debunking

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.

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.  

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

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

Back in 2005, Japan Times science writer Rowan Hooper noted US-based medical studies which, although inconclusive, suggested that aging-related conditions could be ameliorated through transcendental meditation (TM) techniques such as mindfulness and progressive muscle relaxation. Hooper went on to suggest that Japanese lifespans may be long due to similar effects brought about by two factors: Buddhism and "shikata ga nai mentality".

If you have any contact with "Japanology" musings, you've no doubt heard of shikata ga nai, or its other common form shou ga nai, as yet another entry on a loooong list of "uniquely Japanese" concepts. The phrase, as normally used, is a simple expression of resignation, of giving in or going along when things are beyond one's control – as in, "Oh well, what are you gonna do." Read more

A lot of Japanese words have popped up in English over the years. We could pick out a bundle brought back by soldiers after the war ("A skosh more whiskey, barkeep!"), another handful arriving during later trade troubles ("We're bringing in a kaizen specialist to re-prioritize our manufacturing paradigms!"), and a recent crop imported by pop culture fans ("I just love anime, don't you?"), with surely more to arrive via new routes. Words don't often jump languages with meaning intact, though, and many Japanese loanwords are no exception. Let's look at a few words that have found a new life – and some new meanings – in English. Read more

A single word for "death from overwork" – imagine that! You've probably seen the astonishment over that fact in contexts like this WIRED article: "And in a nation that actually has a word for 'death from overwork,'...", the gist of which is that the existence of a single word for the concept reveals its unusual severity or significance in Japan. 

In fact, there is a single word for "death from overwork" in Japanese: karoushi (過労死). There's no argument about that (well, except maybe from those claiming that Japanese has no words). The word exists.

What I'm debunking here is the overworked meme that the phenomenon's single-word status has any significance whatsoever. It doesn't. Read more

Should I ever need to hire a translation firm, I know one I won't be considering. A strange pang of kindness holds me back from giving out the befuddled firm's name here, but the FAQ page of these "Japanese translators of the highest quality" contains this goofiness:

[T]here are no such things as words in Japanese.

Apparently, the firm's "experienced Japanese translators" have never come across a Japanese dictionary. For the curious, here's a dispatch from reality: Japanese has words. Read more

One of the most beloved Japanology memes overseas involves the word kaizen (or Kaizen to some). Here's the definition from the New Oxford American Dictionary:

kaizen |ˈkaɪzən|
noun: a Japanese business philosophy of continuous improvement of working practices, personal efficiency, etc.

That sometimes gets further embellished by eager writers who extend kaizen to carry continuous improvement out of the business realm, and "throughout all aspects of life", per one definition I've seen. Whatever the specifics, what you'll find in common across all definitions is that kaizen is a Japanese word for "a Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement".

Unfortunately, that's wrong. Read more