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.