A Room of One’s Own / We Should All Be Feminists

Virginia Woolfe, 1929

(December 2015)

Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, 2014

(January 2016)

I read these and they were good and I sadly have very little to say about them that hasn’t been said many, many times already. If I had the inclination, knowledge, or talent I’d offer some thoughts on the differences and similarities between the two, and what that tells us about the progression of gender (and indeed racial) politics over the last century, but I regret that I find myself falling short on all counts. Nonetheless, both are clearly necessary, if in markedly different ways.

Tae Think Again

Here at This is How She Fight Start we like to pride ourselves on always being slightly behind the bleeding edge of the perpetually onrushing buzzsaw that is the 24-hour News Cycle. It’s the Ridcully approach to information management: if it really is important then people will still be talking about it a few days after the fact, and if they’re not, well, it can’t have been that vital anyway. And so it is that I eventually come to put down some thoughts on the Scottish referendum, a mere week after the fact. Next time I’m planning to discuss whether or not we should abandon the Gold Standard.

Two Funerals…

1.    It’s what she would have wanted

I have no truck with the notion of an afterlife. If you do then good luck to you, but being of a somewhat lazy tendency myself I’ve always had to fight against my natural urge to put off until tomorrow what I really should be doing today. The prospect of putting off until the next life what I should be doing in this one strikes me as a step too far – I’d never get anything done.

Mmmmm… Sacrilicious

“…hence I will excite their minds

With more desire to know, and to reject

Envious commands, invented with design

To keep them low, whom knowledge might exalt…”

God, I love my job. It was my base school’s culture festival last Saturday, and that’s always a great reminder of how creative and motivated the students can be when the leash is loosened a bit. Great fun.

The school’s pretty high level, and has a specialist art course. Every class produces a big mural/poster to hang outside their homeroom, and the kids spend a couple of weeks getting it ready. The 3^rd year art course class did a pastiche of the Last Supper, with Kocho-sensei as Jesus and various other teachers as the apostles. It was the last thing I was expecting and I pissed myself laughing when I saw it. I think the students were just happy that someone had got the joke. That’s the trouble with parodies; if people don’t know the source material, they can die a rapid and embarrassing death.

A Kick in the Teeth

The results of the Senior High School entrance exams were released today. This year I’ve taught at SHS exclusively, but for the two years prior to that I taught at a couple of local Junior Highs as well.

Every year I wander down to the courtyard to see how my former/prospective students will fare. They don’t know I teach here too so most of them ignore me, which is fair enough as they’ve got bigger fish to fry. For a few of them though I’m an obviously welcome distraction during perhaps the most stressful hour of their lives so far. It’s one of those times when you feel that if you’ve made it easier for even one student then it’s a job well done.

Waveforms

The first thing you do is send a text.

No, that’s not right. The first thing you do is try to send a text. And try again, and again, and again. Send. Contacts. Send. Contacts. Send. Send. Send.

“I’m OK. You?”

NETWORK IS BUSY

RESEND MESSAGE?

Send.

Wider Still and Wider

It’s almost that time of year again. We all have to file into the sports hall, bow, stand, look solemn, bow some more, sit, listen to interminable droning from various random dignitaries, bow again, stand, sit, clap (maybe), bow, stand, sit, stand bow, bow bow, clap (maybe), sing stand (are we still standing? I forget) bow listen bow sit stand clap (maybe) stand bow bow stand bow, bow bow bow bow…

Congratulations kids! You’ve finally graduated High School! Six years of spirit-crushing tedium are almost over, but not yet; we have to celebrate first. With more crushing tedium.

Celebration Japanese style. This is how we do it.

Worse Than Hitler

One - Off Topic

So. The context thing. Again. It’s a tricky one. Take this for example; a travel article by a travel writer in the travel section about travelling to Hiroshima. Unless the entire anglosphere has decided, overnight, to redefine the word ‘travel’ without telling me, most of the comments below the line are a little off topic.

It’s entirely predictable though. Absent the bombing, Hiroshima is a fairly unremarkable Japanese city. There’s always the other World Heritage Site, but pretty temples are ten-a-penny over here. The bombing is really what defines the city in the eyes of the outside world, and as such is the main reason for wanting to visit. It’s perfectly understandable that talking about the city and its various memorials provokes discussion on the wider issues.

7 Deadly Virtues – Part the Second

Previously, on This is How She Fight Start...

SUBJECT/OBJECT

In last month’s exciting episode I said I’d explain myself on issues of equitable treatment. But this is a work in progress, and the vague framework I had mapped out is breaking down already. Yay me. So this time I won’t be talking about equality. No. This time I’ll be talking about Doraemon.

Try to contain your disappointment

7 Deadly Virtues – Part the First

Previously, on This is How She Fight Start...

PREJUDICE

Prejudice has got an unfair reputation. It’s not always a bad thing. In fact it’s often useful, and even necessary. We all make initial assumptions about people based on any number of things, including sex, age, dress, accent and race. No matter how fair-minded you think you might be, this stuff all gets accounted for at the unconscious level. I’m male, young(ish. Stop sniggering at the back there), wear a suit to work, speak with a fairly regionless middle-class English accent, and I’m white.

Got a good mental picture there? You realize that it’s almost certainly wrong, of course, but you just can’t help it. There I am, sitting in your head (clean up in here, will you? It’s filthy), half-formed and you’re already coming to opinions about what kind of person I am. Judging me, even though your mother told you not to.

7 Deadly Virtues – General Prologue

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a westerner in Japan in possession of half a brain will not be in want of an opinion on race. This is a good thing – race, ethnicity, and national identity are all big, important issues and need to be thought about. Of course in an ideal world they wouldn’t be issues at all, but to ignore it is to bury your head in the sand like the stereotypical bleeding-heart liberal, insisting that ‘we’re all one race - the human race,’ and incidentally that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.