Did I neglect to mention...

I have gotten married!! It was just the technical marraige (paper marraige) here in Japan, but we're now legally married. Be having a ceremony later on after we return to US. In any case, life is wonderful when you're married to your soul mate. And the time is drawing near that we will move to the US and begin life there. This is a short post, but maybe that's because I'm too busy enjoying my life. ;)

PS Well, as long as I'm here, I might point out that I saw a Japanese crane yesterday. Quite a rare find actually, as there are only about 800 left in the world. Really beautiful. Elegant creature. I can understand why the crane has such a large role in Japanese culture. I caught some bad pictures of the crane as well. Maybe I'll post the best one on here when I get it off of the card.

Problems with Hotmail...

This post is unrelated to Japan, teaching, and my life here, but it's something that has been bothering me. I posted almost the same post as this as comments on Ejovi Nuwere's blog (www.ejovi.net) but I wanted to post it here, too.

Has anyone noticed that features have suddenly been disappearing from hotmail?

Like the ability to arrange your mail by something other than from newest mail to oldest. You used to be able to click on the: "From, Subject, Date, Size" links and arrange it in either of the 2 possible directions. (like oldest to newest versusu newest to oldest, or names A-Z versun Z-A) Now they aren't links. You can't change the order. It is just from most recent to least recent.

And "Junk mail" used to give you a little number by it on parenthesis with the number of new messages. (ie: Junk E-Mail(3) ) If there was no number then you didn't need to check. This is important because messages in there are automatically deleted after a short period. Well, the number isn't there anymore... and I've missed checking it because it didn't say that it had any junk mail. (and I had mail in there that I wanted to recieve.) The number isn't there for "Inbox" either anymore, but I always check that.

Not only this, but there used to be a drop down menu that allowed you to chose which page of your inbox you wanted to go to. Like, page 23 of 55. Since we now have over 1GB of space it is likely that we'll have many pages of e-mails. Well this feature is also gone. So now the only way to get to page 23 is to click the forward arrow 22 times. :(

That's all I've noticed thus far, but it's happened fairly recently because I've been using these features until very recently. With these features gone, hotmail has truly become unusable. My guess is that thay want to squeeze everyone out so they can make them switch to their new Live Mail Hotmail whatever... (Windows Live Hotmail, is it now?) But the fact that they would go this far to do it is really infuriating. Now I have no choice but to join live mail (which I've heard many bad things about) or find a new mail account which means a new e-mail and telling all of my contacts that I have a new mail address...

it really is unusable; the other day I needed very desperately to find info in an e-mail from about 3 months back. Well, I new who it was from, but I couldn't arrange my mail by name. And I could guess about the page it would be on, but I still had to click 20 or 30 times to get to that page. And when I e-mailed the site and submitted my info which got me a reply e-mail with my password or username or whatever, this e-mail ended up in my junk mail which I never checked because it had no notification that there were unread messages there. Only when I had requested the info again and was getting desperate did I venture into the Junk Mail folder and find the e-mail. (incidently, it was there along with the RSS feed e-mail for Ejovi's site, which never used to be junk...) Hotmail... grrr...

My life is a Happy Ending

Been a while again. Seems that I'm becoming good at lying online. I post about how I will be posting very often from now on and then I don't post for 3 months. Well, this time I'll not say anything of the sort and maybe I'll just happen to post more things in the near future.
One of... no, THE biggest reason for my break from posting is because I had a specific post that I wanted to write, but I wasn't sure if I should write it yet because I didn't want to post this big news online until I'd properly informed everyone close to me. That being:

I'm getting married.

Yeah, it's true! If you've been reading my blog for a little while you might remember when I wrote that I had found my soul mate. I didn't go all out and write fuzzy wuzzy stories of how perfect we were for each other and how fate had brought us together... but those stories would have been true. And thus we're engaged. Both of us are absolutely thrilled. It's one of those things that I was starting to question; you see the romantic comedies and read novels where true love occurs, but then you wonder if it's just a fantasy. I mean, we're here on Earth for the basic purpose of making children and living a happy life with our family, but this can be done without true love. (Don't read too deeply into the "we are on Earth for the purpose of..." bit, I'm generalizing, of course.) But it would not be outlandish to consider that the real key to a good marriage is to just find someone who you find attractive and date them long enough to find that you can stand being around each other all the time, and then you marry them. Well, I'm not saying that it'd be wonderful, just logical and functional, which --- really --- is more than we can say about some love-marraiges. BUT, the point that I'm trying to make here is NOT that true love doesn't exist. I had begun to ponder that possibility in a little corner of my mind... But I was so completely wrong. When you meet that one person who just completes you, who just gets you and matches you and makes you a better person... well, if and when that happens to you, you will know at that time that true love is real. Yeah, I do realize that I'm spouting cliches and telling you about true love when I've not even been married for any short amount of time yet, but the thing is... well you know how some people say that "you just know"? Those people are right. I've dated a number of women and felt like it was something special, but when I began seeing the woman who I am engaged to marry, it was completely different; it all just clicked. And I'm a logical fellow. Being one, I wouldn't let myself fall victim to the first feeling that said "this is the woman who I'm going to marry." Or the second. Or the third. Or the throbbbing of my heart, or the pain of seeing her go. It was just infatuation... or a romanticism created by the media... or I just wanted it to be... these are the possibilities I considered. So I waited and tried as hard as I could to find problems with her. I looked for problems with us. Having served boyfriend in several long term relationships I had seen how any small problem can grow and fissure over time into a deal breaker. For instance, if you are of a different religion with your partner it might seem as no problem on the first date, but when you have dated 2 years and you have to decide which church to go to or one of you wants not to go to church and then you start questioning how the other person can think the way they do... Or one person has a small habit that annoys the other. No problem at the beginning but then over time it develops into fights and arguments and comes up in the most inexplicable conversations... Anyway, I'm just saying that I picked apart our relationship in every possible way to find the flaw which was absolutly certainly definitely there somewhere.

...only that it wasn't.

So. We. Will. Be. Married.
My life is a romance.
My life is a Happy Ending.

I know, I know. I've gone and written about things which cannot be expressed in words. Gone and gotten mushy. Written about feelings and love and scary things that shouldn't be spoken of with a serious face except between two lovers. I've gone and said things that can't be tested and can't be proven. And I've said it with a straight face and meant every word.

I love my fiancee.
I'm getting married.
Just thought you'd like to know. :)

~Sven~

Living in a glass house is not unique to me...

I (and other ALTs who I converse with) often feel like they treat us like children here. Like, because we are foreigners they try to control all aspects of our life to keep us from getting into trouble and, as such, they demand knowledge of all aspects of their life. For instance, ALTs who I know have been told that they cannot drive their personal car to Sapporo (Hokkaido's main city). This is a car that the ALT purchased with his/her own money and is fully funding as far as insurance, maintenance, etc. The ALT does not use this car for work. The ALT isn't going to Sapporo for work. It has nothing to do with the Board of Education... but, when the ALT happened to mention that he was going to go to Sapporo on the weekend (a 2 or 3 hour drive) they forbid it. This is your job. They can't do this! But they do. And other stranger things that you think they should not be involved with. But recently I found out that it is not just us foreigners who are being treated like children. We definitely are treated more like children, but normal Japanese employees must also expose their entire personal life to their employers. When you work somewhere they make you get a physical exam every so often. This is not for drugs (in US we might get a drug test to work somewhere). This is just for your normal health. And your work gets all of your information from your physical, and all your coworkers chat about it. If the doctor decides you are overweight (no, not me, if you know me you're laughing now) then all your coworkers are telling you to lay off the potato chips or to jog more. It's not like a support group, it's more like organized teasing. (and by the way, the "overweight" limit in Japan is quite low compared to that of US) It is so invasive.
I have a friend who everyone at the school says is overweight. (seems fine to me...) But, the thing is, they talk about it all the time. Apparently the doctor said he is overweight, so they are always teasing him about eating fattening things and exercise. And he just confirms them. "Yes, I am fat. I'm a bad person. I should lose weight." I am always shocked by that. Here it is normal.
I have a friend. Joe Japaneseman. (no, that really isn't his/her real name.) Joe is an English teacher. He was taking the test to get his teaching license. But he is a temporary English teacher at one of the schools until he gets it. (temporary is still like years.) He takes the test, and another teacher I know in the same position takes the test at the same time. This other teacher is far less qualified, but still manages to pass. Joe does not pass. He doesn't/won't ever get to hear the reason. But there is one strong probability, which is basically what he's figuring is the reason. He was speeding this year and got caught. Got a ticket. Because of the point system here and the absurdly low speed limits he actually lost his license, but just had to attend a seminar and pay a fine to get it back right away. (the low speed limits are because they don't change in the summer and the winter. They are just set for winter speeds all the time.) Yeah, this wasn't a good thing that he did, but it has nothing to do with his job, right? It didn't occur near the/a school. It wasn't during work hours. He wasn't on a work errand. But the principal of his school was informed and they had to inform the test committee of this information. And this is very possibly what caused him to fail the test! It seems to me like the ticket was his own private affair and unrelated to work unless he was in a work car or driving the principal somewhere. I don't know. If I got a ticket in US I wouldn't expect my boss to be told. I wouldn't tell him/her. If I did happen to mention it they would just take that as conversation, they wouldn't lower my pay or job status for it. (Joe's pay was lowered for that ticket, by the way.)
Well, it's a glass house. It's like everyone wants to know everything and then everything about the way you run your own life must be done as they say or you will get punished/demoted/fired for it.
Now, this all having been said, it's just a cultural difference and Japanese people are used to it. (although some of them might complain about the system, but some Americans might do the same, eh?) And I'm happily living here and enjoying my life. I can deal with all the probing into my personal life, my medical problems, the activities I engage in on the weekends, being careful not to say anything that they might disapprove of. It's like so much paperwork, you get through it very careful to read the fine print and then you can achieve what you want. It's just their culture. Not the same as mine. The point at which it will start to bother me is when I get my pay deducted for something unrelated to work or am banned from traveling to Sapporo in my own car. But for now my particular BOE is fairly good about those things (although they have gotten more strict recently with the change of my boss to a new guy).
Still here. Still alive. Still having a blast. If you have an opinion. (Agreeing or disagreeing.) post a reply, or start a board on the messageboard (if it warrants that much discussion). Thanks for reading. Hope my English hasn't deteriorated too much in all this time. :)

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! :)