Sons of Loki

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’ve been feeling pretty good lately. As if everything’s going alright. Like I’m on top of the world. This sort of thing could come from a number of factors:

#1 Undiagnosed manic depression
#2 Undiagnosed love (see #1)
#3 Springtime (it is unseasonably warm (well, not cold) and sunny for late January)
#4 A dramatic paradigm shift in the study of Japanese

Which is to say: I’m starting to get it. It’s rare that one website could make me turn my entire life around, but I came across All Japanese All The Time a few days ago and it was like everything I read rang many, many bells.

The site’s owner is a guy who taught himself Japanese in the US over about a year or two (and soon after was hired by a Japanese software company as a programmer) without classes or textbooks or drills or any of the stuff I hate, but simply by loving the language and filling his entire life with it. 24/7. Japanese music, Japanese TV, games, books, manga. Even when sleeping he had his earphones in. Like any good diet, he simply replaced anything in English with the Japanese equivalent; so,  if he felt like watching Independence Day, he watched the Japanese dub. If he found himself wasting time on Wikipedia, he wasted it on the Japanese version.

And he kept his brain open, picking up interesting sentences and picking them apart to learn grammar and words, rather than using textbooks or vocab lists. Coupled with an SRS and Heisig, he proceeded to become fluent in a year or two.

Impressive.

And it explains so much. Why I can’t be bothered in class, why I find textbooks so dry. Because they are dry. I always live my life by a tenet from David Byrne:

If your work isn’t what you love
Then something isn’t right

and the key to doing anything is working out what you love about it, and doing it. Why do I do Japanese? Because I enjoy tests, flashcards, and filling in blanks? No! I do it because I want to partake in Japan. People, films, books, games, everything. I’d forgotten that.

So I started again. I complained before about not being good enough to enjoy games or manga in Japanese, but I’d got it the wrong way round. I should use my enjoyment of games and manga as a spur to encourage me to want to study, and as a tool to teach me. I opened my brain and played Metal Gear Solid 4 and sure, I only got 10% of the wordy verbosity, but that 10% was valuable stuff. (反政府勢力 – anti-government forces.) I opened my brain and read One Piece and stuff went in. (海賊 – pirate (lit. sea burglar).) I watched Hatoyama in the Diet on NHK. (政治家 – politician.) I studied the lyrics of those ancient and learned Japanese poets, the Teriyaki Boys – rap is so good for learning because the rhymes make words pop out.

やるだけやってあとは交代
じゃ、そろそろみな集めて乾杯!

I’ll do it only what I can do and after that change
Well, we’ll gradually get everybody together and – cheers!

Just concentrating on what I understand rather than what I don’t is such a boost, too. Last night I watched one of MGS4′s famously lengthy cutscenes and though most of the highly complicated technical speak washed over me, I understood most of the opening scene and the ending one, and to the point where I didn’t even realise I was understanding it, I was just enjoying it. That’s the goal. That’s the reason I study.

Also, I should be hopefully published in an upcoming issue of Metropolis with an article on Rikugien in Tokyo and hopefully another one after that, so keep eyes peeled! (If you’re in Japan. Obviously if you’re in Mexico or Sri Lanka, not much point looking out for it.)

Japan isn’t as straightlaced as you might think. (Also, on a random whim I looked up that “BNE” sticker, and it has a surprising history and no one quite knows what it means. Fascinating.)

I was gearing up for a tortuous day of three straight periods today, but I was surprised to find that only the first lesson was mandatory, and everyone else was heading off to do other stuff, so I went to Shinjuku for to pick up these kanji books we need for the Leeds kanji test.

Kinokuniya is practically the biggest book store in Tokyo, but it took me ages to find it. I was ready to give up when I finally stumbled across it, and I melted a little when I discovered the small-yet-well-stocked English-language section.

“It consoles me in my retreat; it relieves me of the weight of distressing idleness and, at any time, can rid me of boring company. It blunts the stabs of pain whenever pain is not too overpowering and extreme. To distract me from morose thoughts, I simply need to have recourse to books.” The Complete Essays III.3.932, Michel de Montaigne

Since finishing The Tipping Point I’ve hungered for new non-fiction books, but all I’ve had to read is manga, which is barely readable for someone of my level after much effort, but it’s still more like hard work than something to lose yourself in on the train or on the bog. So it was great joy that I picked up an interesting tome by recent science hero Simon Singh (currently fighting the good fight against chiropractors and UK libel laws) all about the Big Bang. Oh, the kanji books. I’m not entirely sure if I even really need them, given that it just seems like a kanji dictionary and I’ve already got a good one of those (the Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Dictionary), but I did also get Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji 1. For years we have been told that kanji are all but impossible to learn, that we should give up, that the only way to do it is slog through them with the utmost misery. Heisig just says “Why not use a system?” And it sounds like a very good system indeed – mnemonic pictorial cues, similar to what I’ve been using before, but codified and refined. And best of all, he concentrates on meaning, not the particular reading/pronunciation (which is something that comes naturally anyway).

So, being all geeked up, I decided to head to Harajuku to see if you really could get cheap clothes there, as I’d been told. Harajuku is a place, like the rest of Tokyo, which is hard to pin down. It’s not quite as achingly, effortlessly hip as Gwen Stefani might think it is (that’d be Shibuya) – it’s a little rough around the edges, a little too self-conscious. Of course, you’ve got the truly cool and fashionable gliding through the crowds like they’re too hot to touch. Then you’ve got the freaks in bizarre costumes, gothic lolita, or a dozen piecings and pink hair. And finally you’ve got everyone else, the normals, the Japanese public and the kids hanging out with their friends and the permamently bemused tourists and the coolhunters.
Coolhunting. It’s such a postmodern concept, the idea that cool is a natural resource that flows out of the ground in Harajuku and Shibuya and can be tracked and collected and distilled and sold to the public at large. So you’ll see these Japanese kids with SLRs stalking the streets, hunting down the latest fashion to be transmitted down the line to the boutiques of New York and London in a few months’ time. Or so I like to think; they were probably just photographers like me.

In the end, cheap clothes were nowhere to be found except in the vintage and used clothing shops, which smelled funny and didn’t really have anything I liked (nor which would fit), although I did pick up a ironically retro Swissair manbag for 700yen.

I’m not quite sure what I want to be. A house DJ? (Been screwing around with this DJing app I downloaded, and mixing is hard, but when you get two songs that really work together it’s nowt but pure joy.) A geologist? (For some reason, I found myself trawling through geology articles on Wikipedia recently. It’s fascinating!) An author? A photographer? (It’s so fantastic to just go into Tokyo and take photos of stuff, which is one of the reasons I want to splash out on an SLR for my birthday hint hint ma and pa). Ah, what a time to be alive, when it’s so easy to dabble in various fields (even if it’s a case of jack of all trades, master of none.)