Indeed, they’re just conducting research out there – research in both the fields of deliciousology and deliciousonomy.  Feast your mammalian eyes on this!

By the way, I do think the beef-snarfers from the outside world are hypocritical to be all up in arms about this – but yes none of Japan’s arguments for this practice stand up to scrutiny.  Yes, it’s part of Japanese food culture – and it was the culture of many other places too before they stopped doing it for many of the same reasons they’re trying to stop you from doing it now.  Yes, it can be hunted sustainably – but only if you are the only ones doing it, and why do you get to be the exception?  I can understand the “screw the rest of the world, we know we’re right” attitude… but you’re wrong.  You can still eat all the daikon you want.

We’ve got a few younger women in our classes, singles who are getting the most out of their non-married years before some man comes along and not so much sweeps them off their feet as takes away their one leg to stand on. Most of them are pretty bright. Some are just educated and good test takers. There’s one whom I thought was just a pretty good test taker who’s slowly revealed herself to have a genuinely keen and curious mind but whose intellectual interests heretofore were limited to the highlighted portions of her textbooks. It’s a sadly common pattern amongst even very young kids here, but it seems that her curiosity never had a chance to develop because there was always an authority on whatever she was studying nearby to “guide” and “instruct” and thus remove any need for initiative.
Well, I had thought her mind was more or less dead, as are a lot of college kids who no longer have to study for entrance exams and thus see no reason ever to crack a book ever again, but it was not so. She still had some mind yet to be killed off, and started doing very well at English for about a year. Then came the final nail in the coffin for the intellectual life of young women – domesticity.
I don’t mean to deny her or any other people the happiness that finding a partner and fulfilling a perceived social imperative can bring, but hearing someone who ought to be wanting to travel, solve world problems, attend symposia and consider going for a master’s suddenly realigning herself to purely servile household duties is beyond disappointing. One week it’s “the Dalai Lama’s followers are fanatical and resist modernization”, the next it’s “I made a cake for my boyfriend. I need to attend cooking classes to learn new recipes.” Sad, and such a waste. People ought to have partners in life, but the domestic arrangements that bind them ought not to completely stymie any potential either had in any area besides housekeeping. And yes, I sympathize with the men too, but it’s quite a bit less of an insult to go from learner to earner than to go from learner to squeakily subservient maid/patisier.
In case you think I still need to justify that overly dramatic thread title, consider that this is just the latest case – we’ve had several women quit before just because their husbands didn’t want them out late, or didn’t think they’d need the job skills, or they themselves didn’t have time to both train for a job and take care of her kid or her husband’s mother while her husband was attending semi-obligatory drinking parties with coworkers after working 11 hours 6 days a week. I actually regard each step of female socialization here as more and more bad news – as steps further and further from any chance of having an active, human mind beyond the age of 30. Marriage is the last of these – and when I hear of it I know I have to more or less say goodbye to that person’s potential as an active, curious student.
By the way, none of this applies to my own partnership – I cook and my woman works. We both see gender roles, particularly the chain gangs they are here, as an abomination of wasted humanity and lost self-respect.

Or more so than I am, at least?  I know I’ve got him beat on these things:

-Time spent living here

-Language

-Cultural fluency

-Interest in Japan

And maybe a few more I haven’t the sociological state of mind to come up with.  On any criterion besides the one with immutable physical manifestations, I win the Japaneseness race with my dad and probably any of my other “pure-blooded” relatives under the age of 60.  I suppose I might lose on self-identification too, but of course my self-identification as an American, and theirs as Japanese, would probably change if we weren’t all living in the societies we’re living in now.

I know I say this a lot, but I don’t keep bringing this up because I want my legitimate membership in club Japan recognized by a greater percentage of the population here.  I rather want to use my family as an example of just how useless “race” is as a determiner of one’s personal characteristics.  It’s not true at all that I devalue my Japanese-American family – I just don’t value much at all the fact that they’re Japanese.  They’re my family in California, and have practically nothing to do with my connection to this place.

who comes in for a trial, or rather I should say every student’s mom, initially addresses me only in some variety of learner’s English. After they are informed, or simply observe, that I speak Japanese as well they adapt with varying degrees of success – some not addressing me in any language, some giving me salutation and valediction but not much else, and on the extreme end treat me more or less like their linguistic equal. The one constant is that they assume I don’t speak Japanese lacking any data to the contrary.

I’d be negligent not to include the obvious media-presented stereotypes of non-Japanese as illiterate but lovable dunces in the causes for this assumption, but many of these kids and their parents have been going to different English schools for years – plenty of time to meet a few other pasty faces who aren’t completely out to sea in the Japanese language. Am I wrong? Can the half dozen or so other native English speakers really have been so worthless at the language of the country they’re presumably living in? Or are they just hiding it, as unfortunately a lot of them and a lot of Japanese people believe is the only “professional” way to run an English class?

I prefer honesty here. I enjoy learning language and I want my students to feel the same. There is a lot of wisdom to be discovered in the gap between English and Japanese and I don’t think there’s anything to be gained by pretending they exist in entirely separate universes.

It’s probably not good to expect your language’s onomatopoeia to translate well.

Actually though, this would be impossible to render in the Japanese syllabary, answering for me the question of why they didn’t just leave this in Japanese, but unfortunately leaving the one of whence they drew the inspiration for this unfortunately handicapped kids’ racing jacket.

I reiterate: learn a language to the point you can use it competently, or don’t use it.  At least wait until you can trust yourself to order a #3 combo at any given McDonald’s in the English-speaking world before you start soaking every consumer object imaginable in your malodorous Engrish marinade.

If they had a version of The Office for Japan, I can’t see how it could read as anything but depressing. It would also have to be 3 times as long but have the same or less content. And no one below management could use the confessional. And no one would watch it until a member of SMAP took over as the boss in a totally unironic hero role.

Much like Japan and English, the problem with Japan and “foreigners” isn’t just that there’s a dearth of real education about them, but that people are educated incorrectly about them.

“Foreigner” here is not a blank waiting to be written on with information about someone’s background, interests, language, etc. unknown and somewhat apprehensively and slowly being filled in. It’s a vast swath of misunderstandings and misapprehensions about what everyone outside Japan is and does which are roughly equal in consistency and unity to what everyone inside Japan is and does.

Japanese people eat fish, while foreigners eat meat. Japanese people speak Japanese, while foreigners speak English. Japanese people are shy and reserved, while foreigners are rude and bombastic. There is very little of the idea that the 98% of the world that is not Japanese might actually have 98% of its diversity as well. Actually, probably more than that, since Japan has a particularly strong sense of ethnic identity (and hence unity and uniformity) for a nation its size.

Educating people about anything outside Japan, at least once they get past 2nd grade and have been more or less officially inducted into the Japan Club, is as much erasing false information as it is imparting true information. This would be less frustrating if the TV didn’t so reliably act like a massive misinformation coordinating machine, giving everyone identical and identically wrong ideas about how the rest of the world is.

You all know my last name – as Japanese as sweet red bean stuffed into glutinous rice cake.  What you may not know is that because of my non-Japanese nationality, all official documents have my name written in katakana, the official script of foreign objects/people.  Some people here are actually a bit surprised by this as well, so don’t feel too bad for being taken aback, assuming you have any idea what I’m talking about here.

After I learned this, it took a bit of time for me to realize this didn’t need to bother me – I realized it’s not preferable to be arbitrarily a member of an unfairly exclusive and discriminatory system than not to.  I now balk at comments put forth by well-meaning but anachronistically racially-minded Japanese people that I have a clearer understanding of Japan because of my family’s ethnic background or that I seem sympathetic because I “have a Japanese face”.  Understanding my familiarity and comfort level with Japan is not helped at all either by the blanket categories “foreigner” (I’ve been here almost 5 years, making me neither Lafcadio Hearn nor Harrison Ford in terms of acclimatization) or “haafu” (I never learned Japanese at home or had any Jero-style firsthand experience with Japanese music, art, or popular culture).  I’d actually rather people ask me questions not simply to direct me to one or another pigeonhole.

But back to names – the fact that my Japanese name, though it is written as far as I know only one specific way, is written in katakana due to my non-Japanese nationality, I am free to choose the kanji (pictographs, which almost everyone’s name is written with) to write it should I ever take Japanese citizenship and escape the katakana catacombs.  This is obviously also true of my first name as well, but not nearly as ironic.

Some people upon naturalization simply choose vernacular Japanese names for themselves – Lafcadio Hearn became 小泉八雲　Koizumi Yakumo (little spring eight clouds), and Kim Sin Rak became 百田光浩　Momota Mitsuhiro, aka 力道山　Rikidozan.  I don’t think I’ll do this – the emperor knows there are already way too many Hiroyukis crowding up these isles.  Other people, like David Aldwinckle, adopt sound-sorta-alike names composed of well-known kanji, like his new name of 出人有道　Debito Arudou (exit person existing road, with the first and last names given in English order).  I don’t have to worry about limited Japanese phonology shredding my last name like it did to his – but I am going to have to make some sacrifices with Mark.  Mark in katakana is マーク　Maaku, which sucks but is pretty much as close as you can get in a language where consonants can never be neighbors and every syllable must end in a vowel (n is the only exception; tsu is considered one syllable).  I’ve thought about this a fair bit and so far the only semi-graceful kanjification I’ve come up with is  魔悪　(demon evil).  I like it but I’m afraid it wouldn’t go over well at any future PTA meetings I might need to attend.

For some reason automatic doors don’t open “automatically” until you get close enough to transfer a static charge via your nose. One must wonder what the point is of having automatic things to begin with if they take just as much time and interruption of train of thought as manual ones.

Those who know me, and in addition to knowing me know at least the bare basics of what I like to write about, know I hate katakana. It is pretentious, ignorant, inaccurate, and a great hindrance to the efforts of most Japanese people to learn English. I disdain the great concern for marking out “foreign” words, and feel great contempt for the hypocritical state of mind that allows you to both consider a language that of outsiders, and decorate every available package, shirt, and advertisement with it. Katakana is how the Japanese language manages to both flood its native speakers’ vocabularies with imported words, while not allowing them to be considered part of its vocabulary. To make a comparison to English, imagine if all borrowed vocabulary (and there is a great lot of it) were always written ALL IN CAPS. Words like “tornado” or “spook” would still be ostentatious outsiders, incapable of being used without their non-native status known. Nowadays most English speakers have no idea of the difference in origin between words like “wordy” from “verbose”, nor should they. A language needs to keep its borders open, and not force all trespassers to wear visible proof of their origins.

I realized I wouldn’t mind Japan’s floodlike importation of vocabulary so much if its foreign origins were obfuscated a bit. If people weren’t always aware that a word like ノーハウ(noohau, know-how) came from English, they’d be less likely to wield it like an Louis Vuitton bag, ie an easily available and/but empty symbol of forward-thinkingness and modernity. I’d like these words to stop being written in katakana, to allow them to be assimilated normally where they’re necessary, and eliminate their usefulness for mean lexical pretentiousness. Those words from abroad that do become widespread should be written in a way that doesn’t make their foreignness immediately obvious. They should eventually be considered by those who care to dig up their origins as Japanese words of foreign origin, rather than simply known to everyone as foreign words. In fact it’d help a lot of my students clear up their misunderstandings of how words like リフォーム (rifoomu, renovation) relate to English if they considered them Japanese vocabulary rather than English.