Some light reading

My room owns a small fortune in Japan-related books. Yes, the books belong to the room, not to me.  I have been pitifully working on reading things in Japanese lately, such as my AnAn issues and Ryu Murakami's 限りなく透明に近いブルー, and in hopes of mixing things up a bit (aka: in despair of how long it takes me to read things in Japanese) read a couple of the English books on the shelf.

The first one was Japanese-American Cultural Battle: A Family Approach by Motofusa Murayama.

I read it in part because of my deep love for the topic of international marriage/ relationships. Mr. Murayama married a Japanese-American woman he met at Columbia in the early 60s, and the book details his perspective on their relationship over the past nearly 20 years (the book was published in 1979 in Japanese). Interestingly, his wife was the translator for the English version. First, the writing style is very Japanese, it reads like it was translated. Or perhaps, Mr. Murayama's Japanese wasn't very artful in the first place, because it sounds unnecessarily dense most of the time. I didn't find it to be a smooth read.

There were several interesting sections, but overall you get the feeling that he took it as an opportunity to complain about how his wife didn't magically transform into a Japanese woman as soon as he took her to Japan. His wife does have a little say in the translator's note in the beginning, and her tone makes it seem like things aren't as terrible as her husband makes them sound. The book was written for a Japanese audience, too, and it tends to pander to the idea Japanese-special-ness instead of offering a balanced look at the dynamics of a international marriage. This book is one of several (or just two? not sure), but I won't be reading any more of the series.

The other book I finished reading was Funny Business: An Outsider's Year in Japan. This was a much more satisfying read.

Funny Business: An Outsider's Year in Japan@Amazon

I was a bit wary at first that this would be one of those books where the completely un-initiated gaijin enters the mystical world of Japan and expounds upon all of its exotic ways. I was pleased to find this was not the case. The writing is great, and although there are many gaijin faux pas to be had, the author's writing style and sense of humor keeps things amusing and interesting rather than making things trite. A bit of internet searching was necessary to see when exactly Gary-san was in Japan, I didn't see any exact dates in the book itself. It seems that he was a Luce Scholar from 1983 to 1984, and it was during this time that his experiences working at Sony and living in Japan took place.

Apparently the Luce Scholarship has a requirement that the scholar headed to a foreign country should have relatively little knowledge about the destination and no experience living there. I personally find this to be a crazy requirement, why should someone be subjected to reinventing the wheel by trial and error in a new country? They can learn so much from people before them, and someone who has experience in the country can get over culture shock and get down to business faster. And in this case, it was absolutely ridiculous to send someone who has only had 2 months of Japanese training to work at Sony and have the company expect him to be able to speak and read business-level and technical Japanese. (This point was not lost on Gary-san.) While I do see that there is a special novelty in visiting a place without any prior prejudices (which really is impossible in this day and age, even the author talks about all of the praise for Japanese business practices he heard in his Master's/ college courses), I just don't know that the novelty is special enough to make inexperience a requirement.

Enough of my ranting about the program, Funny Business is a great story. It's depressing at some points to hear about the realities of Bubble Era Japan -- the author spends some time on gender issues in addition to general business practices, and while I know that things can't be exactly the same now as they were in 1983, I still cringe to think how little change there might be in the business world of Japan today. I highly suggest it, but it's important to keep in mind that it is dated by nearly 30 years.

I think I'll try to find some more current books to read next...

So then there was some snow...

A very belated Happy New Year to everyone! 今年も宜しくお願いします〜

I usually don't do resolutions... so the ones I've thought of are not very impressive.

1. Pass N1 - AKA: STUDY daily (not working out so far...) so as to pass it
2. Establish a better daily schedule - I haven't been sleeping until 3pm everyday or anything, but I'd like to shoot for getting up earlier and sleeping earlier
3. Find something productive to do with my free time - I am going to work on my kimono angle some more, I had basically given up on it, but my kitsuke teacher said she'd been thinking about it and would try to recommend me to a couple of places. I also want to get involved in volunteering/ participating in events at the Kyoto Prefectural International Center or Kyoto City International Foundation. I found a very inexpensive Yoga class by way of COSMOS, I plan on trying to attend sometime soon.

I recently decided to change over to Firefox and have, for the first time, actually managed to install Rikai-chan successfully... I'm not sure how effective passively mousing over new vocab will be in the long run, but if I read Japanese on a regular basis, eventually some of the new words are abound to reoccur and stick with me.... Maybe. I also changed to Firefox because it sounded easier to block websites on Firefox than on Chrome. I've decided that I don't want to go to Reddit any more and wanted to put a little something else between me and it. On Chrome it shows up in my frequently visited sites list and I'm tempted by it every time I open a new tab. Not cool.

On an unrelated-to-me note, it has snowed several times in Kyoto lately. I give you evidence:

 

I went out and took pictures with my real camera (these are cell phone pictures), but I don't have them at my disposal at the moment. The second picture is less impressive, but I like that 大文字 is formed out of snow instead of the more famous fire. Now, when I was in Kyoto before it hardly snowed at all. It usually melted as soon as it fell, so I was impressed to discover that it does in fact snow for reals here. The postcards with Kinkaku-ji covered in snow are not lies/ancient after all.