Endless Urination

I had a dream last night.

In it I was wandering around a huge and modern building with bare concrete wall somewhere in an Arabian country.

This building was owned by a government or a state-owned oil company. I was inspecting this organization with my colleague.

I felt hostility from the organization. Although we were allowed to do anything without a person of the organization, I thought that they must be monitoring everything we did. I looked for monitoring cameras, but I couldn't find them.

We came across a big shutter, and I knew that we had to get through it. And then the shutter opened automatically, so I was sure that someone was monitoring us and opened the shutter.

Beyond the shutter was a huge empty space. At the center of the space was a winding staircase. We went down into an underground space.

We heard a cold voice, "You have fifteen minutes to go before you must leave this building." I thought that we would be killed without escaping from the building in fifteen minutes.

Suddenly, I had an acute urge to urinate. I thought that I couldn't escape until I had urinated. I found a restroom at the end of the winding staircase, and ran into it.

I really felt relieved when I started to urinate. But the urination appeared to never end. Time was passing by. Although I felt upset, I couldn't stop this endless urination. My colleague shouted something outside of the restroom.

I thought that I didn't want to be killed while I was urinating.

How to Be "Uncool-Cool"

I'm just an ordinary "salary man" living and working in Tokyo, Japan, and just turned forty-five years old. I look typical middle-aged East Asian man. How can a man like me be cool? It's difficult for me to be conventionally cool, so my target is to be "uncool-cool".

When I watched Far East Movement's video "Live My Life", I realized how I could be "uncool-cool". "I'm gonna live my life. I know that we're gonna be alright!"



They thought East Asian people would be cool if they played hip-hop music, but then they realized their own style. There are many Japanese hip-hop musicians, who mimic black hip-hop music and fashion, but they are actually uncool, because hip-hop fashion doesn't suit them at all.

Kev Nish, a member of Far East Movement, shaves the side of his head and parts his hair on the side, wears hip-hop fashion. The combination of his hairstyle and his fashion is weird and uncool but at the same time cool. He is both uncool and cool. In other words, he's "uncool-cool."

Far East Movement reminds me of YMO, which was a Japanese techno-pop band in the1980s. They also did a sort of self-parody of Orientalism.



I found another example. Please watch this video, Psy's "Gangnam Style."



He is a fat middle-aged man, who dances a funny dance as hard as he can. He is far from coolness, but I can't stop watching him, because he is uncool-cool. Obviously, his video was influenced by Far East Movement.

Sometimes we tend to mimic people, who we think are cool, but this is just the way to be  uncool. It's important to realize what we are and to seek our own way to be cool. I think that my way to be cool is to be uncool-cool.

But I don't know why Far East Movement and Psy aren't popular in Japan. Don't you think that they are uncool-cool?

P.S.
I watched many parodies of "Gangnam Style" on Youtube, and my favorite video is this. I felt the same sprit of Psy, laughing about oneself, from it.

Swim in the Ocean

I wrote 231 entries in the past three years, and my language exchange partners on Lang-8 corrected my entries, but yet I can't write any entry without a mistake.

I learned English grammar in school, and to some extent I understand it, but to read a book about swimming and to swim in the ocean actually are much different.

Elements, which we don't have in Japanese language, are especially difficult for me, for example, the usages of "a" and "the" or singular and plural, the pronunciations "r" and "l".

Of course I know that I should add "s" to a noun, when the number of it is more than 2. But sometimes I encounter the case that I can't distinguish if a noun is singular or plural.

I wrote, "I can't write any entry without a mistake."

I have found both of the expressions, "any one" and "any ones," so I wonder which is correct between "any entry" or "any entries." And at the end of this sentence should I write "without a mistake" or "without mistakes" or "without any mistake" or "without any mistakes?"

Although I also know the anatomically positions of tongue in a cavity of mouth at the pronunciations of "r" and "l", I can't pronounce and distinguish "r" and "l," and I often make a typo of "r" and "l."

On Lang-8 one of my friends made a correction about the usage "a" and "the", but another friend wrote that my sentence was right. And then they stared a long discussion about definite article and indefinite article.

When I read this discussion, I was a little relieved because I realized that sometimes it was difficult even for a native speaker to swim actually in the ocean.

Why do the Evils Only Do Evil Things?

I have a question as to why the evils only do evil things in hero movies.

I'm somehow virtuous and evil at the same time. Usually I want to be virtuous, but sometimes I also want to be evil. I can't always keep being virtuous or evil.

I guess that it's easier to be a hero than an evil, because being evil seems to be more stressful than being heroic. Generally it's more possible to be accepted by people around you, when you are virtuous. If you wanted to be evil, you should expect that you would be kept out of your society.

Of course sometimes you could be alone, because you are virtuous, and you could get company, because you are evil. But it's quite tough to keep being only evil.

Primarily, I couldn't be sure what is virtuous or evil. Why do the evils in hero movies look so confident with their evilness? How do they believe in their evilness?

I wrote about heroes and evils in my entry "American Heroes after September 11."

I am interested in the raison d'etre of heroes. If there were no evil in this world, we wouldn't need any heroes. Batman's raison d'etre is Joker. If Joker is gone, Batman also should be gone. Joker will never kill Batman and Batman will never kill Joker. Justice and evil are two sides of the same coin.

I think that heroes and evils, and justice and evil are interdependent with each other. Heroes couldn't be heroes without evils, because they can't believe that they always are virtuous without evils. If heroes want to always to keep being virtuous, evils also must always keep being evil. So "Joker will never kill Batman and Batman will never kill Joker."

I wrote about the conflict between China and Japan about the Senkaku islands in the previous entry "We Should Be Clever Enough Not to Be Controlled by Our Governments But to Control Our Own Governments."

For Chinese people, who go to the demonstration against Japan, Japan is evil, and their claim that Japan is evil makes them confident that they are virtuously stronger. It's true that the Japanese army in World War II did many evil things, but Japanese people including the Japanese army can't always keep being evil. Chinese government wants to make themselves Batman and Japan Joker, but we actually are not as evil as Joker.

In World War II the governments of U.S.A and Japan made horrible propaganda campaigns, which claimed that their enemies were so evil. And this propaganda made the U.S. army and Japanese army crueler, because they thought they could do anything cruel against such evil enemies. If you were interested in their propaganda, I recommend you to read John Dower's book "War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War."

After World War II countries around Japan have been insisting that Japan is evil, and we ourselves think that we are evil to some extent. So we feel guilty about our patriotism. But we are tired of playing as Joker for 60 years.

Osama bin Laden might think of himself as a hero and of George Bush Jr. as an evil. Osama bin Laden needed George Bush Jr. and George Bush Jr. needed Osama bin Laden. The desire of George Bush Jr. becoming a hero made Osama bin Laden more evil for him.

The movie "the Dark Knight" asked about the relation between justice and evil. I think that it's sound to have suspicion about this problem, because that helps us avoid us being like Osama bin Laden or George Bush Jr.

I'm afraid that Japan will become really evil, if Chinese government keeps claiming that Japan is evil.

We Should Be Clever Enough Not to Be Controlled by Our Governments But to Control Our Own Governments

Now the conflict between China and Japan about the Senkaku or the Diaoyu islands is escalating.

I basically think that the assertion of Japanese government is more logical and rational than one of Chinese government, but at the same time I also realize that territorial issues can't be solved by logic but power. It's much better for this kind of issues to be unsolved than to be solved by power, especially military forces.

Before the outbreak of Falklands War almost no one thought that U.K. and Argentina would really make war. We, both of Chinese and Japanese, MUST learn a lesson from Falklands War.

There are a lot of similarities between Falklands War and the conflict about the Senkaku islands. At that time U.K. fell into a long recession, so called "English disease", and Argentina was dominated by the autocratic regime. Both of the British and Argentine people were quite frustrated with their governments.

In the article "Beijing Mixes Messages Over Anti-Japan Protests" September 16, 2012 the New York Times pointed out, as follows.

The political analyst Li Weidong said the official tolerance fit a longstanding pattern of behavior in which the Chinese government uses mass protests to further its foreign policy goals. In a text message sent to friends and associates, Mr. Li compared the current protesters to the Boxers, a quasi-religious group that was used by the Qing dynasty to oppose foreign incursions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

"Beijing dares not to fight, but it’s unable to talk it over either," Mr. Li wrote. "So it has to employ Boxers, using product boycott to press Japan."

I don't completely agree with this article, but it is a usual practice of any government, not just Chinese government, to distract public attention from the frustration to the government by using foreign affairs. But sometimes the government loses control of their people. In fact Argentina government was forced to send its army to Falkland Islands.

At this time almost no one thinks that China and Japan will really fight each other about the Senkaku islands, but I'm afraid that it's possible.

We should be clever enough not to be controlled by our governments but to control our own governments.