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Happy Holidays to everyone!
I hope you’ll have a nice time, regardless of your plans.

My plans involve visiting a friend over the weekend, enjoying the Japanese version of the holidays (remember that Christmas is not celebrated here). I’m looking forward to it and I will post again next Monday.

Sorry guys, no big post here today. I had an appointment in Osaka and came home dead tired and with a headache… Now that I have finished all my emails, I’m off to bed. It’s getting colder too this week – I have seen some days reaching the zero degrees – but I still have a few blankets to throw on the bed if need be. Good night!

I have stumbled across a brand new study that examined the average English proficiency of adults in more than 60 countries that are not English native speaking (obviously).

There are five levels, ranging from very high – high – moderate – low – to very low proficiency. As was to be expected, Europe takes the cake, the seven countries that have very high proficiency in English are all European ones, starting with Denmark, The Netherlands and the other Scandinavian states on top, followed by a quite surprising Poland – and, on the seventh spot: Austria!

This surprised me quite a lot to be honest, I always had the impression that the average Austrian’s English-speaking capability was not that good at all. Although, I have to admit that several people who have travelled to Austria – even to the more rural spots – have assured me they got by fine without knowing any German. Maybe things have changed since I left?

Similarly surprising was the ranking of Japan on place 26 with moderate proficiency. I also thought that this was a bit overenthusiastic, but I have to admit that many Japanese understand English very well, and their grammar is excellent – they just don’t speak English. Interestingly the study states that not much had changed in Japan in the last seven years, when the first such study was conducted.

Of course, these kind of studies always have to be taken with a grain of salt. With this one, you need lots of grains: Nowhere on the site that I linked to above does it say how “proficiency” is measured, and what it takes to have a very high or very low one. Also they said they only tested adults (over 19 years of age) who had internet access (which accounts for a complete lack of central and south African countries) and who were somehow interested in learning (more) English already.

Anyway, it’s fun to check out this page (click on the spotlights to see each country’s individual score) and there is even a way to participate in the test – which takes only 50 minutes… Maybe the right thing to do on a slow weekend?

People are leaving Japan all around me.

When I woke up today and went downstairs, I noticed the open door opposite of my room. This was the room of the most long-term resident of Ebisu’s who had apparently left early in the morning without me noticing. Never before have I seen it open, it felt strange. Never before had I seen his room, so I went and had a peek. It was odd, seeing it so empty, so devoid of everything he had been. Just a pile of futons and sheets in one corner, a table in another, the tatami tattered at places. Curtains and windows were open just as the door, not much left that could be traced to him personally, only these hanging on a nail: He had lived at Ebisu’s for more than five years, he was here all the time I had been here, and now he returned to Europe. He knew so much about Kyoto and Japan, showed me the ropes in my first weeks, told me where to get what,… Whenever I had a problem he would be there to solve it – except my personal problems with spiders and cockroaches, I needed to do that by myself. I am not sure whether I’d call him simply a housemate or a friend – I’m very picky with this title though – but I liked him a lot and we had nice and deep conversations about all sorts of stuff. This is why it is odd to say: I miss him already, but it is true, besides that, Ebisu’s feels different now with that one corner room empty… I’m sorry I was too late and could not say goodbye in person – have a great time back home, I’ll see you when you’re returning to Kyoto, soon, hopefully!

Other people are moving too. My friends from Kobe, whom I visited just two weekends ago, returned to Austria today. Thanks for all the books guys, take care!

Tomorrow another one of my housemates will leave. She was only here for three months, but she was really nice to be with. Today we went to a really nice sushi restaurant, her first and last time to have decent sushi in Japan. We both enjoyed it greatly and I hope she’ll be back some day for more. Thanks for your biscuit cake recipe!

Barack Obama has visited Japan for a couple of days, and, nothing much has happened. In truly political fashion, hands were shaken and bows made, places were visited and banquets held, and press conferences were given. In between, allegedly, there was even time for serious business talks, but, as I said, nothing much happened.

The trade treaty between Japan and the US is still at a standstill (I’m rather glad about this as I am not eager to eat American crap); the US has confirmed that they will still come to Japan’s aid should they be attacked by anyone (meaning: China, in case they stop their verbal threats and start doing something more serious about a couple of islands nobody except a handful of politicians really care about); and I’m sure some things were carefully kept under the rug they have been swept and not mentioned at all (Fukushima, Yasukuni…)

So, nothing much happened. Obama has today moved on to Korea and is probably already busy repeating the Japanese experience there. Nothing much happening nowhere where politicians are involved…

My Japanese is moving slowly but steadily forward. I am trying to speak a bit more and keep learning Kanji – it is indeed true, after a while, not all of them look the same anymore.

What keeps tripping me up are the Katakana though. There are no rules as to how to turn a foreign word into Katakana, and unless a word is very common, I guess different people will come up with a different katakanisation of a word, especially when it comes to names. Some words are written according to how they are pronounced, others are written according to how they a written originally, and others still are changed completely. My favourite example of the latter is the French word for cream puff “choux á la creme” which ends up as ” シュークリーム – shoo kureemu” in Japanese… To be fair, writing French with Katakana is all but impossible…

It does not help in the least that Japanese love to abbreviate words, to shorten long Kanji compounds and often, to simply make up new words this way. This is relatively easy when the word can be written with Kanji, for example Kyoto University is written “京都大学 – Kyoto Daigaku” and the abbreviation takes the first and third Kanji to create “Kyodai”. Foreign loanwords on the other hand are a completely different animal… The German word “Arbeit” is directly turned into Katakana “アルバイト”, its meaning changes from “work” to “part time job”, but the Japanese, not content leaving it there, often shorten it further to “バイト – baito”. Similarly shortened are “パソコン – pasocon” for personal computer, “コンビニ – konbini” for convenience store, or “ノンアル – nonaru” for non-alcoholic.

So far, the most interesting combination of Kanji, Katakana, and an undecipherable abbreviation I found on a box of tissues, where the Kanji means nose:

“鼻セレブ – nose serubu”

Nose – self? Nose – sarp? Nose…?? After a long – very long indeed – trial period I finally caved in, admitted defeat and asked for help. It turned out that the Katakana stand for the abbreviation of an English word, and mean celeb(rity), and “Nose – celeb” is an advertisement for especially soft tissues… Well, at least I know now why learning Japanese goes ever so slowly…

Yesterday was the third anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami, and of the resulting Fukushima nuclear disaster. At 2:46 pm, people all over Japan held a minute’s silence to commemorate the almost 16.000 dead and the more than 2600 people still missing. That doesn’t sound much, does it? What about 270.000? That’s the number of people who still – three years after – could not return home and live in shelters, often just simple container villages. Some of them will be able to eventually go home, once the reconstruction in the devastated areas – a total of about 560 square kilometers of land near the coast were flooded, and more than 1.1 million buildings were damaged – will be complete. Others will have to wait longer, at least three more years or, more likely, forever: Those who are from what is euphemistically called in Japan a “difficult to return zone”, meaning those areas that are contaminated by nuclear fallout of the Fukushima plant.

So, what has happened in the last three years? Well, all of the 48 nuclear power plants have been shut down after the tragedy and are still offline, but the plans of the former government for an energetic turn to renewable energy sources were shelved with the election of Shinzo Abe as prime minister. Although the standards for nuclear power plants have been tightened, and not all of them will go back online because of that, more and more people start to openly oppose nuclear power in Japan.

Dissatisfaction also rises within the survivors of the catastrophe. Many of them believe that the memories of that day are beginning to fade, and that the Olympics that were awarded Japan for 2020 will only take away attention from the areas that are still in need of being rebuilt. They also believe that the reconstruction in the devastated areas goes too slowly, and there are fears that the constructions necessary for the Olympics will further hamper the ones in the affected areas.

Interestingly, Shinzo Abe has promised to speed up building a highway through the destroyed area – in order to increase tourism there. Part of the highway will run through areas that are at the moment still heavily contaminated, and although decontamination is in progress (it is unclear what is happening with the removed soil though…) – would you go to Fukushima as a tourist?

I’m back!

I had four wonderful weeks in Europe, visiting numerous friends in Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands. My friends took me shopping – I desperately needed winter clothes and shoes and a new watch – we spent a huge amount of time eating, drinking, and chatting – the longest session took until 4:30 in the morning, accompanied by three bottles of prosecco – I got to know their kids – who quite surprisingly seemed to like me; I’m not good with kids at all – and we went out, for lunch and breakfast, to the movies, the library in Wolfenbuettel, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam… The highlights: Two birthday cakes, and, in Gmunden, the museum for ceramics. Sanitary ceramics, that is. Mostly toilets, to be precise. I loved it! In those four weeks I got showered with sweets and attention – it was wonderful – thanks to all of you!

Well, I’m back in Japan, five kilos heavier than before. I missed the biggest snowfall of the last 50 years or so (which does annoy me quite a bit) but at least I now have decent clothes to withstand the cold – and it feels especially freezing now after the central heating all over the place in Europe. Unfortunately I have caught a cold a few days before my departure, so the flight was less than pleasant, but by now it has almost passed. I will wait to see my Japanese until I have fully recovered though.

As for my future plans, well… I’ll tell you on Friday.

Nice to be back!