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...

Simstim

Definitely the coolest science cover I've seen ;-) That roll of "brain film" is actual pictures reproduced from visual-cortex activity, of what people were seeing or reading. This is the first time my name's appeared in a scientific journal. In a brain-reading study from Yuki Kamitani's lab in Kyoto called "Visual image reconstruction from human brain activity." I'm the only non-Japanese name on the paper! I'm credited in the acknowledgments section on the last page for "manuscript editing" (fixing English prepositions and overuse of the word "the", mostly; very scientific). I can send anybody a copy if you're interested to read it.

The paper gets pretty technical in parts, but at least take a look at the first two figures. These are two of the clearest images of brain-pattern classification I've seen, like cartoons of how this science is done. And the pictures of the word "NEURON" reconstructed in real-time from visual-cortex brain activity are eery. I love how the figures illustrate the power of the technique both scientifically-- in terms of "mean square errors"-- and viscerally, in the form of the actual images being decoded direct from the brain. I'm excited to have been attached to this paper in any way, even if my only contribution was English prepositions and articles (If you read a particularly well-used "the", "of", or "in", that may have been me ;-). I really think this is a paradigm shift in brain-imaging... Gone are the days of flaky region-of-interest studies pointing to a hunk of cortex "representing language" or "emotion". If you like this one, definitely check out the Mitchell, 2007 paper from Carnegie Mellon. Those people are decoding words-- novel nouns that the classifier's never seen before!-- from brain pattern's, by defining "meaning" in terms of a noun's frequency of co-ocurrence with certain sensory-motor verbs. Language theory meets biology meets computer science in a really thrilling way.

Speaking of speech. I heard today on the November "Neuropod" podcast on this year's Society For Neuroscience conference (SfN; the conference I went to in Atlanta in senior year; this year in DC) that a neuroscientist and a brain surgeon at BU, Frank Gunter and Dr. Kennedy, have designed a brain-machine interface that can decode speech sounds from neural activity. Speech from thought! Our work is connected to this-- the ultimate clinical goal for all brain-pattern-classification work, like my Spidey experiment in Ken's lab-- to help brain- damaged people regain use of speech and motion and their senses.

This speech-decoder is an implanted electrode in the brain of a guy in Georgia with "locked-in syndrome", who's paralyzed except for his eyes. The coolest part about the brain chip is that it's a "neurotrophic device", meaning that it's filled with nerve food-- neurotrophic factors, nutrients for neurons. So, the axons of the nerves actually grow inside the chip, stitching it in place so it doesn't move relative to the brain. A genuine neural cyborg! The hope is that within five years, this locked-in man who hasn't been able to speak beyond yes/no eye-blinks for years, might be able to talk at speech-speed through a computer's synthesized voice. Amazing stuff huh?

If anyone's interested to hear the podcast, it's the November edition here. Neuropod is the journal Nature Neuroscience's monthly podcast, and I love it. It's at a layman's enough level that someone pretty interested in brain science would get something out of it, and it clues you into the latest cutting edge in research if you happen to not be in academia... So I can get cool new articles sent to me from Greg, my grad student buddy back at Princeton. Brain still hungry for brain. and stomach for dinner.

best from the paddies and brains of japan,
T

夢 Obama's election across the world.

I was hanging my Spidey suit out to dry one evening last week when my neighbor walked by with his dog and introduced himself.

He asked in Japanese if I was American, then whether I support Obama or McCain. When I said Obama, his response was immediate: "If Obama is elected, he will be assassinated." I raised an eyebrow, he explained: "In America, there are lots of guns." I didn't understand the Japanese word for 'assassinate', or was surprised he'd used it, so he held up his hand like a gun to show what he meant. "Like Kennedy, or King-san. Same thing. America is a dangerous place." I finished hanging my Spidey mask, shook the guy's hand and said I'd see him around.

Spiderman told my kids today about America's election, as I taught my last Halloween lessons in costume. I told them Obama had been elected, by 7 million votes, and about the Obama and Sarah Palin jack-o-lanters my Dad carved for last Friday night. I told them the most popular Halloween costumes in the U.S. are monsters, super-heroes, jobs like policeman, doctor and teacher, and this year, Obama and McCain costumes. (Obama costumes sold more than McCain's, according to the BBC). The kids seemed pretty excited at the idea of America's first black president. One second-grade girl, Megumi-chan, said she wanted to vote for Obama too. Her teacher had to tell her she can't vote for President, because she's Japanese. It was sad. At lunch one of the 6th graders asked me a lot of questions about America's political system and history, and quoted Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" (just that sentence, not the speech...). His teacher seemed interested, too, to teach me about Japan's political process, parties, and legislature, and to ask me about ours.

I got a cellphone e-mail after school from my Korean friend Minhee in Japanese, congratulating America on Obama's election. The subject line said 夢 yume: dream. Her message, in emoticons, Japanese characters, and one English sentence, said:

オハヨー [pink music note] [Ohayo = Good morning!]

オバマの当選おめでとう [yellow star] [Congratulations on Obama's election]

We can do it!
感動的だったよ [This makes me believe "we can do it!". I was very moved. [smiley face]]

今日も頑張ってね [Today too, let's do our best, eh? [Minhee's signature winking girl with rabbit ears]

Getting Minhee's message made it worth living abroad on Obama's election night. The excitement being generated by one man in Chicago is palpable on the other side of the globe.

* * *

The school nurse this morning at Nakagawa Shougakko seemed moved by Obama's victory, and envious of me as an American. She told me that Japan's prime minister (大統領　daitouryou; same kanji as "daimyou", feudal lord) is not popularly elected. "Citizens don't choose our leader in Japan," she said in Japanese. She added that she wants to see change in Japan, but it doesn't happen here.

Japan's prime minister is chosen by the Diet: The head of the party with the most seats in the two-house legislature becomes president of the country. These representatives are elected by the citizens, but only about 50% of Japan's eligible voters tend to show up, and the same conservative party, the Liberal Democratic Party (自民党　Jimintou) has run Japan's government continuously since World War II. Almost every prime minister since the war had been a bureacrat in the pre-war government, or a descendant of one, the same aristocratic old boys' network, and the government is overwhelmingly male. Only 7.5% of the Diet is women. In the 2002 election, 10% of the candidates were women but only 5% got elected, despite more than half of the voters being women! In the time from 1989 to 2001, when America had 3 presidents, Japan had no fewer than TWELVE prime ministers-- each forced to resign after a few months or years because of corruption scandals or a vote of no-confidence. Pork-barrel meetings behind closed-doors among old men in suits is really how politics are done in Japan. The Japanese people seem generally apathetic. Almost no Japanese people I've met have political opinions. Most, when you ask, will tell you straight: "I don't care about politics" or "I'm not interested in government."

At taiko practice last night, I asked my friend Yasu why Japanese people aren't more political. I asked in particular about Japan's "Peace Constitution" (平和憲法), which has barely been modified from the version written by the Americans 60 years ago. Yasu shrugged and said "We don't care. It's so old." So it is... but there was a time when it wasn't old, and no one seems to have cared then either. The Constitution is a living document, anyway-- it's the basis of Japanese law. But honestly, no one here cares. "Popular sovereignty" isn't a felt ideal in Japan-- personal freedom and responsibility isn't a political tradition here, and the people here don't seem to feel civic responsibility, or political power. Nationalistic, sometimes racist pride at the purity of the Japanese race, yes, but not civic responsibility, not active involvement in the political process.

Many Japanese politicians don't even have responsible political views. Many are outright right-wing nationalists, and revisionist history deniers-- and few in Japan seem bothered by this. The Prime Minster at the time when we were born, Nakasone (still a popular political figure), said in a speech in 1986 that Japanese are more intelligent than people from multiracial societies, because unlike the U.S., their blood is not tainted by Hispanics and blacks. Nakasone also was the first PM to visit Yasukuni Shrine, which honors war dead from WWII including convicted war criminals, angering Koreans and Chinese and blurring the line back into official state Shinto. The current prime minister, Aso Tarou, refuses to acknowledge the Korean "comfort women" who were kept as prostitutes by Japanese soldiers in the War, supports the textbook revisions (教科書 作る買い、kyoukasho tsukuru kai) to omit teaching the history of Japan's wartime atrocities in schools. Some of his ministers have denied the Nanjing Massacre, including his tourism minister who was dismissed a month ago for saying that "Japanese don't like foreigners" and that Japan is a proudly mono-ethnic society. The mayor of Tokyo, Ishihara Yoshitsune, is probably the most disturbing. He has repeatedly said that Korea wanted Japan to take it over during its occupation from 1910-1945, and suggested that many Asian countries are better off now, having been Japanese colonies, whereas European and American former colonies are floundering. He also believes that the U.S. used the atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima rather than on Germany for racist reasons, ignoring the not insignificant fact that atomic bombs were not tested until July 1945, three months after Germany surrendered. Ishihara is allowed to say racist nationalistic nonsense like this, and nobody within Japan speaks up. Nobody cares.

The nurse's Obama enthusiasm today made me appreciate how rare our "we the people" politics truly is. I feel lucky to have been born American.

Democracy as Science: truth is provisional

Absolutes are anathema to scientists, and liberals. James Madison, the great experimenter-founder of America, stitched the ephemerality, the mutability of all truth into the very fabric of our government, in what Joseph Ellis calls the "evolutionary revolution" of America's founding (American Creation, 3-19).

When I read about James Madison's political philosophy last month in Ellis' American Creation ("The Argument" p. 87-126), I realized that Madison envisioned politics as a scientist would. He founded American government on progressive renewal-- the belief that principles must be challenged continually in order to remain vital, that conflict would stabilize not weaken a democracy, that no politics of individual liberty remains free if it calcifies into conservative doctrine, but must be kept "true" by being debated, questioned, tested. As in the peer review process of science, where any theory is validated with experimental evidence and old theories are continually tested, clarified, sharpened, modernized, by new experiments, American politics should be forever a work in progress.

Obama, as an expert on constitutional law, understands this:
"Its not just absolute power that the founders sought to guard against. Implicit in the Constitution's structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth — the infallibility of any idea or ideology, or theology, or 'ism', any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course."
(From The Audacity of Hope, quoted here.)

Science's assumption about the nature of "truth" is that it doesn't exist. All facts are provisional on experimental evidence. This is why it is silly when Creationists argue that evolution is "just" a theory. That's right, it is a theory, as is all of human knowledge-- but it happens to be a theory that is supported by more empirical evidence, replicable experimental evidence, than, say, the "theory" of Intelligent Design (which isn't a theory because it poses no testable hypotheses to verify). Churchill might have said about natural selection what he did about government: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried". Yes, it's just a theory, inferior perhaps to absolute truth, but it is better than any other theory we've come up with yet-- including the theory of an absolute truth. Scientific "knowledge" is a liquid rather than a solid form of fact, adaptable rather than brittle. It is a body of temporary claims, that today's scientist realizes may be overturned, or better put, re-framed, by the discoveries of tomorrow. We work to make our picture of the world ever clearer, recognizing that the scientists of the future will see a different world than the one we see now, and will adapt our contribution to that newer, more modern reality.

Madison envisioned American politics like this, as a laboratory, "an institutionalized forum for everlasting debate" (125). He came to believe that the best resolution to the argument over central versus state sovereignty was to leave it unresolved, forever . In fact to institutionalize the conflict, to make the tension permanent. That way, competing factions would continually negotiate compromise between two opposing visions of America, allowing neither to dominate unchallenged. John Adams used the same logic in distributing powers among the Executive, Judicial, and Legislative branches of government, and in keeping the Judiciary independent of the federal government. A distributed network of competing interests insured against consolidation of power, and against political stultification. Ideas that are being constantly debated-- "peer reviewed" in the science language-- never have the chance to calcify into unquestioned facts or political cudgels.

"The genius of Madison's argument," as Ellis writes, "for a version of sovereignty that was at once shared and divided raised the wholly pragmatic and politically painful compromises reached at the Constitutional Convention to the level of a novel political discovery: to wit, the notion that government was not about providing answers, but rather about providing a framework in which the salient questions could continue to be debated" (p. 123).

The role of government: Not to provide answers, but to provide a framework in which the questions can continue to be debated. Discussed. Sounds an awful lot like the kind of world Obama sees.

Hopefully we'll all live in that world, starting tomorrow.

Country of Possibilities: Our liberal mandate

My ex writing prof Roger Cohen writes about American Stories in today's NYTimes. How America is the only country on Earth where Obama's story could be possible. Why Obama stands to bring hope and credibility back to the American ideal, its "twin badges" of liberty and capitalism, of equal rights and possibilities for all-- races, religions, nationalities, classes, sexualities-- that America is supposed to represent. Undermined by 8 years of Bush conservatism, and the cartoonishly fundamentalist "Good versus Evil" world view that goes with it.

Roger's take on Obama made me think of my dad's favorite historian Joe Ellis, who writes the following in his great latest book "American Creation".

"America's founding succeeded [in that] against all odds, the most liberal nation-state in the history of Western Civilization was now firmly embedded in the most extensive and richly endowed plot of land on the planet. The plot itself was providential, a function of geographic and chronological good fortune. The political shape of the emerging American nation was a more human creation, flawed as all human creations must be, most notably in its prevailing racial prejudices and its inability to envision the multicultural ideal we now take for granted.
"But the design of the political foundation was ingenious in its combination of stability and agility, most especially its prudent placement of an explanding liberal mandate at the start that left room, up ahead, for an Abraham Lincoln and a Martin Luther King to join the list of founders. In that sense, perhaps the most creative act of the founding era was to make time as well as space an indispensable ally, in effect extending the founding moment everlastingly into the future." (

Next Tuesday could be America's 21st century founding moment, and we will be a part of it. I'm convinced if Obama is elected, America's "expanding liberal mandate" will have taken a historic leap that will be remembered forever in the history of our founding-- a leap towards a globalist, progressive, genuinely egalitarian world society. When another Joseph Ellis comes along in 300 years, Obama and the diplomatic, open outlook he'll bring to American foreign policy, will be added to that list of liberalism's founding moments. We're here, now, to be a part of it. We can describe it to our kids and grandkids when they read it in their history books. Our potentially multi-lingual, multi-colored American kids, whose world, thanks to the ever-expanding power of the Internet, will be so much bigger than ours has ever been able to be.

With hope.
T

America's Election in Japanese Cartoons

I'm jealous you guys get to be in America next Tuesday night.

This week's 小学校毎日新聞Mainichi Shinbun elementary-school newspaper has a front page story on the American election. The illustration is a manga of Obama and McCain over a map of the American voters, including Spiderman, Batman, and Superman near NYC, a cowboy out west, a Johnny Depp-ish pirate for Owen's mom, two (gay?) male sailors holding hands; a black jazz trumpeter and a basketball player; some football and baseball players, a boxer, a gangster, a priest and a nun, a few news broadcasters, King Kong, Mickey Mouse, and a big bald eagle. Makes me miss my country, Spidey, Louis Armstrong, and The Godfather in particular.

The article explains, to a Japanese elementary schooler and me, that America's election process is complicated because America is a 連ぽ国家 (renpotsu/kokka), a union of states nation: "America" is a "country" (国 kuni) but also 50 separate states gathered together. There's a great manga showing McCain and Obama's heads poking over the American flag, both sweating with voices merged saying "It's complicated". A speech bubble runs from the stars, saying "The 50 states' voters choose". Next to the speech bubble, in front of the stripes, stand five men and women representing the "538人" electoral college voters, and an arrow runs from them back to the two candidates above, with a speech bubble saying "The candidate who obtains 270 or more people is elected." Absolutely the most clear representation of the electoral process I've ever seen... in a Japanese newspaper for 10 year olds.

The kids' newspaper reminds me why comics are such an awesome communication tool. I see the manga on the covers of the kids' newspaper tacked on the school bulletin board every day, and if it's an interesting story-- about politics, or a neuroscientist, or "What was life like for grandpa?", about Japanese history during WWII-- I copy the article and spend my free period translating the kanji in it. That's how I've learned the characters for "neuron", "development", "green fluorescent protein", "gene", and now "Democrat", "Republican", and "election".

I also learned today the reason our election day is on Tuesday. Since America is a Christian country (クリスト教の国, "Ku-ri-su-to　kyo no kuni", country of Christ's teachings) where the president-elect puts his hand on the Bible at his inauguration, we could never have Election Day on the "day of repose”、安息日, Sunday, like they do in Japan. (Japanese people are mind-boggled that Americans vote on a weekday, because they can't imagine how any voter with a job could make it home for dinner with his family before 10pm, let alone to a voting booth, on a day of work.) Why not Monday you ask? well, since our country is freaking gynormous-- about 25 times the size of Japan-- and covers a few time zones, we don't want to encroach on Californians' day of rest either (at least, I think that's what it says). So we vote on Tuesdays.

I'm very jealous that you guys will get to sit around a TV, Super-Bowl style, with your friends next Tuesday night, with beers (Dogfishhead! god I miss you), Doritos and pizzas, and shout at the TV (or celebrate all night if the results are obvious fast, knock on wood), as the votes are tallied. But there's something interesting about viewing this election from abroad, too. I never figured I'd be learning Japanese from the American electoral process, but now that I have, I'm damn sure never gonna forget it. Especially when Obama wins.

Did you know that next year will be the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth, and the Lincoln Memorial, founded in 1922 in DC, will be re-dedicated by the new president on May 22? No black people were invited to Lincoln's 100-year birthday party in Illinois. Few were at the opening of the memorial either, where Lincoln was praised by the Republican president as the preserver of the union, not freer of the slaves. As Thomas Mallon put it in a great article, "Set In Stone: Abraham Lincoln and the politics of memory":
"The look and the emphasis of the occasion will have changed-- measurably, for certain; astoundingly, perhaps-- in the fourscore and seven years since 1922."

Breathtaking stuff. Wish I were with you, and Obama, on Tuesday night.

P.S. This American Life ran a great show this week on the Obama and McCain campaigns' competition in Pennsylvania-- "Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in the middle", as James Carville put it. An interesting microcosm of the country as a whole, on the brink before next Tuesday. By the time of Ira Glass' next episode, we'll have a new president.

Green tech rising

My dad sent me this NYT mag article, Capitalism to the Rescue, to cheer me up about investment. It's about Kleiner-Perkins, the venture capital firm that funded Google and now invests in scientists working on renewable energy. I find it inspiring as a former/ maybe-future scientist, to learn that this progressive, pro-fundamental science current is so strong in America's financial world. The money-gamblers aren't all cynics, some have hope to invest in basic science exploration. Here's an inspiring American financial story in the midst of the economic meltdown. It's an interesting point that the reason, other than Wall Street, that the U.S. financial world is unique is based in California, not New York. It's our venture capital/ tech/ science culture, and it's the reason why I've never been sold on the case people make that American cultural influence in general is on the wane worldwide. We're at a cutting edge that matters.

Spiderman Stitch Halloween

Since this is my last Halloween in Yakage, I figured I'd have two costumes this year. Spidey was an obvious decision. I realized one crucial aspect of Americana my students hadn't been taught about yet, superheroes. The Stitch costume comes with a story.

Stitch came to Yakage this week via Mary Childs, who got it from a Japanese guy in Tokyo. Mary is a friend of Kate's from her semester in Dehli, where they were two of twelve on their program, including a girl from Wesleyan. Mary graduated from Washington & Lee last year, and has a Watson Fellowship now to travel around the world for a year painting people's faces. She was in Brazil in July, came to Tokyo about August 15th, and got to Yakage a week ago to stay with Kate. We put her on a train tonight to Kyoto, and she's heading to Shanghai at the end of the week.

Here's the crazy part. Before all those other places, Mary grew up in Richmond. She went to St. Catherine's K-12 the year behind us. A year ago, she dated Andrew Barr. In our game of "Do you know.." the first night we met last week, we had sort of stunning success.. first she told me about Andrew (I'd mentioned I'd gone to Tuckahoe and had you guys at Freeman). Then I told her my one St. Cat's connection, Mary Depasquale-- My first girlfriend, who Owen and I met at summer camp on the James when I was in 6th grade and she was in 5th, whose dad, Paul, made the Arthur Ashe statue and the Braves Indian at the Diamond. Turns out Mary and Mary were good friends, and grew up together in the same class at St. Cat's for 12 years. Then as we were cutting onions and peppers to make spaghetti at Kate's house one night, we realized we had both gone to St. Mary's Episcopal church. She sung in the choir, maybe even with Greeley. I asked if she knew Mrs. Erb, Esther's mom, who taught singing at St. Cat's, and Kate said O yeah, actually Esther is one of her best friends. So a few Facebook messages later, I get a message from Esther (in Vienna) saying she hears I met her best friend from Richmond, in Yakage.

Tiny place, this planet. How do you guys like me as Peter Parker?