This is a leap of faith, and I'm hoping for a soft landing.
Entering my last days in Japan, I feel like I'm being drawn and quartered. Trying to get my bags packed, ship boxes home, finish my grad school application process, get my financial aid application in, negotiate the hand over of my school, train Brian to take my place, and say goodbye to everyone!
I wish I had time to properly write about my last weekend trip, but it's not gonna happen at the moment. Anyway, please check out these pictures. They're worth a thousand words each.
BitTorrent, the creator of the file-sharing software that for some has become synonymous with piracy, has struck a landmark distribution deal with a Hollywood studio.
Warner Bros. Entertainment Group has agreed to use BitTorrent's peer-to-peer system to distribute movies and television shows, including "Dukes of Hazzard" and "Babylon 5," beginning this summer, the companies are expected to announce Tuesday.
My good friend Tiffany recently returned to Japan from France. She made a surprise appearance at the Heiwa Matsuri last week by sneaking up behind me and giving me a big hug.
Amidst all the party people, she managed to snap quite a few funny pictures; including some of embarrassing shots of me trying to cut the rug.
Click here to check out some of Tiff's pics from the past few weeks back in the land of the rising sun: Tiff's Olympus Slideshow
In a move that deliberately echoes the rush release of "Ohio" in the wake of the Kent State shootings, Neil Young bashed out his 2006 protest record Living with War in a matter of days, sometimes recording songs the day they were written, and then seized the opportunities of the digital age by streaming the entire album on his website only weeks after it was recorded, with the official digital and CD releases trailing several days later. It's the best use yet of the instant, widespread distribution that the Web has to offer, and it also hearkens back to the days when folk music was topical, turning the news into song.
The cold of winter is officially over and the warmth of spring is emitting energies and emotions straight through the stratosphere.
My old hometown friend Brian arrived in Japan last week to move into my Heiwa-cho house and assume my English teaching responsibilities. He’s settling in really well; he even started a blog called The Fire That's In Me to write about his first impressions, and I think he’s got a great attitude towards living in Japan. He’ll do well.
At the same time, my good friend Cem left to begin a job writing for the Japan Times. He will be in Casablanca, Morocco for the next three and half months interviewing businessmen before departing for his next worldly destination. He will be deeply missed.
To celebrate this emotional changing of the guard, so to speak, we pooled our efforts to host a three-day squat party in Heiwa-cho. We had live didgeridoo performances in the living room, multiple DJs spinning dance music, fire dancers, a pot of curry to feed 50 people, a BBQ outside, a full bar that included three kegs of Tokyo Ale, another fridge full of bottled beer, and Brian’s very own liquor carousel shot dispenser. Hell, we even printed T-shirts!
Earlier this month I sent off an application to the School for International Training. I'm applying for their Master of Art in Teaching with an emphasis on teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL).
As part of the application process, I had to write a 1500 word essay on an international experience or cultural exchange that was important to me. It took me months before I decided on an approach, but I finally settled on giving a brief overview of my life in Japan.
If anyone would like to read my essay, please click here: SIT Essay.doc
It's not the greatest thing I've ever written, but it's the first time I've actually summed up on paper the impact Japan has had on me, and I'm very grateful to my good friends Cem & Alexis for proof reading it and giving me constructive criticisms and ideas.
Venture capitalist John Doerr made his name and fortune with early investments in Netscape Communications Corp., Amazon.com Inc., Google Inc. and other pioneering tech firms that went from scrappy startups to household names.
Now Doerr and his firm, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, are placing big bets on an emerging sector he calls "green technology," one he believes could become as lucrative as information technology and biotechnology.
The only way I can describe the Rolling Stones Bigger Bang concert in Nagoya Dome is with a string of expletives unfit to print here. To say I'm still buzzing or walking without touching the ground would be a mild understatement.
Before the show, I met my friend Toku, his girlfriend Nami, his colleague Motoshi, and a local promoter that goes by the name Go-Low. The night before, Toku and Go-Low went drinking with some of the Stones roadies and received an offer to come backstage. I got to tag along!
We met Pierre, the Stones chief sound technician, who escorted us backstage and gave us a tour of the area. He took us past Mick's dressing room, all the guitars, and up on the stage. I actually walked around on the Rolling Stones' stage!
Eventually, Pierre passed us off to Mike, Charlie's drum tech. Mike told us to bust out our cameras and he started talking pictures for us. He gave Motoshi a set of drumsticks and everyone else got guitar picks.
Check out this video of Mike showing us the drums:
The show itself was fun, but the Japanese audience was a little too conservative. Believe it or not, they didn't even serve beer in the place. Totally mind-boggling.
It took a little while for the audience to really get into it, but the latter half of the show was really fun.
Here's a short video of Honky Tonk Women:
After the show, we all went to a restaurant to chill out, get something to eat, and finally drink a beer. While we were eating, Bernard, one of the back-up singers came and sat down near us.
The whole night was surreal, as it should have been.
With the boom of blogs and podcasts, RSS feeds are becoming increasingly relevant to Internet users because it's an easy way for users to subscribe to websites and receive notifications when those sites are updated. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.
I'm still learning how to use RSS, and I have a long way to go, but in the meantime, I'm trying to offer this blog up for syndication.
In my opinion, the easiest way is to sign up for subscription by email. If you enter your email address below, you will receive an email anytime I post a new entry.
Alternatively, you can click on one of the icons below to add this blog's headlines to your Yahoo, Google, or AOL pages.
Lastly, if you're using the newest version of Safari or Firefox, you can click the RSS or syndication icon in the address bar and simply bookmark the feed address.
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I hope ya'll find this useful and it saves the time of checking for updates and being disappointed if I'm too busy or lazy to make posts.
Spring is slowly setting in, but the cherry blossoms look like they’re gonna take another week.
For April Fool’s Day, I went to Inuyama with my friends Cem, Yuki, Ethan, and Alexis for a festival. We spent the afternoon walking around casually eating all the usual matsuri snacks: choco bananas, yaki-mochi, squid, various meat sticks, butter potatoes, etc.
Here’s a video of Ethan demonstrating how to give a kancho:
If you don’t know what a kancho is, I suggest you read Wikipedia’s explanation here: Kancho
The following day I had plans to go to a cherry blossom party in Okazaki, but the rainy weather forced the party inside. Regardless, we still had a good time, and a couple from Okinawa brought a shamisen and performed a few songs.
I put a few pictures on my Flickr account that you can scroll through here: Okazaki Pics
Twentieth Century Fox has confirmed that popular animated TV series The Simpsons is to be made into a film.
The movie will be released in the United States in July 2007. A 25-second trailer for the film has been shown to US audiences at screenings of Ice Age: The Meltdown, promising to introduce "the greatest hero in American history".
It then cut to Homer Simpson, wearing only his underwear, who admitted: "I forgot what I was supposed to say."
For the past few years, during spring break, I've also done something with a group of my students. Past activities include a trip to the Higashiyama Zoo and a trip to the Nagoya Aquarium.
This year, due to the unusual cold weather in late March, we decided to go bowling. Most of the kids had only been bowling once or twice before, so I think it was a good experience for them.
For me, I just enjoyed watching them. Check out this short clip of my youngest student named Ha-kun throw a ball as big as he is.
Afterwards, we all went to eat McDonald's hamburgers and fries. It wasn't exactly an educational day, but it when else will I have the chance to throw rocks with a bunch of ten year old nihilists?
A couple weeks ago I went to see Damo Suzuki's Network play in Nagoya. Damo is an ex-member of the '70s German prog-rock juggernaut CAN. He's now on what he calls the Never Ending World Tour.
Damo travels alone to cities all over the world, and he has a revolving cast of musicians improvise behind him. In each city, he assembles a band of local musicians. Thus, every night is new and slightly or maybe even extremely different.
His show in Nagoya consisted of Hiroshi Higashi (Synthesizer), Makoto Kawabata (Guitar), Atsushi Tsuyama (Bass) all members of the Acid Mothers Temple. As well as local Zen musician Kei (Guitar) with pal Ryoko Ono (Sax), and Taiqui (Drums).
I've been messing around with YouTube a lot recently, so I decided to post this short clip from the show.
We stayed in a Japanese style, onsen hotel called Takemine, located on the top of the ski resort. The only way to get there was to take a snow-cat from the parking lot or ski in. After we arrived, everyone changed into the comfortable yukatta's provided for us, and we went to eat dinner in the dining hall.
The hotel served Japanese carp in a variety of different ways. I'd never eaten carp before, and I was shocked at how good it was.
After dinner, we returned to our room for a three-dimensional sound experiment. We played the Flaming Lips' Zaireeka album using two iPods, each connected to an iFusion speaker setup, and two iBooks, each connected to an external speaker set-up. For one night, we had the best stereo on the planet!
The next day we woke up, put our iPods in our pockets, walked out into a blizzard, and went cross-country skiing across a 3km cat track. At the end of the cat track, we strapped on a pair of snowshoes and went trooping through the woods like the March of the Rotten Vegetables.
Eventually, we decided to dig a snow cave. We managed to hollow out a deep snowdrift that provided us shelter for lunch. After eating, we went back outside and noticed all our tracks were snowed over. It took us some time to find our way back to the cat track, but we did it.
On the way back to the hotel, we stopped off in front of a mirror to have some fun with our cameras.
Pure silliness. Believe it or not, that was the music I was listening to at the time.
All jokes aside, that night I ate one of the best meals of my life; carp sashimi, carp in a kind of sweet miso soup, nabe, tsukemono, fish paste served with a shiso leaf, and a few bottles of atsukan.
Our last day, we woke up to beautiful sunshine and went snowboarding all morning before catching a 3pm snow-cat back down the mountain.
At the end, I concluded that any time Jason, Mark, and I get together hilarity ensues.
It was a bittersweet occasion. I taught these students for four years starting when they were 5th grade at elementary school. I have many fond memories with them; for example, these students wrote letters to my uncle when he was sick, and in return as thank you notes, they received baby pictures of me from my father.
I was very proud to watch them walk and receive their diplomas, but the event also marked the end of my tenure at this school. From April, the town of Jushiyama will merge with a neighboring city, so my contract with the local BOE will be lost.
I enjoyed myself here immensely, but it's time to start moving on...
