Origami A Day 3: Fox

Today's fox diagram can be found here. This site seems like a pretty good place for those wanting to start folding. Though the site lists this model as hard, I'd place it as intermediate if you've got some folding experience. I'm once again using my 15x15 cm Suisai paper.

As I said, folding this model wasn't too difficult, though I think the diagram is vague on some points. It doesn't offer any indication on when folds need to be duplicated, offers no commentary to help explain the folds, and indicates folds that don't exist on at least one occasion. Step 29 shows a layer or fold that vanishes in the next step. A few of my layers also ended up wider than what was illustrated. These issues held me up a little bit, resulting in about an hour folding time. Still...

If you follow the instructions keeping these things in mind, it turns out alright in the end. Much like yesterday's unicorn, I like the simple design. It's not quite as cartoony, but it's still very cute. I think the big head helps.

I don't know if it's instantly recognizable as a fox, as it could easily be confused for a cat or maybe even a dog (if you squint just right). I'm also not sure how I feel about the head being 3D when the rest of the model is relatively flat. On the plus side, it gives the model a bit of character, but it's a bit difficult to keep the head down, in shape, and the colored bits hidden all at once.

And hey, it stands without any problems.

Origami A Day 2: Unicorn

Today's unicorn diagram can be found here. I once again used a piece of 15x15 cm Suisai origami paper, choosing red for this model.

This particular unicorn pattern is one of the simpler ones I've attempted lately, having little success with the more advanced version found in Dragons, Witches, and other Fantasy Creatures Origami. If your familiar with reverse and rabbit ear folds, you should have no problem making this. I personally didn't bother with the rabbit ear folds on step 5, opting instead to just fold the flaps forward. The result was a little less crisp, but fits well with the simplified feel of the overall model. I had to refold the neck a few times due to some balance problems. It took me about 15 minutes to finish. I placed it in a book and set it at the bottom of a stack of other books to help flatten it overnight.

I'm quite happy with how it turned out. I enjoy the cartoony proportions and feel it's easily recognizable.

As I mentioned, I had to refold the head a few times. This is because there is so much weight in the head. Just looking at the diagram makes that apparent. At first, my model couldn't even stand on its own, toppling forward as soon as I removed my hand.

I fixed the problem by pushing the initial reverse fold of the neck back toward the body and making it a little steeper. This in turn pushed the entire head assembly further back and allowed the model to stand on it's own. Some other potential solutions to this problem include sweeping the front legs out to the sides for more stability or making the back leg shorter.

I really like this model. It's simple and fun. It's something I could see showing my students if I'd run across it sooner.

Kanji In Context: 呪文

As I mentioned a few posts ago, I acquired a great deal of Japanese reading material during my time in Japan. Though I am nowhere near fluent in Japanese (I failed the JLPT level 3 twice) I nevertheless enjoy reading, and occasionally struggling, through a japanese manga or light novel.

There are a couple of lessons I've learned while trying to find books that not only interest me, but also achieve that delicate balance between amusement and challenge. I need something that will push me to learn something new, but not something so hard that reading it becomes a chore. I find the best books for me are those which are set in our reality with maybe a hint of something otherworldly to make it interesting. It's even better if the story is set in a school. The reason being is that I have become quite comfortable with words associated with school life and those were the most useful for me to learn while I was in Japan.

While One Piece may be my favorite manga in English, I found it too time consuming to really appeal to me in Japanese. It taught me a number of interesting words like pirate, captain, and navy. However, it is so seeped in its own world that I found myself having to look up every other word and taking as much as an hour to get through a single chapter. I instead started gravitating to titles such as Super Dog Rilianthal, Kuroko no Baske, Enigma, and Yotsuba&! They were easier to follow and helped reinforce vocabulary I would use on a regular basis while also introducing me to new words. I still read a bit on the slow side, but can get through a volume of one of these titles in a few days if I'm really motivated.

Before I get to the crux of this post, I suppose I should explain briefly what kanji is. Japanese actually consists of three forms of writing: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Hiragana is closest to the English alphabet, with a symbol to represent one of 46 syllables. For example, to write the syllable "de" you use the symbol "で". Katakana is a second alphabet with letters representing the same 46 syllables as hiragana. The difference between the two is in usage. Katakana is used exclusively for loan words, words taken from other languages. So the "で” from earlier becomes"デ”. Confused yet? Well, it gets worse...

Kanji is the third form of writing in Japan. Unlike hiragana and katakana, kanji consists of pictographs, symbols that represent ideas more than they do sounds. Due to the complicated way in which kanji was brought over from China and adapted for the Japanese language, each kanji can have several pronunciations, though their meanings are fairly consistant. The trouble with kanji, and something I didn't realize until I actually visited Japan, is that without it you are illiterate. While some writing, especially comics or books for kids, will include the hiragana readings for kanji, a practice called furigana, most do not as it is assumed the average citizen knows how to pronounce it.

As yet another avenue to share my growth and experience with the Japanese language, I thought it would be fun to occasionally share what I'm currently reading and explain a word I've recently learned from it.

Today's word comes from a light novel called Kuromajosan ga Toru. It's the story of an elementary witch in training. As such, though today's word will rarely come up in conversation, it's nevertheless a fun one to know. The word is 呪文(じゅもん, jumon) and means spell, charm, incantation, or magic word. The first kanji 呪(のろ, noro) can mean charm or curse. I became familiar with this kanji while reading Enigma, as the character Moto often refers to his power as a curse early on. The second kanji 文(ぶん, bun) has a number of meanings, though I've most often seen it associated either with art in words such as 文化(ぶんか, bunka) which means culture or with literature, figures, and sentences in words like 文書(ぶんしょ, bunsho) which means document or writing. Putting the two together gives you a compound meaning something along the lines of "cursed word" or "charmed sentence" thus explaining how the same term could apply to a single word or an entire incantation.

I'll no doubt run across a few more unfamiliar words as I work my way through this book (I just finished chapter one after all) and when I do, I'll be sure to do my best to explain what I've learned from it. If your interested in attempting reading japanese manga to help your studies, I'd suggest yesasia as a good place to start. I've also found jisho.org to be the best, most comprehensive online Japanese to English dictionary. See you next time.

Origami A Day 1: Triceratops

I've been on a dinosaur kick recently, having just finished the two models I need to recreate one of my favorite scenes from Firefly.

So today, I thought I'd continue with the triceratops pattern I found here. I used a blue sheet of 15x15cm Suisai Origami paper. This triceratops pattern is fairly advanced, but it didn't give me near as much trouble as the t-rex. It is entirely possible to finish as directed at this size.

The diagram instructions were very nicely detailed and well illustrated, making the more difficult folds easy to follow. My only complaint would be the 2/3 fold on step six, as you just have to eyeball it and hope for the best. I was a bit nervous about the thickness of the layers by step 13, but they mostly worked out okay. I also had a bit of trouble when it came to folding the head up in step 50, but this was because of an incorrect fold I made in the step before. All in all, it took me about two hours to fold this model.

I'm pretty happy with the result overall. It certainly looks like a triceratops and I doubt the average person would notice the minor flaws that I am more than willing to expound upon.

I fudged a bit on the horns and I think the frill is a bit larger than it's meant to be. I just could not find a way to make rabbit-ear folds at this size. Still, the face is instantly recognizable, so I'm happy with it.

Look at his awesome feet! If there is one ridiculous thing that gets me easily excited about my models, it's when I can pull off decent looking feet at tiny sizes. I'm quite happy with these. However, due to some imprecise folds early on, one foot did end up a bit...off. I was able to make it work, but it seems like one side of my models always ends up looking better than the other.

Yay! there all one big happy family. Now if only I could get my hands on a copy of Dinosaurios de Papel and make me an ankylosaurus...

Origami A Day: Introduction

I’ve been interested in origami (the Japanese art of paper folding) for a long time. As far back as middle school, I was folding simple patterns like the traditional crane and jumping frog. I briefly joined an origami club during my last year as a college student and had the opportunity to fold a bit during my stay in Japan as well, usually as a way to connect with the students or decorate my English board. Most of the kids were pretty impressed and I even had a few teachers marveling at some of my more complicated models.

One of my school secretaries, in turn, showed me her kirigami, which is the art of paper cutting.

Recently, I’ve been pursuing this hobby a bit more seriously than I have in the past. As a way to share my creations with others, I thought it would be fun to try for one origami pattern a day and see how long I could keep at it.

I would place myself as an intermediate to upper-intermediate folder. I’m familiar with the terms found in a typical origami book and have made several complicated models, with varying degrees of success. I am not acquainted, as some are, with the mathematics behind folding nor am I able to conceptualize my own models. As such, the models I fold will run the gamut of my abilities. It all depends on what I'm in the mood to fold that day.

Each entry in this series will include the following information:

Model Name (probably in the title)

The type of paper I’m using

A link to the diagram or citation of the book I found it in

A difficulty ranking

My thoughts about the folding of the model

Pictures of my completed model

My thoughts about the outcome

Other trivia I find interesting

I look forward to the challenge!

Reading Material

I was in Japan for two years, my fiancee for three. In all that time, we amassed a rather impressive amount of Japanese literature. After all, Shonen Jump comes out once a week.

Reading manga was one of the ways I would reinforce my Japanese study. Comics like Shonen Jump were especially useful, as they are made with kids in mind and all the kanji within have furigana (the hiragana appears above it). With around 52 issues a year, we had about 150 by the time we left, and that's before you start adding in all the monthly comics like Shonen GanGan, Zero Sum, and Ward. There were also about a year's worth of Nintendo Dream and Hyper Hobby magazines, the occasional Newtype, Koro Koro Comics, the semi-annual Jump specials (for Golden Week and New Years), a sengoku themed comic that I only found once, and various other odds and ends. We bought bags for most of them and stacked them up in the closet, where they slowly grew to mountainous proportions.

When it came time for us to leave, we had to find something to do with all these books. Normal people, as far as I can tell, keep them for a while then dispose of them, either by putting them out for recycling or selling them to a recycle shop. Fortunately, all we needed to do was call up Emily, who is always enthusiastic about receiving new reading material. She reads comics for much the same reasons as we do and agreed to take all the manga, but not the magazines, which we threw away in chunks at various convenience stores and hotels. Emily's car, as you might recall from the Halloween entry, is tiny. Here's what it looks like when you shove three years of comics into it. First, the backseat:

And the trunk:

I'm glad we were able to fit it all in one trip and that Emily now has more reading material than she will likely ever need. Not that I think it's going to stop her from getting more. It never stopped me.

Coming Home

[Note: the pictures in this post are pictures of my students uploaded elsewhere on the internet, so I feel okay posting them here.]

I returned to the states in August after almost a month of travelling around Amakusa, doing all the things I said I would do one day but never found time for. I’m sure I’ll write about some of it later. For now, I want to talk about what coming home has meant for me and the good and bad I’ve taken from my experience in JET as a whole.

I’ve been thinking about writing about this post for some time, but I never wanted to write it when my emotions about the whole ordeal surrounding my return were still raw. I suppose I thought if I did that, there would be no balance to the post and decided to let some time pass before I wrote anything else here.

When I first came home, I was pretty upset and disillusioned with aspects of Japan and the JET program that I took for granted. Added to that was the self-doubt that the BOE and one of my JTE’s hurtful words instilled in me. I still have days where I feel this way. My time in Japan had also made me forget about who I was in America. By this, I mean that I am not the talkative, outgoing person I attempted to be while there, at least with the kids. For a while after I was back in America, I found it difficult to inject myself into conversations, make eye contact, or listen to people at length. Some of those problems still persist. I also found myself victim to one of the most common aspects of reverse culture shock. When you come back home after so much time abroad, you are bound to get a number of people who will assume that you are happy to be back in America. If I were being completely honest, I’m only happy to be here about half of the time. I loved living in Japan. I loved my job and students. I had a house and a car and had things to do everyday. I have none of those things now, though I’m working on changing that soon. The timing of my return wasn’t what I had had in mind, so I didn’t have a plan in place like I would have liked.

It’s important, though, for me to remember that things weren’t all bad. In fact, as I’ve said several times here and elsewhere, I loved being an ALT. I have far more good memories than bad and I can take heart knowing that I got a chance to play a role in the lives of my students. I sometimes marvel at this idea, the notion that I travelled 7000 miles to a tiny island town in Japan and got to meet such wonderful kids. I look at my pictures often and though it sometimes gets me down thinking about the distance between us, I have to smile at the times we had together. When I left, my JTE (not the same one I mentioned earlier) told me that nothing was changing between the students and me, only the distance. I know I will never forget them and though I will never know for sure, I imagine they think of me too.

My time in JET also gave my career goals some focus. When I was in college, everyone assumed that, as an English major, I would end up teaching. I never really wanted to pursue that before, perhaps because all I could think of at the time was how terrible high school kids were. But teaching in Japan, planning out lessons and implementing them and getting to know the students who actually cared about learning made me realize how much I really enjoy it. I want to continue with ESL training and become a teacher here in the states, though I’ll probably still do my best to avoid high school. Who knows, maybe some day I can get back to Japan.

I keep in touch with a few of my students and teachers via email and Facebook. It’s a good feeling to know I’m still in their lives to some degree. I often wondered what I would do with this blog once my time in Japan was done, but after being back so long, and still feeling this strongly about my time there, I don’t think I’ll do anything. Ariake is a part of me now and it isn’t going to go away. Just like I’m an Aggie for life, Ariake will hold a place in my heart and deserves a place on my blog.

As for the future of this site? Well, I still have a few things I could write about and I’m every bit as passionate about Japanese culture as I ever was. Expect a few more entries on teaching, learning, and living abroad as well as news on the next phase of my continuing adventure.