しあわせ

A new print of this film is playing until the 12th of July at the BFI Southbank.

It’s part of a month long season of films by the Director, Mikio Naruse. He is as major a film-maker as Kurosawa or Ozu, but is probably completely unknown outside Japan.

I must say I’d never heard of him or seen any of his films.
Three of his films are available in the Eureka Masters of Cinema collection. (This collection has titles by a number of Japanese directors)
Flowing, Sound of the Mountain, Repast
and
When a Woman Ascends the Stairs is available in the Criterion Collection from the US.

IMdB entry for 成瀬巳喜男.

— July 16 update —
After seeing When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, I can see why he isn’t well known. If this is an example of his better work it is fairly disappointing. The portrayal of women characters was interesting but overall it was a very static and tedious film with very little to offer visually. I didn’t even really get a sense of the time and place of the film. But I’m going to give some other films a chance to see if it wasn’t just a bad choice to headline the Naruse season at the NFT.

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Maria Fernandez-Toro & Francis R Jones (CiLT)

This is an interesting textbook offering advice on how to study a language on your own. It’s not specifically about Learning Japanese, but gives methods for studying any language.

It has 2 main sections.

Section 1 looks at style of learning, your aptitude for self instruction, your experience in solo learning, and motivation. There are short questionnaires to help you diagnose problems you might have in some areas.

Section 2 gives 82 learning techniques divided amongst the four key skills; reading, writing, listening, and speaking; and the two building blocks; grammar and vocabulary.

It can help you find new inspiration if your study habits have become a bit stale. Especially useful for people going back to study after a long time or those studying on their own.

The only place I’ve seen that you can buy this book is direct from CILT’s suppliers.

Tomoko-san, another friend of mine from the “Chickens”, is one of the directors and performers in this play at the Pleasance Theatre Islington
June 21, 22, 23 at 19:45, Sunday 24 June at 18:00
Tickets £10 (£7 concessions)

Hiroshima, 1947. Canadian journalist Henri
Corbeil is sent on a six-week assignment.
He does not return home for almost a year.

Montreal, 1971. 24-year-old Hélène Corbeil
retraces her father’s journey through Japan.
Armed only with his journals and interviews,
she hopes to find the mother she never knew.

This bout of visual theatre explores hand in
hand melodrama and satire, tragedy and
parody, as the international cast concieve a
poignant, sensitive, albeit sometimes silly epic,
in their native English, Japanese and French.

I saw the dress rehearsal last night and it’s quite a performance.
The company has put a lot of work into it and it deserves an audience.
I was pleased to be able to understand the Japanese except for one long speech, but that is given a translation by another cast member anyhow.
As a bonus the venue is really good– There’s a great courtyard and pub/restuarant below the theatre.

–update 14Sept–
The company has a promotional video on YouTube showing their work on this show.

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This can be useful for making practice sheets of kanji.
It is a font made by Tim Eyre showing as the title says the stroke orders in kanji. This link is to his home page from where you can download the font.

My friend Kazuko-san has some performances in June.

Hello,

I am doing a few things in the next two weekends including some FREE things;

June 23rd Saturday, 11am, 1pm, 4pm
Oh Doh
at Chelsea Theatre
FREE!
As part of InTransit – season of artists led walks in “Royal” Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. This show is about ‘end’ led by Kazuko Hohki and Thomas Moor. (the audience are limited to 8).

June 24th Sunday around 2:45pm
Frank Chickens

Leicester Square (outside stage)
FREE!
As part of West End Live ( China Town Arts Space event)
Post punk, post modern, post intercultural cabaret.

June 29th Friday and 30th Saturday 7:30pm
KH’s Wuthering Heights
£15 (£10 concessions) at Artsadmin
As part of Artsadmin Summer season.
Kazuko, Colin Carmichael and Clive Bell (music) under supervision of Tim Hope examine Wuthering Heights via Japanese tourist and some sheep.

Hope you can come.

Best
Kazuko

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After 3 years I finally know enough to start being able to read books. The problem has always been finding graded readers in Japanese.

I started with a set of graded readers called 「レベル別日本語多読ラブリー」

These are very slim books that come in sets of five with a CD. Levels 1 and 2 I had no difficulty with. Level 3 is probably around my reading level and is a bit of a challenge. All the kanji have furigana so their readings aren’t a problem.
The idea is to read books in the same way you read books in English. without a dictionary and guessing the meaning of unknown words by their context. The system is based on The Extensive Reading Method. And this is where I got my idea to try to read 1,000,000 characters this year. (slightly easier than the 1 million English words target, as I’ll count each character, kanji or kana, rather than each word. Actually I’ll estimate the numbers of characters in any given book)

There are four rules

多読４つルールがあります。

1. Start reading from the lowest possible level.
2. Don’t use a dictionary.
3. Skip over unknown words and phrases.
4. If a book becomes too difficult or boring, start another.

So with the confidence given to me by being able to read this readers, I’ve bought some childrens books at Adami Shobo in Soho and hope to document my progress here.