Primary Sources

I’ve had a dispiriting week—nothing seriously wrong other than the usual perennial personal and global worries, just a variety of little demoralizing things—and so I am posting a bunch of silly bits of things that have been piling up.

Y and I took a walk early in January and found one of the big shrines still full of people for the New Year; we did our own 初詣 elsewhere (up in the north of the city where I used to live there’s a small shrine on a hill with a beautiful, ancient camphor tree), but we stopped at the stalls offering food outside. These included such traditional Japanese snacks as candy apples, fried chicken, and of course takoyaki, as well as corn on the cob and kebab. The corn stall was run by several Chinese ladies, one scolding another “talk Japanese in front of the customers!” and the kebab stall, as far as I could tell, by a genuine Turkish guy. Both were delicious.

Music: chestnut got me to go listen to the Prokofiev Second Piano Concerto (this one is my 偶像 Seong-Jin Cho’s version) and it’s wonderful; I need to spend a lot more time with it. Prokofiev is hit-or-miss for me but this one’s a hit.

Tickled by a Chinese song (this one, very comforting lyrics-wise) which uses the English term “happy ending” in passing, pronounced “HAPpy enDING” with a strong back-of-the-throat Chinese h sound; the English ability of Chinese singers seems to cover a range from Zhou Shen, among whose many talents is sounding like a native speaker whatever language he’s singing in, to a number of others who apparently consider consonants one hundred percent optional. Still, they’re all doing better than me singing in the shower in Chinese.

Where Japanese says “mofumofu” for petting a fluffy cat or dog, Chinese slang has “rua,” written in roman letters—you see “想rua” for something (or someone) fluffy and adorable.

In Chinese you sometimes hear 哈 (ha) at the end of a sentence, apparently in the sense of “—right?” “—okay?” “—yeah?” (It’s one of the invisible speech particles, i.e. (in non-scripted speech) subtitles sometimes don’t include it even when it’s there; 嘛 and 嘞 are others.) I’m curious if anyone has investigated whether it’s related to its soundalike, the similar English “—huh?”

My morning running course goes past a large boys’ school, and one day I encountered some of their junior high baseball team (in semi-uniform) on the uphill past the entrance, where a teacher/coach was checking off their times. Some of them were not faster than me, which means they were pretty slow. Around the corner on the flat, where the coach couldn’t see them, they slowed down to a walk/trot; I couldn’t resist teasing “don’t let this old lady beat you! 頑張って!” as I went past, and one gave me a big grin and shouted back “Thank you! 頑張ってください!”

Because Client N can’t make up their minds about terminology from one month to the next, I had to spend some time lately changing all the terms translated as “Post Type” to “Pillar Type” and I’m very sorry it wasn’t the other way around, so I could have worked from pillar to post.

Y took me to see an old Gundam movie from his childhood, prudently making me read a plot synopsis first. Gorgeous animation, they knew what they were doing in the 1980s, very strange plot (everyone is motivated by both complex political opinions and high-school-level “I’ve never forgiven him for taking my girl” or “She doesn’t get to have you!” emotions). Very good worldbuilding, both the beautifully realized settings and giving a lot of nameless characters throwaway lines that made them three-dimensional, and also thinking through things like people working at weird angles to each other in zero gravity. Speaking of which I could have done without the damn miniskirts, but that said there were more women as competent pilots, soldiers, and mechanics than I would have expected from the era. Not surprisingly I rather fell for the minor character in glasses who has his own little tiny rebellion.

Photos: Three from a New Year’s Eve visit to a temple: the raw material of mugwort mochi ready for pounding, some thousand-crane strings, and the temple roof with its sky. Also persimmons, ducks, and something pink (a rose? a camellia?). The last one is for maggie, a poster I saw in a subway station of Machida Keita warning the public not to get caught up in fraud.

Be safe and well.