True Selves and Neil Gaiman

I remember years ago talking to someone about the signs of the Zodiac and I said, "If Scorpios are all promiscuous, that would mean Neil Gaiman is promiscuous, so it's obviously bunk." Maybe Zodiac signs are as reliable as anything else in the media these days.

The conversation about Gaiman has become surprisingly existential in the past few days following the publication of a piece at Vulture and Gaiman himself finally posting a blog entry addressing the allegations, breaking the public silence he's maintained on this and other matters for months. Chiefly, the issue now is over the concept of consent, even enthusiastic consent, being retracted several years after the fact. Counterintuitively, the prevailing opinion seems to be that yes. it can be, particularly in matters in which the individual engaged in activities generally considered to be repulsive in the culture. This is nothing new in Britain where BDSM has long been illegal due to the belief that it's impossible for a person to willingly engage in an activity that will inflict pain or injury upon themselves, a perspective that has long weathered the obvious hypocrisy in simultaneously permitting people to engage in physically intense sports, cosmetic surgery, and body piercing.

The original article on the Gaiman allegations was on a right wing site called Tortoise. Now that a left wing platform, Vulture, has published a piece, voices on the right find themselves compulsively arguing with it. They kind of have to since the right has had to rhetorically push back against cancel culture so they've accrued an armoury of logical arguments that can't be tamped down.

There's an article on the predominantly right wing British site UnHerd called "The Perils of BDSM". Author Kathleen Stock uses the Gaiman situation primarily to take aim at BDSM and concludes with the telling statement;

More often than not, it is very bad for the submissive in the scenario — not just because it leads her to physically dangerous situations, but also because it tends to put her in a state of mind in which agency is undermined and subsequent choices aren’t those of her true self, however confidently things started out.

Her choices aren't those of her "true self"? It's impressive Stock has the chutzpah to unabashedly make such a statement, to presume knowledge of a woman's "true self" without even having met her.

Regular UnHerd writer Kat Rosenfeld did not publish her piece on Gaiman on UnHerd but on her Substack perhaps because, despite beginning the article by saying she believes Gaiman to be "a pretty bad guy," she does not support the narrative that Gaiman's alleged victims lacked agency. People on Twitter who didn't read or understand her article have been attacking her for being sympathetic to Gaiman.

I spend all this time reading long, thought out articles that I forget about masses of people who see headlines and base everything they believe on them. I saw one guy posting on Reddit, replying to someone distraught because she only had very good memories of her encounters with Gaiman, by saying that back then maybe "he still had some good in him." So this guy apparently thinks of Neil Gaiman as Darth Vader now, sorting him into that fantasy narrative because the articles he didn't read were just too complicated. The way people confidently go out into the world with some opinions is like people going out without pants on. I just marvel at the history of intellectual complacency that brought them to that point.

I finally read the Vulture article, which was, like the Tortoise article, behind a paywall. At least the name of the publication is more fitting. The article is called "There is No Safe Word", which is not a quote from Gaiman or anyone else involved but it's one a few people have taken to be. The article was written by Lila Shapiro who garnered accolades for her piece on Joss Whedon. You know, more and more I think the pool of brilliant writers on the cancelled bench should get together and make a fantastic streaming series or something.

As with everything else I've been hearing, I can't help but notice that all tangible evidence, all the texts and videos, points to these being consensual relationships; all the things suggesting they're not are from third or fourth party hearsay or from the alleged victims who have changed their opinions on their own past decisions. It's all starting to seem like alien abduction stories, which Carl Sagan spent some time debunking and wrote about in his book Demon Haunted World, a book in which he also decries a psychiatric industry that profits by coercing clients into constructing false memories of assault not unlike those of alien abduction. And one of Gaiman's alleged victims is said to have changed her "perspective" after spending time with "women who were experienced in dealing with sexual assault and abuse."

That alleged victim, Scarlett Pavlovich, spent time with Kris Taylor, "a doctor of psychology who had lectured at the University of Auckland on coercion, consent, and rape" and his partner, Misma Anaru. "Although Pavlovivh had never used the words rape or sexual assault to describe what had happened to her," the Vulture article states, "both Anaru and Taylor believed Gaiman had raped her repeatedly."

It's strange how few people find it suspicious that these articles which confer on Gaiman nearly supernatural powers of coercion, manipulation, and subterfuge, are unwilling to consider anyone else involved capable of deception.

The Many Snacks of Christmas

I had plans for to-day but I think I'm mostly just going to eat snacks. I got a bunch of Christmas snacks and candy from students and teachers yesterday at a Christmas party for the junior high school's ESS or English club. It also happened to be my last day at the school and my last chance to see the third year students at school. I knew I was going to miss them but I don't think I counted on just how much. In the almost five years I've spent as an English teacher in Japan, working with this group has been by far the most rewarding English teaching experience. It was rewarding for their friendship and for the ability to work with them somewhat unfettered by standard Japanese English education procedure. It's with enormous pleasure I can say these third year students are now among the strongest English speakers I've worked with. One boy in particular exhibits an astonishing capacity for communication in English. We'd gotten to the point where we could have real casual conversations every morning that went beyond the usual small talk about the weather into genuinely novel topics such as the particular details of individual interests as well as opinions and perceptions of events and ideas.

But all of the club's students have impressed me in one way or another. Two of the girls are about as good as the boy I mention. I could always rely on them to give intelligible responses to questions that went beyond simple greetings. I can't take all the credit because a lot of their success in learning English comes from their extraordinary individual courage and curiosity. I can only hope I'll be lucky enough to work with another group like that again in such a productive environment.

X Sonnet #1906

A silent beach was mirror flat at noon.
The thought of gulls was naught but fancy's flight.
Ahead, a broken box contains a demon's boon.
Your hand would freeze before its burden's sight.
A buried orange provoked a stranded thought.
As time dissolved the soil, ghosts arose.
A million tides distort the picture lot.
Another Christmas charts how silence grows.
The cakey chalk constructs a lively base.
Detectives gather late to study Yule.
The warmth of life adopts a fleeting pace.
But pockets form to dodge a savage rule.
As candy days depart behind a screen
The metal clouds descend to end a scene.

The Yoshino You Know

I made an unscheduled trip to Yoshino this morning. One of the most famous cherry blossom spots in Japan, it's only 45 minutes south of me by train but I procrastinated going the past couple springs. This morning I put on a pink shirt and thought, what the hell, I'll go right now.

It was kind of silly to go on a Sunday. I've been off for about a month so I could have gone on a week day. Instead, I chose to go when all the trains were packed with people.

Yet there were lots of quiet, peaceful spots, despite the crowds.

Someone broke a cup:

I bought no souvenirs, just some sakura mochi and a bottle of sake. The former are good and tart, the latter I'll drink to-night while enjoying the natural splendour of Skyrim.

X Sonnet #1832

To crash molasses, grapes were smashed with plums.
Detective roofs descend on guilty floors.
The graves of teeth were black in pregnant gums.
Another mouth awaits through talking doors.
Unending springs for steam could not be crossed.
The mammoth corpse provoked a pack of wolves.
A jacket's colour cooked the penguin lost.
A lover's judgement ran on wooden hooves.
Angelic dogs discoursed on tasty gin.
Disturbing strings would cut guitars to bone.
A final whistle changed to tranquil tin.
Contentment buzzed for ears across the phone.
A cherry glamour broke between the chips.
No movie's just a set of little clips.

Springtime in Osaka

Here's a photo from Umeda Station in Osaka on Wednesday. I was in town for a meeting. I walked around a bit.

Under this bridge I saw some provocative graffiti.

A closeup on the sticker at the centre of the bomb:

The sticker commemorates the third year anniversary of a Chinese restaurant called Kitchen Yokoyoko. Make of it what you will.

While I was waiting for a train in Osaka Abenobashi, I saw this boy band at Q's Mall.

I didn't catch their band name. They were performing a song in unintelligible English and then stopped to chatter for a very long time.

So there's your little slice of Osaka for the month.

The Welcoming Screen

Now I feel somewhat free to watch old movies since I finished my Best Of/Worst Of lists. And TV shows. I want to keep watching Fringe but Amazon gives me an error whenever I try to watch the next one. No clue why and by the time I settle down with my dinner to watch something I don't have the patience to wrestle with the technical problems. My internet is shit, especially when it comes to websites owned by Google. My provider is Softbank, a company with a good reputation in Japan but that doesn't stop them from being shady as hell. That's why it takes six hours for me to upload a three minute YouTube video (by the way, video versions of my Best Of/Worst Of lists are up on YouTube).

I've been dozing off at 12:30 or so with some old favourites on the screen. Chinatown, Videodrome, Wild at Heart, The 39 Steps. None of these movies should be comforting but they are. I guess The 39 Steps is kind of cosy. I love when Robert Donat checks into the hotel and orders whisky for himself and milk for the girl.

Being handcuffed to Madeleine Carroll seems like it would be nice.

I have been playing video games. Lately Metroid II, Kirby's Dreamland, Final Fantasy Legend II, and, of course, Skyrim. Here's my current character, Gwen:

I named her that because I have a mod that expands the dialogue of an NPC character, Serana, to be able to say certain names--there's a list of well over a hundred. This free mod has a professional voice actress and was covered in Forbes magazine. I'm taking my expanded Serana through another mod about rebuilding Helgen, a fort town that was destroyed at the beginning of the vanilla game. This mod is also fully voiced and totally free.

Since the last time I talked about the remarkable phenomenon of Skyrim mods, Bethesda has introduced new purchasable mods, which are causing controversy in the gaming community. I'd advise people not to worry, I think we all know nothing will come of them. It's funny, I believe in capitalism as a motivator for human achievement, except when it comes to art. More often than not, the profit motive has inhibited art rather than advanced it. The evidence is everywhere. Lousy movies make lots of money while hundreds of better achievements have to fight for funding and then end up losing money. Exceptions exist but are extremely rare--rarer than they might seem because they take up a lot of media space. And a lot of the best Skyrim mods are better than what people were paid to create for the vanilla game. Of course, this leaves the problem of the most creative people barely being able to afford basic necessities.

I heard recently that Miyazaki Hayao doesn't like video games, that he feels they're taking up too much space in children's lives. I've addressed the topic before of whether or not video games can be art and my position was always that they're not art but they can contain art. For example, the NPC mod I mentioned features lots of written and recorded dialogue. I consider that to be art but the interface for encountering that art, I'd still call a game. This comes from my definition of art as something created by a human mind to transmit an idea or feeling. For a game to achieve this, it has to utilise assets in a way that a communicated idea or feeling clearly comes through only because of player input, only because of an achievement or failure. Often, dialogue scenes in games feel detrimental to the gaming experience because the game really stops and becomes a movie. So when we're talking about art there, we're really talking about short films. I have yet to experience any kind of game dialogue that approaches the immersive experience of a movie. By and large, although I obviously like and play video games, it's always a shallower experience than a movie.

But on that note, I recommend watching video game designer Kojima Hideo's recent visit to the Criterion closet:

What he's saying about young people in Japan being unaware of Japan's great history of cinema is, unfortunately, quite accurate. Many of the teachers I work with, let alone the students, have never heard of Mizoguchi or Naruse and, though they may have heard of Kurosawa or Ozu, have never seen any of their movies. I was thinking of putting together a presentation on old Japanese films to show students but I knew if I didn't use a Japanese source some of the students wouldn't give credence to what I said. So I went to the bookstore to see if I could find a book about Japanese cinema. What I found were two walls of books about Hollywood, written in or translated into Japanese. They had a really lovely copy of Lulu Goes to Hollywood even, Louise Brooks' book of criticism. Then there were half a dozen books on Kurosawa, a couple on Ozu, all on the bottom shelf. Nothing comprehensive like what I wanted. I guess I wasn't surprised. Even Kurosawa complained in his lifetime about the lack of interest in Japan for the giants of '50s Japanese cinema, which is of course why he had to get funding from Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas for his '80s movies.

Anyway. Go watch some movies, kids.

Time is Here Again

My Christmas tree this year. To-day's feeling fairly Christmasy, too; it's been snowing for the past couple hours. Proper cold came late this year. I said it'd come a few weeks ago but that one day turned out to be a fluke. It's only this week I've been wearing my heavy Inverness coat and long underwear.

Yesterday was my last day at my current school and it was also the day the school's English club had a Christmas party. I was especially sad to say goodbye to them as most of them are second year students and will therefore be third year students, and no longer participating in club activities, if I go back next year at the same time. They read from "A Visit from Saint Nicholas" and I showed them A Charlie Brown Christmas, which one student particularly seemed to like. The same student student brought balloons and had come up with a balloon volleyball game which we played. The kids really enjoyed it and I was happy to see some of the quieter ones coming out of their shells.

On Monday, we played our last Dungeons and Dragons game, from the original Dragonlance module I started them on last year. They voyaged to the heart of Xak Tsaroth, which I copied onto large sheets of graph paper, and faced the black dragon Khisanth, for which I'd made a little origami dragon. It was a hard battle, but they prevailed.

I also gave them candy canes I'd gotten on Amazon, just like last year. I remember last year it was so cold and snowy that I slipped on the ice outside my door, breaking some of the candy canes. No broken candy canes this year, so that's something.

X Sonnet #1800

Deceptive colours slice the temple lime.
With thoughts of horses, sleep at night descends.
A distant word reduces thought to time.
On shaky ropes, the fate of tongues depends.
A frigid castle broke the ice for kings.
No naming code could talk to me of words.
The eyes denied the worth of golden rings.
Dissolving shops amassed a dozen herds.
Balloons rebound from busy fingertips.
A table net preserves the space of play.
A fearful sky is full of watchful ships.
Conceptions ever dampen down the day.
Beyond the grasp of tortured brains it shines.
Escape was hid on garbage destined rinds.

Star Wars for You and Me and Everyone

Yesterday I showed Star Wars to the English club at the Japanese junior high school where I work. I mean Episode IV: A New Hope, and that was the first thing I had to explain to them, "This is the first movie, I know it says 'Episode IV'. It's from 1977, Episode I came out in 1999." Attending the club yesterday were three second year girls, one second year boy and one first year boy (ages ranging from 13 to 14). None of them had ever seen Star Wars before. Previously, I've shown them Ghostbusters and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, both of which they seemed to enjoy. So I was surprised to find they seemed to be struggling to maintain interest in Star Wars.

Well, one of the girls seemed to be captivated. She told me later her favourite character was Obi-Wan Kenobi. The rest liked R2D2. Everyone seemed more engaged once the characters got to the Death Star and there was bickering between Han, Luke, and Leia. And they all seemed riveted by the finale. It's fascinating just watching the movie with people who'd never seen it. I can't even remember my first time seeing Star Wars and it's very difficult even to imagine the experience of watching C3PO and R2D2 wandering the desert and not knowing what was going to happen next. But now it occurs to me that people who've recently been saying that Star Wars has to stick to certain formulaic elements are dead wrong. The defining element of the first film is that one scene after another throws unexpected elements at the viewer. The very fact that the first movie is the fourth episode, that it drops you into the middle of the story without really holding your hand and explaining anything, speaks to the franchise's broad storytelling possibilities.

Thinking about why the kids liked Ghostbusters and Roger Rabbit better, I came up with a few theories. Ghostbusters and Roger Rabbit are both comedies, so maybe they're easier for kids to latch onto quickly. Also it occurs to me that they'd never seen anything like those two movies before. Neither one is widely seen in Japan and none of the new Ghostbusters movies are really like that first one. Meanwhile, Star Wars has had a lot of exposure in Japan. So while A New Hope may have been unique in 1977, it's now something the kids would already recognise as a certain type of story from its countless imitators in American and Japanese media. Teaching in Japan, I've had a number of teachers and coordinators here try to sell the idea that Japanese students need more preparation and explanation for everything but I've also seen a few people offer rebuttals to this idea, asserting that one of the problems with English education here is that teachers tend to over explain. There's so much emphasis put on sentimentality and nostalgia in the culture that I suspect the compulsion to explain and prepare is partly a means by which adults can feel a certain ownership of the students' new experiences. Also, it masks some incompetence. The reality is, I believe, that Japanese kids can enjoy surprises just as much as kids in any other country.

Another thing I was thinking of watching Star Wars again was a video I saw a few months ago on YouTube called "How 'How Star Wars was Saved in the Edit' was Saved in the Edit", a delightfully blistering reply to another video essay called "How Star Wars was Saved in the Edit". The original video, posted six years ago, offers various weak arguments and phony perspective to argue that Star Wars was in reality the accomplishment of George Lucas' ex-wife and editor Marcia Lucas. There's been a lot of talk of Disney shills lately. I don't know if these people were actually paid by Disney or if they're just a weird group of corporate simps but they do speak with the lame, phony tones of a Disneyland tour guide. Anyway, the original video has over three million views while the rebuttal, from two years ago, has only 217k. I urge you to watch the rebuttal.

So when I was watching Star Wars again, I was specifically thinking of "How Star Wars was Saved in the Edit"'s argument that the whole idea of the Death Star attacking Yavin IV was something that Marcia Lucas came with and cobbled together with creative editing. The rebuttal video points to the footage of Tarkin referring to "our moment of triumph" which seems to throw cold water on the idea. But I would have to ask further questions, like, before the supposed edit, what was the point of a tracking device on the Millennium Falcon, which was clearly referred to in unedited dialogue? Anyway, please watch the video above.

X Sonnet #1798

Exchanging looks, the elves would sort the bows.
A present mind repeats the morning's past.
A rare and golden gift's a nose that glows.
And here, some fame would hold a monster fast.
Wasabi bears retained the key to home.
Remembered palms were swaying over graves.
Attackers drove the years ahead of Rome.
The face of love submerged beneath the waves.
A child's break became a woman's dream.
Across the sand, a golden servant steps.
Combining fruits unites the scurvy team.
The flattened skirt has lost its vaunted pep.
For trading stars, the gods were put to bed.
The darker space has faded up to red.

Kobe Dumplings

On Friday, I went on a field trip to Kobe with the second year students. Kobe is a city just west of Osaka and we were on the bus for about an hour and a half. It was a really nice day, apart from all the rain.

Four big buses carried all the students and teachers. Each bus had a centre aisle with pairs of seats on either side. I sat all the way in the back on the only middle seat. All the girls sat on the left and all the boys on the right so I was the border region between two boys and two girls, as it happened four of the most talkative students on the bus. I played a card game with the boys and talked to the girls about Kobe, coffee, and sweets. Then they all played a card game called Jin-roh which they deemed too complicated to explain to me. Players drew hands and then most of them covered their eyes while one pointed at certain players silently to the dealer. When the players uncovered their eyes, it was announced who among them had died. I'm still not sure how strategy was involved or if any was.

We arrived at a parking lot by the bay. I knew Kobe has a Maritime Museum and it happened to be nearby but I didn't see any old ships. It wasn't until we were leaving that I saw this pretty tourist rig coming into the harbour:

First we all went to a building with a large assembly room with few chairs. Students sat on the floor in rows as they do for assemblies in the gymnasium at school. A couple of guys showed a Power Point with video about the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995 that affected the region. Students were then given tasks designed to give them the impression of what it was like to survive in the aftermath. Groups of four or five students were given sets of cardboard boxes with which to make rudimentary little homesteads. Most of them managed to follow instructions and make their little houses. I laughed at one girl who first tried to make a rickety tower of boxes before abandoning her group and trying to sit with one who'd already finished making their house properly. She was scolded by a teacher but, had this been an actual emergency, I bet she'd do pretty well for herself.

After this, the students were given newspapers with which to make shoes. Finally, we all ate the lunches we packed or bought (I made sandwiches with pastrami and spinach on bread I'd baked on Wednesday) before setting off for Kobe's Chinatown.

All of the students were given 1000 yen (about ten bucks) and allowed to roam free for three hours, buying whatever snacks or souvenirs they liked. It was crowded and tricky to navigate all the umbrellas out for the rain.

I spotted a Spider-Man on one of the restaurant signs like the one I saw in Namba:

And then I saw another one:

A student later told me she saw a third. It seems to be a new tradition now in Japan for restaurants to invoke the blessings of Spider-Man.

I didn't want to spend very much money or eat anything that might disagree with me on the bus trip back. I watched enviously as students chowed down on candy apples and fried chicken. Many of the shops were selling some kind of panda dumpling that all the kids wanted. So I thought I'd get one and save it for when I got home. I got one packed with a pig dumpling:

As I expected, the pig was filled with ground pork. The panda turned out to have azuki bean paste. They were both pretty tasty and paired well enough with my Wild Turkey. Speaking of wild, I also saw this sculpture in Kobe on Friday:

A pretty fun town, Kobe.

X Sonnet #1788

The devil bear devours closet space.
A graceful rodent steals the hearts of soups.
Together, teams perceive a messy face.
Could Baby shuffle Hoyle cards in loops?
A spiky monster funds a dizzy band.
Without a trace of guilt, she called the ghast.
Required desert parts included sand.
But other stories told became the past.
Extorted tension trips condemning ice.
So happy waves were laughing late at lunch.
Eroding cliffs, the water chuckles twice.
Enough to give a god a hefty hunch.
If pig or panda face approached, we ate.
The fear of seven held by six was eight.

Our Luckiest Day

Happy Friday the 13th, everyone, and a Friday the 13th in October, no less! Though, of course, I got here quicker than most of you, for whom to-day is still likely Thursday. Friday the 13th is a western superstition but people do know about it here in Japan. A few teachers I've brought it up to immediately refer to its origin being Christian, having to do with the Last Supper and the crucifixion. When I say they that's only one possible explanation, and that the origin of the superstition isn't actually known, I usually get a quiet, indulgent nod, like I don't know what I'm talking about. To be fair, most of the foreigners who come to teach English here are really ignorant so I'm not surprised many of the teachers I work with are accustomed to knowing more about America and English grammar than the Americans they meet.

One teacher even remembered Jason's birthday from the Friday the 13th franchise and she seemed satisfied to have beaten me at movie trivia. I have only very dim memories of the Friday the 13th movies, which I saw when I was a child. I don't even remember which ones I've seen. I suppose this would be a good time to watch one or two of them again. I really don't want to, though.

Sport Pumpkin

Happy Sports Day, everyone. Yes, sports are so important in Japan there's in fact a holiday for them. Sports really are like a religion in Japan, as you can see from the tradition for Japanese baseball players to shave their heads (though that particular tradition is in decline). I suspect it's partly related to the fact that western style sports were only introduced to Japan at the end of the 19th century. Before that, there were only martial arts, which tend to have religious or at least ritualistic connotations. So it makes sense playing baseball would be like becoming a monk.

Last week, the schools had their sports festivals in which an entire day was given over for students to compete in relay races, tugs of war, and obstacle courses. It happened to be my last day at one particular school. The school's brass band, whom I often visited after school, gave me these flowers and they all sang for me the theme from Space Battleship Yamato.

I was overwhelmed, to say the least. It's truly an honour to work with such lovely students.

To-day, of course, I haven't been playing sports. I have been making pumpkin muffins:

Pumpkin muffin recipes I found online called for pumpkin puree but I decided to mince it instead.

I used a quarter of a green Japanese pumpkin for a batch of six muffins, chopping that quarter into four parts. Three parts I chop into tiny pieces to mix into the batter and the fourth part I chop into large chunks to sprinkle on the tops.

Normally in Japan, pumpkin is eaten, with the rind, boiled in soups or fried as tempura. So I thought, why not bake it? The muffins are pretty tasty, if I do say so myself. I used cinnamon and brown sugar.

Halloween in Japan is kind of seen as an adult holiday due to the wild Halloween parties held in Shibuya every year. But a lot of people, especially people selling sweets, are trying to make Halloween happen for kids. I'm trying to do my part. Here's a worksheet I made recently to teach relative pronouns:

By the way, my preferred relative pronouns are that, who, and whom.

X Sonnet #1747

The living truth was far behind the tube.
A trusting god would eat the breakfast cake.
So place the proper squares around the cube.
You're gonna buy another bridge to stake.
The lengthy lizard bugs devour guts.
Remember looking lost the Nazis skins.
Exploding heads compete with rifle butts.
An angry sky attests the end begins.
Descending guests concealed their eyes from view.
The mountainside was shaken past resolve.
The atmosphere was orange and liquid blue.
A thousand grains do morbid plans involve.
Approaching pumpkin moons survey the ground.
The nights absorb a shaky screaming sound.

A Namba Afternoon

I spent the afternoon wandering around Namba in Osaka a few weeks ago. I think it was in my first year living in Japan that a guy at Starbucks tried chatting me up by complimenting my attire. Although I wasn't interested in flirting with him, I was kind enough to return the compliment--he was nicely dressed--and he told me he got his outfit in Namba. This led me to vaguely assume Namba was some kind of fashion haven and recently I've been wanting some rust coloured chinos. After seeing Matthew Broderick wearing rust trousers and brown shirt on Only Murders in the Building, I wanted to make more rust and brown outfits. I see people around here wearing rust coloured trousers all the time and finally decided I wanted a pair but, oddly enough, I don't see any in the local shops. I think they must get sold out really fast.

So I went to Namba and didn't find any. It was an interesting afternoon, though. I've never seen so many foreigners, and all of them apparently wealthy, since I was in Tokyo. There was a middle aged French couple who seemed to be lost. There was a 20 something redheaded Australian girl loudly arguing with her parents who were on the other side of a busy sidewalk. It was strange to overhear so much English.

Who wants takoyaki (octopus in fried batter balls)? I do.

I saw a lot of artwork. Part of Namba Station for some reason has a bunch of reproductions of art from the Chicago Museum of Art.

I dug the Degas.

Along the river, there was some local art.

I also saw Spider-Man:

X Sonnet #1743

Familiar bugs protect the hill from death.
Behind the varied plants, the eaters live.
Behold the leagues of ash and take a breath.
For time has come to stay and space to give.
Reduced returns have paradise in hawk.
Assembled brothers barter music rights.
Successful kills could feed the hungry clock.
Although the ice would fain retreat from fights.
Emerging fast from dusk's the pallid face.
Beneath a starless eve, the workers sweat.
Revolving pools deny the angel's grace.
Below the busy froth, crustaceans bet.
Diluted honey rains above the woods.
The critters don emrboidered magic hoods.

Spiders of the Fall

The higanbana, aka spider lilies, are here so it feels like autumn has started. What's even better, the weather has cooled. A little.

So yesterday I decided to try my hand at making some persimmon muffins, persimmons being in season and a traditional autumn treat in Japan.

They came out pretty well. I used almond milk because my guts just can't seem to handle cow milk these days. It's inconvenient because, as I was surprised to discover, a kind of milk mania has arisen in Japan in recent decades. I suspect it has something to do with a dairy industry lobby. But now a population that's more inclined to lactose intolerance than many others is subject to and perpetuates messaging about how drinking milk is manly and essential to health. I often think of Ash from Alien.

There have also been a lot of butterflies lately. Here's a beautiful caterpillar I saw yesterday:

The right side is the head and the left side is the butt. The little wand on his butt waggled as he walked.

X Sonnet #1742

Intoning tunes, the parrots brought the song.
Astounding deals were reached in secret lots.
Acquired cars were gently used for wrong.
Perceptive right was lost amid the bots.
A flying goal was just its name in truth.
Machines mishandled mar the turtle chest.
Misfortune finally pulled the pulpy tooth.
Consumption chose the morsel eaten best.
A symptom table choked on ginger ales.
Remember blank, the name without a line.
Afforded bars allow the prison bails.
But then again, the ghost can pay a fine.
Arriving spiders summon red and thin.
Concealing blades of grass were green and slim.

The Shadows of Jokes

You may have heard the "Barbenheimer" phenomenon has finally reached Japan. People on Japanese Twitter--I'm sorry, "X"--have been angry. Looking at some tweets (we're still calling them tweets, right?) yesterday, I saw that indeed many Japanese people are expressing disgust. One guy argued that Japan could show just as much insensitivity to other countries with its humour. That's certainly true. There's an "American" shop near a train station here that almost exclusively sells racist depictions of black Americans.

Another Japanese user pointed out that some of the people who are the loudest advocates of political correctness in the U.S. have embraced the Barbenheimer meme. How did something like Barbenheimer happen under the nose of an increasingly politically correct American media? Well, I'd argue insensitivity is only one part of it, and a smaller part than many might imagine. The story goes back to a rivalry between the two films coming from Oppenheimer's director, Christopher Nolan, formally being a luminary at Warner Brothers, the studio that released Barbie. The fact that Warner Brothers was releasing a potential blockbuster opposite a serious dramatic, yet epic, film like Universal's Oppenheimer seemed potentially like a direct attack on Nolan by his former studio.

The real life drama spilled over to create public interest in both films, augmented by the absurdity in the contrast of the films' subject matters. Barbenheimer wasn't exactly created by insensitivity. Mashing together Barbie and Super Mario Brothers, for example, wouldn't have been as funny. Barbenheimer was a successful joke because people know atom bombs are no laughing matter.

But the U.S. has its own history of nuclear terror quite different from Japan's. In the U.S., the threat of nuclear attacks between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. was a central part of the Cold War. Nuclear bombs were (and still are) a terrible threat that could be realised at any moment. Humour sprang from this anxiety more than contemplation of the real effects of the bomb and you can see it in things like the Fallout video game franchise or in the title of Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. For decades, the U.S. and Japan were culturally remote from each other so few really imagined the actual impact of the real atomic bombs that were dropped on hundreds of thousands of real civilians. Now we're seeing how the internet is changing that, even for a country as culturally isolationist as Japan.

It's a myth that irony and sarcasm are foreign concepts in Japan. But there are a lot of humourless people who use the castigation of ironic humour as a wedge, politically or professionally. So jokes about death and suicide, in particular, do happen, but they're much edgier than in the U.S. (see an anime like Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei). But jokes about the atomic bomb are another matter entirely, a step much further beyond the pale. People might point to the use of nuclear weapons in Godzilla but it should be remembered the first Godzilla was a straight horror movie. Kurosawa Akira made a movie in 1955 called I Live in Fear (the original Japanese title translates to "Record of a Living Being") about an old man psychologically dominated by his fear of a nuclear attack. Kurosawa returned to directly addressing the topic in 1991 with the film Rhapsody in August (八月の狂詩曲) starring Richard Gere, a notably somber if conciliatory film.

On a subliminal level, a lot of Japanese art, particularly in anime, depicts massive explosions that wipe out cities. Sometimes even in a tongue in cheek manner, as in the famous DAICON IV animation. But it is rare you'll hear anyone speak lightly of the atomic bombs. Few people may be left alive with firsthand memories of the attacks but there are plenty of people whose parents and grandparents were alive at the time. There are plenty of people who lost close relatives in both attacks.

A couple months ago, a junior high school student actually asked me how I felt about the atomic bombs being dropped on Japan. I was very surprised and I praised the boy for his courage in even asking an American such a question. I thought about it and the first thing that came to my mind was William S. Burroughs satirising "The Star Spangled Banner" with the line, "Bombs bursting in air over Hiroshima gave proof through the night that our flag was already there." I told the student I thought the attacks were a terrible mistake.

I hope Oppenheimer is eventually released in Japan (it currently has no release date). I'm noticing a growing number of young people here who want to talk about World War II and the changes the country underwent afterwards. Miyazaki Hayao, I think, knew he was touching a vital nerve with his new movie. Let's hope people can contemplate these things bravely and honestly.

The Streets that Spawned Street Fighter

Behold, it is Ryu, now in bronze, reserved for an eternity of admiration. And he's here, in Kashihara, part of a collaboration between the city and Capcom, the company that produced the Street Fighter video game series. From the web site:

Capcom Co., Ltd. (Capcom) today announced that it entered into a Comprehensive Agreement to Promote the Vitalization of the Local Economy with Kashihara City (Nara Prefecture) on Tuesday, August 30, 2022, under which it will utilize its popular Street Fighter series with the aim of bolstering tourism and other local revitalization efforts.

Capcom supports regional revitalization efforts throughout Japan by leveraging the power of its brands to engage people in four areas: Economic Development, Cultural Awareness, Prevention Education and Election Participation. The company has carried out various activities since 2009, such as concluding the first comprehensive agreement between a video game company and a local government body, collaborating with police in a number of prefectures on prevention activities, and working to raise awareness of gubernatorial elections.

That's the official story. There may be more to it. Last year, I started seeing these posters everywhere at the various junior high schools where I work:

One of the teachers I worked with is married to a guy who works at Capcom so I asked her about it. She said that one of the creators of Street Fighter is from Kashihara. So I guess, in a sense, this really is Ryu's hometown. お邪魔します、リュウ先生！ It's cool and I am a Street Fighter fan but, of course, I always used Chun-li. In addition to the fact that she's better looking, she also has that really useful downward kick and the ability to bat-jump off the side of the screen. True, she was vulnerable to uppercuts but that downward kick was a lot easier to pull off than any of the uppercut moves so I generally didn't have to worry about them if I was fighting against a human opponent.

Club Drawings

Yesterday was my last day at one of the schools I work at, though I'll be going back to this particular school in January. I've been working at this school since 2020 so I've formed a real attachment to it. I said goodbye to the art club and the colour guard, the two clubs I hang out with. I watched the colour guard practice a new dance until 7pm. It's great seeing how committed they are and how rigorously they repeated the same dance moves in the increasingly humid weather.

In the art club, I drew pictures for some students. Here are a few doodles I've accumulated this year, some things I've drawn in the art club:

A dragon.

I was doodling the Fourth Doctor on the right and explaining how to draw a cat to a new student on the left. I told her to study cat skeletons.

I'm afraid I blathered on about John Milton and my take on his daughter, Deborah, for my webcomic.

I was trying to find a way to explain how "view" is used as a noun in English. The text book, written by an esteemed committee of Japanese professors, gets it wrong, as it does many things. Some of the mistakes in the books are hilarious. My favourite is a page from the second year text book in which the students are taught sentences for offering assistance to tourists. One sentence they're encouraged to use is "What's the matter with you?" I found a supercut on YouTube of Robert De Niro using the phrase to explain why it's a very rude, unwise thing for students to say to tourists. For the rare occasion when a Japanese English teacher accepts my authority on a subject over a text book. I'm routinely reminded why Japan has the worst English education in Asia. It's not so funny when you remember how students suffer for it.

Deborah Milton again.