桜 (sakura) is Japanese for cherry blossom, an important symbol of spring time in Japan and, with it, a symbol of renewal. The cherry blossom is a beautiful fluffy and light flower which falls quickly off the tree with wind and rain, making it also an important representation of 物の哀れ (mono no aware).
Last weekend my family (including my aunt Mikako and Bailey) took a short trip to Yugawara (湯河原) at the base of the Izu peninsula. Last weekend was possibly the peak of the cherry blossoms this year, making it a very picturesque trip. It’s quite rare for the four of us to all be in the same place at the same time, so these photos are definite keepers:
One of my personal highlights was going down a slide at Azumayama Park in Ninomiya right through a grove of cherry trees in full bloom—it was so beautiful that I had to go back down it again and take a video! Unfortunately the Flash video encoding (or my camera) doesn’t do it justice, but I hope you can fill in the gaps with your imagination.
A few weekends ago, I went out west to visit Bailey. While I normally visit her in Kyoto, it was a three-day weekend, and we decided to explore another city near her: Osaka (大阪). If Kyoto is the historical capitol, Tokyo is the modern and imperial capitol, Osaka has traditionally been the merchant capitol of Japan. It’s known for its food, comedy, and business.
My trip began with the three-hour bullet train (新幹線 shinkansen) ride out to Osaka. I hadn’t purchased a ticket in advance, so that meant standing in a non-reserved seating car for most of the way there, the sole consolation being the great view of Mt. Fuji. Lesson learned: buy reserved tickets for holiday weekends.
大阪城
Our first stop was the Osaka castle (大阪城 ōsaka jyō). Located at the center of the city, the castle is surrounded by a moat and a pretty big park. Many of the paths are lined with cherry trees, making it a popular cherry blossom viewing venue in the spring.
Item 80. Brain Farts: The Collected Works of The University of Chicago Bathroom Graffiti (organized by theme, but attributed to location). [102 points. 15 bonus points for an inset detailing the entirety of the “Grout Work.”]
I spent a day or so going around campus with a friend (so I didn’t have to be snooping around in ladies’ rooms) taking pictures and compiled the booklet. (more…)
I recently have been playing a fair deal of RISK on the web with some friends.1RISK, for those who don’t know, is a wonderful world domination strategy board game.
My friends and I use a site called warfish.net which lets you set up games with your friends and play sans Flash. You don’t need to play in real time, either… warfish will email you when it’s your turn, making it a great way to play with friends halfway around the world. The site is invite-only, but you can request an invite from me here.
About a week ago I tried playing from my iPhone while on the train and it worked remarkably well. The addition of a proper <meta name='viewport'> tag so I don’t have to zoom in with every reload would be even better, but I really can’t complain. This weekend I was playing on the way to and during breaks at my spacetime workshop as well.
Here’s a quick video I put together to show how it’s done on the iPhone:
Hope to play with you soon!
A little マイブーム (mai boomu, lit. “my boom”, another wasei-eigo roughly meaning a “personal fad”), you might say. ↩
Bailey just asked me what the difference between 回収 (kaishū) and 収集(shūshū) is—two words that would both map to the English verb “collect.” I intuitively came up with a hypothesis to explain the distinction:
回収 may take things away from others when collecting while 収集 does not have that implication.
Things that you 回収 may have been previously distributed by the actor themself while 収集 does not have that implication.1
Not content with armchair theorizing, however, I decided to take advantage of one of the largest corpora in the world: Google.2 To test my hypothesis, I chose two “objects of collection”, one you can take away (and often is distributed first) and one you can’t take away: アンケート (ankēto “survey,” from the French enquête) and 意見 (iken “opinion”). I then took the four resulting collocations3 on Google in quotes (“•”) and recorded how many hits there were.
This second point could also be hypothesized based on the component meaning of 回, which in the verb 回る (mawa=ru) can mean “circle back.” ↩
Google is of course a huge corpus but it has very limited search and can easily be misused and misunderstood, thus making Google an unreliable (unprofessional) source for statistical data. One Google alternative for some different statistics is the n-gramdata they offer for research. ↩
”Collocation” on Wikipedia says: “Within the area of corpus linguistics, collocation is defined as a sequence of words or terms which co-occur more often than would be expected by chance.” ↩
About two doors down from my new place is a restaurant serving ramen (ラーメン, derived from the Chinese 拉麵), a distinctive type of noodle. Ramen noodles are wheat-based but crucially use kansui (鹹水), a mineral-rich water.1 This water colors the noodles yellow and helps add a certain firmness to the noodles. The noodles can be served in a variety or different ways (with regional variations as well), but it is most often served in a miso-, soy sauce-, pork broth-, or salt-based soup.
The store down the street is called ichifuku (一福). Not only is it one of the closest restaurants to my house, it’s also been featured on a number of ramen restaurants and websites. The store is known for its delicious miso ramen but also for its more creative, Western-style arrangements. The female shopkeeper is often running everything by herself, gardening out front as well as cooking and playing great music.
Here are some pictures of the great food they serve:
If you ever come by the Hatsudai area, I highly recommend a visit. The address is: 東京都渋谷区本町６−６−４.
NB: Kansui in Japanese refers to a specific type of solution, while the same word in Chinese simply means “salt water.” ↩
I’m certainly not the first one who’s noticed that Japanese apartment buildings often have weird English names (I can think of Tony László in one of the ダーリンは外国人 books.) In fact, I moved into my very own “Palace Mansion” myself a couple weeks ago. No, really. That’s the name of the place.
A mansion? By Japanese standards, yes.1 A palace? Um… not quite. Take a look—here are some pictures from my move-in.
マンション (“mansion”) in Japanese actually refers to an apartment complex of at least a certain size. It’s an instance of 和製英語—English-sounding words in the Japanese lexicon which, for some reason or another, do not actually exist or mean the same thing in English. ↩
Perhaps with increasing restlessness to find increased variety in my diet or perhaps by hanging out with Aaron more, I’ve been eating some great food recently. Here’s a documentation of some great food in Taiwan (Yilan and Taipei) and where to find it:
Best Curry Udon ever (Yilan)
I’ve been craving some good udon noodles, called 烏龍麵 (wūlóngmiàn) in Taiwan which originally confused me as those are the characters for Oolong tea.[^3] I haven’t found great soup udon in Yilan but I did find some fabulous fried curry udon.
A week ago a reporter from the China Times came and interviewed me on teaching in Nanao and learning Atayal. The article was in the paper today in the education section: 服務偏鄉 外師學會流利泰雅語.
A couple weeks ago I went to Chiayi (嘉義, pinyin: Jiāyì) to present a paper at the Linguistic Society of Taiwan’sNational Conference on Linguistics.[^1] I got a chance to meet some wonderful and kind Taiwanese linguists, make friends with some linguistics students, as well as explore the city of Chiayi.
It’s that time of the year again—Mother’s Day weekend—and that means Scav Hunt! Every year at the University of Chicago we have a huge Scavenger Hunt (a.k.a. “Scav,” or “The Hunt”). On Wednesday night at midnight, a list of roughly 300 items is released in some obfuscated fashion. The items are to be presented three days later, on Judgement Day (Sunday). While some items are simply rare and must be found, most are some sort of construction, production, or art project. There are also some other scav staples: some of the items make up the Scav Olympics, the Party on the Quads, Scav All Stars, and the Road Trip.
