私は日本のお化けは怖くないのですが、日本人形は怖いものです。そんな目をした人形はおもちゃらしくないです。普段は日本文化や歴史が面白いのですが、全然分かられないこともあります。このような目をした気味悪いものが、純粋な若い娘に与える習慣はいじめに近いように思えるのです。

私がアメリカで子供時代を過ごしていた頃、お化け屋敷に行ったり、怪談を聞いたりするのが怖いのも半面、面白いのも半面でした。

日本では夏になると怪談話がよく語られますが、私にはそれらがあまり怖いとは思えません。実は、カッパは怖いというよりも、むしろ可愛いと思えるのです。それに、日本人は西洋のお化けのことや怪談話を聞いても怖がらないと言います。

子供のときから培われた、それぞれの「畏怖」に対するイメージは大人になってもそれぞれのバックグランドにより、違ってくるのでしょう。

亜未はティキが嫌いだから、ティキが一匹しかいない。

一匹ティキは寂しいティキだ。

寂しいティキは悲しいティキだ。

猫について、日本語の慣用句は思った以上に多いです。慣用句を読むと、日本人は猫が一匹狼的な振る舞いをするところや、賢いところや、女性的なイメージを受けているように思えます。たしかに、そう言う動物かもしれませんが、たまに分かりにくい文章になります。例えば、「亜未が犬を猫かわいがる」と言うのは文章としておかしいと思います。

と言う表現は良く言われますが、間違いのように思います。

特に私が独身時代は、冷蔵庫の残り物には、福があるようなことはありませんでした。むしろ危険でした。毛むくじゃらなアボガトや茶色くなったトマトなどは幸運を運ぶものとは言えないと思います。

ただし、枝豆は放っておけば、結局納豆になっていくので、この慣用句は和食に当てはまるのかもしれません。

日本人の友達は私の日本語より英語がわかりやすいと思いますけど、今日からはブログを日本語で書くようにします。

私は２０年以上、日本に住んでいます。来年、日本にいる期間が海外にいる期間よりも長くなります。その２０年間で、日本人の友達や会社の上司や部下もいました。また、一昨年からは結婚して、日本人の妻もいます。日本語で披露宴のスピーチをしたり、ラジオでインタビューも受けました。

日本で気楽に生活をしていましたが、日本語が上達していません。実際に２０年間も日本に住んでいるのに、いまだに中学校レベルの日本語しか話せないのは恥ずかしいです。

毎日、日本語能力試験２級に向けて勉強しているので、日本語でブログを始めます。
日本人の友達が、日本語の間違いを指摘してくれたら、徐々に日本語が上達して、２級合格もあり得るかもしません。

よろしく御願いします。

Playing Twister with Japanese girls is hopeless if you are actually trying to win. The flexibility gap is insurmountable.

India is mad for cricket. Service in restaurants stops while the game is on and then resumes in a flurry of arms, silverware and steaming dishes during the commercials. Years ago, I spent what was probably the most confusing three hours of my life at a cricket match, and watching it on Indian TV was no more illuminating.

It would not be so bad if my companions would simply leave me in my blissful ignorance, but they always feel the need to explain the game to me, which makes the confusion much, much worse.

In much the same way the cricket looks a lot like baseball, but has almost nothing in common with the sport. Cricket is explained in language that sounds like English, but bears little relation to the language. Bowlers and batsmen are fine sensible terms, but googly golden ducks and sticky wickets are simply not English.

Before I moved to Japan, I assumed that two-year-olds were unaware of things like race. I soon discovered that they are. I occasionally pass by a Japanese mother trying to soothe her screaming, crying child to have the toddler suddenly fall silent and stare at me with open mouth and pealed eyes.

On the flight to India there was woman sitting across the aisle holding a baby who had been screaming incessantly for ten minutes. When she shifted her daughter to her other shoulder, the little girl looked at me agape, smiled and pointed, and thankfully she stopped crying and everyone around could relax. I told the mother how cute her little girl was, leaned my seat back and closed my eyes for sleep.

Then, for the next hour the woman and her husband tried to turn the girl so she was facing the other way. Each time they did, she would begin to scream and squirm until she was resting with her head in a position where she could see across the aisle. Husband and wife then changed seats so the wife and daughter were by the window where the girl eventually cried herself out after another 30 minutes or so.

Strangest thing.

I realize that people are just trying to be friendly, but I hate answering that question. The fact is, I don’t know. I don’t know how anyone can get a handle on what this country is all about.

India is one of the fastest growing economies on Earth, but the new skyscrapers exist next to abject poverty.

India gave us such incredible thinkers the Buddha and Gandhi and Indians are rightfully proud of that legacy, but the country is still cursed with tremendous discrimination and suffering.

The people I get into conversations with are evenly split between those trying to aggressively cheat me and genuinely warm and friendly individuals.

I don’t mean this as praise or criticism. You have to understand something before you can praise or criticize it. It’s just how I see it, and it’s the reason I feel idiotic when I have to answer the question with the insipid “It’s very nice.”

Killing a few hours in Bangkok before my flight to Delhi. Angkor Wat was amazing; beyond what I had expected. Cambodia itself has problems, but in many ways it reminds me of Thailand 20 years ago. I hope they do as well.

It always turns out the only time I can take a lengthy vacation is between engagements. So now that I have the chance, I’m off to Cambodia and India. Places I’ve been meaning to get to for years, but never got around to it.

In addition to lengthy online surveys, bayesian algorithms, mutual compatibility profiles, there is now genetic matching to help boy meet girl. Gene Partner claims that true love (or at least a piece of the online dating market) can be found in DNA sequences.

I’m planning a trip to Cambodia and India next month, and I expected that being able to use the internet to, for example, choose a hotel in Delhi would be simpler that the old way in which you either booked a famous high-end place or just showed up and took your chances.

It’s not.

I don’t really need or want to look at the 200 hotels that are available and read dozens of reviews (many of them obviously planted) for each place.

In his recent book, Jason Zweig explained that after a certain point investors with access to more information tend to underperform investors with less info to work with. I am beginning to understand why.

The Japanese have the right idea about Valentines day. Much better to have the girls buy chocolates for the guys.

This is the last of my posts about my 2010 goals. I’m hoping my friends will help encourage me and hold me accountable.

Area Three: Music
I what now seems like another life, I was a professional musician. It was without question the hardest, most time-consuming, and lowest-paying job I ever had, and I had a love-hate relationship with it. I loved the music, and hated the profession. I don’t care it I never working in that business again, but over the past few years, I have not been spending much time on my music, and thats not good.

In fact, that gap between my abilities then and now is so large it can get really frustrating when I start up again. So some simple, modest goals that I’ll enjoy.

By the End of 2010 I will:

• Learn at least 60 popular songs
• Sing on stage at least twice
• Agree to go to karaoke when my friends ask
• Practice until I can recognize all chords and intervals again

This probably won’t be that big of an issue in the news because the networks won’t be able to put a red-blue spin on it. It’s bad for American democracy as a whole.

The legal fiction of corporate personhood keeps getting stretched farther and farther. Yesterday the Supreme Court overturned several precedents and ruled part of the 2002 campaign finance reform law to be unconstitutional saying that corporations have the same free speech rights as actual people, and as such the government can not place any restrictions on corporations and labor unions spending money from of their general funds to support of specific candidates.

Companies are not people. They can’t be found guilty of a crime, have no emotions or social connections and don’t fear punishment or ostracism. That’s not criticism of companies. It’s just a fact. They are not people and should not be treated as such.

Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned; they therefore do as they like.
— Edward Thurlow

I’m continuing to post about my 2010 goals hoping my friends will help encourage and hold me accountable.

Area Two: Japanese
I’ve been living in Japan for over 20 years. Twenty long, stinking, painful years. No, seriously only about three of those years were long stinking and painful. The rest ranged from “same as the old year” to unbelievably challenging and fun. I’ve married into a Japanese family, served on the board of a public Japanese firm, negotiated the sale of a company, given countless of business presentations, three hiroen speeches and not a few public presentations; all in Japanese. But you know what? As far as I’m concerned my Japanese stinks. I must be getting my point across using some combination of facial expressions, hand gestures and telepathy, because I lot of the time even I don’t know what I just said. That changes starting now.

There are three areas of my life that I plan on improving in 2010. My goals are modest when I look at them individually, but achieving all of them would make life at the end of 2010 a bit better than it is at the start of it. I’m putting my goals up here on my blog in the hope that my friends will hold me accountable vie encouragement, gentle prodding, shame, mental abuse or swift and blinding violence as they deem appropriate.

Area One: Health
I don’t think I ever fully recovered from the trauma of my seventh grade gym class. You see, I was a fat kid (not chubby mind you, but 30-inch-inseam and a very tight 36-inch-waist rotund) and had a crew-cut sporting gym teacher with a who liked to call us fat kids “jellybeans” and make snarky remarks when it was our turn at the chin-up bar. Even though I eventually dropped the weight and got pretty good at baseball and the martial arts, I (shamefully) never managed to do more than three chin-ups.

Truth be told, last year was supposed to be my get in shape year, but things didn’t work out. A nasty back injury led to a knee injury, which shut down all exercise for much of the year. Thankfully, yoga and stretching averted the surgery my doctor suggested, but 2009 was a step backwards in health. This year is going to be different.

By the end of 2010 I will:

• be able to do 10 perfect pull-ups
• run 5k in under 30 minutes
• have a 90 cm waist as measured across the belly-button
• do a downward dog with my heels on the floor

It’s wonderful to watch a nation try to create an ideal government. Bhutan is in the process of creating one in which the government is held accountable based on the happiness of its people.

To make this work the Bhutanese came up with a way to mathematically quantify happiness both on the individual and national level, and to have an objective measure of to what degree specific government policies increase or decrease the happiness of the people.

Part of this involves a 300 question questionnaire, which most people were quite happy to fill out. Questions about the degree to which people feel safe from spirit and ghost attacks struck me as silly at first, but the fact is that people do feel less happy when they are worried about being attacked by a ghost.

Amazing and inspiring stuff.