Writing exercise 5

After posting several times in a row, I find myself with not much else to write about, at least for now. By the way, part of the reason I've been doing this is to goof off instead of doing what I have to do to eke out a living. Put differently, to get away from the tedious stuff I have to do day in and day out. But as expected, it has ended up making it much harder for me to make ends meet in the months ahead. It seems that just a week of goofing off took a toll on my financial well-being.
So for the next several posts I'm going to borrow something from the books I've been reading, in apparent defiance of copyright law.

Writing exercise 4

Speaking of suicide, I recall two of my friends committing suicide in the past.
They were both four or five years older than me but now I'm older than they were when they died, so now I find myself looking at them from a different angle than I did then, which makes me feel a bit strange. Being that older than me, they influenced me tremendously, both when they were alive and when they died.
Recently I read a scientific article that pointed out a close relationship between sleeping time and suicide rate: the less you sleep, the more you're likely to commit suicide, statistically speaking. This is quite understandable. My friends who committed suicide would say that they slept less than five hours a day on average. One of them even said that about three hours were the longest she could manage to get to sleep. I wish she had had the habit of taking more sleep then maybe I could see her even now. But let bygones be bygones. It's quite common to read news about people committing suicide after working harder than usual for an extended period of time, which seems to include a factor of sleep deprivation in many cases.
On the other hand, they say sleeping more than nine hours a day on average results in earlier death than if you sleep about seven to eight hours a day.

Writing exercise 3

Needless to say, writing something always ends up being much more revealing to the writer himself than to readers.

Yesterday I wrote I didn’t like Japanese manga, but saying that you don’t like something is not the same as reviling it, or is it? Obviously I’m the one who’s idiosyncratic in this case, and deservedly so, when it comes to something as ubiquitous as Japanese manga. I know full well that to some of you, manga has been and will always be part of your life, and if someone said something like I said yesterday, you may feel you’re bad-mouthed. But that’s not true. I think there's a difference between saying you don’t like something and reviling it. As far as the mangaphobia I've been suffering from for so long goes, bad-mouthing it won't make any good; I must find a way to overcome the nasty symtomps associated with it. Feeling alienated by the culture you must live with increases the chance of your feeling suicidal, however trivial it may seem. The best bet would be to try as hard as you can to get used to it, to the point that you feel you've become a big fan of it without your knowledge.

Writing exercise 2

I've made up my mind to write here every day from now on. I'll write down whatever comes to my mind. I know that some English teachers argue that writing English could do more harm than good to those whose mother tongue is not English. Maybe it's true but I don't care.

So I'm going to write down whatever comes to my mind.

Although I'm a Japanese, I don't like Japanese anime and manga, except for a few cartoonists. I don't understand why they have had such a great success worldwide. The very kind of anime and manga that seems most appealing to people around the world just gives me the willies. I usually try as best I can not to come across them while on the Internet, but these days they seem to get into every nook and cranny of the digital world. How disgusting.

Today I saw a middle-aged transvestite walking up and down a station platform. He was scantily clad, with a micromini and pink tank top. It was so weird. The skirts he was wearing were way too short that I wondered why he's not arrested. One of the weirdest things I've seen this summer.

Writing exercise 1

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Sometimes I feel I should update this blog more frequently as long as I'm blogging. I mean, as long as I'm posting something on the WWW, I feel I'm somehow responsible for what I'm doing. But the fact is that very often I have no idea what to write about.

1. This evening I stumbled upon an interview with Toshiko Akiyoshi and some of her plays on Internet radio. It was an NPR's program (we can listen to them everywhere in the world, even in Japan) and so will be broadcast again or you can search the net and download it, if you're interested. I've been interested in this Japanese jazz player who's praised as Bud Powell of Japan in the US, mainly because her name appears in a few chapters of Hampton Hawes' autobiography "Raise up off me" that relate how he stayed in Japan, not long after the WWII ended, that is, during the US occupation of Japan. The part of the book about his stay in Japan, his experience at Asaka, the bad trips he had there, and how he, as a junkie, hooked up with a Japanese junkie who was a teenage whore, as well as how he played in some halls and stayed in brothels in Yokohama, is quite riveting. The pimps and whores in Asaka where there used to be a US base dubbed him "Uma-san," 'uma' meaning horse, and -san mr. in Japanese. That's because they thought they heard him saying not Hawes but horse. Uma-san is credited with having a huge impact on the Japanese jazz with his then avant-garde bebop style.

2. Today I read the news about Google protesting about its name being used as a 'generic verb.' ("Google wants people to stop googling," on Cnet News.)
I remembered writing "How many times did you google today" somewhere in my blog. Seeing as this free blog service is being run by Google, and I've been thinking that I didn't particularly like the post where I used the 'generic verb,' I deleted it today. But don't think I'm catering to them.

Blackout

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This morning I awoke to the news of a blackout that hit wide swaths of Tokyo and nearby areas. That brought several train services to a halt, and left more than one thousand traffic signals without power for a few hours, according to ABC news. The area where I live was not affected. Seeing this as a good chance to see if what I said about the Japanese media in the last post has any truth to it, I checked several news media on the Internet, both national and international, to see how they reported it: CNN com. international was the first to report the news, only about an hour (0:11 GMT) after the power outage occurred due to an accident at a construction site. Even ABC news reported it less than an hour after CNN did, and was the first to report that the power was restored. Of the English versions of three major Japanese newspapers and the Japan times, Mainichi was the first, about the same time or slightly later than ABC news. Daily Yomiuri, about four hours later, in the form of "flash news" about the occurrence of the blackout, well after ABC news had reported that the power was fully restored in all the areas affected. And the other sites, instead of updating any information, kept posting what they had posted last Saturday, for most of today. All this seems to suggest that for those now staying in Japan who cannot read Japanese, it's much better to rely on the American media than the Japanese ones if they want to get information over the Internet about what's happening right now in this country. That way they can be better informed for their own security in cases of emergency.

Here comes the dan again.

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'Dan' is not Dan Rather or anything. It's a Japanese word meaning a group, team, party, troupe, etc. And it's also a slang word that has very limited use, having something to do with the Japanese newspaper industry.
Dans are recruited on an almost day-to-day basis. You can find it in recruit ads on every tabloid newspaper here in Japan, typically in a phrase like 'dan-boshu.' (we're recruiting a dan.) It means a group of salespeople who visit every house trying to get subscriptions for two Japanese major newspapers that are distributed nationwide.
Sometimes you see middle-aged men clad in business suits, riding bicycles with detergent boxes on the luggage carriers, in the late afternoon in Tokyo or anywhere else.
Last week one of them came to my apartment complex.
Since I knew well who rang the bell, I didn't open the door. He didn't leave until he rang the bell another three times. I pretended to be absent because I'd already subscribed for one of the newspapers a few months before, so I just waited for him to leave. Feeling that he left already, I stepped out and, unfortunately, ran into him downstairs. Apparently aware that I was the one living in the room he vainly knocked on the door at, he looked very incensed. Looking at how furious he was and how accustomed to violence he looked, I thought I might be the third victim to be killed by those dan people in ten years.
Assault or even homicide by the dan people seems to occur every five to seven years here in Japan.
I have no intention of criticizing their sales-promotion activities at all, because technically they are just the salespeople touting the two major newspapers and as such there's nothing wrong with what they're doing .
But nonetheless we have to be as cautious about their recurring visits as we are about other natural disasters that pose risks.
It's bad enough that even after a few homicides by them, nothing seems to have changed in terms of laws or regulations or anything, but the fact that the newspaper companies don't seem to take any responsibility for those felonies seems far more problematic.
I get the impression that those newspapers editorialize on social security issues at least once a week.