But until now, I haven’t yet posted about anything written by a good friend of mine, whose writing is serious, introspective and thought-provoking prose, but at the same time entertaining, often funny, and infinitely readable.  Many thanks to him for bringing us all a window into the life and times of a Canuck in Asia.   He is perhaps one part teacher, one part student, one part writer, and one part anthropologist, and I think you’ll enjoy his writing.

A few recent reads of this Canuck that I like:

http://canuckinasia.blogspot.com/2008/08/jeepney-dreams.html

http://canuckinasia.blogspot.com/2008/08/what-kind-of-model-did-you-say.html

This blog was brought to you by LifeInCubicle, your source for all things cubed.

No, actually this is a friend’s site, and since I figure MOST of you are reading this from your cubicles at work, you might get a kick out of it.

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Young men, some clad in miniskirts, stockings and pastel-colored wigs, were lining up for photos at the shrine’s vermilion gate. Over the big New Year’s holiday in January, nearly 300,000 such visitors — almost 10 times the town’s population — showed up, scores of them clad in outfits resembling schoolgirl uniforms.

What brought these men to such a remote, sober location – and in such “scandalous” attire?

Their shared love for a Japanese animated series (or anime) called “Lucky Star”–which features many scenes at or near the temple, or inspired by other places in Washimiya, a small town of only around 3,000 people.

Anime, a $1.75 billion USD industry in Japan, may be Japan’s biggest cultural export, and though if you are reading this, you may be in the US, Canada, or India, chances are you’ve heard something about it.

“For us, this is a holy site,” declared a young man named Shigeki Ito, strolling through the shrine one recent weekend in a wig of blue tresses, a red-and-white schoolgirl uniform and dark knee socks.

This is one of the most interesting lines in the whole Wall Street Journal article to me — for the dual meaning “holy” could have in this context.  Though I can’t say exactly how Ito meant it, this holy place has become an intersection between worlds and cultures.  That of the “sacred” and traditional Shinto belief, and that of near-religious reverence for the nearly all-female cast of characters in “Lucky Star”, whose attitudes and behavior probably set them apart from any notions one might have of “traditional” Japanese women.

Not to mention that it seems to be just a bit more socially acceptable for men in Japan to dress up as women should the right occasion strike.  (Compared to men in the US.)  Though this is probably up for debate – and one might argue that they are less dressing up as women and more as characters…

As for the residents of this small, once quiet town?  Some were initially “spooked” at the sudden mass deluge of costumed men.  Many soon realized the business possibilities of hundreds of new potential customers though, and began manufacturing snacks, trinkets and costumes inspired by the series.

Local officials even offered up honorary town residence to all the fictional “Lucky Star” characters.  Might sound zany to some, but makes plenty of business sense to me!

In all, this whole phenomenon may be no less “bizarre” than the tours in NYC that have folks lining up to see the diner from Seinfeld or visit with the man who inspired the show’s character Cosmo Kramer.  Or maybe even those tours of Beverly Hills which feature driving by the homes of various celebs (most of which are probably never actually there).

At any rate, I find anime and Japanese popular culture quite entertaining – both as a fan and from a slightly more “academic” perspective.  (I even did my Bachelors honor thesis on anime fandom in the US.)  ^_^    I cannot claim an objective point of view.

For the entire WSJ article click here.

And is if those topics were not a tall enough order for a four-day conference…

On the final day of the Global Catastrophic Risk Conference experts will focus on what could be the unintended consequences of new technologies, such as superintelligent machines that, if ill-conceived, might cause the demise of Homo sapiens.

That’s right, they’ll talk about the possibility of super-smart robots taking over the world.

“Any entity which is radically smarter than human beings would also be very powerful,” said Dr. Nick Bostrom, director of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, host of the symposium. “If we get something wrong, you could imagine the consequences would involve the extinction of the human species.”

What’s more, this sort of possibility may not be as remote as we think.  Bostrom, a self-proclaimed “transhumanist” believe that the time is coming where “biotechnology, molecular nanotechnologies, artificial intelligence and other new types of cognitive tools will be used to amplify our intellectual capacity, improve our physical capabilities and even enhance our emotional well-being” and that the result would be a new breed of “posthuman” life.  Think super-humans, or human-like robots, I guess.

This era would be a massive and rapid transformation of a magnitude that would normally take thousands and thousands of years to occur in nature (if it could occur in nature) through natural selection and evolution.

Some say that this could occur in as little as two decades!  Mama mia…

I can’t even digest the rest of this article right now.  (ack!)  Read on for the full details: http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/07/14/bio.tech/

I came across a rather entertaining collection of links today.  The site touts itself as the place for “the most banal, grotesque, ironic, twisted or perverse creations of the capitalist marketplace.”

I don’t know about twisted or perverse, but this “Museum of Weird Consumer Culture” is certainly entertaining.  From testicular implants for a neutered dog to pills that claim to make your feces odor free. 

This array of products seems to show just how much disposable cash some of us have to spend, along with the diverse ingenuity of the human marketing mind.

Language is inextricable from human culture, and the study of languages has always fascinated me.  I love looking at the transformation of a language over time, and the various permutations or offshoots of a language (for example, French Creole), along with the differences between different languages.  Differences and changes tell us a lot about the people that speak them, their world view and beliefs, and their relationships to speakers of similar or very dissimilar dialects.

If you’re like me, you believe that language is living, and always changing, and try not to put too much of a positive or a negative spin on the specific changes.  A great example of some radical change is the rise of “Chinglish” in recent Wired article “How English is Evolving Into a Language We May Not Even Understand“:

The targeted offenses: if you are stolen, call the police at once. please omnivorously put the waste in garbage can. deformed man lavatory. For the past 18 months, teams of language police have been scouring Beijing on a mission to wipe out all such traces of bad English signage before the Olympics come to town in August. They’re the type of goofy transgressions that we in the English homelands love to poke fun at, devoting entire Web sites to so-called Chinglish. (By the way, that last phrase means “handicapped bathroom.”)

But what if these sentences aren’t really bad English? What if they are evidence that the English language is happily leading an alternative lifestyle without us?

Thanks to globalization, the Allied victories in World War II, and American leadership in science and technology, English has become so successful across the world that it’s escaping the boundaries of what we think it should be.

As the article astutely points out, “By 2020, native speakers will make up only 15 percent of the estimated 2 billion people who will be using or learning the language. Already, most conversations in English are between nonnative speakers who use it as a lingua franca.”

Regardless of your perspective, this fact is likely to have fascinating consequences for the future of the English language.  This conjures up all kinds of questions that intertwine with culture, politics, economics and technology.  Is there such a thing as an “authentic” or proper language?  (It’s been changing for hundreds of years, and was spoken and written pretty differently even 100-200 years ago–think of Shakespeare!)  What is true language fluency?  Should we attempt to keep a language “pure”?  And if so, what are the costs (both monetary, social, and political) of doing so?

The above statistic, and the pervasive use (both in daily life and in high-level business transactions) of English offshoots like Singlish or various Pidgin languages lead me to think we are too late to “save” the English language (if it even needs saving).  Ask many British citizens and they will say the cause was lost long ago with us Americans.

I’d advocate instead keeping nimble by getting as much familiarity as possible with these other forms of English – from Delhi to Dalian.

For a less serious look at Chinglish (or “bad English” if this is what you believe), check out this fun site.

The man, named Thomas Beatie, is actually transgender, and he maintained his female reproductive organs despite becoming hormonally, and legally, and for all appearances on the outside – male.

What interests me more than this medical “oddity/miracle”, is the public outcry, and Thomas’s own family’s outcry about such a pregnancy and birth being “immoral” or “perverse”.  Thomas has been called a “monster” by his very own relatives…

Though Beatie’s doctor judged that the pregnancy would be safe and the risk to the baby minimal, people in most of the world it seems find this issue very disconcerting.  I suppose that it challenges their notions about gender and sexuality, even spirituality for some.  It’s an interesting case.  I guess some might say that Thomas is still to some extent a female – at least reproductively–(in which case I say, why the hell not let him/her have a baby?)  Or you might say he’s all man – which physically and socially is true as well.

Regardless of your stance, it’s an interesting case because whatever our opinions, they are definitely influenced by our own ideas of what gender is.  Is a man a man because he has a penis?  What about a woman with an extraordinarily large clitoris?  Is a man a man because of his chromosomes?  Or is it his hormones?  What makes a woman a woman?  Large breasts? (Because I know guys who have those too…)  Makeup?  And what about those people who straddle the line?  Either because they are born ambiguous physically, or because they choose to change themselves physically, or through clothing or through hormonal treatments?

I think that we in the West for a long time now have had pretty strict attitudes about what’s appropriate for a man and what’s appropriate for a woman.  I for one applaud Thomas and his wife, and all those folks who make a difficult choice to do what feels right for them – regardless of societal sanctions.  Congrats Thomas!

Thought this was an interesting article though on Cincinnati’s Creation Museum, where creationist theory is presented as fact:

Its popularity should perhaps be no surprise. A survey published this week by the respected Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that the “typical” American believes not only in God (92 per cent) but also in absolute standards of right and wrong (78 per cent), life after death (74 per cent) and, most interestingly, that the Bible is the literal word of God (63 per cent).

I was born and raised in the US – in the Midwest no less – so these figures are not too surprising to me.  I think it would be fascinating though, for an anthropologist from a completely different culture to come in and live in a small town in the Midwest or South amongst Fundamentalists for a years and do an ethnography of sorts. 

Not a New Yorker or other ‘city slicker’ though–I think they develop elitist attitudes about Midwesterners that would too heavily bias what they observe.  I’m thinking more an ethnographer from China or Japan.  I for one, would love to read an ethnography or cultural study on what apparently is a dominant culture here in the US.  We are so accustomed to reading ones on the “exotic” worlds of some “uncontacted people” or tribal group somewhere.  I’d love to see how some of these people perceive us.

If any of you have visited the Museum mentioned above, I’d also love to hear about it.

“There are more English-speaking people in China today than the whole population of the United States and Canada combined, and only a fraction of them have seen New York.”

According to recent IHT article “New York sees big potential in a new wave of Chinese tourists” Chinese tourists have a fondness for visits to Wall Street, Potomac cruises hosted by Mickey and Minnie Mouse, shopping for luxury and/or American brands of clothing, and all things “Sex and the City”.

I’ve always been interested in tourism – but more importantly tourists– What’s on the top of our sightseeing list, and why?  How do we picture the tour destination, and does that picture change after actually visiting?  And what do the top “landmarks” or most well-known cultural references say both about the visited culture and the visitors?

Personally, it troubles me that Carrie and the “Sex and the City” girls, and even good ole’ Mickey Mouse have become the nation’s biggest ambassadors.  (Perhaps I’m a snob though.)  What about US history?  Art?  Architecture?  The mixtures of food and culture that make up New York City?

Some might argue (in particular my French husband) that the US has exported little in the past years that was of any real “Cultural” value.  (Yes, the capital “C” was intended.)  On the other hand, America’s propensity for creating entertainment, and for creating wealth and goods have been until recently almost unparalleled in the past century so perhaps it’s natural that this is what we are known for.  In addition, given this point in the economic cycle for them, many of China’s middle class are probably just ready to shop.

Maybe though, I could start my own tour company and show Chinese tourists the “real New York”.  Though this of course, would be more of my New York than anything else, and I recognize that talking about the reality of any place or culture brings up a lot of complicated questions related to notions of authenticity.

Just for fun though, what about you?  What would your New York look like on such a tour?  Or even, what would your hometown look like?

Audiences in Asia have long been familiar with these Japanese-style games. Variety shows like “Super Trio Series” in Hong Kong, which began in 1995, have enjoyed wide popularity for their silly contests.

Now it is the Americans’ turn to humiliate themselves for cash and prizes.

Read on to the International Herald Tribune’s article  about how batsu games (roughly translating to “punishment and humiliation games”) a phenomonen previously unique to Japanese TV (I think), have inspired programs with a similar flavor in the US.

While entertainment at another person’s embarassment or failure is probably pretty common cross-culturally, I do wonder if there is a reason why this type of programming emerged first in Japan, and has become so popular there.  Time will tell if the formula is as successful here in the USA.