More random notes:

On studying Japanese:

Last week marked the end of my summer intensive Japanese course at the Yuurinkan (in Kagoshima City). Despite the fact that I had to commute to the city during the hottest portion of each day, I had a blast. Much of the grammar material I had covered before, either with self-study, or with a tutor (I started studying with a tutor last October), but the review was most welcome. I can converse with people at a much greater rate of speed. Sort of.

The cultural portions of the class were a lot of fun, too. The teachers illustrated the grammar points with a number of examples you wouldn't really expect to find in a classroom. For example, we discussed sequential listing of actions by learning how sho-chu (a fairly potent alcoholic beverage) is made. This was followed by taste testing. . .

We spent a class period discussing onomatopaea, which Japanese has far too much of, by examining its use in manga. We learned about cooking terms by making curry in class. (Japanese curry is at once the same and different as curry from anywhere else in the world. . . ) We tried our hand at haiku (which is actually easier to write in Japanese, due to the fact that you can have more words within the 5-7-5 syllable structure. Of course, for me, this is offset by the fact that I don't know all that many Japanese words). We spent one class playing Monopori, and another playing I-Go. (I sucked at both.)

Minami-Nippon Shimbun

One of the more interesting things we did was visit the Minami-Nippon Shimbunsha (South Japan Newspaper Company). I had never visited a place like this before, so I found it quite amazing. At one point, we saw a display of various printing technologies of the past 100 years. (The Minami Nippon Shimbun has been in business under various incarnations since the 15th year of Meiji, over 120 years ago.)

Seeing the (pre-digital) printing methods that were in use 20-30 years ago was very interesting. Things like those big curved metal plates that had to be melted down and re-created every day. (It all seems so much easier now!) I was also impressed at the sheer numbers of those little typesetting thingies. I remember doing hand-typesetting back in junior high school, and being annoyed at the big tray with 52 slots for all the letters, upper- and lower-case, plus 10 slots for numbers, and a bunch more for punctuation and blanks. Now, for typsetting in Japanese, you need all the hiragana and katakana (that's about 140), plus a buttload of kanji (Chinese characters, around 2000 of which are designated "everyday use"), plus a tiny set of kana to be used as furigana, which are used to show the pronunciation of more obscure kanji. The tray for typesetting in English took up a whole desktop; the Japanese typesetting set was more the size of a kitchen table.

And then they showed us the printing complex. Paper goes in on the ground floor, gets fed through the ceiling into a three-story room of printing equipment, and pops out as newspapers at the other end. Totally cool.

More later....