Live from Omishima
I guess I shouldn’t admit to posting during work hours, but that is exactly what I am doing. I don’t feel particularly bad about it, though. Why? Because 1) nobody is using this computer (and the guy on the computer next to me is playing solitaire…and has been for an hour and 23 minutes), and 2) I finished all of my classes for the day. So there. 
I started reading a book called The Japanese Mind today. It is a collection of short essays on all kinds of Japanese cultural concepts that was written by students at Ehime University in Matsuyama, edited by Roger J. Davies and Osamu Ikeno. (Matsuyama is my prefecture’s capital.) I know I shouldn’t hold them to a higher standard, but after I read that the goal was “error-free” English in the introduction, I couldn’t help but be nitpicky. Not that I’ve ever done that before… I’ve already found 3 typos. Aileen is reading the same book, so maybe we can have really intelligent sounding chats in front of other people when we’re done. Anyhoo - while I know the book was not designed to be read cover-to-cover, the essays I read today were based on the following concepts:
- 曖昧 Aimai (ambiguity)
- 甘え Amae (dependence)
- 天下り Amakudari (”descent from heaven”)**
- 美学 Bigaku (sense of beauty)
- 武士道 Bushidou (way of the warrior)
- 沈黙 Chinmoku (silence in communication)
- 男女関係 Danjyo Kankei (male-female relationship dynamics)
- 道 Dou (uses, meanings, & consequences of the kanji “dou”)
- 頑張り Gambari (patience & determination)
- 義理 Giri (social obligation)
- 腹芸 Haragei (implicit communication)
- 隔たると馴染む Hedataru to Najimu (personal space)
- 本音と建て前 Honne to Tatemae (private vs. public stances)
- 家 Ie (uses, meanings, & consequences of the kanji “ie”)
I considered answering one question from each essay’s included discussion materials, but I decided that it might bore you out of your minds…on the other hand, if anybody wants my take (yeah right!), feel free to ask. I can at least tell you which essays I found helpful, which ones I found woefully incomplete, which ones I thought were written by would-be classic “PhD candidates” according to the good Dr. Leavell (e.g. inconclusive for the purposes of remaining academically balanced…kind of…more noncomittal than anything else), etc. Some of these dichotomies are helpful, if not for actually understanding Japanese society, for understanding the construct within which the people who study Japanese society attempt to frame it - whether or not that has any basis in contemporary Japan. I have personally written about soto-uchi, mono no aware, amae, and honne to tatemae in various classes, for instance. Plus, they come up in lectures and books a lot, so it’s nice to have a working understanding of them as buzz concepts. Anyway, enough of the boring stuff.
I also hit my regular blogroll just to see what was up. 2 of my buddies delivered for me. Clay at The Hopeless Romantic had a good post on current events and racism in Japan. Readers who are familiar with Cartoon Network’s The Boondocks (the characters from which have yet to perpetrate any “terrorist” acts on U.S. cities…ahem…unlike the Aqua Teen Hunger Force…) will find his post interesting. He also links to a snowballed-from-a-blog story from Yamanashi Prefecture that recently hit the mainstream news. Meanwhile, Megan at Constantly Baffled linked me to probably the funniest web comic that I have seen, excepting Penny Arcade. (You have to be a nerd to understand either of them, but Megan’s find - called “xkcd,” is waaaay more highbrow on occasion, and thus more rewarding I’d say.) Anyway, I enjoyed their posts enough to pass them along, so give them a visit. 
** Amakudari is a phrase referring to the shady political method by which “senior bureaucrats…are allowed to take important positions with private or semiprivate companies after retirement,” which sort of guarantees that they’ll have a huge sum of wealth coming to them when their real retirement comes. And they get shielded from huge screwups they may make…etc. It’s a system to make sure that people at the top who fail don’t fail…and could be tangentially related to the Western idea of the bigwig who jumps with a “golden parachute.” Kinda. Sorta. Ish. Loosely ish.