In celebration of the month of the flying squirrel, a holiday spanning late September and most of October with a 3000 year long tradition in the land of Muninn, I have resolved that for about one month this blog’s name will change to the Chinese for Flying Squirrel (鼯鼠 or wushu in Chinese, musasabi in Japanese, naldaramjui in Korean). Because I have a horrible memory, can someone remind me to do this next year? Oh, and can someone else remind me to change the name back again in late October?
Category: Personal
鼯鼠: My Life as a Flying Squirrel
Many of us here on earth cultivate for ourselves an identity. After some reflection and a little imagination, we take extra pride in identifying with some particular configuration of abilities, characteristics, or even physical or ethnic features.
I am one of these people, and I have long cultivated, and perhaps taken pride in, my “jack-of-all-trades” nature. I remember making a business card on some vending machine in London back in 7th grade. On the card I made “Jack-of-all-trades” the “title” attached to my name. Perhaps from around that time I decided that my interests and abilities were so diffuse and I was so utterly incapable at excelling in any one of them that I would have to develop some unique combination that would get me through life. What is somewhat odd about this, though, is that this ended up leading me to celebrate my own mediocrity in any and all of my pursuits.
I was reminded of this tonight. After rereading a book by Kenneth Pyle on The New Generation in Meiji Japan for my modern Japan historiography class, I wanted to see how Pyle’s portrayal of the Japanese intellectual Hasegawa Nyozekan meshed with Andrew Barshay’s portrayal of him in the latter half of his book State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan: The Public Man in Crisis (Whole book is online). There I found quoted an old passage from Nyozekan’s journal that I had highlighted a few years ago:
He is a good jumper, but can’t reach the roof; a skillful climber, but can’t make it to the top of the tree; an easy swimmer, but can’t cross the stream; a deep digger, but can’t cover himself up; a fast runner, but can’t outrun a man…Five skills you possess
Yet not in one are you accomplished.
Flying squirrel, how can you brag?
Barshay notes that this is a reference to a passage in the first book of Xunzi (“The wingless dragon has no limbs and yet it can soar; the flying squirrel has many talents but finds itself hard-pressed.”) I really like this little passage, and I think that, like Nyozekan, I feel very much like a flying squirrel. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not the least bit unhappy with my fate as a flying squirrel. I believe that I have successfully developed a combination of skills and interests so bizarre and unlikely that my very presence in the world helps mitigate its monotony. I believe I am the only squirrel in the entire world to have precisely this particular configuration and by golly, there was a niche for me in society after all.
Orwell: Politics and the English Language
I met a nice Australian guy by the name of Gregory. He lives on my floor here in Perkins hall and popped in last night for a chat. He has been a consultant, taught communications in Denmark, and studied Danish and Chinese languages. During our talk he introduced me to Orwell’s essay Politics and the English Language which has apparently become the basis of the Economist‘s style guide.
Settling In
I have made my move to Cambridge in the Boston area and I’m still getting adjusted. I haven’t met many people, visited my department, or done much else than locating food, various shiny objects for my den (like a spoon for cereal), and doing a bit of random exploring by bike. Classes start on the 20th and I’ll hopefully have more to report by then, but in the meantime, enjoy the wonderful Shi Shi poem. I was delighted to find this online, complete with audio versions in Mandarin and Cantonese thanks to No-Sword.
The End of An Age
In less than 24 hours I leave Japan for the USA. I have been here almost two years, mostly as a scholarship research student at Waseda University’s Political Science department studying Sino-Japanese relations history with Hirano, Kenichiro (平野健一郎). He has been incredibly kind to me, supporting me both in my studies with him, and in the half year or so I stayed on and did various smaller things such as helping edit a collection of essays Toyo Bunko, being an English conversation partner for a retired prime minister, traveling around East Asia on my limited savings, and helping out with various things at Waseda’s Contemporary Asian Studies Center of Excellence as a research assistant. Today I’m getting together with a group of good friends for a last gathering and tomorrow morning I leave Japan to begin the last step in my formal education: a PhD in history.
This blog will change accordingly. At least for a while there won’t be any more first hand stories of my experiences in Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and China and probably more academic sounding babble as I dive into my studies. The frequency in postings will probably drop somewhat (not that it was ever high to start with). I plan to be in Korea next summer and the summer after studying Korean language but I don’t know when my next extended stay in Japan will be.
Lars at Tokyo Station
My friend Lars, dressed like a Western tourist might, emerged from Tokyo station’s ticket gate yesterday to be suddenly swarmed on by three police officers. “Are you a tourist?” Lars answers, “Umm, No.” Then they ask, “Do you work here?” and Lars replies, “No. I am a graduate student [at Waseda University]” The police officers then asked him for his “Foreigner Identification Card” He handed it over but asked, “Can I ask why I have been approached?” They told him, “There has been a terrorist attack.” Lars asked, “Where?” to which they replied, “Spain.” Lars then replied, “Oh really? When was it?” The police then replied, “Several months ago.” They soon let him go and Lars then went on his way, wondering what a terrorist attack that happened in Spain several months ago had to do with him walking out of a train station. This happened to my Canadian friend Andrew, also at Waseda studying engineering a few months ago as well. When Andrew asked why he was stopped by a police car when walking down a street, he was just told that, “We have a lot of crime. Foreigners often commit crime.”
China Trip 1: A 34 Hour Travel Day
I’m going to post a few things about my recent trip to China. See also Sayaka’s recent postings on our trip. July 23rd, 2004: I’ll post this next time I have a net connection. I’m currently in Qingdao (pictures here), a coastal city in China’s Shandong province. Getting here was a thirty-four hour adventure that began in Takarazuka, Japan.
Continue reading China Trip 1: A 34 Hour Travel Day
Leaving for China
I leave Takarazuka and my adventures in the Kansai region tomorrow morning and travel to Beijing and Qingdao for about a week. I’ll be back in Tokyo at the end of the month and leave Japan August 15th. I’ll be back visiting my parents in Bartlesville, Oklahoma until early September, when I move to Boston.
Tatami Mats and Escalators
After giving my final presentation at Waseda University, where I have spent the last two years as a “research student” 研究生, I left immediately for the Kansai area of central Japan to join Sayaka and her family in her hometown of Takarazuka 宝塚. The next three days were spent traveling around to nearby sites that I have, in all my time in Japan, never gotten around to visiting. Sunday was spent visiting Nara (see some of my pictures here) while the next two days were spent in Kyoto (some pictures here). It is a bit ironic that I have spent some of my last days in Japan in two cities tourists usually spend their first nights, but I’m very happy to have had the opportunity to visit.
The Kansai region is different from the Kantô area of Tokyo in many ways and since I have spent very little time in the former, some of these differences are quite new to me. Two little tidbits that have escaped my notice all this time: 1) Tatami mats, the size of which are a common measurement for the size of rooms and apartments, are apparently significantly larger in the Kansai area. I am told, however, that the “standard” Tokyo size of tatami mats are becoming more widespread. 2) In the Tokyo area, people stand on the left side of the escalator and walk up the right side. In the Kansai area, people stand on the right side and walk up the left side. Sayaka said something about seeing a TV news clipping which explained this as having something to do with the location of the exit in the first department store in which escalators were used in Japan. I’m really curious to know where this practice switches sides. Presumably, somewhere between Osaka and Tokyo, escalator-standing-culture switches sides…anyone know where? While I’m on this type of topic, I always wondered what the border between Sweden and Norway looked like back in the days when the Swedes drove on the left hand side of the road….two great questions for an idle google moment.
UPDATE: I found out a little more about the history of the Sweden case of switching from left to right on this web page (can’t vouch for its accuracy)
Open to the Public?
Ok, I don’t want to seem fixated on the subject of bathrooms here, but I saw signs on the outsides of a lot of restaurants in Seoul which resembled this one. I think the text under the sign (click on the picture for a larger version) says something like, “The restrooms in our establishment are open for the benefit of the public.” (at least that is what I can make out, with the help of my new EW-K3000 electronic dictionary)
This may not seem like a big deal, but if that is what these signs mean, that is very cool! Japan, Norway, the US, most of the places I have visited always have obnoxious signs that say things like, “The restrooms here are only available for use by our customers.” That doesn’t stop every drunk on a late night in Stavanger from using the bathroom at MacDonalds (when I lived there, McDs was open really late on weekends) but still! In Stavanger, and many places I can remember visiting in Holland, Germany, and China you have to pay a fee to get into many bathrooms. Japanese train stations usually put bathrooms on the inside, where only ticketed passengers can get too them.
It may not sound like much but for traveling bums like me on a shoestring budget and those who like to walk around big cities and explore, public trash cans (see my earlier entry) and publicly accessible bathrooms go a long way towards making me happy. I should note, however, that in Japan, both of these are pretty much provided by the ubiquitous convenience store.