Protocol 7

The rainy season has come and gone, replaced by a blazingly hot, humid, and repressive summer. The days are now averaging around 35º C, hot enough to render yours truly into a lifeless piece of flesh lounging about in her underwear in front of two electric fans. Cold showers provide temporary relief from the oppressive heat, as does a trip to the local combini, where we can bask in the coolness of regulated temperatures while browsing for chocolates and canned oxygen. For extended relief we head to the river, where cooling waters have an undisputed and rejuvenating effect on tired summer bodies. As it’s too hot to continue typing, the narrative will henceforth be strictly visual.

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Japanese-English, or Engrish, adorns every other physical object in Japan, from clothing to billboards to candy. It’s near impossible to avoid the omnipresent poetic flourishes painted on the side of pachinko parlours and gas stations, and has even inspired several websites dedicated to documenting the phenomenon, including an online store that sells various items emblazoned with reproduced Engrish phrases.

Westan toilets and soft dinks are not limited to the realm of printed text, but also find their home in spoken communications. A ‘biking lunch’ isn’t a midday meal on a bicycle, but an all-you-can-eat buffet (spelled Viking and derived from smorgasbord, go figure). Shorts are called ’short pants’, lest you get confused with something else that is short, and ‘expat’ is apparently something you shoot at (this one I still haven’t figured out). Whether the Engrish is spoken or printed, native speakers are enchanted with the new linguistic configurations that confront them day in and day out (or at least I am).

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Golden Week has come and gone (and gone), underscored by the incessant rain dismally signaling a return to work after seven blissful days of vacation. This is the exact same thing I said last year, except with perhaps a little less rain. Golden Week is a springtime blessing, a weeklong national holiday (more accurately, several individual holidays in series) that’s even better in Hamamatsu owing to the three-day revelry known as the Hamamatsu Matsuri (festival). Last year we had a lot of fun as spectators, but this year passively watching wasn’t enough; we participated.

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Studying Japanese, or any other language for that matter, is a challenging and frustrating experience, but quite rewarding if you put the time in. My favorite part of studying a foreign language is the moments of insight, usually quite small and nuanced, that introduce a new perspective or deepen cultural understanding.

Prior to the Japan chronicles, my experience with languages extended to only a couple of the romance languages, Spanish and Latin. Latin was enjoyable because our teacher was crazy (that fun kind of I-love-Latin-more-than-anything-else crazy that only Latin teachers possess) and the etymological aspect was interesting. Etymology is your standard, run-of-the-mill language insight that you expect to receive when taking a language class. I can’t recall any moments of surprise and reflection during my tenure as a Latin student, though I do remember asking, in Latin I, if the phrase ‘Aes Sedia’ had any meaning (if you are familiar with The Wheel of Time books then you know what I’m talking about). However, I’m not interested in what’s expected, but rather what is unexpected, the insights that make you go hmmmmmmmmm.

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It seems fitting that I’m writing a retrospective of our first year in Japan while sitting in a karaoke box listening to kzi croon “Eyes Without a Face”. After all, Japan popped my karaoke cherry late one summer night after skinny-dipping in the moonlit ocean. Subsequently, karaoke has seen us through the ups and downs of adjusting to life in Japan, a reliable standby no matter what the occasion (or lack thereof). It’s a daunting task to sort through (and make sense of) the first year in a new country, so I’ve tentatively divided the year into three parts: Holy Shit We Are in Japan, The OMG OMG OMG Months, and A Continuing Conclusion.

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One evening a couple months ago the doorbell rang, and being the ever intrepid gaijin I went to see what Japan had delivered to our doorstep. Usually the doorbell heralds one of three things; someone from the apartment downstairs in need of computer help, our landlord collecting the monthly neighborhood tax, or the delivery of a package (my favorite). But this time is was something new! A representative from NHK (the Japan Broadcasting Corporation)!

Obeying the masochistic urge welling up inside of me, I opened the door to see what form our communication would take and if I could decipher heads or tails of why he was at our door. After waving around several pamphlets and asking if we had a television he said, “You have to pay, don’t you know?” Blinking several times I told him I’d talk to my husband and ended the very confusing interchange that never would have occurred had I simply not answered the door. I told kzi what happened, and we surmised that the NHK representative was just trying to muscle me into an NHK subscription with his English phrasing. The pamphlet wound up in the garbage and I haven’t thought about it since.

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A little over a month ago I made a quickie-post on my Free Speech blog that made brief mention of a wiki for direct action, and a torrent site curated specifically for the activist crowd. In this post I’d like to flesh out those ideas more in as non-technical a way as possible. Where specific technologies are involved, I’ll do my best to offer an explanation of why the technology is important to the fundamental ideas of what I’m brainstorming. I’d like to emphasize that I’m at the brainstorming stage, so you might run into some half-baked (or not baked at all) ideas, inconsistencies and the like, so please don’t flame me if x doesn’t exactly make sense in light of y. Without further ado, let’s delve into the world of wikis, torrents, and useful content.

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The evenings are beginning to cool off, which means that Chapter One: pnts and kzi vs. Murphy’s Law and Japan[1] is drawing to a close. It was chapter of epic proportions in which we saw our heroes move halfway across the world, engage in mighty battles with the most formidable of bureaucratic systems, dodge deportation and food poisoning, discover innovative ways of using clothing for pillows and blankets, dance lithely between pronounced cultural differences, obtain gruesome facial wounds, and drink lots of beer.

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