Sons of Loki

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.

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.