Category: Random Stuff

I love going through the book offerings at Japanese shrines, where you are almost guaranteed to get some gems. At Kasuga Taisha (春日大社) in Nara, I found a series of childrens’ books entitled “Japan: A Good Country” (『日本いい国に』). Each chapter was designed to give children a lesson in how to be a good Japanese or on how wonderful Japan is. I opened to a random page which came from a chapter on the “Japanese Diet” and found the following passage (running short on time so I’ll just post my English translation):

In France, the French eat mainly French food, in China they eat mainly Chinese food. This is a pretty obvious fact (当たり前) but in each country they primarily eat that country’s food. And yet, in Japan’s case, we are importing all kinds of food from many different foreign lands and eating all kinds of different things. There isn’t any other country which has made such a mess of (バラバラになった) even their own dietary habits (自分たちの主食までも).

My last day in Stavanger this time around, it started raining in the morning. I biked into town from my uncle’s office and was getting soaked along the way. I remember the many times my Japanese friends have asked me, “Why don’t you use an umbrella?” and I have either explained that I really don’t like umbrellas, that I have lost every umbrella I have ever owned, and/or made the rather non-scientific claim that, “They don’t use umbrellas where I come from.” So as I rode into and through downtown Stavanger in the rain (it had been raining for about 2 hours before I started riding), I decided to do a little survey. I counted how many of the first 100 people I passed on my bicycle who were carrying or using an umbrella. The result: 7 people out of 100. Lots of people had rain coats on, but I don’t have the brain power to manage the count of more than one variable.

Monday is 17th May, big nationalist holiday in Norway. Lots of flag waving, hot dog eating, song singing, band playing, people marching, and occasional Sweden bashing. I’ll be following my cousins Alex and Frida around and will do whatever they do. I saw something interesting on “children’s TV” this morning, which I was glued to with Frida. They were doing lots of 17th of May stuff, and being patriotic and all when suddenly one of the announcers jumps out in a Sami costume and says to the kids, “Norway has two national days, the 17th of May and February 6th. February 6th is when we celebrate the Sami people.” Then things got even more interesting. A line of kids made a dragon thingy, lining up under a green dragon outfit and the show cut to an explanation of Chinese dragon dances. Then some other kids come out wearing costumes from other cultures. “Hey, how about if we have a 17th of May parade combining all the cultures together!” The band then tried play a dozen different tunes at once. After it was over, the announcer adds, “Wow, this was sooo cool!” before going on to the next activity. Interesting…I don’t know where to start on this one…

Sometimes Sayaka pats my head and in a patronizing voice says,「いい子いい子」Sometimes I pat her head and tell her she is an「いい子いい子」Today I tried to explain to her that what we essentially have going on here is an echo chamber (in which we each congratulate the other for being a “good little boy/girl”). She said, “No, we have an いい子 chamber.”

I love the smurfs. I always have. My sister and I were raised on Smurf songs and the cartoons. Never, never did I (and I doubt Carleen did either) turn the analytical eye on the holy smurfs. Others have, though. Now, after all these years, do I realize where my deep socialistic instincts find their source. I must overcome these urges towards an egalitarian society born of the propoganda of my youth and the seeming tranquility of Norwegian welfare society and embrace the invisible hand! 資本主義萬歲! :-)

I added a half a dozen pictures from the last few months to the People Gallery.

There is a “gangster war” going on now between the huge Yamaguchi-gumi and something called the “Iijima-kai” (飯島会). Over the weekend there were a spat of murders of the Iijima-kai (More on the war in Japanese). I’m not usually interested in Japan’s crime, except when spending a pleasant evening with a couple of Yakuza movies. What surprises me the most about this past weekend’s violence is the fact that one of the gangs, the Iijima-kai, appear to be a bunch of street vendors（露店）!? Off the top of my head I can think of three varieties of street vendors that I see around the city: Foreigners selling cheap jewelry or fake stuff (clothes, train cards etc.), old men selling traditional Japanese snacks, and younger punks selling barely legal “love pills” and other “party products.” I can’t imagine the former joining something called the “Iijima-kai” and I can’t imagine the last group, which look like a bunch of deeply suntanned beach bums with little or no grey matter between their ears, could actually organize anything with “kai” (group) in its name. So are these gang members a bunch of potato and noodle venders? Why do I never see them in the Yakuza flicks?

Here is a posting submitted by my friend Derek:

I saw this article on slashdot, which probably means a lot of you have already seen it, but I thought others that might not have seen it already would find it humorous. A suggested read if you’ve ever attended a forum with a lot of literature professors and graduate students and after about half an hour you started wondering whether anyone was really saying anything useful, or if it was all just verbose and creative b.s.

Continue reading The World of Postmodern Literary Criticism as Seen From an Outsider