#2 The 1960s and 70s in Japan are marked by student protests and riots. Many were radicals but I personally know a few who participated in some of the protests to varying degrees. The protests began in the late 1950s for the return of Okinawa to Japan, boiled over with the unpopular mutual security treaty between Japan and the US in 1960 and developed into riots against the Viet Nam war and for education reform at the University of Tokyo to end bureaucratic authoritarianism and meaningless lectures by disengaged professors. Underlying these protests was a deep-seated distrust of the man, those who scheme to maintain appearances and their position of authority... but this is a conversation better left to the political scientists of whom I am not one.
　However, I can say that a number of the films of this era seem to reflect this distrust of higher authority. The second film I show is "Harakiri" (切腹 Seppuku) recipient of the Special Jury Award at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival. The film is about two masterless but law-abiding samurai who struggle to make a living by making paper umbrellas and fans or teaching the Classics to neighborhood kids instead of wandering the country as mercenaries. They are juxtaposed against samurai who are members of major clans that live in the mansions of their Lord in the city of Edo, samurai who espouse the Way of the Warrior (Bushido), a life style created by and for the samurai elite to justify and glorify their status in society. The story begins with rumors of masterless samurai "requesting" an official place to commit ritual suicide on the grounds of the palatial residence of a major clan but ultimately receiving a position in the clan or at least some money to discourage them from making a mess--socio-politically rather than physically--of their house. Chijiwa is not of this dubious ilk but his infant son is sick and he cannot even afford a doctor so he tries his hand at this scheme to glean a few coins for his family but is surprised to find that he will be forced to fulfill his request. The suicide ritual is gruesomely cruel. Tsugumo, Chijiwa's father-in-law and also masterless, reacts: He decides to call out the hypocrisy of this particular house (and the ruling class in general), revealing that their "code" of Bushido is just a facade.

Okay, on facebook, an old blog friend, Jeri, has tasked me to post one poster a day of a movie that influenced me for 10 days. I don't know if I can do it for 10 days, but I will try. Anyway, any film will influence me one way or another and it's hard to choose ten that have influenced me "the most." As I was pondering my choices, I got an email from Sierra Humes, a student in my class this summer who said she continues to think about some of the movies we saw more than a month after class ended. For this teacher, it is hard to think something more satisfying than the idea that students are still "influenced" by a course I taught. So I've decided to post Japanese films I screened this past summer.

　#1: The first J-film I ever saw in a class as an undergraduate and the first I ever showed in a class I was teaching was "Seven Samurai". Yes, a bit dated and unoriginal, but it remains a classic. It is still one of the highest-rated action films on Rotten Tomato of all action films, not just J-films. And while it is fun to watch--Toshiro Mifune's Kikuchiyo is certainly a treat--it is instructive as well. It depicts class separation of the Edo period: Young Katsushiro desperately wants to be with the peasant Shino, but she knows that she must remain with her kind. Kikuchiyo born a peasant, wants desperately to be a samurai, and in a way he does, but at what cost? (Watch the film.) It is also a film reflective of the time it was produced. Kurosawa often incorporated his own view of society, and the seven samurai--ronin, masterless samurai looking for purpose in the Edo period--may be a reflection of those soldiers wandering back home from WWII trying to find their way in a rebuilding Japan of the 1950s.

Okay, so online IQ tests are supposedly unreliable, but I took one anyway.

Free IQ Test

This year has been awful physically.

In February, I suffered the worst flu in I don't remember how long--with a fever over 102, I even canceled classes!

In March, I strained my ankle because my right foot supinates quite a bit and it became obvious after I started running outside more. I now wear orthotic inserts to counteract the supination but I did not run for about a month.

In June, I experienced a brief bout of plantar fasciitis when my left arch began to bother me, perhaps a reaction to adjusting for my right ankle, resting it for about 5 days.

I also found out in June I have cataracts and so had surgery in July and August. While the surgery did not stop me from exercising, I was told not to over-exert myself for a week, so it was more walking than running/jogging.

Then as I started to speed up my pace a bit under the beautiful autumnal weather, by December I had developed patellar tendonitis which forced me to stop running for two weeks. So as I slowly began running again after my birthday, I came to realize that the time off was going to prevent me from reaching my exercise goal for the year.

1200 miles. That's a goal of 100 mile a month.

In all honesty, I should disclose that my mileage is a made up number. I mean, my walking/jogging/running numbers are actual miles--or at least as real as I can calculate by using Google map--but a significant portion of my miles (40%?) are guesstimates based on metabolic equivalents (METS) associated with aerobic exercises. For example, a typical work out for me would be 10.5 minutes of medium impact aerobics to warm up, the 25.5 minutes of high impact, then 10 minutes of high intensity interval training (HIIT), then finishing with 12 minutes of core/abs work. This is 58 minutes of aerobics exercise that totals a METS of 6.2--each exercise has its own METS number depending on intensity and each number has an equivalent in miles. My high impact aerobics equals a METS of 7 which is the equivalent of jogging 4.7 mph, so the 25.5 minute exercise equals 2 miles of jogging--although I always think that high impact aerobics feels harder that jogging 4.7 mph.

Yes, this is not an exact science, but it seems to me to be a relatively fair estimate of actual miles run and I so include it into my calculations.

In any case, what I wanted to say was that I've been exercising intensely since I graded finals and found myself doing more than 23 miles since Christmas Eve and as a result, I just might hit my goal by New Years Eve!

1200 miles, here I come!

One of my favorite shows has ended. I realize that all TV shows must come to an end, I would like it to have a satisfactory ending.

Unfortunately that was not the case for Longmire.

For the most part, Longmire--a sorta contemporary take on the old western--was a dark show with bad folk trying to do bad things on Absaroka County in Wyoming. Sheriff Longmire is a loner of a lawman who will often head into danger's way without the help of his too-few deputies. He is a man of few words. He takes a black-and-white, I'm-right-you're-wrong attitude. He resists following the book, ignores the advice of family and friends, makes decisions and comes to conclusions all by himself, and will ultimately take action without notifying anyone else. And horrors upon horrors, he refuses to carry a cell phone. (Actually, I can relate.) As a result, he is hated by a large portion of Absaroka County and the Cheyenne Indian reservation within it. But it's this kind of flawed Hero that makes for a good drama, I think.

* * * * *SPOILER ALERT* * * * *
Unfortunately, the conclusion was not very satisfactory. In the good (bad) ol' tradition of American TV, it ends on a happy sappy note.

The final season was all about unfinished business but PLEEEEEZE! Did they have to tie up every single issue into a nice tidy bow? I mean I can understand the Malachi dying and Nighthorse going to prison--which they actually didn't show--but Dang! Did Henry Standingbear have to become the casin's new manager/executor? Did Ferg have to have his love life handed end up like a fairy tale--in a tuxedo no less? Did Mathias (police chief on the rez) and Longmire have to suddenly develop a good working relationship to catch Mathias? Did Longmire's daughter have to become the new sheriff instead of heading to New York to pursue her career in law? Did Longmire and Vic have to actually have sex? Did Longmire have to retire just so he and Vic can live happily ever after?

Ugh! It was perfect and nice and sappy...

And so unfortunate. *sigh*

I have online quizzes for many of my courses. As you might imagine, student's love online quizzes since they can use their notes and books to find answers. I've tried making the quiz time really short, but this disadvantages many of the international students who need time just to understand the question, so I give them plenty of time to complete it. Why? Because the questions are detailed. Not necessarily long but they contain information that may be incorrect. As I tell my students: In a True/False question, every portion of the the question must be true to be True. If even one part of the question is false then the answer is False. I will often place the false information towards the end of the statement so students have to read the entire question before answering or risk getting an answer wrong.

The non-international students find the extra time great since this gives them some breathing space, but they will accuse me of being "tricky" because I backload the false information. Me? Tricky? Students fail to read the entire question, get an answer wrong, then need to blame someone else for their failure, right? I mean, geez... y'know... I mean... well...

Okay, maybe I AM tricky, because I just realized that... that... I can't believe I'm gonna admit this....

I tricked myself...

As a conscientious teacher, I usually take the online quiz myself to confirm the quiz questions and answers are correctly matched. During the course of creating a quiz, it is quite simple to set the wrong radio button for the answer. Sometimes I will create a multiple choice question with answers then change up the order of the answers but forget to reset the radio button to the correct answer. Sometimes I simply forget to make a selection and leave the default choice--usually the first answer--as is. Anyway, to avoid these occasional omissions, I will take the quiz myself before making the quiz available to students.

Now the late-term online exam I gave last week had 77 questions. As per usual, I took the exam and found two mistakes, promptly corrected them and took it again. Result: 77/77. Grrrreat, the exam is ready to go. I double check the availability time--4:45-6:00--the date--yes, I have set the wrong date before--and other miscellaneous options. I send an email reminder to my students to find a computer with a hard Internet line--WiFi can ruin your quiz/exam if you become disconnected--and reiterate the time of availability.

Subsequently, I look on the Grade Sheet on Blackboard and can tell that everyone took the exam without any major incident. Whew. Actually this was the first time I ever gave an online exam. Quizzes yes, but not an assessment with more than 15 questions. So I'm glad that all went well. But any sense of relief I had was short lived.

Mere minutes later I get my first email.

I hate to ALREADY be the pain in the ass, but I just finished the exam and already have a few "contestations" to make about the grading.

Contestations? Huh? Did my student just call herself "pain in the ass"? (Oops. Did I just write "herself"?) Then faintly from my bag I hear in a soft voice: "LINE". I check it and find a message from another student.

Sensei! Tanizaki wrote the tattooer right? You made a trick question I think that said "it would not be far fetched to call the artist in akutagawa ryunosuke 's the tattooer sadistic" and I said false, because ... akutagawa didn't write that but it said I got zero points for that question? Obviously the tattooer was sadistic but akutagawa didn't write that! Lol

What? I mean, yeah, "The Tattooer" was sadistic and it WAS written by Tanizaki, not Akutagawa.

So I check the exam and sure enough I have the wrong radio button selected. Crap. But then how did I get 77 out of 77 when I retook the exam? Did I enter the wrong answer? Did I select True?

Did I... omigod... trick myself?

m(_v_)m

I just learned today that my unlce passed away. The weird thing is that he passed away over a year ago in September. His wife--my aunt--told me in a Christmas card that he told her not to inconvenience other people about a death, presumably his. Apparently she took it to heart.

Now, this is something that I can relate to at a certain level--Don't make others feel obliged to travel to a funeral or send o-kōden. I get it. It's "just" a death and life goes on. I certainly wouldn't want or expect a lot of mourners at my own funeral. But this was a very special uncle to me when I was growing up. While I have not been in touch with him so much these past few years, the relationship I had with him previously was something that my aunt was aware of, I'm sure.

It is puzzling... and more than anything else, very sad that she would not have told me.

This Uncle taught me how to throw a baseball. He sat me in his lap when got my first taste of driving a car at 7 or 8 years old. When mom and dad said no snacks, he would sneak something in so we could enjoy a treat surreptitiously.

Anyway, I'm gonna need a few moments... hours... days to process this news.

I am exercising much less than last year. I'm projected to do 90 hours--or about 2 hours a week--less. Of course, this year, I strained a quad, hurt my lower back and moved offices, so I took off for short stretches that total more than a month off and ultimately gained about 5 pounds I had lost the year before when I ran about 1600 miles on a treadmill.

Still since I'm doing more outside walking and indoor aerobics--the treadmill broke down in February--I think I've gained some muscle mass. According to M, even if you're walking, you have to propel your weight forward, so there's a good argument that walking may be just as effective as jogging on a treadmill where you don't push yourself forward but rather simply move you feet in a scissor action. Indeed, my skinny jeans feel tighter around the calves, and I've tightened my belt by one notch (inch?).

This has to count for something, right?

Teaching with hay fever
I hate ragweed. It is the bane of my life. I have a runny nose, itchy eyes, sore throat. I manifest all the yucky symptoms of a cold but without a fever. Ugh.

So in bungo today, we were learning the interrogative/emphatic particle や (ya) and I used a famous poem as an example. I set up the poem explaining how Narihira was hooking up with the princess Takaiko who was already promised to the emperor. Of course, when the powers that be found out--her brothers--they secreted her away where he could no longer meet her. A year later he goes back to the place they used to hook up and recited a poem expressing his loneliness:

　月やあらぬ春は昔の春ならぬ
　　わが身ひとつは元のみにして
　Is the moon not there?
　　Is the spring not the spring of old?
　　　My self alone being the same self...

So as I recite this poem, I sniffle a bit and suddenly feel a tear streaming down my cheeks.

Juliana: Sensei! Are you crying?!?

MarieClaire: It's the pol...

Juliana: "The poem?" she blurts out before MC could complete the sentence. "Are you so moved?!?"

The class--MarieClaire, Xavier, Monica, Irene, Mark, Phoebe, Pim, Yuta, Chloe, et al--exploded into laughter, as I try to explain my issues with hay fever.

Did I mention?: i HATE RAGWEED!!!

Random thoughts for the day:

Literature is a representation of how we think, our mental capacity, our emotions, our memory. All those things that constitute being human. Mental representation.

Non-literary is a representation of the "real world" nature, society, physical representations.

Ki no Tsurayuki wrote:

やまと歌は人の心を種としてよろづの言の葉とぞなれりける。
世の中にある人　事・業しげきものなれば心に思ふことを見るもの聞くものにつけて言ひいだせるなり。

Yamato poetry makes the hearts of man its seed and it became the myriad leaves of words. When matters and machinations of people in this world are intense, they apply them to things seen and heard and they express them

"Matter and Memory" by Henri Bergson and his philosophy of Duration (la Duree) may be a starting point for reading Murakami Haruki's "Girl from Ipanema 1963/1984" and the concept of intertextuality.

This is just a first step.