Japan Is Doomed

According to The Inquirer, Japanese lawmakers are again in talks about building an underwater train line that would connect Japan and South Korea, similar to the channel tunnel that connects me to Paris. It seems like a plausible idea that has lots of benefits. Prime Minister Fukuda has been promoting improving relations with other Asian countries for ages so this can’t be a bad idea, really. Or so I thought, until I spotted this gem;

“Concrete steps will be discussed in the future,” said a secretary to Japan’s former defense chief Seishiro Eto, a member of the committee, adding that the lawmakers have yet to inform South Korea about the plan.

Brilliant idea there. I absolutely love the fact these guys are insisting “Hey yeah, we are really super serious about this train. Look, I have my serious face on. What’s that? Oh, what will happen when people get to Korea? We hadn’t really thought that far.”

Painful oversight ignored however, this is probably the sort of progress Japan could benefit from. I wouldn’t put “Build a really expensive underwater train” above “Stop going to shrines that celebrate war criminals” in the list of things to do, but since that seems unlikely I guess we have to accept what we can get right now.

Yet more exciting news is that the government are to launch a new group dedicated to becoming friends with South Korea. Whilst this may sound good, remember that this group will do absolutely nothing at all, as is the style in Japanese parliament when it comes to international relations. Oh well, we can dream, can’t we.

I have made a few suggestions of what this group might want to consider in order to improve relations with Korea;

Do: Tell them about the railway idea. They might be quite happy! They might even help!
Don’t: Build the bridge right up to their border, then create a diversion and quickly build the rest while they aren’t looking.

Do: Get rid of this fingerprinting nonsense.
Don’t: Keep the fingerprinting, or add mandatory retina scans, finger and toe counts or any other sort of bizarre measures.

Do: Offer Korean as a language in schools.
Don’t: Gloss over everything in textbooks.

Do: Acknowledge the importance of good relations with nearby countries.
Don’t: Do nothing for the next 20 years.

Any bets for when we’ll see some change? I’m guessing I’ll be celebrating my 60th birthday.

Japan's Culture Korea, Politics

In a previous update, I talked about how the big ’secret’ for learning Kanji is to write it out over and over. For those of you hoping that my 3 awesome tools would remove the need for that will be sadly let down - no matter how many clever gadgets and nifty books come out with claims like “This book will make learning Kanji easier than throwing a cat over a fence!” at the end of the day it’s all about the grind.

That said, there are things out there that can make it less of a nightmare. I’d say these tools are better used for remembering and internalizing Kanji. So here we go!

1. jMemorize
Even though I already posted about it I’m going to sing it’s praises once again. Once you’ve built up over 100 flashcards you’ll really start to love the way it organises your revision - if you keep getting a card wrong you’ll see it more and more often, whereas ones you find easy will appear much less. It makes it very easy to focus revision on your weak points.

For more info on jMemorize, check the update I wrote about it.

2. Basic Kanji Book
Everyone studying Japanese at Sheffield University who just read that suggestion groaned. But the truth is, this is an amazing book. It groups the Kanji into logical lessons, and Volume 1 and Volume 2 add up to 500 Kanji, which if you learn everything for is really good going. Click here for an example page.

As you can see, it gives you a chance to practice writing the Kanji out after checking the correct stroke order, plus it gives all the readings for the Kanji, and makes them immidiatly useful by providing a few example combinations to create more vocabulary. It’s a truly great book. It’s available on Amazon, although if you have a friend in Japan willing to go to a bookstore and pick it up for you it will be much, much cheaper.

3. Kanji Sonomama Rakubiki Jiten [Nintendo DS]
This is an amazing piece of software and really shows the versitility of the DS as much more than a gaming device. If you write a Kanji in the space in the bottom screen, you can then either get the Japanese meaning, English translation or various other meanings through the use of the four inbuilt dictionaries. This software is so much more than that, with lots of built in tests such as the TOIEC English test. To be honest, I’m not really very good at using it so I’m not the one to ask, so instead I took a photo of it in action.

You can get the game imported from Japan for $48.90 from Play-Asia here.

So there you are. I hope that helps in making Kanji a little easier to learn. That said, the only reason I’m writing this update is because I’m putting off learning them myself…

Japan's Language Japanese, Kanji

For various reasons, I have had to change part of my course, and will for the next semester be taking East Asian Cinema. As a result I’m going to have a handful of interesting films to talk about over the next few weeks, and where better to start than Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 classic “Rashomon”.

The film tells the story of a murder of a Samurai and the rape of his wife by a bandit. The same event is retold four different times by the Bandit, the wife, a woodcutter who witnessed the events, and by the murdered Samurai himself through a medium. Whilst not Kurosawa’s first film or his last, it is without a doubt one of the most influential pieces of work that introduced the West to Japanese cinema.

The film opens with a priest and a woodcutter sheltering from the rain an abandoned ruined shrine gate. A traveller approaches to hide from the rain, and overhears the other two discussing a “terrible story”. He asks them to expand on it. At this point we the audience become a jury as each of the four characters involved in the murder tell their version of the events, all wildly contradictory from each other.

The film itself upon watching seems overly drawn out but it is absolutely great and well worth sticking with until the end. The murderer, played by Toshiro Mifune makes an amazing crazy man - it’s truly creepy when he does his “crazy laugh”. The samurai’s wife to begin with starts off as a disappointingly typical downtrodden female role, but worry not, her particular character twist is very well done and the stereotype is cleverly flipped.

From a language point of view, the Japanese in the film is very hard to understand - I had absolutely no chance without the subtitles, and I could rarely make out more than a few words at a time. You may have more luck, but beginners and intermediates alike are going to struggle with some of the older style Japanese present. Still well worth watching though, and you can pass it off as revision! Hurrah!

Japan's Culture, Sheffield University Film

So Thursday saw me and sixty odd other brave students face the Japanese Language Exam. I’ll run through each part of it here then go onto other stuff. If you’re interested in learning Japanese at university one day this might be very useful for you, as I would imagine most universities’ exams are somewhat similar.

1. Japanese Writing, Reading, Translation & Comprehension
Not the official name of the exam but the one that makes the most sense in my opinion. The first section had eight Japanese sentences that we were to translate into English. It had a few hard ones (”I don’t like doing the things people like to do” was particularly fiendish) but hopefully it was OK. Right from the off these questions were very difficult which probably caused quite a few people, myself included, to start to mourn over the lack of throwaway easy marks. Following that there was translation from English into Japanese, then a large Japanese story from which we had comprehension questions, then finally an original composition question which was “How have your eating habits changed since you started university?”

2. Kanji
My favourite of the whole lot because I obsessed over learning all the combinations for weeks. We were presented with either 16 or 20 (I can’t remember) combinations and were asked to give their English meaning and their Japanese reading. I remmeber 病院 (Hospital びょういん）, 部屋 (A Room へや*) and 不便な (Inconvinient ふべんな). After that we had to copy out sentences that were written in Japanese, inserting as many Kanji as we could. * Irregular Reading

3. Listening
Then the horror that was the listening exam. I have absoloutly no idea how well I did on this because it’s just impossible to know before the results come on.

After all of this I had 24 hours before the worst exam of all;

4. Understanding Japan
Do I have to talk about this one? We had three hours to just regurgitate all of the knowledge we had memorized from various books onto the page. The only problem being I was so worried about getting enough content in that I didn’t really bother with essay structure. Oops.

Nevermind, though. I should have a rough idea of my results in a week or two’s time, and they are officially released in March. But rather than just worry about them, I thought I’d talk about Semester 2! I believe we have around 10 weeks of lectures, and during this I am aware that we will cover another 250 Kanji, the ば form and a variety of other brain burning grammar structures. Our original compositions will start again, however rather than post them like I did last year, this time I may just post clippings from them.

No photos this week, I’ve been too busy studying / taking exams / drinking.

Sheffield University Sheffield University

Another boring “about me” update, I’m afraid. In around 35 hours, I will sit down for three hours to take my Japanese language exam. It consists of two English to Japanese translation exercises and one Japanese to English one. Those should take two hours. The final hour is dedicated to writing an entire composition similar to the ones I used to post here once a week. It’s quite a demand and I’m pretty worried.

That said, I have worked hard in revision - especially learning Kanji and Kanji combinations. Even some really bizarre ones like 文部科学省 (The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology), 耳鼻科 (Otorhinology) and 内科 (Internal Medicine).  Grammar wise I feel I am strong although it’s quite hard sometimes to know exactly which grammar structure to use when. The exams are intentionally made with sentences that are beyond our Japanese abilities, forcing us to adapt our knowledge on-the-fly. It sounds unfair but it’s what foreigners do in Japan on a daily basis. I just wish I didn’t have to do it. :(

On Friday I sit the infamous “Understanding Japan” exam. This is a general exam, again for three hours, about various aspects of Japanese society and history. Hot topics include the post-war reformation of the country, business practices, minorities in Japan and Tokugawa history. I find it all very interesting, but because the exam is so crazy general it’s hard to feel confident about what I know.

Of course, I’ll do a quick update after the exams to let you know how I did, and maybe a big one with the results whenever they arrive. Unless I fail. In which case this website will become mikeisdoomed.com or something.

Sheffield University Sheffield University