The Sixth Sense

One of the best books I use for teaching private lessons is called "Impact Issues". Each lesson contains a story meant to open up discussion on a particular topic and a page of opinions that students can agree or disagree with. The topics cover a broad range of issues, but one of the most interesting lessons is called "Flight 77". In this particular lesson, a man talks about how he was about to board an airplane and decides not to after a voice tells him that he should not get on the plane. The teacher and student then discuss the potential origin of the voice.

This topic is good because it opens up the floor for spiritual discussions, but tends to avoid the overall topic of religion. While Japanese people aren't especially religious (on the whole) and it's unlikely that an uncomfortable discussion would develop on the topic, they also don't have much knowledge about religion and tend not to be overly interested in it. Spirituality, on the other hand, is something they do have their own notions about and can discuss with varying levels of enthusiasm.

As part of the discussion of this lesson, it's usual to ask the student if he or she has ever had any sort of metaphysical experience. While most of the students I've spoken with believe that the "voice" in the story in the "Flight 77" lesson is not a product of the author's imagination (and was a genuine spiritual warning), only one of them has said she has had a similar experience. This particular student told me a story from her childhood which was remarkably similar to the one in the textbook.

When she was a child of about 7, my student was playing a game where she and some friends pretended to be "invisible". As part of this game, one person kept her eyes open and the others kept their eyes closed. In this instance, my student and another friend were walking around with eyes closed while one other friend directed them. The friend who could see would tell the other two what to do as they walked "blindly". The "seeing" friend was preoccupied with the other person as the three of them approached a street. My student was just walking along with her eyes closed when she heard a voice (in her mind) clearly tell her to stop walking. She stopped and opened her eyes to find she would have walked in front of a car if she had continued on.

Oddly enough, my husband had a relatively similar experience when he was 15 years old. He was standing at a light waiting for it to turn green so he could cross a street. No cars were coming and the light turned green. Just as he was lowering his foot to the curb, he had a very strong feeling that he should not step into the street. He didn't hear anything and couldn't work out why he should feel that way so he looked up the street and soon saw a car speeding down the street which ran the light. If he had completed that step, the car would have hit him and possibly killed him given that it was going about 50 mph in a 35 mph zone. In my husband's case, he didn't hear a voice but received a strong "message" from his body nonetheless. He was being told to freeze and not step out.

When I asked my student why she thought she received such a message and many other people die in accidents, she said that she felt that it wasn't her time. She felt that she was meant to hang around on the planet and learn and experience life for awhile longer so she was stopped from prematurely making her exit. I feel that the same was the case with my husband. I think he and I were meant to journey through at least part of our lives together and it was very important for both of us that it be this way.

I know many people don't believe in this sort of thing and will concoct some sort of "logical" explanation (e.g., they both heard the cars and reacted to the sound on an unconscious level) and that's okay. If someone is so frightened of the idea that the world and our experiences may not be defined entirely by sensory stimuli and neurological processing of that stimuli, they can make up any explanation they want to sooth themselves. However, making up experiences that didn't happen in order to more comfortably explain what actually did happen is just as fanciful as speculating on the metaphysical. It's just a matter of being open-minded about the possibility of "sixth senses" or not.

Things in T.V. and Movies That I Could Do Without

There are many times when I'm watching something and the thought occurs to me that I've just seen or heard something that I'd really rather not encounter again. I don't know what is wrong with the people who make entertainment but it seems as though they lack imagination and feel we do as well.

Indications of this to me are as follows:

1. In the past, when someone tossed their cookies, we heard a coughing sound and the person dived down out of camera range to spare us the ugly spewing process. Now, we need to see the liquid pouring from people's mouths. This isn't just in movies but in prime time television shows. I think we all know what it looks like to barf and don't need a vivid reminder. I shudder to think what sort of normally-hidden-bathroom-behavior we're going to have to watch next.
   
2. "If he dies, you die." If there is a doctor and a person with a gun, it's irresistible for writers not to use that line. The idea is that the gunman is always irrational and feels it necessary to state this despite the fact that anyone with two brain cells to rub together knows a doctor who is trying to save any sort of adversary or enemy in such a situation will do his or her best. Besides the fact that this line is greatly over-used, the person who fails to save the friend doesn't die when the patient dies so it's all rather pointless.
   
3. I don't know if these sorts of commercials air in the United States but some time back advertisers in Japan decided that any drink commercial has to show someone downing the showcased beverage accompanied by a disgusting, loud, overly-exaggerated gulping noise. I neither associate this horrible sound effect with enjoyment nor require an audio sample of what it sounds like to swallow amplified by the equivalent of a digital blowhorn.
4. Breasts and beverages. Breasts and cars. Breasts and tools. Breasts and whatever item are being marketed at males. In this day and age, how many pathetic loser men believe that buying the socket wrenches will also bring delivery of the babe standing next to them? Are men really that easily manipulated and gullible or do advertisers just like to continue to think they are rather than design imaginative ad campaigns?
   
5. The fantasy doctor who spends extra time with his or her patients doing the jobs that only nurses do in real life like blotting their feverish brows. Isn't it fantasy enough that doctors in entertainment series (with the exception of House) care about their patients and actually talk to them about their lives and show interest in them as people? I've rarely met a doctor in real life who has regarded me as anything more than a piece of meat in need of curing.
6. Children who undergo accelerated growth. Back when I was in university, I spent some of my summer doing what a lot of people my age did during the afternoon. I watched soap operas. One thing you learned quickly is that kids grew up fast on soap operas. A pregnancy may gestate for over a year as the storyline around it unfolded at a leisurely pace but a kid generally grew to pre-teen in about 3 years and fully-grown early adulthood in no more than 6 years. Their parents, of course, aged normally. This little hack-writing chestnut lives today in science fiction as a way of getting around the nuisance of having to write about people who have kids in any credible way. This also allows them to trot out some oedipal weirdnesses in the storylines. The rather bad and short-lived "V" T.V. series played both these cards when they had the star-child off-spring of a reptilian visitor and a human hibernate in a cocoon and come out all pretty and grown up. She then competed with her mommy for the affection of the shows young beef-cake character (young accelerated growth child is always attractive and always gets the love interest). I saw a repeat of this situation in "Angel" when his infant son was kidnapped and spirited away to another dimension where time passed more quickly. He came back a whiny 17-year-old who banged his father's love interest and impregnated her with his demon love baby. Said baby also skipped the growth process by springing from the womb a full-grown woman. Most recently, I've seen this sort of rapid growth occur with baby Isabel (I'm a few seasons behind, folks) on "The 4400". During the entire time I was watching the second season, I was saying to myself, 'please don't succumb to the accelerated growth storyline,' but the writers couldn't resist. Pregnancy apparently makes for a great story but kids are just a pain to deal with once they're out of the womb. They either magically fade into background accessories (like on "Friends" and "Murphy Brown") or they grow up freakishly fast. I wish writers would simply not have people get pregnant if they can't credibly write storylines once the babies are born.
7. Computer nerds who dress in a stylishly dorky way and wear variations on horn-rim glasses and/or hot, slightly wacky-looking geek girls with mad skills at the computer. Real dorks and dorkettes don't look like this and even when they do, they don't transform into very attractive people once the glasses come off and the hairstyle and clothing style change. It's almost like they doubt our intelligence as viewers sufficiently that they have to push these stereotypes in front of us as a way of flashing a "geek character" sign in front of us. I do, however, have to give credit to "24" which avoided this stereotype and showed the computer literate types as normal people.
8. Pocahontas syndrome. I name this syndrome not for the real situation with Pocahontas but the one white people like to imagine. In what I'm sure is a historically inaccurate situation, Pocahontas is young, beautiful, desirable and speaks English perfectly and wants nothing more than to show all the palefaces safe passage through Indian territories. In television and movies, every time the hero finds himself in a strange culture where he can't speak the language, an attractive woman steps out and announces she can speak his language and serves as his guide. In many cases, the woman ends up the love interest. I think any writer who falls back on this hackneyed means of getting a character through an alien place should be dropped into the middle of rural China and see how many beautiful, helpful, perfect-English speaking women step up to make his life easy.
   
9. People who pine for each other but avoid hooking up for artificially constructed reasons. I'd blame the X-Files for this but they were hardly the first to indulge in this sort of long-term tease. It gets old very fast, particularly when the reason is unbelievable or absurd.

I'm sure there are a good many of these sorts of things I'm leaving out but these are the ones that have been bugging me as of late. If I compile another list, you can look forward to part 2. ;-)

8 Reasons Why "The Simpsons" Is No Longer Funny

Image pinched from the Wikipedia entry on an especially weak episode of the Simpsons.

It's no secret that the Simpsons has been on a slow decline for quite some time. Despite being a great Simpsons fan, I hadn't been watching since Season 15 and was unaware that the slide had ceased and that they were now bottom feeding on a regular basis.

Many people who have visited this topic far earlier and far more often than I have talked about where they believe the show has gone wrong. A lot of the decline can be laid at the feet of the writers and Ian Maxtone-Graham whose involvement in the show seems to have signaled the show's decline. However, the Simpsons was rarely conventionally funny and in fact they often made things funny in the same way that Monty Python does; that is, through well-timed repetition, great line delivery and funny juxtaposition of various normally conventional lines.

The main problems I've noticed are as follows:

1. The voice actors aren't working together and it shows.

In the commentary on the DVDs that have been already released, the show's creators and writers have mentioned on more than one occasion that the voice actors no longer do "table reads". A table read is where all of the actors sit around a table together and read through the script. This not only allowed them the equivalent of a live actor's rehearsal so they could fine tune their timing and line delivery but it also allowed jokes to be refined and comical ad libs to be included.

These days, all of the actors can record their lines remotely and then the pieces can be edited together. As of late, this is crystal clear in the way the lines are delivered. In particular, I've noticed that energy levels and emotional infusion between lines delivered by different actors are not matching. It seems especially noticeable with Julie Kavner's lines for Marge Simpson. This messes with the "punch" of the lines. I believe it's also partially responsible for unfunny jokes running on far too long because the pacing isn't obvious from what is written on the page nor from the pieces being cobbled together in editing.

I'm not sure how long it has been since table reads were regularly done. It's possible they stopped a long time ago and there's been a slow decay in the rhythm of line delivery through time. I believe this is likely the single biggest factor in the show's decline and it's unlikely to ever change as the voice actors all have other work they are doing and probably find it impractical to work together physically now.

2. Too many meta-references.

In the past, the meta references the Simpsons made tended to be appropriate within the context of the show and less obviously self-referential. Mainly, such jokes included references to Fox as a network. Such jokes occurred several times a season but it seems these days they can occur as often as several times per episode and some are lame repetitions of meta jokes that have already been overdone. In particular, there are references to the Simpsons fame or merchandising, animation or animators, and the show's inconsistency with things like Homer and Marge's jobs.

Meta-references can be considered a wink and a nod to the audience but it looses its impact if it occurs too often. If you worked with a co-worker who was constantly making the same comment and winking at you, how long would it take before it'd cease to be amusing?

3. Too narrowly-known parody references.

In early Simpsons episodes, classic movies or well-known cultural references were parodied such as Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" or Orson Welles's "Citizen Kane." Recent references included a White Stripes video that was re-created with Bart. It made no sense and wasn't the least bit funny. These sorts of references are done to showcase the guest voices (who increasingly appear to be there because of the personal interests of the writers or show runners and not because the audience may find their appearance of interest) rather than to add humor to the show. This is a case of the tail wagging the dog.

Narrow references only work when you explain them to the audience so they know what's going on. In the past, the Simpsons went out of its way to explain certain references (particularly music-based ones), such as the Homerpalooza episode. Now, they're too lazy or indifferent to frame the references for those who aren't experienced with their source. Parody only works when most of your audience knows the reference and when it's done well. The Simpsons has been failing more frequently on both of these fronts.

4. Interchangeable characters.

The Simpsons is a cartoon and you can expect some flexibility in how the characters are portrayed. Initially, Homer was used as the all-purpose character who was smart or stupid, a great or terrible father, hopelessly out of shape or athletic, etc. This back and forth for Homer was bad enough but acceptable for one character to give the show some flexibility in story lines but this sort of inconsistency bled over into Bart who has been both untalented and talented musically, obedient and disobedient, famous and unknown, and both a child and a man (doing adult jobs).

The next in line to be afflicted with serious character issues was Marge who started off as a wonderfully diligent and caring mother who was capable and moral and now sees more than her share of neglectful behavior toward her kids and immoral behavior. The last character to be corrupted is Lisa who has become increasingly shallow and morally labile when the story calls for it though her character has remained largely intact relative to the others.

The problem with this lack of character integrity is that the viewer loses all ability to relate to the characters in even the most minimal fashion and it guts the emotional impact which in turn undermines the humor. If, for instance, Ralph Wiggum is passive and dumb most of the time but on rare occasions says something oddly aggressive or smart, it's funny. If he says such things too often, the impact is lost and the comments are no longer funny.

One of the reasons humor is difficult to convey cross-culturally is that viewers from one culture can't relate to those from another. It is essential that the viewer identify with and empathize with characters for the comedy to work. When the characters become interchangeable, they cease to have a concrete personality you can find a foothold with emotionally.

5. Too gross, scatological, juvenile and tasteless.

In general, it seems that the Simpsons are siphoning their content from the same wells of death, desperation, violence, and childishness. These wells are obvious, deep and broad but uninteresting. The best stories of the past were dug up from personal experiences that the writers had in real life which they adapted for use in the Simpsons. Now, it seems anything goes. Perhaps this means they need new writers with fresh experiences to draw from after so many years or that the show runners are content to allow the quality to lapse because they're profitable even with a half-assed show.

In a show I recently saw, Michelle Kwan uses her skates to cut up a judge's chest when he scores her badly. This was supposedly a "hotdogging" maneuver. In another episode, two gangsters have an exchange where one asks the other if he's still married to his sister and he says he's not because she's been dead for two years. Ned Flanders makes an incredibly violent biblical movie which is not only gross but also out of character for Ned. Mr. Burns is in a car crash and his lungs are his airbag which he sucks back in. In an episode which visits 8 years in the future, professor Frink's skeleton is seen hanging in his home to indicate that he committed suicide and his body was left here. All of this is just a little too black outside of a Halloween episode.

In general, it seems the Simpsons is starting to confuse itself with South Park. This sort of nonsense only works about 1/5 of the time on South Park and it works almost not at all on the Simpsons.

6. Repeated story-lines from earlier episodes of the Simpsons and Futurama.

Homer's antics allowed him to dance and show off as a baseball mascot in a very early episode. In season 16, Homer's antics allow him to become a teacher of showboating behavior for various sports figures. Bart traps homer on April Fool's with a beer. Bart traps Barney with a beer to get him hit in the face with a watermelon. Too many of the more recent episodes are vaguely familiar.

7. Heavy-handed social and political commentary.

The aforementioned biblical movie made by Ned Flanders was an obvious reference to Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ. Homer joins the army and we're treated to a great amount of Iraq war commentary. Springfield glacier melts and the guide tells us that the official stance is that global warming doesn't exist as Lisa points out that the glacier is now sludge. While I almost always agree with the Simpsons writers' politics, I don't find it amusing when these sentiments are waved in front of my face like a screaming banner. Such things are far funnier and more effective when they are subtle and represent rushed, lazy or hack writing.

8. Too many jokes at the characters' expense which are sad instead of funny.

Fat jokes on a show like the Simpsons are an easy way to try and get a laugh since so many characters are rotund. When Homer is gearing up to take a shot at Flanders's pool table and says, "they don't call me Springfield Fats just because I'm morbidly obese," it's a funny fat joke. When police chief Wiggum, in reference to how he's not a good cop, says his badge is covered because his fat grew over it, it's just sad. When a character as oblivious to his faults as Homer makes a comment about his shortcomings (odor, weight, hair), it's funny because he's speaking with misplaced confidence. When Wiggum does it because he's feeling bad about himself, it's pathetic.

I believe this sort of "humor" started with Gil and has been expanded to other characters. The writers need to understand that it's not funny to kick someone when they're down on themselves or others are making fun of them unless the character has the confidence not to care or the zeal to fight back. I guess children who are 10 or younger who have parents that never taught them that mocking others is cruel may find it amusing.

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A reasonable question to ask is why I continue to watch (even belatedly) if I don't think the show is funny (or even enjoyable) anymore. The answer is that I want to believe it can be funny again and am not quite ready to give up on it yet.

"House" in Japan

Note that the only screenshot (as opposed to a promotional photo) on the Fox Japan site for House is one with an Asian patient.

House has been airing in Fox Japan for awhile now and season two is about to start. I've been seeing brief ads for the next season and they have left me wondering if someone has intentionally or unintentionally designed an ad which may be considered racist.

These ads show a sequence of photos which move to the left across the screen and stop on a large photo of a cast member with a smaller picture of that cast member next to and slightly behind it. The entire strip is a bit like a montage but with white space separating each "slide". It's a little hard to explain and, unfortunately, I couldn't find a visual representation of it on Fox Japan's web site.

In this ad, a slide of Jesse Spencer (blond-haired doctor Chase) with a large and small image of him freezes then slides into a large and small picture of Jennifer Morrison (Cameron) where it again hesitates. Between them, there is a small image of Omar Epps (Foreman) which the screen does not pause on. The final large and small images are of Hugh Laurie and the screen stops on his picture and details of the show appear next to his large image.

The question I can't help but ask is why there is no large image of Foreman and why the screen doesn't pause on his image as it does for the other two members of House's medical team. Omar Epps is actually the top of the three cast members in this group as he had more name recognition than the other two prior to being cast in House (likely due to his recurring role on "ER"and some movie roles). This fact is not lost on the Fox Japan people if you look at their site for House. In the "Cast" section of their site, the actors listed in order from left to right are: Hugh Laurie, Lisa Edelstein, Robert Shawn Leornard, Omar Epps. The other two actors aren't even listed in the "Cast" section.

The only conclusion I can reach is that it's because he's not "pretty" enough or because he's black. Personally, I think he's no less attractive than the other two but I realize beauty is highly subjective. One thing I can assert for certain is that this promotional spot would never be aired in America in this fashion as someone would quite rightfully cry "foul".

The "Real" Japan

This image pinched from the BBC's Japanorama site.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Unfortunately, sometimes those words are wrong. Pictures without context or which are not narrated by someone who can interpret them properly can lead you to reach incorrect conclusions. As someone who has lived in Japan for a long time, I often feel that westerners are looking at a lot of pictures and reaching wrong conclusions. One of the primary ones is that any single story or bit of culture is representative of "all" Japanese people or even a significant majority so long as the information being provided fits their preconceived notions of Japanese culture.

I'm sure that every person observing another culture reaches conclusions based on too little information. In the case of Japan though, the west seems to have a great affinity for seeing the people and culture as absurd, quirky, inventive, and unrelentingly capable of producing and demanding cute and odd products. The last thing people seem to want to do is believe that the Japanese are trudging off to work every day, working at a boring job, going home and watching T.V., and then going to bed day-in and day-out just like much of the rest of the world.

My husband and I have been watching the BBC's "Japanorama" series and have been having mixed reactions to it so far. I can't help but feel that the show is made, by and large, with an eye toward pandering to the western desire to see Japan in the way it wants to see it instead of how it really is. The first episode was about what is "kakkoi" or "cool" in and about Japan. The second one is about otaku (essentially anime and manga geeks who are equivalent to Star Wars or Star Trek geeks in the U.S.). The third about "zoku" or tribes and the fourth (which is the point to which we've watched) is about "owarai" (comedy).

Shows like this seem custom-designed for people who know Japan from the outside only and have an interest mainly in the quirky or weird parts. People who think Japan is all about its pop culture or most artistically-outstanding elements rather remind me of those who have the outdated notion that it's all about geisha, sumo, and Mt. Fujii.

In the first show, they talk about the avant garde architecture in Japan and treat the viewer to a brief tour of some of the outstanding buildings. It leaves the unknowing viewer believing that Japan is full of stunning and unusual architecture or beautiful traditional buildings. The truth is that what Japan is full of is some of the ugliest skylines and unimpressive buildings you'll ever see in a developed country. Amid seas of metal and glass boxes with smog-stained facades and apartment complexes with ugly metal balconies, you occasionally see something interesting but such highlights are relatively rare.

There's also a profile of clothing "designer" and Bathing Ape founder, Nigo, which talks about the Japanese 'love of collecting'. In my experience, outside of otaku, the Japanese collect less than Americans or are at least much more selective in their collecting and rarely assemble vast collections due to their limited living space. The clip that shows Nigo's vast collection of Star Wars collectibles and anime characters perfectly displayed in glass cases is so far away from the reality of collectors in Japan, who neither collect as much nor have them beautifully displayed, that it might as well be a work of fiction.

The "owarai" episode seemed to focus excessively on humor which was degrading and focussed on comedy that featured nudity or crude sexual humor which, apparently, all Japanese are eating right up if you believe the show's conclusions. While I'm very much willing to accept a good many people really enjoy that type of humor, I'm pretty sure it is over-represented in Japanorama relative to other types of interests or entertainment.

I realize that these more extraordinary parts of Japan are the most attractive to foreign viewers but a multi-part series focusing only on those aspects is a serious bit of reality distortion. In some ways, it does a disservice to average Japanese folks as it makes a lot of them look like a bunch of cosplaying, manga-reading, sexually-obsessed, quirky weirdos resting their heads on pillows shaped like women's laps or breasts and sighing "moe" or giggling moronic women catering to socially-awkward men's needs.

I think this bothers me to some extent because I try to focus on the psychological differences and similarities which have some utility in promoting cross-cultural understanding and depth of knowledge of the culture. Showcasing the oddities does nothing but offer up trivialities to people who are doing the television equivalent of rubber-necking. While I think there's value in showing these types of things, I think it should be offered in a broader context or at least with a proper perspective. At the very least, it should be made clear what portion of the population these pop cultural aspects represent rather than to simply say "the Japanese love ..." as if this is the way many of them live their lives.

Getting the Runaround

(Note: This saga updated at the end)

You often hear people talk about service in Japan in glowing terms and act as though the Japanese will bend over and kiss the boots of their customers to keep them happy. This is an interesting myth but, if you actually live in Japan, you find that good service, by and large, is a function of how much money the customer spends just like it is in every other country. If you go to an expensive place, you get treated like gold. If you go to a cheap place, you are treated in a relatively adequate but unimpressive fashion.

I'm disappointed to say that the same goes for dealing with places like the cable company. As I previously posted, J-Com (Japanese cable company) completely lied to us about the service we'd get. Their salesman displayed behavior I am very familiar with from working at my former company. That is, they tell the customer whatever it takes to get the customer to buy the product/service whether what they're telling you is the truth or not. Once you've agreed, they figure you'll put up with it rather than go through the trouble to get out of it.

The internet service J-Com has offered has been abysmal by anyone's standards. The speeds we get when doing a C.net speed test are around 280-350 kbps. This is supposed to be with a 30 Mbps connection. With NTT's FLETS 1.5 Mbps, the same speed test gets us between 500-800 kbps. J-Com has tried to dismiss this by saying they only regard tests done on a Japanese speed test site as valid.

When they run a test on a site they put their seal of approval on, we get 16 Mbps but I'm pretty sure this is a test ran on internal servers to create the illusion of speed. It's either that or their speeds are horrible when connecting to any site or server outside of Japan which is pretty useless for us and something we should have been told about before being sold a 6-month contract. It's a pretty ridiculous situation, especially since no reputable ISP would sell a service based on getting good connection speeds in a very limited geographical area.

I did contact tech support and they took control remotely of my computer to see if they could fix it up. There was nothing they could do but they were preoccupied with the idea that I had Bitlord installed and kept asking me if torrents were running while I ran tests. Of course, they inappropriately used their access to my computer to troubleshoot my connection to investigate my installed applications to find this out. The thing is, I ran the C.net test and showed it to the tech. fellow while he could see my screen and he saw the abysmal stats for himself and could clearly see no torrents were running. The only thing running was Internet Explorer.

Once the tech person couldn't improve my speed, he then changed his approach and claimed that 16 Mbps was "better than most Japanese households get". I told him the salesman promised each unit in our apartment building would be getting 30 Mbps when he pitched the service. I also asked him why the C.net test was so pathetic with J-Com despite his test saying we had a 16 Mbps test and he had no answer for that.

Since that interaction 2 days ago, I was called again and told that the case was going to be referred back to the sales section and someone would be calling me this morning to discuss it. Instead of someone calling me, a technician showed up at my door and wanted to mess with my hardware. The problem is that I had private lessons and was not in a position to have him do anything. My attempts this afternoon to get anyone from J-Com on the line to talk about it failed.

I'm essentially being given the runaround. They're hoping that avoiding the problem will make it go away. This would be on par with the way in which a lot of problems get dealt with in Japan for a variety of reasons. One is that no one wants to be responsible for making the decisions that would result in a resolution. The other is that they don't want me to break the contract and figure I'll eventually get fed up and just pay out the contract rather than deal with the aggravation of trying to get them to talk to me and deal with the problem. This is how a Japanese person would respond in most cases.

My experiences with J-Com to this point have been very negative and I would strongly advise anyone considering using their internet services to avoid them at all costs and to not believe anything they are told in regards to the quality of their services. Unless you are on a dial-up, you will likely not see much improvement in your internet speed through them, particularly when compared to even the lowest level ADSL access.

Update: Several hours after writing this post, I wrote an extremely irate letter (using words like "lie" and "cheat" relatively liberally) to J-Com and they finally contacted me by phone. They transferred our case over to a different salesperson (a woman) who is arranging to have the offensive technology removed next Tuesday. She said they wouldn't charge us for the internet or phone service for the 3 days they were installed. I'll keep my fingers crossed but I'm not holding my breath (yes, two cliches in one!).

Cable Frustration

My husband and I have been using a relatively slow ADSL (NTT FLETS) connection for quite some time. It is 1.5 Mbps which has been just fine for the most part. When our cable company representative came by to evaluate the ability to upgrade our cable access to HD and add in some channels, we discussed getting an integrated cable T.V./internet access/telephone package with an upgrade to 30 Mbps on the internet speed front. Using the integrated package would save us about $20 a month over the total amount of money for services we have been paying to our ISP and the phone company (and for cable T.V.).

My main concern initially was about whether or not the Japanese set-up software would run in a legible fashion on my computers which have English operating systems. The PCs have no Japanese capability installed. The Mac, like all Macs, can pretty much handle any language though it's not always 100% reliable that the software will accept the Mac itself. We asked the cable representative to bring us the software disc so I could test run it. It turned out it was all in Flash and ran just fine on the Mac.

The Flash interface of the set-up program makes everything look like a happy experience.

For those who don't know about the rigors of running software which uses double-byte characters rather than regular characters in English fonts, you can sometimes get total gibberish as your OS attempts to substitute characters for the double-byte ones. Since Flash uses graphics, all the text is nothing more than a picture so no OS fonts have to be used. The software ran okay on my PCs as well though one of the dialog boxes at the end was full of question marks and nothing else.

The cable installers came at around 4:30 yesterday and started working outside the apartment. They had to set up wiring for the phone mainly. We complicated matters for them by insisting that they not disconnect our old NTT ADSL and phone capability in case the cable internet ended up being a disappointment. They had to install a separate phone jack so we could use either one. Of course, we have to pay for both to have this flexibility but we wanted to be able to run them side by side at first. We'll cancel one or the other after we've concluded which is better.

I was afraid my taking pictures of the installation process might worry the guys doing it so I could only sneak in one shot while this fellow's attention was diverted.

The odd thing was that they drilled a hole in the wall in the living room (see picture above) and ran a cable through but they didn't use it. They ended up using the hole that was already in our bedroom. I have no idea why they did this but they capped the wire with a box and nothing is plugged into it.

It took the men doing the installation 4 1/2 hours to get their work done. During that time, they installed the wrong modem and we had to get them to bring a different one but that wasn't their fault. We later learned that we were victims of the all too common lack of communication between a salesman and the people who have to implement what he's sold.

During our initial meeting with the salesman, one of the questions we asked was about how many wired connections we could maintain in addition to a wireless one. The salesman assured us we could have 3 wired and 1 wireless but the modem that was installed was 1 wired and 1 wireless. A Linksys router had to be secured to replace the Motorola they'd brought in. I watched one fellow try to get the internet to work repeatedly and watched him fail and started to get concerned.

The first thing that worked was the cable T.V. It now has about a bazillion specialized functions and a huge remote has replaced our old one.

Ground control to Major Tom. You've left your remote behind.

The new remote has some pretty nifty features including channel listings and the ability to program favorites and call them up. With the new set-up, we no longer need a cable guide for programming. Everything is in Japanese, of course, but we can understand this sort of thing fairly well. However, it's all a bit much for now. It's an overload of features.

So far, the telephone also works fine but that's not what we were worried about. The thing we were most worried about and that turned out to be as much (or more) of a problem than we'd anticipated is the internet. While I ran the Japanese software on all of our computers with no difficulties and followed the instructions with no problems at all, our computers refused to connect.

At 8:30 at night, we had to contact customer service and see if they could help us out. The first thing the tech people told us was that the software would not work on an English OS. The most frustrating thing about this was that the salesman was well aware we were running English operating systems as that was a point we specifically had concerns about and asked about. He was too ignorant about what he was selling to know enough to tell us this would be an issue.

Fortunately, the tech person I dealt with was pretty savvy and I know enough about computers that we went through manual configuration on the PCs. The Mac somehow figured it out for itself once the router was reconfigured to act as a router rather than a bridge. The technician also told us we were only allowed two wired connections but I emphatically said that we were promised three. That was pretty much strike three for the salesman and his baseless promises and assurances.

The technician and I were on the phone for about an hour and a half but we eventually got them all to connect. I wish I could say that was the end of that but I ran speed tests on all of the computers this morning and they are running far slower than our old 1.5 Mbps ADSL connection. Even with only one computer connected, we're getting crappy speed so I know it's not a multiple computer set-up issue.

I'm sorry to say that it's back to the phone and tech support for us again. I can't express how pleased I am though that we didn't put all our eggs in one basket and decided to keep our other connection available. Unfortunately, if the whole thing craps out, we lose a lot of money for 6 months since the cable company wouldn't sign anything less than a 1/2 year contract with us. We may end up having to use double service for the duration of that contract if our issues aren't resolved.

Ghosties and Such

logo pinched from the Discovery Channel's site

Earlier today I was watching a Discovery Channel series called "A Haunting" which recounted the story of a little boy who was being "influenced" by a demonic entity and how his mother eventually rid herself of it. Generally, I don't go in for these types of shows but there was nothing better on and I wanted to watch something while I did some back exercises.

I'm not going to debate whether or not such things are "real" but I will say that I believe we make our own reality and that any manifestations of good or evil in our lives are our own mental constructions made manifest. I'm sure others feel otherwise and that's fine by me. It's not like anyone can prove that they are right or wrong about such things.

The thing that struck me while watching this "docu-drama" (or whatever you want to call it) is that the producers really did a good job of ramping up the potential spookiness factor by adding in cinematic touches which weren't a part of the story. The mother said, while she was attempting to perform a ritual to bar the spirit from influencing her son, that she wasn't sure if the house was going to shake or the windows break . These things never occurred but the camera was shaking to make it seem as though it had. There were also all sorts of spooky sound effects and "demon eye view"shots with a filter on the camera which was rushing in on the woman or her son as if the demon was "watching" or "attacking". This also never happened.

It occurred to me after watching all the work that went into juicing up the story that the audience must be pretty jaded to need cheap horror flick effects tossed into a supposedly true account of a demonic encounter. I also felt that doing these things undermined the emotional impact of the real mother's story as she narrated portions of the story. I guess we've all seen way too many horror movies to be impressed by the mere retelling of a ghost story.

Cartoons and Crab Meat

Last night, I was flipping through channels looking for something interesting and found myself on the Japanese Cartoon Network. It's similar to the one in the U.S. except the cartoons are bilingual when they are in English and there is a mixture of Japanese cartoons as well.

The cartoon I happened to land on was Peanuts which was just finishing before Bugs Bunny started. Since I'm a fan of old Bugs Bunny cartoons, I decided to let the commercials play through and watch the upcoming cartoon. This is where things got weird.

The commercial that aired was a really long one about crabs. This is the sort of ad where some woman stuffs huge gobs of the featured food into her mouth while shrieking orgasmically. At one point, she looked like she was trying to gag herself by inserting the better part of an entire leg into her mouth and sucking off the meat. I'm not kidding. She easily stuck 4 inches of it in her mouth and it looked like more. No wonder her eyes were bugging out and she was making loud noises. I'm sure her uvula was bruised.

Anyway, the commercial was offering up 7 enormous spiky-looking crabs for about $100 so I was wondering who they think is watching cartoons at 9:00 pm. I'm doubting kids are jumping up and down begging their mothers to buy them crabs (though they may grow up thinking they may prove useful in foreplay after watching those ads). So, I'm wondering who this type of thing is aimed at.

I guess it could be the mothers of children who watch cartoons with their kids but my image of kids parked in front of the T.V. is one where it's an electronic babysitter while mothers are off doing the thousands of little things they must do to run a household and care for their families. Perhaps all the over the top expressions of delight are meant to force the mothers to come rushing into the living room to see if their kids have stumbled across some pornographic programs only to become entranced by the great value and obvious deliciousness of those monster crabs...or at least make them wonder if they can seek the gratification they're missing elsewhere in their lives through seafood consumption.

"I Know How American High School Kids Live...

...because I have watched Beverly Hills 90210." Believe it or not, quite a few students have said this to me. My reaction is somewhere between incredulity and horror though I keep that under wraps. It's pretty important for Japanese people to understand we don't all grow up rich, white, manipulative, and promiscuous with a colorful cadre of close rich white friends and friendly token ethnic friends.

Even though the show went off the air in the U.S. six years ago, it is still ran consistently on cable television (on a woman-oriented channel called LaLa) in Japan. In fact, it appears to be sufficiently popular that, as of 2 years ago, aging cast members were still visiting Japan to promote the show and special behind the scenes shows about the series continue to be shown. That means the show continues to "educate" the Japanese about youth culture in the U.S. to this day. I'm guessing that the O.C. will usurp that role eventually but manage not to portray life any more accurately.

While discussing prejudice, ethnicity and poverty, one of my students told me that she thought all white people in America were middle class or rich. I have to wonder to what extent the aforementioned types of shows foster this erroneous belief or if this particular student has a much more skewed viewpoint than most Japanese people. She felt that only black people were poor. The fact that her black college teacher has reinforced the idea that blacks are constantly living in poor conditions and at an economic disadvantage has probably fueled that notion but it's no more true that all blacks are poor than all whites are rich.

While I used to see my students as quite naive for their notions that U.S. television programs reflected real life in any way, I'm pretty sure now that other cultures and Asians in particular are misunderstood or stereotyped no less by Americans based on how they are portrayed on T.V. While we don't see as much culture imported wholesale into the U.S. from other countries, we do see distorted American views of them inserted into U.S. T.V. programs. This is sometimes for comic effect (e.g., Monty Python's depiction of Chinese and Japanese), it's sometimes fairly earnest and, on older shows, rather racist by current standards.

Given the number of old American shows on Japanese cable, I've at times stumbled on some pretty overt racist statements which were not seen as such at that time. On the old show Quincy M.E., Robert Ito portrayed an assistant for a dozen and a half shows and, at one point, Dr. Quincy remarks on how "inscrutable" he is. In Star Trek, the character of Sulu, being Japanese (yet not having a Japanese name), knew how to use a sword and the character of Keiko on Star Trek the Next Generation seemed to have grown up with less exposure to western culture than Japanese people in our era. Being Japanese, she had to wear her hair with sticks stuck in it, eat food from the sea, grow bansai trees (though to be fair, she was a botanist), and get married in a kimono.

These portrayals seem to be beating us over the head with the characters' ethnicity but I'm pretty sure that the writers didn't realize how trite their characterizations were. Just like my students know Americans from shows like Beverly Hills 90210, those writers know Japan from things like Shogun. Among U.S. television shows, the only one that gets it right is "The Simpsons" though, of course, they exaggerate things for comic effect.

Watching Region-free

Back before DVD standards were settled upon, my husband and I had to make a decision about what region code we were going to accumulate a collection under. Since we ultimately plan to reside in the United States, we chose to purchase only Region 1 encoded DVDs. This also was better for us because discs from the U.S. are cheaper than those in Japan and often titles are released earlier or exclusively there.

Having made that choice, we bought a rather expensive region-free player from the states by mail order. This was back in "the old days" before many shops in Akihabara carried players that could easily be set to be region-free or were region-free out of the box. That venerable machine, a Pioneer, went to DVD heaven earlier this year.

Rather than toddle off to Akihabara to secure a successor, we decided to opt for the rather cheap one that the FBC was offering. The main benefit of doing this was we were guaranteed the ability to download an English manual and a diagram of all the remote's functions translated into English. While I've gotten pretty good at stumbling my way through everything from Japanese computer manuals to utility bills (with the help of my husband), I'd rather that the more complicated functions of an audio-visual device were there for me in English if I have that option.


For 8,730 yen, it's been a pretty good deal. It works as well as any DVD player. That is to say, it can be idiosyncratic about some discs but plays 95% of them without problems. It also plays MP3's, DVD-RWs, and other discs which our old player could be a bit fussy about. The circular display on the right has a kaleidoscope function where it cycles through various colors while it displays the time on the disc. If that weren't all dandy enough, the unit has a small footprint (Dimensions: W25 x H6.2 x D25.5cm) which is rather helpful for those of us in small apartments.

images copyright of the Foreign Buyer's Club

Rome

"frow him to the froor vewy wough-wy, centuwion"

I don't watch much Japanese T.V. unless you count snippets on YouTube posted by Japan Probe. Part of the reason for this is that the type of entertainment on Japanese T.V. doesn't interest me much and the other reason is my Japanese is embarrassingly bad.

I do watch Japanese cable T.V. when I can find a station that's not showing Korean dramas, Aly McBeal, old crime dramas, or bad movies. However, I seem to have an uncanny ability to think about watching T.V. about 10-15 minutes before the hour when Japanese networks are running commercials between shows. For those who are in the U.S., a lot of Japanese cable channels show no commercials at all during programs and just run them repeatedly between shows.

So, I buy a lot of DVDs. I'm always on the hunt for good viewing material and I'm a particular fan of historical dramas. Fortunately, I stumbled across "Rome", a miniseries jointly produced by HBO and the BBC. Season 1 is now out on DVD and well worth spending some time watching. There are 12 episodes that span the time from Julius Caesar's struggle to make himself emperor to his death. However, unlike most of these types of dramas, the center of the series is not Caesar though his story is the backbone of season 1. The machinations of his relatives, enemies, and allies and the part they played in his demise form the meat of the show. We also get to follow the lives of two soldiers, Titus and Lucius. They are meant to portray the "everyman" of Roman society but are often ensnared in loftier situations through unfortunate happenstance.

"Do you think that sheppardess would like to do it doggie-style?"
(Titus and Lucius)

It is the way in which the series shows us the daily lives of Romans where it deviates from the usual Roman epic. Some of it is pretty brutal and quite graphic. In fact, it's rather hard not to notice the softcore porn aspects of some of the sex scenes. Since "Rome" was co-produced by HBO, it's not surprising that they've chosen to take advantage of their cable-based freedom when it comes to showing nudity. Titus in particular seems to display a voracious appetite for women and speaks quite crudely of their anatomy on several occasions. The series is not for the prudish or easily-offended.

Aside from the more titillating aspects, there are numerous plots woven and unravelled in a soapishly delicious way, character development (espeically for Lucius) and a real feel for what it may have been like to live in Rome around 40 BC. Background characters, such as the town crier, show personality in their limited roles and you develop an affinity for them, as if they were acquaintances in a town you actually lived in.

The series does a very good job of making the history behind Caesar's downfall clear and understandable without being boring or tedious. This is the first time I've seen a portrayal of Caesar's life show us how someone who was a conquering hero and generally seemed to act in the interests of the people could have been seen as such a great tyrant by his political opponents.

It's also good for what it avoids. While many movies have spent most of their screen time savoring Caesar's relationship with Cleopatra, we barely see more than a kiss and a resulting offspring. We're spared the cliche of Cleopatra being unrolled from a carpet at Caesar's feet and "et tu brute" is never uttered.

The series can be purchased from Amazon for about $62. If you wait awhile, the price will likely go down but it is well worth that price given the quality of the production and the compelling story.

all images from "Rome" are the copyright of HBO and the BBC