Lost In Translation

Book Club: Rising to the Challenge

This month’s book club book is Rising to the Challenge by Avery Goldstein. Good Day Books, is the sponsor of this reading group, if I haven't mentioned it before. I have to say that this selection is a bit too academic for me. The focus is on policy and there’s not much of a compelling narrative. However, having read a couple books on China, it is interesting to analyze what China is trying to do as far a foreign policy is concerned. But this seems more like a book for policy wonks than general readers like myself. Goldstein outlines China’s “Grand Strategy” policy, which would allow China a peaceful transition to becoming a great power. He talks about the many issues that China is facing in regards to America, Japan, Russia, Asia, and the rest of the world, as well as potential internal problems along the boarders within China where most of its minorities reside. Taiwan haunts China as a major bugaboo with their foray into democracy and seeming independence. I didn’t like the design of the book-too many footnotes for those academics and poorly defined typeface. That being said it was also well-researched and comprehensive in its limited scope.

Public Space

I came across the mention of this new literary magazine, Public Space, on Jean Snow's blog. I may have to pick up the inaugural issue, which has a focus on Japan with interviews with the likes of Haruki Murakami (there's a section of it here) among others, as well as fiction by contemporary writers, and other interesting looking articles.

Kurage

Kurage is a fairly new cafe in Shibuya near Parco that has a great fusion menu. I didn't eat on my visit, but the food looked great and it's in a central location and has stylish decor and an arty atmosphere. Next time I'm in the neighborhood I'd like to try some of the tasty looking food.

The Lilliputian

Lorenzo Fantini, and another friend of mine, Jack MacLean, are doing a joint exhibition at Heartland in Roppongi Hills for the next two weeks. Unfortunately I couldn't download the image used for the invitation. There's an exibition party from 5 pm on Sunday the 23th-check it out. I was there last night for the first night and it looks impressive.

Munich

GQ’s film critic Tom Carson singles out Steven Spielberg’s Munich as the best high-minded politically liberal film of the year in the April edition of the magazine. Although I don’t agree with his criticisms of these other films (Syrianna, The Constant Gardener-for example)—I was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked Munich. I guess that's the advantage of having low expectations. I agree that the gritty opening sequence approximates the 1972 Olympic spectacle where Israeli athletes are taken captive and killed. Carson nails it when he states:

Cinematically, one of Munich’s best touches is the way Spielberg evokes the 70s by echoing the look of the era’s films, with their zoom shots, druggy editing, and very un-Spielberg-like moral muck. But the movie he plainly studied hardest was Gillo Pontecorvo’s The battle of Algiers, with its heart-stopping scenes when the audience understands that the Algerian rebels-the people we’re rooting for-are about to blow up innocent, happy French women and children. Since, Algiers was fiercely pro-revolutionary, nobody can really doubt Spielberg’s sympathies in Munich: You don’t worry about a country losing its soul unless you’re convinced it got one. Suggesting Israel’s survival has come at a hard price in human values-and specifically Jewish ones, too-hardly equals calling for its destruction, especially since Spielberg stops well short of showing Palestinians feeling similar qualms about their tactics, and maybe they don’t. The movie’s real burden is the director’s glum apprehension that, while dramatizing the toll the assassinations take on the hero’s psyche, he can’t confidently claim they were unjustified or unnecessary.

English Word Count

This week I have just started the 2006-2007 school year and my colleagues tell me this is the first graduating class that wasn't required to know at least 2500 English words. My initial thought was: do I know 2500 Japanese words?--I'm assuming so, judging my Japanese ability with my student's English ability. So far I haven't noticed any difference between this years students and last year's. Incidently, Slate.com had an article that was concerned with how may English words there are:

How many words are there in the English language?

No one knows. But that hasn't stopped an operation known as the Global Language Monitor from proclaiming that—as of this writing—there are exactly 988,968 words in English. GLM has done a remarkable job suckering even the respectable press into believing that we're on the verge of adding the millionth word to English—at which point we'll presumably see another flurry of articles about GLM. Even so, its claim is a bogus one.

The problem with trying to number the words in any language is that it's very hard to agree on the basics. For example, what is a word? If run is a verb, is the noun run another word? What about the inflected forms ran, runs, and running? What about words with run as a base, such as runner and runnable and runoff and runway? Are compounds, such as man-bites-dog, man-child, man-eater, manhandle, man-hour, man of God, man's man, and men in black, to be counted once or many times?

Hamazushi

Hamazushi is a kaiten (revolving) sushi chain that has a branch near my university that I've been meaning to check out. Today I felt like something light and stopped by, and was mightily impressed. It's cheap 105 yen a plate with serve-yourself-all-you-can-eat miso soup. There were also big slices of cantaloupe for the same price. But the coolest thing was that instead of shouting out your orders to the sushi chefs you entered your order into a computer which, then would alert you when the sushi was arriving. I don't usually eat sushi more than once or twice a month, but I can see this becoming a regular thing.

Book Notes: Song of Solomon

For one of my last assignments for my Modern American literature class I was required to read Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon for an asignment. I once tried to read another of her novels, Beloved, but it was one of the few novels that I gave up on before finishing. I do have to say that Morrison does an excellent job of bringing to life a vast array of characters: respectable men and women, children, poor country folk, hustlers, as well as down and out adults struggling in the cities. She also manages to string together a compelling narrative about a particular family over time. There is suicide, birth, murder, incest, and a lot of other stuff going on in this novel, but it is essentially a novel about identity and the importance of knowing where you came from before you know who you will become. Macon Dead, the main character in the novel cannot truly be his own man free of his father’s influence until he can find out who he is. I enjoyed the novel more than I thought I would, but I don’t feel compelled to go out and read everything she’s written-so much to read and so little time.

Regret Or Something Like It

In this week's Daily Yomiuri Cultural Conudrums column, Kate Elwood takes on the "te-shimatta/chatta" aspect of the Japanese language. And it was a revealatory experience for me, because I always assumed that it was only a negative response-as in regret for doing something-thus it is revelatory in showing how people in our respective cultures differ in expressing their feelings:

The te-shimatta/chatta construction can sometimes be used in a felicitous way, when something has definitively taken place and life is better as a consequence. In this case, the tagged-on ending becomes an appended, rather modest-sounding "yippee," as when someone gets married and says kekkon shichatta, implying, according to my Japanese informants, that the outcome was a kind of lucky fluke or an outcome that was against the odds. To get the same nuance in English you'd have to say something like "I can hardly believe it myself, but..."

Another common -chatta phrase that is not regretful but is however a bit sheepish-sounding is katchatta, used when a person has taken the plunge and bought something that he or she may feel was slightly extravagant. But now that it's bought and paid for, they might as well enjoy it, is the remorse-resisting but suitably restrained subtext.

Then there are the expressions which seem primarily to indicate that things will never be the same, probably but not necessarily in a good way, like falling in love (koi ni ochitte shimatta). Ah, irrevocable love. In general, te-shimatta/chatta is reminiscent of the feeling of releasing an important letter into the postbox or clicking "send" on an e-mail. The matter is out of the sender's hands or lover's power to control, and let the chips fall where they may.

As so often, some sort of sigh is embedded in te-shimatta/chatta, but I'm not quite sure what the exhalation implies exactly even when I'm the one speaking. When I say of a book I loved and read voraciously yonde shimatta (I finished reading it) am I expressing satisfaction at its conclusion or let down that the experience is over or both? The ambiguous versatility is pretty nifty.

Click here to read the entire article.

Aux Bacchanales Ginza

Aux Bacchanales used to be one of my favorite cafes when I lived in Harajuku and they closed it down a couple of years ago, and although there's been a branch in the Akasaka business district I never felt the need to go there. I However, Ginza is less than 15 minutes by train and I'll stop by occasionally for my favorites: the Mixed Sandwich (pictured below) and omelet. It has that French brassie feeling, with all the smokers, antique wooden details, and outdoor seating, which is all-too rare in Japan. The daily specials are pretty impressive as well. Too bad the location is marginal-not much street traffic in comparison to Meiji-dori: it is located across from a junior high school, but not far from a busy intersection.