Departures おくりびと (2008 Takita Yōjirō 滝田 洋二郎)

(N.B. Mild spoilers abound.)



The opening shots of one-time pink film director Takita Yōjirō's Departures are shrouded in a thick haze of snow flurries, reminiscent of the first scene of Fargo, but switch the flatlands of North Dakota for the scenic valleys of rural Japan. Parting this wall of white is a solitary hearse, the passengers of which we follow along to their destination: an encoffining ceremony for a recently deceased daughter of a local village family. Except that she turns out not to be a female at all. The solemn ritualistic cleansing and enrobing of the corpse is abruptly halted by the younger specialist's discovery, which shatters his image of the otherwise attractive young "woman" and sets the tone for the majority of the movie, reverent but humorous at the same time.

This part of the funerary ceremony in Japan, which cuts across all religious denominations Eastern and Western, requires sensitive and skilled hands. After sponging the body's exposed skin with a sanitized cloth, the clothes are removed from under a silken cerement, and once the rest of the body is cleansed, new clothing and make-up is applied to restore the departed to look as if in their prime, before being lowered into a coffin and transferred to the cremation retort. Our startled handler, Daigo Kobayashi (Motoki Masahiro 本木　雅弘), called an "NK agent" after the Japanese term nōkan 納棺, has recently returned to his hometown and fallen into this line of work after plans to become a symphonic cellist in Tokyo failed to pan out. Though the job is elevated to an artform, revered by all mourning Japanese (the bereaved often tearfully proffer gifts of gratitude to the agents), it is nonetheless beneath an individual's dignity to fulfill this function. While the protagonist, on his journey from resigned acceptance of the position to genuine veneration of its rites, attempts to hide the nature of his business from his dotingly smiley wife (Hirosue Ryoko 広末涼子) , soon word of his profession spreads around town, deflecting old acquaintances and finally driving away his homemaking wife as well.

Though the movie, which won the 2009 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, has its moments, for the most part the sequences develop like a feature-length Japanese soap opera. Despite the stunning scenery of Yamagata, nestled in the shadow of Mount Fuji, our emotions are piqued by little else on the screen. The story develops along largely predictable lines: As Daigo develops an immense pride for the work that previously had driven him to wretch before every meal, he ostensibly has to choose between his ordinarily submissive wife, and his newfound pride for the profession. It turns out he must have known all along how to play his cards, as his wife dutifully returns with only the pretense of a fight. Moreover, when characters pass away it feels more like a familiar plot turn than any great loss to shed tears over. By the end, a longstanding family sub-drama is even resolved, with no outstanding tensions left remaining.




Adding to the semblance of the daytime drama, most characters overplay their roles: at some of his more dejected moments, our leading man pulls faces that remind me of the Korean screwball comedy Sex is Zero. (In the scene where Daigo discovers the symphony he has worked so hard to be a part of is dissolved, he draws a quick face that might have been accompanied by the boing of a burst Slinky.) This makes it hard to sympathize for the character when he is supposed to be duly enduring the down sides of the story. The wife figure, though sometimes charming, is played to bubble-gum effect, so fixated on an overstretched smile and crescent-moon eyes that she grins in her sleep.

The one exception is the other staff at the NK agency, especially Shōei, the proprietor (veteran actor Yamazaki Tsutomu 山崎 努, perhaps known best for his role in Itami Jūzō's Tampopo). Tall and aquiline, his presence exudes at both times a sense of gravity and humanity mostly lacking elsewhere in the story. Aloof throughout most of the film, he plays the traditional sensei role to perfection, all the while appearing to tolerantly guide the actor Motoko as much as the character Kobayashi. The high point may be the private puffer roe dinner shared by the two agents, in which Shōei dryly opines to his apprentice on the themes of work and mortality.

Departures isn't a bad film to relax with after a long day. The long shots of the Japanese countryside are beautiful, and toward the end, most of its shortcomings can be conveniently ignored if one is willing. But in a country famous for Ozu Yasujiro's light-hearted family dramas and Akira Kurosawa's humanistic storytelling, Departures feels more like a spin-off with a mildly unconventional theme. Released the same year, Kore-eda Hirokazu's Still Walking (歩いても 歩いても) is a much greater example of the vibrancy that still flourishes in this great tradition.

Still Life 三峡好人 (2006 Jia Zhangke 贾樟柯)

(The following is a movie review I wrote some time back for my brother's blog.)



Over roughly the last decade we have seen the slow decline of some the biggest names in mainland Chinese filmmaking. Luminaries of the fifth generation of Chinese cinema like Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou have abandoned the simplistic and artful styles that made up films like Yellow Earth and The Story of Qiu Ju, and with perhaps an eye to China’s ever-growing foreign markets, have produced glossy, flamboyant period pieces that are nearly as foreign to domestic audiences as they are to those who flock to them in the West. This vacuum in art cinema has been filled by a new generation of directors who have focused their lens on daily life in a country that is marked by upheaval and perpetual social change stemming from breakneck economic development. The name that has received the most recognition as of late is Jia Zhangke, director of Unknown Pleasures, Platform and The World. His most recent feature length production, Still Life, has taken him from the margins of obscurity into the fold of world cinema, for which he received the 2006 Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival.

Shunning any form of adornment, Jia’s films focus on the daily lives of ordinary people in some of the most underdeveloped regions of China. In Platform, a performance troupe-turned-rock band tours the back towns of north central China, finally ending up in the same place they started. The World follows the daily routines of migrant workers at an ambitious theme park in Beijing, where famous global landmarks are recreated in miniature form for Chinese tourists. Every film captures the mundane life of those people absorbed in a country changing by the minute, but held just outside the benefits which are purported to follow--an endless waiting for something new or something better. Jia’s films unfold slowly with a deliberate pacing similar to Abbas Kiarostami or Hou Hsiao-hsien, marked by understated gestures and austerity, a far cry from Hero or Curse of the Golden Flowers.

Still Life makes its setting in a small town on the Hubei/Sichuan border, currently under destruction for the massive Three Gorges Dam project, which will bring cleaner energy to thousands more Chinese citizens, but has in the process destroyed innumerable local ecosystems and cultural landmarks, uprooting hundreds, if not thousands, of local residents, the subject of a recent documentary Up the Yangtze.



The film opens with the return home of one of the two main characters, Han Sanming, hailing a motor-taxi to his old address, only to find it completely submerged below water. He proceeds to find work with a local demolition crew as he searches for his estranged wife and tries in vain to re-establish contact with his daughter, whom he has not seen for 16 years. Wandering amid the rubble and chaos is the film’s other protagonist, Shen Hong, who is also looking for her spouse, who has been incommunicado for quite some time. Even in the same town, the two’s paths never cross, and when they finally accomplish their missions, the results are anticlimactic at best. In the meantime, they form ephemeral relationships with others amid the disarray that surrounds them.

People wander in and out of scenes as in a Fellini film: a young teenager singing saccharine love songs, a lackluster proprietor of a small prostitution ring, a civil engineer showing off his elaborate light display to a group of businessmen. All the while, there is the noise of sweaty demolition workers toiling in the humid haze amid fumigators and crews marking new buildings for destruction or projecting stages of future water level rises.

The scenes that unfold, less like a movie than the titular style of painting, show a section of society crushed under the boot of so-called progress. Air conditioning here is either absent or useless in the sticky climes of southern China. The music emanating from old radios and television sets is from decades past. When not repetitively hacking away with sledgehammers, barely-clad men sit in idle groups, mechanically wiping sweat from their faces. There seems to be such a tacit acceptance of the tumult that has marked their otherwise monotonous existence, that no one seems to notice, or care, when a flying saucer wobbles in over the mountains and then exits as nonchalantly as it came, or when a building inexplicably rockets itself off into the hazy skyline. In a world coming slowly undone, these are minor details to be observed, and then discarded, before moving on to the next routine task.

But it would be too easy to attribute some air of condemnation originating from Jia’s projects. He never appears to be pointing the finger, or making a value judgment in his films. He merely documents what he sees around him, and does so to aesthetically stunning effect. The subjects and themes may speak to the viewer in any number of ways, but they are, after all, just daily life in a country whose citizens make up over one third of the world’s population.

Pronunciation and Language Facts

If you are interested, I've put together this guide for reading names in the languages that will be coming up most often, namely Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. As others may become relevant, I plan to add them when the need arises. (Here's to hoping, though probably in vain, I never have to add Tibetan.) There is some basic jargon from linguistics that the uninitiated can skim over.

--Chinese--

**Mandarin**

Mandarin is written with an ideographic character system that is ideal for the morphology of the language. Since each syllable in Chinese is a morpheme (i.e. it has some sort of semantic value), and words are generally composed of one or two syllables (that is, single morphemes or compound words), it makes sense that each syllable would be represented by a unique character that stands for the meaning of the morpheme, and sometimes represents the sound as well. This is how so many different languages can be referred to as dialects, since they historically share the same writing system, each reader reading the characters with the pronunciation from their native dialect. (In modern times everyone studies Mandarin from elementary school, so it is just as likely they will read in the standard language used in media and taught in the classroom.)

Among East Asian languages, Mandarin has one of the more standardized transcriptions into Roman orthography, called Pinyin. The following is a guide to its pronunciation. Though Mandarin is a tonal language (i.e. every syllable has a distinct pitch--one of four available--that distinguishes it from another syllable with same string of consonants and vowels but a different pitch), and Pinyin orthography does represent tones with diacritics, these tonal indicators are never used in movie or author names, and need not concern anyone on this blog. You will not sound Chinese without using tone, but it takes a great deal of time to master the system. Read on, grasshopper.

The following consonants are basically the same as English. Technically, [b, d, g] are the same as the 'p, t, k' in the English words "spool, stool, and skill", since Mandarin contrasts for aspiration and not voicing. However, you can read them as 'b, d, g' (boy, dude, gimp)and probably get by better, as English has long VOTs on obstruent consonants. Also, [d, t, n, l, s]are pronounced with the tip of the tongue touching the teeth, rather than the alveolar ridge as in English, but this is not a very noticeable difference.

Same as English:
b, p, m, f, d, t, n, l, s

Almost the same as English:
h: technically this is the sound of "ch" in German 'Bach', but it tends to be less emphatic impressionistically. A slightly breathier English [h] will do.

ch & sh: you can pronounce these the same as English and get by fine as well, but there is a slight difference in that Mandarin speakers curl the tip of the tongue back (i.e. retroflex) slightly, whereas English speakers do not. (Phoneticians claim these sounds are not true retroflexes, as in Indian languages, because the sound is still produced with the blade of the tongue.)

r: This is fairly similar too, which is nice because it is such a rare sound in world languages. However, the main difference is that English speakers round their lips when pronouncing [r], while Mandarin speakers do not. Also, impressionistically, there seems to be more friction than in English.

y: The easiest way to deal with this is to treat it as a less tense version of English "y". In the syllable "yi", it is hardly even there, as in Zhang Ziyi. In the syllable "yuan", or anytime preceding a [u], it is produced the same, but with the lips rounded.

w: The same applies as with "y". It is a slightly less tense counterpart to English "w", and is gone entirely before [u] (read "oo"), though [u] is farther back in the mouth than in English.

Not the same as English:
zh: This is NOT the sound of French 'Je t'aime' or Russian 'Zhivago', and I hate it when people pronounce as such, assuming it is exotic enough to get the [Ʒ] treatment. If you pronounce it as an English "j", as in 'Joe', you will sound just fine. The same applies to this sound, however, as "sh" and "ch" above.

j, q, x: These sounds are more or less the same as English "j", "ch", and "sh", respectively. The difference is that the front of the tongue is raised slightly, which gives the impression of a hissing sound when articulated. To distinguish from "zh", "ch", "sh" above, just produce more air when pronouncing. (For the record, the IPA transcriptions would be [tɕ,tɕh, ɕ], respectively.)

z, c: The z, as in Zhang Ziyi (note the difference between zh and z), is like the "z" in English 'pizza', or the last sound in the word 'fads'. That is, it an affricate rather than a fricative. The c, as in the family names Cao or Cai, is the same as the sound at the end of the word 'cats' or the Slavic c, as in 'Gorecki'. It is an affricate as well. Just pretend there is an unwritten t before each letter.

Mandarin vowels are not as easy to give a straightforward account of, as they change their pronunciation depending on the adjacent sounds. I will not attempt to cover them all, but only point a few guidelines. See the link below for a fuller explanation.

u: Ordinarily, this is [u], slightly more back in the mouth than English [u] (read "oo"). However, after the letters j, q, or x, the pronunciation becomes IPA [y], which is the same as French "u" or German "ü". To make this sound (which English speakers find snobby), simply hold the vowel [i] (as in "bee", "scene", "thing"), then round your lips. This letter exists independently in Pinyin as ü, but is written without the umlaut when it is predictable from the environment just mentioned, i.e. after j, q, or x.

ou: This rhymes with the English words "toe", "go" and "show".

ai: This rhymes with the English words "eye", "my", "sigh".

ei: This rhymes with the English words "hey", "way", "say".

e: If this is the last sound in a syllable it is [ɤ], best approximated as 'uh', except after "i" or "y", where it is [ɛ], approximated as 'eh'.

Most other vowel combinations, you should be fine with. The only exception is the "i" in the syllables "zi", "si", "ci", and "zhi", "chi", "shi", which would be too hard to explain here. Allow me to say that these syllables essentially have no vowel, rather you pronounce the initial consonant and a sharp, short sound similar to "uh", but unrounded.

One final note. Mandarin syllables can only end in two consonants (if you don't count glides--we won't), [n] and [ng]. However, the historical tendency seems to be moving towards nasalized vowels (as in Portuguese or French). At this stage of Mandarin's development they are still more like consonants, but the tongue does not make complete closure of the airflow through the mouth as in English. When pronouncing a Chinese syllable ending in one of these nasal consonants, end it without your tongue entirely touching the area it normally would, as in an approximant.

One more final note: Pinyin is not used in Taiwan, Hong Kong (where they mostly speak Cantonese anyway), or Singapore. The second most common system is the Wade-Giles romanization. For a comparison of different transliterations see the following page: Romanization Comparisons The most important points to know are:

hs: This combination, as in the director Hou Hsiao hsien, is the same as Pinyin x.

Pinyin j, q, zh, ch: These are written ch, ch', ch, ch', respectively. The only way to differentiate is that the first two always precede the vowel [i], whereas the latter two never occur before this vowel.

Pinyin b, p, d, t, g, k, z, c: These are written (more accurately) as p, p', t, t', k, k', ts, ts'.


**Cantonese**

For the most part, you can leech off your above knowledge of Chinese sounds to bumble your way through Cantonese. (Cantonese is the second most common dialect outside of China, though from a linguistic perspective it is not a Chinese "dialect" at all: It is about as different from Mandarin as Romanian is from Spanish.) Here are a few pointers for the words and names that originate from Hong Kong (for our purposes, the main area where it is spoken):

ng: This sound, the sound at the end of English "sing" or "lung", can't begin a syllable in English (or Mandarin, there it has historically become a [w]), but it can in Cantonese, where it is written simply as Ng when read with an [u] (pronounced 'oo', but more back in the mouth). This can be tricky for Westerners, but one thing to keep in mind is that the "g" is mostly gone, so be sure not to pronounce a complete stop.

h at the end of a syllable: This is not a real [h], but rather an indicator that the tone is of a low, rather than high, register. (Between the two registers, Cantonese has six tones, versus Mandarin's four.)

vowels: Well, you're pretty much on your own. Cantonese has 11 vowels, most of which can be long or short in duration (see Japanese below), plus 11 diphthongs, many of which can also contrast as long or short. I won't even try. Just let me give the following important fact: Stephen Chow's name, which in Mandarin would be Stephen Zhou, does not rhyme with English "cow". Pronounce this as if it were Stephen Joe, and you will not sound so dumb.


--Korean--

Korean is a non-tonal, polysyllabic (not every syllable has a meaning) language that uses, since the 14th century, an alphabet, which differs from English only in that syllables are written together in squares, thus the blocky nature of Korean writing, known as han'gul.
Korean consonants are as follows:

same as English:
p, b, t, d, k, g, s, ch, j, h (usually silent), n, m, ng

not the same as English:
l & r: In terms of mental representations, these are the same sound (i.e. phoneme) in Korean. However, unlike Japanese, the two are differentiated. "l" occurs at the end of a syllable and at the beginning of a syllable that follows a syllable ending in "l". When you see "l", go ahead and read it as "l".
The "r", however, is NOT like English (or Mandarin) "r". It is like the sound in the middle of the (American) English words "batter", "fatter", "bitter", "cooter". (Wink.) This is known as a flap, and is the most common rendering of this letter in world languages, next to, perhaps, a trill.

y and family names: See the note on Mandarin "y" above. Basically this sound has less tension than English. Here's a note for you: The Korean name Yi 이 (sometimes written as Li/Lee because Korean used to use Chinese characters and Li was the reading of the Chinese character in Chinese) is pronounced "ee". Just ignore that first consonant. While we're on it, the family name "Park" 박 is not pronounced with an "r", either. The "r" was inserted to help British people pronounce Korean, and as we all know, Brits down pronounce "r" in this environment.

There's no non-technical way to put this, but Korean obstruents (the first eight sounds above) have a three-way contrast, where English only has two (Korean s also only has two). In English the vocal chords are either vibrating or they are not (an effect called voicing); in Korean, it is the distance between the vocal chords that matters (they also vibrate between vowels, but this is non-contrastive). This has led to a variety of romanizations, especially at the beginning of the word, but I will transliterate from the letter used in the Korean alphabet to its context-free equivalent in English:
p: The same as the English [p] in "spool", "spike", "spa".
ph: The same as the English [p] in "pool", "pike", "pot". (Yes, they are different.)
p': More or less the same as the [p] in English "top", "rap", "keep", but with more tension.
t: The same as the English [t] in "stool", "stack", "store".
th: The same as the English [t] in "tool", "tack", "tore".
t': More or less the same as the [t] in English "bat", "coat", "heat", but with more tension.
k: The same as the English [k] in "skin", "sky", "skate".
kh: The same as the English [k] in "kin", "kite", "Kate".
k': More or less the same as the [k] sound in English "packet", "occult" and "accent", but with more tension.
As for the Korean letters ㅈ, ㅊ, ㅈㅈ I will use ch, ch', cch until I figure a better way.

Korean vowels are not so bad, although the back vowels, viz. [a, o, u] are further back and more "pure" than English vowels. What will give you trouble? Two vowel sounds English basically lacks:

eu/ŭ 으: Sometimes written as "u", which makes it indistinguishable from the next vowel, this is basically an [u] (read as "oo") with the lips spread instead of rounded. It is also like the sound in the second syllable of the natural English pronunciation of "Athens". (Say it in the middle of a sentence to make sure you don't do anything weird while thinking about it.

eo/ŏ 어: This is an oddball. If you are a speaker who pronounces "caught" and "cot" differently, this is basically the same as the vowel in "caught", but with the lips spread, rather than rounded. If you don't differentiate these two words, you're gonna need a Korean. This vowel is often confused with Korean [o] or [a]. Good luck with it.

All other Korean vowels can probably be recovered by relying on the spelling in English.

ae 애: This is the vowel in English "cat", "sag", "bat".

e 에: This is the vowel in English "cake", "late", "ape".

For a more thorough explanation of Korean letters in IPA transcriptions see the following link: Korean pronunciation

Here are just a few more notes that the astute observer may wish to follow:

Korean stops are unreleased at the end of a syllable. They also lose all laryngeal features, so t', th, and t are all pronounces as [t] at the end of a syllable. Also, the consonants h, ch, ch', cch, s, and s' are pronounced as [t] as well.

Korean syllables exhibit liason. So a consonant ending a syllable will realign to
the next syllable, even if that syllable begins with "h". ("h" ㅎ is usually not pronounced in Korean.) This will mean that phonological rules, like the l & r rule and the syllable-final rule mentioned above, will shift. A Korean syllable ending in an "l", will realign to a following syllable that begins with "h" or a vowel and then be pronounced as a flap.

Nasals ending a syllable will assimilate in place to the following consonant if there is one.

Stops will assimilate to their nasal counterparts if the next syllable begins with a nasal. So in the word /hankukmal/ 한국말 the pronunciation is [hanggungmal].


--Japanese--

Japanese is the nicest to Western tongues and ears, in that it is mostly read with the Latin values of the letters you see. It is a polysyllabic, nontonal language like Korean, that uses a combination of ideographic Chinese characters (kanji), two separate syllabic scripts (collectively called "kana", one character gives the pronunciation of an entire syllable), and the sometime roman lettering (romaji).
The consonants are the same as what you get in English, with the following exceptions:

sh, j: These sounds, to me at least, sound more like Mandarin "x" and "j" than their English counterparts, but I don't speak Japanese. One key difference is that "sh" and "j" are pronounced in English with slight rounding of the lips that is absent in Japanese.

ts, dz, z: This can begin a syllable, just like the Mandarin "c", whereas in English it cannot. This is the sound at the end of English "cats". This sound, and its voiced counterpart dz, are often written as simply [t] or [d] because they only precede the vowel [u]. Consider the alternate spellings of "aduki/adzuki beans". Furthermore, for many dz is simply pronounced as z.

r: This is somewhat like the Korean "r" described above, but it varies quite a bit from speaker to speaker. It has been described in various ways, but I will call it a retroflex flap. Like the sound in the middle of the English words "butter", "batter", "cutter", but with the tongue curled back somewhat. It variously sounds like an English "l", "t", or "n". Listen to a speaker say "Domo arigato" for clarification.

f: This sound is commonly not considered part of the Japanese sound system because it only occurs beside certain vowels. Actually, it is different than the English [f] in that the lower lip does not touch the teeth (IPA ɸ). Essentially, anywhere a [h] would proceed [u], you get this sound, which to some listeners sounds more like an [h] anyway. When [h] would precede an [i], you get something like the sound at the end of German 'ich', or the sound at the beginning of English "hue" or "huge" in casual speech, i.e. IPA [ç] (NOT equivalent to the French cedilla).

Japanese has what are called geminate consonants. This means you hold the consonant for twice the duration of a singleton consonant. Certain words are differentiated just by this effect. You can also think of this as a syllable ending in a consonant and beginning in the same consonant (since otherwise Japanese syllables must end in a vowel.....or homorganic nasal, but ignore that). Geminate consonants are usually just written as two of the same consonant in a row.

It is different with vowel length. The same thing applies: a vowel held for twice as long as a short vowel can change a word (e.g. 'hodo' means "extent", 'hodō' means "sidewalk), but convention varies between adding a macron over the vowel (as I have done), or writing the vowel twice, as in 'shiitake'. I will defer to the macron unless a name is commonly transliterated otherwise.

Otherwise, vowels are read as their latinate counterparts. One possible exception is that Japanese [u] is commonly pronounces without lip rounding, making it similar to Korean "eu". Also, high vowels ([i] and [u]) devoice between voiceless consonants, so a high vowel between, say, the letter "s" and "k", will sound as if it is not even there. Spooky.

One final note on prosody. Japanese does not use a stress-based system like English, rather it uses a lexically-determined pitch-accent system, where the voice rises in pitch rather than volume on one syllable of the word. This means for Westerners that some attempt should be made to pronounce words as if every syllable received equal stress (a very simplified, but useful view). A very noticeable example is the word "yakuza" ヤクザ, which some English speakers unknowingly pronounce with a prominent "cooze" in the middle, with the two a's pronounced as schwa. This annoys me. Act as if the stress is on the first syllable, and reduce no vowels: YAkoozah.

For a more complete picture, see the wikipedia page on Japanese phonology.

You can trust that I did not take the time to proofread this, nor am I an expert on Japanese pronunciation. Any errors pointed out will be greatly appreciated.

Why I Blog (and What)

I am starting this blog a month after receiving my Master’s degree in Linguistics. Since I will be out of school for the foreseeable future, I figure I needed some exercise to keep myself writing, as well as to upkeep and organize research. While it would be tempting (and easy) to keep a blog on linguistics issues, I am not doing so for a few reasons. One, no one would read it. I’ve tried this before and people tend to drop out once they have to commit terms to memory. (No fault of their own; people lead busy lives.) As most topics require a good deal of background information, I don’t want to go this route. Blogs that do deal with linguistic issues will either keep the lecturing below a paragraph or two, or simply be written for my own edification, with little thought to the befuddled reader. Another reason is that I’m no longer digging the whole Linguistics scene anyway. I dearly love studying languages, burying myself in data from across the globe, but the bigger questions most (successful) linguists are working to answer (how do we learn and store language, what would a model of this cognitive system look like, how much can it vary (or remain the same) throughout the world’s languages) are of little interest to me.

However, I did want this blog to have a more or less unified theme. Partly because I am giving myself weekly assignments to write about, simply as an exercise not to fall out of practice, and also because narrowing down the possibilities is the only way to keep myself involved. But also it just makes more sense than a random smattering of my own narcissistic impulses.

Therefore I chose to make this a blog on all things East Asian, from language to art (mostly in the form of movie or music reviews) to the infrequent political reflection, and whatever else may come up along the way. One thing I am considering in the nebulous future is a Phd in Asian Studies, and this may be my first step in that crossover from the soft science of Linguistics to the airy humanities of “Cultural Studies”.

Within that context, all things are on the table. I am much more interested in 20^th century East Asia than other eras, but everything is fair game. It is certainly not my intention to focus more attention on experimental/avant-garde art forms, but a mental list of possible topics looks like it may turn out this way. All the same, don’t be surprised to find a blog about a Kim Kiduk film, followed by Bashō, followed by Can Xue, then Akira Kurosawa.

I’m no fan of my own writing. I am wordy. I rattle on. I am prone to grandstanding. I thought about making this blog private, and then figured, what the hell, just use a pseudonym. While some proofreading and revising at a later date is not out of the picture (yeah, right), I am making it a rule to never delete a post. So consider it my disclaimer here: though I may finish a blog with a grin on my face and a pat on my shoulder, the next day I will surely be slightly nauseous to read back over what I’ve written. But then someone once told me that self-deprecation is the ultimate form of flattery.

I hope not. Thanks for reading.