I have a sushi addiction that is helped by the fact that I shop for groceries everyday.   Today, on the way out of the apartment building, I noticed a sign in the elevator.  This was a new one printed on A4 paper in multi-coloured ink.  In large red letters it said “Warning”.  It then stated that we had to take everything off the balcony because of a dangerous storm.

When I got outside it reminded me of an early Autumn day in Ireland.  It’s not particularly cold but it’s wet, grey, and miserable.  Not a great day but certainly not a dangerous day.  Nothing much has changed outside but  Typhoon Melor has started to move across Japan and it’s due to hit Tokyo tomorrow.

My teacher told me this morning that I need to learn another 52 kanji before the exam in early December.  She believes that I can learn 4 per lesson.  4 doesn’t sound like a lot but today we worked really hard and it took 30 minutes per kanji.  Each kanji can have more than one way to pronounce it and more than one meaning.  As well as understanding it I need to be able to draw it.  Some are simple like “katana 刀”, or complicated like “kazu 数”.

The 4 kanji took up my whole lesson.  This gave me no time to work on the other parts of the exam and, given that kanji is only 25% of what I need to know, this is not going to be a winning strategy.

The other problem with learning Japanese through kanji is that they are not always relevant to my daily life, making them difficult to remember.  Today I spent 30 minutes discussing Japanese swords.  We didn’t have problems when discussing katana, the Japanese swords, but my teacher’s English is not good enough for her to know the difference between daggers, blades, and knifes.  This means getting out dictionaries and trying to find sentences that adequately describe the meaning.  Sometimes these sentences lead us off on strange tangents.  At one point she said, “Robin Hood used this instead of a sword”.  And I’m left trying to work out the connection between Samurai swords and the weapons that Robin Hood might have used.  The word she was looking for was dagger.

We also spent much too long trying to work out what “meitou” means.  The direct translation is “famous sword”.  But what is a famous sword?  I thought it was something like “Excalibur”.  A sword that had a name or was used by a great warrior.  My teacher believes that it is a sword created by a famous sword master.  Whatever it actually is it’s not a word I’m going to be using very often if ever.  I can remember it today, as it irritated me, but I will have forgotten it two weeks from now.

I know I need to learn kanji but I wish that they were taught in a different order.  Today’s lesson reminded me much too much of the Eddie Izzard sketch on how French is taught in UK  schools.  Only the Japanese equivalent of, “the monkey is on the branch” is, “the Budhist monk wore black robes”.

For the past few years I have attended a YAPC in North America, Europe, and Asia.  All three conferences are very enjoyable but also very different.  YAPC::Asia has been held in Tokyo for the past few years.  The Japanese culture obviously impacts the conference but I can’t always find ways to express these differences.  This year they have helped me out by adding a couple of items to the conference bag that I can’t imagine being given in America or Europe.

The first is a plastic bag that I assume is an advert for one of the sponsors.  Other conferences have given attendees plastic bags and advertising material but the image on this bag is typically Japanese.

The second item was a fan.  Paper fans are very common in Japan and I have been given one at a number of different events.  The image on this fan is a cartoon of two Japanese authors, one of these is Yukihiro Matsumoto, sitting in a Japanese bath with their laptops.

I think the image is strange but not as strange as being given a PHP and Ruby advert at a Perl conference.

I need to start studying Japanese again.  I haven’t had that many lessons in the past couple of months but that’s about to change.  I have an exam in December. This isn’t something I want to do but Marty got the application form and filled  it in for me.  My Japanese teacher also thinks it’s a good idea but I’m not convinced.  I only know 50% of the vocabulary and about 60% of the kanji.  I have been too frightened to even look at the required grammar list.  The pass mark for the exam is around 65% and I would fail if I had to sit this tomorrow.  I wish I found it easier to learn Japanese.

I was in one of the bathrooms in the Mori Tower today.  They had bottles of hand disinfectant beside the soap.  These are new but I imagine they have been added because of the swine flu scare. On the wall was a list of instructions written in multiple languages.  It stated that you shouldn’t use the disinfectant under the following conditions:

If you have a deep cut or burn;
If you are alergic:
If you are under a doctor.

I would like to write more but instead of writing I spend time thinking about writing.  Or reading books on language and writing.  Last night I started reading a book on Hypnotic Writing.  I get the impression that this is supposed to be about writing that is so good that you are put under a spell by it.  The book, unfortunately, put me to sleep.

To help me find focus I have decided to join the NaNoWriMo writing challenge.  I have no idea if I’ll be able to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November but it might be a fun thing to try.  This will mean writing around 1,700 words a day.  (At the minute this blog post only has 125 or so words in it).  I also have no idea what I would write a novel about but if all else fails I suppose I could write something about a Japanese half-werewolf, half-vampire, that decides to terrorize Ireland… or maybe not.

I have learnt many things since coming to Japan but I’m not always conscious of having learnt them.

During the summer I was taken on a boat trip on the Aegean sea.  It stopped a few times so that we could swim but the sea was cold and I found it more enjoyable to sit on the deck and read.  During one such stop there was suddenly a lot of commotion.  My little sister was screaming and running away from Mehmet, the captain.

Mehmet had gone diving and returned with an octopus.  He had put this on his head and was chasing the woman and children around the boat.  He came rushing up to me and waited for me to run away.  But sticking an octopus on your head is not going to scare me.  Even threatening to put in on my chest is not going to have much effect.  I have eaten small octopus whole, I have seen them on sushi, freeze dried as snacks, and had them cooked in batter.  A live one is not a frightening thing and certainly not one that’s safe enough for a person to carry about on their head.

This year I gave a talk called “Remote Controlled Volunteers” at both YAPC::EU and YAPC::NA.  Today I received official feedback from  YAPC::EU and two weeks ago I got the feedback from YAPC::NA.  This is the first time I have ever received formal feedback for speaking at a conference and I’m impressed that a volunteer is willing to put in this much effort for the speakers.

I was curious to see how similar the feedback for both conferences would be.  As I suspected the talk was better at the second conference.  (My average score out of 10 for overall presentation went from 8.80 to 9.23).  I didn’t do an exact count of the number of people at my talks but I think in both cases around 10% of the attendees have provided feedback.  This means that the results aren’t statistically significant.  They are interesting though and the written comments provide useful information on how to improve the talk.  Some of the comments also amused me, my favourite being:

speaker was confident and had no strange odors; laid bare the
problems with being a jerk in a volunteer community, which is
something people often need reminding of

I would love to receive the feedback sooner.  I tend to use a talk for one particular conference season.  This year that meant I was giving the talk at both YAPC::NA and YAPC::EU.  YAPC::NA took place on the 22nd – 24th June.  The surveys for YAPC::NA were kept open for responses until the 14th August by which stage YAPC::EU, which took place at the start of August, was already over.  I understand that people need to be given enough time to respond but I can’t imagine that much speaker feedback is given at that late stage.  I could be wrong but I know I would find it difficult to answer a survey on a talk more than a month after I had heard it.

Now that I have seen the feedback I’m going to make more of an effort to fill in speaker evaluation forms at next year’s YAPCs.  One other quick point about feedback.  After my talk in YAPC::NA, Miyagawa made a comment to me about my presentation materials.  He was very polite but basically he was telling me that I could do much better.  So it’s thanks to him and a crashed hard-drive (I lost the final version of the presentation) that my average score out of 10 for presentation materials went from 8.70 to 9.0!

On Saturday I went to watch Sumo.  This wasn’t on my list of things to do in Japan.  When I saw it on T.V. I found it really hard to watch the huge half-naked men slapping themselves and each other.  But Marty managed to get tickets and he wanted me to go with him.

Since moving to Japan I have started to pay attention to the flexibility of clothing.  When going out for dinner to a new restaurant I think of things like “how comfortable is it to kneel in this outfit”, or “are these socks O.K. if I have to take my shoes off”.  For watching Sumo the web was telling me that people wore “smart casual”.  In Japan this usually means some sort of skirt for woman.  Our tickets placed us in a “mass” seat.  This is quite a small area of the floor with four cushions to seat four people. I also knew that we would be there for at least four hours.  Looking through my wardrobe I managed to find a skirt that had lots of material that would make it easy to move around in.  I also decided to wear leggings underneath which made it very easy for me to sit either cross-legged or on my knees.

When we got there the seating area was a bit smaller than we were expecting but we managed to fit in and got fairly comfortable.  There was some sort of ceremony going on in the ring but I realised that not many people were paying attention. There was a stadium wide party going on with people chatting, eating, and drinking.  It reminded me of the parties that take place around cherry watching season or the large fireworks displays.  Thousands of people crammed together sitting on the ground enjoying themselves.

The top division goes on last with elaborate ceremonies.  By the time this started the arena was completely full and the audience was paying a lot more attention to the ring, yelling and chanting for their favourite Sumo stars.

I enjoyed the whole thing much more than I was expecting.  We were with people who were really into Sumo that explained the rules, traditions, and personalities.  Their enthusiasm was infectious and I found myself wanting the Rikishi they supported to win their bout.

I don’t see Sumo becoming my favourite sport but I do think I would go back and watch another tournament.

It’s been a bad Japanese morning.  As I find it hard to understand people on the phone I try to avoid calls with strangers.  This morning, in my half awake state, I answered a call from a phone number I didn’t recognise.  From what little I could understand the caller had dialed the wrong number.  At one point during the short conversation the person I was speaking to said “Hai, wakarimashita” and I was so busy thinking that I was glad that at least one of us had understanding that I missed the rest of the sentence.

After I hang up I decided to comfort myself with reading some English.  But within 5 minutes of starting the intercom in the apartment sprung to life and an automated female voice started to speak.  I’m glad the building wasn’t burning down because the only word I caught of that announcement was “everyone”.