10 things

Credo - 10 things you have to believe to be a Republican
Lies and Lying Liars who Fund Them

Just a couple of links to great entries in a health-related blog. Ok, so the first link is more of a rant about people dense enough to support Bush, but generally the authors' posts are really insightful and focused on health issues, but as health care is tied inextricably to the economy and politics, it's a pretty far-ranging topic.

Anyway, on to today's ramblings. I was in the movie rental store ("Family Book") the other day and noticed some of the changed titles on Japanese releases of "Foreigner" movies. Conan is no longer a Barbarian, he's Conan the Great. Kinda makes Arnie sound like a magician. Or there's Resident Evil becoming Biohazard, and many others. But the one that fascinated me was The Color of Money - which becomes Hustler 2. Why the 2? I couldn't find anything just called Hustler, let alone a prequel to Color. (Added Sep. 26 - Ok, so maybe there is a sort of prequel. See the comments. My bad.) Maybe just because Newman and Cruise were partners, but the title is still gibberish. It drives me nuts to watch language being butchered like this, and this is a mild example. I don't care if people anywhere want to change the titles of whatever they want to make more sense to the locals, but to make a mockery of someone else's language to do it is just lame. I know this in itself isn't really a big deal, but so many things in Japan do this. Some phrase that is at best vaguely recognizable as having some meaning in English becomes standard Japanese, to the point that even though borrowed foreign words are written in a separate alphabet (linguistic apartheid?) Japanese people often don't realize that it's actually neither Japanese nor real English. Things like "Everybody fashion!"(a current popular slogan) are part of the common vernacular.

Surely a huge cause of this is that English is considered pretty cool here and probably anywhere that still buys the mythology of the American Dream - I don't know how many times I've seen "American Coffee" advertised like it's gold - but it doesn't seem so much to ask that we not be constantly talked down to by people who insist the general public can't handle anything that takes more than 30 seconds to communicate. Japan's uniquely tortured, fashionable English is well-documented and famous but reaches well beyond its shores. Western celebrities who take spots in Japanese commercials for quick cash on the side usually seem to keep their integrity hovering at least a few millimeters off the floor - Tommy Lee Jones barely speaks or does so in Japanese in this Boss Coffee commercial, Kiefer Sutherland manages to make sense in his Calorie Mate spots, there are others from Ang Lee, Natalie Portman, Angelina Jolie, maybe we can pass off John Travolta's shot because it was the 80's and just a brand name anyway, and Ahnuld skips on English, not that that's unusual, but if anyone can find the spot Uma Thurman is in with the Kill Bill costume on a motorcycle spouting nonsense, I'd be much obliged. Now that's rock bottom. The whisky commercial with Bill Murray in Lost in Translation is not far off at all - obviously it's just a paycheck, but how hard can it be for someone with that kind of star power to look at a script written in their native tongue and suggest changes?

The company I work for is technically a publishing company, with a native English-speaking staff of around 300 and growing, but their publications and even their English textbooks are riddled with mistakes too typically Japanese and awkward to make on a keyboard to believe that they were just typos. Obviously someone was too proud to ask a decent proofreader to have a look. I can't help but picture the nephews of company chairmen all over the country assuming that their 6 months abroad made them fluent enough to write anything you please in English, and then unable to risk losing face by getting a proofreader even if they were willing to do so.

None of this is to say that Japanese is alone in this. We do it all the time in English, and to a far larger extent, given how eclectic and flexible the language is, and how far the British Empire stretched. Then there are helpless and confused Chinese characters tattoed all over people who couldn't be bothered to find out what they mean or get them done properly. French and Spanish words routinely have all their grace and music stripped when they get assimilated. English is like the Borg, it's the ten-cent whore of the language world. It just absorbs everything, which is both its beauty and its greatest weakness. Sure it's a language of amazing versatility (and don't even get me started on the "language of Shakepseare" bit), but that versatility brings the pitfall of believing there's no point in learning other languages, like the apocryphal stories of Americans who've never been more than 5 or 10 miles from home, despite the relative wealth, freedom, and opportunity to travel, because "we done got ever'thang a body needs right here". Aside from the mental benefits of bilingualism, especially from an early age, there are untranslatable words in every language.

Maybe I'm weird but I believe in knowledge for the sake of knowledge, learning just for the joy of it, art for art's sake, all that liberal hippy crap. I hope and believe that most people share that view, although I have to wonder how people of otherwise reasonable intelligence can not only believe in God but insist that God and science are mutually exclusive. If God created the universe, didn't he also create the laws of science that govern it? I don't go quite as far as Richard Dawkins in this clip from The Root of All Evil, where the premise is essentially that religion is destroying civilization, but I do believe that the spiritual benefits of any religion and the inner peace faith can bring have to be weighed carefully against the radical elements and intolerance that people seem determined to read into religious texts. (Yes, I do realize my topic is wandering a bit, check the title of the blog.)



On the other hand, maybe I'm just getting all preachy because what I ended up renting was V for Vendetta. If you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend it, not as the typical Hollywood wire-fighting and stuff blowing up fare, but because it's a thought-provoking look at terrorism and the mindset that inspires it, and the idea that in the right circumstances it's not necessarily a bad thing. The movie doesn't offer pat answers about right and wrong, though it does lean towards V pretty strongly in most parts and is full of obvious references to the Bush administration.

Unfortunately the disc also included the pilot of "Supernatural", a mind-numbingly flat ghost story series that's probably old news or hopefully cancelled back home by now. I watched the entire painful episode hoping to find enough in the end to redeem it. No luck.

That's about all for today, I'll leave you with two things: one last photo, just a light chuckle. If you think God and Technology can't coexist, check out this computer school. And last, a reminder that mangling English can also be fun!

Now you see me

Wow, time really does fly when you're having fun. I've been away for a while, but I've been having a blast. Loads to talk about, but I haven't got a whole lot of time just now. I'll get through what I can, and for the rest, you'll just have to... wait longer.

Several friends have had their escaping from Japan parties in the last couple of weeks, so I've spent a few days in Saitama, the concrete bleah between Gunma and Tokyo. I forgot to bring my camera when I went to Molly and Andrew's combined sayonara party, which is just as well, because surprise surprise, I got drunk and sang my voice off at karaoke till 5 am. But I don't think I particularly made an ass of myself, which is a nice change. Everyone else was drunk anyway, so here's hoping they won't remember if I did.

On the job front, I hope I'm not jinxing anything here, but I applied for a promotion to the curriculum development team and they're going to bring me down to Nagoya to test run for a few days at Head Office. Apparently I'm one of two finalists. If it comes down to a swimsuit competition I haven't got a chance though; I have a feeling the other applicant is a girl. My sneaking suspicion is that they just wanna laugh at me and staple my tie to things, but I guess I'll find out. If that doesn't pan out, I have two other standing job offers with different companies and I might go to one of those.

My kickstand was stolen about two weeks ago. I have a fairly nice bike that saves me a ton of money when it comes to trains, and I parked it at the train station bike parking lot for about three hours while I went out carousing with some friends, when I came back the kickstand was gone. Friggin high school kids. I guess it serves me right, I had an accessory pouch under the seat and forgot my hex wrench set in there. (The whole pouch was stolen, but I don't particularly need or miss it or anything that was in it.) It was just attached with velcro, so I'm betting some kid stole the pouch, looked inside and found the hex wrenches, and thought, "what the hell, why not go for gold?" My idea at the moment, assuming I even bother to buy a new one, is to put a note inside the accessory pouch written in French, maybe make it look like a love note or something so that the kid might get curious about what it says and take it to a teacher for kicks, but it'll actually say "whoever gave you this stole it from my bike" or words to that effect. Any suggestions on what to put on the note are welcome, just leave a comment on this post. I try to keep it in perspective anyway, knowing the entire bike would likely have been stolen several times over by now if I used such a flimsy lock in North America.

Beside one of my schools there's a new ramen restaurant where the owner, a friend of one of my coworkers, never lets me pay for anything and keeps piling more food in front of me. He's like my Japanese mom. His English skills and those of his staff are shall we say non-existent, so I muddle through in Japanese as best I can and we all usually manage to get our ideas across. A few weeks ago he invited me to a seasonal restaurant he owns along with two of my coworkers and their boyfriend and husband respectively. (No, it was not a triple date.) The restaurant is on the banks of the Kiryu River and they offer very very fresh fish kept in a large pool by the entrance.

Eating this thing is a ritual in itself: first you gently mash it with your chopsticks, then use them to sever the tail and most of the head - but leave the spine intact. Then you grab the head and pull out the spine, ribcage, organs and the majority of the tiny bones intact. Voila! dig in... there's not a whole lotta meat left on one of these little guys after all that, but it's pretty good. Unfortunately I lack the finesse required to do the surgery just so, and I always ended up just pulling the head off. Then I had to rummage around with my fingers in hot deep-fried fish to find the spine and ever so gently pull it out. By far the most interesting dish of the evening, and I distinguish 'interesting' from 'good' here, was a paste made by pureeing the organs of one or two of the little guys. It's in the blue china dish in the background. It was a nasty pale brown and had to be one of the most bitter things I've ever tasted. Fotunately it was only about a teaspoon of the stuff, but even so only two of us even tried it at all. A tiny dab on one of my chopsticks was enough to tell me it wasn't for me, but Takako managed to finish hers somehow, grimacing the whole time. Ninomiya-san, the owner, had to take off early to go back to his other restaurant, but he warned us before he left that it was not a dish to everyone's liking, so we really didn't have to feel obliged to eat it. Phew. There were also several other varieties of fish, lots of beer, and a dessert that tastes kinda like a puff of dust in jello, and everyone left feeling quite content but knowing we'd be hungry again soon.

It was quite a nice evening, sitting in an open-sided building on the banks of the river that the fish came from so their cousins can watch you disembowel and eat their family, and as the five of us left we figured the bill would probably come to at least 6 or 7 thousand yen each (60-70 dollars, and well worth it), but the cashier had instructions not to let us pay for any of it, or give us any information about how much it would have been.

Thanks, Ninomiya-san!

I've got a backlog of funny pictures, but I think I'll wrap up for the day with just this one of a music shop here in Kiryu. See if you can spot the most interesting instrument they offer.



"Lessons in what? I know I have a skin flute around here somewhere... or perhaps you meant a rusty trombone?" Actually I had to check the real definition, which is disappointingly mundane, but it sure stands out doesn't it?