One More Epicycle

Or, to put it another way: あけましておめでとうございます!

I suppose the time has come to own up to why things were so quiet here in the fall: time that I would have otherwise spent wallowing in enjoyable curmudgeonly gloom was spent studying Japanese. Long story short, I think my geek cred should be pretty well established by now, but I’m about to take it to a whole new level..

To understand the genesis of this we need to go back to the Saturday morning cartoons of my youth– and one in particular, which came on at 6:30 or 7:00 or some such hour: Robotech.

I was astonished. It was a far richer story than anything I’d seen before, and I was completely hooked. I had no defences up against that mixture of romantic angst and battles with giant robots. The background was complicated, the characters were believable, and people I liked _died_. Not temporary back-next-episode deaths, but forever-and-ever deaths. It was terrifying, and wonderful. I used to wake up early just for the chance to watch it, and even after they started playing scheduling games with it I kept getting up in the hopes it’d come back on.

And then I fell in love with the books, written by James Luceno and Brian Daley under the alias Jack McKinney. That’s a minority view, but in my opinion most of their changes were improvements.

I’d long set those memories aside. But then a few years ago, the famous net.writer Steven den Beste stopped writing on his blog USS Clueless and instead started full-time animeblogging at Chizumatic. I followed the transition — he brings a very engineering-oriented mindset to lots of things, and is always worth reading — and wound up deciding it was worth watching some to see if it was worth it. After all, Robotech had been pretty good, right?

So I took his strongest recommendation, and watched Haibane Renmei (灰羽連盟).

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a better-told short story. The ending affected me more than anything I’d seen or read in a long time.. the only comparisons that come to mind are with the end of Chesterton’s “The Man Who Was Thursday” and Tolstoy’s “What Men Live By”. I felt like I’d discovered a whole new category of good things I hadn’t even imagined could exist before.

That was my re-entry into the anime world. Sturgeon’s second adage famously tells us that ninety percent of everything is crud, and in the case of anime I’d push that percentage closer to three figures. But there are stories you can tell there that you simply can’t tell in any other way. Always and everywhere good writing can triumph.

Which is how I first started casually studying Japanese, and earlier this year I decided to make a more serious go of it. After much individual practice over the summer, I realized I needed more experience with conversation, so I took a class in the fall and it’s been going pretty well (although reading kanji is always going to be a nightmare).

This isn’t just for entertainment purposes, by the way: I’m off to Japan for a few weeks in early summer to visit the planetary group at Tōkyō Tech, thanks to the exceedingly generous offer of Prof. Nagasawa Makiko. They have some of the world’s best N-body planetary astrophysicists there, so it should be enormous fun.

Anyway, there you go. Absence explained!