Spring… stay! stay!
1May 24, 2009 by miki
Brag Hag
To any comments about how technologically immersed I am out here in Japan… uh, yeah, I wish. Alas, the Japanese countryside is an entirely different creature from the Japanese big city. Tokyo? Nowhere close in distance nor in flavor to Shimane prefecture, despite all the expensive and ostentatious construction work written about in east coast US newspapers. Especially considering that I work in a school where I can count myself fortunate on days when the duct taped-together printers decide to work properly. Ayup. Technology. Maybe my cellphone is the only cooler-than-yours toy I have, at least for the stupendous price of FREE. Okay, so in that case… haha! That’ll learn ya.
Alright, another thing I’ll boast about in Japan… I found out that on Saturday when I’m scouring the supermarket at 8:30PM for a quick late dinner fix, I can pick up some end of the day ready-made sashimi plates for around 100-120 yen ($1 or so) each. The Japanese higher-than-mine standards for freshness means I can make a meal of some fine, cold pieces of raw fish sliced the very same day with a side of ready-made seaweed salad for under $5. Haha, again!
Finally,
an animation to check out: Waltz With Bashir.
It’s about a filmmaker who served in the Israeli army and sent to Lebanon in 1982 when he was nineteen years old, and who now seeks to piece together his broken memories from the war by interviewing others who also enlisted in the army and witnessed to the same events at Sabra and Shatila as young men. The movie combines hand drawn backgrounds with your usual Flash animating (Adult Swim has more or less killed Flash-fluid cartoon watching for me) to create, at least this time, some very cool and attractive visuals. It’s also not often that you can find a movie able to approach a war with consideration to both sides. Here, without trailing too far from the intended exercise of memory searching, the audience comes to recognize the brutal effects on the Palestinian people, too.
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Ok, so while you aren’t trapped in the giant seizure machine known as Tokyo, you have to admit the electronic infrastructure in your part of Japan is still light years ahead of the equivalent in the States. Well maintained streets, crosswalks that chirp at you to indicate what you should be doing with different bird noises, vending machines as far as the eye can see and well maintained bike lanes even on a country highway. Not so bad really. Certainly not the slightly less corny version of the Jetson’s I was expecting, but I imagine one drive past a pachinko parlor should give you enough light pollution to last a lifetime.
Thanks for the movie recommendation. It’s hard to find a movie on that subject that isn’t rabidly for or against one side or the other without any thought to why.