Oh well, if everyone else thinks it’s ok…

Kate McCulloch, a woman dense enough to want to be Pauline Hanson:

“Look, scores of people are coming up to me and saying, ‘Good on you, Kate … you’re saying what we’re too scared to ‘cos of racial vilification laws, but we all think it.’ I would like to keep our place like it is and I guess [joining the] Liberals would be natural,” she told the Herald.

I wonder if the same conversation happens amongst groups of would-be thieves?

“Oh man Steve-o you fuckin’ rock! Robbing that fuckin’ bank man! We’re all too scared by the fuckin’ pigs, but goodonyamaaaaaaate…“

[sirens can be heard in the distance, edging closer and closer...]

Proof that the weirdest things do happen in Japan

So. You’re home alone, but something strange has been happening. Food that you swear you saw in the fridge keeps disappearing. So what do you do? Well, a 57 year old man in Fukuoka had this problem, and he installed a security camera to monitor his home while he was out. And he was rather surprised, to say the least, to discover than a homeless woman had been living in his closet.

“She told police that she had nowhere to live,” the spokesman said. “She seems to have lived there for about a year, but not all the time.”

A year! And she stole nothing but food! If that’s not the mark of an honest person, I don’t know what is. If I could afford it, I would seriously consider just letting her stay; I think she’s earnt squatter’s rights on that closet!

Spotted in the Jetstar in-flight shopping catalogue

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The obvious solution is…

I recently read a story about the “growing dangers” of hybrid cars, namely that hybrids are are too difficult to hear for blind pedestrians, and pedestrians who can be distracted by, I shit you not, cell phones, music devices, and kids. So what are the US lawmakers’ solution? A two year study, and possibly require Auto makers to make hybrid cars louder. Yep, those big brains over in America thinks the best way to deal with quiet hybrids is to make them louder. Wow, what qualifications are required to be a US politician? Common sense isn’t one of them.

Here’s what the NSW Police is doing. Scroll down to the bottom — some of the best public service ads I’ve seen.

Lost

I watched Memoirs of a Geisha last night, I’d never got around to watching it when if first came out, and I found a copy at home so I popped it in. It started a bit slow for me, but I quite enjoyed it in the end. But there was one moment in the film that grabbed me; it was a line from the older Sayuri, narrating (and me paraphrasing):

There’s a poem carved into a rock in the garden called “Lost”, made up of three words that the author had carved then scratched out; you can’t read “Lost”, only feel it.

Despite all the inaccuracies of the book and the movie, I think that line really captured one part of what it means to be Japanese. Loss is part of life, it is an inevitable conclusion of having had something. I think the Japanese take loss more philosophically than we do; certainly more than I could. And it’s such a beautiful phrase, I confess I could feel the tears welling up inside.

On Return

I’m afraid I’ve become one of those people.

You know, the type that goes overseas only to complain that “it’s not like back home blah blah”. Except in my case it’s the other way around; “It’s not like that in Japan….”

And it isn’t: public transport is expensive and shit, it’s more dangerous in parts of the city (like at the Town Hall bus stop at 2am when the Riot Squad showed up), and even the produce is not as good as I remembered it to be. All week I’ve been eating tasteless vegetables and wondering what went wrong — admittedly my vegies were bought at Coles, but I used to shop at Coles and it was fine two years ago.

That and all the other things added up, and I’ve been talking up Japan so much that even I wanted to tell myself to just get the hell back over there if I like it so much!

I’ve got the post-holiday blues bad, that’s for sure. Let’s hope I get a job soon so I have a distraction from how un-Japan everything is.

(Apologies for the lack of activity here, evidentially I’ve been too busy whinging and have been neglecting this blog.)

Things I have learnt since coming back to Sydney

Sydney is annoyingly large geographically.

The trains worked better than I remembered.

But the seats are just as uncomfortable as I remembered them to be.

Sydney is more expensive than Tokyo, no lie.

I live out in the freakin’ sticks, and I need to get the hell out of the Shire as soon as I can.

But given how expensive everything is, that is highly unlikely.

What’s In A Name?

1. Think about your own name. Did you ever have trouble spelling it as a kid? Does your name bear any resemblance to something unfortunate that haunted you through school (and possibly beyond)? Does your name have any stereotypes associated with it?

2. Names seem so straight-forward. It was probably the first thing you leant how to say and spell, it’s possibly one of the words you will hear and say most often in your lifetime — beaten only by hello and goodbye; or in my case: fuck.

3. Consider my name. By birth in Hong Kong, my name is Kung Chun Hin:

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4. When I was seven, my family moved to Australia. I remember a conversation I had with my family, talking about what English names my sister and I should take on. I first wanted “Peter”, but Mum thought that “Peter” was a name for triad punks (nevermind that my Dad’s name is the Dutch version of “Peter”). Anyway, such was my level of English (zero) and imagination (sizable, but not in English) that my next choice was “John”, and so it stuck, and I named myself “John Chun Hin Kung”.

5. Over the course of time and several run-ins with, err, less worldly Government officials, I took to hyphenate my middle names; apparently when confronted with “John Chun Hin Kung”, some people couldn’t figure out which was my middle name and which was my surname. So my name became “John Chun-Hin Kung”, which is what appears on my passport.

6. Just before I came to Japan, I stopped by Hong Kong to visit family, and to get my Hong Kong permanent ID card, which gives me the Right of Abode in Hong Kong. The officials there were very helpful; they understood that some Western officials were, err, unhelpful and easily confused. So the name on my ID card was “Kung, John Chun-hin”.

7. When I got to Japan, Japanese officals were far more strict about how names were recorded, and my name became “Kung John Chun-Hin” (note the lack of comma after my surname). This was fine, it’s close enough to my passport and how I’m known in Australia. The trouble only came to bear when I was getting married.

8. According to government officials here, “John Chun Hin Kung”, “John Chun-Hin Kung”, “Kung, John Chun-hin” and “Kung John Chun-Hin” were all different people. Order and punctuation were very important, any deviatiation could cause terrible confusion. And if you have ever dealt with Japanese beauracracy, you’d know what I mean. If not, imagine you have no legs, and you were placed at the end of a long gravel driveway and told to crawl to the house. It gets old pretty quick.

9. And it gets better — it’s generally custom for the wife to change her surname to match mine, but since Japanese uses Chinese characters, does she use my romanised surname, or the original Chinese? I would prefer Chinese, but then that doesn’t match any of our documents so far, so that would cause that “terrible confusion”. Luckily for us, the changing of her name is a custom, not a requirement.

10. Add to this a new dilemma — it has become popular for the Chinese to keep the order of their names, and add their English name to the front, so in my case that would be “John Kung Chun Hin”. I really like this, it keeps the original order while conforming to Western standards. And officials now are more aware of non-Western names, and it’s a lot easier now than it has ever been. But because of a choice made in necessity when I was a teenager, I’m stuck with the name that was shaped by others. And one’s name is, in the end, all that one has; everything else can be lost or stolen or given away, but a name stays true. I just wish I could have the name that best represents me.

An Unusual Event

1. So, here’s something you don’t see every day.

2. Imagine sitting at a McDonald’s in the food court of a Westfield’s. At the next table there’s two guys taking a break, and a few tables away, separated by a glass partition, are a group of school kids, dressed in their cooler-than-you best, hanging as school kids do best. As with any group of boys any where in the world, they’re mucking about, throwing stuff at each other, when one miscalculated throw carried a plastic candy box over our way and hits the glass partition. The two guys at the next table takes offence, and marches over to the kids and gives them a good talking to. The kids strut a bit, try to look tough, but obviously copped a verbal hiding. The administors sat back down, resumed their meal.

3. Nothing new here right? What came next was a bit of a surprise.

4. I had been expecting a fight to break out, which would’ve been the most interesting part of my day, but instead the kid responsible ill-fated throw came in to apologise. He ducked his head, said sorry, then went back to join his friends. Meanwhile, I was choking on my double cheeseburger.

5. Japanese people, especially the older generation, bemoan the lack of respect young people (don’t) have, and how dangerous Japan has become. But how nice would it be if kids everywhere else were like that? Or people in general? It’s not that I think all people are bad, or that these kids were especially good, but these are pretty much the bad kids you get around here. Bad kids in Sydney knife and rape and steal.

6. I can’t tell you how nice it is when you can walk down a dark alley in the seediest part of town in the middle of the night and feel perfectly safe.

What I’ve been up to recently

Planning our wedding. Or rather, making a list of things to think about later.

I’ve finished up at my old job, and now I’m unemployed and living with my fiance and her family. (To the tune of Bon Jovi) Whooo ohhh, Livin’ with the In Laws!

I went to Osaka with a friend for a week, stayed in a hotel room with a blocked window, and found a bar owned by a former pro-footballer where we then spent quite a bit of time and money there.

Watched lots of movies. Lots, and lots, of movies.

Tried to play Super Mario 64 DS, in Japanese. The no-English part was a bit hard, but what’s with the shitty D-Pad controls?

Sold Super Mario 64 DS.

Debated, decided, and ultimately didn’t buy a Wii. Not even I can find a reason to buy one, given my PS2, PC and DS lurking mostly unused.

Very efficiently parted with $700 in the form of a jacket, coat, three pairs of pants and a bag. Clothes that fit people, clothes that only asian countries can provide an asian frame. The bag, well…

Spending stupid amounts of cash at internet cafes and coffee joints with free internet. As a consequence I haven’t been sleeping very well. Poop.

Working on my sister’s EP cover, photo shoot and website. Check it.