It’s Saturday night, which leaves me thinking about what to post. Here’s what I wrote. Ha ha. Read on, fearless reader. (That was a Japanese blog joke…sorry. I made it up myself.) Read more…
Ready for round 2? Come and get some love. (Or a suspicious box of bananas, depending on which story you read first.)
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NOTE: The seek bar does not work on this video. (The metadata is missing from the flash video, and I need to inject it.) When you click play, you can only pause and continue to play from that point. Do not try to seek – either nothing at all will happen, or you will restart the video. Since it is 15 minutes long, that would suck. When I fix it, I will remove this warning. Thanks.
This was a student project from a course I took called Intro to Urban Anthropology: Tokyo under the auspices of Professor Bernard at Waseda University in the 2004-2005 academic school year, whilst studying abroad. I didn’t want to work in a group, so I worked by myself – but give credit to Megan and Sam for playing dual roles as interviewees and part-time camera folk. The theme I chose was how foreigners handle interactions with one another, and whether or not culture or ideals from their home country is present in these decisions and feelings. Sounds fun, huh? No? Ok, fine. Be that way. Anyhoo. Please indulge yourself in a 15 minute long joyride through my young-skull-full-of-mush’s version of an anthropological short. My goals were two; not to take myself too seriously, and to make a video that stood out from the sure-to-come onslaught of boring stuff that did eventually come. (I only say that with a twinge of jealousy, for many of the boring films blew mine out of the water. Hence the need to differentiate myself in some way.) Behold it and weep – or just giggle at my awkwardness. That’s what I do.
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Japanese toilet paper squares are not squares at all. They are rectangles with roughly 1.5 times the length of their American counterpart. Ply seems to have the same definition, though. Which one is the rebellious measurement? Does this vary by brand? I don’t know. Reminds me of the “select the length you want” style paper towel from America. They annoy me, because you can tear paper anywhere – there is no need for additional perforations. All the extraneous holes just weaken the structural integrity of the paper towel, rendering it useless in some common applications. Leave it alone, folks. Just let it be. Ok? Ok.
Also, it is spring and getting warmer by the minute. That is all.
The following stories were written by students at one of my schools during a chain writing activity. I won’t put their names or year in this post. I purposefully left all of the original mistakes in the text – so these are copied verbatim, incorrect capitalization, punctuation, spelling, and grammar included. I have been correcting these for about 2 days, and thought I’d share some of the ones that struck me as particularly interesting. This is not to make fun of their English (though I excuse native speakers who giggle at the funny stuff), but to show what kind of weird stuff comes out when you tell them to write with a time limit and nearly zero direction. It also shows you the level of English that I tend to deal with in high schools. Each story was written by a group of 4 in 5 minute shifts without any outside ideas. I hope you enjoy it.
No matter what form of transportation I take, the ocean is never far from me. It struck me over the end of last week that I am perpetually at the water’s edge. I don’t mind, however. I feel like my buddy James much of the time – uncomfortable, irritable, and a touch faded when removed from my natural habitat. I come from a seaside city, and came to a seaside city. Good match, if you ask me. The cool thing is, living out here, I get the joy of seeing huge mountains right next to the deep. It’s cool. Here are 2 videos of me traveling right next to or right on top of the water. Watch if you like.
This is a video of the ferry ride back to Hakatajima from Imabari. The water was a bit choppy. These videos are really just meant to give an impression of what I spend a lot of my time here doing…riding around in boats. From island to island, and from school to school. I’ve come to really like ferries as a method for commuting.
This is a video of the train ride into Matsuyama from Imabari. You pass the shore for a nice long time during the trip. It’s gorgeous. Especially around the Hojo area. Anyway, this video is much longer than the video above, but is really intended to do the same thing: give a vague impression of what my commuting looks like. I really enjoy it sometimes, and I am really frustrated by it sometimes. Either way, I get a lot of reading done in between destinations. Hope this entry wasn’t too boring. 
