My 100 word update

My ears must have been burning for I decided to drop in on some of my fellow Japan-based bloggers tonight (virtually, mind you), and was hit with a pang of rue and regret when I saw this blog mentioned on KenLoo’s World, in a very flattering post about Ken missing my photography and writing, and how an old post of mine brought up some thoughts Ken has been having recently about copyrights and such.

But I’m not pinging that post, but rather his previous post about writing 100 words. His sentence, “It’s bad if you don’t write, though.” it occurred to me might have been subconsciously directed at me (I won’t flatter myself to think it conscious)….at any rate I felt I should get on my high horse and fire up the blog apparatus and post my 100 words post haste. Of course, when have I ever limited myself to 100 words?

Where have I been? Nowhere special, I’ve been where I’ve always been, physically, but truthfully my mental space has shifted a little and I’ve become less interested in sharing my thoughts with others recently, or at least not sufficiently interested to make the effort and move away other things I’m doing. Such as…. Namely, studying Japanese (including studying for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test — Level 3 only — which is less than 4 weeks away now); and working, including taking on more private English students.

Stuff I’ve wanted to blog on but haven’t:

* I upgraded to Movable Type 2.5, mainly so I could add in the search feature. But it was at that time that I sort of gave up the blogging ghost, so it hasn’t yet been added. Remains to be seen if I do add it, and if I do, whether it will be searching a living breathing site or a remants of a 5-month old archive.

* It’s hardly winter yet, still Fall as evidenced by my Chichibu photos of a few days ago, but already it’s cold enough that I can’t remember what the summer’s heat and humidity were like, and that sure enough I’m already starting to anticipate the cold dissipating and summer returning. And I’m sure I’ll repeat the same thoughts with different seasons when summer does roll around. I can’t imagine living this cycle the rest of my life, always pining for what’s on the other side of the seasonal fence.

* Naoko and I had our wedding photos taken a couple of weeks ago. 7 months after the fact, but I suppose better later than never. The in-laws are happy (and they paid for it, so I’m happy!) Wedding photography is big business here (as is other kinds of studio photography, lots of children pictures and what not), places will charge as much as $800 USD for 2 poses in the studio (mind you, this includes kimono rental and make-up). If you want to have the negative (so you can make prints on your own later), it’s usually around $80 per negative. But Naoko shopped around and we found a very reasonable place (in ultra expensive Ginza, no less): 20 poses for roughly $500 USD. One of these days I’ll get around to scanning and uploading a pic for you all to see.

* Naoko’s pregancy is coming along schedule, yesterday she paid another visit to the hospital and came home with a video ultrasound. I can believe how much the fetus moves around in there. Although we’re still a good 4 1/2 months away, Naoko successfully dragged me to the opening of a new baby store this week, where we bought some things on sale.

* That’s more progress than we’ve made on the name front. Having kanji at our disposal adds a whole new dimension to the naming. Not only will the visual nature of the characters be important (to me at least), but the various meanings will of course need to be considered. I want the name to have complicated-to-write (and rare) kanji, my thinking being that if the first kanji they learn is difficult, learning the rest of them will be downhill from there. Not sure though, will need to think about that one more. I certainly wouldn’t name my child Major Major (any Heller fans out there?) and so I don’t want to needlessly saddle the child with a pain-in-the-ass name, but….

* Along these lines, I’ve been mentally drawing up a list of my hopes and aspirations for the child. I think this is important enough to discuss so I’ll hopefully blog on this later, but I think living in a country that devalues individual thinking and to my mind puts limits on achievement has caused me to do a lot of (admittedly way ahead of the game) thinking on this. Perhaps “devalue” is too strong a word? Uh, I’ll need to blog on this when I’m in a good mood or it will run the risk of becoming yet another rant.

* I went back to the Salt and Tobacco Museum’s Yoshiwara exhibition a second time before it closed (thoughts written after my first visit are here), and I also went recently to see the Ota Gallery’s companion Yoshiwara ukiyo-e print exhibition. I can’t write well enough about how sublime, how alive, how wonderful, how moving these prints are. That said, I can neither write well enough about something that has started to gnaw at me: for all its refinement, beauty, elegance, it’s easy and convenient to overlook the fact that Yoshiwara was (and still is) a place where women were prostituted. It was at the Salt and Tobacco Museum’s exhibit that this hit home. In a series of black and white sketches (perhaps from which prints were later made?) by Utagawa Kuniyasu, Yoshiwara courtesans were depicted in various scenes all revolving around the draconian methods used by their handlers to induce pregnant courtesans to miscarriage. These methods included tying up the women at a stake and beating them, violently pushing on their distended bellies, and inserting hot pokers into their vaginas.

Seeing these prints came just after another incident: at the wedding photography studio, I offhandedly remarked to Naoko and the women busily changing her kimono that she looked like a “Yoshiwara bijin” with her head piece, makeup, and gaudy kimono. But as the women laughed their tittering laughter and exclaimed that “gaijin know more about Japanese culture than Japanese do,” I became bogged down by the realization that I had just likened my wife to a prostitute, and no amount of refined and elegant floating world images could gloss over that fact, even if I was the only one in the room to realize it. So let me rephrase what I wrote above: for all its because of the refinement, beauty, elegance ascribed to it by men for the consumption of other men, it’s easy and convenient to overlook the fact that Yoshiwara was (and still is) a place where women were prostituted.

To end this little spurt of blogging on a lighter note…,

* I see that Jeremy of Antipixel has finally gotten around to posting long-promised photographs of his neighborhood. Start here and go backwards through his archives for more. I’m jealous. His pictures are more interesting, and I think his neighborhood’s too.

* I got a nice email from the owner of randomentality.com (great domain) praising my photos and writings. He’s got lovely photos of Montreal on his developing photo blog. I see the same eye as mine in the photos he takes, so no wonder he was taken with mine.

* Is there any sound more plaintive than the charumera music played from the ramen truck passing by in the dark night around 9:30 in the evening? So what if it’s from a cassette tape player these days. I need to tape it and upload it here.

Hmmn, I’m not going to stick this into Word to find out the word count, but I think we can safely say it tops 100. So if I don’t post for another 10 days, it’s because I rationalized that I just posted 10 days worth of words herein this one post!