A Walk in the Woods

In the news yesterday

2011-04-16T03:53:00.012+09:00

The good news is that the amount of radiation in Tokyo right now is only about half as much as that in Moscow, according to a group of Russian nuclear experts who have come to Japan and measured the level of radiation in soil on the premises of the Russian Embassy in Tokyo. With this scientific evidence, they are advising their government to lift the warning against travel to Japan.(Yomiuri Shinbun).

The bad news is that an opposition group within the Democratic Party of Japan are capitalizing on the disaster to pursue their bid to take over the much coveted post of Prime Minister.

Speaking of higher radiation levels, according to an article in a recent issue of a Japanese popular magazine, the amount of radiation measured in a water treatment plant in Tokyo around year 1964, was about ten thousand times higher than it is right now, because it was in the midst of the Cold War, when nuclear experiments in the Pacific Ocean were common events, and the radiation supposedly spread from the South Pacific Ocean. But this fact was not made public back then.

Changing the prime minister and the cabinet now will only further slow down the relief and recovery efforts that appear to be very slow even now.
Don't they realize that now, of all times, is not the right time for a power struggle. It's disgusting and ugly.

1

2011-01-01T01:40:00.026+09:00

Much has changed in the world of Japanese politics since Japan's Democratic Party took power a year and a half ago. First off Hatoyama resigned less than a year after he took office, just like his predecessors from the LDP. The general feeling among people is that they are disillusioned once again, with the knowledge that the Dems won't be able to make the changes they promised to bring about. One of the Dems at the top publicly admitted that wresting control from the bureaucrats, like Hatoyama promised during the election campaign, has turned out to be anything but realistic. The budget screening (jigyo-shiwake), which with a lot of fanfare they started in the form of public hearings, is beginning to look like a huge waste of time and energy, or a mere political stunt at best, as people begin to realize that these changes are just temporary small fixes and won't get into the core of the problem; the system itself that allows unscrupulous, lavish spending and funneling tax money into some special interest groups won't change, since decision-making bodies remain the same.
Child allowances, one of the promises the Dems made during the election that seemed to have worked greatly to get voters on their side, turned out to be a trick. A tax hike on families with children more than cancels out the bonus money, but alas, mighty is the power of cash. It appears people are treated like brainless monkeys in old Chinese sayings. The primary reason for their victory in the last election was because in their manifestos they promised to provide cash to different strata of the society, compensation cash for every failed agricultural effort, the child allowances for the families, and so forth. Their cash-based strategy did work fabulously. People are no better than monkeys that can be very easily duped by feeding cash. The guy behind all these plans, by the way, was Ichiro Ozawa, who's now having a real tough time despite deserving the most credit for the regime change. The initial planned amount of the monthly child allowance, 26000 yen, had been arbitrarily set by him on the spur of the moment, without any rational calculation or any financial feasibility taken into account. The amount was attractive enough, real good bait for the voters. But after the election ended in their landslide victory, the amount has been cut down to half and there's no prospect that it will be paid in full amount, just as expected for experts, but it's okay as long as people get their hands on cash, they won't complain.
Other changes they promised to make, such as getting rid of the notorious special health insurance for the elderly, are taking too long to be implemented, and it would make a lot of sense to suspect that these reforms might be reversed as soon as they get out of power, as has been the case with the postal reform that the LDP promoted.
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4-moji-jukugo this week

2010-01-23T04:51:00.017+09:00

Hatoyama's approval ratings are plummeting. A lot of people are beginning to think he's not fit for the job. And for good reason, every time he speaks out, he exudes lack of confidence and decisiveness, something that would make people feel disgusted. Over the past few months he and his party have been plagued with money scandals that surfaced one after another. Yesterday the Diet was convened for the first time this year and he was grilled on his money scandal, an accounting fraud having to do with huge donations from his mother, who came from one of Japan's most affluent families. He denied he knew anything about the fact that he got the money from his mother, but given the huge amount of money involved and the fact that the donations spanned more than five years, it's very unlikely that he didn't know anything about it, that's what most people would think. When he denied his direct involvement with the scandal yesterday, he started his statement with the cliché involving a grandiose-sounding four-Kanji-character word (4-moji jukugo), “I swear by the gods of heaven and earth (天地神明に誓って) that I'm innocent, blah-blah-blah (cited from the Japan Times).” This was exactly the expression beloved by members of the subway gas attack cult, and also by a once-famed economics professor charged for molestation on the train, when they denied their allegations. Apparently Hatoyama did the worst mistake and made the situation worse. Everybody would think when someone uses the expression, he's lying. People overexaggerate when they lie.

Personally I've never seen a political leader with such a dismal lack of confidence and determination, Japan or elsewhere, and it was disgusting as hell hearing the grandiose expression that reminds everyone of the nightmares long ago. Years back, his mother reportedly said in a magazine interview that she was determined to make his son another prime minister from the Hatoyama family, after his grandfather. Traditionally, prime ministers are not chosen because they are best fit for the job but because they are the most powerful money-wise. Now people know what she meant. And it's kind of tempting to imagine she would have made a much better prime minister.

What's in the news today

2009-12-22T11:44:00.009+09:00

Despite Japan being the world’s second largest economy, suicide rate here is among the highest throughout the world. Annual suicide deaths have never been below 30 thousand over the past decade. Percentage-wise, it is 20 people per one hundred thousand population. In 2008 Japan ranked eighth in terms of suicide rate, with former Soviet countries and a former satellite communist country rounding out the top ten.

The news today reports that a recent investigation into causes of train delays in and around Tokyo has found that the biggest cause last year was train suicide, accounting for more than half of about 40 thousand delays. Train companies have now come up with a new way to tackle this problem: They are replacing red lights usually installed at stations with blue lights, as blue is believed to have a “calming effect” and thus could deter people from committing suicide.

In fact train delays are almost an everyday thing here and the term “jinshin-jiko” (train accident involving human injury or death) is one of the most heard 4-moji jukugo (4-Kanji-character idiom) these days.
Train workers’ jargon for gathering up mangled and scattered body parts after an accident is “tuna disposal (maguro shori),” and it’s not uncommon that travelers to Japan are unfortunate enough to witness the scene and be traumatized for the rest of their life.

On a side note, Japan will no longer be the world’s second largest economy in a few years, maybe next year at the earliest. China is going to take over that position. It is believed to surpass even the US around year 2040.

In the recent news

2009-09-29T23:18:00.033+09:00

The city hosting the world's biggest sports event in 2016 will be decided on Oct 2nd. Tokyo is one of the contenders. The idea of hosting it only about 50 years after the first one was held in the city was first brought up by the incumbent governor of Tokyo. He was reportedly miffed by the fact that the country he hates most hosted the event just recently. It seems his jingoistic pride was hurt. And that seems to be the main reason he brought the idea up, with no one else seemingly getting involved in drafting the plan.

The DPJ is considering scrapping the controversial plan to relocate Tsukiji, Tokyo's huge fish market, to a landfill on the shore of the Tokyo Bay, because the soil contamination there has proven too high for such a facility to be built. The location is very close to the area where the event will be held if Tokyo becomes the winner. If the pollution is bad enough for dead fish, it would be far more problematic for people and athletes who would have to stay there, even for a short while.
I think the world has recently learned the hard way that the event should be held in a city with no pollution problems.
On the other hand if Tokyo lost, the huge amount of tax money spent on campaigning activities would be wasted. If it did, then who would take responsibility for that. But even that might be better than further wasting crazy amounts of money on an equally crazy, disgusting extravaganza in the opening ceremony and things like that.
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Sep 15

2009-09-15T03:51:00.005+09:00

A member of the now opposition LDP who appeared on a news show today made a comment pointing out the plan of the DPJ that is characterized by a massive increase in welfare spending without tax increases is anything but realistic. He just stated the obvious. It's painfully apparent to everyone that the welfare spending proposed by the DPJ would not be feasible without the government issuing more government bonds to compensate an unavoidable huge budget deficit. However the DPJ pledge they will not consider raising consumption tax for the next four years. It seems obvious even to lay people that just cutting "unnecessary" spending that they blame on what they call "bureaucrats' empire" would in no way be sufficient to make the extra welfare money needed. If they are envisioning a welfare state like those in Europe, they should act in a more responsible way. A hike in consumption tax would be unavoidable. It's time to admit the obvious.
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Sep 13 2009

2009-09-13T05:39:00.005+09:00

A newspaper mentions the incumbent prime minister's inability to read Kanji correctly as one of the things that helped the DPJ with its resounding victory. That may or may not be true, but who cares now that he is history. One of the biggest things that contributed to the devastating loss would be Abe's early resignation two years before, due to his nervous breakdown and severe stomachache.

Last week the media were all about two Ichiros, Suzuki Ichiro of the Seattle Mariners and Ozawa Ichiro of the DPJ, one for his record-breaking pursuit, and the other for his role as a background fixer who was behind the scenes all along and who deserves the most credit for making the landslide victory possible. Self-proclaimed successor to Tanaka Kakuei, he would be best remembered as the true revolutionary of our time in later days.

Before and during the Koizumi era, one of the highest political agendas people were talking about almost every day was how to boost the national economy by enacting various deregulation laws and thus globalizing the country. Now a lot of people are talking about the mess the deregulations created and condemning market fundamentalism and globalization. The guy who put this line of thinking into words to be posted on a foreign newspaper is going to be the next prime minister. Next week.
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In the news last week

2009-08-30T02:49:00.015+09:00

Every single newspaper is predicting the Dem Party's landslide victory.

The weather forecast for today, the election day, is cloudy with occasional rain in much of Japan. Though it may sound a bit counterintuitive, cloudy weather boosts voting, according to statistics. Or that makes a lot of sense considering this election takes place in summer vacation season, when people will likely choose to go to resorts or Disneylands with family over going to vote on sunny days. It is believed, though without much evidence, that the higher the turnout the more likely it is that the opposition party will win.

Ozone generators are actually a health hazard:
There have been numerous reports of health problems from people using the gadget, which is supposed to boost health by staving off flu and other viruses. It's not that they have glitches; despite what many might believe, ozone is intrinsically bad for human health, esp if supplied in excess. Their sales have seen a marked increase the past couple years. In the cases reported, the ozone they generate has contributed to triggering or aggravating asthma and similar diseases.
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Election fever

2009-08-24T22:46:00.011+09:00

Japan is in the middle of the election campaign. Exactly the same campaign broadcast featuring the leader of each party is being rerun every morning and every night. I watched Hatoyama, the prospective winner, say,"We should put an end to the politics of the bureaucrats, by the bureaucrats, for the bureaucrats, for our better future," on TV over and over again. According to their logic, bureaucrats are our common enemies. I wonder how many people will take these words at face value. Few will deny the fact that Japan's success and prosperity since the end of the last war owes a great deal to the bureaucrats' tactical ways of making quasi-socialistic policies under the disguise of free market capitalism. As an example, Japan's health insurance system, which covers each and every one of us, was first thought up and created by truly insightful bureaucrats in the wake of the end of the occupation. They modeled the system after those of Northern European countries like Sweden, which they admired.
While lambasting the bureaucrats on the one hand, the Democratic Party is saying the "free-market-is-everything-ism" is ruining this country. Some analysts predict they won't be able to do much without help from the powerful bureaucrats, let alone have control over them.
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In the news today

2009-08-18T16:00:00.023+09:00

Campaigning for the Lower House election officially started today. The election is on Aug 30. Yesterday a debate among six party leaders took place at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan, among them the ruling party leader and Prime Minister Aso, the strongest opposition party leader Hatoyama.
During the debate, Mr. Aso again made a Kanji reading error. He read　踏襲　as “fushu”, instead of the correct “toshu,” something that could be laughed at even by elementary school children. “Fushu” means the smell of corruption.

Democratic Party, the strongest opposition group, is leading in every recent poll. Hatoyama said during the debate that his party is willing to give voting rights to aliens in Japan. Personally I have no idea why he brought that up on this occasion, nor what good it will possibly do to his party in the election. Coincidentally (or not), a Korean old man who's lived in Japan for a long time committed a really gruesome crime on the same day. The abduction issue is nowhere near being solved. Grandchild of a former prime minister, Hatoyama is one of the richest politicians in Japan, with estimated assets of around eighty-four million dollars.

One party leader criticized Aso for the way he dissolved the Lower House, saying the law that allowed the long-overdue dissolution was a remnant of pre-democratic conventions and that it was just against democratic ways of doing politics. But despite the criticism, the timing of the dissolution couldn't be better for Aso's foes, as the poll figures suggest. Had he made the decision a little earlier, things might have been a bit different. Having said that, Democratic Party's victory is in no way a sure thing. At least just yet.
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What happened today in Japan

2009-08-03T19:18:00.019+09:00

A new judicial system started today. This is the first time a jury is convened since the end of the last war, and a second time since the Meiji restoration. There was a brief period before the war when a few trials involved a jury, a historical fact relatively unknown to people these days. The new system is meant to let citizens participate in the judicial process.
Personally I see no point in this. There should have been other priorities for judicial reforms that could have been put into effect earlier, like getting rid of the statute of limitations for serious crimes, life in prison without parole as an alternative to death penalty, and so forth.

A case of a stalker turned killer. A 41-year-old man stabbed a 21-year-old girl he's been stalking and her grandmother age around 80 in Minato Ward, Tokyo this morning. The grandmother is dead and the girl is in critical condition. This is a second such stalker crime in the past few months in Japan. The girl was working in an ear-cleaning parlor where he met her as a customer. Ear-cleaning parlors are a relatively new business emerging in Japan, catering mostly to men who seek relaxation and comfort. Customers have their ears cleaned by female service providers, while resting their heads in the girls' laps.
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What happened yesterday in Japan

2009-08-02T03:08:00.009+09:00

In Higashi-Murayama city, Tokyo, an elderly homeless man stabbed a total stranger in a station square. He told the police he wanted to go back to jail by committing the crime. He had recently been discharged from jail but hadn't been able to find any job. He said he realized the prison was a much better place for him. The victim was seriously wounded but in stable condition.

The Women's British Open is now underway. Its name has recently been changed to include the name of a Japanese photocopier manufacturer that's exclusively sponsoring it. A lot of Japanese top pros are in it and a few of them are faring well so far. It's aired at midnight in Japan and its ratings are exceptionally good for the late hours, as would be expected. A reporter says even half the galleries there are Japanese. I wonder how much advantage these Japanese players are being given. I feel like the Women's Japanese Open in England or something like that might be a better name for it.
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J-E translation 3

2008-01-17T14:18:00.000+09:00

In the first post of this series, I spent some time considering how to better translate "Figure that out" (imperative) into Japanese. I was thinking that the difficulty of translating it into natural Japanese had to do with "figure out." But then I found out that most English imperative sentences are not easy to translate into Japanese. I don't know exactly why, but it seems that they don't really fit well with Japanese. For instance, it seems as difficult to translate "Find out if you can do it," into natural Japanese as it is to translate "Figure that out." So the difficulty lies with the fact that it is in imperative rather than with how to translate "figure out." One example of translation I can think of for "Find out if you can do it" is "Dekiruka dohka tameshite mitekudasai," when this seemingly ubiquitous sentence appears in a public document or website or things like that. As you see, the interesting thing about it is that, although "find out" is usually translated as "wakaru," "shiru," "kizuku" when it appears in normal sentences, all of these Japanese verbs don't fit well into Japanese translations of English imperatives that include the phrasal verb.
The fact of the matter is that Japanese has no imperative, at least in the sense that English does.
It's pretty much impossible to use the Japanese verb "shiru" in translating an imperative sentence that includes what looks like an English counterpart.

On the other hand, it's true that in imperatives, some English verbs seem easier to translate into Japanese than others.

J-E translation 2

2008-01-16T21:45:00.000+09:00

About the Japanese verb 知る(shiru) as an action verb.

get to know; learn; find out.

1. I got to know that he was a bit of a womanizer.
2. I learned that he was a bit of a womanizer.
3. I found out that he was a bit of a womanizer.

It seems that all of these can be basically translated into Japanese as "Watashi wa kareni onna tarashi no ke ga arukoto wo shitta."
2 might also be translated as "..onnatarashi dato kiita" depending on the context.
3 can also be translated as "kizuita."
It would be wrong to translate 2 as "mananda," except in some rare situations where it would sound right.
3 (and sometimes maybe 1) can also be translated as "wakatta."
I am of the view that of "shiru," "wakaru," "kizuku," "wakaru" will best convey the original meaning of 3. Said that "shiru" may be just as good, or even better, depending on the context.

I didn't include "realize" in the list because it didn't seem to fit the meaning of "shiru" here. However translating "I realized that he.." as "shitta" might be okay.

Translating from Japanese to English 1

2008-01-15T10:56:00.000+09:00

The Japanese verbs "shiru," "wakaru."

Shiru: get to know; come to know; find out; find out about; learn; realize; come to realize; notice; recognize; come to be aware of something; etc.

Shitteiru: know; realize; be aware of something/that; etc.

Wakaru: understand; see; get; get to know; figure; figure out; realize; come to realize; recognize; etc.

Wakatteiru: know; understand; be aware of something; be aware that; etc.

"Find out (about)"
I have noticed that "find out (about)" is used almost as often as "know" in English. It may be translated more often as "kizuku," but given that the Japanese "shiru" and "kizuku" are quite similar in meaning, it would be okay to translate "shiru" as "find out (about)" more often than we do.

"Figure out" might be better translated as "rikai-suru" or "mi-i-da-su" (or "mitukeru," as in "kotae wo mitukeru" for "figure out an answer/solution, etc.") than "wakaru," depending on the situation. However, the lines are again blurry.
In English, they say "Figure that out" (imperative) very often. I wonder how best to translate it into Japanese. Obviously, we'd need to translate "I've figured that out" and "Figure that out !"(imperative) differently. "I've figured that out" would be "Wakatta." But "Wakareyo!" sounds a little bit awkward, if not wrong. "Wakattekudasai" isn't any better. "Wakarinasai," "Wakare," etc., are out of question.
"Figure out an answer" could be translated two ways: "kotae wo mitukeru/miidasu" and "kotae ga wakaru (wakatta.)"
For "I figured out how to/a way to ...," "yarikata ga wakatta, " or "Yarikata wo mituketa," would be fine.

The core meaning of "shiru" is get new information about something, or understand something in a new or different way.
The core meaning of "wakaru" is understand something, or find a way to solve something.

"Realize" for "shiru" may not seem quite right, but it depends. "Kizuku" or "wakaru" may be better for it, as in "Don't you realize that?" The fact is, shiru, wakaru, kizuku overlap in meaning. Needless to say the object of a sentence determines which to use.

By the way, "figure out" seems pretty similar to "come up with" in meaning.

It doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to compare English verbs with Japanese counterparts this way, as there is no one-to-one correspondence between them and syntax and things like that have to be taken into account, first and foremost. However, as long as English and Japanese are both human languages, they should have much in common and it would be quite interesting to see how well we can translate from one to the other.

Learning English 4

2008-01-02T11:03:00.001+09:00

Learning foreign language seems to take on different meanings depending on what language one chooses to learn. Learning a foreign language that is spoken worldwide, like English and Spanish, seems different in many respects from learning one that is spoken in virtually only one country, like Japanese, Thai, Mongol, etc. There would certainly be pros and cons to each choice, but they seem so obvious that I don't want to dwell on that point. In our country English is a mandatory subject for 3 years and every high school teaches English as well. There are a few options like French, German, Chinese, Korean, but these seem rare. Practically everyone is given an opportunity to learn the basics of English. These days every school is staffed with assistant teachers who speak English as their mother tongue. So after graduating from school, everyone is supposed to speak excellent English. But I digress.

The other day there was a question on Yahoo! Answers Japan asking for a translation from Japanese to English. It involved the word "hairstyle," which crept its way into the everyday Japanese speech a long time ago. As in the case of words ending with -mania, which I mentioned somewhere here before, we need to be extra careful in using these English-derived words, especially when translating those words back into English. Having said that, it seems perfectly okay to directly translate the japanese "he-a-su-ta-i-lu" back into "hairstyle" and vice versa, cause it's one of the few English-derived words that didn't lose their original meanings or forms. I remember there being three answers or so to the question. Two of them appeared to be posted by the Japanese living in Japan and one by someone living in the US. The two translated the Japanese "he-a-su-ta-i-lu" as "hairstyle," while the expat pointed out that in the US they usually say "hairdo," rather than "hairstyle." I don't know who got the BA but anyways at that moment I just considered it a good example of what people usually refer to as "ikita English" versus "shinda English" in Japanese, or usable English versus "school" English that is not really practical. But afterwards another thought occurred to me: while what the expat said might be true, it seems to me that it depends on the situation which one is better to use. The reason we learn english in school seems to be not because we're all supposed to live in the US in the future but because English is an international language, or lingua franca, which these days more and more people around the world are learning.

Suppose a situation where people from, say, four different nationalities, like Thailand, China, Russia and Japan, meet, which is pretty likely at tourist destinations and the like today. The odds are slim that they all know the four different languages but it's likely that they know some English. In such a situation, it would be better to say "hairstyle" than "hairdo," cause that would increase the likelihood of being able to have better communications.
That all said, it's definitely better to know two different words for the same thing than only one.

Learning English 3

2007-12-29T12:13:00.000+09:00

New Year's holidays and I'm on a reading spree. I'm determined to finish all the books that I left half-read, though I have no idea exactly how many there are and for me "being half-read" has a rather broad meaning, ranging from the last 10 pages to the last 300 pages or more.
Yesterday I finished "Skipping Christmas" overnight. I thought I got a glimpse of how important Christmas is for Christian countries. In fact it's sort of an enlightening experience for me. I realize I knew next to nothing about the customs of the country whose language I've been learning. These days not a few homes in my neighborhood decorate the outside of their houses with Christmas illuminations, but I doubt that any of them has a Christmas tree inside their home. No exchange of Christmas cards. No party. The book taught me how much the Christmas tree means to the people. It's hard for me to imagine ever having the same level of material affluence in my country, whether it's the end of the year or any other time. The whole story seemed to me like something that unfolds on a different planet. Countries where people can afford such holidays are called developed countries, whereas the rest of the world is called the third world, in which we belong, like one of the key characters in the novel. It seems that although it's been so long since Christmas made its way into our country, we (or I) still don't know anything about what Christmas truly means.

Last month I finished "Timeline" by Michael Crichton. It's a crazy novel and I wish I hadn't picked it up. Like many other Crichton's, it fails to seamlessly integrate every element into the flow of the novel, to borrow words from a review on one of his novels on Amazon.com. What the reviewer was saying was that he succeeded in seamlessly integrating all the elements together, like in any other of his novels, though. The beginning of the novel has nothing to do with the long rambling story that follows. Worse yet, it completely lacks a sense of humor, just like many of his other novels, and honestly I had a hard time reading it through to the end. On the other hand, "Skipping Christmas" was full of wry humor and that made reading it a lot of fun.
BTW, my take on novels is that they are, first and foremost, detrimental to health. And generally there is little to gain from them. However, living life vicariously is sometimes better than getting bored to death.

Learning English 2

2007-12-26T14:07:00.000+09:00

I was again disappointed at Cobuild Dictionary as I found that there's no entry for "haze" or "hazing" in it. I was honestly baffled, given that even the smaller version of Microsoft Encarta Dictionary contains it. Yesterday I was watching NHK news in English when the interpreter used the word "harass" three times or more where I thought it would be more appropriate to say "haze" or "hazing." I wanted to know how Cobuild defines its usage, and the next thing I knew I was reaching for the bulky one, only to find that the only definition for haze that it contains is that it is something of mist. The definition of haze in the smaller Microsoft Encarta is: "to persecute a subordinate." That's what I wanted to know and I think it's very concise and to the point.

The good news is that I finally began to realize that my English sucks. The bad news is that I find myself as clueless as I was a few years ago. Recently I've been listening to NPR the whole time I'm at my PC, and I think my listening comprehension has much improved. That's the only solace I have now.

Learning English 1

2007-12-15T19:19:00.000+09:00

It took me almost a year to recognize a mistake I made in here,--- and a terrible one at that---which I made, well, exactly a year ago. I wrote "I'm a Beatlemania" several times as I didn't know that words ending with -mania don't mean people in English. The Japanese language adopted a few words ending with -mania from English and people took them to mean freaks. And that's actually the common usage of these words in Japanese, so that in Japanese Beatlemania means a Beatles freak, carmania a car freak or a car buff, and so on. I recall feeling something was wrong with the way I used the word. I learned the fact from a book with tips on how best to translate Japanese into English, titled "tutawaru eigo hyogen-ho," written by a professional interpreter. The fact is I didn't know about it at all even though I've been studying English since I was a teenager. Is it something to be ashamed of? Maybe. But the reason I didn't know it is because I have never come across any book explaining about it before. That may sound like a lame excuse, but it's true. The lesson of this experience is that you couldn't be more careful in the translation into English of Japanese words derived from English.
"Learning is a painful process" is a sentence as an example of translation from Japanese to English that I found in the book I owe this knowledge to. For me learning is an enjoyable process, though not an easy one.
Another thing to learn from all this is that it would be unrealistic to expect to get all the information you need to learn a foreign language from one book or two. However, really valuable information like this is hard to come across.

Writing practice

2007-12-15T15:58:00.000+09:00

From today's news.
It's hardly surprising that a power hitter who used to play in the same team as Matsuzaka was named in the list of players suspected of using performance-enhancing drugs. Anybody with the slightest bit of common sense would have been aware for a long time that he was heavily dependent on steroids. I bet practically everybody here in Japan knew that. Just a glance at his disproportionately developed arms was enough to convince me of it. The disgrace Marion Jones suffered just recently was a really sad thing to see. Considering her fate, it's a good thing that, unlike her, the guy won't have to pay back all the money he got by strengthening his muscles to an almost otherworldly degree by virtue of the drugs. Now he's our real hero!

Ramblings

2007-12-08T20:28:00.001+09:00

It's really good to be drunk, especially at this time of year. But drinking at home is kind of boring and I want to spend every evening in a chicken joint or something but every joint in my neighborhood seems to close too early. I really want them to be open 24h a day. The ones that do open very late into the night are the ones that invariably rip me off. I often end up drinking at two or three locations in a night and that costs quite a bit so it's just not possible for me to go out every night.

Recently I've been feeling like I'm lost in translation or I'm lost in how to learn English more effectively. I'm just wondering what's wrong. So to boost my motivaiton, I bought myself a new dictionary, Cobuild Advanced learner's English dictionary. I did a few checks on it by comparing it with other dictionaries in terms of how they define the same words. To begin with I checked how they define the phrasal verb "fork out/over." Cobuild defines it as "if you fork out for something, you spend a lot of money on it," with no mention of its variation "fork over." Microsoft Encarta: fork over, fork out, fork up vti. to pay the money required for something or spend a lot of money, often grudgingly. Scholastic Children's Dictionary: if you fork out for something, you pay for it reluctantly. My understanding was that what the latter two mentioned, grudgingly and reluctantly, is the core meaning of the phrasal verb and I was kind of disappointed to see that the definition by Cobuild has no mention of it. I don't want to be too hasty in making judgment but I have the impression that Cobuild is a bit overhyped by many, whether they be teachers or anything. First of all it seems like it's been edited without readability being taken into consideration at all, so figuring out what's important to learn takes time. In contrast, Microsoft Encarta, summarizing the core meanings of every word in just one or two words and printing them in boldface, is very easy to read and understand.
This time I was pleasantly surprised that Scholastic Children's Dictionary, which I've put aside for a long time, is unexpectedly good, with clear and concise definitions and superior readability. And despite being concise, it's more detailed in places than the overrated one.

Diary 1

2007-11-17T00:40:00.001+09:00

There used to be a liquor store right down the block but since it went out of business recently, now I have to go on a sort of night outing just to get some liquor.
The shopping mall in Nishihara-cho closes very early so I have to go as far as to a tiny Seiyu supermarket store inside an apartment complex. With every store closed, it feels like I'm walking through a ghost town. The Seiyu chain was bought out by WalMart a couple of years ago, so if, like many other Seiyu stores did recently, the one in there gets shut down, which seems pretty likely under WalMart that seems far more blatant than Japanese counterparts in giving priority to profitability over anything else, like contributions to communities, how much longer will my nocturnal outing become? The part of Tokyo I live in is in a suburban area and convenience stores that used to be so ubiquitous around here went out of business one after another, presumably because of difficulty operating the stores. Before being turned into convenience stores, they were local liquor stores or groceries or things like that. Ironically, convenience stores ended up inconveniencing us. That all said, it's nice walking around at this time of year. Yesterday the first hint of winter was visible, audible and palpable. The leaves of trees lining the streets have not fully turned red yet but fallen leaves are everywhere, creating slippery pavement and a very autumnal atmosphere that is very nice to be immersed in. On my way back, I stopped by a Korean restaurant and had another drink. I'd secretly had a crush on a Korean girl working there. Having sexual desire is one thing, having a crush is another and just does not happen very often. The last time I had was maybe at least five years ago. And now I'm thinking to learn Korean. All in all, it was another relaxed, nice drunk night in autumn.
The first sentence I borrowed from Lenny Kravitz's song. "Don't go and put a bullet in your head, just turn your life around instead...."

Writing practice 2

2007-11-13T13:32:00.000+09:00

Language is in essence inextricably linked with human emotions. But that's only one characteristic of it and there's much more to it. For one thing, enumerating things is one of the things that language makes possible. This afternoon an idea occurred to me that spending hours and hours and hours just enumerating things by taking advantage of that feature of the language might have some unexpected side effects. But since I haven't experimented it yet, I have no idea what exactly they could be. The easiest way to do this is to count from one to whatever number it takes that long to reach, though it would be way too boring and pointless. But on the other hand, spending, say, two hours, enumerating things that just come to mind in a willy-nilly fashion, doesn't seem to be an easy thing to do, because your emotions will surely get in the way and try to create sentences with some definite meanings to them, even if they might be just fragments and not complete sentences. The only thing I can say is that the experiment might serve some purpose, in one way or another, when it comes to second language acquisition. It's kind of like brainstorming. As long as it's my second language, I can barely put my emotions into it. I can't make sentences that make sense at all times, either. But if that's your mother tongue, every word would have some emotions or feelings attached to it, or thoughts or memory or whatever, even if it's not combined with other words to make up a sentence. Besides it's doubtful if you can truly say a single word cannot constitute a sentence to begin with. I'd like to add that all this has to do with inner monologue and spoken language is another story.
This argument of mine may be completely irrelevant. Because I seem to stand on the old assumption that language equals thought, which proved wrong by linguists for once and for all and is therefore no longer a moot point. And obviously, language and emotions are two different things. Language just gives shape to our emotions. The point is how much it affects our emotions and to what extent the shaping takes place in our everyday thinking process and our emotional life.

English writing practice

2007-11-07T13:01:00.000+09:00

Last month there was a question in the Travel Japan section of Yahoo! Answers asking if it is safe to drink tap water in Tokyo and my answer was picked as the best answer. I said that there's nothing to worry about, that tap water here is even safer than bottled water because it's 100% chlorinated, and added I'm a big fan of tap water in Tokyo. What I said was 100% true, and for sure the tap water tastes very good in the part of Tokyo where I live. But the other day I had an occasion to drink tap water in Ikebukuro and was surprised how awful it tasted, though not so awful as to knock me unconscious. It's because even within Tokyo, water sources vary from area to area. Or it's just that I'm so used to the taste of the tap water I've been drinking for so long, that I felt that way. I don't want to say bad things about it considering how much effort they are putting in to secure precious water that is getting increasingly harder and harder to obtain these days. So that's it.
I'm now reading "Anything you say can and will be used against you" and enjoying it immensely. It's a real good book. I highly recommend it to everyone. It's exquisitely written and truly compelling.

There was a question in the Language section of Yahoo! Answers a couple of days ago asking how to say "If you can smell what the Rock was cooking" in Japanese. One of the answerers who sounded like a girl in the US was laughing uncontrollably. I learned it was a quote of a pro-wrestler in Kansas City or somewhere else in the US, but being Japanese that I am, I didn't figure out why it's so funny nor could I find out how to put it into the appropriate Japanese.

Very good news

2007-10-26T12:50:00.000+09:00

The good news is that the conversation school has actually gone bankrupt today. Not to sound insensitive, but it makes me feel really good to hear that. I just can't help but say that. At the same time I feel sorry for the people who might not be reimbursed at all and those who might not get paid. The company should do everything it can to pay them, and ASAP. I just hope that other schools, with the exception of some really well-intentioned ones, will take the same path so that no Japanese will be talked into paying crazy amounts of money anymore just to learn how to converse in English.

English school in Japan

2007-10-23T14:04:00.000+09:00

It looks like Japan's biggest English conversation school is having a very tough time and rumors are going around that it will go out of business sooner or later. People who're teaching English there as native English speakers coming from various countries have gone on a strike because they don't get paid. If they don't get paid at all I wonder how they manage to make ends meet. And how inhumane it is to not pay them their due wages. But who cares. As far as I'm concerned I couldn't care less. The news will be distributed worldwide and I wonder what the world will feel about it. Just another disgrace to our country? I couldn't care less either. The school's business started going downhill last year after its fraudulent way of doing business was brought to light by the government's intervention in the wake of accusations from a lot of customers. Over the years they have developed fairly elaborate ways of ripping its students off. For one thing, the school sells a lot of "lesson tickets" with a limited validity to every student when they enter school, while guaranteeing them that they will be able to use them all up within the validity period. However the school well knows that it can't afford to provide every student with the lessons they pay for in advance, because of lack of class space and an inadequate number of teachers. From what I've heard, the amount of money they have to pay just to get started starts from around $3,000 and is about $6,000 on average. But despite the exorbitant tuition, because of the inadequacies much of the tickets go unused and expire. It's a well-thought-out way of fraud.

Ramblings

2007-10-11T15:09:00.000+09:00

Yesterday I was glad I managed to get Yahoo! Answers to delete a question in the "Travel Japan" section that seemed to me to be in violation of the guidelines of Yahoo! Answers. The question was posted by an ID that sounded like a japanese name. Although what it stated was factually correct, it had nothing to do with japan and was apparently meant as a derogatory remark to our neighboring country that will be hosting the Olympic games next year. Derogatory or not, it's definitely a violation, as it had nothing to do with Japan. So there's nothing wrong with what I did, although I knew there were already more than ten answers to it and it was even starred by three people. I was so elated to see it deleted just minutes after I reported it as abuse.
Good job Tanaka! Hee-hee-hee-hee!
The japanese guy should have posted the question in the Travel China or somewhere else to prove he's not just another coward or asshole.

ramblings

2007-10-10T16:14:00.000+09:00

I've been reading and even answering questions in the section of Yahoo! Answers about Japan for the past two months. Most of the people asking and answering questions about Japan in there seem to be very fond of things japanese and I think I learned a lot from them, but at the same time I felt kind of disgusted at how racist and insensitive some of them were. It's really disgusting and disheartening to see that. I don't want to read embarrassing, repulsive questions anymore. I don't like to see people who're living or have lived here bad-mouthing or ridiculing our country blatantly in their own blogs, either. I just wonder how come they thought it's okay for them to do so in the first place. Maybe that's none of my business and freedom of expression is the most important thing in the world, that's for sure. But before that, it's a matter of decency. As for me, the last thing I will do is insulting foreign countries and people living there, particularly in a manner that smacks of racism.
Or I'm the one who's insensitive. Without the experience of living in any foreign country, I have no idea how stressful it could be living in a foreign country. And that's living in a country as eccentric as japan. It may be something of a torture to some and they need to vent sometimes. I don't know.

Learning a foreign language

2007-10-10T03:27:00.000+09:00

There's pros and cons to everything and it seems like sometimes things backfire. I read somewhere on the Internet that writing in a foreign language while you're not yet proficient enough in it to do so could only detract from your learning. Now I think I know what it really means.
I feel like the more I write in English, the worse my English gets. But at the same time I feel that all in all, it's better than nothing.
Maybe I was wrong in assuming that one can master a foreign language in the space of one or two years by just keeping writing.

Writing practice 1

2007-08-11T03:00:00.001+09:00

It seems like the devastating heat waves are a global phenomenon and most people living in the northern hemisphere seem to be experiencing this almost life-threatening heat, according to cnn. There was an NHK news report today that this summer will be the second hottest since record keeping began here in Japan. The heat is really exhausting and just unbelievable. Everything is soggy and I don't want to move an inch in my non-air-conditioned apartment. Some of my Beatles vinyl records, which I'd inadvertently left near a window sill, got warped due to the murderous heat. Once they got warped, there's no way you can straighten them back. I can't listen to Revolution anymore.
BTW, I'm wondering why the Earth turns from left to right and not in the opposite direction. I'd like to ask this on Yahoo!Anwers Japan today. Asking a question like this would remind me of a radio Q&A program for schoolchildren that used to be aired during summer vacations. The Bon season has started and people are going back to their home land for a very short vacation. The summer vacations the Japanese take are about 3 to 4 days long on average. The Prime Minister is reportedly not going on vacation this summer because of the election debacle last month. Neither will I. The Bon season is in the middle of August in the rural part of Japan, while in Tokyo it is in the middle of July. I've always been wondering what the time difference is for. Anyhow, I have no country to go back to cause I was born in Tokyo. The town I was born in is just two stations away and next week I'm going back to the city and stopping in an izakaya celebrating the bon season one month late. I headed over there twice or more in the last week, though. The izakaya's owner is now on a brief vacation in her home country in the northern Japan and it is now closed. One of the surest ways to fend off heat stroke is to consume an inordinate amount of alcohol overnight. That much I'm sure of.

Corridor

2007-08-05T16:25:00.000+09:00

It came as no surprise that the corridor they planned on constructing turned out to be a very long one.

BTW, I feel sorry for Asa-sho-ryu, the greatest Sumo champion from Mongolia. I don't want to see him retire so young. I believe he has the potential to remain yokozuna for another five years.

A heat wave descended on Tokyo and it's been another swelteringly hot day today.

I wonder how much effect the temporary shutdown of Japan's largest nuclear plant will have on our life as a whole. Now nuclear plants are producing between 30 and 40 per cent of the total energy produced in this country. I've noticed that this year trains in and around Tokyo are air-conditioned to slightly higher temperatures than they were last year. It used to be that riding a train was like going into a refrigerator.

Learning English 8

2007-06-29T04:49:00.001+09:00

According to the eminent linguist, the vast majority of possible sentences have not been uttered yet. If that's so, then I would like to speak/write sentences that have not been spoken yet. Everybody wants to tell what's already been told. Everybody wants to write the way others do. What's the use of blogs if you don't break the mold. Even at the center of language, there is something astonishing. And all that glitters ain't gold.
It seems like learning a foreign language consists in learning to be able to write or speak sentences that the people speaking it as their mother tongue are very likely to speak. In this sense, there is not much freedom when you learn foreign language. On the one hand, sometimes I feel like creating a new kind of language like non-japanese people out there who're learning Japanese do with japanese when writing blogs in japanese. I don't know why more people don't try creating new words like Joyce did. I've never heard of any japanese writer who tried writing Joyce-style. Tsutsui Yasutaka used to write experimental novels and sure I've been fascinated by them, but they were not even remotely close to what Joyce did. The biggest difference was that all the works by Tsutsui were commercially motivated. It might be safe to say that the only Joycean Japanese writers are non-Japanese bloggers writing in Japanese, most of whom seem to do so unknowingly, thus making unique contributions to the great tradition of the Japanese language. If learning cliches is all you have to do, what's the point of learning language? On the other hand, I want to make my english sound as much like true English as possible, because that's the main reason I practice writing English in here. Those people who write blogs in Japanese as a second language would very likely have the same intention as me. Easier said than done.
That's all for this hour. Thanks for reading.

Learning English 7b

2007-06-26T11:00:00.000+09:00

I might have given a false impression that every japanese is as loony as me and can't even read "訴訟" right. That's not true. I would be the only one or two out of ten ordinary japanese people to read it as "soko." Because of the irrational nature of japanese kanji, especially in terms of how each character represents different sounds depending on what other kanji characters they are associated with, funny stories about kanji reading errors abound in Japan. Quite a few anchorpersons, especially girls, used to make a lot of mistakes reading kanji. Some TV personalities have to have their scripts checked by their assistants so that every kanji word they won't be able to read correctly is given information written in plain hiragana or katakana(called furigana) to save them from looking like idiots by making kanji-reading errors in public. But I don't think that just because some TV celebrity read "南大泉”as "minami-daisen," "塩山”as "shio-yama," or "百草園”as "hyaku-so en," it proves she's an idiot.

That's all for today.

Learning English 7

2007-06-25T18:28:00.001+09:00

Kanji is hard to learn, especially when it comes to learning how to read two-kanji words correctly. It was only last month that I learned that the correct way of reading "訴訟" is "sosho." I was thinking "so-ko" was the right way to read it, probably because the right section of the second kanji letter is usually read "ko" when used independently. I don't know if it is something to be ashamed of as a japanese. But even if I don't know how to read it correctly, that doesn't make any difference nor does it cause any problems, cause my everyday life, and perhaps the everyday life of 90% of japanese people for that matter, has nothing to do with the word. It is translated in English as "lawsuit." Not that I don't hear it said in everyday situations, cause TV news will use it at least once a day. But hearing it said is one thing and saying it aloud is a wholly different thing. It's just that there was no synapse in my brain that connected the sound of the word "so-sho" with its written form "訴訟." I don't think it has anything to do with what is often referred to as "dyslexia." And even if I read it the wrong way, I know exactly what it means, so there's been absolutely no problem at all. This might have to do with the ROM part of the brain for the language. There's a sentence in the book (I am a pencil) I've been reading that caught my eyes; a girl in elementary school in the US asked her teacher what the word "agony" meant. I think most Japanese who spent years learning English would know what it means. Even if she doesn't know what it means, she can speak and write English fluently because she seems to have what can be described as a "RAM for English" in her brain. On the other hand, while most Japanese might know what the word means, I doubt that they are able to use it in any practical way when speaking or writing. As for myself, of course I can't. It seems like what is called "language acquisition" has a lot more to do with creating this RAM than just increasing the capacity of the ROM, or non-working knowledge database, in the brain. I might have a very incomplete and limited ROM for English, but I still don't have a working RAM for English in my brain. And what I've found recently is that my ROM for japanese language is just as incomplete and limited, though japanese is my own language.

Kudos to NHK 2

2007-06-22T16:12:00.000+09:00

This week's "Sono toki rekishi ga ugoita (pivotal moments of history)" was a disappointment. I lost interest as soon as I saw Itsuki Hiroyuki, the champion of the preachy pulp fiction writers out there, showing up in the program. Oh come on give me a break. What I want from the program are solid historical facts and not philosophical nonsense from someone like him.

That's all for this hour.

Learning English 5

2007-06-17T15:49:00.000+09:00

I want to make as few mistakes as possible. But as a person whose mother tongue is not the language he's writing, it can't be helped. Once a translator who claimed to be bilingual with her experience of receiving more than ten years of education in the US was unmercifully ridiculed by an American guy online about her English she posted on her own Website: "Having born and educated in America for more than 10 years, I'm truly bilingual!" If someone like her made such a mistake, what's wrong with me writing bad English? It seems like Japanese people tend to believe that it's okay for them to make grammatical errors. I must confess I use to be one of them. But from what I've seen lately, English-speaking people seem much less tolerant of bad grammar we're so familiar with than we think. Today as usual, people who claim to have a lot of experience with English were posting answers full of grammatical errors on Yahoo! Answers Japan while saying that posts by other people contain a lot of grammatical errors. Looks like I'm no different from them in this regard. But anyway I'd like them to try to make as few mistakes as possible, like I'm doing right now, so that their English would be less detrimental to students who might be reading them. After all, they are influential, much more influential than me in terms of their career and the popularity of the forum where they make posts.

Learning English 4

2007-06-17T01:57:00.000+09:00

This post (or any post i've made so far, for that matter) will have to do with only japanese people learning English. Although the mistake I wrote about the other day that I'd made about whether to use 'already' or 'yet' in question sentences is discouraging enough in itself, I've decided to not care about these things anymore. Just because you don't know the basics doesn't mean you don't know anything about the language you're learning. I've been watching Japanese people online who say they've lived in English-speaking countries for a very long time make basic mistakes about grammar. Some of them even don't know things about grammar that every high school student in japan might know. Despite that, the English they write is sometimes very excellent and makes me want to express respect to them. The thing is, to learn basic things, you need to actually spend some time learning them. That's it. The more I learn about basic things, the more aware I become of how they actually contribute to making sentences. After I learned (not through practice but by reading grammar books) how to use "yet" in questions in present perfect tense, I've come to be able to recognize that they are actually used quite often, while listening to the radio. Before that, I didn't even notice questions in present perfect tense that end with 'yet.' However, like I said, that won't discourage me. This got me thinking about how things are not as easy as they look, or how hard they really are when it comes to learning language. What all the eminent teachers out there tell us is that when it comes to learning language, what's important is, "narau yori narero," or "practice makes perfect." I think this English translation, which you'll find in just about every J-E dictionary, is a little too different than the original. What they seem to tell us is that you need to train your involuntary muscles rather than your voluntary muscles. Now I've come to doubt its validity. Considering my experience just mentioned and the fact that japanese who say they've lived in English-speaking countries for a long time sometimes write sentences like "I found an information online," "I've seen her yesterday," etc., I wonder if practice really makes perfect. My take on this right now is that "narau," or "to study, to check books, etc.," might be far more important than "nareru" or "to practice or to get familiar with things without thinking anything or train your involuntary muscles." In other words, "nareru yori narae," or "read grammar books first and foremost."
That's all for today.

Rain

2007-06-15T00:17:00.000+09:00

The rain season is officially here in Tokyo according to the weather reports. We're going to have a lot of rain next week, which is a good thing in itself. Were it not for the rain season, our whole lives would be jeopardized. Last week I saw an NHK documentary on China and learned something about the devastating toll that serious water shortage is taking on the country. They are now going to great lengths to increase precipitation. Efforts are under way to get rain clouds to actually dump water by launching rockets at them whenever they appear in the sky, which the program said has become a rare event in much of the inner part of the country. It made me realize that we should appreciate much more our water supply system, which we usually take for granted. I'd love to see Lake Tama full of blue water rather than drained dry, which is the condition it's been in for years now. Lake Tama is supposed to provide drinking water to people of Tokyo although part of it belongs to Saitama Prefecture.

Lake Tama: http://www.u.arizona.edu/~sandiway/bike/tamako/index.html

That's all for today.

Kudos to NHK

2007-06-14T01:39:00.000+09:00

I'm a big fan of NHK programs except for dramas and programs featuring entertainers. When a program is as good as I expected, I am so deliriously happy that sometimes I think I was born to watch NHK programs. I especially like documentaries. I used to think documentaries made by BBC were great, but these days I have the impression that those created by NHK are just as great or even better. Today's "Sono toki rekishi ga ugoita" was as compelling as ever.

That's all for today.

Learning English 3

2007-06-11T17:11:00.000+09:00

Recently I've found out that I haven't mastered even the very basics of English yet. There was a question on Yahoo! Answers Japan the other day asking for a translation from a simple Japanese conversation into English. "Moh shi-na-i wo ken-ga-ku shimashita-ka?" I first translated it into "Have you already toured/looked around the city?" I was feeling that something's not quite right with the way I used "already," but that's my first answer I posted there anyway. Then I checked dictionaries and found that the use of 'already' in question sentences needs some attention.
It should be: "Have you toured/looked around the city yet?" The thing is I didn't know what implications 'already' has when used in questions. I'm glad I learned it by making the mistake. I don't care if I don't know the very basics of English because I'm not teaching English to anyone, at least for profit. I'm no academic person, so I think I can make mistakes anytime I like. But I don't think teachers can make mistakes that easily. Especially if they are English teachers. Because they earn their living by teaching English. But this doesn't mean I'm going to accuse English teachers every time they make mistakes, like some people out there seem fond of doing. Those people blame everything on education. According to them, the reason why they are not doing well in English is because their English teachers and/or education systems weren't good enough. I just can't figure out why they think it's okay for them to keep blaming teachers like children or teenagers do despite the fact that they are already adults and even some of them seem like professors. The teachers have absolutely no responsibility for every mistake those accusers make. I think they are arrogant.

Learning English 2

2007-06-11T14:34:00.000+09:00

I bought another English-Japanese dictionary in a used bookstore the other day. It was Tokyo Shoseki's Advanced Favorite English-Japanese (E-J) Dictionary. I already have a Japanese-English (J-E) dictionary published by the same company and find it very reliable and even the best I've ever used as a Japanese-English dictionary. I checked it to see how it explains the usage of the verb "regret" combined with a gerund (regret writing/regret having written), in comparison to the other E-J dictionaries I have. Now I have and am using four E-J dictionaries that were published relatively recently: Taishukan's Genius E-J dictionary; Kenkyusha's Luminous; Shogakukan's Random House; and Tokyo Shoseki's Advanced Favorite. Advanced Favorite provides the simplest explanation on the usage. It mentions only the form "regret ...ing." Random house is more detailed and explains that since the thing the speaker regrets is always something he/she did in the past, there's no need to make it clear that it happened in the past by using the form "regret having pp." Genius mentions both forms. Luminous mentions only the form "regret having pp."

I did Internet searches. "I regret writing" yielded less than 3,000 results. "I regret having written" yielded less than 300 results. My guess is that "regret having pp" is sometimes needed, as when the speaker wants to use past perfect tense. Like "I regret having signed before reading the email."

Advanced Favorite E-J is much less detailed in explaining the usage of every verb than, say, Genius, with much less information provided, but that seems to make it that much easier to read and even COMPREHEND. That's my impression. Since I have a great deal of confidence in the J-E dictionary published by the same company, I'm going to rely on Advanced Favorite E-J for a while.

June

2007-06-03T18:41:00.000+09:00

Recently I've resumed my old habit of talking to dead souls. The dead souls are my friends and relatives. Last year one of my relatives in Shikoku died at the age 93. I was an ingrate to him because, though I got a lot of help from him, I did nothing in return. And he died. I was thinking I needed redemption in one way or the other. This weekend I felt I had a conversation with him between this side of the world and the other side of the world while gazing at the dark evening sky. I felt he said he doesn't mind. I was glad to hear him say that. June is the time when I very strongly feel that all the dead souls are around me, though Japanese tradition has it that they usually come back around the spring and fall equinoxes. Now I feel he's always beside me to protect me. I don't believe in occultism at all, so I don't really buy what I'm saying here right now myself. It could be a pure fiction. Having said that I don't really think it's a fiction. Just because they are dead doesn't mean they are really dead.

Today I planned on going to a friend's grave. But I didn't. Because I thought that if I stepped out today, I would spend a whole day drinking again, for four days in a row.

Last week I stopped in a pub where there were a bunch of Philippine girls in Hibari-ga-oka. I didn't think they are still in Japan because of recent law changes, though I rarely go to such a place. One of the girls said you were 'overdrunk.' I don’t know if 'overdrunk' makes sense. I know it would make perfect sense but wonder if English-speaking people say that in their respective English-speaking countries on a daily basis. The girls there all speak excellent Japanese and can even read Japanese, hiragana and Kanji, as I saw them read hiragana when clicking hiragana buttons on a tiny karaoke gadget. I thought they were geniuses, language geniuses, and I said that to them and they chuckled like little girls although they said most of them are mothers in their 30s, with their children left behind in the Philippines. Drinking there is a little bit expensive and I won't be able to go there as often as I like, though I'd very much like to. I even want to go tonight. But I've spent pretty much everything as I've been on a bender for like three days in a row.

This Saturday I stopped in the Yanaka cemetery in Taito ward, Tokyo, on my way back from my stay in the Uguisu-dani area the previous night, and strolled there for some time because the weather was once again gorgeous despite heavy rain the previous day. The place attracts a lot of foreign people because the area reeks of history, Edo and Meiji eras. I often see people from overseas taking photos of old stone statues and old buildings around there. There was a signboard in front of an old apartment, saying "No photographs." I wondered just how annoying it would be for people living there to have their residences photographed by a bunch of total strangers, most of them Japanese photo buffs, on every weekend. The apartment, though a bit on the run-down side, looked so attractive and made me want to live there. I didn't take pictures of it because like I said photographs are prohibited. I didn't have a camera with me in the first place. Afterwards, I headed over to the Tokyo turf again, although I hadn't promised to go with the guy I went with the previous week.

Derby day

2007-05-28T09:24:00.000+09:00

I went to the Nihon (Japan) Derby in Fuchu-city Tokyo this Sunday. It was a blast. I'm not saying watching the horses was a blast. It was a blast because the weather was gorgeous. Spending a day like this in Okutama or resorts around Mt. Fuji would have been much better. The May breeze couldn't have been nicer. I don't play the horses. A friend of mine in his 60s, who's long been a horse fan to the point of being pathological, had asked me to go with him. I'm about the same age as his son, so I guess we would be looked at as a father and his son, but actually he's just a gambling friend of mine and the owner of a drinking joint where I've been one of its customers for almost a decade. The crowd of the day in the race track in Fuchu must have been around 150,000, but after a long overdue overhaul of the stadium for which construction work had taken a few years to get done, the place didn't seem that crowded. No need to wait a while in line to buy betting slips, which used to be the case even on races of a lesser scale than the Japan Derby. Just before the race started, Mr. Abe, among the crowd though in a bulletproof stand at the top of the stadium, showed up smiling in the recently-built gigantic monitor that Asahi Shinbun said cost a whopping 3.2 billion yen, or 32 million dollars, to build. I had seen him the previous day in a TV news strolling in Jukai, Japan's largest forest at the foot of Mt. Fuji, flanked by a gaggle of guards and reporters, to see how the effort of an NGO led by a maverick alpinist to clean up the area, which they say is horribly littered with everything from domestic garbage to industrial waste, is going on. No wonder because his approval rating has been declining steadily since he took office. According to today's news, he was the third prime minister to attend the annual national-scale event on that day, the Japan Derby, after the former minister Koizumi and Abe's grandfather Kishi Nobusuke (1896-1987). I was thinking the first name of the legendary prime minister Kishi read as "Shinsuke."
A filly named "Vodka" won the race. The trifecta payout was a mind-boggling 2,100,000 yen or $20,000. Which means 100 yen (a buck) bet on the race morphed into that incredible amount. A guy in his 50s watching the race beside me in the front row of the crowd showed me the betting slips he bought and I found he narrowly missed a chance of winning the big money, that could have been a once-in-a-lifetime one for him, or anyone else for that matter as far as gambling. The combinations he had bought were 3 (Vodka)-14, 15, 17- all the rest numbers. The winning combination was 3-16-14. In Japanese gambling slang, a thing like this is usually called "nu-keh-meh," or a missing number, meaning that the number they leave out is often the winning one. And the horses numbered 16, 14 were zubuzubu-ed by Vodka, 'zubuzubu' being another gambling slang term, whose meaning I'll explain to you in later days. There were also lots of groups of American people here and there, at the paddock and at yakitori stands, and I heard them shouting, "Oh my God," now and again, partly because that's one of the few English phrases I can understand. A decade or so ago, Japan seemed to be in the process of becoming a truly international society, with people of all races and ethnicities gathering everywhere. It is a thing of the past after the government began enforcing a very strict immigration policy. Sometimes I feel that in no other country in the world would the immigration policy be as strict as in Japan. Places like race tracks in and around Tokyo used to be a multilingual environment. They are no more. The only non-Japanese speaking people coming seem to be people from the US base in Fussa or somewhere else.
After we were done, we spent some time in one of the run-down drinking joints right in front of the front gate of the Tokyo Race course, drinking our losses away. The smell of yakitori grilled on good-quality charcoal is so alluring we just can't resist the temptation every time we go. No day of horseracing would be complete without this part. In fact, that's always the best part of every gambling outing.

Tuesday ramblings

2007-05-22T19:37:00.000+09:00

A brief understanding of how my own language works seems to help me figure out how different it is from the foreign language I'm learning. English and Japanese are both inflected languages, meaning verbs assume different forms depending on the tense. Chinese is not an inflected language. In addition to being an inflected language, Japanese is also an agglutinative language, as are other languages belonging to the same language group. "I walk every day." "I walked every day while I was in Japan." The difference between 'walk' and 'walked' is what makes English one of the inflected languages out there. The same goes with Japanese. "Watashi wa ma-i-ni-chi aru-ku," meaning "I walk every day;" "Watashi wa ni-hon ni iru-to-ki ma-i-ni-chi aru-i-ta," meaning "I walked every day while I was in Japan." The difference between 'aru-ku (walk)' and 'aru-i-ta (walked)' is what makes Japanese an inflected language. At this point English and Japanese are not much different. Now here comes the difference. In Japanese, it is possible or even sometimes necessary to add a suffix(es) to the end of the inflected or uninflected form of the verb. This 'agglutinative' nature makes Japanese a very context-dependent language, which is also the bane of a lot of Japanese learners. The variant of 'aru-ku' that is the most commonly used and polite is 'aru-ki-masu.' It is possible to add multiple suffixes to one verb. In 'aru-ku' (the present form of 'walk'), for instance, its variants I can think of now are: 'aru-ku-yo,' 'aru-ku-ne-e,' 'aru-ku-n-da,' 'aru-ku-n-desu,' 'aru-ku-n-da-yo,' 'aru-ku-n-da-ke-do,' 'aru-ku-ke-do-ne,' 'aru-ku-no-sa,' etc., etc. The list goes on and on. (There are also variants 'aru-ki-suffix(es)' but I didn't mention them here.) Things are more complex with the combinations of the present/paste tense and the polite/impolite. These suffixes serve to allow the speaker to tweak the meaning of each sentence to suit the context it is spoken in, and are the main reason why Japanese is considered one of the world's most blatantly sexist languages as well as the one capable of reflecting social hierarchies. It seems impossible to logically explain all of this. There might be comprehensive grammar books on the usage of Japanese suffixes. But I wonder how effective it could be to read them in mastering their usage.

There may be something wrong in my explanation here from the viewpoint of authentic ways of teaching Japanese or linguistics, because I haven't studied Japanese in any systematic way. But Japanese is my own language and the one I use every day so I think I know it a lot better than grammar books.

Monday ramblings

2007-05-22T02:15:00.000+09:00

My inane ramblings about how a thinking process proceeds in terms of using language may be summed up in terms like "mental lexicon," etc. There might be people who speculate on a daily basis or even every moment using such vocabularies as "phantasmagorial," "ollapodrida." But just because some words are long and complicated, it doesn't mean they have no use in everyday situations. It would not be easy for people learning foreign languages to distinguish between everyday words and words that would sound odd if spoken. One thing I have noticed is that my thinking process based on language always proceeds auditorily, not visually, i.e., I don't visualize letters in my mind in order to think in language; everything takes on the form of sound even inside my heart. I don't know how things go in different languages, but my guess is that the same goes for every language in the world. If that holds true, one would have to think "auditorily" in a foreign language before being able to speak in the language.
BTW I realize I should stop fooling around with a foreign language. I should be more serious, serious enough that I won't hurt the feelings of people who speak the language as their mother language. I feel I've become a little complacent lately. Or I've always been. It's high time I changed my attitude towards learning, or everything for that matter. I'm grateful that I was given the chance to learn almost all kinds of things at school, one of them English. For that, I feel really indebted to this country and people who founded all the good systems. According to CNN news I watched today, a lot of children in the world are now being forced to work at very early ages instead of going to school, akin to slavery. It said that the number of people in a state of slavery all around the world is even much greater today than when there were no laws whatsoever banning slavery and some part of the world was relying on it. It's a really good thing I can afford the time to learn something. Education is one of the things that one should value all life long. Several years back, things started to go downhill and I'm in poverty right now, but I have that much more time to learn what i want to learn, and it makes me feel a lot happier than when I was so busy and earning a whole lot more money than I do now. I really mean it. I'm not looking for solace or anything.

Agglutinative Weekend

2007-05-20T13:06:00.001+09:00

Last night was a fairly agglutinative night. I pondered the possibility of thinking in a foreign language. This led me to think about how my thought process in Japanese proceeds. One thing I realized is that I rarely or never use words that only show up in written language. Almost all the words that come up to my mind while thinking are those we exchange in everyday conversation or hear on TV, radio, etc. I rarely think the way books are written. In other words, our inner monologue consists almost entirely of everyday words. So it would be very natural to assume things are not much different in foreign languages. To be able to speak in a foreign language, one would first have to think in that language. So if we focus our effort of language acquisition mainly on learning to speak, our best bet would be to spend much more time in trying to create as many sentences as possible out of easy words we learn in school than in trying to learn words that only come up in written English, like "legerdemain," "peremptory," "abstemious," etc. I seriously doubt that English-speaking people would use such words in their everyday thinking process.
As you all know, however, things are not that simple. Knowing simple words and basic grammar about how to combine them is far from enough. Just to be able to create sentences that make sense using easy words, we'd have to have a lot of experience coming across sentences where those easy words are actually in use, in a huge variety of ways, so that we are able to create intelligible sentences by combining simple words. And it goes without saying that everyday language acquisition is achieved most effectively by becoming part of the speaking environment of the language itself. I don't know how much it has to do with the theory of "connectionism."
BTW, last week I had a chance to know something about the theory proposed by Noam Chomsky. "Generative Grammar" is ""Basically, sentences are "generated" in your mind by applying a limited number of rules to a limited (though larger) number of morphemes (words and meaningful bits of words, like -ed and -ing). The result is an infinite number of possible sentences, the vast majority of which have not yet been uttered. " I was particularly mesmerized by the part "the vast majority of which have not yet been uttered." That's part of the reason why I said "Last night was a fairly agglutinative night," at the beginning. That must be one of the vast majority of sentences yet to be spoken. Doesn't make any sense unless it is meant to be a dadaist poem or things like that. Another part of the reason is I was just as mesmerized by the word "agglutinative," which must be derived from Latin or Greek. And another is that I have a thing for nonsense literature like dadaism. Yet another is I might be a little bit nutty, what with overdue tax payment and unraveling finances, not to mention mild alcoholism. I have no clue what connotations it might have. I only know that it is used like "Japanese is an agglutinative language." In a sense, blogging in a foreign language is to create sentences that have not yet been spoken. Does all this shit sound too ridiculous?

Oxymoron

2007-05-18T00:11:00.000+09:00

Despite the impression the words I added under the title of this site might create, I'm not a linguist. I wouldn't even say I'm a would-be linguist. I'm simply too knuckleheaded to even dream of becoming one. The reason it looks like I went nuts is simply that I've become infatuated with the sound of the word "Ural-Altaic." ....

Lately, when I drink in izakayas, I've been asked again and again if I'm one of those "working poor." The people asking me this are retirees most of the time. My answers are, "kind of," "I'm assuming you watch those NHK programs quite a bit," etc. That's how quickly the notion "working poor," coming recently from the US, has caught on in Japan, especially among retirees who have enough time on their hands and enough pension but have nothing to do but drink out every night while watching NHK programs. Maybe "working poor" rolls off their tongue. The fact that "working" or "working mothers" had already made their way into the Japanese vernacular might be part of the reason why. Another thing to note is that there's a close phonetic resemblance between English "poor" and Japanese "putaro," which is roughly translated as "loafers." (Space Alc.) The dictionary definition of a loafer is a lazy person who avoids work and wastes time. So "working loafers" may be a kind of oxymoron. But my guess is that some day "working poor" will get replaced by "working putaro" somehow. Today David K Shipler, the author of "the Working Poor," was interviewed in the NHK program "close-up gen-da-i," a kind of news analysis program and one of my most reliable information sources. It's rerun on the same day on different channels on every weekday. So I try watching it as much as I can. According to the program, the US and Japan are the two countries with the highest percentages of people who fit the description of "working poor," among world's developed countries. The figures are around 13% of the working-age population, which translates to about 4 million people in Japan. What he was arguing was that it's no longer possible for people with no special expertise in these countries to expect to live a decent life like they used to, by just engaging in traditional manufacturing industries as low-skilled workers. I think of myself as being one of them. The scenes of some families on the verge of becoming homeless were heart-wrenching, but the situation they are facing seemed like one of "moderate poverty." There seems to be ways to pull through if they are lucky enough. In contrast, some of the scenes I watched the other day in an NHK documentary on China today were one of extreme poverty. But at the same time I was very much impressed by very strong family ties among those Chinese people, many of whom seem to be living in destitute condition by our standards.

Diary 2

2007-05-14T20:58:00.000+09:00

Yesterday I misspelled "jewelry." (I've already corrected it.) Today I found exactly the same mistake that I made, in a comment on Mother's day in a news website that seemed posted by an American. My dictionary (Microsoft Encarta) has even an entry for an example of incorrect spelling of "jewelry," though the one it mentions is "jewelery," not "jewerly," which I made. Ms Word has automatically corrected my misspelling as I wrote it. I have often no idea how bad my misspellings might be. Last week I wrote "fairly" to mean "fairy" somewhere online. Some Japanese misspellings make us laugh. Some don't. Same might go for English. It was something of a relief for me to know "jewerly" was not such a bad mistake.

Today a question on Yahoo! answers Japan caught my eye and got me thinking about how the process of memorization proceeds and how it varies from person to person. It goes like, "What are some kanji words that you can read but cannot write?" I doubt that I can ever write more than 1000 kanji characters with precision, or even 500.
I don't think that no matter how much I read Japanese books and how often I come across those complicated kanji words, ten or even twenty years from now, I will ever be able to write them correctly, unless I put a conscious effort into learning to write them. It seems very unlikely that I'll learn to be able to write “憂鬱” or “瑕疵” as if by magic unless I do something about it, although I can read and comprehend them in a fraction of a second like most Japanese do. The same might be said about English. I think that no matter how much I read English, chances are slim that I'll ever be able to write English with as much precision as I would like my writing to have, unless I make a conscious effort in that direction in one way or another. Some people argue that just writing something repeatedly can help with memorization, especially if it is as simple as a word. If they say that and strongly believe it, then it would certainly work out for them. But as far as I'm concerned, I doubt that no matter how many times I write words down like schoolchildren are told to do, I will memorize them. First off, I have no idea to what extent simple hand movements have to do with memorization process. It might work out for something other than language acquisition. Some people might have memorized words by writing them numerous times to cram for exams. I didn't. Simple as that.

Diary 1

2007-05-13T14:17:00.000+09:00

These days not a day goes by that I don't listen to She loves you or I want to hold your hands at least once a day (Would the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you'll just rattle your jewelry.) I think I got hooked. I also listen to the Hamburg live. Thanks to Wikipedia I learned quite a bit about the days before they became what we know they were. One of the anecdotes that intrigued me is that some people blamed the death of Stewart Sutcliffe on Lennon. I don't know how true it is. Who cares. The information offered by Wikipedia and external links it provides about Beatles is very detailed and exhaustive. Sometimes Wikipedia provides only sketchy information depending on the theme. The information it provides about Beatles is just amazing. One of the links gives a full list of their songs with comments on each song from the members. I was particularly moved by Paul's comments on his Your mother should know and Let it be. He said Mother Mary in the song was his own mother. Before writing the song he had a dream where his mother who died when he was 14 appeared. He said it was a very rare experience for him and led to the creation of the song everybody knows now. I remember him saying Yesterday was also created in his dream.
On a side note I remember someone arguing that the English used in Wikipedia is sometimes sloppy. I don't know how true it is. I'm not proficient enough in English to say anything, much less pontificate, about it. English is now the de facto "lingua franca" and I've come to realize that just because English is my second language, that doesn't give me an excuse to write bad English in this age of the Internet. The other day I found a site where people from around the world gather to exchange information and tips using only English. I've been spending quite a lot of time (or goofing off) there the past few weeks and even had the nerve to post a few comments despite my poor English. Most of them write very good English though many of them say English is not their mother tongue. I did pontificate on something about Japanese a couple of times, only to add to confusion on the part of askers. What I found out is that teaching Japanese to people overseas is not as easy as I thought it would be. I admit there were a few inconsistencies in what I explained to them. But overall I don't think what I said was wrong. When it comes to language, sometimes it could take a lot of words to explain even a seemingly very simple thing. One thing for certain is that if I were a little better versed in English than I am now, the whole thing would be a lot easier. At any rate this whole experience was enough to make me realize I should be much more serious about learning English as long as I'm interested in learning it. As far as this site, it's my own site, so no matter how bad my English might be, that's not that much of a problem.

EWP 6

2007-05-08T19:28:00.000+09:00

Today was the day I used my fan for the first time this year. I suppose people who are unable to open their windows for noise or air pollution concerns have also started using their air conditioners this week.
I didn't stash it away last fall. It stays on my desktop all the year round though it seems to not fit on a desktop considering its large size.
It’s supposed to be used on floors. My desk is so large that it can accommodate a PC, a bookshelf, loudspeakers, a printer, and the fan at once.
During the winter, I usually store it in a closet, in the space that a heater takes up during the summer. The last winter was exceptionally warm and I didn't need any heater. It was the first time that there was no snow accumulation in winter in Tokyo since I was born. I don't know if it has to do with global warming.

A couple of days ago I watched the Beatles' Budokan live in 1966 on DVD. About half of it was their interview and scenes of them landing at the Haneda airport, getting into a white Toyota Crown, making their way to their accommodation through a then-new Tokyo highway, staying in their hotel rooms, and ultra-right-wing people in Shinbashi protesting the use of Budokan for a concert of Western music for the first time in its history. Despite the fact that it was filmed more than 40 years ago, the city of Tokyo didn't strike me as archaic at all. Shinbashi city looked cleaner than today. At the interview, they were obviously sick and tired of having to answer questions that I found couldn't be more silly. One of the questions went like, "How highly would you rate your own music?" or something like that. Silly as it sounds, it was one of the least stupid questions they were asking. Paul McCartney answered, "We are not very good musicians, we're adequate, but not very good." I remember him repeating the word 'adequate' a couple of times. The concert was pretty good. In fact I hadn't expected it was so good. Some musicians out there are real pros, they are technically perfect all the time, the musical instruments and equipment they're using are of top quality almost all the time. But most of the time they have little or no appeal. When it comes to music, being technically perfect doesn't mean they can create music that's appealing to people. During the concert George Harrison put his Gibson semi-acoustic guitar aside for a while and strummed a red Rickenbacker only for his "If I needed someone." The same model is being sold in a shop in Ochanomizu. I kind of like it. Their performance of the song was a bit lousy but that seemed to make it that much more appealing.

EWP 5

2007-05-04T15:34:00.000+09:00

I watched "Day after tomorrow" on DVD. It's a story about the onset of a new ice age triggered by global warming and was made in 2004. It was a jaw-dropping experience for me because I didn't have the faintest idea that CG has advanced that much. It struck me as something different altogether from movies as we knew them in the last century. Having said that I wasn't as impressed by its digital wizardry as I was by its plot. At first I found it kind of boring. It got interesting midway. I got the impression that it was written by multiple writers. Maybe that's the way every film is written these days. The part about Gutenberg's bible seemed to leave a long-lasting impression, and I thought it could have been a much better flick had they taken more time and brains to come up with just a little bit better scenario. As overwhelming as the CG scenes are, they at times get almost as lame as those you'll find on films created at the time when CG technology was still in its infancy. I wouldn't say it was as tacky as those you'll find in movies like "Godzilla," though. There's a world of difference. CG wolves or dogs were awesome. The scene in Tokyo was awful. Not only far from the reality, it seemed too stereotyped. However advanced some of the images are, there would be no point in all this if they keep offering stereotyped images.

Last month I watched "Duel" once again on TV, probably for the tenth time or even more. That's because they rerun it over and over here in Japan. It seems like it has gained some popularity here over the years and probably its ratings have been fairly good. Sure enough, it seems like one of the masterpieces made just before CG and all that stuff came along. Everything in it looked like real things. The sunset in the last scene was the real one, the protagonist's car about to smash against an oncoming train was real. In retrospect all this was something of a feat. With all the latest filming techniques available, no one in their right mind would do the same thing today. I think CG films sure are great. But at the same time I sometimes find myself more comfortable with those pre-CG films.

EWP 4

2007-05-02T15:23:00.000+09:00

It was hot today. It felt like a summer day. Seemed like a perfect day for an outing. But I didn't go out. I spent the morning watching Matsui playing in New York on TV. I lost appetite. It's too hot for a day in May. The sky began to cloud up in the afternoon. Anytime I'm home, the weather is gorgeous. Anytime I go out, it starts to rain. It occurred to me a while ago that it would be good to buy a musical instrument. It would be nice to spend a whole day playing music on a day like this. The only musical instrument I have now is a toy balalaika I got during a layover in Moscow. It has only three rusty strings. I can hardly play anything on it. It's too small. Yesterday I bought a paperback in a used bookstore. It's one of Michael Crichton's. It's priced at 300 yen. I'm going to read it tomorrow. I also bought "Snow falling on cedars" because the front cover looked nice and promising. I wonder however if I'll ever get my hands on it. I browsed it and found Japanese names here and there. It has to be a story of Japanese.

EWP 3

2007-04-14T14:04:00.000+09:00

The breaking news we heard this week was that Kurt Vonnegut passed away. His late novel Jailbird, which I read only once and only in translation while I was in school, remains one of the best novels I've ever read. I don't have much to say about him because his only novel I read in English was Breakfast for Champions, which I got my hands on only last year. I read most of his novels in translation. They're all great. His style spawned a lot of followers, among them Murakami. Murakami's first novel reads just like Vonnegut. To say it's plagiarism is not enough. It's more than that, though his first and its sequel are the only ones I like of Murakami. His first novel was imbued with a wry, sarcastic sense of humor (though only superficially), which he obviously borrowed from Vonnegut. His other novels, none of which was in the style of Vonnegut, all seemed to me crappy. Because they seemed to me to be awfully lacking a sense of humor, which I think is one of the prerequisites for any great literary works. Norwegian wood is one of the crappiest novels I've ever read. But I digress. It's a shame that most Japanese seem to believe that Hemmingway and Steinbeck and Stephen King are the only great American novelists worth mentioning. I first got to know about Vonnegut via Kenzaburo Oe's essay, in which he raved about Vonnegut's sarcastic writing style and credited him as a successor of the great tradition of satire in the history of English literature dating back to the days of Jonathan Swift and the like. As it often happens, it looks like the Nobel prize went to the wrong person.

Everyday writing practice 1

2007-04-11T22:57:00.000+09:00

I was relieved to find out yesterday that I’m not as crazy as I think I am. Learning foreign language is awash with these meaningless, nonsensical sentences. That’s one of the things that makes learning foreign language all the more intriguing for me. Half of what I’ve written here is meaningless. I didn’t have an inkling that I would go insane this year. It’s just a word play or part of my writing practice. Rather, I had an inkling last year that by this time of year I would have already come to the conclusion that I was not as crazy as I thought I was. It’s a good time for him to realize he’s as crazy as he thinks he is. It’s mind-boggling how oblivious she is to the fact that she’s far crazier than she thinks she is. And so on.
Last night I watched the game between Boston Redsox and Seattle Mariners. The Redsox pitcher, Beckett, was one hell of a pitcher. It was really amazing how fast his fastballs were. Seemed to me much faster than Matsuzaka’s, or Dice-K’s. He was absolutely phenomenal. Actually he struck Ichiro out three times in a row, that was a record as far as Ichiro goes. Not only fast but well-controlled and looked so heavy. I bet in Japan he would win more than 25 games per season, whether in the Pacific League or the Central League. On the other hand, Matsuzaka's statistics are 108 wins versus 60 losses in his entire eight years of career. That’s pretty unimpressive, isn’t it. It doesn't seem to fit the bill of a pitcher worth a trillion dollars, to say the least. His record of the most wins was just 17 that was last year. It just doesn’t make sense to assume that a guy who managed to win just barely more than 15 games at the most in a Japanese league would be able to win like 20 games in MLB.

Beautiful Weather

2007-04-10T20:28:00.000+09:00

When I started blogging last spring, I had an inkling that I would go insane this year. But fortunately it looks like I haven’t yet. I think I owe it in part to long spells of sunshine though meteorologists are saying that the sky is getting yellowish because of desert sand flying across the ocean from China. Actually I didn't notice that at all until I heard the story about it. Today I read the news that snow on mountain tops is getting pinkish because of that. I don’t understand what chemical reactions have turned them pink instead of yellow. I also think I owe it in part to my habit of taking green tea regularly. If I had taken coke instead of green tea every day, that would have made a big difference. Japan is famous for the ubiquitousness of beverage vending machines. They used to sell only heavily sweetened carbonated drinks and no green tea. Today every one of them seems to include more than two or three kinds of green tea as their vending items. That may be one of the key factors that have been contributing to me remaining sane, not to mention my good dental health. This is the season that makes me want to stay outside any minute of the day because breeze is so nice. The modern day myth has it that mad people go outside when spring comes. So will I.

Writing practice 4

2007-04-09T18:22:00.000+09:00

I think I found out the main reason why my short-term memory is deteriorating. I got hideously drunk the other day and when I woke up the next morning, it took me more than fifteen minutes or so to recall what I had done and where I had been the night before. A friend of mine said he got drunk so bad the other day that only after he woke up the next morning did he find he'd broken his hand but had no idea whatsoever where and how. When you drink too much, maybe you won’t be aware of the fact that you’re dead already the next morning. It’s not a bad way to end your life.

Last week I finished “The world is flat.” It seemed to me that the only thing the author is yelling throughout every chapter is how gifted and talented people in India are. So it would be safe to say that the book is all about India, and its implications are that people with no degree in science will have no place to live in the industrialized world in the future, that what history tells us is Marxism has been right all along, that the author spent a whole lot of time studying Marxism at college, that there must be an awful lot of potential math geniuses among children in India who live on less than $1 a day, that they deserve to lead a much better life, while idiots living in the more developed world who enjoy a much better life like me just because they’re in the developed world should die fast, and so on. It made me feel alienated more than ever cause my low IQ prevented me from even dreaming of going to places where science or engineering is taught. So as far as I’m concerned, it was a depressing read and I’m feeling much better now cause I don’t have to read it anymore.
The only saving grace was that I got the hardcover version, which comes with a flimsy paper cover on it, something that paperback versions usually do not have; when inserted between pages the end of the cover served as a sort of bookmark, saving me the trouble of reading the same parts over and over again like I did with Apollo 13.

writing practice 3

2007-03-22T17:17:00.001+09:00

I can't seem to remember what I did a couple of days ago. My short-term memory seems to be deteriorating. Sometimes I don't remember what I did just an hour ago. This might have something to do with the fact that it took me a tremendous amount of time to finish reading Apollo 13, as I read the same pages over and over again without noticing that I had read them before. I think actually I read more than 100 pages of the same chapter more than a few times. I had no idea why it took me so long to get through it. After I figured out the cause, I picked up speed and managed to finish it in a few days. As it turned out, I was reading the same part again and again over a month. No wonder it looked like a never-ending book. This happens when I forget to put a bookmark in the book. It could be just the tip of the iceberg. Sometimes I eat breakfast more than twice forgetting I had already one. Looking back, I remember my short-term memory has been not so good ever since I was a schoolchild. That always made me a lousy student who's beaten the most in the class by teachers as a punishment for not bringing textbooks or something to school. I just couldn't get everything ready for school no matter how hard I tried. I know that bad short-term memory is a sign of senile dementia. But in this case, it's senile dementia started in childhood. In her last days, my grandma would talk to me about her childhood in the Meiji era (1868-1912), about festival days at a nearby shrine in Shikoku or how her teachers praised her for her quick wits, though she didn't seem to know exactly who I was. She seemed to take me for someone from a municipal office and not her grandchild. Recalling things that happened a very long time ago with so much clarity while forgetting everyday things occurs as brain cells die off. But there must be some other explanation for particularly bad short-term memory that starts in childhood.

writing practice 2

2007-03-20T16:34:00.000+09:00

Lately, I feel like I'm getting dumber and dumber each day. Something is definitely wrong. I don't think malnutrition or chronic poisoning by chemicals spewing out of factories nearby is to blame. I think the truth is that even though I've been so dumb all my life, I didn't know it and only very recently did I begin recognizing that awful truth. Or that may not be something "awful" or even something to worry about, as English-speaking people put it so nicely: "blissfully ignorant;" recently I've learned that it was derived from an old saying dating back to the 18th century.

Last month I finally read through Apollo 13.
It turned out to be one of the toughest to read I've ever had, and actually took me much longer than I'd expected to finish, mainly because it's peppered with a lot of slang, not to mention a bunch of technical jargon. Not only that, in some scenes I found it kind of boring, and it took me some effort to keep awake for more than 2 minutes before turning a single page, even in the middle of the scene where the real crisis unfolds. After I was done with it, however, I was glad I read it till the end. Though not compelling enough for me to finish in a few weeks, it left me much more satisfied than I would have if I read a fiction. Reading it made me realize again how nice it is to spend time reading quality nonfiction books. The satisfaction you can get from reading an excellent nonfiction book like this is something fundamentally different in nature than what you can get from reading novels. They cannot, by nature, be as exciting and riveting as novels can be, but the accumulation of facts and details, one of the traits of nonfiction books which sometimes could make them dull and boring, can have a long-lasting effect on readers, which is not possible with fictions that basically seek to dramatize everything.

English writing practice

2007-03-19T00:12:00.000+09:00

Pink is the color known to have a calming effect and is hence used typically in jails and similar facilities. That's what I have recently read on the Internet. My impression is that it could also have the added effect of suppressing appetite to some degree when you're hungry. These are the reasons I've opted for pink here, though I know it doesn't seem to fit very well with this blog, content-wise. I don't like black background for blogs because they look too grim and depressing. Anyway, just because I chose pink for my own mental well-being doesn't prove I used to be an inmate.

Last week I couldn't get the CD I bid for on Yahoo! auction. I lost the bid at the last moment. I felt the winner was so tactful or even mean, because his bid was just 10 yen (about 10 cents) higher than mine. But it may be just that he knew the ropes while I didn't. It's no wonder because it was the first time I placed a bid on an Internet auction. This week I have made another bid for an LP of the same thing. I hope I have luck with this one even though I'm pretty much broke now. If I had luck, I would be glad, -----more glad than I would have been if I had won the bid last week, because I like analog records better than CDs, though it's unclear whether I would be able to pay for it. The reason I like vinyl records is that they seem to make music livelier and more energetic than digital recordings do. Some might say they just make it noisy. Maybe they have a point and maybe I'm just enthralled with the old-fashioned way of listening to music.

News today

2006-12-16T03:13:00.000+09:00

The good news is that Daisuke Matsuzaka's deal was finalized today and it looks like he's going to be the 1000th MLB player from Japan. The bad news is that I seriously doubt that he'll do better than Nomo. In my view, Nomo was one of the best pitchers Japan has ever seen, and D-Mat (sounds much better than his full name, which only reminds us of high-priced beef) is as good or slightly worse because, despite being so young, he relies much more on slow pitches than Nomo as if he's a tremendously seasoned pitcher, although his straight balls may be a bit faster than Nomo's. Ichiro once commented about him: "He pitches like an old man," adding he was pretty disappointed to see how often Matsuzaka counted on his slow breaking balls instead of his trademark straight fastballs. He's the kind of pitcher who loses as much as he wins, and gives up quite a high percentage of homers per inning, ------ and this with Japanese players who obviously have much less power on average than American counterparts. So chances are that he's going to be another Irabu, or still another Irabu after Ioka in Yankees. Anyway I bet even if the Red Sox make it to the World series in the years to come, he won't be among starters. So it's going to be like déjà vu all over again for American people to see.
By the way, I once lived within walking distance of the home stadium of Seibu Lions, Matzuzaka's team. I watched Ichiro playing there. I remember he looked so petit because we were seated at the top of the stadium. But even at that distance, I was impressed how fast he stole second, though I couldn't really distinguish him from the base umpire from our position. He hit a homer while I went to the bathroom and a double while I went up to buy sushi, California rolls.

Diary

2006-12-13T02:56:00.000+09:00

Today I deleted all the links except mine.
I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize to all of you that I put links to your sites without your prior permission, and I'd also like to thank you all for dropping in!

All I can say now is it's pretty tough writing in a foreign language, and it's pretty frustrating, too. But it's also fun and makes me want to learn English more than ever. Or I should say "time-consuming" instead of tough. These days, once you get the hang of using search engines, writing in English is not that tough. In the age of the Internet, writing English for us is something very different from what it used to be. It seems like I'm not writing but just making a puzzle with the help of the search engines. But it sure is time-consuming at my level of English. Anyway, hopefully more and more Japanese people will take a stab at blogging in English.

Linguistic ramblings by a layperson 1

2006-12-10T22:47:00.000+09:00

I don't know if the title makes sense. I'm going to jot down whatever pops up in my mind about learning language on an everyday basis. I have practically no knowledge of linguistics, sociolinguistics, whatever. I just read a few books on linguistics for laypersons. Which means I'm no academic person. So everything I write here is going to be, at best, distortions of what little knowledge I have that I borrow from great books by linguists, and could be a pure fantasy at worst, which is more likely.

According to scientists, language is a "combinatorial system" and open-ended. This means that the number of possible combinations of English on a page that can contain about 100 words on average can easily surpass the number of atoms in the whole universe. But in reality this number is reduced to a very small one by grammar restraints, although it's incredibly huge even with the intervention of grammar. That's what I read in a book. But what I wanted to say by making a new post here today is something different. While it's true that language allows this open-ended freedom for expressions that could be infinite, it seems to me like that's not the case in reality. To explain or describe something, say, a thing or event in everyday situations, there seems to be not much room for freedom of expressions, and it seems to me like that's more so with spoken language than with written language, whether in English or Japanese or any other language.
(To be continued)

I'm just sitting here wasting my time thinking I'm really learning English

2006-12-10T11:07:00.000+09:00

It's discouraging to realize that I've made little progress in writing and/or reading English over the course of this year despite the fact that I've been writing here for almost a year. Sometimes it all strikes me as nothing but a waste of time. Just as disheartening is the thought that I might have gotten used to rather inefficient ways of learning language in the process, or learning anything for that matter, due to the complete lack of concern over how best to learn effectively. Maybe this is pretty much the same as saying that when you do things without prior planning, you'll very likely end up wasting your time. I think probably I need a tutor who's good enough to help me figure out how to learn more effectively. That's a real good idea. If only I could afford one. As I write this, it occurred to me that self-education needs at least two things: One is just spending as much time learning something you want to learn as you can and the other, no less important, is figuring out better ways to spend time and energy and money for that goal, which I think need to be reassessed on a constant basis. As the proverb goes, it may be true that if there is no pain, there is no gain, but it may also be true that if you just endure pain without thinking about how to get out of it, it could be worse. And even worse is trying one expensive painkiller after another believing they are the saviors you're looking for.

Learning English 1

2006-11-27T05:00:00.000+09:00

Some things I learned today about English:

grow on : to become gradually acceptable or pleasing to someone

cf. But I have to admit that over time the comedian has grown on me.

beat the rap: escape punishment for a crime.

pull down: earn a particular amount of money (American slang)

Writing exercise 17

2006-11-25T11:01:00.000+09:00

I'm blogging only for self-serving reasons. I'm blogging not for profits. So I can write anything I want no matter how boring it gets, unless I write something too derogatory or obscene about someone or something.
Writing in a foreign language gives a kind of perverted pleasure which I suspect native speakers of that language might not understand. I've even come to the point where I find myself possessed by the desire to write something at all times. Just writing such meaningless sentences as "I ate two apples and three bananas this morning," makes me feel so happy sometimes, though I don't have the boldness to say such a thing. In other words, I find pleasure in writing in a foreign language in pretty much the same way I felt so happy when I began writing in my own tongue at elementary school.
But the fact is "words fail me," to borrow the title of a book. Or more exactly, "English fails me," as far as I go.

Writing exercise 16

2006-11-22T07:02:00.001+09:00

Sometimes I feel a sudden urge to write something while online. No matter what. And I'm grateful that I can satisfy my desire to do that in no time at all. What a great time we're living in. In reality I wind up posting gibberish on the net most of the time, though. Recently I've been asking silly questions at Yahoo! Answers, to which by the way Yahoo! Japan has given a somewhat different name here in Japan that makes it hard to figure out what it really is at first glance.

People used to communicate their thoughts and feelings by writing letters. It seems that with the advent of the Internet, writing has again become as important as it was before the invention of telephones, when people were frequently writing to their family and friends, sometimes on a daily basis.

Writing exercise 15

2006-11-21T02:09:00.000+09:00

Blogging is now free of charge and allows us the freedom to say anything but who knows if it will continue to be that way. Seeing as the government people love to control just about everything, some kind of censorship might be introduced in the future or the time may come when blogging is charged. In a nutshell, we're not supposed to do anything freely. Whenever things are going good for some people, there are other people who try to take control of them. Whenever people find a place nice and comfortable to be in, whether it be a town or playground for children, those people plan to build something drab and lifeless there that will completely ruin the fun of being there.
Any place comfy to some people that costs little to stay may be doomed to be demolished sooner or later for reasons of profitability. Looking back, every place I found nice to be in was pulled down a few years after I came across them. So I figure that when you find some place that' so nice to be in, you better go there as often as you can before it's obliterated.

Writing exercise 12

2006-11-03T17:27:00.000+09:00

It seems to me that for non-native English writers to write in English, reading or listening to English at least an hour a day is a must. Otherwise what I'm doing here will always result in the direct translation of our own language into English and it's hard to make any progress at all or, even worse, it will result in memorizing odd sentences that I make up myself. But I think it's better than nothing....

Sometimes I read blogs written in Japanese by English-speaking people. The other day I stumbled upon an extremely odd one. But as odd as it was, it made perfect sense to me and I thought I could tell what was in his mind before he put the original English into Japanese.... So it was kind of interesting to read and struck me as kind of innovative and even artistic as Japanese prose, in the sense that no Japanese would be able to write that way.... And this led me to wonder if it's always necessary to learn ordinary ways of saying things in a foreign language when you learn to write in the language. What seems ideal to me when non-native writers try to write in a foreign language is being able to write in it in such a way that, even though you are not particularly interested in making your writing look as close to writings by native writers as possible, your writing will not strike them as odd at all. I think it's possible, in part because I have come across some very good Japanese writings by non-native Japanese writers before. I even thought their writings were in a sense better than poor Japanese written by Japanese people, not because they know a lot of Japanese clichés and conventional ways of saying things in Japanese, but because their writings are very logical and convincing although somewhat different from ours, and even though they seem not to care much about sticking to ordinary ways of making sentence in Japanese, for example, in terms of coordinating adjectives with nouns. I guess they can do so because they have mastered the Japanese grammar thoroughly. I mean not the textbook grammar but something that is at the root of the language. Or is it because English is inherently more logical than Japanese? I know that linguistically speaking, that's a misunderstanding, but sometimes I can't help but think so.

What I wanted to say is that logic might be different from convention that permeates language.

Writing exercise 11

2006-11-03T04:42:00.000+09:00

Today is a national holiday called "Bunka no Hi," or "a Culture day." It falls on Friday, so people are going to have three days off in a row, though it has nothing to do with me, except that a special keirin race is taking place over this weekend, as is usual on a string of holidays like this.

From today's news (Asahi Shinbun, Nov 02): As Japanese food makes its way into the world, bureaucrats are now planning to establish a kind of international certification system for Japanese foods that is meant to dictate what Japanese cuisines should be like and how they should be made in an authentic way, thus trying to extend their control even beyond the border of our country. It looks like they want to have control of just about everything.

I've finished reading some of the books I have left half-read over the course of the past few months. One of them was “Airframe” by Michael Crichton, which was not really a compelling read but which is easy to read as it is not laden with as many literary words as novels like Stephen King's. I'm also reading "Different seasons" by King right now. The first part of it, a story about a prison break, was made into a movie. The novel seems to me much more compelling than the movie.
The thing I want to do now is increase my vocabulary of English that I can put into writing, but it takes time and a conscious effort to do so. Though it’s true that just reading books doesn’t help, it seems impossible to increase one’s vocabulary without reading at all.

My understanding is that information is conveyed in either of two ways: Electromagnetic radiation and language, or signs. The first is achieved by means of electric signals sent by electric installations as well as by human brains. Sight is also another form of information transmission by electromagnetic radiation. Telepathy has nothing to do with occultism. It’s how human brains, consisting of ordinary atoms, emit electromagnetic radiation in the form of waves that contain a lot of information. This allows us to recognize any threat lurking behind us, without relying on sight, or to know what someone is thinking about, without even exchanging words.

It seems that semantics is less talked about these days than it used to be. What semantics tells us is that the behavior of all animals including human beings is inextricably linked with language or signs. Language seems as important or more important than electromagnetic radiation as a means of conveying information. It would be safe to say that it’s almost impossible to overemphasize the importance of learning languages.

Writing exercise 10

2006-10-31T14:47:00.000+09:00

The weather today was excellent and the air was as crisp as it should be at this time of year, making today a perfect fall day. It seems like humidity is the determining factor ----- even at about the same temperature, it makes a huge difference when humidity is 20% lower.

NHK (in a sense NHK is to Japan what BBC is to England) is right now broadcasting a program that seems totally inappropriate to be aired at this time of day (10:30 PM). It's manga with no substance at all. It seems like even NHK is now under control of people with mental problems. It's simply disgusting.... I just got back home and flipped on the TV because I wanted to know what happened today. Instead of broadcasting craps, they should air news and news-related programs 24h a day like CNN does as long as they get every citizen living in Japan to pay an outrageous fee of about 1000 yen per month for their programs, whether we actually view them or not.

Now able to read blogs written by people who come to stay in Japan, I was delighted to find that they think things we say about ourselves in a bid to distinguish ourselves from other countries are all crap. That's exactly what I've been thinking. Sometimes we portray ourselves as being exquisitely sensitive to subtle changes in seasons, because we live in a country with four very different seasons, which most people in the world do not enjoy; we define ourselves as being the offspring of farmers, in contrast to Westerners being hunters; the concept "yugen" is something Westeners will never understand; and so on. Indeed, these are all crap.

100 things Part 4

2006-10-17T15:43:00.000+09:00

23. Recently I've become more convinced that I was born to be vermin.
24. And with that, I've come to think it might be a good idea for someone like me to pursue a kind of short-term-purpose-driven life.
25. I believe in no religion.
26. I like it when people even don't know when they were born, as can be seen in some Asian countries. Like all of you, I took it for granted that wherever you go, people at least know their dates of birth. But what media tell us is it's not the case in some countries in the world; when some Asian sport events were held in Japan, officials were astonished to find that athletes from some countries had no information whatsoever about when they were born. The fact is that in their countries, they simply don't have the tradition of making a fuss over such a thing as date of birth. That's what I heard. Your date of birth may serve as your ID information but I doubt it's really necessary for modern life. All we have to know is approximately how old we are. Not knowing your date of birth would have many advantages, like you don't have to care anymore about astrology and related mumbo-jumbo, you don't have to celebrate someone's birthday, etc., not to mention that computers would no longer have to handle redundant information in addition to processing information related to iris identification or something like that, in the not so distant future.

English practice 9-b

2006-10-06T20:58:00.000+09:00

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I think I’ve found a solution on how to say that September has been the month when I have had the most free time this year. I should have said: “September has been the least busy month,” as opposed to “September has been the busiest month.”
There are a lot of search results for 'free month (day, year),' but most of them seem to have a different meaning than I thought; 'a free month' seems to mean that something is free of charge during that month, as in phrases like 'a free month of DSL service,' 'free months of viewing.' But on the other hand, most dictionaries and thesauri define 'free' not only as "being free of charge" but also as being exactly the opposite of being busy; as for "busy," sentences like “September (or any other month) has been the busiest month” generate not a few search results. There are also expressions where the adjective 'free' is used in an attributive way in conjunction with nouns meaning a duration of time, like 'free day,' 'free time,' 'free week,' in which case it seems to mean that someone is free during that period. Then why not for 'month,' and 'freest month,' as opposed to 'busiest month?' Anyway, there’s not a single search result for 'the freest month' on Google, and there’s only one on Yahoo!. The discrepancy between the numbers of search results for 'busiest month' and 'freest month' is staggering and seems significant, to say the least. This seems to me like just another indicator of how difficult it is to learn a foreign language. Or maybe I’ve come to the wrong conclusion. I’m not sure. The fact of the matter is that there’s no way for me to say anything decisive, since those search engines are the only means available to me to see if they’re right.

Writing exercise 9

2006-10-05T17:43:00.000+09:00

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September has been the freest month*1 as far as I was concerned and this gave me more time than ever to try to write in English here. But on the other hand, one thing for certain is having enough time on my hands right now is going to translate into less income in the months ahead. Autumn used to be the busiest time of the year a few years back and I recall being so busy day in day out back then that I felt kind of depressed. Being busy was a good thing as far as money went, but that didn’t make me feel happy or satisfied. Being too busy makes me feel gloomy, but not being busy also makes me feel fucked up because I don’t know how I can pay debts and tax and everything in the months ahead. This would be the reason why I’m so enamored with the idea of getting easy money whenever possible. The easier it gets, the better it is for my well-being, mentally, physically, and emotionally. But the truth is that the easier it is to gain, the easier it is to lose. Striking a balance is something that needs to be taken more seriously in whichever situation you might find yourself in.

*1 I thought that there’s nothing wrong with the wording “freest month,” which seemed to me like a pretty common expression. But a few simple searches revealed that it’s probably not.
freest day: 46 results
freest month: 16 results
freest year: 8 results
It seems like I’ll have to find an alternative expression in English to say that I was pretty free last month.

Writing exercise 8-b

2006-10-03T00:18:00.000+09:00

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I also tried some direct translations from Japanese to English and checked to see how many search results each and every expression will have. Search results for "Kami-jisho （紙辞書）" on Google Japan are over 700, while its direct translation into English, "paper dictionary," has nearly 60,000 results. Search results for "kami-ban jisho （紙版辞書）are around 1400 on Google Japan while its direct translation, "paper edition dictionary," and variants thereof equally have no search results, like I said earlier. My IQ scores are so low that I'm not able to draw any meaningful conclusion from here, or at least it would take a while. I'm not sure if Japanese is more flexible than English in terms of how to combine words to mean anything. Maybe that's a false impression. The fact is that anytime I put on a search engine any combination of two to three English words I find in the blogs I read that are written by English-speaking people, I'm amazed that they usually have an incredibly large number of search results, and that's probably about 90% of the time. On the other hand, rarely do I find that any combination of two to three English words I come up with myself has more than even one hundred search results, and oftentimes they have zero. Which means it takes me much longer than you might expect to write in English, however trivial the topics I'm talking about may seem.

Writing exercise 8

2006-09-29T12:27:00.000+09:00

In the last post I wrote: "a paper edition of dictionary."

Aside from the apparent omission of an article in front of "dictionary," I thought it's almost correct. But just a moment ago it occurred to me that it might be wrong, so I put it on a search engine to see if it's correct, and found no matches. Then I made different combinations of the three words to see in what way I can say what I want to say in English.

On Google:

paper edition : 973,000
(a, the) dictionary of (the, a) paper edition: no matches
(a, the) paper edition of a dictionary: no matches.
dictionary in a paper edition: no matches

Maybe just because no matches are found on search engines with those expressions doesn't prove they don't make sense. But on the other hand, when I want to say the same thing in Japanese, just about every expression I can easily come up with without taking it so seriously yields at least one hundred search results or more. If you are Japanese, you can check out yourselves using any search engine out there. The first one I came up with in Japanese without much thought was "kami-ban no jisho," and it yielded more than six hundred search results, which is much more than expected. In English, the most vexing part of this is that while there are so many search results with "paper edition," an effort on the part of a non-English speaker to try to combine it with the simple word "dictionary" in whatever way it makes sense takes this much time.
Is it that there's no way to combine the three words, "dictionary, paper, edition," add a few words, and find hundreds of search results to prove they make sense?

Maybe I can just say "a printed dictionary," or "a paper dictionary."

Writing exercise 7

2006-09-28T00:18:00.000+09:00

It looks like Japan is entering a new era as the first prime minister to be born after the WWII has taken office this week. I don’t know anything about politics nor do I like to talk politics here. Period.

One of the TV programs that intrigued me this week was an NHK news report on a controversy over whether to extend the term of posthumous copyright from the current 50 years in Japan to 70 years, which is the de facto global standard. The program centered on the pros and cons of the reform, and there seemed to be two points about the issue. One point is that shorter copyright terms obviously benefit people because they make it possible for us to read a lot of novels for free earlier than otherwise, which we’re actually doing now thanks to a few free novel sites out there, and because shorter terms will certainly contribute to furthering the proliferation of the great works through dramatization, film adaptation and so forth that can be done virtually for free. Another point is whether following the global standards on just about everything is the right thing to do, considering the obvious advantages that benefit us all. And another benefit of having shorter copyright terms that the program put emphasis on was that they make translation rights expire earlier, making an earlier publication of different translations possible for any literary work. One of the reasons we need more than one translation is that translations published in Japan are generally known to be full of mistakes, some of which can be spotted even by those with only rudimentary knowledge of the languages, as in the case of Françoise Sagan’s works, which are rumored to have made the translator as wealthy as the writer herself despite a lot of hideous mistakes in her translations. By the way, the reason I referred to Sagan here rather abruptly was that an example the program cited happened to be Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's "The little prince." The French writer reminded me of Sagan. That's why. The translation right for "Le petit prince" in Japan expired only recently, just 50 years after his death, paving the way for seven or more different translations, instead of the only one that had been available for more than half a century. I think that's a very good thing from the standpoint of not the translators' profits but the spread of the great work, now interpreted in many different ways. The program also showed a bunch of Japanese writers rallying to call for the implementation of the reform, insisting that their ‘great achievements' need to be paid the fair value. I was disgusted at the scene. Their argument that their works of 'high artistic value' deserve to be given some legal privileges does not seem to make sense. And my take on this is that the current 50 years should be reduced to 25 years or less, not only for literature but for music as well.

This month I bought the Microsoft Encarta college dictionary. The last time I bought an English dictionary of this volume was more than a decade ago and it was one of Webster’s. It may be true that buying a paper edition of dictionary in this age doesn’t make sense, but I thought I made a very good purchase. I’ve been using a much smaller version of it for years. One of the good features of it is that definitions are arranged in increasing order of archaism, namely, the most up-to-date one comes first.

Writing exercise 6

2006-09-26T03:02:00.000+09:00

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After going to a keirin stadium nearby last Sunday, I went over to a pub in Kokubunji that I would frequent about five years ago, but I'd forgotten it closes on Sundays. So I headed to the next town, strolled around the streets for a while in the twilight, and decided to stop in an izakaya (Japanese style pub) I'd never been to before. Luckily enough, I found the place so cozy and comfortable and, on top of that, I had a crush on mama-san there who said she was at the tender age of 57. So while I had no luck with the keirin races, overall I felt pretty fortunate that Sunday.
These days more and more these kinds of small izakaya are going out of business, in part because, from what I've gathered from people running those pubs, younger generations today do not drink as much as older generations used to when young, and in part because heavily-invested chain izakayas are increasingly taking away their share, making every suburban city look pretty much the same, and contributing to the deculturalization of our country, especially in terms of the landscape of suburban cities.

It looks like there's no such English word as 'deculturalization.' I think I wanted to mean by that that things tend to become more bland as we get more 'civilized,' but I don't know for sure myself nor am I particularly willing to Yahoo! or G##gle it. In Japanese, it's possible to create new words by combining Kanji (Chinese) characters in any way you want, thanks to Kanji characters being ideographic. Except that we don't do that very often. At any rate I think it's good to revel in the pleasure of creating new combinations of Kanji characters to create new words or ideas on our own, rather than spending time fooling around with English words and being laughed at by English-speaking people as the world's largest producer of 'Engrish' when it comes to ads. I know I have absolutely no say about being laughed at. But as far as 'Engrish' goes, my point of view is that the English used solely for advertising purposes in Japan only doesn't have to be grammatically correct, or even genuine English words, for that matter. It's something that needs to be construed in the terms of semantics, like 'connotation,' etc.

Houry diary on Equinox

2006-09-23T09:44:00.000+09:00

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9:35 am in Tokyo time: It’s a very beautiful day today here in Connecticut. No. I live in Tokyo. It makes me feel like humming “Ribbon in the sky.”

11:10 am in Tokyo time: I’ve been wondering whether to spend today learning Engrish or just go out. My conclusion is that staying at home all day long on a day like this is like wasting every penny on a dark horse you’re pretty sure has no chance of winning. So I decided to go out for a Keirin race today. I’ll take an electronic camera with me.

4:00 pm in Tokyo time: Clouds started to cover up the sky from noon and I ended up not going out. I'm going to study Engrish.

5:00 pm in Tokyo time: The book I'm reading now is "Airframe" by Michael Crichton. His books are generally much easier to read than, say, Stephen King's, and I believe they are appropriate for intermediate learners like me.

6:30 pm in Tokyo time: Speaking of Stephen King, "Pet sematary" is the most chilling, horrendous and creepiest novel I've ever read. I read it in translation. I don't want to read it again, though I'm sometimes tempted to. It really freaked me out.

7:54 pm in Tokyo time: I realize blogging needs some kind of momentum to keep going. Or simply enough time on your hand.

9:32 pm in Japan time: Thanks for reading today. Hope tomorrow will be another great day for you.

A rare occasion of sobriety

2006-09-22T13:56:00.000+09:00

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The title doesn’t mean anything. It’s just something that popped up in my mind this afternoon. I put it on a few search engines to see how incorrect or improper it is as an example of English expression that a non-native English writer came up with. No results were found. Then I did searches again, modifying it to 'occasion(s) of being sober,' or just omitting 'rare.' A few search results were found with each.

That’s it. period.

100 things part 3

2006-09-22T00:47:00.000+09:00

20. I once climbed Mt. Fuji. It's too chilly at the top though it was during summer. No wonder because it's 12,387 ft/3,776 m high. On the way up I narrowly escaped being struck by lightning. It's that dangerous up there. There were an observatory and even a post office at the mountaintop but no pubs or beer gardens. It takes one and a half hour to circle its crater, which is still active. One of the friends I went with had a fracture on the way down. I didn't.
21. I wish I hadn't shelled out for a Paul McCartney's live concert at the Tokyo dome in the last century. It was terrible. The worst part was Hey Jude at the finale, all the more so because he made all the audience sing together. It was one hell of a nightmare. As bone-chilling as an equally huge audience in the Tokyo dome singing "Angie" in unison at a Rolling stones' concert. You know what I mean. There would be few things more appalling than thousands of Japanese people singing an English song in unison. How I wished I had spent the cash instead to see Matsui the Godzilla playing as the center fielder of the Tokyo Giants. Linda was still alive then.
22. When it comes to pop music, the cheaper they sound, the better they are for me. The songs I love are for example "Dear doctor," "Factory girls" by Senile Stones, some of the best ones by Minnesota's great artist, ABBA (kidding) and so forth. The songs I hate are too serious ones like "Stairways to heaven," Bob Dylan, Guns&Roses, too sentimental love songs.

100 things about me part 2

2006-09-20T20:21:00.000+09:00

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17. I have a thing for mature girls.
18. Once I fell in with an aunty who's more than 10 years older than I and spent around one million yen financing the needy "obasan*," to no avail.

* Japanese slang meaning an aunty, mature lady, etc.

19. One of the things that got to me recently was that a supermarket "Seiyu" in the town I was born in got closed this year because Wal-Mart, the largest shareholder of Seiyu since 2002, made the decision to close every Seiyu store in our country that doesn't meet the outrageous profitability criteria it applied to Seiyu, much to the inconvenience of people of the town where the Seiyu has been practically the only supermarket that offered reasonable prices for many decades.

100 Things About Me part 1

2006-09-19T23:48:00.000+09:00

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I've read lots of "100 things about me" on a number of cool blogs out there, thinking that short sentences are much better when it comes to learning English. To practice writing I'll give it a try myself.

1. I'm on the verge of going bankrupt as always.
2. Basically I'm a drunk, gambling-addicted, debt-ridden asshole.
3. I'm a kind of freelancer who can do my thing anytime I like.
4. I was much wealthier about five years ago but now I'm pretty much broke.
5. I used to live with a homeless guy.
6. But I'm not homeless yet.
7. I used to be an apprentice for exterior plastering.
8. I was born into a family that's not so wealthy.
9. I've never been to any of the English-speaking countries, much less study there.
10. I've never even once in my life had the opportunity to speak English in the true sense of the word.
11. I don't attend English conversation schools in Japan because I know they'll make you pay through the nose.
12. So instead I read. That accounts for about 700% of the time I spend learning the language on a daily basis.
13. I have no criminal record.
14. I've grown so addicted to net surfing over the past few years. I suppose that's the main reason for the financial predicament I'm in now.
15. The music I like most is cheesy American music in the '70s, The cheesier it gets, the better it sounds to me.
16. I used to be a factory worker for about three years.

Green 2

2006-09-19T01:42:00.000+09:00

Some of you might have taken the photo below as an obituary to this blog.
But you're wrong.

Recently I have a strange feeling that this blog doesn't belong to me anymore, probably because I've realized that this is being read by much more people than I thought. Sometimes I sense that some people out there are actually reading this while I don't feel like updating at all. And I find something morally wrong with the way I'm doing this, especially considering that I sometimes feel like I have no responsibility whatsoever to what I've written here so far, looking at this as if it's something written by someone else. I seem to be one of the 21st century schizoid men, in the far east. I wonder how many bloggers out there feel the same way I do.

Green 1

2006-09-18T19:24:00.000+09:00

Autumn, Keirin, and all that glitters ain't gold 4

2006-09-08T17:27:00.000+09:00

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I didn't actually go on a trip.It's not doable in the first place, considering the financial situation I'm in now. But I don't mean that I saved all the money I got, either. I went on another Keirin spree and that left me with few yen in the end. I'm so used to this kind of thing that I don't give a damn. Having said that, I kind of think I should have known better after all the botched attempts to win much bigger after one small win.

Speaking of weather, this week the temperature plummeted in a matter of one night and we've been having a lot of rain lately. As it gets cooler after summer, this season of the year is at the same time depressing and beautiful. I listen to Hampton Hawes' CDs and they kind of make me feel reinvigorated enough to start over.

I'm now planning to get revenge on the next big keirin race next month.

Autumn, Keirin, and all that glitters ain't gold 3

2006-09-06T23:48:00.000+09:00

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I'm not sure how to describe it. Maybe I should say, "Bingo!" (?) Honestly I didn't expect to win. I don't mean that the numbers I'd posted yesterday panned out. Today after buying the betting slips for those numbers, I made another purchase and that turned out to be the right guess (4-2). I could have proven it's true by bringing the winning slip back home and taking a photo of it to post here. But I didn't find any point in doing so nor do I have any intention of turning this blog entirely into a gambling blog, so I just got the payback. Put simply, today was the day of easy money for me. With the extra cash for this month I'm going to go on a trip for a while from tomorrow. Thanks to all of you for reading. See you soon.

(To be continued)

Autumn, Keirin, and all that glitters ain't gold 2

2006-09-06T03:02:00.000+09:00

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Just because I took a phrase from Prince's "Gold" to put it in the same sentence as Keirin, it doesn't mean it's the theme song of Keirin, though it's true that "Endorphin Machine" by the same singer has long been the electrifying theme song of a Karate/martial arts tournament in our country. The 10 songs of Prince I like most are:

1. Gold
2. Emancipation
3. 1999
4. Cream
5. Get your groove on
6. Love thy will be done
7.
8. I feel for you
9.
10. Raspberry Beret

On a side note, about another phrase from "Gold:" "Even at the center of fire there is cold." When I first heard this kind of spiritual song, I sensed a similarity between it and a Japanese historical word dating back to the 16th century, which goes like this: "Even at the center of fire you can feel there is cold if you try as hard as you can to suppress your self," or "Suppress your self and even a fire is cool." Legend has it that it's the word of a Buddhist monk who said it as he was burnt to death by Oda Nobunaga, a powerful medieval warrior and one of the most adored historical figures throughout our history. I don't know for sure if there is any hidden relationship between the singer's imagination and the old saying. By the way, I recall that when I first heard the song about a decade ago on FEN (Far East Network, a US military radio station in Japan) the DJ chuckled after airing it. Since then I've been curious to know if the words of the song are so unique and strange as to make people laugh, as far as English-speaking people are concerned.

This time around I first intended to write about the stigma attached to the word "keirin," in light of the images it would undoubtedly evoke in the minds of people like my aunts, just because it's a gamble, a brief history of how it developed into what it is today, the bleak situation it is in now and its even bleaker future that's sure to come, and so on. But it would take a lot of time and I'd like instead to concentrate now on tomorrow's final race. Its winner will be awarded over $400,000. Whereas most of us who bet on it lose pretty much everything we got.
I'm going to bet on 2=5, 2=5=9 tomorrow. Let's see what happens.

(To be continued)

Autumn, Keirin, and all that glitters ain't gold 1

2006-09-04T06:03:00.000+09:00

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Today I headed to a Keirin stadium for the first time in almost three months, and it was a blast, though I ended up losing some money after betting on two of the twelve races held in Yokohama. I won the first one but the second one I lost. On the second one, the last race on the 2nd day of a Keirin GI (same as horseraces) held every autumn, I put in all the money I got at the first race plus a few bucks, and this ended in the red, as expected and as usual. Now known worldwide as an Olympic sport, Keirin is the second Japanese word meaning a sport after judo to be listed on Webster's dictionaries. It started out in 50' in Japan as another gambling business to add to the horserace and the motorboatrace, the latter being yet another form of gambling that's the invention of our country. Unlike what you'll see in Keirin races at Olympic or other cycling events, one keirin race comprises nine racers (six in Olympic) and the tracks are usually outdoors and asphalt.
I've never heard of anything like Keirin and motorboat races being held in other countries, in that it seems so unusual to bet on humans rather than on animals like dogs, horses, cockroaches, or machines that produce random numbers. Betting on humans would surely make you wonder if some kind of rigging might be going on there. To clear the doubt Keirin racers are kept out of touch with the outside world during the three days, which is the usual period of Keirin.

(to be continued)

Writing exercise 5

2006-08-23T23:53:00.000+09:00

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

2006-08-20T00:44:00.000+09:00

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

2006-08-19T13:32:00.000+09:00

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

2006-08-18T20:20:00.000+09:00

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

2006-08-17T20:48:00.000+09:00

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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

2006-08-14T16:26:00.000+09:00

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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.

2006-08-06T12:04:00.000+09:00

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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.

We give you the latest news of what happened yesterday.

2006-07-27T16:12:00.000+09:00

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The Japanese translator of Harry Potter series who's been translating it from the beginning and publishing it through her own company was accused yesterday of tax evasion over the past three years that amounts to around $35,000,000. The news came out yesterday in Japan, but it was only today that the English versions of not all but some of the Japanese newspapers reported it on their Web pages. CNN. com seemed to have reported it earlier than they did. Why they are always so slow in providing the latest news is beyond me. All they've been doing since they started their own websites is just reporting what we already knew the day before. Is it that it takes them that long to do the translations? As far as I'm concerned, I don't care if I can't read about what happened today in Japan in English, but I'm wondering what people around the world, including those now staying in Japan, who cannot read Japanese yet desire to get information about Japan, think about this tardiness, in this age of the Internet.

Mangled language

2006-07-21T22:28:00.000+09:00

I think there's something pointless or even ludicrous about me blogging in English, given the fact that there's no need for me to use English in everyday life. The sad fact is that the Internet is the only place where I get in touch with English by reading, listening, and writing a little.

Reading Japanese blogs written by non-Japanese people is one of my favorite pastimes, in part because it's fun to see them increase the possibilities of language use by using (or concocting) Japanese expressions I've never come across before. Language, especially spoken language, often strikes me as a kind of jail where convention rules everything. The Japanese blogs out there written by non-Japanese people, though sometimes a little bit weird and even hilarious depending on the degree to which they mangle ordinary Japanese, on the levels of word selection, world perception and so forth, give me the same sense of liberation that, for example, atonal music or really good conceptual art, does. Liberation from anything ordinary or authoritarian. (?)

World Cup 3

2006-07-02T00:21:00.000+09:00

I was watching one of the quarter finals kick off when they got the British captain reading out something about fight against racism before the game. I wonder whether the other game today between France and Brazil will start off with the same thing. Every time I see the French team playing, I can't help but wonder why there is not a single player who looks like real French people (not legally, but ethnically speaking.)
The reason I say this is because last month I saw a TV documentary that gave a sense of how prevalent and socially structured racism is in France these days, especially in terms of job opportunities. If I give credit to it, the toll racism takes on minorities in the country is so devastating that it's no wonder that racial turmoil erupted there recently. The irony is that the French team seems to consist almost exclusively of players of the races that are discriminated against.

However, that's absolutely none of my business.

World cup 2

2006-06-27T03:09:00.000+09:00

Last week Japan played Brazil and lost the game. Which means it couldn't make it to the final round. So as far as Japan is concerned, the world cup is over.
Word is that Japan may have to wait more than a decade before it gets another win at World Cups, given that Asia will likely be given fewer places at the next Cup because of its lackluster performance overall, with only one win by South Korea during the qualifying rounds. With fewer places allocated to Asia, and Australia slated to participate in the Asian group from the next time, it's certain that Japan will have a much harder time qualifying for future world cups.
It should be noted that the two Japanese TV stations that got the exclusive right to broadcast Japan’s three games denied allegations that they had negotiated with FIFA to make the games kick off at 3:00 PM local time, which coincides with the prime time in Japan. Of the 32 teams that participated in the qualifying rounds, 17 teams had games at 3:00 PM when it’s still quite hot, and only three of them, Japan, Serbia and Montenegro, and Togo, had two of their respective three qualifying games started at 3:00 PM. Coincidentally or not, the three teams all got eliminated after devastating defeats during the qualifying stage, and they got listed among the worst five teams of World Cup 2006 by a foreign newspaper.

Speaking of Brazil, I bought myself a CD from Brazil last month, Antonio Carlos Jobim's "Wave" though I don’t have a thing for this kind of “easy listening” and this is the first time that I listened to music of that sort. The reason I bought it was that I got to like the design of the CD quite a bit when I took a glance at it at Amazon com. Likewise, the reason the book titled “Argument culture,” which I’ve been reading in fits and starts for a couple of months now, is on the list “Reading” you see on the right side of this blog, which I had created on my own by tweaking the program a little bit, was also because the front cover of the book looked attractive. I usually choose books based on how appealing their front covers look to me.
The "Wave" is not so bad, though not as good as it appears to be.

World Cup

2006-06-18T09:46:00.000+09:00

What I’ve been thinking the past two weeks is that blogging is definitely not something I feel like doing during the summer where I live. It’s too hot.

Another thing I was thinking was that I’d like to write in a very fragmented way to make my writing as disjointed as possible, rather than zeroing in on varied topics one at a time, which is what I believe people are supposed to do when blogging.