On the Opinions of Celebrities

I just came across another bit in Kickboxing Geishas that caught my attention. In a later conversation with a Japanese woman about women in the modern workplace, the subject circles back around to what appears to be one of Chambers’ favored topics: role models. The woman she is talking to expresses some dissatisfaction with the [...]

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On the Pervasiveness of Sumimasen

From Kickboxing Geishas: How Modern Japanese Women Are Changing Their Nation, by Veronica Chambers. I knew I was going to like this book before it ever got around to discussing the actual topic of the book, because by page 3, I already found myself saying, “Yes, yes, absolutely, that’s what it’s like.”
I grew up in [...]

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Taiko

I meant to blog about this last week, but never quite found the time. Last Saturday, Mark and I went to see a performance by Fugaku Taiko, a taiko drum group from the area around Mt. Fuji. Mark already blogged a bit about the performance, mostly about the way taiko combines both visual and auditory [...]

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Subjective Volume

One of the faculty members I work with is responsible for doing phone interviews with students who will be going abroad with our program in China, in order to establish language proficiency. She does parts of these interviews in both English and Chinese. The last time she did it, she complained that one of the [...]

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On Grace, and the Lack Thereof

I would like to think that five years of ballet, followed by more than ten years of karate would have imbued me with graceful movements and responses in every situation. But on Tuesday, I fell down at karate, bruising and skinning both of my knees. I don’t even have a particularly good story to tell [...]

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Taking My Kitties to Work

When I lived in Japan, it was very much in fashion to have little dangly things on your cell phone. We JETs referred to them as “keitai straps,” keitai being the word for cell phone, but I have since been more properly informed that they are called netsuke. In any case, while I was there, [...]

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Useful Skills

You really never know when some random skill you picked up by chance sometime in the past is going to turn out to be useful. Today, for instance, I spent several hours of my workday taping together large boxes, filling them with books, and making a spreadsheet noting which books were in which boxes, so [...]

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I’m so sore; I think I’ll do that again

Last night was my first night back at karate since before Christmas, so it’s been more than 3 weeks since the last time I trained. I can’t even claim that I was good and worked out on my own during the vacation, because I didn’t. I sat around on airplanes, in houses, and at dinner [...]

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Setting a Good Example

Tonight, Mark and I went out to dinner on the way home from work, and experienced perhaps the most scrupulously polite service I have ever encountered. We owe this all to Tim.
Tim was our completely silent trainee waiter, assigned to follow our waitress around and not even get to hold extra plates while she passed [...]

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Holiday Books, Gifts, Travel

More catch-up posting! If this ends up not making sense, it’s because my brother caught some virus of doom and gave it to me and my dad right before he went back to the mountains. I forgive him, though, because he will have to suffer through it sleeping in a cold tent in the mountains [...]

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