The Extremely Delayed Second Part to "At the Movies, 2013"....

I more or less never did come to a satisfactory conclusion on whether or not I liked "Eien no Zero".  The film has been criticized for its politically right leaning baggage that is quite plain to see.  That characteristic certainly didn't appeal to me.  But I found it interesting for a different reason.  It brought back to me a quote from the movie "Patton".  I believe in the first monologue of that movie the good general spouts this gem, "Now, I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country.  He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."  I don't have the energy right now to go to great lengths to explain the connection I formed between the two movies.  I suppose what I find interesting about "Eien no Zero" is how it inadvertently shows the tactical, strategic and behavioural flaws of Japan's military back in WWII.  The tragedy being that most of the audience don't seem to have recognized them in the movie. 

Household Gods

A little something from a conversation I had with two people at a local cafe about two weeks ago....

I don't know how we reached the topic of traditional customs which have seemed to vanish but we got there nonetheless.  I was at Crescendo, a local cafe, for dinner.  Somewhere along the line the owner, a customer and I were engaged in a discussion about things which people used to do in Japan.  One part of that conversation was about household gods.

Nakazawa-san, the owner, recounted how her family would set out offerings of mochi, cakes of pounded sweet rice, to household gods around New Year's.  There were probably more than a handful.  The kitchen, the entrance, and certain rooms were on the list.  The mochi was freshly made so inevitably it became moldy.

That moldy mochi did not go to waste.  The practice of "saikyo yaki"(sic), building of a community bonfire to burn New Year's decorations, may still be carried on but mochi is not on the list of things which are tossed into the fire.  So, back in those days it had to be eaten.  The mochi was cut, washed, and scrubbed clean of mold.  I presume it may have found its way into some variety of dishes. All said, it may have still smelled (and tasted) a bit moldy but it wasn't going to be thrown out.  Simply put, it was mochi, it had been offered to the household gods, and throwing it out was out of the question.  Such waste could not even be thought of.

I suppose this lost tradition could be categorized in two ways: old rural homes just have that aura of having household gods (whilst modern ones don't) and, tongue in cheek, moldy mochi, even if it had been offered to the household gods, wasn't a terribly popular dish....

Guilty Pleasures....

First of all:  Merry Christmas! 

I started this blog post about ten days ago.  Things got a bit busy and so it goes that I'm finishing typing this up in Canada...after I had started working on this in Japan.

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Sometime during the past year a friend sent out an e-mail to all those he usually spams suggesting people send in the titles of songs which they'd call guilty pleasures.  Now my friend's tastes in music can be summed up along the lines of eclectic and widely varied.  He does have an ear for music and he can play an instrument competently.  So what he listens to has to meet a reasonably high personal standard.  He sent out one e-mail afterwards with a link to his guilty pleasure.  I took one look and, as I smiled to myself, thought "Oh...that was a bit predictable".  In short, it was a piece by a semi-obscure musician who could be summed up in one word: brilliant.  My follow-up thought was "Where's the fun in that?".

The fun in the situation from my friend's perspective probably lay in an expected reaction of "Oh, you still listen to him?".  Over indulging can certainly equate to guilty pleasure.  But my initial reaction had more to do with my personal feeling that a guilty pleasure should also arouse a sense of public embarrassment for the one holding it.  For me, that's the element of fun in having a guilty pleasure.


I was going to ramble on further but I'm going to cut this short by mentioning that my latest (yes, there are plenty of others) musical guilty pleasures come from the field of Kpop girl idol groups.  Not the statuesque and stunningly pretty variety though.  No.  I've gotten hooked on a couple of units (lets face it: no matter what the country, idol pop stars are more product than just talent) who I'd label as "quirky" or "odd".  The "odd" label applies to a quality which I've noticed: they remind me of mid-80s to mid-90s Japanese idols...which of course serves as a signpost in the direction of my past musical guilty pleasures.... 

No.... I Haven't Vanished...

It's been a while....  November seemed like a particularly busy month.  The first 10 days were dominated by work and my preparations to give a speech, in Japanese, on my experiences in Japan regarding the topic of human rights.  The next week after that was spent fighting a cold which I had picked up from a co-worker.  The last part of the month was highlighted by a life event which got me re-acquainted with Japanese emergency wards.  The highlight at the end of the month was a rock concert I attended in Saitama city.  Squeezed in between all that was the excitement of the Montedio Yamagata's push to make it into the J1 promotion playoff (they finished in 6th place and in December they upset the 3rd and 4th place teams in the playoff to win promotion to J1).  "Monte" is an association football, re: soccer, club which more or less is the only professional sports team of note in Yamagata prefecture.  I attended their last home match of the season.  I got to the stadium a little later than intended and in the hurry to get into the stadium after parking my car I forgot to turn off my headlights.  So I had to deal with a dead car battery after the match.  Luckily the nearest gas station/service station wasn't too far away from the parking lot and so I was able to obtain a jump start and make my way home.  Any ways, I'll go into details of the other things later.


Odd thought of the day:  I was looking at a map of south east Asia hanging on a wall in a classroom.  I took a closer look at Indonesia to see if I could spot where Krakatoa's location was.  I had been reading about the eruption of that volcano a few weeks ago.  I sussed out the location and for some odd reason I recalled reading there had been an attempt to get a particular group of people in Indonesia to use Hangul, the Korean alphabet, to write their language.  That attempt failed.  I had read about that because I've recently taken some interest in Korean pop music.  One challenge which quickly arose from that interest was the question of deciphering Hangul.  So I pulled up a web page and read about that alphabet, its history and the attempt to spread its use outside Korea.  Subsequently I printed off a chart meant to help people learn to read Hangul.  Reflecting on the Indonesians and the chart, I thought to myself "Well, if there were Indonesians willing to try using Hangul then what would it be like trying to write Japanese in Hangul?".  I contemplated that for a short moment.  Upon which I thought to myself, "Now there's something that would really annoy a lot of people...".

On the Word "Demolish"

Last Sunday a friend took me up to Akayu to attend a concert given by Futenma Kaori, a singer from Okinawa.  I'm not sure when the connection between my friend and Ms. Futenma originated but it goes back a little while.  The concert was held in the Akayu Civic Hall which is an aging structure which houses an auditorium and probably meeting rooms and a few offices.  I remarked that the building looked like it could use a fresh coat of paint and I was advised that it will soon be torn down.  If I'm not mistaken, it was erected in the 43rd year of the Showa era which was 1968.  I would hazard a guess it's replacement is being erected using government funds earmarked for replacing civic buildings.  The new Yonezawa library is another project funded that way.

During the following week I mentioned in a couple of classes that I had been up to Akayu and visited their civic hall.  My first challenge was trying to get students to understand what I was talking about.  In one class I resorted to finding an image of the building using my iPhone and showing that to the students.

My Friday night beginner's class seemed to grasp the idea of what a civic hall is when I pointed in the direction of the area where the Yonezawa Civic Cultural Centre (re: auditorium) stands.  I mentioned its location next to a former public square and that seemed to do the trick.  Where I lost them was when I said the counterpart in Akayu was being demolished.  I wrote the word "demolish" on the board and made motions with my hands to indicate two walls of a building falling inwards while trying to impress upon them the phrase "tear down a building".  That got me a couple of very puzzled looks.

I didn't want to resort to using Japanese so I tried to think of something the two students could relate to.  One is a young woman who is works in the Kanaike neighbourhood and the other is a junior high school student.  I glanced at the junior high school student and then I hit upon an idea: mention the fate of Yonezawa Fourth Junior High School in Kanaike.  That school's main building and gymnasium were found to be structurally unsound after the March 2011 earthquake.  Both were demolished and right now construction of the main building is nearing completion. 

As soon as I mentioned that school building and its replacement my student's eyes lit up.  Okay.  They got the concept.  Once I clarified that "demolish" was in reference to the old building which is no longer then things were okay.  I don't want to think about what I would've had to resort to if I hadn't thought of that school.


Post script:  The pace of construction over here can sometimes be frustratingly slow.  I used to have a student who attended Yonezawa Fourth Junior High School.  He graduated this past March.  I had asked him last winter "When will they finish building your school?" and he just shrugged his shoulders.  He replied "Yes" to my follow-up question of "...After you graduate?", which turned out to be the case.  So almost all of his time at the school was spent attending classes in two temporary structures.  The structures are three story buildings made of steel girders and corrugated steel walls.  They're probably cold as heck inside in the winter and hot as heck in the summer.  But I suppose they're a better alternative than the modular wooden mobile home-like buildings employed when I was in high school in North Vancouver.

Small Surprises

The past month or so has featured a couple of small surprises.  The first one came from the realization that young children can have crushes on their teachers.  It popped up in front of me when a six year-old girl drew a likeness of me on the board next to a princess (who I presume was supposed to be her).  Add all the little hearts she drew in to fill up the empty space and yes, I got the message.  Luckily her mother was there to keep an eye on her that day so that drawing had a short life.  As things turned out, the mother had already planned on bringing her daughters to our school on a different day so after the switch I no longer have that situation to deal with.

The other one came about last week.  The father of one of my junior high school class students came by one evening to pay his daughter's monthly lesson fees.  I was teaching at the time so I wasn't there to overhear the conversation he had with our office manager.  After I finished teaching our office manager mentioned something from the conversation she had had with him.  She had asked him how his daughter was doing in my class.  His answer was positive but he went on to mention what had happened to her at school.  Apparently her English teacher, who our manager discerned is Japanese, had admonished her by remarking that her English pronunciation was too good in comparison to the rest of the students in that class.  So now the girl has to put in the effort not to sound out of place when using English at school.  My office manager opined that she couldn't believe that such a comment would be uttered in this day and age.  Likewise it caught me off guard too.  I had completely forgotten about the expression "The nail which sticks out gets hammered down".     

A Small Writing Assignment

The company I work for distributes a flyer each month to students which features a written contribution from one of the teachers.  That contribution is entered in the "Global Talk" section.  The articles usually focus on various aspects of life back in each teacher's home country.  The recent exception was an article written by my co-worker James about his experiences when he first came to Japan as a high school exchange student (if I recall correctly, he graduated from a high school in Shiga prefecture following three years of study there).

Two weeks ago I was asked to provide a Global Talk article.  Initially I was stumped as to what to choose as a topic.  The requester suggested that I use one of the articles I have written for a series of lunchtime lessons I teach.  My response to that was a "Well..."said with a tone of voice which didn't hide the fact I thought that was a bit of a cop out.  She kindly responded "You have an interesting one coming up about the Stanley Cup.  How about choosing hockey as a topic.".  Okay.  She had me there.  She asked if I could have the article ready in two weeks and I said I could have it ready the next week.  It wouldn't take me two weeks to write a three hundred and fifty word article.

My first thoughts about the article were focused on how to introduce the topic to my audience.  I thought of my sport spectator experiences in Japan.  On my past trips here I took whatever opportunity which presented itself to go watch sumo, specifically the grand tournaments which are held every two months.  I've yet to watch a baseball game in person in Japan.  The closest professional team is based in Sendai and I'm not one to take that much time and trouble to watch a baseball game.  I will travel to watch soccer matches.  So I'm content to drive up to Tendo and watch the local team, Montedio Yamagata, struggle to gain promotion to the top level J1 League.  After watching Montedio win their latest match I struck upon the idea of drawing a quick analogy between Japan's two national sports, sumo and baseball, with Canada's two national sports, lacrosse and hockey.

So I put that idea to paper...so to speak.  Actually, I typed it up on a computer in a word processing document.  I had gotten started on the second paragraph when I had to set the article aside to teach some classes.  Upon completing those I returned to the article...and didn't like what I saw.  It was a bit convoluted and dry.  Really dry.  The contents amounted to a tenuous comparison between two cultures and their favourite sports plus some historical facts.  It lacked life.

I leaned back and thought for a moment; what makes a game interesting as a spectator?  For some odd reason "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" popped into my head.  The logical connection to that for a hockey fan...of course...!   I quickly typed in the words to the chorus of Stompin' Tom Connor's "Hockey Song" at the head of the article.  Voila!  It was the blast of fresh air the article needed.

The rest of the article was written up quickly.  Out went the history lesson.  The description of the game was boiled down to "people on skates using curved sticks to try to put a round object, it's called a 'puck', into a goal".  Due to space constraints mention of Foster Hewitt had to be dropped but the anecdote about Danny Gallivan, where a university professor complained to him that "cannonading" wasn't a word, stayed.

I closed off the article with the chorus from "Big League", a song recorded by Tom Cochrane and Red Rider.  I had chosen to write about a moment at a hockey game which I thought was special.  I've been to many games over the years so there were plenty to choose from.  I ended up choosing the Vancouver Canuck's 2008-2009 season home opener.  Before that game a memorial tribute ceremony was held to honour Luc Bourdon, a young member of the team who had died in a motorcycle accident in May 2008.  Tom Cochrane and, if I'm not mistaken, Red Rider band mate Ken Greer performed "Big League" as part of the ceremony.  For me, it was a haunting and powerful moment.  I don't suppose my little article did it justice but I hope I managed to convey an iota of its impact to my audience.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed on that one...