Matt and Funny Words

I have a new favourite phrase!

The phrase: 江戸の敵を長崎で討つ。

Pronounciation: Edo no kataki o nagasaki de utsu.

Translation: To enact revenge on someone in an unlikely place.

Literal translation: To attack your Edo enemy in Nagasaki.

What fun!

New Computer! (and some tangents)

I bought a new computer yesterday! It cost about $850, $720 of which come from savings from my part-time job. I feel really good about having actually purchased something substantial (almost entirely) with my own money. Especially because it was my own fault that my last computer is decrepit. Look mom, I'm responsible!

I also bought a couple Nintendo DS games on Junko's behalf. She's been spending way too much time playing Mario, the lazy kid. I, on the other hand, managed to spend the weekend (and, who am I kidding, most of the week) at bars, house parties (a rare event in homestay-ridden Japan) and travelling to Nishiwaki, a town in the middle of nowhere that translates quite literally as Western Armpit. As such I have not done any homework per se in quite some time. I did finish Kokoro though, thoroughly disliking most of it. There's way too much foreshadowing for a climax that is (not entirely) lacking profundity. Also, it just seems very structurally and thematically similar to Norwegian Wood, and having read that book so recently I am perhaps not in the mood to reread it.

Matt and Women

I've noticed that there's something terribly cute about women who like to eat. Have yet to figure out why this is.

Little yellow crescent moons.

The blogosphere has been having a bad run of it recently. A number of clever, older bloggers have taken it upon themselves to highlight the missing scale on the underbelly of the beast. I mentioned two articles yesterday, but the conversation has snowballed. Terry Glavin connected me with Oliver Kamm's commentary ("The blogosphere, in short, is a reliable vehicle for the coagulation of opinion and the poisoning of debate.") which connects to the disastrous debate between blogger Guido Fawkes and veteran Guardian editor Michael White. ("It's all commentary.")

Which of course I wouldn't feel so bad about if I hadn't checked into China Confidential this morning and had my stubborn optimism dashed against the rocky shores of 'Fools, knaves, blowhards and nuts', more specifically that last one. I have an immense amount of respect for the Reporter - his content and his rhetoric, seperately - but recently he's begun mutating into something horrible, horrible. Commenting on the recent, peaceful, Moqtada al-Sadr-instigated demonstrations in Iraq.

The Islamist scum chanted: "Get out occupier!" They waved Iraqi flags and banners saying "Down with Bush, Down with America."

By midday their wannabe Iraqi fuhrer--a piece of human filth that should have been exterminated years ago--had not made an appearance at the rally.

And later, reviewing developments of the Iranian nuclear program.

Iranian monster-in-chief Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made the announcement with
pomp and ceremony at the heart of the regime's nuclear program, the uranium enrichment facility at Natanz.

Question: Why is he still alive?

Another question: Why are the Shiite and Sunni Islamist scum of Iraq still alive?

I mean, seriously, how can you condemn the holocaust and incite racial hatred in the same article? There was a day when China Confidential was about China. Those were fiery days, bold days, interesting days. But there's a certain lack of maturity being displayed here that I don't feel I need to elaborate on.

Maybe there's something to what Oliver Kamm was saying. "The great innovation of web-based commentary is that readers may select minutely the material they are exposed to. The corollary is that they may filter out views they find uncongenial." I mean, it's not like there's a lack of news concerning Asian involvement in the Middle East. It's the kind of news that keeps us out of the hyena pen.

Take for instance monday's visit by Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki to Japanese PM Shinzo Abe's residence, and the reassurances from Japan that support for the Iraqi reconstruction will continue.

Maliki said Iraq is making a new start for the future, having overcome many problems already. He indicated the country hoped for further support from Japan.

Japan's contribution to the reconstruction of Iraq has been both financial assistance and Self-Defense Forces activities.

Ground SDF troops were based in Samawah in southern Iraq for two years.

In addition, Japan has extended yen loans of up to $3.5 billion (417 billion yen) and grants of more than $1.5 billion. The financial assistance has gone toward improving infrastructure, such as electric power facilities, officials said.

In Monday's meeting, Abe also told Maliki that Japan will offer yen loans to rebuild water supply systems in Basra, southern Iraq. (Asahi Shimbun)

Now there's an uplifting story. Cheer up Reporter. It's not all yellow-stars and car-bombs and knocking off Philistines.

Quit being such a damn Fuhrer.

The Lucky Strike Problem (also, Hanami Photodump)

I have a pack of cigarettes in my front pocket. I haven't started smoking, mind you. I've just run into an interesting moral dilemma.

It started near the end of a 花見 (hanami, flower-viewing party) I threw last night on the banks of the Shukugawa near my home. Like 20 people came and it was a ton of fun and when it got late and we started to clean up there was a pack of Lucky Strikes that somebody had left on the tarp. There were only a few of us left, and nobody wanted them. Now somebody had paid good money for these, and moreover, the pack was practically full. By giving them to somebody I could reduce waste and increase somebody's utility. It was, apparently, an economic problem.

But of course I don't really like cigarettes. The other option was that I could simply throw them away. It would be a waste, true, but not much of one since ultimately it'd be like throwing away a pill of cyanide. I feel like this is what I should do. But at the same time, why throw away something perfectly good?

I guess it's sort of a weird moral dilemma. Maybe I shouldn't think so much about it.

Here are pictures from the hanami. Enjoy.

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.

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.

Nukes and Pi

You may remember this crazy Japanese guy I talked about back in October who set a record by reciting pie to 100 000 digits. The Japan Times recently ran a feature on him and his life. He's a pretty fascinating guy, mathematically and metaphysically.

Also, the 6-Party talks are set to resume this morning, albeit in a rather underwhelming way. Though the meeting looks good in theory, it doesn't sound like anybody is really expecting it to, how do you say, amount to anything.

"I anticipate it won't be easy to seek substantive measures to resolve the situation partly because the talks will be exploratory in nature," Chun [the South Korean delegate]told reporters after meeting the other envoys except for the North Koreans. (Reuters)