Sons of Loki

Me ma’s been watching Swedish smash-hit crime drama Wallander and, on another of her crackpot schemes, picked up a book on Swedish grammar. Clearly, my mother was never meant to learn Swedish, but I thought I’d have a flick through and it’s interesting stuff, you know.

You know how athletes will run at high altitudes with heavy weights so that, when they’re accustomed to that, running unladen at sea level feels like a breeze? It’s like that after studying Japanese. Two years of banging my head against the brick wall of fluency in Nippongese, and when I try my hand at Swedish, it’s like punching through cardboard. There’s so many cognates that vocabulary – lång (long), hem (home), också (also, pronounced ockso) – just pops into my memory in a way that Japanese words never do. Knowing a little German helps too – läsa (lese, read), arbeta (arbeite, work).

It always seems remarkable to monolinguists like myself when you hear of people who can speak three or four or six languages, but once you’ve learned the skill-set necessary to learn a language – which tools to use, how conjugating works, what articles and particles do – the next language is half as hard. Conjugating Swedish verbs is essentially the same as conjugating Japanese verbs – it’s just a matter of learning different ‘bits’.

I watched Tora Tora Tora today (remarkably, half-directed by Kinji Fukasaku, he of the Yazuka Papers and Battle Royale) and as a test, tried to understand the spoken Japanese without the subtitles. Entirely hopeless. Been studying this two, three years and I can’t understand even a sentence or two.
I know the answer is “study more” but it’s hella depressing.

I also watched the much-hyped The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (Swedish: Män som hatar kvinnor) and found it to be pretty enjoyable, even if I’m always suspicious when beautiful troubled young women end up sleeping with chubby, middle-aged author surrogates. (When I’m an author, my protagonists will be celibate and miserable.) I liked Lisbeth – she put me in mind of one of William Gibson’s heroines, and in a way the whole film is like some kind of modern post-cyberpunk thriller. Sort of. You know, the stuff that Gibson was pioneering in the 80s – technology as an integral part of our daily lives, a world where everything’s on the net and information is a commodity, all those cliches which were revolutionary then but today sound ancient – that sort of stuff is so mainstream now that you hardly notice it.

I noticed Lisbeth’s password was only four characters, though. No real hacker would let that slide.

So I’ve hopefully got an interesting little job lined up, if I pass the final interview next week. Heading up to Leeds this weekend to move into my house and kill a few days before the interview and then, if I get it, starting my induction the week after – then it’s Freshers’ Week and finally, after that, lessons begin again.

I’ve been worrying about what to do for my dissertation, but the other day I found myself writing a blog post about the future of Japan – slowing economy, fossilised government, aging population, freeters, continued backwards attitude to immigration – and realised I’ve got a beautiful paper to write right there. If I do it right. The New World: Changing Paradigms For Japan In New 21st Century Economic Realities – Demarking the Migrant Pathos and the Erotics of Primal Pathology, it will be titled.

Until then, then, I chill out, raid the fridge, learn lines like “Du bröt dig in i mitt hem. Jag kan ha ihjäl dig utan vidare.”* and try to put off packing until Friday.

* “You broke into my house. I can kill you without consequence.” Learning lines from films is much more fun than “I am Herr Smitt,” don’t you think?

“Yell”, by ballad-y group Ikimono-gakari (a name Wikipedia explains as “[the] group of children who are responsible for looking after plants and animals in a Japanese elementary school”) came out last September and went to #2 in the charts. It’s shamelessly sentimental (the video is all about kids in high school, and I hear it’s a popular choice at graduation) and I’d hate it if it was a cheesy English ballad but shucks, there’s something about the brave eyes of naive schoolchildren staring into the camera combined with Kiyoe Yoshioka’s soaring vocals that tears me up inside.

「”わたし”は今どこに在るの」と
“So what of “I”, now?”
(This is a doozy. “わたし” (‘I’) comes in quotes, and the verb 在る (meaning “to exist” for inanimate objects) is used where you’d usually use 居る (meaning “to exist” for animate things like people). Literally it’s “Where am I now?” but if I had to guess, I’d say the gist of the line is “What now for (the concept of) ‘I’?”, or “What’s to become of me?” or “Where am I now?” in a spiritual rather than material sense.)
踏みしめた足跡を何度も見つめ返す
I go back to stare at trodden footprints again and again
枯葉を抱き 秋めく窓辺に
I embrace dead leaves, and by the autumnal window
かじかんだ指先で夢を描いた
I traced dreams with numb fingertips

翼はあるのに飛べずにいるんだ
Though I have wings, I can’t fly
ひとりになるのが恐くてつらくて
At being alone, I’m scared, heartbroken
優しいひだまりに 肩寄せる日々を
The days of sweet sunshine with your arm around me
越えて僕ら孤独な夢へと歩く
We pass through, we walk towards lonely dreams

Chorus
サヨナラは悲しい言葉じゃない
“Sayonara” is not a sad word
それぞれの夢へと僕らを繋ぐＹＥＬＬ
When we head towards our many dreams, a “yell” will connect us
ともに過ごした日々を胸に抱いて
I hold those days we spent together close to my chest
(“胸”, literally “chest” but more figuratively “heart” just as in English, is probably one of the most used words in J-pop)
飛び立つよ独りで未来（つぎ）の空へ
Fly, alone, into your future sky
(The kanji read みらい (future) but are sung as つぎ (next). I mean, if you just listened to the song without reading the lyrics you’d have no idea, but I guess this is a songwriting trick)

僕らはなぜ答えを焦って
We’re impatient for answers to “Why?”
宛ての無い裏切りに自己（じぶん）を探すのだろう
I guess it betrays no one to search for ourselves
誰かをただ思う涙も
Both tears just when I think of someone
真っ直ぐな笑顔もここに在るのに
And smiling, straight-ahead, there’s both here

本当の自分を誰かの言葉で
Our real selves, through someone else’s words,
繕うに逃れて迷って
We run from fixing, we go astray
ありのままの弱さと向き合う強さを
The truth is, the power to face our weaknesses –
掴み僕ら始めて明日へと掻ける
Only when we grasp that can we succeed tomorrow

Chorus
サヨナラを誰かに告げる度に
Every time we say goodbye to someone
僕らまた変われる強くなれるかな
Can we change, can we get used to it?
たとえ違う空へ飛び立とうとも
Even if we take off into different skies
途絶えはしない思いよ今も胸に
We’ll never stop, I hold that in my heart even now

Bridge
永遠など無いと (気づいたときから)
When there was no such thing as eternity (From the time we realised that)
笑い合ったあの日も (唄い合ったあの日も)
That day we laughed together (That day we sang together)
強く (深く) 胸に刻まれていく
Strongly (deeply) those days dig into my heart
だからこそあなたは (だからこそ僕らは)
Because of this, you … (because of this, we …)
他の誰でもない(誰にも負けない)
Without anyone else (no one will fail)
声を(挙げて)”わたし”を生きていくよと
Our voice (as one), “I” will go on
約束したんだひとり(ひとり)ひとつ(ひとつ)道を選んだ
I promised. Alone, I chose a single path

Chorus
サヨナラは悲しい言葉じゃない
“Sayonara” is not a sad word
それぞれの夢へと僕らを繋ぐＹＥＬＬ
When we head towards our many dreams, a “yell” will connect us
いつかまためぐり逢うそのときまで
Until the time comes for us to meet again
This sentence, more literally, is “Until someday, some day, again, again, when we meet again.” Japanese can be wonderfully redundant.
忘れはしない誇りよ友よ空へ
Say you won’t forget – into the sky, my friend

僕らが分かち合う言葉がある
There’s a word we all share
こころからこころへ声を繋ぐＹＥＬＬ
From my heart to yours, a “yell” connects our voices
ともに過ごした日々を胸に抱いて
I hold those days we spent together close to my chest
飛び立つよ独りで未来（つぎ）の空へ
Fly, alone, into your future sky

June’s just flown by in a blur of routine. Indeed, there’s nothing like routine to make the days just fly by, is there? I wake up, go to lesson, get back, learn two chapters of Kanji in Context (I’ll hopefully have done all the ones on the official government-mandated “jouyou kanji” list by the time we leave … at least, all the old jouyou kanji), hit the flashcards for a bit, eat, go to the gym and do some weights and some pretty intensive stationary biking (stationary bikes are ace! You can exercise and read/do flashcards/listen to music/watch TV at the same time! Thinking of buying one next year), get back to my room, watch The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya with jury-rigged Japanese subtitles (excellent combined reading/listening practice), then if I’m feeling good, read a bit of Yotsuba or else switch my brain off and play Fallout 2. Then it’s time for bed.

Did I mention I passed? Yeah, that big ass Leeds exam. Obviously, I didn’t get a great mark – well, not even a good one – but it doesn’t bother me now. I am a changed man! I study most of the time. I’ve started using Khatzumoto’s 10,000 sentences method, wherein you find interesting and useful sentences in films/books/manga/daily life, pop them into an SRS flashcard system, and drill them daily until they are burned into the fabric of your brain. It seems to be starting to pay off, or at least I think it is.

Yesterday I went for a bit of a wander for no particular reason; starting in Ebisu, then walking through the quietly upmarket neighbourhoods of Shibuya towards Roppongi Hills and an iced tea outside Starbucks, overhearing a conversation in Australian next to me about how hot it was (and boy, it’s been 31°C – and humid).

Today, though, I went back to Nakano, a place just west of Shinjuku which I used to visit all the time when I lived here two years ago (shit, two and a half years ago. Nearly three years ago). I used to visit the Working Holiday Office there in hopes of finding teaching work (of course, when I arrived in 2007 it was literally mere days after the gigantic NOVA English school imploded, throwing thousands of desperate, highly-qualified, and suddenly unemployed English teachers out on to the streets of Japan, so work was practically non-existent). I’d also hit the Nakano Broadway nearby, because it had a handful of hobby shops and PC stores. And I honestly couldn’t remember why I used to trek halfway across the city when I had Akihabara practically on my doorstep, but wandering around the Broadway mall today, I was suffused with nostalgia, revisiting shops I hadn’t been to in two and a half years. I found the PC store where I bought a keyboard for some reason – and in ultimate proof that everything comes full circle, I bought almost exactly the same model of no-name Chinese-made 500 yen keyboard (the W and S and backspace on my laptop keyboard have stopped working and I stripped the fucking screw! so I can’t replace it until I get home and maybe try some specialist equipment).

There’s all these nice little indie stores – the main store of manga and doujin specialists Mandarake; a store full of weird old books (including Philip K Dick in translation, which I was tempted to buy until I realised that reading VALIS in Japanese would actually give me a brain haemorrhage); a shop selling model railway carriages and model railway carriages only, clearly a labour of love for the glasses-wearing owner (I like to think he worked as a salaryman for decades before deciding to throw it all away and pursue his dream of starting a shop selling sixty-two types of rolling stock); low ceilings, narrow corridors, and a sense of comfort.

So I was thinking: what good manga have I been reading?

I always thought manga would be a great way to study Japanese: unlike novels you’ve got pictures to help you, and it teaches you real-world, colloquial speech rather than textbook phonyism. (If you’re looking for a good textbook that teaches with manga, I strongly recommend Japanese the Manga Way.)

But when I got here, I found it didn’t really help. People told me to read this, and read that, and I picked up a issue or two of Shonen Jump!, but none of it really engaged me. Was manga not the solution after all? Was I doomed to poring through textbooks to learn?

Not so! My mistake was simple: I was reading the manga people told me to read, not the manga I wanted to read. Ironically, the manga that turned it all around was one my friend Darlo recommended to me.
Yotsuba&! (2003-present) (よつばと！, “Yotsuba and…!”) is a slice of life, the daily adventures of a small girl, her adoptive father, “uncle” Jumbo, the family next door, and … that’s about it.

Only it’s a remarkably good manga to start learning Japanese with. The language is simple, everyday and colloquial; because Yotsuba is a pre-schooler, she doesn’t use kanji, she uses simple grammar constructions, and like any small child is always asking questions and stating the obvious. “What’s that?” “What does “global warming” mean?” “It’s a car!” “Wow! Fish!” So throughout the story, you have explanations of words like “air conditioning” and naming of animals and things and people, all for the benefit of Yotsuba but also benefiting Japanese learners. It’s perfect.

But most importantly, it’s a damn fine manga. It’s sweet and sad and funny all at the same time. The author, Kiyohiko Azuma, showed a remarkable knack for making everyday things seem incredibly poignant and moving in his previous work Azumanga Daioh, and he continues this in Yotsuba. She’s incredibly cute and lovely, but there’s always this bittersweet sense of childhood running through his work; a sense of transcendental, transient beauty that can’t last forever, so be sure to enjoy it when it comes.

Planetes (1994-2004) (プラネテス, from Ancient Greek ΠΛΑΝΗΤΕΣ “wanderers”) I’ve already written about, but it deserves repeating. I heard about it because of the fact that it was a rigorously researched, scientifically accurate portrayal of life in space, and when I finally found a copy of the first volume I wasn’t disappointed.

It’s beautifully drawn; Makoto Yukimura captures the emptiness and loneliness of tiny human figures hanging in the void of space, and the ship interiors are amazingly intricate. The cast are a ragtag, international band of astronauts all suitably messed up with their own secrets and reasons for doing the dull, hazardous job of Earth-orbit space debris clean-up, and there’s a cool Firefly-like vibe going on of all these different personalities coming together. It’s tough reading; with no furigana and complex kanji, it’s full of technical terms about air pressure and orbital mechanics, and it’s all stuff you certainly won’t learn in class, but that’s exactly why you should read it.

Kachō Shima Kōsaku (1983-1992) (課長島耕作 “Section Chief Kōsaku Shima”) is actually the first in a long-running series that charts the career of salaryman Kosaku Shima from humble section chief at Hatsushiba Electric to boss of the company. (I believe it’s one of the manga in Japanese the Manga Way).
I kind of wanted to buy it half as an ironic joke – I mean, a manga about a salaryman? What’s the plot: one day he falls over on the train when commuting? Takeshi from Accounting keeps drinking all the coffee? – but I found the first volume of Young Shima Kosaku (which is in fact a prequel that began in 2001) and it’s actually, in a surreally dull way, very fun. Shima is a salaryman with a heart of gold; he bumbles around being berated by his superiors but having his ass saved by their superiors, who presumably see something in young Shima-kun. He speaks up about one of Hatsushiba’s stores dumping old TVs in the river! He feels bad about letting down old people! He nearly has an affair with the boss’s mistress! (And when I say nearly, I mean he takes her home when she gets drunk, she comes on to him, and Shima is already half out of the door in panic when he runs into his boss coming home, makes his excuses and escapes. So, ‘nearly has an affair’ in a uniquely lame way.)
But I like it. I like Shima-kun, he who cannot get anything right. The language used is more immediately useful than Planetes’s, obviously, and it’s a fascinating look into the hidden world of the salaryman and Japan’s social norms.
Look at him. Look how happy he seems. He’s actually jumping for joy at the possibility of working in a small cubicle for the entirety of the rest of his life! It’s hilarious and terribly sad at the same time, like when a clown dies.

I’m finally getting the hang of this Japanese thing! (How many times have I said that?) I’ve pretty much decided that I’m never gonna be an accomplished conversationalist in either Japanese or English, but that if I honestly do have a knack for the skills of reading, I might as well concentrate on that. I’ve started reading the news (almost) daily in Japanese, and it feels rather remarkable to be taking in a Japanese newspaper, getting most of the kanji to some extent, even if the overall meaning of each sentence remains murky and uncertain. Fiction, too – I finished the first story in Read Real Japanese and I ought to make a good start on the next.

You know, learning Japanese – it’s all about scrambling up the mountain using every means at your disposal. People will tell you “It’s better to do it with one hand behind your back,” or “You ought to use hiking boots”. Some advice you should listen to. Some of it you should ignore. The one true way to climb the mountain of Japanese is to do it whatever way works. For me, that’s making up stupid mnemonics and reading newspaper articles about minor party officials in funding scandals. I guess I’ll be alright.

I need to stop counting down my days left in Japan… though it be 72 days right now. Yeah, after a tense phone call with the JAL office in Tokyo (why do I find phone calls with strangers such an unmitigated terror?) I went ahead and changed my return date to the 2nd of August, so I’ll be with everybody else coming back on the 3rd of August at 4:35pm. (It’s cost me 15,000 yen to change, but then I would have had to pay 17,000 yen rent to stay here until the 10th (plus food and stuff) so it’s worked out fine.)

This is day 235, or thereabouts. It feels like a marathon, and part of me is glad that I didn’t go back at Christmas because the longer I stick it out here, the more insane it will be when I get home. Yeah, it will be insane.   I remember when I came back last time, after a paltry ten weeks, being blown away by the ticket machine on the London Underground. When I get back on the 3rd, it will be a whopping 308 days since I left. I’ll be a stranger in my own country.

Been listening to a couple of new good albums recently: Here Lies Love, David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s unlikely musical/song cycle collaboration on the even unlikelier topic of Philippines dictator’s wife Imelda Marcos, has an all-star cast of female singers (including Florence “+ The Machine” Welch, Cyndi Lauper, and …er, Steve Earle) and some surprisingly catchy tunes on the subject of Imelda’s rags to riches to unparalleled embezzler and shoe collector story, some of the best being the title track, “How Are You”, “Please Don’t”, and “Never So Big”. Also, LCD Soundsystem’s new album This Is Happening, with a stompingly awesome first track “Dance Yrself Clean”. James Murphy has this really interesting half-spoken, half-singing style on tracks like “Pow Pow” that puts me in mind of the old Jonathan Richman. A good album for the summer, methinks.

Finally, interesting thing of the day: The Strange Case of the Electronic Lover, a insightful look into one of the very first internet chat communities with a male psychiatrist undercover as a woman.

Today wasn’t an entirely wasted day! I went back to Shinjuku – that old tart – for the first time in a long time, only to find that I’d totally forgotten how to behave. I walked into people. I got lost. I barged into elevators. There’s a knack to getting through Shinjuku, and I’d entirely forgotten it.

But I found Kinokuniya once again (I always think it’s on the wrong street) and basked myself in its beautiful seven floors of books. Books! Books with words. Books with pictures. Books to educate. Books to entertain. Books that can, in a tiny package and for a small fee, change your very being. To distract me from morose thoughts, I simply need to have recourse to books, as Michel de Montaigne said.

I bought Freakonomics, because everyone else in the world has read it by now and it was only 850 yen. I bought our super-dull textbook for next year, called New Approaches to Pre-Advanced Intermediate Grammar Solutions For Learning Japanese in Context (or something like that). And I got our recommended Japanese-Japanese dictionary, 小学国語学習辞典 (Primary School Japanese Study Dictionary). As the name suggests, it’s for primary school kids, but it’s full of cute pictures and I like my textbooks with cute pictures.
Plus, it gives a tiny insight into how Japanese children learn the language. Obviously the bulk is just natural acquisition, but I noticed things in the dictionary like a little box distinguishing the homophones 形 and 型 and the tiny semantic difference, which is something I was beginning to wonder about in my own study, and intriguing insights into how Japanese kids are taught kanji (by year, organised by theme, and the dictionary scattered with what seem to be pictographic representations of the components, as far as I can tell).

I also bought a book called Read Real Japanese Fiction, because it caught my eye with an appealing offer of six short stories from contemporary Japanese writers, together with grammatical explanations and a glossary. I strongly believe the best way to learn a language is through interaction with a genuine corpus of day-to-day use; having never read much fiction in Japanese (aside from manga, which has its own stylistics) I thought it would be good to have a primer in Japanese fiction so as to become more literate.

So I retired to a nearby cafe with a maple latte and began reading 「神様」 (“God”), a short story by Hiromi Kawakami about a bear who moves in three doors down. I read quite slowly (I’m only three pages in), but it’s incredibly exciting to be reading an actual Japanese story, and I can already feel my comprehension increasing.

A little later, I joined Ella, Fran, and Hime for a visit to Kuu, this bar in Shinjuku I’m doing a review of. I want to save my thoughts for the review, but it was a nice place, I tried some ten-year old Yamazaki whisky, and we got free creme brulees (I think because I had a coupon).

Yes, fateful days indeed! Apologies for not updating in a while (although most people I know update their blogs every year or two, so count yourself lucky). Only, it’s quite a turning point this week for me and the country.

Tomorrow is the big Leeds exam, and – you know what, it’s not cool to say it, but I’m not worried. I think I’m gonna pass. Most people are bricking it, but it’s only 40% to pass.

Which may come as a surprise, because literally less than two weeks ago I’d given up all hope. I was pretty sure I’d end up emailing to say I was dropping Japanese and taking up single honours English. And then a tiny, life-changing thing happened. Dan told me I could do it.

We were told you had to start studying for the exam at the start of the year — in October — when you were on the plane. And there I was, with less than two weeks to go on a Monday evening – there was no way I could do it. That’s what conventional wisdom said. 653 kanji and 58 chapters in two weeks? No chance.

But Dan explained how over the past month, he’d gone through Kanji in Context (our workbook) with the help of Heisig’s mindblowingly-awesome Remembering the Kanji. He’d gone through Kanji in Context in order, looked up each kanji in Heisig’s book, and built a mnemonic story with the reading of the kanji built in.

This is not how you’re supposed to use either of these books. Kanji in Context is based around the old-school method of “stare at the kanji until it goes in, then write it a hundred times”. Its deficiency are obvious; it takes forever, the kanji are in a stupid order, and you can forget it in an instant.

Heisig (technically “Remembering the Kanji”, but everyone calls it Heisig after its glorious author James Heisig) is much more sensible; you don’t learn a complex kanji until you’ve learned the components that make it up (KiC has ridiculous things like teaching you 驚 a dozen chapters before you learn 句, and who the hell can wrap their head around that?) and the mnemonic system makes revising kanji actually scarily enjoyable. But it has its failings, too; you don’t learn how the kanji are pronounced, you can sometimes get confused with the mnemonic stories (you learn about fifty kanji in a row with the 人 radical and it all tends to merge together into a baffling mess) and you don’t learn any words, so you’ve got no grounding in the actual language. (It’s entirely possible to read Heisig cover-to-cover and know nothing about the Japanese language.)

But look at it this way; Heisig is a locomotive and Kanji in Context is the track. Neither are any use without the other, but put them together and shit, you can achieve so much.

So I look at something ridiculously complicated like 驚 and I break it down into awe and horse and I see myself in awe as a rock (which reminds me of the reading, odoroku) smashes through the window and a beautiful horse bursts in, causing me shock and wonder, which is what the kanji means. Do that 652 more times, and you are in a very good place to pass the exam.

It is election day.

I am voting for the Liberal Democrats.

The Tories (保守党: “Protect and Guard Party”) were out of the question. Even before reading Johann Hari’s article on the rotten borough of Hammersmith and Fulham:

A young woman – let’s called her Jane Phillips, because she wants to remain anonymous – turned up at the council’s emergency housing office one night, sobbing and shaking. She was eight months pregnant. She explained she was being beaten up by her boyfriend and had finally fled because she was frightened for her unborn child. The council said they would “investigate” her situation to find “proof of homelessness” – but she told them she had nowhere to go while they carried it out. By law, they were required to provide her with emergency shelter. They refused. They suggested she try to find a flat on the private market.

For four nights, she slept in the local park, on the floor.

They are the party of the few and the privileged; the party who will earnestly lie through Murdoch to get the vote of the people they will do the least for (the Sun’s front cover reminds me of the way Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, not Eurasia). So, in general terms, fuck that.

Labour – oh, I’m supposed to vote for Labour (労働党: Labour and Working Party), the party of the left and the impoverished and the working man, except they really aren’t the party of the left any more. They’ve done so much to advance Britain in terms of civic rights, with the minimum wage and civil partnerships, but I can’t vote for a party of the past – I have to vote on what they are now, and I just don’t agree with Labour’s tired, centrist policies any more.

So we have the Liberal Democrats (自由民主党: “Self-Action People-Rule Party”, which is ironically the name of the recently-ousted Liberal Democratic Party of Japan). Unless the pollsters have got it all wrong and dramatically underestimated the youth vote (which I doubt, because the polls are incredibly accurate these days) there’s very little chance of getting in, but the thing about the Lib Dems is that they’re tenacious – once they’re in, they’re hard to get out, so even a small surge here will build and build, and we have a generation growing up disheartened with Labour but not willing to vote Tory. Clegg seems a decent guy who really cares. Their policies – from the little stuff like protecting post offices, protecting the internet and sorting out unfair council taxes to the big changes like proportional representation, ditching Trident, and a fully-elected House of Lords (something Labour have failed to do in 13 years) are all things that make me excited.

So me, I agree with Nick.

I think most of my problems in life stem from being a determinist at heart. I’m not completely sure free will exists. I feel like innate personality (determined by biological and external social factors) determines your actions, not your consciousness and not free will.

This raises big, scary questions. Like, is it fair to punish criminals if they had no control over their actions anyway? Can a leopard truly change its spots? If I simply put my mind to something, can I do it?

More specifically, if I decide to work hard at Japanese, would I get better? Yes, but can I actually decide to work hard at Japanese? It’s like sleep paralysis; you’re awake and fully conscious and trying so desperately to move your legs, feeling like you’re suffocating, but it’s impossible. It’s physically impossible. I sit down to study Japanese, I get bored and do something else.

Is this an error on my part? Should I try really, really, really hard instead of merely quite hard? Or is it blind deterministic mechanics, that I am a product of my upbringing, that I will always pick the easy path, that I have no patience, that I get easily distracted?

I don’t know. It’s a philosophical question, anyway. The main thing is, do I want to keep doing Japanese?

I don’t know!

I think my honest feelings are: I’d like to do Japanese if I could just coast through like I always do, turning up to most lessons and doing enough of the homework and doing sorta okay. But it’s a damned hard degree, and I apparently just won’t do all the work that’s necessary to pass.

I think my honest feelings are: I don’t want to do Japanese. I know enough to get by, and I basically only took this degree because I wanted to live here for a year for free. I can read Yotsuba-to and that’s enough for me. I’d much rather do English or Graphic Design or something like that. I don’t really have any desire to learn the language.

I think my honest feelings are: I love Japanese. I want to become impeccably fluent. I want to watch films and read books and talk to interesting people. I want to learn all the kanji and all the words. It’s just the teaching style here I can’t get on with. When I think about it, I really miss the Leeds department. Somehow everything was easier there, more fun.

Indecision. What’s made my day is that I emailed Leeds to let them know of my possible intentions, and I just got a reply to say that I can put a request in to the English department in May if I want to switch to Single Honours, and they’ll decide in June by the earliest. Meanwhile, I get to finish my year here whatever happens.

That’s the best news I could get. (Well, realistically winning the lottery isn’t going to happen, especially since I don’t play.) I’d hate so much to go home early, to encounter enormous visa and financial wrangles, to possibly have to pay back all my JASSO (god that would ruin me) and generally ruin my year. I get to stay.

Kinda makes me want to start studying again…

In other news, I’ve put up the teaser page for Yoshida, my work-in-progress visual novel salaryman simulator. Demo someday. I worry I made the titular Yoshida rather too stylish, rather than the chubby sweaty salaryman I envisioned him as.

Well, it’s been nice with the hanami.

Anyway, here’s the two finest minutes of animation ever produced (the first 30 seconds is cut off, but it’s toe-curlingly good up to the 1:30 mark, although your tastes may vary)

The voice acting by the sublime Norio Wakamoto just makes this scene mint.

「どうか？うまいか？トマトがうまいのか？」
“How are they? Are they … delicious? Are the tomatoes delicious?”
「うん！おいしいよ！」
“Yeah! They’re tasty!”
「こんなに赤いのに、ちよは美味しいという…！」
“Despite their being red, Chiyo says that they are delicious…”

｢本当の猫…」
“A real cat…”
「私は偽者の猫だと？」
“Did you just say I was a fake cat?”
「ごめんなさい！すいません！」
“I’m sorry! Please forgive me.”
「いや！」
“No!” (the delivery of this line alone is sumptuous)
「私は偽者ではない。」
“I am not a fake.”
「まあ、本当の猫と、そうでない猫が、いると言うことだねぇぇ？！」
“But, there are real cats, and cats that aren’t so; …Did you just say that?”

After an impromptu meeting with Suzuki-sensei at 6pm today, it was established that due to my low mark of 63.9 (C) I will be repeating level 300 instead of moving up to 400 with everyone else. Also, I think I was advised to do all the auxiliary lessons (the speaking, listening, reading and writing classes) and the kanji class too. There goes my free time!

That’s not set in stone. I could still push for 400, I reckon. But, I dunno. It might be best to cut my losses and concentrate on the Leeds exam.

I’m doing joint honours English and Japanese at the moment. I am informed that there is a possibility of applying for straight BA English in May, which would entail basically dropping Japanese and reverting to my remaining two years of English in 2010/11 and 2011/12.

Do I want to do that? Not really. I do want to finish Japanese, but at the same time, in all honesty, I’m just not putting the work in.

Suzuki-sensei asked me today why I’m doing Japanese, and for the first time I gave the honest answer: I like living in Tokyo. I adore this city. I always tell people “Well I liked anime when I was younger,” or “I like Japanese culture”, but the simple truth is I like living here more than England. (In some respects. I do miss home.) No crime, great transport, exciting events, the bustle of a megapolis; it’s everything I want. I mean, you can walk the streets at 3am and never, ever feel threatened. You know how much more pleasant that is than in England? I don’t want to go all Daily Mail, but it’s little things like that.
And I don’t really need a degree to live here: obviously it would help with getting a job but right now, I know enough Japanese to survive here. I realised that when I went to get my bike fixed – just a minor errand, and my Japanese went off without a hitch, and it was sorted. I know enough to get anything done. I’m pretty much illiterate beyond kids’ manga and I can’t really hold an interesting conversation, but I can Get By.

So if I can get by, the question becomes what am I learning Japanese for? I’m not really sure. Obviously if I could be fluent I would. If I had a roadmap for fluency, I’d follow it. But that seems an awful long way away (and it is) and right now I’m sort of okay and I’m not really sure how I’m supposed to get better, but that doesn’t really bother me, y’know? (And yet it does…)