An interesting—though too-short— piece on the clash between modernity and traditional identity in Japanese society and the advent of the “modern Japanese woman”. I find this fascinating as a comparison point with Korea. How could one be both Japanese and modern, if modernity is defined as Western? Were modernity and Japaneseness antithetical? Or could individuals and society synthesize some new middle ground? If so, how? Might modernity have parallels in Japanese tradition, or, more precisely, in those practices actively being constructed as “tradition”? Stated conversely, did the Japanese past contain the seeds — the antecedents — of modernity? … It …

Realized I had no contact info up. Now there’s a “contact me” in the sidebar. I’ll get a link in there soon, but for now it’s antispammer protected.

I was talking with my friend Charlie, who lives on Cyprus, and he said that he has a near-death experience on his bike about every 15km. As he told me, “the Greeks are crazy.” Well, I don’t know how many kilometers pass between each of my near-death experiences, but I do know that I have a lot of them here in Jeonju.

I can’t remember what caused me to begin to write this, but I gave up on it sometime last year. I’ve been digging about among my unpublished “draft” posts, and decided to fill out the ones worth finishing, and delete the rest. This one seemed like it was worth finishing. It’s simple a set of rules comprising “Dataquette”. If you think of anything I’ve left out, please do submit them via the comments function.

Yes, I am plugging myself here for a guest post I made on a friend’s blog, which is called Dare You To Write. The post is called The Real Work and it’s about that endless question of what to do with your life when you realize you want your life to have a point, and when you start working through the question of what you need to be doing. Ah, forget the explanation. Just go read it.

Wonderful moments abound on some weekends:

Earlier today, I was looking at some websites (not just one) and noticed some people using (and in some cases insisting on others using) a spelling of Korea that begins with a “C”. The common reasoning, which I’ve encountered a few times since arriving, is that the country was, until the arrival of the Japanese, known as “Corea.” The anti-Japanese urban legend is that during the colonial era, the Japanese shifted the spelling to “Corea” in order to ensure that all of their subjugated colonies appeared after them in alphabetical order. One wonders, mind you, what they would have done …