My friend Hiroki and I have started a weekly video podcast called “Bad Communication,” named after the song by J-pop duo B’z. In it, we talk about stories related to Japan and whatever else strikes our interest. Here are the first and second episodes:

The show page can be found here. Hiroki does most of the heavy lifting with the editing and presentation, I just provide a few stories and some dry wit.

On a new personal note, I am being transfered to the city of Miki, a suburb of Kobe in Hyogo Prefecture. The new owners of GEOS, G.education, decided that the Fukuchiyama school was not worth keeping open and are closing it. It’s tough to be uprooted so soon after settling in here and starting to make friends, but I have to make the best of it and go with the flow for the time being. To be honest, I feel worse for my coworker and my students than I do for my own situation.

So as of yesterday I am unemployed. Tomorrow I will go to the school, sign an employment agreement with this new company, and continue to teach lessons according to my schedule. What remains is the question of when and if I will get paid for the time that I’ve put in here, as the remains of GEOS Corp. likely doesn’t have enough money to go around. I am also unsure of what will become of the company apartment I’m currently living in.

All I can do is go to work tomorrow and try to reassure the students that neither I nor the school are going anywhere. しかたがない, as they say in Japanese.

Anyway, here are some pictures that I took around Fukuchiyama Castle while the sakura were still blooming:

I am leaving Tokushima next month to take a job with GEOS Corporation in the city of Fukuchiyama, Kyoto Prefecture. Things are going to be quite hectic in the next week for me as I get rid of most of the things I’ve accumulated in the two years I’ve lived here, take off for training, and then move into the new place. I’m also anxious to find out what life will be like in a place even more rural than here.

I’m also on Twitter now. I signed up mostly to follow other people and probably won’t post to it much myself, but you can find me here.

In the sidebar on the right, under “Meta,” click “Log in.” Then click on the blue “f Connect” button, and you’ll be able to connect your Facebook account with this site.

I think I have a few bugs to work out, but happy commenting!

EDIT: So we’re back to the old Arclite theme because Arjuna X was putting HTML garbage in Facebook users’ names. I would like to put a “Connect to Facebook” button somewhere in the comment area, but I can’t get it to place correctly. This little Facebook status box in the upper-right corner of the page is also annoying me, and I wish I could get rid of it. Unfortunately, the documentation for the Facebook Connect plugin is as clear as mud.

Start with a standard Japanese net cafe format. There are 20-30 booths with PCs and TV monitors. There is a large library of manga and periodicals. There is a self-serve bar for soft drinks and soft-serve ice cream. There is a printer/copier. There are also some food and media items for sale. Add to this language learning software (such as Rosetta Stone) on the PCs, and a selection of English comics and periodicals. Anyone could pay to use the cafe, they wouldn’t have to be a language student.

Adjacent to the cafe would be some classrooms for regular language classes, and a children’s computer lab with a number of inexpensive all-in-one touchscreen PCs. The Asus EeeTop would fit the bill nicely. Language students would get a certain amount of time in the cafe included with their class fees.

There are some drawbacks, however. As my friend Hiroki pointed out, net cafes cater to a rather narrow demographic of teenagers and young adults. Older students, such as housewives, wouldn’t be drawn to a net cafe for English lessons. Parents wouldn’t want to send their children to one either. So the two sides would have to have separate entrances, and be treated and advertised like separate businesses as well. Also, the initial capital required for the PCs, software licenses, library, and other equipment would be high.

I see a lot of entrepreneurs struggling. I don’t think I would be a particularly good one, and I’m not planning to stay in Japan long-term. But this seems like a fresh business angle, and it would be interesting to try.

As some of you know, I’ve been looking for a new job for a few months now. I have a few promising leads in Osaka, but unless one really likes teaching young children the job market for an English teacher in Japan isn’t what it once was. You could blame the sluggish economy, people losing interest in foreign things, or a combination of both. But, I press on. I’m hoping that things will get better for everyone soon.

During my stay in Santa Barbara, my mother showed me Indian director Tarsem’s beautiful film: the Fall. It’s a stunningly visual piece set part in 1920′s Los Angeles and part in a fantasy world. In it, an adorable young Croatian girl named Alexandria meets a movie stuntman named Roy. Both are hospitalized: Alexandria with a broken arm from falling from a latter while picking oranges, and Roy with paralyzed legs from taking a horse off of a bridge into a lake while shooting a movie. Roy agrees to tell Alexandria a story if she’ll do some favors for him, and the audience is whisked off to a fantasy world in which Roy’s fractured state of mind drives the plot and Alexandria’s vivid imagination fills in the details.

Falling is major theme in the movie, not just in the literal sense but also in the sense of falling from grace, or falling in love.

The scenery is amazing, as the film has scenes shot in around 20 different countries. The costuming and cinematography were beautiful as well. And thanks to the film’s score, I can’t get the second movement of Beethoven’s Symphony no.7 out of my head. I highly recommend this film.

“We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that “we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.”

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.”

“…this may wall mean having to shut down Google.cn” is quite an understatement. A move like this will be seen by the Chinese government as a foreign attempt at meddling in domestic affairs, something which is always countered with nationalistic indignation on its part. If Google really is willing to toe the line on this issue, then the people at Google’s Chinese offices better be getting ready to clean out their desks and update their résumés.

Nor will shutting down Google.cn provoke a significant backlash within the Chinese internet-using population. Google has about a third of the internet search market in China, so some users would likely be upset by the loss of Google but most would move on to the native and more popular Baidu.

Having said that, Google is making the right choice. It’s refreshing to see a large corporation making a stand for righteous values, despite how it might affect their bottom line.

As is evident in the photo, the Santa Ynez Mountains and foothills above the city were ravaged last year by not one, but three wildfires: the Tea Fire, the Gap Fire, and the Jesusita Fire. I was able to survey the damage of the Jesusita Fire by taking a short hike up the trail that it was named after.

There are still a lot of blackened areas, but things seem to be greening up nicely. Predictably, weeds were the first thing to move in, but grass and other plants are also growing and the scorched trees are sprouting new leaves.

I will post the handful of other photos I took to my Facebook page.

He did similar videos for all of the Star Trek movies that came after Star Trek VI, which I found similarly insightful and amusing. He didn’t give the same treatment to the latest JJ Abrams’ Star Trek however, a movie which I found particularly flawed. The “review” for that one was a rather distasteful short about a woman getting raped and finding out that it wasn’t as bad as she thought it was going to be.

But the point all of it drove home for me was just how creatively bankrupt big-name science fiction has become. Now, when dealing with series that have large and established followings, writers will start with a few elements they want in a film then twist, beat, and break the plot around them. It doesn’t matter how nonsensical the story becomes, just as long as it has certain characters, dazzling action sequences and special effects. One of the things that disturbed me most about the latest Star Trek was the positive reception it got even among a lot of hardcore fans, despite its glaring flaws.

YouTube user typeNtardis very nicely summed up the state of Star Trek in particular with this posting: