KID ETHNIC IS WRITTEN BY:
saleem
who is currently moving around East Asia.
kidethnic@gmail.com
ALSO BY KID ETHNIC:
100JapaneseThings
A collaborative site to help folks (and each other) find Japanese stuff.
SEAWEED BREAKFAST
A weekly column about Japan that I wrote for Glimpse.org.
The Annual Kid Ethnic Valentine
Because I love you so much.
The Alpaca Song
I wrote and recorded this for you. Because you <em>need</em> a song about alpacas, don’t you?
The Whiteboard Videos
Music+Whiteboard Markers+Friends=Good ways to spend weekends
Twitter
I twitter infrequently. But hope we can stay friends.
Illiterate at 26 · 11 November 04
A week ago, a friend and I went to a conveyor-belt sushi shop. The hostess handed us a sign-in sheet with a spot for our names.
In a stunning moment of simultaneous ignorance, neither of us could remember how to write them.
On this, the first day of my 26th year, I must confess:
I am functionally illiterate.
One of these holds detergent, and the other contains liquid fabric softener. Or is one of them bleach?
These are the daily questions of the functionally illiterate.
I can’t distinguish between junk mail and bills. A walk through a mall is filled with symbols that amount to white noise. A Japanese menu might as well be a stream of green symbols from the Matrix.
I have a cell phone with GPS navigation, which means it can give me directions to anywhere in Japan from Japan. Can’t read that either.
The Japanese write in three main systems, two alphabetic and one logographic .
“Logographic” basically means “picture words”. Like in pyramids.
You have to know about 2,000 of them to kick back and read a good book.
Luckily, some designers mark packages with just enough English:
And pictures often save you. This, for example, was obviously designed to make rats wish they had never been born:
But when the pictures and the English are lacking, you are not saved.
You are illiterate. At 26.
* * *
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