The Telegraphic

In case you’re wondering about the title (yeah, even if you weren’t, you are now), it’s a quote from George W Bush off a bushlexia page, which is quite humorous. I even fired up my del.icio.us bookmarks so I could add them. There you have it.

I thought I should do a more upbeat blog because people have been thinking that I’m a bit depressed. I’m not, I was just complaining and being cynical. There are entire communities of people on the internet who do nothing but complain, like most forums for example.

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been doing Aikido, which is a form of martial art derived from Ju-Jitsu (in 1942 by Morihei Ueshiba). There are some large differences between the two, however, as I had heard beforehand but never quite realised. Basically, Aikido is like a Tai-Chi version of Ju-Jitsu, where you’re more interested in inner spirit and perfecting a technique. Functionality never really comes into the picture – although having said that, if you managed to do a technique perfectly then you could do a lot of damage. All the techniques are very similar to Ju-Jitsu, but slightly different. The main differences that I can see is that you sometimes rely on the other person’s cooperation and that the stance is different. Even though the small differences have large repurcussions, I’m enjoying it and getting quite a lot out of it. I think I am making “Steadfast progress”. Last night, my rolls were 100% better than the night before (although they’re still very different to Ju-Jitsu – believe it or not). There’s a few things I hope to get out of it:

1. Improve my flexibility – we do about 1/2 hour of stretches before we start
2. Improve my falling (Ukemi) – when they fall over they do it with grace and elegance
3. Improve my body movement and locks (the main things they seem to seek prefection in)
4. Meet the grandson of Morihei Ueshiba – (Morihei also taught Jan De Jong, who’s school I belong to in Australia).
5. Get a bit fitter – we do 6 hours all up a week.

Tonight I’m heading over to the apartments (where the other exchange students live), where there’ll be a curry cookoff. Should be fun. Then I’m going canoeing on saturday and to a flea market out the front of a famous castle and shrine on sunday. But now I’m off to get ready for Uni.

Catcha later
Danny

I have been informed by the friendly staff of the international centre that I do not exist. There is no such student as Daniel Price. There is however a Danikoru.

Basically, I made a mistake when I was filling in my application form for Himeji Dokkyo- I spelt my name incorrectly in katakana (Japanese characters), but spelt it right in English on the same form. The logical plan of action is to correct the mistake – that’s why there is such a thing as administration; if things didn’t change and mistakes weren’t made there would be no need to administer anything.

In Himeji however mistakes do not get corrected. I first noticed this when I received my homestay contract. Naturally, as I didn’t want to commit fraud, I corrected my name before signing it.

A month later, they say there is a problem with my name on the contract and that they would print out new ones – which sounds good – but the problem they had was that there was no such student as Daniel Price. So I was forced to sign a contract with someone elses name on which as far as I’m concerned isn’t legally binding in any way, shape or form.

I haven’t been escorted off university grounds for tresspassing yet however.

For the last week, which happened to be golden week, I’ve been pissed off. That is, I’ve been steadily above a 5 on the pissed-off-meter. It’s a bit like the chicken and the egg situation, as I think I inadvertently created a feedback loop where the more pissed off I am, the more pissed of I was getting. It started with the bugs.

Ah well. Im better now although I did have a mild allergic reaction to scallops yesterday.

Speaking of ‘the chicken and the egg’ – I think I’ve solved it, by applying the theory of evolution. It all comes down to the definition of a chicken – and any mathematician will tell you that ‘chicken’ is not well-defined. (i.e. defined in an unambiguous way using a logical set base of axioms). In short, it’s not precise enough. The real question is – “when does a egg, or series of evolving organisms* become a chicken?“”. I’ll break it down into three questions:

1. What is the definition of ‘the chicken’?
2. What is the definition of ‘the egg’?
3. Which one of these objects existed in an earlier point in history?

Now you see the problem lies in your definition of a chicken, which is difficult if not impossible. So, let’s avoid defining ‘a chicken’ and ‘a chicken egg’. We can just say that there was a proto-chicken, an egg** and then a chicken (in that order). You don’t need to define a chicken as ‘something that lays chicken eggs’, or define a chicken egg as ‘something from which a chicken hatches’ – those definitions suffer the problem of not being well-defined.

So there you have it according to me.

* It has been ‘proved‘ by geneticists that the domestic chicken evolved from Red Junglefowl, a tropical member of the pheasant family.

** I hasten to add that this egg isn’t defined as a ‘chicken egg’ or a ‘proto-chicken’ egg – just ‘the egg’. It is implied in the question that a chicken hatched out of it, not that it is a egg laid by a chicken.

It’s bug season. The sakura blossoms have all fallen away, replaced by bright green leaves that are so green, in fact, they look like a Kodak or HP advert, where they’ve adjusted the colour saturation way too high. It’s also nice and hot at the moment, with lots of clear, sunny days.

It’s also bug season. So when you’re riding around on your lovely 4 geared bike, you h ave to constantly dodge fuckin’ huge black bug things. They seem to swerve towards you when you’re going fast so they can brush your face just to piss you off. There’s also little midget insect things that make little swarms and then get in your eyes when you accidentally ride through them (e.g. when avoiding a large bug hovering in the air). There doesn’t seem to be any other types of bug though, which isn’t really that suprising.

On a completely unrelated topic, today was the beginning of Golden week – a cluster of unrelated holidays spread over a ‘Golden week’. It would be the perfect time to go travelling, apart from the small fact that 250 million people are thinking ‘It’s the perfect time to go travelling’. I was going to try and make it to the World Expo, but it’d cost about AU$380 for two days accommodation and entry – and there’d be an insane line for each exhibition. I might try later in the year.

Anyway I have a week of holiday time to figure out what to do with, so I’m off.

See you in a few months,
Danny

As I’m currently in Japan, the tension between China and Japan is a hot issue at the moment. I was talking to Jo’s host father yesterday and he asked me what I thought about it, which made me realise I didn’t know much on the issue. So I decided to do some research using trusty wikipedia and the ABC news*, which I’m writing up so I remember it.
The problem (from China’s end) is, to quote Wu Dawei , John Taylor and AFP is that “The Japanese Government is unable to face and deal squarely with the issues of history arising from the invasion of China by Japanese militarists.” In short, Japan did bad things and hasn’t quite faced up to it.

During the second Sino-Japanese war (1937-1945) and the Second World War (1939-1945), the Imperialist Japanese forces commited several atrocities, such as the Nanjing, Sook-Ching and Manila massacres. During this time, over 15 million Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Indonesian, Burmese, Indochinese civilians, Pacific Islanders, and Allied POW were killed.

On August 6th, 1945, the US President, Harry S. Truman, gave the go ahead for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (Nagasaki was bombed 3 days later), to force the “unconditional surrender” of Japan. It has been argued that Japan was essentially defeated already by this stage, however Japanese Military leaders were commited to “fighting a ‘decisive battle’ on Kyushu” (aka Operation Downfall). On August 15, Japan surrendered unconditionally.

Whether or not the use of the atomic bombs was ethical, a war crime, or the correct plan of action is still contested. International law at the time stated that the use of poisionous weapons (e.g. radiation poisioning), was prohibited and a war crime (with massive civilian casualties). However, the US got the desired result: they avoided an all out confrontation in Kyushu (of which the expected death toll was about 500,000) and quickly freed over 600,000 POW’s from concentration camps. For all you cynics – they also gave the soviet union a taste of US power and justified the 2 billion dollar Manhattan project.

The actions of the Japanese military cannot be justified, but can be partly explained by the bushido code which they subscribed to at the time. The Japanese Military believed it to be cowardly to surrender and that anyone who did so was cowardly and sub-human. This does not, however, excuse the actions that the military took (which we unfortunately see mirrored all too often throughout history).

So, the current situation stems from actions taken in the past by the Japanese Military. The ‘feather on the camel’s back’ was the white-washing of the events in Japanese textbooks, as well as Japan’s bid for a permanent seat on the security council of the United Nations. The recent rallies in China are related to this. Now, Japan is demanding an apology for the violence in the rally which China doesn’t think they deserve. So there you go.

* Sorry to all of you 7, 9 and 10 watchers – but commercial news sucks – feel good dog stories, weather reports submitted by children, biased reporting (e.g. every Today Tonight story), incorrect information (e.g. Today Tonight on several occasions), and ad breaks are not good things.