Check out these Japanese sword set images:

Set up on the Course


Image by rasdourian
Nothing fancy

the set w/her sword


Image by tkmrabbits
the set is incredibly complete,the swords are removable from their sheaths.they’re made of solid wood. carved,then covered in gofun. late edo-early meiji

Some cool How to Read Japanese images:

Boris Johnson


Image by nofrills
A few weeks back, I was looking at a bunko (paperbacks) shelf at a local, small, family-run bookstore. I often go to the store because they have a excellent selection of books – other bookstores in my area are too consumeristic to have Edward Said and other books that make me feel intellectual.

I was looking for a "The Secret of Google" sort of books needed in my work, when I found the "B・ジョンソン (B. Johnson)" book. I know one B. Johnson – Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, a British MP, a Tory, etc. The amusing title, 「世界同時中継！　朝まで生テロリスト？」　caught my eyes too. I couldn’t find the right kind of my book, so I bought this. 1,000 yen is rather costly for an entertainment book, but this is Boris Johnson. I didn’t know how long the store keeps it or it might not be very long until it gets in the usual out-of-print status. (I don’t reckon this sells so well, and I know how publishers make decisions.) It was "now or never".

「朝まで生 something？」 is sort of in the Japanese pop culture, after a TV debate program, 「朝まで生テレビ」. It literally translates as "Live TV til Dawn", in which guest members do some debates from 01.00 til 05.00 (or something). I seldom see the program, as I don’t like the host. Anyway the phrase 「朝まで生 something？」 is catchy enough.

The book is rich in details. I have just read the first 100 pages, and am sort of bored of the tale but some details make me LOL. There will be a huge go in the tale in the next 100 pages, I hope. If Robert Altman were still alive, he’d do a clever job on this novel.

And 「世界同時中継！　朝まで生テロリスト？」　translates: Live on Air World-Wide! Live Terrorist til Dawn? … Looks seriously stupid for a title of a book. (Originally, as on the cover, "Seventy-Two Virgins".)

Visual Ideology


Image by timtak
In addtion to the subtitles to what the speaker is saying, and in addition to the fact that they both read from a written speech rather than pretend to extemporize, both these leaders (one the minister for defence, the other a prefectural representative) are wearing overalls. Do they reckon, do we reckon, does anyone reckon that they will or should be doing manual labour? No.

All three Japanes cultural phenomena, or non-book-religion, non-logocentric phenomena, attestify to the fact that in Japan visual signs, be they subtitles on what someone is saying, the script that the person is reading, or the clothes that they are wearing, are more vital than the phonemes. And this in spite of the fact that there are many Westerners that say only phonemes have meaning.

But to show their solidarity with those that are engaged in manual labour at this time of crisis, Japanese leaders choose to wear overalls.

C.f. the fact that, Japanese sports persons, no mater how much of a novice or not they are will get the right gear. Japanese sports persons some times have all the gear and no thought? What is an "thought" and how does one express it?

My heartfelt sympathy is with the victims of the Japanese earthquake.

Check out these authentic sword images:

Ever More Horror


Image by pbyrne
Here’s more evidence of the arm-related carnage after the blood drive at work. I’m worried this picture reveals more about me as a person than the poor job done by the nurse who took my blood. See the notes.

Reader Question: The Impact of Blogging on Travel


Image by LeeLeFever
We recently received a nice email from Nath at Blue Fronier Media. Nath questions…

Firstly, how much has running this blog taken over the ‘mission’ that you guys have embarked upon?

Hi Nathan!
What a can of worms you have opened. We like talking about this stuff… Let’s see…about the mission…

TwinF is a huge part of our experience – I am personally thinking about it all the time – usually in terms of what would make fantastic content and where the next Web connection is going to come from (man, I sound like a junky). As for mission though – TwinF was part of the mission from the beginning. We saw it as an opportunity to travel and experiment at the same time. We had a hypothesis that a new type of travel is possible now because the Internet makes it so simple to collect information and meet new people. In testing this hypothesis, I get to learn new things for my work with Common Craft. So, we’re very motivated to keep things rolling. I’d also say that our hypothesis has proven to be right – blogs and the Internet have enabled us to learn about places and meet people we never would have known otherwise. TwinF has helped us make our travel world much smaller and more localized. We call it the "Long Tail of Travel", if you’re familiar with that thought.

Has it enriched the trip…something to keep you interacting with your world and — in the case of a travel diary like yours perhaps — ensuring that you keep engaging critically with what’s going on around you; chasing the next post, as it were).

It’s a double-edged sword. It is incredible to know that people are watching and are ready to help, but it’s also intimidating sometimes. I honestly worry about looking like a rookie or saying something insensitive. Aside from that, the notion of sharing something on the web has pushed us into places and situations that we may not have pursued otherwise. The perfect example is eating weird things in Asia – that would not have been so fun without video and TwinF as a means to share it. Also, it has made us really reckon about how a place makes us feel because we want to be as authentic as possible. I have no regrets – I would say blogging has enriched more than detracted by a long shot.

Also, Member Travel Experiences along with comments and emails has enriched the trip immeasurably. We found some of our favorite spots by asking for advice from our readers.

Has it become a pain at times when you’d just rather blow TwinF off and be another hedonistic, aimless vagabonding vagrant?

I have a small voice in the back of my head that is constantly keeping track of the length of time between posts and sometimes it is a bit too loud. But, that voice is not specific to TwinF, I’ve heard it since my first blog and I’m used to it.
It is the administrivia that gets ancient… Finding a connection, uploading pictures, trying to use the mobile phone, dealing with comment spam, etc. If wifi was ubiquitous and the technology worked consistently, we would have no complaints.
Blowing off TwinF has never even been a possibility and I reckon we would both count it as a failure if we did. TwinF is a project that are both committed to seeing through to the end and I reckon we’re lucky that we have such fun doing it.

A few nice Japanese Comic images I found:

Japanese comic character cakes at Bread Talk


Image by renaissancechambara

A few nice Learning to Speak Japanese images I found:

Situated Meaning in the Empire of the Indexes


Image by timtak
My understanding of Pierce in this description is sorely misguided. Icons are a seperate class of sign.

I have been claiming that while the Westerners tend to be very "logocentric" or linguistic, Japanese are more inclined to concentrate on visual information, especially when it involves themselves. Hence Westerners care about linguistic self-expression, and carry around with them an "Other" or "Superaddressee" that reflects their speech acts upon themselves. And Japanese care about visual self expression (clothes items, things, pointing) and carry around with them, a "mirror in their head" (Heine and Takemoto, et. al).

But, lately I have been forced to realise that Jane Bachnik is right and I was incorrect: It is not that the West is linguistic and Japan is "occular," nor even that Western signs are sounds rather than images, but rather it the difference is in the way that Japanese and Westerners use signs, or the type of signs that they use.

Jane Bachnik claims that Japan is (to paraphrase Barthes) "the empire of the *indexes*".

What are indexes? Indexes are a type of sign, in American linguist Pierce’s taxonomy of signs. Their most well-known subgroup are icons, such as on your computer screen. Icons are strictly speaking, indexes that have a resemblance to that which they represent, such as the well-known trashcan which represents the deletion of computer files and thus has a likeness to its meaning. More purely indexical is the Nike logo, called a "swoosh," which gets to mean "Nike" by virtue of the fact that it is printed on all their products and showed at the end of their adverts, rather than by its similarity to a running shoe. Indexes get their meaning by their "contiguous relationship" with the thing that they refer to. That means that they are often showed at the same time in the same place, or immediately before or afterwards in time and space. Many of the typical examples of indexes are natural phenomena related causally, hence smoke is an index for fire, thunder an index for lightening (and vice versa), and the mercury in a thermometer is an index for the temperature. Perhaps the vital thing about indexes is that they have a direct, one-to-one relationship with that which they represent. As mentioned in my previous post, indexical thought may have a lot in common with "savage thought" as defined by Levi-Strauss. Indexes are one part of the word, used as a sign for another part.

What other types of signs are there? That a sign has a direct one to one relationship with that which it represents may seem pretty much the way that all signs are. But Saussure, and even ancient Buddhists have pointed out that linguistic signs (at least in the West!) are defined by their relationship to other signs, "cat" is understood by its relationship to "bat," and "dog." Phonemic words (at least) mean, have meaning, by virtue of not being other words.

Returning to indexes, another well-known example of an index is a pointing finger. It has meaning because you can see what it is pointing at. Jane Bachnik proposed the theory that indexes are vital to the Japanese from consideration of the importance of such words such as inner and outer ("uchi" and "soto") or front and back ("omote" and "ura"), which are used extensively to describe social interactions. Like pointing fingers but, these spacio-metaphorical words have meaning in contextual locations, and shift their meaning depending upon who is saying them. Inner (uchi) e.g. my family, for me will be outer (soto) for you and vice versa. Bachnik struggles with this shifting aspect of indexes, and I believe emphasises their shiftiness more that I do. Indeed, I reckon that is were Bachnik and I differ. For Bachnik indexes are inherently shifty and subjective, but for me, I reckon it depends upon the culture from which one looks upon them. I will come back to this point but first I will introduce some examples of where Bachnik’s theory of Japan as the empire of the indexes is useful.

A few days ago I was out in a river bay on my kayak and at 6 o’clock, or one or two minutes before or after came the sound of the tannoy sound system that announce this time (and perhaps that it is time for dinner, time to go home from the rice fields) to the local inhabitants. Some of the 6-oclock-sounds were simply sirens, others were the melodies from folk songs (often Scottish, for reasons unknown) and there was one sound of someone ringing a temple bell. Since they localities around the bay were slightly out of sync, the continued for about 5 minutes, before the bay returned to silence. These sounds can be heard at least twice a day, also at noon. In some rural prefectures the local town hall will make announcements such as "the primary school children have all safely returned from their school trip." Sticking to the noon and 6pm sirens, it is clear that that they are phonic not visual signs, so bang goes my theory that the Japanese are into their visuals. This is a very Japanese, very phonic sound. It is also an index. The sounds get their meanings (certain times of day) by occurring at those times of day, contiguously with the small hand of the clock pointing at six.

More importantly, it would be very untrue to suggest that the Japanese do not place considerable significance on language, but the way that they do it is different. It is simple to point to areas in which, from a Western, logocentric point of view, the Japanese do not seem to place a fantastic deal of importance upon language. "Japan is a society without dialogue" as Nakajima points out, (Taiwa no Nai Shakai), in which university students never question questions, decisions are made before committees deliberate (and debate) on the issues, political debate tends toward the grey with the manifestos of all parties being very much the same, rules are often reinterpreted in surprising ways (e.g. "scientific whaling"), there is a lot of flattery ("oseiji"), and there are books extolling the vagueness of the Japanese. At the same time but, there are some instances in which it is clear that Japanese take words *really* seriously.

Today there was a tragic tale in the only English language "Japan Today" news site. An eight year ancient Japanese girl committed suicide apparently because she had been the victim of bullying. And the bullying consisted (perhaps solely, since the culprit remains unknown) in finding the word "die" written on her pencil case and books. As the father of a daughter my heart goes out to the parents. At the same time, as a Westerner I find myself confused. In Anglophone countries it has become vogue (and the subject of pop song lyrics) to tell people to go away and die in far more offensive language, but I doubt that many or any of the "victims" feel as traumaticised as this 8 year ancient did. It is clear that some words can be very offensive in Japan, and that the Japanese can take them very seriously with tragic results.

That Japanese take terrible words seriously is supported by the fact that there are few expletives in Japanese. Instead of accusing someone you intensely dislike of being incestuously involved with their mother, one claims that their mothers belly button sticks out. The word for the female sex organs is felt to be so rude that it can not be used, so that Japanese sex educators have had to experiment with the use of "girl willy."

A Japanese teacher of debating skills bewails the aforementioned lack of debate in Japan, ascribing it to the belief in the spirit of words. He argues that debate requires that one examine the pros and cons, the positive and negative outcomes of an act. Japanese do not like to talk about negative outcomes, lest they come right as a result, so debate is often avoided. Hence it is precisely the belief in *the power of words* motivates the avoidance of dialogue.

This phenomena again relates to the theory of indexes. Indexes have meaning by their direct relationship with that which they mean, rather than by their position in a language or discourse. Thus the word death may conjure up the state and event of death far more strongly among Japanese (who avoid even homonyms of the word), than among Anglophones for whom death is associated with life and birth. Speaking the word "death" to an indexical thinker may even bring death upon them, but speaking the word death to a linguistic dialogic thinker may bring them to life.

That Japanese see words as being particularly disturbing is often related to their belief in "word-spirits" (kotodama, shinko). This is the ancient belief that words hare imbued with spirit such that their utterance can make the word come right. Hence for this reason, certain words weakly related to the concept of divorce (such as "go home") are avoided at Japanese weddings lest they encourage the bride to "go home to her parents" and divorce the groom.

Finally, returning to Bachniks feeling that indexes shift more than other types (our types) of sign, I can not agree. Words in western society, even those that underpin our society, such as freedom and justice, excellent and terrible, are interpreted in many ways. That they share particular interpretations, and remain vital to us, is the result of a cultural practice of internalising language via the "Other" "Generalised Other" or "Superaddressee" of language. This linguifying of the psyche does not have to be done, and the Japanese do not do it. On the other hand, that Japanese identify far more greatly with the visual self representations, theire face, and with "lococentric" (Lebra) clasifications of society such as inner and outer (uchi and soto) does not imply that Japanese society is more shifting, but rather that they have learnt to internalise a co-experiencer, a mirror in their head (Heine and Takemoto et al.), something with which to nail the context down, to sew the subjective worlds of experience, these fish-bowls together.