The World in English 我的英语

I've just finish reading Levy Hideo's essay "The World in Japanese 我的日本語."

Levy Hideo is a non-Japanese author who writes novels in Japanese.

He used to be a professor of Japanese literature in Princeton and Stanford University, and he was trying to translate "Manyou-shu (万葉集)", which was a collection of Japanese old poems written in the eighth century, into English.

At that time the scholars of Japan, Japanologists, mainly translated Japanese literature into English or wrote critics about Japan in English in order to introduce Japan to English readers. Edward Seidensticker and Donald Keene are two of the most typical "Japanologists".

But Levy Hideo wanted to write in Japanese. He retired from his job in the U.S. and moved to Japan. He became a pioneer of non-Japanese authors writing novels in Japanese. I wrote the entry "Multilingualism and Literature" about the foreign authors in Japanese literature.

I'm a native Japanese speaker and I've learned English in school. It takes much more time to write in English than in Japanese and I make a lot of mistakes when I write and speak in English.

But I've been keeping this weblog in English for sixteen months. I'm always thinking about the reason why I'm writing in English.

I myself am not sure about the reason, but I guess that there are two reasons.

I'm interested in Western cultures and societies and I've written about them on my Japanese weblog. But I want Western readers to read them more, because I write about them from the non-Western standpoint, for example the entry "The Myth of "Democracy": "the State of Nature" and "the Social Contract"".

On the other hand, I also write about Japan in English. When I write in English, I can think about Japan critically and rationally, for example the entry "Is Japan Really a Democratic Country?"

Now Levy Hideo write novels about modern China in Japanese and he's got his own unique standpoint. I've also got my own perspective to write in English.

"这是我的英语"

Writing Is Thinking

The date of my first entry in my weblog is February 6 1997. At that time there was no blog service and even the word "blog". I wrote html by a text editor and uploaded to a rental server through a FTP client by myself. But what I had done was just "blogging".

I may be the biggest fan of my blog. I often read the entries on my weblog, and I'm always surprised, "Ah, this is exactly what I think!" Of course I'm happy, when I find that accesses to my weblog increase, but I guess that I basically write my blog to myself.

The main reason why I keep writing my blog for fifteen years is to think of something new. When I come across some issue that I want to understand, I'll write a new entry.

At first I've not understood about the issue, but I began to write what come into my head. At that time I myself didn't know the conclusion of the entry. While writing, I was getting to understand what I want to write. I read the draft of the entry and rewrite it, and then I become to understand about the issue more clearly. The process of writing the entry is just thinking of the issue.

Socrates didn't think that writing was important. He hadn't written any book. If Plato hadn't written the dialogues by Socrates, we couldn't know about Socrrates' philosophy. He thought that discussing was thinking.

I think that discussing is as important as writing. Especially criticism makes my thought deeper. Two different thoughts crush dialectically into new thought.

We think that we get a new conclusion through some discussion, but often times the conclusion isn't clear and we forget it sooner than we imagine. So I write about it, and I find how imperfect the conclusion is and make it clear.

I forgot what I wrote on my blog by myself, and then I read it to find what I thought.

A "Mecca" of American Democracy

Last summer I made a trip to Washington D.C.

There is a narrow plaza called the Mall in Washington D.C. At one end of the Mall, the U.S. Capitol stands on Capitol Hill, and at the other end is the Lincoln Memorial. Between them the Washington Monument towers up.

I took a visitor tour of Capital Hill and walked down to Lincoln Memorial through the Mall. In the Lincoln Memorial the statue of Lincoln stands saintlike watching over the U.S. Capitol. When I saw it, I realized that for American the people the Mall was a holy place, which I could call a "Mecca" of American democracy.

In the entry "The Myth of "Democracy": "the State of Nature" and "the Social Contract" " I pointed out that "American democracy" appeared very religious to me. At the inauguration of the president of U.S.A., they swear an oath by putting their hands on the Bible. What will happen, I wonder, when a "pagan" like me becomes the president of U.S.A.? Will they too be forced to put their hands on the Bible, aren't they? (Of course American people don't imagine that their president will ever be a jew or a Muslim.)

On the contrary French democracy is far worldlier than American democracy. Many French couples don't choose religious marriage but worldly PACS. Christianity in France is the part of the old regime defeated by the French Revolution. On the other hand Pilgrim Fathers sought another Land of Canaan in the new world.

I watched a movie at the beginning of the visitor tour of Capitol Hill. As a foreign tourist it seemed to be a propaganda movie, which indoctrinated visitors to "American Democracy".

I don't speak against "American Democracy". Moreover I love it. But it isn't universal but somehow strange for me as a foreigner. (At the same time Japanese political system might be quite strange for American people.)

If you are interested in Japanese political system, you will read this entry, "Is Japan Really a Democratic Country?"

Paperless Environment

At home I use iMac with a wireless keyboard and mouse. There is no cable coiled up like a snake on my desk and I'm satisfied with the simplicity of iMac.

At the office I use ThinkPad. My company gives us three choices of PC, a ThinkPad notebook, a ThinkPad laptop and a Lenovo's desktop PC. I chose a ThinkPad notebook with a high capacity battery.

I always bring it in the office. I stopped printing out documents and I read them on its display at the meetings.

I write a minute of the meeting while we are making a discussion and I send the minute by e-mail just when the meeting ends. Before I began to use my ThinkPad, I wrote the draft of a minute on my "notebook" by my hand, and then I typed it by PC on my desk and sent it by e-mail. Now I can save my time.

I like the feeling of the keyboard and the pointing stick of ThinkPad, but it's too small for me to use it on my desk. When I'm back to my desk, I connected a display, a mouse, and a keyboard to my ThinkPad.

It's very convenient to use two displays. I open a browser on one display and write by MS-Word on another display with reading references on the browser. Before I began to use two displays, I printed out the references and I wrote with reading the paper.

Now I'm considering that I should buy another display at home.

Hip Hop DJs Went back to the Origin of the Music

I listened to pop music most in the 1980s, when I was a student. I don't like pop music in the 80s that much, because I feel that it's too commercial, so I mainly listened to the 70s music.

I don't really like pop music after the 90s, because I can't understand how to enjoy Hip Hop music. I guess that there are many people over 40 years old who can't enjoy Hip Hop.

When I listen to pop music, I wait for the climax of the song. For example, when I listen to the song "Let It Be", I'm waiting for the part of the follows.

Let it be, let it be.
Let it be, let it be.
Yeah, There will be an answer, let it be.

After I listening to the climax and guitar solo, I can be satisfied with a song like "Let It Be".

But Hip Hop songs have no climax. This is an old school Hip Hop song, "Freestyle" by Grandmaster Flash and Furious Five.



There is no climax, harmony, start or end, but just beats and lyrics.

The origins of contemporary pop music are blues and Western classical music. Both of them are very structured.

Blues has the routine code progression and sometimes all blues songs sound like the same one song.



Bach's works were constructed precisely and its structure made his works beautiful.



Hip Hop deconstructed contemporary pop music. In the 80s Hip Hop DJs held parties "literary" on the street. They found that audiences got moving more when they played the bridges of songs than the climax of songs. So they began to play only the bridges of songs.

This is one of the contemporary Hip Hop songs, "Otis" by Jay Z and Kanye West. They broke down Otis Redding's voice and repeated his shout again and again.



But music without the structure isn't an invention by Hip Hop musicians.

For example, James Brown had already broken down his songs and shouted the same phrase again and again.



Most native music doesn't have structure.



I guess that the native music that was played at the ritual didn't have a start and end, and people were playing the music through the ritual.

The early Hip Hop DJs held their parties like these kind of rituals and went back to the origin of the music.

Running Away from Vietnam

I've written about TED on this weblog twice.

"A Baby Starts Learning Language From When They Are In Their Mother's Womb"
"There Are No Mistakes on the Bandstand"

I've listened to a new interesting lecture on TED, Tan Lee's "My Immigration Story".


She ran away from Vietnam to Australia on a small boat with her grandmother and mother.

I was really moved by the story about her grandmother's death.

She said that her grandmother was born under a Confucianism society and became a second wife.

At that time Vietnam was a French colony. And then the Japanese army invaded Vietnam. After World War II the French army came back and the Vietnam people fought against them. Vietnam was divided into North Vietnam, which was a communist country, and South Vietnam, which was a despotic country. The US armed forces made a cruel war against Viet Cong.

At the end she ran away from the Vietnam Communist party and died in Australia. The history of modernization in Asia is full of hardship, which her life symbolized.

Tan Lee said the following.

I was taking a shower in a hotel room in Sydney the moment she died 600 miles away in Melbourne. I looked through the shower screen and saw her standing on the other side. I knew she had come to say goodbye. My mother phoned minutes later. A few days later, we went to a Buddhist temple in Footscray and sat around her casket. We told her stories and assured her that we were still with her. At midnight the monk came and told us he had to close the casket. My mother asked us to feel her hand. She asked the monk, "Why is it that her hand is so warm and the rest of her is so cold?" "Because you have been holding it since this morning," he said. "You have not let it go."

"Her hand is so warm." I won't forget that phrase.

I wrote about a Vietnam refugee in Japan on the entry "Moving Children".

Please read about MC NAM's story and hear his rap "My Song".

The End of Cold War; Berlin and Prague in the early spring of 1990

As I wrote in the entry ""断捨離 (dan sha ri)" Cutting Away, Throwing Away, and Getting Away", I'm cleaning up my home now, and I've found many interesting things.

One of them is an old video tape, which record my trip to Eastern Europe in the early spring of 1990. Now I don't have a video player, so I brought it to a camera shop and made it be converted into an mp4 file.

When I heard the news of the collapse of the Berlin Wall on November 1989, I thought that I should go and see it.

As I mentioned in the entry "Writing with a Pen or Typing with a Keyboard", I usually don't bring a camera on my trip, but on this trip I brought a video camera, because I wanted to record the history by myself.

This is the Berlin Wall on March 1990. I have a piece of the Berlin Wall.


At that time, there exited East Germany and East Berlin, although the citizen of East Germany already were allowed to visit West Germany freely.

I got into East Berlin through the check point Charlie, which was managed by U.S. army. I went to Berlin tower at Alexanderplatz, which was a typical building in a socialist country.

When I took a night train to Prague, I argued when Germany would reunite with passengers in the train, and our conclusion was around five years after. But in fact they reunited on October 1990.

The Velvet revolution brought down communist regime on November 1989 in Czechoslovakia.


The president of Czechoslovakia (, at that time Czech and Slovakia hadn't separated yet) was Václav Havel, and there were many posters of Tomáš Masaryk on the streets, who was the first president of Czechoslovakia.

The Velvet revolution was almost peaceful, but there were some victims. People gathered to Václavské plaza and commemorated the victims of the revolution.

Time has flown so quickly. What did Agota Kristof think of it? ("L'analphabète (The Illiterate)" )