Moroha　諸刃

Cyber-bullying and such has recently come into the consciousness and lexicon of the internet-using west. Incidents like the Star Wars kid or more tragically Megan Meier have made us more aware and wary of what us and our children are doing online.

In East Asia though, there is another type of cyber-bullying that hasn’t really been noticed so much here in the west yet. It’s called internet vigilantism, and this is where seemingly the entire internet attacks someone online, leading to real-life consequences.

There are cases of internet vigilantism in the west, but there has been almost no backlash against it because it’s almost always directed towards individuals that have committed fraud, theft, or pedophile crimes. 419 Eater is famous for baiting Nigerian scammers, and Anonymous/4chan (No link for 4chan. You don’t want to go there. Really, you don’t.) has baited and outed pedophiles in the past. Similarly there have been internet blitzes against people that have thrown dogs off of a cliff. Generally this kind of internet vigilantism results in people working to 1) identify the perpetrator 2) make their identity public, and 3) alert law enforcement. Especially in the case of the dog-throwing soldier there were also numerous death threats, etc., but overall the internet vigilantism served to bring the criminals to justice.

This isn’t how it’s been working in Asia, especially Korea. This article calls it ‘witch hunting’, which is perhaps a better term because many of these cases were not against criminals, but against normal people that had done something that people found offensive. The above article mentions the ‘loser girl‘:

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Satogaeri (里帰り) means ‘returning to your hometown’, and is used for when you go back to your hometown to visit your family. Ryoko is from a small town of Imazu on the northeast shore of Lake Biwa, about an hour out of Kyoto by train (or about 2 hours if driving).
So, I’m stuck here without the internet. I thought that I would be able to get internet access one way another because this time around I was bringing a computer with me. It has both built-in ethernet and built-in wireless, so I was pretty sure I could get internet access by one of the following methods:
1. Going to the local library.
2. Going to the home of Ryoko’s cousin Akihiro, who lives nearby and has internet access in his home.
3. Going to a Starbucks, Internet Café, or some other similar place with wireless internet available.
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Last Wednesday my family and I returned to Austin from our (so far) annual trip to Japan to see Ryoko’s family. Since Ryoko’s mother passed away last year, this year is one of the important anniversaries of her death where a special memorial service needs to be held. So we went to Ryoko’s home for two weeks to attend the ceremony and then to spend some time with her family.

The afternoon after the ceremony (held in the morning), all of Ryoko’s family was gathered together and chatting, and the subject turned to exotic foods. When asked for my two cents, I said that I’m always willing to try something at least once, and that I like new culinary experiences. Then Ryoko’s cousin Akihiro chimed in: “I know a place not far from here where you can eat deer meat and wild boar! I’ll take you there this evening!

So that’s how I ended up going here to eat:

That’s Ryoko’s father and older sister about to go inside. It’s a tiny little place that I can most easily describe as ‘seedy’. The outside looks a little run-down, and inside a little more so. Here’s the front of the restaurant:

Basically the large white sign says, “All natural: Wild boar stew, game fowl dishes, wild deer dishes.”
I didn’t bother taking any pictures of the interior of the restaurant, but it isn’t hard to describe: low light and dingy, old faded posters of actresses and Enka (basically, Japanese country music) stars. There was even a calendar with a nude woman on it hanging on the wall. (I took it down, rolled it up and set it behind the old dusty karaoke machine when the cook was back in the kitchen. He never noticed.)

The first dish was some wild fowl fried with some onions. I didn’t even take a picture of it because at the time I didn’t realize it was anything but ordinary chicken. Neither the taste nor texture disabused me of that notion. It was pretty good though.

The second dish was grilled deer meat with onions:

It had a slightly gamy flavor to it, but it was pretty heavily salted and peppered so it didn’t stand out much. It wasn’t very tough, and I thought it was quite tasty!

The third dish was none other than roasted wild boar with salad:

This meat was really, really tough. It was hard to chew, and there was tons of fat on every cut. The flavor wasn’t too bad though. Sort of a cross between pork and something really really gamy. I don’t mind gamy flavor so once I could chew it until it was soft enough I had no trouble eating it, but someone without a high tolerance for gamy tastes might have trouble getting it down.

Overall it wasn’t too bad, but the atmosphere definitely left a lot to be desired.

(Note from Derek: my wife Ryoko has a small blog of her own in Japanese. She posts a lot of pictures and stories of our family, but my mother is unable to read them. So I will be adding some English translations of Ryoko’s posts for those that may be interested.)

Today is Mother’s Day.

I slept in and when I woke up I heard Derek making breakfast. He made oatmeal, and with yogurt, juice, and some chocolate put it on a tray and gave me breakfast in bed!

Thank you, Derek! But I’m not very good with mornings and didn’t have much of an apetite… When I got out of the shower, Karisa and Eren said ‘Happy Mother’s Day’ and gave me a card that Derek had helped them make. They had done their best to sign their names too, with Derek’s help.

At church they gave a rose to each of the mothers’ after Sacrament meeting, and the children sang a song for all the mothers.

Derek also made dinner for me, Spaghetti with a spicy tomato sauce, with some spicy Italian sausage and garlic. Karisa helped cut the onions. It made me really nervous, but Karisa seemed really happy to try and help.

From morning to evening everyone tried to make the day relaxing for me. I’m really thankful to have such a wonderful family. Thank you!

Also, recently Karisa has shown a lot of interest I playing the piano. Derek studied the piano for 8 years, and is showing Karisa some basics. Of course she couldn’t concentrate for more than about 10 minutes, but it’s great that she was having fun! I hope some day she can play a duet with her father…

So, I’m going to try and get back up a bit with my blog again. Back in January I had the opportunity to go to Kenting, Taiwan for a conference/symposium called Beyond Moore’s Law. There were about 100 students from the US, Korea, and Taiwan attending a series of lectures and presentations given by guest lecturers that are currently on the forefront of next-generation computer/semiconductor technology. Some of the presentations were really interesting, even though a lot of the subject matter was way over my head. Some dealt with new and emergent physics like spintronics, superconductors, and quantum computing with qubits. All of these are still in the discovery phase and are still many years from having actual devices made with them. Others dealt with up and coming devices, like higher density CMOS using different and new techniques, and there was one very interesting lecture on making programmable integrated circuits that would have the same connection density as mammalian brains – considered one of the necessary breakthroughs for development of strong AI. And of course there were several lectures that were way over my head and were very, very boring. I don’t remember much about those.

Ryoko’s one request was that I take a lot of pictures, since I wasn’t able to take my family with me. I’ll put a lot of them here on this blog, we’ll see if they eat up too much bandwidth or not.

First let me show you where the conference was. It was at the Howard Beach Resort near Kenting. Kenting (Chinese characters 墾丁) is at the very southern tip of the island, and is a famous resort area in the middle of a large national park.

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There is a top view of the hotel itself. It’s quite a large complex, with probably close to a thousand rooms. However, January is definitely the off-season at this place. Out of the 150 or so students, professors, researchs, and staff that were there for the conference, there probably weren’t half as many additional guests at the entire hotel. For it being the off season though, the weather was absolutely wonderful. High 70′s to low 80′s the entire week.

Here’s the front entrance to the hotel:

Here is another picture about 50m down the road:

You can’t see the details very well in this small picture (I have much larger pictures, but when I try and post them on the blog it cuts off the edge at 500 pixels and I don’t know how to make it wider…), but that is a sign for a restaurant on the left, and a 7-eleven sign on the right. This hotel/resort complex had all sorts of things. A convenience store, 3 restaurants, a bar, a beach, a gaming center

with a bowling alley,

and carnival rides.

What was really strange was that since we were there on the off season, everything was almost deserted. The arcade and bowling alley was staffed by one person total, but half of the games weren’t even turned on. There was a pool hall in the next room, but the lights weren’t even on in there. There were a couple of concession stands that were unmanned, and next to this whole area was a souvenir/gift shop area with a dozen stores. I walked by them once and was cheerfully greeted by the shopkeepers, who frankly looked bored out of their minds because I was probably the first potential customer they had seen in a week. I assume they make enough profit during the peak season to sustain them through the year, because otherwise there is no way they could have lasted more than a month in that condition.

This summer has been pretty eventful for me an my family, but unfortunately not in a good way. It started off pretty well, although lonely for me. Ryoko and the kids went to Japan back in mid-April for two months for a long stay home. She didn’t get to go home last summer because of her pregnancy, so she had a very long vacation this year. In June I went to Japan to spend two weeks there with them, and then we came home together.

So things were somewhat back to normal here in Texas, although Ryoko was worried about her mother’s since she hadn’t been doing very well health-wise while we were there. Then Monday the 16th, we got a call from Ryoko’s sister at about 2 AM. Ryoko’s father had found her mother unconscious. She was in the hospital and may be dying. A later call confirmed our worst fears: after 45 minutes of attempting to recussitate her, Ryoko’s father asked the doctors to stop. Even though her mother hadn’t been well, her death was by no means expected. This was a big and tragic shock to the entire family.
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Over at fark a while back, there was a LONG discussion in the forums here. The subject is, “If you could go back in time and tell your 12-year old self one thing, what would it be? Difficulty, no stock tips.”

The ensuing discussion is REALLY long, but it was also a good mix of thought-provoking and entertaining comments. Basically, most things people say are in one of 4 categories:

1) Take opportunities or you will regret it. (For most people this equates to “You could have a relationship with [certain person] in [number] years if you just ask him/her.)
2) Try hard, or you will regret it.
3) If you love someone, tell them every day, or you will regret it. Also related to this, alot of people said something to the effect of “Get [certain loved person] to a doctor before they [die , collapse, etc.] to be screened for [debilitating or deadly condition, usually cancer], no matter how they say they don’t want to.”
4) Be forgiving, but be strong.

What would I say to myself? Probably not too much. Even though my angst-filled teenage years were pretty difficult, there really isn’t that much that I regret. Maybe just the following:
1) You’re not going to hit puberty for another 4 years, so be patient with your puny body. You’re not athletic either, so don’t expect too much even after you do.
2) Feel free to (try to) date girls and stuff in high school, but don’t be too serious about girls until you’re older and in college. They unfortunately won’t be serious about you until you’re 24 or so. If you decide to date [name witheld] in high school, know that she will only be interested in you as a temporary surrogate boyfriend that treats her nice, and she’ll be sleeping with at least two of your friends while you think you’re dating her. (This really happened.) Also, don’t date [name witheld] when you’re at OU. She actually has a fiancé back in her hometown, and she’s only dating you in order to make an excuse to break up her engagement. (This actually happened too!)

We had some family pictures taken over the holidays, so I thought I would post one of them here. I finally got around to scanning it (I don’t have a scanner at home so I had to use one at school) and so here it is. That’s me (bearded version) on the right, my wife Ryoko on the left, and our daughter Karisa.

Well, Monday was Ryoko’s due date. It came, it went, and…. nothing. Now it’s Wednesday Friday, and she has yet to have anything but the occasional Braxton-Hicks contractions (evidently they’re lighter contractions that are just the body ‘warming up’ for what’s to come) but they are so light she hardly notices them most of the time. We went to the midwife today to get her checked out, and she’s only dilated 1 or 2 cm. Ryoko’s getting quite impatient to get the baby out of her. Understandable, I guess. Only that the actual process of getting the baby out doesn’t seem like it will be too much fun.

On the bright side, it’s one more day Ryoko and I can spend together before our lives are irrevocably changed (ominous music) FOREVER.

僕と涼子はあとまもなく長女を産むから、今までよく悩んでいたのは名前のことだ。二人は同じ国籍や母国語ではないから簡単に決めるのはないでしょう。綺麗だと思う日本の女性の名前はたくさんあるからべつに日本語の名前はかまわないし、それより産まれてから日本の司令官で日本国籍を手続きするつもりから少なくとも仮名で書ける名前は必要だ。しかし長くアメリカに住むことになるから、勿論アメリカで通じ安い名前も大切だと思う。

その条件に合わせる名前は多くないから、2人でよく考えた。「まり」、「まりや」、「なおみ」などは僕が考えたけど、そべては涼子に却下された。いろいろ考え続けたが、あまり2人も好ける名前は出来なかった。2ヵ月前までこの厳しい条件の複雑さにちょっとあきたから、「玉雯」（ユーエン）という中国語の名前にちょっと気に入れたけど、ほかの名前も考えている。

そして名前を決めても、漢字も考えなければならない。勿論平仮名か片仮名にできるけど、僕の考えで名前に漢字を付けるのは大切な深みがある。

いちよう僕と涼子も気に入れる名前を考えたけど、「産んだら変わるかも」と言うことでまだ発表してない。それでも好きな名前に意見を合わせてるのに、漢字はまだ決めてない。涼子によると、日本で名前を決めることに画数なども意味があるから（涼子は「わたしはべつにかまわないけど、両親に大切からそれも考えたほうがいい」って）いろいろ複雑だ。

まあ、産んだらどうしても決めなければならないから、そのときにみなにちゃんと発表する。

Update: My brother whined about not being able to read the Japanese on this post (someone actually read my blog! He even posted a comment!) so I thought I would summarize it for him. I was talking about the difficult in choosing a name for our daughter, because we want a name that goes well in English and Japanese without having to give an American first name and a Japanese middle name, and she would switch between what she’s known as depending on who is talking to her, etc.