PETA Problems

Recently, PETA decided to target Mario from the Super Mario Bros. series for the tanuki (raccoon dog) suit that Mario wears as a form of power up. PETA is targeting Mario for this because it supposedly endorses the wearing of fur. The allegation completely misses the idea that the “tanuki” in the tanuki suit is more referring to the magical tanuki in Japanese legends than actual raccoon dogs, and because of that Mario is more becoming the tanuki (or perhaps he was one all along?) than wearing any fur so to say. In the end though, it is hard not to be cynical about this recent accusation by PETA. Since Super Mario Bros. recently had a new installment of their game on the 3DS, PETA is most probably targeting Mario because it is a ton of free press they can get from various websites complaining about how ridiculous they are being. PETA seems to employ the “all press is good press” philosophy for while their message is being sent throughout the internet, it has been peppered and salted by criticism and skepticism on almost all the sites that are broadcasting the news.

Which is actually too bad, because I feel like PETA has a good point sometimes. I feel that how people treat animals is something that everyone should be aware of. Especially now that we know two things: 1.) Some of the most potent epidemics are coming from animals 2.) How a person treats an animal can reflect on their potential empathy for all things (including other people).

So let’s start with the first thing: biological science is confirming more and more that some of the biggest diseases are coming from animals. This is the reason like “bird flu” and “swine flu” are named as such are because they actually came from birds and pigs. Something I was not made aware of until recently is that all flu viruses come from birds. Viruses and germs can travel from animal to animal and they eventually mutate and evolve to survive in the environment that they find themselves placed in. The problems humans run into is that with the rapid slaughter and consumption of birds, pigs, and many other animals, it is much easier for these microorganisms to travel around and become stronger to the point of worldwide problem. While it is easy to assume that people take the right precautions when killing an animal that none of the blood and whatnot gets into the person slaughtering it, the fact is that it only takes one person in the process of killing an animal, shipping it, and then eating it to do something wrong and get a disease that kills thousands if not millions of people. Take HIV for example. Scientists have traced that deadly epidemic that is ravaging people from just from one person killing a monkey that just happened to have the virus that could infect people. Imagine, if that person just had more thought and been more careful, perhaps HIV and AIDS could have been something only in horror stories. Maybe with this thinking, it is easier to see where PETA is coming from.

Even more than the unfortunate probabilities that face the consumption of animals, it is hard not to look at the way we treat animals sometimes and think of how it reflects on ourselves. It has been said that kids being cruel to animals can be an indication of a lack of empathy and an early warning sign for psychopathy. The idea is that people, especially children, tend to over-identify and empathise with things that can’t really return their feelings. It is then that empathy we exercise to relate and socialize with other people (and hopefully this leads to treating them kindly). I guess there is no real proof that treating animals badly as adults is bad for human empathy, but when I hear about things like how KFC treats the chickens it serves in buckets, I get a little sick in my stomach. I can not say with absolute authority if cage free eggs taste better or worse than the eggs coming from a caged chicken, but I would rather pay the premium if I know that those animals are being treated humanly. Maybe I am the one over-empathizing here, but I just feel there is something wrong about treating animals horribly in order to get a constant stream of their meat on store shelves. It reeks to me of greediness and a growing feeling that people are losing the ability to cope with inconvenience. Also, if businesses can only survive by treating animals poorly, than should those businesses exist? I really don’t think so. The problem for me I suppose is I am not sure if these sentiments are coming from a real rational place or if they are just my feelings of empathy that come with positive memories of the animals most people don’t really care to interact with.

Maybe that is the same problem that PETA as a group is going through. They are letting their strong feelings get ahead of actually trying to make a good argument against violence on animals. While I do not necessarily agree with everything they believe in, I do think can serve an important reminder that people need to be aware of the consequences of our actions against animals. Maybe if everyone were to take that awareness and let ourselves care about all living things big and small, then PETA would not have to get so crazy and criticise the actions of a fictional magical plumber. 

On Fluency

To be honest, being fluent is something I have always felt a bit insecure about. I have studied the Japanese language for about 7 years, and have lived in Japan for about 3 and a half years, but whenever I ask myself, “Am I fluent in Japanese?” I begin to doubt myself. It is not that I can’t speak or read the language, but it is the fact that I never feel like I am good enough. Whenever I speaking Japanese, most of the time I feel like I get my point across, but every so often I run into somebody that can’t understand me at all, and I begin to wonder if no one understands me, and they are being too polite to say anything. I understand that, English being my native language, that I can not help but have an accent. No matter what I do, that is something I can’t really change. Sure, I can go into a voice imitation of some Japanese people around me or a Japanese celebrity or something, but in the end, it doesn’t feel natural. Like many people in Japan learning English, I have to deal with my limitations of being a non-native speaker.

In a round a bout way though, I have found that this struggle has made me much more sympathetic to English speech in Japan. Since English is required learning in Japan, there are a whole lot of Japanese students who study English, but only a percentage of them become fully able to hold a conversation with other English speakers. I find that a lot of native English speakers in Japan tend to look down and make fun of a lot of the English speech in Japan but there is a part of me that just feels like that is just wrong headed. Though, in their defense, Japanese people tend to laugh at their own English all the time. Though when Japanese people do it, it is self-deprecating, but when native English speakers do it, the jokes sometimes come off as mean spirited. I realize now that a lot of that stems from my own struggles with Japanese. My Japanese is worlds better than before, but I remember after I graduated high school it wasn’t until my friend called a baby “kowaii” that we realised that kowaii means scary, while kawaii means cute. I studied for four years before I understood that. Perhaps that is why when a Japanese student says “rook” instead of “look,” I am more sympathetic than amused.

Though I suppose fluency is really about confidence. It is the ability to speak quickly and confidently to express yourself. I feel like I can do this, but sometimes if I want to ask about something I am not sure what the word is in Japanese, I just don’t talk about it. Does it count as fluent if I only talk about things I know all the words for? I actually took a point after thinking about that to talk about bigger issues with my Japanese colleagues and friends. It ended up okay, I got said what I wanted to say, but it wasn’t as intellectually fulfilling as I wanted it to be. Maybe if I really want to get to the level of fluency I desire, I need to really challenge myself and go the distance; argue about something I really feel passionate about and stand my ground.

It is that passion I think that grounds true fluency. Being able to talk about the weather is all fine and good as far as language goes, but until I find something I really want to discuss and need that high level language in order to make a conversation, I am not going to be satisfied. I would rather talk in broken Japanese about the effect of the warlord Oda Nobunaga has on the modern day salary men, than talk in perfect Japanese about how boring my day was. It will be that drive that will propel me to learn more Japanese and become a true master in the language. Or at least propel me to read a Japanese comic book now and then.

Sound Novels 101

Ever since I have heard the term “Sound Novel” (actually the term I heard was “Visual Novel” which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense since all novels are “visual) I kept on wondering what the heck they were. Whenever I would try to find pictures or a good explanation of what was really happening, I came up kind of short. Whenever I would then look for them in Japanese shops, I would run into the “erotic” game section instead, and I began to think that “sound novel” was just a way to disguise inappropriate material. The more I lived in Japan though, I began to realise that this wasn’t really the case. My first real foray into sound novels was reading the Japanese video game magazine Famitsu, and reading the review of a sound novel called 428: Fuusa Sareta Shibuya de (428: The Blockade at Shibuya) and seeing that they gave it a perfect 40/40 score. I began to wonder what was really up with this rising form of entertainment was really about.

Sound novels usually are PC games (that are then ported to various game devices) that essentially scroll the text of a book at you while music and pictures are shown and played in order to influence the readers reading of the text. Sometimes they have the text read to the reader, but often for both immersion and budget reasons, they rely mostly on music and cartoon pictures to establish mood and atmosphere. Due to the multimedia aspect, they usually play out like a TV serial (which is to say it has a heavy focus on dialog with often convoluted or “pulpy” plots, though this varies from novel to novel). The audience that is most targeted in Japan is  20-30 something males, with deviations and stand outs like 428 that brake the mold and appeal to a wider audience. As these are becoming more popular, people can see their influence on various manga, TV, video games, and other Japanese pop culture media.

As their influence spreads, I first began to wonder why they are so popular. Perhaps it is a sign of the Japanese language itself, with its many complicated characters of kanji and reading capacity supposedly going down every year (also known as the “Nihongo Midare” or “The Disturbance of the Japanese Language”). Also the natural high-context nature of the Japanese language (1/3 of the Japanese language is homonyms which makes context very important to understand what people are saying) makes Sound Novels much more appealing to the Japanese audience. While that is true, it is also very likely that the modern era is mostly about more fast paced TV, movies, and games, and books have unfortunately been left behind by a lot of people. Sound novels can be seen as a natural evolution of books, trying to stay relevant in an age where people seem to have less and less patience for anything not completely stimulating to multiple senses.

Another thing influencing their rising popularity is the fact that Sound Novels have a relatively small budget compared to most other popular pop culture media and therefore can thrive in a niche. Groups of five or six people can make a visual novel, and thanks to the democratization of media on the internet, they can be very profitable. This low budget nature of the sound novel also means that they tend to explore more taboo subjects such as violence and sex. Especially in Japan, censorship can be a huge blockade (even at Shibuya) for a lot of media, but strangely enough, Japan seems to turn a blind eye towards sound novels. Though Sound novels have a huge advantage of being able to write a description of a mature scene, instead of showing it, but that doesn’t really cover why other things aren’t censored. I personally believe Japan can be a little too harsh with its censorship sometimes, so it is all good to me.

What I have discovered about sound novels is that of all the anime, video games, and manga that proliferate Japan, these new multi-media novels are becoming honestly the most interesting emerging thing coming out of the Japanese pop culture scene. While many (if not most) are still limited by the male audience they are pandering to in order to get noticed, the potential for innovation in storytelling and telling stories that are usually shunned by the mainstream, makes it a vast form that has only scratched the surface of bringing back the literary experience back to cutting edge relevancy. Even when I read Higurashi: When They Cry, a pulpy Japanese horror story centered around making the readers like a group of Japanese school children, and then doing horrible things to them, the joy of reading while the author puts in their own touches to further immerse me into their narrative, I found fascinating (to the point that I could overlook the mediocre to poor translation). As Sound novels become something that Japan wants to experience (and as that popularity slowly reaches to other parts of the world) I can’t wait to see if the medium reaches the potential I think it has.

If you want to experience sound novels for yourself, I would probably recommend Phoenix Wright for the Nintendo DS and iOS. While it is not necessarily a strict sound novel, it liberally takes aspects of the medium and makes them its own. I would also recommend Higurashi: When They Cry for PC and iOS, but due to the strange mix of really violent mature things happening to immature people, I can only advise looking into it if you are an appropriate age and have the stomach for it. 9 Persons, 9 Doors, 9 Hours also gets my recommendation, but since it is essentially Saw but with anime characters, it is also hard to give a full recommendation. Well, anyway, happy reading!

A Humble Proposal

Due to vacation and lack of portable computer, this blog is a little last minute, but that is how it goes sometimes. So, in the Japanese tradition, I WILL DO MY BEST!

When I broke my foot around 6 months ago I found myself in the hospital. This was the first time I found myself hospitalized, either in Japan or in my home country of America. It was only for a month, but it was a lot harder than I expected it to be. For one, I didn't realize how much you need to bring in a Japanese hospital (they actually tell you the stuff you should bring, but I guess I was too out of it after the injury to really read it too carefully) and how little there is to do there. There was a TV room and people did visit me from time to time, but the TV room was always filled with older, sicker people, and there would be just stretches of 5 hours when I just wouldn't have anything to do. I was too sleepy to really concentrate on a book, but too awake to just go to sleep. It was these down times that really hit me the most.

It was in these times that I really appreciated having video games as a hobby. While I love reading, and my kindle was great for the hospital, video games helped me both keep my mind active and deal with not being able to move around and be active. Keeping that sort of movement and activity really helped me keep my spirits high and made daily life in the hospital easier to deal with. As an adult, I could have just did nothing for a month and been fine, but it was such a nice thing to be able to turn on Super Mario Brothers and feel happier about the day. While being an adult helped me realized that I was fine, I wonder how I would have dealt with the day to day monotony and inactivity if I was younger. How could a child deal with all that?

That is why I implore people to consider giving to Child's Play via the Humble Bundle (click here to check it out). It is a charity that gives money to hospitals to pay for video games for the children to play. While you yourself may not play video games, or find them enjoyable, kids of my generation on have enjoyed video games and it brings them a form of entertainment that makes staying in a hospital bearable. The bundle also helps the Electronic Frontier Foundation (which is a non-profit organization that defends peoples' rights of free expression on the internet) and helps independent game makers get their games out. While I support all these causes, people can just donate how much they want to whatever they want. I also enjoyed the games that comes with them if you give any amount, but in the end, that is just a little nice bonus to the charity that you can give peoples' rights, indie game makers, and sick children.

This charity drive does give several opportunities to share, I hope that everyone will at least consider giving, since it is almost that season! And by "season" I mean Thanksgiving, not Christmas, as all the coffee shops in Japan are trying to convince me is right around the corner.