There are two examples of kana usage in Japan that demonstrate this; braille and morse code.

It can’t be claimed that blind people are unable to comprehend what they read in braille. It is the same Japanese. It is sound represented through kana encoded as braille.¹ Nor has this been lost on Japanese educators.

The blind man can be better educated than his more fortunate brethern who are endowed with good sight; for the former by acquiring the forty-seven letters of the I-ro-ha syllabary, through the Braille system, can read history, geography or anything written in that system; whereas he who has eyesight cannot read the daily paper unless he has mastered at least 2000 characters.

Nitobe Inazo, quoted in Ideogram J Marshall Unger. ²

Entire fleet movements and diplomatic negotiations were driven through kana, enciphered then encoded to a variation of the morse code, wabun code. Not only was this sufficient for the Japanese to understand but also for the British and Americans who had cracked their ciphers. (Although Toland seems to argue that the Americans’ poor translations hindered the negotiations to avoid war. p180 Rising Sun)

Another example, this time of romaji use, is in multipart carbonless forms on postal deliveries. These have to be made with a typewriter and romaji is the most efficient way to do this. And yet no-one would suggest that the Japanese post office can’t read these addresses and deliver them, extremely quickly.

The Myth that bloggers are perpetuating is number five on DeFrancis’ list of six myths about Chinese characters. The Indispensability Myth. More than anything else, the continued use of kanji in Japan is cultural rather than pragmatic. Perhaps bloggers want to have extra reasons to spend a large amount of time on learning kanji. Kanji are indispensable to being literate in Japanese, given that that is what is used in Japan, but you cannot rightly claim that kanji are the only way to properly represent spoken Japanese (nor the most functional).

Unfortunately we have to deal with what is. While it would be pragmatic to use kana or romaji alone, “real” Japanese is written using kanji. Japanese would find kana alone easier in the long run as they have complete command of their spoken language, but for JSL learners oddly kanji when augmented with a computer can make things easier. It is easier to do a dictionary search. It is also possible to extract some meaning without fully understanding the kanji or the word. ³

I doubt very much there will be any language reform to eliminate kanji. They are too much a part of the culture at this point. Language reform would need a revolution to carry it, such as when kanzi were simplified under the communists in China, or abandoned in favour of a roman alphabet in Vietnam. Or be imposed by a totalitarian regime such as happened with hangul. At any rate, reform if it comes will come from the Japanese themselves rather than from any outside forces. Japan’s last opportunity was immediately after World War II, while they did simplify some things they didn’t bite the bullet and introduce more far reaching script reforms.

For JSL learners, the trend now seems to be hiragana, then a limited amount of kanji in Adult education at least where once whole courses would only use romaji. The emphasis is on spoken Japanese and communication. ⁴ Romaji is often used in the earlier stages. I suspect university degree courses have a greater emphasis on written Japanese and kanji (but have yet to satisfactorily address how to teach these). For self-taught, well it’s up to the individual. But I’m sad to see an emerging elitism around the use of kana and kanji (and specific methods) rather than an excitement in exploring Japanese to whatever level is desired.

Further reading.
J Marshall Unger is very interesting on the area of script reform, romaji and literacy. While I’m sure many would dispute with him, his credentials as a researcher and scholar of Japanese are impeccable. Unlike me, say, he’s not just a random blogger.

Here are excerpts from
The Fifth Generation Fallacy
This is an interesting book. The computing aspects are completely outdated now, but they do give an insight into problems that have only relatively recently been overcome. I’d like to see an essay from Ungar on what he thinks of the current situation in computing in regards to the Japanese language now. Whereas in 1987 he was writing about the complexity and cost of pen input and OCR, yet I now have good pen input on a Nintendo DS and OCR that costs under $200 (compared to $50,000 plus for roman only when he was writing). However what he has to say about Japanese literacy and the efficiency of roman touch-typed input compared to any other method still remains true today.

Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan
Research from the late 1940′s suggest that romaji is a much better way for Japanese children to learn. Research also suggests that Japan might not have been as literate a society as was imagined. Kanji were for the elite, who had the time to master them.

Ideogram

Notes

1. There are systems for representing kanji in braille but understandably they don’t seem to have much traction. Ungar points out in Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan that it was developed for social reasons as the blind were discriminated against for their inability to talk about and deal with kanji (p26, p126).

2. Nitobe probably wrote this in English, rather than this being a translation. However I can’t access the original source.

3.

Many non-Japanese believe that because they can guess the meaning of a word like uwayaku if they know the meanings of other words written with the same kanji, “knowing a kanji” in this ad hoc sense is sufficient for written communication. For them, the correct reading is a mere detail of little consequence. While it is easy to see why they should think this way, they are mistaken—as are Chinese college students who think they can coast through Japanese texts by looking only at the kanji.

J Marshall Unger Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan p20

4. It’s hard to find studies about teaching Japanese or literacy in JSL learners. Maybe this discourse only happens in Japanese, maybe it just doesn’t happen. My only resource is the Internet really, where sometimes I find tantalising references or abstracts but without access to a university library or login (and 4 years of not getting paid and circa £70k to spare to pursue a language degree) my amateur (dilettantish) efforts are stymied. I wish bloggers would either keep to opinion (“this is how it works for me”) rather than absolute statements not backed up by citations or research (“romaji is bad”) or even just stop making stuff up.

Related posts:

1. Easy Japanese Crosswords Puzzles: Using Kana
2. Is Romaji a bad idea?
3. Self Study Kana Workbook

(unfortunately since it seemed to insist on a Facebook account I couldn’t comment on the no-romaji site. But in the spirit of fixing the Internet I’m working on a post in rebuttal.)

Related posts:

1. Premium Courses from JapanesePod101 大学生の一日
2. EnglishPod101
3. Pitch Accent in Japanese

They’ve squandered a lot of goodwill and are now engaged in some damage limitation. (They have since deleted their blog, not that they read many comments judging by the spam they allowed to accrue.) Despite what Cerego say a substantial amount of content on the site was user generated, according to their own statistics yesterday over 1000 items were created and 120 lists (goals) compiled, and this during the swan song. Individuals have added thousands of words, sentences and translations, and hundreds of lists. Quality aside, just going by the index generated on custom lists I would guess there are circa 674,000 custom goals compared to under 100 of Cerego’s official goals.
I’m tempted to delete the lists I made but it’d be a bit churlish perhaps. I more or less knew I was providing free labour for Cerego, but saw it as part of the give and take of a sharing community. I certainly won’t be making any transition to the paid site.

Smart was good for a while. Eventually though, I became fed up with how laborious it was to create lists and how difficult it was to extract your content from the site. When I got an iPod touch I no longer wanted to study online and moved to using a flashcard application. I think that’s where the majority of iKnow / Smart’s users will go. I reckon under $30 would buy a desktop app of equal power or about $6 on an iPod.
I understand their need to charge fees. It can’t be cheap to run a site like that and as yet there wasn’t much evidence of a revenue stream from the site itself although they have raised $23million plus in funding to date. I wonder if the investors will be seeking a return. That’s about 160,000 user years of subscriptions. Unfortunately for Cerego the dominant pricing on the Internet is free. The pricing of apps on the Apple App Store is under $5 (as a one off payment) They are facing an uphill battle. I would have thought a freemium model would have worked better. Although maybe they hope the core market in japan is less likely to complain and more likely to pay. I’m not so sure. The Japanese I’ve met expect top quality service and products.

If you want an alternative to smart.fm online try wordchamp.com. It may not be as graphically stylish but it has some more features. It’s free but also has a premium rate at a very reasonable $10 a year. Or there’s quizlet. On the iPod I recommend flashcards deluxe ($4) Or for a dedicated (but less customisable) program with multiple tests and games and high quality material to study including audio by native speakers and example sentences I highly recommend Japanese Sensei ($16)
Actually I recommend an iPod over any online system or desktop system mainly because it’s so portable; you can find many spare moments to go through your flashcards.
Anki seems very popular. It’s free for pc and mac but relatively expensive on the iPod (mainly the developers idea is for the iPhone app to subsidise the work on the free desktop app). I don’t really like it. It requires a lot of initial effort to learn the program and it always seemed windows clunky in it’s interface and documentation.

(This is a cross-post from my microblog, I wonder what that does to my google juice)

Related posts:

1. iFlash
2. WordChamp – Internet Flashcards
3. Japanese on an iPod Touch

I never learn, so “once more unto the breach..”

I am interested in how people learn and the problems of kanji and language in particular.
The topic rises again and again on forums so I’ve been thinking a bit more about it. Instead of a long post into threads that have strayed and grown too long I thought I’d make it into a post here.
It has stayed in draft form for a long time but between a comment about Heisig on this blog recently and trying to catch up with half finished posts, I’ve revisited it. Hopefully this will put Heisig to rest for me, it becomes a little frustrating to have my kanji studies defined in reaction to a method developed 33 years ago by someone who self-admittedly knew nothing about Kanji or Japanese when he first developed it.

First I think there may be a mismatch with what people are calling having learnt a kanji. For people who have used RTK1 “learnt” seems to be writing a kanji linked to a keyword. Quite an achievement and useful in and of itself. Another group perhaps equate “learnt a kanji” with being able to use it. ie linking it to actual words in Japanese, reading and writing. And yes RTK users will progress onto this at which time they will fully “own” those kanji.

Here may be the difference in style. RTK users are learning a larger chunk at once concentrating on two tasks, writing the kanji and an English meaning. They are deferring putting the kanji to Japanese, with the hope, or certainty, that this will be easier further down the road. Traditionalists, for want of a better term, want to have usage of a kanji all at once for the Japanese they know at a given time. They may have to deal with more at once but they deal with it in smaller chunks at a time, and have more immediate full use of a given kanji. They may concentrate more of kanji they immediately need. I also get the feeling that self-directed learners tend to use the Heisig method and those that attend classes tend towards more traditional methods. I feel it’s a bit swings and roundabouts though.

As far as I am aware, other than anecdotes and opinion there is no evidence or studies one way or another about effectiveness or time taken to be literate using any method for non-natives. (Literacy being able to read and write Japanese to a particular standard; the end of formal schooling before high school, being a reasonable benchmark perhaps.) Also while we seem to be discussing two styles of learning I’m sure there are many more styles of learning a language and many approaches. The problem is finding the approach that will work for you.

This is what I’ve found with Heisigs order. Which I followed for a while. I constantly came across kanji that as yet I have no use for and this inhibits my memorising of them. I have far more success with those I can link to Japanese I already know or see some more immediate use to. Now of course there’s no reason I have to stick to the order, but then I’d lose the advantage of taking something off the shelf rather than having to work it out for myself. Catch22 it seems. But if you take away the strict order and learn components as and when you need them it would be easier to use for kanji you need to learn, for the grade school and JLPT orders, or based on frequency of use. There are diminishing returns in learning kanji. The most frequent 1000 are used 90% of the time.

Another thing I’m noticing is the keywords. I’ve noticed a couple of things here. Ambiguity; I don’t make the same connections as Heisig. For example, Spring can have 4 meanings for me; season, water appearing from the ground, metal coil, the action of jumping. I’ve got to go the usage of the kanji to clarify it. Then I feel fountain gives a better prompt for 泉［いずみ］The other thing I’ve noticed is less common links being made. For instance 頂, “wear on head” an idea which I’d more commonly associate with 冠, made more useful links when I saw it was いただく or ちょうだい. humbly receiving. I suppose in one respect it makes these kanji stand out but it also erodes what confidence and trust I have in the author and I’m back to not being able to use something off the shelf. Nor am I alone in noticing this and I wish Kanjidic would cull the Heisig keywords or at least note them as such rather than having them as the first meaning.

Whatever way you look at it these keywords are giving meaning to a particular kanji. I’d also go further and say the stories are giving meanings to the kanji. Often meanings that don’t exist. It may not be the intention but I feel it is a by-product. This suspicion is one reason I dislike the stories. I’m more interested in the actual derivation of a kanji. That helps me more than making something up. In any case I’m not very good at making up stories like this.

Writing out kanji as the alternative to Heisig is a common misconception. Yes at first it does look like that is the alternative. Especially if you use Japanese classroom like materials with all those practice boxes.
Traditional isn’t write repeatedly and cram readings in (IMHO). Yes on Japanese school books or handouts there is usually space for 12 characters but it’s very important that a child learns neat handwriting. And yes the action of writing helps you learn it. But… The learning of meanings and readings seems more to do with hanging the kanji on example vocabulary the student already knows, combined with a definition and possible etymology of the character. Because of traditional dictionary usage, stroke count and radical are taught although I would guess this might tend to be ability to count and identify rather than rote learning. It’s more based on understanding than on rote. The characters are also broken down into specific elements much the same way as spelling in English. So in explaining 明，it might be described as 日 and 月

That breaking down is one part of the key, yes just as ol’ H does it. I just prefer to use the actual names and not use a story. にちへん、つきへん。If I can I prefer to hang it on a Japanese word. 明るい in this case. The other part is putting it to words rather than trying to remember a complete picture.

A more interesting Japanese approach is in the books by 下村昇, a Japanese teacher whose writings predate Heisig’s. His method uses pictures to explain the etymology of the forms (although he does ignore the difference of phonetic components and semantic components) This at least gives you an understanding of the character. Then having broken down kanji into about 36 basic components and 24 common radicals he can write out in a sentence of about 4 steps how to write any given character.

From an article about EFL I read recently.

Alas, the perfect method is an illusion. A chasing of the wind.

And the problem may be that on the Internet there are very many students and very few teachers. The Internet while of fantastic value is full of amateurs (like me and many blogs and forums) groping for direction in the dark. Often the value of a good teacher isn’t recognised. I think some good kanji teachers are needed.
下村昇 is one, so is隂山英男 (of Kakitorikun fame), and 加納千恵子 the author of the Kanji Book series and a researcher into teaching Japanese to foreigners is another.

Related posts:

1. Adventures in Heisig • day 2
2. Heisig revisited
3. Adventures in Heisig • day 3

Yesterday I had my closest encounter with the bombing of Hiroshima.
Closer than having been in Hiroshima and seen the remains and memorials.
Closer than seeing documentaries, and reading contemporary accounts.
Closer than touching a stunted tree that survived the blast.

A friend of mine on mixi wrote about how her grandfather died in Hiroshima that day.

Her grandfather was going to work near the epicentre of the explosion. Hopefully he died instantly. Three weeks later her relatives managed to enter Hiroshima looking for his remains. All they could find was his teeth. (How they could tell I don’t know). But that is all that was able to be put in his tomb where today she lit some incense for him.

The remains are important in Japan, more so that the West. From my experience of my farther-in-law’s funeral the remains become part of daily life for the family enshrined in a Butsudan and part may also be buried in a tomb or a temple as well. I don’t know what happens if there are no remains or no family to observe the rites.

For me my friends grandfather illustrates the big tragedy of Hiroshima and countless other places. It is about the people just trying to live their lives that have no power over what their governments do. The people that are steamrollered by the indiscriminate military machine. For most there is no grand sweep of history, just death or survival in turbulent times.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki should be remembered and studied.
I don’t believe the reason that it had to be done to save lives. Kill 100,000 to somehow save a different 500,000. Japan was already defeated by the fire bomb raids and the blockades. Nor can Japan’s wartime atrocities justify it. (ie. two wrongs don’t make a right) The bomb was revenge. It was also a field test of a very expensive weapons system on unbombed cities to find out what would happen. And it was a warning to the Russians in Europe.
By today’s standards it would be a war crime. By the standards of the day, long abandoned by 1945, that civilians shouldn’t be targeted, it would have been too except there was no-one to indict.
It was done by the “good-guys”

There is an interesting news report on JapanProbe about a 90 year old survivor Toshie Une
Doug has an entry on his blog Japan: Life and Religion today.
And I’ve written about Hiroshima before with links to other articles and films.

Pray for peace if that is part of what you do.
Hope for a world free from nuclear weapons; not just held by the “good” regimes.
Practice empathy.

For the people in Hiroshima 6 August 1945
ご冥福をおいのりします。。。

–update 07Aug09–
An interesting blog that has quotes and links to papers expanding the motives for bombing Hiroshima and an interesting comments section.

Related posts:

1. Hiroshima – melted people
2. Upcoming films at ICA London
3. Social Histories of Japan 1 – Confessions of a Yakuza

• It has two tones high and low.
• The pitch change doesn’t occur within a syllable but at the change of syllables.
• When the first syllable is high the second is low, when the first is low the second is high.
• Within a word (phrase?) once the pitch lowers it won’t rise again.
• Particles become part of a word when considering pitch accent

So with two syllables the possible accents are FF (flat), LH, HL.
Flat is usually marked as being low tone but I think this can change when a high tone precedes it; you just continue in that tone, you don’t necessarily drop the tone.
With four syllables the permutations are FFFF, LHLL, LHHL, LHHH, HLLL.

This is fine until you start putting words together.
A preceding phrase’s pitch can affect a following phrase. So a high tone may be sustained in rapid gapless speech until the next drop in tone, or a rise in tone may be ignored if the preceding phrase ends in a low tone. ²
illustrated in these two phrases

oHAYOU goZAIMAsu — two words
oHAYOU GOZAIMAsu — one phrase

aRIgatou goZAIMAsu — two words
aRIgatou gozaimasu — one phrase

but even then this isn’t a hard and fast rule, consider this example.³

haNA is the accent for both nose and flower
but
haNA ga akai — the flower is red
haNA GA AKAI — his nose is red

In fact the rules (if there are any) start to get complicated when you go away from single words and start using sentences. Then there are regional changes, even within the standard accent ⁴, and words whose pitch accent is variable. Kindachi goes so far as to say ” …it would seem that there are no fixed accent patterns at all. ”

Usually pitch accent is presented as the method to distinguish synonyms. Unfortunately given the small amount of variation in pitch and the large number of synonyms this isn’t as useful as you might think.
kougyou 工業 industry and kougyou 鉱業 mining for instance. or
nou for 能 talent　脳 brain　農 farming
Fortunately context will give meaning in 99.9% of cases.

Another problem is where to find out the tones of a given word. As far as I’m aware only specialist dictionaries such as NHK日本語発音アクセント辞典in Japanese give them. Proper standard Japanese is very important in broadcasting, although like the BBC who once only used received pronunciation maybe regional variations might become more acceptable in Japan. For L2 learners the only markers I’ve seen are difficult to read. I’ve seen accent marked by using capitals, or putting an accent over the last high tone, when using romaji. In kana I’ve seen lines under and over kana, or by using superscript for high tones. I’ve even seen musical notation used to denote tones. But overall it’s very hard to read passages marked up in these ways.
The most comprehensive textbook I’ve seen for pitch accent is Gene Nishi’s Japanese Step by Step. Which could work as basic dictionary of sorts.

There is stress in terms of emotion or emphasis, but it’s important not to use English stress patterns, or to use English stress (louder and longer) in place of pitch stress ( a pitch change, a diatonic step). Although anyone who has heard a Japanese woman say sugoi has heard how elongation emphasis occurs (on the syllable before i as it happens)

I think therefore that the important thing is to know of pitch accent’s existence. Rather than mark up books in very cumbersome ways it is best to learn proper pronunciation by mimicry. Learn by shadowing or by having a native correct you. I think a uniformly flat accent is the most acceptable foreign accent. The most important things are to avoid stress accents in an English fashion and to pronounce Japanese loan words in Japanese rather than English. Bear in mind what English sounds like when the stress accent is placed in the wrong place. One of my Japanese teachers finds the way Japanese place-names are mangled into American English on the Tokyo underground English announcements very distracting for instance.

afterthoughts and updates
#1 I think it is the advent of cheap CDs that stopped textbook makers attempting to markup accents. What could be better than a recording of the Japanese words and passages?

#2 Thinking back to Doug’s piece, children as part of their language acquisition skills are very good at discerning differences and mimicking them. As you get older you lose this ability, so it’s no surprise that Doug’s daughter has no problem and the relatively ancient L2 learners do.

#3 To complicate matters I’ve noticed that verbs can change their pitch accent depending on their declension. For instance 見る　miru but mimasu

#4 Thanks to arunlikhati for the link to the paper on marking accents.

#5 there are recordings of pitch accents in otherwise identical words here. Are your ears tuned enough to tell the difference in a single word out of context? (possibly offline due to earthquake in Northern Japan Sunday March 13 2011)

#6 There is a CD ROM companion to the NHK dictionary that looks quite interesting. You compare recordings of your voice to a standard recording to see where you’re going wrong.

#7 From a high school Japanese teacher Katie Suttles on Edufire a link to a teaching supplement for the Genki textbooks. You can see just how cumbersome marking Japanese text for tones is. Without audio I doubt it would be any use at all.

#8 I finally got a chance to ask a Japanese teacher (and teacher-trainer) about what the thinking is in teaching pitch accent.
The “official” line is to introduce new words with correct pronunciation and hand gestures and mark the pitch accent in handouts.
However it is found that in the classroom when accent signs are used in handouts students’ accents sound slightly strange as they are more cautious when pronouncing, loosing fluency.

In adult education where you probably only have 2 hours contact per week, communication and fostering fluency take precedence over the fine tuning of accents. Don’t sweat the small stuff. I think it would also be very demoralising to have a teacher try to fine tune your pitch when you might not be able to hear the difference; it’s hard enough to remember the words and get them out grammatically at a reasonable speed.

The advice for self-instruction is to understand about pitch but to learn accent by emulation of model Japanese sentences. ie shadowing.

Indeed I was thinking to myself how do you know you’ve got the correct accent even if you have annotations in front of you. You need a feedback loop of some sort to fine tune what you are producing. You can’t really hear yourself talk, so you either have to record yourself and compare your accent (WordChamp has an interesting on-line application that allows you to do this and overlay your recording and waveform with a native speaker’s) or have a native speaker who will listen to you and try to correct you.

#9 (Oct ’09) Through a post on JapanesePod101 I found that goo’s online dictionaries have accent information in their entries.

——
1. Haruhiko Kindachi, The Japanese Language translated by Umeyo Hirano (Tuttle 1978) pp117 to 123
2. Gene Nishi, Japanese Step by Step (McGraw Hill 2001) p20
3. Clarke and Hamamura, Colloquail Japanese (Routledge 1981) p9
4. Yoko Hasegawa, Against Marking Accent Locations in Japanese Textbooks (University of California) section 5

Related posts:

1. The Japanese Language
2. Basic Japanese Through Comics (parts 1 and 2)
3. iSpeak Japanese

Having embarked on another kanji learning phase I looked again at Heisig to see if it could help me. Unfortunately not, I’m a traditionalist at heart. A traditionalist who doesn’t have the type of imagination and patience needed to invent mnemonic stories.

However there are some things I’ve learnt about Heisig that I feel are worth pointing out for anyone embarking on that method.
You have to do it on Heisig’s terms. That means you follow his order, use his keywords and do not attempt to integrate Japanese. He has the reasonable insistence that you should do one thing at a time. In RTK1 this is putting English to the symbols in such a way that it becomes easy to remember how to write them. You come back later to integrate that into Japanese readings. Also it’s all or nothing. For it to be truly useful you have to complete the course. At the end you are in a similar position of a Chinese person, able to recognise, write and put a meaning to kanji but not knowing the language. Heisig himself admitted that while he could write kanji from memory after developing his system he could neither write nor read ねこ　for the character　猫; he could only relate it to the English “cat”.

All my reservations about the Heisig method still stand, but if you have the ability and 6 months it could be worth the attempt.

Related posts:

1. Heisig — Snake oil or Solution?
2. Adventures in Heisig • week 2
3. Adventures in Heisig • day 3

I’ve been wondering lately if I should allow comments here. This is actually the second time I’ve posted this piece. I pulled it the last time.

At first I used WordPress more as a content management tool. しあわせ started as a static website. I can’t remember why I decided to shift to WordPress actually.

This is just hobby stuff really. I spend rather than make any money on it. I’m not even sure why I’m shouting into the void of the web about these various topics. Something to do I guess. The 21st century equivalent of writing manifestos on a wall.

But I saw a video of a presentation by Liz Strauss at WordCamp Dallas and I think her call of “C’mon Let’s Talk!” inspired me a bit.

I’ve sporadically commented on other blogs. Mostly I prefer bulletin boards for discussions such as JapanesePod101 or BigHeadedMan Club. I always try to comment on friends posts on mixi and always reply there.
Maybe it’s because I’ve been commenting on HaikuGirl’s blog and I read a post on commenting at WeblogTools that I’m pondering opening comments.

My concerns might be
1. Is commenting suitable for the post. I don’t think a lot of what I write needs commenting on. How do you comment on a post about what films are upcoming for instance.
But sometimes in comments there can be extra useful information and discussion.

2. Spam Hopefully Askimet will catch it, but it’s boring to deal with spam. When I look at places like MySpace and YouTube the comments are … spammy. I might need to keep comments for people who can be bothered to register. I need to think of an incentive to register for that matter.

3. Quality of comment. At the risk of offending, I’d want some quality beyond hi there. (and pingbacks what the hell are they about?) I’d be tempted to have draconian comment vetting. Which might mean people don’t comment. But while I’m all for free speech, this is my kingdom, you can start your own blog should you feel the need to rant.

4. No one comes to play This is a very minor blog. I consider 100 visitors in a day really good, but don’t drop below 30 most days. When I got linked the other day from 2ch I got a big spike, I was once stumbled on and got an enormous spike (for me).
But if comments are open and then there are none, it’ll feel like tumbleweeds blowing through! My teacher Chika-san had this feeling maybe on her class site. There must be around 100 students but few comments or participation.

So this post is open to comments.
And when I have the time I’ll open up my other posts.

The policy is Play nice, Help each other, Don’t make a mess. Just like kindergarten really.

話しましょう〜♪

Related posts:

1. Mixi restores Shogunate isolationism
2. Mixi

Hiroshima by: John Hershey pub: Penguin

In January I visited Hiroshima. I’m not sure I wanted to. I was going there on a recommendation of a friend to see bugaku at Miyajima shrine near Hiroshima. I was afraid Hiroshima would be too depressing; maybe upsetting; maybe just too macabre to be a tourist at the worlds first nuclear destruction.

In the event, what I found was a vibrant modern city not overly dominated by it’s past. Yes there are memorials, and a museum, but oddly I didn’t find it depressing as I expected. It’s strange knowing what happened, seeing what survived. There’s the famous A-Bomb dome. The bank, and in the grounds of Hiroshima castle, trees.

And people survived.

Hiroshima is a contemporary account written by an American journalist of six of these peoples stories. I’m not sure what Japanese contemporary accounts exist. I do know the SCAP censored all mention of the bomb by the Japanese. Even in a memorial to schoolchildren killed by the bomb, the coded reference E=MC2 had to be used instead. Also Hershey’s article was the first to put a human face to what happened. Previously articles about the bomb concentrated on its abstract destructive power and America’s triumph.

Originally written as a groundbreaking single article for the New Yorker in 1946, it was updated in 1986 to see what had become of the people in the book. A German Jesuit priest. A Japanese Reverend. A Japanese office lady. Two Japanese doctors. A Japanese Housewife.

The things that struck me about the accounts in the book were

• the sense of resignation. しかたがない。
• the apparent silence of those dying in the ruins of Hiroshima.
• the sense of adventure felt by the children.
• the crassness of “re-uniting” a victim with the co-pilot of the Enola Gay on This Is Your Life.
• the abandonment of the survivors to their fates
• the endurance of the human spirit

It’s a thin volume and well worth a read.

I know when I was at school history studies were very Euro-centric. The Pacific theatre in World War 2 was summed up as Pearl Harbour ’41, British POWs and Hiroshima ’45. Nothing about Manchuria, China, Midway, Firebombings, Okinawa, Occupation.
In the eighties, the accounts of nuclear war tended to be fictional what-ifs. What if a bomb dropped on America, the UK? But strangely the true bombing and it’s effects were ignored. I can’t remember much about it in mainstream media until the 60th anniversary.

Indeed at the start of the HBO documentary White Light Black Rain, Japanese teenagers are vox-popped in Shinjuku about what happened on August 6, 1945. And although I suspect a film-maker’s manipulation at work, none of them knew, nor even guessed, it might have had anything to do with the war.

In that film I saw the melted people of my title. A man whose flesh was quite literally melted onto his bones. You could see holes on his chest between his ribs. Apparently his heart is visible through these. A woman whose fingers cannot be straightened, whose face is a reconstruction. Yet whose spirit is miraculously intact. People whose friends and families disappeared in an instant. A woman who survived with her sister, only to see that sister commit suicide by jumping in front of a train because she couldn’t go on. Ordinary people used as guinea pigs in studying the effects of nuclear weapons.

And I also saw the dehumanising effects on the people who make and drop bombs. An inability to empathise with the potential victims. Or maybe an unwillingness, if you did empathise could you do it.? In the end maybe everyone takes refuge in the mantra “only obeying orders”.

It’s important to known about these things. Then there might be some possibility of them not being repeated, again, and again, in smaller or larger conflicts.

Further Reading
Atomic Bomb Museum dot org
Hiroshima Peace Museum
Japan Focus
Hibakusha
Dissent

Related posts:

1. Hiroshima Day
2. Upcoming films at ICA London
3. Social Histories of Japan 1 – Confessions of a Yakuza

Autobiography of a Geisha by Sayo Masuda pub: Vintage

Second in my short series about social histories of Japan.

Usually when you think of geisha you have an image of elegance in Kyoto. And geisha are adamant about how their function is not about sex. This woman’s life was very different. She was an onsen geisha and it was almost all about sex, albeit that her art put her a step above the common prostitutes. Her life was also one of slavery in all but name.

Unable to go to school, unable to read, I had grown up as an abandoned dog does; and then at the age of twelve, I was sold.

The second half of the memoir recounts her life after the war and black marketering and how she had to go into prostitution to pay for her half brothers treatment for TB. A sad life.
If you’ve read Arthur Golden’s novel or Geisha of Gion the autobiography of a high class Kyoto Geiko, or Lisa Dalby’s anthropological adventure, you should read this to get a fuller picture of what was probably the majority of geisha’s lives before the war. Of course the geisha in Kyoto and Tokyo would look down their noses at the common geisha and not consider them true geisha at all. However that is what Sayo Masuda was; a Geisha.

As with so many things in Japan, to the outsider there are many layers and subtleties to negotiate. Only those within the society really know and they feel no great need to satisfy outsiders curiosity.
It will make you think again if you catch a rare glimpse of a Geiko or Maiko in Kyoto.

It is remarkable that she wrote the whole book in hiragana. She was able to write but had no education so was illiterate in that she couldn’t write kanji. I’d like to try to read the original someday.

She is still alive I believe and has the much better life everyone deserves.

Also available at Amazon. You can read an extract on Random Houses web site.

–update 28May09–
Doug at Japan: Life and Religion has a nice (and probably more readable!) review.

Related posts:

1. Social Histories of Japan 1 – Confessions of a Yakuza
2. Photographs of Old Japan
3. Premiere Japan ’07