Izumo Taisha part One

A long, long time ago, this area used to be called Izumo, and was very important. It is a mystical place with lots of gods and monsters, and also it is probably where the first yamato people came over from Korea before spreading out over all of Japan and basically replacing or intermarrying with the people that were already here. But that part seems to be less important than the gods and possibly even the soba.
Being such an important and ancient area, the actual city of Izumo (not here, specifically, which would have just been part of the Izumo province) is blessed with a big shrine, called appropriately, Izumo Taisha, or Izumo Big shrine. It is a big tourist attraction here, and the god that is supposedly housed there, Ookuninushi-no-mikoto (大国主命), is the shinto god of marriage, so people head up there to get luck for their marriages, I hear. Here he is, playing with a wave:



And this is him with a rabbit:



I don't really know what the wave this is all about, but there's a story to the rabbit. You see, once there was a rabbit, the Japanese word for which is usagi, 兎, who was out on an island in the sea of Japan (I think it was one of the Oki Islands here in Shimane, but I don't know for sure), who wanted to come into mainland Japan, but, being a rabbit, couldn't very well get there on his own. So, he tricked some sharks into acting as a bridge for him. I'm not sure how he did this because it wasn't explained to me when I heard the story. Anyway, the sharks figured out his little trick and tried to eat him. He got away, but was hurt by the time he got into what is now Tottori prefecture (just east of here). He happened upon Ookuninushi-no-mikoto's brothers (eighty of them!) who all wanted to marry the princess Yakami, and asked them for some help.

The brothers told him to wash his wounds in the sea and dry them in the wind, which he did, but it hurt a lot, which the brothers knew it would but did anyway because they are the villains of this story. We can hardly fault the sharks for wanting to eat, I figure. Anyway, along came Ookuninushi-n-mikoto (the -no-mikoto part just tells you that his is a god, which he actually wasn't at this point in the story), who actually did help the rabbit by telling him to wash himself in fresh water and roll in the pollen of the cattail plants, which acts as medicine. So, that is why the rabbit statue is there.

There's more to the story of Ookuninushi-no-mikoto and how he came to rule the Izumo province, but I don't know it off the top of my head and you can just find it on Wikipedia if you really want.

I have more pictures from my recent trip to Izumo Taisha, but apparently blogger and Japanese computers don't get along very well, so I can't move the pictures around within the text, so adding them right now is a bit inconvenient. Mata ne!

Another Job Well Done

Was ist das?


Sea urchin, 雲丹　or 海胆, that is uni flavored cheetos. They taste like cheetos.

Logan's Run

I just watched the 1976 classic Logan's Run. I have to say, this movie is hilarious in certain ways. It is basically just an old-school dystopian sci-fi story about the evils of collectivism and all, but it has its charm. Especially noteworthy is Michael York, who is hilarious in his sheer lameness. I admit I am now sort of interested in the book and its sequels, though.

I'd like to point out, though, one weird thing I noticed, in a nitpicky sci-fi fashion. I am not sure of how much time has passed between the supposed end of society and when the story takes place, but I noticed that the people from the city (our main characters) had no problems understanding the old man from outside of the city. I would think that if a significant amount of time had passed since the city had been isolated and the story's setting, that the language would have changed like crazy. Also, no black people in the city? I call dystopian racism.

Spring Has Sprung

There's a wonderful fling to be flung and all that. That may not seem like such a big deal if you are currently living in an equitorial African country and fighting off bugs and heat, but keep in mind that this is what it looked like here just one month ago.

That was my car. Obviously getting out was a bit of a challenge.

There's the parking lot for my apartment building.

And there's one of the schools. A fun time was had by all.

Lately I've been studying French and German for no particular reason, which of course means learning vocabulary words, which is of course very tedious. It is made more frustrating by the fact that European languages are in general stupid and involve gender, which really serves no purpose whatsoever when you think about it. Japanese is great in that there is no gender, there's no real plural form to speak of, and pretty much everything is regular. From this perspective, one has to wonder why Germanic tribes/Romans were so dumb about how they decided to speak. Anyway...

As you are no doubt aware, French, like all Romance languages, to the best of my knowledge, uses two genders, masculine and feminine. German, not being a Romance language, uses a third gender, neuter, in addition to those. A friend mentioned to me that when he was learning French, there was an Italian guy in the class who sucked at everything except gender. Eventually he figured out that the reason was that in Italian, gender is extremely easy because the endings to the words indicate the gender, whereas in French, the rules are a little less precise. There happen to be a lot of cognates between French and Italian, and, furthermore, gender is preserved between the two, so if you speak Italian, it's really no thing to get gender in French.

Knowing that German and French are not in the same language family, I decided to do a little comparison of gender and see how well it stacked up. I took a couple sets of vocab words in both languages, and compared the genders of nouns to see what would happen. From a total of 94 words, in German 32 were masculine, 22 feminine, and 40 neuter. It seems like neuter is a bit more prevalent, but I'm not really sure how to do statistics on this, nor do I care to, and I'm guessing the sets of vocab that you choose (as in places, foods, jobs, etc.) might affect that. In French, of the 94 total words, 49 were masculine and 45 feminine, so probably just about the same, which comes as no real surprise.

Of the 32 masculine German words, when translated to French, 21 remained masculine, while 11 became feminine. That doesn't seem like a huge difference, but it's probably notable, and definitely good, if so, since gender-preserved words should be easier to remember.

Of the 22 feminine German words, 19 remained feminine after translation, and only 3 became masculine. That seems to me a very strong indication, and a good one, at that.

Of the 40 neuter words, 25 became masculine and 15 became feminine. One would expect if it were entirely random about 20 of each, which is probably not too far off here. So, maybe there is a slight preference for masculine nouns, but maybe not. I have no idea, really.

On a completely unrelated note, imagine the closed interval [0, 1]. That is to say, all the real numbers between 0 and 1, including the endpoints. Now, remove the middle third, that is, the open interval (1/3, 2/3), so that you are left with two disjoint closed intervals, [0, 1/3] and [2/3, 1]. Now, from those intervals, remove the middle thirds, giving you four disjoint closed intervals, [0, 1/9]; [2/9, 1/3]; [2/3, 7/9]; [8/9, 1]. Then repeat this process to infinity. What you get is a set called the Cantor set. It's pretty clear that the set isn't empty, and, in fact, is infinite. What's less clear is that it contains no intervals, and is in fact, nowhere dense. (That last bit is some topology stuff, but if you are still reading, you can just look this up.) What's crazy is that not only is it infinite, but it has the same cardinality as the original interval, which is the same as that of the real numbers. It's neat.

Zombie Movies

Let me talk a bit about zombie movies, which in general are awesome. I recently watched the original Day of the Dead, the last of the original Dead Trilogy from George Romero, so I feel like sort of recapping the genre.

Romero really created the genre as we know it with the classic Night of the Living Dead, which holds up pretty well. It is remarkable for all these reasons according to people who place far too much significance on stupid movies, like for having an intelligent black man as the protagonist, but that is not what is really important. What is important is that it sets out some of the rules for zombies, such as that they are slow and stupid and all they want to do is eat people. Zombie movies fans seem to be obsessed with "the rules" more than fans of any other genre, and flip out if zombies are made fast or smart or anything. I think this is due to the fact that zombie movies are basically just survival fantasy, and people get bees in their bonnets when the fantastic plans they inevitable contrive for their own survival in the unlikely event of a zombie apocolypse end up being useless.

Anyway, the sequel proper to Night of the Living Dead is Dawn of the Dead, which is basically about some folks who hole up in a mall. I have to say it is the best zombie movie I've seen. It manages to have a sense of humor despite being pretty bleak. The opening sequence is also kind of surreal, being about soldiers raiding a building to kill the zombies that the people living there had allowed to survive because they didn't want to destroy the bodies. It's very weird, but shows one of the cool things about the Romero Trilogy in that you don't really see everything that is going on, but it is clear that the world is pretty messed up.

The last of the trilogy is Day of the Dead, which is pretty hard to find, as I Dead, which is pretty hard to find, as I understand it. It's absurdly dark, being about a small group of people living in a military bunker who are trying to find a cure or solution or something for the zombie plague despite thinking they are probably the only people left on earth. It's mostly about the group all hating on each other and going crazy, and there is almost no humor. It's also absurdly gory compared to other zombie movies, especially the last twenty minutes or so, when everything goes wrong. It's pretty good, though.

There's another movie in that series, but is generally not part of the trilogy, as a trilogy usually has part of the trilogy, as a trilogy usually has three parts, as I understand it. It's called Land of the Dead, and it is pretty much terrible, but at least entertaining. It features Jon Leguizamo (I am not concerned enough to look up his name) bashing up zombies to protect a city that has been built by some crazy industrialist guy, pretty much the only refuge from the zombies, but you gots to pay to get in. Kind of an interesting concept, but like I said, not really good. It is pretty obvious that stuff goes wrong and the zombies get in. Wow.

The other sequels to Night of the Living Dead are the Return of the Living Dead series, which zombie fans seem to hate due to their utter stupidity. I personally think they are awesome. They are generally low budget, and play by slightly different rules than the other Dead series. For example, in the Return of the Living Dead series, the zombies can only be killed by fire or electrocution, but in Romero's series, zombies can only be killed by destroying their brains. In the Romero series, zombies just try to eat people, but in the Return try to eat people, but in the Return series, the zombies hunger specifically for brains. Also, sometimes the zombies talk and are created by some crazy government chemical. These movies are hilarious.

There are other low budget movies, but I am not going to other low budget movies, but I am not going to look them up specifically.

I should mention the Resident Evil movies, which are generally terrible. I never really got why anyone would enjoy the games, which struck me as boring whenever I saw them, and the movies don't really do any better. They feature a super-powered main character, which is a pet peeve of mine. They have a lot of crappy cg. They spend forever talking about their stupid evil corporation villain which is uninteresting to say the least. They generally just try to be cool and fail on every level.

28 Days Later is a cool movie, even if some zombie purists claim it isn't a zombie movie because the so-called zombies aren't dead and are fast. Regardless, it is a zombie movie for all intents and purposes, and pretty effective. It's very dark and keeps you watching. It gets a little ridiculous near the end in terms of how realistic the plot is, but whatever. I'm particularly pleased with the idea that zombies would eventually starve to death, because, yeah, they would.

28 Weeks Later is an abomination. You can tell it will be terrible almost from the very beginning, and with this movie more than any other, I found myself cheering for the zombies to kill the annoying main character. Stupid incompetent zombies.

That's pretty much all there is for now. Happy Vernal Equinox.

Japanese People Make Awesome Cake

Seriously, very good cake. It's always small but decorated incredibly ornately. I don't make cake, but I do sometimes make this.


The thing you are supposed to notice is the stuff in the middle, which is saba, 鯖, meaning mackerel, in miso sauce. I am basically like a chef now except that I can only make a couple of things and I get all the recipes from About.com. But, anyway, I digress.

It is graduation time for the elementary school kids, which is sort of nice, but also too bad because now all the sixth graders that I've gotten to know over the last few months are becoming junior high schoolers. Sixth graders are sometimes the hardest kids to teach because they don't think that learning is inherently fun, so they don't always pay attention, but some of them are great.

This weekend I went to an enkai, 宴会, for the end of the school year, with the people from the office, and that was fun. I am getting so good at singing the theme song to the Doraemon cartoon, apparently. I guess that is what happes when you play it almost every day. Soon it will be spring vacation, so I might be able to take a short trip somewhere, probably just within the prefecture or something. I hate planning, though, so I have not done any of that. We'll just have to see.

I'm well over halfway into The Confusion, which is the second book in the Baroque series from Neal Stephenson. It continues to be excellent, but if I finish it, I won't have the third one, The System of the World to read. If anyone in a more English-friendly country would send me that, they would be pretty awesome and might get something weird and Japanese in return, but we'll just have to see.

This One's For You

I heard that a dude named Chet really likes the blog, so this one's for you, Chet. It's kind of late, so there won't be anything else to this post.

A Funny Thing Happened the Other Day

Let me relate to you a funny story that I think illustrates some of the wonderful ways in which Japan is weird.

A few days ago, I was walking home from school, as were a bunch of the kids, who had been there late doing club activities, which I got to partake in, much to my delight. Now, most of the snow has melted here by this point, but there are still some sizable piles of it where the snowplows pushed it after clearing streets and parking lots. One of these piles is still large enough that kids will climb up it and play.

Well, as I was walking home, some of the kids were on this pile, and then there came a great commotion. Apparently, there was some problem and the kids were asking me to help, so I came to see what the matter was, despite the fact that I was not wearing my boots at the time, so climbing around in the snow didn't really appeal to me. Anyway, one of the kids had managed to get his boot stuck in the snow, and nobody could pull it out, so he was just laying on this mound of snow in one boot while all the kids were standing around him. I climbed up to see if I could get this rather Arthurian boot, but due to the kids all standing around, I could only reach it by bending over a pile of snow, and only then partially gripping it.

It was really stuck in there, so I couldn't get it out. It did, of course, occur to me to simply dig it out, but, as I said, there were kids all around, so I couldn't get to a position where that would be possible. So, another kids starts digging the boot out, and eventually succeeds in freeing it from its icy prison. In the meantime, apparently some kids had gone back to the school to get some real teachers to help or something, so a hole squad of them came bearing shovels. I'm not sure why anyone thought a stuck boot was a state of emergency, but you can't really fault them for responding too much.

After some more digging around in the snow, the point of which was lost on me, most of the teachers went back and the kids returned home. When some of the teachers thanked me for helping, I told them I hadn't really done anything, and pointed out the kids who actually did do the digging. Still, they seemed convinced that me being there was important, when really I was just interested in seeing what was going to happen, and the kid who had lost his boot was even made to thank me and the other kid and apologize. Again, I'm not sure why getting one's boot stuck in snow is really something one needs to apologize for, but I suppose that is what we call a cultural difference.

So, that was all behind me, but then a couple nights ago, the kid who lost his boot and his mother came to my door apologizing and thanking me profusely, even giving me a box of candy for my "trouble." I again tried to explain that it was no big deal and that I hadn't done anything in the first place, but I've found that trying to be modest, even if it is entirely truthful, is almost entirely pointless here. Ah, Japan.

So, basically, everyone here is great. Here's the candy, if you are interested. It is very good.


And here is some new "Beer Fine," which is not bad. It is low-carb, which seems to be a new trend here, as all the major brands just came out with low-carb versions. So, yeah, low-carb, but not terrible despite that. The snack is soybean-flavored (?) puffs of something (corn?) shaped like soybeans that were absolutely awesome.

This Is Senegal

I finally got around to adding another sweet blog link. You should check it out, yo.

Kuriimu Shichuu

I like this stuff, but it took me a couple hours to realize that kuriim shichuu meant cream stew.