When I first moved to Japan earthquakes didn’t bother me much.  There were many of them and they didn’t really do anything apart from make everything shake.  But that all changed with the Tohoku Earthquake in 2011.  Now I’m very aware of the horror a quake can cause.  This morning shortly after 5am we experienced the strongest quake to shake Tokyo since 2011.  And it really wasn’t pleasant.  I think part of the problem is that I feel trapped when the building starts to shake.  There isn’t anywhere you can go as you certainly shouldn’t try to leave.  But when the building is jolted and swaying it feels unnatural to stay inside.  I want out.  The other issue is the uncertainty.  You can’t easily tell anything much other than the fact the earthquake is big. The earthquake this morning had a magnitude of 6.2 and was felt at either a weak 5 or a 4 in this area.  So, it was certainly big enough to to make me feel slightly panicked.

The earthquake got us out of bed when the emergency alarm system started.  The local government disaster administration wireless broadcast is tested everyday at 5pm, but it is tested with music.  This morning, when they used words, we had no idea what was being said.  It echoed and distorted off the buildings.  For all I know it was saying “we come in peace” but since we couldn’t understand it we turned on the T.V. and listened to the announcements.  The T.V. presenter looked nervous but things quickly calmed down and thankfully there was no tsunami warning.

I mostly enjoy living in Japan but I now have nightmares about earthquakes.

It’s Golden Week in Japan – the name given to a group of national holidays that occur close together.  Today was Greenery Day.  I think it’s a day when you are supposed to spend time with nature, but the closest I got to anything green today was on my lunch plate.  We did consider going out but the horrible thing about national holidays in Japan is that the whole country goes out for the day.  Tomorrow I’ll at least brave the crowds at the supermarket as we’ve run out of green thing to eat.

I’ve been working on my talk for LinuxCon Japan by rereading a number of papers on the topic of motivation in Free and Open Source (F/OSS).  I was able to recall a lot of the information I had read before but I realised that today I was memorizing odd details about the papers.  And then I remembered why – it was because of a question I was asked after giving a talk on a related subject at another tech conference.

“Your talk was interesting but how much of this is relevant to men?”

Now there was a question I was not expecting.  There are always more men at the conferences I speak at than there are women.  And when I say more I mean that at that particular conference about 95% of the attendees were male and I was the only female speaker.  It was a few years ago and the question has stayed with me.  I replied by saying that the research I was referring to was carried out on members of various F/OSS communities, and the majority of those respondents were male.  The person who asked the question said I should have mentioned that in my talk.  Really?  I don’t recall any of the other speakers saying that their material was relevant to men.  I’m sure that the person asking the question didn’t mean to upset me but it was just another thing that highlighted the fact that I was different from the other speakers at the conference.

The paper I was reading this morning stated that 97.5% of the respondents were male – so the question could be, “how much of this is relevant to women”.

Recently I received an email from the Open University about a free online course.  It seems that they have created their own version of Coursera called FutureLearn.  I’ve started the Start Writing Fiction course as I’d considered signing up for a courses like this in the past.  The software is slow and some aspects of the course are overly simplistic but the writing exercises have been interesting and I think I’ll keep going and see how it works out.  I do love this trend to offer free education.

I will be speaking on volunteers at LinuxCon Japan on the 22nd May.  I have never attended this conference before as the timing hasn’t worked out.  I’m a little nervous about speaking in front on an unknown audience but since I’m speaking on the final day of the conference I will have time to get used to the venue and to hear some of the other speakers.

We have had visitors for a couple of weeks and I spent quite a bit of my time attempting to be a tour guide.  I’m not always good at it.  I walk too fast, walk too far, and sometimes walk to places that aren’t open.  But I had fun and I got to see some new places in Japan.

 

 

I’m not sure how February managed to pass so quickly.  It seems to have disappeared in a haze of Japanese language learning.  I can’t wait for the end of term on the 21st March, but I’m really not looking forward to the exams and speech contest. I have not signed up for the next course as the dates don’t suit so I’m going to have to find a different school to study at for a while.  I’m also looking for something that isn’t as intense as I don’t really want to spend so many hours a week studying Japanese.

Friday’s classes were really tiring as they started with the weekly tests and then an hour and half of speaking Japanese.  We speak a lot in class but this was different as five strangers were brought in to chat with us.  It wasn’t as terrible as I was expecting but I didn’t really enjoy it.  The conversation was about the work practice of after hours drinking in Japanese companies.  It was interesting to hear about some of the cultural reasons behind this but I did find it hard trying to explain the cultural differences in Northern Ireland.

This week we are being taught how to be polite when people accuse us of things that we didn’t do.  I’m not really having a problem with this as I don’t know very much impolite Japanese and since these conversations are happening in a classroom I am not likely to speak polite Japanese with a bad tone.

 

 

It’s that time of the year again when I need to think about conferences.  This year I am hoping to attend YAPC::NA in Florida.  The deadline for talk submissions is February 15th – which seems earlier than previous years – and I have just submitted my talk proposal.  I wasn’t able to attend YAPC::EU last year and I’m not sure if I will make it this year.  But YAPC::EU takes place in Sofia towards the end of August and the talk submission deadline is the 1st July – so I have time to decide.

 

I am back to school and back to struggling with Japanese again.  The first class of the new term was terrible as I found it incredibly hard to understand the new grammar.  The lesson also contained about 200 new words that I did not know.  In my first few terms every new verb and noun was explained in class, but not any more.  Now that I am considered to be an intermediate student I am expected to go through all the class material in advance and look up the meaning of anything I don’t understand.  I am also allowed to use a dictionary in class.  This does mean that the classes progress faster as explaining every new verb in Japanese using words that we have been taught before is time consuming.  But it also means spending many more hours a day studying by myself.

I am managing to keep up with homework, kanji, essay writing, and grammar but I am not good enough at conversation.  I have a good memory, so I can memorize the weekly conversations we are expected to learn by heart, but my general conversation ability in class is low.  I have a disadvantage.  Everyone else in my class lives with someone who is a native Japanese speaker.  The women who sits beside me is Chinese and she only communicates in Japan in Japanese because her husband and his family don’t understand any Chinese.  I rarely communicate in Japanese and my fellow students were surprised to discover that I was not married to a Japanese man.  It seems that the only reasons they could come up with for a woman living in Japan for this long was that she was married to a Japanese man or that she taught English.  And since neither of these things is true for me I get to remain mysterious.  Aided by the fact I find it hard to explain my situation in Japanese so I don’t always try.

Today I am working on kanji.  This week’s kanji is much too difficult to remember as all the words are new and the concepts are a little confusing.  There are far too many ways to describe construction and building in Japanese.  Of course there are many ways in English too but today it’s Japanese I am sulking with.

 

It would have been nice to wake up today feeling better but my flu is not yet gone.  There are things I would like to be doing, and people I would like to talk to, but they will have to wait until I have a voice and feel less like a zombie.