hightext

E-mails are, like, so not cool

According to a Chungbuk University survey of over 2000 high school and college students, young South Koreans rarely use e-mail any more, preferring SMS and instant messaging. I wonder if this will continue when they start working. I've already had people asking me whether instant messaging is generally acceptable in Japanese corporates and my quick scan of news articles suggested it was still confined to young people and seen as being for private not corporate use.

Also interesting to note from this article that mini-homepages are big in South Korea as well as Japan. I have been trying to explain the concept of Japanese mini homepage sites such as Mahou no Island (Magic Island) to people in the UK, who immediately lumped them in with moblogs, which I never felt was quite the right description. They are much richer than just a diary with cameraphone pictures attached.

Thanks to Textually and Techdirt.

Burying some memes

Good old Snopes has laid to rest a few of the cross-cultural memes that I get to hear in the course of my work.

Firstly, the 'bite the wax tadpole' Coca Cola one - it seems Coca Cola itself didn't make such a mistake when translating its name, but local shopkeepers had hung out signs that could be read in such a way.
Secondly, the 'Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead' one.
And finally, the Chevrolet Nova 'doesn't go' in Spanish speaking markets one.

So conspiracy theorists will have to go back to believing multinationals are clever enough to be scheming successfully for evil world domination, rather than stupid and ignorant.

Walk like a Dane

Michael Maloney, the actor maybe best known for his role in the film Truly Madly Deeply, was interviewed in the Financial Times last Friday. Again, subscription only, sorry.

He was publicising the Yukio Ninagawa production of Hamlet, which started at the weekend at the Barbican, London, with Michael Maloney in the title role. In the interview he gives some useful illustrations of the different approaches to rehearsing between Ninagawa and the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), which will be useful to me in my explanations of the different teaching styles in Japan and Europe.

Maloney says that at the RSC "you might sit for up to two weeks round the table and analyse every word. But Ninagawa asked us to start doing the play on day four, after three read-throughs. Learn the lines; do it; run it... That's the Japanese tradition."

Ninagawa did not give specific directions on how he saw the text but instead revealed his thoughts through the careful use of concrete details, such as the set and costumes. "You know exactly where to go when you've said something." Maloney says. "If you're high status you go up the back so everyone can watch you disappear. If you've done something terrible or you're in a state of flux you go out of a lower door." "When I'm mad I wear something close to a martial arts costume. Very large trousers, if not skirts, which make you move in a certain way." Asked if this prescriptive approach constricts the actor he says that on the contrary, "it removes your self-consciousness."

As I have mentioned before, Japanese teaching, and it would seem directing, is more inductive than deductive - working from experiences and cases. Whereas Western teaching is more deductive - coming up with a theory first and then providing examples. Hence the RSC spending days on analysing the text first. I asked my husband about this, as he used to be at the RSC and now directs plenty of productions as a teacher of drama. He said such endless analysing was typical of the RSC and that he often prefers the Ninagawa method - "sometimes you just know that something has to be done in a particular way and you can't explain why. You get the actors to do it and they understand instinctively too."

The example I often use in training is of being apprenticed to a sushi chef. You spend years shadowing the sushi master, only being allowed to sweep floors and wash up and when you do finally get to make sushi, you are expected to have learnt how by absorption - 'minitsukeru' is the Japanese expression for this kind of learning, which literally means 'stick on the flesh' - learning from the outside in rather than from the inside out.

Maloney also says he warmed to the level of courtesy and respect. "Ninagawa taught me how to behave." But he does remember one moment during the rehearsals for King Lear, when they were on the stage with full lighting, but out of the corner of his eye he could see Ninagawa take off his shoes and walk all the way across the arm-rests of the chairs, screaming with frustration. Again, hubby says "I know that feeling. Tech rehearsals are the worst." Maloney reckons that calm Japanese exteriors can disguise passion: "If you could rip off the mask, you'd find they're Italian underneath!"

Ninagawa's Macbeth

John Peel

OK, I realise that the death of a radio DJ in the UK has nothing much to do with information and communication technologies or intercultural issues, although you could argue that radio is a communication technology.

You could also say that John Peel was very very English - in his self deprecation and his use of irony and as one of the obituaries pointed out, his nerdish enthusiasm and trainspotter tendencies in the way he kept up with new music, no matter how obscure. His enthusiasm for the music he played was very obvious to listeners, but was nicely underplayed - again a very English trait.

At the same time he was "intercultural" in his music tastes, even if he was not as closely associated with promoting World Music as other DJs who followed. He even played a record of mine once, when I was 14. I had been listening to his show under the bedsheets from about the age of 12 and had sent in two records, one of traditional Japanese music and one from the Candies, who were a very popular girl band in the 1970s in Japan. He played the traditional Japanese music one and read out my postcard, which I had chosen because it came from the Liverpool Art Gallery - his home town. One of the coolest boys at school heard this and came up to me the next day to ask if it was me (as there aren't that many people in the UK called Pernille). I didn't get permanent promotion to being cool though, just a one day backstage pass from swotdom. I've still got the record he scribbled his thanks on, along with the postcard which he sent back to me.

He also provided one of the reasons my husband and I fell in love. In the early flirty days we found out we had both recorded Peel sessions under the bed clothes - finger hovering over the record and pause buttons on our cassette radio players. And we had both ended up recording an Altered Images session where John Peel talked over the ending of "Song Sung Blue" saying 'when I die you'll find the words tweedle eedle um pum engraved on my heart'.

He was on our fantasy wedding guest list (along with Robyn Hitchcock (for my husband), David Bowie (for me), Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall and various others that I can't remember off hand). According to one reminiscence I heard on his BBC Radio 4 programme Home Truths, he might well have come if we had asked him - as he did turn up to someone's 60th birthday party when her son invited him out of the blue.

We nearly featured on Home Truths ourselves. I wrote to the researchers suggesting they covered the celebration of the 8th of the 8th that my husband and his brothers invented to liven up their village of Halford in Warwickshire. (It's a long story, but involves Vikings, a cheese factory, a rat the size of a Volvo Estate and throwing cheese in the river at 8 minutes past 8pm on the 8th of August every year). They were enthusiastic and suggested I recorded the event myself but they didn't get back to me until the event had passed.

Although I was shocked to hear of his death I was not tearful until I heard the Home Truths tribute by Roger McGough, particularly when he played the clip of how John Peel felt holding his grandson in his arms for the first time. Then the floodgates really opened last Saturday when I watched a BBC TV programme about him, and Phil Jupitus (a great big bumptious bear of a DJ to those who don't live in the UK) looked like he was about to cry during his vox pop, on top of all the memories unleashed by vox pops and music clips from Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Buzzcocks, Pulp, Ivor Cutler and then of course that midnight sign off music he used to finish his Radio One show, with me half asleep under the bedclothes, starting awake to turn the radio off, feeling guilty that it was midnight already and I had a school day the next day...

OhmyNews

South Korea's 'citizen reporters' website OhmyNews featured in a generous sized article in Saturday's Financial Times. Subscription only I'm afraid, but I still subscribe to the hard copy because of articles such as this - international, serious, interesting and no axe to grind.

Anyway, it seems there are South Korea-specific factors behind OhmyNews' success (35,000 citizen reporters, 40 staff reporters, 14 million page views a day in 2003, a modest profit based on advertising revenues topped up by third party content sales and a tipping service). Apparently there has been a real hunger for anti-establishment or at least 'non' establishment news due to the dominance of conservative newspapers. South Koreans have been able to fulfil this hunger by reading OhmyNews thanks to a high penetration of broadband access at home. The FT reporter quotes Professor Yoon of Yonsei University who even thinks that OhmyNews helped Roh win the last presidential election.

The FT article says that JanJan which was set up in Japan specifically to imitate OhmyNews (and features some Japanese translations of OhmyNews stories on its website) has not been so successful. This article in the Japan Media Review points to some of the reasons. Firstly, Japanese use of PC and internet access from home is much lower than in South Korea. Which is true, but as many of the target audience in Japan use their mobile phone to access the internet, I'm surprised I don't see any evidence of a mobile phone version on the JanJan site.

Secondly, as Miki Imazu, a Tokyo-based consultant who has conducted market research in South Korea says in the article, "Koreans love to express their opinions. Koreans always want to talk about whatever is going on in the world. It's almost as though Korea is a culture where every citizen wants to be a politician. It's a national character trait -- and the polar opposite of the Japanese personality."

OhmyNews founder Oh Yeon-ho and staff

Friends abroad

A start up in the UK called FriendsAbroad is starting to get some publicity. The founder is Simon Murdoch, who started Bookpages which was then sold to Amazon.com, with Murdoch ending up as VP of Amazon in Europe.

It's in its beta phase at the moment, and is free - the idea is that you plug in which language you can speak and which language you want to learn and then you are matched with someone you can communicate with by e-mail or text chat. They are hoping to add Voice over IP later on.

The target group is people who have failed so far to learn a language. As Murdoch rightly says, to learn a language properly you need to practice regularly if not daily, so the immediacy and ease of use internet based communication should help. I do have some doubts about the form of language people will end up learning - being able to write e-mails or TXT is useful but may not be much use for conversation or formal business communications. But it does at least take some of the fear out of making mistakes when it is not face to face ro real time, as studies of multicultural e-learning have shown.