Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Japanese Tea Ceremony

I am interested in Japanese tea ceremony, because it has not only a particular ritual form but also it has two particular aspects of Japanese culture.

First, some Japanese tea ceremony masters have been like an art director from the beginning, 500 years ago. They have unique directions in artworks, for example, ceramic teacup, architecture, Japanese garden, art of calligraphy, and some kind of painting.
Second, Japanese tea ceremony is based on the Zen philosophy. The Zen is a kind of Buddhism religions. The Zen respects good manner and meditation in our lives, so this influences our life style.

I want to write more for another day.

Sunday, September 28, 2008

Private problems - food and clothing

I have been staying in New York since June 29th. I lived in midtown Manhattan, and I moved to upper east Manhattan last week. I feel these locations are quite different from each other. There are many shops and offices in midtown, and almost buildings are taller and bigger, a lot of people and many cars are on the roads, in addition, there are something smell bad and dirty in midtown. However, Upper east is very quiet and cleaner place. I saw many mothers and children on the roads, and when I went to coffee shop, old men told about politics together. I have never seen these kinds of people in midtown.

On the other hand, I can’t find deli in upper east. Deli is a food shop. It is very convenient for me. They have many kinds of ready-made foods, for example, breaded chicken cutlets, steamed sermons, flied rice, pastas, salads and cut fruits. These foods are on the trays in their shops. We take a little plastic bowl and put any foods which we want to have in it, and bring it to register counter. They weigh it, and the price is depended on the weight. We don’t need to leave tip. I often go to deli when I lived in midtown.

I can’t find these kinds of shop near my upper east new residence, so I often buy frozen foods at grocery stores these days, but these foods are expensive and not enough for me. I have to consider my dietary life now.

I have to consider another thing. It is clothing. When I came to New York, it is on the summer. I brought only clothes for the summer from Japan, but the season is becoming the fall. I have to get new clothes for the fall. I went clothing shops these days, but I found that American clothes’ size is bigger than Japanese size. The small size is even little bit bigger for me, so I wanted to have extra small size clothes, but almost clothing shops don’t have extra small size.

Moving living place and changing season bring me the new problems. I hope I could find some good ideas to solve these problems.

Thursday, September 25, 2008

"Android" by google

Yesterday, T-mobile announced their new product. It is an intelligent cell phone, named "G1". T-mobile is one of the mobile phone companies in the USA. of course, many mobile phone companies often released a lot of their products. But G1 is a different from them. They adopted "Android" for this product’s operating system. "Android" is developed by Google that is a famous Internet searching engine company.

Operating system is basic system software for computer. It controls all software on computer and every software takes advantage of the functions in operating system. Many type of intelligent cell phone has such an operating system also.

Google has been developing an operating system for mobile phone. Furthermore they open the source code of it. Source code is rewritable original code of software by programming language. If software developers get such source codes, they can read all this technology from it and use it for free. Any mobile phone makers can implement "Android" on their product freely.
This idea is called "open source approach" in software industry. It is a kind of policy. Someone who takes this policy opens his source code, then someone else can use this source code but he have to open his new source code. They are developing each other with their codes in common. Google has been developing "Android" with such source codes, so they want to open the source code of "Android".

Usual businesses proceed with being depended on their own specialty. So almost software developing company close their technology and they want have their uniqueness. But the idea of "open source approach" is quite different. They want to have creative solutions efficiently with using their resources each other and want to make creative combinations of their resources.

Our global world has a lot of intelligent resources. If all of them were opened and we could use them freely, we might be able to create a lot of things more efficiently. But most of people don’t allow it, because they think they have profits of rights of their own resources. Therefore open source approach might be able to change a social situation. So I think that ‘G1’ is very interesting product.

Sunday, September 21, 2008

The economic crisis

I think we are in the crisis of economic. The global economic is very complicated now, so I hardly understand what is happening on that. But I will try to understand it and try to figure out it.

The one of reasons of economic crisis is the problem of the subprime loan in USA. Many banks make loans for buying house. A lot of people got the loan. Because they were told by banks that the price of house is growing up, then they could get money to sell their house after that. But in reality they can’t pay back their loan and went bankrupt. And the price of house is decreasing. Banks got their house in mortgage, but the price is lower at this time. A lot of banks lost money.

In addition, financial companies bought these loans’ rights, and they sold these as claimable assets. This is a strange for me. I can’t understand enough what they did and why they can do it. Anyway, they have done it and these assets have gone down the drain. An insurance company for them additionally broke down.

Maybe these will influence our global economics. Some politicians say that markets naturally make our economics to be good. But nowadays we need to control our economy. I think we should consider about the balance of freedom and controlling of market economy.

Saturday, September 20, 2008

Tokyo's subways

Tokyo’s rush hours subways are extremely terrible crowded. We have to have long patience to it. In addition, standing people have to pay attention not to step on someone’s toes. Women have to be careful of groper and men have to be more careful of being misunderstood as a groper.

But in even such trains we try to do anything for example listening music, learning English with iPod or emailing with cell-phone. These help us to be in our own world. I mean that it is not only a mental way to make an escape from pain but also useful for our life.

I think we can’t get rid of crowded trains at this time. However we can take advantage of this. Maybe it is a good opportunity to take a meditation. We might be able to find pleasure in studying ourselves in crowded trains.

Thursday, September 18, 2008

My favorit TV show

I had a favorite TV show in Japan. It’s name was “The Spring of Trivia”. You know, Trivia means unimportant and obscure information.

For example, In Australia they play tag separated men and women, and when someone catches someone, they have to kiss each other; The Bush administration abandoned the White House to Clinton administration in 1993. They removed doorknobs before going out; Louis Vuitton had made the chopsticks had their logo mark; Keanu Reeves’s house is next to Leonardo DiCaprio’s house; like that.

These are really unimportant information. But some people are interested in these things and say “Oh, year?” or “You don’t say so.” Then this TV program counted how much interest their panelists had. That’s all. Maybe This TV program was also definitely unimportant for our world. But I thought it was interesting that a lot of Japanese people watched this TV program.

Monday, September 15, 2008

Bosston:Museum of Fine Arts

I went to Boston three weeks ago. My main purpose was to visit to the Museum of Fine Arts. They have a special exhibit now. “Art Nouveau jewelry.“

Art Nouveau is a style of art. This started at the end of nineteenth century. Art Nouveau artists use nature creatures as their art motif. For example, flowers, leaves, vines and insects. They made various art works with these things that are decorative and symmetrical, artificial. They designed advertised posters, furniture, building, glassware, and jewelry.

The interesting thing is that they were influenced Japanese nineteenth century’s craft works. Some Japanese crafts were brought to Europe in nineteenth century and became a boom. This boom was called “Japonisme”. After that, some artists got inspiration from these things when they started Art Nouveau.

I am interested in not only the beauty of these designs but also this background.