On why she couldn’t recognize a friend of mine she had met a week before:

You know, gaijin faces all look the same to me.

This one dedicated to Jeff:

I was enjoying a peaceful late lunch and tea break at the small eatery next-door with E., somewhere between lovemaking session #5 and arguing session #253, when a noisy discussion, one table over, draw our attention:

Three obatarians were seated, twice as many teapots in front of them, loudly and excitingly commenting over what looked like exercise sheets scattered on the table. From the style of the exercises and the tone of their comments, it seemed like at least one of them was learning how to write kanjis: a peculiar explanation, seeing how they all sounded positively natives, with little chance of belonging to the 1% illiterate people in Japan.

But then, listening more carefully to their attempt at pronouncing strange guttural tchaw’s and yow’s and taking a closer look at their papers, we realized they weren’t working their Japanese kanjis: these little old women were indeed feverishly teaching each other Korean. At that point, I could clearly see the ghost of Bae Yong Joon hovering above the table and reflecting into their glistening pupils.

I suppose until that moment, I had woefully underestimated the spread of Yong-sama-mania among the greying Japanese masses, but E. confirmed that even her aging slightly xenophobic grandma had all but started to learn Korean, secondary to that mop-head single-handedly bringing Korea to the forefront of sappy insipid drama production for the Asian market.

And I naively thought that peace and understanding between countries would have to be slowly built over mutual respect and appreciation for millennia-old cultures.

Dr Dave, 3 days after Landing, attempting to convey to a befuddled bank clerk that the damn ATM outside refuses to take his US card (conversation transcribed to English for clarity purposes):

“Me… money… want… money… please…”

Ten months and twenty full pages of Japanese phrasebook later: trying to open a bank account in order to cash my first paycheck. After literally half-a-dozen fruitless attempts, I find one bank (みずほ, if you must know) that doesn’t mind the fact that I have: 1) no relatives born within 50 miles of the branch, 2) not been living a few decades on the island, 3) no inkan emblazoned with my kanji name and 4) a suspiciously pale skin color, compared to the local shade in fashion. I am not about to ask if they have multilingual staff on the premises.

In Japan, whenever a foreigner steps into a business asking for service, it is customary for staff to hastily draw straws. Failing that, they seek the one employee who has foreign country’s experience (usually a one-week honeymoon in Thailand). Failing that, they send the youngest trainee with instructions to commit seppuku if things get out of hand.

Two hours, many outdated Japanese-English dictionaries and one slightly rattled employee later, I have a Japanese bank account. It only took us 40 minutes to figure how to spell my name in katakana. It will only take me a few more months to figure out how to withdraw money from it.

Three years later: “Hi, I just lost my cash card in Paris, need to change my two-year out-of-date address, make a bank transfer (without my card) and, oh yea, gimme 50,000 yens in cash, by the way that’s a lovely necklace you got here. kthanx.”

Somehow even ended up with her personal phone number on the back of my checkbook.

This language thing is becoming way too easy, high time to leave the country.

Clicking through some stuff this morning, I stumbled upon somebody’s account of life in China, and in particular, a funny observation about hanzis:

Turning now to Chinese characters: We are learning them again at last, and many make me pleased. The character for “to endure” is a knife held to a heart. A tomb is required to draw “antique.” There are other things, too, of course: the local glyphic idea of “peace” is a woman in a house, while that of “family” is a pig in a house. This surely explains either less or more than it purports to.

Like most people, I too struggle to give more or less apocryphal interpretations to kanjis in order to make them more memorable. Some of my findings are quite far-fetched. Yet, this particular set never occurred to me before (as usual: mouse-over to get kanji pronunciation and meaning):

• 忍, as in 忍ぶ, is made of 心 and 刃
• A woman (女) under a “roof” (宀), becomes 安… Though in japanese, the 安 character doesn’t really hold the meaning of “peace” as in “war and peace” (usually written 平和), but rather a “spiritual, inner, peace” (安心). Interestingly, it is frequently used to indicate “cheapness” or “easiness” (安い).
• A “pig” (豕) under a “roof” (宀), becomes a “house” (家) and by extension: a “family” (家族).

Funny how the semantic oddity has been perfectly preserved in the transition from Chinese to Japanese (commonplace, indeed, but certainly not the all-encompassing rule).

Of course, there are hundred of these observations to be made, and I could probably come up with stories for nearly every kanji I know, but to stay with the farm theme, there is this one classic I really can’t get over:

Japanese kanji for “beauty” (美) is none other than a combination of “big” (大) and “sheep” (羊): makes way for all sorts of weird thought processes when a friend points out a 美人 in the street…

Small quid pro quo today reminded me of an old conversation:

Tomomi: But Dave-san, is there really a difference between English and American?

dr Dave: Of course there is. British are civilised people. Americans are ruthless barbarians: they couldn’t make a cup of tea to save their life.

T: Maajii-de?!?

drD: When Americans try to make tea, they use cold sea-water and don’t even bother taking the leaves out of the box. And that’s Boston we’re talking about. The further west you go, the worse it gets.

T: Aa, so-ka, so-ka. It all makes sense now.

Anything I can do to bring greater cultural understanding between people.

Decent week-end, slow news evening.

I’m sure nobody’s eager to hear the fascinating tales of my uneventful yet appropriately social week-end: birthdays were celebrated, morning were slept in, lazy afternoons sitting in the sun, sipping on drinks and writing physics were spent, ice-cream while people-watching on the steps of Shibuya’s Oy’ Oy’ department store^(*) were had… Nothing quite blog-worthy, as you’ll realize: no waking up in puddles of bodily fluids in some unknown street/train station/love hotel, no unexplained whip marks in the lower back, no kidney unaccounted for in the morning. Only routine Summer week-end stuff, minus the drink-till-you-puke and hangover stories.

Luckily, I have just what we need for such an occasion!

And thus, let me introduce our generic cultural blog-filler of the day:

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First off, let me officially declare Geek Week closed for good: no more stuff about databases, microformats and other cool pet projects, for a while.

Instead, I’m gonna bring a crowd pleaser to the important part of my readership who is currently saving on their weekly imported Poki consumption, to fulfill their teenage wet-dream of a pilgrimage to the fantasy land they have come to associate with Japan in their head. I know they’ve been reading ever since their google search for “japanese upskirt pictures” or “pokemon furry porn” got them here.

Today’s topic is: Manga.

Mangas can be summed up approximately thus: they suck. They suck big hairy giant mutant robots balls.

Now I know I’m causing a lot of grief among the otaku crowd here. At least those who haven’t already gone back to humping their pillows dolls or building that lifesize gundam robot…

Let’s take a closer look, shall we?

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Not long after I arrived in Japan, I was introduced to an older gentleman, who shared a keen interests in some European authors and was altogether a pleasure to converse with. That man spoke extremely little English, but was practically fluent in both German and French, while I was, on my end, doing my best to start conveying meaningful sentences through the 15 words of Japanese I had mastered at the time.

I have been in the past ironically referring to “my Japanese lawyer“, and people naturally always assumed I was joking… Well, he is a lawyer. While he should probably have hit retirement a few years ago now, he seems well intent on pleading cases until the very last day. He has, on rare occasions, given me some pro bono advices, repaid in old whiskey and binded european books, which, I suppose, makes him my Japanese lawyer after all.

We once had a conversation about his youth: growing up in Japan during and immediately after the war. The bombing over Tokyo, where his parents lived, got extremely intensive during the last two years. Most of his childhood neighbourhood burnt down before the end of the war. He and his older sister had therefore been sent to some relatives’ house in the country, near a smaller city that had been so far spared from most of the bombings.

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A pretty bad week for databases.

After nearly killing a client’s DB yesterday (and spending most of my night restoring every bits and pieces semi-manually), I felt it wise to secure my own DB here. The one that stores this blog. Guess what happened then?

Yea, I blew the DB too. Or to be more precise: mySQL blew the part of the DB encoded in Japanese.

Here again I just spent half my night recovering everything that could be. Unfortunately all Japanese content for entries posted in June and early July is lost for good: not like it had much literary value, but still a bummer. And in case you are wondering about backups: believe me, I have backups, hundred of them… It just turns out that this piece of crap SQL isn’t even able to properly back up an exact binary copy of your tables that won’t screw up when it encounters encodings it can’t handle properly. So every single backup I have, is identically screwed.

My last personal piece of advice to any mySQL user out there, is to stay away from mysqldump do a freaking binary copy of the db files directly.

擬音語 are the Japanese version of Western onomatopeia. They are often used in comics, to add intensity to a scene, describe a noise or even a texture. But they have a much wider use, often replacing bona fide words or full sentences, in everyday conversations. They nearly all follow the same specific pattern: a group of two syllables repeated twice (pika-pika, pera-pera etc)… which makes them very easy to spot and remember… Using them in your daily conversation will simultaneously propel you to the ranks of l33t native speakers, and make you sound like one of these 13 year-old Japanese schoolgirl with 5 pounds of plushies dangling from her keitai.

I have compiled below a short list of all those I could remember, off the top of my head, along with a few friends’ contributions. I have made arbitrary use of katakana and hiragana, more or less dictated by what I’ve seen more often in writing. Rule of thumb is that most of these can be found in either form, depending on the mood of the author and the type of material it is used with. Mouse-over the kanas to get the romaji pronunciation….

The ubiquitous (all the time, provided you ever watch TV or speak to a Japanese teenager):

• ピカピカ glittering!
• ソラソラ sparkling!
• ギリギリ quick (chop chop!)
• ぺらぺら fluent (in a language)
• ぺこぺこ starving
• モシモシ [when answering the phone]

The commmon

• ドロドロ messy/dirty (a room, a floor) or muddled (a relationship)
• チャキチャキ efficient
• ツルツル smooth, slippery
• プンプン intense smell or furious anger
• ポツポツ bit by bit
• ベタベタ clingy (overeager lovers) or sticky (sweaty gaijin pig)
• じめじめ humid, damp
• ゆらゆら flickering

The uncommon (friends use them, dunno how universal they are):

• バラバラ scattered, all over the place
• エロエロ [will let you guess that one…]

The rare (those you likely won’t find in a dictionary, as they are total slang):

• ブリブリ high
• パキパキ fucked-up (much stronger than the slightly ‘cute’ ブリブリ)

The manga-style (those that sound like a comic strip description all by themselves):

• キョロキョロ looking around restlessly
• イライラ getting nervous (also as kanji: 苛々)
• うろうろ walking aimlessly
• カチカチ scared motionless

The real deal (actual onomatopeia, such as used in comics):

• ワンワン bow-wow (dog)
• ザアザア water sound (rain, river etc), white noise
• ケラケラ cackle (hen)… [not quite certain]

The fake (not really 擬音語, but still close):

• 色々 miscellaneous
• 時々 sometimes
• 中々 quite, considerably

Now your turn: send me your favorite 擬音語!

A few cool things coming up:

Wednesday (07/20) - Japanbloggers Meetup - Zest, Harajuku

A group of people from all horizons and many countries, brought together by a common love of blogging, tech gizmos and cheap somewhat reasonably priced beer.
Newcomers always warmly welcomed.

Thursday (07/28) - Laurent Garnier - Yokohama Museum of Art [Note: I got the date wrong initially. This is taking place next week, not this week. Thanks to Martine for pointing that out!]

Reels of silent early-century B&W movies, with live instrumentation by worldwide famous, veteran techno DJ and producer: Laurent Garnier.
Sounds very experimental, but the man is insanely talented, should be interesting.

Update (also playing on 08/06):

Friday (07/22) - screening of Bondi Tsunami - Super Deluxe, near Roppongi Hills

An indy surf-movie about a bunch of crazy Japanese and their adventures in Ozland…
Miss Tracey blogged about it a few weeks ago. Turned out last week-end that my friend, the awesome Stacia, is going steady with the lead actor… It’s a small, tiny, star-studded, world, after all.

About Laurent Garnier:

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As part of an elaborate not-getting-laid-at-all-cost strategy, I spent the best of my Friday night hacking at home on a whim, bravely ignoring 1am drunken phone calls from a lonely ex, I didn’t stop until I basically had a working prototype.

And thus here you go:
Dr Dave’s Keitai Kanji Multiradical Dictionary!

Of course, you can use this dictionary from any browser, but it has been made especially compact, so as to offer convenient browsing on a small keitai screen.

Why bother making yet another multiradical dictionary when Jim Breen (and many others, most likely) already offers a very decent one on his site?

Two reasons:

1. I wanted one that be easy to use from a keitai. Jim Breen’s is still a bit heavy to load and browse with a small screen.
2. I wanted a smarter system for radical selection. All the systems I’ve seen so far let you choose your radicals from a checkbox list of all common radicals. Such a list can be quite long. This makes finding each radical quite tedious and particularly cumbersome on a keitai. Mine use a slightly different approach, that requires at least some knowledge of basic kanjis, but make it much faster then.

Instructions

Fairly obvious, really:

• Screen 1: enter a string of kanjis. Can be any kanjis containing one of the radical you want to match or directly a radical. In practice, this means you should pick kanjis that look similar to the one you are trying to match… Say, you want to figure out [汾], you could enter [分] and [海]…
• Screen 2: you will get a list of all radicals matching any of the kanjis entered previously (in our example, you’d get: [ハ], [刀], [母] and [汁]). Select the ones that belong to the kanji you are looking for (e.g. [ハ], [刀] and [汁]). Optionally, enter a number of stroke, with a margin of error (if you want to get any stroke count, do not change the ‘all’ value).
• Screen 3 will give you a list of all kanjis (if any) containing all the radicals selected in the previous screen, ordered by frequency and stroke count (in our example, you’d get only the kanji you were initially looking for: [汾]). Along with the kanji, you are given stroke count and unicode value. Clicking on the kanji will do a word search in WWWJIC (translations). Clicking on the unicode value, will give you WWWJDIC’s Kanjidic entry (kanji pronunciation keys and data).

This script has been successfully tested with AU’s EZweb, but should work on any net-enabled keitai, please let me know if you encounter any problem. Suggestions and general comments most welcome.

Hope you’ll find it useful, I know I will!

Note: As usual, this project uses extensively the amazing amount of data gathered and made available by the EDRG on Jim Breen’s website.

I finally caved in and got myself a Mixi account.

I am not exactly a big fan of so-called “Social Networking” software. Overall, services like Friendster, Orkut et al. have always seemed more of an attempt to make up for years of high school unpopularity, than actually trying to establish meaningful connections between people.

Well, that’s a whole other debate altogether, but frankly, the mere idea of “Social Networking” kinda irks me. That pragmatism of friendships that contend to be mixing mutual feelings of appreciation with some sort of social ladder climbing scheme. You no longer have “friends” on miscellaneous degrees of closeness, you have “contacts”, rated on their ability to help you reach your own social goals. Back when I experimented with Friendster, shortly after it was hailed as the dawn of a new digital age of human interactions, things went a bit like:
Step 1: create a semi-anonymous profile with hobbies, likes and dislikes. Mention that you like to play with electronic music production. Watch the level of activity hovering close to zero outside of the friends you already knew before joining.
Step 2: add a mention in passing that you actually release records, organize parties in SF, and mix for some of them. Watch as over a hundred “friends” suddenly pop-in, add you to their contact list, quickly start trying to sell you their own demo mix or grab guest list comps.

If anything, this laughably caricatural episode taught me one thing: never mention in too much of a positive light any of my professional activities outside of purely professional discussions. If we are having a friendly chat in a social context and it turns out I may be able to help you or we may enter in a mutually beneficial partnership, I’ll be the judge of that, but please save me the fucking faux-friendly courtship that wastes everybody’s time and does nothing to convince me of your professional qualities. Yea, I guess I’m not exactly much of a schmoozing PR guy.

This post-dotcom brand of opportunism, along with the equally ridiculous concept that the friends of your friends ought to be cool people (let me tell you something about the friends of my friends: to an overwhelming majority, they are drug-addled, self-centered, alcoholic pricks. I certainly don’t want anything to do with them) is why I can’t wait for this braindead concept to go down the dot.com drain.

Why have I joined Mixi then?

A few reasons:
1) I need to practice my Japanese more, and Mixi being 100% Japanese is a good way to force me to read and write regularly.
2) The communities and calendar functions make it an infinitely more useful tool than the “You have 3 millions friends-of-friends” traditional Friendster feature.
3) It’s pretty fucking well done altogether.

And here is my account if you wanna be my friend.

You are stuck in Japan, it’s oppressively hot and you don’t have a yen to your name. You decide to do the obvious and rob a cab.

Sure why not: the rich bastards must be carrying like a million yen on them at all times. Sounds like an easy one, right? Right?

Well, no.

You see, the incidence rate of mad bank robbing ending in wild taxicab chase and hostage situations through the streets of Tokyo is so high (Bogota of the East, that we call it) that officials have had to come up with a solution. Unbeknownst to you, from the moment you hopped on the cab with your gun, the taxi driver has been pressing a secret button on his dashboard that turns on an emergency distress signal light on top of the car, thus warning any law enforcement agent in the vicinity that something fishy is afloat.

In your face, evil taxicab robbers!

Well, that is, unless you actually take the time to poke your head out the window, spot the blinking red light, shoot the driver and escape.

But taxis are not the only ones that have received special care regarding the endemic hijacking problem in Japan: all public buses are also equipped with such a special emergency light that can be turned on in case a crazy lunatic would suddenly decide to re-enact the best moments of Su-ppee-do, the movie. I feel so much safer already.

Why do I have the feeling some lawmakers in Japan watch too much TV?

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I used to hate weddings; all the Grandmas would poke me and say, “You’re next sonny!”
They stopped doing that when i started to do it to them at funerals.

My friend Nordine is getting married this Friday.

As you can see in the photo beside, tradition has been duly respected, pre-wedding pictures in traditional outfits included (you should see the one with the katana). Can you sense a certain Watanabe Ken complex? yea, me too…

Anyway, the photo studio probably thought Nordine was sufficiently ridiculous cute manly in his hakama to feature the shot on their portfolio website. Although maybe Masako’s smile may have helped a bit too.

Considering the bride is a flight attendant on JAL, half the wedding guests will consist of Japanese air hostesses. Which makes an invitation to the reception worth at least a couple hundred thousand yens on Tokyo’s black market. But I don’t think I’ll sell mine: much more to be made with hush money paid not to tell a single of the groom’s stories, back in his Roppongi days.