that important to me is fine for now. It's not very demanding and I won't be getting laid as long as I'm dirt poor anyway. Eventually I'd like a new ladyfriend, but right now, I've got other pressing matters like money, studies, and getting used to my new life. However, it wasn't until today that I really felt like I had a lock on the food thing.
Security of body (check)
employment, resources (eh)
of morality (huh?)
of the family (no, actually)
of health, property (check)

I, and pretty much everyone else are entirely dismissive of this thing as a rigid model. Even so, I guess I'm gonna have to get started making friends, and getting sexually intimate before long. Oh bother.

the country to worry about: america

I ran into this magazine while I was buying my new keitai. The cover story (with excellent cover photo) is about the most "worrying" country: America. A quick perusal of the story was pretty surprising. It was about fundamentalist christians, aimless wars, guns, drugs, prisons, etc. In short, it was like the Euro media.
Except unlike the Euro media, it was published in Japanese. Most discussions of America in this country center on bringing closer ties to the two countries, and how best to clean the underside of the American boot stomping on a face forever (with your tongue). This one was actually the story about my country that I know, the one that most of us middle class expats know. And it's really heartening to see this kind of media, because it feels like a sign that, at long last, Japan gets it. (I don't really read enough Japanese media for adults. It could be that I'm only just happening onto this well-established story.)

Speaking of getting it though, how about that America when it talks about Japan? They can't tell fact from fiction, can't tell extreme from mundane, can't tell when you're being sarcastic... They constantly talk about the news stories that would have been on japanese boing boing 10 years ago if such a thing existed. And then they laugh their barroom laughs about this backward country full of soulless people. Idiots.

like father, not far from the tree!

Something occurred to me.

My dad is well respected as a "smart dude" by all his friends, but never really found great success in life.
All my friends think I'm a really "smart dude", but I can't deny that I haven't found anything approaching a career path, even as I enter my "late late 20's".

BACK TO STUDYING!

technology will save mankind.

witness: my new cell phone weighs 93 grams. I have installed as a potential ringtone a small snippet of "dick in a box".

there is no end to human potential.

year of the boor... bore... boar

I'm more in the mood to face forward than look back.

I don't have nearly so many reservations about the official mascot of 2007 as I did with the stupid dog. 2007 is the year of the boar. If you have kanji enabled, the character looks like this:

亥

Since my 2006 was nothing to sing about, I wanna make 2007 a karaoke sing-along that we can all join in. I have some very concrete goals in mind for 2007.

1. I'm throwing down the gauntlet on the kanji kentei. I'll take the test twice this year. My goal is to pass level 3, and try to take level pre-2 by the end of the year. In a perfect world, I'll pass level 2 proper in february 2008.
2. money matters. When I turn 28 in April, I want to be debt free (excluding of course, my behemoth student loan debt). By the end of the year, I want to have a certain amount saved as well. I won't disclose that amount here because it's embarassingly small.
3. bigger stronger faster more. I'll be joining a gym very soon, and I don't want to go in there without goals either. This year, I'll set some mediocre ones as a starting point. Run 10k in 45 min; press my own weight 10 times.
4. a backflip. maybe a wallflip.

I don't think any of those goals is out of the question. I want to make this the year where I exceed my own expectations, so I have some "whisper numbers" as well.

Conspicuously absent from my list is the Monbushou scholarship. Although I'm going to throw my hat in the ring again this year, I'm not expecting results this year... not when I haven't made any personal, professional or linguistic progress in the last 365. Maybe 2008 will be my year there.

a dog of a year.

2006, huh?

Not really a killer. I'm sure lots of interesting and exciting things happened, but looking back now, it was a slow year.

On the good side, I got my results on the JLPT (pass), bought my lovely little macbook, and got myself started in Tokyo. The last of those big things was my only important goal for the year.

On the bad side, I didn't get the monbushou scholarship, I lost a good part of what I put into the stock market, and consequently, have come to tokyo under the shadow of a couple thousand dollars of new debt. I also let all of my minor goals slip. While I may be a slightly better cook, a slightly better japanese speaker and reader, a slightly more tidy guy, lots of aspects of my life are stalled.

I would call "getting accustomed to reality" the theme of my 2006. The missteps I made this year left me with a more realistic impression of what I need to do to get where I want to be (even if "where I want to be" has gotten a lot less clear). For more on where I want to be, stay tuned. A year of the boar post is coming soon.

japan needs english.

Who better to tell Japan how to handle it's future than someone who's only lived here a few years, and still doesn't have a typical highschooler's grasp of the language? That's why I'm gonna take this opportunity to share my opinion on the world stage (aka blogger).

Japan needs English. By hook or crook, Japan should find it's way to speaking English as well as other developed countries.
Setting aside the reality that even the most English-positive of my educator friends don't think English is very important to the Japanese, there might seem to be a conflict of interest. I am after all, reliant on the English learners of Japan. But I fall squarely in the self-hating camp of English educators. I share my reason for disliking eikaiwa with a lot of teachers, in thinking we aren't very effective, but with the novel addendum that I believe we're failing them on a very important matter.

Having taught students from 5 years old to retirement, in the public and private forums, I've watched and taken part in the failure at several levels. Recently I delivered a sub-par lesson to a very serious student. She's a doctoral candidate shooting for a position with a global charitable organization. It got me to thinking, am I really the best she can find in Japan, even when money isn't an object? As a serious graduate student, why doesn't she already speak near-perfect English like my German friends?

She's not the only example either. I see people day in and day out who are studying English to speak to their French and German and Chinese colleagues. Professional, sincere, hard-working folks who studied for 6 years in middle and high school, and often in college as well. After their 10 years of ineffective study, we just don't have the juice to solve the problem in 40 lessons. I don't have even an inkling of how to remedy this systemic shortfall.

I returned to this thought today (as usual) after reading an editorial at Yomiuri. I agreed with the editorial for the most part, that Japan would greatly benefit from a stronger presence in the UN, and greater involvement in the international politcal community in general. Japan, being a resource-poor country, benefits from almost all strengthening of international ties, be they via university exchange programs, tourism, or business. Yet the de facto international language elludes them.
Especially as Japan moves away from being a sattelite of planet America and becomes part of the new league of semi-super powers, it needs to be able to take English ability in it's populace for granted.

(wow. all flash, no substance in this entry)

junshoku (caution, japan-love ahead)

junshoku (殉職): death in the line of duty.

Murakami uses this word to describe the deaths of two station attendants at Kasumgaseki station from unwitting sarin exposure. They had picked up and disposed of the leaking bags, and unwittingly saved a bunch of lives. It's not the same sort of professional heroism that we normally associate with "junshoku".
This usage seems very correct though. Even if they were unwise to do what they did, and didn't really anticipate the consequences of their action, they did their job. This juxtaposition of a word normally reserved for our mass-produced uniformed "heroes" with the dreary workaday life of the even-more-mass-produced working stiff, is wonderful. It's one of those things I really love about the country. A hero is a hero, death is death. No need to analyze the actor, no peering into his "soul" (no soul!) for his true intentions.
If the duty of shoving people into a train is potentially heroic, what duty isn't? You and I and everyone who helps keep the country safe, clean and well-lubricated are all heroes in that sense. We have duties to one another, and to the society (see my entry raving about the constitution), and they might one day cost us our lives. Thank god.

how low can you go?

I don't think many of my readers will really know what this is about (not me), but:

An American refuses to fail. No matter what happens, an American loses only when he labels it a failure (see the unshakable American belief in the power of words). When it comes to protecting a fragile ego, and bullying those around you into accepting your worldview, this works in your favor, but when it comes to gauging your life, and living your day to day, it can be a disaster.

To wit: imagine you slip a bit, and have a rough time of it for a while. If you don't accept the failure as a failure and move to set yourself right, the bottom creeps lower and lower. Eventually even the most horrible things that happen to you and happen by your hand become just the lower end of "acceptable", and the old "failure" looks impossibly naive.

I've always thought the pleasure principle and it's inevitable diminishing returns was the heart of evil in humanity, but looking at it turned on it's head, I suppose it's really there to keep us afloat.

are you for real?

fees deducted from my international wire transfer to my citibank account:

Japan side: 2500yen (for something) + 1500yen (for something else, god knows)
America side: $16 (for something, even god doesn't know) + $10 (for "incoming wire transfer")

for those of you who aren't so good at math, that's just about $60 total at the going rate (over 7000 yen).

That is ridiculous. like "close my freaking citibank account because they charge fees that other banks don't" ridiculous.

this is an email that i wrote to myself while I was sitting in starbucks a few days ago. I wanted to remember a couple of things I was considering writing blog entries about. I'm too lazy for that though.

"you dont need to emerge from nothing = starbucks

terror = the hellmouth of freedom

japan needs english."

if you have any questions about these three ideas, please ask. Otherwise, I'll be in my apartment waiting for my muse.

wait for it.... wait for it....

Hej. I'm back online.

I'm quite settled into Tokyo now. I'm still getting these moments over and over where I'm surprised at how good things are and how easy it all is. and this is against the backdrop of me living on an extremely tight budget (whittling down 52man of debt repayment in 4 paychecks while furnishing my apartment bit by bit). Imagine how I'll feel about the place when I own more than one pair of pants that aren't the bottom half of a suit, or when I buy a coat!


But like I parenthesized, the money thing means although I can enjoy the sights and sounds of tokyo, I can't yet enjoy the tastes, or the inside of many buildings. Life remains, as of this writing, on hold. I'll take this time to study, and lay out what I want to do and how to get there. When I figure that stuff out, you'll be the first to know.

first things first

I'm back in tokyo, and all kinds of stuff like that, but more importantly:

If anyone knows how I can arrange for the murder of those two very unfunny fatty twins that are showing up on every damned tv show in Japan, please comment below.
I think I may be able to justify killing them in self defense because in addition to the years they take off of my life by raising my blood pressure and forcing release of stress hormones, they also rob me of hope for the future of Japan and the world... pushing me perceptibly closer to offing myself.

more on tokyo soon. (sneak peek = tiny apartment, great location, pretty cheap, job from friday)

whats stranger than strange

Time's up.
Early tomorrow morning, I'll be getting on a train toward the airport. Leaving is a lot stranger than being here ever was. Because my folks are out of town for a couple of days, they won't be there to see me off. So it's just me silently creepin out of the house in the early morning, never to come back. Well not for a year or so, at least.
But really, it is like I won't be coming back. Thanks to some logistical things I've taken care of during this trip, and things that I'll be solving when I get back to Tokyo, several little threads that had bound me tightly to the parents are finally cut. For the forseeable future, even if I do come back here, it won't be back to the same place. This is sort of a farewell to indolence and immaturity and hello to owning a bed outright (for the first time!).

What's really strange though is washing the dishes and doing my laundry in silence, in American suburbia.

unrelenting.

I'm just about finished reading "The Cult at the End of the World". The story it tells of Aum Shinrikyou (these days known as Aleph), is shocking. Unrelentingly so. From kidnappings and murders to mining for uranium and stealing cutting-edge technologies for enriching it, the cult makes the last 10 years or so of anti-US terrorism look ameteurish.
Far from being a group of like-minded people with a political grudge, Aum was a world wide organization using shady business practice, intimidation, kidnapping, forgery, arms dealing, drug manufacture, and whatever other means they could to enrich themselves, and better arm themselves to kill every last non-believer in Japan. Were it not for a couple of poorly timed missteps, they certainly could have brought Tokyo and all of Japan to it's knees.

At the time, I wasn't especially aware of the news, or the extent of coverage that the US media gave the story, but I feel pretty certain that it wasn't nearly enough. Despite being likely the biggest terrorist threat that any nation has ever faced, in America, Aum remains largely unknown. Those that do know of the cult seem to remember something about a gas attack on subways, and a fat guy with long hair and a beard. (My dad seems strangely fixated on the idea that in his early career he sold his bathwater, for the purpose of drinking, and thereby attaining some extra degree of enlightenment.) But we're talking about an event with as much impact on the national psyche of Japan as September 11th has had on America.
Unlike America's run in with mass murder, Japan couldn't rally 'round the flag. Japan wasn't "under attack" from people it could call the enemy, or people of a different race, from different countries and societies. The worst of the worst at Aum were supposed to be the best of the best. They were graduates from the top of their classes at the best universities in Japan. They were rich, and successful people.
When, in the middle of a hard recession, and fresh on the heels of the deadliest earthquake to strike Japan after the war, Japan suffered this further blow, no one could feel very good about Japan and its future. I imagine this low point in early 95 was where a lot of the changes the last 11 years have brought Japan got their start, most especially, the renewed interest in Japanese nationalism (10 years later).



As an aside, reading a little of what the net has to say, I found something that feels relevant to me.

Jay Rubin holds that [Haruki] Murakami also had highly personal reasons for wanting to write Underground, notably that he wished to learn more about Japan after living almost entirely abroad for nine years and that he wanted to fulfil a responsibility he felt towards Japan's society

Having made a home of the country, I always feel like I'm woefully unaware of the history of the country, and most importantly, the history of the last 30 years... the world that my boss and my coworkers and my friends grew up in. The language is really only the tip of the iceberg.

Where I'll spend my morning tomorrow.

The naked lounge sits quietly on a corner near the R street light rail station. In a building that looks like a house with shop windows, and set in the ubiquitous sacramento jewel tones, it's hardly as enticing as it's name would suggest. My guess is that the name comes from the female nudes (paintings) inside. It would take an aggressively anti-porn lesbian to find the namesake artwork at the naked lounge titillating, but I did once have a disastrous fling with a member of the staff (prior to her employment there).
In any other town, the naked lounge wouldn't really stand out, but this is sacratomato we're talking about. Offering the right mix of aggressively indie and aggressively gentrified puts it in a market of its own in sac. Really, offering any mix of the two would put it in a market of it's own, seeing as the town's coffee market is owned by starbucks, with 4 or 5 reputable indie sellers, staffed by very pierced and very tattooed young people... (and java city, but they don't know ambiance or good tea from adam).
The interior features cozy furniture, attractive, friendly staff and a clientele that seems to have a lot of time to drink coffee. More importantly, it features cheap, delicious iced tea. At 1.75 for a big beer glass of properly brewed iced tea, and 1.00 for a refill, it's an easy place to
spend a morning, or and afternoon, or a series of them.
Tomorrow, I've got a bunch of business to take care of, and a bit of a yen to see "the departed", so I won't be wasting the whole day in a jade green armchair, just enough time to look cool for reading a book in japanese.

marketing success

1. last night's episode of south park was unexpectedly good, and about World of Warcraft in an unusually non-derisive way
2. Blizzard is running a 10 day free trial period. I was surprised too.
3. I'm downloading the client now (all 2.7 gigs of it)

4. (specualtion) my world probably won't be rocked, and I won't buy the game, but I think a lot of worlds are going to be rocked, and a lot of copies are going to get sold. Impressive.

UPDATE bastards wasted my time. It's not until after you download a 2.7 gig file, and install a 4.6 gig program that they tell you you'll need a credit card to verify your identity. I'm the last dude alive without a credit card, I guess.

just a thought about the "freedom tower" (s?)

The old building "the world trade center" was precisely that, a space occupied by people from all around the world doing trade. (about 10% of the victims were not US citizens.) It's identity was tied to it's content, and it's exterior was iconic, and free from the taint of a heavy-handed identity. It was long, hard, throbbing commerce.

So what of the new building? It reeks of america. The damned thing is 1776 feet tall (as though anyone cares about feet). It's called the "freedom tower". Who is going to occupy this jingoistic space? How can you locate an embassy in there? Looking at the outside, how can you locate anything but a web design firm circa 1999 in there?
The only way I can see the tower put to good use is if the government fills it up with all of it's domestic and international spying infrastructure. And that presumes that you think ironic tension between a building's name and it's purpose is "good use".