Posted on

Social obligation

Naoko and Kaika, April 26, 2003: click for larger image

We took Kaika yesterday to visit an uncle and aunt of Naoko’s. It was also my first time to meet any of Nako’s extended family. We presented them with an obligatory gift, as they had given us money when Kaika was born. Kaika slept the whole time, although you’ll forgive me if I tell you that at a certain point I was trying to telepathically send him the message to start crying so we could get the hell out of there. From this picture, I suspect Naoko was trying to do the same thing. The conversation was stilted, I spent much of the time trying to hide the hole I had found (too late) in my sock, and all of us tried to overcome the obvious awkwardness of the situation by staring at Kaika sleeping on the sofa, with utterances of kawaii desu ne (“isn’t he cute?”) liberally proffered in an attempt to salve the stasis. I will say this, however, they had one hell of a nice house. A few more photos from the visit are here.

Posted on

Local kid makes good — in Japan

There’s a humorous puff-piece story in The New York Times online about Anthony Bianchi, a former New Yorker from Brooklyn who is now a naturalized Japanese citizen, and who is running for a seat on the Inuyama (Aichi prefecture) City Council. Bianchi, a 44-year old English teacher and diehard New York Yankee fan, appears to be in good position to get elected, and is not hurt by the current interest in the Yankees now that Japanese baseball superstar Hideki Matsui is playing for them. But asked about his core support:

His political base, he said, is the 1,800 students he has taught here since 1988. He joked, “If you run into anyone around town speaking English with a Brooklyn accent, you know who taught them.”

“If I become councilman, I’m going to bust their chops,” says Bianchi, and with respect to his platform, adds,

“I am not going to do the typical foreign clown thing,” he said. “We want to get Council meetings on the Internet, broadcast on cable TV. Citizens don’t find out until things are decided.”

Buried in the article was this amusing nugget, which I think epitomizes Japanese tv:

“If I was a regular 44-year-old schoolteacher running for election, all this wouldn’t be happening,” he said, jerking his thumb toward a Japanese television crew and two reporters doing stories today about an American reporter doing a story about the American running for City Council.

…two reporters doing stories today about an American reporter doing a story about the American…

Posted on

A round of acknowledgements

I just wanted to publicly thank some fellow bloggers who have helped me this past week:

For helping me get my moblog up and running, I’d like to thank Kevin Cameron (Bastish.net) for his generous and selfless efforts to create Moblogging for Other People, and continued work to make it better for its users, and proselytizing on behalf of moblogging and where it might lead. And all this from someone who doesn’t even own a mobile phone! Thanks also to Jeffrey Wood (snapturtle) who patiently answered my questions about his Moblog and PHP.

Lil (esthet.org) and Jean Snow (jeansnow.net) were extremely helpful in helping me debug a problem I had this week with how my site was displaying on IE for the Mac. Considering I don’t own a Mac nor really know anyone nearby who does, I was reliant on their taking the trouble to QA my site as I tweaked this and that control, and to send me screenshots of the progress. Without their help and suggestions as to how to fix the problem, I wouldn’t have been able to fix it.

Lil also alerted me to a problem with respect to how my fonts were appearing on IE for the Mac, most likely as a result of changing the encoding of this page so it could display Japanese characters. (I will say that one thing I’ve learned this week: if I ever do get a Mac, I’m going to use Safari as my browser!) For help with this problem (I’m not sure in the end that I ever fixed it, but I’ve changed the encoding back and I’m going to leave it as it is for now), thanks go to M (Nippon Daze and Ken Loo (Ken Loo’s World).

Thanks everyone!