I must introduce this style of English language teaching into my lessons! (minus the skintight lycra of course)

Console Wars

The next-generation console war stepped up a gear on Saturday with the launch of Sony’s PS3 in Japan, and naturally the console’s long-awaited (perhaps ‘long-delayed’ is more accurate) release has been the subject of a lot of discussion on the internet.

Two great accounts of the shambolic PS3 launch in Tokyo are ‘PS3 Get!’ on Tokyo Incidents and ‘Foreigners and Fights, PS3 JPN Launch’s Dark Side’ on Kotaku.com which report on chaotic queueing, poor organisation and hordes of Chinese people paid to wait in line by Japanese entrepreneurs planning to resell consoles on Yahoo Auction for over-inflated prices. Both sites have photos of the launch, and the Kotaku.com report has videos of the chaos too.

For a more general look at the console war, this month’s Japanzine has a good overview of the Xbox, PS3 and Wii. I also checked out the official MicroSoft, PlayStation and Nintendo sites and found Nintendo’s Wii to be by far the most interesting console - The official site has videos of an elderly Japanese couple, a Japanese family, a Japanese girl, and people of various other nationalities having loads of fun using the Wii-mote controller.

Jizō on Mt Daigo, Kyoto

People often use the cliché ‘old meets new’ when describing Japan, a reference to the country’s unique mixture of tradition and modernity. The cliché can also be applied, however, to several anachronisms found in Japanese culture.

Although the difference between ‘anachronism’ and ‘tradition’ is perhaps difficult to distinguish, anachronisms are basically things or practices that appear to belong to another time, the most common cultural examples being those that appear outdated because they’ve been superceded by new technology or more modern practices.

Since Japan is such a technologically advanced country, there are also numerous anachronistic examples of stuff that is so cutting edge that it seems too futuristic to be contemporary, but for the purposes of this series I’m just going to focus on the former type of seemingly-outdated anachronism.

The way we view anachronisms is, of course, highly dependent on our own culture as this informs our perceptions of the ‘here and now’ that are essential in determining what appears anachronistic. For example, someone from a developed country might regard oxen being used to plough fields in a developing country as an anachronism because they are used to seeing tractors being used for the same purpose in their country, despite the use of oxen appearing entirely contemporary to the farmers using them.

My interpretations of Japanese anachronisms are therefore influenced by my being a foreigner, yet undoutedly seem natural and contemporary to Japanese people; in this series then, I’ll be focusing on why these anachronisms became popular (i.e. their history), why they seem like anachronisms to foreigners (i.e. thinking about what they should logically have been replaced by) and considering how likely their continued use is in the future.

I’ll add the links to the list below as each post appears on Big On Japan:

• soroban (abaci)
• kasshu (cash)
• kanji (Chinese characters)
• fakkusu (fax machines)
• hanko/inkan (name stamps/seals)

For me, one of the most interesting things about comparing different cultures is the variations in interpretation of the world around these groups of people that is evident in their languages. These interpretations offer insights not only into the local environment of a particular culture, but also (to varying degrees) a unique logic in assigning names to things and a reflection of the culture’s attitudes and values.

Even in similar or neighbouring cultures there are often radically different perceptions of the same things found in their lexicons, so comparing two culturally and historically disparate languages like English and Japanese - languages that evolved on islands located off opposite ends of the Eurasian landmass under the influence of very different continental languages and cultures - naturally yields some interesting differences.

In this series I’ll be analysing these differences between interpretations of the world around us found in English and Japanese and will add the links below when I post each part on Big On Japan.

• Part 1 - Cultural Significance in Numbers of Words
• Part 2 - Direct Translations and Word Associations
• Part 3 - Onomatopoeia
• Part 4 - English Around the World