This time last year I asked some students what the route to enter university was like. Interestingly enough, the first step for those not entering through the suisen, or recommendation system, was to buy a face mask in order to prevent getting sick before the all-too-important entrance exam, which is often make or break.
Mind you, this was pre-COVID.
Ask your Japanese friends to try reading 一斗二升五合 and most of them will probably be stumped. It is a riddle of sorts employing 斗, 升, 合, all of which are traditional Japanese measures of volume.
一斗 (itto, about 18 liters) is equal to ten 升 (shô, about 1.8 liters). 一斗, then, can be said to equal 五升の倍 (go shô no bai), which means “five shô doubled”. 五升の倍 (go shô no bai) is synonymous with 御商売 (go shôbai) which means “one’s business or trade”.
Still with me?
二升 (nishô). 升 can also be read masu. 二升 here can be read “masu masu” which sounds like 益々 (masu masu), meaning “more and more”, “steadily”, and son on.
五合 (go gô, 5 x 0.18 liters, or 0.9 liters) is one half of a shô or 半升 (hanjô) and sounds the same as 繁盛 (hanjô, prosperity).
So, putting it all together 一斗二升五合 can be read “Go-shôbai masu masu hanjô!” (御商売益々繁盛), meaning something to the effect that your business or trade will enjoy increasing prosperity.
On Saturday I took my brood to the Tōka Ebisu Festival to pray to Ebisu, the god of wealth, fishermen, fortune, and merchants. (And if that isn't already large enough portfolio for one god, Ebisu is also said to be the guardian of the health of small children.)
As I have written before, one of the highlights of the four-day-long festival is a lucky drawing (福引, fukubiki) for Ebisu goods—calendars, large paper fans, daruma dolls, lucky mallets, giant paper-maché fish, and so on. In past years, I've "won" all sorts of prizes, big and small, but last year my elder son and I arrived too late and missed the drawing altogether. Not wanting to make the same mistake twice, I made sure we left home nice and early Saturday morning, the last day of the festival.
My son wanders off alone in search of a Kyōryūja mask. (I'll have to write about that one of these days.)
And finds a lucky drawing stand, instead. There are all kinds of pellet guns on display.
"Lucky drawing! Everyone's a winner. Lucky drawing!"
"I want this one," he says to me.
"This isn't a shop. You don't buy these. You have to buy a raffle ticket."
"I want this one," he says again.
My son has become rather persistent when he wants something. Usually it's junk, overpriced junk, but he wants it all the same, and wants it NOW.
A few weeks back, the two of us popped into a convenience store. As I was withdrawing some money from the ATM, my son wandered about the aisles looking for candy and toys and found an Anpan Man Camera.
“I want this,” he said, placing the toy on the check-out counter.
"What is it?"
"Anpan Man Camera."
"I don't have any money," I said.
"You have money."
"Yes, but not for this," I said, picking the camera up. "How much is it, anyways? A thousand yen! No way!"
"I want it . . ."
With a tantrum threatening to erupt, I scooped the boy up into my arms and headed straight for the door. We were going a German restaurant that was about a twenty-minutes' walk away and I'll be damned if my son did not keep saying, "I want Anpan Man Camera! I want Anpan Man Camera!" the entire distance.
"You have a camera. I nice digital camera."
"It's broken!"
"It's not broken," I replied. "I fixed it the other day."
The battery had died, but I had since recharged it and emptied the storage. It was working nicely again.
"I don't want Daddy to fix it! I want Anpan Man camera."
He finally calmed down by the time we reached the German restaurant, but having carried the 20kg kicking and crying boy the entire distance, I was thoroughly exhausted.
Back at the festival, I tell my son, "You don't understand. You have to buy one of these tickets first. If and ONLY if you're lucky will you win the gun."
The old woman running the stand says, "Everyone's a winner."
"Yeah, right," I shoot back.
"I want this one!"
I ask the woman how much one of the raffle tickets cost.
"Five hundred yen."
"Five hundred yen! Auntie, I think the biggest winner at this stand is you!"
"Yep," she says with toothless grin.
Just then a middle-aged retarded (sorry, Sarah Palin) man walks up to the booth and says he wants a gun, too. His minder tries to hold him back, but the man tries to take one of the guns, saying in Japanese, "I want this one. I want this one." His minder relents and gives the retarded man a five-hundred-yen coin.
I tell my son: "You watch! You'll see, he won't win anything."
Well, as luck would have it, the retarded man ends up winning the very gun my son wants. A second man in his thirties with severe Down's syndrome comes up next and also wins a gun.
"I want one, too!" my son says.
Now I have no choice but to also give my son a five-hundred-yen coin and let him have a go at the game.
Maybe it is because it's the last day of the festival and the woman has nothing to gain by cheating us, or maybe it is simply because she doesn't want to make a little boy cry, either way, my son "wins" the gun he wanted.
"What do you say?"
My boy looks up to the woman and very bashfully says, "Thank you."
I tell her thank you, too. "That was awfully decent of you. You didn’t have to do that."
"Lucky drawing! Everyone's a winner! Lucky drawing!"
By the way, the gun didn't look anything like the photo on the box AND, worse, it broke on our way home on the train. Oh, well.
Before I moved to Japan, I looked at a map of the world and saw that Fukuoka had the same latitude as San Diego, CA and thought: I guess I won’t be needing any sweaters or my heavy coat.
I was soooo wrong.
Several years ago, the White House issued a response to a petition on its “We the People” site which had called for the adoption of the metric system. The petition had garnered almost fifty thousand "signatures". Although many proponents of the meters and liters were disappointed with the response, I found it to be rather convincing.
Patrick D. Gallagher, the Under Secretary of Commerce for Standards and Technology and Director at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, wrote:
“Right after the Civil War, President Andrew Johnson signed legislation that made it ‘lawful throughout the United States of America to employ the weights and measures of the metric system in all contracts, dealings or court proceedings.’ In 1875, the United States was one of the original 17 nations to sign the Treaty of the Metre. Since the 1890s, U.S. customary units (the mile, pound, teaspoon, etc.) have all been defined in terms of their metric equivalents.
“So contrary to what many people may think, the U.S. uses the metric system now to define all basic units used in commerce and trade. At the same time, if the metric system and U.S. customary system are languages of measurement, then the United States is truly a bilingual nation.
“We measure distance in miles, but fiber optic cable diameter in millimeters. We weigh deli products in pounds, but medicine in milligrams. We buy gasoline by the gallon, but soda comes in liter-size bottles. We parcel property in acres, but remote sensing satellites map the Earth in square meters.”
The “bilingual” nature of the way we Americans measure things around ourselves hadn’t really dawned on me until I read this.
A bio/chem major in college, I have long known that the metric system with its ease of convertibility is a superior way to measure the world’s phenomena. A Calorie (1C) for instance is the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius. One kilogram of water is equivalent to the mass of one liter of water, which is also equal to the volume of a cube with sides ten centimeters in length. Try to make these calculations in the U.S. customary system and you’re bound to come up with the wrong answer.
Gallagher concluded, “In our voluntary system, it is the consumers who have the power to make this choice. So if you like, “speak” metric at home by setting your digital scales to kilograms and your thermometers to Celsius. Cook in metric with liters and grams and set your GPS to kilometers.
“We were thrilled to see this petition from ‘We the People’ succeed. Feedback like this from consumers shows everyone from policymakers to businesses how important having this choice is to Americans.
“So choose to live your life in metric if you want, and thank you for signing on.”
After reading this, I realized that while I had been living the metric system for over two decades, I wasn’t completely committed to it. My speech was still being corrupted by pounds and inches and gallons.
So, from today on I will “speak” pure metric. On a clear day, I will I exclaim “You can see for multiples of 1.609 kilometers!” When a colleague puts in extra effort, I will thank him for “going the extra 1,609 meters.” I may even buy him 0.57 liters of beer to show my appreciation.
When I’m under intense pressure to perform, I may perspire what feels like increments of 3.785 liters and may still end up missing a target by 1.6 kilometers. Shylock will now demand 0.453 kilograms of Antonio’s flesh in Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice”. And, when adamant, I shall not budge, not even 2.54 centimeters. And when I die, they may lay me 1.829 meters under.
Reading Henry Scott Stokes's The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima I came upon the following passage:
“As we left Odawara and reached the coastal expressway beyond, the car passed the first of the succession of big industrial plants which we would see on our return to the capital, still an hour away at least. There was no beach below us, only a dreary series of massive reinforced-concrete tetrapods, intended to break the force of the sea as it hit the mighty wall below us. ‘I believe in culture as form and not as spirit,’ said Mishima, referring to the leprous Khmer monarch Jayavarman III and his building of one of the temples of Angkor Wat, Bayon. He seemed very tired as he talked. ‘I want to keep the Japanese spirit alive,’ he added, as if unaware that he was contradicting himself . . . A few minutes later, he cradled his head in his left arm, leaning back in his seat, and fell fast asleep. The car sped swiftly on toward Tokyo, which we would reach in another half hour . . . From time to time I caught the sight of buildings, new factories, other expressways. As we passed Chigasaki, there was an occasional pine tree to be seen by the road, still standing on what had once been the historic Old Tōkaidō Road to Osaka, three hundred miles to the west. That was all that was left of old Japan, perhaps—a few pine trees.” [1]
It occurred to me that if in the late 60s Japan’s landscape had already become a scorched earth of industry and “modernism”, then it was stupidly naïve of me to embrace the romantic image I’d had of Japan before I actually came almost a quarter of a century ago—the sensitivity devoted to the most mundane of daily items, the beauty of manicured gardens changing with the seasons, quaint Japanese houses with tiled roofs and a zen-like simplicity inside, young pearl drivers lowering their lithe bodies deep into the pristine sea, a respect for nature that exceeded worship . . .
Thirty years after Stokes biography was written, humorist David Sedaris had this to say about Japan:
“Riding the high-speed train—the Shin-kansen—to Hiroshima, I supposed that to the untrained eye, all French cities might look alike, as might all German and American ones. To a Japanese person, Kobe and Osaka might be as different as Santa Fe and Chicago, but I sure don’t see it. To me it’s just concrete, some gray and some bleached a headachy white. Occasionally you’ll pass a tree, but rarely a crowd of them. The Shin-kansen moves so fast you can’t really concentrate on much. It’s all a whoosh, and before you know it one city is behind you and another is coming up.” [2]
Out of fairness to my adopted country, I should note that Japan is seventeenth among nations in the world (and the third industrialized nation, after Finland, 72.9%, and Sweden, 69.2%) for forested area. 68.6% of the land in Japan is covered by forests. It is also one of the few countries in the world where the percentage of forested land is increasing.
The title of this post might not ring any bells for most readers, but this was a play on the title of Yasunari Kawabata's acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature: "Japan, the Beautiful, and Myself. Kawabata won the prize in 1968, and, four years later, killed himself.
One thing that comes up time and time again when people who are unfamiliar with Japan read my writing is the issue of why the Japanese language uses "Chinese characters". "What?" they invariably comment. "I thought this was supposed to be Japanese . . . Is this Japanese or is this Chinese? I don't get it." Don't worry. I asked the same question almost thirty years ago. (For more on the Japanese writing system, scroll down to the bottom.)
Every day I hear Japanese complain, “Eigo-wa muzukashii.” (English is difficult.)
I suppose for non-native speakers of the language, English can be hard to master. This blessed tongue of mine is a hodgepodge of languages—Germanic, Romance, Celtic, etc.—making the spelling and grammar a confused mess that is not only cumbersome for learners but for native speakers alike.
BUT! The Japanese language is so much more muzukashii. Our list of irregular verbs and odd spelling rules cannot even begin to burden a student the way the Japanese writing system hinders foreigners who try to master it.
Of the more than five thousand different languages out there in the world, the most difficult one to read has got to be Japanese.
It’s not unusual to find a single sentence chockablock with Hiragana (ひらがな), Katakana (カタカナ), Kanji (漢字), Rōmaji (also known as the alphabet), and even Arabic numerals. While hiragana, katana, and rōmaji are straight-forward enough and can be mastered in less than a week, what really makes Japanese so hellish for learners (especially non-East Asian ones) is the fact that unlike the pictograms in Chinese, known as hànzi (漢字), where most characters have one basic reading, almost all Japanese kanji have several possible, often unrelated readings.
Take the kanji for “I”. In Chinese 我 is pronounced wǒ. In Japanese, however, it can be pronounced: a, aré, ga,wa, waré, and waro. The character for “food/eat” 食 is read shí in Chinese, but can be read: uka, uke, ke, shi,jiki, shoku, ku, kui, su, ta, ha and so on, depending on context. And while the kanji for “go”, 行 can be read in a number of similar ways in Chinese—xíng, háng, hang, héng—in Japanese it can be read in the following ways: kô, gyô, okona, yu, yuki, yuku, i, an, and, who knows, possibly more.
Kids in Japan must master 1,006 of the 2,136 different characters, the so-called jôyô kanji,[1] by the end of elementary school and the remainder in junior high school.
Think about that.
It can take up to nine years of education for a Japanese child to become literate in his own language, far longer than it takes an American to learn how to read English. By comparison, hangul (한글) the Korean writing system can be mastered for the most part in a single day. If you’re determined enough, that is. I taught myself how to read (though not quite understand) hangul during a trip I took in the mid 90s. Riding on the high-speed train connecting Busan in the south of the country to Seoul in the north, I compared the Romanization of the station names and the Chinese characters with the hangul. By the time I reached Seoul a few hours later, I could read the Korean script. Piece of cake!
No other language offers as overwhelming a barrier to entry as Japanese does when it comes to its writing system. As a result, students of the language are often forced to focus on speaking alone. They cannot reinforce what they learn by, say, reading books or magazine and newspaper articles the way you can with other languages.
If they ever try to do so, however, as I did, they’ll find that written Japanese is a very different animal from the spoken language.
Open up any book, even a collection of casual, humorous essays by Murakami Haruki for example, and you’ll immediately bump up against “ーde-aru” (ーである). I hadn’t heard of this copula[2] until I started trying to read things other than textbooks and manga.
De-aru, which is just another way of say desu (ーです) but in a more formal and rigid way that is suitable for reports or making conclusions, is only the beginning. While I can generally catch almost everything that is being said to me or what is said on TV even when I’m not really paying attention,[3] written Japanese takes concentrated effort to comprehend and sometimes up to three perusals[4] to get a firm grasp on what the writer is trying to convey.
Even if you’re not interested in learning how to read Japanese, just trying to master the spoken language can provide you with years of headaches.
Thinking I could master the language in my first three months or so in Japan—Hah!—I dove headfirst into my studies almost as soon as I arrived, taking sometimes two to three private lessons a week.
At the time, the selection of textbooks for learners of Japanese was extremely limited. While I had a good set of dictionaries called the Takahashi Romanized “Pocket” Dictionary—the only kind of pockets they would conceivably fit in were the pockets you might find on the baggy pants of a circus clown—the textbook I had to work with couldn’t have been more irrelevant.
Written for engineers from developing countries invited by the government to study and train in Japan, it contained such everyday vocabulary as “welding flux”, “hydraulic jack” and “water-pressure gauge”. The phrases taught in the textbook were equally “helpful”:
Q: ラオさんは何を持っていますか。
Rao-san-wa nani-o motteimasuka
What is Rao-san holding.
A: ラオさんはスパナを持っています。
Rao-san-wa supana-o motteimasu
Rao-san is holding a spanner.
In all of my twenty years in Japan, I have never once used this phrase. I haven’t used a spanner or a wrench for that matter, either. Nor have I met anyone named Rao-san.[5]
But, the biggest shortcoming of the textbook was its desire to have learners of Japanese speak the language politely.
And so, the less casual -masu (−ます) and -desu (—です) form of verbs triumphed. If you wanted to ask someone what he was doing, the textbook taught you to say:
あなたは、なにをしていますか？
(Anata-wa, nani-o shiteimasuka?)
I practiced this phrase over and over: Anata-wa, nani-o shiteimasuka? Anata-wa, nani-o shiteimasuka? Anata-wa, nani-o shiteimasuka? Anata-wa, nani-o shiteimasuka? Anata-wa, nani-o shiteimasuka?
Armed with this new phrase, I went up to a group of children in a playground and asked, “Anata-wa, nani-o shiteimasuka?”
Crickets.
A few months later I was diligently studying Japanese in that most effective of classrooms—a girlfriend’s bed—when I learned that people didn’t really say Anata-wa, nani-o shiteimasuka, especially to children much younger than themselves. No, they said, “Nani, shiteru no?” or something like that, instead.
After about a year of studying the language, I could manage. I certainly wasn’t what I would call fluent, but I was no longer threatened by death or starvation. When I moved to Fukuoka, however, I bumped up against a new and very unexpected wall: hôgen. The local patois, known as Hakata-ben, is one of the more well-known of Japan’s many bens, or dialects.
When the people of Fukuoka wanted to know what you were doing, they didn’t say anata-wa, nani-o shiteimasuka or even nani, shiteru no. They said, “Nan shiyô to?” (なんしようと) or “Nan shon?” (なんしょん).
Let me tell you, it took quite a few years to graduate from saying “Anata-wa, nani-o shiteimasuka?” to “Nan shiyô to?” And that, of course, was only the beginning. It took me nearly a decade to figure out what 〜んめえ (~nmê) and ばってん (batten) meant.
Example:
博多弁: 雨なら、行かんめーと思うとるっちゃばってん、こん様子なら降らんめーや。
Hakata-ben: Ame-nara, ikanmê to omôtoruccha batten, kon yôsu nara, furanmê ya.
標準語: 雨なら行くまいと思ってるのだが、この様子だと雨は降らないだろう。
Standard: Ame nara, ikumai to omotteru-no daga, kono yôsu dato, ame wa furanai darô.
English: I was thinking of not going if it rained[6], but it doesn’t look like it’s going to rain (after all).
My Japanese grandmother would say something like, “Anta, ikanmê” (you aren’t going, are you) to which I’d grunt, “Un” (that’s right), when in fact I had every intention of going. The poor woman and I had conversations like that all the time.[7] When I finally figured that one out it was as if the scales had fallen from my eyes. Day-to-day life here has contained fewer misunderstandings ever since. ばってん (batten), by the way, means “but”.
My experience with Hakata-ben has spawned a masochistic interest in Japanese dialects in general and I have been maintaining a blog on the topic for the past few years. Have a look-see!
Anyways, the long and short of it is that while English is no cakewalk, it’s still much easier to learn than many other languages, such as Japanese. So, the next time you hear your students grumbling about how difficult English is, just tell them, “Oh, shuddup” or in Hakata-ben: “Shekarashika-ken, damarī”.
So, why "Chinese characters"?
Mr. Wiki says: "The Japanese language had no written form at the time Chinese characters were introduced, and texts were written and read only in Chinese. Later, during the Heian period however, a system known as kanbun emerged, which involved using Chinese text with diacritical marks to allow Japanese speakers to restructure and read Chinese sentences, by changing word order and adding particles and verb endings, in accordance with the rules of Japanese grammar."
[1] 常用漢字, jōyō kanji, are the Chinese characters designated by the Ministry of Education for use in everyday life.
[2] A copula is a word used to link a subject and predicate, as in “John is a teacher”, where “John” is the subject, “a teacher” (actually a predicative nominal), the predicate and “is”, the copula. (Don’t worry; before I started studying Japanese, I thought copula was a film director.)
[3] Unless it’s a period piece and the actors are using Edo Period Japanese.
[4] I use the word “perusal” to imply thoroughness and care in reading. So many Americans today mistakenly assume the word means “to skim”. It does not, it does not, it does not. So, for the love of God, stop it! Same goes for the word “nonplussed”. If you’re not a hundred percent certain of the meaning—and even if you are (over confidence is America’s Achilles heel)—don’t use it. Chances are you’re probably mistaken.
[5] I eagerly await his arrival, though. For when I find him, I will surely ask, “ラオさん、何を持っていますか？”
[6] I have intentionally translated this in the manner that Japanese speak—namely “I was thinking about not doing” rather than the more natural “I wasn’t thinking about doing”—to make the original sentences easier to understand.
[7] Incidentally, while in Tōkyō I chatted up a girl from Gifu who told me that they also used the same ~nmē verb ending. Her friend from Hokkaidô had never heard it before.
I used to get so depressed after Christmas when I was young. In America, there really wasn’t much to look forward to once King of All Holidays had passed. We had Easter, of course, but you had to first eke your way through six weeks of Lent, which was no easy task in my devoutly Roman Catholic family.
After coming to Japan, though, I haven’t had that problem. Here, there is always something in the offing to look forward to: Ōmisoka, or New Year’s Eve; Gantan or New Year’s Day itself; the first seven or fifteen days of the New Year called Matsunouchi; the Tōka Ebisu Festival held around the 10th of January; Dondoyaki on the 15th; Setsubun at the beginning of February, and so on.
And so, to keep those Christmas Blues in check, we have made it a habit to decorate our home if not as lavishly, then just as festively for the New Year. That involves a trip to one of my favorite florists, Unpas. Every year they make the most wonderful shimenawa and mini kadomatsu.
This year, in keeping up with the muted mood of the times, we opted for a simple design.
We may add something to this pine branch to make it a bit more colorful.
A few days later, we went to the Yanagibashi Shōtengai market, which is always hopping with at the end of the year, picking up New Year’s decorations and ingredients to make traditional New Year’s dishes.
I think this may be the first time we have ever bought a real kagami-mochi. I think we may have started a new tradition.
What is a kagami mochi you want to know?
Let’s ask Mr. Wiki:
Kagami Mochi (鏡餅, "mirror rice cake"), is a traditional Japanese New Year decoration. It usually consists of two round mochi (rice cakes), the smaller placed atop the larger, and a daidai (a bitter orange) with an attached leaf on top. In addition, it may have a sheet of kombu and a skewer of dried persimmons under the mochi. It sits on a stand called a sanpō (三宝) over a sheet called a shihōbeni (四方紅), which is supposed to ward off fires from the house for the following years. Sheets of paper called gohei (御幣) folded into lightning shapes similarto those seen on sumo wrestler's belts are also attached.
The kagami mochi first appeared in the Muromachi Period (14th–16th century). The name kagami ("mirror") is said to have originated from its resemblance to an old-fashioned kind of round coppermirror, which also had a religious significance. The reason for it is not clear. Explanations include mochi being a food for special days, the spirit of the rice plant being found in the mochi, and the mochi being a food which gives strength.
The two mochi discs are variously said to symbolize the going and coming years, the human heart, "yin" and "yang", or the moon and the sun. The "daidai", whose name means "generations", is said to symbolize the continuation of a family from generation to generation.
How much profit does the typical restaurant earning ¥5 million in revenue make? Crispy Chicken 'N' Tomato, a franchise business, claims it's only 5%. Some say it's closer to 7%, but depends on the type of restaurant, with ramen shops being the most profitable at 20%.
I don’t even have a driver’s license so this is all academic for me, but even if I did have one, I probably still wouldn’t own a car.
For starters, I really like to drink. The real reason, though, is that I live right smack in the heart of the city and most of the places I want to go to—department stores, restaurants, bars, boutiques, parks—are within walking distance. When I do want to go someplace further, I use public transportation which is often much faster and less nerve-wracking than driving. And, several times a month, for convenience sake I hail a cab.
When people hear about this, they often say something to the effect of, “A taxi? Wow! You must be rolling in the dough!” Mind you, these are often people who own cars.
What I tell them, time and time again, is that for someone like me who lives in the city and works six days a week, taking a taxi every now and then is small change compared to the high cost of buying and maintaining a car. I never had proof to support this assertion until I read an article in Nikkan Gendai which claims that owning a car is “the ultimate waste of money”.
The article says that while having a car enables the owners to go wherever and whenever they like, in reality most “salarymen” are only weekend drivers.
When you think about it, nothing eats through money quite like an automobile. In spite of their claims that cars give them freedom and convenience, most drivers do little more with their cars than go shopping at big box retailers on the weekends. A few may take day trips, but for the most part, their cars just sit in the garage, guzzling resources.
For someone living in the suburbs of Tōkyō, the cost of maintaining a car comes to about ¥30,160 ($295) a month, or ¥380,000 ($3,712) a year. Keep in mind that this does not include the price of the car itself.
Parking: ¥15,000/month (in my neighborhood, parking is about ¥30,000/month)
Gasoline: ¥5,0000/month
Insurance: ¥50,000/year
Car Tax: about ¥40,000/year
Vehicle Inspection: about ¥100,000 every two years
If the owner of a car were to only drive five times a month, he would be spending the equivalent of ¥6,000 per use. Keiichi Kaya, author of the “The Rich Man’s Textbook” blog, writes, “Owners of cars shouldn’t expect to become even moderately wealthy.” The article goes on to say that even if a person were to use taxis and rental cars frequently, it would still be much cheaper than owning a car.
I agree.
Still, I wouldn’t mind owning a Mini.
Note: For my friends who are car crazy, the costs involved in maintaining a car are well worth it.
Fukuoka is a great place to live. That said, like any town, it does have some drawbacks. For me as a foreign resident of the city, it is the scarcity of traditional Japanese architecture. The only area in Fukuoka that still has a handful of fairly-well maintained machiya-style townhouses and temples and shrines all within a short walking distance of each other is Gokusho Machi (御供所町). Located less than ten-minutes’ walk from Hakata Station, you’ll find Japan’s oldest Zen Buddhist temple, Shofuku-ji (聖福寺) pictured here as well as Jōten-ji (承天寺), which claims to be the place where udon, soba, manjū, and, I believe, uiro were first introduced to Japan.
The best time to visit the area is in autumn when the maples of the temples are ablaze in color. Even then, it tends to be very quiet.
These photos were taken several years ago. For some reason, this year’s momiji were not as beautiful as in year’s past.
The name Gokusho (御供所) is a reference to the function the area used to have as a place (所) to purchase offerings (御供えもの, o-sonae-mono) to be made at Hakozaki-gū Shrine (箱崎宮) located just beyond from the Mikasa River.
From Wiki: 日本においては、神々に感謝・祈願し霊を鎮めるため神社などに供物を捧げる習慣が、古来から神道儀礼として定着しており、とりわけ稲作中心の農耕文化であったため、気象条件により年によっては凶作となった。そこで、新米など新しい五穀を供えてその年の収穫に感謝し、豊作を祈願する稲作儀礼がさかんに行なわれ、農耕に限らず、神社信仰においては、大漁、安産、地鎮祭、七五三詣などはもとより私的な細事に至るまで、日頃から供物を捧げて祈願する。神社などの儀礼施設に限らず、個人の居宅にも神棚を設けて、榊や灯明とともに神饌と呼ばれる供物を捧げることにより家内安全や招福を祈願し、今日でもその伝統は残されている。その一端として皇室で行なわれる新嘗祭や大嘗祭にもその儀礼が伝わっている。
If I have the chance, I will translate the Wiki page later.
In additional to the area’s autumn foliage, another highlight of the Gokusho are a number of light-up events held during the season. This is from Fukuoka City's website, something I translated years ago:
“Matsushita hails from a family of carpenters who specialized in building shrines and temples. The opportunity to start a career as a lighting designer also came about through working with sacred buildings. 'The way shrines and temples take in light is very good,' says Matsushita. 'It's difficult for a woman to get involved in shrine and temple carpentry, but then it dawned on me that even a woman like me could work with light.’
“Matsushita is the general producer of the Gokusho Light Up Walk, an event held every autumn in which the historical temples in Gokusho are beautifully illuminated. Areas, which are normally off limits, are opened to the public and bathed in dreamy light. It has become a popular event at which visitors can experience Fukuoka's eternal history. 'The Gokusho area is an area no one normally ventures into at night,' says the lighting designer. ‘Jōten-ji, however, is where Hakata ori (textiles), udon and soba originated. Tōchō-ji was founded by Kōbō-Daishi (also known as Kūkai), who was a Buddhist monk, scholar, poet, and artist. And, Myōraku-ji has a long connection to the merchants of Hakata. There are so many marvelous treasures sleeping there. I wish more people could realize how beautiful it is.’ Matsushita hopes the festival will continue for a hundred years, growing ever livelier at the hands of ordinary people.”
In recent years, I have been doing the following activity on the first class after the winter break.
I split the class up into teams and, while listening to traditional Japanese music featuring the koto or shamisen, I have the students write on the blackboard as many words as they can in rōmaji related to the Japanese New Year.
In addition to being kind of fun—not barrels of fun, mind you, but fun enough—this activity can be rather instructive.
For starters, you'll find that many Japanese students, not being proficient in the Hepburn romanization, will write things such as fukubukuro with an "h" rather than an "f" (hukubukuro) or nengajō with a "y" (nengajyo). The reason for this is that many Japanese learn simpler forms of romanization known as kunrei-shiki or Nihon-shiki. For more on this, go here. This is a good chance to briefly re-introduce the students to the Hepburn romanization and encourage them to use it in the future.
A few years back, my second-year English Communication majors came up with the following words:
One of the interesting things about this is that while many Japanese students will offer up words like hagoita, a decorative paddle used when playing a game resembling badminton called hanetsuki or even tako-agé (kite-flying), you shouldn't expect to see any of your neighbors playing hanetsuki or flying kites on New Year's Day. (In all my years in Japan, I have never once seen young women in kimono playing this game live as I have in television dramas.)
I then tell the students to ask one another if they had done any of the things on the board.
"Did you eat o-sechi or nana-kusa gayu?"
"Did you decorate your homes with shimenawa and kadomatsu?"
"Did you send any nengajō?"
Of the 23 students who attended that day, twenty had eaten o-sechi, four had a shimenawa at the entrance of their homes, six had gone to the hatsu-uri New Year's sales, eleven had drunk o-toso, and so on.
Erasing those items which few or none of the students had partaken of, we came up with the following significantly pared down list:
Where New Year's in Japan was once a very colorful, tradition-laden event, all that remains of it today, or so it seems, is the food, the shopping, and banal TV programs. Less than half of the students visited one Shintō shrine (hatsumōde), let alone three, during the holiday. It's kind of sad when you think about it.
Now, I'm not suggesting that we need to put the Shintō back in the Shinnen (New Year), like some good Christians back home demand Christ be kept in that pagan celebration of the winter solstice also known as Christmas. But, I find it odd that the Japanese are so lackadaisical when it comes to their own heritage and culture.
I asked a group of young women if they could throw some common—and not so common—Japanese abbreviations at me.
Old standards, of course, are OL (Office Lady), OB (Old Boy, as in an alumni network), and TPO (Time Place Occasion).† Ones I hear rather frequently now include CA (Cabinet Attendant, i.e. stewardess, who for the longest time were called “sutchi”) and KY (Kuki-o Yomenai, which refers to someone who can't read the mood of a situation; i.e. someone who just doesn't get it.)
Newer abbreviations, though, can be rather funny.
“PK,” one of the girls in the back of the classroom called out to peals of laughter.
"PK?" I asked. "PK, as in penalty kick?"
The girl giggled and said, "Yes, sensei, penalty kick."
I could tell that she wasn't telling me the truth. "C'mon, what does it really mean?"
"It's embarrassing."
"Yes, but, you brought it up."
"パンツ食い込み (pantsu kuikomi)."
"Aa-ah," I said, as the image hit me. (Don't recommend googling that when you're at work, by the way.)
And then the girls rolled about in the aisles between their desks, as they do.
PK is no laughing matter. According to a highly scientific study conducted by Wacoal, a manufacturer of lingerie, some 80 percent of Japanese junior and senior high school girls, namely JC and JK, are troubled by PK. Fortunately, the good people at Wacoal have come to the aid of these fair damsels in distress with a new line of inexpensive skivvies called NPK, or “Non-P. K.” that retail for ¥1,100. SM no more! Shimpai muyō (心配無用).
More abbreviations include:
HK 話、変わるけど（Hanasi Kawarukedo）
HM 話し戻る けど（Hanasi Modorukedo）」
MK5 マジ（Maji））で切れる（Kireru）5秒前
WK しらける from 白＋蹴る＝White＋Kick
AY 頭（Atama）」+「弱い（Yowai）
AKY あえて空気読まない which is further abbreviated to KY
MMK モテて、モテて、困る (異性から人気があり過ぎたり、多数の異性から言い寄られて困るという場合に使用する)
For more of these abbreviations, go here.
Most Japanese believe that TPO is English, but it was actually thought up by Ishizu Kensuke (石津 謙介), the founder of Van Jacket, an apparel maker popular between the 60s and 80s.
Next year, Setsubun will fall on February 2 for the first time in 124 years. This will also be the first time in 37 years that the seasonal ritual is not February 3rd.
For more, go here:
https://eco.mtk.nao.ac.jp/koyomi/topics/html/topics2021_2.html
I was talking to a student about the draft in Japan during the war and how her grandfather had tried to enlist but was too short. Later on, of course, the Japanese military wasn’t very picky anymore and he got sent an akagami (lit. “Red paper) from the Imperial Army informing him that his time to fight had come.
He was still only 16 or 17 at the time and Americans were now at Japan’s doorstep. No longer too small to die for his country, he was trained how to unpin a grenade and lie down before an advancing tank to literally stop it in his tracks. Imagine that.
For some reason, that got me thinking about the Selective Service. I remember having to register at the age of 18 and for the next five years the potential to be drafted always hung over my head like an ominous cloud. Every time the US attacked or bombed another country—and we did it a lot during Reagan and Bush’s administrations, I always wondered if my own time to fight had come. It had only been a decade or so earlier that boys were being drafted to fight in Vietnam.
Fortunately for me and the soldiers who volunteer, the US military figured out that it was better in the long run to just pay service members more and improve the benefits package for veterans than to conscript unwilling citizens to do your bidding.
Out of curiosity, I went to the Selective Service’s website where I found a tool to look up your draft number. After some 30 years, I was still in the system. With a few clicks of the mouse, I printed out my Selective Service card. It would have come in handy when I tried to renew my license ten years ago and didn’t have a third piece of ID, such as my Social Security card, on me.
Although I was once a "Young Republican", today I consider myself a moderate Libertarian†. I can appreciate the need for Keynesian-style stimulus spending in times of recession and higher taxes to help reduce budget deficits, BUT nothing brings out my inner curmudgeon quite like seeing government money, my taxes, going to waste.
Two years ago I posed some questions for our newly elected mayor. One of them was: "Throughout Japan, and in Fukuoka, too, many historical spots are indicated by little more than concrete posts stating that this is the location that such and such happened. This is a missed opportunity to make the history live, to build authentic sightseeing spots. How can Fukuoka better highlight its historical heritage?" I also asked: "Many of the parks are poorly maintained. Gardeners come in only once every few months, hack at the weeds, trim limbs, and then leave the parks to be overrun with weeds, garbage, and the homeless once again. What can the city do to better maintain these areas, to make them places people would be happy to visit?"
Now, I'll be damned if in two short years the city didn't go on to address both of these issues head on. Maizuru Park where the ruins of Fukuoka Castle are located now has a regular crew of gardeners (most of whom are mentally retarded*) which tends to the flower boxes and generally keeps the park clean. And this visitor center located in the park was recently opened. Progress!
I have two problems with the center, though. One is the design which has nothing to do with Fukuoka Castle or the other structures in the area.
For instance, all of the restrooms in the park look like this:
White washed walls, known as shirakabe (白壁) with a gray border along the bottom half, reminiscent of townhouses in the Edo and Meiji eras.
Why didn't the city build a visitor center in this or a similar style, something that would have been both interesting for tourists to see and would have been in keeping with the previously established theme? The architectural style of this new building has nothing to do with the culture of Japan or Fukuoka. It's a missed opportunity, to say the least.
The second, and bigger, of the two problems with the visitor center is the price. How much do you think it cost?
Take a wild guess? Make it wilder . . . You're still cold. You're not even close, my friend.
The Fukuoka Jō Mukashi Tanbōkan ((福岡城むかし探訪館)) cost a whopping 70 to 80 million yen to build. (The Yomiuri Shimbun has the price at "about 70 million", and NHK reported recently that the center cost 78 million yen.) In dollars that comes to between $875,000 ~ $975,000. Almost a million bucks! And that is for the structure alone. The city didn't need to buy the land (usually the most expensive part of a structure) it was built upon. Imagine what your home would look like if you had put that much money into its construction. It would be fitted with saunas and Jacuzzis, heated floors, an elevator for your cars, a gorgeous designer kitchen, a wine cellar, living quarters for the help, and so on.
Obviously someone made a killing off of this little projects and it worries me to no end that the citizens of this city don't rise up and voice their disgust and anger. Instead, they just shrug.
The consumption tax is going to be doubled in a number of years, but as long as projects like these continue to waste money hand over fist Japan's massive public debt will never be addressed.
Your tax dollars at leisure.
Originally posted in 2012.
___________________________
†There is an excellent online tool which plots your opinions on political and economical matters on a "compass" and compares them with the policies and beliefs of political leaders, past and present.
Winston Churchill reportedly said, "If you aren't liberal at 20, you haven't got a heart; if you aren't conservative at 40, you haven't got a head." If that is true, then I was a heartless youth, and today at the age of 46 I am not sufficiently curmudgeonly for my age.
*By the way, you can holster your offense at my use of the word "retarded": one of my sisters was (she has already passed away), and two of my cousins are "mentally retarded". My sister’s case was so severe, she couldn’t say much more than “Ma-ma-ma-ma.” We all miss her.
This was originally written in March, 2012, a year after the Fukushima earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster.
It’s starting to sound like I do nothing but sit in front of the boob tube, but there was another one of Ikegami Akira’s television specials on Saturday night that is worth mentioning. Part of FujiTV’s series Ano Hi o, Wasurenai: Higashi Nihon Daishinsai kara 1 Nen (I’ll Never Forget That Day: A Year after the Tôhoku Earthquake and Tsunami), Ikegami’s program dealt with both the mechanism of the deadly quake and the energy crisis that has confronted Japan in its wake.
While last year’s tsunami was directly responsible for the shutdown of the Fukushima Dai’ichi nuclear power plant, subsequent, and might I add legitimate, concerns about the safety of nuclear energy have resulted in all but two of Japan’s 54 commercial nuclear reactors being idled[1]. The remaining two are also scheduled to be shut down soon[2], meaning that a country which once depended on nuclear energy to produce 31.4% of its electricity has had to make up the shortfall by importing more natural gas and coal precisely at a time when fresh tensions in the Middle East are driving fuel prices up.[3] Incidentally, 80% of Japan’s oil and 20% of its natural gas passes through the Strait of Hormuz, underscoring how crucial it is that Japan address its energy needs before another oil shock brings the country to her knees.[4]
Fortunately, Japan has options.
By sheer coincidence, I happened to be speaking to an engineer who had just come back from the Kyûshû Electric’s Hatchôbaru geothermal power plant located in central Ōita prefecture near the Asô-Kujû National Park. The largest of 17 geothermal power plants in Japan, Hatchôbaru along with the neighboring Ōdake geothermal power plant produces 122,500kW of electricity, which only amounts to about 1% of Kyûshû Electric’s capacity. The potential for geothermal energy in Japan, however, is great.
I may be oversimplifying this, but wherever volcanoes are found, a power plant can be set up using the steam generated by heat of the volcano’s magma. Japan, with its 119 active volcanoes—the third most numerous in the world—has the potential to produce some 23,470,000 kW of this clean energy. At present, though, Japan ranks 8th in the world in geothermal energy production, producing only 536,000 kW. What’s more Japan has not built a new geothermal power plant in over ten years. Only 0.3% of Japan’s electricity is currently being supplied by these geothermal plants. In spite of that, a surprising 70% of the word’s geothermal power plants are using turbines produced by Japanese companies, including Mitsubishi and Toshiba.
If Japan has the capacity and the technology, what then is preventing the country from taking advantage of this resource?
One, the initial costs can be quite high. Drilling the wells needed for a geothermal power plant costs several million dollars each (I’ve heard as much as five million dollars). And because the wells can only be used for about a year, as many as twenty wells may have to be drilled. The largest geothermal power plant in Iceland has 28 wells.
Two, the hot spring industry is against it. They worry that if the water is diverted for use in the production of electricity there won’t be any left for the spas Japanese love so well.
And, three, most of Japan’s volcanoes are located in National Parks which have strict regulations on development.
In February of this year, however, the Ministry of Environment has signaled that it is willing to consider opening up National Parks for the development of geothermal power. Officials from Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry have also been to Iceland to see how Japan might benefit by taking advantage of this natural resource, which has the potential of producing as much as 20 nuclear reactor’s worth of electricity.
Ikegami’s special also looked into Brazil’s biofuel industry. A similar system has already been adopted in Miyako-jima (Okinawa prefecture), where bi-products from shôchû and sugar production are being used for bio-fuels and the fiber from sugar canes is burned to produce electricity. The aim is to make the island completely energy-self sufficient.
Other towns in Japan have also taken the initiative, including one farming village in the Tōhoku region—the name escapes me right now—which currently produces enough energy from biomass and other sources that it is able to sell its excess electricity back to the power company.
While Japan may not realistically be able to do without nuclear power in the short-term—the demand for electricity, particularly in the summer is still too great—I do think there are things that the country can start doing today to encourage the use and production of alternative energy sources. I’ll address this issue in a day or two. (For more on this, go here.)
[1] According to a recent poll by Tôkyô Shimbun, 80% of Japanese asked were in favor of phasing out nuclear energy.
[2] By law, nuclear reactors in Japan must be idled every 13 months in order for safety checks to be conducted. Once shut down, however, public pressure has prevented them from being put back online.
[3] Before the earthquake, Japan got 31.4% of its electricity from nuclear power plants, 60.3% from thermal power plants, 8.1% from hydropower, and 0.5% from renewables such as wind and solar. Today, 7.3% of electricity is generated by nuclear power plants, 86.3% by thermal power plants, 6.1% by dams, and 0.6 by renewables. (Note: these figures are for 2011-2012.)
[4] That Japan had the infrastructure in place to compensate for a loss of over 23% of its nuclear power capacity is truly amazing. I don’t think America would be able to make up the loss.
Bud Clark, future Mayor of Portland, OR, in the iconic “Expose Yourself” to Art Poster
On Sunday evening we received an email from the kids’ school informing us that one of the cooks in the kitchen had contracted COVID-19. (Uh-oh.) The school assured us parents that the person in question had had no contact with teachers or students. It also said that the remaining cooking staff had been sent home to quarantine for two weeks. What’s more, professional cleaners had been brought in to disinfect the kitchen and related areas over the weekend. As a result of the steps that had been taken, kids would be able to go to school on Monday with only one change: there would be no apple jam in Monday’s school lunch as the infected person had been in charge of it.
I asked my wife why the school would even bother mentioning the jam.
“Because some petty-minded parent would complain,” she replied. “There was no apple jam in my child’s school lunch!”
True. True.
Now, I wouldn’t say we were on pins and needles about this, but still I was checking my email every now and again to see if a cluster would develop at the school.
Well, late Monday night, we got another email from the school. Fortunately it was about a different kind of exposure.
“What is it,” my wife asked, her voice tense.
Just another pervert, I answered.
“Oh, what a relief!”
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