This page shows photos and words left by an American-born educator living in Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan's four main islands. The city of Kagoshima (pop. 600,000+) and the prefecture of the same name form the backdrop for many of the photos.
The campus of Kagoshima Prefectural College (鹿児島県立短期大学) is also on display. The camera used is a Canon Powershot SD500. The photos are of various sizes and are best appreciated with a click.
To the left, a view from my office window. Cherry blossoms are an object of wide admiration in the final weeks of March. Despite the season's euphoria, early April is the beginning of the Japanese fiscal year, a time when many employees either retire or are transferred to other locations. To mark their departure and show gratitude for their efforts, somber ceremonies are held in which departing employees give speeches and are presented with large bouquets.
Walkway in front of campus announcement board.
The boldest of the first signs of spring, the flowers of these plum blossoms (梅の花) bloomed in late February and early March.
This field is used throughout the day for exercising, jogging, playing soccer or softball. Faculty members or office workers stroll around it. It is grassy on the inside, with a few earthy patches marking the baseball diamond on one end. When standing in this area, which in Japanese is called the "ground," you can see the summit of the volcano Sakurajima to one side and, below that and much closer, some tennis courts. The small hill pictured here is one of many that was formed by the accumulation of volcanic ash (much like the rest of the land in the area). In the other directions are hills dotted with gravestones and apartment blocks and, just next to the track -- on the left side of the image above -- a multi-building school for the blind. (For exercise, the blind are led around the track by hand at the length of a short chord.)
Lasting service cut to human scale.
Once, as I walked onto the ground to stretch my legs and get a welcoming-party speech into my head for that night, I saw a young woman who had just pulled a large rake around the dirt track set the rake against a fence, turn back towards the track, and bow deeply. That is, she bowed to the track. She was the only one visible near the track, and I don't believe that she had taken note of me. A gesture of respect toward the exercise track that she had just raked for the benefit of others, it seemed to have sacred overtones. It was explained to me later that the student, from a nearby high school, was likely showing gratitude to our school for allowing her and her fellow track team members use of the track.
大口 Okuchi (Kagoshima Prefecture)
For anyone visiting a Wep page featuring photos taken in Japan in the spring, the expectation that cherry blossoms will be on display is understandably high. Let us not disappoint said page visitor. But may the predominance of the image be checked, for in the words that follow, you will find neither Latin names for the flora in question, nor sentimental musings on the passage of time. The relation of words to text will not be one of simple "commentary." This should not alarm anyone. When you listen to the radio in the evening and your cool jazz program is intermittently visited by news reports of distant storms and their aftermath or of crimes against humanity being committed abroad, the disparate collage of music and words does not unsettle you.
I work for a public institution, a college administered by the prefecture government. Being a public institution, the college does not have profit-making as its primary goal; rather, its primary goal is enhancing the common welfare of its employees and students. The idea of enhancing the common welfare has come under great suspicion in powerful media and political circles the United States today, even to the point where it is mocked outright and saddled with grotesque labels (like "socialism," which in the minds of many uneducated Americans, evokes despotic foreign regimes). Indeed, as someone who is highly motivated to educate both myself and others, and who is happy to do so without striving to amass private wealth, I likely appear, in the eyes of the corporate privatizers who dominate U.S. government today (from both within it and by means of lobbying and donations) to be no more than a freak of nature. Whatever they deem those who act and think for the sake of the common welfare, it is sure that, for them, such motivations are inherently "inefficient" when compared to the motivation of boundless self-enrichment (i.e., greed).
It is no wonder, then, that Republicans in particular continually try to diminish or extinguish public institutions of all stripes as well public participation in such institutions, including State-affiliated schools at all levels. By thus transferring commonly supported institutions and property, whose main purpose is to enhance the welfare of all, into the hands of unaccountable, a-democratic, privately-exploited corporations whose sole motivation -- as dictated by law, no less -- is self-enrichment, corporate privatizers flip the middle finger at anyone who is not enthralled at the prospect of reducing social existence to a self-enraptured quest in which greed itself becomes the only legitimate "social" goal and all other concerns of existence -- including health, environment, social justice, and human rights -- are discredited and scorned.
This sociopathic mechanism, which dominates social and political life in the United States while rarely being discussed in the nation's corporate-owned networks, is portrayed in its recent historical emergence by Joel Bakan in The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (New York Free Press, 2004). The dangers it poses to democracy are thoroughly considered in The Fox in the Henhouse: How Privatization Threatens Democracy (Kahn and Minnich, Berrett-Koehler, 2005).
Shortly after finishing the excellent book on privatization, I read the incredible document of human history written by Eric Schlosser titled Fast Food Nation (Houghton Mifflin, 2001). The history it recounts is, at first glance at least, of the fast food industry: of the specific people who created it or who took the early ideas and expanded them throughout the world. Actually, the book actually has no beef with fast food itself or with fast food restaurants, a fact that may surprise some. Rather, Schlosser thoroughly documents the radical changes in diet, landscape, and other aspects of social life that have been thrust upon the world willy-nilly through the homogenizing efforts of franchizers. The link between the two is that fast food franchizers have always led the way, showing other industries how to crack foreign markets, exploit cheap labor, manhandle franchisees, and privitize wealth while socializing negative consequences and financial losses. 
What makes Schlosser's book powerful is that he elaborates the stories of individual lives that are caught up in the franchizing frenzy. He looks at those who have profited from or been exploited by the franchizing industries and their anti-union, anti-regulation, take-over-the-world tactics. He also discusses those who have resisted the uniformity and unfair practices of corporations such as McDonald's.
Not content with dominating children's perceptions at home, corporations such as McDonald's have gained increasing foothold in American schools. Chapter 2, "Your Trusted Friends," opens with a photograph of Ronald McDonald addressing several hundred children gathered in a school auditorium and discusses the proliferation of children-targeted advertising. "Twenty-five years ago, only a handful of American companies directed their marketing at children -- Disney, McDonald's, candy makers, toy makers, manufacturers of breakfast cereals. Today children are being targeted by phone companies, oil companies, and automobile companies, as well as clothing stores and restaurant chains" (41). One of the paradoxes of contemporary America is that the very same groups who tout "family values" and believe themselves to be protecting their children against forces of moral corruption are in fact the same groups who turn a blind eye to the corporate domination of regulatory agencies like the FCC (Federal Communications Commission), which, if stronger, would prevent the corporations from exposing children to filth and violence as relentlessly as they do today.
As a consequence, every year, on average, corporations get as many as 30,000 whacks at American children in the form of TV ads. And this goes on despite the fact that, as studies have repeatedly shown, young children often cannot tell the difference between TV programming and advertising (not to mention American adults, who, in view of their general purchasing habits and the military invasions many of them are brought to support, cannot be that far ahead of children in viewing television critically). This is an alarming recipe for crafting minds incapable of critically assessing the world in which they live, especially since, "the typical American child now spends about twenty-one hours a week watching television -- roughly one and a half months of TV every year" (46).
Eric Schlosser's book is one that I will surely read again. One of my seminar students is focusing on the first chapters in which Schlosser discusses the origin of fast-food franchizing, and I would like, eventually, to read the Japanese translation of the book. It is unclear to me if critical perspectives on the fast food industry are widespread in Japan, and I fear that that is not the case.
While the Japanese cannot rival the French when it comes to baking bread, they excel at making pastries. At right you see a shot taken at El Monde, a pastry shop where a purchase is complemented by a cup of coffee or tea at no extra charge, making the two roughly the same cost as a very bitter cup of coffee at a franchise such as Starbucks. In some ways, visiting a pastry shop is the antithesis of fast food consumption. The pastry shop emphasizes the refined nature and visual stimulation of small portions, whereas fast food restaurants create meals that are large in size and are designed to give one a quick sense of satiety. One should not only be served the food fast, but one should eat it fast, throw out lots of plastic and paper, and come back to the fast food "restaurant" as soon as possible to repeat the process. The fast food is meant to curb your hunger, which it does imperfectly, jolting your blood sugar levels upwards before leaving them to free-fall within hours; whereas the little pastry, while it may consist of sugar, chocolate, butter, and other mildly insalubrious ingredients, is not offered as a meal. It is not meant to satiate one or provide nutrients. Its superfluousness is no secret. It is, in fact, its charm.
I first discovered the Shiroyama view of Sakurajima by taking the sightseeing bus on the weekend when I first came to Kagoshima to interview for the teaching position I now hold. It might be inaccurate to say that the view was a decisive factor in my accepting the job offer, but not too inaccurate.
Around the city, there are little collection spots for bags of volcanic ash. In my first year in the city, there was only one occasion when the bags were set out in significant numbers. The ash fall occurred early evening, while I was indoors. I only noticed it when I discovered a greyish film on the balcony, which needed to be swept and wiped down. The ash is spewn from Sakurajima on about every other day of the year, but it usually gets blown eastward, away from the city. Down the centuries, the ashfall has built up the moutains and hills that surround the city of Kagoshima.
Volcanic ash, at any age, is not the most stable foundation. Coupled with the area's heavy annual rainfall, it makes for excellent mudslides. Securing homes built atop hills of prehistoric ash occasionally leads to Kafkaesque structures such as the one pictured left.
Several types of trees, including the massive camphors, see their leaves brown slightly and thin out during a two-week period near the end of March, and no sooner. The campus grounds crew busily rake up the fallen leaves, and this creates the illusion that autumn arrives just before the onset of spring, all the more so since evergreens dominate the landscape, making fall, like the mild winter, barely perceptible seasons.
Certain Japanese-language textbooks laud the existence of "four seasons" in Japan, as if this were unique among nations; but the boast is surely unwarranted for southern Kyushu, which seems, at least to someone who had always lived in cooler climates, to experience only a protracted summer and sometimes chilly spring. The winter of 2006-7 is a case in point: not only did it never snow within the city (other than on the top of the volcano), the temperature never reached as low as freezing. Few in the Great Lakes region of the United States would be willing to call such a season "winter."
Earth-bound and ferny ways.
