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 RSS2010-02-04Hey rest of the planet, you like your 3G mobile phone service? SUCK IT. add comment to post #635 Peter:Okay, honestly, I don't really know what 4G service means, but I am assume that more G's is good G's. 2010-02-04There are a lot of ways Japan is sort of advanced in taking care of people with disabilities. Many new people in Japan ask about the "annoying" noises in the train stations. They are to help blind people find the exits. A new innovation for the deaf is the Wasabi Smoke Alarm which wakes up deaf people (usually under 3 mins) by emitting the potent smell of wasabi. Why wasabi? Why the hell not, I guess. It's pretty distinctive and powerful and a lot of smells might not wake you up. Other ideas? add comment to post #634 2010-02-03
Today is Setsubun, a day when dads dress up like a devil so that their kids can throw beans at them. It's also celebrated with another activity, one which I was planning to explain until I found a very clear and concise explanation on Wikipedia and decided to just copy and paste it. "It is customary now to eat uncut makizushi called Eho-Maki (恵方巻) (lit. "lucky direction roll") in silence on Setsubun while facing the yearly lucky compass direction, determined by the zodiac symbol of that year." Which my wife forced me to do. add comment to post #633 2010-02-03Yesterday a midwife came to my house to check on our living conditions in relation to our new daughter. I don't have a problem with government workers checking on home situations for the welfare of families. I do have a problem with what happened after she had confirmed we weren't living in our own filth. She saw a family picture and decided to test my 2 year old son on his comprehension so she came in really close and asked "Papa ha doko?" Which would translate into "Where is Papa?" My son didn't answer. Firstly, the woman swooped in on him, which makes pretty much any kid shy. Second, my child refers to me as "Dada" so he doesn't know who the fuck this Papa motherfucker is. Being my son, he responded appropriately by swiftly ignoring her. Last year the same woman checked on my son's abilities with similar results. My wife then said "Where's Dada?" in English and my son pointed me out like it was a boring exercise beneath him and left the room. The midwife then started to cross the line from checking living conditions to making value judgments, something I am not really cool with. She started telling my wife how it would be difficult for my son when he starts going to school if he only speaks English. This, of course, is pretty ludicrous since I am the only person in his life who speaks to him in English all the time. With his grandmother he speaks 100% Japanese, but the woman has to cover up the fact that she doesn't really interact well with children. This is, I suppose, a taste of the rest of our lives in Japan. While it was hardly racism, we didn't raise our son to mimic every standard response taught by every other family in the country and thus we were judged deficient. I wonder whats going to happen when I teach my son that the green light on a traffic signal is "green" and not "blue" like everyone else in Japan says it is. add comment to post #632 2010-02-03This month's Japanzine has an article on the gaijin perimeter -- a topic I've heard a lot about (in Japanzine) but have yet to personally experience or even see. If people regularly avoid sitting next to you on the train, you may want to entertain other possible causes than your foreigness. add comment to post #631
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