This and That
This evening I’ll be flying out to Berkeley to participate in a workshop tomorrow on Natsume Soseki. It will be my first visit to California in over a year; I can’t wait to feel the dry air when I get off the plane. In the meanwhile, I’m enjoying re-reading Soseki’s Sanshiro, the topic of our discussions tomorrow. We are all just stray sheep….
I’m certainly not an economist, but I was intrigued by this blog post by Jon Taplin I came across a couple of days ago. With a striking combination of hopefulness and pessimism, Taplin argues that the current global economic crisis could be the harbinger of a fundamental change in our basic living patterns, akin to what happened in the 1930s.
It seems to me that the American public has already made a shift to a culture in which spending at the mall will be a lot less important and yet the politicians are acting like their job is to restore the status quo ante–a world the public no longer cares about.
In the meanwhile, however, Japanese television carries on with its usual aplomb. We’re currently watching “Around 40,” last year’s hit drama starring the always terrific Amami Yuki. It’s the tale of a single female doctor nearing her fortieth birthday who increasingly feels her biological clock ticking and decides it may be time to get married. We’ve just finished watching NHK’s similarly themed “Konkatsu Rikatsu” (“Seeking Marriage, Seeking Divorce”), notable above all for the rather everyday quality it lent not only to marriage, but also divorce. Even Japan’s staid public broadcasting network is acknowledging that divorce is a fact of contemporary life, not an unthinkable trauma.
Neither series, however, is anywhere near remarkable as the new animated hit “Unko-san,” in which the leading characters are all turds–literally. According to the Pink Tentacles website, the show is a hit among teenagers in the Kansai area. For your viewing pleasure, here’s a sample, complete with subtitles. Don’t forget to flush when you are finished watching.
