Tokyo!
The first leg of the trip to China is duly completed. I am in Tokyo. And, thus, I am in the future. Yes, the future. While you slackers dither around in the early morning hours of the 25th, I have been in the 25th for a very long time and am currently relaxing in the ANA lounge at the Tokyo-Narita airport.
The plane ride was only 12 hours long. It wasn`t too bad. I dithered away the time by eating, reading and watching a bizzare Japanese movie entitled `Red Moon`. The movie centered on the life of one morally bankrupt Japanese woman living in Manchuria in 1935-45. She is involved in numerous love triangles, and leads one of her lovers, a spy in the Japanese secret police, to murder his other lover and behaves in a generally despicable way. But, this movie is complicated by the need to address, from a Japanese perspective, the difficulties the Japanese in Manchuria faced when the enemy withdrew and the various horrors the Japanese occupiers had inflicted on the Chinese. Red Moon negotiates this conflict by having every other Japanese character choose a noble death as redress for the sufferings of the Chinese, often with subtly crafted lines like, `I now choose death for what I and our people have done to the Chinese. But a noble death. I am a Japanese man.`
And then the movie ends with the woman choosing life, escaping, and, as she and her children (adorable kids who are always catching her in flagrante with the old spy cum opium addict) ride the train to leave the now-Soviet Manchurian state all these other Japanese people are ripping up the currency of the Japanese puppet state and saying things like, `You were no friend to me Manchuko!` She sits there and says `Thank you Manchuria.`
Part of me wonders if she learned her lesson. Part of me wonders if I`ll ever be able to absorb enough of the cultural symbolism in the movie to get it.
That`s not much of a story. Everything else is going fine.
And for those of you who wondered about the keyboard, I`ll say that who wondered about the keyboard, I`ll say that the keyboards here ａｒｅ standard except I cant figure out how to turn off this underlining function I just started. Oh！It just stopped!
We also met a Chinese student from Shanghai and a Harvard B-School professor who is an enthusiast about B-School professor who is an enthusiast about the Olympics.He was nice. I think he represented the general phylum of people who will be on our tour, although he himself is not on the tour. Very accomplished people who expect to be recognized as such, eh?
I`ll leave it at that. I want to try and take pictures of the Japanese soda machine.
The plane ride was only 12 hours long. It wasn`t too bad. I dithered away the time by eating, reading and watching a bizzare Japanese movie entitled `Red Moon`. The movie centered on the life of one morally bankrupt Japanese woman living in Manchuria in 1935-45. She is involved in numerous love triangles, and leads one of her lovers, a spy in the Japanese secret police, to murder his other lover and behaves in a generally despicable way. But, this movie is complicated by the need to address, from a Japanese perspective, the difficulties the Japanese in Manchuria faced when the enemy withdrew and the various horrors the Japanese occupiers had inflicted on the Chinese. Red Moon negotiates this conflict by having every other Japanese character choose a noble death as redress for the sufferings of the Chinese, often with subtly crafted lines like, `I now choose death for what I and our people have done to the Chinese. But a noble death. I am a Japanese man.`
And then the movie ends with the woman choosing life, escaping, and, as she and her children (adorable kids who are always catching her in flagrante with the old spy cum opium addict) ride the train to leave the now-Soviet Manchurian state all these other Japanese people are ripping up the currency of the Japanese puppet state and saying things like, `You were no friend to me Manchuko!` She sits there and says `Thank you Manchuria.`
Part of me wonders if she learned her lesson. Part of me wonders if I`ll ever be able to absorb enough of the cultural symbolism in the movie to get it.
That`s not much of a story. Everything else is going fine.
And for those of you who wondered about the keyboard, I`ll say that who wondered about the keyboard, I`ll say that the keyboards here ａｒｅ standard except I cant figure out how to turn off this underlining function I just started. Oh！It just stopped!
We also met a Chinese student from Shanghai and a Harvard B-School professor who is an enthusiast about B-School professor who is an enthusiast about the Olympics.He was nice. I think he represented the general phylum of people who will be on our tour, although he himself is not on the tour. Very accomplished people who expect to be recognized as such, eh?
I`ll leave it at that. I want to try and take pictures of the Japanese soda machine.
posted by The Gadabout at 10:58 PM
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