Spare me my life!

Here is a hillarious video to prepare any of you Japanese people for life in America, should you decide to travel or live there. ;) I must have been out of the US for too long... looks like it's become a pretty scary place. Better brush up on my English... "Spare me my wallet... I mean Spare me my life!" This is harder than I thought...

*New feature* "ebuddy"

I have now successfully added a messaging signin box to my blog, courtesy of ebuddy. In the right-hand side bar right below the "Links of Interest" you will see a login box. Click on the icon for MSN messenger, Yahoo messenger, or AOL messenger (AIM) and type your ID and password as you normally would. Now you can sign on from any computer anywhere without needing the privelages or time to install another messaging program on the computer that you happen to be at. For those of us like me, that will be especially useful when we are at "work" at the BOE when classes are cancelled or something. Nothing to do, but we don't have any permissions on the computer so we can't even switch the default printer. Now we can sign in and IM our families back home or the other JETs in other cities in Japan who are also being underutilized. ;) Hope someone else finds this useful! Enjoy!

Kamihikouki

How to make a cylindrical paper airplane. An animated flip book that I made. ;)
I often teach the kids how to make this paper airplane at my elementary schools. That way I can work in words like: paper, airplane, fold, triangle, half, hamburger, hotdog, old mountain man, dog, river, mountain, disney land... yeah, maybe you don't see the connection... you'll just have to come to my class and see. Oh, and by the way, the plane does fly. It flies very well. :) Enjoy!

Graduate School... the next step!

I've been working here in Japan for 1 year and I will be continuing for another year until July of 2007. At that time I wish to return to the US and enter into graduate school. Thus, I am now in the process of applying for such schools. My undergraduate field was Zoology, with a Genetics minor. For grad school I will be studying Virology. (viruses) May sound boring to most, but to me it is like the coolest thing on Earth. I love genetics, in all actuallity, and my work in the Wheat Genetics Lab at my university was the most rewarding thing that I've ever done. The problem that I find with genetics, or rather, the annoying little thing, is that you can never look at the full picture in full detail. The human genome is so long that it took years and years just to sequence it all. There is no way that you could try and process it all individually without some magical supercomuter from the future. The wheat genome is a number of times larger than the human genome! So you work on one process that is regulated by one group of proteins on a specific section of the genome. But then you find that there are other proteins at work in this process (as there always are) and you have to talk to someone else who is an expert on those proteins from some far away segment of DNA. And so on... and so forth... Of course, it works, you get the picture figured out, but it would be so much more satisfying if you could look at the bigger picture without burning out all of your brain cells.

But virus (viruses) are cool! They are so simple and yet do so much. And their genome is short!! I mean really short!! This means that you can know all of the proteins formed from what parts of the genome and etc. and you just need to put the pieces together and figure out what is happening. I mean, yes, it is a little more complicated than that, and viruses work with the body, so some other proteins from the body can come in and interact with them in some vital part of the process. But still... viruses are just cool! So cool! And so, because I think they are cool, I want to work with them. I may be crazy to find viruses so fascinating, but that doesn't really bother me. ;) I think you're crazy for not finding them fascinating!

*New feature* "Subscribe"

You may have (or more likely did not) noticed that there is a new box on the right-hand side of this page that asks for you to "Subscribe" by entering your e-mail. I just figured that it was easier than having to check this page every so often; and if I stop posting for a little while then you aren't checking the blog for no reason. All you do is put in your e-mail and click subscribe. It will not share your e-mail with companies. You will not get spam from it. You will only get an e-mail when I make a new post on my Blog. And, as you know, I don' make a hundred posts a day, so you don't have to worry about cluttering your inbox. But basically this is a service for your convenience. If you think it would be convenient, sign up, if not, don't. Ok? Ok. I will be making an effort to post on my blog regularly once again. So lets enjoying blogging! (Engrish is fun!) ;)
~Sven~

Japanese Racism, or is it?

Recently I heard that the Hokkaido Speech competition disqualified a prospective contestant (a junior high school student) simply because one of the student's parents was originally from the Philippines. Thus arises the discussion:

Having lived here as a foreigner, it would be a lie to say that there is not a lot of "racism" in Japan. In fact, if we were living by US politically correct standards, most of the people I know would be racists. But I don't mean this in a derogatory way. The Japanese culture has far less diversity than that of the US. And although the "foreigner" population has been steadily increasing recently, most Japanese consider Japan to be a homogeneous population. "We are Japanese people, anyone else is gaikokujin." (Foreigner, literally: outsider, outside country person.) So anyone who doesn't look "Japanese" is a foreigner, no matter what length of time they have lived in the country. Again, this is a cultural difference, I want to point out that this is not a country of Hitlers and they don't hate all foreigners and sit at home and burn voodoo dolls of us. But, they are often very underexposed to the idea of racism or diversity in a culture. Par example:

In one of my elementary schools there is a child who has a parent from Sweden. And, thus, he has blond hair and looks like a stereotypical European kid. The thing is that he has lived in Japan his entire life. He can only speak Japanese. He is a Japanese person in as much as I am an American. (for those of you who don't know, my mother is originally from Sri Lanka) But! In his class all of the students talk about him as the Swedish person. When I came to teach them they said, "We've got a Swedish person in our class, go talk English to him!!" "Oh, he's Swedish, talk to him!" "Oh, is gaikokujin like you!" And various chants of the sort. I was appalled. I mean, these were not teasing or bullying. If anything he was like a celebrity because he was their very own foreigner. But, that was it. This was completely normal. No one even considered it strange. It was just fact. To the students and even the teachers. He is a foreigner, we are Japanese. He's cooler because he is a foreigner and lets make him talk to the other foreigner. And the funny thing is that when they dragged me over to him and made him talk to me, he couldn't speak a word of English. As expected from a normal Japanese elementary school student. In fact, one of the fully Japanese girls spoke much better than him.

It's kind of sad. If you look at it from a Japanese viewpoint, it is just kids and not meant in any aggressive or demeaning way. But this kid will live his whole life like this, on the outside.
Do you know how I am introduced in class? As a "half". If is actually the same in Japanese: "haafu". And here in Japan that is not a derogatory term. So I don't begrudge them, but I do flinch a little every time I hear it. That kid was later explained to be as being a half. And anytime I explain my background, they say things like, "Oh, you're not a real American, you're a half." This is said with perfectly straight faces by perfectly friendly and well meaning people. So I ignore the word half, but explain that in America we have a lot of cultural diversity and that I am, in fact, an American.

Needless to say, any of those ultra sensitive about their race or profiling based on skin color or appearance should avoid the land of the rising sun if they don't want to spoil their day. Or maybe they should visit. It might help to show how much advancements have been made in your respective country, although no country has it perfect yet as far as I know.

Anyway, back to the story of the Speech contest. There may be some actual validity in the reasoning behind this banning of "halfs". That being, that if they have an English speaking parent and they speak both languages, then they will have a huge advantage in the contest. But, of course, there is no way to measure that. The kid at my elementary would have been disqualified, and he was no better than any other Japanese kid. But again, they can't exactly go to every house and check, so they is a tricky question... How do you make it fair? I keep trying to think what we would do in the US. Say a Spanish speaking contest. I kind of think that the contest would not ban anyone as long as their first language was English. Or maybe as long as they could not claim Spanish as a spoken language. This would be somewhat based on person to person honesty, although your teacher has to sign you up. And in the end there would happen to be some people who were basically fluent and the rest of us might feel like it was a little unfair. But, still... I can't help feeling that what is happening here is not quite the best way to handle it. I mean, we will be excluding students simply based on race. And basically it's based on their parents' race. So... Well, what do you think? Post a reply on my blog. Let me know.

I just want to point out that I love Japan and I'm enjoying my stay greatly. The people are great and friendly. My intention is not to badmouth Japan, it is simply to ask questions and spread awareness about Japanese culture. No culture, no country is perfect. My country has tons of problems of it's own. But I live here now, so I'm focusing on these problems. Happy Blogging! :)