My favourite animal.
I'm going to talk about my favourite animal.
My favourite animal is a cat. Because the cat is very lovely.
A white cat is kept in my house. Her name is Tofu.
She came to my house in the winter three years ago. Her eyes are very beautiful blues. She has three children. They are all lovely children who look like her.
Hereafter, I want to make her important as family's member. Thank you.
- Madoka, 14 years old.
Monday, March 17, 2008
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Oh THERE'S that 5.93 billion yen in cash! I was wondering...
In the news on Wednesday, March 12: "Two women arrested for record-high inheritence tax evasion after Y5.93 billion cash found in their garage." http://www.japantoday.com/jp/news/430740
That's just over 57 million Canadian dollars worth of yen. The idea was to avoid the inheritance tax which would've taken nearly $28 million from the $80 million they inherited from their father (a very successful businessman who passed away in 2004), leaving the sisters with a paltry $52 million. So instead, they hid this unimaginably large amount of cash in cardboard boxes which were stacked in the moldy garage of one of the sisters. The tax man came snooping and they were found out.
It was Yoshie, a lady in my English conversation class, who brought up this story during class. We all laughed at the claim by the arrested women that she had "forgotten about the cash" kept in her garage.
Inevitably, talked turned to what we would do if we had $57 million in cash sitting in our garage. We agreed that it would be nearly impossible to spend it all, but that some leisurely traveling around the world would be nice, send our kids through university, etc.
Takao said that he would buy, like, ten dorayaki cakes and eat them all at once. "What a small dream!", laughed Kimie.
Old Inoue asserted that he wouldn't want that kind of money. "I'd have to go around with ten bodyguards all the time!".
Someone said that they wouldn't mind having the money as long as nobody else knew they had it. Interesting. It reminded me something comedian Dave Chappelle said in an interview. He said that the sudden wealth and fame he got didn't change him so much as it changed the people around him. "You know in cartoons, when a dude is real hungry and he looks at his friend and he sees a roasted chicken? That's what it's like. That's how people start to see you."
-------------------------------
In other news, the weather is finally starting to warm up, which means I no longer sleep with 4 layers of clothes and I don't see my breath when I wake up in the mornings.
Fig. A: Dorayaki cake (sweet red-bean paste cake). You can't get the scale of them from this picture, but they're about the size of a small pancake.
In the news on Wednesday, March 12: "Two women arrested for record-high inheritence tax evasion after Y5.93 billion cash found in their garage." http://www.japantoday.com/jp/news/430740
That's just over 57 million Canadian dollars worth of yen. The idea was to avoid the inheritance tax which would've taken nearly $28 million from the $80 million they inherited from their father (a very successful businessman who passed away in 2004), leaving the sisters with a paltry $52 million. So instead, they hid this unimaginably large amount of cash in cardboard boxes which were stacked in the moldy garage of one of the sisters. The tax man came snooping and they were found out.
It was Yoshie, a lady in my English conversation class, who brought up this story during class. We all laughed at the claim by the arrested women that she had "forgotten about the cash" kept in her garage.
Inevitably, talked turned to what we would do if we had $57 million in cash sitting in our garage. We agreed that it would be nearly impossible to spend it all, but that some leisurely traveling around the world would be nice, send our kids through university, etc.
Takao said that he would buy, like, ten dorayaki cakes and eat them all at once. "What a small dream!", laughed Kimie.
Old Inoue asserted that he wouldn't want that kind of money. "I'd have to go around with ten bodyguards all the time!".
Someone said that they wouldn't mind having the money as long as nobody else knew they had it. Interesting. It reminded me something comedian Dave Chappelle said in an interview. He said that the sudden wealth and fame he got didn't change him so much as it changed the people around him. "You know in cartoons, when a dude is real hungry and he looks at his friend and he sees a roasted chicken? That's what it's like. That's how people start to see you."
-------------------------------
In other news, the weather is finally starting to warm up, which means I no longer sleep with 4 layers of clothes and I don't see my breath when I wake up in the mornings.
Fig. A: Dorayaki cake (sweet red-bean paste cake). You can't get the scale of them from this picture, but they're about the size of a small pancake.
Friday, March 07, 2008
Black Cab Sessions.
AWESOME music/video project by Just So Films and Hidden Fruit.
Chapters 2 and 28 are my favourites thus far! Emmy The Great rules my heart!
www.blackcabsessions.com
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
English Discush.
"In most countries, women outlive men by an average of 5-6 years. Why is this?". This is the question I posed to my English conversation class tonight.
Takao, the sixty-something-year-old retired math teacher and the most fluent in our class, responded immediately: "It's because women are physically stronger. I'm not talking about muscles! I'm talking about the physical capacity to endure."
I asked him why he thought that?
"Well, take child birth, for example! There's NO WAY I could do that! There's a saying that, wait, what is it... there's a saying that says giving birth to a child is like pushing a watermelon out of your nostril." To which Yoshie, mother of 3 adult sons, expressed some doubt: "It's not quite like that..." and Kimie, recent grandmother, laughed outright said she'd never heard of that saying before.
I wondered aloud whether women have healthier lifestyles than men, and thus live healthier, longer lives? For example, don't men usually drink and smoke more than women? Nay, said Takao (who does not drink, but whose wife does).
Twenty-something-year-old Rie said it's because women handle stress better. She said that women have more flexible minds and can think about many things at once; "if something bothers us, we just drop it and move on."
At this seventy-something-year-old Inoue, he of the massive English written compositions (see December 13 2007 post), said:
"I will tell you the correct answer.[much laughter from the group] It's because God ordered women to live longer so that they can care for their husbands."
To which Rie said, "Well, widows do seem happy." [lots of laughter]
"In most countries, women outlive men by an average of 5-6 years. Why is this?". This is the question I posed to my English conversation class tonight.
Takao, the sixty-something-year-old retired math teacher and the most fluent in our class, responded immediately: "It's because women are physically stronger. I'm not talking about muscles! I'm talking about the physical capacity to endure."
I asked him why he thought that?
"Well, take child birth, for example! There's NO WAY I could do that! There's a saying that, wait, what is it... there's a saying that says giving birth to a child is like pushing a watermelon out of your nostril." To which Yoshie, mother of 3 adult sons, expressed some doubt: "It's not quite like that..." and Kimie, recent grandmother, laughed outright said she'd never heard of that saying before.
I wondered aloud whether women have healthier lifestyles than men, and thus live healthier, longer lives? For example, don't men usually drink and smoke more than women? Nay, said Takao (who does not drink, but whose wife does).
Twenty-something-year-old Rie said it's because women handle stress better. She said that women have more flexible minds and can think about many things at once; "if something bothers us, we just drop it and move on."
At this seventy-something-year-old Inoue, he of the massive English written compositions (see December 13 2007 post), said:
"I will tell you the correct answer.[much laughter from the group] It's because God ordered women to live longer so that they can care for their husbands."
To which Rie said, "Well, widows do seem happy." [lots of laughter]
Saturday, March 01, 2008
**WARNING: This post may contain scenes which are not suitable for those who are adverse to large phallic sculptures**
The Penis Shrine.
An acquaintance of mine, a lady by the name of Mayumi who works as a receptionist at city hall, wanted to take me and Brett on a road trip. Accompanying us was Izumi, Mayumi's friend. The four of us had gone out for dinner once before while Tola was visiting over winter holidays.
According to Mayumi, there are only two such "fertility" shrines in all of Japan. I've completely forgotten the Japanese name for the place so I can't check to verify if this is true or not. Let's say it is.
Basically, hidden away in some random corner of very rural Yamaguchi, there is a small little wooden shrine containing hundreds of penis sculptures, most of them to scale. Some, as you can see from the pictures below, are quite prodigious.
Izumi: "Well, I came all this way, I might as well touch it." If you look closely, the tip of this particular member has been rubbed to a shiney sheen from countless people touching it for good luck.
--------------
I read the English translation of the legend of this shrine and it didn't seem to be connected in any way to fertility or penises. Essentially, some dude a long time ago did something bad in his village. He was run out of the village and was given over to mob justice. He managed to escape and later in his life, he erected (I beg your pardon) this little shrine, for some reason. The only connection I can see, if I read between the lines, is that the man might have been the victim of a John Bobbitt-like fate at the hands of the mob, and thus, later in life, wished he could have kids, or something. Anyways, the story I just recounted above is probably not accurate at all, it's going on some very fuzzy memory-work.
The reason why my memory is fuzzy is because Brett and I spent most of our collective energy that day trying not to throw up in the backseat of Mayumi's car. We spent an agonizing 5 hours, round trip, in that hell. This is something that has stricken both Brett and I ONLY in Yamaguchi, Japan. The likely reason is that the mountainous terrain of Yamaguchi makes for very windy and hilly roads. Combine that with the fact that for some reason, the Japanese drivers I've ridden with have very twitchy gas/brake feet, and you've got a fail-proof recipe for car-sickness.
I, through some deep-breathing mediation, managed to master my nausea, but Brett was in bad shape. I joked to him that the fertility shrine must be really potent (ha!) because he's already experiencing morning sickness!* He kept it together through a superhuman effort, despite my telling him stories about various throwing-up stories I'd heard or experienced. I did this because I thought it would make him feel not-so-bad about being sick. But he didn't seem to appreciate my amusing stories. All he said was, gasping, "Dude-don't-talk-about-it. It's-like-a-no-hitter."
[*Actually, I did not make this joke at the time; it came to mind just now and I think it would've been a witty thing to say at the time so I've included it as part of that narrative.]
The Penis Shrine.
An acquaintance of mine, a lady by the name of Mayumi who works as a receptionist at city hall, wanted to take me and Brett on a road trip. Accompanying us was Izumi, Mayumi's friend. The four of us had gone out for dinner once before while Tola was visiting over winter holidays.
According to Mayumi, there are only two such "fertility" shrines in all of Japan. I've completely forgotten the Japanese name for the place so I can't check to verify if this is true or not. Let's say it is.
Basically, hidden away in some random corner of very rural Yamaguchi, there is a small little wooden shrine containing hundreds of penis sculptures, most of them to scale. Some, as you can see from the pictures below, are quite prodigious.
I'm guessing these are the wishes/prayers of past visitors to the shrine ("Please grant us a baby. Let it be a girl and let her have Zhang Ziyi's face").
Izumi: "Well, I came all this way, I might as well touch it." If you look closely, the tip of this particular member has been rubbed to a shiney sheen from countless people touching it for good luck.
--------------I read the English translation of the legend of this shrine and it didn't seem to be connected in any way to fertility or penises. Essentially, some dude a long time ago did something bad in his village. He was run out of the village and was given over to mob justice. He managed to escape and later in his life, he erected (I beg your pardon) this little shrine, for some reason. The only connection I can see, if I read between the lines, is that the man might have been the victim of a John Bobbitt-like fate at the hands of the mob, and thus, later in life, wished he could have kids, or something. Anyways, the story I just recounted above is probably not accurate at all, it's going on some very fuzzy memory-work.
The reason why my memory is fuzzy is because Brett and I spent most of our collective energy that day trying not to throw up in the backseat of Mayumi's car. We spent an agonizing 5 hours, round trip, in that hell. This is something that has stricken both Brett and I ONLY in Yamaguchi, Japan. The likely reason is that the mountainous terrain of Yamaguchi makes for very windy and hilly roads. Combine that with the fact that for some reason, the Japanese drivers I've ridden with have very twitchy gas/brake feet, and you've got a fail-proof recipe for car-sickness.
I, through some deep-breathing mediation, managed to master my nausea, but Brett was in bad shape. I joked to him that the fertility shrine must be really potent (ha!) because he's already experiencing morning sickness!* He kept it together through a superhuman effort, despite my telling him stories about various throwing-up stories I'd heard or experienced. I did this because I thought it would make him feel not-so-bad about being sick. But he didn't seem to appreciate my amusing stories. All he said was, gasping, "Dude-don't-talk-about-it. It's-like-a-no-hitter."
[*Actually, I did not make this joke at the time; it came to mind just now and I think it would've been a witty thing to say at the time so I've included it as part of that narrative.]
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