It's all About the Presentation(s)

Another fairly long break from updating, sorry about that. I've been preparing 3 presentations over the past few weeks, so the other-wise largely work-free exchange student lifestyle has been a bit busier than normal. I've still got one left to do, though it really should have been done last week were it not for technical issues (ie, Powerpoint).

Out of the three (Translation Studies, Second Language Acquisition and International Communication), International Communication provided the most laughs. Given it's not really a proper class per-say, you're allowed a little more leeway when it comes to taking the piss with things, hence one group's referencing of the Tellytubbies ("He's happy because there is no death penalty in his world"), and out citations of the movies "Independance Day" and "Armageddon". Our topic was nuclear weapons (and nuclear power as my group DIDN'T TELL ME until it came up on the projector screen), and I figured that having been given the task of coming up with the case for, (in a conversation that went something along the following lines:

3 Japanese Students (to another foreign student): What country are you from?

Foreign Student: Malaysia

3 Japanese Students (to me): What about you?

Me: The UK

3 Japanese Students: Right, well since your country is the only one here that has nuclear weapons, you must be in favour of them, so you do the "pro" section.

There's logic in there somewhere....)

Anyway, back to the point, I figured that this being Japan, I had the choice of the "It wasnae me" route, or the "I love the bomb so much" route. Of which I picked the latter, leading to lines such as "Thanks to nuclear weapons, my country was protected and I was born in a free Europe" and "As you can see from these movies, Nuclear bombs are will be very useful when the asteroid/aliens come"...

Other notable taste/sensitivity/reasonableness-fails courtesy of International Comm. class presentations included "Japan's justified acquisition of Korea" (I believe the word she was searching for was "rather brutal invasion and occupation of") from the Textbook controversy/historical revisionism group, and "Abortion. First, lets look at reasons why parents kill their children" from the interestingly titled "Abortion and Infanticide" group who effectively tried to argue that the term "Abortion" applied to children up to the age of 8 or 9...

A number of groups covered capitol punishment as well, and on repeated occasions brought up the argument that some criminals commit crimes in order to be sentenced to death... given that no cases were cited I'm not quite sure where they got that point from, much less where they were going with it (If we abolish capital punishment the crime rate will drop?).

Without meaning to have a massive go at the Japanese students, I do feel that their presentation skills and delivery techniques are far below what would be considered acceptable for undergraduate students in Europe or America. Having never had to do a university level presentation outside of physics perhaps my judgment is not the most well-informed, but does anybody consider standing at the lecturn, staring down at a pre-written sheet of paper and reading it out aloud (no-powerpoint) to be acceptable?

This criticism is more aimed at the other two classes where the Japanese students deliver their presentations in Japanese. Given that in Int. Comm. we have to present in the target language, reading off pre-prepared notes is more forgivable given most of us are not at the level of being able to make up presentations on the spot or from small flashcards in our target language.

I'll just mention now that the Japanese education system is frequently criticised by foreigners who have had contact with it as being too focused on cram-learning "facts" rather than developing any sort of analysis skills... I emphasis that this criticism is made by foreigners because rather frustrating Japanese cultural taboos forbid people from actually criticising most things, regardless of how they feel.

Hmm, this has turned into a rather negative article... I'll just make it clear I'm still having a great time here and I'm not in a bad mood, just seeing/ doing all these presentations lately has made me think about some stuff...

Oh, Yoo comes back from his gap year in Germany/Italy in a few weeks, so I'm going to go meet him a the airport since it's not that far from here. It'll be interesting to see how his German has improved since I saw him in Italy in September... He's probably better than me now...

Oh, and I just wanted to mention this. Without meaning to a)politicise this blog, or much more importantly b) trivialise the terrible tragedy in Haiti, I would like to point out that that the official casualty figure from the earthquake now stands at 100,000 people, which is approximately 1/6th of the 2006 death toll of Iraqi civilians directly or indirectly as a result of our invasion, as calculated by the peer-reviewed Lancet survey. Granted I only pick up information from BBC news website and Facebook, but in light of the above does the whole "Save Haiti" media blitz not strike a certain note of moral indulgence with anyone?

Just a small though...

明けましておめでとう！(Akemashite Omedetou!)

Merry Christmas and a Happy New year everyone, hope you had a good one and sorry I havn't updated this in a while, I hope the withdrawal wasn't too terrible.

Hmm, where to start. Japanese Christmas? After all the build-up and hype in all the shops and stuff it actually turned out to be a bit of a let down, Nothing much happens, it's considered mostly a couple's thing, and oddly for Japan they don't even really take the opportunity to indulge in lots of food (or maybe that's how they make it different from every other day...). A bunch of us exchange students went out for lunch to this restaurant which does pretty decent (by which I mean recognisable) western food, so I had a distinctly festive spicy mushroom pasta for Christmas dinner...

Oh, and this may seem a little bit odd, but what with all the couples down in Harbourland (they put up loads of illuminations there. The Japanese like pretty illuminations) it seemed particularly noticeable that there really are a lot of Japanese people in Japan. And pretty much ONLY Japanese people. I know this is pretty obvious, and I find my self in situations every day where I'm the only non-Japanese person in sight, but what with the massive number of people and me the only foreigner it was just more in-your-face than usual.

New Year! Bloody hell that was cold. (largely my own fault, should have put on more clothes, had a nice new-year cold for the next few days). All in all, not my favourite New Year, went to a club in Kobe, as we all figured Osaka, which has a much better night life in all honest, would be even more crazy than it is on a normal day. Anyway, place was mostly filled with random (mostly rather fat for some reason) foreigners, and there was much drama with some of the other exchange students which sort of put a downer on things. We went to a shrine at 4am on the promise of hot Sake from the monks, which turned out not to be the case (though there was much food, this being Japan. (Anyone who tells you the main religions of Japan are Budhism and Shintoism has no idea what they're talking about.). We then went up Mount Maya to watch the first sunrise of 2010, where it was even colder. Not to mention cloudy :-(

Oh, I went to see Avatar as well, in 3D! (And fortunately not the Japanese dub. The first time we tried to go I got the times wrong and we turned up in time for that showing, though it was sold out so we went back a few days later and saw the Japanese Subtitled showing.). Without meaning to turn my blog into a film review, I did really enjoy it, even if the story was entirely predictable and rather overly messianic, very much recommended if you havn't already seen it. Oh, and when you do, and you see those tribal-font subtitles they give to the alien language, spare a thought for me trying to speed-read the Japanese versions. I ended up giving up reading the phonetics (ie, the names) and just reading the Kanji (ie, the bits with the meaning in them). So basically what I read was "[Blank] killed [Blank]!You bastard! [Blank] will never forgive you and I will avenge [Blank]", or something like that.

I had a great Gaijin (foreigner) moment the other day. After spending an hour speaking in Japanese to my (Japanese) friend in a coffee shop (incidentally I just found out there are KANJI for coffee-珈琲. It's a frikkin foreign word! There aren't supposed to be kanji for it!). Anyway, as we get up to leave, I notice the people sitting next to me are looking interestedly at my keyboard-scarf, so I show it to them and explain it to them (In Japanese), and then, after a brief chat with me, they turn to my friend and ask "What country is he from?"! Then to cap it off, after we both say "the UK", they start talking about how they've always wanted to go to Switzerland...

Also lately, in response to the much complained about Japanese language classes, I've been working through Chris' grammar textbooks, which have been really helpful, only now I feel a bit over-stuffed on sentence structures, so I think I need some more vocabulary to fill them in with. I feel fine with everyday stuff (and rather oddly some rather technical linguistic vocabulary), but I be able to hold some more advanced discussions...

Oh, and the 一生三宅 store-staff's stalking geared up a notch this month with both a hand-written note and a phone call at 2100 (the store closes at 2000!) to tell me about the new collection on sale from Friday... freaky...

Finally, bizarre Japanese preoccupation of the last month: Alpacas