Near Miss

Whew! I just almost lost the entire text of my Misfortune Teller post. Blogger is a nice idea, but I have found the e-mail interface unreliable, and there's no way to completely remove the risk of losing work with the web interface. I'm thinking of moving this blog to my own site. It won't be as pretty but I'll have better control over the post data and the software that keeps it organized. I'll let you (you? Do I have any readers out there?) know here if/when the move is on.

Misfortune Teller

What's your type?

If someone asks you that in Japan, they're likely trying to tell your fortune based on your blood type.

In Japan, many people think a person's basic personality type can be determined from their blood type: A, B, AB, O. I took it for a quaint social icebreaker like Astrology (What's your sign?) in the U.S. and didn't think anyone took it seriously.

Silly me. A recent article at the Mainichi Daily News website, Myth about Japan blood types under attack reminds it is impossible to underestimate the stupidity to which some people may sink. It reports that Japanese academics are starting to protest abuses of blood typing ranging from job discrimination to broken romances to pidgeon-holing school children.

The origin of the blood type-personality type idea is another story. I had always assumed it might have arisen from a confusion between the alphabetically coded blood types and the coincidentally named Type A and Type B personality models developed by the cardiologist Meyer Friedman. However, I was mistaken and the true origin of the idea is quite sinister.

The discovery of blood types in the early 20th century was a great medical breakthrough, but it was the Nazis who made the leap from blood type to personality based on the coincidental predominance of blood types A and O among Germans versus type B among Jews, Asians, and others. The Japanese militarists adopted the idea from their Nazi allies in the 1920's. From there it morphed into the modern Japanese urban legend it is today, though one that is not quite as harmless as I once thought.

Fourteen Years in the Noose

A Salaryman and His Necktie

The more things change, the more they remain the same. Once again, Japan makes a fashion discovery thirty years behind the United States. Casual clothes are comfortable. At least this time it is a good idea we are borrowing.

As reported at Japundit and in the New York Times, the Japanese government is launching a campaign to encourage both public and private employees to wear lighter clothing to work during the coming torrid summer months instead of the very ingrained traditional conservative business suit and necktie. This is in order to allow employers to raise thermostats during the peak air conditioning season, thereby reducing power generation needs and helping Japan meet its target for reduced greenhouse gas emission agreed to in the Kyoto Protocol.

The campaign will likely not make much of a difference for me personally because my company along with many others located in the Osaka area, which is reputed to have summers even muggier than Tokyo, has been following a similar policy for several years already. I welcome the dress-down campaign, though. I don't know how much impact it will have on global warming, but I support any excuse to wear a tie less frequently, and there are a lot of my fellow salarymen who would not be hurt learning to take themselves a mite less seriously in dress or otherwise.

Maybe you need a suit and a tie to sell things. It doesn't make much sense to me, but I've never had a job like that and no desire to. I like dressing up for special occassions, enough that I'm even willing to go through the torture of dressing the five kids for really big days. However, I've never seen the need or the desirability to make it a daily ritual. On the days I wear a jacket, I've always been more comfortable taking it off and working in shirt sleeves once I get to the office. I've come to appreciate neckties only as a way to add a little color to the drab business uniform, but have never had one that was better than tolerable as something to wear.

I had always subscribed to the wear anything as long as it is appropriate to your work rule of reason. At my last employer in the U.S., which had a reputation as a conservative organization, neckties were a widely declined option for technical personnel who didn't meet customers.

Having seen nothing specifically about a dress code in my contract when I started working in Japan, I assumed the same rule of reason applied. Knowing that Japanese salaymen were conservative dressers, I had made up my mind when I started working here to generally conform to the local dress customs. I always had a hard time keeping a suit nice for long, but I would at least show up for work in a (soon doffed) blazer with some form of constrictive if colorful clothing around my neck, varying from the standard only if I had a particularly good reason or a strong mood to the contrary.

However, I learned that things were not quite so free and easy at the end of last year's no necktie season. A memo was circulated sometime last September to employees at our Osaka-area offices announcing the end of the dress-down season. What surprised me about the memo was language that implied that there was an official company suit-and-tie dress code now going back into effect when I thought our dress had been dictated merely by custom and reason. I don't like having more rules than are necessary, even when I don't mind complying in the matter in question. I especially don't like having rules created by petty bureaucrats who confuse their own opinion with official policy, so I replied to the memo's author with a polite, Is that really the rule or are you just sharing your general idea of what's appropriate dress?

Maybe I should have left it as Don't ask/Don't tell, or started trying to convince someone other than the dress code memo's author. But a reply came back with the fingerprints of enough bosses to tell me that further challenge would be pointless to the effect that although we had no explicit dress code, the rule of reason did not mean that we could wear anything within reason, but that the traditional coat-and-tie was the only reasonable thing to wear.

It hasn't changed my dressing habits much, but has mad the salt mine a little less fun.

Casterbridge Quagmire

I have been bogged down with this book review for weeks. I wanted to write an unpretentious recommendation for a book I enjoyed, but it seems like I've settled into a permanent state of being just one more paragraph from being done. So I'm cutting my losses and posting now, though I'm no longer certain it's to any good purpose.

I had wanted to write something like:

Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge is a real page-turner for a nineteenth century novel with a contemporary feel to its prose, brings its setting alive with Tolkienesque world-building, and deals in engaging, thought-provoking themes even if pessimistic and non-Christian in perspective, so you should read it.

Below, the insomniac among you can read and see how badly I failed.

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Books: The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy (available in electronic form free-of-charge from Project Gutenberg) is the most easily enjoyable classic novel I have ever read, and that is in spite of having philosophic reservations on some of its themes.

To me there is an alien quality to older English works, some even as late as the early twentieth century. It's not the incomprehensibility of an unknown language, but the sensation that in spite of being able to make sense of every word on the page the obsolete vocabulary and forgotten idioms, the style of expression and approach to storytelling all create a barrier between my world and what the author is trying to say that's impenetrable without constant mental effort to punch through. It makes a labor of even the greatest of old books.

I did not get the same feeling from The Mayor of Casterbridge. Although it is definitely written and firmly set in the Victorian era and has a measure of paragraphs thick with unfamiliar idioms and dialects, the storytelling and overall style seem contemporary and accessible. I haven't read many books considered page-turners, but The Mayor of Casterbridge should be counted as one.

No matter what troubles the characters face, it is obvious that Hardy had a great love for the town of Casterbridge and the country around it. His writing imparts a share of that love on the reader. Casterbridge is a fictionalized version of the southwest English town of Dorchester where Hardy grew up. He describes the town to such depths of detail and history that a map spontaneously forms in the mind while reading the novel. Hardy's world is a creation comparable to Tolkien's Middle Earth to such a degree that I think it's likely Hardy was one of Tolkien's inspirations.

Hardy captures Casterbridge during an historic transition. The town has been a regional center for centuries, its fortune tied to the agricultural rhythms of the surrounding country. However, it is now the Industrial Age, at least in the outside world. Casterbridge is a backwater for the moment, but signs are on the horizon that the times are soon to catch up with the town. An air of nostalgia and melancholy in the novel's descriptions is perhaps due to Hardy having witnessed the tide of modernity sweep over the real Dorchester and change it forever.

The theme of The Mayor of Casterbridge can be summarized with the novel's brief quote from the German poet Novalis:

Character is Fate.

That is, the overall trajectory of a person's life is determined not so much by conscious choice or blind luck as it is by his basic personality. The consequences of our actions are inescapable because we can never escape ourselves. To Hardy, sin is not a lapse of virtue, but a tell-tale of a person's true character.

Another of Hardy's themes is that while the pursuit of happiness is futile, since even in the best case it is only an ephemeral good and in the worst case unachievable, peace of mind can be obtained through emotional detachment and acceptance of one's life situation with equanimity. By sacrificing the striving and elation at good fortune one can blunt the sting of misfortune. Hardy communicates this theme very subtly with his storytelling style. Although the novel is not explicitly narrated from the point-of-view of any one character, heinous and pathetic deeds are related matter-of-factly, their moral import unremarked, revealing that the narrator is not emotionally engaged in the action but is detached and peacefully relating whatever the characters do.

My first thought as Hardy's themes emerged was, This is the kind of book that can be enjoyed on literary merit while ignoring philosophical shortcomings. Certainly, no mainstream Christian could accept the thesis of the impossibility of salvation. However, further reflection shows that Hardy's views, while non-Christian, make some relevant challenges to my way of looking at the world.

Is character destiny? My first answer was no, people can learn and change. Even if we sometimes or often fail to live up to what we know is right, it's usually just a moment of weakness. In general we know what's right, intend to do it, and manage to pull it off more often than not. But do we really? While I affirm that change of character is possible, it is much easier to talk about change than to do it. While I have known transforming moments in my own life, I have also felt trapped in bad habits, even ones I thought I had beat years ago. Although Christians believe in transforming grace, we also believe in fallen human nature that will dog our best intentions all our days.

Is happiness achievable? […]

(Why did I pick up The Mayor of Casterbridge in the first place? A film critic recently interviewed the screenwriter of the movie Millions who had previously written the screenplay for The Claim which was based on The Mayor of Casterbridge. I knew there was little chance I'd see either movie anytime soon, the novel was available free online, and I'd never read any Thomas Hardy before, so I thought what the heck …. A read well-worth the time invested.)