東京は今夜になってまた雪が降り始め、今では10センチぐらい積もっています。家のまわりの道はどこも凍結してて、車はすごくゆっくりと流れてます。ウチのクルマはチェーンがないので使えません。。。とりあえず家にこもってWikipediaに執筆するぐらいしかすることないんですが。。。それもまた楽しきかな。
Author: Masayuki (Yuki) Kawagishi
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HIMEMIKO*WEBを閉鎖します
私の別サイト「HIMEMIKO*WEB」を閉じる事にしました。サイト10周年を前に非常に辛い決断です。
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Snowing again
It began to snow from this evening in Tokyo and now the snow is covering the ground more than 10 centimeters high…. All roads around my house are frozen and the car traffic is very slow. My car is already useless because I have no snow chains. I had nothing I can do but staying in my house and writing text in Wikipedia. It’s not bad for me.
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HIMEMIKO*WEB will be closed
I’ve made up my mind to close the website "HIMEMIKO*WEB." It was one of the toughest decisions I’ve ever made because I’ve kept this website for almost ten years.
It was in November 1998 that I founded the website. After I had read a comic book Hi no Tori by Osamu Tezuka I wanted to know about Princess Tōchi, who was starred in the book. I looked for the information about her throughout the internet but not so much information was found. Then I started to set up a website about her, after the research with many books, documents and other resources. Because no good HTML publishing applications were sold at that time, I made the HTML pages putting tags manually in the text files and uploaded them to the web server using a simple FTP uploader. I registered the website named 十市皇女～山吹の常処女～ (Tōchi no Himemiko — an ever virgin with Japanese yellow roses —) to many search engines to make it easier to be found.
After the registration to the search engines, many people came to see my website and left messages to me because there were no other kinds of websites that introduced this ancient lady. I replied all of the messages, and I got in touch with countless of men and women who were interested in her and Japanese ancient history. I had some meaningful experiences with a few of them, including even romance.
In addition to human communication, the creation and the maintenance of the website helped me to improve technical skills related to HTML and HTTP. I made simple bulletin board systems and guestbooks using CGI scripts, and made them communicate with a database.
There were many personal websites in the early five years of 2000s, because web browsers with higher functionality like Netscape 4.x or Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.x were released and web surfers could see more expressive web pages with large-sized images and motion videos. Many people uploaded their own information they wanted to give in public for lower costs. Most of the information was creative, and helpful to people, from a different viewpoint from that of old-fashioned mass media.
My website has been also informative and has helped many people of the same taste. In 2003, my website introduced not only Princess Tōchi but other 16 princesses who lived in the same era as Tōchi. In 2004, my website, renamed into HIMEMIKO*WEB, started giving information in both Japanese and English so that much more people all over the world can understand what I meant.
However, the mass media and big companies with much more funds began to take part in sending their information over the internet a few years ago. Many individual webmasters, being inferior to those companies in funds, time and amount of own information, were losing the reason-d’etre of their own websites, because the new websites those companies created were better and more informative by excellent web designers and engineers, and were maintained 24hrs/365days by special maintenance teams.
Also, the web-related techniques became much more complex and confusing for individuals. DHTML, Ajax, and many new techniques appeared one after another to make websites informative and interactive, and there have been too many things-to-be-learned for us to catch up with. We are busy, and we have no such time to master them all.
At the same time, the Web 2.0 policy is being popular and now we have many alternatives of expressing our own information more easily, instead of learning those dreadfully-difficult technology from scratch to maintain personal websites. Blogging is the easiest way of introducing yourself, by choosing a blogging service providers and creating your own account, or by installing a general-purpose blogging system like Movable Type to your server and changing a few settings as you like. If you know something useful and share it to the public, you can write it in Wikipedia. Google, Yahoo! and YouTube also have some nifty options to share information. If you want to just communicate with others, you can sign up to a popular SNS like MySpace, Facebook, mixi, GREE, etc., and join communities.
In such circumstances, the good old days of personal websites is now over. From now on, it’s better to share information in other ways. That’s why I’m going to close HIMEMIKO*WEB. (Another reason is that I’ve become too busy to have time to update it frequently 🙂
Of course it doesn’t mean that the content of HIMEMIKO*WEB turns invisible forever. The text, the images and other information used there will be transfered to other media, like Wikipedia and Google Maps, and you can get my idea in various places. I’ll never throw away the data I’ve made for years.
I’m very excited to meet the new style of the internet and get acquainted with many new things and people in the next ten years. It’s hard to follow the flow of change, though. -
節分です
昨日は節分なので、恵方巻を買って帰りました。ここ東京でも恵方を向いて巻き寿司を丸かぶりする習慣ができてきたようで、スーパーでもコンビニでも恵方巻がいっぱい売っていました。ちなみに今年の恵方は南南東だそうです。
節分といえば「鬼は外、福は内」の豆まきが有名ですが、豆をまかれて追い出された鬼たちはどこへ逃げるかというと、奈良・吉野の金峯山寺・蔵王堂にかくまわれるんだそうです。吉野の開祖・役小角が鬼を愛し、追われて逃げ込んできた鬼たちを鄭重に迎え入れたからだと言われていますが、そういうわけで、蔵王堂では「鬼は内、福は内」と言いながら豆まきをするんだとか。
以上、トリビアでした。 -
Where will America go?
America’s recession seems to begin. US stocks are falling down every day. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell from $13,500 in December 2007 to less than $12,000 right now, and the NASDAQ Composite was at around 2,700 in the end of December but now at about 2,300. For these five weeks, I’ve LOST more than 1/3 of the total amount of money that I’ve invested!
I’ve believed in the strength and the wealthiness of the United States, and invested American stocks and mutual funds instead of hopeless Japanese stock market. America’s economic growth was stable for over 50 years and the stock prices rose every year. You could get richer and richer as long as you buy and hold the American stocks or mutual funds.
However, the situation has changed completely for the last two months. America is no longer what it was before. What the hell happened to America? And what will happen in the future?
But I won’t give up yet. I’ll keep trusting America, because I love America and America will be still alright and won’t lose its presence in the world as long as it has the strongest military power and global standards in many fields. I have confidence that America will make it by any means.
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Snowing! / 大雪です
日本文が後ろに続きます。
When I woke up and opened up the entrance door in the morning I was surprised to see the HEAVY snow covering all over the area…. The weather forecast was saying that it had been snowing very much in the Kanto Plain.
The heavy snow piled up on my Accord, too. It was the first time to see my Accord covered with such heavy snow. I ripped the snow off the windshield with my hands and drove to the nearest car service shop to buy a snow brush with a window scraper.
The lessons I learned today was that the snow chains I bought this winter was useless because it was too hard to be installed, and that it was okay to drive without chains or snow tires as long as driving on the street with moderate traffic.
今朝起きて玄関のドアを開けると、一面大雪で埋もれてました！・・・天気予報によると関東地方は昨夜から大雪だそうです。
私のアコードワゴン君もごらんの通り雪に埋もれてました。今のクルマが雪で埋まるのを見るのは初めてです。とりあえず手でフロントガラスの雪を払い落とし、近くのオートバックスまで走ってウインドウスクレイパー付きのスノーブラシを買ってきました。
今回の大雪でわかったことは、この前買ったタイヤチェーンはこのクルマにはつけられなくて役に立たないことと、普通に交通量のある道路を走っている限りノーマルタイヤでチェーンを巻かなくても普通に走れるということです。 -
Inukai memorial exhibition / 犬養孝生誕百年回顧展
日本文が後ろに続きます。
This morning I visited Daikan’yama i-Studio to see the exhibition commemorating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Takashi Inukai, a leading scholar in the field of Man’yoshu. For those of you who don’t know it, Man’yoshu is Japan’s oldest collection of tanka poems created more than 1,300 years ago by emperors down to aristocrats and unknown common people nationwide. Inukai was an authority on the studies of the ancient poetry for over 50 years, teaching at many schools including Osaka University and Konan Women’s University as a professor.
According to the biography displayed in the exhibition room, he was born on April 1, 1907, in Tokyo. His first encounter with Man’yoshu was in the classroom of the high school in Kumamoto. Through the teachers of the high school he was greatly attracted by the beautiful words, melodious rhythms, and expressive images of the 4,516 verses.
After graduating from Tokyo University in 1932, he got a teaching job at Kanagawa Prefectural Yokohama Dai-ichi Junior High School, or Jinchu, where he taught for ten years. In 1942, he moved to Taiwan and became a professor of Taipei High School, teaching many students including Lee Teng-hui, who became a Taiwanese president 45 years later.
When the WWII came to an end in 1945, the Island of Taiwan belonged no longer to Japan, and accordingly he lost his teaching job. He returned to the mainland and landed at Wakayama. After that, he started living within the Kansai district. It was very convenient for him, because the area had plenty of places where the Man’yoshu verses were created and it could help his profound research of it. When he got a job at Osaka University in 1950, he made up his mind to walk around the places where each poem was sung to help him understand it more deeply. His idea impressed the students very much. They proposed him to make a trip to those places to understand the feelings of the ancient people. He agreed. He and his students went for more than 250 trips all over the country for almost 50 years, until he died in 1998. The total number of participants of those trips reached more than 40,000 (including me).
His contribution to the studies of Man’yoshu affected many people very much. In addition to writing papers and books as a specialist, he made his best efforts to spread it to the general public who aren’t familiar with pedantic literatures. He put his own melodies to each poem and sang it to the people to make it suit the popular taste. His “propagation” of Man’yoshu had influenced many artists, including Peggy Hayama, a singer, and Machiko Satonaka, a cartoonist who wrote Tenjo no Niji, a comic describing the life of Empress Jito.
His achievements was the object of public admiration in all directions. In 1978, he received the Order of the Riging Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon. The following year he was invited to the Imperial Palace and showed a tanka in front of Emperor Hirohito. Also, he gave a lecture on Man’yoshu to Hirohito on the top of a hill in Asuka, Nara, on December 4 that year. He was qualified as a person of cultural merit in 1987. The Order of the Sacred Treasure, Gold and Silver Star, was posthumously conferred on him on October 3, 1998, the very day that he passed away.
I have ever met him on our way of the trips by Osaka University students. He was very frank, friendly and humorous. Although the term that I was in touch with him for is much shorter than that of his life, I feel that I am sharing very many memories with him.
I uploaded the pictures of the exhibition to Flickr.
今朝、代官山ｉスタジオで「犬養孝生誕100年回顧展」というのをやっていたので見に行ってきました。犬養孝は、万葉集の研究の権威で、大阪大学や甲南女子大学などの教授として50年以上にわたって研究にたずさわってきた人です。
展示室にあった年譜によると、犬養孝は1907年4月1日に東京で出生し、熊本の第五高等学校にいたときに初めて万葉集と出会い、その美しい言葉、躍動的なリズム、表現力豊かな心象風景などに魅惑されたといわれます。
1932年に東京大学を卒業後、神奈川県立横浜第一中学校（神中）に奉職し10年間教鞭をとりました。そのあと台湾に移って台北高等学校の教授となり、数多くの学生を教えました。教え子の中には、後に台湾総統となった李登輝氏もいたとのことです。
終戦後、台湾は日本の領土でなくなったので、帰還船で内地へ帰り和歌山に上陸しました。そして、万葉集の歌の宝庫である関西に居を構え、1950年には大阪大学で教えることとなり、そのころから、万葉集を理解するために実際に現地を歩くという研究スタイルを確立させていったそうです。その考え方に学生たちは共鳴し、万葉集の故地を歩くツアーを提案しました。これは「大阪大学萬葉旅行」として、犬養が1992年に死去するまで50年近くにわたって250回以上も続けられました。この旅行の参加者は延べ4万人以上で、私もその中に含まれています。
犬養の万葉集研究は多くの人に影響を与えました。論文や著書を書くほかに、衒学的な学問としての文学になじみのない一般層に対して万葉集を広めることにも努力しました。万葉集の一首ずつに独自の節をつけ、それを人々の前で朗誦することにより、万葉集を一般向きのものとしました。犬養の“布教活動”は多くのアーティストに影響を与え、歌手のペギー葉山や、「天上の虹」を描いた漫画家の里中満智子も、すべて犬養孝が原点です。
これらの業績は多方面から評価され、1978年には勲三等旭日中綬章を受章、翌年の歌会始には宮中に召され、昭和天皇の御前で歌を読み上げられました。またその年の12月4日には、奈良県明日香・甘樫丘の上で昭和天皇をお迎えし、御進講を行いました。1987年には文化功労者に叙せられました。そして、死去した1998年10月3日には、正四位勲二等瑞宝章が追贈されました。
私は学生のときに萬葉旅行でこの犬養先生にお会いしたことがありますが、非常にフランクでフレンドリーでユーモラスな方だった記憶があります。実際に犬養先生と接した期間は犬養先生の人生に比べればごくわずかの期間なのですが、非常に多くの記憶が残っているような気がします。
回顧展の模様をFlickrにアップしました。
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【Softbank】X02NK／Nokia N95発表【春モデル】
今日、ソフトバンクから春モデルとしてX02NK／Nokia N95の発表がありました。
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