The election polls closed 48 minutes ago. All the TV channels are showing the votes adding up on screen. I don’t understand what is going on. Of the four channels we are flipping back and forth from, there are 3 different vote counts being displayed for the two sides (Blue and the President Chen’s Green). [...]
Wow, my first full day in Taiwan and the President and VP have been shot (with one bullet?). They are in the hospital but not in critical condition. The election goes ahead tomorrow. UPDATE: This happened about 13:45 this afternoon and special editions of the newspapers, evening papers and TV have been saying all sorts [...]
I went on a used book buying spree last week, finally blocking off some time to roam the stores near Waseda’s campus one afternoon. One book I snapped up was a cheap copy of the normally $60 oral history book 『南京戦：閉ざされた記憶を尋ねて』edited by 松岡環 (Matsuoka Tamaki). The book is part of a series of new Japanese [...]
Here are a few links from the last few days. My sister Carleen has an interesting post on Leonardo da Vinci’s bridge to link Europe and Asia and a Norwegian bridge of the same design. An interesting article on the linguist who did the ancient languages for the new movie on the Passion. If you [...]
Chanpon has a little article talking about Japanese train melodies – the sounds that Japanese trains play to warn of the trains imminent departure. I was really set on collecting some of these sounds myself and post the recordings but it looks like there already an NPR report about them and you can download the [...]
I’m spending the weekend in the countryside with some friends. As I was working on a programming project at about 2:30 in the morning, I heard the roosters starting to sound the coming of morning outside. For a second I though my computer’s clock was set wrong. In a book on the birth of modern [...]
There is suddenly a problem posting on my blog, as you can see from the error message as you try…I’m going to look into this when I get some internet access and free time, I apologize in the meantime… UPDATE: I fixed it…
Japan once implemented the old Chinese mutual-responsibility system called Baojia (保甲) in colonial Taiwan. In this traditional system, when one person commits an offense, the group of persons to which the criminal belongs are all held responsible. Of course Japan itself, and indeed most pre-modern societies have had similar practices throughout history. Unfortunately, collective punishment [...]