I had a fascinating conversation with a student today.
We somehow followed a rabbit trail to comparing the Romantics like Wordsworth’s image of childhood to the Puritan’s. The Puritans believed that children were naturally evil and that the evil must be beaten out of them as they grow up.
The conversation then led to talking about Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”. In that sermon, Edwards creates an image of us all as sinners who are dangling over hell by a single spider’s thread – waiting to fall into the abyss at the slightest flick of god’s wrist.
Hearing that, my student’s ears jumped, and she was excited to share her own story with me from Japanese literary tradition. I’ve just found it online here. It’s a story called “The Spider’s Thread”, by Akutagawa Ryunosuke.
In this story, Buddha is relaxing in paradise, but he just happens to be over hell and glimpses down into it. There he sees a man who was full of evil in life, but committed one act of good. Almost killing a spider, he stopped himself and had spared the spider’s life. Thinking that the man, having shown compassion at least once, could still be saved – Buddha was filled with compassion and lowered a spider’s thread down to the man. The man saw it and started climbing up it, hoping to make it up to paradise. But along the way, he paused and looked down to see all the other sinners following him. He yelled at them to get off the thread – that it was his thread! Immediately the thread snapped from his lack of compassion and he fell back into hell forever. Buddha was sad.
Anyway – just comparing the image of the spider’s thread in the hands of Edwards’ God and Akutagawa’s Buddha is quite interesting, so I thought I’d share. Hope you enjoy. ^^
I remember soon after I started out on YouTube, Hikosaemon was tagged by…I think it was Apokalypse34…for a music remix, and he made a pretty cool remix out of it. I remember thinking it was cool and being really confused by the fact that there was some strange functionality in YouTube that I couldn’t for the life of me figure out. How does one get “tagged” on YouTube? Well – the answer is simple. You don’t. It’s not a YouTube functionality (although it SOO should be!). Basically just someone says in the video or in the sidebar or on Twitter…or gives you a call…or walks down the dormitory hall to your room and kicks you and says, “You’re tagged!!”
Then, if you feel like it, you make a video that follows some general parameters set forth in the first vid. Or you just do whatever you want to…there’s no rules really. It’s not an actual thing.
In this case, I decided to take this awesome Asian Emoticons video that MissHannahMinx made and turn it into a tag game.
Basically I just asked people to make a video explaining their favorite emoticons and showing what their face would look like making that expression. It’s already given me a whole lot of lolz, and I hope it does the same for you too! How about browsing through all the videos in the series? I’m organizing all of them into a playlist, and you can watch them all right here in this player. It will be continually updated and automatically refresh, so feel free to check back again and see new ones when they come out!
I was talking to a good friend of mine and discussing some cool poetry she wrote today, and it got me thinking about back in the day when I used to write poetry a lot more. I kinda miss writing – I should do it again someday. I sifted through my computer and stumbled across this old poem. It was from a long time ago, back when my life was surrounded by religion and all the complications that go along with it.
These days I don’t care so much about the imagery that a lot of this poem represents, but the deeper message behind it is one that stays strongly with me ’till today.
After living in Asia for over 6 years, and never once being able to get back home for Christmas, I’ve come to accept that Christmas will never be exactly what it was when I was a kid. Excitedly sifting through the stocking hung over my bed for marzipan, eating fondue with Swiss family friends, playing Jass, opening presents…come to think of it, the majority of my good memories of Christmas are more Swiss than American. Maybe I’d better go to Switzerland to experience that again, but for now I’m here, so I’d like to make to most of it.
Three years ago, I spent it with a foreign family here in Japan – stuffing my face with awesome food, drinking nice wine, and playing with their kids. Two years ago, my brother was in town and my roommate, brother and I attempted a fondue for ourselves…that was a failure, but the company couldn’t be beat. Last year I worked all day – enjoyed the day with my students, which was surprisingly nice.
But this year, I’ve decided to do something different. Slightly inspired by my Korean friend Hyun Woo (watch his video here or at the bottom of this post), I’ve decided to send anyone that wants one a 年賀状 (nengajyo = New Year’s Card). The reasons behind the idea are: to celebrate the spirit of Christmas by giving to others, to mix Japanese culture of New Year’s Cards with western culture of Christmas cards, and to connect in a new and deeper way with my online friends.
Please email me at Tolokyo@gmail.com or on YouTube
Also, I’ll be having a house party on Christmas Day!! From morning to night, anytime – come to my place, hang out, help me write New Year’s cards, and spread some Christmas cheer!
You’re all welcome, but if you’re crazy, don’t come…k? But seriously, if you have an online presence (YouTube, Twitter, Facebook), please send me that. If not, then please send me a picture and some information about you. If it’s just a random person that asks for directions to my place, I probably won’t tell you. ^^
Hope everyone can come!
So, i haven’t found a way to mesh feeds together and pump them out successfully as a new feed yet. I’ve got the feed, but Tumblr can’t read it…I’ll work on this more.
Well, some of you might have noticed yesterday that I put up a bunch of “test” blog entries. That was because I was testing out integration for a number of services that I’m sending my feed (and a couple other people’s) to a new site I’m trying to create for multiple J-vloggers to share: http://japan-vlog.tumblr.com
It’s still a baby site, but it seems like it might be working. Let’s see if this post makes it there. ^^
I was chatting with an American guy living in Kazhakstan yesterday, and he asked me an interesting question: “why do you guys always say foreigner? Does nobody use the term expat out there?”
And come to think of it – he’s kinda right. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone use the term….except for that one time when I performed a musical at the American Club near Tokyo Tower. That place had a distinctly expat feel to me. Why is that?
I thought about it a bit, and here’s what I came up with.
I think that there are (at least) 3 worlds available for 外人 in Tokyo to live in: the foreigner world, the expat world, and Japan.
1) The foreigner world:
This is a place where eikaiwa teachers and low level corporate workers who get sent over here by their companies exist. It mostly revolves around the area of Roppongi generally between Almond and Don Quixote, and maybe a few of them have branched out into Camelot in Shibuya. Maybe those areas are a little outdated as I’ve only gotten glimpses of that world for the past few years. This world successfully goes to countryside places in Japan without ever meeting a Japanese person, generally consumes a lot of alcohol, and is the most likely to read this blog post, I would imagine.
2) The expat world:
This is a place that revolves around places like Hiroo, Azabu-Juban, and the parts of Roppongi that don’t match the description of the foreigner world. It’s a place with wine tastings and actual cheese…eating real cheese is just like a normal thing in this world! It’s 40th floor apartments in Shinagawa paid for by whatever investment bank they happen to work for and taking trips with the kids to an onsen — in the car. I don’t know. I’m just kinda making it up because the fact is that I’ve only ever had little glimpses into that world.
3) Japan
That’s kinda the place that I’ve always tried to live in the most. That’s the place where you sit on the floor and feel awkward hugging people. It’s the place where the drunker you get, the happier and more friendly you get. It’s where you’re not allowed to speak your mind directly and statements like, “let’s hang out someday” most likely mean, “I really don’t like you and don’t wanna see you again”.
Of course there’s a lot of crossover, but I think they tend to be quite distinctly different places.
Do you think those are in fact 3 distinct worlds? What would you add/take away from the descriptions? Which one are you living in most of the time?
So I put this together this morning.
It’s a lesson plan for Japanese high school students teaching the Unreal Conditional with if clauses.
That’s for example, “If I had 3 months to travel, I would visit Antarctica.” or “If I found my favorite singer’s cell phone, I’d call him and return it to him personally…then scream” (my student made that example today )
First I taught the grammar point using a page from the textbook Interchange 2 (third edition – pg 101).
Then I showed this video that I threw together (I know…I made a mistake subtitling just one little bit).
I had shown them the whole first episode of GLEE the week before as a intro to using it as a teaching tool. That way they’re all generally familiar with the characters/situation and their interested to understand what they’re saying.
I think the music and high school themes are interesting and have a lot of material to pull from for teaching. I’ll probably use it a few more times.
I showed it a few times and gave a gapped script. The file for that is here.
The second page of that file was their homework. They need to work on reading comprehension for university entrance exams coming up, so it’s a kinda fun version of reading comprehension.
Next week will be a Halloween lesson, so I’ll do a little ghost story kinda stuff…using the theme of fear from this clip is preparing them for next week’s lesson.
The goal is to open them up to a dialogue about what they fear as Japanese high school seniors halfway through their senior year, and how that’s not really so different from the frustrations and fears that Finn feels about his chances at success.
Right click on those links and click “save link as” to download them.
Feel free to use them!
But remember, I don’t own that video, and neither do you. Share and share alike – just try to let your kids have fun learning!
Yesterday, I uploaded my first real major collaboration attempt with other Japanese YouTube vloggers, and I think it really came out great!
I actually never intended to become a “YouTuber”, but somehow I’ve kinda fallen into it.
For one thing, I really want to make video and learn so that I can do my documentary project right when I set out on it next year. And also, I thought it would be a good idea to start building up connections and viewers in the online video world. I’m sure those connections will come in really handy when I’m on my trip! When you’re trying to do something big, it never hurts to have hundreds of people who are skilled in video making and marketing themselves who are following you and interested in what you’re doing. It can only help raise the hype. It’s not that I wanna get famous or want the whole world to watch me. It’s just that I really believe I’m gonna set out on a great adventure and be making documentaries about people that are much more praiseworthy than myself — but who will know if I haven’t first done the work to get stuff out and spread the word?
And also, one very pleasant surprise I found when I entered the world of YouTubers is that it’s a world full of really cool, intelligent, friendly, interesting people! Somehow making your own videos attracts people who are exceptional in their own right. And the more I get to know exceptional people, the more chance I’ll someday be able to make something exceptional of myself. And who doesn’t wanna do that?
So, on that note, I’ve been making videos as interesting as I know how to, and here’s my latest attempt. Hope you enjoy it!
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