Konketsu 混血 – Mixed Race

Barack Obama – “the first black president.”

Obama's Mum and Dad separated soon after his birth.

I find it interesting that he is considered ‘black’ when actually his mother was white.  Surely he is is half white and half black, mixed race?   I guess it is all relative…if he had been elected president of Kenya, perhaps they would have called him their first white president?

Anyway congratulations to him, he was surely far more electable than his opponent who was 142 years old and promised little more than to repeat the misery of W’s presidency.  I thought McCain made a huge gamble on his running mate – I guess he thought he could pick up all Hilary Clintons supporters and reduce the democrats votes in half.  Instead it seems he failed in that, and also alienated a lot of Republicans.  I think it would have been interesting to see if Obama could have won against a younger man (for me 72 is not an electable age) with a sensible running mate.  Maybe we find out in 4 years time.

Anyway I think its a huge moment for the US.  I wonder if the days of positive discrimination will soon be over?  How can anyone claim to be the victim of racism now that:

• the President himself is black
• 45% of white voters voted for him? (note that 95% of black voters voted for Obama)

It is going to be very interesting to see how things develop.  Personally I have good feelings about him.  He is promising ‘Change’ but I reckon this is just a buzzword and nothing radical will be done.  I just think he will be more sensible and fair than Bush was, and this will improve relations with other countries.  Maybe he will do for the US what Tony Blair did for the UK.  I think there is a similar feelgood factor going on, and already people are talking about ‘Cool America’ in the way of 90s ‘Cool Brittania’.  Maybe the US will start to churn out crap girl bands that cant sing/dance/interview/look pretty and lame rock groups that copy verbatim old Beatles songs.

I just noticed this book Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Obama containing his feelings about his upbringing.  It has good reviews and seems to be non-political, so I’m going to try and get hold of a copy.

UPDATE (Nov 19 2008)

It seems many people are expressing the same opinion that Obama is mixed race.  One guy offers the curious and bizarre opinion that he is not black because he is not descended from slaves – Is Obama black? Anyway I think it doesn’t matter.  Everyone is mixed race to some extent.  Myself I am caucasian but no doubt a strange ‘mixed race’ of Anglo-saxon, Roman and Viking.

Translation notes

Of course in everyday life people in Japan refer to mixed race people as ‘haafu’.  Like ‘gaijin’ this is a controversial word, though it tends to be only the extremely uptight and self-righteous that get upset by it.  I’ve heard some people respond to it by saying ‘no not haafu, but double’ but this is surely ridiculous. Personally I think the way something is said counts much more than the word itself, and I rarely pick up any ill feeling when ‘gaijin’ or ‘haafu’ is used.  On the contrary, if anything I would say people mean it as a compliment most of the time.  My kids get worshipped everywhere they go, ‘haafu ha chou kawaii ne!  ningyou mitai!’ – it is never meant as an insult.

Today in a restaurant my daughter got bored and went walkabout.  She ended up getting coo-ed over by a group of 4 grannys and they were talking to her.  I went over and one of them said ’shes a haafu isnt she’ so I said ‘yes she is, actually I have another one over there, so I have two haafus – together they make One’ but they didnt seem to get the joke

混

KON – This seems to mean ‘mix’ or ‘blend’.  I wonder if it is used as cooking vocabularly (to mix the flour and water etc)

血

CHI – This means blood.

混血

KONKETSU

A mixed race child is KONKETSUJI 混血児 where JI means infant or child.

Shitto 嫉妬 – Jealousy

Jealousy – this is another word I have often needed to know but not had at my disposal.

On Sunday there was a show on NHK about abnormal development in young children.  They started out by talking about kids with development problems and how they can be fixed with special attention and education at a very early age.

They then spent the bulk of the time focusing on Marc Yu, the so called ‘Little Mozart’ who is only 9 years old but is already well on the way to being a classical pianist.  The title of the show was ‘My Brilliant Brain’ and was basically 30 minutes of fawning and adoration for this kid.  The show was supposed to be investigating how and why kids become so brilliant, using a lot of scientists to talk about left brain right brain, nature vs nurture and so on.  But I thought the show missed the point completely.  Consider the following points:

• The boy has no siblings.
• His mother was (until very recently) single
• His mother seems quite well off.

As a result of these three things, obviously the mother can give the boy so much more attention than a regular boy would get.  There’s no distraction from a sibling, no Dad to cook for and clean up after, and no job to take mum out of the house.  I am just guessing, but I can imagine she poured a massive amount of time and attention into the boy and this is the reason the boy became ‘The Man’ on the piano.  Of course nature helps (if he had no hands it might be something of a disadvantage for example), but I believe it is 90% nurture.  If any of the three items above were not true, I believe he would not have turned out to be this child prodigy.  And I believe if genetically different children were put in the same situation they would turn out similarly.  (Now a really good tv show would take some babies and make them into Plato’s “Philosopher Kings” – that would be something to watch…)

Obviously, I am just jealous because the boy is so good at the piano But this is an issue quite close to the bone for us because we are always trying to teach our own kids various things, but it is difficult when you have two little ones around the same age.  Its very difficult to get a nice quiet environment where they can study something alone without the other one smashing them over the head with something.

“Two kids = three times the work” as I always say.

Translation Notes

I have just checked on ALC for the translation of Jealousy and I can reveal with much glee that the translation is SHITTO!

Interestingly (and amusingly) both of the kanji in shitto (嫉 and 妬) have ‘woman’ as the left radical.  I wonder what those kanji mean in isolation.

Jealousy can also be translated as NETAMI ねたみ or just plain old katakana JYERASHII ジェラシー.

A more obscure translation is YAKIMOCHI 焼きもち, literally meaning ‘cooked or burnt rice cake’ which is also easy to remember.  In English there are often two ways of saying the same word: the coarse Germanic way or the romantic Latin way.  In Japanese I notice a similar thing sometimes: the standard way and the “yokel farmer” way such as above.

Those annoying phrases like ‘nebaneba’ (sticky, viscous), ‘tekateka’ (shiny), ‘pikapika’, ‘garigari’ etc sound babyish to me and (without any evidence or study to back it up!) I blame the yokel farmers totally for their existence.

Down with the yokels.  Let them eat shitto.

Nintai 忍耐 – Patience

Today I went to a kind of fete for the kindergarten my son will be attending from April next year.  We arrived at lunchtime and started to queue up for one of the many food stalls. We choose yakisoba and spent about 40 minutes in the queue.  About 10 people were cooking up a storm, but for some reason at some point they stopped serving the yakisoba and started to pack it away into boxes.  They started to whisper amongst themselves and look nervously out at the queue of 30-odd hungry parents standing in line.  For about 10 minutes, no food was given out and the queue was growing longer.  Suddenly, calculators were whipped out and a worried looking young lady was pushed out in to the queue to ask people how many portions they wanted.  Things were looking bad.  Sure enough, a few minutes later it was announced that they had ’sold out’ and that we had effectively been queuing for 40 minutes for no reason.  Amazingly, no-one bawled them out for hording the food for staff (this is obviously what had happened to all the yakisoba they cooked and stashed in the boxes) and the queue just dispersed into other queues.  I thought to myself, in this way the cliche may be true that Japanese are patient. I cringe to think what would have happened if it occured in the UK.

On the whole I think its true that Japanese are quite patient, however on the other hand, I can think of a few examples of where Japanese are not patient at all.

Old ladies seem to never bother to queue up and just barge their way in where-ever they like.  I wonder if this is some kind of custom that I do not know about, because they are just so shameless about it.  Ironically you often hear the Chinese criticised by Japanese for bad manners in this way.

Another example is queuing to get on a train:

• Train stops and doors open
• 30 people try to get off train, but cannot because 30 people are standing in their way and trying to squeeze on as they get off (in order to get a seat)
• Result: it takes twice as long as it should for people to get on/off the train, and it is stressful.

I can never understand why people do not simply stand to the side of the doors, let everyone get off, and then get on and take a seat.  This seems so much more civilised.  I punish the heathen when it is my turn to get off the train and I have my huge suitcase in tow – I take great pleasure in chopping peoples ankles or shins with it as they stand in my way.

A final one is driving manners.  It always stuns me how people are so aggressive here in protecting their space in the queue for the traffic light.  Some poor sod is trying to turn into the main road and no-one stops to let them in.  They prefer to be that 3 meters closer to the traffic light, let that guy just sit and wait another few minutes.

Hmm this is a becoming a bit of a ‘Japan-bashing’ post today so I’ll stop here, blame it on the terrible hayfever I had today, and move on to translation notes…

Translation Notes

Patience seems to be usually translated as ‘gaman’ but I normally feel unsatisfied by this.  Gaman seems to be more like ‘put up with’ or ‘endure’ where the object is quite unpleasant.  But I think patience also has a meaning of ‘to bide your time’, ‘wait for the right moment’ or ‘restrain yourself’ which perhaps is where Nintai is used.  The NIN in nintai seems to mean restraint.