ELA class 4/29

First of all, I am glad to know about the tutorial sign-up web page since I embarrassingly visited Rab’s office this morning without knowing about it… I am sorry about thatL From now on, my name will appear on the sign-up page before I actually appear in Rab’s office!

The first topic that we discussed today in class was what we thought about the revelation of Columbus’s “other side”, and most people in my group said that the facts were not a surprise to them because they had either already learned it in school or had expected it, and this was a surprise to me. This tells me that although textbooks may lie to students, some exceptional history teachers do not, so the book title Lies My Teacher Told Me seems unfit. I thought that the people who had previously been taught the material were lucky since it must have been intriguing learning about Columbus’s unknown characteristics while studying about him and the age he lived in. I never enjoyed a single history class in high school because it was merely time given to make an exact copy of the chalkboard surface on my notebook, so I am envious.

Rab showed us a video today by a person called Ken Tanaka, who was adopted by a Japanese family after being abandoned by his parents in Japan. (I did a little research on him, and it seems that his true name is David Ury, who is an American actor and translator of Japanese animes and mangas, and he adopted the name Ken Tanaka for his Youtube channel. However, it also says that Ken Tanaka is a so-called identical twin brother of David Ury. All these information are from Wikipedia, so they are probably not trustworthy but it was still interesting to find out about this.) Personally, I found this video to be slightly offensive towards the Japanese people. It seemed to me as if he was poking fun at the weird communication gestures instead of introducing an interesting cultural aspect of Japan. His mimicking of the Japanese English pronunciation will most likely annoy many Japanese people as well. However, I suppose what matters is his intentions. Rab mentioned today that when we view the customs of other countries, we need to apply critical analysis, meaning we should not decide what is unorthodox or orthodox according our own cultural views. If Ken Tanaka’s intention in this video was to demonstrate an intriguing linguistic nature of Japan, then I think the video is acceptable, but if his intention was to mock the queer-looking gestures and sounds of the Japanese culture, then he should not have done it. Nevertheless, I found myself laughing while watching this video which is contradictory to what I feel. Perhaps this is telling me that I am both Japanese and Canadian because the fact that I am laughing denotes that I understand the viewpoint of a non-Japanese person looking at the Japanese culture.