Tradition

I just looked over the description in the paragraph above and realized that I haven't lived up to it at all. This blog has just been a diary. No real discussion of Japanese culture at all. So, let's talk about a little aspect of Japanese culture called tradition.

The Japanese love tradition. Tell them something is traditional, and it's an instant hit. They're generally very interested in knowing what the traditions from my home town. Interestingly though, a lot of Japanese traditions aren't really so traditional. Kuma's goyoboku (log carrying festival) and gonindaiko (five person drum show) are only 20 years old. In this culture where it seems like nothing ever changes, that change is in fact impossible, the most celebrated traditions were invented within my lifetime.

I talked with some Japanese friends about this, and they responded that there are some geniunely ancient traditions, but it's true that many are new. They also asked what I could call traditional in America, given the nation's young age. I had to admit that America doesn't have a lot that is geniunely old. What I find interesting about Japan though is that the people here seem to put such a big emphasis on the idea of tradition. I don't think of tradition as all that important to most Americans. In the cases where tradition is important to Americans, it seems like it's usually family tradition rather than local tradition. I think Americans tend to do traditional things because they really enjoy them, while Japanese people tend to do them simply because it is tradition, or more accurately because they have been told by an authority that it is a tradition.

In his book Japan: A Reinterpretation, Patrick Smith has a lot to say about tradition in Japan. Smith thinks that much of what passes for Japanese tradition was forced upon the people in the Meiji Restoration (1868) as a way of controlling the people and building a modern state. This is especially true for traditions involving 'bushido' (the way of the warrior). Since Meiji Japan, all Japanese have been expected to adopt the 'beautiful customs' of the samurai. Chief among these is unquestioning loyalty to one's master. While the master has changed from shogun, to emporer, to general, to CEO, the underlying model has remained the same. However, Smith argues that this model has never been representative of the Japanese people as a whole. It originally applied only to the samurai, a tiny minority. The application of this tradition to the common people has only been a device of control for the elite. The 'corporate warrior' image that was in vogue in the 1980s is just another version of this myth, according to Smith.

14 August 2003

Summer Matsuri

This is the season of summer festivals in Japan. Every little town puts something together. They are all variations on the same theme: food vendors, some entertainment, and fireworks to close. Kuma's festival was supposed to be two days, but the first day was cancelled due to a typhoon. That means the odori (dancing) didn't happen. We still got to see goyoboku though, which is teams of six guys carrying a log (looks like a pretty heavy log) through the town while townspeople throw water at them. I'm not sure what the point is. Apparently this "tradition" is only 20 years old. Supposedly it's based on some ancient ritual though.
	I also went to festivals in Hirai and Seto. My friends Kaori and Mahibon drummed at Hirai, while another friend, Yuko, danced. I went to Seto to see Martyn and his parents, who are visiting. That matsuri featured amateur sumo. There was also an event where kids try to catch fish in a pool with their hands. Funny, but not nearly as funny as the similar event I saw last year with kids trying to catch eels. The eels offer a lot less to grab onto and tend to go shooting through the air. Be warned that these pictures aren't too good.
I also went to the festival in Mikame, although only briefly as I had to work that evening. The Mikame festival was the first event I went to when I arrived last year. There was definitely some strong nostalgia to watching the human curling (two people push a bucket loaded with a third person down a track of rollers which leads to the sea, closest to the edge without going over wins) and meeting some new JETs who are in exactly the same situation I was in just a year ago. What a year. I had to leave before the pig rodeo, which was quite a let down. I was hoping to outdo my poor performance from last year.

14 Aug 2003

Nomijima Trance Party

Another great music festival in Hiroshima-ken. Actually, I could take the music or leave it. Trance is just sort of there for me, not annoying, but not interesting. It was a great time though. I always like camping. It seems like outdoor music festivals like this are where a lot of cool Japanese people get together, so I think I'll keep going whether I'm into the music or not. The atmosphere is just much more fun and free than anywhere else I've been in Japan. Follow the link for pictures and more details.

14 August 2003

Kyushu

My buddy Brian is leaving Japan pretty soon. I'm sad to see him go, but he's on to better things, studying medicine at UCSF. He wanted to see Kyushu before he left, so we took a trip together. Excellent time. Check out the photos and stories.

22 July 2003

Happy 4th of July

I threw a cool 4th of July party. What luck that it fell on a Friday. What luck that fireworks are legal in Japan. I took my camera, but left it safely in my bag, so there's no photographic record of the fun. You'll just have to take my word for it. I just wanted to post this here to let the folks at home know that despite being on the other side of the world, I didn't let the 4th slip by unnoticed. I even got some of my new Japanese friends to show up for the party. Plus a Brit and an Australian. That's my job, internationalization.

As cool as my little shindig was, I'm sure it didn't compare to the Club Wolff 4th of July / leaving KC party. I can't even imagine what that must have been like. I hope it lived up to what it is celebrating: the end of an era. Club Wolff World Headquarters has now left its famed birthplace on the outskirts of Olathe. My parents are Tucson. The world is upside down. Anybody who was there, send me your stories and pictures.

10 July 2003

Miyajima

I took a fantastic trip to Miyajima the weekend before last. I'm a little bit slow on getting this stuff online. Instead of the usual page of thumbnails, I wrote something like a little photo-journalism piece with the photos included. Let me know what you think of this format. I don't know if it will load too slowly for some of you or not.

24 June 2003

I think, therefore I am

Brian sent me this link last week. Check out the philosophy of the Matrix. It even has an essay by the U of AZ's own David Chalmers. I'm impressed overall by the number of philosophy heavy-hitters they got to write for this.

18 June 2003

Photos from Michelle

My cousin Michelle sent me some photos of her baby Christian. Check out how cute he is!

11 June 2003

Too tired to write about this right now, but the pictures are here. Have a look.

9 June 2003

Bush Good?

I read an interesting AP article the other day. I'd like to hear people's thoughts on it.

Looks like Bush is plunging head first into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I'm wondering if it might actually be a good thing. I even read a speech that really makes Bush sound alright. Of course I don't really mean that Bush might be good; I still generally think of Bush as too self-interested (well, bigger than self-interested, sort of clan or tribe interested, but in any case not humanity-interested) for that. But, a lot of radicals (and liberals, yeah, yeah) have been calling for a Palestinian State for a long time, and here we have Bush asking for exactly the same thing. He's even demanding Israel return to pre-1967 borders.

Can Bush make it happen? It would be the ultimate power play for him. He solves one of the last half-century's great ethnic and political conflicts and appeases the Arab world so no one gets too upset about the Great Train Robbery he just pulled in Iraq. Israel is the big loser. That's what happens when you're the colony of an imperialist nation. You get sacrificed for the good of the whole. I can't believe Sharon said a Palestinian State is a possibility. The majority of Israelis polled say they support the creation of a Palestinian State. Let's just call it Palestine. Palestine. Haven't heard that word in awhile.

I don't mean to imply that anything's a done deal. Half the players involved I know nothing about. The other half I don't like. Nothing has even really been done yet, but big things are being said. Change may be in the wind.

Finally, don't think I'm being naive here. I realize what a great smokescreen this is for the screwing we're receiving on the homefront. Whether it's allowing new media monopolies, ending the 40-hour work week, or leaving the working poor out of the recent tax cuts, these guys do not have our best interests in mind. Might they accomplish something good in Israel and Palestine with their own best interests in mind though?

5 June 2003

Hall's Words

I'm currently reading Bamboozled! How America Loses the Intellectual Game with Japan and Its Implications for Our Future in Asia, by Ivan P. Hall. It's interesting, if a bit tedious at times. I'll post a review of it soon, but for now, I just want to mention that the guy uses some really big words. He's had me running to my dictionary quite a bit. So, take the quiz, see how your vocabulary stacks up against mine and Dr. Hall's. Here are the words I had to look up. Each one is a link to it's definition:

avuncular
chary
comity
dudgeon
eleemosynary
factotum
impecunious
opprobrium
vade mecum

Open Source

I've recently realized that a lot of the ideas I have about how the world should be organzied are already embodied in the open source software movement. So, I've downloaded a bunch of it and decided to start playing. This entry is really just a test of my new open source text editor and ftp client. I'm using Vim and FileZilla. Vim is a little tricky to get used to, at least if you don't use the 'easy' mode and haven't used something like this before (I haven't). FileZilla is super-easy.

An Open Letter to Christina

23 May 2003

I'm in Japan, reading the dictionary. I figure I've ripped off enough of Chris Locke's life over the past six years, no one can judge me for ripping off his literary voice any more than they can judge me for having learned my father's speaking voice. Why not continue with a publicly posted letter to a woman I don't (really) know?

It's been good thinking tonight. Chilling with a cd I got in Breck playing in the background. Got it off the band, too many whiskeys into the night. Their name escapes me. Just stuck the cd in a folder and forgot about it until tonight. The guys are really going to town. The Sparrow came to mind tonight as I broke vegetables into bubbling ramen. It's a fantastic novel about a Jesuit-organized trip to another planet to meet the intelligent lifeforms there. The explorers meet two species of intelligent life, one of which feeds on the other. The prey creatures live fulfilling lives before they are slaughtered. This leads one of the characters suggest that the moral status of their meat production system was possibly superior to ours. Vegetarianism comes to mind. Buddha said not to take life. Of course, everyone knows vegetables are alive. But they've never been considered as alive in a moral sense. Except by Tool:

These are the cries of the carrots.
Tomorrow is harvest day, and for them, it is the Holocaust . . .
This is necessary. Life feeds on life. This is Necessary. Life feeds on life.

The bass thumps while a crazy sickle sound slices in and out around it. And your head spins. Life feeds on life. It has to doesn't it? We can't feed ourselves rocks. The Jetsons was a silly dream, never really possible. And not as healthy even if it were possible. Go organic. There's a moral imperative to live off those things that are not too closely related to us biologically, or perhaps consciously. Whatever that means. All the while there's an evolutionary pressure to live off those things closely related to you, although not too closely. Did better designed meat eaters ever go extinct because the benefits of cannibalism tipped the scales at a genetic turning point and swung the pendulum too far? Maybe it was triggered by the rapid depopulation of their prey. Maybe it caused the rapid depopulation of their prey. Do we have the sensitivity of measurement to determine between cause and effect? I would say not generally at an evolutionary biology principle. Things are too tangled up. It's the same in the land of the very small. Cause and effect is simple. It doesn't work well with certain knots. Anybody got a suggestion for a better system? Math loses cause and effect. The 'equals' sign should be a circle. Those higher order polynomials. Tangly, tangly. Three lines was pretty good for the 'defined as' sign. It has a nice yin and yang to it. The bane of Western metaphysics. Yet, it seems in the end, the fact of the matter. As Michael Albert said:

External effects are the rule.

Leibniz understood this way ahead of his time. You can see why he was Einstein's favorite philospher. You can see why when you think he doesn't make any sene you suddenly wonder if you don't get it. Of course the field where cause and effect disappear most completely is human psychology and the philosophy that surrounds it. How can you dig into your own mind using your mind? Am I the sum of my thoughts? Do I create my thoughts? What would I be without them? The questions all seem to orbit around that one great star: I think therefore I am. Clever guy, Descartes. Squeezed out philophy's one big truth and invented analytic geometry. In his sleep. I'm not kidding. So, math and logic stumble at the same points as science, and no one is particularly suprised. What do they all have in common? Rationality. I don't trust it blindly. But I don't know how to get beyond it. Or if I want to. Right now I'm happy living with rationality and doing my best to appreciate it's limits. What is the other way to order your life?

I just changed cds and noticed that bands name: Raq. Kind of Phishy. They give their music away: http://raq.thropter.com. Have a listen. I gotta go do the dishes. The ball's in your court.

W. Zach Wolff

Japanese-English Dictionaries

Writing that bit about the ensoku made me think about Japanese-English dictionaries. Japanese-English dictionaries are so bad. An example I came across yesterday (this is just what comes to mind, they happen all the time) is aisatsu, which gets translated as "greeting". Well, 'hello', 'good morning', and such are aisatsu, but so are 'good bye', 'excuse me', 'thank you', and many other phrases that certainly aren't greetings. Do we have a word for this in English? Sometimes I think the dictionaries are bad because the two languages are just so different. Is this because we mentally carve up the world in fundamentally different ways? Is this because meaning is use (Wittgenstein, somewhere) and in two languages so different syntactically it is uncommon to words to have really similar uses. We don't even have the same number of fundamental classes as them if you ask me. I feel like there is a spectrum from noun to verb that we divide into three classes (noun, adjective, verb) that Japanese divides into four (noun, na-adjective, i-adjective verb). So not only are all the rules very different (claim that it stems from a high level SOV vs. SVO choice if you like, Chomskians) but the pieces being played with are different. My best attempt at a single word translation for aisatsu is 'salutation'. Sorry for the linguistics diversion. Tell me if you think of a better translation.

Read Christina's more artful piece on the same topic here

Ensoku

We went on an ensoku today. That's a school field trip. They're quite different here. Your typical ensoku is a walk to nowhere in particular, stop for lunch, then walk back. Okay, I'm exaggerating a bit we took a nice walk through the mountains and stopped at a place that is supposed to be a lookout point it's not much of lookout point now though, unless you want to see a mountain being raped. They're building a new ski course, so it's all ripped up earth and heavy machinery pushing it around. I've heard of other schools walking to the zoo or to a park. In any case, the walk itself is a big part of the outing, not just a way to get there. Also, lunch is more than just getting fed. One teacher asked me if the correct translation for ensoku' was 'hike' or 'picnic'. I chose neither and suggested 'field trip'. The trusty Japanese-English dictionary agreed with me.

Arrival in Japan