Photo Dump: Eiga Mura

I went to Eiga Mura a couple weeks ago with a family that's friends (related? I'm embarassingly unclear on this point) with my homestay family. Eiga Mura is a sort of theme park that doubles as an Edo-period set for the historical dramas that are always playing on Japanese TV. Lots of old-style buildings and streets paved with nothing but dirt. We saw a rehearsal of sorts. We saw a chanbara play involving the warlord and dynasty-founder Tokugawa Ieyasu and his loyal retainer Hattori Hanzo (not this one) fighting, oh, some evil dude. We saw a ton of incongruous cosplaying teenagers.

A petition worth signing. (maybe)

I've been signing up for too many mailing lists recently. My latest acquisition is Avaaz.org, a group that coordinates petitions on issues of international justice. Their newest burning cross is the fresh round of talks in the mid-east being urged on Israel by the Arab League.

Arab leaders are making a serious peace offer, and the world supports them. Ordinary Israelis want negotiations too - but their leaders risk losing this rare chance. Talks just about security will never bring peace. (Avaaz)

The offer centres on an Arab peace plan rejected by Israel outright in 2002, but this time round the word is that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is reacting more positively, if still skeptically. Anyway, the pillars of the international community are generally rallying around the Arab push, notable UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and European Union's foreign policy chief Javier Solana.

Mr Ban told the summit that "the Arab peace initiative is one of the pillars of the peace process... [it] sends a signal that the Arabs are serious about achieving peace."

Correspondents say no-one expects any breakthroughs, but the fact that Saudi Arabia, the regional powerhouse, is being so pro-active means this will be one of the most scrutinised Arab League summits. (BBC)

So I signed the petition, because it seemed like a no-brainer. And then I ran into this fiery critique over at China Confidential. It's from Wednesday. It's titled Understanding The Saudi Plot to Destroy Israel.

The official version of the kingdom's peace plan calls for all Arab countries to formally recognize Israel's existence and establish relations with Israel if it withdraws from all land held since the 1967 war, recognizes the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital, and provides the so-called right of return for all Palestinian refugees. (China Confidential)

The general thrust being to flood Israel with Arabs, making it a dually-religious state, and thus not Israel at all. The pseudonymous Reporter seems to think this is a bad thing of course. I'm not so convinced, but that doesn't make the execution of such a plan any less duplicitous . I mean, God, at least Iran is being honestly malicious.

Nuclear-arming Iran, which has vowed to destroy Israel the old fashioned way--through blood and fire--is skeptical about the Saudi piece-by-piece plan. But Iran's energy-starved ally, China, is a believer. Sun Bigan, Beijing's special envoy to the Middle East, is said to be urging patience and restraint, advising Iranian monster-in-chief Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that a deescalation of his country's nuclear standoff with the West would allow for implementation of the Saudi scheme. (China Confidential again)

Which brings us back to Asia. To say that China is afraid of an escalation in the Middle-East is an understatement. China is the world's second-largest (second-worst?) oil consumer, and even its recent pax with oil-rich Russia is not enough to wean it off its Arabian addictions. (hint: not talking about coffee) I find myself torn in choosing sides though. Iran's President is a terrible, terrible man, and China's policies are not much better, but if Chinese money is one of the keys to extinguishing the inferno in the Middle-East...

I just don't know what to think. It's too complicated. I give up. I'm going to go read some web comics.

I am poooooooooooor.

Speaking of ridiculously expensive things, I paid my next round of student fees to Kwansei: 244 000 yen, a little less than 2 500 dollars. Exciting!

I am pooooor. I've started a stash for my get-a-computer-again fund with monies from my part-time job. Sitting at over $300 now, which actually isn't that bad. If I don't do too much travelling I may actually be able to buy a new computer outright. On the other hand, doing too much travelling is kind of the whole point of being in Japan. Decisions decisions.

I've started indulging my guilty addiction to roleplaying games again. We're playing Nobilis, an amazing and stylish game that treads lightly on the heels of philosophy. It's been a few years since I've actually had a chance to game, and I'm really enjoying it.

Fuck (again)

I just found out that fixing my computer screen is going to cost over 100 000 yen, or about $1 000, roughly the same price as the whole computer.

I'm not paying to fix it. Haven't figured out what I am going to do though.

My sister is hilarious.

You may have to read my sister's Facebook wall to get this. And read this.

This has absolutely nothing to do with Japan.

But it is terribly unusual: after being away from the internet for all of Thursday.

Things I have done recently.

1. Handed over my busted computer to the good people at HP. No word yet on how much it's going to cost to fix the screen. The running estimate is between $200 and $1000. Thank god I'm being given extra shifts at work this month.

2. I went skating. At work. With all the kids. Working at a preschool is a ton of fun, but can be very tiring. Trying to keep two toddlers from falling on their faces is one example of how it can be tiring.

3. Handed in this goddamn essay I've been working on for the past month or so. I'm moderately happy with it, though frustrated by the page limit. A month and a half worth of research cannot be condensed into 20 double-spaced pages. Anyway, it's nice to have it over with and be able to relax again.

4. Went out to a bar on Friday with some people for the first time in a month. Then I went out again on Tuesday. It's expensive but I really needed to get out of the house.

5. Answered like a gajillion wallposts and emails that have been piling up over the last month. I've been so focused on my report. It was pretty bad.

6. Started listening to a lot of Tom Waits and Fiona Apple. A-gorram-mazing.

7. Memorized the length and breadth of Tiger Tiger. Next on my list is Xanada. I don't know the authors of either of those, because I never know authors, but I do know that I want to learn them from back to front. I even learned the word in Japanese that means "recitation from memory." They, conveniently, have a single verb for it. Good people, the Japanese.

Tomorrow is my gym day. I haven't actually been in more than a month. It's quite bad. I'm going to go every day this week, protestations from my body be damned.

Anyway, the library's closing for the day. Time to head home and eat and bathe and then sleep the sleep of the dead.

About four things

I'm in the library today from dawn to dusk, finishing up this paper that I thought was due tomorrow. Turns out that may not be true. I ran into Graeme on the way in, and he pointed out that while the English copy of our instructions simply says that we have to hand a copy into CIEC before our presentation on the ninth, the Japanese copy says we must do this the day before. Maybe. Literally it says "by about the eighth of March."

Huh? "By about the eighth"? Does that mean the morning of the ninth is okay? I don't understand.

Anyway, I've been walking around with this J-pop song stuck in my head for the last couple of days. It's called Chu-Lip, by Otsuka Ai, and the music video is terribly disturbing. I saw the whole crew on one of the many celebrity talk shows that float around Japanese TV. It was pretty hilarious, and the drag queen with the tutu kept hitting on one of the hosts.

Less hilarious but equally disturbing is the trial of Canadian citizen and refugee Husein Dzhelil in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region , China. Exactly what he stands charged with is unclear. Mr. Dzhelil, who fled XUAR in the mid 1990s, was detained by the authorities in Uzbekistan in March 2006, and handed over to China in June. He was held incommunicado initially, but on the 2nd of February a trial was held that, for the first time, his family was permitted to attend. His treatment is shocking, but not terribly surprising. This is China, after all.

Those close to Husein Dzhelil say he claims that he was tortured after his
extradition to China in June 2006, including by being starved and deprived of
sleep during the first fifteen days of his imprisonment. He has also claimed
that Chinese authorities threatened that he would “disappear” and “be buried
alive” unless he signed a document. This document was later held up as a
confession, although Husein Dzhelil reportedly later claimed he did not know
what he had signed. (Amnesty International)

The Amnesty Page has information on how to write the Prime Minister (of China), and other officials. There's also a link to a year-old open-letter to Stephen Harper, whose integrity when dealing with China's human rights record and Chinese officials has been impeccable. You may remember this article from the Epoch Times about Harper's tumultuous chat with Hu Jintao at APEC in November. Mr. Dzhelil was a hot topic at the time.

Whatever else may be said about the Prime Minister, I appreciate his efforts on this front.

Oh, and one last thing that I'm sure will offend my mom. I've decided to sign up for the Prime Minister's mailing list. I look forward to comparing it to the NDP newsletter, which I have found to encapsulate the worst sort of self-important aggression that has come to characterize the Left Wing. We'll see how it goes.

Argh!

I tripped over my computer saturday night and now there is a big footprint in the screen.

I am so dumb sometimes.

He sits on a bench by night and is immersed in a universe of strange and wondrous questions

So I'd been cooped up indoors all day, pouring over a number of books on Daoist cosmology, the Yi Jing, and a few resources related to, what, something I've heard referred to as Confucian Geomancy, though that's a terrible misnomer. I decided to go for a walk.

I've been writing, rather researching, this paper on, again words fail me. Maybe that just means my thesis lacks focus. It's about directions, and how the Japanese at the turn of the last millenium thought about them. Like anything and everything about old Japan, I've had to turn to ancient Chinese sources, hence the Yi Jing. It was written a profoundly long time ago, like two and a half millenia ago. It predates, say, Christ by about 500 years. Buddha by about 250, Confucius the same. It's methuselan.

I've been maybe hitting the books a bit too much lately. It's what I deserve I guess, for not really doing any work while my parents were here. This report I'm writing, I've changed the subject twice now - “narrowing” is the verb I used with my academic advisor. I started writing about geomancy in Japanese gardens, but got kind of sidetracked and now I'm writing ostensibly about the shijin, these four guardian beasts of the cardinal points. It's fascinating.

I took a walk. I went south, because I haven't been south of my house yet, not past the highway anyway. I made it all the way down to the ocean only to discover that there was a tenuous peninsula stretching out hoizontally before the horizon, and in any case the shoreline was concrete and caltrops. I found a bench. I sat.

The Dao De Jing is an absorbing read. I've heard that much of it's appeal comes from its ambiguity, its uncomplaining subservience to interpretation. I've seen excerpts that read like realpolitik, I've seen excerpts that read like the Bible. And I've seen excerpts that read like this.

Compassion cannot fight without conquering or guard without saving. Heaven arms with compassion those whom it would not see destroyed.

That is Lao Tzu at his most eloquent, his most sympathetic, and his most transparent. The rest of the time I get the feeling that Lao Tzu is grounded in some intellectual system that is beyond me. His writing is prone to great leaps of fancy, forcing connections between things that don't have any, jumping from one concept to the next to the next in a merciless stream of consciousness that is almost symbolic, almost metaphysical.

Tao gave birth to the One; the One gave birth successively to two things, three things, up to ten thousand. These ten thousand creatures cannot turn their backs to shade without having the sun on their bellies, and it is on this blending of breaths that their harmony depends.

Sometimes, when I've spent a day locked away in a dark corner contemplating the Shangqing Cosmology, other people become just as untenable. I went to a party Friday night, lots of drinks and chatter and people I've come to deeply care about. The chatter was something foreign though. I couldn't get into it, couldn't see ahead to the terminals of dialectic, trialectic, couldn't make the leaps of free association required for lively conversations, kept coming back to that line about compassion. That line and Mobius Loops and Klein Bottles. Don't you just hate it when you're trying to think of something clever to say to a girl you like and all you can think about are topological pheonomena that only exist in four dimensions?

Wanna hear something else that doesn't make sense? Classical Chinese doesn't have punctuation. Period. When translators look at something like the Yi Jing or the Yu Jing or the Wuxing Dayi or the Dao De Jing they have to determine for themselves where one sentence begins and another ends. They have to arbitrarily assign groupings of words, or rather, divisions between concepts. It's like doing algebra without the zero, speaking a language that lacks a present perfect progressive tense. So not only is the Dao De Jing flagrantly ambiguous, (e.g. “He who acts harms, he who grabs lets slip.”) it's also stubbornly unclear. Wringing sense from the Dao De Jing is practically sysiphisian. And yet. And yet.

I sat on a bench, and I looked out at this spit of land that stood between me and my horizon. Then I got lost on my way home.

Incidentally, Japanese lacks a present perfect progressive.

China Exploring Africa's Biodiesel Crop Potential

From the erudite China Confidential. Look for the third entry down, same title.

Energy-starved China is expanding its African oil safari to include oil from plants--the kind that can be used as feedstock for biodiesel production.

[...]

China, the world's second largest oil importer after the US, is showing significant interest in biodiesel as an alternative fuel. China has become the fourth largest--and the fastest growing--motor vehicle market. Under pressure from its own citizens and the international community to seriously address the worsening air polution problem, the government recently set a goal that that by the year 2020, 20 percent of Chinese energy is to be derived from renewable resources. Hence, the interest in securing supplies of feedstock.

Rack one up for China. Not that we should be singing the praises of the CCP mind you. The Middle Kingdom's human rights record in Africa is notoriously bad. At the end of all this, we are as likely to see exploitation under conditions reminiscent of colonial histories as we are to see a a decline in greenhouse gasses.

And then there's the question of small arms and munitions trade. I've commented on this before, but China is running a sort of oil-for-guns program, and the kinds of people they trade with are not the good kind of people.

Togo and the Congo are two countries of focus. In competing for commodities and and, Beijing's energy behemoths, which answer to the Chinese government (controlled by the Communist Party) and not to stockholders, have important competitive advantages over their European and US rivals. Chinese firms can offer African leaders an array of incentives--from presidential palaces and sports stadiums to guns and cash gifts--to achieve company aims and advance the national interest.

You win some you lose some, I guess.