Turning Japanese, I Really Think So

One of my neighbors is in greater Tokyo, so now's as good a time to turn Japanese as any. Yes, I realize that tomorrow is July 4th, but what are we independent of anymore? The only "Coalition of the Willing" forces of any size in Iraq are US -- and British. As Janis Joplin once quipped in another context, "I mean really, man." Our national government seems to hate the French, even though they were indispensable in the American War of Independence -- against the British. But wah, they wouldn't join in the invasion of Iraq. So now they must be bad! Orwellian musical chairs? That's the way of the world. GM merging with Renault and Nissan? Now there's a real ha-ha, especially with the Germans firmly entrenched up in Rochester Hills. Writer Philip K. Dick was on to something with his bizarre twist on the Second World War II in his The Man in the High Castle (1962). Who really "won" after all? At least we have the neutral Swedes in our back yard to hand out Nobel Prizes for Peace and Literature at IKEA, thank God.

Turning Japanese again, they were early adapters in the world of gadgetry. Maybe because they're the only country on earth to have survived an atomic attack (by the Americans and British) and resultant random mutant attacks by Godzilla, Mothra, and other crazy creatures -- or maybe it's because they're so densely packed on islands and dependent on international communications and trade and sick of war (the token Japanese Army contingent is packing up in Iraq and heading home shortly) -- for whatever reason, they've been out there for some time with the cellphones, the text messaging, the interweb, the robots and the Anime; and now the rest of the world is moving in their direction. What seemed like science fiction ten ot twenty years ago is really happening. The US sent spaceships to the Moon more than thirty years ago; the Mainland Chinese will be next. Blogs are springing up everywhere, telephonics are rapidly moving from the day we had only party lines and home landlines to the day we will have only mobile units, internet connections, and God knows what else. How will education change as a result, and everything else? It takes a while for things to even begin to sink in to our primal ways of thinking.

In recent years, I've asked students how they communicate with other people. Since about 2000, they've responded that multi-purpose mobile phones / cellphones have supplanted almost everything else, but even that's just a phase. How many correspond regularly with pen and paper anymore? Answer: about three in twenty-eight. How many send paper special occasion cards regularly? Answer: about ten in twenty-eight. How many send e-cards? About the same. How many send and receive email regularly? About twenty-three in twenty-eight. How many have MySpace or similar accounts for regular communications? Maybe five in each class, and growing (the younger the student, the more likely this is true). So what's going on? Where are we going next? Hell if I know. But it's starting to feel like life in a science fiction tale, even to me, a fan of the Twilight Zone from a very young age. And keeping up with the blogging is fun, but also transforming the way we live, let alone keeping in touch.

Tora! Tora! Tora!