Yeah, so I found out that Rover makes cameos in Japanese newspapers, presumably taking part in some sort of sports event. He's there to make sure no one tries to leave early without paying the toll - ONE HUMAN SOUL.
I watched a Japanese movie today called Yomigaeru, or Resurrection. It is this pretty cool movie about these people who rise from the dead and hang out with their living loved ones until mysterious lights start happening and enter life-affirming tragedy, stage left. I love how much mileage movies get out of scientists pointing to computer-generated graphs at key moments. In this movie, for example, I had no idea what the scientist was saying, but as soon as he pointed to the 3-D dome graph on the screen, I knew something fishy was going on. Japanese movies are also apparently cool with leaving gaping plot holes unexplained - here a man discovers a giant crater in the middle of the forest that seems to be the source of the resurrections, yet the movie never explains the crater itself, how it causes resurrections or why it is important that there is some kind of funky gravity inside the crater; indeed, it never even thinks about answering these questions, as if it should just be self-evident that craters of this sort appear all over Japan all the time, and really should be no more a cause for special explanation than the magical power that fills a room with the fire of a thousand candles at the flick of a switch. Clearly only cavemen would ask for such explanations.
In my Japanese culture class today, we had a really interesting conversation about nationality and perception in Japan. All the Japanese in the class said that if a westerner became a Japanese citizen, then had kids who then had kids and so on to the third and fourth generation and beyond, all of whom would be native-born Japanese citizens, they would still be considered foreigners; moreover, not just ignorant country folk would consider them foreign - all the people in class said that they themselves would, too. I always heard that Japan was a monolithic, exclusive culture, but I never really knew how much so. The Chinese in the class for the most part said that they would consider the third and fourth generation people to be true Chinese, but at first glance they would still be considered foreign. We Americans and Australians have a hard time wrapping our minds around this, but the class explicitly said that the Japanese directly link race and nationality. Wow. While there are the handful of racial bigots that believe in the purity of a racially monolithic America, everyday life is completely free of this taint.
I am also amazed at what a mythological quality American racism has when overseas. Japanese freely talk about what a big problem race is in America, while they themselves see no problem in serious social and legal persecution of Koreans, Ainu and Burakumin, or the untouchables of Japan. Even in the worst of places, America has no race problems that compare to these, and yet still it is Americans that have race problems, not Japanese.
- Gyaa! I'm give up
