Allister & ElleGarden

The concert totally rocked! We were packed in a small livehouse that only holds 300 people. I pushed my way close enough to get a good view while keeping away from the jumpers and crowd surfers. Ellegarden was supposed to be the main show, but I was more looking forward to Allister and wish they had more time. I absolutely love their music - it fills me with energy and my body just starts moving. And I still can't believe they came to Japan and played here of all places!

I was the only non-Japanese person in the crowd and I think the only one who knew any of their songs, which makes sense since they're American and were here as the opening band for Ellegarden. Allister played all the songs I was looking forward to hearing and after they got off stage I was hoping to get a chance to talk with the members, but they didn't come out to mingle in the crowd. Don't get me wrong, I like Ellegarden too, but a lot of their songs sound the same to me so in my opinion Allister is the much better band.

After the concert I went outside to the booths selling shirts and stuff. Everyone was congregated around the Ellegarden section giving me the chance to leisurely check out the Allister merchandise. Then when I looked up it was the bassist standing at the table! It took me off guard. I got so nervous that I couldn't think of anything to say and ended up blubbering a bunch of nonsense that probably made him think I'm some weirdo. I love these guys so much it was like meeting a superstar and my mind just went blank. What I wanted to say was "I absolutely love you guys and can't believe you're here!" but what came out was "You guys are good." He introduced himself as Scott and instead of saying "Nice to meet you" I was busy thinking "I know" and didn't even respond.

I ended up asking him how he learned Japanese (he did all the talking while Allister was on stage - his Japanese is fantastic!). He said after the band came to Japan for the first time four years ago he started studying on his own - must be some kind of language genius. He asked why I'm here and I muttered something about teaching English. I mentioned living in St. Louis and he said he's from Chicago. All in all it wasn't the conversation I wished I'd had and I felt like a dolt. And yes, I know putting them on a pedestal is dumb when they're just humans like you and me, but I really like these guys. And did I mention the lead singer is hot?

After my failure with the bassist I lingered around waiting for the whole band to come out so I could accost them and take a photo with them or something before they got into the van. A half hour of waiting in the cold passed. Ellegarden came out and went straight to their van, then waved to the few of us waiting outside from the van window. That's all? I would have stayed longer for Allister to come out but I had to rush to the train station for the last train back to Beppu. Darn.

Well, if the bassist is studying Japanese they must be planning on having more Japan tours. I just hope they come this far south again!

Tomorrow World in Japan?

After yesterday's entry I got to thinking about how Japan and Korea are suffering from decreasing birth rates. There's all this hubbub about what's going to happen when the current generation retires, like how there won't be enough people putting money into the pension system to support all the retirees (it's already running out of money so pension checks are being reduced and cut).

America's birthrate is decreasing too, but there isn't much of a labor shortage thanks to the influx of immigrants. Japan is pretty xenophobic that way. People who aren't racially Japanese can't become citizens even if they were born and raised here, which seems so weird to me. There are tons of Koreans in this situation - they've spent their entire lives in Japan but aren't recognized as Japanese, and neither are their children nor grandchildren because they're racially Korean. I think the mindset of the people is changing and people are becoming more open to the idea of interracial marriages and having foreigners in their midst, but there's still a long way to go.

So how do you increase the population without accepting immigrants? The government gives monetary bonuses to families when a child is born, and a while back there was a mayor who suggested increasing taxes for single women as a penalty for not having children, which would be completely unthinkable in America (I picture rioting women burning the guy's house down). Call me crazy but I don't think that's going to solve the decreasing population problem. As if people are going to have children for a tax break, especially when educational fees and the cost of living totally outweigh whatever monetary bonus you'd receive.

The population decrease is easy to see in this area . . . schools are closing every year because there aren't enough children to justify a full staff of teachers, and some towns don't even have high schools anymore (the kids commute to neighboring towns). Take the school I work at for instance: ten years ago there were 400 students per grade. Since then the school has had to substantially relax its admission standards (there are some real lugnuts in class) while having a student body of only 160. There's talk about merging with another school across town that's having the same problem. If the two decide to merge there'll be 320 students per grade, but it would only be a temporary solution seeing as the population is steadily decreasing.

How can there be half the number of students in only ten years? It seems this area is additionally suffering from the emigration of people who move to big cities like Tokyo and Osaka to find better jobs, then stay there to raise families. From a teacher's point of view I'd have to support that move; children who live in bigger cities seem to get a better education. I know that sounds like a terrible stereotype, but it seems to be true - almost all of my top students are those that were raised in big cities like Fukuoka or Tokyo, then moved here recently. On the other hand my students on the lower end were all born and raised here. Could just be a coincidence though.

Anyhow I'm curious to see how things turn out. Forty years from now Japan might implode in upon itself from labor shortage. Actually if the ocean levels keep rising there might not even be a Japan in forty years, like the situation with Palau now.

Tomorrow World

The previews looked interesting so I went and saw a movie called "Tomorrow World" (I think it's called "Children of Men" in the States, but I'm not sure). The premise reminded me a lot of one of my favorite books - The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood.

I won't give away anything that can't be discerned from the previews . . . No children have been born in 18 years, and naturally the world has had to change in order to accomodate this unfortunate circumstance. Then a pregnant woman is discovered, and it becomes imperative to keep her hidden from the government while trying to get her out of the country to keep her safe from the chaos. The movie takes place in England and we can see how the country has reacted, but I kept wondering how things came to be this way and how the rest of the world compensated for this change in humanity. I guess the movie itself was well made but I had so many questions that remained unanswered and left without any feelings of closure.

The previews for Aragon looked good so will probably check that one out in a couple weeks.

Nothing like the smell of gas

Everyone complains about it and here's me saying it one more time: Japanese winters suck. It's not that the winters are very cold, or that the weather is especially terrible. Living in southern Japan means that winters are actually quite mild and we hardly ever get any snow, but thin walls, a lack of proper insulation and no central heating mean there's no escape from the cold. I come inside only to feel the same as if I were standing outside in the garden. In the beginning I relied on the electric fan heater I had set into the living room wall. I spent the entire winter trapped in the living room. Then last year I bought a carbon-filament heater (kind of like a long halogen bulb) for when I'm sitting at the computer in the other room, but that was a letdown. The heat is really concentrated and feels great, but only extends far enough to heat up half my body.

So this week I bought a new heater. I love how it looks! You fill it with kerosene and enjoy the warmth of an open flame. It's like having a portable chimney. And if there's ever a blackout, I don't have to worry about freezing to death because it doesn't require electricity! It even boils water for tea if you place a pot on top. The downside - having an open fire means I'm using up all the oxygen in the apartment and releasing fumes into the air. You're supposed to keep the window cracked to let fresh air in, but doesn't having an open window take all the heat away as well?

There was no crystal ball.

It was nice to get out of the prefecture last weekend even if it was only just across the border into Kumamoto. My friends are really into fortune tellers (who I personally believe are all gypsy swindlers) and they found one that tells the future through "dowsing". They'd visited before to try a sample session, where the fortune teller encouraged my friends to buy special bracelets that match their auras. The bracelets were chosen through the mysterious art of dowsing, which can be explained as the scam artist figuring out how much someone is willing to pay, then letting their powers lead them to a bracelet in that price range. But my friends truly believe in these bracelets as being "chosen".

This time they wanted a full reading, so we drove 3 hours through the mountains and into Kumamoto Prefecture to get there. I went to a nearby cafe (the upscale kind with fancy desserts and all kinds of teas) to wait for them to finish and tell me all about the crazyman stealing their money. The fortune teller asked what they wanted to know, then started shaking his head back and forth while tapping his finger on the table (they were pretty certain he was calling forth his powers, and not afflicted with Parkinsons disease). If you ask me, the suggestions and advice they got seemed more like a counselling session than a reading of their futures . . . since you work at night you can use your mornings to find another job and supplement your income . . . you're not attracted to the man that is after you so it probably wouldn't work out . . . the 18-year-old doesn't seem to be a very good dating prospect . . . All stuff I could have told them myself, but without the head shaking and finger tapping.


I was only along for the ride but it was a nice day for a drive and we stopped off at a really nice restaurant on the top of a hill. They make their own cheese and use natural spring water. It was nice; spring water tastes kind of sweet and doesn't have any aftertaste.
The wood-burning oven was near the entrance so you could peek in and see the pizza baking inside as you walked to your table. And the food was good, too!
Just hanging out in the cafe.

Heroes

I got a tape with episodes of the new TV series Heroes and am loving it. The theory is that the human race is still evolving and a few select people are discovering abilities that normal humans lack (the same idea as in X-Men but there's no mention of the mutant X-gene just yet). In a freaky coincidence I happened to catch a program on TV tonight about people with super enhanced senses - sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch. These people could be the next evolutionary step.

Sight
The Masai tribe in Africa has super-enhanced sight. The men were pointing at zebras and giraffes that the cameramen couldn't see until they used binoculars, and they could see 1cm-sized pictures of animals while standing 35 meters away. Doctors tried testing their eyesight using the standard eyetest and they read the bottom line easily, even when the chart was placed at the opposite end of a basketball court. Not quite as good as x-ray vision, but pretty good if you ask me.

Sound
A blind man named Juan Luis uses echo location (like bats) to see the world around him. He was walking down the street making clicking noises and saying stuff like, "There's a trash can on the left, a parked truck on the right and a yard with a large tree in front." He can tell how high, wide, and hard things are by clicking his tongue. And he's not the only one! A blind American boy does the same thing, and runs around chasing his brothers and sisters without any problems. You'd never know he was deaf by seeing him walk down the street (without a cane of course) swerving around bicycles and people. Watching him spar in karate class was pretty impressive. And chase basketballs while rollerblading.

Then they tested an orchestra conductor who can hear everything at once. The 22-person orchestra played a 30-second piece, then played it again with 5 differences. I couldn't believe it! The two pieces sounded exactly the same to me, but he rattled off all 5 mistakes as soon as they finished playing. The cello played a note that was an octave different from the first time, the oboe skipped a note, the violin played a note in b-flat, the flute played a note softly. . . How could he hear it all??? They also dropped combinations of coins on the floor and asked him how much they dropped - a fun game to try at home. But quite impossible for normal humans.

At this point there was a break where they explained how our ears lose the ability to hear high-pitched sounds as we get older. They played sounds at a range of frequencies and what I heard (or actually didn't hear) bothered me. 60-year olds can hear frequencies up to 10,000 hertz, and the annoying, high-pitched squealing sound made me turn the volume down. The frequency that 50-year olds can hear was also loud and irritating, and thank goodness they stopped that one quickly because it was starting to hurt my ears. Then the 14,000 hertz frequency that 40-year olds can hear was white silence. I heard nothing. The previous two were ear-piercing, and then there was silence. I couldn't hear any of the frequencies they played after that. I discovered that I have the ears of a 40-year old. It explains why I'm having a hard time catching conversations in a crowd and have to ask to repeat what people say more and more often. I'm really quite disturbed by this, but apparently there's no way to reverse the process to make your hearing better. Very depressing.

Incidentally one of my students can hear dog whistles. I secretly tested her and she made me stop.

Smell
A normal human can distinguish 8 different scents if you mix them together. There are about 400 people on record that have the ability to smell a mind-boggling 200 scents (they work for perfume companies around the world). The interesting thing is that 25% of these people all come from the same village in France. They interviewed someone from the village, and when he was younger he liked to test himself by taking random mixes of scents and exactly reproducing them. He said that he can't stand going into cities because the flood and intensity of smells are sickening. When we were younger my sister used to complain about the same thing. I think she might be a super-smeller, too.

Touch
They interviewed a guy who has an amazing sense of touch. He can discern how flat a surface is, up to half a micron (5/10,000ths of a millimeter). They gave him a large, flat piece of plastic to run his hands over, and the places where he said were slightly raised matched up with the computer images. I don't exactly see how this could be used as a super-power, though.

The other people were mostly just weird. Like the man who sees colors when he hears sounds. Or the lady who can smell sickness off a person. Or the artist who sees everything in color - including black and white newspapers. The CAT scan pictures were interesting. Their brains were lighting up in places that shouldn't be active.

So I guess our species is still evolving and some of us are already super-human. As for me, I'm still waiting for those latent abilities to take effect. Any day now.