The Secret To Learning Kanji

Ok, just a quick note here because I still have to finish my homework.

I'm studying kanji right now. For years, these characters simply would not stick in my head, no matter how hard I tried to pack them in, no matter how many hours I spent in front of my flashcards. Never, that is, until I discovered the Secret To Learning Kanji.

There are three aspects of kanji that you need to learn: their writing, their reading(s), and their meaning(s). To the beginning student, there isn't much you can do beyond rote memorization. However, with a little background knowledge, the studying begins to do itself. Once you become familiar with how kanji are constructed, it is vastly easier to read and understand new characters, thanks to a limited number of common groups of strokes that are often repeated and have specific meanings, similar to the role of Latin and Greek word roots in English. Even a cursory study of the meanings and readings of these key stroke groups paves the downhill road to literacy with teflon and oils it up for good measure.

So, to take an example from my homework tonight, the character "催" can be broken down into three groups of strokes - first, the two strokes on the left are a reduced form of "人", which means person. The three strokes on the top are "山", which is the kanji for "mountain", and the snarl of eight strokes on the bottom right is "隹", an old radical meaning "bird".

"Person", "mountain", and "bird". By assembling these primitive meanings, one will intuitively grasp the meaning of the verb "催す", which means, of course, "to hold (a meeting)" or "to develop symptoms of".

It's that easy.

But it doesn't stop there! Most kanji have multiple readings, and knowing the radicals helps there as well. The Chinese-derived reading (on-yomi) of the radical "隹" is "sai", and ... what do you know? The on-yomi of "催" is also "sai"! Likewise, the Japanese-derived reading (kun-yomi) of the radical "人" is "hito", and ... the kun-yomi of "催"? You guessed it - "moyo-o(su)"! Because, well, duh.

Get out the map!

Hey everybody, apologies for the shameful seven-week gap in my blog. I've been working some serious overtime lately and I really need to learn to pace myself.

So, for today's topic... I think I often write and talk about how great this country is. There are so many things I love about Japan - the people are wonderfully hospitable; the public transit system is quite convenient, runs on time, and is generally clean; the TV commercials are hilarious; the food is delicious; and people are like, "yeah, I went to Boston once and visited MIT. I also visited... what's it called again? It's a pretty well-known university kind of up the road from MIT..." Yes, this is a wonderfully quirky and interesting place.

But if the ability to produce a clear and accurate map were a skill essential to survival, the entire population of Japan would have died off long ago.

No, despite the meticulous attention to detail for which the Japanese are famous, despite their love of complex graphical representations of information, and despite the extraordinary lengths to which they go to make the world accessible to everyone - the blind, the physically handicapped, the hard of hearing, and pretty much any other disability you can imagine - they seem to be unable or unwilling to convey geographical relationships effectively through a map, particularly to foreigners. (Somehow, it appears that many Japanese people are able to navigate effectively using Japanese maps. How this is possible is an absolutely unfathomable mystery to me.)

Of course, I've tried to understand the cultural context for the seeming universality of inscrutable maps. I long ago discovered that very few Japanese have any sense of direction. I've noticed that a lot of my Japanese friends have difficulty giving and receiving directions over the phone. Why this should be, I don't understand. I can't say whether it applies over all of Japan, either. The Tokyo subway system, for example, is so complex and convoluted that it makes New York look like Beijing. I can't imagine people not having a pretty good grasp of where they are and where they're going if they can navigate that. Likewise, Sapporo is laid out in a very rigid, equidistant grid system oriented along North-South and East-West axes, so it is certainly possible that people there have an intuitive grasp of cardinal directions.

In general, though, people here seem to have no knowledge of or interest in cardinal directions at all. All directions here are relative. On the street, in the train stations, at the temples, every map you find is oriented to be relative to the observer. Up is forward, down is back. The narrow, twisty, unnamed streets in residential neighborhoods are notoriously hard to navigate, and so every few blocks it's not uncommon to find a local map, always oriented in relative coordinates.

Perhaps this is related to the general inward focus that seems to permeate Japanese culture. Most buildings here are horribly ugly on the outside, yet beautifully architected and elegantly decorated on the inside. Most people I've met here don't think about big things like global economic trends, government issues, or international politics as much as the Westerners I know - rather, the focus seems to be inward, local, personal, on the details. Movies, too, seem to me to have much smaller-scale themes than the movies back home. Does this society not value the "big picture"? That could be why maps are so highly localized. (the follow-up question, of course, is whether it is necessarily so important to focus on the "big picture" - maybe if Americans spent more time working on the tiny details, we'd have a more harmonious society...?)

Or maybe one could look at it from a religious perspective. In monotheistic religions there is a clear-cut distinction between right and wrong. In Shinto, however, where countless kami are all around us, there doesn't seem to be such a need for moral absolutes. Morality, or so I've read in a number of places, is judged relatively, with respect to the group - harmony or disharmony is a more important distinction than absolute ideas like right and wrong, good and evil. It seems like one might draw a parallel here, too, to the widespread disregard for concepts like "north".

Another possibility... one of the wonderful things about Japan is their customer service. Rare it is indeed to find someone behind a register not armed with a genki smile and greeting you with a cheerful "irrashaimase!" and a cheerful sparkle in the eye. Maybe it's considered a courtesy to the customer to provide a custom map in the most convenient, personalized orientation possible.

While walking, hopelessly lost, in misguided circles today for almost 40 minutes in the hot sun, getting navigational misinformation from absolutely every person I asked, passing parks, high schools, and highways not to be found anywhere on my map, and searching for streets that existed only in the deranged imagination of some creative cartographer, a few other thoughts occured to me.

The first thought was that perhaps this is a manifestation of the ever-mysterious dichotomy of "tatemae" and "honne". "Tatemae" means the outward behavior and actions of a person, whereas "honne" is a word for their true feelings and intentions. In Japanese culture these are not expected to be even remotely connected. Back home that's called scheming, two-faced hypocrisy. Here, it's called everyday life. Why should that not extend to mapmaking? The actual layout of roads and buildings is the "honne", and the map is merely "tatemae". Is it really so bad to draw two buildings right next to each other when actually they're a 15-minute walk apart? What if drawing them that way made the map-reader feel better, thinking the destination was right around the corner? Is that really so different from asking whether it's wrong to lie in order to avoid hurting somebody's feelings?

Then I had a vision of an apprentice cartographer and his master, in a setting reminiscent of the bonsai tree scene in The Karate Kid:

"Daniel-san, close eyes. Trust. Concentrate. Think only 4-lane elevated highway. Make perfect picture, down to the last exit ramp...

"Wipe mind clean, everything but the highway...

"You got it?

"Open eyes. Remember picture?"

"Yeah"

"Make like picture. Just trust the picture."

"But master, how do I know my picture's the right one?"

"If come from inside you, always the right one."

Seriously. I strongly suspect that a number of the roads on my map today were placed there for aesthetic value alone.

My final thought was that maybe the reason why there is so much less illegal drug use in Japan than there is in the US is that THEY DON'T NEED IT. Living in their little universe of imaginary streets connecting at nonexistent intersections, seeing the world through psychedelic noneuclidean lenses where all distances between topologically similar forms can be considered equal and even the twistiest, most convoluted maze of snaking streets can be warped into a perfectly symmetrical grid, and simply erasing from the map and the world anything negative, anything they don't want to see... it makes me wonder whether anything was really accomplished when they made shrooms illegal here a few years ago. The trippiness in this culture comes from deep within its roots.

The system ... is down. (Dm dm dm dm...)

(Note: that's supposed to be a Homestar Runner reference, not the Dragnet music... ah, text is so flat.)

Hmm... ok, so I really, really was planning to post some pics this weekend, but it seems my computer has had a little crash. I suspected the culprit might be Google Desktop, as the crash occurred after I upgraded it to the latest version, but I tried uninstalling that and it doesn't seem to have fixed the problem.

Around New Year's I was thinking to myself that it might be time for a reinstall. Now I'm thinking that even more. Computers accumulate gunk, like your bellybutton or the space behind the TV cabinet. A good reinstall is like a really thorough cleaning of your room (and rebuilding of the furniture therein). Or maybe it's more like that tea Tom's sister used to drink to "purge the system" before closing the bathroom door with a smile. :P

I've got a 4-day weekend coming up, thanks to my company's founding day being the day before the vernal equinox (which is a national holiday here - Japan ROXX!). I had been thinking about doing a little trip somewhere, maybe traveling around Gifu-ken or something, or even just spending the days wandering around Osaka doing some shopping or something. Now it's starting to look like I'll need that time to do a nice slow reinstall, maybe take a hot bath while I wait with these nice new bath salts I got last week.

I remember when there was a lot of talk about e-appliances, for example, a box that does nothing but email. I haven't heard too much about that lately, but it is certainly a relief to be able to do things like listen to my music on my iPod and make calls with my IP phone without needing my computer to be in a stable state.

Anyway, in conclusion, computers suck. Maybe it's time to switch back to Linux.

Ping

Sigh... so once again I'm going more than a week without a post. Quick little update though so people don't think I dropped off the face of the earth. :)

Things are going pretty well. My old buddy Ernest (from my Unified class!) and his wife Patty came to visit, and I showed them around Osaka, Nara, and Kyoto. That was a blast! But his DSLR puts my little Pentax Optio to shame, so I'm just going to wait for him to send me copies of his pictures, and then maybe I'll post something. ;) But who can resist the title? "Ernest Goes to Kansai". hahaha, yeah, you all shut up. I know I'm old. :P

Did some partying this weekend - my friend Yuki just turned "18", so we had a little celebration for her on Saturday. We made cheese fondue from scratch... before realizing that our lactose-intolerant friend was coming. (>_<) Delicious though. A cappella was really awesome on Sunday too - moving ahead with new songs in both groups, and good vibes all around. I even got a few compliments on my beautifully resonant bass voice, which, well... was pretty hilarious, given that I'm supposed to be a 1st tenor, but I guess Osaka nightlife can do that to you. :P

And yes, my email performance has been shameful - way back above 150 again. Gonna rock on some email this weekend though. Haha.. and learn me some kanjis too. I swear, there is just too much awesome stuff to do in life. Was it Nathan Hale who said, "I regret that I have but one life to spend catching up on emails and blog entries, and learning Japanese, practicing for a cappella, programming my robot, improving my go skillz, going to festivals once in a while, and at some point getting around to sending my sister her long overdue birthday presents that are all essentially summer things anyway, so maybe it would be better to just hang on for another couple months?" ... or did I misparaphrase that a little bit?

Violence, Poison, and Danger!

Yes, it was quite the weekend...

Saturday, in an old, traditional Japanese-style house deep in the heart of Nara prefecture, the most intrepid of us gathered to partake in one of Japan's most mysterious and dangerous rituals. We ate fugu.

This was no supermarket sushi. On a bloody chopping block behind my friend's house, we watched firsthand as three of these unwitting bearers of deadly poison were coolly dispatched in swift strokes of merciless accuracy by the hands of a professional. Yes, we were unusually fortunate - my friend's classmate (in nursing school(!)) is a licensed fugu assassin. From his carefully wrapped case he pulled a long knife, its hilt darkened with the blood of countless kills, its blade showing the wear of its years, but carefully honed to a fine edge. "Eight years ago", he said, he bought this beauty from a knifemaster in Osaka. "But back then, the blade was this much longer," gesturing about six inches from the tip.

Casually slicing out and casting aside a small sac of poison that held the power to kill all of us standing there many times over, he talked us through the intricacies of his art. Everything from the special cut to open the cavities in the head where the parasites live, so that they could be cleaned out before the skull was thrown in the stew, to the delicate layer of "skin between the flesh and the skin", which had to be ever so briefly touched to boiling water before eaten essentially raw.

As his knife worked through the ritualized sequence of cuts and motions, the fish before him twitched and squirmed. "The sashimi from this side always has a bit of a ragged shape", he explained, "but once you get past about here, the fish stops moving so much, and you can cut more cleanly." His fingers and knife swiftly worked their way through slice after slice so thin they were translucent.

Unfortunately, I have no photos from that night, but if I can get copies of Linda's, I'll put some up here. Suffice to say, that we not only survived the night but had a most delicious meal. I have to say, though, that it was ... strange eating the gonads of the male fugu. That just seemed wrong. Bizarrely smooth, creamy texture, though.

However, the most dangerous experience was yet to come.

Sunday morning, we took part in an even darker, more violent ritual buried in the shadows of ancient Japanese culture. A ritual producing a substance even deadlier than fugu, which is then eaten and ... yes, even given to children sometimes! (And they wonder why they have a problem with decreasing population here...)

It's true. In fact, if you look at the statistics, substantially more people die each year from eating mochi than from fugu. Due to its resilience and extraordinary stickiness, it gets lodged in the throats of its unfortunate victims and kills them! Not a substance to be trifled with.

Fortunately for us, the personnel at the Kizu-cho International Exchange Center were highly trained and highly organized. When undertaking a hazardous project of this complexity, it is absolutely critical to coordinate your teams with meticulous efficiency.

We were divided into action teams and briefed by our squadron leaders. Then we were assigned to our various posts.

Shen and I were assigned to the yellow team and sent to the aerial operations bay, announcements over the PA to the other teams echoing in the background ("Red squadron, go to the bathroom and wash your hands NOW! Move!! Move!!")

At our tables we were instructed in the ancient art of Japanese kitemaking, sort of a minimalist approach stressing historical accuracy. We were given only the materials and tools that the ancient Japanese would have had - four thin strips of hand-hewn bamboo, some rubber bands, a clear plastic garbage bag, some neon kite string, and a bright pink plastic ribbon for the tail.

They taught us all the ancient secrets, from the delicate grip required to splay the bamboo strips in exactly the right way to optimize aerodynamics to the mindbending topology of "wrapping" a rubber band in a robust way around an intersection of three struts with no ends protruding.

The finished product:

But the kitemaking was just a distraction. Soon our team was taken out the back door to engage in the real action.

Many people condemn the Japanese educational system, saying it puts too much pressure on children at too young an age. Well, some may believe junior high school is too early for ulcers, but one effect of the intensive youth education here is that children's minds are sharpened to a degree that can't be attained by the slow, inflexible adult mind. Precision operations such as the one we were about to engage in involve split-second reflexes and an intense level of focus that are simply beyond the reach of adults.

Our diminutive drill sergeants schooled us on the finer points of "mochi-tsuki", the delicate process of transforming specially-prepared rice into perfect-consistency mochi by mercilessly assailing it with vicious blows using an enormous hammer.

And thus we took turns "mauling the mochi", "poundin' the paste", "rammin' the rice", or whatever alliterative euphemism you prefer. The unfortunate woman on the right in these pictures had to swiftly splash a tiny bit of water on top of the big mochi glob and then knead it a bit with her hand just before each blow ("slappin' the slab" and "lubricating the loaf"?) which is why historically, that job used to be reserved for only the most heinous of criminals - seldom does a glob-kneader ever escape a mochi-tsuki session with both hands intact.

And finally, once the physical violence was through, it was time to revisit our inner peace and shape the mochi into perfect little deadly snack shapes. Again, only the youngest among us are still pure enough of mind and heart to see through the sins and distractions of our world and visualize the ideal form of the perfect mochi ball.

All of us tried our hand at it, each of us striving for the unreachable ideal - just the right amount of smoothness and roundness, a plump shape that felt good to hold in your hand. It had to have enough heft to feel substantial, but as the ancient Japanese saying goes, "bigger than a handful is a waste". Of course we all had to resist the temptation to play with it too much - overkneading the mochi made it stiff and hard to shape - a supple firmness is the ideal, so that as you stroke your fingers gently over its ample curve, you can just barely feel the rise of the anco underneath. Since only the purest of undistracted minds can visualize such an ideal form, I was of course the only one in my group who was able to do it.

And voila, our creation!


We ate our mochi and flew our kites. At last check, nobody in our group had succumbed to any serious mochi-related injuries. We were fortunate, this time. But such is the way of the Japanese spirit. The ever-present possibility of death only heightens the sweetness of life, and here they savor every drop.

雨の夜

(Non-Japanese speakers, try the *new* Jpn-Eng Auto-translation link on the right!)

ごめんね、皆さん。最近風邪引いちゃってなにも書いてへんな。いろんなおもろいイベントに行ってんのに。今日も書こうと思ったんやけどやっぱ寝た方がいいから明日しようかな～

でもみんなわざわざ読んでくれてるのに何も面白い事を書かないとちょっとまずいな。

ポエムがんばろうかな？
さて：

雨の夜

冷たい風、木炭の空
しょぼしょぼ雨を歩いて
敷石の上、踊り光
右に跳んで、左にも
びしょびしょこの足から
逃げ出し飛んだり遊んだりして
あっちもこっちも淡い幻覚
無声の戯笑に囲まれ
前を見て増えて増えて
光の川、逆さに流れ
空目指して、止むを得ず
血気盛りで考えぬ
どんだけ踊っても、どんだけ逃げても
暗い末路しかならぬ
神色自若恨みなしに
火の粉みたいに消えてって
また一人で雨の夜
自分の川に流されて


どや、初ポエムとして？コメントどうぞ！

Slogging through the Inbox of Shame

You may have noticed the little graph on the right. As a part of my "Together Every Day" campaign to organize my life, I've decided to resort to public humiliation as a motivational tool. Now the world can see how much progress I make in my quest to crunch through the backlog of "starred" messages in my inbox.

The first 50 went relatively quickly, for the simple reason that their relevance had passed, and I was able to delete several of them. I suspect that my pace will start to lag as the signal to noise ratio rises, but though it may take months I will not relent until I reach my goal of zero!

Then I can slack again. :)

Let's make this interactive: Do any of you have any advice on how to manage enormous amounts of email? Or general habits / techniques that help you to keep in touch with all your friends from high school, college, previous jobs, etc? Leave a comment - I'd love to hear about them.