やばい大淀

There are Four Seasons in Japan

2008-07-06T23:36:00.000-07:00

日本には四季があります (Nihon ni wa shiki ga arimasu)

“Do you remember Aki?”

He said it over beers at the izakaya. I nodded quickly before taking a sip from my mug. “Sure.”

His eyes widened. “Get this...”

***

Of course I remembered Aki. We’d only been in town about two months then. He’d been in Japan longer, but I’d just started working here. We were out with a cluster of friends at a hole-in-the-wall bar near the big station. It was dark and narrow, but it was still an actual, honest-to-god bar — a precious rarity in our rural prefecture. We were drinking big fat bottles of Heartland, which seemed to be Canadian beer. Occasionally someone would get a Jack and Coke (which we jokingly called “Jack and Splash” given the heavy hand of the bar’s owner) or a drink my friend had concocted with help from the bartender — a neon green thing they’d named The Incredible Hulk.

Two girls were talking and laughing at the end of the bar, and he’d been chatting them up. I wandered over and they’d introduced themselves: Aki and Natsuko. When you’re a moderately tall, broad, bald American in rural Japan, appearance tends to be an easy topic of conversation. My Japanese was crap, but Natsuko knew some English, and asked about my earrings. By the end of the evening, he and I were waiting for the ramen truck and Natsuko had walked out wearing one of my earrings. I’d gotten her keitai email and planned to contact her the next day... I needed that earring back after all.

***

He sipped his Coke-hai. “So I was at the bar the other day and damned if she wasn’t there!”

I nodded again and drank more beer. My eyes were heavy-lidded. I felt like I knew what he was going to say, like I’d scripted it out months ago, drunk, on the back of a supermarket receipt and then lost it, and found it again by accident when I was cleaning out the pockets of my jacket — surprised, but familiar.

“What was the name of her friend?”

***

Natsuko answered the phone. He and I were at the yakitoriyasan eating chicken on a stick and drinking beers. She laughed as she recognized my voice, then his in the background, coaching me through the Japanese I needed to say to finalize the plans. She and Aki would meet us in two weeks at the sushiya across from the bar.

We’d met the master of the sushi place at the bar, but forgotten him at first. The memories washed back, though — a young guy, face far younger than his actual age. Short, in a black shirt and black jeans. Stylish hair. He could have been a hairdresser or an art student. He’d invited us to eat at his shop after I’d told him of my love for sushi. He knew Aki and Natsuko well, and was eager to get more foreign business.

I thought two weeks was ridiculously distant. He explained that Japanese girls, especially in their mid- to late-20’s and working full time, often had plans lined up two months in advance. I shook my head. I actually did want my earring back, on the one hand, but I thought, through the drunken haze, that I remembered Natsuko as having particularly glistening pink lips and a cute grin. I wanted to see her again to be sure. He’d said he was willing to be the wingman if she wanted to bring Aki, too. A date was made. We decided to meet about three weeks before Christmas, right before he went home for the holidays.

***

I took another long, deep drink from my beer, then set the mug down. I didn’t let go of the handle, but I let out a false sigh of satisfaction, as if at the flavor of the beer. “Ahhhh.” I looked into the glass mug, watching the foam of the head slide down the sides of the glass slowly, collapsing on itself and once again becoming amber. I looked up at him slowly.

“You mean Natsuko?”

***

The sushi dinner went well, but he’d told me on the train that he didn’t plan to contact Aki again. I understood. She was friendly and sweet, but a little stuffy and not particularly cute, though not unattractive. I, on the other hand, was caught. I was hopelessly smitten. I’d been right — her lips glistened with a liquid pearlescence, and her eyes were large and lively. She had a surprisingly deep voice, especially her laugh, which was more like a wry chuckle. Her hair was feathery like something from a 1970’s magazine. She dressed simply but stylishly. Ultimately, she made my teeth hurt.

We made plans to go out together, then, just the two of us, to see a movie. I took the train to the station and she picked me up in her car. On the way to the shopping mall, she’d run a red light and we’d laughed when I called her “abunai-chan” — “Little Miss Dangerous.” The line for the purikura booths were too long, so we didn’t take cute pictures together, though she’d wanted to. We had pizza and I nursed a glass of wine, then we went to the movie theater. The movie we’d wanted was sold out, so instead we got tickets for a Japanese-only political drama. It was somewhat overwhelming and not at all a good date movie, and afterward she apologized. I smiled and told her that I’d look on the Internet and see if I could understand it better later.

When she dropped me off at my apartment, I kissed her. She was surprised, but I asked then if it was ok, and when she said yes I kissed her again. Then I said good night and went inside. In email, she told me that she thought foreign guys thought that “Japanese girls are so easy,” and she had hoped that I wasn’t like that. I tried to assure her that I wasn’t, and apologized if I’d given her that idea.

***

“Natsuko! Yeah, that’s it.” He finished his Coke-hai and flagged the vapid high school kid whose part-time job was waiting tables. After a few attempts, the kid understood that he wanted a wheat shochu with water. “She was the one you were ga-ga over for like six months, right?”

I ordered another beer, even though my mug was still full. “Yeah. That’s her.”

***

I didn’t really hear from her that regularly after that. She’d occasionally email. I’d send a flurry of messages. I ran into her at the bar just after the New Year and she’d been drunk and really friendly. I didn’t hear much else until I’d sent a message asking, very simply, “Are you there?” She responded right away, surprisingly. We met for lunch at the beginning of summer. She was staggeringly gorgeous that day. I’d dated other women, and I held no practical illusions that she was ever going to really stop being flakey, but that day she was the perfectly striking vision I’d built her up to be in my mind. Then silence for weeks. She was looking for a new English teacher and emailed me. At the end of the summer, I stopped by the hospital where she worked and loitered around outside for 40 minutes until she was free again and came downstairs to talk to me for ten minutes. She went to Italy and brought me a wine stopper. Went to Fujisan and brought me the towel I had slung around my neck to mop the sweat off my face.

Finally, she agreed to meet me for a drink one autumn evening. I knew that this was it... I was fed up and I was also far more confident than I’d been for quite some time. We went to the same bar where we’d originally met, and we started talking. I ordered the drinks. The bartender caught on quickly to leave us be, even though we were the only three people in the bar. I asked her if she had a boyfriend. She paused, then said, “Yes” in English. I asked how long she’d been dating him, and she told me that it had been around 11 months or so.

“You mean... around the same time you met me?”

She nodded.

“So... why didn’t you tell me?”

Her eyes grew wide and she suddenly seemed like a little girl caught sneaking candy before dinner. “I didn’t lie,” she said. “You never asked.”

A tsunami of understanding crashed over me with those words. I gave her hell about the kiss, about all the unanswered emails, about the way she seemed to only contact me when it was convenient for her. It was cathartic, as if a huge weight could finally be taken off my back and I could rest and stretch and flex again. We were both drunk by then, but she seemed almost as relieved as I felt. I had to catch the last train, so we left the bar around 11. I told her that if she wanted to be my friend then she’d have to respond to email within a day, and she’d have to try, too. Over the course of the next six months we exchanged messages three or four times. I hadn’t even thought about her for a couple of months.

***

“Dude, get this — she’s getting married!” His eyes were wide and he seemed shocked. “I didn’t even know she’d had a boyfriend that serious!”

I nodded and finished my beer. “Yeah. She’s been seeing him at least a year and a half, I think...”

The dopey high schooler came back with our drinks. I raised my mug. He stopped mid-drink and raised his glass to meet my toast.

“To Natsuko. Omedetou gozaimasu.”

“Omedetou. Indeed.”

I licked the glisten from my lips, smiled with just the corner of my mouth, and took another drink. I looked into my mug and pondered the bubbles in the foam, then wiped the sweat from my face with a towel from Mt. Fuji.

Unsung

2008-06-16T01:19:00.000-07:00

Ogino Takashi

Ling Sosite Shigure

2008-05-29T06:39:00.000-07:00

As Yumi-chan said.... "Damn."

"telecastic fake show" by 凛そして時雨

(link updated 7/9/2008)

The Poetry of T-Shirts

2008-05-25T16:00:00.001-07:00

If you know an iota about current Japanese pop culture, you're aware that t-shirts with English sayings and logos and slogans are everywhere here... but... they're not always quite right, or sometimes they say surprising things.

Today, on the train (which I rarely take in the mornings), I saw ahead of me to the left "To Want and To ACHIEVE." To the right, over a bit, across a rather shapely set of breasts "Are You Gonna ENSLAVE?" and down the way just a bit from her "Without a Doubt."

Somebody's trying to tell me something.

HaiKara followup

2008-04-21T20:20:00.000-07:00

So Justin went with me to the High and Mighty Color show, since, sadly, Patrick from Texas had to miss the show for a work party.

IT WAS AWESOME.

They played a long time, and a lot of great songs. Sadly, they didn't play either "Days" or "Run Run Run," but they did play "Pride" and a bunch of other good songs. They talked to the crowd a lot and really got the crowd into the performance. It was very cool. When they played "Mushroom" they all came out in rainbow clown wigs, which was weird, but cute. Maki was totally adorable during that bit. She seems kind of... stiff... in some of the videos I've seen of them live, but that wasn't the case AT ALL at this show. Her stage presence was excellent - all of the band members were great, really.

Weird piece of trivia - Maki's only 20! That's crazy! She's been in a pretty successful rock band since she was 15 or 16 years old! She's also an actress now - she was in the movie あなたを忘れない (Anata wo Wasurenai - I won't forget you) which is also sometimes called 26 Years Diary (which may be the translation from the Korean title). It's about a Korean student in Tokyo, Lee Su Hyon, who attempts to save a man who falls on some train tracks and dies in the effort.

Here's the Japanese trailer:

スポーツ！

2008-04-21T20:07:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday I went with about 30 other JETs to the city gym in Uda, near Haibara. We played some games with kids from first through 8th grade, and then we ran competitions - cricket, dodgeball, volleyball, and ultimate frisbee. I ran the Ultimate game with another member of the Shika Fun team, Jarrett. We had a good time and the kids really seemed to like it. It was good to catch up with Jarrett, too. He lives pretty far out in the inaka, so it's rare to get a chance to talk with him.

Here's some video coverage from the local news:

Murakami Haruki

2008-04-17T04:24:00.000-07:00

Just read it.

And be daunted. Like I was.

"Writing stories is work to plunge you into your soul. That is a dark world, and life and death are unclear and chaotic. It is a world with no language, and there is no standard for right and wrong."

Tootles

2008-04-09T00:20:00.000-07:00

some tips from a Tokyo rental car agency:

"When passenger of foot heave in sight, tootle the horn. Trumpet him melodiously at first, but if he still obstacles your passage then tootle him with vigor."

via Melina

High and Mighty Color

2008-04-07T23:35:00.000-07:00

Some kids from my school played a couple of songs at the Bunkasai (culture festival) and one of them was a cover of a song by a band called High and Mighty Color. It stuck with me and felt sort of familiar. I didn't know why at the time, and I'm still not sure. But it was a catchy tune.

In Japan, there's a video rental chain called Tsutaya. They're sort of the Japanese Blockbuster. Because of the differences in the music industry in Japan, the video shops also rent CDs, including singles. After the rental disks are getting old and no one is renting them anymore, Tsutaya sells them used - cheap. The average CD single in Japan is well over 500yen, and usually gets close to 1000yen, or about $9-$10. Albums are about ¥2500 - ¥3500, depending on the number of disks or if there's a DVD included (a common practice). Imported CD's from America are usually cheaper than domestic CD's. It's crazy. If you ever wondered why you were paying $40 for an import album from Japan, that's why -- they're freakin' expensive.

Anyway...

I was at Tsutaya going thru the used music bin and I found 3 High and Mighty Color singles, along with some singles by Miz (aka Mizrock, aka Watanabe Mizuki) and some Bump of Chicken and Orange Range disks. The singles are ridiculously cheap, like maybe 3 for 100yen or 10 for 500yen. REALLY cheap. So I grabbed 10 disks and took them home.

The singles included the songs "Run*Run*Run" and "Days" (which was the tune my students covered) and I fell in love with those tunes immediately. The b-sides were ok, too, though not as good as the main songs. I picked up some other stuff by them and found their videos on YouTube. They're getting popular in the States because many of their songs have been used in various anime (most notably "Pride" in Gundam Seed Destiny).

HIGH and MIGHTY COLOR - Days
Uploaded by spencer41

Thanks to my friend Patrick (woo! Texas!), I heard about an upcoming concert... so Saturday evening I'm going to Osaka to see High and Mighty Color live! Very excited...

high &mighty color - RUN RUN RUN
Uploaded by futzlecker

If you're into a sort of blend of maybe Linkin Park blending with maybe Kelly Clarkson's better stuff(?) - I dunno, it's Japanese so these genre distinctions blur into all sorts of weirdness - you should check them out. It's power pop with a weird overtone of American rap-rock/post-NuMetal. They're from Okinawa and feature a female vocalist and a male rapper (who tends to use English lyrics).

Oh, and Maki, the singer, is adorable.

凉風

2008-03-31T03:42:00.000-07:00

Suzuka is an anime that's recently made it to the States (I guess - or it's coming out soon). I'm watching it with fansubs. The story is a pretty typical high school romance, which is common here in Japan. Suzuka is a girl from Yokohama who moves to Tokyo to go to a school with a noted track and field team. (Yokohama is about an hour or two outside of Tokyo, depending.) She's a high jumper with a lot of potential. She lives in an apartment building that also has a 銭湯 (sento - a public bath).

But the main character of the story is Yamato Akitsuki. He's from Hiroshima (which is a long way from Tokyo, being completely past Osaka and most of the Kansai region - probably around a 3-4 hour bullet-train ride, depending). His aunt runs the apartment building and sento. Akitsuki is sort of rough around the edges. He falls for Suzuka and joins the track team to try to impress her.

The show is engaging. It's 26 episodes, so new characters are added gradually. We meet Akitsuki's aunt and cousin, a childhood friend who goes to the same school, another classmate whose family has a shrine that Akitsuki spent time at as a child, and the neighbor college girls who drink too much. In episodes 7 and 8 we start to meet the other members of the track team, too.

It's the kind of show that completely grabs a sucker like me. And it's infuriating that the thing that grabs me is also the aspect I find most annoying - the source of the drama is a love/hate relationship between two immature people who grow closer as they grow up and become more mature. It's the same motif as Ranma 1/2, Love Hina, Kare Kano, Escaflowne, etc.

So I'm hooked. I'll probably finish it by the weekend... and I'm only on episode 9.

Caper Beans

2008-03-30T23:34:00.000-07:00

The guitarist for the band Caper Beans graduated from Oyodo High School, and he was here to visit some teachers earlier today. Gambatte kudasai!

(and no, I have no clue where the hell they came up with the name)

Old Men on the Way to Yoshino

2008-03-27T20:10:00.000-07:00

(being fiction, or something like it, that echoes reality - written months ago)

I see them looking in at me, through the windows. Really, only one looks. The others are drowsing, nodding - not bowing - and scratching or talking. Lines collapse their once wide, flat, round faces into rugged landscapes, river valleys, fissures and ravines. I will never be one of these old men. I don't know that I want to be. When I think of being old, I'm on a porch in a swing, not on a train. I already have the hat. I already feel some aches. Some days, I am already shindoi, like the lines on the old mens' faces betray them to be.

There is a girl. (Truly, there are many girls. But I mean particularly one whom I wish to know. More.) She has gloss-glistening lips and kakkoi megane (red with black temples, half-lenses), works in a hospital, emails occasionally. I think some days of how we'd raise a child, where we'd make a home, how we'd survive one another. I am not afraid. This courage -- no. Courage is to strive when every impulse is to tremble. This calm -- yes, far more appropriate -- is new, and perhaps it's even näive. C'est la vie (since we're speaking French). I think of sleeping next to her, and it feels wholly foreign. I have slept in foreign arms, but it's not the ethnically alien that I sense -- she is of another ethic. She is cut not only from silk (to my flannel), but in a different pattern, with a different tool. She is the product of pinking shears, and me a razor blade.

The train shuffles on, a great beast dragging its lonely carcass through the tunnels, across bridges, gasping in relief at every station, sighing before starting up again.

It's an old man, too, on its way to Yoshino.

The Power of the Visual - A Cultural Thing

2008-03-25T17:13:00.001-07:00

Google has changed the design of their Japanese entry page to include more graphics.

This is a smart move, I think. Japanese culture is highly visual, and I'm convinced this is related to the use of kanji. I also think it's why manga is so popular here and why it's also not dismissed outright as childish. Though there is a definite association of manga with young people and teenagers, it's not exclusive and it's not dismissive in most cases.

The Japanese also use many icons and emoticons in email messages. Many people (especially girls and women) use tons of animations in their emails, too. The phones have added these features across the board, regardless of provider.

I'm particularly sensitive to this because I think tone in a text message can cause massive misunderstandings. Icons help inflect and convey the tone or intent behind a message, especially if it's a joke that is slightly sarcastic.

I also have had to defend visual media within the academy more than once. It's appalling that open-minded academics reinscribe the prejudices they have faced when dealing with other media.

Anyway... one more thing to keep in mind about visual culture.

J-Rock Glossary

2008-03-12T19:28:00.000-07:00

http://www.jrocksaga.com/site/content/glossary.php

めちゃべんりだよ。(Really freakin' useful.)

Music in Japan

2008-03-11T22:22:00.000-07:00

Namba Hatch, Osaka

Club Zion, Nagoya

Zepp Osaka

Club Quattro, Osaka

Fandango, Osaka

Coolest Thing

2008-03-10T20:43:00.000-07:00

Wow. Saki just came to the office and asked to talk to me. She said "Mae ni... you told us... English... jobs?" So after we figured out together what she was really asking, I learned that she wants a job in the future where she will use English. She doesn't know what kind of job she wants, but she knows she wants to use English in her job.

Cool.

Exam Day!

2008-03-05T21:31:00.000-08:00

I gave an exam to the 2nd Year students today. In America, they would be Juniors. Part of the test asked them to write sentences using words in a list.

Wow.

Some of my favorite, somewhat goofy answers:

I have headache because I drink full of soy sauce in soup bowl.
Did you in my class last year?
Was she on my class last year?
Please you are wait because it is danger medicine.
Ayaka eats food paste.
You don't waste of money. If you forgot it is problem.
Japanese culture and traditional is useing chopstick. And they likes a soy sauce, too.
I necessary to eat noodle.
Bob and Miki are difference tradition.
I like Japanese culture. It is difference China.
Chopsticks is necessary eat food.

The ones that are either really too close to home, or just a little bit inappropriate:

I am headache. (written by the girl who never pays attention during class)
This noodle is danger.
My private is hardly.
I like to shy boy. (You like to WHAT the shy boy? Huh?)

Some of the sentences were actually pretty good:

Mr. Utamaru said, "The kikuzou noodle is very bad."
Can't you wait until this soup is cooked?
I'm not sure he can keep a secret.
I have my soup bowl and chopstick.
She studies Japanese culture.
He doesn't like soy sauce.
We are full so please wait.
I hardly take medicine.

And some are almost there, but just impress me anyway:

I study necessary matter.
I like Japanese tradition and culture. Because it is necessary for me.
I hate Shizuka because her personalities bad.
I have a headache because I drink soy sause too much.

Hisashiburi

2008-03-04T22:47:00.001-08:00

So... it's been a long time.

Lots going on, in a way, and most of it vaguely "Japan-related" but some of it more stupid-naivete-related or something. Guh. So... more stuff is on the way. And there's a lot of new pix at my Flickr page, so I'll try to tell some of those stories, too.

Also, I now know how to make tortillas from scratch. This changes everything.

Seriously.

I Used to Study Poisons...

2008-02-18T22:59:00.000-08:00

From the Asahi Shimbun*:

"Organophosphorus substances like dichlorvos cannot pass through the vinyl wrapping. So the dichlorvos was mixed into the product during the period from when mackerels were transported from Denmark to when they were processed in China's Shandong province," said Hideaki Karaki, professor emeritus of toxicity at the University of Tokyo.

::blink::

"professor emeritus of toxicity"

WTF?

*Isn't it cool that a beer company runs one of the most powerful newspapers in the country? Can you imagine "The Budweiser Times"? Or maybe "The Daily Coors."

Sushi Battle!

2008-01-07T03:52:00.000-08:00

Before I ever came to Japan, and as I was just beginning to learn about good food and good cooking, I started watching Iron Chef on Food Network.*

"Iron Chef" is a loose adaptation of the actual name of the show. In Japanese, it's called 虜利の鉄人 (ryori no tetsujin), or "Iron Men of Cooking" ("ryori" is "cooking" or "cuisine," "tetsu" = "iron" and "jin" = "men" or "people"). There's a lot to be learned from watching this show, but now that I've been in Japan, I get even more out of the show. I almost wish, though, that it was only subtitled and not dubbed. I do like that even with the dubbing, you can hear the Japanese sometimes. I haven't ever seen this on DVD, so I'm wondering if there's a sub-only version.

I love sushi. I remember being squeamish about Chinese food and tofu, but after I got to grad school and started exploring food more, I learned to really love sushi. Now that I live in Japan, I can eat it every day if I want to... In fact, I might go have some as soon as I finish this post! I learned to make sushi and I've sampled many kinds and styles, and I've eaten some things (raw and otherwise) that I never thought I'd like.

On YouTube, I found the very first SUSHI BATTLE! on Iron Chef. Here are the links. WOO! Morimoto is a badass, but the challenger is pretty impressive, too, and there's a lot of cool stuff about the history of sushi in the episode.

Part 2
Part 3
Presentation
Judgment

*I think it's important to note, too, that my increase in disposable income and standard of living helped A LOT in this effort. In some ways, now, I look back on the time after grad school as a very "nouveaux riche" time in my life. I don't regret any of it, but it's not cheap to learn to love wine, whiskey, sushi, and other good food. Sometimes it's easy to forget that.

Junk

2007-12-26T22:32:00.000-08:00

Check out Junk Magnet for good (and thorough) overviews of a bunch of Japanese culture, including music.

emoji

2007-12-17T03:33:00.000-08:00

I have been wondering what the hell "orz" means. So today, I learned about "OTL" and then found out it's the same thing, basically. It's a drawing of a stick-figure guy kneeling, on hands and knees, with his head on the ground.

Jeez.

OTL
orz

Get it? Guh.

further on the "ideo-" issue...

2007-12-12T20:30:00.001-08:00

So, real issue is that the symbols mean WORDS rather than IDEAS.

Um, ok. Sure. Yes. Fair enough. So perhaps "logographic" or "lexigraphic" might be better than "ideographic." Certainly.

I think this starts to beg the question about the difference between an "idea" and a "word." Seems also really easy to end up down a road that ends in Plato's Cave, too.

The real question this raises for me, though, is compound kanji that are made up of radicals - smaller versions of stand-alone kanji that, when combined, create a new kanji - therefore, a new word. A good one is "mori" 森　which is made up of three small versions of "ki"　木. Ki means tree, and mori means forest. This makes some sense. And I would argue that that's more than just a "word" - it's a word made from other words to convey a more complex idea involving the first word. So, OK, maybe I'm falling into the whole "simple early learner" trap mentioned before. But at some point we have to acknowledge that WORDS exist for the explicit purpose of communicating IDEAS, and are, in fact, representations of ideas, no matter the language. Obviously, where the early theorists went wrong was overstating the issue. But this guy feels sort of overcorrective, and that can totally cause problems, too.

Another fun example of compound kanji: "noisy" - 姦　"woman" - 女　(this is a bit unfair, though. that symbol is also part of the words for "adultery" and "rape" as well as "crafty" and "scheme" and "villain." So it's not necessarily good to be with many women, and the multiple women thing can express several ideas. However, there's also this proverb: 女三人寄れば姦しい - "Wherever women gather it will be noisy."

"Ideogram" is a Myth

2007-12-12T20:13:00.000-08:00

Interesting chapter on the "myth" of ideographic writing: http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/ideographic_myth.html
I follow the arguments pretty well, and on some level it's all about splitting a very fine hair: the notion that Chinese writing exists (or ever did) completely independent of sound as a way to transfer ideas. The point being that the language, as soon as it shifted from representational drawings into actual writing, began to use one symbol to stand for things that were pronounced the same, even if they were dramatically different in idea or concept. The example given is the word for "wheat" - in Chinese, the character that means "wheat" also means "come," because they were pronounced the same way. The symbol was first a stylized picture of a wheat stalk, but as soon as it was standardized into writing, it was used to mean something that had nothing to do with wheat, but which sounded the same when spoken. Egyptian heiroglyphics were similar.

OK. I get it. I also get that the notion of an ideogram-basis for the symbols is reinforced by the fact that you learn really simple symbols first when learning Japanese or Chinese - stuff like "river" and "mountain" and "man" that look sorta like those things. This makes it easy to keep thinking of the characters as ideograms rather than "letters" the way the Roman alphabet works.

Fine.

What it doesn't change is that one symbol, perhaps complex but still a single entity, functions not only as a sound (or in Japanese, potentially several sounds) but also as an idea or an entire word. And in Japanese, the limited number of phonemes (sounds) means that one phoneme is associated with several characters, and the meaning is impossible to distinguish unless one knows the kanji or the context. I think it's not that "ideogram" is a bad label, but instead that it's been taken to mean "picture-only language component."

Gaijin-Smasher Sighting!

2007-12-11T20:49:00.000-08:00

So, about 10 days ago, I actually met Azrael from Gaijin Smash in person! He was at the last WhyNot?! Party. Very calm, friendly guy.