Uiggu

Uiggu, a self-described “blonde Japanese-speaking girl living in Tokyo with [her] Japanese man;” who also sometimes does things dressed as a maid for money (“NOT THOSE THINGS” she points out), runs a blog focused on food, cute unnecessary items and daily life. Mostly she blogs about her life, in which food and cute things are sometimes involved, looking at Tokyo from an Western perspective.

First looking at Et tu Tabelog, the reader is introduced to the post with the following: 

Oops, it’s been over a month since I last updated. It’s also been about that long since I went to the gym. I shall blame my quite insane schedule and my くそ 4 hour commute every day.

Uiggu’s casual speaking style and smooth incorporation of katakana give a sense of familiarity as well as authenticity on her part as a new Tokyo native. Telling us about her past month, since she didn't’ have a chance to blog about it as it was happening, in list form she gives us a rundown of what happened, assumedly in order of importance.

Right at the top of her list is “The Worst Izakaya EVER That Actually Ruined a Perfectly Good Saturday Night By Its Crapness,” which she goes on to say is not it’s actual name. Then she gives us the actual name. Giving the bar its own title, full of her own flavorful language, is humorous, and she is also revealing her personality to be witty, along with showing she’s not afraid to speak up if she’s unhappy with something. She then proceeds with a description of how to get to the bar:

All you need to remember is the…fact that it’s on the 8^th floor of that narrow building with a weird brightly-lit comics/anime shop on the ground floor and a tiny elevator which is past that expensive bar with the blue colour scheme, under the bridge and to your left if you come out of the Hachiko exit of Shibuya station and turn right.

The descriptive language lets us know that uiggu is observant, and also shows off her familiarity with Shibuya—while serving to authenticate uiggu as our tour guide of the area, we are getting her feel for the area—it’s a unflatteringly-lit difficult-to-get-to place that basically sucks. Continuing down her list, number two continues in the same vein. It details her attempt to write a “Scathing Review” (her term for it that she uses multiple times) and explains why it is such a big deal that she bothered to write it in the first place.
 We can get a good sense of her emotional state when she describes herself as “INCENSED.” Yes that is a combination of bold type, caps lock, and quotation marks. You can definitely feel her emphasis there. Uiggu also uses hyperbole pretty often:

THAT’S HOW SHITTY THIS PLACE WAS. I am not even exaggerating (and some might say I do that a lot too).

With the help of parentheses, uiggu is poking fun at herself while also once again emphasizing how angry she is.

As for linking strategies, uiggu employs the basic hyperlinking to the bar’s site and review site Tabelog. She actually links to Tabelog each time she mentions it, which, knowing that she has vowed never to use it again, may seem counterintuitive but I think she is proving a point by linking to Tabelog so many times.

Uiggu’s voice is consistent across posts, though it’s pretty easy to discern how she’s feeling at the time. In Et tu Tabelog, she displayed anger, but in other posts she’s excited or content, such as in Hand-made Valentines –OR ELSE. This post is about the Japanese approach to Valentine’s day, and how she too has been into the chocolate-making, PSP-receiving craziness.

In terms of content, uiggu blogs about pretty much whatever she comes across. This includes topics she’s stumbled upon on Reddit, her everyday bento making, and strangers she runs into at train stations. These topic choices give us a sense of her personality through what she’s chosen to write about, and what dominates even her non-topic-oriented posts. We learn about what she’s interested in and passionate about, as well as her pet peeves and what makes her angry.

Overall, uiggu’s voice definitely complements the subject matter of the blog. Basically, the blog is about her life so it follows that her voice is going to shine through it. Her voice is definitely what makes the blog fun and popular, and I think any type of blog involving a cross-cultural element should have a lot of voice and personality. Readers want to find out what’s weird and crazy about a place far away, maybe that they’ve never been to, and they want to find that out through a cool and funny person. I’m super glad I found this blog. 

Dedicated to heinous stories

Heinous Stories, a tumblog dedicated to the study abroad experience of one American college student, is actually written by a friend of mine. Who better to relate my blog to than someone who had a similar experience to me? Paku (her tumblr doesn’t require a username, and I’m going to refrain from using her real name), an Oregon native who similarly studied Japanese for a few years before making the trip to Tokyo, is fellow adventure-seeking globetrotter who spent her previous semester abroad in Chile. As a Tokyo newcomer and undergraduate student she is fairly inexperienced in the world she has immersed herself in, but she is a quick learner and has some compelling insights on the bunka, or culture of urban Tokyo.

Now that the abroad experience is over, Paku has pretty much stopped posting. However, during the semester her goal was to post every day, though she failed pretty miserably at that. It ended up being more like once every two weeks, though the posts would cover the timespan since the last.

I had some trouble finding a measure of the popularity of the blog, since it’s a tumblr url and it didn’t come up on technorati or alexa, but I think it’s safe to say that it’s fairly obscure. Paku did post a link to her blog via her facebook, which was the way I found it, but she wasn’t very actively promoting it or trying to get tumblr followers or anything like that. Her shared link got ten likes and four comments, which gives us an idea of the blog’s audience; the comments were all from friends who had been a part of the same study abroad program and were mentioned in posts on the site. Basically, it’s a pretty personal and intimate collection of posts, more like a diary that she’s letting her friends see.

Each post is a list of whatever happened in the time since the previous post, so it’s difficult to choose a real stand-out, but her final entry, post-Japan and entitled

ヽ(´▽｀)ノ(I didn’t know you could name a post with an emoticon) was a comprehensive look at the whole experience. All of her posts showcase her (in my opinion) hilarious sense of humor, and her seamless blending of Japanese and English slang. There may be a word for that, like the opposite of Engrish I guess? Another post I liked, “the blog post that i half-assed my way through just to show that i’m still posting,” was pretty entertaining, especially since I know the Rachel mentioned in the first nine items on the list, but I also like it because I can relate to falling asleep on the train and ending up at the airport and having a terrible rum and coke. Paku has some interesting and strange ideas and I’m glad she shares them on this blog.

Heinous stories is closely related to my blog in that we’re both basing our posts on this experience of being abroad for half a year. Since we were in the same program, we went to the same school, same field trips, some of the same friends, etc. Though her blog is organized in a list form, and posts don’t really have any particular theme, we’re both dealing with being confronted with a culture that is very different from our own, and slowly (or sometimes pretty rapidly) falling in love with it. Her blog is far from scholarly (aside from the fact that she is a student), filled with inane, tangential observations and inappropriate language, but she still manages to capture detail in her posts.

Most of Paku’s followers, who are friends and other members of our study abroad group, are relevant to the field in that, like us, they could be authors of blogs like this. Some are East Asian Studies majors, or interested in pursuing careers and lives abroad in Japan. We are the soon-to-be college graduates that are deciding whether or not we want to get into this field, and so are pretty relevant.

This blog is a great source of inspiration to me, I wish I could be as effortlessly funny and charismatic. Until I find that voice, I will continue to look to Heinous stories, even though it will have to be all old posts since she’s pretty much done with updating. My site will be different in organization, in that I want to base posts on some sort of main topic or idea and go from there, and try to dig a little deeper at some larger issues that bother, or I guess just occupy my mind. I want to work on making my blog more personal, which we’ve had the opportunity to do with open posts and such, but I guess the fact that it’s assigned work has made me a little reserved. In any case, hope to adopt some of Paku’s spirit into Purikura puroland and make it more clever and cute for everyone.

Kato-san

Though it was not originally my intention to do my soulmate searching on Pinterest, I found Mr. Yoshiaki Kato’s Pinterest profile through a search of “Disney Sea.” Once on his profile, where I could look at all of his boards, I found that besides his great collection of “Favorite Places I’ve Been,” he had an entire album dedicated to sakura (my favorite flower and season in Japan), and Food and Drink, the cover photo of which was some delicious looking ahi and salmon nigiri. And as I scrolled down to the end of his boardlist, I came across a Mt. Fuji board, which is of great personal interest to me after my Fuji ‘pilgrimage’ this summer.

Kato, a Nagoya native, is also a frequent visitor of Kyoto and other Kansai cities. He’s a seemingly big fan of temples, especially the fox shrine of Kyoto. Having been to the tori gate overload (in a good way!) of a shrine myself, I can see why he loves the place. Beyond being visually stunning, it’s fascinating that each gate belongs to a person, or more likely a family. Like a donator getting his or her name on a chair in a theatre, people and corporations can receive a tori gate if making a sizable donation (we’re talking one million yen) to the temple. The mascot of the fushimi inari temple is the fox, whose statues guard the gates and adorn the temple’s talismans.

Citing Fuji-san as his “favorite place” (we must’ve climbed different Fuji-sans), Kato has posted some beautiful pictures of the national treasure. I wonder if he’s ever actually climbed it. While I think it’s great to admire from afar, how can you love a place without ever having been there? Sidenote: this is somehow different from being homesick for a place that doesn’t even exist, which I won’t get into now. But I guess he has been there if the post is on his “Favorite places I’ve Been” board. But chilling at the Fuji on sen and actually climbing the 2.34 mile monster of a mountain are very different, in my humble opinion.

Going on to his “Place I’d Like to Go” album, whose posts more than triple the previous board of places he’s been (ambitious boy), Kato wants to explore more of Japan, as well as the world. I find it cute that he wants to go to Tokyo Skytree (which just opened this summer; I went and it was pretty amazing), as well as underground cave rivers in Cancun. As for me, Greece is pretty much the number one place I’ve never been and would like to go to, and Kato is also a wannabe Grecian visitor. I’m not super sure of the relationship between Japan and Greece (except from a short story of Murakami’s where a couple moves to a small Greek island off the coast of Turkey) but that interaction does seem to happen. I suppose a true travelbug and adventure lover’s places-to-go list will always vastly outnumber favorite places already traveled to. 

Lost in translation

When asked who my favorite author is, I’m tempted to say Haruki Murakami. Never mind that I haven’t read all his books, or that I don’t understand what’s going on his novels half the time: there are passages, regardless of the plot intricacies, that just hit me with an overwhelming sense of wonder and beauty. His words flow so fluidly sometimes, it’s easy to forget that what I'm reading isn't really his words—it's a translation of them.

I'd never thought too much about translations before this year. In language classes, we learn how to take one thing in English and turn it into another language. We could get fancy with the grammar, maybe throw in a more sophisticated vocab word. We might learn figures of speech, idioms that require figurative thinking. But are there times when meaning transcends a specific language or defies laws of translation? At what times are there actually no words, no way to communicate an idea?

In my semester abroad, I met a translator. He was my Intro to Japanese Lit professor, and used the pseudonym Swarthyface. Our first novel was Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. I don’t think I’ve ever thought about a book so hard (my preferred leisure reading is Harry Potter fanfiction), but here was a story, all of its deep, dark thoughts shared with me. I had never before put myself in the shoes of a fatherless 13-year-old boy with a tendency to skin cats and preach of ‘absolute dispassion.’

An ugliness unfurled in the moonlight and soft shadow and suffused the whole world. If I were an amoeba, he thought, with an infinitesimal body, I could defeat ugliness. A man isn’t tiny or giant enough to defeat anything.

Looking back, how was I not floored by the amazingness of this translation, along with the rest of the entire book, all of Yukio Mishima's translated works, and let's just include every attempt to translate Japanese literature? It's one thing to be able to communicate and have a conversation with someone in another language, and to understand what's going on. But to derive meaning in a story, and elegantly describe and relate a character or situation, that's pretty special. A translator's creative decisions shape how the reader will perceive a work. It's an incredible challenge, and I'm sure there are a lot of people out there like I used to be, totally oblivious to the art of translation. 

Jay Rubin, Murakami's longtime translator, has this to say: "I strongly advise people not to read literature in translation, because I know what happens in the process." When asked what about Murakami is untranslatable, he responded with "everything."

According to Rubin, the reader is at the mercy of the translator. A translated book is the result of the author's words filtering through the brain of the translator, and we end up with something Rubin calls "an interesting imitation." But somehow, even through the work of multiple translators, Murakami's English-speaking audience can discern a recognizable voice. 

So now what to say about translation. It’s great that we have a way to communicate ideas past language barriers, and can share thoughts with people we ourselves don't have the means to communicate with. But at the same time, we are missing out on so much because we can't totally understand languages and cultures foreign to us. I could get way more out of Haruki Murakami if I could read the original versions of his stories. But for now I guess l'll have to settle for the translation.