April 11, 2005
Mr. Roy Marshall Berman
93 Watchung Avenue
Montclair, NJ 07043Dear Mr. Berman:
I am pleased to inform you that your application for a 2005 Taiwan Scholarship for Chinese language study in TAIWAN has been successful. Congratulations.
Your scholarship will be in effect for three months from June 1 to August 31, 2005.
I think that says it all. No idea yet what I might be doing after August 31 yet, but I’m sure I’ll think of something.
When I went to a job fair a few weeks ago, an encounter with the woman at the Defense Intelligence Agency counter stuck out in my mind. After giving her spiel about how their agents are given full weapons training and get shipped to a different foreign country every 2 years, she mentioned that they were especially looking for people who spoke foreign languages. When I said I spoke Japanese her eyes lit up and she asked me to stay after and talk with her in more detail. I had to decline though — I’m not ready for that kind of responsibility.
This article gives me an idea as to why they were so interested:
Pentagon to Stress Foreign Languages
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 8, 2005; Page A04The Pentagon has ordered a broad effort to expand the foreign language skills of the U.S. military, calling for recruitment of more foreign language speakers, higher proficiency levels for linguists and increased language instruction for U.S. forces.
Among measures still under consideration, a senior defense official said, is adoption of a requirement that all or most U.S. military officers understand a foreign language.
This next passage indicates that they have a need for Japanese. While I guess we won’t be fighting the Japanese any time soon, a friend of mine was saying that they often take Japanese speakers and force them to learn how to read Chinese. Kanji gives them a big head start:
“We’re really aiming to move a big part of the force — that would otherwise only know a few words or nothing — up to some kind of middle category,” he said in an interview.
One option under review is whether to require every officer, in Chu’s words, to “have some degree of competence in one or more of what we call the ‘investment languages,’ ” meaning Arabic, Chinese, Japanese or Korean. “We’ve asked the military services for a concept on how we’d do this,” Chu said.
The “defense readiness index” might give us some indication of where we’ll be attacking next:
Titled “Defense Language Transformation Roadmap,” the report outlined a series of directives to the military services and regional commands, with deadlines for action stretching over the next several years.
By the end of the year, for instance, a Pentagon survey is to be conducted to determine how many military and civilian personnel in the Defense Department speak a foreign language. A Pentagon “Language Office” is being established, and a “language readiness index” will be devised to measure the military’s capabilities.
Well, it finally started: the Aichi World Expo 2005. It promises to usher in the next wave of technology (Robots), showcase the best the world’s got to offer, and is being held in the economic power of Asia’s fastest-growing city. Thanks to major sponsors, Toyota, for both holding the Expo and building the Nagoya International Airport to support it. Japan’s Yokoso! tourist PR campaign led up to the event, with even Koizumi appearing in commercials welcoming visitors to experience the country of ancient culture and futuristic technology, or whatever he said. Some visitors to Japan will be able to get their hands on special PDAs that will allow them to make phone calls and get pertinent information. Not everyone agrees that Japan is the best tourist destination, though, citing not only language difficulties but more basic tourism problems — Japan’s stores don’t accept foreign credit cards, and there is no reliable hotel information for most destinations.
Despite all the fuss about walking robots, the most popular attraction at the expo is likely to be Totoro’s house, a life-size recreation of the lovable creature’s home in the classic movie, My Neighbor Totoro. For all the hype about this being a World Expo, it’s really going to be mostly Japanese tourists in attendance. Fact is, there probably won’t be throngs of people from all over the world storming the country to get a peek at what the Expo’s got to offer. Like most people who are curious about the bampaku, I am content to read about the highlights online (and I’ll be sure to blog anything good I come across).
I don’t know about you, but the Internet makes me a lot less curious about the world. Now that I can read all sorts of really general information on the Internet for free, I feel like I already have a sense of what those places must be like. The Marmot’s Hole, for one, has completely ruined me on Korea. I have gotten such an inside scoop from Marmot and his blogroll that I kind of doubt I’d be missing much. When you’re an adult and the thrill of going out and getting drunk fades, all that’s left is more going out drinking. Doesn’t matter where you are, if you work full time then you don’t have time for much else. It’s all the same — the minute differences between countries that you care about can be easily digested in a foot-long blogroll.
No wait, I take it all back. I wish I could be there. I really really do.
最近はGREEを友達に紹介してもらってハマってる。GREEとは、自分の母校や友達や趣味を登録することで、その友達の友達や同じ趣味の人のプロフィールを見て連絡することもでき、人脈をどんどん広げていくためのサイトである。例えば、「ワシントンに住んだことがある」と検索したらなんと「この人知ってる！」って人の画像がいっぱい出てきた。日本で出会った懐かしい仲間たちを見つけるのが楽しい（まだ一人しか見つかってないが）。やってみたい方は招待が必要なので、ぜひ俺に頼んでください。
A friend recently turned me on to GREE, a kind of Japanese Friendster. Like Friendster, you can use the site to register friends, hobbies, alma maters (almas mater?) or whatever. Another great feature is that it lets you run your blog’s RSS feed through the site, which I have done. You need an invitation to join, so anyone who’s lived in Japan, reads Japanese reasonably well, and wants an invite can feel free to ask me for one. Enjoy!
Japundit brings us a translation of a kooky ad I saw on my trip. It’s a clever ad in that it appears to invite people to imagine how great learning English could be while in reality doing the imagining for them:
If I could speak English, I would . . .
Read the rest over at Japundit or NEOMARXISME. We can’t make these up folks!
I’m going to Cape Cod with my dad tomorrow, back Wednesday or Thursday. Maybe some pictures?
Sadako Ogata came to DC this week to promote her new book, The Turbulent Decade, which chronicles her stint as UN High Commissioner on Refugees from 1990-2000. I took Mrs. Adamu to see her give a talk at the Library of Congress. You can listen to her Mar 8 appearance on The Diane Rehm Show, a local NPR politics roundup. She also made appearances in New York.
The audience was, not surprisingly, mostly professional, Japanese women. Ogata is a hero(ine) to Japanese women because she was one of the first Japanese women to secure a major role in Japanese politics, born in an era when few women attended college. She’s been the subject of countless TV shows and books (Including “Sadako Ogata’s Way of Life“), causing a bit of a sensation because of her liberal politics (and pedigree), direct personality, and unapologetic professionalism and cosmopolitanism.
I couldn’t help but be a little surprised when I saw the diminuitive figure of the elderly Ogata. I was expecting someone larger than life judging from all the hype. She did have an aura about her that exuded confidence. She deserve it — not was she the first woman, the first Japanese, and the first academic UNHCR, she is also credited with changing refugee assistance from the traditional “set up camps when they get here” model to what we know today. Under Ogata, humanitarian aid came first, political solutions were the number one priority, and in general she refused to allow refugee assistance to become a “humanitarian figleaf” that masked a dire situation.
The talk itself ended up being a kind of disappointment, with Clark sounding off at any opportunity with lines from his 2004 presidential campaign (Inside info: He’s planning to run again). But some interesting points:
Note, this entry was written as a comment posted on this thread over at Coming Anarchy. It’s only tangentially related to the discussion on US Foreign Debt over there, but I thought it was good enough so I should post it here as well.
Saru: You said, “In order to keep the RMB pegged to the dollar, the Chinese central bank must intervene in the currency markets to counter upward or downward pressure on the RMB against the dollar.”
It’s important to remember that the primary way that China controls the exchange value of the RMB, as compared to how other countries attempt to control their own currency, is by strictly regulating the export of RMB. You may remember how when we were in China and exchanged foreign currency for RMB we were issued a receipt? Upon leaving China again, without that receipt we would have been completely unable to sell back any excess RMB we had, and if we were carrying a large amount of Chinese currency, we would have gotten into serious trouble as customs. Chinese law only allows for the export of amount of currency that they consider to bepocket change, and they regulate this so carefully that even Chinese tourists going abroad are only licensed to exchange a fairly limited amount of funds.
By keeping virtually all Renmenbi inside China the government manages to keep an independent market for their currency from developing. I’m sure you also remember the black market currency traders that we used in Urumqi? They are the direct result of China’s currency policy. Because RMB cannot be exported or traded by private citizens, Chinese businessmen (apparently especially in the Shenzhen area, according to what we were told) who want to invest abroad, or make large foreign purchases, may have to acquire foreign currency indirectly.
For the others, I’ll tell the story briefly. When Saru and I (and Younghusband as well, but he didn’t actually make it on the bus to Almaty with us) were at the international bus station in Urumqi we were greeted outside the building, in a neighborhood where the signs were more likely to be writtein in a Cyrillic-script language than in the local Chinese or Arabic alphabet using Urumqi language, by a throng of dark coated men of dubious nationalities standing around the crowded parking lot fanning huge stacks of RMB in the open air. Seeing a pair of confused white boys, they immediately jumped into business mode and started offering to buy our US$ in a variety of incomprehensible languages. Although I didn’t have many dollars on me (having come from Japan, and already been in China for three weeks besides) I did exchange the little I had left, as did Saru. Since we were going to Kazakhstan later that day, I also asked around and found one fellow who had some Kazhak Tenge in his wallet and was grudginly willing to sell them to in exchange for more Chinese RMB.
Later on we got an explanation from our Uyghur friend who had been helping us arrange our transportation. Black market currency traders like the ones we met operate throughout market areas along the Chinese borders, where foreign currency is more easily avaliable, and then buy US$ at a better exchange rate than the bank. It might seem like a money losing proposition, but then once they have accumulated a decent amount of money (about $1 million) they hire a courier to take it to the rich areas of Eastern China. The usual method is to pay a commericial airline pilot to carry the money with him as he makes his ordinary flight, in exchange for a sizable fee of about $5000. When the money reaches the East, it is bought by businessmen at far higher rates than the official market value, because as I mentioned before, this is only way for them to acquire large volumes of foreign currency without a difficult to obtain government license.
As a footnote, when we got to Almaty I was astonished to see little currency trading stands all over the place, sometimes within only a couple of blocks of each other in the busier areas. Each one had a slightly different selection of advertised currencies, but they all took Dollars, Euros, and Rubels plus a few others. There were none that took Chinese RMB.
I’ve finally installed the photo gallery software that I’ve been meaning to for some time. Called, appropriately enough, Gallery, it is a php based user installed package, much like the wordpress software that runs this blog. I first installed the beta of Gallery2, but for some reason I couldn’t get it to finish the installation procedures and I ended up just using the fully functional release of 1.5 instead. I haven’t yet explored what it can do much at all, but I have it running on this server at www.mutantfrog.com/gallery with a few galleries of photos, some of which have been online before and some which have not.
The week after the one that started today is my spring break, and over that week I should have the time to both fully repair the blog, and to set up my gallery installation properly, hopefully with matching themes and links that make them appear to be an integrated web site. If anybody out there has used gallery before and has any specific tips, feel free to pass them along.
Ok, some of you may have noticed that this blog was not loading in Internet Explorer for at least the past week or two. I spent a decent amount of time trying to diagnose the problem, and after a protracted period of completely and utterly failing to do so, I decided the only course of action was to completly wipe out my installation of wordpress and reinstall it.
Having done so, the problem seems to have cleared up, and everything is very nearly back to Normal. There are quite a few glitches and missing features remaining, since although I did back up the graphical theme correctly, I also wiped out most if not all of my customized html and php, which I will have to redo over the weekend when I have time to mess around with that again. Still, things work now, and I should be doing some more posts in the near future. Other plans also include installing a separate photo gallery program more suitable to manageing large numbers of photos, so I can finally post the hundreds that I’ve been meaning to without having to rely on the clunky blog/photogallery format that I’ve experimented with in the past.
