Iwa ni Hana

I have decided to start a sub-blog dedicated to Mawaru Penguindrum. It is more convenient to dump all episode commentaries and news/gossip/rumours in one place.

I think I owe this to Ikuni for having produced such a fabulous show as Utena. I really do.

The sub-blog is here. The RSS feed for entries is here and the RSS feed for comments is here.

I have an announcement to make: I think I will be relocating to the Tokyo branch of my bank for work fairly soon.

Didn’t you say you already resigned and wanted to live in Kyoto for 3 months to do nothing except reading history books, learning Kyoto cuisine and zazen. Yes, I said that. After a lot of lengthy and complicated negotiation with my bosses, I can go away for 3 months before I report to our Tokyo office for work. But it is not my intent to write about work on this blog, so I will leave it at that.

I still have not written about:

• My trip to Shanghai and Hangzhou in March 2011: This was sobering lesson on new-found wealth and all the social complications that come with it. I was staying at five-star hotels either owned by someone I knew or paid for by someone I knew. I was even offered a car to drive around by someone I knew. (“Do you have a driving license? I can lend you one of my cars – they are all just sitting in the garage!”) I also managed to steal some time off to see some out-of-way neighbourhoods that I can only describe as Dostoyevskian.

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Being cyberstalked was only the beginning of my troubles this year. Even the cyberstalker seemed to have lost interest in me, I was snowed under a torrent of challenging work – a partial result of which was that I was awarded a princely amount of bonus money last week. The bonus came in the form of a new award whereby no more than 5% of staff are recognized every half-year for “setting the standard for outperformance in our organization”. During the first round of this award, my name along with nine others were put forward.

Just like in school where it is always the same few kids getting the top grades, I can foresee that this special bonus being won by the same few individuals time after time. Presumably, this pool of winners will be considered the next generation’s leadership material who will someday take charge and lead. What this portends to the quality of my working life has yet to be unraveled, but the one sure thing is that free time will be in even scarcer quantity in the future.

I have not been idle in making use of what free time I have left. Among other things, I have been reading a long-running series called Gyakusetsu no Nihonshi (逆説の日本史) by Japan’s foremost conspiracy theorist Izawa Motohiko (井沢元彦), and (though long-winded at times) his observations about the course of Japanese history are most fascinating. I have also started reading the novels of Morimi Tomihiko (森見登美彦) after watching Yojohan Shinwa Taikei (四畳半神話大系), and that author is the personification of wit itself.

Scene from the movie "Ooku" (2010).

I also look forward to seeing the the live-action movie of Yoshinaga Fumi’s manga Ooku in October 2010. I check their official website almost every week for updates. Without doubt, Shibasaki Kou will be fabulous as the female shogun Tokugawa Yoshimune. I think I may even be around to catch the theatre release.

But what I want to get my hands on most is the CD drama of Ooku, with a stellar cast of Tanaka Atsuko (of Ghost in the Shell‘s Motoko fame) as Tokugawa Yoshimune and Konishi Katsuyuki (of Skip Beat‘s Tsuruga Ren fame) as Mizuno. But that CD just seems to be one of those things that cannot be had for love or money…

A few people have emailed me to see if I am doing okay, as I have not updated for a while. There is actually a reason for this.

In the English law of tort, there was the leading case of R. v Ireland in which the defendant made a large number of silent phone calls to his victims. I think I have been experiencing the cyber equivalent of that in the past few months.

I use Google Analytics to track my site traffic. Since the beginning of 2010, someone from Del Mar (which is apparently an American town with a population of around 4000 people) have been using the search term “what happened to iwa ni hana” to reach my blog. This was repeated for about 40-50 times, sometimes more than once a day. I found it annoying, but let it be for the time being.

And then a few weeks ago it got scarier. The same person from Del Mar began to use the search term “iwanihana suicide” to reach this blog. This has been repeated for over 10 times so far. I wish that person would stop as it is seriously disturbing.

That was also when I began to worry about personal safety. Iwa ni Hana is only a blog about personal hobbies – manga, anime, books, films, languages etc. I never get involved in any kind of flame wars with anyone. It is not even like I have some extreme message in politics or religion to deserve this sort of fanatic attention. And although I still have a ton of stuff to write about, I had to stop and think about what to do with this blog. To be honest, I cannot say I have come up with any good answer. I can only say that I no longer feel comfortable to blog in English, so I will stop that for a quite a long while. In the meantime, I will continue to blog in some other language sphere and see what happens.

I apologize if this is disappointing news to anyone. Please understand that I receive this sort of mental harassment every day. In the mean time, I always welcome emails.

1) In the spirit of trying something new in the new decade, I have decided to also blog in Japanese. The address is here.

There are many motives behind this. One of them is that I think it makes more sense to talk in Japanese about books (such as most novels of Kyōgoku Natsuhiko) which will probably never be translated into English. Another is that I recently came across some very impressive blogs in the Japanese blogosphere of people writing kanshi [漢詩], or poetry in the classical Chinese style. That reminds me of all the poetry I write in the classical Heian style which I hide in the drawer. I should try to post them from time to time.

When I was at university (that was a university somewhere in North America, by the way), the way they taught Japanese in the upper years was very old-fashioned. There was no “practical” course like Business Japanese whatsoever. The upper years were spent mostly in learning classical Japanese and – only marginally and as if in a fit of afterthought – modern Japanese literature. That… was the beginning of the slippery slope for me. (I hear that they changed the curriculum right after I graduated though.)

Give me time, and soon I will be blogging in Russian and Korean too (which I am learning just to survive at work).

2) One thing that disappointed me recently was that Nokemono to Hanayome was completely sold out on the first day. I could not get a copy even though I had placed an order. For all the talk of how the manga industry is going down the toilet, it has been years since I last heard of a manga being sold out on the first day.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the magic of Ikuhara “Utena” Kunihiko.

Ikuni has also written about this news on his blog. Let us hope that they will reprint it soon.

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I will make it simple. The questions below should be self-explanatory:

1) What do you want to see more/less of in terms of content here at Iwa ni Hana?

The reason I ask: I once read somewhere that if a blogger sways too far from a niche topic, then readers would dwindle away. Such is the reality of blogging – readers are more interested in following a niche topic than a personality (unless you are Paris Hilton). In other words, never assume that the force of one’s personality is such that one’s readers would gobble up everything one writes, on-topic or off-topic.

The niche I pitch at is this: a non-academic working adult fan of animation/manga/books/films/East Asian culture writing for a general audience of non-academic working adults who like the same things.

I must stress “non-academic” part because I think it is more interesting to ask “what does this work say to me?” rather than “how would so-and-so’s theory apply to this work?”

2) Do you think the length of the posts are: i) too long, ii) just about right or iii) too short?

The reason I ask: When I blog, I apply the same assumption I have when I send emails at work – that nobody ever reads what someone else wrote carefully word by word. So I aim at brevity, precision and clarity. I assume that people’s eyeballs just glide through the screen. (I do that sometimes when I read other blogs.) That is why I try to break a long post into smaller sections etc.

I am concerned about length in particular because I typically have a stock of at least 50 ideas I want to discuss. The drafts exist on my mobile phone and I tinker with them whenever I have time. I have a choice of i) discussing one idea in one post of around 500 words or, ii) discussing several ideas in one post of around 1500 words. Naturally, this would also make a difference in the frequency I post. It usually doesn’t take me long to write. Usually I have been turning over the ideas in my head while I wait in line-ups or work out at the gym etc. I always know what I want to say and it is just a matter of banging it out with a keyboard. I have never really experienced “writer’s block.” Any temporary drop in posting frequency has only one explanation and it is my work schedule. Personally, I prefer blog posts to be short and focused on one idea, but I wonder if you guys may think otherwise.

Thank you kindly for taking your time to answer this survey. Your comments would be a great help to me.

(Or, even if you don’t feel like answering the survey, please feel free to take this opportunity to say “hi” if you have been a lurker, or have been lurking for a while. December is the festival season after all. And before people start to go away on holidays – let me get it over with the seasonal greetings: Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Farewell to the old decade! All the best in the 2010s!)