Archive for January, 2005
TMHT
Sunday, January 23rd, 2005
I just finished watching Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, the Japanese version of the first TMNT movie. There are obviously some changes made to the movie, which all add up to one important thing. Japan has removed any reference to itself in this movie. I don’t know if they’re ashamed of all the super dated 80’s references or what, but Japan has completely divorced itself from the “hero” turtles. Every instance of “Japan” is dubbed over with something, like “homeland” or “Korea.” Obviously the turtles are not ninjas anymore, and now practice the ancient art of “combat” or just “fighting” sometimes. The most obvious changes come whenever Splinter talks. He can’t meet a new character without giving the whole “I learned ninjitsu from my master, Hamato Yoshi,” speech, but that contains shameful references to Japan. So now Splinter is from Korea, and he learned the art of combat from his master Kiyamo Yang. Shredder was Oroko Saki (a kind of fakey Japanese name to begin with) but apparently that was also shameful, so now he’s Hyung Kyu (a name that could never be anything but Korean). They fought over Thang Shin, a COMPLETELY not Japanese name that gets mentioned once, but that had to change too, just to make the flashback more interesting, so now she’s named Tai Ying (Chinese?). I’m not positive Tatsu’s name is ever mentioned except in the credits, so his name doesn’t change, nor does his saying “kuso” (”shit” in Japanese). Did I spend too much time thinking about this? Maybe. I’m just confused as to why Japan would feel so compelled to separate the idea of ninjas from four giant pizza eating talking turtles. Was the movie that bad? Its instantly dated by horrid 80’s slang and jokes, and some scenes are basically just commercials for Dominos Pizza, but come on guys. I loved this movie. This is probably the 25th time I’ve seen it, so thats got to count for something*, right? Right, well that had entirely too many parentheses in it, but there’s no helping that now. Just remember: ninja animals are not welcome in Japan. But Samurai Pizza Cats are A-OK.
*note: no, it does not
haw
Friday, January 21st, 2005
To celebrate the fact that I got through all the parent observations without any children being maimed or andy parents angrly accusing me of wild fraud, here are some Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure themed images I found in my many travels on this crazy internet thing.
Return
Thursday, January 13th, 2005
So its yet another installment of man vs. cat in my student’s journal. Here for your enjoyment is “My sister’s cat” or “I fought the cat piss and won!”
On December 27th, I came back to home with my sister’ cat from her apartment, because her husband and she were going to go to Korea next day. The cat looked like loneliness at first time, but after arriving at home, he run around in my home. When he visited my home before, he had a piss on my carpet (the carpet was exchanged new one.). So I had big attention about the piss. He stayed at my home for three days. In this time, he did not have a piss the wrong place. On December 30th, after coming back to home from my work, I went to my sister’ home with the cat. During the way to her home, the cat continued to cry in my car. However, the cry stopped when my car curved immediately. Maybe, he would be surprised. Anyway, he was fine very well at my sister’s apartment.
Insanity
Thursday, January 6th, 2005
I nearly forgot, but today there was some in class madness that outshines…most of what has happened so far. In one unit we had to go over the difference between “you LOOK mad” “you SOUND mad” and “you SEEM mad” or any emotion. So that means there has to be some minor acting from the students, which gives some mixed/hilarious results. When Ryouhei (a man) said “I’m getting married!” I would have said “You look uncomfortable!” but the correct answer was of course excited. I told them to make some extra conversation afterwards so they don’t just tear through the activity and leave us with 20 spare minutes at the end of class, so Hiroe (a woman) asked “What is your wife’s name?” A perfectly reasonable question. Now Ryouhei is a very uptight sort of shy guy, so he thought about it for a while and said “Her name is……………………Brad.” So I did the only thing I could do. Collapse onto the table. What do you say about that? Everyone laughed, but since Ryouhei is so spastic most of the time I can’t tell if he was going for that or just blurting out the first name he could think of. OR he just wants to marry me. And who wouldn’t really?
Work It
Thursday, January 6th, 2005
Here’s a picture from the Japanese website for Higashi Hiroshima.
The picture at the bottom is me, Nami and Ron. Nami is….I guess our head teacher at this point, but she’s such a big goof you’d never know she was “in charge.” We call her boss sometimes and it really makes her irritated. Its pretty funny.
A note about the picture of me teaching. It says thats me teaching my “travel English class.” Nothing about that sentence is true. These are not my students. We are looking at a discussion class textbook that they don’t study. I’m not actually teaching, its just a posed picture. But hey, whatever makes them happy I guess. Its sort of admirable that they’d go through all that trouble to make up a fake caption for a fake picture. Rock on with your bad self English conversation school.
