After another week of studies It was time for the swedish Midsummer. It is one of the major festivals in Sweden, maybe the most important one. But it is not a festival in the sense that there is a festival spot, it is a traditional event like Christmas, and you celebrate it with your friends and/or family. Usually we celebrate it by eating on the veranda or at a table on the lawn, having fresh potatoes (prepared shorty after being pulled out of the ground - much jucier and tastier than usual potatoes) and pickled herring. To this we often drink beer and snaps (see also my earlier page about the swedish Kräftskiva). Snaps is vodka (usually the swedish version, called brännvin) which you pour into a small glass and, after singing a silly snaps-song (snapsvisa) together with the others around the table, you drink the whole glass at once. You should be careful with snaps if you can´t hold your liquor. Anyway, last year the swedish exchange students at Tokai university celebrated the whole thing with Swedish food and snaps, but this year was looking grim. Celebrating by myself at the dormitory didn´t seem very fun... But it turned out to be party night at the place I wrote about in the April 9 log, so I went there and had a pretty good time. The weather was fantastic and after the last sharp light from the sun disappeared the evening sky was beautifully tinted in purple and pink. There wasn´t any swedish food of course, but there was beer and good company, and when Daniel showed up at around nine o´clock I had a snaps with him. It was unfortunate that I had to be back by 23:00 as usual but otherwise it was a great evening. If I was in Sweden I wouldn´t have been this desperate for celebrating it, but being here the Swedish culture is getting more and more important to me. Having a snaps with Daniel was kind of a symbolic celebration and it meant much to me.

The funniest thing about last year´s midsummer was when we went to a town called Tôbetsu where they have a place called Sweden Hills. In that area there is only Swedish houses (unbelievably expensive) and they have a swedish glassblowing studio and other swedish things. At Midsummer they celebrate it in a great festival which felt kind of like a japanese parody of the real thing, but it was fun and very interesting. For instance, when people danced they played traditional music from all kinds of countries. And while we usually have some guys with fiddles and accordions playing the music, here they had a big band with additional instruments like an electric bass. But hey, I guess it is no worse than the interpretation of Japan in Sweden or other countries. When someone says "This is how they (do this/celebrate that) in that country" you should be sceptical. It is very few things that everyone in a country do in the same way. It often differs a lot between regions. Just travel around in your own country and you´ll see that the customs and ways of thinking can vary quite a bit.

Something I´m really glad we don´t have in Sweden is the trucks or buses with loudspeakers driving around disturbing the peace. There are several different kinds of these vehicles. for starters there are the ones promoting politicians and their parties. They usually don´t say anything but polite words without real meaning. The good thing with these is that they only drive around before an election. The bad thing is that they are the noisiest. Then there are the ones playing melodies, like the tiny ramen trucks (noodle soup). There are a lot of these trucks selling food driving around. The other day a truck selling potatoes slowly drove down the street outside the dormitory. From the speakers you could hear a voice singing/saying "Fried potatoooooes! Potatoooooes! Cooooome and buy potatoooooes! Good for beauty and health!" or something like that. I saw a funny thing on tv a month or so ago where a couple of comedians tried to find the famous voice that would make most people come up to the truck to buy potatoes. The funniest one was a middleaged tough-guy´s dark voice: "Yaki-imooooo...yaki-imoooo...imooooo...kono yaroo..." which translates something like "Fried potatooooes...fried potatooooes...potatooooes...this sonnova (this damn guy)...". It didn´t attract anybody but they got a lot of surprised looks. Then they tried a famous voice actor for some anime. I think it was Doraemon but I´m not sure. When people heard this voice they froze and listened closely for a whle before they approached the truck to find out if it really was the voice of their childhood favourite anime character.

I am sure you have heard about he movie Pearl Harbour. It had it´s japanese premier recently and there has been quite a fuss about it since it (in true Hollywood spirit) is said to ignore facts and portray the japanese in a, to say the least, unflattering way. Well it is not the first of it´s kind. american movies has portrayed germans, russians, japanese, native americans and others as evil enemies in more movies than I can count, but you´d think they´d open their minds at some point. The people behind the movie says it is not a history lecture but a story about love. Well that may be so but then why does it have to be based on a real event? What if someone made a movie about your neighbourhood portraying it as a really rotten place with a lot of crime and bad people. Or what if a movie were made about you where they portrayed you as a backstabbing lier, rapist and all kinds of bad things. Even if it was explained clearly in the beginning and the end of the movie that it is not at all true, if people don´t already know you they have no other image of you and I doubt that they will look at you in a flattering way. Just look at how actors playing roles of "evil" people on tv is treated. There are people who yell at them in the street. Sure this is extreme but if you haven´t seen the actor in the role of a "good" person you aren´t liely to have a good image of him/her. And children is even more vulnerable to this kind of impressions. They are even less likely to have read about the historic events in history books and they have no way of telling what is true and what is not. But as it is based on an actual historic event, they are very likely to believe that large parts of it is true. I know I thought the american heroes killing germans in WW2 movies were cool when I was a kid. The fact that I thought that then makes me sick now. But it is not only americans who falsify the truth and try to hide it with beautiful words. According to the Japan Today webzine some japanese private school recently decided to use history text books in which the actions of the japanse army in other asian countries is portrayed in an unrealistic way. For example, the japanese colonization of Korea is portrayed as having a good effect on the country. As you might expect, Korean reactions are strong. Children take history textbooks as words of truth so I think it is a very dangerous thing. The people at the school defended the books saying that they didn´t want the children to come to dislike their own country. In that is their worry, don´t you think they´ll dislike their country even more when they grow up and learn the truth and that they were lied to at school? Well, enough ranting abut this. Let´s move on to a less serious matter - concerning life and death...

My father recently made a shocking discovery. My parents bought the house next to ours last year. It is a small place where an old man lived until he passed away a couple of years ago. There is no electricity in the house (he used an old stove where you burn logs for heat) and the garden was totally overgrown. My parents have been tidying up the place ever since. A couple of weeks ago my father cleaned up around and under the house when he found a badger´s den! The real surprise came when he dug it out though. In the den there was a messed up badger corpse and a mummified dog! Most probably the dog had chased the badgers into the den after which the badgers had gotten out and covered up the exit. One of them didn´t get out though. A hunter my father spoke to said that badgers often do this when attacked at their den. After trapping the attacker in the den they leave it there to starve to death. It is strange nobody heard the dog bark though. There must have been a rackage when it attacked the den.

One funny thing here at the dormitory is that every now and then a couple of guys turn the room with sinks (with one sink for cooking needs three for hygien needs) on our floor into a hair salon. I get just as surprised every time when I find them there with hair all over the place. They usually seem just as surprised by my appearance and excuse themselves while I do what I came there for. I have to say I´m pretty impressed by the fact that they are cutting eachother´s hair. I wouldn´t trust my male friends with that in Sweden. Well, yeah I would but then I don´t care much for how my hair looks. If I cared then I wouldn´t let them cut it, and these guys seem to care. I guess they´re just good barbers...

Saturday and Sunday I have stayed in my room working with the logs. Now I´m so tired of writing them that I can´t stand reading through them again. They are probably full of misspelligs and strange formulations. Sorry about that...