台湾糖業博物館の旅行 The Sugar Museum

On Thursday, I went with a UK friend I had not seen in almost 15 years to the Taiwan Sugar Museum (台湾糖業博物館). This museum has a very interesting history (for the history in Chinese) that dates back to the late 19th century when Taiwan came to be under Japanese rule. (For a brief history of the Japanese colonial rule in English click here and scroll down).

前社長金木善三郎所建造之宿舍. This is the house in which the Japanese director of the sugar factory lived. The Japanese ruled Taiwan for fifty years (almost two generations) and regardless of how we view them, they had a deep influence on Taiwan, so much so that when the Mainland Chinese arrived in the late 1940s they were shocked to see how Japanese the island had become.
甘蔗運輸的機具. Trains like this ran on narrow gauges to transport the sugar cane as well as the finished product.

Sheds were built to shelter the steam engines, presumably if they needed to be worked on.
比利時進口的小火車. This steam engine was built in Belgium, and not Japan as I originally thought.
The "Taiwan sugar railways" with their narrow gauge were at one time quite extensive in Taiwan, extending several thousand kilometers.
製糖石轆 Sugar mill stones.
「甘蔗迷宮」. This is not just an example of what sugar cane looks like, but is actually a sugar cane maze. In the past, before TV and X-Box were invented, children could enjoy themselves by playing games in the sugar cane fields.
製糖工廠. Inside the factory, I tried to imagine what it was actually like to work there. I found out that much of the machinery and equipment had been imported from the UK. The writing on the wall means "Tidy" and "Clean" - obviously an exhortation to the workers to make sure they did not leave the place in a mess.
This is a kind of oven.
灣製糖株式會社事務所. This was the plant director's office, built more or less as it would have been built in Japan.
The tree-lined route from the director's office to his adjacent house would have provided plenty of shade and fresh air on a hot day (most days were fairly hot).
前社長之宿舍. A different view of the director's living quarters. I once lived in a wooden Japanese house similar to this for several months in Taipei as a language student.
Bougainvillea ブーゲンビリア紅赤. These flowers always add some color to the browns and greens associated with the surrounding trees.
高雄捷運: 交通の便も良いです. Getting to the museum is very easy. Just a few stops on the mass rapid transit system from the city of Kaohsiung. The museum is next to one of the stations. The MRT in Taiwan reminds me of the local trains in Osaka. Before the train enters the station, music is always played over the loudspeakers.

Overall, I found the place very relaxing, and it was able to help me understand something about the history of Taiwan's economic development over the last century or so. It taught me to value being able to reconnect with the past and to see more clearly how Taiwanese society has developed to where it is today. Many changes, but still a common thread running through it all!

Trip to Alishan 阿里山の旅行

On March 9, my wife and I and our younger son traveled to Alishan in Chiayi County in Taiwan, where we caught the little train for which Alishan is very famous, and proceeded on a four-hour trip where the train climbed about 2,000 meters. After dinner and an "early night", we were up before 5 a.m. to get ready for a trip to see the sunrise. Later in the morning we went for a walk in the forest and saw many trees with their awe-inspiring blossoms.

登山鉄道。 In the lower parts of Alishan, the train wound its way past innumerable betel nut trees.

雲海。At close to 1,000 meters, a brief stop at a station enabled me to take this picture of a sea of clouds.

神木。Alishan has many huge sacred trees, sometimes over a thousand years old.

日出。Alishan has some spectacular sunrises.

Almost wherever one looks, one sees more mountains and mountain ridges.

This sacred tree was huge.

View from the platform next to the tree in the above picture.

Despite the beautiful scenery, traveling can be dangerous.

The post office at Alishan is housed in a beautiful building.

These flowers were actually potted and were right next to our hotel.

森林。Hsiu-chin and Morrison enjoying the walk through the forest.

The most famous sacred tree, which is 2,000 years old, unfortunately collapsed in recent years.

桜　さくらさくら。The cherry blossoms. Unfortunately, my camera was not really able to capture the beauty of these trees.

(Click on images to enlarge to see the flowers more closely)

吉野桜 Tokyo cherry

The train at Fenqihu (奮起湖) station, heading down the mountain.

Delicious local food and a model of the steam engine used in the past.

Unfortunately, our elder son was unable to accompany us due to spraining his foot the day before we were to go. Maybe we will go again some time to give him the opportunity to experience what was a wonderful trip.

How to type in Japanese

Flowers on sale at a local outdoor market in Taiwan.

The following is probably how Westerners type in Japanese and I have yet to experiment more to find out how the Japanese themselves type. When I originally learned to type in Chinese on a PC, I familiarized myself with a "Romaji" (Roman letters) approach that was what the foreigners learned because it was based on the Roman alphabet, but it was not the same as my Chinese friends' approach, which, although based on sounds, was related to the Mandarin phonetic symbols used in Taiwan and which required that different keys be pressed to obtain the different letters.
To complete this exercise, you ideally need a Mac computer. Of course there are ways of typing in Japanese on a PC, but I am no computer expert and I now have a Mac. Macs are expensive, but in my opinion they are better for this kind of thing, just as there is a difference between driving a BMW and an "economy" car.
Typing Japanese has become a lot easier than I thought:
1) Go to Google and type the words "typing Japanese on a Mac". There are many good sites, but I chose the following [PDF] Japanese Text Input Guide for Mac OS X (which came up as the second entry and had to do with the following site: library.wcc.hawaii.edu/Computers/Tips_Japanese_Input.pdf ). If you click on the entry, you can download a 3-page PDF file which serves as a guide for learning how to input Japanese text. It is very easy to follow.
By following the simple steps, I ended up with a blank Microsoft Word file, and a "palette" on the left side of my screen in which all the Hiragana symbols as well as punctuation appeared.
With the Hiragana symbol showing near the top right-hand corner of my screen (instead of the US flag to show that I am intending to type Japanese and not English), I started typing the following examples (typing the Roman letters you can see to the right of the Japanese) by copying from an elementary textbook:
ありがとうございます (arigatou gozaimasu "thank you")
I tried the following more complicated sentence (since it includes Katakana (for place names) and one Kanji character:
The idea was to type "igirisu no rondon kara kimashita" (which means "I'm from London in England"). So here goes (still in Hiragana mode):
いぎりす came out as the first four characters, but it should be in Katakana. Instead of choosing the Katakana mode and retyping, simply hit the space bar, and continue typing, and do the same with the word for London:
イギリスのロンドンからきました。(I got the "period" symbol off the palette, which is easier at this stage).
The trained eye will notice that the Japanese will normally replace the き symbol with the kanji character 来 meaning "to come". To get this to appear will require hitting the space button in the right place:
イギリスのロンドンから来ました。
The right place is at the end of the sentence (at least through trial and error). I guess the computer has to see complete words before it can judge whether a Hiragana symbol needs to be changed to something else. It is a little like an ongoing spelling checker in English. I know from English, however, that the computer sometimes changes something in a way that we don't want, so we have to be careful to check everything.
Anyway, what I learned from this exercise is that there is no mystery to typing Japanese on a computer. How things have changed since I started studying Chinese 30 years ago, which involved buying a dictionary and spending hours looking everywhere for those elusive characters.
Of course, while using a computer can be a lot of fun and easier when writing in Japanese, this does not mean we should not learn how to write by hand. I will share my experience of how I practiced writing the Hiragana and Katakana symbols in another posting. I will also write a short post about how to choose the right kanji symbol if and when the computer is in doubt about which one you intend to use. That is also explained on the above 3-page document.
Finally, if you like me think that you can't type Japanese because your computer does not give you that option, then buy a computer that does. In the end the investment will be well worth it.

Using the "Furiganizer" to Pronounce Kanji

The Japanese kanji symbol 'gaku' meaning 'happiness', which is also part of my Chinese name.

I have found a useful site (claiming to be "free"), which helps "hiriganize" Japanese "kanji". This is really helpful for me as I recognize most "kanji" (due to my knowledge of Chinese), but don't know how to read the words in Japanese. Of course this might not be 100% accurate, as there are many different pronunciations for the same "kanji", but on the other hand, it should prove extremely helpful. The link is http://www.furiganizer.com.
To test it, copy the following Japanese characters ("kanji"): 日本語, meaning "Japanese (as a language)" and click on the hyperlink to the website above. Then insert the three characters on to the page as instructed, and click on the word "Furiganize" at the bottom, and there you are!
Here is a slightly longer sentence:
もし、何かあったら連絡してね。
moshi, nani-ka attara renraku-shite-ne.
If there is anything, please contact me. (Courtesy of NHK)
In this sentence, if you can already read hiragana, you would be able to pronounce everything except "何" and "連絡". By copying and posting/furiganizing the whole sentence, you will be given the pronunciations for these kanji and in this case they agree with the roman pronunciation provided in the NHK lesson.
What is also particularly interesting, is that if you click on the kanji, an explanation of what the word means will appear in a box. This saves a lot of time that may otherwise be spent thumbing through a dictionary.

Early Experiences of Learning Japanese

Maybe one of the reasons why I enjoy learning Japanese is because of the delicious food. This is what my family and I ate on Christmas Eve.

From my experience of learning Chinese, I know learning a language requires a lot of hard work and one can feel very discouraged at times. A few years ago, I suddenly became interested in learning Japanese. It was not the first time I had been interested, but it was the first time I actually did something about it.
Living outside Japan with only very occasional contact with people who speak Japanese, I have mostly sought to teach myself Japanese, and always in addition to an already busy schedule. While a few months have passed since I was last trying to make an effort to learn, I would like to begin by sharing a little of the things I have been using to help me learn. The best way to illustrate this is by a series of pictures, as follows:

NHK have an Internet radio program with daily lessons for learning Japanese with the lesson commentary in a wide choice of languages besides English. NHK also offered to send the book that goes with the lessons free of charge. The above book is design for Chinese learners of Japanese. In the past, I also found http://www.japanese-online.com/ helpful. They have some very good beginning lessons that you can listen, too, and various ways you can interact with other people learning Japanese.

This book and the CD that comes with it were found in a secondhand store. The content is pretty basic, but that is a good thing as one can easily feel overwhelmed when trying to swim at the deep end. There are many good learning tools available. The important thing is that they have a CD and are not too expensive, unless you have a lot of money to spare and are really committed.

I bought this exercise book a couple of years ago in Osaka in order to practice writing Japanese. It looked so cute that I still have not used it. However, I did find a couple of websites (I forget what they were) which were very helpful for learning to write the hiragana (the more curved Japanese alphabet that is mostly used by small children and also together with the other forms of writing by adults) and the katakana (the "straighter" alphabet used for imported "foreign" words). These websites (which are easy to find on Google) show how each letter or character is written in terms of stroke order and also give a lot of useful advice to avoid confusing certain characters with other characters as well as how to remember them.

When studying on one's own (and especially if one can understand a lot of the kanji (Chinese-looking characters) already), there is probably a greater tendency to write things down. For instance, one might write down a few sentences from the subtitles when watching an anime movie, or copy out a lesson from a radio program. The penciled notes in English are either translations of the whole sentence (if the meaning is known) or else of individual words and expressions that have been recognized.

One thing I have often tried to do when learning a language is to record words and phrases on small cards. This can be helpful, provided that one spends time looking through the cards and reading what is on them.

On YouTube it is easy to find clips from well-known anime movies. Of course, it is better to have DVDs of a few such movies. Preferably, if the movie has Japanese subtitles (which some at least do), then that is even better. In my opinion, listening to Japanese being spoken in daily life is a lot more beneficial than just trying to read from a textbook. The anime movies may be cartoons, but the voices are those of normal people and if they have a character in the movie from Tokyo, then that person will speak with the Tokyo accent, while if the character is from Kochi, the voice will be from Kochi, too.

I will probably post initially at most once per week. You are welcome to leave comments.