Rocking in Hakata

Japanese essay time! While I’m far more partial to golden oldies than your average 23 year old, this post is (regrettably) not about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. Though, I kind of wish it were. For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, you are missing out. No, sadly, this is another Japanese essay. Very poorly constructed, I must confess. I am getting lazier and lazier with attempting to correct them before I send them in. That’s probably due to the fact that my brethren and I have come to realize that our labors are in vain - if you sneeze on your paper, you get a perfect 10. So why try? Well, I do want to learn Japanese…I just feel unmotivated. They don’t even offer corrections, so I annoy my Japanese colleagues. Luckily, they like me. Anyhoo - this one did not pass through their helpful filters verbally beforehand - I just put pen to paper (that’s a lie, I composed it on the computer and edited it, then hand wrote it). Anyhoo. Thought I’d keep it up. I’m thinking that I’ll try to write a topical Japanese blurb once a month in spite of the correspondence course, though. When it ends, I’ll try and keep this thing regular. Now, for the actual writing. First in Japanese, and then in English after the break.

質問：日本には四季（春・夏・秋・冬）があります。日本の季節の中で、あなたが一番好きな季節はどれですか？また、なぜその季節が好きですか？日本語でまとめなさい。

日本人はよく日本に四季があることを自慢に思います。しかし、私の実際の経験によると日本人の四季観と実際は違います。出身のサウス・カロライナ州には季節が二つだけあると思います。それらは長くて、蒸し暑くて、熱い夏と長くて、蒸し暑くて、暖かい秋のような季節です。サウス・カロライナには真冬はありません。最後の雪が降った時をまだ覚えています。１９８９年の１０月の終わりごろでした。ヒューゴと言う酷い台風が９月に来たので、その年の天気が変になりました。私たちの芝生にあった雪を熊手でかき集めて、身長が低かった雪だるまを作られました。その時から、冬が好きな季節として思っています。

出身地には真冬がないので、日本の冬を本当に楽しめます。もう札幌市の雪祭りを見に北海道に行って回りましたし、一度新潟県にスキーをしに行きました。でも、今私は瀬戸内海の伯方島に住んでいるが、伯方島にも真冬がありません。伯方島は日本の島ですが、日本らしい四季がありません。伯方島なら、秋と春の方が好きです。なぜなら、夏が暑くて辛いからです。伯方島に住んでいる人々なら、皆がそう思っているかもしれません。

伯方島の季節で、面白いことは、夏だけがはっきりと他の季節から分かれていることです。実は秋から春までは毎日変わっています。段々変わって行くことではなくて、毎日全然違う天気になることです。ある教頭先生が私に教えて下さった諺を思い出します。「女心と秋の空は変わりやすい」と言う諺です。意味はよくわかりますが、伯方島の季節なら、その諺に冬も春も加えた方がいいと思います。

最後に、今まではもう一つこの作文に出していない季節が残っています。それは梅雨です。それを季節に含むと、伯方島には四季があると言えます。しかし、普通の日本の四季ではなくて、特別な四季です。夏、秋、春、梅雨で新しい伯方島の四季と言えるでしょう。

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Please get your entries in, everyone. Start writing and cranking out the matsuri love. I want to make this a great Japan Blog Matsuri! Here’s a link to the original post, and a quick and dirty breakdown for the link-through lazy.

April Japan Blog Matsuri

Theme: Tourism

Deadline: Monday, May 7th (due to Golden Week holidays)

Submissions:

Official Page

Widget @ WJT

Email to deas (at) rocking in hakata (dot) com

Remember, tangentially related things are fine. Creative angles are encouraged! Multiple entries are ok for this one, but don’t submit blogspam. It will be weeded out. Tell your Japan-related blogging friends about it and try to get everyone involved. The more the merrier, guys.

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Hey there all you crazy kids. I thought I’d write a quick post about my latest bit of technology. It’s a USB jump drive, or flash drive, or whatever you like to call them. I first recommended a USB key to my sister a while back as a faster, more convenient method of transferring files back and forth from computer to computer. Thing is, I never actually went out and bought one. Until last weekend. I had seen an ad in the newspaper for the Daiki sale going on at the moment. (Daiki is kind of like Home Depot or Lowe’s in the states, I think, just add a limited pared-down digital media section next to the topsoil…and make the physical store waaay smaller.) Anyway, I took a walk to the local Daiki (map) on my way home. I picked up a 1GB Buffalo USB 2.0 Flash Drive for about ￥2400. That’s a good deal. Also bought some more blades for my razor. That’s good news too. Ha ha.

When I got home I started to play around with the drive, and I installed and uninstalled some things. I bought it to store school files, but I suddenly had an idea. I’d read about portable applications, so I decided to look them back up again and catch up. I am currently writing this entry sitting in Yuge High School, after my classes for the day have ended. (I’m a good worker. I swear. I’ve even done prep for tomorrow already.) I’m using Firefox Portable, which I installed along with the PortableApps interface. It’s pretty much cool. There aren’t too many other applications available that I actually have any use for, but I did install the Clamshell antivirus, Portable Sudoku (when I’m torn away from my Sudoku desk calendar), and VLC Media Player Portable.

The browser is nice. Everywhere I go I have my browser, now. It has my bookmarks, my saved stuff, and my settings preferences locked into it. I installed the FoxyProxy add-on (get it here), and using a ProxyGet program (from PortableApps), I’m able to swap out proxy connections on the fly and get through to the net from anywhere. I toyed with TOR (a method for surfing anonymously), but decided it was entirely extraneous - didn’t need it. Not a shady person, I guess. Anyhoo - it’s cool to have my quick access anywhere. Also - I only use my power for good (and for awesome, actually). It’s neat technology, and I’m glad that I finally got a USB key.

Funny side story - as I walked up the cement ramp into the schoolyard today, I was listening to my iPod, and I felt wind on my face. Then, a clattering roar came up from my side, and it seemed like all the garage doors were rattling. I wrote it off as a lower gust, but in actuality, it was a level 4 earthquake. Ha ha ha. Awesome. I am oh-so aware of my surroundings.

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On the way home from teaching at Imabari South High School yesterday, I stopped by a salon called Vogue. Why? I had to fix my hair. You see, it was broken. At least, according to one of my students. She’s a sweet kid, and thought I deserved an honest opinion - it cracked me up. We were all out on a field trip to Fukuyama Zoo. After we got off the bus and made our way through the rain to the entrance gate we stood around waiting for our teachers to return from the ticket booth and clear us for entry. (It was my second time to the zoo, so this was old hat for me.) I was hanging out with a bunch of the kids, making small talk about the penguins, when a group of 2nd years walked up to me and frowned. I was confused. I hadn’t done anything weird that day. So why were they looking at my head? Oh, that’s right, the day before, my hair had finally gotten long enough that I could not coax it to stand up. Therefore, I reverted to the part-down the middle, wavy look. It’s unavoidable in rain anyway - it just happens naturally. Well, the kids had decided that they liked my more youthful style better. Therefore, they announced somewhat timidly, “Deas-sensei…your hair…is broken.” Ha ha ha. My hair is broken? Another one chimes in. “It is too flat.” Ha ha ha. “Make it go up.” This turned into a really funny talk. I assured them that I would go get my hair cut. They were pleased. Their plan had worked.

I followed through. Yesterday, I went to Vogue and saw my buddy Shin there. Josh, an ALT in Imabari, introduced me to Shin. He’s a cool guy - speaks English and has great stories to tell about his various travels. I told him that I wanted basically what we had done last time. Cut it shorter on the sides and longer on the top like a heavily deemphasized faux-hawk. That way, I can kind of pluck at it and gunk it up to make it do kind of a clean-cut version of a messy “styled chaos” look. Anyway, after a marvelous double shampoo / head massage by Shin’s lovely assistant, he went to town on my mass of hair with his straight razor and scissor powered fury. All in all, I’d say it’s a good cut. I don’t know if I can handle that. 2 good cuts in a row from him. Hmmm… I don’t think I’ve ever had 2 good cuts in a row before. I’m used to really hating my hair cuts until I retrain my hair. Ha ha. Anyhoo - fear not, my hair is no longer broken. I’ll know that for sure once I get the seal of approval from my students. Good times. Does anyone else have students who give them fashion and general appearance tips? (Not that you should accept them all…I staunchly refuse to use cosmetics on my face or tweeze my eyebrows. Not for me. Or for most of the boys who do that here. Ugh. Anyway.)

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Living on Hakatajima has given me a new perspective on the beauty of the natural world. The Charleston / Mt. Pleasant area of South Carolina is still an amazing place to live - but I am incredibly biased towards it, having grown up there. Breaking away from sandy beaches, silently powerful marshland, barrier islands, local forested areas, and the not-so-intrusive low profile of the buildings around town (which were not even close to being skyscrapers), and coming to live in this place has been profound in some ways. Now I walk on coarse and pebbly sand, deal with foothills and mountains galore, choose scenic vistas on either side of my apartment, ride my bicycle everywhere, and I cannot get over the color of the water here.

The water of the Atlantic is a dark green with a lot of brown and hints of a weathered Prussian blue. It’s very much suited to oil paintings, to nor’easters and hurricanes, to creating foam and driftwood, and for spectacular sunsets. The water of the Japanese Seto Inland Sea is, in my opinion, not dissimilar from the waters around Venice, Italy. The Adriatic Sea. I’ll never forget seeing that water and thinking to myself in wonder that the way the local minigolf shop dyes their water isn’t actually all that outlandish. There are waters on this planet of intense and vivid colors. Islanders here like to remind me that the inland sea is often referred to as the Aegean of the East. I think perhaps Adriatic of the East is better, but I’ve never been to the Aegean Sea, so I can’t really be sure. (I suppose I should go…you know, for research.) My point is that the water here is full of gradients. It is nearly clear, evoking images of tropical getaways on sunny days close in on the beaches. Moving out into the water, however, the color deepens dramatically into an restless, roiling turquoise. It carries emerald hues, sudden tears of teal and glints of aquamarine, but these are appreciable only in person. Cameras fail at capturing their essence, and satellites overgeneralize to a monumental degree. The Seto Inland Sea is the home of humid rain showers, watercolor paintings, shells, and islands dipping their craggy feet in the water like trees in a mangrove - keeping their lush greens above the reach of the tide. Of course, the sunsets are spectacular here too. I suspect that I’d enjoy sunsets just about anywhere, though.

I am taken in by this beauty around me and often find myself daydreaming, my mind floating about outside the window. (This is a common problem for me anyway, but when you give me such a gorgeous location in which to play, it is compounded exponentially.) Something that recently struck me is how video games are starting to attempt to bring natural beauty to market in the form of eye candy. One such instance might be the introduction of High Dynamic Range lighting by VALVe in their first add-on to Half-Life 2. It was called the Lost Coast. The point of the game was to let a player have fun shooting the bad guys in a breathtaking locale. (In fact, I remember thinking “Wow, I live in a Japanese lost coast” once upon a time.) There is another game that comes to mind. Oblivion - it sounds like a game full of scary places, but is basically an open-ended non-linear RPG that is set in a make believe land of rolling hills, vibrant gardens, and realistic weather. (In fact, I remember thinking “Wow, Oblivion is almost as nice as Hakata” at times. No kidding.) Other games, like the upcoming Crysis, which I believe is the next iteration in the Far Cry series, also take place in exotic, hyper-stylized worlds. I think it’s really interesting that the thing some companies want to emulate the most is environment. I don’t think that they will ever top the natural world, but I am all for incorporating as much of the stunning real-world inspiration as they can.

I know this is kind of random, but it’s what I was thinking about today. Any thoughts?

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