Kevin Ryan in Tokyo

Category: culture

  • Barack Obama’s Inauguration Speech

    Ogawa-sensei remembered that I had brought Obama’s acceptance speech to Cosmos Festival in November. He asked me if I had a good copy (better than the one on YouTube). Ogawa-sensei, I’ll bring it in on Monday.

    Obama’s speeches are legendary now. I’ve been following him since 2004, and he continues to amaze.

    President Barack Obama gives his inaugural address. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty
    President Barack Obama gives his inaugural address. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty

    The text and video of his speech show initially that his Inauguration speech on Tuesday may have had lukewarm reception at first.

    But when you start to look at the speech carefully, his mastery shows. It is a new style of speech, more measured, more exact, and it leads to discussion and interpretation. He is moving the ideas front and center, instead of personalities.

    Stanley Fish, Dean of my university (Uof I , Chicago) when I was there (now former) and widely read columnist for the New York Times, looks closely at Obama’s speech, and shows us the intricacies. He thinks we should use this speech in our English classes, because of its

    Paratactic prose lends itself to leisurely and loving study, and that is what Obama’s speech is already receiving. Penguin Books is getting out a “keepsake” edition of the speech, which will be presented along with writings by Abraham Lincoln and Ralph Waldo Emerson. (You can move back and forth among them, annotating similarities and differences.)

    I can’t wait for the new Penguin Edition to come out. After their ground-breaking WeTellStories, I am really looking forward to more experimentation on augmenting regular text. Penguin is really innovative.

    My (younger) daughter will be giving a part of an Obama speech on February 14 at the Jr/Sr high school on campus. She picked it out last September, and hopes to take it to the National Finals of the Hachishibu Speech Contest. I’ll put up a video after.

  • Recent books

    Over winter vacation, I spent almost a week at my wife’s mother’s place in Nagoya. No Internet. Which meant lots of time for reading paper-based stuff. Here is how I spent my New Year’s.

    The Limits of Power by Andrew Blacevitch, former Navy Admiral shows how we can’t continue our imperial ways in the world, how they got started with Regan, how Carter was right, and how Rhienhold Neibuhr foresaw this a long time ago.

    Anathem by Neal Stephenson: Monks in the future, on another world, grapple with society, purges and a new world-shaking event. 940 pages of classic Stephenson, his best book yet, but hard to read because it has its own vocabulary.

    The Big Necessity by Rose George: The biggest health improvement in the last 500 years has been sewage treatment. This Guardian reporter explores, literally, the biggest and the best, the worst and the stinkiest ways to handle shit.

  • Tokyo: smelliest place on earth

    nioibu.com lets people warn others of smelly places
    nioibu.com lets people warn others of smelly places

    According to the new Social Networking  website that relies on Google Maps to point out smelly places in the world, Tokyo must be the smelliest place on earth.

    That is, until you realize that the site is in Japanese, and that it is almost brand new. Of course, those of us that live in Tokyo, and have good noses, would be the first to post sites. Each flag is color coded, depending on the type of smell.

    Google Maps is being used for numerous applications. For example, in San Francisco, they link together the location of searches on mobile phones for key words like flu or disease to try to map out a progression of a breakout and where it might be headed.

    Only would the Japanese think of applying it to avoid smells.

  • Ministry of Education back tracks

    On the backs of babes.

    backpack200-bbIt seems since the scores are falling in international tests, and Japanese kids aren’t learning stuff you can test as much, there is a panic to find a solution.

    About 10 years ago there was a move to restrict time at school because kids were not very well-rounded. They tend not to play together, or learn about cultural activities. To increase “humanity” among the kids, they were given most Saturdays off (yes, they used to go most Saturdays). The number of school days dropped from about 240 to 210 (the US has about 180).

    The drop in scores on these international tests didn’t start appearing until about 5 years after the change. Of course, the first thought on the cause of the drop was the changed schedule. No solid indication of causation here, but everyone thought something must be done.

    So what did the Ministry of Education come up with? Reinstate Saturdays, and double the page count of the textbooks. You see, the system here in Japan is incredibly centralized. There is a week-to-week curriculum that everyone in K-12 follows. So a kid could move from Hokkaido down to Kyushu over the weekend, and pick up exactly where he left off. (The textbooks might be different, the content is the same.)

    So now the kids will be carrying much heavier backpacks, and the publishers fat and happy. There is a constant outcry when new textbooks are brought out, because of their (non) treatment of WW2 and things like the Rape of Nanjing. Now they will have twice as much room, but we can be fairly certain there won’t be twice as much content.

  • 88 Yen

    That is how much a dollar costs these days. Glad I stopped sending money over there about 3 years ago. Sorry I sent over so much in the years before. Then again, things may come around eventually, but I don’t expect a quick recovery. Interesting that the Japanese stock market is tanking because the support for the US car makers is eroding in the US Senate. Just happy to have been saving yen in cash. Lately.