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Broadcasting to an audience of three (and a goldfish)...
Comment, ramblings and musings... life through the eyes of a Japanologist...
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Tuesday, July 9, 2002 |
 Hey! What was I thinking? I just realised that today's school lunch could be a...Who would eat that? Delectable- or not- morsels
So, bacon soup, seaweed salad, and fried baby mackerel, we salute you. (Let's not forget the rice, either...)
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Breakfast Show Staple Notable weather
Just a quick weather note. It looks like the typhoon is going to miss us after all...
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The curtains'll be all twitched out this evening! For the last fifteen minutes or so, there's been a man wandering round outside, shouting at the top of his voice! He was challenging people to come outside, yelling at a dog that barked (for which he gets my vote any day!), and generally disturbing the peace...
He sounds as if he's drunk, but even so, this sort of thing doesn't happen in upmarket Washibe (well, not very often, anyway). I think the subject of gossip for the next six months or so has just been decided...
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Programmes worthy of mention...
Ito-ke no shokutaku
This Tuesday evening programme, whose title translates as 'The Ito family's dining table', is a weekly documentary about the dining room furniture industry in Japan.
No, actually, it's not. In fact, this is a programme where viewers send in clever discoveries (for example, if you tie cotton to the end of a toothpick and throw it at a piece of polystyrene, it will stick into the polystyrene, but if there's no cotton, it won't), useful tips (for example, if you angle your feet at right angles to your leg you can swim backwards), and so on. The 'Ito family' then test these out on the programme. The one thing that spoils the whole thing for me, though, is the quite incredibly annoying voice of the commentator- it's one of those smarmy, shopping-channel voices that makes you want to gnash your teeth and smash things... Anyway, at the end of the programme the family vote on the most useful or interesting tip, and the winner gets 300000 yen (about 1500 pounds)!
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The air this afternoon was so humid that the windows steamed up, and the handrail to the staircase outside the office building became slippery. Walking outside the air-conditioned office was truly like stepping into a sauna.
I was really not looking forward to the fact that there was more of this- nothing but this- until about the end of September. But then I had a thought. This is basically as bad as it gets. Therefore there's still the problem of this weather lasting for months yet, but at least it's not going to get less and less pleasant. I can cope with this weather, so it's just a matter really of waiting for autumn. Somehow, I feel better having realised this.
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Why is 'Land of Hope and Glory' being used in an advert for Chinese cooking sauces, I wonder?
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How time flies. Today was my last lesson for this term- there's nothing
more until September. Which is just as well, really, since I'm so busy
with my 'real' work...
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Another interesting happening at school. I played Fruitbasket with the
6th-years, and we set the rule that if anyone managed to get to the end
of the lesson without becoming the person in the middle, they'd get
three stickers, and everyone else would get one, but if everybody had
become 'on' by the time the lesson finished, then everyone would get two
stickers.
Anyway, just as the lesson ended, one girl had still not
become 'on', and so she was set to get three stickers while everyone
else got one. However, instead of sitting down and getting the stickers
for herself, she purposely didn't sit down, so she became 'oni',
meaning that everyone got two stickers. In other words, she'd favoured
the group at her own expense. I don't think this is something we'd ever
see in Britain; even in Japan it's rare enough.
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Examples of amusing- and just plain bad- language
"FITH Our kids will go on"
This was on a T-shirt. I wonder
what FITH stands for? Suggestions on a postcard...
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Ate school lunch with the 3rd-years in Koyo today. The menu was
(somewhat unappetizingly) bacon soup, seaweed salad, fried baby
mackerel, and (of course) rice. Anyway, the third years are only 8 years
old or so, and they're still at the age of picking and choosing what
they're going to eat, and it was most amusing to see how they dealt with
the fish (which of course, had head, bones, and tail). Some of them ate
everything without a murmur, some of them baulked at the head or the
tail, and some of them moaned that the bones were hard (which, in
fairness, they were). Some of the boys tried mixing the bones with rice;
it didn't make them any easier to eat apparently...
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Web articles worthy of mention...
This isn't really fame so much as infamy, though. It's a BBC article about the problem of
English in Japanese. Overall, it's not a bad article- I myself have
argued for ages that there should be more pride in traditional Japanese
rather than in loan-words imported for their supposed trendiness (or
simply through laziness)- but it is spoiled completely by a quotation
from a language student in Tokyo. This person comments all-so-knowingly
(or so he thinks) about how igirisu is the word for England, and
so when people started using engurando (sic) for England during
the World Cup things got confusing.
Whenever I read stupid, ignorant
comments like this, my blood boils. Had there been a section for
comments on the article, I would have sent one- and I wouldn't have
minced words. I bet the student in question feels really big and clever
because he's been learning Japanese for two whole years, but in fact he
simply shows that (1) after all that time he doesn't even know that
igirisu does not equal England, and (2) that England is not the
same as the United Kingdom. The reason that people started talking about
ingurando (no, it's not spelt with an 'e'- another slip-up
there!) during the World Cup was (strangely enough) because England were
playing, and the Japanese for England is... you've guessed it...
ingurando. Not igirisu. That's the name for the United
Kingdom. So, not very big- or clever- at all, really, then...
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Breakfast Show Staple Randomhaiku of the day (from The Genuine Haiku Generator)
impossible gray
ardent lash blushing, dancing
lying, morbidly
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© Copyright 2003 Nathan Duckworth.
Updated: 8/1/03; 8:17:49 pm.
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