read poetry when you wake and satire before bed

Or poetry both times. Just don’t read satire when you wake. Your circadian rhythms aren’t up to it.

[image thanks to http://carabaas.livejournal.com/1631114.html]

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coupla pics from the Dick Tracy phone

White bait and nuts. Together at last.

Me with a ‘car’ in the supermarket carpark. The picture is such poor quality because we were trying to capture the 50 circus clowns who’d just poured out of the back door. We learnt that good photography is all about timing.

A vending machine drink. Not at all unusual to name things this way. Really.

A shop in Kanazawa. No comment required here. Nor, they tell us, is one possible.

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Haado Gei, woooo!

This is a Hard Gay. Pronounced Haado Gei. He’s a very popular TV character. I bought this toy of him at a convenience store. Push the HG his head and his eyes flash an alternating yellow and red, and a high pitched voice says things like “one, two, zree, wooooo!!”, “Haado Gei wooooo!” and “Domo! Haado Gei desu!” which translates, I guess, as “Thanks a lot! I’m Hard Gay!”.

OK, so, chuck out your Western models of sexual orientation, I think. Japan doesn’t have gays like the west. Well, I qualify that: I’m pretty sure they have much the same desire and the manifestation thereof as other gays. But gender-identity? We’re not in Kansas anymore.

I’m in no position to give any remotely accurate analysis of how Japan views homosexuality. But, it is true Haado Gei and many others like him are all over the mainstream media. As some academic I googled put it:

On television, in particular, the homosexual man is represented as an okama. James Valentine says of the okama stereotype: ‘In media portrayals okama look like fakes, trying to be women but noticeably failing.’ Okama are represented as the opposite of ‘normal’ men. … Japanese television loves to present documentaries and ‘wide shows’ (live variety programmes) detailing ’surprising’ things or events and okama are often featured on these shows either as subjects of investigation or as studio guests.
full article

Yet no-one, it seems, is publicly recognised as being ‘gei’. A Japanese person we know who thinks HG’s funny, when asked about his sexual preferences, said “Oh, but he’s not gay.” No justification; none needed. Of course he’s not gay; it’s just a pretence. It’s funny.

This is not, I think a repression of homosexuality, the way we’d view it at home. Instead (taking a step back), I think we view our lives in terms of how much we can get out of it. You decide what you want from life, and then follow it. Western homosexuality, with ideas about ‘acceptance’, follows the same line. Here (and in many countries where you don’t have the choice to ‘follow your dream’), I think life is viewed differently. Japanese people have a strong sense of community, and of working towards the common good. There is no other explanation I can see as to why teachers stay so late at work, or why coming home on time implies to your family that your job isn’t very important. Seriously – they chat and sleep and read the newspaper for much of the day, yet they stay till 7 at least each night. The reason (as I see it) is that they are not thinking “I could be home relaxing, drinking a beer and watching Haado Gei”, but rather that almost exclusively the Japanese believe it important to be accepted and have a place in society. They don’t feel they’re not being fulfilled; fitting in is fulfulment. This idea runs pretty deep here.

I think we might not value this so much, and it has its costs, but we forget there are many ways we suffer in our eternal search for personal freedom, from teenage gangs to mid-life crises and on and on and on.

Just interesting, that’s all. What’s just plain weird, then? Gay men in Japanese girl’s manga.

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pig

This is a pig key chain. His nose lights up. That is all.

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Well, it’s been a few days between posts again. Little has happened, except exams and a big tearful graduation. All the teachers are in a meeting now, which is no doubt to do with the upcoming entrance exams for the school. I’ve yet to figure this out; you finish junior high (12-15 yrs old), and you apply for schools, going for either the Academic type or Worker Drone type (such as mine) by estimating how smart/stupid you are? Or does the junior high you’re at decide you’re in the stupid 50% of the population, THEN you apply at a WD school, and they accept or reject you?

Hm, that must be it. Sorry, just had to write that down to get the process clear in my head.

While the cats’re away, I can bring you the FIRST EVER instalment of:

Japanese mysteries

A syndicated series

Pt 1 The Hanko

How safe is a signature, really? It’s not very difficult to create a passable forgery. My own signature changes quite a bit every time I make it, for a start. And how reliable are these supposed ‘handwriting experts’ anyway? Where are they? I’ve never met one. It’s a stupid, outdated system. We should have fingerprint readers or DNA samples imbedded in documents or something by now. That’d be cool.

But as dodgy as signatures are, they are as secure as Kerry Packer’s frozen head compared to hankos. (local touch, nice – ed.) Hankos are a stamp of the Chinese characters that make your name, and are used in Japan as proof of identity. Mine are at the top of this page. I could use it to open bank accounts, rent a flat, get a passport (if I were Japanese), authorise insurance, and would use it sign my will with if I owned anything here. They cost $2, and any local key-cutting-type-dude can make one for you.

So, bank fraud is pretty rampant here, or so the English language papers here tell me. Most of the time they don’t mention hankos. But when hankos are used, rarely are the banks found liable. Often people just have to lump it.

On the other side of the bureaucratic reversible jacket, I have to use the thing to sign in every morning, and to stamp – 4 times - the form that lets me go to primary school once every 2 weeks.

Such a system is ideal in conditions such as, say, China, 500 years ago. One might have thought the age of mechanical reproduction might have changed things. I can see the meeting now … way, way up in the meeting room of power, circe 1900 …

Head Bureaucrat: “So, you say we have machines that can make many, many copies of things now. Cheaply, quickly and easily. They are glorious devices that befit Emperor Meiji’s vision for this blessed country.”

chorus of bureaucrats “Yes sir. They are a wonder indeed.”

“Mm, yes, you agree with me well. And you tell me, as they develop over time, through the application of the principles of supply and demand in a basically capitalist economy modelled within the constraints of an essential governmental structure that may be interventionist at times in order the redress the imbalances of inequity that are simultaneously and regrettably produced by said economic model, they will be able to reproduce almost any material want or need with satisfactory results?”

“Yes sir. Within limits, yes sir.”

“I see. Your agreement with me wasn’t so great there, by the way. But, very well – let us use this method to become the greatest producer of said goods the world has ever seen! We will reproduce things with speed of ten thousand eagles! Order me a hundred machines to present to the Emperor!”

“… uh, what sort of machines would you like, sir?”

“Any! The ones that make those useless little trinkets one ties to one’s fob watch! The Emperor likes those. Here’s my hanko, which uniquely identifies me as the purchaser of these goods, and these goods alone!”

…

(another meeting, weeks later)

“Fellow bureaucrats! Should not my reproducing machines have arrived by now?”

(much squirming)

“Uh, there has been a small problem, sir.”

“What? In how many ways have you failed me? … Is it in the thousands?”

“…It appears you have become the what might be the first victim of what is already known as hankohacking, sir. Very nasty business.”

“Tell me what this is of which you speak before I silence you with the force of ten thousand typhoons.”

“It appears, well … we placed the order …”

“Yes?”

“…well, we placed the order with an American company which only recently outsourced its Easy Asian distribution operations to Malaya, where it appears a young goods clerk managed to somehow reproduce your hanko (through what fantastical technical skill we know not of), and has since purchased, under your name, many flat-screen daguerrotypes, high-definition dictionaries and laptops!”

“What?! I am fueled with the rage of ten thousand feral cats in a bag …. eh? Wait up. What’s a laptop?”

“American word for hooker, sir.”

(silence)

(through teeth)“… Don’t … mention … this … to … the … Emperor.”

THE END

There you have it. Hankos. Still with us.

One hour to finishing time. They’re still in their meeting (my other teachers, that is). Back to twiddling my thumbs.

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Movies

You know, you really should see the bean-throwing movies. Matt’s put up an index page for me and everything. They still make me laugh, and I’ve seen them about 10 times. ‘Course it helps to know the guy in them.

Go here.

And if you’re really bored this deserves another viewing.

(Oh, and yeah, our Japan pictures are a little dull – but how’s that flash animation? Pretty swish, eh? Eh?)

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Rather boring pictures

Finally done it. Matt, my tech guru of a brother, has graciously allowed us some space on one of his sites to put up some of our pictures. Go here:

http://electronic-village.org/album/index.html

and have a play.

You can also see movies of the recent Bean-Throwing Festival that signals the coldest day of winter. The idea is, you get your beans from the priest, you take them home and throw them around, thus scaring the demons away. Also helps prevent mid-life crises (no joke). If only.

Movies are here: http://electronic-village.org/movies/

Click on one of the AVI movies to view. Hopefully this works OK until I get some sort of HTML editor to make a page.

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Peter

Peter
Originally uploaded by Charlotte and Toby.

Resident philosophical agonist, Peter.

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tombi

IMG_3419
Originally uploaded by Charlotte and Toby.

The noble tombi keeps a watchful eye over Wajima. Yes, the statue does look out of context; this bird carried it with him in a recent migration from St Petersburg.

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We got the bastard flu. We got the BASTARD flu. Not the bird flu variety, just the piss-ant rat-hole dog’s-scrotum ordinary flu that’s going around. And I was supposed to go skiing again this weekend.

‘Course, in Japan, it has to be the sort of thing that utterly wipes you out for 4 days. Hell, some of the teachers at school have even taken sick leave.

You probably don’t want to hear me bitching about the weather, my sickness, or the distinct lack of central heating in Japanese houses, so for now let me relay a joke that tickled me:

An international team commissioned several nations to do a book on the elephant. Germany produced a 3-volume set called A Short History of the Elephant. Britain’s book was titled Stalking the Elephant in the Wilds of Africa. The US came up with How to Raise Elephants in your Own Backyard for Fun and Profit, and Japan produced two volumes. The first was Elephants: How They See Us, and the second was Bridging the Elephant-Japan Perception Gap.

Which is funnier when you’re here, because you generally perceive the locals have – how shall I say – an exaggerated sense of their own uniqueness? It goes back centuries, I suppose, and even relates – dammit, I’m going to do it – to the fear of central heating. If you wanted to start up a central heating installation company in Japan, you’d need to overcome, first of all; basic Japanese housing design. Then all sorts of arguments trying to justify “this is the way it’s always been done”. Finally, there’s a sort of suffer-through-difficult-times-as-it’s-character-building ethos. Which, as always with these sorts of things, is admirable in its place, downright stupid and even evil in others. Especially when it comes to keeping my arse warm.

I should mention that this blog is something of an outlet for my frustrations, and I/we wouldn’t have recontracted if it was all that bad here. I think once you accept the fact, from when you wake up in the morning, that your day will make no sense, you are pleasantly surprised when it does. And coming from a country where all you read in the papers about the world’s 2nd largest economy has to do with whales and not mentioning the war (maybe some manga and robots in the weekend magazines), I don’t know how strong my arguments can be. Won’t stop me bitching about the place though.

And so, on that note: from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4669408.stm:

About 40 Japanese lawmakers have joined a rally in Tokyo to protest against government plans to allow women to ascend to the throne.
…
The imperial family is facing a crisis, having produced no boys since 1965, but some conservatives oppose any change.
…
“If [four-year-old Princess] Aiko becomes the reigning empress, and gets involved with a blue-eyed foreigner while studying abroad and marries him, their child may be the emperor,” he told the rally at a Tokyo hall

Which makes perfect sense, really. But wait, breaking news: the whole campaign for permitting women to ascend to the throne was recently abandoned because … (drum roll) one of the princesses is now pregnant! There’s a 50 per cent chance there will be a male heir! Who either will not be stupid enough to get involved with a blue-eyed foreigner, or will in no way pollute the pristine imperial blood line by doing so! Praise be to the glorious Emperor (we hope)!

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