katrina volunteers

Today my student, at a group that prides itself on its English proficiency, said :
"We have many earthquakes in Japan. You don't need to prepare for them in America."
and I said "Well, we have earthquakes in LA, San Francisco, Seattle, and other places."
This surprised her.

Then she said "It's too bad you don't have the spirit of volunteerism like we Japanese do. After the kobe earthquake there were many Japanese volunteer but I guess in America you just use the army."


I said "Uh, there were many volunteers in katrina. I think the gov't did a bad job with the situation but I think the volunteers were wonderful. And I think anyone, no mater mhat their opinion of my country's foreign policy would agree that volunteering is something Americans can be proud of."

She was pretty surprised that America had volunteers 'just like Japan."

The usual stuff came up about how the nat'l gov't ignore new Orleans because it's black. Uh, hello, there ar emillions of arguments but how does the fact that 1 week after the storm the gov't appropriated $51 billion in aid? ok, it should have been ther 5 days earlier and yes they did a shitty job handling the situation, but why would a gov't ignore an entire race only to spend such a huge sum on it one week later? Do people really believe this? Sadly yes i think many peole do.

Vision of America

Today my student said it gives her a strange feeling to see armed soldiers standing guard while behind them relief workers deliver aid to hurricane Katrina victims. (I said "Me too.") Then she said these two parts are how she sees America: both the heavily armed soldiers and the people giving out aid.

Convenience Stores

There are a lot of words used in Japan that have been borrowed from English and modified. For example, people might say of their friend "He is mypace," meaning "He likes to move at his own pace," or in other words, he is slow.

I was at a dinner party last night and thankfully it was with people who have figured out they can talk to me about topics other than the English language. Y'know, things like the weather, movies, world news. Can't tell you how many hours I've spent at dinner parties having people keep telling me over and over nothing but how hard English is and how Japanese people can't speak it. But I digress.

But once last night a word came up. Someone said (in Japanese) "I bought these snacks at the conbini." Conbini is Japanese shorthand for "convenience store."

Then she asked me "Is 'conbini' Japanese English? Do you say 'conbini' in America?"

I said "No, we say 'convenience store'"

and her friend said "They don't say 'conbini'? Ah that's right --They don't have them over there. Only in Japan."

Here we have, in one brief statement, an unholy tripartite alliance: Japanese English, instant cultural theorization, and the "Only in Japan" phenomenon.

(Just an historical note: the first if not the biggest 'conbini' in Japan is the 7-eleven chain from the States. Not that it makes me proud or anything, but c'mon, duh.)

More Katrina

This is about a week after hurrican katrina hit and New Orleans got flooded by the broken levee. Depending on when you read this or how good your knowledge of US history is, there was a badly co-ordinated relief effort, at least during the first crucial days. Many people were stranded or died as the city lay submerged. Looting and shooting broke out.

Many of my students express sincere sympathy for the people there and even for America as a whole.

But they also see the faces of mostly blacks on TV clamoring for help and have concluded that only whites got away and the US isn't trying to help because New Orleans is a "Black City." The Japanese media often mention the fact that New Orleans (the city, not the surrounding areas) is over 60% black a fact which my students often repeat to me as if they've got some inside dirt that I thought outsiders couldn't know about.

Hurricane katrina

This is a few days after Katrina hit and all hell broke loose, people stranded, rioting etc. I've been explaining the special geography of New Orleans to my students and how it made the disaster worse. It's below sea level protected by seawalls and levees some of which broke, it's shaped like a bowl and so on.

Some people have asked me: "America is very big -- why did they build a city in such a bad location?"