What? You Wanna Live Forever?

This is a post of farewells, but also of new beginnings.

I've been meaning to post here for a while. Much has happened since I last blogged about. . . Home Depot? I dunno. I don't even remember.

First, I took part in the BC Japanese Speech contest, winning second place in the University division, Beginner category. I would have posted my speech on the blog, except that the copyright is held by the BC Japanese Speech Contest Organizing Committee. Basically, I talked about the time I met Miyuu Sawai (a story you can read about on this blog), and how that taught me courage and whatever.

Second, I've been doing a lot of thinking about that little Sailor Moon side project I started back in 2010, which in the absence of actual writing on the topic could be mistaken for giving up on it. I won't go into details here. . . I'll just mention that it's still on my mental back burner. 

Third, and perhaps most significantly, I've been officially accepted into the JET program as an A.L.T.. I'm going back to Japan! Specifically, I'll be going to the town of Shirakawa. . .

. . . in Fukushima prefecture. . .

. . . What? You wanna-- oh, wait, I already said that.

Anyway, I'm coming up on a new phase in my life, and along with that I hope to enter a new phase of my writing. Kyle Took A Bullet For Me was my first blog. It was, incidentally, also the medium for my first screenplay, Sailor Moon. I look back at both of these things as a huge rough draft of who I want I want to be as a writer, which is probably the best way you can look at something that you're really not all that proud of in retrospect. I mean, hell, the friggen name of this blog was taken from a Tenacious D song. Not a sign of terrific originality. 

So, to commemorate the end (for the foreseeable future anyway) of my life in P.G., in Canada, and in Physics, I've decided to officially end Kyle Took a Bullet For Me. . .

. . . and launch my new blog, Doin' the Nihon Go Go, a chronicle of science, life in Japan, creative ideas (more carefully exposited than my Sailor Moon stuff was), and whatever the hell else I want to write about. All on a damn schedule this time!

So, yeah. Get over there! There might not be anything written up yet, but at least you can admire the template.

Update: I've closed down comments on this blog, mainly so that spambots will stop bothering me.

Shut the fuck up, you piece of shit.

Tokyo governor and ultra-rightist loon Shintaro Ishihara calls the March 11 earthquake "punishment from heaven" for Japan's greed (source).

Other gems of Ishihara's wisdom(from wikiquote):

On the Naking Massare: "They say we made a holocaust there, but that is not true. It is a lie made up by the Chinese."

Speaking of the Chinese:

"The Chinese are ignorant, so they are overjoyed. That spacecraft [Shenzhou 5, which carried China's first astronaut] was an outdated one. If Japan wanted to do it, we could do it in one year."

"China holds no value at all for human life and can start a war without any concerns. . ."

On Terrorism:

"A bomb was planted [at the private residence of Deputy Foreign Minister Hitoshi Tanaka]. I think it was deserved."

Asshole thinks he's hot shit because he used to hang out with Yukio Mishima.

3/11

I feel obliged to say something about the earthquake that has hit Japan, but I really don't know what. Honestly, I've never known what to say in the wake of tragedies like this, and have preferred instead to say nothing at all. This hasn't been so much out of overwhelming emotion as it has about simply feeling like I have nothing worth saying. Do I wish for the continued well being of the survivors? Offer condolences to the families of the dead? If I do, so what? What could the obvious platitudes of a distant observer possibly matter?

But for me, this is different than the Indonesian tsunami, or hurricane Katrina, or earthquakes in Haiti or New Zealand, or 9/11. I lived in Tokyo for three months. I used to walk by the skyscrapers which can now be seen swaying "like palm trees in the wind" on videos all over the internet. One of the cities I most wanted to visit was Sendai-- my M.Sc. thesis work on molecular quantum tunneling is based on research that began at Sendai's Tohoku University. Now it looks like that city, like New Orleans and Port au Prince, has been more or less destroyed. I have friends and teachers from Japan-- thankfully, though, their families seem to be alright. I was connected to all of this, in my own very minor way.

I find myself contrasting my feelings right now with how I reacted to the 9/11 attacks. Back then, I didn't have friends from New York (hell, I still don't), and to this day the closest I've ever come to the city is spending a night in Albany. Maybe that's why, in the weeks following the attack, the strongest emotion I felt regarding 9/11 was. . . irritation. I was just sick of it. I was sick of the constant news reports. I was sick of the flag waving and the fear mongering and the beating of the drums of war (of which there was plenty in even in Canada). I was sick of hearing that The World Has Changed. I was sick of the "oh! those poor souls" and "oh! what a terrible tragedy" that I kept hearing from people who, like me, had probably never been to New York or Washington, who probably didn't know anyone from those places and were falling to pieces over nothing more than images on a screen.

In other words, I was a cynical prick. A little cynicism is, and was, good thing (there are too many examples of post-9/11 irrationality to list, but one that sticks out for me is the "Death of Irony" that was supposed to have happened. . .and of course, these were pretty appalling too). But when cynicism blinds you to the fact that, maybe, just maybe, there are people out there who really do care and really are trying to help in whatever way they can. . .

Well. . . maybe I'm finally feeling the way I was supposed to ten years ago. Maybe that's what needed to be said.

Oh, to be a Japanese nerd in the early '80s. . .

Back in the early eighties, Gainax-- the Japanese animation studio that would eventually produce Neon Genesis Evangelion, among many other famous anime-- produced opening animations for Japan's Daicon (lit. Big Con) science fiction convention. Having discovered these animations on YouTube more or less by accident about ten minutes ago, I must now share them with you because they are awesome.

Here's the first animated short, from Daicon III. The animation is a bit rough, but it shows the starship Enterprise getting blown up by a schoolgirl, so I have to include it.



Gainax's animation for Daicon IV is a significant improvement over Daicon III. The animation is smoother and. . . well, just watch (it really starts to get good at the 2:00 mark).



Note: the next part of the Sailor Moon script will be taking place at a science fiction convention, so consider this a warning.

Sayonara, Nippon

Hi Everyone.

During the past few weeks I've been trying to find work in Japan, with no success. The Japanese economy has been in real trouble since the sub-prime crisis. The yen is skyrocketing, the JET program had to make massive cutbacks in enrollment (which probably played a factor in my being rejected last year), English language schools have been going bankrupt, and as I reported earlier, the Working Holiday Makers Association announced it was going to close it doors just the day before I picked up my visa from the Japanese consulate. This is not to say that I completely blame the economy. . . the truth is, I've been avoiding the fact that I was not ready to make this trip. My Japanese was not nearly as good as I thought it was, and my particular teaching experience was clearly not what the companies I applied to were looking for.

Any prospective jobs that might have been available from now on would not begin until October, and even then, the paychecks would not be given out until late October (in Japan, paychecks are given out monthly, rather than bi-weekly). As my rent was due no later than today, and my money was running out, I faced two options:

1) Continue my lease, with financial help from my family, in the hopes of maybe getting work.

2) Submit my one-month notice of vacation, use my remaining month of time to do the things I wanted to do in Japan (apart from the more unrealistic, like visiting Hokkaido, Kyoto, and Hiroshima), and come back to Canada to look for work.

A couple of days ago, I decided, with great reluctance, that would have to come home. By mid-October I will be back in Canada. From there, I will temporarily return to Prince George before moving to Victoria, where I will seek employment, hopefully at the University of Victoria, Camosun College, or as a private tutor. While there, I also plan to continue learning Japanese, most likely by auditing courses at the University, like I did at UNBC.

I was hard coming to this decision. Yesterday I revisited the Imperial Shrine grounds just outside downtown Tokyo. I came here again because I had taken some beautiful photos of the area which were unfortunately lost. Coming here again, I was filled not with the sense of adventure that I felt durig my first visit, but rather sadness. Call me a sappy sentimentalist if you want, but the truth is, after only two months of living here, I'm already sad to be leaving. This place, despite the short time, despite my inability to communicate effectively, already seemed like home to me. As late as last week, I was convinced that that's exactly what Tokyo would be, at least for the year that my visa was valid.

I want to stress that I'm not giving up on Japan; I will come here again. In the two months I have been here-- leaving aside the stress of job-hunting, not to mention the play "Imagine 9.11" which I'll talk about some other time-- I have had one of the greatest adventures of my life. I lived, however briefly, in one of the world's great metropolises. I engaged with a totally different culture-- two years ago I had not even left Canada or travelled further east than Edmonton. I witnessed Shinto festivals and massive fireworks spectacles. I climbed Mt. Fuji. I fucking met Sailor Moon. And I've only just begun.

As I said, I plan to continue learning Japanese until I achieve some level of fluency. When the time comes-- maybe a year, maybe a few years-- I will come back, perhaps with my family as a tourist, perhaps as a student, perhaps with work already arranged. But I will be back.

And as I said, I ain't leaving tomorrow, either. There's still plenty I wanna do: re-visit Mt. Fuji (I never got any pictures of the mountain from the ground, and my Mom keeps bugging me to put up some pictures with ME in them); visit Nikko; visit Yokohama and Yokosuka; go to Tokyo Disney Sea for a day (money permitting); go to a few more Sailor Moon locations; and hopefully try one more time to get a picture with Miyuu Sawai.

Stay Tuned.

Another Milestone Met. . .

Today, I saw my first black van. In fact, I saw a whole mini-convoy of Uyoku Dantai propoganda wagons circling the National Diet building. Uyoku Dantai is the term used for Japanese ultra right-wing groups, of which there are estimated to be about 100,000. Many of these groups are believed to be fronts for the Yakuza. I've known about these groups for years, and today, I finally saw one of them in action:



Somehow, that terrible song they were playing reminds me of this:

There's no turning back now. . . at least not without a $200 cancellation fee.

For some, this first bit will be old news. I've purchased my plane ticket and will be off to Japan on the ninth of July! I'll be heading down to Vancouver early that week to make sure that everything has gone well with the visa, as well as to visit family before my departure.

Naturally, I'll be updating this blog with tales of great adventure in the land of the rising sun*. For such an undertaking, mere text will not do. So, yesterday, I bought a camera, and decided to test it out last night. I'm pretty pleased with it so far. Below is a picture of the view from the deck of our house. It looks much better if you click on it, but be warned, it is huge (4000x3000 pixels-- I forgot to set the camera to lower resolution before taking this photo).



But what I really wanted to try was video uploading-- yes, my camera takes video. It's capable of HD quality, but for my purposes, I'll be filming at lower quality. Below is a video of my cat, Cedric. At midrange quality (640x480), this two minute video takes up ~150 Mb of data and took over twenty minutes to upload to YouTube. Unfortunately, the quality of the YouTube video is not quite up to par with the original file, but I guess that's to be expected.

Anyway, here's Cedric!



Am I getting sentimental about home already? Yeah, maybe. . .

*I even considered starting a new blog, "Doin' the Nihon Go Go!", just for that purpose, but then I realized it's hard enough maintaining one blog, and ultimately decided against it.

Well. . . I'm Kinda Screwed.

I writing from a hotel room in Vancouver. My mom came down here to take part in some fancy lawyer course, and I came with her in order to submit to the Japanese consulate my application for a working holiday visa. The good news is that everything appears to be in order as far as the application is concerned-- after submitting all the necessary forms (application form, tentative itinerary, CV, letter of motive, and passport), I was told that my visa would be ready in week, barring any problems found later on, in which event I would be contacted.

As for the bad news. . . the consulate employee to whom I was submitting my forms asked me if I had any work lined up. I answered no, adding that I was planning to find work through the Japanese Association of Working Holiday Makers (J.A.W.H.M.), the only organization licensed by the Japanese government to assist those taking part in working holidays. That's when he dropped the bombshell: the J.A.W.H.M. will be shutting down as of June 19th. I had not heard of this because the news was announced only a day before I left for Vancouver.

The J.A.W.H.M. provided a lot of helpful services for working holiday takers: job postings, help with finding accommodations, Japanese lessons, etc.. Without J.A.W.H.M., I, and a lot of other people who plan on taking working holidays , will have that much harder a time getting by in Japan.

At the same, though, it's not like I don't have a plan. I figure that since I am both a native English speaker AND possess high level scientific education, I can serve as a tutor for a niche market: foreign Anglophone students who need help in physics, math, and maybe even chemistry as well. Plus, there's always demand for English teachers, even if TESOL certification (which I don't have) is preferred.

I guess I'm starting to get cold feet. Shit's getting real now.

Stay tuned.

Update on Sailor Moon and Things

Hi Everyone,

It's now been one month and five days since the last piece of the Sailor Moon script was posted, and the next part is no-where near finished. So, instead of trying to rush things, and in the process present something that's not really all that good (which may have actually been the case with Part #4, given the lack of comments), I thought instead that I would give an update as to what's going on in my life in general, and to reassure you that Sailor Moon: The Movie Part #5 is slow coming, but it's a comin'.

First off. . .

1) What did everyone think of Lost finale?

Did you watch Lost? Did you start it, but give up on it near the middle of Season 3 like I almost did? Did you like the finale, or hate it?

Me? I liked it. (Warning: if you don't watch Lost, you would probably be better off skipping to part 2) Given all the questions that the show raised throughout it's six years, and the fact that it's grand narrative really wasn't planned from the beginning but was basically patched together at the end of third season once ABC and the producers decided upon a three year ending plan, I think the writers actually resolved quite a bit. True, much of this resolution came in the form of some pretty heavy-handed exposition, and involved a few elements that feel extracted from the creative rear end (The Island is now the source of all life, which we symbolise with this bright warm light which you must NEVER TOUCH or it will turn you into a smoke moster. . . or does it? WE HAVE SPOKEN!). And yes, I personally would have liked to have learned a bit more about what happened to the Island children, namely, Aaron, Ji Yeon, and that massive dangling plot thread, Walt. But still, as much of a cop-out as it is to say "they weren't going to explain EVERYTHING". . . well, they weren't, and they couldn't. Instead, they opted for an ending that yielded emotional closure, if not narrative closure. Almost everyone* got a happy ending (and I mean Disney happy), and the original motivation of the series-- getting everyone who is still alive and who still wants to leave off of The Island-- has been met.

*The absence of Michael from the finale is notable, given both those who DO return (Shannon and Boone?! Seriously?) and the presence of Ben, someone whose actions have been FAR more evil than Michael's. Something to chew on I guess. . .

Anyway, the reason I mention Lost is that during the final season I've realized just how much of my approach to Sailor Moon has been inspired by Lost. . . I won't specify as of yet, but as the script rolls on, those who have watched Lost will probably start to see the connections.

2) I'm convocating this week!

This Friday, May 28th, I will officially be a Master of Science. Okay, this isn't really news. Ever since I passed by thesis defence, you've all known that I'm going to be getting my master's degree. Still, this week it becomes official. The parchment will be in my hand. And with that out of the way. . .

3) I'm finally going to submit my Visa application to go to Japan.

After a full year of saving up money, learning Japanese, and waiting to recieve my degree, I will be submitting my working holiday visa application in June. Then, hopefully within that month, the application will be approved and I'll be off to Japan.

Obviously, going to Japan will have major ramifications for the script. For one, I'll actually be able to interact with Japanese people, which certainly helps when ninety percent of the characters in your screenplay are Japanese. Additionally, simply being in Tokyo will surely help the script come to life. Seeing the place, hearing it, hell, even smelling it, will be a great aide to my imagination, which until now has been the only thing I've relied upon for my writing. That, and more reruns of Sailor Moon S than any man should be allowed to consume in a given week.

And finally. . .

4) Sailor Moon: The Movie Part #5 IS COMING

. . . just not soon. I already said this, but I feel it needs to be stressed. I've seen many people start up blogs, or other projects, only to let them just peter away. If anyone is still reading this, I want you to know that I've not given up. . . I'm just trying to work through writers block. I'm eagerly await the day when the first draft is finished. . . so I can start up the second draft and fix up all the mistakes I made in the first draft.

Unitl next time. . .

Good to Know!

Don't Let the Picture Fool You, This IS a New Post!

Reasons Why I Should Write the Sailor Moon Movie #10 & #11

I've been feeling a little deflated lately. UNBC's Reading Break, which should have been relaxing, instead turned out to be a waste of time. There were things I was supposed to do, things I could have done, which I simply didn't do. I could have marked assignments, or studied for the Japanese midterm I had on the Monday immediately following the break and which I didn't feel terribly prepared for. But no. The only thing I managed to get done was to write a post summarising my physics paper, and judging by the lack of comments, either no-one's read it yet or no-one's really interested.

It's not just reading break, either. You may have heard that I got into a car accident a couple of weeks ago. Maybe that's what threw me off my stride. I know that my once very high marks in Japanese have begun to slide since the accident. Another possibility is that being summarily rejected from JET has had more of an affect on me than I thought. In any event, whatever the cause of this malaise, it's starting to affect my Sailor Moon writing. Despite all my ideas and ambitions and despite all the support I've seen so far, I'm beginning to worry that what I end up producing will be just a pure piece of crap.

The state I'm in is I really need to get myself out of. It's probably been two weeks since my last Sailor Moon post. If you are still checking in, I appreciate it. To show how much I appreciate it, this post contains not one, but two reasons why I, possibly, just maybe, should write the Sailor Moon movie. What's more is that these two reasons are actually pretty strongly linked to each other-- the one doesn't really make full sense without the other. So, from a narrative standpoint, it's good to outline these two reasons simultaneously.

So, without further ado. . .

Reasons Why I Should Write the Sailor Moon Movie #10: Destroying a Better World. . . Through SCIENCE!

Queen Beryl, Metallia, the Shittenou, and the Dark Kingdom are vital elements of the Sailor Moon mythos. After all, it was at their hands that the Moon Kingdom fell-- they are, really, the very reason Sailor Moon and the other senshi came to be in the first place. They were Sailor Moon's very first enemy, the only enemy to appear in every incarnation (Manga, Anime, Stage, and PGSM) of the story, and are to the Sailor Moon franchise what Lex Luthor is to the Superman franchise.

So just imagine if, in the Sailor Moon movie. . . they were no-where to be found.

And imagine moreover that it wasn't just the fans of Sailor Moon counting on these villains being in the movie, but many of the characters themselves. If you've already read the script excerpt I posted, you know that Luna was already told that she was sent into the future to fight the Dark Kingdom. As it turns out, there was one more person who expected things to unfold a certain way. . . but we'll get to that later. For now, though, let's just focus on the villain I've chosen for my movie. . .

Dr. Tomoe.

Why Dr. Tomoe?

One reason is that the Mad Scientist has become a vastly underused cliche in recent years, and when it is used these days it's typically for the purposes of parody (Dr. Insano, etc.). Some might attribute this to the Mad Scientist becoming a discredited trope. I, however, believe that the Mad Scientist has, in fact, surpassed a critical threshold of triteness and, in doing so, has become something totally original and fresh again, kinda like zombies in early 2000's. It only needs one visionary movie to harness its true potential.

Another reason is that Sailor Moon S, the anime series which featured Dr. Tomoe as its villain, is widely considered to be the creative peak of the Sailor Moon anime. Many attribute its artistic success to Dr. Tomoe and his team of evil super-powered lab techs known as the Death-Busters. From that most infallible source, Wikipedia:

Sailor Moon S is considered one of the darkest story lines in the series, partly due to the villains' ultimate goal of destroying, rather than conquering, all life in the world, as well as ethical themes of sacrifice.

Of course, lesbian senshi don't hurt matters any, but still. . .

The third reason: This guy is awesome. Check it out:



Need more proof?



I'm not sure what attracts me more: the dark, foggy underground lab (which, among other things, is a far more tangible hideout than the Dark Kingdom); the string-section accompaniment in the background (my sister, who's studying classical music, would probably know the correct term for what I'm trying to describe); the idea of actually manufacturing monsters (through SCIENCE!) rather than just summoning them; or the man himself, at once hilariously over-the-top and kind of frightening, thanks to a constantly shrouded face that reveals only the unnatural glare of his spectacles and his hideous inhuman grin.

But when it comes right down to it, quite honestly, the main reason for choosing Dr. Tomoe is that I am fucking sick of the Dark Kingdom. I said already that every incarnation has already featured them as villains, and at this point I'm pretty sure that not even a Heath Ledger-as-Joker style re-imagining could make them interesting.

Still, I know that the Dark Kingdom, the lynchpin of Sailor Moon's back story, cannot be simply brushed aside. Their absence has consequences. That's where Reason #11 comes in. . . but first, a little back story. Yes, it does involve more politics, but hopefully the treatment in the film will be subtle enough not to bother most people. For your consideration:

Souichi Tomoe was born in Chiba prefecture in 1920. It is known that during his childhood he showed a remarkable scientific aptitude. Though displaying promise in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and enginieering, among other fields, Tomoe focussed his attention primarily on medicine. He entered Tokyo Imperial University's medical program in 1936, but records on Tomoe's activities are unclear until after the end of World War II. Only two things are known for certain: one was that he lost his right eye during the war, and the other was that he had a family, wife Keiko Tomoe and daughter Hotaru Tomoe, both of whom were dead before war's end. A few rumours have come and gone throughout the years regarding just what Tomoe was doing during the war. Some rumours place him in Shanghai, others in Manchuria, and still others in Germany. Some suggest that his family was killed when a lightning strike cause an explosion in Tomoe's laboratory, while others suggest that a Chinese underground resistance group planted a bomb. The one thing the rumours have in common is a gruesome depiction of Tomoe's medical research.

Despite a (very suspicious) lack of evidence to support the them, the rumours haunted Tomoe long after the war ended. The post-war period found Tomoe at his intellectual peak. He made numerous seminal advances in genetics, and it's believed by some that he might have unravelled the structure of DNA long before Crick and Watson. . . were it not for the fact that he was unable to attend a crucial conference in England; it was hard enough for Japanese citizens to travel abroad at the time, and even harder for suspected, if unproven, war criminals. Thus was set the pattern that would be followed by Tomoe throughout his career. For every genuine success-- whether the establishment of a science-centred academy/think tank, Mugen Gakuen, or yet another in a string of groundbreaking discoveries-- his past always ensured a setback-- the small but vocal groups of protesters that followed him to public events, the perpetual denial of what many thought was a guaranteed Nobel prize.

One would expect bitterness to have worn the man down, yet at 92 years old he looks like man 30 years younger. The resistance Tomoe encountered throughout his life certainly frustrated him, yet it has never really embittered him, not exactly. Maybe a better way of putting it is that, if bitterness does lie within his soul, it is driven by more than mere professional envy. There has always been a zeal to the man, one that cannot be explained by the usual brands of scientific ambition; everyone who knows him senses he is on a mission. Just what that mission is, no-one knows.

No-one, that is, except Tomoe, and even then Tomoe, for all his drive, has sometimes had his doubts. It wasn't just his wife, or his daughter, or his eye, that he lost in that laboratory explosion somewhere in China-- he lost his sense of what the world was. In the aftermath of that explosion Tomoe was visited by. . . something, at once vague and more clear than anything he had ever known. Tomoe might have confused for it for a religious experience, an encounter with God, were it not for certain peculiarties. The thing, which for reasons known only to him he named "the Pharaoh," made fantastic promises-- to give him life, to give back his daughter, to give him knowledge.

And so Tomoe emerged from the flames of his lab, with his burnt, comatose daughter in his arms and, he believed, the eye of the Pharaoh where his own eye used to be. He navigated the tumultuous world of occupied Japan, offering his knowledge to whomever Tomoe felt could help him. He continued his research, making discoveries no-one would have believed possible-- most of which he kept to himself. It was though these freakish discoveries that Tomoe knew his encounter with the Pharaoh was not some near-death delusion. And yet, even as he used his knowledge to create fantastic and fearsome creatures, strange devices, and even a group of attractive humanoid assistants-- all the while keeping his still comatose daughter alive-- he spent the next decades never sure of why the Pharaoh came to him that day. He continuously sensed the Pharaoh's presence, a presense so potent it sometimes drove him mad, and yet he could never seem to fully satisfy the Pharaoh's wishes.

Then, in the early nineties, a new development arose, one which, at last, seemed to point to his ultimate goal. . .

Reasons Why I Should Write the Sailor Moon Movie #11: Codename: Sailor V



It was sometime in 1991 when a thirteen year old schoolgirl named Minako Aino discovered that she's a superhero. With her talking feline mentor Artemis at her side, the police (and eager press) on her tail, and a evil force seemingly all around her, Mianko became the pretty sailor suited soldier of love and justice, Sailor V. Minako didn't pick the name herself-- the press gave her that nickname-- but she liked it. After a few months of fighting crime and subduing evil, buried memories resurfaced in Minako's mind, and her true purpose was revealed. She is the reincarnation of an ancient warrior from a kingdom destroyed by an evil force-- an evil force which, like her, has returned from the dead. Minako also learns that she will soon be joined by other reincarnated warriors, as well as the princess of the ancient kingdom. Together, they will destroy this new evil once and for all. The evil force, known as the Dark Kingdom, did indeed come. . .

. . . but not the other senshi. Minako made a valient and semi-successful effort to hold back the forces of the Dark Kingdom, managing to even defeat one of its generals, Zoicite. But she knew she could not defeat them alone. To make matters worse, another evil force emerged which, like the dark kingdom, was capable creating deadly, monstrous foes but, unlike the Dark Kingdom, possessed a certain scientific and technical sophistication, as well as a sense of pragmatism. Moreover, they seemed to have no interest in human energy (which the Dark Kingdom sought) nor any obvious ambitions of world conquest. In fact, this new unknown enemy seemed utterly at odds with the Dark Kingdom, whom they viewed as a threat.

Indeed, they seemed so threatened by the Dark Kingdom that they ultimately offered to make a deal with Sailor V: they would help her defeat the Dark Kingdom once and for all, if Sailor V agreed not to interfere in their future activities. Sailor V knew it was a Faustian bargain, but she had not yet found the other Senshi, and the Dark Kingdom posed the more immediate threat. She reluctantly accepted, and the Dark Kingdom was defeated once and for all. . .

And so as not to give too much way, I will leave it at that for now.

Well. . . I guess this means I'm going to Tokyo.

I sent an application for the JET program again this year. I applied to the program once before, and was interviewed last year. I documented that experience here. I just heard back from the Japanese embassy, and the good news is that I won't have to go through it again.

I was rejected, flat out. This is strange to me, since I thought my prospects would have improved. By the time of my second application, I had successfully defended my master's thesis (with a clear pass, something which only one other grad student in physics had accomplished at UNBC) and satisfied all of my dgeree requirements-- in other words, the only thing standing between me and a MSc degree was a silly robe and a long, boring ceremony. Not only that, I had been taking courses in Japanese course, and even got a letter of recommendation from my prof (I guess a measly 99.5% grade just doesn't cut it for JET). Plus, I had been doing teaching work as a supplementary instructor for a physics course, which added to the lab teaching experience I already had.

So what the hell happened? Did the poor economy result in less teaching positions? Did they decide they weren't going to give a one time semi-reject (I made it to on to the alternate list) like me a second chance? Did I bungle the application in some way that I managed to avoid doing last time? Did they somehow manage to find my blog and discover all the nasty things I've been saying about certain Japanese politicians? Honestly, the confusion that arises from being rejected despite being a stronger candidate is actually less distressing than the rejection itself.

Why? Well, first off, being rejected means I can leave for Japan sooner. If I were accepted, I would be waiting around until August before flying off. Second, it means I can go to Tokyo-- you don't even mention the word Tokyo on the application form for JET-- and that, to say the least, will be an adventure.

But ultimately, what it comes down to is that I don't need JET. I chose JET because I thought it offered the path of least resistance to getting to Japan. We all know now how well that idea turned out. On top of that, I'm a master of fucking science. A government position teaching English in some podunk high school in Asscrack prefecture is-- and I don't say this often-- beneath me.

(Gosh, that didn't sound bitter at all!)

I'm still willing to tutor English, don't get me wrong. I may even take a TESOL course before I leave. Until then, I'll keep saving up my money, kicking ass in Japanese. . .

. . . and writing the motherfucking Sailor Moon movie. That's right! You thought that just this once I wasn't gonna mention my little pet project. Well, think again! This is my new thesis, people. Only this time, I'll actually enjoy writing it!

Sure, A Magical-girl Anime and the Japanese Far-right May SEEM Like an Odd Combintaion. . .

Reasons Why I Should Write the Sailor Moon Movie #5: Rei Hino

There are two things I need to say before beginning this next part of my Sailor Moon series.

First, I have to confess that of all the main characters of Sailor Moon, Rei Hino is the only one that I don't really "get." I have a sort of intuition about what fundamentally comprises the other characters, and all the revisions I have mentioned and will mention in future installments are based on that. For example, turning Ami Mizuno into a 8-10 year old prodigy who has skipped ahead into junior high was meant to highlight both her intellect and her personal reservation-- age and a few details aside, she is mostly the same character she always has been. Rei, however, is different. At a fundamental level, I just don't know what the hell Rei is. I realize that this is not exactly a good thing to admit in a series called "Reasons Why I SHOULD Write The Sailor Moon Movie," but in fairness to me, Sailor Moon can't seem to decide just what the hell Rei is, either. In the manga, she is both elegant and ethereal, so much so that Usagi and Luna consider whether she might be the Moon Princess, or an enemy. In the anime, she's temperamental and, frankly, kind of a bitch sometimes. In PGSM, she's a jaded realist, someone who has been hurt far too many times to entertain any sentimentality concerning friendship or love. This inconsistency does not exactly make things easy for the prospective writer trying to adapt the character to the motion picture screen. As a result, my approach to Rei will likely be the most radically different from previous incarnations of all of the senshi, save for one which I'll discuss later.

As for my second point. . . I mentioned that some of the revisions I would make to Sailor Moon are political in nature. I thought I should explain where this all comes from. I first saw the Sailor Moon anime during its initial Canadian run on YTV, and I can safely say that it was one of the few bright spots in an otherwise very dismal part of my life. In 2006, something prompted me to look up info on Sailor Moon on the web. This was how I discovered the live action series, and as a result got back into Sailor Moon. Thanks to YouTube, I watched every single episode of PGSM, as well as the two specials. At first, I watched both for the nostalgia factor and the pure hilarity of it all. But somehow, as the show went on it managed to dig its way into my psyche in ways that few other series have. I'm still not entirely sure what it is about this show that affected me so much, but I think part of it was just the sheer Japaneseness of it all-- the show was effectively my first real exposure to unfiltered Japanese pop culture.

The timing of when I started to watch PGSM, moreover, was impeccable. In the fall of 2006 I took a course in short fiction. One of the stories we studied was Yukio Mishima's "Patriotism," about the ritual suicide of a Japanese soldier and his wife set during the "February 26 Incident" in 1936. It's a chilling story on its own, and moreso when you consider that Mishima himself later committed a similar act of ritual suicide at the Japanese Self-Defence Force headquarters in 1970, his last protest of what he saw as Japan's retreat from imperial and militarist values. Later, in the winter of 2007, I took a political science course, titled "Democracy and Dictatorship." My final essay was focussed on how certain policies of the Allied Occupation forces in Japan following WWII helped contribute to the counrty's present-day denial of war-crimes. Through my research on the topic, I was introduced to the strange world of the Japan's political right. I could go on for a whole post on that topic (actually, I already blogged on this subject once, though looking back on it, it's quite ranty), but what matters as far as this post is concerned is that my fascination with these two disparate things-- a magical-shojo story and a disturbingly influential part of the Japanese sociopolitical spectrum-- developed simultaneously, and as a result one bled into the other. This may have been somewhat apparent in Part #1, but it's here where the influence really becomes clear.

With that out of the way, let's begin.


Rei Hino

As I said in Part #1, my version of Sailor Moon is in large part a story of a teenage girl trying to make her way in a foreign culture. Therefore, one of the roles of Rei Hino should be to epitomize and embody that culture. No surprise there: in the Tradition vs. Modernity debate that seems to dominate much of anime, Rei has always taken the tradition side, even if she indulges in a few modern pleasures. But when I say she should epitomize the culture, I mean that she epitomize all of it, the good and the bad.

Remember that Rei's father is a politician. In previous incarnations, this fact was used merely as an explanation for what a deadbeat he is, and that's still all good. But the thing about politicians? They have politics. As you may have guessed from my introduction, my version of Papa Hino is a member of the right-most edge of the center-right Liberal Democratic Party, the type who thinks Article 9 is for pussies, who thinks all Koreans have cooties, who makes claims about extra-long Japanese intestines to argue against increased food imports, who has unsavoury connections to Uyoku Dantai groups and organized crime, and who wants all Japanese history textbooks to contain the words "Nanking? What Nanking?" And his politics will have rubbed off onto Rei, adding a shade of xenophobia to her traditionalism.

"Great," someone out there is saying. "Jerkface here has turned Sailor Mars into a racist. Next he'll tell us that there won't be any Queen Beryl in his movie, and that the senshi will be fighting Dr. Tomoe!" Not so fast. Yes, Rei will have a distrust of foreigners, and this is something that Usagi will experience firsthand. But Rei will also know at some level that her particular distrust of foreigners is irrational. While she may have been politically indoctrinated by her father, you have to remember that much of Rei's psyche is framed by her pure contempt for the man. It was her father's absence, as well as his willingness to exploit his daughter for political purposes (like in episode 8 of PGSM), that led Rei to give up on men. It's like what Dr. Manhattan said: "When you left me, I left Earth. Does that not show you I care?" (Yes, I have made references to both Watchmen and Yukio Mishima in giving my pitch for a Sailor Moon movie.) This contempt will lead Rei to have at least started to question her political assumptions by the time she meets Usagi. As I said, Rei epitomizes Japanese culture, and a big part of that culture is the aforementioned Tradition vs. Modernity debate. Rei plays out this debate every day of her life. Even though she favours tradition, she is still fascinated by modern life: she shops, she listens to J-pop, she goes to the arcade, she parties (I envision just a tiny bit of the Bush Twins/Paris Hilton in her). As a child, she even went so far as wanting to be "a singer-songwriter, a model, a wonderful voice actress," though her father quickly shamed her out of that notion. This debate will come to a head in the movie.

But Rei is more than just a set of conflicting abstract principles trapped in the body of a schoolgirl. She's a character, a human being. It's in this respect that my portrayal of Rei differs from previous ones more radically than my portrayal of the other Senshi so far. I mentioned in part #4 that the personalities of the guardian Senshi are modelled on the Chinese elements. For example, the element of water is associated with the colour blue, the season of winter, the planet Mercury, and the emotion of fear. Hence, Sailor Mercury. Likewise, the planet Mars is associated with the element of fire and the color red, which are both seen in Sailor Mars. Yet the emotion associated with Mars, happiness, is not what comes to mind when one sees Rei Hino, especially in the anime. What to make of this? Well, the simple answer is that the writers of Sailor Moon didn't take the Chinese astrological meanings all that literally, and that's understandable-- partly because of the Greco-Roman influences on Sailor Moon, and partly because the writers didn't want to limit themselves by being overly literal.

Still, when thinking about writing Sailor Mars, I tried to keep the Chinese elemental meanings in mind. To do this, I asked myself, what happens when you try to make Rei Hino "happy?" Even forgetting all of the political baggage I've heaped onto her, the fact of the matter is that her mother is dead, her father is such an asshole that she ended up unable to relate to men of any kind, and she's so isolated that before she meets Usagi her best friends are pair of crows who communicate with her psychically. What in the hell does she have to be happy about? Don't ask me how -- it would take too long to explain-- but this is the answer I came up with. (note: if what follows comes off as pretentious, it's because it is ;P)

It's sometimes been said that to live in Japan, one must wear a mask. This is true to an extent everywhere in the world but, perhaps because of the prevalence of masks in Japanese No theatre, this metaphor has taken hold in Japan. Rei Hino, being the daughter of a politician, serves as a sort of public representative. As such, she spends quite a bit of her time wearing the proverbial mask, be that at public events, the exclusive catholic school she attends, or elsewhere. Depending on the context, Rei Hino presents certain alternate versions of herself. At public functions, under the eye of her father, she's smiling and vacuous. In front of others her age, she feigns slightly arrogant aloofness, an almost detached amusement at others. This is not the temperamental Rei of the anime-- movie Rei is far too cool for that shit. As part of her "mask," she even enters into a rather detached relationship with a boy, a cynical parody of love. Yet ironically, this boy is one of the few true friends she has (just who this boy is, and why they can connect with one another, shall remain a secret for now). True happiness mostly eludes Rei, but in the halls of the Hikawa Shinto shrine, she finds a certain peace that comes close to it. She has to concentrate in order to attain this peace, but ultimately it comes. With it come psychic visions, a sense of a growing evil, and a strange affinity for fire. . .

This post has a lot of things to take in, so I'll leave Rei for now. Besides, to further explain Rei's role I first need to discuss a couple of other characters.

Next time, the flip-side of Rei: Makoto.

Katana Found Near Murder Scene in Prince George

I saw an intriguing story on the cover of today's Citizen. Police have discovered a katana (the paper insists on calling it a "samurai sword") in the Hudson's Bay Slough canal near Queensway. The katana had "red discolouration[ie. blood, most likely] on the tip and more splattered down the blade." This fact, as well as the location where it was found, have led police to consider whether it might be related to a murder that occured on Saturday. The victim is rumored to be a gang member, though police will only say at this time that he was "known to us."

I'm waiting to hear if more information is released about the sword, specifically whether it really was used to kill the victim and whether it was an authentic katana or just an imitation. Prudence leads me to believe that it's probably an imitation. If it is authentic, it means that the sword is, to say the least, not cheap.

UPDATE: Or, rather, non-update. Since the story broke on the fourteenth of April, there has not been a follow-up story in the Citizen, though they did run an op-ed on the sixteenth, which can pretty much summed up as "killing people with swords is bad." The Free Press did run a story on the sword, but it doesn't offer anything not already revealed in the Citizen article.

My Win-sense is Tingling. . .

Fireman dresses as Spider-Man to rescue boy.



Seriously.

BANGKOK - A Thai firefighter dressed as Spider-Man to rescue an autistic boy who climbed onto a third-floor balcony and dangled his legs over the side because he was nervous on his first day of school.

Firefighter Somchai Yoosabai was called in after the 11-year-old boy's teachers and mother failed to coax him off the ledge on Monday, he said in a telephone interview Wednesday.

"He was nervous about the first day at school, and he was asking for his mother," Somchai said. "He cried and refused to let any of us get close to him."

Overhearing a conversation between the boy's mother and his teachers about his love for comics and superheroes, Somchai rushed back to the fire station to change into a Spider-Man costume before swinging into action.

"I told him Spider-Man is here to save you. No monster will hurt you now," Somchai said. "Then I told him to walk slowly toward me. I was very nervous that he might have slipped if he got too excited and ran."

Somchai, who keeps costume of Spider-Man and a Japanese superhero Ultraman to liven up fire drills at schools, said the teary-eyed boy broke into a smile and started walking into his arms.

Win.

JET Jagger!

I've found another reason to love Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon.

Subtitles.

Since all the dialog is subtitled, I can watch PGSM during lab without turning on the speakers on the lab computer. I can't do this for any other show that I watch online.

Why do I bring thus up? Because I'm in lab.
And because PGSM is Japanese.

And because it's probably the closest I'll ever come to actually visiting Japan.


Last week, I drove down to Vancouver for my JET interview. JET is Japan's government-run English-teaching exchange program, which brings thousands of people from all over the English-speaking world to Japan. I sent out my application form just barely in time to make the November 28th deadline, and by late January received notice that I would be interviewed. The interview date was conveniently scheduled for Wednesday, February 18th, right smack in the middle of reading break. This meant that I wouldn't have to worry about labs.

I hoped this would be a fun trip. However, on the weekend before the trip, my back went out. It was so painful that, for the first time in my life, I had to get medication for back pain, as well as thermal pads.

But by Tuesday morning, my back was feeling a somewhat better, and I was able to drive off to Vancouver without difficulty. As I always do nowadays whenever I go to Vancouver, I took the Highway 99 route through Pemberton, Whistler, and some of the most beautiful countryside I've ever seen. Here are some pictures(shamelessly pirated off Google) to give you an idea:









I arrived in Vancouver at around 7pm, late enough to avoid rush hour. To get into the mood, I had dinner at a very reasonably priced sushi restaurant-- I don't remember the name, but I;m sure I could find it again. The next morning was spent scouring the city for any scraps of Japanese culture I could find to use in my interview.

Name five famous Japanese people:

Nanako Matsushima, Naoko Takeuchi, Akira Kurosawa, Yukio Mishima, and, uh. . . (Goes to Chapter's, finds book on physics, looks up Yukawa's first name) Ah, yes, Hideki Yukawa. Good ol' Hideki Yukawa. Predictied the existence of the Pi-meson, he did. He was a physicist. I'm getting a master's degree in physics, you know. . .

I also stumbled upon an art-house theater that had just finished a retrospective on the work of Japanese director Nagisa Oshima (here's the website-- "In the Realm of Oshima", if you're interested). I made a note of this, thinking it might be of some use during the interview.

The interview was scheduled for 3 o'clock, at the Harbour center branch of SFU, just a block from my hotel. I arrived a half-hour early, registered, and took a seat outside the interview room. After a couple of minutes, the gentleman being interviewed before me came out of the room. I smiled and nodded, but he just glanced at me and walked away.

This was not going to be good.

After a bit of a delay, I was escorted into the interview room. There were three officials: a Caucasian Canadian, Brian, and two Japanese officials, Damien and (I think) Emily. After a brief overview of the selection process (basically, the interviewers send their notes to officials in Japan, who will ultimately decide if I am to be accepted), and a bit of small talk ("You drove?!"), the questions began. Things went wrong almost immediately. What follows is my almost certainly incomplete reconstruction of the interview.

What would you bring with you from Canada to Japan to help with your duties?(English teaching, cultural exchange, etc.)

After a bit of floundering about how I'm a "minimalist" packer, I finally mentioned that one of the things I would bring are pictures-- of my family, pets, Prince George (Mr. PG!), and Canada in general-- I emphasized that when I think about what Canada means to me, I think natural beauty (hell, it beats hockey...)

This was where I first screwed up. The thing that brought "pictures" was the fact that I had prepared a series of pictures to show to the interviewers, in the event that I would be asked to show how I would introduce myself to a class of Japanese children. However, I never showed them the pictures. The reason for this, I guess, was that I wanted to present myself as conservative in personality, not to outgoing or chummy. My big mistake throughout the entire interview was in allowing myself to get so nerved out that I withdrew further and further into my "conservative" persona.

The interviewers, I suppose, weren't impressed with my answer, since they mentioned that a lot a Japanese live in the countryside. I mentioned that I knew this, and that one of the reasons I wanted to go to Japan was that Japan itself had great natural and architectural beauty. I then floundered a bit about how I have a Slovak father, and that there is a unique culture, the Czech and Slovak "tramps," that has formed in the midst of Canada's nature-- the point being that the wild aspect of Canada, and the myth surrounding the Canadian Wilderness, has created a distinct culture in and of itself. I don't think I phrased it as articulately as that, though. . .

In hindsight, I also realized that a good thing to mention would have been English-language translations of Japanese manga. Oh well. . .

Have any hobbies?

I told them that I'm big, so I like to eat-- and also cook. They remarked that I might be confused for a sumo wrestler in Japan, and for self-esteem's sake I just assumed that they were referring to my height and not my. . . girth. I then remarked that I enjoyed walking.

Oh, well then, speaking of walking. . . Suppose you're on one of your walks, you go down some road or whatever, and then the next day someone comes up to you and says that they saw you. How would you react?

Whatev's. Like I said, I'm a big guy even by Western standards, and I'm used to all sorts of people that I don't know or remember noticing me.

They followed by saying that this occurs regardless of height, and is a consequence of the greater social interconnection that exists in Japanese culture. They wanted to know whether this aspect would bother me. I told them that it still probably wouldn't bother me, and then explained that my sister is in a band in Prince George, and that she's also friends with pretty much everyone and their brother. As a result of this, I'm used to a lot of people recognizing me, even if I don't know or remember them.

Brian made a note of this, giving a brief raising of the eyebrows, as if to say "Okay, whatever."

You mentioned that you tutored a South Korean student. Did you ever give her help with English?

No, at least not in terms of grammar or anything like that. I taught her physics, chemistry, and mathematics.

Okay. . . well then, I guess that I (Damien) am gonna have to play the bad cop here.

Suppose I've bought a piece of property, and I'm talking to you about it. Would it be okay to say that I own this piece of ground?

This was one of the few questions where I thought I did pretty well. I explained that "ground" refers to the physical stuff beneath our feet, whereas "land" is a more abstract concept relating to ownership and property. Thus, it would be more appropriate to say "I own this land." They seemed fairly pleased with my answer, and explained that the teaching of English won't be related so much to grammar as to colloquialisms.

Ironically, the "bad cop" Damien turned out to be nicest guy in the interview.

You still like anime?

I said that I wasn't as interested in it as I once was. That is true, but it's not the whole truth. I can't stand most anime (take a look at this flash animation-- it'll give an idea of what's wrong with most anime) but there are two directors I do like-- Hayao Miyazaki and Satoshi Kon. I particularly like the latter. I would have liked to have mentioned some of his works, like Perfect Blue, Paprika, Millenium Actress, and Tokyo Godfathers. . . but instead, I just said that my favourite anime was Sailor Moon. Damien and Emily both nodded and "ahhhh!"-ed in recognition.

I didn't even mention PGSM. Squandered opportunities.

In your work as a lab instructor, have you ever made lesson plans?

No. The senior lab instructor draws out the lesson plan. I simply enact it.

Have you ever given a big presentation, and have something go wrong, and if so, how did you cope?

I had to ask the interviewers three times for clarification, since this seemed like such a bizarre question. Yes, I have given brief presentations for physics classes, often involving complex concepts that are difficult to explain even to my fellow students, but these have gone swimmingly. So of course I couldn't mention those during the interview because they were irrelevant o the question.

Stupid, stupid, stupid!

Instead, I talked about how nerved out I was giving my first opening lecture for a physics lab, and how I've tried to take the experiences from those moments to calm me down during subsequent presentations. Generic bullshit.

Do you like kids?

This one came out of no-where. Surprised, I nodded and said "yup."

Sure I like kids. Totally. Yup.

I'll bet I convinced them.

It's a completely obvious question, too.

Your responsibilities as an Assistant Language Teacher may end up amounting to rote repetition of certain English phrases, over and over again. Would you be okay with that?

I could have mentioned the possibility of starting an "English Club" for interested students. Instead, I just said,

"Yup."

Would you be okay with a rural area?

"Yup."

At this moment, I'm imagining the worst case scenario-- I'm accepted, but on the basis of my terrible interview, I'm sent of to some Japanese backwater with a population of three-hundred, with an ultra-conservative teacher who belives the responsibility of the ALT is to teach kids to say "Yes, sir!" over and over again.


The interview was pretty much over by this point. All that remained was for me ask questions of the interviewers. I asked them three questions. The first was about accomidations; the second was about when I would be starting in the school year, and whether students will have had any advance preparation in English before I arrive; the third was directed to Damien, who was the only former ALT in the group. I asked him what his best and worst experiences as a JET were. His best experience was becoming close to his host family in Japan, effectively becoming the "Canadian Son." His worst was having to sign his renewal contract after getting into a bicycle accident.

With that, the interview ended. I met up with the next prospective ALT. He asked me how it was, and I told him it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, which is true. The interview wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. . . it's just that I wasn't as good as I thought I was going to be.

I was drained after that interview. I spent about six hours looking for a good place to get dinner (I ultimately decided on Cafe Crepe) and went to a theater to see Frost/Nixon.

The next day, I was home.

By the way, the title is a reference to a character from one of the Godzilla movies, known as "Jet Jaguar." Here's a video of MST3K parodying his theme song (this is where "Jet Jagger" comes from):

Lab

I'm in my Phys 111 lab. It's 7:50 pm and I'm not leaving until around 9:30. It's hard going. I mangled my introduction to the lab because I was tired and didn't prepare and basically just didn't give a shit. As a result, I think a couple of students laughed at me, and frankly, I can't blame them. On top of that, I'm also marking labs for Christine, the senior lab instructor. She's telling me that I have to "get mean," which means, in part, that I'll have to be even more vigilant in identifying mistakes than I already am, which means even more work. Either that, or I'll just have to take off more points for the same mistakes, which is easier, but not neccessarily fair to the students.

Labs. My "fuck that guy" of the evening.

(This does not bode well for me if I'm selected by JET to teach English in Japan. Come to think of it, that would have been an interesting blog topic. Way better than bitching about the shitty commercials done by my make-believe Japanese girlfriend.)

Miyuu Afterwards, or, YOU USED TO BE SAILOR MOON, GODDAMMIT!!!

Click here. You'll find a video. Don't worry, it won't take too much of your time.

Did you notice the tiny woman on the left about ten seconds in? You know, the one showing off the latest in Japanese corporate homogenization, performing a modeling task one or two small steps above that of your typical Sears mannequin?

Look at it again, if you missed it.

You'd never guess that woman used to be Sailor Moon. You know, one of the most popular Japanese heros of all time.

And now she's pitching suits.

Okay, okay, you're thinking "It's not that bad." (Or "Christ, here he goes with Miyuu Fucking Sawai again. Get a girlfriend, you fucking loser.") It's certainly not the lowest to which Miyuu Sawai has ever stooped. I already showed you the PGSM toy commercials, but even that's not so bad, she was the star of her own TV show at the time.

But the next thing I'm going to show you. . . there's just no excuse.

Just in case it doesn't show, here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ar7ZRoeYJKY

This commercial, first aired in 2007, did indeed star the one and only Homer Simpson. . . in Miyuu Sawai's mouth. The saddest thing is that as weird as this commercial is, it doesn't even have the benefit of being that unique, Japanese sort of weird. It's a bland, commercialist, acultural, boring kind of weird.

But it's not even the corporate aspect that bugs me. I mean, there are plenty of successful actors who do commercials. Like this one:

Denny Crane.

Sure, the Commodore Vic-20 has "a real computer keyboard," but that's not what made it "The Wonder Computer of the 1980s" TM.

No, it was William Shatner. By mere whim, Shatner took some hunk of ugly plastic with a five kilobyte memory and declared that for the remainder of an entire decade, no other computer shall surpass it Wonder-ness. He made the Vic-20.

And that's the difference. The Vic-20 commercial was really an advertisement not of a computer, but of the awesomeness that is Shatner. It's really his way of saying "I made it."

On the other hand, Sawai's commercials seem like a retreat back to anonymity. In both cases she's secondary to the product. The suit commercial's focus is on the spokeswoman, who in turn is directing the viewer's attention not to Sawai but to her clothes. The donut commercial features an extreme close-up of Sawai's visage, and even then, even then, she's upstaged by a freakin' cartoon. IN HER OWN MOUTH!

The weird thing is, before a couple of days ago, I thought I had made peace with donut commercial. The year 2008 was relatively good for Sawai. She landed a small roll in the film Shaolin Girl, a Japanese pseudo-sequel to Shaolin Soccer. She also co-hosted an educational series for NHK called "French TV" (at least I think that's how it translates), which as its name suggests is focused on teaching French to Japanese speakers. I would have loved to have found some clips from the show, but so far I've not had any luck.

On top of this, she did a few TV guest roles. My favourite out of all of these-- and the one for which it was easiest to get clips-- was her appearance as a bicycle delivery girl on the series Tomika Hero Rescue Force, a show that manages to make PGSM look subtle and restrained by comparison.

The episode was uploaded in three parts; I've put up the second part below. The best scene starts at about seven minutes in.

For whatever reason, that scene always reminds me this classic movie moment:

While some people-- those lacking vision-- would call that bike leap scene moronic, you can't deny that it's a huge step up from smuggling an amorphous pirated copy of The Simpson's Movie inside one's mouth. And you can't deny that that clothing ad was a step down. Unless you're talking in terms of good taste, in which case, why are you reading this blog?

I don't know quite how to close this entry in any logical way, so I'll just conclude with another reference to Yor: The Hunter from the Future.

Meet The New Boss. . . Same as the Old Boss. . .

. . . which in this case is a good thing. Two teams of scientists have discovered a way to convert skin cells into stem cells. Scientists have been trying to conduct research on stem cells for years, in spite of opposition from the U.S. Government, which has refused to provide federal funding due to political pandering to the religious right objections over the use of human embryos, which are killed during extraction. This new method of stem cell production should hopefully overcome the ethical barriers traditionally associated with stem cell research. From msn.ca:

Laboratory teams on two continents report success in a pair of landmark papers released Tuesday. It's a neck-and-neck finish to a race that made headlines five months ago, when scientists announced that the feat had been accomplished in mice.

The "direct reprogramming" technique avoids the swarm of ethical, political and practical obstacles that have stymied attempts to produce human stem cells by cloning embryos.

Scientists familiar with the work said scientific questions remain and that it's still important to pursue the cloning strategy, but that the new work is a major coup.

"This work represents a tremendous scientific milestone - the biological equivalent of the Wright Brothers' first airplane," said Dr. Robert Lanza, chief science officer of Advanced Cell Technology, which has been trying to extract stem cells from cloned human embryos.

"It's a bit like learning how to turn lead into gold," said Lanza, while cautioning that the work is far from providing medical payoffs.

"It's a huge deal," agreed Rudolf Jaenisch, a prominent stem cell scientist at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass. "You have the proof of principle that you can do it."

The White House lauded the papers, saying such research is what President Bush was advocating when he twice vetoed legislation to pave the way for taxpayer-funded embryo research.

There is a catch with the new technique. At this point, it requires disrupting the DNA of the skin cells, which creates the potential for developing cancer. So it would be unacceptable for the most touted use of embryonic cells: creating transplant tissue that in theory could be used to treat diseases like diabetes, Parkinson's, and spinal cord injury.

But the DNA disruption is just a byproduct of the technique, and experts said they believe it can be avoided.

The new work is being published online by two journals, Cell and Science. The Cell paper is from a team led by Dr. Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University; the Science paper is from a team led by Junying Yu, working in the lab of in stem-cell pioneer James Thomson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Both reported creating cells that behaved like stem cells in a series of lab tests.

Thomson, 48, made headlines in 1998 when he announced that his team had isolated human embryonic stem cells.

Yamanaka gained scientific notice in 2006 by reporting that direct reprogramming in mice had produced cells resembling embryonic stem cells, although with significant differences. In June, his group and two others announced they'd created mouse cells that were virtually indistinguishable from stem cells.

For the new work, the two men chose different cell types from a tissue supplier. Yamanaka reprogrammed skin cells from the face of an unidentified 36-year-old woman, and Thomson's team worked with foreskin cells from a newborn. Thomson, who was working his way from embryonic to fetal to adult cells, said he's still analyzing his results with adult cells.

Both labs did basically the same thing. Each used viruses to ferry four genes into the skin cells. These particular genes were known to turn other genes on and off, but just how they produced cells that mimic embryonic stem cells is a mystery.

"People didn't know it would be this easy," Thomson said. "Thousands of labs in the United States can do this, basically tomorrow."

The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, which holds three patents for Thomson's work, is applying for patents involving his new research, a spokeswoman said. Two of the four genes he used were different from Yamanaka's recipe.

Scientists prize embryonic stem cells because they can turn into virtually any kind of cell in the body. The cloning approach - which has worked so far only in mice and monkeys - should be able to produce stem cells that genetically match the person who donates body cells for cloning.

That means tissue made from the cells should be transplantable into that person without fear of rejection. Scientists emphasize that any such payoff would be well in the future, and that the more immediate medical benefits would come from basic research in the lab.

In fact, many scientists say the cloning technique has proven too expensive and cumbersome in its current form to produce stem cells routinely for transplants.

The new work shows that the direct reprogramming technique can also produce versatile cells that are genetically matched to a person. But it avoids several problems that have bedevilled the cloning approach.

For one thing, it doesn't require a supply of unfertilized human eggs, which are hard to obtain for research and subjects the women donating them to a surgical procedure. Using eggs also raises the ethical questions of whether women should be paid for them.

In cloning, those eggs are used to make embryos from which stem cells are harvested. But that destroys the embryos, which has led to political opposition from U.S. President George W. Bush, the Roman Catholic church and others.

Those were "show-stopping ethical problems," said Laurie Zoloth, director of Northwestern University's Center for Bioethics, Science and Society.

The new work, she said, "redefines the ethical terrain."

Richard Doerflinger, deputy director of pro-life activities for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, called the new work "a very significant breakthrough in finding morally unproblematic alternatives to cloning. ... I think this is something that would be readily acceptable to Catholics."

White House spokesman Tony Fratto said the new method does not cross what Bush considers an "ethical line." And Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, a staunch opponent of publicly funded embryonic stem cell research, said it should nullify the debate.

Another advantage of direct reprogramming is that it would qualify for federal research funding, unlike projects that seek to extract stem cells from human embryos, noted Doug Melton, co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.

Still, scientific questions remain about the cells produced by direct reprogramming, called "iPS" cells. One is how the cells compare to embryonic stem cells in their behaviour and potential. Yamanaka said his work detected differences in gene activity.

If they're different, iPS cells might prove better for some scientific uses and cloned stem cells preferable for other uses. Scientists want to study the roots of genetic disease and screen potential drug treatments in their laboratories, for example.

Scottish researcher Ian Wilmut, famous for his role in cloning Dolly the sheep a decade ago, told London's Daily Telegraph that he is giving up the cloning approach to produce stem cells and plans to pursue direct reprogramming instead.

Other scientists said it's too early for the field to follow Wilmut's lead. Cloning embryos to produce stem cells remains too valuable as a research tool, Jaenisch said.

Dr. George Daley of the Harvard institute, who said his own lab has also achieved direct reprogramming of human cells, said it's not clear how long it will take to get around the cancer risk problem. Nor is it clear just how direct reprogramming works, or whether that approach mimics what happens in cloning, he noted.

So the cloning approach still has much to offer, he said.

Daley, who's president of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, said his lab is pursuing both strategies.

"We'll see, ultimately, which one works and which one is more practical."

When I learned that one of the two teams that made the discovery was Japanese, being the lovely little cynic that I am, I started to wonder whether this was part of Japan's "scientific whaling."

One Step for Small Men. . .

. . . and I'm just gonna stop there.

Japan has launched a probe into lunar orbit. The probe, SELENE, is taking HDTV images of the Moon's surface even as I speak(so to speak). Below I've posted two time-compressed video streams sent back by the probe (the video below shows them both).