I’ve been living in Japan for more than 4½ years now and tried many times to get one, always to be turned down. This especially includes applying for ones from my bank, Shinsei Bank, that I’ve used exclusively for all my time in Japan, and where I now have “platinum” status, meaning that I have many million yen entrusted at their bank, a significant part of which is in risky assests where they make a lot of profit. So they clearly rank me as one of their best customers, and I’m clearly bound to keep significant assets in their bank for the immediate future (so I cannot just “escape”), but still turn me down every time I apply for a credit card. Why is that?

Being turned down for a VISA credit card by my Japanese bank

When I visited one of Shinsei’s branch offices recently for a completely different, but somewhat time-consuming and complicated issue, I got to talk quite a lot with one of the staff there. As I have “platinum” status, they treat me quite well too, not hurriedly at all. This was one of the branches where a lot of foreigners visit, and she seemed quite used to working with foreigners, although we spoke only in Japanese. So at the end she asked if there was something else I’d like to inquire about, and I asked something along the lines of why do you turn my credit card applications down all the time, despite me being a “platinum” level customer and having millions of yen in your bank?. And surprisingly, she did have a good answer for that, not just the usual appologies.

The reason, it seems, why Shinsei Bank (which is, by the way, founded by a foreigner based on foreign capital) systematically turns down foreigners’ credit card applications is that the company that is contracted to handle credit cards for the bank doesn’t have any support line in English. Since we’d just been having a conversation about quite complicated banking matters in Japanese for half an hour, that reason obviously seemed very silly at that point. Still, that’s why. And since Japan doesn’t have any laws against racial discrimination, systematically turning down anyone with a foreign-sounding name (they don’t actually check your nationality) is just fine here.

Anyhow, at long last I went to Citibank to beg for a credit card there, since I’ve heard they’re more open to foreigners’ business. Considering the bank would have gone bankrupt if it hadn’t been bailed out by the US government, it’s not exactly my primary choice for doing banking, but anyway. And they gave me a credit card within less than a week, with a 1 million yen limit, which I think is very high. And unlike Shinsei Bank where I have the highest available “platinum” status, that was the first time I walked in to a Citibank office. I have no prior history with them at all. And they still gave me a pretty sweet credit card.

Finally got a Japanese credit card.

So what is the conclusion from all this? Go to Citibank. It seems Shinsei Bank and Citibank are the two somewhat modern banks in Japan, with Shinsei being about 10 years behind the average Swedish bank instead of the Japanese average of 50 years behind. Citibanks seems just as (comparatively) moderen. Shinsei seemed very foreigner-friendly when I opened an account there, but in the end they certainly do practice discrimination against foreigners, so I must say that I regret my decision – I should have gone with Citibank instead. That is the best advice I can give to anyone non-Japanese who’s getting a bank account and/or credit card in Japan.

However, as things have changed I have now decided to move all my web activities over to the humongous and well known DreamHost hosting service. Moving it all has been extraordinarily boring, but at least it’s finished now so I can concentrate on making new, fun stuff for the web instead of worrying about my hosting, since I’ve known for about a month that I had to make this move. This three day weekend provided a good opportunity to move things over in stages to prevent a total meltdown of all my sites at the same time (which happened quite a lot when I hosted with Binero). That last remark brings me to why I’m changing to DreamHost. These are the reasons:

1. A more stable hosting service. Binero used to be very good and all, but at some point they just started sucking. This peaked last month when I found all my sites being broken due to changes made by Binero (without informing me in advance) three times in one month. That is just a bit too often for me to tolerate. I’ve had my sites broken by Binero in the past too, but not that often. And once it took them two weeks to fix a simple problem introduced by one of their changes, by which time I had of course already worked around the it.

Binero’s tech support has always been very quick to respond, but usually had some snide, unnecessary remark in the response as well, and usually blamed me for problems caused by them randomly changing stuff. I’ve been a customer with them for a long time, so even if they’ve been telling new customers how to set things up correctly for the last five years, that doesn’t mean I know it automatically without them telling me about it. It’s not good when being a loyal customer is used against you. So I definitely can’t recommend Binero to anyone who’s thinking about getting web hosting somewhere.

Lately they’ve started hyping a new system they call Binero 2.0, which is exactly what I don’t want – even more changes, bound to break stuff if I know Binero correctly. On the other hand, the sysadmin at work has had sites running at DreamHost for many years without any breakage or changes. That kind of stability is what I want. I also like DreamHost’s attitude that you can essentially do whatever you want as long as it’s not a security risk or malicious. Binero on the other hand disabled sftp (encrypted) access, allowing only ftp (unencrypted) access for security reasons, according to their tech support. That is about as stupid as it gets. Besides, they also disabled ssh shell access (of course, unannounced), which is a pain in the ass when you need to fix something quickly, besides being just silly.

2. Better located hosting for faster response times. When I started making web sites I lived in Sweden and most people who accessed the sites were in that area as well, so it made sense to use Sweden-based hosting. Now, however, I live in Japan and most of the people accessing my sites (whatlanguageisthis.com is by far the most accessed one now) are in North America, Japan, or India, as well as from all over Europe with no country in particular standing out. My ping time to my sites on Binero’s servers was 300 ms, but DreamHost has 125 ms ping, which is a very noticeable improvement. DreamHost’s servers are located in California, which is the center of the physical Internet, unlike Sweden, which is about as far out on the fringe as you can get except Russia and Africa. (For example, Internet traffic from Japan to Sweden goes via the US, not via Russia, and all Asian countries are connected via the US west coast.)

3. Get away from Sweden due to FRA. If you don’t know what FRA (“National Defence Radio Establishment”) is, would you believe me if I said that the Swedish government/military intercepts all Internet traffic crossing the border? Hopefully you wouldn’t, since you’re thinking that Sweden is a nice, modern, democratic society that doesn’t need to spy on its citizens nor the Russians, since the Cold War is over by now. Unfortunately, that’s what they’re doing, and Sweden seems to be moving in the wrong direction in many other ways too now when it comes to information privacy. Not nice. Since I’m in Japan, and stupid Binero didn’t allow encrypted access, that meant the FRA could intercept anything I uploaded to my sites. Not that I would upload something sensitive without encrypting it first, but still, it’s just silly. The US is a better place to host web sites, so score one more for DreamHost.

Anyway, that’s the end of this rant. Finally the move is over, and I’m looking forward to not having to wake up and find my sites being broken much often any more. I’ll also be writing more interesting stuff on this blog now that I’ve finished both the moves to a better blogging platform (WordPress instead of Blogger) and hosting service (DreamHost instead of Binero). No need to procrastinate any further now that the boring stuff is done.

Over time though I started hacking my own server-side features that inserted dynamic functionality into the static pages using comments in the html as hooks. Features such as the “related posts”, logging, ads (removed now, I was just interested in seeing how adsense worked in practice), etc. But even if php suddenly shut down, the static html pages would still display fine, just without these features.

Anyway, when Google announced the deprecation of the ftp publishing feature of Blogger, I realized something had to be done in order to keep my blog going. (And I am also getting a bit fed up with Google, so I’m going to try to move away from using so many of their services.) After evaluating the alternatives, I decided to set up a WordPress installation on the server. WordPress’s Blogger import tool worked well, although one post didn’t seem to make it. I don’t know why, nor which. I then created my own theme based on the default. I had to tweak the permalink “slugs” for many of the posts to correspond to the old naming scheme, and did some ModRewrite and php tricks to make sure all old urls are permanently redirected to the corresponding new ones (labels to tags, categories, archives, etc). Which means that all old urls should still work – let me know otherwise.

The old feed urls are also redirected, so this should show up in everyone’s feed readers, although I’m not sure that will work correctly. So let’s see…

You don’t have to be Jesus to walk on water when it’s frozen!

This year however awards us with a great cold and snowy winter. Yesterday morning when I was still up at my grandmother’s place in the village of Vittangi, outside Kiruna, a good couple of 150 km or so north of the Arctic Circle, where the sun doesn’t rise for a month during the winter, we went for a walk with the dog in -29℃. My beard froze to ice from the water vapor in my breath, but the dog doesn’t mind the cold at all.

It’s been an eventful year for me, with some turbulence and good stuff, but also a lot of tiredness. In the end I find myself in a better position than a year ago, all things taken together. Tomorrow we’re getting on the plane home to Tokyo, via Amsterdam, including a 6 hour visit to Korea where we plan to stop to have some spicy barbecued meat and kimchi on the way.

Right now I’m in Uppsala, the old university town north of Stockholm – also, conveniently, the city closest to Arlanda airport. We had sushi with miso soup for lunch today at Yukikos sushi, the new one in the market hall (Saluhallen) in the center of the city. Quite good, especially – as expected – the fresh salmon.

Swedish sushi.

The second, and more interesting, experiment in merging Swedish and Japanese culinary cultures today is this Ramlösa chūhai that I made as an apéritif before New Year’s dinner. Chūhai, for those not in the know, is a simple drink made by mixing barley shōchū (a Japanese spirit, not to be confused with rise wine) with soda and some fruit flavoring, usually some citrus fruit in a highball glass, on ice.

One thing that Sweden has right is the ubiquity of tasty carbonated water. These are often flavored in very imaginative ways. Since my mom happened to have a small bottle of Iichiko shōchū (one of the best when making chūhai) in the fridge (!), I bought some Ramlösa, the king of Swedish carbonated waters, with blåbär (“blueberry”, a delicious type of bilberry) flavor, and also one with pear and lemon balm flavor, and mixed these together with a slice of lime. Here’s to a happy 2010!

The ingredients.

Finished Ramlösa chūhai.

Surprisingly, the bilberry one tasted better than the pear and lemon balm one. Actually, the bilberry-lemon chūhai was one of the best drinks I’ve ever had. The contrasting tastes of bilberry and lemon complement each other superbly!

I noticed that lately many people find my blog with search queries such as “jlpt revised n3″, “text books for jlpt N3″, “prepare for N3 jlpt”, “jlpt n3 books”, etc. This makes a lot of sense, since the last of the old format JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) examinations was conducted last Sunday, the 6th of December, 2009.

Starting next year the JLPT will be replaced by the revised format, which is essentially the same as the old one, except that the first (vocabulary and characters) and third (reading and grammar) sections are merged into one big one (with no pause? that’ll be tough!). And, of course, the introduction of the new N3 level, which is between the old levels 2 (new level N2) and 3 (new level N4). The gap between the old levels 3 and 2 was indeed rather large, jumping from beginner’s book to serious hobby level with a 300% increase in vocabulary required, for instance.

And with the introduction of the N3 level, a whole new market for textbooks and study aids specifically targeting JLPT N3 opens up, and you’d expect the publishers to rejoice and then hurry to be the first one to the market with such a book, wouldn’t you? So last time I went by the big Kinokuniya book store in Yoyogi, out of curiosity of just how difficult/easy the new level n3 was I had a look at the old JLPT bookshelf (where I used to hang out, before I graduated from the JLPT). And lo and behold there were none! None study books targeting JLPT N3, that is! Lots of books and flash cards and stuff targeting the other, old levels, still though. A search on Amazon has the same result: no JLPT n3 books.

The bookshelf with textbooks for JLPT level N3.

So where are these books? Did the book writers/publishers not realize that there was going to be a guaranteed demand for them? Or are they hoping people will buy the remaining old format JLPT books before they introduce new once to the market? Because surely the demand for old ones will drop significantly once new ones are introduced, especially for the old levels 2 and 3, I would presume. Anyway, as soon as they’re out and I’ve had some time to evaluate them, I’ll update my Best Books for Learning Japanese page with recommendations on JLPT N3 books as well.

That doesn’t really work out well for Chinese, though. I think the main reason for that is that – compared to Japanese – pronunciation is very difficult. I don’t know about you but I can’t remember a word that I can’t pronounce. Or rather I can remember it as a (hanzi) character, but I can’t connect that to a sound, which makes it semi useless. Of course it would be possible to learn Chinese completely as a written language without ever learning how to pronounce things, but besides that being sub-optimal (it would certainly be very valuable for a deaf person, for instance, though) I also think it would take even longer than it takes to learn Chinese while learning both reading/writing and listening/speaking at the same time (for a non-deaf person).

So what I’m trying to say is that I finally realized that me going all in on hanzi and all out on pronouncing the damned thing was not going to work (obviously!), which is where Chinese Future comes in.

Chinese Future happens to be the portending name of a Chinese language school conveniently located between my office and my home, slightly cheaper than the competitor across the road, and with a name that I think really captures the essence of why learning Chinese is not only a fun activity but also highly rational for anyone with a remaining life expectancy of over 20 years – in a very non-subtle manner!

So yeah, I signed up as a customer-student there and had my first lesson yesterday. It seems like in Japan everyone’s going to language schools all the time – it’s really the hip thing to do. No one ever seems to learn any language though. In practice that usually means Japanese people going to “learn” English at one of the English conversation “school” chains, which never seems to produce any result. Considering not being able to speak any foreign language being a point of pride for many Japanese individuals, that is hardly surprising.

So color me full of skepticism (as always!) when I went there. But the first lesson is free, after all, so not much to lose anyway. The following 8 lessons are just 3,000 yen a piece – a considerable amount, but not too large to give it a shot. So well, that is my plan at the moment: Try those (in total) nine lessons and see whether or not language conversation school is really the thing for me. I’ve already got some good conclusions from the first lesson, which I’ll summarize in the next blog post. Stay tuned.

In the olden days, finding information on the web was hard, and good link directories were worth their bytes in gold, and good content was worth even more. Nowadays we have good search engines, thanks to Google, and lots of good content (and lots of bad content too, but that’s not really a problem).

Wikipedia is one source of good content on the web. But it’s not the only one – it’s just the most obvious one in many cases. My problem with Wikipedia is mainly how people link to it. Here’s an example:

　×　I like to feed the pigeons. I sometimes feed the sparrows too.

This I’d like to claim is by far the most common way of referring to Wikipedia. What’s wrong with it?

1. If your reader doesn’t know what a pigeon or sparrow is, it’s 99.9% certain that’s because the reader isn’t very good at English. In this case, if anything, every word ought to be linked to a dictionary, but that wouldn’t be very useful except for 0.1% of your readers. They should know how to look up words themselves if they’re not proficient in the language of the text they’re reading, don’t you think?

2. If your reader suddenly becomes very interested in pigeons or sparrows by reading your text, I’m sure one of the first places your reader would look for informations on said birds is Wikipedia. There is no need to point people to Wikipedia, because everyone knows how to find Wikipedia articles anyway. In Firefox, just type “wikipedia pigeon” in the address bar, and you’ll get redirected to the page. In other browsers, go to google.com and type it in and press “I’m feeling lucky”. It’s real easy.
3. The reader might think that you’re linking to some really interesting tidbit about pigeons or sparrows, or maybe a funny Youtube video. But to find out, the reader has to mouse over the links and check the status bar where they point. Only to find out they just point to the Wikipedia entries, which the reader could easily have found without your assistance. This makes reading cumbersome.
4. It degrades the quality of interlinking on the web. All you’re doing is helping Wikipedia get a higher PageRank – and their PageRank is already as high as it can get. You’re not helping the guy who has spent serious time documenting pigeons and sparrows and runs a really interesting web site on the subject that your readers may actually enjoy if you had only taken the time to find and link to it – like in the old days.

In the example above, it’d be easy to argue that “pigeons” and “sparrows” don’t need to be linked at all. But this is how thoughtlessly people use hyperlinks. So let’s change the example to something similar yet where hyperlinking a word might be more appropriate:

　×　But the pronunciation doesn’t change since the word is a dvandva.

I bet you don’t know what a dvandva is. It doesn’t matter here anyway since I’m just using it as an example but I’m sure you’ve already went and read the Wikipedia article. The Wikipedia entry comes out first on Google for a search on “dvandva”. Why? Probably because of hyperlinks like the above example. But the article sucks. Here’s an example of good use of hyperlinking:

　○　But the pronunciation doesn’t change since the word is a dvandva.

The target of this link is a paper written at a university regarding dvandvas in Japanese. Of course, if the context isn’t about Japanese then it might not be the best link target, but I’m sure there are more good articles about dvandvas. I thought that paper was da proverbial bomb. Really good reading. That’s why I link to it – to encourage my readers to read it, and to promote it in the search rankings. (Of course this is hypothetical since I’m actually writing about something else right now but if I were writing about dvandvas…)

It takes time to find good link targets – but please take the time! For your own, your readers’, and the authors’ of those link targets sake. And for the future of the Internet.

Note that I am not opposed to linking to Wikipedia completely. If the Wikipedia article on a subject really is the best piece of information on it on the whole web, and the subject demands a hyperlink in order to be understood by most people, then indeed it’s the corresponding Wikipedia article you should link to.

Also of course when discussing Wikipedia itself it is highly appropriate to link to Wikipedia sources. But even in this case, I see it go wrong, for instance like this:

　×　Wikipedia recently started adding the “” attribute to outgoing links.

That “nofollow” link to the Wikipedia article on the “nofollow” attribute violates the point outlined above in the same way “pigeons” did. Here’s a better way of linking it:

　○　Wikipedia recently started adding the “nofollow” attribute to outgoing links.

which links to Wikipedia’s meta wiki describing the policy. That’s a good way of linking to Wikipedia. Here’s an even better way of doing it:

　☆　Wikipedia recently started adding the “nofollow” attribute to outgoing links.

That links to the most interesting text on the subject that I could find in a couple of minutes. I’ll gladly share that good piece of writing on this subject with you – that’s why I link to it.

Lastly, I’d like to mention that I think said Wikipedia policy of adding the “nofollow” attribute to outgoing links on Wikipedia is stupid and bad. I think that if you read my above argumentation, you’ll see why I think that. People are linking to Wikipedia en masse for no good reason, bloating its PageRank and diminishing the chance of other, better, sources of information to get found. If at least being cited in a Wikipedia entry boosted the PageRank of the source, then the chance of someone finding it would improve just a little. Not to mention it would be fair. The paper on dvandva above and Ed Felten’s blog entry deserve that.

[No interwebs were hurt in the writing of this blog post; all links to Wikipedia have the "nofollow" attribute set.]

Let me tell you three things that I used to think sucked but really enjoy now:

1. Discovering a kanji I don’t recognize

2. Reading a word I don’t know
3. Finding a sentence pattern I don’t understand

Out of which 3 and 1 are fairly uncommon. And I am making an effort!

Every time I find a kanji that I don’t recognize, or a come upon a word I don’t know, or find a sentence pattern (grammar) I don’t understand, I look it up in the dictionary, find words using its different readings, locate sentences using these words, and add them to my Anki card deck.

I am learning 5 new items per day, and I make an effort to catch up by learning more on days after I for some reason didn’t do any new items (such as holidays). Most of these items are words, so that means my Japanese vocabulary is growing by at least 1800 words per year, which seems like a reasonable pace to me – although I’m sure it’s possible to learn much more than that.

Finding 5 new items per days actually takes some effort though. Although some days just seem to bring with them a storm of unseen vocabulary and kanji, in order to keep a decent buffer of them – I aim at always having at least 50 unseen cards in my Anki deck for rainy days – some effort is required. These are my main sources for discovering unknown Japanese:

1. Japanese Wikipedia

2. News”papers” – specifically Asahi Shimbun
3. Books – any book, as long as it’s in Japanese

I find these three to have quite different characteristics; Japanese Wikipedia uses quite formal and long-winded language, decent supply of new words, but not many unknown kanji. The news on the other hand is written in that typically very compact form with lots of kanji compounds, but of course almost no non-joyo kanji, with a decent supply of new words, and also often interesting sentence patterns or vocabulary usage.

Books of course depends on the book… I read essentially anything I find interesting. Quite often that is books about the Japanese language or one of those introspective books about Japaneseness – of which there are plenty in Japan – both ones that go “Japan is the greatest” and those that go “Japan sucks”. The one I’m reading right now is quite basic in its general difficulty level but uses a tremendous amount of obscure kanji – actually I think the author is trying to show off – but that is of course great for my purpose.

Anyway, so, lots of reading, finding new things, and reviewing – every day. I used to listen to the radio a lot but I kind of grew tired of it and it stopped being very effective (although I still think it is for JLPT 1 listening practise), and besides now I’m listening to Chinese while working.

So that’s how I’m studying Japanese now, and I don’t expect it to change much for a while since I’m focusing on Chinese, albeit still mostly on a hobby level. Another thing I’m going to do is write a few more pages like my recently published page on software development-centered technical Japanese. I found writing that more fun than I had thought as well as providing me with a good chance for review, and I have a few more topics in mind!

These three were my favorites:

• how do you pronounce falck

• kanji falck
• how to falck my self

The first two of which I consider myself competent to answer.

Falck ending in ‘ck’ is a fancier spelling of the word ‘falk’, which is also a surname, and is the Scandinavian cognate word for the English ‘falcon’. So a falk, and thus a falck, is a falcon. Falk and Falck are not very common but not too rare either last names in especially Denmark and Sweden, but also Norway and Finland. Falck is considerably less common than Falk.

Many Scandinavians probably associate Falck with the Danish company Falck A/S, who run rescue services, ambulances, security services, etc.

Falck, as well as falk, is pronounced with a short, pure, basic vowel sound that is spelt with an ‘a’ in all sane European languages. The Japanese あ is the same sound. For English analogy, it’s like the ‘u’ in ‘up’. So it’s not pronounced as ‘folk’ – the vowel sound is different and shorter. The ‘f’ is like you’d expect in English, and the ‘lk’ is pronounced like I think many Americans would pronounce it in ‘folk’ as well, but not like most Brits who pronounce ‘folk’ the same way as they pronounce ‘fork’. In other words, you can distinctly hear both the ‘l’ and the ‘k’. And it shouldn’t be confused with ‘Flack’.

Falck in kanji, i.e. the Japanese characters based on Chinese characters, as well as of course how to spell falk in kanji, depends of course a little bit on what kind of falcon you’re thinking of. I’ve always used 隼 to spell my name in kanji when it’s needed (or just for fun). Most often that’s when I’m hung over ordering pizza online and the web form absolutely insists that you enter your name as both kanji and reading (katakana/hiragana). So when when the pizza arrives, the receipt has my name as “隼 変陸” – and it has never failed.

Anyway, the kanji 隼 is read as hayabusa in Japanese and means peregrine falcon. I think the peregrine falcon is probably the coolest falcon out there, so it fits me well. Hayabusa is also the name of a space probe and a motorcycle, among other things. Here is the kanji for falcon and thus also falck/falk as a jpeg:

Feel free to print it out and bring it to your neighborhood tattooist for a cool falck/falk/falcon kanji tattoo! If you do use it to get some ink done, I humbly request that you include a link back to my site in the tattoo.

As I’ve written before, Chinese was among the alternatives when I decided to start studying Japanese. But Japanese seemed even more weird and hard, and the selection of courses at my university was better, so I chose Japanese instead. But I promised myself years ago that once I passed JLPT 1, I could start studying Chinese. And I did pass JLPT 1.

So I went to the huge Kinokuniya book store in south Shinjuku – you know the one located next to the NTT Docomo Yoyogi Building, the tallest clock tower in the world. The supply of language-learning books in Japan is just overwhelming! Especially, of course, for English, but the supply of books on other popular languages is tremendous as well. I can only surmise that this is because foreign things are superficially fashionable in Japan, combined with a school system that teaches kids that foreign language acquisition is impossible. So everyone buys the same kind of miracle cure beginner-level language books every year, and every year the miracle breakthrough doesn’t happen, so the cycle repeats itself.

Anyhow, my philosophy on language learning is the antithesis of that kind of books so I bought the most boring-sounding ones I could find: one called 文法から学べる中国語 (“Chinese that can be learnt from grammar”) and one called 中国語の教科書 (“Chinese textbook”). Still quite fancy books, but the content seemed serious, and they follow different approaches: the grammar one obviously focuses on grammar, and the textbook one is more focused on listening, pronounciation, and conversation, so they should complement each other, I think.

As you notice, the Chinese language study books I bought are in Japanese. This is an important point, since that allows me to keep learning Japanese while enjoying studying Chinese (it is rather enjoyable as a change from years of Japanese studies). In fact, out of the first approximatly 100 words I harvested from the “textbook” book, 5 were new to me in Japanese as well. Double-win! Once you pass JLPT 1, there aren’t really any language study books available for your level, so this I think is a good method to ensure there aren’t any holes in my basic Japanese vocabulary.

I believe in setting goals, just as I did both when I decided to pass JLPT 1 in 2008 and JLPT 2 in 2006. So I have set my overall goal of my Chinese language studies: to be able to read a book in Chinese by the time I turn 30 (i.e. in about 2.5 years from now).

That seems challenging, yet doable. I don’t have any specific type of book in mind, but I imagine it would be some normal top-selling book. Actually come to think of it, the only book I’ve read in both English and Japanese is Haruki Murakami’s after the quake (神の子どもたちはみな踊る) so maybe that would be a good one to use as a reference standard.