Fishing the Seto Inland Sea

I spent my evening gutting the fish that have been in my freezer for a month.

The pink-and-green wrasse is marinating in soysauce and vinegar in my fridge for the night, while the long scary tachiuo (sablefish) is in my belly. There's something exhilarating about catching your food in the wilderness, prepping it with your own knife, and boiling it on your own stove, with your own sake and soysauce and sugar. The rice I ate the fish over was a gift from my 6th graders at Kawamo, planted and harvested from their own paddy behind the school. The tomatos and cucumbers I made a salad out of were a goodbye gift from the second grade teacher at Mitani. A whole local meal, caught or picked by me or my friends, in Yakage or the Seto Inland Sea.

I caught these fish back in early June, when I went out on the Inland Sea from Kasaoka harbor. I was invited by my friend Morikawa-san, the fisherman-librarian from Okayama Public Library who took me fishing for octopus last fall, and his young friend Nakayama-san, to spend the Saturday afternoon fishing on Nakayama's boat. Morikawa-san met Nakayama at a fishing shop where they both buy bait, when the owner introduced them as guys he thought would get along. Ever since, Nakayama's been offering to take out "Morikawa-sensei" (he used to be a middle school teacher) with Nakayama's two young boys, Umi 海　and Kouga 海旅. The kids names mean "Ocean" and "Sea Voyage."





We ended up catching some twenty fish, all species I'd never caught before. I was most excited to catch a bright green-and-pink fish that I recognized as a wrasse, the tropical fish I'd seen once snorkeling with Danny's family in Hawaii; I looked it up on my Wordtank and sure enough, it was a べら "bera". We also caught these freaky long thrashy fish called tachiuo ("sablefish" in french; scabbardfish in English) that are really common in Japanese supermarkets, and a translucent silver fish called "kissu". The guys gave me a bag full to take home with me, but my sister was coming to visit hte next week, so I put them in my freezer and didn't touch them again until tonight, a month later, when I've finished teaching and I've got a solitary weekend in Yakage by myself. The fish were beautiful to catch, fun to dissect, and tasty to eat.

I hope the next fish I catch come from the James River.

My Workplace

Summer vacation begins next week, and with it, the end of my teaching. These are photos from this week's lessons, my last at all four schools in Yakage.

Me with the Oda second graders and the origami they taught me on our last day together.


My lunch tray from the last day at Nakagawa, with my new Ryoma fan.

Kenshin the "evil daimyo", me and my samurai, with the Ryoma fan I bought in Nagasaki.

Me and a second grader at Nakagawa, handing me her class' photo and goodbye letters.

Yui-chan at kyushoku, school lunch, in her second grade classroom at Mitani.
Me with the faculty at Mitani Shogakko as I was leaving on my last day.

Me and the Kawamo 5th graders playing "Taylor Tiger" (They're meat, I'm the tiger).

My desk in the faculty room on a typical day; the manga is about Ryoma, from the school library; the characters I made for a review board game we played this week, based on our English class pals Toru-chan the Koala, Spiderman, Cow-chan, and Mario.


The third grade at Oda Shougakko after our clothing lesson, with Mario characters.


Me with Ryoma

Ishida-sensei's 4th grade class after our last lesson. Ishida, a 25 year old drummer who graduated from a music academy and studied in Germany, is the best teacher I've taught with, and we've taught together, three separate classes at two schools, for two years. I really look up to him, and I've learned a ton from him about persuasion-- how to appeal to children, get them to look up to you and channel their energies into what you want them to learn. Ishida is wildly enthusiastic about English, and has always helped me. His is the one class where, these last few months, I told the kids I hit my head in a bicycle accident and forgot all my Japanese, and from that point on conducted the whole class in English, with him occassionally translating what I said, and helping me to mime things.

If the kids look a little mopey, it's because all of us-- this entire class of 4th graders, Ishida and me included, just finished crying our eyes out. It was the most emotionally intense moment, my last day in Ishida's class. Every single one of the home-room teachers I teach with had their kids (400 of them total) write me a personal thank-you note, some with photos attached, or drawings or pop-up picture books the children made for me. But Ishida also had his kids decorate the entire class for me-- drawing pictures of me and notes to me on the blackboard in colored chalk, putting their drawings of me up on the wall-- and then he had the kids sing a song to me, called "O-wasure" (Parting), about how they'd never forget me, and then stand in a line and read to me, one by one, their personal letters to me in Japanese. Ex: "Te-i-ra sensei, I did not like English before you came. But every week when I saw your smile, I wanted to do my best, and now I can talk to foreigners. Now that I will not see you again, I am very sad. When you go back to America, please remember us. I will never forget you." One or two kids got through reading their notes to me before the tears started. About the third kid got choked up on his second sentence, and from that point forward, I had to hold the hand or pat the back of almost every kid to help him get through, telling him that it was ok, I was only moving to Kyoto, I'd be back. When the kids finally finished reading their sweet notes, my eyes were a little wet. But then I looked over at Ishida-sensei, who was about to give his own goodbye speech to me, and saw that he was sobbing, his face streaked with tears. I couldn't watch this role model of mine, dabbing at his eyes with his rolled up sweatshirt as he tried to get through telling me how much it had meant to him to work with me these two years, more than a second before I was crying too. The speech ended with me and Ishida throwing our arms around each other to a crowd of howling, weeping 10 year olds.

Needless to say, it was dramatic. Afterwards we calmed the children, and ourselves, down by getting them to sing one of our favorite English songs, the Rainbow song, while pointing to colors in the classroom ("red and yellow and green and blue, purple and orange and pink. I can see a rainbow, see a rainbow, see a rainbow now"). Then I asked them to pose for this last class photo.

Rice Planting at Kawamo

The fifth graders gave me a bag of homegrown rice today as a thank-you present for my year and a half of teaching.

The rice is planted in June on a 田圃 (tanbo, rice field) behind the school, at the time when the paddies are wet and lake-like, reflecting all of Yakage.


It's harvested in late October or early November, when the wet world behind my house goes from lush and green with red dragonflies buzzing above the rice shoots, to brown and desolate for winter.




A bag of rice is saved for each teacher, as a school year present at winter's end, late March, as the plum flowers are in bloom, just before the sakura cherry blossoms. Everyone eats sakura-mochi at graduation ceremonies, rice cakes wrapped in cherry leaf to celebrate the sakura's bringing spring, and the start of a fresh school year.

One of my students, Daiki Ikeda, wrote a note to me on the bag in Japanese.
"Dear Taylor sensei, who always cheerfully give us enjoyable times. This rice was planted by us. Please make delicious rice meals out of it. My favorite rice meal is curry rice. Next year, we will become upper classmen. As upper classmen (来年度、rainendo, 6th graders) we will try our best to spread cheerful greetings around the school. This year too, let's do our best."

Brain-map.org

I read an article this week that shows how my Dad's world of manufacturing, mine of brain imaging, and computer science Google style are teaming up on neuroscience lately.

The Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle was started by Paul Allen, co-founded of Microsoft and the 44th richest person on earth, in 2002. The project's goal is to map gene expression for the entire human brain. Where in the brain are each of some 22,000 genes expressed? Gene expression is being visualized by a lab-bio method called "in situ hybridization"-- dripping onto slices of brain RNAs that will bind to corresponding base-pairs of DNA, then dyes that bind to the RNAs and stain them purple, "the color of spilled wine", with the shades' intensity corresponding to the concentration of a particular gene. The science is all doable. The difficulty of the Allen Institute's project was the sheer scale of it: Each individual brain would need to be sliced into thousands of one-micron-thick slices, and stained for 20,000 different genes, then each stained slice would need to be photographed and analyzed. This would take human scientists years and years of repetitive labor. The answer?

Industrialized science by robots! I've always believed that science ought to be imagined by scientists, the theory and experimental design thought out, and then all the math and data-crunching should be left to teams of unthinking drones, either robots, mole-rats, ants, or number-grubbing physicists, so a scientist's work can stick to the interesting, imaginative stuff. Now my dream of science seems to have come true. "What the institute needed was someone who could translate this epic ambition into an efficient production process, in which thousands of brain slices would be collected and assessed every day." The guy the head of the lab, Allan Jones, found to solve this engineering problem has a background alot like my Dad's: "this led Jones to hire Paul Wohnoutka, a former Boeing engineer with decades of experience in managing complex manufacturing systems ("I thought a commercial airliner was the most challenging thing I'd help build," he says, "I was wrong.")"


So Wohnoutka designed this elaborate system of bar-coded brain-slice-slides, that neuroscientists can scan with computerized gadgets to get all the data they need about the slice instantaneously. Amazingly, the slices are even analyzed by robots(!): robotic Leica microscopes with glass-slide loaders, barcode readers, and small computers running image-analysis software (that is, statistical pattern recognition algorithms like the ones we use in our fMRI work at Princeton and in Kyoto, and in Google searches). Each slice of brain converts instantly into its location in the digital brain-map, showing the expression of each of 22,000 genes in each voxel.

Here's where the project converges with the brain-mapping work I've done. The Allen Institute is the first "wet lab" project I've heard of that thinks of the brain in terms of "voxels"-- those 3mmX3mm cubes of cortex that we break the brain down into in fMRI (~40,000 per brain). The project needed to decide on a level of resolution larger than individual neurons but smaller than "brain parts", and since they don't have any over-aching theory or hypothesis about the functional architecture of brain gene expression, they just decided to think of the brain as a volume of cubes, as we do. So, they'll end up converting the brain into a "3D matrix" form a lot like the one we think about in fMRI. Anyone doing an fMRI experiment will be able to spot an active voxel and say, "I wonder what genes are expressed in that cube?" and on brain-map.org-- The FREE, open-source gene-brain map from the Allen Insitute, which will be finished by the robots in 2012-- they'll be able to see, instantaneously.

Pretty wild stuff, eh? If you're interested in this convergence of comp sci and brain-mapping, a friend of mine David Weiss explains the idea really well here.

David Weiss '07 on his Senior Thesis, Play video (3 min. 15 sec.) »
David Weiss '07, currently pursuing a PhD in computer science at the University of Pennsylvania, speaks about his Princeton thesis, for which he developed computer science methods to help neuroscientists analyze fMRI data.

David was the other undergrad advisee in Ken Norman's lab with me senior year (We were both research assistants in Ken's lab the same summer, so we got to know each other pretty well, and Dave helped with my Spidey experiment. He was a computer science major, not psych, bio or neuro, and his job was more Googley, developing the algorithsms for "dimensionality reduction"-- how to reduce fMRI activity patterns to relevent features that a pattern classification algorithm can actually parse and make sense of.) Anyway, check out this little 3 minute clip and let me know your thoughts. That computer behind Dave with the brains on it is in the scanner room I used to scan my nine friends' brains in This is Your Brain on Spiderman.

One day maybe we'll all end up teamed-up on a Google-Meets-Kyoto-meets Brooklyn indie rock- meets Chicago comedy- meets jazz project of interstellar brain decoding, where all you'll have to do is flip a switch to churn bebop, jokes or novels out of your skull. What do you say?

Yes we can!

I spent this first of Obama's presidency teaching my kids "Telephone Conversation" with Super Mario Bros. puppets. In my free periods, I translated articles about Obama from the 毎日小学生新聞, the primary school kids' daily newspaper. At recess, we played the "flying pigs game", where I spin them around in circles until I get dizzy. The second grade girls sing a song I made up, in my scrappy Japanese, to the tune of Frere Jacque that goes "Tobu buta, tobu buta, toberu! toberu! Tobu tobu buta tobu tobu buta, dekiru, dekiru!", meaning, roughly, "We're flying pigs, we're flying pigs, we can fly, yes we can!"

Obama made the front page every day this week- manga of Obama, rather- in the lead-up and aftermath of his inaugural address. I photocopied all the pages and keep them in my kanji notebook. On Obama's first day in office, December 22 in Japan, I bought the adult Yomiuri newspaper from the convenience store on my way home from school, to keep the front page photo of his family, and translate the article later. In the photo on the cover of another daily, the Asahi Shinbun, Michelle is looking at Barack as he puts his hand on the Bible to take the oath, with this proud look that says: my husband is the hottest man in the world.

I laminated pictures of all my favorite video game characters with magnets on the backs- Yoshi, Mario, Luigi, Peach, Donkey Kong, Toad, along with cartoon telephones. Toad the toadstool, I learned, is called "Kinopiyo" in Japanese, a diminutive of the word for mushroom that sounds like "Pinochio". Lots of the kids mix up and call him "Pinokyo".

Last week, the kids learned how to have a simple phone conversation, scheduling a play date with a friend. They'd come up in pairs, and play the roles of their favorite Mario characters, complete with video-game voices:
"Hello, it's Mario!"
"Hello, it's Kupa. Let's play! (or, Let's fight!)"
"Ok. Where?"
"Let's go to the park."
"Ok. See you!"

This week, though, I started my lesson by showing the kids the front page of their newspaper, and telling them how Obama became president of America this week. The kids all recognize Obama, and many of them know his slogans in English: "CHANGE!" they'll call out. Or, as the caption of one newspaper article said in both English and the Japanese syllabary, "Yes We Can!"

I showed the kids a cute cartoon inside the paper, titled "ホワイトハウス小学校入学": White House Elementary School Enrollment: Shiny-new First Graders!" Obama and Hilary are shown as Japanese first graders holding hands, dressed in the elementary-school uniform and the standard red- or black- "randoseru" Japanese knapsacks. Joe Lieberman is opening Obama's backpack to load it with textbooks on "Finance", "Iraq/ Afghanistan", "Terrorism", and "Energy", saying "There's a lot to study!" (勉強することがいっぱいあります！) In the background is the Capitol building, with Lincoln floating on a cloud, wearing an angel's halo and waving to baby Obama. Off to one side is an embarrassed looking Bush, getting hit by a shoe. And behind him, a mother bald eagle in her nest standing over a newly-hatched chick, saying "自由の新たなる誕生", jiyuu no arata naru tanjyou": "Birth of liberty anew!"

The article published today is headed "Q: What did Obama call for in his inaugural address? A: Hope and Unity". The cartoon shows Obama being offered the Bible, with an image of Lincoln hovering behind his pointing hand. The final paragraph is about discrimination. It says: "From this point forward everyday, children all over the world will see a black president of America. "Discrimination" (差別, sabetsu)-- when a person can not make certain choices because of the country where he was born, the color of his skin, or the job his parents have; when strangers say mean things to him for no reason; when he is excluded from groups. Such discrimination is dying out from the world now. It's wonderful, don't you think?"

I asked each class if they know why Obama is a special president. Typically, one student would raise her hand and say "Hajimete no kokujin no daitouryou da kara.": Because he's the first black president. Good! I'd say. Then I'd show them a cartoon of Lincoln and ask if they knew who he was, what he did. Typically they wouldn't, but their teacher would help me explain how in olden times in America, black people had to work for white people for no money, but Lincoln freed the slaves. I told them how Obama was sworn in on the same Bible that Lincoln had touched- the first black president swearing on a book from the president who gave American blacks freedom.

I also explained how Obama's mother, after she had him, got divorced from his African father, and married an Indonesian, an Asian man. Obama's half-sister is not black, but Asian, and she's married to a Chinese man from Canada. So, in America's White House family now, there are people from Asia, Africa, and America-- blood from Kenya, Kansas, Canada, China, and Jakarta. "So," I said in Japanese. "there is an international first family of the United States. America is changing!" "CHANGE!" all the kids called out happily. "Hopefully now America and other countries can start to become friends." "And there will be no war, right?" One third grader asked me. "I hope not," I said.

We played a special "Inauguration Day" version of the Mario Telephone game. Yoshi wanted to fly to Washington DC to see Obama's Inauguration Ceremony, so he called his friend Sonic the Hedgehog to invite him along (Or Mario called Peach to invite her, as a date). I used a flashcard I have of "America", showing a big bald eagle's head, over the Blue Ridge mountains, a river, the Statue of Liberty, and Mt. Rushmore; a map of the U.S. showing Virginia highlighted in orange, with DC as a star; and a photo of the Jefferson Memorial in April, with the Japanese sakura blossoms in bloom all around it. The script was changed a little too:
"Hi Peach, it's Mario! Let's go to [Washington DC] for [Obama}!"
"Yes we can! What time?"
"__ o'clock."
"Ok. See you! YES WE CAN!"

I asked a series of questions in Japanese to the whole class afterwards. They caught on fast.
"Gaikokujin to hanasukoto ga dekimasu ka?" Can you speak to foreigners?
"YES WE CAN!"
"America to hokano kuni wa tomodachi ni narukoto ga dekimasu ka?" Can America and other countries become friends?
"YES WE CAN!"
"Can we end violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East?"
"YES WE CAN!"
"Can you come visit Te-i-ra sensei in Virginia?"
"YES WE CAN!"

By the time I left the fourth grade class at Oda, everybody was jumping up and down and shouting and clapping. "Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Watashi-tachi wa dekiru da yo!" "CHANGE!"

I learned the kanji for "Hope" and "Unity" today from Obama's shyuuin enzetsu, his inaugural address: 希望, kibou, and 団結, danketsu. I hope Obama doesn't disappoint the hopes of these Japanese kids, and mine.

Dreams you can see. or, 将来の可能、future possibilities

My future just took a little more shape... I've been offered a job in the brain-imaging lab in Kyoto when I finish teaching in Yakage.

The Japanese psychologist I've been working with, Yuki Kamitani, sent me Japanese news clips about his lab's "Neuron" publication last week, which I used to learn new kanji about fMRI. When I wrote him to say thanks this weekend, I asked about the possibility of doing some volunteer work with his lab when I finish my teaching contract in Yakage. The articles about Yuki's experiment all mention "Possibilities for the future"-- shourai no kanou, 将来の可能,-- such as allowing disabled people to express themselves through brain activity, and re-constructing images from people's dreams. So I titled my e-mail "将来の可能かな？"... Possibilities for the Future?

Yuki replied that he'd be glad to have me, not just for a "short time" but for several months, as an intern in his lab. He can offer me a visa and housing, and even a Japanese class through ATR, Advanced Telecommunications Research International, his research institute. (My next workplace will be 京都の国際電気通信基礎研究場所-- Kyoto's kokusai-denki-tsuushin-kisou-kenkyuujyou, "International Electrical-Communication Fundamental Research Institute"! Quite a mouthful to fit on a business card...). This is exactly what I had been hoping for. It will give me the chance to deepen my Japanese, to take the next level of the language proficiency exam next December, and Yuki says I can take the GRE from Japan. I'll get my act together to apply to graduate programs in neuroscience in December (American programs!). Assuming I do well in Yuki's lab, I'll have recommendations from Yuki, Ken, and hopefully Sam Wang (the biologist I took seminar and went to the Society For Neuroscience conference in Atlanta with senior year), plus the experience in Ken and Yuki's lab, at the cutting edge of fMRI research! ;-)

The only barrier will be, well, my ability. And my interest. But I've got hope that I may make it as a scientist yet. Plus, even if I don't... This is a once in a lifetime chance to work in a futuristic brain-imaging lab in Kyoto, and come away with better Japanese than I ever could have from just my teaching job in Yakage. I'll be writing like a fiend. Wide-eyed like an infant all along, I hope.

I'm still as undecided about my life as ever. But I feel resolved about my future for at least this next step. I may not be able to charm my way much further into my career... But maybe, just maybe, somewhere in this next year I'll find serious direction, apply myself, and start to grow up.

Meantime, my adventure won't stop yet. I'm not through being young yet, and glad not to be.

What all this means for you guys is: You haven't missed your chance to see Kyoto's beautiful fall leaves! You've got three more months when you could visit me in Japan.

I will almost definitely come home to the U.S. in early September, right after my Yakage contract ends and before my gig in Kyoto starts, to bring home my Yakage life, see you guys, my family and Claire. Any of you would be welcome to come see me in Yakage over the summer. From late July through August my life will be low-key. Since my elementary students will be finished school, I'll just be playing with the kindergardeners during the week (any of you could probably tag along), starting to pack up and ship out my house, and prepping about neuroscience stuff for operation Kyoto Brain-reading Adventure. So think about it! please. I'd love to get as many of you guys out here to this country that's come to mean so much to me, before I leave.

DBow's already made his plane reservation for early May. Owen, Brett, James, SD... When might you could come see me and my Japan?

Brain-imaging in Japanese

When I got to Mitani this morning, dressed as "Spidey Santa", the school nurse Kuboyama-sensei had newspaper clippings for me.

Last week, when Kamitani's "Neuron" paper came out on Thursday it made the front page of the Asahi Shinbun (目で見た文字や図形、脳活動からコンピューターが再現 "Letters and Shapes seen with the eye are recreated from brain activity by a computer.") The Asahi is kind of like Japan's NYTimes, one of the two most-read national newspapers, with the Yomiuri. It was also written-up on page 3 of the more local Sanyou Shinbun. Both had some great manga like the ones I've doodled in my notebooks, to illustrate how brain-imaging and pattern classification work. A person imagining a snowman, having his brain decoded and the snowman reproduced on a computer screen. The headlines mention mental images, too: "Dreams and fantasies we can see" was the headline of one:夢や空想見えれかも, yume ya kuusou mierekamo. It's exciting to see the experiment start popping up in the real-world press.

I haven't spotted anything in the mainstream U.S. media yet, but it popped up on pink tentacle through digg.com if anybody wants to read something in English that's not hardcore technical jargon. My friend Adam mentioned the experiment on a train on Saturday, after reading about it on Digg, without ever having heard of it from me ;-)

I spent all afternoon learning how to say things like "brain-imaging", "changes in cerebral blood flow", and "functional magnetic resonance imaging" in Japanese. It's exciting to be learning the vocabulary, and even kanji, I'd need to talk about my thesis in Japan. Let me know if you guys spot the study anywhere else.

p.s. No newspaper yet has mentioned the foreigner who provided mild grammatical help and was credited in small print on page 33. Most papers, true to Japanese style, don't even mention the main author of the paper. Just Kamitani, since he's the 研究室長、the head of the lab. No credit to the little guys...