Moroha 諸刃

Here are a couple of posters I thought were interesting that I took pictures of while I was in Imazu-cho in Shiga Prefecture visiting my wife’s family.

This first one shows the fairly low-ranked sumo wrestler 高見盛 (Takamisakari) endorsing a campaign against fish poaching. The large writing in the center approximately translates to “Defeat Poaching!”

This can be a problem in fishing communities, where fishermen leave traps for shrimp, mollusks, fish, etc. As long as you don’t get caught, it’s pretty easy to go right to where the traps are and help yourself. The real problem isn’t the occasional guy trying to get some cheap seafood, but competing fishermen that will raid the catches of other fishermen when times get tough. It’s easy to do, and it’s essentialy impossible to keep a trap from being raided.

So why is Takamisakari endorsing this campaign? I haven’t a clue. He isn’t a particularly good sumo wrestler, he’s currently only ranked komusubi. (The fourth rank from the top, and the lowest rank that can still participate in the grand sumo tournaments) He does have some popularity, or at least notoriety, due to his exuberant displays of energy before his matches. Maybe he’s from a fisherman’s family, or he just wan’t very expensive as a celebrity sponsor. If I researched it more I could probably find it out, but I’m too lazy.

Here is the other image.

(Yes, I know you can see me in the reflection. The poster was behind a glass case, and I don’t exactly carry a polarizing filter with me.) I found this poster in a very small shrine about a minute walk from my wife’s home. The yellow text on the right reads, “Let’s fly the national flag on national holidays.” The black text in the center says “Now introducing a flag for family use. Price: 1,500 yen. (Pole and fittings included)” Finally the black text in the lower left hand corner translates to “Shinto Political Federation: Shiga Prefecture Headquarters”.

I find this very interesting, as this campaign is trying to promote Japanese nationalism by encouraging a practice that is fundamentally non-Japanese. During this trip I was only in Japan during one national holiday: Umi no hi.(Sea day) Despite this campaign (probably not an extremelly well-know campaign) I failed to see any national flags flown at any homes on this day. Of course it may have something to do with the fact that Umi no hi doesn’t really signify anything in particular, just that Japan needed a national holiday in July and needed to call it something, so they called it sea day, probably just because it’s summer and everyone loves to go to the beach in the summer. There may be more flags flown on more significant holidays, like the Emperor’s birthday or such, but I’m doubtful.

What I find most interesting is the group that published this poster, the Shinto Political Federation. This is the same group that had a meeting a few years ago which was attended by many prominent right-wing politicians, including the then Prime Minister Mori. It was at this same meeting that Mori made the infamous stament 「天皇を中心とした神の国」 (the nation with the Emperor at its heart in the land of deities) in May of 2000. This fiasco caused a big scandal that eventually led to Mori losing the Prime Ministership. It also led to gaijins residing in Japan making all sorts of jokes about Japan being “Kami no Kuni”.

Ryoko, myself, and our baby just returned from a month in Japan, visiting her family and such. There were some days when I didn’t have much to do and just sat around, but overall I had a really good time, as did my wife. She really needed this trip to be able to unwind a relax for a while.

This being my fifth trip to Japan, every time I go there and come back there are several differences that always catch me off guard, no matter how much I’m expecting it. There is of course the crowdedness of Japan, expecially Tokyo, that converses with the big open spaces here, and the fact that I’m a giant there while only moderately tall here. I’m pretty much used to both of those. What really catches me off guard every time is that Americans are fat. Really fat. Over half of the people I see look too fat to me, and a significant percenage of people are so freaking obese how in the world are you able to take a single step or fit into a chair or even keep your skeletal system from collapsing under the wieght!!! Maybe there is something to be said for places like southern California, where over half of the women have boob jobs and tummy tucks and are too tanned and wear too much makeup and everyone talks about how superficial they are and are way too preoccupied with appearance but at least they don’t look like a pod of whales that have re-adapted to life on land!

In Japan they just finished the summer Sumo tournament at Nagoya, where everyday they show all the matches on national TV. Sumo wrestlers are renouned for thier large size, but I regularly see people on the street here in the U.S. that would easily overweigh these giants. How is a human physically capable of being this corpulent as these Americans? It never ceases to amaze me.

娘は5月3日で産まれて、名前は「カリサ」と決めた。アメリカの出産証明書でもちろんローマ字だから、Karisaで書いてしかなくて漢字ではまだ決めていなかった。しかし、カリサちゃんが二重国籍を持てるように2ヶ月までに戸籍に入れなければならない。その届けをするためにカリサに使う漢字を決めなければならない。

僕の場合は漢字の意味をわかるけど、苗字に合わせてからの雰囲気がいいとかはまったくセンスがない。それは涼子の役割だ。今日そのことを話して「伽里紗」がいいと思ったけど、「鳥居」の涼子の氏名に合わせたらあまり気に入らないって。最近、日本政府がの何百の新しい漢字を名前に使うのは許したみたいけど、「癌」とか「呪」とか使わない限り僕は別に何の漢字でも平気だ。

Since my wife and I will be going back to Japan in June, mostly for the purpose of Ryoko’s family seeing their new granddaughter/neice, It means that we need a passport for our baby girl, Karisa. I first looked up the requirements and application form online at the U.S. Department of State. The application form is straightforward, and the amount of red tape we had to go through at the county offices was pleasantly small. The only complaint is that we had to pay an extra $60 for a total of $140 in order to get the passport within 2 weeks. Normally it takes up to 6 weeks, but we need her passport before that.

But later I took a closer look at the Department of State homepage. After the title and shortcut bar at the top, it has several headlines that are considered of top importance for U.S. citizens abroad. The first item concerns voting while overseas, but after that it has a Worldwide Caution Public Announcement, Middle-East and North Africa Public Announcement, East Africa Public Announcement, and then travel warnings to various countries including Lebanon, Iran, and Haiti. After looking through all the travel warnings and such, I have compiled and simplified the data so that any American can plan an international trip in relative safety:

1.) Do not go anywhere near the entire Fertile Crescent. This pretty much includes all of the Middle-East and Asia Minor.

2.) Do not go to any country that ends in -stan.

3. No Northern Africa, Eastern Africa, or Western Africa. In fact, just to be safe, avoid the entire continent. It’s just not worth the risk.

4.) Wherever you do go, try not to let on that you are American. This is impossible for your average American, who generally blend in like a killer-whale in a group of seals, both physically and culturally. Since only cosmopolitan Americans (all too often an oxymoron) could successfully pretend to be Europeans, your best bet is to claim to be a Canadian. This is easily accomlished by wearing a maple-leaf pin on your backpack or shirt. Unless you’re a Quebecois, even Americans and Canadians can’t really tell the difference.

Well, I’ve been too busy and then too lazy to write anything here for the past week or so. My wife Ryoko gave birth to a baby girl, Karisa, at 9:40 pm on Monday the 5th. Pretty much everything went fine, with no major complications or anything. I’d say she’s very cute, but I’m horribly subjective, and pretty much everyone thinks babies are cute anyway. I’ll even post a few pictures as soon as Mitch tells me what I need to do to upload files onto this thing.

Wtinessing my childs birth did bring some revelations that I wasn’t prepared for:
1) The moment they are born, babies are ugly. Hideously ugly. I thought my wife had given birth to an alien mutant purple monkey-Yoda. It’s only until an hour or so later when all the goo has been wiped off and the head has mostly gone back to it’s original shape that they start looking cute. And then after a week, they become really cute.
2) Becoming a parent does not give you any innate knowledge on how to be a parent. The hospital does give you some very useful booklets that I would summarize as “things that might happen to your baby that you don’t have to freak out over”, but other than that you’re mostly on your own. Thank goodness for friends and relatives that have been through this before and are very helpful with all sorts of tips and reccomendations.
3) New-born babies do one of 4 things, generally in sequence every 2 hours or so. Eat, sleep, poop, and cry. That’s it. No peek-a-boo or giggling. Since Ryoko has to feed her every couple of hours or so, that means she gets no more than 2 hours of sleep at a time. That’s a really difficult way to spend a couple of months. I’m trying to be helpful as a dad, by burping the baby, changing diapers, etc., but there isn’t a lot that I can do.

Still, it’s pretty neat being a dad and having your own child. We’ll she if she lives up to some of the steroetypes of ethnically mixed children: bright, beautiful, and cosmopolitan. It’s that second one that scares me. How will I react when she starts dating guys? Especially if the guy is a jerk-wad or a scumbucket. Maybe I’ll be conveniently polishing my sword collection when she introduces him to me. If I can act like a Bond villian, surely he won’t try anything with my daughter. (I can already see her rolling her eyes at me. “Dad, would you stop that? It’s so embarassing.”)

Another concern is how to raise our children multi-lingual. Probably the best way to ensure that they know Japanese is to always speak Japanese at home, at least while we are in the U.S. But that would be hard on my wife, who still doesn’t speak English well yet. Well, we still have a couple of years to think about what we will do.