Updated - January 14, 2008

Alas, I am the kind of person who thinks 18 months in the future. Not that it helps because I'm also disorganized and flighty.  Still, I have plans for my making-my-friends happy project. It really helps that a majority of them will be clueless while reading this journal.

• Southern-ness...

• Revisit American history and introduce people who are not generally well-known to the rest of the world.

•  Get a better icon!

• More pictures and information about Hokkaido and Japan in general.

• More Japanese drama translations. Daisuke - It's the story about a mentally disabled  young woman with the mind of an 8-year-old who falls in love, gets pregnant and ends up having to raise her child without a father (of course, he dies).
  

• Recaps of Japanese dramas and movties beginning with  14-sai-no-haha (14-year-old-Mother - the signature piece that proves that subtitles don't help very much with comprehension)..

• Go crazy...wait. That doesn't require any work at all.

One of my favorite songs in the entire world is Shirushi (Proof) by Mr. Children. It is one of the best songs ever written. Sakurai Kazutoshi is a genius songwriter and musician. This song touches me on a level I didn't think even existed inside me. The first time I head it, all the feelings I had for my beloved husband bubbled to the surface. Mere words cannot express how much I love this man and I never the believed the words existed. They do. It makes no difference that ours is not the story of Shirushi...it only matters that the same intense love is there.

Thank the gods for Atom. I don't know who he is or where he is, but he truly understands Sakurai and the complexity of love. His is the most beautiful and most poignant English version of this song I've ever heard. It isn't as deep or as rich as Sakurai's original version,  but it's damned close.  Thank you, Atom.

The last song to touch me, literally make me sob,  was Mahalia Jackson singing Troubles of  the World in Imitation of Life. I have never watched her sing this with anyone else in the room because I can't bear anyone seeing me as a sobbing mess.

If you wish to give Mr. Sakurai a try, click on the media. The translation and Karaoke are behind the cut.

 

It's January 14, 2008 and it's Coming-of-Age Day  (成人の日 - Seijin no hi)　here in the land of the rising sun.  The official explanation of this day is: The Coming of Age festival is celebrated on the second Monday of January (until 1999, it was always celebrated on January 15). All young people who turn twenty years old in that year are celebrated on Seijin no hi. Twenty is the age considered as the beginning of adulthood. It is also the minimum legal age for voting, drinking, and smoking.

Celebrations are held nationwide in every town with most of the people turning 20 participating in formal dresses. Seijin no hi is a national holiday.

In 1999, Seijin no hi became a part of the government's Happy Monday holiday scheme, which they claimed was to help eleviate doom and gloom after the economic bubble burst. Well...maybe that's partially true. More Monday holidays means more shopping days. There was also another positive turn of events. In the past, young people from rural hometowns had to celebrate this day on New Years Day because they couldn't return home. Now they can.

What happens during the ceremonies? Usually local officials (mayors and sometimes governors) give speeches and give gifts to welcome the newest crop of adults. They generally look especially cute in their Kimonos (females) and Haori Hakama (males).

We are often reminded though that age truly is only a number. For some of them (hooligans), this day celebrates their legal right to drink, smoke and vomit. Some even make fools of themselves on national televison by heckling the speakers.  I suspect most organizers pray that the unruly child-like creatures stay home.

Those who know me well won't find it strange at all that it has taken me 11 days to make a New Year's post. That's par for the chaotic course, isn't it? Unfortunately, in the past I've taken better pictures. Sadly, all of those pictures would require scanning and I'm just not up for that. Instead, I'll share over 40 other shots  from our New Year's celebration in Iwamizawa.


These are kani...crabs. They are not my friends because I  have a seafood allergy.  Over the years, we've more or less learned how to co-exist. Kani are essential for any country-side New Years Eve celebration. Soba noddles, traditionally eaten at midnight, came later, only I didn't take pictures of those.

This is a beautiful banner, isn't it? It's a merging of St. Paul, Minnesota's ice palaces and an ice palace built during the Sapporo (Hokkaido) Snow Festival.

Awhile back, Henna_Juna and I (Sapporo_Girl) teamed up to make our own fansub collaboration (i.e. we translate Japanese dramas into English although it is an insane thing to do). Normally, I'd shy away from such a thing because it's so time consuming and I'm frequently distracted. However, the quality of Henna_Juna's subtitles drew me in and I'm happily editing his brilliant work. Thanks to him, I have more of an appreciation for both English and Japanese languages. During the edits, more often than not, it is English (my mother tongue) that challenges me and makes me want to rip my hair from the roots.

Henna_Sapporo is a collaboration, not a group.  Neither of us are group-oriented people. We're two people who walk to the beat of our own drums and amazingly, our partnership works perfectly.  Henna_Juna explained it best on our Henna_Sapporo wiki page, thus,  it would be appropriate to share that information here and I quote:

"We are not so much a group as much as a pair of enthusiasts with our own perceived standards of quality, driven by a desire to improve our understanding and appreciation of the subtleties and idiosyncrasies of language and culture through attempting not only to translate, but to comprehensively re-render the dialog in a form that can be natively appreciated by speakers of English (admittedly targeted to American English speakers...maybe localized to the Midwest and South). Along the way, we want to bring to the viewers 1) definitely some enjoyment and 2) hopefully some new, improved, or otherwise altered appreciation of the study of languages and the foreign.

We would like to think of our effort as a truly collaborative venture, under the assumption that translation requires an active interaction between multiple minds, inasmuch as the art of dialog is a process requiring the same. After all, language is only the mode for two individuals to try to make each other understand their ideas, emotions, and the otherwise intangible.

Being novices to the translation community, we are ignorant of the conventions surrounding translation. Let us assert that we do not necessarily adhere to grammatical rules of English in our effort. To be sure, we will not abuse our disregard for them, but we will prefer well-accepted (American) vernacular, striving to deliver a translation that is contextually appropriate while universally intelligible. For example we will gleefully acknowledge the currently accepted usage of hopefully--hopefully no one will take issue with that."

Completed project: Watashitachi no Kyokasho (Our Textbook ) - Spring 2007 (soft subs -.srt) ~ translated by Henna_Juna
Current project: Joshi deka (Female Detective) - Fall 2007 (subs in progress) ~ translated by Henna_Juna
Forthcoming project: Daisuki!! (I love you)- Winter 2008 ~ to be translated by  sekainozomi(Sapporo_Girli)

Honestly speaking, the Windsor Hotel Toya is just a big ol' luxurious Western-style hotel sitting on top of a mountain overlooking a spectacular volcano-made lake.

My spousal unit and I made a detour one day last year and went to visit it.  It was closed. In fact, they'd gone bankrupt or something. So we returned to the mountain one day to try to get a good view of Lake Toya and found the hotel had re-opened. Excellent. Now I could do what I meant to do the first time....collect background scenery for my friend in Greece. She is doing photo manipulations for my fan fiction. My priorities are straight! As I said before, this hotel will be the main venue for next year's G-8 summit.

I'm sorry these images are not dial-up friendly!

In Japan, I learn something new everyday. It isn't always good information. Actually, most of it is iminaijan - 意味ないじゃん (pointless). Still, I prefer that to not learning anything at all. I dreamed once that my brain had fossilized. It wasn't pretty.

I learned two things yesterday. It was a slow day.

I learned that I could be mentally and emotionally violated and the prosecutor wouldn't have a problem with that at all. As I understood it (it's always tricky because I'm not sure how proficient my Japanese is), a woman can go to a public bath （市の湯）, be filmed/recorded without her permission, appear in a movie and have no say about it at all. In fact, from what I gather, this isn't even a crime. It isn't a violation of privacy. The prosecutor wouldn't consider this porn!!! Hello!!! The only thing I could do would be to sue for defamation of character. Amazing. Absolutely amazing. I'm filing that under the things I need to know to survive in Japan.

The second thing I learned was that children who do ballroom dancing are a hellava lot better than the adults. I saw two 11-year-olds do their thing. The rest of the nation and I envied them.

Way way way back in the day, a singer named Rose Royce belted out a song called Love Don't Live Here Anymore. It went a little something like this:


You're catching my drift, right? With just those few lyrics you can clearly see how messed up life can be. Love has never abandoned me, but enough crap has been dumped in my lap to make me almost fall into that trap.  ALMOST. In my very fertile imagination, I can see myself a dried up old hag constantly complaining, b*itching and moaning about how the world has wronged me. Nah, not me. Such emotions are time-consuming and draining. Besides, I'll be 29 for the rest of my mortal life.

Instead basking in ugliness, I've decided to use my powers for good instead of evil. Right now, I've got sunshine in my heart 24/7/52/365! From this moment forth, my name is Nozomi (hope in Japanese). I'm a new kind of superhero. I've destroyed my enemies and now I'm ready to help my friends wage their own battles against angst and negativity.

Or...more than likely, I'm going to bore the hell out of  you with useless information about Japan. You know what they say! You are what you eat! Natto anyone?