It felt good, and the results are pleasing. I dug out the Mamiya 645 camera earlier this week, half expecting to find fungus or something, not having used it in over a year. No fungus apparent, just a dead battery, which didn’t affect metering as there is none with the prism finder I have, but did necessitate being limited to a 1/60 shutter speed (with a dead battery, the shutter will only fire at 1/60). With my trusty analog Sekonic meter in hand, Kaika and I went for a walk around the neighborhood.

All of a sudden felt the tug of a big(ger) negative, and while I certainly have a much more solid 35mm camera than the Mamiya, probably due to size and the loud clang of the shutter, it somehow felt substantial, felt like an old friend (indeed, of all my current cameras, I’ve had it the longest). Getting the negs back tonight, more of the same. Tactile is a word that comes to mind.

Someone suggested family as a way to work through “photographer’s block.” Sally Mann or Friedlander I am not, but we’ll try not to get too hung up on the whys and wherefores for now. Didn’t realize until we were already outside that the wiping off of Kaika’s milk moustache from breakfast had been neglected. In lieu of a makeup artist, I left it as-is. It’s only really apparent in one photo.

In connection with a “Blog Establishment” cover feature piece, New York Magazine has assembled a list of the 50 most linked-to blogs and mapped their connections in one of those pretty graphics (pdf here). What’s interesting are the number of Asian sites listed in among the 50, sites the magazine has to admit “don’t have any links from the others shown here,” which takes more than a slight bite out of their “blog establishment” angle.

Particularly interesting to me was this: out of nine blogs listed as “Japanese”, only three of them are in fact Japanese; the other six are actually Chinese. (There are a further six “Chinese” or “in Chinese” blogs listed — all correctly so). Of course this is just sloppiness on the magazine’s part, but it makes you wonder how much the magazine cares about these “Asian” blogs (a full 17 out of the 50 listed).

No doubt because they never bothered to find anyone who could read or understand them, most of these blogs are simply tagged “in Japanese” or “in Chinese.” But perhaps more troubling, there’s no acknowledgement of their place vis-a-vis this so-called “blog establishment.” In the magazine’s cover story, there isn’t a single mention of these or any Asian bloggers, perpetuating their own “A-list” bias as it were (“A” in this case most definitely not standing for Asia). They can crash the Top 50 party based on their Technorati data, but the A-list (or B- and C-listers for that matter) won’t even acknowlege their existence.

It could also be that many of the “foreign” blogs in this Top 50 (12 altogether) are hosted on MSN’s My Space blogging platform, which the article refers to, not surprisingly, as a “rather lame network of blog sites.” Granted these “community” sites tend to link and comment with each other, thereby pushing up their “linked to” status, but shouldn’t this phenomenon be part of the story, rather than relegated to the asterisked margins of lameness?

Today we got our first, and perhaps only, snowfall of the winter in the Tokyo area. This was really Kaika’s first time out in the snow (he had a cold when it snowed last year). At first he couldn’t deal with the flakes landing on his tongue and on his eyelashes, but he quickly warmed up to the whole idea once I showed him you could throw the stuff. Not surprisingly, 30 minutes later it was hard to get him to go back into the house.

This is Demon Kokugure, a performer and artist, and serious sumo fan. Here he is doing commentary for NHK’s sumo broadcast (he’s doing a full 5 hours for them, very unusual). Don’t judge this book by the cover, this guy knows his sumo, frontwards and back. I’m looking forward to being able to hear his insight when I watch the DVD recording tonight. (I’ll upload a better image tonight as well.)

I have to work harder at teaching him [English] words, but I get the feeling he will speak more Japanese first, because there are so many easy two-syllable words for him to pronounce easily in Japanese, and most English words that I say to him are longer and harder to pronounce in comparison.

To which I responded, in a comment (I’m posting more or less verbatim, so this is a bit rough-hewn):

just my two yen of course but I wouldn’t fall for the “japanese is easier to pronouce than english” trap too quickly….i heard similar when my little one was taking his first verbal steps….just remember, your little one isn’t saying anything is difficult, his parents (and other well-meaning folk) are! for him, the concept of “difficulty” doesn’t exist.

the fact of the matter is, is that kids in an English environment, or kids in a Swahili environment (okay, i know nothing about Swahili but you get the idea), learn perfectly well how to start repeating sounds, regardless of whether the word is “difficult” to pronouce. the very concept of “difficulty” is arbitrary and tends to reflect the speaker’s point of view, not an objective fact. I mean, for most of us native English speakers, French is at the same time an incomparably beautiful and exceeding difficult to pronouce correctly language…yet the very fact that there are millions of people who can speak the language beautifully gives the lie to the idea that the language is difficult at all, for those born into that language.

I have found that if you are serious about your child learning your own language, as I trust you are, you have to view that development within your language, not via the pov of the other language. Granted, being that English is the minority language, and that the child is surrounded by Japanese almost every moment of his life, it IS an uphill battle, but that doesn’t mean you should be raising any white flags. In actual fact, there is little difference between “atta” and “there it is”, or “baba” and “grandma”, but even to acknowledge that is to worry too much about it. just teach him what you want. hell, I’d start him on “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” right now!

(of course the same applies to your [Japanese] wife wanting him to speak Japanese as a native, which means we need to try not to correct his pronunciation when he says “makudonarudo” [McDonald's in Japanese])

I’m curious what others think, especially those raising (or trying to raise) a child bilingually. I’m no expert of course, and Kaika still has a long way to go before we can hope to proclaim him bilingual, but I guess I’m natually suspicious of this idea that Japanese, which doesn’t have a lot of words longer than 2 syllables (at least not any words a toddler needs to know!), not to mention that it does have a lot of onomatopoeic words that can at times be mistaken for “baby talk”, automatically makes it easier to learn.

On the other hand, I suppose one could make the argument that the child really isn’t aware he’s repeating “words” but rather is just sounding out sounds, sounds he’s only vaguely connecting with meaning. In which case, I guess the easier to replicate sounds (or syllables) would get the advantage. I don’t know.

Well, you can see I’m no linguist, but if you have an opinion or your own experiences to share, please leave a comment.

Given that part of the purpose of this trip was to get away from all the various goings on around New Years time, it’s highly ironic — or just stupid — that I decided on the spur of the moment to visit Ise Shrine, which just so happens to be the holiest Shinto place in Japan. “The ‘vatican’ of Shintoism,” as it has been put. I almost got to where everyone was heading, but the steady flow of foot traffic soon became a solid wall of standing still worshippers, and I didn’t like my prospects of getting there and back in a reasonable time, and so I turned around. And less pragmatically speaking, I started to feel somewhat guilty of my agnosticism. A perverse notion in Japan perhaps, considering that if you asked the legions who were there today, “Are you religious?” the overwhelming answer would be “No!” But having experienced more or less the same thing yesterday at Himeji, seemingly the only person not offering a prayer at the shrine, I knew it would be awkward.

Headed home tomorrow, which is a good thing. Took this tonight from Kobe’s Odaiba-like shopping complex at the port, which does have in its favor compared to its bigger Tokyo sister that it’s a lot more accessible (walkable from any of Kobe’s main stations). An excellent date spot no doubt. Actually I can’t help but see Kobe as one large date spot, which is probably why I haven’t taken to the city as I had hoped, seeing as I don’t have a date nor am I’m looking for one.

The first part of the day was spent at what is generally regarded as Japan’s most beautiful castle, Himeji, about 40 minutes west of here. (It would have made for a better image than the one above but I neglected to take a cell phone picture.) Being New Years Day, entry was free, but the place was packed and not a very pleasant experience overall. The reason for the crowds I discovered when I got to the top of the main tower, as there’s a shrine up there (it’s customary for Japanese to visit a shrine sometime during the first 3 days of the new year).

Naoko warned me that I probably wouldn’t be overly impressed with Kobe’s “foreigner houses” and other attendant vestiges of European presence, and indeed she was right. It does seem to be quite a hit with the kawaii set, not surprisingly.

I hate arriving into a city at night, so hard to get one’s bearings, get a lay of the land. Of course the nice thing about Japan is that no matter where you land, you’re pretty much guaranteed you won’t have to worry about personal safety. Hence I can sit on a bench in Kobe’s Chinatown in semi-darkness typing this out with nary a care other than figuring out how to get back to my hotel.

Unlike my previous stop, Kurashiki wears its tourist heart on its sleeve. Quaintness is just oozing from the mortar and tile of the old granaries (kura) that line the “historical district”. It’s nice, don’t get me wrong, but there’s just something a bit inauthentic about it, a bit disingenuous. Would these buildings still be around had someone not realized the tourist potential of them? On the other side of the station, seemingly far away, there’s a Tivoli amusement park modeled on the famed Tivoli in Copenhagen. But I can’t vouch for it’s fidelity to the original. I only had time to fit in one theme park today.