Christmas in Japan
Today is Christmas…
Being an anti-theistic agnostic, I usually try not to celebrate, but being in Japan has made me kind of nostalgic for the western traditions of home. This morning, my family and I opened our presents together by video-conference. This is very much thanks to Apple and iChat AV, which is the only high-quality video-conferencing application I or anyone I know has ever managed to get working. No thanks, however, to Australia’s pathetic ADSL network. While my family got to enjoy a high-resolution video-feed of me, uploaded at several mbps, I had to live with the blocky feed that the typical Australian 256kbps uplink could serve me.
Anyway, Happy Christmas, everyone. I’ll leave you with the Christmas card I sent my younger brother, which demonstrates just how little Japan seems to exhibit the traditional spirit of either its own culture, or that of the West.
Mini-Santas swarming over the Kamakura Daibutsu.
When I described this card to a British exchange student I met here, we started to rack our brains to come up with a similar, perhaps slightly more blasphemous mix of Japanese culture and Western religious imagery. The product of our wild fancies: Geisha Jesus.
As I’ve seen written here in Japan: “Happy Merry Christmas,” everybody!
The Escape Pod Collection 1
On Friday I received a nice Christmas present (of sorts), the Escape Pod Collection 1.
For those who don’t know, The Escape Pod is a weekly podcast that delivers short, fun stories in the fantasy and SF genres. The podcast’s host, Steve Eley, manages to pay the authors whose work is published to the podcast, by way of support from listeners. The Escape Pod Collection 1 was my inducement to and reward for donating $20 to the podcast.
I highly recommend the podcast, which you can subscribe to with iTunes 6, or the podcatcher of your choice. If you enjoy the podcast, as you well may, please consider donating to support it, its host, its authors, and its listeners.
Snow
Today I saw snow fall for the first time.
I’d seen it on the ground before, while skiing at Falls Creek in Victoria around 11 years ago, but it was icy and probably artificial. Snow on the ground, but none in the sky.
Today, though, around 8:00am, I saw snow fall, in plump flakes that floated heavily past the window of the 11th floor classroom where I was teaching English. They distracted me from the lesson.
Snow looks light, and feels dry to the touch, but it quickly sticks to one’s clothes in patches of icy slush. It blows into one’s eyes, and catches in one’s hair. Many people here carry umbrellas to keep the snow off them.
I saw some of the heaviest snowfall from the window at the McDonalds where I was eating breakfast:
Back at Berlitz, I watched it floating this way and that by the classroom window. I saw competing winds drive the air-filling snow into a slow and beautiful upward climb, before wrenching it away to one side and then another.
I brushed snow off the seat and handlebars of my bike (the one in front):
And on my way home I saw a rose garden, decorated for Christmas, covered in snow:
Snow has always been part of my cultural literacy; now it’s part of my life.
Happy holidays, everyone!
How many comic books does it take to change a lightbulb?
The answer, in my case, is ten.
In Japan, people are traditionally accustomed to sitting on the floor, so when one of my lightbulbs blew last night, I found my furnished apartment lacking a chair high-enough to stand on while I changed it.
Today, though, some lateral thinking led me to make use of a stack of ten comic books that I’d rescued from the garbage area about two weeks ago. Weekly comic compilations in Japan are very thick, so the bundle of ten, neatly tied up with string for collection, was quite high enough for me to reach the light fitting.
Ten comic books, next to one of the floor-sitting chairs that were in my apartment when I arrived.
benhourigan.com’s funniest comment so far
Just a few minutes ago, Sasha posted this masterful comment, which made me, university trained geek that I am, laugh harder than I had in weeks. Kudos to you, Sasha. Thanks, too, to the mysterious Jess/Jessica, who made such a good butt for Sasha’s jokes.
What are you waiting for? Read the comment!
Howl’s Moving Castle (review)
Diana Wynne Jones, Howl’s Moving Castle (1986; repr. New York: HarperTrophy 2001); Howl’s Moving Castle screenplay and direction by Miyazaki Hayao (2004), DVD.
Book: 7/10. Movie: 5/10.
As I did before Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring came out, I decided to read (in that case, re-read), the book of Howl’s Moving Castle before I saw the animated movie, just recently released on DVD in Japan.
Left: The book. Right: The DVD.
Jones’ novel starts out looking like an ironic fairytale, with its heroine Sophie resigned to the hard and dull life that comes of being an elder sister. Yet as an apparently undeserved curse from the fearsomely glamourous Witch of the Waste turns her into an old woman and catapults her out into the world to seek her fortune, the novel begins its trajectory towards being an unexpectedly affecting tale of romance.
The novel’s greatest asset is its main characters: Sophie, a young woman suddenly turned ninety, who discovers a tenacity and verve in old age that she never knew as a mousey teenager; Howl, a good but vain wizard who has lost his ability to love by making a pact with a fire demon; and Calcifer, the demon himself, who warms Howl’s hearth with his flames and personality even as their pact slowly destroys them both. As the story moves on, we see deeper into Sophie and Howl’s character and powers, and in the course of a story that is over-packed with incidents, characters, and settings, readers are likely to become invested in seeing what becomes of the web of loves and broken hearts that Howl leaves in his wake.
One often gets the impression, given the chaotic turns the plot takes, that Jones did not have a clear plan when writing the novel. It hardly matters, though: the way it roughly piles on new elements to build a story apparently at random makes for a charmingly unpredictable read. The characters hold it together well enough, much as Calcifer holds together the moving castle itself, which is forever on the verge of falling apart from going too quickly.
Now, as Erika reminded me, and Laura might have, I ought not to expect movies ‘based on’ books to be much like their originals. Indeed, Howl’s Moving Castle would better be described as ‘inspired by’ than ‘based on’ Jones’ novel. It changes so many characters, and so many plot elements, that it’s just barely recognisable. It has the skin of the novel, but not its soul.
The problem that movies made of books usually face is that they’re unable to reproduce all the detail of the original, usually to the ire of people who know the book inside out, or have only just read it. It’s unreasonable to expect a movie to include all the details, though: it just won’t have the time, even a monstrously long adaptation like David Lynch’s Dune.
One may, however, expect an adaptation to be true to the spirit of the original, and it’s here that one may be rightly disappointed with Miyazaki’s version of Howl’s Moving Castle. It turns Sophie’s sister Lettie into her mother, does away with her other sister, Martha, and her stepmother, Fanny, creates a new villain, and turns Howl’s apprentice from a teenager in love with Sophie’s sister into a little boy not higher than Sophie’s waist. Howl’s life in Wales is nowhere to be seen, and nor is his tendency to be infatuated with women that he dumps the minute they begin to love him.
Miyazaki’s version demonstrates rather clearly the strengths of books against movies: books are better at character development, and better at creating complex plots. The space a movie has to tell a story is so limited that it must be simple. Where movies make up for this weakness is in their ability to describe an alternate world (or the real world) visually.
Some of the more drastic changes Miyazaki made to Howl’s Moving Castle, such as making war a central motif in the film, where it was barely mentioned in the book, and having Howl on the verge of turning into a (literal) monster, seem calculated to give the crew the chance to draw airships, explosions, fires, battles, transformations and spell effects. The film is definitely visually spectacular, although I take little pleasure in action scenes and battles. I much prefer the film’s evocation of its old-Europe-themed world and of its occasional pastoral idylls. Unfortunately, many of the changes made to Jones’ story seem gratuitous.
Nevertheless, Howl’s Moving Castle is a beautiful film to watch, even if it is extremely shallow compared to the book. A movie to see for the splendour of its animation alone.
Humanities academics’ poor communication skills
Today I was most inspired to write a comment at Binary Bonsai, where Michael Heilemann was complaining about DAC 2005 delegates’ inability to express themselves clearly. It’s a post in its own right.
To academics, Michael, the words you think are barely known are commonplace: they use them every day. Academia has its own dialect, and it is able to do so because academics aren’t, as a rule, forced to have much contact with the world outside academia. It’s incredibly destructive, because the more time academics spend with each other, reinforcing their curious use of language, the more they ensure no-one in the world at large will be interested in what they have to say.
Why did academics start using this language to begin with? Why do they tolerate speech that often verges on nonsensical? The answer, I believe, is in the emergence of literary modernism in the early 20th century. Experimental writers of prose from Ezra Pound to James Joyce attempted to reinvent literary style according to the idea that new times demanded new language, and they produced some famously unreadable pieces like Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans.
The “make it new” idea of modernism seems to mesh rather well with the need for humanities scholars to write something “original” to get their doctorate. Rather than talking about something new, you can talk about something old using new words that you made up yourself, or by taking an old, incomprehensible study of something and making it incomprehensible in a slightly different way. The experimental techniques of the literary modernists made their way into the academy, where they slowly infected almost all of the humanities, throughout the world.
These days, to get a doctorate in the humanities, you usually have to emulate your peers’ incomprehensible style. This is called being scholarly. Sadly, the people you think are unenthusiastic on stage probably are very passionate about what they’re trying so unsuccessfully to talk about, but they’re labouring under the extraordinary effort of producing convoluted sentences.
To get a doctorate, you also have to cite “previous scholarship.” If there isn’t much in your field (as there usually isn’t in game studies), you have to choose some from another field. Which explains why you might be hearing people going on about literary hypertexts, political theory, or psychoanalysis when it seems they really ought to be telling you about a game they played. It’s also, sadly, part of what they have to do to convince other academics that studying videogames is a worthwhile activity.
It was the entrenched poverty of communication in academia that made my time as a PhD student in Melbourne, Australia, very unhappy. At DAC 2003, I put forth the same tripe that seems to have been boring you for the last day or so. But I got tired of it, I spoke against it, and I tried to stop doing it. It earned me no love, but now I’m living in Japan, thousands of kilometres away from my university, I feel much more at home in my intellectual life. I can think more clearly about my PhD thesis when I don’t have to spend time with my colleagues.
For what it’s worth, I found the Scandinavian contingent at DAC 2003 to be among the plainest-speaking of the delegates. Think yourself lucky you’re living among the best of them.
Xbox 360: It’s big in Japan
Microsoft are busy gearing up for this month’s launch of the Xbox 360 in Japan, hoping to succeed with it where Xbox failed. Since the original Xbox’s sheer size and ugliness undoubtedly contributed to its unpopularity in Japan, putting a giant Xbox 360 on display at the Umeda Hankyu station in Osaka this week may not be the best of ideas, but it certainly is drawing the attention of passers by, including me.
Xbox 360 with miniature security guard… Actually, the 360 is giant…
The giant Xbox 360 from above.
The upper glowing square is a very large HDTV showing trailers of Xbox 360 titles including Perfect Dark Zero. The lower square is a faceplate display.
The giant Xbox 360 from the other side.
Some of the faceplates on display inside the giant Xbox 360.