Debt free, and Yakushima

As of this afternoon, I am officially both dirt poor, and debt free. It feels...about the same. Maybe it hasn't really hit me yet? More likely the fact that I managed to keep pretty well on top of it prevented me from ever having that drowning feeling which a lot of people have described. The relief is real, just relatively speaking my "relief, from what?" question amounts to a lesser evil.

I think we all have different tolerances for the amount of debt we're comfortable carrying. Mine turns out to be alarmingly low. I have real trouble rationalizing spending any kind of money I don't actually have, and even though the school loans were inevitable, my first impulse once I started rakin' in the teacher yen was to throw everything that was not directly preventing me from starving to death towards no longer having that hanging over my head.

But now I do find myself in an interesting position. No wife, no kids, no great material desires, no real obligations of any kind what so ever. I could get fired tomorrow and be totally fine, as long as I could scrape together enough to not starve, a minimum threshold I tend stay above fairly easily. The board just opened up significantly.

I am free to try some really, truly, wacky and experimental ways of going about living. I guess I always have been, but suddenly it seems a lot more obvious.

So later tonight I'm hopping on an 11 hour ferry ride up to the mainland, finding another ferry down to Yakushima, island of giant-cedar trees, monkeys and deer, and spending a week with no reservations, and no particular plans. It's an exercise in unstructured living, something I have always dreamed of, but tend to get mild panic-tremors when actually faced with a large number of unknowns. Time to go get comfortable being uncomfortable.

I'll be taking photos and maybe even some video the whole way along, but am going internet and media free for the duration. I'm bringing a total of 8 kilos of gear. 1 of those is my pack, 1 is my camera, and 1 is my raincoat. Yakushima is wet. I'm also going in my Fivefingers, which may turn out to be a horrible, horrible mistake when it comes time to scramble up some steep trails, but you know what? I'm tired of trying to plan for every contingency. I'm just going to go explore, and let the adventures, good, bad, weird and unbelievable, happen.

See you in a week and a half. I'll hug a giant-cedar for you.

Call me crazy...

It would almost be a confession, if I were ashamed of it. Let's pretend it is, for the sake of drama and tension. Ladies and gentlemen, I have a shaaaaameful confession, which I am only now able to bring myself to admit publicly. The only sport which has ever managed to hold my attention is sumo. There, I said it!

I love sumo, and I don't care who knows! I know the names of rikishi! (Sumo wrestler in Japanese, for the uninitiated) I can tell you the requirements for a promotion to ozeki! (The 2nd highest rank, below yokozuna) I can list the most common kimarite, and can tell you why one 5 second bout was way, way more impressive than another 5 second bout because that mother lover just used mitokorozeme, a technique which has only been seen once in the modern era of sumo! I find the salt throwing, and the staring contests a riveting display of martial prowess!!!

Sumo is a sport which most Americans seem to meet with two primary reactions:

a)It's boring. They posture, squat around, throw salt, and look at each other for 5 minutes, then fight for 5 seconds, and call it a day. What nonsense is this? Where are the flying clotheslines? Where are the cages, the bloody noses, the dick punches!? How could you possibly get excited about that?

b)It's profoundly ironic. Sumo is a sport in which being extremely fat is an asset, nay, a necessity. This is in a country where people are generally rail thin, and the dieting and weight-loss industry is large enough to form its own country, albeit a very neurotic, skittish one.

They are not entirely invalid criticisms. I myself often do something else while watching sumo to combat the extremely long down time between bouts, read a book for example. Or write this blog post. A lot of sumo wrestlers are pretty damn out of shape. Not all of them mind you. There's a fine line between "fat, muscular" and "fat...faaaaaat" and if you look at the ten or so guys camped out in the sanyaku (top 4 ranks) this becomes painfully obvious.

I used to marvel at exactly how the hell anyone could get so worked up over a sport, any sport. I have seen grown men weep, openly, to the point of buckling knees, when their team has lost at a crucial moment in the season. Not to rag on "the ex", but she like all Buffalo residents is a fanatical Sabres fan, and I recall one particularly crushing defeat which kept them from the playoffs where she was heartbroken, and existentially void for about a week. Being a good boyfriend, I was concerned enough to be in another state at the time.

For the record my love of sumo does not extend to this pinnacle, not yet at least. There are fighters I like, and watching the yokozuna Asashoryu retire as the result of a scandal (in which he punched a non-rikishi in the face while out drinking) about a month ago was mildly heartbreaking, but in more of a "Gee, that really sucks...OK, what's for lunch!" as opposed to "I just...I just can't see the point in living anymore..." way.

So why do I like it so much? For all of its reputation as a terribly boring sport, the number of individual inspiring moments is inexplicably high.

This tournament just finished its 9th day, of 15. Baruto, the absolute giant of a rikishi from Estonia who is currently ranked just below ozeki at sekiwake, just won his 9th straight victory this tournament, making him undefeated going into the 10th day. Hakuho, now the solitary yokozuna after Asashoryu's retirement also sits at 9-0. Baruto is currently up for ozeki review, and the prevailing thought is if he can get more than 10 wins, he's got it in the bag. But he's fighting like crazy, and there is a possibility, albeit slim, that he is in contention to actually win this tournament. The tension is amazing every single time he steps into the ring. Baruto is a very popular fighter because inside the ring he fights honorably, and outside of the ring he is always smiling, an all around nice guy to have representing the sport. Not to mention he's huuuuuge, and blond-ish. Plus I personally love him because lately he gets interviewed after fights a lot, and he has just the most adorable "Oh no, Japanese happening, go brain go! No...Noooooooooo" panic moment every single time he is spoken to. It leads to some pretty fantastic mumbling, and the occasional brilliant one liner "Baruto! Now that you are up to 9 wins is the pressure more, or less?" "Well...pressure is pressure." Classic.

This basic scenario, or something similar to it, happens in every single tournament. Last tournament it was Baruto stopping yokozuna Hakuho's 30 consecutive win streak. At the tournament I saw in Tokyo, not only did a European (Kotooshu, ozeki) win the tournament, but there was some amazing bad blood between the two yokozuna after Asashoryu gave Hakuho an extra shove into the ground after the fight was over, and the two nearly got into a brawl in the ring (which is considered sacred. Really, really sacred. So sacred women aren't allowed to step foot in it. Yes, its also sexism, but that's another post.)

I have yet to see a properly boring tournament on the macro-level. It's also usually pretty tense on the micro-level too, when it comes to fighters struggling to make their 8 wins. A fighter who wins more than he loses in a tournament either holds his rank or moves up. A fighter who fails and loses more than he wins is demoted. There is no other way to change rank within the sport. Everything is based on one's performance in the ring. And maybe one's ability at fixing matches, but that too is another post.

A kind of post

Took the day off today because of some epic food poisoning last night, which really put a damper on any attempt to move until about 9 am. Probably as a result of said food poisoning, I am currently suffering some absolutely god-awful heartburn or something which is making sleep frustratingly impossible. Tomorrow is the middle school graduation so skipping work again is pretty much out of the question. If this doesn't clear up soon though I'm defaulting to the "something has gone seriously awry" plan.

At any rate, if I'm going to be up anyway, I figured I might as well write something.

Still trying to find a new way of dealing with this blog. The periodic "journal" version just isn't doing it for me. Getting close though, I think. But don't believe it until you see it.

So, what's the 5 second version of my life these days?

I've started a barefoot running and high-tension strength training regimen which has been going very well, up until this recent bout of creeping death. Both are worth writing about in their own right, and in a very short period of time there have already been fairly notable results.

Once the weather picks up a little bit more I'm hoping to start swimming on a daily basis. I'm not a bad swimmer, it's just always one of those things I wished I were better at.

It'll be spring break very soon. Planning a trip to Yakushima, and also maybe going to Miyazaki to see some traditional Japanese archery. I'm quite excited about both of them. Particularly looking forward to doing some hiking in my barefoot running shoes, a contradiction of terms to be sure but really the only way I can think to describe them. Imagine gloves with a hard sole, for your feet. They seem incredibly, incredibly gimmicky. Until you try them.

After spring break I'm looking to be in the water pretty much every weekend diving.

The guard is changing all over the island, as is the Japanese custom of rotating out jobs around the prefecture every 3 years or so. My boss, one of the English teachers, and a surprising number of the elementary teachers are leaving this year, which means when I come back from spring break there will be a lot of new teachers running around. Should be interesting.

Ok, ate some plain rice and it seems to have calmed things down a bit. I'm going to try and get something vaguely resembling sleep before the sun rises. Real posts to come soon. Better posts.

The Not-so-art of Bowing

My mom sent me a link to this article about the way the Toyota corporation, in particular the president Toyoda-san, has been criticized for his failure to show proper contrition over his company's failure, in particular with respect to the apology bow he made. It also talks a lot about bowing in general, and it is actually a very well written article with some interesting information, which I feel is framed in a kind of unfortunate, destructive way. She asked me what I thought of it, and my e-mail response kind of turned into an article, which I figured some of you might be interested in. You should go read the article at any rate, but if you're in a hurry the gist of it is "Toyoda-san has been accused of offering a short, insincere bow for a fairly serious f-up, and the company has suffered for his failed bow."

Sigh. I mean, there are certainly parts of it which I agree with, but as I said I think the way the article as a whole is framed is kind of problematic. The truth is bowing, almost all of it, is pretty involuntary. You don't really sit around going "Oh gosh, I really should hit about 80 degrees on this one", you just bow to a level and duration, and in a style, appropriate to the situation.

For big, awkward foreigners this seems like it would (and does) take a fair amount of thinking, which is coincidentally why big, awkward foreigners are not expected to bow appropriately. But for Japanese people, they've witnessed these complex hierarchical interactions like...a hundred billion times by the time they are an adult. That number is probably not an exaggeration. You bow like, every 30 seconds. It means "hello", "let's begin", "thank you", "I'm sorry" or sometimes it's just an acknowledgment that the other person exists. We do the same thing in America, nodding at someone on the street if you make eye-contact.

The problem is that when you read articles like this, you get the idea that Toyoda-san f-ed up his bow. Like, he was thinking too hard and screwed up the gesture. That seems to be what the article is focusing on, but this just isn't what happened. Toyoda-san misread the severity of the situation, and his bow reflected this misread. It wasn't "his bow wasn't deep enough" it was "His apology wasn't deep enough. His mortification wasn't deep enough. His shame for his company wasn't deep enough." The bow merely reflected this.

So what the article does is it portrays the situation from a big, awkward foreigner's viewpoint, and ultimately ends up doing the whole "Ohh, Japan is so exotic and foreign. Look at the elaborate social custom of bowing, you sure couldn't understand that could you?" shtick which is ultimately harmful to the general cause of mutual understanding. Think of some of the JETs over here who haven't been studying the country for years now. They feel awkward as hell just about every day because they're not used to bowing, I sure did at first, and when they read something like this and it just reinforces their belief that they can never learn how to bow properly because it's just too complicated. Trust me, you could, if you spent 20 years growing up in Japan.

Anyone could.

Shit, I understand bowing for the most part and I've been here a combined year at this point. I even know how to bow sarcastically. It's not that hard, and you can always always get away with the gaijin "basically a head-nod" bow. Eventually you will start to get instincts for "oooh, I f-ed that up, they're all way lower than I am", and your bows start to instinctively reflect the social situation, along with your way of speaking, and your way of moving. We do the last 2 in America, we just don't realize it because it's not as much of an overt part of our culture. You don't talk to your boss the same way you talk to your kids. You also don't bow to your boss the same way you bow to your kids. Eventually, you'll learn. And chances are you are significantly smarter than the average gradeschooler, which means that you'll be able to learn it faster.

Nothing in the world is so complicated that you cannot learn it with enough time and exposure. The danger, perhaps the only danger, is in convincing yourself that you cannot.

Chindogu

珍度具 (Chindogu) is a Japanese word defining an invention which on the surface appears to solve a problem or serve a useful function, but in fact creates additional problems or would be incredibly embarrassing or cumbersome to actually use. All sorts of fantastically weird inventions have been produced, from slippers for your cat so that it can help with the housework, to an all day tissue dispenser which essentially amounts to a roll of toilet paper attached to your head. One of the chindogu I seriously considered putting together while living in Tokyo was a plunger that attaches to your head, which you can then attach to a train window, to prevent you from slumping into any number of the hilarious yet oh so embarrassing positions in which Tokyo train-goers are often found. Here's a website I found with some examples. Read the linked to articles about the feud between a random Chinese Jessica Alba lookalike and Jessica Alba at your own peril.


At any rate, I was lead to believe that chindogu is somewhat of an enthusiasts hobby here in Japan. People do it basically for the thrill of making something completely, to use their lingo "unuseless". or at least this is what I was lead to believe until about 10 minutes ago. I'm watching Japanese infomercials, or rather something like "the top 30 most seemingly useful but actually totally chindogu kitchen appliances". From the combination shabu-shabu, yakiniku plate, to the home yogurt maker, to the "mysterious plate" which allows you to fry things in the microwave, these are some of the most chindogu things I have ever seen, presented in such a questionably serious fashion. They even have the little Japanese "tarento" in the corner gasping and wowing along, although to give them credit half the time the look in their eyes is certainly one of "If I hold the laughter in for another second I may die." Oh man, it just ended and now they're talking about it all. First comment: "well, the names of the products were really good."

There is pretty much nothing good on Japanese TV, ever. It's like an elaborate satire, a meta-satire even because eventually you have to start reminding yourself just how ridiculous it is to be watching a team of questionably famous people answer questions while running back and forth between a toy train track where a train with a needle on the front threatens to pop a balloon unless you lift the balloon out of the way every 15 seconds or so when it makes a lap. It gets normal.

But for all its inherent fluffiness, it is absolutely fascinating, and man does it ever make for some amazing background noise. I could half-watch Japanese tv forever. Maybe that's what it's designed for. Having on while you do other things. I think that actually explains a lot about the way Japanese tv tends to operate. Very small, independent chunks. A lot of back and forth banter between an ever revolving cast of tarento, just long enough that you come to know them, and be familiar with them, but don't have time to get bored of them.

Either way, as soon as the weather warms up and it stops raining (as it has every day for about 2 weeks now) I am mowing a 6x3 patch of my lawn, laying down a towel, and reading in the sun. I got through about 200 pages today, granted of manga but still a pretty substantial amount of words. I'm getting faster, and having to skip less. I'd almost call myself literate at this point...almost. As long as I don't have to read aloud I'm pretty much golden. I'm very excited to see where I am at the end of my 2 years here.

It's not you, it's me

Posts have been infrequent lately, and I just want you all to know that it's not permanent. I have stumbled upon great truths to happiness and success, and am going through a long process of meditating on, and integrating them into the way I run my life. It feels fantastic, but some things are getting turned down low while my focus is elsewhere. There will still be posts, but until I can sit down and rework the way I treat this blog to make it less of a chore and obligation more or something I actually want to do, I just don't feel right throwing stuff up just to fulfill my Operational Blog Quota, or whatever you want to call it.

Kikai has just entered into what the locals call "the dead of winter" and I call "the first day of spring". Funny, that. It's over 20 C, and we got a rare break in the weather because whoever is doing the forecasting scribbled a whole line of angry storm clouds all over my week, and today was sunny and pleasant. Island - 1, Science - 0. Take that weather prediction!

I took the opportunity to ride around on my increasingly broken bike, and take some photos.








There, those are some of the things I'm seeing. Sunset over the harbor, the island Sakura (Japanese cherry trees) are just about in full bloom, and for it being the "dead of winter" there is alarming amount of fruit, and greenery.

I'm going to go be alarmingly productive now. If any of you have any specific questions or concerns about my charming little patch of island real-estate feel free to leave a comment with some questions, or send me an e-mail. I think you all know the address. It might strike a chord and inspire an actual post, or I might just write you back.

これからだよ

On the virtues of Japanese television

I believe that the world at large is beginning, in our modern age of youtube, to get some idea of exactly how surreal Japanese television is on any given day. The popularity of shows like Ninja Warrior and the whole human-tetris phenomenon speak to some level of the warped world of Japanese pop entertainment appealing to the world at large.

When I first got here, I neither understood, nor enjoyed Japanese television on any level. It was frustrating, impossible to keep up with even with the subtitles, and for some reason they kept putting these little picture in pictures of Japanese celebrities who seemed to do nothing except gasp and laugh at the show, which they were not actually participating in.

Lately, as part of Project Literacy, I have actually been watching a fair amount of tv. I didn't even touch the thing for the first 4-5 months here, but now that I can't go to the beach every day I'm spending more time in my house, and can't always muster the wherewithal to focus on reading something. At these times, tv provides useful background noise, especially when I'm doing something in English and music would be too distracting. It was profoundly useful as something that was interesting, but entirely ignorable.

At least until today. So I'm watching a show which I actually struggle to describe in English. Japan really likes "The top X" type shows, varying from "Top x weirdest animals!" "Top 3 most popular meals at every train station along a route!". Today's top x, is "Top 30 instant noodle meals".



It is literally two guys, getting served bowl after bowl of instant ramen, eating it, and talking about how awesome it is in a fashion which is so Japanese it makes my teeth hurt.

But for me, this particular moment in Japanese televised oddity, will always hold a special place. So I'm sitting here, trying to study my kanji while the dudes on screen slurp down bowl after bowl of ramen, and I'm getting all frustrated because for some reason I just cannot focus on the kanji! Damn dudes and their ramen just keep on distracting me! It's not even that interesting! Most of the noodles probably taste exactly the same!

And that's when it hit me. I'm being distracted by Japanese, and not in like a "screaming children way". Even when I'm not focusing on it, trying to understand it, my brain is deriving substantial meaning from it. My brain is starting to understand Japanese passively.

This. Is. Crazy.

My god if manzai starts being funny I am going to shit a brick...

Adorable little monsters

At first, the walls were enough. More than the crumbling concrete and creaking black gates, it was the walls in their minds that kept them at bay. The Rules, and they respected The Rules, even if they weren't sure what exactly what or why The Rules were. We thought we were safe.

And for a time, we were.

Until he came along.



They needed a leader, someone who was unafraid of The Rules. He walked past the walls, through the gates, and they called to him "No! You can't do that! You can't go in there!" And he just looked at them, with a question in his eyes "Why?" and rang the doorbell anyway.

And just like that the walls were gone. Just like that, suddenly they weren't afraid of anything. Our terrifying new existence, side-by-side with these adorable little monsters, had truly begun.




But it's going to be ok. We're going to be ok. They may have gotten the courage up to talk to me at home...but I'm still way better than they are at rock-paper-scissors. こい！



In other news, I have had a request for more photos of the island. Here's a shot I took while riding down the long hill in the north of the island, of the sugarcane field terraces on the southern hill. Sugarcane baby! It's everywhere.



As per usual, if you want to see it larger you can click on the picture to take you to Teh Flickr.

And when I was 22

I learned to read.


I owe you a real post at some point. January has been a spectacular month in a completely unspectacular way. The sakura are starting to bloom, the sunsets are amazing, and the weather is starting to turn around. I have a broken toe, have utterly messed up my back, and have no proper explanation for either. I kicked ass at the demonstration class in front of the rep from the Amami board of education, and have the unofficial go ahead for next year from my boss, his boss, and 400 screaming elementary school kids. I am very, alarmingly nearly, debt free.

It has been a good year.

Winter diving

So it turns out that one can actually dive in the winter here, even during the tail end of January which is thought of as sub-arctic freezing by the locals, and as Spring by anyone who has lived in Minnesota. I previously had decided to suspend underwater operations for the duration of Winter, after going out on a cloudy day with typhonic wind somewhere in the middle of November and almost catching hypothermia on the boat ride home. But hey, the chance to be able to tell your snow-bound friends that you just spent the day 18 meters under is just too good to pass up. I had to try it at least once.

Most of the people who dive year-round on Kikai do so by utilizing the latest in dry-suit technology. A dry-suit is a custom fitted, completely contained, single piece, air filled suit. They are the underwater equivalent of plate-mail: high degree of protection, without sacrificing too much mobility, with a 3000 dollar price tag which a lowly squire such as myself has no possible way of, or desire to, afford.

Today I learned that there is a 2nd solution to the winter-water problem. A dry-suit is what you would get if you got some engineers together and explained that water is cold in the winter, and asked them for their best solution. A semi-dry suit is what you would get if you got a bunch of 4-year olds together and explained the same problem. If one wet-suit is good, well then like...4 wet suits must be amazing! To return to the armor metaphor, if a dry-suit is plate-mail, a semi-dry suit is taking several suits of chain-mail and wearing them one on top of the other. Cheap, dirty, about as mobile as a turtle in space, and with the added benefit of tearing nearly every hair off of your body in the process of putting it on, or taking it off. This particular semi-dry also had a hood, allowing me to satisfy several James Bond-eque fantasies, both mine and theirs.

The first dive was rough. The guys at the dive shop really aren't used to dealing with someone with my particular buoyant qualities. I tend to float like a cork even when I don't have a tank full of air, and a triple-thick full-body condom on. So even though I had...8 kilos? strapped on to me in various parts, I really had to fight to get below 6 meters. Once you get down below 6 or so the pressure smashes some of the airspace and you equalize much easier, but in the process of fighting my way down those 6 meters or so I failed to notice that Yoda-san was still on the surface until I was on the sea-floor...35 meters down. Oops! Apparently he couldn't get his ears to equalize forever, and had to keep going back to the surface. So I was kind of spinning in circles down on the sea floor trying to figure out if his hand signal meant "What the hell are you doing get back up here!" or "No no, I'm ok, don't worry!" Thumbs ups in diving parlance is just so damn misleading. Surfacing proved equally difficult, and I ended up shooting to the surface like a cork without properly depressurizing, which sounds dangerous, but is more embarrassing than actually harmful unless you've been under much deeper or much longer.

Dive 2 we strapped 12 kilos on, which I believe is what the clam-divers use when they're bottom walking.

Still, despite flopping around in several centimeters of rubber, and totally fucking up my first dive, it was a pretty good day of diving. Saw two sea snakes (one of which was sniffing another diver's boot), and my first turtle. Turtles are way cool, and I really need to get a camera so I can show you guys if I see more of them. I also should really look into getting some contacts, so I can stop having to choose between a) going with a normal mask and giving up vision over 15 feet, and b) going with the prescription mask someone else left behind and having vomit-worthy headaches every single time I get back on the boat.

Finished off the night with fresh caught sashimi, yakiniku, and several pounds of fire-baked oysters, while I sat around and listened to the local dive-rats and surf-bums discuss all the things they wanted to do when they went to America, probably the funniest conversation I have born witness to since I arrived on this island. Images of Japanese men hailing a taxi from LA to Las Vegas, where they proceed to don a cowboy hat and two pistols, walk into a bar and demand a Budweiser, while smoking Marlboros, then go find a strip club, ride around on a motorcycle, and I believe at some point both Robocop and Terminator were brought into the elaborate fantasy as well, punctuated by "アメリカいいねええ！” (A sentiment something like "Man I want to go to America!") every thirty seconds.

Ah the dive shop. How I've missed you.

Kanji, comics

It is the start of week 3 of Project Literacy, and it is becoming readily apparent to me that whoever started the vicious rumor that "DUUDE Kanji are so forking hard, you can't learn those like ever, there's like a billion of them!" was smoking copious amounts of hash. The miracle is no longer how Japanese kids manage to learn all 2000+ kanji, bur rather a) how it takes them like...9 years to do it and b) how on Earth I managed to figure out the absolutely back asswards phonetic character system we use in English. "Sound it out" looks great on paper, but I think the reason why most kids can do that is that you're sounding out words you already know, and you're just figuring out how they're written. Watch any Japanese kid learning how to read English "sound it out" and you'll see how hard it is if you're not already steeped in tens of thousands of hours of English practice. By the time you're reading words like "hegemony" and "bifurcate" you've already seen those basic sounds so many times that you've got the instincts necessary to extrapolate pronunciation from the letters.

Kanji on the other hand let you sound out meaning. You have no idea exactly how profound that is until you start doing it. In English knowing 26, or lets be honest at least 52 since the upper case characters are in many cases significantly different, lets you sound out the pronunciation of most words to a reasonable degree of accuracy. Conversely, knowing 2000 characters in Japanese lets you sound out the meaning of most words to a reasonable degree of accuracy.

What. The. Hell.

Just think about how surreal that is for a moment. There are certainly some instances of that in English, pre/suffixes, words based on other words. But gosh golly how many of those do you think we have? And how often to you even realize that's what you're doing? I mean hell, they forced 3 years of Latin down my throat pretty much entirely on the basis that I would then be able to do just that, but hell if it actually took. With an obscene length of repeated exposure, maybe a native English speaker can get some degree of the prophetic powers that kanji can seem to bring out. I'm doing it after seeing these characters once, maybe twice.

It's pretty gosh darn cool.

It's allowed me to start blowing through Japanese reading materials like I was being paid to do so (and hey, lets be honest. Sometimes at the office I actually am). Once you realize that between kanji and context there is maybe one sentence every 5-10 pages which you cannot at least mostly grasp, reading gets a lot more fun. That whole "word, dictionary, word, dictionary" thing just wasn't doing it for me. It made reading feel like work, something which one should avoid at all costs. And the really, really surreal bit is when you start accidentally learning words, readings for kanji, grammar patterns, simply because you just read it a few dozen times in about an hour and a half. And half the time I don't even realize I learned it, until I'm chatting and it just comes out.

One of the reasons I was previously hesitant to read in Japanese before getting comfortably fluent was because I had this odd obsession with reading "works of great merit". I own way way way more Mishima than anyone who does not have a Japanese inner monologue should ever even see, much less pay money for. The problem with works-of-great-merit is that you feel bad skipping over a sentence you do not fully grasp, because you fear it will some day come back to haunt you, or that you are doing the work a disservice. Comics do not have this problem. I am not particularly concerned with failing to grasp the subtlety of the razor-sharp exchanges of ”絶対負けられねェ！！！” (something like: I definitely cannot lose!!!). Even the bits which have some substance to them generally are aimed at an audience with a relatively high degree of aloofness (as grade/middle schoolers are wont to) and thus are repeated, reworded, and reiterated numerous times. Like...once every page. "I don't kill anymore because I regret my actions. Did I mention that I am no longer a murderer? Notice how I am not killing you. This is because..." and so on.

Winter in the semi-tropics is a curious phenomenon. Most of the things which define it as a sub-tropic island suddenly become unavailable. Some degree of depression kind of comes along with it naturally I feel. Can't swim, can't dive, and it's cloudy and chilly every single day. But fear not, for I have found a fine cure for the winter blues. A great big rack of highly entertaining, nearly mindless fluff, doled out in ￥１００　increments, which also happens to magically teach me Japanese.

Alight with purpose

It's called a paradigm shift. A moment beyond which one's entire outlook is irreparably changed.

Trying to explain it, my words begin to fail me. Like my brain is afraid if I try and put it into words, it'll die on me.

Well, if I can't attack it directly, maybe the minutes from the week will explain themselves.

Aside from this blog (which I haven't written in lately) and talking with friends and family back home, every single moment of my life about 8 days now has been Japanese. I learn about 75 kanji a day, how to write 'em, and what they mean. Goofy mnemonics that would make HRM of puns my father cringe at the corniness. I have to physically stop myself at the end, because I want to keep going, but fear that my brain cannot keep up with my ambitions. Knowing I could keep going, knowing I want to keep going, while studying kanji, the bane of Japanese students' collective existence was the first hint that I was maybe, maybe, on to something.

All my music is Japanified. Every single English song I had is now keeping my recycle bin company. English movies: gone. English tv: gone. English books: on ice. (Sorry Ma, the Xmas presents will have to wait for now. I've got a mission! But thank you.) I watch Japanese TV shows where contestants try to get their pet dogs to not eat a bowl of food, only being allowed to say "Matte!" (Wait!) twice. I watch Die Hard 4 in Japanese, and marvel at how much Bruce ceases to be even the least bit badass, when he speaks like an aging sushi-chef. I have found a shop which will actually allow me to rent comic books, for 100 yen a week. This must be illegal.

All of this may seem extreme, but the beautiful part, the part that's so hard to properly put into words, is that it is the most fun I have had in years. That unto itself is not the root of the new-found peace of mind, but it's what leads to it.

You see, for most of my life I have ascribed to two basic method of operation:

1) Wow, that would be cool to do/be. But ooh, that would be cool to do/be too...AND OOH, how about that one! Oh man, this is too complicated, if I pick one, I can't do the others, so I'm going to go take a nap, have a sandwich, and kill the afternoon/week/year/first 22 years of my life (well...maybe 20, the last few years had some substantial value, albeit mostly in getting my ass handed to me).

2) OK! This time I'm really going to do it! Here's what I want! Here's a rigidly structured plan which more or less parallels the education system I was brought up under, only A THOUSAND TIMES MORE OPTIMISTIC, AND STRICT! I will be up, every morning, at 4:30 am, no, better make it 4 you goddamn coward! You will go running for 30 minutes! Uphill!! Fuck that better make it an hour you fat son'bitch! Usually I then proceed to continue this level of rigor for about 2 days...3 if I'm really feeling genki that week. Then slowly begin making compromises, winding down just in time for next Monday. I have tv to watch, games to play, shamisen to attempt to write blues songs for, chips to eat. You know...important stuff.

The reason why option 1 always fails, is because I am a tragically fantasy prone person, and I have inherited a healthy streak of arrogance from my father. (I will never forget the time where Dad proclaimed, after a workshop in a field in which his sum experience amounted to "that workshop", that he didn't want to sell anything, because he didn't want to upstage the teacher. Not an exact quote, but you get the flavor.) I honestly do think I can do just about anything. No really. I once spent a solid week working out a plan to start an asteroid mining operation in space. I even started keeping a list of asteroids which would pass close to Earth in about 25 years time—the time frame I estimated to make my first billion, and acquire the necessary knowledge to advance the field of astrophysics by like...50 years. If only I had that damn astrophysics degree! *Eats chips*

Option 2 fails for a number of other reasons. 1) I am just not, despite all my hopes and dreams, particularly disciplined, at least in the classical "masochistic" sense of the word disciplined. If something sucks, I generally quit it fairly quickly. I used to view this as a raging character flaw. What a lowly worm I am, to not even be able to struggle through this little bit of pain, ok a lot of pain, for an awkwardly long time frame, in order to get what I want! BEING A MAN MEANS HAVING THE UNBREAKABLE WILL TO FORCE YOURSELF TO DO ANYTHING! HOLD YOUR HAND STEADY ON THAT STOVE-TOP PRIVATE!!! 2) I for some reason see attempting to change one thing, as an excuse/imperative to change everything. If I'm going to start exercising, I better start building my space shuttle (or rather nuclear propulsion ore carrier. No matter how much I wish I were kidding, I was not.) 3) My habit was to mark out my goal, mark out systematic steps towards this goal, accompanied by extremely unrealistic time frames. Today, 1 pull-up. Tomorrow, maybe 20? And the day after that we should be up to about 100 right? That is if we have time in-between mastering all 2000 basic kanji through sheer force of will, and building the chassis for my rocket...When the reality began to deviate from the plan almost from the moment I stopped writing said plan, the logical discouragement sets in, and *eats chips*.

It turns out that really, to succeed, be happy, enjoy the ride, whatever, there are only two basic things that I seem to need to do. 1) pick something. Can't build a rocket ship while I train for climbing Everest. They're just incompatible. I can certainly play around with other things, but only if they also contribute to OBJECTIVE ALPHA. 2) Continually do something related to (1). It doesn't even have to have tangible results. The point is not to be continually grinding forward. The point is not to work at all, in fact. I hate work. Secretly I bet you do to, if you get over your puritanical work ethic, drilled into you from the years of schooling, and/or laboring. Or rather, the the point is not to "work" if you define work as something unpleasant. The point is to just keep on playing around! Do things you like! A lot of them! If they're not fun, then find other things! And stop trying to put things on your list of life-goals just because they sound cool! Do you even like space? Does mining actually even sound remotely fun to you? I highly doubt it good sir.

Yes, sometimes there are things you have to do which aren't "fun". This is where you make games out of it! How many dishes can you do in 2 minutes!? GOGOGO! How about every time I walk past the sink I just do one dish? Every time I walk by the Landry Room (oh boy...it's tragic)how about I fold one shirt? Learning kanji isn't always fun, but putting them all into a little computer program that shoots them out at me every couple of days, depending on how well I did last time, and then I get to click things and feel like a total badass every time I get a kanji right without thinking because I get to click the "easy" button, and tell the program "psssh, bi-ya, I don't need to see that for like...2 weeks". Your brain is stupid as hell! It'll never figure it out, I swear! If anything it starts to get addicted to it! WHEN ARE WE GOING TO PRESS MORE BUTTONS ADAM!?!? WE HAVE TO TRY AND BEAT OUR LAST RECORD AT DISH WASHING ADAM!!!! BUILD THAT ROCKET CHASSIS ADA...*cough**cough*. Anyway, you get the point.

Think less. Do more. Have fun. Be conflicted between the desire to continue watching the TV program in which teams of Japanese celebrities compete to test their kanji knowledge, and the desire to go play with tiny little digital cards to work on your own. Get Japanese pop-songs stuck in your head. Put down your video games because they're "too academic" to go read comics about samurai. Shirk your way to greater prosperity.