The Melting World

Here’s a shot of our garden patch–my son and I planted everything from seed and he must have a green thumb because it’s blissfully wild and green. I just signed up for an account on flickr because this new blog platform at UBC has a tight limit on storage–almost peaked. Thus most images are not […]

I have been catching up with an old friend via email who actually located me via google, and she just sent this photograph of me, probably dating from 1993 or 1994, when I lived in Chiba. I look so thin and young– is that really me? I don’t remember why I posed with these young […]

The past weekend I took a brief trip to Tokyo, and it’s such an enormous, chaotic, mad elephant compared to our slow and peaceful existence in the Hokkaido mountainside. Oh yes, I was glad to come back to fresh air and quiet, but I really love Tokyo, too, for its vibrant energy and for its […]

Absence from this journal serves as a sign that my wheels are spinning again, too fast, you might say. I just completed my first big media production for my New Media Studies class, and it took much time and experimentation. I am not happy with the quality of later scenes in the film (some parts […]

A woman helping to build a traditional Ainu house, called a chise: the walls are made with sa-sa (bamboo) leaves. I think the “sa-sa” name matches the way these bamboo grasses sound when the wind blows through them.

Students putting on ‘Ainu’ dress (actually made for the tourists to try on). Tuesday my world culture seminar (all four students!) went to the nearby Ainu Memorial Museum run by the Kawamura family. We learned the Ainu language has over 80 words for bear, an animal who is probably the most important spirit-god in the […]

I have been badly neglecting my blog of late, so forgive me. This is because I found something else to focus my energies on during this two-week break from my graduate studies. The problem is I have become so obsessed with my new project that I have even forgotten to relax during the weekend or […]

Yesterday evening my family and I drove out, creeping our way instinctively through a blizzard, to the neighboring village of Higashikawa. We had been invited by a local NPO worker who said the townspeople wanted to speak with foreigners for advice about setting up a concierge system for incoming foriegn tourists who wished to hike […]

Remind me to never watch movies, especially violent ones, at night. Yesterday evening I went to the cinema to see “Bourne Supremacy” (alone) and I shared the experience with less than five other strangers. In Japan, since the English language is supplementary to the sound and the music, the volume is increased to the extreme, […]

Free time for me, if it were a window, would be a slit cut into the fortress turret. With students streaming in for their graduate theses to be edited, with the demands of the readings and the group activities for my grad class in educational research, with the daily prep and teaching, the marking (long […]

I just spent a steady hour with a red pen (I don’t usually use a red pen, but I felt a bit peevish) dancing, sliding and hopping through two English Literature students’ graduate theses on Midsummer Night’s Dream and something by D.H. Lawrence I have never read. The smell of coffee grounds scooped into an […]

We are home. Took a trip to the main island, to Osaka and Kyoto for four nights, and I felt overwhelmed with the sudden onrush of city life–crowds, cars, taxis, buses, airplanes, trucks, motorcycles, bicycles, mopeds, shoes, and faces that didn’t smile as much or hands that didn’t hold doors open as much, and the […]

As most of you know, and others will soon find out, I am equipped with a highly developed serial obsessive compulsive personality–which means I am “into things” (quote from the sweet movie “Jump Tomorrow,” but I hope not in the same pathetic way…). I am just constantly studying, reading and dreaming about a few chosen […]