Today, I had a bit of a 'eureka' moment - I came up with a theory about why the Japanese approach to working, and perhaps something deeper, is different to our way. The Japanese have to learn four different ways of writing - romanji (like what we use), Katakana (what they use for writing 'anglicised' works - like 'livingroom' is 'ribingu' - pronounce ri-bing-gu and you'll recognise it!), Hirigana (a phonetic alphabet) and Kangi (from the Chinese). All these are muddled together! There are 26 (plus capitals etc.) romanji characters, 46 katakana, 46 hirigana, and over 6,000 kangi! Most Japanese school children spend the first [several] years of school learning approx 1,200 characters. Most people know about 2,000. To go to university, you need to know about 6,000, and you cannot read a newspaper without knowing 6,000.
You can see how it must work - if you can read a newspaper, you must be well educated. It seems that many people just don't bother to remember all these symbols (I challenge any of you who did any maths / physics / electronics / chemistry / biochemistry etc. at Universty to go back and decipher your notes!) My theory, well, my thought really, is that perhaps this goes someway to explain why education is considered soooo important to the Japanese, and why they study soooo much harder than your average brit! The Brits are supposedly snobby about class, the Americans about wealth, I wonder whether the equivalant heirachy for the Japanese is structured around education??
Anyway, enough pontificating!
Felix had an 'only in Japan' moment today - his school is on the same campus as a rather posh girl's school. Today he watched in amazement as, apparently, a whole school's worth of girls danced to 'we will, we will rock you' by stamping their feet in time - this he found most amusing!
Neve had less of a great day, it seems mainly due to the fact that she put her shirt on inside out, and couldn't undo the button to rectify the situation. Still, her shirt looked lovely and clean! Poor girl - got a bit upset in the hairdressers!
...which was a great success - infact a most enjoyable experience. The hair washing chair was like one they have at the dentist, I think I gave a squeel when it threw me backwards! Then there was this lovely hot towel put on my neck - extracted from a machine which said 'hot towels' on it ahhhh.... Rather nerve racking though, as he didn't ask what colour I wanted, nor how I wanted it cut - so it was really just a 'wait and see'!
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