you're kidding right?

Japan, like every other country frets over what its kids are learning in schools. Just like in the US, you see article after article chronicling the descent into mediocrity of the average Japanese student. Among a number of other responses to this problem, the government has decided to give more leeway to individual schools and school boards by leaving several hours a week open to study what each particular school finds most relevant and pressing.

Tokyo and Hyogo Ken have got the same idea. They're going to take 2 hours of class time every week to teach traditional Japanese culture. This way kids can learn that certain aspects of manga and anime come from traditional Japanese drawing styles (no mention whether the origin of the comic book format, and 95% of the drawing style is essentially adapted from the west). They'll also get to study why Noh and Kabuki are relevant to our daily lives.

Why? Well, the article I read isn't really clear on why. In fact the only concrete benefit it seems to document is that they intend on teaching some English phrases about Japanese culture so that when these kids grow up, they can tell foreigners about tea ceremony and Noh theater. Another benefit is suggested, to tell the truth. I'm not following the calculus myself, but it seems that if Japanese kids knew more about 600 year old pottery, they would have more self esteem.

So you know where I'm coming from, I don't really think especially much of traditional Japanese culture. Yet, I don't think it's a bad thing to teach in schools, IN ART CLASS. I really distrust these people so eager to force Japanese-ness into the schools, by hook or crook. Sacrificing time (more than 7% of weekly class time) that could be used on something more productive than say, how many times it's appropriate to turn a tea cup when presenting it, is stupid.

This addition to the curriculum mirrors a national debate, as to whether "愛国心" (love of country) should be taught in schools. Here's an over-zealous critique by a foreign press correspondent, and here's a little bit about it (buried inside a longer, but worthwhile article) from Marutei Tsurunen, the first diet member of foreign descent. Ooh, this is really good, if you read any of my links about this matter read that one.

several dozen minutes of toil later...

I got me a job. now I gotta figure out how to get me a new plane ticket.

I think I'm gonna have to go into a little bit of debt to make this all work. "lame"

bachelor chow.

I don't have the money to eat out right now, so it's bachelor chow for me. For example:

4-500g spaghetti
2 onions
40-60 mukiebi
2 piman
200g ketchup
pinch salt/pepper
1T olive oil

boil spaghetti
wash+drain shrimp
cut onion into 1cm slices, piman into 5mm rings
fry the onion in the oil on high until transparent,
then add the piman and shrimp and stirfry over medium

when the shrimp's done, turn heat to low, add ketchup,
once heated through, add the spag and go!


Yes, it's ketchup based sauce, and with the low sugar ketchup I bought, it was surprisingly good.

let the freeters eat cake.

Japan's got a problem, according to all the newspapers and TV shows I've seen. The problem? Not enough young people are taking on proper jobs with long term prospects. It seems after generations their ancestor's hard work, Japanese youth are giving up, and becoming lazy and unproductive. So sayeth the Japanese mass media.

I know what you're thinking: Oh dear! That must mean that companies are having a hard time finding quality employees. Maybe it's a good time for me to try to find a job in Japan.

But you'd be mistaken. Firstly, by thinking that you can enter the Japanese job market and compete for positions with Japanese people. That's not going to happen. Secondly, because the companies are not having a lick of trouble. As the economy continues to warm up, the companies having trouble finding quality employees are those offering low paying, unskilled temporary jobs. There are countless young people eager and qualified to enter into the proper careers... but not enough hiring, and hiring and work practices so inflexible as the rule out a huge portion of the qualified society.

The media is trying to make a big deal of the small number of people who have shitty jobs and don't especially mind. If anything, it's an initiative to keep competition high for decent jobs so as to keep the wages in check.

freakin' awesome.

"Needless to say, we should not forget that Japanese were not the only victims of the Showa War."

8.8071万円生活

Can I survive 29 days in Tokyo (with rent already paid) on a scant 8.8071man en?

Well, yeah. No sweat. If Bobby and Thane can pretend to do it on 1man, I can make it on 8.8071.

That's the budget I want to keep in order to have a reasonable amount of money in hand when I get back home... but reasonable is in the eye of the debtor.

stay with me on this one...

New, "ultra-first-class" cabins
+
international waters (national laws need not apply)
+
tired, bored businessmen with money to burn
+
stewardess uniforms
+
+
+

Anyway, why isn't there an airline where you can "engage the services" of the stewardesses for a set fee? Sure there are some kinks to work out, but a couple of minor adjustments and it could be a winner, no?

OOOOOHHHH, I hate spiders!

Fuckin' good for nothing waste-of-legs spider's sitting up in the corner of this room, acting all nonchallant... man, fuck him. Here I go to the trouble of not squishing his plainly visible ass between my thumb and forefinger, and he can't even get his job done.
There's a damned mosquito that has bitten me about 10 times in the last hour, and Peter Parker up there can't be bothered to help a brother out.

Let me state this unequivocally for the record: If there are any spiders reading this blog, please stop. Your kind are not welcome here.

to the limit to the wall

The last couple days I've been packing boxes and suitcases with everything I own from here on. My goal was to get into a single suitcase plus one box of books. It's still a hell of a lot more than that. Subtract the books, and I've still got a pretty big box worth of clothes, electronics, papers and other lifestyle ephemera sitting beside my suitcase... and a back pack.

I've got about a month of bumming around at 35.716108 degrees N, 139.78795 degrees E during which I hope to get rid of most of that.

ridin dirty out of tohoku.

6 days and I'm on my way out.

Sadly I spent my whole summer eating conbini food and avoiding any activity at all. So I'm going to Tokyo fat and broke, with a wardrobe that I havent added a thing to since to snow melted.

But from blogging nate to real life nate: Good luck!

what's news.

In my life:
the feller I know who had also been an alternate for the monbushou got upgraded to a proper recommendation.
i got my new computer in the mail.
i realized I have only 47 days left in Japan, and 14 in Aomori.
I managed 95% of my visa and travel worries, and about 70% of my money worries.
I watched the first 2/3rds of Gandhi and decided that it may be my favorite movie.
I found a disk full of photos from the 6 months or so before I came to Japan (I'll find some to put up soon).
i failed roundly to clean up my room for the 5th or 6th day in a row

eat that yasukuni assholes.

The Showa emperor never visited Yasukuni shrine again after the decision to honor Class A war criminals there was made. It was something people liked to avoid talking about... not unlike the fact that the current emperor has not visited the shrine since he assumed the throne.

People had held out that it was potentially a matter of complicating public obligations and private beliefs into one another... but the papers say otherwise. He disliked the Class A war criminals being enshrined there and did not want to honor them with his visit.

Why do the current ruling party leaders want to?

It's interesting watching a real election issue heat up that isn't just about believing one person's hypothetical economic model versus another, but a real american-style morality issue. Japan, say hello to an (even more) ineffectual, bickering era of government!

looking for a new place. 4 kinds of sakura.

In addition to the job search, I've also got to find a place to live in the short term. Leopalace, I learned yesterday, isn't so great for the foreign audience without a job. So, I'm probably going to wind up booking a place at sakura house. Try not to confuse it with this sakura house, even if they are similarly marketed.

Sakura in the sex trade are men posing as women via email or sometimes on the phone in order to entice customers into joining/staying with a subscription service by giving the impression that the place is crawling with horny chicks. I'm sure they've undertaken shadier and more illegal scams too.

The flowers are also nice.

I am a customer service nightmare.

I just had the funniest conversation with a customer service...

Imagine that you're going about your business being a Japanese person with a head set on, and a foreigner with occaisionally dodgy Japanese calls up... if you've imagined with any veracity, you're already shaking in your medium-high heels. This foreigner is going to be leaving the country and coming back and wants to know if he will need to close his account. The rules are pretty clear, and say "YES" this foreign customer will need to close his account if he's not resident in Japan.
Then the foreigner gets shady. He notes that he hasn't yet told you his account number, and begins to ask questions about whether his address and whereabouts would be verified if he were to simply leave this unknown account open...

That's right, I got help bending the rules! The conversation proceeded in fits and starts, but I actually got all the information I needed to know before she started getting insistent about my account number. At that point I said I'd rather not share that and that I was quite satisfied already before hanging up. I win!

pre-blog emo nate.

"the parents love to set the tone for a loveless evening"

I had been doing a bunch of brooding in my first year post college, and decided to again take up keeping a diary, like I had done in Germany. Today, I found the last jornal I kept, and it's kind of weird to see how much my head was swimming, and what was important to me then. Japan and the JET program really did change everything.

above is just one of the weird, self-consciously arty stuff written in there.

I am unsatisfied with apple.

I ordered a new laptop from Apple Japan on Sunday last week, and transfered my money which arrived on Tuesday, the 11th. Their set shipping date is the 25th... and the eta isn't until the 31st.

What is it that takes so long? Two weeks from payment receipt until shipping? That's "gay to the max".

what makes me laugh.

I'm just finishing up David Brancaccio's "squadering aimlessly". There's a situation at the end where he finds himself with a $42,500 check in his hands. He "knew exactly what to do next". He "would have to donate to public radio. The beauty of that strategy is that [he] could pledge to public radio at a level [he] was comfortable with, and still have $42,465 left over to build the portfolio of [his] dreams."
I don't know why, but hat shit cracked me up.

editorializing another editorial

here's an editorial chiding japan for not being net-savvy enough. it concludes on how dangerous the internet is, and that japan has to fix the internet so that it's safe enough for everyone. why do I feel like I'm getting advice on sexual positions from a preacher?

also included is reference to the winny virus that supposedly exposed all your files to everyone. I don't trust how the media and gov't treated that case. Along comes a virus that exploits a problem in the coding, and puts all of your files in the shared folder. The news tells stories of companies losing vital information and passwords, individual users getting their creditcard numbers lifted, the whole government on the verge of collapse. There's only one solution, they say: abstainence! that's right, stop all file sharing now to save your country.
What they didn't mention is telling. The fix could be downloaded long before any of the news stories actually aired. Any anti-virus software at all would have stopped the virus. With notable exceptions, you only get viruses from irresponsible downloading. Viruses cannot be transfered via any of the major media formats: mp3 avi etc.

Japan's clumsy "piracy = death" campaign is embarassing... and maybe just another sign of japan's not being net-savvy enough.

aaaahhhhh fuck.

I'm an alternate too.

I think I'll type a little more than that actually, there's a lot on my mind now.

So, yeah. There's no telling what that means, being an alternate. I've heard two other people's results and they are both alternates as well. Seems fishy to me... especially since one of them interviewed in the same location I did.

Upon closer inspection, the phrasing of the letter: "...we will reccommend you to mext as an alternate. should on of the selected recipients be unable to accept..."

Which means it's all in the hands of the Japanese gov't now? and that the consulate was able to reccommend some people wholeheartedly, but could not do the same for me and the other fella who interviewed with? The most troubling vagueness is that it's not exactly clear who would have to cancel to get me to go... the people from my consulate, or anyone in the whole wide world.

Other ideas:
is there such a thing as an outright no?
I've heard that we are accorded "points" based on our test and performance in the interview... is that all that will be considered from here out?
Could it be that we got alternated because our proposed schools were not in line with our scores?

I searched pretty hard for anyone else blogging about the monbushou money, but didn't find a single thing that seemed to be from this season other than talk about going to the interviews, etc. Some guy in china got accepted, I think. but the rest is mum.

also, a small silver lining. Now that this is fully out of my hands, and in proper limbo, I neednt feel so pressed by it. and worry about how to apply to schools and all that is now a much much lower priority. so I can get a bit more moving and job applying done in peace.

I don't get north korea.

reading editorials again. Not surprisingly a lot of the recent topics have been about North Korea and self defense. I made a slight realization just now though.

I really don't get North Korea.

What if the whole world gave them everything they asked for? They clearly don't intend to take over the world. (here I had intended to write more about KimJ.I. just being a nut, but thought better of it)

Later on, rethinking, maybe I do get North Korea. The only country that regularly funds them hates Japan like god hates sin. It's not much of a stretch to think that China has a lot to do with the NK foreign policy of causing trouble for the biggest rival in the region, and pissing off China's biggest rival in the world.

last time ever!

Today I had my last elementary school visit. A shame that it was so mediocre. I just wasn't much of a teacher today.

On Wednesday next week, I have my official going away party. I'll tell you about it afterward, I promise, but even beforehand, it's proving to be a bit of a hassle. I had to choose a teacher to deliver a speech about me, and one to accompany me to the stage. That was sort of a complicated matter for several reasons.
I've also got to pose for some photos so they can put xeroxed copies in the program, and I've got to write a 3 minutes plus speech for the fans. It sure would be a lot easier to think of what to say if my damned monbushou results would arrive.

"gay to the max"!

almost as good as this video is the comment relating to it "this is gay to the max".

nuisance news abounds.

today was just a bunch of bummers.

POINT: my friend who I was sure would get a monbushou scholarship got alternate status.

POINT:gmail's smtp is not working, on a day when I'm writing a bunch of mails

POINT:my score on the better of the two tests came in, and it turns out that the test was much easier than last year, so my expected "above average perfomance" was actually a hair "below average"

POINT:I paid 3000 yen for dry cleaning

POINT: the teacher I most want to deliver my going away speech at my going away dinner is too involved in the ceremony to do it.


There was a good point though... my plane tickets and such are going to work out advantageously for me. And seperately, I sort of balanced the books, and found that I'm not really so bad off come the end of my contract (though by no means well off)

this equals that

this equals that.

this is a guy proclaiming to have figured out an algorhythm for solving sudoku puzzles. It is in fact, the intuitive first couple of steps. Only low and mid level puzzles can be solved using it. That said, I still enjoy a low or mid level puzzle as a strictly analytical break for my mind.

that is a joke about those "anarchists" of the era when I first got online. They see through the system, and want to liberate the world... with totally worthless and meaningless tacts.

another excerpt from an email:

This is part of what I wrote just now, and concerns some of that same stuff I've been blabbing about for the last couple of days:

About Debito, I’ve read several pages worth of his site, and the more I read, the less I like him. He spends most of his time defending himself, a little less on defending his friends and his own race, and occasionally some time on the other much larger minorities in Japan. His points of contention are also suspect. How hung up is he on the mizushoubai? There are a lot more foreigners (russian, philippino, chinese etc) suffering a lot worse on the other side of that door, but he’s more concerned about his friends with crew cuts who can’t get into hostess clubs and handjob shacks, when they don’t speak much Japanese anyway.

Even if it is important for the individual to change the world in this way, setting up a website that subverts any public dialogue, and divides the gaijin community from the Japanese one (like his, or big daikon) is counter productive, and accomplishes nothing but stoking the fires of the “west knows best” westerners who exercise inordinate influence in the gaijin community.

When I call him a “white man”, I’m using (perhaps unfortunate) shorthand for a long history of Western Europe and America’s insistence on the governmental and individual level that Japan is backward, undeveloped, or wasting its potential on account of its national peculiarities.

In my worldview, if there are places where Japan does fall behind the western countries they relate to efficiency at the managerial and governing level. The most elite among the elite of western countries also seem to outclass their japanese counterparts. But the lumpen mass of regular folks that comprises 95% of the population tell another story entirely. It’s the sense of self-sacrifice that exists less and less in Japan today, and existed in FDR America as well, the sense that the nation has a purpose greater than the value of an individuals short-lived happiness that sets great countries apart.

What follows is a short account of my view of how things got so different: FDR’s greatest adversary (thanks to his populist, pro-gov’t, anti-business agenda) was big business. Business fought back hard, and with the help of Freudian techniques, worked to re-atomize the individual, and turn him into an individual consumer whose needs could no longer be met by the government.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_Of_The_Self

The trust in authority that brought about unprecedented prosperity in America was slowly dismantled, as a belief in mechanical administration rose to power, and decayed into a governmental policy of distributing “rights” that have no basis in or connection to the functioning of the world, and work quite clearly against prosperity, justice and in the end, the freedom of the individual. A la Philip K Howard... http://cgood.org/

By no means do I think Japan is perfect, but almost all of the changes at the level of the individual being and many of the reforms in law and governance that foreigners recommend for the country seek to rush Japan down the same road that’s filled american convenience stores with 15 flavors of gatorade and american streets with drugs and violence.
There are things I’d like to see changed, and indeed, more humane working conditions for the middle class is on the list. What I really object to is the insistence that Japan is somehow uniquely burdened by especially urgent problems and that her people are profoundly unhappy with the status of their country. It’s just not true.

gaijin to shite...

This isn't something I'm gonna go to great lengths to develop, but this morning, as I was making my rounds on the internets, I peeked at the english section of the yomiuri website. While I was there, I figured I'd take a glance at the serialized autobiography of donald keene, and then there was an interesting story on citizenship appropos the immigration dust-up in America. You know how it goes, you follow links, you drift around, ultimately you get kind of a big picture feel for the 10 or so articles you read and their connections to one another...

So reading all these tales of foreigners qua foreigners, I little lightbulb goes on over my head. I am going to have to be a "foreigner" again soon. I hadn't really been thinking of myself as belonging to the set "gaijin", even if I was never thinking I was Japanese.
But with visa concerns, and the citizenship restrictions on lawyers and a bunch of other kitzelkleinigkeiten on the horizon, it's being pushed right back in my face.

Until now, I thought of gaijinhood as some compensatory skill I used to make my livelihood, not some fixed aspect of my existence. I go to school, I teach them some things I know, the kids flip out over my appearance, and I go home. I come home, and I feel "at home". I've got no sense of being in a foreign land anymore.
I can read reasonably well, and watch TV without missing much. The culture doesn't deal out any surprises. I know more about the way the government runs, and current events relative to Japan than a lot of college educated adults. Other than the "in progress" language ability and a lack of encyclopedic knowledge of the progression of Japanese history from era to era, I don't feel out of my depth here.
The image that keeps popping into my head is of a feral child.

But now I've got to fess up to being an adult, and holding a passport from a hegemon, and start negotiations from there. Wish me luck.

internationalization, the two way street.

Several weeks ago, I fired off a snobby little email to our local listserv in response to a couple of messages about "internationalization".

As a consequence of that mail, I was contacted by another monbushou recepient who was researching precisely that stuff, and who consequently shared a bit of useful knowledge about the application process.

But my real point: I also got a direct response from the person who wrote the original mail that triggered a lengthy one on one discussion (including an email of 2440 words) about some aspects of the program, and gripes back and forth and what not. I don't think the exchange itself is particularly remarkable, but as I'm working on writing another rebuttal for the japanese team, something occurs to me. There is some sort of communication breakdown occuring at a very fundamental level.
In the last couple weeks, I've been an apologist for Japan over and over, and on occasion, changed some people's minds... but how did that get to be my job? Shouldn't the jet program and the japanese community surrounding these jets be able to get the message through much more effectively? Why does it take someone like me to get people to shake off the fundamental attribution errors about japan?

It's cuz I'm american, and I have no special allegiance to the jet program... in fact I'm broadly critical of it. Because I speak, at least in part, from the gaijin's perspective, it's an awful lot harder to think that I'm one of those inscrutable japanese types who are just out to bilk the poor jet community for all of its 4 WEEKS OF VACATION every year.
I'm only ever making the same arguments that CLAIR does though. I'm not especially eloquent, and if you're reading this, you know that I'm not much of a sympathetic character either.

Why does the messenger change everything? Can't clair get their messages across more effectively, to cut off the continual bile of the jet community? If not, can I have some money to do it?

"by early july"

I'm still waiting on the results of my scholarship application. According to the much-lauded "pink memo", we should be hearing word on the results "by early july".

Now the grammar stickler in me feels compelled to point out that "by" implies before.... such that even if they did indicate as period of time rather than a set point, the results should be available before early july, clearly not the case. The kid in me likes the sweet frosting.

the country I left.

If you click this link you will see boobs, and the reason I am not at all eager to go back to the "land of the free".

who wants that shit? I know there are lots of other, more "mature" modes of sexuality back home, but girls going wild seems to be the dominant paradigm of sexy in the still young millenium. I'll take the retrograde sexual practices of japan over "'merricun sexy" in an instant. Happy fourth.

凸(｀Д´メ)FUCK YOU！！
(that link and it's text only good if you've got japamanese enabled)

how nate rolls, a pesto cream sauce recipe.

since I know you all be sittin around wonderin how nate rolls, let me tell you:

I melt 60 grams of butter over a low flame, and gradually add 30 grams of flour about a spoonfull at a time, stirring until it dissolves before adding the next spoonfull. Then I do the same with about 300cc of lukewarm milk. (This is where it gets a little crazy.) You know what I do then? I add as much pesto as I want, and let it all condense over that same low flame.

That's how I roll.

2nd editorial response in a row...

editorial = sharp research for 30 years to bring their lcd tvs to market, but the market changes so fast now that its hard to recover all that research.
writer's implication = poor sharp

real implication = sharp spent too long getting this technology to market, and/or struggled too long in making it affordable (since they aren't especially affordable now).

the editorial's author is a hoser who thinks the industries should not have to deal with a change in the competitive global landscape. The market will ultimately determine for itself how much time and money can be spent on research without destroying the prospect of an actual profitable product in the end. I'm not one for free markets. I still think that complaining that industries with failing business models are the victims of free markets is gay (in the pejorative, grade-school sense).

the tokyo school of human rights.

Anyone else puzzled why Japan insists on treating the North Korea kidnappings as an international "human rights" issue? Normally in such cases, you'd expect to be defending the human rights of a group of people who are losing them as a consequence of belonging to that group, whether it be a race, creed, or political belief.
The only thing linking the kidnapping victims is their status as kidnapping victims. Of course, they are being held in North Korea against their will, but so is every other North Korean. What makes this a case if human rights rather than the simple criminal actions of a foreign government?

I try to cock my head to the side, and figure out why Japan insists on barking up the wrong tree, but I get nothing. Anyone got a clue?

density, speedreading.

I have always thought of myself as a slow reader. I'm not the fastest writer in the world either, but in the realm of writing, my pace is commensurate with the average college-edu-ma-cated joe, I think. My reading pace is just about high school appropriate.

That's why I have an undeniable interest in these speed reading courses that float around the web and through concrete space too. I've started up with them over and over again, only to abandon them quickly because they don't do shit for me. I pick a book off my shelf and give it a quick perusal, and no matter what, I pick up nothing. nuss-ink at all.
In the last couple days though I've realised what my problem was all along: my book shelf. It's filled with dense, intricate materials, written by writers richer in knowledge than expressive ability. The only piece of English language fiction up there is "labyrinths" from borges, and the rest are on either economics, philosophy, or the japanese legal and criminal systems.

So when the speed-reading teachers tell me to read the first sentence of the paragraph, and then "skitter" the body of it, and read the last sentence, I get zero from it. Adorno and Veblen and others have this charmingly anti-consumptive trait. They will not be swallowed in one gulp.
Lately, I've been reading a couple of other more simple books, aimed at regalurr folks. Shit flies by.

Add to inventory; Discard

In Metro City, they have the same sign about leaving "items" in oil drums.

(stolen von momus)

just finished up that "why I want to live in Japan essay". It's supposed to be over 500 words, so I was shooting for 650... and only came up with 522 in the final product. Still it's pretty tight on the whole, and well organized and filled with action verbs.
Now it's time to cook up a new resume.

btw, take a guess at what age amity starts teaching children. (answer in the comments)

freeter up.

almost every editorial I read makes me wanna say something here...

this time, there's some discussion of the new proposals to counter the decreasing birthrates. One of the strategies discussed is training aging freeters to get proper jobs, which would put them in a more secure fiscal position to have children.
But is there some surplus of proper jobs? I don't understand how this is anything but a zero sum game. More people being qualified for good jobs doesnt make more good jobs... at least not immediately or predicatbly.
In a different scenario: Drive more people into the market for jobs, and you increase the competition factor. This could possibly strip the proper jobs of some of their security. If people in the secure jobs or those on the track to secure jobs lose confidence in their security, wouldnt they be less likely to have children (based strictly on the stability factor)?

I still don't think there's anything inherently wrong with a population decrease. (though I'm growing more convinced by the day that Japan's current children are increasingly coddled as they decrease in number)

the least of my abilities. (english)

There was a rare comment on my post yesterday from someone who had been reading my previous (emozionale) blog. He said he skimmed my blog over the last several months (and hit counter logs bear that out), and concluded that I must be here in Japan for law school.

...which is interesting. I've made 332 posts on this blog as of this one, and not many of them deal with the aspect of my life which comes in second only to sleeping in terms of aggragate hours. I teach English, but I'm so dismissive of it that I seem to border on shame over being an english teacher. Not true, my friend. Not true.
Its just not what I write about. When I get together with my friends, we talk about it, when I'm at work, it always feels worth my time. It's just that in the circles I inhabit, teaching english to Japanese kids is utterly unremarkable. Speaking English fluently is (as I'm always saying) "the least of my abilities". I happily apply a huge amount of time to my job, but not so much effort, and not particularly much planning. At the end of the day, it doesn't feel like there's much to say about it that isn't either trite and obvious to the in crowd, or overly specific for the layman.

So, other than broad reflections on jet, or how the new one works for me, you still can't expect much talk about my work here. now when I enroll in law school, all bets are off...

why do you want to live and work in japan?

So, with the tests behind me, it's time to think about work. Because I've got a great deal of other things on my mind for the next year, I'm probably going to go for the path of least resistance... eikaiwa. Either a job, or a job application process that requires a lot on my part is going to be incompatible with the huge amount of studying I've still got to do (see previous entry).

Before compiling my resume (which is gonna take some phone calls back and for to the home of the brave), I figure I'll tackle the ancillary application requirements first. My first choice eigogaisha request a single page essay in addition to a resume. The topic: why do you want to live and work in Japan?

Do you ask a bird why it swims, or a fish why it flies? I don't really know where to go with that question other than the honest route. I've long since decided to make a future here (because I like it here!), and eikaiwa represents the visa and pocket money I need to put the finishing touches on my language and legal knowledge of Japan before enrolling in law school here.
The thing is, every sentence of that essay I type, I feel like I've put an invisible phrase in direct address at the end: "you friggin moron". Maybe I ought to get really drunk before I write it, or try to imagine myself in the role of a person with no prospects (not that big a stretch), for whom the job isn't a step down. One way or another I gotta get into short-sleeve-and-tie-idealistic-youth-job-applicant mindset so that I can avoid having to enter that state physically back in the states.

90 minutes of kicking ass, then ninety of making an ass of myself.

So, I had you hold your breath for me while I took the last* test. Sorry about making you inhale the night before.
Things went well... kind of. The test was in two parts. Part one, deduction and analysis went rather fantastically actually. I think I got either 32 or 35 points out of fifty (the answers are already posted online). The average on the first section (again, this is among Japanese graduates of Japanese colleges, aiming for Japanese Law Schools) is 27. In other words, I pwnzored it.
But when it came time for the second part, reading comprehension and expression, the pwnzorer became the pwnzored. Here, where the average is 28 pts, I managed either 10 or 12.

I hadnt expected much on the 2nd part, but I really thought I'd get over 15. It would have been nice as well to cross the 55points total threshhold. Had I managed that it certainly would have been helpful in the upcoming admissions process. I could have claimed that despite only studying the language for 3 years and change, I had outperformed the average law school hopeful. Now that's going to be, "I performed nearly as well as" the average law school hopeful. I find it lacks a certain punch.
The horrible score on the last part puts me in the awkward position of having to explain that I still kind of suck without an electronic dictionary handy. I'll probably also have to ask for some faith that the next 9 months before school starts is ample time for me to improve.
Due to the vagaries of the system, I'll probably be taking the same test again next year, even if I do get the scholarship and admission at a place to use it. My money's on a 78 next time.


*probably not really the last test.

ok, let it out.

ok, take a big deep breath... and hold it...

...

...

...

two unrelated things

from another editorial (I dont read the regular news): the whole kerpfiffle about livedoor buying up the tv stock was actually the handiwork of the famed murakami of the murakami fund. He encouraged Horie to buy up the stocks, mentioning that if livedoor took control of 1/3 of the stock, it could be combined with the funds holdings to claim a controlling stake in the company.

But then when the price soared as horie bought, murakami sold a good part of the fund's holdings for big gains, leaving Horie holding the bag. What a bitch!

also, "rock vapor" and a "tidal wave of earth"

japan and the deregulation blues.

I've been reading the editorials over at yomiuri.co.jp again... and all these months later, they're still telling the same story: Japan needs to deregulate to compete. Also just like when I was last reading them, a good number seem to be about how deregulated industries are failing in their duties.
Back then it was securities exchanges (horie) and earthquake-proofing (huser). Now it's non-paying insurance companies (mitsui sumitomo) and the unconsidered pitfalls of last years postal deregulation... it's going to be difficult to find private carriers willing to take the unprofitable (sparsely populated) regions of the country, at least for the same price as local service.

What's the argument? That these minimally regulated, or recently deregulated fields are exceptions?

dicksein, dickenhass. *snicker*

keitai on the bus.

It may have been a while ago, but I remember a small discussion over at momus' place about using cell phones in public transportation.

So, lets say a person is talking on his cell on the bus. Even if it is annoying, it's his right, no? Therein lies the biggest single difference between Japan and the US.

Regardless of whatever right you may posess, using that right to the detriment of all around you is not acceptable here. Granting the individual freedoms X,Y and Z is a long way from saying that he or she should be able to use X,Y or Z to interfere with the well being of a large group of others. But ask an american to be a little quieter, or not smoke here, or stop cursing around the children, and you will, more often then not, get an ill-informed lecture about this being a "free country", or perhaps about the first amendment.
I'm on board with Philip K .Howard here. In an effort to avoid passing judgement on anyone, americans have legislated "rights" well beyond their logical end.

These rights have utterly destroyed any sense of ettiquette and reduced all corners of the public sphere to the lowest common denominator. Worse, they've turn every American into an island, even unto his or her own family. It sucks.

I see this stuff in only one place in japan, the schools. The most aggressive asshole of a student sets the level of behavior for the whole class, and so long as he acts within the bounds of a very liberal frame of rules, the teacher can do nothing to change it. In that he has no restriction preventing him from being a disruptive prick he's within his right, but it's hard to imagine that anyone thinks he should have the "right" to prevent everyone else from learning.

Japan usually believes that groups have rights. Sometimes the rights of the group are superceded by the rights of the individual and often vice versa. America, however doesn't see any rights for groups that aren't actually the rights of the individual members (excluding those of corporations, which in almost all cases surpass those of individuals).

(zusammenhang mit Dickenhass.)(dickenhass is my new favorite neologism, please use it in english.)

practice test results, good news.

I have the last of this wave of tests coming up on Sunday. Today, for practice, I took the 2004 version of the test, and actually got a score almost exactly equal to the average (but a point or two below the median). That's the average law-school-aspiring, Japanese-college-educated Japanese person with whom I'm standing sort of shoulder to shoulder.

So yeah, that's the good news.

Then there's some tenatively good news. I think the interview went reasonably well, and I'm pretty sure I was the strongest linguistically of the group. There were thirteen people in total, and I'm told 5 spots to be given away. I'm positive that one of those spots is going to a guy named Eric who's studying at the University of Beijing right now, but I'm optomistic about getting one of the other four. I wouldn't be surprised if I didn't get it, but I am optomistic. I should know by the end of next week if I made it through this phase.

Then there's the not so good news. The two tests that I took last week were baad. Fortunately, I think a good score on Sunday's test will obviate any need to draw anyone's attention to them.

these things I believe.

(a treatise on beauty born of house-bound illness)

1. There is a happy medium between fat and skinny, but it's pretty skinny.
2. Most faces that aren't somehow broken, can be made attractive, with sleep, soap and self-confidence. This is doubly true for men.
3. Hollywood-pretty and TV-pretty don't compare to "normal people on the-streets-of-any-major-world-metropolis-pretty".
4. Beauty is not only skin deep. It reflects a pro-active interest in one's appearance, and as such one's personal beauty is also an indicator you one's own sense of beauty.
5. Constipation leads to pimples.
6. My own graceful aging is being sabotaged by my graceless balding.

something is green

something is green
Originally uploaded by notnato.

I'm home sick today for the first time in months. (I think it's no coincidence that I also haven't been going to the gym regularly for about 4 weeks now).

As part of my rehabilitation routine, I decided to download and watch an episode of London Hearts. That episode inspired me to write another blog entry "in defense of Japanese TV", but Firefox seemed to think it was a better idea to crash when I asked for a spell check. Suffice it to say, I like Japanese culture well beyond (and sometimes to the exclusion of) anime and J-pop. Japanese TV reflects some of the deep-seeded human kindness that exists in Japan, the absence of which has long been a theme of literature abou and cultural critique of America.

Q: how go the preparations for the very important test you'll be taking on Sunday?

A: I've learned a lot about Voltaire and John Zorn in the last few days.

Updated A: and Thomas Aquinas and I re-read the stranger.

(the test, by the way is the Japanese version of the LSAT, which has precious little to do with avant garde music, medieval or french philosopher/authors)

setsuko drops and auschwitz

boing-boing's daily "ain't japan crazy" entry is about these. Sakuma drops are "retro" a Japanese candy that's been around since before the war. (However the manufacturer underwent a fissure at some point so that there are now two "sakuma" companies, producing "sakuma drops" proper and these "sakumashi drops". )
What's "crazy" about them is that they feature an illustration of "Setsuko" from "grave of the fireflies". Without going into much depth, (spoilers ahead, yo) she starves to death in the aftermath of the war, and these sakuma drops (a non-fictional product) are a potent symbol for her.
Boing-boing and the site they link call them macabre, but I don't really like that reading. They're symbolic of her death to some extent, sure, but they're much more symbolic of her life, and the fleetingness of all life... and most especially of innocence. These candies, in their nostalgically over-constructed can, are perfectly on the mark for the nascent showa retro-ism that I see more and more every day.
Showa nostalgia is a considerably more dialetical nostaglia than "wally and the beav" American nostalgia. Like America, the sense is that Japan has, in the interim years, drifted from a more original (more japanese) morality and lost it's innocence, just as the children who grew up in the era did. (That is to say, a critique of modern capitalism, and consumerism hides behind the rather cynically capitalistic and consumerist repackaging of our memories... but that's another show.) However, unlike the American counterpart, it remembers that Japan was a nation of steel and labor. That they didn't enjoy the freedoms they do today, whether it be the power to travel the world, or the gradually developed canon of women's rights.
And unlike America, nostalgia means remembering a war as painful and not "glorious". Which brings me to the tangential point that I wound up at somehow:

What keeps Japan "off the march" is not the same as Germany, where the nation's attrocities themselves are the best evidence against any future war. In Japan, it's the death of Setsuko. And the death of the equally "macabre" folder of paper cranes, and a million more symbols of the pain that came to Japan as a result of the war.
This may not an internationally sensible way to look at the war, but it's a more potent, and, having lived in both countries I think, tangibly more effective approach. There's no turning away from orphaned children and razed cities and calling it "nothing to do with me".

That young germans can and (way too often) do say "my grandfather was never in the Nazi party/ never killed a Jew/ was only 12 when the war started" gives them every reason to forget and ignore the war. And why wouldn't they want to? It's only been taught to them as an enormous guilt trip, with the occaisional mention of the dangers of fascism. All the death that they're treated to in war media is "outsider" death, to the extent Germany is united as one nation.

holy crap, I can't write anything longer than a single sentence without losing focus, can I?

I'm back.

By the way, I was gone.

brb.

nate is currently away from the country. please wish him luck after the beep.










beep.

good advices:

following are excerpts from the two emails I received from acquaintances about the interview process for the monbushou scholarships:

Exhibit A: as regards the content of the majority of the questions, are they about the proposed "research" or about "you the applicant"?

Scholarship recipient A:
"you, generally."
Later he lists some questions he remembers:
"2) what was the most challenging experience you had on
jet? how did you deal with it?

3) why do you think your proposed research is
important?

4) if accepted, what do you plan to do once you
graduate?"

scholarship recipient b:
"I remember talking almost 85% about my research proposal."

Exhibit B, regarding the formality of the interview process:

Recipient A:
"the atmosphere was fairly jovial."

Recipient B:
"Pretty formal."


Exhibit C, was the interview conducted in English or Japanese?:

Recipient A:
"the interview was mostly in english,
but the japanese woman asked me one question in
japanese at the end of the interview."

Recipient B:
"I
did mine in Japanese, but I believe that you are supposed
to do them in English. I think they started speaking to me
in Japanese as a test, and then we just never switched
over."

Well, they sort of agree on the English bit.
I'm very grateful for any advice from people with concrete experience, of course. There's just something comical about getting the opposite advice from two equally reliable sources. There is a tiger behind one door and a lady with a whole lot of scholarship money behind the other.

america, you are a bunch of liars.

from harper's index:

"Percentage of U.S. adults in 1985 who said they found overweight people less attractive than others: 55

Percentage who said this last year: 24"

yatta. sort of.

Well, I can let out 1/2 of a sigh. I made it through the initial screening phase, and will be going to San Francisco next week to take a test and get interviewed. They may also pull up my upper lip to see if I have healthy gums. I'm sort of worried about that last one... I think it's too late to start flossing.

But in all seriousness...

There is ALWAYS a "but" with me. This time the "but" is: the interview is scheduled for 2:25 on Friday, just about an hour after my plane to Japan leaves. According to some early calculations that I scratched out just now, that's not gonna work. Indeed, my algorithm suggests that "something has got to give".
Hopefully what "gives" is their side. That doesn't feel likely.

UPDATE: Everything is cool as cucumber. Now it's just a matter of impressing them.

6 months on, the winter's gone... retaking practice tests.

It's been almost six months now since I studied my eyes out, and got a passing score on the jlpt. To be honest, not much has happened in the meantime. Fear of the future has grown heavier and heavier as August nears. I've done a bunch of poorly directed work toward the scholarship. And sadly, I've sort of come to terms with the idea of teaching children for a while longer if need be.

I've also continued to study a whole lot. Which is why I thought it would be a lark to pick up one of the old JLPT practice tests that I took in October, and give it another go. I was expecting it to give me sort of a boost, in showing how much better I am now than I was back then. It didnt really happen that way. I just finished the kanji and vocabulary segment, the hardest part for me. On the real test, I got a 63% on this section. Add to that 6 months of off and on studying, but generally pretty serious attention to kanji and vocabulary and you get 71.1%. I'll solve for X for you... 8.1%.
In the last six months, I've only improved by that slim margin, despite the fact that I wound up improving about 15 percent (of total score) in the 6 WEEKS before the test.

So, I'm not sure what to make of that. I'm thinking about taking the rest of the test, but the grammar part is probably gonna be worse than my test score.

Allow me to bend over backward to justify what happened there (in a way I won't believe myself). No doubt, I've gotten to be a much much better speaker, and my vocabulary has grown by leaps and bounds since then. I can understand almost everything that crops up even on the NHK news. I've increased my reading speed and read about 1000 pages worth of book. Anyone who talks or works with me at all, has seen me get a lot better, but this score hasn't really changed. What gives? At that point in time, I was studying for the test. I was studying test words, in a test-oriented way. At that point in time, I couldn't speak for shit, and was glad to work with exactly what the test prep books suggested.
Since then, I've actually learned Japanese. Maybe.

a couple of words.

Its been a long time since I last updated... and I have nothing to say. please enjoy my current itunes shortlist (in alphabetical order):

continuation john vanderslice
Corkscrew King momus
Everlasting Love (someone from the Katamari Damacy 2 sdtk)
Frienger Otsuka Ai
Go Go Gadget Gospel Gnarls Barkley
Hoist That Rag Tom Waits
Kana asa chang and junray
Mushaboom Feist
The Wings (whoever plays the brokeback mountain sountrack)
Vitamin C Can

Urgent update:
Ｐｏｐ’ｎ　Ｘｍａｓ　２００４〜電子ノウタゴエ〜 Strawberry Bariums

cossacks are charging in

the trees have regrouped. run.
Originally uploaded by notnato.

(a scary looking picture I took)

photos.

Wanting to brighten this place up a bit, I decided to put a flickr badge up there. Click on any of those pictures to see it a little bigger at my flickr site. I hope you like it.
Now let me qualify that first sentence. I wound up putting a flickr badge up there. I had sort of an idea what I wanted to have at the top and spent about an hour fiddling around with the code to put it there, only to realize that flickr does something fairly similar and quite simply with their "badges". So I threw out my vision and did what was easier.

(hear the crowd chant "U-S-A! U-S-A!)

what you really want to know.

I've been "running sprints" for a good part of the day today (sprints in the sense of timing my reading speed over a stretch of 2 minutes). The time I'm gauging is probably far far to short to give an accurate picture of how I can read over a 40 minute stretch, and the material will almost certainly be harder and take more consideration than the semi-popular fiction that I've been working on, but I'm proud to have a just put a pretty big milestone behind me.

I read 500 characters in 2 minutes... 250 characters a minute. 1/2 the pace of an average Japanese reader.... for two whole minutes!

If we wanted to be really fair, I've only really been exposed to the Japanese language for about 4 years, so I can only legitimately be compared with a 4 year old japanese child... a child whose ass I would soundly kick.

I'll be finishing the second of the three books of the Wind Up Bird Chronicles in just a few minutes as well, opening the door to the last 509 pages worth of ねじまき鳥goodness. If I can get my average reading pace up to around 300 characters per minute, that's only about 1018 minutes worth of reading time!

(I look forward to a day when I don't have to crunch meaningless numbers to give myself a sense of progress toward an important goal)

platinum cats.

blue, salt-flavored chocolate.

(another shocking fact about aomori, according to that manufacturer's page, it arrived here 2 months later than in kansai and shikoku... curiously it was also released late in kantou (tokyo et al)).

japan sinks again.

So, they've remade 日本沈没, Japan Sinks. It's part of a really big nostalgia kick that the media is on, as all the aging salarymen of Japan's "greatest generation" are leaving the workplace to a new, worthless generation of spoiled brats who haven't know a moment's want since birth...

but I digress.

There's a commercial featuring a clip from the movie, with a reporter explaining that everyone's got to hightail it out of Japan because she is 'a' sink-ing. Cut to two men on the couch watching the report. One turns to the other and say "I wish I'd gone to Nova sooner". Another clip of the movie, and the nova logo play, then an announcer's voice says, "Nova, before japan sinks."

33:43 and law school.

33:43 is the amount of time it took me to read 10 pages worth of Murakami Haruki... or roughly 6000 characters of straightforward, sparsely decorated japanese. 178 characters a minute, if you wanna get exact on it. According to this japanese speed reading website, the average speed is something like 500 characters a minute. If I want to pass the reading comprehension portion of the big test on June 11, I've got to get my pace up to around 400 hundred characters a minute... in the original terms, I need to reduce my 10 page reading time to about 15 minutes. at least down to 20 minutes anyway.

In case you're just tuning in, I like standardized tests, and I like incremental preparations, and concrete goals. I spent most of november posting similar stuff about practice tests for the JLPT.

This test is a bit heavier than the JLPT though. This is the Japanese equivalent of the LSAT, and I'll be taking it alongside all the japanese law school hopefuls. If I nail this one, or even do "pretty good", I think I've got a really strong shot at getting into one of the schools I'm shooting for next April.

The new Japanese "law school" system was put into place in 2004 to combat the present and future shortage of legal professionals in Japan. It's just another part of the permanent revolution that the Koizumi government has instated, and like a lot of other aspects of the broad stroke reform policy, it's modeled on the US (a country with NO shortage of lawyers). Like the US law school systems, students untrained in law are very welcome. Likewise, the admissions system relies heavily on an LSAT clone test, a test not of legal knowledge, but reasoning and academic ability.
That's my in. If I can throw down on this test, like I throw down on others, I can make a big splash in the early phases, and then figure out how to back it up after the fact. I'll have to figure out something to back it up, because there are still interviews and a timed essay test to worry about. Still, the test lets me really put my best foot forward.

I have a lot of thoughts about the current legal reform movement underway right now, but it can all be summed up in one question, to which I already know the answer:

Why the hell would you choose the US for your new legal model?
(a: american laws and the american legal system are held by a certain class of legal scholars to be a big part of the broad economic success of american corporations. [likewise the similar legal system of the uk and it's corporations])

if you're lucky, this phase is mercifully short.

I just wanna say something about this video from the perspective of learning language. If you take the time to watch it, you'll see the Rick character be immensely proud of his limited language ability. He uses one and two word snippets of japanese as though they had opened the gates of this culture wide just for him.
I'm not sure I was ever quite so impressed with myself for such a limited ability, but this phase is sort of the model for what a language learner needs to always run from: premature pride. The truth is that pride in your language ability is almost inevitably premature. You're really no good at a language until you start taking your ability completely for granted.
The video brought back a internal montage of (now) embarrasing moments in the past... like reading a romanized text of the local dialect in front of almost all the city English teachers (not my choosing)... or falling (halfway) victim to a internet scam...

If you're gonna really learn, pride is the first thing that's got to go.

may 2, the last day of this phase...

So, things didn't really go as planned with the application form. I had to revise it a million times, and spent most of the last two days in the office fixing things up, despite being on vacation. This part of the tour really is almost over though. After 3 months of talking about it, the application is ready to fly over the ocean now (or should be within the next 20 minutes). I could only make the complete application when I had built up enough ability and surplus gumption to try and write 2000 characters worth of straight-faced Japanese. No big surprise that it was a real herculean effort, but I am pleasantly surprised to find that the characters really do flow pretty well when I'm writing.

What remains to be seen is how well and how long I can keep up the good work. If the next twelve months are anything like the last, I'll...

*****(stopped writing, picking up 3 days later)****

(ahem) if the next twelve months are anything like the last, I should really get a grip on this language. Though the earliest indicators seem to say that it's not gonna be so simple keeping my resolve.
The good weather yesterday (best so far this year) was irresistable... so was the desire to clean my desk. All of the studying I got done was finished by 10am. Today's a holiday too, Childrens Day to be exact. Maybe it will be a better day for studying.

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.

flesh.

Today, for the first time in just about seven years, I intentionally bit into a piece of meat.

A weird couple of accidents had me sitting on the business end of a bowl of ramen today, and I decided just to be a good soldier and eat it up. Surprisingly enough, the world still seems to be turning. Also worthy of note is that meat, even when you haven't eaten it for seven years, still tastes pretty much the same.

It's not time to start shoveling dead (land-dwelling) flesh into my stupid face just yet. I'm still gonna hold off for a major life event of some sort before I give up my vestigal vegitarianism. It's not time to go soft on myself just yet.

don't say hello.

Yesterday, I went to my regular(ish) cafe, just like any other day, and "POW!", there was a white guy there. Naturally, I became agitated and uncomfortable. The existence of other foreigners, most especially white guys, is highly problematic for the honky about town in Japan (me). I once had a case of hives that the doctor traced back to my having shaken hands with a guy from Philadelphia named "paul".

I just couldn't get comfortable in my seat while I read my book and waited for my ginger ale to come. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't shake from my head that this guy, over at the other table was being white right there in the cafe. I decided to take this bull by the horns, and say hi.

This unorthodox approach beared limited fruit.

Being in Japan too long means that I've forgotten how to talk to a small subset of the population: those who aren't endlessly fascinated by my being a foreigner. So the fellow in the cafe got an earful of how much I dislike Jesus and America. Poor guy.

Don't say hello.

a paragraph from "Authority Without Power: Law and the Japanese Paradox" that JETS ought to take to heart

"Autonomy had a price. For the community and the individual, conflict avoidance and deference to authority were the prerequisites of self-governance and independence. So long as peace prevailed and taxes were paid, there was little to draw official attention and scrutiny. However, any open conflict or breach of peace threatened that autonomy and invited investigation and more stringent controls. By suppressing intracommunity quarrels and satisfying formal fiscal obligations, a village community could restrain or avoid unwanted official regulation. The consequence was an institutional structure that in allowing evasion of official legal controls also promoted external deference and internal cohesion. In effect the village had the security of the administrative state along with the freedom of the outlaw."

two heroes

roast beef. (achewood, onstad)

moses herzog. (herzog, bellow)

sekaiichi.

Congrats go to Japan on beating Cuba to win the first "world baseball classic". After a loss to Korea, and another one to America, Japan was hardly the favorite, but they got the gold.

During the game, the stands were filled with posterboard bearing the phrase sekaiichi (世界一). It means world's #1, but I think there's a sense among the fans that the sekkaiichi status doesn't stop at baseball. Lots of people feel that way about their own country, to be sure. I'm not sure many countries have such a good claim on it though.

Japan, of course, comes in 2nd place and third place and fourth place all over the map. There aren't many #1's for Japan to brag about (not even sumo), but Japan can brag about it's lack of "last place"s. Unlike, say, America, it has done a much better job of balancing it's success with a nod to the life of its citizens.

Japan isn't violent, filled with drugs, repressed, addicted, fat, et cetera. It's not a country of anger and vandalism. They aren't rioting over this law and that. There's no long history of systematic violence to immigrants. Human rights are still in quite good repair (even if equality of the sexes could use a shove).

But today Japan is the world's best at baseball. and video games. and animation. and and maybe even at food. It's a country that knows how to relax, knows how to fuck, knows how to share corporate earnings with employees, knows how to stay above the fray of global conflict.

Even if you rebut every single one of the gold stars I give Japan, there's something cumulatively good and functional about this country. Cumulatively better than any other country I've been to.

(edit: I have no idea who it was since I wasn't looking at the screen when it came up, but I heard on the news an american voice saying "this just shows you that baseball is the same all over the world. we just have better players." Isn't that second sentence open to debate now?)

too much time at BD.

my own words (regarding final fantasy 12):

"I bought the game for an ex-jet friend in america. seemed like too much trouble to open the plastic seal and play a few minutes before sending it off.

honestly, you rpg players get ass? that's a travesty.

edit: Seriously! that pisses me off to no end that you god-damned wastes of space that have the knowledge to meaningfully compare these boring, time-sap monstrosities are allowed to enter even a single vagina in your lifetimes. Much less to actually be bedding semi-attractive women on a regular basis while I'm stuck with a lame, below average-looking girlfriend who's far under my league.

I'm a f*** ball of rage over this.

the holocaust made me question the existence of god, this makes me hate him.

edit2: I'm 5% kidding. and 95% pissed off that my community doesn't dispense cooter like gacha-pon to blonde-haired blue eyed dudes."

in my dreams

the internet comes to me in my sleep, like an apparition of a dead father. It demands vengence; vengence and release from this awful template.

I deny the internet's will at my own hazard. Already, my cellular phone and blow-dryer have begun conspiring against me. if the template should mysteriously change back, or should I fail to post in the next few days, call the police. and tell them to watch out for power cords.....

week in review. memo to myself.

This week started badly, and ended only slightly up from where it began.

My four day weekend was swallowed whole by the blob that took up residence in my nose. I spent four days with a head full of liquid that decided to vent itself without warning time and again.
On returning to work, I did the unadvisable and went back to bd. That site always does me in. All the boasting and pissing contests just remind me of how isolated I've gotten since my good friend jets left. That and how much I really am just "on the edge" of this all, and how little fun there is to be had around here.

Upsides were that I started getting along better with my coworker jets, that I went to the gym twice (after being sick), and that I have a renewed ability to learn kanji (but no patience for reading at all). also, late breaking, softbank is gonna buy vodafone's japanese operations, which means I'll get a little bit of the money I've been bleeding back.

now I'm on the front edge of another four day weekend, and I don't have a single thing planned between now and work on wednesday. It's not cool.

1/4 stars.

throw out 100 things.

today, I'm throwing out 100 things. 23 down.

(edit: 100 things that I hadn't yet considered trash)

edit2: got 51 done last night. If I can get my gumption a'gumping I'll finish out the job tonight.

4 days later.

I took two days of vacation to have extra time to study, and wax philosophic through a four day weekend. Then on Friday I got sick. I spent almost all of my weekend wishing I could sniffle, but I had a sinus infection. Sniffling when you are properly swollen shut feels like trying to suck a milkshake through a straw with your nose.

I'm better now, so it's back to the gym. I don't remember if I made an entry to that effect or not, but according to all the medical and muscle tests under the sun, I'm 20% weaker than an average man my age.

I probably would have killed myself if I had gotten 20% below average on any other standardized test. I've spent most of my life in the 95th-99th percentile, when there were percentiles to be had. Now that my physical condition has been couched in those terms, I'm not gonna rest until I move well past that "average line".

the new lamest joke ever? (evar?)

Back when we were all upset about Sadaam the first time in the early nineties, I remember hearing the stupidest joke I've ever heard. I don't know how many times I heard it, but it was more than enough to lodge it into my brain. It was just a one liner, playing on a lame, way overdone stereotype.

"The french contribution to the Gulf War effort was to parachute in 400 rude waiters."

The mundanity of it makes my head hurt. But in the spirit of that joke, Japan is, no shit, contributing to the current rebuilding of Iraq by:














Giving them free anime.

dramatic pause technique courtesy of Yuki.

bill wasik's got you all in check.

Hey, do you remember "flash mobs"? The creator of the flash mob (though not term itself), Bill Wasik is an editor at Harper's magazine. He writes an perfect post-mortem of the fad in the a recent issue of said magazine, which is available in installments at it's website here.

It's like a big long fuck you to hipsterism, in terms of deindividuation. The long piece on the Milgram experiments in the second part of the essay is especially rewarding.

You've got to love that the (then still anonymous) Bill Wasek answered questions about his occupation with "I work in the culture industry". (link: my own)

Speaking of blithely tossing around titles of Adorno books, Japan is go.

why ladies love conservatives

This is from the national review online (conservative internet headquarters). It's in regards to international women's day, and whom the individual authors would like to honor.

"Anne Corkery
[snip]

Hillary was once described as "brittle." Funny, but I always figured the ideal woman would be soft — soft and friendly and understanding. One of the greatest women I have ever known was Joan Prince. She never really had a career, yet that didn't stop her from being a great force for the good. She would give of herself generously in every relationship, so that everyone felt they were her closest, dearest friend. The love she had for others was infectious. "Don't you just love Beth?" she would ask. And you'd decide that you did, even if you hadn't really thought about it before. She admired her husband so much, we couldn't help but think of him as some sort of hero.

She literally gave her life for her children. She found out she had breast cancer during one of her pregnancies, and when the doctor told her euphemistically that he needed to "interrupt" the pregnancy, she jokingly asked him when she could resume it. As her precious body nourished her unborn baby, it also allowed the cancer to flourish.

She spent the last days of her life writing soft, feminine, intelligent advice to her girls. "Always wear skirts if you can because men love it." "Smile when you don't know what to say." "Always remember, I'll be your angel watching you from heaven."

— Ann M. Corkery has served as a representative to the United Nations at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations."

I have the feeling that all the liberal acolytes of femininity (like momus) don't really think this "ideal" is related to the one they favor... but it's like saying "I love 79, but 82 is way way too much". What begins with pink and flowery clothes leads quickly to different moral ideals, to seperate moral standards, to different worth as individuals.
Sure, I like sweet-smellin' soft ladies as much as anyone, but deliberately limiting folks' possibilities on account of their gender (despite it's ubiquity in the world) is the worst.

ps. Men like skirts because they like vaginas, and want unrestriced access to them at all times.

maybe no.

I've been working like gangbusters on the Monbushou stuff... but at least a portion of the work I had been doing seems to have vanished into thin air. Work does that when you don't really know enough about what you're researching.

I now know that Waseda no longer admits monbushou recipients who haven't passed the normal entry requirements (international or regular). So begging favors with the staff is sort of meaningless.
That doesn't mean that I can't get in. Far from it. It does mean that I will have to study like a crazy to get in though.

We'll see what research into other schools monbushou admissions processes reveal.

oh, nate, your work ethic is so big.

that's people keep telling me anyway.

I'm sure all the people that have been telling me that over the last few months mean well.

blogger averaging 16 hits daily, dead at 26

That could have been the headline in some strange alternate world had things gone just a little differently this evening. Suffice it to say that the smell of smoke and flickering orange light make for one shitty way to be awoken from a nap.

*cough*

the japanese constitution rocks!

These are some of the things I love about this country:

Article 13 [Individual Rights]

(1) All of the people shall be respected as individuals.
(2) Their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness
shall, to the extent that it does not interfere with the public welfare, be the supreme consideration in legislation and in other governmental affairs.

Article 21 [Communicative Rights]

(1) Freedom of assembly and association as well as speech, press, and all other forms of expression are guaranteed.
(2) No censorship shall be maintained, nor shall the secrecy of any means of communication be violated.

Article 22 [Right to Move, Freedom of Profession]
...
(2) Freedom of all persons to move to a foreign country and to divest themselves of their nationality shall be inviolate.

Article 23 [Academic Freedom]
Academic freedom is guaranteed.

Article 28 [Unions]
The right of workers to organize and to bargain and act collectively is guaranteed.

Article 36 [Torture]
The infliction of torture by any public officer and cruel punishments are absolutely forbidden.


To name just a few.

ignoble peace.

"Chapter II Renunciation of War

Article 9

(1) Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.
(2) In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of aggression of the state will not be recognized."

I wish my country had a clause like that first one. Since this part of the Japanese constitution was drafted by Americans, it sort of stands out that war is described as "a sovereign right of the nation". Agression is likewise described as a right. That phrasing, even in the revocation of such rights seems to suggest that America reserves that right.
America is starting to feel more and more like a skeleton in my closet.