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It’s the cherry blossom season here in Tokyo. Japan’s cherry blossom time is famous, and justly so. There would appear to be a number of reasons for this.

• The cherry trees produce incredible amounts of bloosm. Not only do the twigs and minor branches produce blossom, but the major branches produce it in places as well. The incredible profusion covers the trees with pink and white flowers.
• The cherry trees produce their blossom before producing any leaves, unlike many trees which produce leaves first. This again provides a spectacular sight of just the blossom with no leaves to get in the way of viewing.
• It’s a very short lived affair. As soon as the blossoms start appearing, petals start dropping off, and within a couple of weeks they main bloom is over.

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Spotted today in Mainichi Daily News (Mainichi means “every day”). Following the success of their “Maid cafe” Pinafoa (“Pinafore” in Engrish) where the waitresses dress up in traditional maid outfits, a company has opened a “Butler cafe” where the waitresses dress up in pseudo-traditional butler outfits. The quote from one of the senior waiting staff was:

“There’s a wide range of butlers here — moe (passionate interest) types, good-looking types and tsundere (aloof/lovestruck) types — so both men and women can enjoy it. We’re aiming to be the world’s No. 1 butler cafe.”

Easy to be the best when you’re the only one, I would have thought.

Just daily life weirdness in Japan.

I’m often reminded of an SF story which included the idea of “femininists” (note: that’s the correct spelling). In the story they’re a cover for a terrorist organisation, but the idea itself is a lot of fun: in reaction to the imitation of masculine traits exhibited by many feminists, the femininists emphasise “traditional” feminine virtues while retaining control over their own lives. This seems to be quite in keeping with where Japanese women are coming from. They strive for equality of opportunity in many things while not losing the things they like about being “feminine” in clothes, appearance and power over the sex-dominated brains of men.

Unfortunately I can’t remember which story that was in and a web search on femininists simply brings up huge numbers of pages where they’ve spelled “feminist” incorrectly.

It’s that time of year, and I never knew if Japan had DST. So, having been reminded of the issue by User Friendly, I did a web search and found that Japan does not follow daylight saving time. You learn something new every day, and today one of the things I learned is that in Antarctica there are three time zones observed: Chile, GMT-3 and New Zealand. The Chilean and New Zealand zones observe their relative DST settings, but the British base at Rothera maintains GMT-3 all year. So, when the UK “springs forward” I’ll only be eight hours ahead of the UK.

During discussions with my collaborators yesterday we ended up discussing the present evolution of Japanese. Explanation of this requires a quick description of Japanese writing systems. For those of you who know about this, you may wish to skip down to below the “read the rest of this post” marker.

Japanese Writing

There are three main elements to Japanese writing: Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana. Hiragana and Katakana, collectively referred to as kana, are a syllabic phonetic system. There is very little “spelling”, although the pronunciation and dictation are not quite as simple as Japanese teachers first present (is anything?). The two kana systems have various usages historically but present usage is that hiragana, a more “cursive” script is used for Japanese words and word fragments (see below on kanji usage for word-fragment usage) such as desu (です), while katakana, the more blocky or angular script is used for Western loan words such as camera (カメラ). The kana were derived from phonetic simplifications of imported kanji (see below).

The Japanese Kanji are derived from three different imports of Chinese Kanji characters. These importations were sometimes based on the sounds of the characters, sometimes on their meanings, and sometimes on both. In addition, original misunderstandings of sound or meaning were possible and divergences in both spoken language, kanji usage, and kanji presentation have now led to a significant divergence of the kanji in use. Until about twenty years ago, however, it was still common in schools to study Chinese literature by reading the kanji in Japanese. This practice seems to have mostly been dropped, possibly except for some private schools. Partly because of the way the kanji were imported. When using kanji, there are usually at least two and often more than two possible phonetic “readings” of the characters – based both on multiple phonetic imports from China and also on different spoken words in Japanese represented by the same kanji. Just to make things more complicated kanji may have overlapping meanings with the same or difference readings. A typical written sentence in Japanese will contain multiple kanji with hiragana used for parts of speech: particles (a bit like English prepositions, conjunctions etc) declensions and conjugations. For example, the kanji 上 with conceptual meaning of above, over, rise, raise etc. is read as “a” in 上げる (ageru: raise or give) and in 上がる (agaru: rise) in transitive and intransitive variants of the same verb, but is also read as “oo-eh” in 上に (ue ni: on top of or above). The hiragana げ, が and に indicate the correct phonetic reading. When kanji are used in multiple kanji “words” there is a specific reading of the combination, usually but not universally, based on the Chinese phonetic reading. Some close phonetic variants such as kawa/gawa (川), ta/da (ç”°) occur in different combinations due to euphony (sounding good) or ease of pronunciation.

OK, now you’re ready to appreciate some modern Japanese written puns.
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As part of my research in both terrorism issues and Japanese social attitudes, I’m reading “Underground” by Haruki Murakami. He’s a well-regarded Japanese novelist. Underground isn’t a novel, it’s a piece of “witness literature” – edited accounts of the attack from survivors. I’m about a quarter of the way through and it’s getting quite chilling. The account I just read talks about Ochanomizu and Yotsuya stations. When I travel to the Kanda campus of Meiji University I get the Odakyu line to Shinjuku then take the Chuo (Rapid) line past Yotsuya station and get off at Ochanomizu. I’m no more worried by this than the fact that I travel through some of the 7/7 bomb sites when I visit London, but it does make the accounts more immediate for me.

Last year when I was applying for my visa to come to Japan there was a bit of a panic at one point in that I’d sent a bunch of original documents through by airmail (OK, I should have had them couriered) and they hadn’t arrived two weeks later. After couriering a smaller packet of hopefully sufficient replacements – I didn’t have originals of some of the same ones since i only had a single copy) later that day I got word from Japan that the original airmail stuff had arrived, taking 16 days in total.

I recently found that amazon.co.jp have an English language site, so I’m using that to order books I want while I’m here. They processed the first order today and sent it out. The shipping details show:

Items shipped on 2007/2/15:
Delivery estimate: 2007/2/16 – 2007/3/12

Now that’s impressive, giving almost four weeks for possible delivery!

Near to Shinjuku Station, which I’ve mentioned before, is the Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden. This was originally a garden for the royal family but is now a national park. It includes both Japanese and European style garden/park areas as well as a greenhouse with exotic plants.As usual, there’s a bunch of photographs. I spent about two hours wandering around this tranquil area near the centre of Tokyo. We’ve had some rain the last couple of days. Not enough to be annoying but enough to clear the air somewhat and it was a bright but cool day. I’m not sure if the blossom on the trees is expected to be appearing this early or if it’s a result of the very mild winter, but a number of the trees had already started to bloom. Tree blossom seems to be a big thing in Japan and there were lots of people photographing the blooms. So many, in fact, that it was awkward to get a decent shot of some of the trees in bloom without it being full of photographers and cameras, many with high resolution zoom lenses on them. Still, I did get a couple of nice shots, myself.

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I finally got around to visiting the Edo Tokyo Museum. Pictures of my visit are available.

This is well worth planning a visit to if you come to Tokyo. It covers the  development of Tokyo from its original small fishing village, through the Edo period when it was the headquarters of the Tokugawa Shogunate, and then through its renaming as Tokyo and on into a modern metropolis with occupation and modern technology. It’s a well put together museum that doesn’t overwhelm with too many things. The guide book recommends allowing two hours for a visit. It’s possible to see the whole of the permanent exhibition in that time. There is other space for temporary exhibitions. Unlike museums such as the Victoria and Albert in London, one can review the whole museum in one go and not become burned out. A defined route through the two floors is fairly obvious and  includes a large seating area for a rest about half way through, under the shadow of the spectacular recreation of the Float of the Kanda Myoujin Shrine. There are a number of incredibly detailed 1/30th scale models of street scenes and major buildings from the early period, along with a substantial number of Shogunate artifacts, including of course swords and armour, but also including clothing, children’s toys and many documents. (more…)

I was really glad today that my host, Murata-sensei, had mentioned to me when they provided my visiting professor’s ID tag that I would need it in February. They’ve just finished this year’s exams for current students and have started the entrance examinations for prospective students to enter in April. Japan’s academic year is very different to that of the West.

Japanese schoolchildren who are expected to go to University will typically start extra evening (and weekend) classes to prepare for University entrance exams at around nine or 10. Although things may well be changing due to the over-a-decade-long recession, it is still that case that many aspire to a lifelong job with one of the major companies. The way to get one of these jobs is to graduate from one of the top universities. The way to get into the top universities is to do well in their entrance exam. Since many of the others you’ll be competing against for those places will take extra classes for eight or nine years, you have to do so. Unfortunately, after the effort of getting in, many of the students will coast through their degrees and come out the other side with a reasonable pass (some of the academic writing I’ve seen really shows the frustration of the staff at this attitude and the system that allows it to continue by not placing any significant stress on the students to learn). Once they’ve gained their degrees and their places in the companies, promotion is mostly on a strict seniority basis. Hence the lack of movement between companies.

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I now have my own office at Meiji University. Until now I’ve been working at a desk in a shared office in the “Academic Commons” building. For the next two months I’ve got an office a couple of doors down from Murata-sensei, my host and principle collaborator. We’re finally getting down to the detailed work on the first piece of research – a comparison between the Japanese and UK/EU Data Protection legislation. We started at just past 14:00 and ran through until after 17:00, as we had done last week as well. At 17:00, once again, the PA system throughout the building, including in the offices, played a soulful little number just to remind people that it was going home time. Weird!