The Monster Flower

The Shine Has Gone Off

2009-07-10T13:00:00.004+09:00

I've concluded that the shine has gone off of airing my private thoughts and experiences publicly, so I'm going to give up private blogging (again). This time, I don't expect that I'll be making a return trip.

Thanks to all of the people who read and took the time to be supportive and kind to me. I appreciate it.

I will be keeping up my other two non-personal blogs, will still be writing for Tokyo Journal magazine, and will perhaps return to Blogcritics more regularly as a means of airing my deeper notions and developed ideas. If you'd like to hear my thoughts on such topics, you can still find my thoughts on limited topics in these places. From now though, my private life and notions won't be out there for regular public consumption.

The other two blogs are:

1000 Things About Japan

Japanese Snack Reviews

And other ways you can access my writing:

My Blogcritics page

Tokyo Journal (at Amazon, though you can also buy it from Kinokuniya in Japan)

Tokyo Journal's web site

My first blog:

My So-Called Japanese Life

The Lunchbox That's Not a Bento

2009-07-09T09:15:00.004+09:00

At one point last month, Kelly made a post about bento (Japanese lunch boxes) and asked, "do you bento?" I believe that real bento making is an art form and that it takes a certain character type and appreciation for that art to really make the time and effort put into it worthwhile. I think many Japanese people find it gratifying because they find presentation to be just as important as the quality of the food.

When I commented on Kelly's post, I said that I make a boxed lunch, but not a bento. Even if I were inclined to take the time to make a real bento, it wouldn't be the sort of thing my husband would want to eat. He won't eat cold rice, potatoes, etc. and there's no microwave oven at his workplace. Also, he doesn't like his food to touch, so artfully cramming a lot of different food into the same box is simply not going to work for him. Finally, he doesn't like a lot of fruit and vegetables so there would pretty much be a limited palette to work with in regards to what was used to embellish the box.

In our case, the preparation of a lunch box is relatively utilitarian, but it's a bit beyond the standard brown bag or lunch in a pail in terms of effort. I make my husband's lunch 4 days a week both to save money and because it's better nutritionally than eating out. He eats out once a week for some variety (usually at Subway). The preparation starts with making my own high protein bread. I have to make this about twice every three weeks and keep it in supply in the freezer. The loaves are actually on the small side, so even though he is the only one who eats it (and it is only used for lunch), it doesn't last terribly long.

I also make espresso shots once or twice a week to prepare cold lattes to take in his cold thermos, and also make hot coffee for his hot thermos. If that weren't enough on the caffeine front, I also send along a Diet Coke wrapped in an ice pack and about once a week prepare two liters of Brita filtered water for him to drink at the office. His office used to have a filter on the tap, but they recently removed it so now he needs his own water (and we don't want to create waste by having him buy 2 liters every week).

The box itself looks something like this. Everything is in a separate container so that the food doesn't touch and contaminate the other food with various odors, wetness, or flavors. From the left on the top is a sliced apple (turning brown, though I know a bit of lemon would stop that, he doesn't care), fig newtons, and a rare inclusion of a white chocolate peanut butter cup on top of a container of pretzels. Usually, he takes baked tortilla chips, but this week he's having pretzels for a change of pace. On the bottom is a container of carrots wrapped in a wet paper towel to keep them from drying out and a baloney and cheese sandwich on the low carb high protein bread.

This particular box looks more put together than usual because the fruit actually fits in it. Often, he takes a banana, strawberries, grapes, or a bigger portion of apple that won't fit into the box and has to be taken separately. Often, my husband doesn't eat all of the starchy or sweet components that are packed here, but because he works 2 long days that start at 11:00 am and end at 10:00 pm (and 3 more "normal-length" days), and swims before work, he wants to have extra food on hand in case he gets hungry during the long day. Usually, I get this box back with 2-3 of the cookies still in it, about 1/3 to 1/2 of the pretzels or chips, and sometimes a portion of the sandwich as well.

He's not a big eater, and doesn't eat all of the carbs in particular. He'll almost certainly only eat half of that peanut butter cup, for instance, if he even eats it today at all. Sometimes he just takes it to work and leaves it there until he really wants it.

I've been making these sorts of lunches for him for quite some time now, and now that we're looking at leaving, I'm thinking that I probably won't be doing this sort of thing after we go back to America. It's not so much because I won't want to, but because our circumstances will certainly be different. For instance, I expect to work full-time if I can find a job, and he expects to be a student somewhere. Because of this, I'm immortalizing this process that I'll have undertaken for 6 years for my future reference.

No Energy to Be Angry

2009-07-08T14:51:00.004+09:00

When I learned that the move to put a tighter leash on legal foreigners in a lame attempt to catch illegal foreigners had passed both of Japan's houses (lower house at the end of June, upper house yesterday), I was mad and frustrated. With the police's illegal drug testing and searching of foreigners for weapons going on, forcing us to carry cards with computer tracking chips seems like a drop in the bucket of violating our rights to peaceably go about our business. The Japanese authorities have no respect for foreign residents. They tolerate us. They're happy to take our tax money and apply it to the needs of the Japanese people. They'll use us as labor if they have no other choice or can't find locals to accept low wages, but they have no respect for our well-being or our rights as fellow human beings.

Mind you, I'm separating the government and legal authorities from the population at large. I don't think the Japanese population on the whole knows or cares about what happens to the foreigners amongst them. Some radicals might want us out. Some radicals on the other side might very much want us here, but the vast majority are indifferent and aren't going to use the power of their votes or their voices (which are the only ones that matter - every foreigner in Japan could protest and the government would not care) to help us.

Frankly, I'm sick of thinking about it and worrying about what is to come. I'm tired of feeling paranoid every time I step out the front door and wondering if this will be the day I manage to check the mail or step out to put the trash in front of the building, or go shopping, and some cop decides I need to be checked for I.D. or asks me to pee in a damn cup for no other reason than I have red hair and blue eyes. I'm fed up with it being an issue and with the Uncle Tom white boys and their apologist mentality. I'm sick of thinking about civil rights and civil liberties and living in a country where racism is condoned not only by the 98% that makes up the native population, but at least some portion of the 2% that is having its liberties and rights violated because they're too damn stupid to understand the implications of what is going on.

Frankly, I just want to accomplish what I need to and get the hell out of here. I know America is a mess right now, but at least it's a mess where I won't be treated like a criminal for no reason or surrounded by people in the same boat as me who have their heads so far up the ass of the Japanese that they can't see the clear light of day. I'm too sick of it to be mad about it. I just want to stay off the radar for the next 2 years and 10 months and slip away before it gets any worse.

New Blog

2009-06-30T20:43:00.001+09:00

Just a quick note to say that I've created and will be working on a new blog. This one is designed to help me track my feelings about leaving Japan. That is, both in terms of what I think I will and won't miss when I leave.

If you're interested, it is here. It's also linked to on the right under "The Flower's Features."

Peach Oatmeal Bread

2009-06-29T15:10:00.002+09:00

In what may be a vain attempt to eat better by incorporating more whole grains, I've been poking about for more recipes to try and came across a promising looking peach oatmeal bread recipe on a site called "Slow Like Honey". The recipe apparently originally came from the King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking recipe collection, so I had more confidence that it might not be a dud (as so many of my experiences with Internet recipes have been).

It turns out that those King Arthur people know how to use whole grains. In fact, after trying this recipe, I'm inclined to actually buy their recipe book. My only concern is that it might use ingredients that I can't get in Japan, but I'll almost certainly still get it anyway given the rave reviews of it on Amazon and the fact that this turned out really well for me.

I did change just a few things (Splenda, canned white peaches rather than fresh ones or yellow cling peaches) and made a small mistake. I should have baked it just a bit longer as you can see by the picture above were the center is a little dark. The center is slightly still "doughy". I think a full hour (rather than my stopping it around 53 minutes) as the original recipe stated would have done the trick.

My loaf looks more "rustic" than the one pictured on Slow Like Honey because she pureed her peaches and I just chopped mine up into small pieces of about half about the size you'd find in fruit cocktail. I also didn't use fresh peaches as they're too good to waste on baking and too expensive in Tokyo.

Peach Oatmeal Bread
(adapted from King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking)

Dry Ingredients:
2 cups whole wheat flour
¾ cup unbleached bread flour
½ cup granulated Splenda (or you can use white sugar)
½ cup packed light or brown sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 cup old fashioned rolled oats

Fruit:
1 can white peaches, drained and diced into small pieces

Wet ingredients:
2 large eggs
1 cup milk
¼ cup vegetable oil
¼ teaspoon almond extract

Directions:
Mix all of the dry ingredients together then toss the diced peaches in the dry mix. Whisk the eggs a bit then add the other liquid ingredients and blend thoroughly. Add the wet to the dry and mix until just moistened. Pour into a greased loaf pan and bake at 350 degrees F (180 degrees C) for an hour or until a skewer inserted in the center comes out clean.

My husband, who generally does not care for whole grain foods, actually liked this but was unhappy with the texture inconsistency with the peaches. Next time, I'm going to puree the peaches to get a smoother texture. We ate ours with butter this first time out, but I think it'd be just as good plain despite not being incredibly sweet.

A Big Bully

2009-06-29T09:59:00.003+09:00

In a previous post, I mentioned an issue with one of my students who is going to college on a military base. At the end, I said that I would work out what this teacher wanted and was going to be like with a little time. Well, I have, and it's not good.

There area few ways I can figure out what the teacher is like and wants. One is through their comments, syllabus, and what the student tells me. The other is by listening to recordings of the class. Obviously, the latter is the best way to know what is going on, but I can't listen to all of each class she takes. That being said, I can scan through what is going on at key points.

First of all, the teacher is a bully, but a crafty one. He's the sort who you could easily imagine beating his wife in his private time. In the classes and in written correspondence, he criticizes, berates, and pushes the students on the one hand and then offers to have lunch with them, take them on tours of the base, and is nice to them on the other. The "carrot" and the "stick" approach really smacks of the man who gives his wife a black eye and then brings her flowers the next day.

Second, he will brook no explanation or argument which can be (mis)construed in any way to be what he imagines to be a challenge to his authority. If you say anything, he'll go off on an attack. For instance, he said some things which made it sound like my student had been drawing her ideas and information from external sources rather than offering up her aggregate knowledge based on being 45 years old and having taken a lot of other classes and insisted that she reference her ideas. When she explained that the source of her ideas was not from somewhere else per se, but from a body of accumulated knowledge, he got pissed off and wrote back a highly defensive letter saying that even he (and he must be the authority, after all) references 90% of what he writes.

She went out of her way to say that she'd be happy to find references after the fact and do what he wanted, but he seemed to completely ignore that part. Rather than see what she said as an explanation that she was not plagiarizing or lifting ideas without giving proper credit, he read it as a challenge to his authority to dictate how papers were to be written. This is the behavior of a bully who is insecure with any opinion other than his own.

My student was quite upset by his reaction, of course, and is going to write an apology. One thing about the vast majority of Japanese people, particularly women, is that you don't have to bully them to get them to study or cooperate. This guy doesn't seem to know the difference between teaching children (which he did in the past) and adults who are studying of their own volition and don't need to be pushed hard to do the work.

What is more, this teacher's way of explaining himself is not very clear and his requirements for weekly papers is absurd. Every week, the students must write two essays, but he expects them to reference them like term papers, even when part of the content they're answering questions for contains opinion questions. It's ridiculous for someone to expect you to provide references for their opinions. You get the feeling this guy is more in love with the letter of the law rather than the spirit when it comes to education. He's more interested in students following form than showing they have learned and digested the material.

Finally, he follows in the footsteps of a long line of teachers my student has encountered at this particular school on the base who does not actually know how to lecture. He spent the class I listened to relating old war stories of when he worked as a cop, criticizing other students, bragging about himself, and offering up his opinions on anecdotal cases. A structured, informative academic lecture was nowhere in the room. While I would definitely say that discussion of prominent anecdotal cases can be very effective in teaching material, this is not what he was doing. This is mostly finding a way to bullshit one's way through the time.

I told my student that, if she is ever hassled by the school in any way, I am going to fight for her like nobody's business because she has forked over a lot of money to go to that college and has never had a proper face-to-face lesson or teacher. The teachers, when they are qualified, are only so on paper. None of them seems to know how to conduct a real lesson or prepare and present material. They just hang out and chatter about opinions one way or another and make the students learn from the book.

At any rate, I'm actually responsible for my student getting in Dutch with the bully teacher because I advised her to explain things to him and helped her write the letter. This was a mistake on my part because I should have seen the carrot and stick thing as a bullying tactic, but I was viewing it rather personally instead. That is, I thought he was being nice to try and get her on as a private student (that is, steal her from me) since he says he teaches Japanese people privately. The truth is that this was an egotistical way of looking at it. It had nothing to do with what I might lose and everything to do with this guy's personality.

Now, It's Real

2009-06-26T20:45:00.002+09:00

One of my former students recently returned from a year in America as a university exchange student. She told me that, now that she is back in Japan, she wishes she could go back to the U.S. because it was like it was "not real". I understand all too well what she is talking about.

When my husband and I first came to Japan, part of the appeal was that it wasn't "real". Everything you encounter carries an air of novelty and mystery. Even things like the Coke cans, which when we got here were small and short to the way in which your change is handed over to you in a special way when you make a purchase is a curiosity.

The "mystery" aspect is in all of the things you can't understand or have never seen before. You never know when you buy something which looks like a carton of peanut butter (because it has a peanut on the front and is next to the jam and Nutella) is going to be what you think it is or if you're in for an unpleasant surprise.

Even something as mundane as traveling from place to place is pretty interesting when you see the train zipping past houses whose design is different from the ones you saw back home. When you see the huge apartments full of "rabbit hutch" apartments, rice paddies, and temples and temple gates, it all seems incredibly unreal. It's as if you've been transported to some ethereal land where the rules you grew up with don't seem to apply.

In fact, one of the things which makes the experience of living in a foreign country less real is that you lack an awareness of the rules. Back home, you're fully aware of all of the crap your parents have been putting up with all their lives like taxes, insurance, and home maintenance responsibilities. When I got here, I had no idea about the need to file an income tax return, pay city taxes, or health insurance and nobody at my work told me about it. I was completely unencumbered by these things. All of the reality of adult life is suddenly left behind as you go about your business in ignorance enjoying the exotic nature of your surroundings.

I'm not sure when it happened, and I'm sure it happened very slowly, but Japan became completely real for me. The novelty wore off of how cute the cans of Coke were. I started to understand what was in all the mystery packages I encountered. Watching the girl at the department store wrap my purchase like a gift was less of a cute idiosyncrasy of the merchants in Japan and more of an irksome waste of material. Cute little Japanese ditties that I heard again and again in shops or on T.V. became as annoying as the cute little English ditties in stores and T.V. back home. And, of course, all of those expenses and responsibilities which I was blissfully ignorant of became crystal clear to me and I started to understand what people were saying rather than experience it as background noise which meant nothing to me.

After awhile, the the way in which living in a foreign country feels unreal because you are disconnected from everything fades and it's all very real. I notice this very acutely when I read blogs written by people who haven't been here as long as me. They're delighted by all sorts of stuff which is now so mundane as to hold little appeal for me. Summer festivals are now the rage, but I've seen more than my share of them. Now, they're like the carnivals I grew up visiting as a kid. They don't change, and you can only ride the tilt-a-whirl so many times before it starts to feel boring or eat snow cones and think they're a special treat. In Japan, the kakigori (shaved ice with syrup) is no longer appealing. The opulent tanabata festival in my neighborhood is just incredibly annoying because it blocks access to shops and the train station.

The fact that Japan is now "real" is probably part of why the shine has gone off of it for me. That doesn't mean that my perspective isn't a valid one, but it does make it irritating to other foreigners who have no idea how it feels to be here long enough for the novelty to wear off. It's part of what motivates them to assert that Japan is "wasted" on me or that I should leave. To a lot of people, I don't belong here anymore, but that's only because they can't begin to imagine what it's like to live in the "real" Japan.

Long Time, No See

2009-06-22T19:33:00.003+09:00

This evening my husband and I were walking along the huge, snaking shopping street about 6 minutes from our apartment. One thing I'm going to miss after we leave Japan is the proximity and variety of shops that we have at hand. This street is one of several reasons we have lived in the same neighborhood for our entire stay. It's not only that it is convenient, but also that we save so much money on food at the cheap markets located on it.

At any rate, as we were walking down the street, a Japanese woman pushing her bicycle shouted out my name. I looked over at her and I had no idea who she was. Fortunately for me, she said her name and then I remembered her. She was a student who I taught privately for about 3 years about with the last lesson ending about 10 years ago. We stopped having lessons together when she moved to a city in another part of Japan then moved to Germany due to her husband being transferred.

I'm not sure if I remember correctly, but it is possible that this student was the first private student I ever taught in Japan. I liked her a lot and even went to see the sumo with her at one point. It's nothing short of amazing to run into her after all of these years. It's not only that she's back in my area, but also that she was on that street at the same time as us in the same location along the street. For the record, walking the entire length of that street if you don't stop and check out any of the shops would likely take 10 minutes at a decent pace.

We chatted briefly and I gave her my e-mail address and phone number. My hope is that she'll contact me and we can at least catch up with one another. If she wants to start to study again with me, that'd be all the better, but I mainly would like to see what she's been up to. She was pretty shocked, incidentally, that I was still in the same place. Such is the life in Japan that no one expects you to remain in the same place for long. I think she was also surprised that we were still in Japan.

At any rate, this experience is one that I have occasionally mulled over in the back of my mind. I have taught and met a great many Japanese people in my time here. Some of them came to my home over a hundred times, but I'm not sure that I would easily recognize the ones who I haven't seen in the past three years. And, no, I'm not trying to say anything here about all Japanese people looking alike. :-p

The main problem is that I have seen so many of them and it all becomes a bit of a blur after awhile. I recognize their names, of course, but not their faces. It doesn't help that I endeavor not to make eye contact with anyone when I'm out and about because it is taken as an invitation for strangers to walk over and start talking to me while I'm just trying to go about my business and head back home.

This time, I was lucky that she told me her name. I don't know if my face was as blank as my mind and she saved me from myself or if she just figured out that it had been so long and I might not recall her. I still wonder if the day is going to come when a former student or coworker comes along and greets me and I'm just left looking like the middle-aged woman with the Swiss cheese memory that I am.

A small aside about people "recognizing" me on the street. I once had an experience where I was coming out of the subway and a tall, foreign man with very little hair and what sounded like a German accent said "hello" to me in a familiar way and then asked, "you don't remember me, do you?" I said that I did not and he started talking about having worked out with me at some gym that we supposedly went to together. Since I've never joined a gym of any sort in Japan, he'd clearly mistaken me for someone else. So, sometimes people walk up to me and think they know me when they don't. That's pretty surreal given how few foreigners are around who look like me.

Whole Wheat Pancakes (that are actually good)

2009-06-22T09:33:00.011+09:00

I'm guessing one of the hallmarks of a good pornographer is that they can hide all the flaws and grossness of the activities they are portraying and make it look like happy fun time with beautiful people. Well, maybe not actually "beautiful" so much as thin, copiously implanted, and shaven.

A good food pornographer similarly takes a subject which can look like slop and make it look appetizing. What is more, they can take utter failures and make them look like successes. One of my major pet peeves (which I've mentioned before) is that a lot of the recipes I find on the Internet look fabulous or are steeped in superlatives, but when I try the recipe, I get something inedible or lame.

Invariably, a lot of the best looking pictures with bad recipes have a bunch of comments under them saying, "it looks fabulous! I can't wait to try it!" They never have comments from people who have actually tried it. This irked me as the comments are relatively useless to those of us wanting to actually try the food rather than just treat it like a statue to admire, but I have finally figured out why there are no comments from people who make the featured item. I have posted comments on some of these failures and said in a polite way that the recipe didn't work out for me. Sometimes I've even asked for advice about where I may have gone wrong. Unsurprisingly, these comments are never posted. This goes a long way toward supporting my suspicion that people who post their glorious food porn pictures know that the recipes suck, but they post them anyway and hide the consequences.

I've made whole wheat pancakes on many occasions, but the results have been somewhat disappointing. Mainly, they're denser than I'd like, too flat, or too eggy. On the whole, they simply weren't fluffy enough to satisfy compared to the glory of cakes made with white flour. The truth is that whole wheat can't hold up to the decadence of white flour cakes. It never will because it has a different taste and texture due to the extra protein in them. The best you can hope for is something which is as good as it can be, but not so different from beautiful white pancakes as to disappoint.

I was poking around for a recipe for whole wheat pancakes and you'd be surprised how many included white flour. How can it be whole wheat if there's white flour in it? It sort of takes away the "whole" part. At any rate, I found an abysmal recipe which was just 4 ingredients - whole wheat flour, baking soda, brown sugar and milk. I was going to try it anyway because I though a radically different approach might work better. The next morning I had second thoughts and decided to heavily modify the recipe to include things I think should be in any pancake recipe. The results were surprisingly good.

Whole Wheat Pancakes:

Dry ingredients:
1 cup (regular) whole wheat flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. baking powder
1 semi-heaping tbsp. brown sugar
1/4 tsp. salt

Wet ingredients:
3/4 cup milk with 1/2 tbsp. distilled vinegar added (or buttermilk)
1 medium egg
1 tbsp. Canola oil
1/2 tsp. vanilla

Sift the flour, baking soda, and baking powder into a bowl. Scoop most of it up and sift a second time. Add the sugar and salt and mix up the rest of the dry ingredients. In a separate bowl, mix the wet ingredients until well-blended. Add the wet into the dry and stir until all of the dry ingredients are moistened. Don't overmix it or smooth out lumps. Mainly, you're just looking to make sure there's nothing dry in your pancakes.

Heat a skillet or griddle at medium-high heat. The pan should be good and hot, but not smoking hot. Add just enough Canola oil to coat the pan and let it heat for about a minute. There shouldn't be any pools of oil. You just want to add enough to make sure they don't stick.

Add the batter by the tablespoon. I used about two tablespoons per cake and they were not huge, but not small. It's very important to follow this next part when cooking if you want to have good, fluffy pancakes. You need to watch them carefully and flip them when the edges look dry and/or the very first bubble starts to form on the top. If you have the heat set properly, they will brown quickly as well. Only flip them once or you will have tough pancakes. You can test for doneness once they're flipped by pressing gently on the center of one of the cakes. It should feel firm, but be springy.

If you wait too long to flip them, they won't rise enough. You should also be able to tell if they're ready by the fact that they don't break apart when you attempt to flip them (and by the edges looking dry near the bottom). Essentially, the bottom should be cooked and the top still quite wet. If you look at the stack of cakes at the top of the post, you can see that they are uneven because they were flipped when top was still very moist and it splayed out a bit (bottom is smaller than the top). This is what you want.

These are very hearty tasting and undeniably "wheaty" in taste, but they have the right texture and look and feel like an real, fluffy pancake. They're actually better with things like jam and honey than the average white flour pancake, but good with syrup as well. When you add the syrup, the pancakes will be more "crumbly" than usual pancakes because those made with whole wheat flour isn't as gluey as those made with white, but they don't disintegrate.

My feeling is that the baking soda made a huge difference with the whole wheat flour because it acts much more rapidly than baking powder. I think it gave these extra lift, but it also means you can't make too many at once or save the batter for the next day if you won't want to use it all. My recipe made 7 medium-sized pancakes. I ate two and put the rest in the refrigerator for the next few days. I recommend cooking them all up at once rather than saving the batter because I think they'll lose all of their capacity to rise by the next day.

Of Teachers and Idiosyncracies

2009-06-21T14:02:00.004+09:00

For the last two and a half years, I've been tutoring a student who is studying criminal justice at a college on one of the American military bases. This is one of the reasons that I have insight into both the American and Japanese justice systems and wrote the "This is not America" posts. I'm not speaking from anecdotal experiences. I'm speaking as someone who has taken courses side-by-side with my student as she's mainly taken distance courses and my job has been to read her texts and provide a lecture for her to base her papers on. I'm just as much a student as she is, but I have the added benefit of her research into the Japanese justice system (in Japanese) as a part of my learning process. It's how I learned things like there are no rights provided in line with habeas corpus in Japan (or that they are ignored).

At any rate, one of the things about helping someone get through college is that you are taken back to the time when you were going through the process yourself. All of the issues that I experienced with some of my teachers back then are in play for my student as well, and I find myself frustrated on her behalf.

One of the biggest problems that students complain about is the amount of work that teachers give them. Each teacher tends to expect not only attendance at lectures and reading the textbook, but regular personal research into related topics and articles. Some teachers assign work as if their class were the only one the students are taking, or at least as if their class is the most important and therefore worthy of a disproportionate amount of the students' study time.

My student is currently studying with one of these types of teachers. She has a gigantic text chock full of more information than anyone could possibly retain on the first pass, but he also expects her to research for articles and information on discussion topics. This is on top of writing essays every week for homework. It appears to be a daunting task for even the students who speak English as a native language as my student has forwarded messages from the teacher where he complains that they are just writing their opinions too much and not doing enough volitional work to augment their essays content. Never mind that at least some of the questions that the teacher is telling them to answer are opinion-based questions...

The other point that I recognize as being akin to my college experiences is that some teachers don't actually teach. I considered myself fortunate that the vast majority of my teachers at university lectured on the content they wanted you to learn. A few of them, however, mainly told stories or anecdotes and did not actually teach so much as fill the time in a way which was easy and entertaining for them. My feeling is that teachers are supposed to aid the digestion of the material they want you to learn. They're supposed to take some of the hairier elements of the topic and make things much clearer than a book could. Teachers who just have chat sessions or tell stories tend to expect the students to regurgitate the book on tests and in papers while not actually helping you succeed at either of these tasks with their lectures. I will note that I only got a "B" in one of my psychology classes after choosing my major (the rest were all A's) and it was in a class with a teacher who did this sort of story telling and time-wasting class while testing us on the textbook material.

Another point I recognize through my student's work is that every teacher has different idiosyncrasies about how written work is done. Some of them take off points for sentences that are too long. Some of them take off points for paragraphs with too few sentences in them. Others have strict style guidelines which differ from those of other professors. Some of the really lazy ones insist that the students type out or copy and paste every question they are answering as part of a test or essay so that the teacher does not have to reference the questions while reading the answers. Others get miffed if you waste their time and word counts on putting the questions in your work.

The bottom line with the idiosyncratic choices for each teacher is that I have to help my student work out what they want each time and help her tailor her work to fit in with what a particular teacher's wishes are. Usually, it takes a few assignments and analysis of comments and corrections to work out what they want to get it right. This illustrates how subjective the academic evaluation process is as each teacher applies a different standard.

Finally, the one constant is that teachers grade you higher if you concur with their viewpoints on topics which require an opinion or conclusion. The teacher of my student's current class is a former police officer who identifies more strongly with victims. If my student expresses less punitive views of the perpetrator of a crime (such as mental illness factoring into punishment and charges), he's less likely to see what she writes or says favorably.

This is one of the stickier idiosyncrasies because there's a choice to be made in terms of either pandering to the teacher's bias to get a better grade or to simply be honest. Some teachers are open-minded enough to grade objectively if an opinion is backed up with research or evidence. Some are not. I haven't sussed this one out yet in that regard, but I'll know soon enough based on how she is graded on particular assignments.

One thing this has reminded me of is that we grow up seeing teachers as being authorities and being scholarly. In many cases, we see them as knowing much more than us and being in control in a manner which we are not. From a certain viewpoint, that is true. They are in control of the class and speak with confidence and authority. Of course, this is easier to do when you've presented the same material over and over and over again. The idiosyncrasies I've noted illustrate, however, that (at least some) teachers are just as human as anyone else and as likely as your boss at your office to apply arbitrary standards or unrealistic expectations as anyone else.

A Brief Note About Straw Man Arguments

2009-06-18T09:33:00.004+09:00

Just a quick note for any readers who come over from Japan Soc and decide to quibble with me. I will ignore any straw men that are put up. I realize this means I will have to ignore most of what anyone says, since 99% of the arguments I encounter are based on straw men.

If you don't know what a straw man is, here you go.

This is Not America Pt. 2

2009-06-17T13:36:00.004+09:00

(part 1 is here)

How do other foreigners feel about the changes to the way in which Japan will handle it's foreign residents? Well, many of the vocal minority appear to be just peachy keen with it. Some think it's a spiffy idea because they believe it'll help keep those awful illegal immigrants under control. You know those hordes of illegals, don't you? They're the smoke and mirrors politicians whip out to distract you from the real problems your culture is having like a tanking economy, rampant unemployment, a lack of social stability from the growing income gap, and the huge national debt.

At any rate, I don't have any qualms necessarily with the foreigners who support more punitive measures against foreigners if they have a sound rationale. Most of them don't, but that's really beside the point. What I'm really interested in is what causes people to support measures that are meant to make life more difficult for people like themselves. What motivates a foreigner to say, "yes, I'd like to see a measure passed where I'd have to fork over a monumental amount of money ($2,000 USD/200,000 yen) for being absent-minded enough to walk out of my house without my foreign resident's card and provoke the police into asking for my I.D. by willfully (and inappropriately) being non-Japanese looking."

This sort of question interests me because anyone who advocates making their own life harder has some interesting psychological issues at play. I know some people will take issue with this, but, frankly, they're being willfully stupid. If you don't believe me, go out and ask your family, neighbors and friends if they'd like to see their lawmakers institute a policy whereby failing to carry a certain kind of I.D. will result in a $2,000 fine.

And, incidentally, make sure you don't say anything about foreigners. We are talking about people advocating people like themselves being fined, not people unlike themselves. I can tell you that not one Japanese person I've discussed this with thinks that it is fair or a good idea to force foreign folks to pay such a fine (or to carry cards with computer chips in them for remote tracking or scanning, for that matter). It's mainly a certain population of foreigners who are fine with this. It's not the Japanese themselves. In fact, at least a handful of Japanese people I've talked to about this have concerns about the slippery slope. That is, they figure once it applies to us, it'll eventually apply to them.

Getting back to the main point, I have some speculation why I think some foreigners think that the proposed changes are fine and dandy like sour candy. My guess is that one or several of these may apply in motivating their "support" of future punitive and potentially highly invasive and insecure measures:

They want to ingratiate themselves to the Japanese by agreeing with anything they do rather than be seen as "troublemakers".
They are racist at heart and support racist measures in Japan because they'd like to support similar measures in their own culture.
They are frozen in Kohlberg's conventional stage of moral development and believe that lawful people will not be unfairly treated or punished. They see themselves as lawful and therefore immune to any sort of negative consequences to changes in the law.
They are so hopelessly self-centered and their worldview so limited that they believe bad things don't happen to foreigners in Japan because they've never had such experiences. That is, they don't even believe random harassment occurs because they have never been victims of it.
They hate other foreigners being in "their Japan" and would like to see others driven out. They figure making it more uncomfortable or unpleasant to stay here will weed out some of the riff-raff. These people are overlapping with those who find anyone who teaches English in Japan to be a blight on the country.

There are more reasons, I'm sure. However, the bottom line is that the situation for foreigners is dramatically different in Japan than other countries. One of the big reasons for this is that in other countries those in the same boat unite and help one another get better treatment and rights. In Japan, they attack each other and undermine each other's efforts to improve the conditions for foreigners. I'm guessing this is a pretty unique situation and it says a lot about the kind of people who decide to live here, and none of what it says is very good.

This is Not America

2009-06-17T12:43:00.007+09:00

Occasionally, I'll watch one of the plethora of crime dramas from America that populate a great deal of Japanese cable television. Such shows are so popular that one of the Fox networks here is called "Fox Crime". Despite having a dumping ground for all crime-based programming on that particular channel, I still see plenty of other such shows on the plain old "Fox" channel and "Fox Life". If I had access to "Fox Movies", I'm guessing I'd see a lot more American crime drama there as well.

At any rate, when I watch one of these shows (usually with half an eye and half a mind), I occasionally see the hoary old routine where the police approach an immigrant and try to question him or her about a crime and try to intimidate said foreigner into cooperation by asking about his or her green card. For those who don't know, a "green card" is slang for one's permanent residence card or permission to remain in the country.

For the record, and for those who are not American or have been away for so long that they don't recall their own culture except through the lens of a T.V. camera, this sort of crap doesn't happen very often. This is not America. It's the fictional America which popular entertainment uses as a short-hand for reality because reality is so much more boring than pushy cops and weaselly immigrants who need to be coerced into cooperating in an investigation.

Lately, this topic has been on my mind as I've been following some of the drivel, er, comments attached to my friend Joseph Tame's video interview with foreign rights activist, Arudou Debito. Debito has his own site which he uses to raise awareness of news and issues related to life for foreigners in Japan. It's a place where people who need a platform from which to discuss their experiences can find an audience of supportive parties. Debito's aim is to act as if Japan were a place which should be held accountable for its actions toward foreigners and where the standards of ethics, equality, and morality which tend to be held in most developed countries should apply. He's a funny sort of fellow like that.

Debito's notions that principles that are good for everyone else ought to apply to Japan are not shared by the vocal minority of foreign folks in Japan. That is, there are a lot men from developed countries who think that what Japan does is just fine and justified. The part of this on-line cocktail party debate which concerns my introductory comments about America come in when these parties pretend America is "as bad" or "worse" than Japan when it comes to how foreigners are treated and the expectations of them when it comes to presenting identification.

For the sake of addressing my main point, which is a contrast and comparison between how America and Japan treat their respective foreign residents, I'm going to set aside the logical argument that one country's unethical or poor treatment of it's foreign residents is not in the least bit germane to a discussion of another country's. That's my way of saying that one country's poor behavior isn't a justification of another's. If you used that logic, we could justify anything including ethnic cleansing and religious persecution. If I live in Japan, my concern is how Japan treats its foreigners. The way America treats its foreigners is not the concern of Japanese expats. It's the concern of American expats, but let's set that reasonable argument aside, shall we?

One of the oft-cited reasons for justifying the upcoming changes to their dealings with foreigners is that America requires its foreign residents to carry identification and present it upon request as well. This is absolutely true. However, there is a marked difference in how the authorities in each country use their power to check identification and how they treat those who fail to present it. Japanese authorities abuse that power. American authorities generally use it only as necessary.

In Japan, the police will stop you and request that you offer your gaijin card merely because you look foreign. They can do this simply because they feel like harassing you, are bored, or want to flex a few power muscles. This is racial profiling and random harassment at its finest and it's easy for the Japanese to do because they figure most people who don't look Japanese aren't Japanese.

In America, the police don't go around randomly asking for I.D. for "foreign looking" people. They couldn't even if they wanted to because no one knows what a "foreigner" looks like in a country full of mixed cultural and ethnic histories. Beyond that, America has a long history of habeas corpus which anyone acting in a capacity related to criminal justice must act in accord with and is educated in. Don't know what habeas corpus is? In a nutshell, it's protection from being unlawfully detained by an official or unofficial person or persons. For the record, Japan does not have habeas corpus in its laws (or if it does, it's totally ignored). That means they can detain you for any reason any time. Their system does not operate from this judicial compass.

American police also have to act based on probable cause, not based on whims as the Japanese police do. The shorthand and oversimplified version of this that means the police have to establish that they have a reason to bother you before they can bother you. There are consequences for any authority that decides to randomly harass anyone for any reason. The Japanese police can essentially question you for no reason, drag you into the police station and interrogate you for no reason, and charge you for a crime without evidence. They can also hold you for up to 21 days without charging you for anything if they feel like it.

I'm not saying that the authorities never ask for the identification of foreign residents in America. I'm sure they do. However, they don't ask unless they have a reason to ask like you are a criminal suspect (for which they must have some evidence that you are connected to a crime, not simply that you look like a foreigner) or you are at a checkpoint for sobriety testing (at which every person is checked, not just those who look a certain way). What is more, any foreign resident in America who is mistreated already has a base of power from which to operate if he or she wants to lodge a protest. Even illegal immigrants have powerful support networks in the United States. I know this because I used to work at a community center which was for the Hispanic people in a particular area of California. I shared an office with one of their advocates. In Japan, we have no such support or power base if we are randomly mistreated.

So, yes, foreigners in America have to carry their foreign registration cards all the time, but the chances that they will be asked for them merely for walking around while looking foreign are exceptionally low. Could it happen? Sure. Does it happen on rare occasions. I'm sure it does. Does it happen often? No.

How can I reasonably conclude the latter? Well, besides the fact that the ethnic composition of the American population would make the same sort of random harassment you receive in Japan damn near impossible and that the laws in America are set up to protect everyone from such racial discrimination, I did some research. If you check forums for those holding green cards in America, what you don't find are discussions of being singled out and asked for I.D. pointlessly. You find talk about people who committed crimes and are worried they might be deported. You find information about paying taxes and citizenship hearings. You don't see anyone saying they were stopped and asked for I.D. for no reason at all.

The situation which Debito addresses in Joseph's interview with him isn't even about the current situation where police are asking for I.D. for no reason or subjecting foreigners disproportionately to bicycle theft checks. It's about the fact that the singling out of foreigners for carrying I.D. with computer tracking chips and punitive measures should they fail to carry their alien registration cards at all times is going to get harsher. If the new laws are passed, any foreigner who happens to walk out and forget his wallet can be fined 200,000 yen (that's $2,000 U.S. dollars) for not having his card. In America, if you don't have your card, you can bring it the next day or so. There's no fine or arrest. In Japan, you currently get hauled to the police station for questioning and are detained until a third party can deliver the card. That's the situation now. In the future, you can be held like a criminal and have to pay an exorbitant amount of money if you forget to take your card everywhere you go. So, forgetting your wallet or misplacing your card could be a terribly expensive and emotionally stressful mistake.

And lest you think the police don't give random checks, let me say that I've been randomly checked as has my husband, and we are very non-threatening-looking people who rarely go out at night (let alone late at night), don't drink alcohol or drive. We're very boring middle-aged people. My brother-in-law also told us early on in our stay in Japan that he had a coworker who stepped out in front of his apartment in his bathrobe to grab his mail and he was asked to present his card. After a great deal of persuading, the cop let him go step back into his place to retrieve his card. Needless to say, I don't take one step outside without my card. Every time I take out the trash in the morning, I have to take my wallet for fear that I could be at risk for being hauled off for detention and questioning. Having to make sure I never forget to take my wallet even for a brief trip to the trash pile about 20 paces from my door and directly in front of my building is a reminder to me each time I put a toe out my front door that I could be treated as a potential criminal.

(Part 2 to come)

The Joy of Immigration: Round 2

2009-06-15T20:34:00.010+09:00

Today my husband and I went off to Shinagawa to complete part two of the immigration odyssey. I mentioned before that part one involves making the application. Part two involves actually getting the visa in your passport. I must say that I got my postcard notifying me that the application had been processed much faster than expected. I applied Monday morning and got the card Friday afternoon.

Since we had good luck with shortening the wait by going relatively early in the morning, we followed the same pattern this time. This was despite the fact that we had to stand on the trains almost all of the time and my back and hips were not happy campers. The most efficient way to get there was via the Rinkai line (from Shinjuku) as it bypasses a lot of stations and gets you to Tennozu Isle pretty quickly.

The second half of the process involves pursuing a line to counter "A". There's a long red line running down the carpet and a bunch of those roped off areas that snake around like they have at Disney for people waiting to get on rides. That means that you get to wait a bit before you get up to the counter and offer up your postcard, gaijin card, and passport.

You also have to buy a 4,000 yen (about $40) revenue stamp to pay for the whole thing. If anyone indicates that immigration processes are paid for by taxes, they are wrong. It costs $40 per visa application and $30 per single re-entry permit. The face time you get with an immigration official is about 2 minutes combining both the application and pick-up time. I don't know how long people spend on the processing, but I can't imagine it's too terribly long. Sure, they have to pull your files and check your forms for mistakes, but given the number of people making applications, there's no way it's more than 15 minutes per person for anything besides a permanent residence application.

At any rate, I got in the line and it took about 15 minutes to snake my way up to the counter where I surrendered my identification and applied the revenue stamp to a piece of paper that said what I was doing (extending my current visa status) and required a signature. After that, instead of waiting in line, I was allowed to sit and wait.

The waiting areas at Tokyo Regional Immigration in Shinagawa are hot and stuffy. We've been told by students that they believe public buildings don't have great air conditioning because walking into an uncomfortable government office reassures people that their tax dollars aren't being squandered keeping public servants and the unfortunate souls at their mercy comfortable. Personally, I'd be very happy if some of the money I pay to the Japanese government in taxes were used to keep immigration cool and dry rather than to finance cheap classes to teach grannies and grampies how to dial a cell phone and push a mouse on their computers.

The "system" for picking up the visa is a bit different from that for applying. When you apply, you get a number and your number is called and you go to the counter. It's a lot like visiting a busy New York bakery. When you pick up the visa, they don't call your number exactly. They call a number and anyone who is currently holding a number lower than the one called can rush to the counter and stand in another line to get the visa. My number was 185 so I was able to go up when 187 was called, for instance.

Unfortunately, there are always some people who think that they don't have to follow the system or find it too taxing to comprehend. When 187 flashed up and I was happily first to the counter, someone with a number around 218 jumped in front of me and started trying to submit paperwork which was not supposed to be handled at that counter. He kept asking the woman working there for something and she told him to go elsewhere, but he wouldn't give it up. Eventually, she convinced him to go away and then apologized quite sincerely to me for what had happened. It's not like it was her fault that he was either clueless about the process and/or okay with usurping the time and attention due to people who had already spent their time waiting.

I imagine the bane of the existence of a lot of immigration officials are people who think they can skip to the head of the line or wheedle their way into some area that they don't belong in. It wastes their time and just prolongs the process of dealing with applications in an orderly fashion such that I'm sure they fall behind more and more as the day goes on. That being said, they start out behind (by an hour or a bit more) and I think they never catch up, but every person who thinks they can horn in where they don't belong is only adding minutes to the rest of our waits.

At any rate, once this fellow hit the road, she showed me my visa and returned my passport with its shiny new renewal. I thanked her. We smiled at each other, and the CH and I hit the road. The entire business took about 45 minutes, not counting the ludicrously long commute to the office conveniently located in the middle of nowhere. Unfortunately, we forgot the camera so I can't offer you any scenic shots of absolutely gigantic lots stacked with enormous Chinese shipping containers or multitudes of big trucks surrounding our cab and filling the air with the delicate scent of diesel exhaust.

Since things went so swimmingly, we decided to stop off at an English language second-hand book store in Ebisu. We had about $35 worth of credit due to expire tomorrow and we bought 3 psychology books with it. We chose those so my husband can familiarize himself with some more concepts before taking classes back home. The man at the shop remarked, jokingly, but I think also meaningfully, that we spent little more than our credit allowed. I think they don't really like it when people only spend their credit as it's not very profitable for them. However, we need to liquidate our books, not get more of them, and this is the start of our effort to minimize our collection.

While we perused the books, we were treated to some pretentious conversation about how foreigners living in Japan lose their ability to have conversations and that the highly intelligent customer who was buying books couldn't have a good chat with his troglodytic friend who had lost his conversation skills after teaching English for awhile. Apparently, we English teachers spend so much time asking our students simplistic and simple-minded questions that we forget how to form any but the most primitive of sentences. I imagine after all of my years here, I'm going to be reduced to nothing more than grunts when I attempt to communicate with my fellow Americans upon returning to my native soil. The magnanimous foreign fellow did grant that, after spending some time with someone of his immense ego...er intellect that his friend regained some of his perspicacity, so I'm relying on my American friends and acquaintances to help me regain my capacity for sophisticated discourse.

Our books procured (and with a new sense of confidence that books would bring us into the light of intelligence once more), we headed out to Subway for double turkey and roast beef subs chock full of healthy, healthy veggies. We got them to go as we'd rather eat in the comfort of our home than the warm, narrow hallway the shop is set up in . My husband has become expert in asking the people there to load up my turkey sandwich with jalapeno and black olives. Apparently, these items are in short supply as they anoint my sandwich with exactly two of each even when asked to put "takusan" (many) on it. My hubby had to ask them twice for more in order to net me a total of 6 each.

When we reached our home neighborhood, my husband and I briefly split up because he wanted potato chips with his sandwich and I just wanted to get to my bike. He sprinted off and I trudged toward the bikes figuring that our respective speeds should have us meeting up at the bicycles. During the entire time that I was out and about with my husband, no one approached me, but during the brief duration that we were apart, some Japanese guy gave me a major gawking and when I gave him the hairy eyeball in return, he started talking to me about my legs. I ignored him, but the experience reinforced something which I have noticed about Japanese people bothering foreigners in Tokyo. That is that they don't bother you if you're with another Japanese person of any gender or with a foreign male. If you're alone, they feel free to intrude on you in a manner which is utterly inappropriate in their culture (Japanese people as a rule do not strike up a conversation with strangers, and it's even less common in Tokyo than other areas).

After getting home and inhaling the sub and a Diet Coke, I decided to complete the final phase of the process and just go to the local government office and register my new visa. I didn't want to do it, and my feet doubly did not want to, but the allure of an entire day off tomorrow without annoying bureaucracy of any sort squashed the protest that my feet were making. So, we biked off to another massively overheated government office and allowed them to duly note whatever it is that needed duly noting. I noted that my ku (ward) taxes were being used to buy a bunch of new chairs for the waiting areas. I actually liked the old seating more, but I didn't get a say on how my yen got spent.

As of now, we've each got one more tangle with bureaucracy and then we should be in the clear for the duration. Unfortunately, our alien registration cards expire this year so we each have to go get new ones within a month of our respective birthdays. Sigh. I'm going as early as possible so I can tick this one last thing off the list and, hopefully, never look back.

No Lives Were Lost

2009-06-14T15:29:00.001+09:00

I just got word via Twitter that the green tea Cokes arrived with no related fatalities. A picture of the unexploded bottles was put up by their recipient here. ;-)

Angry Rant is Angry

2009-06-12T09:42:00.003+09:00

There are 212 posts on this blog (and 218 in my other snack reviews blog). I can say with confidence that there are no angry posts on the snack blog since food, unless it is being hucked at my face by an angry mob, doesn't really angry up my blood. On this blog, any time I complain with a bit of fire in the blood, I tag the post as "whining". There are three such posts tagged on this blog and even those three are more like a very low simmer on the blood boiling scale.

The "There's no rule, but..." post garnered a bit of attention, and one of the commenters labeled me as "angry" because of it. The truth is that I'm not an angry person, but I'm also not a robot that drifts through the day providing programmed responses to stimuli without any sort of emotional response. When dumb things happen, or when I've had an especially hard time of it and something unpredictable and frustrating happens, I get mad, and I may drift into hyperbole or fail to express myself in an optimal fashion. This doesn't make me an angry person. This makes me human.

The truth is that I used to be pretty angry because my life has generally been a hard one and I live with pain on a daily basis (which is an emotional burden you can't imagine until you've lived with it day-in and day-out), but I've labored long and hard to control my temper and to mellow with age. And, honestly, I've done very well as my husband can attest to. For me, letting loose and actually having a proper rant is a rare and brief period of letting myself go in the interest of blood pressure control and free expression. The absurdity of someone reading that one post and reaching the conclusion that I'm angry, hate Japan and should leave should be apparent to anyone. They can more reasonably decide if I'm an angry person after they've read all 211 other posts on this blog and the more than 500 posts on my former blog. Even then, the picture of my character wouldn't be a true one, but it'd be a lot closer than judging me on one post.

The truth is that most people don't blog about indifferent experiences unless they are doing a diary-style blog, something which is rarer these days because of other outlets like FaceBook and Twitter which afford people with a chance to note experiences in their daily lives as they occur. Most people blog about something they have some sort of emotional reaction to whether it be happiness, anger, or curiosity. Mostly, I blog about curious experiences because that's what I think about most of the time. I'm actually happier far, far more often than I'm angry (by a country mile), but I'm pretty sure no one wants to hear about how the angels sing, the sun shines beautifully, and life is a wondrous cloud of love every time my husband comes home from work and once again shines the light of his soul directly onto mine (this happens on a daily basis, folks, I'm utterly smitten as my long-suffering sister can attest to). Hey, but if there is a demand, I'll start posting about that.

I also have a lot of gratifying conversations with my Japanese students on an almost daily basis, but I can only share snippets with people on occasion due to time constraints and a concern for protecting the privacy of the students. Also, honestly, how interesting would it be if I posted, "had a nice chat with a lovely student today" five times a week every week. Let me just say it now and then everyone can assume that is the case unless I say otherwise.

So, for the record, angry rants are angry. That's kind of the point of them. They don't define me, but if you choose to believe they do, then perhaps you shouldn't be reading this blog because I'm not going to pull any punches in responding to any commenter who judges me based on such limited contact with me.

Follow-up to "There's No Rule"

2009-06-10T14:39:00.009+09:00

One of the great things about bad experiences in life is that you an milk them pretty effectively for humor. When things go well, you find that the comedy cow (that's probably an actual god in some religion somewhere) isn't going to give up much, no matter how hard you squeeze those metaphorical udders.

You might take that first paragraph as an indication that my second round in the ring with Japan Post was rather less aggravating than the most recent one. This time they didn't even put up a fight. I'm happy to report that the second attempt at a different post office went the way that the first one should have gone had it not been staffed by people who apparently reside in a reality where exploding soda pop bottles are a normal and greatly feared part of their existence. That is to say that they took the box, put it on the scale, told us the price, allowed us to pay, and will be ferrying it to a magical land where people working for major bureaucratic agencies don't make up the rules as they go along (that's America). My husband and I are fortunate in that we live close to two post offices so it was possible to easily try the other one. Most people don't have that luxury and probably would just have to give up if they were faced with someone who lives in an imaginary world where life or death circumstances surround the shipping of PET bottles of carbonated beverages.

This experience beautifully illustrated one of the particular unpleasant realities of life in Japan that you will know and come to be put out by if you live here long enough. That reality is that Japanese people lie. They lie a lot. They lie often. And, more often than not, they lie transparently expecting you to want to avoid confrontation as much as a Japanese person so you won't call them on it. Lies are woven into the fabric of the culture as being not only acceptable but desirable as part of the tatamae (public face) and honne (true face) culture.

The reason they lie is because they don't have the same attitude toward lying that the West does. This may be because they don't have Judeo-Christian principles underlying their culture and aren't afraid God will smite them because he's had to put too many hash marks in the "false witness" category of his book of sins. It may be because the desire for social harmony outweighs any notion of honesty. It's likely that most principles can be sacrificed on the alter of not causing anyone any trouble, and that would include telling the truth. At any rate, the "why" is less important than the point that it is a fact of life here.

The problem with this is that there is a lot of lying based not on social harmony, but self-interest. One of the reasons I can't help but scoff when people gush about how great service is in Japan is that I've been lied to so many times when receiving or attempting to receive service here. If you ask a question and someone doesn't know the answer or isn't interested in troubling themselves to find the answer, they just lie. They'll either make up something ridiculous or say "no" or the equivalent.

This type of lying while supposedly attempting to provide a service is what the fellow at the post office was engaging in. Rather than verify the real situation regarding the safety of sending bottles of carbonated beverages, he just made something up. With a Japanese customer, this likely would have worked since they'd almost certainly not argue about it and accept what he said whether they believed it or not. The Japanese know when they're being lied to, but they tend not to challenge those lies. We foreigners, on the other hand, don't take nearly so well to it. I guess that's part of why we're such a troublesome lot.

(A little postscript to the "anonymous" person who made a rude comment on the last post without any sort of evidence or argument to invalidate what I said - seriously, you were already warned you weren't going to get through and the least you can do is make a counterargument and link to a user name with your own web site so I also get the chance to go offer insults at your posts. If you don't have the balls to stand behind your comments enough to open yourself up to the same sort of scrutiny at the very least, then don't bother. You're not getting past moderation, you big loser.)

There's no rule, but...

2009-06-09T19:16:00.005+09:00

...you can't do it anyway.

I had the most frustrating experience a brief while ago at a Japanese post office. I'm trying to send a box with two 500 ml. PET bottles of green tea Coca-cola to Hawaii. I put the bottles in a Ziploc bag. I bubble-wrapped the hell out of them so they are immobilized, and I dutifully put the proper customs tag on it with details of the contents.

When we offered the box over to the people at the counter in the post office, they read the tag (which honestly listed that there was Coke in it) and then started sucking air between their teeth and clucking amongst themselves. Once they got through with that, they kept looking at a chart on the wall which listed all the things you can't send like, oh, poison, toxic chemicals, etc. There was nothing on their wall chart which said you can't send Coke.

After we tried to tell the two hens who were frowning and acting like we were trying to mail a ticking bomb that it was just a few bottles of soda, they called over a MAN to handle it. After all, if a Japanese man tells you something, the sway of his testosterone-fueled masculine authority will make the barbarians at your gate stop quibbling with you and go away.

The man, who was just your usual scrawny Japanese dude, but I guess Japanese women think anyone with a penis gets respect, insisted that there was this horrible risk of the bottles exploding in transit because of the air pressure changes on the plane if the box is sent by airmail. We told him that they were in a plastic bag. Even if they exploded, the bag would catch any leaked soda. He essentially said that we couldn't send them by air because of this risk.

At any rate, we asked the man if there was a rule about not sending carbonated beverages. He said that there was no rule, but they essentially didn't want to do it. That means that there isn't a word on any book anywhere about not sending these things and it is not listed as a restricted item, but because he's imagined some problem which there has been no case of to date, he won't allow us to mail our package.

Now, folks, I try hard to be balanced about cultural differences, but this experience is where I've freaking HAD IT with the Japanese "case by case" crap and the way in which they "take responsibility". The truth of the matter is that much of the way Japan works is with people making decisions based on what helps them avoid responsibility for anything. Generally, that means being ridiculously timid so that they can't be held accountable if the most obscure and moderately troublesome (not catastrophic, not devastating, not even annoying) possibility happens to take place.

That "man" wasn't concerned with doing his job according to what the job allows or requires. He was only concerned with some extreme possibility where the bottles rupture *and* leak through the bag *and* this is actually a problem for anyone *and* they look at the post mark and trace it back to their particular post office and someone then calls them on the carpet for sending a parcel which contained items which weren't restricted in the first place.

This sort of thinking is exactly why Japan changes at a slower pace than a glacier. It's the reason their economy has been on a 20-year decline with no end in sight. It's why they have greater debt per capita than the United States. It's why their inept and corrupt politicians keep getting re-elected. It's why they have a tendency to embellish and polish what other people have success with rather than invent their own unique ideas. No one wants to take a damn risk of messing up and then having to take responsibility.

On the bright side, the people working at my local post office are now at no risk of having to commit seppuku in the unlikely event that the bottles of soda I'm trying to send rupture en route *and* leak out of their Ziploc bag *and* it ends up being a problem for someone. On the not so bright side, I can't help out someone who has been really helpful to me and who I really want to help.

I'm going to change the customs tag so it says something vague and try another post office tomorrow. I know other people send this stuff abroad all the time. I'm not only talking about J-List and whatnot, but I've heard of people who just send their friends bottles of Pepsi Cucumber or Pepsi White or whatnot. There must be a few postal workers out there whose testicles are big enough to take on the great risk of sending a couple of bottles of pop. :-p

Oh yeah, anyone who has a problem with my little rant. I advise you to keep your comments to yourself because I'm in no mood for fingers being waggled at me by people who haven't had to put up with the ridiculous crap I've had to for the last 20 years. There's reasonable judgment, and then there is abject bullshit. This my friends, came directly from the ass of a male bovine.

Whole Wheat Oatmeal Bread (for ABM)

2009-06-08T16:50:00.006+09:00

I've made a lot of whole wheat bread since I bought a bread machine about a decade ago. I haven't made much really good whole wheat bread though. Most of the time, it has come out relatively heavy and dense. I'd pour the ingredients into the machine and the brick of brown bread that came out was usually only about 25% bigger than the dough ball that had formed at the start of the process.

I used to think this was because of Japanese yeast or possibly because the bread machine didn't knead the dough well enough. Eventually, I just concluded that whole wheat bread was dense by nature and that I was never going to be able to make a loaf which was relatively light. This was pretty frustrating because I can buy whole wheat bread which has a pretty decent texture at Japanese markets, but it costs about $1.30 for 3 tiny slices. If food manufacturers can make whole wheat bread that is relatively light, why can't I?

After years of bread so dense I'm surprised it didn't form its own singularity, I finally stumbled upon what seems to make the difference, wheat gluten. If you add a couple of tablespoons of vital wheat gluten to the dough, it seems to puff up and make a much lighter whole wheat loaf. With a little help from a random recipe I ran across on the web and some experimentation on my part, I finally have a recipe for what I'd consider about the best bread machine recipe for whole wheat bread. For those in Japan, please note that you can get vital wheat gluten from the Foreign Buyer's Club.

Whole Wheat Oatmeal Bread (for ABM):

1 1/4 cups water
1/4 cup Canola oil
1/4 cup honey
2 tbsp. vital wheat gluten
3 1/4 cups (regular) whole wheat flour
1/2 cup oatmeal (regular rolled oats - not quick)
1 tsp. salt
2 tsp. yeast

Place the liquid ingredients in your bread machine, then the oatmeal, and then the remaining dry ones (add the yeast last, making sure it doesn't touch any wet ingredients). For best results, allow the flour to sit in the bread pan and absorb moisture for about an hour. Set the crust color to light and choose the whole wheat setting. Press start.

If you use honey, note that bread will be a little dark even with a light crust color setting. Also, when you toast it, it will tend to toast pretty rapidly because of the extra sugar, particularly if you use a high setting on a toaster oven. I think it would be possible, however, to make this with sugar instead of honey, but you might have to make some minor adjustment to the amount of wheat flour because the honey is liquid and sugar is not. Also, I'm not sure if the yeast will be quite as effective feeding off of sugar as compared to honey. Using more "nutritious" oils and sugars tends to give me a better rise.

The Joy of Immigration

2009-06-08T14:02:00.005+09:00

This morning the CH and I made what will (hopefully) be my second to last venture to the Tokyo Regional Immigration Bureau for an extension on my visa. For those who don't know, you need a special stamp in your passport giving you permission to remain in the country and there are various types. The first year you're here, they usually allow you only a one-year stamp. After awhile, they'll grant you one that lasts three years. I think that they used to be much more reserved about the longer duration visas than they are these days.

When we first arrived in Japan, we had to go to an ancient building in Otemachi for visas and it was an all at once process which wasted the entire day. You went there, stood in line, offered documents, and then waited literally for 6-8 hours and at the end you got your visa stamp. Now, the process is broken in half and we go to the new office they built in Shinagawa.

The old office wasn't too far from central Tokyo, but it was clearly too small for the load and had no air conditioning. The newer one is two floors and large enough to deal with the increased load. It's also out in the middle of nowhere (literally). To get there, we have to take two subways, then a taxi or a bus from the station. The taxi ride takes one past areas piled deep and wide with shipping containers (we hope to take a camera next time to memorialize our last trip). It's the sort of area where there are neither shops nor residences, and no nature or beautiful sites. It is essentially a place where ugly things are kept including a garbage dump and bland grey buildings abound.

The trip there takes about an hour and requires a lot of standing and walking around. Believe it or not, I haven't been on a train for about 3 years since I quit my former office job. I had forgotten about the cacophony and overstimulating hassle of the trains in Tokyo. Passing through Shinjuku station provided a teeth-gritting reminder of why commuting is so awful. People are walking every which way and they don't look where they are going so that they don't have to take responsibility for moving out of anyone's way. Most of them meander about in a dream-like state. Some of them are in a hurry to overtake you and walk in front of you, but as soon as they get around you, they immediately slow down and block you.

The noise is also overbearing. Japan has to have more noise pollution than almost any other developed country. When you walk along the train platform, you hear the trains themselves, a constant flow of automated announcements, and buzzers, tunes, and beeps notifying people of things like the trains are coming, going, or their doors are closing. All of these things can't be helped, but the worst part of it is that over the unavoidable din there seems to be the near constant shouting into loudspeakers by platform and train personnel. Essentially, they are repeating what is already being said or cued through automated means and they do it several times and at high volume. The layers of unpleasant noise start getting to you after a very short time unless you've managed to turn into one of those meandering zombies.

People traveling in their own world aren't a problem in big, open spaces, but they are a problem in fairly crowded ones. That doesn't stop the Japanese from abdicating responsibility for showing courtesy toward others. When we were walking down a set of steps from the platform, a man in front of us, who surely knew he was in the middle of a throng that exited the train when he did, was making a slow descent while staring at his cell phone screen. Eventually, he just decided he'd stop about 2/3 of the way down and mess with his phone regardless of the fact that he'd jam up the rest of us.

At any rate, once at immigration, we found that the system had changed or was different in the morning. When my husband went in the afternoon, he took a number and waited. We had to go stand in a line, have my paperwork looked over quickly, and then were given a number. The office opens at 9:00 am and we arrived at 10:05. My number was 62 away from the one that was currently being served.

Things at this point were looking good. The man who already inspected my documents would have said something if everything weren't in order so I expected smooth sailing. I also knew that we likely weren't going to end up blowing the whole day there because chances were I'd be served in about an hour. They tend to deal with about one person per minute. While I waited, I read a book and my husband went off to another section to get re-entry permit for when he visits home later this year.

When my number approached, we stood up so we wouldn't take long to get to the counter and it ended up that the woman dealing with me was right in front of us when the number rolled around. I handed her the paperwork and she riffled through it then started asking for other things. I checked, double-checked, triple and sextuple-checked the requirements and the fellow who did the preliminary check didn't seem to think anything was missing. The first thing she asked for was my husband's tax form. I figured that wasn't a big deal, though it shouldn't have been necessary according to the requirements I'd read on-line, and handed it over which satisfied her.

Next she asked for something which neither my husband nor I recognized but he later remarked was essentially a "5-kanji" (Chinese character) version of a much simpler word that he would have recognized. At this point, I was a little freaked, but calmer than I would have expected given how nervous the whole process had been making me for the last week. I knew nothing else was on the list of requirements. When we didn't get it, she asked if we had a "company paper" and I thought she wanted one of those sheaths of papers that you submit when you get your first work visa that has all sorts of information about your company like the number of employees, president's name, number of branches, gross income of the whole shebang, etc. Note that this is not a typical requirement for renewing a straight on "work visa", let alone a spouse's "dependent visa" (which is generally a simpler affair).

I intuited that what she must have meant, despite my initial thought about it being a huge company description, was a copy of my husband's contract, which is certainly required. The main reason this wasn't the first conclusion I'd reached about what she wanted was that the contract was already in the small pile of papers I'd submitted (only 4 pages). We told her it was already there and she looked again and found it. She apologized and I mock wiped my brow and said "phew", so we all had a good laugh. It seems a lot less funny now, but I wanted to make a joke of it at the time to mitigate any embarrassment she might have felt at her error. I know that her job sucks and she certainly doesn't know that she is dealing with a foreigner who is incredibly paranoid and nearly psychotically nervous. Things happen. Papers get stuck together.

That's step one of the process finished now. After they accept your paperwork, they give you a postcard which you write your name and address on. When they are finished processing your application, they send you the postcard and you go back for stage two where you stand in a different, similarly long line and get the visa stamped into your passport. Usually, the postcard shows up in less than 10 days (my husband's came in a mere 5), though it depends on how busy they are. Once they accept your documents, you're generally home free though so the vast majority of my stomach-churning nerves have passed. Now, all I have to dread is the second trip back and all of the hassle involved with that.

Stage Four

2009-06-05T17:10:00.006+09:00

By nature, both my husband and I are creatures of habit. If we're comfortable, then we stay where we are. It takes a pretty strong push to move us off in a different direction and this more than anything has kept us in Japan for 20 years.

Life in Japan has largely been "as usual" during most of our time here. Generally speaking, the level of comfort and familiarity has increased as the years have gone on. We can watch foreign television via cable or DVD rental. We can talk and even see family in real time through the internet and foreign food is easier and cheaper than it was when we first arrived. Setting up a comfy refuge from the sometimes oppressive Japanese environment has never been easier and the number of pop culture touchstones between the Japanese and Westerners have never been greater. I can talk for quite some time with students about shows like "Lost", "House", "Ugly Betty", and "Desperate Housewives."

However, the times, they have been changing. The Japanese government is starting to put policies into place so they can remotely track foreigners with computer chips that contain biometric data. This will make identity theft easy and makes it look like we are criminals who need to be watched. If you step outside your home without your card, you will be fined about $2,000 if a cop scans you and finds your card missing. He can do this from the comfort of his koban (police box). It adds a whole new level of possibility to the usual police harassment of foreigners in Japan.

In addition, the Japanese government is looking to forcibly add foreigners to the Japanese pension scheme. This would be ideal if it weren't for the fact that you have to live here for 25 years to collect your money back. The scheme is clearly an attempt to fill Japanese pension coffers with money from people who won't get it back. And, while this doesn't apply to me, Japan is currently attempting to bribe foreign residents to leave who were issued permanent residence based on having Japanese ancestry.

You can add to this the increasing numbers of violent crimes in Japan as the economic situation continues to worsen. News of finding dismembered bodies and people going on stabbing sprees is no longer shocking in Japan. I'm not saying other countries don't experience violent crime, but it's no longer a place where a lack of economic disparity keeps crime at bay. It's a place where the gap between the haves and the have nots continues to grow and crime is increasing as a result. If you consider that Japan has twice its GDP in debt and a problem with the birthrate falling and an aging population which they are unwilling to solve through immigration, you can see which way this train is rolling.

The writing is on the wall. Japan is becoming a more foreigner hostile place with social and economic problems. That doesn't mean it'll be terrible or that people can't still enjoy their lives here, but it's a sign of the times. For these reasons and more personal ones (which I will get to shortly), my husband and I are setting in motion a long-term, but concrete plan to leave Japan. When I say "concrete", I mean there is a departure date in mind. That date will be some time in April 2012. It will be shortly before my husband's current and final work visa expires.

The proposed foreigner-hostile changes in Japan have been the catalyst for finally pushing my husband and I to do what we would have done long ago if we weren't so comfortable where we are. We're also 44 and 46 years of age respectively and there are age-related issues at hand. The bottom line is that we have to go soon or never go at all. If we leave in 2012, we will have saved a bit more money and we will still have time to go to school for higher degrees in America and start new careers in a different field. If we linger much longer, that narrow window will have closed and we'll essentially be too old to start anew back home.

In addition to the other issues that are at hand, we have to consider that neither of us had worked long enough in America to qualify for retirement benefits in the U.S. If we go back soon, we will have put (and paid) in enough years to do so. If we remain, then we're resigning ourselves to the idea that we will have to retire only on savings from our earnings in Japan up until the point when we won't be able to work anymore due to age or infirmity. While we're good savers, I'm not sure I'd like to stake my entire future on that money.

The reason we're choosing 2012 is mainly because that is when the visa will expire and it's a good kick in the pants to know that it'll be a hassle to stay beyond that date. Beyond that though is that it's not easy to just pack up 20 years of your life and walk out the door so quickly or easily. While I have assiduously attempted not to hang on to too much junk, there's still a lot that needs to be dealt with. If we wanted to leave as soon as possible, it'd be hard going to get out successfully in six months given our possessions and connections to people who have the right to have some time to make up for our future absence. Also, honestly, this decision was made fast, but the full acceptance and arrangements for what is to come on the other end will take some time. I don't take well to change and I need some time to prepare myself mentally for walking away.

At the moment, the plan is for my husband to go to graduate school at his Alma Mater in California. I'm hoping to attend simultaneously with him, but I don't know if I qualify as a state resident so that plan will have to wait. I may just have to find some stop-gap work to defray the costs. For now, I've investigating the possibility on-line and looked into the finances in a rough way. It all looks good on paper, but my husband will look into it in person later this year when he goes home in the fall for a visit. Another part of having to make arrangements for our future plans will be taking the GRE (Graduate Record Exam) before going.

One way or another, I can't imagine us staying after 2012. The prospect of leaving is terrifying, but also exciting. It'll be the fourth stage of life for my husband and I. The first was our long distance relationship which spanned a little over a year. The second was our brief time living together in California and the third has been our life together in Japan.

Leaving a comfortable and stable life is very difficult, but moving on to a greater challenge is enticing. Unless something serious happens in the next three years (like a serious illness which requires a change in plan), we'll be blowing this Popsicle stand in a little under 3 years.

Cultural Adaptation, What It Is and Isn't

2009-05-30T10:16:00.004+09:00

Lately in America, there have some pretty stupid assertions about names and how they are to be pronounced. I haven't followed the details, but at one point some lame politician insisted that a Chinese person simplify their name so it's be easier for "Americans" to pronounce and someone else more recently said that Supreme Court justice nominee Sotomayor should allow people to mispronounce her name if it was easier for them to do so.

Personally, I think America is multi-cultural enough and most people are smart enough to learn how to correctly pronounce a name and these issues are just lame publicity trumped up to pander to people with an extremely narrow notion of what "American" means. There are fewer of these myopic sorts than most non-Americans think, and more of them than most Americans would like to believe.

At the root of issues like this are notions of cultural adaptation (or worse "assimilation") of those of what they view as external origin. In a country like the U.S., which is full of nothing but the relatively recent descendants of immigrants, the notion that a name is "American" or not is laughable. In a country like Japan, which has a largely homogeneous population with a similar cultural heritage, it's an entirely different kettle of fish.

That being said, I think a lot of people who live in Japan for awhile are not clear on the concept of what cultural adaptation is and is not. Most of them think that adapting means allowing the Japanese to do and say whatever they want because it is the Japanese way to treat foreigners in a manner which objectifies them either positively or negatively. People who embrace the notion that "prejudice is a right for the Japanese" would fall into this category.

Cultural adaptation in Japan is a matter of following the same rules that the Japanese do when dealing with the Japanese. That is, you need to say your name backwards because that's the way it is done in this country, and you need to write it and say it in a manner which suits their phonetic alphabet so that they can pronounce as close an approximation of your name as possible. You need to at least try to curb the tendency among those in your culture to be blunt and straightforward and communicate your intentions indirectly so that you don't offend people unnecessarily. You also need to follow the neighborhood rules in regards to trash handling, noise, etc. And you at least have to expect to communicate in Japanese with them when you are applying for services or dealing with the bureaucracy.

Cultural adaptation does not include having to eat Japanese food all the time, enjoy their entertainment, or take part in cultural activities like tea ceremony or flower arranging. It doesn't mean you have to make Japanese friends or try to integrate with Japanese people. You should get along with them, but you don't have embark on a futile attempt to become one of them. Adaptation only applies to your behavior in society where it is important that you endeavor not to trouble other people or place a burden on them which is not placed on them when dealing with the Japanese. It does not apply to your private life or interactions with friends, family, or how you spend your time when you're alone.

It also doesn't mean the Japanese have the right to treat you with prejudice because you're different and you have to defend it or accept it with good grace. The Japanese have the right to treat you like other Japanese people, which granted is sometimes not very nice. One of the big mistakes foreign folks sometimes make is assuming they are being treated badly because they're foreigners. Sometimes, the Japanese treat each other badly and they're just doing the same to you.

The notion that adapting to the culture means you have to surrender your identity or tolerate prejudice is one that those who have identity issues and are desperate to be accepted spout on a regular basis, but the truth is that choosing to be more like the Japanese in every respect has nothing to do with cultural adaptation. The person you are in the privacy of your own home has nothing to do with Japanese people or getting along in their society. It's really none of their business.

Trying to be like the Japanese in every respect is a matter of cultural and personal validation, not adaptation. The Japanese love foreigners who love their culture because it makes them feel that their culture is important and attractive on a global scale. Foreigners who get praised for their Japanese ability, chopstick prowess, etc. feel that they are personally valued and accepted. In both cases, it's more about an insecure individual receiving a reassuring pat on the head than about adapting to life in a different culture.

If we're going to measure people's cultural adaptation, then let's use a yardstick that matters rather than sets of arbitrary criteria rooted in the personal psychological issues of each individual. Let's look at how they get along with the outside world and not how they make us feel about our personal tastes and choices.

My Mother-in-law's Keeper

2009-05-26T19:04:00.006+09:00

When I was growing up, there were certain inequalities of life of which I was acutely aware. For instance, I noticed that one of my many aunts, Judy, had a house which was much bigger than my family's. I also noticed that she had nicer furniture, a much, much newer car, and brand name snacks were always in the house. From a kid's point of view, having a relative who always had Hostess Ho-Ho's on hand or my favorite brand of barbecue potato chips was pretty significant. My family was scrimping together returnable bottles for their deposits and hunting up stray change at the end of every month so they could afford milk, and her refrigerator was always fully-stocked.

Though I wasn't aware of this so much as a child, my mother was always competing with my aunt in a battle that she could never win. That is, a lifestyle battle. She overspent and got my family into debt because she wanted to keep up with Judy, but Judy had an edge in more ways than one. For one, her husband wasn't disabled and living on social security benefits like my father. For another, she lived with my grandmother and grandfather whose pensions helped augment her family's lifestyle in numerous ways.

It was the latter which I think galled my mother most. My aunt Judy was constantly being helped out by my grandmother from funds to finance a nicer home with better furnishings to new cars to free babysitting and support for her children when they were born. I think it was more upsetting for my mother because Judy was "the baby" of their large family and always had been my maternal grandmother's favorite.

All that being said, my aunt Judy paid a price for the relative affluence of her life. My grandfather was bedridden and had to be looked after all the time. He had worked in coal mines and suffered from black lung disease. He died when I was still too young to understand just how much of a burden this would have placed on those living in my aunt's house, but, as an adult, I now see the hardship clearly in retrospect.

As the years went on, my maternal grandmother also became increasingly weak, sickly, and somewhat senile. In the end, my aunt ended up having to look after her as well. To be fair, my other aunts and my mother did their best at times to stop in and look after their father while he was alive to give my aunt Judy and my grandmother a break. My mother actually lived closest, so she helped out more often than most.

At any rate, one lesson I learned from my upbringing was that the children who end up living with their parents benefit immensely for quite awhile materially, financially, and in terms of support for their young children, but then end up bearing a burden for awhile as well. My family was poor and lived in a really terrible house and my aunt lived in a nice, middle class place, but she also had a lot of the responsibility and stress as both of my grandparents became enfeebled.

As of late, this situation has come to the forefront for my husband and I, but not through my family. It has become an issue with my husband's family. His sister has been living with their mother and father for the past 19 years and now their mother has developed a degenerative disease which has left her showing increased signs of senile dementia and unable to walk or look after herself. She needs round the clock monitoring, careful scheduling of medication, and assistance with many basic needs like using the bathroom and washing.

My sister-in-law at first was not intimately involved with my mother-in-law's care, but merely gave breaks to my father-in-law. Now, her role has expanded greatly and she's become increasingly frustrated and stressed out by the responsibilities coupled with my father-lin-law's resistance to complying with her method of caring for his wife. She has two brothers, but both of them are residing in Japan so they cannot help in any measurable way. It's simply logistically impossible.

Usually, I don't get very involved in my in-laws' lives because the truth is that they have never had much interest in us. About 16 years or so ago, my sister-in-law needed some help with Photoshop and both my husband and I tried to establish a cordial relationship with her via e-mail. After she got what she wanted though, she begged off on further correspondence claiming she was too busy to really keep up much of a written conversation.

Additionally, and I believe I have blogged about this before, but I'll repeat it as a reminder. My husband and I were flat out refused when we asked to temporarily reside with them when we lived in California. We lived with my husband's best friend's family instead. When we left for Japan, his father begrudged storing some of our boxes in his garage and wanted us to put our items in paid storage. In other words, his family has not done much to support us when we needed help nor shown more than a cursory interest in our lives, particularly if maintaining a relationship with us has required any more effort than talking on the phone.

As of late, my sister-in-law has been pelting my husband and brother-in-law with long, detailed letters venting and explaining about the details of her situation with her parents. She has even intimated that, if her parents exhaust their copious financial resources, she may call upon my husband and his brother to bear some monetary burden. The ludicrousness of that can't be overemphasized. Both my sister-in-law's husband and my father-in-law make a great deal more money than my husband and I combined.

At any rate, my husband doesn't have a talking relationship with his sister from a distance for the aforementioned reasons, but my brother-in-law does. Today, my brother-in-law called my husband to vent about a conversation that he had with their sister. Apparently, she expressed some anger and resentment that she is bearing the brunt of the care of her elderly parents and is increasingly burnt out from coping with it. She is especially put out by the fact that she's had to put "her" life on hold to deal with these new responsibilities.

While I do feel empathy for my sister-in-law, I also know that she has benefited greatly from living with her parents from free babysitting services for her two kids when they were younger, to free food when they used to have meals together, to having the opportunity to invest in and live in a piece of prime real estate in one of the most lucrative areas in California, to a certain level of support and security, she has had benefits that one brother (my husband) was overtly and specifically denied and the other has not been present for.

Because I grew up around extended family who had such a markedly improved life via their association with my grandparents, I have always been aware of both sides of the coin. It strikes me that anyone who benefits from cohabitation with their parents should see that the road ahead is likely to end in a particular way, but some people are too self-involved to realize that they had it better than their siblings and too selfish to realize that their responsibility will be proportionally greater when the time comes.

When Confession is Bad For the Soul

2009-05-23T16:26:00.006+09:00

A lot of my tales from working at a Japanese office will likely focus on what other people did rather than one what I did. However, I don't want anyone to think I believed I was perfect and didn't make my fair share of mistakes. One of the problems one has working in a cross-cultural situation is that there are varying expectations on both sides and each assumes the other knows the score and will act accordingly. This results in a lot of disappointment on both sides.

I'm of two minds about cross-cultural working. One is that a company which employs foreigners must understand that they are not Japanese and cannot be expected to comply with the unspoken "rules" of the company. Any part of the culture which they want foreign employees to adhere to should be explicitly stated before a work contract is signed. Unfortunately, one aspect of Japanese business culture is that they don't see contracts as binding nor do they feel it's necessary to offer up an accurate job description.

The other part of my thinking on this matter is that those who live and work in foreign cultures should do their best to try and compromise in reasonable situations to fit with the culture. However, I've seen far too many situations where those who make the compromise are simply walked all over or expected to abandon their principles entirely. Just because Japanese employees are willing to offer up their free time to the company without compensation and to take less than half of the holidays they are entitled to is no reason to expect foreign employees to do so as well. I don't mind the expansion of job responsibility to include things like helping clean up around New Year's holidays, or even requests to work extra hours and be comped for them later, but I draw the line at becoming the company's bitch.

At any rate, after I'd worked at my former company for quite some time, I was able to better anticipate certain things. I knew what the Japanese wanted in certain situations and had the choice to comply or not. To be honest, more often than not, I didn't comply because I felt fairly disconnected from the rest of the company due to the fact that I was treated as the mentally deficient stepchild that was to be locked in the basement when company came round. Neither my boss nor I were treated to the perks of the Japanese staff, yet we were expected to carry out the same responsibilities. You'd be surprised how not offering someone a carrot will make them fail to respond to the stick.

One aspect in particular that I learned to predict after about 6-8 years with the same tinpot dictator of a president was how he would respond to mistakes. That is to say, he'd overreact and behave in the most hysterical fashion, particularly if that mistake was made by a foreigner. For example, one temporary employee came in and ate a carrot for breakfast at his desk one day and wasn't admonished. When that same employee took the further step of eating a bowl of cereal at his desk, the president went off on him and docked him a half hour's pay for his failure to understand that this was just not done. Mind you, I think that the president had every right to admonish him for having a sit down meal on the company's dime, but I think that there was a better way to handle it and that docking someones pay that much for what probably cost the company no more than 10 minutes was over the top. He could have simply asked him to make up the 10 minutes by taking a shorter lunch or staying 10 minutes late. Going ballistic didn't really do much in the way of smoothing cross-cultural understanding.

After years of the president's overreactions and sledgehammer punishment for minor infractions on the part of foreign employees who unwittingly made mistakes, I knew what sort of response certain errors might receive. Unilateral punishment for very human occurrences or misunderstandings in which everyone paid the price were not the least bit uncommon.

On Saturdays, I worked completely alone in the office so no one was around to witness an accident I had one day. I was eating lunch at my desk with a bottle of Diet Coke when I bumped the bottle and about 1/3 of it spilled into the keyboard on my ancient PC. Note that the foreigners were using 10-year-old (or more) Windows '95 computers while the Japanese staff had updated Windows XP machines. That meant that I couldn't have easily purchased a replacement keyboard, nor could the company without some digging through shops that kept antiques in stock.

I knew that there was a chance that the keyboard might dry out and work fine if I turned it upside down, let the Coke drain out, and allowed it to dry thoroughly. Because I had to work the rest of the day, I borrowed a keyboard from a computer that wasn't going to be used by anyone until the following Monday and set mine aside to dry. As I processed what had happened, I decided that it would be best if I did not confess in the event that the keyboard was ruined.

Before I go any further, let me say that, except for this one incident, I never failed to own up to a mistake I made on the job. If I screwed up, I told my boss that it was my error. And the truth is that I would normally confess to this type of accident as well and pay for a replacement out of my own pocket in the event that the keyboard was ruined. I had no problem with that possibility.

The almost certain possibility that I had a problem with was the type of punishment that would have followed a confession. That is, the president would almost certainly ban all foreign employees from drinking anything at their desks. Since we were conducting tests with students by telephone which required us to talk for hours, this would be a pretty serious punishment causing discomfort for all. Dry throats and mouths were not the least bit uncommon. If I told the president that I spilled a drink and ruined equipment, I was sure everyone would suffer for my little bump of a Coke bottle.

At the end of the day, I reattached my moist keyboard to my powered down machine and put the intact one back on the computer I borrowed it from and left for the weekend. When I came back on Tuesday, it had dried out and was working fine, so there wasn't a problem. However, had it failed to work upon my return, I would have simply claimed that the old thing had given up the ghost after so many years of use.

I'm not happy that I was planning to lie. Lying is completely not in my nature and I am awful at it. When I think about this incident though, I believe that it illustrates all too well how some people bring out the worst behavior in others by their abuse of power or disproportionate reactions to very human mistakes. If the president weren't so overbearing and unfair in his responses, I would never have pondered hiding the truth. The reason I could always own up to every other mistake I made without hesitation was that work errors were reported directly to my Australian boss and not to the president. Since he was a good boss who knew that no one was perfect, I never worried that any admission of an error would garner a disproportionate response from him.

Japan is so much more special when you're stupid

2009-05-21T13:48:00.001+09:00

Some time back, I had a commenter who was new to Japan who I tried to be supportive of and help out as she repeatedly freaked out over her troubles in Japan. As time went by, she turned into one of those foreigners who finds everything in Japan so precious and unique and ragged constantly on her home country (which happens to be America).

I quit reading her blog, but occasionally something will compel me to take a peak back and see if she's found some balance in her life here. Unfortunately, I can't say from my latest peak that she has. While certainly it is any person's right to bash their home country and praise Japan as being just so precious and wonderful, the lengths to which some people go leaves me flabbergasted.

One of the recent posts by this person was bubbling over about sugar syrup for coffee and how wonderful it is that you can buy little plastic tubs of it in Japan and pour in your cold beverages to sweeten them. 'Why doesn't America have this syrup,' she exclaims. Well, America does have sugar syrup for cold drinks. In fact, America has far more of it than Japan does. You can get such syrup in dozens of flavors and as both a sugar and sugar-free version from more than one manufacturer. One of the ones I buy it from (via the FBC) is Da Vinci. The main difference between Japan and America on this front is that the Americans have a vastly greater variety of it and the Japanese have it in one flavor (plain) only and sell it in excessive packaging.

Certainly, there are things that Japan has that can't be had in other countries, but the gaijin Uncle Toms are so myopic that they either don't know their own country well enough to know what isn't worth gushing over or simply are so blinded by their infatuation with Japan to see reality. I try to be patient with people, but these people get my goat because of the ridiculous lengths to which they go in order to keep Japan on a pedestal. And yes, this is the same stupid person who was clapping her hands at an article that said that racism was right for Japanese people. One of these days, I swear I'm going to pop by and find her talking about how wonderful it is that Japan handles prostitution by essentially sexually enslaving women from other Asian countries. I'm sure she appreciates that it keeps more Japanese women out of the profession, and the Japanese are the important ones, aren't they?. :-p

Most Contrived Pose Ever

2009-05-20T15:59:00.003+09:00

The Japanese company I used to work for had what must have been a thousand color, A4 size (about the size of a US letter sheet of paper), multi-page brochures made up during the years of the bubble economy. I'm sure it cost a fortune at that time to make so many large color booklets to hand out to customers, but they were produced back in the days when Japanese companies were buying up real estate in America and artwork from around the world. Everyone had money to toss down the crapper on frivolous expenses.

There were a few things which I will never forget about the brochure. One thing was that it featured a panorama shot of young foreign people who supposedly worked at the company in front of the skyscrapers in Shinjuku and that none of them actually worked there. Another was that the founder and president (at the time) was shown smiling on one page and had written some long-winded statement about the business. The rest of the booklet was liberally peppered with pictures of people supposedly working around the office. All but one or two of those pictures showed someone pointing at something. They were so exceptionally fake and unnatural looking that we couldn't help but make jokes about them.

It's not that people don't point at things. Obviously, sometimes they do. However, pointing in photos when there is no focal point always looks, well, stupid. It doesn't help when the people who are posing are clearly uncomfortable holding the pose for the camera. They know pointing at phantom objects for the sake of the camera looks lame. That leads me to the political flyer that was left in our mailbox:

Look! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's Godzilla!
(click on the picture to see a bigger version)

This brochure takes the whole posing and pointing concept to it's nadir. The three guys posing with hands on hips and one hand pointing in the air look more like a stiff chorus line preparing to do a jerky choreographed routine than politicians leading the way into Japan's new direction in the future.

The guy in the center is the son of a former Tokyo governer. His dead eyes and stiffly set jaw make him look like he's a teacher pointing at a badly behaved student and admonishing him for texting in class. The guy on the left looks like he's having difficulties holding the pose and the one on the right looks like he feels embarrassed and is just counting the seconds until the humiliating photo session is over.

I realize that all promotional pictures for politicians are contrived and posed for, but this is one of the funniest ones I've ever seen in Japan. I really want to find some outlet to post this picture and ask people to make up a caption for it as there is so much fertile capacity for making up ridiculous descriptions. I guess I'll have to settle for privately mocking it. My husband plans to take it to his school and talk about it with his students to get their take on how it looks. I'm sure their responses will be interesting.

New Trek Movie (Japanese flyer)

2009-05-13T16:05:00.006+09:00

The images are much bigger than they appear in this post. Click on the small versions in this post to see a full-size version.

About a week and a half ago, my husband went to see Watchmen at a Japanese movie theater. They showed a trailer for the new Trek movie and flyers were available for it. My husband noticed that Spock did not make much of an appearance in the clips at all.

I'm not sure why Spock isn't in it, but I also noted that he doesn't make much of an appearance in the flyer either. It's my guess that the Japanese promotional material is focusing on the blond-haired, blue-eyed captain. Most promotion in Japan comes with a pandering slant. For instance, all of the advertisements for Battlestar Galactica here focused heavily on the Asian actress (sorry, I didn't watch BG so I don't know who she is or who she plays). Also, the commercials for Law and Order: SVU showcase and talk about B.D. Wong a lot because he's Asian. Note that I've never seen ads for either of these shows featuring any of the other actors in those shows.

The back of the flyer mentions that there is a Japanese blog for Chris Pine. There are no other blogs for other actors. This further fuels my feeling that the pretty boy has been chosen to appeal to the Japanese audience. The fact that the header graphic has a big heart on it and he's posed like some boy band idol doesn't do much to dissuade me from my conclusions.

One interesting point for those of us who followed the original Trek series here in Japan is that two of the characters have regained their original names with the reboot. In Japan, Scotty was called "Charlie" in the original series broadcast here and the brochure now lists his character as "Scot". I don't know why his name was changed to Charlie, but the thought always amused me. Also, Sulu was called "Sato" in Japan. This is likely because "Sulu" is not a real Japanese name. He is listed as "Sulu" in the brochure.

I hope you enjoy the scans. Note my marvelous stitching together of the center! The seam running down the center is the fold line in the brochure, not a flaw in my Photoshop work.

A little postscript: There's a mention on the back of an "ID card neck strap" which one can buy for 1,300 yen (about $13) which shows Chris Pine as Captain Kirk. I'm not sure what the point of this is, but it's a limited edition movie souvenir.

Reality-Media Disconnect

2009-05-07T14:25:00.005+09:00

Lately, I've been reading a lot about how the bad economy in Japan is forcing prices downward and how this is such a terrible thing. Supposedly, with consumers keeping as much money in their tight little fists as possible, competition is pushing merchants to lower prices which leads to lower profits which in turn means they lower wages and layoff staff.

I'm not a consumer of high-priced goods, and only buy big ticket items like computers, televisions, etc. when something breaks down or is outdated enough to cause great inconvenience, so I can't speak to how the market for luxury goods or pricier bags, shoes, clothes, and adult toys (no, not the dirty kind) is working. I can say one thing for absolute certain and that is that the prices of daily necessities has not been dropping. In fact, as of about a month ago, the price of dairy products and milk in particular went up yet again.

About three years ago, a liter (about a quart) of milk could be had in Tokyo at most markets for about 170 yen (about $1.65). The price went through incremental increases and was hanging at around 198 yen (about $2.00) until recently when it went up to 208 yen ($2.10). Similarly, 200 grams (about two sticks in America or 1 cup) of butter used to be available for around 260 yen ($2.60) and now you're exceptionally lucky if you find it on sale for as low as 300 yen ($3.00). Usually, the price hangs around 388 yen ($3.80) for the equivalent of 2 sticks.

The dairy prices are particularly curious in light of the fact that I read recently that Japanese dairy farmers are crying that they can't make a living raising cows. In part, I can see where their problems are coming from. Feed prices have gone up due to fuel prices (though gas prices have gone down) and increased global demand for grain products, particularly corn, as alternate fuel and manufactured products material. However, prices have continued to go up so it's hard to believe that they aren't compensating for increased grain costs through these hikes.

One of the farmers who was saying he couldn't profit in the dairy business said that he is going to switch over to the rice growing business instead. The reason why this is curious is that Japan is awash in a sea of rice. The government has so much stockpiled that they are actively encouraging people to eat more rice and to return to traditional Japanese cuisine to consume rice, which is relatively cheap in comparison to other grain products like pasta and bread, and vegetable starches like potatoes. If Japan is full to the brim with rice, why would it be profitable to become yet another rice farmer? The answer is that rice is subsidized by the Japanese government so it's a more secure choice. Also, you don't have to depend on the price of animal feed if you grow rice.

I find it relatively frustrating to read articles again and again about how prices are going down only to find that things at the market continue to creep up. Starting about 3 years ago, rather substantial jumps in prices for all sorts of staple goods occurred, and this was in anticipation of oil price increases and conglomerates buying up supplies, not in response to these changes. Toilet paper that used to cost 198 yen currently sells for 258 yen, for instance, and it has not budged along with changes in fuel prices.

My feeling is that companies know there are certain daily use products that people will buy because they have to or are extremely reluctant to give up and that they continue to take advantage of the average shopper by keeping those prices high. As Japanese consumers grow increasingly frugal in response to news of more job losses, diminished bonuses, and stagnant wages, they continue to shy away from buying new "stuff" that they don't need, and focus on the basics. My guess is that, given that this is the only area where people can't really hold back on their spending, the much publicized decrease in prices isn't likely to hit such items any time soon.

Two Boxes (and the non-existence of time)

2009-04-24T08:31:00.005+09:00

There are many ideas that people accept as so completely obvious that anyone who questions the status quo is seen as being a little mad. I'm sure that anyone who thought space was anything more than a vast black nothing full of heavenly bodies was completely reasonable up until "dark matter" was hypothesized by scientists. Of course, dark matter isn't a fact, nor is there any direct evidence of it. It's something scientists made up to explain the unexplainable while figuring out the way the universe works.

At any rate, when you question what is utterly obvious to the vast majority of people, it's hard to make others understand where you are coming from. When I say that I don't believe in the existence of time, I find it a little difficult to explain to those who can't even begin to fathom such an absurd notion. Last night, I was having a talk with a student about the future and whether or not she believed that people could tell the future. When she asked me if I believed they could, I told her that it was complicated because I didn't believe time existed, so it's not a matter of predicting what has not occurred.

After the lesson, I was thinking about how to frame this feeling about time in an understandable and clear way. When I explained it to the student, I drew a time line of our life which is like an arrow shooting forward from birth to death. Our conception is that that is how we experience life. We move in one direction and we can't go back nor can we change the rate at which we move forward. The best I could explain to her at that time was to consider the smallest measures on that line as chopped up little slides what we existed in and were blind of the slices ahead of us. That is, we were walled off from the past and future, but they were still there.

Later, I thought about this again and a better example came to mind. Consider that there are two boxes on either side of you. You don't know what is in one of the boxes, but you know something is in them. You are given an item from the "future" box and you experience it. You can touch it, see it, smell it, or even taste it if you want. When you are finished with it, you put it into the other box, "the past". Once you put the item into the past, you can never access it again. Would you say that the box full of the past was empty because you couldn't see what was in it or access its contents? Do you really believe the "future" box is empty because you cannot see what is inside of it? My feeling is that just because you can't access the contents of the boxes, it doesn't mean they cease to exist. Time shapes how we experience this existence, but it is a construct that exists to feed us experiences in a manner which will not overwhelm the fragile body's sensory mechanisms.

This is how I view time. Because of the limits of our perceptions (due to our nervous systems' inability to process multiple "dimensions" without suffering a complete mental and likely physical overload), we can't have access to everything at once so we can only access life in a limited way. It's as if our bodies are designed to be "handed" items in a fashion that they can process so they can still function in this reality rather than being inundated with all experiences (past and present) at all times. I don't believe that means those experiences are gone, but rather that we aren't allowed to access them for our own "protection".

This relates to both predictions and past lives (if you believe in such things). Some people, perhaps because they are capable of handling it or have a capacity which is uncommon, have access to the contents of the boxes that we don't. The extent to which that access is distorted, however, is always an issue. That is, just because they can reach into those boxes, it doesn't mean they can clearly and accurately experience what is in them as they are fighting through a construct which is meant to protect our reality from others, so such things are rarely presented without the distortion of the psychology of the involved party and less than 100% clarity is present while processing them. The results of any such access will almost certainly be skewed (sometimes very badly) by the zeitgeist the person lives in and their own psychological need to view things in a particular way.

This is also, incidentally, how I believe ghosts, spirits, and other strange things show up for some people in our reality. I see it as a form of dimensional "leakage" which occurs when two entities (people) have a sensitivity to one another and can interact. Most of them are terrified and react accordingly. That is, they try to force one another out of their respective realities. Such experiences are inevitably full of perceptual distortions as well. Consider that a "ghost" that is telling someone in our reality to "get out" may be experiencing the other party as a similarly invasive and terrifying "ghost" in their reality.

I could be wrong, of course. I've never had an experience with a past life memory or what might be considered a significant premonition, nor have I ever seen a ghost. However, I'm not prepared to utterly dismiss those who have had such experiences as all being self-deluding, psychotic, or simply liars. Scoffing at them and waving away their experiences is a handy way of explaining away the unexplainable, but I question the psychology of the need to do this. Mainly, I think that it's rooted in arrogance and self-centeredness. That is, if it is unusual and I haven't experienced it, it didn't happen, so that person must be crazy or a liar. While I am sure that some people have psychotic breaks or neurological problems which cause them to see, hear, and experience things (as I've worked with such people before), I'm not prepared to believe that is always the case.

I don't believe that time doesn't exists as an explanation of the unexplainable, though it somehow does end up explaining some things. Though I guess that if I did make it up to explain the unexplainable, I'd be no different from those who made up dark matter to fill in the gaps of their theoretical notions of how the universe works.

The "Case By Case" Culture

2009-04-13T14:23:00.010+09:00

Back in the days when such statements were not considered racist, people in movies, television, and various other media used to say that the Japanese were "inscrutable". I'm not sure exactly what aspect of Japanese behavior elicited this widely held observation, but the statement is supposed to reflect the idea that the Japanese are difficult to analyze and understand. One thing I can say for certain is that it does not have anything to do with language. Plenty of people learn to read, speak, and write Japanese language. Another thing I can say is that the idea that Japanese people are incomprehensible to outsiders is one that the Japanese themselves love to perpetuate.

Part of the reason I believe that the Japanese believe that outsiders can't understand their culture's depth and breadth is that they lack perspective on outside cultures. They don't know how their culture differs because they don't have intimate knowledge of other cultures as a point of reference. They can't explain the differences because they don't know what is different except in relatively isolated cases. Few people in either culture have a macro view of the mechanics of the cultures they're trying to understand so we are left with a lot of micro views of things like deference to authority, respect for the aged, notions of homogeneity and conformity, etc.

I'm sure that somewhere someone has written books explaining the things I'm about to say and that someone in an academic ivory tower has made it their life's work to understand and explain such things. I'm not attempting to compete with such authorities or to say I know what they know, but there are some things I've realized which have provided me with a different perspective and a better understanding of a particular aspect of Japanese culture which tends to drive many foreign people who live here mad. That is the way in which the Japanese handle matters of rule and law on a "case by case" basis. That is, they have rules which they will recite chapter and verse, but then they will bend those rules on a whim.

For foreign folks, the "case by case" culture is maddening because we never know where we stand and we always expect to be standing in the line which says, "you're going to get screwed over." The latter is a bit paranoid, and probably fueled by errors we make when dealing with Japanese business and bureaucracy, but I'm sure that prejudice is applied at times as well.

Just to be clear, I will offer an example of a typical "case by case" situation which affects our lives as foreign folks. This is the immigration situation and the requirements for visas and visa renewal. When you apply for a visa, you get an application form and a list of documentation that you must submit. In the vast majority of cases, you hand over the documents and you get your stamp and move along. However, as part of the information you receive, there is essentially a statement that the immigration office can demand any other documentation of you that they wish and can refuse you for any reason whatsoever. They don't have to point to any rule to demand that you offer up your mother's birth certificate, your foreign bank account's address, or your grandmother's marriage license. If they want these things, they have every right to request them because they have the power to handle every situation on a "case by case" basis. There is no promise that you will be treated equally to other applicants or that the same demands will be made of each applicant. Now, I don't think that such demands are made, though I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if certain people were refused renewals based on this flexibility and power.

The interesting thing about the "case by case" culture is that it can benefit as well as take away from you in a given situation. People who have power to make life harder for you also have the power to make it easier. They can waive punishment if you apologize or they can make your case an exemption when the other 1000 cases before you had to do exactly the same thing. This does happen in Japan and I think it'd probably happen more often for foreign folks if they knew how to show regret and accept responsibility in exactly the same manner as Japanese people do.

Unfortunately, we foreign folks, by and large, are accustomed to rules that are hard and fast. We like our rules this way because they guarantee that each person is treated exactly the same and that we are all equals. Without such rules, there is the possibility of prejudice and abuse of power. We like to have everything spelled out for us so that we can operate under the expectation that we can be guaranteed a certain result when we cross all of the "t's" and dot all of the "i's". Under such a system, we have the power to control the outcome because we know exactly what to do and we know that no one in an authority position has the power to deny us if we do everything we're supposed to.

If you compare the usual Western structure to the Japanese one, you'll notice that the Japanese situation places a great deal more power in the hands of the authorities making the decisions. You are, essentially, at the mercy of their whims should they choose to exercise them and you are powerless to do anything about it by tapping on a rule book or quoting a law because they have a trapdoor in most cases which allows them to say 'and whatever else we want from you or want to do to you.'

Fortunately, most of the time the people who have the power do not abuse it nor do they use their power to make your life difficult. Generally speaking, everyone just does what they're supposed to do and all goes smoothly. Mainly, in my experience, knowing about the way the case by case culture works helps when things go wrong. If you approach the person in authority in a manner which does not challenge their power and places you firmly as someone who is of inferior status, highly apologetic, and sincerely regretful that something has gone awry, that flexibility is used to help you rather than harm you.

Unfortunately, most expatriates don't approach dealing with various authorities and businesses in Japan in this fashion. Because we are accustomed to knowing exactly what our rights are and what sort of power we have, we get aggressive and insistent about what is supposed to happen and what is "right". In other words, we challenge the person in authority's right to make various requests and choices which only serves to make them all the less likely to want to help us or let us off the hook.

To us, following the Japanese way is degrading. It makes us feel like we're allowing ourselves to be cowed into submission or lowering ourselves in order to cooperate. In American culture in particular, the whole idea of figuratively kneeling before an authority in submission or putting yourself at their mercy is repugnant, cowardly, and a surrender of your independence and rights. In the end though, it's not about your ego. It's about a culture that is comfortable with having two faces, the true face (honne) and the public face (tatamae). The Japanese don't feel degraded by having to use a different face in order to make things operate smoothly in most cases. Their core ego structure is not centered around the public face. It's just something they put on when needed and take off when unnecessary. They oil the wheels when needed to make things go smoothly and move on to other things.

In the end, we can only be true to who we are. As an American, I don't know that I could ever be entirely comfortable with the "case by case" nature of Japanese life. However, one thing I've realized is that this system is not in place as an excuse to be prejudicial. It's about power, not prejudice, and keeping it in the hands of one group of people rather than in the hands of the average person. It's something that has developed as a result of Japan's history just as the egalitarian nature of America's laws has developed because of its history. If I want to continue living here, it serves me far better to accept that rather than to fight it.

Nobody Tells Us

2009-04-07T08:09:00.003+09:00

Recently, my husband and I have been through a pretty stressful experience related to some elements of the bureaucracy in Japan. All countries have their red tape and rules, of course. The difference in Japan is that the rules are so vastly different for foreign folks compared to the average Japanese person and it can be confusing at best.

If you want to do everything right and get everything straight as a foreign person in Japan, you have to make a concerted effort to find everything out and even then you might fail to get it right. The tendency of most people in Japan due to communication differences is to simply tell you only what you ask to hear rather than enlighten you about an overall situation. If you fail to ask the right question, you may not learn what you need to know.

There are a few reasons for various problems that foreign folks have in dealing with the red tape here. One of the reasons is that most Japanese employees are of a different status than most foreign employees. That is, most are "company workers" and we're considered "temporary workers". The point of making us "temporary workers" is to stop companies from having to fork over the benefits to us that they pay Japanese employees like supplemented health care payments, pension benefits, etc. Since most foreign folks remain in Japan for a short time, I don't have too great a problem with this. Most of them don't really need those benefits or would likely lose any money invested in such systems should they be hooked into them, though I don't think the companies care at all about saving us money. They do it mainly to save themselves money.

The real problem arises because company employees get a wide variety of bureaucratic tasks completely taken out of their hands. For instance, most Japanese people don't file their own taxes or manage their payments. The company's accountant just takes care of the whole thing. When I ask Japanese people about filing their income taxes, most of them have no idea how to do it, when to do it, or what they're even paying. The average Japanese person can offer me no advice on such things. The average American, on the other hand, can tell you plenty about taxes and how they need to be handled and when they need to be paid because the responsibility is equally in every person's hands.

Such is not the case for the vast majority of foreign folks and the people at the companies we work for often do not tell us anything about what we should be doing. The best you can generally hope for is some vague notation with your salary statement that you may owe additional tax and are responsible for paying it, but with no guidance about what those taxes might be above and beyond the income tax you already have paid or how you should go about finding out what they are. Sending newcomers to a foreign country out into the wild blue yonder in search of random taxes to pay isn't really the best way to handle things in my opinion. The fact that the companies know full well what taxes need to be paid and could tell you what they are, where to go to handle them, and how to make sure you are sent the proper bills indicates that they are either too lazy or indifferent to offer guidance or that they don't want you to know about those taxes because the bite out of your paycheck (10%) may make you think twice about working for your current salary. My vote is on lazy and indifferent.

During my first few years in Japan while working at Nova, I was never told that I needed to file an income tax return. I don't even know to date if I could have filed and gotten some of my tax money back or if I owed money, though the latter is almost certainly not so. The issue simply did not exist for me because I was completely unaware of this need. My husband's school, which was a much better place to work, took care of the tax filing for him so I figured this is what all places of employment did. In retrospect, it may have been what Nova did for me, but I have no way of knowing 18 years on. Certainly the idea that I was failing to act properly never even occurred to me.

Foreign folks get criticized a lot for not following the rules, not paying their way, etc., but the truth is that there is no organized system in place to help us do so. You learn piecemeal, if you learn at all. There's absolutely no reason for this to be the case. We're all registered at our local government offices and they have our addresses. They could send us tax forms to remind us that we have to pay, but they don't send them to you until you first file of your own initiative. In other words, you have to first find out that it is necessary and do it of your own volition in order to receive a reminder. If you assume that the company handled it for you (as is so often the case for the majority of people), no one is going to tell you this is even necessary in your particular case so you blithely go about your business. Most foreign folks are not even aware that their cases are different from that of the Japanese when it comes to such things.

The part that aggravates me about this situation is that critics (mostly the "Uncle Tom" foreigners) will state that you can't expect to be treated differently simply because you're a foreigner. The thing is that the problems stem from the fact that you are treated differently already because you're a foreigner. You can't automatically place the vast majority of foreign folks in different working conditions than the norm (the norm being the company handles such things) and then expect them to figure out that they need to do something differently and then criticize them for not doing exactly what the Japanese do (which is nothing). In other words, you can't have it both ways. Either they are treated the same and expected to do the same or they are treated differently and offered guidance to assist them in their particular situation. The aggravating thing is that the solutions are relatively simple, but no one takes responsibility for implementing them. Nobody tells you how to be a good citizen, but they're all ready to get in line and condemn you when you make a mistake and fail to act like one.

Personally, I think the ambiguity is intentional. The government wants your money, but they also want to allow loopholes for certain groups of people. In Japan, they love nothing more than being wishy-washy. This may sound absurd, particularly in regards to taxes, but there is a level on which it makes sense. There are "temporary workers" who are Japanese as well as foreigners. The main difference is that there are very few company workers who are foreign. In fact, lately, the number of Japanese who are seen as temps is growing. These workers are cheaper for companies because they get no benefits and cost the companies less.

The ambiguity likely exists to allow the companies to continue to easily secure such workers because they are okay with working under less than optimal conditions (no security, no bonuses, no benefits) if they can keep more of their paychecks than company employees. It may sound absurd, but Japan is not a country that views contracts and rules of law as something to be adhered to strictly. They view such things as guidelines from which to consider each situation on a case by case basis. One of the reasons Western business and Japanese business often have problems working together is that the Japanese don't view contracts as something hard and fast, but Westerners do. If ambiguity and selective enforcement are seen as having an overall benefit to society, then they are left in place. This can be rather maddening for those of us who are accustomed to having rights and using the laws to let us know where we stand.

(As an aside: I will note that my views spring from the fact that there are some Japanese people who are "temporary workers" who willfully do not file their taxes even though they are aware that they should. I'm told that they don't do it because they are young and don't want to start paying into the pension system yet because they won't benefit from it for decades and that this allows them to avoid paying city and prefecture taxes. (For the record, most of us are taxed accurately or over-taxed on our income taxes so not filing means writing off a possible refund.) This is an entirely different topic, but I think their reluctance to pay into the pension fund is driven by the ridiculously low monthly payments and the fact that paying in more or longer has no impact on your benefits. In other words, they can spend 25 years paying into the system or 50 years paying in and they're still only going to get a flat payment of about 60,000 yen so they don't want to start paying any earlier than they have to.)

Fortunately for my husband and I, our issues appear to have sorted themselves out at this point in time. We won't know for sure for a few more weeks, but I'd say it's 99% sure that everything is okay and that nothing bad will come of the situation I've been stressing out over for the past three days. Being a nervous sort of person, I'm still losing sleep over that 1% though. And having a tendency to construct worst case scenarios, I'm still building mountains out of molehills. Chances are though, that it'll all be okay.

Adobe's Unhelpful Help

2009-03-27T16:34:00.001+09:00

I had a lesson yesterday with one of my favorite students. She's a designer and artist and I can talk to her about Adobe geek stuff. We spent about the first half hour of her lesson talking about things like serif and sans serif fonts and which works better in various situations. I know someone is a kindred soul when they are aware of the fact that, as a general rule of thumb, you shouldn't use more than two fonts in a piece of work (and sometimes only one is better).

I had been encouraging her to learn to use Adobe's page layout software, InDesign, rather than do layout in its drawing application, Illustrator. She already bought all of Adobe's publication suite so she might as well get more out of it. The main thing holding her back had been a lack of motivation because most of her projects contained few pages and learning InDesign wasn't worth the effort if she could easily do it in Illustrator, which she knows very well and can work quickly and comfortably in.

Recently a new project came up which required a 16-page layout and it was too daunting to do in Illustrator so she bit the bullet and dug in. This was essentially what I made myself do awhile back, though I did it of my own volition because I'm just that big of a dork. There are two ways to learn InDesign. One is to use Adobe's help system to guide you through the rough spots and slowly learn the program. The other is to buy some sort of classroom in a book and teach yourself. The way I learned is no longer an option because I learned from printed manuals that Adobe sent me back in the days when such things were included as part of the outrageous price you paid for their software.

I try not to finish my student's sentences, but when she said "Adobe's Help is...", I had to blurt out "awful". I've tried it for a variety of programs since getting CS4 and have found it dismal in offering up the information I need. The main problem is that its online help relies on a search spitting out a link to the proper information. Sometimes you land in the middle of the information you need with no lead to how you're supposed to start. Sometimes you end up in the middle of nowhere. On rare occasions, you may get the information you want, but it's all rather scatter shot.

While I don't think Adobe or any company ought to send out some huge manual with every piece of software, I think they should link to a downloadable manual on the first page that loads up on your web browser when you choose the "help" item from the menu. In fact, I think they should make sure that such a link stands out on the page rather than tucking it off to the side with other files (and only showing you the link after you conduct a search).

After poking around a bit, I sent my student off a message about where to find the downloadable manual and how to easily link to training videos (from inside the manual), but I think it's too late. My guess is that she's finished this project and now she has no incentive to learn the software any better and, indeed, is probably too turned off by the hassle of seeking help to even try.

Not Getting On Each Other's Nerves

2009-03-26T07:22:00.003+09:00

A few weeks ago, one of my students told me that she had a fight with her husband and went off on an extended bike ride to cool off. I asked her what the argument was about and she described a situation to which I could very much relate. She said she wanted to talk about something she was interested in with her husband after he came home from work, but he was tired and not in the mood. She persisted and he got angry, then she got angry.

Like me, this particular student works freelance from home, though unlike me, she actually makes a full-time living from it. Her husband, like mine, works outside the home and puts in some pretty long hours. One of the things you find occurring when you're home all day and your partner is out working in a box somewhere is that he comes home overstimulated and tired, wanting nothing more than to zone out and be left alone while you want to talk about whatever has been floating around in your head all day. There's a big difference in your energy levels and how much stimulation your nervous system has had or needs.

When I first quit my full-time job (about 3 years ago now) and had no or few private students each day, this was a bigger issue because I was sitting at home most of the day and only talked to my sister or my friends very early in the day (due to time zone differences) and spent the rest of the day in relative isolation. When the CH got home, I was ready to pounce on him with a conversation and he was in desperate need of a decompression session. He spends all day talking to people so this is no small surprise, and spends the half hour before he gets to our door on a crowded train or station being bombarded with noise and buffeted around by other people who don't look where they're going and expect you to move to accommodate them.

In short order, we worked out a system whereby he came home and I left him in peace for about 15-30 minutes until he was ready to talk. Generally, I just wait until he starts talking to me of his own initiative. I imagine that this arrangement would not have been worked out so quickly if we hadn't been married for so long or didn't have experience identifying and working out solutions to such things. It also helps that we're both confident about our feelings for each other and don't take the need for a certain arrangement which excludes the other personally. Of course, the exclusion isn't a physical one. I don't have to leave the room or anything. I just have to leave him to recover from the stress of the day and the commute for a short time before engaging him in conversation.

I wonder at times if this may be a bigger problem for couples in Japan than those back home because having a larger house makes it easier to find a place to "escape" to areas where conversation can be avoided without necessarily making it clear why you're doing so. In fact, I wonder if people may develop patterns to adjust to their need for isolation without even being aware of why they're doing it in a larger home. In our apartment, the only rooms sufficiently isolated from one another that one can't hear a conversation or be spoken to are the bedroom and the bathroom.

Since I now have more students and freelance work compared to when I first quit, this is far less of an issue than before. I spend several hours talking to people so I don't really need to pounce when the CH gets home. However, one thing I take away from this experience (and my student's situation simply reminded me of this) is that there's usually an easy fix for the problems that arise from people living together if both parties communicate and surrender their neuroses and willfulness and just address the issue at hand.

Paper Thin

2009-03-23T07:37:00.005+09:00

I once read that the children of alcoholics often grow up to be very sensitive because part of surviving the dysfunctional environment of their homes involves anticipating moods and reacting to them in a manner which diminishes their suffering. If this is so, it would also explain why so many children of alcoholics are also prone to addiction themselves. Increased sensitivity means increased emotional pain and addiction often is a means of emotionally anesthetizing yourself.

My father is an alcoholic and my mother probably has had some sort of undiagnosed depressive disorder for most of her life. Growing up with both of them, I recall moments of difficulty and tension and trying not to get on the wrong side of either of them for fear of bringing on more misery. I'm guessing that part of the reason I worked so hard at school was to keep them happy with me and show that I was "good" and therefore not deserving of the verbal wrath that sometimes came my way.

I've forgiven both of my parents for the damage they did to me as a result of how damaged they are. Neither of them has changed much, though my father has gotten a bit better and my mother worse as the years have gone by. I realize that they are in pain, too, and that they never meant to mess up their kids by their actions. They were just doing what they could to cope, and sometimes that involved random spreading of their misery to available targets without even knowing what or why they were doing it.

Unfortunately, growing up in the way I did coupled with perhaps some genetic predispositions has left me thin-skinned. I tend to be hyper-aware of the environment around me and the actions of people toward me. This is almost certainly a lingering response pattern to how I grew up. I'm still looking to anticipate how the people around me are going to behave so that I can alter my actions such that I will endure the least possible emotional pain.

Fortunately for me, my husband is a calm, placid, emotionally stable person who extremely rarely has any sort of negative response to anything I do or say. I can still read him like a book from his tone of voice or small changes in body language, but what I tend to read are things like 'he's about to ask me if I'd mind making coffee' or 'he's tired or out of sorts' right now, but hasn't even realized it himself yet. Those who wonder why I get effusive about how wonderful my husband is may understand a bit better now. He's emotionally a warm, comforting blanket to someone who grew up being emotionally (though fortunately not physically) beaten up.

The main problem for me with being so thin-skinned and overly attentive to how I'm regarded is that I live in Tokyo and I'm not Japanese. Living in an environment which is over-stimulating at best and around people who are constantly reacting to you because you are different can be very hard. Part of the process I continue to go through in Japan is to build a psychological wall between myself and people who I encounter. Every time I leave the apartment, I have to consciously decide to try hard not to pay attention to them and how they are reacting to me. This wall is necessary not only to protect myself, but to stop me from building up anger toward them for stolen glances, gawking, pointing, and commenting rudely in Japanese about the gaijin while laboring under the incorrect assumption that I don't know what they're saying or doing.

It took me a long time before I even decided to put this wall up. While I knew I was sensitive, my initial response to people who behave in ways that cause me pain was to be angry at them and react with angry looks or by saying or doing something to try and get them to stop. Essentially, I was trying to "fight back", but the truth is that you can't control other people in this way and it's completely energy-draining to even try in a city as big as Tokyo and when you stick out like a sore thumb in a culture which has serious issues with anyone who is obviously different. It was exhausting and ineffective.

One of the things that I realized some time ago was that this need to put up a wall between me and the Japanese around me was fueling my lack of desire to learn to speak or read Japanese better. Not understanding completely actually made my life easier because it shut me off from pain. It's much easier to build a wall when the voices around you are just noise and not actual communication. It also gave me an excuse to put a buffer between myself and any potential cross-cultural issues because someone else always did the communicating for me. When I worked in a Japanese office, my Australian boss, who spoke Japanese quite well (despite his protestations to the contrary at times), was my protection from all sorts of problems. At home, my husband did the talking when it was necessary. I used both of them as protection from possible pain and stress, and it has worked really well from that angle.

For years, I've successfully lived in a bit of a cocoon to keep my paper thin skin protected to some extent from the pain I might suffer from those around me. While it might seem that a person in my shoes might come to regret this insulation, isolation, and willful effort not to fully engage in the environment around her, I don't regret it one bit. It's what I needed to survive, and I don't know what sort of emotional state I'd be in if I hadn't had my various "buffers". The difference between people like me and people who have a thicker skin is that I am living in the equivalent of a cultural downpour with painful hailstones bashing into me and they are experiencing a light sprinkling of rain. They didn't ask for, earn, or build their ability to not experience everything with the volume turned up to 10 anymore than I asked to be the way I am. That's just the way it is, and they can't know what it's like until they have lived a few decades in my shoes.

The good thing about realizing why you live your life the way you do is that it gives you the ability to choose another path of coping. About a year ago, I started to dabble in Japanese study again because I know at least some of the reasons why I tried to shun improvement for so long. There are other reasons, and there are even some pretty good excuses (like I actually rarely need to speak it, oddly enough), but the bottom line is that I was setting the terms for how I dealt with life in Japan so that I could have a filter against pain. I'm changing the type of filter I use, and hoping that I end up all the better for it.

Information Aggregators and Intellectual Property

2009-03-20T12:52:00.006+09:00

There are many types of blogs out there and I read a fair variety of them. One type is an "information aggregate" which collects news and information from sites of interest to its readers and presents it in smaller bites with a link back to the original posts or articles.

Virtually all of the Gawker Media sites are such places which collect news gathered by others or form content based on user input and then offer up samples or opinions based on that news. Very little of its content tends to be original pieces researched, written or extrapolated from its writers' personal experiences, though at least some of it is. One of the best and most useful sites on the web, Lifehacker, is a part of Gawker's suite of sites. Lifehacker's editors and writers keep an eye on what is new and useful and distill that information for us so we don't have to follow things like when Google changes gmail or find useful articles that help us live a greener, cheaper life.

While I believe that a lot of information aggregate sites perform very useful services to readers and drive traffic to the sites which they cull information from, I have concerns about what they represent and the trends that spawn as a result of their form of presenting content. At their best, such sites provide such a small thumbnail of the content of the sites they poach from that interested readers have no choice but to visit the site the information originated from to get more information. At their worst, they steal so much that there is no need to click through to the parent article and give the people who worked hard to create the original content their readership.

The point at which a site which recruits editors to spend their days gleaning "news" from other sources treads over the line from promoting those sites to stealing their intellectual property can be a tricky one. How much parroting of content can one do before they've reduced the chances that the reader will feel the need to move on to the original source? Additionally, there are issues of profiting from the work of others at play. If the New York Times writes an article and parts of that article are featured on an aggregate site, does that site have the right to profit from what it has gleaned from the New York Times when the Times never agreed to allow any part of their article on that site?

This very issue is currently being dealt with on the Apartment Therapy web site as the New York Times has asked them to remove all posts related to Times articles. Like Gawker, Apartment Therapy is host to a suite of sites and derives most of its content from users and searching for articles and other posts related to their core content (interior design and home life). Unlike Gawker Media's sites, they tend to show more of the original source articles and write less involved editorials or opinion pieces to accompany the information they reproduce.

The comments section about the article linked in the previous paragraph is full of people talking about both sides (including myself). Personally, this entire situation is a kissing cousin of an issue which has aggrieved me for quite some time and that is bloggers who create nothing unique, but ride on the coattails of those who do. In the case of aggregators, they do this for profit. In their defense, many of them are performing a valuable service and are helping out the sites who they showcase. Without a doubt, any site featured on sites like Gawker's are going to see a huge (almost certainly welcome) upsurge in traffic.

In the case of individual bloggers, most of them do it for ego-driven reasons. They want attention and they either have nothing in their lives which they feel is worth writing about, or they are too paranoid about privacy to expose their lives for the sake of receiving the desired attention. They mine other people's sites for content to piggyback off of, more often than not doing so by picking up on an issue someone else has spoken about and pontificating on why they are wrong.

The bottom line is that much of the blogging world is like a parasite to true journalists. However, I must hasten to point out that sometimes the blogging world is represented by people who are actually amateur journalists themselves. For the sake of clarity, I will say that I call anyone a "journalist" who writes uniquely about something rather than using someone else's work in whole or in part or as a springboard for a counterpoint piece. (And, incidentally, I'd be more impressed with people who wrote counterpoint pieces if they spent more time making their own points rather than reading something else and then and only then finding something to say.)

The parasitical nature of a lot of blogging doesn't have to be a harmful one. Sometimes the "parasite" assists the host, as it were. However, by and large, I think that is not the case. Those who create unique content invest a huge amount of time or money (or both) in their work and the fruits of their labor are regarded as an information larder for anyone to raid because of claims of "fair use". The problem is that the liberal sampling of professional journalistic sources by bloggers and aggregators undermines the need of readers to seek out the sites which created that information on a regular basis. In essence, if I know I can rely on a site like Apartment Therapy to point out any lifestyle article in the New York Times which concerns topics like design, home organization or cooking, I have little incentive to visit the Times site regularly and skin through their entire list of articles. This in turn reduces the chances that I'll become a regular reader. Apartment Therapy could be siphoning off readership by being too reliable a source of information on articles of interest.

Additionally, while I think aggregators and even private bloggers sometimes do a great job of finding far flung sites and bringing them to the attention of readers, many of them rely far too much on external sources rather than developing their own content. Aggregators do this because it is far cheaper to hire editors to scour the web than writers to create unique pieces. Bloggers do it because their lives are tedious and its hard to find something interesting in their own experience to write about on a regular basis.

While aggregators claim that they want to help the sites they point to, the real reason they showcase the web sites of others is that the more new posts you put up, the more page views you get and the more ad revenue you generate. Using more unique but high quality content is less profitable than semi-regurgitation of the existing content created by external sources.

The bottom line is that those who use the content of others to fuel their blogs are serving to remove the profit from and incentive to create unique content from the sources they mine. At the end of the line if such a trend continues is a diminishing pool of original writers, journalists, and reporters as it becomes increasingly more difficult to make money from your hard work. While aggregators and content poachers are likely indifferent to the harm they do as long as they gain more profit by their efforts, they are essentially contributing to the demise of the sources from which they derive most of their content.

Not Wanting a Long Life

2009-03-15T08:07:00.006+09:00

Recently, I asked a few students an interesting question off of one of the Facebook Memes that's going around. This question was, "would you want to know the day you're going to die." To be fair, this is hardly a question that originated with the banal interactions we have with one another on Facebook. In fact, it's a philosophical question that I recall talking over with my friends during late nights back in college and high school.

Most people say they don't want to know because then they'd have to think about it for the rest of their lives. The main benefit of knowing only comes from knowing you have a relatively short time left because then you can modify your lifestyle to maximize enjoyment of that time. Since no one wants to know they have little time left, most of us would rather forgo that possible benefit for the larger comfort of uncertainty.

This issue has come up in the past with students because of the plethora of fortune tellers around Tokyo. A lot of my students have gone to them from time to time and one of the things they are sometimes told is how long they will live. One of my students said she was told she'd live to be 70-something, but she felt that was too long because life was too hard. Recently another student told me that she didn't want to live past 60 because she didn't want to live with diminished physical capacity.

In a country where people enjoy the longest life spans in the world, I find their responses curious. It's especially odd in some ways because so many people in Japan who I've spoken to about what happens after you die believe that we face oblivion. They clearly are not thinking that there is some comfort in an after life. I also find it interesting that men don't seem to have the same reaction to the question as women. Maybe women in Japan see a long and lonely road ahead as they outlive their husbands, or perhaps their lot in life is such that they don't feel particularly satisfied with the circumstances of their lives. Or, and I think this may hold a more relevant clue, women are so responsible for taking care of their husbands (even in equitable relationships) that they see a future full of the burdens of old age without any of the restful benefits of retirement. One thing I will note is that the students who don't want to live a very long life do not have children. I wonder if having kids changes the way in which people view a longer life because they know someone will be responsible for looking after them.

Unfortunately, the number of people I teach is too small to reach any conclusions, but it is an interesting question to ponder. I can say that it always makes me a little sad when someone tells me they don't want to live that long, though I honestly can't say I want to live to be a gnarled shadow of myself unless my husband makes it there with me.

A Million for Clothes

2009-03-12T08:27:00.004+09:00

One of my students works for an international fashion designer. If you're into clothes (and I'm not, but I figure some people must be), you would certainly recognize her company's name. Recently, she and I were discussing how to motivate employees as part of a lesson and I asked her what sort of incentives the company gave her to do her best.

My student said that everyone gets a "clothing allowance" of about a million yen ($10,204) which will be reduced if they don't do particularly well for a long time. Note that amounts of money always sound more impressive in their yen figures than when you convert them to dollars. One can easily be a "millionaire" if you measure in yen.

On the surface, this sounds like a really good deal. She gets free designer clothes in an amount of money few of us could spend, but it's not so great when you scratch beneath the surface. The primary problem is that the company keeps employees' salaries lower because of this allowance. She said she'd rather have the million yen than the clothes. Also, these are designer clothes so the money isn't going to buy as much as run of the mill clothing. Finally, and this is the worst part, she has to pay taxes on the allowance. That means that she pays 10% or 100,000 yen ($1,200) out of her reduced salary for this allowance. This benefit ends up costing her and she has nothing to show for it but piles of clothes that she may not especially want.

I know that companies all over the world use these sorts of "bonuses" to make their compensation more attractive, from free meals at McDonald's to employee discounts on big ticket items, but given that she's forking over a lot of money in taxes, this seems more egregious. When a "bonus" ends up costing you 25-30% of one months salary, it seems like no bonus at all.

Blogging is Hard, New Computers Are Easier

2009-03-11T09:34:00.009+09:00

The title of this post is actually misleading. Blogging is easy. I can write almost as easily as I can breath, but having the energy to blog in three places and divide my time and attention among other new pursuits (*cough*Facebook*cough*) has made it difficult to do what I used to do with my personal blog. That's not an excuse as I don't actually feel obliged to blog, but I do this for myself as well as for others who are interested. This is supposed to be me catching random threads from my life, holding them up and scrutinizing them and then immortalizing them in my blog posts so that I can look back on them when I'm even older and more addled and see who I was. Well, they'll be around provided Blogger doesn't knuckle under the weight of a millions of inane thoughts being stored for posterity in its digital coffers.

The last several days have been particularly busy because Apple finally released a new model Mac Mini (after 14 months, thank you so very much Apple for your attention to the machine that launched thousands of PC switchers). Since my old Mini is a month or so shy of its fourth birthday and my husband has been chomping at the bit to get a new media PC hooked up to our television, we bought one as soon as possible.

For those who don't live in Japan, I'll say that you have few options when it comes to pricing on Apple products. I've heard that this is much the same in the United States. We had the choice of paying 89,800 yen ($912) for the high end model at either the Apple Store or paying the same price at any of a number of electronics shops. Note that the same model costs $799 in the United States so we're forking over $113 more for the privilege of buying it in Japan. That's not quite enough of a difference to have someone buy it in the U.S. and airmail it over, but it's enough to make me feel ripped off.

Since the price was the same everywhere, we bought it at Yodobashi Camera because they give you "points" for purchases. That means we got about $45 worth of store credit for buying it from them whereas we'd get nothing but the smug satisfaction of walking out of an Apple Store with an Apple Store shopping bag if we bought it there. We used the money for the exciting purchase of rechargeable batteries. Still, free batteries (and a little more credit leftover) is better than an Apple Store shopping bag, though there may be some fanatical types out there who may feel otherwise (I'm looking at you, Joseph).

For the first day or so, I had to use my old keyboard and the new and old Minis look exactly the same so it didn't feel very new except for the increased speed and less yellowed-looking white top. I haven't had much of a chance to take advantage of the speed though since I've spent the two days since getting it loaded with software and fighting with getting Windows installed on a dual boot. I gave up on that eventually, but am reconsidering now, though I will say the issue was not related to my lack of ability to do it as I've done it before on my husband's MacBook. When a spiffy flat aluminum keyboard arrived from Amazon, it finally started to seem like a real new computer.

I'll confess to growing pains with Safari and a crash when trying to update the system to use the newest version of Safari. I'm thinking Firefox is looking like an old friend that I'm not quite willing to abandon at this point, but I want to give Safari 4 a shot once I can install the security update that is necessary to install the beta. Right now, it's driving me crazy that opening a link from Google Reader opens in a new window instead of a new tab despite my setting preferences to open links in tabs. Why won't you listen to me Safari? Are you punishing me for ignoring you and using Firefox for all these years?

At any rate, buying the Mini has set us off on a bit of a spending spree. Part of the reason is simply necessity, but perhaps once the purse strings have been loosened, it's easy to keep dipping in for more. It's not really a big deal for us though since we have no debt and aren't going into debt for new purchases, but it does feel like wild abandon when we buy both a new computer and an iPod stereo dock (to be delivered today) in close proximity to one another. I'm sure the strange sense of being a slave to materialism will pass after a year or so of frugality. ;-)

(Note: And to Joseph, who raved about the new Apple keyboards months ago and has been carrying one around the office like a precious child for quite some time, you were right about how good it is. It is a superior keyboard.)

Peeping Taro

2009-03-02T07:21:00.005+09:00

When you first arrive in Japan, you're hyper-aware of everything and note all sorts of curious differences. For instance, many people carry around paper shopping bags in addition to their regular complement of handbags, backpacks and briefcases. It looks like they've all been on shopping sprees but the truth is that they just carefully store and re-use the bags to carry random things. One of my students told me she did this for things which were on a one-way ride so she could toss the bag away when it reached its destination.

These little things often make up more of the framework of cultural differences than the big things. Most small differences are not arbitrary and are motivated by some less trivial factor if you scratch a bit and look under the surface. Personally, I think the omnipresent shopping bags are social camouflage for carrying boring, ugly, or possibly embarrassing things. They look like they've just been out shopping at a nice, semi-posh department store, but they're really carrying a bag full of old books to take to "Book Off" (a book exchange shop where you can get new books for 100 yen, about a dollar, and return old ones) or a wad of clothes to see them through a night at a love hotel with a paramour.

I've become so accustomed to a lot of these small things that they have little or no impact on me these days, which is rather a shame. Occasionally though, I'll be inconvenienced enough to notice or one of my students will tell me something that they notice. Recently, one of my students related a story of an experience she had at Costco which brought one of these small differences to mind and how transplanting an American way of doing something into Japan can have unexpected consequences.

This particular student mentioned that, in America, doors in public lavatories don't go all the way down to the floor while Japanese doors in public toilets nearly touch the ground. I had forgotten about this, but I think the U.S. ones have a large gap at the bottom. Costco branches in Japan appear to have adopted the American style, perhaps because they felt it was in keeping with all of the other Costco conventions (like selling food in quantities large enough for healthy Mormon broods to live off of until the apocalypse).

My student was using the facilities when she heard a mother and her little boy talking. Obviously, the boy was too young to stand outside alone or to use the men's room on his own. Suddenly, the little boy's head popped out from under her stall's door and he was looking at my student as she sat on the toilet. In a state of shock, embarrassment and anger, she rapped on the door and the little boy withdrew. She told me later that she was furious at the invasion of privacy and wanted to let the mother have it for not controlling her son or keeping a better eye on him in the lady's room, but the mother and son had disappeared by the time she left the stall. She told me she had been carrying around the tension from this unreleased frustration for a day.

I concluded, and she concurred, that the boy's mother was probably using an adjacent stall and he though he was catching his mother's attention rather than getting a head start on a career as a pervert. When asked if this ever happened to me, I told her that it had not. This might be because I was lucky, but I think that circumstances which are common in a culture, such as toilet doors with gaps, tend to develop behavioral conventions to deal with them in a manner which is appropriate or those circumstances are removed promptly. That is to say, if a situation where privacy can be invaded is everywhere, the vast majority will not take advantage or that avenue of invasion will be shut down.

Since doors with big gaps are not a part of Japanese culture, the situation unfolded rather unfortunately for my student. I think a mother in the U.S. would have taken the child into the stall with her or he would have knocked on the door or spoken through it rather than stick his head under the gap to check for his mother. This was a reminder, once again, of how incidental environmental factors shape behavior in unexpected ways and how transplanting a situation wholesale from one culture to another may have unpredictable results.

Homemade Tomato Soup

2009-02-17T14:26:00.006+09:00

Back when I was a child, my mother used to buy huge amounts of tomatoes when they were in season and "stew" them for canning. I'm not sure how she did this as the process was of no interest to me, but I only knew the result was vats of smelly, wet, over-cooked tomatoes and jar after jar of them which were put in the cellar for later consumption. When she used those tomatoes, it was always in a manner which pretty much ended up with us simply eating the tomatoes as they were right out of the jar. I think one of her favorite ways was to slop some of them on bread with nothing else.

I love tomatoes and I eat fresh ones with a little salt and pepper several times a week. They're very good for you because they're full of vitamin C. When I was a kid, I'd eat them like apples (and without salt). However, my mother's methods of preparing and serving canned tomatoes put me off of them for decades. Since fresh tomatoes are relatively expensive in Tokyo (about 80-100 yen each unless you get a good deal and buy them in bulk), using fresh ones for cooking can get really pricey. Last week, I saw a can of "Frana" Italian tomatoes imported for Meiji for 100 yen and decided that I'd make a soup recipe I ran across via the Kitchn web site.

As is so often the case though, modifications were necessary because of differences in ingredients in Tokyo, free time, my personal tastes, and expenses. I'm not a fan of celery, and it costs a fortune here anyway, and I can't buy canned chicken soup stock nor get my hands on a whole chicken to make some (or even chicken with bones other than tiny little pigeon-sized drumsticks). I decided to omit the celery and substitute chicken consomme soup for the stock. I think it may actually have turned out more flavorful for using the dehydrated cubes instead of real stock. I used Knorr (the type sold in green and yellow boxes with a white chicken graphic on it), but any type will probably do.

One of my students bought a case of Campbell's tomato soup at Costco awhile back and gave me two cans because it was too sweet for her. I'm not a big fan of Campbell's soup, but at least I have sampled it recently enough to compare this homemade stuff to the usual dreck and this is much, much nicer. We had the soup with grilled sandwiches, but I think it'd be really tasty with bread or toast for breakfast.

Tomato Soup:

1 tbsp. butter
1/3 medium onion (or 1/2 of a small one as the original recipe stated)
1/3 medium carrot
1 can crushed tomatoes
1 tsp. dried parsley
2 cubes chicken consomme
2 cups near boiling water
dash (about 1/4 tsp.) coarse black pepper
salt and cream to taste

Melt the butter in a heavy bottom sauce pan then saute the onion until softened. Add the carrot and cook for about minutes. Add the dried parsley and let it "cook" for about thirty seconds. Stir in the parsley and add the tomatoes. While the tomatoes and vegetables are heating, dissolve the consomme cubes in the water and add it to the pot. Add the black pepper and simmer the soup until the carrots are tender. This should take about a half hour.

Remove the pot from the stove and use a hand mixer or food processor to purée the vegetables to an even consistency. A hand mixer is better because you can directly work in the pot and it's not as messy (and the soup stays hotter). Taste the soup and add salt as you feel is necessary (I added 1/2 tsp.). Depending on how potent you like your soup, add cream. I added two tablespoons of cream, but the original recipe called for up to 1/4 cup.

My husband is not a fan of tomatoes or tomato soup, but he gamely gave this a try because he's caught a cold and I told him it'd be good for him. He said it tasted "sharp" because of the strong tomato flavor. I'm guessing that more cream would have taken the edge off of it, but he declined to have it diluted more. I loved this as it was, and probably could have skipped the cream completely. This was so good that I'm sure to make it again some time. It's also very cheap, even if you're buying the ingredients in Tokyo.

Love Letters

2009-02-14T08:00:00.002+09:00

Most people are probably familiar with the movies or stories where a daughter or other relative goes up into the attack or goes through an old dresser and finds a stack of love letters. The stack is usually about 3-5 inches thick and tied with a pretty ribbon. I'm wondering if that image is approaching the status of anachronism. Phones started to kill the idea of love letters, and all the opportunities for instantaneous communication that the Internet provides are in the process of delivering the finishing blow.

Even though I fell in love in the age of the telephone, certain circumstances made it such that it was not really a possibility for my husband (the CH) and I to use one. He was in Japan for a year of our "courtship". During his year alone, he didn't even have a phone because having one required a huge deposit at that time. Even if he had had one, it cost $1 per minute at that time and we couldn't have afforded it. During that year, we exchanged copious numbers of cassette tapes which we talked to each other on. We still have some of those cassettes, but very few relative to how many were exchanged. We had to record over them because we couldn't possibly save them all without going broke. We easily traded eight 90-minute tapes per week (apiece) with each other.

This is the approximately 10-inch stack of written correspondence we have saved from over the years.

You'd think that would have been enough correspondence, but it wasn't. What is more, the correspondence didn't stop after we were living together then married. When I was going through the letters, I found that there was a large number of Valentine's Day, birthday, and holiday cards. We also used to write each other letters from work early in our days in Japan when we had down time. That means we were writing to each other even when we saw each other every morning before work and every evening afterward. There are also some letters which each of us wrote late at night when we couldn't sleep and our partner was slumbering mere feet away in the next room.

31 cards in 18 days

There is a wide variety of correspondence in the stack pictured above, but there was a sequence that I wrote which I completely forgot about. The CH and I were married on April 1, 1989 and had a short honeymoon. Shortly after that, he flew to Japan to look for a job in Tokyo with the plan that I'd follow after he'd secured a job and an apartment. While he was in Tokyo from April 11 to April 29, I sent him 31 postcards from California. There were obvious days when I sent more than one card. For some reason, on April 14, I sent 4 cards. Note that we had lived together for a year before marrying, but being apart even for almost 3 weeks was nearly unbearable.

These days, we don't do this anymore. That is, we don't write each other late night letters, letters from work or give each other holiday cards. Somewhere along the line, we stopped writing it and just said things to each other. It wasn't that our passion was any less (far from it), but the ease with which we expressed it increased and we didn't feel compelled to write it as often. Still, looking through that stack of correspondence makes me consider the value of having such a romantic and nostalgic record of our relationship.

Lesson Therapy

2009-02-13T09:45:00.001+09:00

Let me start off this post by saying that I am not a monkey. That's right. I'm not a gaijin monkey who performs for the student during lessons to entertain them. It's not that the students and I don't have a laugh from time to time, but it's not because I'm slapping fins together and balancing balls on my nose. My demeanor with students is very casual and relaxed. I ask them questions or have them do textbook material and I allow them the time to answer and speak. Occasionally, they volunteer a question and I answer. That all sounds pretty natural for lessons in language practice, but you'd be surprised how many people treat it like monkey hour.

I feel it was necessary to get that out of the way before I say that one of my students told me at the end of a lesson today his English lesson was the happiest time of his week for him. If you think this is my way of boasting, then I will also add that this fellow currently has a very difficult life situation. His mother is ill and he has to take care of her and his sister is in the hospital dying from the big "C". It's not like I've got a lot of competition in the happiness department.

That being said, I do believe that, for several of my students, having lessons with me serves a meaningful purpose in their lives which has little to do with language skill improvement. Since returning to private teaching after a little over a decade of office work, I've come to realize that there are some people for whom their English lessons are a psychological lifeline. They offer a type of interaction and mental stimulation which they cannot find elsewhere in their lives. In particular, students who are opinionated and outspoken have a chance to speak out to someone who isn't going to judge them or ostracize them for their ideas.

Like many people around the world, a lot of my students spend their time working and operating in relatively small circles. They have friends, but they can't always have the types of conversations with friends that they need or want because they have to keep certain things to themselves in order to not be considered strange or risk being ostracized. One thing I've had to adjust to is the idea that having a conversation lesson which is just me sitting down with a person with an emotional need, having a cup of tea or coffee and "having a chat" isn't shirking my responsibility as a teacher. The fact of the matter is that I'm accepting that some of my students need more of a therapeutic encounter than a boost to their English skills. This is particularly so for some of the older, unmarried ones.

The truth is that these types of lessons, depending on the student can be much harder or much easier than doing a real lesson plan with a textbook there to provide structure, direction and momentum. When you're responsible week in and week out for carrying on a "chat" with the same person who has no obligation whatsoever to initiate anything, you have to work hard to make sure there's something to talk about. For the aforementioned student who said his English lessons were the happiest time of his week, I often have to do 20 minutes or more of preparation to make sure I have enough current event and topical information on hand to keep the "chat" alive. After 75 conversations with the same person, it's not so easy to avoid retreading the same talking points territory.

Right now, the student I am focusing on in this post is incredibly lonely because both his mother and sister are in the hospital, though he isn't the only one who I believe comes to me for social interaction more so than skill building. He spends his days at home or visiting his relatives or hanging around his house with nothing to do. He says his other friends are still working either part-time jobs or full-time, but he's not able to pursue such things because of his age and familial responsibilities. I have a sense right now that I'm pretty much all he's got to perk him up these days and that makes me sad for him.

I think a lot of people who take English lessons are fulfilling a range of emotional needs that can't be fulfilled in their lives otherwise, but the fact that they are doing so isn't nearly as obvious as a few of my students. I wonder if the structure English language learning in Japan has been built around this need just as much or more than the need to improve language skills which are so poorly taught here. In a country where people are always saying "do your best" (gambatte), going to a psychiatrist is uncommon, and putting on a false happy face is common, and where there is a fair bit of conformity and homogeneity, English teachers may be performing a variety of therapeutic services including exposure to cultural diversity, companionship, intellectual stimulation and cathartic expression.

Proof of "God"

2009-02-12T09:44:00.004+09:00

Recently, I was reading a very reasonable and well thought out debate on proof that God exists and whether or not there is such proof or if it is even possible to prove that God exists. For me, the main problem with questions of "proof" of any concept is that there is an assumption that humans are equipped to experience any given entity or material and their inability to experience it means it does not exist. In particular, if we can't see, smell, feel, hear, or taste it or invent a mechanism that can translate a phenomenon into data which we can apply one of those senses to, we say it cannot be proven. This is the unavoidable flaw when science tries to "prove" metaphysical concepts. It is limited to what our meat sacks can comprehend, and we're hardly the best instruments. If "God" is out there, we may be no more capable of comprehending it than a tree is capable of having a conversation with us.

The other problem is that people are constantly framing "God" concepts in their own image, and I don't just mean the psychological concepts like judging people or issuing rules to run their lives. There may indeed be some sort of greater entity that set the universe in motion and is monitoring every action that goes on, but that doesn't mean it is paternalistic or concerns itself with what goes on in our lives beyond some sort of perception that changes of some sort are occurring. Whatever "God" is does not have to be some single entity looking after our welfare. It could simply be something that spawns energy or reorganizes it or has some sort of imperative to see matter and energy manipulated into different patterns or frequencies. If that is so, it doesn't mean that that entity has no interest in our improving ourselves or our world, but rather that our achievements mentally, emotionally, or spiritually bring about that entity's desired changes to energy or matter.

We can't prove it, but I think there is far less value in proof than in thinking more expansively about the concepts and what they mean to our lives than in seeking proof. If there is any "proof" to be had, it won't come as a result of prognostication and fulfillment of a prediction, scientific research, or personal experience. It'll come from an analysis of trends and looking for a certain pattern of interaction both in the way civilizations and people change across thousands of years and by studying the interaction of matter and energy on an atomic level.

Microwave Brownie in a Cup

2009-02-05T20:38:00.007+09:00

When I'm perusing recipes on the Internet, I often see things which I can't make for one reason or another. Mainly, I run into ingredients which can't be had in Japan. Simpler recipes which require few exotic foods to perform their delicious alchemy are always more attractive, but most of them let me down. I've mentioned this before, but it bears saying again, most people lie about the results of their cooking when they post recipes. Often they leave out where the recipe falls short so they can just display their gorgeous food porn pictures (always taken about a millimeter away from the food at an angle no human would view the food from). I'm as much a fan of food porn as anyone, but I get annoyed at the accompanying recipes which more often than not let me down.

I ran across a recipe on Chow for a homemade microwave brownie in a cup and I was skeptical. I've seen cake mixes in Japan which you can whip up in a paper cup and zap in the microwave so the concept is not new. Unfortunately, the resulting cake is usually weird. There's a reason baked goods are usually baked rather than irradiated.

The recipe is super simple:

2 Tbs vegetable oil
2 Tbs water
1/4 tsp vanilla extract
dash salt
4 Tbs granulated sugar
2 Tbs unsweetened cocoa powder
4 Tbs all purpose flour

You whip up the wet ingredients (I used a fork) then add in the dry and mix them until mixed then stick it in the microwave for 60-90 seconds. I tried this for 60 (on high) to get the "molten" version which is still fudgie in the middle. Then I let it cool for a bit and ate it with a spoon while it was still warm.

And the result was delicious. It was surprisingly good for such little work and so few ingredients. I don't know how it'd fare later after cooling off, but it was very satisfying while warm. I'm guessing it'd be even more interesting with vanilla ice cream, whipped cream or creme fraiche, but those aren't things I have around.

Ultimately, I'd wager that the kind of cocoa you use factors into how well this turns out because there are so few ingredients. I used Van Houten cocoa, but I'm guessing any cocoa which one favors would do just fine. The only potential "bad" in this will be the clean up after baking a brownie in an ungreased cup.

Big Shoes to Fill

2009-02-04T10:03:00.003+09:00

During the winter, I keep the CH's and my Birkenstock sandals in (never used for trash) trash pail by the entrance. I do this so our shoe box area (the genkan) isn't full of shoes and the students who come to my apartment have room to park their footwear. Occasionally in winter time, I'll fish out my sandals and put them on for a quick run outside because putting on other shoes takes more time. Last time I did this, I tossed them haphazardly back into the pail such that one of them was laying on top face up.

Last Saturday as one of my students was leaving, she was zipping up her boots and noticed my displayed sandal. She said, "oooo, big!" I told her that that was my sandal and she said, "very big!" My feet are size 8.5 in U.S. sizes, and about a half size too big for the biggest size of shoe for women in Japan. I either have to get shoes from back home, or buy men's shoes (this only works for tennis shoes). My feet are also quite wide because I haven't tended to wear shoes much my entire life and that has resulted in rather splayed bones.

I wasn't offended in the least by what my student said, but I did wonder if that was the sort of thing that generally would be considered offensive back home. I guess a lot depends on how self-conscious someone is about their foot size. This did remind me of the fact that Japanese people are generally more liberal about commenting on body sizes and imperfections than Western people are and that it isn't considered offensive in their culture. They say the same sorts of things to each other, perhaps more often than they say it to us. It's one of those cultural differences that can be a bit hard to adjust to at first because Western culture generally frowns on talking about anything related to bodies which is outside the norm, particularly in terms of something being too big.

In the end, I take what the student said as an indication of her increased comfort level with me as a person after being my student for over a year now. Perhaps I can mention her teeny tiny feet at some point in the future to return the favor.

Three Blogs Full

2009-02-03T14:58:00.004+09:00

As I'm sure regular readers have noticed, I haven't been posting nearly as much lately. The reason for this is that I'm currently running three blogs and I'm finding it hard to work up the energy to attend as much to this one. One of those blogs is known to readers of this one, but the other is a protected blog which can only be accessed with a password. That blog is for my students and includes photos which I don't want to put out in the wild where just anyone can see them both to protect my privacy and the privacy of those who are in the pictures (particularly family).

The private blog for my students is only dealt with once a week and the snack review blog is "only" every other day, but both seem to be draining my creative battery disproportionately. Mainly what I find being the case is that all of the thoughts that I used to blog about still occur to me and I think I'm going to write about them, but I end up just brushing them aside and forgetting about them because I'm tired.

I'm hoping to get back on track, or at least find a way to more regularly update this blog by devoted scheduled time to it. Watch this space.

The Rage of Our Age

2009-02-02T16:27:00.005+09:00

As the sub-prime meltdown was unfolding and as the current sinking of economies worldwide is dragging more and more people down with it, I've noticed that there are a lot of angry young people who feel that the boomers have gobbled everything up and left nothing but a big economic mess for young people. Most of us who are younger than 50 are unlikely to enjoy the same level of lifestyle as our parents. In particular, we seem to be in a situation where we will not be able to buy property and expect it to help smoothly pave the way to retirement. In fact, most people feel they will be lucky to stumble down a dirt road considering the collapse of the housing market.

I can't say that I know what is ahead. I tend to think it'll get better and that it'll happen sooner than most people expect. That being said, I must say that sometimes I also get angry about some of the things which I view as disparities between economic conditions and opportunities for our parents and those for ourselves. This anger is completely wasted of course, but it is not irrationally rooted.

Sometimes it makes me mad that people who have retired complain about younger generations not doing better and blaming it on their inability to control their spending. While I have no doubt that this is true for a lot of people, not everyone who is finding it hard to prosper is failing to live modestly or work hard. The truth is that a lot of older people have built their prosperity on real estate. That is, they bought houses which appreciated in value greatly and have been able to cash in for retirement. The amount of appreciation on more recent purchases, with a few exceptional areas, is less than that on homes bought 40-50 years ago.

My point is that a lot of people who cite hard work as the reason for their comfort at retirement actually just got lucky that they were buying in their era and not ours. They didn't necessarily prosper because of hard work and scrimping and saving. That was actually what our grandparents did, not our parents. Some of them just bought homes, others became landlords of one sort or another. Some simply checked out at the right time before the stock market bubble burst. In fact, a lot of the, supposedly inspirational, stories about people who became millionaires despite never working at very high wage or professional jobs emphasize frugal and simple living rather strongly and whisper and vaguely mention in a footnote at the end of the article that there were also real estate purchases. Such people can't stand as an example for us since our era is unlikely to yield such opportunities to increase investments ten fold (or more).

I'm not whining because I won't end up rich when I retire, because I've never been in a position to consider much investing anyway. That's not because I don't have a little bit of money to play with, but rather that I have been living in a foreign country on a mental lease that I renew three years at a time rather than staying in a place I expect to remain in. Rather, I am complaining because of the amount of blame that gets tossed around and the arrogant presumption that anyone who hasn't set themselves up for a comfy retirement has not lived in a manner that suits their income level. What is more, I'm probably more than a little jealous and resentful to see people who get to coast on their buying-based luck later in life, while I will be working until I no longer am capable of doing so. Going by a lot of the comments I see on various articles, I'm certain I'm not alone.

Rote Memorization and Literacy

2009-01-28T09:26:00.005+09:00

I'm not sure if studying psychology gives one an interest in understanding the underlying causes of things or vice versa, but one thing about my time in Japan is that it has offered me the opportunity to find new human behavioral puzzles to ponder. For instance, why don't the Japanese wear shoes in their homes? The Japanese like to conclude that they're such wonderfully clean people by nature. As someone who grew up in a multi-cultural society that embraces nurture over nature, that's an explanation I reject. Japanese people may be clean because they grew up in a culture which embraces cleanliness at a deeper level, but it's no because it is encoded in their genes. The best guess is that it has to do with the fact that they have eaten, slept, and sat on the floor during their history and what is on the floor is of paramount concern. If they'd have developed furniture which had legs, they might be wearing shoes inside as well.

Before anyone protests that they are Westerners and also do not wear shoes inside, let me say that this isn't about wearing shoes in the house (and keep in mind that the usual temperature of one's area has a huge impact on this point as well). That's actually a topic I addressed in my previous blog. It's simply an example of a cultural difference which is interesting to reflect on past the self-important or self-deprecating conclusions that are usually offered as explanations for behavioral differences.

Recently, my husband and I have been listening to psychology lectures (for university classes) and one point the lecturer made was that memory is influenced by literacy rates and the availability of reference materials and the perception of intelligence was related to the ability to memorize. In the middle ages, for instance, people with excellent memories were seen being important and very bright because few people could read and write and books were in scarce supply. The lecturer also noted that, because of ready access to information via the Internet and modern publishing techniques, we no longer see the ability to remember facts, quotes, passages, etc. as a reflection of intelligence. If we can access the information at any time, then memorizing it is a waste of mental energy. We have come to value what we can do with the information more than retaining it perfectly.

Anyone who has taken a few moments to look at the Japanese education system knows that one of the biggest features is an emphasis on rote memorization. Teachers want nothing more than for students to commit facts to memory and spit them back out when tested. There is a rigidity to Japanese thinking as a result of this which makes teaching languages cumbersome. Japanese people are conditioned by their education system to endorse the idea that their is one right answer to each question. I've actually had students insist grammatically incorrect sentences must be right because they followed some pattern the student learned which a teacher said was the "right way". Japanese learners are most comfortable when everything follows the rules, expectations are clearly understood, and there is a correct reply that they can offer which you have given them previously.

The converse of this is that students often become uncomfortable in situations where the answer was not clearly given, but is hidden in the overall content or must be derived logically from the given information. Time and again, I've had students insist the answer simply was not there because it was not overtly stated. They don't naturally make inferences because that is not something they spent a lot of time doing in school and aren't accustomed to doing it. That doesn't mean they are incapable mentally, but rather that they were simply not taught to do so and, in fact, they may be punished in school for doing so in some cases since they are taught not to question the teacher's answers or assertions.

(Note: I speak about general tendencies here and not about specific people. Clearly, there are exceptions and people are located along a continuum in their tendencies, so please don't pepper my comments with anecdotes that "prove" I must be wrong. I reach these conclusions based on having dealt with teaching and working here for two decades and also having been coerced to structure information in textbooks I wrote to cater to the most comfortable way of learning for Japanese people rather than the most effective way for speaking English well.)

I never really thought much about the value placed on fact regurgitation in Japan except that I felt it had to do with status, authority figures, possibly linguistic patterns, and Japan's political history. Yesterday though, the point in the lecture about the value of memory and literacy rang a new bell in considering this issue. Becoming literate in Japanese is a fairly daunting task with 2 phonetic alphabets of over 50 characters and thousands of logographic characters. Literacy itself is only achieved through a daunting amount of memorization and it takes about 4 years more for a Japanese child to reach the same level of reading that a Western child, who only has to deal with 26 characters, to memorize.

I started to wonder if another part of the high premium placed on memorization is the time, complexity, and difficulty the Japanese must face when becoming literate. If the perception of intelligence, the ability to memorize and literacy rates are related, then a culture where one has greater difficulty mastering the written language would certainly place a premium on memorization. While Japan currently has one of the highest literacy rates (if not the highest) in the world, that wasn't always so and this is a culture where changes in priorities come at a glacially slow pace. Even if the value of memorization when weighed against the value of a more analytical or deductive way of learning has diminished, there is likely a cultural precedent which will keep the focus on rote memorization in place.

Fifteen Minutes

2009-01-27T08:49:00.003+09:00

I'm guessing that a least a few readers are thinking I'm talking about Andy Warhol's famous line about fame with this post. Thankfully, that has nothing to do with the topic at hand. I can't think of anything I'd like much less than being famous.

For quite some time, I've been trying to add a few things back into my life that had fallen by the way side and having no success at it. I've also been struggling for various reasons to keep some good habits (like exercise) in my life due to physical problems, and having difficulties with that as well. Part of the larger issue is that my time is incredibly fragmented. I teach students face-to-face about 12 hours a week these days and do 2-6 hours of freelance work on top of that most weeks. This is all for the good because I feel very lucky to have the work that I do. It is the difference between quite modest additions to our saving and rather generous ones. However, it's not like my schedule is compact.

Adding to that part-time work is the mix of being a housewife. People who think being a housewife is just another word for hanging around the apartment and doing a little housework or cooking aren't doing it right. In order to make our current life situation as successful as possible, a lot of time has to be spent cooking, shopping, and cleaning rather than doing what is convenient and expensive. Until you cook three meals a day (and prepare lunches, make homemade bread and baked goods), clean up after them (without a dishwasher), and shop for them, you have no idea how much effort and time it takes. I don't mind doing what I have to do, but it does introduce more fragmentation of time into my day.

At some point, I decided that a little was better than none. The only way I was going to be able to add certain habits back into my day on a regular basis was to do them for small amounts of time. Starting last week, I went on a "15 minute" plan. My hope is to do a quarter hour of Japanese study, exercise (twice a day for 15 minutes, hopefully), something creative, and, eventually, meditation. So far, I've got the Japanese study back in there and the exercise. I do spend the time on creative things if you count blogging, particularly on the snack blog. However, I'd like to do skill expanding things rather than just blogging so I'm hoping to develop that habit as well.

I know that fifteen minutes isn't much time to devote to something, but sometimes tiny steps will get you there (or at least stop you from falling back). I realized that the way in which my schedule works right now requires me to achieve some goals in pretty small bites rather than big ones because it's too daunting or difficult to manage otherwise. I have often encouraged my students to do something related to English study for just 15 minutes every day rather than cram a few hours in once a week because betting exposure often is more important than for a long time. I decided that, if that advice is good for them, it's also good for me.

Behind Every Apologist

2009-01-20T22:50:00.008+09:00

Lately, there's been a bit of a flap amongst those who are paying attention about an article in the Japan Times (an English language newspaper here) from an 72-year-old teacher who asserts that discrimination is "right" for Japanese people. I'm not going to talk about the article as it speaks for itself, albeit rather inaccurately at times as some of the "examples" that are cited are factually incorrect.

Recently, my attention was brought to a response to this article by a particular blogger who I used to follow. This blogger was someone who I tried to be supportive of and assist during some difficulties during her early time in Japan, but she had some emotional problems and I decided it was best to separate myself from her and stop following her writing. I was directed to a post by her today, however, that supported the article.

At first, I was really angry. Somehow, reading this made me feel as if my energy and good intentions were wasted on someone who clearly did not deserve them. After all, if you advocate the random suffering of others based on prejudice (which is itself based on superficial and arbitrary factors), then you're sowing a bit of karma for your own random suffering. I wanted to write a response making my feelings clear, but I didn't have the guts to do it and was apprehensive about spreading negativity to no useful end.

After stewing and ruminating on this a bit, I reached some realizations about apologists in Japan. While I already knew that Japan very much does not have the market cornered on prejudice and discriminatory behavior, I do believe that it is somewhat rare among developed countries in that there is little or no societal imperative to censor one's bigotry or prejudicial responses to those who are different from oneself. This last thought propelled me along a line of thinking which has been most enlightening and educating. It made me feel that all of the emotional turmoil I experienced over this situation was worthwhile, as something meaningful was gained.

There are a lot of foreigners who are apologists for bad behavior in Japan. I always felt that this was a form of self-loathing, the manifestation of immense insecurity, or intellectual bending over backwards in order to assimilate with the culture (if only in their own minds) because of weak ego integrity or self-identity. The realization I reached was that the desire to rationalize and justify discrimination against one's own ethnic group is something else entirely, at least in some cases.

Those of us who grow up white in countries that are predominately Caucasian grow up with guilt over any feelings of prejudice that we experience. We may find ourselves growing up next to neighbors of a particular ethnic group and be rubbed the wrong way by them until we form a prejudicial stereotype of that ethnic group. Essentially, we experience the concept of familiarity breeding contempt. This prejudice cannot be acted upon because our culture instills in us a strong sense that such feelings are wrong and should not be acted upon, particularly if those feelings are possessed by someone who is from the majority holding most of the power in the culture (in many cases, the Caucasians). That doesn't stop people from having those feelings. It mainly stops them from expressing them or acting on them. I'd be surprised if there were any people in multi-ethnic democratic countries who didn't repress feelings of bigotry at some point in their lives.

Imagine those people coming to Japan where they are now the minority that is the target of unfair prejudging. For some people, this is a situation which they feel is unfair and they rage against it. They apply the empathy that they felt for minorities back home to themselves now. They develop a better understanding of what it is like for an entire group of people to be punished for the behavior of a random few. For others, the response is different. For them, this situation is an opportunity to express their repressed prejudice without appearing outwardly to be bigots. If you advocate discrimination against a group other than your own which is treated unfairly, you're a bigot. If you advocate discrimination against your own group, you get the intellectual satisfaction of flexing all your justifications for being a bigot without appearing to be one. After all, saying your own group should be treated with prejudice doesn't make you a bigot.

I realized that behind every apologist is a repressed bigot. Being a minority which is discriminated against in Japan allows you to advocate discrimination freely and provides a visceral satisfaction for the inner racist to trot out all the arguments she'd like to make for her prejudices without having to deal with any of the guilt or accusations she'd experience if she made those arguments against minorities back home. In the end, I realized that anyone who advocates discrimination against foreign people in Japan isn't acting on any beliefs in regards to prejudice that they didn't already have before coming here.

(If you want to know more about the article and read an intelligent response, you can check out Black Tokyo's reply.) Google Reader recommended this blog to me about 3 weeks ago and it's a real winner.

Little Big Man

2009-01-15T21:14:00.006+09:00

Several times in the past few months, the movie "Little Big Man" with Dustin Hoffman has aired on one of the cable channels. I've never sat through the movie in its entirety, but seeing glimpses of it has brought back a memory from high school that I've failed to lose in the shuffle of images in my mind.

Some time when I was in tenth grade, I had an English teacher who was one of what I'm sure was an uncommon breed in my rural town. He was cool, but not in the way that some teachers try too hard to be hip or cool. He was "cool" because of his utter indifference to adhering to the standards of other teachers and his inconsistency. For the sake of clarity, I will refer to this teacher as "Mr. N."

Mr. N. was so cool that he was completely bored by any work that the students did which merely fulfilled requirements. He wasn't interested in our demonstration of our understanding of the material or our general proficiency. Being entertained was part of what he wanted. If our work was competent and showed we worked hard, it wasn't enough for him. Mr. N. wanted us to show our originality above and beyond regurgitating facts. Word around the school was that he was also a big pothead. He certainly acted like one on occasion, but I wasn't really in a position to know for sure considering I was more familiar with the behavior of alcoholics than druggies (and I had no first hand experience with any substances).

Besides English, Mr. N. also taught a speech class. I remember that he liked to give us fairly eclectic assignments like getting up and doing a commercial for a product or a news show. I recall my group did a wry, clever, and dryly humorous news show that he approved of. Our group was followed by three girls who hung out together all the time and generally spent their time mocking and harassing those outside of their clique. They did a news show which mainly used the words "gay", "homo" and "fag" repeatedly and amused them endlessly. In fact, they so entertained themselves that they constantly broke out laughing and struggled to do their show. I recall that no one else laughed, even at a time when people were not nearly as open-minded or enlightened about homosexuality as they are now. The main problem was that it was all a big "in" joke for their group and the humor of their buzzwords was lost on us.

At the end of their news show, Mr. N. ripped them a new one. He spent several minutes describing exactly how obnoxious, unfunny, and stupid their work was. He reduced them to tears by the end of his evaluation and he failed them to boot. Since these girls were a thorn in multiple sides, including mine, I experienced a huge helping of schaudenfreude at that moment.

Getting back to "Little Big Man," in one of the English classes Mr. N. assigned every student in the class a different book to read. Most of them were given the normal crap that we all have to read in school like "Animal Farm". Every single person was given the type of book that ran 200 pages or so. Some of them were given books that were puny, but I was given the gargantuan "Little Big Man." I can't recall exactly how many pages it had, but it was at least 400. After class, I went up to Mr. N. and noted that I was being asked to read this monster book which was far more than anyone else had to deal with and it was about a subject I had zero interest in it to boot. I asked him if I could read a different book, and he essentially told me that I was more capable than the other students so I could handle it.

You know how in movies the teachers are always challenging their students in order to help them realize their potential and to make them feel more confidant? Real life isn't like that. I already knew I was more capable than the other students both in terms of my ability to read quickly and write well. "Challenging" me didn't reveal anything I didn't already know about myself and I slogged through that annoying book and wrote an indifferent report which stated how much I didn't like the story or the character. I felt like I had been punished for being more capable than the other students, not rewarded.

In the end, I wonder if Mr. N. just had a list of books and he was too lazy to assign me a different one. Maybe he had to go down to the school's paltry library and found 22 books that were an appropriate level for our grade and he didn't put one more extra book on the list so I got the shaft. I figure that was far more likely than he really gave a toss about expanding my horizons or helping me understand how capable I was.

What's In a Name

2009-01-13T17:26:00.003+09:00

Back when I was teaching up to 32 telephone English lessons per day, I'd occasionally get someone who would offer up his name "backwards". That is, he'd give his family name first and first name second as is the style in Japan. When I gently reminded him that when speaking English, we gave the family name last. Most students just accepted this and moved on but some insisted that they were Japanese and must give their names in the Japanese way. No amount of explaining that they would confuse business associates and friends alike if they followed Japanese convention while speaking English if they did this could convince them to give their name as first then last.

These guys (it was always men) viewed how they stated their name as a cultural turf war and they refused to give up the battle, even if the consequences could result in their confusing others or even screwing up a business deal. Keep in mind that I only taught business English back then. They wouldn't even go for the "when in Rome" argument. That is, when I speak Japanese, I follow the Japanese convention of last name, first name so as not to confuse the Japanese people and likewise they should follow their convention as long as they are speaking Japanese, but not when speaking English.

The only thing worse than a Japanese man who refuses to follow logic because he's so insecure that he feels he has to "win" a pointless cultural victory is a foreigner who when discussing some Japanese person with (only) English speakers feels the need to use Japanese naming conventions. Recently, in a discussion of a piece on Digg about Ken Shimura, one person used "Shimura Ken" in a sea of comments (and an article title) that said "Ken Shimura". These people (and it's almost always men) are all about showing you how they know something about Japanese culture that you don't and that they are either culturally acclimatized or demonstrating pointless and misguided cultural sensitivity by following the Japanese way when speaking a language and to an audience which is not Japanese. Never mind that doing so accomplishes nothing except make people think his family name is "Ken". Well, that and it shows that the speaker is, at least on some level, a douche bag.

24 Cans of Chickpeas

2009-01-09T12:30:00.005+09:00

Back when the CH and I first started buying from the Foreign Buyer's Club (FBC), they only sold food in complete cases and a lot of the items they offered were not available in Japanese markets. With access to food we hadn't seen for awhile came a lot of purchases of huge quantities of items. More often than not, canned items that we'd enthusiastically embrace at first would languish under our shelves for years until they grew rusty and outdated. I hate to imagine how much money we wasted on food that was thrown out.

These days, the need to buy an entire case of some food has been greatly lessened by the plethora of imports in run-of-the-mill Japanese shops and the FBC's changed shopping options which allow you to frequently buy single items. We try not to buy a case of anything unless we're sure that we'll eat it regularly enough to finish it off. In some situations, however, there is such a vast discrepancy between the cost of an item as a single unit in a Japanese market and the per unit price when buying a case from the FBC, that I'll leap in and buy more than I think I can make.

That is where this post comes in. When I decided to make hummus for some guests awhile back, I picked up a can of chick peas (garbanzo beans) for a whopping 400 yen ($4.39 USD). The hummus was a huge hit, and I wanted to make it again for a more reasonable price. I also wanted to be able to make Chana Masala occasionally, but not at such a high cost for something which is so low on the food chain and really should be part of a cheap, vegetarian meal. The FBC carries a store brand of garbanzo beans for about 160 yen a can, but you have to buy 24 cans at once. Before I allowed myself to buy so many, I had to make a commitment mentally to using them at regular intervals, even if it meant making a special effort and trying a variety of new recipes. The situation, incidentally, is complicated by the fact that my husband won't eat chick peas.

The first new recipe I tried was Butter Chickpea Curry, though I modified the original recipe a bit as it includes condensed tomato soup and I both do not have it available and don't like using pre-prepared food if I can avoid it. It turned out very well, but I want to make something other than hummus and Indian dishes. It's not that I don't like them, but rather that I'd like to use a variety of flavors.

I'd tried making chick pea patties once before with pretty bad results. They tasted okay, but the texture was gummy and unpleasant. This time around, I got a much better result, one that is worth keeping around and making again.

Chick pea (garbanzo bean) patties:

2 cloves fresh garlic, minced
1/2 small onion, diced
1 very, very small green pepper (piman), finely diced
1/2 large tomato, diced
1 15-ounce can of garbanzo beans/chick peas
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4-1/2 tsp. coarsely ground pepper (to taste)
1/4 tsp. cilantro
1/4 tsp. oregano
1/4 tsp. parsley
1 egg
1/2-3/4 cup dry, unseasoned bread crumbs
canola oil and butter for cooking

Heat enough canola oil to cover the bottom of a skillet. Saute the garlic over medium heat until softened and fragrant. Turn up the heat to high and cook the onions until softened. Add the peppers cook them until softened. Finally, add the tomato and cook the mixture until most of the moisture has cooked away. It'll resemble a coarse paste when finished. Stir the salt and pepper into the vegetable mixture. Keep an eye on it and make sure it doesn't burn. Turn the heat down if necessary. The moisture of each added ingredient should keep it from burning.

Put the vegetable paste in a small bowl food processor and add the parsley, cilantro, and oregano. Drain and rinse the garbanzo beans. Add them to the food processor and process it into a rough mixture. You may need to scrape down the bowl a few times. Add the egg and process until the mixture becomes a wet, loose paste. Turn this mixture into a larger bowl and stir in bread crumbs. Mix in 1/2 cup at first and allow the mixture to rest for 5 minutes and see if it is firm enough to form patties. If it's still too wet, add another 1/4 cup of breadcrumbs. It shouldn't be sticky, but it should be soft and hold its shape.

Separate the dough into 4 parts and make a flat patty from each part. Heat butter in a skillet (use oil if you like, but it'll brown and taste better with butter) and fry each patty over medium-high heat on each side until cooked through and nicely browned.

I ate mine with fresh homemade bread and butter. I think that they'd be good with mayonnaise and mustard in a sandwich, too.

A Little Morning Project

2009-01-07T10:01:00.004+09:00

One of my students once remarked that she thought that I was "good with (my) hands" because I did things like build my own simple monitor stand and paint or cover pieces of furniture on my own. Given that I have little regard for my skills in these endeavors, I thought she was giving me far more credit than I was due. Nonetheless, I do enjoy doing such things even when the results are hardly noteworthy.

When I was younger, I used to do these sorts of things all the time. Some of them were pretty good and others rather so-so. Mainly, I liked to paint murals on my bedroom walls, though I was also handy with pen and ink drawing, calligraphy, and making montages. I also used to embroider, crochet and to a much lesser extent, knit. Unfortunately, I don't remember how to do any of those things anymore.

Still, there's something very gratifying about doing something creative with your hands, even if it's unimportant or someone else's idea. This morning, during my usual time wasting on the Internet, I ran across instructions for an oil lamp made from tangerines. With mikan season in full force, I thought I'd give it a try. The instructions are here.

Taking pictures in the dark is hard, so please don't judge my blurry picture too harshly.

The main problem I have with a lot of on-line information, particularly projects and recipes, is that a lot of people aren't entirely honest about the ease, shortcomings, or desirability of the results. I'm pleased to say that this was one occasion where the project pretty much lived up to its potential. It took me about 10 minutes to do this, and about half that time was spent eating the contents of the mikan.

I made my candle about an hour ago (pictured above in its early stages) and it's still burning fine. I have a few notes though about how it burns, however. First of all, my patterned center hole looks kind of cute (at least for a first try), but it was too small. The inside of the pattern started to darken and smelled a bit burnt. I recommend cutting a bigger hole. With mine, I removed the top and just cut it larger once it started to darken up. Also, the top starts to dry out after about 40 minutes and it will look darker around the top when the lights are out and it's illuminated, giving a less even glow. With the lights on, it's still pretty much uniform in appearance, but if you want a uniform glowing ball look, you'll want to light these later rather than earlier.

The site that I got this from said that it smells faintly of orange while burning, but mikan don't seem to do that. I'm guessing other citrus fruit might do better on the aromatic front. Obviously, it's safest to put this on a plate and you absolutely have to keep an eye on it. The bottom of the mikan absorbs the oil pretty rapidly and I don't know what the consequence of this will be after hours of use. Note that I used canola oil rather than olive oil since it's cheaper and I have more on hand.

I think that 6 or 8 of these placed in a double row in the center of a table would look great for a romantic dinner or for a holiday dinner (as long as other lights like candles were on the sides for more illumination). I'll note that mine burned very dimly at first but got a good deal brighter as time went by.

Update: As the burning approached the 2-hour mark, the bottom of the mikan started to burn (like a larger wick) and the oil started to bubble and smell like burnt oil. Clearly, you can't burn these for too long, but they're good for about 90 minutes.

The Old Year, The New One

2009-01-06T10:18:00.003+09:00

I've said before that I don't make New Year's resolutions, and I don't and I didn't. I think change has to be gradual and built up to, not declared and seized by the throat. At least I believe that is the case if you want the changes to actually stick.

Depending on how you look at time, I'm either "only 44" or "already 44", and I've learned from my own life that change, particularly internal personal change, is a long, difficult and slow road. I'm not the person I was when I was 26 or 30, but I'm probably pretty much the same person I was last year. The only question is whether I've inched ahead over the last year or crept back. I'd say that in most ways I've inched ahead.

On a personal level, 2008 was, by and large, a very good year. Nothing spectacularly bad happened and that probably makes us rare compared to a lot of people who had a very bad year, particularly economically-speaking. Nothing spectacularly good happened either, but if I ask myself some important questions about personal growth, I'd say it was certainly an improvement over the previous year. Those questions mainly would be about whether I was spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually richer this year compared to the person I was in previous years, and I believe I can say yes on all three counts. By no means am I perfect, but I think I'm better than before on these points. I ask about these points because I think they're the only ones that can possibly be carried with me after this life has ended, if anything can be carried and if there is anything after this.

On a more concrete note, I will leave you with my very first meme. I have avoided memes in the past, yet I enjoy reading the replies others give in them. I guess it's simply the idea of interviewing myself rather than writing out what I have to say which has made me resist, but I'll say that I'll give that little emotional barrier up this year.

This was most recently pinched from Helen, but I've seen it on many other bloggers sites recently as well. I'd enjoy seeing this on everyone's site if they have the time or inclination to do it:

1. What did you do in 2008 that you’d never done before?
Visit a Japanese shrine on New Year's Day.

2. Did you keep your new years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I don't make resolutions.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
No, and I'm pretty sure they're all happy about that given their respective ages and situations.

4. Did anyone close to you die?
Thankfully, no.

5. What countries did you visit?
None. I didn't even leave my neighborhood last year.

6. What would you like to have in 2009 that you lacked in 2008?
Better health. More free time.

7. What date from 2008 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
November 4, 2008 - the day Obama was elected.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Managing to cook most everyday rather than ordering take out food or delivery once a week as had become a bad habit of ours.

9. What was your biggest failure?
Being too dependent on my husband for the vast majority of my happiness.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
No.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
A new and very cheap PC a month before my old one died.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?
My husband's. He has the patience of a saint and rock solid emotional stability.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
The press and media, who have seemed to delight in spreading as much gloom and doom as possible and lowered their standards steadily.

14. Where did most of your money go?
Rent and food.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
The announcement of Diablo 3.

16. What song will always remind you of 2008?
None, as I don't listen to music.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
i. happier or sadder
About the same.

ii. thinner or fatter?
About the same. (You can tell a woman created this meme by the presence of this question.)

iii. richer or poorer?
Richer

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?
Creative work.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?
Reading the Internet.

20. How will you be spending Christmas?
I worked and knew I'd be working.

22. Did you fall in love in 2008?
I'm always in love with my husband. This never changes.

23. How many one-night stands?
Now I can tell this was written by a single woman. :-p Not applicable.

24. What was your favorite TV program?
The Adventures of Robin Hood from 1955, which I discovered late this year.

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
No.

26. What was the best book you read?
Walking Through Walls by Philip Smith

27. What was your greatest musical discovery?
None.

28. What did you want and get?
Kindness, compassion, and friendship

29. What did you want and not get?
Better health.

30. What were your favorite films of this year?
No new films really jumped out at me.

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I don't remember well, but I think I was just lazy and had my husband do everything.

32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
A new and healthy body.

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2008?
I could care less about fashion (and this is the third sign that this meme was written by a woman).

34. What kept you sane?
My husband, sister, and friend, Shawn.

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
Oh, please. (Now I wonder if this meme was written by a 15-year-old girl.)

36. What political issue stirred you the most?
I've spent most of my year trying not to get too stirred up politically, but I'd say that the lack of adequate welfare policies to assist the poor, homeless and those suffering job losses in several major developed countries has troubled me on and off all year.

37. Who did you miss?
My former boss, Darryl.

38. Who was the best new person you met?
One of my new students who is fun to discuss a variety of topics with.

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2008.
That death comes as a surprise no matter how old you or those around you are. No one leaves this existence happily of their own volition.

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:
This is tough since I don't listen to music anymore.

Phases

2009-01-05T07:58:00.007+09:00

My life in Japan has gone through phases. Most people only know me as I live in my current phase of life here in Tokyo. In the current phase, my focus is on domestic life, particularly on cooking, cleaning, and working from my apartment. My hobbies tend to center on the computer and dealing with my health issues as best I can. However, there was a phase in my life when a lot of my interest and hobbies revolved around sumo wrestling.

For several years, my husband and I would watch sumo as much as possible when it was shown on television. At the very least, we watched the Japanese language "Sumo Digest" which aired late at night on weekdays. On the weekends, we watched the bilingual (English and Japanese) sumo matches that were aired live on NHK. The earliest matches we watched included the great Chiyonofuji, though we saw him more toward the end of his career.

Later, we started to go to the kokugikan in Ryogoku to watch the matches in person. We had to get up very early in the morning and wait in a long line for 2-3 hours to get one of the 300 or so cheap (about ¥2500) tickets that were sold the morning of the matches, but it was worth it because we could really enjoy the atmosphere of the experience as well as pick up souvenirs. We still have a few cups in our cabinet from that time and some reproductions of the framed photos of champions that hang around the kokugikan in our closet (which were pretty expensive). After a few years, we were able to make a connection with a magazine editor of an English language sumo magazine called "Sumo World" and buy his press box tickets sometimes. His box included 4 seats with Western-style chairs and a table which was at the back of the first level of the two-leveled stadium. The tickets were about ¥8,000 each and we had to buy all 4 for the day, but it gave us a chance to invite friends along to enjoy the matches with us. At that time, sumo was very popular so getting tickets was difficult. We went sometimes even if there were just the two of us. I'm sure that we blew a lot of money on sumo in those days.

As our enthusiasm for sumo grew, we started to write reports about each day's matches for an online bulletin board service called GEnie. It would take hours to detail the matches. During this time, we also took part in a tour of a sumo stable (Tomozuna beya) that allowed us to watch a brutal early morning practice session, see the inside of a stable, and eat chanko nabe with the head of the stable. After seeing the practice, it is easy to see how a wrestler might die from injuries inflicted during practice (as has happened in the last few years) because it's rough and they get hit with a stick.

As the years went by, the "old guard" of sumo that was fighting when we first became interested in it gave way to a new group that included Wakahanada (later Wakanohana) and Takahanada (later Takanohana). As these young wrestlers became more popular and successful, the tone of sumo changed. Their stable, Futagoyama beya, had many good wrestlers in the top division. Since wrestlers from the same stable don't fight one another, Waka and Taka as well as their stable-mates didn't have to face as many tough opponents. Sumo became less competitive and consequently less interesting. Also, as proud Japanese fans embraced the young brothers as champions, they became more overtly racist in their responses to foreign wrestlers like Akebono and Konishiki, who are both from Hawaii. When one of the Americans lost a match, the Japanese crowd far too often went wild with glee roaring their approval and tossing their cushions at the ring.

The ugliness of the racist reaction and the lack of strong competition eventually caused my husband and I to lose interest in sumo after being ardent fans for about a decade. These days, we don't watch sumo at all. One of the reasons for this is that there is a lot of corruption and "fixed bouts" (yao-cho), but the fact that the number and type of competitors are controlled to make sure foreign wrestlers can never become too dominant leaves a bad taste in our mouths. When Akebono and Konishiki were both competing, the sumo association changed the rules to make it more difficult for foreigners to compete by making the age at which someone could join a stable much lower (19, I believe). This made it far less likely that a foreigner would be recruited since most of them join when they are older. This rule may have since changed, but it was such a blatant effort to control foreign competition that it demonstrated that the sumo association was more interested in promoting their agenda (making sure Japanese wrestlers were highly ranked rather than good competitors were involved in bouts) than making the sport compelling to watch.

We still know a lot about the sport, but we don't watch it anymore. In fact, it's the only aspect of Japanese culture which we know far better than most average Japanese people. We'll always have fond memories of the time when we were fanatical about sumo and I'm sure it helped us learn a lot about Japan in our earlier time here. I'm also pretty sure that it fueled at least some of the CH's interest in reading kanji and perhaps is one of the reasons why he reads Japanese better than he speaks it.

I also remember that time as a point when the CH and I formed our first mutual interest in something together. Up until then, all of our other interests came into our relationship fully formed and few of them were entirely mutual aside from record collecting (and even then, we collected different records). There's something really satisfying about being able to prattle on about something you both are completely into and sumo was our first experience that involved something other than ourselves which allowed us to do that.

The Golden Screw

2009-01-04T15:53:00.000+09:00

Quite some time ago, I read a book about the history of IBM. Back when computers were mysterious behemoths residing mainly in laboratories or corporate computer rooms rather than compact little boxes on the desks of the average person, IBM ruled the computer roost without challengers.

One of the things they used to do to keep production streamlined was make one fully functional monster machine model which they sold to all customers at different prices. Depending on the functionality the customer required and how much they were willing to pay, they disabled parts of the machine to customize it to the specifications the customer ordered. That meant there was a computer with far greater functionality sitting in offices that was intentionally hobbled so as not to do all it could do.

When the customer was ready to pay for an upgrade, an IBM technician was called in to perform the task. While the companies believed they were getting new software or hardware installations, the truth was that the tech person was actually just turning "the golden screw". That is, they enabled some functionality which was always there but turned off. This way of doing business allowed IBM to get additional revenue while investing very little in the products they'd already sold. They called this turning the golden screw because it was profitable and literally sometimes involved the turn of a screw, though it probably also at least carried the subtext of gouging the customer.

Recently, I have experienced my own firsthand encounter with a golden screw though not at the hands of IBM. My experience was at the hands of Apple. The CH bought an iPod Touch around spring of last year and has been using it for its basic functions since then. He told me that he'd have to upgrade its OS at a price in order to enable it to use other applications. While I'm accustomed to paying for OS upgrades on my computer, I pay for them in order to get the OS itself to acquire new functionality. For instance, you get an back-up utility, a better search function, faster operation, or a better interface. The OS itself is improved and it has nothing to do with running other software as the OS generally doesn't hold you back from running other programs made by other companies. It's the responsibility of Adobe, for instance, to make Photoshop run under the current OS, not for Apple to make their OS so it run Photoshop.

I have never needed to upgrade a device or computer in order to be able to run someone else's software. In the case of the iPod Touch/iPhone, one has to pay for an OS upgrade in order to get the device to run third party apps, not because some new desired functionality is coming with the device's operating system. That means that Apple is essentially turning the golden screw. The device's hardware is capable of running such apps, but it is hobbled in its ability to run other software until you buy an upgrade you don't want.

Yes, I know there was some added functionality with the new OS, but it's mainly for Apple's benefit like being able to use the AppStore and MobileMe (essentially enabling us to pay for more services by paying for an upgrade) or fixing some of the shortcomings of previous versions of their software, particularly the e-mail and web browser. In other words, we're paying to get what should have been in place from the start, rather than getting some great shiny and new stuff with a very few unexciting exceptions. The only "improvement" we wanted was to enable third party application installation.

Frankly, this strikes me as incredibly lame on Apple's part. They squeeze another 1200 yen out of us because we want to be able to read books using free software like Stanza. If we were getting some great new OS capability on the iPod Touch, that'd be one thing. If Apple were selling us Stanza, that'd be another, but they're just wheedling a little more money out of us so we can install a third party application and can offer some software polishes for some imperfectly implemented apps with the customer footing the bill. Apple used to offer OS upgrades for free, even major ones. Now, they dominate the MP3 market sufficiently to give us the golden screw just like IBM once had the mainframe market in its back pocket.

Justifiable Conclusions

2009-01-03T09:26:00.005+09:00

Several weeks ago one of my students told me that a friend of hers, who is also Japanese and 31 years old, married an American while residing in Texas on what I'd guess is a student visa of some sort. This is certainly not peculiar on the face of things. The odd thing is that the man she married is 24 and still a student, and her friend only works part-time. That means she married a person with no income and she herself has a limited income as a teacher of some sort of musical instrument.

My student did not approve of this arrangement and felt that her friend, well, actually one of her acquaintances from high school, had acted imprudently. I'm sorry to say that I'm just as guilty of judging the people in this situation without knowing much about them. I judge them by their age discrepancy and employment status (or lack thereof). I reach conclusions about her motives based on the circumstances and his intelligence and sophistication based on the fact that he's from Texas and married while still in school.

This post isn't about whether or not my conclusions are reasonable or justifiable, but rather about the fact that I shouldn't be judging them at all. While the circumstances are peculiar and appear ill-advised, I don't know either of these people except a few bare bones facts. Beyond that, their life choices aren't there for me to weigh in on and I'd hate it if someone had done the same thing to me when I chose my partner. Okay, the truth is that other people did do the same thing to me when I chose my partner.

In fact, it's been so long since the CH and I first fell for each other and our relationship so wildly successful that I rarely reflect back on all the warnings and fear for my future that were sent my way back when I fell head over heels for a guy I'd never even met face-to-face or talking to in real time. For those who weren't following my old blog and don't know this tale, the CH and I were penpals who exchanged cassette tapes and talked to each other back in the days before VOIP, instant messaging, or even e-mail. Friends to whom I revealed the situation felt I was making a huge and glaringly obvious mistake, particularly when I went off to Japan to spend a month with this person whose eyes I'd never looked into but to whose voice I'd spent countless hours listening.

Given the surface facts, I'm sure my friends reached what they felt were justifiable conclusions, but they were wrong. They didn't know him at all and perhaps they didn't know me well enough. They certainly didn't know what it was like when we interacted. So, I'm going to wag a finger at myself for judging this couple who I've never met based on a few facts and try to remember that the same was once done to me and everyone's expectations of the worst were wrong then and I'm probably wrong about this couple now.

Dining With the "Enemy"

2009-01-02T08:57:00.003+09:00

Earlier this week, the CH and I had dinner with his brother and his Japanese wife. This is the brother-in-law whose behavior contributed directly to the demise of my former blog and is essentially responsible for the birth of a different blog. I've had problems with him during most of my time in Japan, but he suggested to the CH that we all get together and I wanted to at least try for the CH's sake.

To be honest, I was surprised that the brother-in-law suggested a get-together. Despite the fact that my back problems have kept me from working outside the house and have seen me be essentially bound to my immediate neighborhood for the last two and a half years, I think he believes our not visiting his apartment for social reasons is a personal affront, though hopefully my telling him that I haven't left a limited area for a long time will make him understand that it isn't personal. However, it's generally been the case that he hasn't believed my claims in the past and this is one of the reasons he hasn't suggested coming by our place much. I believe he wants the mountain to come to Muhammad as often as the reverse and he feels he's done more than his share of trekking to our particular mountain.

At any rate, he seems to be rather oblivious to how his behavior has affected me or has decided to pretend it all didn't happen now that time has passed so we all got together and tried to make the best of it. There were some high points and only one low one. The high points mainly related to the fact that his wife may yet "train" some of his more obnoxious behaviors out of him.

One of the problems I've had with my brother-in-law in the past has been with his tendency to treat possessions like they are part of a status competition. That is, he mocks and makes fun of old items in our apartment like our ancient 15-year-old CRT television, old computers, or even the speed of our modem. When he started in on that the evening of the dinner, his wife mumbled something about her not wanting him to do that anymore and him saying he'd try not to. I was glad to see that she was pointing out his bad behavior and attempting to get him to stop it, though he did say the CH and I were "family" so he could do what he wanted.

Rather than get angry at his competitive possession fixation this time, I simply said that I'd rather have an extra $2,000 in my savings account than a new television and that television quality really wasn't that important to us. Since he mentioned the T.V. twice, I responded with this twice and his wife was shaking her head in agreement both times. The brother-in-law has a fixation on high-priced man toys, and I have a feeling that his wife may not feel this is for the best. Clearly she is not the sort of person who cares how new your gadgets are when dealing with others and I really respect that. Another brief discussion of taking one's own lunch to work rather than eating out again seemed to indicate that they may not concur 100% on how money is handled in the relationship as she agreed with us that its fiscally more prudent to carry your own rather than patronize local fast food.

Generally speaking, my brother-in-law showed the same levels of opinionated selfishness that I have come to expect, but having his wife there really helped. She's clearly more sensible and down to earth than he. Though she didn't go out of her way to be confrontational with him (as would be expected), she also didn't hold back on agreeing with us on various points.

The "low points" for me included my slipping up and saying he was "close minded" about the effect of things like reiki treatments (which his wife studies and practices) and therefore it would never work with him as he would actively block any benefits to validate his strong view that it doesn't work. He contended that it came across as a generalized comment that he's close minded about everything and I asked the CH if this was so and he said he believed it could be seen that way. I apologized for having spoken in a manner which could be viewed as a big insult and got a very ungracious, loud and overly exaggerated "thank you" for it. It was clear that he felt this apology was some sort of victory on his part rather than me saying I misspoke and regretted the impression it created. Once more, it's as if this was a competition and he felt my apology was a "win" in his column and I got a bit of "victory cheering" from him for my troubles.

Other than that, we were treated to rants about how the public services, particularly the trash not being picked up during the holidays, were a major inconvenience to him. I guess the idea that these people doing these unpleasant jobs should be entitled to enjoy their holidays along with the rest of the country (including him) wasn't important to him. We were treated to arguments that the shops managed to stay open and that there was no reason they couldn't do some sort of rotation or temporary service so he didn't have to hold back his trash for a few days. My response that trash handling is probably more complex than post card delivery and that people want to be with their families while the family members are also not working fell on deaf ears. After all, he was being slightly inconvenienced.

I'd say the dinner went well. The food I made, pork roast and Welsh onion, potato soup, and carrot salad, was a big hit as was the wine choice we made, though my husband got a big headache later from the wine. They also generously brought us several gifts including cookies, bread, caramel pastries, and a cheesecake (though the cheesecake was real "cheese" flavor and not cream cheese so it's pretty weird). I don't know if I made any progress in healing the relationship with my brother-in-law, but I did learn that I like his wife and have hope that she'll file away some of his social sharp edges through time and, at the very least, I don't think things have gotten any worse.

New Year 2009

2009-01-01T16:50:00.007+09:00

Salesgirls offering up good luck charms for the coming year pose amiably for my CH.

No, I haven't fallen off of the face of the planet, nor have I abandoned my blog. I've just been so busy during December that I felt like I was going to drop over from exhaustion and lack of sleep (due to back pain and related problems). However, hopefully, I'm well on my way to normality and can come back to blogging.

This year was pretty much the usual for the CH and I. We took no note of the festivities around us at night and he ventured out and took photos the next day. The full collection (of which the pictures here are but a sampling) can be accessed via my Picasa web gallery. You can access the Asagaya 2009 collection in this post or you can use the links to the galleries on the right.

At the shrine, there was the usual surreal mix of the trivial with the spiritual as exemplified by this chocolate covered banana stand just outside the entrance to the shrine.

One has to wonder if prayers go more smoothly with colorful sprinkles on one's banana.

This seemed a big year for dogs to be taken to the shrine. If you peruse the entire collection of pictures, you'll see a lot of people dressed their dogs for the occasion. Of course, the dogs above were rather indifferent to the surroundings and did what dogs naturally do.

People write their wishes on the back of these wooden placards (only 500 yen/$5.51) and hang them near the shrine.

This year is the year of the ox, or the cow if you prefer. The CH bought me one of these placards (the more stylized one) as well as a small ceramic cow bell to add to my collection. I have a dragon and a tiger already since I was born in the former and the CH in the latter.

I want to write a post about the past year and the upcoming year, but I don't have the motivation after uploading and dealing with the web album. However, we did buy a fukubako ("lucky box") this year and I reviewed it on my Japanese snack reviews blog. If you'd like to see what goodies were in this year's Mister Donut box, you can mosey on over there and read it.

All I Want For Christmas

2008-12-25T08:45:00.004+09:00

When I was a kid, all I wanted for Christmas was toys. A tree with a boatload of wrapped gifts filled me with excitement. When I was a young adult, the shine started to wear off a bit, but I was still pretty happy with getting big ticket "toys" like a stereo or tech gadgets. As I entered my later 20's and 30's, I felt a hunger every year to return to the excitement I used to feel at getting and giving "stuff".

I'm pleased to say that the transition is complete and I don't have a desire to receive things at all anymore. I still have a desire to give, but I'm satisfied to do so in relatively small, but non-perfunctory ways. My choices are based one what I think people might enjoy but can't obtain for themselves easily (or at all), not on impressing with packaging style or price tag guesses.

This year, I did "receive". One of my students gave me pound cake. Another gave me a small bunch of flowers. Another gave me apples, another a giant butter pear, and yet another persimmons. My husband got wine, cookies, and chocolates from his students. My sister gave me much needed articles of clothing. It's nothing big, but it's more than I expected and as much as I could have wanted.

The only thing I really want at this time of year is more time with my husband, and that is what I'm going to get. Starting from tomorrow, he'll have 12 days off and we'll have the luxury of spending most of the day together during that time. I'm still working during some of the holiday, but by and large we'll have a plethora of hours together. Having time with the people you love is really the best gift. Getting over the materialistic part of Christmas helps you appreciate that.

I hope everyone has a really wonderful time with whatever free time they have this Christmas. :-)

The Chicken or the Egg

2008-12-21T14:22:00.003+09:00

When I was studying psychology, one of the points we discussed was whether or not biological responses followed psychological reactions or whether the psychological reactions were the result of biology. That is, when you are scared into a "fight or flight" reaction, do you first experience the release of adrenaline and then feel fear, or do you feel fear then the adrenaline is released?

At the time, I recall thinking that it didn't really matter all that much. I also thought that it was an odd question to ask as I was sure that feeling preceded neurochemical release. As I look back on the question, I realize that there may have been a deeper issue to explore. If biology precedes psychological responses, then our emotions and responses are mere slaves to our internal chemical processes. The fact that people often experience mood swings in accord with things like hormones and blood sugar levels definitely supports this idea.

On the other hand, I don't know that we can say we are slaves to our biology. As I sit here typing, I'm slowly being overtaken by post-meal sluggishness. I know my tired feeling is being set off by biology and I wonder to what extent I can reject that response and push my body and mind not to act on this all too common response to having recently eaten. Soldiers have been trained to effectively maintain their core body temperature in freezing water. They can suppress their need to shiver and keep their trunk warm so that they will not experience a slowing of their heart rate so rapidly. If we can "think" our way out of biological response, surely this would encourage the idea that our feelings and mental application are masters of biology rather than the other way around.

I wonder if, in the end, the entire question of which comes first is at its heart a debate over a mindset that reduces man to the sum of his chemistry or one that elevates him to master over his particular biological domain. One viewpoint renders us powerless and the other grants us a great deal of power over ourselves. What is much more interesting to me than which is true is what would motivate a particular person to embrace one theory or another. These days, I'm much more inclined to view us as capable of influencing our biology should we apply ourselves to doing so, particularly when it comes to mastering emotions and responses to stimuli.

Christmas Baking 2008

2008-12-20T19:15:00.004+09:00

Two finished bags in front of a bag of treats for my husband to take to work (he assembles his bags at work).

I'd apologize for the lack of updates if I didn't think everyone was just as busy as I and therefore not really missing the distraction of my posts. I've been on a baking treadmill over the last week and a half or so getting baking goods together as gifts for students.

Last year, the CH and I gave students a goodie bag with a variety of chocolates and peanut butter cookies. This cost quite a lot and I'm not sure that the students necessarily were keen on the chocolates anyway. They seemed to be far more impressed by the cookies. This year, we decided to go with bags of only homemade goodies both because we felt the students would enjoy them more and it costs about 1/3 of what buying a bunch of candy cost.

Because of this, I've been trying to streamline the baking process and string it out so that things are fresher. Instead of baking 6 dozen cookies and freezing the finished product, I made a double batch of the dough, split it into 6 discs and froze the dough. When we need more cookies, I thaw out the dough and bake up as many as needed for the following day. All in all, this is a labor saver and it also spares me one day of absolutely exhausting baking. One of the biggest drawbacks of of living in Japan is that the oven is so small that you can't get make many cookies at once. I can't even bake two trays at once because they won't bake properly.

What I'm saving time-wise on the peanut butter cookie front, I'm losing on the fact that 3 baked goods take more time than one. Well, "baked goods" isn't really quite right because one of the items is Rice Krispies treats. Yes, I know they are low rent and considered pretty nasty by a lot of people, but the truth is that the students really enjoy them. One of the CH's students liked them so much when she had them during a homestay that she special ordered boxes of the cereal so she could try to make them for herself in Japan. Unfortunately for her, they were spoiled by Japanese marshmallows (which are not make with gelatin like American ones so they don't lend the same texture or flavor to the Rice Krispies treats).

The third item is brownies. Tonight, I made the third pan of them and I think that should be the last of them, but there's still more need for pans of buttery molten marshmallow and another tub of peanut butter dough. We aren't giving the students that much per person (5 cookies, 1 brownie and 1 treat for the CH's students), but when you're doling things out to about 30 people, it really starts to add up. Anyway, I'm hoping to see some free time starting the last week of December and hopefully can get back to life as usual.

Tiny Bouqet

2008-12-18T19:40:00.007+09:00

One of my students surprised me today with a small, but extremely beautiful bouquet as a Christmas gift.

The colors are incredibly deep and lovely.

There are some tiny pine branches in with the flowers that give it a nice Christmas feel. It really brightens up my desk and I very much appreciate the student's thoughtfulness.

"Fomp"

2008-12-15T08:14:00.003+09:00

Yesterday morning, one of my student was pecking at her electronic dictionary to find a translation for a particular concept or word and she showed me the result in the dictionary. The result was "fomp". I never heard of such a word so I checked at dictionary.com and it turned up no result. The urban dictionary has three results, but I'm pretty sure that none of them (particularly not the extremely disgusting last one) apply to the relationship between her grandmother and her family.

For years now, I've been telling Japanese people that they cannot trust their Japanese to English dictionaries and that the results they get have to be double-checked with an English only dictionary. In particular, I've encouraged them to check example sentences when looking up a word to check the proper context in which various words are used. For years now, I've been looked back at as if I were making up fairy tales. The students simply don't believe that their dictionaries, which are the finest technology major electronics companies offer, are more fallible than their teacher who is just some schmo who ended up teaching English in Japan.

I'm pretty sure that the three cornerstones of bad English in Japan are:

Inaccurate dictionaries and textbooks full of bad translations.
Japanese teachers of English who aren't even close to fluent and teach their students all of their mistakes.
The plethora of mangled Engrish and Japangrish which saturates the culture and makes people think that certain phrases are proper English use.

In regards to that last note, I used to see and read people repeating crap English used in big advertising campaigns. About 15 years ago, JR did a big advertising campaign where they wrote "traing" ("train" + "ing") to promote the idea of "let's travel by train" (because "ing" is used for gerunds). I started to get reports from students around that time with nouns that had "ing" added to the end of them, aping the expansive ad campaign. Another contamination by advertising I still experience to this day is "charm point". Students will ask what my "charm point" is as if this is a set concept everyone understands. What they really mean is "outstanding feature".

I guess that the mangled English is a two-edged sword. The presence of so much English (or "Engrish") provides a point of reference for students which increases their overall ability to understand and relate to English. On the other side though, breaking bad habits or the use of incorrect phrases, words and grammar is pretty much impossible. Once a Japanese high school teacher drills students to say things like, "I have ever been to (place)," it is completely beyond my magic teaching skills to break the student from using this incorrect phrasing.

Someone really should do something about the dictionaries though. There's really no excuse for that besides being too cheap or sloppy to get the information in there correctly.

Happy Birthday, Sharon

2008-12-13T16:35:00.002+09:00

My sister was born on the 13th, which unfortunately subjected her to a lot of comments from parents and relatives when that date happened to fall on a Friday. We all know how Friday the 13th is supposed to be so unlucky. She was also born in December, which meant that the proximity of her birthday to Christmas meant people often didn't shop especially for her birthday. My mother would usually pull out an extra Christmas gift and give it to her early.

On the bright side, when your birthday is this close to the biggest holiday of the year, you can look forward to it because you'll get a week off from school in the near future. For me, my birthday was 3-5 days before school started so I never felt entirely great about its arrival.

My sister is 46 this year and I'm sure she wouldn't like me to remind her of it, but I'm glad she's been around for all of my life. The truth is that she has provided better stability and a closer familial bond than my parents ever did. These days we talk about 5 days a week, sometimes more, and I'm immensely grateful for the technology that allows us to have such a bond when we live on nearly opposite sides of the planet. I'm also immensely grateful that she's my sister and hope this is a special day for her because she deserves it. Happy birthday, Sharon, and all of my love to you.

Surrendering Control

2008-12-13T08:21:00.004+09:00

Yesterday, one of my students showed up with a nasty welt across her right hand. It looked like she had a rather severe accident with a car door or raked her hand across something, but it was actually a long, nasty crescent-shaped burn. When I asked her how it happened, she said it had to do with oden. Oden is various vegetables and fish stuff floating in a boiling hot vat of smelly liquid which is often sold in convenience stores in open vats when it gets cold. I don't like it, but most people (even foreigners) love it.

An oden-related accident is no surprise because the places that sell it have to keep the liquid hot to keep all the airbourne bacteria falling into the open air boiling boxes at bay. I figured she probably tried to snarf it down too rapidly and spilled some on herself. The story was actually a little different.

She told me she safely transported her oden home and planned to eat it later by microwaving it. She also said that her dog, a bulldog, loved oden and that if she ate it while her dog was around, the dog would sit next to her as she ate and drool at her or bark to beg. So, she waited until her dog was asleep and microwaved her oden. Because she was trying to hurry and eat it as fast as possible so the dog wouldn't smell it and wake up and come over to beg, she yanked it out of the microwave and spilled it on her hand and burned herself badly. The dog woke up and she ended up feeding most of it to the dog anyway.

One could be flabbergasted at how a person could surrender control of their life to a dog in this way. I certainly would not try to gobble down a favored dish clandestinely to keep a pet from begging for it nor would I feed most of it to the pet when I failed, but I do think we all allow the expectations, wishes, and actions of others to control us. Sometimes this is a form of loving accomodation which is good for a relationship as surrendering control shows someone you care more about their needs than your own. I'm guessing this is why my student, who I think loves her dog more than her husband, did what she did. Sometimes though, we surrender control out of fear of the consequences if we do not or as a result of our own insecurity when it comes to asserting our needs. I know I've been guilty of both of those.

I told my student that it was a good thing that she didn't have any children. If the behavior of her dog was enough to have her caving in like this, I can only imagine the influence children might have on her.

1965 or 2008?

2008-12-12T07:05:00.002+09:00

Awhile ago, the CH started asking his students a question about the world they'd prefer to live in. He asked his students if they would prefer to live in the social environment of 1965, where the roles of men and women were more clearly divided, or if they'd prefer to stick with the social situation of 2008. Unsurprisingly, most of the men chose 1965 and most of the women chose 2008. In 1965, men still operated in the world of lifetime employment while the women were at home supporting them as wives and mothers. It was a time when men were men and women were trapped in the limits society imposed upon them.

Most people feel that the world was a better place in their youth and older people often lament that people were more civilized back when. Personally, I don't have a sense that people were any better when I was younger. I think they're just obnoxious in a different way now compared to the past. I do believe there was a time which predated my birth by a fair amount of time when people were taught more rigid notions of social interaction and "manners" which discouraged them from indulging their emotions every time someone bumped into them or treated them rudely.

Some Americans have balked for quite some time at the idea of rules of manner. The main reason for this is that many such rules evolved as a means of showing deference to status in other cultures and we like to pretend we are all equals. One way to assert your equality is to not treat a person with false respect simply based on perceived status. Personally, I feel this has been a case of throwing out the baby with the bath water. Good manners are about treating others with the same level of consideration and kindness you'd like to be treated with, not showing that someone is owed some level of deference.

Growing up, I wasn't role-modeled any manners at all. Neither of my parents ever said "please" or "thank you" to me or my sister for anything, though they at times insisted that we do so. In fact, as an adult, I have never once received a word of gratitude for anything I have given or done for my parents. Every year, no matter what Christmas present I sent them, they always complained about it. If I sent coffee, it was the wrong kind. If I bought clothes, they didn't really need them or the style was lacking. If I sent candy, they really didn't want more sweets around. Eventually, I just gave up and relied on my sister's opinion that candy (I send See's) was good because my parents always ate it up and enjoyed it, even while they complained about having received it and never offered a word of gratitude.

Because I so rarely experienced good manners from my parents, and the children around me were cruel and obnoxious (as kids often are), I don't have some idealized sense that the world was a better place way back when. If I could choose between now and an era from the past, I think I'd be pretty indifferent to whatever the cultural landscape was regarding how people treated one another or the conditions we live in. Grudgingly, I'd have to say that we probably are better off now world-wide as a species than we have been for quite some time in terms of material quality of living and the potential to control health, food supply, and energy resources.

While there are a lot of problems with resource management and the environment, our ability to deal with them is much greater than ever before. Yes, people are starving and suffering all over the world in various places, but that was happening at every stage of human history. The difference now is that we are more aware of it than before. It used to be that people died from disease, war and starvation somewhere else on the globe and we had no idea what was going on. Now, we know every detail and have the technology to intervene in at least some cases. So, if I could choose any year or time to live in, I guess I'd choose now, but mainly because I can't find it in myself to idealize the past, no matter how much I'd like to be able to do so.

Christmas Decorations 2008

2008-12-08T15:27:00.008+09:00

The wooden "Merry Christmas" sign was a present from my husband a long time ago as was the clear candy dish (and the almond roca wrapped in gold in the dish). He also procured the Simpsons Christmas mugs. The acorn candles actually came from my brother-in-law in more cordial days.

Note: Any picture can be seen in a larger version by clicking on it.

Every year around this time, the web is full of pictures of elegantly appointed decorations in homes that resemble none that I have ever stepped foot in. That's not to say that such homes do not exist. I'm sure they do belong to people who have figured out a way to live life in perfectly color coordinated, immaculate, perfectly lit houses that do not require trash cans, power outlets, cables, cords, or most common electronic household items. I'm sure of the latter because those things are always absent from those gorgeous houses with their perfect holiday decor.

This paper tree was a gift from my friend the wombat stuffer last year. He sent it to me along with a bunch of other goodies after listening to me complain for ages about all the things I didn't or couldn't have in Japan. My students think the tree is very cute. I think it's a wonderful reminder of friendship.

So, every year, I drag out my box of ragtag, hodgepodge, mixed up Christmas decorations and attempt to adorn my apartment in an aesthetically pleasing manner. They may not look perfect, but almost all of them are reminders of thoughtfulness, consideration, generosity and kindness on the part of others.

The gold candles and the Santa candle holder were gifts from the CH. The gold candles smell wonderful, like holly and berries. They're the last of huge box of gorgeous candles the CH got me and I refuse to burn them because I want to remember their scent and the larger gift they came with. The snowman between the candles were from the wombat stuffer. It reminds me of Calvin & Hobbes as well as my good friend the stuffer.

So, my decorations may not be perfect or impressive, but they make me happy, and they put me in the right spirit.

The round tree candle holder was also from the CH. I love candles. It's a beautiful holder, but you can't really tell from this picture. The Skull plushie gets a blue Santa cap at this time of year.

Today, I went out and bought bags for student baked goodies offerings this year. I also mixed up a huge quantity of peanut butter cookie dough and froze discs of it for (near) future cookie making.

The CH gave me the plates, holders, candles and wooden NOEL train a long time ago. The lights are actually new. I bought them from Amazon Japan and didn't realize they were musical lights. Fortunately, there's a switch to turn off the music.

In past years, I've often waited for the spirit to motivate me, but this year I decided to make make the spirit on my own. I'm hoping it sticks with me for the duration.

Absolutely Inauthentic Chicken Pulao

2008-12-07T19:09:00.005+09:00

One of my favorite Indian dishes is chicken biryani. Prior to coming to Japan, I had never sampled Indian food because I was born in a rural area and there were no ethnic restaurants in the area during most of the time I lived there. In fact, there wasn't even a Chinese place within reasonable distance of my home until a few years before I moved to California and married.

I've had biryani at several Indian places in Japan and though it is often different, it's always been good. Unfortunately, it is also quite expensive, so I rarely have it from restaurants these days. Now that my income is about 1/3 of what it was when I worked full-time, I have to be mindful of these things.

I've been trying to create something close to the biryani I enjoyed at restaurants for some time and have been messing around with a chicken pulao recipe on Quick Indian Cooking for months and months trying to get it to come out somewhere in the neighborhood of the tasty dishes I've had from the kitchens of actual Indian cooks. I made the recipe pretty much as it was given at first, but I think none of the spices I can buy locally are fresh or potent enough to really do a good job. I've tinkered with it and finally come up with something I believe works with the quality and type of spices one can buy in Tokyo. By the way, the reason this is pulao and not biryani is that the rice is cooked with everything else. In biryani, it is cooked separately. If you're interested in authentic Indian cuisine, then I strongly recommend Quick Indian Cooking. The recipes are excellent and easy.

My recipe is quite good, though it certainly is not easy. This is probably the 7th or 8th time I've made this dish and this is the last version. I'm quite pleased with it. The tomato paste really brought something to it and I think this was the best mix of spices considering my limits in terms of freshness and options.

Absolutely Inauthentic Chicken Pulao

for marinade and meat:

2 cups low fat yogurt
1/4 inch fresh ginger
2 small garlic cloves (or 1 big fat one)
1 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. coarse black pepper
2 large raw chicken breasts (1/2 breasts, actually) cut into bite-size pieces

for cooking:

1/4 inch fresh ginger
2 small cloves garlic (or 1 big fat one)
1 cinnamon stick broken into 4 pieces
1.5 star anise (mine are fragmented such that all the points are broken off, so about 8 "tips")
2 small bay leaves (or 1 large one - though I prefer 2 small)
2 cardamom pods
2 tbsp. tomato paste (in Japan, you can buy this in individual packets with 1 tbsp. in each)
1 tsp. cumin seeds
1 tsp. turmeric
1/2 tsp. hot garam masala (use regular if you're sensitive to hot spices)
salt to taste
2 large thinly sliced onions (or 3 small ones)
2 cups uncooked rice
4 cups chicken stock
vegetable oil (any unflavored oil) or ghee (clarified butter) as needed (I used Canola oil - but I bet ghee would be tastier and give it that restaurant greasiness)
1 very small diced green pepper (optional)
cashews (optional, as garnish)

Marinade instructions:
Put the yogurt into a bowl with a lid. Add the salt and pepper. Blitz all of the garlic and ginger in a small bowl food processor (or mince the garlic and grate the ginger). Add half of the ginger and garlic to the marinade and set the other half aside to use in cooking. Whisk the spices into the yogurt. Add the chicken, cover with lid, and allow to marinate in the refrigerator for 2 hours to overnight.

Cooking instructions:
Add about 1-2 tbsp. oil to cover the bottom of a large, deep skillet. Heat the oil over medium-high heat then fry the bay leaves, cardamom pods, star anise, cumin seeds and cinnamon stick pieces until they become fragrant. Create a little free space in the pan and add the ginger and garlic that you previously set aside. Fry the fresh spices until they are aromatic and lightly brown. Be careful not to burn any of the spices. If they start to cook too quickly, turn down the heat.

Add the sliced onions to the spices and stir. Cook the onions until they are golden brown and translucent. They should reduce in size to about half their original volume as you cook. If you want green peppers, add the diced peppers and cook them about halfway through the cooking of the onions. The peppers don't have to be soft, but they should be a little wilted before you move on to adding the chicken.

Push all of the vegetables and spices to one side of the pan. Move the pan off center on the burner such that the vegetables and spices aren't getting much of the main heat from where they have been pushed to the side. Add the chicken and yogurt marinade to the empty side of the pan. Stir the turmeric into the yogurt/chicken mixture. Cook with medium to high heat until slightly browned. A lot of the moisture from the yogurt will boil off, but all of it does not have to. Add the chicken stock, hot garam masala, and tomato paste. Stir these in gently and carefully until they are dissolved. Allow this to simmer for at least 15 minutes, longer is okay, but if too much liquid boils off, you'll need to add in some water to make sure there is enough moisture for cooking the rice.

Add the uncooked rice, stir to distribute the rice evenly and cook over medium heat until it just starts to bubble. Cover the pan and turn the heat down as low as possible while still allowing the dish to simmer. Allow to cook until most of the water is absorbed and the rice is tender. This should take around 40 minutes, but it depends on the kind of rice you use and the type of pan. You'll have to test the rice for doneness by tasting it or cutting it with a fork.

Note: You can salt this at any stage of the cooking or wait and add salt when you eat it. In my experience, it will need to be salted again at some point. The salt from the marinade will not be enough.

For serving, I usually take tongs or chopsticks and pick out all of the bits of whole spices just so we don't have to take them out as we eat or don't accidentally bite into a bit of star anise or a cardamom pod. Also, I don't want stronger spices permeating the finished dish in select spots (esp. the cinnamon) when the leftovers are stored in the refrigerator so I like to get them out before storing.

I think this would also be good if about a handful of raisins were added at the same time as the rice, but my husband doesn't like raisins in these types of dishes so I've never tried it (though all of the biryani I've ever had in restaurants has included raisins). Also, the pictured version does not have green peppers in it, but I have used green pepper in this dish before. It's good, but you have to be careful not to overdo it or the green pepper flavor will be too strong and dominate the dish.

Finally, keep in mind that my spices are crap. I think they're old because most of them are not typical in Japanese cuisine and spend a lot of time on store shelves before being sold. If you are using better quality spices, you may need to scale back to avoid making things too intense.

Cheating

2008-12-04T20:19:00.004+09:00

Sometimes I read bulletin boards devoted to the interests of women. One group of such boards is located at iVillage. The topics of greatest interest to me are the ones that deal with relationships. Lately, I've been looking into a topic that the CH and I have discussed between ourselves as well as with students. That topic is "emotional affairs."

For the rare reader (of course, all of my readers are pretty "rare" in that there aren't that many of them) who doesn't know what an emotional affair is, it's when two people are in love, but do not physically consummate their relationship with illicit sexual congress. With the potential to contact strangers from every hemisphere on the globe as well as friends and acquaintances from down the block through Internet-based methods, more people are probably having emotional affairs than ever before.

Most of the time, these relationships consist of people having intense conversations, flirtatious text exchanges, and sharing deep levels of emotional intimacy. Often, the depth of relationship is measured by information shared with the "other man/woman" that cannot be shared with one's spouse. The "other" extracts satisfaction from knowing they are chosen to share in secrets to which the spouse is denied access as well as the recipient of compliments and appealing innuendo.

On the message boards, people will ask if what they are doing is cheating because it is not physical or they ask if they are justified in their actions because their spouse is failing to fulfill a need. The latter is often the rationale for actual physical affairs. That is, if a person fails to meet the sexual needs of his or her partner, the deprived spouse justifies an affair by citing that failure as the motive for cheating.

My views of relationships in terms of how other people conduct them are pretty broad. My feeling is that all commitments have to be defined by those who are taking part in them. If people want to have "open marriages" where they are free to engage in sexual behavior with others, that's fine as long as they both freely embrace the idea and all latitudes are applied equally. I would say the same applies to emotional affairs or whatever else people want to do.

The only thing I think is out of bounds in any relationship, is hiding a relationship of any kind with a third party from your partner. If you hide it, then you are doing so because you know that you're operating outside of the concept of your commitment to the relationship that the two of you decided upon or that you both generally feel is the norm for your culture. One of the reasons why I have no problems with my husband's friendships with other women, including an ex-girlfriend whom he was once deeply in love with, is that no aspect is ever hidden from me. Of course, I also trust him completely, but that trust is confirmed and upheld by the transparency with which he conducts other relationships.

I believe cheating is the ultimate act of selfishness and cowardice. In all but a very few rare cases, people cheat in order to keep their cake nice and safe which having a snack on the side. If you're unhappy in your relationship, you have three choices. One is that you work on the aspects of your relationship that make you unhappy. Two is that you formally break up or divorce. Three is that you recognize the shortcomings of your relationship in meeting your needs and be upfront with your spouse about your need to go outside your shared concept of your commitment to one another and seek satisfaction. The third option is rarely exercised, but I believe that if you feel you have to grant yourself the latitude to have an affair (emotional or otherwise) to satisfy yourself, then you have to offer your spouse that same possible avenue of satisfaction. The main reason people don't pursue these options and decide to have secret affairs is that they're trying to selfishly have everything for themselves - faithful, supportive spouse and torrid affair with the other man/woman.

While I accept any sort of open relationship among other people, I couldn't accept such a thing myself because that isn't the sort of concept the CH and I share. We're both of the mind that mind, body, and soul are shared to the extent possible between us. However, our deep devotion and commitment to sharing as much as possible has been the driving force behind my being open-minded about how other people conduct their relationships. I realize that the intensity of our bond is unusual and odd compared to most people's relationships. In fact, I've been made aware on multiple occasions that our devotion is pretty freakishly intense. If we can be unconventional, then I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't say it was okay for other people have whatever arrangements suit them. However, I don't think many relationships are served favorably by deception, double standards, or lying.

Adventures in "New" Used Furniture

2008-12-03T16:34:00.007+09:00

There's a style of low profile office chair which I ran across at a second-hand items shop about 6 months ago. It was black and only about 3000 yen (about $30) and looked like it'd suit the CH's need for a replacement chair at his office. Unfortunately, my rickety old chair, which I had repaired 3 times and extended the life of for another year and a half, finally gave up the ghost and I ended up with the chair intended for my husband. (He was in need of a new chair because his company's president replaced everyone's comfortable chair with nicer looking, but very uncomfortable chairs).

Since that time, I've been checking the same shop every time I ride my bicycle past it hoping that another one would show up. This particular type of chair is well-suited to Japanese apartments because it is light and has a low back so it doesn't seem so large in a small space. It's also wider and has good lower back support and is more comfortable than most conventional office chairs.

My new chair, restored to working condition.

Well, today was the day another one of these chairs showed up. The odd thing was that it wasn't there when I rode past it to the supermarket, but it was there 10 minutes later on my way back home. This one only cost 1890 yen (about $18) so it was a steal at that price. The only bad point was that this one is red and showed a bit more wear and tear. It's a little dingy, but I figured I could reupholster it. My husband can take the black one to his office and I'll use the red one.

So, that would be all well and good if that was the end of the story. Of course, then this wouldn't be an "adventure". The used items shop is about a 7-minute walk from my apartment and charges for delivery so I decided to just push the bike I was on with my right hand and drag the chair along the sidewalk with my left hand. It was noisy, and a little troublesome, especially with my bad back, but I got it home and was very pleased.

I put my groceries away, chatted with my sister a bit on Skype, and then decided to try out the chair. When I sat in it, it leaned forward any time I did. It was as if it was hinged. I turned it over and saw that two of the four bolts were missing. The front ones were there but very loose, and the ones from the back were gone. Given how loose the ones in the front were, my guess was that they were shaken out during the journey rather than absent all along.

The main problem with losing the screws is that the base of the chair is very thin so you can't replace them easily with other bolts. They'd have to be exactly the right length and width. Also, Tokyo is not exactly overflowing with hardware shops with a plethora of bolts for every need. In fact, I have no idea where to find a specific size bolt. Given the difficulties in replacing them, I though the best course of action was to retrace my steps and hope to find them.

Now, if I lived in the isolated countryside or in some quiet suburb, this wouldn't be a big deal, but this is Tokyo. There are people and cars everywhere. To add more fun to finding the lost screws, ginkgo leaves are all over the ground and blowing around. That means there are chances that they could be covered, swept up by the ever vigilant shop keepers sweeping several times a day in front of their stores, or ran over by a car. Yeah, I crossed a major street (Ome Kaido Avenue) full of traffic on my way home.

Still, I gamely retraced my steps and found one of the screws, sans its nut, at the curb where I crossed the street. I was actually surprised to find one at all and pocketed it. When the light changed, I crossed the street carefully scanning the crosswalk. However, I figured I'd be screwed if one fell in the street because tons of cars drive over the intersection every minute. It could be thrown, crushed, or stuck in some one's tire if it happened to fall on the crosswalk.

After walking all the way back to the shop, I came up empty on the second screw and decided I'd give up after one more pass over the crosswalk. Strangely enough, I found it lying in the middle of the street undamaged and with its nut intact. I must say that I felt really lucky to recover them under the circumstances.

Of course, my entire experience was two parts luck (finding the chair, then finding both lost screws) and one part bad luck (the loose screws). I can't believe that the people who assembled the chair were so careless as to leave the screws so loose that simply pulling it along the sidewalk for 3 minutes made them fall out. I guess it could have been worse. All 4 of them could have fallen out and the chair could have fallen apart before I got it home.

Note: This chair is obviously the Stockholm office chair sold by Walmart in the U.S. There are no Walmarts in Japan so I have no idea where this came from. I've never seen one like it in any shop. If anyone else knows where these can be bought in Japan, I'd appreciate knowing. I did find a Japanese version of this style of chair called a "Roco desk chair" (ロコデスクチェアー), but it's not the same exactly, though it still has the appealing low profile style.

Faith

2008-12-02T09:21:00.007+09:00

Most people think of faith as something you have in a deity. However, faith applies to all areas of our lives. One can have faith in other people, in the future, nature or in technology. We can even have faith in our routines and the routines of others who interact with us in our daily lives. More often than not, we don't even think about our faith in such things as long as it isn't shattered by some event. The lack of faith in many of the aforementioned things, incidentally, results in cynicism.

For a person who has grown up under far less than optimal circumstances (i.e., me), sometimes it's very difficult to have faith in anything. Lately, I've been trying to build faith in some things in order to calm my all too frequent fears about the future. One of the things I want to have faith in is the idea that my financial life is going to be fine. When you grow up poor, it's easy to fear financial ruin, especially when your parents were constantly living at the brink of ruin and made no effort to hide their anxiety about money when you were too young to rationalize that anxiety and could only internalize it on a pure emotional level.

Since the nature of my work situation is unpredictable, I have to actively work at keeping my faith in financial security alive. I try to boost this idea with an underlying faith in two other things. One is that karma will eventually repay me for the kindness and generosity that I extend to others. The other, much greater faith I'm trying to nurture is in the idea that there is "enough" work, money, opportunity, etc. for everyone and that, if one does not try and grab more than one's necessary share of such things, these things will naturally flow one's way. I try to see jobs as a river that sometimes flows hard and strong my way and sometimes weak and slow, but I want to have faith that there will never be less than I need. However, I also have to be careful not to confuse what I "need" with what I "want".

Recently, I referred someone to my former company who I knew without a shred of doubt would be good at the job. Before making this referral, I had the nagging idea that doing so might end up resulting in my getting less freelance work because I had benefited in the past from the fact that my successors had been troublesome employees. However, the person I was referring deserved the security and my former boss deserved to work with someone who I knew would be a delight to work with. Initially, it looked as if setting aside my fears and doing "the right thing" was also going to end up rewarding me as I was told I'd be asked to do a lot more work than usual. In fact, one of the Japanese staff members and my former boss came by my apartment and this appeal was made in person.

Over the last several days, changes to the plan have been made due to the ambitions of a particular Japanese staff member. Most, if not all, of the work that seemed to be on the horizon is evaporating rapidly and it is somewhat depressing. To cope with this (very likely) letdown, I've been trying to convince myself that I may have merely wanted this work rather than needed it and that things are coming together as they are to make sure more important needs than mine are being met. That is, possibly the new staff that were hired needed the jobs they're getting more than I needed the extra income. Still, my faith that good acts go rewarded and in the ebb and flow of that river of opportunity have been rattled a bit. However, I was incapable of making any other choice. My values would not allow me to protect my own interests at the expense of another and I still have faith that those who do so ultimately do not prosper.

Sometimes I wonder if my attitude about taking as much as I need rather than as much as I want and making the choices which are "right" rather than selfish is what separates me from people who society views as truly successful. That is, if I were the type of person who protected my own interests first and foremost, I might have been wealthier and/or risen to a higher position in my work. I'm sure that one element of ambition, besides a need for status and the approval of others, is a certain drive which compels you to get as much as you can, even when it is far more than you actually need.

The CH has often said that we should live our lives bearing in mind what the world would be like if everyone lived the way that we do. If everyone grabbed as much work as possible so they could be a little more financially comfortable and others had less opportunity than they needed because of that person's desire, then the world would be an imbalanced place. Of course, this applies to all thing from material possessions to food to energy to work. When we take what we need rather than what we want, we leave more for others to take what they need as well. If everyone lived that way, I'm sure the world would be a better place. I have pretty solid faith in that idea.

The Divorce Calculator

2008-11-29T15:02:00.004+09:00

Via Digg (I know, I shouldn't be looking at Digg), I came across a link to a divorce calculator. The calculator uses census data to determine the likelihood that people who share the same background, characteristics and history as you will divorce. I guess the idea is to shake people out of the lala-land mindset they tend to have when they marry. After all, no one ever marries thinking that divorce is likely... at least they don't if they're sane.

While I'm sure people will say everyone feels they are an exception, I'm certain I will never divorce. The CH and I are just too compatible and into each other to ever part. Hell, I hate it when he has to leave the house for work and we're apart for hours. I'm not even very happy with the fact that he has to leave the room to go to the bathroom sometimes. ;-) I'm probably the only person in Japan who feels one of the "up" sides to living in a tiny apartment is that I can see and talk to my husband almost all the time when he's home because neither of us has any privacy.

At any rate, the interesting thing about these calculators isn't so much that they tell you the chance that you will divorce, but rather how changing a few variables effects the outcome. The stats that are used are:

gender (Female)
whether or not you have children (if you are female) (No)
the year you married (1989)
your education (university graduate)
your age when you married (24)
how long you've been married (19 years)

For a person in my situation, the chances of divorce are 32%. However, if you answer "yes" to the children question but leave all of the other stats the same, the chance of divorce drops to 23%. This would seem to point to the idea that women would divorce more often if they didn't have kids. If I leave all the stats the same as my original information, but lower the educational level to "high school graduate", the chances increase to 39%. The biggest difference though comes if I, again leaving all the stats the same, lower the age of marriage to 22 or younger. If I do that, the chances shoot up to 66%

I did truthful stats for my husband and it said his chances are 22%. I'm guessing this is mainly because he's 2 years older than I and the older one marries, the less likely it seems one might divorce. When I increased the age (for a male with his stats) to marriage after 33, the chances of divorce dropped to 12%.

Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if I hadn't met the CH. I'm guessing there's a decent chance I might have ended up divorced since that seems to be what has happened to about 1/3 of women in my shoes. There are two things of which I'm absolutely certain that can be said about my life if I hadn't met my husband. One is that I never would have ended up living in Japan. The other is that I never would have known such happiness with someone else. Of course, fact 1 has had no effect on fact 2, but both are the direct result of having met the CH.

Pain

2008-11-26T13:58:00.004+09:00

If you follow any blog for any period of time, you'll see that the frequency of posts sometimes drop off and then the excuses start popping up. I'm not one for offering such excuses because I don't feel obliged in any way to keep blogging. The fact of the matter is that I've often had things to say as of late, but have felt unable to say them. I offer an explanation of the situation not as an excuse, but rather as a bookmark in my personal history to tell myself what has been going on.

As of late, I've been experiencing more issues with my back than I had been and it's been draining my energy. Unless you've lived with pain day-in and day-out for years, you can't imagine the toll it can take on your ability to live a full life. Enduring pain, even when it's low-grade or bearable, taxes you in ways those who have not been in such a situation can't imagine.

Imagine a normal person's daily stamina as a fully inflated tire that loses air as the day goes on and refills to full capacity each morning after a night's rest. A person who is in pain everyday not only loses air at a faster rate, but finds that the tire never fully inflates no matter how much rest they get. This is because the pain represents a few extra holes allowing air to escape which make full inflation impossible no matter how hard you try to pump air into it.

As of late, I've felt like my tire has been near flat all the time and it's been difficult to raise the energy to type out my thoughts. It just feels like it's not worth the expenditure in effort when I have other things to do which are more immediate. Hopefully, this will pass and I'll be back to normal soon. One can hope.

Pronunciation Matters

2008-11-23T11:53:00.005+09:00

When you're teaching a foreign language, explaining why pronouncing a word correctly is important is often a rather abstract concept for students. Often, they think you're being overly fussy or pedantic. The truth is that this impression is not always a false one. I've heard teachers who are from other countries go out of their way to correct an accent because it represents the pronunciation of native speakers from another country. Particularly, a lot of British people want to "correct" North American accents when the student's speech patterns would be comprehended just fine anywhere in the world.

My feeling has always been that, as long as what you say can be understood, it doesn't matter if its the pronunciation a native speaker would use. However, sometimes it's very important to get it straight so that you are not a laughing stock. If one ever needed a more perfect example of this, one need only turn to the very well known (amongst expatriates) Japanese Self Defense Force Navy commercial:

The words on the screen are telling you what they mean to say, but what you hear if you're not reading along is "semen sip for love." Seeing a bunch of dancing, prancing sailors say "semen sip for love," does not conjure up the intended image of peace-loving protectors so much as gay sailors who enjoy nothing more than some round robin acts of fellatio.

So, if you ever need to prove how important it is to get the pronunciation of words correct, you can just show this video to the students and explain the meaning a native speaker is going to get.

Chances Are Very High

2008-11-21T17:00:00.001+09:00

There was a story recently in the Japanese news about a 15-year old girl who stabbed her father to death. The papers reported that she was scolded by her mother for poor grades and then stabbed her father "in the chest and other places". The girl was sentenced to 4 years in a reform school for her crime.

In response to this news, a few foreign commenters speculated that there was more to the story than was being offered. One person noted that it didn't make sense for a girl to commit murder over being yelled at for bad grades. Personally, I think it's also odd that it was the mother who reportedly yelled at her but the father who was killed. Also, the vague wording of the details of the crime, particularly the "other places", got someone speculating that those places might be indicative of something inappropriate going on between the father and daughter. In essence, he speculated that the motive for the murder may have been molestation. This speculation caused an uproar among other commenters who felt that this way off base and came out of thin air.

The speculation that she may have been molested and it was not reported is not out of line for Japan. People who disagreed with the proponents of the theory that this dark bit of data was hidden said that it would have come out because he was dead and there was no reason to hide it. This is Western thinking. In Japan, the opposite is often true. The thinking is usually that, if the person is dead, there is no reason to reveal it.

I asked some students about this to get their opinions and they all told me that Japanese papers do not like to speak ill of the dead. One of my older, more experienced students told me that he felt that chances were very high that newspapers "self-censored" frequently and that many facts were missing in cases where it'd be embarrassing to the family of the deceased or appear that the memory of the dead person was being disrespected.

The way death affects criminal cases is very different in Japan than in the U.S. as well. Often, crimes committed by a person who commits suicide will end an investigation into a particular crime. That is, if a man embezzles money and he had associates involved in that crime, his death by his own hand will end all investigation. The feeling is that justice is satisfied when he chooses to take the ultimate responsibility. In other words, he liberates his compatriots from paying for their crimes with his actions and spares his family further embarrassment.

So, between a desire not to speak ill of the dead and the crimes of the deceased ceasing to be an issue, it wouldn't be a huge shock if the girl who murdered her father was molested, but the fact remained hidden by the press. His death closed the book on any crime he committed and not speaking ill of him would keep the lid on anything that smacked of speaking poorly of him. I don't know if the girl was molested, had a family problem which was not revealed, or was mentally ill. However, I do know that the truth is unlikely to ever be known and that you can't apply Western thought processes to how the information is offered. This is part of how people come to misunderstand Japan and Japanese culture. You can view it through Western eyes using Western logic, but you're going to see a distortion.

It's Okay to Bitch, But Not to Praise

2008-11-20T17:26:00.000+09:00

Nearly two decades ago when I was working at Nova, I worked with a lot of teachers from a variety of countries. Near the end of my first year, a couple in their 30's from Canada started working there. Both of them held Master's degrees and were pretty smart people so I was surprised that they'd settle for work at the likes of Nova. This was before the teaching bubble burst and jobs became scarce and lower paying, though it was during the start of the slow ride downward for teachers in Japan.

At that point in time, I had only been with the CH for about two years in person and was extremely hungry to spend as much free time with him as possible... which is actually not appreciably different from now, but that's rather beside the point. At any rate, when we sat around the teacher's lounge area and talked about what we wanted to do, I would remark on occasion about how I preferred to spend as much time as possible with my cute little husband. While I did not remark on this to the female half of the married Canadian couple (who I believe was named Angela) probably overheard me talking to other people about the CH on occasion.

At one point, somehow my attitude toward the CH came up when she was taking part in a group chat and I showed my usual restraint in enthusiasm toward him, which is to say little to none. Well, that's an exaggeration. I do try to keep my remarks within socially acceptable boundaries in person, though I am pretty straightforward and don't go out of my way to hide the fact that my marriage is a very happy one if there is a topic at hand which may include something related to my relationship with my CH. At any rate, I said something, and Angela snapped back nastily saying something about how we all didn't have to spend as much time as possible with our husbands.

Considering the fact that I rarely or never spoke with her because she disliked Americans on principle, I felt her response was pretty out of line. It's not like I was "over sharing" with her. In fact, I'd never directly shared anything at all with her, but, even if I did, I'm not sure why my happiness ought to be so antagonistic toward her that she'd find it necessary to lash out at me.

Angela approved of British folks on principle and buddied up to them before teachers of all other nationalities. I think the pecking order was something like: U.K., Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Americans (but only if she held her nose near one). Since she wanted to be BFF ("best friends forever") with any Brit on the premises, she confided in my best friend at the time who happened to be from England. Angela told my friend that her husband was seeking an "open relationship" now that he'd spent some time in Japan and was finding that many delicate flowers were willing to open up to him. Their marriage was stressed because she didn't have a desire to stray and was angry about his attitude. In the end, she went back to Canada alone and I transferred to another branch of Nova in Kichijoji so I don't know if her husband went about pollinating all the blossoms on offer or if he kept it in his pants while his wife was an ocean away.

When I started working at my former office, I encountered another bitter woman who grew irrationally angry at me for my attitude toward my husband. This woman was American and married to a Japanese man. She hated living in Japan and felt trapped here because her husband couldn't work in the U.S. and make a decent living and she had no appreciable skills for getting work back home. She almost never spoke about her husband and was vague when anyone made polite smalltalk which involved asking her about him (e.g., what his job was). She also took a dislike to me because I was pretty gung-ho to expand my skills on the job in my down time and she preferred to read magazines and write letters in hers and she felt I was attempting to show her up. I must say that it was a pretty good indication of her self-preoccupation if she thought I spent hours cultivating skills just to make her look bad rather than doing something of use and interest to me. Between her growing resentment in my interest in gaining skills on the job and dislike of my mentioning anything about my personal life, the hostility reached a point where she simply stopped speaking to me altogether.

After those two memorable experiences with women who were openly snotty with me for being so openly happy with my husband, I realized a few things. First and foremost, unhappy people hate to be around someone who isn't experiencing the same type of unhappiness as they are. Misery loves company, but moreso if that company is miserable about the same things as it. The second thing I realized is that people are open-minded and sympathetic about any complaints people have about their spouses (at least up to a point). They can bitch about how lazy, selfish, stubborn, childish, etc. a spouse is and people will not think less of them unless they do it too often or too irrationally. However, they are far less tolerant or accepting of praise of one's spouse.

Sometimes we hear that many developed cultures are cultures of whiners and complainers. I think that the lack of social acceptance and, indeed, frequent social censure of people who are talking about their happiness is part of cultivating cultures full of people who focus excessively on the negative in their lives. It's cool to sneer, be snide, or deride people and everyone is more than happy to jump on the bandwagon for a bitch session (especially about spouses), but it's trite, childish, and possibly seen as bragging to focus on the positive. We get the cultures full of the types of people we earn through our actions.