My reading days

I have been reading a lot in the last two weeks. It all began with my pledge to myself to finish every library book within the three weeks for which it is lent and to get a new book next time I go to the library. My wishlist coincided largely with the list of recent Booker Prize winners - I remember planning to read all the winning titles back in my university years. So I began with Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (I didn't borrow this book, though), then went to the library in search of Yann Martel's Life of Pi, but it was out on loan, so I settled for DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little.

I read Roy's book slowly, desperately trying to make the joy last longer, turning the pages slowly over a large teapot of darjeeling and countless bars of Meiji black chocolate on quiet evenings. I tried to taste every word, hold it in my mouth for some time, chuckling at jokes and sighing when Roy's fictional world threw its weight on my shoulders. In short, I couldn't get enough of this book - it eventually ended, as good books usually do, leaving me thinking about it for the rest of the week.

Vernon God Little was good in its own way. The eff words kept piling on my head from the very first page, and after reading Roy's beautifully constructed prose, it was a little disappointing, even disgusting to some extent. But later on I got used to this, and caught up with the narrator's real story, which is nothing but hilarious. I literally swallowed the book in one busy week.

I finally got my hands on the Life of Pi, which I am reading at the moment. The book is promising much at this stage (I am now in the thirtieth pages), but let's see whether I will eventually approve of the Booker Prize panel's decision.

Lazy lazy lazy

I have not been so lazy in the last few months. I am so lazy today that I don't want to even think about anything. Maybe I am tired of everything, maybe I need a rest. Maybe it is because I can feel that something is wrong with my body, my head, my spirit. Or maybe it is because I am not getting enough sleep every night. I don't know. I am fed up with most of what I have everyday. And I want to change some things in my life, because almost everything I have now adds up to the current frustration. So I have to do something about it. But before that, I need a good rest.

About my long-suffering toe

Last December I hurt the fourth toe on my right foot due to a bicycle accident - it struck the ground while I was trying to stop the bike abruptly. It was nothing too serious, but the swelling didn't go away for about a week, although the doc had assured me prior to that that the toe would be fine in two days. He even lectured me over a high-precision X-ray shot of my right foot on which I could see every tiny bone in minute detail - and make it clear for myself that the bone was not hurt, not even displaced. That the swelling was largely due to the damage to the surrounding tissue.

Months have passed since and I have almost forgotten about the accident. And a football match misstep made me remember the whole shit from the beginning. I lifted my leg high in the air and somehow managed to land it badly. There was a sharp feeling in the toe and the first thing that came to me was "not again, the fucking toe!" I played on, though, for an hour and a half. At home I was not very surprised to find the toe swollen. I know it's nothing too serious and not worth spending another 3000 yen on a visit to the doc, but still it struck me out of my inner balance.

Blogging

What are the chances of landing a journalism job through blogging extensively? Does blogging help develop writing skills to the extent stipulated by job descriptions?

I don't know whether one day I will write for an English language media outlet or not, but blogging for me at the moment is merely a chance to reflect my experiences, to record my life somehow for future reference, to let my thoughts out and make them tangible, visible, comprehensible. Let some order into them. And if in the course of doing all this my writing skills happen to improve, I think I will have one more cause to celebrate.

I'm back

My long absence is over now. Life has been very tough on me recently, and the last thing I could think of in the last month was to update this blog. I am slowly recuperating, mentally. There are events in this world one cannot accept, although it is possible to comprehend them to some extent. I have tried to live through that in the last weeks and who knows how many more weeks I will have to fight off certain thoughts. But I am on my path back, that's for sure. Although the world is never gonna be the same.

I have started working part-time as a teaching assistant to one of the professors at the University. The job so far is utterly technical: setting up the computer-projector-speakers and, once in a week, microphones in class; helping the lecturer with showing PowerPoints by literally pressing the button after a signal; passing the cordless microphone from one student to another during class discussions. It's been mostly ok. This month I will also be taking care of one of the seminars, for which I am preparing at the moment a list of readings. I have to come up with a PowerPoint and show it to an 80-odd class of Japanese first- and second-year undergraduates. I am looking forward to it, although I am also worrying a little about the reluctance of the students to speak up in the public, of which I have already written. And will write more, it appears.

Rod Liddle and his beloved Jihadists

Rod Liddle, whose columns in the GQ (UK Edition) I could not read without at least one loud laugh, carries this style into the more worldly newspapers too. This morning, reading my favourite football news page I came across a link with Rod's smiling face. On the other side of the link was, as you might well have guessed, another piece of political comedie noire about Jihadists of Britain.

A more critical eye will surely have noticed - and questioned maybe - Rod's obsession with Muslim groups and their political struggles, but I am not critical of Rod, not least because I find his writings exceedingly amusing. Consider this passage:

More to the point, these jihadists, allied (so it is said) to the exiled, grinning imbecile Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, distributed thousands upon thousands of leaflets to the Muslims of Luton urging them to attend the demo, and all they were left with on the day were 20 bearded lunatics and, hovering behind the arras, a handful of ululating burqa-clad babes doing as they were bidden by their menfolk. In other words, an infinitesimally tiny minority.

The Value of Critical Thinking

In Japan, students are not very used to criticising in class. What they do is sit still, take notes, and nod. There are classes without a single question asked, and the teacher has the privilege of talking without being challenged. This happens even during seminars where students are supposed to speak up, never mind lectures.

Thus, a student more prone to critical thinking might sometimes draw surprised looks both from the instructor and classmates, because he or she would be standing out of the mass. For a student with experience of education in the West, especially in the United Kingdom, this environment may come as something bordering on absurd: how can you learn something without ever challenging things taken for granted? Only here in Japan did I face the necessity to consider the question of conformity, because it is very rare in this country to see someone challenging the conventional wisdom openly.

This raises more important questions: what is the role of critical thinking in social and political development? And it makes me think about the role of culture in development, the cultural differences between the West and Japan. Surely, this will take more than a year to explore and document, but I am more than ready to continue my observations of the Japanese society.

A more secularist America?

Another piece of interesting news comes from Andrew Sullivan, who links us to his Times of London article on atheism in America. A chunk of text he quotes on his blog:

It's a reminder to exercise a little skepticism when you hear of America’s religious exceptionalism. Yes, America is far more devout than most of western Europe; but it is not immune to the broader crises facing established religion in the West. The days when America’s leading intellectuals contained a strong cadre of serious Christians are over. There is no Thomas Merton in our day; no Reinhold Niebuhr, Walker Percy or Flannery O’Connor. In the arguments spawned by the new atheist wave, the Christian respondents have been underwhelming.

I did research on the topic very recently, for a short two-session course named "Politics and Religion in America" which I liked very much. The paper I wrote was on the return of the Religious (Christian) Right to the fore of political debate in the United States during the Bush years. I have always been interested in the roots of American religiosity, which becomes so conspicuous when compared to the European societies. The above article is a piece of good news for me.

Talk to me, babe, talk to me...

In his column-cum-blog on the Foreign Policy website Professor Stephen M. Walt hails a letter by a dozen veteran foreign policy officials that advise Obama to talk to Hamas. This is a realist step in the new president's foreign policy agenda, according to Walt, whose main line of criticism in the last several years was directed towards Bush's largely non-realist policy decisions.

According to the Boston Globe article quoted by Walt, the old foreign policy hands are also preparing a report on how exactly to begin the talks.

If this speculation becomes policy, it will mark a huge turn in the US Middle East policy, the turn long-awaited by the millions across the globe. Of course, there will be conditions dictated by the US, such as renunciation of violence and recognition of Israel, at the very least. But that the US is contemplating talking to an organisation it has defined for the last several years as "terrorist" is a clear sign of a change in political winds.

At last!

Barack Obama has today announced the end date for one of the bloodiest and most pointless conflicts in recent history. The blessed day is August 31, 2010.

I would think about making a count-down engine, if I could make one. This does not make my welcoming of the news less joyful.

The art of fitting in.

For some time in the last few months I have tried to suppress my surprise at what I see as the grand paradox of the Japanese society - how such an advanced society could have been built on the shoulders of people with such a limited personal outlook at the world. This country is filled with people who always live by the rules, who cannot even imagine that there might be another way to do something. I know I am indulging myself in one of the most terrible generalisations, but this is what I feel after almost three months of living here. This is a society of taboos - and breaking them is tantamount to social suicide. What is most important here is to fit in, not stand out.

People here are so much afraid of taking responsibility, of standing up and facing the music, to borrow the words of one marvellous speaker (and tango dancer, how could I forget?) Liet. Col. Frank Slade. If you plan to visit your local bank with a question that is not on the day-to-day FAQ list of an average cashier, and, to make the matters worse, your Japanese does not go far beyond “Hello!” and “Nice weather!”, then be prepared to be sent somewhere else to call some number. Which is usually answered, after a few minutes of standing in the queue and listening to stupid phone music, by a Japanese female with a geisha voice and an American accent, to whom you will have to explain everything from the very beginning. And no wonder if at the very end of your long conversation she redirects you somewhere else. Simple things that usually take no time at all are turned into long and tiresome procedures here. Everyday, whereever you go, you face - you feel the walls around you, and sometimes they close in on you. This is where little frustrations start to build one upon another, slowly, day by day. It is very important not to lose your temper in this country - the Japanese themselves always somehow manage to do this.

I more often than ever feel myself a round peg in a square hole here. I haven’t gone so far as to regret my decision to come here, no, but there surely have been some hard times during which I felt short of swearwords. Maybe I should learn Zen or to meditate - maybe the ancient art of healing - acupuncture - will soothe my nerves?

Samuel P. Huntington, 1927-2008

© WWW.COLORADOCOLLEGE.EDU

A few moments ago I opened the Arts & Letter Daily website - one I try to read almost every day - and found a link to a Samuel Huntington obituary written by Francis Fukuyama. "Huntington is dead," I mumbled for a moment, amazed, and then remembered the recent encounter with his name, long after having read his Clash of Civilizations as an undergraduate student of IR. The encounter was on the pages of The Israel Lobby, a very warm reference to Huntington by the authors, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, who dedicated the book to him:

For more than twenty-five years, we have been fortunate to enjoy the friendship and support of one of America's most accomplished social scientists, Samuel P. Huntington. We cannot imagine a better role model. Sam has always tackled big and important questions, and he has answered these questions in ways that the rest of the world could not ignore. Although each of us has disagreed with him on numerous occasions over the years - and sometimes vehemently and publicly - he never held those disagreements against us and was never anything but gracious and supportive of our own work. He understands that scholarship is not a popularity contest, and that spirited but civil debate is essential both to scholarly progress and to a healthy democracy. We are grateful to Sam for his friendship and for the example he has set throughout his career, and we are pleased to dedicate this book to him.

In the obituary, Fukuyama calls Huntington "easily the greatest political scientist of his generation," and attributes to him the creation of "the subfield of strategic studies, an area that was not seriously researched by most universities until he came along."

It is a pity to lose Huntington, who contributed to IR and political science a great deal. Death is one thing that we cannot escape; and in death some of the greatest people and their works acquire a different aura.

© REUTERS

I spent the whole evening reading The Israel Lobby, the chapter on the 'dwindling moral case' from the side of the U.S. to support Israel, followed by a set of review articles ('No sentiments in war', The face that launched a thousand MiGs) and a speech by Avi Shlaim. And minutes before logging off to go on reading the book, I came across the piece of news about Israel's attack on Hamas in Gaza (The Guardian story, The Reuters story).

The Guardian story displays a photo of dead Palestinians laid in rows and covered with blankets - a pathetic view, a picture of war among thousands of others not seen.

Ehud Barak is quoted as saying the attacks "will widen as necessary". I wonder how many more of those rows covered with blankets Israel needs.

Reading reading reading...

Reading uninterruptedly about 80 pages of academic text for about 5 hours last night, I came very close to feeling aversion to the printed word. Reason - I have been out of this for more than 2 years now, and at the time of leaving school this feeling of aversion was overwhelming and all-encompassing; I was running out of academia to a real life job, which at the end also turned out to arise in me deep aversion.

With this in mind, I think - will I be able to devote the rest of my life to the printed word?

Tsukuba: the place

Tsukuba is a town (or call it a small city, if you like) some 60 kilometres north-east of Tokyo, with a population of about 200,000, if we believe the Wikipedia article under the same title. It is a pretty quiet and cosy place (if you don't count the roar of patrol helicopters up in the sky), a very green and clean too.

When I made the decision to come here, I naturally surfed the Web in search for at least some information about the place, as I had not heard anything about it before. From what I read then I perceived Tsukuba to be a really small place, a little larger than a big village. However, I found it a lot bigger than I first thought. A big chunk of the city is occupied by Tsukuba University, of which I am a graduate student at the moment and which boasts one of the biggest campuses in the country. The campus is really big indeed, and without a bike - which is by the way the most popular means of transportation in the city - it takes helluva lot of time to get from one end to the other. The shopping points - for example, the Dayz Town, where I buy grocery usually - are also quite a long distance from where I live, so if you are planning to come to Tsukuba, make your arrangements for a bike.

In general, the place is great to live and study. Those who look for entertainment and fun might find it a little bit sleepy here (and I felt a little sleepy, comparing Tsukuba nightlife to that in Manchester, UK, where I had spent a year as a student). However, for those who look really well, there is some fun tobe surely found. There are numerous karaokes and a bowling in Tsukuba, although I am not sure about night clubs and pubs where one could socialise with others over a pint or two. Nonetheless, this doesn't make Tsukuba a dull place. I like it here.