カズオイシグロの小説のおかげで、ベーオルフの本を少し読みました。そこで改めて感じたのが指輪物語のトールキンのすごさ。Norton のCritical Editionsで彼のベーオルフの研究Beowulf: The Monsters and the Criticsが大きな影響を与えたのを知りました。昨年彼の未発表のベーオルフの訳が出て話題になりましたが、ようやくそのインパクトを理解できました（汗）
The earliest use of the word gyokusai is found in the biography of a Chinese of the sixth century (the northern Ch’i dynasty), who reportedly said that he would rather be a broken jewel than a whole tile, meaning that he would prefer to die gloriously than to live the inglorious life of a common clod. As adopted by the Japanese, the expression acquired a special meaning during the Pacific War. Gyokusai was used to describe the final, all-out charge of surviving Japanese units against superior American forces. The Americans called such actions “banzai charges” because many of the Japanese soldiers cried banzai as they made their suicidal charge into the teeth of enemy forces.
In fact, Oda was at pains not to identify where the action took place, as if to reject any odor of wartime journalism. It was obvious to me, however, because of my experiences as a translator and interpreter during the war, that the place described in the novel is Peleliu, one of the Palau group, the island where the Japanese defenders put up the most prolonged and fiercest resitance to the American Landing forces.
Michelle Williams covers our April issue BY LEISA MILLAR POSTED 2 MON MARCH Michelle Williams brings a much-needed pop of spring colour to newsstands this month on the cover of ELLE's April issue, on sale now. The three-time Oscar nominee, whose new film, Suite Français, is released this month, looks incredible in Louis Vuitton, photographed by Kerry Hallihan.
Mainly, she lightens up when she's not talking about work – when she's telling me what authors she's reading (Rebecca Solnit, Philip Roth), or about her secret desire to indulge in old-lady pastimes like birdwatching.
During her interview, Michelle also spoke about her decision behind picking well scripted films as opposed to those with massive budgets. '[It's always just been] an instantaneous response that happened while I was reading a script', said the Take This Waltz actress. She added: 'It's the only thing I ever went off – not advice, not some picture in terms of placement or strategy – but just a feeling that came off of the page and into my heart. 'It suits me best to work with friends, and to make something that feels really homemade.'
優しそうな中にも芯の強さを感じることができるセリフがWhat excited me most is finding the hardest thing, or the thing I know the least how to doです。タイトルにも使わせてもらいました。
With her acting pedigree she could take her pick of Hollywood roles yet the Brokeback Mountain star, 34, says she prefers to push herself by choosing challenging parts.
“What excited me most is finding the hardest thing, or the thing I know the least how to do,” Michelle, who spent most of last year playing Sally Bowles in Cabaret on Broadway, tells Elle magazine, “It is the only thing keeping me interested in doing this.”
We love cotton because it’s soft, breathable and renewable. But we didn’t like the fact that conventional farming can harm the growers and the environment. So IKEA made a commitment to help improve the industry.
By the end of 2015, all the cotton that we use will come from more sustainable sources. This means that farmers:
> Use less water thanks to more efficient practices > Use less chemical fertiliser and pesticide, reducing costs and pollucion > Increase their profit margins without raising prices
ここでTOEIC定番表現を確認しておきます。IKEAではmade a commitment to help improve the industryとしています。be committed to –ingはおなじみですが、同じようにTOEICではa commitment to –ingと-ingが使われていました。
Frank also has a strong commitment to educating the youth of Talson City. He has been a volunteer at an after-school center for children for the last three years, teaching computer skills and internet search techniques.
英英辞典の表記ではオックスフォードはto do/doingの両方載せていますが、a commitment to doのかたちだけを紹介している辞書が多い感じです。アメリカとイギリスの違いなんでしょうかねええ。
（オックスフォード） commitment to do/doing something The company's commitment to providing quality at a reasonable price has been vital to its success.
(Cobuild) countable noun [usu N to-inf] If you make a commitment to do something, you promise that you will do it. (formal) ⇒ “We made a commitment to keep working together.”
（ケンブリッジビジネス） [C or U] a promise or firm decision to do something, or the fact of promising something: He was encouraged by the commitment of car manufacturers to improving dealer profitability. The mayor also pleaded for a commitment to the city's request for $250 million in federal funds. We will set an example to the rest of the public sector and business by making a commitment to buy recycled goods. a strong/firm commitment We can arrange for you to trial the equipment without commitment to buy.
IKEAの取り組みは、農家支援だけではなく、児童労働禁止も訴えているようです。Children should only work hard at school.というカタログにあった言葉はWorkが「勉強する」という意味にもなる英語ならではのメッセージですね。日本語サイトでもこの取り組みは紹介されているので、英語学習にも役立てることができそうです。
Cotton Cotton is one of the most important raw materials for IKEA, and we work actively to promote better cotton growing methods. IKEA wants the cotton used in IKEA products to be produced in a sustainable manner, taking into consideration both people and the environment.
Conventional cotton growing and processing consumes large amounts of water and chemicals. Together with WWF, IKEA is actively involved in developing better cotton cultivation practices to increase the volume of cotton produced in an environmentally friendly way.
(Wikipedia) Religious In the context of Christianity, heaven is sometimes symbolically depicted as populated by angels playing harps, giving the instrument associations of the sacred and heavenly.
Americans tend to say "Excuse me" when they accidentally get in your way, while the British say "Sorry." Americans say "Excuse me" even when they are 10 paces away from you, since they are accustomed to a lot more space than we are in Europe. One knows one is back in the U.K. when everyone is constantly saying sorry for no reason whatsoever.
アメリカ人は率直で、やたらポジティブで、やたら大げさといった感想は日本人でもうなずけると思います。下記のWSJではありませんがアメリカ人が現在形を使いたがるのはPerhaps this reflects a present-oriented society.と本では書いていました。イーグルトンは最近自己啓発について書いたりして、すっかり俗になった印象ですね。 People in Britain do not usually say "I appreciate it," have a hard time, zero in, reach out to other people, stay focused, ask to be given a break, refer to the bottom line or get blown away. The word "scary," as opposed to "frightening" or "alarming," sounds childish to British ears, rather like talking about your buttocks as your bottie. Brits tend not to use the word "awesome," a term which, if it were banned in the States, would cause airplanes to fall from the sky and cars to lurch off freeways. （中略） Americans tend to lapse into the present tense when speaking of the past much more commonly than Brits do. "I'm in the kitchen and there's this terrific bang and I dive under the table" is distinctively American. Perhaps the British rate the past more highly than their trans-Atlantic cousins. People in Britain might call children kids, but not in newspaper headlines or on television news. Americans tend to prefer the ugly monosyllable "kids" to the rather beautiful word "children," seemingly content to regard their offspring as small, smelly goats.
PROSPERO: Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air; And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. （宴は終った。この役者たちは前にも話したように、みな精霊だ。今では空気のなかへ、薄い空気のなかへと溶けてしまった。そして、この幻が礎のない建物であるのと同じように、雲を頂く塔も、豪華絢爛な宮殿も、荘厳な寺院も、巨大な地球そのものも、地上のありとあらゆるものも、すべていずれは消滅し、今消えていった実体のない見せもの同様、跡形も残しはしない。我々は夢と同じ材料でできている。この短い人生は眠りで包まれているのだ。）
Anyone know who the reading is? Sounds like Helen Mirren, which would make sense considering she played the character not too long ago. That said, I don't see Helen Mirren doing ads for Ikea. Zainab 2014-07-17 17:21:25
Our latest ad of the week is a dreamy new spot for Ikea from Mother London, directed by Cadbury Gorilla director Juan Cabral, which uses CG visuals, a charming dog and an extract from Shakespeare to promote the retailer's range of bedrooms...
The 90-second film, which aired on TV last night, opens with a woman waking in a bed high in the sky. She dangles her feet for a second before jumping into the clouds, tumbling past yet more beds and into the heart of a city, where she eventually lands in her own room alongside her partner and dog, who are fast asleep. Set to a reading from Act 4 of Shakespeare's The Tempest, voiced by Prunella Scales, it ends with the strapline, There's no bed like home.
In a stunning global expansion, the Swedish home furnishings giant has been quietly planting its blue and yellow flag in places you’d never expect. Pay attention, Wal-Mart: You could learn a few things.
Even with all that careful planning, Ikea managed to get a few things wrong. It misjudged the number of parking spaces needed, and a seemingly benign map for sale upset some customers: The body of water east of Korea was labeled the Sea of Japan rather than the East Sea, as South Koreans prefer.
But the Koreans seem, for the most part, to have forgiven the Swedes. Today the Gwangmyeong store, which is the company’s largest in the world by shopping area, is on track to become one of Ikea’s top-performing outlets for 2015.
インドや中国など、中産階級が拡大している国でもIKEAは好調を維持しているようです。
The success is hardly a fluke. Ikea, it seems, is a genius at selling Ikea—flat packing, transporting, and reassembling its quirky Swedish styling all across the planet. The furniture and furnishings brand is in more countries than Wal-Mart, Carrefour, and Toys “R” Us. China, where Ikea has eight of its 10 biggest stores, is the company’s fastest-growing market. An outlet in Morocco is coming soon, and there are hints that Brazil may not be far off. Meanwhile, Ikea is going meatballs out in India, where it plans to invest about $2 billion over a decade to open 10 stores.
Getting it right in emerging markets like China and India, where Ikea is well-positioned to capitalize on a growing middle class, is a key factor in its goal of hitting €50 billion in sales by 2020. That’s up from €28.7 billion in its fiscal 2014 ($39 billion based on the average exchange rate for Ikea’s fiscal year) and almost double its 2005 sales level. Today the Ikea Group has 318 stores, not including the brand’s some four dozen franchised locations; it’s aiming for around 500 by 2020.
There are important lessons here for Wal-Mart, which has sometimes struggled overseas, and for Target, featured in Fortune’s March 1 issue, which recently decided to pull out of Canada after a disastrous expansion.
The Ikea model is based on volume—producing a lot of the same stuff over and over, which helps it secure a low price from suppliers and in turn charge a low price to customers. One Billy bookcase, an Ikea classic, is sold every 10 seconds. More stores mean more volume and the chance to drop prices even more, which Ikea did by an average of 1% last year.
For the company, this isn’t just a business model, apparently. It’s a mission: helping “the many people” and those with “thin wallets,” which is a mantra spoken by company employees everywhere from Croatia to Qatar. “We’re guided by a vision to create a better everyday life for the many people. That is what steers us, motivates us—that is our role,” says Ikea Group CEO Peter Agnefjäll, a 20-year company veteran, who took the helm in 2013. “We feel almost obliged to grow.”
Today research is at the heart of Ikea’s expansion. “The more far away we go from our culture, the more we need to understand, learn, and adapt,” says Mikael Ydholm, who heads research. Rather than focus on differences between cultures, it’s his job to figure out where they intersect.
The company, for example, did a study of 8,292 people in eight cities, examining morning routines. People are the fastest out the door in Shanghai (56 minutes) and the slowest in Mumbai (2 hours, 24 minutes), where they’re also the kings of the snooze (58% hit the button at least once). New Yorkers and Stockholmers are the most likely to work in their bathrooms (16%). But regardless of city, women spend more time than men picking out their outfit for the day, a process many find stressful.
ただし、各国向けに商品開発するのではなく、商品の使用方法をその国に合わせてアレンジしていくというようです。動画でもtatamiと言っていましたが、the Japanese version might incorporate tatami mats, and the Dutch room will have slanted ceilings, reflecting the local architecture.と日本とオランダでの商品ディスプレイを変えているようです。
The aim of gaining all this cultural knowledge is not to tweak the products for each market. The Ikea model, remember, is volume, volume, volume: It needs vast economies of scale to keep costs low, and that means creating one-size-fits-all solutions as often as possible. Rather, Ikea has gotten awfully good at showing how the same product can mesh with different regional habitats.
Witness the full-size sample rooms that Ikea sets up in stores and where customers will sometimes be caught napping. The rooms play an essential, if secret role, showing consumers how to fit Ikea pieces into their lives. Displays in Sendai, Japan, and Amsterdam could feature the same beds and cabinets, for example. But the Japanese version might incorporate tatami mats, and the Dutch room will have slanted ceilings, reflecting the local architecture. Beds in the U.S., meanwhile are covered with pillows.
Ikea’s catalogues serve a similar purpose as the sample rooms—and, again, the company has invested in the strategy in a comprehensive way. Catalogues come in 32 languages and 67 versions, with each reflecting local customers and customs. There are two catalogues for Belgians: one in French, another in Flemish. Ikea customers in Winnipeg and Calgary typically see a different version from their Francophone countrymen in Montreal.
Ikea printed 217 million copies of its most recent annual tome—which the company claims is the biggest run of any publication of its kind in the world—producing them in a studio in Älmhult, Sweden. For every room setup, there is an Ikea employee standing by responsible for tracking any element that needs to be switched out—making sure that glass products produced in mainland China don’t show up in Taiwan’s catalogue and removing Persian rugs from the one that gets mailed to Israelis.
Ikea has not always gotten these local nuances right. The company came under fire for Photoshopping women out of its catalogue in Saudi Arabia and for removing a lesbian couple from its magazine in Russia. “We have done mistakes,” acknowledges Kajsa Orvarson, communications officer at Ikea Communications, the home of the catalogue, “but we are becoming more and more aware of how to improve and to share our values.”
Ikea’s designers look well beyond the furniture industry for expertise when it comes to trimming production costs. They’ve commissioned a shopping-cart manufacturer, for instance, to mass-produce a new table and a bucket maker to punch out a chair. As the price of wooden drums declines, Engman has considered using a drum supplier for round tables. The same goes for materials such as cork, which is in greater supply as wine bottles increasingly employ screw tops and plastic stoppers.
So, too, design inspiration comes from everywhere. Engman points out a folding table that he saw in bars and restaurants throughout China. “It costs near to nothing,” he says. “It is the smartest table. It has the construction of an ironing board.” He is also excited these days about acacia wood, which Ikea sources primarily from Southeast Asia. Normally used in outdoor furniture, acacia has the properties of teak but the price of pine. Its downside is it turns as it grows and does so even more when it dries, making it hard to glue together. (That’s why particleboard became so popular in furniture; it’s also cheap, and every piece is alike.) But Engman says his team had a “breakthrough” in working with and drying the wood.
部屋や店の改装はTOEICでも登場します。Bedroom makeoverという動画がありました。
（ロングマン） makeover 1 if you give someone a makeover, you make them look more attractive by giving them new clothes, a new hair style etc 2 if you give a place a makeover, you make it look more attractive by painting the walls, putting in new furniture etc: It's time we gave the kitchen a makeover.
北陸新幹線がナショナルジオグラフィックでもBest Spring Trips 2015として紹介されていまいた。The new service launches March 14 and extends the existing Tokyo-to-Nagano high-speed railway line west by 143 miles.なんて表現はTOEIC的ですね。Sleek bullet trainsとsleekが使われていますね。
Be among the first to ride the 281-mile-long Hokuriku Shinkansen bullet-train line connecting Tokyo and Kanazawa, a UNESCO City of Crafts and Folk Art. The new service launches March 14 and extends the existing Tokyo-to-Nagano high-speed railway line west by 143 miles. Sleek bullet trains whisk passengers at speeds of up to 160 miles an hour between Tokyo and Kanazawa in about two and a half hours (one-way). The trip includes spectacular views when crossing through the Japan Alps and along the Sea of Japan. Located on the less visited north-central coast of Honshu, Japan’s main island, Kanazawa and the surrounding Hokuriku region harbor a wealth of natural and cultural treasures, including national parks and natural hot springs, traditional Japanese art and crafts such as lacquerware and gold leaf, samurai and geisha heritage districts, castles and ancient ruins, and historic farming and fishing villages.
How to Get Around: Buy a Japan Rail (JR) Pass before your trip. Designed specifically for foreign visitors, the pass provides one, two, or three weeks of unlimited travel on most Japan Rail routes, including Hokuriku Shinkansen. The JR Pass is also valid on most local bus routes and on the Tokyo Monorail from Haneda Airport to Hamamatsucho Station. Take the Hokuriku Shinkansen Kanazawa from Tokyo to Kanazawa Station. From Kanazawa, use local buses and trains to travel around the region.
Where to Stay: The eight-room Sumiyoshiya ryokan (traditional inn) in Kanazawa’s city center (a 20-minute walk from the train station) has been welcoming guests for more than 300 years. Rates include breakfast and communal hot baths (separate men’s and women’s baths). Onsite bike rentals and the efficient local bus system make it easy to visit popular attractions such as the Omi-cho Market and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art.
What to Read Before You Go: Nobel Prize-winning writer Yasunari Kawabata’s internationally acclaimed Snow Country (Yukiguni) (Vintage, English edition, 1996) is set at an isolated hot spring in the Japan Alps and opens with a train emerging from a tunnel into the snowbound backcountry.
The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country. The earth lay white under the night sky. The train pulled up at a signal stop. A girl who had been sitting on the other side of the car came over and opened the window in front of Shimamura. The snowy cold poured in. Leaning far out the window, the girl called to the station master as though he were a great distance away. The station master walked slowly over the snow, a lantern in his hand. His face was buried to the nose in a muffler, and the flaps of his cap were turned down over his face.
Starbucks SBUX -0.34% CEO Howard Schultz has never shied away from involving his company in controversial debates, whether those debates are about same-sex marriage, or gun control, or U.S. government gridlock. But the executive, who oversees a coffee empire with 4,700 U.S. stores, has now taken on arguably the most polarizing political debate in the United States: race relations.
It began with one voice As racially-charged tragedies unfolded in communities across the country, the chairman and ceo of Starbucks didn’t remain a silent bystander. Howard Schultz voiced his concerns with partners (employees) in the company’s Seattle headquarters and started a discussion about race in America. Despite raw emotion around racial unrest from Ferguson, Missouri to New York City to Oakland, “we at Starbucks should be willing to talk about these issues in America," Schultz said. "Not to point fingers or to place blame, and not because we have answers, but because staying silent is not who we are." Partners were not silent. For more than an hour, at an all-hands meeting at the Starbucks Support Center, partners representing various ages, races and ethnicities passed a microphone and shared personal stories. “The current state of racism in our country is almost like humidity at times. You can’t see it, but you feel it,” said one partner.
Japan 日本 ロンドンと日本にはさまざまな縁がある。船乗りになって最初に行ったのが小笠原諸島、横浜であり、初めて活字になった作品「日本沖合の台風の話」（一八九三→M）をはじめ、初期作品には、日本とその周辺の海を舞台とするものがいくつかある。（後略）
上記で触れている記念すべき活字デビュー作は題名こそ日本がついていますが、それだけでした。。。
STORY OF A TYPHOON OFF THE COAST OF JAPAN (First published in San Francisco Morning Call, November 11, 1893) By Jack London "The first article Jack London wrote for publication. It won first prize in a contest for local authors run by the San Francisco Call. The success of this first article was to be the spark which eventually ignited all of Jack's latent creative genius."
Words checked = [1559] Words in Oxford 3000™ = [84%]
According to Japanese custom, Hona Asi did not eat with us, but waited on the table as a true wife should. She removed the covering from a round wooden box, and with a wooden paddle ladled out two bowls of steaming rice, while Sakaicho uncovered the various bowls on the table and revealed a repast fit for the most fastidious epicure. The savory odors arising from different dishes whetted my appetite, and I was anxious to begin. There was bean soup, boiled fish, stewed leeks, pickles and soy, raw fish, thin sliced and eaten with radishes, kurage, a kind of jellyfish, and tea. The soup we drank like water; the rice we shoveled into our mouths like coals into a Newcastle collier; and the other dishes we both helped ourselves out of with the chopsticks, which by this time I could use quite dexterously. Several times during the meal we laid them aside long enough to sip warm saki (rice wine) from tiny lacquered cups.
１９世紀後半ですでにアイスクリームがあったのに少し驚いたのと、旅行客として日本を訪問したせいかI had found the Japanese a shrewd, money-seeking raceとお金にがめつい印象を日本人に対して持っているのが気になりました。イザベラバードなんかは誠実な日本人が多いことを書いてくれているのと対照的です。
By the time we concluded Hona Asi had brought from the little shop round the corner two glasses of ice cream, which she placed before us with a porcelain jar full of green plums, packed in salt. When we had done justice to this, we had resort to the inevitable hilbachi and tabako-bon, presumably to aid digestion.
As a rule, I had found the Japanese a shrewd, money-seeking race; but when, as a matter-of-course, I took out my purse to pay the reckoning, Sakaicho was insulted, while, in the background, Hona Asi threw up her hands deprecatingly, blushed, and nearly fainted with shame. They gave me to understand very emphatically that it was their treat, and I was forced to accept it, though I knew they could ill afford such extravagance.
A NIGHT'S SWIM IN YEDDO BAY By Jack London Source: Oakland High School literary magazine, Aegis, (27 May 1895)
Words checked = [2388] Words in Oxford 3000™ = [86%]
"They're always longing to be, as they call it, Europeanized or Americanized. They're only too quick to discard their old habits and way of doing things for the newer and more improved customs and methods of ours. Why, take the simple matter of dress, for instance. From the lowest beggar in the street to the highest dignitary in the land, they all want to be European in their dress. Pretty near all that can afford it dress like us, and sometimes those who can't put themselves to pretty shifts in order to do so.
Words checked = [4125] Words in Oxford 3000™ = [86%]
The religion of Japan is practically a worship of the State itself. Patriotism is the expression of this worship. The Japanese mind does not split hairs as to whether the Emperor is Heaven incarnate or the State incarnate. So far as the Japanese are concerned, the Emperor lives, is himself deity. The Emperor is the object to live for and to die for. The Japanese is not an individualist. He has developed national consciousness instead of moral consciousness. He is not interested in his own moral welfare except in so far as it is the welfare of the State. The honor of the individual, per se, does not exist. Only exists the honor of the State, which is his honor. He does not look upon himself as a free agent, working out his own personal salvation. Spiritual agonizing is unknown to him. He has a "sense of calm trust in fate, a quiet submission to the inevitable, a stoic composure in sight of danger or calamity, a disdain of life and friendliness with death." He relates himself to the State as, amongst bees, the worker is related to the hive; himself nothing, the State everything; his reasons for existence the exaltation and glorification of the State.
The most admired quality to-day of the Japanese is his patriotism. The Western world is in rhapsodies over it, unwittingly measuring the Japanese patriotism by its own conceptions of patriotism. "For God, my country, and the Czar!" cries the Russian patriot; but in the Japanese mind there is no differentiation between the three. The Emperor is the Emperor, and God and country as well. The patriotism of the Japanese is blind and unswerving loyalty to what is practically an absolutism. The Emperor can do no wrong, nor can the five ambitious great men who have his ear and control the destiny of Japan.
（アメリカンヘリテージ） Bonin Islands An archipelago of volcanic islands in the western Pacific Ocean south of Japan. The islands formed a major Japanese military stronghold in World War II.
（コリンズ） Bonin Islands a group of 27 volcanic islands in the W Pacific: occupied by the US after World War II; returned to Japan in 1968. Largest island: Chichijima. Area: 103 sq km (40 sq miles) Japanese name: Ogasawara Gunto
After the end of the war, Frank made seven voyages to the Ogasawara Islands, known then as the Bonin (uninhabited) Islands. In a leter to his uncle in Sydenham, Frank wrote that the Bonin Islanders – descendants of early Western whalers:
… will be very sorry when we are taken out of the ship as we are the only fresh Western faces they see, and we always do our best to cheer them up. One trip we brought down a gramophone and another time a magic lantern. They are a very good-hearted lot of people. One old man seventy years of age remembers Commodore Perry calling at the islands some fifty years ago.
The green turtles which abound in the island were probably mistaken for crabs, which may account for the gigantic size attributed by Kfempfer to these animals. Other accounts give a much earlier date for the discovery by the Japanese than that' of 1675, stated by the authority just quoted. At any rate, the English have not a particle of claim to priority of discovery. In illustration of the discovery of the Bonins by the accidental visit of a Japanese junk, it may be stilted that the Commodore was informed by Mr. Savory, an American resident, that a Japanese vessel of about forty tons burden came into Port Lloyd thirteen years before, having been driven by stress of weather from the coast of Japan. After remaining during the winter she sailed on her return home in the spring, and, as she had brought with her nothing but a small supply of dried fish, was provided gratuitously by the settlers with provisions. On another occasion, some eight years subsequently, a French ship, cruizing off Stapleton island, discovered a fire ashore, and on sending a boat to the spot found the wreck of a Japanese junk and five of its crew, the only survivors, in a most helpless plight. They were then taken on board and carried to Port Lloyd^ and thence subsequently removed by the humane Frenchmen with the intention of lauding them on one of the Japanese islands. In confirmation of this statement we have the fact that a party of officers from the Susquehanna, on a visit to Stapleton Island, accidentally saw the wreck of this same vessel. The remains of the junk were found in a little bay where they landed, the wreck being still partially kept together by large nails of copper and portions of sheets of this metal. From these materials and other indications, it was inferred that it was a Japanese junk, and as the edges of the planks were but little rubbed or decayed, it was concluded that the wreck could not be very old.
Most of the tourists see few traces of the island's rich history. They view Chichi Jima, the main island in the Ogasawara chain, as little more than a nice place for diving, kayaking and forgetting the stress of Tokyo for a few days.
Still, there are hints of the island's special character. Departing ferries still bring out crowds sending off friends and relatives, complete with a taiko drum salute, in a reminder that mainland Japan is still a faraway place.
Over the years, visitors to the Ogasawara Islands, known in the West as the Bonin Islands, have included the famous and infamous. Commodore Matthew Perry and author Jack London spent time on Chichi Jima. In 1944, former President George H.W. Bush, then a 20-year-old Navy pilot, was shot down offshore and rescued by an American submarine. During World War II, cannibalism also paid a grim visit.
Since it was settled by Mr. Savory’s American and European followers — fortune seekers, deserters, drunkards — and their Hawaiian wives, the island has been pillaged by pirates, gripped by murder and cannibalism, and tugged back and forth between Japan and the United States in their battle for supremacy in the Pacific. There was a brief revival of the island’s Western culture after World War II, when it was ruled by the United States Navy.
Even the island’s V.I.P. visitor list seems outsized for a spit of land just five miles long. It includes Commodore Matthew C. Perry, who stopped here on the 1853 voyage in which he opened Japanese ports at gunpoint, and Jack London, who visited as a 17-year-old deckhand and later wrote about the Bonins.
Today, the island is a sleepy place. Its rhythms are set by the arrival once every six days of the ferry that makes the 600-mile journey from Tokyo, which has administered Chichi Jima as part of what are now known as the Ogasawara Islands, after the United States returned them to Japan in 1968.
About 2,000 people live here, mostly Japanese from the mainland who came after the transfer. Over time, they have overwhelmed the descendants of the original settlers — known here as Obeikei, or the Westerners — who are now estimated to number fewer than 200.
Most of the Obeikei are Japanese citizens. Most of those who still speak English and retain distinctly Western or Polynesian features are over the age of 50.
What is undisputed is that the island was left largely to rule itself until 1875, when Japanese settlers and officials took over in what the historian Daniel Long calls the first act of territorial expansion by a budding Japanese empire.
“Chichi Jima was probably the only case where the island was claimed by an Asian power and the natives were English-speaking Westerners,” said Mr. Long, who has written several books on the island.
作家ジャックロンドンが小笠原諸島を船乗りとして訪問していて、その体験をズバリ「Bonin Islands: An Incident of the Sealing Fleet of '93」という短編に書いていたということを最近知ったので、興味をもったのでした。そのあたりは次の記事で取り上げます。
"It reaffirms to me that for most ordinary people, music sounds like Japanese to them if they're not Japanese. This just takes the fear knob and cranks it to 11 for people who do what I and Pharrell do for a living," he told AFP.
“The verdict handicaps any creator out there who is making something that might be inspired by something else,” Mr Williams told the Financial Times in his first interview since the ruling.
“This applies to fashion, music, design . . . anything. If we lose our freedom to be inspired we’re going to look up one day and the entertainment industry as we know it will be frozen in litigation. This is about protecting the intellectual rights of people who have ideas.”
今回は金額がものスゴイですし、あまりうるさく言うと今後の創作がやりにくくなりますよね。
Mr Williams declined to comment on whether he and Mr Thicke would appeal against the verdict. “We’re working out our next steps right now,” he said. But he was adamant that taking inspiration from other sources was a big part of the creative process. “Everything that’s around you in a room was inspired by something or someone,” he said. “If you kill that, there’s no creativity.”
TEDのトークでは、以下のSteve Jobsのコメントを参照しながら、Androidに対しては激高しI'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on thisと語ったJobsを少しちゃかしていました。。。
It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things in to what you're doing.
And Picasso had a saying -- 'good artists copy; great artists steal' -- and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.
And I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.
「八紘一宇」とは何か？ 三原じゅん子議員が発言した言葉はGHQが禁止していた Author Information The Huffington Post | 執筆者： Kazuhiko Kuze 投稿日: 2015年03月17日 15時38分 JST 更新: 2015年03月17日 17時28分 JST
Japan TimesやAsahi Shimbunが英文ニュースを発信いしているだけで海外メディアはほとんどスルーしていました。The term roughly translates as “all the world under one roof.” During the Sino-Japanese war and World War II, the Japanese government used the slogan to justify its Emperor-centered policies and overseas expansion.というような説明フォーマットは流用できそうですね。
A Liberal Democratic Party lawmaker has raised eyebrows after suggesting Japan should follow a wartime slogan used to justify past global expansion ambitions in its current approach to tax evasion. Junko Mihara, a House of Councilors member from the ruling party, referred to the slogan hakko ichiu at a meeting of the Upper House Budget Committee on Monday, saying it represented “values Japan has cherished since its founding.”
The term roughly translates as “all the world under one roof.”
During the Sino-Japanese war and World War II, the Japanese government used the slogan to justify its Emperor-centered policies and overseas expansion.
＊＊＊＊＊＊
LDP lawmaker urges Abe to spread wartime slogan March 17, 2015 THE ASAHI SHIMBUN A popular lawmaker in the ruling party has raised eyebrows with her call for Japan to promote the concept of “hakko ichiu,” a wartime slogan used to justify Japan's expansionism. Junko Mihara, a former actress who is with the Liberal Democratic Party, was addressing an Upper House Budget Committee meeting on March 16 about the need to create a mutually supportive economic system. "I'd like to introduce 'hakko ichiu,' the ideology Japan has cherished since its foundation," said the director of the party's Women's Affairs Division. The term, which literally means "to bring the world under one roof," was a political slogan which was widely used to justify Japan's invasion of neighboring nations during World War II.
英語版Wikipediaでも結構大きく説明がありました。
（wikipedia） Hakkō ichiu (八紘一宇?, literally "eight crown cords, one roof" i.e. "all the world under 1 roof") was a Japanese political slogan that became popular from the Second Sino-Japanese War to World War II, and was popularized in a speech by Prime Minister of Japan Fumimaro Konoe on January 8, 1940.
Lastly I felt impelled to tell of the massacre plan, the plot to leave no traces of the atrocities of our captors. It is important that people know that the atomic bomb saved far more lived than it took, that it saved far more suffering than it gave, and that it was used on a people possessed and controlled by an insane code. No, not all citizens were believers in that insanity. But they supported those in control, and those in control were believers. Their military was. They were cruel, brutal, and uncaring because of their irrational beliefs.
（中略） Every year now the anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are used by peace and anti-nuclear groups to hammer home their message of the horrors of war. The Japanese have cleverly turned these annual events into world-wide media propaganda vehicles to try to show how badly they have suffered, and their citizens who survived those bombings still suffer.
日本語版の序文にも以下のようにあります。まさか日本語に訳されるとは思ってもみなかったとあります。
What worries my generation who suffered and survived is the one-sidedness in the apportioning of blame for war. （中略）Why cannot those who lost relatives in those terrible bombings accept that the many thousands who died there died ending that war and in order to save the lives of countless thousands on both sides who would have perished had the war continued?
Five-time Tony Award® nominee Kelli O'Hara (The Light in the Piazza, South Pacific) and Academy Award® nominee Ken Watanabe (The Last Samurai, Inception) star in a magnificent new Broadway production of Rodgers and Hammerstein's beloved THE KING AND I.
Tony winner Bartlett Sher (South Pacific) directs this classic tale of a British schoolteacher's unexpected relationship with the imperious King of Siam.
Featuring a cast of more than 50, choreography based on the original by Jerome Robbins, and a score of treasured songs including "Getting to Know You," "I Whistle a Happy Tune" and "Shall We Dance?" in their glorious, original orchestrations, Lincoln Center Theater's new staging of THE KING AND I invites you to get to know this inspiring and enchanting musical classic.
Additional casting will be announced at a later date
For a Broadway musical that premiered in 1951, The King and I is shockingly relevant. Strip the show of such classics as “Getting to Know You” and “Shall We Dance?” and what remains is the story of a ruler with a dictatorial bent who is grappling with Western cultural influences and is at odds with women who demand to be heard. The contemporary feel of The King and I is what persuaded Bartlett Sher to stage the revival that opens this month at Lincoln Center Theater. “Rodgers and Hammerstein are like Shakespeare,” Sher says. “You are engaged in very serious questions and at the same time have a good time.”
渡辺謙がミュージカル？って感じですが、あの存在感が欲しかったようです。謙さんは“Even a pig will climb a tree if you sweet-talk him.”とあのことわざを使って今回の出演を語っています。
Sher’s surprising and shrewd pick is Japanese film star Ken Watanabe, whose performance as the quietly noble garrison commander in Clint Eastwood’s 2006 Letters from Iwo Jima so impressed the director that he sought out the actor two years ago in Vancouver, where Watanabe was filming Godzilla. “Bart said to me, ‘I do not need a good singer. I do not need a good dancer. I need a king!’ ” he recalls. Sher prevailed, which is a tribute to his cajolery as much as it is to Watanabe’s intrepidness. “In Japan, we have this expression,” says Watanabe. “Even a pig will climb a tree if you sweet-talk him.”
Paul Allenさんの武蔵発見というニュースで彼の書いたIdea Manを読みました。Octopusという船を作った経緯は最後の方に少し載っていました。
Fast forward to a few years later, when my captain said, “What’s your ultimate boat, Paul?” I told him that I’d been absorbed by the undersea world ever since my parents took me to see Jacques Cousteau’s The Silent World, one of the first documentaries with underwater color cinematography, including shots from a two¬ man submarine. I said that I’d love to have my own sub to take my explorations literally down to the next level. While I wasn’t after size for its own sake, a bigger boat could accommodate more of my friends on our far-flung journeys. I also wanted to upgrade my onboard recording studio with a full digital console. Dave Stew¬ art had an idea for a shipboard concert stage, with audience seat¬ ing on the aft deck.
That’s how Octopus was born, in the spirit of Cousteau’s un¬ derwater adventures. I went to Espen Øino, the naval architects based in Monaco, and they created a two-foot model that looked reasonable. Then the work started. It took a full year for more than a hundred draftspeople to design Octopus, and three years more for two companies to construct it. Midway through the pro¬ cess, the prime contractor invited me to their shipyard in Kiel, Ger¬ many, to show me how they built submarines for the German and Turkish navies. One of them had a torpedo, which piqued my in¬ terest. At the end of the tour, I asked them, deadpan, “Could I add a torpedo tube to my yacht?”
I’ve owned a couple of other yachts, Meduse and Tatoosh, but I was stunned by the sheer size of Octopus when it was delivered in 2003. At 414 feet, it was a third longer than a football field, more than twenty yards wide, seven stories high. At the time, it was the fourth largest yacht in the world, with the top three built for heads of state. (As the yacht industry continues to extend the realm of the possible, Octopus has dropped in the rankings and is now ninth largest overall.) It had a full-time crew of more than fifty and the most advanced nautical technology. When I first stood on the bridge, I felt as though I was on a spaceship.
If we’d been older or known better, Bill and I might have been put off by the task in front of us. But we were young and green enough to believe that we just might pull it off.
THE JAPANESE MARKET wasexploding,thanksinlargeparttoKa¬ zuhiko (Kay) Nishi, our flamboyant agent in East Asia. Kay pub¬ lished a chain of glossy computer magazines that worked hand in glove with his nonstop salesmanship for Microsoft. In August 1979, after he snagged a big contract with NEC, Bill and I went to Japan to help drum up more business. It was my first trip out¬ side North America and everything was new to me, from our futon mats with wooden headrests to the multicolored plates of sushi and boiling pots of shabu-shabu.
We traveled first to Kobe, where Kay’s parents owned a girls’ school with an outdoor swimming pool. There were two diving platforms, one three meters high (plenty for me) and another at ten meters. A bunch of the girls watched between classes as Bill climbed to the top of the high dive. He jumped, feet first, and they screamed. He must have hit the water at a slight angle—when he pulled himself out, the whole front of his body was bright red. It must have stung, but it didn’t stop him. Bill kept jumping, and the girls screamed each time.
I left Microsoft a quarter century before Bill did, and we’ve both had our signal triumphs since then. But in certain respects, neither of us has been quite as good alone as we were together. I missed Bill’s laser focus on competition in the marketplace, his ability to execute my ideas and keep me from getting too far ahead of what was doable. And I’d like to think that Bill missed my abil¬ ity to divine where technology was headed and my knack for meet¬ ing its trajectory with something big and original.
In my post-Microsoft years, I discovered how challenging it was to operate without a pragmatic partner and business maven. Even so, I have no regrets about taking my own road. It has led me to rich experiences in a great range of pursuits—to the life I’d al¬ ways dreamed of, even back in the early days, when I was happily chained to my terminal and striving to perfect the next line of code.
I visited Jobs in Palo Alto around that time to hear more about his plans for the Macintosh, Apple’s cheaper GUI machine then still in development. We had a vested interest in the Mac, which would give our GUI applications—Microsoft Word and Excel—a welcome foothold until the PC platform and our new Windows operating system caught up to them. Jobs launched into a solilo¬ quy about the glories of the graphical user interface, not know¬ ing he was preaching to the choir. After I let it slip that we were planning a mouse for Microsoft Word, Jobs put their one-button mouse through its paces. When I asked him whether two buttons might be better, he passionately lectured me: “You know, Paul, this is all about simplicity versus complexity. And nobody needs more than one button on a mouse.”
I said, “But Steve, people have more than one finger, and there’s going to be things they might want to do with a right click, too.”
Jobs dismissed my point with a shake of his head. He believed in making the entry-level experience as unintimidating as possible— and that there was usually one and only one correct way to do things. At Microsoft, we tried to balance simplicity with power. I considered the trade-off worthwhile if an extra feature made a program or device more functional. （中略） In time, I’d be vindicated. Windows was introduced in 1985, eventually becoming the dominant GUI personal computer plat¬ form. The Microsoft Mouse thrived through many incarnations— optical, wireless, laser, Bluetooth—as one of the company’s longest-lived products. And every one of those mice had more than one button. People quickly adapted. Today that extra button helps millions of Windows users gain access to context menus and a host of other convenient features.
Postscript: In 2005, after twenty-two years of one-button wor¬ ship, Apple relented and released the multibutton Mighty Mouse.
自伝、伝記の類は読みやすいので、英語の本に迷ったら興味を持った人物の本を読むのがオススメです。Allenのお父さんのdo something you loveというアドバイスのくだりは難しい単語などないことがわかると思いますし、なかなか哀愁を感じることもできるのではないでしょうか。事務所での9時５時の仕事をnine-to-five life under fluores¬cent lightsと表現していますね。
I was still young when my father first asked me what I wanted to do with my life. It was his way of imparting his laconic wisdom: “When you grow up and have a job, do something you love. What¬ ever you do, you should love it.” He’d repeat this to me over the years with conviction. Later I’d figure out what he meant: Do as I say, not as I’ve done. Much later, my mother told me that my fa¬ther had wrestled with his career choice. He suspected he might be happier coaching football than managing libraries, but he finally chose the safe and practical route, a nine-to-five life under fluores¬cent lights. Lots of men from his generation did the same.
普通はDo as I say, not as I do.ですが、ここではDo as I say, not as I’ve doneとなっています。これまでやってきたこと、生き方と幅広い感じを指しているのではないでしょうか。たくさん読むことでいろいろな表現のバリエーションも学ぶことができます。
Though Tim Cook ’s rhetoric sometimes obscures the fact, Apple is a business, and for once the business-page superlatives were not overdone. In the fourth quarter of last year, Apple sold nearly 75 million iPhones at a profit margin of nearly 40%, making its quarter the most profitable quarter in the history of any American business.
A stupendous gold mine is the iPhone. There is no product Apple can invent or reinvent that likely can replace it. To the business-savvy mind this can only indicate one thing: If Apple were to build a car, it would be to protect the iPhone business. If Apple builds a watch, it’s to protect the iPhone business.
The iPhone has a weakness! What started as an incredible convenience has become a pain in the butt, an annoying friction in our consumption of digital services. Google has been experimenting with Google Glass for four years. Samsung and Huawei are testing the market with smartwatches of their own. If Apple doesn’t find an answer and someone else does, Apple’s $700 billion market cap could be in trouble. Indeed, when so much of the value resides not in the device but in the services that it delivers, many analysts already wonder how much longer Apple can keep charging princely prices for an iPhone not very different from hundreds of devices running Google’s and Microsoft ’s operating systems.
So the Apple watch is not about Mr. Ive indulging his fetish for high-end timepieces. It’s not about Apple reinventing the watch because it doesn’t know what else to do. Not for nothing did Apple’s leaked training materials emphasize using watch inquiries to upsell customers to a new iPhone. Not for nothing was the unveiling tilted toward luxurious versions encased in gold with fancy straps and selling for $17,000. Clearly Apple is looking to use rich bozos to defray the watch’s development costs quickly so it can be rolled out as cheaply as possible to average iPhone buyers.
Apple’s leaked training materials emphasize using watch inquiries to upsell customers to a new iPhoneについては9to5macというサイトが従業員向けのApple Watchの売り込みマニュアルを取り上げていたようです。iPhone５より前のバージョンのiPhoneしか持っていない顧客にupgradeを勧める部分を指しているようです。
Using the Apple Watch as an opportunity to sell iPhones is another interesting element of Apple’s sales strategy. Apple CEO Tim Cook previously dedicated four-hour meetings with Apple Retail Store managers to discuss boosting sales within Apple’s own stores, and the Apple Watch launch will be another occasion to pitch customers on the high-margin smartphone. iOS 8 notably added the Health app and HealthKit, which aggregate fitness and health data, tying deeply into the Apple Watch experience. Given the Apple Watch’s dependence on an iPhone running iOS 8, Apple Retail employees are also specifically told to encourage customers “who don’t use iPhone to switch now so they’re ready for Apple Watch later.”
（オックスフォード） upsell persuade a customer to buy more products or a more expensive product than they originally intended You can usually upsell to about half the customers. Sales staff get bonuses based on the ability to upsell.
（ケンブリッジビジネス） upsell specialized business to try to persuade a customer who is already buying something to buy more, or to buy something more expensive: They are trained to upsell customers to a larger drink.
（ケンブリッジビジネス） cross-sell COMMERCE, MARKETING to sell another further product or service to a customer who is already buying a different product or service: They can cross-sell to the bank's existing customers and introduce life insurance and pensions products.
（オックスフォード） cross-selling the activity of selling a different extra product to a customer who is already buying a product from a company
This week I will travel to Tokyo to join Akie Abe, the wife of Japan’s prime minister, as the United States and Japan announce a new partnership to educate girls across the globe. As part of this effort, the U.S. government has launched an international initiative, called “Let Girls Learn,” to help girls in developing countries go to school and stay in school.
These new investments—along with previous investments by countries like the United Kingdom—reflect a growing global consensus that when 62 million girls world-wide are not in school, that is not only a tragic waste of human potential. It is also a serious public-health challenge, a drag on national economies and global prosperity, and a threat to the security of countries around the world, including our own.
Let Girl Learnとはどういうものか、なぜ日本なのか、については以下のところで書いています。途上国支援の一環として女性教育支援をしていくようです。日本でも同様のアプローチがあるなんて知りませんでした。。。
America’s nearly 7,000 Peace Corps volunteers live and work in developing communities across the globe and know better than just about anyone the challenges girls face. Through Let Girls Learn, the Peace Corps will be training all of its volunteers in gender and girls’ education. Hundreds of these volunteers will then work to develop locally based education programs, from leadership camps to mentoring projects.
These efforts will be community-generated and community-led, based on solutions devised by local leaders, families and girls themselves. Japan is taking a similar, community-driven approach in its girls’ education efforts. And during my trip to Asia this week, I will visit a school in Cambodia—one of the first countries in which Let Girls Learn will operate—where Peace Corps volunteers are already transforming girls’ lives.
But given the magnitude of the challenge, U.S. action alone will not suffice, nor will the efforts of just a few concerned countries. That is why this week in Japan, we will call for countries around the world to join us by making their own investments to help girls learn.
「欲望という名の電車」を見て、作家そのものに関心を持ったので、John LahrのTennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Fleshを読んでみました。残念ながら全米図書賞は逃しましたが、Finalistになった本です。正直、ガラスの動物園と欲望という名の電車ぐらいしか知らなかったのですが、それ以外にも舞台や映画で重要作品を生み出していったのですね。
Published in 1995, Mr. Leverich’s “Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams,” the first of two planned volumes, drew strong reviews for its excavation of the years up to 1945, when the wild success of “The Glass Menagerie” made Williams famous. And now, Mr. Lahr, who inherited Leverich’s archives upon his death in 1999, has finished the job, after a fashion, with a free-standing book that begins with that play’s Broadway opening night but circles back to cut a fresh path through his life.
Mr. Lahr’s book, to be published on Sept. 22 by W. W. Norton, offers plenty of backstage anecdotes and high private drama, if perhaps less sex than his subtitle, taken from a 1939 letter, might suggest. But Mr. Lahr, ever the critic, keeps the plays themselves front and center.
Among Williams scholars, it has also stirred hope that the fog of gossip and sensationalism surrounding Williams’s life, much of it stoked by the playwright’s own scandalous (and often unreliable) 1975 memoir, will finally lift.
“Most previous efforts have tended to sensationalize, or have been very narrow,” said Thomas Keith, a consulting editor at New Directions, Williams’s publisher, who contributed a chronology to Mr. Lahr’s book. “John has really humanized the life and brought the focus back to the work.”
Lahr’s book was conceived as a sequel to Lyle Leverich’s 1995 Tom, a biography of Williams’s early years that ends in 1944. Lahr starts in 1945, with The Glass Menagerie, but never fully explains Williams’s childhood. Gaps and repetitions ensue, along with confusing sequences that tell us of Williams’s emotional reactions to events we haven’t yet encountered. Rose’s lobotomy, so central to Williams’s emotional life, and thus to his art, is related in a piecemeal way that will surely confuse readers unfamiliar with it. Williams’s own serious nervous breakdown at the age of 24 is dispensed with in a sentence. Anecdotes repeated in close proximity betray the book’s 12‑year gestation, its mutation from a sequel to a “stand-alone biography” that doesn’t always stand alone.
These are the book’s weaknesses; its strengths are redemptive, and stem from Lahr’s years of work as a theatre critic. It is compulsively readable, thoroughly researched and exemplary when it comes to the productions. Lahr is especially good on Williams’s long-term collaborations with director Elia Kazan and agent Audrey Wood, who together ensured that the finest actors of a generation – Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Geraldine Page, Maureen Stapleton and Eli Wallach – brought Williams’s plays to life. Lahr declares Kazan’s partnership with Williams “the most influential in 20th‑century American theatre”, and it is hard to disagree. Kazan “rallied him out of his writing blocks, challenged his melodramatic excesses, chivied him to work for greater depth, and allowed his imagination to soar”.
Williams also released US theatre from its puritanical straitjacket, liberating it into an erotic space that acknowledged the dark alleys and twisted paths of adult sexuality. For Williams, Eros may save us, or it may savage us. His plays exploded the virgin/whore stereotype; he was the first American playwright to grant women erotic sensibilities (The Rose Tattoo can claim to be the first US play to celebrate female sexuality) and he was the first to eroticise men as sexual objects.
EASY CHAIR — From the April 2015 issue Abolish High School By Rebecca Solnit I didn’t go to high school. This I think of as one of my proudest accomplishments and one of my greatest escapes, because everyone who grows up in the United States goes to high school. It’s such an inevitable experience that people often mishear me and think I dropped out.
（中略）
I was ravenous to learn. I’d waited for years for a proper chance at it, and the high school in my town didn’t seem like a place where I was going to get it. I passed the G.E.D. test at fifteen, started community college the following fall, and transferred after two semesters to a four-year college, where I began, at last, to get an education commensurate with my appetite.
What was it, I sometimes wonder, that I was supposed to have learned in the years of high school that I avoided? High school is often considered a definitive American experience, in two senses: an experience that nearly everyone shares, and one that can define who you are, for better or worse, for the rest of your life. I’m grateful I escaped the particular definition that high school would have imposed on me, and I wish everyone else who suffered could have escaped it, too.
Suicide is the third leading cause of death for teens, responsible for some 4,600 deaths per year. Federal studies report that for every suicide there are at least a hundred attempts — nearly half a million a year. Eight percent of high school students have attempted to kill themselves, and 16 percent have considered trying. That’s a lot of people crying out for something to change.
We tend to think that adolescence is inherently ridden with angst, but much of the misery comes from the cruelty of one’s peers. Twenty-eight percent of public school students and 21 percent of private school students report being bullied, and though inner-city kids are routinely portrayed in the press as menaces, the highest levels of bullying are reported among white kids and in nonurban areas. Victims of bullying are, according to a Yale study, somewhere between two and nine times more likely to attempt suicide. Why should children be confined to institutions in which these experiences are so common?
同じ年代でグループ化するとSuch units automatically create the conditions for competition, pressuring children to be as good as their peersが生じて、助け合いの精神がなかなか生まれなくなると指摘しています。またヘイトクライムやレイプなどの遠因となっているのではとも推測します。
（オックスフォード） Peer pressure pressure from people of your age or social group to behave like them in order to be liked or accepted Teenagers are highly influenced by peer pressure.
Since the 1970s, Norberg-Hodge has been visiting the northern Indian region of Ladakh. When she first arrived such age segregation was unknown there. “Now children are split into different age groups at school,” Norberg-Hodge has written. “This sort of leveling has a very destructive effect. By artificially creating social units in which everyone is the same age, the ability of children to help and to learn from each other is greatly reduced.” Such units automatically create the conditions for competition, pressuring children to be as good as their peers. “In a group of ten children of quite different ages,” Norberg-Hodge argues, “there will naturally be much more cooperation than in a group of ten twelve-year-olds.”
When you are a teenager, your peers judge you by exacting and narrow criteria. But those going through the same life experiences at the same time often have little to teach one another about life. Most of us are safer in our youth in mixed-age groups, and the more time we spend outside our age cohort, the broader our sense of self. It’s not just that adults and children are good for adolescents. The reverse is also true. The freshness, inquisitiveness, and fierce idealism of a wide-awake teenager can be exhilarating, just as the stony apathy of a shut-down teenager can be dismal.
A teenager can act very differently outside his or her peer group than inside it. A large majority of hate crimes and gang rapes are committed by groups of boys and young men, and studies suggest that the perpetrators are more concerned with impressing one another and conforming to their group’s codes than with actual hatred toward outsiders. Attempts to address this issue usually focus on changing the social values to which such groups adhere, but dispersing or diluting these groups seems worth consideration, too.
But abolishing high school would not just benefit those who are at the bottom of its hierarchies. Part of the shared legacy of high school is bemused stories about people who were treated as demigods at seventeen and never recovered. A doctor I hang out with tells me that former classmates who were more socially successful in high school than he was seem baffled that he, a quiet youth who made little impression, could be more professionally successful, as though the qualities that made them popular should have effortlessly floated them through life. It’s easy to laugh, but there is a real human cost. What happens to people who are taught to believe in a teenage greatness that is based on achievements unlikely to matter in later life?
Rei Shimuraが主人公のミステリーがあることを知らなかったのですが、最新作は東日本大震災を舞台にしたもので、題名もKizuna Coastと 絆という日本語がそのまま使われるかたちになっています。興味本位でアマゾンを調べてみたら、値段がなんと１２０円、何かの間違いですぐに値段が上がってはいけないとすかさずポチりました（笑）
When a devastating earthquake rocks Japan’s northeast coast, a tsunami follows and Rei Shimura is swept into her most rugged adventure yet. The mystery begins with an SOS from Rei’s friend, the antiques dealer Mr. Ishida, trapped among thousands of displaced and dead on the Tohoku coast. Rei rushes to Tokyo, where she discovers Ishida Antiques may have been burglarized. Rei takes Mr. Ishida’s abandoned dog, Hachiko, on a volunteer bus to the ravaged town of Sugihama. But Mr. Ishida’s got more work for her, since he lost contact with his antiques apprentice Mayumi and is frantic with worry. He won’t leave Sugihama without knowing the fate of the troubled 19-year-old girl from a famous lacquer-making family.
(Wikipedia) Sujata Massey is a mystery writer born 1964 in Sussex, England who emigrated with her family to the United States at the age of 5. She attended Johns Hopkins University graduating in 1986 and worked on the Baltimore Evening Sun.[1] She is best known for her series featuring Rei Shimura, a Californian born to a Japanese father and an American mother. Many of her novels are set in Japan and in Washington, D.C. On her official Website, Massey states that she has begun work on a new Rei Shimura book set in post-tsunami Japan entitled The Kizuna Coast.
作家のサイトからの抜粋です。
Welcome! The Kizuna Coast is available now! The new Rei Shimura novel, THE KIZUNA COAST, is now available as an e-book and trade paperback. Right now, the paperback is on sale at Amazon.com, and the e-book is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Kobo. Distribution spreads to independent and chain bookstores and all Internet sales platforms worldwide on March 15, 2015. I’ll let you know later on about the various public and Internet special events in March. Hardcover and audio-book versions are coming out that month, too.
絆という感じについては以下のように説明がありました。
Kizuna means bonds of loving kindness, and was used often right after the tsunami when referring to help people gave each other. According to my friend Satoshi, the characters forming that kizuna are very old Chinese ones reinterpreted over centuries of life in Japan. On the left, the character means “thread” or “string”; the character to its right originally meant “half” but now refers to “strong feelings that tie people.”
I want to share one last kizuna story with you in 2014. It comes from Ishinomaki, one of the most devastated towns that I researched when trying to create my own fictional village in Tohoku called Sugihama.
Hamaguri Hama is an Ishinomaki café located an old Japanese house that sits on a cliff overlooking the bay. I hope this short film celebrating daily life at Hamaguri Hama will make you smile, and perhaps inspire you to visit Tohoku one day.
Thanks for stopping by. Explore what’s new, and let me know what you think.
Chapter One If you’ve been through an earthquake, you remember. You recall where you were and exactly what you’d been doing. What you had for breakfast and the plan for the day’s activities. It’s much harder to explain the panic that rolls through you when the ground won’t stop shaking. When everything that you trusted to be safe and solid is not.
I’ve weathered a variety of earthquakes, large and small, in California and Japan. But the earthquake that still figures in my dreams is the big one: the Great Eastern Kanto Earthquake of 2011. Even though I wasn’t even there when the earth buckled.
I was perched midway in the Pacific, playing mah jongg, a thousand-year-old Asian game of tiles that moves fast and furious. That makes it all the more confusing. The mah jongg set my Hawaiian friends played with dated from the 1920s, so its 144 tiles were probably ivory or bone. This gave me the creeps, although the set’s owner, Pak Chang, argued that such old tiles carried great feng shui. But that disagreement was the least of it. Pak, my great-uncle Yosh, and their cohort, my neighbor Lilia DeCruz, continually fussed about the right rules to follow: American, Japanese or British. As a result, almost everything went–including controversial “dirty hands” played with tile pairs from more than one suit.
NHKラジオ新年度の入門ビジネス英語のテキストが発売されていました。この入門ビジネス英語はちょうどTOEIC的なトピック、表現、語彙レベルに収まっているのではないかと思います。現にこのテキストで紹介されている基本表現Business Phrase of the Day （今日のフレーズ）のほとんどがTOEIC定番表現でもありました。ですからTOEICはビジネス英語に役立つと胸をはっていいんですよね。ただ、どういう状況でどのような表現が使われるのかという説明はTOEIC教材でもなかなかカバーできていないので、この講座をうまく使えばTOEIC対策でも相乗効果が得られそうです。
ちょっと横道にそれますが「すべての真の歴史は現代史である」は英語だと"All history is contemporary history"となるようです。このような有名な言葉はエッセイなどのつかみで利用されます。まさにそのようなエッセイがありました。といってもYutaはこの言葉は知りませんでした。。。（汗）
I believe in yesterday The history of the recent past is more popular with readers than ever – and just as well, because it BY VERNON BOGDANOR PUBLISHED 17 DECEMBER, 2009 - 07:06
"All history is contemporary history," the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce once said, meaning, no doubt, that all history was written from the point of view of contemporary preoccupations. Inevitably, perhaps, we look at the past through the eyes of the present. Even so, until very recently, contemporary history was regarded with suspicion by the professionals. When A J P Taylor read history at Oxford in the 1920s, most of his time was spent studying the medieval period. When he reached the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89, his tutor told him, "You know all the rest from your work at school, so we do not need to do any more." The further one gets from the present, the more "scholarly" one becomes.
The house we rented was at the top of a steep flight of steps from the beach. English friends of ours had spent from the beach. English friends of ours had spent the summer there, and were having a pre-prandial drink on the lawn on that day 1 September 1923, when the earth began to shake and the seawater suddenly receded, revealing unfamiliar rocks and leaping fish, before coming back in three long heaves, hurling great waves up against the walls of the royal villas. “GONE TO THE HILLS”. The message our friends had scratched on the wood of the front door was still there when I came back to Japan in 1949. Fortunately, that particular tsunami reached no higher than the garden, which was about 17 feet above sea level.
As I write this, three years after the magnitude nine Great Tohoku Earthquake of 2011, I am still overcome with sympathy for the victims of that even worse disaster. Those enormous tsunamis swept away town after town and thousands of people on Japan’s north-eastern coast. Thinking about their ordeal, I have finally understood, after all these years, why my father could not bear to look at a doll I had once made which my mother had forced me to hide away, out of his sight. It hurt my feelings at the time. I had never received an advertised ‘walking doll’ my parents had tried to order for me, a small lonely only-child, and when I was a little bigger I had tried to make a doll my size to keep me company. But it was so badly made, that its ugly face and straggly hair must have reminded my Father of all the gruesome corpses he had seen when searching for my Auntie Dorothy’s remains.
先週末読んだ本の報告です。第一次世界大戦が芸術家の作風にどのような影響をもたらしたのか、芸術家一人一人を簡潔に振り返っていくアンソロジーとなっています。ニューヨークタイムズの書評ではこの本のタイトルとなったNothing but the Clouds Unchangedの元のベンヤミンの一節を紹介してくれています。
The anthology “Nothing but the Clouds Unchanged: Artists in World War I” quite sensibly steers clear of sweeping assessments, offering instead a cacophonous cluster of short artist biographies. Edited by Gordon Hughes, an assistant professor of art history at Rice University, and Philipp Blom, an independent scholar, it accompanies the current Getty Research Institute exhibition “World War I: War of Images, Images of War.”
Its evocative title comes from Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay “The Storyteller”: “A generation that still drove to school in horse-drawn carriages suddenly stood under the open sky in a landscape with nothing but the clouds unchanged, and in the center, in a force field of destructive currents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.”
With the [First] World War a process began to become apparent which has not halted since then. Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent—not richer, but poorer in communicable experience? What ten years later was poured out in the flood of war books was anything but experience that goes from mouth to mouth. And there was nothing remarkable about that. For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power. A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.
Battlefield carnage was so nightmarish and unprecedented that a new language had to be created to visually and textually describe it. “Most artists and writers, even those who were fairly aesthetically conservative prior to the war, tended to view traditional forms of image making or writing as wholly inadequate to the task of representing the experience of modern warfare,” Hughes said. He pointed out Italian Futurism, and the watercolor drawings on cigarette boxes by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner as examples of the period's new visual vocabulary. It was, he said, an “effort to find a visual or written idiom that could represent, even if inadequately, what by its very nature cannot be represented.”
How did artists and designers choose to represent the unrepresentable? That’s the questions driving the exhibit at the Wolfsonian, according to its curator, Jon Mogul. The typical answer in art history is that World War I was a trigger for avant-garde innovation, since the war alienated artists from the established culture. That's not wrong, said Mogul, and there's evidence for that in the exhibition—works by Wyndham Lewis and Paul Joostens that depict soldiers and machines as nearly abstract geometric forms, a poster by Jean Carlu that incorporates a photo of a badly disfigured French veteran.
But Mogul was just as fascinated by the resilience of conventional, unrebellious depictions. Despite the rise of Cubism, Expressionism and, later, Dadaism, Mogul says that if you look at the art of period broadly, there’s more there than the modern-leaning, angsty stuff. He refers to a series of lithographs portraying the medical care of wounded British soldiers by an artist named Claude Shepperson, which avoided showing any evidence of wounds themselves or further suffering.
Given Walter Benjamin's claim that “men returned from the battlefield [of World War I] grown silent—not richer, but poorer in communicable experience,” does it hold, as he goes on to argue, that “the art of storytelling is coming to an end”? The writings of these authors — Graves, Barbusse, Sassoon, Jünger, Blunden, the list goes on—would suggest the contrary. Rather than remain mute, abandoning narrative in the face of incommunicable experience, the trick is to find a new means of storytelling, a modern form for a modern war, a new voice. “I must go over the ground again,” Blunden writes of his perseverance in the face of his failed efforts. “A voice, perhaps not my own, answers within me. You'll be going over the ground again, it says, until that hour when agony's clawed face softens into the smilingness of a young day... then we'll change our ground.” To change ground — to give voice to the otherwise incommunicable — is for Blunden to change the very foundation of storytelling; likewise for poetry, as Blaise Cendrars (who lost an arm in the fighting at Champagne) suggests in the concluding lines of his 1918 war poem J'ai tué (I've killed).
内容紹介 Including her survival of Japan's Great Kanto Earthquake, this book is an enthralling account of Dorothy Britton's life, loves and discoveries in an amazingly varied life and career. Bilingual from birth, she found the immense joy of blending in with peoples of different cultures simply by getting the sound right when speaking their languages to the extent that she herself sounds Japanese. While interviewing Talent Education's Shinichi Suzuki, she realized his peerless 'mother tongue method' for learning the violin was ideal for foreign languages too. While composing music for many documentary films introducing Japan to the world, in Empire Photosound's beautiful My Garden Japan she used the ancient instruments of the Imperial Court Orchestra. The film was shown daily at Montreal's EXPO 67 where it garnered a prize. Amusing episodes and stories of fascinating people and relationships abound in the book, as do valuable insights into topics such as the post-war Occupation and its impact on everyday life, the role of women, learning Japanese, marriage customs, food and many other aspects of Japanese culture and society. Appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 2010 for her highly regarded contributions to bridging two cultures, this long awaited memoir will be widely welcomed. Here is the remarkable and remarkably frank story of a life lived to the full by the doyenne of British residents in Japan that has benefited so many and touched the lives of countless others.
I am absolutely certain it is that first step that is so important in learning a foreign language: getting the sound and rhythm right. Spending time going over and over and over first words, then sentence, until you get it sounding just right. It takes time, but it is well worth it!
It happened so often in Tokyo at Embassy receptions, that a professor of English from some university would greet my mother in English, and she would turn to me and ask me to interpret, which was always so embarrassing. He was usually a highly respected professor, and his grammar was perfect, but it just did not SOUND like English!
Dorothy Britton From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Dorothy Guyver Britton, Lady Bouchier MBE (14 February 1922 – 25 February 2015) was born in Yokohama, moved to the United States at the age of 13, and was educated in the United States and England, returning to Japan after the American Occupation. She was best known as a translator into English of Tetsuko Kuroyanagi's Madogiwa no Totto-chan as Totto-chan, the Little Girl at the Window, and Oku no Hosomichi by Basho: A Haiku Journey – Basho's Narrow Road to a Far Province. She was the author of The Japanese Crane: Bird of Happiness and co-author of National Parks of Japan. Dorothy Britton was also a poet and composer, and was a pupil of Darius Milhaud. She was known for her popular album Japanese Sketches, in which Tetsuko Kuroyanagi's father is violin soloist. Her husband, Air Vice Marshal Sir Cecil ("Boy") Bouchier, K.B.E., C.B., D.F.C. was the first commander of the Indian Air Force and a station commander during the Battle of Britain. Lady Bouchier was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2010 Birthday Honours.[1]
（オックスフォード） the Old Vic a famous theatre in south London, built in 1818. It was officially named the Royal Victoria Theatre in 1833, and was given the nickname the 'Old Vic' later in the century. It became well known in the early 20th century when Lilian Baylis began producing Shakespeare's plays there. The National Theatre was based there from 1963 until its own building was completed in 1976.
Old VicがあるからのYoung Vicなんですね。
（Wikipedia） History In the period after World War II, a Young Vic Company was formed in 1946 by director George Devine[1] as an offshoot of the Old Vic Theatre School for the purpose of performing classic plays for audiences aged nine to fifteen. This was discontinued in 1948 when Devine and the entire faculty resigned from the Old Vic, but in 1969 Frank Dunlop became founder-director of The Young Vic theatre with his free adaptation of Molière's The Cheats of Scapin, presented at the new venue as a National Theatre production, opening on 11 September 1970 and starring Jim Dale in the title role with designs by Carl Toms (decor) and Maria Bjornson (costumes).[2] Initially part of the National Theatre, the Young Vic Theatre became an independent body in 1974.[3] In the words of Laurence Olivier, then director of the National Theatre: "Here we think to develop plays for young audiences, an experimental workshop for authors, actors and producers." The aim was to create an accessible theatre which offered high quality at low cost in an informal environment. The aim was to appeal to young audiences, but this time not specifically to children.
Xファイルのジリアンアンダーソンはこの演技でEvening Standard Theatre Awards 2014の女優賞を受賞したそうです。
I staggered out of this shattering production of Tennessee Williams’s bruising modern classic feeling shaken, stirred and close to tears.
Never have I seen a production of the play that was so raw in its emotion, so violent and so deeply upsetting.
Gillian Andersonの熱演を絶賛しています。
The acting is superb, with Gillian Anderson giving the performance of her career as Blanche DuBois, the faded Southern belle of a big Mississippi mansion who has lost her home before the action begins and loses her mind by play’s end.
Petite and vulnerable, she captures the syrupy southern charm of the woman which so provokes her blue-collar brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski, and you readily understand why he finds her affected ways so infuriating. But as the play progresses, Anderson devastatingly captures a woman whose options are running out and who is getting ever closer to the end of her rope. Suddenly her lies and fantasies of a better life seem almost heroic, and her final crack-up is almost too painful to watch.
Still, the evening belongs to Anderson, who makes each phase of the DuBois disintegration her own. She does not arrive with swivel-featured disturbance, but makes her distress delicately evident. Her fingers pick at things around her, smoothing, trying to get things under control. Her collapse is spectacular: a terror of blotched lipstick and flying petticoats. Her departure is a masterclass in how to make audiences weep. She comes down from the stage and processes between the spectators and the shattered action. She leans on the arm of the doctor who is to commit her to an asylum, sauntering gracefully, looking around her as if she were taking the air at a delightful seaside resort. To the end, aspiring and lying.
But the model performance of restrained, unshowy television acting that Anderson gives as Gibson is not the only weapon in her armoury. Her recent emotionally raw Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire (ironically the classic role about a woman failing to cope with her fading beauty) at the Old Vic suggested that there is much more to come from this actress. It’s hard to believe that just seven years ago, she was playing opposite Danny Dyer in the low-budget Brit thriller Straightheads.
• In the nearly three decades since the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, a consensus has emerged that the flora and fauna of the contaminated region have fared surprisingly well despite long-term exposure to background radiation. • Yet this consensus is based on very limited data. Our understanding of the effects of low-dose radiation on living things remains incomplete. • The meltdown at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi reactor four years ago provided another chance to study these effects. The first results suggest that fallout from Fukushima has harmed the biota in ways we are just beginning to see.
Barn swallows are ideal scientific subjects because they are philopatric, meaning the birds tend to return to breed in the same locations over a lifetime. Much is already known about them under normal conditions, and they share similar genetic, developmental and physiological characteristics with other warm- blooded vertebrates. The barn swallow is the proverbial canary in the coal mine, except the coal mine in question is radioactive. Mousseau counted about a dozen old nest “scars,” crescent-shaped blots of mud plastered under eaves, but not one new nest.
The barn swallow is the proverbial canary in the coal mine, except the coal mine in question is radioactive.という表現ですが、canary in the coal mineに関してアメリカを読む辞書というサイトで詳しく説明してださっています。驚くことにイディオムとして紹介していない辞書が多数派なんですね。やはりこういう感覚をつかむには多読の必要性を感じます。
（英辞郎） treat ~ as a canary in a coal mine ～を警告［炭鉱のカナリア］として扱う
（Wikipedia） canary in a coal mine An allusion to caged canaries (birds) that miners would carry down into the mine tunnels with them. If dangerous gases such as methane or carbon monoxide leaked into the mine, the gases would kill the canary before killing the miners, thus providing a warning to exit the tunnels immediately.
Barn swallowって知らなかったですが（汗）、ちゃんと日本語でなんというか触れてくれいているところです。
Police stopped Mousseau's car every day to scrutinize his permits. The only thing I understood during these tense exchanges was tsubame, the Japanese word for “barn swallow.” The utterance of tsubame was usually followed by puzzled smiles. Barn swallows are omens of good fortune in Japan. Many people nail little wooden platforms over the doors of their houses to attract the birds. In the zone, the platforms, like the houses, were all empty.
A massive amount of radioactive materials has been released into the environment by the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant accident, but its biological impacts have rarely been examined. Here, we have quantitatively evaluated the relationship between the dose of ingested radioactive cesium and mortality and abnormality rates using the pale grass blue butterfly, Zizeeria maha. When larvae from Okinawa, which is likely the least polluted locality in Japan, were fed leaves collected from polluted localities, mortality and abnormality rates increased sharply at low doses in response to the ingested cesium dose. This dose-response relationship was best fitted by power function models, which indicated that the half lethal and abnormal doses were 1.9 and 0.76 Bq per larva, corresponding to 54,000 and 22,000 Bq per kilogram body weight, respectively. Both the retention of radioactive cesium in a pupa relative to the ingested dose throughout the larval stage and the accumulation of radioactive cesium in a pupa relative to the activity concentration in a diet were highest at the lowest level of cesium ingested. We conclude that the risk of ingesting a polluted diet is realistic, at least for this butterfly, and likely for certain other organisms living in the polluted area.
![NHKラジオ入門ビジネス英語 2015年 04 月号 [雑誌]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51DkW49kSVL._SL160_.jpg)
![[CD付]TOEICテスト出まくりリーディング (出まくりシリーズ)](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41EDCDhJp%2BL._SL160_.jpg)
![新TOEICテスト出る語句1800[CD2枚付]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51lIqsLjFPL._SL160_.jpg)
