A question of character

Shamelessly expanded from an email I sent to my father, because EFFICIENCY.

My friend the Japanese teacher recently suggested kanji characters for my name. Justin can't have any because his name has significantly non-Japanese sounds, but "Nana" is a common sound in Japan. Not only is it the pronunciation for the number 7, it can even be a name: there is a recent manga in which the premise is that two girls named Nana meet up on a train to Tokyo and become roommates in apartment 707. The joke, of course, is on the number pronunciation; you have two Nanas living in apartment "Nana-zero-nana." I wanted to just use the character for "seven," or "七", for my name (look how easy it is to write!!!) but apparently this is Not Done.

There are apparently two characters for "Na" which are appropriate for names, either of which would be followed by a character indicating that you double the sound. Forgive me for not typing that, since I have no idea how to type "repeated sound" phonetically on my keyboard, which is the only way to type in Japanese. Kind of a metaphysical question, actually.*

 

The first "Na" is the character for vegetables, and looks like this: 菜. I like this because vegetables are funny, and also I already know how to write it, which would save time. However, she said that felt a little soft for me, since it also has sort of a bendy, "amber waves of grain" connotation. After some reflection, I thought perhaps of the English name "Willow."

The second "Na," she said, would be "a much better fit." It is the same "Na" from the city of Nara, the old capital, and is used by one of the two Nana manga characters (the other just writes it ナナ, which is phonetic Katakana). This alternative "Na" looks like this: 奈

 

I looked it up. It means "hell, abyss, the worst possible." 

Cannot decide if my feelings are hurt, or if I should consolidate power and rule through fear. Advice would be appreciated.

 

* After looking up the character Nana Komatsu from Nana, I found that her name is written with this character: 奈々. So now you can see it thanks to the magic of cut and paste, but I still don't have a clue how to type it.

ZOMG, Candy! features TheSenseitions

Our college friend Rosa (she was in the marching band with us; metaphorical pouring-out of one for the grand old YPMB) maintains an excellent candy blog at ZOMG, Candy! We've sent her oddities from our Asia adventures before; in fact, we got her on Google's top three search results for "crunky nude balls." Our mothers are so very proud.

Some previous candy crossovers:
Weird kit-kats #1: TheSenseitions; ZOMG, Candy! (Wasabi, Sweet Potato)
Okinawa Shikwasa Hi-Chew
Okinawa Brown Sugar candy
Korean Candy: chocolate-covered peanuts, Lotte Pepero, Crunch Ball Crispy Candy, various Hi-Chews (actually from Japan and picked up in an airport), and the legendary Crunky Nude Balls.

So we - or rather, my aforementioned mother, whom I now owe $5 postage - sent Rosa some candy during our winter trip home. She put up her reviews a long time ago but I just got organized enough to actually do this post linking to them. We now have:

Candied Yuzu Peel
Kabosu (cabos lime) Caramels
and another Kit-Kat review, Kyoto Yatsuhashi.

Finally, if you'd like to see Justin take a shot at Kit-Kat reviewing, check out the old blog posts on Citrus Blend Kit-Kats and Hojicha (tea-flavored) Kit-Kats.

Have a sweet day!

History Education in Japan's Disputes With China & Korea

Nana pointed me to this article from the BBC, written by a Japanese student who started in the Japanese system but completed her high-school education at an International Baccalaureate (IB) school in Australia.

Her insights ring true for us IB teachers: students in the Japanese system learn a pile of stuff about the medieval era, almost nothing about the twentieth century in general, and even less about World War II. These days, Japanese nationalists are pushing to whitewash even what little instruction the students are given - for instance, by removing references to comfort women or to the Nanjing Massacre. (Note: those are not pleasant links.) Bad for two reasons, as it's annoying Japan's neighbors now and raising a generation destined to annoy those neighbors in the future.

Anyway, an interesting read. Check it out.

Sendai Earthquake: Two Years Later

Yesterday marked the second anniversary of the Tohoku Earthquake & Tsunami that devastated northern Honshu here in Japan. While the immediate impact of the event has faded around the world - and, to a lesser extent, in more distant parts of the country - the many of the worst-hit regions still haven't recovered. In some ways, it probably never will, as to a certain extent the recovery efforts run counter to a long-term demographic shift in Japan: the younger generations are almost universally abandoning small towns in favor big urban areas like Tokyo, Nagoya, Kansai, Sapporo, and Fukuoka.

Slate.com has a photo gallery depicting the ongoing effects of the disaster. At school, we're also doing our small part to help the relief efforts through various charity activities and through the considerably larger sacrifices made by the teams of students and teachers who head there to lend a hand twice each year. If you feel like pitching in from afar, have a look at this donation page from the Japanese Red Cross Society.

Park Air at the Sapporo Snow Festival

In the middle of the Snow Festival, halfway down the length of Odori Park, stood a giant ski slope on a scaffold. Throughout the festival, teams of (mostly local) skiers and snowboarders put on aerial exhibitions high above the shivering crowd. The guys and gals below tackled the freestyle moguls the night Nana and I came by to watch. The skiers ranged in age from about 13 to 50 (no joke); they were freestyle beginners, national team superstars, and everything in between.

That guy's 50.

Softening the landing.

That guy's 14.

13, I think. Doing a front flip.

Yeah, it seems you can get pretty good at this sport if you grow up with world-class skiing in your backyard!

Sapporo Snow Festival 2013

Last month, Nana and I spent a long weekend in Hokkaido visiting the famous Sapporo Snow Festival (yuki matsuri, 雪祭り). Every February, the city of Sapporo turns its long, narrow, snow-bound Odori Park into a magical celebration of the winter season upon which so much of the area's tourism is built.

First, the amount of snow involved is simply unspeakable. When we arrived, the snow was already piled several feet deep along the roads and sidewalks - and for most of our time there, it just kept falling.

What's more, all along Odori Park, huge blocks of snow had been built up into nearly a dozen towering, multi-story sculptures that loomed over the festival site.

An old Japanese hotel.

A Thai temple. Every year, a foreign tourism board is invited to sponsor a sculpture.
This was right next to a Thai Airways booth.

Some Japanese cartoon characters visit Hawaii. This one was sponsored by Hawaiian Airlines, who have started offering some direct flights to Honolulu from a few secondary Japanese airports. (This includes Fukuoka - we're going later this month!)

An old Japanese government building (I think).

Taipei's Chiang Kai Shek memorial, in snow and ice lit from within. Also, with a bunch of freezing cold B-list J-pop stars and a few inexplicable mascots.

The Chiang Kai Shek memorial in the daytime.

Ise Shrine, the holiest site in the Shinto religion. Now in snow form.

It was hard to capture in a photo, but this sculpture actually had a lot of depth. That bridge projected out about 10 feet from the background. A really neat effect.

Some kind of crazy mercastle thing. In ice.

A detail of the Ise Shrine sculpture at dusk.

Ise Shrine again.

But these mega-sculptures weren't the only attractions: various civic organizations also sponsored their own smaller sculptures, and at one end of the park there was an international contest for snow sculpture teams from all over the world.

A person-sized tower.

A shout-out for Nana's homies.

Instant nightmares.

An ice fox.

Ultraman (naturally).

An Okinawan shi-sa.

This was the US team's entry into the sculpture competition. The team was from Portland. They chose to depict a beaver riding a sled with a very frightened Sasquatch. You do the math.

New Zealand pitches some trippy Maori stuff.

Sapporo landmarks.

Orangutans by the Malaysian team. (Yes, there was a Malaysian snow sculpture team.)

The winners? Thailand's sculpture of these very artistic elephants.

And Finland did a cricket. Hm.

Bonus: it turns out the snow was only one of the attractions at the Snow Festival. The Festival is also a celebration of regional cuisine. (More on that later.) Tons of walking, tons of snow, tons of interesting food? Throw in a day of fresh powder on the ski slopes, and you pretty much have the best weekend ever.

This Week in Daibii-Chan

デイビーちゃん (Daibii-Chan, or "Little Davy") is my sister's baby. His exploits teaching us Japanese have already been documented here. We had class again yesterday and once again Daibii-Chan rode to the rescue.

Yesterday's lesson was the phrase "-そうです”, which attaches to an adjective to indicate that you think the adjective is accurate, but you haven't confirmed it personally. Its rough English equivalent is "looks [as if it is]," as in "That cake looks tasty" (but I haven't tasted it yet), or "I heard that..." "I heard that that movie is good" (but I haven't seen it myself).

And Daibii-Chan? I have a new photograph of him on my phone wearing a bear hat. My sister has asked me not to post pictures of her child here, so you can just trust me when I tell you it is objectively the cutest photograph of an infant which has ever been taken, and I include baby penguins in that statement. That prompted the following practice sentence:

デイビーちゃん はうれしそうです。

Daibii-Chan wa ureshisoudesu.

Little Davy (subject) happy looks to be.

I described this to my sister and she said, "This is the perfect phrase for that photograph. He looks happy, but two seconds after I took the picture, he ripped the hat off, screaming."

In which case we could say:

デイビーちゃん はうれしくなさそうです。

Daibii-chan wa ureshikunasasoudesu.

Little Davy (subject) happy does not look to be.

Little Davy looks unhappy.

And this gets even better. To check that I didn't mess up the phrase, I ran it through Google Translate, which came up with "Davy Chan is unlikely to be pleased." Jackie, I think that kind of sums him up!!