Technology in Japan

I think when people go to Japan they assume everything is going to be all futuristically technologized, with robots running around everywhere and automated kitchens and everything is voice-operated and stuff. That doesn't seem to be the case. In fact, it seems the opposite is true.

My first real inkling of this thing was the classrooms at school. Although some classrooms are equipped with projectors mounted on the ceilings and most have ethernet ports and TVs with DVD players, that's about as much technology as you get. The TVs also have actual VCRs hooked up to them. And the strangest thing is that every classroom I've seen, with the exception of the three computer labs and a few classrooms in the new building, have old-fashioned chalkboards, with CHALK and CORDUROY ERASERS. I was like wtf? Even stranger is that they advanced the technology of this antiquated tool by making electric eraser cleaners. There are these plastic machines with a shallow basin that you put the eraser in, and there are a couple small slits in the basin. When you turn the machine on, it works like a vacuum, and as you rub the eraser back and forth, the chalk dust gets sucked into the machine, cleaning the thing off. It's ridiculous, although it beats clapping them together, like in the old days.

I managed to get a picture of one:

When I told some of my students that chalkboards went out in the States like twenty years ago, they were quite surprised. I guess it's normal for schools to never have replaced chalkboards with whiteboards, and especially nothing as modern as like a Smart Board or whatever they're releasing lately.

Another crazy thing at school is that the supply room next to my office has this cabinet full of VHS tapes. They've kept them around for years, decades, which I guess is defensible if they've still got VCRs and they work, but there's only ONE DVD, and get this, there are are least TWO beta tapes in there. As if. The library is also full of VHS tapes, although previous foreign teachers have requested the library to order DVD copies of movies they want, so there's now a fair collection of modern media.

Something I just learned recently, from this article (http://japandailypress.com/japans-fax-fixation-113935) is that over half of Japanese homes still have a fax machine--that they actually use. Apparently because of reasons like Japanese language having three types of writing, one of which has thousands of symbols, and high cost of high-speed internet being typically high, fax machines provide a quicker, simpler solution to some of the issues that everyone else uses computers for.

I tried to find out how many Japanese homes have a computer, but it looks like more work than I'm willing to put in to find out. A map-making website listed the top ten PC-owning countries from 2003-04, with Japan at number two, with about 62 million computer users (halfish), but that's pretty old data. There are several articles to be found that say that PCs are being ousted by cell phones, high-tech TVs, cameras that connect directly to printers, etc. There's less use for them here now.

The one thing that seems both advanced and common, though, is cell phones, and this could be a big reason people think Japan actually keeps some of its own technology, instead of just exporting it all. Here, 3G on phones is the bare minimum, and from what I can tell, people use their phones (keitais) for internet more often than computers. They've all got touch screens and cameras and apps and some have GPS, and blah blah blah. It's nothing that we don't have back home, but it's just that what we tend to think is a bit higher end is the standard here, although they pay just as much, or more. When I tell people I don't have a cell phone yet (because I haven't had anyone to call yet and I don't want to waste my money), they go into shock.

It's not to say that technology doesn't actually exist here, though, even excepting keitais. Even the above article about the fax machine says there are two Japans: one old-fashioned and the other super slick and futuristic. I live in what Asia considers to be a small city (about 650k), so this isn't Tokyo. Plenty of people have tablets and iPods and so forth, but stuff like that isn't ubiquitous around here. The Kindle will soon be released here, as I read in the paper recently. I showed my Kindle to one of my students last week, when she said she didn't know what one was, and it was like being on Star Trek and encountering some primitive culture who had no idea what a data pad was. She looked at this thing (and it's only the $79 version) and watched me pull up text from a book and turn the pages, and she was like amazed, man. Last night I showed her and another student (these two often come to my room to ask questions about English newspaper articles) my iPad, and I let them play Fruit Ninja on it. It was the best thing in the world. They were barely cognizant of this kind of device. They also jumped on the notion of the camera and decided we must take a picture immediately, because in Japan, everything is a photo op.

Anyway, I don't have the whole picture here, but this is what it's all seeming like to me so far. I may have more insightful insight later on in my stay.

Vending Machines

In Japan, or at least in Kagoshima, there is a vending machine about every five feet. They're outside convenience stores, apartment buildings, offices, and pretty much every type of building as far as I can see, as well as by bus stops and other places where people gather, and in just miscellaneous spots alongside the street. I think there's like one per capita.

Drinks you can get from vending machines include things like water, sodas of various sorts, juices and juice-like drinks, and coffees and teas of various sorts, as one would expect.

I like the Suntory Boss Coffee vending machines because their slogan is "Suntory Boss is the boss of them all since 1992." Also, Tommy Lee Jones is the spokesperson, and you can see him on the machines. Ha ha.

But you can also get beer from vending machines here. This is an Asahi beer vending machine that I pass when I go to town every weekend.

And they also still have cigarette vending machines, which is also kind of strange. Apparently you need a special 18+ ID card to swipe on the cigarette machines, and I think the drinking age here is 20, so I imagine you need a 20+ ID card for the beer ones. But how hard is it to yoink dad's card? Whatever, though. I'm sure underage consumption is not a major problem here.

Vending machines here seem to mostly be for drinks. I haven't seen any kinds with what we have in them back home, like chips, candy bars, cookies, and crackers, although they do have ice cream vending machines and I think they do have ones with mainly candy items.

I have only bought like two items from a vending machine here, because as with vending machines anywhere else, it's kind of expensive.

Japanese Money

As you probably know, the Japanese unit of currency is the yen. In Japanese, it's pronounced "en," and, if I'm understanding Wikipedia correctly, we can blame the Portuguese, the Dutch, and a couple of lazy lexicographers named Walter Henry Medhurst and James Curtis Hepburn for the discrepancy. The Japanese used to pronounce in "yen" hundreds of years ago, but the language had since evolved when the first Japanese/foreign language dictionaries were published, and no one bothered to check. Also, "en" means "round thing," which is also what "won" means in Korean, which I knew, but I didn't really put it together with "coin" when I was over there.

Anyway.

The other day I learned from my Kindle version of the Oxford English Dictionary that the yen used to be divided into 100 sens, which I find very odd, since "sen" means 1000 in Japanese. But I learned in Wikipedia that 1/1000 of a yen used to be a rin. Both these denominations were taken out of circulation in 1953, though, and now it's only the yen.

Here are some pictures of my Japanese monies. The bills are funny because they have a semi-empty oval in the middle (there's a watermark portrait), which says to me "Your face here."

 Nice hair.

 

By the way, there's also a ¥2000 bill, and I got like three of them from Bank of American when I exchanged money before I came over here, but I didn't take a picture. As I later found out, this denomination is actually somewhat rare, though perhaps not as rare as the American $2 bill, and when I used them, people were quite surprised.

Japanese monies are cool because the coins are all different textures, sizes, and weights, so they're easy to distinguish, even for blind people. The bills are also sized differently, which benefits the blind, and the colors are all different, too. We could learn something from this.

Japanese monies are not cool because the coins go up to such a high value, and the bills only start at a high value, which means I've got to carry around a stupid change purse, a lot of my transactions are solely coin-based, and I also feel slightly nervous about losing valuable change.

Between the early 1990s and the late 2000's, the yen ran at typically around 100 yen per US dollar (sometimes getting up to like 125, though), which made conversion a pretty simple matter. Since the end of '08, though, the yen has been getting stronger in comparison with the dollar, and has been running in the high 70's to low 80's range, which involves slightly more math to convert, but which benefits me greatly. Now when I transfer money home, instead of getting about $4000 for ¥400,000, as I would have a few years ago, I get about $5000. It's totally suite.

But you can see how it's a bit of a concern to have a coin that's worth over six bucks, and not have any paper money worth under twelve bucks. But I guess it's okay. People seem to be pretty patient at the store if I need to carefully count out a dozen coins onto the tray.

The funniest thing ever.

On Saturday at the dorm, the students do this thing called Saturday Night Fever, which was started by a teacher a few years ago. Each night we have announcements at 9:20, but on Saturday, one or two students get to do an announcement of their own. They choose an English-language song, play it over the PA system (as it the custom every night, and also during the insane amount of other announcements they have during the waking hours), and then talk about it, do a little skit, etc. Last week a girl pretended she was a radio DJ and was doing a radio show. This week, two girls decided they wanted to an animal sounds quiz, because animals make different sounds in English and Japanese.

So they come to me to check their grammar and the sounds themselves. The first thing they wrote was

bow wow bow wow
bow wow bow wow

Can you understand? Okay? Colect answer is dog!

Next,

vomit vomit
vomit vomit

This cry is from a flog!

And then I laughed for like an hour and told them what vomit means, and they also laughed a lot. Then I colected the sound to ribbit ribbit, and fixed their grammar and spelling, and we talked about other animals. It was very funny.

I have an update here: I was talking to those girls about frog sounds again, and found out that in fact Japanese flogs do say "vomit vomit." The word for both "vomit" and "ribbit" is "gero," and the electronic dictionaries all these students have probably don't include animal sounds in English, so it assumed "vomit," and that's where the confusion came in. It all comes together now.

In a related English mishap, a girl was eating these tiny dried fish at dinner a couple weeks ago, and these things are very sharp. She wanted to say it was hurting her mouth, but Asians somehow end up learning wicked advanced words before they can master simple sentences like "It hurts," so she said "It's aggressive in my mouth." And I laughed for a very long time at that time, too.

The End.

Sakurajima: A Pain in the Ash

The title pun is from John, a fellow teacher over here. I can take no credit.

"Sakurajima" means "cherry blossom island." It's not an island anymore, though. In 1914 a massive lava eruption connected it to mainland Kyushu on the eastern side (I'm on the west of it). Anyway, the thought of living in the shadow of a severely active volcano is kind of cool. It does have its benefits, like the awesome view I get right onto it and the bay from my fifth floor window. I take a fair amount of pictures. Sakurajima also provides the area with a lot of hot springs, of which I have visited two so far.

However, it's perhaps more trouble than it's worth. This thing spews out ash in eruptions like the one below almost every day, often multiple times in a day. In the summer, when the winds are a-blowin', it sends giant clouds of ash over the city. More on that later.

Recently we had an annular eclipse visible from southern Japan. I was quite excited about it. So I got up at like six in the morning and got ready to see it around seven. But it was a cloudy day. I'm a little off topic here, because it wasn't really the volcano's fault. It just happened to be a really cloudy day, as it often is. Anyway, we had to watch the eclipse on tv. I did take these cool shots of Sakurajima, though.

This is a picture through my windows. That gunk on it is ash. This is what we deal with.

This is also ash, all over my balcony.

This is still the eclipse day, but from the roof of the dorm, a little later in the morning. It's constantly Ghostbusters sky over here.

Anyway, so it's been a record-breakingly ashy season so far. One day a week or two ago, the winds dumped this absolutely massive cloud of ash on the city, and all the cars were black with it. The school was covered.

The clouds of ash look like these dark clouds, so sometimes it's hard to tell if it's weather coming our way, or if the volcano has erupted. Sometimes you can hear a boom and the windows rattle when it does erupt, but not always.

So like at school on my floor is a big roof balcony, and every day teachers and students and staff members (not cleaners, though. We don't have those. More later.) would be out there cleaning this big balcony, and for like three days they'd only get it half done. Then we'd come back the next day and the winds would have blown more ash on the clean half, so they'd do that half again that day. Eventually they wised up (after a lifetime living here, jeez) and spent an extra hour or two to get the whole thing done. But then really it just ends up being covered in ash again the next day. They should call the town Sisyphus instead. HA.

People rely on heavy rains to wash this stuff away, and luckily the rainy season is soon upon us. But when it's not raining, all over the city you see these special yellow bags to put soot in. I don't know what happens to it when the trash man picks it up. If ever.

Last night I went out to eat with some people near the harbor, and when we left the restaurant it was actually snowing ash down on us. It was awful. I had to wear my big sunglasses, even though it was dark out, and put my hands around the top and sides to TRY to prevent ash from flying into my eyes. It hurts when you get ash in your eyes, and then you can't wipe it out, because your hands are filthy with ash, also. I'm considering getting some actual goggles to wear around outside. I had to walk home for like a half hour, but it seemed like forever. It was like being in that desert motorcycle race from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

When I finally got home I felt like about the dirtiest dirty that ever dirtied, although it turned out to not look as bad as it felt.

 I thought about taking pictures of my white sock ash lines, but the camera doesn't pick up so much.

Here's last night's wicked scary lookin' sky.

They say that all the little eruptions are good for releasing the pressure that builds up in there, which makes a major earthquake less likely. I just hope it's not as bad all summer as it has been recently.