In-Joke

That's a marzipan strawberry (this is what I'm reduced to).

Fingering the Pulse

This could have been so much worse

My ongoing twitter experiment to try and maintain some semblance of a grasp on current events continues to bear mixed fruit. The consensus on recent events appears to be that we’re all going to die in the now inevitable Sino-Japanese pissing contest over a bunch of rocks, but that’s OK because no one is allowed to talk about it anyway.

When all you need is a knife

Taro Aso, current finance minister and deputy prime minister of Japan, has spoken of his annoyance with what he perceives as the negative impact of certain sections of Japan’s elderly population. His opinions chime with those of a significant body of commentators who feel that the allowances made for some older members of Japanese society are excessively generous and forgiving.

“The problem won’t be solved unless you let them hurry up and die,” said the 72-year-old former prime minister.

Credit where it's due.

Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

The Amazing Adventure of Translation

David Bellos, 2011

(September 2012)

“Translating something ‘from cold’, ‘unseen’, out of the blue’, or, as some literary scholars would put it, ‘translating a text in and for itself’ isn’t technically impossible. After all, students at some universities are asked to do that in their final examinations. But it is not an honest job. It can only be done by guessing what the context and genre of the utterance are. Even if you guess right, and even granted that guessing right may well be the sign of wide knowledge and a smart mind, you are still only playing a game.”

(p78, emphasis added)

Anyone fancy translating that into Japanese?

In Defence of the ALT I

Book One – Larry Cotter and The Laboured Metaphor

Regular readers will remember that I used to work in a gym. This meant that occasionally friends and acquaintances would ask me for advice. And because they were getting this advice for free instead of investing any of their hard earned cash in it, they generally ignored it completely.

Christmas is over (if you want it)

Easter is the most important festival in the christian calander, but christmas comes a pretty close second. Anyone who’s had an even nominally christian upbringing will recognize the significance of gathering together to celebrate - if not the birth of christ - then at least the communal warmth of friends and family in the middle of a long, cold winter.

Not that that’s what christmas is all about these days, of course. These days it’s a graphically indulgent gang-bang of venal (and possibly venereal) grasping and wanton consumerism. I say ‘these days’ but I suspect it was ever thus. You need, at the very least, an appreciation of the irony of it all to shepherd your psyche through the bruising month(s) long assault of branding, annoyance, and false cheer which comprises the ‘holiday period’. Can you imagine experiencing christmas in a country which lacks not only religion, but worse, any sense of irony?

Götterdämmerung

One of the unexpected benefits of living in Japan is the lack of annoying ambient noise. That might sound slightly strange if you’ve been here a while. Certain towns do love their pointless communal loudspeakers, and noise pollution is pretty endemic.

It’s more personal than that though, because my Japanese is still at a level where I have to concentrate to make it work. I have to consciously ‘turn it on’, and if I don’t then it’s possible to float around in an innocent, prelapsarian state of incomprehension. There is a lot of noise, but it’s devoid of all meaning. Given that I’ve now reached an age where shouting at the TV news is a legitimate hobby, sometimes ignorance really is bliss.

I remember going back to the UK and getting picked up at the airport. Having listened to the ads on the car radio for all of three minutes, if you’d offered to cut off my bollocks so I could use them as earplugs I’d have given your proposition serious consideration.

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.