Good-Bye Kevin.

Kevin left Shikaoi for good this morning and as I write this should be boarding a plane to Tokyo where he and Jessica will be staying during the next couple of weeks while touring southern Japan. He has also planned an extensive China and Korea trip; which one might as well do since you are in the area. He won't be fully back in the States until mid-October.

Had a little bit of a song train wreak today. In the course of studying basic shapes with the grade one's we attempted a new song. The words - though repeated many times - were too hard to hear and sung too fast. Even I had trouble with words just teaching it to them. So that song was abandoned for today. I don't know if we'll come back to it. I can see the benefit if we stick with it but I don't know if it's worth the effort. It's a really tough song. It doesn't really flow at all. It was probably never easy to begin with to write a children's ESL song about triangles and rectangles and whatnot.

I am also working on a creaky body after trying to bend my knee in an unnatural fashion while running backwards in the gym. It was a play related accident so no one is really to blame, but I do wish my mom or grandma were around to nurse me back to health. I think my best course of action is to have ice cream for dinner.

I have had a good reception of last week's post about Japanese news and received several emails. While the uproar over paper shredders has yet to subsided - still taking a sizable chunk of the evening news discussing what should be done - I would like to this opportunity to expand on my comments about writer Masako Bando's habit of throwing unwanted kittens off a cliff.

I have not seen a link to a full English translation but several pieces of it have appeared in English on various internet news sites frequented by foreigners. Bando is an extremely popular novelist in Japan. So popular, in fact - that in a long tradition of other writers - has moved away from Japan to escape from Japan's sometimes predatory media. Currently she lives somewhere in Tahiti, which is governed under French law. It should also be established before moving on that she loves cats and owns several. In the essay, published last week in one of Japan's main national newspapers (Asahi Shinbun), she illustrates some very bad logic even if you don't morally judge her actions. If you happen to love animals and morally judge her, you will probably think she uses extremely twisted logic.

The crux of her article begins by stating that she feels it is her social/moral/spiritual responsibility to let her female cats procreate when in heat - which she considers essential to life - thus she has left them unsterilized. Following this route, of course, one ends up with a lot of kittens. She writes that because she has such a strong sense of social responsibility as a pet owner - she knows that she can't have extreme numbers of cats around - she has decided to take steps that are quite depraved in my opinion to remedy the problem. Now, besides the fact that if one thinks letting female cats procreate is essential to their nature, it has to follow that one consider motherhood also essential to the female cat's nature. Using her own logic, if you feel a social responsibility toward pets this would naturally lead you to have them sterilized in the first place. Her essay has ignited a normally passive and apathetic demographic to endlessly discuss the matter on blogs and forums which is why I bring it to your attention here.