Ok, there was this guy on the trains from 静岡 to 名古屋. He was a westerner, white, and had a big camping backpack like me. He was dressed to travel, like me. Yes, we were the only two westerners either of us had seen all afternoon. Yes, we were probably both too cheap to buy bullet train tickets and had therefore probably been riding all the same local trains a quarter of the way across Japan’s main island. However, for some reason I just didn’t want to make eye contact with him, and I didn’t want to do the usual “Gaijin nod” where the two, usually Western, guys (do women do this too?) meeting each other in a foreign place, in this case surrounded by Asians, nod knowingly to each other as if to say, “We are different. Here we are – how special we are.”
Continue reading Refusing Eye Contact
Author: Muninn
Early Postwar Reconciliation with China
On Monday I joined my friend Jaehwan to hear a presentation by Daqing Yang, a professor of George Washington University whose work I’m very fond of. His presentation, on Japan’s early postwar relations with China through the perspective of reconciliation studies started with two questions: Did the “history problem” between Japan and China exist before 1982 (the first textbook controversy)? and Did Japanese work for reconciliation with China after the war? Yang argued yes on both accounts. He concludes that Japan achieved “thin reconciliation” or a very limited reconciliation but was reservedly optimistic that future efforts to expand efforts at reconciliation between Japan and China can be achieved by shifting the emphasis from inter-governmental to inter-societal exchanges.
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The Long Road to Kameyama
I will have to post this with half a dozen other entries when I get some internet access. I’m going to be staying a few days with my friend Hiroshi in Kameyama, Mie prefecture, somewhere between Nagoya and Kyoto. I took the long and cheap way here (7,250 yen) using only local trains from Kichijoji, where I had lunch with my former landlady Nami-san. This basically means I get to spend 8 hours seeing more of the country side, do more reading, and take longer naps than if had gone by bullet train (three hours or so total, for about 12,000 yen). It was a beautiful day, filled with some beautiful views.
Continue reading The Long Road to Kameyama
Celebrating the 1911 Revolution in China
Once or twice a week I work part time at the Oriental Library (東洋文庫), mostly doing English editing and occasional small bits of translation from Chinese or Japanese. I spend most of my time helping edit a collection of previously published English essays by the author Etô Shinkichi, who was my own Professor Hirano’s mentor. In one of his essays I was working on today, on the Chinese revolution of 1911, Professor Etô discusses the historiography related to the period and contrasts the “modern detached positivists” who “try to minimize overt political assessment in their research” to the deeply political Marxist historiography of the revolution after 1949.
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Grab the Nearest Book
I’m not sure what all this is about, but it is going around (can anyone tell me where this bizarre idea comes from?) and I just don’t want to be left out of a fun game:
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
除加強偽軍力外，日軍與汪政權也加緊建軍，其中重點是改遍原有偽軍，組建新軍與收遍受到日軍和共軍雙重壓迫的國府雜牌正規軍。 (劉熙明 偽軍－強權競逐下的卒子 1937-1949)
“In addition to strengthening puppet forces, the Japanese military and the Wang Jingwei regime also sped up the building of military forces, some important elements of which were the reorganizing of existing puppet military forces, the establishment of new units and the organization of units put together from ragtag Nationalist government troops that had been attacked by Japanese and Communist forces.” (Zhang Ximing, The Puppet Army – Pawns in the Struggle for Power 1937-1949)
Continue reading Grab the Nearest Book
Engrish Poetry
There is a store in Kichijoji which sells very cheap T-shirts and sweaters which I often buy for the very reasonable price of around 500 yen. I love this store because, in addition to its other surfer and hip hop theme items, they have a fascinating range of products covered in the most bizarre English writing. It is not always grammatical errors or spelling mistakes I am talking about, just lots of very surreal and philosophical passages, bordering on a celebration of randomness. I think this has potential as a whole new genre of literature. (Note: All mistakes below are sic)
Wonderful a Machine
Continuing having simple and delicate feeling – I think that the big difference between this and other things is continuing having simple and delicate feeling. It is how original custom-made spirits budded.
As wonderful a machine as that exists only in this city all over the world.
This one is more sinister, but introduces us to the mysterious Camerd (camera?):
Everyday objects become devices to trigger confusion. These metaphorical tricksters keep mutating like viral atrocities. I work with a large format camerd and between the black hood, the camerd and subject there are demons of dreams. A visual pun, a mnemonic devices, a story by the model perhaps will bring manifestations betond any one identity. I am just a tool of a bigger force. People, objects and ideas come my way. I become a caretaker of sorts I would like for people to say that I’m taking good care. It’s based on some uncommon love I discovered with some deaths.
This one describes our Gramscian world:
Stable Mainstream Group
A history of mutual trust talks about theaccuracy of the product
This new addition to my collection begs freedom for the subject and probes some of the theories of the postmodern linguistic turn, which it surely matches in difficulty to understand (it may indeed be a modified quotation from something, does anyone recognize it?):
Keep Things From Taking Over One’s Life
Metalinguistic ontological distinctions
The general and specific object distinction
Both general and specific objects are abstract generalizations over utterances or texts. General objects represent supersets of specific sets.
The lexical and virtual object distinction
Most specific objects are lexicalised, i.e. known from some previous process of construction and stored, or non-lexicalised, i.e. virtual objects, not yet constructed in actual use and afterwards stored.
Finally, this new long-sleeve addition to my collection is a very happy celebration of hobbies and urges us to find people having the same interests. I wonder if this author’s hobby is making strange T-shirts?
Find Someone Who Likes the Same Stuff
Are there any vidoes you’d recommend?
Watching a movie I saw when I was a student brings back a lot of memories about that time.
There used to be a lot of theaters that played classic movies.
That last scene was so sad, I just couldn’t stop the tears from falling.
I turned my hobby into a career / I’ve met lots of people through this hobby.
I’m putting my hobby to practical use.
Through a hobby you can meet hundreds of (new) people a year.
This song gave me goose bumps the first time I heard it.They say they don’t
use computer
graphics. So how did they
film that final scene?
004/8/27.taste
1975.taste
…You sure do have a lot of hobbies.
You really have diverse tastes, don’t you?
Share Common Tastes
Pleasant Hobby
One of my favorite sweaters has been packed away in a box. It begins with the profound quote which I wish I could pin at the top of my Inbox:
Mail Comes on the Contrary
Fjords
When I eat dinner these days I have been playing over some great audio versions of the classic Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series read by the author, Douglas Adams. As most geeks the world over know, these books are amazing and have spawned a whole set of bizarre references that only we can appreciate. Today, I was listening to the scene where Author talks to Slarty Bartfast (sp?), who was a coastline designer for the creation of Earth. This is one of many references to him and his design of a coastline feature that I’m also particularly fond of:
“I think the chances of finding out what is really going on [in life] are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is say, ‘Hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied.’ Look at me, I designed coastlines. I got an award for Norway.” He rummaged around in a pile of debris and pulled out a large perspex (sp?) block with his name on it and model of Norway molded into it. “Where is the sense in that? None that I can make out. I have been doing fjords all my life and for a fleeting moment they become fashionable and I get a major award…In this replacement Earth we are building, they have given me Africa to do, and of course, I’m doing it with all fjords again, because I happen to like them and I’m old-fashioned enough to think they give a lovely baroque feel to a continent. And they tell me it is not equatorial enough. Equatorial.” He gave a hollow laugh, “What does it matter? Science has achieved some wonderful things, of course. But I would far rather be happy than right, any day.” (From Chapter 30)
Updated JSFlash
I updated my open source JSFlash script to 1.1. This little Javascript program creates an interactive flashcard web page which works in most recent browsers. I have embedded the script into OWLS, Jii-chan, and the upcoming Fool’s House of Cards project for practicing vocabulary. I even put it into a timeline/bibliography/biography database project I am working on. While not an important feature, it will be handy to be able to review events from any timeline in the database. These last two projects are still buried in construction.
The update I’m releasing today adds one new feature: the ability to advance to the next ‘card’ or mark a card ‘incorrect’ using a keyboard command (‘z’ and ‘x’ keys by default but you can change this in the code).
Dresner on Korea and Taiwan
Jonathan Dresner wrote an interesting article on HNN which talks about democracy in Korea and Taiwan. In a later posting on Cliopatria he lists three “landmark moments” for democracy (first transfer of power to the opposition, first peaceful transfer of power to another party, resolution of first major constitutional crisis) and says Taiwan is struggling with both 2 and 3. A few thoughts below…
Continue reading Dresner on Korea and Taiwan
Good Old Chinese Word Frequency
On a recent trip to Taiwan I picked up a copy of James Erwin Dew’s 6000 Chinese Words: A Vocabulary Frequency Handbook for Chinese Language Teachers and Students. 杜老師, as we knew the author, was a former director of the IUP Chinese language program in Beijing, where I studied for a year (it is also known as IUB now and was originally in Taiwan. Sayaka is currently studying at the successor to IUP in Taiwan, now called ICLP). He still came to the center fairly frequently while I was there and I occasionally chatted with him about technology and language learning. He also designed the Easytone pinyin font which I host for him, and provided me with some files that helped me make my Pinyin to Unicode Converter.
I just read through the introduction to the book’s wonderful collection of reference charts and lists of word and character frequency. In comparing a mainland Chinese frequency dictionary, the BLI (现代汉语频率词典) with the data from studies by Academia Sinica in Taiwan, he notes a few terms which have a very marked difference in frequency ranking (p20). The word 同志 (comrade) is the 86th most frequent term in the mainland China study, while it has a ranking of 6,619 in the Taiwanese data. The mainland China data ranking for 戰鬥 (Simplified Version: 战斗) meaning ‘fight or combat’ and 錯誤 (错误) meaning ‘error or mistake’ was also very different from that of the Taiwanese data.
The most amusing, however, was the fact that in the mainland Chinese frequency data, the word 敵人 (敌人) or ‘enemy’ was ranked 168th most frequent, while the word was nowhere to be found in the first 5000 terms of the Academia Sinica materials. This would have made a great propaganda poster at the 2/28 Hand-in-Hand rally in Taiwan I went to see during which many were protesting China’s ‘aggressive’ and ‘belligerent’ behavior towards Taiwan.
I should note, however, that Du laoshi does mention that the data is somewhat old so these rankings would have changed over the years. The BLI dictionary was published in 1986.
On a separate note, I am pondering (together with my 20 other projects yet to get off the ground) the idea of making a Chinese equivalent to my Jii-chan Kanji flashcard review site using a portion of the word frequency data in this book. Any volunteers to help me input some data or who already have a digital version of something similar? I don’t think lists like this frequency data can be copyrighted, and indeed the book makes no reference to getting permission from BLI to reprint their data.