Hey, the final wasn't too awful after all, but still harder than I expected it to be. I spent all this time memorizing reasonable facts and details, then ended up botching a question because she insisted on asking us to write down two different bird calls - I mean, bird calls for goodness's sake. I'm trying to learn about haiku here, not earn a merit badge. I missed one of the bird calls and another kanji I just couldn't remember, but I'm pretty sure I pulled an A on it anyway, which just proves that I am the King of... Haiku. Boy, I can't wait to be deposed. Actually, I kid because I love. I've gotten pretty into Japanese poetry lately, and I can definitely understand why the Japanese love it so much. Still, I insist that anyone who writes haiku or other Japanese-style poetry in any language other than Japanese is wasting his time (ahem, Jack Kerouac, this includes you).
Other than that, I saw The Last Samurai with some friends. It was pretty enjoyable, but it definitely had contracted a near-critical case of Never Ending Disease, and by the end of this two and a half hour extravaganza I was pretty desperate for everyone to hurry up and just die already so that I could go home. I thought the ending was pretty weak and didn't address the main point of the movie, which was the conflict of the need for modernization and the loss of traditional Japanese customs. In the end, Tom Cruise comes in and gets his melodrama on for a while, then the Emperor makes this little speech about how Japan needs to modernize while respecting traditional Japanese customs with all the feeling and depth of reading a bad joke out of a Cracker Jack box when you can't figure out where the punchline is. Oh, and don't let's forget that it's okay for Hollywood to glorify religion and its positive effect on man as long as the religion in question is not Christianity; this movie had a good handful of lush, sympathetic scenes involving Buddhism and Buddhist practices, any of which would have had audiences screaming in the seats about prosletyzing and "keeping your beliefs out of my ovaries" or whatever it is these people say if the scenes had been about Christianity. In fact, this one movie probably contained more sympathetic scenes about Buddhism than all the movies I've ever seen combined have had for Christianity. For all this it was still a good movie and definitely worth seeing in the theaters if you have a chance, if it hasn't already left them in America.
- Gyaa! I'm give up
Naka-ku, Hiroshima
730-0803
JAPAN