i-sako.com

Summer evenings in Japan are when families get together and put explosive things into the hands of small children. This evening, our daughter had her first experience playing with fireworks. When she wasn’t running away from the ones her father was trying to hand her, she seemed to be having a pretty good time.

And, as a special bonus, I’ve added another video. This one is completely unrelated to fireworks (it shows her dancing in our local video store), but I’ll put it here anyway.

Our daughter’s preschool held a yūsuzumi-kai, a party to celebrate the cool summer evenings, this past weekend. She got to show off her new yukata jinbei (summertime casual wear) and her dancing skills.

Here she is waiting for an event to begin. Standing slightly behind her is Yūta-kun, the class Casanova. Somewhere in the background is her best friend, Reimi-chan.

Enjoying a strawberry frappe.

Posing for the camera.

Dancing with her classmates. Here is a short video of her dancing. It’s a bit large (8.05MB) and is best viewed in QuickTime Player. If you absolutely must view it in Windows Media Player (WiMP!), please be sure that you have the most recent version of DirectX installed—otherwise it won’t work.

This picture was taken after the yūsuzumi-kai. The weather has been consistently rainy for weeks, but this past weekend was nice, so we took advantage of the opportunity to play outside.

This lucky girl just got a gift package from her Grandma Across the Ocean. Among other things, she now has a soccer ball and a pair of shorts featuring the Ohio University bobcat logo. (My mom, my wife, and I are all OU alumni, hence the choice of apparel.)

She also has an OU T-shirt and new teddy bear (with a tiny OU T-shirt of its own, of course).  The bear, we are told, prefers to sleep on a bed of its own—on top of mommy’s dumbbells, for reasons that make sense to a 3-year-old girl, I assume—whenever she is not around to play with it.

Noticeably absent from the gift package were pictures of Grandma herself, which 3-year-old girls need to remember what faraway grandmas look like. In our daughter’s case, it has been more than a year since she last saw her grandma (which is nearly a third of her lifetime!), so she doesn’t have a very clear memory. It has gotten to the point where any white woman could be Grandma in her mind—she’s just not sure anymore. (Then again, she’s not very good at identifying non-Japanese people. She once pointed to an image of Dennis Hastert on TV and said, “Is that Daddy?")

If all goes well, perhaps she will see Grandma again sometime around the Christmas/New Year’s holidays, when there will be another grandchild competing for attention.

My mother works at an all-women penitentiary in Ohio (this one, I think). She offers psychological counseling to the inmates by day and coordinates activities of the employees’ union on the side.

Recently her union has asked her if she would like to take part in a 10-week paid training session for lobbyists in Washington, DC. After her training is complete, I guess the plan is to have her apply her newly acquired skills at the Ohio statehouse.

In the course of our discussion, I mentioned to her that the Republicans have been making a concerted effort to remake K Street in the GOP’s image. (What’s K Street, you ask? The main lobbying district in DC, of course!)

Nicholas Confessore writes about it in this article in The Washington Monthly:

Welcome to the Machine

The chief purpose of these [Republican-only] gatherings is to discuss jobs--specifically, the top one or two positions at the biggest and most important industry trade associations and corporate offices centered around Washington’s K Street, a canyon of nondescript office buildings a few blocks north of the White House that is to influence-peddling what Wall Street is to finance. In the past, those people were about as likely to be Democrats as Republicans, a practice that ensured K Street firms would have clout no matter which party was in power. But beginning with the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, and accelerating in 2001, when George W. Bush became president, the GOP has made a determined effort to undermine the bipartisan complexion of K Street.

Actually, it was Paul Krugman who called my attention to the plan, the “K Street Project” as it is called, in this recent article:

Toward One-Party Rule

Nicholas Confessore draws together stories usually reported in isolation—from the drive to privatize Medicare, to the pro-tax-cut fliers General Motors and Verizon recently included with the dividend checks mailed to shareholders, to the pro-war rallies organized by Clear Channel radio stations. As he points out, these are symptoms of the emergence of an unprecedented national political machine, one that is well on track to establishing one-party rule in America. 

…

Of course, interest groups want to curry favor with the party that controls Congress and the White House; but as The Washington Post explains, Mr. Santorum’s colleagues have also used “intimidation and private threats” to bully lobbyists who try to maintain good relations with both parties. “If you want to play in our revolution,” Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, once declared, “you have to live by our rules.”

…

Mr. Confessore suggests that we may be heading for a replay of the McKinley era, in which the nation was governed by and for big business. I think he’s actually understating his case: like Mr. DeLay, Republican leaders often talk of “revolution,” and we should take them at their word.

I tend to agree with Krugman’s assessment: We are heading on a course that would create a government “of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations”.

Although I doubt my mom will have an office on K Street any time in the near future, perhaps I can persuade her to give us an inside look at what the lobbying scene looks like in Bush’s Washington.

[Note: See also this MetaFilter discussion: K street antics.]

Our daughter’s preschool held a Father’s Day event this weekend, so we all got up earlier than usual (for a Saturday morning) in order to be there at 8:45 a.m. in time for the festivities.

I wasn’t really surprised to be the only gaijin father attending, but I was surprised to see how much older most of the other fathers were. I’m rapidly approaching the end of my 20s, but most of the fathers I saw were at least 10 years older, if not more. Do Japanese men really wait that long before having children? Interestingly, many of the mothers who were there were all roughly my wife’s age. That would seem to imply a not-so-slight age gap among married couples.

Our daughter seems to be something of a celebrity at the school. She’s one of a small number of “half-” children, I gather. I resist using the Japanese term (”haafu," a loose transliteration of the English word “half") because I’ve always thought is sounds discriminatory, as if she’s only half a person or something. I prefer the term nibai, which means “double”, to emphasize the dual nature of the upbringing we try to provide for her. (I first saw the term nibai used this way in this interview with Elina Moriya, a Finnish-Japanese photographer.) Anyway, everyone knows her. We were even surprised when, later that weekend, we were walking to a park in our neighborhood when some older kids called her by name. They were not kids who go to her preschool, so we have no idea how they knew her.

I gave my wife a digital camera that I borrowed from work, but forgot to mention that I only had two memory cards, both only 8MB each. She was really disappointed to find out that an 8MB card doesn’t hold much digital video. She kept trying to take videos of us, but could only record for a few seconds before running out of memory.

We did manage to get a few nice pictures, though. Here is the celebrity girl herself, doing what she does best: Taking a break. That is not to suggest that she’s not active, though! Some of what she does on the playground makes Laura Croft look like a couch potato.