A fond farewell to JETAA Liaison Shinya Bando
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Today is Shinya Bando’s last day working at the Japan Local Government Center (aka CLAIR) in New York City. He is returning to Tokyo in two days and then on to his home prefecture of Wakayama for his next assignment after spending the last two years in New York. His first year he served as the JETAA USA Liaison (among other roles), and this past year he served in an overseer role for both JETAA USA & Canada.
In addition to all of his support and encouragement for JETAA, JET alums who know him and had a chance to interact with him always appreciated his easygoing style, ever-present smile and warm nature.
The always-ganbatte-ing Taichi Hanzawa will take over Bando-san’s role as the JETAA USA & Canada overseer and will also serve as the JETAA Canada Liaison. Also pictured below is the wonderful and talented Ryoko Kobayashi, who served this past year as the JETAA Canada Liaison and will provide additional support to JETAA USA and Canada. Arriving May 6 will be Kawamura-san who will serve as the new JETAA USA Liaison.
O-tsukare sama deshita, Bando-san!
Taichi Hanzawa, Shinya Bando and Ryoko Kobayashi
Many thanks to JET alum Vlad Baranenko for capturing the JET Alumni Author Showcase in photographs. Click “Read More” below to see all the photos.
I just heard from JETAA Northern California’s President and am sad to report that JET alum Daniel Sakai, a police officer in Oakland, was one of the officers killed in the police chase in Oakland on Saturday.
You can read the San Francisco Chronicle article about him here: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/23/MNRF16L6DO.DTL&hw=japan&sn=006&sc=188
If any readers knew him, please feel free to share any memories or stories of him in the comments section of this post.
JETAA Hanami Forecast (updated)
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The JETAA Hanami Forecast (updated)
The Consulate-General of Japan in New York has a listing of all of the NY and Philly area upcoming hanami festivals, so let’s add those to the mix from the original post. (Email jetwit at jetwit dot com if you have other events to add to the list.)
Sunday, April 5
- JETAA Northern California – 11:00 am – Garden Gate Park, Speedway Meadow
- JETAA Philly (NY subchapter) – 11:00 am to 4:00 pm – Fairmount Park Horticulture Center (Ambassador Nishimiya, who will be replacing Ambassador Sakurai starting in April, will attend and speak)
Sunday, April 19
- Essex County Cherry Blossom Festival – Bloomfest -Sunday, 4/19, from 11AM to 5PM -The Cherry Blossom Welcome Center in Essex County Branch Brook Park, Newark – List of more event, please visit www.essexcountynj.org/ or call at Essexy County Park Department 973-268-3500
Saturday, April 25
- Flushing Meadows Corona Park (Queens) 5th Sakura Matsuri – 11am – 2pm – For more information, please call Japanese American Association at 212-840-6942
Saturday, May 2 & Sunday May 3
- Brooklyn Botanic Garden Sakura Matsuri – 10am – 6pm (Note: Hanami will officially run there from April 4 – May 10)
- 10th Annual Cherry Blossom Festival – Sunday, May 3, 2009, noon to 5PM – Turnure Park – 20 Lake Street, White Plains, NY 10603 – For more information, please contact 914-774-3187
JapanInfo e-Newsletter – March 2009
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The March 2009 edition of JapanInfo is now available online. JapanInfo is published by the Consulate General of Japan in New York/Japan Information Center and is a great source of info for Japan-related things going on in New York and the surrounding area.
Highlights include:
- U.S.-Japan Summit Meeting
- 13th Annual Japanese Speech Contest in Pittsburgh
- Second Annual September 11th Teacher Award Goes to a Japanese Teacher in Long Island
- The World of J-Cinema : Lights, Cameras, and Reality
- From the Ambassador’s Desk
- And plenty of things to do and see on the Events Calendar.
Job: Sanyo Solar, Account Manager/sales – San Jose, CA
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This job listing comes from JETAANC member Robert Zerner (Nagano ’99-’01):
Account Manager/sales position at SANYO Energy (USA) Corporation
Sanyo’s HIT solar technology leads the industry in efficiency and
performance, and illuminates Sanyo’s “Think GAIA” vision of creating
products we need to live in harmony with the Earth.
Based in San Jose, California, Sanyo is seeking to hire an Account Manager /
sales position as we grow in 2009.
Read More
Remember in Japan how the news would show the hanami progressing across the country, akin to a weather forecast? U.S. geography isn’t quite as conducive to that approach, and I can’t really picture any local news channels taking that approach anyway. But now JetWit is providing you with the next best thing:
The JETAA Hanami Forecast
JetWit has the unique, gaijin-riffic superpower to forecast the progression of hanami throughout the U.S. based on the scheduling of JETAA chapter hanami events! Here’s what’s on tap so far. Don’t see your chapter’s event listed? Email jetwit at jetwit dot com and let us know.
Sunday, April 5
- JETAA Northern California – 11:00 am – Garden Gate Park, Speedway Meadow
- JETAA Philly (NY subchapter) – 11:00 am to 4:00 pm – Fairmount Park Horticulture Center (Ambassador Nishimiya, who will be replacing Ambassador Sakurai starting in April, will attend and speak)
Job: Experienced translators of literary works (also seeking financial translators)
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Please include your rates, including volume discounts, additional charges for scans, etc. where applicable.
We also continue to seek competent financial translators, with experience in handling IR disclosures and annual reports. Agencies are also welcome to submit rates and sample projects.
Shortlisted candidates may be subject to a trial, in cases where potential work is available in their field.
Many thanks,
C. Lyall
Modis Design
By translator and writer Jamie Graves (Saitama-Ken 2002-2003)
The Google Honyaku group has a great discussion going on trying to pin down exactly what physical sensation karai (辛い) refers to. The easiest English analogy is “spicy“, and it’s often used to refer to hot foods, but as I learned from a few years of working in restaurant kitchens in Japan, the word can also refer to anything that’s a little too salty, too strong (dark Belgian beer with a high alcohol content) , or strongly flavored (sun-dried tomatoes).
People even provide examples of native Japanese speakers (NJS’s) using karai to describe such disparate flavors as minty Colgate toothpaste or cola.
As Marc Adler ably sums it up, “Anything that is over-stimulative of the mouth gets labeled as ‘karai.’ I think we just don’t have a single word in English that covers all of karai’s lexical bases.”
Case in point, the word used to describe a dry wine is kara-kuchi (辛口), which isn’t by any stretch of the imagination “spicy”. Laurie Berman supplies an excellent and concise theory about this:
My impression is that [karai] 辛い and [amai, “sweet”] 甘い are regarded as opposites, and as a result, [amai] 甘い can be used to mean “not [karai] 辛い,” and [karai] 辛い can sometimes be used to mean “not [amai] 甘い”–which is how I interpret [karai] 辛口.
Does anyone else have an example of an unusual food that they heard a native Japanese speaker refer to as karai?
Writing Opporunity: Write the ending for “The Strange Ship: Part II”
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James Kennedy (Nara-ken, 2004-06), author of The Order of Odd-Fish, has a strangely compelling post on his blog asking readers to help him write the ending to the first book he ever wrote–The Strange Ship.
[A]s a lark, back in November I posted The Strange Ship, the first book I ever wrote (I was seven years old). I mentioned I had written a sequel. Some of the students in Mrs. Vivian’s fifth grade class asked me to put it online. My pleasure!
In The Strange Ship, two nameless space explorers called “moneymen” and their trusty droid 5-0-6 stumbled upon a strange ship full of monsters (including the giants Carziperes, Diploziperes, and Zarzit). The moneymen then proceeded to blow up the ship by making all the monsters simultaneously sneeze.
Clearly a sequel was required, to tie up all those loose ends. So let me take you back to March 13, 1981-almost exactly 28 years ago-and The Strange Ship: Part II.
However, I must warn you-the last couple pages are, tragically, missing! The story breaks off right in the middle of the climax! But America, my carelessness is your opportunity. I propose a contest. Draw / write YOUR OWN ending to The Strange Ship: Part II and send it to me! Let’s make the deadline April 15, 2009. I’ll post the new endings right here on this blog, and there will be prizes!
Click here to read the full post and experience the wonderful drawings in their entirety.
Kirsten’s World: “Shake Up the Picture The Lizard Mixture”
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By Kirsten Phillips (Niigata-ken, 2005-08)
Many things in Japan were my crack cocaine. Tarako, choco an-pan, hijiki, and heated toilet seats all soon became things I could not smile without. I would do lines of kinako dust in the morning just to ease my peanut butter withdrawal. Hon maguro became my sushi requirement. In my rusty little hamlet by the sea there was no shortage of shiokara (salted squid guts) to go with the copious amounts of booze that somehow found me. The stuff was pretty tasty as long as you ate it with a heaping dose of denial.
But of all things Japanese that would make me their bitch, I owe my sanity to one ambrosial substance: 玄米茶。
That’s brown rice tea for those not in the know.
Friends, a steaming cup of genmai-cha on a colorless cold morning feels like a mini three day weekend. It tastes like autumn in a cup, like being hugged by your ample armed mother. Please have some. Read More
Translator’s Corner: Keep Our English Out of Your Japanese Puns!
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By translator and writer Jamie Graves (Saitama-Ken 2002-2003)
The Japanese language is notorious for having a relatively small number of phonemes compared to other major world languages, which can be a hindrance when having to learn new sounds outside that structure (the infamous “L” and “R” distinction), but results in a tremendous number of homonyms. While there are slight changes in emphasis between the words for “hair”, “god” and “paper”, they are all kami. I think we can safely assume that the Japanese have been making linguistic tricks like this into bad puns for centuries, if not millennia.
When the Chinese writing system first crash landed onto the Japanese language around fifteen-hundred years ago no one could have predicted the historical fallout: an explosion of bad puns. As Chinese characters were gradually adapted to Japanese, all of the tones that had previously distinguished words like“mǎ” (“horse”, 馬) from “má” (“hemp” 麻) were flattened out. In a language already rife with nearly identical words, this produced a new explosion of homonyms, the building blocks of puns. (The Chinese also use these for puns. In an effort to mess with government censors the phrase 草泥马, “grass-mud-horse” has gone viral on the Chinese blogosphere because the same sounds with different tones mean… something not really printable here. ( This page explains the whole phenomenon.)
Case in point, the furious Japanese tongue twister “Uraniwa niwa niwa, niwa niwa niwa, niwatori ari”. (裏庭には二羽、庭には二羽、鶏あり). Niwa in Read More
Tokyo As Seen Through the Eyes of Foreigners (film review)
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By Rick Ambrosio (Ibaraki-ken, 2006-08) and Stacy Smith (Kumamoto-ken, 2000-03)
Sunshine Cinema is now showing the movie Tokyo!, a compilation of three short films from the French directors Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and Leos Carax (Lovers on the Bridge) and the Korean director Bong Joon-Ho (The Host). Gondry himself made an appearance at two showings of the film when it debuted last weekend, for a Q&A session after the 7:30 show and introducing the movie at the 10:30 show. He spoke in his typically quirky way about his time shooting in Tokyo, and how things like the spaces between buildings and how Japanese people falling asleep on each other on the train fascinated him. Before starting the show, he expressed relief that his Japanese producers weren’t there so he wouldn’t feel bad about forgetting to thank them.
Tokyo! kicks off with his contribution of “Interior Design,” a Kafkaesque story about trying to find your place in the world. The story revolves around a young couple that Read More
James Kennedy “Librarian” essay sets blogosphere atwitter
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Following James Kennedy’s (Nara-ken, 2004-06) recent post of his essay describing the heretofore unpublicized lifestyles and rituals of librarians (a “cult” of which Kennedy’s own wife is admittedly a member) in connection with the American Library Association’s awarding of the “Best Book for Young Adults” to Neil Gaman, author of Coraline, rather than Kennedy’s The Order of Odd-Fish, the blogosphere was atwitter with commentary about Kennedy, who will be appearing in NYC March 22 for the JET Alumni Author Showcase along with Roland Kelts (Osaka-shi, 1998-99) and Robert P. Weston (Nara-ken, 2002-04)).
The Handless Poet’s Maria Alexander said:
I’m buying James Kennedy’s book, The Order of Odd-Fish. I’m buying it entirely because of this blog post. James Kennedy could quite possibly be the funniest man in America. http://www.thehandlesspoet.com/blogger/2009/03/james-kennedy-is-all-growed-up.html
School Library Journal’s Elizabeth Bird wrote:
Bad news for my husband. I have just fallen head-over-heels in love with James Kennedy, author of the YA novel The Order of Odd-Fish. Ladies and gentlemen of the liking men variety, I advise you to be very careful in reading this blog post of his which tells (in a fashion) of his experience with the last ALA Media Awards. He had me at “conniving sidelong lope” and now I feel compelled to read every damn word the fellow has ever written, starting from the early scribbles he scrawled out as a toothless mewling babe. Ba-bump goes my little heart. I also feel inclined to give him a bad review with the sole intention of hoping that he will write about me and do complicated things with my name. As I read through it I almost want to dedicate this entire post solely in the purpose of getting you to read this blog. Go. Now. Read. This. Man. I, for my part, am off to read his book. Even if it is YA. http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/blog/1790000379/post/1130041713.html?nid=3713
Jobs: English Teaching in Japan and Korea – Aclipse
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Aclipse is seeking English teachers for Japan and Korea. More info below. To apply go to: http://www.aclipse.net/apply_now.html
