(identity 'myron)

Sat, 20 Mar 2004

Japan and China: National Character Writ Large [/Japan]

Interesting article inferring that differences in representing foreign loan words in Japanese and Chinese reflect different ways of thinking in each country of itself vs the rest of the world. For anyone who doesn't know the two languages, Japanese generally spells out foreign loan words in a very square and distinct script. Chinese, in contrast, coins new words using Chinese character compounds to match the meaning of the new foreign word. Some people seem to have a funny take on why this is:

"China is a big continent and has an inclination to think that it is No. 1 and that others are uncivilized," said Minoru Shibata, a researcher at NHK, Japan's public broadcast network. "Therefore, they feel that giving Chinese names to foreigners is doing them a favor."

Riight... and nevermind that last I checked, Japan still requires anyone gaining citizenship to adopt a legal Japanese name.

The rest of the article goes on to talk about overseas Chinese and overseas Japanese. Second-generation overseas Japanese seem to get their names spelled out like foreign words, rather than with the normal use of Chinese characters, the implication being that they're more or less counted as foreigners. The same is not true of the Chinese.

There's also a decent rebuttal of these pretty far-out conclusions here. Although I don't agree with them entirely because they don't address points like how names are written. They argue the use of the special script for foreign words is no different than italics in English. Well, then, my name is clearly foreign, so why isn't it Myron Wu? And if you were pedantic, it's doubly foreign, because the first name is supposed to be of ancient Greek origin. So why wouldn't it be "Myron" Wu?

// posted at 09:13. permalink   comments

Sun, 08 Feb 2004

Foreign marriage on the rise [/Japan]

"More Japanese finding wedded bliss with foreigners." Hehe.

// posted at 20:08. permalink   comments

Wed, 07 Jan 2004

EMIT [/Japan]

Was looking on my ex-company's website for info about ricecookers and stumbled on a page about their EMIT technology, which connects house appliances to the internet and lets you access them from mobile devices like say, a cell phone. Anyway, thought the concepts were pretty neat, sorta the kind of thing I'd dreamed of once. Although nothing revolutionary.... The animations are pretty self-explanatory if you don't understand Japanese, just click the headings on the bottom. Left for examples of use from a cell phone and right side for examples from within the house.

// posted at 22:18. permalink   comments

Wed, 31 Dec 2003

Clubs and Missions [/Japan]

Researching papers on Japanese culture for my work term report, and I stumbled on this quote:

Of course, the clannish, parochial outlook of the Japanese is not unique to that nation. One longtime student of Japan divides the world into two types: clubs, and missions. "France and China, for example, are missions: if you conform, if you learn the language and adopt their customs, the people accept you entirely.... Britain and Japan, on the other hand, are clubs: you can be accepted and belong to them as corresponding associates, but you are never really a standing member.... In fact, for foreigners it is more difficult socially in England than it is in Japan."

Interesting view that I mostly agree with, but don't think it's quite that clear-cut. It's also more interesting to note that getting in, if I ever counted as being in, feels like being part of the Borg collective or something, especially when it comes to a company where you're around the same people for up to 12 hours a day. By virtue of all being in the same company, the same living arrangements and essentially the same mindset, you acquire this strong social network around you, and leaving it feels like you're leaving the collective: all the voices are gone.

// posted at 07:47. permalink   comments

Sun, 28 Dec 2003

Yasukuni [/Japan]

Another year, another ultra-publicized visit by Koizumi to Yasukuni Shrine to pay homage to dead war criminals. This time, the visit's been decided 8 months in advance! How thoughtful! That gives the Chinese and Koreans 8 long months to ready their insults and protest banners.

*sigh* This isn't half as fun as when I was in Japan, but I'm gonna continue keeping an eye on Japanese news. RSS feeds are tracking their newspaper headlines anyway, no sense in removing them from the aggregator. It'll be even better when I can finally read their language....

// posted at 19:55. permalink   comments

ダイソーひゃっきん [/Japan]

Daiso opened up the equivalent of a 100Yen shop (Japan's equivalent of a dollar store) recently in Vancouver while I was away. It's almost creepy walking through the store seeing the exact same products as I saw in Japan, all made in China, of course. Instead of 100Yen though, it's $2 cad. And instead of hearing the polite "sumimasen" of people that might've even remotely gotten in your way, it's the hustle and bustle, elbow to elbow madness of Canadians all trying to get a cheap deal.

Amusingly enough, some of the exact same products I ended up bringing back with me from Japan like cheap pencils and notebooks are all in there. Go Daiso.

// posted at 19:21. permalink   comments

Sat, 27 Dec 2003

Japan Japan [/Japan]

Lots of drinking and tearful goodbyes--I miss Japan already. Anyway, as you can see I'm not and won't be blogging for some time as I rush to finish writing a report. I'll post my last set of pictures from Japan later.

// posted at 13:23. permalink   comments

Fri, 19 Dec 2003

初雪 [/Japan]

Began snowing lightly last night. Very timely. :)

// posted at 14:27. permalink   comments

And here it ends [/Japan]

Work is finished. Tough to say goodbye as always. Interestingly enough, today there was a huge change in my company too. It merged back with Panasonic, becoming a subsidiary citing reasons of increased cooperation between the two companies. For those who don't know, National and Panasonic split off as Matsushita Electric Works and Matsushita Electric Industrial some time in the 40's. And now 60 years later, they're back together.

// posted at 01:45. permalink   comments

Mon, 15 Dec 2003

Just a little more [/Japan]

8 days till I fly, and only 4 left of work. It's funny, in software engineering classes they always talk about software disasters and I think this project was a mini-software disaster of its own. The only thing I gain from it is better understanding of things that can go wrong in software projects. I got a little more experience working with C++, but just enough to know that it probably takes a lot more projects under my belt to be fully proficient at it.

Apparently I'm supposed to give back my work uniform by Friday--it's almost like I'm being defrocked. All the better anyway, though, I think I've done everything I wanted to do here. After a combined 15 months of work, it's certainly time I got back to full-time school.

It's funny, cause doing co-op is almost like a strange game you play where every 4 to 8 months you switch from work to school or vice-versa. Going from school to work, you're apt to use the things you'd just learned in class and apply them to real-world projects. From work to school, you bring all your honed skills back and try to lay the smackdown on all your course projects. And in total, it all feels like some kind of incubation period where you're constantly growing up towards being a practical programmer ready to wield math and theoretical principles in one hand, skills won by experience in the other.

*shrug* In other news, we all know Hussein was captured, yadda yadda. But volokh.com points out that the ensuing media frenzy shuts out another bit of news that General Musharraf came less than 30 seconds of being assassinated. Pakistan, nuclear power, Islamicists wanting to overthrow their U.S.-friendly president, probably to install an Islamicist in his place--you connect the dots. Story is here, free NY times login required.

// posted at 16:41. permalink   comments

Sat, 29 Nov 2003

Japanese [/Japan]

Just some miscellaneous thoughts I've been having about the Japanese language lately....

Japanese seems particularly well suited for describing feelings and emotions. One particular construct does both, though, which I don't think occurs in common conversational English. The word is 感じ / kanji, which means something like feeling or sensation, but seems to simply capture everything felt at at particular moment whether sensory, emotional or whatnot. As an example, after having spent 15 months working in co-op, returning to school will be a sensation I haven't experienced in a long time, so I could say something like "久しぶり、こんな感じ" (it's been a long time, this feeling). In English, I'd probably say, "It's been a while", or "It's been so long since I've been in school". Notice, though, that the focus has changed towards highlighting the action rather than the feeling, as in the Japanese version. The word can also be used in a wide range of cases, anywhere from the mundane, like the way I eat, to very fine-graned situations, like describing the particular feelings I have after an exact sequence of events and comparing them with present feelings. Point is, the versatility of this generic feeling word just doesn't seem to exist in English.

However, this might not be so much an issue of language as it is of culture--it's possible that we never developed a commonly use word like 感じ simply because we don't talk about feelings as often as the Japanese do.

This cultural aspect comes into play again when it comes to cursing. Given that conflict is generally avoided and much more subtle in Japanese, there just aren't many strong swear words, particularly ones that would match up to the strength of, say, motherf*cker. As an amusing side-note, it seems animal names are used sometimes as invective in manga, such as calling someone a たこ / tako, or an octopus.

One last thought on the whole language differences thing is that Japanese can easily be used for obfuscation through vagueness. I can't really give specific examples, but this leads to very easy hand-waving, hyperbole, escaping direct conflict, and "mushy talk". The latter being obvious in a particular kind of engrish like "Let's be happy and enjoy this choco delicacy" on a candy wrapper or something. This occurs because of direct translation attempts of some vague sentence of well-meaning in Japanese to English, where such vagueness implies more that you haven't sorted out your thoughts well enough yet, rather than a general sense of good will.

All in all, Japanese is very interesting to learn, likely because the cultural gap is wide enough that what's considered natural to speak of in Japanese is very different from the norm in English. Likewise the large gap between the linguistic families of both languages makes for a lot of differences in vocabulary and constructs like 感じ. In the end, though, words are only what we come up with to divide and name the things we encounter in reality so that we can manipulate them in our heads. Words are second to the things they describe. And nowhere is this more apparent than in another language where they chose to divide the ideas differently, drawing the boundaries between ideas in different places than we did, as in the generic feeling-word 感じ, or the honorific and polite speech of Japanese.

*shrug* just a thought....

// posted at 19:49. permalink   comments

Wed, 19 Nov 2003

Japanese Emoticons [/Japan]

Found a list of Japanese emoticons. The 2-byte ones are a little strange to look at though, cause they contain non-ascii characters. Example from the page: "Expressing defeat" is parens - parens - set intersection symbol - underscore - set intersection symbol - semi-colon - parens - capital pee. Take a look for yourself, the ninja one's even more interesting.

// posted at 16:46. permalink   comments