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In A dose of dumb: Asians can't understand Western music, I noted a clueless TV comment about whether Asian musicians are unable to fully comprehend "Western" music, plus TIME magazine's posing of the same question regarding none other than famed Boston Symphony Seiji Ozawa (!). My mocking of the comments and my return question ("Why the hell would an 'Asian' have any less comprehension of 'Western' music than a 'Westerner'?") are on the money. But the post is still a weak one, as I was only able to paraphrase the dumb comments from memory. I'd much rather point you to sources which we can cringe at together.

And hey – here's one! From blogger Kidist Paulos Asrat, two posts ostensibly about art and music: Asians Playing Western Music and "Music is about bringing us all together- it should never be a vehicle for division." Get a load of these excerpts from the first post:

I realized that the performance of Handel's Messiah was to be performed by a "Korean-American" concert choir called Peniel Choir... As the concert progressed, I began to realize a certain "prettiness" in the performance, a lack of force, drive and even drama. I don't think this is simply a cultural phenomenon (as in misunderstanding the Messiah's content, message, meaning, etc...). I think it is a physio/cerebral problem. I've seen it happen in art and design, and even in science - a friend of mine was a Korean PhD student. At some level, I think Asians demonstrate some ability (i.e. memorization, or fast, scale-like exercises). But there seems to be an inability to create a synthesized beauty, which is what much of art (and order in Science) is about...

[Asians] are notably absent in the brass and percussion sections... these instruments (brass and percussion) might actually be too physically demanding for them...

So this is what multiculturalism is bringing us. I think it is a mixture of aggressive Asians pushing their way in everywhere, and a liberal white public that wants these multi-culti influences to dominate in its cities and institutions.

Holy bejesus. The second post tries to quell the resulting (surprise!) flood of unfriendly emails to the author:

I know what I'm writing sounds hypocritical since I'm deriding Asians despite my similar technical background, but at least I realize that these issues exist, and I'm not afraid to confront them. Perhaps that makes me a better critique [sic]...

I think Mary Lee [SC Philharmonic Concertmaster, who wrote to protest] and the other white admonishers are trying to say that given my own background, how do I have the grounds to say that Asian musicians are inferior?

No, you dolt. It's not your "background" that doesn't give you grounds. It's your utter failure to provide evidence that doesn't give you grounds to claim that "Asian musicians are inferior".

Believe it or not, the blogger then posits that as a non-white herself, the angry emails are just a case of whites telling a non-white that she's not allowed to make judgments on which non-whites are or aren't good at white music. I think. Frankly, it's too convoluted for me to follow. Or too stupid. Or both. (Either way, I think the technical term for the follow-up is "digging the hole deeper".)

I know, this is just an unknown blog by an unknown doof who is (as a glance at other weird posts reveals) a crazed anti-Asian racist. It's a personal blog post, not a TIME magazine article – and yet, it did catch the attention of an online heavyweight, the wonderful Pharyngula blog. Check out Her prospects for a future in art journalism may have just dimmed to see the above posts dismantled by an expert in the art of puncturing the pretentious (as well as by dozens of regular commenters with no mean skill in the same).

Ah, the Internet. It lets any numbskull post silly culturologist or ugly racist rants – and, wonderfully, lets the saner world shoot those to bits. We live in good times.

At the stricken Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, robots are finally heading in to gather vital data from areas too dangerous for human workers. That's a great step forward, right? Well, you'd think so – unless you're the kind of doltish chowderhead who can only digest such news in the most ridiculous terms possible: the stroking of idiotic national pride.

The April 14 issue of general-interest weekly Shukan Shincho (article not available online) opines:

Japan prides its cutting-edge technology in building robots -- yet it now faces an embarrassing situation where Japan must rely on the U.S. to provide robots to conduct work at the nuclear power plant -- how sad is that?... This embarrassing situation was caused to do blindingly believing that such incident would never occur.

Sad? Embarrassing? The disaster itself is horribly sad, and any errors made in response may be embarrassing – but do those words also describe people wisely using helpful technology to improve the situation? In the befuddled writer's world, we can't praise amazing technology that helps people cope with disaster until we know what's stamped on the passports of the people who created it. If the passports have this political entity's name stamped, then the technology is glorious and wonderful; if they have that political entity's name stamped, then it's all "sad" and "embarrassing".

Am I the only one who wonders when (or whether) humans will ever grow up? 

Here's an unexpected find: The 5 biggest tech myths about Japan. 

To summarize the article's brief but welcome myth busting: Japan does NOT have bizarre vending machines all over, does NOT have robots all over, and is NOT overrun with schoolgirls bearing unusual technology prowess. (I'm ambivalent on two other points: Japan's Internet speeds probably are pretty good by international comparison, and Akihabara does have lots of fun for techies, though I'll happily agree that these are not "OMG Japan is unbelievable" things.)

For more in the same tech myth-debunking vein, see Low-Tech Japan, Debunked: Japan's "Special Relationship with Robots", and technology-tagged articles in general.  

Somewhere along the way, the link toward the top of the page to all posts about Japanese broke. It's fixed now, so if you've an interest in the language, click and learn! 

The site's seen a small rush of readers from well-known video game site Kotaku, which linked to A dose of dumb: Governor Ishihara's racist yammerings. Why is a gaming site turning its attention to the ethnocentric fantasies of Tokyo's xenophobic governor? Because it seems Shintaro Ishihara has turned his sights on "cleaning up" video games and comics of sexual content – and he's not above stepping outside the bounds of proposed legislation to suggest that gay characters on TV are some moral threat to the nation. Fans of comics and animation are rightly worried by the nutcase's potential influence over the pending Tokyo Metropolitan Ordinance Regarding the Healthy Development of Youths. 

Speaking of youths: What a waste of a youth. As the Kotaku article notes, Ishihara gained fame at the tender age of 23 by winning Japan's top literary award with a depiction of post-war rebellious, sexual youths. He and his younger brother Yujiro (who starred in the film version of the book) became idols within that youth culture, and Shintaro went on to hobnob with celebrities such as acclaimed author (and homosexual) Yukio Mishima. But that's just the start of the fellow's younger-day adventures. He motorcycled across South America, visited the North Pole, raced his yacht, wrote musicals and plays, ran a theater company, and – coolest of all – led a monster-searching expedition to Loch Ness. (A monster was not found, but that's okay.) If those things were all I knew of the guy, he'd be my hero! 

But what a change the years make. Now Ishihara is an ultra-conservative, hawkish, nationalist, gay-bashing, foreigner-hating crank who infamously denied Japanese WWII atrocities such as the rape of Nanking, who told an interviewer that women are "useless" past reproductive age, and who now wants to shield people from pop-culture acknowledgment of sexuality – the very thing upon which he built his young fame.

Take heart. Ishihara is now 78. Nature or fatigue will surely pull him away from command of Tokyo before he can cause too much damage. 

Via Slashdot, I came across The Puzzle of Japanese Web Design.

With respect to clarity, simplicity, and boldness of line, the Japanese have been a thousand years ahead of us in fine art and graphic design. Our best painters learned minimalism, cartooning, and much else from the Japanese during the “Orientalism” period of the late 19th century. Before that, western fine art was judged in part on its complexity and detail. And our posters and advertisements! Don’t ask.

Following that simplistic, stereotyping, jingoistic "us vs them" nonsense, there's a bizarre bit about chopsticks that somehow mistakes cheap, ugly, scrap-wood waribashi disposable chopsticks as the only form of chopsticks in Japan. It's really unrelated, but I can't resist: Read more

When you see the words "technology" and "Japan" appear together in the media, it's usually in the context of "Wow, Japan is a high-tech wonderland so many years ahead of us!"

Those of us living in Japan see a much more varied and complex picture. Thus, it was nice to come across the BBC's Revealing Japan's low-tech belly, a look at the computer-clumsy, Internet-inexperienced portion of the country that will never use the living room VCR as a clock (because it's been blinking "12:00" for the past nine years). Read more

You know what's so annoying – very mildly annoying, yes, but persistently so – about "cultural contrast" discussions? It's really not so much the more elaborate made-up claims backed by laughably imaginary evidence (the "special relationship with robots" is a good example). Rather, it's the non-stop rain of little claims, the ones that paint everything in sight as a "difference" or a "unique twist" – but then just leave those assertions hanging, without any attempt at backing them up.

Below is a fine example: a piece on the impressive uptake of mini-blogging service Twitter in Japan from the Mainichi Daily in June. (I've been told that it first ran in the Japanese version of the paper, though I haven't been able to locate a Japanese original). It was picked up by news services everywhere; here's the full article, which you may have already seen: Read more

Hey, how'd I let this one go untouched for so long? Of all the misconceptions about the Japanese language, "three writing systems" has got to be the most widespread, even among people who really should know better. Lately the meme has been working overtime on this Slashdot thread – which is so all-round packed with misconceptions about Japanese that my head gets all asplodey just trying to keep track.

I'll stick to addressing just one mistake here. The question to be answered is: How many writing systems does Japanese use?

And the answer is: ONE. 

Yes, whatever you may have heard, Japanese does not use "three writing systems". It uses precisely one. No more, no fewer.

"Huh? There are three: Kanji, then hiragana, then katakana.. That's three writing syst..."

No. ONE. Read more

I watched Steve Jobs unveil the new iPhone 4 today. As part of his demonstration, he invited the audience to look at a non-English language on the phone's high resolution screen:

When you get to character-based languages... Kanji in this case... it's also striking...

Hey, that text does look great on the gadget! But...

Dang it, there is no language called Kanji. This mistaken idea keeps on spreading, so let's make a tiny contribution in trying to squash it:

The word 漢字 kanji is Japanese for "Chinese character". That's the literal breakdown – 漢 kan is one of several Chinese characters meaning "China, Chinese", and 字 ji means "written character" or "written letter". (For the scholars: the 漢 part comes from a historical area of China. If you've heard of the Han Dynasty, that "Han" and 漢 are one and the same.)

And that's all there is to kanji. It's the Japanese word for "Chinese character(s)", whether those appear in written Chinese, or in written Japanese, or in written Korean, or in a hamfisted tattoo on some wretch's leg (with random strokes missing and ninja written upside down). Read more