Sons of Loki

It is a beautiful Saturday afternoon and the sports teams are on the sports pitch doing whatever the hell they do (they never seem to play sport, they stand in huddles shouting at each other) and I still have 94 days in Japan and the Leeds exam is increasingly in the past and I think I did alright and yet I can’t shake this strange desire to keep going. I want to learn it all. I doubt this’ll last, but I might as well go along with this feeling as long as it persists.

So many things to do, but nothing that I really need to do… Might go into town, later. I was watching the video for m’flo’s “Been So Long” (I can’t tell if it’s self-consciously ironic or not) and realised I miss the big empty streets of places like Minato-ku, so I was thinking of doing some arty night black-and-white photography down there, like every single photograph of New York ever taken.

I want to finish off Yoshida, at least the #gowife portion. Gotta pay my bills. Play 龍が如く, the Kabukicho-based GTA clone, which I picked up from (the hilariously named) Book Off the other day. Find an arcade and get good at DrumMania (seeing as the actual PS2 drum controller is nowhere to be found).

Cycled to Hachioji the other week – took about two hours each way, and I reached the edge of Tokyo, which is quite a feat. Here’s some pretty pictures.

Right at the limits of my camera's capability. Observe the Bay of Rainbows, the tiny line of light at the top left.

Dunno what this joker was playing at, but he was doing some neat stunts.

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.